Saturday 17 April: The Queen will be strengthened today by the love and respect of millions around the world

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated. Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning.  Persistent offenders will be banned.

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/04/16/lettersthe-queen-will-strengthened-today-love-respect-millions/

530 thoughts on “Saturday 17 April: The Queen will be strengthened today by the love and respect of millions around the world”

  2. Short and Sweet

    Now on sale at IKEA – ‘lesbian’ beds: no nuts or screwing involved, it’s all tongue and groove…

    A Muslim has been shot in the head with a starting pistol; police say it’s definitely race related…

    Due to a water shortage in Ireland, Dublin swimming baths have announced they are closing lanes 7 and 8….

    Paddy thought his new girlfriend might be the one but, after looking through her knicker drawer and finding a nurse’s outfit, a French maid’s outfit, and police woman’s uniform, he decided if she can’t hold down a job, she’s not for him.

    I got sacked from my job as a bingo caller the other day apparently, ’A meal for two with a terrible view’ isn’t the best way to announce number 69.

    After 100 years lying on the sea bed, Irish divers were amazed to find that the Titanic’s swimming pool was still full.

    3. A DT article on the same subject:

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/04/17/answer-crony-capitalism-smaller-state/

      “The answer to crony capitalism is a smaller state

      The British state once regarded itself as one of the most open and honest in the world, but is starting to look increasingly shady

      Matthew Lynn17 April 2021 • 5:00am

      Splitting up companies so that you can trouser more soft government loans. Former prime ministers lobbying for flimsy, puffed-up financiers. Senior civil servants with side hustles in the private sector, and contracts worth hundreds of millions handed out to people who hardly even know how to scribble on the back of a fag packet.

      Over the past few weeks, the British state has started to acquire the whiff of a seedy Latin American republic. Crony capitalism is rampant.

      We will hear a lot, quite rightly, about how that needs to be cleaned up. There will be calls for codes of conduct, new regulations, tougher audits, and more disclosure.

      To some degree that might work, but in truth there is a much simpler fix. The real reason cronyism is running out of control is not just because politicians are dodgy, and the Tories are evil, but because the Government has grown dangerously large. If you don’t like crony capitalism, then try having a smaller state – because that is the one thing that will actually work.

      Events of recent weeks will have confirmed the impression that in business it is who, rather than what, you know that really counts. We have learned how David Cameron was texting former colleagues on behalf of the collapse financial firm Greensill Capital, including asking for it to be included for government-backed loans.

      We have learned that GFG Alliance, the firm run by the steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta, set up new entities allegedly with the sole purpose of applying for government-backed Covid loans. It turns out that a number of senior civil servants were also working for Greensill at the same time as they were supposedly labouring away on behalf of the taxpayers.

      Even worse, that might only be the tip of the iceberg; when a financial scandal starts to unravel, there are usually lots of skeletons waiting to emerge from the closet. The British state, which once saw itself as one of the most open and honest in the world, is starting to look increasingly shady.

      Inevitably, there are calls for reform. Cameron has already agreed there are “lessons to be learned”. Gordon Brown, another former PM, and to his credit one of the few who has not tried to alchemise that position, has called for the ban on former ministers lobbying for banks and companies to be extended from the current two years.

      Why not five, or ten, or come to think of it, forever? No doubt we will hear a lot more calls for changes to the system. Civil servants may be prevented from working part-time elsewhere, and there may well be restrictions on bringing outsiders into the system.

      There will be calls for fresh codes of conduct, and lots more disclosure of any money earned by anyone who has ever been a minister, while audit committees will be tasked with crawling through government contracts. Heck, who knows, maybe we will get a whole new regulator charged with cleaning up public life.

      The list could go on and on until we fix a tracking device on every former minister, and put every transaction on their debit card up on a live Twitter feed just to make sure they are not up to anything dodgy. Here’s the problem, however. None of it is going to work.

      Sure, no one would argue the system needs to be cleaned up. But the real way to achieve that is to make the state smaller. In reality, crony capitalism is an inevitable consequence of massive government.

      If we dole out soft loans, with money the Bank of England prints as if it could be created by magic, then we should hardly fall over in astonishment if businesses start to rearrange their affairs so they can take advantage of that. Why would we expect them to do anything else?

      If the government starts investing billions in start-ups, as it has with its new Future Fund, then we shouldn’t be shocked if entrepreneurs start working out how they might qualify for some of that cheap cash.

      Once we get started with an “industrial strategy”, as the government seems intent on doing, chucking vast sums of money at “green energy” and “climate technologies”, then “business plans” from every spiv and chancer will start to flood into the relevant ministry, and every possible string will be pulled to siphon off some of that easy money.

      After all, everyone knows the honeypot is full – the only question is how they get their fingers into it. When the state controls 54pc of the economy – the shocking figure reached last year – then of course business revolves around who knows who in Whitehall. It is where the money is.

      And yet, by contrast, if the state only controlled a fifth of GDP no one would bother with schmoozing ministers. There would be a lot more money to be made elsewhere.

      If you want to you can work yourself up into a terrible lather about how politicians are corrupt, and Tory politicians the sleaziest of the lot, and if only we had some more upstanding, straightforward people in public life then the system would work perfectly. You would be kidding yourself, however.

      A free, open and competitive market more or less regulates itself because the customer is ultimately in charge. Who you know is not very important at all: what counts is how good your product is, and how competitively you can price it.

      The only “access” that matters is to the market, and the only “connections” you need to worry about are with the people who buy whatever it is you make.

      Most people will look at the latest crop of scandals and conclude that politicians are self-interested, corrupt chancers only out for themselves. No doubt the #Torysleeze hashtag will trend daily on Twitter.

      The real lesson is that actually we need a smaller state – even if not many people want to hear that right now.”

  5. the usual, last letter confirms Anthony Mellery Pratt is living up to his name and Michael Deeprose may be starting to figure out that not knowing anybody means a short christmas card list:

    SIR – The Queen will be sitting alone at today’s funeral. Physically that may be true, but she will also be surrounded by the love, affection and respect of millions around the world, and it is certain that will give her strength.

    David Miller
    Newton Abbot, Devon

    SIR – I am no more than an ordinary citizen of the United Kingdom. I am not, particularly, a royalist or monarchist.

    And yet I was taken by surprise by a powerful sense of personal loss after the death of the Duke of Edinburgh. He formed a part of our lives to a far greater extent than we had realised.

    Christopher Macy
    Wellingore, Lincolnshire

    SIR – I am 72 and I do not remember a time when Prince Philip was not at the forefront of public life. He was not a self-promoting celebrity and until his death I had not appreciated the breadth of his service and the number of people he had touched. “More than we will ever know,” said the Queen.

    Yes, press and broadcast coverage has been extensive, but I suspect it only scratched the surface of this complex man.

    David Kenny
    Tredunnock, Monmouthshire

    SIR – It would be a tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh if all of his Award holders wore their lapel badges today, the day of His Royal Highness’s funeral.

    Murray Leslie
    Askrigg, North Yorkshire

    SIR – Sheila Farrell (Letters, April 14) recalled an occasion during the diamond jubilee tour in 2012. It was my elderly mother who was wrapped in a foil blanket against the cold, and the Duke did indeed stop and ask her if she was ready to go into the oven next.

    This made my mother’s day, though she was sorry not to respond with an equally witty quip. The family a week later came for her 90th birthday lunch dressed, of course, in silver foil.

    The press got hold of the comment and it went viral in many countries, later appearing in a book called Prince Philip: Wise Words and Golden Gaffes. It declared that his “down-to-earth humour and no-nonsense approach have brought colour to our lives”. His impromptu comment certainly did just that on that cold May day.

    Pam Shaw
    Beckenham, Kent

    SIR – My own abiding memory is of the afternoon of Tuesday June 2 1953, after the Coronation. With thousands of others, as a young Rada student, I had spent the previous day and night crouched in the rain on the Mall (second flagpole on the right from Buckingham Palace).

    Excitement reached fever pitch as we waited for the Queen and the Duke to appear on the balcony. We were witnessing “the dawn of a new Elizabethan Age”, in the words of (Churchill’s words).

    We surged forward on a tide of emotion, breaking through lines of good-natured police. Then suddenly there they were. We were dazzled and moved to tears. Our beautiful young newly crowned Queen and by her side the Duke – her “liegeman of life and limb and of earthly worship”.

    Almost 68 years later, I too mourn the loss of the Duke, the Queen’s “strength and stay”. But in my mind’s eye still is that dashing figure – always by the side of the Queen.

    Diana Travers
    Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset

    SIR – In 1962 the Duke visited South America. In Chile my father, working for a British-owned bank, was privileged to accompany him on various tours.

    They shared the same sense of humour until the Duke was on the receiving end of a few rotten tomatoes. My father, understandably, was upset and embarrassed. Prince Philip just shrugged it off and carried on.

    Carolyn MacDougall
    Berwick St James, Wiltshire

    SIR – I never met the Duke, but as a police constable in Westminster I saw him on many occasions.

    The most memorable was the Royal household ball, Christmas 1952. I was recruited to escort a young lady from the “Linen Closet”. In attendance were the Queen, the Duke Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Group Captain Townsend.

    The family had butlers or pages to select partners for each dance, except the Duke, who dashed about the floor choosing his own, enjoying himself immensely.

    My partner was an excellent dancer, and it was a thrill to mingle with the Royal family in such a relaxed setting.

    Michael Deeprose
    Morden, Surrey

    SIR – I met the Duke at the Eccentric Club annual dinner in London.

    He asked me why I was eccentric. I said: “I can speak to insects and they respond.” He raised an eyebrow and said: “I bet they have listened in to some intriguing conversations.”

    Edward Rupert Boisier
    Duffield, Derbyshire

    SIR – How sad that the world has not been able to benefit from the Duke’s views Prince Philip’s views on the new cricket language.

    John Bennet
    Totland Bay, Isle of Wight

    Conflict in Afghanistan

    SIR – You are right in saying there will be nothing now to stand in the way of the Taliban (Leading Article, April 15).

    On March 9 2012, I and others wrote of our desperate plight in Afghanistan, when six more of our troops had been killed. I said then that it was a lost cause and that a Taliban-dominated government was inevitable, but it was not until October 2014 that the British Army pulled out. It has now been announced that US troops will quit Afghanistan in September, leaving another failed war in the Middle East.

    In 1897, as a young officer fighting in Afghanistan, Winston Churchill called the conflict financially ruinous, morally wicked, militarily an open question and a political blunder. The British had already lost two wars there in the 19th century. It is unlikely that Churchill would have started another.

    Barry Bond
    Leigh-on-Sea, Essex

    National Trust policies

    SIR – Frustrated by more “wokery” from the National Trust, this time on diversity training for volunteers, I decided to support Restore Trust, which is the group challenging these policies.

    Sadly, I found that to back its campaign I had to be a member of the NT, which I’d left many years ago.

    Walter Walker
    Cowden, Kent

    Profusion of profs

    SIR – Is it my imagination, or is almost everyone who is interviewed on the radio these days a professor?

    David Langfield
    Pyrford, Surrey

    Microchipping cats

    SIR – There is little point microchipping pets to stop thefts (report, April 15) until it is a legal requirement for vets to check the chip on any visit.

    James Taylor
    Collingbourne Ducis, Wiltshire

    SIR – Why require owners to microchip their cats after thefts increased by 12.3 per cent? Dog thefts increased by 20 per cent, despite their being chipped already. Chipping is not the answer.

