1st May 1945
Click to Read
On the 4th
May Doenitz surrendered to Field Marshall Montgomery and after the War was sentenced
to 10 years imprisonment. He was released in 1956 and died in 1980.
Front pages (and usually back, middle or other pages) chosen at random (more or less) from my collection of mostly 20th Century mostly British newspapers. Weekly new posts on Sundays, a Random Cutting on Wednesdays and a Random Advert on Fridays.
Showing posts with label WWI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WWI. Show all posts
Sunday, 29 March 2015
Friday, 20 June 2014
Random Ad - Oatine Face Cream (1917)
Click to Enlarge
A 1917 advert for Oatine Face Cream. It may have worked on female Bank clerks but I doubt it did a lot of good for munitions workers whose skin turned yellow from handling TNT.
Sunday, 27 April 2014
Prospect of Peace at Easter (1919)
Evening Standard dated Wednesday March 12th 1919
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Fighting in the Great War or World War I ended with the Armistice on November 11th 1918 but didn't officially end until the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28th 1919, missing Easter by just over 2 months. Some say it didn't end until the Treaty of Sèvres was signed on August 10th 1920. The Paris Peace Conference began on January 18th 1919 and came to an end on January 21st 1920 with the inaugural General Assembly of the League of Nations.
Friday, 28 February 2014
Random Cutting - Greys Cigarettes (WWI)
Click to Enlarge
First World War anti-German propaganda used for cigarette advertising resulted in this bizarre image of man and horse wearing gas-masks. Cigarettes '... for real men' not poison gas weilding Huns!
Sunday, 6 October 2013
Labour’s Most Critical Week
The Pall Mall Gazette dated Monday February 21st
1919
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The Pall Mall Gazette was founded as a pro-conservative
evening paper in 1865 and lasted until it merged with the Evening Standard in
1923.
The War may be over but the Versailles Peace Treaty is still
being forged, labour unrest in Britain increases and Germany is politically and
economically unstable.
Click to Read
(Cont’d from page 1)
All this talk of Germany paying for pensions etc was changed
when the total amount of reparations was fixed in 1921 on the basis of the
German capacity to pay, not on the basis of Allied claims. The debt was set at
about £1billion and by 1931 they had repaid less that 20% when the debt was
suspended indefinitely, although it was revived in 1953 and paid off in full by
West Germany.
Click to Read
(Cont’d from page 1)
Demobbed soldiers found a very different Britain to the one
they left in 1914. High unemployment, a rising cost of living, strikes by newly
organised unions and a severe shortage of houses were the order of the day.
Click to Read
As George Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister and
President of the Paris Peace Conference, was leaving his house the previous
Thursday, a man fired several shots at his car. Clemenceau was hit once between
the ribs, just missing his vital organs. His attacker, Emile Cottin, was seized
by the crowd and nearly lynched. Clemenceau died in 1929 with the bullet still
in him.
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The Pall Mall Gazette, being an evening paper, is commenting
here on the news that Kurt Eisner the Socialist who had declared Bavaria an
independent state, had been assassinated in Berlin earlier in the day.
Immediately following The Great War Germany was in turmoil with various
factions for or against the terms of the surrender and the occupation of the
industrial Ruhr by the French. Bavaria was strongly anti-French and became the
breeding ground for Nazism as the 1920’s progressed.
Click to Read
The
Late News tells us that Prince Leopold of Bavaria had been arrested on
suspicion of being involved in the plot to murder Eisner.
Click to Read
No great mystery really – the retired actress
Jessie Francis, wife of actor/manager Frederick Wright Sr. and mother of comedians
Huntley and Fred Wright, died of a heart attack during or after a burglary.
Click to Read
The Melville Brothers (Walter and Frederick) owned and
managed theatres, including the Lyceum in London, as well as writing and
directing plays like this melodrama of German spies that ends with a British
General shooting his traitorous wife, the Female Hun of the title.
