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21,387,608 | Isle of Skye | 1,170,698,390 | Island of the Inner Hebrides, Scotland | [
"Cleared places in the Inner Hebrides",
"Islands of Highland (council area)",
"Islands of the Inner Hebrides",
"Islands of the United Kingdom",
"Isle of Skye"
]
| The Isle of Skye, or simply Skye (/skaɪ/; Scottish Gaelic: An t-Eilean Sgitheanach or Eilean a' Cheò; Scots: Isle o Skye), is the largest and northernmost of the major islands in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. The island's peninsulas radiate from a mountainous hub dominated by the Cuillin, the rocky slopes of which provide some of the most dramatic mountain scenery in the country. Although Sgitheanach has been suggested to describe a winged shape, no definitive agreement exists as to the name's origins.
The island has been occupied since the Mesolithic period, and over its history has been occupied at various times by Celtic tribes including the Picts and the Gaels, Scandinavian Vikings, and most notably the powerful integrated Norse-Gaels clans of MacLeod and MacDonald. The island was considered to be under Norwegian suzerainty until the 1266 Treaty of Perth, which transferred control over to Scotland.
The 18th-century Jacobite risings led to the breaking-up of the clan system and later clearances that replaced entire communities with sheep farms, some of which involved forced emigrations to distant lands. Resident numbers declined from over 20,000 in the early 19th century to just under 9,000 by the closing decade of the 20th century. Skye's population increased by 4% between 1991 and 2001. About a third of the residents were Gaelic speakers in 2001, and although their numbers are in decline, this aspect of island culture remains important.
The main industries are tourism, agriculture, fishing, and forestry. Skye is part of the Highland Council local government area. The island's largest settlement is Portree, which is also its capital, known for its picturesque harbour. Links to various nearby islands by ferry are available, and since 1995, to the mainland by a road bridge. The climate is mild, wet, and windy. The abundant wildlife includes the golden eagle, red deer, and Atlantic salmon. The local flora is dominated by heather moor, and nationally important invertebrate populations live on the surrounding sea bed. Skye has provided the locations for various novels and feature films and is celebrated in poetry and song.
## Etymology
The first written references to the island are Roman sources such as the Ravenna Cosmography, which refers to Scitis and Scetis, which can be found on a map by Ptolemy. One possible derivation comes from skitis, an early Celtic word for "winged", which may describe how the island's peninsulas radiate out from a mountainous centre. Subsequent Gaelic-, Norse- and English-speaking peoples have influenced the history of Skye; the relationships between their names for the island are not straightforward. Various etymologies have been proposed, such as the "winged isle" or "the notched isle", but no definitive solution has been found to date; the place name may be from an earlier, non-Gaelic language.
In the Norse sagas, Skye is called Skíð, for example in the Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar and a skaldic poem in the Heimskringla from around 1230 contains a line that translates as "the hunger battle-birds were filled in Skye with the blood of foemen killed". The island was also referred to by the Norse as Skuy (misty isle), Skýey or Skuyö (isle of cloud). The traditional Gaelic name is An t-Eilean Sgitheanach (the island of Skye), An t-Eilean Sgiathanach being a more recent and less common spelling. In 1549, Donald Munro, High Dean of the Isles, wrote of "Sky": "This Ile is callit Ellan Skiannach in Irish, that is to say in Inglish the wyngit Ile, be reason it has mony wyngis and pointis lyand furth fra it, throw the dividing of thir foirsaid Lochis." but the meaning of this Gaelic name is unclear.
Eilean a' Cheò, which means "island of the mist" (a translation of the Norse name), is a poetic Gaelic name for the island.
## Geography
At 1,656 km<sup>2</sup> (639 sq mi), Skye is the second-largest island in Scotland after Lewis and Harris. The coastline of Skye is a series of peninsulas and bays radiating out from a centre dominated by the Cuillin hills (Gaelic: An Cuiltheann). Malcolm Slesser suggested that its shape "sticks out of the west coast of northern Scotland like a lobster's claw ready to snap at the fishbone of Harris and Lewis" and W. H. Murray, commenting on its irregular coastline, stated, "Skye is 60 miles [100 km] long, but what might be its breadth is beyond the ingenuity of man to state". Martin Martin, a native of the island, reported on it at length in a 1703 publication. His geological observations included a note that:
> There are marcasites black and white, resembling silver ore, near the village Sartle: there are likewise in the same place several stones, which in bigness, shape, &c., resemble nutmegs, and many rivulets here afford variegated stones of all colours. The Applesglen near Loch-Fallart has agate growing in it of different sizes and colours; some are green on the outside, some are of a pale sky colour, and they all strike fire as well as flint: I have one of them by me, which for shape and bigness is proper for a sword handle. Stones of a purple colour flow down the rivulets here after great rains.
The Black Cuillin, which are mainly composed of basalt and gabbro, include 12 Munros and provide some of the most dramatic and challenging mountain terrain in Scotland. The ascent of Sgùrr a' Ghreadaidh is one of the longest rock climbs in Britain and the Inaccessible Pinnacle is the only peak in Scotland that requires technical climbing skills to reach the summit. Nearby Sgùrr Alasdair, meanwhile, is the tallest mountain on any Scottish island. These hills make demands of the hill walker that exceed any others found in Scotland and a full traverse of the Cuillin ridge may take 15–20 hours. The Red Hills (Gaelic: Am Binnean Dearg) to the east are also known as the Red Cuillin. They are mainly composed of granite that has weathered into more rounded hills with many long scree slopes on their flanks. The highest point of these hills is Glamaig, one of only two Corbetts on Skye.
The northern peninsula of Trotternish is underlain by basalt, which provides relatively rich soils and a variety of unusual rock features. The Kilt Rock is named after the columnar structure of the 105-metre (344 ft) cliffs, said to resemble the pleats in a kilt. The Quiraing is a spectacular series of rock pinnacles on the eastern side of the main spine of the peninsula and further south is the rock pillar of the Old Man of Storr. The view of the Quiraing and the Old Man of Storr is one of the most iconic in all of Scotland and is frequently used on calendars and tourism guides and brochures.
Beyond Loch Snizort to the west of Trotternish is the Waternish peninsula, which ends in Ardmore Point's double rock arch. Duirinish peninsula is separated from Waternish by Loch Dunvegan, which contains the island of Isay. It is ringed by sea cliffs that reach 296 metres (971 feet) on the west at Waterstein Head and on the northwest at Biod an Athair where, a metre from the summit trig pillar, the cliffs drop 1,029 feet (314 metres) to the ocean. Oolitic loam provides good arable land in the main valley. Lochs Bracadale and Harport and the island of Wiay lie between Duirinish and Minginish, which includes the narrower defiles of Talisker and Glen Brittle and whose beaches are formed from black basaltic sands. Strathaird is a relatively small peninsula close to the Cuillin hills with only a few crofting communities, the island of Soay lies offshore. The bedrock of Sleat in the south is Torridonian sandstone, which produces poor soils and boggy ground, although its lower elevations and relatively sheltered eastern shores enable a lush growth of hedgerows and crops. The islands of Raasay, Rona, Scalpay and Pabay all lie to the north and east between Skye and the mainland.
### Towns and villages
Portree in the north at the base of Trotternish is the largest settlement (estimated population 2,264 in 2011) and is the main service centre on the island. A December 2018 report recommended the village as "Skye's best home base" for visitors", since it has "a few hotels, hostels and bed-and-breakfasts in town, while more B&Bs line the roads into and out of town". The village also has "banks, churches, cafes and restaurants, a cinema at the Aros Centre, a swimming pool and library ... fuel filling stations and supermarkets".
Broadford, the location of the island's only airstrip, is on the east side of the island, and Dunvegan in the north-west is well known for its castle and the nearby Three Chimneys restaurant. The 18th-century Stein Inn on the Waternish coast is the oldest pub on Skye. Kyleakin is linked to Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland by the Skye Bridge, which spans the narrows of Loch Alsh. Uig, the port for ferries to the Outer Hebrides, is on the west of the Trotternish peninsula, and Edinbane is between Dunvegan and Portree. Much of the rest of the population lives in crofting townships scattered around the coastline.
### Climate
The influence of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf Stream create a mild oceanic climate. Temperatures are generally cool, averaging 6.5 °C (43.7 °F) in January and 15.4 °C (59.7 °F) in July at Duntulm in Trotternish. Snow seldom lies at sea level and frosts are less frequent than on the mainland. Winds are a limiting factor for vegetation. South-westerlies are the most common and speeds of 128 km/h (80 mph) have been recorded. High winds are especially likely on the exposed coasts of Trotternish and Waternish. In common with most islands of the west coast of Scotland, rainfall is generally high at 1,500–2,000 mm (59–79 in) per annum and the elevated Cuillin are wetter still. Variations can be considerable, with the north tending to be drier than the south. Broadford, for example, averages more than 2,870 mm (113 in) of rain per annum. Trotternish typically has 200 hours of bright sunshine in May, the sunniest month. On 28 December 2015, the temperature reached 15 °C, beating the previous December record of 12.9 °C, set in 2013. On 9 May 2016, a temperature of 26.7 °C (80.1 °F) was recorded at Lusa in the southeast of the island.
## History
### Prehistory
A Mesolithic hunter-gatherer site dating to the seventh millennium BC at An Corran in Staffin is one of the oldest archaeological sites in Scotland. Its occupation is probably linked to that of the rock shelter at Sand, Applecross, on the mainland coast of Wester Ross, where tools made of a mudstone from An Corran have been found. Surveys of the area between the two shores of the Inner Sound and Sound of Raasay have revealed 33 sites with potentially Mesolithic deposits. Finds of bloodstone microliths on the foreshore at Orbost on the west coast of the island near Dunvegan also suggest Mesolithic occupation. These tools probably originated from the nearby island of Rùm. Similarly, bloodstone from Rum, and baked mudstone, from the Staffin area, were found at the Mesolithic site of Camas Daraich, also from the seventh millennium BC, on the Point of Sleat, which has led archaeologists to believe that Mesolithic people on Skye would travel fairly significant distances, at least 70 km, both by land and sea.
Rubha an Dùnain, an uninhabited peninsula to the south of the Cuillin, has a variety of archaeological sites dating from the Neolithic onwards. A second- or third-millennium BC chambered cairn, an Iron Age promontory fort, and the remains of another prehistoric settlement dating from the Bronze Age are nearby. Loch na h-Airde on the peninsula is linked to the sea by an artificial "Viking" canal that may date from the later period of Norse settlement. Dun Ringill is a ruined Iron Age hill fort on the Strathaird Peninsula, which was further fortified in the Middle Ages and may have become the seat of Clan MacKinnon.
### Early history
The late Iron Age inhabitants of the northern and western Hebrides were probably Pictish, although the historical record is sparse. Three Pictish symbol stones have been found on Skye and a fourth on Raasay. More is known of the kingdom of Dál Riata to the south; Adomnán's life of Columba, written shortly before 697, portrays the saint visiting Skye (where he baptised a pagan leader using an interpreter) and Adomnán himself is thought to have been familiar with the island. The Irish annals record several events on Skye in the later seventh and early eighth centuries – mainly concerning the struggles between rival dynasties that formed the background to the Old Irish language romance Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin.
Legendary hero Cú Chulainn is said to have trained on the Isle of Skye with warrior woman Scáthach.
The Norse held sway throughout the Hebrides from the 9th century until after the Treaty of Perth in 1266. However, apart from placenames, little remains of their presence on Skye in the written or archaeological record. Apart from the name "Skye" itself, all pre-Norse placenames seem to have been obliterated by the Scandinavian settlers. Viking heritage, with Celtic heritage is claimed by Clan MacLeod. Norse tradition is celebrated in the winter fire festival at Dunvegan, during which a replica Viking longboat is set alight.
### Clans and Scottish rule
The most powerful clans on Skye in the post–Norse period were Clan MacLeod, originally based in Trotternish, and Clan Macdonald of Sleat. The isle was held by Donald Macdonald, Lord of the Isles’ half-brother, Godfrey, from 1389 until 1401, at which time Skye was declared part of Ross. When Donald Macdonald, Lord of the Isles, re-gained Ross after the battle of Harlaw in 1411, they added "Earl of Ross" to their lords' titles. Skye came with Ross.
Following the disintegration of the Lordship of the Isles in the late 15th century, Clan Mackinnon also emerged as an independent clan, whose substantial landholdings in Skye were centred on Strathaird. Clan MacNeacail also have a long association with Trotternish, and in the 16th century many of the MacInnes clan moved to Sleat. The MacDonalds of South Uist were bitter rivals of the MacLeods, and an attempt by the former to murder church-goers at Trumpan Church in retaliation for a previous massacre on Eigg, resulted in the Battle of the Spoiling Dyke of 1578.
After the failure of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, Flora MacDonald became famous for rescuing Prince Charles Edward Stuart from the Hanoverian troops. Although she was born in South Uist, her story is strongly associated with their escape via Skye, and she is buried at Kilmuir in Trotternish. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell's visit to Skye in 1773 and their meeting with Flora MacDonald in Kilmuir is recorded in Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Boswell wrote, "To see Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great champion of the English Tories, salute Miss Flora MacDonald in the isle of Sky, [sic] was a striking sight; for though somewhat congenial in their notions, it was very improbable they should meet here". Johnson's words that Flora MacDonald was "A name that will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour" are written on her gravestone. After this rebellion, the clan system was broken up and Skye became a series of landed estates.
Of the island in general, Johnson observed:
> I never was in any house of the islands, where I did not find books in more languages than one, if I staid long enough to want them, except one from which the family was removed. Literature is not neglected by the higher rank of the Hebrideans. It need not, I suppose, be mentioned, that in countries so little frequented as the islands, there are no houses where travellers are entertained for money. He that wanders about these wilds, either procures recommendations to those whose habitations lie near his way, or, when night and weariness come upon him, takes the chance of general hospitality. If he finds only a cottage he can expect little more than shelter; for the cottagers have little more for themselves but if his good fortune brings him to the residence of a gentleman, he will be glad of a storm to prolong his stay. There is, however, one inn by the sea-side at Sconsor, in Sky, where the post-office is kept.
Skye has a rich heritage of ancient monuments from this period. Dunvegan Castle has been the seat of Clan MacLeod since the 13th century. It contains the Fairy Flag and is reputed to have been inhabited by a single family for longer than any other house in Scotland. The 18th-century Armadale Castle, once the home of Clan Donald of Sleat, was abandoned as a residence in 1925, but now hosts the Clan Donald Centre. Nearby are the ruins of two more MacDonald strongholds, Knock Castle, and Dunscaith Castle (called "Fortress of Shadows"), the legendary home of warrior woman, martial arts instructor (and, according to some sources, Queen) Scáthach. Caisteal Maol, a fortress built in the late 15th century near Kyleakin and once a seat of Clan MacKinnon, is another ruin.
### Economic turmoil and mass emigration
In the late 18th century the harvesting of kelp became a significant activity, but from 1822 onward cheap imports led to a collapse of this industry throughout the Hebrides. During the 19th century, the inhabitants of Skye were also devastated by famine and Clearances. Thirty thousand people were evicted between 1840 and 1880 alone, many of them forced to emigrate to the New World. The "Battle of the Braes" involved a demonstration against a lack of access to land and the serving of eviction notices. The incident involved numerous crofters and about 50 police officers. This event was instrumental in the creation of the Napier Commission, which reported in 1884 on the situation in the Highlands. Disturbances continued until the passing of the 1886 Crofters' Act and on one occasion 400 marines were deployed on Skye to maintain order. The ruins of cleared villages can still be seen at Lorgill, Boreraig and Suisnish in Strath Swordale, and Tusdale on Minginish.
### Overview of population trends
As with many Scottish islands, Skye's population peaked in the 19th century and then declined under the impact of the Clearances and the military losses in the First World War. From the 19th century until 1975 Skye was part of the county of Inverness-shire, but the crofting economy languished and according to Slesser, "Generations of UK governments have treated the island people contemptuously" --a charge that has been levelled at both Labour and Conservative administrations' policies in the Highlands and Islands. By 1971 the population was less than a third of its peak recorded figure in 1841. However, the number of residents then grew by over 28 percent in the thirty years to 2001. The changing relationship between the residents and the land is evidenced by Robert Carruthers's remark c. 1852, "There is now a village in Portree containing three hundred inhabitants." Even if this estimate is inexact the population of the island's largest settlement has probably increased sixfold or more since then. During the period the total number of island residents has declined by 50 percent or more.The island-wide population increase of 4 percent between 1991 and 2001 occurred against the background of an overall reduction in Scottish island populations of 3 percent for the same period. By 2011 the population had risen a further 8.4% to 10,008 with Scottish island populations as a whole growing by 4% to 103,702.
## Language
Historically, Skye was overwhelmingly Gaelic-speaking, but this changed between 1921 and 2001. In both the 1901 and 1921 censuses, all Skye parishes were more than 75 percent Gaelic-speaking. By 1971, only Kilmuir parish had more than three-quarters of Gaelic speakers while the rest of Skye ranged between 50 and 74 percent. At that time, Kilmuir was the only area outside the Western Isles that had such a high proportion of Gaelic speakers. In the 2001 census Kilmuir had just under half Gaelic speakers, and overall, Skye had 31 percent, distributed unevenly. The strongest Gaelic areas were in the north and southwest of the island, including Staffin at 61 percent. The weakest areas were in the west and east (e.g. Luib 23 percent and Kylerhea 19 percent). Other areas on Skye ranged between 48 percent and 25 percent.
## Government and politics
In terms of local government, from 1975 to 1996, Skye, along with the neighbouring mainland area of Lochalsh, constituted a local government district within the Highland administrative area. In 1996 the district was included in the unitary Highland Council, (Comhairle na Gàidhealtachd) based in Inverness and formed one of the new council's area committees. Following the 2007 elections, Skye now forms a four-member ward called Eilean a' Cheò; it is currently represented by two independents, one Scottish National Party, and one Liberal Democrat councillor.
Skye is in the Highlands and Islands electoral region and comprises a part of the Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch constituency of the Scottish Parliament, which elects one member under the first past the post basis to represent it. Kate Forbes is the current MSP for the SNP. In addition, Skye forms part of the wider Ross, Skye and Lochaber constituency, which elects one member to the House of Commons in Westminster. The present MP Member of Parliament is Ian Blackford of the Scottish National Party, who took office after the SNP's sweep in the General Election of 2015. Before this, Charles Kennedy, a Liberal Democrat, had represented the area since the 1983 general election.
## Economy
The largest employer on the island and its environs is the public sector, which accounts for about a third of the total workforce, principally in administration, education, and health. The second-largest employer in the area is the distribution, hotels, and restaurants sector, highlighting the importance of tourism. Key attractions include Dunvegan Castle, the Clan Donald Visitor Centre, and The Aros Experience arts and exhibition centre in Portree. There are about a dozen large landowners on Skye, the largest being the public sector, with the Scottish Government owning most of the northern part of the island. Glendale is a community-owned estate in Duirinish, and the Sleat Community Trust, the local development trust, is active in various regeneration projects.
Small firms dominate employment in the private sector. The Talisker Distillery, which produces a single malt whisky, is beside Loch Harport on the west coast of the island. Torabhaig distillery located in Teangue opened in 2017 and also produces whisky. Three other whiskies—Mac na Mara ("son of the sea"), Tè Bheag nan Eilean ("wee dram of the isles") and Poit Dhubh ("black pot")—are produced by blender Pràban na Linne ("smugglers den by the Sound of Sleat"), based at Eilean Iarmain. These are marketed using predominantly Gaelic-language labels. The blended whisky branded as "Isle of Skye" is produced not on the island but by the Glengoyne Distillery at Killearn north of Glasgow, though the website of the owners, Ian Macleod Distillers Ltd., boasts a "high proportion of Island malts" and contains advertisements for tourist businesses in the island. There is also an established software presence on Skye, with Portree-based Sitekit having expanded in recent years.
Crofting is still important, but although there are about 2,000 crofts on Skye only 100 or so are large enough to enable a crofter to earn a livelihood entirely from the land. In recent years, families have complained about the increasing prices for land that make it difficult for young people to start their own crofts.
Cod and herring stocks have declined but commercial fishing remains important, especially fish farming of salmon and shellfish such as scampi. The west coast of Scotland has a considerable renewable energy potential and the Isle of Skye Renewables Co-op has recently bought a stake in the Ben Aketil wind farm near Dunvegan. There is a thriving arts and crafts sector.
The unemployment rate in the area tends to be higher than in the Highlands as a whole, and is seasonal, in part due to the impact of tourism. The population is growing and in common with many other scenic rural areas in Scotland, significant increases are expected in the percentage of the population aged 45 to 64 years.
The restrictions required by the worldwide pandemic increased unemployment in the Highlands and Islands in the summer of 2020 to 5.7%; which was significantly higher than the 2.4 percent in 2019. The rates were said to be highest in "Lochaber, Skye and Wester Ross and Argyll and the Islands". A December 2020 report stated that between March (just before the effects of pandemic were noted) and December, the unemployment rate in the region increased by "more than 97%" and suggested that the outlook was even worse for spring 2021.
### Tourism
A report published in mid-2020 indicated that visitors to Skye added £211 million in 2019 to the island's economy before travel restrictions were imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report added that "Skye and Raasay attracted 650,000 visitors [in 2018] and supported 2,850 jobs". The government estimated that tourism in Scotland would decline by over 50% as a result of the pandemic. "Skye is highly vulnerable to the downturn in international visitors that will continue for much of 2020 and beyond", Professor John Lennon of Glasgow Caledonian University told a reporter in July 2020.
Tourism in the Highlands and Islands was negatively impacted by the pandemic, the effects of which continued into 2021. A September 2020 report stated that the region "has been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to date when compared to Scotland and the UK as a whole". The industry required short-term support for "business survival and recovery" and that was expected to continue as the sector was "severely impacted for as long as physical distancing and travel restrictions". A scheme called Island Equivalent was introduced by the Scottish government in early 2021 to financially assist hospitality and retail businesses "affected by Level 3 coronavirus restrictions". Previous schemes in 2020 included the Strategic Framework Business Fund and the Coronavirus Business Support Fund.
Before the pandemic, during the summer of 2017, islanders complained about an excessive number of tourists, which was causing overcrowding in popular locations such as Glen Brittle, the Neist Point lighthouse, the Quiraing, and the Old Man of Storr. "Skye is buckling under the weight of increased tourism this year", said the operator of a self-catering cottage; the problem was most significant at "the key iconic destinations, like the Old Man of Storr and the Quiraing", he added. Chris Taylor of VisitScotland sympathised with the concerns and said that the agency was working on a long-term solution. "But the benefits to Skye of bringing in international visitors and increased spending are huge," he added.
An article published in 2020 confirmed that (before the pandemic), the Talisker Distillery and Dunvegan Castle were still overcrowded in peak periods; other areas where parking was a problem due to large crowds included "the Old Man of Storr, Kilt Rock, the Quiraing, the Fairy Pools, and Neist Point. This source also stated that Portree was "the busiest place on the island" during peak periods and suggested that some tourists might prefer accommodations in quieter areas such as "Dunvegan, Kyleakin and the Broadford and Breakish area".
## Transport
Skye is linked to the mainland by the Skye Bridge, while ferries sail from Armadale on the island to Mallaig, and from Kylerhea to Glenelg, crossing the Kyle Rhea strait on the MV Glenachulish, the last turntable ferry in the world. Turntable ferries had been common on the west coast of Scotland because they do not require much infrastructure to operate, a boat ramp will suffice. Ferries also run from Uig to Tarbert on Harris and Lochmaddy on North Uist, and from Sconser to Raasay.
The Skye Bridge opened in 1995 under a private finance initiative and the high tolls charged (£5.70 each way for summer visitors) met with widespread opposition, spearheaded by the pressure group SKAT (Skye and Kyle Against Tolls). On 21 December 2004, it was announced that the Scottish Executive had purchased the bridge from its owners and the tolls were immediately removed.
Bus services run to Inverness and Glasgow, and there are local services on the island, mainly starting from Portree or Broadford. Train services run from Kyle of Lochalsh at the mainland end of the Skye Bridge to Inverness, as well as from Glasgow to Mallaig from where the ferry can be caught to Armadale.
The island's airfield at Ashaig, near Broadford, is used by private aircraft and occasionally by NHS Highland and the Scottish Ambulance Service for transferring patients to hospitals on the mainland.
The A87 trunk road traverses the island from the Skye Bridge to Uig, linking most of the major settlements. Many of the island's roads have been widened in the past forty years although there are still substantial sections of single-track road.
## Culture, media, and the arts
Students of Scottish Gaelic travel from all over the world to attend Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Scottish Gaelic college based near Kilmore in Sleat. In addition to members of the Church of Scotland and a smaller number of Roman Catholics, many residents of Skye belong to the Free Church of Scotland, known for its strict observance of the Sabbath.
Skye has a strong folk music tradition, although in recent years dance and rock music have been growing in popularity on the island. Gaelic folk rock band Runrig started in Skye and former singer Donnie Munro still works on the island. Runrig's second single and a concert staple is entitled Skye, the lyrics being partly in English and partly in Gaelic and they have released other songs such as "Nightfall on Marsco" that were inspired by the island. Ex-Runrig member Blair Douglas, a highly regarded accordionist, and composer in his own right was born on the island and is still based there to this day. Celtic fusion band the Peatbog Faeries are based on Skye. Jethro Tull singer Ian Anderson owned an estate at Strathaird on Skye at one time. Several Tull songs are written about Skye, including Dun Ringil, Broadford Bazaar, and Acres Wild (which contains the lines "Come with me to the Winged Isle, / Northern father's western child..." about the island itself). The Isle of Skye Music Festival featured sets from The Fun Lovin' Criminals and Sparks, but collapsed in 2007. Electronic musician Mylo was born on Skye.
The poet Sorley MacLean, a native of the Isle of Raasay, which lies off the island's east coast, lived much of his life on Skye. The island has been immortalised in the traditional song "The Skye Boat Song" and is the notional setting for the novel To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, although the Skye of the novel bears little relation to the real island. John Buchan's descriptions of Skye, as featured in his Richard Hannay novel Mr Standfast, are more true to life. I Diari di Rubha Hunis is a 2004 Italian language work of non-fiction by Davide Sapienza [it]. The international bestseller, The Ice Twins, by S K Tremayne, published around the world in 2015–2016, is set in southern Skye, especially around the settlement and islands of Isleornsay.
Skye has been used as a location for several feature films. The Ashaig aerodrome was used for the opening scenes of the 1980 film Flash Gordon. Stardust, released in 2007 and starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, featured scenes near Uig, Loch Coruisk and the Quiraing. Another 2007 film, Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle, was shot almost entirely in various locations on the island. The Justin Kurzel adaption of Macbeth starring Michael Fassbender was also filmed on the Island. Some of the opening scenes in Ridley Scott's 2012 feature film Prometheus were shot and set at the Old Man of Storr. In 1973 The Highlands and Islands - a Royal Tour, a documentary about Prince Charles's visit to the Highlands and Islands, directed by Oscar Marzaroli, was shot partly on Skye. Scenes from the Scottish Gaelic-language BBC Alba television series Bannan were filmed on the island.
The West Highland Free Press is published at Broadford. This weekly newspaper takes as its motto An Tìr, an Cànan 's na Daoine ("The Land, the Language, and the People"), which reflects its radical, campaigning priorities. The Free Press was founded in 1972 and circulates in Skye, Wester Ross, and the Outer Hebrides. Shinty is a popular sport played throughout the island and Portree-based Skye Camanachd won the Camanachd Cup in 1990.
Whilst Skye had unofficial flags in the past, including the popular "Bratach nan Daoine" (Flag of the People) design which represented the Cuillins in sky blue against a white sky symbolising the Gaelic language, land struggle, and the fairy flag of Dunvegan, the Island received its first official flag "Bratach an Eilein" (The Skye Flag) approved by the Lord Lyon after a public vote in August 2020. The design by Calum Alasdair Munro reflects the Island's Gaelic heritage, the Viking heritage, and the history of Flora MacDonald. The flag has a birlinn in the canton, and there are five oars representing the five areas of Skye, Trotternish, Waternish, Duirinish, Minginish, and Sleat. Yellow represents the MacLeods, and Blue the MacDonalds or the MacKinnons.
## Wildlife
The Hebrides generally lack the biodiversity of mainland Britain, but like most of the larger islands, Skye still has a wide variety of species. Observing the abundance of game birds Martin wrote:
> There is plenty of land and water fowl in this isle—as hawks, eagles of two kinds (the one grey and of a larger size, the other much less and black, but more destructive to young cattle), black cock, heath-hen, plovers, pigeons, wild geese, ptarmigan, and cranes. Of this latter sort I have seen sixty on the shore in a flock together. The sea fowls are malls of all kinds—coulterneb, guillemot, sea cormorant, &c. The natives observe that the latter, if perfectly black, makes no good broth, nor is its flesh worth eating; but that a cormorant, which hath any white feathers or down, makes good broth, and the flesh of it is good food; and the broth is usually drunk by nurses to increase their milk.
Similarly, Samuel Johnson noted that:
> At the tables where a stranger is received, neither plenty nor delicacy is wanting. A tract of land so thinly inhabited must have much wild-fowl; and I scarcely remember to have seen a dinner without them. The moor-game is every where to be had. That the sea abounds with fish, needs not be told, for it supplies a great part of Europe. The Isle of Sky has stags and roebucks, but no hares. They sell very numerous droves of oxen yearly to England, and therefore cannot be supposed to want beef at home. Sheep and goats are in great numbers, and they have the common domestic fowls."
In the modern era avian life includes the corncrake, red-throated diver, kittiwake, tystie, Atlantic puffin, goldeneye and golden eagle. The eggs of the last breeding pair of white-tailed sea eagle in the UK were taken by an egg collector on Skye in 1916 but the species has recently been re-introduced. The chough last bred on the island in 1900. Mountain hare (apparently absent in the 18th century) and rabbit are now abundant and preyed upon by wild cat and pine marten. The rich fresh water streams contain brown trout, Atlantic salmon and water shrew. Offshore the edible crab and edible oyster are also found, the latter especially in the Sound of Scalpay. There are nationally important horse mussel and brittlestar beds in the sea lochs and in 2012 a bed of 100 million flame shells was found during a survey of Loch Alsh. Grey Seals can be seen off the Southern coast.
Heather moor containing ling, bell heather, cross-leaved heath, bog myrtle and fescues is everywhere abundant. The high Black Cuillins weather too slowly to produce soil that sustains a rich plant life, but each of the main peninsulas has an individual flora. The basalt underpinnings of Trotternish produce a diversity of Arctic and alpine plants including alpine pearlwort and mossy cyphal. The low-lying fields of Waternish contain corn marigold and corn spurry. The sea cliffs of Duirinish boast mountain avens and fir clubmoss. Minginish produces fairy flax, cats-ear, and black bog rush. There is a fine example of Brachypodium-rich ash woodland at Tokavaig in Sleat incorporating silver birch, hazel, bird cherry, and hawthorn.
The local Biodiversity Action Plan recommends land management measures to control the spread of ragwort and bracken and identifies four non-native, invasive species as threatening native biodiversity: Japanese knotweed, rhododendron, New Zealand flatworm and mink. It also identifies problems of over-grazing resulting in the impoverishment of moorland and upland habitats and a loss of native woodland, caused by the large numbers of red deer and sheep.
In 2020 Clan MacLeod chief Hugh MacLeod announced a plan to reintroduce 370,000 native trees along with beaver and red squirrel populations to the clan estates on Skye, to restore a "wet desert" landscape which had depleted from years of overgrazing.
## See also
- List of islands of Scotland
- :Category:Mountains and hills of the Isle of Skye
- Timeline of prehistoric Scotland |
7,194,073 | Brill Tramway | 1,148,279,426 | Former rail line in Buckinghamshire, England | [
"Brill Tramway",
"Horse-drawn railways",
"Predecessor companies of the London Underground",
"Rail transport in Buckinghamshire",
"Railway lines closed in 1935",
"Railway lines opened in 1871"
]
| The Brill Tramway, also known as the Quainton Tramway, Wotton Tramway, Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad and Metropolitan Railway Brill Branch, was a six-mile (10 km) rail line in the Aylesbury Vale, Buckinghamshire, England. It was privately built in 1871 by the 3rd Duke of Buckingham as a horse tram line to help transport goods between his lands around Wotton House and the national rail network. Lobbying from the nearby village of Brill led to its extension to Brill and conversion to passenger use in early 1872. Two locomotives were bought but trains still travelled at an average speed of 4 miles per hour (6.4 km/h).
In 1883, the Duke of Buckingham planned to upgrade the route to main line standards and extend the line to Oxford, creating the shortest route between Aylesbury and Oxford. Despite the backing of the wealthy Ferdinand de Rothschild, investors were deterred by costly tunnelling. In 1888 a cheaper scheme was proposed in which the line would be built to a lower standard and avoid tunnelling. In anticipation, the line was named the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad.
The existing line was upgraded in 1894, but the extension to Oxford was never built. Instead, operation of the Brill Tramway was taken over by London's Metropolitan Railway and Brill became one of its two north-western termini. The line was rebuilt in 1910, and more advanced locomotives were introduced, allowing trains to run faster. The population of the area remained low, and the primary income source remained the carriage of goods to and from farms. Between 1899 and 1910 other lines were built in the area, providing more direct services to London and the north of England. The Brill Tramway went into financial decline.
In 1933 the Metropolitan Railway became the Metropolitan line of London Transport. The Brill Tramway became part of the London Underground, despite Quainton Road being 40 miles (64 km) from London and not underground. London Transport aimed to concentrate on electrification and improvement of passenger services in London and saw little possibility that passenger routes in Buckinghamshire could become viable. In 1935 the Brill Tramway closed. The infrastructure was dismantled and sold. Little trace remains other than the former junction station at Quainton Road, now the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre.
## Background
Brill is a small village at the top of the 600-foot (180 m) high Brill Hill in the Aylesbury Vale in northern Buckinghamshire, 12 miles (19 km) northeast of Oxford, and 45 miles (72 km) north-west of London. It was the only population centre in Bernwood Forest, a forest owned by English monarchs as a hunting ground. Traditionally believed to have been the home of King Lud, Brill Palace was a seat of the Mercian kings, the home of Edward the Confessor, and an occasional residence of the monarchs of England until at least the reign of Henry III (1216–1272). Brill was a centre for manufacture of pottery and bricks, but it was a long way from major roads or rivers, and separated by hills from Oxford. It remained small and isolated. In the 1861 census it had a population of 1,300.
### Wotton House and the Dukes of Buckingham
Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, the only son of Richard Plantagenet Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, was born on 10 September 1823. By the mid-19th century the family was in financial difficulty. The family's estates and their London home at Buckingham House (No. 91 Pall Mall) were sold and the family seat of Stowe House seized by bailiffs as security and its contents sold. Over 40,000 acres (16,200 ha) of the family's 55,000-acre (22,300 ha) estates were sold to meet debts.
The only property in the control of the Grenville family was the small ancestral home of Wotton House and its associated lands around Wotton Underwood near Brill. The Grenvilles looked for ways to maximise profits from their remaining farmland around Wotton, and to seek opportunities in heavy industry and engineering. Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville (titled Marquess of Chandos following the death of his grandfather Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos in 1839) was appointed chairman of the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) on 27 May 1857. After the death of his father on 29 July 1861 he became 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, and resigned from chairmanship of the LNWR, returning to Wotton House to manage the family's estates. His efforts to pay debts incurred by his father earned praise from Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and in 1875 he was appointed Governor of Madras, serving until 1880.
### Early railways in the Aylesbury Vale
On 15 June 1839 entrepreneur and former Member of Parliament for Buckingham, Sir Harry Verney, 2nd Baronet, opened the Aylesbury Railway. Built under the direction of Robert Stephenson, it connected the London and Birmingham Railway's Cheddington railway station on the West Coast Main Line to Aylesbury High Street railway station in eastern Aylesbury, the first station in the Aylesbury Vale. On 1 October 1863 the Wycombe Railway opened a branch from Princes Risborough railway station to Aylesbury railway station on the western side of Aylesbury, leaving Aylesbury as the terminus of two small and unconnected branch lines.
Meanwhile, north of Aylesbury the Buckinghamshire Railway was being built by Sir Harry Verney. The scheme consisted of a line running southwest to northeast from Oxford to Bletchley and a second southeast from Brackley via Buckingham to join the Oxford–Bletchley line halfway along its length. The first section opened on 1 May 1850, and the whole on 20 May 1851. The Buckinghamshire Railway intended to extend the line south to the station at Aylesbury but the extension was not built.
On 6 August 1860 the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway, with the 3rd Duke (then still Marquess of Chandos) as chairman and Sir Harry Verney as deputy chairman, was incorporated by Act of Parliament to connect the Buckinghamshire Railway (now operated by the LNWR) to Aylesbury. The 2nd Duke ensured the new route ran via Quainton, near his estates around Wotton, instead of a more direct route via Pitchcott. Beset by financial difficulties, the line took over eight years to build, eventually opening on 23 September 1868. The new line was connected to the Wycombe Railway's Aylesbury station, and joined the Buckinghamshire Railway where the Oxford–Bletchley line and the line to Buckingham met. A junction station was built. With no nearby town after which to name the new station, it was named Verney Junction railway station after Sir Harry. Aylesbury now had railway lines to the east, north and southwest, but no line southeast towards London and the Channel ports.
## Construction and early operations
With a railway near the border of Wotton House estate, the 3rd Duke decided to build a small-scale agricultural railway to connect the estate to the railway. His intended route ran on his own land other than a small stretch west of the Aylesbury and Buckingham line. This land was owned by the Winwood Charity Trust, an operator of almshouses in Quainton of which the Duke was a trustee. The Duke agreed to pay an annual rent of £12 (about £ in 2023), in return for permission to run trains. With the consent of the Winwood Charity the route did not require Parliamentary approval, and construction could begin immediately.
The Duke envisaged a tramway west from Quainton Road railway station across his Wotton estate. The line was intended for transport of construction materials and agricultural produce and not for passengers. It would not have a junction with the Aylesbury and Buckingham railway but would have its own station at Quainton Road at a right angle to the A&B's line. A turntable at the end of the tramway would link to a spur from the A&B's line. The line was to run roughly southwest from Quainton Road to Wotton near Wotton Underwood. Just west of the station at Wotton the line split. One section would run west to Wood Siding near Brill. A short stub called Church Siding would run northwest into Wotton Underwood itself, terminating near the parish church, and a 1 mile 57 chains (2.8 km) siding would run north to a coal siding near Kingswood. The branch to Kingswood was routed to pass a pond, to allow the horses working the line to drink.
Ralph Augustus Jones was appointed Manager of the project, and construction began on 8 September 1870. Twenty labourers from the Wotton estate who would otherwise have been unemployed following harvest were employed six days a week to build the line, each paid 11 s per week. They carried out all the construction except laying the track, which was done by the specialists, Lawford & Houghton. The line was built using the cheapest materials and winding around hills to avoid expensive earthworks. The ballast was a mix of burnt clay and ash. The stations were crude earth banks 6 inches (150 mm) high, held in place by wooden planks. As the Duke intended that the line be worked only by horse-drawn carriages, the line was built with longitudinal sleepers to reduce the risk of horses tripping. A 13-foot (4 m) diameter turntable was installed at Quainton Road to link the tramway to the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway.
### Opening
On 1 April 1871, the section between Quainton Road and Wotton was formally opened by the Duke of Buckingham in a ceremony in which coal from the first goods wagon to arrive at Wotton was distributed to the poor. At its opening the line was unnamed, but it was referred to as "The Quainton Tramway" in internal correspondence. The extension from Wotton to Wood Siding was complete by 17 June 1871; the opening date of the northern branch to Kingswood is not recorded, but it was not fully open in February 1873. The London and North Western Railway began a dedicated service from Quainton Road, with three vans a week of milk collected from the Wotton estate shipped to the London terminus at Broad Street. The only passengers were estate employees and people accompanying livestock.
The Duke and Jones intended to run no more than one train on each section of the line so the line was not built with passing loops or signalling. When more than one horse-drawn train or locomotive was in operation, the Tramway operated a token system using colour-coded staffs to ensure only one train could be on a section. Drivers between Quainton Road and Wotton carried a blue staff, those west of Wotton and the Kingswood siding a red staff.
On 26 August 1871, an excursion ran from Wood Siding to London hauled by the Great Western Railway (GWR). It carried around 150 people, for a total of 105+1⁄2 passenger fares (with each child counted as half an adult), and was drawn by horses between Wood Siding and Quainton Road and by locomotive from Quainton Road to Aylesbury where the carriages were attached to the 7.30 am GWR service via Princes Risborough to London, arriving at 10.00 am. The experiment was not a success. Sharp overhanging branches posed a danger to passengers and had to be cut back in the week before the excursion. The day was wet and ticket sales were lower than expected. The return from London to Quainton Road was delayed in Slough, and the excursion arrived back at Wood Siding at 2.00 am.
The surveyors designing the line had worked on the assumption that the wagons would have a load on each wheel of 2+1⁄2 long tons (2.54 t; 2.80 short tons) and had designed the line accordingly. As it turned out, the four-wheeled wagons used had an average weight of 3+1⁄2 long tons (3.56 t; 3.92 short tons) and each carried 6–7 long tons (6.10–7.11 t; 6.72–7.84 short tons) of goods, meaning this limit was regularly exceeded. The coal wagons used on the line weighed 5 long tons (5.08 t; 5.60 short tons) each and carried 10 long tons (10.16 t; 11.20 short tons) of coal, meaning a load on each wheel of 3+3⁄4 long tons (3.81 t; 4.20 short tons).
As well as damaging the track the loads strained the horses, and soon the line began to suffer with derailments, particularly in wet weather. On 20 October 1871 Jones wrote to the Duke that "The traffic is now becoming so heavy that I would, most respectfully, venture to ask your Grace to consider the subject as to whether an Engine would not be the least expensive and most efficient power to work it."
### Extension to Brill and conversion to steam
In late 1871, residents of Brill petitioned the Duke to extend the route to Brill and open a passenger service. The Duke agreed; it is likely he had already planned passenger services to Brill, as correspondence from early 1871 mentions passenger facilities at "the Brill terminus". In January 1872 a scheduled passenger timetable was published and the line was named the "Wotton Tramway". (Officially called the "Wotton Tramway", it was commonly known as the "Brill Tramway" from the time of its conversion to passenger use.) The new terminus of Brill railway station, at the foot of Brill Hill approximately 3⁄4 mile (1.2 km) north of the town, opened in March 1872. It was now a passenger railway, but goods traffic continued to be the primary purpose of the line. The line was heavily used to ship bricks from the brickworks around Brill, and cattle and milk from farms on the Wotton estate. By 1875 the line was carrying around 40,000 imperial gallons (180,000 L; 48,000 US gal) of milk each year. The inbound delivery of linseed cake to the dairy farms and of coal to the area's buildings were also important. The line began to carry manure from London to the area's farms, carrying 3,200 long tons (3,300 t; 3,600 short tons) in 1872. The tramway also opened a cartage business to handle the onward shipment of goods and parcels unloaded at Brill and Wotton stations.
With horses unable to cope, Jones and the Duke decided to convert at least part of the railway for locomotives. The lightly laid track with longitudinal sleepers limited them to 9 long tons (9.14 t; 10.08 short tons), and it was thus necessary to use the lightest locomotives possible. Two traction engines converted for railway use were bought from Aveling and Porter for £398 (about £ in 2023) each. They were chosen for weight and reliability, and had a top speed on the level of 8 miles per hour (13 km/h). They took 95–98 minutes between Brill and Quainton Road, an average of 4 miles per hour (6.4 km/h). With an unusual configuration in which a flywheel drove chains which in turn drove the wheels, the locomotives were noisy and were nicknamed "Old Chainey" by locals.
The first of the new locomotives, given serial number 807 by Aveling and Porter and numbered 1 by the Tramway, was delivered to Wotton station on 27 January 1872. On the day of its delivery, the now-redundant horses had been sent away. Nobody at Wotton could operate the locomotive so a horse had to be hired from Aylesbury until the driver arrived. After the delivery of the second locomotive on 7 September 1872, all passenger services were drawn by locomotive except on Thursdays, when locomotives were replaced by horses to allow for maintenance. The line carried 104 passengers in January 1872, rising to 224 in April, and 456 in August 1872.
With steam came the need for water. Plans to dig a well near Wotton came to nothing, and the Duke's expedient of drawing water from a pond near Quainton Road did not impress the pond's owner. By March 1872 Jones recorded that "The party to whom the pond near the Quainton Station belongs is making complaints about our having water and I expect he will be using force to prevent our getting any". A wooden water tower was built at Brill station, and a large water tower known as the Black Tank was built in the fork of the main line and Church Siding.
The engines proved adequate but slow. On 6 February 1872, Jones timed one as taking 41 minutes to travel roughly 2 miles (3.2 km) from Quainton Road to Wotton hauling 42 tons (43 t). They were low-powered, and when pulling a heavy load their front wheels would lift off the track. The Duke's cost-cutting led to poor maintenance of track and equipment, and the service was often interrupted by derailments and accidents.
In 1876, the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway raised its prices for coal haulage. All coal hauled on the Tramway needed to pass along the A&BR from Verney Junction or Aylesbury and Jones had to raise prices to cover the surcharge or keep prices stable despite the loss of profits. Road-hauled coal from Bicester was already undercutting the Tramway and the unreliable engines had given the Tramway a poor reputation. Jones kept prices fixed and absorbed the increased costs, wrecking the Tramway's already declining business.
In 1873, the 3rd Duke attempted to have the Wotton Tramway recognised as a railway, and William Yolland inspected the line in April 1873. The Railway Regulation Act 1844 defined minimum standards of travel, one of which was that the trains travel at an average of 12 miles per hour (19 km/h), which the Aveling and Porter locomotives could not manage. None of the stopping places had adequate station buildings, and the line had no signals. Yolland permitted the line to continue as a tramway, but refused to recognise it as a railway.
## Improvement and diversification
By the mid-1870s, the slow locomotives and their unreliability and inability to handle heavy loads were major problems. In 1874 Ferdinand de Rothschild bought a 2,700-acre (1,100 ha) site near Waddesdon station from John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough, for his planned Waddesdon Manor. Jones and the Duke recognised that construction would increase the haulage of heavy goods and that the engines would not cope.
Engineer William Gordon Bagnall had established the locomotive firm of W. G. Bagnall in 1875. Bagnall wrote to the Duke offering to hire his first locomotive for trials. On 18 December 1876, the locomotive Buckingham was delivered. It entered service on 1 January 1877, mainly on the steep section of the line between Wotton and Brill. Jones was unhappy with some aspects of Buckingham, but recognised the improvement and ordered a locomotive from Bagnall for £640 (about £ in 2023). Wotton was delivered on 28 December 1877 and Buckingham was returned to Bagnall in February 1878.
Buckingham and Wotton were more reliable than the Aveling and Porter engines. With modern locomotives on the Brill–Quainton Road route (the Kingswood branch generally remained worked by horses, and occasionally by the Aveling and Porter engines), traffic rose. The figure for milk traffic rose from 40,000 gallons carried in 1875 to 58,000 gallons (260,000 L; 70,000 US gal) in 1879, and in 1877 the Tramway carried 20,994 tons (21,331 t) of goods. In early 1877 it appeared on Bradshaw maps and from May 1882 Bradshaw listed the timetable.
Despite frequent derailments, low speed meant Wotton Tramway had a good safety record. The locomotives occasionally ran over stray sheep, and on 12 September 1888 sparks from one of the Aveling and Porter engines blew back into one of the train's cattle wagons, igniting the straw bedding and badly burning two cows. The line had one serious accident, in which Ellen Maria Nickalls, a servant at Wotton House, was struck by a locomotive near Church Siding and killed. The coroner returned a verdict of accidental death, absolving driver James Challis.
### Passenger services
Jones increased scheduled passenger journeys from two to three each day in each direction. With locomotives generally occupied with goods, many passenger services were drawn by horse. The increased passenger journeys boosted revenues, but the Tramway no longer owned enough horses and had to hire them. By 1881, the passenger service was losing £11 (about £ in 2023) a month, although reduced use of locomotives lowered maintenance costs. Reliability had improved, but services were still slow. Horse-drawn passenger services took 60–70 minutes to travel 6 miles (9.7 km) between Quainton Road and Brill. The locomotive-hauled mixed trains, with frequent stops to load and unload, were timetabled at 11⁄2 to 23⁄4 hours to make the same journey, slower than walking.
Jones hoped to increase passenger revenue by promoting Brill as a spa. The chalybeate springs of Dorton Spa outside Brill were known for supposed healing powers, and a resort had been built around the Spa in the 1830s, featuring a modern pump house and eight baths, set in 12 acres (4.9 ha) of parkland. Despite the redevelopment and the building of modern hotels in Brill, Dorton Spa was unfashionable and by the late 19th century was little used. Jones and the Spa's owners hoped Queen Victoria would visit during her 1890 stay at Waddesdon Manor and thus boost Brill as a spa town. A visit was arranged, but Victoria changed her mind and visited the spa at Cheltenham instead. The spa traffic never materialised.
### Waddesdon Manor
In 1876, Ferdinand de Rothschild began work on Waddesdon Manor, a short distance south of the Tramway's station at Waddesdon (later renamed Waddesdon Road). The top of Lodge Hill, a landmark, was levelled to provide a site and sloping drives were cut into the hill to provide access to the construction site. Transport of materials was by horse, but the contractors had to get enormous stone blocks up the hill. Rothschild's contractors built a line, known as the Winchendon Branch, which turned off the Tramway between Waddesdon and Westcott stations and ran south to the foot of Lodge Hill. From there a cable tram ran on narrow gauge rails up the hill to a gully close to the building site. Materials were hauled along the cable tramway in tubs by a steam-powered winch. The Winchendon Branch was hastily and cheaply built; after one of the Tramway's locomotives derailed there on 5 July 1876 Jones refused to allow his engines on it, and from then on materials were hauled along the branch by horses.
The building of Waddesdon Manor generated huge business for the Tramway. Large numbers of bricks from Poore's Brickworks at Brill were shipped. By July 1877 the entire output of the brickworks was going to supply the Waddesdon Manor works, with 25,000 bricks a week being used. Additional bricks were also shipped via Quainton Road, along with 7,000 tons (7,100 t) of Bath Stone from Corsham. The manor also required power and in 1883 a gasworks was built to the west. A siding from Westcott station ran south to the gasworks, to carry coal. Waddesdon Manor chose not to use the Tramway for supplying coal to the gasworks and the siding was abandoned in 1886.
Waddesdon Manor was complete in 1889, 13 years after construction began. The Winchendon Branch closed and the track was removed. The gasworks remained operational, supplied by road, until its closure during the coal shortage of 1916. It was demolished shortly afterwards. The track of the disused siding remained until at least 1916.
### Brill Brick and Tile Works
Poore's Brickworks was well established, and Jones believed there was potential profit in the Duke of Buckingham's capitalising on his access to a railway line by becoming directly involved in brickmaking. Trials with Brill clay in 1883 proved positive, and in April 1885 Jones sought estimates for machinery and labour necessary to produce 10 million bricks a year. It was decided that 5 million bricks per year was a realistic figure, with bricks to be manufactured in kilns between Brill and Wood Siding stations and shipped down the Tramway to the national network. Progress was slow and obstructed by the local authority.
Few records survive of the Brill Brick and Tile Works, as it came to be called, but it was operational by 1895. Jones (1974) says the siding to the brickworks opened with the extension to Brill, implying that Brill Brick and Tile Works existed in early 1872. This is almost certainly incorrect; no mention of the sidings is made in the Duke of Buckingham's correspondence before 1887 and no reference to the Brill Brick and Tile Works exists in any source earlier than 1895. The bricks used to build Waddesdon Manor had to be shipped by road from Poore's to Brill or along the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway from further afield before being sent down the Tramway to the site, implying there was no works capable of making high numbers of bricks along the Tramway.
Brill Brick and Tile Works could not compete with the larger and better-connected brickworks at Calvert and declined. The brickworks finally closed in the early 20th century. The building was taken over by the W. E. Fenemore workshop, making hay loaders, before being converted into a timber yard in the 1920s.
### Relations with the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway
The introduction of the Bagnall locomotives and the traffic generated by the works at Waddesdon Manor had boosted the route's fortunes, but it remained in serious financial difficulty. The only connection with the national railway network was by way of the turntable at Quainton Road. The 3rd Duke of Buckingham chaired the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway but its management regarded the Tramway as a nuisance. In the 1870s it charged disproportionately high fees for through traffic between the Tramway and the main line with the intention of forcing the Tramway out of business. Relations deteriorated between Jones and J. G. Rowe, Secretary and Traffic Manager of the A&B. The A&B's trains at Quainton Road would miss connections with the Tramway, causing milk shipped to Quainton to become unsellable, to the extent that Jones began unloading milk at Waddesdon and shipping it to Aylesbury by road. Jones asked the Duke to intervene but relations remained poor; in 1888 Rowe blocked the telegraph along the Tramway, and in one meeting Jones and Rowe threatened violence.
Jones sought legal advice and was told that the Duke would probably win a legal action against the A&BR. The A&BR was in such a precarious financial position that any successful legal action against them would likely have forced the line through Quainton Road to close, severing the Tramway's connection with the national network altogether. Local dairy farmers began to switch to beef and butter, causing a drop in milk transport. From its peak of 20,994 tons carried in 1877, goods traffic fell in each of the next four years, dropping to 9,139 tons (9,286 t) in 1881.
Many of the passengers using the Tramway continued their journey by way of the A&BR line; in 1885, 5,192 passengers changed trains between the A&BR and the Tramway at Quainton Road. Jones suggested that the A&BR subsidise the Tramway's service to the sum of £25 (about £ in 2023) per month to allow passenger services to continue, but the A&BR agreed to pay only £5 (about £ in 2023) per month. By the mid-1880s the Tramway was finding it difficult to cover the operating expenses of either goods or passenger operations.
## Oxford extension schemes
### Oxford, Aylesbury and Metropolitan Junction Railway Company
Euston railway station opened in 1837, the first railway station connecting London with the industrial heartlands of the West Midlands and Lancashire. Railways were banned by a Parliamentary commission from operating in London itself and the station was built on the northern boundary. Other termini north of London followed at Paddington (1838), Bishopsgate (1840), Fenchurch Street (1841), King's Cross (1852) and St Pancras (1868). All were outside the built-up area, making them inconvenient.
Charles Pearson (1793–1862) had proposed an underground railway connecting the City of London with the main line rail termini in around 1840. In 1854 he commissioned the first traffic survey, determining that each day 200,000 walked into the City, 44,000 travelled by omnibus, and 26,000 in private carriages. A Parliamentary Commission backed Pearson's proposal over other schemes. Despite concerns about vibration causing subsidence of buildings, the problems of compensating the many thousands whose homes were destroyed during digging of the tunnel, and fears that the tunnelling might break into Hell, construction began in 1860. On 9 January 1863 the line opened as the Metropolitan Railway (MR), the world's first underground passenger railway.
The MR grew steadily, extending its own services and acquiring other local railways north and west of London. In 1872 Edward Watkin (1819–1901) was appointed Chairman. A director of many railway companies, he wanted to unify a string of companies to create a single line from Manchester via London to an intended Channel Tunnel and on to France. In 1873 Watkin negotiated to take control of the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway and the section of the former Buckinghamshire Railway north from Verney Junction to Buckingham. He planned to extend the MR north from London to Aylesbury and extend the Tramway southwest to Oxford, creating a route from London to Oxford. Rail services between Oxford and London were poor, and the scheme would have formed the shortest route from London to Oxford, Aylesbury, Buckingham and Stratford-upon-Avon. The Duke of Buckingham was enthusiastic and authorisation was sought from Parliament, who rejected the Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire Union Railway Bill in 1875. Watkin received consent in 1881 to extend the MR to Aylesbury.
With extension to Aylesbury approved, the Duke of Buckingham in March 1883 announced his own scheme to extend the Brill Tramway to Oxford. The turntable at Quainton Road would be replaced with a junction to the south of the existing turntable to allow through running. The stretch from Quainton Road to Brill would be straightened and improved to main line standards, and Waddesdon Road and Wood Siding stations would close. From Brill, the line would pass in a 1,650-yard (1,510 m) tunnel through Muswell Hill to the south of Brill, and on via Boarstall before crossing from Buckinghamshire into Oxfordshire at Stanton St. John. From Stanton St. John the line would stop on the outskirts of Oxford at Headington, terminating at a station to be built in the back garden of 12 High Street, St Clement's, near Magdalen Bridge. The proposal included a separate set of rails to be provided where the old and new routes ran together, to allow the existing Wotton Tramway to continue to operate independently if it saw fit, but given the Duke's involvement in the new scheme it is unlikely he intended to use this option.
At 23 miles (37 km) the line would have been the shortest route between Oxford and Aylesbury, compared with 28 miles (45 km) via the GWR (which had absorbed the Wycombe Railway), and 34 miles (55 km) via the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway and the LNWR. The Act authorising the scheme received Royal Assent on 20 August 1883, and the new Oxford, Aylesbury and Metropolitan Junction Railway Company was created, including the Duke of Buckingham, Ferdinand de Rothschild and Harry Verney among its directors. The scheme caught the attention of the expansionist Metropolitan Railway, who paid for the survey. Despite these powerful backers, the expensive Muswell Hill tunnel deterred investors. De Rothschild promised to lend money in return for guarantees that the rebuilt line would include a passenger station at Westcott, and that the Duke would press the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway to open a station at the nearest point to Waddesdon Manor. Waddesdon Manor railway station opened on 1 January 1897.
### Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad
Despite cash from Rothschild, the company could not raise sufficient investment to begin construction of the Oxford extension, and had only been given a five-year window by Parliament in which to build it. On 7 August 1888, less than two weeks before the authorisation was to expire, the directors of the Oxford, Aylesbury and Metropolitan Junction Railway Company received Royal Assent for a revised and cheaper version. To be called the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad (O&AT), the new scheme envisaged the extension's being built to the same light specifications as the existing tramway. To avoid expensive earthworks and tunnelling, the line would parallel a road out of Brill, despite the considerable gradients involved. The entire route would be single track, other than passing places, and the Oxford terminus was to be in George Street, nearer the edge of the city. Jones was sceptical and felt that it was unlikely to recoup its construction costs.
On 26 March 1889, the 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos died, aged 65. A special train brought his body from London to Quainton Road, and from Quainton it was taken to Stowe for the service, and on to the family vault at Wotton. Five carriages provided by the London and North Western Railway carried mourners to Church Siding, near Wotton Underwood's church. Another carried a company of the Royal Buckinghamshire Yeomanry, associated with the Grenville family and the upkeep of which had helped bankrupt the second duke. (This second train was delayed on the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway, arriving late to the burial.)
The dukedom was inherited only in the male line. As the 3rd Duke had three daughters but no son, the title became extinct. The 1st Duke was also Earl Temple of Stowe, a title which descended through heirs of his relatives should the male line become extinct. Consequently, on the 3rd Duke's death this title, with most of the Wotton estate, passed to his nephew William Temple-Gore-Langton who became the 4th Earl Temple.
By this time construction of the MR extension from London to Aylesbury was under way, and on 1 July 1891 the MR absorbed the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway. Sir Harry Verney died on 12 February 1894, and on 31 March 1894 the MR took over services on the A&BR from the GWR. On 1 July 1894 the MR extension to Aylesbury was completed, giving the MR a unified route from London to Verney Junction. The MR embarked on upgrading and rebuilding stations along the line.
Construction of the route from Brill to Oxford had not begun. Further Acts of Parliament were granted in 1892 and 1894 varying the route slightly and allowing electrification, but no building was carried out other than surveying. On 1 April 1894, the proposed extension to Oxford still intended, the O&AT exercised a clause of the 1888 Act and took over the Wotton Tramway. Jones was retained as general Manager and work began on upgrading the line for the extension.
#### Rebuilding and re-equipping by the O&AT
The track from Quainton Road to Brill was relaid with improved rails on standard transverse sleepers. The former longitudinal sleepers were used as fence posts and guard rails. The stations, little more than earth banks, were replaced with wooden platforms. Waddesdon, Westcott, Wotton and Brill were fitted with buildings housing a booking office, waiting rooms and toilets, and Wood Siding station had a small waiting room "with shelf and drawer". Church Siding was not included and was removed from the timetable.
The Kingswood branch was not included in the rebuilding, and retained its original 1871 track. Two Manning Wardle locomotives, Huddersfield and Earl Temple, came into use on the line at around this time. Huddersfield had been built in 1876 and originally named Prestwich; Earl Temple was identical to Huddersfield other than having a covered cab. The Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad could not afford the price when Earl Temple was delivered and the Earl bought it with his own money and rented it to the O&AT. In 1895 two new passenger carriages, each accommodating 40 passengers, were bought from the Bristol Wagon and Carriage Company. In 1896 Huddersfield was withdrawn, and in 1899 replaced with a new Manning Wardle locomotive named Wotton No. 2, at which time Earl Temple was renamed Brill No. 1.
The rebuilding reduced journeys between Quainton Road and Brill to between 35 and 43 minutes. From 1895 the Tramway ran four passenger services in each direction on weekdays. The population of the area remained low, and in 1901 Brill had a population of only 1206. Passenger traffic remained insignificant and in 1898 passenger receipts were only £24 per month (about £ in 2023).
Meanwhile, the MR were rebuilding and resiting Quainton Road station, freeing space for a direct link between the former Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway and the O&AT to be built. A curve between the lines opened on 1 January 1897, allowing through running between the two lines.
With through running between the lines in place, in June 1899 the MR inspected the O&AT's carriages and locomotives, and had serious concerns. The original passenger carriage began as a horse tram and was shabby internally, and unsafe as part of a longer train. The passenger carriage from the 1870s was in a poor condition. The 1895 Bristol passenger carriages were unfit because of their light construction. Eight of the O&AT's nine goods wagons did not comply with Railway Clearing House standards and could not be used on other lines. On 4 October 1899 the MR loaned the O&AT an eight-wheeled 70 seat passenger carriage. As this had been built for the MR's standard height platforms rather than the O&AT's low platforms, 80–100 ft (24–30 m) of each platform on the Tramway was raised to standard height to accommodate the MR carriage.
## Metropolitan Railway takeover
The Metropolitan and the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company were cooperating closely by 1899. The line had been upgraded in preparation for the Oxford extension and had been authorised as a railway in 1894, but construction on the extension had yet to begin. On 27 November John Bell, Watkin's successor as Chairman of the MR, leased the line from the O&AT for £600 (about £ in 2023) a year with an option to buy the line. From 1 December 1899, the MR took over all operations. Jones stayed as Manager. The O&AT's decrepit passenger coach, a relic of Wotton Tramway days, was removed from its wheels and used as a platelayer's hut at Brill station. An elderly Brown, Marshalls and Co passenger coach replaced it, and a section of each platform was raised to accommodate the higher doors of this coach using earth and old railway sleepers.
On 28 March 1902, the 4th Earl Temple died aged 55, succeeded by Algernon William Stephen Temple-Gore-Langton, 5th Earl Temple of Stowe. The Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company, which by now did nothing except collect £600 annual rent from the MR, pay the Winwood Charity Trust rent for their land near Quainton Road crossed by the rails, and pay Earl Temple an annual dividend of £400, remained independent under the control of the 4th Earl's trustees.
### Rebuilding and re-equipping by the Metropolitan Railway
The MR sold all but one of the dilapidated goods wagons to the Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr Railway, replacing them with five eight-wheeled carriages built in 1865–66. The MR considered the Manning Wardle locomotives unreliable and from early 1903 they were replaced by a pair of Metropolitan Railway D Class engines; they were sold in 1911. The heavy D Class locomotives damaged the track, and in 1910 the track between Quainton Road and Brill was relaid to MR standards, using track removed from the inner London MR route but considered adequate for a rural branch line. Following this upgrading, the speed limit was increased to 25 miles per hour (40 km/h).
The Kingswood branch was again not upgraded, and still retained its 1871 track. It was abandoned at the end of 1915, and the track removed in 1920. In 1911 Brill Brick and Tile Works closed, and the siding to the brickworks was removed, with the exception of the rails on the level crossing which in 1984 were still in place, albeit tarmacked over. On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Brill became a centre for training cadets, who were housed in Wotton House and ferried in trains of five passenger coaches.
The Metropolitan Railway was unhappy with the performance and safety of the D Class locomotives and sold them between 1916 and 1922. With much of their route close to London now electrified the MR had surplus steam locomotives, and two Metropolitan Railway A Class locomotives, numbers 23 (built 1866) and 41 (built 1869), were transferred to the route. Built by Beyer, Peacock and Company from 1864, the A Class had been the first locomotives owned by the Metropolitan (in 1863, the first year of operation, the MR had used engines borrowed from the GWR). The A Class were the most advanced locomotives regularly to work the route, but they predated all other rolling stock on the Tramway. The two locomotives operated for a week at a time. Occasionally, the MR substituted other similar locomotives.
Four services per day operated, taking around 40 minutes from one end to the other in 1900, falling to 32 minutes by 1931 after the upgrading of the route and the introduction of the A Class locomotives.
On 1 February 1903 Jones retired and control was taken over directly by the Metropolitan Railway. Jones died on 14 April 1909, surviving to see the railway network in the Aylesbury Vale reach its greatest extent.
## New railways through the Aylesbury Vale, 1899–1910
### Great Central Railway
In 1893, another of Edward Watkin's railways, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, had been authorised to build a new 90 miles (140 km) line, from its existing station at Annesley in Nottinghamshire, south to Quainton Road. Watkin had intended to run services from Manchester and Sheffield via Quainton Road and along the Metropolitan Railway to the MR's station at Baker Street. Following Watkin's retirement in 1894, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway obtained permission for a separate station near Baker Street at Marylebone, and the line was renamed the Great Central Railway (GCR). The new line joined the existing MR just north of Quainton Road on the Verney Junction branch, and opened to passengers on 15 March 1899. Many of the bricks used in the building of the Great Central Railway were supplied by the Brill Brick and Tile Works and shipped along the Tramway, providing a significant revenue boost to the O&AT.
### Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway
Following Watkin's retirement, relations between the Great Central Railway and the Metropolitan Railway deteriorated badly. The GCR route to London ran over MR lines from Quainton Road to London, and to reduce reliance on the shaky goodwill of the MR, GCR General Manager William Pollitt decided to create a link with the Great Western Railway to create a second route into London. In 1899 the Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway began construction of a new line, commonly known as the Alternative Route, to link the GWR's existing station at Princes Risborough to the new Great Central line. The line ran from Princes Risborough north to meet the Great Central at Grendon Underwood, about 3 miles (4.8 km) north of Quainton Road. The new line was to cross the Tramway on a bridge immediately east of Wotton station; no intersection was built between the lines. A temporary siding was built from the Tramway onto the embankment of the new line, and was used for the transport of construction materials and the removal of spoil from the works during the building of the new line. The line was formally an independent company, but in practice was operated as part of the Great Central Railway.
The new line was planned as a through route and was not intended to have any stations of its own, but in 1904 it was decided to build two stations on it. A new station, also named Wotton, was built immediately to the south of the existing Wotton station. On 2 April 1906 the new route opened to passengers. The two Wotton stations were very close together, and the same stationmaster was responsible for both.
### Chiltern Main Line Bicester cut-off
In 1910, the new Bicester cut-off line of the GWR Chiltern Main Line opened, allowing trains from London to Birmingham to bypass a long curve through Oxford. The new line was routed directly through Wood Siding, but no interchange station was built. The GWR ran in a cutting beneath the existing station; Wood Siding station and its siding were rebuilt at the GWR's expense between 1908–1910 to stand on a wide bridge above the GWR's line. The new line included the station named Brill and Ludgershall, which was considerably further from Brill than the existing Brill station.
With the opening of the new routes, the Tramway for the first time suffered serious competition. Although further from Brill than the Tramway's station, the GWR's station provided a fast and direct route to the GWR's London terminus at Paddington. The Great Central Railway's station at Wotton, and the other Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway station at Akeman Street, provided fast and direct routes to both Paddington and to the Great Central's new London terminus at Marylebone, without the need to change trains at Quainton Road. In addition, following the end of the First World War motorised road transport grew rapidly, drawing passenger and goods traffic away from the railways. The Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company repeatedly tried to persuade the Metropolitan Railway to buy the line outright, but the MR declined. In July 1923 the O&AT tried to sell the line to the GWR and to the Electric and Railway Finance Corporation, but was rebuffed by both.
## London Transport
On 1 July 1933, the Metropolitan Railway, along with London's other underground railways, aside from the short Waterloo & City Railway, was taken into public ownership as part of the newly formed London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB). Thus, despite Brill and Verney Junction being 50 miles (80 km) and over two hours' travel from the City of London, the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad and the former Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway became parts of the London Underground network. The locomotives and carriages were repainted with London Transport's Johnston Sans emblem.
By this time, the route from Quainton Road to Brill was in severe decline. Competition from the newer lines and from improving road haulage had drawn away much of the tramway's custom, and the trains would often run without a single passenger. The A Class locomotives were now 70 years old, and the track itself was poorly maintained. Trains, once again, were regularly derailing on the line.
Frank Pick, managing director of the Underground Group from 1928 and the Chief Executive of the LPTB, aimed to move the network away from freight services, and to concentrate on the electrification and improvement of the core routes in London. He saw the lines beyond Aylesbury via Quainton Road to Brill and Verney Junction as having little future as financially viable passenger routes, concluding that at least £2,000 (about £ in 2023) per year would be saved by closing the Brill branch.
On 1 June 1935, the London Passenger Transport Board gave the required six months notice to the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company that it intended to terminate operations on the tramway.
### Closure
To fulfil their obligations, London Transport formally inspected the line on 23 July 1935. The inspection was carried out with great speed, the special train taking just 15 minutes to travel the length of the line from Brill to Quainton Road. The inspection confirmed that the closure process was to proceed.
The last scheduled passenger service left Quainton Road in the afternoon of 30 November 1935. Hundreds of people gathered, and a number of members of the Oxford University Railway Society travelled from Oxford in an effort to buy the last ticket. Accompanied by firecrackers and fog signals, the train ran the length of the line to Brill, where the passengers posed for a photograph.
Late that evening, a two-coach staff train pulled out of Brill, accompanied by a band playing Auld Lang Syne and a white flag. The train stopped at each station along the route, picking up the staff, documents and valuables from each. At 11.45 pm the train arrived at Quainton Road, greeted by hundreds of locals and railway enthusiasts. At the stroke of midnight, the rails connecting the tramway to the Metropolitan Railway main line were ceremonially severed.
Following the withdrawal of London Transport services the Metropolitan Railway's lease was voided and at midnight on 1 December 1935 the railway and stations reverted to the control of the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad Company. The O&AT Board by now had only three members: the 5th Earl Temple, the Earl's agent Robert White, and the former Brill hay-loader manufacturer W. E. Fenemore.
At the time of the closure there was some speculation that the O&AT would continue to operate the tramway as a mineral railway, but with no funds and no rolling stock of its own, the O&AT was unable to operate the line. On 2 April 1936, the entire infrastructure of the stations was sold piecemeal at auction. Excluding the houses at Westcott and Brill, which were sold separately, the auction raised £72 7s (about £ in 2023) in total. The Ward Scrap Metal Company paid £7,000 (about £ in 2023) for the rails, with the exception of those at Quainton Road which were retained as a siding.
With the stations at Wood Siding and Brill closed, and the GWR's Brill and Ludgershall railway station inconveniently sited, the GWR opened a new station on the Chiltern Main Line near to Brill at Dorton Halt on 21 June 1937.
On 5 January 1937, the board of the Oxford & Aylesbury Tramroad met for the last time. On 5 February 1937 a winding up petition was presented to the High Court, and on 24 March 1937 Mr W. E. Fisher was appointed liquidator. On 11 November 1940 Fisher was formally discharged, and the O&AT officially ceased to exist.
## After closure
After closure, the line was largely forgotten. Because it had been built on private land without an Act of Parliament, few records of it prior to the Oxford extension schemes exist in official archives. At least some of the rails remained in place in 1940, as records exist of their removal during the building of RAF Westcott. Other than the station buildings at Westcott and Quainton Road almost nothing survives of the tramway; much of the route can still be traced by a double line of hedges. The former trackbed between Quainton Road and Waddesdon Road is now a public footpath known as the Tramway Walk.
After the death of the 3rd Duke of Buckingham the family archives, including the records of the Brill Tramway, were sold to the Huntington Library in California. In 1968 the London Underground Railway Society launched a fundraising appeal to microfilm the relevant material, and in January 1971 the microfilms were opened to researchers at the University of London Library (now Senate House Library).
In the 1973 documentary Metro-Land, John Betjeman spoke of a 1929 visit to Quainton Road, and of watching a train depart for Brill: "The steam ready to take two or three passengers through oil-lit halts and over level crossings, a rather bumpy journey".
Wotton station on the Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway, which in 1923 had been taken over by the London and North Eastern Railway, remained open (albeit little used and served by only two trains per day in each direction) until 7 December 1953, when the station was abandoned. The bridge that had formerly carried the GW&GCJR over the tramway at Wotton was demolished in 1970, and the former GW&GCJR station was converted to a private house.
Both Dorton Halt and Brill and Ludgersall stations were closed on 7 January 1963 and trains no longer stop; the line through them remains in use by trains between Princes Risborough and Bicester North. Quainton Road station was bought in 1969 by members of the London Railway Preservation Society to use as a permanent base, and now houses the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre. The station is still connected to the railway network and used by freight trains and occasional special passenger services, but no longer has a scheduled passenger service. There are no longer any open railway stations in the areas formerly served by the tramway. Plans have been proposed by the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre to rebuild and reopen a stretch of the tramway as a heritage railway.
## See also
- Infrastructure of the Brill Tramway |
160,210 | Alexander of Greece | 1,173,248,526 | King of Greece from 1917 to 1920 | [
"1893 births",
"1920 deaths",
"1920 in Greece",
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"Burials at Tatoi Palace Royal Cemetery",
"Danish princes",
"Deaths due to animal attacks",
"Deaths from sepsis",
"Eastern Orthodox Christians from Greece",
"Eastern Orthodox monarchs",
"Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour",
"Greek generals",
"Greek people of British descent",
"Greek people of Danish descent",
"Greek people of German descent",
"Greek people of World War I",
"Greek princes",
"Honorary Knights Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath",
"House of Glücksburg (Greece)",
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| Alexander (Greek: Αλέξανδρος, Aléxandros; 1 August 1893 – 25 October 1920) was King of Greece from 11 June 1917 until his death in 1920.
The second son of King Constantine I, Alexander was born in the summer palace of Tatoi on the outskirts of Athens. He succeeded his father in 1917, during World War I, after the Entente Powers and the followers of Eleftherios Venizelos pushed King Constantine and his eldest son, Crown Prince George, into exile. Having no real political experience, the new king was stripped of his powers by the Venizelists and effectively imprisoned in his own palace. Venizelos, as prime minister, was the effective ruler with the support of the Entente. Though reduced to the status of a puppet king, Alexander supported Greek troops during their war against the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. Under his reign, the territorial extent of Greece considerably increased, following the victory of the Entente and their Allies in the First World War and the early stages of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922.
Alexander controversially married the commoner Aspasia Manos in 1919, provoking a major scandal that forced the couple to leave Greece for several months. Soon after returning to Greece with his wife, Alexander was bitten by a domestic Barbary macaque and died aged 27 of sepsis. The sudden death of the sovereign led to questions over the monarchy's survival and contributed to the fall of the Venizelist regime. After a general election and a referendum, Constantine I was restored to the throne.
## Early life
Alexander was born at Tatoi Palace on 1 August 1893 (20 July in the Julian calendar), the second son of Crown Prince Constantine of Greece and Princess Sophia of Prussia. He was related to royalty throughout Europe. His father was the eldest son of King George I of Greece by his wife, Olga Constantinovna of Russia; his mother was the daughter of Frederick III, German Emperor, and Victoria, Princess Royal of the United Kingdom. His parents' cousins included King George V of the United Kingdom and Emperor Nicholas II of Russia. Wilhelm II, German Emperor, was his maternal uncle.
Alexander's early life alternated between the Royal Palace in Athens, and Tatoi Palace in the city's suburbs. With his parents he undertook several trips abroad and regularly visited Schloss Friedrichshof, the home of his maternal grandmother, who had a particular affection for her Greek grandson.
Though he was very close to his younger sister Helen, Alexander was less warm towards his elder brother, George, with whom he had little in common. While George was a serious and thoughtful child, Alexander was mischievous and extroverted; he smoked cigarettes made from blotting paper, set fire to the games room in the palace, and recklessly lost control of a toy cart in which he and his younger brother Paul were rolling down a hill, tipping his toddler brother a distance of six feet into brambles.
## Military career
Alexander was third in line to the throne, after his father and elder brother. His education was expensive and carefully planned, but while George spent part of his military training in Germany, Alexander was educated in Greece. He joined the prestigious Hellenic Military Academy, where several of his uncles had previously studied and where he made himself known more for his mechanical skills than for his intellectual capacity. He was passionate about cars and motors, and was one of the first Greeks to acquire an automobile.
Alexander distinguished himself in combat during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. As a young officer, he was stationed, along with his elder brother, in the field staff of his father; and he accompanied the latter at the head of the Army of Thessaly during the capture of Thessaloniki in 1912. King George I was assassinated in Thessaloniki soon afterwards on 18 March 1913, and Alexander's father ascended the throne as Constantine I.
### Courtship of Aspasia Manos
In 1915, at a party held in Athens by court marshal Theodore Ypsilantis, Alexander became re-acquainted with one of his childhood friends, Aspasia Manos. She had just returned from education in France and Switzerland, and was reckoned as very beautiful by her acquaintances. She was the daughter of Constantine's Master of the Horse, Colonel Petros Manos, and his wife Maria Argyropoulos. The 21-year-old Alexander was smitten, and was so determined to seduce her that he followed her to the island of Spetses where she holidayed that year. Initially, Aspasia was resistant to his charm; although considered very handsome by his contemporaries, Alexander had a reputation as a ladies' man from numerous past liaisons. Despite this, he finally won her over, and the couple were engaged in secret. However, for King Constantine I, Queen Sophia and much of European society of the time, it was inconceivable for a royal prince to marry someone of a different social rank.
### World War I
During World War I, Constantine I followed a formal policy of neutrality, yet he was openly benevolent towards Germany, which was fighting alongside Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire against the Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain. Constantine was the brother-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and had also become something of a Germanophile following his military training in Prussia. His pro-German attitude provoked a split between the monarch and the prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who wanted to support the Entente in the hope of expanding Greek territory to incorporate the Greek minorities in the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans. Protected by the countries of the Entente, particularly France, in 1916 Venizelos formed a parallel government to that of the king.
Parts of Greece were occupied by the Allied Entente forces, but Constantine I refused to modify his policy and faced increasingly open opposition from the Entente and the Venizelists. In July 1916, an arson attack ravaged Tatoi Palace and the royal family barely escaped the flames; Alexander was not injured but his mother narrowly saved Princess Katherine by carrying her through the woods for more than two kilometers. Among the palace personnel and firefighters who arrived to deal with the blaze, sixteen people were killed.
Finally on 10 June 1917, Charles Jonnart, the Entente's High Commissioner in Greece, ordered King Constantine to give up his power. On the threat of Entente forces landing in Piraeus, the king conceded and agreed to go into self-exile, though without officially abdicating his crown. The Allies, while determined to be rid of Constantine, did not wish to create a Greek republic, and sought to replace the king with another member of the royal family. Crown Prince George, who was the natural heir, was ruled out by the Allies because they thought him too pro-German, like his father. Instead, they considered installing Constantine's brother (and Alexander's uncle), Prince George, but he had tired of public life during his difficult tenure as High Commissioner of Crete between 1901 and 1905; above all, he sought to remain loyal to his brother, and categorically refused to take the throne. As a result, Constantine's second son, Prince Alexander, was chosen to become the new monarch.
## Reign
### Accession
The dismissal of Constantine was not unanimously supported by the Entente powers; while France and Britain did nothing to stop Jonnart's actions, the Russian provisional government officially protested to Paris. Petrograd demanded that Alexander should not receive the title of king but only that of regent so as to preserve the rights of the deposed sovereign and the Crown Prince. Russia's protests were brushed aside, and Alexander ascended the Greek throne.
Alexander swore the oath of loyalty to the Greek constitution on the afternoon of 11 June 1917 in the ballroom of the Royal Palace. Apart from the Archbishop of Athens, Theocletus I, who administered the oath, only King Constantine I, Crown Prince George and the king's prime minister, Alexandros Zaimis, attended. There were no festivities. The 23-year-old Alexander had a broken voice and tears in his eyes as he made the solemn declaration. He knew that the Entente and the Venizelists would hold real power and that neither his father nor his brother had renounced their claims to the throne. Constantine had informed his son that he should consider himself a regent, rather than a true monarch.
In the evening, after the ceremony, the royal family decided to leave their palace in Athens for Tatoi, but city residents opposed the exile of their sovereign and crowds formed outside the palace to prevent Constantine and his family from leaving. On 12 June, the former king and his family escaped undetected from their residence by feigning departure from one gate while exiting through another. At Tatoi, Constantine again impressed upon Alexander that he held the crown in trust only. It was the last time that Alexander would be in direct contact with his family. The next day, Constantine, Sophia and all of their children except Alexander arrived at the small port of Oropos and set off into exile.
### Puppet king
With his parents and siblings in exile, Alexander found himself isolated. The royals remained unpopular with the Venizelists, and Entente representatives advised the king's aunts and uncles, particularly Prince Nicholas, to leave. Eventually, they all followed Constantine into exile. Royal household staff were gradually replaced by enemies of the former king, and Alexander's allies were either imprisoned or distanced from him. Portraits of the royal family were removed from public buildings, and Alexander's new ministers openly called him the "son of a traitor".
On 26 June 1917, the king was forced to name Eleftherios Venizelos as head of the government. Despite promises given by the Entente on Constantine's departure, the previous prime minister, Zaimis, was effectively forced to resign as Venizelos returned to Athens. Alexander immediately opposed his new prime minister's views and, annoyed by the king's rebuffs, Venizelos threatened to remove him and set up a regency council in the name of Alexander's brother Prince Paul, then still a minor. The Entente powers intervened and asked Venizelos to back down, allowing Alexander to retain the crown. Spied on day and night by the prime minister's supporters, the monarch quickly became a prisoner in his own palace, and his orders went ignored.
Alexander had no experience in affairs of state. However, he was determined to make the best of a difficult situation and represent his father as best he could. Adopting an air of cool indifference to the government, he rarely made the effort to read official documents before he rubber-stamped them. His functions were limited, and amounted to visiting the Macedonian front to support the morale of the Greek and Allied troops. Since Venizelos's return to power, Athens was at war with the Central Powers, and Greek soldiers battled those of Bulgaria in the north.
### Greek expansion
By the end of World War I, Greece had grown beyond its 1914 borders, and the treaties of Neuilly (1919) and Sèvres (1920) confirmed the Greek territorial conquests. The majority of Thrace (previously split between Bulgaria and Turkey) and several Aegean Islands (such as Imbros and Tenedos) became part of Greece, and the region of Smyrna, in Ionia, was placed under Greek mandate. Alexander's kingdom increased in size by around a third. In Paris, Venizelos took part in the peace negotiations with the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. Upon his return to Greece in August 1920, Venizelos received a laurel crown from the king for his work in support of panhellenism.
Despite their territorial gains following the Paris Peace Conference, the Greeks still hoped to achieve the Megali Idea and annex Constantinople and larger areas of Ottoman Asia Minor; they invaded Anatolia beyond Smyrna and sought to take Ankara, with the aim of destroying the Turkish resistance led by Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk). Thus began the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). Although Alexander's reign saw success after success for the Greek armies, it was eventually Atatürk's revolutionary forces that obtained victory in 1922, negating the gains made under Alexander.
## Marriage
### Controversy
On 12 June 1917, the day after his accession, Alexander revealed his liaison with Aspasia Manos to his father and asked for his permission to marry her. Constantine was reluctant to let his son marry a non-royal, and demanded that Alexander wait until the end of the war before considering the engagement, to which Alexander agreed. In the intervening months, Alexander increasingly resented his separation from his family. His regular letters to his parents were intercepted by the government and confiscated. Alexander's only source of comfort was Aspasia, and he decided to marry her despite his father's request.
The ruling dynasty of Greece (the House of Glücksburg) was of German-Danish origin, and Constantine and Sophia were seen as far too German by the Venizelists, but even though the marriage of the king to a Greek presented an opportunity to Hellenize the royal family, and counter criticisms that it was a foreign institution, both Venizelists and Constantinists opposed the match. The Venizelists feared it would give Alexander a means to communicate with his exiled family through Colonel Manos and both sides of the political divide were unhappy at the king marrying a commoner. Although Venizelos was a friend of Petros Manos, the prime minister warned the king that marrying her would be unpopular in the eyes of the people.
When Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, visited Athens in March 1918, to confer the Order of the Bath upon the king, Alexander feared that a marriage between him and Princess Mary of the United Kingdom would be discussed as part of an attempt to consolidate the relationship between Greece and Britain. To Alexander's relief, Arthur asked to meet Aspasia, and declared that, if he were younger, he would have sought to marry her himself. For the foreign powers, and particularly the British ambassador, the marriage was seen as positive. The British authorities feared that Alexander would abdicate in order to marry Aspasia if the wedding was blocked, and they wanted to avoid Greece becoming a republic in case it led to instability or an increase in French influence at their expense.
Alexander's parents were not so happy about the match. Sophia disapproved of her son marrying a commoner, while Constantine wanted a delay but was prepared to be his son's best man if Alexander would be patient. Alexander visited Paris at the end of 1918, raising hopes among his family that they would be able to contact him once he was outside Greece. When Queen Sophia attempted to telephone her son in his Parisian hotel, a minister intercepted the call and informed her that "His Majesty is sorry, but he cannot respond to the telephone". He was not even informed that she had called.
### Public scandal
With the help of Aspasia's brother-in-law, Christo Zalocostas, and after three unsuccessful attempts, the couple eventually married in secret before a royal chaplain, Archimandrite Zacharistas, on the evening of 17 November 1919. After the ceremony, the archimandrite was sworn to silence but soon broke his promise by confessing to the Archbishop of Athens, Meletios Metaxakis. According to the Greek constitution, members of the royal family had to obtain permission to marry from both the sovereign and the head of the Greek Orthodox Church. By marrying Aspasia without the permission of the Archbishop, Alexander caused a major scandal.
Despite his disapproval of the union, Venizelos allowed Aspasia and her mother to move into the Royal Palace on condition that the marriage remain secret. The information leaked, however, and to escape public opprobrium Aspasia was forced to leave Greece. She fled to Rome, and then to Paris, where Alexander was allowed to join her, six months later, on condition that they did not attend official functions together. On their Parisian honeymoon, while motoring near Fontainebleau, the couple witnessed a serious car crash in which Count de Kergariou's chauffeur lost control of his master's vehicle. Alexander avoided the count's car, which swerved and hit a tree. The king drove the injured to hospital in his own car, while Aspasia, who had trained as a nurse during World War I, rendered first aid. The count was seriously injured and died shortly afterward, after having both legs amputated.
The government allowed the couple to return to Greece in mid-1920. Although their marriage was legalized, Aspasia was not recognized as queen, but was instead known as "Madame Manos". At first, she stayed at her sister's house in the Greek capital before transferring to Tatoi, and it was during this period that she became pregnant with Alexander's child.
Alexander visited the newly acquired territories of West Thrace, and on 8 July 1920 the new name for the region's main town—Alexandroupoli (meaning "city of Alexander" in Greek)—was announced in the king's presence. The city's previous name of Dedeagatch was considered too Turkish. On 7 September, Venizelos, counting on a surge of support in the wake of the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres and the expansion of Greek territory, announced a general election for early November.
## Death
On 2 October 1920, Alexander was injured while walking through the grounds of the Tatoi estate. A domestic Barbary macaque belonging to the steward of the palace's grapevines attacked or was attacked by the king's German Shepherd dog, Fritz, and Alexander attempted to separate the two animals. As he did so, another monkey attacked Alexander and bit him deeply on the leg and torso. Eventually servants arrived and chased away the monkeys, and the king's wounds were promptly cleaned and dressed but not cauterized. He did not consider the incident serious and asked that it not be publicized.
That evening, his wounds became infected; he developed a strong fever and sepsis set in. His doctors considered amputating his leg, but none wished to take responsibility for so drastic an act. On 19 October, he became delirious and called out for his mother, but the Greek government refused to allow her to re-enter the country from exile in Switzerland, despite her own protestations. Finally, the queen dowager, Olga, George I's widow and Alexander's grandmother, was allowed to return alone to Athens to tend to the king. She was delayed by rough waters, however, and by the time she arrived, Alexander had already died of sepsis twelve hours previously at a little after 4 p.m. on 25 October 1920. The other members of the royal family received the news by telegram that night.
Two days later, Alexander's body was conveyed to Athens Cathedral, where it lay in state until his funeral on 29 October. Once again, the royal family were refused permission to return to Greece, and Queen Olga was the only member who attended. Foreign powers were represented by the Prince Regent of Serbia with his sister Princess Helen wife of John Constantinovich of Russia, the Crown Prince of Sweden with his uncle Prince Eugene, Duke of Nericia, and Rear-Admirals Sir George Hope of the United Kingdom and Dumesnil of France, as well as members of the Athens diplomatic corps.
After the cathedral service, Alexander's body was interred on the grounds of the royal estate at Tatoi. The Greek royal family never regarded Alexander's reign as fully legitimate. In the royal cemetery, while other monarchs are given the inscription "King of the Hellenes, Prince of Denmark", Alexander's reads "Alexander, son of the King of the Hellenes, Prince of Denmark. He ruled in the place of his father from 14 June 1917 to 25 October 1920." According to Alexander's favorite sister, Queen Helen of Romania, this feeling of illegitimacy was also shared by Alexander himself, a sentiment that helps explain his mésalliance with Aspasia Manos.
## Legacy
Alexander's death raised questions about the succession to the throne as well as the nature of the Greek regime. As the king had contracted an unequal marriage, his descendants were not in the line of succession. The Hellenic Parliament demanded that Constantine I and Crown Prince George be excluded from the succession but sought to preserve the monarchy by selecting another member of the royal house as the new sovereign. On 29 October 1920, the Greek minister in Berne, acting under the direction of the Greek authorities, offered the throne to Alexander's younger brother, Prince Paul. Paul, however, refused to become king while his father and elder brother were alive, insisting that neither of them had renounced their rights to the throne and that he therefore could never legitimately wear the crown.
The throne remained vacant and the legislative elections of 1920 turned into an open conflict between the Venizelists, who favored republicanism, and the supporters of the ex-King Constantine. On 14 November 1920, with the war with Turkey dragging on, the monarchists won, and Dimitrios Rallis became prime minister; Venizelos (who lost his own parliamentary seat) chose to leave Greece in self-exile. Rallis asked Queen Olga to become regent until Constantine's return.
Under the restored King Constantine I, whose return was endorsed overwhelmingly in a referendum, Greece went on to lose the Greco–Turkish War with heavy military and civilian casualties. The territory gained on the Turkish mainland during Alexander's reign was lost. Alexander's death in the midst of an election campaign helped destabilize the Venizelos regime, and the resultant loss of Allied support contributed to the failure of Greece's territorial ambitions. Winston Churchill wrote, "it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite."
### Issue
Alexander's daughter by Aspasia Manos, Alexandra (1921–1993), was born five months after his death. Initially, the government took the line that since Alexander had married Aspasia without the permission of his father or the church, his marriage was illegal and his posthumous daughter was illegitimate. However, in July 1922, Parliament passed a law which allowed the King to recognize royal marriages retroactively on a non-dynastic basis. That September, Constantine—at Sophia's insistence—recognized his son's marriage to Aspasia and granted her the style of "Princess Alexander". Her daughter (Constantine I's granddaughter) was legitimized as a princess of Greece and Denmark, and later married King Peter II of Yugoslavia in London in 1944. They had one child: Alexander, Crown Prince of Yugoslavia.
## Ancestry
## Footnotes and references |
147,976 | David I of Scotland | 1,172,822,928 | King of Scotland from 1124 to 1153 | [
"1080s births",
"1084 births",
"1153 deaths",
"11th-century Christian saints",
"12th-century Christian saints",
"12th-century Scottish monarchs",
"Burials at Dunfermline Abbey",
"Christian monarchs",
"Christian religious leaders in Scotland",
"David I of Scotland",
"Earls of Huntingdon (1065 creation)",
"Medieval Gaels from Scotland",
"Medieval Scottish saints",
"Military saints",
"People of The Anarchy",
"Roman Catholic royal saints",
"Scottish Roman Catholic saints",
"Year of birth uncertain"
]
| David I or Dauíd mac Maíl Choluim (Modern: Daibhidh I mac [Mhaoil] Chaluim; c. 1084 – 24 May 1153) was a 12th-century ruler who was Prince of the Cumbrians from 1113 to 1124 and later King of Scotland from 1124 to 1153. The youngest son of Malcolm III and Margaret of Wessex, David spent most of his childhood in Scotland, but was exiled to England temporarily in 1093. Perhaps after 1100, he became a dependent at the court of King Henry I. There he was influenced by the Anglo-French culture of the court.
When David's brother Alexander I died in 1124, David chose, with the backing of Henry I, to take the Kingdom of Scotland (Alba) for himself. He was forced to engage in warfare against his rival and nephew, Máel Coluim mac Alaxandair. Subduing the latter seems to have taken David ten years, a struggle that involved the destruction of Óengus, Mormaer of Moray. David's victory allowed expansion of control over more distant regions theoretically part of his Kingdom. After the death of his former patron Henry I, David supported the claims of Henry's daughter and his own niece, Empress Matilda, to the throne of England. In the process, he came into conflict with King Stephen and was able to expand his power in northern England, despite his defeat at the Battle of the Standard in 1138. David I is a saint of the Catholic Church, with his feast day celebrated on 24 May.
The term "Davidian Revolution" is used by many scholars to summarise the changes that took place in Scotland during his reign. These included his foundation of burghs and regional markets, implementation of the ideals of Gregorian Reform, foundation of monasteries, Normanisation of the Scottish government, and the introduction of feudalism through immigrant French, Anglo-French, and Flemish knights.
## Early years
David was born on a date unknown in 1084 in Scotland. He was probably the eighth son of King Malcolm III, and certainly the sixth and youngest borne by Malcolm's second wife, Margaret of Wessex. He was the grandson of King Duncan I.
In 1093, King Malcolm and David's brother Edward were killed at the River Aln during an invasion of Northumberland. David and his two brothers Alexander and Edgar were probably present when their mother died shortly afterwards. According to later medieval tradition, the three brothers were in Edinburgh when they were besieged by their paternal uncle Donald III, who made himself king. It is not certain what happened next, but an insertion in the Chronicle of Melrose states that Donald forced his three nephews into exile, although he was allied with another of his nephews, Edmund. John of Fordun wrote, centuries later, that an escort into England was arranged for them by their maternal uncle Edgar Ætheling.
King William Rufus of England opposed Donald's accession to the northerly kingdom. He sent the eldest son of Malcolm, David's half-brother Duncan, into Scotland with an army. Duncan was killed within the year, and so in 1097 William sent Duncan's half-brother Edgar into Scotland. The latter was more successful, and was crowned by the end of 1097.
During the power struggle of 1093–97, David was in England. In 1093, he may have been about nine years old. From 1093 until 1103 David's presence cannot be accounted for in detail, but he appears to have been in Scotland for the remainder of the 1090s. When William Rufus was killed, his brother Henry Beauclerc seized power and married David's sister, Matilda. The marriage made David the brother-in-law of the ruler of England. From that point onwards, David was probably an important figure at the English court. Despite his Gaelic background, by the end of his stay in England, David had become a fully Normanised prince. William of Malmesbury wrote that it was in this period that David "rubbed off all tarnish of Scottish barbarity through being polished by intercourse and friendship with us".
## Early rule 1113–1124
### Prince of the Cumbrians
David's brother King Edgar had visited William Rufus in May 1099 and bequeathed to David extensive territory to the south of the river Forth. On 8 January 1107, Edgar died. His younger brother Alexander took the throne. It has been assumed that David took control of his inheritance – the southern lands bequeathed by Edgar – soon after the latter's death. However, it cannot be shown that he possessed his inheritance until his foundation of Selkirk Abbey late in 1113. According to Richard Oram, it was only in 1113, when Henry returned to England from Normandy, that David was at last in a position to claim his inheritance in southern Scotland.
King Henry's backing seems to have been enough to force King Alexander to recognise his younger brother's claims. This probably occurred without bloodshed, but through threat of force nonetheless. David's aggression seems to have inspired resentment amongst some native Scots. A Middle Gaelic quatrain from this period complains that:
If "divided from" is anything to go by, this quatrain may have been written in David's new territories in southern Scotland. The lands in question consisted of the pre-1975 counties of Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire, Berwickshire, Peeblesshire and Lanarkshire. David, moreover, gained the title princeps Cumbrensis, "Prince of the Cumbrians", as attested in David's charters from this era. Although this was a large slice of Scotland south of the river Forth, the region of Galloway-proper was entirely outside David's control. David may perhaps have had varying degrees of overlordship in parts of Dumfriesshire, Ayrshire, Dunbartonshire and Renfrewshire. In the lands between Galloway and the Principality of Cumbria, David eventually set up large-scale marcher lordships, such as Annandale for Robert de Brus, Cunningham for Hugh de Morville, and possibly Strathgryfe for Walter Fitzalan.
### Earl of Huntingdon
In the later part of 1113, King Henry gave David the hand of Matilda of Huntingdon, daughter and heiress of Waltheof, Earl of Northumberland. The marriage brought with it the "Honour of Huntingdon", a lordship scattered through the shires of Northampton, Huntingdon, and Bedford. Within a few years, Matilda bore a son, whom David named Henry after his patron.
The new territories which David controlled were a valuable supplement to his income and manpower, increasing his status as one of the most powerful magnates in the Kingdom of the English. Moreover, Matilda's father Waltheof had been Earl of Northumberland, a defunct lordship which had covered the far north of England and included Cumberland and Westmorland, Northumberland-proper, as well as overlordship of the bishopric of Durham. After King Henry's death, David revived the claim to this earldom for his son, Henry.
David's activities and whereabouts after 1114 are not always easy to trace. He spent much of his time outside his principality, in England and in Normandy. Despite the death of his sister on 1 May 1118, David still possessed the favour of King Henry when his brother Alexander died in 1124, leaving Scotland without a king.
## Political and military events in Scotland during David's kingship
In spite of the fact that King David spent his childhood in Scotland, Michael Lynch and Richard Oram portray David as having little initial connection with the culture and society of the Scots; but both likewise argue that David became increasingly re-Gaelicised in the later stages of his reign. Whatever the case, David's claim to be heir to the Scottish kingdom was doubtful. David was the youngest of eight sons of the fifth from last king. Two more recent kings had produced sons, William fitz Duncan, son of King Donnchad II, and Máel Coluim, son of the last king Alexander, but since Scots had never adopted the rules of primogeniture that was not a barrier to his kingship, and unlike David, neither William nor Máel Coluim had the support of Henry. So when Alexander died in 1124, the aristocracy of Scotland could either accept David as king or face war with both David and Henry I.
### Coronation and struggle for the kingdom
Alexander's son, Máel Coluim, chose war. Orderic Vitalis reported that Máel Coluim mac Alaxandair "affected to snatch the kingdom from [David], and fought against him two sufficiently fierce battles; but David, who was loftier in understanding and in power and wealth, conquered him and his followers". Máel Coluim escaped unharmed into areas of Scotland not yet under David's control, and in those areas gained shelter and aid.
In either April or May of the same year, David was crowned King of Scotland (Old Irish: rí(gh) Alban; Medieval Latin: rex Scottorum) at Scone. If later Scottish and Irish evidence can be taken as evidence, the ceremony of coronation was a series of elaborate traditional rituals, of the kind infamous in the Anglo-French world of the 12th century for their "unchristian" elements.
Ailred of Rievaulx, friend and one-time member of David's court, reported that David "so abhorred those acts of homage which are offered by the Scottish nation in the manner of their fathers upon the recent promotion of their kings, that he was with difficulty compelled by the bishops to receive them".
Outside his Cumbrian principality and the southern fringe of Scotland-proper, David exercised little power in the 1120s, and in the words of Richard Oram, was "king of Scots in little more than name". He was probably in that part of Scotland he did rule for most of the time between late 1127 and 1130. However, he was at the court of Henry in 1126 and in early 1127, and returned to Henry's court in 1130, serving as a judge at Woodstock for the treason trial of Geoffrey de Clinton. It was in this year that David's wife, Matilda of Huntingdon, died. Possibly as a result of this, and while David was still in southern England,
Scotland-proper rose up in arms against him. The instigator was, again, his nephew Máel Coluim, who now had the support of Óengus of Moray. King Óengus was David's most powerful vassal, a man who, as grandson of King Lulach of Scotland, even had his own claim to the kingdom. The rebel Scots had advanced into Angus, where they were met by David's Mercian constable, Edward; a battle took place at Stracathro near Brechin. According to the Annals of Ulster, 1000 of Edward's army, and 4000 of Óengus' army – including Óengus himself – died.
According to Orderic Vitalis, Edward followed up the killing of Óengus by marching north into Moray itself, which, in Orderic's words, "lacked a defender and lord"; and so Edward, "with God's help obtained the entire duchy of that extensive district". However, this was far from the end of it. Máel Coluim escaped, and four years of continuing civil war followed; for David, this period was quite simply a "struggle for survival".
It appears that David asked for and obtained extensive military aid from King Henry. Ailred of Rievaulx related that at this point a large fleet and a large army of Norman knights, including Walter l'Espec, were sent by Henry to Carlisle in order to assist David's attempt to root out his Scottish enemies. The fleet seems to have been used in the Irish Sea, the Firth of Clyde and the entire Argyll coast, where Máel Coluim was probably at large among supporters. In 1134, Máel Coluim was captured and imprisoned in Roxburgh Castle. Since modern historians no longer confuse him with "Malcolm MacHeth", it is clear that nothing more is ever heard of Máel Coluim mac Alaxandair, except perhaps that his sons were later allied with Somerled.
### Pacification of the west and north
Richard Oram puts forward the suggestion that it was during this period that David granted Walter fitz Alan Strathgryfe, with northern Kyle and the area around Renfrew, forming what would become the "Stewart" lordship of Strathgryfe; he also suggests that Hugh de Morville may have gained Cunningham and the settlement of "Strathyrewen" (i.e. Irvine). This would indicate that the 1130–34 campaign had resulted in the acquisition of these territories.
How long it took to pacify Moray is not known, but in this period David appointed his nephew William fitz Duncan to succeed Óengus, perhaps in compensation for the exclusion from the succession to the Scottish throne caused by the coming of age of David's son Henry. William may have been given the daughter of Óengus in marriage, cementing his authority in the region. The burghs of Elgin and Forres may have been founded at this point, consolidating royal authority in Moray. David also founded Urquhart Priory, possibly as a "victory monastery", and assigned to it a percentage of his cain (tribute) from Argyll.
During this period too, a marriage was arranged between the son of Matad, Mormaer of Atholl, and the daughter of Haakon Paulsson, Earl of Orkney. The marriage temporarily secured the northern frontier of the kingdom, and held out the prospect that a son of one of David's mormaers could gain Orkney and Caithness for the Kingdom of Scotland. Thus, by the time Henry I died on 1 December 1135, David had more of Scotland under his control than ever before.
### Dominating the north
While fighting King Stephen and attempting to dominate northern England in the years following 1136, David was continuing his drive for control of the far north of Scotland. In 1139, his cousin, the five-year-old Harald Maddadsson, was given the title of "Earl" and half the lands of the earldom of Orkney, in addition to Scottish Caithness. Throughout the 1140s Caithness and Sutherland were brought back under the Scottish zone of control. Sometime before 1146 David appointed a native Scot called Aindréas to be the first Bishop of Caithness, a bishopric which was based at Halkirk, near Thurso, in an area which was ethnically Scandinavian.
In 1150, it looked like Caithness and the whole earldom of Orkney were going to come under permanent Scottish control. However, David's plans for the north soon began to encounter problems. In 1151, King Eystein II of Norway put a spanner in the works by sailing through the waterways of Orkney with a large fleet and catching the young Harald unaware in his residence at Thurso. Eystein forced Harald to pay fealty as a condition of his release. Later in the year David hastily responded by supporting the claims to the Orkney earldom of Harald's rival Erlend Haraldsson, granting him half of Caithness in opposition to Harald. King Eystein responded in turn by making a similar grant to this same Erlend, cancelling the effect of David's grant. David's weakness in Orkney was that the Norwegian kings were not prepared to stand back and let him reduce their power.
## England
David's relationship with England and the English crown in these years is usually interpreted in two ways. Firstly, his actions are understood in relation to his connections with the King of England. No historian is likely to deny that David's early career was largely manufactured by King Henry I of England. David was the latter's brother-in-law and "greatest protégé", one of Henry's "new men". His hostility to Stephen can be interpreted as an effort to uphold the intended inheritance of Henry I, the succession of his daughter and David's niece Empress Matilda. David carried out his wars in her name, joined her when she arrived in England, and later knighted her son Henry.
However, David's policy towards England can be interpreted in an additional way. David was the independence-loving king trying to build a "Scoto-Northumbrian" realm by seizing the most northerly parts of the English kingdom. In this perspective, David's support for Matilda is used as a pretext for land-grabbing. David's maternal descent from the House of Wessex and his son Henry's maternal descent from the English earls of Northumberland is thought to have further encouraged such a project, a project which came to an end only after Henry II ordered David's child successor Máel Coluim IV to hand over the most important of David's gains. It is clear that neither one of these interpretations can be taken without some weight being given to the other.
### Usurpation of Stephen and First Treaty of Durham
Henry I had arranged his inheritance to pass to his daughter Empress Matilda. Instead, Stephen, younger brother of Theobald II, Count of Blois, seized the throne. David had been the first layperson to take the oath to uphold the succession of Matilda in 1127, and when Stephen was crowned on 22 December 1135, David decided to make war.
Before December was over, David marched into northern England, and by the end of January he had occupied the castles of Carlisle, Wark, Alnwick, Norham and Newcastle. By February David was at Durham, but an army led by King Stephen met him there. Rather than fight a pitched battle, a treaty was agreed whereby David would retain Carlisle, while David's son Henry was re-granted the title and half the lands of the earldom of Huntingdon, territory which had been confiscated during David's revolt. On Stephen's side, he received back the other castles; and while David would do no homage, Stephen was to receive the homage of Henry for both Carlisle and the other English territories. Stephen also gave the rather worthless but for David face-saving promise that if he ever chose to resurrect the defunct earldom of Northumberland, Henry would be given first consideration. Importantly, the issue of Matilda was not mentioned. However, the first Durham treaty quickly broke down after David took insult at the treatment of his son Henry at Stephen's court.
### Renewal of war and Clitheroe
When the winter of 1136–37 was over, David prepared again to invade England. The King of the Scots massed an army on Northumberland's border, to which the English responded by gathering an army at Newcastle. Once more pitched battle was avoided, and instead, a truce was agreed until December. When December fell, David demanded that Stephen hand over the whole of the old earldom of Northumberland. Stephen's refusal led to David's third invasion, this time in January 1138.
The army which invaded England in January and February 1138 shocked the English chroniclers. Richard of Hexham called it "an execrable army, savager than any race of heathen yielding honour to neither God nor man" and that it "harried the whole province and slaughtered everywhere folk of either sex, of every age and condition, destroying, pillaging and burning the vills, churches and houses". Several doubtful stories of cannibalism were recorded by chroniclers, and these same chroniclers paint a picture of routine enslavings, as well as killings of churchmen, women and infants.
By February King Stephen marched north to deal with David. The two armies avoided each other, and Stephen was soon on the road south. In the summer David split his army into two forces, sending William fitz Duncan to march into Lancashire, where he harried Furness and Craven. On 10 June, William fitz Duncan met a force of knights and men-at-arms. A pitched battle took place, the battle of Clitheroe, and the English army was routed.
### Battle of the Standard and Second Treaty of Durham
By later July 1138, the two Scottish armies had reunited in "St Cuthbert's land", that is, in the lands controlled by the Bishop of Durham, on the far side of the river Tyne. Another English army had mustered to meet the Scots, this time led by William, Earl of Aumale. The victory at Clitheroe was probably what inspired David to risk battle. David's force, apparently 26,000 strong and several times larger than the English army, met the English on 22 August at Cowdon Moor near Northallerton, North Yorkshire.
The Battle of the Standard, as the encounter came to be called, was a defeat for the Scots. Afterwards, David and his surviving notables retired to Carlisle. Although the result was a defeat, it was not by any means decisive. David retained the bulk of his army and thus the power to go on the offensive again. The siege of Wark, for instance, which had been going on since January, continued until it was captured in November. David continued to occupy Cumberland as well as much of Northumberland.
On 26 September Cardinal Alberic, Bishop of Ostia, arrived at Carlisle where David had called together his kingdom's nobles, abbots and bishops. Alberic was there to investigate the controversy over the issue of the Bishop of Glasgow's allegiance or non-allegiance to the Archbishop of York. Alberic played the role of peace broker, and David agreed to a six-week truce which excluded the siege of Wark. On 9 April David and Stephen's wife Matilda of Boulogne (daughter of Mary of Scotland, and so another niece of David) met each other at Durham and agreed a settlement. David's son Henry was given the earldom of Northumberland and was restored to the earldom of Huntingdon and lordship of Doncaster; David himself was allowed to keep Carlisle and Cumberland. King Stephen was to retain possession of the strategically vital castles of Bamburgh and Newcastle. This effectively fulfilled all of David's war aims.
### Arrival of Matilda and the renewal of conflict
The settlement with Stephen was not set to last long. The arrival in England of the Empress Matilda gave David an opportunity to renew the conflict with Stephen. In either May or June, David travelled to the south of England and entered Matilda's company; he was present for her expected coronation at Westminster Abbey, though this never took place. David was there until September when the Empress found herself surrounded at Winchester.
This civil war, or "the Anarchy" as it was later called, enabled David to strengthen his own position in northern England. While David consolidated his hold on his own and his son's newly acquired lands, he also sought to expand his influence. The castles at Newcastle and Bamburgh were again brought under his control, and he attained dominion over all of England north-west of the river Ribble and Pennines, while holding the north-east as far south as the river Tyne, on the borders of the core territory of the bishopric of Durham. While his son brought all the senior barons of Northumberland into his entourage, David rebuilt the fortress of Carlisle. Carlisle quickly replaced Roxburgh as his favoured residence. David's acquisition of the mines at Alston on the South Tyne enabled him to begin minting the Kingdom of Scotland's first silver coinage. David, meanwhile, issued charters to Shrewsbury Abbey in respect to their lands in Lancashire.
### Bishopric of Durham and the Archbishopric of York
However, David's successes were in many ways balanced by his failures. David's greatest disappointment during this time was his inability to ensure control of the bishopric of Durham and the archbishopric of York. David had attempted to appoint his chancellor, William Comyn, to the bishopric of Durham, which had been vacant since the death of Bishop Geoffrey Rufus in 1140. Between 1141 and 1143, Comyn was the de facto bishop, and had control of the bishop's castle; but he was resented by the chapter. Despite controlling the town of Durham, David's only hope of ensuring his election and consecration was gaining the support of the Papal legate, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and brother of King Stephen. Despite obtaining the support of the Empress Matilda, David was unsuccessful and had given up by the time William de St Barbara was elected to the see in 1143.
David also attempted to interfere in the succession to the archbishopric of York. William FitzHerbert, nephew of King Stephen, found his position undermined by the collapsing political fortune of Stephen in the north of England, and was deposed by the Pope. David used his Cistercian connections to build a bond with Henry Murdac, the new archbishop. Despite the support of Pope Eugenius III, supporters of King Stephen and William FitzHerbert managed to prevent Henry taking up his post at York. In 1149, Henry sought the support of David. David seized on the opportunity to bring the archdiocese under his control, and marched on the city. However, Stephen's supporters became aware of David's intentions, and informed King Stephen. Stephen therefore marched to the city and installed a new garrison. David decided not to risk such an engagement and withdrew. Richard Oram has conjectured that David's ultimate aim was to bring the whole of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria into his dominion. For Oram, this event was the turning point, "the chance to radically redraw the political map of the British Isles [had been] lost forever".
## Scottish Church
### Innovations in the church system
It was once held that Scotland's episcopal sees and entire parochial system owed its origins to the innovations of David I. Today, scholars have moderated this view. Ailred of Rievaulx wrote in David's eulogy that when David came to power, "he found three or four bishops in the whole Scottish kingdom [north of the Forth], and the others wavering without a pastor to the loss of both morals and property; when he died, he left nine, both of ancient bishoprics which he himself restored, and new ones which he erected". Although David moved the bishopric of Mortlach east to Old Aberdeen, and arranged the creation of the diocese of Caithness, no other bishoprics can be safely called David's creation.
The bishopric of Glasgow was restored rather than resurrected. David appointed his reform-minded French chaplain John to the bishopric and carried out an inquest, afterwards assigning to the bishopric all the lands of his principality, except those in the east which were already governed by the Bishop of St Andrews. David was at least partly responsible for forcing semi-monastic "bishoprics" like Brechin, Dunkeld, Mortlach (Aberdeen) and Dunblane to become fully episcopal and firmly integrated into a national diocesan system.
