Download or read book Lady Lucy Houston DBE written by Miles Macnair and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life-story of Lady Lucy Houston DBE must surely be one of the most romantic and dramatic epics of the last one hundred and fifty years, yet nowadays she is a woman unknown. She was a renowned beauty with a sharp intelligence, and over the years she would exploit her charismatic charm, first as a teenager to entice a wealthy lover, and subsequently to lead three husbands to the altar.She was an ardent and productive campaigner for womens rights, conducting outstanding works of charity during the Great War, such as providing a convalescent home for nurses returning from the front line. In recognition of these endeavours, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1917. After the death of her third husband, a known misogynist, under mysterious circumstances, she was temporarily certified mad, but his Will was to make her the richest woman in England. During the rest of her eventful and eccentric lifetime, she spent her fortune on a vast number of charitable causes, whilst waging a feisty political campaign against weak British politicians of all parties. As a great admirer of how Mussolini had restored Italys patriotic self-esteem, she championed men like Winston Churchill as the future saviour of her own beloved country. But her greatest legacy arose from her steadfast support for the Royal Air Force, whose finances were being crippled. She funded the 1931 Schneider Trophy Race as well as the Houston-Mount Everest Expedition of 1933. This funding had a crucial bearing on the development of the Merlin engine and the Spitfire aircraft, essentially kick starting the chain of events that would ultimately end in allied victory during the Battle of Britain. She died before the cataclysmic war that she so accurately predicted however, her death being precipitated by an infatuation with Edward, Prince of Wales.In spite of her many eccentricities, the enchanting, infuriating, inspiring and endlessly controversial Lucy Houston deserves to be remembered as a very patriotic lady indeed.
Download or read book Lady Houston D B E written by James Wentworth Day and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book R J Mitchell To the Spitfire written by John Shelton and published by Fonthill Media. This book was released on 2023-04-16 with total page 809 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: R. J. Mitchell at Supermarine is the definitive account of the life of Britain’s best-known aeronautical engineer. Shelton calls upon unpublished letters, extensive press accounts, and updated material from his previous publications, concentrating particularly on the harsh conditions of Mitchell’s apprentice years, the precarious state of the aircraft firm he joined, and moments of good fortune of which he took advantage. He was a ‘chancer’ as well as a methodical developer of, mainly, slow flying seaplanes. Mitchell’s progress from draughtsman, with no formal training in aeronautical design, to internationally known chief designer is charted through a chronological study of his designs, revealing a formidable work ethic with a complex personality that combined ‘dreams and common sense’. It will also be shown how the success of his high-speed Schneider Trophy designs propelled him reluctantly into public attention and how his anxiety for his pilots’ safety matched an equal concern that his designs should not let down an expectant nation. Later expectations on him to produce a ‘killer fighter’ were equally daunting, and the outcome was often uncertain, but details of colleagues’ accounts highlight the essential and unique contribution of R.J.’s experience and drive to the eventual appearance of the iconic Spitfire.
Download or read book Guilty Women Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter War Britain written by Julie V. Gottlieb and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-07 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British women were deeply invested in foreign policy between the wars. This study casts new light on the turn to international affairs in feminist politics, the gendered representation and experience of the Munich Crisis, and the profound impression made by female public opinion on PM Neville Chamberlain in his negotiations with the dictators.
Download or read book Hurrah For The Blackshirts written by Martin Pugh and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain is celebrated for having avoided the extremism, political violence and instability that blighted many European countries between the two world wars. But her success was a closer thing than has been realized. Disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, outbreaks of fascist violence and fears of communist subversion in industry and the Empire ran through the entire period. Fascist organizations may have failed to attract the support they achieved elsewhere but fascist ideas were adopted from top to bottom of society and by men and women in all parts of the country. This book will demonstrate for the first time the true spread and depth of fascist beliefs - and the extent to which they were distinctly British. Rich in anecdotes and extraordinary characters, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! shows us an inter-war Britain on the high-road to fascism but never quite arriving at its destination.