    Michael Savage
    Merrow, Surrey

    Moor mismanagement

    SIR – On the Somerset Levels we need no reminders of what happens after a period of mismanagement by central government (Letters, April 16).

    Decisions made by the Environment Agency allowed the devastating floods of 2012 and 2013 to destroy homes, farms, businesses and wildlife, which could have been avoided or mitigated if local opinion had been heeded.

    Now back under the control of the Somerset Rivers Authority, our again moors again function for the benefit of all.

    Must we really watch our national parks suffer under Whitehall’s control?

    Anna-Clare Seymour
    Easton Wells, Somerset

    Scottish weather

    SIR – As an enthusiastic (but very average) golfer, I read the weather reports and noted that on April 14 the warmest, coldest, wettest and sunniest places were all in Scotland.

    Does anyone know how unusual this is and if it has occurred in the past?

    William Telford
    Ayr

    Spelling is harder to remedy than bone idleness

    SIR – My education was blighted on two counts. First, I could not spell and secondly, I was bone idle.

    Through the course of a life of 81 years, I have managed to ameliorate the latter but not the former. Nevertheless, I complete the Telegraph crossword most days, provided that I have a dictionary at my elbow.

    It also gives me a certain satisfaction in boasting to my young “snowflake” friends how I was caned at my state primary school (Rhodes Avenue School, named after the uncle), most Friday mornings for making more than three mistakes out of 20 in the weekly spelling test.

    On the other hand, I could handle mathematics, and my grammar held up well, though I am open to correction.

    Fred Pidcock
    Middleton, Norfolk

    SIR – Robin Lane (Letters, April 15) writes that students should “choose a university that teaches them to write and spell English correctly”. Isn’t that what our schools are supposed to do?

    Jo Hardy-Bishop
    Hampton Bishop, Herefordshire

    Cricket: the best of Line of Duty and quidditch

    SIR – The cricket moguls believe that dumbing down the language will attract a new audience. They are clearly mistaken, as can be seen by the increasing millions who watch Rugby Union, where the terminology is complex, rules change or are “nuanced” and the results of games can depend on the mind-set of the referee.

    People are beguiled by complexity in what they watch, as is evident from the popularity of Line of Duty. Aficionados of Harry Potter enjoy debating the rules of quidditch.

    If anything, it seems likely that increasing the complexity (the opposite of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s approach) might encourage new fans.

    Peter Owen
    Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

    SIR – Robbie Book, the chairman of the Club Cricket Conference (Letters, April 15) says that the Hundred will give people who have missed out on cricket
    at school an opportunity to learn about the game. Anyone inspired by the Hundred competition to go along to one of the member clubs of his organisation will find a very different game from the one that tempted them in.

    Supporting a new competition that radically changes the way in which the game is played and introduces a completely different terminology will do nothing to help playing at grassroots level.

    However it is dressed up, the Hundred is about money and nothing else. It will distract from club cricket and have a detrimental effect on both county cricket and international Test matches in the future, all of which have been the bedrock of the game for longer than Mr Book’s organisation has existed.

    Roger Gentry
    Weavering, Kent

    SIR – If cricket is to have “outs”, surely football should follow and have “ins”.

    Anthony Mellery-Pratt
    Poole, Dorset

  6. Good Moaning. Another frosty morning. Thank goodness we leave all that veg growing to greengrocers’.
    I found and posted this item for Maggie rather late last night, so I’ll repost in case she didn’t see it.

    https://unherd.com/2021/04/he-was-never-really-phil-the-greek/

    “He was never really ‘Phil the Greek’

    Though most people know that Prince Philip was born in Greece and almost immediately exiled, the precise circumstances of this leaving of his native country are surprisingly obscure. How many are aware, for example, that if Ataturk had lost the 1921 Battle of the Sakarya River, outside Ankara, not only would modern Turkey not exist, but neither would Princes Charles, William and Harry?

    The existence of our future kings is the chance product of the tumult accompanying the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is a dramatic illustration of the Butterfly Effect, whereby random events on one corner of the European continent totally reshaped timelines on the other: indeed, we could declare the prime mover in the events that placed the Duke of Edinburgh as our Queen’s consort to be an aggrieved Greek monkey.

    On 2 October, 1920, Prince Philip’s uncle, King Alexander of Greece, was taking the air in the grounds of the royal palace of Tatoi, outside Athens. His German Shepherd dog, Fritz, attacked a Barbary Macaque belonging to a member of his staff. As the King rushed to extract the screaming monkey from Fritz’s jaws, the macaque’s furious mate sunk its teeth into the king’s leg. Alexander contracted sepsis, and died just over three weeks later, throwing Greece into a succession crisis, and totally reordering the subsequent history of the Near East. As Churchill later wrote, “it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite”.

    King Alexander’s septic leg, like the rest of the Greek royal family, possessed not a drop of Hellenic blood — something Prince Philip reportedly made clear to a Greek visitor to Buckingham Palace who dared to claim ethnic kinship with his host. Back when the small Balkan nation finally won its independence from the Ottoman Empire, in 1831, the European Great Powers had decided on the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty to rule the poor and volatile Greeks. When the Wittelsbach King Otto was forced from his throne by the revolution of 1862, the Great Powers reconvened, and chose the 17-year old Prince William of Denmark, Prince Philip’s grandfather, as Greece’s new king. As he would later instruct his children, “You must never forget that you are foreigners in this country, but you must make them [the Greeks] forget it.”

    Retaining his markedly un-Hellenic surname of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderberg-Glücksberg (to this day, the Hellenic Republic refers to his deposed descendent ex-King Constantine II as Citizen Glücksberg), Prince William adopted the regal name of George I, King of the Hellenes.

    This styling was significant: where the luckless King Otto merely styled himself King of Greece, George’s title expressed a desire to expand his little kingdom’s reach to encompass the still unliberated Greeks of the Ottoman Empire, who outnumbered the population of Greece itself.

    In this, his reign was markedly successful: first, Greece was granted the Ionian Islands, including Prince Philip’s birthplace of Corfu, as a coronation gift by Britain. Then, following the unsuccessful 1897 war against Turkey, Greece was nevertheless awarded the rich farmlands of Thessaly and Central Greece by the Great Powers. Most dramatically, under the inspired generalship of King George’s eldest son, Constantine, Greece doubled its territory by conquest in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, winning control of the wild and ethnically-mixed Balkan provinces of Epirus, Macedonia and Western Thrace (my own great-grandfather, a Corfiot army officer, met and married my great-grandmother, a peasant girl from Epirus, while taking part in Constantine’s successful campaign).

    The Greek monarchy won unprecedented acclaim from its people following that succession of victories against the vastly superior Ottoman armies. It came as a great shock, then, when King George was gunned down during a stroll through the newly-liberated port city of Thessaloniki by a Greek, Alexandros Schinas, variously described as either a socialist or a lunatic (his subsequent fatal flight from a 30-ft window during detention unfortunately leaves his true motivation a matter of debate).

    When George’s eldest son, Prince Philip’s uncle, assumed the throne as King Constantine I in 1913, it was as the victorious commander of the First Balkan War as well as Greece’s first Greek-born king. Immensely popular, Constantine won further accolades for his generalship of the Greek armies in the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria, which broke out a few short months after his accession. Annointed Conqueror of the Bulgarians, awarded the rank of Field Marshal by his premier, the liberal Cretan statesman Eleftherios Venizelos, Constantine had reached the summit of his career.

    The outbreak of World War I a year later would quite literally split Greece in two, and set in train the events that would lead Greece to catastrophe and the infant Prince Philip on his path to Britishness.

    Educated in Germany, and married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s sister Sophie of Prussia, King Constantine had no desire to lead a Greece exhausted by two years of war into a greater European conflict, regardless of Britain’s offer of Cyprus as an inducement. Venizelos, however, saw the war as an opportunity for further Greek expansion into the Balkans and Asia Minor; he intrigued with the Allies to effect Greece’s entrance into the conflict. When the premier allowed British and French forces to land in Thessaloniki to establish the Macedonian front against Entente forces, it enraged Constantine, and escalated the National Schism between liberal and monarchist elements in Greek politics to previously unimaginable heights.

    In 1916, Venizelist officers in Thessaloniki mounted a coup to commit their forces to the Allied cause; in Athens, a Franco-British landing to force the King to enter the war on the Allied side was defeated by Greek royalist volunteers. French public opinion would never forgive Constantine for the death of French marines in this brief engagement. As Churchill would later remark, Constantine became “a bugbear second only to the Kaiser himself in the eyes of the British and French people”, a fact that would have tragic repercussions for Greece.

    In June 1917, following an Allied naval blockade of Greece and the seizure of the Greek Navy, the French landed troops in Thessaly and forced Constantine to abdicate the throne in favour of his son Alexander. Greece entered the war on the Allied side, fighting doggedly against German, Bulgarian and Austrian forces on the Macedonian front, and winning the country the approval of the Allies once again.

    Through Venizelos’s expert diplomacy, Greece was awarded a share of the Ottoman Empire in the peace conferences that followed the war’s conclusion. Greek troops entered Eastern Thrace, raising the Greek flag over the historic city of Adrianople, even as Greek forces landed in the ancient port city of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, home to a Greek ethnic majority. The Greek battleship Averoff sailed through the Bosphorus to Constantinople, the lost Byzantine capital now bedecked with Greek flags under Allied occupation: it seemed that the Greek Megali Idea, of the uniting of the Greek people in a rich and powerful nation of “two continents and five seas,” had finally come true.

    Then that random monkey bite changed everything.

    In a plebiscite on who would replace the luckless King Alexander, the Greek people overwhelmingly chose his exiled father Constantine, hero of the Balkan Wars, to the horror of both Venizelos and the Allies. Constantine returned home, exiling Venizelos in turn, and took over command of the Asia Minor campaign. The Turkish nationalist forces under Ataturk, fighting the Italians in Southwest Turkey, the French in the south and east and the Greeks in the west, had withdrawn into the country’s deep interior, settling on the ramshackle village of Ankara as their revolutionary capital.

    Winning battle after battle against the Turks without ever landing a decisive blow, Constantine’s forces pressed on into the country’s waterless interior in the pursuit of total victory. The king was unimpressed with the new lands he had won, and the squalid villages his men passed through. “It is extraordinary how little civilized the Turks are,” he wrote home, “it is high time they disappeared once more and went back into the interior of Asia whence they came.” Had he won his war, an independent Kurdistan as well as an Anatolian Armenian state would likely have accompanied the Greek victory, and modern Turkey would not exist.

    Among King Constantine’s generals was his younger brother Prince Andrew, Prince Philip’s father, a career cavalry officer who had been appointed command of Greece’s II Army Corps. Andrew was the “most Greek” of the Glucksberg dynasty: as a child, he made a conscious choice to speak only Greek where his relatives conversed with each other in German and English. A sickly infant, he had grown up in the ramshackle Athens palace built for King Otto (today Greece’s parliament), even contracting typhoid from its single squalid bathroom.

    Prince Andrew, Philip’s father, with his wife, Princess Alice, in Athens, January 1921. Credit: Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty

    As he marched his forces across Anatolia’s Great Salt Desert, omens of impending doom flit across his mind. He had no great affection for the Asia Minor Greeks of republican sympathies for whom he was fighting, once writing that “the people here are generally disgusting. A swollen Venizelism prevails… It would really be worth handing over Smyrna to Kemal [Ataturk] so as to kick all these worthless characters who behave like this after we have poured out such terrible blood here… My God, when shall I get away from this hell here?” Andrew’s death in battle outside Bursa had already been erroneously announced in the world press.

