Blogging 200 years of history from 1785-1985
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 It was 150 years ago today that the French acrobat Charles Blondin made his first tightrope walk over Niagara Falls. In the following weeks he repeated the stunt several times, to huge crowds of spectators, with ever more weird and terrifying refinements.
By the time The Times caught up with the story, excursion trains and steamers were running from Chicago, Detroit and Toronto, to watch Blondin's carrying his unfortunate manager piggy-back across the void. The article was, not unreasonably, headlined "extraordinary foolhardiness".
A few days later came another report, "More buffoonery at Niagara", which was one way of describing a man carrying a portable kitchen 1,000 feet above the falls, and stopping in the middle to cook and eat an omelette. The reporter was happy to report that by now the crowds , by now rather jaded by all the excitement, were dwindling.
Then, bizarrely, a resident of Niagara wrote to the paper to complain that Blondin was a hoax, and the whole thing had been got up to make money for the rail companies, a claim that was quickly denied by an eye-witness.
Despite this inauspicious publicity, Blondin became a bit hit in the UK and Ireland, and died eventually in Ealing, where he is immortalised in Blondin Avenue, and its parallel street, Niagara Avenue.
Click on the links above for the orginal Times reports and obituary.
Want to explore 200 years of The Times Archive for yourself? Check out the Archive homepage or subscribe here
 And he didn't even serve the full time.
The inventor of the pyramid selling scheme which now carries his name, and for which Bernard Madoff has been given 150 years, was first sentenced to five years, for mail fraud; he served three and a half. He then got seven to nine years for larceny and fraud, of which he served seven. On his release he was finally deported to Italy.
You can read The Times's reports of his career in this Archive blog post, Charles Ponzi and his scheme.
 I'm sorry if this gives away the end of the film, but John Dillinger was shot by police in a gun battle on July 24, 1934.
He was immensely famous. News of his death merited no less than two news articles and a leading article in The [London] Times.
First, came the actual news report:
The desperado John Dillinger was shot and killed last night by Federal detectives as he came out of a cinema theatre in Chicago. They took no chance of his putting up a fight but shot him from behind point-blank, hitting him once in the head and twice in the body. He died in an ambulance without uttering a word.
A soft-shod detective stole up behind Dillinger from a doorway, set a pistol against his back, and fired. Three other shots were fired by detectives in rapid succession. One of the bullets went wide and gave glancing wounds to two women passers-by.
Betrayed by an acquaintance, Anna Sage, Dillinger had been recognised by Chicago FBI head, Melvin Purvis, despite his extensive disguise.
When his body was examined at the morgue there was some difficulty in making positive identification of him, for he had burned his fingertips with acid to hide their betraying lines, and had plucked out much of the hair from his eyebrows, besides having had the shape of his nose and his cheeks altered.
On another page of the paper, was a distinctly colourful summary of Dillinger's career:
No American outlaw, not even the notorious Jesse James, was ever more hunted than Dillinger, who was killed by detectives last night.
Time and again he escaped capture or death by the narrowest of margins, shooting his way out of traps in which several of his companions were killed and owing his life as much perhaps to his luck as to the bullet-proof vests he almost invariably wore.
The article details his incredible career of gaol breaks, bank robberies, murders, kidnappings, captures and escapes. But just in case anyone thought this was some sort of a jolly caper, there was also a leading article.
The intrepid men of the Chicago Department of justice who on Sunday night trapped and killed John Dillinger have earned the world's congratulations on the completion of their grim task.
BUT, and there was a big but. First of all, in order to catch him the police had acted like gangsters themselves.
There are countries where the disposal of public enemies by surprise attack and swift slaying, instead of by arrest and trial, is regarded as entirely satisfactory. It is certainly not so regarded in Washington.
And, there was Dillinger's fame; his notoriety had made him a national hero.
