Reina del Pacifico

MV Reina del Pacifico

The motorship Reina Del Pacifico had a long and particularly interesting life and was witness to many of the important events of the 20^th Century.

She was built by Harland & Wolff shipbuilders in Belfast, the company perhaps most famous for building the ill-fated RMS Titanic. Launched on the 23 of September 1930 she was to be a passenger liner for the Pacific Steam Navigation Company. Her maiden voyage on the 9^th of April was from Liverpool to Valparaiso via the Caribbean and Panama. This was to be a regular journey for the Reina del Pacifico which in 1936 made the voyage there in a record 25 days.

When Reina del Pacifico was built, Ramsey MacDonald, one of the chief founders of the Labour Party, was Prime Minister and head of a minority Labour government (their second ever, with MacDonald having become their first Prime Minister in 1924). However, the need to drastically cut public spending in the face of the Great Depression led him to form a National Government with the Conservatives. This led to MacDonald being expelled from the party he had founded and much personal bitterness being directed against him. Deeply affected by the rupture, his health rapidly declined and in 1935 he agreed to stand down to be replaced by Stanley Baldwin. He boarded the Reina del Pacifico in 1937 with his youngest daughter Sheila. They had decided to take a holiday in South America and had hoped to do some climbing in the Peruvian Andes. Sadly, though he died four days into the voyage on the 9^th of November 1937 of heart failure. His funeral was conducted in Westminster Abbey and he was buried next to his wife in Morayshire.

Ramsey MacDonald

When war broke out two years later the gentle luxuries of cruises in South America had to be put aside and the vessel was requisitioned by the Admiralty for work as a troopship. Converted in Liverpool she then took troops to Harstad in Norway. In 1940, she carried RAF men to Suez via Cape Town. The next year she carried Indian soldiers to Port Sudan where they then moved to Ethiopia. She continued to have a varied and wide-ranging war career, carrying Highlanders to Sicily, German POWs from Oran and visiting places from Colombo to Iceland and New York. She was bombed several times but largely escaped damage.

Again, she carried important figures including, in 1943, King Peter II, the last King of Yugoslavia as well as the staff of the United States First Division HQ as they prepared for D-Day. The end of the war wasn’t the end of the service of Reina del Pacifico as she sailed 350,000 miles to carry 150,000 personnel back to their homes and families.

She was then returned to her builders in 1947 to be overhauled for return to civilian use. However, on the 11^th of September a piston overheated, causing an engine explosion which killed 28 people.

Despite this, she was renovated and during the 1950s carried many West Indian migrants to start a new life in post-war Britain. In her later years she suffered some injuries, in 1957 running around on Devil’s Flat, Bermuda and then losing a propeller at Havanna.

On the 27^th of April 1958, she took her last voyage to South America and then finished her long and varied life, that had seen the grand figures and great events of history, at the breaking yard of John Cashmore at Newport.

Sludge

One shipowner in our master catalogue caught my eye last week. Five Late Victorian steamers owned by London County Council and the Metropolitan Board of Works. At first, I guessed they were ferry ships and I thought I’d be able to contact TFL’s archives but it turns out they had a much more earthier purpose.

By the mid-19^th Century the sanitation conditions in London had become untenable. The population had exploded from under one million in 1800 to well over two million in 1850 and London’s sewage system, which emptied directly into the Thames, was desperate out of date. Cholera outbreaks caused by dirty water killed thousands of Londoners. The crisis reached a head in 1858 when hot weather led to the infamous “Great Stink” which almost forced Parliament to flee the city.

In response, a massive sewage construction scheme was commenced under the direction of Joseph Bazalgette. Part of this system would be six vessels Binnie, Barrow, Belvedere, Bazalgette, Barking and Burns that would carry processed sewage out to sea. They were all built by the Naval Construction & Armaments Co in Barrow between 1887 and 1892. At least five of them were surveyed by Lloyd’s Register surveyor William Johnstone at Barrow meaning we have survey reports, correspondence and plans which have been catalogued as part of Project Undaunted (the only one we haven’t located yet is Burns.)