    Back in Corfu, at his home of Mon Repos, a Regency villa built for the island’s former British governor which could have been lifted straight from Bath or Cheltenham, his Anglo-German wife Princess Alice of Battenberg gave birth on the kitchen table to a son, Philippos.

    But here in the depths of Anatolia, the Greek high command, split between officers of royalist and Venizelist sympathies, was internally divided. The Army’s supply lines were dangerously over-extended, and its baggage train was harried by Turkish cavalry along the long route to Ankara. “There are still some villages where dangerous fanaticism still reigns, and then the Turks go out by night and massacre, in the most atrocious manner, our men or the lorry drivers who happen to be isolated,” Constantine had written home. “They mutilate them or even skin them, which enrages our soldiers to such an extent as to give rise to disagreeable reprisals. The war is developing into wild fighting, and that is the reason why we have so few prisoners — they are all massacred on the spot.” Some Greek sources note that Prince Andrew was given the epithet of “hut burner” by his men for his treatment of the Turkish villages along his path.

    At the winding Sakarya river, some 35 miles outside Ankara, the Greek and Turkish forces readied themselves for the decisive battle of the war. The Greek inability to decisively defeat Ataturk’s forces, along with Constantine’s return to the throne, had caused the British and French attachment to Greece’s cause to wane dangerously. For Greece to retain Lloyd-George’s support against what Churchill described as the “pro-Turk bias” of the British Conservative Party, Foriegn Office and military establishment, Constantine would need a decisive victory at the Sakarya. Unfortunately for the Greek people and its royal family, he did not win one.

    After three weeks of bitter fighting along a 60-mile front, in a battle which could at any point have gone either way, the Greek general Anastasios Papoulas disengaged his forces and began the retreat westward. The bodies of thousands of men on both sides littered the field of battle. Ataturk had won a famous victory, regarded now as the moment which led to the birth of the modern Turkish state. Years later, the Turkish General and future president Ismet Inönü remarked of Sakarya that Papoulas was too nervy to be an effective commander: “Papoulas avoided disaster. But he never won a battle,” he would later write.

    Papoulas saw things differently. He lay the blame for the defeat directly on Prince Andrew, who had refused a direct order to commit his II Army Corps to the fray at one of the battle’s decisive moments.

    Prince Andrew requested to be relieved of his command position, and was refused, though his chief of staff was sacked. Papoulas was replaced with the mentally unstable general Georgios Hatzianestis, who was too preoccupied with the delusion that his legs were made of glass to command effectively. Back in Smyrna, Andrew would write presciently of the darkening situation that “something must be done quickly to remove us from the nightmare of Asia Minor… we must stop bluffing and face the situation as it really is. Because finally which is better? – to fall into the sea or escape before we are ducked?”

    Permitted three months leave, Andrew finally returned to his wife in Corfu and held his newborn son Philippos for the first time. After nearly a year of stalemate in the trenches west of Ankara, during which time Greece’s Western allies abandoned their support of the Greek cause and began treating with Ataturk, the Turks launched an offensive that would see the Greek forces fly in headlong retreat towards the Aegean. Greeks call the result, simply, “the Catastrophe.” When the victorious Turkish forces reached Smyrna, the city and its predominantly Greek inhabitants were put to fire and sword, leading to the flight of 1.6 million Christian refugees to Greece and all but ending a 3,000-year Greek presence in Asia Minor.

    In Athens, a military coup unseated King Constantine, restoring Venizelos to negotiate the Treaty of Lausanne which established the modern borders of Greece and Turkey. As Constantine abdicated, the revolutionary government arrested six of the royalist generals and politicians blamed for the defeat, and sent troops to Corfu to arrest Prince Andrew and bring him to Athens for trial. He was accused of disobeying a direct order to attack, and abandoning his position in the face of the enemy “with disastrous results not only to the corps under his command but to the entire army”.

    After a brief trial, the unlucky six were sentenced to death by firing squad, positioned at the edge of a hastily dug pit and shot without blindfolds. A 2010 court case would later overturn their convictions for treason. Prince Andrew’s trial began two days later. The revolutionary general Theodoros Pangalos, Andrew’s contemporary at the Hellenic Military Academy and briefly the country’s future dictator, visited him in detention. “How many children have you?” he asked, nodding when Andrew answered. “Poor things,” he replied, “what a pity they will soon be orphans!”

    As the historian Michael Llewellyn-Smith noted in his excellent book on Greece’s Asia Minor campaign Ionian Vision, “whether or not Andrew had been guilty of insubordination, it was an absurd charge to bring fifteen months after the event, given that he had not been relieved of his command at the time.” On 3 December, Andrew took the stand. A staff officer, Colonel Kalogeras, stated that Andrew had refused to attack despite direct orders. Colonel Sariyannis and General Papoulas both attested that if Andrew had carried out Papoulas’ orders, the Greeks would have won the day at Sakarya. Andrew was unanimously found guilty of disobedience and abandoning his post and sentenced to be stripped of his rank and banished permanently from Greece.

    Andrew expected to be executed in his cell at any moment. However, in the background, the Greek revolutionary General Nikaloaos Plastiras, a future three-time Prime Minister of Greece, had been negotiating with the British government, which had broken off formal diplomatic relations with Greece since the execution of the Six. They agreed that Andrew would be permitted to leave Greece on a British warship.

    And so, a few months after his birth, Prince Philippos of Greece left Mon Repos, Corfu and Greece on the British destroyer HMS Calypso, along with his mother and father and into a life of exile. Philippos was, famously, carried onto the warship in an orange crate instead of a cot. His father Prince Andrew settled into a life of exile in France, writing a book Towards Disaster, translated by Philip’s mother Princess Alice, which aimed to justify his actions at Sakarya as necessary to avoid a pointless loss of life in a losing battle. When the monarchy was restored in Greece, Andrew refused a commission for Philip in the Hellenic Navy, saying “‘Never the Greek Navy! In the Greek Navy after a bit they would throw him out – that’s what they did to me, not once, as you know, or twice, but three times!’”

    Instead, Philip served gallantly in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, and was awarded the Greek War Cross for his actions at Cape Matapan. While his son Prince Charles became a benefactor of the Greek monastic republic of Mount Athos and frequent visitor to Corfu, and who is widely considered to be a Phillhellene with a strong mystical attachment to the Greek Orthodox faith of his grandparents, Prince Philip described himself as “a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction”. For despite his nickname as “Phil the Greek”, he felt no great affection for the country and the uneasy crown it offered its foreign rulers. As he once said of the land of his birth and the mercurial people it contains, “I certainly never felt nostalgic about Greece. A grandfather assassinated and a father condemned to death does not endear me to the perpetrators.”

      2. Hate to be a rather pedantic wet blanket but wasn’t the pass from Derek Quinnell a bit forward?

        1. Often said over the years, that. I’d point out the number of high tackles that would get the player sent off today.

          I never tire of watching it, esp the way Gareth Edwards steams into shot out of nowhere.

          1. Both ‘tackles’ on JPR Williams would be a hanging offence in the modern game.

    4. Another former home nations rugby captain, John Pullin of England, died this February. Pullin led the English team to Ireland during the Troubles and even though England were heavily beaten the team went to play in Ireland unlike the Welsh and the Scots who were afraid to go there.

      “At least we turned up” was what Pullin said at the after-match dinner and this is the title of the biography my very great friend, Steve Tomlin, has written about him

      Steve Tomlin – who was captain of the UEA side in the 60’s and played for the Pirates in Cornwall – now writes books about rugby. If you are interested in the subject his books – available at Amazon and in good bookshops, are well worth reading.

    2. It’s one of those weasel phrases that appear from nowhere. Like Topsy, they just grow.

    1. scrolled down and had to sit down at the BBC’s Breaking News flash over the “Zimbabwean marauding quadruple slashing mutant variant” discovered in Bognor Regis.

          2. If, in an alliterative mood, you bugger Bognor what do you to to Folkestone?

  12. For some bizarre reason, my greeting has been vaporised.

    Good morning, all – again. Sunny but very sharp frost.

  16. Morning everyone. I note from the declining number of posts on Nottl that the rest of you find the World as quiet as myself. This is I suspect because the MSM has reduced itself to State Events or to mere pamphlets for the dissemination of propaganda! One of the main, but paradoxically unreported aspects of living in a Police State is boredom. So much is banned for discussion, (the other half of the argument) that there is nothing to draw interest let alone comment on. One reasonably supposes for example that most of the population of North Korea, deprived of any stimulus whatsoever live in a permanent state of clinical depression! An opportunity to attend a Rally or clap on their doorstep, or even kneel in support of the Chairman seeming like Manna from Socialist Heaven!

    Expanding democracy on the other hand is quietly vibrant; new and mostly outrageous ideas vie for attention from a people trying to make a living on their own terms. Its inhabitants, high or low, concede nothing to anyone. Fear other than that imposed by their own nature is beyond their comprehension. Entrepreneurs abound due to the possibilities in such an environment. It is a thrusting, uncomfortable place where sharp elbows and sharper wits are a necessity. The State, as it is generally understood, is invisible to the average citizen and manifests itself mostly in the form of Tax Returns. There are no Social Campaigns for a Better World from an Authority that is usually just trying to keep order and survive itself in free chaos!

    Guess where we live!

          1. I see you too have benefitted from Indian English language courses, as many Indians I’ve worked with will say ‘I’ll revert to you.’ instead of ‘I’ll reply to you’

            They don’t seem to realise that ‘to revert’ is to go back to a previous state.

          2. nothing to do with mhindis squire, I use revert when dealing regularly with US, merely as reminder to pick up thread and continue exchange [as you say – previous state]

    3. I noticed a significant drop in the number of comments in the aftermath of high-profile bannings on the site. It could ne a coincidence of xourse.

    1. The politicians, police,and local authorities in the UK are all islamophobes. They are frightened of retaliation if they try to control the extreme Islamists.

      1. 331659+ up ticks,
        Morning Cs,
        ALL these overseeing units are VOTED in, same types, again & again, the political close shop has the fools consent.

      2. Labour will turn that round. Here is one of the recommendations from the above report.
        “The development of comprehensive Islamophobia training to be rolled out in conjunction with LMN, the Muslim Council of Britain and other Muslim organisations as appropriate.
        Along with adopting a definition and a Code of Conduct, members must have confidence that all elected officials, volunteers and staff members under the Labour banner have undergone comprehensive, mandatory training on Islamophobia.”

        In simple terms all Labour Party officials have to be trained by muslims under the auspices of the Muslim Council of Britain.
        No Christian with a conscience could ever become a Labour Party member or vote for them, surely?

  18. Has TCW fallen to the censor, they would not allow this post in one of their articles about crossbreeding humans and apes, I’ve never had one taken down before.

    When we have all been culled by the great reset vaccineacide the billionaire technocrats and their puppet heads of government are going to need someone to do all the donkey work, ordinary mortal humans, despite decades of dumbing down and gaslighting with fake wokery issues are still not obedient enough and some are still smart enough to work out what is happening.
    No a human ape crossbreed would be the answer.
    At least they wont have to change the mainstream tv programming to keep them amused.

    1. 331659+ up ticks,
      Morning B3,
      One only has to look at the success via continuing input from the lab/lib/con/green supporter / voters
      in three monkey mode is successful in bringing a Country to it’s knee, confirms for me an army of such critters is already in place.