As for the development of the parochial system, David's traditional role as its creator can not be sustained. Scotland already had an ancient system of parish churches dating to the Early Middle Ages, and the kind of system introduced by David's Normanising tendencies can more accurately be seen as mild refashioning, rather than creation; he made the Scottish system as a whole more like that of France and England, but he did not create it.
### Ecclesiastical disputes
One of the first problems David had to deal with as king was an ecclesiastical dispute with the English church. The problem with the English church concerned the subordination of Scottish sees to the archbishops of York and/or Canterbury, an issue which since his election in 1124 had prevented Robert of Scone from being consecrated to the see of St Andrews (Cell Ríghmonaidh). It is likely that since the 11th century the bishopric of St Andrews functioned as a de facto archbishopric. The title of "Archbishop" is accorded in Scottish and Irish sources to Bishop Giric and Bishop Fothad II.
The problem was that this archepiscopal status had not been cleared with the papacy, opening the way for English archbishops to claim overlordship of the whole Scottish church. The man responsible was the new aggressively assertive Archbishop of York, Thurstan. His easiest target was the bishopric of Glasgow, which being south of the river Forth was not regarded as part of Scotland nor the jurisdiction of St Andrews. In 1125, Pope Honorius II wrote to John, Bishop of Glasgow ordering him to submit to the archbishopric of York. David ordered Bishop John of Glasgow to travel to the Apostolic See in order to secure a pallium which would elevate the bishopric of St Andrews to an archbishopric with jurisdiction over Glasgow.
Thurstan travelled to Rome, as did the Archbishop of Canterbury, William de Corbeil, and both presumably opposed David's request. David however gained the support of King Henry, and the Archbishop of York agreed to a year's postponement of the issue and to consecrate Robert of Scone without making an issue of subordination. York's claim over bishops north of the Forth was in practice abandoned for the rest of David's reign, although York maintained her more credible claims over Glasgow.
In 1151, David again requested a pallium for the Archbishop of St Andrews. Cardinal John Paparo met David at his residence of Carlisle in September 1151. Tantalisingly for David, the Cardinal was on his way to Ireland with four pallia to create four new Irish archbishoprics. When the Cardinal returned to Carlisle, David made the request. In David's plan, the new archdiocese would include all the bishoprics in David's Scottish territory, as well as bishopric of Orkney and the bishopric of the Isles. Unfortunately for David, the Cardinal does not appear to have brought the issue up with the papacy. In the following year, the papacy dealt David another blow by creating the archbishopric of Trondheim, a new Norwegian archbishopric embracing the bishoprics of the Isles and Orkney.
## Succession and death
Perhaps the greatest blow to David's plans came on 12 July 1152 when Henry, Earl of Northumberland, David's only son and heir, died. He had probably been suffering from some kind of illness for a long time. David had under a year to live, and he may have known that he was not going to be alive much longer. David quickly arranged for his grandson Malcolm IV to be made his successor, and for his younger grandson William to be made Earl of Northumberland. Donnchad I, Mormaer of Fife, the senior magnate in Scotland-proper, was appointed as rector, or regent, and took the 11-year-old Malcolm around Scotland-proper on a tour to meet and gain the homage of his future Gaelic subjects. David's health began to fail seriously in the spring of 1153, and on 24 May 1153, David died in Carlisle Castle. In his obituary in the Annals of Tigernach, he is called Dabíd mac Mail Colaim, rí Alban & Saxan, "David, son of Malcolm, King of Scotland and England", a title which acknowledged the importance of the new English part of David's realm.
## Veneration
David I is recognised as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, with a feast day of 24 May, though it appears that he was never formally canonized. There are churches in Scotland which have him as their patron.
## Historiography
### Medieval reputation
The earliest English assessments of David portray him as a pious king, a reformer and a civilising agent in a barbarian nation. For William of Newburgh, David was a "King not barbarous of a barbarous nation", who "wisely tempered the fierceness of his barbarous nation". William praises David for his piety, noting that, among other saintly activities, "he was frequent in washing the feet of the poor" (this can be read literally: his mother, who is now patron saint of Scotland, was widely known and lauded for the same practice). Another of David's eulogists, his former courtier Ailred of Rievaulx, echoes Newburgh's assertions and praises David for his justice as well as his piety, commenting that David's rule of the Scots meant that "the whole barbarity of that nation was softened ... as if forgetting their natural fierceness they submitted their necks to the laws which the royal gentleness dictated".
Although avoiding stress on 12th-century Scottish "barbarity", the Lowland Scottish historians of the later Middle Ages tend to repeat the accounts of earlier chronicle tradition. Much that was written was either directly transcribed from the earlier medieval chronicles themselves or was modelled closely upon them, even in the significant works of John of Fordun, Andrew Wyntoun and Walter Bower. For example, Bower includes in his text the eulogy written for David by Ailred of Rievaulx. This quotation extends to over twenty pages in the modern edition, and exerted a great deal of influence over what became the traditional view of David in later works about Scottish history. Historical treatment of David developed in the writings of later Scottish historians, and the writings of men like John Mair, George Buchanan, Hector Boece, and Bishop John Leslie ensured that by the 18th century, a picture of David as a pious, justice-loving state-builder and vigorous maintainer of Scottish independence had emerged.
Moreover, Bower stated in his eulogy that David always had the ambition to join a crusade, which was prevented eventually by his death. In addition, Ailred of Rievaulx hinted that David expressed his desire to be part of the Second Crusade himself, but he was dissuaded by his subjects. However, David had already met Hugues de Payens, the first Grand Master of the Knights Templar, in 1128 in Scotland.
### Modern treatment
In the modern period, there has been more of an emphasis on David's state-building and on the effects of his changes on Scottish cultural development. Lowland Scots tended to trace the origins of their culture to the marriage of David's father Máel Coluim III to Saint Margaret, a myth which had its origins in the medieval period. With the development of modern historical techniques in the mid-19th century, responsibility for these developments appeared to lie more with David than his father. David assumed a principal place in the alleged destruction of the Celtic Kingdom of Scotland. Andrew Lang, in 1900, wrote that "with Alexander [I], Celtic domination ends; with David, Norman and English dominance is established".
The ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism had elevated the role of races and "ethnic packages" into mainstream history, and in this context David was portrayed as hostile to the native Scots, and his reforms were seen in the light of natural, perhaps even justified, civilised Teutonic aggression towards the backward Celts.
In the 20th century, several studies were devoted to Normanisation in 12th-century Scotland, focusing upon and hence emphasising the changes brought about by the reign of David I. Græme Ritchie's The Normans in Scotland (1954), Archie Duncan's Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom (1974) and the many articles of G. W. S. Barrow all formed part of this historiographical trend.
In the 1980s, Barrow sought a compromise between change and continuity, and argued that the reign of King David was in fact a "Balance of New and Old". Such a conclusion was a natural incorporation of an underlying current in Scottish historiography which, since William F. Skene's monumental and revolutionary three-volume Celtic Scotland: A History of Ancient Alban (1876–80), had been forced to acknowledge that "Celtic Scotland" was alive and healthy for a long time after the reign of David I. Michael Lynch followed and built upon Barrow's compromise solution, arguing that as David's reign progressed, his kingship became more Celtic. Despite its subtitle, in 2004 in the only full-volume study of David I's reign yet produced, David I: The King Who Made Scotland, its author Richard Oram further builds upon Lynch's picture, stressing continuity while placing the changes of David's reign in their context.
## Davidian Revolution
However, while there may be debate about the importance or extent of the historical change in David I's era, no historian doubts that it was taking place. The reason is what Barrow and Lynch both call the "Davidian Revolution". David's "revolution" is held to underpin the development of later medieval Scotland, whereby the changes he inaugurated grew into most of the central institutions of the later medieval kingdom.
Since Robert Bartlett's pioneering work, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (1993), reinforced by Moore's The First European Revolution, c.970–1215 (2000), it has become increasingly apparent that better understanding of David's "revolution" can be achieved by recognising the wider "European revolution" taking place during this period. The central idea is that from the late 10th century onwards the culture and institutions of the old Carolingian heartlands in northern France and western Germany were spreading to outlying areas, creating a more recognisable "Europe". Scotland was just one of many "outlying" areas.
### Government and feudalism
The widespread enfeoffment of foreign knights and the processes by which land ownership was converted from customary tenures into feudal, or otherwise legally-defined relationships, would revolutionise the way the Kingdom of Scotland was governed, as did the dispersal and installation of royal agents in the new mottes that were proliferating throughout the realm to staff newly created sheriffdoms and judiciaries for the twin purposes of law enforcement and taxation, bringing Scotland further into the "continental" model.
Scotland in this period experienced innovations in governmental practices and the importation of foreign, mostly French, knights. It is to David's reign that the beginnings of feudalism are generally assigned. This is defined as "castle-building, the regular use of professional cavalry, the knight's fee" as well as "homage and fealty". David established large-scale feudal lordships in the west of his Cumbrian principality for the leading members of the French military entourage who kept him in power. Additionally, many smaller scale feudal lordships were created.
Steps were taken during David's reign to make the government of that part of Scotland he administered more like the government of Anglo-Norman England. New sheriffdoms enabled the King to effectively administer royal demesne land. During his reign, royal sheriffs were established in the king's core personal territories; namely, in rough chronological order, at Roxburgh, Scone, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Stirling and Perth. The Justiciarship too was created in David's reign. Although this institution had Anglo-Norman origins, in Scotland north of the Forth at least, it represented some form of continuity with an older office.
### Economy
The revenue of his English earldom and the proceeds of the silver mines at Alston allowed David to produce Scotland's first coinage. These altered the nature of trade and transformed his political image.
David was a great town builder. As Prince of the Cumbrians, David founded the first two burghs of "Scotland", at Roxburgh and Berwick. Burghs were settlements with defined boundaries and guaranteed trading rights, locations where the king could collect and sell the products of his cain and conveth (a payment made in lieu of providing the king hospitality). David founded around 15 burghs.
Perhaps nothing in David's reign compares in importance to burghs. While they could not, at first, have amounted to much more than the nucleus of an immigrant merchant class, nothing would do more to reshape the long-term economic and ethnic shape of Scotland than the burgh. These planned towns were or dominated by English in culture and language; William of Newburgh wrote in the reign of King William the Lion, that "the towns and burghs of the Scottish realm are known to be inhabited by English"; as well as transforming the economy, the dominance of an English influence would in the long term undermine the position of the Middle Irish language, giving birth to the idea of the Scottish Lowlands.
### Monastic patronage
David was one of medieval Scotland's greatest monastic patrons. In 1113, in perhaps David's first act as Prince of the Cumbrians, he founded Selkirk Abbey for the Tironensians. David founded more than a dozen new monasteries in his reign, patronising various new monastic orders.
Not only were such monasteries an expression of David's undoubted piety, they also functioned to transform Scottish society. Monasteries became centres of foreign influence, and provided sources of literate men, able to serve the crown's growing administrative needs. These new monasteries, the Cistercian ones in particular, introduced new agricultural practices. Cistercian labour, for instance, transformed southern Scotland into one of northern Europe's most important sources of sheep wool.
## Genealogical table
## Fictional portrayals
- David the Prince (1980) by Nigel Tranter. The story of Queen Margaret's sons Alexander I and David I. |
72,195,478 | Kingdom Two Crowns | 1,172,683,699 | 2018 video game | [
"2018 video games",
"Android (operating system) games",
"Coatsink games",
"IOS games",
"MacOS games",
"Multiplayer and single-player video games",
"Nintendo Switch games",
"Noio Games games",
"PlayStation 4 games",
"Raw Fury games",
"Strategy games",
"Windows games",
"Xbox One games"
]
| Kingdom Two Crowns is a 2018 strategy video game developed by Thomas van den Berg and Coatsink and published by Raw Fury. It is the third entry in the Kingdom series. Players control a mounted monarch as they attempt to defend their kingdom from the Greed, a race of monsters. The monarch can recruit villagers to perform certain jobs while building defenses such as towers and walls to fend off waves of Greed attacking the kingdom at night. Kingdom Two Crowns features single-player and cooperative multiplayer modes, with cooperative play enabling two monarchs to join via a split screen.
The developers originally designed Kingdom Two Crowns as an expansion pack for Kingdom: New Lands (2016). As the expansion grew, they decided to release it as a separate game. The series' creator, van den Berg, wanted to develop a new experience centered around defending structures. The developers chose to lessen the difficulty of the previous games' roguelike mechanics, and used a pixel art style to reduce the time between drawing and implementing new designs in gameplay.
Kingdom Two Crowns was released for Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One on December 11, 2018, and for iOS and Android on April 28, 2020. It received positive reviews, gaining praise for its strategic gameplay, artwork, and cooperative play, though its slow pace was criticized. The game attracted over 300,000 players within six months of launch, and was supported by Raw Fury with several updates and downloadable content.
## Gameplay
Kingdom Two Crowns is a 2D strategy and resource management game presented from a side-scrolling perspective. Players control a mounted monarch who must build their kingdom and defend it from the Greed, a race of monsters. Gameplay takes place across a day-night cycle, the monarch exploring and building during the day and fighting the Greed at night. Expansion is facilitated by spending gold coins, which the monarch collects and stores inside a bag. Camps where the monarch can spend coins to hire new subjects are located outside the kingdom. Once recruited, villagers remain idle until the monarch buys equipment for them, leading them to perform a specific job. Typical hires include builders who clear land and construct defenses, farmers who grow crops for gold, and archers who hunt animals for coins and attack enemies.
The kingdom is located in the center of the procedurally generated level, and at night, the Greed attack it from the left and right. Monarchs have no means of self-defense, but can spend coins to build walls, construct towers, and hire archers to hold off the increasing waves of enemies. If the villagers are not protected by walls, the Greed can steal their coins and equipment, and they must be recruited again. Furthermore, the Greed can take coins from the monarch, and if the player has no remaining coins, the Greed can steal the monarch's crown, causing a game over. Unlike previous Kingdom games, the kingdom is not destroyed if the crown is lost. Instead, the player continues as a new monarch called the "heir", who inherits a partially destroyed version of the player's previous realm.
As the monarch explores, they can encounter portals that spawn Greed and treasure chests containing coins or gems. The player uses gems to purchase upgrades for the kingdom, such as mounts that the monarch can ride on, hermits who can be hired to make new buildings, or statues that provide benefits for subjects. Each level has a shipwreck that the monarch can repair, allowing for passage between five island levels. As the monarch expands their kingdom across the islands, they can discover and unlock new technologies that allow for the construction of better defenses and buildings. Eventually, the technological improvements allow the monarch to create a bomb to destroy the source of the Greed, a portal located at the far end of each level. The monarch must assemble an army to attack and destroy the portal; their goal is the extermination of the Greed on all five islands.
Kingdom Two Crowns can be played in single-player mode, or through cooperative multiplayer (co-op), in which two monarchs can join via a split screen. In co-op, both players act independently, and can share their coins by throwing them at each other. If one player loses their monarch's crown, they lose the ability to build, but can continue collecting coins for the other player. The game only ends if both players lose their crowns.
## Development
Kingdom Two Crowns was developed by the Kingdom franchise creator Thomas "Noio" van den Berg, and British game studio Coatsink. The game was originally intended to be an expansion pack for Kingdom: New Lands (2016), an updated version of the 2015 video game Kingdom. As the expansion grew and experienced delays, the designers chose to develop it as a new game. In contrast to the other Kingdom games, Two Crowns was mainly designed by a co-founder of Raw Fury, Gordon Van Dyke, with van den Berg acting as a creative director. Both developers wanted to create a new experience focused on defending structures instead of "defeating and escaping". They were inspired by the narrative of Infinity Blade (2010) to reduce the difficulty of the original Kingdom's roguelike design. As a result, the developers allowed the player to keep most of their buildings after losing their crown, believing that it would encourage them to keep playing.
Van Dyke described the art of Two Crowns as "modern pixel art aesthetics. Inspired by retro video games, but without the limitations of that era". Van den Berg liked the style for its impressionism, and chose it because it could be quickly produced, despite having some trouble designing the fonts and rotating images. The level design was particularly difficult, as van den Berg found that the "one-dimensional" layout limited player strategy. Although he was previously opposed to adding a new currency, the rest of the team convinced van den Berg to add gems, without complicating the existing gameplay.
In 2019, van den Berg sold the rights to the Kingdom franchise to Raw Fury for an undisclosed fee. He had been transitioning control of the series to Raw Fury over the course of three years, and decided to begin working on other projects. Van Dyke became the new manager of the franchise, after working as a designer on the previous games. By then, the series had sold over four million copies, and Kingdom Two Crowns had gained over 300,000 players within six months of launch. Raw Fury created a franchise "roadmap" for upcoming expansions and games. The studio said in 2020 that supporting Two Crowns was one of their main priorities, and they would be providing it with further content updates.
## Marketing and release
Kingdom Two Crowns was teased at PAX West in 2017, where the developers demonstrated the new multiplayer. Raw Fury displayed a demo at the Game Developers Conference in March 2018, and announced the release date in November alongside free downloadable content (DLC) called Kingdom Two Crowns: Shogun. The developers said that Shogun was the first of several "campaign settings", which would all contain new environments, strategies and characters. The Shogun setting was Japan-themed, and allowed for players to recruit new units such as ninjas. Kingdom Two Crowns was released alongside the Shogun DLC on December 11, 2018, for Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One.
An update introducing "Challenge Islands" was released on September 2, 2019, adding three new islands and a mount. Versions for iOS and Android were released on April 28, 2020 alongside another free setting, Kingdom: Dead Lands. The update included a crossover with the 2019 Metroidvania game Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, allowing players to switch between four Bloodstained-themed monarchs possessing their own unique abilities. The setting was conceived after the developers met Bloodstained publisher 505 Games at an indie game convention, and were inspired to create a campaign similar in design to a Halloween event that occurred annually in Kingdom: New Lands.
A further free update dubbed "Never Alone" was released on April 20, 2021, introducing co-op to the Challenge Islands and adding a new island called "Trade Routes". Paid DLC, Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands, developed by Raw Fury and Gordon Van Dyke, was released on November 16 alongside a free patch. The DLC added a new campaign, a type of Greed, and Norse-themed jobs and mounts. The soundtrack for Norse Lands was composed by the Norwegian alt-pop group Kalandra, the composers drawing heavily upon Scandinavian and Celtic influences and using instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy and moraharpa. A new game mode, "Lost Islands", was introduced on January 23, 2023. The mode allows players to procedurally generate a random Challenge Island on a daily basis, and gives them a 72-hour time limit to complete it.
## Reception
According to the review aggregate website Metacritic, the Switch version of Kingdom Two Crowns received "generally favorable reviews". Critics frequently praised the strategic elements of gameplay. Nintendo World Report called the game a worthy sequel to Kingdom, and recommended it to fans of the strategy genre; Push Square and Pocket Tactics described its mechanics as simple and well-designed. GameStar praised the minimalism in how the monarch was controlled, and found its strategy elements to be "amazingly complex". Other critics considered the game substantially similar to Kingdom: New Lands, but said that it was generally better in comparison.
Critics praised the introduction of co-op, feeling it made the gameplay easier. Nintendo Life considered co-op a helpful addition, but said players may feel like they were gaming the system after performing worse on their own. Nintendo World Report noted that adding a second monarch allowed players to split their attention between several areas, calling it a powerful and creative enhancement. GameRevolution said that the cooperative mode encouraged players to win in an "exploitative way", and undermined the original Kingdom's atmosphere by forcing the player to adopt an overly strategic approach. The reviewer felt that allowing monarchs to share tasks removed the stress of gameplay, which he believed was central to the appeal of the franchise.
Reviewers such as Push Square and Nintendo Life said the pacing was sedate and would not appeal to everyone. Kotaku felt that the slow pace suited the game world, but might become frustrating when a player has to rebuild after a setback. Other commentators found the lack of direct control over the villagers annoying, although Pocket Tactics said that this did not fully detract from the experience. Journalists frequently highlighted Two Crown's art style and themes. Nintendo World Report and Nintendo Life singled out the pixel art as captivating, Nintendo Life also highlighting how the scenery changed from day to night, saying that it would win over players with its tranquility. Similarly, Pocket Tactics's reviewer appreciated how the in-game progression reminded him of medieval rulers expanding their domains, and wrote that Two Crowns's combination of simplistic strategy with an aesthetic feel amounted to "a really smart kingdom management game". |
227,167 | Dementia with Lewy bodies | 1,172,871,023 | Type of progressive dementia | [
"Aging-associated diseases",
"Ailments of unknown cause",
"Cognitive disorders",
"Geriatrics",
"Lewy body dementia"
]
| Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a type of dementia characterized by changes in sleep, behavior, cognition, movement, and regulation of automatic bodily functions. Memory loss is not always an early symptom. The disease worsens over time and is usually diagnosed when cognitive impairment interferes with normal daily functioning. Together with Parkinson's disease dementia, DLB is one of the two Lewy body dementias. It is a common form of dementia, but the prevalence is not known accurately and many diagnoses are missed. The disease was first described by Kenji Kosaka in 1976.
REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD)—in which people lose the muscle paralysis (atonia) that normally occurs during REM sleep and act out their dreams—is a core feature. RBD may appear years or decades before other symptoms. Other core features are visual hallucinations, marked fluctuations in attention or alertness, and parkinsonism (slowness of movement, trouble walking, or rigidity). A presumptive diagnosis can be made if several disease features or biomarkers are present; the diagnostic workup may include blood tests, neuropsychological tests, imaging, and sleep studies. A definitive diagnosis usually requires an autopsy.
Most people with DLB do not have affected family members, although occasionally DLB runs in a family. The exact cause is unknown but involves formation of abnormal clumps of protein in neurons throughout the brain. Manifesting as Lewy bodies (discovered in 1912 by Frederic Lewy) and Lewy neurites, these clumps affect both the central and the autonomic nervous systems. Heart function and every level of gastrointestinal function—from chewing to defecation—can be affected, constipation being one of the most common symptoms. Low blood pressure upon standing can also occur. DLB commonly causes psychiatric symptoms, such as altered behavior, depression, or apathy.
DLB typically begins after the age of fifty, and people with the disease have an average life expectancy, with wide variability, of about four years after diagnosis. There is no cure or medication to stop the disease from progressing, and people in the latter stages of DLB may be unable to care for themselves. Treatments aim to relieve some of the symptoms and reduce the burden on caregivers. Medicines such as donepezil and rivastigmine can temporarily improve cognition and overall functioning, and melatonin can be used for sleep-related symptoms. Antipsychotics are usually avoided, even for hallucinations, because severe reactions occur in almost half of people with DLB, and their use can result in death. Management of the many different symptoms is challenging, as it involves multiple specialties and education of caregivers.
## Classification and terminology
Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a type of dementia, a group of diseases involving progressive neurodegeneration of the central nervous system. It is one of the two Lewy body dementias, along with Parkinson's disease dementia.
Dementia with Lewy bodies can be classified in other ways. The atypical parkinsonian syndromes include DLB, along with other conditions. Also, DLB is a synucleinopathy, meaning that it is characterized by abnormal deposits of alpha-synuclein protein in the brain. The synucleinopathies include Parkinson's disease, multiple system atrophy, and other rarer conditions.
The vocabulary of diseases associated with Lewy pathology causes confusion. Lewy body dementia (the umbrella term that encompasses the clinical diagnoses of dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson's disease dementia) differs from Lewy body disease (the term used to describe pathological findings of Lewy bodies on autopsy). Because individuals with Alzheimer's are often found on autopsy to also have Lewy bodies, DLB has been characterized as an Alzheimer disease-related dementia; the term Lewy body variant of Alzheimer disease is no longer used because the predominant pathology for these individuals is related to Alzheimer's. Even the term Lewy body disease may not describe the true nature of this group of diseases; a unique genetic architecture may predispose individuals to specific diseases with Lewy bodies, and naming controversies continue in 2022.
## Signs and symptoms
DLB is dementia that occurs with "some combination of fluctuating cognition, recurrent visual hallucinations, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (RBD), and parkinsonism", according to Armstrong (2019), when Parkinson's disease is not well established before the dementia occurs. DLB has widely varying symptoms and is more complex than many other dementias. Several areas of the nervous system (such as the autonomic nervous system and numerous regions of the brain) can be affected by Lewy pathology, in which the alpha-synuclein deposits cause damage and corresponding neurologic deficits.
In DLB, there is an identifiable set of early signs and symptoms; these are called the prodromal, or pre-dementia, phase of the disease. These early signs and symptoms can appear 15 years or more before dementia develops. The earliest symptoms are constipation and dizziness from autonomic dysfunction, hyposmia (reduced ability to smell), RBD, anxiety, and depression. RBD may appear years or decades before other symptoms. Memory loss is not always an early symptom.
Manifestations of DLB can be divided into essential, core, and supportive features. Dementia is the essential feature and must be present for diagnosis, while core and supportive features are further evidence in support of diagnosis (see diagnostic criteria below).
### Essential feature
A dementia diagnosis is made after cognitive decline progresses to a point of interfering with normal daily activities, or social or occupational function. While dementia is an essential feature of DLB, it does not always appear early on, and is more likely to be present as the condition progresses.
### Core features
While specific symptoms may vary, the core features of DLB are fluctuating cognition, alertness or attention; REM sleep behavior disorder; one or more of the cardinal features of parkinsonism, not due to medication or stroke; and repeated visual hallucinations.
The 2017 Fourth Consensus Report of the DLB Consortium determined these to be core features based on the availability of high-quality evidence indicating they are highly specific to the condition.
#### Fluctuating cognition and alertness
Fluctuations in cognitive function are the most characteristic feature of the Lewy body dementias. They are the most frequent symptom of DLB, and are often distinguishable from those of other dementias by concomitant fluctuations of attention and alertness, described by Tsamakis and Mueller (2021) as "spontaneous variations of cognitive abilities, alertness, or arousal". They are further distinguishable by a "marked amplitude between best and worst performances", according to McKeith (2002). These fluctuations vary in severity, frequency and duration; episodes last anywhere from seconds to weeks, interposed between periods of more normal functioning. When relatively lucid periods coincide with medical appointments, cognitive testing may inaccurately reflect disease severity, with subsequent assessments of cognition showing improvements from baseline.
Unlike the deficits in memory and orientation that are characteristic of Alzheimer disease, the distinct impairments in cognition seen in DLB are most commonly in three domains: attention, executive function, and visuospatial function. These fluctuating impairments are present early in the course of the disease. Individuals with DLB may be easily distracted, have a hard time focusing on tasks, or appear to be "delirium-like", "zoning out", or in states of altered consciousness with spells of confusion, agitation or incoherent speech. They may have disorganized speech and their ability to organize their thoughts may change during the day.
Executive function describes attentional and behavioral controls, memory and cognitive flexibility that aid problem solving and planning. Problems with executive function surface in activities requiring planning and organizing. Deficits can manifest in impaired job performance, inability to follow conversations, difficulties with multitasking, or mistakes in driving, such as misjudging distances or becoming lost.
The person with DLB may experience disorders of wakefulness or sleep disorders (in addition to REM sleep behavior disorder) that can be severe. These disorders include daytime sleepiness, drowsiness or napping more than two hours a day, insomnia, periodic limb movements, restless legs syndrome and sleep apnea.
#### REM sleep behavior disorder
REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) is a parasomnia in which individuals lose the paralysis of muscles (atonia) that is normal during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and consequently act out their dreams or make other abnormal movements or vocalizations. About 80% of those with DLB have RBD. Abnormal sleep behaviors may begin before cognitive decline is observed, and may appear decades before any other symptoms, often as the first clinical indication of DLB and an early sign of a synucleinopathy. On autopsy, 94 to 98% of individuals with polysomnography-confirmed RBD have a synucleinopathy—most commonly DLB or Parkinson's disease in about equal proportions. More than three out of four people with RBD are diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition within ten years, but additional neurodegenerative diagnoses may emerge up to 50 years after RBD diagnosis. RBD may subside over time.
Individuals with RBD may not be aware that they act out their dreams. RBD behaviors may include yelling, screaming, laughing, crying, unintelligible talking, nonviolent flailing, or more violent punching, kicking, choking, or scratching. The reported dream enactment behaviors are frequently violent, and involve a theme of being chased or attacked. People with RBD may fall out of bed or injure themselves or their bed partners, which may cause bruises, fractures, or subdural hematomae. Because people are more likely to remember or report violent dreams and behaviors—and to be referred to a specialist when injury occurs—recall or selection bias may explain the prevalence of violence reported in RBD.
#### Parkinsonism
Parkinsonism is a clinical syndrome characterized by slowness of movement (called bradykinesia), rigidity, postural instability, and tremor; it is found in DLB and many other conditions like Parkinson's disease, Parkinson's disease dementia, and others. Parkinsonism occurs in more than 85% of people with DLB, who may have one or more of these cardinal features, although tremor at rest is less common.
Motor symptoms may include shuffling gait, problems with balance, falls, blank expression, reduced range of facial expression, and low speech volume or a weak voice. Presentation of motor symptoms is variable, but they are usually symmetric, presenting on both sides of the body. Only one of the cardinal symptoms of parkinsonism may be present, and the symptoms may be less severe than in persons with Parkinson's disease.
#### Visual hallucinations
Up to 80% of people with DLB have visual hallucinations, typically early in the course of the disease. They are recurrent and frequent; may be scenic, elaborate and detailed; and usually involve animated perceptions of animals or people, including children and family members. Examples of visual hallucinations "vary from 'little people' who casually walk around the house, 'ghosts' of dead parents who sit quietly at the bedside, to 'bicycles' that hang off of trees in the back yard".
These hallucinations can sometimes provoke fear, although their content is more typically neutral. In some cases, the person with DLB has insight that the hallucinations are not real. Among those with more disrupted cognition, the hallucinations can become more complex, and they may be less aware that their hallucinations are not real. Visual misperceptions or illusions are also common in DLB but differ from visual hallucinations. While visual hallucinations occur in the absence of real stimuli, visual illusions occur when real stimuli are incorrectly perceived; for example, a person with DLB may misinterpret a floor lamp for a person.
### Supportive features
Supportive features of DLB have less diagnostic weight, but they provide evidence for the diagnosis. Supportive features may be present early in the progression, and persist over time; they are common but they are not specific to the diagnosis. The supportive features are:
- marked sensitivity to antipsychotics (neuroleptics);
- marked dysautonomia (autonomic dysfunction) in which the autonomic nervous system does not work properly;
- hallucinations in senses other than vision (hearing, touch, taste, and smell);
- hypersomnia (excessive sleepiness);
- hyposmia (reduced ability to smell);
- delusions (fixed falsed beliefs) organized around a common theme;
- postural instability, loss of consciousness, and frequent falls;
- apathy, anxiety, or depression.
Partly because of loss of cells that release the neurotransmitter dopamine, people with DLB may have neuroleptic malignant syndrome, impairments in cognition or alertness, or irreversible exacerbation of parkinsonism including severe rigidity, and dysautonomia from the use of antipsychotics.
Dysautonomia (autonomic dysfunction) occurs when Lewy pathology affects the peripheral autonomic nervous system (the nerves dealing with the unconscious functions of organs such as the intestines, heart, and urinary tract). The first signs of autonomic dysfunction are often subtle. Manifestations include blood pressure problems such as orthostatic hypotension (significantly reduced blood pressure upon standing) and supine hypertension (significantly elevated blood pressure when lying horizontally); constipation, urinary problems, and sexual dysfunction; loss of or reduced ability to smell; and excessive sweating, drooling, or salivation, and problems swallowing (dysphagia).
Alpha-synuclein deposits can affect cardiac muscle and blood vessels. "Degeneration of the cardiac sympathetic nerves is a neuropathological feature" of the Lewy body dementias, according to Yamada et al. Almost all people with synucleinopathies have cardiovascular dysfunction, although most are asymptomatic. Between 50 and 60% of individuals with DLB have orthostatic hypotension due to reduced blood flow, which can result in lightheadedness, feeling faint, and blurred vision.
From chewing to defecation, alpha-synuclein deposits affect every level of gastrointestinal function. Almost all persons with DLB have upper gastrointestinal tract dysfunction (such as gastroparesis, delayed gastric emptying) or lower gastrointestinal dysfunction (such as constipation and prolonged stool transit time). Persons with Lewy body dementia almost universally experience nausea, gastric retention, or abdominal distention from delayed gastric emptying. Problems with gastrointestinal function can affect medication absorption. Constipation can present a decade before diagnosis, and is one of the most common symptoms for people with Lewy body dementia. Dysphagia is milder than in other synucleinopathies and presents later. Urinary difficulties (urinary retention, waking at night to urinate, increased urinary frequency and urgency, and over- or underactive bladder) typically appear later and may be mild or moderate. Sexual dysfunction usually appears early in synucleinopathies, and may include erectile dysfunction and difficulty achieving orgasm or ejaculating.
Among the other supportive features, psychiatric symptoms are often present when the individual first comes to clinical attention and are more likely, compared to AD, to cause more impairment. About one-third of people with DLB have depression, and they often have anxiety as well. Anxiety leads to increased risk of falls, and apathy may lead to less social interaction.
Agitation, behavioral disturbances, and delusions typically appear later in the course of the disease. Delusions may have a paranoid quality, involving themes like a house being broken in to, infidelity, or abandonment. Individuals with DLB who misplace items may have delusions about theft. Capgras delusion may occur, in which the person with DLB loses knowledge of the spouse, caregiver, or partner's face, and is convinced that an imposter has replaced them. Hallucinations in other modalities are sometimes present, but are less frequent.
Sleep disorders (disrupted sleep cycles, sleep apnea, and arousal from periodic limb movement disorder) are common in DLB and may lead to hypersomnia. Loss of sense of smell may occur several years before other symptoms.
## Causes
Like other synucleinopathies, the exact cause of DLB is unknown. No trigger for the build-up of alpha-synuclein deposits in the central nervous system has been conclusively identified. Synucleinopathies are typically caused by interactions of genetic and environmental influences; infectious causes have also been considered, but arguments in their favor are controversial and lacking in support. Most people with DLB do not have affected family members, although occasionally DLB runs in a family. The heritability of DLB is thought to be around 30% (that is, about 70% of disease severity is due to external factors or chance).
There is overlap in the genetic risk factors for DLB, Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease, and Parkinson's disease dementia. The APOE gene has three common variants. One, APOE ε4, is a risk factor for DLB and Alzheimer's disease, whereas APOE ε2 may be protective against both. Mutations in GBA, a gene for a lysosomal enzyme, are associated with both DLB and Parkinson's disease. Rarely, mutations in SNCA, the gene for alpha-synuclein, or LRRK2, a gene for a kinase enzyme, can cause any of DLB, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease or Parkinson's disease dementia. This suggests some shared genetic pathology may underlie all four diseases.
The greatest risk of developing DLB is being over the age of 50. Having REM sleep behavior disorder or Parkinson's disease confers a higher risk for developing DLB. The risk of developing DLB has not been linked to any specific lifestyle factors. Risk factors for rapid conversion of RBD to a synucleinopathy include impairments in color vision or the ability to smell, mild cognitive impairment, and abnormal dopaminergic imaging.
## Pathophysiology
DLB is characterized by the development of abnormal collections of alpha-synuclein protein within diseased brain neurons, manifesting as Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites. When these clumps of protein form, neurons function less optimally and eventually die. Neuronal loss in DLB leads to profound dopamine dysfunction and marked cholinergic pathology; other neurotransmitters might be affected, but less is known about them. Damage in the brain is widespread, and affects many domains of functioning. Loss of acetylcholine-producing neurons is thought to account for degeneration in memory and learning, while the death of dopamine-producing neurons appears to be responsible for degeneration of behavior, cognition, mood, movement, motivation, and sleep. The extent of Lewy body neuronal damage is a key determinant of dementia in the Lewy body disorders.
The precise mechanisms contributing to DLB are not well understood and are a matter of some controversy. The role of alpha-synuclein deposits is unclear, because individuals with no signs of DLB have been found on autopsy to have advanced alpha-synuclein pathology. The relationship between Lewy pathology and widespread cell death is contentious. It is not known if the pathology spreads between cells or follows another pattern. The mechanisms that contribute to cell death, how the disease advances through the brain, and the timing of cognitive decline are all poorly understood. There is no model to account for the specific neurons and brain regions that are affected.
Autopsy studies and amyloid imaging studies using Pittsburgh compound B (PiB) indicate that tau protein pathology and amyloid plaques, which are hallmarks of AD, are also common in DLB and more common than in Parkinson's disease dementia. Amyloid-beta (Aβ) deposits are found in the tauopathies—neurodegenerative diseases characterized by neurofibrillary tangles of hyperphosphorylated tau protein—but the mechanism underlying dementia is often mixed, and Aβ is also a factor in DLB.
A proposed pathophysiology for RBD implicates neurons in the reticular formation that regulate REM sleep. RBD might appear decades earlier than other symptoms in the Lewy body dementias because these cells are affected earlier, before spreading to other brain regions.
## Diagnosis
Dementia with Lewy bodies can only be definitively diagnosed after death with an autopsy of the brain (or in rare familial cases, via a genetic test), so diagnosis of the living is referred to as probable or possible.
Diagnosing DLB can be challenging because of the wide range of symptoms with differing levels of severity in each individual. DLB is often misdiagnosed or, in its early stages, confused with Alzheimer's disease. The majority of individuals with Lewy body dementias receive an inaccurate initial diagnosis—such as Alzheimer's, parkinsonism, other dementias or a psychiatric diagnosis—resulting in reduced support and increased fear and uncertainty, sometimes for many years. Comparing the rates of detection of DLB in autopsy studies to those diagnosed while in clinical care indicates that as many as one in three diagnoses of DLB may be missed. Another complicating factor is that DLB commonly occurs along with Alzheimer's; autopsy reveals that half of people with DLB have some level of changes attributed to AD in their brains, which contributes to the wide-ranging variety of symptoms and diagnostic difficulty.
Living with an uncertain diagnosis and prognosis is a concern expressed by both individuals with DLB and their caregivers and difficulty gaining a diagnosis and differing interactions with healthcare professionals are common experiences; once diagnosed, there are still difficulties finding a doctor knowledgeable in treating DLB. Despite the difficulty in diagnosis, a prompt diagnosis is important because of the serious risks of sensitivity to antipsychotics and the need to inform both the person with DLB and the person's caregivers about those medications' side effects. The management of DLB is difficult in comparison to many other neurodegenerative diseases, so an accurate diagnosis is important.
### Criteria
The 2017 Fourth Consensus Report established diagnostic criteria for probable and possible DLB, recognizing advances in detection since the earlier Third Consensus (2005) version. The 2017 criteria are based on essential, core, and supportive clinical features, and diagnostic biomarkers.
The essential feature is dementia; for a DLB diagnosis, it must be significant enough to interfere with social or occupational functioning.
The four core clinical features (described in the Signs and symptoms section) are fluctuating cognition, visual hallucinations, REM sleep behavior disorder, and signs of parkinsonism. Supportive clinical features are marked sensitivity to antipsychotics; marked autonomic dysfunction; nonvisual hallucinations; hypersomnia (excessive sleepiness); hyposmia (reduced ability to smell); false beliefs and delusions organized around a common theme; postural instability, loss of consciousness and frequent falls; and apathy, anxiety, or depression.
Direct laboratory-measurable biomarkers for DLB diagnosis are not known, but several indirect methods can lend further evidence for diagnosis. The indicative diagnostic biomarkers are: reduced dopamine transporter uptake in the basal ganglia shown on PET or SPECT imaging; low uptake of <sup>123</sup>iodine-metaiodobenzylguanidine (<sup>123</sup>I-MIBG) shown on myocardial scintigraphy; and loss of atonia during REM sleep evidenced on polysomnography. Supportive diagnostic biomarkers (from PET, SPECT, CT, or MRI brain imaging studies or EEG monitoring) are: lack of damage to medial temporal lobe (damage is more likely in AD); reduced occipital activity; and prominent slow-wave activity on EEG.
Probable DLB can be diagnosed when dementia and at least two core features are present, or when one core feature and at least one indicative biomarker are present. Possible DLB can be diagnosed when dementia and only one core feature are present or, if no core features are present, then at least one indicative biomarker is present.
DLB is distinguished from Parkinson's disease dementia by the time frame in which dementia symptoms appear relative to parkinsonian symptoms. DLB is diagnosed when cognitive symptoms begin before or at the same time as parkinsonian motor signs. Parkinson's disease dementia would be the diagnosis when Parkinson's disease is well established before the dementia occurs (the onset of dementia is more than a year after the onset of parkinsonian symptoms). Known as the one-year rule, the distinction is acknowledged to be arbitrary; it recognizes overlap between the conditions along with key differences, while allowing for variations in treatment and prognosis and providing a framework for research.
DLB is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) as major or mild neurocognitive disorder with Lewy bodies. The differences between the DSM and DLB Consortium diagnostic criteria are: 1) the DSM does not include low dopamine transporter uptake as a supportive feature, and 2) unclear diagnostic weight is assigned to biomarkers in the DSM. Lewy body dementias are classified by the World Health Organization in its ICD-10, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, in chapter VI, as diseases of the nervous system, code 31.8.
### Clinical history and testing
Diagnostic tests can be used to establish some features of the condition and distinguish them from symptoms of other conditions. Diagnosis may include taking the person's medical history, a physical exam, assessment of neurological function, brain imaging, neuropsychological testing to assess cognitive function, sleep studies, myocardial scintigraphy, or laboratory testing to rule out conditions that may cause symptoms similar to dementia, such as abnormal thyroid function, syphilis, HIV, and vitamin deficiencies.
Typical dementia screening tests used are the mini-mental state examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). The pattern of cognitive impairment in DLB is distinct from other dementias, such as AD; the MMSE mainly tests for the memory and language impairments more commonly seen in those other dementias and may be less suited for assessing cognition in the Lewy body dementias, where testing of visuospatial and executive function is indicated. The MoCA may be better suited to assessing cognitive function in DLB, and the Clinician Assessment of Fluctuation scale and the Mayo Fluctuation Composite Score may help understand cognitive decline relative to fluctuations in DLB. For tests of attention, digit span, serial sevens, and spatial span can be used for simple screening, and the Revised Digit Symbol Subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale may show defects in attention that are characteristic of DLB. The Frontal Assessment Battery, Stroop test and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test are used for evaluation of executive function, and there are many other screening instruments available.
If DLB is suspected when parkinsonism and dementia are the only presenting features, PET or SPECT imaging may show reduced dopamine transporter activity. A DLB diagnosis may be warranted if other conditions with reduced dopamine transporter uptake can be ruled out.
RBD is diagnosed either by sleep study recording or, when sleep studies cannot be performed, by medical history and validated questionnaires. In individuals with dementia and a history of RBD, a probable DLB diagnosis can be justified (even with no other core feature or biomarker) based on a sleep study showing REM sleep without atonia because it is so highly predictive. Conditions similar to RBD, like severe sleep apnea and periodic limb movement disorder, must be ruled out. Prompt evaluation and treatment of RBD is indicated when a prior history of violence or injury is present as it may increase the likelihood of future violent dream enactment behaviors. Individuals with RBD may not be able to provide a history of dream enactment behavior, so bed partners are also consulted. The REM Sleep Behavior Disorder Single-Question Screen offers diagnostic sensitivity and specificity in the absence of polysomnography with one question: "Have you ever been told, or suspected yourself, that you seem to 'act out your dreams' while asleep (for example, punching, flailing your arms in the air, making running movements, etc.)?" Because some individuals with DLB do not have RBD, normal findings from a sleep study cannot rule out DLB.
Since 2001, <sup>123</sup>iodine-metaiodobenzylguanidine (<sup>123</sup>I-MIBG) myocardial scintigraphy has been used diagnostically in East Asia (principally Japan), but not in the US; studies validating its use in differential diagnoses are lacking as of 2022. MIBG is taken up by sympathetic nerve endings, such as those that innervate the heart, and is labeled for scintigraphy with radioactive <sup>123</sup>iodine. Autonomic dysfunction resulting from damage to nerves in the heart in patients with DLB is associated with lower cardiac uptake of <sup>123</sup>I-MIBG.
There is no genetic test to determine if an individual will develop DLB and, according to the Lewy Body Dementia Association, genetic testing is not routinely recommended because there are only rare instances of hereditary DLB.
### Differential
Many neurodegenerative conditions share cognitive and motor symptoms with dementia with Lewy bodies. The differential diagnosis includes Alzheimer's disease; such synucleinopathies as Parkinson's disease dementia, Parkinson's disease, and multiple system atrophy; vascular dementia; and progressive supranuclear palsy, corticobasal degeneration, and corticobasal syndrome.
The symptoms of DLB are easily confused with delirium, or more rarely with psychosis; prodromal subtypes of delirium-onset DLB and psychiatric-onset DLB have been proposed. Mismanagement of delirium is a particular concern because of the risks to people with DLB associated with antipsychotics. A careful examination for features of DLB is warranted in individuals with unexplained delirium. PET or SPECT imaging showing reduced dopamine transporter uptake can help distinguish DLB from delirium.
Lewy pathology affects the peripheral autonomic nervous system; autonomic dysfunction is observed less often in AD, frontotemporal, or vascular dementias, so its presence can help differentiate them. MRI scans almost always show abnormalities in the brains of people with vascular dementia, which can begin suddenly.
#### Alzheimer's disease
DLB is distinguishable from AD even in the prodromal phase. Short-term memory impairment is seen early in AD and is a prominent feature, while fluctuating attention is uncommon; impairment in DLB is more often seen first as fluctuating cognition. In contrast to AD—in which the hippocampus is among the first brain structures affected, and episodic memory loss related to encoding of memories is typically the earliest symptom—memory impairment occurs later in DLB. People with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (in which memory loss is the main symptom) may progress to AD, whereas those with non-amnestic mild cognitive impairment (which has more prominent impairments in language, visuospatial, and executive domains) are more likely to progress towards DLB. Memory loss in DLB has a different progression from AD because frontal structures are involved earlier, with later involvement of temporoparietal brain structures. Verbal memory is not as severely affected as in AD.
While 74% of people with autopsy-confirmed DLB had deficits in planning and organization, they show up in only 45% of people with AD. Visuospatial processing deficits are present in most individuals with DLB, and they show up earlier and are more pronounced than in AD. Hallucinations typically occur early in the course of DLB, are less common in early AD, but usually occur later in AD. AD pathology frequently co-occurs in DLB and is associated with more rapid decline; cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) testing may reveal an "Alzheimer's pattern" of higher tau and lower amyloid beta.
PET or SPECT imaging can be used to detect reduced dopamine transporter uptake and distinguish AD from DLB. Severe atrophy of the hippocampus is more typical of AD than DLB. Before dementia develops (during the mild cognitive impairment phase), MRI scans show normal hippocampal volume. After dementia develops, MRI shows more atrophy among individuals with AD, and a slower reduction in volume over time among people with DLB than those with AD. Compared to people with AD, FDG-PET brain scans in people with DLB often show a cingulate island sign.
In East Asia, particularly Japan,<sup>123</sup>I-MIBG is used in the differential diagnosis of DLB and AD, because reduced labeling of cardiac nerves is seen only in Lewy body disorders. Other indicative and supportive biomarkers are useful in distinguishing DLB and AD (preservation of medial temporal lobe structures, reduced occipital activity, and slow-wave EEG activity).
#### Synucleinopathies
Dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson's disease dementia are clinically similar after dementia occurs in Parkinson's disease. Delusions in Parkinson's disease dementia are less common than in DLB, and persons with Parkinson's disease are typically less caught up in their visual hallucinations than those with DLB. There is a lower incidence of tremor at rest in DLB than in Parkinson's disease, and signs of parkinsonism in DLB are more symmetrical. In multiple system atrophy, autonomic dysfunction appears earlier and is more severe, and is accompanied by uncoordinated movements, while visual hallucinations and fluctuating cognition are less common than in DLB. Urinary difficulty is one of the earliest symptoms with multiple system atrophy, and is often severe.
#### Frontotemporal dementias
Corticobasal syndrome, corticobasal degeneration and progressive supranuclear palsy are frontotemporal dementias with features of parkinsonism and impaired cognition. Similar to DLB, imaging may show reduced dopamine transporter uptake. Corticobasal syndrome and degeneration, and progressive supranuclear palsy, are usually distinguished from DLB by history and examination. Motor movements in corticobasal syndrome are asymmetrical. There are differences in posture, gaze and facial expressions in the most common variants of progressive supranuclear palsy, and falling backwards is more common relative to DLB. Visual hallucinations and fluctuating cognition are unusual in corticobasal degeneration and progressive supranuclear palsy.
## Management
Palliative care is offered to ameliorate symptoms, but there are no medications that can slow, stop, or improve the relentless progression of the disease. No medications for DLB are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as of 2023, although donepezil is licensed in Japan and the Philippines for the treatment of DLB. As of 2020, there has been little study on the best management for non-motor symptoms such as sleep disorders and autonomic dysfunction; most information on management of autonomic dysfunction in DLB is based on studies of people with Parkinson's disease.
Management can be challenging because of the need to balance treatment of different symptoms: cognitive dysfunction, neuropsychiatric features, impairments related to the motor system, and other nonmotor symptoms. Individuals with DLB have widely different symptoms that fluctuate over time, and treating one symptom can worsen another; suboptimal care can result from a lack of coordination among the physicians treating different symptoms. A multidisciplinary approach—going beyond early and accurate diagnosis to include educating and supporting the caregivers—is favored.
### Medication
Pharmacological management of DLB is complex because of adverse effects of medications and the wide range of symptoms to be treated (cognitive, motor, neuropsychiatric, autonomic, and sleep). Anticholinergic and dopaminergic agents can have adverse effects or result in psychosis in individuals with DLB, and a medication that addresses one feature might worsen another. For example, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs) for cognitive symptoms can lead to complications in dysautonomia features; treatment of movement symptoms with dopamine agonists may worsen neuropsychiatric symptoms; and treatment of hallucinations and psychosis with antipsychotics may worsen other symptoms or lead to a potentially fatal reaction.
Extreme caution is required in the use of antipsychotic medication in people with DLB because of their sensitivity to these agents. Severe and life-threatening reactions occur in almost half of people with DLB, and can be fatal after a single dose. Antipsychotics with D<sub>2</sub> dopamine receptor-blocking properties are used only with great caution. According to Boot (2013), "electing not to use neuroleptics is often the best course of action". People with Lewy body dementias who take neuroleptics are at risk for neuroleptic malignant syndrome, a life-threatening illness. There is no evidence to support the use of antipsychotics to treat the Lewy body dementias, and they carry the additional risk of stroke when used in the elderly with dementia.
Medications (including tricyclic antidepressants and treatments for urinary incontinence) with anticholinergic properties that cross the blood–brain barrier can cause memory loss. The antihistamine medication diphenhydramine (Benadryl), sleep medications like zolpidem, and benzodiazepines may worsen confusion or neuropsychiatric symptoms. Some general anesthetics may cause confusion or delirium upon waking in persons with Lewy body dementias, and may result in permanent decline.
#### Cognitive symptoms
There is strong evidence for the use of AChEIs to treat cognitive problems; these medications include rivastigmine and donepezil. Both are first-line treatments in the UK. Even when the AChEIs do not lead to improvement in cognitive symptoms, people taking them may have less deterioration overall, although there may be adverse gastrointestinal effects. The use of these medications can reduce the burden on caregivers and improve activities of daily living for the individual with DLB. The AChEIs are initiated carefully as they may aggravate autonomic dysfunction or sleep behaviors. There is less evidence for the efficacy of memantine in DLB, but it may be used alone or with an AChEI because of its low side effect profile. Anticholinergic drugs are avoided because they worsen cognitive symptoms.
To improve daytime alertness, there is mixed evidence for the use of stimulants such as methylphenidate and dextroamphetamine; although worsening of neuropsychiatric symptoms is not common, they can increase the risk of psychosis. Modafinil and armodafinil may be effective for daytime sleepiness.
#### Motor symptoms
Motor symptoms in DLB appear to respond somewhat less to medications used to treat Parkinson's disease, like levodopa, and these medications can increase neuropsychiatric symptoms. Almost one out of every three individuals with DLB develops psychotic symptoms from levodopa. If such medications are needed for motor symptoms, cautious introduction with slow increases to the lowest possible dose may help avoid psychosis.
The anticonvulsant zonisamide has been approved in Japan since 2009 for treating Parkinson's disease and since 2018 to treat parkinsonism in DLB. There is high certainty according to the GRADE certainty rating approach that it is effective for treating motor symptoms in DLB.
#### Neuropsychiatric symptoms
Neuropsychiatric symptoms of DLB (aggression, anxiety, apathy, delusions, depression and hallucinations) do not always require treatment. The first line of defense in decreasing visual hallucinations is to reduce the use of dopaminergic drugs, which can worsen hallucinations. If new neuropsychiatric symptoms appear, the use of medications (such as anticholinergics, tricyclic antidepressants, benzodiazepines and opioids) that might be contributing to these symptoms is reviewed.
Among the AChEIs, donepezil and rivastigmine can help reduce neuropsychiatric symptoms and improve the frequency and severity of hallucinations in the less severe stages of DLB. For treating psychosis and agitation in DLB, there is low evidence for memantine, olanzapine and aripiprazole, and very low evidence for the efficacy of quetiapine. Although clozapine has been shown effective in Parkinson's disease, there is very low evidence for its use to treat visual hallucinations in DLB, and its use requires regular blood monitoring.
Apathy may be treated with AChEIs, and they may also reduce hallucinations, delusions, anxiety and agitation. Most medications to treat anxiety and depression have not been adequately investigated for DLB. Antidepressants may affect sleep and worsen RBD. Mirtazapine and SSRIs can be used to treat depression, depending on how well they are tolerated, and guided by general advice for the use of antidepressants in dementia. Antidepressants with anticholinergic properties may worsen hallucinations and delusions. People with Capgras syndrome may not tolerate AChEIs.
#### Sleep disorders
The first steps in managing sleep disorders are to evaluate the use of medications that impact sleep and provide education about sleep hygiene. Sleep medications are carefully evaluated for each individual as they carry increased risk of falls, increased daytime sleepiness, and worsening cognition.
Injurious dream enactment behaviors are a treatment priority. Frequency and severity of RBD may be lessened by treating sleep apnea, if it is present. RBD may be treated with melatonin or clonazepam. Melatonin may be more helpful in preventing injuries, and it offers a safer alternative, because clonazepam can produce deteriorating cognition, and worsen sleep apnea.
Memantine is useful for some people. Modafinil may be used for hypersomnia, but no trials support its use in DLB. Antidepressants (SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics, and MAOIs), AChEIs, beta blockers, caffeine, and tramadol may worsen RBD.
#### Autonomic symptoms
Decreasing the dosage of dopaminergic or atypical antipsychotic drugs may be needed with orthostatic hypotension, and high blood pressure drugs can sometimes be stopped. When non-pharmacological treatments for orthostatic hypotension have been exhausted, fludrocortisone, droxidopa, or midodrine are options, but these drugs have not been specifically studied for DLB as of 2020. Delayed gastric emptying can be worsened by dopaminergic medications, and constipation can be worsened by opiates and anticholinergic medications. Muscarinic antagonists used for urinary symptoms might worsen cognitive impairment in people with Lewy body dementias.
### Other
There is no high-quality evidence for non-pharmacological management of DLB, but some interventions have been shown effective for addressing similar symptoms that occur in other dementias. For example, organized activities, music therapy, physical activity and occupational therapy may help with psychosis or agitation, while exercise and gait training can help with motor symptoms. Cognitive behavioral therapy can be tried for depression or hallucinations, although there is no evidence for its use in DLB. Cues can be used to help with memory retrieval.
For autonomic dysfunction, several non-medication strategies may be helpful. Dietary changes include avoiding meals high in fat and sugary foods, eating smaller and more frequent meals, after-meal walks, and increasing fluids or dietary fiber to treat constipation. Stool softeners and exercise also help with constipation. Excess sweating can be helped by avoiding alcohol and spicy foods, and using cotton bedding and loose fitting clothing.
Physical exercise in a sitting or recumbent position, and exercise in a pool, can help maintain conditioning. Compression stockings and elevating the head of the bed may also help, and increasing fluid intake or table salt can be tried to reduce orthostatic hypotension. To lessen the risk of fractures in individuals at risk for falls, bone mineral density screening and testing of vitamin D levels are used, and caregivers are educated on the importance of preventing falls. Physiotherapy has been shown helpful for Parkinson's disease dementia, but as of 2020, there is no evidence to support physical therapy in people with DLB.
### Caregiving
Demands placed on caregivers are higher than in AD because of the neuropsychiatric symptoms associated with DLB. Contributing factors to the caregiver burden in DLB are emotional fluctuations, apathy, psychosis, aggression, agitation, and night-time behaviors such as parasomnias, that lead to a loss of independence earlier than in AD. Caregivers may experience depression and exhaustion, and they may need support from other people. Other family members who are not present in the daily caregiving may not observe the fluctuating behaviors or recognize the stress on the caregiver, and conflict can result when family members are not supportive.
Teaching caregivers how to manage neuropsychiatric symptoms (such as agitation and psychosis) is recommended, although education for caregivers has not been studied as thoroughly as in AD or Parkinson's disease. Caregiver education reduces not only distress for the caregiver, but symptoms for the individual with dementia. Caregiver training, watchful waiting, identifying sources of pain, and increasing social interaction can help minimize agitation. Individuals with dementia may not be able to communicate that they are in pain, and pain is a common trigger of agitation.
Visual hallucinations associated with DLB create a particular burden on caregivers. Caregivers can be educated to distract or change the subject when confronted with hallucinations, and that this is more effective than arguing over the reality of the hallucination. Coping strategies may help and are worth trying, even though there is no evidence for their efficacy. These strategies include having the person with DLB look away or look at something else, focus on or try to touch the hallucination, wait for it to go away on its own, and speak with others about the visualization. Delusions and hallucinations may be reduced by increasing lighting in the evening, and making sure there is no light at night when the individual with DLB is sleeping.
With the increased risk of side effects from antipsychotics for people with DLB, educated caregivers are able to act as advocates for the person with DLB. If evaluation or treatment in an emergency room is needed, the caregiver may be able to explain the risks associated with neuroleptic use for persons with DLB. Medical alert bracelets or notices about medication sensitivity are available and can save lives.
Individuals and their caregivers can be counselled about the need to improve bedroom safety for RBD symptoms. Sleep-related injuries from falling or jumping out of bed can be avoided by lowering the height of the bed, placing a mattress next to the bed to soften the impact of a fall, and removing sharp objects from around the bed. Sharp surfaces near the bed can be padded, bed alarm systems may help with sleepwalking, and bed partners may find it safer to sleep in another room. According to St Louis and Boeve, firearms should be locked away, out of the bedroom.
A home safety assessment can be done when there is risk of falling. Handrails and shower chairs can help avoid falls. Driving ability may be impaired early in DLB because of visual hallucinations, movement issues related to parkinsonism, and fluctuations in cognitive ability, and at some point it becomes unsafe for the person to drive. Driving ability is assessed as part of management, and family members generally determine when driving privileges are removed.
## Prognosis
As of 2021, no cure is known for DLB. The prognosis for DLB has not been well studied; early studies had methodological limitations, such as small sample size and selection bias. Relative to AD and other dementias, DLB generally leads to higher rates of disability, hospitalization and institutionalization, and lower life expectancy and quality of life, with increased costs of care. Depression, apathy, and visual hallucinations contribute to the reduced quality of life. Decline may be more rapid when the APOE gene is present, or when AD—or its biomarkers—is also present. The severity of orthostatic hypotension also predicts a worse prognosis. Visuospatial deficits early in the course of DLB were thought to be a predictor of rapid decline, but more recent studies did not find an association.
The trajectory of cognitive decline in DLB is difficult to establish because of the high rate of missed diagnoses; the typical delay of a year in the US, and 1.2 years in the UK, for diagnosis of DLB mean that a baseline from which deterioration can be measured is often absent. Compared to AD, which is better studied, memory is thought to be retained longer, while verbal fluency may be lost faster, but the most common tools used to assess cognition may miss the most common cognitive deficits in DLB, and better studies are needed. There are more neuropsychiatric symptoms in DLB than AD, and they may emerge earlier, so those with DLB may have a less favorable prognosis, with more rapid cognitive decline, more admissions to residential care, and a lower life expectancy. An increased rate of hospitalization compared to AD is most commonly related to hallucinations and confusion, followed by falls and infection.
Life expectancy is difficult to predict, and limited study data are available. Survival may be defined from the point of disease onset, or from the point of diagnosis. There is wide variability in survival times, as DLB may be rapidly or slowly progressing. A 2019 meta-analysis found an average survival time after diagnosis of 4.1 years—indicating survival in DLB 1.6 years less than after a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. A 2017 review found survival from disease onset between 5.5 and 7.7 years, and survival from diagnosis between 1.9 and 6.3 years. The difference in survival between AD and DLB could be because DLB is harder to diagnose, and may be diagnosed later in the course of the disease. An online survey with 658 respondents found that, after diagnosis, more than 10% died within a year, 10% lived more than 7 years, and some live more than 10 years; some people with Lewy body dementias live for 20 years. Shorter life expectancy is more likely when visual hallucinations, abnormal gait, and variable cognition are present early on.
Fear and anxiety feature strongly for both people with Lewy body dementia and their caregivers; a range of emotional responses to living with Lewy bodies includes fear of hallucinations, fear of falls and frightening nightmares as a result of RBD, and being fearful of the effects of tiredness and fatigue. The symptoms of fluctuations, depression, delirium and violence are also experienced as frightening. An immense amount of physical support from friends and family is often required to maintain social and supporting relationships. Individuals with Lewy body dementias describe feeling a burden in the wider social context, as they reduce attending social events due to their increasing physical needs. Frequently reported burden dimensions include personal strain and interference with personal life, which can lead to relationship dissatisfaction and resentment.
In the late phase of the disease, people may be unable to care for themselves. Falls—caused by many factors including parkinsonism, dysautonomia, and frailness—increase morbidity and mortality. Failure to thrive and aspiration pneumonia, a complication of dysphagia (difficulty swallowing) that results from dysautonomia, commonly cause death among people with the Lewy body dementias. Cardiovascular disease and sepsis are also common causes of death.
## Epidemiology
The Lewy body dementias are as a group the second most common form of neurodegenerative dementia after AD as of 2021. DLB itself is one of the three most common types of dementia, along with AD and vascular dementia.
The diagnostic criteria for DLB before 2017 were highly specific, but not very sensitive, so that more than half of cases were missed historically. Dementia with Lewy bodies was under-recognized as of 2021, and there is little data on its epidemiology. The incidence and prevalence of DLB are not known accurately, but estimates are increasing with better recognition of the condition since 2017.
About 0.4% of those over the age of 65 are affected with DLB, and between 1 and 4 per 1,000 people develop the condition each year. Symptoms usually appear between the ages of 50 and 80 (median 76), and it is not uncommon for it to be diagnosed before the age of 65. DLB is thought to be slightly more common in men than women, but a 2014 review challenged that view, and said that the gender distribution was unclear. An estimated 10 to 15% of diagnosed dementias are Lewy body type, but estimates range as high as 23% for those in clinical studies.
A French study found an incidence among persons 65 years and older almost four times higher than a US study (32 US vs 112 France per 100,000 person-years), but the US study may have excluded people with only mild or no parkinsonism, while the French study screened for parkinsonism. Neither of the studies assessed systematically for RBD, so DLB may have been underdiagnosed in both studies. A door-to-door study in Japan found a prevalence of 0.53% for persons 65 and older, and a Spanish study found similar results.
## History
Frederic Lewy (1885–1950) was the first to discover the abnormal protein deposits in the early 1900s. In 1912, studying Parkinson's disease (paralysis agitans), he described findings of these inclusion bodies in the vagus nerve, the nucleus basalis of Meynert and other brain regions. He published a book, The Study on Muscle Tone and Movement. Including Systematic Investigations on the Clinic, Physiology, Pathology, and Pathogenesis of Paralysis agitans, in 1923 and except for one brief paper a year later, never mentioned his findings again.
In 1961, Okazaki et al. published an account of diffuse Lewy-type inclusions associated with dementia in two autopsied cases. Dementia with Lewy bodies was fully described in an autopsied case by Japanese psychiatrist and neuropathologist Kenji Kosaka in 1976. Kosaka first proposed the term Lewy body disease four years later, based on 20 autopsied cases. DLB was thought to be rare until it became easier to diagnose in the 1980s after the discovery of alpha-synuclein immunostaining that highlighted Lewy bodies in post mortem brains. Kosaka et al. described thirty-four more cases in 1984, which were mentioned along with four UK cases by Gibb et al. in 1987 in the journal Brain, bringing attention to the Japanese work in the Western world. A year later, Burkhardt et al. published the first general description of diffuse Lewy body disease.
In the 1990s, with Japanese, UK, and US researchers finding that DLB was a common dementia, there were still no available diagnostic guidelines, with each group using different terminology. The different groups of researchers began to realize that a collaborative approach was needed if research was to advance. The DLB Consortium was established, and, in 1996, the term dementia with Lewy bodies was agreed upon, and the first criteria for diagnosing DLB were elaborated.
Two 1997 discoveries highlighted the importance of Lewy body inclusions in neurodegenerative processes: a mutation in the SNCA gene that encodes the alpha-synuclein protein was found in kindreds with Parkinson's disease, and Lewy bodies and neurites were found to be immunoreactive for alpha-synuclein. Thus, alpha-synuclein aggregation was established as the primary building block of the synucleinopathies.
Between 1995 and 2005, the DLB Consortium issued three consensus reports on DLB. DLB was included in the fourth text revision of the DSM (DSM-IV-TR, published in 2000) under "Dementia due to other general medical conditions". In the 2010s, the possibility of a genetic basis for LBD began to emerge. The Fourth Consensus Report was issued in 2017, giving increased diagnostic weighting to RBD and <sup>123</sup>I-MIBG myocardial scintigraphy.
## Society and culture
The British author and poet Mervyn Peake died in 1968 and was diagnosed posthumously as a probable case of DLB in a 2003 study published in JAMA Neurology. Based on signs in his work and letters of progressive deterioration, fluctuating cognitive decline, deterioration in visuospatial function, declining attention span, and visual hallucinations and delusions, his may be the earliest known case where DLB was found to have been the likely cause of death.
At the time of his suicide on August 11, 2014, Robin Williams, the American actor and comedian, had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. According to his widow, Williams had experienced depression, anxiety, and increasing paranoia. His widow said that his autopsy found diffuse Lewy body disease, while the autopsy used the term diffuse Lewy body dementia. Dennis Dickson, a spokesperson for the Lewy Body Dementia Association, clarified the distinction by stating that diffuse Lewy body dementia is more commonly called diffuse Lewy body disease and refers to the underlying disease process. According to Dickson, "Lewy bodies are generally limited in distribution, but in DLB, the Lewy bodies are spread widely throughout the brain, as was the case with Robin Williams." Ian G. McKeith, professor and researcher of Lewy body dementias, commented that Williams' symptoms and autopsy findings were explained by DLB.
## Research directions
The identification of prodromal biomarkers for DLB will enable treatments to begin sooner, improve the ability to select subjects and measure efficacy in clinical trials, and help families and clinicians plan for early interventions and awareness of potential adverse effects from the use of antipsychotics. Criteria were established in 2020 to help researchers better recognize DLB in the pre-dementia phase. Three syndromes of prodromal DLB have been proposed: 1) mild cognitive impairment with Lewy bodies (MCI-LB); 2) delirium-onset DLB; and 3) psychiatric-onset DLB. The three early syndromes may overlap. As of 2020, the DLB Diagnostic Study Group's position is that criteria for MCI-LB can be recommended, but that it remains difficult to distinguish delirium-onset and psychiatric-onset DLB without better biomarkers. Nonetheless, severe late-onset psychiatric disorders can be an indication to consider Lewy body dementia, and unexplained delirium raises the possibility of prodromal DLB.
The diagnosis of DLB is made using the DLB Consortium criteria, but a 2017 study of skin samples from 18 people with DLB found that all of them had deposits of phosphorylated alpha-synuclein, while none of the controls did, suggesting that skin samples offer diagnostic potential. Other potential biomarkers under investigation are quantitative electroencephalography, imaging examination of brain structures, and measures of synucleinopathy in CSF. While commercial skin biopsy tests for DLB are available in the US, and the FDA has given a 'breakthrough device' authorization for CSF testing, these tests are not widely available and their role in clinical practice has not been established as of 2022. Other tests to detect alpha-synuclein with blood tests are under study as of 2021.
Cognitive training, deep brain stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation have been studied more in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease than they have in dementia with Lewy bodies, and all are potential therapies for DLB. Four clinical trials for treating parkinsonian symptoms in DLB have been completed as of 2021, but more studies are needed to assess risk vs. benefits, adverse effects, and longer-term therapeutic protocols.
Strategies for future interventions involve modifying the course of the disease using immunotherapy, gene therapy, and stem cell therapy, and reducing amyloid beta and alpha-synuclein accumulation. Therapies under study as of 2019 aim to reduce brain levels of alpha-synuclein (with the pharmaceuticals ambroxol, NPT200-11, and E2027), or to use immunotherapy to reduce widespread neuroinflammation resulting from alpha-synuclein deposits. |
21,105,750 | Rampart Dam | 1,154,980,090 | Proposed dam on the Yukon River, Alaska, United States | [
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"Cancelled projects in the United States",
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"Unbuilt buildings and structures in the United States",
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| The Rampart Dam or Rampart Canyon Dam was a project proposed in 1954 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dam the Yukon River in Alaska for hydroelectric power. The project was planned for Rampart Canyon (also known as Rampart Gorge) just 31 miles (50 km) southwest of the village of Rampart, Alaska, about 105 miles (169 km) west-northwest of Fairbanks.
The resulting dam would have created a lake roughly the size of Lake Erie, making it the largest human-made reservoir in the world. The plan for the dam itself called for a concrete structure 530 feet (162 m) high with a top length of about 4,700 feet (1,430 m). The proposed power facilities would have consistently generated between 3.5 and 5.0 gigawatts of electricity, based on the flow of the river as it differs between winter and summer.
Though supported by many politicians and businesses in Alaska, the project was canceled after objections were raised. Native Alaskans in the area protested the threatened loss of nine villages that would be flooded by the dam. Conservation groups abhorred the threatened flooding of the Yukon Flats, a large area of wetlands that provides a critical breeding ground for millions of waterfowl. Fiscal conservatives opposed the dam on the grounds of its large cost and limited benefit to Americans outside Alaska.
Because of these objections, United States Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall formally opposed construction of the dam in 1967, and the project was shelved. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers nevertheless completed its engineering study of the project in 1971, and the final report was released to the public in 1979. In 1980 U.S. President Jimmy Carter created the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Sanctuary, which formally protected the area from development and disallowed any similar project.
## Site
From its headwaters in the Coast Mountains, the Yukon River flows northwest, across the Yukon–Alaska border, until it intersects the Porcupine River at the settlement of Fort Yukon. At that point, the river turns west and southwest, flowing through the Yukon Flats, a low-lying wetland area containing thousands of ponds, streams, and other small bodies of water. As the river flows southwest, it intersects the Tanana and Koyukuk rivers before looping south, then north into Norton Sound in the Bering Sea.
During the river's flow through eastern Alaska, and before it intersects the Tanana River, the Yukon flows through the Central Plateau region of Alaska. During the millions of years of its flow, it has cut through ridges, forming canyons in some places near its juncture with the Tanana. One of the deepest of these canyons is known as Rampart Gorge, or Rampart Canyon. The gorge is located 31 miles (50 km) downstream of the village of Rampart, 36 miles (58 km) upstream of the village of Tanana, and immediately downstream from the mouth of Texas Creek. It is named for the Ramparts of the Yukon, as the early gold miners called the rock formations which created the gorge. The village of Rampart was named for the Ramparts.
At the proposed dam site, the river is 1,300 feet (396 m) wide and has an elevation of 183 feet (56 m) above sea level. On the south bank, the land rises sharply to a ridge 1,500 feet (457 m) high. North of the river, the bank rises to 1,200 feet (366 m) before ascending gradually northwest to the Ray Mountains. Below the surface of the ground are patches of permafrost, and the area is seismically active. An earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter Scale struck the region in 1968, and a 5.0 earthquake hit the area in 2003. Geologically, igneous rock predominates, and quartz can be seen in places.
Hydrologically, the portion of the river upstream of the proposed dam drains about 200,000 square miles (517,998 km<sup>2</sup>). On average, the Yukon flows at a rate of 118,000 cubic feet per second (3,341 m<sup>3</sup>/s) through the canyon, with the fastest flow occurring in the later part of May and the first part of June, and the slowest flow occurring after the river has frozen over. This occurs no later than early November and lasts until mid April.
## Surveying
In 1944 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers considered building a bridge across Rampart Gorge as part of a project to extend the Alaska Railroad from Fairbanks to Nome to facilitate lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union during World War II. The war ended before the project got beyond the planning stages, and the bridge idea was scrapped.
As early as 1948, U.S. Government officials eyed the Rampart site for its hydroelectric potential. A report by Joseph Morgan, chief of the Alaska Investigations Office for the United States Bureau of Reclamation declared, "The demand for electric power supply in the [Alaska] Territory is expanding so rapidly that new installations of hydroelectric power plants are needed." Morgan's report listed 72 potential hydroelectric power sites in Alaska, but the Rampart site was one of the few to have a potential capacity of more than 200,000 kilowatts.
In his report, Morgan addresses the potential of the site:
> Reconnaissance topography indicates several potential dam sites in Lower Ramparts, but the best site probably will be found about 31 miles (50 km) downstream from the village of Rampart. ... this site on the Yukon River would easily be one of the major potential hydroelectric power developments in North America.
## Planning
The first serious consideration of a dam project was made in a 1954 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessment of the resources of the Yukon and Kuskokwim River basin. Engineers considered Rampart Canyon to be a prime site for a hydroelectric dam. In April 1959, four months after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Alaska's declaration of statehood, junior U.S. Senator from Alaska Ernest Gruening passed a resolution calling for the Corps of Engineers to begin an official study of the project, and \$49,000 was allocated by the federal government for that purpose. Preliminary estimates said the project would cost \$900 million (1959 dollars) and generate 4.7 million kilowatts of electricity. At the time, the largest hydroelectric project in Alaska was the Eklutna Dam, which produced just 32,000 kilowatts.
The project competed with the smaller-scale Susitna Hydroelectric Project proposed by the Federal Bureau of Reclamation for south-central Alaska, but thanks to Gruening's support and that of other backers, the Rampart project took precedence. The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1960 passed by the U.S. Congress in that year included a \$2 million appropriation to conduct a full four-year feasibility study of the project, including its economic feasibility and the impact it would have on fish and wildlife. In March 1961, a team of engineers from the Corps' Alaska district began drilling operations at the site to determine bedrock depth and gather other data. To examine the economic feasibility of the dam, the Corps of Engineers created the Rampart Economic Advisory Board (REAB) in February 1961. The REAB hired David E. Lilienthal's Development and Resources Corporation in April to complete the study, and a team of Corps engineers and REAB members arrived in the state in June to study the Rampart project first-hand. At that time, Sen. Gruening estimated that the project would cost roughly \$1.2 billion to complete.
As investigation and planning work continued, the Corps of Engineers reached an agreement with the Department of the Interior, the parent agency of the Bureau of Reclamation, in March 1962. The agreement stated the Corps would have responsibility for design and construction of the project, while the Interior Department would be responsible for running and maintaining the dam after completion. In the planning stages, the Interior Department also would be responsible for examining the economic feasibility of the project and its effect upon natural resources. This agreement negated much of the work of the REAB to that point, as the Interior Department promptly began its own three-year study of the dam's economic feasibility and environmental impact. The DRC report, though trumped by the Interior Department's new precedence in such matters, nevertheless released a report in April 1962, stating that the project was economically feasible and would attract new industries to Alaska. Meanwhile, the Corps of Engineers continued engineering studies.
The interim Corps of Engineers report was released in December 1963, and reported that building the dam was feasible from an engineering standpoint. President John F. Kennedy supported the project, and lobbied for an appropriation of \$197,000 (1963 dollars) to continue study of the project. The needed money was included in a House appropriations bill, and studies continued. The initial report included some figures about the size of the project. The dam would be a concrete structure 530 feet (162 m) high and about 4,700 feet (1,430 m) long. It would raise the height of the Yukon River from 215 feet (66 m) above sea level to approximately 656 feet (200 m). The resulting reservoir would be 400 miles (640 km) long, 80 miles (130 km) wide, and have a surface area greater than that of Lake Erie. The power facilities for the project would produce a maximum of 5 gigawatts of electricity. In total, the proposed reservoir was anticipated to cover an area of 10,700 square miles (27,700 km<sup>2</sup>) and have a capacity of 1,300,000,000 acre-feet (1,600 km<sup>3</sup>).
In April 1964, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) released its report on the project. Though only a part of the larger Department of the Interior study, the FWS report came down strongly opposed to the dam on the grounds that it would irrevocably destroy the Yukon Flats, a critical waterfowl breeding ground. In January 1965, the Bureau of Land Management set aside almost 9,000,000 acres (3,600,000 ha) of land for construction of the dam and reservoir. It was a typical process that had been done for other dam projects several times before, but the amount of land to be set aside generated several months of hearings before the decision.
In June 1964 the Natural Resources Council asked Stephen H. Spurr, dean of the Graduate School of the University of Michigan and an authority on forestry and forest ecology, to form a group to evaluate the proposed Rampart Dam. The Spurr report determined that the scenarios offered as justification for the project were overly optimistic with respect to Alaska's projected long-term population growth, its per capita use of electricity, and the predicted rate of entry of electroprocess industries like the aluminum industry (which had substantial power requirements) into Alaska. Moreover, the proposed dam would have greatly reduced the catch of five species of Pacific salmon, especially the chinook (king), chum (dog) and coho (silver) salmon. It would also eliminate vast numbers of migratory waterfowl, including an estimated 1.5 million ducks and 12,500 geese that migrated annually from the Yukon flats. There would also have been a sharp decline in both large mammals - the moose, black and grizzly bear, and caribou - and smaller mammals: muskrats, mink, beavers, and river otters in aquatic habitats, and marten, wolverines, weasels, lynx, snowshoe hares, red fox and red squirrels in terrestrial or upland habitats. Spurr's report noted: "[It]is a truism of wildlife ecology that displacement of a population from the area where it normally lives is tantamount to eliminating it completely. Adjoining habitats ordinarily are carrying all the wildlife that the local resources will support. In short, loss of habitat is synonymous with loss of the animal population supported by the inundated habitat."
In March 1966 Spurr's team issued its final report, finding that the dam was not a cost-effective investment.
In January 1965, the Department of the Interior completed its three-volume, 1,000-page study of the Rampart project's feasibility and impact. The Fish and Wildlife study released in 1964 was included, as were studies of the impact on the region's Alaska Native population. United States Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall then created a task force to review the findings before he made a final decision. Throughout 1965 and 1966, opponents and proponents of the project funded studies of their own, aimed either at supporting or rejecting the arguments for the dam.
In June 1967, the Department of the Interior made its final recommendation and suggested that the dam not be built. Secretary Udall cited the fish and wildlife losses that would result, the availability of less-costly alternatives, and the fact that no recreational benefits would accrue.
## Final design
Despite the Interior Department's rejection of the overall Rampart Dam project, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continued its engineering feasibility study on the project. That plan was completed on June 25, 1971, and it included most of the previous federal documents pertaining to the project, including the electricity market studies published by the Department of the Interior in 1965, the Fish and Wildlife study of 1964, and other studies about the economic feasibility of the project. A detailed description of potential construction methods and the overall plan for the project were included, as were reports about the site's geography and hydrology. In total, the report encompassed two volumes including more than 480 pages. Because the construction season at the site is only five months, the Corps of Engineers projected that several decades would be needed to build the dam and associated structures.
### Preparation
Due to the lack of any land transportation route to the dam site, the first stage of construction would have involved the building of a temporary road from Eureka, about 30 miles (48 km) away, to the dam site. Consideration also was given to the extension of the Alaska Railroad from Fairbanks to the site. A period of about four years would have been required for preconstruction planning, including detailed construction surveying and finalizing the design of the dam, powerhouse, and other structures. Engineers estimated that after the four years of final planning and surveying, three years would be needed to dig river diversion tunnels and construct the cofferdams needed to clear the Yukon River streambed for construction. Housing and construction offices also would have been constructed for workers on the south bank of the site, and the cost for this effort was included in overall cost proposals for the project.
### Construction
Site clearing and foundation work would have been scheduled to begin after completion of the diversion work in the seventh year of the project. The first pouring of concrete was scheduled for the project's eighth year, and work on the powerhouse would have begun in the 11th year. Owing to the large size of the reservoir, engineers estimated that the diversion tunnels would be closed in the 13th year, allowing construction to pace the filling of the new lake. The reservoir would have reached a pool elevation of 550 feet (168 m) in the 21st year, the dam would have been completed to elevation 660 feet (201 m) in the 25th year, and the reservoir would have been filled to the full 640-foot (195 m) level in the 31st year after the project's start. The installation of power generators was planned to follow as needed, with the last unit scheduled for installation by the 45th year of the project.
In total, the dam would have consisted of a concrete gravity structure with a structural height of 510 feet (155 m) and a hydraulic height of 430 feet (131 m). At the elevation of 660 feet (201 m), the dam would have stretched for 4,700 feet (1,430 m) from north to south. On the south bank would have been a concrete gravity spillway with a crest at elevation 600 feet (183 m) and a maximum flow of 603,000 cubic feet per second (17,100 m<sup>3</sup>/s) at maximum pool elevation. The power facilities would have consisted of twenty-two 266,000 kilowatt units and two 10,000 kilowatt service units.
Materially, building the dam would have required 15,000,000 cubic yards (11,470,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of concrete aggregate, 2,900,000 cubic yards (2,220,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of rock fill, and another 1,700,000 cubic yards (1,300,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of various other types of fill. Engineers suggested that some of the material could be found at the site, but the remainder would have to be brought from outside sources.
### Reservoir
At the projected pool elevation of 645 feet (197 m), the resulting reservoir would have had a total capacity of 1,145,000,000 acre-feet (1,410 km<sup>3</sup>). The full pool length would have been about 270 miles (435 km), and the maximum width would have been 80 miles (129 km). The resulting lake would have had approximately 3,600 miles (5,800 km) of shoreline and a total surface area of about 9,844 square miles (25,496 km<sup>2</sup>). Because the Yukon also is a transportation route, transshipment facilities were planned for below and above the dam site and would have been connected by road and rail links. Because of the large size of the proposed reservoir and the need to allow some flow of the Yukon River downstream of the dam site for river navigation and fishing, engineers anticipated that filling the reservoir would take no fewer than 16 years to complete.
### Anticipated costs
The Rampart Dam's large size had a correspondingly large price tag. The Corps of Engineers anticipated spending \$618.4 million (1970 dollars) on construction of the physical dam alone, another \$492 million for power-generating equipment, and \$1.39 billion in total. That total included \$15.59 million for relocating Alaskans from the area to be flooded, \$56 million for fish and wildlife facilities to mitigate the anticipated losses, and \$39.7 million for roads and bridges to access the area. After completion of the dam, the Corps of Engineers estimated that operation and maintenance of the project would cost \$6.5 million annually, including \$570,000 for replacement power equipment and \$2 million for the maintenance of fish and wildlife facilities.
## Weather effects
From the initial planning stages, proponents and opponents speculated that the large size of the reservoir created by the dam could affect the weather in Interior Alaska and the Yukon. Several studies were conducted in regards to these potential changes, and most of the reports hypothesized an effect similar to the weather that occurs around Great Slave Lake and Lake Baikal, both of which were of similar sizes and latitudes to the proposed reservoir. Forecasts predicted the lake would hold in heat longer during the autumn, thus keeping area temperatures slightly warmer than normal. In the spring, however, the area around the lake would have been prone to increased precipitation due to the phenomenon of lake-effect snow. In the summer, the long periods of daylight would have caused the land around the lake to become warmer than the lake itself, also creating the possibility of storms.
## Supporters
Support for the dam project came from a variety of sources, but supporters tended to use three primary arguments in favor of its construction: the electricity generated by the project would be cheap and plentiful, industries would be attracted to Alaska by the cheap electricity, and the dam's construction would have minimal impact on the environment and human populations.
During the campaign that preceded the 1960 U.S. Presidential election, both candidates (Nixon and Kennedy) made campaign stops in Alaska. Both men gave their support to the Rampart Dam project, with Kennedy saying, "I see the greatest dam in the free world at Rampart Canyon, producing twice the power of the Tennessee Valley Authority to light homes and mills and cities and farms all over Alaska." Nixon, arriving three months after Kennedy, said, "As far as Rampart Canyon Dam is concerned, certainly you can expect progress, more progress, I believe, in our administration than his".
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers leaders strongly supported the project in its initial phases. In 1960 Harold Moats of the Corps' Alaska district said, "Rampart Canyon, the big one, is Alaska's most valuable resource, and as it is developed, Alaska will take her rightful place in the family of states contributing richly to the economy of the nation and the welfare of the whole free world."
In early September 1963, a group of Alaska businesspeople, local government leaders, and industry representatives met at McKinley Park Lodge to organize lobbying efforts in favor of the dam. The resulting organization was called the Yukon Corporation for Power for America, later shortened to Yukon Power for America, Inc. The organization began with a \$100,000 budget, which it used to produce "The Rampart Story", a color brochure distributed in Alaska and Washington, D.C. to promote the dam project.
Alaska senator Ernest Gruening remained a staunch backer of the project from its inception to its cancellation, and made it a major personal political priority. Gruening led a coalition of Alaska lawmakers that included most of the Alaska Legislature. In the 1962 Alaska state elections, every candidate elected to the state legislature was a supporter of the project. In the years that followed, the Alaska Legislature voted several times to allocate state funding for the project. Politicians at the city level also got into the action, as the city of Anchorage and the Fairbanks Public Utilities Board each voted to contribute \$10,000 to a pro-Rampart organization. Among the group's members was Ted Stevens, who was appointed in 1968 as one of Alaska's representatives to the U.S. Senate.
### Electrical argument
As planned, the dam would have produced roughly 34 terawatt hours annually, nearly 50 times the total energy use for the entire state of Alaska in 1960 (700 gigawatt hours). Gruening, in particular, believed that the dam would have an effect similar to that of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, with cheap electricity providing the economic basis of the region. Dam proponents also suggested that the electricity might be transmitted to the rest of the United States, lowering utility prices in those states by increasing the amount of available power. Anthony Netboy, a salmon biologist employed by Yukon Power for America, claimed that one day "a housewife in Phoenix or L.A. will fry her eggs at breakfast with electricity generated on the far-off Yukon."
### Industrial argument
Supporters of the project suggested that the cheap electricity provided by the dam would be a strong enticement for electricity-intensive industries, such as aluminum smelting, to move to Alaska. They were encouraged by a 1962 economic feasibility study by the Development and Resources Corporation, which stated that the electricity generated would attract aluminum, magnesium and titanium industries to the region and help process locally produced minerals. The report also stated that the dam would attract a wood pulp mill on at least a temporary basis to process the hundreds of millions of board feet of timber that would otherwise be lost as the dam's reservoir flooded. The authors of the DRC report were specific enough to predict that 19,746 jobs would be created by the dam's construction, not including jobs opened during the construction process. Both the 1962 study, and another report by University of Michigan researcher Michael Brewer in 1966, stated that tens of thousands of jobs would be created by the construction process alone, even if the cheap electricity generated by the dam failed to attract any additional industries to Alaska.
### Impact argument
At the time Rampart Dam was being considered, Alaska as a whole, and Interior Alaska in particular, was sparsely settled. The 1960 United States Census recorded just 226,127 people as residents of Alaska, making it the least-populated state in the United States at that time. Interior Alaska contained about 28,000 residents, and promoters suggested that the dam's benefits would vastly outweigh the costs to the few residents who would be displaced. An unnamed Gruening staffer once said the area to be flooded by the dam was worthless, containing "not more than ten flush toilets. Search the whole world and it would be difficult to find an equivalent area with so little to be lost through flooding." In a 1963 letter responding to a Sports Illustrated article about the dam, Gruening wrote:
> As for the 2,000 Athabascan Indians, they could not but be better off than they are now. Their villages are flooded intermittently by the Yukon. Their habitations are miserable and their livelihood a bare subsistence supplemented by relief. Construction of the Rampart Dam will give them ample gainful employment, and in their new locations, chosen by them on the lake's borders, they will have better homes, better community facilities and a permanent income from now nonexistent activities, generated by the lake.
In the same letter, Gruening also promoted the possibility of the dam creating a thriving tourism industry in Interior Alaska, a hypothesis that was raised by other dam supporters as well. Gruening stated that the project would be similar to Lake Powell, in that it would create a range of recreational activities, including water skiing and picnicking.
## Opposition
Opposition to the project was based on three separate objections to its construction: ecological, human, and financial. Conservation groups opposed the dam's construction because it would flood the Yukon Flats, a large wetland area that provides breeding ground for millions of waterfowl and habitat for game and fur-bearing animals. Alaska Native groups objected to the project's human cost – the need to relocate more than 1,500 people and nine villages – and Native groups outside the reservoir area objected to the potential devastation of the Yukon River salmon population. The third objection to construction of the dam stemmed from its high cost and the belief that cheap electricity would not be enough to attract industry to Alaska.
### Ecological objections
In late 1960 the Alaska Conservation Society became the first large conservation group to oppose construction of the dam. The organization believed the flooding of the Yukon Flats would cause critical damage to Alaska waterfowl and promoted the alternative Susitna Hydroelectric Project to supply Alaska's electric needs. This was followed in early 1961 by an Alaska Sportsmen's Council resolution that criticized the Corps of Engineers for reducing its funding for studies of the impact of the project on fish and game stocks. In April of that year, Alaska Sportsman magazine took a formal stand against the project.
The California Fish and Game Commission was among the first non-Alaska conservation groups to oppose construction of the dam, saying in 1963 that it would inundate the Yukon Flats, an area of wetlands that is among North America's largest waterfowl breeding grounds. Following that objection, other groups began to organize during the 1963 North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference. Fifteen conservation groups pooled a total of \$25,000 at the meeting to begin an independent scientific study of the project and start an opposition campaign.
In the spring of 1964, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a report on the impact of dam construction on the Flats. The report strongly opposed construction of the dam, saying in part: "Nowhere in the history of water development in North America have the fish and wildlife losses anticipated to result from a single project been so overwhelming." The report also pointed out the threat the dam would pose to the Yukon River's large salmon population, which swim upstream each year to spawn. Arthur Laing, Canada's minister of northern affairs, also expressed alarm at the potential waterfowl losses and the threat the dam posed to Canada's portion of the Yukon River salmon population.
A May 1965 article in The Atlantic magazine by author Paul Brooks illustrated the growing protests of conservationists concerned about the project. After traveling the Yukon River, Brooks hypothesized that construction of the dam would be catastrophic from an ecological and human standpoint, would cost an exorbitant amount of money, and that the claims of attracting industry and tourism to Alaska were greatly exaggerated. In real terms, he estimated that construction of the dam would eliminate the habitat for 1.5 million ducks, 12,500 geese, 10,000 cranes, 270,000 salmon, 12,000 moose, and seven percent of Alaska's fur-bearing animals. Similar articles appeared in magazines such as Field and Stream, which called the project "a catastrophe of major proportions", and the Audubon Society Magazine, said the dam "would negate thirty years of endeavor in waterfowl preservation. Even sporting magazine Sports Illustrated got into the act, asking if the cost of so many waterfowl would be worth building the dam.
### Human objections
In planning the dam project, engineers anticipated that building the dam would flood nine Alaska Native villages, forcing the relocation of an estimated 1,500 people. Although some of the affected villagers felt the increased job opportunities would outweigh the forced move, most objected to the potential loss of the region's history. Among the affected villages was Fort Yukon, which is the oldest English-speaking settlement in Alaska. In 1964 several groups of Native dam opponents in the Yukon Flats came together to form an organization called Gwitchya Gwitchin Ginkhye, which lobbied against the project. The Tundra Times, an Alaska newspaper devoted to Native issues, also came out strongly in opposition to the project, saying that all but one village from the head of the proposed reservoir to the mouth of the Yukon River were against the dam. Don Young, Alaska's representative to the U.S. House of Representatives, was elected to the Alaska Legislature in 1964 from Fort Yukon on a platform of opposition to Rampart Dam.
A survey of the archeological and paleontological potential of the Yukon Flats, conducted in 1965, objected to the potential loss of the area. In part, it said: "... it may be said that relatively speaking, the archaeological potential of the Rampart Impoundment area is great; the practical difficulties of field work will have to be overcome in order to obviate the possible loss of what may be some of the most important prehistoric records in North America."
The Canadian government also strongly opposed the Rampart Dam project. According to the Treaty of Washington, signed in 1871, Canada was allowed free navigation of the Yukon River. It was feared that construction of the dam would block navigation routes and violate the treaty.
### Financial objections
Opposition to the dam project also arose in concern of the dam's cost. Several United States congressmen and fiscal conservatives protested the proposal on the grounds that the money that would be spent on its construction would be better used to support other projects. They pointed to the lack of existing infrastructure in the region and said it was unlikely that enough electricity generated by the dam could be sold at a high enough price to pay for its construction.
In his 1966 analysis of the project's economic feasibility, Michael Brewer refuted the conclusions of the 1962 federal study, saying that the ability of the dam to pay for itself was "an exercise in speculation". He also wrote that even if the dam was built and cheap electricity made available, "Alaska did not possess a competitive advantage". He concluded by saying that the project was "not economically efficient". Because of arguments like these, the common belief among informed observers outside Alaska was that the project was designed to benefit Alaska alone, and thus could almost be considered "foreign aid". An editorial in The New York Times summed up non-Alaska opinions when it asked if the dam project was "the world's biggest boondoggle".
## Cancellation
Owing to increasing public pressure, in June 1967, United States Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall announced he was strongly opposed to the dam, citing economic and biological factors as well as the drastic impact on the area's native population. Though this effectively ended the project, planning continued to go ahead until the final Army Corps of Engineers report was released in 1971 and recommended the project "not be undertaken at this time". Alaska governor William Allen Egan protested the statement, saying the report was out of date due to population growth in Alaska and rising demand for electricity.
The report was duly reconsidered, but in 1978 the Army Corps of Engineers confirmed the project no longer was justified. The audited report was accepted by the U.S. Senate, and no further funding was allocated to study the issue. The final nail in the coffin came on December 1, 1978, when President Jimmy Carter authorized the creation of the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Monument, which became the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge in 1980. The refuge status eliminated any possibility of flooding the Yukon Flats, a process that would have been inevitable with the construction of the dam.
In summer 1985, the last remnants of the dam project were eliminated when the 8.96 million acres (36,300 km<sup>2</sup>) set aside for development of the dam were released by the Bureau of Land Management for other uses.
## Legacy
The controversy surrounding the Rampart Dam project illustrated the growing shift in the environmental movement during the 1960s. Rather than becoming focused singularly on solely preserving the natural beauty of a particular landscape, as had inspired the creation of the U.S. National Park Service in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, naturalists and environmentalists began to consider the human cost of development as well. Though opposition to Rampart was founded primarily on economic and natural grounds, its consequences for the Alaska Native population in the region reflected later concerns about industrial development in more urban areas.
Among Alaska Natives, the Rampart Dam project encouraged organization and the creation of communications links between various like-minded communities and tribal groups. When the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was proposed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Native organizations that had formed to oppose Rampart Dam were revived in opposition to the pipeline. Only after Native land claims were recognized in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act did the pipeline progress.
## See also
- List of reservoirs and dams of Alaska
## Further information
### Articles
- Cooke, A. "The Rampart Dam proposal for Yukon River". Polar Record, December 1964. pp. 277–280.
- Leopold, A. and Leonard, Justin. "The Rampart Project". Natural History, January 1966. p. 12
- Spurr, Stephen H. "Rampart Dam: A costly gamble". Audubon, May–June 1966. pp. 173–175
### Audio/Visual
- Development and Resources Corporation. "Senator Ernest Gruening and Gus Norwood discuss the marketing potential of Rampart Dam". Alaska Film Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks. 1961.
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "Sen. Ernest Gruening listens to a report from Chief of engineers General Walter Wilson about his recent trip to Alaska". Alaska Film Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks. 1961.
- U.S. Senate. "Senator Ernest Gruening and Jim Brooks discuss effects of the proposed Rampart Dam on fish and wildlife". Alaska Film Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks. 1961.
- U.S. Senate. "Senator Ernest Gruening and Oscar Chapman discuss power usage of the proposed Rampart Dam". Alaska Film Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks. 1961.
- U.S. Senate. "Senator Ernest Gruening and Oscar Chapman discuss weather changes from the proposed Rampart Dam". Alaska Film Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks. 1961.
### Books
[Buildings and structures in Yukon–Koyukuk Census Area, Alaska](Category:Buildings_and_structures_in_Yukon–Koyukuk_Census_Area,_Alaska "wikilink") [Cancelled hydroelectric power stations](Category:Cancelled_hydroelectric_power_stations "wikilink") [Cancelled projects in the United States](Category:Cancelled_projects_in_the_United_States "wikilink") [Dams in Alaska](Category:Dams_in_Alaska "wikilink") [Unbuilt buildings and structures in the United States](Category:Unbuilt_buildings_and_structures_in_the_United_States "wikilink") [United States Army Corps of Engineers proposed dams](Category:United_States_Army_Corps_of_Engineers_proposed_dams "wikilink") [Yukon River](Category:Yukon_River "wikilink") |
9,461,189 | Portrait of a Young Girl (Christus) | 1,119,086,557 | Oil on oak painting by Petrus Christus | [
"1460s paintings",
"15th-century portraits",
"Paintings by Petrus Christus",
"Paintings in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin"
]
| Portrait of a Young Girl is a small oil-on-oak panel painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus. It was completed towards the end of his life, between 1465 and 1470, and is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. It marks a major stylistic advance in contemporary portraiture; the girl is set in an airy, three-dimensional, realistic setting, and stares out at the viewer with a complicated expression that is reserved, yet intelligent and alert.
It is widely regarded as one of the most exquisite portraits of the Northern Renaissance. Art historian Joel Upton described the sitter as resembling "a polished pearl, almost opalescent, lying on a cushion of black velvet." The panel builds on the work of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, and was highly influential in the decades after its completion. Its appeal lies in part in her intriguing stare, accentuated by the slight misalignment of her eyes, while the eyebrows are faintly skewed.
## Description
Christus frames his sitter in a rigid and balanced architectural setting. She is positioned within a narrow rectangular space, before a wainscotted wall. The image is divided by the horizontal parallel lines of her wainscot and blouse, which join at the inverted triangle formed by the neckline of her dress. The rendering of the background departs somewhat from contemporary conventions in portraiture: Christus sets the girl against a dark brown wall with little detail, in contrast to the elaborate interiors of Jan van Eyck, who is often regarded as Christus' master. It is defined entirely by its material, a wooden dado rail along the top and the wainscot that forms the lower portion. The wall sets her in a realistic interior, perhaps intended to represent a space within her home.
Light falls on the pictorial space from the left, creating shadows against the back wall, the strongest cast by the girl's hennin. The depth of space provided by the back wall gives room for this detailing, which Charles Sterling believes is indebted to van Eyck. The light throws a murky but curved shadow on the wall behind the girl and acts as a counterpoint to the contour of her cheek and hairline.
The girl has pale skin, almond and slightly oriental eyes and a petulant mouth. She reflects the Gothic ideal of elongated facial features, narrow shoulders, tightly pinned hair and an almost unnaturally long forehead, achieved through tightly pulled-back hair which has been plucked at the top. She is dressed in expensive clothing and jewellery and seems to be uncommonly elegant. She looks out of the canvas in an oblique but self-aware and penetrating manner that some art historians have described as unnerving. Joanna Woods-Marsden remarks that a sitter acknowledging her audience in this way was virtually unprecedented even in Italian portrait painting. Her acknowledgment is accentuated by the painting's crop, which focuses the viewer's gaze in a near-invasive manner that seems to question the relationship between artist, model, patron and viewer.
The headdress is a variant of the truncated or bee-hive hennin, then fashionable at the Burgundian court. A very similar style, with no tail, is seen on the older of two girls in the donor panels of Presentation of Christ by the Master of the Prado Adoration of the Magi, a pupil of Rogier van der Weyden. The black band under the chin is rarely found in other images from the period, and has been interpreted as a style borrowed from the male chaperon hat, which always has a long tailing tail or cornette, sometimes worn wrapped under the chin in this way.
The influence of van Eyck can be seen in the delicate rendering of the textures and details of the dress, trimmings and adornments. Her pale skin and strong bone structure is strongly van Eyckian, and recalls the male sitter in his Arnolfini Portrait. But in other ways Christus abandons the developments made by van Eyck and Robert Campin. He reduces the emphasis on volume of those artists, in favour of an elongation of form; the narrow, slight upper body and head are, according to the German art historian Robert Suckale, "heightened by the V-shaped neckline of the ermine and the cylindrical hat." Further, while the first generation of Early Netherlandish painters benefited from the patronage of the newly emerging middle class, secularising portraiture, and removing it from the preserve of royalty, Christus renders the girl as aristocratic, haughty, sophisticated, and exquisitely dressed.
## Identity of the sitter
In a letter dated 1824 or 1825 Gustav Waagen, later Director of the Berlin Museums, gave his interpretation of Latin inscriptions he had seen on the original frame of the portrait, which was subsequently lost. As well as a Christus signature, he found an identification of the sitter as "a niece of the famous Talbot" (eine Nichte des berühmten Talbots). His research led to a consensus that the sitter was a member of the leading English family, the Talbots, then headed by the Earl of Shrewsbury. In 1863 George Scharf suggested the panel was intended as the right-hand wing to a diptych with the 1446 Portrait of Edward Grimston (or "Grymston") in the National Gallery, London, leading to speculation that the girl might be Grimston's first wife, Alice. This was rejected by Grete Ring in 1913, on the basis that neither the dimensions nor background of the panels match, and that the Berlin panel was most probably completed some 20–30 years after the Grimston portrait.
Joel Upton, supporting Waagen's analysis, investigated whether the "famous Talbot" was John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, killed at the Battle of Castillon in 1453. However, John Talbot had only one niece, Ankaret, who died in infancy in 1421. Lorne Campbell suggests that given the Latin signature, Waagen might have misinterpreted the word "nepos", which can also mean "grandchild". Upton concludes that she was more likely a daughter of John Talbot, 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury, either Anne or Margaret. Their parents married between 1444 and 1445, suggesting that the sitter was under 20 at the time of the portrait. She may have travelled to Bruges to attend the famously lavish wedding in 1468 of Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV of England, to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
## Provenance
The earliest extant record of the painting is in a 1492 inventory of the Medici family, where it is described as a small panel bust of a French lady, coloured in oil, the work of Pietro Cresci of Bruges. However, it seems from other works in the collection that the scribe was uninformed and noted any piece of northern art in the collection as "French". It was highly valued, with an unusually high price of 40 florins, and prominently displayed. The record does not address the matter of the girl's identity beyond her nationality, indicating that the painting was regarded as of aesthetic rather than historical interest.
In the 20th century Erwin Panofsky was instrumental in furthering Christus' reputation as a major 15th-century northern painter, described the work as an "enchanting, almost French-looking portrait", perhaps noting the resemblance to the virgin in Jean Fouquet's Melun Diptych. Sterling picks up on this, noting the many similarities between the two women, including their tightly pulled-back hair, high cheek bones, slanted eyes and sulky expressions.
The portrait entered the Prussian royal collection with the purchase in 1821 of the Edward Solly collection, from which the then-recently formed Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, was allowed to take its pick. It was positively identified in 1825 as an original by Christus when Waagen identified the lettering on the (now lost) frame "PETR XPI" as shorthand for "Petrus Christophori", which he associated with the "Pietro Christa" mentioned by Giorgio Vasari in the 1568 edition of his "Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects". In this way, Waagen also identified Christus' so-called Saint Eligius panel, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (and seen as just a portrait of a goldsmith), marking the painter's rediscovery after centuries of obscurity.
Before this identification, a number of his paintings had been attributed to Jan van Eyck, but became identified with Christus after Waagen established him as a distinct and separate master. Christus is known to have signed six extant works, sometimes with the text "PETR XPI ME FECIT" (Petr Xpi made me). Over the next century sketches of Christus' biography were constructed, as art historians – notably Panofsky – slowly disentangled his works from those of van Eyck.
## Dating
The painting was dated c. 1446 by Wolfgang Schöne in the 1930s, mainly by matching the style and fashion of her clothing to contemporary trends. In the early 20th century the dating and authorship of works then attributed to Christus were challenged. Max Friedländer proposed a number of dates and an ordering of works in the 1957 volume of his Early Netherlandish painting, but many of his assumptions were discounted by Otto Pächt just a few years later.
In 1953, Erwin Panofsky established that Schöne's dating was at least twenty years too early. In his view, the girl's dress resembles Burgundian high fashion of the late 1460s to mid-1470s. He compared the hennin worn by Maria Portinari in a c. 1470 portrait by Hans Memling, and her gown to that worn by a lady in an illumination from around the 1470s Froissart of Louis of Gruuthuse of Bruges. Sterling, placing the work as c. 1465, remarks that the hennin in the Berlin panel is of a different type to that of the New York painting. The New York headdress is far more extended, and seems to be of a style prevalent a few years after, and moreover lacks the draped and hanging veil. Sterling further notes that the panel has increased depth of field and more intricate detailing of light than Christus' earlier works. On this basis he believes the work was executed late in the artist's career. |
32,805,051 | Adiantum viridimontanum | 1,163,952,049 | Species of fern | [
"Adiantum",
"Ferns of the United States",
"Flora of Maine",
"Flora of Quebec",
"Flora of Vermont",
"Plants described in 1991"
]
| Adiantum viridimontanum, commonly known as Green Mountain maidenhair fern, is a fern found only in outcrops of serpentine rock in New England and Eastern Canada. The leaf blade is cut into finger-like segments, themselves once-divided, which are borne on the outer side of a curved, dark, glossy rachis. These finger-like segments are not individual leaves, but parts of a single compound leaf. The "fingers" may be drooping or erect, depending on whether the individual fern grows in shade or sunlight. Spores are borne under false indusia at the edge of the subdivisions of the leaf, a characteristic unique to the genus Adiantum.
Until 1991, A. viridimontanum was grouped with the western maidenhair fern, A. aleuticum, which grows both in western North America and as a disjunct on serpentine outcrops in eastern North America. At one time, A. aleuticum itself was classified as a variety (A. pedatum var. aleuticum) of the northern maidenhair fern, A. pedatum. However, after several years of study, botanist Cathy Paris recognized that A. aleuticum was a distinct species, and that some of the specimens that had been attributed to that taxon (group of organisms) were a third, hybrid species intermediate between A. pedatum and A. aleuticum. She named the new species A. viridimontanum for the site of its discovery in the Green Mountains in Vermont; it has since been located in Quebec and in one site in coastal Maine.
A. viridimontanum is difficult to distinguish from its parent species in the field. It can generally be separated from A. pedatum by the shape of the ultimate segments (the smallest divisions of the leaf), and by its habitat on thin, exposed serpentine soils rather than in rich woodlands. It more closely resembles A. aleuticum; but the stalks of the ultimate segments and the false indusia are longer and the spores larger.
Due to its limited distribution and similarity to other Adiantum species within its range, little is known of its ecology. It thrives on sunny, disturbed areas where ultramafic rock is covered with thin soil, such as road cuts, talus slopes, and asbestos mines. Individual plants seem long-lived, and new individuals only infrequently reach maturity. It is one of four species endemic to serpentine in eastern North America and is considered globally threatened due to its habitat restrictions.
## Description
Adiantum viridimontanum is a medium-sized, deciduous, terrestrial fern, about 2 feet (60 cm) wide and 1 to 2 feet (30 to 60 cm) high. Its fronds range from 30 to 75 cm (12 to 30 in) in length from the base of the leaf stalk to the tip. Like many ferns, the frond of A. viridimontanum is divided into a series of leaflets, known as pinnae, and the pinnae are further divided into pinnules. The shape of the frond in A. pedatum, A. aleuticum, and A. viridimontanum is very similar. They are usually described as having a rachis that forks into two branches, which curve outwards and backwards. Several pinnae grow from the outer side of the curve of each rachis branch, with the longest pinnae located closest to the fork of the rachis. The fingerlike pinnae are pinnately divided into short-stalked pinnules.
However, this interpretation of the frond architecture (pedately divided into pinnae, then pinnately divided into pinnules) presents a problem: no other species of Adiantum, nor any other member of the Polypodiaceae sensu lato (the family in which Adiantum was once included) has a forking rachis. In fact, these species are not pedate, but pseudopedate. What appears to be a fork in the rachis is in fact the junction between the rachis and a basal pinna. That basal pinna makes up one of the two curving branches; the rachis runs straight up the first fingerlike segment on the other branch, while the remainder of that curving branch is made up of the other basal pinna. Both basal pinnae are further divided and subdivided to create the other fingerlike segments. Therefore, even though they appear structurally similar, the longest and most central fingerlike segment represents the tip of the frond, pinnately divided into pinnae (the first level of division of the frond), while the two shorter fingerlike segments immediately on either side of it are pinnae, pinnately divided into pinnules (the second level of division). Each fingerlike segment thereafter represents a level of division one greater than the one that precedes it. Therefore, the final, pinnate subdivisions of each fingerlike segment may be referred to as "ultimate segments" to avoid the technical inaccuracy of calling them pinnules.
The rhizome shows little branching, with intervals of 4.0 to 7.5 mm between nodes. It measures 2.0 to 3.5 mm in diameter. The rhizome and the stipe (the stalk of the leaf, below the blade) have bronze-colored scales. The stipe and rachis range from chestnut brown to dark purple in color and are glabrous; the stipe is about 2 to 3 mm in diameter while the rachis is smaller, 1 to 2 mm. The basal pinnae are from three to seven times pinnate (due to the pseudopedate structure of the blade), while the apical parts of the blade (and the corresponding segments of the basal pinnae) are once-pinnate. The penultimate segments of the blade (the apparent "pinnae", or fingerlike segments) are typically lanceolate in shape. The overall arrangement of the penultimate segments ranges from drooping and fan-shaped on plants growing in the shade to funnel-shaped on plants growing in full sun; under the latter conditions, the segments stand stiffly erect.
The ultimate segments of the divided blade (the apparent "pinnules") are borne on short, dark stalks of 0.6 to 1.5 mm, with the dark color often spreading into the base of each segment. They are long and obliquely triangular, the basiscopic margin forming the hypotenuse. The tip of the segments is typically acute, but entire (not pointed). They measure from 9.5 to 22.5 mm in length and 4.2 to 7.5 mm in breadth, the average length being about 2.5 times the breadth. Their tissue is herbaceous (firmly leafy) to chartaceous (parchment-like) in texture, and bright green to bluish-green in color. As in other members of Adiantum, the glabrous leaves shed water when young. Under shady conditions, the ultimate segments lie within the plane of the blade, but tend to twist out of the plane when grown in the sun. The acroscopic margins of these segments are lobed, with narrow (less than 1.0 mm) incisions lying between lobes. In fertile segments, these lobes are recurved to form false indusia beneath the leaf. These are transversely oblong, from 2 to 5 mm in length and from 0.6 to 1.4 mm in width.
The sporangia (the fern's spore-bearing structures) are borne on the underside of the leaf beneath the false indusium, a trait found in all members of Adiantum and not in any species outside it. The sori are round, and are found on veins ending in the false indusium, below the veins' ends. The spores are tetrahedral to globose, yellow in color, and measure 41 to 58 micrometers (μm) in diameter (averaging 51.4 μm), on average larger than other species in the A. pedatum complex. Spores appear in the summer and fall. The species has a chromosome number of 116 in the sporophyte.
### Identification
Adiantum viridimontanum closely resembles the other species in the A. pedatum complex (A. pedatum and A. aleuticum), and distinguishing the three in the field is difficult. Paris and Windham, in their study of the complex, noted that while each species, collectively, can be distinguished from the others, no single morphological character was absolutely distinctive among species. Sterile triploid hybrids between A. viridimontanum and the other two species may occur, further complicating field identification.
One potentially distinguishing character is the shape of the ultimate segments in the middle part of the leaf blade, which are oblong in A. pedatum and long-triangular or reniform (kidney-shaped) in A. viridimontanum and some specimens of A. aleuticum. Furthermore, A. viridimontanum can grow in both shade and sun, while A. pedatum grows in shade only.
Adiantum viridimontanum can be separated from the morphologically similar individuals of A. aleuticum by the greater length of the stalks on the medial ultimate segments and of the false indusia, measuring greater than 0.9 mm and greater than 3.5 mm, respectively, in A. viridimontanum. Spore size is also a useful character (although not easily measured in the field); the average A. viridimontanum spore measures 51.4 μm in diameter. While A. aleuticum spores can reach up to 53 μm, they average about 43 μm. In A. aleuticum growing as a disjunct on eastern serpentine (the specimens most likely to be confused with A. viridimontanum), the rhizome is much more frequently branched, with intervals of 1.0 to 2.0 mm between nodes.