Click to Read
Special constables as we know them now date back
to the First World War. The case of Herbert Stanton Moss can’t have helped the
distrust the public had for the Specials as reflected in the lyrics of the
popular 1919 song ‘My Old Man (Said Follow the Van)’ – ‘…you can’t trust a
Special like an old-time copper…’
Click to Read
There are no photos in the Pall Mall Gazette so this fashion
drawing is a nice relief from the pages of text.
Click to Read
With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that
Prohibition in the USA between 1919 and 1933 did not work and even had a
detrimental effect on society with the criminalisation of social drinking and
the rise in organized crime to support the supply of alcoholic drinks. This
article is referring not to the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act
that brought in National Prohibition on January 1st 1920, but to the
temporary Wartime Prohibition Act that preceded it.
Click to Read
I wonder if Lt.-Col PSC was at all mollified by the 1920
issue of the Bronze Oak Leaf to all service personnel mentioned in despatches. I
doubt it.
Sunday, 16 June 2013
Germany Surrenders 1918
Daily Mail dated November 12th 1918
Click to Read
Click to Read
As seen before on this blog broadsheets of this period
devoted their front page to adverts, so the only indication that this paper is
reporting on a momentous day in 20th Century history is the small
block in the top right hand corner.
I
see Christmas used to start in November
– Whiteley’s Grand Xmas Bazaar. Now, of course, it’s closer to August.
Click to Read
Click to Read
After four and a half years of the bloodiest and most costly
war in history it must have been an enormous relief to open this paper and read
the words ‘Germany surrenders’.
The Armistice Terms were regarded as harsh by the Germans
and in them were the seeds of the discontent that led to the rise of
Nationalism and finally World War II.
Click to Read
November 11th 1918 was not the actual end of the
Great War; merely a cease-fire that could have been broken by either side at
any time in the 7 months before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June
1919 which marked the true end of the War.
Click to Read
George V had changed the name of the British royal family
from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor as late as 1917 to distance himself from his
cousin the Kaiser Wilhelm (they were both Grand-sons of Queen Victoria).
These messages were to the survivors – 5 and half million
Allied troops didn’t live to read them.
Click to Read
The men who helped to win the War – familiar names like
Lloyd George, Clemanceau, Wilson, Haig, Allenby, Foch, Pershing, Beatty and
Petain along side those that are less familiar after all these years – Plumer,
Rawlinson, Byng, Monash, Keyes, Geddes, Hughes, Joffre and Tyrwbitt.
Click to Read
The Kaiser was allowed to stay in Holland, which
had been neutral throughout the War, and died there in 1941.
The political chaos in Germany at the end of the War was too
complex for me to even think about summarising, suffice to say Kaiser Wilhelm
II was forced to abdicate on the 9th November 1918 and a Republic
was declared but the Left wing Parties couldn’t agree among themselves any more
than the right-wing anti-Republicans, and a virtual civil-war continued until
the adoption of the Weimar Constitution in August 1919.
Click to Read
This idea for a permanent memorial to the War dead became
the Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall, designed by the architect Edwin Lutyens.
The original structure was a temporary one made of wood and plaster, which was
replaced in time for the Victory Day parades of July 1919 by the Portland stone
cenotaph that has been the focus of Remembrance Day every November 11th
ever since.
Click to Read
Victory Day as it became known was held on 19th
July 1919 just after the official end of World War 1 with the signing of the
Treaty of Versailles on 28th June 1919. See this post.
Click to Read
What possible objection could there be to vehicle lights if
the streetlights are to be switched on? I would have thought that most people,
particularly those who’d been fighting on the front line, had had enough of
fireworks for the last few years.
Click to Read
Time to tot up the scores.
I can see that warships, transport ships, ammunition and supply ships
were ‘legitimate’ targets, but I wonder what stories lay behind the figures for
steamships and sailing ships?
Click to Read
The National Birth Rate Commission was formed in 1913 to
look into the falling birth rate in the years since the turn of the Century and
its effect on the population figures. The massive loss of life during the Great
War made their concerns even more acute so a 1918-1920 investigation was set up
under the Presidency of the Bishop of Birmingham and a group that included such
note worthies as Sir Rider Haggard, General Booth’s widow, Dr. Marie Stopes and
the Duchess of Marlborough. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of 46 witnesses that
made statements to the commission about various social, moral and economical
aspects of having or not having children.