Sewage would be pumped to treatment works, one north of the river at Barking and one in the south at Crossness where it was treated with photo-sulphate of iron and lime. It would then be passed through precipitation channels where liquid and effluent would be drained off into the Thames. The remaining residue, named sludge, would be pumped into the steamers which would take them off to sea.

The material was then dumped at the ominous sounding Black Deep, one of the deepest channels of the Thames Estuary, located 12 miles off the appropriately named Foulness Point in Essex. It was would distributed over a length of eight to ten miles. Nearby fishing vessels knew to stay well clear of any sludge vessels as it would take two to three weeks to clean out the impurities from their nets. In 1911 the six vessels together made 2,580 trips to the Black Deep, a total of 258,000 miles.

The fleet continued their grim but vital duty for decades but by the early 1920s they were found to be in a very bad condition and were overhauled by William Beardmore & Co. However not long after they were replaced by a new fleet built between 1923 and 1926 which had a capacity of 1,500 tons. The new vessels were named Henry Ward, J H Hunter, John Perring and G W Humphreys. Barking, Binnie and Burns were sold off to Mr T C Pas of Scheveningen, Holland for £8.010.

The effects of the sanitation improvement of which the sludge ships were a part were dramatic. As the Irish Times noted on the 14^th of February 1906 “the effect of the precipitation works on the Thames has been most marvellous. Its banks had been freed from the black and offensive mud which accumulated upon them and the river itself freed from the large patches of black putrefying matter which formerly floated upon its surface and fish life has finally returned.” Today 125 species of fish live in the Thames.

In 1998 due to concerns about pollution the European Union banned dumping sewage at sea. Today it is now incinerated to generate power or used as fertiliser on farmland.

 

Happy New Year! Praise Janus!

Happy New Years!

If you were a Roman Pagan you would be consecrating this day to Janus, the dual headed God of beginnings and passages, of change and time, of Gates and Doors. An appropriate God to see in the New Year with.

Janus was unusually a uniquely Roman deity with no prior Greek incarnation. His temple stood in the Roman Forum and had appropriately two sets of doors on each end. They were opened in times of war and closed in times of peace. If you know anything about Roman history you’ll know that the doors were open quite a bit.

Image of the Temple of Janus on a coin from the reign of Nero.

 

Hope you have a wonderful MMMMXV!

Happy Fraimaire!

I hope all our readers are all having a very happy December to all our readers, and to all our readers living in Revolutionary and early Napoleonic France I would like to wish you a very pleasant and hopefully execution free Frimaire!

After the French Revolution took a more radical turn, the National Convention decided to utterly upturn the old Christian calendar with a new Republican Calendar. According to the historian Matthew Shaw, the calendar “offered a “new tool” with which to inscribe the “annals of the French nation marking each anniversary of the founding of the republic as a new year”.

The institution of a new calendar had two twin motives. Firstly it fell within the scheme of rationalisation of administration and decimalisation of measurement undertaken by the revolutionary regime.

Secondly it served to strike against that pillar of the ancient regime, the First Estate, the Catholic Church. Removing the Gregorian Calendar, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII, would strip the year of its saint days and can be seen as part of the campaign of de-Christianisation that included attempts to turn the “Cult of Reason” and the “Cult of the Supreme Being” into the French state religion.

The new calendar retained the 12 months of the year but renamed them with more weather and agricultural based terms.

Months of the Year

French Name – English Translation – Starting Date – Mixed English version suggested by Thomas Carlyle – Parody names invented by the British

Autumn Quarter

Vendémiaire – “Grape Harvest” – Starts 22, 23 or 24 September – Vintagearious – Wheezy
Brumaire – “Fog” – Starts 22, 23 or 24 October – Fogarious- Sneezy
Frimaire – “Frost” – Starts 21, 22 or 23 November – Frostarious – Freezy

Winter Quarter

Nivôse – “Snowy” – Starts 21, 22 or 23 December – Snowous – Slippy
Pluviôse – “Rainy” – Starts 20, 21 or 22 January – Rainous – Drippy
Ventôse – “Windy” – Starts 19, 20 or 21 February – Windous – Nippy

Spring Quarter

Germinal – “Germination” – Starts 20 or 21 March – Buddal – Showery
Floréal – “Flower” – Starts 20 or 21 April – Floweral – Flowery
Prairial – “Pasture” – Starts 20 or 21 May – Meadowal – Bowery

Summer Quarter

Messidor – “Harvest” – Starts 19 or 20 June – Reapidor – Wheaty
Thermidor – “Summer Heat” – Starts 19 or 20 July – Heatidor- Heaty
Fructidor – “Fruit” – Starts 18 or 19 August – Fruitido -Sweety

An illustrated depiction of the Republican year.