## Taxonomy
The work which led to the recognition of Adiantum viridimontanum as a distinct taxon began in the early 20th century. Following the discovery of disjunct specimens of western maidenhair fern, then classified as A. pedatum var. aleuticum, on the serpentine tableland of Mount Albert by Merritt Lyndon Fernald in 1905, botanists began to search for western maidenhair on ultramafic outcrops elsewhere in Quebec and Vermont. It was first identified in Vermont by L. Frances Jolley in 1922 at Belvidere Mountain in Eden. In 1983, William J. Cody transferred A. pedatum growing on serpentine, both in eastern and western North America, to A. pedatum subsp. calderi instead. Many of the stations for the fern in Vermont were described in 1985, in a survey of ultramafic outcrops in that state.
From 1983 to 1985, Cathy A. Paris, then a graduate student, gathered specimens of A. pedatum from non-serpentine soils in the Midwest and Vermont, and from serpentine soils in New England and Canada, for biosystematic analysis. In 1988, Paris and Michael D. Windham published the results of this analysis, revealing A. pedatum in North America to be a cryptic species complex. They showed that A. pedatum sensu lato included two well-distinguished diploid taxa, one found in the Eastern woodlands, and the other found both in the Western mountains and as a disjunct on serpentine in the East. However, not all of the serpentine disjuncts proved to belong to the Western taxon. Several of them, including most of the specimens in Vermont, were found to be tetraploid, forming a taxon distinguishable from the two diploids. Isozyme banding patterns suggested that the tetraploid had arisen by hybridization between the eastern subspecies of non-serpentine woodlands and the western and serpentine taxon, followed by a duplication of the hybrid genome through polyploidy (allowing the chromosomes to pair and restoring sexual fertility). This allotetraploid was also morphologically intermediate between the two taxa, although it more closely resembled the serpentine taxon (hence its referral to var. aleuticum before Paris's work). Paris formally described the tetraploid as a new species, A. viridimontanum, in 1991, and also separated the western and serpentine taxon from A. pedatum as the species A. aleuticum. The type specimen of A. viridimontanum was collected from a talus slope at the old asbestos mine on Belvidere Mountain on August 28, 1985. The sequencing of several chloroplast DNA loci has revealed that the A. viridimontanum chloroplast genome most closely resembles that of A. aleuticum, suggesting that A. aleuticum was the maternal parent of A. viridimontanum.
In 2015, Christopher Fraser-Jenkins treated it as a subspecies of a broadly defined A. pedatum as A. pedatum subsp. viridimontanum, arguing that the morphological similarity among members of the complex should outweigh the biological species concept in defining the boundaries of the species.
## Distribution and habitat
Adiantum viridimontanum is narrowly distributed in New England and Quebec. At least seven stations in Vermont lie in the Missisquoi Valley, in the northern Green Mountains, giving the fern its common name. The ultramafic rocks of this area extend northwards into Quebec, where as of 2001, eight stations were known in southern Quebec and six in the Thetford Mines area. It is also known from one station on serpentine on Deer Isle, Maine.
The fern thrives in thin serpentine soils on sunny, disturbed habitats such as roadcuts and talus slopes, in dunite and other ultramafic rocks. Anthropogenic disturbance has removed thicker soils and increased sun exposure in many of these sites; for instance, many of the Quebec stations are in asbestos mines, both abandoned and active. In more natural habitats, frost weathering and erosion may promote rock fall and maintain suitable habitat. A detailed quantitative analysis of habitat preferences has shown that while A. viridimontanum occupies similar habitat to A. aleuticum in northeastern North America (ultramafic ledges, mine dumps, etc.), it also occupies serpentine-influenced northern hardwood forests, where the calcium-rich forest habitats preferred by A. pedatum have been altered by magnesium-rich drainage from ultramafic sites. This niche is not generally occupied by either of the two parent species.
The eastern serpentine outcrops where A. viridimontanum thrives have relatively few endemics, compared to serpentine exposures globally. A. viridimontanum is one of only five taxa (four species and a variety) that are strictly endemic to serpentine in eastern North America, and two of these, A. aleuticum and Aspidotis densa, grow on non-serpentine substrates elsewhere in North America.
## Ecology
Adiantum viridimontanum largely reproduces asexually by branching rather than sexually through spores. While wind-blown spores can result in sexual reproduction for the species, most spores probably fall within a relatively short radius of the plant. In addition, reproduction through spore dispersal requires the spore to land in suitable conditions for generating a gametophyte, typically in bright sunlight on thin serpentine soils. These requirements allow A. viridimontanum to colonize recently disturbed sites on ultramafic outcrops, where bedrock has been exposed and competing plants have been removed. The populations appear stable, with the long life of individuals compensating for low recruitment rates.
Little is known about the role of A. viridimontanum in the ecosystem. In general, ferns are less susceptible to herbivory than flowering plants due to higher levels of toxic and distasteful compounds in their foliage. A. viridimontanum is not known to be threatened by a particular predator or disease.
## Conservation
Under the NatureServe conservation status system, A. viridimontanum is considered globally vulnerable (G3). It is considered imperiled (S2) in Vermont and vulnerable (S3) in Quebec; as of 2015, when the state list of rare plants was last updated, it had not yet been classified in Maine.
Conservation of A. viridimontanum is primarily limited by its restricted habitat on serpentine cliffs and talus slopes which are of little value to humans. The most likely threat to the species is expansion of asbestos mining, which often occurs near populations of the fern, or other reuse of abandoned asbestos mines. Road construction might also threaten some sites, although this is mitigated by the fern's ability to flourish on disturbed serpentine. None of the sites are as yet known to be invaded by non-native plants. The species is considered more difficult to cultivate than either of its parent species. |
53,727,080 | The Bill (Inside No. 9) | 1,170,479,949 | null | [
"2017 British television episodes",
"Inside No. 9 episodes",
"Restaurants in fiction"
]
| "The Bill" is the second episode of the third series of the British dark comedy anthology television programme Inside No. 9. It first aired on 21 February 2017, on BBC Two. The episode was written by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, and was directed by Guillem Morales. "The Bill" focuses on four men—Archie, Malcolm, Kevin, and Craig—arguing over who should pay the bill in a restaurant at closing time, much to the dismay of the waitress Anya. It addresses themes of masculinity and competition, and the English north–south divide is a recurring issue; Craig, the visiting southerner, is wealthier than the other three, and unfamiliar with some of their terminology.
The episode was inspired by a real dispute seen by the writers, and also influenced by Yasmina Reza's play Art. "The Bill" starred Pemberton as Malcolm, Shearsmith as Archie, Jason Watkins as Kevin, Philip Glenister as Craig, and Ellie White as Anya. Callum Coates played Tim, who appears in the episode's final scene. Though set in northern England, the episode was filmed in a Hendon restaurant. Commentators compared the episode to the television series Hustle, the work of the director Quentin Tarantino—including his 1992 film Reservoir Dogs—and Roald Dahl's 1948 short story "Man from the South", which was adapted for both the television series Tales of the Unexpected and the 1995 anthology film Four Rooms.
Critics responded positively to "The Bill", praising its humour, direction and acting. Glenister, Watkins, and White were all singled out for particularly compelling performances. Despite considerable praise for the writing and timing, some commentators questioned the effectiveness of a twist in the closing minutes, several criticising the final scene. "The Bill" won Shearsmith and Pemberton the Best TV Situation Comedy award at the 2018 Writers' Guild Awards.
## Production
The second series of Inside No. 9 aired from 26 March 2015 to 29 April 2015, and in October the BBC confirmed a third series. Further information, including hints at settings and confirmed performers, was released in January 2016, around which time the series was filmed. "The Devil of Christmas", the first episode of this third series, was shown as a Christmas special on 26 December 2016 on BBC Two. "The Bill", the second episode of the third series and the first of a run of five episodes, followed a few months later, on 21 February 2017.
### Writing and filming
Inspiration for "The Bill" came when Shearsmith and Pemberton, the creators of Inside No. 9, saw a group arguing over a bill at a Muswell Hill restaurant. The writers had an office in the area, and had lunch at the same restaurant every day while writing the programme's third series. The group was made up of three older people: two women and a man. Pemberton said that, unexpectedly, "they were arguing about wanting to pay it, and we just came out and thought, 'Could that be one episode?' ... And then it's about sustaining that one idea". For him, "when you're in the writing phase, you can see anything in day-to-day life that could spark your imagination"; after seeing this dispute, the writers immediately returned to their office to begin writing. Another inspiration, according to Shearsmith, was Yasmina Reza's play Art, which, like "The Bill", involves escalating arguments between friends. Richard Bean's stage version of the 1987 film House of Games, meanwhile, was identified by Shearsmith as sharing an "intensity" with the more violent moments of "The Bill".
Much of the script was originally written prior to the decision to include the twists in the episode's closing minutes, and some parts that were written were not filmed. This included the characters playing a word-based drinking game with limoncello. Limoncello remained a part of the narrative, however, and formed the basis of a joke that was one of Shearsmith's favourites from the series: a quip that the thickly accented waitress was likely to bring a lemon and a cello rather than glasses of limoncello. For Pemberton and Shearsmith, the episode was particularly claustrophobic, and, in this sense, it mirrored "Sardines" and "La Couchette", the first episodes of the first and second series of Inside No. 9 respectively.
The episode was filmed in a restaurant/nightclub in Hendon, London. The location, which was close to Pemberton and Shearsmith's homes, was found by the Inside No. 9 producer Adam Tandy. "The Bill" is set in the north of England at night; this introduced particular filming challenges. Takes had to be re-shot or edited if a London bus was visible out of the restaurant's windows, and some takes, including many of the character Craig (as his chair faced away from the restaurant's windows) could only be done later in the working day, otherwise daylight would be visible on-screen.
### Cast
As each episode of Inside No. 9 features new characters, the writers were able to attract actors who might have been unwilling to commit to an entire series. "The Bill" starred Shearsmith as Archie, Pemberton as Malcolm, Jason Watkins as Kevin, Philip Glenister as Craig, Ellie White as Anya, and Callum Coates as Tim. For his role, Pemberton wore an Eddie Large-inspired wig, but had his own beard. He also wore padding to appear larger. Pemberton explained that he and Shearsmith work hard to make roles attractive to accomplished actors, claiming that Glenister had hoped he would not like the script, looking for an excuse to turn down a week's work in his busy schedule. Pemberton and Glenister had known each other for many years prior to "The Bill"; they shared a mutual friend, and Glenister had appeared in productions for Pemberton's theatre company 606 Theatre. Glenister and Watkins, too, had worked together on a play read-through in the past. Prior to filming, Watkins had not met White, a less-well-known performer, who was sought out by Pemberton and Shearsmith due to her appearance in People Time, an acclaimed pilot that was shown as part of BBC Three's Comedy Feeds.
Watkins had previously starred in Shearsmith and Pemberton's black comedy television programme Psychoville; the pair say that though they generally have a rule against "reusing" actors from Psychoville in Inside No. 9, so as "to keep surprising and avoid familiarity", they broke it "because [Watkins is] brilliant". He was not the only actor for which the writers broke this rule. Performers were also reused in "The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge" and "Cold Comfort", for example. Pemberton highlighted working with Watkins again as one of the highlights of the series. Watkins said he was attracted to Inside No. 9 by the chance to work with Pemberton and Shearsmith again. He described the episode as "like a beautifully constructed little play for television" with "a great mix of characters and surprising plots". His character, meanwhile, he called "put-upon and pathetic and petty".
## Plot
Anya closes a restaurant where four men—northerners Archie, Malcolm, and Kevin are entertaining Londoner Craig—have finished a post-badminton meal. After a misunderstanding between Craig and the thickly accented Anya, Malcolm takes the bill, but he and Archie both wish to pay. Craig insists that he will pay, as he is leaving, and wealthier than the others. The three argue, Archie being unable to pay as the card machine lacks paper. Malcolm suggests that the bill should be split three ways, the northerners treating Craig, but Kevin claims to be the poorest. Archie, Malcolm, and Craig thrust cards at Anya until Kevin offers to pay. He counts cash as Anya fetches drinks. Craig thanks the others for making his trip bearable, and offers to pay, restarting the argument. The dispute becomes about Malcolm's position as badminton-club secretary, and Malcolm reveals that Archie has spent time in prison. Anya arrives with drinks, and Craig, paying the bill, speaks of craving excitement, only to have his card declined. He phones his au pair for a card, keen she not look in the wrong drawer, but Malcolm snatches the phone. He is about to pay, but Archie stops him. Archie reveals that he wanted to pay as he has an inoperable brain tumour.
A distressed Malcolm leaves the table only to return furious; Archie was lying. A heated debate ensues, and the four men wrestle over the bill until Anya tells them that the meal can be free. Malcolm insists it is not about the bill, and fetches a knife and chopping board. Archie and Malcolm are to play stabscotch, with the winner paying. Malcolm is quick but Archie is slower, repeatedly stabbing himself. Craig pulls the knife from Archie, inadvertently slashing Anya's throat. She collapses as blood splatters. Anya is dead, and Malcolm formulates a story blaming Archie, but Archie has called a prison contact who will remove the body.
The clean-up will cost £200,000; it is needed tonight, in cash, meaning only Craig can pay. He calls his au pair, but treads on Anya's hand, and she yells. Kevin declares the plan a failure; Archie, Malcolm, Kevin, and Anya had been hustling Craig. Kevin, now in control, demands Craig's phone. Craig refuses, but is locked in the restaurant. In a final scene, a waiter closes the restaurant while the hustlers ("Archie", "Malcolm", "Kevin", and "Anya") entertain the well-dressed Tim. "Archie" requests the bill, and "the waiter" is revealed to be Craig, who has joined the hustlers to satiate his cravings for excitement.
## Analysis
"The Bill" opens with the mundane image of men eating at a restaurant and arguing about the bill, but then, in the words of one critic, "takes that familiar scenario and pushes it to impressively baroque extremes". In a reversal of the norm, all diners want to pay the whole bill, rather than wanting to limit their payment. In this dispute, "The Bill" explores themes of masculinity, losing face, competitiveness, passive aggression, and rivalry. Andrew Billen, writing in The Times, compared this aspect of the episode to the television series Mad Dogs, which had also starred Glenister; one critic suggested that Glenister's character in Mad Dogs and Craig in "The Bill" are similar. The characters tell "well-rehearsed anecdotes and blokey jokes", while Craig is "all flash-cash and inappropriate comments to the waitress". Pemberton's Malcolm, for Michael Hogan of The Daily Telegraph, "appeared to have wandered in" from a Mike Leigh production; several critics commented on his striking hairpiece. All four of the men are unpleasant people.
The English north–south divide is a key feature of the plot and humour, with many references to north–south caricatures. Craig is unfamiliar with the northern phrases used by Archie, Malcolm and Kevin, including diddlum, piss-mints, and bluecock (a "tight-fisted wanker"). Craig is wealthier than the other characters, and mocks them with stereotypes about northerners as poor and stupid. For one critic, the significance of the north–south divide in the episode means that it could have been called "Revenge of the Northerners".
After the revelation in the closing minutes of "The Bill", the character of the episode changes. The biggest changes come about in Watkins's Kevin and White's Anya. Kevin changes from a timid penny pincher referred to as "the professor" apparently in jest to a menacing criminal mastermind. Anya, initially reminiscent of Manuel of Fawlty Towers or a character from 'Allo 'Allo!, faces criticism from her co-conspirators for taking her characterisation too far, allowing the writers, for one critic, to have their cake and eat it—any exaggerated characterisation is the fault of the character, not the writers. The script also acknowledge the plot's "silliness" in an almost-fourth-wall-breaking piece of dialogue, when Shearsmith's Archie declares that the characters' plan "was too elaborate".
For one commentator, "The Bill" was the closest episode of Inside No. 9 to The League of Gentlemen, an earlier project of Shearsmith and Pemberton's, due to its use of gallows humour and back-and-forth dialogue. Critics also compared the episode to the television series Hustle, to the work of the director Quentin Tarantino—including the 1992 film Reservoir Dogs—and to Roald Dahl's 1948 short story "Man from the South". This latter story was adapted for the television series Tales of the Unexpected, a key influence on Inside No. 9 as a whole, and by Tarantino for the 1995 anthology film Four Rooms. Meanwhile, the premise was compared to that of "The Chinese Restaurant", a 1991 episode of Seinfeld.
## Reception
"The Bill" was generally positively received by critics, being given ratings of five out of five by Mike Ward of the Daily Express, four out of five by Hogan (The Daily Telegraph) and the freelance journalist Dan Owen, and three out of five by Andrew Billen of The Times. It was praised as "a tight, gloriously stressful half-hour", "hugely enjoyable", "an intricate, wonderfully well-executed tale", and "terrific fun". Mark Butler, writing for inews.co.uk, said that while there had been Inside No. 9 episodes "with greater atmosphere, invention or ideas", this episode, "as a 30-minute exercise in darkly comic suspense, ... did the trick". It was not, for Butler, among the best episodes; after the conclusion of the fourth series, he identified "The Bill" as the 20th best episode, out of 24. The comedy critic Bruce Dessau described "The Bill" as "quite a low-key opener for the series proper". Ian Hyland, writing in the Daily Mirror, considered "The Bill" a competitor with "The 12 Days of Christine" for the distinction of the best episode of Inside No. 9 ever.
The episode was praised as genuinely funny, with a range of different kinds of humour. Praise was also directed at Morales, both Louisa Mellor (Den of Geek) and Owen commenting on his ability to give the impression of movement, even while the episode revolved mostly around four men sitting at a table. Critics commended the performances; Dessau called the cast "uniformly excellent", and Owen said that the script was "brilliantly performed". Ellen E Jones, writing for the London Evening Standard, praised both Glenister and Watkins; Hogan did likewise, but argued that Watkins "stealthily stole the show". Owen suggested that, in the episode, "Watkins again proved why he's one of the most underrated comic actors around right now". Mellor identified Watkins and White as offering the strongest performances. Hogan praised White for offering "estimable support", while Billen identified White as the performer who "stole the half-hour".
The story, for Mellor, was strong; "the shocks have the intended impact and the whole half-hour works a treat". She commended the "good writing [and] excellent structure". Hogan considered the episode "ingeniously plotted", and Owen called it "delightfully written". The timing was also praised. Critics were less convinced by the revelation at the end of the episode; though Butler initially called it "satisfying and surprising", he later characterised "the overly-elaborate ending" as lowering the quality of the episode. The ending was criticised as lacking in meaning, and as "prosaically disappointing". For Billen, the reveal made the episode's premise "less interesting", and, for Owen, the characters were too quick to admit defeat. The final scene, in particular, was criticised, some commentators suggesting that, if thought about too much, it was not fully convincing; it was described as "arguably unnecessary" and as offering the episode's only "punch [that failed] to connect".
### Writers' Guild Award
At the 2018 Writers' Guild Awards, administered by the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, Shearsmith and Pemberton won the Best TV Situation Comedy award for their work on "The Bill". The award was presented by Brenda Gilhooly. The other nominees were Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper, the writers of This Country, and Simon Blackwell, for his work on Back. |
4,926,829 | 1986 World Snooker Championship | 1,139,113,215 | Professional snooker world championship tournament, April–May 1986 | [
"1986 in English sport",
"1986 in snooker",
"April 1986 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"May 1986 sports events in the United Kingdom",
"Sports competitions in Sheffield",
"World Snooker Championships"
]
| The 1986 World Snooker Championship (also referred to as the 1986 Embassy World Snooker Championship for the purposes of sponsorship) was a professional snooker tournament that took place between 19 April and 5 May 1986 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. It was the sixth and final ranking event of the 1985–86 snooker season and the 1986 edition of the World Snooker Championship, first held in 1927. The total prize fund was £350,000 with £70,000 awarded to the winner and was sponsored by cigarette manufacturer Embassy.
The defending champion was Dennis Taylor, who had defeated Steve Davis 18–17 in the 1985 World Snooker Championship final to win his first world title. In defence of his title, Taylor lost in the first round of the event 6–10 to Mike Hallett. Joe Johnson the world number 16 defeated Davis 18–12 in the final to win his sole ranking event. Prior to the competition, the bookmakers' odds for a Johnson victory were 150/1. There were 20 century breaks compiled in total during the tournament, the highest of which was a 134 made by Davis in the opening frame of his quarter-final win.
## Overview
The World Snooker Championship is an annual professional snooker tournament organised by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA). Founded in the late 19th century by British Army soldiers stationed in India, the cue sport was popular in the British Isles. However, in the modern era, which started in 1969 when the World Championship reverted to a knockout format, it has become increasingly popular worldwide, especially in East and Southeast Asian nations such as China, Hong Kong and Thailand.
Joe Davis won the first World Championship in 1927, hosted by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the final match being held at Camkin's Hall in Birmingham, England. Since 1977, the event has been held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The 1986 championship featured 32 professional players competing in one-on-one snooker matches in a single-elimination format, each match played over several . These competitors in the main tournament were selected using a combination of the top players in the snooker world rankings and the winners of a pre-tournament qualification stage. The top 16 players in the world rankings automatically qualified for the event, the remaining 16 players coming through the qualification rounds.
### Prize fund
The tournament featured a total prize fund of £350,000, with £70,000 awarded to the winner. A bonus of £80,000 was reserved for the first player (if any) to make a maximum break. The prize money allocation is shown below.
#### Main tournament
- Winner: £70,000
- Runner-up: £42,000
- Semi-finalists: £21,000
- Quarter-finalists: £10,500
- Last 16: £5,250
- Last 32: £2,953.12
- Highest break: £7,000
- Maximum break: £80,000
#### Qualifying
- Fourth Qualifying round: £2,296.87
- Third Qualifying round: £1,203.12
- Highest break: £1,750
## Tournament summary
### Qualifying
Qualifying matches took place at Preston Guild Hall from 26 March to 6 April 1986. All matches were played as the best of 19 frames. Joe O'Boye recorded the first century break of the qualifying rounds, compiling a 118 in his 8–10 defeat to Bill Oliver. Paul Thornley made a 126 break in his 10–3 win over Derek Mienie. John Hargreaves was 2–9 down in his match against Bernie Mikkelsen, but won five frames in a row to recover to 7–9 before being knocked out in the next frame. Dave Gilbert also won five consecutive frames, recovering from 5–7 behind to win 10–7 against Roger Bales. Veteran professional Bernard Bennett suffered the only whitewash of the first qualifying round, failing to win any frames against Sakchai Sim Ngam. James Giannaros, Jim Rempe and Wayne Sanderson all withdrew from the competition.
In the second qualifying round, the Scottish Professional Championship winner Stephen Hendry made a break of 141 in his victory over Paddy Browne; this was the highest break in qualifying for which Hendry earned a prize of £1,750. He had led 8–3 and 9–8 before winning the match 10–9. Level at 8–8 against Bob Chaperon, Frank Jonik conceded the next frame when 22 points behind, despite the to stotalling 22 points, enough for him to draw the gamestill being on the table. He then conceded the 18th frame while 53 points behind with six reds still remaining, meaning that up to 75 points were available without , and lost the match 8–10. Jimmy van Rensberg beat Ian Williamson on the final black in the of their contest, clearing to brown to win the frame 42–41. On the way to his second-round qualifying match, Steve Newbury was involved in a traffic collision which injured his wife and wrecked his car; despite the accident, Newbury beat Omprakesh Agrawal 10–5. There was one whitewash in the second round, Ray Edmonds beating Billy Kelly 10–0.
Hendry made breaks of 117 and 91 in his 10–8 third-round defeat of Wayne Jones, during which Jones had recovered from 3–7 behind to level at 8–8. Les Dodd lost only one frame against former World Snooker Championship promoter Mike Watterson, and Peter Francisco defeated Fred Davis, a former billiards and snooker world champion, by the same margin. Robby Foldvari, who had won the 1986 WPBSA World Billiards Championship the previous month, defeated the 1974 World Snooker Championship runner-up Graham Miles 10–7. John Spencer qualified to meet another former champion, Alex Higgins, at the main stage of the competition by beating Newbury 10–7 in the final qualifying round. Hendry became the youngest-ever qualifier for the Crucible stages at the time, by defeating Dene O'Kane 10–9, after having led 6–3. O'Kane was one of three top-32 seeds to be knocked out in the fourth round, the other two being Mark Wildman and Murdo MacLeod; Wildman lost 9–10, after establishing a 9–6 lead against Edmonds, while MacLeod was defeated 6–10 by Danny Fowler.
### First round
The first round took place between 19 and 24 April, each match played over two sessions as the best of 19 frames. Defending champion Dennis Taylor, looking "jaded" according to Clive Everton, lost the first seven frames of his match against Mike Hallett, who ended the first session 8–1 ahead. Taylor won five more frames, but lost the match 6–10. Like John Spencer in 1978, Terry Griffiths in 1980, Cliff Thorburn in 1981, and Steve Davis in 1982, Taylor was unable to retain his first world title; this inability of a first-time champion to defend their title has become known as the "Crucible curse". Second seed Steve Davis beat Ray Edmonds 10–4. Third seed Thorburn beat Bill Werbeniuk 10–5, whilst fourth seed Tony Knowles won a close match against Neal Foulds 10–9.
The 16th seed Joe Johnson defeated Dave Martin 10–3 in the first round, his first win in three appearances at the World Championship. Jimmy White compiled a 121 break in the final frame of his 10–7 victory over John Virgo. Three-time world champion Spencer made his final appearance at the tournament, losing 7–10 to Alex Higgins in the first round. Future seven-time world champion Stephen Hendry made his Crucible debut, losing 8–10 to Willie Thorne in the first round. Aged 17 years and 3 months, Hendry was the youngest player ever to compete at the World Snooker Championship. Another debutant in 1986 was Danny Fowler, who lost 2–10 to Terry Griffiths. Six-time world champion Ray Reardon was knocked out 8–10 by John Campbell.
In the other first-round matches, Doug Mountjoy beat Perrie Mans 10–3, qualifier John Parrott beat Tony Meo 10–4, Kirk Stevens beat Dean Reynolds 10–6, Silvino Francisco beat Rex Williams 10–4, Eugene Hughes beat David Taylor 10–7, and Eddie Charlton beat Cliff Wilson 10–6.
### Second round
The second round, which took place between 24 and 28 April, was played as best-of-25-frames matches spread over three sessions. Steve Davis and Doug Mountjoy, who had contested the 1981 final, ended their first session tied at 4–4, and their second with Davis leading 11–5. Mountjoy did not pot a ball in the final session as Davis completed a 13–5 victory. Alex Higgins missed a black ball from its spot that would have put him 6–2 ahead of Terry Griffiths at the end of their first session, but the frame went to Griffiths, leaving Higgins just 5–3 ahead. Griffiths had the better of their second session, and made a break of 110 to level at 6–6. Whilst the next two frames were shared, Griffiths a to win frame 15 and then went 9–7 ahead at the end of their second session. The match went to a deciding frame, with Griffiths eventually winning 13–12. The match between Kirk Stevens and Eddie Charlton also finished with a deciding frame, Stevens winning the last three frames from 10 to 12 behind, to prevail 13–12.
Joe Johnson led Mike Hallett 5–3 after their first session, on his way to completing a 13–6 win, making a break of 110 in frame 13. John Parrott and Jimmy White were level at 4–4 and 6–6, before White won a run of four frames to lead 10–6 after the second session. White then won three of the next five frames to win the match 13–8. Willie Thorne beat the Australian Professional Championship winner John Campbell 13–9. In the other second-round matches, Tony Knowles beat Silvino Francisco 13–10, and Cliff Thorburn beat Eugene Hughes 13–6.
### Quarter-finals
The quarter-finals were played as best-of-25-frames matches over three sessions on 29 and 30 April. Joe Johnson led Terry Griffiths 9–7 at the end of the first day of their match. On resumption of play, Griffiths won five frames in a row to come within one frame of winning the match at 12–9. Despite his three-frame deficit, Johnson took the next four frames, making two century breaks on the way to a 13–12 victory. Steve Davis played Jimmy White in what was effectively a rematch of the 1984 World Snooker Championship final. Davis made a break of 134 in the opening frame and played consistently well in securing a 13–5 victory, White having missed a number of relatively simple pots.
Cliff Thorburn played Willie Thorne and won 13–6. The match report in The Times stated that Thorne "was never allowed to play his usual fluent game." Thorburn took a 9–3 lead, and finished the second session 11–5 ahead. During the match, his wife Barbara gave birth to their second child in the couple's native Canada. Tony Knowles played Kirk Stevens in the fourth quarter-final. The pair were level at 4–4 after the first session, and then again at 8–8 after the second. At the beginning of the final session, Knowles won five out of six frames to win the match 13–9.
### Semi-finals
The semi-finals took place between 1 and 3 May as best-of-31-frames matches played over four sessions. The first semi-final was between Tony Knowles and Joe Johnson. Knowles led 1–0 and 2–1 but ended their first session 3–4 behind, having missed middle pocket pots to allow his opponent into both the sixth and seventh frames. According to Sydney Friskin's match report in The Times, Johnson appeared to be relaxed and was potting well as he built a 10–5 lead over Knowles by the end of the second session, and finished the third session 14–8 ahead. He took the first two frames of the last session to win the match 16–8, reaching his first World Championship final. Johnson won the match despite having taken painkillers for a cyst on his back before the start of play.
Steve Davis played Cliff Thorburn in the second semi-final. With Davis leading 3–2, Thorburn was on course for a maximum break but failed on the ninth black, although he did go on to win the sixth frame and level the match at 3–3. Davis won the next three frames to lead 6–3, but his lead had dwindled to 8–7 by the end of the first day's play. Thorburn pulled ahead 9–8 and 10–9 in the third session before Davis made his fifth century break of the tournament, a 112, to tie the match at 10–10. A missed black from Davis gave Thorburn the opportunity to take the next frame, but Davis won the last of the session to draw level again at 11–11. On resumption of play, Davis won five frames against Thorburn's one, compiling a break of 122 in the last frame of the match, to secure a 16–12 victory and reach his fifth world final.
### Final
The final between Steve Davis and Joe Johnson took place on 4 and 5 May. It was a best-of-35 frames match played over four sessions. The two players had never previously played a professional match against each other. Davis was considered much more likely to win the final, reflected in the bookmakers' odds of 2/9 for Davis and 5/1 for Johnson. Davis took a 3–1 lead before the first mid-session interval, having made breaks of 108 and 107. Johnson then took the next three frames to finish the first session 4–3 ahead. Davis made a strong start to the second session, winning four frames in succession to put himself 7–4 ahead. After the next mid-session interval, Johnson won four consecutive frames, before Davis clinched the last frame to leave the match level at 8–8 overnight.
On the second day, Johnson wore an unusual pair of red, pink and white leather shoes. On resuming the match, he won another run of four frames to take him into a 12–8 lead, assisted by a fluke on a red ball in the 18th frame. The third session ended with Johnson 13–11 ahead. In the final session, the crowd responded in favour of Johnson, who had played with an attacking style throughout the tournament. He won three of the next four frames to lead 16–12 before the mid-session interval. Johnson then won frame 29, and secured a break of 64 in frame 30 to win the match 18–12. The win helped lift him from 16th place in the 1985–1986 professional rankings to eighth for 1986–1987.
Davis, being the World Championship runner-up for a second consecutive year, commented to interviewer David Vine "We can't go on meeting like this, David," and Johnson later retorted "I hope that we can still be friends". The popularity of Johnson's win resulted in an appearance on television show Wogan, as well as him accompanying Cliff Richard in a box to watch Wimbledon. This was Johnson's only ranking event win in his career, although he would go on to win two non-ranking tournaments: the 1987 Scottish Masters and the 1989 Norwich Union Grand Prix. The two players again met in the final at the following year's championship to contest the world title for a second time, Davis winning the match 18–14. Johnson's attacking style of snooker, notable for his long potting, has been seen as a harbinger of the style that became dominant in the 1990s. The odds on Johnson were 150 to 1 against him winning the 1986 World Championship as he had not won any tournaments in his seven-year career and had never previously won a match at the Crucible. A condensed version of the final was showcased on BBC Two on 22 April 2020 in place of the 2020 World Snooker Championship which had been postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
## Main draw
The numbers in brackets denote player seedings, whilst match winners are denoted in bold. The results for the tournament are shown below:
## Qualifying
Four rounds of qualification for the main draw were played at the Guild Hall in Preston, England from 26 March to 6 April 1986. All matches were played as the best of 19 frames. Players in bold denote match winners.
### Round 1
### Round 2
### Rounds 3 and 4
## Century breaks
There were 20 century breaks in the main stage of the tournament, the highest amount at the World Snooker Championship until the 1991 event. The highest break was a 134 made by Steve Davis.
- 134, 112, 108, 108, 107, 102, 101, 100 – Steve Davis
- 121 – Jimmy White
- 115 – Dean Reynolds
- 112 – John Virgo
- 111, 110 – Terry Griffiths
- 110, 110, 102 – Joe Johnson
- 105 – Tony Knowles
- 104 – Cliff Thorburn
- 101 – Silvino Francisco
- 100 – Willie Thorne
### Qualifying stages
There were 12 century breaks compiled in qualifying. The highest break was a 141 made by Stephen Hendry.
- 141, 117 – Stephen Hendry
- 126 – Paul Thornley
- 120 – Tony Drago
- 118 – Joe O'Boye
- 118 – Steve Longworth
- 114 – Ian Williamson
- 112, 102 – Barry West
- 111 – Vic Harris
- 108 – Martin Smith
- 105 – Robby Foldvari |
345,245 | Geology of the Lassen volcanic area | 1,150,536,647 | Geology of a U.S. national park in California | [
"Calderas of California",
"Geology of California",
"Lassen Volcanic National Park",
"Natural history of Lassen County, California",
"Natural history of Shasta County, California",
"Regional geology of the United States",
"Stratovolcanoes of the United States",
"Volcanism of California",
"Volcanoes of California"
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| The Lassen volcanic area presents a geological record of sedimentation and volcanic activity in and around Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California, U.S. The park is located in the southernmost part of the Cascade Mountain Range in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Pacific Oceanic tectonic plates have plunged below the North American Plate in this part of North America for hundreds of millions of years. Heat and molten rock from these subducting plates has fed scores of volcanoes in California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia over at least the past 30 million years, including these in the Lassen volcanic areas.
Between 3 and 4 million years ago, volcanic-derived mud flows called lahars streamed down several major mountains that included nearby but now extinct Mount Yana and Mount Maidu to become the Tuscan Formation. Basaltic and later andesitic to dacitic flows of lava covered increasingly larger areas of this formation to eventually form the lava plateau upon which the park is situated. About 600,000 years ago, Mount Tehama started to rise as a stratovolcano in the southwestern corner of the park, eventually reaching an estimated 11,000 ft (3,400 m) in height.
Roughly 27,000 years ago, a dacite lava dome quickly pushed its way through Tehama's former north-eastern flank, becoming the approximately 1,000 ft (300 m) shorter Lassen Peak. Lassen's shape was significantly altered by glacial erosion from 25,000 to 18,000 years ago during the Wisconsin glaciation. Since then, smaller dacite domes such as the 1,100-year-old Chaos Crags have formed around Lassen. Phreatic (steam explosion) eruptions, dacite and andesite lava flows along with cinder cone formation have persisted into modern times. Most notable of these is the eruption and formation of Cinder Cone in the mid- to late 17th century and the eruption of Lassen Peak in the early 20th century. The only activity since then has been the constant bubbling of mud pots and steaming of fumaroles from the various geothermal areas in Lassen Volcanic National Park. The potential exists for renewed vigorous volcanic activity that could threaten life and property in the area.
## Regional geologic setting
### Current setting
The Lassen volcanic area lies at the southern extremity of the Cascade Range, which extends northward some 500 mi (800 km) from Lassen Peak within the park through Oregon and Washington and into British Columbia. Lassen Peak is one of the Cascade Volcanoes that form a segment of a ring of volcanoes that circle the Pacific Ocean known collectively as the 'Pacific Ring of Fire'. All four types of volcanoes found in the world—shield, composite, cinder cone, and plug dome—are represented in Lassen Volcanic National Park.
The Cascade Volcanoes are fed by heat generated as the Gorda and Juan de Fuca tectonic plates are being subducted below the much larger but lighter North American Plate. Lying some 300 mi (480 km) offshore, the spreading center of the Gorda Plate pushes out about 1 in (2.54 cm) of new crust toward the coast of northernmost California and southern Oregon every year.
The composition of the molten rock (magma) that feeds volcanism in the Lassen volcanic area ranges widely in its content of silica or SiO
<sub>2</sub>; the higher the silica content, the greater the ability of the magma to trap and hold on to gas and water vapor. When high-silica (dacitic) magma rises to the Earth's surface, the trapped gases and vapors can erupt explosively to produce ash clouds and pyroclastic flows that consist of superheated gas, ash and volcanic fragments. Dacite magma that is extruded nonexplosively as lava forms domes because it is too viscous (sticky) to flow far away from its source. Low-silica (basaltic) magma is more fluid and usually erupts as lava in less explosive eruptions than dacite because gas and water vapor escape easily from it. Eruptions of basalt magma typically produce elongate lava flows, as well as build cinder cones (piles of small frothy lava fragments or 'cinders') around volcanic vents.
Basaltic volcanism in the Lassen volcanic area occurs mainly along chains of vents aligned in a north or northwest direction, parallel to regional faults. Examples include Poison Buttes, Subglacial Buttes, Tumble Buttes, the Prospect Peak-Red Cinder area, the east side of the Hat Creek Valley and Potato Buttes-Sugarloaf area, and the Red Lake Mountain area. Prolonged basaltic volcanism at a single site can produce a sizeable edifice, like the broad, relatively flat shield volcanoes of Prospect Peak and Sifford Mountain. Unlike other Cascade volcanoes, Lassen's large plug dome and composite volcanoes are in close proximity to the smaller cinder cone volcanoes that surround the volcanic center.
Northwest of the park lies the Klamath Mountains (a collective term for the Siskiyou, Trinity, Salmon and Marble mountain ranges). To the west lies the Sacramento Valley. Just south of the park begins the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and to the east lie the Modoc Plateau and then the Great Basin.
### Geologic history of the region
All rock now exposed in the area of the park is volcanic, and unconformably overlies much older sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous rock, which was formed during the hundreds of millions of years when the Lassen region underwent repeated uplifting to form mountains, only to have them worn down and submerged under encroaching seas. During the periods of submersion, sand, mud and limestone were deposited. Occasionally volcanic activity was associated with the mountain building.
About 70 million years ago, the area where the Cascade Range is now situated was under the most recent encroachment by the Pacific Ocean. The rocks that make up the modern Sierra Nevada and the Klamath Mountains were already in existence but deeply buried. Some 70 million years before (140 million years before present), the rocks that now make up the Klamaths broke away from the rocks that now make up the Sierras and moved 60 mi (97 km) west, leaving the flooded 'Lassen Strait.' This broad depression was a seaway that connected the marine basin in California with that in east central Oregon.
The entire western portion of North America was being deformed from the Laramide orogeny starting around 70 million years ago. Gradually during millions of years, crustal rocks were folded and fractured and the seas driven away. This same bending and breaking of rocks relieved pressure on the hot material beneath the Earth's crust and permitted magma to rise toward the surface. Volcanoes burst into activity starting 30 million years ago from Washington southward along the Cascades and in the area now occupied by the Sierra Nevada. This activity continued until approximately 11 or 12 million years ago. Lava and ash reached a thickness of up to 10,000 ft (3,000 m) in some areas, forming what is now known as the western Cascades. These have been eroded until they are now rolling hills. The northern end of the San Andreas Fault and the Mendocino Triple Junction have moved northward over time, and with them the southern margin of Cascade volcanism retreats north; it currently is located at the southern end of the Lassen national park. The extensional tectonics of the Basin and Range and the widespread fault system of the Walker Lane are also encroaching on the Lassen region and faults associated with them provide pathways for magma to reach the surface.
Meanwhile, toward the end of this activity, eruptions of a different kind took place on an unprecedented scale in eastern Oregon and Washington. From innumerable cracks, floods of highly fluid basaltic lava spread to cover an area of over 200,000 sq mi (520,000 km<sup>2</sup>). Now known as the Columbia Plateau, this great lava bed of flood basalt covers much of Oregon and Washington and even parts of Idaho. Northern California's Modoc Plateau is a thinner basaltic flow which some geologists associate with the Columbia Plateau, but there are technical objections to this. The High Cascades took shape as a distinct mountain belt as a result of this upheaval and the bending of the thick blanket of volcanic rocks. During the next 10 million years, a series of new basaltic volcanic cones similar to the shield volcanoes now found in Hawaii were built.
## Formation of basement rocks
Between two and three million years ago, during the Pliocene, the Sierra Nevada was uplifted and tilted westward. A series of volcanic mudflows (lahars) from three major source areas contributed debris that covered almost 2,000 sq mi (5,200 km<sup>2</sup>) to form the oldest distinctive geologic formation in the High Cascades. The resulting Tuscan Formation is not exposed anywhere in the national park but is just below the surface in many places within it. It consists mainly of tuffs but also contains conglomerates and lava sheets. The formation can reach thicknesses exceeding 1,000 ft (300 m) and is of late Pliocene age. An overlying rhyolitic lava flow gives an age of 1.5 million years.
Lassen is the fifth volcanic center to be active in the region. Latour, Yana, Maidu and Dittmar were the four preceding centers; Latour and Yana are only poorly known. One major source of the formation was Mount Yana; centered a few miles (5 km) southwest of Butt Mountain and south of the park. Mount Yana had probably reached its full size of 10,000 ft (3,000 m) in elevation and 15 mi (24 km) in diameter before Mount Maidu, the second source, had acquired half its growth. Mount Maidu, which eventually surpassed Mount Yana in size, was centered over what is now the town of Mineral, California, but has been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years (the grassy plain around the town is Maidu's caldera). A third source situated north of Latour Butte made a lesser contribution to the formation. Minor sources included an area near Hatchet Mountain Pass (northwest of Burney Mountain), dikes south and southwest of Inskip Hill and possibly Campbell Mound (north of Chico, California).
Also during the Pliocene, basaltic lavas poured forth in the vicinity of Willow Lake in the southwestern portion of the park. These were followed by a very thick sequence of very fluid andesitic lavas which erupted near Juniper Lake and flowed westward about four miles (6 km). At about the same time, other andesitic lavas poured from several vents on the central plateau to cover an area of at least 30 sq mi (78 km<sup>2</sup>). Included among these flows were the Twin Lake lavas of black porphyritic andesite, which are notable in that they contain xenocrysts of quartz. The Flatiron andesites spread over the southwestern part of the park area around this time.
Somewhat later, andesitic lavas poured out from what is now Reading Peak and mainly flowed to the south and east, reaching the head of Warner Valley. By this time, the park's eastern portion had been transformed into a relatively flat plain. The activity was followed by an eruption of the Eastern basalts from volcanoes east of the park. These thick flows have subsequently eroded to produce rugged hills that limit the park on the east. Taken together, these flows built the lava plateau upon which the Lassen volcanic area is located.
## Volcanoes rise and fall in the park area
### Mount Tehama and pre-Lassen volcanics
The earliest volcanic activity of the Lassen Volcanic Center commenced 825,000 years ago. The Rockland complex formed between 825,000 and 609,000 years ago. It was the source of lava domes and lava flows of dacitic composition. Around 610,000 years ago over 130 km<sup>3</sup> of rhyolite magma violently erupted onto the surface, producing massive pyroclastic flows and an ash plume several tens of kilometers high. This plume distributed ash almost entirely over the state of Nevada and sending traces as far as southeastern Idaho. As the eruption progressed the underlying magma chamber was severely drained. This caused the overlying rock that was once supported by the magma to collapse downward. Forming a massive depression known as a caldera. Over 326.7 km<sup>3</sup> of tephra was erupted during this event. This could very well make the Rockland tephra the most voluminous eruption to have occurred in the Cascade Volcanic Arc, nearly twice the size of the Mazama ash. From 600,000 to 400,000 years ago, eruptions built a large conical stratovolcano called Mount Tehama (also called Brokeoff Volcano) in what is now the southwest corner of the park within the Rockland caldera complex. It was made of roughly alternating layers of andesitic lavas and tephra (volcanic ash, breccia, and pumice) with increasing amounts of tephra with elevation.
Tehama eventually reached an elevation of about 11,000 ft (3,400 m), was 11 to 15 miles (18 to 24 km) wide at its base, and contained 80 km<sup>3</sup> (19 cu mi) of material. Its principal vent lay in the neighborhood of what is now Sulphur Works, but a second vent from which no lavas issued lay on the eastern flank of Little Hot Springs Valley. Contrary to popular belief, Bumpass Hell is not one of Tehama's main vents since it is located outside of the caldera. Tehama collapsed during the late Pleistocene, and numerous glacial advances tore down its remnants.
The largest remnants of Tehama include Brokeoff Mountain, Mount Conard, Mount Diller, and Pilot Pinnacle. Between about 385,000 and 315,000 years ago the character and locus of volcanism in the Lassen Volcanic Center changed dramatically from the andesitic (silica content between basalt and dacite) stratocone to the Lassen domefield, which consists of a core of dacite lava domes surrounded by an arc of hybrid andesite flows. The dacite domes erupted along the northern flank of Brokeoff Volcano and are divided on the basis of age into the Bumpass sequence (about 300,000–190,000 years ago) and Eagle Peak sequence (about 70,000 years ago to present day). The hybrid andesite units erupted in two groups called the older Twin Lakes sequence (about 315,000 to 240,000 years ago, contemporaneous with the Bumpass Peak sequence) and younger Twin Lakes sequence (about 90,000 to present day, contemporaneous with the Eagle Peak sequence). No volcanism is known in the Lassen volcanic center during the period from 190,000 to 90,000 years ago.
Four shield volcanoes (Raker and Prospect Peaks, Red Mountain and Mount Harkness) grew to elevations of between 7,000 to 8,400 ft (2,100 to 2,600 m) at the corners of the central plateau. Raker Peak erupted andesite lavas while basalt flowed from the others. Each of these volcanoes developed a cinder cone on its summit during their last stages of eruption. Later, a mass of rhyolite was forced through the north flank of Sifford Mountain and a plug of dacite was pushed up through the west flank of Raker Peak.
In the past 50,000 years, at least seven major episodes of dacitic volcanism produced lava domes and pyroclastic deposits in the Lassen volcanic area, and another five episodes produced basaltic and andesitic lava flows. Eruptions have occurred at sites including Lassen Peak, Chaos Crags, and Sunflower Flat (explosive dacite eruptions followed by dome growth) and Tumble Buttes, Hat Mountain, and Prospect Peak (basalt eruptions). In addition, about 30 smaller volcanoes erupted basaltic lavas in the larger region surrounding the Lassen volcanic center. These volcanoes are geologically related to the Basin and Range volcanic province.
### Development of Lassen Peak
Radiometric dating indicates that around 31,000 years ago a new vent opened up on the northeastern slope of Tehama, probably close to where Lassen Peak now stands. Streams of fluid dacite flowed chiefly toward the north, reaching a thickness of 1,500 ft (460 m) and covering perhaps 20 square miles (52 km<sup>2</sup>). Known as the Loomis Sequence, these pre-Lassen dacites are the black, glassy, columnar lavas that now surround Lassen Peak.
Sometime between 25,000 and 31,000 years ago, Lassen Peak, a Pelean lava dome volcano, was pushed up through the pre-Lassen dacites. Lassen grew past the normal maximum size of plug dome volcanoes, 1,000 ft (300 m), and reached a height of 1,800 feet (550 m) above the surrounding plateau in as little as a few years. The growth of the pile of lava shattered the rocks previously there, forming enormous banks of talus. When Lassen Peak formed, it looked much like the nearby Chaos Crags domes do today, with steep sides covered by angular rock talus. Lassen Peak's shape was significantly altered by glacial erosion from 25,000 to 18,000 years ago during the Wisconsin glaciation. In turn the growth of Lassen Peak intercepted moisture, allowing a glacier on its northern flank to grow to almost 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) long.
Later, but not precisely dated, eruptions from the Lassen volcanic area have formed over 30 smaller steep-sided, mound-shaped accumulations of volcanic rock, called lava domes. Crescent Crater, which at first glance appears as a parasite on Lassen's northeast flank, has been more heavily glaciated and thus is older. Other dacite domes which rose on Tehama's flanks are Bumpass Mountain, Helen Ridge, Eagle Peak and Vulcan's Castle. An upper limit of 10,000 years has been set for the domes next to Lost Creek (north domes). All of these domes must have risen with great rapidity.
### Glacial action
Glaciers existed throughout the park area during most of the Pleistocene with smaller ones persisting at higher elevations until comparatively recent times. Lassen Peak is situated at a center from which many of these glaciers originated. Glacial ice that filled Mill Creek (whose canyon is mostly post-glacial), Blue Lake Canyon, Kings Creek Meadows, Flatiron Ridge, Warner Valley and the valley of Manzanita, Hat and Lost Creeks originated from there. Indeed, Lassen Peak appears to be sitting in the depression carved by the Lost Creek Glacier.
Reading Peak formed a second center from which ice moved north into Hat Creek and Summit Creek. Ice moving southward united with some of the above glaciers and emptied into Warner Valley. On the central plateau, the ridge connecting Hat Mountain with Crater Butte served as a divide between ice flowing northward to Badger Flat and Hat Creek and that moving southward to Corral Meadows, Kings Creek and Warner Valley. Ice from Mount Harkness and Sifford Mountain also wound up in Warner Valley.
The crest of Saddle Mountain served as a divide with ice north of it moving into the depression containing Snag and Butte Lakes, while those to the south entered Warner Valley. The ice varied from a thickness of 1,600 ft (490 m) in Warner Valley to much thinner sheets in the higher mountains.
### Post-glacial to 19th-century activity
Subsequent to the rise of Lassen Peak, several dacitic pumice cones developed in a rift extending northwest from the base of Lassen Peak. Then about 1,100 years ago several dacitic domes, the Chaos Crags, protruded through these cones and obliterated all but half of the southernmost cone. At least 300 years ago a series of large avalanches, possibly triggered by steam explosions, occurred on the north side of the Crags. These avalanches created their own 'air cushions' that helped accelerate them to speeds exceeding 100 mph (160 km/h) and push them partway up Table Mountain. The resulting wilderness of debris, the Chaos Jumbles, covers an area of 2.5 sq mi (6.5 km<sup>2</sup>). Manzanita Lake was formed as a result of Manzanita Creek being dammed by the debris. Steam rose from the domes of Chaos Crags until 1857.
Around the mid-18th century a series of eruptions produced Cinder Cone in the northeast corner of the park, mantling an area of 30 sq mi (78 km<sup>2</sup>) with ejecta in the process. Ash falling on the streams of lava pouring from the cone's east flank formed the Painted Dunes. A flow of quartz-studded basalt lava (the Fantastic Lava Beds) poured from the Cinder Cone and dammed the streams that run towards Butte Lake to the north and Snag Lake to the south.
### Early 20th-century activity
Explosions took place on Lassen Peak in 1914. Later, on May 19, 1915, a mass of lava rose in the summit crater and spilled 1,000 ft (300 m) down the western side of the volcano. Extensive lahars (mudflows) were created on the northeastern side as snowbanks were melted. The resulting debris swept down the slope. Divided by Raker Peak, part of this mudflow raced down Lost Creek; the remaining flow passed over the rise 100 ft (30 m) east of the park road and rushed down Hat Creek. A wide barren swath was torn through the forest.
A great explosion blasted out a new crater three days later on May 22. A volcanic cloud rose 40,000 ft (12,000 m), but a portion of the explosive force was deflected downward. The resulting pyroclastic flow of super-heated gas, rocks and ash roared down the same path taken by the mudflow, resulting in further damage along the headwaters of Hat and Lost Creeks. Ash from the eruption blew eastward with some fine ash falling at least as far as 200 mi (320 km) from the volcano.
The last major eruptions of Lassen Peak occurred in April through June 1917, when a new crater was created at the summit of the mountain. Less explosive activity continued through 1921. The Smithsonian considers the eruption of Mount Lassen to have ended on June 29, 1917.
Since then, the volcano has been dormant, although some steam still rises from small vents in its summit and on its flanks. Pumice ejected during the 1915 eruption of Lassen Peak is conspicuously banded with light streaks of dacite and dark andesite, which appears to represent two distinct magmas imperfectly mixed during the eruption. The 1915 eruption of Lassen Peak was the second most recent volcanic outburst in the contiguous 48 U.S. states (after the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington).
## Volcanic hazards
### Direct eruption hazards
The Lassen area remains volcanically active. The most common volcanic activity over the last 50,000 years in the Lassen volcanic area consists of small to moderate-sized eruptions that produce basaltic lava flows and localized ash falls. These eruptions typically last a few months to a year, but may continue for several years. They can cover more than 1 sq mi (2.6 km<sup>2</sup>) with lava flows, build cinder cones as high as 1,000 ft (300 m), and blanket many square miles (square kilometers) with ash a few inches (several cm) to about three feet (one meter) deep. Because these eruptions are relatively nonviolent, they rarely cause human fatalities.
Dacite eruptions in the Lassen area typically begin with steam explosions caused by the interaction of rising magma with ground water. When dacite magma charged with volcanic gases reaches the surface, it erupts explosively, usually as a vertical column of gas and ash that can rise several miles into the atmosphere. Heavy fallback of hot ash and rock fragments from eruption columns may generate highly mobile pyroclastic flows that can rush several miles down a volcano's slopes and adjacent valleys. Fallout from the eruption column can blanket areas within a few miles (about 8 km) of the vent with a thick layer of pumice, and high-altitude winds may carry finer ash tens to hundreds of miles from the volcano, posing a hazard to flying aircraft, particularly those with jet engines.
The areas of highest hazard are those that could be affected by pyroclastic flows and lahars. These areas, including Hat Creek Valley, are those in the immediate vicinity and downhill from likely eruption sites. Fallout of ash will affect areas downwind at the time of an eruption. Within the hazard zones, relative hazard is gradational, decreasing away from the location of potential vents.
After an initial explosive eruption, extrusion of gas-depleted dacite magma commonly forms lava domes. Growing lava domes are inherently unstable, and collapse of their steep sides often generates pyroclastic flows of lava blocks and ash that can travel several miles. Such a sequence of events is recorded by the deposits related to the emplacement of Chaos Crags domes between 1,100 and 1,000 years ago.
Interaction of hot pyroclastic flows with snow and ice can generate highly mobile flows of mud and debris (called lahars) that may rush down valleys leading away from a volcano. Because of this, active volcanoes that have a significant snow and ice cover can be particularly dangerous. The lahars that threatened residents of the Lassen area in May 1915 were generated by relatively small eruptions of Lassen Peak. Nonetheless, they traveled down creek beds as far as 12 mi (19 km) and released floods that affected valleys for 30 mi (48 km) downstream.
### Non-eruption hazards
Additional volcano hazards at Lassen are rockfalls and landslides not directly related to eruptions. Recently erupted volcanic domes are unstable and can collapse, generating small to large rockfalls. Approximately 350 years ago, collapse of one of the Chaos Crags domes generated huge rockfalls, creating an area now called the Chaos Jumbles. The first and largest of these traveled 4 mi (6.4 km) downslope and was able to climb 400 feet (120 m) up the side of Table Mountain. The trigger for the rockfall is unknown, but was most likely a large earthquake. Normal weathering also weakens fractured volcanic rock and contributes to small rockfalls. In the summer of 1994, a rockfall of 13,000 cu yd (9,900 m<sup>3</sup>) occurred on the northeastern flank of Lassen Peak. During periods of extreme rainfall or snow melt, mudflows are sometimes generated by mobilization of loose volcanic debris and soil on the slopes of volcanoes.
The only current visible activity in the Lassen volcanic area is from the various geothermal areas in Lassen Volcanic National Park; boiling hot springs, bubbling mud pots and fuming fumaroles. Most of these features lie in or are closely adjacent to Mount Tehama's caldera. In each thermal area, the highest temperature of water generally is close to the boiling temperature at the altitude of the particular spring or fumarole 198 °F (92 °C) at Bumpass Hell and 191 °F (88 °C) on the northwest flanks of Lassen Peak.
The hottest and most vigorous hydrothermal features in the Lassen volcanic area are at Bumpass Hell, which marks the principal area of upflow and steam discharge from the Lassen hydrothermal system. A prominent steam plume marks the site of Big Boiler, the largest fumarole in the park. The temperature of the high-velocity steam jetting from it has been measured as high as 322 °F (161 °C). A thin crust of material often covers these boiling hot features, making them a serious burn hazard to anyone walking off trail. The waters of the features are typically acidic and, even if cool enough, are not safe for bathing. |
405,674 | Blast Corps | 1,170,843,705 | 1997 action game | [
"1997 video games",
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"Nintendo 64 games",
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| Blast Corps is an action game developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64. In the game, the player uses vehicles to destroy buildings in the path of a runaway nuclear missile carrier. In the game's 57 levels, the player solves puzzles by transferring between vehicles to move objects and bridge gaps. It was released in March 1997 in Japan and North America. A wider release followed at the end of that year.
The game was Rare's first game for the Nintendo 64. Its development team ranged between four and seven members, many of whom were recent graduates. The team sought to find gameplay to fit Rare co-founder Chris Stamper's idea for a building destruction game. The puzzle game mechanics were inspired by those of Donkey Kong (1994).
Blast Corps was released to critical acclaim and received Metacritic's second highest Nintendo 64 game ratings of 1997. The game sold one million copieslower than the team's expectationsand received several editor's choice awards. Reviewers praised its originality, variety, and graphics, but some criticized its controls and repetition. Reviewers of Rare's 2015 Rare Replay retrospective compilation noted Blast Corps as a standout title.
## Gameplay
Blast Corps is a single-player action video game. The player controls vehicles to destroy buildings, farms, and other structures in the path of a runaway nuclear missile carrier. The player fails if the carrier collides with an object. The eight demolition vehicles vary in the way they clear structures: the bulldozer rams, the dump truck drifts, the lightweight buggy crashes from higher ground, the tricycle shoots missiles, another truck presses outwards from its sides, and robot mechs tumble and stomp from the land and the air. The player must transfer between vehicles and other machinery to solve puzzles. Objectives include transporting timed explosive crates and bridging gaps. The game's puzzles increase in difficulty as the player progresses through its 57 levels.
The world is portrayed from a three-quarters overhead view. The player can adjust the game's viewable perspective with zoom and horizontal panning functions. Pop-up hints will guide the player in the early stages of the game, and other characters audibly encourage the player as each level wears on. The cheery soundtrack increases in tempo as the level's timer runs low. After completing a level, the player can return to explore without a time limit. By finding secrets and activating lights throughout the level, the player raises their score and final medal ranking. There are also secret levels hidden throughout the game, where the player completes objectives against the clock. The player can compete against a ghost copy of their previous path through a level. There are no settings to change the game's difficulty, and the game saves to both the game cartridge itself and external storage.
## Plot
The game's story takes place on a parallel Earth, in which mankind lives in relative peace, until an event occurs that threatens the lives of the whole planet. The national government of an unnamed country discovers that the transportation of two defective nuclear missiles has gone wrong, after they begin leaking radiation. The automated carrier transporting them becomes damaged as a result and automatically sets itself on a direct course towards the site for a controlled detonation, effectively placing it in danger where the slightest jolt from hitting buildings or falling into pits would trigger the missiles, causing a catastrophic explosion.
To prevent this, the government hires the demolition company known as Blast Corps - founded by several former military soldiers who were stationed in the base the missiles came from, until an accident involving one of their members led the others to desert their post. Using a variety of different machines to assist them, Blast Corps assigns a new recruit to help clear the carrier's path, ensuring it can get past areas safely, while at the same time seeking out a group of missing scientists needed to conduct the safe detonation of the missiles. Dealing with an array of difficult situations, Blast Corps manages to prevent catastrophe, finding the scientists and putting an end to the threat from the missiles.
After Blast Corps successfully complete their mission, the company finds themselves contracted to help clear several buildings in a city in order to create an emergency runway for a space shuttle returning to Earth. The company successfully completes the mission, later earning a contract to clear debris on the moon, before its employees take a well-earned break after establishing a reputation for being the best demolition company in the business.
## Development
Blast Corps was among Rare's first games for the Nintendo 64 and led a run of seven critically acclaimed Rare titles for the console. The game's production began in early 1996. The development team consisted of four recent graduates, though it expanded at times to seven concurrent staff. Martin Wakeley became the game's lead designer. He credited the team's small size for their easy progression from planning to market. Rare founder Chris Stamper was the impetus for the project. He had wanted to make a game about destroying buildings for years prior to Blast Corps's development. The team worked to fit his idea to a gameplay concept and devised a "Constantly Moving Object" conceit that would give the levels a time limit. This idea became the nuclear missile carrier.
Retro Gamer credited Wakeley for Blast Corps's idiosyncratic ideas and humor in light of the game's serious premise. For instance, the Mario Kart 64 "power slide" drift mechanics inspired that of Blast Corps's dump truck. Wakeley championed the drift controls against the rest of the team, who found them aggravating. The game's lead artist, Ricky Berwick, had developed the vehicle concepts without consideration for their in-game function, and the vehicles were only later retrofitted to the gameplay. One of the robot vehicles was designed without an arm because the developers had run out of computer memory to store the data and liked the look anyway. Wakeley determined the game's high score "goal medal" objectives, in which players would attempt to better a set completion time on each level. Blast Corps's Japanese and American quality assurance teams later competed to push the levels to their limits, which resulted in the game's platinum level objectives. Wakeley described these platinum challenges as "just insane" and said he could only finish four himself.
Wakeley saw Blast Corps as a puzzle game at its core. He was influenced by the 1994 Donkey Kong, in which the player begins each level with all the tools they need to finish but must learn how to use them. Wakeley said this was Blast Corp's core game mechanic. He was also inspired by the Super Mario 64 demo at Nintendo's annual trade show in 1995, which introduced him to the 3D analog stick and spurred him to achieve something similar. The team's technical accomplishments included character and environment models composed completely of polygons and the absence of distance fog to obscure the draw distance.
Nintendo published Blast Corps for their Nintendo 64. In its 1995 trade show preview, it was originally titled Blast Dozer, a name it retained for its Japanese release. (The team had considered other titles, including "Heavy Duty Heroes", "Blast Radius", and "Power Dozer".) Blast Corps was first released in Japan on March 21, 1997, and in North America three days later. Its European and Australian release followed on December 22. The game had been in production for just over a year.
## Reception
The game received "universal acclaim", according to review aggregator Metacritic, and "unanimous critical success", according to Retro Gamer. Reviewers highly praised the novelty and variety of Blast Corps's gameplay. Peer Schneider of IGN, in particular, lauded the game's originality. Trent Ward commented in GameSpot that the premise taps into childhood fantasies, while "the unique relationship between the terrain and the vehicles you pilot ensures that Blast Corps will exercise your mind as well as your reflexes".
Reviewers struggled to master the game's controls. GamePro's Slo Mo praised this aspect of the game, saying that even mastering the extreme precision of the steering is fun, and rewards the player with both better gameplay technique and an appreciation for the strong distinction between the game's many vehicles. Schneider likewise overcame his initial concerns to appreciate the complexity of the controls and the differences between the vehicles. He considered the locked camera view restrictive when compared to the unrestricted 3D camera in the game's contemporaries. Schneider thought the game should have been longer, with fewer bonus levels and more main missions, though he did appreciate the pacing, design, and difficulty of the included levels. Slo Mo instead asserted that "Over 60 levels and hidden areas within hidden areas give you your money's worth". A Next Generation critic agreed, asserting that the vast size of the levels and numerous secrets and bonus areas make Blast Corps "one of the few Nintendo 64 games that justifies its exorbitant price tag". Shawn Smith and Sushi-X of Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) thought the game was repetitive, as did Computer and Video Games. The latter, though, praised Blast Corps's level design and difficulty progression. Ward had fewer reservations, writing that "basically what you have here is a game with great graphics, great sound, and a great premise. What's even more impressive is that the game doesn't really have any substantial flaws to speak of – unless you want to count lack of a two-player mode, which really isn't fair." Crispin Boyer of EGM wrote that the game's best feature was its "palpable sense of suspense" as the carrier advanced on resistant buildings.
Critics praised the game's graphics and sound. Schneider found the game unpretentious in comparison to video game trends of photorealistic rendering and cartoonish art. He likened the slick vehicle animations and metallic elements to Micro Machines and Rare's R.C. Pro-Am. Schneider praised the game's texture maps, which made the night scenes and houses look realistic, and the canyons breathtaking. He wrote that the game's 3D programming was errorless, and was particularly pleased about the game's lack of fog, usually used to cover developer limitations. EGM echoed Schneider's praise of the deep landscapes, which Boyer called "incredible". Scott McCall (AllGame) praised the game's realistic polygonal models and technical prowess, and Steve Polak (The Weekend Australian) wrote that Blast Corps showcased the console's graphics capabilities. Schneider described the soundtrack as between "70s pop, disaster movie score, and Country Bear Jamboree". He praised the range of engine, tire screeching, and crashing sound effects. Reviewers disliked the country music tracks with jaw harp.
IGN wrote that Blast Corps exemplified qualities of enjoyable Nintendo Entertainment System and arcade games, while EGM considered the game unlike all others. Retro Gamer wrote that the game's combination of puzzles and continuous destruction made the game so unique as to defy genre classification. The magazine described the gameplay concept of returning to explore without a time limit as "a stroke of genius". Retro Gamer thought of Blast Corps as a 3D successor to "nail-biting reaction games" such as Loco-Motion. Computer and Video Games agreed with a reader that Blast Corps was part of a "Destroy" subgenre including games like Desert Strike, Return Fire, and Body Harvest, and Matt Fox of The Video Games Guide put the game in a lineage with Highway Encounter and Lunar Jetman. Slo Mo said it was "like Pilotwings with a kamikaze twist. It's a multifaceted game that melds a slick vehicle sim and a mind-thumping action/strategy challenge with massive destructive force." Schneider said Blast Corps was on par with the quality of Shigeru Miyamoto games and an excellent display of Rare's potential. Next Generation described it as "effectively every Tonka fantasy brought vividly and explosively to life".
EGM named it a runner-up for "Most Original Game of the Year" (behind PaRappa the Rapper) at their 1997 Editors' Choice Awards.
Blast Corps sold close to a million copies. The game sold reasonably well in Japan. Metacritic ranked the title among the top ten games released in 1997. It remained Metacritic's highest ranked 1997 Nintendo 64 game after GoldenEye 007. Blast Corps was selected as Electronic Gaming Monthly's May 1997 Game of the Month and an IGN Editors' Choice. Later the same year, Electronic Gaming Monthly ranked it number 93 on their 100 best console video games of all time, remarking, "C'mon, not only are you driving all the vehicles you thought were mega cool as a kid – you're using 'em to plow through buildings." Four of six Nintendo Power reviewers recommended the game.
## Legacy
Wakeley, the game's designer, considered making a sequel as an action combat game, but thought the concepts behind Blast Corps had been fully exhausted. After praising the game in a 2010 Rare retrospective feature, Retro Gamer's writers craved a sequel. The magazine said the title was proof of the company's inventiveness. Steve Ellis, who was a programmer at Rare, thought Blast Corps to be among the company's most underrated games, and though its physics were now dated, he continued to find the game fun enough to revisit regularly. Blast Corps is included in Rare Replay, a compilation of 30 Rare titles, released on the Xbox One on August 4, 2015. The release's bonus features included behind-the-scenes interviews with Blast Corps's developers. Blast Corps was a standout favorite among Rare Replay reviewers.
Rare's Blast Corps began a run of highly praised Nintendo 64 games, including GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Jet Force Gemini. Retro Gamer wrote that Rare had doubled the number of classic Nintendo 64 games and was an important alliance for Nintendo. Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002 for a record price of \$377 million. After the industry had changed, Blast Corps designer Martin Wakeley reflected a decade after the game's 1997 release. In 2009, Wakeley said, a studio would rarely entrust the scope of a project like Blast Corps to a team of four recent graduates.
The staff of Nintendo Power (1997) and IGN (2014) both listed Blast Corps in the bottom halves of their top 100 Nintendo games of all time. Official Nintendo Magazine ranked the game 84th on a list of the greatest Nintendo games. |
62,200 | Oganesson | 1,173,641,064 | null | [
"2002 introductions",
"Chemical elements",
"Noble gases",
"Oganesson",
"Synthetic elements"
]
| Oganesson is a synthetic chemical element with the symbol Og and atomic number 118. It was first synthesized in 2002 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, near Moscow, Russia, by a joint team of Russian and American scientists. In December 2015, it was recognized as one of four new elements by the Joint Working Party of the international scientific bodies IUPAC and IUPAP. It was formally named on 28 November 2016. The name honors the nuclear physicist Yuri Oganessian, who played a leading role in the discovery of the heaviest elements in the periodic table. It is one of only two elements named after a person who was alive at the time of naming, the other being seaborgium, and the only element whose eponym is alive as of 2023.
Oganesson has the highest atomic number and highest atomic mass of all known elements. The radioactive oganesson atom is very unstable, and since 2005, only five (possibly six) atoms of the isotope oganesson-294 have been detected. Although this allowed very little experimental characterization of its properties and possible compounds, theoretical calculations have resulted in many predictions, including some surprising ones. For example, although oganesson is a member of group 18 (the noble gases) – the first synthetic element to be so – it may be significantly reactive, unlike all the other elements of that group. It was formerly thought to be a gas under normal conditions but is now predicted to be a solid due to relativistic effects. On the periodic table of the elements it is a p-block element and the last one of period 7.
## Introduction
## History
### Early speculation
The possibility of a seventh noble gas, after helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon, was considered almost as soon as the noble gas group was discovered. Danish chemist Hans Peter Jørgen Julius Thomsen predicted in April 1895, the year after the discovery of argon, that there was a whole series of chemically inert gases similar to argon that would bridge the halogen and alkali metal groups: he expected that the seventh of this series would end a 32-element period which contained thorium and uranium and have an atomic weight of 292, close to the 294 now known for the first and only confirmed isotope of oganesson. Danish physicist Niels Bohr noted in 1922 that this seventh noble gas should have atomic number 118 and predicted its electronic structure as 2, 8, 18, 32, 32, 18, 8, matching modern predictions. Following this, German chemist Aristid von Grosse wrote an article in 1965 predicting the likely properties of element 118. It was 107 years from Thomsen's prediction before oganesson was successfully synthesized, although its chemical properties have not been investigated to determine if it behaves as the heavier congener of radon. In a 1975 article, American chemist Kenneth Pitzer suggested that element 118 should be a gas or volatile liquid due to relativistic effects.
### Unconfirmed discovery claims
In late 1998, Polish physicist Robert Smolańczuk published calculations on the fusion of atomic nuclei towards the synthesis of superheavy atoms, including oganesson. His calculations suggested that it might be possible to make element 118 by fusing lead with krypton under carefully controlled conditions, and that the fusion probability (cross section) of that reaction would be close to the lead–chromium reaction that had produced element 106, seaborgium. This contradicted predictions that the cross sections for reactions with lead or bismuth targets would go down exponentially as the atomic number of the resulting elements increased.
In 1999, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory made use of these predictions and announced the discovery of elements 118 and 116, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, and very soon after the results were reported in Science. The researchers reported that they had performed the reaction
<sup>208</sup>
<sub>82</sub>Pb
+ <sup>86</sup>
<sub>36</sub>Kr
→ <sup>293</sup>
<sub>118</sub>Og
+ .
In 2001, they published a retraction after researchers at other laboratories were unable to duplicate the results and the Berkeley lab could not duplicate them either. In June 2002, the director of the lab announced that the original claim of the discovery of these two elements had been based on data fabricated by principal author Victor Ninov. Newer experimental results and theoretical predictions have confirmed the exponential decrease in cross sections with lead and bismuth targets as the atomic number of the resulting nuclide increases.
### Discovery reports
The first genuine decay of atoms of oganesson was observed in 2002 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, by a joint team of Russian and American scientists. Headed by Yuri Oganessian, a Russian nuclear physicist of Armenian ethnicity, the team included American scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The discovery was not announced immediately, because the decay energy of <sup>294</sup>Og matched that of <sup>212m</sup>Po, a common impurity produced in fusion reactions aimed at producing superheavy elements, and thus announcement was delayed until after a 2005 confirmatory experiment aimed at producing more oganesson atoms. The 2005 experiment used a different beam energy (251 MeV instead of 245 MeV) and target thickness (0.34 mg/cm<sup>2</sup> instead of 0.23 mg/cm<sup>2</sup>). On 9 October 2006, the researchers announced that they had indirectly detected a total of three (possibly four) nuclei of oganesson-294 (one or two in 2002 and two more in 2005) produced via collisions of californium-249 atoms and calcium-48 ions.
<sup>249</sup>
<sub>98</sub>Cf
+ <sup>48</sup>
<sub>20</sub>Ca
→ <sup>294</sup>
<sub>118</sub>Og
+ 3 .
In 2011, IUPAC evaluated the 2006 results of the Dubna–Livermore collaboration and concluded: "The three events reported for the Z = 118 isotope have very good internal redundancy but with no anchor to known nuclei do not satisfy the criteria for discovery".
Because of the very small fusion reaction probability (the fusion cross section is or (3–6)×10<sup>−41</sup> m<sup>2</sup>) the experiment took four months and involved a beam dose of 2.5×10<sup>19</sup> calcium ions that had to be shot at the californium target to produce the first recorded event believed to be the synthesis of oganesson. Nevertheless, researchers were highly confident that the results were not a false positive, since the chance that the detections were random events was estimated to be less than one part in 100000.
In the experiments, the alpha-decay of three atoms of oganesson was observed. A fourth decay by direct spontaneous fission was also proposed. A half-life of 0.89 ms was calculated: <sup>294</sup>
Og decays into <sup>290</sup>
Lv by alpha decay. Since there were only three nuclei, the half-life derived from observed lifetimes has a large uncertainty: 0.89+1.07
−0.31 ms.
<sup>294</sup>
<sub>118</sub>Og
→ <sup>290</sup>
<sub>116</sub>Lv
+ <sup>4</sup>
<sub>2</sub>He
The identification of the <sup>294</sup>
Og nuclei was verified by separately creating the putative daughter nucleus <sup>290</sup>
Lv directly by means of a bombardment of <sup>245</sup>
Cm with <sup>48</sup>
Ca ions,
<sup>245</sup>
<sub>96</sub>Cm
+ <sup>48</sup>
<sub>20</sub>Ca
→ <sup>290</sup>
<sub>116</sub>Lv
+ 3 ,
and checking that the <sup>290</sup>
Lv decay matched the decay chain of the <sup>294</sup>
Og nuclei. The daughter nucleus <sup>290</sup>
Lv is very unstable, decaying with a lifetime of 14 milliseconds into <sup>286</sup>
Fl, which may experience either spontaneous fission or alpha decay into <sup>282</sup>
Cn, which will undergo spontaneous fission.
### Confirmation
In December 2015, the Joint Working Party of international scientific bodies International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) recognized the element's discovery and assigned the priority of the discovery to the Dubna–Livermore collaboration. This was on account of two 2009 and 2010 confirmations of the properties of the granddaughter of <sup>294</sup>Og, <sup>286</sup>Fl, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as the observation of another consistent decay chain of <sup>294</sup>Og by the Dubna group in 2012. The goal of that experiment had been the synthesis of <sup>294</sup>Ts via the reaction <sup>249</sup>Bk(<sup>48</sup>Ca,3n), but the short half-life of <sup>249</sup>Bk resulted in a significant quantity of the target having decayed to <sup>249</sup>Cf, resulting in the synthesis of oganesson instead of tennessine.
From 1 October 2015 to 6 April 2016, the Dubna team performed a similar experiment with <sup>48</sup>Ca projectiles aimed at a mixed-isotope californium target containing <sup>249</sup>Cf, <sup>250</sup>Cf, and <sup>251</sup>Cf, with the aim of producing the heavier oganesson isotopes <sup>295</sup>Og and <sup>296</sup>Og. Two beam energies at 252 MeV and 258 MeV were used. Only one atom was seen at the lower beam energy, whose decay chain fitted the previously known one of <sup>294</sup>Og (terminating with spontaneous fission of <sup>286</sup>Fl), and none were seen at the higher beam energy. The experiment was then halted, as the glue from the sector frames covered the target and blocked evaporation residues from escaping to the detectors. The production of <sup>293</sup>Og and its daughter <sup>289</sup>Lv, as well as the even heavier isotope <sup>297</sup>Og, is also possible using this reaction. The isotopes <sup>295</sup>Og and <sup>296</sup>Og may also be produced in the fusion of <sup>248</sup>Cm with <sup>50</sup>Ti projectiles. A search beginning in summer 2016 at RIKEN for <sup>295</sup>Og in the 3n channel of this reaction was unsuccessful, though the study is planned to resume; a detailed analysis and cross section limit were not provided. These heavier and likely more stable isotopes may be useful in probing the chemistry of oganesson.
### Naming
Using Mendeleev's nomenclature for unnamed and undiscovered elements, oganesson is sometimes known as eka-radon (until the 1960s as eka-emanation, emanation being the old name for radon). In 1979, IUPAC assigned the systematic placeholder name ununoctium to the undiscovered element, with the corresponding symbol of Uuo, and recommended that it be used until after confirmed discovery of the element. Although widely used in the chemical community on all levels, from chemistry classrooms to advanced textbooks, the recommendations were mostly ignored among scientists in the field, who called it "element 118", with the symbol of E118, (118), or even simply 118.
Before the retraction in 2001, the researchers from Berkeley had intended to name the element ghiorsium (Gh), after Albert Ghiorso (a leading member of the research team).
The Russian discoverers reported their synthesis in 2006. According to IUPAC recommendations, the discoverers of a new element have the right to suggest a name. In 2007, the head of the Russian institute stated the team were considering two names for the new element: flyorium, in honor of Georgy Flyorov, the founder of the research laboratory in Dubna; and moskovium, in recognition of the Moscow Oblast where Dubna is located. He also stated that although the element was discovered as an American collaboration, who provided the californium target, the element should rightly be named in honor of Russia since the Flyorov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at JINR was the only facility in the world which could achieve this result. These names were later suggested for element 114 (flerovium) and element 116 (moscovium). Flerovium became the name of element 114; the final name proposed for element 116 was instead livermorium, with moscovium later being proposed and accepted for element 115 instead.
Traditionally, the names of all noble gases end in "-on", with the exception of helium, which was not known to be a noble gas when discovered. The IUPAC guidelines valid at the moment of the discovery approval however required all new elements be named with the ending "-ium", even if they turned out to be halogens (traditionally ending in "-ine") or noble gases (traditionally ending in "-on"). While the provisional name ununoctium followed this convention, a new IUPAC recommendation published in 2016 recommended using the "-on" ending for new group 18 elements, regardless of whether they turn out to have the chemical properties of a noble gas.
The scientists involved in the discovery of element 118, as well as those of 117 and 115, held a conference call on 23 March 2016 to decide their names. Element 118 was the last to be decided upon; after Oganessian was asked to leave the call, the remaining scientists unanimously decided to have the element "oganesson" after him. Oganessian was a pioneer in superheavy element research for sixty years reaching back to the field's foundation: his team and his proposed techniques had led directly to the synthesis of elements 107 through 118. Mark Stoyer, a nuclear chemist at the LLNL, later recalled, "We had intended to propose that name from Livermore, and things kind of got proposed at the same time from multiple places. I don't know if we can claim that we actually proposed the name, but we had intended it."
In internal discussions, IUPAC asked the JINR if they wanted the element to be spelled "oganeson" to match the Russian spelling more closely. Oganessian and the JINR refused this offer, citing the Soviet-era practice of transliterating names into the Latin alphabet under the rules of the French language ("Oganessian" is such a transliteration) and arguing that "oganesson" would be easier to link to the person. In June 2016, IUPAC announced that the discoverers planned to give the element the name oganesson (symbol: Og). The name became official on 28 November 2016. In 2017, Oganessian commented on the naming:
> For me, it is an honour. The discovery of element 118 was by scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, and it was my colleagues who proposed the name oganesson. My children and grandchildren have been living in the US for decades, but my daughter wrote to me to say that she did not sleep the night she heard because she was crying.
The naming ceremony for moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson was held on 2 March 2017 at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
In a 2019 interview, when asked what it was like to see his name in the periodic table next to Einstein, Mendeleev, the Curies, and Rutherford, Oganessian responded:
> Not like much! You see, not like much. It is customary in science to name something new after its discoverer. It's just that there are few elements, and this happens rarely. But look at how many equations and theorems in mathematics are named after somebody. And in medicine? Alzheimer, Parkinson. There's nothing special about it.
## Characteristics
Other than nuclear properties, no properties of oganesson or its compounds have been measured; this is due to its extremely limited and expensive production and the fact that it decays very quickly. Thus only predictions are available.
### Nuclear stability and isotopes
The stability of nuclei quickly decreases with the increase in atomic number after curium, element 96, whose most stable isotope, <sup>247</sup>Cm, has a half-life four orders of magnitude longer than that of any subsequent element. All nuclides with an atomic number above 101 undergo radioactive decay with half-lives shorter than 30 hours. No elements with atomic numbers above 82 (after lead) have stable isotopes. This is because of the ever-increasing Coulomb repulsion of protons, so that the strong nuclear force cannot hold the nucleus together against spontaneous fission for long. Calculations suggest that in the absence of other stabilizing factors, elements with more than 104 protons should not exist. However, researchers in the 1960s suggested that the closed nuclear shells around 114 protons and 184 neutrons should counteract this instability, creating an island of stability in which nuclides could have half-lives reaching thousands or millions of years. While scientists have still not reached the island, the mere existence of the superheavy elements (including oganesson) confirms that this stabilizing effect is real, and in general the known superheavy nuclides become exponentially longer-lived as they approach the predicted location of the island. Oganesson is radioactive, decaying via alpha decay and spontaneous fission, with a half-life that appears to be less than a millisecond. Nonetheless, this is still longer than some predicted values.
Calculations using a quantum-tunneling model predict the existence of several heavier isotopes of oganesson with alpha-decay half-lives close to 1 ms.
Theoretical calculations done on the synthetic pathways for, and the half-life of, other isotopes have shown that some could be slightly more stable than the synthesized isotope <sup>294</sup>Og, most likely <sup>293</sup>Og, <sup>295</sup>Og, <sup>296</sup>Og, <sup>297</sup>Og, <sup>298</sup>Og, <sup>300</sup>Og and <sup>302</sup>Og (the last reaching the N = 184 shell closure). Of these, <sup>297</sup>Og might provide the best chances for obtaining longer-lived nuclei, and thus might become the focus of future work with this element. Some isotopes with many more neutrons, such as some located around <sup>313</sup>Og, could also provide longer-lived nuclei.
In a quantum-tunneling model, the alpha decay half-life of <sup>294</sup>
Og was predicted to be 0.66+0.23
−0.18 ms with the experimental Q-value published in 2004. Calculation with theoretical Q-values from the macroscopic-microscopic model of Muntian–Hofman–Patyk–Sobiczewski gives somewhat lower but comparable results.
### Calculated atomic and physical properties
Oganesson is a member of group 18, the zero-valence elements. The members of this group are usually inert to most common chemical reactions (for example, combustion) because the outer valence shell is completely filled with eight electrons. This produces a stable, minimum energy configuration in which the outer electrons are tightly bound. It is thought that similarly, oganesson has a closed outer valence shell in which its valence electrons are arranged in a 7s<sup>2</sup>7p<sup>6</sup> configuration.
Consequently, some expect oganesson to have similar physical and chemical properties to other members of its group, most closely resembling the noble gas above it in the periodic table, radon. Following the periodic trend, oganesson would be expected to be slightly more reactive than radon. However, theoretical calculations have shown that it could be significantly more reactive. In addition to being far more reactive than radon, oganesson may be even more reactive than the elements flerovium and copernicium, which are heavier homologs of the more chemically active elements lead and mercury respectively. The reason for the possible enhancement of the chemical activity of oganesson relative to radon is an energetic destabilization and a radial expansion of the last occupied 7p-subshell. More precisely, considerable spin–orbit interactions between the 7p electrons and the inert 7s electrons effectively lead to a second valence shell closing at flerovium, and a significant decrease in stabilization of the closed shell of oganesson. It has also been calculated that oganesson, unlike the other noble gases, binds an electron with release of energy, or in other words, it exhibits positive electron affinity, due to the relativistically stabilized 8s energy level and the destabilized 7p<sub>3/2</sub> level, whereas copernicium and flerovium are predicted to have no electron affinity. Nevertheless, quantum electrodynamic corrections have been shown to be quite significant in reducing this affinity by decreasing the binding in the anion Og<sup>−</sup> by 9%, thus confirming the importance of these corrections in superheavy elements. 2022 calculations expect the electron affinity of oganesson to be 0.080(6) eV.
By using Monte Carlo simulations and molecular dynamics methods benchmarked against highly accurate relativistic coupled cluster calculations, it could be shown that oganesson has a melting point of 325±15 K and a boiling point of 450±10 K. The underlying reason for this behavior can be found in spin–orbit relativistic effects (non-relativistic oganesson would melt around 220 K). Thus oganesson would probably be a solid rather than a gas under standard conditions, though still with a rather low melting point.
Oganesson is expected to have an extremely broad polarizability, almost double that of radon. Because of its tremendous polarizability, oganesson is expected to have an anomalously low first ionization energy of about 860 kJ/mol, similar to that of cadmium and less than those of iridium, platinum, and gold. This is significantly smaller than the values predicted for darmstadtium, roentgenium, and copernicium, although it is greater than that predicted for flerovium. Its second ionization energy should be around 1560 kJ/mol. Even the shell structure in the nucleus and electron cloud of oganesson is strongly impacted by relativistic effects: the valence and core electron subshells in oganesson are expected to be "smeared out" in a homogeneous Fermi gas of electrons, unlike those of the "less relativistic" radon and xenon (although there is some incipient delocalisation in radon), due to the very strong spin–orbit splitting of the 7p orbital in oganesson. A similar effect for nucleons, particularly neutrons, is incipient in the closed-neutron-shell nucleus <sup>302</sup>Og and is strongly in force at the hypothetical superheavy closed-shell nucleus <sup>472</sup>164, with 164 protons and 308 neutrons. Studies have also predicted that due to increasing electrostatic forces, oganesson may have a semibubble structure in proton density, having few protons at the center of its nucleus. Moreover, spin–orbit effects may cause bulk oganesson to be a semiconductor, with a band gap of 1.5±0.6 eV predicted. All the lighter noble gases are insulators instead: for example, the band gap of bulk radon is expected to be 7.1±0.5 eV.
### Predicted compounds
The only confirmed isotope of oganesson, <sup>294</sup>Og, has much too short a half-life to be chemically investigated experimentally. Therefore, no compounds of oganesson have been synthesized yet. Nevertheless, calculations on theoretical compounds have been performed since 1964. It is expected that if the ionization energy of the element is high enough, it will be difficult to oxidize and therefore, the most common oxidation state would be 0 (as for the noble gases); nevertheless, this appears not to be the case.
Calculations on the diatomic molecule Og
<sub>2</sub> showed a bonding interaction roughly equivalent to that calculated for Hg
<sub>2</sub>, and a dissociation energy of 6 kJ/mol, roughly 4 times of that of Rn
<sub>2</sub>. Most strikingly, it was calculated to have a bond length shorter than in Rn
<sub>2</sub> by 0.16 Å, which would be indicative of a significant bonding interaction. On the other hand, the compound OgH<sup>+</sup> exhibits a dissociation energy (in other words proton affinity of oganesson) that is smaller than that of RnH<sup>+</sup>.
The bonding between oganesson and hydrogen in OgH is predicted to be very weak and can be regarded as a pure van der Waals interaction rather than a true chemical bond. On the other hand, with highly electronegative elements, oganesson seems to form more stable compounds than for example copernicium or flerovium. The stable oxidation states +2 and +4 have been predicted to exist in the fluorides OgF
<sub>2</sub> and OgF
<sub>4</sub>. The +6 state would be less stable due to the strong binding of the 7p<sub>1/2</sub> subshell. This is a result of the same spin–orbit interactions that make oganesson unusually reactive. For example, it was shown that the reaction of oganesson with F
<sub>2</sub> to form the compound OgF
<sub>2</sub> would release an energy of 106 kcal/mol of which about 46 kcal/mol come from these interactions. For comparison, the spin–orbit interaction for the similar molecule RnF
<sub>2</sub> is about 10 kcal/mol out of a formation energy of 49 kcal/mol. The same interaction stabilizes the tetrahedral T<sub>d</sub> configuration for OgF
<sub>4</sub>, as distinct from the square planar D<sub>4h</sub> one of XeF
<sub>4</sub>, which RnF
<sub>4</sub> is also expected to have; this is because OgF<sub>4</sub> is expected to have two inert electron pairs (7s and 7p<sub>1/2</sub>). As such, OgF<sub>6</sub> is expected to be unbound, continuing an expected trend in the destabilisation of the +6 oxidation state (RnF<sub>6</sub> is likewise expected to be much less stable than XeF<sub>6</sub>). The Og–F bond will most probably be ionic rather than covalent, rendering the oganesson fluorides non-volatile. OgF<sub>2</sub> is predicted to be partially ionic due to oganesson's high electropositivity. Oganesson is predicted to be sufficiently electropositive to form an Og–Cl bond with chlorine.
A compound of oganesson and tennessine, OgTs<sub>4</sub>, has been predicted to be potentially stable chemically.
## See also
- Island of stability
- Superheavy element
- Transuranium element |
46,823 | George V | 1,173,557,296 | King of the United Kingdom & Emperor of India from 1910 to 1936 | [
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| George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert; 3 June 1865 – 20 January 1936) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 until his death in 1936.
Born during the reign of his grandmother Queen Victoria, George was the second son of the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra), and was third in the line of succession to the British throne behind his father and his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor. From 1877 to 1892, George served in the Royal Navy, until the unexpected death of his elder brother in early 1892 put him directly in line for the throne. George married his brother's fiancée, Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, the following year, and they had six children. Following the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, George's father ascended the throne as Edward VII, and George was created Prince of Wales. He became king-emperor on his father's death in 1910.
George's reign saw the rise of socialism, communism, fascism, Irish republicanism, and the Indian independence movement, all of which radically changed the political landscape of the British Empire, which itself reached its territorial peak by the beginning of the 1920s. The Parliament Act 1911 established the supremacy of the elected British House of Commons over the unelected House of Lords. As a result of the First World War (1914–1918), the empires of his first cousins Nicholas II of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany fell, while the British Empire expanded to its greatest effective extent. In 1917, George became the first monarch of the House of Windsor, which he renamed from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha as a result of anti-German public sentiment. He appointed the first Labour ministry in 1924, and the 1931 Statute of Westminster recognised the Empire's dominions as separate, independent states within the British Commonwealth of Nations.
George suffered from smoking-related health problems throughout much of his later reign. On his death in January 1936, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII. Edward abdicated in December of that year and was succeeded by his younger brother Albert, who took the regnal name George VI.
## Early life and education
George was born on 3 June 1865, in Marlborough House, London. He was the second son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and Alexandra, Princess of Wales. His father was the eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and his mother was the eldest daughter of King Christian IX and Queen Louise of Denmark. He was baptised at Windsor Castle on 7 July 1865 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Longley.
As a younger son of the Prince of Wales, there was little expectation that George would become king. He was third in line to the throne, after his father, and elder brother, Prince Albert Victor. George was only 17 months younger than Albert Victor, and the two princes were educated together. John Neale Dalton was appointed as their tutor in 1871. Neither Albert Victor nor George excelled intellectually. As their father thought that the navy was "the very best possible training for any boy", in September 1877, when George was 12 years old, both brothers joined the cadet training ship HMS Britannia at Dartmouth, Devon.
For three years from 1879, the princes served on HMS Bacchante, accompanied by Dalton. They toured the colonies of the British Empire in the Caribbean, South Africa and Australia, and visited Norfolk, Virginia, as well as South America, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and East Asia. In 1881 on a visit to Japan, George had a local artist tattoo a blue and red dragon on his arm, and was received in an audience by the Emperor Meiji; George and his brother presented Empress Haruko with two wallabies from Australia. Dalton wrote an account of their journey entitled The Cruise of HMS Bacchante. Between Melbourne and Sydney, Dalton recorded a sighting of the Flying Dutchman, a mythical ghost ship. When they returned to Britain, the Queen complained that her grandsons could not speak French or German, and so they spent six months in Lausanne in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to learn another language. After Lausanne, the brothers were separated; Albert Victor attended Trinity College, Cambridge, while George continued in the Royal Navy. He travelled the world, visiting many areas of the British Empire. During his naval career he commanded Torpedo Boat 79 in home waters, then HMS Thrush on the North America and West Indies Station. His last active service was in command of HMS Melampus in 1891–1892. From then on, his naval rank was largely honorary.
## Marriage
As a young man destined to serve in the navy, Prince George served for many years under the command of his uncle Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who was stationed in Malta. There, he grew close to and fell in love with his cousin Princess Marie of Edinburgh. His grandmother, father and uncle all approved the match, but his own mother and Marie's mother opposed it. The Princess of Wales thought the family was too pro-German, and the Duchess of Edinburgh disliked England. The Duchess, the only daughter of Alexander II of Russia, resented the fact that, as the wife of a younger son of the British sovereign, she had to yield precedence to George's mother, the Princess of Wales, whose father had been a minor German prince before being called unexpectedly to the throne of Denmark. Guided by her mother, Marie refused George when he proposed to her. She married Ferdinand, the future king of Romania, in 1893.
In November 1891, George's elder brother, Albert Victor, became engaged to his second cousin once removed Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, known as "May" within the family. Her parents were Francis, Duke of Teck (a member of a morganatic, cadet branch of the House of Württemberg), and Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, a male-line granddaughter of George III and a first cousin of Queen Victoria.
On 14 January 1892, six weeks after the formal engagement, Albert Victor died of pneumonia during an influenza pandemic, leaving George second in line to the throne, and likely to succeed after his father. George had only just recovered from a serious illness himself, having been confined to bed for six weeks with typhoid fever, the disease that was thought to have killed his grandfather Prince Albert. Queen Victoria still regarded Princess May as a suitable match for her grandson, and George and May grew close during their shared period of mourning.
A year after Albert Victor's death, George proposed to May and was accepted. They married on 6 July 1893 at the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace, London. Throughout their lives, they remained devoted to each other. George was, on his own admission, unable to express his feelings easily in speech, but they often exchanged loving letters and notes of endearment.
## Duke of York
The death of his elder brother effectively ended George's naval career, as he was now second in line to the throne, after his father. George was created Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, and Baron Killarney by Queen Victoria on 24 May 1892, and received lessons in constitutional history from J. R. Tanner.
The Duke and Duchess of York had five sons and a daughter. Randolph Churchill claimed that George was a strict father, to the extent that his children were terrified of him, and that George had remarked to the Earl of Derby: "My father was frightened of his mother, I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me." In reality, there is no direct source for the quotation and it is likely that George's parenting style was little different from that adopted by most people at the time. Whether this was the case or not, his children did seem to resent his strict nature, his son Prince Henry going as far as to describe him as a "terrible father" in later years.
They lived mainly at York Cottage, a relatively small house in Sandringham, Norfolk, where their way of life mirrored that of a comfortable middle-class family rather than royalty. George preferred a simple, almost quiet, life, in marked contrast to the lively social life pursued by his father. His official biographer, Harold Nicolson, later despaired of George's time as Duke of York, writing: "He may be all right as a young midshipman and a wise old king, but when he was Duke of York ... he did nothing at all but kill [i.e. shoot] animals and stick in stamps." George was an avid stamp collector, which Nicolson disparaged, but George played a large role in building the Royal Philatelic Collection into the most comprehensive collection of United Kingdom and Commonwealth stamps in the world, in some cases setting record purchase prices for items.
In October 1894, George's maternal uncle-by-marriage, Alexander III of Russia, died. At the request of his father, "out of respect for poor dear Uncle Sasha's memory", George joined his parents in Saint Petersburg for the funeral. He and his parents remained in Russia for the wedding a week later of the new Russian emperor, his maternal first cousin Nicholas II, to one of George's paternal first cousins, Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, who had once been considered as a potential bride for George's elder brother.
## Prince of Wales
As Duke of York, George carried out a wide variety of public duties. On the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901, George's father ascended the throne as King Edward VII. George inherited the title of Duke of Cornwall, and for much of the rest of that year, he was known as the Duke of Cornwall and York.
In 1901, the Duke and Duchess toured the British Empire. Their tour included Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Aden, Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Mauritius, South Africa, Canada, and the Colony of Newfoundland. The tour was designed by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain with the support of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury to reward the Dominions for their participation in the South African War of 1899–1902. George presented thousands of specially designed South African War medals to colonial troops. In South Africa, the royal party met civic leaders, African leaders, and Boer prisoners, and was greeted by elaborate decorations, expensive gifts, and fireworks displays. Despite this, not all residents responded favourably to the tour. Many white Cape Afrikaners resented the display and expense, the war having weakened their capacity to reconcile their Afrikaner-Dutch culture with their status as British subjects. Critics in the English-language press decried the enormous cost at a time when families faced severe hardship.
In Australia, George opened the first session of the Australian Parliament upon the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia. In New Zealand, he praised the military values, bravery, loyalty, and obedience to duty of New Zealanders, and the tour gave New Zealand a chance to show off its progress, especially in its adoption of up-to-date British standards in communications and the processing industries. The implicit goal was to advertise New Zealand's attractiveness to tourists and potential immigrants, while avoiding news of growing social tensions, by focusing the attention of the British press on a land few knew about. On his return to Britain, in a speech at Guildhall, London, George warned of "the impression which seemed to prevail among [our] brethren across the seas, that the Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her colonial trade against foreign competitors."
On 9 November 1901, George was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. King Edward wished to prepare his son for his future role as king. In contrast to Edward himself, whom Queen Victoria had deliberately excluded from state affairs, George was given wide access to state documents by his father. George in turn allowed his wife access to his papers, as he valued her counsel and she often helped write her husband's speeches. As Prince of Wales, he supported reforms in naval training, including cadets being enrolled at the ages of twelve and thirteen, and receiving the same education, whatever their class and eventual assignments. The reforms were implemented by the then Second (later First) Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher.
From November 1905 to March 1906, George and May toured British India, where he was disgusted by racial discrimination and campaigned for greater involvement of Indians in the government of the country. The tour was almost immediately followed by a trip to Spain for the wedding of King Alfonso XIII to George's first cousin Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, at which the bride and groom narrowly avoided assassination when the driver of their coach and more than a dozen spectators were killed by a bomb thrown by an anarchist, Mateu Morral. A week after returning to Britain, George and May travelled to Norway for the coronation of King Haakon VII, George's cousin and brother-in-law, and Queen Maud, George's sister.
## Reign
On 6 May 1910, Edward VII died, and George became king. He wrote in his diary,
> I have lost my best friend and the best of fathers ... I never had a [cross] word with him in my life. I am heart-broken and overwhelmed with grief but God will help me in my responsibilities and darling May will be my comfort as she has always been. May God give me strength and guidance in the heavy task which has fallen on me.
George had never liked his wife's habit of signing official documents and letters as "Victoria Mary" and insisted she drop one of those names. They both thought she should not be called Queen Victoria, and so she became Queen Mary. Later that year, a radical propagandist, Edward Mylius, published a lie that George had secretly married in Malta as a young man, and that consequently his marriage to Queen Mary was bigamous. The lie had first surfaced in print in 1893, but George had shrugged it off as a joke. In an effort to kill off rumours, Mylius was arrested, tried and found guilty of criminal libel, and was sentenced to a year in prison.
George objected to the anti-Catholic wording of the Accession Declaration that he would be required to make at the opening of his first parliament. He made it known that he would refuse to open parliament unless it was changed. As a result, the Accession Declaration Act 1910 shortened the declaration and removed the most offensive phrases.
George and Mary's coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on 22 June 1911, and was celebrated by the Festival of Empire in London. In July, the King and Queen visited Ireland for five days; they received a warm welcome, with thousands of people lining the route of their procession to cheer. Later in 1911, the King and Queen travelled to India for the Delhi Durbar, where they were presented to an assembled audience of Indian dignitaries and princes as the Emperor and Empress of India on 12 December 1911. George wore the newly created Imperial Crown of India at the ceremony, and declared the shifting of the Indian capital from Calcutta to Delhi. He was the only Emperor of India to be present at his own Delhi Durbar. As he and Mary travelled throughout the subcontinent, George took the opportunity to indulge in big game hunting in Nepal, shooting 21 tigers, 8 rhinoceroses and a bear over 10 days. He was a keen and expert marksman. On a later occasion, on 18 December 1913, he shot over a thousand pheasants in six hours (about one bird every 20 seconds) while visiting the home of Lord Burnham. Even George had to acknowledge that "we went a little too far" that day.
### National politics
George inherited the throne at a politically turbulent time. Lloyd George's People's Budget had been rejected the previous year by the Conservative and Unionist-dominated House of Lords, contrary to the normal convention that the Lords did not veto money bills. Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith had asked the previous king to give an undertaking that he would create sufficient Liberal peers to force the budget through the House. Edward had reluctantly agreed, provided the Lords rejected the budget after two successive general elections. After the January 1910 general election, the Conservative peers allowed the budget, for which the government now had an electoral mandate, to pass without a vote.
Asquith attempted to curtail the power of the Lords through constitutional reforms, which were again blocked by the Upper House. A constitutional conference on the reforms broke down in November 1910 after 21 meetings. Asquith and Lord Crewe, Liberal leader in the Lords, asked George to grant a dissolution, leading to a second general election, and to promise to create sufficient Liberal peers if the Lords blocked the legislation again. If George refused, the Liberal government would otherwise resign, which would have given the appearance that the monarch was taking sides – with "the peers against the people" – in party politics. The King's two private secretaries, the Liberal Lord Knollys and the Unionist Lord Stamfordham, gave George conflicting advice. Knollys advised George to accept the Cabinet's demands, while Stamfordham advised George to accept the resignation. Like his father, George reluctantly agreed to the dissolution and creation of peers, although he felt his ministers had taken advantage of his inexperience to browbeat him. After the December 1910 general election, the Lords let the bill pass on hearing of the threat to swamp the house with new peers. The subsequent Parliament Act 1911 permanently removed – with a few exceptions – the power of the Lords to veto bills. George later came to feel that Knollys had withheld information from him about the willingness of the opposition to form a government if the Liberals had resigned.
The 1910 general elections had left the Liberals as a minority government dependent upon the support of the Irish Nationalist Party. As desired by the Nationalists, Asquith introduced legislation that would give Ireland Home Rule, but the Conservatives and Unionists opposed it. As tempers rose over the Home Rule Bill, which would never have been possible without the Parliament Act, relations between the elderly Knollys and the Conservatives became poor, and he was pushed into retirement. Desperate to avoid the prospect of civil war in Ireland between Unionists and Nationalists, George called a meeting of all parties at Buckingham Palace in July 1914 in an attempt to negotiate a settlement. After four days the conference ended without an agreement. Political developments in Britain and Ireland were overtaken by events in Europe, and the issue of Irish Home Rule was suspended for the duration of the war.
### First World War
On 4 August 1914, George wrote in his diary, "I held a council at 10:45 to declare war with Germany. It is a terrible catastrophe but it is not our fault. ... Please to God it may soon be over." From 1914 to 1918, Britain and its allies were at war with the Central Powers, led by the German Empire. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who for the British public came to symbolise all the horrors of the war, was the King's first cousin. George's paternal grandfather was Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; consequently, the King and his children bore the German titles Prince and Princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Duke and Duchess of Saxony. Queen Mary, although born in England like her mother, was the daughter of the Duke of Teck, a descendant of the German Dukes of Württemberg. George had brothers-in-law and cousins who were British subjects but who bore German titles such as Duke and Duchess of Teck, Prince and Princess of Battenberg, and Prince and Princess of Schleswig-Holstein. When H. G. Wells wrote about Britain's "alien and uninspiring court", George replied: "I may be uninspiring, but I'll be damned if I'm alien."
On 17 July 1917, George appeased British nationalist feelings by issuing a royal proclamation that changed the name of the British royal house from the German-sounding House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor. He and all his British relatives relinquished their German titles and styles and adopted British-sounding surnames. George compensated his male relatives by giving them British peerages. His cousin Prince Louis of Battenberg, who earlier in the war had been forced to resign as First Sea Lord through anti-German feeling, became Louis Mountbatten, 1st Marquess of Milford Haven, while Queen Mary's brothers became Adolphus Cambridge, 1st Marquess of Cambridge, and Alexander Cambridge, 1st Earl of Athlone.
In letters patent gazetted on 11 December 1917, the King restricted the style of "Royal Highness" and the titular dignity of "Prince (or Princess) of Great Britain and Ireland" to the children of the Sovereign, the children of the sons of the Sovereign and the eldest living son of the eldest son of a Prince of Wales. The letters patent also stated that "the titles of Royal Highness, Highness or Serene Highness, and the titular dignity of Prince and Princess shall cease except those titles already granted and remaining unrevoked". George's relatives who fought on the German side, such as Ernest Augustus, Crown Prince of Hanover, and Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, had their British peerages suspended by a 1919 Order in Council under the provisions of the Titles Deprivation Act 1917. Under pressure from his mother, George also removed the Garter flags of his German relations from St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.
When Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, George's first cousin, was overthrown in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the British government offered political asylum to the Tsar and his family, but worsening conditions for the British people, and fears that revolution might come to the British Isles, led George to think that the presence of the Romanovs would be seen as inappropriate. Despite the later claims of Lord Mountbatten of Burma that Prime Minister David Lloyd George was opposed to the rescue of the Russian imperial family, the letters of Lord Stamfordham suggest that it was George V who opposed the idea against the advice of the government. Advance planning for a rescue was undertaken by MI1, a branch of the British secret service, but because of the strengthening position of the Bolshevik revolutionaries and wider difficulties with the conduct of the war, the plan was never put into operation. Nicholas and his immediate family remained in Russia, where they were killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. George wrote in his diary: "It was a foul murder. I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and thorough gentleman: loved his country and people." The following year, Nicholas's mother, Marie Feodorovna, and other members of the extended Russian imperial family were rescued from Crimea by a British warship.
Two months after the end of the war, the King's youngest son, John, died aged 13 after a lifetime of ill health. George was informed of his death by Queen Mary, who wrote, "[John] had been a great anxiety to us for many years ... The first break in the family circle is hard to bear but people have been so kind & sympathetic & this has helped us much."
In May 1922, George toured Belgium and northern France, visiting the First World War cemeteries and memorials being constructed by the Imperial War Graves Commission. The event was described in a poem, The King's Pilgrimage by Rudyard Kipling. The tour, and one short visit to Italy in 1923, were the only times George agreed to leave the United Kingdom on official business after the end of the war.
### Post-war reign
Before the First World War, most of Europe was ruled by monarchs related to George, but during and after the war, the monarchies of Austria, Germany, Greece, and Spain, like Russia, fell to revolution and war. In March 1919, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Lisle Strutt was dispatched on the personal authority of the King to escort the former Emperor Charles I of Austria and his family to safety in Switzerland. In 1922, a Royal Navy ship was sent to Greece to rescue his cousins Prince and Princess Andrew.
Political turmoil in Ireland continued as the Nationalists fought for independence; George expressed his horror at government-sanctioned killings and reprisals to Prime Minister Lloyd George. At the opening session of the Parliament of Northern Ireland on 22 June 1921, the King appealed for conciliation in a speech part drafted by General Jan Smuts and approved by Lloyd George. A few weeks later, a truce was agreed. Negotiations between Britain and the Irish secessionists led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. By the end of 1922, Ireland was partitioned, the Irish Free State was established, and Lloyd George was out of office.
George and his advisers were concerned about the rise of socialism and the growing labour movement, which they mistakenly associated with republicanism. The socialists no longer believed in their anti-monarchical slogans and were ready to come to terms with the monarchy if it took the first step. George adopted a more democratic, inclusive stance that crossed class lines and brought the monarchy closer to the public and the working class—a dramatic change for the King, who was most comfortable with naval officers and landed gentry. He cultivated friendly relations with moderate Labour Party politicians and trade union officials. His abandonment of social aloofness conditioned the royal family's behaviour and enhanced its popularity during the economic crises of the 1920s and for over two generations thereafter.
The years between 1922 and 1929 saw frequent changes in government. In 1924, George appointed the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, in the absence of a clear majority for any one of the three major parties. George's tact in appointing the first Labour government (which lasted less than a year) allayed the suspicions of the party's sympathisers that he would work against their interests. During the General Strike of 1926, George advised the government of Conservative Stanley Baldwin against taking inflammatory action, and took exception to suggestions that the strikers were "revolutionaries" saying, "Try living on their wages before you judge them."
In 1926, George hosted an Imperial Conference in London at which the Balfour Declaration accepted the growth of the British Dominions into self-governing "autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another". The Statute of Westminster 1931 formalised the Dominions' legislative independence and established that the succession to the throne could not be changed unless all the Parliaments of the Dominions as well as the Parliament at Westminster agreed. The Statute's preamble described the monarch as "the symbol of the free association of the members of the British Commonwealth of Nations", who were "united by a common allegiance".
In the wake of a world financial crisis, George encouraged the formation of a National Government in 1931 led by MacDonald and Baldwin, and volunteered to reduce the civil list to help balance the budget. He was concerned by the rise to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. In 1934, George bluntly told the German ambassador Leopold von Hoesch that Germany was now the peril of the world, and that there was bound to be a war within ten years if Germany went on at the present rate; he warned the British ambassador in Berlin, Eric Phipps, to be suspicious of the Nazis.
In 1932, George agreed to deliver a Royal Christmas speech on the radio, an event that became annual thereafter. He was not in favour of the innovation originally but was persuaded by the argument that it was what his people wanted. By the Silver Jubilee of his reign in 1935, he had become a well-loved king, saying in response to the crowd's adulation, "I cannot understand it, after all I am only a very ordinary sort of fellow."
George's relationship with his eldest son and heir, Edward, deteriorated in these later years. George was disappointed in Edward's failure to settle down in life and appalled by his many affairs with married women. In contrast, he was fond of his second son, Prince Albert (later George VI), and doted on his eldest granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth; he nicknamed her "Lilibet", and she affectionately called him "Grandpa England". In 1935, George said of his son Edward: "After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months", and of Albert and Elizabeth: "I pray to God my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne".
## Declining health and death
The First World War took a toll on George's health: he was seriously injured on 28 October 1915 when thrown by his horse at a troop review in France, and his heavy smoking exacerbated recurring breathing problems. He suffered from chronic bronchitis. In 1925, on the instruction of his doctors, he was reluctantly sent on a recuperative private cruise in the Mediterranean; it was his third trip abroad since the war, and his last. In November 1928, he fell seriously ill with septicaemia, which localised between the base of his right lung and diaphragm in the form of an empyema that required drainage. For the next two years his son Edward took over many of his duties. In 1929, the suggestion of a further rest abroad was rejected by the King "in rather strong language". Instead, he retired for three months to Craigweil House, Aldwick, in the seaside resort of Bognor, Sussex. As a result of his stay, the town acquired the suffix Regis – Latin for "of the King". A myth later grew that his last words, upon being told that he would soon be well enough to revisit the town, were "Bugger Bognor!"
George never fully recovered. In his final year, he was occasionally administered oxygen. The death of his favourite sister, Victoria, in December 1935 depressed him deeply. On the evening of 15 January 1936, George took to his bedroom at Sandringham House complaining of a cold; he remained in the room until his death. He became gradually weaker, drifting in and out of consciousness. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin later said:
> ... each time he became conscious it was some kind inquiry or kind observation of someone, some words of gratitude for kindness shown. But he did say to his secretary when he sent for him: "How is the Empire?" An unusual phrase in that form, and the secretary said: "All is well, sir, with the Empire", and the King gave him a smile and relapsed once more into unconsciousness.
By 20 January, George was close to death. His physicians, led by Lord Dawson of Penn, issued a bulletin with the words "The King's life is moving peacefully towards its close." Dawson's private diary, unearthed after his death and made public in 1986, reveals that George's last words, a mumbled "God damn you!", were addressed to his nurse, Catherine Black, when she gave him a sedative that night. Dawson, who supported the "gentle growth of euthanasia", admitted in the diary that he ended the King's life:
> At about 11 o'clock it was evident that the last stage might endure for many hours, unknown to the Patient but little comporting with that dignity and serenity which he so richly merited and which demanded a brief final scene. Hours of waiting just for the mechanical end when all that is really life has departed only exhausts the onlookers & keeps them so strained that they cannot avail themselves of the solace of thought, communion or prayer. I therefore decided to determine the end and injected (myself) morphia gr.3/4 [grains] and shortly afterwards cocaine gr.1 [grains] into the distended jugular vein ... In about 1/4 an hour – breathing quieter – appearance more placid – physical struggle gone.
Dawson wrote that he acted to preserve the King's dignity, to prevent further strain on the family, and so that George's death at 11:55 pm could be announced in the morning edition of The Times newspaper rather than "less appropriate ... evening journals". Neither Queen Mary, who was intensely religious and might not have sanctioned euthanasia, nor the Prince of Wales was consulted. The royal family did not want the King to endure pain and suffering and did not want his life prolonged artificially but neither did they approve Dawson's actions. British Pathé announced the King's death the following day, in which he was described as "for each one of us, more than a King, a father of a great family".