          4. given everything in the system’s interconnected, wouldn’t suprise me they have / provide”an input”. Ability to make a decision and implement such actions is a Q above their competence, which as you know, wouldn’t stop them trying

  19. Mail to YKW…..

    You want to reduce the cost of electricity? That’s so easy!

    Buy an Act of Parliament !

    First step, ask a Conservative think tank to write a report.

    You must become a “partner” of the think tank which should get you the recommendation to government you want, and all enthusiastically endorsed by Mr Michael Gove MP saying how wonderful it all is for the Conservative Party. Followed by the Act of Parliament you desire.

    After all, it worked for Mr Soros and the “Offshore Wind Industry”, so I’m sure a think tank can help you cut costs if you are generous enough and provided you outbid the others.

    If you fund a few $100,000 speeches for the right people, everything will work perfectly the way you want.

    It’s government by Ebay. Highest bid wins, or try “Buy it Now”. You might be lucky.

    Good luck !

    Polly

  20. Prince Philip funeral will be moment of anguish for Queen, says archbishop. 17 April 2021.

    The Queen may behave “with extraordinary dignity and extraordinary courage” but the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral at Windsor Castle on Saturday will be an “anguished moment” for her, the archbishop of Canterbury has said.

    Justin Welby spoke as Buckingham Palace revealed there will be no sermon and no eulogy to Prince Philip, who for seven decades played a prominent role in the nation’s public life.

    By some dreadful mischance I caught this socialist cockroach emoting the Queen’s “Anguish” twice yesterday. Why he should think that he has some insight into her emotional state can only be known to him.

    I have no personal animosity to the Duke but the present post mortem apotheosis is getting on my nerves!

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/apr/16/prince-philip-funeral-will-be-moment-of-anguish-for-queen-says-archbishop

    1. We heard/saw this drip yesterday evening. I assume he’s leaving his kitchen to preside over this afternoon’s proceedings.

    2. Where was Welby last year when a presence was required , so many dying or dead, so much savagery on our streets , and frightened anxious isolated people . He took himself off on sabbatical !

      Sorry to sound daft , but the hand of God has bypassed that idiot.

      Others with a far more dedicated cause to humanity , produced the Vaccine .. similar to Alexander Fleming who created penicillin or if you go through the list, the thousands of Geniuses who have benefitted mankind .

      The Arch Bish has proved to be useless and ineffectual.. the weakest link .

      3. Don’t forget that Welby was Cameron’s choice and it is now very clear to see just how bad Cameron’s choices are.

        2. Meddlesome and turbulent are the other adjectives quoted. Anyway Sir William went to Canterbury to do the business.

    3. Archbishop / Grauniad should note it may be difficult for the remanining alive members of the band Queen to experience a moment of anguish, but reveals more about the woke tendencies of the Archbishop and rag

  22. A thought. The world – or at least the western part of it – has spent the the past couple of years getting terribly exercised over single use plastics and an island of discarded stuff the size of Wales swirling around in the Pacific Ocean.
    Yesterday, I visited Elderly Chum at her care home.
    The procedure used 1 plastic and chemical based testing kit, 2 flimsy plastic aprons about the size of those sported by Lyon’s Corner House Nippies, 2 pairs of plastic gloves and a couple of disposable face masks.
    Multiply that by several million and we’re up to a swirling plastic island the size of Texas.

      3. I pick them up and wash them. What with detergent, two days on the line and a spell in the tumble drier, there won’t be much Chinese virus left.

        1. Aside a commendable litter exercise, please provide your evidence of any Chinese virus https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.html

          “Considering that the C-19 virus” was constructed on a computer, meaning its RNA has never been isolated, and considering that the
          physical virus as such has never been isolated either, I find it quite amazing that they were capable of creating both a test and a vaccine, based on no data at all.

          Actually high level quack Christian Drosten had created the test without owning a sample of any new virus, he even admitted it. How can you detect or fight anything if you don’t even know what you’re looking for?

          It’s even possible that the entire virus-hypothesis is completely false, that ‘exosomes’ are being misunderstood as ‘viruses’. And then over 200’000 people are dying each year from preventable hospital infections in Europe, and politicians couldn’t care less about it.

          So where does this phony interest in our health come from, all of a sudden? These politicians only care about our health when the topic may be abused as a Trojan horse against our basic freedoms. It’s a blatant PSYOP from the textbook of the world’s most evil intelligence agencies.

          The ‘population reduction injection’ was created first, and then they had to invent a narrative as a pretext so they could inject the poison into us”

          I claim my £5, you are Fred Pidcock, author of letter in today’s DT Letters

      4. Round here you can see discarded black ones, pink ones, embroidered ones, patterned ones …

    3. Double decker, swimming pool, football pitch, Wales.
      Ascending orders of length/volume/area.

      I wonder what is used outside the UK instead of Wales.

  24. Good morning, my friends

    I am very pleased to that they have written about the Duke of Edinburgh’s love of sailing – something I mentioned here a few days ago. They have also attached some early photos photos of him sailing in a heavy open dinghy which looks very like the whalers they used at BRNC Dartmouth.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/16/previously-unseen-prince-philip-photos-show-early-sailing-prowess/

    These dinghies were large, heavy 30′ clinker-built, yawl-rigged boats and they were still using them as training boats at the BRNC Dartmouth in the 1960’s. On school CCF Field Days the RN Section at Blundell’s went by coach from Tiverton to sail these clumsy old tubs on the River Dart. As Wordsworth put it: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive – but to be young was very heaven. Or as Mick Jagger put it: What a drag it is getting old!

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/49aac05b6bacce79e15a9e74159d43795b6917637538bb04d3571f0cc6ce12eb.jpg

  25. Another one for Maggie.
    While sifting through old photographs, we discovered this.
    This is the bungalow to which my grandparents retired in 1932 (?). It was then named “Llangollen” edit (thank you TB “Engollen” (thank goodness it wasn’t “Dunroamin”). The people on the verandah are my grandfather, my grandmother and Aunt Ethel Eckett who was headmistress at West Lulworth School.
    When my father last saw it in the early 1990s, the name had been changed to ‘Point Pleasant’.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2c7fe2f419130a3753a8703cb84cfd09b665bd4ad9b2e5771d6ba9ef972be21b.png

    1. Wonderful photo Anne .

      Would you mind if I put that on the Lulworth F/B site , I am sure many will know where it is , and give some clues!

      1. Carry on.
        Here are some more details: Charles and Annie Drye moved there when my grandfather sold his share of the Marlow garage to his brother.
        My grandmother was a pupil teacher at West Lulworth school when her aunt was the headmistress.
        Ethel Eckett was one of the first properly trained female teachers. I don’t know if you’ve read ‘Jude the Obscure’ but Sue Bridehead trains at one of the new fangled female teacher training colleges. Given Aunt Ethel’s age and family location, I would imagine that was the establishment Hardy had in mind.

      1. There are lots of old colonial looking properties , and funnily enough harbouring many old colonials who have now sadly departed .

      1. 🙂
        My grandfather was a very uncommunicative man.
        Seriously, when we visited him about once a year – usually on our way to a fortnight’s freezathon in the West Country, he would look up briefly from his newspaper – say “Hullo, Son” to my father, and that was it for the entire stay. I suspect the current situation would be right up his street.
        Strangely enough, in his younger days he was member of the Marlow Pierrots. His second wife was a very chatty person, and I think he gave up because he couldn’t get a word in edgeways.

    4. What a lovely place.

      My mother decided to name her house ‘Dunroamin’. Not that i was aware they had ever been anywhere. They certainly never travelled abroad.

      She also had one of those extremely annoying doorbells that played ‘I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy’ all the way through.

      You can see why i left home as soon as i could.

      1. Parents are put on this earth to embarrass their children; as I frequently point out to our sons.
        I just wish they could feign surprise.

  27. Here’s a fine collection of petty restrictions to stop people getting back to enjoying their lives. As the heavy hand of a restrictive and kill-joy government is lifted these tiresome lower order restrictions creep in. I do not think that it is coincidental.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bf39ce61a2e870fe04ce5bfa3693da8d10b4a761b0a41545abf830470d42b21c.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/51e77391707342381a82935cec0631cf40e8577fb3d3513809acce83fa3c42c6.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8d69bea8cb981396d8f008c520954a1f8affef8b4e9a64600553ce6aef13a163.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/57cfb5ac948be3e31447e2026fe1c8efe5824c9df459448c031a4830427144ac.png

  28. 331659+ up ticks,
    The UKs political overseers WILL without doubt bend over backwards
    they are seriously into the bending game, submissive / appeasement knee ect,etc.

    French Police Instructed to Bend Lockdown Rules for Muslims During Ramadan: Report

      1. 331659+ up ticks,
        Morning AWK,
        The Dover campaign is openly a slap in the kisser for even the most loyal tory ( ino) member / voter, unless of course they agree to their children’s legacy being treacherously denied.

        1. I was chatting with Mum earlier, she’s in New Romney [between Dungeness and Folkestone], on a good day you can see France from the coastline. The RNLI there are, as usual underfunded, as I’ve pointed out to my MP [Damian Collins] which of course he never responds, so more recently I’ve helped by drafting his response [aka I do apologise, my trout is so deep in the trough, I am unable to deal with real issues and respond in kind”. He’s not helped being told the only reason he’s elected is because nothing’s done about the economic migrants, and for better or worse, you are the rep on the front line and alternative voting options even make “you” look good. Again, no response.

          I told Mum expect more boats. She was more interested telling me about her 2nd jab – which I cut her short by telling her on the next jab [and on the preferred list] you’ll get a yellow star to wear on your clothing. She knows my views on this and that the MP couldn’t care less how many aged people die

          1. 331659+ up ticks,
            AWK,
            They don’t care for the simple reason there are replacement units arriving on a daily basis. indigenous supporter / voters in many respects are being made redundant with every inflatable that hits the beach, and many of the electorate are
            supporting the replacement campaign via the polling booth.

          2. Collins knows his card’s marked. And all those inbound are the proposed voting numbers replacing the elderly. Collins knows this, and this was launched via House of Lords [given age bracket a bit closer to “home”] so he had to respond, and tried to cover his tracks and failed.

          3. 331659+ up ticks,
            AWK,
            We have proof enough now from over the last three decades
            of treacherous actions that NO cards will be seriously marked until the whole rotten edifice is dismantled via the polling booth.

            All the while a large % of the herd are complying with the political tripe via party first, do not let IN the other segment of the odious close shop coalition things ARE continuing to get worse.

          4. the next port of call agenda electorally, UK will attempt [very hard] to follow the Demented Joe manipulation of vote count. The system had their “shot across the bows” viz the EU referendum result followed by attempted “postal voting chaos” [Peterborough springs to mind] and exposed. Those involved know the worst fate is akin to being slapped on the arse with a wet fish.

            Hence economic migrants are easily pliable and manageable, as are the youth. It will get worse and the hope / intent is removal of elderly voters and those who can see through this. As Stalin said in 1942 “If it’s total war of extermination you want, you shall have one” is where the reality is now

          5. the next port of call agenda electorally, UK will attempt [very hard] to follow the Demented Joe manipulation of vote count. The system had their “shot across the bows” viz the EU referendum result followed by attempted “postal voting chaos” [Peterborough springs to mind] and exposed. Those involved know the worst fate is akin to being slapped on the arse with a wet fish.

