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1987: Soldiers remember Passchendaele
Veterans have returned to the scene of the bloodiest battle of World War I to commemorate its 70th anniversary.
The fields of Passchendaele in Belgium claimed the lives of 250,000 troops of the British Commonwealth between July and November 1917.

The battle was the heaviest bombardment of the war and few of its survivors are still alive.

Now in their 90s the men paid their respects at the Commonwealth's largest war cemetery - Tyne Cot - where 11,908 soldiers are buried.

In the evening they joined a formal parade through Ypres to the Menin Gate, which carries inscriptions of the 55,000 Allied soldiers who were never found.

Many of them disappeared into the swamp created by continual shelling and rain on reclaimed bogland.

All Commonwealth troops sent to the trenches at Passchendaele - also known as the Third Battle of Ypres - marched through the Menin Gate.

Traffic is stopped there at 2000 BST (1900 GMT) every day for the local fire department to sound the Last Post.

Battle plans

Once fighting began in earnest, it took the Allied troops 99 days to capture what was left of the village of Passchendaele in south-west Flanders.

When the assault was planned in 1916, the British command expected to reach Passchendaele in two days, before advancing to drive the Germans behind the Rhine as part of the Big Push to end the war.

Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig never went to the Western Front and ignored reports of the appalling conditions there.

When his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Sir Lancelot Kiggell, visited near the end of the campaign he reportedly broke down and said: "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?"

There were nearly half a million losses on both sides. The British gained just five miles (8km) at a cost of around 35 lives per metre.


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Tyne Cot is the Commonwealth's largest war cemetery


Passchendaele soldiers remember comrades of World War I




In Context
World War I was fought from August 1914 to November 1918.
It was the first war that involved militarisation on a global scale, taking advantage of and encouraging advances in communication and weaponry.

A total of 65m soldiers went to battle. Of these 21m were wounded and 10m were killed - including a million missing and presumed dead.

The British Empire lost a total of 950,000 men, while the French, Germans and Russian Empire each lost well over a million.

Witnesses and survivors of WWI hoped it would be the war to end all wars. Remembrance services are held on 11 November to mark the official end of the war.

For many the Battle of Passchendaele symbolised the futility of war and needless slaughter of human life.


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1987: Soldiers remember Passchendaele

1543 - England's Henry VIII married Catherine Parr, his sixth and last wife, at Hampton Court Palace. Catherine was the fourth commoner Henry had taken as his consort, and she outlived him. She was also the most-married English queen, having a total of four husbands.

1812 – War of 1812: the United States invade Canada at Windsor, Ontario.

1910 - Charles Rolls, aged 33, pioneering pilot and co-founder of Rolls-Royce, was killed when he crashed his biplane in a flying competition at Bournemouth.

1962 - The Rolling Stones performed their first ever concert, at the Marquee Club in London.

1971 – The Australian Aboriginal flag is flown for the first time.

1837 - Queen Victoria became the first sovereign to move into Buckingham Palace.

1923 – The Hollywood Sign is officially dedicated in the hills above Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. It originally reads 'Hollywoodland' but the four last letters are dropped after renovation in 1949.

1939 - Frank Sinatra made his recording debut with the Harry James band, singing Melancholy Mood and From The Bottom of My Heart.

1955 - Nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain, she was executed at Holloway Prison for the murder of her lover David Blakely.

1985 - Two simultaneous Live Aid concerts, one in London (Wembley Stadium) and one in Philadelphia, raised over £50 million for famine victims in Africa. The 16 hour 'super concert' was globally linked by satellite to more than a billion viewers in 110 nations.

2011 – Mumbai is rocked by three bomb blasts during the evening rush hour, killing 26 and injuring 130.

Tom Simpson died of dehydration on Thursday 13th July in 1967 in The Tour de France near the top of Mont Ventoux

(13-07-2012 13:13 )skully Wrote: [ -> ]1955 - Nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain, she was executed at Holloway Prison for the murder of her lover David Blakely.