The German composer Paul Hindemith went to a BBC studio on the morning after the King's death and in six hours wrote Trauermusik ("Mourning Music"), for viola and orchestra. It was performed that same evening in a live broadcast by the BBC, with Adrian Boult conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the composer as soloist.
At the procession to George's lying in state in Westminster Hall, the cross surmounting the Imperial State Crown atop George's coffin fell off and landed in the gutter as the cortège turned into New Palace Yard. George's eldest son and successor, Edward VIII, saw it fall and wondered whether it was a bad omen for his new reign. As a mark of respect to their father, George's four surviving sons – Edward, Albert, Henry, and George – mounted the guard, known as the Vigil of the Princes, at the catafalque on the night before the funeral. The vigil was not repeated until the death of George's daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, in 2002. George V was interred at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on 28 January 1936. Edward abdicated before the year was out, leaving Albert to ascend the throne as George VI.
## Legacy
George V disliked sitting for portraits and despised modern art; he was so displeased by one portrait by Charles Sims that he ordered it to be burned. He did admire sculptor Bertram Mackennal, who created statues of George for display in Madras and Delhi, and William Reid Dick, whose statue of George V stands outside Westminster Abbey, London.
Although he and his wife occasionally toured the British Empire, George preferred to stay at home pursuing his hobbies of stamp collecting and game shooting and lived a life that later biographers would consider dull because of its conventionality. He was not an intellectual: on returning from one evening at the opera he wrote, "Went to Covent Garden and saw Fidelio and damned dull it was." He was earnestly devoted to Britain and its Empire. He explained, "it has always been my dream to identify myself with the great idea of Empire." He appeared hard-working and became widely admired by the people of Britain and the Empire, as well as "the Establishment". In the words of historian David Cannadine, King George V and Queen Mary were an "inseparably devoted couple" who upheld "character" and "family values".
George established a standard of conduct for British royalty that reflected the values and virtues of the upper middle-class rather than upper-class lifestyles or vices. Acting within his constitutional bounds, he dealt skilfully with a succession of crises: Ireland, the First World War, and the first socialist minority government in Britain. He was by temperament a traditionalist who never fully appreciated or approved the revolutionary changes under way in British society. Nevertheless, he invariably wielded his influence as a force of neutrality and moderation, seeing his role as mediator rather than final decision maker.
## Titles, honours and arms
As Duke of York, George's arms were the royal arms, with an inescutcheon of the arms of Saxony, all differenced with a label of three points argent, the centre point bearing an anchor azure. The anchor was removed from his coat of arms as the Prince of Wales. As King, he bore the royal arms. In 1917, he removed, by warrant, the Saxony inescutcheon from the arms of all male-line descendants of the Prince Consort domiciled in the United Kingdom (although the royal arms themselves had never borne the shield).
## Issue
## Ancestry
## See also
- Household of George V and Mary
- Interwar Britain
- List of covers of Time magazine (1920s), (1930s) |
40,749,149 | History of Chincoteague, Virginia | 1,146,046,965 | null | [
"Chincoteague, Virginia",
"Histories of cities in Virginia",
"History by island"
]
| The history of human activity in Chincoteague, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, begins with the Native Americans. Until European explorers possessed the island in the late 17th century, the Chincoteague Indians used it as a place to gather shellfish, but are not known to have lived there; Chincoteague Island lacked suitable soil for their agriculture. The island's name derives from those early visitors: by one popular tale, chincoteague meant "Beautiful land across the water" in their language.
Use of Chincoteague Island by European settlers began in the 17th century, when the island was granted to a Virginia colonist. Legal disputes followed, and it was not until 1691 that title was determined by the courts. Although a few people were living on the island by 1700, it was primarily used as a place to graze livestock. This was probably the origin of the Chincoteague ponies, feral horses that long roamed in the area. They are no longer present in the wild on Chincoteague Island. During the American Revolutionary War, the islanders supported the new nation's bid for independence. The local seafood resources began to be systematically exploited in the early 19th century.
In the American Civil War, the islanders supported the Union despite being located in a seceded state, and the war touched Chincoteague only lightly. Oysters became a major industry in the postwar years. Chincoteague's relative isolation ended in 1876 with the arrival of the railroad at Franklin City, Virginia, across Chincoteague Bay from the island, and the initiation of a dedicated steamboat service between the two settlements. Nevertheless, contemporary visitors found Chincoteague primitive. Part of the island was incorporated as the Town of Chincoteague within Accomack County in 1908; the municipality annexed the remainder of the island in 1989. Road traffic could reach the island with the completion of a causeway in 1922. Two devastating fires in that decade caused the establishment of the Chincoteague Fire Department in 1925; the new volunteer company took over the traditional pony penning, and soon had ponies from nearby Assateague Island swim the narrow channel between the two islands as part of that roundup. The carnival, pony swim, and subsequent auction constitute a highlight of the town's calendar, attracting tens of thousands to the island.
The seafood and poultry industries thrived through much of the 20th century, but neither is important to the island's economy today. Chincoteague is a major tourist destination on Virginia's Eastern Shore, with many coming to enjoy the beaches on Assateague Island. The success of Marguerite Henry's 1947 children's book Misty of Chincoteague and its sequels helped publicize Chincoteague, as did the 1961 film Misty.
## Setting and Native American use
Chincoteague is the name of a town, and the barrier island on which it is located, on Virginia's Eastern Shore, in the United States. The island is about 8 miles (13 km) long and 2 miles (3.2 km) wide. Sand forms its soil, with a thin layer of loam above it away from the water, enough to support pine trees and grass. Chincoteague Inlet, a break in the barrier island system, occurs near Chincoteague Island, at the southern end of Assateague Island. Assateague shelters Chincoteague from the Atlantic and stretches north almost 30 mi (48 km) to Ocean City, Maryland.
The local Native Americans, called by Europeans the Chincoteague Indians, did not in fact reside on Chincoteague Island itself, but lived on the mainland, where there was suitable land for hunting and agriculture. They lived near what was at first called Chincoteague Creek, on the mainland, and is today Little Mosquito Creek. The tribe moved to a new village site every few years, and visited Chincoteague Island to obtain shellfish. Although many references state that the name Chincoteague is the Native American word for "Beautiful land across the water", according to local historian Kirk Mariner, this legend is of 20th-century origin, invented to promote a song by that name by an islander. The name, he states, instead derives from the tribe's word for "large stream" or "inlet".
The Chincoteague Indians gradually withdrew northwards in the late 17th century as European colonization grew; most settled on a reservation at present-day Snow Hill, Maryland, with allied tribes of Native Americans, though some may have remained in their traditional area. They were later forced from the reservation, and their descendants are among the Nanticoke people in southern Delaware.
## Colonial Chincoteague
Although Virginia was settled in 1607 with the advent of the Jamestown Colony, it was not until 1680 that Europeans settled Chincoteague Island. A patent to Chincoteague Island had been granted by the British colonial authorities to Daniel Jenifer in 1671; that interest had been transferred to Thomas Welburn, husband of Jenifer's stepdaughter and prominent local merchant who lived on the mainland side of Chincoteague Bay. To fulfill the terms of the patent and gain title, the holder or his designee had to live on the land for a year—in the contemporary term, to "seat" the land. Welburn and several employees built a house there and cleared land for a small farm. His employee and tenant, Robert Scott, lived there for only the required year. Once it had expired, the house was abandoned, but Welburn, despite considering the land his own, did not register his efforts to perfect title.
Unaware that Welburn had seated the land, the authorities declared Chincoteague Island abandoned and issued another patent for the land in December 1684 to John Clayton, who conveyed it to Colonel William Kendall of Northampton. When Welburn learned that Kendall was planning to seat the land himself, he threatened to shoot trespassers on the island. Instead, Welburn sued, and the case dragged on in the Accomack County courts until the local justices transferred it to the General Court in the capital of Williamsburg. Welburn lost the case, as the General Court ruled in 1691 that as Jenifer had never lived on the island, he had not conveyed a valid patent to Welburn. Fresh patents were then issued, dividing the island between Kendall and another prominent citizen of Northampton, Major John Robins, with the dividing line near present-day Church Street.
Once ownership of the island was settled, it was used mostly as a place to house livestock, since there was no need for fences or other enclosures to prevent the animals from straying, and they could feed off of the marsh grasses. This usage was most likely the origin of the ponies that have made Chincoteague and Assateague Islands famous, though there are legends that the ponies' ancestors survived a shipwreck of a Spanish vessel. One such ship did run aground on Assateague Island in 1750, but according to John Amrhein Jr. in his account of his efforts to locate that vessel, "the mystery of the origin of the wild ponies became fused with the oldest memories of the Spanish shipwreck."
An early inhabitant was Henry Towles, who had seated the island for Kendall in 1686. He bought land from Kendall on the island, lived there, and sold it in 1709. The first permanent residents were likely George and Hannah Blake, originally tenants; their son John bought land from Kendall in the 1690s. Blake's Point, which extends out into Chincoteague Bay, testifies to their residence on the western side of the island. The will of John Robins, recorded in 1709, documents the presence of horses on Chincoteague—he bequeaths one, and mentions that his livestock were on the island. He also willed a "mallato [recte mulatto] boy Charles son of Hannah, which said boy is now on my part of Jengoteague [sic] Island". Through the 18th century the population slowly expanded until by the end of it about 200 people, mostly tenant farmers and squatters, lived on Chincoteague and Assateague.
## Antebellum period (1776–1860)
When the Thirteen Colonies broke away from the British Crown in 1776, early decrees of the provisional Virginia Convention affected Chincoteague. In May 1776 the body ordered that the coastal islands be stripped of livestock that might be taken by British ships. In June the islanders petitioned for a repeal or exemption, as they had [the petition stated] " the most fervent desire to do everything in their power to defeat the [...] enemies of American liberty" and a forty-man militia. The convention allowed Chincoteague and other islands along the Atlantic coast to retain their livestock.
In mid-1776, the convention voted to fortify Chincoteague's harbor—it was then being used by ships evading the British blockade of Chesapeake Bay. Smuggled goods were unloaded on the mainland, and taken down the Eastern Shore toward more populated areas. The resulting fort was built on Wallops Island, across the inlet from Chincoteague. The smuggling route maintained its importance as the American Revolutionary War continued, and in August 1779, the sole action in the area took place—a British privateer, pretending to be a smuggler, disabled the fort's guns and captured a cargo ship at anchor in Chincoteague Bay. Island legend holds that four men from Chincoteague fought for the Americans at the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781, and that one was delayed in returning to the island because General George Washington had the soldier transport the battle flag to the general's home at Mount Vernon.
By 1800, the original large parcels of land on Chincoteague Island were being broken into plots of 30 acres (12 ha) or larger. There were some two hundred people living on Chincoteague or Assateague, but there were no stores or other retail enterprises. A school, unusual for Virginia's Eastern Shore at the time, was erected sometime before 1804. Three island families were free African-Americans; two other households had black servants or slaves. One of the free African-Americans, Ocraw Brinney, became a major island landowner. Born in Africa and transported by slave ship, he was freed in 1787 and was supposedly 130 years old when he died around 1840, but was more likely aged about 100. His holdings included what today are the Carnival Grounds, south of downtown Chincoteague.
In the first half of the 19th century, Chincoteague became a source of seafood. As the cities along the eastern seaboard, such as New York and Philadelphia, continued to expand, their local areas could not supply them with enough shellfish. Islanders saw the opportunity, and many abandoned agriculture, instead harvesting the sea. The villagers of Chincoteague petitioned the Virginia General Assembly three times between 1833 and 1851 seeking the repeal of various fishing laws. The first post office was established in 1854, and the first doctor arrived four years later. By 1860 there were 150 families resident on Chincoteague, 126 oystermen on the island, and others belonging to allied trades. That year a hotel was operating on the island, located in what today is the downtown area—in the mid-19th century that part of the island developed as Chincoteague's commercial core.
The first accounts of pony penning are from an 1835 letter to the editor published in the Farmer's Register by Thompson Holmes of "Chincoteague"—that is, the mainland opposite the island, then also called by that name. According to his letter, few horses remained wild on Chincoteague Island, and residents would go over to Assateague to build temporary corrals to place the local herds in. Selected horses were branded, gelded, and sold. Holmes told about an earlier practice, to drive the horses directly into the water, which had been abandoned because too many had drowned. Holmes mourned that the pony pennings of his day were only "a shadow of their former glory". The pennings, the letter related, nevertheless attracted crowds from far and near.
## Civil War (1861–65)
The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 left Chincoteague residents with a stark choice. If they left the Union as Virginia sought to do, they would potentially lose access to their seafood markets. Refusal to do so might isolate Chincoteague from the rest of its state. In the referendum on secession held in Virginia on May 23, 1861, Northampton County, in the southern Eastern Shore, voted unanimously for secession, and there was also a majority for leaving the Union in Accomack County. Nevertheless, the residents of Chincoteague, along with those on Tangier Island (part of Accomack) in the Chesapeake Bay, chose not to leave the Union, in Chincoteague's case by a vote of 134 or 135 to 1 or 2—sources differ as to the exact tally. Despite this lopsided vote, some from Chincoteague supported the South, or even fought for it.
Even before the vote, commerce between the North and Virginia had been forbidden by Union officials. Residents sent John A.M. Whealton, a merchant and staunch Union loyalist, to Philadelphia to seek the release of confiscated supplies. He was able to gain the support of local officials and sailed cautiously for home with the goods, aware that the permission of Philadelphia's mayor did not bind the U.S. Navy. He found the Assateague Lighthouse extinguished by southern sympathizers and the bay again used for smuggling. In September, the USS Louisiana, arrived, with orders to secure the area against smugglers, and within days, one smuggler's ship was burned in the engagement known as the Battle of Cockle Creek, and another captured two days later. The naval vessel received a warm welcome from the islanders, who promptly took oaths of allegiance to the Union. After a petition on behalf of 800 inhabitants of the island was passed up the chain of command, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles granted the islanders the right to continue to engage in trade in November 1861, the same month the Eastern Shore was taken for the North with little bloodshed.
The Louisiana was sent away to more troubled waters in December 1861, arousing fears by the islanders that they would be abused by Confederate loyalists on the mainland. There were some incidents of this sort, but they ceased as the mainlanders adjusted to the military presence, and the war did not again come near Chincoteague. Union soldiers were stationed on Chincoteague Island for about four months in 1863 and 1864 to guard against a rumored attack on Assateague Lighthouse by sympathizers. Maryland militia were initially used, followed by a regiment of African-American soldiers, but in March 1864, they were removed and local men in the Eastern Shore Volunteers, formed in 1863 but not called into service until the following year, guarded the island and other local points.
## Postwar prosperity (1865–1908)
The years after the Civil War brought prosperity to Chincoteague with expansion of the oyster trade. As the law required an oysterman to be a Virginia resident for a year before harvesting in Virginia waters, many in that trade bought lots along Main Street, running along the west side of the island, or across the bay in the new village of Greenbackville, Virginia, just south of the Maryland line. Other new residents on the island were freed African-Americans, or Northerners who sought opportunities in the southern states. Chincoteague oysters, especially those from Tom's Cove at the southern point of the island, gained a reputation for taste and, marketed across the country as "Chincoteague salt oysters", became famous.
In 1876 art student Howard Pyle visited Chincoteague. He wrote of his experiences, including viewing the pony penning (which took place behind his hotel), the following year in Scribner's Magazine, accompanying the text with the first known contemporary drawings of the event. Pyle was struck by the quaintness of Chincoteague, describing it as "an enchanted island, cut loose from modern progress and left drifting some seventy-five years backward in the ocean of time". The publicity in a national magazine did nothing to reduce the crowds coming to Chincoteague for the penning.
The island's status as an isolated backwater began to end in 1876, when a rail line reached Franklin City, on the shores of the bay and only 5 mi (8.0 km) from Chincoteague Island, with a steamship supplying the remaining connection. This improvement gave oystermen an efficient means of getting their wares to market, and also brought early tourists to Chincoteague, seeking respite from the sweltering summers in the city.
Due to the popularity of oysters, Chincoteague continued to grow; commercial buildings were built along Main Street. In 1890 the island acquired its first barbershop, and about 500 barrels of shucked oysters were being sent to the mainland daily on the steamer. Gas illumination arrived by 1900, the first telephone exchange in 1902, and rural free delivery by the United States Post Office Department in 1905. Although there were few shops or public buildings, there was a shoe store and a notary public. The roads were made of dirt, covered with sea shells.
## Entering the modern era (1908–46)
In the early 20th century, according to Mariner, Chincoteague "was a curious mixture of the progressive and the primitive, of worldly-wise townsfolk and isolated country people". Beginning in about 1900, the residents sought to be incorporated as a town. Gaining a municipal charter from the General Assembly would allow ordinances to be passed to keep livestock off the streets without seeking redress from the state government in Richmond or the county government in Accomac. In 1908 the legislature incorporated part of the island as the Town of Chincoteague, and on July 4, A. Frank Matthews became the first mayor.
The 1910 United States Census showed a population of 3,295 for the island, of whom 1,419 lived in the town. Few resided in the interior of the island; most lived in single-family houses, facing the water across roads that ran just above the high tide line. The population of the island had increased to about 3,600 as of 1916; there were about a hundred African-Americans, all of whom lived on the same part of the island. Most islanders of working age were part of or supported the seafood trade. At that time, most houses got their water from shallow-dug wells, located in many cases close by primitive privies. Water from such wells was also used to wash the oysters and to make ice to preserve them. Almost all Chincoteague oysters were sent out of state, and the federal Public Health Service intervened in 1916 to get the mayor and town council to order improved sanitation, with islanders living outside the town line agreeing to abide by the ordinances.
Although dwarfed in population by the neighboring island, Assateague was still populated by a few families. A penning was still held on Assateague along with one on Chincoteague, but the Assateague event was suspended after 1920 as the largest landowner refused to allow access. Beginning in 1923, the Assateague herd was transported to Chincoteague for a joint penning, most likely by boat, as the idea of swimming the ponies had not yet been adopted. The refusal of the Assateague landowner to allow islanders to cross his land made it difficult for them to get to work, and Assateague became depopulated, with most of the buildings disassembled and rebuilt on Chincoteague Island. Most of Assateague Island was sold to the federal government in 1943.
In 1919 John B. Whealton, Chincoteague-born though a Florida resident, persuaded the Virginia General Assembly to grant a charter to his Chincoteague Toll Road and Bridge Company to build a causeway from the mainland to the island. Whealton submitted the winning bid to build the causeway as well as gaining the charter for his company to operate it. The road was originally a toll crossing, and early plans had it reaching the island south of downtown, near the site of today's Carnival Grounds, but Whealton persuaded the town council to have the terminal point be downtown, near the Atlantic Hotel, the island's largest. The road was close to completion when a major fire destroyed much of downtown, including the hotel, on February 5, 1920. There was then only a small, ill-equipped fire company in Chincoteague, and the fire was fought by men of the Coast Guard from the stations near the island. The hotel was underinsured and not rebuilt, though others took its place, and the council took advantage of the disaster to straighten Main Street. The fire and poor weather in the winters of 1921 and 1922 delayed the causeway, which was officially opened on November 15, 1922, by Virginia Governor E. Lee Trinkle. Most vehicles on the first day wound up mired in mud once a downpour turned the causeway into a quagmire. Nevertheless, the causeway proved a success, and by year's end more than a hundred vehicles were crossing it on an average day. Water from mainland wells was piped along the causeway, allowing the town to offer running water.
The second devastating fire in four years destroyed much of downtown Chincoteague on February 25, 1924, and caused the town's leaders to conclude that a better-organized volunteer fire department was needed to replace Chincoteague's fire brigade. The Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company was founded in June 1925, though it needed much equipment, including a fire truck. To raise funds the fire company took over the 1925 Chincoteague pony penning, which had been declining, and sold some horses at fixed prices (auctioning began not later than 1932). Fifteen thousand people attended the penning and other festivities. The proceeds from the event were over \$6,000, enabling the department to buy a pump truck. Public fascination with the pony swim, inaugurated that year at the narrowest point of the channel between the two islands, led to increased attendance in the following years. Except during the war years of 1943 and 1944, and the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the carnival, pony swim and auction have occurred every year since.
By 1930, the year the causeway was purchased by the state and the toll removed, the Town of Chincoteague had a population of 2,130. In the 1930s poultry farming became popular on the island, and by the 1950s was producing more than a million birds per year. Although oystering was still a common occupation, the trade was increasingly regulated, causing much of the production and canning to be done by large companies, and many watermen turned to fishing, clamming, and crabbing. Others shot ducks and other waterfowl indigenous to the island. Locals carved duck decoys to aid in the hunt; these remain a popular collectible and souvenir of the island.
In 1941 the United States entered World War II; early the following year, the Germans torpedoed two merchant ships off the Assateague coast. To guard the coast, the United States Army established two small posts on Virginia's Eastern Shore, one each at Accomac and Chincoteague. The Navy established the Chincoteague Naval Auxiliary Air Station in 1943, across from Chincoteague on the mainland. One young pilot being trained there, future president George Herbert Walker Bush, got in trouble for "buzzing" the house of a young woman he had met at a dance. The conclusion of the war, in 1945, brought celebrations in Chincoteague and the reinstatement of the annual July events, now held at the brand-new Carnival Grounds south of downtown.
## Misty and changes (1946–62)
In 1946 children's author Marguerite Henry came to Chincoteague for the summer, intending to write about the wild horses of Assateague and the pony penning and auction on Chincoteague Island. With her came illustrator Wesley Dennis, with whom she had previously worked, and who would take photographs to be converted to pen-and-ink drawings. Staying at the bed and breakfast of Miss Molly Rowley on Main Street, Henry encountered island horse breeder Clarence Beebe, visited his ranch on the southern portion of the island, and met his grandchildren Maureen and Paul. On the Beebe Ranch, Henry saw a young filly named Misty. Henry fell in love with the horse, and tried to persuade "Grandpa" Beebe to sell the filly, promising to include him and his grandchildren in her book. The breeder eventually agreed, on condition Misty remained on the Beebe Ranch until she was weaned, and that the animal was eventually returned to him from Henry's Illinois home for breeding. Henry made the purchase, and returned to the Midwest with an outline of her story. Several months later, Misty arrived by rail. In 1947 Henry's book Misty of Chincoteague was published, about the desire of the Beebe children to have a pony of their own—Misty, daughter of the untamable Phantom. The book became an immediate best seller, and the following year was designated as a Newbery Honor Book by the American Library Association. Following the book's appearance and success, a steady stream of articles on Chincoteague began to appear in national magazines.
Henry wrote a series of sequels, and hoped to interest the movies, but Hollywood was slow to reach out to the Eastern Shore. It was not until 1960 that filming of Misty began. Almost all of it was shot locally—though the Beebe Ranch was not used, with a property on the mainland substituted. The film premiered at a Hollywood cinema and at the Roxy Theatre in Chincoteague, with the first showings simultaneous. In a nod to Hollywood, the real-life horse Misty placed her hoof in wet cement outside the Roxy just before the movie ran.
Despite the new source of island fame, many young people left Chincoteague in the years after World War II. There was no beach on Chincoteague; in an effort to provide one for visitors and townsfolk, local promoters sought the construction of a bridge to Assateague Island, where there is a beach along the Atlantic shoreline. They were led by Wyle Maddox, a wealthy chicken farmer who had significant business interests on Chincoteague Island. First proposed around 1950, the bridge and roadway across Assateague, by then uninhabited and under federal jurisdiction, took over a decade to approve, and finally opened in September 1962. The bridge to Assateague is at the east end of Maddox Boulevard, which crosses Chincoteague Island north of downtown, and was developed by Wyle Maddox.
The town remained busy and prosperous in the postwar years, especially by the standards of the rural Eastern Shore, and the locals took pride in this—in the early 1950s, the town twice finished second in a competition for the cleanest community in America, and then won the award for its size classification in 1954 and 1955. Main Street was so crowded with cars that parking meters were installed. When oyster parasites and overfishing combined to devastate the oyster industry in the 1950s, clams became the island's major industry. The Burton Clamming Company promoted itself as the largest in the world, sending 1.3 million clams to market on a typical day in 1957.
The final delay in the completion of the Assateague bridge was caused by the Ash Wednesday Storm of March 1962, which devastated both islands as well as other points along the Atlantic Seaboard. Although no one died on Chincoteague, the storm flooded virtually all buildings on Chincoteague Island and wiped out the poultry industry—not only were an estimated quarter million birds killed, the buildings used in chicken farming were destroyed. An estimated one hundred ponies were killed by the storm, both on Assateague Island and at the Beebe Ranch. Misty was pregnant with her third foal; the Beebes placed her in their kitchen before they were evacuated. Once the ranch could again be reached, Misty was taken to a farm on the mainland just over the Maryland line, where she gave birth to a filly, Stormy. The devastation of the storm brought national attention to Chincoteague, and Stormy's birth upstaged the visit of Virginia Governor Albertis S. Harrison. Many contributed to the recovery efforts, and Misty—both film and horse—was made available for special benefit showings.
## Tourist destination (since 1962)
Until the 1950s, most tourists to the island, except during the annual carnival and pony penning, were sportsmen, there to fish or hunt waterfowl. Publicity generated by the Misty franchise, and the easy access to the beach and recreational facilities on Assateague Island, brought many tourists to Chincoteague who were uninterested in shooting the wildlife except with cameras. Combined with the continued decline of the seafood industry, the economy of Chincoteague gradually shifted from being based on harvesting its waters to tourism.
Many souvenir shops and other tourist enterprises were built along Maddox Boulevard, especially in the years after 1962. At first, the motels were buildings converted from other uses, but by the late 1960s, purpose-built structures were being erected along Maddox Boulevard, some with swimming pools. Although Misty died in 1972 at age 26, the island continued to be publicized. By the 1990s, tourism was the island's principal business, bringing in more than \$100 million annually. National hotel chains, including a Hampton Inn and a Comfort Suites, arrived with the 21st century.
The changes to Chincoteague, including the sale of the Beebe Ranch for development in 1989 and the destruction by fire of the ranch house in 1996, brought local soul-searching. Islanders were divided by such questions as the establishment of a nudist beach on Assateague (outlawed by Accomack County ordinance in 1984) and the building of a McDonald's near the bridge between the two islands. The modest homes on Chincoteague Island were supplemented by townhouses and condominiums, many occupied by seasonal residents. With increased real estate prices, many from Chincoteague sold their land and moved to less expensive property on the mainland. The seafood industry ceased to be a major factor in the island's economy: most of the oyster-shucking houses, which had continued in operation using imported shellfish despite the local decline in oystering, finally closed in the 1980s and 1990s. The clam industry sought bivalves from deeper waters, and Chincoteague by then supplied few shellfish.
In 1989 the town expanded, by agreement with the Accomack County government, bringing all of Chincoteague Island under town jurisdiction. Despite local opposition, the modest bridge between Chincoteague and Assateague was rebuilt into a four-lane structure in 2010, the better to accommodate the millions of annual visitors to Assateague. The causeway from the mainland was re-routed, moving the terminal point on Chincoteague Island to a point north of downtown, the intersection of Main Street and Maddox Boulevard. From there, visitors may proceed south to downtown and the Carnival Grounds, or east to the tourist strip along Maddox Boulevard and to the bridge to Assateague Island. The tourist stores on Maddox Boulevard sell souvenirs, local artwork, the necessities for a day at the beach, and pony-related T-shirts and books. As of 2009, the average foal at the auction sold for \$1,344. Between sixty and eighty are sold annually; the auction helps keep the herd at a sustainable population of about twice that (150). In 2020 and 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the pony swim and associated events were canceled. James Tigner Jr. wrote in his 2008 book about Chincoteague Island,
> In the book and in real life, the story of Misty is really of those who loved her unconditionally. For that reason Misty today is a symbol for all that is wonderful and beautiful ... From my visits I know that much of the good that Misty represents can still be found on her little island of Chincoteague.
## See also
- Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, Assateague Island |
69,216,664 | British logistics in the Western Allied invasion of Germany | 1,172,492,776 | Aspect of World War II | [
"1945 in the United Kingdom",
"Allies of World War II",
"Military logistics of World War II",
"Military logistics of the United Kingdom",
"Western Allied invasion of Germany",
"Western European Campaign (1944–1945)"
]
| British logistics supported the operations of Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery's Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group in the Western Allied invasion of Germany from 8 January 1945 until the end of the Second World War in Europe on 8 May 1945. To conserve scarce manpower, the British and Canadian forces employed mechanisation and materiel for maximum effect in combat operations. This involved prodigious use of ammunition, fuel and equipment, which in turn demanded a first-class military logistics system. By this time, the British Army was highly experienced, professional and proficient.
Originally scheduled to start at the beginning of January 1945, when the ground would have been frozen, Operation Veritable, the 21st Army Group's advance to the Rhine, was delayed for five weeks by the German Ardennes Offensive. It was therefore conducted over muddy and sometimes flooded ground, and roads were sometimes impassable even to four-wheel-drive vehicles. The offensive was supported by 600 field and 300 medium guns. Over 2.5 million rounds of 25-pounder ammunition were made available. The army roadheads were mainly supplied by rail. Fuels were brought by tankers and the Operation Pluto pipeline from the UK, and delivered by barge and pipeline to the army roadheads. Special arrangements were made to supply the Royal Air Force's Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation, which consumed 410,000 litres (90,000 imp gal) a night, and Gloster Meteor jet fighters, which consumed 14,000 litres (3,000 imp gal) of kerosene each day. Montgomery's armies were reinforced by the redeployment of three divisions from Italy under Operation Goldflake.
The next major operation was Operation Plunder—the assault crossing of the Rhine on 23 March. For this the British Second Army and the US Ninth Army deployed 2,144 field and medium guns, augmented by 3,337 anti-aircraft guns and anti-tank guns. A large force of engineer units was assembled for the operation: 37,000 British and Canadian engineers and pioneers, and 22,000 American engineers. Every available amphibious craft was collected, and they were joined by a Royal Navy contingent of 36 LCMs and 36 LCVPs that were transported by road across Holland and Belgium to participate. Operation Plunder included an airborne operation, Operation Varsity, in which two airborne divisions were landed with a day's supply of food, fuel and petrol. Engineers soon had bridges in operation over the Rhine that were later superseded by more permanent road and rail bridges.
During the first three weeks of April 1945, the 21st Army Group advanced about 320 kilometres (200 mi) across northern Germany to reach the Elbe on 19 April and then the Baltic Sea. Until the railway bridges could be brought into operation, maintenance depended entirely on road transport. The 21st Army Group allocated further road transport capacity to the armies by shifting vehicles from the rear areas and immobilising units that were not immediately needed. The corps sometimes had to send their transport back to the army roadheads to assist when major operations were required. The high use of road transport meant that the Second Army burned 7,600 tonnes (7,500 long tons) of petrol a day, but pipelines were laid across the Rhine at Emmerich and were in operation by the end of April. On 4 May, Montgomery took the surrender of the German forces in front of the 21st Army Group.
## Background
The 21st Army Group was commanded by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery. It consisted of two armies: the First Canadian Army under General Harry Crerar and the British Second Army under Lieutenant-General Sir Miles Dempsey. Most of its units were British or Canadian, but there were contingents from Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The RAF Second Tactical Air Force, operating in support, also had Australian, French, New Zealand and Norwegian squadrons. Although it contained personnel from many nations, the logistical support was British. Charles Stacey, the Canadian official historian, noted that:
> Thus, throughout the campaign in North-West Europe, there was virtually no separate Canadian supply organization other than what existed within First Canadian Army itself. The great majority of Canadian requirements, including ordnance stores, ammunition, petroleum products, most engineer, medical and dental stores, rations, office machinery and other supplies, were provided through British channels. Canadian units indented for warlike stores direct to their division's Ordnance Field Park, which carried stocks of spare parts for mechanical transport, small arms, armament, signal stores, and engineering equipment, as well as complete wireless sets and small arms. Bulk demands for artillery equipment, clothing and general stores were sent periodically by the formation's R.C.O.C. staff to a British Advanced Ordnance Depot.
The 21st Army Group's campaign in North-West Europe had commenced with Operation Overlord, the Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944. German resistance was stubborn and the British and Canadian advance much slower than planned until July, when the American Operation Cobra broke through the German defences west of Saint-Lô. What followed was a far more rapid advance than anticipated. The British Second Army liberated Brussels on 3 September and Antwerp was captured virtually intact on 4 September but it could not be used as a port until the Germans were cleared from the Scheldt approaches, through which ships had to pass to reach the port. This required a major operation and the Battle of the Scheldt was not concluded and the port opened for shipping until 26 November. Once it was opened, Antwerp had sufficient port capacity to for the British and American forces but its use was hampered by German V-weapon attacks.
A new base was developed around Brussels and an advanced base area around Antwerp but supplies were still being drawn from the Rear Maintenance Area (RMA) in Normandy. To get the railway system in operation again required the reconstruction of bridges and the importation of more locomotives. Petrol was brought in by tankers and through the Operation Pluto pipeline from the UK. French, Belgian and Dutch civilian labour was used at the base in a variety of tasks to enable military personnel to be released for service in forward areas. By January 1945, some 90,000 civilians were employed by the 21st Army Group, of whom half were employed in workshops in the advanced base and 14,000 at the port of Antwerp. Belgian Army transport units were trained in the UK and took over the equipment of the 17 general transport companies that had been loaned to the 21st Army Group by the War Office in 1944, allowing their personnel to return to the UK.
During the German Ardennes Offensive in December 1944, the Supreme Allied Commander, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, had transferred the US First and Ninth Armies to Montgomery's command. Now that the German offensive had been defeated, the US First Army reverted to American command on 18 January 1945 but the US Ninth Army remained part of the 21st Army Group until 4 April. The US XVIII Airborne Corps was assigned to the 21st Army Group for the crossing of the Rhine and again on 25 April for operations between the Elbe and the Baltic Sea. Although they were under the operational control of the 21st Army Group, the administrative control of these US formations remained with the US 12th Army Group.
On 31 December 1944, Eisenhower ordered Montgomery to resume his preparations for Operation Veritable, the objective of which was to defeat the German forces west of the Rhine. He intended to make the main Allied effort in the north, in the 21st Army Group's sector. There were tactical, operational and political reasons for this. The best sites for a crossing of the Rhine were there, a crossing in the north gave access to the North German Plain, where the terrain was good for mobile warfare, for which his Allied forces were particularly suited, it offered a means of cutting off the Ruhr, the main industrial region of Germany and it had the political advantage of involving the British and Canadians. After some debate, the Combined Chiefs of Staff endorsed his strategy at the Malta Conference in January and February 1945.
## Operation Goldflake
At the Malta Conference, the Combined Chiefs also decided to reinforce Eisenhower's armies in North-West Europe at the expense of those in the Mediterranean. In view of pressure from the Canadian government to have its forces reunited, the Combined Chiefs decided to send the two divisions of the I Canadian Corps to rejoin the First Canadian Army, followed by up to three British divisions. This was codenamed Operation Goldflake, and it involved the redeployment of the I Canadian Corps and British 5th Division from Italy to North-West Europe. At this time the ration strength of the 21st Army Group (which also counts civilians and prisoners of war being fed by the army as well as the troops) was around 1.2 million; that of the Mediterranean theatre was 1.4 million. The transfer involved 102,415 troops. A request from the 21st Army Group for more resources to support the redeployed formations was rejected by the War Office; any further support units required had to either be drawn from the Mediterranean or supplied by the 21st Army Group. To secure the required transportation resources, eleven general transport companies, seven artillery transport platoons, a tank transporter company, a bulk petrol transport company, a bridge company and an ambulance car company were transferred from Italy.
To cater for the new arrivals, the 21st Army Group asked for four base supply depots (BSDs), six field bakeries, three field butcheries, a cold storage depot and two detail issue depots (DIDs). A BSD was a unit capable of supplying up to 25,000 troops. It had a four store sections. A field bakery had 56 personnel and could produce up to 16,000 kilograms (35,000 lb) of bread per day. A DID was a 31-man unit capable of supplying up to 8,000 troops. It had a supply section and a petrol, oil and lubricants (POL) section. The Mediterranean theatre was only able to provide two field bakeries. The War Office found that it could provide another two field bakeries from the United Kingdom, along with three field butcheries that were already scheduled to be sent. The other units could not be found, and the 21st Army Group was informed that it would have to make do without them. In May 1945, the 21st Army Group had 25 BSDs, 81 DIDS, 35 field bakeries, and 14 field butcheries.
The headquarters of the 9th Line of Communications Area was transferred to Paris to assist the American Communications Zone with the move. Advance parties from each formation involved travelled by air from Florence, but most Operation Goldflake units moved by sea. It was arranged that 3,700 personnel, 40 tanks, 650 wheeled vehicles and 50 Bren gun carriers would disembark each day in Marseilles, where accommodation was provided for 10,000 troops in tents and parking space for 200 vehicles. The first troops sailed from Naples on the troop ship SS Esperance Bay on 22 February, and arrived at Marseilles two days later. Lorries then took them to the dispersal point at Renaix via Lyon and Dijon, guided by road markers that read "GF". This took another five days. The first vehicles to arrive came with only fifty drivers, so a detachment from 141 Vehicle Park was sent to Marseilles from the RMA. In due course it was relieved by a vehicle park from Italy.
A rail halt was established at Gevrey-Chambertin and bivouac areas at Montbard and Chalon-sur-Saône. The bivouac areas were provided with temporary billets, latrines, emergency rations and fuel, and medical teams and vehicle maintenance crews were on hand. At the rail stop there were messes and a kitchen that ran 24 hours a day. During the two-hour rail halt, the troops were served a hot meal and provided with sandwiches for the next meal. Four trains a day passed through Gevrey-Chambertin, which handled 72,550 personnel and 4,035 lorries. Road transport accounted for another 29,865 personnel and 23,360 lorries.
On 10 February, the 5th Canadian Armoured Division loaded its 450 tanks and 320 Bren gun carriers on flat wagons in Rimini and Riccione, from whence they moved by rail to Leghorn. They were then loaded into landing ships, tank (LSTs) that took them to Marseilles, and onto flat wagons again for the five-day railway journey to Dixmude. Initially Goldflake convoys sailed to Marseilles by a direct route but after the Battle of the Ligurian Sea on the night of 17/18 March they were routed further south, through the Strait of Bonifacio between Corsica and Sardinia. Many of the tanks needed overhaul or modification and this task was beyond the resources of the 21st Army Group's Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) units, so excess tanks were shipped to the UK. The problem had been foreseen, and replacements were available at the ordnance depots. All movements were completed by the second week of April.
## Development of the line of communications
### Fuel
At the start of January 1945, the stocks of packaged and bulk POL held by the 21st Army Group amounted to 249,000 tonnes (245,000 long tons), representing 58 days' supply at the normal rate of expenditure. This was more than sufficient to hold the thirty days' reserve of POL that Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) stipulated should be held, but the American fuel position was less favourable. It was therefore agreed that from 1 March 1945 onwards, 74,000 tonnes (73,000 long tons) of fuel, representing about a third of the supply held in British storage, would be transferred to the Americans so both forces could have thirty days' reserves.
Ostend was the main reception port for POL. It was linked by pipeline to the largest British POL installation, at Ghent, where there was 50,000 tonnes (50,000 long tons) of storage capacity. Antwerp had 300,000 tonnes (300,000 long tons) of POL storage but that was shared with the Americans. Storage areas for packaged POL (POL in drums or cans as opposed to tanker wagons or lorries) were located at Antwerp, where there was 36,000 tonnes (35,000 long tons); at Diest-Hasselt, where 40,000 tonnes (40,000 long tons) were stored; at Ghent, where 36,000 tonnes (35,000 long tons) were kept; and at Brussels, where there was 20,000 tonnes (20,000 long tons).
The pipeline running from Cherbourg to Rouen was shut down on 9 January, which freed personnel to work on extending other pipelines. The Operation Pluto Dumbo pipeline was now in operation. It drew fuel from Dungeness on the coast of Kent and transported it across the Strait of Dover to a terminal near Boulogne. Pipelines were now constructed from Calais to Ghent, and thence to the storage facilities around Antwerp. By mid-March POL was arriving at a rate of 15,000 tonnes (15,000 long tons) per day, of which 3,000 tonnes (3,000 long tons) was coming over the Dumbo pipeline.
The bulk petrol transport companies that distributed the fuel were reorganised, each company now having four instead of three platoons, so eight companies were reduced to six. This saved 150 vehicles, from which a seventh company was formed. At the beginning of March 1945, the 21st Army Group had a bulk petrol transport capacity of about 2,700 tonnes (2,700 long tons) per day, assuming 80 per cent of the vehicles were running. A three-platoon company arrived from Italy with the Operation Goldflake units. A petrol station company was formed from personnel made surplus by the reorganisation with six platoons, each containing three sections. With some assistance from pioneers or civilians, each section could operate a petrol station issuing up to 45,000 litres (10,000 imp gal) per day. As well as the road transport, the 21st Army Group also had barges capable of carrying 10,000 tonnes (10,000 long tons) of bulk POL, which operated on the canals.
A petrol depot was a unit that received, stored and issued package petroleum products. There were three types: type A, which had 85 personnel and was designed to hold up to 12,700 tonnes (12,500 long tons); type B, with 38 personnel, which was designed to hold up to 5,100 tonnes (5,000 long tons); and type C, with 24 personnel, which was designed to hold up to 2,000 tonnes (2,000 long tons). With the good road and rail communications and civilian labour available, as was often the case in North-west Europe, they often held far more. In May 1945, the 21st Army Group had 3 type A, 14 type B and 28 type C petrol depots, a base petrol filling centre, 21 mobile petrol filling centres and 8 bulk petrol transport companies.
A major user of fuel was the Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation (FIDO) system at Épinoy, which consumed 410,000 litres (90,000 imp gal) per night. In February, a French fuel installation was opened at Douai, and this was used to supply the Royal Air Force (RAF) airfields in the vicinity. No. 616 Squadron RAF began operating Gloster Meteor jet fighters from Brussels, and they required kerosene. An initial stockpile of 91,000 litres (20,000 imp gal) was supplied to the unit, followed by daily deliveries of 14,000 litres (3,000 imp gal). A German V-2 rocket scored a direct hit on the British POL installation at Antwerp on 19 January. A train caught alight, and the fire spread to three nearby storage tanks. Although only 3,600 tonnes (3,500 long tons) of petrol was lost, POL storage tanks capable of holding 10,000 tonnes (10,000 long tons) were rendered unusable. As a result of this fire it was decided to remove camouflage from the oil storage tanks, because it was not effective against the V-2, and hampered fire fighting efforts.
### Organisation
To free up administrative units to support the advance into Germany, it was decided to shorten the line of communications by closing down the RMA in Normandy, where some 300,000 tonnes (300,000 long tons) of supplies were still held. This included 15,000,000 rations, which were gradually eaten by the troops in the RMA. Stores still required by the 21st Army Group were moved forward to the new advanced base. The first phase of this was the transfer of remaining stores to the advanced base. This had been scheduled to occur on 20 March 1945, but in early February it was brought forward to 20 February. Depots and stocks remaining in the RMA were transferred to the control of the War Office.
On 15 February, the region south of the Seine under British administration by 5th Line of Communications Sub Area and the 101st Beach Sub Area were reduced to the ports of Caen and Ouistreham and the depots around them; that administered by the 9th Line of Communications Sub Area was handed over to the US Communications Zone, as was the region between the Somme and the Seine administered by the 6th Line of Communications Sub Area, except for the city of Amiens. This freed the 9th Line of Communications Sub Area to participate in Operation Goldflake.
It was estimated that seven line of communications sub area headquarters would be required to support the advance into Germany. Only three could be provided by the 21st Army Group: the 5th Line of Communications Sub Area and the 101st Beach Sub Area when released from the RMA, and the 9th Line of Communications Sub Area, when it was no longer required for Operation Goldflake. The War Office therefore created a new headquarters, called the 25th Garrison, to take over the RMA, and four new line of communications sub area headquarters, the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th.
The 25th Garrison assumed control of the RMA on 2 April, allowing the 5th Line of Communications Sub Area to take over the western part of North Brabant, and the 101st Beach Sub Area, which became the 21st Line of Communications Sub Area, took over the territory west of the Maas. The 17th and 19th Line of Communications Sub Areas assumed responsibility for the region around Lille, allowing the 15th Line of Communications Sub Area to move to the area between the Maas and the Rhine. The 18th Line of Communications Sub Area was formed on 25 April and assigned to the First Canadian Army; the 19th joined the 15th; and the 20th relieved the 4th around Brussels, allowing it to take over the region to the north east of Nijmegen. The 6th Line of Communications Sub Area was earmarked to take over the administration of the port of Rotterdam when it was captured. The 11th Line of Communications Area took over the administration of the ports and the entire advanced base area, freeing the 12th Line of Communications Area headquarters to move forward.
## Operation Veritable
### Planning
Originally scheduled to start on 12 January 1945, when the ground would have been hard and frozen and off-road vehicle movement possible, Operation Veritable was delayed for five weeks by the Ardennes Offensive. By this time a thaw had set in, and the ground was now soft and muddy, restricting off-road vehicle movement. It would be carried out by the First Canadian Army, which was built up to 449,865 personnel through the addition of many British troops; its ration strength was 476,193.
Operation Veritable would be spearheaded by the five British divisions of Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks's XXX Corps, and would form part of a giant pincer movement with Operation Grenade, which would be conducted by Lieutenant-General William H. Simpson's US Ninth Army. Operation Veritable was scheduled to commence on 8 February, but the date for Operation Grenade could not be set, as it depended on the capture of dams on the Roer further south by the US First Army. Operation Blackcock, a preliminary operation to clear German forces from the Roer Triangle, was carried out by the XII Corps in January 1945. The position gained along the Roer was then taken over by the US Ninth Army.
The artillery fire plan for Operation Veritable called for the widespread use of "pepperpot tactics". Operational research had shown that the number of guns saturating an area was more important than the actual weight of shells fired. Pepperpot tactics involved supplementing the artillery fire with that of anti-tank guns, anti-aircraft guns, mortars and machine guns. This involved a large expenditure of ammunition, including some that were in short supply like ML 4.2-inch mortar rounds and the Mark VIIIz ammunition used by the Vickers machine gun.
The weight of shell employed was still be formidable; the fire plan called for 6 tonnes (6 long tons) of shells to be delivered on designated targets, and some would receive up to 11 tonnes (11 long tons). Some 600 field and 300 medium guns supported the operation. The 25-pounders were each provided with another 1,471 rounds in addition to the 206 rounds per gun each regiment normally carried. Over 2.5 million rounds of 25-pounder ammunition were made available. Stocks of ammunition were built up at No. 166 Field Maintenance Centre (FMC) at Veghel and the two Canadian FMCs at Wijchen and Oss. No. 166 FMC was developed from one formerly established there by the VIII Corps, although it had to be expanded as XXX Corps had over 200,000 troops under its command for Operation Veritable. To simplify storage and handling, only ammunition for field, medium and heavy artillery was held at the Canadian FMCs, ammunition for all other weapons was stocked at No. 166 FMC. There were 350 different types of ammunition in all.
No. 166 FMC also held 200 rounds per gun of field, 175 rounds per gun of medium, 175 rounds per gun of heavy and 50 rounds per gun of super-heavy artillery ammunition. Medium and heavy ammunition for units north of the Maas was stockpiled at Wijchen and for those to the south of the Maas at Oss. The former held 200 rounds per gun of medium and 250 rounds per gun of heavy artillery ammunition; the latter held 200 rounds per gun of medium and 150 rounds per gun of heavy artillery ammunition. Both stocked 200 rounds per gun of field artillery ammunition for the entire XXX Corps. The ammunition dumping program was completed by 4 February, by which time 14,400 tonnes (14,200 long tons) of ammunition had been dumped at the gun positions, and 23,100 tonnes (22,700 long tons) at the XXX Corps and II Canadian Corps FMCs. Crerar noted that if the ammunition for Operation Veritable was stacked side-by-side and 1.5 metres (5 ft) high, it would have extend for 48 kilometres (30 mi).
The opening of a railway bridge over the Maas at Ravenstein on 4 February enabled the FMCs to be served by rail. This reduced the pressure on the road network, and also permitted stone for road works to be supplied by rail. Some 50 miles (80 km) of new roads were built, and over 400 miles (640 km) of roads were repaired, which required 64,000 tonnes (63,000 long tons) of road metal. In the lead up to Operation Veritable, 446 special trains were run to the First Canadian Army railheads, delivering 349,356 tonnes (343,838 long tons) of supplies, of which around 227,000 tonnes (223,000 long tons) was for Operation Veritable.
Road maintenance was made difficult by the winter weather. Temperatures were as low as −15 °C (5 °F) on 26 January, resulting in firm, frozen ground, but a subsequent thaw caused widespread flooding, and by 5 February a section of the Turnhout-Eindhoven road had become impassable even to four-wheel-drive vehicles. Nearly 50 engineer companies, together with three road construction companies and 29 pioneer companies, were engaged in road maintenance. Four main road routes were available for troop movements, utilising road bridges over the Maas at Grave, Mook and Ravenstein. It was estimated that each could carry 7,000 vehicles per day under frozen conditions and 4,000 per day during a thaw. Operation Veritable required 35,000 vehicle movements, mainly to move XXX Corps units 80 miles (130 km) in nineteen days. To coordinate troop movements between the First Canadian Army and the British Second Army, a joint office known as "Grouping Control" was established. For security reasons, troop movements had to be conducted at night. Despite the weather, all movements were completed as planned by 8 February.
Because it was not anticipated that the advance would be rapid, it was not considered necessary to hold large stocks of petrol, oil and lubricants (POL) in the FMCs, but to ensure that vehicles moving to the assembly areas arrived with full tanks of fuel, a train loaded with petrol was sent to Nijmegen to allow them to be topped off. Rations were moved forward, and 2,318,222 rations were stockpiled for Operation Veritable. As it was thought that vehicle movement in the battle area would be restricted by the weather, terrain and battle damage, units were issued with 14-man "compo" ration packs for up to two-thirds of a formation's strength, and the divisions and independent brigades were also supplied with two-, three- and five-man "AFV" ration packs in case the distribution of compo packs proved to be too difficult. The troops in the assault units were issued with 24-hour ration packs, together with a Tommy cooker and a tin containing tea, condensed milk and sugar, enabling the troops in the front line to brew a hot cup of tea. Each of the assaulting infantry carried five days' supplies, and the armoured divisions carried six. This gave them sufficient petrol to advance for 200 and 180 miles (320 and 290 km) respectively, although no such rapid advance was contemplated; the petrol was to sustain the divisions in operations when the road network became congested with operational traffic.
Special tracks were provided for the Bren gun carriers to prevent skidding on icy roads, but these had to be withdrawn when it was discovered that they caused excessive wear and tear on their suspensions. The tracks of Sherman tanks were equipped with "duck bill" connectors to facilitate advancing across snow and soft ground. These were manufactured locally in Brussels and fitted in REME workshops. Extremely cold conditions persisted into February, and the divisions were issued with Arctic clothing and equipment that had been stockpiled for operations in Norway. A special effort was made to ensure that all units had their full allowance of winter and protective clothing. There was also demand for covered accommodation in the 3,300 bivouacs, and 21st Army Group headquarters released 343 huts and 1,600 45-kilogram (100 lb) tents from its stocks, which were delivered to the railheads around Mill and 's-Hertogenbosch. Covered accommodation was eventually provided for between 300,000 and 400,000 troops.
Thus far in the campaign in North-West Europe, XXX Corps had only served as part of the British Second Army, and it found that maintenance procedures of the First Canadian Army differed from what it had been used to due to the fact that the First Canadian Army's operations had been conducted where there had been adequate communications. Consequently, the daily pack trains that carried supplies were normally run straight through from the advanced base to the corps railheads, each of which normally stocked a particular commodity, such as ammunition, POL or engineer supplies, and the roadheads supporting the First Canadian Army carried much less stock than its British Second Army counterparts. This saved on road transport, but at the cost of some degree of flexibility.
It did not remove the need for road transport entirely though, and XXX Corps found that the First Canadian Army was unable to provide any further resources. Fourteen transport platoons, each of which operated thirty vehicles, were taken from the divisions to serve the corps' needs. The possibility that the Germans might flood the forward area was not overlooked, and a company of DUKW amphibious trucks and a platoon of Terrapin amphibious vehicles was on 48-hours' notice to assist. During February 300,000 tonnes (300,000 long tons) of supplies were delivered to the XXX Corps railheads. Supplies and POL were stocked at Eindhoven; POL at Schijndel; ammunition at Veghel, Uden, Oss and Wijchen; road material at Mill; coal at Best; and bridging at 's-Hertogenbosch.
### Execution
Once the battle commenced on 8 February, the main administrative task was replenishing the stocks of ammunition. Since the First Canadian Army did not hold large stocks at No. 11 Army Roadhead, it was dependent on the daily arrival of ammunition trains. Daily expenditure of ammunition soon exceeded a trainload, so the non-arrival of even one train meant that ammunition had to be drawn from the Second Army roadhead at Bourg Leopold. Since prompt clearance of the trains was essential to allow turnaround of the locomotives and rolling stock, vehicles had to be used to clear less urgently required supplies such as POL, coal and engineer stores. Ammunition expenditure was prodigious, and a system of rationing had to be introduced. This was never satisfactorily implemented, and confusion and duplication was created by the same requests for more ammunition being made through multiple channels.
Rising floodwaters soon created difficulties. By 9 February sections of the Nijmegen-Kranenburg road were under 46 centimetres (18 in) of water and 5 miles (8.0 km) of the Nijmegen-Cleve road was under 610 millimetres (24 in) of water. DUKWs were employed to move supplies forward along it to a "skeleton" FMC, No. 167 FMC established by the XXX Corps, which held only petrol, compo ration packs and ammunition. To maximise their turnaround time, they were only used to cover the flooded stretch, loads being transferred to them and unloaded from them into other vehicles at each end. Some of the ammunition that had earlier been dumped was rendered inaccessible by rising floodwaters. It was feared for a time that the skeleton FMC was in danger of being inundated, although it was on high ground. Preparations were made to move it to a new site, but this was not required. The 3rd Canadian Division made use of Buffalo tracked amphibious vehicles. In the forward area, land mines and the few tracks through the Reichswald Forest kept vehicles on the roads, and the traffic, thaws and heavy rains resulted in a rapid deterioration of the roads. Recourse was therefore made to Weasel tracked vehicles, and every available Weasel was rushed to the front. Many had seen hard use in the Ardennes, where they had demonstrated their utility, and large numbers were in the REME workshops. An emergency repair effort was conducted, and many were shipped direct from the workshops to the front lines.
The II Canadian Corps assumed control of the left sector on 15 February and No. 167 FMC was handed over to it, becoming No. 206 FMC. XXX Corps opened a new No. 168 FMC near Goch. The XXX Corps FMC series started at 151 and the II Canadian Corps one started at 201, and the stark difference in maintenance practices between the two corps was illustrated by the fact that XXX Corps had opened three times as many FMCs in the campaign up to this point. When the flood waters subsided, it was found that the Nijmegen-Cleve road surface had been too badly damaged to use, so the II Canadian Corps and XXX Corps were forced to share the road running south of the Reichswald. XXX Corps reverted to the control of the British Second Army on 8 March, and by 10 March the last German units had retreated across the Rhine. The two corps stocked their FMCs by road, but the completion of repairs to the 1,222-metre (4,008 ft) bridge over the Maas at Gennep by the 7th Army Troops Engineers on 20 March relieved the pressure on the one at Grave, and it became possible to move the railhead to within the No. 168 FMC area at Goch.
## Operation Plunder
### Planning
With Antwerp in operation from 26 November 1944, some supplies were now coming directly from the United States. The longer shipping time meant that a working margin of 30 days' supplies was desirable instead of the 14 days' margin for shipments from the United Kingdom. It was anticipated that as the Allied advance proceeded into Germany, there would be increased demand to feed and accommodate prisoners of war, liberated Allied prisoners and displaced persons. Having more reserves would also allow transport to be temporary diverted from port clearance to support a rapid advance, as had been done the previous autumn. A request for an increase in the theatre reserves from 28 to 51 days was approved by the War Office, but it was not possible to increase the stockpile of ammunition, as this was already being shipped as fast as it could be manufactured.
The next major operation was Operation Plunder—the assault crossing of the Rhine. For this the British Second Army deployed 1,520 field and medium guns, and the US Ninth Army had 624 field and medium guns. They were respectively augmented by 1,891 and 1,446 anti-aircraft guns and anti-tank guns. Ammunition for the 25-pounders was based on 1,500 rounds per gun. In the three days preceding the assault, the three hundred and thirty six 25-pounders assigned to the XII Corps fired 225,061 rounds, the sixteen 4.5-inch guns fired 7,002 rounds, the one hundred and sixty 5.5-inch guns fired 69,607 rounds, the fifty two 155 mm howitzers fired 4,335 rounds, the sixteen 7.2-inch howitzers fired 3,964 rounds, and the two 8-inch howitzers fired 176 rounds. Also, XII Corps employed forty-eight 3.7-inch anti-aircraft guns in the ground role, and they fired 16,573 rounds. Up to seven trains per day were required to move the ammunition from the advance base to the ammunition railheads at No. 10 Army Roadhead. Deliveries of ammunition averaged 4,800 tonnes (4,700 long tons) per day, peaking at 9,300 tonnes (9,150 long tons) on 25 March. A smoke screen concealed preparations on the west bank of the Rhine. Demands for smoke generators exhausted the available stocks and generators were taken from the anti-aircraft gun positions around Antwerp.
A large force of engineer units was assembled for the operation: 37,000 British and Canadian engineers and pioneers, and 22,000 American engineers. Every available amphibious craft was collected. As well as the storm boats, DUKWs, Buffaloes and Weasels, there were also amphibious DD tanks. The Royal Navy formed Force U, consisting of three squadrons, each with a flotilla of twelve Landing Craft Medium (LCM), and a flotilla of twelve Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP), which were transported by road across Holland and Belgium to participate. When mounted on the proposed trailer, the 15-metre (50 ft) LCM was 4.6 metres (15 ft) high, which left only 7.6 centimetres (3 in) of clearance under some of the bridges they had to pass under between Antwerp and the staging area around Nijmegen. The base workshops built a prototype trailer that provided more clearance, and the navy ordered 25 of them. Five days before the operation began, the navy asked for 40 more, which were provided. The Kangaroo armoured personnel carriers and the Buffalo tracked amphibious vehicles of the 79th Armoured Division were overhauled between January and March.
The accumulation of stocks for Operation Plunder began on 8 March. During the month, 432 trains delivered 230,000 tonnes (230,000 long tons) to 37 railheads in the British Second Army area. The British rail line of communications now ran from Antwerp to Nijmegen via Roosendaal and Tilburg, where the railway bridge that had opened on 22 December was duplicated by 3 January 1945. By the time the amphibious phase of Operation Plunder commenced at 09:00 on 23 March, 60,000 tonnes (60,000 long tons) of ammunition, 18,000 tonnes (18,000 long tons) of POL, 5,000 tonnes (5,000 long tons) of supplies, 30,000 tonnes (30,000 long tons) of engineer stores and 5,500 tonnes (5,400 long tons) of other stores had been dumped at No. 10 Army Roadhead. Second Army's VIII, XII and XXX Corps drew their supplies from No. 10 Army Roadhead, and the attached II Canadian Corps continued to draw its supplies from the First Canadian Army's No. 13 Army Roadhead at Nijmegen.
Units participating in Operation Plunder were re-equipped before the start of the operation. A special train brought the required stores to the Second Army railhead within 48 hours of a demand being lodged with the advance base. A problem was encountered when defects were discovered in the tensioners of the 29th Armoured Brigade's new Comet tanks. A new type was flown out direct from the UK factory by priority air-freight and fitted to the tanks. The British 6th Airborne Division was withdrawn to the UK and re-equipped there, but the logistical units of its seaborne tail had to be re-equipped by the 21st Army Group. This was difficult as its special equipment was not stocked. A new ordnance field park was formed to hold the equipment, which was shipped from the UK.
### Execution
The two airborne divisions participating in Operation Varsity, the airborne operation supporting Operation Plunder, were initially supplied by the First Allied Airborne Army. Their initial drop of the 6th Airborne Division was conducted by 683 aircraft and 444 General Aircraft Hamilcar and Airspeed Horsa gliders; that of the US 17th Airborne Division used 913 aircraft and 906 Hadrian gliders. Fifteen minutes after the glider landings, there was a resupply mission flown by 240 Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers from the US Eighth Air Force. Of the 610 tonnes (600 long tons) of supplies and equipment dropped, 80 per cent was recovered. Sixteen of the bombers were lost to anti-aircraft fire. The supplies dropped represented a day's supply of food, fuel and petrol for the two divisions.
Once the link-up with the ground forces was effected, the 6th Airborne Division drew its supplies from XII Corps, and the US 17th Airborne Division drew its from the US Ninth Army. The seaborne tail of the 6th Airborne Division established a DUKW replenishment area west of the Rhine from whence supplies were moved until it could cross the river. XII Corps allocated sixty DUKWs each to the 6th Airborne Division, US 17th Airborne Division and the 15th Infantry Division; thirty were in corps reserve, nine were designated for casualty evacuation and six for the Royal Engineers. In XXX Corps, all DUKWs were retained under corps control.
The South Beveland Canal was opened on 19 February to allow inland water transport to reach the Dutch canal system when the western Netherlands were liberated. The Meuse-Escaut Canal was also opened that month, and by the end of March the Zuid-Willemsvaart and the Maas–Waal Canal were open as well, allowing barge traffic from Antwerp to reach the Waal. The average tonnage on the canal system rose steadily from 27,000 tonnes (27,000 long tons) in January to 35,000 tonnes (34,000 long tons) in February, 48,000 tonnes (47,000 long tons) in March and 56,000 tonnes (55,000 long tons) in April. The road network was also developed, and by 23 March eleven routes were open across the Maas, of which six were in the First Canadian Army area, including the sole class 70 route (ie one roughly capable of bearing loads of up to 71 tonnes (70 long tons)) and five in the British Second Army area. The British Second Army also had access to the American class 70, timber pile bridge at Venlo and the Canadian First Army class 70 bridge at Grave. Only the class 70 bridges would take a loaded tank transporter.
At Gennep, the 6th Army Troops Engineers built a 312-metre (1,023 ft) class 30 Bailey bridge using the piers and abutments of a demolished railway bridge. A 229-metre (751 ft) class 40 Bailey pontoon bridge was erected by the 7th Army Troops Engineers at Well and a 270-metre (880 ft) one by the 6th Army Troops Engineers at Lottum was opened for traffic on 10 March. A 370-metre (1,220 ft) class 40 Bailey pontoon bridge was built at Venlo by the 15th GHQ Troops Engineers. These bridges carried maintenance traffic by day and operational traffic by night. Seven American combat engineer battalions assisted with road and bridge maintenance in the British Second Army area. Although working in the British Second Army area, they remained under the command of the US Ninth Army. The 21st Army Group headquarters also allocated three other general transport companies to the British Second Army. The final troop movements for Operation Plunder involved 662 tanks, over 4,000 tank transporters and 32,000 other vehicles.
Vehicles crossing the Rhine did so with full fuel tanks and a reserve of filled jerricans. Additional fuel supplies were loaded on DUKWs, to be ferried across the river until bridges were opened. Each man crossing the Rhine was issued with a 24-hour ration and an emergency ration, plus a tin of preserved meat, a tin of self-heating soup or cocoa, a packet of biscuits and a Tommy cooker with six hexamine tablets. Divisions carried two days' compo rations in their first line (unit) transport and two days' in their second line (divisional) transport. The armoured divisions also carried a day's worth of AFV ration packs. The airborne troops landed with two 24-hour ration packs, and the 6th Airborne Division's seaborne tail held two days of compo rations in second line transport. A double issue of Expeditionary Force Institutes stores was made to all participating units. This included the 6th Airborne Division, but it was held by the seaborne tail.
The assault divisions established ordnance dumps on the west bank of the Rhine with at least one section of the divisional ordnance field park from which urgently required equipment and spare parts for vehicles could be sent across by DUKW without delay. Damaged vehicles on the east bank of the Rhine were collected at points near the river and transported back on rafts. XII and XXX Corps each formed a bank control group along the lines of the beach groups that had supported the Normandy landings in 1944, but with the logistical elements restricted to the medical, provost and REME components. The bank control groups controlled all movement from the marshalling areas on the near side of the Rhine to the dispersal areas on the far side. They only operated until newly constructed bridges were able to take traffic, which occurred about 72 hours into the operation.
The engineer units in the XII Corps assault area were under 11th Army Group, Royal Engineers (AGRE), commanded by Colonel R. B. Foster. The XII Corps plan called for the construction of a class 9 Folding Boat Equipment (FBE) bridge, a class 12 Bailey pontoon bridge and two class 40 Bailey pontoon bridges. The first British bridge across the river was the class 9 FBE bridge, known as "Twist", in the XII Corps area, which was erected by the VIII Corps Troops Engineers in ten hours on 24 March. A traffic jam broke the bridge during the night, but it was reopened thirteen hours later. The class 12 Bailey bridge, known as "Sussex", took the XII Corps Troops Engineers and the Royal Navy 43 hours to erect. Meanwhile, the class 40 Bailey pontoon bridge at Xanten was erected by the 7th Army Troops Engineers in 31 hours, and opened to traffic at 16:30 on 25 March. Over the next six days it was used by 29,139 vehicles. The second class 40 Bailey pontoon bridge, "Sparrow", was built by the 4th GHQ Troops Engineers on 27 March.
In the XXX Corps area, the engineer units were grouped under the 13th AGRE, under the command of Colonel F. C. Nottingham. The XXX Corps plan called for the construction of a class 9 FBE bridge, a class 15 Bailey pontoon bridge and two class 40 Bailey pontoon bridges. The "Waterloo" class 9 FBE could not be built at the intended site at Rees on 24 March because the town had not been captured. Instead, 18th GHQ Troops Engineers erected it the following day at a downstream site near the town of Honnopel. Work commenced at 09:30, and the bridge was opened for traffic at midnight. Bridges were named after ones in London. The XXX Corps Troops Engineers commenced work on "Lambeth", a class 15 Bailey pontoon bridge, at 15:00 on 24 March, but work was frequently interrupted by German fire, and the bridge was not opened until 08:30 on 26 March. Due to the proximity of Rees, the VIII Corps Troops Engineers could not work on "London", a class 40 Bailey pontoon bridge, until the afternoon of 25 March, and it was opened at 23:00 on 26 March. The second class 40, Bailey pontoon bridge, known as "Blackfriars", was built by the II Canadian Corps Engineers in 50 hours, starting at 10:00 on 26 March. A third bridge, called "Westminster", was commenced by the 6th Army Troops Engineers on 26 March, completed at 18:00 on 29 March, and ceremoniously opened by Dempsey the next morning.
It was recognised in the planning of Operation Plunder that the maintenance of the floating bridges over the Rhine would require more engineers than could be spared from the campaign ahead. It was therefore decided that the floating bridges should be replaced by semi-permanent ones as soon as operational circumstances permitted. It was estimated that six one-way class 40 and two one-way class 70 pile bridges would be needed. Their construction would require 3,000 wooden piles 30 centimetres (12 in) in diameter and 18 to 23 metres (60 to 75 ft) in length. To provide them, beech trees were felled in the Sonian Forest near Brussels. Some 10,000 tonnes (10,000 long tons) of wooden piles, baulks and chesses was assembled for the project. These included 36-centimetre (14 in) baulks and chesses that had originally been set aside for the construction of emergency bridges over the Thames. Twenty-five special vehicles were built in Army workshops to carry them. Due to changing operational requirements, it was ultimately decided to build only three semi-permanent class 40 bridges, at Xanten, Rees and Arnhem, and two class 70 bridges, at Rees and Arnhem.
A semi-permanent class 40 bridge and a semi-permanent class 70 bridge were also built over the Ijssel at Zutphen. The class 40 timber pile bridge at Zanten, known as "Dempsey" was built by the 18th GHQ Troops Engineers and was opened on 26 May. At Rees, steel-piled class 40 and class 70 jetty bridges 490 metres (1,600 ft) long and known as "Tyne" and "Tees" were built by the 50th GHQ Troops Engineers, and were opened on 23 May. The 690-metre (2,250 ft) class 40 and 70 steel-piled jetty bridges were built at Arnhem by the First Canadian Army engineers, and opened on 31 May, and the 440-metre (1,450 ft) class 40 and class 70 timber pile bridges at Zutphen were completed on 26 May.
## Beyond the Rhine
During the first three weeks of April 1945, the Second Army advanced about 320 kilometres (200 mi) across northern Germany to reach the Elbe on 19 April. During this advance it suffered 7,665 casualties and captured 78,108 prisoners. Until the railway bridges could be brought into operation, maintenance depended entirely on road transport. The 21st Army Group allocated an additional 2,190 tonnes (2,160 long tons) of road transport capacity to the Second Army between 27 March and 3 April. Another 640 tonnes (630 long tons) was reallocated from the First Canadian Army, and 7+1⁄2 platoons were made available, taking the transport from an anti-aircraft brigade. Another 2,000 tonnes (2,000 long tons) was obtained from within the Second Army by taking transport from artillery and armoured units that were not immediately required for the advance.
Stocking of No. 12 Army Roadhead in the Rheine area commenced on 3 April, and VIII, XII and XXX Corps started drawing from it on 9 April. Between 6 and 8 April the 21st Army Group released another 4,630 tonnes (4,560 long tons) of road transport, along with two DUKW companies that were re-equipped with 3-ton trucks. This came from the reorganisation of the line of communications, and more general transport companies arriving from Italy through Operation Goldflake. Stocking of No. 14 Army Roadhead in the Sulingen area from No. 10 Army Roadhead commenced on 13 April, and the first train arrived at No. 12 Army Roadhead via the American rail bridge at Wesel three days later. Three trains a day were run over this route under an arrangement with SHAEF and the American Military Railway Service.
That day trains also began arriving at No. 16 Army Roadhead from locations around Bocholt, using captured rolling stock and locomotives. German railway personnel were used to man two trains a day from Celle to Bienenbuttel. They were also utilised for duties such as manning level crossings. The expansion of the rail network allowed the 21st Army Group to give the Second Army another 11,460 tonnes (11,280 long tons) of road transport capacity. Railway units were moved forward, and only one railway group headquarters and two railway operating companies were left in France, Belgium and the Netherlands south of the Waal.
Despite this, stocks at the Nos. 12 and 14 Army Roadheads were being run down. On 16 April XXX Corps sent its road transport back to the Rhine roadhead to collect the ammunition it needed to capture Bremen. There were doubts as to whether this need could be met, but the situation was eased by the arrival of 4,700 tonnes (4,600 long tons) of ammunition that had been pre-loaded on some of the transport allocated by the 21st Army Group. Three days later, XII Corps did the same to facilitate the capture of Hamburg, but the expenditure of ammunition at Bremen was not as great as anticipated, and this allowed XII Corps' requirements to be met in full. VIII Corps also used its own transport to haul ammunition for the crossing of the Elbe on 28 April.
A 300-metre (980 ft) Class 9 FBE bridge was built over the Elbe at Lauenburg by the VIII Corps engineers on 29 April. While it was under construction, the engineers came under attack by the Luftwaffe, and 8 men were killed and 22 wounded. This merely delayed work on the bridge, which was opened to traffic at 20:15. The following day a German swimmer was seen affixing a suspicious cylindrical object to the bridge. The object sank after being cut loose during an attempt to recover it, and the swimmer was captured. At Artlenburg, 7th Army Troops engineers constructing a 282-metre (925 ft) class 40 Bailey pontoon bridge also came under air attack, and two of its mobile cranes were damaged by artillery fire, but the bridge was opened on schedule at 12:00 on 30 April. Over the next 24 hours, 7,415 vehicles crossed the bridge.
On 3 May an VIII Corps FMC at Lüneburg was taken over by the Second Army and used as an advance roadhead in conjunction with No. 14 Army Roadhead. There was a further allocation of 5,100 tonnes (5,000 long tons) of road transport for the drive to the Baltic Sea on 26 April, and another 2,700 tonnes (2,700 long tons) was received by the end of the month. This brought the amount of road transport capacity under Second Army's control to 31,580 tonnes (31,080 long tons), which was reckoned to be the equivalent of 76 general transport companies. The high use of road transport meant that the Second Army was burning 7,600 tonnes (7,500 long tons) of petrol a day, but the supply of fuel caused no problems. The Dumbo pipeline was extended from Boulogne to Antwerp in March. Two pipelines were laid across the Rhine at Emmerich and were in operation by the end of April. Initially, bulk POL was brought across the Rhine in tanker trucks at the rate of 1,000 tonnes (1,000 long tons) per day. It was decanted at Bocholt and transported by rail to No. 14 Army Roadhead. By mid-May the 21st Army Group's reserves had been reduced by a quarter.
Dumbo surpassed its target of 4.5 million litres (1 million imperial gallons) (about 3,620 tonnes (3,560 long tons)) per day on 15 March 1945, and by 3 April the Dumbo lines were delivering 4,600 tonnes (4,500 long tons) a day. New lines continued to be laid, the last one on 24 May. By this time the system consisted of 1,811 kilometres (1,125 mi) of pipelines and storage tanks with a capacity of 104,770 tonnes (103,120 long tons). To take pressure off the roads, the 21st Army Group placed an air composite platoon capable of receiving and handling up to 510 tonnes (500 long tons) per day under the Second Army's control. An allocation of 300 tonnes (300 long tons) per day was made, but owing to competing American demands, the use of aircraft to repatriate liberated American, British and Commonwealth ex-prisoners of war (PWX), and a somewhat cumbersome procedure for requesting air deliveries, the tonnage of air freight never reached this level, averaging just 145 tonnes (143 long tons) per day for the month of April. British and Commonwealth PWX were flown directly to the UK, and American PWX were flown to collecting camps around Le Havre.
Meanwhile, the First Canadian Army established two lines of communications. No 13 Army Roadhead was opened at Nijmegen on 2 March, and was stocked by rail. No. 15 Army Roadhead opened in the Almelo area on 18 April being stocked by road from the No. 13 Army Roadhead. I Canadian Corps advanced on Utrecht, supported by No. 13 Army Roadhead while II Canadian Corps advanced on Oldenburg supported from No. 15 Army Roadhead. Emmerich was taken on 1 April after a three-day battle, to provide another bridgehead. Three bridges were constructed there, but by the time they opened II Canadian Corps already had its three Canadian divisions across the Rhine.
As the German forces crumbled before the Allied onslaught, the numbers of German prisoners of war grew to the point where orders were issued on 1 May that no more prisoners should be sent west of the Rhine. Four days later orders came that disarmed troops would no longer have prisoner of war status, but would be classified as Surrendered Enemy Personnel, and that their own officers would be responsible for their administration. Captured German dumps held sufficient quantities of food for them, but they were not always easily accessible or distributable, so some had to be fed from 21st Army Group stocks, on a temporary ration scale of 1,100 calories (4,600 J) per man per day. Large numbers of displaced persons were also encountered, and they were accommodated in special camps. These provided health care, bathing and delousing with DDT to prevent the spread of disease. Their feeding was the responsibility of the German civilian population, but the British Army had to release many NAAFI packs to displaced persons. By May the ration strength of the 21st Army Group had risen to 1.711 million.
On 4 May 1945, Montgomery accepted the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath, which covered German forces in the Netherlands, Dunkirk, North-West Germany and Denmark. Four days later the German Instrument of Surrender was signed in Berlin, and the war with Germany was over.
## Post-war
Civil affairs supplies (mostly food, but also soap, medical supplies and some other goods for civilian use) were issued through military channels. The British Occupation zone in Germany roughly corresponded to the old Prussian provinces of Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover and Westphalia, together with the northern half of the Rhine Province. Each of the three areas was controlled by a corps. Major-General Gerald Templer became the Director-General of Civil Affairs at 21st Army Group headquarters in March 1945. He recognised that a humanitarian catastrophe was in the making in Germany unless food, shelter and fuel could be made available to the civilian population.
The British zone contained the Ruhr, and its agricultural areas, mostly devoted to dairy farming, were insufficient to feed the population. Before the war it had imported millions of tons of food from the eastern parts of Germany which were now in the Soviet occupation zone, but the collapse of the transportation system caused by Allied bombing had prevented the movement of foodstuffs, mostly grain and potatoes, in the 1944–1945 agricultural season, and stocks were all but exhausted. Even butter production was at a standstill owing to a shortage of coal.
Rehabilitation of Germany's transportation infrastructure was a priority. Regional port control organisations were established at Emden, Hamburg and Lübeck, and inland water control teams at Hamburg, Hanover, Münster and Duisburg. Most of the senior staff of the Reich Ministry of Transport were discovered on a pair of trains in the Hamburg area. Finding staff for the British control organisations was more difficult, as demobilisation and redeployment for the ongoing war against Japan thinned the ranks of skilled transportation officers.
The railway system required considerable work. A major bottleneck was the line between Löhne and Hanover, because there was only a single-track bridge over the Weser near Bad Oeynhausen. Another single-line bridge was opened in August 1945. Rolling stock was recovered from damaged rail yards and in some cases tank transporters were used to move wagons from sections of the line that had become isolated due to damaged bridges. By October about 22 per cent of the railways were back in service. Road transport was no less hampered by the loss of bridges, and the Royal Engineers took the lead in repairing or replacing the 1,500 bridges that had been destroyed by bombing or demolitions. To get the vehicles back into service, the REME organised 530 workshops by the end of July. Initially trams were preferred to buses to economise on petrol and tyres, but by September the focus had shifted to conserving coal.
The British zone had sources of coal, but the number of miners had fallen from around 300,000 before the war to 117,000 in June 1945, due to the departure of foreign workers, the German miners who had been drafted into the army, and the dispersal of the local population due to bombing and fighting. The 21st Army Group organised the effort to get the coal industry working again. As well as a shortage of labour, there was a shortage of wooden pit props. Arrangements were made to acquire 1,500 tonnes (1,500 long tons) per day from the American zone, but this did not meet the requirement of 3,600 tonnes (3,500 long tons). The British Army organised the extraction of the rest from the British zone, despite its dearth of forests, and timber was brought to the mines by British Army transport.
## Outcome
In the campaign in North-West Europe in 1945, Montgomery sought to contribute to the defeat of Germany and to do so in a manner that displayed a visibly committed and active British role. He had to do so to ensure a prominent British role in the post war political organisation of Europe and secure a stable and lasting peace. This was not easy when the 21st Army Group was fighting alongside the much larger American armies and had to deal with a severe manpower shortage. Excessive casualties could reduce the size of the British force and hence its role and visibility. To compensate for this, to minimise casualties, and to maximise the combat effectiveness of what manpower they had, the British forces relied on machines, materiel and firepower.
The vast resources brought to bear were in stark contrast with scarcities of the early war years. Lend-Lease aid from the United States and a high degree of industrial mobilisation provided the equipment and materiel. The British Army of 1944–1945 was highly mechanised, which conferred great tactical and strategic manoeuvrability, but at the same time demanded a high degree of organisation and professionalism to use the machines, materiel and firepower to best effect. In this campaign the British Army demonstrated its proficiency in logistics. The 21st Army Group's logistical system proved capable of keeping the fighting men fed and supplied, whether in the awful weather conditions of Operation Veritable or the fast-moving advance of the final drive beyond the Rhine. |
27,850,825 | Battle of Settepozzi | 1,173,574,949 | 1263 battle off the island of Spetses | [
"1260s in the Byzantine Empire",
"1263 in Europe",
"13th century in Greece",
"Byzantine Empire–Republic of Genoa relations",
"Conflicts in 1263",
"Medieval Aegean Sea",
"Michael VIII Palaiologos",
"Military history of Greece",
"Naval battles involving the Byzantine Empire",
"Naval battles of the Venetian–Genoese wars",
"War of Saint Sabas"
]
| The Battle of Settepozzi was fought in the first half of 1263 off the island of Settepozzi (the medieval Italian name for Spetses) between a Genoese–Byzantine fleet and a smaller Venetian fleet.
Genoa and the Byzantines had been allied against Venice since the Treaty of Nymphaeum in 1261, while Genoa, in particular, had been engaged in the War of Saint Sabas against Venice from 1256. In 1263, a Genoese fleet of 48 ships, which was sailing to the Byzantine stronghold of Monemvasia, encountered a Venetian fleet of 32 ships. The Genoese decided to attack, but only two of the four admirals of the Genoese fleet, and 14 of its ships took part and were easily routed by the Venetians, who captured four vessels and inflicted considerable casualties.
The Venetian victory and the demonstration of Genoese reluctance to confront them had important political repercussions, as the Byzantines began to distance themselves from their alliance with Genoa and restored their relations with Venice, concluding a five-year non-aggression pact in 1268. After Settepozzi, the Genoese avoided confrontation with the Venetian navy, instead focusing on commerce raiding. This did not prevent another, even more lopsided and complete defeat at the Battle of Trapani in 1266.
## Background
When Michael VIII Palaiologos (r. 1259–1282) became ruler of the Byzantine Greek Empire of Nicaea, he set about realizing the Nicaean ambition to recover Constantinople, the former capital of the Byzantine Empire, which since the Fourth Crusade in 1204 had been the seat of the rival Latin Empire. By this time, the Latin Empire was a weak remnant of its former self, but was backed by the naval might of the Republic of Venice, which contributed to the failure of two large-scale Nicaean attempts to capture the city in 1235 and 1260. The latter failure especially made the need to counter the Venetian fleet apparent to Palaiologos. Only one state possessed that ability: the Republic of Genoa.
Venice's main commercial rival, Genoa had been embroiled since 1256 in the War of Saint Sabas against Venice, and after a reverses suffered in the conflict, the city was faced with the prospect of being cut off entirely from the lucrative Levantine trade. Seeking a way out, as well as a diplomatic coup that would bolster his own internal position against the Genoese nobility, the autocratic Captain of the People, Guglielmo Boccanegra, dispatched an embassy to Palaiologos offering an alliance. The resulting Treaty of Nymphaeum, signed on 13 March 1261, obliged Genoa to furnish a fleet of 50 vessels, with their expenses paid by the Emperor, but in exchange secured very advantageous commercial terms; following a successful recovery of Constantinople, the Genoese stood to effectively inherit and even expand upon the privileged position that the Venetians held in the Latin Empire.
In the event, Constantinople was recovered by the Nicaean general Alexios Strategopoulos barely a fortnight after the treaty was signed, without the need for Genoese naval assistance. Nevertheless, Michael VIII scrupulously observed the terms of the Treaty of Nymphaeum, as Genoese naval strength was still necessary to confront a potential Venetian counterstrike while a native Byzantine fleet was slowly being re-established. With the Emperor's subsidies, the Genoese were able to increase their fleet strength considerably. For a year after the recapture of Constantinople, both Venice and Genoa remained passive in the Aegean Sea: Venice hesitated to confront the numerically far superior fleet that Genoa had dispatched to the area, and awaited political developments in Italy, while Genoa suffered from internal turmoil with the overthrow of Boccanegra and the assumption of power by a collective leadership representing the noble houses of the city.
In the summer of 1262, the Venetians ordered a 37-galley fleet under Jacopo Dolfin into the Aegean, which met the Genoese fleet of 60 ships under Ottone Vento at Thessalonica. The Genoese refused to engage, but were also able to obstruct Venetian attempts to blockade them in port. A piratical foray by the Lombard lords of Negroponte, who were allied with Venice, into the Marmara Sea was confronted and defeated by a Byzantine–Genoese squadron. Meanwhile, hostilities broke out in the Morea (the Peloponnese peninsula), where Michael VIII dispatched an expeditionary force (in late 1262 or early 1263) against the Principality of Achaea. Despite initial successes, Byzantine attempts to conquer the entirety of the principality were decisively defeated at Prinitza and Makryplagi.
## Battle
Some time in early 1263, a Genoese fleet of 38 galleys and 10 saette, crewed by some 6,000 men and commanded by four admirals, was sailing to the Byzantine fortress and naval base of Monemvasia in the south-eastern Morea. At the island of Settepozzi (Spetses) it encountered a Venetian fleet of 32 galleys, under Guiberto Dandolo, sailing north to Negroponte.
The details of the engagement are not very clear. According to the Genoese Annales Ianuenses, when the signal to attack was given, only fourteen Genoese ships under two of the admirals, Pietro Avvocato and Lanfranco Spinola, advanced, while the rest stood back and then suddenly fled. The Venetian chronicler Martino da Canal, however, records that the Venetian ships attacked first, while the Genoese were deployed in four ranks of ten ships each. According to Canal, the Venetians boarded two of the Genoese flagships and, once they captured them and cut down their flags, the other two admirals turned and fled. The battle ended in a clear Venetian victory: the Genoese fleet lost many men, including Avvocato, and the Venetians captured four Genoese ships, including the flagships of the two admirals. Canal put Genoese casualties—"exaggeratedly perhaps", according to the historian Deno Geanakoplos—at 1,000 men (600 killed or wounded and 400 captured), as compared to 20 killed and 400 wounded on the Venetian side.
According to the Annales Ianuenses, the hesitation of the Genoese fleet to engage may have been due to the fact that the Venetians claimed immunity as crusaders. On the other hand, the Genoese navy generally failed to effectively confront its Venetian counterpart throughout the war; often, according to naval historian John Dotson, "because of divided or ineffective command", which was also in evidence at Settepozzi. The historians Frederic Lane and Deno Geanakoplos explain the Genoese commanders' reluctance to risk their ships by pointing out that these were owned by private contractors, usually the rich noble merchants who ran the city, and thus constituted valuable assets for which the admirals were answerable.
## Questions of chronology and details
The 14th-century Venetian historian Andrea Dandolo placed the battle at the end of the tenth year of Doge Reniero Zeno's reign, i.e., either in late 1262 or January 1263, whereas the Annales Ianuenses simply record it under the year 1263. Modern historians generally place the battle in the spring of 1263: the medievalist Georg Caro placed it in March at the latest, whereas the naval historian Camillo Manfroni suggested May as the most likely time. Geanakoplos, largely following Manfroni, placed the battle in the period May–July 1263.
The Annales Ianuenses mention the battle directly after the sailing, on 28 May 1263, of a fleet of 25 galleys and six other ships to reinforce their fleet operating in the Aegean, under the admirals Pietrino Grimaldi and Pesceto Mallone, implying that they were involved in the battle. However, the Byzantinist Albert Failler considers that this fleet probably sailed before news of Settepozzi had arrived in Genoa, and that it did not engage in any combat, while the medievalist Michel Balard suggests that the fleet defeated at Settepozzi may have been sailing to Monemvasia to unite with the new fleet coming from Genoa. While the fleet sailed for Monemvasia "on the emperor's orders" according to the Annales, its direct connection with the Byzantine operations in the Morea, such as the arrival of Byzantine troops at Monemvasia mentioned in a letter of Pope Urban IV, is uncertain.
In addition, the exact identity of the two admirals who were not engaged in battle is unknown. Canal reports that one of them was a Greek, and the presence of Byzantine ships in the Genoese fleets is mentioned in the sources. However, the only Byzantine fleet commander attested by name during this time, Alexios Doukas Philanthropenos, was active in the Aegean islands, rather than along the coasts of the Greek mainland.
## Repercussions
Although most of the Genoese fleet survived the battle, and in its aftermath managed to capture four Venetian taride cargo vessels full of provisions sailing for Negroponte, the Genoese established a court of inquiry on the battle, and condemned the surviving admirals, councillors, and pilots "for their excesses ... and malfeasance in the areas of Romania [i.e., the Byzantine East]". No further details are given in the Annales but, as Geanakoplos remarks, "it is nevertheless a significant indication of guilt that such terms could be used by the more or less official chronicle of the [Republic of Genoa]".
Subsequently, the Genoese avoided direct confrontations with the Venetian battle fleet and engaged in commerce raiding against the Venetian merchant convoys, achieving a notable success in 1264 at the Battle of Saseno. In 1266 the main Genoese fleet of 27 galleys was defeated and captured in its entirety by the Venetians at the Battle of Trapani. The war between the two powers lasted until 1270, when King Louis IX of France coerced both to sign the Treaty of Cremona.
Apart from the loss in lives and ships, the long-term ramifications of the defeat at Settepozzi were political: Michael VIII began to reconsider the alliance with Genoa, which was very costly but had so far brought little in return. The Emperor had shown signs of impatience with his allies before, but now he made his frustration public: soon after the battle Michael VIII dismissed sixty Genoese ships from his service and, according to Canal, severely dressed down the Genoese podestà in Constantinople. Genoese ships were soon allowed to return to Imperial service, but Michael VIII began to delay the payments for their crews. The Byzantine–Genoese rift culminated in 1264, when the Genoese podestà was implicated in a plot to surrender Constantinople to Manfred of Sicily, whereupon the Emperor expelled the Genoese from the city.
Michael VIII signed a treaty with the Venetians on 18 June 1265, but it was not ratified by Doge Zeno. In the face of the threat from Charles of Anjou after 1266, Michael VIII was forced to renew his alliance with Genoa, but also maintained his détente with Venice, signing a five-year non-aggression pact in June 1268. |
25,154,546 | Mechanical filter | 1,136,742,932 | Type of signal processing filter | [
"Analog circuits",
"Electromechanical engineering",
"Electronic design",
"Linear filters",
"Mechanics",
"Signal processing filter",
"Sound recording technology"
]
| A mechanical filter is a signal processing filter usually used in place of an electronic filter at radio frequencies. Its purpose is the same as that of a normal electronic filter: to pass a range of signal frequencies, but to block others. The filter acts on mechanical vibrations which are the analogue of the electrical signal. At the input and output of the filter, transducers convert the electrical signal into, and then back from, these mechanical vibrations.
The components of a mechanical filter are all directly analogous to the various elements found in electrical circuits. The mechanical elements obey mathematical functions which are identical to their corresponding electrical elements. This makes it possible to apply electrical network analysis and filter design methods to mechanical filters. Electrical theory has developed a large library of mathematical forms that produce useful filter frequency responses and the mechanical filter designer is able to make direct use of these. It is only necessary to set the mechanical components to appropriate values to produce a filter with an identical response to the electrical counterpart.
Steel alloys and iron–nickel alloys are common materials for mechanical filter components; nickel is sometimes used for the input and output couplings. Resonators in the filter made from these materials need to be machined to precisely adjust their resonance frequency before final assembly.
While the meaning of mechanical filter in this article is one that is used in an electromechanical role, it is possible to use a mechanical design to filter mechanical vibrations or sound waves (which are also essentially mechanical) directly. For example, filtering of audio frequency response in the design of loudspeaker cabinets can be achieved with mechanical components. In the electrical application, in addition to mechanical components which correspond to their electrical counterparts, transducers are needed to convert between the mechanical and electrical domains. A representative selection of the wide variety of component forms and topologies for mechanical filters are presented in this article.
The theory of mechanical filters was first applied to improving the mechanical parts of phonographs in the 1920s. By the 1950s mechanical filters were being manufactured as self-contained components for applications in radio transmitters and high-end receivers. The high "quality factor", Q, that mechanical resonators can attain, far higher than that of an all-electrical LC circuit, made possible the construction of mechanical filters with excellent selectivity. Good selectivity, being important in radio receivers, made such filters highly attractive. Contemporary researchers are working on microelectromechanical filters, the mechanical devices corresponding to electronic integrated circuits.
## Elements
The elements of a passive linear electrical network consist of inductors, capacitors and resistors which have the properties of inductance, elastance (inverse capacitance) and resistance, respectively. The mechanical counterparts of these properties are, respectively, mass, stiffness and damping. In most electronic filter designs, only inductor and capacitor elements are used in the body of the filter (although the filter may be terminated with resistors at the input and output). Resistances are not present in a theoretical filter composed of ideal components and only arise in practical designs as unwanted parasitic elements. Likewise, a mechanical filter would ideally consist only of components with the properties of mass and stiffness, but in reality some damping is present as well.
The mechanical counterparts of voltage and electric current in this type of analysis are, respectively, force (F) and velocity (v) and represent the signal waveforms. From this, a mechanical impedance can be defined in terms of the imaginary angular frequency, jω, which entirely follows the electrical analogy.
The scheme presented in the table is known as the impedance analogy. Circuit diagrams produced using this analogy match the electrical impedance of the mechanical system seen by the electrical circuit, making it intuitive from an electrical engineering standpoint. There is also the mobility analogy, in which force corresponds to current and velocity corresponds to voltage. This has equally valid results but requires using the reciprocals of the electrical counterparts listed above. Hence, M → C, S → 1/L, D → G where G is electrical conductance, the inverse of resistance. Equivalent circuits produced by this scheme are similar, but are the dual impedance forms whereby series elements become parallel, capacitors become inductors, and so on. Circuit diagrams using the mobility analogy more closely match the mechanical arrangement of the circuit, making it more intuitive from a mechanical engineering standpoint. In addition to their application to electromechanical systems, these analogies are widely used to aid analysis in acoustics.
Any mechanical component will unavoidably possess both mass and stiffness. This translates in electrical terms to an LC circuit, that is, a circuit consisting of an inductor and a capacitor, hence mechanical components are resonators and are often used as such. It is still possible to represent inductors and capacitors as individual lumped elements in a mechanical implementation by minimising (but never quite eliminating) the unwanted property. Capacitors may be made of thin, long rods, that is, the mass is minimised and the compliance is maximised. Inductors, on the other hand, may be made of short, wide pieces which maximise the mass in comparison to the compliance of the piece.
Mechanical parts act as a transmission line for mechanical vibrations. If the wavelength is short in comparison to the part then a lumped-element model as described above is no longer adequate and a distributed-element model must be used instead. The mechanical distributed elements are entirely analogous to electrical distributed elements and the mechanical filter designer can use the methods of electrical distributed-element filter design.
## History
### Harmonic telegraph
Mechanical filter design was developed by applying the discoveries made in electrical filter theory to mechanics. However, a very early example (1870s) of acoustic filtering was the "harmonic telegraph", which arose precisely because electrical resonance was poorly understood but mechanical resonance (in particular, acoustic resonance) was very familiar to engineers. This situation was not to last for long; electrical resonance had been known to science for some time before this, and it was not long before engineers started to produce all-electric designs for filters. In its time, though, the harmonic telegraph was of some importance. The idea was to combine several telegraph signals on one telegraph line by what would now be called frequency division multiplexing thus saving enormously on line installation costs. The key of each operator activated a vibrating electromechanical reed which converted this vibration into an electrical signal. Filtering at the receiving operator was achieved by a similar reed tuned to precisely the same frequency, which would only vibrate and produce a sound from transmissions by the operator with the identical tuning.
Versions of the harmonic telegraph were developed by Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell, Ernest Mercadier and others. Its ability to act as a sound transducer to and from the electrical domain was to inspire the invention of the telephone.
### Mechanical equivalent circuits
Once the basics of electrical network analysis began to be established, it was not long before the ideas of complex impedance and filter design theories were carried over into mechanics by analogy. Kennelly, who was also responsible for introducing complex impedance, and Webster were the first to extend the concept of impedance into mechanical systems in 1920. Mechanical admittance and the associated mobility analogy came much later and are due to Firestone in 1932.
It was not enough to just develop a mechanical analogy. This could be applied to problems that were entirely in the mechanical domain, but for mechanical filters with an electrical application it is necessary to include the transducer in the analogy as well. Poincaré in 1907 was the first to describe a transducer as a pair of linear algebraic equations relating electrical variables (voltage and current) to mechanical variables (force and velocity). These equations can be expressed as a matrix relationship in much the same way as the z-parameters of a two-port network in electrical theory, to which this is entirely analogous:
$\begin{bmatrix} V \\ F \end{bmatrix} = \begin{bmatrix} z_{11} & z_{12} \\ z_{21} & z_{22} \end{bmatrix} \begin{bmatrix} I \\ v \end{bmatrix}$
where V and I represent the voltage and current respectively on the electrical side of the transducer.
Wegel, in 1921, was the first to express these equations in terms of mechanical impedance as well as electrical impedance. The element $z_{22} \,$ is the open circuit mechanical impedance, that is, the impedance presented by the mechanical side of the transducer when no current is entering the electrical side. The element $z_{11} \,$, conversely, is the clamped electrical impedance, that is, the impedance presented to the electrical side when the mechanical side is clamped and prevented from moving (velocity is zero). The remaining two elements, $z_{21} \,$ and $z_{12} \,$, describe the transducer forward and reverse transfer functions respectively. Once these ideas were in place, engineers were able to extend electrical theory into the mechanical domain and analyse an electromechanical system as a unified whole.
### Sound reproduction
An early application of these new theoretical tools was in phonographic sound reproduction. A recurring problem with early phonograph designs was that mechanical resonances in the pickup and sound transmission mechanism caused excessively large peaks and troughs in the frequency response, resulting in poor sound quality. In 1923, Harrison of the Western Electric Company filed a patent for a phonograph in which the mechanical design was entirely represented as an electrical circuit. The horn of the phonograph is represented as a transmission line, and is a resistive load for the rest of the circuit, while all the mechanical and acoustic parts—from the pickup needle through to the horn—are translated into lumped components according to the impedance analogy. The circuit arrived at is a ladder topology of series resonant circuits coupled by shunt capacitors. This can be viewed as a bandpass filter circuit. Harrison designed the component values of this filter to have a specific passband corresponding to the desired audio passband (in this case 100 Hz to 6 kHz) and a flat response. Translating these electrical element values back into mechanical quantities provided specifications for the mechanical components in terms of mass and stiffness, which in turn could be translated into physical dimensions for their manufacture. The resulting phonograph has a flat frequency response in its passband and is free of the resonances previously experienced. Shortly after this, Harrison filed another patent using the same methodology on telephone transmit and receive transducers.
Harrison used Campbell's image filter theory, which was the most advanced filter theory available at the time. In this theory, filter design is viewed essentially as an impedance matching problem. More advanced filter theory was brought to bear on this problem by Norton in 1929 at Bell Labs. Norton followed the same general approach though he later described to Darlington the filter he designed as being "maximally flat". Norton's mechanical design predates the paper by Butterworth who is usually credited as the first to describe the electronic maximally flat filter. The equations Norton gives for his filter correspond to a singly terminated Butterworth filter, that is, one driven by an ideal voltage source with no impedance, whereas the form more usually given in texts is for the doubly terminated filter with resistors at both ends, making it hard to recognise the design for what it is. Another unusual feature of Norton's filter design arises from the series capacitor, which represents the stiffness of the diaphragm. This is the only series capacitor in Norton's representation, and without it, the filter could be analysed as a low-pass prototype. Norton moves the capacitor out of the body of the filter to the input at the expense of introducing a transformer into the equivalent circuit (Norton's figure 4). Norton has used here the "turning round the L" impedance transform to achieve this.
The definitive description of the subject from this period is Maxfield and Harrison's 1926 paper. There, they describe not only how mechanical bandpass filters can be applied to sound reproduction systems, but also apply the same principles to recording systems and describe a much improved disc cutting head.
### Volume production
Modern mechanical filters for intermediate frequency (IF) applications were first investigated by Robert Adler of Zenith Electronics who built a 455 kHz filter in 1946. The idea was taken up by Collins Radio Company who started the first volume production of mechanical filters from the 1950s onwards. These were originally designed for telephone frequency-division multiplex applications where there is commercial advantage in using high quality filters. Precision and steepness of the transition band leads to a reduced width of guard band, which in turn leads to the ability to squeeze more telephone channels into the same cable. This same feature is useful in radio transmitters for much the same reason. Mechanical filters quickly also found popularity in VHF/UHF radio IF stages of the high end radio sets (military, marine, amateur radio and the like) manufactured by Collins. They were favoured in the radio application because they could achieve much higher Q-factors than the equivalent LC filter. High Q allows filters to be designed which have high selectivity, important for distinguishing adjacent radio channels in receivers. They also had an advantage in stability over both LC filters and monolithic crystal filters. The most popular design for radio applications was torsional resonators because radio IF typically lies in the 100 to 500 kHz band.
## Transducers
Both magnetostrictive and piezoelectric transducers are used in mechanical filters. Piezoelectric transducers are favoured in recent designs since the piezoelectric material can also be used as one of the resonators of the filter, thus reducing the number of components and thereby saving space. They also avoid the susceptibility to extraneous magnetic fields of the magnetostrictive type of transducer.
### Magnetostrictive
A magnetostrictive material is one which changes shape when a magnetic field is applied. In reverse, it produces a magnetic field when distorted. The magnetostrictive transducer requires a coil of conducting wire around the magnetostrictive material. The coil either induces a magnetic field in the transducer and sets it in motion or else picks up an induced current from the motion of the transducer at the filter output. It is also usually necessary to have a small magnet to bias the magnetostrictive material into its operating range. It is possible to dispense with the magnets if the biasing is taken care of on the electronic side by providing a d.c. current superimposed on the signal, but this approach would detract from the generality of the filter design.
The usual magnetostrictive materials used for the transducer are either ferrite or compressed powdered iron. Mechanical filter designs often have the resonators coupled with steel or nickel-iron wires, but on some designs, especially older ones, nickel wire may be used for the input and output rods. This is because it is possible to wind the transducer coil directly on to a nickel coupling wire since nickel is slightly magnetostrictive. However, it is not strongly so and coupling to the electrical circuit is weak. This scheme also has the disadvantage of eddy currents, a problem that is avoided if ferrites are used instead of nickel.
The coil of the transducer adds some inductance on the electrical side of the filter. It is common practice to add a capacitor in parallel with the coil so that an additional resonator is formed which can be incorporated into the filter design. While this will not improve performance to the extent that an additional mechanical resonator would, there is some benefit and the coil has to be there in any case.
### Piezoelectric
A piezoelectric material is one which changes shape when an electric field is applied. In reverse, it produces an electric field when it is distorted. A piezoelectric transducer, in essence, is made simply by plating electrodes on to the piezoelectric material. Early piezoelectric materials used in transducers such as barium titanate had poor temperature stability. This precluded the transducer from functioning as one of the resonators; it had to be a separate component. This problem was solved with the introduction of lead zirconate titanate (abbreviated PZT) which is stable enough to be used as a resonator. Another common piezoelectric material is quartz, which has also been used in mechanical filters. However, ceramic materials such as PZT are preferred for their greater electromechanical coupling coefficient.
One type of piezoelectric transducer is the Langevin type, named after a transducer used by Paul Langevin in early sonar research. This is good for longitudinal modes of vibration. It can also be used on resonators with other modes of vibration if the motion can be mechanically converted into a longitudinal motion. The transducer consists of a layer of piezoelectric material sandwiched transversally into a coupling rod or resonator.
Another kind of piezoelectric transducer has the piezoelectric material sandwiched in longitudinally, usually into the resonator itself. This kind is good for torsional vibration modes and is called a torsional transducer.
As miniaturized by using thin film manufacturing methods piezoelectric resonators are called thin-film bulk acoustic resonators (FBARs).
## Resonators
It is possible to achieve an extremely high Q with mechanical resonators. Mechanical resonators typically have a Q of 10,000 or so, and 25,000 can be achieved in torsional resonators using a particular nickel-iron alloy. This is an unreasonably high figure to achieve with LC circuits, whose Q is limited by the resistance of the inductor coils.
Early designs in the 1940s and 1950s started by using steel as a resonator material. This has given way to nickel-iron alloys, primarily to maximise the Q since this is often the primary appeal of mechanical filters rather than price. Some of the metals that have been used for mechanical filter resonators and their Q are shown in the table.
Piezoelectric crystals are also sometimes used in mechanical filter designs. This is especially true for resonators that are also acting as transducers for inputs and outputs.
One advantage that mechanical filters have over LC electrical filters is that they can be made very stable. The resonance frequency can be made so stable that it varies only 1.5 parts per billion (ppb) from the specified value over the operating temperature range (−25 to 85 °C), and its average drift with time can be as low as 4 ppb per day. This stability with temperature is another reason for using nickel-iron as the resonator material. Variations with temperature in the resonance frequency (and other features of the frequency function) are directly related to variations in the Young's modulus, which is a measure of stiffness of the material. Materials are therefore sought that have a small temperature coefficient of Young's modulus. In general, Young's modulus has a negative temperature coefficient (materials become less stiff with increasing temperature) but additions of small amounts of certain other elements in the alloy can produce a material with a temperature coefficient that changes sign from negative through zero to positive with temperature. Such a material will have a zero coefficient of temperature with resonance frequency around a particular temperature. It is possible to adjust the point of zero temperature coefficient to a desired position by heat treatment of the alloy.
### Resonator modes
It is usually possible for a mechanical part to vibrate in a number of different modes, however the design will be based on a particular vibrational mode and the designer will take steps to try to restrict the resonance to this mode. As well as the straightforward longitudinal mode some others which are used include flexural mode, torsional mode, radial mode and drumhead mode.
Modes are numbered according to the number of half-wavelengths in the vibration. Some modes exhibit vibrations in more than one direction (such as drumhead mode which has two) and consequently the mode number consists of more than one number. When the vibration is in one of the higher modes, there will be multiple nodes on the resonator where there is no motion. For some types of resonator, this can provide a convenient place to make a mechanical attachment for structural support. Wires attached at nodes will have no effect on the vibration of the resonator or the overall filter response. In figure 5, some possible anchor points are shown as wires attached at the nodes. The modes shown are (5a) the second longitudinal mode fixed at one end, (5b) the first torsional mode, (5c) the second torsional mode, (5d) the second flexural mode, (5e) first radial expansion mode and (5f) first radially symmetric drumhead mode.
## Circuit designs
There are a great many combinations of resonators and transducers that can be used to construct a mechanical filter. A selection of some of these is shown in the diagrams. Figure 6 shows a filter using disc flexural resonators and magnetostrictive transducers. The transducer drives the centre of the first resonator, causing it to vibrate. The edges of the disc move in antiphase to the centre when the driving signal is at, or close to, resonance, and the signal is transmitted through the connecting rods to the next resonator. When the driving signal is not close to resonance, there is little movement at the edges, and the filter rejects (does not pass) the signal. Figure 7 shows a similar idea involving longitudinal resonators connected together in a chain by connecting rods. In this diagram, the filter is driven by piezoelectric transducers. It could equally well have used magnetostrictive transducers. Figure 8 shows a filter using torsional resonators. In this diagram, the input has a torsional piezoelectric transducer and the output has a magnetostrictive transducer. This would be quite unusual in a real design, as both input and output usually have the same type of transducer. The magnetostrictive transducer is only shown here to demonstrate how longitudinal vibrations may be converted to torsional vibrations and vice versa. Figure 9 shows a filter using drumhead mode resonators. The edges of the discs are fixed to the casing of the filter (not shown in the diagram) so the vibration of the disc is in the same modes as the membrane of a drum. Collins calls this type of filter a disc wire filter.
The various types of resonator are all particularly suited to different frequency bands. Overall, mechanical filters with lumped elements of all kinds can cover frequencies from about 5 to 700 kHz although mechanical filters down as low as a few kilohertz (kHz) are rare. The lower part of this range, below 100 kHz, is best covered with bar flexural resonators. The upper part is better done with torsional resonators. Drumhead disc resonators are in the middle, covering the range from around 100 to 300 kHz.
The frequency response behaviour of all mechanical filters can be expressed as an equivalent electrical circuit using the impedance analogy described above. An example of this is shown in figure 8b which is the equivalent circuit of the mechanical filter of figure 8a. Elements on the electrical side, such as the inductance of the magnetostrictive transducer, are omitted but would be taken into account in a complete design. The series resonant circuits on the circuit diagram represent the torsional resonators, and the shunt capacitors represent the coupling wires. The component values of the electrical equivalent circuit can be adjusted, more or less at will, by modifying the dimensions of the mechanical components. In this way, all the theoretical tools of electrical analysis and filter design can be brought to bear on the mechanical design. Any filter realisable in electrical theory can, in principle, also be realised as a mechanical filter. In particular, the popular finite element approximations to an ideal filter response of the Butterworth and Chebyshev filters can both readily be realised. As with the electrical counterpart, the more elements that are used, the closer the approximation approaches the ideal, however, for practical reasons the number of resonators does not normally exceed eight.
### Semi-lumped designs
Frequencies of the order of megahertz (MHz) are above the usual range for mechanical filters. The components start to become very small, or alternatively the components are large compared to the signal wavelength. The lumped-element model described above starts to break down and the components must be considered as distributed elements. The frequency at which the transition from lumped to distributed modeling takes place is much lower for mechanical filters than it is for their electrical counterparts. This is because mechanical vibrations travel at the speed of sound for the material the component is composed of. For solid components, this is many times (x15 for nickel-iron) the speed of sound in air (343 m/s) but still considerably less than the speed of electromagnetic waves (approx. 3x10<sup>8</sup> m/s in vacuum). Consequently, mechanical wavelengths are much shorter than electrical wavelengths for the same frequency. Advantage can be taken of these effects by deliberately designing components to be distributed elements, and the components and methods used in electrical distributed-element filters can be brought to bear. The equivalents of stubs and impedance transformers are both achievable. Designs which use a mixture of lumped and distributed elements are referred to as semi-lumped.
An example of such a design is shown in figure 10a. The resonators are disc flexural resonators similar to those shown in figure 6, except that these are energised from an edge, leading to vibration in the fundamental flexural mode with a node in the centre, whereas the figure 6 design is energised in the centre leading to vibration in the second flexural mode at resonance. The resonators are mechanically attached to the housing by pivots at right angles to the coupling wires. The pivots are to ensure free turning of the resonator and minimise losses. The resonators are treated as lumped elements; however, the coupling wires are made exactly one half-wavelength (λ/2) long and are equivalent to a λ/2 open circuit stub in the electrical equivalent circuit. For a narrow-band filter, a stub of this sort has the approximate equivalent circuit of a parallel shunt tuned circuit as shown in figure 10b. Consequently, the connecting wires are being used in this design to add additional resonators into the circuit and will have a better response than one with just the lumped resonators and short couplings. For even higher frequencies, microelectromechanical methods can be used as described below.
### Bridging wires
Bridging wires are rods that couple together resonators that are not adjacent. They can be used to produce poles of attenuation in the stopband. This has the benefit of increasing the stopband rejection. When the pole is placed near the passband edge, it also has the benefit of increasing roll-off and narrowing the transition band. The typical effects of some of these on filter frequency response are shown in figure 11. Bridging across a single resonator (figure 11b) can produce a pole of attenuation in the high stopband. Bridging across two resonators (figure 11c) can produce a pole of attenuation in both the high and the low stopband. Using multiple bridges (figure 11d) will result in multiple poles of attenuation. In this way, the attenuation of the stopbands can be deepened over a broad frequency range.
The method of coupling between non-adjacent resonators is not limited to mechanical filters. It can be applied to other filter formats and the general term for this class is cross-coupled filter. For instance, channels can be cut between cavity resonators, mutual inductance can be used with discrete component filters, and feedback paths can be used with active analogue or digital filters. Nor was the method first discovered in the field of mechanical filters; the earliest description is in a 1948 patent for filters using microwave cavity resonators. However, mechanical filter designers were the first (1960s) to develop practical filters of this kind and the method became a particular feature of mechanical filters.
## Microelectromechanical filters
A new technology emerging in mechanical filtering is microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). MEMS are very small micromachines with component sizes measured in micrometres (μm), but not as small as nanomachines. These filters can be designed to operate at much higher frequencies than can be achieved with traditional mechanical filters. These systems are mostly fabricated from silicon (Si), silicon nitride (Si<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub>), or polymers. A common component used for radio frequency filtering (and MEMS applications generally), is the cantilever resonator. Cantilevers are simple mechanical components to manufacture by much the same methods used by the semiconductor industry; masking, photolithography and etching, with a final undercutting etch to separate the cantilever from the substrate. The technology has great promise since cantilevers can be produced in large numbers on a single substrate—much as large numbers of transistors are currently contained on a single silicon chip.
The resonator shown in figure 12 is around 120 μm in length. Experimental complete filters with an operating frequency of 30 GHz have been produced using cantilever varactors as the resonator elements. The size of this filter is around 4×3.5 mm. Cantilever resonators are typically applied at frequencies below 200 MHz, but other structures, such as micro-machined cavities, can be used in the microwave bands. Extremely high Q resonators can be made with this technology; flexural mode resonators with a Q in excess of 80,000 at 8 MHz are reported.
## Adjustment
The precision applications in which mechanical filters are used require that the resonators are accurately adjusted to the specified resonance frequency. This is known as trimming and usually involves a mechanical machining process. In most filter designs, this can be difficult to do once the resonators have been assembled into the complete filter so the resonators are trimmed before assembly. Trimming is done in at least two stages; coarse and fine, with each stage bringing the resonance frequency closer to the specified value. Most trimming methods involve removing material from the resonator which will increase the resonance frequency. The target frequency for a coarse trimming stage consequently needs to be set below the final frequency since the tolerances of the process could otherwise result in a frequency higher than the following fine trimming stage could adjust for.
The coarsest method of trimming is grinding of the main resonating surface of the resonator; this process has an accuracy of around ±800 ppm. Better control can be achieved by grinding the edge of the resonator instead of the main surface. This has a less dramatic effect and consequently better accuracy. Processes that can be used for fine trimming, in order of increasing accuracy, are sandblasting, drilling, and laser ablation. Laser trimming is capable of achieving an accuracy of ±40 ppm.
Trimming by hand, rather than machine, was used on some early production components but would now normally only be encountered during product development. Methods available include sanding and filing. It is also possible to add material to the resonator by hand, thus reducing the resonance frequency. One such method is to add solder, but this is not suitable for production use since the solder will tend to reduce the high Q of the resonator.