Some reports of Dillinger's death say that souvenir-hunters soaked their handkerchiefs in his blood upon the pavement. This is the reverence that has been done in the past to the bodies of kings and martyrs.
The popular delusion that has surrounded the obscene Dillinger with a like romanticism is the supreme evil that the United States has to overcome.
So have they succeeded? With Johnny Depp as Dillinger? I don't think so.
By the way, does anyone know what film he went to see before he was shot? The Times just describes it as a "gangster film", which seems like a bit of a cop out. Are they sure it wasn't the 1935 blockbuster, The Barretts of Wimpole Street?
With a telescope one could see myriads of men on each side fighting at all points; dead bodies of men and horses strewn on the ground, with the wreck of uniforms and arms; but to the naked eye it seemed as if a vast ant hill were in motion - men becoming pigmies, as they doubtless are, in encounters of such magnitude.
Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers are meeting in Solferino, in northern Italy, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the battle which inspired the founding of the organisation.
On the evening of June 24, 1859, a Swiss businessman, Henri Dunant, arrived in Solferino to find scenes of carnage in which 6,000 Austrian and French soldiers had been killed, and around 35,000 wounded. The battle was graphically described in this Times report.
 Dunant was shocked to find the wounded lying more or less unattended on the battlefield. He organised teams of locals to help, and himself provided funds and equipment. When The Times's reporter returned to the scene three weeks later, it seemed that almost all the evidence of a battle had been cleared away.
Three years later, Dunant published a book, A Memory of Solferino, suggesting the formation of an international volunteer organisation to care for wounded soldiers. The idea was taken up, first in Geneva and then across Europe, and his insistence that members of the organisation should have neutral and protected status became one of the founding tenets of the Geneva Convention, adopted in 1864.
Dunant's organisation was renamed the International Committee of the Red Cross and went from strength to strength, but he was frozen out after going bankrupt, and spent many years in the wilderness before his achievement was recognised with the first ever award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
In the UK, fundraising for the Red Cross started in earnest after a letter was published in The Times in 1870, as news arrived of the outbreak of the Franco Prussian War. C. J. Burgess of the international committee wrote:
Every country in Europe, except England, has its "Societe de Secours aux Blesses et Malades Militaires". Now is our opportunity to form a strong British "Society of Help for the Sick and Wounded."
A few days later came a letter from an old Crimea hand, Robert Loyd Lindsay, announcing the setting up of a committee, The National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War, and the deposit of £1,000 at Coutts Bank to start the fund. A further letter brought a more direct appeal to the public, and the news of royal patronage.
And on September 12, a mere seven weeks later, The Times reported that "the total contributions paid to Captain Burgess or into Coutts's Bank on behalf of the society are now considerably in excess of £100,000". By the end of October, Captain Loyd Lindsay sent The Times this financial report, with subscriptions standing at an astonishing £263,000.
As well as the sick and wounded, the Red Cross's remit soon extended to caring for prisoners of war. Since my father was kept alive with Red Cross food parcels through five years' captivity in the Second World War, my family has plenty to be grateful to it for. In fact, without it I suppose I wouldn't have been born.
International Committee of the Red Cross
 Some commenters on John Bercow's accession to the Speaker's chair seem to be upset that he's decided to ditch the full Speaker's rig and appear in a suit.
As long ago as 1868, The Times greeted the election of a new Speaker with a leading article appealing for reform on the subject of formal dress. At that time, all MPs had to wear full court dress to go to the Speaker's parties and this newspaper thought the rule highly unfair to the fat, the scrawny and the bandy-legged.
Court Dress is, at least on the majority of figures, ugly, ridiculous, and productive of a painful self-consciousness likely to interfere with self-possession. An Apollo, of course, will look the better the more thoroughly a pretence of clothing reveals his real form; but Silenus would rather give less distinct outline to his rotundity, Vulcan will wish to disguise his crooked shanks, and Pluto his gaunt limbs.
