Broithe

Correct! It is not. And I believe she is not still living..?

No. He would have been twelve years old. That would have required considerable widespread foresight amongst the general population.

No. I think he is No 8 of those still alive. If you take twenty guesses, you might get the second and third, but if you don't know the top one, you won't get that with a thousand guesses...

Reminds me of a time doing a pub quiz in England, around 2005. "Whose autobiography was called 'Reach For The Sky' ?" I had the pen, so I just wrote in 'Douglas Bader'. Bemusement from all the others in the team, including the Head of History at a secondary school, with a 'specialism' in WW2 matters. "You must have heard of Douglas Bader, surely?" - "No, he sounds like he might have been a cricketer?" Well, I suppose he would have a good go at it... The same person also asked me who I would have voted for in the "Hundred Greatest Britons" TV poll*. I said I would probably have gone for Leonard Cheshire, because he had great influence, both during and after the war, in very different fields - this met the same bemused look from her. "What did he do?" - "You've surely heard of Cheshire Homes, at least?" - "Ah, I think they built an estate near us - my Dad did some work for them". Knowing when to give up is a skill. * If you have nothing better to do, then, without looking it up, try to guess who, since the death of Thatcher, has been, according to that 2005 poll, the Greatest Living Briton..?

Many interesting things at Scampton, including this impressive fire. It threw a compressor disc and just burned to the ground. Plenty to burn, with two bomb bay tanks in, too. Everybody got out, including the cadet they had with them, whose parachute went off inside the plane, adding to the interest of the occasion. The runway at Scampton had been extended for the Vulcans, resulting in the big sweep on the originally dead straight A15 road, but this made such a mess that it was shortened again by 500 feet, until it was repaired, eventually. I 'believe' that I met Mick Martin, around 1970, but without really realising who he was, he was never really one of the better known names from that period, for some reason.

Guy Gibson's dog's grave is still there, although there is a new memorial stone these days, Still plenty of Brownings in use these days, all over the place.

Although the flak was a danger, the bombs from above were possibly a greater risk factor. Short Brothers do also seem to have had a tendency to go for alliterative names, Sunderland, Singapore, Sandringham, etc - but they did also come up with the dramatic 'Knuckleduster'. Alliteration was a common theme - Vickers devices often began with a V, all the way from Vimy to Valiant, Viking and Valetta. There's also the odd situation where names were reused - a Hawker Fury could be either a biplane or a later, completely different, monoplane - and a Westland Whirlwind could be a twin-engined fighter or a helicopter. Both "pairs" were in service, but not on overlapping timescales, but you could have spares for the earlier ones lying around for decades, whilst the later ones were in use.. The Americans weren't immune to that, either, there was a McDonnell Phantom prior to the more well-known device, although the earlier one never entered British service,

The Lancaster was, perhaps, named after somewhere near to Manchester, as it was really a development of the ill-fated Avro Manchester, after the Vulture engines were abandoned in favour of the rather better Merlins. And, Avro was a 'local' company there. The Lancaster then morphed into the Lincoln and, ultimately, the Shackleton, flying on into the 1990s. Handley Page had a penchant for names that started with an alliterative 'H'. 'Stirling' also, perhaps, had a secondary hint of solid reliability? The Stirling was rather overshadowed in the four-engined hierarchy. It was an early design that was required to fit through the standard hangar doors, so the wingspan was shorter than it could otherwise have been. The airframe was relatively robust, but the landing gear could be troublesome, and the bomb-bay was divided, so it couldn't transport the larger bombs that became operational later in the war. And the low aspect ratio wings led them to often fly lower than the other planes, with a consequent higher risk of being bombed from above. We made a list once of the various types of names - battles, famous people, cities, weather, birds, other animals, etc. There were some odd ones that stood out, there were a few insects, but we could only think of one plant, the Bristol Sycamore helicopter - and it seemed odd to name military aircraft after prey animals, Gazelle, Wildebeest, etc.

Energy, ancient and modern.

Many years ago, there was an article in the annual Rathdowney Review about a plan for a tramway from Ballybrophy to Rathdowney, for passengers and for Perry's brewery traffic. The plans were, supposedly, quite advanced, but nothing ever actually happened on the ground. If I ever find it again, I will post it on here.

Another potentially interesting RAF term is that the preferred description of the big fan thing on the front is 'propeller', and not 'airscrew'. This is allegedly because of an incident where somebody misread, or mistyped, 'airscrews', missing the first 's', and a load of chaps arrived in two buses, rather than the required spares.

At one time, if you'd requested "a couple of dozen eggs" in the RAF, this is what would arrive.

