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Passing of Time - living history
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Message 1.Â
Posted by GrandFalconRailroad (U14802912) on Tuesday, 8th November 2011
I know this isn't a revelation as such but it's weird to think that by the end of this year/part way through 2012 there will be in theory no one born of the British rule of India working in the UK (based on the retirement age of 65) - another generation of people that experienced something that will never happen again (I mean a small country like Britain doing so much to rule over so much) into the autumn's of their lives.
And to think in another 10 years or so none of the children of the fag end of Afican Empire will be under 65.
b 1939 = 72 Y/O
A 18 year old in 1939 being drafted to fight in WW2 will this year be 90 Y/O.
A post that makes me feel young in many respects but shows how much time that has past also. -
Message 2
Posted by Thomas (U14985443) on Tuesday, 8th November 2011
(I mean a small country like Britain doing so much to rule over so much)Â
This sentence, although I suppose you´ve meant it that way "... doing so much to rule over so many", left me to think about all what the former British Empire meant.
I was just thinking about the Gurkhas, as one instance in the meaning of doing so much and the way they were treated after service by the British government. I´m not going to extent this example, just to point out to what those "many" were doing as well so much towards and for Britain. Britain hasn´t been always that gracious towards them as they might had deserved it in regards of their service. Just to connect this to the people who fought for Britain in WWII and the conflicts afterwards and their age of retirement.
As we´ve noticed in recent years that there are some efforts taken up to conservate the stories of those who lived the history of the past century, one might find that it´s hard to get the balance between the good and the wrong doing within the British Empire and Britains policies domestic and foreign (including the Commonwealth of Nations). I´d agree with you that to achieve something like that, would be important, at least imo.
A post that makes me feel young in many respects but shows how much time that has past also.Â
Yes, and to take the time for some historical reflections as well in the light of Remembrance Day approaching. -
Message 3
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 8th November 2011
GrandFalconRailroad
I think that of even greater significance is the fact that we must hope that there will never be a generation like the "Sixties Generation" which was in many ways the first and only truly global one. A ring of new-birth and Renaissance, hope and resurgence that gave older "Lost Generations" some reason to go on.
On Sunday I was phoned by a student from my old university, who was fund raising for its Centenary (the call centre being one of the ways that she earns the money she needs to pay her University Fees).. We talked about the University experience then and now, and she seemed to think that we had much more fun back in the Sixties.
Perhaps we did. But as in the Richards-Jagger song we were part of a global generation who had spent our childhood seeing our mothers "standing in the shadow".. I pointed out that my Hall of Residence was located just the country side of Brunel's suspension bridge and this meant that at least four times a day I was presented with the easiest possible suicide, just straddling over the waist-high barrier and floating down the 2-300 feet... Getting all the way across the bridge was an act of faith and an expression of a determination to make a personal and collective life worth living.
And there were such young people all around the world. Mark Knopler "If we can't find a way to be one world in harmony- can't get no antidote for the blues". Gathering and sharing, and pooling our energies and strengths.
Subsequently the world has fallen apart- held and locked firmly-distanced by money, capital and its mechanisms.
The other day I heard one of the researchers working on the new project to excavate the tunnels under "The Somme" saying that these days it was possible to see and work out what happened in a "grannular" way. By which he meant that they would work out what happened to each combatant individually. But that is nonsense. People were not fighting on the Somme as individuals but as part of a massed humanity that had been swept by a historical vortex of change into that great catastrophe that was only exceeded by the Second World War.
United we stand. Divided we fall.
Cass -
Message 4
Posted by GrandFalconRailroad (U14802912) on Wednesday, 9th November 2011
"I think that of even greater significance is the fact that we must hope that there will never be a generation like the "Sixties Generation" which was in many ways the first and only truly global one."
Yet in the strictly 20 years a generation sense it was shaped by the random chance that a lot of 18-21y/o's came back from "the war" slept about a bit and had kids out of sequence. Those kids then had kids in late 60's/very early-70's and the generational gap has been skewed ever since.