            Hence economic migrants are easily pliable and manageable, as are the youth. It will get worse and the hope / intent is removal of elderly voters and those who can see through this. As Stalin said in 1942 “If it’s total war of extermination you want, you shall have one” is where the reality is now

          6. 331659+ up ticks,
            AWK,
            We have proof enough now from over the last three decades
            of treacherous actions that NO cards will be seriously marked until the whole rotten edifice is dismantled via the polling booth.

            All the while a large % of the herd are complying with the political tripe via party first, do not let IN the other segment of the odious close shop coalition things ARE continuing to get worse.

      2. In Lycidas, John Milton, a committed Protestant, wrote about the grim wolf (meaning the resurgence of Roman Catholicism) in the seventeenth century:

        Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
        Daily devours apace, and nothing said,

        Unfortunately Boris Johnson and his wimpish associates go along with saying nothing and are in need of the will and any sort of ‘engine’ to sort out the West’s problem with Islam for ever

        But that two-handed engine at the door
        Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more”.

        1. it’s of their own [political “class”] creation / making, as always there’s never an exit plan in the belief it won’t affect them personally, by which time none of them will hold office. So it becomes “SEP” = Someone Else’s Problem

      3. I watched the same thing happening in the Med. A trickle became a flood. We are now seeing the same in the English channel. 13,000 last year. 50,000 next year.

        Priti Patel is lying through her teeth.

    2. Good morning, ogga

      Caroline found a report on this in Le Figaro yesterday evening.

      This is a disgrace. Unless the West whose laws, culture, morality and philosophy are based on the Christian ethic, takes a firm stand against Islam and stops giving Muslims special treatment and rights not afforded to others the West will be lost.

      I fear that the West may well be lost already.

      Remember that old film How the West Was Won which is a 1962 American epic Western adventure film directed by Henry Hathaway (who directs three out of the five chapters involving the same family), John Ford, and George Marshall, produced by Bernard Smith, written by James R. Webb, and narrated by Spencer Tracy? Is it now time to start work on a new epic film entitled: “How the West Was Lost.“.

      1. 331659+ up ticks,
        Morning R,
        “Now time to start work on a new epic film entitled: “How the West Was Lost.”.

        Starring roles of blame going to such great political sh!tes as
        b liar, major, brown,cameron, starmer, may & johnson.

        Endgame being about a new party under the name of either the “Charter Party” or the “Magna Charta party” main policy being the pursuit and return installation of patriotism and
        personal self respect.

      2. Ironically the northern hemispheres eastern peoples were the invaders in early America.
        But it’s pretty clear what has been allowed to happen in the UK and most of northern Europe over the past 40 years. There is even talk of sharia run councils now in the most obvious (communities) areas. Quite clearly It has to be stopped, this ‘religion’ leads all the way to a total disaster where ever it is allowed to dominate.

  29. UK military chief disappointed over US withdrawal from Afghanistan. 17 April 2021.

    Taliban ‘is not the organisation it once was’, says General Sir Nick Carter

    Britain’s military chief has expressed disappointment at president Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan.
    He said he felt a “great deal of pride” at what the British armed forces had achieved during their time in the country.

    “We went into Afghanistan back in 2001 to prevent international terrorism ever emerging from Afghanistan,” he said.

    “In the last 20 years there has been no international terrorist attack mounted from Afghanistan. I think that is a great tribute to our armed forces and of course to the armed forces of the Nato countries that have been committed to this.”

    Yes we had our asses kicked and handed to us on plate like the three previous times we have ventured into this hellhole! As to the terrorist attacks, they were planned and executed in the UK. instead! Perhaps we should have occupied Rotherham or Birmingham!

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/afghanistan-military-troops-withdrawal-defence-b1832722.html

    1. “in the last 20 years there has been no international terrorist attack mounted from Afghanistan” – wrong
      There never was any terrorist attack from Afghanistan on anybody which Gen Nick Carter would know IF he’d read the brief

      1. The Russians want to run a pipeline through Afghan. So do the U.S. All this nonsense about the Taliban is a smokescreen.

        We were first shown images of oppressed people. Women and girls had no rights. As if we should give a stuff.

        That’s the same the world over. Including the U.K. That is how the Muslim world works.

        1. pipeline’s being built by Chinese / Russians under the Belt Road Initiative [hence Lavrov in Pakistan last week]. Iran already on board, hence the recent Natanz waffle

        2. Years ago, Julie Burchill pointed out that Afghani women had more rights and a freer life under Russian occupation.

        3. A bit more to it than having no rights tho’ – women are barely even considered human.

          Have you read ‘The Kite Runner’?

    2. What he fails to state is that there never has been an international terrorist attack mounted from Afghanistan. The whole Afghanistan thing is an American myth dreamt up by the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney. Carter is nothing more than a puppet.

    3. Fake Biden is following President Trump’s Afghanistan policy which is further evidence Donald is in charge behind the scenes.

      Having watched his videos, I think Carter probably knows Open Society.

    4. A while back I came to the conclusion that armies need live fire training grounds to ensure their troops get real combat experience….

      1. Yes. I’ve thought the same. From Malaya to Borneo, Belize to Sierra Leone, from the Gulf states to the Falklands, our military have had the benefit of being shot at and being allowed to shoot back.

  30. Another mail to YKW…

    Great article today about wind farm financing on Conservative Woman.

    If you want to put matters right for the future, the only realistic choice is exposure of the collusion and corruption of LabCon since 1990.

    Which comes first ?

    Is the UK or LabCon more important to you?

    Polly

  31. Re Petty /Insane Covid ‘Prevention Rules’:

    This was Vicky Park, Bath a couple of days ago. It seems the obligatory peculiar old guy with a dirty raincoat and a bag of boiled sweets is a thing of the past (Except in places like Rotherham perhaps). However, there was one bloke wandering around all the time with a reddish hi-vis vest with the words ‘Covid Prevention Officer’ printed on the back. He was being studiously ignored by the hundreds of parents and children. What a waste of public funds…..

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/83e595bfa9c9e7374ba95cc9938681466f9fee2e4b1938df5687be7c0c124c0f.jpg

    2. he could be the local mayor or sitting MP wondering why he’s being ignored. Perhaps he was wearing a mask and parents were too diligent, protecting kids knowing they’ll get zero response from the Police

    3. The “Covid Marshals” in Hammersmith & Fulham wander around looking bored. Easy money I guess.

      1. he wasn’t allowed on the merry go round for being a card carrying member of the horse shot jab, and was told the best alternative is, he can walk round in circles on his own. Being a compliant sort of chap that follows orders, he actively engages. But no one told him when he could stop

  33. Putin residence has cryo chamber and stables, Navalny team alleges. 17 April 2021.

    Investigators have released floor plans and photos of expanded residence they say is Putin’s favourite.
    An investigation by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has revealed new details about another of Vladimir Putin’s alleged lavish residences, complete with stables, a golf course and an expansive spa complex that includes a cryo chamber.

    Using satellite and drone footage, company records, photographs and other data, investigators have released floor plans and some of the first photographs of an expanded residence near Valdai, which they said was the Russian president’s favourite and most secret.

    As with the Black Sea property there is of course no evidence whatsoever to support this assertion. No reports from the neighbours of personal sightings. No photographs on file of Putin in the gardens with guests, or relaxing in the interior, though I would point out that these would not tell us that he actually owned the house. No sign of the considerable security or communications presence that would be required for the President of Russia. In other words just propaganda!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/16/putin-residence-cryo-chamber-navalny-team-alleges

    1. Grauniad progesses to Playschool level: Here’s a House, with a door, windows, 1,2,3,4. Grauniad is honoured to present the prestigious BBC Take Hart programme award of Morph to Navalny. In tradtional Take Hart fashion, all other fake entries “will win a prize for all those that we show” – so Grauniad’s next article also wins Morph – “inclusivity”

  34. Can’t get over the Pfizer jab containing polyethylene glycol. That’s literally shooting up anti-freeze. Apparently a well nourished body with the right balance of vitamins and minerals will eject the poison but it still leaves me wondering. If Matt Hancock told the masses to drink petrol, it kills coronavirus, would they?

      2. Morning Rik!

        Yes, if it was rebranded as a miracle cure and the flavour disguised (I don’t know how petrol tastes but it can’t be good), I’m sure it would go down just fine.

    4. PEG is synthesised from ethyl oxide, which is the major component of anti-freeze. However, PEG is chemically inert, non-toxic and has many medical uses because of its strong binding properties that help drugs work more effectively.

      2. And should be expelled by the body via urine and faeces but it seems that the possibility of long term toxicity does exist.

        1. Everything is potentially toxic, even water. It comes down to risk vs benefit.

    5. It might have come in handy with these cold evenings at the pub and in friends’ gardens

      1. If it helps the 1939 register shows Charles John Drye and Ethel living at Engollen which given the houses around it seems to be the first bungalow on the right as West Road is joined by Church Road

        I will have a look much later , if I can avoid all the parked holiday traffic and the traffic wardens and towaway services that the Lulworth estate have put into place !!!

        1. Well done, Maggie.
          When my grandmother died in January, 1937, my grandfather was of the generation that took in a housekeeper because men couldn’t possibly manage housekeeping themselves.
          Ethel was a local farmer’s daughter, who, I suspect had given up all hope of marriage and was grateful to be taken down off the shelf. She could talk pure Dorset at a rate of knots. I always remember she was the only one who called my father Bert (imagine the numbers of ‘rrrs’ she worked into that name); everyone else called my father John or Dickie (Drye) because he loathed the name Bertram.

    2. I read about some sort of monkey/human embryo being developed future places in politics i guess.

      1. Happy Saturday Ped, this is Pud / Hatman in Tel Aviv, stay safe & well. I wish “Call me Dave ” would take the train to the Cassandra Crossing.

  39. The West is playing with fire by rejecting the Enlightenment values that created it. 17 april 2021.

    What is being denied is that Western ideas or culture can claim any universal validity or special importance. Instead, they are attacked as hypocritical, morally corrupt and oppressive: John Locke, theorist of political rights, benefited from the slave trade; David Hume, a founder of modern ideas of the self, was a racist; Mozart and Beethoven wrote during “the age of slavery”.

    Our museums are products of empire, our National Trust treasures are the fruits of slave labour, and our universities, churches and charitable foundations, tarred with the same brush, make fulsome expressions of shame.

    Well it’s not too bad. The author is only a couple of years behind Nottl. The real problem is that he has the wrong tense. This is not a movement in progress but already complete. The “West” in the sense of being a Democratic European Civilisation worthy of the Enlightenment is already dead. It is largely Crypto- Marxist; Atheistic, opposed to Free Speech and indeed Freedom itself. Its Foreign Policies are Nihilist leaving only destruction in their wake. It will shortly take the next step and become a collection of Totalitarian Dictatorships where rule is by Fear and Fiat!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/16/west-playing-fire-rejecting-enlightenment-values-created/

    1. What’s missing in each of those examples is the word ‘successful’.
      Most countries through history had or still have examples of the offences described. Chagrin won’t alter this fact.

  41. Gorgeous out – just this damned chilly breeze. Away to do the edges. The MR is assisting with the Zyklon B again. Making sure the queue is orderly…

    1. Roll up, roll up, get your fix here!

      Good day for gardening, or playing in the trees and chasing birds.

    2. It’s 30 c in my green house this morning. The little Tommie’s are doing well, It reminds me of my old Grandfather, he use to sit out in his green house and smoke his smelly old pipe.

