sandr020

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In Sept 1942, a lone plane dropped three bombs on Petworth in Sussex , one of them falling on a boys’ school. The bomber killed 29 school boys, a headmaster and schoolmistress in this daylight raid. The town was de­vastated so immediate protests were organised to the Lord Lieut of Sussex, the House of Commons and church author­ities. Why am I discussing Petworth? Kingdom House was a fine C17th grey stone mansion situated in a hamlet named River, consisting of 18 cottages and a public bouse. Near Petworth, one of the most picturesque parts of Sussex, this property was owned by barrister and fascist sympathiser WG Barlow . A church at Kingdom House was set up by a group styl­ing itself the Legion of Christian Reformers/LCR and dedicated to the worship of Adolf Hitler. During the war Barlow was detained under Regulation 18B of the Defence General Regulations 1939 , which enabled the internment of enemy aliens and political dissenters. Most members of the LCR were former 18B de...

We understand the very close connection among the three principal monarchs of the early C20th. 1.  British King George V and Russian Tsar Nicholas II ’s mothers, the princesses Alexandra and Dagmar, were sisters, the daughters of King Christian of Denmark and his wife Queen Louise. The king and tsar were thus first cousins. 2.  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and King George were first cousins (via Wilhelm’s mother and George’s father), while Wilhelm and Nicholas were third cousins. It was common for European royalty to promote each other into the other’s defence forces.  In the photo below, Tsar Nicholas II was in the uniform of the German Westphalian Hussars and King George V was in the uniform of the German Rhenish Cavalry . King George V was appointed Colonel-in-Chief of the German regiment in Jan 1902 and served in this role until the two countries declared war in 1914. If their grandmother Queen Victoria had still been alive, said the Kaiser, she would never have ...

Over the years in this blog, I have tried to show how Australia’s most creative and productive citizens were once terrified refugees and migrants, forced out of their own countries and waiting to be accepted by Australian society eg Judy Cassab: from Hungary ,  Scottish migrants ,  the Evian Conference of 1938,   Holocaust survivors from Poland ,   child deportees from Britain,  recent boat people , the Dunera Boys ,  Nicholas Winton’s train loads of children and Viennese refugee Richard Goldner . Australia would have been a very bland, conservative country, if it was not for the large minority of Australian citizens in every generation who were not born here (26%). My year at school would have had five children in it, rather than the 120 I met in 1953. Jane McAdam is law professor and director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at NSW University. McAdam and Fiona Chong’s new book Refugees: Why See...

50,000 Jews lived in Kishinev (now Ukraine) in 1900, 46% of the total population. Kishinev was the 5th largest Jewish city in the Russian Empire city after Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz and Vilna. Thanks to the book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Steven Zipperstein, 2018) and to my grandfather. Rumours of attacks surfaced before Easter each year in Kishinev. Acc­usations of ritual murder in Pavel Krushevan ’s anti-Semitic newspaper, Bessarabets , remained ugly; there were rumours of menacing anti-Jewish meetings held in the back room of a Kishinev tavern, and leaflets calling for the beating of Jews were left in bars and cheap restaurants. By then Bessarabets had launched a semi-secret, anti-Semitic soc­iety. Against this backdrop, Jewish anxieties were heightened. Jewish shop owners took home bank records, receipts and financial doc­u­ments for safekeeping. Employees were told that shops could stay shut after the Passover festival. Heartbroken fathers claimed their children'...

David Goldblatt (1930-2018) was born in South Africa , the grandson of Lithuanian refugees who fled their homeland in 1893. Goldblatt worked in his father's men's wear shop and graduated from the Uni­versity of the Witwatersrand with a commerce degree. He lived in Johannesburg where he began photographing in 1948 and documenting devel­op­ments in Apartheid South Africa. Goldblatt grew up during the rise of the National Party. When the Party came to power in 1948, the Nationals began implementing Apartheid policies that marginalised non-white South Africans. In this difficult political environment, young Goldblatt dev­eloped an interest in photography-focused magazines like Life  and wanted to become a magazine photographer. Then, when the African National Congress became active in their struggle against Apart­heid, the editor of Picture Post asked him to photograph ANC meetings. Young men with dompas the identity document that every black South African had to carry, 1972. A ...