A more radical and impactful alteration for the common person was the change from having four seven day weeks in a month to three ten day weeks. This meant that a person would have to work for 9 days before getting a day rest which unsurprisingly turned out to be immensely unpopular. The last day of the week was the fêtes décadaires which Matthew Shaw states was “envisioned as a weekly gathering in each commune for fraternal celebration, morally improving speeches and the announcements of new laws”.

Think that it is 2014? A San-Coulette would instead inform you that it is in fact the year 223, with Year 1 now dated to have started not with the birth of Christ but the commencement of the Republic. The New Year was now dated on the 21st of September, again to coincide with the declaration of the republic, which was, by lucky coincidence close to the Vernal Equinox, thus allowing the year to begin with the start of Autumn.

In order to make up the five days left unaccounted for and to replace the abolished Catholic feasts and holidays, five festival days were added to the end of the year, with an additional one on leap years. These were, in order: the Festival of Virtue, the Festival of Genius, the Festival of Labour, Festival of Conviction, the Festival of Rewards and lastly the Day of the Revolution.

Furthermore each day of the year was given a name based on animals, plants, minerals or agricultural equipment. Today, the 19th of December 2014 or 29 Frimaire CCXXIII was the appetisingly named Day of the Olive which sounds better than tomorrow which is the more prosaically named Day of the Shovel.

The calendar was used to mark important events, the summertime fall of Robespierre became known as the Thermidorian Coup while Napoleon’s own coup is dated the 18th of Brumaire. However the Republican Calendar would only last from October 1783 till the end of 1805 when Napoleon abolished it. It managed an 18 day revival during the Paris Commune but met its final end in its bloody suppression.

As short lived as the new calendar was, it still outlived its creators. It was the work of mathematician Charles Gilbert Romme and poet Philippe Fabre d’Eglantine. The former worked out the arranging of days, weeks and months while the latter gave them their names. Neither survived long into what Romme called the “new book of history”. D’Eglatine was executed in the second year of the revolutionary calendar while Romme stabbed himself to death rather than face his own appointment with the guillotine that same year.

If you aren’t a Jacobin or San-Coulette but are friends with them then visit this site – http://www.windhorst.org/calendar/ – for a useful tool to work out what day you actually agreed to go to drinks with them.

Artist Eleanor Crook’s Lecture on her “And The Band Marched On” Exhibition at the Florence Nightingale Museum

*Warning graphic images of some reconstructions of severe facial injuries are below*

Yesterday on the 2nd of December I attended a talk by Eleanor Crook on her exhibition “And the Band Played On” at the Florence Nightingale Museum. The exhibition features five life sized wax models which depicts five soldiers with facial injuries from the Crimean War to the present day.

Before I begin, a full disclaimer, I was a Museum Assistant at the Florence Nightingale Museum and helped set up the exhibition. Having seen the sculptures I have to say they are very graphic and very moving. It’s difficult to look at them and not have an emotional reaction.

Eleanor started the lecture by telling the story of how she got into the subject. Her involvement with these ideas started with the story of her great uncle Frank who after receiving a severe facial injury in combat dropped off the family radar. No one knew what had happened to him until a very distantly related family historian discovered he had lived in a nursing home from the time of his disappearance until 1983. She later became interested in anatomical sculpting with would later tie in with this.

One of her first sculptures heading in this direction was one of an ex-boyfriend, coping with the rejection by sculpted with his “trousers” or rather skin falling down. “He’s actually very nice and didn’t deserve it at all” she said “I think if he saw the piece he’d realised he made the right decision.”
That piece and many of her others can be seen here: http://www.eleanorcrook.com/gallery/sculpture/

Eleanor then went on to describe the history of reconstructive surgery which can be traced back to the Romans and Greeks and was certainly present in this country as far back as the 11th Century. However she decided to start with the development of anaesthetics in the 1830s and 1840s which allowed for extended surgery and coincided with advent of photography.

