Cassell, 1959, 214 p including 2 p Preface, 1 p Bibliography, 8 p Index.

The book’s title is 1914 and it is a history of the events of that fateful year but of course it is its latter half which will inevitably predominate any such undertaking. The year’s early months are all but ignored, Chapter 1 beginning with “That year the summer came ungrudgingly early.” Nevertheless, Cameron sets the scene of that last hurrah of Edwardian life. (Okay, the old King had died four years before but nothing much had changed in the interim.) He runs through life in Britain in the realms of painting, music, theatre (and music-hall,) dance, literature, fashion, and the nascent cinema with some detail. (At the White City, the Anglo-American Exposition proclaimed the “Wonders of the Panama Canal – the Grand Canyon – America’s skyscrapers.”)

In British politics, though the calls for votes for women were becoming ever louder, the Irish question was to the fore: this was the year of the mutiny at the Curragh. Other more normal political divisions were evident. In one of the broadsheets a Mr John Littlejohns from Pontypridd alliteratively thundered, “Mr W Churchill is the biggest braggart of blatant braggadocio in the brutish trituration of bombastic Radicalism!” continuing his diatribe with, “Mr Lloyd George addresses public meetings with the grimace of a mountebank and the spite of a viper. The present Government is a mawkish medley of parasitical lugubriousness, a neurotic contemporary amalgam of mental profligacy, which seeks to disintegrate the empire with persuasive pasquinades, Liberal levity, volatile vivacity, and designed deception.”

No one thought of war. When the crisis came there was no immediate consensus for war; the Manchester Guardian was for neutrality. Yet Europe, and Britain, slid into it just the same.

Despite the warnings from the last century, the US Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (whose treaty arguably pointed directly to this later conflict,) the cost in lives still came to many as a shock. France lost 800,000 men in the five months of fighting in 1914; most in the Battle of the Frontiers. Cameron says, “It was not to recover from this for many a generation.” (It certainly hadn’t by 1940.)

British troops took things stoically for the most part. Unlike the Germans, known to sing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ or the French with their ‘Marseillaise’ or ‘Brabançonne’ they did not march to tunes of patriotism, honour, or glory but instead to songs irreverent and frequently obscene: above all to “an inconsequential ditty called ‘Tipperary’, a mild, music-hall number the uproarious, passionate, almost immortal success of which was a mystery never in history to be explained, or indeed repeated.” Its triumph astonished its jobbing vaudeville composer Jack Judge “to his dying day.”

Yet when they had to the Tommies fought fiercely. On August 27 a battalion of Munster Fusiliers, acting as a sort of rearguard during the retreat from Mons, “became detached from the main body of the 1st Guards Brigade. They fought for almost twelve continuous hours against huge odds, and died, as far as was ever learned, to a man.” Cameron says, “Mons itself could have been, almost was a disaster.”

At home rumours abounded – myths of Cossacks with snow-caked boots landing all over Britain to defend the West. This was around the same time as the Russian armies were being surrounded at Tannenberg, where almost every man was captured or killed, including General Samsonoff. (In Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 Samsonoff is portrayed as committing suicide.) News of this defeat did not pass the Allied censor. Spy fever ensured that “every pull-up and tea-room … fell over themselves to dismiss anyone remotely suspected of alien blood; not a hard thing to detect in the catering trade.”

Though the Germans undoubtedly committed what would now be called war crimes, the soldiers of the BEF was not deceived by the word pictures in the British or even more furious French press. They knew their enemy: “Jerry was a coarse bastard, but if he was the undisciplined sot he was said to be, would he make such a superbly professional job of his sandbag barricades and his trenchings, would he stand in his defensive positions so resolutely and long?”

The steel helmet when it eventually came was apparently “accepted reluctantly, even derisively; it was finally sanctified by a black-and-white artist called Bruce Bairnsfather, who had invented a strange philosophical, whiskered archetype for the middle-aged Tommy whom he called ‘Old Bill’.”

Towards the end of the year income tax was raised for earned income from 9d in the pound to one shilling and for unearned income from 1/3d to 1/6d. Beer went up a penny a pint (a staggering 25% increase,) tea duty from 5d to 8d a pound. All the new taxes would bring in only £65 million. The war was costing £8 million a week. France, Russia, Belgium and Serbia all requested loans from the pre-eminent financial power, Britain.

It was a strange war. Days after the naval defeat at Coronel had been avenged by the sinking of the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, the Nurnberg and the Liepzig in the Battle of the Falkland Islands, HMS Bulwark, a pre-dreadnought battleship, inexplicably exploded in Sheerness harbour, with only twelve survivors of its nearly 800 crew. As Beatty was to say at Jutland two years later, there was “something wrong with our bloody ships.”)

This book is an intensely readable overview of those months of peace and war. Though its focus is understandably for the most part on Britain it covers the salient points of the war’s spread into the wider world. It is all the more readable for not concentrating on events in diplomacy or on the battlefields.

Sensitivity notes: Lenin is referred to as having ‘Jewish’ eyes and there is a reference to the thudding music of the negroes.

Pedant’s corner:- The words ‘England’ or ‘English’ is frequently employed to mean ‘Britain’ or ‘British’, England is at one point described as an island. Otherwise; “the land-locked harbour of Port Stanley” (I had no idea of the precise geography here but wondered: how can a harbour be land-locked? I have since looked it up. There is indeed a channel to the sea.)

