november newsletter

NOVEMBER 2015 NEWSLETTER

The weather was kind to us on Guy Carnival night but it was a great shame that there very few floats after all the hard work that has gone into the preparations by John Wade and his helpers. As we have said many time, we can encourage people to enter but there is no way that we can make anyone to take part. Having said that, it was encouraging to see so many youngsters dressed up and taking part and being Halloween many of the young children watching were dressed up. Chris Strachan and his jazz band gave the Carnival the musical sounds that it needs – the days when we used to get bands taking part are a distant memory. No doubt there will be a lot of discussion within the Club and at the post Carnival Meeting to where the Guy Carnival goes from here. It was good to see so many Rotarians and their ladies on Sunday morning at the money count and thanks go to them and all those who helped on the Saturday night and of course to John Wade and his team for all their hard work, Money raised so far seems to be about £2500 and thanks must go to John and all the Rotarians who turned out on the night.

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On Tuesday 3rd November Norman Cory and I attended Teen Talk Awards Evening at the Pier Hotel and presented the youngsters with their Cookery Workshop Participation Certificates. There were presentations for the HIYA Volunteering Award, the award for the outstanding volunteer at the Hoody Festival. The Community Garden Volunteer Award, the iWill Volunteering Certificate, the Essex Art Award and the Outstanding Achievement Award.  They had two outside functions during the year – a sleep over in the Redoubt Fort and a day’s sailing on the 70ft Essex smack ‘ Pioneer’ and with the money which they had raised made a donation to the Harwich Society and to the Pioneer Trust. It was heartening to hear of all the activities that the youngsters had achieved during the year and thanks must go to Hayley and her team at Teen Talk for all the guidance and support that they have provided. The evening was sponsored by Milsom Hotels.

The sailing fraternity in the Club will probably know all about the Pioneer Trust but it was only after talking to the two gentlemen from the Trust who were at the meeting that I learnt about how it all started. Built in 1864, the 70ft Essex smack Pioneer broke her mooring off  Mersea Island in 1942 and after grounding, lay in the mud, rotting. In her heyday she had been used to dredge for oysters and scallops in the Thames Estuary, off the Dutch coast and down the English Channel. In 1998 the Pioneer Trust was formed (as a charity) and so started the fundraising and planning to restore the vessel to her former glory, and in 1999 she was salvaged from the mud and taken to Great Totham for restoration. Launched at Brightlingsea with great ceremony in 2003 she started her new life as a sail training vessel in 2004, capable of carrying 16 persons. Based at Harkers Yard in Brightlingsea, the Trust has now grown into training apprentices in boat building and is affiliated to Colchester Institute. If anyone would like to find out more, they have a very good website.

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Reception of Visitors

                 30th​​Ray Pryce​​Ron Reeves​​David Rutson

December   7th​​Shane Scott​​John Wade​​Richard Wearmouth

​     14th​​​LADIES  ​CHRISTMAS​       DINNER

​     21st​​​​NO     MEETING

​     28th​​​​NO     MEETING

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Dates for your Diary

MONDAY  30th November​-​James Bond film and Thai supper

Wednesday 2nd  December​-​SENIOR CITIZEN’S XMAS PARTY

MONDAY   7th  December​-​SPECIAL MEETING & CLUB COUNCIL

MONDAY  14th December​-​LADIES CHRISTMAS DINNER

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Edith Piaf

One hundred years ago on 19th December 1915, Edith was born in Belleville, a working class district of Paris and named after Edith Cavell who had been shot by the Germans earlier that year in Belgium. It was said that she was born on the steps of 72 Rue de Belleville although her birth certificate shows that she was actually born in Hopital Tenon, the local hospital and christened Edith Giovanna Gassion Her mother and father were street performers with her father being an acrobat and her mother a singer and when Edith was still quite young her mother  left the family to further her singing career. In her teens she toured with her father and sang with Simone ‘Momone’ Berteaut, who apparently was a half-sister and at other times she stayed with her paternal grandparents who ran a brothel in Normandy and of course was mixing with the prostitutes from an early age. At the age of 17 she gave birth to a baby girl after a brief love affair but the child died when she was 2 years old from meningitis. Her big break came in 1935 when she was spotted while singing on the streets of Paris by a passing night club owner, Louis Leplee, who offered her a contract. At just 4ft 8in tall, Edith was a tiny person and Leplee suggested that she changed her name to La Mome Piaf – ‘the little sparrow’. Performing at his club, Gerny’s, just off the Champ-Elysees she mixed with leading figures from the arts and politics and within a year she had recorded several albums and become one of the highest paid musical stars in France. When France was occupied she performed in Paris nightclubs frequented by German officers and was also invited to make a concert tour in Berlin. After France was liberated she was accused of collaboration, but her secretary, Andree Bigard,  a member of the Resistance, said that she had performed concerts in POW camps and that photographs taken there had been used to help prisoners escape. In the late 40’s, Edith began writing songs and with her ‘ La vie en Rose’ became known internationally but tragedy continued to haunt her – in 1949 the love of her life, the married boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, was killed in a air crash on his way to meet her in New York. She herself was involved in three serious car crashes which left her addicted to morphine and when married to her first husband, Jacques Pills in the mid 50’s she had a drink problem. Her second husband, actor and singer Theo Sarapo, arranged for her body to be secretly taken to Paris from her home in Provence when Edith died of liver cancer in October 1963, aged 47 years. The Archbishop of Paris refused to allow a Mass to be said at her funeral because she had led such a wild life and she was buried at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, following a procession watched by tens of thousands of mourners.

