Diggers

There May Be A Cultural Difference Here

Forsooth, bear in mind that we here at the blog might be talking about various excavations, or establishment of foundations, or otherwise.  Art!

Giant digger with puny Hom. Sap. for scale

     First of all, props to 'Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable' which has to be the best £5 Conrad ever spent, full of fascinating facts that can lead to twenty or thirty minutes following them down a positive rabbit warren.  To prove this, I looked up 'Diggers', and Hay Pesto! learned something new.  'Twould seem that there was a radical English political party formed in the wake of the Civil War, who were called the 'Diggers' thanks to their activity with the spade.  Art!

NO THERE ARE NO PHOTOGRAPHS

     Their intent was to give land back to the common man, which proto-Bolshevik attitude was not long tolerated by the Cromwellian government, whom crushed them.

     'Digger' is also slang for an Ocker, or Australian if we're being formal.  According to 'Brewer's' it was around in the 1850's and seems to have been associated with a gold rush of the time, where one Edward Hargraves claimed to have found - you may be ahead of me here - gold, in New South Wales.  What does one do to excavate veins of gold?  Why, one digs, of course.  Art!

Enduring it, not digging it

      Here a slight aside.  'The Dirty Digger' is a slanderous yet accurate nickname applied to the media tycoon Robert Murdoch, who owns various tabloid newspapers and the Fox television network, which is as tabloid as television can get.  He was great mates with Boorish Orange Oaf Himself, until they started publishing unflattering true stories about him, whereupon Mister Zeppelin Ego threw a tantrum.  Their relationship has never really recovered but DJ Tango is wary of tackling TDD because of his sheer media clout, and his willingness to use unscrupulous - or 'robust' as 'Brewer's' would have it - business practices.  Art!

This is not Murdoch.  Just so we're clear.

     ANYWAY onto the meat of the matter, which actually involves Diggers, doing digging, on the Western Front in 1916, so we're not too far off course from the above.  You see, I have bookmarked a paragraph in Volume III of "Official History Of Australia In The War Of 1914 - 1918: The AIF In France 1916" which is a bit of a mouthful.  If I reference it again I shall merely call it 'Vol III'.  Art!

     To set the scene, weather in November of 1916 was as much the enemy as the Teutons, with heavy and persistent rains causing roads to break up, thanks to the enormous volume of traffic present.  Conditions for the front-line infantry were utterly miserable; if you want to replicate this experience, dig a six-foot hole in your back garden, fill it with a couple of gallons of water, then sit in it for four days existing on a tin of cold corned beef, wearing a metal bucket on your head that you strike at random with a hammer (in lieu of being shelled and shot at).

     Art!

                             

     Into the chaos and muddy confusion, enter General Cyril Brudenell White, whom was as far from the stereotypical general of the First Unpleasantness as you can imagine.  His approach was to be analytical and methodical; he issued a memo to the various Ocker divisions on the front lines on how to proceed with roads, railways and encampments, and to calculate traffic flow accurately to render possible predictions about numbers, tonnage and volume.  Art!

     Under White's planning and orders, broad-gauge railways would be constructed to within a few miles of the front, with narrow-gauge 'Decauville' light railways being used to move supplies up to just behind the front lines, under the supervision of a light railway specialist in uniform, Colonel Fewtrell.

     Since it would take considerable time to construct the permanent way, immediate remedial action to repair and sustain the parlous roads was essential.  The Anzac Corps front was divided into districts and sub-districts, with almost 8,000 men from the Australian corps and British labour battalions. Their brief was to construct gigantic sumps for drainage and to line the roads with railway sleepers, known as 'corduroy'.  Art!

     You can see the conditions of the terrain above; no corduroy, no convoy.  What you see above are a few of the 12,000 pit-props and railway sleepers delivered to keep the roads functioning.  White, looking towards better weather, had road-metal delivered to the huge dump established at Quarry Sidings, where trains were dropping off over 400 tons of it daily.  None of this work was dashing or glamourous, just dirty vital work to keep the army functioning in awful weather and conditions.

     This is only the first part of General White's cunning plan, the rest of which can wait for another day.  I bet you can hardly wait.

The Ring-Tailed Recidivist

Another tangent I took after yowling in complaint at the Codeword Compilers using LEMUR as a solution.  Art!

     Well, the Teuton biologist E Haekel was baffled by the distribution of lemurs in the world, a problem everyone can sympathise with.  You can imagine him lying awake at night, fretting and fussing over the global distribution of lemurs, worrying about it at breakfast, and neglecting his wife in search of a solution.  Art!

     Here it is: Lemuria, a land-bridge between Madagascar, India and Australia (hi diggers!), which allowed free passage of lemurs until it sank beneath the waves à la Atlantis.  There was only one problem about Lemuria: it never existed, which is a bit of a bummer for his theory.

     Now, Haekel's theory may have been wrong, as proven by plate tectonics, but he put it forward in all innocent sincerity.  It has since been adopted by various nutters to promote silly psychic nonsense, or silly racial nonsense - hence the Tamil name on the graphic above.  

     All because of lemurs.

Your Daily Ration Of Bov

Your Humble Scribe will keep this short and steely, as we have probably another hundred-odd photos to get through.  Art!

     This is the British Infantry Tank Mark III, universally known as the 'Valentine', although nobody has come up with a convincing explanation of where that most inappropriate name came from.  The Val tipped the scales at 16 tons, were mostly armed with the 2-pounder gun you see here, with some converted to the much more effective 6-pounder.  Over 8,000 of them were manufactured, and they were used extensively in North Africa, where they were well-liked as being sturdy and reliable.  Many were supplied to the Sinister Union, whom didn't do their usual whinging about furrin tanks, and they especially liked that for maintenance or replacement, the whole engine could be slid out on rails.

     Okay, enough tanks for one day.  We will come back to this.  I can hear you cheering enthusiastically.

Ooops

Conrad got a nasty surprise when looking at his news feed this morning.  Normally these things go in one eye and don't interact with the grey matter at all.  Today - not so much.  Art!

     Erk.  Guess who takes this every morning?  No, Vulnavia, not Lord Lucan.  ME!  I'd better go see what horrible risks I'm taking.

     Ah.  Nosebleeds.  Which I haven't suffered for decades.  I may survive a bit longer*.

NO THERE ARE NO PHOTOGRAPHS

For obvious reasons.  Which I will explain after the artwork.  Art!

     This is an example of artistic licence, with Terence Cuneo showing a panorama titled 'Glider Assault, D-Day' during daylight, when in fact the initial glider assaults were during the night.  Which would have made for a rather dull picture.  The beach landings seem to be at about the stage they reached only after a couple of weeks, with piers already laid.  Nor will you get this in photographic form, as again the assault went in at night and infra-red film was not a thing then.

* For some - including me - good news.