Peter Ball

The Great War of 1914 to 1918 was said to be “The War to End All Wars” and it symbolically ended with the signing of the Armistice (a truce), which gave the time and the date of when hostilities would cease – the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 1918. However, the War only ended when all the treaties were signed and those signatures ranged between 1919 and 1923. The War began on the 1st August 1914 and was fought between two Alliances, the first being the Empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans (the Central Powers) and the second being that of the Empires of France, Russia and Great Britain (known as the “Triple Entente”) and both sides truly believed that the War would be over by Christmas and it could well have been. The Germans were within a whisker of emulating the Prussian victory over the French of 1870, but they were checked, at the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 and going forward there would be four more wretched years of trench warfare.

The British Expeditionary Force (BEF), of six divisions (the “Old Contemptibles”), was sent, in mid August 1914, to France, in support of the French Army, to counter the German threat and between then and the end of the War each side would try and annihilate the other. The film “Oh! What a Lovely War” and the TV series “Blackadder Goes Forth” showed with satire and pathos the utter lunacy of the...

This year Britain celebrates “Rail 200”, the bicentennial of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which had its opening on the 27th September 1825. It was not the first public railway, that honour was bestowed on the Surrey Iron Railway of 1803 (horse drawn & goods only), but it was the first to envisage and employ steam loco-motion (the Iron Horse). As engineered by George Stephenson, it was laid out with steam engines in mind, thus the curves were more gradual and the gradients more level than was the norm for horse drawn tramways. Its immediate success would lead to further railways being proposed, built and operated, which would culminate in a revolution not only in transportation, but also in the way we live.

Concurrent with the growth in railways during the second quarter of the nineteenth century was the establishment of a weekly journal which included several illustrations to accompany the written articles. The periodical in question was the “Illustrated London News” (ILN). It had its first issue on Saturday the 14th May 1842, with the main feature covering the Fancy Dress Ball at Buckingham Palace, held by the young Queen Victoria.

For the price of sixpence (6d) the reader got sixteen pages containing forty-eight columns of news along with thirty-two “woodcuts” (large & small). It is well to remember that photography was still in its infancy and would not come to the fore until circa 1850 and thus prior to then a “woodcut” (a relief printing technique) was the preferred...

When the popular board game, “Monopoly”, was introduced to Britain in 1935 by John Wadddington Ltd. of Leeds (Yorkshire), Marylebone (pronounced Mahr-le-buhn) was one of the four London railway termini chosen. The others were Fenchurch Street, Kings Cross and Liverpool Street. Those four stations just so happened to be owned by the same railway company, the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER), thus there was no room on the board for the main line stations of the other “Big Four” railway companies, namely Paddington (GWR), Euston (LMS) and Waterloo (Southern). Monopoly was not only a success in Britain, but also throughout the British Empire and the board game retained the street and station names of London, the capital city. Through playing “Monopoly”, many thousands of people across the globe became familiar with London’s place names and many a visitor would seek out a “Square” from the board game. I could well imagine the disappointment a visitor would have had on seeing Marylebone Station for the first time, as it was unpretentious and somewhat small, having only four platforms and its facade was said to look rather like a branch public library in a Manchester suburb.

Marylebone was the last railway terminus to be opened in London, with its first “Down” passenger train leaving for Sheffield and Manchester, on the 15th March 1899. The station and the extensive goods yard were built to serve the Great Central Railway (GCR) at the southern end of the London Extension of the former Manchester, Sheffield &...

The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, made the speech “How the UK will Kickstart Growth”, on the 29th January 2025, at the Siemens Healthineers, Eynsham, Oxfordshire. In the speech, one of the cornerstones of her policy for economic growth was the “Ox Cam Arc”, a corridor joining Oxford and Cambridge by way of Bicester, Bletchley, Milton Keynes and Bedford. In her speech she states:

Oxford and Cambridge offer huge potential for our nation’s growth prospects. Only 66 miles apart, these cities are home to two of the best universities in the world and the area is a hub for globally renowned science and technology firms. This area has the potential to be Europe’s Silicon Valley. To make this a reality, we need a systematic approach to attract businesses to come here and to grow here.

Pivotal to the success of the Government’s policy for sustained economic growth is the improvement of transport links between the two university cities. At present, to travel by train would involve a journey that would start at Oxford Station on a GWR service to London, Paddington (45 minutes). Once there, a change is made to the Elizabeth Line for the second leg under central London to Liverpool Street (12 minutes) where another change is made to a Greater Anglia service to Cambridge (75 minutes). If due allowance is made for walking between platforms and waiting for trains to leave, a journey could take 3 hours.

Should you wish to drive it would require travelling first up the A34...

High Speed 2 (HS2) is a Mega railway engineering project currently being built in the United Kingdom, the cost of which is being covered by the British Government (read the Taxpayer). To say that the project is a controversial one is no overstatement as its construction has been beset with cost and time overruns, ever since its inception (in 2009). The original Scope of Work was to lay a double track high speed (passenger only) railway from London Euston to the provincial cities of Birmingham (Phase 1), Crewe (Phase 2a), Manchester and Leeds (Phase 2b), however because of spiralling costs the scope now has been reduced with only the London to Birmingham section going ahead, with the Old Oak Common Interchange station now becoming the initial London terminus, which is situated 5 miles (8km) due west of Euston.

HS2 plan (Wikipedia)

The original London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR), as engineered by Robert Stephenson, was opened in 1838 between Euston and Birmingham and had existing onward connections from Birmingham to Liverpool and Manchester via the Grand Junction Railway (of 1837) and the Liverpool & Manchester (of 1830). The three railway companies had a close working relationship which led to their merger, in 1846, to become the “London & North Western Railway” (LNWR), considered by many as the “Premier Line”.

