Dunkirk Ace – the first Spitfire pilot to win his spurs

/in /by

Stanford TuckBob Stanford Tuck was every inch the fighter pilot as if ordered up from Central Casting; brave, good-looking, a crack shot and a superb aviator. The London boy who did not excel at school and nearly made the Merchant Navy his career, was to become the first Spitfire Ace in May 1940 in the skies above northern France.

Tuck combined excellent flying skills with being a superb shot. He had grown up with shotguns and game shooting, and practiced with clays regularly throughout his service career with Fighter Command. When moved to the Hurricane-equipped No 257 Squadron, he set up a clay pigeon shoot at the squadron dispersal at RAF Coltishall. But that was six months after Dunkirk.

In May 1940, Tuck was transferred from No 65 Squadron at RAF Duxford to No 92 Squadron at RAF Croydon in Kent. During his two years at Duxford, he had proved his fighting and leadership skills making him an ideal choice for the junior flight commander slot.

Paul Beaver - history hub planesAs the Battle of France hotted-up and the Allied armies were thrown back towards the North Sea and Channel coasts, the Commander-in-Chief of RAF Fighter Command released Spitfires to operate over the Continent. Tuck led a section of Spitfires to escort Winston Churchill in one of his attempts to rally the forlorn French government in Paris; it was the first time that Spitfire fighters – as opposed to the still secret high altitude photo-reconnaissance variants – had ‘overnighted’ overseas.

Tuck’s big chance to demonstrate his training in a dogfight came on 23 May, somewhere in the vicinity of Dunkirk, which was not yet the centre of that great military evacuation for which the seaport is now famous, but it was still the centre of aerial action. The Luftwaffe was attempting to deny reinforcements to the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force and the Channel ports were prime targets.

Tuck clay-pigeon shooting (RAFM)On 23 May, British ground forces were ordered to evacuate Arras, the main communications hub in that part of France. The British commander, General the Lord Gort wanted to concentrate his forces to protect the ports of embarkation such as Boulogne which was already under assault from the German Second Panzer Division. It was against this background that standing patrols were launched from airfields in Kent and Surrey to interdict the Luftwaffe operations then supporting the Panzer assault.

Tuck opened his score with three conclusive and witnessed victories against the Luftwaffe with three Messerschmitt Bf 109s downed on 23rd May followed by two Dornier bombers the next day.

The Spitfire had first met the German fighter some 10 days before so both sides were still feeling their way in the development of fighter tactics. Unlike, Fighter Command, however, many German pilots had the advantage of previous service the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War. That lack of experience did not seem to affect Tuck’s fighting spirit.

Tuck’s career literally took off. Not only was he the first Spitfire ace but he had rapidly moved up the promotion ladder within No 92 Squadron, taking over as the senior flight commander and then assuming command when Squadron Leader  Phillip Sanders  was reported missing. Tuck was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on 11 June.

Fighter Command’s commander-in-chief, Air Chief Marshal Dowding saw Tuck’s potential and promoted him to acting Squadron Leader and gave him a Hurricane squadron at RAF Coltishall in Norfolk to command. Despite being shot down and imprisoned in German-occupied Poland, Tuck finished the war with 27 enemy aircraft destroyed. After a brief spell in the post-war Royal Air Force, he left the service and became a mushroom farmer.

Paul Beaver in Spitfire sep14Paul Beaver is an aviation historian and pilot who will be speaking on “Dunkirk – the misunderstood triumph of Air Power” at the Chalke Valley History Festival on Sunday, 28th June 2015. His latest book, “Spitfire People”, the result of a talk at Chalke Valley last year, goes on sale from 18th June.

The Olden Days: The Power Of The Past In Britain

/in , /by

Audio from Ian Hislop’s talk at Chalke Valley History Festival on 26th June 2014

Journalist, satirist, comedian and broadcaster Ian Hislop looks at the British capacity to dwell on imagined golden eras in British history. Based on his documentary series for BBC2, he explores the ways in which that national emotional attachment to a romanticised past is used by artists, writers and politicians. Ranging from Dark Age heroism to Victorian Medievalism to 20th century Pastoralism, it will be a backward look at the nature of looking backwards.

Ian HislopIan Hislop is returning to the Festival this year to talk about ‘The Satirical Magazine and the History of Private Eye’ on Saturday, 27 June. He will be discussing the importance of satire, both in the past and present, and the story behind Private Eye, from its beginnings to its ongoing role in ensuring the absurdities and pomposity in life continue to be exposed…

Elizabeth’s Bedfellows: An Intimate History of the Queen’s Court

/in , /by

Audio from Dr Anna Whitelock’s talk at CVHF on Monday 23 June 2014.
Dr Anna Whitelock, historian, television and radio presenter, reveals the politics of intimacy in the court of Elizabeth I. The Queen’s close circle of favoured women were guardians of the truth about her health, chastity and fertility and their stories offer an exceptional insight into their daily lives, the fragility of royal favour and the price of disloyalty.

Darling Monster: Letters from Lady Diana Cooper

/in /by

Audio from John Julius Norwich’s talk at the Chalke Valley Festival on Wednesday, 25th June 2014.

