Sunday Graphic dated Sunday April 4th
1943
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Big blow or not, a couple of days later (April 6th)
the Italians and German Afrikakorps were defeated at the Battle of Wadi Akarit
and by May 13th the German and Italian forces in Tunisia surrendered
to the Allies.
Erwin Rommel was well respected not only by his own men,
but, surprisingly, by his counterparts in the British and American armies. In
1944 he was involved in a failed conspiracy to overthrow Hitler and was forced
to choose between being tried, convicted and executed along with his family or
committing suicide. He chose suicide and was buried as a Nazi hero.
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Benito Mussolini had been politically insecure
since the war in North Africa had started to turn against the Axis powers in
late 1942. Unrest at home with strikes, inflated food prices and an unwelcome
German army presence along with the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 led
to the Dictator being ousted and arrested. Unfortunately this didn’t mean that
the Allies could just walk in and take over. There was another year of bitter
fighting before the Germans were cleared from the country.
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No trains, no petrol for cars and no extra buses, but apart
from that, have a good Easter Holiday!
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70,000 children cannot be traced! Why isn’t this front-page news? Are
they really lost or just not in London anymore? Are the ones ‘drifting back’
part of the 70,000? Were they ever found? Are they still out there? What is this snippet really about?
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Maybe this is where the 70,000 lost children have gone – to
Lord Woolton’s agricultural holiday camps.
Lord Woolton became the Minister for Food in 1940 and it was because of
his management of food rationing that on the whole the British people all got a
fair share of what food was available. He even had a pie named after him,
though I doubt you’ll find one in Tesco’s these days.
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This was a common type of wartime news item; quoting
increased production figures to boost moral; rather in the style of the USSR
Agricultural 5 Year Plan updates that peppered Russian news in the Communist
era.
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‘Failure to comply’ to the Nurses and Midwives Order 1943
was ‘punishable by fine, imprisonment or both’ Civil liberties? You must be
joking – we’re at war, Love.
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In 1940 the clocks in Britain were not put back by an hour
at the end of Summer Time i.e. not reset to GMT. From then until 1945 clocks
continued to be advanced by one hour each spring and put back by an hour each
autumn, so for these summers Britain was two hours ahead of GMT and operating
on British Double Summer Time. Note the reminder on the front page.
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After World War I, Sir Percy Robert Laurie KCVO CBE DSO had
been a Deputy Assistant Commissioner and an Assistant Commissioner in the
Metropolitan Police. He retired in 1936 but was recalled in 1939 to be
Assistant Chief Constable of the War Department Constabulary and then the
Provost-Marshal of the United Kingdom until this little problem got in the way.
His conviction was later quashed on the basis that ‘he had simply made a
mistake’.
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King Feisal (or Faisal) II of Irak (or Iraq) succeeded his father just a month shy
of his 4th birthday. He was murdered during a coup in 1958.
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Orson Welles' ‘Citizen Kane’ has been long regarded as the best film ever
made by those that should know, so it is interesting to see it referred to,
along with his second film ‘The Magnificent Embersons’ (sic), as
‘badly received by the British public’.
Johnny Weissmuller (as Tarzan) and Maureen O’Sullivan (as
Jane) had made 6 movies for MGM, but when this Tarzan-meets-the-Nazis
propaganda flick was made at RKO Maureen bowed out. In the plot Jane is on
holiday! She never returned to the jungle. Johnny did 5 more Tarzans plus 13
Jungle Jim films and a TV series.
‘Colonel Blimp’ has a well deserved reputation as a clever
satire.
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Scientists and MPs plan Britain’s post-War future based
entirely on the ‘inexhaustible supplies’ of coal – oops! At least they
correctly predicted the ‘electrification of the railways’.
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There must be hundreds of authors who were household names
in their day, but who are now all but forgotten. Rex Beach was an American
novelist, playwright and Olympic silver medallist water-polo player (1904 St
Louis) who spent 5 years in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush and wrote
several very popular novels in the Jack London idiom. His second, ‘The Spoilers’, was filmed
5 times. After the death of his wife he committed suicide in 1949.
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A lot of the older papers (1920’s-1930’s) I have blogged
have had episodes of fiction serials in them, which I haven’t posted because 1
day’s excerpt of a story would be pointless, however this paper has this
complete short story written by Wing-Commander (later Group Captain) Leonard
Cheshire who went on to win the Victoria Cross in 1944. See this post
for more on Leonard Cheshire.
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