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We are all familiar with the First Gulf War in 1991 after Iraq had invaded Kuwait but I had not realised that we had in fact invaded Iraq in 1941, fifty years previously. As I mentioned in my last newsletter the countries of Iraq, Lebonon . Palestine and Syria had been created and the boundaries drawn up after the defeat of the Otterman Empire in 1918. Britain had maintained a presence and hold over Iraq and Palestine and France over Syria and Lebanon and in 1930 Britain had accorded sovereignty to Iraq, made a Treaty allowing British troops the right to travel through the country, to maintain two airbases in the country and in the event of war ‘ give all aid, including the use of railways, rivers, ports and airfields. Furthermore the Iraq government should provide security and protect the vital pipelines running from the oilfields of Mosel and Kirkuk to Haifa. In 1937 Iraqi army officers had formed a secret association (known as the Golden Square) and considered the British influence and presence as an insulting vestige of imperialism.  Under the treaty, Iraq should have sided with Britain in the event of war but the Iraq government under the pro-Italian Prime Minister Rashid Ali el Gailani . a lawyer and co-founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, conscious of the Axis triumphs in the invasion and occupation of France, decided to side with the Axis powers and depose the 4 year old King and his uncle who served as Regent. Luckily, they were tipped off and were able to make good their escape and were flown out of the country by the British. Churchill was adamant that Britain should occupy Iraq and troops were sent from India to capture Basra – he also wanted Wavell (Commander in Chief, Middle East) to send troops from Egypt but Wavell was against the invasion of Iraq because he thought that it would just fuel Arab nationalism and anyway he was short of troops. Wellington bombers ,fighters and troops were flown in from Egypt and before any help came from Germany the British had occupied Iraq. The Vichy-France commander in Syria and Lebanon decided to allow German planes to land in the country – he was so angry with the British for attacking and sinking the Vichy-French naval ships in Oran harbour- so British forces from Palestine occupied the west part of the country and forces from Iraq the eastern parts. Britain was also having trouble in Palestine with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was preaching anti-British and anti-Jewish venom and  Palestinian Arabs dreamed of the day when Italy and Germany would eject Britain from the area, and with them the Jews. In 1940 Palestine was in a state of rebellion and it took 20,000 British troops to keep order between the Muslim extremists (who had turned much of Jerusalem into a no-go area) and the Jewish militants like Moshe Dayan, trained by Captain Orde Wingate, who was later to serve with great success behind enemy lines in Burma in command of the Chindits.

Perhaps Wavell had been right to oppose the invasion of Iraq and instead try to get Turkey to mediate and at the same time threaten to invade. By invading Britain had secured the short term objection of preserving its political base and of preventing the Axis powers of occupying the area but by the invasion and the sponsoring the Zionist counter-terror groups, exiling the Grand Mufti and high handed treatment of the young King Farouk in Egypt, Britain fanned the flames of Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalism.

This is just a short resume of the situation in the Middle East during the early part of the war and as we all know the area has been in the news ‘on and off’ since then and now today peace in the Middle East seems further away than ever.

