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Avery Brundage: president of the American Olympic Committee

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Avery Brundage (1887-1975) grad­uated civil engineering from the University of Ill­in­ois in 1909. His links to anti-Semitism were first seen in his university days, where he was pres­id­ent of a fraternity chapter who would accept any Aryan male who did not have a Jewish parent. Brundage was a fine athlete who won the American National dec­athlon three times. He competed in the 1912 Summer Olymp­ics in Stockholm , where he represented the USA in both pentath­l­on and decathlon, but did not win any medals. He began to involve himself in sports administration, event­ually at the American Olympic Committee level. In 1928, Brundage was elected AOC president. Many sports administrators disliked women’s involvement at the top level. So the anti-woman movement was not pleased when, in July 1932, American athlete Babe Didrikson did brilliantly to win two Olympic gold medals in javelin and 80m hurdles. Didrikson was charged with “professionalism” because she had appeared in an advertisement ...
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Endell St Military Hospital, London - run by women during WW1

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WW1 hospitals were tough, partially because the conditions in which the medical staff had to tend to the terrible injuries were too crowded and poorly equipped. But necessity was the mother of invention; the wounds inflicted on millions of soldiers drove the search for new medical tech­niqu­es. Technological innovations had a massive impact on survival rates. The Thomas splint, for example, secured a broken leg. In 1914, 80% of all soldiers with a broken femur died. By 1916, 80% of such soldiers survived. The British Army began the routine use of blood transfusion in treating wounded soldiers, where blood was transferred directly from one person to another. That was until a US Army Dr Captain Robertson realised the need to stockpile blood; he established the first blood bank on the Western Front in 1917, using sodium citrate to prevent coagulation. Blood was kept on ice for up to 28 days and then transported to casualty clearing stat­ions for use in life-saving surgery. But professi...
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Australian soldiers in WW1 with their dogs etc

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Animals made an important contribution to Australia’s mil­itary history during WW1. Homing pigeons were used as a comm­unication tool: they were silent, difficult to intercept and not greatly affected by gas or noise. They could carry messages over long distances, from the Front Line back to Britain [and in turn, the Germans trained hawks to kill any carrier pigeons they saw]. Early in WWI, cavalry horses were considered essential offensive elements of a military force. But over the course of the war, horses’ vulnerab­il­ity to modern machine gun and artillery fire reduced their ability on the battlefield. Thereafter they were mainly used for logistical support as better suited than mechanised vehicles to travelling though deep mud and over rough terrain. Light draught horses were used to pull light artil­l­ery, wagons and ambulances and to carry supplies and munit­ions. Heavy draught horses of a sturdier type were teamed together to pull the larger artillery pieces. Don­k­eys, camel...
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"The Alfred Munnings: War Artist 1918" exhibition, Britain then Canada

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I wanted to focus on WW1 anniversary exhibitions in this blog before the end of 2018. So today we will examine Canadian soldiers and horses in Europe, and next post we will examine animals in the Australian army camps in Europe. From a young age  Alfred Munnings  (1878-1959) loved drawing. His art was further developed through his apprenticeship as a lith­og­rapher in Norwich and by attending night classes at Norwich School of Art. By the time Munnings set up his first studio in Mendham, Suffolk in the late 1890s, he had already exhibited at London’s Royal Academy. Munnings travelled extensively to enhance his knowledge of art and techniques. He visited continental galleries, studied in Paris and was based in Cornwall with other well-known artists like Laura and Harold Knight. Exhibition catalogue Alfred Munnings: War Artist, 1918 Now in the National Army Museum in Chelsea Thanks to the Canadian War Museum for the following details. It was WW1 that was the making of him ...
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1905 - in art, science, films, Canadian confederation, Bengal partition and Russian revolution

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I normally think of the Edwardian era as time of culture, literature, science, medicine and peace. But 1905 began with a series of strikes and demonstrations in the Russian streets . In Jan a protest march in St Pet­ersburg was led by a workers’ organ­isation, the Assembly of Russian Factory and Plant Workers . c200,000 mar­chers moved to the Wint­er Palace to present pet­itions to the Tsar, but soon 1,000 protest­ors lay shot dead that Bloody Sunday. Anger spread throughout Russia with more strikes and mar­ches. In March the universities were shut down by radicals. In July, sailors on the battleship Potemkin mutinied in Odessa and avoided death only when the firing squad seized the ship instead. Odessa’s citizens turned out to support the sail­ors and many were massacred on the steps leading to the wharf. Albert Einstein 1905 In St Petersburg Leon Trotsky set up a Soviet Workers’ Council to organise opposition to the Tsar. But Trotsky and his supp­or­ters were soon imprisoned. A...
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150 years celebrating St Pancras railway station, London

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I love travelling on trains and ships, but not so much on planes.   St Pancras is a C19th station that provides regional, inter-city, continental services to London. It is London’s second busiest railway station, the terminus for Eurostar trains arriving from Europe. But who was St Pancras? A short Latin account of his martyrdom suggested that Pancras was born to a wealthy Christian family in Phrygia (Turkey). After the death of his par­ents, he moved to Rome with his guardian. There they both gave shelter to Christians persecuted by the Emperor Dioc­letian (284-305 AD). When the Emperor heard of Pancras’ eff­orts to save Christians, he im­mediately summoned him. He tried to dissuade the 14 year old him from Christianity but Pancras was adamant. Enraged, the Emperor ordered Pancras' immediate beheading and burial in Rome c287CE. What made Saint Pancras' cult so potent were the mir­acles assoc­iated with his relics. No wonder that Pancras’ relics were soon distributed to many...
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How close was Salvador Dali to Sigmund Freud?

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The main founder of the Surrealist movement and writer of the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 was André Breton (1896-1966). According to Breton in 1924, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud  (1856-1939) “very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this consider­able portion of psychic act­ivity”. Also Breton credited Freud’s ideas with discovering “a current of opinion that was finally forming and that the imagin­ation is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights”. So André Breton and Max Ernst were very knowledgeable about Freud's beliefs. They saw that Surrealism was the most popular modern art form because it was a special, dogmatic and theoretical art that revealed human emotional truths. The theory it illustrated, i.e Freud's, was true as well. Freud's conception of the unconscious and the importance of dreams en­c­ouraged painters, sculptors and writers to pay attention to thei...
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