This advance was put to its first significant test in the American Civil War. Eleanor said seeing facial sculptures from that conflict, like the ones below showed her the reality of war injuries much better than photographs did. She explained how the 3D models showed the unnatural caverns that the wounds would open on the human face, something she tried to show in her own sculptures.

Starting as merely attempts at wound closure to give those injured the semblance of a “wall” on their face, techniques were pioneered by Harold Gillys and his “guinea pigs”. The one I found most interesting was Tubed Pedicles. Before the dawn of microsurgery skin grafts needed to be connected from one part of the body to the other as without blood supply and lymphatic drainage the new skin will either wither and die or swell up. Thus this meant that the skin had to be physically connected to its original location to allow for the capillaries in the skin to grow together.

Perhaps most incredibly the tubed pedicles would know what to grow into. On the outside of the mouth they would grow into regular skin but if connected to the inside of the mouth it would grow mucus membrane.

This sculpture represented a Second World War pilot, a group that were disproportionately affected by burns as their cockpits were positioned dangerously close to fuel tanks.

Eleanor ended the lecture on a positive note. She said she chose the theme of a marching band to represent the fellowship between the men who had been injured in this way and their gameness to carry on.

Her sculpture of an injured American veteran shows the possibility of facial transplants in the future. If you look close enough to can see the contrast between the ginger fair on the man’s own skin and the black hair on the transplanted face. She said she hoped to convey the mixed emotions of fear, bewilderment and hope that the man would be feeling. Personally I think she succeeded, not just with this sculpture but the whole exhibition.

For more on the exhibition which is open till the 22nd of December please visit the blog at https://andthebandplayedonblog.wordpress.com/ which is being run by two interns Rhiannon and Morgan.

Happy Blotmonath!

I hope you are all having a good November! And in case you are reading this from a 6th Century Angle or Saxon Kingdom I also want to wish you a great Blotmonath.

According to our good friend 9th Century Monk the Venerable Bede, the Anglo Saxons called the month we now call November, Blotmonað or Blotmonath meaning literally “blood month”. During this time livestock that wouldn’t survive the winter would be slaughtered and consecrated to the Gods with their meat being preserved for later consumption. Perhaps a large steak dinner would be an appropriate substitute for our modern audience?

I wonder if it was at this time of year that Anglo-Saxons started to get excited for the 25th of December which to them was named Modranecht or Mothers’ Night, the start of their year and a time of sacred rites. Unfortunately Bede remains silent on what they involved exactly so we’ll have to stick with the Christmas trees and carols for the time being.

Small Museums of London #2: Library and Museum of Freemasonry

Where?  On Long Acre, up the street from Covent Garden Station. Perfect for incorporating into a trip to the nearby British Museum.

How much?  Absolutely free.

Unfortunately they do not permit photography in the museum and thus I can’t include any of my own photos of my trip. While I picked the best ones I could find on the net I should say in advance they really don’t capture how amazing some of the architecture is.

The museum runs regular tours at 11am, 12noon, 2pm, 3pm and 4pm from Monday to Friday. They are completely free of charge and will really make the visit so time your attendance accordingly. I would also recommend turning up around twenty minutes early so you can look around the exhibition before the tour begins. Not only does it include an extensive collection of items relating to the Masons but to other fraternal organisations like the Oddfellows and the Sons of the Phoenix.

The Freemason’s Hall serves as the Headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England and is the main governing body for masonry for England, Wales and much of the former British Empire. Furthermore it was founded in 1717 making it the oldest Grand Lodge in the world.

Unfortunately the day I went was not as bright and sunny as in this picture

The current building today was completed in 1933 and the whole building is steeped in history with every inch seeming to have more symbolism that the average Dan Brown novel. The utmost care seems to have gone into constructing the building and the art deco interiors remain absolutely stunning to this day.

The coat of arms of the United Grand Lodge of England.

