Tag Archives: Empire flying boats

Diary Blog, 22 February 2025, with a few thoughts about flying boats

Morning music

[Eurasian lynx]

Saturday quiz

Well, slightly to my surprise, I defeated political journalist John Rentoul once again this week. Rentoul scored 4/10, but I trumped that, scoring 6/10 (admittedly, was unsure about question 8). I did not know the answers to questions 1, 2, 4, and 5.

Journalistic accuracy

Never accept, without checking, whatever a journalistic scribbler may say. I was just reading a not-uninteresting piece in The Oldie magazine, and about the Metropolitan Police in the 1970s, which article was written in 2023 by Duncan Campbell, a well-known journalist and author who was, arguably, better-known in the 1980s than he now is.

https://www.theoldie.co.uk/blog/partners-in-crime

Duncan Campbell is over 80 now, and married to that striking actress, Julie Christie. Their political views are, I think, quite similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_(journalist,_born_1944)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Christie

Reading Campbell’s nicely-written piece, I notice that he says (in 2023) of the famous or infamous ex-cat burglar, Peter Scott, that “Scott now lives in a council flat in King’s Cross, the proceeds from the odd Vermeer and Sophia Loren’s diamonds long gone.

In fact, Scott died in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scott_(thief)

As a matter of fact, I reviewed Scott’s memoirs on Amazon UK many years ago now.

My Amazon book reviews are now unavailable— the usual pack of Jews had me “cancelled” about 15 years ago, around 2010, from reviewing books both on Amazon UK (where I was one of the top book reviewers) and Amazon USA. A Jew formerly resident in the
UK but now living in Ra’anana (a suburb-town in the Tel Aviv area of Israel/Occupied Palestine) was the main instigator.

Scott lived, in his heyday, in the less-prestigious outer part of Maida Vale, whereas I lived at one time in Little Venice (also part of Maida Vale):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Venice

My (intermittent, from 1976 to 1996) times in Little Venice overlapped with Scott’s time in the area (he used the tiny “gangster pub”, the Windsor Castle, in Lanark Place, a pub at one time supposedly owned by Barbara Windsor, who was tied up with all sorts of gangsters and other criminals).

[The old Windsor Castle pub, in Lanark Place W.9., not to be confused with another and much larger pub with the same name in the outer regions of Maida Vale by Harrow Road; I believe both are now permanently closed, the Little Venice one (above) now trading as a Korean food outlet. Sign of the times…]

I occasionally had a drink there. One morning, waiting for the no.6 bus to take me to the High Court (I was appearing as Counsel), I observed the aftermath of a police raid there; about 3 or 4 police cars blocking Lanark Place. God knows why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Windsor

I enjoyed Campbell’s Oldie article, even though I already knew most of the facts noted in it.

Always check the accuracy of anything that anyone in and of the msm says.

Talking points

She is rather a loonie, but that is more in her manner than in the main substance of what she says, which is often, though not always, correct.

Tweets seen

A flying boat capable of going nearly 6,000 miles without refuelling, at a cruising speed of 360 mph; maximum speed 380 mph.

The 105 passengers were carried in First and Tourist cabins.

As with the 1930s German airships, the Empire flying boats made in the UK were in some respects superior to the flying machines of today. As Francis Bacon observed, just because a thing is superseded by another thing does not mean that the latter is superior.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon].

See also: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-5191131/Inside-glamorous-world-luxury-flying-boats.html.

[Dornier Do X flying boat; prototype on test near Berlin, 1929; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dornier_Do_X]
[Dornier Do X in flight]

The Dornier Do X could carry over 150 passengers and was the largest plane in the world at the time.

Unlike the British and American flying boats, though, the Dornier never went into regular service.

[boy and girl amuse themselves aboard the Pan Am Clipper]
[dining area aboard the Dornier Do X]

More tweets seen

[“The Russian military struck Ukrainian infrastructure over the past day, the Defense Ministry reported: https://vk.cc/cIPYtl“— TASS]

“Boris Johnson is no threat. He is the architect of all the decline & chaos you see around you today, all the mass uncontrolled immigration. If an architect destroyed your home you would never invite him back.”

[Matt Goodwin]

The only “threat” is that a huge number of dummies have still, after everything, not yet awoken to the utter uselessness of “Boris” Johnson.

I think that I can claim to have been one of the first not personally acquainted with Johnson to have realized that he was not only unfit morally to be MP, minister, and then Prime Minister, but actually intellectually incapable of doing any of those jobs.

I expressed my views first on Amazon book reviews from about 2002 (but was “cancelled” by Jewish lobby pressure sometime around 2010 or 2011); then on Twitter from 2010 until Jews again brought pressure on Twitter to “cancel” me (in 2018). Also, on the blog from 2017 to present.