      1. So are mine, Eddy. I was stunned to see a chap down the road offering similar sized plants to mine at £1.25 a go

        1. Did you check the back garden for foot prints ?
          Last season was one of my best, but Erin say she doesn’t really like too many tomatoes.
          I took seeds from the 4 varieties I grew put them on to kitchen paper to dry labeled them, but the labels fell off in the paper bag, so i have no idea which are which, oh well they were all very tasty, especially the pick and ‘pop in any time’ cherry variety. I have been handing them out and sweet pea seeds to our family and near neighbours.
          Every one of the seeds has germinated. All about 4 inches now.

      2. Mine in the greenhouse were slaughtered by the frost last night. No mention of Jack appearing on the met office site. I’m miffed to say the least.

          1. Ha ha ha,………. You needed to have been present recently. I thought i was on my last legs this time last week. And NO ! 😏

    4. Just planted out two rows of Asparagus Burgundine. Watered. Now to wait four years. :@(

      1. There was a superb but complicated green veg and sparrow grass recipe on Saturday kitchen this morning.
        It made me wish i still had my allotment.

    5. Gorgeous out – thought you were discussing the cricket, Bill!
      ;-))
      Morning…

      2. Greetings & Happy Saturday Obers my friend, this is Pud / Hatman in sunny Tel Aviv. I have a post stuck in Pending , could you please release it & add me as a Trusted User, thanks !

          3. It comes & it goes, I had the last serious attack some 10 years ago when it lasted about 4 months, this time its been well over 7 months now but seems to be gradually lessening. My current GP says the length of the attack is a function of age as I am now 70

          4. With a crushed disc in the lower back, I’ve suffered, Hat, since 1964, the best cure is manipulation by a qualified Osteopath or Chiropractor.

            Physios and pills are a waste of time and money – in my book.

  42. 331659+ up ticks,
    As child abuse goes it is only a little bit out of order, I mean the mass uncontrolled immigration coalition ongoing purveyors lab/lib/con covered up actual paedophile rape & abuse for 16 plus years, and this coalition is still flourishing in the support & vote department.

    https://twitter.com/Liz6716/status/1383000861207584771

    Link gone on walkabout.

          2. Happy Saturday Rastus to you & your Missus . It certainly would, especially since humor is not permitted in Islam & with other folks like Africans , Germans, the French, Belgians & the Swiss it is simply not understood anyway!

          3. My sister and I used to perform that – my ‘Indian’ accent learned from Peter Sellers.

      2. 331659+ up ticks,
        Afternoon EaS,
        Which reflects badly on the lab/lib/con supporter / voter whos parties have a pro burka policy.

        1. Happy Saturday ogga1 my friend, you & family stay safe & well. In a strange way I don’t object to their female of the species being covered in smelly black rags from head to foot as 1) it makes them easy to spot from a distance ( but hard to know if its a nun or a penguin or Fatima the human bomb ) and 2) it hides their ugly faces and saves me from throwing up my lunch when looking at their Medusa like features !

  45. Interesting example of the stupidity and ignorance of teenage scribblers these days.

    A couple of days back, when discussing what people were to wear at the funeral, the DT (and the Grimes) said that they would be in “mourning dress”.

    They certainly would not wear “morning dress” – that seems only to appear at Ascot. They would not be in uniform. The correct rig instruction is “ladies in day dresses, gentlemen in lounge suits.”

    I ask you….

    1. A friend of mine always always wears a black top hat rather than a grey one at weddings. Much to mourn when you put on morning dress for a chap about to commit matrimony.

  46. Greetings all Nottlers, I won’t say Happy Saturday out of respect for HRH Prince Philip who is laid to rest today after a lifetime of service to Queen & the nation, may he rest in peace in the arms of the Lord, Amen. He was a good bloke, served with distinction in the RN during WW2, was loving husband and father & has kept us all amused ever since with his famous gaffes.

    For the sake of clarity this is Pud AKA Hatman AKA Mahatmacoatmabag in sunny Tel Aviv, where from tomorrow Sunday 18th April 2021 facemasks are no longer required in public & the lockdown was lifted 2 weeks ago as we have with over 5.3 million over 16’s vaccinated with the 1st dose & 4.9 Million ( including me ) vaccinated with the 2nd dose & have de facto achieved herd immunity . I wish you & families well & hope that the UK achieves herd immunity in the near future.

    All the best from Pud / Hatman in Tel Aviv. ( my Mahatma account is retired & I post mainly on my own blogs as Sputnik One & outside of my blogs as Ivan Skavinsky-Skavar or this old ID Elf & Safety which I originally posted with on the Telegraph back in 2013 )

    PS. Has anybody seen Tony post anywhere – he seems to have vanished off of NTJP where he was a Mod & since his profile is closed he can be contacted.

      1. Just passing through Eddy to say hello to all my fellow Nottlers , pay respect to HRH Phil & ask if anybody has seen Tony from Leeds who used to be a regular on here.

        2. Good to see you again. You must visit us more often.

          Your turn of phrase reminds me of the American who visited a pub in a remote West country village.
          “This place,” he remarked to the barman, “is the arsehole of the world!”
          “Just passing through?” the barman replied.

          2. Love it, Richard but the problem with Americans and humour is that they don’t do subtle.

    2. Well done Israel.
      Good to see you and better to see you a little more buoyant too.

      1. Happy Saturday Sos my friend, I still have my aches & pains but far less than in the last 6 months of Sciatica with severe back, leg, ankle, neck & over the left eye daily pains. I hope you & family are all well & have come through the Wuhan plague unharmed.

        1. So far so good, thank you, but no sign of vaccinations being available; they’ve pulled the AZ and the J&J here.

          Assuming you mean Tony Angel, the stargazer, I haven’t seen Tony for ages. He was fairly old, if I remember correctly.

          5. Just as Tony with a closed profile & he was not an ex-Torygrapther like us but a fellow I introduced to the Nottler crowd just before the channels were closed.

          6. He posted just as ‘Tony’ – as we were both from Leeds (although it is 50 years now since I lived there) we exchanged posts from time to time. He wasn’t with us very long and could rub some people up the wrong way, he could provoke from time to time. I think he left after a contretemps.

          8. Happy Saturday Poppiesmum, stay safe & well. Tony from Leeds did get a bit offended by some commenters on here & yes he could be rather abrasive at times. He was not a former Torygraph poster like us but a poster I came across a few years ago & invited him to NTTL

          11. Thank you.
            I don’t use the platform, but glad he’s still around; he used to put up some interesting posts here.

    3. Greetings, Hatman. We have wondered a lot about how things were going in Israel.

      1. Bill, apart from the usual wars & political shenanigans, we are winning the battle against Covid-19 & have achieved de facto herd immunity with infection, hospitalization & death rates dramatically reduced thanks to mass vaccination with Pfizzer’s vaccine . I hope you & your mem sahib have had at least one dose.

        1. Well done, Israel.

          Just back this very minute from my second AZ jab. The MR had her first a month ago – Phizer – and she fainted twice during the first night…

          2. Well then, Bill, you should have switched the lights off before you changed into your pyjamas!

            :-)) (Just a joke, my friend.)

    5. Sending you envy from Ontario.

      Maybe two percent have a second vaccination, yet another lockdown starting today and politicians blaming others for the mess.

      1. Happy Saturday Richard, stay safe & well, maybe Justina will make a deal with his Dad & uncle in Cuba and buy some useless ….surplus Russian Sputnik vaccine from them.

      1. Happy Saturday NTN , stay safe & well . Is far-flung fields a relative of Hu Flung-Yu ( I used to post with that name for a short while on the DT )

    8. Good to see you, Hatters, old chap. Tony last posted on Disqus three years ago. I seem to recall that he’s been seen on Twitface more recently…

      1. Happy Saturday Geoff , I hope you & family are well, you are thinking of Tony Angel & I was looking for Tony, an elderly man from Leeds who I introduced to NTTL just before the channels closed, he was not one of our DT veterans but a pro-Brexit poster I came across elsewhere & thought he would like posting with like minded posters on NTTL.

    9. Hi Hatman,
      Good to see you back. As a casual nottler I am uncertain as to which Tony. There was a retired accountant from the Leeds (?) suburbs who used to post. He used to go on cruises, and I once found a contact address for him. I can not open my disqus profile, otherwise I might find a clue from some of his comments.

      1. Hi Tim, I have no idea if its the same Tony or not, he is an elderly Jewish man from Leeds & was a Mod until recently on Bill Smiths NTJP blog https://ntjp.news/open-forum but seems to have vanished & doesn’t answer any attempts to communicate with him. I got him to post on here in the run up to Brexit which he voted for but he has had one or two disagreements with posters on here as he was not well grounded in the nuances & personalities of our Nottler culture which only veterans of the Torygraph from 2011 to 2015 will understand & appreciate.

  47. This was to do with the Adonis post but i can’t find it now…….

    When I became a minister I was told I should not own any shares in any company with which the government might contract. I divested myself of all shares in companies

    Far easier to lodge the shares with the wife and family eh. Keep it in the ‘bubble’ as it were.

        1. and whilst we are at it I’ll sign you up for Hotgirlspoledancenakedontheweb.com so that your sister & her friends can make $500 an hour from home ( sarcasm )

      2. Enron Venture Capitalism

        You have two cows.

        You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a
        debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.

        The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.

        The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one.

  48. Just seen a small salamander in the sunny grass at Firstborn’s farm: Dark green, and it most certainly didn’t want to be photographed.

    1. Apparently, it’s on the red list, according to SWMBO who just looked it up.

    1. There is a TV advert (‘A Day of Change’) that’s been doing the rounds for a while in case we forget. It features many black people and one or two whites, amongst them Benjamin Zephaniah, Jon Snow and, unsurprisingly, Max Headroom. Surprisingly, Jess Phillips missed a photo-op.

    2. Last night I watched the 1968 film of OLIVER! and was astounded that in the London crowd scenes there was not a single coloured person as far as I could see. Were the film to be re-made (as indeed is currently planned) I guess that will not be the case, despite the 1850-ish setting. And then I looked the film up in IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) and discovered that the black singer Georgia Brown (who created the role of Nancy in the original stage production) was replaced in the role by the “hideously white” singer Shani Wallis since the producers (Columbia Studios) claimed that “the general public are not yet ready” for mixed cast productions!!!

        1. True, but the film producers considered even the slightest of darker tones to be “unacceptable” in those days – today it is the reverse, i.e. white is barely acceptable.

  51. Hello. There was video of an ape teasing tiger cubs. I cannot find it. Could somebody please tell me why day that was, or maybe even repost it?

          1. I think you have me confused with someone else, hat. I live in North Shropshire – not that I don’t like Oz.

      2. Sos, where did you get that footage of Uncle Bill teasing Gus and Pickle? He seems to be a lot better at climbing trees after his unfortunate episode on a ladder a couple of years ago!

        :-))

  52. Well boys & girls I am off for a cuppa ( its 4:34 pm in Tel Aviv ) and I am watching Prince Philips funeral coverage live on Sky News Int’l ( the only UK TV station I get on my cable TV now that they pulled the plug on the hated & biased BBC World channel ) . I’ll try & look in later, stay safe well & sober !