The Ruth Ellis saga remains one of the most controversial cases of the post-war era, but in a strict legal sense the reason why is baffling, and much of the interest in her was because a stunningly attractive woman - what we'd now call a babe - was to be hanged.

Ellis was born Ruth Hornby in North Wales but with her father often away (he was a musician on a cruise ship) the family moved to Basingstoke. She took up nude modelling at 16 and became pregnant by a Canadian soldier at 17, giving birth to a son. By the age of 23 she was working as a prostitute, at 24 became pregnant again by a client (this time having an illegal abortion) then married George Elllis, a divorced dentist 20 years older than her. The marriage produced a daughter which her husband would not acknowledge was his, and after she left her husband she became pregnant for the fourth time, this time by racing driver David Blakely, resulting in another abortion.

After this, Ellis took up with another man but continued seeing Blakely, and it was this disintegrating and increasingly violent relationship that ended up in the fatal confrontation of Easter Sunday 1955.

There was sympathy for the way life had treated her but there was never any doubt as to what happened and who was responsible. Ruth Ellis took out a gun and shot her lover dead; in fact she shot him five times, three times at point blank range as he lay on the ground. She admitted that she intended to kill him and it took a jury just 14 minutes to bring in a guilty verdict. Ellis refused to appeal against her mandatory death sentence and after the Home Secretary refused to commute the sentence she was hanged.

Like all condemned prisoners, she was examined by a panel of Home Office psychiatrists who found her to be legally "sane," i.e. not suffering from any demonstrable mental illness that could be identified at the time that would have been severe enough to diminish her responsibility for the crime.

The jury were not permitted to reach a manslaughter verdict and, in fairness, the evidence they heard simply did not justify it and thus were left only with a verdict of guilty of murder. Had they been asked merely to reach a verdict of guilty to homicide, leaving the actual sentence to be decided by others, perhaps she would have gone to prison for a few years and never been heard of again. The question of whether she deserved death or not was not one the jury were able to consider - if they had been, it is very unlikely that she would have been hanged. The American concept of degrees of murder had been discussed in Britain but always rejected.

In 1969 Ellis’s mother, Berta Neilson (the family changed their name from Hornby), was found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead. She never fully recovered and didn't speak coherently again. Ellis's husband, George Ellis, descended into alcoholism and hanged himself in 1958. Her son, Andy, who was 10 at the time of his mother's hanging, suffered irreparable psychological damage and committed suicide in a bedsit in 1982. Astonishingly, the trial judge, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's upkeep, and Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel at Ellis's trial, paid for his funeral. Ellis's daughter, Georgina, who was three when her mother was executed, was adopted when her father hanged himself three years later. She died of cancer aged 50.

An urban legend grew up that disquiet at having to execute Ellis had caused hangman Albert Pierrepoint to resign the following year, but this was simply not true. The principled (and stubborn) Pierrepoint quit in a row over travel expenses when a prisoner was reprieved at the last moment. Pierrepoint himself compared the public sympathy and interest in Ellis's case to the total lack of either in the case of Mrs. Styllou Christofi, who he had hanged eight months earlier. Mrs. Christofi was an unattractive middle aged Greek Cypriot woman who had brutally murdered her daughter-in-law (and possibly another person previously) and in whom there was very little media interest. Equally the other women hanged since the end of the war, Margaret Allen and Louisa Merrifield, had very little attraction (sex appeal?) for the media and for various reasons elicited little public sympathy.

The last death sentence passed on a woman was in 1958, when 68 year old Mary Wilson was convicted of poisoning two of her husbands, but her sentence was commuted by Home Secretary Rab Butler.

In 2003 Ellis's case was referred back to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The Court firmly rejected the appeal, although it made clear that it could rule only on the conviction based on the law as it stood in 1955, and not on whether she should have been executed.

