EnglishCountryHelen

Dorset Mum in Hants. Lover of the British countryside & our historic buildings. Tweets about gardening, food, heritage & books. On Instagram and Pinterest too.

[EnglishCountryHelen @EngCountryHelen]

I'm now on #Instagram - find me there and follow at https://t.co/qUBWADQPDI

[Kate Ferguson @kateferguson4]

Tom Holland calls for a national celebration to mark England’s 1,100th birthday next year.

King Athelstan was declared the first ‘King of the English’ on July 12, 927.

Let’s get this campaign going!

[Rodney Marshall @RodneyMarshall1]

39 years ago this month Inspector Morse was first broadcast. Many in the TV industry doubted that the two-hour format (100 minutes running time) would work. Others thought it was too cerebral and slow moving. The series proved a huge success, both in the UK and globally. 1/

[EnglishCountryHelen @EngCountryHelen]

Remembering the fallen heroes of the Great War on #ArmisticeDay

[Mark Hayes @MarkHay55822123]

The funeral of Emily Davison took place on 14th June 1913. The funeral procession set off from Victoria Station for a memorial service in Bloomsbury and then to King's Cross for the journey North.
An amazing photograph of the scene at Piccadilly Circus:

[Damien Lewis @authordlewis]

Sadly, the last known surviving WW2 veteran of the SAS, Matthew "Matt/Jock" Mackinnon-Pattison died on Thursday 5th November aged 102years. We remember Matthew. Here is a summary of Matthew's wartime service. Please share widely: Matt MacKinnon Pattison was among hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers who fought Germans in Italy in the spring of 1944.
Sometimes remembered as the "D-Day Dodgers", in reference to their role away from Normandy, men in Italy faced brutal conditions as they battled to take Monte Cassino and dislodge enemy soldiers.
"We came back from Italy having flogged ourselves to pieces, nervous wrecks, and people say 'where were you on D-Day?'" said Matt, from Penrith, Cumbria.
"We just say we were busy bloody well fighting."
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill thought of Italy as the "soft underbelly" of Nazi-dominated Europe, but the campaign there proved difficult and costly.
With perhaps typical military irony, the men in Italy adopted the "D-Day Dodgers" moniker, even creating a song to the tune of Lili Marleen, a famous wartime melody.
"We are the D-Day Dodgers in sunny Italy," rang the chorus.
But this was no sojourn in the sun and the Allied forces knew it.
Enemy soldiers were dug in on defensive lines across the country, and at Monte Cassino it took four separate attacks from US, British, Polish and Commonwealth forces to destroy and take the hilltop monastery.
Matt still has razor-sharp memories of the battles he fought, and the comrades he lost.
He fled agricultural service in Kilmarnock as a teenager to get to Glasgow to enlist as an infantryman before ending up "right in the forefront" of the battle for Monte Cassino.
Advancing up the slopes amid the fog of deadly artillery bomb blasts and the continual crackle of gunfire, the soldier saw many of his comrades fall.
But, he said, there was no time to be frightened.
"You don’t look upon it as bravery, you just look at it as part of your life," he told the BBC.
"When the officers told you to advance, that was what you had to do.
"Every battle is the same. You get pounded to death, whether it was Normandy, Burma or anywhere."
Matt was recruited for the SAS after being injured and taken to a Naples hospital to recover.
From 100 candidates, he was just one of 10 that made it. He was dropped behind enemy lines near Genoa, tasked with finding Italian dictator Mussolini who by then had been captured by partisans.
Once the war was over, he was sent to Germany as part of the War Crimes Unit to find Nazi suspects who had executed captured members of the SAS.
There, he said, he saw a broken nation, but people "just like us".
Eight decades on, he can clearly recall the claustrophobic horror of war, from German soldiers playing dead to entice Allied soldiers into shooting range, to landmines and enormous loss.
"I lost a lot of my mates, especially one called Ginger," he said.
"And when he died he was sitting in a trench with his head down. There was a smile on his face."
"Still a smile on his face that marked the place where he and his maker met.
"And that was Ginger. He was a good lad."
Dodging D-Day was no pass, and so many thousands paid the ultimate price in Italy.
In his flat, Matt still has his SAS beret, his medals and his memories.
He also has his nation’s thanks.
(Source: https://t.co/DJA1rW5gra)

[EnglishCountryHelen @EngCountryHelen]

Stop dumbing everything down @PoppyLegion - it’s not a garden, it’s an arboretum.

We should be trying to improve people’s knowledge, not reduce it.

[Calgie @christiancalgie]

Does the RBL think that the public is too stupid to understand the word 'arboretum'?

https://t.co/14lMz5Yd3i

[Lily Craven @TheAttagirls]

On Remembrance Day, a day when we honour the fallen who gave their lives for our freedom, the Woman of the Day can only be “The Poppy Lady from France”, teacher and humanitarian Anna Guérin (1878-1961) from Ardeche.

