In the 12th century, Bernard of Chartres described a process of finding truth, in building on previous discoveries. The concept is best remembered in the words of Sir Isaac Newton, in 1675: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”…
Source: December 2, 1943 The Surprising Origins of Chemotherapy – Today in History
The First World War ended with the deaths of a generation of young men. But the devastation of the conflict didn’t end with that last blast of a howitzer. Thousands of soldiers went home still re-living their horrific experiences of the battlefields for many years. Their lives were damaged by shell shock, a condition many had suffered from during their military service. And, throughout Britain, doctors were baffled by this …
Source: Shell Shock – Legacy of the Trenches #WW1 | Judith Barrow
Today I’m commemorating my maternal grandfather Lieutenant-Colonel Chandos Hoskyns. This is a letter he wrote to his family in December 1914. I suspect what’s being describing the start famous ‘Christmas Truce’.
2nd Bn Rifle Bde.
25th Inf Bde.
8th Divn.
Brit. Exp. Force
[Xmas 1914]
Darling all!
I hope you got my Xmas letter all right only I hear Grannie sent it on, the one thing I did not want done as I particularly wanted you all to get it together on Xmas day.
I am sending you the IVth Corps Xmas Card – rather a crude drawing I’m afraid but you’ll find it rather interesting as it has on it all the signatures of the other company officers. It will be rather nice to keep won’t it. E P Watts 53rd Sikhs (FF) is attached to us as second in command of the company. He is a topper. He is in the Indian Army (FF = Frontier Force) & as hard as nails.
I got a topping letter from Mr Gilbert at the same time as your last one. Just after I got it a frantic [?] note came from HQRS “Stand to arms at once!! this was in the trenches. Apparently an aeroplane of ours had been reconnoitring & had seen masses of G’s troops concentrating behind the village in front of us. Great excitement. That night patrols went out to find out what they could. One came back saying the Germans were cutting their own barbed wire entanglements to get through preparatory to making an attack. However nothing happened. On our right some miles away the line was heavily attacked. Later on a funny thing happened. A patrol went, (trembling in every limb) got quite close to the enemy and actually heard — (another thrilling instalment in our next issue) a man playing a penny whistle & man singing!
I got a topping letter from Mr Gilbert at the same time as your last one. Just after I got it a frantic [?] note came from HQRS “Stand to arms at once!! this was in the trenches. Apparently an aeroplane of ours had been reconnoitring & had seen masses of G’s troops concentrating behind the village in front of us. Great excitement. That night patrols went out to find out what they could. One came back saying the Germans were cutting their own barbed wire entanglements to get through preparatory to making an attack. However nothing happened. On our right some miles away the line was heavily attacked. Later on a funny thing happened. A patrol went, (trembling in every limb) got quite close to the enemy and actually heard — (another thrilling instalment in our next issue) a man playing a penny whistle & man singing!
Well there is no more news to tell. We are resting now after 6 days running in trenches. By Jove the dirt – One almost walks about without meaning to.
Much love to all
Your loving
Chan
Lieutenant-Colonel Chandos Hoskyns
1885 – 1940
Lest We Forget
Chan [pronounced ‘Shan’] also fought in the Second World War taking part in the Seige of Calais in 1940 where he was badly wounded. He was transferred to a hospital in Dover and was expected to live by the doctors but he was too concerned about the men under his command still fighting, which hindered his recovery. His death had such an enormous impact on his wife, Joyce Austen Taylor who had already lost her only brother in the First now loses her husband and is devastated. It had a particularly bad effect on my mother, his daughter. It never left her and shaped many of her choices in life. There are more forbears in the wider Hoskyns family who dealt with loss in both wars as with families all over the world.
Sarah Vernon © 11th November 2020
Broome House, near Canterbury.
A guest post by Dr Anne Samson, London Historians Member.
The name Kitchener does not tend to trigger thoughts of London. Invariably, it’s the poster “Your country needs you” which comes to mind or the Second Anglo-Boer (South African) war of 1899-1902 with concentration camps and farm burning in South Africa or Kitchener’s New Armies and…
Kitchener in his pomp, 1910, aged 60, by Bassano. NPG, London.
