The books and moments of history are filled with memorable names, courageous figures, and moments of sheer ingenuity. Yet not all names are as well recogni…
Source: Nancy Wake, in WWII – Freedom Fighter, Allied Agent and The Gestapo’s Most Wanted
New Zealand
Defending Wellington: The Home Guard at Makara – History Geek
Braithwaite, a young member of No. 12 Platoon, Makara Battalion, New Zealand Home Guard, 1942. Lemuel Lyes Collection.
These previously unpublished photographs of the Home Guard offer a rare candid view of an often-overlooked part of New Zealand’s experience during the Second World War. Far from being a safe sidesh…
Source: Defending Wellington: The Home Guard at Makara – History Geek
On this day: the death of Kate Sheppard | In Times Gone By…
In 1905
In 1905 Kate Sheppard, New Zealand’s most famous suffragette, died on the 13th of July, 1934. Born to Scottish parents in England in 1847, Sheppard moved to New Zealand in 1869. She became a …
Source: On this day: the death of Kate Sheppard | In Times Gone By…
Two Bloggers Tackle WWII – Book Reviews | Pacific Paratrooper
The ordeals of the POWs put to slave labour by their Japanese masters on the ‘Burma Railway’ have been well documented yet never cease to shock. It is impossible not to be horrified and moved by their stoic courage in the face of inhuman brutality, appalling hardship and ever-present death.While Barry Custance Baker was enduring his 1000 days of captivity, his young wife Phyllis was attempting to correspond with him and the families of Barry’s unit. Fortunately these moving letters have been…
Source: Two Bloggers Tackle WWII – Book Reviews | Pacific Paratrooper
10 Anti-Nazi David Lowe Cartoons | Made From History
Hitler Burning the League of Nations
Originally from New Zealand, David Low (1891-1963) was a political cartoonist who worked for many years in the United Kingdom. He is known for his satirical work in the Evening Standard, especially his depictions of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin, but also for his criticism of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of Appeasement toward Hitler.
Low’s work for the Standard during the 1930s and 40s caught the ire of the Nazis, resulting in his name being placed in the infamous…
Source: 10 Anti-Nazi David Lowe Cartoons | Made From History
Maori Protests and the Treaty of Waitangi | W.U Hstry
History of the British Empire’s involvement and subsequent negative and detrimental impacts on indigenous people and societies of the lands they colonised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is well known. Those effects today are highly prevalent even in now developed and Westernised countries of the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with indigenous populations having faced depleting numbers, inequalities in welfare and health care and mistreatment from the government, and ongoing disputes concerning land rights. But focus has slid from the perspective of Maori people, and their history outside of New Zealand is…
Source: Maori Protests and the Treaty of Waitangi | W.U Hstry
Lusitania Survivors: A Thrilling Escape | GM 1914
Mr and Mrs Arthur Dixon and their son Stanley were returning to Oldham for a five-week visit. Mr Dixon was a commercial traveller and latterly an agent in New Zealand for Messrs Hirst Bros and Co Ltd, wholesale jewellers of Roscoe Street, Oldham. They had left New Zealand on 26 March 1915, and made their way to New York via Honolulu, Vancouver, and San Francisco.
The Lusitania sailed shortly after noon on 1 May 1915. On board were 291 passengers in saloon or first class; 601 including a large number of young children in 2nd or cabin class; and only 373 in 3rd class, making a total of 1265 with a crew of 694 of which only…
Fine Ships and Gallant Sailors | barbdrummondbooks
Originally posted on barbdrummondbooks.
I grew up in Australia where ANZAC Day is an annual holiday, but I had never heard of this battle. But if it hadn’t happened, the Australians and New Zealanders might not have made it to Gallipoli, and the history of the First World War could have turned out very . book is based on the journal of a friend’s grandfather who signed on to deliver Australia’s first light cruiser, the HMAS Sydney, in 1913 and ended up in the middle of the first running gun battle of the First World War against the raider/pirate, the German SMS Emden.The Sydney was escorting the first of the ANZAC fleet from Freemantle to Gallipoli, which had been delayed repeatedly due to the risk of attack from the Emden. When the Emden attacked the telegraph station…
Gallipoli: Tom’s Story
This post is dedicated to the memory of my great great uncle Thomas Alexander Gillanders, who was killed in action one hundred years ago today, and to those who fought alongside him at Gallipoli.