Grant Richards Ltd, 1916, 304 p.

The book is a memoir of the Great War experiences of the author, famous for creating the character of Old Bill in his cartoons for the magazine The Bystander and later collected in various Fragments from France booklets, from late 1914 till he is wounded during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.

In this early stage of the war the trenches were rudimentary to say the least, with men waist deep in water, and what dugouts there were also sodden. Not far behind the front line a few farm buildings not yet destroyed by shellfire gave some cover from the Germans provided no movement whatever could be seen in them.

Bairnsfather was in charge of a machine gun company but seems to have had a lot of time to be able to wander about just behind the line exploring the local area. I assume his sergeant looked after things in his absences. His company was also rotated in and out of the line on a regular basis.

He describes these early days of the war as “delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life,” which he says to his mind gave the war what it sadly needed – a touch of romance. Later, though, “much of the romance had left the trenches.” He says he “wouldn’t have missed that time for anything” and claims “our soldiers” even though living “in a vast bog without being able to utilize modern contrivances for making the fight against adverse circumstances anything like an equal contest” wouldn’t have either.

It was during this time he began his artistic career, drawing on the farmhouse walls and making sketches for fellow officers and then deciding to sending off his first cartoon to The Bystander. The book has some of the author’s sketches scattered throughout and also photographic plates of cartoons which appeared in The Bystander bound in and counting towards the pagination.

As an insight into how a British officer felt in that first year of the war this is probably as good as it gets.

Sensitivity warning: contains the word “gollywog.”

Pedant’s corner:- focussed (focused,) “form part of a slack heap” (since these were now ruined farm walls the author may have meant ‘part of a slag heap’, but no matter,) “gulley”, two lines later followed by “gully”.

The Picardy Symbol Stone stands in the middle of a field a couple of miles or so north of Insch in Aberdeenshire. It seems to mark a burial site.

Information Board:-

Tomnaverie Stone Circle is a recumbent stone circle in Aberdeenshire. It was one of the sites we visited when we were up north last summer.

Circle from north approach path:-

Altar stone from west:-

Information board:-

Stone circle from east:-

Stones:-

Altar stone with Lochnagar in the distance. It is likely that the altar stone was deliberately aligned with the mountain:-

Beside the stone circle and on the left of the north approach path is what shows above ground of a nuclear bunker. The ancient and (relatively) modern almost side by side:-

Culsh Earth House is a souterrain near Tarland in Aberdeenshire.

It lies beside the road on the B 9119 and it would be easy to miss it. It’s just a passage leading underground and no-one now knows what its purpose was but it might have been for storage.

Entrance unlit:-

Lit with flash:-

End of (short) passageway:-

I only discovered yesterday that Tom Nairn, the Scottish historian who came up with the memorable phrase that “Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the Sunday Post,” has died.

He is most famous for his critique of the British state which he dubbed Ukania for its monarchical resemblance to a Ruritanian archetype, anatomised in his book The Break-Up of Britain.

An advocate of Scottish independence, his Republicanism and Marxism, though neither Trotsykist nor Stalinist – his sojourn in Italy led him to lean towards Gramsci – probably did not help his career.

Thomas Cunningham (Tom) Nairn: 2/6/1932 – 21/1/2023. So it goes.

The interior of Cuween Hill Chambered Cairn is reasonably spacious with plenty of room to stand up and various side chambers. The first of these photos was taken with the good lady’s camera phone:-

End wall with chamber entrance:-

Roof:-

Cuween Hill Chambered Cairn, Orkney, lies on Cuween Hill, south of Finstown on a path off the Old Finstown Road.

There’s a small car park – about two cars worth – but then there’s a bit of a climb (though not far) to the cairn.

Cairn:-

Information board:-

Entrance. The access is restricted. You have to crawl or stoop very low to get through the passage though once inside you can stand up very easily:-

Entrance from inside:-

Stepping into the main buidling at Kirbuster Farm Museum is indeed like stepping into the past. It was inhabited up to the 1960s and opened as a museum in 1986 – the last unrestored ‘firehoose’ in Northen Europe.

We had wondered whether to visit this museum but it turned out to be extremely interesting. The guide was a lovely, chatty woman. We were the only people visiting at the time so she may have been lonely.

Main bedroom:-

Sitting room:-

The harmonium in the sitting room reminded me of the one in my great uncle’s house (he was a piano/music teacher and church organist):-

Wall mounted alarm clock:-

Box-bed in kitchen:-

Cruisie lamp:-

There was another building which contained loads of old farm equipment. Some of their uses were a bit mysterious:-

On the way back to Stromness from Birsay we took a slight detour and passed Kirbuster Farm Museum. It being latish we saved a visit for a day or so later.

It’s one of the few attractions on Orkney’s mainland that isn’t a neolithic ruin. It’s a now disused farm in which two brothers had lived out their lives without modernising the place to 20^th century standards.

The first thing you come across is an old kiln:-

Further on is the farm building:-

To the side is a path to the garden leading through this lovely swan necked arch:-

The garden is sheltered and so can harbour trees; a rare sight on Orkney:-

At the bottom of the garden is a burn going under a bridge whcih carries the main road past the farm:-