Speaker Bercow is hardly a Silenus or a Pluto, and I'm glad to say I've never seen a picture of him in shorts so I'm sure his motives for dropping the tights come from an admirable desire for modernisation, as elegantly expressed in the leader.
Dress ought to equalize rather than distinguish men in this civilized age, in which we exercise our political rights without much respect of persons - at least, with respect rather to their character and positions.
The Speaker's salary today, at £141,866 is worth something like £100,000 less than his equivalent in 1789, when this article was published. The pay may have been magnificent, but the difficulties of the job made it well-deserved.
The salary of the Speaker is between seven and eight thousand pounds per annum, besides patronage; but then it requires so much parliamentary knowledge, such promptness, evenness of temper and, above all, such drudging attendance, as can only make it a bait for the most patient ambition.
The one thing the writer of this article didn't anticipate was that the Speaker's own party wouldn't have voted for him:
Though the official duty of a Speaker of the House of Commons is to act as a kind of President in putting questions, etc, etc, yet to carry the election of one has ever been reckoned as the first great test of the prevalency of either party in the House.
Swift once said, when the choice of a Speaker was mentioned as of no great consequence, the office being only to deliver the words of other people, "admitting this, who would choose a footman to deliver a message, whose interest and opinion led him to wish it might miscarry."
 Cheers to Another Nickel in the Machine for publishing some wonderful photos from Life magazine, 1940, showing the exciting things that wartime London restaurants were doing with Spam.
And when you'd eaten it, you could get all creative with the tins. Here's a little-known insight into what those US troops were getting up to when they were "over here" before D-Day (apart from making hay with the flower of British womanhood, that is).
 A fascinating parliamentary report in The Times on Britain's treatment of Kikuyu tribespeople during the Mau-Mau uprising: Viscount Stansgate, father of Tony Benn, asked the House of Lords to justify the mass round-ups of tribespeople that were happening in Kenya, with the use of dogs, and the confiscation of their animals and property. His question was based on a report he had read in The Times.
He was ridiculed and abused by the Lords' laughing yahoos, but would not be deterred from his point: "He would not be a party to punishing the innocent to frighten the guilty."
Excerpts of the report below, but you can read the whole report here.
VISCOUNT STANSGATE called attention to the policy of collective punishment in Kenya ...
He had collected information from many sources - from a friend and from the newspapers - about what happened in the round-ups carried out by the Government. At dawn troops arrived; everybody was turned out, aircraft were overhead, and there were dogs. The people were then rounded up ...
He said that the people were examined to see if there were Mau Mau marks on them. Some were carried off, sometimes in chains - and that information came from a photograph which had appeared in The Times. They were sent to a camp, and those considered worthy of attention were kept in prison. Then, under the new orders, their crops, their cattle, and bicycles were taken away from them. None of those people had been proved guilty of any offence ...
He was not making the speech without a good deal of careful consideration and under the sharp urge of conscience. Continuing, the noble viscount read extracts from The Times of today of speeches made in the Kenya Legislature by Mr Wyatt the Member for Law and Order, and Mr. Humphrey Slade, a European elected member and commented: That is the type of punishment that the members of Legislative Council desire ...
He also, read a report of a round-up of the Kikuyu in settled areas which stated: "Sterner measures against Kikuyu in settled areas were initiated today when between 2,000 and 3,000 men, women, and children, with their household goods, sheep and goats, were collected from farms in the Leshaw ward and confined behind barbed wire ...
"The men, impassive and inscrutable, were taken in lorries to a prison camp at Thomson's Falls, where they squatted, each clad in a dun-coloured blanket. A police officer at a table in the middle then interviewed each in turn. In the middle of the enclosure stood a newly erected gallows, encased in corrugated iron, with a broad set of steps leading up to it" ...
These were uncharged people who had been rounded up. Men, women, and children not charged with any offence had sat round and in the centre of them was this sign of British justice and fairness, "a newly erected gallows" which had been erected ...
