Last week I briefly mentioned the events that followed Operation Frankton, promising to set them in the context of rural Charente. Put briefly, Operation Frankton was a commando raid on the port of Bordeaux in early December 1942, carried out by a small unit of Royal Marines. Six folding kayaks were transported to the Gironde…
It was Valencia, July 1972 and blazing hot: my first time in Spain (it now seems odd that I had already sat my Spanish A Level). I was on a three-week language course organised by Liverpool Poly, as it then was, and there were school students from all across the UK. One was at Eton,…
Thursday afternoons at Birkenhead School were for playing soldiers. Everyone was more or less obliged to join the Combined Cadet Force. We were fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, to have a genuine, high-ranking ex-soldier as our CO: Lt. Col. Arthur N. Green (AKA "The Ang"). Dad’s Army was one of the most popular programmes at the…
There will never be another Armistice Centenary. On Sunday 11 November 2018 at 11am - exactly 100 years after the guns fell silent and the slaughter stopped - local people and visitors gathered for a brief commemoration at our Sunday market. *** For more than 12 months I've been leading a Heritage Lottery-funded project to identify…
The Wight Stuff 