Yesterday, on Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday Telegraph had an interesting and informative article about work in Norfolk to preserve surviving pillboxes near North Walsham in Norfolk which were erected to resist a possible, indeed anticipated, German invasion during the Great War.
As the article explains such an invasion plan did not exist, but the fear of it, fuelled by the popular war-scare fiction of the early 1900s, was for a time genuine, and considerable. Some of the contemporary quotations cited in the article are revealing.
Conserving these miniature blockhouses is certainly a worthwhile project and a way of appreciating how local communities and individuals reacted to the War and its potential impact on rural Norfolk.
The article can be read at How fear of a German invasion swept Britain in the First World War
As a personal addendum my mother and her sister-in-law both recalled going out with their family and neighbours at night to watch the Zeppelin which passed over Pontefract in, I think, 1917, and dropped its bombs harmlessly in the Park - where the racecourse is - and my mother also recalled going the next day with her brother, who was four ears older, to view the craters. Why they went out to watch the potential air-raid was not clear, as there was shelter provision used on other occasions nearby.
1 comment:
The twenty four hour rule strikes again! I've found, many times more than coincidence might dictate, that after seeing a reference to something out of the ordinary I encounter another reference to the same thing within twenty four hours!
Some people claim they haven't noticed this, but others agree that the same has often happened to them.
Only yesterday I was watching an episode of Whacko, starring the inimitable Jimmy Edwards playing the roguish headmaster of Chislebury school:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvKbYXUho58
At one point, when they are discussing how to con one of the masters out of his pools win, one of Jim's colleagues, a decrepid superannuated old fool called (if I recall) Mr Dimwiddy, who is generally in a world of his own, asks out of the blue "Have the zeppelins passed by yet?".
And less than a day later, lo and behold, I see John has mentioned zeppelins in his latest blog post!
Regards
John Ramsden (jrq@gmx.com)
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