Download or read book Bright Particular Stars written by David Mckie and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bright Particular Stars, David McKie examines the impact of 26 remarkable British eccentrics on 26 unremarkable British locations. From Broadway in the Cotswolds, where the Victorian bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps nurtured dreams of possessing every book in the world, to Kilwinning in Scotland, where in 1839 the Earl of Eglinton mounted a tournament that was Renaissance in its extravagance and disastrous in its execution, McKie leads us to places transformed, inspired, and sometimes scandalized by the obsessional endeavors of visionary mavericks. Some of McKie's eccentrics, such as Mary Macarthur, who helped the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath win the right to a fair wage in 1910, were good to the point of saintliness; others, including the composer Peter Heseltine, who in the 1920s set net curtains twitching by his hard drinking and naked motorbike riding, rather less so. But together their fascinating stories illuminate some of the most secret and most extraordinary byways of British history. Here, quiet, unassuming streetscapes become sites of eccentric and uproarious sites of action. The triumphs and failures of the visionaries who thus transformed them—recaptured here in vivid and beguiling fashion—have each, in their own way, helped shape the island's rich and checkered history.
Download or read book Feminine Fascism written by Julie V. Gottlieb and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-28 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British Fascisti, the first fascism movement in Britain, was founded by a woman in 1923. During the 1930s, 25 per cent of Sir Oswald Mosley's supporters were women, and his movement was 'largely built up by the fanaticism of women.' What was it about the British form of Fascism that accounted for this conspicuous female support? Gottlieb addresses these questions in the definitive work on women in fascism. This book continues to fill a significant gap in the historiography of British fascism, which has generally overlooked the contribution of women on the one hand, and the importance of sexual politics and women's issues on the other. Gottlieb's extensive research makes use of government documents, a large range of contemporary pamphlets, newspapers and speeches, as well as original interviews with those personally involved in the movement. This new edition includes a preface analysing the current affairs of the last 20 years, reframing the book according to contemporary context. Here, Gottlieb looks at the resurgence of populism, the rise of women as leaders of far-right parties across Europe and North America, and the normalisation of fascism in fiction and political discourse.
Download or read book Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation written by Gordon Pirie and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new activity of trans-continental civil flying in the 1930s is a useful vantage point for viewing the extension of British imperial attitudes and practices. Cultures and caricatures of British imperial aviation examines the experiences of those (mostly men) who flew solo or with a companion (racing or for leisure), who were airline passengers (doing colonial administration, business or research), or who flew as civilian air and ground crews. For airborne elites, flying was a modern and often enviable way of managing, using and experiencing empire. On the ground, aviation was a device for asserting old empire: adventure and modernity were accompanied by supremacism. At the time, however, British civil imperial flying was presented romantically in books, magazines and exhibitions. Eighty years on, imperial flying is still remembered, reproduced and re-enacted in caricature.
Download or read book From Nighthawk to Spitfire written by John Shelton and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2015-07-06 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: R. J. Mitchell was virtually self-taught; surprisingly, almost all his other aircraft 24 aircraft were slow-flying seaplanes. How a lad from the land-locked Midlands, apprenticed to a locomotive works, came to be responsible for the Spitfire is a great tale in itself. This detailed book tells us how Mitchell learned his trade – from 1916, contributing to the production of the cumbersome Nighthawk, designed to combat the German Zepplin threat, and gradually coming to produce record-breaking racing floatplanes which in 1931 won outright the prestigious international Schneider Trophy. Mitchell was thus well placed to design a high speed aircraft when war began to threaten, but Dr Shelton reveals the production of the famous fighter was by no means a certainty and how, indeed, its vital contribution to winning the Battle of Britain was ‘a very close run thing’.
Download or read book The Kipling Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 964 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes lists of members of the Kipling society.
Download or read book Fallen Giants written by Maurice Isserman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first comprehensive history of Himalayan mountaineering in 50 years, the authors offer detailed, original accounts of the most significant climbs since the 1890s, and they compellingly evoke the social and cultural worlds that gave rise to those expeditions.
Download or read book Roof of the World written by Lord James Douglas-Hamilton and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-02-08 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the morning of 3 April 1933, two single-engine biplanes set off on a flight into history. From their base near the Indian border with the mystery country of Nepal, the two young pilots, one a British Marquis and a Scottish Member of Parliament, the other a dynamic flight commander, flew towards as great a challenge as world aviation had faced to date - Mount Everest, 'Roof of the World'. The first flight over Everest was the climax of years of thought and months of intensive planning, an epoch-making event which caught the imagination of millions. News of its success reverberated throughout the British Empire to the world at large. Among the deluge of telegrams of congratulations received were those from the King and the Prime Minister. The Times of London, which had given exclusive coverage of the Expedition since its early days, carried one of its longest features ever and was excited enough to comment that the achievement was 'almost like exploring the rainbow'. Some half-a-century later that Houston-Mount Everest Expedition takes its place as one of the last great pioneering flights before the era of space travel. Roof of the World tells the remarkable story of that flight and its repercussions, among which were the growth of the British aviation industry and the creation of the country's second international airport. Using rare and unique photographs, many taken from the flight itself and giving an idea of the qualities required of the crews, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton has recreated the scene facing the pilots, one of whom was his father. He has had access to relevant diaries and personal papers presents in Roof of the World a valuable contribution to our understanding of a unique achievement in an eventful decade.