To think also that history has been changed by the fact a proportion of earlier generations would have expired by "the 5 giants"...it's allowed history to live on at least 15-20 years longer.
John Simpson put it elequently when he talked of which veterans were alive in his youth - even some Boer War veterans....that's to say people from a different century let alone a different decade. -
Message 5
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 9th November 2011
GrandFalconRailroad
Of course the Age of Catastrophe (1914-45) left those consequences and other challenges. There was no getting away from being "Children of the Ashes" and inheritors of a world that had endured unprecedented disruption and dislocation. In the early Fifties OXFAM was still largely concerned with trying to help the millions of refugees across Europe.
And family life was often disfunctional as a result. This certainly seems to have been the case with for example John Lennon.. And yet there are clear signs that Lennon, and almost certainly Paul Macartney , experienced that "nunc dimitis" dynamic. "Lord now let thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen the salvation". It is no wonder that he ended up with something of Jesus fixation..
Perhaps it did not happen to everybody.
"How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?"- the Beatles sang in "Baby you're a rich man".. During the war time and the immediate post-war a feeling of coming through, if not Hell itself, at least "Darkest Hours" fostered in many a spirit of unity. And it seems to me looking back that a child like me (born in 1944) was seen as a forward projection by the whole community, the new growth for a new society. When our beautiful son was born, his paternal grandmother would reminisce that total strangers, would stop her out shopping to look at such a beautiful baby. I grew up accustomed to the "Heaven's Smile" of strangers.
And it seems likely that I learned to respond quite early- perhaps like so many Sixties musicians.. Another of my mother's reminiscences told of a long bus trip up into the Cotswolds to visit my grandparents when I entertained the whole bus with endless renditions of "Does eat oats etc".. Sounds terribly irritating now. But in the 1940's people did not have wall to wall mass-entertainment and it was common for other boys to stop me in the street as a was cycling along and ask me to sing them a song.
By the Sixties, and perhaps even more since, children were no longer seen as such a source of joy and optimism for the whole community. Marrying in 1968 we had to discuss carefully whether it was fair to bring children into this world with all its ongoing problems, and socially responsible in terms of the world population etc ..
Of course we had the pill, and with it the "right to choose"- but therefore the reality of having children ask us "why", which had not happened in previous ages.
Cass -
Message 6
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Wednesday, 9th November 2011
John Simpson put it elequently when he talked of which veterans were alive in his youth - even some Boer War veterans....that's to say people from a different century let alone a different decade.Â
I'm old enuff to have already been an adult when the last Boer War veteran died in the early 1990s. It doesn't seem like that long ago really. -
Message 7
Posted by GrandFalconRailroad (U14802912) on Wednesday, 9th November 2011
I suppose there'd be the odd one that lived until 100 - so born in what? 1889? I think that scary but its when you see Falkland vets and they are old guys now - many of them at the end of their 25 years in service and have been out of uniform as long as their period of service.....even when you see Desert Storm footage - old hat....some of that armed forces facial hair - Desert Storm? More like Groovy Storm LOL
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Message 8
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Friday, 11th November 2011
The last known Boer War veteran was George Ives who was born in 1881 and died in 1993 aged 111.
Good point GrandFalconRailroad re the Falklands vets and the years since their service. It's remarkable to think that the Falklands War of 1982 is now closer in time to the end of the Korean War in 1953 than it is to us living in the penultimate month of 2011. Even more remarkable is the thought that George Ives would have been a sprightly 68-year-old when the Korean War broke out in 1950 and younger than 70-year-old serving US officer General Douglas MacArthur. -
Message 9
Posted by GrandFalconRailroad (U14802912) on Monday, 14th November 2011
111 is amazing given the fact he'd have went thru at least 1 war (2nd Boer) and then lived thru 2 world wars and the attendant hisotry e.g. Spanish influenza, smallpox, rabies, eggs and bacon every morning for a strong lad.....scary as well when you look at Vietnam vets that had done end of WW2, Korea and went back to bomb the bejesus out of Hanoi....Crazy!