However the court was critical of the fact that it had been obliged to consider the appeal at all:

"We would wish to make one further observation. We have to question whether this exercise of considering an appeal so long after the event when Mrs Ellis herself had consciously and deliberately chosen not to appeal at the time is a sensible use of the limited resources of the Court of Appeal. On any view, Mrs Ellis had committed a serious criminal offence. This case is, therefore, quite different from a case like Hanratty [2002] 2 Cr App R 30 where the issue was whether a wholly innocent person had been convicted of murder. A wrong on that scale, if it had occurred, might even today be a matter for general public concern, but in this case there was no question that Mrs Ellis was other than the killer and the only issue was the precise crime of which she was guilty. If we had not been obliged to consider her case we would perhaps in the time available have dealt with 8 to 12 other cases, the majority of which would have involved people who were said to be wrongly in custody."

1099 - During the First Crusade, Christian knights from Europe captured Jerusalem and began massacring the city's Muslim and Jewish population.

1789 - The French Revolution began as Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops stormed and dismantled the Bastille, a royal fortress that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs.

1789 - The Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie finally completed his journey to the mouth of the great river he hoped would take him to the Pacific, but which turns out to flow into the Arctic Ocean. Later named after him, the Mackenzie is the second-longest river system in North America.

1867 - Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel demonstrated dynamite for the first time, at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey.

1881 – Billy the Kid is shot and killed by Pat Garrett outside Fort Sumner.

1933 – The Nazi eugenics begins with the proclamation of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring that calls for the compulsory sterilization of any citizen who suffers from alleged genetic disorders.

1958 – Iraqi Revolution: in Iraq the monarchy is overthrown by popular forces led by Abdul Karim Kassem, who becomes the nation's new leader.

1960 – Jane Goodall arrives at the Gombe Stream Reserve in present-day Tanzania to begin her famous study of chimpanzees in the wild.

1967 - Abortion was legalized in Britain.

1969 – The United States $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills are officially withdrawn from circulation.

2000 – A powerful solar flare, later named the Bastille Day event, causes a geomagnetic storm on Earth.

2002 – French President Jacques Chirac escapes an assassination attempt unscathed during Bastille Day celebrations.

971 - According to the legend of St. Swithin, if it rains today, it will be the start of forty days of rain.

1149 – The reconstructed Church of the Holy Sepulchre is consecrated in Jerusalem.

1207 - England's King John expelled Canterbury monks for supporting the Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton. Langton was a central figure in the dispute between King John and Pope Innocent III, which was a contributing factor to the crisis which led to the issuing of Magna Carta in 1215.

1685 - Charles II's illegitimate son (the Duke of Monmouth) was executed for rebelling against James II. His head was then put back on his shoulders so that his portrait could be painted.

1799 – The Rosetta Stone is found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard during Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign.

1823 – A fire destroys the ancient Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome.

1916 – In Seattle, Washington, William Boeing and George Conrad Westervelt incorporate Pacific Aero Products, later renamed Boeing.

1948 - Alcoholics Anonymous, in existence in the USA since 1935, was founded in London.

1975 – Space Race: Apollo–Soyuz Test Project features the dual launch of an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft on the first joint Soviet-United States human-crewed flight. It was both the last launch of an Apollo spacecraft, and the Saturn family of rockets.

1985 – The Nintendo Entertainment System, the best-selling game console of its time, is released in Japan.

1996 - Prince Charles and Princess Diana were granted a decree nisi. Princess Diana could no longer be addressed as Her Royal Highness but was to be known as Diana, Princess of Wales.

1997 – In Miami, Florida, serial killer Andrew Phillip Cunanan guns down Gianni Versace outside his home.

(15-07-2012 15:15 )skully Wrote: [ -> ]1975 – Space Race: Apollo–Soyuz Test Project features the dual launch of an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft on the first joint Soviet-United States human-crewed flight. It was both the last launch of an Apollo spacecraft, and the Saturn family of rockets.

