"Firing into the Brown" #106 - Paris, archives 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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What an excellent book on the French Resistance - in this case specifically in Paris - from the earliest days just after the fall of France and the rejection by the population (in very few cases it seemed) of Petain, it's about the hundreds of different factions that made up the resistance, in the early days fighting among themselves more than fighting the Germans, until then came the arrival on the scene of de Gaulle, and how the Allies welded all these disparate groups of communists, socialists, Gaullists, Royalists under one banner. All of this set against the story of Paris, so we also get Hemmingway, Picasso (who lived in Paris for the whole of the war), Chevalier, Cocteau, Coco, and then the Germans - from the softly softly approach of their first presence, to the arrests and investigations Gestapo and their French allies in the Gendarmes, and also the round-ups of the Jews..  hugely readable - very much recommended

10+

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 You'll know how much Steve the wargamer loves a rabbit hole, especially if there's a military connection, and this week I got to visit the ultimate rabbit hole..... as part of this years Heritage Open Days [clicky] events, Portsmouth City Library offered the chance to have a tour of their archives (or rather one of their archives, as there are several)..  hugely enjoyable, and very informative it was too..

Main storage area as follows...  so the City Library Archive has a statutory duty to store all the local council documentation (minutes, bills, committee reports, etcetcetc) - there's stuff going back to the late 19th Century in this archive - astonishing amounts of information...

..in addition to that, because of the military connections (Navy predominantly, but also Army) the archive also houses huge collections of information to do with that, plus large private collections that have been donated following the death of the owner - this archive has a huge collection of Conan-Doyle stuff (he of Sherlock Holmes fame) because he lived in Portsmouth..

....box after box of stuff (thousands of them) you'd just love to open and have a look through..

..so the archivist giving the tour then says that on Fridays, there idea of fun in the office is to take any three boxes, and just open them to see what's in there.. 😁 Sounds like a geeks 'jamboree bag' if ever there was one! 

He explained that all they have to go on is a dry description of the contents, but not what the contents physically are.. So they'd got the three boxes out and we had a good rummage through them, and he'd also got out a few other items he thought we'd be interested in - just a few of the many here - all of these are original, by the way, and he told us to not hang back, but to feel free to actually touch which I thought was excellent..

Details (such as they are) underneath each..

Found this in a book entitled "Pictures of Portsmouth", and I guess printed in the early 1900's - this is the boom that was used to protect the entrance of Portsmouth Harbour from any enemy attempt to enter the harbour - the far side is Fort Blockhouse so this is taken from the Pompey side..  this would be a good little trip this winter to see what if anything is left.. 😁

No details on this photo other than who took it - not even a date - but I reckon that this was taken in, or around, WW2, and I think that they are S and T type British submarines moored alongside at HMS Dolphin.. you can see the Semaphore Tower building in the Dockyard in the background (which was built 1930), and that's No.1 Bastion [clicky] in the background over there to the left.. I think it unlikely that many submarines would have been alongside during the war, so I'm guessing it's either before, or immediately after, the war, as both these types came into service in the early 30's..

...bit of current applicability as this year is the 100th Anniversary of Portsmouth's 'city-hood'..  it made us chuckle as it's typical government.. giving all the indications that the bequest is begrudged, but given we've done it give us some cash anyway.. 😏

Then last of all a couple of original posters from WW2..

...what a fascinating insight..  think I've now found what job I'd like to do after leaving school...  ahhh....  40 years too late... 😏

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