The story of Hitler in Vienna starts in 1907. Aged just 18 at the time, Hitler moved to the capital city to pursue a career as an artist and live a bohemian lifestyle.He would remain in the city until May 1913, when he went to Munich after avoiding conscription to the Austria-Hungary army. He would return again in 1938, triumphant after the Anschluss – the annexation …
Source: Hitler in Vienna: homeless, hungry, hateful – History Wench
‘Heimat’ in a Suitcase: Flight and Exile of the Herzberg Family
Today we would like to invite you to have a glimpse into the private rooms of Haus Herzberg. The photographs you see here are an extract from an album that contains images of the Herzberg family home in 22 Richard-Wagner-Straße, in the German town of Hanover. The pictures were taken in the 1930s, before the Herzbergs had to flee Germany to escape the Nazi Regime. The beautifully bound red leather album contains an array of photographs showing…
Source: ‘Heimat’ in a Suitcase: Flight and Exile of the Herzberg Family | Leo Baeck Institute London
An aerial photograph of the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley, Hampshire, in the first world war. Click here to see the full image. All photographs courtesy Marion Ivey
A hospital orderly, wearing what resembles a butcher’s apron, poses with an equally ominous-looking trolley. Ward maids, country-looking girls, pose in utilitarian overalls designed for dirty work, rather than the pristine starch of nurses’ uniforms. A handsome stable hand, straight out of War Horse and proudly holding a pair of equine charges, looks hesitantly into the camera’s lens. A quartet of stretcher-bearers wait on a dockside to…
via Palace of pain: Netley, the hospital built for an empire of soldiers | Art and design | The Guardian
Some welcome sanity from historian Andrew Roberts.
British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) in the garden at 10 Downing Street, London, circa 1943. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
by Andrew Roberts
The movie Darkest Hour, in which Gary Oldman won an Oscar playing Winston Churchill, has garnered many plaudits, and deservedly so. It introduced a new generation to Churchill and the inspiring story of 1940, reminding them of how Britain stood alone for a year against the might and fury of Nazi Germany.
But it has also produced a vicious backlash against Churchill and all that he stood for and unleashed an avalanche of vitriolic abuse, much of it ahistorical and ignorant.
It says more about our modern “fake history” culture than anything about…
easter egg, handmade © IWM (EPH 641)
Physical description
A carved wooden Easter egg, in two halves, depicting on one side a painted rural scene with cottage, fields, trees and a blue sky, on the other side are large letters in gold…
Captain Robert Falcon Scott was the first British explorer to reach the South Pole and explore Antarctica extensively by land in the early 1900s.
The celebrated explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) also famously took part in the race to claim the South Pole in 1911, but sadly failed in his mission and died on his return journey…
via Captain Robert Falcon Scott | Explore Royal Museums Greenwich
Pictured L-R: a police matron, Hettie, Winnie Mason and Alice Wheeldon in custody
On this day, 6 March 1917, the trial of socialist, suffragette and anti-war activist Alice Wheeldon, along with two of her daughters and her son-in-law, began in London at the Old Bailey. She and her family had been framed by…
President Woodrow Wilson addressing Congress before the US Declaration of War
A decade ago when we first took up the challenge of Professor Carroll Quigley from his seminal works, Tragedy and Hope and The Anglo-American Establishment to look for evidence of the secret cabal [1] and how they grew into the Secret Elite we were stunned by…
The Dreadnought hoaxers in their Abyssinian regalia, with Virginia Woolf on the far left. PUBLIC DOMAIN
EVEN A PERSON RUSHING FOR a tight connection at Paddington Station, London, might have stopped to stare at a strange group making its way onto the train to Weymouth on February 7, 1910. Four people, men of foreign extraction, by all appearances, with luxuriant beards, patterned…
Source: When Virginia Woolf Dressed Up as an ‘African’ Prince to Fool the Royal Navy – Atlas Obscura
Portrait of Ethel Smyth (1858 – 1944), 1901, John Singer Sargent
Role-models matter as much as they ever did but women are also significantly under-represented in our history books. Their absence has taken its toll: a 2016 survey carried out by English Heritage revealed that 40 percent of us believe men have had a greater impact on history than women. It’s a misconception, of course. Women have always excelled, we just haven’t easily been able to read their stories because the omission has…
Rosa May Billinghurst endured much in her fight for women to get the vote, yet it is her experience of violent suffrage demonstrations as a disabled campaigner which remains her legacy.
Born in 1875, May Billinghurst was branded…
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