AS PROMISED - SAMPLE CHAPTER FROM SCOTTISH MILITARY DISASTERS - > Book Extract
* He was an Eighteenth Century Scottish Forrest Gump - Stobo
** Here's one that combines Canadian and Scottish themes - Tunnelling for Victory
*** Those who enjoyed reading about the Royal Scots’ Armistice Day battle with the Bolsheviks in 1918might be interested in the same fight as seen from a Canadian viewpoint - Canada’s Winter War
***** Read about the blunder that made Canada an easy target for invasion from the United States - Undefended Border
****** Read about the Second World War's Lord McHaw Haw
******* Serious questionmarks over the official version of one the British Army's most dearly held legends - The Real Mackay?
********** It's been a while since I posted a new article. This one's called Temptation
********** Read about how the most Highland of the Highland regiments during the Second World War fared in the Canadian Rockies - Drug Store Commandos.
************* We now have a Guide to Scottish military museums on this site.
************** Just weeks before the outbreak of the First World War one of Britain's most bitter enemies walked free from a Canadian jail - Dynamite Dillon
*************** Click to read - - Victoria's Royal Canadians - about one of the more unusual of the British regiments.
*************** Read an article about the Royal Scots and their desperate fight against the Bolsheviks on Armistice Day 1918 - Forgotten War A second article, looks at the same battle but through a Canadian lens .
***************No-one has got back to me with a German source for the claim that the kilties during the First World War were known as The Ladies from Hell . See My Challenge to You
***************** A map showing the old Scottish regimental recruiting districts can now be seen by clicking Recruiting Area Map .
****************** The Fighting Men 1746 article now includes the estimated strengths of the Jacobite clan regiments which marched into England in 1745 See Clan Strengths
****************** **I've posted a fresh article - Scotland’s Forgotten Regiments. Guess what it's about.
******************** The High Court Hearing in London in May 2012 attracted a lot of visitors to this site. See Batang Kali Revisited
********************* Why not have a look at Book of the Year
Zulu Warrior
I was recently reading about the Battle of Rorkes Drift, imortalised in the 1964 film Zulu, and the book looked at recreations dating back almost to the time of the battle in 1879. British interest in the battle was such that performances, some involving real Zulus, were quickly to be seen at theatres, circuses and military tattoos. Some, particularly at the latter, simply featured white guys covered in boot polish as the Zulus. That all reminded me of my first and only byline in the old Glasgow Herald. While walking along Woodlands Road in the city I spotted a little card in shop window looking for black Africans and telling them to apply for work at Python Films. Some follow up revealed, yes, that Python. They were filming a sequence for the Meaning of Life featuring red coats and Zulus. I suppose Glasgow was the closest they could get to South Africa without leaving the UK. Anyway, come filming day the black extras refused to work. Many were medical students at Glasgow University and something about the portrayal of the Zulus upset them. An emergency search of nearby JobCentres was launched. So, if you look closely at the battle footage most of the Zulus are actually from the Indian sub continent and the ones furtherest from the camera are unemployed white Glaswegians wearing boot polish and sandshoes.
DeNaturalised
Should people who work for foreign governments and undermine Britain while promoting the interests of a third country lose their citizenship? The question came to mind after listening to Kate "HawHawsdottir" Laycock on German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle. DW is known to still recycle anti-British Second World War Nazi propaganda and combine it with present day material most probably scripted in Washington by the CIA. The coverage of the last major anniversary of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift was a disgrace. The one token former RAF pilot included in the fawning US worshipping programme grossly misrepresented the British contribution of almost 25% of the supplies flown in. I suspect the DW scripts are American written because Cambridge-educated Laycock employs Americanisms such as Gotten and uses the word Protest without saying whether it's For or Against something. And for a supposedly German broadcaster DW has an awful lot of American presenters or people who learned their English from Americans. Maybe perhaps there should be consequences for folk who denigrate their former neighbours for foreign government money. And the US Über Furhers who seem call the shots at DW don't even know their own history - The first St Patrick's Day parade was not in Boston but in the then Spanish colony of Florida in 1601. Or perhaps HawHaswdottir might just check what she is telling her audience is true.
Shameless Plug #9 - With Wellington was among the books recommended as an excellent Christmas present by the prestigious The Society for Army Historical Research. There was another mysterious surge in sales of With Wellington last summer. At the end of May it was the third best selling book about the Peninsular War on the website of one of Britain's biggest booksellers and Number Eighteen in the table for all Napoleonic books. Last December's sales surge turned out to be a combination of the venerable Scots Magazine declaring it Book of the Month in its January 2015 edition and a highly favourable review in the Napoleonic Association's newsletter. Scots Magazine's reviewer, nature writer and author, Jim Crumley, declared "I don't much care for military memoirs, but I could not put this one down". Other reviewers have been equally enthusiastic - "If you are interested in the memoirs of British soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars this book is a MUST!... You don't get many Napoleonic memoirs as good as this" and "It is the most candid memoir of the British Army I have ever read... does not pull any punches ... highly entertaining, but also thought provoking..." To have a look at the full reviews check out more about With Wellington
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