Tom was a native of Inverness and the eldest of eleven children. He was a much-loved brother of my great-grandmother who fondly recalled the time he took her on a trip to Edinburgh when she was thirteen years old. He had recently spent some time working on a farm owned by cousins in Winnipeg but had returned announcing that he did not want to face another Canadian winter and had decided to try New Zealand. His father decided that the whole family would emigrate, as the other sons would likely follow Tom eventually anyway.
Thomas Alexander Gillanders (8 April 1881 – 25 April 1915)
The family left for New Zealand in 1908 and in 1910 they…
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Anzac Biscuits – Food Icons
Anzac Cove by Leon Maxwell Gellert
Anzac Cove by Leon Maxwell Gellert
There’s a lonely stretch of hillocks;
There’s a beach asleep and drear,
There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea.
There are sunken trampled graves;
And a little rotting pier;
And winding paths that wind unceasingly.
There’s a torn and silent valley;
There’s a tiny rivulet
With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.
There are lines of buried bones;
There’s an unpaid waiting debt;
There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.
Leon Maxwell Gellert (1892-1977) – January, 1916.
On this day: Gallipoli in 1915
Australian and New Zealand soldiers land in Turkey on what will go on to become Anzac Day.
Anzac Beach at 8am on 25 April 1915. Men from the Australian 4th Battalion (1st Brigade) and Jacob’s 26th Indian Mountain Battery are seen landing. The men in the foreground belong to the 1st Brigade staff. At the water’s edge is the body of Sapper R. Reynolds, one of the first men to be killed at Gallipoli.
Photographer: L-Cpl. Arthur Robert Henry Joyner (1st Division Signal Company, killed 5 December 1916 at Bazentin, Somme).
Gallipoli: Through the Soldier’s Lens | The Public Domain Review
Originally posted on The Public Domain
To mark the 100 years since Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) fought the Gallipoli campaign of WW1, Alison Wishart, Senior Curator of Photographs at Australian War Memorial, explores the remarkable photographic record left by the soldiers. Made possible by the birth of Kodak’s portable camera, the photographs give a rare and intimate portrait of the soldier’s day-to-day life away from the heat of battle.
2015 marks the centenary of one of the most commemorated events in Australia’s military history. One hundred years ago, at dawn of 25th April, boatloads of Australians and New Zealanders quietly landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula at a beach that became known as Anzac Cove.
Had Australia’s military commanders and elected leaders known how significant this event was to become in Australia’s history and the development of its national identity, they might have thought to send official photographers or war artists. But they didn’t. Instead, the photographic record of the nine month Gallipoli campaign relies primarily on the images taken by soldiers.
Fortunately, Kodak had released its ‘Vest Pocket’ camera in 1912, which made taking a camera to the front more feasible. Kodak encouraged enlistees…
Read original: Gallipoli: Through the Soldier’s Lens | The Public Domain Review.
Gallipoli 1: The Enduring Myth
I am still having connection problems and am thus unable to like and respond to your comments with any consistency.
The infamous Gallipoli campaign of 1915 was set up to fail. 180,000 allied soldiers were sacrificed, wounded or dead, for a strategic policy which served the imperial designs of the British Empire by failing. This is the essential truth which the next series of blogs will prove. Over the last century, in both Britain and Australia, Gallipoli has been turned into a heroic-romantic myth; [1] a myth promoted by court historians and pliant journalists in order to hide the stark truth. It was a ruse, a sop to the Russians to keep them out of Constantinople in the belief that allied forces would capture the city on their behalf. Put into the hands of incompetent generals and admirals, starved of determined leadership, ill-equipped, ill-advised and certain to fail, the attack on the Dardanelles obligated the Russians to turn back to the eastern front and wait. As an integral part of…
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The Danseuse Electrique: 1893
Loie Fuller at Folies Bergeres. http://www.jules-cheret.org/Folies-Bergeres–Loie-Fuller,-France,-1897.html
The latest stage development is the danseuse electrique, the title given the youthful corphyee who, to enhance her grace and pedal dexterity, invokes the aid of science and appears at times in a blaze of varied coloured lights that rival in brilliancy and splendour the gems of the Eastern monarchs who figure in Arabian story. The latest contrivance must be regarded as more wonderful than all its predecessors. First for the effect; then for the explanations. The lady, usually a pretty one, runs upon the stage attired as if for the serpentine dance, and about her skirts and the folds of her dress dash sparks and lights of every possible hue. She dances, kicks and turns while the lights continue to corruscate. Revolving wheels, fountains and prisms of light play about her, appearing and disappearing ab every undulation of her form. She is…
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First Night History 