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After mentioning Orde Wingate in the last article I decided that I needed to find out more about this interesting and controversial man. Born in Kumaon, India on 26th February 1903 to a military family who were Plymouth Brethren , young Orde returned to England when he was two, when his father retired from the Army. His education was at Charterhouse School as a day boy before being accepted at the age of 18 by the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, the Royal Artillery’s officers training school. He received his commission in 1923 and because of his prowess in riding he was posted to the Military School of Equitation, where he excelled but came rather unpopular due to his rebellious nature. His father’s cousin, an Army man, had been Governor-General of the Sudan and High Commissioner in Egypt and had a considerable influence over young Orde, which led him to take a course in Arabic and in 1928 transferred to the Sudan Defence Corp. Their main work was combating slave traders and ivory poachers and it was here that he developed his tactics of ambush. never happier than being in the bush with his men. On his way back to England by ship he met his future wife Lorna, then a 16 year old, and married her two years later. In 1936, now with the rank of Captain, he was sent to the British mandate of Palestine and became politically involved with a number of Zionist leaders and formed and trained small groups to combat the Arab revolt – he was admired by leaders Zvi Brenner and Moshe Dayan and they said he had ‘taught them all they knew’. While on leave in the UK, his superiors thought that he was so deeply involved with the Zionists that he was compromising his position as an intelligence officer and so. after a spell in the UK, he was posted to Egypt before being sent down to Ethiopia to organise behind the lines operations against the Italian invaders. With some of his Zionist friends from Palestine and the local resistance fighters they harassed the Italian forts and supply lines and his force of 1,700 men (named the Gideon Force after the biblical judge, who defeated a large force with a tiny band of men) took the surrender of 20,000 Italians at the end of the campaign on 4th June 1941. During the campaign he had asked the British authorities to pay his men back pay and to award them decorations but this fell on deaf ears and the Gideon force was disbanded and Wingate had to leave Ethiopia before he could say goodbye to Emperor Salassie, and return to England. He wrote a damning report about his commanders, fellow officers, government officials and many others, which made him more unpopular. Shortly afterwards he contacted malaria and rather go to the Army doctor and give the authorities another cause to undermine him, he choose to go to a local doctor who prescribed the drug Atabrine which, if taken in high dosages brings on depression, which added to his already depression from his Ethiopian experience. He tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the throat and only survived through the prompt action of a fellow officer. After recuperating, his political supporters approached Churchill and through Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India,  who contacted Wavell, now Commander-in-Chief in India, to ask if he could use Wingate in the Far East. On arrival in Rangoon he was promoted to Colonel by Wavell and was ordered to organise guerrilla operations behind Japanese lines in Burma but before this could be put in to operation the Japanese quickly overran Burma. Back in India, Wingate began to promote his ideas for long-range penetration  units and Wavell was so taken with this that he gave Wingate the Indian 77th Infantry Brigade which later became The Chindits (apparently a corrupted version of the name of a mythical Burmese lion, the chinthe). After a few setbacks and the delayed British offensive back in to Burma, Wavell gave permission to Wingate to proceed with Operation Longcloth and on 12th February the Chindits, in eight separate columns, crossed the Chindwin river , destroyed  one of the main railways in Burma and pushed on across the Irrawaddy, only to find the area crisscrossed by many roads which made it difficult to evade the Japanese who were finding all their supply drops. It was decided by HQ on 22nd March 1943 to order Wingate to return to India by the same route as they went into Burma but being hunted by three Japanese divisions they were eventually trapped inside a bend on the Shweli river. Unable to cross the river in force it was decided to split up and each group to make their way back ‘home’ , and it was late spring when they returned in groups ranging from individuals to whole columns of men, some making their way through China. The force had lost a third of their men and it made the Japanese realise that the country was not so impassable as they had thought and the British questioned the overall value of the Chindits. But back in the UK their success went down well after all the defeats and Churchill invited Wingate and his wife to join him to the Quebec Conference, where Wingate explained his ideas of deep penetration warfare to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, explaining that with improved  communications and aircraft , bases could be established deep into enemy territory. They were very impressed and approval was given for the go ahead and Wingate was promoted to acting major-general and returned to Burma  with the knowledge that he had a direct line to Churchill which did not go down too well with the other commanders. After a few more setbacks because of shortage of aircraft it was decided to use gliders forlanding the Chindits and the operation,( Code name Operation Thursday) went ahead to establish bases with airfields behind Japanese lines. His fellow commanders were not too happy because he was taking troops that they said that they needed for the invasion of Burma and again he became very unpopular. They had picked three landings sites,  Piccadilly, Broadway and Chowringhee and in the end it was decided to use Broadway and after a few gliders crashed on route or trying to land, the base was successfully established and an airstrip was built and C-47 transport planes flew in with supplies. The Japanese had launched an attack on India about the same time and the Chindits were in place in their three bases in Burma to attack the Japanese supply lines diverting troops from the front line. It has been argued that the Chindits did not have an enormous effect on the war in Burma considering the number of troops and aircraft involved, but the Japanese commander Mutaguchi  Renya said after the war that Operation Thursday had tied down the 53rd Division and parts of the 15th Division when an extra Division could have turned the Battle of Kohima to success for the Japanese Army – like so many things in life and war, we shall never know if the outcome would have been different without the Chindits. On 24th March 1944, Wingate flew out of Imphal on a USAAF B-25 Mitchell bomber to inspect the three Chindit-held bases in occupied Burma, and on his return to India the plane crashed into jungle covered hills and he was killed, as were the other nine people onboard. Over the years there have been questions asked why the plane crashed – was it an accident or something more sinister. We shall never know. The dead were buried in a common grave near to the crash site at Manipur, NW India  and as the bodies could not be identified and seven of the crew were American ,the bodies were exhumed in 1947 and buried at Imphal and yet again exhumed in 1950 with permission from all governments and families and flown to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia for reburial. Wingate is commemorated in several parts of the World – in Israel a square in Jerusalem is named after him as is the Yemin Orde youth village near Haifa and the National Centre for Physical Education and Sport is named the Wingate Institute. A Jewish football team formed in London 1946, Wingate F C bears his name. A memorial to Wingate and the Chindits stands on the Victoria Embarkment , with the names of the units that were involved as well as the four men awarded the VC. In Addis Ababa the General Wingate School commemorates Orde’s contribution, together with the Gideon Force, in liberating Ethiopia from the Italians in 1941. As I have said before, a very complex and controversial man, always being moved on for over stepping the mark, for criticizing and perhaps being better than his superiors in some cases, of not acting like a British stereo-type officer and often to be seen with a string of onions and garlic around his neck – he maintained that snacking on these kept him free of mosquitoes!