Click to Read
One way to celebrate a great victory, steal the
Secretary for War’s car. He won’t be needing it anymore!
Click to Read
Nothing like a couple of aristocrats slogging it out in the
divorce courts to take one’s mind off one’s troubles.
Click to Read
Maskelyne Theatre of Mystery (near Oxford
Circus) caught my eye. Is the mystery in how to find the Theatre? Actually it
was in Langham Place. John Nevil Maskelyne was a magician, escapologist,
inventor, and paranormal investigator. He invented the penny-in-the-slot public
toilet lock!
Sunday, 5 May 2013
Rhineland Evacuation signed
Daily Mirror dated Saturday August 31st
1929
Click to Read
Click to Read
At the end of the First World War the Treaty of
Versailles stipulated that the Rhineland would be off-limits to the German
military and up until 1935 a combined force of British, American, Belgian and
French soldiers would police the area. In fact the Americans evacuated their
troops in 1923 and the last to leave were the French in 1930. The idea of the
occupation was to ensure that Germany could not use the Rhineland industrial
infrastructure to re-arm. In March 1936 Hitler ordered the remilitarization of
the Rhineland.
Click to Read
Jewish access to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem was at the
root of the violence that broke out in August 1929 between Arabs and Jews in
Palestine. From the 23rd to the 29th of that month 133 Jews were
killed by Arabs and 339 Jews injured, 110 Arabs were killed and 232 Arabs
injured. Many of the Arabs were shot by
the British Police who were trying to restore order. The nasty massacre at Safed marked the end of this particular outbreak of Arab/Jewish hostility.
Click to Read
Movietone pioneered sound newsreels from 1928 onwards.
Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Hoover met at the President’s
retreat in Virginia in October 1929. They didn’t solve the World’s armaments
problems.
Click to Read
After the fire, which gutted Dorset’s Lulworth Castle on August 29th it was left empty and exposed to the elements until the
1970’s when English Heritage started a restoration effort that was finally
completed in 1998.
Click to Read
Not exactly the Great Train Robbery but literally a wages
snatch.
Click to Read
Click to Read
I think the photo is of the new Morris Isis-Six, which
replaced the Morris Six, which had been around since 1920.
Click to Read
Lots of bargains here if only one had a time
machine.
Click to Read
Rather than get married, surely it would have been easier
for this 84 year-old woman to just leave all her property to the young man in
her will.
Click to Read
I know little or nothing about fashion but the lady on the
left of the top picture looks suspiciously like a time traveller from the
1980’s to me. Maybe she was there house hunting.
Click to Read
The U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service Board’s investigation
found that the ‘San Juan’ had changed course in the fog and had cut across the
oil tanker Dodd therefore causing the collision, which claimed the lives of 72
people.
Click to Read
Click to Read
The race for the Schneider Trophy was a competition for
seaplanes and was run (or flown) in 1913 and annually from 1919 until 1931. In 1929
Richard Waghorn in the Supermarine S6 won with an average speed of 328.64 miles
per hour. Sadly Waghorn was killed 3 years later after parachuting out of a
Hawker Horsley biplane test flight at Farnborough.
R J Mitchell, who is most famous as the designer of the Spitfire,
designed the Supermarine S6.
Click to Read
Mary Learoyd was strangled in Sedbergh Park,
Ilkley, Yorkshire on August 25th. Nobody was ever convicted of the
murder. It seems that the man arrested in London was actually on his way to
Scotland Yard to present an alibi and clear his name.
Click to Read
This is something that I think is lacking from modern
newspapers – nicely drawn headers for articles and columns.
Click to Read
I include this because it reminded me that I used
to frequent Gamages’ Store in High Holborn many years ago and once used their
recording booth to create a vinyl record – now long lost - both the record and the booth.
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