When LORD SANDHURST intervened to ask if it was in order to read from a newspaper, the MARQUESS of SALISBURY interrupted to remark that as Lord Stansgate had read it he would read a paragraph which he had omitted - "The whole operation, distasteful though it may have been, was carried out with decorum and humanity. There was no question of ill words or buffets, and it is evident that the administration's efforts to curb such tendencies have had an effect" ...
There was some laughter mingled with the cheers from the Government benches, and VISCOUNT STANSGATE agreed that it was a distasteful job, but he did not know that it was a subject for merriment.
This statement was one of the most distressing comments on British administration he had ever read. It was what they wanted investigating. They would like the House to comment on it, and Lord Salisbury to justify it. It was discreditable. It would bring shame on us and shorten the period of our beneficent rule in Africa. He would not be a party to punishing the innocent to frighten the guilty ...
The EARL of MUNSTER, Under Secretary for the Colonies, said that Lord Stansgate's speech was one of the most lamentable and dreadful he had ever heard (Ministerial cheers).
The report ends:
The EARL of MUNSTER said the dogs were not terrorizing women and children, nor biting nor gnawing anyone, but were rounding people up in a normal manner.
You can read more in The Times Archive about the Mau Mau rebellion here.
 The BBC reports today that an attempt by descendants of Geronimo, the Chiricahua Apache leader, to regain his remains are being blocked by the US Justice Department. Geronimo's family believe that members of the Yale University secret society, Skull and Bones, stole the remains in 1918, and have kept them ever since.
No one seems to know whether the bones were really taken, but what harm can there be in trying to find out? If there really is some hidden crypt where they're stashed, surely they should be returned. If there isn't, then why not put the mystery to rest?
Some very powerful people seem to have been members of the Skull and Bones society over the years. Do they have more skeletons in their closet that they don't want anyone to know about?
Geronimo fought a long and gruesome struggle against the Mexican and American settlers in Apache territory. When he finally surrended, The Times said:
This is regarded at Washington as the termination of a war which has lasted for 26 years and has been very fertile in dramatic incidents.
The report touches on one problem relating to a possible trial - no witnesses:
It is thought that they cannot be tried by court-martial nor by the civil tribunals, which require the evidence of witnesses, whereas the atrocities charged against Geronimo were all committed without any witnesses being present, unless indeed some of his followers should turn round and give evidence against him. The general opinion is that a military commission will be formed.
Geronimo lived on for 23 years, with no diminution of his reputation.
The excellent History Today magazine has a strange and wonderful story in this month's edition about garotting.
I thought garotting was how Spain used to deal with its criminals, but to the mid-Victorians it apparently meant a violent mugging, whereby people were simultaneously grabbed round the neck and shoved in the back. The best that could happen was that you fell on your face while your wallet was pinched, but several people were killed and a full-scale media (newspaper anyway) panic broke out.
1862 seems to have been when the garotting scare reached its zenith, but the hysteria didn't really die down for fifty years. In 1907 there was a lively debate in The Times letters page under the catchy heading, "Garotting and the lash".
This 1862 leading article probably sums up why these street robberies were so shocking - no more the merry repartee with a highwayman on a country road, but just a sudden, rough, business-like attack in the middle of a city street.
But was it the lash that suppressed the outbreak? Apparently not.
As so often, the answer seems to have been to put more Bobbies on the beat. They didn't even need tasers, apparently.
I love how readers' comments have turned Lindsey Bareham's innocuous cookery article about how to make a pork pie into a national food fight between Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
Here's a sad story from 50-odd years ago, which shows how times have changed in the Chalk Farm/Belsize Park neck of the woods. It's more celeb central than rough sleeping nowadays.
Wow, this is great. The US National Archive has launched its own YouTube channel, making available incredible old film like this Depression-era piece about California - fantastic shots of the Big Sur park in 1935.