She campaigned for all WW1 Allied Countries to use poppies made by French widows and orphans as a symbol of remembrance and to raise money for the families of the fallen and those who had survived.

In 1911, Anna was living with her family in England and delivering lectures on behalf of the Alliance Française, an international organisation that promotes French culture and language. Soon after Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, she left Liverpool on the Lusitania bound for New York. While delivering lectures to American audiences on behalf of the Alliance Française, she quietly raised funds at the end of each lecture for those made destitute by war, sending all donations directly to the American Red Cross.

Once the USA entered the war, Anna was free to raise funds openly. She returned to France each summer throughout the war and was halfway across the Atlantic at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918: Armistice Day.

In 1915, Canadian surgeon Lt Colonel John McCrae had famously written “We shall not sleep, though poppies grow, in Flanders fields”, which inspired Moina Michael of Georgia to persuade the American Legion Auxiliary to adopt the poppy as their symbol in 1921 but Anna had already started promoting the poppy as the symbol of Remembrance two years before after the French government formed "La Ligule des enfants de France et d'Amerique" with the poppy as its emblem and asked her to travel to the USA to form the American branch.

From 1919, Anna raised funds for the war orphans of France by holding Poppy Days in every American state she visited, distributing paper poppies in exchange for donations. Women and girls wearing sashes bearing the words "In Flanders Fields the poppies grow” sold them. It was then that Anna devised a plan for holding an Inter-Allied Poppy Day, a day when all WW1 Allied countries could use poppies as a symbol of remembrance and to raise humanitarian funds.

The USA decided to go its own way and follow the American model so Anna turned her attention to the Commonwealth, starting with Canada and Newfoundland (not part of Canada then). Both signed up to her idea so she travelled to the UK, arriving in Liverpool in August 1921.

Anna brought samples of her French-made poppies to the British Legion and offered to fund the manufacture of a million poppies in France, an offer the British Legion accepted. She also persuaded the Legion of the value of recruiting women as volunteers to form a distribution and collection network.

Australia and New Zealand followed suit and the Inter-Allied Poppy Day became established.

When Earl Haig announced in October 1921 that 11 November would be known as Remembrance Day or Poppy Day, the British Legion contributed a further eight million poppies made in Britain to Anna’s one million French poppies.

All nine million poppies sold.

Today, over 45 million poppies are distributed by the British Legion in the UK and many more are created at home by volunteers for civic remembrance displays. #LestWeForget

[Neil O'Brien @NeilDotObrien]

Athelstan on the fourth plinth - let's make it happen!

[Helen Day @LBFlyawayhome]

How do you do that with paint?
The mastery of artist Harry Wingfield.
‘Cherries’
Fifth Picture Book (1973)

[BijanOmrani @BijanOmrani]

Why did the National Trust "queer" the Ham House Chapel? I've written about this extraordinary treatment of a Christian place of worship @Telegraph in next post...

[Slightly out of focus @Normandy661944]

Armistice Day, 11 November 1940. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir John Dill lays a wreath at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London. A low key event - a few pressmen attend, and a poppy collector and a few passers by watch. Traffic is held up temporarily.

The cameraman would later be killed at Salerno in 1943

IWM (AYY 54), Harry Rignold, War Office Film Unit

[Marcus Walker @WalkerMarcus]

This is astonishing. Appalling and astonishing. What kind of punishment is available for a man who destroys the tangible links to peoples’ history and faith like this?

[EnglishCountryHelen @EngCountryHelen]

@CapelLofft Aww ❤️

[EnglishCountryHelen @EngCountryHelen]

@PaulEmbery Puts me in mind of Waterloo & the experience of the Marquess of Anglesey (leg blown off by a canon):

Duke of Wellington: By God Sir, you’ve been shot.

Marquess of Anglesey: By God Sir, so I have.

[The Tower of London @TowerOfLondon]

We will remember them.

📍 The Tower Remembers, Tower of London.
#RemembranceSunday

[Richard van Emden @richardvanemden]

As we approach 11am today, I would like to remember the children left behind when loved ones died in war. The wonderful Alicia Wilson (1912-2018) lost her father on the #Somme in August 1916. His last letter to his two children can be read here. #ww1 #RemembranceSunday

[EnglishCountryHelen @EngCountryHelen]

@WRCharlie437766 @sommecourt Utterly devastating; the poor man, it breaks your heart. You wonder how those men survived. I remember a converted hostel near where we used to live in SE8. It had been a hostel for homeless men around the early 20th century- many of them veterans.

Some Homes for Heroes 😞

[Dan Jackson @northumbriana]

For Armistice Day here’s a very touching account by Lord (Tom) Denning about the death of his brother Jack on the Somme.

[Westminster Abbey @wabbey]

'At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.'

#RemembranceSunday #LestWeForget

[Lee Harris @LeeHarris]

A remarkable and deeply moving photograph capturing the first two minutes of silence in London, 106 years ago on Tuesday 11th November 1919.

The first time a grieving nation held its collective breath.

Lest we forget.