Having cause to open an IRM box today reminded me of the day in the 80s when I finally saw how odd something that we thought was normal actually looked to an outsider. Before digital recorders arrived. a lot of the high-speed recording was done via UV oscillographs - a tight beam of UV light would be shone at a tiny mirror attached to a light coil in a magnetic field. Tiny changes in the current through the coil would cause the mirror to move proportionately and that movement would be 'amplified' by the fact that the reflected beam would travel many inches before it struck the (moving) UV paper, thus leaving a trace on the paper, corresponding to whatever it was measuring, pressure, movement, stress, whatever. Kodak made our paper, but I can't find a picture of their actual product. However, it was much like this. It needed to be stored in darkness, as the UV in daylight, and most artificial light, would render the paper 'exposed' after a few minutes. This meant that it was supplied in really high quality cardboard boxes - and these were also necessary to store any used rolls, if you wanted to keep the record for a while. These boxes were in great demand, as they were very strong and very accurately made. I still have a few of them. They would be used for many things - often small projects would be constructed with them, in early development stages. I actually used one as a 'pneumatic damper'. Over time, as the 70s moved into the chaos of the 80s, they became used for more and more things, as it became impossible to get agreement to spend any money on the actual job. As things failed, they were slowly replaced by, essentially, home-made things. Eventually, the high-voltage test apparatus was largely controlled by a series of units made from these boxes, still in their yellow, black and red Kodak corporate colours. Switches, knobs, connectors and the odd meter were mounted through the cardboard, with the wiring hidden inside and all worked well enough. Now and then, we would get customers' inspectors who had little idea about what the item they were supposed to be supervising was, but they knew it cost X million pounds. One day, standing next to one of these bemused chaps, as we put most of a million volts into it, I realised what he could see - a couple of testers flicking switches sticking out of a few cardboard boxes on an ancient wooden table... A sideline for IRM?

There could well be items of a railway interest amongst this stash.

If you're going to crash the same Jag every week, then it can't be into anything too substantial...

Well, I thought I might just be able to nip out and back for a minute, but I arrived back to find 'the card' though the door. The key to a rapid delivery is to include a police vehicle in the order, even an unmarked car. If the content had been clearly indicated, I assume they would have kicked the door in and left the package in the hall? Impressively, it even has NHK 289 M plates - I just need plausible figures now... The Stoppo Driver car chase - the cutting of the corner via the pub car park is a gem.

Oooh, I've just grabbed the last gold Consul. One day, there will be a Garda Flying Squad raid...

If you only have a bit of track and one tunnel portal, but loads of spare trees. And you only have to paint the carriage roofs.

I grew up on RAF bases and didn't really realise just how much of the past had lodged itself in my head, until 2005. I'd never been anywhere outside France, 'on the continent', but a friend moved to Prague and we drove a van there overnight, across Germany on Easter weekend and the roads were really (even spookily) quiet. We hadn't even got to Germany before the motorway signs started carrying "wartime place-names", the first was Venlo, a major night fighter base, then we cruised by Cologne and many other places in the Ruhr, which were regular targets. We went past Frankfurt airport, on the way to Nuremberg. For some reason, as we passed the retro-futuristic terminal building, there was a searchlight beam swinging around in the sky. The lad was born in 1979, so none of this was of any concern to him, and when I said "If this engine starts missing, I'm turning south for Switzerland!", he really didn't know what I was getting at. In the late 50s, the Chief of the Defence staff was Air Chief Marshall Sir Dermot Boyle - he had joined up in WW1 and worked his way to the very top. He was from a few miles away from here in Laois and my father was very indirectly acquainted with him, via his sons, I think. Anyway, he came out to visit the then Near East Air Force establishment at Luqa in Malta. At the time, my father was a new corporal and worked in the officers' mess. He was there in the background as all the top chaps were presented to the absolute top chap. Half way through the introductions, he spotted my father and said "Ah, I heard you were here - I'll see you when I've finished with this lot". Utter silence and sideways glances followed, as people tried to remember what they might have said in my father's earshot... They had a quick chat along the lines of "Come back here tonight and we'll pop out for a Guinness after the dinner". My father went back, in t-shirt and shorts, to be asked by Boyle in full kit "Where's the best Guinness?" - "Well, it's in the sergeants' mess..." - "That's OK, you're with me" and they burst in on people who were not expecting that amount of brass at that time of night - the immediate panic was quelled by the order "He's with me and I'm not here! Carry on." The association protected him well, even after Boyle had long retired. He came out to Cyprus, when retired, and much the same thing happened again, but people were forewarned this time - but it was good to 'top up the shield'.

I bought the double cassette in a charity shop - well, I thought I did, but only Tape 2 was in there when I got it home... It was broadcast in 'real time' sections though the whole day, from the pre-flight stuff in the morning, to the raid itself and the return flight, if you were coming back... Here we are - the first of four parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6U0e5DUdNQ

The general lack of fireworks in the Republic is a great thing, from my point of view. The annual onslaught on the Big Island has dropped off over the last decade, from a peak in the early years of this century. In an urban area, you would get them daily from late September into the first week of January, with the obvious peak around late October, early November. That fortnight would sometimes be like the Somme - drawn out, if the "special days" weren't at the weekend, in particular. I was once listening to a BBC dramatisation of Len Deighton's Bomber, on a dark, cold, autumn night, when I started to feel that the explosive soundtrack was a bit repetitive and out-of-sync with the narration - at that point, I also realised that the next day was bin day, so I decided to put it out before I forgot again. When I opened the front door, the noise got louder - it was actually a firework display that was four miles away in a straight line, and loud enough to be heard above the flak and bombs on the radio indoors, with all the doors and windows shut. Madness. As a child on the Big Island in the 60s, Trick or Treat was something that was occasionally mentioned on US TV shows - nothing more, and we didn't really know what it was - and Hallowe'en, as a whole, was of virtually no consequence, it was hardly even mentioned.

Three shades of grey?

It's not to be sniffed at...

When I saw this yesterday, I was initially concerned that it was a CAB seizure of somebody's "high value goods".