  54. Watched the funeral of Prince Philip on Aftenposten TV. Edit: Link.
    https://www.aftenposten.no/verden/i/pA8nVX/se-direkte-bisettelsen-av-prins-philip
    First impressions:
    I love the converted Landy. How practical and straightforward! Only comment – should have been a Series 2, not a Defender, but at least the Defender started..
    Weird that there’s almost nobody there.
    The Piper was excellent, a real tear-jerker.
    I’m actually in favour of the 30 mourners-rule. The “Great & the Good” were not given an opportunity to preen and show off. Excellent!
    I hope there would be an opportunity for people to line the road and pay their respects.
    And the saddest moment: A little old lady in a brimmed black hat is driven away.

    4. The Landrover was wonderful wasn’t it. Among all that pomp and ceremony. It sort of gave an insight into how Philip felt among all the courtiers, if that’s not too fanciful – an outsider, but holding his own.

    5. The carriage with the ponies started us off. I wonder if the horses sensed something was up. Animals are very sensitive to atmosphere.
      It’s the little personal things like the cap and gloves that are so affecting.

  55. Well, a jolly good send off. The military did their bit very well. Of the two bearer parties, the Royal Marines had drawn the short straw with all those steps…

    Thank goodness Welmeaning didn’t preach. I thought that they coped with the (fatuous) no singing in church rule rather cunningly. The Dean of Windsor was streets ahead of the Archprick in every way.

    We watched BBC – someone should explain to the Welsh chappie that troops standing with their heads bowed are simply performing the standard drill book command “Arms Reversed”.

    Tea now.

    1. BBC staff have no knowledge of British military drills as they have only ever served in the Bader-Meinhof Red Army Faction or the Palestine Liberation Army or the Zimbabwe Liberation Front Army.

    2. BBC staff have no knowledge of British military drills as they have only ever served in the Bader-Meinhof Red Army Faction or the Palestine Liberation Army or the Zimbabwe Liberation Front Army.

      3. At least the beeboids shut up as the Grenners brought the coffin out and placed it in the Landie.

      4. Absolutely. They didn’t speak when we could see what was happening. The Dan Maskell school of commentary. “I say!”

    4. Yes indeed. If you want the job done properly, give it to the military every time.

      Service would have been better without Welby.

      1. Shame we can’t get the military to get some target practice at Westminster whilst their bands play some patriotic music.
        I’d pay well to see that.

      3. That’s the good thing about the Chapel Royal. Outwith the hierarchy of the C of E – so Welmeaning was simply invited to play a very small part.

    5. The Dean seemed genuinely upset. I assume he knew them on a more personal level.
      That picture of the Queen sitting hunched on her own will haunt me forever.

      1. I really feel for her.
        Her husband really is gone now, and her bed will feel very lonely tonight.
        Same applied a weel ago for SWMBO’s sister-in-law. There’s nothing like a funeral for putting a full stop to things. I guess that’s one reason we have them.

          1. May that picture haunt every bloody government apparatchik into eternity.
            Damn the bloody lot of them.

          1. Likely, but it’s that off-guard moment, when the loved one isn’t there and they usually were… Breakfast, maybe, or just wanting to share a moment, and the other half isn’t there, and never will be, to share.

  56. Well, a jolly good send off. The military did their bit very well. Of the two bearer parties, the Royal Marines had drawn the short straw with all those steps…

    Thank goodness Welmeaning didn’t preach. I thought that they coped with the (fatuous) no singing in church rule rather cunningly. The Dean of Windsor was streets ahead of the Archprick in every way.

    We watched BBC – someone should explain to the Welsh chappie that troops standing with their heads bowed are simply performing the standard drill book command “Arms Reversed”.

    Tea now.

  57. Firstborn is stilling a failed beer brew just now. It’s rather good, only about 47-odd %. It’s made from beer, so it’s been hopped, but it’s good, although no whisk(e)y.
    We’ll call it the Duke of Edinburgh brew.

    2. We’ll raise a glass later this evening, once the spirit has cooled (as it were).

    1. I hate the BBC with a passion. I watched a Canadian livestream which was mercifully free of commentary.

      1. I do too. The MR and I managed to block out the commentary by concentrating on the spectacle.

    2. I hate the BBC with a passion. I watched a Canadian livestream which was mercifully free of commentary.

    4. Don’t worry the BBC will next week for the sake of Racial Equality, re-broadcast the funeral of Nelson Mandela which the BBC covered with more staff than the London Olympics & if enough loyal BBC viewers in Gaza & Kabul ask for it the BBC will re-broadcast their live coverage of Yasser Arafat’s funeral cortege in Cairo which was temporarily halted due to the BBC’s Cairo correspondent being overcome with grief & heard on live TV saying “we have lost our beloved father who was a shining light & the world is a little darker today, sob, sob, sob…….”

    3. I went over to the BBC coverage for a few seconds just to check that it was the same pictures, and they were wittering on about her not being allowed to travel by her doctors – not a mention of Oprah! Still maintaining the fiction that she behaves like a decent human being. Why they had to mention her at all, I really don’t know.

    5. Maybe she meant it? Just a thought… but then, why make a point of letting everybody know about it? Unless that puffery is by the MSM, of course.

  63. Just a thought – the music played by the massed bands before the cortege started. – it was just like Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph.

    1. I understand that the Duke planned most of the commemoration himself and I suspect that that will have been the intention.

  64. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/royal-family/2021/04/17/TELEMMGLPICT000256182351_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNJjoeBT78QIaYdkJdEY4CnGTJFJS74MYhNY6w3GNbO8.jpeg?imwidth=1260

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/royal-family/2021/04/17/TELEMMGLPICT000256193405_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQfyf2A9a6I9YchsjMeADBa08.jpeg?imwidth=1260

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/royal-family/2021/04/17/TELEMMGLPICT000256189564_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNadeZm0KzkFwpSYJhHDpPbQMI5hkDcUBB5qZKQzbZSY.jpeg?imwidth=1260

    1. Along with his cap, gloves and rug, the red-capped jar on the seat of Prince Philip’s carriage contained sugar lumps for the ponies, according to Alastair Bruce!

      A kindly driver …

  65. I didn’t watch much of the Dukes funeral, seeing them all masked up like that just annoyed me.

  66. My satellite connection broke up halfway through the Prince Philip’s funeral. I switched to another satellite, mostly in German. Nearly every channel had the funeral live, some with simultaneous translations. I also saw that it was on French channels and numerous Arabic ones, including BBC Arabic.

    I have to admit, unemotional as some people think that men are supposed to be, that I shed a few tears, especially seeing the Queen sitting on her own. But she has an extraordinary inner strength and knows that she has the sympathy of countless millions of people in her realms, the Commonwealth (2.5 billion people) and further afield.

    I thought that it must have been one of the most dignified funerals that has ever taken place.

    1. Agreed, S. I watched a Norwegian version without commentary, and thought how dignified and celeb-free it was: A pleasure, if that’s the right word.

        1. I had hoped that yer commoners weddings and funerals might learn a lesson from covid numbers and go back to simply being a celebration of the occasion.

          However, we are still seeing people plan nice big ostentatious shows of excess.

        2. Agreed, but when the time comes, I would like to see the Queen get the send off she deserves; with the heads of state of every Commonwealth country and territory, as well as all those countries she has visited and received in the UK.

          Damned nearly the whole world.

          1. I couldn’t agree more. She will deserve the best send off that any person has ever received, although, hopefully, many more years from now.

          2. I do so agree, Sos, and, without her strength and stay, I fear that that day is not too far away.

            God, love and keep her.

      2. The Canadian broadcast was without commentary for the most part but the talking heads had their say before and after the service and procession – I fact they are still chatting away but saying nothing.

  67. Simon Armitage’s two pence worth – as is the way with poetry, it’s much easier to read when put into paragraphs.

    The Patriarchs – An Elegy’ by Simon Armitage

    The weather in the window this morning is snow, unseasonal singular flakes, a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up for a whole generation – that crew whose survival was always the stuff of minor miracle, who came ashore in orange-crate coracles, fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.

    Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets, regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business. Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became both inner core and outer case in a family heirloom of nesting dolls. Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.

    They were sons of a zodiac out of sync with the solar year, but turned their minds
    to the day’s big science and heavy questions. To study their hands at rest was to picture maps showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions. Last of the great avuncular magicians they kept their best tricks for the grand finale: Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.

    The major oaks in the wood start tuning up and skies to come will deliver their tributes. But for now, a cold April’s closing moments parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.

    or

    The Patriarchs – An Elegy’ by Simon Armitage

    The weather in the window this morning
    is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
    a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion
    to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
    for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
    was always the stuff of minor miracle,
    who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
    fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
    with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.

    Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
    across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
    regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
    was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
    Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
    both inner core and outer case
    in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
    Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
    in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.

    They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
    with the solar year, but turned their minds
    to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
    To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
    showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
    of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
    Last of the great avuncular magicians
    they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
    Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.

    The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
    and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
    But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
    parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
    snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.

    3. I’m sorry, Plum. That’s hard. I feel for you. If I had some comforting words, I’d let you know, but there aren’t any.
      One thing I learned, is that to have a “goodbye forever” ceremony, makes settling the thoughts easier. So, when friends have departed this life, I found that the Mozart Grosse Messe, played at volume, allied with appropriate drink to celebrate the departed, helps one settle afterwards.
      Same goes for the loss of our pets…

        1. A powerful and expressive piece of music. Excellent choice. I’ll try that next time – whenever that might be.

      2. The Funeral Music for Queen Mary – takes exactly the time to play as to carry a coffin from the W est Door of St Paul’s to the Chancel Steps.

        Henry Purcell – the music was played on the, er, Funeral of Queen Mary 5 March 1695 – and eight short months later at Purcell’s own funeral.

        He was only 36.

    6. Its tough. Somehow the death of a pet has more of an impact than some family members.

      Our little cat must have died almost fifteen years ago, we still remember him.

    7. Lend Me A Pup
      By Unknown Author

      I will lend to you for awhile a puppy, God said,
      For you to love him while he lives
      and to mourn for him when he is gone.
      Maybe for 12 or 14 years, or maybe for 2 or 3
      But will you, till I call him back
      take care of him for me?

      He’ll bring his charms to gladden you and
      (should his stay be brief)
      you’ll always have his memories
      as solace for your grief.
      I cannot promise that he will stay
      since all from Earth return,
      But there are lessons taught below
      I want this pup to learn.

      I’ve looked the whole world over
      in search of teachers true,
      And from the fold that crowd life’s land
      I have chosen you.
      Now will you give him all your love
      Nor think the labor vain,
      nor hate me when I come to take
      my pup back again?

      I fancied that I heard them say,
      “Dear Lord, They Will Be Done,”
      For all the joys this pup will bring
      the risk of grief you’ll run.
      Will you shelter him with tenderness,
      Will you love him while you may?
      And for the happiness you’ll know
      forever grateful stay?

      But should I call him back
      much sooner than you’ve planned,
      please brave the bitter grief that comes
      and try to understand.
      If, by your love, you’ve managed
      my wishes to achieve,
      In memory of him that you’ve loved,
      cherish every moment with your faithful bundle,
      and know he loved you too.

        1. It is a lovely poem isn’t it OB. .

          Poor Plum , Maud looked such a darling little companion , the death of a pet leaves such a huge gap in your heart , it is a shared life.

      2. My beloved hound, Robinson, died on 31 January 1991 aged 15 years and 7 months. I remember him whenever I go for a walk – and sometimes catch a glimpse of him in corner of the garden.

        1. ……out of the corner of your eye, a tail whisking round a corner, a fleeting shadow…. they are never very far away.