In the case of MEMS filters, it is not possible to trim the resonators outside of the filter because of the integrated nature of the device construction. However, trimming is still a requirement in many MEMS applications. Laser ablation can be used for this but material deposition methods are available as well as material removal. These methods include laser or ion-beam induced deposition.
## See also
- Ceramic resonator
- Surface acoustic wave
- Crystal oscillator
- Reed receiver |
855,465 | Wail al-Shehri | 1,169,712,142 | Perpetrator of the September 11, 2001 attacks | [
"1973 births",
"2001 deaths",
"American Airlines Flight 11",
"Participants in the September 11 attacks",
"People from 'Asir Province",
"Saudi Arabian al-Qaeda members",
"Saudi Arabian mass murderers"
]
| Wail Mohammed al-Shehri (Arabic: وائل الشهري, Wāīl ash-Shehrī; also transliterated as Alshehri) (July 31, 1973 – September 11, 2001) was one of five terrorist hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, which was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Wail al-Shehri was an elementary school teacher from Khamis Mushait in the Asir region of Saudi Arabia. In early 2000, he traveled to Medina to seek treatment for mental problems. He and his younger brother Waleed traveled to Afghanistan in March 2000 and joined an Al-Qaeda training camp. The brothers were chosen, along with others from the same region of Saudi Arabia, to participate in the September 11 attacks. Once selected, al-Shehri returned to Saudi Arabia in October 2000 to obtain a clean passport, then returned to Afghanistan. In March 2001, he recorded his last will and testament on video.
Al-Shehri arrived in the United States in early June 2001, staying in budget motels in the Boynton Beach area of south Florida. On September 5, 2001, al-Shehri traveled to Boston and checked into a motel with his brother. Six days later, al-Shehri arrived early in the morning at Boston's Logan International Airport and boarded American Airlines Flight 11. Fifteen minutes after takeoff, al-Shehri, along with his brother and three others, hijacked the airliner. They deliberately crashed it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.
## Background
Wail al-Shehri and his younger brother Waleed were from Khamis Mushait in the Asir province, which is an impoverished area in southwestern Saudi Arabia, along the Yemeni border. Al-Shehri was born in Annams, and grew up in the Um Saraar neighborhood in Khamis Mushait. He had ten brothers and one sister. Several of al-Shehri's brothers joined the Saudi military, while his uncle may have been a major in the army and director of logistics. Al-Shehri's father, Mohammed Ali Asgley Al Shehri, worked as a car dealer. On weekends, the family often spent time together at the Red Sea. The family strictly adhered to the Wahabi school of Islam, which forbids many elements of modernity. As such, the al-Shehri family did not have satellite television or Internet, nor did his parents permit music or contact with girls. Some of Wail al-Shehri's elder brothers had visited the United States and could speak English; however, he knew little English.
During high school and college, al-Shehri was deeply religious and attended Al-Seqley Mosque, which his family had built as the local mosque. Al-Shehri also frequented government-supported religious camps in Saudi Arabia. At this time, there were strong religious feelings in Saudi Arabia, especially in the Asir region. Many young people in the region idolized Osama bin Laden, who had family ties to the area. Al-Shehri's father was a friend of Bin Laden's father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. Ahmed al-Nami and Saeed al-Ghamdi, who were both hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93, came from the same area in Saudi Arabia as the Shehri family.
After graduating from Abha teachers college in 1999, Wail al-Shehri took a job as an elementary school physical education teacher at the Khamis Mushait airbase. Five months into the job, al-Shehri took leave due to mental illness and depression. Rather than conventional therapy, al-Shehri sought consultation with Muslim clerics, and hoped that a visit to Medina would help. His treatment involved verses from the Qur'an read to him by a sheikh. He traveled to Medina together with Waleed. After the September 11 attacks, others recalled seeing the al-Shehri brothers in Medina.
## Afghanistan
Wail and Waleed al-Shehri disappeared after going to Medina, calling their father just once; in the conversation, the brothers were vague about when they would return. Both had expressed interest in joining the jihad in Chechnya, though may have been diverted to Afghanistan. Before disappearing, the al-Shehri brothers went to Al-Seqley Mosque to swear an oath and commitment to jihad, as did Ahmed al-Nami and Saeed al-Ghamdi. Wail al-Shehri presided over the ceremony, dubbing himself Abu Mossaeb al-Janubi after one of Muhammad's companions.
In March 2000, he left for Pakistan with Waleed and Ahmed al-Nami; later, they went on to Afghanistan. Wail al-Shehri followed the standard path for new al-Qaeda recruits in Afghanistan, spending time in the Khalden training camp and then Al Farouq training camp near Kandahar. Details on how the non-pilot ("muscle") hijackers were chosen for the September 11 attacks are vague, though the hijackers appear to have been selected by senior al-Qaeda leaders in 2000 from the thousands of recruits at training camps in Afghanistan. The most capable and motivated volunteers were at al-Farouq, and Saudi citizens were good candidates, since it would be easy for them to obtain visas to travel to the United States. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet later said that the muscle hijackers were probably told little about their mission in the United States.
Once al-Shehri and the other muscle hijackers completed their training in Afghanistan, they received \$2,000 so they could return to Saudi Arabia to obtain new passports and visas. The al-Shehri brothers may have been assisted by a relative who worked in the Saudi passport office. Wail and Waleed al-Shehri received passports on October 3, 2000, and then obtained United States visas on October 24. On his visa application, Wail al-Shehri provided vague information, stating his employer/school as "South City", and his destination as "Wasantwn". Al-Shehri indicated his occupation as "teacher", and that he would be traveling with his brother on a four-to-six month vacation, which would be paid for with al-Shehri's teacher salary. Although he would not be working while on vacation, consular officials nonetheless did not question if the al-Shehri brothers had the financial means to support themselves while in the United States.
In late 2000, al-Shehri traveled to the United Arab Emirates, where he purchased traveler's checks, presumed to have been paid for by Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. Five other hijackers passed through the United Arab Emirates and purchased traveler's checks, including Majed Moqed, Saeed al-Ghamdi, Hamza al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Haznawi and Ahmed al-Nami. The 9/11 Commission believes that in mid-November 2000, three of the future muscle hijackers, including the al-Shehri brothers, traveled in a group from Saudi Arabia to Beirut and then onward to Iran where they could travel through to Afghanistan without getting their passports stamped. An associate of a senior Hezbollah operative is thought to have been on the same flight, although this may have been a coincidence.
Wail al-Shehri appeared together with hijackers Ahmed al-Nami, Hamza al-Ghamdi, and Ahmed al-Ghamdi on a video recorded in March 2001, and aired on Al Jazeera in September 2002. Al-Shehri was seen studying maps and flight manuals, but he did not speak in the video; it also included a segment of Abdulaziz al-Omari reading his last will and testament. While in Afghanistan, another video was recorded that showed al-Shehri reading his last will and testament. This video was released on September 7, 2006.
## United States
On June 5, 2001, Wail al-Shehri obtained an International Driving Permit, which was issued in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Al-Shehri arrived together with fellow al-Qaeda member Ahmed al-Haznawi at Miami International Airport, via London, from Dubai on June 8. Both were admitted as tourists for six months. Al-Shehri opened a bank account at SunTrust Bank in Florida on June 18, with a deposit of \$8,000 that came from American Express traveler's cheques purchased on June 7 in the United Arab Emirates.
Al-Shehri moved into the Homing Inn, a budget motel in Boynton Beach, on June 21, 2001, sharing a room with his brother Waleed, and Satam al-Suqami. Wail al-Shehri and al-Suqami both used this hotel as their address when they received Florida state non-driver identifications on July 3. Al-Shehri checked into the Panther Motel & Apartments, in Deerfield Beach, with his brother and al-Suqami on August 2, staying there until August 10. While in Florida, al-Shehri was a member of the World Gym in Boynton Beach, where he trained with Waleed and al-Suqami. During the summer of 2001, al-Shehri regularly used computers at the Delray Beach Public Library.
On August 28, 2001, Wail and Waleed al-Shehri made reservations on American Airlines Flight 11, using the Mail Boxes Etc. in Hollywood, Florida, as their address. The al-Shehri brothers contacted American Airlines on September 3 by telephone to change their first-class seat assignments for American Airlines Flight 11, selecting seats on the side of the aircraft that offered a direct view of the cockpit. Wail and Waleed al-Shehri left Florida for Boston on September 5, traveling together on Delta Air Lines Flight 2462.
Wail al-Shehri checked in together with Waleed at the Park Inn Hotel in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, on September 5, 2001, staying in room 432. While staying at the Park Inn, the brothers may have called a prostitute. Wail al-Shehri accompanied his brother on September 9 to the Travelex at Logan International Airport, where Waleed attempted to wire \$5,000 to the United Arab Emirates. Waleed had insufficient documentation, so the brothers returned the next day to complete the transaction. Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad received the funds on September 11 at Al-Ansari Exchange in Sharjah. Hijacker Abdulaziz al-Omari possibly spent a night at the Park Inn before leaving with Mohamed Atta for Portland, Maine, on September 10. When Wail and Waleed al-Shehri checked out on September 11, they left a sheet of instructions for flying a jet behind in their hotel room.
## Attacks
Wail al-Shehri, his brother Waleed, and Satam al-Suqami arrived together at Logan Airport at 06:45 on September 11, 2001. Upon check-in, all three men were selected by the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS) for further screening of their checked baggage. As the CAPPS was only for luggage, the three hijackers did not undergo any extra scrutiny at the passenger security checkpoint.
By 07:40, all five hijackers were aboard the flight, which was scheduled to depart at 07:45. Wail and Waleed al-Shehri sat together in first class in seats 2A and 2B respectively. The aircraft taxied away from Gate 26, and departed Logan International Airport at 07:59, following a 14-minute delay. Flight 11 was hijacked at approximately 08:14, which is when the pilot stopped responding to air traffic control. It is suspected that the brothers stabbed two flight attendants in the hijacking. At 08:46:40, Mohamed Atta, who was flying the plane, deliberately crashed Flight 11 into the northern facade of the North Tower (Tower 1) of the World Trade Center between floors 93 and 99. The immediate damage destroyed any means of escape from above the impact zone, trapping 1,344 people. The North Tower collapsed at 10:28, after burning for 102 minutes.
## Aftermath
Waleed al-Shehri was reported to have been found alive by a BBC News article on September 23, 2001, and other news reports in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Reports said that the al-Shehri brothers were the sons of a Saudi diplomat stationed in New Delhi, Ahmed al-Shehri. The diplomat's son was trained as a pilot at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and was working as a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines. At the time of the attacks, he was in Morocco for a training program. There were also reports that Wail al-Shehri was a trained pilot. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Saudi officials suggested that Wail and Waleed al-Shehri were victims of identity theft, but the diplomat's son was the victim of mistaken identity.
Jamal Khashoggi, of Al-Watan and ArabNews in Saudi Arabia, spoke with Muhammad Ali al-Shehri in Khamis Mushait, who said his sons Wail and Waleed had been missing for months. He denied reports that Wail had an aeronautics degree, as some news reports said, "My son Wail was 25 years old and had a BA in physical education from the Abha Teacher’s College. He was mentally ill and had gone to numerous clerics for assistance in overcoming this instability. He had asked the school, where he taught, for a 6-month leave to go to Madinah." His father also told reporters that he dreaded having to believe that his sons were involved in the September 11 attacks, "If that turns out to be the truth, then I'll never, never accept it from them. I'll never forgive them for that." Family members said that Wail and Waleed became very religious in the months before they disappeared, had expressed interest in going to Chechnya, and hoped for martyrdom. In a report entitled "A Saudi Apology" for Dateline NBC aired on August 25, 2002, John Hockenberry traveled to Asir, where he interviewed another al-Shehri brother, Salah, who agreed that Wail and Waleed were deceased. Salah described them as not very religious, and suggested they had been brainwashed.
Saudi officials later stated that the names of the hijackers were in fact correct, and that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. In response to 9/11 conspiracy theories surrounding its original news story suggesting hijackers were still alive, the BBC stated in 2006 that later reports on the hijackers superseded the original story. The BBC also explained that confusion arose with the Arabic names that were common.
## See also
- Hijackers in the September 11 attacks
- PENTTBOM |
52,634,040 | Nigel Williams (conservator) | 1,154,436,239 | British conservator and expert on the restoration of ceramics and glass (1944–1992) | [
"1944 births",
"1992 deaths",
"Alumni of the Central School of Art and Design",
"Conservator-restorers",
"Employees of the British Museum",
"People from Surrey",
"Sutton Hoo"
]
| Nigel Reuben Rook Williams (15 July 1944 – 21 April 1992) was an English conservator and expert on the restoration of ceramics and glass. From 1961 until his death he worked at the British Museum, where he became the Chief Conservator of Ceramics and Glass in 1983. There his work included the successful restorations of the Sutton Hoo helmet and the Portland Vase.
Joining as an assistant at age 16, Williams spent his entire career, and most of his life, at the British Museum. He was one of the first people to study conservation, not yet recognised as a profession, and from an early age was given responsibility over high-profile objects. In the 1960s he assisted with the re-excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, and in his early- to mid-twenties he conserved many of the objects found therein: most notably the Sutton Hoo helmet, which occupied a year of his time. He likewise reconstructed other objects from the find, including the shield, drinking horns, and maplewood bottles.
The "abiding passion of his life" was ceramics, and the 1970s and 1980s gave Williams ample opportunities in that field. After nearly 31,000 fragments of shattered Greek vases were found in 1974 amidst the wreck of HMS Colossus, Williams set to work piecing them together. The process was televised, and turned him into a television personality. A decade later, in 1988 and 1989, Williams's crowning achievement came when he took to pieces the Portland Vase, one of the most famous glass objects in the world, and put it back together. The reconstruction was again televised for a BBC programme, and as with the Sutton Hoo helmet, took nearly a year to complete.
Williams died at age 47 of a heart attack while in Aqaba, Jordan, where he was working on a British Museum excavation. The Ceramics & Glass group of the Institute of Conservation awards a biennial prize in his honour, recognising his significant contributions in the field of conservation.
## Early years
Nigel Williams was born on 15 July 1944 in Surrey, England. His early schooling was interrupted by rheumatic fever and slowed by dyslexia, yet he went on to study silversmithing and metal design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. There he excelled. The school recommended him to the British Museum, which recruited him in 1961 to work as an assistant for the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities. Conservation was not a recognized profession at the time, and Williams became only the second member of the museum to study the field in a three-year part-time course at University College London's Institute of Archaeology.
## At the British Museum
After joining the British Museum in 1961 and studying conservation, Williams worked on a wide variety of antiquities. He conserved metals (including clocks and watches), glass, stone, ivory, wood, and various other organic materials, yet more than anything he worked with ceramics, which became "the abiding passion of his life." Williams also proved skillful at working with archaeological finds; among other tasks he saw to the lifting from the earth of a medieval tile kiln and a Roman mosaic—likely the Hinton St Mary Mosaic, thought to be one of the earliest known depictions of Christ. His most significant work came at the beginning and the end of his professional life, with his reconstructions of the Sutton Hoo helmet and the Portland Vase. Between these achievements Williams also pieced together the nearly 31,000 fragments of Greek vases found in the wreck of HMS Colossus (1787), and in 1983 was promoted to Chief Conservator of Ceramics and Glass, a position he held until his death.
### Sutton Hoo
The first major success for Williams came during the re-excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial from 1965–1970. In 1966 he was appointed the conservator of the Sutton Hoo finds, and in the summer of 1967 he helped with the moulding of the ship impression. The following summer the casts were reassembled in a warehouse and a fibreglass replica made. The process was more dangerous than was then known, and left Williams allergic to styrene for the rest of his life.
In 1968, as the re-excavation at Sutton Hoo reached its conclusion and with problems apparent in the reconstructions of several of the finds, Williams was put in charge of a team tasked with their continued conservation. In this capacity he conserved many of the objects, chiefly among them the helmet, shield, drinking horns, maplewood bottles, tubs, and buckets. Williams's colleagues at the museum termed the Sutton Hoo helmet his "pièce de résistance"; the iconic artefact from England's most famous archaeological discovery, it had previously been restored in 1945–1946 by Herbert Maryon. Williams took this reconstruction to pieces, and from 1970 to 1971 he spent eighteen months of time and a full year of work rearranging the more than 500 fragments. No photographs of the fragments in situ had been taken during the original excavation in 1939, nor were their relative positions recorded. As Rupert Bruce-Mitford, who oversaw the work, put it, the task for Williams "was thus reduced to a jigsaw puzzle without any sort of picture on the lid of the box", and, "as it proved, a great many of the pieces missing": fitting for Williams, who did jigsaw puzzles to relax. Unveiled on 2 November 1971, the new reconstruction was met with universal acclaim. It was published the following year by Bruce-Mitford, and posthumously by Williams in 1992.
### HMS Colossus
In a precursor to the work he would do on the Portland Vase, the 1970s saw Nigel Williams reconstructing fragments of smashed Greek vases. The 1798 sinking of HMS Colossus had taken with it part of Sir William Hamilton's second vase collection, where it lay in pieces for the next 200 years. A salvage operation following the wreck's 1974 discovery unearthed some 30,935 fragments, and when they were acquired by the British Museum, Williams set to work reconstructing them. This endeavour was aided by eighteenth century drawings of the vases by Tischbein, and shown on television, where the instinctive talent of Williams made him become a television personality. "He worked as if he were alone, and many people remember the moment in the resulting Chronicle programme when he uttered a four-letter word as one of his partially-completed restorations fell apart before the cameras." In 1978 Williams and his team restored seven vases, in whole or in part, for an exhibition at the museum in conjunction with the 11th International Congress of Classical Archaeology. The other vases generally did not have enough pieces remaining to allow for complete reconstructions, although ultimately 115 individual examples were identified.
### Portland Vase
The crowning achievement to Williams's career, wrote his museum colleague Kenneth Painter, was his 1988–1989 restoration of the Portland Vase. Regarded as "probably the most famous glass object in the world" by the Journal of Glass Studies, the vase is "a masterpiece of Roman cameo glass." First recorded in 1600–1601, the vase is dated to around 30–20 B.C., or shortly afterward. It was placed on display in the British Museum in 1810, and then intentionally smashed in 1845 by a young man who admitted to "indulging in intemperance for a week before". It was restored the same year by John Doubleday, and then again in 1948–1949 by J. W. R. Axtell. By 1988 the adhesive used had yellowed and weakened, and Williams was tasked, alongside his assistant, Sandra Smith, with restoring the vase for a third time.
With the BBC's History and Archaeology Unit filming, Williams began the restoration of the vase in June 1988. He deconstructed the vase by wrapping it inside and out with blotting paper and letting it sit in a glass desiccator injected with solvents for three days, leaving it in 189 pieces. After removing the remnants of the old adhesive and cleaning the fragments, Williams used an epoxy adhesive, Hxtal NYL, in conjunction with an acrylic resin to join the pieces. Although they attempted to avoid so-called trap-outs, where the placing of a fragment prevents the next from fitting in, Williams and Smith left for Christmas in 1988 fearing that they might have to take apart six months' work in order to fit in the last few shards. These fears proved unfounded: a few more weeks spent working on the top half of the vase, and the final pieces joined perfectly. At the end of nine months' work, only 17 minuscule fragments remained unplaced, rather than the 34 that were omitted from the previous restoration. After filling in the cracks with coloured resin, Williams gave his verdict: "It's OK... ruined my Christmas."
## Personal life
For 20 years Williams lived with his partner Myrtle Bruce-Mitford, a professional cellist and the daughter of his colleague Rupert Bruce-Mitford. The two met in 1964. She likewise contributed to the Sutton Hoo finds, being employed by the British Museum to work on the remnants of the lyre and co-authoring a paper with her father. She additionally revised and published the second edition of Williams's text Porcelain: Repair and Restoration, on which he had been working at the time of his death. Williams and Bruce-Mitford had a daughter, Matty, who was born in 1976 or 1977.
## Death and legacy
Nigel Williams died of a heart attack on 21 April 1992, at the age of 47. He had recently arrived in Aqaba, Jordan, and was taking a break on the beach from his work as the on-site conservator for a British Museum excavation at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh. Though his death came early, Williams, as Painter wrote, "made a great contribution to the art and science of conservation, to the archaeological record and to the preservation of great collections, and above all to the public's appreciation and understanding of the past."
The Ceramics & Glass group of the Institute of Conservation awards the biennial Nigel Williams Prize both in memory of his work, and in encouragement of high standards for those in the conservation profession. Noting the dramatic highlights of Williams's career, and "that for most conservators today the opportunities to conserve or restore high-profile objects such as the Portland Vase are rare", the Institute awards the prize "as much in a spirit of encouragement as in that of healthy competition, recognising the value of consistent and day-to-day professional practice." The three-member judging panel is headed by Sandra Smith, who restored the Portland Vase with Williams while at the British Museum; along with the £1,000 awarded to the winner comes a "virtual" image of a gilded replica of the vase, the original copy of which was donated by Wedgwood and is still kept in their museum. |
20,028,506 | Tanks in the Spanish Army | 1,159,735,755 | History of tanks in the Spanish Army | [
"Spanish Army",
"Tanks of Spain"
]
| Tanks in the Spanish Army have over 90 years of history, from the French Renault FTs first delivered in 1919 to the Leopard 2 models of the early 21st century. The Spanish FTs took part in combat during the Rif War and participated in the first amphibious landing with tanks in history, at Alhucemas. In 1925, the Spanish Army began to undertake a program to develop and produce a Spanish tank, an upgraded version of the Renault FT, called the Trubia A4. Although the prototype performed well during testing, the tank was never put into mass production. Spain also experimented with the Italian Fiat 3000, acquiring one tank in 1925, and with another indigenous tank program called the Landesa. However, none of these evolved into a major armor program, and as a result the FT remained the most important tank, in numbers, in the Spanish Army until the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
Between July 1936 and April 1939, during the Spanish Civil War, the two opposing armies received large quantities of tanks from foreign powers. Spain's Second Republic received tanks from the Soviet Union, many of which were captured by the Nationalists and pressed into service against their former masters, while the Nationalists were aided by the Germans and Italians. The Spanish Civil War, although the testing grounds for the nations which would ultimately take part in World War II, proved inconclusive with regard to the proof of mechanized warfare. Despite attempts by Soviet, German and Italian advisers and soldiers to use newly devised mechanized theories, the lack of quality crews and the tanks, and the insufficient number of tanks provided bad impressions on the usefulness of tanks on their own.
The Spanish Army ended the Spanish Civil War with a fleet of light tanks. Looking to field more modern and capable tanks, the Spanish government and army approved a venture to design and manufacture a better light tank, known as the Verdeja. Although the tank proved extremely capable, a lack of raw materials and incentives doomed the program to failure. Furthermore, the army's requirements were temporarily satisfied by the procurement of Panzer IVs in late 1943. However, the failure to acquire more Panzer IVs led Spain to field a largely antiquated collection of light tanks and an insufficient number of medium tanks. In 1953, the United States and Spain signed a military aid program agreement which led to the supply of M47 Patton and M48 Patton tanks. The American decision to not allow Spain to deploy the new equipment during the war with Morocco caused Spain to look elsewhere for a supplement to their fleet of Patton tanks, ending with the procurement of the AMX-30E, based on the French AMX-30.
Almost immediately after, the Spanish Army and the Spanish Ministry of Defense began to look for a future Spanish tank. This turned into the Lince tank program. Despite numerous bids the Lince program failed, both for financial reasons and because of the decision to instead modernize the existing fleet of AMX-30Es, and to procure a large number of American M60 Patton tanks to replace the fleet of older Patton tanks. Over half of the AMX-30Es were upgraded to a standard known as the AMX-30EM2, while the rest suffered a more finite modification known as the AMX-30EM1. However, the M60s and modernized AMX-30Es did not provide Spain with a sufficiently modern tank for the next century. In 1994, the Spanish Ministry of Defense began to negotiate with the German government over the purchase of the Leopard 2. Ultimately, 108 Leopard 2A4s were procured and integrated into the Spanish Army, while 219 Leopard 2Es were built in Spain, based on the German Leopard 2A6. The Leopard 2E and Leopard 2A4 replaced the fleet of M60 Patton tanks. Presently, the Spanish Army possesses 108 Leopard 2A4s and 219 Leopard 2Es.
## Birth of the Spanish tank force: 1919–1926
### Background
Before the First World War, the Spanish Army bought a unarmored Schneider-Brillié truck in 1909 to be used in Melilla, where armed conflict with local tribes was going on. This was a French bus platform that was fitted with an armoured body in Spain, to be used as troop transport. Although the Schneider-Brillié model 1909 was big, slow and its performance was not good, the Spanish Army learned the value of armored vehicles and bought a second one. Spanish Army officers appreciated the advantages of using advanced weapons technology in the Colonial War in Spanish Morocco and followed First World War advances.
### First purchases
The Spanish army's interest in the tank began near the end of World War I, when a formal petition for one Renault FT light tank was made to the French government on 28 October 1918. This purchase, however, was not processed until 15 January 1919. Spain's Comisión de Experiencias, Proyectos y Comprobación del Material de Guerra (Experiences, Projects and Confirmation Commission) issued a formal order for an FT, armed with a 37-millimeter (1.5 in) cannon, and days later extended the order to include another three cannon armed tanks, and another FT armed with a machine gun. On 5 March the order was authorized and then extended further to include two more FTs, armed with the 37-millimeter (1.5 in) cannon. On 20 March the French government declared that they could not process the sale, and on 12 April the process to acquire these vehicles began anew.
In May 1919, the French acceded to the sale of a single FT light tank to the Spanish Army, delivered the next month. This particular FT was armed with an 8-millimeter (0.31 in) Hotchkiss machine gun, and was later re-armed with a Spanish 7-millimeter (0.28 in) machine gun. Upon inspection by the Spanish government, it was decided to procure another ten—including eight armed with machine guns and two armed with cannons. The French government declared that there were no vehicles available for sale, and later added that under no circumstances would they allow Spain to rearm these vehicles with the Spanish 7 millimeters (0.28 in) machine gun, and consequently denied the sale. As a result, Spain began to approach other governments, including Great Britain and the United States, but with no success.
### Rif War
Following Spain's colonial defeat at the Battle of Annual, on 22 July 1921, another military envoy was sent to France to petition for more tanks. This time, the French government consented and agreed to the sale of ten machine gun armed FTs and a single command tank. The command tank was an FT chassis, with the turret replaced by a superstructure, carrying a single communications radio. These were presented to the third section of the Escuela Central de Tiro, or the Central Shooting School, on 12 January 1922, and organized into a company of twelve light tanks. In September 1921, the Spanish government also procured six Schneider CA1 tanks and deployed these to Morocco as early as 28 February 1922. On 13 March 1922, six FTs were unloaded at Melilla, as well.
On 18 March 1922, the company of FT light tanks took part in its first combat operation, during the Rif War. Ordered to operate with the Spanish Legion, the force was to capture the town of Tunguntz, in Northern Morocco. Surprising the defenders with their appearance, the armored company advanced, and the legionnaires behind, and captured the town of Anvar. Advancing towards Tunguntz, the tanks began to come under heavy fire, as their advance had isolated them from the legionnaires due to the speed. As a result, the tanks were forced to withdraw to Anvar to fall back on the protection of the infantry. Two FTs were abandoned by their crew because of mechanical problems and were later destroyed by the Moroccan defenders with dynamite. A post-action analysis of the action decided that the poor performance of the tanks company was a direct result of poor cooperation with the infantry, the lack of reliability of the tanks' machine guns and the lack of prior training before being rushed to the front. Thereafter, Spain's armored company was used almost continuously in small-scale operations between late 1922 and September 1925. On 8 September 1925, Spain's armor would take part in the first amphibious landing with tanks in history.
After being refitted with brand new FTs to replace losses incurred during the three years of operations in Morocco, the tank company was transferred to Ceuta to prepare for the amphibious operations planned to place in and around Al Hoceima Bay. In the days previous to the Alhucemas landing, the armored company took part in a number of training exercises, with four K-type landing craft, specially modified to allow them to carry three tanks each. However, on the day of the landings the landing craft hit a shoal 50 meters (55 yd) from the beach; as a result, the armored company was not able to land until the next day, on 9 September 1925. Upon landing, the vehicles were used to support the left flank of the Spanish attack and aided in the capture of the heights surrounding the beaches and controlling the exit points towards the inland.
The Rif War came to an end in May 1926, and the armored company was relocated to the Spanish mainland in July of that year.
## Early indigenous tank development programs: 1925–1935
With their experiences in Morocco, the Spanish Army decided to fund a development program for a new Spanish light tank. The new vehicle was to be based on the Renault FT, which was the most numerous armored vehicle in service with the Spanish Army at the time and one of the most widely used by foreign armies. The program was spearheaded by Captain of the Artillery Carlos Ruiz de Toledo, who had first commanded the battery of Schneider CA1 assault tanks in Morocco; Toledo felt that the tank would become an extremely important asset in future conflicts and felt that the Spanish Army required a Spanish-built model. As a result, he toured a number of European states in an effort to collect information on new trends in tank design and attempt to integrate these into the Spanish tank program. The resulting tank was known as the Carro de Combate Trubia serie A, or the "Series A Trubia Tank".
### Trubia light tank
The first prototype development began in 1925. Produced in the Trubia Artillery Factory (Fábrica de Artillería Trubia), in Asturias, the tank was powered by a four-cylinder Hispano-Suiza 40/50 engine, the same engine the Spanish Army's military trucks had been equipped with since 1915. Given the Spanish Army's opinion that the FT was limited in firepower, the Trubia tank featured a special turret. The turret was designed in two articulated halves, which could traverse independently, each armed with a machine gun. Theoretically, if one of the machine guns jammed, the tank would still have another one to defend itself with. Furthermore, the vehicle's hull was provided with firing ports, to allow the crew to fire small arms from within the tank. This prototype was put through a series of tests, and its success brought about the decision to continue development on a Spanish tank, leading to an improved Trubia tank design, known as the Modelo Trubia 75HP, tipo rápido, serie A (Model Trubia 75 hp, fast tank, series A).
While touring Europe for a second time, in an attempt to integrate foreign design trends into the new Trubia, Captain Ruiz de Toledo found a new type of track system in Germany. Designed to avoid having problems with the tracks coming off the vehicle, the new design substituted the traditional tracks with a system which was held together by a lateral metal wall, with the roadwheels suspended from the chassis. The track system was the most innovative and unique part of the new Trubia light tank. Apart from the new tracks, the Trubia was to have a greater velocity (at least 30 kilometers per hour (19 mph)) and greater road range than the FT. While a new machine gun was installed on the glacis plate, the tank's crew was increased from two to three, which caused the hull to be enlarged; this also allowed the engine to be maintained from inside the vehicle, allowing the crew to fix small breakdowns in the field. To refrigerate the engine and the crew, a compressed air dispenser was installed inside the chassis. This solved problems dealing with the crew's claustrophobia and the intake of gasses originating from the engine found in the FT, and made crewing the tank much more ergonomic. The original 50 horsepower (37 kW) was replaced with a more powerful 75 horsepower (56 kW) Daimler four cylinder engine. The transmission had four forward gears and four reverse gears. The new tank proved satisfactory—and even bettered the FT in some aspects—and the Spanish Army ordered the construction of four prototypes.
The first prototype was manufactured in 1926. A total of four prototypes were ordered, but production was slow and by 1928 only one of the tanks had been completed, while the other three prototypes were not armed. The completed vehicle, called the Trubia A4, was sent to the Firing School where it was put through a series of tests. In 1931, a second prototype was completed, while the final two were completed in 1934. The original prototype was returned to the factory in 1935, to integrate a number of modernizations and to repair any damage which was done to the vehicle during the testing process. The other three tanks were issued to the Milan Infantry Regiment, in Oviedo, where they continued testing.
### Other tank programs
While the Trubia was being developed, the Spanish Army acquired an Italian Fiat 3000A. Ordered in October 1924, it was received in January 1925, and assigned to the Central Firing School. There, it went through a series of experiments and tests. The tank was originally developed as a near copy of the Renault FT, of which Italy had previously attempted to procure one hundred units. It had a smaller chassis and was powered through a 50 horsepower (37 kW) engine. The FIAT 3000A had a turret with two 6.5-millimeter (0.26 in) machine guns; this was later improved with a 37-millimeter (1.5 in) cannon and designated the FIAT 3000B.
In 1928, the Trubia Factory, under Major of the Artillery Victor Landesa Domenech, designed and began production of a prototype of a new armored tractor; these were named after him, as the Landesa. The unarmed tractor finished production in 1930 and went through a series of tests. Between 1931 and 1932 the vehicle went through a series of upgrades in the factory and was later sent to Madrid for further testing, where it passed satisfactorily in April 1932. Landesa, who had at this time been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, began a preseries of three vehicles, motored by the L-2000 55 horsepower (41 kW) engine, designed by Daimler-Benz. Ultimately, two were produced and set for testing with the Spanish Republican Army, and another nine were ordered with the idea of using them to tow Škoda 76.5-millimeter (3.01 in) anti-aircraft cannons. All the while, the Trubia Factory began to plan an armored and armed version of the vehicle for the Spanish Army. Two were produced by 1934, although the Trubia Factory experienced troubles in producing the L-2000 engines; as a result, they were not powered by the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. They were armed with a single 7-millimeter (0.28 in) machine gun.
## Tanks during the Spanish Civil War: 1936–1939
At the start of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Army counted on a total of ten Renault FTs in working condition distributed equally amongst two light tank regiments; one in Madrid and the other in Sevilla. The former (1st Light Tank Regiment) fell under the control of the Second Spanish Republic's army, while the 2nd Light Tank Regiment (in Zaragoza) was integrated into the Nationalist army. The lone Fiat 3000A is thought to have been in service at this time, but was cannibalized for parts. Spain's six Schneider CA1 assault tanks were put into service with the Republican Army, and saw combat around Madrid before and during the siege of Madrid, and during the siege of the Alcázar in Toledo. They were destroyed during the siege of Madrid. The three Trubia A4 prototypes issued to the Milan Infantry Regiment at Oviedo were turned over to the Nationalist uprising, while the fourth prototype located in the Trubia Factory was taken by the factory's workers and quickly repaired so that it could be pressed into service in the Republican Army. A Landesa armored tractor in Trubia was also modified by the Republicans to carry on machine guns and converted into a light tank.
### Armor of the Popular Front (Spanish Republic Government)
Spain's Republican Forces fabricated a number of different armored vehicles throughout the war. Although serving little military purpose, due to the poor quality of their design and construction, they were important factors in lifting the Popular Front's military's morale. Factories in the northern areas of Spain produced a fair number of armored tractors and trucks; for example, sixteen armored vehicles, denominated Naval-Somua, were manufactured based on the chassis of the French Somua bus. The Trubia Factory, at this time working for the Republic, manufactured between 15 and 20 light tanks known as the Trubia-Naval, which were heavily influenced by the Landesa and the Trubia A4. However, most construction revolved around the armoring of trucks, known as Tiznaos for the grey color of their steel armor. Due to the weight of the armor and the low power output of their engines, many were not able to move more than 20 meters (22 yd) without breaking down. These were mostly constructed in the heavily industrialized regions in northern Spain and in Catalonia. The factories of Levante, under Soviet guidance, built what was considered to be one of the best armored trucks of the war—the UNL-35. These vehicles were based on the Soviet ZiS-5 truck, and were fabricated between early 1937 and March 1939 at a rate of no more than five per month. Also, based on other chassis, such as Ford's model 817T, around 120 UNL-35s were manufactured.
On 15 October 1936, the first shipment of 50 Soviet T-26 light tanks arrived at Cartagena. These were put into combat as early as 26 October, under the leadership of Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Semyon Krivoshein, south of Madrid. The first combat operation in Spain for the T-26 was near the town of Seseña, when a Republican tank company counterattacked against the spearhead of the Nationalist's drive towards Madrid. The counterattack, although partially successful, did not hinder the Nationalist advance. By the beginning of the operation, the tanks had separated themselves from the infantry, following them. However, the Republican armor successfully surprised a company of Nationalist infantrymen, who had mistaken them for Italian allies, and routed them. The tank company then continued towards the town of Esquivias, to the West, where they were counterattacked by cavalry from the Moroccan Legion and finally forced to withdraw. Lacking infantry support, a number of T-26s were knocked out by Nationalist infantrymen using wine bottles as bomblets. The tank company returned through Seseña, which had been reoccupied by Nationalist infantry, and came under heavy fire. Despite the withdrawal, the counterattack was heavily publicized in Madrid, by the Republic, as a victory. The lack of success is attributed to the lack of coordination between Republican tanks, infantry and artillery. Although it is commonly mentioned that Spain received 312 T-26s, this number includes 16 FTs, delivered by Poland, and 15 T-26s which never actually made it to Spain. Ultimately, 281 T-26s were delivered to Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
The Soviet Union also supplied Spain with 50 BT-5 tanks. Although slightly heavier than the T-26, the BT-5 was faster; it was capable of reaching velocities of 65 kilometers per hour (40 mph) with tracks, on road, and 90 kilometers per hour (56 mph) with wheels. However, given the non-ideal nature of Spanish terrain, the BT-5 was rarely capable of taking advantage of its speed. The loss of many of the Republic's BT-5s during the Battle of the Ebro caused them to retire the tank to their reserves. The BT-5 was a product improvement of J. Walter Christie's fast tank concept, using Christie suspension, and was armed with a 45-millimeter (1.8 in) tank gun.
### Organization of Popular Front armored forces
The first 50 T-26 tanks which arrived in Spain, under the command of Krivoshein, were crewed by Soviet personnel. Nevertheless, the Soviet lieutenant colonel opened a training school in the town of Archena, near Cartagena, recruiting mainly truck and bus drivers from cities such as Madrid and Barcelona. The next month, he opened a second school in Alcalá de Henares, north of Madrid. However, only Communist soldiers were allowed to crew Soviet tanks, and as a result the pool of soldiers to recruit from was narrow and often less adept drivers were picked over better ones, due to their political ideologies. For example, in one instance a tank commander broke contact with the enemy because he had not learned how to fire his main gun. Furthermore, at first, the Soviet trainers did not have interpreters to communicate with their Spanish students.
With training underway, and the tanks quickly put into combat, the first 50 vehicles were organized into the Popular Army's first tank battalion. The battalion was equipped with three tank companies (each company containing ten tanks) and a headquarters company; each company had three platoons, with three tanks a piece, and a command tank. By mid-November a second battalion was organized. Later that month, Krivoshein and his deputy (Major Greisser) were recalled to the Soviet Union and replaced by General Dmitry Pavlov. In December 1936, General Pavlov organized new Soviet armored vehicles into an armored brigade, made up of four tank battalions and a reconnaissance company. This brigade, known as Brigada de Carros de Combate (Tank Brigade), was composed of 56 tanks and 68 other armored vehicles, and immediately saw combat around Madrid, including in the battles of Jarama and Guadalajara. However, the brigade was used to support Republican infantry forces and not as a mobile armored group, and as a result its strategic role during the war was limited by its misuse. In July 1937, the brigade took part in the Battle of Brunete, the largest tank battle to that date in the war, with some 150 Republican tanks taking part. The battle was also one of the few examples during the Spanish Civil War of the use of tanks to exploit a penetration along the front. However, the battle cost the Popular Army around 159 armored fighting vehicles.
After the Battle of Brunete, the brigade was reorganized into a new Spanish division, known as the División de Ingenios Blindados (Armored Vehicles Division). This was composed of a tank brigade and an armored brigade; the latter was made up of lighter armored fighting vehicles, such as the BA-6. It was put under the command of Spanish Colonel Sánchez Paredes. By this time, most of the Soviet tankers had returned to the Soviet Union to provide information on mechanized warfare in Spain. The only Soviet unit left was the heavy tank regiment, armed with brand new BT-5s which had not been used in combat yet. This regiment was crewed by both Soviet and veteran Spanish tankers, and was put under the command of Soviet Colonel Kondriatev. Finally, the division also disposed of an infantry brigade and an anti-tank artillery company. However, by this time the Republican military command had relegated the tank to the role of merely infantry support, dissuaded by the poor performance of Republican armor to that date. The last major battle Republican armor would take part in was the Battle of the Ebro, in 1938.
The Soviets deduced that although tank formations in Spain were not large enough to perform an ideal mechanized penetration of an enemy's lines, too large tank formations were also not ideal due to uneven terrain preventing their use en masse. As a result, armored commanders like Pavlov considered the tank's best role to be infantry support. The Republican use of armor during the Spanish Civil War was not a good demonstration of deep mechanized battle.
### Armor of the Nationalists (Spanish Rebel Army)
During the Spanish Civil War, the Nationalist Army only developed a single tank, the Carro de Infanteria modelo 1937 (Infantry Tank model 1937). Taking advantage of the capture of the Trubia Factory in the north, in 1937, the Nationalists-based it on the Republican Trubia-Naval, the German Panzer I, the T-26 and the Italian CV-33. It was designed to unite the best of all three major light tanks used by the Nationalist Army during the war. However, it did not perform as well as expected, and it was not put into mass production. The Nationalist Army did manufacture a small number of armored trucks and tractors, as well as beginning the development of the Verdeja light tank, but none of these contributed with distinction to the Nationalist effort against the Popular Army.
The first foreign tanks to enter service with the Nationalists were five Italian CV-33s, which arrived at the city of Vigo on 26 August 1936. These arrived with ten crewman, who would serve as instructors. The tanks were armed with two 8-millimeter (0.31 in) machine guns and had a maximum of 15 millimeters (0.59 in) of steel armor. On 10 December 1936, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini decided to send combat troops to Spain, in a bid to end the war as early as possible. These men were organized into the Corpo Truppe Volontarie (CTV; Volunteer Corps), and by the end of the year their ranks had swelled to an estimated 47,000 men; 20,000 of which came from the Italian Army, and 27,000 of which originated from the Blackshirts. The corps was put under the command of Italian General Mario Roatta. The first major battle for the CTV came in March 1938, when it decided to engage Republican forces during the Battle of Guadalajara. A force of some 35,000 men, including 81 tanks, attacked on 8 March 1937. Failing to take into account the meteorological conditions of the battlefield, by the following day the Italian troops found themselves attacking over ground that had turned into mud due to the heavy rains. The slow speed of the advance allowed the Republican Air Force to persistently raid advancing Italian forces, dispersing entire columns off the main roads and forcing them to stall in the mud. A Republican counterattack on 18 March, led by Pavlov's armored brigade, forced the Italians to withdraw. Nationalist air support failed to provide close air support for Italian troops because runways had become water-logged, while Italian armor proved no match against the heavier and faster T-26 and BT-5 tanks. Officially, the Italians lost an estimated 2,700 soldiers during the campaigning around Guadalajara; the Republican Army lost an estimated 4,000. According to other sources, the CTV lost an estimated 5,000 casualties during the battle. However, armor losses were relatively low, as the Republicans lost 7 T-26s and the Italians lost 19 CV-33s. Despite this initial setback, the Italian government continued the supply of personnel and equipment to the CTV in Spain, and by late 1938 the Italian volunteer's corps was equipped with three tank battalions. By the end of the war, a total of 155 CV-33s were delivered to Spain.
The Germans delivered a total of 122 Panzer I light tanks to the Spanish Army over the course of the war. The first shipment arrived in October 1936, consisting of 41 tanks. These tanks would see combat as early as 30 October, around Madrid, when they engaged a column of Republican armored cars, which were able to knock out the German tanks at ranges of 500 meters (550 yd), with their larger guns. Although the use of armor penetrating ammunition fired from the Panzer I's 7.92-millimeter (0.312 in) machine guns could penetrate the armor of the T-26 at ranges of up to 150 meters (160 yd), Republican tankers simply began to engage from ranges of up to 1,000 meters (1,100 yd), using their heavier 45-millimeter (1.8 in) tank guns. Furthermore, the sights on the T-26 were calibrated for ranges far longer than those calibrated on German equipment. This disadvantage in firepower led the Nationalist Army to experiment with the adoption of the Italian 20-millimeter (0.79 in) Breda anti-aircraft gun for its fleet of Panzer Is. Firing a 140-gram (4.9 oz) perforating projectile, this cannon could penetrate up to 40 millimeters (1.6 in) of steel armor at a range of 250 meters (270 yd). The installation of the gun required the top of the tank's turret to be cut off and extended upwards, increasing the vehicle's profile and decreasing the visibility of the crew. Furthermore, the new gun's sights were located within an open crease to the front of the new turret extension, forcing the gunner to aim and fire from a relatively unsafe position. Although originally the Nationalists were aiming to equip at least one Panzer I in each platoon of each battalion with the larger gun, only four prototypes were completed. The capture of Republican T-26s and their return to service with the Nationalist Army made the modification of the Panzer I unnecessary, while later attempts to up-gun the German light tank failed because of the lack of available 20-millimeter (0.79 in) Breda guns. There were also attempts to mount a 37-millimeter (1.5 in) anti-tank gun and a 45-millimeter (1.8 in) tank gun, taken from a captured Soviet vehicle, but these failed before any prototypes were completed.
The Nationalist's tank disparity with Republican forces caused Nationalist commanders to offer Spanish soldiers up to 500 pesetas for each captured T-26. Due to the number of T-26s captured and put back into service against their previous masters, the Soviet Union also inadvertently became the largest provider of armored fighting vehicles of the Nationalist Army. An estimated total of 178 T-26s were captured during the Spanish Civil War, including 98 put back into service, 30 irreparable vehicles used for spare parts, and 50 T-26s not pressed into service with the Nationalist Army. In May 1939, France turned over 10 T-26s, which had been interned after they had retreated across the border, to Nationalist Spain. The number of captured BT-5s amounted to much less. By May 1938, the Nationalist tank force had only put into service 4 BT-5s, as opposed to 39 T-26s. The first Nationalist tank company outfitted with T-26s entered combat during the Battle of Brunete, between 18–23 July 1937. Ultimately, the amount of captured equipment caused the Nationalists to organize a recuperation unit, designed to recuperate Soviet armor off the field and repair them so that they could return to combat.
## Post-war era: 1939–1953
At the end of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Army could count on 144 Panzer Is and CV-33s, and 139 T-26s. Panzer Is and CV-33s were organized as "light tanks", denominated Type Is, while the T-26s were considered "medium" tanks and categorized as Type IIs. These were organized into four armored regiments, including the 1st Tank Regiment (based in Madrid), the 2nd Tank Regiment (in Sevilla) and the 3rd and 4th Tank Regiments. The 3rd's organization was based upon that used by Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War, while the 4th's was based on that used by the Italian CTV. In 1941, a fifth regiment was created in North Africa.
### Verdeja tank program
Between late 1937 and 1938, Captain Félix Verdeja Bardales began to privately develop the concept for a new light tank. The new tank would take into consideration all the qualities and problems with existing tanks in service with the Nationalist Army, including the Panzer I and T-26, and combine a number of characteristics which would make it the best light tank in service at the time. His ideal light tank included a 45-millimeter (1.8 in) tank gun, with 360-degree traverse and an elevation of 72 degrees. At the same time, the vehicle was to have the lowest possible silhouette, and no less than 15 millimeters (0.59 in) of all-around armor, and 30 millimeters (1.2 in) on the front. Furthermore, the armor was to be sloped to maximize its efficiency and chance of an incoming projectile ricocheting. With a maximum velocity of 70 kilometers per hour (43 mph), the light tank was to be powered by a 120 horsepower (89 kW) engine. Furthermore, the vehicle's mechanical reliability was to improve upon that of the existing tanks in service with the Nationalist Army. Despite initial obstacles, including opposition to an indigenous Spanish tank program from German General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, the first prototype was delivered in late 1938; this prototype was built from spare parts taken from a number of different tanks. The prototype performed well in testing and a new prototype was ordered.
The new prototype was much closer to what Captain Verdeja had originally planned. The chassis was enlarged, and the engine was moved to the left side of the front compartment of the hull. The volume of the fuel tanks and the thickness of the armor was also increased, while the height of the turret was decreased by sloping the turret's sides. One of the most unusual—at the time—developments for the tank were the tracks, designed to eliminate the possibility of having them slide off when the tank was moving. The tank had a sprocket to the front of the hull, on each side, and a tensioner to the rear. The tracks were guided by four return rollers and four roadwheels. The tracks had previously been tested on the original prototype; they were designed to fit around the roadwheel, and consequently lock themselves into place, avoiding the possibility of slipping off. The construction of the prototype was postponed until May 1940, due to a shortage of funds, and the tank was finally delivered to the proving grounds of Carabanchel for testing. The prototype was denominated the Verdeja 1, and competed against a T-26B in a number of different tests. Ultimately, the Verdeja scored a total of 243 points, as compared to 205 scored by the T-26. The testing resulted in a number of modifications, including higher suspension to allow climbing over taller obstacles, the increase in armor thickness, increase of the body width and the creation of an empty space at the rear, to allow for the future installation of a communications radio. After two months work, the Verdeja 1 was returned for testing and this time scored a total of 261.98 points. Although the success of this prototype persuaded the Spanish government to issue an order for the construction of 1,000 tanks, ultimately lack of incentives to develop the relevant industrial infrastructure; the poor economic situation after the Spanish Civil War and absence of foreign clients, soon caused the production program to collapse.
As the Verdeja 1 program dissolved, Captain Verdeja began to design a successor, taking into consideration the lessons learned during the opening campaigns of the Second World War. The new design featured a reorganized engine bay at the rear of the chassis, which meant moving the drive sprocket to the rear as well. The movement of the engine's location allowed for better cooling of the vehicle's motor and the fighting compartment, as well as allowing the turret to be moved forward. The vehicle's armor was also increased substantially. This new tank was not approved for production or further development, due to continued postponement of the production of the Verdeja 1 for reasons which included offers by the German government to supply the Panzer IV's engine for the Verdeja 1. Although production of the new vehicle finally began in 1942, it was not until August 1944 that the Verdeja 2 prototype was delivered. The decision to purchase a number of German armored vehicles delayed the decision to begin production of the Verdeja 2; ultimately the vehicle was left untouched until 1950, when there was a failed attempt to mount a new engine.
Beginning in 1945, the now-Major Verdeja was ordered to begin designing an artillery piece using a rapid-firing 75 millimeter L/40 howitzer designed by Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval, based on the Verdeja 1 chassis. The chassis' roof and rear wall were eliminated, and instead a gun shield placed over the front. A mechanical brake was installed next to the idler wheel, stopping rearwards movement of the artillery piece during the firing process. The availability of the required parts and the lack of complicated changes meant that the vehicle was quickly prepared and tested extensively. The fate of the self-propelled piece was much the same as that of the Verdeja 2, and the vehicle was left untouched at the proving grounds in Carabanchel until 1973, when it was moved to the Spanish base Alfonso XIII, housing the then Mechanized Infantry Regiment Wad Rass no 55. It was soon moved to another base, and finally delivered to the base of El Goloso, outside of Madrid, as a part of an armored vehicles museum.
### German armor in service with the Spanish Army
In 1943, the Spanish Army and government decided to replace much of its armor, after studying war in Europe and North Africa. Tanks such as the Panzer I and T-26 were obsolete, as compared to newer tanks such as the Soviet T-34 and German Panther tank. As a result, on 15 March 1943 Spain began to negotiate with the Wehrmacht over the acquisition of modern materiel. The petition asked for 250 Panzer IIIs and 100 Panzer IVs. In return, the Germans instead offered a sale of 20 Panzer IVs and 10 Sturmgeschütz IIIs. On 29 April, Spain accepted Germany's offer. The Panzer IVs sold were of the Ausf. H variant, and arrived in Spain on 6 December 1943. The Panzer IV Ausf. H included the longer 75-millimeter (3.0 in) tank gun, and the homogeneous 80-millimeter (3.1 in) steel plate on the glacis.
As early as January 1944, Spain again began to negotiate with Germany for more equipment. The new program revolved around the sale of 33 Panzer IVs, three of which would be of the command variant. Another offer was made for 67 more Panzer IVs at a later date; a result, the two programs together summed up to a potential procurement of 100 Panzer IVs. Spain also suggested the purchase of a number of Tiger tanks, although this offer never amounted to anything serious. Regardless, the program to acquire another 100 Panzer IVs never materialized. The 20 Panzer IVs received in late 1943 were organized into two companies, distributed among two battalions in the armored regiment of the Armoured Division No. 1 "Brunete".
At the end of World War II, the Spanish Army counted on a tank force composed of 20 Panzer IVs, 10 StuG IIIs, 116 T-26s, 93 Panzer Is (including command vehicles), 60 CV-33s and 80 armored cars. In 1949 the armored regiment was reorganized into two battalions of 60 T-26s, with two command Panzer Is, six combat versions of the Panzer I and two CV-33, which were used for reconnaissance, each. A third battalion was composed of the 20 Panzer IVs, plus six Panzer Is. The regiment numbered an estimated 1,500 personnel and 100 tanks.
## American military aid: 1954–1970
By the mid-1950s, the state of the Spanish Army's tanks was deteriorating. Spain's armored force composition remained the same until February 1954, when the United States delivered the first twelve M47 Patton tanks to the Spanish Army. These were a product of a military aid program the United States had signed with Spain in 1953. By 1957, the Spanish Army had received a total of 29 M47 tanks. Over the course of the 1950s, Spain received a total of 389 M47 Patton tanks. Throughout the 1960s, Spain received 65 M48 Patton tanks and 66 M48A1s. The M47 and M48 tanks were an important modernization of Spain's armored firepower. For example, while the T-26 was armed with a 45-millimeter (1.8 in) cannon, the American tanks were armed with the much more powerful 90-millimeter (3.5 in) tank gun.
While a Panzer IV's (Ausf. G) 75-millimeter (3 in) L/43 tank gun could penetrate 77 millimeters (3 in) of steel armor at 1,800 meters (2,000 yd) (using the Panzergranate 39), the M47 (using the M348 high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) warhead) could penetrate 190 millimeters (7.5 in) from its 90-millimeter (3.5 in) tank gun. Further, the M47's armor was 110 millimeters (4.3 in) thick on the glacis plate, and 178 millimeters (7 in) thick on the turret front. Spain also received a number of M41 Walker Bulldog light tanks. These were organized into the Villaviciosa Light Armored Cavalry Regiment, while four were also organized into the Alcázar de Toledo Armored Infantry Regiment as reconnaissance tanks.
Between 1953 and 1968, the Spanish Army received a total of 446 medium battle tanks (M47s and M48s), 123 light tanks (M24s and M41s), as well as 30 armored recovery vehicles (the M74). In 1970, the United States agreed to extend the military aid program by another five years, giving Spain another 66 M48A2 tanks and 17 M41A3s.
The vehicles received were organized based on a reorganization of the Brunete Armored Division in 1965. This included the General Staff, based at El Pardo, and the Nucleo de Tropas Divisionario (Divisionary Troop Nucleus). The latter was formed by the Villaviciosa Light Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Campaign Artillery Regiment, the 1st Anti-Air Artillery Group, the 1st Engineering Regiment and the Divisionary Logistics Group. Also in the division was the XI Mechanized Infantry Brigade, which included the 6th Saboya Motorized Infantry Regiment, the 55th Uad Ras Mechanized Infantry Regiment, the XI Self-Propelled Artillery Group, the XI Engineering Battalion and the XI Logistics Group. Finally, the division also made use of the XII Armored Brigade, which was formed by the 61st Alcázar de Toledo Armored Infantry Regiment, the 31st Asturias Mechanized Infantry Regiment, the XII Self-Propelled Artillery Group, the XII Engineering Battalion and the XII Logistics Group. The majority of the division's armor was located in the Alcázar de Toledo Armored Infantry Regiment, which contained two regiments of 48 M48s and 54 M47s, respectively.
## Late Cold War: 1970–1991
### Western Sahara crisis and Purchase of French tanks
The United States' ban on the usage of American ordnance supplied as military aid to Spain during the 1957–58 Ifni War pushed Spain to look for alternative equipment which could be freely employed in the Spanish Sahara. Throughout the 1960s, the Spanish government had approached the governments of France and West Germany, hoping to procure either the AMX-30 or the Leopard 1, respectively. Ultimately, the Germans were unable to sell the Leopard tank on account of the gun system being British; at the time, the British Labour Party had decided not to sell to the government of Francisco Franco in Spain. As a result, in May 1970 Spain and France agreed to the sale of 19 AMX-30 main battle tanks. The first six AMX-30s were delivered in November 1970, and these were immediately issued to a new armoured company of the Spanish Legion, stationed in Spanish Sahara. All 19 AMX-30s purchased from France in 1970 were delivered to the Spanish Legion, in the Spanish Sahara. Beginning in 1974, Spain began to manufacture the AMX-30 (now denominated the AMX-30E), with production of the first batch of 180 tanks ending on 25 June 1979. The second batch, this time of 100 AMX-30Es, were produced between 1979 and 1983. This gave the Spanish Army a total of 299 AMX-30Es.
The AMX-30E was armed with the 105-millimeter (4.1 in) modele F1 tank gun, and was powered by the HS-110 680 horsepower (510 kW) diesel engine. With a fuel tank of 970 liters (210 imp gal), the tank had a road range of 600 kilometers (370 mi) and the fuel was, on average, sufficient for 18 hours of travel. The tracks had a life of at least 5,000 kilometers (3,100 mi). However, Spain's new tanks began to suffer a number of mechanical problems, dealing with the reliability of the original engine and transmission. Therefore, the Spanish Army and Santa Bárbara Sistemas (the vehicle's manufacturer in Spain) began to look into a series of modifications to improve the AMX-30. By this time, the Spanish Army had already begun upgrading its M47 and M48 Patton tanks to the M47E and M48E models, which made them equivalent to the M60 Patton tank in capabilities.
From the late 1970s Spain had upgraded 330 M47 tanks to the M47E and E1 standard with AVDS-1790-2A diesel engines and CD-850-6A transmissions like those in the M60A1 and elimination of the bow gunners position. Another 46 were further upgraded to the M47E2 standard with a German Rheinmetall Rh-105-30 105 mm gun. Eighteen of the Spanish M48's were locally upgraded to the M48A5E standard, essentially matching the American M48A3 configuration for the Marines. Fifty four M48A2 tanks (1 battalion) acquired from Germany were locally upgraded to the M48A5E1 standard which was equivalent to the American M48A5, followed by and 108 from the United States upgraded to the M48A5E1 which provided a passive M35 periscope for the gunner, AM/VVS-2 passive periscope for the driver and the TEESS engine smoke laying system. From 1983 a further 54 tanks were upgraded to the M48A5E2 standard with a Hughes Mk 7 fire control system similar to that of the M60A3 featuring a passive night vision sight for the gunner, laser rangefinder, and analog electronic ballistic computer. A further 110 were upgraded in 1984. A further upgrade of these to the M48A5E3 standard from 1991 featuring a gun stabilization system and thermal gunners sight was cancelled with the availability of surplus American M60A3 TTS tanks retired under CFE.
### Lince Programme (Lynx)
While the army was studying a possible modernisation of its brand-new AMX-30E fleet, the Spanish Ministry of Defense had set aside 120 billion pesetas (1.1 billion dollars) for a future tank programme and attracted interest from five foreign companies. A bid by Krauss-Maffei's, known as the Lince, provided the clearest technical designs. The tank would be 49 metric tons (54 short tons) and equipped with a 120-millimeter main gun. It could fire this gun on the move and aim at targets with effectiveness in day and night operations. Fitted with a 1,200 horsepower (894.84 kW) engine, the Lince could travel as fast as 70 kilometers per hour (43.50 mph) on the roads. Although heavily based on the Leopard 2A4, the Lince was smaller and lighter, trading protection for mobility. Specifically, the Lince prioritised enhanced mobility over the irregular Spanish terrain. Furthermore, size restrictions were imposed due to the existing capabilities of Spain's railroad and highway network. Although the reduced armor conflicted with the problems that the Spanish had with AMX-30E's thin armour, the Lince used a multi-layer armor similar to that of the German Leopard 2A4, providing greater protection than standard armour for a similar weight. The protection was further enhanced by the low profile turret, again similar to that of the Leopard 2A4. Despite the offer and ongoing collaboration with the Italians, Spanish investment in the German-Spanish Lince programme grew up to 200 billion pesetas (1.8 billion dollars). However, the Spanish government did not announce any winner for the contract. This indecision led Krauss-Maffei to freeze their bid for the Lince. Krauss-Maffei also cited the loss of millions of dollars due to failures on part of Santa Bárbara Sistemas, who would manufacture the Lince. In 1987, the Lince program was pushed aside and postponed by the Spanish Ministry of Defense's decision to instead go on with the modernisation of the Spanish Army's AMX-30E fleet. Ultimately, the purchase of a number of M60 Patton tanks, the modernisation of the AMX-30E and the continued fiscal problems finally caused the Spanish Ministry of Defense to cancel the Lince programme in 1989.
### 1990s modernization
Between 1989 and 1993, 150 AMX-30Es were modernised to what would become known as the AMX-30EM2. The modernisation entailed the introduction of a new armour piercing discarding sabot round, the modification of the turret hatch to allow the installation of a larger anti-aircraft machine gun, and a brand new fire control system. Besides these modernisations of the tank's firepower, the mobility of the tank was improved through the exchange of the old engine and transmission for the more reliable MTU 833 Ka-501 diesel engine, producing 850 horsepower (630 kW), coupled with the German ZF LSG-3000. A new smoke machine, linked to the tank's new engine, was also installed. The other 149 AMX-30Es went through a less expensive and extensive modification, known as the AMX-30EM1. These received the American Allison CD-850-6A three speed transmission (two forward and one reverse); however, the new transmission caused extensive overheating in the engine compartment. These 149 AMX-30EM1s would eventually be replaced by US surplus M60A3 Patton tanks, purchased from the United States, in the early 1990s.
## Modern Spanish armor: 1992–present
In the early 1990s, due large numbers of tanks were being withdrawn from Central Europe in compliance with the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe the Spanish Army received 244 M60 tanks to replace its aging fleet of M47Es and M48Es, and its troublesome AMX-30EM1s. However, these did not represent a great improvement over the existing fleet, and as a result as early as 1994 the Spanish government had already begun to negotiate for a future Spanish tank, which would replace the M60. Although the Germans offered Spain surplus Leopard 1 tanks and Soviet equipment incorporated into the German Army after the reunification of Germany, the Spanish government declined these offers and pressed for the Leopard 2.
In March 1994, the Spanish Ministry of Defense created Programa Coraza 2000 (Programme Armour 2000), which focused on the procurement and integration of new armament for the Spanish Army's modernisation. The program included the procurement and integration of a Spanish derivative of the German Leopard 2, known as the Leopard 2E into the Spanish Army. The programme's scope extended to the integration of 108 Leopard 2A4s, which were leased to Spain in late 1995. Apart from procurement, Programa Coraza was meant to prepare the Spanish Army logistically for the introduction of new matériel.
A memorandum of understanding was signed on 9 June 1995 between the German and Spanish governments, setting the foundations for an acquisition of up to 308 brand-new Leopard 2Es. These were to be assembled in Spain by Santa Bárbara Sistemas, with 60–70 percent of the components manufactured by Spanish companies, and production taking place between 1998 and 2003. Furthermore, the German government agreed to lend the Spanish Army 108 Leopard 2A4s for training purposes for a period of five years. These vehicles were delivered between November 1995 and June 1996. In 1998, Spain agreed to procure the ceded Leopard 2A4s and reduce production of the brand-new Leopard 2E to 219 vehicles. In 2005 it was declared that the 108 Leopard 2A4s were to cost Spain 16.9 million euros, to be paid by 2016. The Leopard 2Es, based on the German Leopard 2A6, were produced between 2002 and 2008. The M60s were replaced by the Leopard 2s.
## See also
- History of the tank
- List of interwar armoured fighting vehicles
- Tanks in World War II
- Comparison of early World War II tanks
- Tank classification
- List of military vehicles
- List of armoured fighting vehicles by country |
4,606 | Battle of the Nile | 1,173,892,045 | 1798 naval battle during the French Invasion of Egypt | [
"1798 in Egypt",
"Conflicts in 1798",
"Egypt–United Kingdom military relations",
"France–United Kingdom military relations",
"French campaign in Egypt and Syria",
"Horatio Nelson",
"Mediterranean campaign of 1798",
"Naval battles involving France",
"Naval battles involving Great Britain",
"Naval battles of the French Revolutionary Wars",
"Naval history of Egypt"
]
| The Battle of the Nile (also known as the Battle of Aboukir Bay; French: Bataille d'Aboukir) was a major naval battle fought between the British Royal Navy and the Navy of the French Republic at Aboukir Bay on the Mediterranean coast off the Nile Delta of Egypt from the 1st to the 3rd of August 1798. The battle was the climax of a naval campaign that had raged across the Mediterranean during the previous three months, as a large French convoy sailed from Toulon to Alexandria carrying an expeditionary force under General Napoleon Bonaparte. The British fleet was led in the battle by Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson; they decisively defeated the French under Vice-Admiral François-Paul Brueys d'Aigalliers.
Bonaparte sought to invade Egypt as the first step in a campaign against British India, as part of a greater effort to drive Britain out of the French Revolutionary Wars. As Bonaparte's fleet crossed the Mediterranean, it was pursued by a British force under Nelson who had been sent from the British fleet in the Tagus to learn the purpose of the French expedition and to defeat it. He chased the French for more than two months, on several occasions missing them only by a matter of hours. Bonaparte was aware of Nelson's pursuit and enforced absolute secrecy about his destination. He was able to capture Malta and then land in Egypt without interception by the British naval forces.
With the French army ashore, the French fleet anchored in Aboukir Bay, 20 miles (32 km) northeast of Alexandria. Commander Vice-Admiral François-Paul Brueys d'Aigalliers believed that he had established a formidable defensive position. The British fleet arrived off Egypt on 1 August and discovered Brueys's dispositions, and Nelson ordered an immediate attack. His ships advanced on the French line and split into two divisions as they approached. One cut across the head of the line and passed between the anchored French and the shore, while the other engaged the seaward side of the French fleet.
Trapped in a crossfire, the leading French warships were battered into surrender during a fierce three-hour battle, although the centre of the line held out for a while until more British ships were able to join the attack. At 22:00, the French flagship Orient exploded which prompted the rear division of the French fleet to attempt to break out of the bay. With Brueys dead and his vanguard and centre defeated, only two ships of the line and two frigates escaped from a total of 17 ships engaged.
The battle reversed the strategic situation between the two nations' forces in the Mediterranean and entrenched the Royal Navy in the dominant position that it retained for the rest of the Napoleonic Wars. It also encouraged other European countries to turn against France, and was a factor in the outbreak of the War of the Second Coalition. Bonaparte's army was trapped in Egypt, and Royal Navy dominance off the Syrian coast contributed significantly to the French defeat at the siege of Acre in 1799 which preceded Bonaparte's abandonment of Egypt and return to Europe. Nelson had been wounded in the battle, and he was proclaimed a hero across Europe and was subsequently made Baron Nelson—although he was privately dissatisfied with his rewards. His captains were also highly praised and went on to form the nucleus of the legendary Nelson's Band of Brothers. The legend of the battle has remained prominent in the popular consciousness, with perhaps the best-known representation being Felicia Hemans' 1826 poem Casabianca.
## Background
Napoleon Bonaparte's victories in northern Italy over the Austrian Empire helped secure victory for the French in the War of the First Coalition in 1797, and Great Britain remained the only major European power still at war with the French Republic. The French Directory investigated a number of strategic options to counter British opposition, including projected invasions of Ireland and Britain and the expansion of the French Navy to challenge the Royal Navy at sea. Despite significant efforts, British control of Northern European waters rendered these ambitions impractical in the short term, and the Royal Navy remained firmly in control of the Atlantic Ocean. However, the French navy was dominant in the Mediterranean, following the withdrawal of the British fleet after the outbreak of war between Britain and Spain in 1796. This allowed Bonaparte to propose an invasion of Egypt as an alternative to confronting Britain directly, believing that the British would be too distracted by an imminent Irish uprising to intervene in the Mediterranean.
Bonaparte believed that, by establishing a permanent presence in Egypt (nominally part of the neutral Ottoman Empire), the French would obtain a staging point for future operations against British India, possibly by means of an alliance with the Tipu Sultan of Seringapatam, that might successfully drive the British out of the war. The campaign would sever the chain of communication that connected Britain with India, an essential part of the British Empire whose trade generated the wealth that Britain required to prosecute the war successfully. The French Directory agreed with Bonaparte's plans, although a major factor in their decision was a desire to see the politically ambitious Bonaparte and the fiercely loyal veterans of his Italian campaigns travel as far from France as possible. During the spring of 1798, Bonaparte assembled more than 35,000 soldiers in Mediterranean France and Italy and developed a powerful fleet at Toulon. He also formed the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a body of scientists and engineers intended to establish a French colony in Egypt. Napoleon kept the destination of the expedition top secret—most of the army's officers did not know of its target, and Bonaparte did not publicly reveal his goal until the first stage of the expedition was complete.
### Mediterranean campaign
Bonaparte's armada sailed from Toulon on 19 May, making rapid progress through the Ligurian Sea and collecting more ships at Genoa, before sailing southwards along the Sardinian coast and passing Sicily on 7 June. On 9 June, the fleet arrived off Malta, then under the ownership of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, ruled by Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch zu Bolheim. Bonaparte demanded that his fleet be permitted entry to the fortified harbour of Valletta. When the Knights refused, the French general responded by ordering a large scale invasion of the Maltese Islands, overrunning the defenders after 24 hours of skirmishing. The Knights formally surrendered on 12 June and, in exchange for substantial financial compensation, handed the islands and all of their resources over to Bonaparte, including the extensive property of the Roman Catholic Church on Malta. Within a week, Bonaparte had resupplied his ships, and on 19 June, his fleet departed for Alexandria in the direction of Crete, leaving 4,000 men at Valletta under General Claude-Henri Vaubois to ensure French control of the islands.
While Bonaparte was sailing to Malta, the Royal Navy re-entered the Mediterranean for the first time in more than a year. Alarmed by reports of French preparations on the Mediterranean coast, Lord Spencer at the Admiralty sent a message to Vice-Admiral Earl St. Vincent, commander of the Mediterranean Fleet based in the Tagus, to despatch a squadron to investigate. This squadron, consisting of three ships of the line and three frigates, was entrusted to Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson.
Nelson was a highly experienced officer who had been blinded in one eye during fighting in Corsica in 1794 and subsequently commended for his capture of two Spanish ships of the line at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in February 1797. In July 1797, he lost an arm at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and had been forced to return to Britain to recuperate. Returning to the fleet at the Tagus in late April 1798, he was ordered to collect the squadron stationed at Gibraltar and sail for the Ligurian Sea. On 21 May, as Nelson's squadron approached Toulon, it was struck by a fierce gale and Nelson's flagship, HMS Vanguard, lost its topmasts and was almost wrecked on the Corsican coast. The remainder of the squadron was scattered. The ships of the line sheltered at San Pietro Island off Sardinia; the frigates were blown to the west and failed to return.
On 7 June, following hasty repairs to his flagship, a fleet consisting of ten ships of the line and a fourth-rate joined Nelson off Toulon. The fleet, under the command of Captain Thomas Troubridge, had been sent by Earl St. Vincent to reinforce Nelson, with orders that he was to pursue and intercept the Toulon convoy. Although he now had enough ships to challenge the French fleet, Nelson suffered two great disadvantages: He had no intelligence regarding the destination of the French, and no frigates to scout ahead of his force. Striking southwards in the hope of collecting information about French movements, Nelson's ships stopped at Elba and Naples, where the British ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, reported that the French fleet had passed Sicily headed in the direction of Malta. Despite pleas from Nelson and Hamilton, King Ferdinand of Naples refused to lend his frigates to the British fleet, fearing French reprisals. On 22 June, a brig sailing from Ragusa brought Nelson the news that the French had sailed eastwards from Malta on 16 June. After conferring with his captains, the admiral decided that the French target must be Egypt and set off in pursuit. Incorrectly believing the French to be five days ahead rather than two, Nelson insisted on a direct route to Alexandria without deviation.
On the evening of 22 June, Nelson's fleet passed the French in the darkness, overtaking the slow invasion convoy without realising how close they were to their target. Making rapid time on a direct route, Nelson reached Alexandria on 28 June and discovered that the French were not there. After a meeting with the suspicious Ottoman commander, Sayyid Muhammad Kurayyim, Nelson ordered the British fleet northwards, reaching the coast of Anatolia on 4 July and turning westwards back towards Sicily. Nelson had missed the French by less than a day—the scouts of the French fleet arrived off Alexandria in the evening of 29 June.
Concerned by his near encounter with Nelson, Bonaparte ordered an immediate invasion, his troops coming ashore in a poorly managed amphibious operation in which at least 20 drowned. Marching along the coast, the French army stormed Alexandria and captured the city, after which Bonaparte led the main force of his army inland. He instructed his naval commander, Vice-Admiral François-Paul Brueys D'Aigalliers, to anchor in Alexandria harbour, but naval surveyors reported that the channel into the harbour was too shallow and narrow for the larger ships of the French fleet. As a result, the French selected an alternative anchorage at Aboukir Bay, 20 miles (32 km) northeast of Alexandria.
Nelson's fleet reached Syracuse in Sicily on 19 July and took on essential supplies. There the admiral wrote letters describing the events of the previous months: "It is an old saying, 'the Devil's children have the Devil's luck.' I cannot find, or at this moment learn, beyond vague conjecture where the French fleet are gone to. All my ill fortune, hitherto, has proceeded from want of frigates." Meanwhile, the French were securing Egypt by the Battle of the Pyramids. By 24 July, the British fleet was resupplied and, having determined that the French must be somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, Nelson sailed again in the direction of the Morea. On 28 July, at Coron, Nelson finally obtained intelligence describing the French attack on Egypt and turned south across the Mediterranean. His scouts, HMS Alexander and HMS Swiftsure, sighted the French transport fleet at Alexandria on the afternoon of 1 August.
### Aboukir Bay
When Alexandria harbour had proved inadequate for his fleet, Brueys had gathered his captains and discussed their options. Bonaparte had ordered the fleet to anchor in Aboukir Bay, a shallow and exposed anchorage, but had supplemented the orders with the suggestion that, if Aboukir Bay was too dangerous, Brueys could sail north to Corfu, leaving only the transports and a handful of lighter warships at Alexandria. Brueys refused, in the belief that his squadron could provide essential support to the French army on shore, and called his captains aboard his 120-gun flagship Orient to discuss their response should Nelson discover the fleet in its anchorage. Despite vocal opposition from Contre-amiral Armand Blanquet, who insisted that the fleet would be best able to respond in open water, the rest of the captains agreed that anchoring in a line of battle inside the bay presented the strongest tactic for confronting Nelson. It is possible that Bonaparte envisaged Aboukir Bay as a temporary anchorage: on 27 July, he expressed the expectation that Brueys had already transferred his ships to Alexandria, and three days later, he issued orders for the fleet to make for Corfu in preparation for naval operations against the Ottoman territories in the Balkans, although Bedouin partisans intercepted and killed the courier carrying the instructions.
Aboukir Bay is a coastal indentation 16 nautical miles (30 km) across, stretching from the village of Abu Qir in the west to the town of Rosetta to the east, where one of the mouths of the River Nile empties into the Mediterranean. In 1798, the bay was protected at its western end by extensive rocky shoals which ran 3 miles (4.8 km) into the bay from a promontory guarded by Aboukir Castle. A small fort situated on an island among the rocks protected the shoals. The fort was garrisoned by French soldiers and armed with at least four cannon and two heavy mortars. Brueys had augmented the fort with his bomb vessels and gunboats, anchored among the rocks to the west of the island in a position to give support to the head of the French line. Further shoals ran unevenly to the south of the island and extended across the bay in a rough semicircle approximately 1,650 yards (1,510 m) from the shore. These shoals were too shallow to permit the passage of larger warships, and so Brueys ordered his thirteen ships of the line to form up in a line of battle following the northeastern edge of the shoals to the south of the island, a position that allowed the ships to disembark supplies from their port sides while covering the landings with their starboard batteries. Orders were issued for each ship to attach strong cables to the bow and stern of their neighbours, which would effectively turn the line into a long battery forming a theoretically impregnable barrier. Brueys positioned a second, inner line of four frigates approximately 350 yards (320 m) west of the main line, roughly halfway between the line and the shoal. The van of the French line was led by Guerrier, positioned 2,400 yards (2,200 m) southeast of Aboukir Island and about 1,000 yards (910 m) from the edge of the shoals that surrounded the island. The line stretched southeast, with the centre bowed seawards away from the shoal. The French ships were spaced at intervals of 160 yards (150 m) and the whole line was 2,850 yards (2,610 m) long, with the flagship Orient at the centre and two large 80-gun ships anchored on either side. The rear division of the line was under the command of Contre-amiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve in Guillaume Tell.
In deploying his ships in this way, Brueys hoped that the British would be forced by the shoals to attack his strong centre and rear, allowing his van to use the prevailing northeasterly wind to counterattack the British once they were engaged. However, he had made a serious misjudgement: he had left enough room between Guerrier and the shoals for an enemy ship to cut across the head of the French line and proceed between the shoals and the French ships, allowing the unsupported vanguard to be caught in a crossfire by two divisions of enemy ships. Compounding this error, the French only prepared their ships for battle on their starboard (seaward) sides, from which they expected the attack would have to come; their landward port sides were unprepared. The port side gun ports were closed, and the decks on that side were uncleared, with various stored items blocking access to the guns. Brueys' dispositions had a second significant flaw: The 160-yard gaps between ships were large enough for a British ship to push through and break the French line. Furthermore, not all of the French captains had followed Brueys' orders to attach cables to their neighbours' bow and stern, which would have prevented such a manoeuvre. The problem was exacerbated by orders to only anchor at the bow, which allowed the ships to swing with the wind and widened the gaps. It also created areas within the French line not covered by the broadside of any ship. British vessels could anchor in those spaces and engage the French without reply. In addition, the deployment of Brueys' fleet prevented the rear from effectively supporting the van due to the prevailing winds.
A more pressing problem for Brueys was a lack of food and water for the fleet: Bonaparte had unloaded almost all of the provisions carried aboard and no supplies were reaching the ships from the shore. To remedy this, Brueys sent foraging parties of 25 men from each ship along the coast to requisition food, dig wells, and collect water. Constant attacks by Bedouin partisans, however, required escorts of heavily armed guards for each party. Hence, up to a third of the fleet's sailors were away from their ships at any one time. Brueys wrote a letter describing the situation to Minister of Marine Étienne Eustache Bruix, reporting that "Our crews are weak, both in number and quality. Our rigging, in general, out of repair, and I am sure it requires no little courage to undertake the management of a fleet furnished with such tools."
## Battle
### Nelson's arrival
Although initially disappointed that the main French fleet was not at Alexandria, Nelson knew from the presence of the transports that they must be nearby. At 14:00 on 1 August, lookouts on HMS Zealous reported the French anchored in Aboukir Bay, its signal lieutenant just beating the lieutenant on HMS Goliath with the signal, but inaccurately describing 16 French ships of the line instead of 13. At the same time, French lookouts on Heureux, the ninth ship in the French line, sighted the British fleet approximately nine nautical miles off the mouth of Aboukir Bay. The French initially reported just 11 British ships – Swiftsure and Alexander were still returning from their scouting operations at Alexandria, and so were 3 nautical miles (5.6 km) to the west of the main fleet, out of sight. Troubridge's ship, HMS Culloden, was also some distance from the main body, towing a captured merchant ship. At the sight of the French, Troubridge abandoned the vessel and made strenuous efforts to rejoin Nelson. Due to the need for so many sailors to work onshore, Brueys had not deployed any of his lighter warships as scouts, which left him unable to react swiftly to the sudden appearance of the British.
As his ships readied for action, Brueys ordered his captains to gather for a conference on Orient and hastily recalled his shore parties, although most had still not returned by the start of the battle. To replace them, large numbers of men were taken out of the frigates and distributed among the ships of the line. Brueys also hoped to lure the British fleet onto the shoals at Aboukir Island, sending the brigs Alerte and Railleur to act as decoys in the shallow waters. By 16:00, Alexander and Swiftsure were also in sight, although some distance from the main British fleet. Brueys gave orders to abandon the plan to remain at anchor and instead for his line to set sail. Blanquet protested the order on the grounds that there were not enough men aboard the French ships to both sail the ships and man the guns. Nelson gave orders for his leading ships to slow down, to allow the British fleet to approach in a more organised formation. This convinced Brueys that rather than risk an evening battle in confined waters, the British were planning to wait for the following day. He rescinded his earlier order to sail. Brueys may have been hoping that the delay would allow him to slip past the British during the night and thus follow Bonaparte's orders not to engage the British fleet directly if he could avoid it.
Nelson ordered the fleet to slow down at 16:00 to allow his ships to rig "springs" on their anchor cables, a system of attaching the bow anchor that increased stability and allowed his ships to swing their broadsides to face an enemy while stationary. It also increased manoeuvrability and therefore reduced the risk of coming under raking fire. Nelson's plan, shaped through discussion with his senior captains during the return voyage to Alexandria, was to advance on the French and pass down the seaward side of the van and centre of the French line, so that each French ship would face two British ships and the massive Orient would be fighting against three. The direction of the wind meant that the French rear division would be unable to join the battle easily and would be cut off from the front portions of the line. To ensure that in the smoke and confusion of a night battle his ships would not accidentally open fire on one another, Nelson ordered that each ship prepare four horizontal lights at the head of their mizzen mast and hoist an illuminated White Ensign, which was different enough from the French tricolour that it would not be mistaken in poor visibility, reducing the risk that British ships might fire on one another in the darkness. As his ship was readied for battle, Nelson held a final dinner with Vanguards officers, announcing as he rose: "Before this time tomorrow I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey," in reference to the rewards of victory or the traditional burial place of British military heroes.
Shortly after the French order to set sail was abandoned, the British fleet began rapidly approaching once more. Brueys, now expecting to come under attack that night, ordered each of his ships to place springs on their anchor cables and prepare for action. He sent the Alerte ahead, which passed close to the leading British ships and then steered sharply to the west over the shoal, in the hope that the ships of the line might follow and become grounded. None of Nelson's captains fell for the ruse and the British fleet continued undeterred. At 17:30, Nelson hailed one of his two leading ships, HMS Zealous under Captain Samuel Hood, which had been racing Goliath to be the first to fire on the French. The admiral ordered Hood to establish the safest course into the harbour. The British had no charts of the depth or shape of the bay, except a rough sketch map Swiftsure had obtained from a merchant captain, an inaccurate British atlas on Zealous, and a 35-year-old French map aboard Goliath. Hood replied that he would take careful soundings as he advanced to test the depth of the water, and that, "If you will allow the honour of leading you into battle, I will keep the lead going." Shortly afterwards, Nelson paused to speak with the brig HMS Mutine, whose commander, Lieutenant Thomas Hardy, had seized some maritime pilots from a small Alexandrine vessel. As Vanguard came to a stop, the following ships slowed. This caused a gap to open up between Zealous and Goliath and the rest of the fleet. To counter this effect, Nelson ordered HMS Theseus under Captain Ralph Miller to pass his flagship and join Zealous and Goliath in the vanguard. By 18:00, the British fleet was again under full sail, Vanguard sixth in the line of ten ships as Culloden trailed behind to the north and Alexander and Swiftsure hastened to catch up to the west. Following the rapid change from a loose formation to a rigid line of battle, both fleets raised their colours; each British ship hoisted additional Union Flags in its rigging in case its main flag was shot away. At 18:20, as Goliath and Zealous rapidly bore down on them, the leading French ships Guerrier and Conquérant opened fire.
Ten minutes after the French opened fire, Goliath, ignoring fire from the fort to starboard and from Guerrier to port, most of which was too high to trouble the ship, crossed the head of the French line. Captain Thomas Foley had noticed as he approached that there was an unexpected gap between Guerrier and the shallow water of the shoal. On his own initiative, Foley decided to exploit this tactical error and changed his angle of approach to sail through the gap. As the bow of Guerrier came within range, Goliath opened fire, inflicting severe damage with a double-shotted raking broadside as the British ship turned to port and passed down the unprepared port side of Guerrier. Foley's Royal Marines and a company of Austrian grenadiers joined the attack, firing their muskets. Foley had intended to anchor alongside the French ship and engage it closely, but his anchor took too long to descend and his ship passed Guerrier entirely. Goliath eventually stopped close to the bow of Conquérant, opening fire on the new opponent and using the unengaged starboard guns to exchange occasional shots with the frigate Sérieuse and bomb vessel Hercule, which were anchored inshore of the battle line.
Foley's attack was followed by Hood in Zealous, who also crossed the French line and successfully anchored next to Guerrier in the space Foley had intended, engaging the lead ship's bow from close range. Within five minutes Guerriers foremast had fallen, to cheers from the crews of the approaching British ships. The speed of the British advance took the French captains by surprise; they were still aboard Orient in conference with the admiral when the firing started. Hastily launching their boats, they returned to their vessels. Captain Jean-François-Timothée Trullet of Guerrier shouted orders from his barge for his men to return fire on Zealous.
The third British ship into action was HMS Orion under Captain Sir James Saumarez, which rounded the engagement at the head of the battle line and passed between the French main line and the frigates that lay closer inshore. As he did so, the frigate Sérieuse opened fire on Orion, wounding two men. The convention in naval warfare of the time was that ships of the line did not attack frigates when there were ships of equal size to engage, but in firing first French Captain Claude-Jean Martin had negated the rule. Saumarez waited until the frigate was at close range before replying. Orion needed just one broadside to reduce the frigate to a wreck, and Martin's disabled ship drifted away over the shoal. During the delay this detour caused, two other British ships joined the battle: Theseus, which had been disguised as a first-rate ship, followed Foley's track across Guerriers bow. Miller steered his ship through the middle of the melee between the anchored British and French ships until he encountered the third French ship, Spartiate. Anchoring to port, Miller's ship opened fire at close range. HMS Audacious under Captain Davidge Gould crossed the French line between Guerrier and Conquérant, anchoring between the ships and raking them both. Orion then rejoined the action further south than intended, firing on the fifth French ship, Peuple Souverain, and Admiral Blanquet's flagship, Franklin.
The next three British ships, Vanguard in the lead followed by HMS Minotaur and HMS Defence, remained in line of battle formation and anchored on the starboard side of the French line at 18:40. Nelson focused his flagship's fire on Spartiate, while Captain Thomas Louis in Minotaur attacked the unengaged Aquilon and Captain John Peyton in Defence joined the attack on Peuple Souverain. With the French vanguard now heavily outnumbered, the following British ships, HMS Bellerophon and HMS Majestic, passed by the melee and advanced on the so far unengaged French centre. Both ships were soon fighting enemies much more powerful than they and began to take severe damage. Captain Henry Darby on Bellerophon missed his intended anchor near Franklin and instead found his ship underneath the main battery of the French flagship. Captain George Blagdon Westcott on Majestic also missed his station and almost collided with Heureux, coming under heavy fire from Tonnant. Unable to stop in time, Westcott's jib boom became entangled with Tonnant's shroud.
The French suffered too, Admiral Brueys on Orient was severely wounded in the face and hand by flying debris during the opening exchange of fire with Bellerophon. The final ship of the British line, Culloden under Troubridge, sailed too close to Aboukir Island in the growing darkness and became stuck fast on the shoal. Despite strenuous efforts from the Cullodens boats, the brig Mutine and the 50-gun HMS Leander under Captain Thomas Thompson, the ship of the line could not be moved, and the waves drove Culloden further onto the shoal, inflicting severe damage to the ship's hull.
### Surrender of the French vanguard
At 19:00 the identifying lights in the mizzenmasts of the British fleet were lit. By this time, Guerrier had been completely dismasted and heavily battered. Zealous by contrast was barely touched: Hood had situated Zealous outside the arc of most of the French ship's broadsides, and in any case Guerrier was not prepared for an engagement on both sides simultaneously, with its port guns blocked by stores. Although their ship was a wreck, the crew of Guerrier refused to surrender, continuing to fire the few functional guns whenever possible despite heavy answering fire from Zealous. In addition to his cannon fire, Hood called up his marines and ordered them to fire volleys of musket shot at the deck of the French ship, driving the crew out of sight but still failing to secure the surrender from Captain Trullet. It was not until 21:00, when Hood sent a small boat to Guerrier with a boarding party, that the French ship finally surrendered. Conquérant was defeated more rapidly, after heavy broadsides from passing British ships and the close attentions of Audacious and Goliath brought down all three masts before 19:00. With his ship immobile and badly damaged, the mortally wounded Captain Etienne Dalbarade struck his colours and a boarding party seized control. Unlike Zealous, these British ships suffered relatively severe damage in the engagement. Goliath lost most of its rigging, suffered damage to all three masts and suffered more than 60 casualties. With his opponents defeated, Captain Gould on Audacious used the spring on his cable to transfer fire to Spartiate, the next French ship in line. To the west of the battle the battered Sérieuse sank over the shoal. Her masts protruded from the water as survivors scrambled into boats and rowed for the shore.
The transfer of Audaciouss broadside to Spartiate meant that Captain Maurice-Julien Emeriau now faced three opponents. Within minutes all three of his ship's masts had fallen, but the battle around Spartiate continued until 21:00, when the badly wounded Emeriau ordered his colours struck. Although Spartiate was outnumbered, it had been supported by the next in line, Aquilon, which was the only ship of the French van squadron fighting a single opponent, Minotaur. Captain Antoine René Thévenard used the spring on his anchor cable to angle his broadside into a raking position across the bow of Nelson's flagship, which consequently suffered more than 100 casualties, including the admiral. At approximately 20:30, an iron splinter fired in a langrage shot from Spartiate struck Nelson over his blinded right eye. The wound caused a flap of skin to fall across his face, rendering him temporarily completely blind. Nelson collapsed into the arms of Captain Edward Berry and was carried below. Certain that his wound was fatal, he cried out "I am killed, remember me to my wife", and called for his chaplain, Stephen Comyn. The wound was immediately inspected by Vanguards surgeon Michael Jefferson, who informed the admiral that it was a simple flesh wound and stitched the skin together. Nelson subsequently ignored Jefferson's instructions to remain inactive, returning to the quarterdeck shortly before the explosion on Orient to oversee the closing stages of the battle. Although Thévenard's manoeuvre was successful, it placed his own bow under Minotaur's guns and by 21:25 the French ship was dismasted and battered, Captain Thévenard killed and his junior officers forced to surrender. With his opponent defeated, Captain Thomas Louis then took Minotaur south to join the attack on Franklin.
Defence and Orion attacked the fifth French ship, Peuple Souverain, from either side and the ship rapidly lost the fore and main masts. Aboard the Orion, a wooden block was smashed off one of the ship's masts, killing two men before wounding Captain Saumarez in the thigh. On Peuple Souverain, Captain Pierre-Paul Raccord was badly wounded and ordered his ship's anchor cable cut in an effort to escape the bombardment. Peuple Souverain drifted south towards the flagship Orient, which mistakenly opened fire on the darkened vessel. Orion and Defence were unable to immediately pursue. Defence had lost its fore topmast and an improvised fireship that drifted through the battle narrowly missed Orion. The origin of this vessel, an abandoned and burning ship's boat laden with highly flammable material, is uncertain, but it may have been launched from Guerrier as the battle began. Peuple Souverain anchored not far from Orient, but took no further part in the fighting. The wrecked ship surrendered during the night. Franklin remained in combat, but Blanquet had suffered a severe head wound and Captain Gillet had been carried below unconscious with severe wounds. Shortly afterwards, a fire broke out on the quarterdeck after an arms locker exploded, which was eventually extinguished with difficulty by the crew.
To the south, HMS Bellerophon was in serious trouble as the huge broadside of Orient pounded the ship. At 19:50 the mizzenmast and main mast both collapsed and fires broke out simultaneously at several points. Although the blazes were extinguished, the ship had suffered more than 200 casualties. Captain Darby recognised that his position was untenable and ordered the anchor cables cut at 20:20. The battered ship drifted away from the battle under continued fire from Tonnant as the foremast collapsed as well. Orient had also suffered significant damage and Admiral Brueys had been struck in the midriff by a cannonball that almost cut him in half. He died fifteen minutes later, remaining on deck and refusing to be carried below. Orients captain, Luc-Julien-Joseph Casabianca, was also wounded, struck in the face by flying debris and knocked unconscious, while his twelve-year-old son had a leg torn off by a cannonball as he stood beside his father. The most southerly British ship, Majestic, had become briefly entangled with the 80-gun Tonnant, and in the resulting battle, suffered heavy casualties. Captain George Blagdon Westcott was among the dead, killed by French musket fire. Lieutenant Robert Cuthbert assumed command and successfully disentangled his ship, allowing the badly damaged Majestic to drift further southwards so that by 20:30 it was stationed between Tonnant and the next in line, Heureux, engaging both. To support the centre, Captain Thompson of Leander abandoned the futile efforts to drag the stranded Culloden off the shoal and sailed down the embattled French line, entering the gap created by the drifting Peuple Souverain and opening a fierce raking fire on Franklin and Orient.
While the battle raged in the bay, the two straggling British ships made strenuous efforts to join the engagement, focusing on the flashes of gunfire in the darkness. Warned away from the Aboukir shoals by the grounded Culloden, Captain Benjamin Hallowell in Swiftsure passed the melee at the head of the line and aimed his ship at the French centre. Shortly after 20:00, a dismasted hulk was spotted drifting in front of Swiftsure and Hallowell initially ordered his men to fire before rescinding the order, concerned for the identity of the strange vessel. Hailing the battered ship, Hallowell received the reply "Bellerophon, going out of action disabled." Relieved that he had not accidentally attacked one of his own ships in the darkness, Hallowell pulled up between Orient and Franklin and opened fire on them both. Alexander, the final unengaged British ship, which had followed Swiftsure, pulled up close to Tonnant, which had begun to drift away from the embattled French flagship. Captain Alexander Ball then joined the attack on Orient.
### Destruction of Orient
At 21:00, the British observed a fire on the lower decks of the Orient, the French flagship. Identifying the danger this posed to the Orient, Captain Hallowell directed his gun crews to fire their guns directly into the blaze. Sustained British gun fire spread the flames throughout the ship's stern and prevented all efforts to extinguish them. Within minutes the fire had ascended the rigging and set the vast sails alight. The nearest British ships, Swiftsure, Alexander, and Orion, all stopped firing, closed their gunports, and began edging away from the burning ship in anticipation of the detonation of the enormous ammunition supplies stored on board. In addition, they took crews away from the guns to form fire parties and to soak the sails and decks in seawater to help contain any resulting fires. Likewise the French ships Tonnant, Heureux, and Mercure all cut their anchor cables and drifted southwards away from the burning ship. At 22:00 the fire reached the magazines, and the Orient was destroyed by a massive explosion. The concussion of the blast was powerful enough to rip open the seams of the nearest ships, and flaming wreckage landed in a huge circle, much of it flying directly over the surrounding ships into the sea beyond. Falling wreckage started fires on Swiftsure, Alexander, and Franklin, although in each case teams of sailors with water buckets succeeded in extinguishing the flames, despite a secondary explosion on Franklin.
It has never been firmly established how the fire on Orient broke out, but one common account is that jars of oil and paint had been left on the poop deck, instead of being properly stowed after painting of the ship's hull had been completed shortly before the battle. Burning wadding from one of the British ships is believed to have floated onto the poop deck and ignited the paint. The fire rapidly spread through the admiral's cabin and into a ready magazine that stored carcass ammunition, which was designed to burn more fiercely in water than in air. Alternatively, Fleet Captain Honoré Ganteaume later reported the cause as an explosion on the quarterdeck, preceded by a series of minor fires on the main deck among the ship's boats. Whatever its origin, the fire spread rapidly through the ship's rigging, unchecked by the fire pumps aboard, which had been smashed by British shot. A second blaze then began at the bow, trapping hundreds of sailors in the ship's waist. Subsequent archaeological investigation found debris scattered over 500 metres (550 yd) of seabed and evidence that the ship was wracked by two explosions. Hundreds of men dived into the sea to escape the flames, but fewer than 100 survived the blast. British boats picked up approximately 70 survivors, including the wounded staff officer Léonard-Bernard Motard. A few others, including Ganteaume, managed to reach the shore on rafts. The remainder of the crew, numbering more than 1,000 men, were killed, including Captain Casabianca and his son, Giocante.
For ten minutes after the explosion there was no firing; sailors from both sides were either too shocked by the blast or desperately extinguishing fires aboard their own ships to continue the fight. During the lull, Nelson gave orders that boats be sent to pull survivors from the water around the remains of Orient. At 22:10, Franklin restarted the engagement by firing on Swiftsure. Isolated and battered, Blanquet's ship was soon dismasted and the admiral, suffering a severe head wound, was forced to surrender by the combined firepower of Swiftsure and Defence. More than half of Franklins crew had been killed or wounded.
By midnight only Tonnant remained engaged, as Commodore Aristide Aubert Du Petit Thouars continued his fight with Majestic and fired on Swiftsure when the British ship moved within range. By 03:00, after more than three hours of close quarter combat, Majestic had lost its main and mizzen masts while Tonnant was a dismasted hulk. Although Captain Du Petit Thouars had lost both legs and an arm he remained in command, insisting on having the tricolour nailed to the mast to prevent it from being struck and giving orders from his position propped up on deck in a bucket of wheat. Under his guidance, the battered Tonnant gradually drifted southwards away from the action to join the southern division under Villeneuve, who failed to bring these ships into effective action. Throughout the engagement the French rear had kept up an arbitrary fire on the battling ships ahead. The only noticeable effect was the smashing of Timoléon's rudder by misdirected fire from the neighbouring Généreux.
### Morning
As the sun rose at 04:00 on 2 August, firing broke out once again between the French southern division of Guillaume Tell, Tonnant, Généreux and Timoléon and the battered Alexander and Majestic. Although briefly outmatched, the British ships were soon joined by Goliath and Theseus. As Captain Miller manoeuvred his ship into position, Theseus briefly came under fire from the frigate Artémise. Miller turned his ship towards Artémise, but Captain Pierre-Jean Standelet struck his flag and ordered his men to abandon the frigate. Miller sent a boat under Lieutenant William Hoste to take possession of the empty vessel, but Standelet had set fire to his ship as he left and Artémise blew up shortly afterwards. The surviving French ships of the line, covering their retreat with gunfire, gradually pulled to the east away from the shore at 06:00. Zealous pursued, and was able to prevent the frigate Justice from boarding Bellerophon, which was anchored at the southern point of the bay undergoing hasty repairs.
Two other French ships still flew the tricolour, but neither was in a position to either retreat or fight. When Heureux and Mercure had cut their anchor cables to escape the exploding Orient, their crews had panicked and neither captain (both of whom were wounded) had managed to regain control of his ship. As a result, both vessels had drifted onto the shoal. Alexander, Goliath, Theseus and Leander attacked the stranded and defenceless ships, and both surrendered within minutes. The distractions provided by Heureux, Mercure and Justice allowed Villeneuve to bring most of the surviving French ships to the mouth of the bay at 11:00. On the dismasted Tonnant, Commodore Du Petit Thouars was now dead from his wounds and thrown overboard at his own request. As the ship was unable to make the required speed it was driven ashore by its crew. Timoléon was too far south to escape with Villeneuve and, in attempting to join the survivors, had also grounded on the shoal. The force of the impact dislodged the ship's foremast. The remaining French vessels: the ships of the line Guillaume Tell and Généreux and the frigates Justice and Diane, formed up and stood out to sea, pursued by Zealous. Despite strenuous efforts, Captain Hood's isolated ship came under heavy fire and was unable to cut off the trailing Justice as the French survivors escaped seawards. Zealous was struck by a number of French shot and lost one man killed.
For the remainder of 2 August Nelson's ships made improvised repairs and boarded and consolidated their prizes. Culloden especially required assistance. Troubridge, having finally dragged his ship off the shoal at 02:00, found that he had lost his rudder and was taking on more than 120 long tons (122 t) of water an hour. Emergency repairs to the hull and fashioning a replacement rudder from a spare topmast took most of the next two days. On the morning of 3 August, Nelson sent Theseus and Leander to force the surrender of the grounded Tonnant and Timoléon. The Tonnant, its decks crowded with 1,600 survivors from other French vessels, surrendered as the British ships approached while Timoléon was set on fire by its remaining crew who then escaped to the shore in small boats. Timoléon exploded shortly after midday, the eleventh and final French ship of the line destroyed or captured during the battle.
## Aftermath
> "[I] went on deck to view the state of the fleets, and an awful sight it was. The whole bay was covered with dead bodies, mangled, wounded and scorched, not a bit of clothes on them except their trousers."
British casualties in the battle were recorded with some accuracy in the immediate aftermath as 218 killed and approximately 677 wounded, although the number of wounded who subsequently died is not known. The ships that suffered most were Bellerophon with 201 casualties and Majestic with 193. Other than Culloden the lightest loss was on Zealous, which had one man killed and seven wounded.
The casualty list included Captain Westcott, five lieutenants and ten junior officers among the dead, and Admiral Nelson, Captains Saumarez, Ball and Darby, and six lieutenants wounded. Other than Culloden, the only British ships seriously damaged in their hulls were Bellerophon, Majestic, and Vanguard. Bellerophon and Majestic were the only ships to lose masts: Majestic the main and mizzen and Bellerophon all three.
French casualties are harder to calculate but were significantly higher. Estimates of French losses range from 2,000 to 5,000, with a suggested median point of 3,500, which includes more than 1,000 captured wounded and nearly 2,000 killed, half of whom died on Orient. In addition to Admiral Brueys killed and Admiral Blanquet wounded, four captains died and seven others were seriously wounded. The French ships suffered severe damage: Two ships of the line and two frigates were destroyed (as well as a bomb vessel scuttled by its crew), and three other captured ships were too battered ever to sail again. Of the remaining prizes, only three were ever sufficiently repaired for frontline service. For weeks after the battle, bodies washed up along the Egyptian coast, decaying slowly in the intense, dry heat.
Nelson, who on surveying the bay on the morning of 2 August said, "Victory is not a name strong enough for such a scene", remained at anchor in Aboukir Bay for the next two weeks, preoccupied with recovering from his wound, writing dispatches, and assessing the military situation in Egypt using documents captured on board one of the prizes. Nelson's head wound was recorded as being "three inches long" with "the cranium exposed for one inch". He suffered pain from the injury for the rest of his life and was badly scarred, styling his hair to disguise it as much as possible. As their commander recovered, his men stripped the wrecks of useful supplies and made repairs to their ships and prizes.
Throughout the week, Aboukir Bay was surrounded by bonfires lit by Bedouin tribesmen in celebration of the British victory. On 5 August, Leander was despatched to Cadiz with messages for Earl St. Vincent carried by Captain Edward Berry. Over the next few days the British landed all but 200 of the captured prisoners on shore under strict terms of parole, although Bonaparte later ordered them to be formed into an infantry unit and added to his army. The wounded officers taken prisoner were held on board Vanguard, where Nelson regularly entertained them at dinner. Historian Joseph Allen recounts that on one occasion Nelson, whose eyesight was still suffering following his wound, offered toothpicks to an officer who had lost his teeth and then passed a snuff-box to an officer whose nose had been torn off, causing much embarrassment. On 8 August the fleet's boats stormed Aboukir Island, which surrendered without a fight. The landing party removed four of the guns and destroyed the rest along with the fort they were mounted in, renaming the island "Nelson's Island".
On 10 August, Nelson sent Lieutenant Thomas Duval from Zealous with messages to the government in India. Duval travelled across the Middle East overland via camel train to Aleppo and took the East India Company ship Fly from Basra to Bombay, acquainting Governor-General of India Viscount Wellesley with the situation in Egypt. On 12 August the frigates HMS Emerald under Captain Thomas Moutray Waller and HMS Alcmene under Captain George Johnstone Hope, and the sloop HMS Bonne Citoyenne under Captain Robert Retalick, arrived off Alexandria. Initially the British mistook the frigate squadron for French warships and Swiftsure chased them away. They returned the following day once the error had been realised. The same day as the frigates arrived, Nelson sent Mutine to Britain with dispatches, under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Bladen Capel, who had replaced Hardy after the latter's promotion to captain of Vanguard. On 14 August, Nelson sent Orion, Majestic, Bellerophon, Minotaur, Defence, Audacious, Theseus, Franklin, Tonnant, Aquilon, Conquérant, Peuple Souverain, and Spartiate to sea under the command of Saumarez. Many ships had only jury masts and it took a full day for the convoy to reach the mouth of the bay, finally sailing into open water on 15 August. On 16 August the British burned and destroyed the grounded prize Heureux as no longer fit for service and on 18 August also burned Guerrier and Mercure. On 19 August, Nelson sailed for Naples with Vanguard, Culloden, and Alexander, leaving Hood in command of Zealous, Goliath, Swiftsure, and the recently joined frigates to watch over French activities at Alexandria.
The first message to reach Bonaparte regarding the disaster that had overtaken his fleet arrived on 14 August at his camp on the road between Salahieh and Cairo. The messenger was a staff officer sent by the Governor of Alexandria General Jean Baptiste Kléber, and the report had been hastily written by Admiral Ganteaume, who had subsequently rejoined Villeneuve's ships at sea. One account reports that when he was handed the message, Bonaparte read it without emotion before calling the messenger to him and demanding further details. When the messenger had finished, the French general reportedly announced "Nous n'avons plus de flotte: eh bien. Il faut rester en ces contrées, ou en sortir grands comme les anciens" ("We no longer have a fleet: well, we must either remain in this country or quit it as great as the ancients"). Another story, as told by the general's secretary, Bourienne, claims that Bonaparte was almost overcome by the news and exclaimed "Unfortunate Brueys, what have you done!" Bonaparte later placed much of the blame for the defeat on the wounded Admiral Blanquet, falsely accusing him of surrendering Franklin while his ship was undamaged. Protestations from Ganteaume and Minister Étienne Eustache Bruix later reduced the degree of criticism Blanquet faced, but he never again served in a command capacity. Bonaparte's most immediate concern however was with his own officers, who began to question the wisdom of the entire expedition. Inviting his most senior officers to dinner, Bonaparte asked them how they were. When they replied that they were "marvellous," Bonaparte responded that it was just as well, since he would have them shot if they continued "fostering mutinies and preaching revolt." To quell any uprising among the native inhabitants, Egyptians overheard discussing the battle were threatened with having their tongues cut out.
### Reaction
Nelson's first set of dispatches were captured when Leander was intercepted and defeated by Généreux in a fierce engagement off the western shore of Crete on 18 August 1798. As a result, reports of the battle did not reach Britain until Capel arrived in Mutine on 2 October, entering the Admiralty at 11:15 and personally delivering the news to Lord Spencer, who collapsed unconscious when he heard the report. Although Nelson had previously been castigated in the press for failing to intercept the French fleet, rumours of the battle had begun to arrive in Britain from the continent in late September and the news Capel brought was greeted with celebrations right across the country. Within four days Nelson had been elevated to Baron Nelson of the Nile and Burnham Thorpe, a title with which he was privately dissatisfied, believing his actions deserved better reward. King George III addressed the Houses of Parliament on 20 November with the words:
> The unexampled series of our naval triumphs has received fresh splendour from the memorable and decisive action, in which a detachment of my fleet, under the command of Rear-Admiral Lord Nelson, attacked, and almost totally destroyed a superior force of the enemy, strengthened by every advantage of situation. By this great and brilliant victory, an enterprise, of which the injustice, perfidy, and extravagance had fixed the attention of the world, and which was peculiarly directed against some of the most valuable interests of the British empire, has, in the first instance, been turned to the confusion of its authors and the blow thus given to the power and influence of France, has afforded an opening, which, if improved by suitable exertions on the part of other powers, may lead to the general deliverance of Europe.
Saumarez's convoy of prizes stopped first at Malta, where Saumarez provided assistance to a rebellion on the island among the Maltese population. It then sailed to Gibraltar, arriving on 18 October to the cheers of the garrison. Saumarez wrote that, "We can never do justice to the warmth of their applause, and the praises they all bestowed on our squadron." On 23 October, following the transfer of the wounded to the military hospital and provision of basic supplies, the convoy sailed on towards Lisbon, leaving Bellerophon and Majestic behind for more extensive repairs. Peuple Souverain also remained at Gibraltar: The ship was deemed too badly damaged for the Atlantic voyage to Britain and so was converted to a guardship under the name of HMS Guerrier. The remaining prizes underwent basic repairs and then sailed for Britain, spending some months at the Tagus and joining with the annual merchant convoy from Portugal in June 1799 under the escort of a squadron commanded by Admiral Sir Alan Gardner, before eventually arriving at Plymouth. Their age and battered state meant that neither Conquérant nor Aquilon were considered fit for active service in the Royal Navy and both were subsequently hulked, although they had been bought into the service for £20,000 (the equivalent of £ million as of ) each as HMS Conquerant and HMS Aboukir to provide a financial reward to the crews that had captured them. Similar sums were also paid out for Guerrier, Mercure, Heureux and Peuple Souverain, while the other captured ships were worth considerably more. Constructed of Adriatic oak, Tonnant had been built in 1792 and Franklin and Spartiate were less than a year old. Tonnant and Spartiate, both of which later fought at the Battle of Trafalgar, joined the Royal Navy under their old names while Franklin, considered to be "the finest two-decked ship in the world", was renamed HMS Canopus. The total value of the prizes captured at the Nile and subsequently bought into the Royal Navy was estimated at just over £130,000 (the equivalent of £ million as of ).
Additional awards were presented to the British fleet: Nelson was awarded £2,000 (£ as of ) a year for life by the Parliament of Great Britain and £1,000 per annum by the Parliament of Ireland, although the latter was inadvertently discontinued after the Act of Union dissolved the Irish Parliament. Both parliaments gave unanimous votes of thanks, each captain who served in the battle was presented with a specially minted gold medal and the first lieutenant of every ship engaged in the battle was promoted to commander. Troubridge and his men, initially excluded, received equal shares in the awards after Nelson personally interceded for the crew of the stranded Culloden, even though they did not directly participate in the engagement. The Honourable East India Company presented Nelson with £10,000 (£ as of ) in recognition of the benefit his action had on their holdings and the cities of London, Liverpool and other municipal and corporate bodies made similar awards. Nelson's own captains presented him with a sword and a portrait as "proof of their esteem." Nelson publicly encouraged this close bond with his officers and on 29 September 1798 described them as "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers", echoing William Shakespeare's play Henry V. From this grew the notion of the Nelsonic Band of Brothers, a cadre of high-quality naval officers that served with Nelson for the remainder of his life. Nearly five decades later the battle was among the actions recognised by a clasp attached to the Naval General Service Medal, awarded upon application to all British participants still living in 1847.
Other rewards were bestowed by foreign states, particularly the Ottoman Emperor Selim III, who made Nelson the first Knight Commander of the newly created Order of the Crescent, and presented him with a chelengk, a diamond studded rose, a sable fur and numerous other valuable presents. Tsar Paul I of Russia sent, among other rewards, a gold box studded with diamonds, and similar gifts in silver arrived from other European rulers. On his return to Naples, Nelson was greeted with a triumphal procession led by King Ferdinand IV and Sir William Hamilton and was introduced for only the third time to Sir William's wife Emma, Lady Hamilton, who fainted violently at the meeting, and apparently took several weeks to recover from her injuries. Lauded as a hero by the Neapolitan court, Nelson was later to dabble in Neapolitan politics and become the Duke of Bronté, actions for which he was criticised by his superiors and his reputation suffered. British general John Moore, who met Nelson in Naples at this time, described him as "covered with stars, medals and ribbons, more like a Prince of Opera than the Conqueror of the Nile."
Rumours of a battle first appeared in the French press as early as 7 August, although credible reports did not arrive until 26 August, and even these claimed that Nelson was dead and Bonaparte a British prisoner. When the news became certain, the French press insisted that the defeat was the result both of an overwhelmingly large British force and unspecified "traitors." Among the anti-government journals in France, the defeat was blamed on the incompetence of the French Directory and on supposed lingering Royalist sentiments in the Navy. Villeneuve came under scathing attack on his return to France for his failure to support Brueys during the battle. In his defence, he pleaded that the wind had been against him and that Brueys had not issued orders for him to counterattack the British fleet. Writing many years later, Bonaparte commented that if the French Navy had adopted the same tactical principles as the British:
> Admiral Villeneuve would not have thought himself blameless at Aboukir, for remaining inactive with five or six ships, that is to say, with half the squadron, for twenty four hours, whilst the enemy was overpowering the other wing.
By contrast, the British press were jubilant; many newspapers sought to portray the battle as a victory for Britain over anarchy, and the success was used to attack the supposedly pro-republican Whig politicians Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
In the United States, the outcome of the battle led President John Adams to pursue diplomacy with France to end the Quasi-War, as the French naval defeat rendered the prospect of an invasion of the United States less likely.
There has been extensive historiographical debate over the comparative strengths of the fleets, although they were ostensibly evenly matched in size, each containing 13 ships of the line. However, the loss of Culloden, the relative sizes of Orient and Leander and the participation in the action by two of the French frigates and several smaller vessels, as well as the theoretical strength of the French position, leads most historians to the conclusion that the French were marginally more powerful. This is accentuated by the weight of broadside of several of the French ships: Spartiate, Franklin, Orient, Tonnant and Guillaume Tell were each significantly larger than any individual British ship in the battle. However inadequate deployment, reduced crews, and the failure of the rear division under Villeneuve to meaningfully participate, all contributed to the French defeat.