The famously beautiful Lady Diana cooper’s bracingly perceptive wartime letters to her son are a delight. She and her husband were the perfect ambassadorial couple who knew everyone from hilaire belloc to Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Winston Churchill. John Julius Norwich, historian, travel writer and television personality, illuminates the letters from his mother with his customary charm and wit.

John Julius Norwich returns to the Festival this year to talk about the history of Sicily. He will explain the enigma that lies at the heart of the Mediterranean’s largest island in ‘Sicily: From the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra’.

Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War Horse

/in /by

In this video, Brough Scott recounts the story of Warrior, bred by his grandfather Jack Seely and ridden by him on the battlefields of World War 1.

Brough will be speaking at CVHF on Sunday, 28th June in ‘WARRIOR: THE REAL WAR HORSE
. He will follow Warrior’s extraordinary journey from birth to his survival through Ypres and the Somme with his grandfather, General Jack Seely. Surviving five years of war, this will be the story of men and horses who fought and died, for ‘God and Country’.

Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One

/in , /by

Audio from Kate Adie’s talk at the Chalke Valley Festival on Monday, 23rd June 2014.

Renowned broadcaster and bestselling author Kate Adie reveals the ways in which women’s lives changed during WWI with fascinating details of their struggle for admission into the world of men. She charts the seismic move towards equal rights that began a century ago and show how women emerged from the shadows of their domestic lives.

Coup D’état Oman

/in /by

Ray Kane - Coup d'etat OmanOn the 23 July 1970, the Sultan of Oman was shot and deposed in the only known military coup d’état executed by British or other NATO officers during the Cold War, or by British officers in living memory.

Why?

In 1970, two years after the Tet Offensive and just months before the last major clash between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army, the world’s attention was still monopolised by the Second Vietnam War and America’s agony.

However, six thousand miles away, events in a country unheard of by most people spelt potential catastrophe for the West. In Oman’s Dhofar Province, a parochial nationalist insurgency with limited aims had morphed into a Marxist communist revolutionary movement with supra-national ambitions. PFLOAG, Popular Front for the Liberation of the Arabian Gulf – armed and trained by China and the USSR, and emboldened by the UK’s intended withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971 – was on the cusp of victory. If achieved, Oman would join the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen as the only two communist states in the Arab world.

Why did it matter to us in the West? On its Musandam Peninsula, Oman stood sentinel over perhaps the world’s most strategically important sea choke point. Laden with 43% of the Free World’s crude oil, tankers exited the Persian Gulf through the 10 kilometre-wide navigable stretch of the Straits of Hormuz.

Calling in its debts after a PFLOAG victory could have earned the USSR bases in Oman and in particular, a base in Musandam with its spectacular and dominating views over the easily blocked Straits of Hormuz below. Already in Egypt as its main adviser and arms supplier, the USSR was also sitting comfortably in Aden since the UK’s expulsion from South Yemen in 1967. Should the cold war turn hot, the USSR could block sea passage to both the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, linking with the Suez Canal – closed since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War – in an embrace that isolated the Arabian Peninsula from sea access.

On the night of 11/12 June 1970, the Iraqi-backed NDFLOAG – National Democratic Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf – attacked Omani army camps at Nizwa and Izki towns in Oman’s heartland. While Nizwa was a failed IED effort, Izki hummed with small arms fire from an 11-man ground attack party. Captain Charles Hepworth, camp commander, assembled an ad hoc force from those few soldiers not on Jummah (Friday, Muslim Holy Day) vacation and set off in pursuit. Twelve hours later, 10 attackers were either KIA or WIA; the 11th escaped – but only for a few weeks.

Now Oman had two conflicts to handle – a nascent insurgency war and a developed rural revolutionary war, one in the north, the other in the south and both separated by 800 kilometres of desert. Politics motivated both liberation movements against an obscurantist Sultan who refused to play politics by either his own volition or the persuasion of others (mainly the UK’s FCO).

Sultan Said bin Taimur al-Busaidi had to go. In the absence of a democratic ballot box to remove the Sultan there was just one alternative.

Force.

On 23 July 1970, just 35 days into Mr Edward Heath’s new Conservative government, Ray Kane, Commander of Red Company, Desert Regiment, was ordered to assault al-Husn palace and seize Sultan Said bin Taimur al-Busaidi – alive, if possible.

The operation’s successful outcome led to Oman’s renaissance, heralded the beginning of the end of the Dhofar War and removed a potential threat to the passage of almost half of the Free World’s crude oil through the Persian Gulf.

Extracted from his memoir Coup D’état Oman, Kane’s talk at the CVHF gives a blow-by-blow account of the coup’s execution from his receipt of orders into action to its successful conclusion. It is not a dry recital of facts. Salisbury artist Fred Fieber’s sketches illustrate and bring to life the coup’s ‘waypoints’, while maps and the odd few photograph show its geopolitical context and give just a hint of Oman’s magical landscape.

Attendees at Kane’s talk will be unsurprised to learn that in the coup’s execution, as in most military endeavours, not everything went according to plan. The Muse of Comedy walked hand-in-hand with the God of War and, uninvited and unwelcome, the lurking Goddess of Retribution exacted her dues. After all Kane, like others involved in the action, had betrayed his pledge of loyalty to Oman’s legitimate Ruler.