          1. I bleedin’ hate funerals. Don’t even like goodbyes… never use the word, always “See you around” or something.

        1. Near this Spot
          are deposited the Remains of one
          who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
          Strength without Insolence,
          Courage without Ferosity,
          and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.
          This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
          if inscribed over human Ashes,
          is but a just tribute to the Memory of
          Boatswain, a Dog

          When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,
          Unknown to Glory but upheld by Birth,
          The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
          And storied urns record who rests below.
          When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen
          Not what he was, but what he should have been.
          But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
          The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
          Whose honest heart is still his Masters own,
          Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
          Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,
          Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth.
          While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
          And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.

          Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
          Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,
          Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,
          Degraded mass of animated dust!
          Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
          Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit,
          By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
          Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
          Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
          Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn.
          To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
          I never knew but one — and here he lies.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaph_to_a_Dog

          And that always makes me cry too.

          1. I had to take my dog to the vet this morning; I thought I should be returning alone, but thankfully, he lives to fight on another day.

          2. He is doing really well! So pleased to hear your vet sorted out his problem and that doggo returned to his familiar basket.

          3. He is such a fighter. My previous dog, who had similar mobility problems, just gave up and told me he’d had enough. This one says, “pick me up I want to go farther!”

          5. He has been prescribed some special dog food (it should be gold-plated, it costs a fortune!), but the upside is that he wolfs it down. I went shopping in a local garden centre this afternoon and bought him a new leather collar.

          6. Excellent! A commitment to the future! He will look very handsome in his new collar.

            We get Lily’s Kitchen dog food for Poppie. She loves it. And Country Hunter for her breakfast in which we hide her Cushing’s capsules. It has to be given at the start of the day, with food and before she gets active, said the vet. So she gets breakfast in bed. Our bed.

          7. This is Royal Canin. I might see if I can buy it on line if he doesn’t go off it. I usually give him his half a steroid between a couple of pieces of chew, but he refused the treat this morning and it was a case of “open wide” and shoving the pill down his throat.

    10. I trust, Plum, that you will soon bring yourself around to finding another companion, like Maud.

      I know it’ll be difficult but you must do it, otherwise you’ll be in a permanent mope.

      We NoTTLers will all be rooting for you. Big ol’ hugs.

        1. Always remember a new companion runs alongside the old faithful….. James Herriot said the best way of getting over the loss of faithful doggy friend is to find yourself a new one as soon as possible. I am not sure….

        2. I was forced to go dogless for four months; the most miserable four months of my life.

  69. FA cup semi final.
    A minute’s silence to commemorate the DoE, then a quick bending of the knee to remember a career criminal who wasn’t fit to drink his piss.
    The sooner the genuflection towards Floyd is stopped the better it will be.

      1. To rearrange your well known phrase or saying:

        I know why they are doing it; they don’t think.

  70. That’s me for this solemn day. Didn’t God play his part well with the weather? Shall watch again this evening on ITV.

    The oddest thing for me was that Prince Philip wasn’t there. I have seen him on TV at nearly every great state occasion since his wedding to Princess Elizabeth in 1947. I kept waiting for a cutaway shot of his sardonic eye on the event..

    A demain, chers amis.

    2. I felt so tearful when his two little ponies and the carriage with his hat , gloves and crop, but what was in that pink jar ?

      Goodnight Bill ,stay warm even though the evening sun still shines brightly .

      3. His companion and confidante in carriage driving….A proper Countess unlike the Duchess of MeMeMeagain….Penelope Meredith Mary Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma,
        known until 2005 as Lady Romsey, and until 2017 as The Lady Brabourne,
        is a British noblewoman and the wife of Norton Knatchbull, 3rd Earl
        Mountbatten of Burma.

    3. I have read so much about the admirable Duke that i chose to sit in my garden room all afternoon getting slightly pissed until my neighbours arrived. They had watched the funeral and we told each other what we knew/heard of the fine chap. The Bugler was a close friend of Lt Kristiansen, my neighbour. Run out of Champagne now. :@(

      Supper tonight Fish & chips takeaway. Burp !

    4. Many tears in my eye, as I watched a fellow service man go to his grave to the tunes of, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” and, as en ex-drum major of a Pipe-Band to, “Flooers o’ the Forest“

    5. Many tears in my eye, as I watched a fellow service man go to his grave to the tunes of, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” and, as en ex-drum major of a Pipe-Band to, “Flooers o’ the Forest“

    6. On reflection, I reckon that the unique character of the Duke of Edinburgh’s dignified funeral was the total absence of politics – and politicians.

      Perhaps Boris got it right – for once …

    7. “Remembrance Sunday, in the United Kingdom, holiday held on the second Sunday of November that commemorates British service members who have died in wars and other military conflicts since the onset of World War I.”

      On reflection, why should any Prime Minister – or living ex-Prime Ministers – be permitted to attend/ participate in/ the ceremonial at the Cenotaph?

      None of them can boast a military microbe …

      1. Nimrod echoes through my head .. and the sound of the slow beat of heavy heels on the hard steps ..

        Modern politicians have no idea , nor do the media wallahs .

        1. The sound of the heels on the hard steps was so viscerally atavistic – it was all so moving, but that was the most moving part of all. It was a reminder of ancient ceremonies past, echoing and reverberating down the corridors of time.

          1. Yes PM , so it was , and ever will be , it is the clunk , the slow beat that echoed previous decades and centuries .

            I still feel tearful because his death has signified the end of grand manhood , and resolute belief in being true to oneself as he was

            Including huge sadness that HRH was one of the last remaining veterans of of our father’s generation.

          2. Poppiesdad said this evening, about half an hour ago, that he feels old, small and insignificant. The realisation that our era has passed today.

          3. We are feeling the void … it is deepening .

            We shed tears.. and although we are quite secluded and rural, some one was having a bonfire, and in the distance some one else was sitting on their rumbling sit on mower cutting the grass, and we wondered whether a skipped generation was unaware of the significance of the dear HRH’s passing .

          4. Plenty are aware, Belle. My daughter watched the coverage from where she is living in central Europe.
            The ultra patriotic families in Windsor took their small children along to lay flowers, I noticed. Sentimental? Yes, but also passing on our history.

        2. The lesson is never have a favourite piece of music played at a funeral. We played Elgar at my mothers funeral, the two are always going to be associated with each other.

      2. They have the responsibility of sending troops to war, so should face up to the consequences. Blair wrecked all that. I hated seeing him at the Cenotaph, using the remembrance of the war dead to try and stir up support for sending our troops out to die in order to make money for his pals in the middle east.

      2. I suspect she was showing her support for all those who had to suffer their beloveds funeral by remote during the covid pandemic. Remember HM the Queen Mothers’ comment after Buck House was hit by a bomb during the war that now she could face anyone in the country who had lost their homes. Her Majesty would not want to show any favouritism to herself or her family at this time of grief.

    2. That poor lady’s face will remain in my memory for a very long time. However, her stoicism and devotion to duty will continue to make me very proud.

      1. It’s easy to think of her as an elderly lady, but if you look back at the many news items since 1952, I doubt if there has ever been a human being who has behaved with such consistent poise, dignity and authority as our Queen. She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman who, from the age of 27, found herself as Head of State of 16 counties. She has been admired worldwide, not least in France where the Champs Élysée has been closed on at least four occasions to welcome her and in her honour.

        And how fortunate she is, and we are, that she had such a wonderful husband.

        We, and those in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica and other countries should be very proud of her and our fortunate system of government, namely that of a constitutional monarchy.

        How proud Americans must be with Biden as their Head of State!

        1. I think that you will find that many from the old empire are looking forward to the end of an era and becoming republics.
          Anyone with a modicum of sense tears up at the thought of a President Trudeau.

        2. 331569+ up ticks,
          Evening S,
          As you say regarding the Queen i’m in total agreement we could NOT wish for better.

          The peoples have let the state down,
          currently we reside in a country very few would have pride in.

          The best thing we could do is trigger a people’s reset starting yesterday with, instead of a grieving elderly masked lady we mask 650 politico’s from the eyebrows down,then secure them to a post prior to triggering the peoples reset.

        3. And without her as our head of state a piece of excrement like Blair would be eager to take the role.

    3. This masking nonsense is cruel at the best of times yet utterly unnecessary in a building with the volume of St George’s Chapel Windsor. Mask mandates are the worst form of social engineering and in my experience equivalent to water boarding.

      For the Royal Family to have to conform to this disgraceful exhibition of apologetic submission to the State is unforgivable.

      I just hope that Johnson, Hancock, their SAGE advisors and the globalists driving this madness all meet a sorry end, preferably following a Nuremberg style Tribunal into their many and multiplying crimes against humanity.

      1. Its nothing to do with Corvid its all about control. johnson has shown no humanity to the people.or HM The Queen.

        2. Of course Johnson is incapable of showing humanity – he is barely human himself.

      2. 331659+ up ticks,
        Evening C,
        A political power sign, on par with the raised clenched fist.

      3. If they had relaxed those restrictions and acted sensibly, there would have been cries of outrage from the woke brigade claiming one rule for us, another for them.

        A fully packed chapel might not have been a good idea but there are many ways they could have made it a less lonely experience for the queen and allowed her some support.

        If it had been a full event maybe me-again would have thought it worth her while attending

        1. On the contrary, had the Royal Family refused to go along with this obvious bullshit we might have been spared yet more years of State interference in our lives.

          1. Duty first. The queen would never publicly tell her government where to get off – and they know it.

          2. 331659+ up ticks,
            Evening R,
            The governance also know it in regards to the electorate, hence we sink deeper into the sh!te bog.

        3. I thought Harry looked perfectly comfortable and accepted by his family today. I think a lot of that which were are told is pure speculation to sell copy.

          1. Harry would have benefitted hugely from being amongst his proper family rather than the faux acquaintances he has adopted in the USA. He must lead a pretty empty life in the USA .

    4. “The moving photo of Queen Elizabeth II standing [??] alone in front of Prince Philip’s coffin.”

      1. Doesn’t say anything about standing; just the moving photo of Queen Elisabeth II alone opposite the coffin of the Prince Philip.

  77. I had never ever heard or read this before .. I think it is perfect

    Ecclesiasticus 43. 11–26

    Read by the Dean of Windsor

    Look at the rainbow and praise its Maker; it shines with a supreme beauty, rounding the sky with its gleaming arc, a bow bent by the hands of the Most High. His command speeds the snow storm and sends the swift lightning to execute his sentence. To that end the storehouses are opened, and the clouds fly out like birds. By his mighty power the clouds are piled up and the hailstones broken small. The crash of his thunder makes the earth writhe, and, when he appears, an earthquake shakes the hills. At his will the south wind blows, the squall from the north and the hurricane. He scatters the snow-flakes like birds alighting; they settle like a swarm of locusts. The eye is dazzled by their beautiful whiteness, and as they fall the mind is entranced. He spreads frost on the earth like salt, and icicles form like pointed stakes. A cold blast from the north, and ice grows hard on the water, settling on every pool, as though the water were putting on a breastplate. He consumes the hills, scorches the wilderness, and withers the grass like fire. Cloudy weather quickly puts all to rights, and dew brings welcome relief after heat. By the power of his thought he tamed the deep and planted it with islands. Those who sail the sea tell stories of its dangers, which astonish all who hear them; in it are strange and wonderful creatures, all kinds of living things and huge sea-monsters. By his own action he achieves his end, and by his word all things are held together.

    Who constructed this most tender descriptive passage of our time on earth.. and who ?

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