### Effects
The Battle of the Nile has been called "arguably, the most decisive naval engagement of the great age of sail", and "the most splendid and glorious success which the British Navy gained." Historian and novelist C. S. Forester, writing in 1929, compared the Nile to the great naval actions in history and concluded that "it still only stands rivalled by Tsu-Shima as an example of the annihilation of one fleet by another of approximately equal material force". The effect on the strategic situation in the Mediterranean was immediate, reversing the balance of the conflict and giving the British control at sea that they maintained for the remainder of the war. The destruction of the French Mediterranean fleet allowed the Royal Navy to return to the sea in force, as British squadrons set up blockades off French and allied ports. In particular, British ships cut Malta off from France, aided by the rebellion among the native Maltese population that forced the French garrison to retreat to Valletta and shut the gates. The ensuing siege of Malta lasted for two years before the defenders were finally starved into surrender. In 1799, British ships harassed Bonaparte's army as it marched east and north through Palestine, and played a crucial part in Bonaparte's defeat at the siege of Acre, when the barges carrying the siege train were captured and the French storming parties were bombarded by British ships anchored offshore. It was during one of these latter engagements that Captain Miller of Theseus was killed in an ammunition explosion. The defeat at Acre forced Bonaparte to retreat to Egypt and effectively ended his efforts to carve an empire in the Middle East. The French general returned to France without his army late in the year, leaving Kléber in command of Egypt.
The Ottoman Empire, with whom Bonaparte had hoped to conduct an alliance once his control of Egypt was complete, was encouraged by the Battle of the Nile to go to war against France. This led to a series of campaigns that slowly sapped the strength from the French army trapped in Egypt. The British victory also encouraged the Austrian Empire and the Russian Empire, both of whom were mustering armies as part of a Second Coalition, which declared war on France in 1799. With the Mediterranean undefended, an Imperial Russian Navy fleet entered the Ionian Sea, while Austrian armies recaptured much of the Italian territory lost to Bonaparte in the previous war. Without their best general and his veterans, the French suffered a series of defeats and it was not until Bonaparte returned to become First Consul that France once again held a position of strength on Continental Europe. In 1801 a British Expeditionary Force defeated the demoralised remains of the French army in Egypt. The Royal Navy used its dominance in the Mediterranean to invade Egypt without the fear of ambush while anchored off the Egyptian coast.
In spite of the overwhelming British victory in the climactic battle, the campaign has sometimes been considered a strategic success for France. Historian Edward Ingram noted that if Nelson had successfully intercepted Bonaparte at sea as ordered, the ensuing battle could have annihilated both the French fleet and the transports. As it was, Bonaparte was free to continue the war in the Middle East and later to return to Europe personally unscathed. The potential of a successful engagement at sea to change the course of history is underscored by the list of French army officers carried aboard the convoy who later formed the core of the generals and marshals under Emperor Napoleon. In addition to Bonaparte himself, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Auguste de Marmont, Jean Lannes, Joachim Murat, Louis Desaix, Jean Reynier, Antoine-François Andréossy, Jean-Andoche Junot, Louis-Nicolas Davout and Dumas were all passengers on the cramped Mediterranean crossing.
### Legacy
The Battle of the Nile remains one of the Royal Navy's most famous victories, and has remained prominent in the British popular imagination, sustained by its depiction in a large number of cartoons, paintings, poems, and plays. One of the best known poems about the battle is Casabianca, which was written by Felicia Dorothea Hemans in 1826 and describes a fictional account of the death of Captain Casabianca's son on Orient.
Monuments were raised, including Cleopatra's Needle in London. Muhammad Ali of Egypt gave the monument in 1819 in recognition of the battle of 1798 and the campaign of 1801 but Great Britain did not erect it on the Victoria Embankment until 1878. Another memorial, the Nile Clumps near Amesbury, consists of stands of beech trees purportedly planted by Lord Queensbury at the behest of Lady Hamilton and Thomas Hardy after Nelson's death. The trees form a plan of the battle; each clump represents the position of a British or French ship.
On the Hall Place estate, Burchetts Green, Berkshire (now Berkshire College of Agriculture), a double line of oak trees, each tree representing a ship of the opposing fleets, was planted by William East, Baronet, in celebration of the victory. He also constructed a scale-sized pyramid and a life-sized statue of Nelson on the highest point of the estate.
The composer Joseph Haydn had just completed the Missa in Angustiis (mass for troubled times) after Napoleon Bonaparte had defeated the Austrian army in four major battles. The well received news of France's defeat at the Nile however resulted in the mass gradually acquiring the nickname Lord Nelson Mass. The title became indelible when, in 1800, Nelson himself visited the Palais Esterházy, accompanied by his mistress, Lady Hamilton, and may have heard the mass performed.
The Royal Navy commemorated the battle with the ship names HMS Aboukir and HMS Nile, and in 1998 commemorated the 200th anniversary of the battle with a visit to Aboukir Bay by the modern frigate HMS Somerset, whose crew laid wreaths in memory of those who lost their lives in the battle.
Archaeology
Although Nelson biographer Ernle Bradford assumed in 1977 that the remains of Orient "are almost certainly unrecoverable," the first archaeological investigation into the battle began in 1983, when a French survey team under Jacques Dumas discovered the wreck of the French flagship. Franck Goddio later took over the work, leading a major project to explore the bay in 1998. He found that material was scattered over an area 500 metres (550 yd) in diameter. In addition to military and nautical equipment, Goddio recovered a large number of gold and silver coins from countries across the Mediterranean, some from the 17th century. It is likely that these were part of the treasure taken from Malta that was lost in the explosion aboard Orient. In 2000, Italian archaeologist Paolo Gallo led an excavation focusing on ancient ruins on Nelson's Island. It uncovered a number of graves that date from the battle, as well as others buried there during the 1801 invasion. These graves, which included a woman and three children, were relocated in 2005 to a cemetery at Shatby in Alexandria. The reburial was attended by sailors from the modern frigate HMS Chatham and a band from the Egyptian Navy, as well as a descendant of the only identified burial, Commander James Russell. |
52,508,440 | Mother's Day (Rugrats) | 1,170,362,951 | null | [
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| "Mother's Day", also known as the "Rugrats Mother's Day Special" or "Rugrats Mother's Day", is the second episode of the fourth season of the American animated television series Rugrats and the show's 67th episode overall. It revolves around the holiday from the perspective of a group of babies—Tommy Pickles, Chuckie Finster, and Phil and Lil Deville. Tommy, Phil, and Lil attempt to find the perfect mother for Chuckie (who is raised only by his father Chas) while sharing their favorite memories about their moms. At the end of the episode, Chuckie's mother is revealed to have died of a terminal illness. It concludes with Chuckie and Chas looking through a box of her belongings, including a poem she had written for her son. Meanwhile, Didi Pickles tries to plan the perfect Mother's Day with her mom Minka, while Betty DeVille helps Stu Pickles with his invention to help mothers.
Norton Virgien and Toni Vian directed the episode from a script by Jon Cooksey, Ali Marie Matheson, J. David Stem, David N. Weiss, Susan Hood, and Ed Resto. Series co-creator Paul Germain had pitched two potential storylines to explain the absence of Chuckie's mother, but Nickelodeon executives rejected his proposed ideas that the mother was either divorced from Chas or had died. Before "Mother's Day" premiered, only minor references to Chuckie's mother had been made. Germain left the show in 1993, and several new writers replaced him. The concept was later revised and approved as a Mother's Day special. Germain said that he was disappointed at being unable to cover the topic during his time on the series.
Broadcast on Nickelodeon in the United States on May 6, 1997, "Mother's Day" was one of several half-hour specials that Nickelodeon commissioned for Rugrats. The episode was featured on the 1998 VHS release Rugrats: Mommy Mania, and was later made available for digital download along with the rest of the fourth season. "Mother's Day" was praised by critics and has been the subject of several retrospective reviews for its treatment of the death of a parent. It was also praised for its positive representation of breastfeeding and expansion on the definition of motherhood. It won the CableACE Award for Writing a Children's Special or Series, and was nominated for the Humanitas Prize for the Children's Animation Category. The series received a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for the 49th Primetime Emmy Awards after Nickelodeon submitted "Mother's Day" for consideration.
## Plot
On Mother's Day, toddler Angelica Pickles constructs a macaroni sculpture of her head as a present to her mother, telling the Rugrats the meaning of the holiday. After dropping off his son Chuckie, Chas Finster gives his friend Didi Pickles a box of his wife's belongings as he fears that Chuckie will find it. Chas does not feel he is ready to talk to Chuckie about his mother. While helping the other babies, Phil and Lil DeVille and Tommy Pickles look for the perfect gifts for their mothers, Chuckie feels uncertain about how he should celebrate Mother's Day. Tommy, Phil, and Lil share their favorite memories of their mothers with Chuckie. Phil and Lil remembered they had their first laugh while being breastfed by their mother, who said it was the best gift they gave her. Tommy reminisces about his mom comforting him while he was in a neonatal intensive care unit. The babies think of a plan to find Chuckie a new mother. Their attempts to have Tommy's dog Spike and Lil act as his mom are unsuccessful. Angelica agrees to act as Chuckie's mother only if he completes her macaroni sculpture. Meanwhile, Didi takes her mom Minka to a spa, and Betty DeVille helps Stu Pickles with his invention to help mothers.
Angelica tasks Chuckie to pick a dandelion to decorate her sculpture. He is unable to obtain it after being chased by a bee and Stu's malfunctioning Mother's Day invention, which is a vacuum-like machine that destroys a majority of the lawn. After Chuckie breaks her macaroni head, Angelica orders him to stay in the closet along with Tommy, Phil, and Lil. While the babies console Chuckie, he realizes that his dad meets all the requirements of a good mother. They open Chas' box, finding a spade, a journal of pressed flowers, and a photograph of Chuckie's mother. Meanwhile, Stu's invention continues to vacuum up mud before finally exploding inside the house. Didi is disappointed that Minka did not like the spa, but Minka says she only wanted to spend time with her daughter for Mother's Day. Chuckie gives Chas the picture of his mother as a Mother's Day present. Chas decides to talk to Chuckie about his mother, telling him that his mother died of a terminal illness shortly after his birth. He explains that she wrote the diary while she was in the hospital, and reads a poem aloud that she wrote for Chuckie. The mother narrates the poem during a flashback to when she played with Chuckie in the backyard. As they play in the backyard, the episode ends with Chuckie telling his friends that his mother is all around in him in nature.
## Production
The 23-minute and 46-second episode was written by Jon Cooksey, Ali Marie Matheson, J. David Stem, David N. Weiss, Susan Hood, and Ed Resto. Directed by Norton Virgien and Toni Vian, it was produced by the animation studio Klasky Csupo Productions, a part of Nickelodeon Animation Studio. Cella Nichols Duffy, Gabor Csupo, Arlene Klasky, Paul De Meyer, Stem, and Weiss also produced the episode. Mark Mothersbaugh and Ruby Andrews contributed to the music. In 2016, co-creator Paul Germain revealed that the concept for the episode, and the discussion about the status of Chuckie's mother, was previously pitched to Nickelodeon executives. She was not included in the first season to avoid the need to animate a completely new character. During the production of the show's second and third seasons, Germain noticed that questions about the character's absence became more prominent. He consulted with fellow co-creator Arlene Klasky, and they concluded that the only two possible ways to address the character were that she was divorced from Chas, or had died before the series' debut.
Germain and Klasky initially planned to portray the character as divorced, but Nickelodeon executives rejected the idea, feeling that the subject would be inappropriate for younger viewers. The studio also vetoed an idea to reveal that the mother was dead, contending that it would be "scary" and that "children [would not] want to see that." Germain stated this prevented them from saying much about the character in earlier seasons, adding: "We mention that she exists but we don't tell you what happened to her. We even made a joke out of it in one episode. But we weren't allowed to go into the subject." Even when the show did portray Chuckie's mother as having died from a terminal illness, the word "dead" was never used by any of the characters. The character had been briefly mentioned before in the episodes "Real or Robots?" (1991), "Chuckie vs. the Potty" (1992), and "My Friend Barney" (1993).
Germain left the series in 1993, and several new writers replaced him. At that time, Nickelodeon permitted the writers and animators to include a storyline about the death of Chuckie's mother. The development of the Rugrats Mother's Day television special was announced on December 7, 1996. Kim Cattrall provided the voice for Chuckie's mother, Melinda Finster. Germain described the episode as "this whole very maudlin thing," and said that he was disappointed over his inability to cover the topic. He explained: "I just sat there thinking, 'We weren't allowed to do this, and now you guys are doing it.' That's something I regret." Mary Harrington, a supervising producer of animation for Nickelodeon, described it as one of her favorite episodes of Rugrats, and commended the writers and producers for their handling of the subject.
## Broadcast history and release
"Mother's Day", also promoted as "Rugrats Mother's Day Special", was originally broadcast in the United States at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time on May 6, 1997 on Nickelodeon. The Los Angeles Times' Lee Margulies recommended the special as appropriate for children between the ages of four and eight. The episode was one of several half-hour specials created for Rugrats, with others including "The Santa Experience" (1992), "A Rugrats Passover" (1993/1995) and "A Rugrats Chanukah" (1996). According to writer Jeff Lenburg, the show's specials, including "Mother's Day", earned high ratings.
"Mother's Day" was featured on the VHS release Rugrats: Mommy Mania, which came out on January 4, 1998. It was included on the 2011 DVD package of the show's fourth season, with the press release listing it as one of the "special episodes". A writer from DVD Talk argued that the episode should also have been featured on the 2004 DVD release Rugrats Holiday Celebration given the lack of content on the collection's second disc. The releases were distributed by Viacom. On February 6, 2018, "Mother's Day" was released on the Rugrats: Season 4 DVD by Paramount Home Media Distribution. The episode was later made purchasable as a digital download on the iTunes Store and Amazon Video, along with the rest of the fourth season. It is also available on streaming video on demand services, such as Paramount+.
## Critical response
In 1998, Eric Schmuckler of The New York Times pointed to the "Mother's Day" special as an example of the show's balance between featuring an "always sunny and usually silly" tone while also being "poignant". Schmuckler described Chas' interactions with Chuckie as "an age-appropriate version of the loss of his mother". Rugrats was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program for the 49th Primetime Emmy Awards, after Nickelodeon submitted the special for consideration, but lost to The Simpsons. The episode was also nominated for the Humanitas Prize for the Children's Animation Category in 1998, which went to the Life with Louie episode "Blinded by Love". Jon Cooksey, Ali Marie Matheson, J. David Stem, and David N. Weiss received the CableACE Award for Writing a Children's Special or Series for their contributions to the episode.
"Mother's Day" has been the subject of several retrospective reviews of the series. Philip Lewis of Arts. Mic praised the episode as an example of Nickelodeon's potential to cover a serious subject, noting its treatment of "the loss of a parent" as one of the series' most memorable moments. Moviepilot's Kristy Anderson wrote that the development of Chuckie's backstory was a surprise as "few would have expected to be confronted by the topic of death while watching a cartoon about babies". In their book Flickipedia: Perfect Films for Every Occasion, Holiday, Mood, Ordeal, and Whim, authors Michael Atkinson and Laurel Shifrin echoed Anderson's sentiment, commenting that the episode could "hit you like a truck if you let it".
"Mother's Day" has been cited in several lists of commentators' favorite episodes or moments from Rugrats. Anderson placed it on her list of must-watch episodes from the show's third, fourth, and fifth seasons, suggesting that "you will need tissues". The poem written and narrated by Chuckie's mother was praised by Moviepilot's Daniel Pearson, and was included in a list of the top eight most heartfelt moments in animated television by Mara Mullikin of the same publication. Victor Beigelman of A Plus put the episode on his list of seven Mothers' Day-themed television episodes, citing it as a "heavy dose of nostalgia".
Critics have also commented on other aspects of the episode. In 2016, Caroline Bologna from The Huffington Post praised the episode for showing "a joyful depiction of breastfeeding" and for normalizing it to a wider audience. Bologna contrasted the scene with the lack of images of breastfeeding in contemporary children's television, writing that the show had a "positive legacy" and proved that "this topic was deemed perfectly suitable for a children's show 20 years ago". Priscilla Blossom of the motherhood website Romper.com also praised the scene as addressing reproductive health, along with the portrayal of Tommy's premature birth and time in a neonatal intensive care unit. In their 2013 essay "What Is a Mother? Gay and Lesbian Perspectives on Parenting", scholars Jack Drescher, Deborah F. Glazer, Lee Crespi, and David Schwartz analyzed "Mother's Day" as an extension of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's theories on early childhood. They highlighted Chuckie's realization that his father acts like a mother as "a moment of postmodern insight" that expands the definition of motherhood. |
66,408,487 | Battle of Saint-Malo | 1,166,116,241 | World War II battle | [
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| The Battle of Saint-Malo was fought between Allied and German forces to control the French coastal town of Saint-Malo during World War II. The battle formed part of the Allied breakout across France and took place between 4 August and 2 September 1944. United States Army units, with the support of Free French and British forces, successfully assaulted the town and defeated its German defenders. The German garrison on a nearby island continued to resist until 2 September.
Saint-Malo was one of the French towns designated as a fortress under the German Atlantic Wall program, and its prewar defenses were expanded considerably before the Allied landings in Normandy during June 1944. As part of their invasion plans, the Allies intended to capture the town so that its port could be used to land supplies. While there was some debate over the necessity of this in August as the Allied forces broke out of Normandy and entered Brittany, it was decided to capture rather than contain Saint-Malo to secure its port and eliminate the German garrison.
After initial attempts to capture the locality failed, the US Army began a siege operation. Infantry units attacked and defeated large numbers of fortified German positions with the support of artillery and aircraft. A fortification on the edge of Saint-Malo was the final German position on the mainland to hold out, and surrendered on 17 August. After extensive air and naval bombardments, the garrison on the nearby island of Cézembre surrendered on 2 September. German demolitions made it impractical to use Saint-Malo as a port. The town was also heavily damaged during the battle and was rebuilt after the war.
## Background
Saint-Malo is a historic port town on the northern coast of Brittany, which, due to its strategic location, was extensively fortified over the centuries. It had a population of 13,000 in 1936, of whom 6,000 lived within the city walls. Saint-Malo's harbor facilities could accommodate medium-sized ships and unload one thousand tons of cargo per day. Before World War II, the town was a popular holiday destination for wealthy Parisians and boasted a casino, hotels and spas.
The town is located on the northwest of the Saint-Malo peninsula, on the eastern side of the mouth of the Rance river. Saint-Malo was once an island, but had been joined to the mainland by a causeway and a road by the time of World War II. The suburb of Paramé was to the east of Saint-Malo, and the fishing port of St. Servan-sur-Mer to the south. The town of Dinard is across the Rance from Saint-Malo. The small but heavily fortified island of Cézembre lies at the mouth of the Rance, and is 4,000 yards (3,700 m) off the coast from Saint-Malo.
During the first months of the war, Saint-Malo was one of the ports used to import supplies for the British Expeditionary Force in France. As the Germans neared victory in the Battle of France, Allied forces were also evacuated to Britain from the town during Operation Aerial in June 1940; 21,474 personnel were embarked from Saint-Malo without the loss of any lives or ships. Brittany was a key center for German forces during the occupation of France and its major ports were used as submarine bases. As the Allies prepared to liberate France, the Germans judged that Brittany was a likely location for an Allied invasion. This led to extensive fortifications being built in the region as part of the Atlantic Wall program. In 1943 the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht () designated Saint-Malo and other French ports with prewar fortifications as fortresses. Each fortress was assigned a commander who was required to swear an oath to defend it to the death. The German leader Adolf Hitler expected that these fortresses would hold out for at least 90 days if they were attacked.
Saint-Malo formed part of the Occupied Zone of France, which was directly administered by the German military rather than the Vichy French regime. During the occupation, the town's port was used as a base for coastal forces by the Kriegsmarine (German Navy). It was also a supply base for the large German garrison in the Channel Islands. In August 1942 German military police rounded up local Jews as part of a mass deportation operation. The Atlantic Wall program led to a substantial augmentation of the prewar fortifications at Saint-Malo, this work being undertaken by volunteer and forced laborers controlled by Organization Todt.
The French Resistance had large numbers of members in Brittany and was capable of successfully attacking German forces. The resistance in the region was dominated by the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans who, unlike many other resistance units, were in favor of making attacks before the Allies landed in France. This led to a partisan war that intensified from 1943. The German forces that attempted to suppress the resistance included the Gestapo secret police, army military police formations and security battalions. Many of the latter were manned by captured Soviet personnel who agreed to fight for the Germans; these units gained a reputation for committing war crimes. The German units were under orders to kill any partisans taken prisoner, at the same time the Free French did not accept their opponents' surrender. The Allies began to airdrop supplies to the Free French in Brittany from early 1944, and special forces units were inserted from June that year to strengthen them. There were more than 2,500 resistance members in the Saint-Malo region as of August 1944, most of whom lived in the towns of Saint-Malo, Dinard and Dinan.
## Prelude
### Allied plans
As part of the preparations for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, Saint-Malo was identified by the Allied planners as one of several minor ports on the French Atlantic coast that could be used to land supplies for the Allied ground forces in France. It was intended that these ports would provide a useful supplement for the major ports such as Brest, Cherbourg and Quiberon Bay. At this time, the planners envisioned that the initial invasion phase would be followed by a subsequent phase to secure a lodgment area. The lodgement area was to include all of the coastline between the Seine and the Loire rivers and nearby inland areas, including Normandy and Brittany. It was believed that this region could be secured within three months of the invasion. Facilities constructed within the lodgment area and supplies and troops landed there would be used to support the subsequent liberation of France and invasion of Germany. Accordingly, the Overlord plan specified that securing Brittany would be the main objective of Lieutenant General Omar Bradley's Twelfth United States Army Group after it broke out from Normandy. This task was assigned to the Third Army, which formed part of the army group and was commanded by Lieutenant General George S. Patton. The planners believed that it would be possible to open Saint-Malo to Allied shipping on the 27th day after the Normandy landings if Allied advances following the invasion went as scheduled, and that 900 tones of supplies could initially be unloaded there daily via DUKW amphibious trucks. It was hoped that port capacity could subsequently be increased to 3,000 tons of supplies per day at Saint-Malo, and another 6,000 tons per day at the ports in the region around the town such as Cancale. This would allow the Saint-Malo area to be the main port for the Third Army. However, Saint-Malo's port was also assessed as being easily blocked by German forces.
Following the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944, the Allies and Germans fought a prolonged campaign in the region. The German forces managed to block the Allies from breaking out of the peninsula into other parts of France for almost two months but suffered heavy casualties in the process. During early July the Allied leadership considered the feasibility of launching combined amphibious and airborne landings at Saint-Malo, Quiberon Bay and Brest to seize ports. It was judged that these operations would be very risky, leading to a decision to only attempt them if the stalemate in Normandy became prolonged. British bomber aircraft attacked railway yards and fuel storage tanks at Saint-Malo on 17 July; this raid resulted in French civilian casualties. In late July the American forces in the west of the Normandy region launched the Operation Cobra offensive, which led the German positions to collapse. The town of Avranches, through which the main roads leading from the west coast of Normandy into Brittany ran, was liberated on 30 July and a German counter-attack was defeated the next day. Large numbers of highly mobile American units passed through the town over the next days, and rapidly penetrated the interior of France.
Patton's initial plans for the liberation of Brittany involved first cutting off the Germans in the peninsula by driving a force from Avranches to Quiberon Bay. His armoured units would then rapidly capture the plateau in the peninsula's center, which would isolate the German garrison in a few port towns. These towns were to be attacked as the final stage of the operation. Bradley initially ordered Patton to capture Saint-Malo as part securing Brittany. Patton did not consider the town's capture to be important in its own right, and none of his forces were assigned it as an objective. Bradley did not object, and Patton gained his agreement to bypass the Saint-Malo area if it proved to be well defended. At this time, the Allied intelligence services believed that there were 3,000 Germans at Saint-Malo and Patton thought that the entire peninsula was held by around 10,000 German troops. These estimates were much lower than the actual size of the garrisons. The collapse of the German Army in France as the Allies broke out of Normandy in early August led the Allied leadership to change their plans regarding Brittany. By 2 August General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, believed that the main effort should be encircling the German forces to the southeast of Normandy rather than securing the peninsula. Bradley's views also changed, and by 3 August he preferred that Patton assign only a "minimum of forces" to Brittany, and advance to the east. The VIII Corps under Major General Troy Middleton was given responsibility for Brittany.
The 6th Armored Division led the advance into western Brittany with the goal of rapidly capturing Brest, while the 4th Armored Division pushed south to liberate Rennes and then Quiberon Bay. On 2 August all of the German Army units in Brittany were ordered to withdraw into the fortified ports, including Saint-Malo, by their parent headquarters XXV Corps. The town was attacked by Allied aircraft again on 1 August. The United States Navy also patrolled the Gulf of Saint-Malo, and American destroyers and torpedo boats engaged German coastal craft in the area on several occasions during early August. The resistance in Brittany was directed on 3 August to launch widespread attacks on German forces but avoid major battles. There were approximately 35,000 armed resistance fighters in Brittany at the time, and they rapidly seized most of the region outside of the towns including strategically important roads and bridges. The resistance's control of these areas and transport infrastructure enabled the VIII Corps' rapid advance. Resistance fighters also guided American forces as they moved through Brittany and undertook some garrison duties.
### German defenses
Prior to the Allied landings in Normandy, the German Army's 77th Infantry Division (77. Infanterie-Division) was stationed in the Saint-Malo area. This division had been formed in early 1944 near Caen in Normandy, and had been transferred to Saint-Malo during May. The 77th Infantry Division was dispatched to Normandy soon after D-Day, and suffered heavy casualties in the fighting there. The remnants of the division returned to Saint-Malo in late July, where it was reinforced with two anti-partisan units, Eastern Battalion 602 (Ost-Batallion 602) and Security Battalion 1220 (Sicherungs-Bataillion 1220). It was later sent forward again as part of the ad hoc force that unsuccessfully attempted to stop the American breakout at Avranches.
At the time of the battle, the German force in the Saint-Malo area comprised approximately 12,000 personnel. The garrison included the remnants of the 77th Infantry Division, which had withdrawn into the Saint-Malo area. Other Army units included the 3rd Battalion of the 266th Infantry Division's 897th Grenadier Regiment, Eastern Battalion 602, Eastern Battalion 636 and Security Battalion 1220. Luftwaffe (German air force) units in the area comprised the 15th Flak Regiment and several other air defense units. Kriegsmarine forces included two coastal artillery units, Navy Artillery Regiment 260 (Marine-Artillerie-Abteilung 260) and Army Coast Battalion 1271 (Heeres-Küsten-Bataillon 1271).
The Saint-Malo area was extensively fortified. The old town of Saint-Malo was enclosed by walls that had thick stone ramparts on the seaward side. Its landward entrance was protected by a fortified chateau that had once been the home of Anne of Brittany, the Duchess of Brittany between 1488 and 1514. The Fort de la Cité d'Aleth, which was designated the Citadel (Zitadelle) by the Germans, was located on a rocky promontory between Saint-Malo and St. Servan-sur-Mer. This fort had originally been designed by the great engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban in the eighteenth century. Several other fortresses were located on the approaches to Saint-Malo, including Fort la Varde at the Pointe de la Varde (fr) on the coast, the St. Ideuc strongpoint to the east of Paramé and fortifications on St. Joseph's Hill to the southeast of the town. Artillery in the fortifications on Cézembre provided support. Barbed wire and other obstructions had been placed on the beaches in the area to deter amphibious landings. The Germans had also planned to dig an antitank ditch across the Saint-Malo Peninsula and fill it with water, but this was incomplete. The fortifications in the Saint-Malo area were positioned in such a way that their garrisons were able to support one another. They were also stocked with ammunition, water and food. Further supplies could be brought in by sea from the Channel Islands. While the German High Commander in the West judged that the Saint-Malo fortifications were the most complete of any in their command at the time of the battle, they were not finished. A key deficiency was that they included few artillery guns.
The Saint-Malo garrison was designated Coastal Defense Group Rance (Küstenverteidigungsgruppe Rance), and was divided into three sub-groups. Saint-Malo and nearby towns were defended by Coastal Defense Subgroup Saint-Malo (Küstenverteidigunguntergruppe Saint-Malo, or KVU Saint-Malo), which manned 79 fortified positions. The area around the town of Dol-de-Bretagne to the southeast of Saint-Malo was the responsibility of Coastal Defense Subgroup Dol and included seven fortified positions. Coastal Defense Subgroup Cancale was assigned the section of the peninsular to the northeast of Saint-Malo and 16 fortified positions. The sector on the western side of the Rance, around Dinard, was the responsibility of the remnants of 77th Infantry Division, which was assigned some StuG III assault guns from StuG Brigade 341. Several strong points had been constructed to bolster the area's defenses. These included four fortified positions for artillery.
Cézembre was garrisoned by the 1st Battery of Navy Artillery Regiment 608, armed with several French 194-millimeter (7.6 in) caliber guns, antiaircraft guns and other weapons. The personnel on the island included around 100 men contributed by the Italian Social Republic. The garrison came under the command of the German forces at the Channel Islands.
The fortress commander was Colonel Andreas von Aulock, a veteran of the Battle of Stalingrad and recipient of German's highest military honor, the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Historian Randolph Bradham has described him as an "arrogant Nazi", but the US Army official historian Martin Blumenson and historians Willard Sterne and Nancy Nahra state that he treated French civilians correctly. He was disappointed to command a fortress, and would have preferred to lead mobile forces. Aulock and the other German commanders in the Saint-Malo region willingness to obey their orders to continue the fighting until further resistance was impossible led to the prolonged battle for the region. During the battle Aulock stated that "I was placed in command of this fortress. I did not request it. I will execute the orders I have received and, doing my duty as a soldier, I will fight to the last stone". His headquarters during the battle was in the Citadel.
## Battle
### Task Force A
An ad hoc unit designated Task Force A was the first American unit to enter the Saint-Malo area. This force was established by Patton in late July to rapidly capture the bridges on the Paris–Brest railway line, which ran along the north coast of Brittany, before they were demolished by German forces. It comprised the 15th Cavalry Group, the 159th Engineer Battalion and the headquarters of the 1st Tank Destroyer Brigade and was commanded by Brigadier General Herbert L. Earnest. The task force passed through Avranches on 3 August, and engaged German forces 2 miles (3.2 km) from Dol-de-Bretagne that day. The commander of the Cavalry Group was killed in the initial clash, and Earnest decided to bypass Dol-de-Bretagne to the south after learning from civilians that it was heavily defended. Middleton directed the Task Force to probe Saint-Malo's defenses as it pushed west, to investigate how strongly the town was held. This led to fighting near Miniac, 7 miles (11 km) west of Dol-de-Bretagne. As the Americans advanced towards Saint-Malo, they encountered stronger defenses to the south of Châteauneuf-d'Ille-et-Vilaine. Due to the strength of the German forces, Earnest asked Middleton to urgently dispatch infantry to support his command. The 83rd Infantry Division's 330th Infantry Regiment was entering the area at that time, and reached Dol-de-Bretagne on the afternoon of 3 August. The regiment's commander decided to delay attacking the town until the next day, to allow his men sufficient time to defeat the many German defensive positions.
The 330th Infantry Regiment assaulted Dol-de-Bretagne on the morning of 4 August, and quickly captured the town. Task Force A also continued to advance north towards Châteauneuf-d'Ille-et-Vilaine during the day. This led to heavy fighting during which German coastal artillery and naval vessels in the Saint-Malo area fired on the American troops.
Despite Patton's desire to avoid a siege, Middleton concluded that the German force at Saint-Malo was too strong to be safely bypassed, as it could attack the supply lines supporting the Allied advance into Brittany. As a result, he directed that the 83rd Infantry Division capture the area. Patton partially overruled him, believing that the Germans would only offer a token defense of the town and the 330th Infantry Regiment would suffice to take it. The Army commander preferred that the rest of the 83rd Infantry Division follow the 6th Armored Division to Brest.
Events during the afternoon of 4 August proved that Middleton was correct. While the Germans withdrew north in the morning, further heavy fighting during the afternoon indicated that they were strengthening their positions. Accordingly, Middleton again ordered the entire 83rd Infantry Division to be concentrated in the Saint-Malo area and then make a quick attack on the town in conjunction with Task Force A in the hope that this would crack the German defenses. The remainder of the division arrived at Dol-de-Bretagne on the afternoon of 4 August, and its three regiments were deployed on the eastern side of the Rance. The 83rd Infantry Division had landed at Normandy on 19 June, and taken part in the fighting there during July. It had overcome strong German resistance during Operation Cobra and followed the 6th Armored Division into Brittany. Major General Robert C. Macon had commanded the division since January 1944.
Attacks made by the American forces on 5 August demonstrated that Saint-Malo would not fall quickly. The 331st Infantry Regiment advanced along the coast and penetrated the first line of German defenses near Saint-Benoît-des-Ondes. Châteauneuf-d'Ille-et-Vilaine was also captured, Task Force A taking 655 prisoners. A battalion of the 329th Infantry Regiment crossed the Rance in assault boats as the first stage of an operation intended to rapidly capture Dinard. Due to strong German resistance, this unit had to be withdrawn. As it was clear that further fighting would be prolonged, Middleton directed Task Force A to disengage from the Saint-Malo area during the night of 5/6 August and resume its mission of securing railway bridges. One of the 330th Infantry Regiment's three battalions was detached from 5 August to 25 September to reinforce Task Force A.
### Advance on Saint-Malo
In early August Bradley reached a conclusion that Saint-Malo should be captured, and ordered that this take place. He believed that it would provide a useful port to supply the large American force in Brittany. The Americans still underestimated the size of German forces in Saint-Malo at this time. While French personnel had advised them that there were around 10,000 Germans in the area, American estimates ranged from 3,000 to 6,000. The VIII Corps believed the garrison comprised 5,000 personnel as of 12 August. There were actually more than 12,000 Germans in the Saint-Malo area. Nevertheless, the stubborn resistance demonstrated by the Germans during the early fighting around Saint-Malo convinced Middleton and Macon that it would be difficult to capture the town.
Aulock prepared for a lengthy battle, and rejected a proposal from local civilians to surrender his command to prevent damage to the towns in the region. On 3 August he told community leaders that most civilians would be expelled from Saint-Malo for their own safety. When the leaders asked him to declare the town an open city to avoid fighting, Aulock stated that after he raised this with his superiors, Hitler ordered him to "fight to the last man". He further claimed that as his forces included armed boats that were operating near Saint-Malo, it was not possible to declare the town an open city as these vessels were legitimate targets for the Allies. During the evening of 5 August most of Saint-Malo's population departed the town, and entered areas controlled by the Americans. As part of efforts to consolidate their positions, in the evening of 5 August German forces withdrew from Cancale as well as the town of Dinan on the western bank of the Rance.
American troops attacked towards Saint-Malo during 6 August. Despite artillery and aircraft support, the pace of the advance was slow. By the afternoon the division was in contact with the main German defenses, including barbed wire, mine fields and machine gunners in pillboxes. The advance brought the Americans within range of the guns on Cézembre, which opened fire. One of the first shells to be fired hit Saint-Malo Cathedral's spire and knocked it over. Due to the slow progress, Middleton reinforced the 83rd Infantry Division that day with the 8th Infantry Division's 121st Infantry Regiment, a company of medium tanks and an artillery battalion. He also requested more air support. The 121st Infantry Regiment was given responsibility for capturing Dinard. The number of American troops assigned to the Saint-Malo area eventually reached 20,000. This force included ten battalions of artillery.
Saint-Malo was extensively damaged during 6 and 7 August. On the afternoon of 6 August multiple fires broke out across the town. French civilians believed that these were accidentally started by German troops who were burning codebooks and other documents, and that SS personnel both refused to allow firefighters to put them out and lit further fires. Efforts to fight the fires were also complicated by the town's water supply being cut by the Americans on that day, which was done to induce the garrison to surrender. A Kriegsmarine patrol vessel was scuttled in the harbor during 6 August. On the morning of 7 August the Germans completely destroyed Saint-Malo's harbor with explosives. In response, American artillery began bombarding Saint-Malo. The German demolitions and American bombardments resulted in fires that burned for the next week.
Aulock ordered all French males aged between 17 and 70 who had remained in Saint-Malo after 5 August to be arrested as hostages following an inaccurate report that civilians had attacked his troops. The 382 hostages were held in harsh conditions at Fort National, and denied shelter, food and water. When American mortars bombarded the fort, 18 were killed.
The 83rd Infantry Division continued to advance slowly towards Saint-Malo between 7 and 9 August. The 330th Infantry Regiment found that the German strongpoint at St. Joseph's Hill in the center of the division's sector was impossible to attack with infantry. This position was a quarry that had been converted into a fortification through the addition of tunnels and bunkers. After being bombarded with artillery for two days, the 400 survivors of the German garrison surrendered on 9 August. After this position fell, the division was able to move rapidly towards the town. On the left of the division's sector, the 329th Infantry Regiment captured St. Servan-sur-Mer and reached the Citadel. On the right of the sector, the 331st Infantry Regiment secured Paramé and cut off the garrisons of St. Ideuc and Fort la Varde. By the end of 9 August, the 83rd Infantry Division had captured around 3,500 prisoners but still faced German forces in multiple fortified positions.
### Capture of Dinard
Free French forces surrounded Dinan on 6 August and found that several hundred Germans had remained in the town. The Germans were unwilling to surrender to Free French troops, but indicated that they would do so for Americans. On 7 August the 121st Infantry Regiment crossed the Rance to begin its advance on Dinard, and a party from this unit took the surrender of the Germans at Dinan. As the 121st Regiment advanced north from Dinan it found that all roads in the region were heavily defended. The German positions comprised roadblocks, well camouflaged strongpoints, minefields and pillboxes, all supported by artillery fire. Progress was slow, and it took until the afternoon of 8 August for the regiment's 3rd Battalion to capture the village of Pleurtuit, 4 miles (6.4 km) from Dinard.
Soon after Pleurtuit was captured, German StuG IIIs supported by infantrymen launched an attack that cut the roads to the village and isolated the 3rd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment. Attempts by the regiment's 1st Battalion to breakthrough were unsuccessful. In response to this action, Macon judged that the 121st Infantry Regiment's performance was unimpressive and there was a need to reinforce it. He decided to give priority to capturing Dinard after St. Joseph's Hill was secured to rescue the isolated battalion, eliminate the German artillery in the area and prevent Saint-Malo's garrison from escaping across the Rance. Accordingly, Macon transferred the 331st Infantry Regiment to the Dinard sector and took personal control of operations there.
The two American regiments began their attack on Dinard during 11 August. German resistance remained stubborn, and little progress was made that day. The next day the German commander in the Dinard sector, Colonel Bacherer, rejected a demand from Macon that he surrender and stated that he would fight "for every stone". The 331st Infantry Regiment finally broke through German positions near Pleurtuit on the afternoon of 12 August, and rescued the 3rd Battalion of the 121st Infantry Regiment. During the period it was isolated, the battalion had fought off several German attacks and suffered 31 killed and 106 wounded.
The American troops continued their attacks on 13 August, which involved isolating and destroying individual pillboxes. Both regiments entered Dinard the next day. The Dinard position was liquidated on 15 August, the Americans securing the town and nearby villages. Almost 4,000 Germans, including Bacherer, were captured.
### Siege warfare in Saint-Malo
The remainder of the 83rd Division continued its advance on Saint-Malo during the attacks on the Dinard area. These operations were commanded by the division's assistant commander, Brigadier General Claude Birkett Ferenbaugh, while Macon was focused on Dinard. While it was no longer considered feasible to use Saint-Malo's port, it was believed to be necessary to capture the fortifications in the area to prevent German artillery from attacking Allied shipping using nearby ports. This would also free up the 83rd Infantry Division for other tasks. The Americans also hoped that securing the town would encourage the German garrisons of other isolated ports to surrender. The American photojournalist Lee Miller, who arrived at Saint-Malo on 13 August, described the resultant fighting as "fortress warfare reminiscent of crusader times".
Before the walled town and the Citadel were attacked, it was decided to capture Fort la Varde and St. Ideuc. The garrisons of these fortifications were able to support one another. One of two battalions under the control of the 330th Infantry Regiment began the attack on the St. Ideuc position on 9 August. After three days of artillery bombardments and infantry attacks first on pillboxes and then the position itself, St. Ideuc's 160 surviving defenders surrendered on the afternoon of 12 August. The battalion immediately began attacking Fort la Varde, whose 100 remaining defenders also surrendered on the evening of 13 August.
The other battalion under the 330th Infantry Regiment attacked towards Saint-Malo with the goal of capturing the causeway that linked the town to Paramé. This led to house-to-house fighting, the American infantry advancing with support from tanks, tank destroyers and engineers. The ruins of Saint-Malo's casino were captured on 11 August. The Americans were then faced with the challenge of crossing the exposed 1,000-yard (910 m)-long causeway to assault the well-defended chateau on the landward side of Saint-Malo.
The chateau was bombarded by artillery and air attacks for two days, with little apparent effect on the defenders. A truce was agreed for the afternoon of 13 August to allow around 1,000 French civilians as well as 500 hostages and internees who were being held by the Germans at Fort National to be evacuated. The 330th Infantry Regiment assaulted Saint-Malo on the morning of 14 August. Under the cover of an intensive artillery bombardment and a smokescreen, a battalion charged across the causeway and entered the walled town. The few Germans in the town were quickly captured, but the chateau held out until the afternoon when its defenders surrendered; 150 were captured. On 16 August American infantrymen assaulted Fort National and Grand Bey, which were the last remaining German positions on the mainland of the Saint-Malo area other than the Citadel. Fort National was found to be unoccupied, and the 150 defenders of Grand Bey surrendered after a brief fight.
### The Citadel
The Citadel was a formidable position. It had been constructed by adding interconnected blockhouses to improve the defenses of the Fort de la Cité d'Aleth. The thick walls were almost impervious to air attacks and artillery, and it had large quantities of water, food and other supplies. The garrison was weakly armed with only 18 or 20 machine guns and a few mortars, but these weapons were skillfully positioned to maximise their effectiveness. Macon was aware that it would be difficult to neutralize the Citadel from an early stage in the battle.
American artillery and Allied aircraft began to attack the Citadel during the assault on Saint-Malo. Shortages of ammunition disrupted the artillery bombardments and the air attacks proved ineffective. Attempts by an American psychological warfare unit to persuade the Germans to surrender were unsuccessful, and Aulock also rejected entreaties from a captured German chaplain and a female French civilian with whom he had a close relationship. His refusal to surrender and the hardline orders he issued led to him being nicknamed the 'mad colonel' by the citadel's garrison.
On 11 August, a rifle company from the 329th Infantry Regiment that was reinforced with engineers and three Free French soldiers assaulted the Citadel after it was attacked by medium bombers. Some of the troops reached an interior courtyard in the fortification, but withdrew after finding that the bombardment had not breached the main defenses. Artillery attacks continued over the next few days, and two specially trained 96-man strong assault groups made another assault on 15 August after medium bombers struck the Citadel again. This attack was repelled by machine gun fire.
After the unsuccessful 15 August assault, Macon ordered an intensification of the artillery bombardment. Two 8-inch guns were positioned less than 1,500 yards (1,400 m) from the citadel, so they could target individual portholes and vents. Mortar bombardments also increasingly used white phosphorus incendiary and smoke rounds. An air attack using napalm incendiary bombs was planned for the afternoon 17 August. This was to be one of the first times napalm bombs were used in combat. Shortly before the air strike was scheduled, a white flag appeared over the Citadel and a party of German soldiers emerged from it to inform the Americans that Aulock wished to surrender. The air strike was diverted to attack Cézembre, and Aulock and 400 other Germans were taken prisoner. Aulock gave the destruction caused by the 8-inch guns and a collapse in the garrison's morale as his reasons for surrendering. French civilians shouted abuse at Aulock and his men as they departed. This marked the end of German resistance in the Saint-Malo area, aside from the Cézembre garrison that continued to hold out. By this time the 83rd Infantry Division had captured more than 10,000 prisoners. Its casualties were relatively light. Aulock was held for a period at the Trent Park prisoner of war camp and interrogation center for senior officers in the United Kingdom, where he was briefly reunited with his brother Brigadier General Hubertus von Aulock who had been captured near Brussels in Belgium. The Allies charged Aulock with war crimes for setting fire to part of Saint-Malo. He was acquitted, with the court finding that the fires had been started by American artillery.
All of the 83rd Infantry Division other than two battalions from the 330th Infantry Regiment were withdrawn from Saint-Malo after Aulock's surrender. The main body of the division undertook largely defensive tasks south of Rennes to allow the troops a period of recuperation. The two battalions remaining at Saint-Malo formed a garrison, and sought to prevent the Germans at Cézembre from landing on the mainland. Following the surrender of Saint-Malo the German warships that had been operating in the Gulf of Saint-Malo rarely put to sea.
### Cézembre
Allied bombers attacked the German positions on Cézembre during 6 and 11 August. The VIII Corps artillery began shelling the island from 9 August. Following Aulock's capitulation and the napalm attack, Macon sent a party of personnel to Cézembre on 18 August to request its surrender. The garrison commander, Oberleutnant Richard Seuss, refused to do so on the grounds that he was under orders to continue resistance and still had ammunition. The Americans observed that the German positions appeared to have been badly damaged by the bombardments. Another air raid was conducted against the island on 23 August. German minesweepers and other small vessels transported ammunition from the Channel Islands and evacuated wounded personnel on most nights from 17 August onwards.
No further attacks were made against Cézembre for another week, when it was decided to eliminate the German positions there. This decision may have resulted from intelligence gained from three Italian deserters who fled to Saint-Malo in late August and, after being taken prisoner, described the heavy damage to the island's defenses and shortages of water and ammunition. The 330th Infantry Regiment was directed to begin preparations for an amphibious assault. To transport the troops, 15 US Navy LCVP landing craft were moved by truck from Omaha Beach in Normandy to Saint-Malo. Aerial attacks resumed on 30 August. A large attack involving 300 heavy bombers, including British Avro Lancasters, as well as 24 Lockheed P-38 Lightnings armed with napalm was made the next day. Artillery bombardments also targeted the island's water tanks. To assist the members of the garrison who were wounded in these attacks, the hospital ship Bordeaux and a barge were dispatched from the Channel Islands. Both vessels were captured by Allied naval forces. Seuss refused to surrender again during another truce on 31 August.
A major air and naval attack took place on 1 September. American and British medium bombers attacked the island, followed by 33 napalm-armed Lightnings. A British battleship and American artillery then shelled Cézembre. Another message was transmitted to Seuss requesting that he surrender, but he refused. After an attempt to use small craft to evacuate the garrison on the night of 1/2 September was foiled by bad weather, Seuss received permission to surrender from his superior officer in the Channel Islands. At 7:30 pm the next day, as the 330th Infantry Regiment was preparing to attack, a white flag appeared over the island and Seuss capitulated. The American landing craft evacuated the 323 surviving members of the garrison, who included twelve female Red Cross nurses. Seuss gave the destruction of Cézembre's water distilling plant as his reason for surrendering. Despite the extent of the attacks on the island, the garrison suffered only light casualties.
## Aftermath
The Battle of Saint-Malo had mixed results. While the 83rd Infantry Division performed well, the German garrison also achieved its goals. Historian Russell F. Weigley judged that the battle was "tenaciously and well conducted on both sides". Aulock denied Saint-Malo's port to the Allies and, by detaining the 83rd Division and other VIII Corps units for two weeks, prevented the Americans from being able to take rapid and decisive action against the German positions at Brest and Lorient. The battle also occupied Allied aircraft that were needed to support the advance into northern France.
The VIII Corps assaulted and captured Brest in a battle which lasted from 7 August to 19 September. The Germans also demolished the city's port, and it proved impractical to restore it to service. The rapid liberation of France and the capture of ports on the English Channel reduced the potential value of the remaining German-held cities in Brittany and the French Atlantic coast to the Allies. On 7 September, Eisenhower approved a proposal that these positions be contained rather than attacked. French units and a US Army division besieged them for the remainder of the war. As result, Cherbourg in Normandy and Brest and Saint-Malo in Brittany were the only fortified German-held ports in France to be taken by the US Army. British and Canadian forces also captured Antwerp, Dieppe, Le Havre and Rouen during 1944, and besieged several other fortified ports in northern France until the end of the war.
The US Army's Communications Zone began work on reopening the ports in the Saint-Malo area on 25 August 1944. Cancale was soon judged unsuitable due to unfavorable tidal conditions, and was dropped from the plans. While the logisticians initially believed that there were good prospects for bringing Saint-Malo's port facilities back into service, the extent of the damage frustrated their efforts. After a report that was completed in September revealed that the Canal d'Ille-et-Rance, which links the Rance and Rennes, was in a poor condition it was decided that re-opening Saint-Malo was not worth the effort. On 21 November the town was handed over to French authorities. Neither Saint-Malo or Cancale were ever used to land supplies for the US military. As a result, historian David T. Zabecki has written that while the capture of Saint-Malo was a tactical success for the Americans, "on the operational level ... it contributed very little" to the Allied war effort.
Saint-Malo suffered extensive damage during the battle; 683 of the 865 old town buildings were destroyed. While consideration was given to leaving the town in ruins as a memorial, the architect Marc Brillaud de Laujardière was selected in October 1944 to prepare a reconstruction plan. Work to clear the rubble began at around this time, and took two years to complete. De Laujardière's plan was accepted by the local council in February 1946. The reconstruction program was completed in 1960, and a new spire was installed on the cathedral during 1971. No ruins were preserved in Saint-Malo and most signs of damage on the surviving buildings were obscured. The old town's population has never recovered to pre-war levels, many apartments being used as vacation homes. By the early 1960s Saint-Malo was a popular holiday destination again.
A memorial to the Battle of Saint-Malo called "Memorial 39-45" was established at the Citadel in 1994. Many of the main sites involved in the battle remained extant as of 2018. These include fortifications in and around Saint-Malo. Cézembre remains largely as it was left at the end of the battle, and is one of the best-preserved World War II battlefields. The final chapters of Anthony Doerr's 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See are set during the bombardment of Saint-Malo.
## See also
- Liberation of France
- Atlantic pockets
- German World War II strongholds |
34,533,226 | Emma Louisa Turner | 1,170,022,368 | English ornithologist and photographer (1867–1940) | [
"1867 births",
"1940 deaths",
"British ornithologists",
"English blind people",
"English women photographers",
"Fellows of the Linnean Society of London",
"Fellows of the Zoological Society of London",
"Nature photographers",
"People from Cambridge",
"People from Girton, Cambridgeshire",
"People from Hickling, Norfolk",
"People from Langton Green",
"Photographers from Norfolk",
"Women ornithologists"
]
| Emma Louisa Turner or E L Turner (9 June 1867 – 13 August 1940) was an English ornithologist and pioneering bird photographer. Turner took up photography at age 34, after meeting the wildlife photographer Richard Kearton. She joined the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) in 1901, and by 1904 she had started to give talks illustrated with her own photographic slides; by 1908, when aged 41, she was established as a professional lecturer.
Turner spent part of each year in Norfolk, and her 1911 image of a nestling bittern in Norfolk was the first evidence of the species' return to the United Kingdom as a breeding bird after its local extinction in the late 19th century. She also travelled widely in the United Kingdom and abroad photographing birds.
Turner wrote eight books and many journal and magazine articles, and her picture of a great crested grebe led to her being awarded the Gold Medal of the RPS. She was one of the first women to be elected to fellowship of the Linnaean Society and the first female honorary member of the British Ornithologists' Union. Though not a graduate, she was also an honorary member of the British Federation of University Women. She lost her sight two years before her death.
## Early life
Emma Louisa Turner was born on 9 June 1867 in Langton Green, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to John and Emma (née Overy) Turner. She was their fourth and last child, following a sister, Mary, and brothers John and Frank. Her father was a grocer and draper with three shop staff. The family was affluent enough to employ a governess and a servant, and to send Emma to a boarding school.
Turner's mother died in 1880, when she was aged 13, and with the death of her elder sister Mary in 1891, Turner's life appears to have been mainly family-based, even after she started her photographic career. This continued at least until the death of her father, aged 83, in 1913. She may also have helped look after her brother Frank's children between the death of his first wife, Annie, in 1895, and his remarriage some five years later.
## Hickling Broad
Turner took up photography after meeting pioneering wildlife photographer Richard Kearton in 1900, joining the Royal Photographic Society in 1901, and by 1904 she had started to give public lectures illustrated with lantern slides of her own photographs. By 1908 she was established as a professional lecturer, producing her own publicity material, and in the 1911 census she gave her occupation as "lecturer in ornithology". She typically photographed from close to her subject using dry-plate camera equipment.
She first visited the Norfolk Broads in 1901 or 1902. Her early contacts included the gamekeeper Alfred Nudd, who would punt her to photographic locations, and his relative Cubit Nudd, who became her general helper on site. Another gamekeeper and professional wildfowler, Jim Vincent, used his extensive knowledge of the area to find birds and nests. Turner's friend, the Reverend Maurice Bird, probably introduced to her by Richard Kearton, kept a natural history diary for 50 years and was therefore also able to share information with her.
For a quarter of a century, Turner lived and worked for part of each year, including two winters, at Hickling Broad in Norfolk. She stayed mainly on a houseboat of her own design, which she named after the water rail (Rallus aquaticus), the first bird that she photographed in the Norfolk Broads. The flat-bottomed boat was transported to Hickling on a trolley, and launched in March 1905. She also owned a hut on a small island in the south-east of Hickling Broad, which became known as "Turner's Island". The hut was used as a photographic darkroom and a spare bedroom when visitors stayed.
A highlight of her career, in 1911, was finding with Jim Vincent, and photographing, a nestling bittern (Botaurus stellaris), a species that had not been recorded as breeding in the UK since 1886. Her nest photographs included those of the rare Montagu's harrier (Circus pygargus) and the first known breeding ruffs (Calidris pugnax) in Norfolk since 1890. Unusually for the time, the Whiteslea Estate, which owned much of the broad, and for which Vincent worked from 1909 to 1944, actively protected its birds of prey. Although both Montagu's and the then even rarer marsh harrier (Circus aeruginosus) bred there at the time, neither was mentioned in her book Broadland Birds.
Emma Turner was a pioneer of bird ringing in the UK, being allocated the first-ever small-size rings (numbers 1–10) issued by Harry Witherby's British Bird Marking scheme in 1909. She also participated in a short-lived Country Life ringing project. In practice, she seems to have done little, if any, ringing after the first year.
She seems to have been generally fit, and was described as being "quite capable with a punt or rowing boat", but she suffered bouts of illness throughout her life, with a notable attack in the summer of 1907. The cause of her illness is unknown, although tuberculosis has been suggested. She kept dogs, particularly Manchester Terriers, which she trained to flush birds so that she could count them.
## Travels to 1923
Although Turner spent part of the year in Norfolk every year from 1901 to 1935, she also travelled widely elsewhere. From the family home in Langton Green, she would drive her horse and trap to sites in Kent and Sussex, but she also journeyed much further afield, including several weeks on remote North Uist in 1913, where she saw breeding red-necked phalaropes (Phalaropus lobatus), divers and Arctic skuas (Stercorarius parasiticus). The following year she was a guest of Mary Russell, Duchess of Bedford at her house in Meikleour, Perthshire. The duchess was also a keen ornithologist, and the two women had known each other for several years. When the duchess sailed to Fair Isle on the ferry The Sapphire, she dropped Turner off at Stromness, Orkney on the way. On Orkney, Turner attempted to photograph breeding seabirds, took a day trip to Hoy, and through a chance encounter found herself a guest at Balfour Castle on Shapinsay. Her host, Colonel David Balfour, sailed her back to Orkney to get the ferry to Inverness, from where she went to Aviemore to search for crested tits (Lophophanes cristatus).
She went to Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island in the autumn as a guest of Edward Hudson, owner of Country Life magazine, and stayed there for the 1914–15 winter right through to May. The island is a bird migration hotspot, and rarities she saw there included a great grey shrike (Lanius excubitor) and a White's thrush (Zoothera aurea). She also made several boat trips to the Farne Islands, 9.7 kilometres (6.0 mi) away.
Probably in early 1913, Turner bought a house in Girton near Cambridge, her permanent home for the next decade. Her journals for 1916 and early 1917 are missing, but it appears that from the middle of the First World War, she was working as a part-time Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) cook at an auxiliary military hospital at Cranbrook, not far from Langton Green.
Turner's first trip abroad came in early summer 1920, when she went to Texel island in the Netherlands. She explored the island by bicycle, her main target species being those that no longer bred regularly in the UK, including the black tern (Chlidonias niger), ruff, black-tailed godwit (Limosa limosa) and avocet (Recurvirostra avosetta). She was particularly struck by the large numbers of singing nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos). A trip to Italy in late 1922 in which she visited its major cultural centres seemed largely committed to art and architecture, a rare ornithological comment in her journal being a sighting of a blue rock thrush (Monticola solitarius).
## Scolt Head
The National Trust had purchased Scolt Head Island in Norfolk in 1923 for its terns and other breeding birds, but was concerned about the damage done to the nesting colonies by egg-collectors, and, inadvertently, by visitors walking around the 490 hectares (1,200 acres) island. By this time, Turner was established as a photographer, bird expert and author. The Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society (NNNS) proposed to appoint a "watcher" (warden) to supervise the reserve, and when Turner was told they were struggling to find someone suitable, she volunteered herself, thus becoming the first resident "watcher" for the island.
Aged 57, Turner found herself living on the reserve in a basic hut during the breeding season, with no electricity supply, and significantly dependent on rain for fresh water. Once protected, the birds prospered, the number of breeding pairs of common terns (Sterna hirundo) and Sandwich terns (Thalasseus sandvicensis) rising from 17 to 800 and from 59 to 640 respectively by 1925, her final year. As well as studying the breeding seabirds, she was able to monitor migrating birds, and found a rare black stork (Ciconia nigra). She wrote a book, Birdwatching on Scolt Head, about her experiences on the island. She was frequently described by the press as the loneliest woman in England, but she pointed out that she never felt lonely, and often had visitors.
## After 1925
Soon after her stay on Scolt Island, Turner moved from Girton to Cambridge proper, and continued to indulge in her passion for gardening in her new suburban home. She was active in the Cambridge Ornithological Club, now the Cambridge Bird Club, becoming a vice-president and committee member. She went to Scotland in 1926, although she seemed by then to be less active as a photographer, perhaps concentrating on her writing. Two years later, she was off to Cornwall to see choughs (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax), where only a few pairs still remained in that county.
In 1929 she travelled to Amsterdam as a member of the International Ornithological Congress, which organised excursions to Texel, Naarden Lake and Zwanenwater. Around 1933 she went on a Mediterranean cruise with Chief Constable of the Isle of Man, Lieutenant colonel Henry William Madoc and his wife. They saw more than 150 species, including 52 that were new to Turner. After this trip, her journals become sporadic and incomplete, and she seems not to have travelled abroad again.
## Recognition
Turner was awarded the 1905 Gold Medal of the Royal Photographic Society for her photograph of a great crested grebe. Jim Vincent also received a gold medal for his part in obtaining her bittern picture, in his case from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
She was elected as one of the first 15 female fellows of the Linnean Society in December 1904. Then aged 38, she was one of the younger women admitted.
Emma Turner was one of the first four female honorary members of the British Ornithologists' Union (BOU) admitted in 1909, and was the only woman, along with 10 men, involved in the 1933 appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), an organisation for the study of birds in the British Isles. Her involvement in the BTO appeal was unusual enough that it led to The Daily Telegraph of 7 July 1933 inadvertently listing her as Mr E L Turner. She was President of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society from 1921 to 1922.
She was a vice-president of the RSPB, although she later fell out with the organisation following what she considered an unfair and dismissive review of her 1935 book, Every Garden a Bird Sanctuary. The reviewer, in the RSPB's 1935 winter issue of Bird Notes and News had said it "showed signs of haste and extraneous matter gathered in to fill vacancies ...". She was made an honorary member of the British Federation of University Women, despite not being a graduate.
## Last years
Turner lost her sight two years before her death on 13 August 1940, and an operation to remove her cataracts was unsuccessful. The failed surgery and the advent of colour photography, which she believed would lead to her life's work being forgotten, meant that her last years were not happy.
In her will, she requested that she be cremated. She left her photographic materials to the BTO, and her book copyrights and £50 were bequeathed to her nephew, Geoffrey Cater Turner. Her boats, furniture and most other personal possessions were left to her niece, Enid Mary Fowler. The residue of her estate was to be disposed of by both of them. She also posthumously cancelled the £900 her brother Frank owed her. Her estate was valued at probate at £3031.
## Legacy
Turner was a pioneer in her photographic work in terms of her preparation, achievements and aesthetics, and earned praise from professional photographers such as William Plane Pycraft, who wrote of Turner and a Mr H B Macpherson as:
> ...combining exceptional powers of observation and the skilful use of the camera. This combination in so high a degree of perfection is rare, and it demands yet a third element to achieve success, that is, endurance under extremely trying conditions.
She was also respected for her writing, which attracted plaudits from national newspapers including The Daily Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian and The Observer. The Observer, reviewing Bird Watching on Scolt Head commended the book for the author's knowledge and commitment, and said of the quality of the writing "It is as good as anything in the Voyage of the Beagle". Her book, Broadland Birds, published in 1924 formed the basis of a radio programme about her life, Emma Turner; a life in the reeds, broadcast by the BBC in 2012, produced by Sarah Blunt and with sound recordings by Chris Watson.
## Publications
Turner produced hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs in her life, many of which appeared in her numerous publications. Most of her original plates were donated to the RSPB, or bequeathed to the BTO, but apart from her bittern images, virtually all appeared to be lost from 1940 until 2020, when hundreds of plates and slides were found in a cardboard box at BTO headquarters in Thetford.
She wrote eight books, and was also a major contributor or chapter editor to at least six other multi-editor publications, writing eight of the 48 accounts in The British Bird Book and eight sections of Country Life's Wildlife of the British Isles in Pictures. From at least 1911 to 1915 she was working on an account of the birds of Norfolk, but it was never published, probably because she chose not to include records from the Whiteslea estate, and no manuscript has since been found.
Emma Turner wrote more than 30 articles for British Birds, one of which was a 1919 review of the breeding biology of the bittern illustrated with her own nest photographs. She contributed to other journals, most frequently the Transactions of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society.
She was a regular contributor to Country Life, for which she wrote more than 60 articles, and she also contributed frequently to other local and national publications including four articles in The Times on Norfolk wildlife. Her photographs were often published in the RPS's The Photographic Journal, and in 1917 she co-authored a technical article on the half-tone process in the same publication.
In addition to her professional writing, Emma Turner kept pocket diaries and daily journals. These, along with press cuttings and photographs, were donated to the BTO in 2011, although her handwriting is so illegible as to require specialist assessment.
### Books
### Selected articles
Some of the better-known of her many articles include:
## See also
- Timeline of women in science |
59,218,288 | Thomas F. Mulledy | 1,170,229,377 | American Jesuit priest (1794–1860) | [
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| Thomas F. Mulledy SJ (/mʌˈleɪdi/ muh-LAY-dee; August 12, 1794 – July 20, 1860) was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who became the president of Georgetown College, a founder of the College of the Holy Cross, and a Jesuit provincial superior. His brother, Samuel Mulledy, also became a Jesuit and president of Georgetown.
Mulledy entered the Society of Jesus and was educated for the priesthood in Rome, before completing his education in the United States. He twice served as president of Georgetown College in Washington, D.C. At Georgetown, Mulledy undertook a significant building campaign, which resulted in Gervase Hall and Mulledy Hall (later renamed Isaac Hawkins Hall). He became the second provincial superior of the Maryland Province of the Jesuit order, and orchestrated the sale of the province's slaves in 1838 to settle its debts. This resulted in outcry from his fellow Jesuits and censure by the church authorities in Rome, who exiled him to Nice in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia for several years. While provincial superior, Mulledy was also the vicar general for the Diocese of Boston.
Following his return to the United States, Mulledy was appointed as the first president of the College of the Holy Cross in 1843 and oversaw its establishment, including the construction of its first building. Both in the United States and in Rome, he developed a reputation as combative and insubordinate, much to the discontent of his fellow Jesuits and his superiors. Others praised him for his administrative skills. In his later years, he was prolific in delivering sermons at Holy Cross, and played a role in seeing the college through investigations by the Know Nothing Party. He also served as pastor of St. John the Evangelist Church and president of St. John's Literary Institution in Frederick, Maryland, where he expelled a significant portion of the student body for protesting the strict discipline he imposed, leading to the school's permanent decline. He then was assigned as pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown, and briefly as the superior at Saint Joseph's College in Philadelphia.
In 2015, Georgetown renamed Mulledy Hall due to Mulledy's involvement in the 1838 slave sale. His name was also removed from a building at the College of the Holy Cross in 2020.
## Early life and education
Thomas Mulledy was born on August 12, 1794, in Romney, Virginia (today part of West Virginia), to Irish immigrant parents. His father, also named Thomas Mulledy, was a poor farmer. His mother, Sarah Cochrane, from Virginia, was not Catholic. So the two could marry, they obtained a canonical dispensation, and agreed that their sons would be raised Catholic, while their daughters would be raised Protestant. Before receiving any higher education, Thomas Mulledy and his brother, Samuel, taught at the Romney Academy in their hometown. Like his brother, Samuel went on to become a Jesuit and the president of Georgetown College.
Thomas later enrolled as a student at Georgetown College in Washington, D.C., on December 14, 1813, having to pay for his own education, as his brother did. He left the school in February 1815 to travel with nine others to White Marsh Manor in Prince George's County, Maryland, where they entered the Society of Jesus. He returned to teach at Georgetown in 1817. While there, he contracted a disease that was unknown to the physicians of the time, and he feared death was imminent. In his debilitated state, he received the viaticum, and was thereafter restored to health, a turn of events that some considered miraculous. He was appointed by the Virginia General Assembly to the board of trustees for the town of Romney in 1818.
In 1820, he was sent to study philosophy in Rome; on the voyage, he was accompanied by Charles Constantine Pise, James Ryder, and George Fenwick. There, he studied at the Pontificio Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide for two years, and spent a further two as a tutor to the crown prince of Naples. Alongside his priestly studies, he was exposed to literature and science, and became regarded as among the most eminent American scholars of Italian language and literature.
Mulledy was ordained a priest in Rome in 1825, and then began his tertianship in Chieri, near Turin. By 1828, he was teaching logic, metaphysics, and ethics at a Jesuit college in Chambéry. He left Italy later that year. It was not until December 1827 that the Society raised enough money to pay for his and other Jesuit students' return to the United States, and that the Jesuit Superior General was satisfied that the Society had regained a footing in the United States after its suppression. He left from the port of Livorno on a treacherous voyage that lasted 171 days, and caused some in the United States to fear that the three Jesuits aboard had perished. Eventually, he arrived at Georgetown on December 22, 1828, where he was made the prefect of studies, as well as professor of philosophy. Mulledy provided the most comprehensive account of the mysterious events at Wizard Clip at the time.
## Georgetown College
### First presidency
Mulledy was appointed president of Georgetown College on September 14, 1829, following John William Beschter's brief leadership of the school. Several months before, Peter Kenney had been appointed apostolic visitor to the Jesuit mission in Maryland, and oversaw Mulledy, who was viewed cautiously by the Jesuit superiors in Europe for his ardent republicanism; at the same time, Mulledy was made a consultor to Kenney. When he assumed the presidency, the state of Georgetown was poor; the number of students had dropped to only 45. By 1834, this had rebounded to 140.
During his presidency, the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum was more fully implemented, primarily under the direction of the prefect of studies, George Fenwick. In May 1830, the first observation in the United States of the Month of Mary was undertaken by Georgetown's chapter of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin, which had been founded in 1808 as the first chapter of the sodality in the United States. With a growth in the number of books owned by the university under Mulledy's presidency, he undertook to organize the 12,000 volumes in a single library room in Old North on February 16, 1831.
Mulledy had a reputation for being relatively lax in enforcing discipline. In 1833, a rebellion was staged by a group of several students who plotted to ambush and assault the prefect of studies, in response to the prefect's reporting of a student who imbibed to the point of intoxication at taverns when the class took a trip to the Capitol. The plot was thwarted, and Mulledy expelled several of the students. In March 1833, Pope Gregory XVI chartered Georgetown College as an ecclesiastical university, the first such institution in the United States. This authorized it to grant canonical degrees in philosophy and theology. The college narrowly escaped destruction on December 10, 1836, when a carpenter's shed near the Walks caught fire. The students and faculty worked to contain the flames and prevented their spread to the nearby dormitory.
During Mulledy's tenure, Georgetown was frequently visited by congressmen and senators. On the whole, he was viewed as having effectively managed the college. Kenney reported back to Rome that Mulledy had been a successful administrator despite his "extremely impetuous enthusiasm and excessive patriotism." His first presidency of Georgetown ended in 1837, and he was succeeded by William McSherry.
#### Building campaign
With the steady increase in the number of students during his presidency, and an influx of money as remuneration from a widow who entered the Georgetown Visitation Monastery and entrusted her son as a ward of Georgetown, Mulledy was able to construct a new infirmary building in 1831. This building was named Gervase Hall, after Brother Thomas Gervase, a missionary who sailed to Maryland aboard the voyage of The Ark and The Dove in 1634.
Notwithstanding the misgivings of the Jesuit province's treasurer, Francis Dzierozynski, about Mulledy's penchant for building despite the province's precarious finances, Mulledy undertook an even larger project the following year. He was initially unable to fund a new building that would house a refectory, chapel, study hall, and dormitories; eventually, a Jesuit who owned property because he had not yet taken final vows offered Mulledy a substantial loan. With this money, groundbreaking on the new building occurred in July 1832 and was completed by July of the following year. This building became known as Mulledy Hall. Erection of these two buildings was enabled by a loan of \$7,000 from the widow of Stephen Decatur.
During Mulledy's presidency, "the Walks", a network of scenic paths through the backwoods of the campus, were created. They were the result of Joseph West, a Jesuit brother's, purchase of the land for the college. Following Congress' donation of land to Columbian College in 1832, Georgetown requested similar benefits. The legislature eventually awarded Georgetown lots worth \$25,000, the titles to which were transferred to the college on February 20, 1837.
### Second presidency
Mulledy again took up the presidency of Georgetown on September 6, 1845, following his brother Samuel Mulledy. Soon thereafter, President James K. Polk requested that the Catholic Church send chaplains to minister to Catholic soldiers in the Mexican–American War; as a result, Mulledy's vice president and procurator left for the Rio Grande to minister to General Zachary Taylor's army.
In 1848, due to popular uprisings in the Italian states, many Jesuits fled Italy and took refuge for a time at Georgetown College, including the future famed astronomer Angelo Secchi and scientist Giambattista Pianciani. That same year, Mulledy resigned as president of the college, and was succeeded by James Ryder.
## Maryland provincial
In October 1837, Mulledy was appointed the provincial superior of the Maryland Province of the Jesuits. He succeeded William McSherry, the province's first provincial, who in turn succeeded Mulledy as president of Georgetown College. His leadership of the province proved dissatisfactory to the European Jesuits in the United States who took issue with Mulledy's laxity in discipline, including failing to enforce sacred silence and permitting overindulgence of alcohol and visitation of female guests in the Jesuits' quarters. This eventually led to intervention by the Superior General in Rome, who ordered Mulledy to remedy these lapses in discipline.
In 1838, Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick appointed Mulledy vicar general of the Diocese of Boston, which he held simultaneously as provincial superior. He was considered by Bishop John Dubois as one of the potential choices for coadjutor bishop for the Diocese of New York, but ultimately John Hughes was selected over him in 1838.
### Slave sale
Mulledy's building program left Georgetown College—and, by extension, the Maryland Jesuits—with considerable debt. Compounding the financial insecurity was that the Maryland Jesuits' plantations had been mismanaged and were not generating sufficient income to support the college. To rectify the province's finances, Mulledy, as provincial, sold nearly all the slaves owned by the Jesuit Maryland Province to two planters in Louisiana. This plan had been authorized by the Jesuit Superior General in Rome, Jan Roothaan, in late 1838 on the condition that the slave families not be separated and that they be sold to owners who would allow them to continue in their Catholic faith. Mulledy executed the sale of 272 slaves to Jesse Batey and Henry Johnson on June 19, 1838. Despite Roothaan's order, it soon became evident that families were, indeed, separated.
This sale provoked outcry among many of the province's Jesuits, who were opposed to slaveholding by the Jesuits and supported manumission of the slaves. These Jesuits sent graphic accounts of the sale to Roothaan, who was inclined toward removing Mulledy as provincial superior. William McSherry convinced Roothaan to delay his decision and, along with Samuel Eccleston (the Archbishop of Baltimore), tried to persuade Mulledy to step down. Roothaan even contemplated expelling Mulledy from the Society of Jesus, but was persuaded otherwise by Eccleston. By August 1839, Roothaan ordered McSherry to inform Mulledy that he had been removed, for the twofold reasons of disobeying orders and of promoting scandal.
By the time Roothaan came to this decision, McSherry had already convinced Mulledy to step down in late June and to go to Rome to explain himself to the church authorities. Mulledy resigned the day he received Roothaan's letter. McSherry was made the acting provincial, and was later elected provincial despite being severely ill and near death. Following Mulledy's meeting with Roothaan in Rome, he was assigned to teach English to young boys in Nice in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, effectively as censure for his conduct in the slave sale affair. During his exile, Mulledy wrote to Roothaan of his feelings of loneliness and sense of being forgotten.
Mulledy became an alcoholic, and later tried to break this habit with a year of abstinence. With the intensity of the controversy waning, in the winter of 1841 and 1842, the province petitioned Roothaan to allow Mulledy to return to the United States. Roothaan was particularly persuaded by Bishop Eccleston's request for Mulledy's return. Granting the request, Roothaan sent Mulledy to the Diocese of Boston, so as to keep him away from Maryland, where the scandal had taken place.
## College of the Holy Cross
Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick of Boston established the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1843. Following Roothaan's permission for Mulledy to leave Europe, Fenwick requested that Mulledy be appointed the first president of the college in 1843. Mulledy accepted this position and first arrived at Worcester on March 13, 1843.
He oversaw the construction of the school's first building, whose cornerstone was laid on June 21, 1843. Originally known as the college building, it was later named Fenwick Hall, and was entirely destroyed by fire in 1852. Regularly inspecting progress on the building's initial construction, he eventually moved to Worcester permanently on September 28, 1843. He first lived in a farmhouse at the foot of the hill on which the college was built, along with a Jesuit candidate and a Jesuit brother. The college building was completed on January 13, 1844.
Relations between Mulledy and Fenwick were strained by the fact that Mulledy wished to have independence in deciding to accept candidates for the Jesuit novitiate. Mulledy eventually prevailed on this matter. Moreover, within three months of the college's opening, Mulledy received directions from Fenwick to significantly curtail the college's expenses, admonishing him to exercise greater frugality. He was unable to offset operating costs with tuition fees and other income. In light of steadily increasing enrollment and accompanying overcrowding, the college was greatly aided by a donation of \$1,000 from Andrew Carney in March 1844. Given Mulledy's worsening relationship with Fenwick, his presidency came to an end in 1845, and he returned to Georgetown; he was succeeded by James Ryder.
## Later years
### St. John's Literary Institution
Mulledy was elected the procurator of the Maryland province in 1847 at the province's general congregation, following heated clashes between himself and his fellow Jesuits, including James Ryder. A Belgian Jesuit, Peter Verhaegen, wrote to Roothaan that Mulledy had been "imperious and despotic," and severely condemned his hostile temperament and breach of fraternity. The new provincial superior, Ignatius Brocard, transferred Mulledy to Philadelphia, where he continued as procurator, before being sent to Frederick, Maryland in 1850 as president of St. John's Literary Institution, succeeding Charles H. Stonestreet. The president of the school also served as the pastor of St. John the Evangelist Church.
Mulledy advocated for an English-only curriculum, rather than teaching classes in Latin, so as to not drive away students into Protestant schools that taught in English. During his tenure, Mulledy enforced very strict discipline, prompting a mass walk-out of the older students in the school. In response, he expelled a majority of them, reducing the once-regional student body to one solely from the city of Frederick. This sent the school into a decline from which it never recovered. Upon the end of his term, Mulledy was succeeded by Burchard Villiger. He then was assigned to Alexandria, Virginia for a short while on a pastoral mission.
### Ministry
In the fall of 1854, Mulledy was again sent to the College of the Holy Cross, where he was made the prefect of studies and spiritual prefect. He remained in this position until 1857. When asked to teach Latin and Ancient Greek, he declined on the grounds that his competence in the subjects had diminished with age. Instead, Mulledy much preferred to deliver sermons, of which he compiled a file. With the rise of the Know Nothing movement across the United States, and the 1854 victory of the party in winning control of the Massachusetts General Court, a Joint Special Committee on the Inspection of Nunneries and Convents was formed to investigate Catholic institutions. A rumor began circulating in July of that year that Holy Cross was being used as a weapons depot for an eventual Catholic revolution. Consequently, the committee arrived in March to investigate the college, and was escorted around the premises by Mulledy. Upon finding no truth to the rumor, they left.
Mulledy once again returned to Washington in 1857, where he served as pastor of Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown until 1858. He then went again to Philadelphia for two years, the latter of which he spent as superior at Saint Joseph's College. Mulledy died of "dropsy" on July 20, 1860, at Georgetown College. He was buried in the Jesuit Community Cemetery on Georgetown's campus.
## Legacy
In 2015, controversy arose at Georgetown University over the name of Mulledy Hall due to its namesake's connection with slavery. This resulted in the building being temporarily renamed Freedom Hall. In 2017, the president of the university, John DeGioia, announced that the hall would be permanently renamed Isaac Hawkins Hall, taking the first name listed on the register of slaves sold in 1838.
In similar fashion, Mulledy Hall at the College of the Holy Cross, which opened in 1966, was renamed Brooks–Mulledy Hall in 2016. The intent of this dual name was to retain its recognition of Mulledy as a founder of the college, while simultaneously recognizing John E. Brooks, who worked to racially integrate the campus of Holy Cross in 1968 and who later was its president. However, in 2020, the college removed Mulledy's name from the building and it became Brooks Hall. |
2,853,227 | Ian Meckiff | 1,123,034,237 | Australian cricketer | [
"1935 births",
"Australia Test cricketers",
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| Ian Meckiff (born 6 January 1935) is a former cricketer who represented Australia in 18 Test matches between 1957 and 1963. A left-arm fast bowler, he is best known for two matters that were unrelated to his skill as a player: he was the batsman run out by Joe Solomon in 1960, causing the first Tied Test in cricket history; and in December 1963, his career was sensationally ended when he was called for throwing in the First Test against South Africa by Australian umpire Col Egar. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, there had been a media frenzy about the perceived prevalence of illegal bowling actions in world cricket. The controversy and speculation that dogged Meckiff in the years preceding his final match caused sections of the cricket community to believe that he had been made a scapegoat by the Australian cricket authorities to prove their intent to stamp out throwing.
With an unconventional front-on bowling action, Meckiff progressed through the district cricket ranks at South Melbourne Cricket Club, making his first-class debut for Victoria in 1956–57. After a productive first season, Meckiff was named in a new-look Australian team for the 1957–58 tour of South Africa. This was the result of a generational change in the Australian Test team after a decline in performances in the 1950s. The shift saw Meckiff open the bowling in his debut Test, where he performed strongly to take eight wickets. Generating his pace from an unusual bent-arm action which involved a flick of the wrist, Meckiff reached his peak in the Second Test of the 1958–59 season against England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. He took 6/38 in the second innings as England were dismissed for 87, setting up an Australian victory. His achievement was engulfed by controversy, as English media and former players accused him of throwing Australia to victory.
The controversy over Meckiff's action persisted as throwing was in the spotlight in England, where it was regarded as a growing problem. The issue prompted numerous international discussions and meetings on amending the throwing law and the interpretation thereof. An expected confrontation with English umpires in 1961 was averted when the bowler suffered multiple injuries in the preceding Australian summer and was omitted from the team to tour England, but Meckiff had two strong seasons in domestic cricket that forced the Australian selectors to recall him for the Tests against South Africa in 1963–64. The Victorian's recall had occurred despite his being no-balled for throwing in two separate Sheffield Shield matches in the previous season. In his first over of the Test, Meckiff was no-balled four times by umpire Egar. Australian captain Richie Benaud chose to not bowl his paceman again, and Meckiff retired from all cricket at the end of the match. The throwing controversy provoked heavy debate among cricket commentators, players and umpires, past and present; some praised Egar's no-ball call while others condemned the umpire and felt that the paceman had bowled in the same way as he had always done. Others felt that Meckiff had been set up so that he would be no-balled in an "execution" or "sacrifice" to prove Australia's resolve against throwing.
## Early life
Meckiff was the second of three children born to Vera and Walter Meckiff; he had an older brother Don and a younger sister Margaret. Growing up in the south-eastern Melbourne suburb of Mentone, the children went to Mentone Primary School before progressing to Mordialloc-Chelsea High School, where both brothers became prefects. All of the children represented their high school for sport—Don and Ian in athletics, swimming, football and cricket; and Margaret in softball. The brothers played for Mentone Cricket Club in the Federal District Cricket Association, Ian as a left-arm unorthodox spinner. He routinely dominated the opposition batsmen in the competition, taking 200 wickets at a bowling average of only 4.50 during his career with Mentone. He began playing in Mentone's under-16 team at the age of 11.
## Early career
Having failed as a spin bowler in a trial at Richmond in 1950, Meckiff switched to fast bowling in 1951–52 when he began his district career in Victorian Premier Cricket with South Melbourne. He started in the Fourth XI after his brother had to withdraw from a match. The following summer, aged 17, Meckiff was in the senior team and played in South Melbourne's first championship-winning side in his debut season in the First XI, although his club career was sometimes interrupted by national service in the reserves. After receiving requests from cricket administrators, the military authorities scheduled the leave of young players for weekends, so that the impact on their careers would be minimised. At the time, Australia lacked bowlers of great pace, so a teammate advised Meckiff to bowl as fast as he could, without regard for accuracy—a plan he successfully adopted.
Meckiff made his first-class debut for Victoria in 1956–1957 against Western Australia. Coming in to bat with his state's score at 8 wickets for 77 (8/77), he made 19 not out to help them reach 131, before taking three wickets for 45 runs (3/45) to restrict Western Australia to a 34-run first innings lead. His first wicket was future Australian captain Bob Simpson for a duck, and he followed up by removing Test batsmen Barry Shepherd and Ken Meuleman. Meckiff made 11 in the second innings and took 0/40 as Victoria lost by four wickets.
Meckiff's most prominent showing in his debut season was in the Sheffield Shield match against New South Wales during the Christmas period of 1956. At the time, the two states were by far the strongest in Australia; in the past decade, the teams had 18 of the 20 top-two Shield placings between them, and New South Wales were in the process of winning nine consecutive titles. The arch-rivals were at full strength as no international matches were held during the season.
Coming in at 7/173, Meckiff top-scored with 55—his only first-class 50—as Victoria batted first and made a late recovery to end with 244. Meckiff took 3/65, including the wickets of Test players Bill Watson and Richie Benaud as New South Wales responded with 281. In the Victorian second innings Meckiff managed only 8 as Victoria left their opponents a target of 161 runs for victory. The paceman took 4/56 and claimed the final wicket, removing Test opener Jim Burke caught for 8 as New South Wales mustered 160, causing the match to end in the first tie in Shield history. Burke had returned to bat after being injured earlier in the innings, while New South Wales captain Ian Craig, who had been ill, hauled himself out of bed in an attempt to salvage the match after his team had fallen to 7/70. Meckiff's other victims in the final innings included Test players Alan Davidson and Johnny Martin.
Strong showings for Victoria earned Meckiff selection in Neil Harvey's XI for the one-off match against Ray Lindwall's XI at the start of January 1957. These annual fixtures were used as trials for the leading players vying for national selection. Lindwall's men batted first and made 428; Meckiff was the most successful bowler, taking 6/75 while his fellow-bowlers struggled to make inroads into the opposition batsmen. His first wicket was Test batsman Ken Mackay for 99, and he followed this by removing Bob Simpson, Norm O'Neill and Graeme Hole in the middle-order. Meckiff followed his productive bowling with 47 runs in a tail-wagging performance, adding 71 for the eighth wicket with Wally Grout as Harvey's men responded with 419. The Victorian took 0/18 in the second innings as Lindwall's team fell for 188 to leave Harvey's XI with a victory target of 198, which was achieved with seven wickets in hand.
Meckiff had performed strongly in his debut first-class season, ending with 27 wickets at an average of 23.66. He was the ninth-highest wicket-taker for the Australian summer and his average was superior to all eight bowlers who took more wickets. At season's end, he was rewarded with selection for Australia's non-Test tour of New Zealand in February and March 1957. The hosts had Test status at the time, but Australia refused to ratify games against their trans-Tasman neighbours as Test matches, citing the weakness of the New Zealand team.
The tour represented a changing of the guard in Australian cricket following the tour of England and the Indian subcontinent in 1956, with the bowling line-up heavily overhauled due to advancing age, injury and loss of form. Australia had lost three Ashes series in a row, and captain Ian Johnson and his deputy Keith Miller retired upon their return home. Johnson was Australia's first-choice spinner while Miller and the 35-year-old Ray Lindwall had formed Australia's new ball pairing for the previous decade. In addition, the fast bowling all rounder Ron Archer suffered a long-term knee injury during the 1956 tour, while paceman Pat Crawford played only one first-class match in 1956–57 after his marriage broke down. In the wake of Australia's decline in the past five years, the selectors turned to youth in an attempt to rebuild the side, resting several established Test representatives from the side. Ian Craig was installed as the nation's youngest ever captain at the age of 22, having previously played only six Tests without securing a regular position in the team.
The New Zealand campaign was a chance for the younger players to establish themselves in the national team. Meckiff took 2/46 and 3/25 in his first-class debut for Australia, an innings win over Otago. He played in the first match against New Zealand, but after taking 0/41 in a drawn encounter, he was dropped for the second game. The paceman forced his way back into the team for the third match after claiming 4/12 and 5/48 to help to set up an innings victory over Auckland.
In the final match, New Zealand batted first and Meckiff played a leading role in Australia's victory, taking 4/28 from 27.2 overs to help dismiss the hosts for 198. The fast bowler was not required to bat as the tourists replied with 8/350 declared. He took 2/17 in the second innings as the home team fell for 161 before Craig's men sealed the series with a 10-wicket win. Meckiff ended the tour with 20 first-class wickets at 10.85, placing him top of the tour bowling averages.
## Test debut
The following season, when the team for the 1957–58 South African tour was announced, Lindwall's name was omitted, despite his 212 Test wickets, second only to Clarrie Grimmett among Australian bowlers. Meckiff was selected for the tour as part of Australia's generational change, after a single season in first-class cricket, and the squad departed for South Africa in October. On the tour, in five first-class matches ahead of the Tests he took 12 wickets, at 26.25.
Meckiff was one of four Australians to make their debuts in the First Test, which was played on a batsman-friendly surface in Johannesburg over the Christmas holiday period. Under some pressure due to Australia's decision to discard Lindwall and invest in new talent, he opened the bowling alongside Alan Davidson, who up to that point had taken only 16 wickets at 34.06 in 12 Tests. The match began badly for Australia's inexperienced attack as the South African openers Jackie McGlew and Trevor Goddard put on an opening stand of 176. Meckiff claimed his maiden Test wicket, and Australia's first breakthrough, when he bowled Goddard for 90. He then removed McGlew for 108 and later dismissed Russell Endean and Roy McLean for 50 apiece. South Africa amassed 470, and Meckiff had the best figures, taking 5/125 in the hosts' first innings, all five being specialist batsmen. When the tourists batted, Meckiff came in at 8/313 and held up his end as centurion Richie Benaud did the majority of the scoring in their 42-run partnership. The debutant ended with 11 in his first Test outing with the bat as Craig's team ended on 368. Meckiff took 3/52 in the South African second innings, including McGlew for the second time, as the match ended in a draw. This fine start to the Victorian's international career was halted in the Second Test at Cape Town, where he broke down with injury early in the first innings and took no further part in an Australian innings victory. He did not take a wicket.
Meckiff missed the Third Test in Durban and spent a month on the sidelines, before returning against a combined team from Orange Free State and Border at the end of January. He took 6/29 in the first innings, his best return of the tour, and earned a recall for the final two Tests of the five-match series. He was not as effective as he was on debut, taking two and one wickets for the matches respectively, and scoring 26 runs in his only innings of the Fourth Test. Overall, the Victorian paceman had made a steady start to his international career, with 11 Test wickets at an average of 32.09, and 56 runs at 18.66. In the entire tour, he took 33 first-class wickets at 23.09. However, there was a hint of the controversy that was to end his career six years later. A year after the series, the South African Test umpire Bill Marais said he was prepared to no-ball Meckiff and his teammate Jim Burke for throwing. There were reports that Craig had been tipped off about Marais's intentions and therefore operated the two bowlers exclusively from the end at which Marais was not officiating.
## Career peak and start of throwing controversy
The Victorian paceman's international career peaked in 1958–59 during the English tour of Australia. He started the season with a match for Victoria against the tourists, taking 4/69 and 1/16 in a losing effort. His wickets included English Test batsmen Peter Richardson (twice), Arthur Milton and Raman Subba Row.
The Test team was now under the leadership of Benaud—Craig had been forced to withdraw from cricket due to hepatitis; Meckiff retained his place in the side. Prior to the Tests, English all-rounder Trevor Bailey privately described Meckiff as "the worst bowler ever to represent Australia", and felt he posed little threat to the visitors. However this proved to be questionable. The Benaud era started well for Australia and Meckiff, with a comfortable eight-wicket victory in the First Test in Brisbane. The paceman took 3/33 and 2/30, removing Milton, Colin Cowdrey and captain Peter May early on the first day to help Australia take the initiative after the tourists had batted first. The match also marked the start of behind-the-scenes rumblings about the bowler's action.
Meckiff's career peaked at the Second Test, which began on New Year's Eve, 1958 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. It was his first international fixture in front of his home crowd, and also marked the start of his career-long public problem with accusations of throwing. The match was dominated by the Victorian and his left-arm pace partner Davidson; the pair took 18 of the 20 English wickets to fall. England's first innings was headlined by Davidson's 6/64; Meckiff took 3/69, including the wicket of England captain May for 113 with a swinging ball, which breached the batsman's defence and crashed into the stumps. This ended a century partnership with Cowdrey, and triggered a collapse that saw England be dismissed for 259, the last six English wickets falling for 49 runs. Meckiff rated the ball as the best of his career. He made a duck as the hosts replied with 308 to take a 49-run lead. It was in England's second innings that Australia's left-arm pacemen were at their most potent; apart from one over from Benaud the pair bowled unchanged to dismiss England for 87 in the 32nd over, Meckiff taking 6/38. Backed a by a vocal home crowd, the Victorian dismissed opener Richardson for three, before removing Bailey, Tom Graveney and Cowdrey in quick succession. He followed this by removing the English skipper for a second time to leave England at 7/71. This set up a comfortable Australian victory as they reached their target of 39 with the loss of two wickets. The Australian pace duo were aided by a series of difficult, diving catches. The pair combined forces when Davidson caught May, and then Graveney, in the leg trap behind square from the bowling of his fellow left-armer, who called the reflex catches "absolutely unbelievable". Meckiff described the hometown atmosphere as "electrifying", and attributed his performance to the crowd support.
The match ended on the eve of Meckiff's 24th birthday, but Australian celebrations were marred by English journalists, who levelled accusations of throwing against him and some of his colleagues. The evening edition of the Melbourne Herald carried a column by former English spinner Johnny Wardle, accusing Meckiff of "throwing England out". Wardle's piece was written confrontationally, as a series of sentences starting with "I accuse". This was followed by more anti-Meckiff comments in the English press, including one that dubbed the bowler "the greatest ogre of international cricket since Larwood". The Evening News proclaimed: "Meckiff's throwing was devastating" and The Star said: "at least two of his wickets were obtained by deliveries which looked to be thrown". Former England spinner Ian Peebles asserted that Meckiff and Gordon Rorke threw "the greater number of balls they deliver", while former English paceman Alf Gover claimed that none of the left-armer's deliveries were legal; it was "ridiculous that a player of his action should be the agent of England's destruction". According to Australian writer Jack Pollard, such headlines relegated the Cold War, which usually occupied the front pages, to the interior of the English newspapers.
By contrast to the strident condemnation of Meckiff in the English press, Australian opinion was mixed. The former Test opener and leading commentator Jack Fingleton said: "when he [Meckiff] delivered to Bailey, his fastest ball looked most suspect" and that the left-armer should have been called for throwing. Fingleton claimed to know of five former Australian Test cricketers who felt that Meckiff threw, but only named the 1930s paceman Ernie McCormick. Former Australian player Tommy Andrews claimed: "if they stop throwing in Australia, cricket will die". Former Australian captain Ian Johnson argued that if Meckiff were to be cited for an illegal action for jerking his wrist, then leading English bowlers such as Trueman, Brian Statham and Tony Lock, who played against Australia during the season, should also be sanctioned. As with Meckiff, Lock was under scrutiny at the time and later tried to change his bowling action but the new style coincided with a downturn in results. Johnson also noted that any successful spinner would be called for throwing if the law were enforced strictly because of their flicking of the wrist and fingers during the delivery of the ball, as they could not otherwise extract spin. In 1993, Robert Coleman, the historian of the Victorian Cricket Association, decried the anti-Meckiff campaign as "Fleet Street bleating", and said: "there have been no more hysterical outbursts on the subject [of throwing] than occurred during England's 1958–59 tour". Writing decades after the event, Pollard said "Meckiff, in fact, went to the crease with a beautifully relaxed approach, paused momentarily with his arm absolutely straight, and then let the ball go with a blurred swing of the arm that was impossible to follow from 60 yards away, even with the aid of good binoculars."
Journalists who wrote books about the 1958–59 season made thinly veiled references to the controversy in the names of their work. Fingleton's account on the series was entitled Four Chukkas to Australia, while E. N. Wellings labelled his tome The Ashes Thrown Away, and accused Meckiff, along with Burke, Rorke and Keith Slater of throwing for Australia in the Tests. An Australian television debate program featured an entire session where English journalists Wellings and Crawford White discussed the throwing issue with former Australian Test cricketers Keith Miller and Sid Barnes.
In the Third Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground Meckiff took one wicket—Bailey—in the first innings, before breaking down with an injury in the second. This ruled him out of the Fourth Test, and he missed a month of cricket before returning for the final Test in Melbourne in mid February, where he removed specialist batsmen May and Ted Dexter. On the field it had been a successful series for the Victorian; he had taken 17 wickets at 17.17, as Australia claimed the series 4–0. These efforts placed him top of the Test bowling averages for the series. When Lindwall was recalled for the Fourth Test in place of the injured Meckiff he was reported to have said "I'm the last of the straight-arm bowlers". The veteran paceman played alongside Meckiff in later matches, including the Fifth Test. Meckiff was also prominent in the two Shield matches against New South Wales, when both teams were at full strength. In the first contest he had match figures of 5/129, his victims including Test teammates Burke, O'Neill and Davidson (twice), but his efforts were unable to prevent defeat. In the return fixture, Meckiff took a total of 7/162; five of his victims were Australian Test batsmen. Victoria held the upper hand, and were 45 runs short of victory in the second innings when time ran out.
Within the wider cricket community there was a steady crescendo of comment condemning the prevalence of bowlers with suspect actions. Prior to the alteration of the bowling law by the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1960, the law stated:
> For a delivery to be fair, the ball must be bowled, not thrown or jerked; if either umpire be not entirely satisfied of the absolute fairness of a delivery in this respect, he shall call and signal no-ball instantly upon delivery.
### Reaction by players and officials
In contrast to the heated debate in the media, players and administrators refrained from publicly questioning or condemning Meckiff. Neither the England captain May nor manager Freddie Brown raised any concerns about Meckiff's action after the Test. However, it was later revealed that Brown had wanted to lodge an official complaint with the Australian Board of Control, but May had refused, fearing accusations of sour grapes. Years later, Richardson and some of his fellow batsmen accused the Australian fast bowler of throwing them out, while England paceman Fred Trueman said: "Meckiff's action was totally illegal and that he should never have been allowed to play". Richardson's off spinning teammate Jim Laker likened Meckiff's and Burke's arm actions to those of dart-throwers.
Benaud said he was "completely satisfied that [Meckiff's] delivery was fair and legitimate", while the selection panel of Don Bradman, Dudley Seddon and Jack Ryder continued to pick the paceman, implying that they regarded his action as legal. Bill Dowling, the chairman of the Australian Board of Control, denounced the media attention on suspect bowling actions as excessive and "magnified out of all proportion".
Off the field, the throwing controversy was beginning to affect Meckiff adversely. In his 1961 autobiography, prophetically titled Thrown Out, he said the accusations took a deep personal toll on him and his family, and prompted him to shun the public. He became known by the derisive nickname "Chucker" and was credited on the front cover of his autobiography as "Ian 'Chucker' Meckiff". Meckiff reported that from the Melbourne Test onwards, his son was verbally abused by classmates; Meckiff's parents were persistently told their son bowled illegally. He added that doctors believed his anxiety was contributing to stomach ailments. At the time, players were not allowed to talk to the media during the season, and Meckiff was upset because he could not rebut his accusers while they were free to attack him. He denied ever throwing, but admitted he may have been open to suspicion after bowling 15 to 20 overs in a day's play, as his body would begin to fall away in the delivery stride due to fatigue. He had a permanently bent bowling arm; he generated his pace from his wrist action, and asserted that his thin wrists gave the impression that his whole arm was bending.
## Subcontinent tour
In 1959–60, the season started with a Test trial between the XIs of Lindwall and Benaud. Meckiff claimed a match total of 4/90 for Lindwall's men and was selected for the Test tour of Pakistan and India. Before the team departed, Meckiff demonstrated his new bowling action, which used a rigid left arm during the run-up, before swinging the arm over during the delivery stride. Over the next two years, sceptics and sporting opponents mostly regarded his action as fair, and said so in public. He was not called for throwing in either India or Pakistan, meaning that he had played in five nations without being sanctioned.
Meckiff was wicketless in Australia's win in the First Test against Pakistan on a matting wicket in Dacca (now in Bangladesh). In the first innings of the Second Test in Lahore, he took three wickets, including that of opposition captain Hanif Mohammad; the match was Australia's last Test win on Pakistani soil for 39 years. Before the Third Test, he helped the tourists beat the President's XI in a low-scoring game in which none of the four innings totalled over 140. Meckiff claimed four wickets in the match, and was batting (he scored two not out) when Australia reached their victory target with three wickets in hand. He missed the drawn Third Test in Karachi.
In the next leg of the tour, Meckiff returned to the Australian side for the First Test against India in Delhi. After claiming 1/52 in the first innings, he compiled his Test best score of 45 not out. He came in to bat with his team's score at 8/402 and helped Lindsay Kline and Rorke push Australia's score to 468, a first innings lead of 333. Meckiff was unable to capture a wicket in the Indian second innings as Benaud's men won by an innings and 117 runs. He bowled with little success in the Second Test in Kanpur, taking 1/52 in a spin-dominated match in which Jasu Patel claimed 14 wickets to bowl India to their first-ever Test win over Australia. Meckiff was unbeaten on 14 when India secured the final wicket. In his first two Tests on Indian soil, Meckiff's only victim had been Chandu Borde, whom he dismissed twice.
Meckiff's most successful Test during the Indian tour was the drawn third match at Brabourne Stadium in Bombay, where he captured 4/79 and 3/67. In the Indian first innings, after removing opener Nari Contractor for 108, Meckiff captured four of the next five wickets as India collapsed from 3/199 to 8/246—they were eventually all out for 289. In the second innings he secured three quick wickets as the hosts slumped from 0/99 to 4/116 before a recovery which prevented their defeat. Meckiff continued to hold the upper hand over Borde, dismissing him in both innings. The Victorian bowler had little success in the final two Tests, taking only three wickets as Australia won the series 2–1. He ended the subcontinental tour with 15 wickets at 35.73, and scored 70 runs at 23.33. He had particular success against Borde, dismissing him five times in as many Tests. Meckiff returned to Australia in time to play his solitary Sheffield Shield match for the 1959–60 season, taking the only ten-wicket match haul of his career. He took 5/41 and 5/84 to set up an easy win over Western Australia. His first innings effort helped dismiss Western Australia for 141, and Victoria replied with 431 to move into a match-winning position. He also helped South Melbourne to another district title, taking 9/51—including a hat-trick—in the last match of the regular season against Fitzroy. This victory allowed South Melbourne to climb from seventh to fourth in the table and become the last qualifier for the semi-finals. They subsequently won their semi-final and the grand final to secure the title.
## Alterations to the throwing law
In 1960, at a meeting of the Imperial Cricket Conference in London, cricket's "throwing law" was changed to forbid the straightening of the arm at the instant of the ball's delivery. The Australian Board of Control were so concerned about the controversy and its possible impact on the Australian game that they sent Board chairman Dowling and board member Sir Donald Bradman to the meeting, rather than the customary Britain-based representative. Despite the agreed change in the law, because of conflicting interpretations in different countries a compromise was agreed, which specified an amnesty during the forthcoming 1961 Australian tour to England. It was agreed that on the tour, umpires would privately report any concerns about bowling actions to the teams concerned, for them to remedy. After the tour, umpires would "call" bowlers whenever they felt the new law to have been breached.
On his return to Australia, Dowling angrily accused the English cricket community of pre-judging Meckiff. Dowling said the strident press attacks on Meckiff had amounted to intimidation of umpires through the media, and claimed that some administrators had privately told him that the Australian paceman would be called if he toured England. The president of the Marylebone Cricket Club, Sir Hubert Ashton, said he hoped Australia would not choose Meckiff for their 1961 tour.
## Tied Test against the West Indies, 1960–61
The Victorian was not called during the 1960–61 Australian season, but his performances were ineffective and he was repeatedly hampered by injuries. In particular, a strained achilles tendon restricted his speed and penetration, particularly in the lead-up to the opening Test. Meckiff played in the First and the Third Tests, taking two wickets at 117.00 and scoring 12 runs at 6.00; he was unable to complete either match, sustaining injuries during the second innings of both fixtures. These fitness problems resulted in his omission for the three other Tests. During the summer, Meckiff's bowling was passed by Col Egar, who later ended his career. He noted that the umpire had told him there was little point in changing his action.
Meckiff took match figures of 4/90 as Victoria started the season with a nine-wicket win over South Australia, but he managed only 2/122 as his state lost by an innings to the touring West Indies in the next fixture. The paceman removed Rohan Kanhai, who made 252 of the visitors' 493, and captain Frank Worrell, who contributed 82. During the heavy defeat, Meckiff equal top-scored with 24 not out in the first innings, as the hosts struggled against the mysterious spin of Sonny Ramadhin. Despite his unpenetrative performance with the ball, the paceman was retained for the First Test in Brisbane. The Caribbean team batted first and attacked Meckiff, taking more than seven runs per over from his bowling. The paceman ended with 1/129 from 18 overs as the visitors amassed 453; his only wicket was that of Gary Sobers for 132. The West Indian batsman had been particularly severe on Meckiff and was ironically dismissed by "the day's worst ball"— a leg side full toss that he hit to mid-on. In the second innings, Meckiff broke down after only four overs, but came out to bat on 14 December, late in Australia's climactic run-chase, for which he was often remembered. At the end of a dramatic final day, Australia needed seven runs from the final over for victory, and they had three wickets in hand. The home side had seemed destined for a win after Davidson and Benaud had fought back with a century stand for the seventh wicket in the final session. Both were well set and had passed 50, but the tourists halted Australia's momentum by running out Davidson with a direct hit from the last ball of the previous over. Benaud was caught behind on the second ball of the final over attempting a hook and Meckiff came to the crease to join Wally Grout. Five runs were needed from six balls with two wickets in hand.
The injured paceman blocked the first ball he faced—the third of the over—and ran a bye after missing the next. The West Indian wicket-keeper tried to run Meckiff out, but missed the stumps at the non-striker's end with the batsman many metres out of his ground. Grout top-edged the following ball straight up into the air, but the two fielders who converged beneath it collided and dropped the catch, allowing the Australians to take another run. The hosts thus needed three runs from the last three balls. Meckiff faced the sixth ball; it was a half volley and he lofted it over square leg. The ball looked as though it would reach the boundary for a match-winning four runs; however, after landing close to the fence, it stopped rolling a metre short on the slow outfield. Grout attempted a third run, which would have won the match, but an accurate long throw saw him run out. The last man Lindsay Kline came in for the final two balls, with scores level, and the Australian pair agreed to run under all circumstances. Meckiff backed up significantly in anticipation of a quick single, and set off for the winning run after his partner hit the ball to square leg. However, he was run out by roughly a metre when Joe Solomon directly hit the stumps from side on, causing the first tie in Test history. Umpire Col Hoy said of his decision to give Meckiff out: "God, it was easy. He was miles out." The entire stadium—players and spectators alike—invaded the ground in excitement, but nobody was sure of the exact scores. It was only later that they realised the match was the first Tied Test; Meckiff initially thought Australia had lost and blamed himself for the result.
After missing the Australian victory in the Second Test due to injury, Meckiff returned for the Third Test and he was again attacked, taking 1/74 from 13 overs in the first innings, his sole victim being Conrad Hunte. He then broke down after five overs in the second innings. Davidson also left the field with injury and the tourists took advantage; they attacked the remaining bowlers, levelling the series 1–1. The Victorian did not recover in time for the rest of the Tests.
Persistently hampered by ankle and back injuries, Meckiff aggregated only 19 first-class wickets at 40 for the summer. His best innings performance was 4/39 against Queensland and he was unable to claim more than five wickets in any single match. In one match against arch-rivals New South Wales, the Victorian took a total of 5/155, all of his wickets being Test batsmen. Meckiff was not selected for the Ashes tour. His lack of form saved the Australian selectors the difficult choice of whether to omit him because of his action and avoid a potential run-in with umpires in England. Critics claimed that his new bowling action adopted in 1959–60 had made him legitimate but reduced his pace and effectiveness.
## No-balled in the Sheffield Shield, 1962–63
The throwing controversy subsided during the 1961 English season, and the 1961–62 Australian season was purely domestic, with no touring international teams. As a result, there were no pressing diplomacy imperatives involving throwing. Meckiff was Victoria's leading bowler with 28 wickets at 27.14 in eight matches and was not called. His best performance was 5/53 in the first innings of the match against Queensland at the MCG, which ended in defeat for the home team. Despite healthy results for the season overall, the paceman struggled and took match figures of 2/136 and 3/112 as Victoria lost both their matches against the dominant New South Wales XI, who won their ninth successive Shield. At the end of the season, Meckiff was part of an International XI that toured New Zealand and played against the hosts' national team and against teams from India and Pakistan. He had little success, taking four wickets at 53.00 in three matches.
In 1962–63, Meckiff was again under the spotlight when Ted Dexter's Englishmen toured Australia. He topped the bowling averages for the Australian first-class season with 58 wickets at 19.86 from ten matches, as Victoria won the Sheffield Shield, ending New South Wales' run of titles. Meckiff and Alan Connolly formed an effective pace pairing, helping Victoria to win four of its eight Shield games, and take first innings points in two others.
Meckiff was hoping to regain his Test place, and started his 1962–63 campaign in a Sheffield Shield match against South Australia. After Victoria made 174, the paceman took 4/65 to dismiss South Australia for 141 in the first innings. In the second innings he took 3/76 to help seal a win. He continued his early season form in taking match figures of 7/179 against Western Australia, but was unable to prevent defeat. Despite these performances, Meckiff was overlooked for the First Test. He had another chance to vie for national selection when Victoria played England after the opening Test, and took match figures of 4/90 as the tourists completed a five-wicket victory. He dismissed Ray Illingworth, Geoff Pullar and Alan Smith as Victoria took a four-run first innings lead, but the hosts collapsed in their second innings and Dexter's men reached their target of 180 with five wickets in hand.
Victoria then played the first of their two matches for the season against their arch-rivals New South Wales, just before the Second Test. Meckiff took 3/33, removing Grahame Thomas, Benaud and Martin as Victoria dismissed the reigning champions for 132. He contributed 32 runs at the end of the Victorian first innings reply, helping to extend his team's first-innings lead to 135 runs. In the New South Wales second innings Meckiff took 3/73, removing Test players Simpson, Davidson and Benaud, to leave his team with a target of 95 runs to win, which they reached with eight wickets in hand.
Despite this effort, he was not selected for the Second Test. His season was then marred when he was called for throwing for the first time in any competition. In January 1963, Victoria played South Australia at the Adelaide Oval. After Victoria had made 218, Meckiff removed both openers—Les Favell and Ken Cunningham—for the cost of 19 runs before Jack Kierse no-balled the fourth ball of his fourth over. He continued to bowl; his remaining deliveries were deemed legal by the umpires, and he ended with 5/84 in South Australia's reply of 8/408 declared. The hosts had a target of only 108 in the second innings for victory, but Meckiff removed Favell, Cunningham and Neil Dansie with the new ball to destabilise the run-chase. He ended with 3/25 as the South Australians stumbled to 7/86 and held on for a draw.
Meckiff took a total of 3/50 in a seven-wicket defeat of Western Australia before the return match against New South Wales, in which Victoria were 34 runs short of victory with seven wickets in hand when time ran out, Meckiff's match figures being 6/121. He had a final chance to push for Test selection in the second of his state's two matches against England. The tourists batted first and made 375; Meckiff took 5/93, dismissing Pullar, Peter Parfitt, Fred Titmus, David Allen and top-scorer Tom Graveney, who had made 185. He took 2/47 in the English second innings, removing Barry Knight and Ken Barrington. England set Victoria 287 for victory, and the hosts faced defeat before Meckiff batted late in the order to score 38 and help his side to a draw with one wicket in hand. Despite this continued run of prolific wicket-taking and his success against England, Meckiff was overlooked for the Fifth Test. In his absence, Australia struggled to make inroads into the English batting, and the series ended 1–1.
Victoria's season ended with consecutive matches against Queensland. In the first, Meckiff took a total of 5/88 as his side completed an innings victory at home. In the final match in Brisbane, his slower ball was no-balled in his fifth over of the second innings by umpire Bill Priem. Meckiff bowled 14 further overs without incident and ended the innings with 4/74. Victoria drew the match and sealed their Sheffield Shield victory. Meckiff had been the state's leading wicket-taker and one of the key figures in their triumph, but his bowling action was the main talking point at the end of the match.
## Test no-ball
Meckiff's performances as the leading wicket-taker during the 1962–63 season meant that he could not be justifiably denied national selection on grounds of productivity, so the matter of his legitimacy had to be resolved. Meanwhile, the retirement of pace spearhead Davidson left a vacancy in the Australian team ahead of the 1963–64 home Test series against South Africa. In the opening Shield matches of the season in Melbourne, Meckiff took match figures of 5/102 and 6/107 against South and Western Australia respectively. His wickets included Test batsmen Les Favell, Garry Sobers, Keith Slater and Barry Shepherd. In the latter match he took the first five wickets in the innings to reduce Western Australia to 5/54. Despite his contributions, Victoria were unable to secure victories against either of their opponents. However, as a result of these strong personal performances, Meckiff was selected for the First Test in Brisbane.
At the start of the season, the Australian Board of Control had issued a directive calling on the umpires to "get tough" in enforcing the laws of cricket, and asked the state associations to "back the umpires to the fullest extent". In the lead-up to the Test, Meckiff was the centre of media attention, and one report described him as cricket's "bogey man". The South Africans were reportedly stunned by Meckiff's selection, giving the impression that they considered him an illegitimate bowler. Reaction in England was also hostile, ahead of Australia's forthcoming tour in the English summer of 1964. Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie wrote in the News of the World: "there is no room in cricket for throwers. Let us hope that...the Australian selectors realise this...otherwise the throwing war will be waged in earnest".
The Brisbane Test was dubbed "Meckiff's Test" by the Australian media; speculation abounded that the bowler was being chosen so he could be no-balled as a public relations effort to promote Australia's anti-throwing credentials. Keith Miller described the left-armer's selection as having "peppered this once drab-looking series into a curry hot-pot, with all the excitement and trimmings of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller". Miller further predicted that the umpires Egar and Lou Rowan would be having sleepless nights and predicted that the selectors would be biting their fingernails, adding that he hoped Meckiff was not being used as a scapegoat for the anti-throwing movement. Former Test leg spinner Bill O'Reilly—a correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald—described the selection as "one of the most fantastic somersaults in cricket policies in our time". As a close friend of the fast bowler, umpire Egar was in a difficult situation; the duo had won a pairs lawn bowling competition just a few months earlier. Nevertheless, the paceman and umpire socialised freely at the pre-match function.