A definite high point of the tour is the war memorial whose impressive design had me gaping in awe. You really have to see it for yourself.During the tour I was surprised to find out how strong the links the Masons have to royalty are but in contrast I was  far from shocked to discover that the building’s sumptuous interiors have been used in a variety of films and TV shows including serving as the Home Secretary’s office in BBC’s Spooks and was used for the death scene of Sir Thomas in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes.

After an hour the tour ends in the best room of all, the Grand Temple. The massive mosaic that skirts the ceiling was so layered in symbolism- four virtues, Biblical figures, representations of the Supreme Being, the schools of architecture, the principles of science- that even as a non-believer I got a sense of the ancient and the transcendental.

The famous all seeing eye above a pentagram. Both have been associated with dark forces but here they represent the Supreme Beings constant gaze on humanity and the Mason’s Five Points of Fellowship. Aside them are pillars from the Corinthian Order and behind them is the Greek God Helios.

A second of the four displays that make up the mosaic, this one being more orientated towards Christianity

A angel representing the virtue of fortitude.

The heavens.

First World War Sites of Britain

Imperial War Museums

All three of their branches, London, Manchester and Duxford are planning new exhibitions for the WW1 centenary. Unfortunately the London branch is closed until the 29^th of June 2013 but has a large recreation as well as good coverage of many of the forgotten fronts like Mesopotamia so make sure to visit when it reopens.

The Duxford branch is situated on a former airfield used in both World Wars and unsurprisingly focuses on the aerial aspects of the war.

Facade of the Imperial War Museum in London

Scappa Flow, Orkney Islands

The body of water known as Scappa Flow in the Orkney Islands was the chief naval base for the British in both world wars. It was from here that the Grand Fleet set off to face the German High Seas Fleet at the Battle of Jutland. After the war the German fleet was kept there while the Treaty of Versailles was being negotiated. In order to prevent the fleet being incorporated into the Allied navies the Germans scuttled their ships in June 1919.

Dolphin Tavern, Red Lion St, Holborn

A traditional pub with a long history, the Dolphin Tavern was hit by a Zeppelin bombing raid on the 9^th of September 1917, killing three. A clock recovered from the wreckage hangs on the walls, still to this day stuck at the minute the bomb hit the building.

I’ll report back soon on the quality and prices of the drinks.

61 Farringdom Road London

Contains a plaque marking where a zeppelin bombing raid hit on the 8^th of September 1915.

Cenotaph, London

Meaning “empty tomb” in Greek, the Cenotaph was originally built in wood and plaster for Peace Day in 1919 on request from David Lloyd George. The public responded to the monument with a spontaneous laying of wreaths and in response a permanent structure of Portland Stone was built. Since then it has been the centre of Remembrance Day commemorations with its two minutes silence, the laying of wreaths and the march past by war veterans.

In its first years of it existence buses would slow as they passed it, the passengers would stand and men would remove their hats.

Shot at Dawn memorial, Staffordshire

The Shot at Dawn Memorial is located at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. 306 stakes stand in memorial to each of the British and Commonwealth soldiers shot for “cowardice” and “desertion” during the war. Many of those executed had suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, then known as “shell shock”. The central statue in the memorial is modelled after Pvt Herbert Burden, a 17 year old who lied about his age to join up and was shot for desertion in 1915.

RAF Museum, London

The Royal Airforce Museum museum in Colindale, North London contains a whole range of aircraft on display including a large number of First World War biplanes such as the German Fokker D.VII and the British heavy bomber Vickers Vimy.

Furthermore the site includes the relocated Claude Grahame-White tower, part of the former factory and airfield which was a pioneering institution in the field of aviation before being commandeered for the war effort.

Tank Museum, Bovington Camp, Dorset

This museum has almost 200 tanks on display including the first one ever constructed, the Mark I, from 1915 as well as a recently constructed replica of the first German tank to see action. It lso  includes the trench experience recreating life for a soldier on the Western Front.

http://www.tankmuseum.org/

Heugh Battery, near Hartlepool, County Durham

A Victorian gun battery which saw action when the German High Seas Fleet attacked Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby on the 16^th December 1914 which led to the death of 137 people and enraged the British public.