There's lots more - politics, war, moon exploration - and they'll be adding to it all the time. Visit it here: usnationalarchives
Eugen Weidman, a German career criminal living in France, was found guilty in 1939 of a spree of kidnapping, robbery and murder, and on this day 70 years ago was guillotined in front of a large crowd in Versailles.
His trial, with two accomplices,attracted huge publicity, and was followed closely this side of the Channel. In a strange twist, it was reported that an English chauffeur from Tufnell Park in London had applied to the gang for a job, answering a newspaper advertisement, and had even travelled to Paris for an interview. When he arrived, there was no one to meet him, and the names he'd been given turned out to be false. A narrow escape.
The Times's notice of the execution was very brief, and did not mention that there had been a near-riot as the public fought for a view. Even worse, the whole thing was filmed from an upstairs window, and the crowd's behaviour caused such a scandal that public executions were thenceforth banned.
Bizarrely, it seems that the English horror actor, Christopher Lee, was there, and described the execution in his autobiography.
The guillotine was last used in France in 1977.
Also in the Archive blog:
Ten murderous exhibits in the Black Museum
Ghastly experiment with the electric chair
Napoloeon Bonaparte met his Waterloo on June 18, 1815, thereby ending the war in Europe and giving a handy name for the first Eurostar terminus.
The thrilling news took three days to reach London and, without the enterprising spirit of one Mr Sutton, "a gentleman of Colchester", it would have been even longer.
As The Times reported, Mr Sutton, "whom we understand to be the proprietor of the passage vessels sailing between that place and Ostend", was hanging around the Ostend docks when casualties of the battle started to roll in.
With great zeal and alacrity [he] ordered one of his vessels to sea without waiting for passengers, and made the best of his way to town to relieve the anxiety of government and the public by the earliest information.
Obviously Sutton was not the main story of the day. Rapture at the victory was unconfined, even if the details were sketchy. It was two more days before the public could read the Duke of Wellington's own dispatch. It's phenomenal to be able to read his own words, presumably dictated the morning after the battle while the smoke was still settling. First, his matter-of-fact description of the action
The attack succeeded in every point; the enemy was forced from his position on the heights, and fled in the utmost confusion.
and then the list of casualties.
Your Lordship will observe, that such a desperate action could not be fought, and such advantages could not be gained, without great loss; and I am sorry to add, that ours has been immense.
But The Times wouldn't let the subject of Mr Sutton rest. Something simply had to be done about keeping the public and, in particular, the newspapers better informed about what was going on:
We cannot quit the subject without expressing some surprise, that, in the present critical conjuncture of affairs, some arrangement has not been adoped by Government for securing the regular transmission of dispatches by the route through which the present intelligence was so laudably transmitted.
Colchester being but 50 miles from town, and packets sailing twice a week between that place and Ostend, it is reasonable to believe that the earliest intelligence of events from the important scene of military action would thus reach the metropolis, and of course be spread with great celerity through the kingdom.
On June 17, 1940, two weeks after the final withdrawal from Dunkirk, the remaining soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force were being evacuated from ports in Brittany and western France.
The Cunard liner Lancastria, carrying 6,000 troops, had just got under way in the Loire estuary when it was hit by a German dive-bomber and sank. Over 3,000 of the men were lost, despite the rescue attempts of many small French and English boats. It was the greatest loss of life in Britain's maritime history.
News of the disaster was suppressed by Churchill, who was concerned about public morale. The first report was not published in The Times for more than a month, and then only because the story had been broken by The New York Times and The Scotsman: Troopship Lancastria lost, July 26, 1940.
Quite why so many men died, in a calm sea with rescue boats to hand, remained a mystery. Oil had poured out of the ship but did not catch fire. According to this letter, it had the bizarre effect of preserving many of the bodies, which came ashore months later. There was dispute over whether men in the sea had been machine-gunned, but this seems not to have been true.