### Incident
In the Test match, which began on 6 December 1963, Australia batted first; Meckiff contributed seven runs before being bowled by Peter Pollock. On the second day, after the Australian innings ended on 435, South Africa began to bat just after the luncheon interval. Bowling from the Stanley Street End, Graham McKenzie conceded 13 runs from the first over. Meckiff took the ball for the second over, bowling from the Vulture Street End to South African captain Trevor Goddard. At the same time, the South African manager Ken Viljoen set up a camera square of the wicket among the spectators and began filming the left-armer's bowling action. Meckiff was no-balled four times by Egar—who was standing at square leg—in what would be his only over of the match. After the Victorian bowled a gentle "loosener" as his first ball (and escaped a front-foot no-ball call), "the drama began". Egar ruled the second, third, fifth and ninth balls to be throws, and therefore illegitimate. After the third and fifth balls—the latter a full toss that Goddard hit for four—Benaud came over to consult his fast bowler. After the ninth ball, Meckiff and Benaud had another meeting, and the remaining three balls were deemed to be fair. In the meantime, the crowd roared loudly, heckling Egar and supporting the beleaguered bowler. Meckiff had previously been passed in five countries, having played Tests in four of these nations. Egar had cleared his bowling on five previous occasions, in three Shield matches and two Tests; the Victorian had bowled 119.1 overs in these games without incident. Egar later said "My only judgement was what I saw at the time". Benaud removed his paceman from the attack and Meckiff did not bowl again in the match, later saying he could not remember the over because he was absorbed by a feeling of complete deflation.
Meckiff conceded eight runs—Goddard's boundary and the four no-balls—from his solitary over and the tourists were eventually out for 346. Meckiff did not bat in the second innings of the weather-interrupted match; Australia declared at 1/144 before South Africa reached 1/13 when the match ended as a draw. After his single over, Meckiff's participation in the match was limited to his fielding, during which he caught Goddard from the bowling of Benaud in the South African first innings. He retired from all forms of cricket at the end of the game, but continued to proclaim that his bowling action was fair.
Barry Gibbs, the secretary of the Queensland Cricket Association and the manager of the Australian team, called the "humiliation" of Meckiff "without a doubt the most dramatic and emotion-charged" sporting moment he had witnessed. Egar's actions also ignited "one of the most emotional crowd displays in Test history", as the public backed the paceman. During Meckiff's over, the crowd expressed strong disapproval of the umpire's calls. Half an hour before the close of the day's play, proceedings were suspended for two minutes as the crowd repeatedly chanted "We want Meckiff". When play ended, spectators stormed the field and carried the fast bowler off the arena on their shoulders, hailing him as a hero. They returned to the field and formed two lanes, booing Egar from the ground. After this incident, the Queensland Police escorted the umpire to and from the match venue. The police presence at the ground was increased because of fears the crowd might attack Egar or Benaud. During the Second Test, which was held in Meckiff's home town of Melbourne, Egar was given a police escort throughout the match after receiving death threats.
### Reaction
During a rest day after the second day's play the media dissected the events of the previous afternoon. The majority of reporters believed all of Meckiff's deliveries had been bowled with an identical action. Louis Duffus of the Johannesburg Star expressed "sympathy for Meckiff as well as admiration for Egar." The South African writer Charles Fortune said that Meckiff's action was "not according to the laws of cricket" although he would not call the Australian bowler a "chucker". England captain Dexter implicitly accused Meckiff of throwing, saying: "One courageous Australian umpire has brought it to a timely end".
Team manager Gibbs reported that at the end of the first day's play the Australian dressing room was stunned into silence. Egar asked Benaud for permission to enter, and after the Australian captain allowed him in, the umpire sat quietly for a period before speaking to some other players and then to Meckiff. The pair were close friends, and shook hands before putting their arms around one another's shoulders. The condemned bowler did not take Egar's judgment personally and did not have hard feelings about the incident. Egar claimed to be "the second most upset person in the world", and later added that he thought Meckiff's first ball was suspect. He said that he could have called more deliveries, but was worried whether the over would ever end.
When asked why he had not asked Meckiff to bowl at the other end to gauge the judgment of the other umpire, Lou Rowan, Benaud replied "over the years I have always accepted the umpire's decision". The Australian captain was criticised for being acquiescent, and one of his predecessors Lindsay Hassett believed Meckiff should have been used at reduced speed. Rowan later indicated his concurrence with Egar, writing in his book The Umpire's Story, "There is nothing I can now say that will alter the opinions already expressed that his [Meckiff's] delivery was unfair". For his part, Meckiff said: "the game is bigger than the individual" and he backed Benaud's decision because doing otherwise "could only have added fuel to the controversy".
Retired Test umpires Col Hoy and Les Townsend were watching at the ground when Meckiff was called. The day after the incident, both asserted that they would not have no-balled the paceman. Hoy said he had never had any problem with the bowler's action during matches in which he officiated. He described Meckiff's action as "slightly different" but attributed this to an accentuated wrist action used in an attempt to get more life out of dead pitches, rather than his elbow. Townsend watched the paceman through binoculars and deemed all of his 12 deliveries to be identical. Townsend regarded Meckiff's arm action as "peculiar" but felt he did not throw. Former Test spinners Ian Johnson and Doug Ring said Meckiff's action was fair.
After his retirement, Meckiff agreed to put his name to a series of ghost-written articles about the no-ball incident. He said that Egar's calls "hit him like a dagger in the back", but described the umpire as "a fair and just man who acted according to his convictions".
### Allegations of a conspiracy
Sections of the cricket community believed Meckiff was no-balled to prove that Australia was serious about dealing with the wave of complaints regarding suspected throwing in the 1950s and 1960s. Leading cricket historian David Frith wrote: "Meckiff was a popular Australian, and won much sympathy among those who believed him innocent or to have been victimised in a 'clean-up campaign'." A dinner hosted by Don Bradman at his Adelaide home in January 1963 for visiting state captains was later cited to suggest that Meckiff may have been a sacrificial offering. At the dinner, attended by Bill Lawry of Victoria, Barry Shepherd, Ken Mackay and Benaud, Bradman showed frame-by-frame slow motion film of Meckiff and other suspect Australian bowlers, which purportedly depicted incriminating actions. This indicated Bradman's doubts over Meckiff's legitimacy, yet Bradman was one of the selectors who agreed to the bowler's inclusion in the Brisbane Test team.
Many members of the Australian media alleged a conspiracy against Meckiff. Ian McDonald of Melbourne's Sporting Globe said the bowler's action had not changed in the previous eight years and stated: "the whole affair smacks of a set-up". Sydney's Mirror labelled the paceman "the most obvious fall-guy in Australian cricket history". On the third morning of the match, former first-class cricketer Percy Beames, writing for Melbourne's The Age, claimed Meckiff had been used as a "sacrificial goat" and called for the selectors' resignation. Keith Miller wrote a column calling for Bradman's and Jack Ryder's removal from the selection panel, noting that they had watched Meckiff's performance against Western Australia which prompted his Test selection. Miller felt that if the selectors deemed the bowler illegitimate, then they should not have allowed him to be "executed" by the umpires. Jack Pollard said: "there is little doubt Meckiff was sacrificed to end the long-running controversy and the way it was done irked many cricket-lovers." Cricketer-turned-journalist Dick Whitington asserted that Benaud was aware his fast bowler had been set up, claiming that the Australian captain knew of Bradman's views on Meckiff's action. Whitington further cited the fact that Egar and Bradman had travelled from Adelaide to the Brisbane Test together as evidence of a plot. Others saw Bradman's tea-time conversation with Benaud after the no-balling as proof of a conspiracy. Benaud repudiated allegations claiming he was involved in a set-up.
Former Australian captain Hassett hinted at a conspiracy when he stated that, as the selectors must have considered Meckiff to be legitimate, then
> If the selectors are right, Egar is wrong, and if he is incapable of interpreting the laws correctly, he should not stand in first-class cricket. On the other hand if the selectors as a body threw Meckiff into this arena merely to be tested by the opinion of a single umpire, they are very much guilty of passing the buck, and of exposing both the bowler and the umpire to extreme embarrassment.
The records of the Australian Board of Control attest to board member Clem Jones's protestations against Meckiff's inclusion when the selectors' proposed team list was submitted for approval. Jones cited the bowler's questionable action but the Chairman Ewart Macmillan rejected his objection as unconstitutional. Two other board members attempted to overrule the chairman, but their motion was defeated.
More than 40 years after the Meckiff incident, Jones was sure the bowler's fate had been predetermined. He said "They'd decided to do it a week before the game, so the poor bloke had no hope...I was chairman of the umpires selection committee." Jones remained convinced of Bradman's intention to have Meckiff called for throwing, something Bradman flatly denied. Gibbs remains suspicious of the motives for selecting Meckiff. He pointed out that although the pitch was conducive to spin bowling, Australia chose five specialist batsmen, two spinners and three fast bowlers. Gibbs speculated that the selection of an extra fast bowler—the most common strategy is to use four bowlers and six batsmen—instead of another batsman betrayed fears that Meckiff would be unable to complete the match. Alan Connolly remained adamant that his teammate's action was legitimate and implied a conspiracy, saying "I wasn't amazed [by Egar's call]...There was a good reason for that which I can't disclose and won't disclose." Tom Veivers, who made his Test debut for Australia in Meckiff's last match, hinted at the same. He recalled Rowan's words at the pre-match function: "It's going to be a very interesting game".
## Outside cricket
After finishing high school, Meckiff worked as a hardware salesman and lived in Mentone until he married and moved to Beaumaris. The couple had a son. After his retirement, the former paceman worked in advertising, and as a cricket commentator. As of 2001, he was a senior executive with Boyer Sports Media and frequently worked with cricket administrators. However, he refused to play the sport—even at social level—after the incident in Brisbane.
Meckiff played Australian rules football for Mentone in the Federal League, helping them win the premiership in 1956. He received offers to play in the Victorian Football League, the top-tier competition at the time, but declined contracts so he could pursue his cricket career. Meckiff also played golf in pennant competition and captained the Victoria Golf Club.
In retirement, the throwing issue continued to dog the former paceman. Former Australian captain and teammate Simpson wrote a book titled Captain's Story in which he assailed various cricketers—Meckiff chief among them—for throwing. Meckiff sued for libel in a five-year case, which ended with an out-of-court settlement and apology from Simpson. Despite this, Meckiff has continued to socialise with people involved in his last Test, including Simpson, Egar, Gibbs, Rowan and Peter van der Merwe, South Africa's vice-captain. He says that he never brings up the topic of the no-ball with them. Victorian and Test teammate Lawry rated Meckiff "along with Graham McKenzie, Brian Booth, Peter Burge and one or two others as really nature's gentlemen" and said his exit was "one of the saddest [days] of [Lawry's] life". Lawry credited his fellow Victorian for being dignified despite the torment and said the bowler was a "pretty fair example of the old expression that good guys run last". Connolly said "'Meckie' was one of the nicest guys. It was to his great credit that he wasn't soured by the whole incident."
## See also
- List of international cricketers called for throwing
- List of cricketers called for throwing in top-class cricket matches in Australia |
3,454,180 | Hurricane Charley (1986) | 1,165,454,724 | Category 1 Atlantic hurricane | [
"1986 Atlantic hurricane season",
"1986 disasters in the United Kingdom",
"1986 in Europe",
"1986 in North Carolina",
"1986 meteorology",
"1986 natural disasters in the United States",
"August 1986 events in Europe",
"August 1986 events in the United States",
"Category 1 Atlantic hurricanes",
"Hurricanes in Europe",
"Hurricanes in North Carolina",
"Tropical cyclones in 1986"
]
| Hurricane Charley was the second hurricane to threaten the East Coast of the United States within a year's timeframe, after Hurricane Gloria of 1985. The third tropical storm and second hurricane of the season, Charley formed as a subtropical low on August 13 along the Florida panhandle. After moving off the coast of South Carolina, the system transitioned into a tropical cyclone and intensified into a tropical storm on August 15. Charley later attained hurricane status before moving across eastern North Carolina. It gradually weakened over the north Atlantic Ocean before transitioning into an extratropical cyclone on August 20. Charley's remnants remained identifiable for over a week, until after crossing Ireland and Great Britain they dissipated on August 30.
The storm brought light to moderate precipitation to much of the southeastern United States. In Georgia and South Carolina, the rainfall alleviated drought conditions. In North Carolina, where the hurricane made landfall, tidal flooding and downed trees were the primary impacts. The storm brought high winds to southeastern Virginia, where 110,000 people were left without power. Minor damage extended along the Atlantic coastline northward through Massachusetts. One traffic fatality was reported each in North Carolina and Virginia. Three people in Maryland died due to a plane crash related to the storm. Throughout the United States, Hurricane Charley caused an estimated US\$15 million in damage (). One person drowned in Newfoundland.
As an extratropical cyclone, Charley brought heavy rainfall and strong winds to Ireland and the United Kingdom, causing at least 11 deaths. In Ireland, the rainfall set records for 24-hour totals, including an accumulation of more than 7.8 in (200 mm) which set the record for the greatest daily rainfall total in the country. In the country, the rainfall caused widespread flooding, causing two rivers to exceed their banks. In the Dublin area, 451 buildings were flooded, some up to a depth of 8 ft (2.4 m). In the United Kingdom, the storm flooded rivers and brought down trees and power lines.
## Meteorological history
Hurricane Charley originated in an area of convection associated with a trough of low pressure first observed on August 11 across southern Florida and the southeastern Gulf of Mexico. The area of disturbed weather spread northward, spawning a broad low-pressure area on August 12. Moving northward over the Florida panhandle, the low became slightly better organized as it merged with a weakening weather front. On August 13, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) identified the system as a developing subtropical low near Apalachee Bay along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The agency defines a subtropical cyclone as "a non-frontal low pressure system that has characteristics of both tropical and extratropical cyclones."
After becoming a subtropical low, the cyclone tracked northeastward through Georgia, before turning eastward and exiting South Carolina into the Atlantic Ocean. Its track was influenced by the western periphery of the subtropical ridge, which is a large belt of high pressure. While moving over land, the cyclone had become better organized, and on August 15 it transitioned into a tropical depression about 70 miles (110 kilometres) southeast of Charleston, South Carolina. The depression strengthened further, and based on reports from the Hurricane Hunters, it intensified into Tropical Storm Charley late on August 15. With a weak ridge to its north, the storm initially tracked slowly eastward just off the coast of North Carolina, before turning to the north-northeast as a trough approached from the west. A broad cyclone, Charley gradually intensified, and a single ring of convection around the center developed into an eyewall. At 1200 UTC on August 17, it attained hurricane status about 13 mi (21 km) off the North Carolina coastline. About two hours later, Hurricane Charley made landfall near Cape Lookout, and it subsequently moved across the eastern portion of the state.
Hurricane Charley did not weaken while moving over land; instead, it intensified, attaining peak winds of 80 mph (130 km/h) after emerging into the Atlantic Ocean near the North Carolina–Virginia border. Within 12 hours of reaching peak intensity, however, the hurricane weakened to tropical storm status. The approaching trough, which had previously caused Charley to turn northward, forced the hurricane to accelerate northeastward and later eastward, bringing the storm about 80 mi (130 km) southeast of Nantucket, Massachusetts on August 19. As the trough was not very strong, Charley slowly underwent the process of extratropical transition, unlike other tropical cyclones that complete the transition much quicker with a stronger trough. As a result, the storm maintained hybrid, or subtropical characteristics for several days. By August 21, Charley completed the transition south of Atlantic Canada.
After becoming extratropical, Charley re-intensified under baroclinic instability. The resulting storm was a very large and fairly strong gale that gradually moved across the northern Atlantic Ocean. As an extratropical cyclone, Charley attained an atmospheric pressure of 980 mbar, which was lower than its pressure as a tropical cyclone. On August 24, it spawned a separate extratropical cyclone, which initially moved northeastward before turning and dissipating near Spain. The remnants of Charley accelerated as it approached the British Isles, and after passing south of Ireland it moved across Great Britain on August 27. While in the North Sea, the cyclone weakened as it executed a counter-clockwise loop, and on August 30 the remnants of Charley dissipated near Denmark as a new circulation developed to its southwest.
## North American impact
### Southeastern United States
As the hurricane paralleled the east coast of the United States and its exact track and strength were uncertain, there were several tropical cyclone warnings and watches issued in association with Charley; in a post-storm analysis, the NHC described "the complication of the warning process for this type of situation." Initially, the storm was not expected to affect land. In its first advisory on Charley, the NHC issued a 22% probability of Charley passing within 65 mi (105 km) of land; specifically, it was predicted to be closest to the South Carolina coastline. About 16 hours prior to the hurricane's landfall, the NHC issued a gale warning between Bogue Inlet and Oregon Inlet along the North Carolina coastline, including the Pamlico Sound. When the storm's intensification and track close to land became apparent, the gale warning was replaced by a hurricane warning, and additional gale warnings were issued westward to Topsail Beach and northward to Virginia Beach, Virginia. Up to 10,000 people evacuated the Outer Banks, which resulted in traffic jams on roadways heading out of the area. Ocracoke island was partially evacuated by six ferries, although many people were unable to leave and instead rode out the storm on the island.
Hurricane Charley affected at least ten U.S. states, resulting in five total deaths and \$15 million in damage (1986 USD). The precursor disturbance to Charley brought rainfall to much of Florida, including a total of 8.61 inches (219 millimetres) in Steinhatchee; that rainfall maxima was the greatest total associated with Charley within the United States. The system also produced light to moderate rainfall across Georgia and South Carolina, which proved beneficial as the region was in a major drought. However, its heaviest rainfall remained over open waters.
Moving across eastern North Carolina as a minimal hurricane, Charley produced locally strong wind gusts, peaking at 80 mph (130 km/h) in Frisco. However, no stations recorded sustained winds of hurricane force. The cyclone dropped rainfall along the coastline, amounting to over 7 in (180 mm) near Manteo. As it moved ashore, the storm generated high tides reaching 5.78 feet (1.76 metres) at the Duck Coe fishing pier. Near Cape Hatteras, a woman drowned while attempting to drive through a flooded roadway. The hurricane's passage left roads and bridges flooded with up to 3 ft (0.91 m) of water, including a portion of North Carolina Highway 12 on Hatteras Island. Across the Outer Banks, the storm left about 8,000 people without power, but damage was minimal and limited to shingles and roofs. Impact in the state was primarily caused by tidal flooding and downed trees, and a preliminary damage estimate placed total monetary losses at \$400,000 (1986 USD).
### Northeastern United States and Canada
As Charley moved across eastern North Carolina, hurricane warnings were extended northward, first to Virginia Beach; they were later extended to Cape Charles, then to the Maryland/Delaware border, and ultimately as far north as Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Prior to its arrival, the storm resulted in the closure of Norfolk International Airport, and more than 9,000 people evacuated the coastline for emergency shelters. Tropical storm force winds spread across southeastern Virginia, with wind gusts reaching 82 mph (132 km/h) on Cape Charles. Offshore, a station on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge–Tunnel recorded sustained winds of 97 mph (156 km/h) with gusts to 104 mph (167 km/h). After the gust, the bridge-tunnel was closed overnight. The winds downed many trees, and in Norfolk, a motorist died after crashing into a downed tree. In Virginia Beach, the winds blew off the roof of a hotel and destroyed two homes under construction. Across the area, the storm left about 110,000 customers without power. Rainfall in Virginia was fairly light, including a 24-hour total of just over 1 in (25 mm) in Norfolk. Strong waves destroyed 250 ft (76 m) of Harrison's Pier in Norfolk. A preliminary damage estimate for the area was \$1 million (1986 USD).
Thunderstorms to the north of the circulation brought moderate rainfall to Maryland; the same thunderstorms caused a light aircraft to crash near Baltimore, resulting in the death of its three occupants. Rainfall spread across much of Maryland, peaking at 4.24 in (108 mm) in Hollywood. Tropical storm force winds extended into Delaware, and a peak wind gust of 75 mph (121 km/h) was reported in Rehoboth Beach. Only isolated and minor damage occurred in Maryland and Delaware. In New Jersey, a hurricane force wind gust was reported on Long Beach Island, and 1.3 in (33 mm) of rainfall was reported in Atlantic City. In the southernmost counties in the state, the winds left about 15,000 electrical customers without power. In New York, after Hurricane Gloria in the previous season left thousands of customers without power, the Long Island Lighting Co. arranged for additional workers for potential power restoration. Light rainfall and gusty winds extended into the New York metropolitan area.
Officials issued gale warnings through Chatham, Massachusetts, including Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. As Charley passed south of Massachusetts, it produced precipitation in the southeastern portion of the state. Nantucket reported 3.20 in (81 mm) of rainfall, and Chatham recorded 2.68 in (68 mm) in a 24-hour period. Nantucket also reported sustained winds of 60 mph (97 km/h), and as the storm passed the island it produced a storm tide of 3.5–4 ft (1.1–1.2 m). High tides and heavy rain caused significant street flooding on Nantucket. Several boats were damaged, others were beached, and one large boat sunk in Nantucket Harbor. Damage on the island \$75,000 (1986 USD).
Before becoming extratropical, the storm brushed the coast of Nova Scotia with wind gusts of 65 mph (105 km/h) and moderate precipitation totaling 4.57 in (116 mm). Strong waves damaged several boats along the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, killing one person in St. John's, Newfoundland.
## European impact
After Charley became extratropical, the United Kingdom Met Office issued weather alerts prior to the arrival of the storm, noting the potential for "extremely heavy rainfall [which would] cause local flooding." In the United Kingdom, the threat of the storm resulted in the cancellation of ferry service between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, as well between Great Britain and France. The extratropical remnants of Hurricane Charley moved across Ireland and United Kingdom with winds of 50 mph (80 km/h). The storm's rainfall significantly affected most of both countries, with the exception of Scotland in the United Kingdom. In the English Channel, waves up to 26 ft (7.9 m) in height breached and flooded a ship; the 31 passengers on board were rescued by helicopters and other ships. Throughout the region, the storm resulted in at least 11 deaths.
### Ireland
First passing just south of Ireland on August 25, the storm dropped heavy rainfall and brought strong winds, significantly affecting the coastline where winds of 65 mph (105 km/h) were reported. Rainfall spread across the entire country, peaking at 11.0 in (280 mm) in Kippure mountain. There, a station reported more than 7.8 in (200 mm) in 24 hours, which set the record for the greatest daily rainfall total in the country. Several 24-hour rainfall records were set during the storm, and new six-hour and twelve-hour record totals at Casement Aerodrome were set with 1.63 and 2.61 in (41 and 66 mm), respectively. The rainfall left some areas flooded, particularly in the Dublin area where 451 buildings were inundated, some up to a depth of 8 ft (2.4 m). Preliminarily, it was described as the worst flooding in the history of Dublin. Two small rivers, the Dodder and the Dargle, overflowed their banks due to the rainfall. The River Dargle overflowed in Bray, flooding some areas up to a depth of 5 ft (1.5 m) and forcing about 1,000 people to evacuate; several special-needs people were evacuated by boat. The flood, which originated about one mile north of the town, damaged over 500 houses and brought down several trees. Despite local politicians promising for flood protection after the flood, the town remained vulnerable to such flooding at least 20 years after the storm. The River Dodder, which also overflowed, nearly exceeded the reservoir dam in Bohernabreena in South Dublin (flooding on the Dodder has been a periodic problem for centuries). Additional spillways were later added in the event of another similar flood. In the Wicklow Mountains, the rainfall resulted in significant runoff, which caused erosion along the Cloghoge River. The passage of the storm left heavy crop damage, part of a larger period of poor agriculture in the country. Throughout the country, the storm caused at least thirteen deaths, four of which were drownings in flooded rivers; one death was caused by a heart attack while being evacuated from flooding. Two months after the storm struck, the government of Ireland allocated IR£6,449,000 (1986 IEP, \$8,650,000 1986 USD) to repair roads and bridges damaged by the weather system.
### United Kingdom
The storm also affected the United Kingdom as it moved across the southern portion of the country. In Wales, Charley produced record-breaking daily rainfall, which surpassed 4 inches (100 mm) in Dyfed. Some locations received hundred-year rainfall. The storm struck the area during the Late Summer Bank Holiday, creating unfavorable conditions for driving and resulting in several accidents. Heavy rainfall flooded rivers, which swept away several people. This prompted officials to deploy boats and helicopters to assist in rescues, although at least three deaths were reported due to drowning in the rivers. Severe flooding was reported in Cumbria and Gloucestershire. The storm also left roads blocked by fallen trees and power lines. At the start of the storm, the inaugural Birmingham Super Prix motorsport race was just getting underway but poor visibility from precipitation contributed to an accident which temporarily called halt to proceedings. In Whitland, Wales, local soldiers assisted rescuing people, and later contributed to the cleanup of the town. Throughout the country, five people were missing after the storm, all of whom are presumed to have drowned; an additional death was confirmed in Newry, Northern Ireland.
## See also
- List of North Carolina hurricanes (1980–1999)
- Other tropical cyclones named Charley
- Tropical cyclone effects in Europe
- Great Storm of 1987 |
918,901 | By the Way | 1,168,132,809 | null | [
"2002 albums",
"Albums produced by Rick Rubin",
"Red Hot Chili Peppers albums",
"Warner Records albums"
]
| By the Way is the eighth studio album by the American rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, released July 9, 2002, on Warner Bros. Records. It sold more than 286,000 copies in its first week, and peaked at number two on the Billboard 200. Singles included "By the Way", "The Zephyr Song", "Can't Stop", and "Universally Speaking". Additionally, "Dosed" was released as a promotional single in the US and Canada. The lyrical subject matter vocalist Anthony Kiedis addresses in By the Way is a divergence from previous Red Hot Chili Peppers albums, with Kiedis taking a more candid and reflective approach to his lyrics.
By the Way was lauded by critics as a departure from the band's previous styles, and is recognized for the melodic and subdued emotions given by the Chili Peppers. Guitarist John Frusciante is credited with writing most of the album's melodies, backing vocal arrangements, bass lines, and guitar progressions, therefore changing the direction of the recording dramatically: "his warm, understated guitar work and his doo-wop style vocal harmonies are king this time around." By the Way contained very little of the signature funk-metal fusion the band had become known for playing. Frusciante has stated that writing "By the Way [was] one of the happiest times in my life." The album went on to sell more than eight million copies worldwide.
## Background
The writing and formation of By the Way began immediately following the culmination of Californication's world tour, in the spring of 2001. As with Californication, much of the creation took place in the band members' homes and other practice locations, such as a recording studio stage. Kiedis recalled of the situation: "We started finding some magic and some music and some riffs and some rhythms and some jams and some grooves, and we added to it and subtracted from it and pushed it around and put melodies to it." Frusciante and Kiedis would collaborate for days straight, discussing guitar progressions and sharing lyrics. For Kiedis, "writing By the Way ... was a whole different experience from Californication. John was back to himself and brimming with confidence." Prior to recording By the Way, the Red Hot Chili Peppers decided that they would again have Rick Rubin produce the album. Rubin had, in the past, granted the band creative freedom on their recording material; this was something they thought essential for the album to be unique, and could only occur with his return.
## Writing and composition
According to the 2010 book, An Oral/Visual History by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Frusciante had originally intended for the album to be very different from how it was eventually completed. Frusciante wanted an album of two different types of songs: songs that were more "English-sounding" and melodic, and songs that were more influenced by punk rock. Frusciante's punk inspiration came from listening to music by The Damned and Discharge, among others. Rick Rubin was not familiar with the latter bands and sound and thought that the melodic songs were original and more exciting, causing the band to focus mostly on the melodic material. However, one punk rock-influenced song was recorded during these sessions, "Body of Water", but did not make the final cut and was instead included on "The Zephyr Song" single. Many of the more melodic inspired songs came from Frusciante listening to The Beach Boys and The Beatles, along with doo-wop groups and their harmonies. Frusciante said he listened to Emerson, Lake & Palmer every day during the recording of By the Way. These new styles as well as Frusciante being especially prolific during this era came to alienate bassist Flea, who had wanted the band to return to its earlier funk-influenced sound. Frusciante felt the band had already thoroughly explored funk and was more interested in creating something new for the band. According to Kiedis, Flea felt his voice wasn't being heard, and there was a point where he considered leaving the band. While speaking to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Frusciante mentioned that he listened to guitarists such as John McGeoch for his work on the Magazine's and Siouxsie and the Banshees' albums including Juju, Adrian Fisher of Sparks for Kimono My House, Johnny Marr of the Smiths, Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column and Keith Levene of Public Image Limited. He also credits XTC singer/guitarist Andy Partridge in the 2002 issue of Total Guitar for being an influence on his guitar work for the album.
The album's guitar and bass ensemble was primarily dictated by Frusciante, rather than a collaborative effort between him and Flea. Therefore, the record took a different direction than any previous Chili Peppers' album. Frusciante sought to create an emotional and poignant soundscape throughout the recording. Drawing influences from musicians such as Reilly and McGeoch, Frusciante made use of textured and multilayered guitar progressions on By the Way, using tools such as the mellotron and various effects pedals throughout. In 2006, while promoting the band's subsequent studio album, Stadium Arcadium, Flea reflected on the composition of By the Way, stating: "John went to this whole level of artistry. But he made me feel like I had nothing to offer, like I knew shit."
Kiedis was lyrically influenced by love, his girlfriend, and the emotions expressed when one fell in love. Songs written for the album such as "By the Way", "I Could Die for You", "Dosed", "Warm Tape" and non-album tracks "Someone" and "Body of Water" all digressed into the many sides of love. Drugs also played an integral part in Kiedis' writings, as he'd only been sober since December 2000. Tracks like "This Is the Place" and "Don't Forget Me" expressed his intense relationship with narcotics, the harmful physical and emotional effects they caused him, and the ever-present danger of relapse (as Kiedis has suffered chronic relapse into drug addiction). He referenced the late Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak, who died of a heroin overdose in 1988, in "This Is the Place", and describes how he was so intoxicated at the time that he missed Slovak's funeral: "On the day my best friend died/I could not get my copper clean." "Venice Queen" was written as an ode to Kiedis' drug rehabilitation therapist, Gloria Scott, who died shortly after he purchased her a home on California's Venice Beach. It mourned her death as a painful loss: "We all want to tell her/Tell her that we love her/Venice gets a queen/Best I've ever seen."
By the Way diverged from the band's previous styles, containing a few funk-driven songs. "Can't Stop" and the title track were the only songs that revisited their once trademark style of short, rapped verses. "Throw Away Your Television", while not having any rapidly sung lyrics, also contained a funk-oriented bass line, though hinted at experimental rock due to the heavy use of distortion throughout the verse and chorus. Other "experimental" tracks include the melodica-based "On Mercury". "Cabron", the only track to be played entirely acoustic, has distinctive Latin influences. Frusciante has stated that the guitar parts for Cabron were influenced by Martin Barre's playing on Jethro Tull's album Aqualung, with Anthony and Chad's parts contributing to the Latin, or Mexican, influence. "Tear" and "Warm Tape" were keyboard based more so than guitar or bass, the latter being completely written on the instrument. Technically, By the Way saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers employing several devices to distort and alter guitar and vocal sequences. "Don't Forget Me" utilizes a mellotron, wah pedal, and echoing techniques to convey an emotive atmosphere, while Frusciante uses a Big Muff for the solos on "Minor Thing".
### Outtakes
Many outtakes from the album have been released or exist. "Time" and a cover version of Dion and the Belmonts' "Teenager in Love" were released on the single "By the Way". "Body of Water", "Out of Range", "Someone" and "Rivers of Avalon" were all released on the single "The Zephyr Song". "Slowly Deeply", which was featured on the single "Universally Speaking", is an outtake from the Californication sessions. The single for "Can't Stop" also features an alternate mix of the song with higher harmonies and a clearer bass line. A cover version of the Ramones' "Havana Affair" was also recorded and later released in 2003 on We're a Happy Family: A Tribute to Ramones. In 2003, the band re-entered the studio to work on their Greatest Hits album. "Fortune Faded", a song first performed live in 2001, was originally recorded and intended for By the Way however this version of the song was never officially released. The song was re-recorded with a different chorus and was released as a single to promote the Greatest Hits album and featured the B-side, "Eskimo", another By the Way outtake. The Greatest Hits sessions also produced enough songs for a new album, many of which have gone unreleased though some of the rough mixes have leaked to the internet. "Bicycle Song" and "Runaway" were officially released from those sessions in 2006 as bonus tracks on the iTunes release of By the Way even though neither song was originally recorded for the album.
In August 2014, unreleased tracks from the album's recording sessions were leaked to the Internet. Many of the album's released songs and outtakes are in their earliest forms and feature improvised lyrics by Kiedis. The leak included three songs never heard before, including "Goldmine", "Fall Water" and "Rock & Roll", along with the original version of "Fortune Faded". Many of the songs on By the Way also had different working titles (which prior to release were also mentioned in various interviews): Soul Train ("By the Way"), Coltraine ("The Zephyr Song"), Choppy Funk ("Can't Stop"), I Would Die, The Most Beautiful Chords Ever ("I Could Die For You"), Wolverine, Drone ("This is the Place"), A Minor One ("Minor Thing" Television, Trash Your Television and Throw Away ("Throw Away Your Television"), Don't Forget ("Don't Forget Me"), Lemon Trees on Mercury ("On Mercury"), The Loop Song ("Dosed"), Epic, Gloria's Epic ("Venice Queen") and New Wave ("Rivers Of Avalon"). To date, "Strumming in D on J", a song assumed to be an instrumental jam and that Frusciante mentioned during pre-album release interviews, has never been released. "Upseen", another instrumental jam which was said to be 10 minutes long, has also never been released however it is speculated that this song could also have been another title for "Strumming in D on J".
## Artwork
All paintings, photography and art direction is credited to Julian Schnabel and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The woman featured on the cover of By the Way is Stella Schnabel, Julian Schnabel's daughter and Frusciante's then-girlfriend. Regarding the artwork, Frusciante noted: "My girlfriend's father offered to do the album art, so we sent him rough mixes of eight songs, and he just got the vibe of the album from that. He said that he wouldn't be offended if we didn't like it, but we loved what he did. He's also given us great covers for all the singles. He's a true artist."
Several pages of the album's booklet, and single for "By the Way" contain paintings of a goat head. A somewhat blurry, black and white photograph of the band in a desolate field, and each band member individually, is also present.
The majority of the booklet's artwork are various scenes of replica grass and plants, stars and indistinguishable objects, which appears to be a miniature pole, placed in dirt. Single covers for "The Zephyr Song" and "Can't Stop" both feature this same background, although angled slightly differently. The lyrics for By the Way are placed on top of the landscape, hand written by Kiedis in pink lettering.
## Release
Feeling extremely confident in the album, the Red Hot Chili Peppers issued the statement, "Greetings from the dimensions of invisible shapes and colors. The music on this record has expanded our space and made us bigger. Thank you for listening and being exactly where and who you are." Drummer Chad Smith commented that By the Way is "very honest, raw, emotional music. It's a very dynamic, rich and lush album. Probably the best collection of Chili Peppers songs we've ever put out." Warner Bros. Records promoted the album heavily in the months prior to the record's 2002 release, especially targeting the online market in order to steer customers away from illegal downloads. The record label implemented a campaign they colloquially titled "A Song a Day". This program, initiated on June 21, was aimed at leaking one song per day until the album was released. Over 150 radio stations participated in broadcasting the band's new daily material, along with MTV, VH1, and digital music retailers like iTunes, as well as cell phone companies. AOL featured the Chili Peppers as their "Artist of the Month" in June, streaming interviews and live performances of the band free of charge; they also sold an MP3 of "By the Way", the record's first single, for ninety-nine cents and raffled off tickets that gave fans a chance to see the band in Japan in November.
By the Way was released on CD and LP on July 9, 2002, under the Warner Bros. label, selling 281,948 copies in the United States in its first week and 1.8 million worldwide. It was certified gold just a few months later on October 26, 2002. Five singles were released from the album; of these, the title track was the most successful, peaking at No. 2 on the UK charts and No. 1 on the Billboard rock charts. Although the album sold fewer copies than Californication, By the Way managed to peak at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, one spot higher than Californication. Around the world, the album debuted at number one in the UK, Switzerland, New Zealand, Austria, and Sweden; and number two in France. In March 2006, all Red Hot Chili Peppers' albums were made available for download from the iTunes Music Store and other online retailers. The iTunes release contained two bonus tracks that didn't appear on the original album.
## Critical reception
The album received a positive reaction from critics, who praised By the Way for its melodic, multilayer and textured styles. AllMusic's Zac Johnson said that the album was "sophisticated ... the Peppers have not sacrificed any of their trademark energy or passions for life, universal love, and (of course) lust". Rolling Stone called the album "insanely melodic" and a "near-perfect balance of gutter grime and high-art aspiration", comparing it to other works, such as the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds. Mojo applauded the recording, and considered it to be "the strongest Chili's album since 1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magik". Giving the album 5 stars out of 5, Q called By the Way "A fantastic record; full of wonder." Kimberly Mack of PopMatters commented on how the album "... showcases a more sophisticated, lush sound that only today's Peppers could have conceived", and that "Anthony Kiedis' lyrics are more personal than ever." Frusciante was, in his eyes, "a musical talent to be reckoned with and is the undeniable X factor in the Red Hot Chili Peppers' sound."
However, the praise was balanced by certain critics. Blender considered By the Way to be an indistinguishable sequel to Californication, calling it "Californication 2". It further criticized the Chili Peppers for not varying their style and remaining extremely similar in sound. Jaime Lowe of The Village Voice panned Kiedis' lyrics as "absolutely baffling" and commented that "it's as if he picked up a rhyming dictionary and arbitrarily strung some phrases together." The newspaper's Robert Christgau was also critical of Kiedis' songwriting, writing that "it's not enough for Anthony Kiedis to get all mature—he's supposed to say something interesting about maturity." Entertainment Weekly praised By the Way for being well refined and a superb collaboration, but criticized the Chili Peppers for playing it safe and keeping the album's energy mild; for being "more fascinating for what it symbolizes than what it is."
AllMusic considered the song "By the Way" to combine "fiery Hollywood funk, gentle harmonies, a little bit of singing about girls, [and] a little bit of hanging out in the streets in the summertime." Rolling Stone commented on "how close this band has come to conjuring pure California sunshine" in "The Zephyr Song". "Midnight" was highly regarded by several sources. It was chosen as one of By the Way's "Allmusic Track Picks". Kimberly Mack of PopMatters considered it to have "hippie-friendly lyrics" and to "evoke images of tie-dyed T-shirts and AM radio." Mack also regarded "Venice Queen" as "a masterpiece ... Frusciante's backing vocals are hauntingly beautiful." In 2005, By the Way was ranked number 375 in Rock Hard magazine's book The 500 Greatest Rock & Metal Albums of All Time.
### Accolades
The information regarding accolades attributed to By the Way is adapted from AcclaimedMusic.net.
### Other accolades
## Tour
Flea decided that he would finish the album and then quit the band. He was still upset over disputes with Frusciante, who he thought was trying to take over the band. According to Smith, Flea and Frusciante eventually had a sit-down meeting with each other to air out their differences. Frusciante had no idea how Flea was feeling and had no intentions of taking over. Flea also credited practicing Vipassanā meditation along with Frusciante for helping the two repair their musical relationship. With their problems worked out, the band launched their promo tour to support the album on New York City's Ellis Island. Sponsored by the rock radio station K-Rock, the event was titled the "Pep Rally". The band performed eight songs from By the Way, as well as tracks from Californication and Blood Sugar Sex Magik in front of 900 contest winners. The New York Post declared the show "one of the top concerts of the year." The location was chosen in order to reinvigorate lower Manhattan after the September 11 attacks and all proceeds were donated to pertinent charity organizations. Immediately following this, the Red Hot Chili Peppers embarked on a world tour to support the album. Beginning in Europe, they also played at events such as the Fuji Rock Festival and Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in between. The band eventually culminated their Europe leg of the tour in February 2003, and commenced the United States leg on May 1. The Red Hot Chili Peppers played at Madison Square Garden in New York City on June 3, 2003, to a sold-out crowd and an enthusiastic response from critics. Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times reported that "on Tuesday night, the [Red Hot Chili Peppers] came to Madison Square Garden for an extraordinary two-hour performance ... On 'Don't Forget Me', [Flea] strummed chords, while Mr. Frusciante contributed a gorgeous guitar line that bubbled and hissed like some sort of chemical reaction." The US leg ended on June 21; the band took a small hiatus before performing at Slane Castle in Ireland on August 23, to a crowd of over 80,000. Live at Slane Castle, the result of the concert, would become the Chili Peppers' second live DVD, after Off the Map.
Following several Japanese and Australian performances, the Red Hot Chili Peppers planned three nights at London's Hyde Park. Over 240,000 tickets were sold within hours, with roughly 80,000 people attending each show on June 19, 20, and 25, respectively. It became the highest-grossing concert at a single venue in history, accumulating an estimated \$17 million gross revenue. Due to the success of the three shows, the band released their first live album, Red Hot Chili Peppers Live in Hyde Park, in Europe, Australia, Japan and New Zealand, excluding the United States. Later that year, the band played for the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
In 2006, Flea revealed that he once again considered leaving the band while touring in support of the album, stating that "throughout the By the Way tour I would play a show and then go and sit on the end of my bed staring into space." He planned to teach full-time at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, but ultimately decided to remain with the band. Flea later stated that "the most painful part of quitting, and the thing that stopped me, was the idea of telling Anthony."
## Track listing
## Personnel
Credits adapted from AllMusic.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Anthony Kiedis – lead vocals
- John Frusciante – guitar, backing vocals, piano, keyboards, modular synthesizer, Mellotron, melodica on "On Mercury", additional bass on "Don't Forget Me"
- Flea – bass, guitar on "Dosed", trumpet on "Tear"
- Chad Smith – drums, percussion, tambourine
Production
- Lindsay Chase – production coordination
- David Campbell – string arrangement
- Suzie Katayama – contractor and cello
- Joel Derouin – concertmaster
- Evan Wilson – viola
- Larry Corbett – cello
- Charlie Bisharat, Gerry Hilera, Peter Kent – violins
- Matt Funes – viola
- Ryan Hewitt – engineer
- Marc Mann – arranger
- Ethan Mates – recording engineer
- Vlado Meller – mastering
- Rick Rubin – production and engineering
- Jim Scott – mix engineer, recording engineer
- Jason Wormer – recording engineer
Design
- Julian Schnabel – art direction
- Red Hot Chili Peppers – art direction
## Charts
### Weekly charts
### Year-end charts
### Decade-end charts
## Certifications |
15,442,947 | Emery Molyneux | 1,171,952,596 | English globemaker (died 1598) | [
"1598 deaths",
"16th-century English mathematicians",
"16th-century births",
"16th-century cartographers",
"English cartographers",
"English inventors",
"Year of birth unknown"
]
| Emery Molyneux (/ˈɛməri ˈmɒlɪnoʊ/ EM-ər-ee MOL-in-oh; died June 1598) was an English Elizabethan maker of globes, mathematical instruments and ordnance. His terrestrial and celestial globes, first published in 1592, were the first to be made in England and the first to be made by an Englishman.
Molyneux was known as a mathematician and maker of mathematical instruments such as compasses and hourglasses. He became acquainted with many prominent men of the day, including the writer Richard Hakluyt and the mathematicians Robert Hues and Edward Wright. He also knew the explorers Thomas Cavendish, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and John Davis. Davis probably introduced Molyneux to his own patron, the London merchant William Sanderson, who largely financed the construction of the globes. When completed, the globes were presented to Elizabeth I. Larger globes were acquired by royalty, noblemen and academic institutions, while smaller ones were purchased as practical navigation aids for sailors and students. The globes were the first to be made in such a way that they were unaffected by the humidity at sea, and they came into general use on ships.
Molyneux emigrated to Amsterdam with his wife in 1596 or 1597. He succeeded in interesting the States-General, the parliament of the United Provinces, in a cannon he had invented, but he died suddenly in June 1598, apparently in poverty. The globe-making industry in England died with him.
Only six of his globes are believed still to be in existence. Three are in England, of which one pair consisting of a terrestrial and a celestial globe is owned by Middle Temple and displayed in its library, while a terrestrial globe is at Petworth House in Petworth, West Sussex.
## Globe-maker
### Construction
Emery Molyneux is regarded as the maker of the first terrestrial and celestial globes in England and as the first English globe-maker. Little is known about the man himself. Petruccio Ubaldini, an Italian calligraphist, illuminator and ambassador who was acquainted with him, said he was "of obscure and humble family background". It seems likely that he was the "Emery Molynox" who was presented to the Worshipful Company of Stationers as the apprentice of one William Cooke in October 1557. By the 1580s he had a workshop in Lambeth, on the south bank of the Thames, and enjoyed a reputation as a mathematician and maker of mathematical instruments. Richard Polter, in his book The Pathway to Perfect Sayling (1605), mentioned that Molyneux had been a skilful maker of compasses and hourglasses.
Through his trade, Molyneux was known to the explorers Thomas Cavendish, John Davis, Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, the writer Richard Hakluyt, and the mathematicians Robert Hues and Edward Wright. The construction of globes by Molyneux appears to have been suggested by Davis to his patron William Sanderson, a London merchant who has been described as "one of the most munificent and patriotic of merchant-princes of London in the days of Elizabeth I". Sanderson readily agreed to bear the manufacturing costs, and financed initial production of the globes with a capital investment of £1,000 (almost £160,000 as of 2007).
#### Terrestrial globes
In making his terrestrial globes, Molyneux examined ruttiers (instructions for directions at sea) and pilots (navigational handbooks). He is known to have given a ruttier for Brazil and the West Indies to Thomas Harriot in 1590. He also received advice and assistance from navigators and mathematicians. It is likely, for instance, that Sir Walter Raleigh advised him on a legend in Spanish about the Solomon Islands that appeared on the terrestrial globe. Raleigh came by the information from Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, a Galician explorer sent by King Philip II of Spain to fortify the Strait of Magellan after Francis Drake had passed through it. In 1584, the Spaniard was Raleigh's guest in London for a few weeks, after being captured by Raleigh on a journey to Europe.
Molyneux accompanied Francis Drake on his 1577–1580 circumnavigation of the world; as Ubaldini reported, "[h]e himself has been in those seas and on those coasts in the service of the same Drake". A legend in Latin on the terrestrial globe, explaining why Molyneux had left out the polar lands and corrected the distance across the Atlantic Ocean between The Lizard and Cape Race in Newfoundland, concluded:
> Quod equide[m] effeci tu[m] ex meis navigationibus primo, tum deinceps ex felici illa sub clariss. Fran. Drako ad Indos Occident, expeditione, in qua non-modo optimas quasqu[e] alioru[m] descriptiones, sed quidquid mea quantulacu[m]que, vel scie[n]ta vel experientia ad integru[m] hoc qui[n]quen[n]io pr[a]estare potuit, ad hujus operis perfectione[m] co[m]paravi ... [I have been able to do this both in the first place from my own voyages and secondly from that successful expedition to the West Indies under the most illustrious Francis Drake: in which expedition I have put together not only all the best delineations of others, but everything my own humble knowledge or experience has been able to furnish in the last five years to the perfecting of this work.]
On the terrestrial globe, tracks of the voyages of Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish around the world are marked by red and blue lines respectively. These lines were applied when the globe was first made. They are mentioned in a description of Molyneux's globes in Blundeville His Exercises (1594) by Thomas Blundeville, a country gentleman who was an enthusiastic student of astronomy and navigation. Thomas Cavendish appears to have helped Molyneux with his globes, and it is possible that Molyneux accompanied him on his 1587 voyage around the world, which returned to England on 9 September 1588. In 1889, Sir Clements Markham, an English explorer, author and geographer, pointed out that a Latin legend on the terrestrial globe, placed off the Patagonian coast, states: "Thomas Caundish 18 Dec. 1587 hæc terra sub nostris oculis primum obtulit sub latitud 47 cujus seu admodum salubris Incolæ maturi ex parte proceri sunt gigantes et vasti magnitudinis". However, Helen Wallis, former Map Curator of the British Library, observed in 1951 that this was unlikely, because Molyneux incorrectly plotted Cavendish's course in Maritime Southeast Asia. She suggested, however, that another legend on the globe may indicate that he sailed on at least one if not all of John Davis's voyages.
The mathematician and cartographer Edward Wright assisted Molyneux in plotting coastlines on the terrestrial globe and translated some of the legends into Latin. On 10 April 1591, the astrologer and physician Simon Forman visited Molyneux's workshop and taught him how to find longitude. It appears that after Molyneux had prepared the manuscript gores (the flat map segments attached to the globes), he had them printed by the celebrated Flemish engraver and cartographer Jodocus Hondius, who lived in London between 1584 and 1593 to escape religious difficulties in Flanders. This can be deduced from the phrase "Iodocus Hon: / dius Flan. sc. / 1592" that appears on the celestial globe along with Sanderson's coat of arms and a dedication to the Queen dated 1592. Molyneux's own name is recorded on the Middle Temple terrestrial globe in the phrase "Emerius Mulleneux Angl.' / sumptibus Gulielmi— / Sandersoni Londinē: / sis descripsit" ("Emery Molyneux of England, at the expense of William Sanderson of London, described this").
#### Celestial globes
Molyneux's celestial globe was virtually a copy of Gerardus Mercator's globe of 1551, which itself was based on a globe of 1537 by Gemma Frisius that Mercator had helped to construct. To the constellations featured on Mercator's globe, Molyneux added the Southern Cross and Southern Triangle, though somewhat to the west of their true positions. His source appears to have been Andrea Corsali's diagram of the Antarctic sky published in 1550.
Molyneux's globes were the first to be constructed in such a way that they were unaffected by humidity at sea. They were made of flour-paste, an unusual material for the time. Simon Forman remarked that Molyneux's moulding or casting process was "the only way to caste [anything] whatsoever in perfecte forme ... and yt is the perfectest and trewest waie of all wayes ... and this was the wai that Mullenax did use to cast flowere [flour] in the verie forme".
### Publication
In 1589, Richard Hakluyt announced the forthcoming publication of Molyneux's terrestrial globe at the end of the preface to The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation. Referring to the map that was inserted into the volume—a reproduction of the "Typus Orbis Terrarum" engraved by Franciscus Hogenberg for Abraham Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)—he wrote:
> I have contented myselfe with inserting into the worke one of the best generall mappes of the world onely, untill the comming out of a very large and most exact terrestriall globe, collected and reformed according to the newest, secretest, and latest discoveries, both Spanish, Portugall and English, composed by Mr. Emmerie Molineux of Lambeth, a rare Gentleman in his profession, being therin for divers yeeres, greatly supported by the purse and liberalitie of the worshipfull merchant M. William Sanderson.
Ubaldini reported Molyneux's progress in manufacturing the globes to the Duke of Milan. He was in attendance when Molyneux presented a pair of manuscript globes to Elizabeth I at Greenwich in July 1591. Ubaldini noted that "he gave her the globe to let her see at a glance how much of the world she could control by means of her naval forces". According to Wallis, the printed globes, which at 2 feet 1 inch (0.64 m) in diameter were then the largest ever made, were published after some delay in late 1592 or early 1593. Sanderson arranged entertainments at his home in Newington Butts to mark the presentation of these globes to the Queen. His son William later reported the Queen's words on accepting the terrestrial globe: "The whole earth, a present for a Prince ..."; and on accepting the celestial globe, she said: "Thou hast presented me with the Heavens also: God guide me, to Govern my part of the one, that I may enjoy but a mansion place in this other." Elizabeth I saw globes and armillary spheres as symbols of her empire and spiritual mission on earth. The royal coat of arms contained in Elizabeth I Privy Seal was emblazoned across North America on the terrestrial globe.
Several treatises were published to describe the Molyneux globes and provide guides on their use. Molyneux himself wrote a treatise, now lost, entitled The Globes Celestial and Terrestrial Set Forth in Plano, which Sanderson published in 1592. In the same year, Thomas Hood, a London-based mathematics lecturer who had written a 1590 work on the use of celestial globes, published The Vse of Both the Globes, Celestiall and Terrestriall. This was followed in 1594 by two works, one of which was Blundeville's book. The other, Tractatus de Globis et Eorum Usu (Treatise on Globes and their Use), was published by the mathematician Robert Hues. This work went into at least 13 printings and was translated from Latin into Dutch, English and French. In 1599, Edward Wright published Certaine Errors in Navigation, which included commentary on the use of the terrestrial and celestial globes developed by Molyneux.
According to Markham, "the appearance of the globes naturally created a great sensation, and much interest was taken in appliances which were equally useful to the student and to the practical navigator." The largest and most prestigious globes were priced at up to £20 each: these were purchased by royalty, noblemen and academic institutions. Among the purchasers were Thomas Bodley and the Warden of All Souls College, for their libraries in Oxford. William Sanderson presented the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge with a pair each. The public preacher Thomas Laughton made an inaugural gift of a Molyneux globe to the Shrewsbury School library. Smaller globes were also made, though no examples have survived. Sanderson is known to have presented one of these to Robert Cecil in 1595, together with Hues' "Latin booke that teacheth the use of my great globes". Intended as practical navigation aids, they cost as little as £2.
The globes provided navigators and students with methods for finding the place of the sun, latitude, course, distance, amplitudes, azimuths, time and declination. They proved such a boon to navigation that they came into widespread use on ships. In the dedication of his 1595 book The Seamans Secrets to the Lord High Admiral, Charles Howard, the 1st Earl of Nottingham, navigator John Davis spoke of "the mechanical practices drawn from the Arts of Mathematick, [in which] our Country doth yield men of principal excellency", and he noted "Mr Emery Mullenenx for the exquisite making of Globes bodies".
## Later life
In the 1590s, Molyneux sought Elizabeth I's patronage for the production of a cannon, which he described as his "new invention, of shot and artillery, to be used principally in naval warfare: protection of ports and harbours, a new shot to discharge a thousand musket shot; with wildfire not to be quenched". In March 1593, Molyneux was issued with a royal warrant. Two years later, the merchant Robert Parkes purchased coal, saltpetre, pitch, oils and waxes for him, possibly for the cannon. On 4 November 1596 the Privy Council urged the Lord Admiral "to speak to Molyneux, Bussy and the two Engelberts about their offensive engines" as part of measures to defend England's south coast. It appears the request was ignored. On 27 September 1594, the Queen granted Molyneux a gift of £200 and an annuity of £50. He chose to surrender the latter when, some time between March or April 1596 and 4 June 1597, he and his wife Anne emigrated to Amsterdam, Holland. Wallis has conjectured that he took with him the printing plates for the globes and sold them to Hondius, who had returned to Amsterdam in 1593.
Why Molyneux left England for Holland is unclear. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography suggests it was to be able to personally distribute his globes to European princes, since Amsterdam was then quickly establishing itself as the centre of globe- and map-making. However, this could not have been his intention if he had sold the globes' plates to Hondius. It is possible that he had decided to concentrate on manufacturing ordnance. On 26 January 1598, the States-General, the parliament of the United Provinces, showed interest in Molyneux's cannon and granted him a 12-year privilege on an invention. On 6 June he lodged a second application, but he died in Amsterdam almost immediately afterwards. His wife was granted administration of his estate in England later that month. It seems that Molyneux died in poverty, because Anne was granted a Dutch compassionate pension of 50 florins on 9 April 1599. Molyneux apparently had no other surviving family, and the English globe-making industry died with him. No other globes appear to have been manufactured in England until the appearance in the 1670s of globes by Robert Morden and William Berry, and by Joseph Moxon. However, over 40 years after Molyneux's death, William Sanderson the younger wrote that his globes were "yet in being, great and small ones, Celestiall and Terrestriall, in both our Universities and severall Libraries (here, and beyond Seas)".
## Influence
### Cartography
In the second volume of the greatly expanded version of his book The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation (1599), Hakluyt published what is known today as the Wright–Molyneux Map. Created by Edward Wright and based on Molyneux's terrestrial globe, it was the first map to use Wright's improvements on Mercator's projection.
Having, it is believed, purchased the plates of Molyneux's globes, Jodocus Hondius was granted a ten-year privilege on 1 April 1597 to make and publish a terrestrial globe. In that year, he produced in Amsterdam a Dutch translation of Hues' Tractatus de Globis. On 31 October 1598, despite a legal challenge by rival globe-maker Jacob van Langeren, Hondius obtained another privilege for ten years. He duly published globes in 1600 and 1601, and his sons Henricus and Jodocus published a pair in 1613. Hondius also published a world map in 1608 on the Mercator projection. Its reliance on the Molyneux globe is shown by a number of legends, names and outlines which must have been copied directly from it.
In his globes of 1612, van Langeren incorporated the improvements made by Hondius the Elder to Molyneux's globe. It is believed that the Hondius globes also spurred Willem Blaeu to start constructing his large globes in 1616, which were published in 1622. Molyneux's globes therefore may have indirectly influenced the evolution of Dutch globe-making.
### Culture
The appearance of Molyneux's globes had a significant influence on the culture of his time. In Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, written between 1592 and 1594, one of the protagonists, Dromio of Syracuse, compares a kitchen maid to a terrestrial globe: "No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her." The jest gained its point from the publication of the globes; Shakespeare may even have seen them himself. Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Dekker wrote in one of his plays published in The Gull's Horn-book (1609):
> What an excellent workman, therefore, were he that could cast the globe of it into a new mould. And not to make it look like Molyneux his globe, with a round face sleeked and washed over with white of eggs, but have it in plano as it was at first, with all the ancient circles, lines, parallels and figures.
It has been suggested that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the playing company that Shakespeare worked for as an actor and playwright for most of his career, named their playing space the Globe Theatre, built in 1599, as a response to the growing enthusiasm for terrestrial and celestial globes stimulated by those of Molyneux.
In Twelfth Night (1600–1601), Shakespeare alluded to the Wright–Molyneux Map when Maria says of Malvolio: "He does smile his face into more lynes, than is in the new Mappe, with the augmentation of the Indies."
## Globes today
Only six Molyneux globes are known to exist today, two terrestrial globes and four celestial globes. Three celestial globes are in Germany, one each in Zerbst, Nuremberg (at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (German National Museum)) and Kassel (Hessisches Landesmuseum (Hesse Museum), Kassel). The Hessisches Landesmuseum once had a 1592 terrestrial globe, but it is believed to have been destroyed during World War II. Three globes remain in England: one pair, consisting of a terrestrial and a celestial globe, is owned by Middle Temple in London and displayed in its library, while a terrestrial globe is at Petworth House in Petworth, West Sussex.
### Petworth House globe
A terrestrial globe was discovered in Lord Leconfield's library at Petworth House in Petworth, West Sussex, in July 1949. According to the tradition of the Wyndham family, who are descended from Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland, the globe belonged to Sir Walter Raleigh, who gave it to Northumberland when they were imprisoned together in the Tower of London. Northumberland, known as the "Wizard Earl" for his interest in scientific and alchemical experiments and his library, was suspected of being involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 because his relative Thomas Percy was among the conspirators. James I imprisoned Raleigh in the Tower for his supposed involvement in the Main Plot. Although the theory is supported by circumstantial evidence, a number of entries in Northumberland's accounts relating to the mending of globes, one dating back to 1596, suggest that the Molyneux globe may have belonged to him from the beginning and was not Raleigh's. The globe, however, almost certainly spent many years in the Tower before its transfer to Petworth House, where Northumberland was confined upon his release in 1621.
The Petworth House globe, now in the North Gallery, is the only Molyneux terrestrial globe preserved in its original 1592 state. One of Molyneux's "great globes", measuring 2 feet 1 inch (0.64 m) in diameter, it was reported in 1952 to be in poor condition despite restoration by the British Museum the previous year. The Northern Hemisphere was darkened by dirt and badly rubbed in places, to the extent that it was hard to read. Parts of it, and large sections of the Southern Hemisphere, are missing altogether. The restoration work revealed that the globe is weighted with sand and made from layers of small pieces of paper overlaid with a coat of plaster about <sup>1</sup>⁄<sub>8</sub> inch (3 mm) thick. On top of this is another layer of paper over which the gores are pasted. The globe retains its wooden horizon circle and brass meridian ring, but its hour circle and index are missing. Further restoration took place between 1995 and 1997. The globe was exhibited at the Royal Geographical Society in 1951 and 1952.
### Middle Temple globes
A bill in the accounts of 11 April 1717 for "repairing the globes in the library" is the earliest reference to the Middle Temple's ownership of the Molyneux terrestrial and celestial globes. Markham's view was that Robert Ashley (1565–1641), a barrister of the Middle Temple who was also an ardent geographer, was likely to have left the globes to the Inn in his will, together with his books. Ashley's books formed the nucleus of the Inn's original library and included copies of the second edition of Hues' Tractatus de Globis and other works on cosmography. On the other hand, Wallis has said that Markham's view is not supported by any available evidence and the globes are not mentioned in the will. She believes that they were probably acquired by Middle Temple on their publication in 1603.
The celestial globe is dated 1592, but the terrestrial globe bears the year 1603 and is the only example of its kind. Wallis has surmised that the globes were made by Hondius in Amsterdam in 1603 for a purchaser in England, perhaps the Middle Temple itself. The celestial globe was made from the original 1592 printing plates, while the terrestrial globe was produced using revised plates redated to 1603. The Middle Temple terrestrial globe differs from the Petworth House globe of 1592 by incorporating Raleigh's discoveries in Guiana and adding new place-names in Brazil, Peru and Africa, as well as an island marked "Corea" off the coast of China. The most extensive revision altered the Northeast Passage to take account of discoveries made on Willem Barentsz's third voyage to Novaya Zemlya in 1596. It appears that the revisions to the original plates of Molyneux's globe were completed by 1597, because no discoveries after that year are included. It is possible that Molyneux helped Hondius to update the plates in 1596 or 1597. For instance, if Hondius had obtained a copy of Raleigh's map of Guiana, Molyneux was the most likely source. Unlike the Petworth House globe, the Middle Temple globes are heavily varnished. The varnish could have been first applied as early as 1818 when the globes were repaired by J. and W. Newton; they were certainly varnished by Messrs. Holland Hannen & Cubitts, Ltd. during maintenance work in 1930.
At the start of World War II, the globes were sent to Beaconsfield and stored with part of the Wallace Collection at Hall Barn in the care of Lady Burnham. They were brought back to London in 1945 and were at one stage kept in the King's Library on loan to the British Museum. The globes were installed in their present position in the Middle Temple Library when the current library building opened in 1958. In 2003, they were loaned to the National Maritime Museum for an exhibition commemorating the life of Elizabeth I.
In 2004, Middle Temple proposed selling the Molyneux globes, valued at over £1 million, to create a scholarship fund for the education and training of needy would-be barristers. Its members eventually decided by a large majority against such a move. There was also a general feeling that the globes should be made more accessible to those wishing to see them.
The Middle Temple's Molyneux globes are the subject of a book-length project, The Molyneux Globes: Mathematical Practice and Theory, by Lesley Cormack of the University of Alberta. The project examines the community of mathematicians, natural philosophers, instrument-makers, and gentlemen-virtuosi that developed around the creation of the Molyneux globes, particularly the histories of four men who wrote treatises about the globes and the larger mathematical community.
### Hessisches Landesmuseum globe
The Molyneux globes at the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Kassel, were inherited from the collection of William IV (William the Wise), the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel), a pioneer of astronomical research. William himself died in 1592, so it has been surmised that his son and successor, Maurice, purchased the globes for the collection. They were first mentioned in 1765 in the index of the Mathematische Kammer (Mathematics Chamber) of the Fürstliches Kunsthaus (Princely Art Gallery) in Kassel, during the reign of Landgrave Frederick III. Only a celestial globe survives today; it is believed that the terrestrial globe was destroyed during World War II.
## Early books about Molyneux's globes
- . A modern reprint was published as:
- .
- (in Latin). Octavo. The work went into 12 other printings in Dutch (1597, 1613 and 1622), English (1638 and 1659), French (1618) and Latin (1611, 1613, 1617, 1627, 1659 and 1663), and a modern reprint of the English version was published as:
- .
- . Further editions were published, including those in 1606 (3rd), 1613 (4th), 1636 (7th) and 1638 (7th, "corrected and somewhat enlarged"). The work includes (at pp. 515–519 of the 7th ed.), a description of Molyneux's globes and an account of Sir Francis Drake's voyage around the world.
- . Another version of the work published in the same year was entitled . Mentions the use of Molyneux's terrestrial and celestial globes. Two further editions were published in 1610 and 1657, and the work was reprinted as:
- . |
3,496,664 | Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, Duke of Caxias | 1,166,175,329 | Brazilian officer and politician (1803–1880) | [
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| Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, Duke of Caxias (; 25 August 1803 – 7 May 1880), nicknamed "the Peacemaker" and "the Iron Duke", was an army officer, politician and monarchist of the Empire of Brazil. Like his father and uncles, Caxias pursued a military career. In 1823 he fought as a young officer in the Brazilian War for Independence against Portugal, then spent three years in Brazil's southernmost province, Cisplatina, as the government unsuccessfully resisted that province's secession in the Cisplatine War. Though his own father and uncles renounced Emperor Dom Pedro I during the protests of 1831, Caxias remained loyal. Pedro I abdicated in favor of his young son Dom Pedro II, whom Caxias instructed in swordsmanship and horsemanship and eventually befriended.
During Pedro II's minority the governing regency faced countless rebellions throughout the country. Again breaking with his father and other relatives sympathetic to the rebels, from 1839 to 1845 Caxias commanded loyalist forces suppressing such uprisings as the Balaiada, the Liberal rebellions of 1842 and the Ragamuffin War. In 1851, under his command, the Brazilian army prevailed against the Argentine Confederation in the Platine War; a decade later Caxias, as army marshal (the army's highest rank), led Brazilian forces to victory in the Paraguayan War. As a reward he was raised to the titled nobility, becoming successively a baron, count, and marquis, finally becoming the only person created duke during Pedro II's 58-year reign.
In the early 1840s Caxias became a member of the Reactionary Party, which evolved into the Party of Order and finally the Conservative Party. He was elected senator in 1846. The Emperor appointed him president of the Council of Ministers (prime minister) in 1856; he briefly held that office again in 1861, but fell when his party lost its parliamentary majority. Over the decades Caxias witnessed the growth and zenith of his party, then its slow decline as internal conflict divided it. In 1875, he headed a cabinet for the last time, and after years of failing health he died in May 1880.
In the years after his death and mainly following the downfall of the Brazilian monarchy, Caxias's reputation was initially overshadowed by that of Manuel Luís Osório, Marquis of Erval, but with time surpassed even Erval's renown. In 1925 his birthday was established as the Day of the Soldier, a day of honor for the Brazilian army. On 13 March 1962 he was officially designated the army's protector—its soldierly ideal and the most important figure in its tradition. Historians have regarded Caxias positively, several ranking him as the greatest of Brazil's military officers.
## Early years
### Birth
Luís Alves de Lima e Silva was born on 25 August 1803 on a farm called São Paulo (today within the city of Duque de Caxias) located in Rio de Janeiro, then a captaincy (later province) of the Portuguese colony of Brazil. He was the first son and second of ten children of Francisco de Lima e Silva and Mariana Cândido de Oliveira Belo. His godparents were his paternal grandfather, José Joaquim de Lima da Silva, and his maternal grandmother, Ana Quitéria Joaquina. Luís Alves's early years were spent on the São Paulo farm owned by his maternal grandfather and namesake, Luís Alves de Freitas. The young boy may have initially been schooled at home, as was common then. He may have been taught to read and write by his grandmother, Ana Quitéria.
Luís Alves's grandfather, José Joaquim, was a Portuguese military officer who had emigrated in 1767 to Brazil. He settled in the city of Rio de Janeiro, capital of both the Rio de Janeiro captaincy and of Brazil. He had neither noble rank nor noble ancestry and lacked patrons in an environment in which advancement depended upon exchanges of favors and family connections. Having fought against the Spaniards on Brazil's southern frontiers, he secured a place for himself in Rio de Janeiro's upper class when he married a member of a local and influential family.
The arrival of the Portuguese Royal Family in Rio de Janeiro in 1808 changed the lives of the Lima family. King Dom João VI embarked upon a series of wars of conquest which resulted in the expansion of Brazil's territory with the annexation of Cisplatina to the south and of French Guiana to the north. By 1818, Luís Alves's relatives, who were military officers and had served in the wars, had been ennobled. His grandfather, José Joaquim, became a member of the Order of Christ and Fidalgo Cavaleiro da Casa Real (Knight Nobleman of the Royal House). His father, Francisco de Lima, and uncles were also granted honors. Within two generations, the Lima family had risen from mere commoners to the ranks of Portugal's untitled nobility.
### Military education
On 22 May 1808, Luís Alves was enlisted at the age of five as a cadet in the 1st Regiment of Infantry of Rio de Janeiro. Historian Adriana Barreto de Souza explained that this did "not mean that he began to serve as a child, the connection to the regiment was simply honorific", his perquisite as the son of a military officer. This infantry regiment was informally known as the "Lima [family] Regiment" because so many members of the family served in it, including his father and grandfather.
In 1811, Luís Alves moved with his parents from his grandparents' farm to Rio de Janeiro and was enrolled at the Seminário São Joaquim (Saint Joachim School), which became Pedro II School in 1837. On 4 May 1818, he was admitted into the Royal Military Academy. The entire course (which ran from the first to seventh year) was mandatory for artillerymen and engineers but infantrymen were only required to take first- and fifth-year classes. Luís Alves took the first- and fifth-year classes in 1818 and 1819, respectively. Though he could have skipped the other years, he chose to take second-year classes in 1820 and third-year classes in 1821. The subjects he studied in the Royal Military Academy ranged from arithmetic, algebra and geometry to tactics, strategy, camping, fortification in campaign and terrain reconnaissance. He was promoted to alferes (equivalent to a modern-day second lieutenant) on 12 October 1818, and to lieutenant (modern-day first lieutenant) on 4 November 1820.
Though an accomplished student, Luís Alves was often reprimanded for bullying new students. With time, he matured, eventually being regarded by his peers as a very reasonable and honest person. He had an ordinary appearance, with a round face, brown hair, brown eyes and average height. Luís Alves's unremarkable features were compensated by his bearing. Historian Thomas Whigham described him as someone who "learned the art of giving orders early in life. Immaculate in his dress, he was soft spoken, polite, and smoothly in control of himself. He seemed to radiate calm composure and authority."
## Wars and military crises
### Independence of Brazil
Luís Alves would normally have begun the fourth-year classes at the Royal Military Academy in March 1822. Instead, he dropped out in December 1821 and enlisted in the 1st Fusilier Battalion. Prince Dom Pedro, son and heir of King João VI, had just embarked upon the struggle against Portugal that would lead to the independence of Brazil on 7 September 1822. The prince was later acclaimed Dom Pedro I, the first Brazilian emperor, on 12 October. Those Brazilian and Portuguese forces who remained loyal to Portugal refused to accept this outcome, which led to a war fought on several fronts across Brazil.
On 18 January 1823, Pedro I created the Emperor's Battalion, a handpicked elite infantry unit that included Luís Alves, who was named as adjutant to the company's commander, his uncle, Colonel José Joaquim de Lima e Silva. The Emperor's Battalion was sent to the province of Bahia in the northeast on 28 January and placed, along with other troops, under the command of French Brigadier Pierre Labatut. The Brazilian imperial forces besieged Bahia's capital, Salvador, which was held by the Portuguese. During the siege, Luís Alves fought in at least three attacks (on 28 March, 3 May and 3 June) against Portuguese positions around Salvador, all successful. In the engagement on 28 March, he led a charge on an enemy bunker.
During the Bahia campaign, high-ranking officers mutinied against Labatut, who was taken prisoner and sent back to Rio de Janeiro. It is unlikely that Luís Alves was involved, but his uncle, Joaquim de Lima, was almost certainly part of the conspiracy and was chosen by the officers to replace Labatut. The campaign resumed, and the Portuguese withdrew from Salvador and set sail back to Portugal. On 2 July, the victorious Brazilians entered the city. The Emperor's Battalion returned to Rio de Janeiro, and Luís Alves was later promoted to captain on 22 January 1824.
### Cisplatine War and the abdication crisis
The Portuguese garrison in Montevideo, the capital of Cisplatina (then Brazil's southernmost province), was the last to surrender. In 1825, secessionists in the province rebelled. The United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (later Argentina) attempted to annex Cisplatina. Brazil declared war, triggering the Cisplatine War. The Emperor's Battalion, to which Luís Alves was attached, was sent to guard Montevideo, then besieged by rebel forces. Luís Alves fought in engagements against the insurgents during 1827 (7 February, 5 July, 7 July, 14 July, 5 August and 7 August).
The war came to a disastrous end in 1828, as Brazil relinquished Cisplatina, which became the independent nation of Uruguay. Nonetheless, Luís Alves was promoted to the rank of major on 2 December 1828 and made second-in-command of the Emperor's Battalion in early 1829. During his stay in Montevideo, he met María Ángela Furriol González Luna. How far their relationship progressed is unknown, but there may have been a failed engagement. He returned to Rio de Janeiro and witnessed the increasing deterioration in Emperor Pedro I's political position. A growing opposition to Pedro I's policies eventually erupted into mass protests at the Field of Santana in downtown Rio de Janeiro on 6 April 1831. The situation became more ominous when several military units, led by Luís Alves's father and uncles, joined the protests.
The Emperor considered appointing Luís Alves to command the Emperor's Battalion and asked him which side he would choose. According to historian Francisco Doratioto, Luís Alves answered that "between the love of his father and his duty to the crown, he would stay with the latter." Pedro I expressed gratitude for his loyalty, but instead ordered him to take the Emperor's Battalion to the Field of Santana and join the rebels, preferring abdication to bloodshedding. Decades later, Luís Alves said in the Brazilian Senate: "I marched along with the Emperor's Battalion to the Field of Santana, out of devotion to competent orders [from Pedro I]. I was not a revolutionary. I esteemed the Abdication. I judged that it would be of advantage to Brazil, but I did not concur directly or indirectly with it."
### Era of troubles
A regency of three was elected to rule until the five-year-old Dom Pedro II reached the age of majority and the ability to rule in his own right. One of the regents chosen was Luís Alves's father. The regency had little effective authority, resulting in nine years of chaos, during which the country was plagued by rebellions and coup attempts initiated by unruly political factions. The army, "demoralized by the far from exemplary part it had played in the April Revolution [i.e. Pedro I's abdication]," said historian C. H. Haring, "became the ready tool of any popular agitator or demagogue, and often the source of riot and sedition." The government severely reduced the size of the standing army and effectively replaced it with the newly created National Guard, a militia force. In July 1831, without troops to command, Luís Alves and other officers joined the Volunteer Soldier-Officers Battalion as soldiers. As second in command of that unit, he put down a mutiny of navy artillerymen led by Miguel de Frias e Vasconcelos in the Ilha das Cobras on 7 October. A year later, on 18 October 1832, he was appointed commander of the Permanent Municipal Guard Corps, a police force in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
On 6 January 1833, at age 29, he married Ana Luísa de Loreto Carneiro Viana, the sixteen-year-old younger sister of an army officer friend, and a member of an aristocratic family of Rio de Janeiro. The union was contrary to the wishes of the bride's mother, who saw Luís Alves and his family as upstarts. Newspapers connected to political enemies of his family took advantage of this disagreement to level serious, but unfounded, accusations against him, including that he had kidnapped Ana Luísa. Despite the invective, their marriage was a happy one and three children resulted: Luísa de Loreto Viana de Lima, Ana de Loreto Viana de Lima and Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, born in 1833, 1836 and 1847, respectively.
In the late 1830s, Luís Alves was appointed instructor in swordsmanship and horsemanship to the young Pedro II. Ties of duty had drawn the two men together, but a long-lasting friendship and personal devotion also developed. Pedro II said many years later that he regarded Luís Alves as "loyal and my friend". According to historian Heitor Lira, Luís Alves was "one of the rare, sincere and profoundly convicted monarchists and friends of the King [i.e., the Emperor] and of the Dynasty [the House of Braganza]. He placed his sword not only in service to a united and strong Brazil, but also to a worthy and respected Monarch".
## Quelling rebellions
### Balaiada
As the commander of the Permanent Municipal Guard Corps, Luís Alves brought order to the streets of Rio de Janeiro, through his own skill and through partnership with the city's chief of police, Eusébio de Queirós. Luís Alves was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel on 12 September 1837. Eusébio de Queirós was a member of the Partido Regressista (Reactionary Party), which had come to power that year. Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, one of the leading Reactionaries and a government minister, attempted to attract Luís Alves to his party.
After being promoted to colonel on 2 December 1839, Luís Alves was sent by the Reactionary cabinet to the province of Maranhão to quell a rebellion which became known as the Balaiada. He was appointed to the highest civilian and military positions in the province: presidente (president or governor) and comandante das armas (military commander), thus giving him authority over the National Guard and army (brought back to full strength by the Reactionary administration) units in the province, respectively.
Luís Alves arrived in São Luís, Maranhão's capital, on 4 February 1840. After several battles and skirmishes, he defeated the rebels. For his achievement, Luís Alves was promoted to brigadier (present-day brigadier general) on 18 July 1841 and raised by Pedro II to the titled nobility as Barão de Caxias (Baron of Caxias). He was given the rare honor of choosing his title; he decided to commemorate his recapture of Caxias, Maranhão's second richest town, which had fallen into rebel hands. Francisco de Lima wrote to his son with news of the Liberals' demand that Pedro II's majority be immediately declared. Meanwhile, Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão (later Marquis of Paraná, a distant cousin of Caxias's wife and a leader of the Reactionary Party) sent letters to Luís Alves attempting to undermine the influence Francisco de Lima had on him and to dissuade him from supporting the unconstitutional proposal to declare the Emperor of age.
### Liberal rebellions of 1842
Upon his return from Maranhão, Caxias saw that the political climate had changed. Francisco de Lima's Liberal Party had pushed through the premature declaration of the Emperor's majority on 23 July 1840. In May 1842, the Liberals rebelled in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais in retaliation for the Emperor's decision—on the advice of a Council of State dominated by Reactionaries—to call for new elections, annulling the previous election tainted by widespread fraud by the Liberal Party.
Named as the province's vice-president and military commander, Caxias arrived in São Paulo on 21 May 1842. After he defeated the rebels there, he was appointed military commander of Minas Gerais and marched to that province. With the aid of National Guard units from Rio de Janeiro under its president, Honório Hermeto, Caxias was once again successful, and by late August, the rebellion was crushed. Caxias was honored by Pedro II, who made him his aide-de-camp on 23 July 1842. Two days later, Caxias was promoted to brevet (acting) field marshal (present-day divisional general).
To distinguish itself from what the Reactionaries perceived as the "unruly" Liberals, sometime around 1843 (and certainly by 1844), the Reactionary Party became known as the Partido da Ordem (Party of Order) and its members as saquaremas. Caxias increasingly identified himself with the saquarema ideology: liberalism, preservation of the authority of the state, and support for representative parliamentary monarchy. Although his move toward the saquarema camp was not clear at the time he accepted the appointment to put down the rebellion in Maranhão in 1839, his victory over the Liberal rebels in 1842 further solidified his allegiance to the Party of Order.
### Ragamuffin War
When the republican secessionist rebellion known as the Ragamuffin War began in Rio Grande do Sul in 1835, João Manuel de Lima e Silva, one of Caxias's uncles, joined the rebels. His father, Francisco de Lima, and possibly another uncle (the Minister of War at the time), also secretly supported the rebellion. On 28 September 1842, Caxias was appointed president and military commander of the province of Rio Grande do Sul. The 16-year-old Pedro II allowed Caxias to prove once more that he was unlike his father and uncles and gave him a short and direct order: "End this revolution, as you have ended the others." Caxias brought with him a fellow saquarema and a famous poet, Domingos Gonçalves de Magalhães (later Viscount of Araguaia), to serve as his secretary, as he had previously in Maranhão.
Caxias had made a short trip to Rio Grande do Sul in 1839 to inspect the troops fighting the Ragamuffins. Upon his return to the province in November 1842, he found that the rebels, severely weakened after years of struggle, had been forced to resort to guerrilla warfare. When threatened, the rebels escaped to safety in nearby Uruguay (formerly Cisplatina). As in Maranhão, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, Caxias planted spies within the enemy's ranks to gather information and to foment dissension. Historian Roderick J. Barman said that he "displayed military, organizational, and political talents essential to what is now termed 'counterinsurgency'."
In early 1843, Honório Hermeto became the head of the cabinet, and so long as the saquaremas remained in power, Caxias was secure in his position. After Honório Hermeto quarreled with Pedro II a year later, he and the saquaremas resigned. The Liberals replaced the saquaremas in government, but Caxias was retained in his command. The War of the Ragamuffins took far longer to put down than had previous rebellions, but through careful negotiation and military victories, Caxias finally managed to pacify the province. The end of the armed conflict was declared on 1 March 1845. He was made a permanent field marshal on 25 March, and raised to the rank of count on 2 April. Caxias ran for a Senate seat, and being among the three candidates with the most votes, he was selected by the Emperor in late 1845 as the senator representing Rio Grande do Sul. He took his Senate seat on 11 May 1846.
## Conservatism
### Platine War
After years in opposition in the parliament, in September 1848, the Party of Order was called upon by Pedro II to form a new cabinet. The saquarema cabinet was composed of men with whom Caxias had close relationships, among them Eusébio de Queirós, who had helped him bring order to the streets of Rio de Janeiro in the late 1830s. Caxias was now a wealthy planter who owned slaves and was very much a part of the landed aristocracy that formed the backbone of the Party of Order. With the help of his wealthy mother-in-law, he purchased his first property—a coffee farm—in 1838. He acquired more lands in 1849, further expanding his plantation. Due to growing international demand, coffee had become the most valuable export commodity for Brazil.
In 1851, Juan Manuel de Rosas, dictator of the Argentine Confederation, declared war on Brazil. Caxias was appointed commander-in-chief of the Brazilian land forces. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paulino Soares de Sousa (later Viscount of Uruguai), forged an anti-Rosas alliance between Brazil, Uruguay and rebel Argentine provinces. When Paulino Soares asked who should be appointed as Brazil's representative among the allied forces, Caxias suggested Honório Hermeto. Honório Hermeto, who had been ostracized by his peers after his fall in 1844, was the saquarema closest to Caxias.
An army commanded by Caxias crossed into Uruguay in September 1851. The allies decided to divide their forces into two armies: a multinational force that included a single Brazilian division, and a second army composed entirely of Brazilians under Caxias. Against the wishes of Honório Hermeto, Caxias chose Manuel Marques de Sousa (later Count of Porto Alegre) to lead the former force. Caxias met and befriended Marques de Sousa, who had served under his command in the War of the Ragamuffins, during his trip to Rio Grande do Sul in 1839. The Brazilian division, led by Marques de Sousa, along with Uruguayan and Argentine rebel troops, invaded Argentina. On 3 February 1852, in the Battle of Caseros, the allies defeated an army led by Rosas, who fled to the United Kingdom, thus ending the war. Caxias spent 17 January aboard the frigate Dom Afonso alongside John Pascoe Grenfell, taking stock of the port area of Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, selecting the best place to launch an amphibious attack. His plan was aborted once the news of the victory at Caseros arrived. As a reward for his role in the victory, Caxias was promoted to lieutenant general on 3 March, and raised to marquis on 26 June.
### Conciliation Cabinet
Caxias's father died in December 1853. For years, father and son had clashed, taking opposite sides. The marquis ultimately prevailed, adhering closely to his grandfather José Joaquim de Lima's steadfast loyalty to the Crown and respect for the law. By the time of his death, Francisco de Lima, a senator in his own right, had long since lost his former influence and had not held any office of importance for years. Nevertheless, Caxias and Francisco de Lima maintained a loving and respectful relationship to the very end, as may be seen in the few surviving letters between them. His relationship with other family members, however, was marred by resentment, as he told his wife years later: "We are placed in the foreground of our society, causing even envy to your relatives and to mine as well."
Around 1853 (and certainly by 1855), the old Party of Order had become more widely known as the Conservative Party. On 14 June 1855, the marquis accepted the portfolio of Minister of War and joined the "Conciliation Cabinet" headed by Honório Hermeto (now Marquis of Paraná). Caxias and Paraná had known each other since 1831 and had formed a deep friendship and strong bond based on trust and views in common. Paraná had been facing overwhelming opposition in parliament from members of his, and Caxias's, own party. Under the guise of correcting flaws in elections so that all parties would have legitimate access to representation in parliament, Paraná attempted to pass electoral reforms that would, in practice, allot cabinets even more influence to meddle in elections through coercion and patronage. The saquaremas understood the threat: it would undermine their own party (or in fact any party) by strengthening the executive branch to the detriment of the legislative.
In search of broader support, Paraná appointed as ministers politicians who had few, or no, links to the saquaremas. Caxias himself was a saquarema, but according to Needell, he "was first and foremost a military man. Personal fealty to the Empire came before any other. As so many did, he identified this loyalty with fealty to the Crown in abstraction and to Dom Pedro personally." He was a choice that could please all sides. Caxias, said Needell, "was not so much a political man as a man profoundly loyal to the Monarchy with which he ... had come to identify with the Conservative Party. Thus, Paraná may have appointed Caxias to reassure traditional Conservatives without endangering the more independent political position Paraná was taking."
### Presidencies of the Council of Ministers
Paraná succeeded in passing electoral reform, which was called the Lei dos Círculos (Law of the Circles). As predicted, and feared, it gave greater powers to the president (prime minister) of the Council of Ministers to meddle in elections. Unexpectedly, Paraná fell ill and died on 3 September 1856. Caxias replaced him, but was reluctant to face the legislature, elected under the electoral reform, that was slated to convene the next year. He resigned, along with the other cabinet ministers, on 4 May 1857. The Law of the Circles and the controversy surrounding it split the Conservative Party: one faction was the saquarema ultraconservative (or traditionalist) wing, then called the vermelhos (reds) or puritanos (puritans), led by Eusébio de Queirós, Uruguai and Joaquim Rodrigues Torres, Viscount of Itaboraí. The second bloc comprised the conservador moderado (moderate Conservative) wing, composed mostly of younger politicians who owed their positions to electoral reform.
The moderate Conservatives were Conservatives in name only, and did not support the saquarema ideology and leadership. During the years following 1857, successive cabinets quickly collapsed, unable to muster a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, as the two Conservative wings undercut each other in a fight for dominance. The Emperor asked Caxias to head a new cabinet on 2 March 1861. Among his ministers were José Maria da Silva Paranhos (later Viscount of Rio Branco), whom Caxias had met and befriended during the Platine War while serving as secretary to Paraná.
Caxias tried to secure support from the traditional saquarema leadership. They attempted, however, to use him as a figurehead and to further their own agendas. He commented to Paranhos: "I see what you meant, with respect to the bizarre behavior of these gentlemen, who do not wish to govern the country, when they are invited to do so, because they prefer to govern the Government. They are completely mistaken about me, since I am not disposed to serve them as a hobbyhorse." Lacking support in parliament, Caxias's cabinet resigned on 24 May 1862 after losing its majority in the Chamber of Deputies (the national legislature's lower house). Pedro II asked members of the Liga Progressista (Progressive League)—a new party consisting of moderate Conservatives and Liberals—to form a new cabinet. Barely a month later, Caxias's only son died at age 14 of unknown causes. There was a small consolation at the end of 1862 when, on 2 December, he was made brevet marechal de exército (army marshal), the highest rank in the Brazilian army.
## Paraguayan War
### Siege of Uruguaiana
In December 1864, the dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López, took advantage of Brazil's military intervention in Uruguay to establish his country as a regional power. The Paraguayan army invaded the Brazilian province of Mato Grosso (currently the state of Mato Grosso do Sul), triggering the Paraguayan War. Four months later, Paraguayan troops invaded Argentine territory in preparation for an attack on Rio Grande do Sul.
The situation in Rio Grande do Sul was chaotic, and the local military commanders were incapable of mounting an effective resistance to the Paraguayan army. Pedro II, aware of the danger, decided to go to the front to shore up operations. As the Emperor's military aide-de-camp, Caxias followed him into the combat zone. The marquis had warned the Progressive cabinet that Brazil was unprepared to intervene in Uruguay and even less prepared to resist a foreign invasion. His warnings were ignored, and he complained, with a bit of irony, to his friend João Maurício Vanderlei, Baron of Cotejipe, a former colleague in the Conciliation cabinet: "I am almost mad with the mistakes that I am seeing being made, but since I am a red [ultraconservative or traditional saquarema] I am not listened to, since everything is progress in our country."
The imperial party arrived in Rio Grande do Sul's capital, Porto Alegre, in July 1865. From there, they traveled inland until they reached Uruguaiana in September. This Brazilian town was occupied by a Paraguayan army. By the time Caxias and his party arrived, the town was under siege by a combined force of Brazilian, Argentine and Uruguayan units. The Paraguayans surrendered without further bloodshed, freeing the Emperor and Caxias to return to the imperial capital.
### Commander-in-Chief
The allies invaded Paraguay in April 1866, but after initial success, their advance was blocked by fortifications at Humaitá by land and along the Paraguay River. The Progressive cabinet decided to create a unified command over Brazilian forces operating in Paraguay, and it turned to the 63-year-old Caxias (made permanent army marshal on 13 January) as the new leader on 10 October 1866. He told his wife that the reason he had accepted the post was because the war "was an evil that has reached more or less all, from the Emperor to the most unfortunate slave."
Caxias arrived in Paraguay on 18 November, and assumed the supreme command of land and naval forces in the war. His first measure was to arrange the dismissal of Vice-Admiral Joaquim Marques Lisboa (later the Marquis of Tamandaré and also a member of the Progressive League) by the government, and appoint fellow Conservative Vice-Admiral Joaquim José Inácio (later the Viscount of Inhaúma) to lead the navy. From October 1866 until July 1867, all offensive operations were suspended. During this period, Caxias trained his soldiers, re-equipped the army with newer guns, improved the quality of the officer corps, and upgraded the health corps and overall hygiene of the troops, putting an end to epidemics. Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay (later the Viscount of Taunay), who fought in the war, remembered that Caxias was a "generous military chief, who forgave small errors, but was implacable with those who committed grave misdeeds, or, then, who betrayed his confidence."
As the Brazilian army was ready for combat, Caxias sought to encircle Humaitá and force its capitulation by siege. To aid the operation, he used observation balloons to gather information of the enemy lines. The combined Brazilian–Argentine–Uruguayan army advanced through hostile territory to surround Humaitá. By 2 November, Humaitá was completely cut off from land reinforcement by Paraguayan forces. On 19 February 1868, Brazilian ironclads successfully made a passage up the Paraguay River under heavy fire, gaining full control of the river and isolating Humaitá from resupply by water.
### Dezembrada
The relationship between the Marquis of Caxias, now the allied Commander-in-Chief, and the governing Progressives worsened until it became a political crisis that led to the cabinet's resignation. The Emperor called Conservatives, under Itaboraí's leadership, back into power on 16 July 1868, while the Progressive League was rechristened as the Liberal Party. Meanwhile, the allies occupied Humaitá on 25 July after López managed to engineer a successful withdrawal of all Paraguayan troops from its fortress.
Pressing his advantage, the marquis began organizing an assault on the new Paraguayan defenses which López had thrown up along the Pikysyry, south of Asunción (Paraguay's capital). This stream afforded a strong defensive position which was anchored by the Paraguay River and by the swampy jungle of the Chaco region, both considered to be nearly impassable by a large force. Rather than making a frontal attack on López's line, Caxias had a road cut through the Chaco. The road was finished by early December, allowing the allied forces to outflank the Paraguayan lines and attack from the rear. In three successive battles (Ytororó, Avay and Lomas Valentinas) which became known as Dezembrada (Deed of December), the combined allied forces annihilated the Paraguayan army. López barely managed to escape with a few followers, and on 1 January 1869, the Brazilians occupied Asunción. According to historian Ronaldo Vainfas, Caxias's "performance ahead of the allied forces contributed in an unquestionable way to the final triumph over the enemy."
The marquis had to take great risks to win these victories. In the Ytororó engagement, which occurred on 5 December, the allied objective was to take a bridge over the Ytororó River. Several attempts were made to cross the bridge, but each was repelled by intense fire from the Paraguayan positions. In the final attempt, the Brazilian soldiers panicked and began to flee in disorder. Caxias, witnessing the unfolding disaster, unsheathed his sword and charged on horseback toward the bridge, followed by his staff. He passed through the fleeing troops, shouting "Hail to His Majesty", "Hail to Brazil" and finally, "Sigam-me os que forem brasileiros!" ("Those who are true Brazilians, follow me!") His display of courage stopped the retreat immediately; the units regrouped, and a vigorous attack led personally by Caxias overwhelmed the Paraguayan positions. Several men who were next to him during the attack were killed, as was his horse.
### Aftermath
Caxias was growing old, and was ill and exhausted by the time he reached Asunción. As he did not feel up to the task of pursuing López into the Paraguayan hinterland, he asked to be either relieved of his post or given a short leave. Although his request was denied, he appointed a senior member of his staff as acting commander, and left for Brazil on 19 January 1869. The Emperor was angered that the marquis had left his post without permission, and especially that Caxias had declared the war to have been already won—even though López was still at large and regrouping his few remaining military assets. Caxias's ill-conceived decision seriously endangered the hard-won achievements of the past months, even as the objective of eliminating López as a threat remained tantalizingly within reach.
In early February the marquis arrived back unannounced at his house in Rio de Janeiro, much to the surprise of his wife. The Viscount of Inhaúma also returned home shortly afterwards, but with his health so compromised that he died a few weeks later. Upon learning of Inhaúma's death, Caxias said: "and the same would have had happened to me, had I not resolved to get out of that hell." Pedro II was greatly disappointed in Caxias, but he was also very aware that the marquis was the person most responsible for the great successes during the war, accomplishments that had come at the cost of years of sacrifice and personal bravery. The Emperor called the marquis to the Imperial Palace, the Paço de São Cristóvão, on 21 February 1869 for a reconciliation.
A few days later the Emperor awarded Caxias the Order of Pedro I and raised him from marquis to duke, the highest rank of Brazilian nobility, and a unique distinction during Pedro II's 58-year reign. The Emperor also appointed him to the Council of State in October 1870. But none of this prevented Caxias from attacks and accusations—some petty—in the parliament, including having left his post without permission. The embittered duke wrote to his friend Manuel Luís Osório, Marquis of Erval: "When I was young, my friend, I did not know how to explain why the elderly were selfish, but now that I am old, I see that they are like that because of the disappointments and ingratitudes they suffer during their lives. At least this is what happens to me".
## Later years
### Figurehead presidency
Paranhos, now Viscount of Rio Branco, led a cabinet from 1871 to 1875. Two serious crises arose that challenged its viability and undermined the foundations of the monarchy. The first resulted from the controversy over the Law of Free Birth, which Caxias voted for. The law was to emancipate children born to slave women after its enactment. With half of Conservative Party members supporting the bill and the other half staunchly opposed, a serious rift opened in the ranks. Opponents represented the interests of powerful coffee farmers such as Caxias, planters who had long been the main political, social, and economic supporters of the Conservative Party.
The second crisis was the Religious Issue, which developed after the government came into conflict with two bishops who had ordered that Freemasons be expelled from lay brotherhoods. The dispute grew out of proportion when both bishops were convicted and given prison sentences for disobeying the government's order to rescind their expulsions. As Catholicism was the state religion, the Emperor exercised, with the papacy's acquiescence, a great deal of control over church affairs—paying clerical salaries, appointing parish priests, nominating bishops, ratifying papal bulls, and overseeing seminaries. As a result of the furor over the handling of the affair, Rio Branco and his cabinet resigned, "disunited and weary after four years in office", according to historian Roderick J. Barman. Pedro II asked Caxias to form a new cabinet. The duke later gave a remarkable account of their meeting:
> Believe that when I entered my carriage to go São Cristóvão, summoned by the Emperor, I was determined not to accept. But he, as soon as he saw me, embraced me and said to me that he would not let me go unless I told him that I would accept the post of minister and that, if I refused to do this service, he would summon the Liberals and would have to tell everybody that I was responsible for the consequence, all the while encircling me with his arms. I pointed out to him my circumstances, my age, and my infirmity; but he concurred in nothing. To free myself from him, I should have had to shove him off, and this I could not do. I bowed my head and said that I would do what he wanted but that I was sure that he would have cause for regret, since I would not be minister for long, because I would die from work and troubles. However, he listened to nothing and told me that I should only do what I could do but that I must not abandon him, since he would in that case abandon us and go away.
The elderly Caxias, almost 72 and widowed since 1874, was in poor health and could serve only as a figurehead president of the government formed on 25 June 1875. Cotejipe was the de facto president. The Caxias-Cotejipe cabinet attempted to dissipate the discord created by the previous cabinet. Their measures included financial aid to coffee farmers, an amnesty for the convicted bishops, and, to please the pro-slavery Conservatives, the selection of new ministers and a call for elections. Caxias, who was a Freemason but also a staunch Catholic, threatened to resign if the Emperor did not grant the amnesty, which Pedro II grudgingly issued in September 1875.
### Death
At the end of 1877, Pedro II paid a visit to Caxias and ascertained that he could no longer remain in office. The entire cabinet resigned on 1 January 1878. His health problems had become so troubling that he had been asking repeatedly to resign since early 1876. Caxias was not only afflicted by concerns over his declining health, but increasingly felt a sense of alienation. He did not feel he could play a relevant role in politics. He belonged to an older generation who perceived the Emperor (and consequently, the monarchy) as essential for holding the nation together.
The new politicians who had begun to dominate the government had little memory of the times before Pedro II assumed control in 1840. Unlike their predecessors, they had no experience of the regency and the early years of Pedro II's reign, when external and internal dangers threatened the nation's existence; they had only known a stable administration and prosperity. The young politicians saw no reason to uphold and defend the imperial office as a unifying force beneficial to the nation. Times were changing fast, and Caxias was aware of the situation. He became increasingly nostalgic for the former times he had spent with his now-dead Conservative Party colleagues and held a pessimistic view of future political prospects. When Itaboraí—one of the last survivors of those Conservative leaders who had begun their careers during the 1830s—died in 1872, the duke wrote to a friend: "Who will replace him? I don't know, I cannot see ... The vacuum he left will not be filled, as it was not with Eusébio, Paraná, Uruguai, Manuel Felizardo and many others who helped us sustain this little church [i.e., the monarchy, his 'second faith'], which collapsed or almost collapsed on 7 April 1831."
Confined to a wheelchair as his health slowly declined, the Duke of Caxias lived his remaining days at Santa Mônica farm, located near the town of Valença, in the countryside of Rio de Janeiro province. On 7 May 1880 at 11 pm he quietly died, attended by members of his family. A saddened Pedro II (who visited Caxias several times during his long illness) remarked about his "friend of almost a half century", that he had "known him, and esteemed him since 1832. He was 76, almost 77 years old. And so we remain in this world." Caxias asked for a simple funeral, with no pomp, no honors, no invitations, and only six soldiers of good conduct to carry his coffin. His last wish was not entirely respected: Pedro II sent a carriage used for funerals of members of the imperial family only, to be followed by sixteen servants of the imperial household, and one corporal and thirteen, not six, soldiers of good conduct to carry his remains. A huge procession was followed by a funeral (attended by Pedro II) and his body was laid to rest in the São Francisco de Paula cemetery in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
## Legacy
From his death in 1880 until the 1920s, the Duke of Caxias was not regarded as the most important military figure in Brazilian history. This honor belonged to Manuel Luís Osório, Marquis of Erval. Caxias was held to be a minor figure in comparison to Erval. His reputation slowly grew, and in 1923, the Ministry of the Army created an annual celebration in his honor. In 1925, his birthday officially became the "Day of the Soldier", which commemorates the Brazilian army. On 25 August 1949, his remains, along with those of his wife, were exhumed and reinterred in Rio de Janeiro's Duke of Caxias Pantheon. On 13 March 1962, Caxias became patrono (protector) of the army, making him the most important figure in its tradition. According to Adriana Barreto de Souza, Francisco Doratioto and Celso Castro, Caxias supplanted Osório because he was seen as a loyal and dutiful officer who could serve as a role model in a Brazilian republic plagued since its birth in 1889 by military insubordination, rebellions and coups. "His name", said the historian Thomas Whigham, "has become synonymous with the upright officer and citizen who never breaks the law—hence the popular term caxias, which refers to individuals who follow regulations without mistrust, doubt and evasion."
The historiography is often positive toward Caxias and several historians have ranked him as the greatest Brazilian military officer. To historian Nelson Werneck Sodré, he was "not only the greatest military commander of his continent [South America], in his time, but [also] a great politician". Moreover, Caxias was "—more than D. Pedro II—the Empire." Francisco Doratioto said that the duke "in Paraguay had doubts, pride, resentment, and made mistakes; in short, he was a real character ... Caxias, however, was able to rise above his limitations, imposed on himself great personal sacrifices and incorporated the responsibility of accomplishing the objective ... In this context, Caxias was, indeed, a hero; he carried with him, it is true, social and political prejudices of his time, but one can not demand from the past the observance of present-day values."
Roderick J. Barman affirmed that Caxias was not only "extremely powerful in the Conservative party", but also "the country's most distinguished" and "most successful soldier", who had "proved his capacity and his loyalty by defeating revolts against the regime". C. H. Haring said that he was "a brilliant army officer", also "Brazil's most famous military figure" and a man "who was genuinely loyal to the throne". To Whigham, the duke was "destined to occupy a lofty spot in Brazil's national mythology. He often had to act as a statesman as much as military man" and was "[s]hrewdly competent in both roles". Hélio Viana regarded Caxias as "the greatest soldier of Brazil", a view shared by Eugênio Vilhena de Morais, Pedro Calmon, Octávio Tarquínio de Sousa, Antônio da Rocha Almeida and Gustavo Barroso.
## Titles and honors
### Titles of nobility
- Baron of Caxias (without Greatness) on 18 July 1841.
- Count of Caxias on 25 March 1845.
- Marquis of Caxias on 26 June 1852.
- Duke of Caxias on 23 March 1869.
### Other titles
- Member of the Brazilian Council of State.
- Member of the Brazilian Historic and Geographic Institute.
- Member of the Supreme Military and Justice Council.
- Emperor's aide-de-camp.
- Emperor's Veador (gentleman usher).
### Honors
- Grand Cross of the Brazilian Order of the Southern Cross.
- Grand Cross of the Brazilian Order of the Rose.
- Grand Cross of the Brazilian Order of Pedro I.
- Grand Cross of the Brazilian Order of Saint Benedict of Aviz.
- Grand Cross of the Portuguese Order of the Immaculate Conception of Vila Viçosa.
### Military honors
- Medal (oval) of the Independence War (Bahia).
- Medal of the army in the Oriental State of Uruguay in 1852.
- Commemorative medal of the surrender of the division of the army of Paraguay that occupied the village of Uruguaiana.
- Medal (oval) of bravery "to the bravest ones" (1867).
- Medal awarded to the army, armada and to civil servants in operations in the Paraguayan War (1870).
## See also
- List of generals of the Empire of Brazil
## Endnotes |
163,555 | Court of Chancery | 1,167,738,205 | Court of equity in England and Wales (c. 1350–1875) | [
"1340s establishments in England",
"14th century in London",
"1875 disestablishments in England",
"Court of Chancery",
"Courts and tribunals disestablished in 1875",
"Courts and tribunals established in the 1340s",
"Courts of equity",
"English civil law",
"Former courts and tribunals in England and Wales"
]
| The Court of Chancery was a court of equity in England and Wales that followed a set of loose rules to avoid a slow pace of change and possible harshness (or "inequity") of the common law. The Chancery had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including trusts, land law, the estates of lunatics and the guardianship of infants.
Its initial role differed somewhat: as an extension of the lord chancellor's role as Keeper of the King's Conscience, the court was an administrative body primarily concerned with conscientious law. Thus the Court of Chancery had a far greater remit than the common-law courts (whose decisions it had the jurisdiction to overrule for much of its existence) and was far more flexible.
Until the 19th century, the Court of Chancery could apply a far wider range of remedies than common law courts, such as specific performance and injunctions, and had some power to grant damages in special circumstances. With the shift of the Exchequer of Pleas towards a common law court and loss of its equitable jurisdiction by the Administration of Justice Act 1841, the Chancery became the only national equitable body in the English legal system.
Academics estimate that the Court of Chancery formally split from and became independent of the curia regis in the mid-14th century, at which time it consisted of the lord chancellor and his personal staff, the Chancery. Initially an administrative body with some judicial duties, the Chancery experienced an explosive growth in its work during the 15th century, particularly under the House of York (r. 1461–1485); academics attribute this to its becoming an almost entirely judicial body. From the time of Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) onwards the Court was severely criticised for its slow pace, large backlogs, and high costs. Those problems persisted until its dissolution, despite being mitigated somewhat by reforms, particularly during the 19th century.
Attempts at fusing the Chancery with the common law courts began in the 1850s, and finally succeeded with the 1873 and 1875 Supreme Court of Judicature Acts, which dissolved the Chancery and created a new unified High Court of Justice, with the Chancery Division – one of three divisions of the High Court – succeeding the Court of Chancery as an equitable body.
For much of its existence the court was formally led by the lord chancellor, assisted by the judges of the common-law courts. The staff of the court included a large number of clerks, led by the master of the rolls, who regularly heard cases on his own. In 1813 a vice-chancellor was appointed to deal with the Chancery's increasing backlogs, and two more vice-chancellors were appointed in 1841. Lord chancellors sold offices of the Chancery for much of its history, raising large amounts of money. Many of the clerks and other officials held sinecures; the holders, in lieu of wages, charged increasingly exorbitant fees to process cases - one of the main reasons for the high cost of bringing a case to the Court of Chancery.
The 19th century saw the abolition of many sinecure offices and the institution of a wage and pension for the lord chancellor to curb the sale of offices; and later the right to appoint officials was transferred from the chancellor to the Crown.
## History
### Origins
The Court of Chancery originated, as did the other High Courts before 1875, in the Norman curia regis or King's Council, maintained by most early rulers of England after 1066. Under the feudal system, the Council was made up of the Monarch, the Great Officers of the Crown and anyone else the Monarch allowed to attend. Its jurisdiction was virtually unlimited, with executive, judicial and legislative functions. This large body contained lawyers, peers, and members of the Church, many of whom lived far from London. It soon became apparent that it was too unwieldy to deal with the nation's day-to-day business. As a result, a smaller curia was formed to deal with the regular business of the country, and this soon split into various courts: first the exchequer of pleas, to deal with finance, and then the Court of Common Pleas, to deal with "common" cases.
The Chancery started as the personal staff of the lord chancellor, described as "a great secretarial bureau, a home office, a foreign office, and a ministry of justice". The earliest reference to legal issues being sent to him is from 1280, when Edward I of England, annoyed with the number of cases coming to him which could have been dealt with by other elements of his administration, passed a statute saying that:
> all petitions which touch the Seal shall come first to the chancellor; and those which touch the Exchequer, to the exchequer, and those which touch the justices, or the law of the land, to the justices; and those which touch the Jews, to the justices of the Jews. And if the affairs are so great, or if they are of grace, that the chancellor and the others cannot do it without the king, then they shall bring them with their own hands to the king to know his pleasure; so that no petitions shall come before the king, and his Council, but by the hands of his said chancellor, and the other chief ministers; so that the king and his Council may, without the load of other business, attend to the great business of his realm, and of other foreign countries.
Records show dozens of early cases being sent to the lord chancellor and master of the rolls, but at the time the chancellor had no specific jurisdiction to deal with them; the cases were referred to him only as a matter of convenience. Under Edward II the chancellor dedicated set days to hearing pleas, as documented in the records of the Parliament of Lincoln in 1315, which also show that some cases were heard by his personal staff, the Chancery, and not by the chancellor. By 1320 requests were regularly sent there, and heard by the judges of the common law courts, with the rules used to settle cases being those of "law or reason", sometimes simply "reason", a far more liberal and adjustable approach than the common law.
### Rise and early years
The Chancery came to prominence after the decline of the Exchequer, dealing with the law of equity, something more fluid and adaptable than the common law. The early Court of Chancery dealt with verbal contracts, matters of land law and matters of trusts, and had a very liberal view when setting aside complaints; poverty, for example, was an acceptable reason to cancel a contract or obligation. Complaints were normally brought via a bill or petition, which had to show that the common law did not provide a remedy for the problem. The Chancery writs were in French, and later English, rather than the Latin used for common law bills. In the reign of Edward III, the Court found a fixed home at Westminster Hall, where it sat almost continually until its dissolution. Before this, justice was difficult to dispose because the lord chancellor had to travel with the King wherever he went.
By 1345 the lord chancellor began to be seen as the leader of the Court of Chancery, rather than as a representative of the King, and writs and bills were addressed directly to him. Under Richard II it became practice to consider the Chancery separate from the curia; academic William Carne considers this a key moment in confirming the independence of the Court of Chancery. The chancellor and his clerks often heard the cases directly, rather than having them referred to the council itself; occasionally a committee of lay and church members disposed of them, assisted by the judges of the common law courts. John Baker argues that it was the late 14th century that saw Chancery procedure become fixed, citing the work done by John Waltham as master of the rolls between 1381 and 1386, and notes that this period also saw the first complaints about the Chancery.
The Chancery and its growing powers soon came to be resented by Parliament and the nobility; Carne says that it is possible to trace a general "trend of opposition" during the Plantagenet period, particularly from members of the clergy, who were more used to Roman law than equity. From the reign of Richard II, the House of Commons regularly complained about the work of the Court, and in 1390 it petitioned the king to pronounce that the Court could not act contrary to the common law, nor annul a judgement without due process. At the same time, it asked that no writ could be issued that would compel a man to appear before the Court; if it was, the clerk who issued it would lose his job and the lord chancellor would be fined £100. The king gave evasive answers to the requests, and made no decision. The Commons did succeed in making some changes to the Court's procedure, however; in 1394 the King assented to their request that victorious defendants in the Court have their costs recompensed from the other side, and in 1341 the king, on their application, allowed the lord chancellor to send cases directly to the common law courts, to avoid the common law judges having to waste time travelling. Kerly suggests that many complaints from the Commons came from lawyers of the common law, aggrieved at the Chancery's extended jurisdiction that overlapped with that of the common law. These complaints from the Commons did not prevent the Court from successfully functioning; in 1393, for example, it was considered prominent enough that the House of Lords sent two cases there to be dealt with.
According to many academics, the Court of Chancery really began to expand its caseload during the 15th century; Margaret Avery reports a massive increase in cases during the 1440s, while Nicholas Pronay suggests that the real expansion came during Yorkist rule (1461–85), when the number of cases submitted each year quadrupled. He gives complaints about the perversion of justice in the common law courts, along with growing mercantile and commercial interests, as the main reason for the growth, arguing that this was the period when the Chancery changed from being an administrative body with some judicial functions to "one of the four central courts of the realm ... the growth in the number of [cases] is a primary indicator of the changing position of Chancery". This increasing role was assisted by the changing function of the court: until the late 14th century, private parties could not bring cases to the Chancery as they could to the other courts, while by the 15th century the number of private cases had increased to the point where there were many complaints in Parliament. Marsh writes that another reason for the Chancery's growing influence was the remedies available; through orders of specific performance and injunctions, the Court could not only rectify previous wrongs but prevent future wrongs from occurring, while the common law courts were limited to awarding damages.
#### Chancery's role in development of Standard English
Chancery English, used in official documents, can be seen as the beginnings of Standard English – a national standard of spelling and grammar. By the 15th century, the City of Westminster had been the seat of government administration for about three centuries. After about 1430, the use of English in administrative documents replaced French which had been used since the Norman conquest. Consequently, the written English that developed at the Court of Chancery eventually became a standard, both in its style of handwriting ('Chancery hand') and in its grammar and vocabulary. By the 1440s and 1450s comparative regularisation of spelling had begun to emerge.
### Competition with the common law
The early Elizabethan period featured a dispute between the Court of Chancery and common-law courts over who held pre-eminence. It had been the practice under Henry VI that plaintiffs in the common-law courts could not execute judgments given by the common-law judges if the lord chancellor felt their claim was "against conscience". This had been vehemently opposed by the common-law judges, who felt that if the lord chancellor had the power to override their decisions, parties to a case would flock to the Court of Chancery. The dispute over the pre-eminence of the lord chancellor continued into Elizabeth I's reign, with the judges increasing in strength; the lord chancellor was no longer a clergyman whom it was risky to offend, while the judges had grown in stature. Sir Edward Coke cites in his Reports a case at the end of Elizabeth I's reign which seems to indicate that the chancellor's prerogative had been overturned, when the judges (without opposition from the monarch) allowed a claim to proceed despite the lord chancellor's implied jurisdiction. At the same time, the common-law judges ruled that the Chancery had no jurisdiction over matters of freehold.
The lord chancellor of the time, Lord Ellesmere, was not dissuaded, and maintained that he had the jurisdiction to oversee decisions of the common-law courts and matters of freehold. In 1614, he heard the case of Courtney v. Glanvil, dictating that Glanvil should be imprisoned for deceit; this was over-ruled by Sir Edward Coke in the Court of King's Bench, who demanded that Glanvil be released and issued a writ of habeas corpus. Two years later, the Earl of Oxford's Case came before Ellesmere, who issued a judgment that directly contradicted English law based on the "Law of God". Coke and the other judges over-ruled this judgment while Ellesmere was ill, taking the case as an opportunity to completely overthrow the lord chancellor's jurisdiction. Ellesmere appealed to the Monarch, who referred the matter to the attorney general for the prince of Wales and Francis Bacon, the Attorney General for England and Wales. Both recommended a judgment in Ellesmere's favour, which the Monarch made, saying:
> as mercy and justice be the true supports of our Royal Throne; and it properly belongeth to our princely office to take care and provide that our subjects have equal and indifferent justice ministered to them; and that when their case deserveth to be relieved in course of equity by suit in our Court of Chancery, they should not be abandoned and exposed to perish under the rigor and extremity of our laws, we ... do approve, ratifie and confirm, as well the practice of our Court of Chancery.