Having said that, there are still a huge number of idiots, mainly Conservative Party members and voters, still willing to support “Boris”, so it is not inconceivable that he could return to Parliament, get Carpetbagger Kemi binned, then take over the “Conservative” Party again. I doubt, though, that that would propel the Cons to victory over Lab; it might save some existing Con Party seats, however.

If the Cons were set to lose about 80 seats, the loss might be reduced by half. Most of Reform’s likely victories henceforth, though, will be in seats presently held by Labour, not by the Con Party.

Late music

[All Souls, Oxford]

If Only “The War” Had Never Happened

I happened to see the second tweet below, the one showcasing an opinion poll from November 1947:

You see, here we are 73 years later, and the Jewish lobby with the compliant msm are constantly putting forward the idea that the 1930s were backward, poor, basically terrible, but that “the war” changed all that. In reality, the latter part of the 1930s was a time of general economic and social advance.

Looking mainly at the UK, the second part of the 1930s was a time when, at least in the South and Midlands, there were job opportunities, new towns and roads being constructed, air routes being laid out, both across Europe and, via Imperial Airways etc, worldwide, using safe and comfortable flying boats.

Across the South of England, people were moving into the detached and semi-detached suburban housing still considered desirable property today, 80-90 years later.

More than that. Advanced thinkers were already laying the intellectual foundations for the Welfare State: decent public housing, a National Health Service etc.

Then came the war. It has been said that, under strict WW2 rationing, perhaps as much as a quarter of the UK population was actually better-fed than it had been in the 1930s, an indication of the social inequality rampant before the war. However, in general, the war impoverished the whole nation (how could it not?). Britain suffered under rationing of various types until the mid-1950s! There is no doubt that poverty and indeed inequality would overall have been ameliorated quicker had the war not “frozen” the social situation.

Before 1939, Britain was taking steps to grant independence to the colonies. The White colonies had already achieved Dominion status. The colonies of black Africa and elsewhere might have been given independence later but on a more secure basis, after sufficient Africans (etc) had achieved the stature capable of running advanced societies and economies. Sadly, that never happened.

“The War”, as UK people still call WW2, was disastrous for most of the peoples, animals, birds etc of the world. Environmental degradation today continues apace, a result, ultimately, of the corruption and inefficiency of the “independent” states formed after WW2.

The peoples of the former colonies have suffered wars, civil wars, banditry, rapacious officialdom, you name it. All because of premature decolonization. Not only in the former British Empire, which attained its greatest territorial extent after the First World War, in 1918. About a third of the world was under British control at that time. Also, there were the colonies of the other European states in Africa and elsewhere, those of France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and the former German colonies (South West Africa, Tanganyika).

How much better a world would we now have were those formerly colonized lands still under European rule, or ruled in collaboration with a large enough and cultured enough African elite built up by the colonial powers over time …Look at Rhodesia up to 1979, and then its decrepit successor-state, Zimbabwe…

This is not just a question for the UK. It is a problem, historical and contemporary, for the world.

In Europe, the UK (and France) might have not given the Poles the worthless “guarantees” of 1939, which led the Poles to imagine that Britain and France would actually fight for Poland. Never happened.

Likewise, after the Fall of France in 1940, Britain might have secured an honourable armistice with the German Reich, so saving the peoples of Western and Central Europe from the massive destruction caused, mainly, by the Allied and Soviet forces during, again mainly, 1941-45. It would also have meant no Soviet takeover of the East and most of the Centre of Europe by Stalin’s Soviet Union in the mid-1940s.

We hear much (much too much) of the Jews, who were, prior to WW2, being allowed to emigrate from Germany and its allied or vassal states. Indeed, the Germans were glad to be rid of them. Well, had there been an armistice in 1940, that emigration would have continued: to the USA, Australia, Palestine etc.

Terrorism after WW2 was a product of the terrorists or “guerrillas” during that war, both those trained and funded by the shambolic British organization, SOE, and by the Soviet Union (the “partisans”). Most postwar “terrorism” from 1945 through to recent times can be traced back readily enough to British, American and Soviet sources.

Had “the War” (in the West) never happened, or been stopped in its tracks in 1940, the Soviet Union would probably have collapsed by 1942, there would have been no massive destruction by Soviet forces (or by the UK/USA air fleets) in the Europe of 1941-45, no Cold War, no Berlin Wall, no East-West proxy wars. The Israeli state and the arrogant Arab and Iranian oil states would have all either been strangled at birth, or kept on a tight rein.

In Britain itself, the neglected historian Correlli Barnett [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlli_Barnett] has made the point that, because of Britain’s having been bled dry by the War, it could not do more than one, or at most two, of its three main policy aims after 1945:

  • keep the Empire;
  • regenerate UK industry and commerce;
  • introduce a Welfare state.

In the end, Britain tried to do all three, but could not fully succeed in any, eventually almost abandoning the Empire and its remnants.

If only there had been no “War”, or a war lasting only a year…

If only.