Download or read book The Saturday Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1937 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book With God on Our Side written by Ben Edwards and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-29 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses Christian reactions to the Spanish Civil War to analyse the role and importance of Christianity in interwar Britain. This conflict is used as a proxy through which to discuss the status of Christianity in Britain because the Nationalists claimed to be fighting a Holy War against communist-atheism. This representation meant that the conflict was of considerable interest to Christians in Britain. British Christians frequently used the war in Spain to discuss their broader concerns. Many leading Catholics and fascistic Protestants argued that the events in Spain were an exaggerated form of the communist threat to Britain; by contrast, many Protestants used the war to voice their wider criticisms of Catholicism. Catholics responded to these chastisements by reasserting that members of their faith were patriots who resisted communist internationalism and atheism. Christian responses to the war, therefore, increased pre-existing tension between Protestantism and Catholicism. Similarly, Catholicism’s already difficult relationship with Labour was adversely affected by these movements’ reactions to the conflict. Labour’s involvement with the Basque children operations showed that it wanted to maintain relatively harmonious relations with Catholicism, but these efforts were unsuccessful. Ultimately, this study uses British Christian reactions to the Spanish Civil War to indicate that Christianity was actually an important aspect of interwar British society.
Download or read book Fellow Travellers of the Right written by Richard Griffiths and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When reviewing the first edition in the Times Literary Supplement, Stephen Koss wrote that Fellow Travellers of the Right 'should be required reading for those who believe that ignorance under any circumstances can deter evil'. One can see why. So topsy-turvy had attitudes become in certain circles that the accusation of being 'unquestionably the biggest war-monger in the world today' was levelled at Churchill, not Hitler! In the author's words 'this book is an attempt to study the various forms of motivation which led to this phenomenon (pro-Nazi sympathies in Britain). It is also an attempt to assess the years in which approval for Nazi Germany became greater or less, and the possible reasons for these changes.' The author goes on to say, 'The pattern of British pro-Nazism is at first sight surprising. After a slow start in the 1933-35 period, it reached a high peak in the years 1936 and 1937, after which it gradually declined until, at the outbreak of the war, it was confined to extremist groups and isolated outcrops of specially motivated approval.' From misguided writers like Edmund Blunden and Henry Williamson to altogether more sinister figures like Lord Londonderry and Sir Arnold Wilson, the roll-call of 'fellow travellers of the Right' is disturbing. Richard Griffiths' acclaimed and much-sought-after book remains the best on the subject.
Download or read book Writers Readers and Reputations written by Philip Waller and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-04-27 with total page 1181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Dickens died in 1870, the same year in which universal elementary education was introduced. During the following generation a mass reading public emerged, and the term 'best-seller' was coined. In new and cheap editions Dickens's stories sold hugely, but these were progressively outstripped in quantity by the likes of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, Charles Garvice and Nat Gould. Who has now heard of these writers? Yet Hall Caine, for one, boasted of having made more money from his pen than any previous author. This book presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain over half a century from 1870 to 1918, teasing out authors' relations with the reading public and tracing how reputations were made and unmade. It surveys readers' habits, the book trade, popular literary magazines and the role of reviewers, and examines the construction of a classical canon by critics concerned about the supposed corruption of popular taste. Certain writers were elevated as national heroes, yet Britain drew its writers from abroad as well as from home. Authors became stars and celebrities, and a literary tourism grew around their haunts. They advertised products from cigarettes to toothpaste; they were fashion-conscious and promoted themsevles via profiles, interviews, and carefully posed photographs; they went on lecture tours to America; and their names were pushed by a new professional breed: the literary agent. Some angled for knighthoods, even peerages, and cut a figure in high society and London clubland. They debated public issues of the day and campaigned on all manner of things from questions of faith and women's rights to censorship and conscription. During the Great War they penned propaganda. Meanwhile the cinema was developing to challenge the supremacy of the written word over the imagination. Authors took to that too, as an opportunity for new adventure. Writers, Readers, and Reputations is richly entertaining and informative, amounting to a collective biography of a generation of writers and their world.
Download or read book United States Navy Medical Newsletter written by and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