Stow Marie Airfield, Essex

Established as an airfield for the Royal Flying Corps in 1916 it would later be closed in 1919. Current restoration work hopes to give an authentic taste of what it would have been like to have visited during the First World War.

Fleet Air Arm Museum, Somerset

A museum dedicated to the aerial branch of the navy, it contains a hall dedicated to First World War and interwar aircraft.

http://www.fleetairarm.com/

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

Its “Dockyard Apprentice” attraction details the story of the construction of the Dreadnought battleships in 1911 which were crucial in sparking the arms race between Britain and Germany and were ultimately used in the Battle of Jutland.

Contains the HMS M33, one of the three surviving Royal Navy ships from the First World War. It saw active service in the Mediterranean and during the Allied intervention during the Russian Civil War.

Tower Hill Memorial, London

This monument commemorates those of the merchant navy who were lost during the two World Wars. In a vaulted corridor there are 12 bronze plaques with 12,000 names engraved upon them.

HMS President, Embankment, London

One of the three surviving Royal Navy ships from the First World War it was originally an anti-submarine Q-Ship. It now operates as bar and a event venue.

Visits are available by appointment.

http://www.hmspresident.com/

Cleopatra’s Needle, Embankment, London

Shows damage on its side from a 1917 Zeppelin bombing raid.

Historic Dock, Chatham

This site was the principal manning station for the Royal Navy during the First World War. It is now home to a very large Naval War Memorial with a large obelisk made from the same Portland Stone as the Cenotaph.

 

Small Museums of London #1: The Wellington Arch

Where?  Just off the South East corner of Hyde Park, right by Hyde Park Corner Station on the Piccadilly Line

How much?  £4 for adults, £3:40 concessions Children (5-15) £2:40. Joint tickets to Aspley House are available.

Like many museums in this series, the Wellington Arch museum is hidden in plain sight. You could go past it for years and never guess there is a museum inside.

Currently running at the Wellington Arch is their exhibition on “The Birth of Archaeology and the Battle for the Past”. It lasts for two more weeks (till the 21^st of April 2013) so get in quick. If you can’t the next instalment of the exhibition “A Monumental Act: How Britain Saved its Heritage” will be running from the 1^st of May till July 7^th 2013. (Note the exhibtion had now closed: the current exhibition is now Carscapes: How the Motor Car Reshaped England)

The thrust of the exhibit is the story of Sir John Lubbock and his valiant attempts to pass the Ancient Monuments Protection Act. Faced with entrenched opposition with landed interests in Parliament who myopically labelled Britain’s ancient heritage as the work of savages, Lubbock’s bill hit defeat after defeat. However the cause finally triumphed in 1882 and brought protection to 86 of Britain and Ireland’s priceless ancient monuments.
The next exhibition “A Monument Act” focuses on the 1913 Ancient Monuments Act which built on Lubbock’s work and whose centenary is being celebrated this year.

One of the protected sites is the Neolithic Castlerigg stone circle in Cumbria.

One of these protected sites is Old Sarum in Wiltshire. Originally an iron age hill fort it was inhabited as early as 3000 BC and continued to be used until late in the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century it was the most infamous of the “rotten boroughs” as it had an MP but no inhabitants while cities of thousands were unrepresented.

Along with a photography exhibition of  the monuments protected, there  is a collection of 14 paintings by Ernest Griset which depict Stone Age scenes. They also have a first edition copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species which is pretty close to a sacred object.

Mammoth Hunters by Ernest Griset c1870

Also don’t forget to visit the permanent exhibit on the second floor which covers the history of the arch.

The Views

Perhaps the best selling point of the museum is the great views of London it gives from the top of the arch.
Looking North West:

Looking right.

Looking left.

Directly ahead is the imposing memorial the Royal Artillery Memorial which was completed in 1925. Designed by Charles Jagger and Lionel Pearson it is unusual for its more realist portrayal of life and death in the First World War.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Behind the Royal Artillery Memorial is five star hotel The Lanesborough which was the original site of St George’s Hospital. The current building was constructed in 1827 after the original 1719 building had become too run down to adequately serve as a hospital.

On your right is the Machine Gun Corps Memorial. First built in nearby Grosvenor Place in 1925 it was quickly dismantled due to road works and not resurrected until 1963. It features a statue of the biblical figure of David.