This flight really was the end of an era although the outcome of the space race had effectively been decided in 1968 when, after a string of failures, the Russians gave up on their N-1 moon rocket (their equivalent of the Saturn 5). What is often forgotten is that in 1963 President Kennedy had proposed a joint venture with the Russians in the moon programme. Khruschev didn't dismiss the suggestion and Kremlin records showed that it was under serious consideration but Kennedy was assassinated soon afterwards and the idea was forgotten.

Leading the three man American crew was Gemini and Apollo veteran Colonel Tom Stafford. In 1969 he had been the commander of Apollo 10 and was unlucky not to get the first moon landing. He was only a Major at the time and was believed to be the inspiration for David Bowie's "Major Tom" in "Space Oddity".

The other two Apollo astronauts were technically rookies, but although Vance Brand went on to make three shuttle flights it was a one and only flight for Deke Slayton 16 years after he qualified as an astronaut. Slayton was one of the original Mercury astronauts and in 1962 he had been due to become the 5th American to go into space but a heart murmur grounded him for the next 13 years and during that time he served as head of the astronaut office at NASA.

The two man Soviet crew was led by the legendary Alexei Leonov. In 1965 he had been the first man to walk in space and had the Russians ever got to the moon he had been pencilled in for both the first lunar orbital flight and first moon landing. His companion Valeri Kubasov had flown on Soyuz 6 but both men had cheated death in 1971 as they were scheduled to fly on the ill-fated Soyuz 11. Kubasov was found to have been exposed to TB and the crew were replaced by the back-up crew just three days before the flight.

The Americans had insisted on full disclosure from the secretive Russians as to what had gone wrong on Soyuz 11 before agreeing to the joint mission.

Slayton penned an autobiography with space historian Michael Cassutt entitled Deke!: U.S. Manned Space from Mercury to the Shuttle. As well as Slayton's own astronaut experiences, the book describes how Slayton made crew choice selections, including choosing the first person to walk on the moon. Numerous astronauts have noted that only when reading this book did they learn why they had been selected for certain flights decades earlier.

Slayton's name also appears with three other co-authors, including fellow astronaut Alan Shepard, on the book Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon, published in 1994. The book was also made into a documentary film of the same name. Slayton died from a brain tumour in 1993 before either Moon Shot project was finished or released, and the book did not receive any input from him. However, the film was narrated from Slayton's point of view (voiced by Barry Corbin) and includes a brief tribute to him at the very end.

The other four crew members are still alive and living in retirement.

1439 - Kissing was banned in England because of the Plague.

1661 – The first banknotes in Europe are issued by the Swedish bank Stockholms Banco.

1809 – The city of La Paz, in what is today Bolivia, declares its independence from the Spanish Crown during the La Paz revolution and forms the Junta Tuitiva, the first independent government in Spanish America, led by Pedro Domingo Murillo.

1910 – John Robertson Duigan makes the first flight of the Duigan pusher biplane, the first aircraft built in Australia.

1945 – Manhattan Project: the Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

1979 – Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr resigns and is replaced by Saddam Hussein.

1993 - Britain's internal security service, MI5, held the first photocall in its 84-year history when Stella Rimington (Director General) posed openly for cameras at the launch of a brochure outlining the organisation's activities.

1994 – Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 collides with Jupiter. Impacts continue until July 22.

1999 – John F. Kennedy, Jr., piloting a Piper Saratoga aircraft, dies when his plane crashes into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. His wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette are also killed.

(15-07-2012 15:15 )skully Wrote: [ -> ]1997 – In Miami, Florida, serial killer Andrew Phillip Cunanan guns down Gianni Versace outside his home.

Which prompted the brilliant Daily Sport headline "Versace's gone out of fashion" which was sadly rejected in favour of the less funny "Shoot you, Sir!"

I can't forget either the event, or the light-hearted memory