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posted 18-03-2010 10:34
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Two veterans of a 1936 street battle against fascists
Both are now in their '90s. Fascinating slice of history.
The best piece of advice I can ever give a young person (apart from telling them not to smoke) is to listen to old people's stories. Some might be boring, but soon it'll be too late to hear eyewitesses to a bygone age speak about it.
My grandmother, who was born in 1895, used to tell me stories about growing up and how she worked in a department store before marrying her naval officer fiancée after WW1. I didn't really understand everything, but I remember so much of what she told me. I don't think you get many blacksmiths storming into a classroom to pin the teacher who hit his son against the wall and slapping him a few.
Anyway, I hail Max Levitas ("I’d sooner fight Labour than the bloody Tories") and Alice Hitchen ("There were so many of us that you couldn’t move. I can remember the elation in the crowd that so many people were there.")
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posted 18-03-2010 11:01
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I understand my paternal grandmother went down that bloody school and gave the teacher a clip for making my cuddywifter dad write with his, er, right.
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posted 18-03-2010 11:14
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More generally on the talking to the old folks point, when my maternal grandmother was alive her house was very much the meeting place for extended family, which has pretty much gone now. Which is a shame. I used to love hearing aunts & uncles talking about the old days, old Middlesbrough, adventures in the navy and so on.
I remember doing a project on WW1 for my history GCSE and although my gran didn’t have much to add as such, she did borrow for me from a similarly aged friend, a book from 1919 or so of photographs detailing the course of the war, with, and I can still see the picture now, inter alia a shot of some Serb POWs who had been hung by Hapsburg troops. The same friend also passed to me a sword & scabbard her late husband had took off an Uhlan (sp?) in a POW camp which I took to school to show off. Again, I can still see Lee Meredith swinging it round his head.
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posted 18-03-2010 13:30
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Thought this was going to be England fans' response to crime fears in South Africa.
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posted 18-03-2010 17:22
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Anyone joining us in Bolton on Saturday, then?
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posted 18-03-2010 17:31
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No, but that reminds me...
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posted 18-03-2010 18:06
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The Battle of Cable Street is my favourite London thing, ever. I was actually staying there the other weekend chez a sometime-OTFer...
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posted 22-03-2010 07:54
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No hype, and I've not been active for all that time, but in more than 30 years of going on demos, I've not seen (in the flesh) the police behave as badly as they did on Saturday.
Whereas the lies they have been telling since are par for the course. The police, it seems, came under vicious attacks from left-wing extremists. These vicious attacks resulted in two coppers being injured. One sprained a finger, and one got bitten by his own dog. Maybe Alsatians aren't so bad after all.
The 50+ arrests the police had to make, defending themselves against these vicious attacks, have as far as I'm aware resulted in precisely zero actual charges of violence.
Expose has a good report on the day.
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posted 22-03-2010 09:02
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Nice thread Gman, I couldn't agree more. My Granny tells stories of living in an Ayrshire mining village during the General Strike of 1926 and subsequent local strikes that seem barely believable now. Yet these events are seared into her mind like they happened yesterday rather than when she was a schoolgirl. Most people if they heard them now would probably think that couldn't happen today, the older I get the less sure of that I am.
As an aside I once met a man who claimed to have worked for Al Capone in Chigaco. His stories were wonderful and though I have no idea if he was actually telling the truth but I have always treasured them.
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posted 22-03-2010 10:03
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sw2boro wrote:
I understand my paternal grandmother went down that bloody school and gave the teacher a clip for making my cuddywifter dad write with his, er, right
Same thing happened at my primary school. My Dad arrived and was all set for a punch up with the headteacher, a British-hating Boer called Thom. Luckily, they both backed off as Thom had an impressive recent CV in the Rhodesian Army (he wasn't too keen on blacks either). The row had been simmering for a while- Thom had previously asked me to carry a tricolor in a school parade.
The Nazi roadshow hits Dudley on 4 April. Anyone coming to demonstrate against?
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posted 22-03-2010 12:05
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I shall be there.
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posted 22-03-2010 12:50
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On listening to the old folks, I did Russian GCSE at 6th form, many moons ago now, and was taught by a Polish lady (she may actually have been ethnically Ukrainian – she certainly spoke Ukrainian too) who lived in the chunk that the Soviets gobbled up in 1939 and was deported to Karelia along with the rest of her town, apparently they were dumped in a forest with a few log cabins and left to get on with it. She always used to go on about these giant mushrooms that grew there. Her late husband had been on of those Polish johnnies who flew with the RAF. I mean, I listened to her, but I wish I’d listened a bit more.
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