Parade grounds, Vichy and stuff..

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update..

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Saw this on Farcebook the other day... you may remember I bored you rigid with a whole series of posts on the Portsmouth defences and the gates, and you may even remember that the old fortifications were all demolished and removed in the 1880's. 

At about that time those busy Victorians however, were also building a massive barracks complex to replace them, comprising the Victoria and Clarence Barracks (the latter replaced the same named one that was originally inside the fortifications)..

The Victoria Barracks was the smaller of the two, started earlier (1880s) and designed to house a regiment of infantry...  and this is it following..

“Victoria Barracks, Southsea, c.1920-1940 Source Historic England Archive (The Penzance Collection) pze_22837_011 flown 1930s (estimated)”

...and another view of the complex from across the Common..

....Victoria Barracks was demolished in the early-1960's and is long gone...  this is the view now:

The handsome house on the far right in the original postcard is still there - that's now Rees Hall part of the University of Portsmouth's student accommodation (middle right above)..  Victoria Barracks is now a housing estate and the handsome bell tower building (which was the officers quarters among other things) is now where the Holiday Inn (😏) is, but off in the distance top left you can still see what was part of  Clarence Barracks - it's now the Portsmouth Museum - and my next little exploration I think..

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Vichy emblem

I've just finished reading "Charlotte Gray" (by Sebastian Faulks - same guy who wrote the probably better known "Birdsong") which is set in France during WW2, and in the very early days of the Resistance, the early coming to prominence of de Gaulle, but very much more about what it might have been like (it is a novel after all) to have lived in Vichy. 

For those that don't know, after 1940, the Germans occupied half of France, but left the running of the other half to the puppet government of Marshall Petain - which was based in Vichy, hence the name. Petain was the WW1 Marshall, and something of a "hero of Verdun" to the French. His government was anti communist, conservative authoritarian and followed a policy of co-operation with the Germans, as they were looking for concessions (return of POW's etc). What it actually meant was that despite these efforts the Germans largely ignored them, while still insisting on a sweep of German legislation, and other more swingeing demands/retributions in the form of labour, money and food resources ...

What I had not realised was the depth of the concessions conceded, some apparently more than willingly - they unilaterally passed "The Law of 3 October 1940" which defined the status of Jews in the unoccupied zone and also "the Law regarding foreign nationals of the Jewish race" which authorized and organized the internment of foreign Jews. There is documented evidence that Petain personally made changes to the first law to make it more anti semitic than it had been. "The General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs" was created by Vichy in March 1941, and was responsible for the seizure of Jewish assets it also organised anti-Jewish propaganda.

Drancy internment camp in August 1941. By the autumn of 1942 approx. 42,000 Jews had passed through mostly sent to Auschwitz.. Note the Gendarme guard.

There were roughly 340,000 Jews living in France after the surrender - two thirds were French nationals, and a third were refugees from Germany and other European countries the Nazi's had invaded. Between '42 and '44, and following round ups and raids leading to multiple arrests, 75,000 Jews were deported  (usually to Auschwitz) from  internment camps in France - most of those deported were Jews of foreign citizenship, refugees who had come to France hoping for safety, but over 90% of those deported died.

By the second half of 1942 some of the roundups of Jews had caused huge protests within the Catholic Church, a mainstay of the Petain regime, but also among the general population. The brutal nature of the roundups, (initial roundups had said adults only, for example, so children were left behind while their parents were arrested) caused widespread public anger. In the end, the Vichy governments decision to try and meet German quota demands by arresting/deporting foreign Jews just meant the Germans increased the quotas. In November '42, the Germans moved into Vichy as a result of the Allied landings in Tunisia anyway.

The Germans met increasing resistance to quota demands, from both the administration and the Gendarmerie. The Vichy president Laval, refused to strip French Jews of their citizenship to facilitate deportation, but thanks to this obstruction the vast majority of Jews with French citizenship survived the Holocaust. France has possibly the highest percentage survival rate of Jews of any of the countries.

Laval was executed on charges of collaboration and treason after the war. Petain was also found guilty,  but de Gaulle commuted the execution to life imprisonment.

More reading stuff:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_France
• Holocaust Encyclopaedia - France

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 Laters, as the young people are want to say...