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Wednesday 27th March 1963 was no red letter day and will always be remembered with regret as the day that a watershed report was published, with the innocuous title “The Reshaping of British Railways”. The report’s author was Dr. Richard Beeching (Chairman of the British Railways Board) and he set out his plans to make British Railways (BR) a “going concern” by way of closing down one third of the network, which on the ground meant the closure of 2363 stations and 5000 route miles of railway line, added to which would be the loss of 67 000 jobs on the railway. To say it was a Bombshell, would be putting it mildly as the damage that was done to the system over the next five years (until 1968) would out do, many times over, that done by the German Luftwaffe during the “Blitz” of 1940/41.

The Beeching Report, as it is now commonly known, was a thorough analysis of the economic state of British Railways (nationalised since 1948) as at the time of publication, which was a time when railways were losing custom due to the competition both from road hauliers (for freight) and the rise in car ownership (for passengers); it was said that the train took you where it went but the car took you where you wanted to go.

In the brief period from 1963 to 1968 Beeching’s recommendations were carried out to the letter, and many branch lines to the seaside, which were well patronised...

Modern High Speed Rail (HSR) is regarded as being an independent railway dedicated solely for passengers and built to standards which allow trains to travel along its rails at speeds in excess of 300 kph (185 mph); thus enabling it to compete with short haul airlines. A case in point is the “Eurostar” service, between London (St Pancras) and Paris (Gare de Nord) that has a journey time of two and a quarter hours, via the Channel Tunnel, with the benefit to the traveller of going from city centre to city centre.

In the last six decades, many HSR services have come into being, commencing with the Japanese “Shinkansen” (a.k.a. Bullet Train) that was inaugurated in 1964, between Tokyo and Osaka, with an initial speed of 200 kph (125 mph). In the years since, the “Shinkansen” has been extended eastwards of Tokyo and westwards of Osaka with the services now travelling at speeds of 300 kph. This need for speed has been replicated in France, Germany, Spain and China, with Indonesia being the latest to join the club with its own brand of HSR called “Whoosh”, between Jakarta and Bandung, which was launched as recently as the 17th October 2023, to coincide with the “Chinese Belt and Road” Summit which took place in Beijing.

I could expand more on modern day HSR’s, and discuss the merits of the French TGV (Train a Grand Vitesse) or the German ICE (Inter City Express), but there is so much information out there that I...

The mere mention of Winston Churchill’s name conjures up in one’s mind a man with an indomitable spirit, a British Bulldog, the man who steeled the resolve of freedom loving people (around the globe) to fight against the odds and be victorious over Hitler’s Axis of Evil. When he was called upon to lead Great Britain in its 'Darkest Hour' and be its Prime Minister and War Leader, he accepted the challenge as a fulfilment of his destiny, at an age of 65 years when most men would have been happy to retire.

Portrait of Churchill circa 1941 (Wikipedia)
 

That Darkest Hour was during the Second World War (1939-1945), on the 7th May 1940 when the British Parliament no longer had any confidence in Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister and he was told, by Leo Amery, “Depart I say and let us have done with you. In the name of God go”. Amery was paraphrasing Oliver Cromwell, as would David Davis in 2022, when telling Boris Johnson to resign. Johnson had (still has) delusions of being another Churchill, but many argue he is just a pale imitation.

The Second World War began when the Germans invaded Poland on the 1st September 1939. Britain and France had given Poland assurances should it be attacked and they duly declared war on Germany on the 3rd September. However, after...

When in Johannesburg, one of the best places to visit is the National Museum of Military History, a.k.a. the War Museum, located next door to the Zoo and just off of Oxford Road. The Museum’s opening hours are between 09h00 – 16h00 daily and I find that three hours is enough time to spend in order to see the exhibits on display. Opened as the South African National War Museum on the 29th August 1947 by the then Prime Minister, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, it had as its main display halls two Bellman hangars, which were originally built during the Second World War and now have become museum pieces themselves.

The Bellman hangar, was so named after its designer N. S. Bellman, the structural engineer for the British Air Ministry in 1936 who was given the brief to design a lightweight, portable and quick to erect (and dismantle) portal frame structure to house the aircraft of the Royal Air Force (RAF), at a time when the RAF was expanding its number of squadrons as a consequence of Britain re-arming to answer the threat of a resurgent Germany. What follows is an abridged version of a Guardian newspaper report, dated Monday 4th March 1935:

In a major reversal of rearmament policy Britain today announced new expansion plans for its army, navy and air force. The plans, in a defence white paper, are to demonstrate that Britain does not take lightly Germany’s continuing rearmament.

The white paper calls for an enlarged fleet...

“Separated by a Common Language” is a paraphrase of what the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), once said when he spoke about the relationship between the United States of America and Great Britain. His contemporary and compatriot (but no companion), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) said much the same thing with the quote, “We have everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language”. The quotations of both men are epigrams and thus are more witty than truthful, but they do emphasise that there are some differences in the way people speak and write either side of the “Pond”.

General American English and British Standard English are mutually intelligible with only minor differences in grammar, vocabulary, spelling and in pronunciation, however, that said regional dialects can be a cause of difficulty and have led to many a misunderstanding; for instance a person with a Cockney accent (from London’s East End) will not easily understand someone with a Southern Drawl from the Deep South and visa versa unless both are able to moderate their speech towards a more “middle of the road” English; Michael Caine meets Johnny Cash if you will.

Standard English, also known as “Received Pronunciation” (RP for short) is instantly recognisable as being “typically British”, the speech of James Bond and those who speak with his accent cannot be “pin-pointed” as to where they come from. With the advent of radio broadcasting in the 1920’s, people from across the British Isles could “tune in” and listen to the...