To your left is the Australian War Memorial. It is particularly striking, with the names of 23,844 towns in Australia merging in places to form the names of the 47 battles they fought in like Gallipoli and Gaza. It commemorates the 102,000 Australians to give their lives in the First and the Second World Wars. The wall is searchable here: www.awmlondon.gov.au . It is the most recent of the memorials and was unveiled in 2003.

On your right is Apsley House which has from the victor of Waterloo to the present day been the London residence of the Dukes of Wellington. It contains over 200 paints from across Europe.

Furthermore on this side of the arch if you look up you can see from close up the statue of the quadriga (four horsed chariot) that adorns the arch.

The South East View:

From here you can get the perfect tourist photo: the London Eye, the newly built Shard, the Houses of Parliament (including Big Ben) and the back garden of Buckingham Palace.

I recommend visiting it on a Sunday so you can incorporate a visit to Speaker’s Corner which I have written about before here: http://theyorker.co.uk/legacy_articles/5607

You can often see some very interesting people…

 

Is marriage legalised sexual slavery asks the old man. A question we should all ponder

Battle Stations

On a recent trip to Paris I was struck by how many stations on the Metro had names with Second World War connotations. On Line 7 I noticed a station named La Courneuve – 8 Mai 1945 (the date of VE Day) and another one named Stalingrad which is sited near a public square called Place-de-la-Bataille-de-Stalingrad.

Furthermore up by the Champs Elysee I came across Franklin D Roosevelt station named after the nearbyFranklin D Roosevelt Avenue. It was originally called Avenue Victor-Emmanuel III after the Italian King under whose reign Italy fought with the French in the First World War but against them in the Second. Thus in 1946 it was renamed after France’s more reliable ally.

A similar story is true of the station currently known as Argentine which was originally named Obligado after the Battle of Vuelta de Obligado in 1845. This choice seems puzzling as this Anglo-French naval victory over the Argentineans was a rather pyrrhic affair. The war was started when the Argentinean government banned foreign ships from their rivers that, like floating 19^th Century Starbuckses, were using them to dodge taxes. The battle inflicted heavy losses on the British and French and rallied Latin Americans around the Argentinean Confederacy.  Both European nations ended up backing down and the date is even celebrated as National Sovereignty Day in Argentina and was made a public holiday in 2010. The name was changed in 1948 in gratitude to the shipments of grain and beef sent to a war-torn and hungry France.

Painting of the Battle of Vuelta de Obligado by Manuel Larravide

There is also Bir Hakeim named after the 1942 battle where Free French forces in Libya managed to hold off Rommel’s much larger army for 16 days. Another is Colonel Fabien which, located near the French Communist Party Headquarters, is named after the French leftist and resistance fighter Pierre-Georges Fabien. Fabien fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War and killed a German Naval Officer in 1941 at Barbès – Rochechouartstation ushering in the beginning of armed resistance in Paris. He was captured and tortured by the Germans in 1943. However he managed to escape and helped to organise the insurrection that liberated Paris but was killed in 1944 as French troops fought to regain their province of Alsace.

Pierre-Georges Fabien

Of course it seems obvious why Paris would have so many more Second World War derived names than London which escaped occupation by the Germans but why then does it have so named after battles that took place during other wars.

The events of the Napoleonic Wars have given their names to several streets as well as to the stations that serve them. Paris’ most famous art gallery can be accessed via Louvre – Rivoli which gets the second half of its name from an early but decisive Napoleonic victory in early 1797 which led to the capture of Northern Italy. Nearby is Pyramidesnamed for Napoleon’s 1798 defeat of the Egyptian Mamluks within sight of the last remaining wonder of the world.

Gare d’Austerlitz in the south west is named after Napoleon’s stunning victory over the Austrians and Russians which ended the War of the Third Coalition and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire which had existed for almost a thousand years.  Campo Formio is named for the 1797 treaty which marked revolutionary France’s victory over the First Coalition while Wagram is named for another French victory over the Austrians in 1809 which ended yet another coalition, this time the Fifth.

