Medway 350, Day 4
Inevitably and naturally, Sunday was the day for a little more solemnity; certainly rather more solemnity than that provided by the hijacker of yesterday’s post, the scurrilous shade of Samuel Pepys himself. Above all, the day featured a service at Rochester Cathedral to mark the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway. For […]
Medway 350, Day 3
(With an affectionate nod toward Samuel Pepys, esquire, sometime Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, sometime Secretary to the Admiralty, sometime President of the Royal Society, sometime Master of Trinity House, sometime serial bonker) Up betimes, and to ye dockyard at Chatham, where I enquired where I might find Pett. ‘No pets […]
Medway 350, Day 2
Over breakfast in my hotel, there was barely audible and intermittent talk to the effect that something vaguely political seemed to have happened overnight. Obviously, I paid no heed to this, as whatever it was, it was clearly completely insignificant compared with the important business of the day, i.e. checking out Chatham Historic Dockyard’s temporary […]
Medway 350, Day 1
Objective 1: exercise democratic right for which countless of my forefathers (and foremothers) fought and died, even if it’s distinctly academic in a constituency with a 25,000 majority and no Monster Raving Loony candidate. Tick. Objective 2: successfully negotiate A1, M25, Dartford Crossing, M2, to get to Chatham. Tick. Objective 3: arrive at Historic Dockyard […]
And So It Begins
It’s a little known fact that ‘June’ is derived from a Latin word which means ‘don’t even think of trying to cram anything else into your diary’. That’s certainly the case for me this month, as I embark on the exciting round of events to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the […]
Carmarthenshire Archives: the End of the Beginning?
Last Thursday, I attended a two-hour consultation meeting in Carmarthen on the proposed new record office for the county, following the closure of the previous one after the discovery of mould in the storerooms. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I have just a little bit of history with this particular issue; […]
The Ghosts of Swarbacks Minn
My fourth and final post about the naval heritage I visited during our recent holiday in Shetland… By complete coincidence (honest!), our rented cottage looked out directly over Busta Voe, at the head of the Swarbacks Minn anchorage. During World War I, this was the base of the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, responsible for enforcing the […]
The Shetland Bus
Perhaps the most moving naval memorial in Shetland can be found on the harbour front in Scalloway, the archipelago’s one-time capital. This is to the unbelievably brave young Norwegians who lost their lives while operating the ‘Shetland bus’, the covert ‘shuttle service’ of fishing craft and, later, submarine chasers, which operated between Shetland and Norway […]
The Submarine and the Bus Stop
Number two in my short series of posts based on last week’s holiday in Shetland… Unst is an absolute must for visitors. As Britain’s most northerly inhabited island, it racks up the superlatives literally every few hundred yards, the further north you go – the most northerly roads, the most northerly shop (splendidly named ‘The […]
The Hollanders’ Graves
Last week, we had a terrific holiday in the sun-drenched beach resorts of… Shetland. OK, it’s a fair cop, the temperatures never reached double figures in the week we were there, and were driven down further by the constant northerly wind (reaching gale force at times, e.g. on our return ferry voyage to Aberdeen). But […]