Fifteen years later, the question was raised again, and survivors came forward with their own theories. John Munroe, in a letter to The Times, suggested that a great number of those who managed to get off the ship were unable to swim. There were not nearly enough life-jackets, and those that there were were handed out indiscriminately, to swimmers and non-swimmers, while swimmers, in such calm waters, could easily have done without them. He expressed the wish that service people would, in future, be taught to swim as a matter of course.
Also in the Archive blog:
The wreck of the General Slocum
How The Times covered D-Day
The Sun today has what seem to be the first mugshots of Ronald and Reggie Kray, aged about 19, when they were arrested for skipping out on National Service and sent to the Tower of London (yes, really).
Their first appearance in The Times was two or three years later. They'd been charged with GBH after one Terence Martin was dragged out of a pub in Bethnal Green and given a going over with fists and a bayonet, and Ronnie, when arrested, was found with a loaded revolver.
So much, so East London. What made it a story was that the boys were identical twins and, once in court, pulled the old "it wasn't me, it was him" trick. The magistrate complained, "The difficulty is to know which one to give bail to," and remanded them both in custody. Read the report here: Court's "difficulty" over twins
For more on the Krays, visit our Archive topic page
It's not coming out for a couple of months, but at least here's the trailer for Creation, Jon Amiel's movie based on the life of Charles Darwin.
In the title role is Paul Bettany, who did a very nice job of playing Darwin's fictional alter ego, Stephen Maturin, in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Opposite him, as Darwin's wife, Emma, is his real wife, Jennifer Connelly. Bettany says their "absent-minded closeness" was useful in portraying the relationship realistically in the film.
At one point in the trailer, you can see Toby Jones, as Darwin's friend, Thomas Huxley, exclaiming "You've killed God, sir!" - which is probably a bit of filmic license. What Huxley really thought about On The Origin of Species you can read in his review in The Times - the first notice published, on December 26, 1859.
The Times's regular book reviewer was handed On the Origin of Species to review, but quickly realised that it was completely beyond him. He called in Huxley to take it on, saying that he would simply top and tail it with his own style of intro, and the Times subs would never notice the difference.
The subs didn't notice, but Darwin did. He wrote to Huxley to thank him: "I will keep your secret ... Several persons have asked me who wrote that "most remarkable article" in the Times. As a cat may look at a king, so I have said that I strongly suspected you."
"The Victorians look so serious in photographs," Jon Amiel told an interviewer at the opening of the Darwin Big idea exhibition at the Natural History Museum. But that's not right, apparently: "They were a wild, whacky sexy bunch of people." Darwin? Really? Can't wait to see it.
Also in The Archive blog:
Darwin and the vivisectionists
Did Darwin stick pins in babies?
 Today is Bloomsday; June 16, 1904, being the day on which all the events of James Joyce's Ulysses took place - including at one point, a character reading about the General Slocum disaster in the morning paper. This is starting to sound like an obsession.
You can read the original Times Literary Supplement review of Ulysses and reports of the many vicissitudes of getting the novel published in this Ulysses Archive topic page. A literary critic in The Times memorably commented:
Mr James Joyce, who in his "Ulysses" (privately published, for excellent reasons, and I don't want to borrow a copy of it) is said to carry his sympathies into the very latrines. You never can tell where your sympathies will lead you.
And you can listen to this extraordinary recording of Joyce reading his own work. Wonderful voice.
Also in the Archive topics:
Thomas Hardy
The trials of Oscar Wilde
Reading about the General Slocum disaster (see last post), I decided it must have been the origin for Bob Dylan's Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues.
Annoyingly, a bit of internet crawling shows it was nothing to do with it, but here's the song anyway, just because it's great.
 Today is the anniversary of the worst disaster in New York's history, after 9/11.
On June 15, 1904, over 1,000 people, mainly women and children, were drowned or burnt to death when the huge steamship, the General Slocum, caught fire while carrying 1,800 passengers to a Sunday school picnic. The St Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church from Little Germany, Manhattan, had chartered the boat for its annual outing.