The station closest to the Champs Elysee has had connection to not one but two wars. Now called George V in gratitude to Britain’s sacrifice in the First World War, it was previously called Alma after the Crimean battle of the same name where Anglo-French forces along with the Ottomans inflicted defeat upon the Russians.

Yet the Crimean War is still namesake to several other places. There is Crimée station in the far north 19th district and in the 3^rd district is Réaumur – Sébastopol named for the Siege of Sevastopol (1854-1855) the Allied victory that brought the war to an end.

Paris even has stations named after battles that occurred even before there was a France. Alésia is named for one of Julius Caesar’s greatest victories. Besieging the hill fort of Alesia in 52BC Caesar and Mark Antony managed to defeat a Gallic force four times their own size and secure the beginnings of four hundred years of Roman rule over Gaul. Close to the Asian quarter is Tolbiac which derives its name from the 496 battle where Clovis I, the king who united the Franks and conquered Gaul, defeated the Alamanni tribes from present day Germany.

Having wracked my brain I really cannot think of any Underground Stations in London apart from Britain’s two greatest victories in the Napoleonic Wars: Waterloo and Trafalgar Square.

Originally a marshy section of the parish of Lambeth, the area was drained in the 1700s. In the early part of the following century Waterloo Bridge, Waterloo Road and St John’s Waterloo Church were built to commemorate what was then the recent British victory over France which brought peace to an exhausted nation after decades of war. Thus Napoleon holds the distinction of having given the most battle names to stations on both the Paris Metro and the London Underground.

Captain Siborne’s huge model depicting the Battle of Waterloo which is held at the National Army Museum in Chelsea.

However London still commemorates its battles in other location names.

   Portobello Road, home of the famous street market ultimately derives its name from the Battle of Porto Bello, a 1739 British victory over the Spanish in the War of Jenkins’ Ear. One of those many eighteenth century colonial squabbles, the war began in 1739 after a Spanish captain, while inspecting a ship suspected of smuggling, had British mariner Robert Jenkins tied to the mast before using a sword to cut off his ear. This incident sparked the dry tinder formed by years of tension and a series of trade disputes plunging the two nations into conflict.

PICTURE

Portobello Road: One of the best antiques markets in the world.

The British hoped to strike at the town of Porto Bello on the coast of Panama which was funding the Spanish war effort with its silver exports. After a disastrous attempt at a blockade, the British sent in a force under Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon who caught the Spanish unawares and seized the fort. Though the town was only held for three weeks, it was heralded as a glorious victory throughout the Empire and led to the first public renditions of “Rule, Brittania”.

The victory, so little known today, was so acclaimed at the time that locations were named not only in London but in Edinburgh (the Portobello area near the sea), Dublin (an area in South East of the city), Maryland (a historic house in Drayden built by William Hebb who had served under Vernon) and Virginia (the hunting lodge of the last Royal Governor of the British Colony of Virginia) as well.

Two years later Lawrence Washington, half brother to the first President of the United States, would serve under Admiral Vernon and would chose to name the estate his father had recently bought Mount Vernon in his honour. Today the site is home to the tombs of George Washington and his wife, Martha.

Mount Vernon

The London Trocadero presents an interesting case. It is named after a battle in 1823 but only indirectly and is in fact named after the glamorous Place du Trocadero which of course has its own station, Trocadero. Place du Trocadero is in turn named for a victory of the restored Bourbon Monarchy of France over the forces of liberal Spain and led to the restoration of absolutism.

Around White City, the Boer War is commemorated in several street names such as South Africa Road andBloemfontein Road, the latter named for the city captured in 1900 following British victory at the Battle of Paardeberg .

However Parisian stations named after battles outnumber London locations even if we include non stations as well.

How can we explain this difference?

My very humble guess would be to point to the massive redevelopment of Paris designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. In order to create the city’s iconic boulevards large swathes of Paris’ medieval street plan was bulldozed. Thus the new rues and avenues could be given chosen names rather than ones passed down from the distant past. In contrast the closest London ever came to a comprehensive redesign after the Great Fire of 1666 was scuppered by citizens fiercely protecting their private property rights and thus London has had little room for upstart street names

Wren’s plan for the redesign of the City of London