Tintin 363 (original)
“I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.”
– HG Wells.
One of the most revolutionary naval advances was the submarine. By 1900, the gyroscope, the gyrocompass, and the use of steel hulls, a safe method of propulsion in the internal combustion engine and the accumulator battery, combined to make the submarine possible. The development of the reliable torpedo provided the submarine with an excellent weapon of attack. In 1900, the six major navies of the world had only 10 submarines among them.
Since then the submarine has become the shark of almost every navy. Silent, hunting, killing, dark and sleek under the oceans, Always a foreboding subject in books and films. Some have argued that it and the aircraft have made surface ships obsolete in naval warfare. today the launchpad of not only torpedoes but missiles and the mainstay of nuclear arsenals. Like sharks, submarines are unseen until they strike, and also like sharks – we know they are out there.
WEEKEND AT DUNKIRK poster
Weekend at Dunkirk (French: Week-end à Zuydcoote) is a 1964 drama film directed by Henri Verneuil and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. It is based on the 1949 Prix Goncourt winning novel Week-end à Zuydcoote by Robert Merle. Music by Maurice Jarre.
Week-end à Zuydcoote on IMDb
Dunkirk (1958) Movie Poster – posted by The Kent Film Office (see full size)
Dunkirk is a 1958 British war film directed by Leslie Norman and starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough and Bernard Lee. It was based on two novels: Elleston Trevor’s The Big Pick-Up and Lt. Col. Ewan Hunter and Maj. J. S. Bradford’s Dunkirk.
The film relates the story of Operation Dynamo, principally from the viewpoints of two people: a newspaper reporter and a soldier.
Mrs. Miniver (1942) – Directed by: William Wyler; Starring: Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon
Miss Monkey watched the old classic Mrs. Miniver the other night, and was inspired to make this week’s Maritime Monday about the Evacuation of Dunkirk.
Based on the fictional English housewife created by Jan Struther in 1937 for a series of newspaper columns, the film won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director.
Mrs. Kay Miniver (Greer Garson) and her family live a comfortable life at a house called “Starlings” in a village outside London. The house has a large garden, with a private landing stage on the river Thames, and a motorboat. As World War II looms, Clem; together with other boat owners, volunteers to take his boat to assist in the Dunkirk evacuation.
Director William Wyler wrote and re-wrote the key sermon “the night before the sequence was to be shot.” The speech “made such an impact that it was used in essence by President Roosevelt as a morale builder and part of it was the basis for leaflets printed in various languages and dropped over enemy and occupied territory.”
In 2009, it was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant and will be preserved for all time. Soon after filming, Richard Ney, who played Kay Miniver’s son and was 11 years her junior, married Garson. –wikipedia
Well, that explains the conspicuously long on-the-mouth kisses they exchanged during the film.
Final outcome of the war being no where near certain by the film’s release in 1942, the studio wisely chose to omit any sweeping declarations about Victorious Britannia and the everlasting pluck of her peoples.
A fleet of Little Ships that rescued Allied troops from Dunkirk in 1940 has set sail from Ramsgate to mark the 70th anniversary of the event. Fifty vessels headed to France to commemorate Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of 338,000 soldiers from Dunkirk’s beaches. The troops had been driven back to the French coast by the German army during the second world war…
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Gavin Bryars – Opening Part I – The Sinking of The Titanic
(click link above to listen) Richard Gavin Bryars (born 16 January 1943) is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in, or has produced works in, a variety of styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, historicism, experimental music, avant-garde and neoclassicism.
Bryars’s first works as a composer owe much to the New York School of John Cage (with whom he briefly studied), Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and minimalism. One of his earliest pieces, The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), is an indeterminist work which allows the performers to take a number of sound sources related to the sinking of the RMS Titanic and make them into a piece of music. The first recording of this piece appeared on Brian Eno‘s Obscure Records in 1975. The 1994 recording of this piece was remixed by Aphex Twin as Raising the Titanic (later collected on the 26 Mixes for Cash album).
* Go log into itunes or Amazon or whatever musical teet-from-which-you-suck and download this. It’s cool and will impress the chicks.
The Adamant and the Cospatrick, 1874
On Sunday 31st October 1874, from the Blackwell Dock in London, two sailing ships left within an hour or so of each other. The first to leave was the wooden hulled Cospatrick with 429 immigrants bound for Auckland, NZ, followed by the smaller steel hulled Adamant with 340 government assisted immigrants bound for Nelson.
The Cospatrick didn’t make it, becoming one of the sea’s most hideous tragedies.
Terra Australis Incognita
The notion of Terra Australis was introduced by Aristotle. Christian thinkers did not discount the idea that there might be land beyond the southern seas, but the issue of whether it could be inhabited was controversial…
GPOY; Sunday edition
(Source: grottu)
In last week’s Maritime Monday, we took a look at the glitzy glamorous side of travel by ship… Decadent, luxurious steam liners that swept late-Victorian and Jazz Age high society to the far-flung and exotic corners of the world.
Ships that competed for claims to be the fastest, most sumptuous, or most technologically advanced vessels of their times, the Depression-era equivalent of first class passage aboard the Space Shuttle. Cruising in international waters allowed folks to tipple outside the reach of America’s prudish Prohibition laws. And then there was the gambling…
Between the Titanic and the Lusitania, transatlantic travel was fraught with very real danger and intrigue. While the gents and debs clinked champagne glasses on the upper decks, thousands of European immigrants were crammed like cattle in the lower decks, where things like sanitary conditions and safety regulations weren’t always priority one. Irish, Italian, and Eastern European hopefuls came flooding across the ocean in numbers and density not seen since the Middle Passage.
Then Ellis Island shuttered its doors, wars made sea travel dicey, and the advent of the jet liner spelled the end for transatlantic crossings. The Glory Days were over. Or were they? Steerage passengers had gone the way of the passenger pigeon, and Cold War One-Percenters didn’t have 10 days to waste on a silly old boat.
The world was moving faster than ever before, and it was Ambush-Makeover time for the big ships. Open ocean metropolises were retrofitted for short-haul, near shore cruising, and it was time for the post-war middle class to take like lemmings to the sea. But it would never be the same…
“If exclusive places are open to everyone then they are no longer exclusive”
The great unwashed from below decks have moved uptown, and are now cabin maids and wine stewards. They circulate freely, albeit invisibly, amongst the pensioners and suburbanites that scrimped for years so they could pretend to be Queen for a week.
It’s much, much uglier now. What was once a class-ride from Point A to Point B has devolved into a revolting soiree of conspicuous consumption and class-pretense where love sick geeks can role play for a fortnight on a multitude of themed-cruises, and overweight tourist-class nuclear families can participate in a non-stop frenzy of contrived and banal amusements. All fueled by fondue fountains, energy drinks, and flags of convenience.
History of the Italian Cruise Industry
1915: English war ships in storms – The Great War by air and sea – 25 fotos
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