The day was a perfect one. The children and their mothers, dressed in their best and carrying flags, marched to the pier, headed by a band. The destination of the steamer, which had been specially chartered for the picnic, was Forest Grove, Long Island Sound.
Tonight hundreds of those who began the day so gaily are dead; many others are badly injured, and scores of the survivors are insane as the result of the awful sights they witnessed. The number of the dead increases in every bulletin issued.
Blame for the disaster was quickly laid at the door of the ship's captain, Captain Van Schaick, who did everything possible wrong once the fire broke out, the ship's owners, the Knickerbocker Steamship Company, and the Government steamboat inspectors:
Some months ago the owner of certain harbour boats was asked by a newspaper reporter about the condition of his flotilla. He replied: "My boats ought to be well equipped, for I do not bribe the inspectors."
The life-belts of the General Slocum, when thrown into the water, sank like so many stones, and when ripped open they displayed a mixture of sodden cork and glue, no more buoyant than so much dirt. The fire-hose on board the boat was rotten, and although the crew got out three lines immediately after the alarm of fire was given, each burnt within a few seconds. The lifeboats were fastened down by wire and could not be moved. Every safeguard on the vessel was a mockery.
The disaster introduced a new concept to British readers:
I suppose by this time the meaning of the American word "graft" is known in London. It was "graft" which was responsible for yesterday's appalling "accident."
Despite this conclusion, Captain von Schaik was the only person convicted for the disaster. He was found guilty of criminal negligence and served three and a half years in prison, but was aquitted of manslaughter.
Picture: The National Archives
 Police in Essex are encouraging residents to be ready for emergencies by packing a "grab-bag". They suggest that, in the event of "fire, extreme weather, a major accident, a gas leak" or possibly, given that it's Essex, a flood, people should have a bag ready, containing the following:
Prescription medicine details
Toiletries
Identity documents
First aid kits
Radio
Torch
Batteries
Notebook and pencil
Spare glasses
Mobile phone charger
Insurance details
Spare keys
No harm in looking on the dark side, I suppose, but I wonder how long all those useful things would stay in the bag; "We've run out of batteries. Oh, I know where there are some," etc.
There was plenty of similar advice when World War II broke out; with only seven minutes between air-raid warning and the first bombs landing you certainly wouldn't have wanted to hang around looking for your keys.
This Air-Raid Precaution announcement sets out the guidelines:
In every house there should be one room in which essential equipment such as water, sand, first-aid set, should be ready. Raids might last some time; therefore provide any distractions you can, such as gramophone, cards, toys.
At the height of the Blitz, heading for the shelters became routine.
Scarcely a night has passed these last three weeks without either air raid, or alarm, or both, and the people have become so used to the nightly disturbance that the housewives shop early, prepare the evening meal, and get the family off to bed for a spell of sleep before the sirens sound.
One story is told of a local Francis Drake who went off to play a heat in his club bowling championship without waiting for the "all-clear," although a bomb had dropped in the next street.
At the gateway of the Thames, Essex was particularly vulnerable. On May 1, 1940, a crippled Heinkel bomber crashed in flames on to a residential area of Clacton-on-Sea, Killing two people and injuring more than 150.
The spot where the bomber fell was the centre of a desolate scene - demolished houses, scores more with every window shattered, doors blown out and roofs caving in, the charred remains of the big bomber, here and there pieces of clothing lodged in the branches of trees, and scattered about dolls, handbags, tooth-brushes, and a hundred and one of the things common to every home.
But things could have been worse:
There are two aspects of this disaster which give some comfort. First it was the accurate fire of our own gunners which brought to grief this carrier of "murder" mines, for the Heinkel was a layer of the mines which wreck and destroy ships without warning.
The second consolation is that the local ARP services were found ready and competent for the work so suddenly thrown upon them.
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