The talk finishes with a point for consideration linking the 1970 Oman coup d’état with events in the Middle East in 2003.

Kane, RayRay will be speaking at Chalke Valley History Festival on Thursday, 25 June

 

The Arc Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

/in , /by

Recording from Dr Irving Finkel’s talk at CVHF on Monday, 23rd June 2014.

British Museum expert Dr Irving Finkel will reveal how decoding the symbols on a 4,000 year old piece of clay has led to a radical new interpretation of the Noah’s Ark myth. This enthralling real-life detective story begins with a modest-sized babylonian tablet from 1850 bc and will challenge our view of ancient history by decoding the story of the flood.

The Norman Conquest

/in /by

Audio from Marc Morris’ talk at the Chalke Valley Festival on Monday, 23rd June 2014.

Acclaimed historian and broadcaster Dr Marc Morris brings to life the momentous events of 1066 and the Norman conquest. How was England, at once so powerful and yet so vulnerable, totally dominated by the Norman invasion? Buildings ripped down and rebuilt, an ancient ruling class swept clean away, even attitudes towards life itself were altered forever by the coming of the Normans.

The Battle to Include Women

/in /by

From Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Myrlie Evers to Title IX, the long struggle to ensure that half of humanity is not kept down and out.

ElizabethCadyStanton PHOTO:UNIVERSALHISTORYARCHIVE/UIG/GETTYIMAGES)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton PHOTO:UNIVERSALHISTORYARCHIVE/ UIG/GETTYIMAGES)

Since its staid beginnings in 1971 as an annual management symposium at a Swiss ski resort, the World Economic Forum in Davos has grown into the premier talking shop for the global financial elite. Unsurprisingly, given the opportunities it offers for smug pronouncements and ostentatious parties, Davos (as it is known) has attracted—and earned—some trenchant criticism. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington coined the term “Davos Man” to pin and puncture a kind of obnoxious alpha male who flits from one international meeting to the next in self-serving pursuit of wealth and power.

But Huntington’s Davos Man highlights another issue about the forum: It was (and is) overwhelmingly male. This year, some 19% of the 2,500 delegates were women, according to the forum—a number that has barely changed since a (widely ignored) quota system meant to involve more women was imposed by the event’s corporate sponsors in 2011. (Saadia Zahidi, who heads the forum’s gender-parity initiative, said that the gender ratio in Davos reflects “global leadership as a whole” and that the forum is working to increase women’s participation.)

Behind some of the most famous public gatherings in history lie arguments and controversies about whether to include women. One particularly egregious example was the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, which met in London in 1840. Women on both sides of the Atlantic had been campaigning to abolish slavery since the 18th century. Nevertheless, the 350 male delegates were divided over whether to allow seven American women to participate. One faction, led by William Lloyd Garrison ’s supporters, favored their inclusion; friends and colleagues of the New York abolitionist Lewis Tappan vehemently opposed it. The latter won, and the women were forced to watch from the gallery.

Half a century later, women faced similar discrimination when the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in April 1896. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee, refused to include women. It would be
“impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect,” he claimed. Four years later, when the summer games were held in Paris, the Olympic committee ignored his objections, and 22 women were allowed to compete alongside the 997 male athletes (although only in five sports: sailing, equestrian, tennis, croquet and golf). At the 2012 London games, some 44% of the athletes were women.

One notable irony relates to the U.S. civil rights movement. The only woman listed as an official speaker on the program for the famous 1963 March on Washington was Myrlie Evers, widow of the murdered Medgar Evers ; she got stuck in traffic. Leading female activists—including Rosa Parks —were not allowed to accompany the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. down Constitution Avenue but were sidelined to walk alongside the wives of male activists. After the women protested, organizers added a short tribute to their work. No women were among the delegation that met with President John F. Kennedy.

But in the long run, these slights only deepened women’s determination. Furious over their exclusion from the 1840 conference against slavery, the activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott went on to hold the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848, marking the start of a 72-year fight for women’s suffrage in the U.S. Similarly, frustration among women’s rights activists in the early 1960s led to the rise of second-wave feminism, from the founding of the National Organization of Women in 1966 to the passage of Title IX and Title X in the 1970s to guarantee educational and employment equality.

Davos Man still rules today, but history is against him. One day, he will be joined by Davos Woman—and she will, we hope, be as unlike him as possible.

“The Battle to Include Women” by Amanda Foreman, originally published as a “Historically Speaking” column in the January 24, 2015 issue of The Wall Street Journal. Copyright © 2015 Amanda Foreman, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

Foreman, AmandaAmanda Foreman is the award-winning historian and internationally best-selling author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire. She won the 1998 Whitbread Award for Biography. In addition to her writing and lecturing, she has served as a judge on almost every major literary prize on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. She is currently a research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. Her latest book is The World Made by Women with a BBC documentary this spring.

Amanda will be speaking at Chalke Valley History Festival on Sunday, 28 June with a talk entitled ‘The World Made by Women: A History of Womankind’