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Message 10
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Tuesday, 15th November 2011
And to think in another 10 years or so none of the children of the fag end of Afican Empire will be under 65.Â
It's also worth noting that when many of the African territories achieved independence from the European empires in the 1960s in some of those territories there were elders who would have been children when the European imperialists first arrived. Take Tanganyika, for example, which became independent from the UK in 1961. An 80-year-old in 1961 would have easily remembered life as a child before the arrival of the Germans in 1891.
There was an interesting thread on historical perspective a while back:
Fascinating topic. -
Message 11
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 15th November 2011
Is it not the case that Jomo Kenyatta's life more or less spanned the whole period of British Kenya?
Cass -
Message 12
Posted by GrandFalconRailroad (U14802912) on Tuesday, 15th November 2011
In "The Dark Valley", the author note Clemenceau's comments that he himself had known men that had seen Napoleon with their own eyes - Clemenceau only died in the 1920's so in effect his associations didn't just span a decade or two but another century and in effect a total other world.....
When the Queen sits down on an evening and looks back at the world she knew as say a 10-11 year old girl I wonder what she thinks...a fascinating conversation. Surely no monarch other than perhaps the World War monarchs, King William III and perhaps Charles II have seen so much change in their lifetimes - although George III and Victoria I have seen a fair bit - I'nm being quite broad based as at work so feel free to rip apart. -
Message 13
Posted by Vizzer aka U_numbers (U2011621) on Wednesday, 16th November 2011
Is it not the case that Jomo Kenyatta's life more or less spanned the whole period of British Kenya?Â
Pretty much so. He was born only about 4 years after the establishment of the British East Africa Protectorate in the 1890s (although the British chartered Imperial East Africa Company had been active in Kenya for several years prior to that) and he lived until 1978 more than 14 years after the end of UK rule.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, is The Gambia which was linked to the Crown of England from 1588 and became a British overseas territory after 1707 (later confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1783) until independence from the UK in 1965 and then becoming a republic in 1970. In other words The Gambia was politically linked with England for over 375 years - longer, that is, than even Scotland has been politically linked with England.
Even that imperial longevity, however, is put in the shade by the history of Portuguese Guinea which remained an overseas territory of Portugal from 1446 through to 1974 - a staggering 528 years. -
Message 14
Posted by GrandFalconRailroad (U14802912) on Wednesday, 16th November 2011
Is it not the case that Jomo Kenyatta's life more or less spanned the whole period of British Kenya?Â
Pretty much so. He was born only about 4 years after the establishment of the British East Africa Protectorate in the 1890s (although the British chartered Imperial East Africa Company had been active in Kenya for several years prior to that) and he lived until 1978 more than 14 years after the end of UK rule.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, is The Gambia which was linked to the Crown of England from 1588 and became a British overseas territory after 1707 (later confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1783) until independence from the UK in 1965 and then becoming a republic in 1970. In other words The Gambia was politically linked with England for over 375 years - longer, that is, than even Scotland has been politically linked with England.
Even that imperial longevity, however, is put in the shade by the history of Portuguese Guinea which remained an overseas territory of Portugal from 1446 through to 1974 - a staggering 528 years. Thanks for that scary, scary fact re: Portugese Guinea - Time: it's crushing in it's impact and when you become aware of it in terms of events (and technology).
1776 - American War of Independance - fought with the odd cannon, flintlock rifles, a sturdy bayonet and communications are next to unknown in the modern sense of warfare and the rules of conflict have not yet been written.
1976 - the famous picture of the then McDonnell Douglas F15 Eagle being flown decked out in AWoI livery over the Gateway to the West in St Louis.
200 years from the ability to kill at 100 yards maximum to being able to kill at 1500mph, 70 miles apart, 45,000 feet and talking to someone many miles away. Progress. -
Message 15
Posted by Triceratops (U3420301) on Friday, 18th November 2011
There was an interesting thread on historical perspective a while back
Frank Buckles has died since previous thread.
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