Coke's challenge to the Chancery is seen by academic Duncan Kerly as helping him lose his position as a judge, and until its dissolution the Court of Chancery could overrule judgments issued in the common-law courts. This was not the end of the dispute, however; in his Institutes of the Lawes of England, Coke suggested that the Monarch's decree was unlawful, and his contemporary David Jenkins wrote in Eight Centuries of Reports that "the excess of Jurisdiction in Chancery, in examining Judgments at Common Law" was one of the largest abuses of the law. In the 17th century Robert Atkyns attempted to renew this controversy in his book An Enquiry into the Jurisdiction of the Chancery in Causes of Equity, but without any tangible result. Even so, future lord chancellors were more cautious; when Francis Bacon succeeded Ellesmere, he made sure to prevent the misuse of injunctions. Horwitz writes that this was not just limited to Bacon, and that "after the dramatic confrontations between Lord Chief Justice Coke and Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, chancellors took care to circumscribe the Court's corrective jurisdiction and to focus more narrowly on territories they had staked out as peculiarly their own".
### Attempted reform under the Commonwealth of England
By the time of the English Civil War, the Court of Chancery was being criticised extensively for its procedure and practice. During the 16th century the Court was vastly overworked; Francis Bacon wrote of 2,000 orders being made a year, while Sir Edward Coke estimated the backlog to be around 16,000 cases. This was partly due to the incompetence of the judges, and partially due to the procedure used; evidence was re-heard up to three times and orders were issued and then over-ruled, only to be issued again: "what was ordered one day was contradicted the next, so as in some cases there had been five hundred orders and faire more as some affirmed". The Court spent a long time on each case, which, combined with the backlog, made the pursuit of a case extremely expensive. This was exacerbated by the appointment to the Court of useless, highly paid officials by the lord chancellor or master of the rolls, many of whom were their friends. The chancellor and master both openly sold these roles, whose exorbitant pay is more surprising considering that their duties were normally such that could be easily performed by solicitor's clerks, and that they were usually performed by underclerks, not by the officials.
In 1649, during the English Civil War, Parliament published a series of orders to reform the Court. Most were from the doctrines set out by Francis Bacon as lord chancellor, but there were some more modern reforms: counsels to the defendants could deliver pleas, rather than defendants in person, thus saving the cost of a Commissioner of Oaths, and cases were to be heard in the order they were accepted by the court. Parliament also fixed the fees that officers could charge, in an attempt to reduce the expense of a case. The following year, Parliament appointed a commission to look at court reform; this made many recommendations, but none that directly affected the Chancery. In August 1653 another debate took place in Parliament, lasting two days, in which a paper titled "Observations concerning the Court of Chancery" was circulated; this concerned the costs, workings, and officers of the Court. A second paper was given out, "for the regulation or taking away of the Court of Chancery, and settling the business of Equity according to the original and primitive constitution of it; and for taking away all unnecessary fees, offices and officers and formalities now used, and for the speedy dispatch of business".
Parliament eventually proposed dissolving the court as it then stood and replacing it with "some of the most able and honest men", who would be tasked with hearing equity cases. Rather than the mass of clerks on the staff, a sufficient number of "godly, able, honest and experienced clerks, which be working attorneys and clerks and not overseeing officers" would be appointed, and the Bar would elect two supervising Chief Clerks to advise on points of practice. A far-reaching and heavily criticised draft, this was eventually replaced by an even more thorough-going bill. The judges would be six Masters, who would sit in groups of three and be appointed by Parliament, assisted by a Chief Clerk. All Justices of the Peace would be allowed to submit cases to the court, with cases to be heard within 60 days. The party that lost the case was to pay full fees to the other side; the fees would be set ludicrously low. This bill was never put into effect, as Parliament was dissolved. Oliver Cromwell did appoint a Commission to institute similar provisions in 1654, but the Commission refused to perform its duties.
### Restoration
After the English Restoration, those judges and officials sacked under Cromwell were reinstated, with little modern progression; as Kerly puts it, "unjust judges presided again, and rank maladministration invaded the offices". The situation was much improved, nonetheless, because many of the faults were down to the machinery of the court rather than the spirit, which Lord Clarendon soon rectified. Upon appointment as lord chancellor he immediately published a new issue of the Orders for the Regulation of the Practice of the Court of Chancery. This was based on the code set by the Cromwellian Commissioners, and limited the fees charged by the court and the amount of time they could take on a case.
An effect of the Civil War and resulting Commonwealth of England, particularly the "liberal" values and feelings it stirred up, was the continuous modernisation and improvement of the common law courts, something that reduced the interference of the lord chancellor in common law matters, except in areas where they had wildly divergent principles and law. Under Charles II, for the first time, there was a type of common law appeal where the nature of the evidence in the initial trial was taken into account, which reduced the need to go to the Court of Chancery. As a result, the nature of the Court of Chancery changed; rather than being a major corrective system for the common law, it became primarily concerned with the administration and protection of rights, as opposed to the common law courts, which were mainly concerned with the remedy and retribution of problems. This was further enforced by the Statute of Frauds, which confirmed Chancery principles across the board, allowing people to receive the same treatment in the common law courts as they did in the Chancery.
A major reform to the Court happened soon after the restoration, with the introduction of a right of appeal to the House of Lords from the Chancery. Before this there had been no records of appeals to the Lords, and a committee had concluded that there was no precedent to give the Lords jurisdiction over equity matters, except when problems and cases were sent directly to Parliament (as occasionally had been the case). In 1660 the Convention Parliament claimed for itself the right of appellate jurisdiction over equity matters, and also the right of original jurisdiction to hear equity cases at first instance. After disputes which lasted into the next Parliament, this second measure was dropped, but the right to hear equity appeals was confirmed. Horowitz writes that despite these changes, one of the academic certainties is that the problems which had dogged the court for the last two centuries persisted; Observations on the Dilatory and Expensive Proceedings in the Court of Chancery, written in 1701, listed 25 different procedures, areas and situations which contributed to the problems of high fees and slow processes.
### Further reform
Lord Somers, following his dismissal as lord chancellor, introduced an Act in 1706 which "became the most important act of law reform which the 18th century produced". The Act significantly amended the existing law and court procedure, and while most of it was aimed at the common-law courts, it did affect the Chancery. For equity, the Act provided that a party trying to have his case dismissed could not do so until he had paid the full costs, rather than the nominal costs that were previously required; at the same time, the reforms the Act made to common-law procedure (such as allowing claims to be brought against executors of wills) reduced the need for parties to go to equity for a remedy. Legal historian Wilfrid Prest writes that despite these legislative enactments, the tally of which "begins to look quite impressive", the old problems continued, albeit less frequently; one barrister of the time claimed that going to the Court with a case worth anything less than £500 was a waste of time.
Under Lord Hardwicke, Chancery procedure was further reformed with a pair of orders published in 1741 and 1747, which mandated that a claimant who brought his case to court and had it dismissed immediately should pay full costs to the other side, rather than the 40 shillings previously paid, and that parties filing bills of review should pay £50 for the privilege. At the same time, a review of the Court's costs and fees was undertaken by a Parliamentary Committee. The Committee reported that fees and costs had increased significantly since the last review under Charles I, a number of expensive honorary positions had been created, and on many occasions court officers had not known what the correct fees were. At the same time, proceedings had grown to several thousand pages in length, necessitating additional expense. The Committee concluded "that the interest which a great number of officers and clerks have in the proceedings of the Court of Chancery, has been a principal cause of extending bills, answers, pleadings, examinations and other forms and copies of them, to an unnecessary length, to the great delay of justice and the oppression of the subject". They recommended that a list of permissible fees be published and circulated to the court officials.
The recommendations were not immediately acted on, but in 1743 a list of permissible fees was published, and to cut down on paperwork, no party was required to obtain office copies of proceedings. The permissible fees list contained over 1,000 items, which Kerly describes as "an appalling example of the abuses which the unrestrained farming of the Offices of the Court, and the payment of all officials by fees had developed".
### Victorian era
Despite these small reforms, the 18th century ended with continuous and unrestrained attacks on the Court. Although complaints had been common since the time of Elizabeth I, the problems had become more unrestrained, at the same time as politically neutral law reformers first arose in any great number. Many critics were barristers of the common law, ignorant of the court's workings, but some, such as Sir Samuel Romilly, had trained as a Chancery advocate and were well aware of the Chancery's procedure. The success of the Code Napoleon and the writings of Jeremy Bentham are seen by academic Duncan Kerly to have had much to do with the criticism, and the growing wealth of the country and increasing international trade meant it was crucial that there be a functioning court system for matters of equity. While the upper classes had been struggling with the Court for centuries, and regarded it as a necessary evil, the growing middle and merchant classes were more demanding. With increasing court backlogs, it was clear to many law reformers and politicians that serious reform was needed.
The first major reforms were the appointment of a vice-chancellor in 1813 to hear cases, and the extension of the Master of the Rolls' jurisdiction in 1833 to hear any and all cases. In 1824 a Chancery Commission was appointed to oversee the Court, which the political opposition maintained was simply to protect it; the membership included the lord chancellor, the master of the rolls and all senior Chancery judges. Some significant reforms were proposed; in 1829, for example, Lord Lyndhurst proposed unsuccessfully that the equity jurisdiction of the Court of Exchequer be merged with the Chancery, and that a fourth judge be appointed to hear the additional cases. A year later, when the common law courts were each gaining a judge, he repeated his proposal, but the bill was strongly opposed by judges who maintained that the court backlog did not justify the additional expense of a fourth judge. Eventually, two more vice-chancellors were appointed in 1841, and a decade later two lord justices were tasked with hearing appeals from the Court through the Court of Appeal in Chancery. These are described by Lobban as "hasty reactions to mounting arrears" rather than the result of long-term planning.
As a result of the new appointments, the court backlog was significantly reduced – the court processed 1,700 cases in 1846–49 compared to 959 in 1819–24 – but it rose again after the death of Shadwell VC and retirement of Wigram VC. Shadwell, appointed under the 1831 Act of Parliament, could be replaced, but a principal in the 1841 Act (under which Wigram had been appointed) meant that it provided for two life appointments to the court, not two open positions; after the retirement or death of the judges, no more could be appointed. Again, the backlog became a problem, particularly since the lord chancellor was distracted with the appellate cases through the Court of Appeal in Chancery and the House of Lords, leaving a maximum of three Chancery judges who were available to hear cases. Further structural reforms were proposed; Richard Bethell suggested three more vice-chancellors and "an Appellate Tribunal in Chancery formed of two of the vice chancellors taken in rotation", but this came to nothing.
The 1830s saw a reduction in the "old corruption" that had long plagued the court, first through the Chancery Sinecures Act 1832 (which abolished a number of sinecure offices within the court and provided a pension and pay rise for the lord chancellor, in the hope that it would reduce the need for the chancellor to make money by selling court offices) and then through the Chancery Regulation Act 1833. (which changed the appointments system so that masters in Chancery would henceforth be appointed by the Crown, not by the lord chancellor, and that they would be paid wages.) Through the abolition of sinecures, taking into account the wages and pension, this saved the Court £21,670 a year. The government had initially intended the 1832 bill to go further and abolish the Six Clerks, but the Clerks successfully lobbied to prevent this. This did not save them, however; in 1842 the "nettle" of the Six Clerks Office was grasped by Thomas Pemberton, who attacked them in the House of Commons for doing effectively sinecure work for high fees that massively increased the expense involved in cases. As a result, the Court of Chancery Act 1842 was passed in the same year that abolished the office of the Six Clerks completely.
Some further procedural reforms were undertaken in the 1850s. In 1850, a new set of Chancery orders were produced by the lord chancellor, allowing masters to speed up cases in whatever way they chose and allowing plaintiffs to file a claim, rather than the more expensive and long-winded bill of complaint. The Suitors in Chancery Relief Act 1852 gave all court officials salaries, abolished the need to pay them fees and made it illegal for them to receive gratuities; it also removed more sinecure positions. The Master in Chancery Abolition Act 1852 abolished the masters in Chancery, allowing all cases to be heard directly by judges instead of bounced back-and-forth between judges and masters. As a result of these reforms the court became far more efficient, and the backlog decreased; in the 1860s an average of 3,207 cases were submitted each year, while the Court heard and dismissed 3,833, many of them from the previous backlog. Much of this work was carried out by the growing number of clerks, however, and members of the legal profession became concerned about the "famine" of equity judges. Despite these reforms, it was still possible for Charles Dickens, writing in 1853 in the preface to his novel Bleak House, to bemoan the inefficiencies of the Court of Chancery. His novel revolves around a fictional long-running Chancery case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce. He observed that at the time he was writing there was a case before the Chancery court "which was commenced nearly twenty years ago ... and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun". He concluded that "If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of a parsimonious public".
### Dissolution
The idea of fusing the common-law and equity courts first came to prominence in the 1850s; although the Law Times dismissed it as "suicide" in 1852, the idea gained mainstream credibility, and by the end of the year the Times was writing that there was "almost unanimity" of opinion that the existence of two separate systems was "the parent of most of the defects in the administration of our law". Much of the impetus for fusion came from pressure groups and lawyers' associations. They partially succeeded with the Common Law Procedure Act 1854 and Chancery Amendment Act 1858, which gave both courts access to the full range of remedies. Until then, the common-law courts were limited to granting damages, and the Chancery was limited to granting specific performance or injunctions. The County Courts (Equity Jurisdiction) Act 1865 gave the county courts the authority to use equitable remedies, although it was rarely used. The lord chancellors during this period were more cautious, and despite a request by the lawyers' associations to establish a royal commission to look at fusion, they refused to do so.
After the Chancery Regulation Act 1862 had gone some way toward procedural reform, in February 1867, Roundell Palmer again brought the problem of having two separate court systems to Parliament's attention, and in March 1870 Lord Hatherley introduced a bill to create a single, unified High Court of Justice. The bill was a weak one, not containing any provision addressing which court would deal with the common law and which with equity, and was also silent on the structure of the court, as Hatherley believed the difference between the common law and equity was one of procedure, not substance. As a result, the bill was heavily opposed from two sides: those who opposed fusion, and those who supported fusion but felt the provisions were too weak and vague to be of any use. As a result, the bill was eventually withdrawn.
In 1873, the idea was resurrected – again by Palmer, who was now Lord Selborne and the new lord chancellor – as the Supreme Court of Judicature bill. While still cautious, Selborne's bill was far more structured than Hatherley's, and contained more detail on what was to be done. Rather than fusing the common law and equity, which he saw as impracticable since it would destroy the idea of trusts, he decided to fuse the courts and the procedure. The final draft provided that all of the existing superior courts would be fused into one court consisting of two levels; one of first instance, one appellate. The court of first instance, to be known as the High Court of Justice, would be subdivided into several divisions based on the old superior courts, one of which, the Chancery Division, would deal with equity cases. All jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery was to be transferred to the Chancery Division; Section 25 of the Act provided that, where there was conflict between the common law and equity, the latter would prevail. An appeal from each division went to the appellate level, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. These provisions were brought into effect after amendment with the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1875, and the Court of Chancery ceased to exist. The Master of the Rolls was transferred to the new Court of Appeal, the lord chancellor retained his other judicial and political roles, and the position of vice-chancellor ceased to exist, replaced by ordinary judges. The Chancery Division remains to this day part of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales.
## Jurisdiction
### Trusts and the administration of estates
The idea of a trust originated during the Crusades of the 12th century, when noblemen travelled abroad to fight in the Holy Land. As they would be away for years at a time it was vital that somebody could look after their land with the authority of the original owner. As a result, the idea of joint ownership of land arose. The common law courts did not recognise such trusts, and so it fell to equity and to the Court of Chancery to deal with them, as befitting the common principle that the Chancery's jurisdiction was for matters where the common law courts could neither enforce a right nor administer it. The use of trusts and uses became common during the 16th century, although the Statute of Uses "[dealt] a severe blow to these forms of conveyancing" and made the law in this area far more complex. The court's sole jurisdiction over trusts lasted until its dissolution.
From its foundation, the Court of Chancery could administer estates, due to its jurisdiction over trusts. While the main burden in the 16th century fell on the ecclesiastical courts, their powers over administrators and executors was limited, regularly necessitating the Court of Chancery's involvement. Before the Statute of Wills, many people used feoffees to dispose of their land, something that fell under the jurisdiction of the lord chancellor anyway. In addition, in relation to the discovery and accounting of assets, the process used by the Court of Chancery was far superior to the ecclesiastical one; as a result, the Court of Chancery was regularly used by beneficiaries. The common law courts also had jurisdiction over some estates matters, but their remedies for problems were far more limited.
Initially, the Court of Chancery would not entertain a request to administer an estate as soon as a flaw in the will was discovered, rather leaving it to the ecclesiastical courts, but from 1588 onwards the Court did deal with such requests, in four situations: where it was alleged that there were insufficient assets; where it was appropriate to force a legatee to give a bond to creditors (which could not be done in the ecclesiastical courts); to secure femme covert assets from a husband; and where the deceased's debts had to be paid before the legacies were valid.
### Insanity and guardianship
The Chancery's jurisdiction over "lunatics" came from two sources: first, the king's prerogative to look after them, which was exercised regularly by the lord chancellor, and second, the Lands of Lunatics Act, which gave the King (and therefore the chancellor) custodianship of lunatics and their land; the Lord chancellor exercised the first right directly and the second in his role as head of the Court of Chancery. This jurisdiction applied to any "idiots" or "lunatics", regardless of whether or not they were British, or whether their land was within England and Wales. They were divided into two categories – idiots, "who have no glimmering of reason from their birth and are, therefore, by law, presumed never likely to attain any", and lunatics, "who have had understanding but have lost the use of it". Lunatics and idiots were administered separately by the lord chancellor under his two prerogatives; the appeal under the king's prerogative went directly to the king, and under the Lands of Lunatics Act 1324 to the House of Lords.
Idiots and lunatics had their land looked after by a court-appointed administrator, and any profits went into a trust fund to support the insane person. Due to the vested interest of the king (who would hold the lands) the actual lunacy or idiocy was determined by a jury, not by an individual judge. Under the Lunacy Act 1845 the lord chancellor had a right to appoint a commission to investigate the insanity of an individual; as part of his role as Keeper of the king's conscience, however, he would only do this when it was beneficial to the lunatic, not simply because somebody had been found insane.
The law courts' jurisdiction over the guardianship of children is said to have come from the king's prerogative of parens patriae. The Chancery had administered this area of law from an early period, since it primarily concerned the holding of land – a form of trust. Since these were mainly dealt with orally there are few early records; the first reference comes from 1582, when a curator was appointed to deal with the property of an infant. While the common law courts regularly appointed guardians, the Chancery had the right to remove them, replace them or create them in the first place. Similarly, while there were actions against guardians which the child could undertake in the common law courts, these were regularly undertaken in the Court of Chancery. This jurisdiction was first regularly recognised from 1696 onwards, and its main focus was the welfare of the child. As such, wards of the court had certain principles: their estates had to be administered under the supervision of the Court, they had to be educated under the same supervision, and any marriage had to be sanctioned by the Court.
### Charities
The lord chancellor had, since the 15th century, been tasked with administering estates where the estate was to be used for charitable purposes. In Bailiff of Burford v Lenthall, Lord Hardwicke suggested that the jurisdiction of the Court over charity matters came from its jurisdiction over trusts, as well as from the Charitable Uses Act 1601. Carne suggests that, as the Court had long been able to deal with such situations, the 1601 act was actually just the declaration of pre-existing custom. This is illustrated by the chancellor's original jurisdiction over feoffments to uses, which came from his original status as a clergyman, as charity had been originally enforced by the Church and the ecclesiastical courts. Essentially, an owner of land could dispose of it by granting the right to use it and collect fees to another, not just by selling it. This was not valid at the common law courts but was in the Court of Chancery; the lord chancellor is reported as having said, in 1492, "where there is no remedy at common law there may be good remedy in conscience, as, for example, by a feoffment upon confidence, the feoffor has no remedy by common law, and yet by conscience he has; and so, if the feoffee transfers to another who knows of this confidence, the feoffor, by means of a subpoena, will have his rights in this Court". After the reign of Edward IV, if the charitable land were to be sold (or land were to be sold to create the charity) the Court of Chancery was the only place this could be done, as ecclesiastical and probate courts did not have a valid jurisdiction.
## Remedies
The Court of Chancery could grant three possible remedies – specific performance, injunctions and damages. The remedy of specific performance is, in contractual matters, an order by the court which requires the party in breach of contract to perform his obligations. The validity of the contract as a whole was not normally considered, only whether there was adequate consideration and if expecting the party that breached the contract to carry out his obligations was viable. Injunctions, on the other hand, are remedies which prevent a party from doing something (unlike specific performance, which requires them to do something). Until the Common Law Procedure Act 1854, the Court of Chancery was the only body qualified to grant injunctions and specific performance.
Damages is money claimed in compensation for some failure by the other party to a case. It is commonly believed that the Court of Chancery could not grant damages until the Chancery Amendment Act 1858, which gave it that right, but in some special cases it had been able to provide damages for over 600 years. The idea of damages was first conceived in English law during the 13th century, when the Statutes of Merton and Gloucester provided for damages in certain circumstances. Despite what is normally assumed by academics, it was not just the common law courts that could grant damages under these statutes; the Exchequer of Pleas and Court of Chancery both had the right to do so. In Cardinal Beaufort's case in 1453, for example, it is stated that "I shall have a subpoena against my feoffee and recover damages for the value of the land". A statute passed during the reign of Richard II specifically gave the Chancery the right to award damages, stating:
> For as much as People be compelled to come before the King's Council, or in the Chancery by Writs grounded upon untrue Suggestions; that the Chancellor for the Time being, presently after that such Suggestions be duly found and proved untrue, shall have Power to ordain and award Damages according to his Discretion, to him which is so troubled unduly, as afore is said.
This did not extend to every case, but merely to those which had been dismissed because one party's "suggestions [are] proved untrue", and was normally awarded to pay for the innocent party's costs in responding to the party that had lied. Lord Hardwicke, however, claimed that the Chancery's jurisdiction to award damages was not derived "from any authority, but from conscience", and rather than being statutory was instead due to the lord chancellor's inherent authority. As a result, General Orders were regularly issued awarding the innocent party additional costs, such as the cost of a solicitor on top of the costs of responding to the other party's false statements.
The Court became more cautious about awarding damages during the 16th and 17th centuries; lord chancellors and legal writers considered it a common law remedy, and judges would normally only award damages where no other remedy was appropriate. Damages were sometimes given as an ancillary remedy, such as in Browne v Dom Bridges in 1588, where the defendant had disposed of waste inside the plaintiffs woods. As well as an injunction to prevent the defendant dumping waste in the woods, damages were also awarded to pay for the harm to the woods." This convention (that damages could only be awarded as an ancillary remedy, or where no others were available) remained the cause until the 18th and early 19th centuries, when the attitude of the Court towards awarding damages became more liberal; in Lannoy v Werry, for example, it was held that where there was sufficient evidence of harm, the Court could award damages in addition to specific performance and other remedies. This changed with Todd v Gee in 1810, where Lord Eldon held that "except in very special cases, it was not the course of proceeding in Equity to file a Bill for specific performance of an agreement; praying in the alternative, if it cannot be performed, an issue, or an inquiry before the Master, with a view to damages. The plaintiff must take that remedy, if he chooses it, at Law." This was followed by Hatch v Cobb, in which Chancellor Kent held that "though equity, in very special cases, may possibly sustain a bill for damages, on a breach of contract, it is clearly not the ordinary jurisdiction of the court".
The Court's right to give damages was reiterated in Phelps v Prothero in 1855, where the Court of Appeal in Chancery held that if a plaintiff starts an action in a court of equity for specific performance and damages are also appropriate, the court of equity may choose to award damages. This authorisation was limited to certain circumstances, and was again not regularly used. Eventually, the Chancery Amendment Act 1858 gave the Court full jurisdiction to award damages; the situation before that was so limited that lawyers at the time commented as if the Court had not previously been able to do so.
## Officers
### Lord chancellor
The lord chancellor was the official head of the Court of Chancery. For much of its early existence he was closely linked with the curia regis; even after the Court became independent around 1345, petitions were addressed to "the king and others". By the time of Edward IV, however, petitions were issued in the name of the lord chancellor and the Court of Chancery. In the early years, the lord chancellor made most of the decisions himself; he summoned the parties, set a date for hearings, addressed questions from the parties to the case and announced the verdict. He regularly called for assistance from the common law judges, who complained that this prevented them from doing the work of the common law courts, and early records frequently say that the decision was made "with the advice and consent of the justices and servants of our Lord the King in the Chancery".
In one period, particularly under Edward III, the lord chancellor also possessed some common law jurisdiction, able to hear cases for petitions of right and the repeal of letters patent, as well as other cases in which the King was a party. He heard cases on recognizances, the execution of Acts of Parliament and any case in which an officer of the Court of Chancery was involved. Records show that he enrolled recognizances and contracts, and also issued writs commanding a sheriff to enforce them. Carne considers that this common law jurisdiction was likely down to a failure to separate the common law jurisdiction and the equity jurisdiction possessed by the lord chancellor, a failure that continued into the 16th century; Sir Edward Coke wrote that in the Chancery there was both an ordinary court and an "extraordinary" one.
Most of the early lord chancellors were members of the clergy; the first legally trained lord chancellor was Robert Parning SL, who was appointed in 1341 and held the office for two years. His successors were again clerics until the appointment of Robert Thorpe in 1371, probably due to pressure from Parliament. The precedent of appointing legally trained Lord Chancellors was not followed strongly, although others such as Nicholas Bacon did hold the office; one lord chancellor is said to have been appointed because the Queen was impressed with his skill at dancing. According to William Carne, Thomas Egerton was the first "proper" lord chancellor from the Court of Chancery's point of view, having recorded his decisions and followed the legal doctrine of precedent. Marsh writes that the use of clergymen as lord chancellors had a tremendous influence on the Court's actions, tracing the idea of following natural law in the Court back to the chancellors' Christian roots. Following the dissolution of the Court of Chancery in 1873, the lord chancellor failed to have any role in equity, although his membership of other judicial bodies allowed him some indirect control.
### Other officers of the Court
When the Court was a part of the curia regis, the officers were fluid; they could include doctors of civil law, members of the curia and "those who ought to be summoned". As the members of the curia ceased to sit as Officers, however, the composition of the court became more solid. From an early period, the lord chancellor was assisted by twelve Clerks in Chancery, known as the Masters in Chancery. It was said that these positions had existed since before the Norman Conquest, sitting as part of the Witenagemot. After the conquest they gradually lost their authority, and became advisers and assistants to the lord chancellor. It was the masters who started court cases, issuing the initial writs without which parties could not begin cases in the common law courts. In addition, they took depositions and acted as secretaries to the lord chancellor, maintaining the plea rolls. In the early years they were almost always members of the clergy, called the "clericos de prima forma"; it was not until the reign of Edward III that they were referred to as Masters in Chancery.
The twelve Masters in Chancery were led by one of their number, known as the master of the rolls. He was almost as powerful as the lord chancellor, and had wielded judicial power since the time of Edward I. He was sometimes known as the "vice-chancellor", and was given the title "The Right Worshipful". The master of the rolls assisted the Court's judges in forming judgments, and regularly sat in place of the lord chancellor. The first reference to the Master of the Rolls comes from 1286, although it is believed that the position probably existed before that; the first reference to his having independent judicial authority is from 1520. The master of the rolls had six clerks, who helped keep the records; they were independently accountable for any mistakes. These were initially solicitors for the people suing in the Court, and no other counsel was allowed, but by the time of Francis Bacon claimants were allowed their own counsel. The master of the Rolls and his clerks were housed in the Rolls Office, along with the Six Clerks' clerks, who numbered sixty. The Six Clerks were abolished in 1843, the masters in Chancery in 1852, and when the Court of Chancery was abolished, the master of the rolls moved to the newly established Court of Appeal of England and Wales.
From an early period, the Court was also assisted by two registrars, who enrolled decrees of the court and orders; their books documented the legal precedent set by the court. At the same time, two examiners were appointed to assist the master of the rolls in examining witnesses. The positions were regularly and openly sold by the master of the rolls and lord chancellor – masters in Chancery went for £6,000 in 1625. To avoid the sale of offices, and due to the corruption of many court officials, an Act was passed that year requiring that fees be paid directly into the Bank of England, and creating an Accountant-General to oversee the financial aspects of the court. In 1813 the first vice-chancellor was appointed to deal with the increasing number of cases submitted to the Court. With the backlog growing larger, two more were appointed in 1841 under a second Act of Parliament, although this provided for two life appointments, not two new positions; when the new vice-chancellors died, there could be no replacements. With the dissolution of the Court in 1873, the position of vice-chancellor ceased to exist.
## See also
- Court of equity
- Chancery Lane
- Court of Chancery (Ireland)
- Court of Chancery of the County Palatine of Durham and Sadberge
- Delaware Court of Chancery
- Michigan Court of Chancery
- New York Court of Chancery
- Subpoena ad testificandum
- Subpoena duces tecum
- The Court of Chancery of the County Palatine of Lancaster |
58,284,465 | Loveday (1458) | 1,172,405,559 | Arbitration event during the Wars of the Roses | [
"1458 in England",
"15th century in London",
"English law",
"Henry VI of England",
"Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York",
"St Paul's Cathedral",
"Wars of the Roses"
]
| The Loveday of 1458 (also known as the Annunciation Loveday) was a ritualistic reconciliation between warring factions of the English nobility that took place at St Paul's Cathedral on 25 March 1458. Following the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in 1455, it was the culmination of lengthy negotiations initiated by King Henry VI to resolve the lords' rivalries. English politics had become increasingly factional during his reign, and was exacerbated in 1453 when he became catatonic. This effectively left the government leaderless, and eventually the King's cousin, and at the time heir to the throne, Richard, Duke of York, was appointed Protector during the King's illness. Alongside York were his allies from the politically and militarily powerful Neville family, led by Richard, Earl of Salisbury, and his eldest son, Richard, Earl of Warwick. When the King returned to health a year later, the protectorship ended but partisanship within the government did not.
Supporters of King Henry and his Queen, Margaret of Anjou, have been loosely called "Lancastrians", the King being head of the House of Lancaster, while the duke and his party are considered "Yorkists", after his title of Duke of York. By the 1450s, York felt increasingly excluded from government, and, in May 1455—possibly fearing an ambush by his enemies—led an army against the King at the First Battle of St Albans. There, in what has been called more of a series of assassinations than a battle, the personal enemies of York and the Nevilles—the Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland, and Lord Clifford—perished.
In 1458 the King attempted to unite his feuding nobles with a public display of friendship under the auspices of the Church at St Paul's Cathedral. Following much discussion and negotiation, and amid the presence of large, armed, noble retinues which almost led to another outbreak of war, a compromise was announced. To celebrate, a procession was held by all the major participants, who walked hand-in-hand from Westminster Palace to St Paul's Cathedral. Queen Margaret was partnered with York, and other adversaries were paired off accordingly, and the sons of the dead Lancastrian lords took their fathers' places. Certain reparations were ordained, all by the Yorkist lords, who for their part accepted full responsibility for the Battle of St Albans. They were ordered to make payments to the dead lords' widows and sons, and masses were paid for the souls of all who had died. Contemporaries varied in their views of the accord. Some wrote verses expressing hope that it would lead to a new-found peace and prosperity; others were more pessimistic as to its value.
In the long run, the King's Loveday and its agreements had no long-lasting benefit. Within a few months, petty violence between the lords had broken out again and, within the year, York and Lancaster faced each other at the Battle of Blore Heath. Historians debate who—if anyone—actually gained from the 1458 Loveday. On the one hand, the crown publicised its role as the ultimate court of appeal but, conversely, although the Yorkists were bound to pay large sums in compensation, this was done with money already owed by the government. Fundamentally, factional discord was highlighted on the public stage, and the war it was intended to prevent was only deferred.
## Political background
By the middle of the 15th century, English politics had become increasingly factional. Richard, Duke of York and his Neville allies—Richard, Earl of Salisbury and his son, Richard, Earl of Warwick, with their cousin John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk—were in opposition to the government of King Henry VI. The King was weak-willed and easily led, and his government was effectively controlled by his favourite, Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. Further weakening the government, King Henry had become mentally incapacitated in August 1453, becoming comatose, unable to feed himself or recognise any of his companions.
At the time, a major feud was taking place in the North of England between the powerful Percy and Neville families. The former was led by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland's son, Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, while the Neville family was headed by Salisbury. In March 1454, the King still being ill, parliament authorised a protectorate to rule in the King's stead. The House of Lords chose the Duke of York—as the King's closest adult relative—as Protector. York and the Nevilles cemented an alliance during the protectorate when York appointed Salisbury his Lord Chancellor. York's protectorate had given the Nevilles a useful advantage over their rivals, and in November 1454, Thomas Percy and his brothers, Henry and Ralph, were captured in battle. They received massive fines. The following January, the King regained his health, and York was no longer required as Protector. York and the Nevilles retreated to their northern estates, and Mowbray did likewise to East Anglia, in an attempt to distance themselves from factional politics. From this point, argues the medievalist A. J. Pollard, power "shifted back into the hands of [York’s] enemies, now given a lead by the Queen" rather than the King.
### Yorkist demands
An uneasy peace existed between the court and the Yorkists until April 1455, when the King summoned a great council to meet at Leicester the following month. The Duke of York feared that the purpose of this council was to destroy him; several chroniclers of the day suggest that Somerset was influencing the King against the Duke with "subtile meanes". York and the Nevilles raised an army from their northern estates. They wrote to Henry regarding their fears, and emphasised their loyalty to him. This was in spite of what they called the "doubtes and ambiguitees [and] jealousie" spread by their enemies. The Yorkist lords also expressed their fears that their lives were in danger from those who hid "undre the wynge of your Mageste Roiall". This, they said, was the reason they felt the need to travel accompanied by large retinues. The Yorkists' solution was that the King dismiss those who kept the King's true liegemen (i.e., them) from him and that the malicious advisers be excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It is unknown whether the King received the Yorkist lords' letters, although the historian Michael Hicks believes that "there is no convincing evidence" that he did not. Henry and a small force left London for Leicester on 20 May; while it was natural for both the King and his followers to travel with armed contingents, the majority were members of their civil households. The Yorkists approached from the north with a speed calculated to surprise. In a pre-emptive strike, York and his allies intercepted the royal army at St Albans. Fighting in the streets lasted only a short time, and though there were very few fatalities among the common soldiery, the chief Lancastrian captains—Northumberland, Somerset and Thomas, Lord Clifford—were all killed. They were not only three of the King's most loyal and powerful supporters, but Northumberland and Somerset were bitter enemies of the Nevilles and York. Because of this, the clash has been described more akin to a series of targeted assassinations than a fully fledged battle. On the 22nd, Henry was escorted, under guard, back to London: "all honour was shown to him" by York, Salisbury and Warwick, notes Griffiths, and a ceremony—intending to establish the new-found friendship between the King and the Yorkists—was held in St Paul's the following day.
The period between St Albans and the Loveday, says Pollard, is one of the most poorly recorded of the entire century, although what is known has enabled historians to piece together the basic chronology. By 1458, Henry's government urgently needed to deal with the unfinished problem that the Battle of St Albans had created, summarised by the scholar Ralph Griffiths as the "craving of the younger magnates for revenge on those who had killed their fathers". But Henry also wanted to bring the Yorkists back into the fold. Taking the initiative, the Loveday was intended to be his personal contribution to a lasting peace. Another motive for achieving a united magnatial front was the French: intelligence had been received suggesting they planned to attack Calais. In the event, this never occurred, but the previous year the French had been able to land at Sandwich in Kent, which they sacked, taking many prisoners. This alone was reason enough to bring the warring parties together. The Yorkists released an official statement, known as the Parliamentary Pardon, which was intended to absolve them of blame for the crisis. This, as the name suggests, was passed by act of parliament, and was seen as a stronger defence for the Yorkists than one issued by the King alone.
## Lovedays as arbitration
### Definition
In the context of a 'loveday', 'love' meant concord or a settlement; likewise, in law, a 'day' indicated a case-opening rather than a twenty-four hour period. There were few, if any restrictions on the kind of business that a loveday could address, as long as the court had authorised it, and this included cases that were pending at a higher court. Arbitration, argues legal historian Anthony Musson, was not a resource restricted to one particular group of people, rather a universal phenomenon, occurring at every level and among all orders of society".
### Mechanics
The ritualistic reconciliations that contemporaries called lovedays have been described by the scholar B. P. Wolffe as "a formal accord on the limited issue of atonement and compensation". Legal historian John Baker suggested that, in particularly contentious affairs, a loveday was deliberately designed "to avoid reasoned decision making", being intended to result in voluntary—therefore amicable—settlements. This was regardless of who was legally in the right. The process often had a social aspect to it, such as the parties having to worship or dine together. Lovedays were particularly favoured among the nobility as a mechanism by which parties could avoid the involvement of the crown if they so wished. Held in neutral locations agreeable to the protagonists, lovedays were arranged by individuals acting as the protagonists' councillors. These would be important men in the extra-legal process, says Griffiths: "anyone who talked or wrote about or organized these dies amories was half-way towards settling potentially dangerous quarrels". The protagonists would usually arrive accompanied by small retinues and await an award from the arbitration committee. This normally comprised three men, trusted by all those involved, and usually members of the local nobility or respected local gentry. Often one of them would be appointed at the beginning of the process as an umpire, in case of a deadlock.
## Preparations and negotiations
### Summoning the lords
King Henry believed that an organised settlement, under his leadership, could be made between the opposing factions. Several great councils were called through the autumn of 1457, involving long and protracted negotiations between the parties. Henry eventually summoned a great council to Westminster, with the intent of eventually imposing his own arbitration award. The summons told how the King wished "to set apart such variances as be betwixt divers lords". This council was scheduled to meet in November 1457, but it received little interest from the nobility, only a few turning up. Among those who did were York and Salisbury, although the latter had been escorted—willingly or not is unknown—from Doncaster by Viscount Beaumont. The little that is known of this council stems from subsequent writs which simultaneously cancelled and reformed it. The council was rescheduled for 27 January 1458, and, this time, it appears to have been more positively received. Lords began arriving in London a few days before it was due to start. Each arrived with their retinues, which in the cases of the main protagonists involved substantial bodies of men.
Henry tried to guarantee the safety of those attending, as he summoned levies from the counties for the defence of London and Westminster, which he then paraded through the City in a show of strength. On 26 January, York arrived with 400 armed followers; the Earl of Salisbury—still in London from the November council—had 500 men. Their attendance, if not their retinues, boded well for the King's plans. The Yorkists' bitter rivals soon followed. These included Henry, Duke of Exeter—who had aided the Percies in the feud with the Nevilles—and the new Duke of Somerset. Somerset had been involved in at least one attempt to assassinate Warwick the previous year. Described as "ducal hotheads" by historian R. L. Storey, they arrived soon after York with another 800 men between them. A fortnight later, the new Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, and his brothers Thomas, Lord Egremont and Sir Ralph Percy arrived, accompanied by John, Lord Clifford. Together, they brought a small army of around 1,500 men. The Earl of Warwick arrived last, coming from Calais—where he was Captain—having been delayed crossing the Channel. He brought another 600 men, seasoned soldiers of the town's garrison, all dressed in red jackets with his cognizance, the white ragged staff.
It was only after Warwick arrived that the King summoned members of the nobility less involved in the dispute, such as the Earl of Arundel. The sheer number of retainers involved meant an enormous increase in the City of London's daily population for it to manage. With tensions running high, civic leaders went to great lengths to keep the parties apart. The Lancastrians were lodged outside the City Walls, at the Temple Bar and in Fleet Street. According to Griffiths, they were seen as "spoiling for a fight", and were therefore unwelcome in the City. The mayor and common council feared a pitched battle breaking out if the two sides and their entourages met. There was little appetite for reconciliation among the sons of the nobility killed at St Albans, and York and Salisbury were nearly ambushed by Exeter, Egremont and Clifford on their way to Westminster, although the attempt failed.
### King's award
The great council met on 27 January 1458 and King Henry made a personal appearance before the newly gathered lords to make a plea for unity. He then withdrew to Chertsey, while the Mayor restored law and order following the attempted ambush of the Yorkists.
Henry returned to London in mid-February, but within the week he had retired to Berkhampstead Castle. York's biographer, Paul Johnson, suggests that, in doing so, Henry damaged any subsequent chance for the attendees to reach a "broad-based accommodation", as now they had no-one to adjudicate their arguments. Also, he suggests that, with the Yorkists effectively confined to the City, the Lancastrian lords could travel unhindered from their lodgings. And travel they did. While the King dwelt in Berkhampstead, Somerset, Exeter, Clifford and Egremont visited him on 23 February. It is not known whether their visit was regarding the imminent arbitration, but Johnson suggests that it was unwise of Henry to see them, in case it was perceived as breaching his perceived neutrality. Meanwhile, the council, says Wolffe, instead of commencing negotiations, "does not appear to have done anything until the middle of March", when the King returned to Westminster.
From that point on discussions,—led by Henry and certain impartial councillors—began in earnest. These negotiations, says Griffiths, "were long and doubtless acrimonious". The King prayed and prayed again for a settlement. Eventually—perhaps inevitably—one was reached, although the presence of so many armed men probably facilitated the process. Deliberations were carried out through intermediaries. Henry's councillors met the Yorkists in the City, at the Blackfriars, in the mornings; in the afternoons, they met the Lancastrian lords at the Whitefriars on Fleet Street. During the council's sittings, other policy issues were addressed. The question of the governorship of Ireland probably arose, and the Earl of Warwick was appointed admiral of the seas. This office had previously been held by the Duke of Exeter, further damaging relations between the two men. These were peripheral issues; the Battle of St Albans was the topic of overriding importance.
On 24 March the King announced his decision. Blame for St Albans was placed squarely upon the Yorkist lords. The King did not spare them, telling of "the execrabill and moost detestable deed by theym doon at Seynt Albones". He emphasised the obviationem et insultationem ("opposition and insults"), as the chronicler, John Whethamstede, called them, that Somerset, Northumberland and Clifford had endured. For the King, his award served two purposes. He both acknowledged and condemned the wrongdoing and criminality done but, by doing so, demonstrated the king's grace in the role of keeper of the king's peace.
Similar to the arbitration awards the nobility imposed upon themselves and their tenants, the financial element was critical. York was to pay 5,000 marks to Somerset and his dowager mother, Warwick was to pay 1,000 to Lord Clifford, and Salisbury agreed to cancel the fines that had been imposed on Egremont and Ralph Percy in 1454. Salisbury was also, on behalf of his younger sons John and Thomas, to pay 12,000 marks to Eleanor Neville, Dowager Countess of Northumberland. She and her son, the new Earl, in turn pledged themselves to keep the peace with the Nevilles. The financial obligations that had been imposed on many Percy tenants after the feud with the Nevilles were also lifted. Further—because Egremont had escaped from Newgate in 1456—Salisbury also swore not to take any action against the Newgate sheriffs whose negligence was presumed to have enabled it.
Wolffe has argued that Henry's decision was no more than "a formal accord on the limited issue of atonement and compensation". Changing the attitudes of individuals towards their enemies was considered more important than the question of compensation, important though that was. Furthermore, York and Warwick's payments to the families of their enemies were not in cash; rather, they were to renounce debts owed them by the crown which amounted to similar sums. To fulfil their obligations, York and the Nevilles merely had to return government-issued tallies which entitled them to receive the required sum. The Yorkists, for their part, were declared to be the King's "true lieges", although any reassurance they took from this, comments the medievalist John Watts, may have been tempered by the knowledge that so also had been the three dead lords of St Albans.
The Yorkists agreed to endow St Albans Abbey with a new chantry and £45 a year for two years for the monks to say masses for the slain. The Lancastrian lords, as the injured parties, had to make no reciprocal concessions to York and his allies. Egremont was required to make an independent bond of 4,000 marks towards the Nevilles to keep the peace with them in Yorkshire for ten years. Thus, says the scholar Helen Maurer, the crown implicitly recognised that bad blood had existed between the Nevilles and Egremont even before St Albans. One contemporary observed in a Paston letter that the final settlement was a "throw [sic: thorough] peace final[ised] by means of all the Lords".
## The Loveday
The pact was announced on 25 March, or Lady Day (the Feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin). Henry—"thanking God for their having reaching accord"—joined his wife and nobles on a celebratory procession from Westminster to London. Leading the parade were Somerset and Salisbury—36 years older than the duke—followed by Exeter with Warwick, then "the King alone, wearing his crown and royal robes" between them all. Finally came York and Queen Margaret. All parties held hands: a later chronicle described how "one of the one faction, and another of the other sect, and behind the King, the Duke of Yorke led the Queene with great familiaritie to all mens sighte". Although no contemporary records now survive to provide the physical details of the Loveday procession itself, scholars are aware of the general nature of medieval urban processions. The scholar Kathleen Ashley has highlighted how they presented what she has called a "fusion of sensory experiences, or synaesthesia" for both the participants and observers, who would often amount to as many people as could physically attend, on account of the holiday atmosphere that accompanied them.
Historians have noted multiple interpretations of the symbolism favoured by Henry. It was "a symbolic series of gestures", says John Sadler, perhaps a show of "friendly and modest intimacies" suggests Patricia Ingham. Or it may have been mere rhetoric, bordering on a charade, suggests Pollard. At the time, physical intimacy was an essential element of concord and the intention was clearly to demonstrate both their agreement and their willingness to agree. The Queen holding York's hand (rather than him holding Somerset's), says Watts, was an acknowledgement of her close involvement in the affairs of central government and her higher political profile in the post-St Albans body politic. The Loveday was a combination, says Griffiths, of "elaborate ceremonial, royal prayer and example, monetary payments and the holding of hands...[between] bitter enemies". The assembled lords were taking no more chances now than they had when they first arrived in London: Salisbury, for example, attended the concomitant religious ceremony at St Paul's with his retinue of 400 men, which included 80 knights and esquires, waiting in the churchyard. It may have been called a Loveday, comments Sadler, yet "the title is ironic, as there was little of love in the air". The closing event was the presentation of a new translation of the contemporary verse paraphrase, Knyghthode and Bataile to the King. This was a recent adaption of De re militari, and celebrates the martial exploits of the noble class in a classic chivalric form.
The immediate aftermath of the Loveday was positive, not least for the Nevilles, as the King granted Egremont permission to go on a pilgrimage in June 1458. From the government's perspective, this was an opportunity to physically remove one of the parties to a dispute. Pollard casts some doubt on whether Egremont actually wanted to go on pilgrimage, arguing that "no doubt he had been persuaded" to do so, as previous attempts to quieten him in the north—through French service in 1453 and imprisonment in 1456—had failed. The King and his council seem to have also concluded by now that the Percies and the Nevilles' feud in the north was the primary cause of St Albans, and their treatment of Egremont reflected that. If this was the case, notes Watts, such a policy made the mistake of ignoring the enmity between other parties, for instance, York and Somerset.
The King went on his own pilgrimage to St Albans at Easter the same year. This, says Griffiths, "demonstrated that the site of the battle in which he had been wounded and his ministers slain no longer stirred fearful memories in his mind". The appearance of amity was maintained publicly "with a royal round of jousts, feasting, and other entertainments until May" that year. These festivities took place both at the Tower of London and at the Queen's Palace at Greenwich, further emphasising her involvement in the proceedings.
## Aftermath
The Earl of Salisbury subsequently had an exemplification copy of the Loveday agreement made. This, to Hicks, suggests that he saw the award as to his benefit, notwithstanding the recompenses he was ordered to make. All Salisbury had to do was—in Storey's words—"give up bad debts". Another probable consequence of the Loveday deliberations may have been that in May, Salisbury's son Sir John Neville was betrothed to a ward of the Queen. This was Isabella Ingaldsthorpe, the heiress of her maternal uncle, John Tiptoft and his earldom of Worcester, and the betrothal would not have been possible without Margaret's permission. The crown itself benefited from the Loveday as its role as arbiter-in-chief—"the cement of the political fabric", wrote Anthony Gross—was reaffirmed in a blaze of publicity. Johnson argues that the traditional and probably definitive way of uniting the nobility was war, and this was too firmly disapproved of by the King ever to be an option.
### Legacy
There is some disagreement among historians as to who won or lost at the Loveday. Hicks considers it to have been a "reasonable compromise", with which the Yorkists appear to "have been pleased with the result". Conversely, Griffiths saw it as being punitive to them. Watts suggests that it indicates that, notwithstanding St Albans, "York and the Nevilles were regarded as acceptable by the ruling lords". Johnson argues that York, at the least, did "very well" out of it. To the scholar David Grummitt, this Loveday illustrated the "essentially private and personal nature of the dispute" between the Yorkists and their enemies. More broadly, though, the personal basis for their enmity was in the long term disadvantageous to the Yorkists. By focussing on, and emphasising, the personal quarrels between York and Somerset—or Salisbury and Northumberland for example—the award ignored and sidelined the original complaints of the Yorkists that they had argued led to the battle. Furthermore, he says, if any part of the nobility were united by the Loveday, it was the Yorkist lords. Historian Christine Carpenter has suggested that the King wanted to keep the occasion one of "general reconciliation and restoration of magnate unity". She argues that not highlighting the degree to which the nobility was divided was a deliberate policy, but the involvement of the Queen meant there had to be "a formal recognition...that there were two opposing camps".
The Loveday saw the Yorkists—for the first time—acknowledge their wrongdoing and accept culpability for St Albans. This was something they had denied immediately after the battle and in the years following, but was insufficient in the long term, says Pollard, because it did not contain the one thing that the new Lancastrian lords most wanted—revenge for their fathers. It was not, therefore, "a satisfying long-term solution" that guaranteed future peace as intended.
### Contemporary reaction
Historian Cora Scofield suggests that the Loveday procession to St Paul's was "doubtless an edifying spectacle, but it had little real meaning and probably deceived no-one". Not long after the Loveday, an anonymous poem was published entitled Take Good Heed; this offers the Yorkist lords advice and anxious support for the years ahead, which, the author recognises, will be difficult ones for all. Other writers were more optimistic. The poem Reconciliation of Henry VI and the Yorkists repeats the refrain, "rejoise, Angleonde to concorde and unité", suggesting that the author expects the kingdom to be strong and unified going forward. The author of the Reconciliation emphasises how "ther was bytwyn hem lovely contynaunce / Whiche was gret ioy to all that ther were". The author expands on his theme:
> In Yorke, In Somerset, as I understonde, In Warrewik also is loue & charite, In Sarisbury eke, & in Northumbreland, That euery man may reioise in concord & unite.
Not all commentators were impressed: a Coventry preacher, one William Ive, said caustically that the King "made Lovedays as Judas made with a kiss with Christ". Enemies may have marched together that day, argues Scofield, but they trusted each other no more after the procession than they had before. This was the view of Thomas Malory in his mid-century Morte darthur, which expresses a cynicism regarding Lovedays as a means of settling feuds. Malory's pessimism was probably caused by his view of the 1458 ceremony. Malory portrays Lancelot as attempting to atone for the murders of his enemies through the building of chapels—"penitence as a remedy for war", suggests literary scholar Robert L. Kelly. But Lancelot's, like Henry's, attempts are in vain: "Lo what meschef lyth in variaunce / Amonge lordis, whan þei nat accorde", comments Malory on both.
## Failure to prevent crisis
The peace ordained at the Loveday, says Pollard, "was shallow and shortlived"; having killed Somerset, York no longer had a blatant enemy in government and so could only make concessions. The opposition, on the on the other hand had, wanted revenge. Hence the Loveday failed to solve the underlying crisis in the long term, "the atmosphere of distrust and intrigue still continued". Indeed, the Loveday itself may have contributed to a heightening of tensions within the nobility. It reopened the very question as to what actually happened at St Albans; but, having opened it, not only failed to provide an answer but highlighted existing divisions. The government, for its part, contributed to the decline in relations with the Yorkists. This was because by releasing the Percies from their constraints, old rivalries were reawakened. The Loveday's undermining of the Nevilles in Yorkshire now shifted the regional balance of power.
In November 1458, there was an ugly brawl at Westminster between the Earl of Warwick's men and those of the Duke of Somerset, which the earl saw as another attempted assassination. He had to fight his way clear of the Palace, and escaped to Calais. At the same time, York and the Nevilles were increasingly isolated by the Queen's party politically. Law and order also declined, and in December 1458 1,000 pikes and clubs were ordered for the Royal Household's protection of the King.
Henry's organisation of the 1458 Loveday negotiations was one of the last occasions of his reign in which he showed either an interest in or a commitment towards affairs of state. From that point on, Queen Margaret began subtly, but clearly, asserting the control of herself and her adherents in government. The Duke of York retired to his marcher estates, and the Earl of Salisbury to his in the north. Carpenter has posited that—"ironically at the most overt moment of conciliation"—the Loveday represents the point at which magnate disunity could no longer be denied, and, therefore, when the Wars of the Roses actually begun. The few months following the Loveday are obscure. The following year, armed conflict broke out again when the Salisbury's army was ambushed at Blore Heath by a Lancastrian army. He and the other Yorkists lords were indicted for treason in the Coventry Parliament, at the Queen's instigation. At this time, the Yorkists were still, supposedly, paying their dues to their opponents from 1455. Within three years of King Henry's Loveday he had been deposed, the Duke of York killed in battle and his son Edward crowned the first Yorkist King of England. |
437,302 | Marwan I | 1,171,600,590 | Fourth Umayyad caliph (r. 684 to 685) | [
"620s births",
"685 deaths",
"7th-century Arab people",
"7th-century Umayyad caliphs",
"7th-century monarchs in Africa",
"7th-century monarchs in Asia",
"Hadith narrators",
"People of the Second Fitna",
"Rashidun governors of Bahrain",
"Umayyad governors of Medina",
"Year of birth uncertain"
]
| Marwan ibn al-Hakam ibn Abi al-As ibn Umayya (Arabic: مروان بن الحكم بن أبي العاص بن أمية, romanized: Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam ibn Abī al-ʿĀṣ ibn Umayya), commonly known as Marwan I (623 or 626 – April/May 685), was the fourth Umayyad caliph, ruling for less than a year in 684–685. He founded the Marwanid ruling house of the Umayyad dynasty, which replaced the Sufyanid house after its collapse in the Second Muslim Civil War and remained in power until 750.
During the reign of his cousin Uthman (r. 644–656), Marwan took part in a military campaign against the Byzantines of the Exarchate of Africa (in central North Africa), where he acquired significant war spoils. He also served as Uthman's governor in Fars (southwestern Iran) before becoming the caliph's katib (secretary or scribe). He was wounded fighting the rebel siege of Uthman's house, in which the caliph was slain. In the ensuing civil war between Ali (r. 656–661) and the largely Qurayshite partisans of A'isha, Marwan sided with the latter at the Battle of the Camel. Marwan later served as governor of Medina under his distant kinsman Caliph Mu'awiya I (r. 661–680), founder of the Umayyad Caliphate. During the reign of Mu'awiya's son and successor Yazid I (r. 680–683), Marwan organized the defense of the Umayyad realm in the Hejaz (western Arabia) against the local opposition. After Yazid died in November 683, the Mecca-based rebel Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr declared himself caliph and expelled Marwan, who took refuge in Syria, the center of Umayyad rule. With the death of the last Sufyanid caliph Mu'awiya II in 684, Marwan, encouraged by the ex-governor of Iraq Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad, volunteered his candidacy for the caliphate during a summit of pro-Umayyad tribes in Jabiya. The tribal nobility, led by Ibn Bahdal of the Banu Kalb, elected Marwan and together they defeated the pro-Zubayrid Qays tribes at the Battle of Marj Rahit in August of that year.
In the months that followed, Marwan reasserted Umayyad rule over Egypt, Palestine, and northern Syria, whose governors had defected to Ibn al-Zubayr's cause, while keeping the Qays in check in the Jazira (Upper Mesopotamia). He dispatched an expedition led by Ibn Ziyad to reconquer Zubayrid Iraq, but died while it was underway in the spring of 685. Before his death, Marwan firmly established his sons in positions of power: Abd al-Malik was designated his successor, Abd al-Aziz was made governor of Egypt, and Muhammad oversaw military command in Upper Mesopotamia. Although Marwan was stigmatized as an outlaw and a father of tyrants in later anti-Umayyad tradition, the historian Clifford E. Bosworth asserts that the caliph was a shrewd, capable, and decisive military leader and statesman who laid the foundations of continued Umayyad rule for a further sixty-five years.
## Early life and family
Marwan was born in 2 or 4 AH (623 or 626 CE). His father was al-Hakam ibn Abi al-As of the Banu Umayya (Umayyads), the strongest clan of the Quraysh, a polytheistic tribe which dominated the town of Mecca in the Hejaz. The Quraysh converted to Islam en masse in c. 630 following the conquest of Mecca by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, himself a member of the Quraysh. Marwan knew Muhammad and is thus counted among the latter's sahaba (companions). Marwan's mother was Amina bint Alqama of the Kinana, the ancestral tribe of the Quraysh which dominated the area stretching southwest from Mecca to the Tihama coastline.
Marwan had at least sixteen children, among them at least twelve sons from five wives and an umm walad (concubine). From his wife A'isha, a daughter of his paternal first cousin Mu'awiya ibn al-Mughira, he had his eldest son Abd al-Malik, Mu'awiya and daughter Umm Amr. Umm Amr later married Sa'id ibn Khalid ibn Amr, a great-grandson of Marwan's paternal first cousin Uthman ibn Affan, who became caliph (leader of the Muslim community) in 644. Marwan's wife Layla bint Zabban ibn al-Asbagh of the Banu Kalb tribe bore him Abd al-Aziz and daughter Umm Uthman, who was married to Caliph Uthman's son al-Walid; al-Walid was also married at one point to Marwan's daughter Umm Amr. Another of Marwan's wives, Qutayya bint Bishr of the Banu Kilab, bore him Bishr and Abd al-Rahman, the latter of whom died young. One of Marwan's wives, Umm Aban al-Kubra, was a daughter of Caliph Uthman. She was mother to six of his sons, Aban, Uthman, Ubayd Allah, Ayyub, Dawud and Abd Allah, though the last of them died a child. Marwan was married to Zaynab bint Umar, a granddaughter of Abu Salama from the Banu Makhzum, who mothered his son Umar. Marwan's umm walad was also named Zaynab and gave birth to his son Muhammad. Marwan had ten brothers and was the paternal uncle of ten nephews.
## Secretary of Uthman
During the reign of Caliph Uthman (r. 644–656), Marwan took part in a military campaign against the Byzantines of the Exarchate of Carthage (in central North Africa), where he acquired significant war spoils. These likely formed the basis of Marwan's substantial wealth, part of which he invested in properties in Medina, the capital of the Caliphate. At an undetermined point, he served as Uthman's governor in Fars (southwestern Iran) before becoming the caliph's katib (secretary or scribe) and possibly the overseer of Medina's treasury. According to the historian Clifford E. Bosworth, in this capacity Marwan "doubtless helped" in the revision "of what became the canonical text of the Qur'an" in Uthman's reign.
The historian Hugh N. Kennedy asserts that Marwan was the caliph's "right-hand man". According to the traditional Muslim reports, many of Uthman's erstwhile backers among the Quraysh gradually withdrew their support as a result of Marwan's pervasive influence, which they blamed for the caliph's controversial decisions. The historian Fred Donner questions the veracity of these reports, citing the unlikelihood that Uthman would be highly influenced by a younger relative such as Marwan and the rarity of specific charges against the latter, and describes them as a possible "attempt by later Islamic tradition to salvage Uthman's reputation as one of the so-called 'rightly-guided' (rāshidūn) caliphs by making Marwan ... the fall guy for the unhappy events at the end of Uthman's twelve-year reign."
Discontent over Uthman's nepotistic policies and confiscation of the former Sasanian crown lands in Iraq drove the Quraysh and the dispossessed elites of Kufa and Egypt to oppose the caliph. In early 656, rebels from Egypt and Kufa entered Medina to press Uthman to reverse his policies. Marwan recommended a violent response against them. Instead, Uthman entered into a settlement with the Egyptians, the largest and most outspoken group among the mutineers. On their return to Egypt, the rebels intercepted a letter in Uthman's name to Egypt's governor, Ibn Abi Sarh, instructing him to take action against the rebels. In reaction, the Egyptians marched back to Medina and besieged Uthman in his home in June 656. Uthman claimed to have been unaware of the letter, and it may have been authored by Marwan without Uthman's knowledge. Despite orders to the contrary, Marwan actively defended Uthman's house and was badly wounded in the neck when he challenged the rebels assembled at its entrance. According to tradition, he was saved by the intervention of his wet nurse, Fatima bint Aws, and was transported to the safety of her home by his mawla (freedman or client), Abu Hafs al-Yamani. Shortly after, Uthman was assassinated by the rebels, which became one of the major contributing factors to the First Muslim Civil War. After the assassination, Marwan and other Umayyads fled to Mecca. Calls for avenging Uthman's death were led by the Umayyads, one of Muhammad's wives, A'isha, and two of his prominent companions, Talha ibn Ubayd Allah and Zubayr ibn al-Awwam. Punishing Uthman's murderers became a rallying cry of the opposition to his successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, a cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad.
### Role in the First Fitna
In the ensuing hostilities between Ali and the largely Qurayshite partisans of A'isha, Marwan sided with the latter. He fought alongside A'isha's forces at the Battle of the Camel near Basra in December 656. The historian Leone Caetani presumed that Marwan was the organizer of A'isha's strategy there. The modern historian Laura Veccia Vaglieri notes that while Caetani's "theory is attractive", there is no information in the traditional sources to confirm it and should Marwan have been A'isha's war adviser "he operated so discreetly that the sources hardly speak of his actions."
According to one version in the Islamic tradition, Marwan used the occasion of the battle to kill a partisan of A'isha, Talha, whom he held especially responsible for instigating Uthman's death. Marwan had fired an arrow at Talha, which struck the sciatic vein below his knee, as their troops fell back in a hand-to-hand fight with Ali's soldiers. The historian Wilferd Madelung notes that Marwan "evidently" waited to kill Talha when A'isha appeared close to defeat and thus in a weak position to call Marwan to account for his action. Another version in the tradition attributes Talha's death to Ali's supporters during Talha's retreat from the field, and Caetani dismisses Marwan's culpability as a fabrication by the generally anti-Umayyad sources. Madelung holds that Marwan's slaying of Talha is corroborated by Umayyad propaganda in the 680s heralding him as the first person to take revenge for Uthman's death by killing Talha.
After the battle ended with Ali's victory, Marwan pledged his allegiance to him. Ali pardoned him and Marwan left for Syria, where his distant cousin Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, who refused allegiance to Ali, was governor. Marwan was present alongside Mu'awiya at the Battle of Siffin near Raqqa in 657, which ended in a stalemate with Ali's army and abortive arbitration talks to settle the civil war.
## Governor of Medina
Ali was assassinated by a member of the Kharijites, a sect opposed to both Ali and Mu'awiya, in January 661. His son and successor Hasan ibn Ali abdicated in a peace treaty with Mu'awiya, who entered Hasan's and formerly Ali's capital at Kufa and gained recognition as caliph there in July or September, marking the establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate. Marwan served as Mu'awiya's governor in Bahrayn (eastern Arabia) before serving two stints as governor of Medina in 661–668 and 674–677. In between those two terms, Marwan's Umayyad kinsmen Sa'id ibn al-As and al-Walid ibn Utba ibn Abi Sufyan held the post. Medina had lost its status as the political center of the Caliphate in the aftermath of Uthman's assassination. Under Mu'awiya the capital shifted to Damascus. Although it was reduced to a provincial governorship, Medina remained a hub of Arab culture and Islamic scholarship and home of the traditional Islamic aristocracy. The old elites in Medina, including most of the Umayyad family, resented their loss of power to Mu'awiya; in the summation of the historian Julius Wellhausen, "of what consequence was Marwan, formerly the all-powerful imperial chancellor of Uthman, now as Emir of Medina! No wonder he cast envious looks at his cousin of Damascus who had so far outstripped him."
During his first term, Marwan acquired from Mu'awiya a large estate in the Fadak oasis in northwestern Arabia, which he then bestowed on his sons Abd al-Malik and Abd al-Aziz. Marwan's first dismissal from the governorship caused him to travel to Mu'awiya's court for an explanation from the caliph, who listed three reasons: Marwan's refusal to confiscate for Mu'awiya the properties of their relative Abd Allah ibn Amir after the latter's dismissal from the governorship of Basra; Marwan's criticism of the caliph's adoption of the fatherless Ziyad ibn Abihi, Ibn Amir's successor in Basra, as the son of his father Abu Sufyan, which the Umayyad family disputed; and Marwan's refusal to assist the caliph's daughter Ramla in a domestic dispute with her husband, Amr ibn Uthman ibn Affan. In 670, Marwan led Umayyad opposition to the attempted burial of Hasan ibn Ali beside the grave of Muhammad, compelling Hasan's brother, Husayn, and his clan, the Banu Hashim, to abandon their original funeral arrangement and bury Hasan in the Baqi cemetery instead. Afterward, Marwan participated in the funeral and eulogized Hasan as one "whose forbearance weighed mountains".
According to Bosworth, Mu'awiya may have been suspicious of the ambitions of Marwan and the Abu al-As line of the Banu Umayya in general, which was significantly more numerous than the Abu Sufyan (Sufyanid) line to which Mu'awiya belonged. Marwan was among the eldest and most prestigious Umayyads at a time when there were few experienced Sufyanids of mature age. Bosworth speculates that it "may have been fears of the family of Abu'l-ʿĀs that impelled Muʿāwiya to his adoption of his putative half-brother Ziyād b. Sumayya [Ziyad ibn Abihi] and to the unusual step of naming his own son Yazīd as heir to the caliphate during his own lifetime". Marwan had earlier pressed Uthman's son Amr to claim the caliphate based on the legitimacy of his father, a member of the Abu al-As branch, but Amr was uninterested. Marwan reluctantly accepted Mu'awiya's nomination of Yazid in 676, but quietly encouraged another son of Uthman, Sa'id, to contest the succession. Sa'id's ambitions were neutralized when the caliph gave him military command in Khurasan, the easternmost region of the Caliphate.
## Leader of the Umayyads in Medina
After Mu'awiya died in 680, Husayn ibn Ali, Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr and Abd Allah ibn Umar, all sons of prominent Qurayshite companions of Muhammad with their own claims to the caliphate, continued to refuse allegiance to Mu'awiya's chosen successor Yazid. Marwan, the leader of the Umayyad clan in the Hejaz, advised al-Walid ibn Utba, then governor of Medina, to coerce Husayn and Ibn al-Zubayr, both of whom he considered especially dangerous to Umayyad rule, to accept the caliph's sovereignty. Husayn answered al-Walid's summons, but withheld his recognition of Yazid, offering instead to make the pledge in public. Al-Walid accepted, prompting Marwan, who attended the meeting, to castigate the governor and demand Husayn's detention until he proffered the oath of allegiance to Yazid or his execution should he refuse. Husayn then cursed Marwan and left the meeting, eventually making his way toward Kufa to lead a rebellion against the Umayyads. He was slain by Yazid's forces at the Battle of Karbala in October 680.
Meanwhile, Ibn al-Zubayr avoided al-Walid's summons and escaped to Mecca, where he rallied opposition to Yazid from his headquarters in the Ka'aba, Islam's holiest sanctuary where violence was traditionally banned. In the Islamic traditional anecdotes relating Yazid's response, Marwan warns Ibn al-Zubayr not to submit to the caliph; Wellhausen considers these variable traditions to be unreliable. In 683, the people of Medina rebelled against the caliph and assaulted the local Umayyads and their supporters, prompting them to take refuge in Marwan's houses in the city's suburbs where they were besieged. In response to Marwan's plea for assistance, Yazid dispatched an expeditionary force of Syrian tribesmen led by Muslim ibn Uqba to assert Umayyad authority over the region. The Umayyads of Medina were afterward expelled and many, including Marwan and the Abu al-As family, joined Ibn Uqba's expedition. In the ensuing Battle of al-Harra in August 683, Marwan led his horsemen through Medina and launched a rear assault against the Medinese defenders fighting Ibn Uqba in the city's eastern outskirts. Despite its victory over the Medinese, Yazid's army retreated to Syria in the wake of the caliph's death in November. On the Syrians' departure, Ibn al-Zubayr declared himself caliph and soon gained recognition in most of the Caliphate's provinces, including Egypt, Iraq and Yemen. Marwan and the Umayyads of the Hejaz were expelled for a second time by Ibn al-Zubayr's partisans and their properties were confiscated.
## Caliphate
### Accession
By early 684, Marwan was in Syria, either at Palmyra or in the court of Yazid's young son and successor, Mu'awiya II, in Damascus. The latter died several weeks into his reign without designating a successor. The governors of the Syrian junds (military districts) of Palestine, Homs and Qinnasrin subsequently gave their allegiance to Ibn al-Zubayr. As a result, Marwan "despaired over any future for the Umayyads as rulers", according to Bosworth, and was prepared to recognize Ibn al-Zubayr's legitimacy. However, he was encouraged by the expelled governor of Iraq, Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad, to volunteer himself as Mu'awiya II's successor during a summit of loyalist Syrian Arab tribes being held in Jabiya. The bids for leadership of the Muslim community exposed the conflict between three developing principles of succession. The general recognition of Ibn al-Zubayr adhered to the Islamic principle of passing leadership to the most righteous and eminent Muslim, while the Umayyad loyalists at the Jabiya summit debated the two other principles: direct hereditary succession as introduced by Mu'awiya I and represented by the nomination of his adolescent grandson Khalid ibn Yazid; and the Arab tribal norm of selecting the wisest and most capable member of a tribe's leading clan, epitomized in this case by Marwan.
The organizer of the Jabiya summit, Ibn Bahdal, the chieftain of the powerful Banu Kalb tribe and maternal cousin of Yazid, supported Khalid's nomination. Most of the other chieftains, led by Rawh ibn Zinba of the Judham and Husayn ibn Numayr of the Kinda, opted for Marwan, citing his mature age, political acumen and military experience, over Khalid's youth and inexperience. The 9th-century historian al-Ya'qubi quotes Rawh heralding Marwan: "People of Syria! This is Marwān b. al-Ḥakam, the chief of Quraysh, who avenged the blood of ʿUthmān and fought ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib at the Battle of the Camel and Ṣiffīn." A consensus was ultimately reached on 22 June 684 (29 Shawwal 64 AH), whereby Marwan would accede to the caliphate, followed by Khalid and then Amr ibn Sa'id ibn al-As, another prominent young Umayyad. In exchange for backing Marwan, the loyalist Syrian tribes, who shortly thereafter became known as the "Yaman" faction (see below), were promised financial compensation. The Yamani ashraf (tribal nobility) demanded from Marwan the same courtly and military privileges they held under the previous Umayyad caliphs. Husayn ibn Numayr had attempted to reach a similar arrangement with Ibn al-Zubayr, who publicly rejected the terms. In contrast, Marwan "realized the importance of the Syrian troops and adhered wholeheartedly to their demands", according to the historian Mohammad Rihan. In the summation of Kennedy, "Marwān had no experience or contacts in Syria; he would be entirely dependent on the ashrāf from the Yamanī tribes who had elected him."
### Campaigns to reassert Umayyad rule
In opposition to the Kalb, the pro-Zubayrid Qaysi tribes objected to Marwan's accession and beckoned al-Dahhak ibn Qays al-Fihri, the governor of Damascus, to mobilize for war; accordingly, al-Dahhak and the Qays set up camp in the Marj Rahit plain north of Damascus. Most of the Syrian junds backed Ibn al-Zubayr, with the exception of Jordan, whose dominant tribe was the Kalb. With the critical support of the Kalb and its allied tribes, Marwan marched against al-Dahhak's larger army, while in Damascus city, a Ghassanid nobleman expelled al-Dahhak's partisans and brought the city under Marwan's authority. In August, Marwan's forces routed the Qays and killed al-Dahhak at the Battle of Marj Rahit. Marwan's rise had affirmed the power of the Quda'a tribal confederation, of which the Kalb was part, and after the battle, it formed an alliance with the Qahtan confederation of Homs, forming the new super-tribe of Yaman. The crushing Umayyad–Yamani victory at Marj Rahit led to the long-running Qays–Yaman blood feud. The remnants of Qays rallied around Zufar ibn al-Harith al-Kilabi, who took over the fortress of Qarqisiya (Circesium) in Upper Mesopotamia, from which he led the tribal opposition to the Umayyads. In a poem attributed to him, Marwan thanked the Yamani tribes for their support at Marj Rahit:
> When I saw that the affair would be one of plunder, I made ready Ghassan and Kalb against them [the Qays],And the Saksakīs [Kindites], men who would triumph, and Ṭayyi', who would insist on the striking of blows,And the Qayn who would come weighed down with arms, and of Tanūkh a difficult and lofty peak.[The enemy] will not seize the kingship unless by force, and if Qays approach, say, Keep away!
Although he was already recognized by the loyalist tribes at Jabiya, Marwan received ceremonial oaths of allegiance as caliph in Damascus in July or August. He wed Yazid's widow and mother of Khalid, Umm Hashim Fakhitah, thereby establishing a political link with the Sufyanids. Wellhausen viewed the marriage as an attempt by Marwan to seize the inheritance of Yazid by becoming stepfather to his sons. Marwan appointed the Ghassanid Yahya ibn Qays as the head of his shurta (security forces) and his own mawla Abu Sahl al-Aswad as his hajib (chamberlain).
Despite his victory at Marj Rahit and the consolidation of Umayyad power in central Syria, Marwan's authority was not recognized in the rest of the Umayyads' former domains; with the help of Ibn Ziyad and Ibn Bahdal, Marwan undertook to restore Umayyad rule across the Caliphate with "energy and determination", according to Kennedy. To Palestine he dispatched Rawh ibn Zinba, who forced the flight to Mecca of his rival for leadership of the Judham tribe, the pro-Zubayrid governor Natil ibn Qays. Marwan also consolidated Umayyad rule in northern Syria, and the remainder of his reign was marked by attempts to reassert Umayyad authority. By February/March 685, he secured his rule in Egypt with key assistance from the Arab tribal nobility of the provincial capital Fustat. The province's pro-Zubayrid governor, Abd al-Rahman ibn Utba al-Fihri, was expelled and replaced with Marwan's son Abd al-Aziz. Afterward, Marwan's forces led by Amr ibn Sa'id repulsed a Zubayrid expedition against Palestine launched by Ibn al-Zubayr's brother Mus'ab. Marwan dispatched an expedition to the Hejaz led by the Quda'a commander Hubaysh ibn Dulja, which was routed at al-Rabadha east of Medina. Meanwhile, Marwan sent his son Muhammad to check the Qaysi tribes in the middle Euphrates region. By early 685, he dispatched an army led by Ibn Ziyad to conquer Iraq from the Zubayrids and the pro-Alids (partisans of Caliph Ali and his household and the forerunners of the Shia sect of Islam).
### Death and succession
After a reign of between six and ten months, depending on the source, Marwan died in the spring of 65 AH/685. The precise date of his death is not clear from the medieval sources, with historians Ibn Sa'd, al-Tabari and Khalifa ibn Khayyat placing it on 29 Sha'ban/10 or 11 April, al-Mas'udi on 3 Ramadan/13 April and Elijah of Nisibis on 7 May. Most early Muslim sources hold that Marwan died in Damascus, while al-Mas'udi holds that he died at his winter residence in al-Sinnabra near Lake Tiberias. Although it is widely reported in the traditional Muslim sources that Marwan was killed in his sleep by Umm Hashim Fakhita in retaliation for a serious verbal insult to her honor by the caliph, most western historians dismiss the story. Based on a report by al-Mas'udi, Bosworth and others suspect Marwan succumbed to a plague afflicting Syria at the time of his death.
Upon Marwan's return to Syria from Egypt in 685, he had designated his sons Abd al-Malik and Abd al-Aziz as his successors, in that order. He made the change after he reached al-Sinnabra and was informed that Ibn Bahdal recognized Amr ibn Sa'id as Marwan's successor-in-waiting. He summoned and questioned Ibn Bahdal and ultimately demanded that he give allegiance to Abd al-Malik as his heir apparent. By this, Marwan abrogated the arrangement reached at the Jabiya summit in 684, re-instituting the principle of direct hereditary succession. Abd al-Malik acceded to the caliphate without opposition from the previous designates, Khalid ibn Yazid and Amr ibn Sa'id. Thereafter, hereditary succession became the standard practice of the Umayyad caliphs.
## Assessment
By making his family the foundation of his power, Marwan modeled his administration on that of Caliph Uthman, who extensively relied on his kinsmen, as opposed to Mu'awiya I, who largely kept them at arm's length. To that end, Marwan ensured Abd al-Malik's succession as caliph and gave his sons Muhammad and Abd al-Aziz key military commands. Despite the tumultuous beginnings, the "Marwanids" (descendants of Marwan) were established as the ruling house of the Umayyad realm.
In the view of Bosworth, Marwan "was obviously a military leader and statesman of great skill and decisiveness amply endowed with the qualities of ḥilm [levelheadedness] and shrewdness, which characterised other outstanding members of the Umayyad clan". His rise as caliph in Syria, a largely unfamiliar territory where he lacked a power-base, laid the foundations for Abd al-Malik's reign, which consolidated Umayyad rule for a further sixty-five years. In the view of Madelung, Marwan's path to the caliphate was "truly high politics", the culmination of intrigues dating from his early career. These included encouraging Uthman's empowerment of the Umayyads, becoming the "first avenger" of Uthman's assassination by murdering Talha, and privately undermining while publicly enforcing the authority of the Sufyanid caliphs of Damascus.
Marwan was known to be gruff and lacking in social graces. He suffered permanent injuries after a number of battle wounds. His tall and emaciated appearance lent him the nickname khayt batil (gossamer-like thread). In later anti-Umayyad Muslim tradition, Marwan was derided as tarid ibn tarid (outlawed son of an outlaw) in reference to his father al-Hakam's alleged exile to Ta'if by the Islamic prophet Muhammad and Marwan's expulsion from Medina by Ibn al-Zubayr. He was also referred to as abu al-jababira (father of tyrants) because his son and grandsons later inherited the caliphal throne. In a number of sayings attributed to Muhammad, Marwan and his father are the subject of the Islamic prophet's foreboding, though Donner holds that much of these reports were likely conceived by Shia opponents of Marwan and the Umayyads in general.
A number of reports cited by the medieval Islamic historians al-Baladhuri (d. 892) and Ibn Asakir (d. 1176) are indicative of Marwan's piety, such as the 9th-century historian al-Mada'ini's assertion that Marwan was among the best readers of the Qur'an and Marwan's own claim to have recited the Qur'an for over forty years before the Battle of Marj Rahit. On the basis that many of his sons bore clearly Islamic names (as opposed to traditional Arabian names), Donner speculates Marwan may have indeed been "deeply religious" and "profoundly impressed" by the Qur'anic message to honor God and the prophets of Islam, including Muhammad. Donner notes the difficulty of "achieving a sound assessment of Marwan", as with most Islamic leaders of his generation, due to an absence of archaeological and epigraphic documentation and the restriction of his biographical information to often polemical literary sources.
## See also
- Al-Harith ibn al-Hakam, brother of Marwan I
- Yahya ibn al-Hakam, brother of Marwan I
- Aban ibn al-Walid ibn Uqba |
41,060,650 | The Carpet from Bagdad | 1,167,783,260 | 1915 film | [
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| The Carpet from Bagdad is a 1915 American silent adventure film directed by Colin Campbell and based on Harold MacGrath's 1911 eponymous novel. In the story, Horace Wadsworth (played by Guy Oliver), one of a gang of criminals also planning a bank robbery in New York, steals the titular prayer rug from its Baghdad mosque. He sells the carpet to antique dealer George Jones (Wheeler Oakman) to fund the robbery scheme. But the theft places both men and Fortune Chedsoye (Kathlyn Williams), the innocent daughter of another conspirator, in danger from the carpet's guardian.
Marketing for the film included a media tour of part of the set and an invitation-only screening sponsored by the publisher of MacGrath's book. The Carpet from Bagdad was released on May 3, 1915 to mostly positive reviews. Many praised the tinted desert scenes and realistic Middle East imagery, although some felt the scenery overshadowed the characters. The film is now mostly lost, although one badly damaged reel was salvaged from the RMS Lusitania in 1982.
## Plot
Horace Wadsworth, disinherited brother of New York banker Arthur Wadsworth, joins a gang of international criminals. He plots to rob his brother's bank by constructing a tunnel from the nearby home of antique dealer George Jones, who is currently on a trip to Cairo to purchase antique rugs. Horace follows him there, and, learning of the Sacred Carpet of Bagdad, joins the caravan of its sworn guardian, Mohamed. Meanwhile, Horace's confederates Major Callahan and Mrs. Chedsoye arrive in Cairo along with Mrs. Chedsoye's daughter, Fortune, who is unaware of her mother's illicit activities.
When the criminals meet with Jones in Cairo, Jones becomes enamored of Fortune. Horace steals the Sacred Carpet from Mohamed's mosque and sells it to Jones to fund the robbery plan. Fortune, becoming suspicious of her mother and the surrounding events, steals the prayer rug from Jones and hides it in her mother's effects. Unable to locate the stolen carpet, Mohamed kidnaps Horace, Jones, and Fortune. Meanwhile, Mrs. Chedsoye and Major Callahan return to New York, where a fourth member of the conspiracy, Wallace, has acquired forged paperwork to gain access to the Jones residence.
The captives escape from Mohamed's planned torture and flee to Damascus. Horace immediately returns to New York to rejoin his compatriots. Fortune and Jones, who have fallen in love, also travel back to New York. Once there, Jones learns of the forgery, and returns home to confront the gang, who still have the Sacred Carpet and who have completed their tunnel into the vaults of Arthur Wadsworth's bank. Sympathetic to Horace after their shared experiences, Jones offers the robbers a two-hour lead before he notifies the police, but keeps the prayer rug. Meanwhile, Mohamed resigns himself to the loss of the carpet.
## Cast
- Kathlyn Williams as Fortune Chedsoye
- Wheeler Oakman as George P.A. Jones
- Guy Oliver as Horace Wadsworth
- Eugenie Besserer as Mrs. Chedsoye
- Frank Clark as Major Callahan
- Charles Clary as Mohamed
- Harry Lonsdale as Arthur Wadsworth
- Fred Huntley as Wallace
## Production and marketing
The Carpet from Bagdad is a film adaptation of Harold MacGrath's 1911 novel of the same name. MacGrath was a well-traveled, successful author of over a dozen novels. Stories with Asian settings were in vogue at the time, and both The Carpet from Bagdad and the Selig Polyscope Company's previous adaptation of MacGrath's work, the popular serial The Adventures of Kathlyn, are set in part in the Near East.
Director Colin Campbell was concerned with the film's realism. He had sets constructed to represent the streets of Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus, and used animals from the Selig Zoo. Scenes set in the Arabian and Sahara Deserts were filmed in the deserts of California. The Arab characters' clothing was genuine, and the actors portraying those roles were required to remain dressed in-character throughout the several days of desert filming to ensure they would appear more natural in the imported garments. Much of the film, including the desert scenes, was hand tinted. Production costs exceeded \$35,000, the equivalent of over \$ in present-day terms.
William Selig aggressively promoted his studio and its films. One such promotion, a March 1915 media tour of the unfinished Selig Zoo, allowed reporters a visit to The Carpet from Bagdad'''s bazaar set. This was the first film distributed by V-L-S-E, a conglomerate created by Vitagraph Studios, Lubin Manufacturing Company, Selig Polyscope Company, and Essanay Studios. The film was also screened in a special invitation-only showing at the art gallery of the Bobbs-Merrill Company, publisher of MacGrath's novel, an early example of a sponsored exhibition of a feature film in a location other than a theater.
## Reception
The Carpet from Bagdad was released on May 3, 1915, to generally positive reviews. Variety described it as a more interesting film than its title might imply, with "perfect direction and faultless acting". Peter Milne of Motion Picture News approved of Campbell's attention to detail and realism. The Moving Picture World's James McQuade praised the film's acting and special effects. Although he believed an unfilmed Cairo scene made Mohamed's motivations easier to understand in the novel, he considered the film a "close second" to Campbell's 1914 The Spoilers. Clarence Caine's review in Motography also compared The Carpet from Bagdad favorably to The Spoilers, but he viewed the film's color as its best feature, especially the closing scene of a desert sunset. Several newspaper reviews also complimented the tinted desert scenes, with New Zealand's The Levin Chronicle describing the film as "a gem of the cinematographer's art" for its use of color. The Chicago Daily Tribune offered a more mixed opinion on the film; reviewer Kitty Kelly found it difficult to care about characters "overshadowed by environment", and considered the 35-year-old Williams unconvincing as an ingenue.
Despite the acclaim from many contemporary reviewers, modern scholars of the silent film era would not consider The Carpet from Bagdad a masterpiece, according to the British Film Institute's Clyde Jeavons.
## Partial rediscovery
Like many films from the silent era, The Carpet from Bagdad was believed completely lost, but in 1982 an Oceaneering International diving expedition salvaged a number of artifacts from the wreck of the RMS Lusitania, including one reel of film. With the assistance of BBC technical advisor Laurie Ward, the BFI National Archive was able to recover images from several feet of the film, sufficient to identify the title, but not to restore any of the film to projectable condition. Although there was a theater on Lusitania, this print of The Carpet from Bagdad'' was probably being taken to London as a film distributor's preview, as was the case for several other films known to have been on board.
## See also
- List of incomplete or partially lost films |
30,707,715 | William Robinson Brown | 1,098,677,503 | American businessman (1875–1955) | [
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| William Robinson "W. R. " Brown (January 17, 1875 – August 4, 1955) was an American corporate officer of the Brown Company of Berlin, New Hampshire. He was also an influential Arabian horse breeder, the founder and owner of the Maynesboro Stud, and an authority on Arabian horses.
After graduating from Williams College, Brown joined the family corporation, then known as the Berlin Mills Company, and became manager of the Woods Products Division, overseeing the company's woodlands and logging operations. He became an early advocate for sustainable forest management practices, was a member of the New Hampshire Forestry Commission from 1909 until 1952, and served on the boards of several forestry organizations. As chair of the Forestry Commission, Brown helped send sawmills to Europe during World War I to assist the war effort. He was influenced by the Progressive movement, instituting employee benefits such as company-sponsored care for injured workers that predated modern workers' compensation laws. As a Republican, he served as a presidential elector for New Hampshire in 1924.
Brown founded the Maynesboro Stud in 1912 with foundation bloodstock from some of the most notable American breeders of Arabian horses. He looked abroad for additional horses, particularly from the Crabbet Arabian Stud, and imported Arabian horses from England, France and Egypt. At its peak, Maynesboro was the largest Arabian horse breeding operation in the United States. In 1929, he wrote The Horse of the Desert, still considered an authoritative work on the Arabian breed. He served as President of the Arabian Horse Club of America from 1918 until 1939. Brown was a remount agent and had a special interest in promoting the use of Arabian horses by the U.S. Army Remount Service. To prove the abilities of Arabians, he organized and participated in a number of endurance races of up to 300 miles (480 km), which his horses won three times, retiring the U.S. Mounted Service Cup. This accomplishment occurred even though The Jockey Club donated \$50,000 to the U.S. Army to buy Thoroughbreds that tried but failed to beat the Arabians. Brown's legacy as a horse breeder was significant. Today, the term "CMK", meaning "Crabbet/Maynesboro/Kellogg" is a label for specific lines of "Domestic" or "American-bred" Arabian horses, many of which descend from Brown's breeding program. In 2012, the Berlin and Coös County Historical Society held a 100th anniversary celebration of the stud's founding.
Although Brown family members sold personal assets to keep the Brown Company afloat during the Great Depression, including Brown's dispersal of his herd of Arabian horses in 1933, the business went into receivership in 1934. Brown remained in charge of the Woods Division through the company's second bankruptcy filing in 1941. He retired from the company in 1943 and died of cancer in 1955. His final book, Our Forest Heritage, was published posthumously, and his innovations in forest management became industry standards.
## Personal life
W. R. Brown was born in Portland, Maine, in 1875 to Emily Jenkins Brown and William Wentworth "W. W." Brown. He was the youngest of the couple's three sons, all of whom were avid horsemen. He also had two younger half-brothers. He attended Phillips Andover Academy and Williams College, graduating from the latter in 1897. He was a Kappa Alpha fraternity member who also managed the football and baseball teams at Williams. In 1915, he married Hildreth Burton Smith, the granddaughter of former governor of Georgia, U.S. Senator and Confederate general John B. Gordon. The couple had five children: Fielding, Newell, Brenton, Nancy, and Frances. Brown lived in New Hampshire for the remainder of his life, in Berlin until 1946 and then Dublin. After a long illness, he died of cancer on August 4, 1955, and was buried at the Dublin cemetery. He was survived by his wife, his five grown children, and 15 grandchildren.
Brown's family was strongly affiliated with Williams College; W. R. and his two older brothers Herbert ("H. J.") and Orton ("O. B.") all attended Williams, as did sons Fielding and Brenton. Fielding also earned a Ph.D. at Princeton University and returned to Williams as the Charles L. MacMillan Professor of Physics before retiring to become an artist and sculptor. Daughter Frances married Nobel Prize–winning physicist Charles H. Townes and wrote a book, Misadventures of a Scientist's Wife, about her life. Newell attended Princeton and served as the Federal Wages and Hours Administrator for the United States Department of Labor during the Eisenhower administration. Politically aligned with the Republican party, W. R. Brown was a presidential elector for New Hampshire in the 1924 election, voting for Calvin Coolidge.
## Brown Company career
H. Winslow & Company, later called the Berlin Mills Company, was founded about 1853, and W. W. Brown purchased an interest in 1868. In 1881, the company expanded from lumber into pulp and paper manufacturing. W. W. Brown obtained a controlling interest in the company by 1888, becoming, along with his older two sons, the sole owners by 1907. The corporation's name was changed to the Brown Company in 1917, removing the word "Berlin" because of the conflict with Germany in World War I.
W. R. Brown went to work for the company in 1897 after finishing college. His father, declaring he "wanted no kittens that couldn't catch mice," made W. R. find a job without family help. As a result, Brown started out selling the company's lumber in Portland, Maine, earning nine dollars a week. He was promoted, returned to Berlin, and after a second promotion became the sawmill's night superintendent. In that position, he developed a method of using exhaust steam to heat a pond that thawed and cleaned logs, speeding up mill production during the winter. Promoted to day superintendent, he organized a successful event on September 8, 1900 to break the world's record for lumber cut by the crew of a "one head rig" in an 11-hour shift, producing 221,319 board feet, a record that still stood 85 years later. After this event, he declared that he "qualified with Father as one of the 'kittens'." His father, who had been out of town on the day of the record attempt, reviewed the results, inquired as to the amount of cut lumber that was actually shipped to customers, and then commented, "Hum, that was good." His father promoted Brown to full general manager of the Woods Division in 1902. He was an officer of the corporation, and managed the company's timberlands as director of woods operations until 1943. When Brown began his career, the company owned 400,000 acres (160,000 ha) of land. At its peak, the company owned, and Brown supervised, 3,750,000 acres (1,520,000 ha), as many as 40 logging camps, plus an inland fleet of more than 30 boats. The loggers used at least 2500 horses to haul logs, and the company-owned railroad had more than 800 freight cars.
The Brown family was later described as "progressive and ... ahead of their times", and had innovative ideas about wood products manufacturing and scientific forest management. During Brown's tenure, the company was one of the first to initiate modern forest management practices and to attempt to conserve the forest for future industry use. He was particularly critical of the damage done by portable sawmills. Brown understood that the pulp mills of his time were dependent on locally accessible timber, and concluded that sustainable practices were important to the industry. He built upon the sustainable forestry practices advocated by company forester Austin Cary, who had been recruited from the U.S. Forest Service. In 1919, Brown set up a tree nursery on the north shore of Cupsuptic Lake that researched sustained yield practices and at its peak was the largest tree nursery in the United States. His innovations in forest management became industry standards; researchers at Plymouth State College concluded that he "led the Brown company to international prominence as a source for scientific research and development."
Brown was influenced by the Progressive movement as applied to business. He paid his workers above the prevailing wage, instituted safety programs, hired a doctor to care for loggers in the camps, and, prior to modern workers' compensation laws, had the company pay for hospitalization of injured workers. He also attempted to improve camp conditions for the workers by banning card games and requiring the loggers to take showers, but those particular reform efforts "were not well received." The Brown family took considerable interest in the city of Berlin. Various family members started a public kindergarten, built a community club with a gym, swimming pool, and bowling alley, provided soup to the sick, and gave Christmas presents to local children. Brown himself helped found a number of civic and business self-help organizations including the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, established in 1901; the New Hampshire Timberlands Owners Association, a fire-protection group established in 1910; and similar fire-protection groups in Maine and Vermont. He set up a series of effective forest-fire lookout towers, possibly the first in the nation, and by 1917 had helped establish a forest-fire insurance company. In 1909, after helping draft the legislation creating New Hampshire's State Forestry Department, he became a member of the New Hampshire Forestry Commission; and its chair from 1910 until 1952, playing a significant role in shaping the forestry practices and laws of the state. Brown also served on the boards of several industry groups, including the American Forestry Association, Society of American Foresters, Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, and the Forest Research Council. He represented the U.S. at the first World Forestry Congress held in Rome in 1926.
During World War I, in his capacity as chair of the New England Forestry Commission, Brown worked with the War Industries Board to send 10 sawmills abroad. The equipment went to Scotland to meet Britain's need for lumber. When the war effort in France subsequently required more than 73 million board feet of lumber per month, Brown was commissioned as a major to oversee sawmill operations there, but ultimately was not allowed to serve in France because of his poor vision, as he was partially blind in one eye.
The Great Depression had a significant impact on the Brown Company. Berlin at that time had a population of about 20,000 people, most of whom either worked for the company or provided services to the families of company employees. The Brown family had borrowed heavily during the 1920s to fund expansion, and, as stated by a company employee, had become "complacent and overly optimistic." The family's nepotism may also have become a disadvantage. Reduced demand for the company's products forced it to take out short-term loans to provide operating capital, and by 1931 the international financial situation led to major losses in the value of the company's bonds. As a result, in the winter of 1931–32 the Brown Company could not obtain the necessary financing for its logging operations, when it normally needed to employ 4,000 to 5,000 loggers to cut timber each winter. Family members sold off personal holdings to try to keep the company solvent, and W. R. Brown dispersed his entire herd of Arabian horses. In 1933, he negotiated a cooperative financing plan with the City of Berlin and the State of New Hampshire, ratified by the state legislature, to fund the woods operations, keeping Berlin's local residents employed. The company was nevertheless forced to file for bankruptcy in 1935, after having gone into receivership the previous year. A court-appointed president took over, but Brown continued as head of the Woods Division. Brown's agreement with the City of Berlin lasted until 1941, when the company again filed for bankruptcy. Ultimately the Brown family ceased to have a significant role on the board of directors and the company was sold to outside investors. Brown officially retired from the company in 1943, but his brother O. B. remained on the board of directors until 1960.
## Arabian horse breeder
Brown bought his first Arabian horses in 1910 and founded the Maynesboro Stud near Berlin in 1912. The farm was named after the original settlement in the area, Maynesborough, located in the White Mountains in an area also known as the Great North Woods Region. The main stallion barn, although moved from its original location, has been preserved and restored by the Berlin and Coös County Historical Society, which is also restoring the work horse barns of the Brown Company. On September 15, 2012, the society celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Maynesboro Stud.
At its peak, Maynesboro was the largest Arabian stud farm in the United States. In 1919, Brown had 88 horses, some at his main farm in New Hampshire, and others at farms he owned in Decorah, Iowa, and Cody, Wyoming. He is credited as the breeder of 194 horses, and became known as one of the most knowledgeable breeders and authorities on Arabians. He served as President of the Arabian Horse Club of America, now part of the Arabian Horse Association, from 1918 until 1939.
### Foundation stock
As he built Maynesboro, Brown studied the pedigrees of almost every purebred Arabian in the US at the time. He believed the Arabian was actually a separate subspecies of horse, a once-popular but now discredited theory. He found that, even though developed in the desert, Arabians adapted well to the severe winter weather of his New England farm.
When he started Maynesboro, Brown obtained his original foundation bloodstock from his oldest brother, Herbert, who had purchased \*Abu Zeyd, a stallion bred by the Crabbet Arabian Stud in England. \*Abu Zeyd was considered the best son of his famous sire, Mesaoud. Herbert Brown obtained the stallion from the estate of Homer Davenport following Davenport's death in 1912. The Maynesboro stud also acquired 10 mares from the Davenport estate. Brown considered \*Abu Zeyd an ideal representative of the Arabian breed, and when the stallion died, Brown donated the skeleton to the American Museum of Natural History. His other American purchases included most of the horses owned by Spencer Borden's Interlachen Farms in Massachusetts, following Borden's decision to disperse his herd. These horses included animals descended from the breeding program of Randolph Huntington, one of the first people in the United States to breed purebred Arabians. Brown also obtained Borden's extensive collection of literary works on horsemanship, Arab culture, and the Arabian horse, which included 8th-century Furusiyya manuscripts. Following this start, he looked abroad for additional bloodstock, eventually importing 33 horses into the United States.
### International purchases
Many American breeders had purchased horses from the Crabbet Stud, which at the time Brown founded Maynesboro was owned by Lady Anne Blunt and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. American breeders obtained some of Crabbet's best Arabians during the early 1900s owing to the turmoil within the Blunt family. The couple separated in 1906, and following Lady Anne's death in 1917, Blunt's daughter Judith, Lady Wentworth, became involved in a rancorous and expensive estate battle with Wilfrid over the Crabbet lands and horses. Wilfrid, needing to appease creditors, sold many of the stud's best horses to international buyers for low prices. Through an agent, Brown purchased 20 Crabbet horses in 1918, although for reasons unknown, only 17 actually made it to Maynesboro; he paid only £2727 for the entire lot. The most significant animal purchased was the well-known stallion \*Berk, who died in America after siring only four foals, much to the dismay of Lady Wentworth, who was trying to buy back the best breeding stock lost to Crabbet because of her father's actions. Brown bought two additional Crabbet-bred horses from England in 1923, although not directly from Lady Wentworth.
One of the most notable Crabbet-bred stallions Brown eventually kept at Maynesboro was \*Astraled, who had come to America in 1909. This horse had been sold by Wilfrid Blunt to an American buyer from Massachusetts, but after siring only two purebred foals in New England, was sold to the remount, shipped west, and lived in obscurity in Oregon, where he sired no purebred Arabian offspring. \*Astraled was ultimately obtained by Brown in 1923, who shipped the aged horse by rail from Idaho to New Hampshire. \*Astraled only sired one foal crop at Maynesboro, but that group of foals included his most notable American-bred son, Gulastra.
Brown traveled to Europe with the U.S. Army Remount Service in 1921, visiting a number of major European studs in Austria, France, and Hungary. He met Lady Wentworth at Crabbet on the way home, but did not purchase any of her horses. He imported several Arabian mares from France in 1921 and 1922, in part owing to France's reputation for producing excellent cavalry horses.
In 1929, Brown traveled to Egypt and Syria with Arabian expert Carl Raswan in search of desertbred horses. According to Brown's wife, the two apparently did not get along well, and the five horses purchased during their journey somehow never made it to America. Following that trip, Brown wrote The Horse of the Desert, still considered to be one of the best works written about the Arabian horse.
In 1932, Brown sent his stud manager Jack Humphrey to Egypt, where acting for Brown he bought two stallions and four mares from Prince Mohammed Ali. The Prince was known as a horseman and scholar, publishing a two-volume treatise on the breeding of Arabian horses. Two of the mares purchased were daughters of Mahroussa, whom Brown described as "the most beautiful mare he ever saw". The stallions were \*Nasr, a successful race horse, and \*Zarife.
### Endurance testing and remounts
Brown was a remount agent, who served on the U.S. Remount Board, and his interest in improving the quality of horses used by the U.S. Cavalry may have been his motivation to breed Arabians. Spencer Borden shared Brown's interest in Arabians as remount bloodstock. Seeking to prove the superior endurance and durability of Arabian horses to the U.S. Army Remount Service, Brown actively encouraged the participation of Arabians in endurance races. He had most of his horses trained to ride and drive. Many were used in endurance races, others shown, and at least one was a polo pony.
In 1918, Brown set up a test ride in which he had two of his horses travel from Berlin to Bethel, Maine, a distance of 162 miles (261 km). They completed the ride in just over 31 hours including breaks; each horse carried a rider and equipment weighing 200 pounds (91 kg) in poor weather and on muddy roads. The horses were Kheyra, a purebred seven-year-old mare who weighed 900 pounds (410 kg), and Rustem Bey, a half-Arab by Khaled out of a Standardbred mare of the Clay Trotting Horses line. Rustem Bey was taller and heavier than Kheyra. Both horses were examined by a veterinarian, assessed as being sound and fit to continue at the end of the ride, and showed no evidence of soreness 24 hours later. A third Arabian, Herbert Brown's \*Crabbet, was ridden by a military officer supervising the test, and that pair covered 95 miles (153 km) in seventeen hours. The results of the test were reported in The New York Times.
Following the 1918 test, Brown helped organize the first U.S. Official Cavalry Endurance Ride in 1919, which was won by his mare Ramla, who carried 200 pounds (91 kg). The race covered 306 miles (492 km) in five days. The U.S. Remount Service requested the weight horses carried in 1920 be raised to 245 pounds (111 kg), and required horses to travel for about 60 miles (97 km) a day for five days. Arabians won the highest average points of any breed, and although an Arabian horse did not win first place that year, Rustem Bey was second. In 1921, with a weight requirement of 225 pounds (102 kg), again covering 300 miles (480 km) in five days, Brown's gelding \*Crabbet won the race and Rustem Bey placed third, despite a donation of \$50,000 from The Jockey Club to the Army to buy the best Thoroughbreds possible in a failed attempt to beat the Arabians. Brown won again in 1923 with an Anglo-Arabian named Gouya, thus retiring the U.S. Mounted Service Cup.
Brown used Arabian stallions owned by the remount service as breeding animals, and over time he also provided 32 of his own stallions to sire remounts. He advocated crossbreeding Arabians to improve other breeds. He concluded, however, that attempting to breed purebred Arabians for increased size resulted in a sacrifice in quality and Arabian type.
### Dispersal
Brown sold all his horses in 1933 in an attempt to raise funds to keep the Brown Company solvent. They were bought by the Kellogg Ranch, Roger Selby, William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon Stud, and "General" J. M. Dickinson of Traveler's Rest Stud, who acquired most of the horses from Brown's 1932 importation from Egypt. Dickinson in turn sold \*Zarife to Wayne Van Vleet of Colorado in 1939, and Azkar, the last foal bred by Brown, to a ranch in Texas. There Azkar was left to fend for himself on the open range as a herd stallion, but, a testament to the hardiness of Brown's Arabians, he survived and was returned to the Arabian breeding world by Henry Babson. Dickinson sold the mare \*Aziza to Alice Payne, who later owned \*Raffles.
## Legacy
Brown believed it was important to preserve the scenic value of New Hampshire's forests. Between 1903 and 1911, he helped with efforts to establish White Mountain National Forest. Among his many civic activities, Brown promoted early legislative efforts to protect public riding trails. He also helped New Hampshire acquire Franconia Notch and Crawford Notch as public lands, and established a river conservation group in Quebec.
A scholar of the Arabian horse, he collected a significant library of works on the breed, one of the largest collections in the United States. His papers are now kept by the Arabian Horse Owners Foundation (AHOF). Today, the term "CMK", meaning "Crabbet/Maynesboro/Kellogg", is a label for specific lines of "Domestic" or "American-bred" Arabian horses. It describes the descendants of horses imported to America from the desert or from Crabbet Park Stud in the late 1800s and early 1900s and then bred on in the US by the Hamidie Society, Huntington, Borden, Davenport, Brown, W. K. Kellogg, Hearst, or Dickinson. |
7,993,134 | W. S. Gilbert | 1,169,629,834 | English dramatist, poet and illustrator (1836–1911) | [
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| Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (18 November 1836 – 29 May 1911) was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan, which produced fourteen comic operas. The most famous of these include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado. The popularity of these works was supported for over a century by year-round performances of them, in Britain and abroad, by the repertory company that Gilbert, Sullivan and their producer Richard D'Oyly Carte founded, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. These Savoy operas are still frequently performed in the English-speaking world and beyond.
Gilbert's creative output included over 75 plays and libretti, and numerous short stories, poems and lyrics, both comic and serious. After brief careers as a government clerk and a lawyer, Gilbert began to focus, in the 1860s, on writing light verse, including his Bab Ballads, short stories, theatre reviews and illustrations, often for Fun magazine. He also began to write burlesques and his first comic plays, developing a unique absurdist, inverted style that would later be known as his "topsy-turvy" style. He also developed a realistic method of stage direction and a reputation as a strict theatre director. In the 1870s, Gilbert wrote 40 plays and libretti, including his German Reed Entertainments, several blank-verse "fairy comedies", some serious plays, and his first five collaborations with Sullivan: Thespis, Trial by Jury, The Sorcerer, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. In the 1880s, Gilbert focused on the Savoy operas, including Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado, The Yeomen of the Guard and The Gondoliers.
In 1890, after this long and profitable creative partnership, Gilbert quarrelled with Sullivan and Carte concerning expenses at the Savoy Theatre; the dispute is referred to as the "carpet quarrel". Gilbert won the ensuing lawsuit, but the argument caused hurt feelings among the partnership. Although Gilbert and Sullivan were persuaded to collaborate on two last operas, they were not as successful as the previous ones. In later years, Gilbert wrote several plays, and a few operas with other collaborators. He retired, with his wife Lucy, and their ward, Nancy McIntosh, to a country estate, Grim's Dyke. He was knighted in 1907. Gilbert died of a heart attack while attempting to rescue a young woman to whom he was giving a swimming lesson in the lake at his home.
Gilbert's plays inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and his comic operas with Sullivan inspired the later development of American musical theatre, especially influencing Broadway librettists and lyricists. According to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Gilbert's "lyrical facility and his mastery of metre raised the poetical quality of comic opera to a position that it had never reached before and has not reached since".
## Early life and career
### Beginnings
Gilbert was born at 17 Southampton Street, Strand, London. His father, also named William, was briefly a naval surgeon, who later became a writer of novels and short stories, some of which his son illustrated. Gilbert's mother was the former Anne Mary Bye Morris (1812–1888), the daughter of Thomas Morris, an apothecary. Gilbert's parents were distant and stern, and he did not have a particularly close relationship with either of them. They quarrelled increasingly, and following the break-up of their marriage in 1876, his relationships with them, especially his mother, became even more strained. Gilbert had three younger sisters, two of whom were born outside England because of the family's travels during these years: Jane Morris (b. 1838 in Milan, Italy – 1906), who married Alfred Weigall, a miniatures painter; Mary Florence (b. 1843 in Boulogne, France – 1911); and Anne Maude (1845–1932). The younger two never married. Gilbert was nicknamed "Bab" as a baby, and then "Schwenck", after the surname of his great aunt and great uncle, who were also his father's godparents.
As a child, Gilbert travelled to Italy in 1838 and then France for two years with his parents, who finally returned to settle in London in 1847. He was educated at Boulogne, France, from the age of seven (he later kept his diary in French so that the servants could not read it), then at Western Grammar School, Brompton, London, and then at the Great Ealing School, where he became head boy and wrote plays for school performances and painted scenery. He then attended King's College London, graduating in 1856. He intended to take the examinations for a commission in the Royal Artillery, but with the end of the Crimean War, fewer recruits were needed, and the only commission available to Gilbert would have been in a line regiment. Instead he joined the Civil Service: he was an assistant clerk in the Privy Council Office for four years and hated it. In 1859, he joined the Militia, a part-time volunteer force formed for the defence of Britain, which he served in until 1878 (in between writing and other work), reaching the rank of captain. In 1863, he received a bequest of £300 that he used to leave the civil service and take up a brief career as a barrister (he had already entered the Inner Temple as a student). His legal practice was not successful, averaging just five clients a year.
To supplement his income from 1861 on, Gilbert wrote a variety of stories, comic rants, grotesque illustrations, theatre reviews (many in the form of a parody of the play being reviewed), and, under the pseudonym "Bab" (his childhood nickname), illustrated poems for several comic magazines, primarily Fun, started in 1861 by H. J. Byron. He published stories, articles, and reviews in papers such as The Cornhill Magazine, London Society, Tinsley's Magazine and Temple Bar. In addition, Gilbert was the London correspondent for L'Invalide Russe and a drama critic for the Illustrated London Times. In the 1860s he also contributed to Tom Hood's Christmas annuals, to Saturday Night, the Comic News and the Savage Club Papers. The Observer newspaper in 1870 sent him to France as a war correspondent reporting on the Franco-Prussian War.
The poems, illustrated humorously by Gilbert, proved immensely popular and were reprinted in book form as the Bab Ballads. He would later return to many of these as source material for his plays and comic operas. Gilbert and his colleagues from Fun, including Tom Robertson, Tom Hood, Clement Scott and F. C. Burnand (who defected to Punch in 1862) frequented the Arundel Club, the Savage Club, and especially Evans's café, where they had a table in competition with the Punch 'Round table'.
After a relationship in the mid-1860s with the novelist Annie Thomas, Gilbert married Lucy Agnes Turner (1847–1936), whom he called "Kitty", in 1867; she was 11 years his junior. He wrote many affectionate letters to her over the years. Gilbert and Lucy were socially active both in London and later at Grim's Dyke, often holding dinner parties and being invited to others' homes for dinner, in contrast to the picture painted by fictionalisations such as the film Topsy-Turvy. The Gilberts had no children, but they had many pets, including some exotic ones.
### First plays
Gilbert wrote and directed several plays at school, but his first professionally produced play was Uncle Baby, which ran for seven weeks in the autumn of 1863.
In 1865–66, Gilbert collaborated with Charles Millward on several pantomimes, including one called Hush-a-Bye, Baby, On the Tree Top, or, Harlequin Fortunia, King Frog of Frog Island, and the Magic Toys of Lowther Arcade (1866). Gilbert's first solo success came a few days after Hush-a-Bye Baby premiered. His friend and mentor, Tom Robertson, was asked to write a pantomime but did not think he could do it in the two weeks available, and so he recommended Gilbert instead. Written and rushed to the stage in 10 days, Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack, a burlesque of Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, proved extremely popular. This led to a long series of further Gilbert opera burlesques, pantomimes and farces, full of awful puns (traditional in burlesques of the period), though showing, at times, signs of the satire that would later be a defining part of Gilbert's work. For instance:
> That men were monkeys once – to that I bow;
> (looking at Lord Margate) I know one who's less man than monkey, now;
> That monkeys once were men, peers, statesmen, flunkies –
> That's rather hard on unoffending monkeys!
This was followed by Gilbert's penultimate operatic parody, Robert the Devil, a burlesque of Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera, Robert le diable, which was part of a triple bill that opened the Gaiety Theatre, London, in 1868. The piece was Gilbert's biggest success to date, running for over 100 nights and being frequently revived and played continuously in the provinces for three years thereafter.
In Victorian theatre, "[to degrade] high and beautiful themes ... had been the regular proceeding in burlesque, and the age almost expected it" However, Gilbert's burlesques were considered unusually tasteful compared to the others on the London stage. Isaac Goldberg wrote that these pieces "reveal how a playwright may begin by making burlesque of opera and end by making opera of burlesque." Gilbert would depart even further from the burlesque style from about 1869 with plays containing original plots and fewer puns. His first full-length prose comedy was An Old Score (1869).
### German Reed entertainments and other plays of the early 1870s
Theatre, at the time Gilbert began writing, had fallen into disrepute. Badly translated and adapted French operettas and poorly written, prurient Victorian burlesques dominated the London stage. As Jessie Bond vividly described it, "stilted tragedy and vulgar farce were all the would-be playgoer had to choose from, and the theatre had become a place of evil repute to the righteous British householder." Bond created the mezzo-soprano roles in most of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and is here leading into a description of Gilbert's role reforming the Victorian theatre.
From 1869 to 1875, Gilbert joined with one of the leading figures in theatrical reform, Thomas German Reed (and his wife Priscilla), whose Gallery of Illustration sought to regain some of theatre's lost respectability by offering family entertainments in London. So successful were they that by 1885 Gilbert stated that original British plays were appropriate for an innocent 15-year-old girl in the audience. Three months before the opening of Gilbert's last burlesque (The Pretty Druidess), the first of his pieces for the Gallery of Illustration, No Cards, was produced. Gilbert created six musical entertainments for the German Reeds, some with music composed by Thomas German Reed.
The environment of the German Reeds' intimate theatre allowed Gilbert quickly to develop a personal style and freedom to control all aspects of production, including set, costumes, direction and stage management. These works were a success, with Gilbert's first big hit at the Gallery of Illustration, Ages Ago, opening in 1869. Ages Ago was also the beginning of a collaboration with the composer Frederic Clay that would last seven years and produce four works. It was at a rehearsal for Ages Ago that Clay formally introduced Gilbert to his friend, Arthur Sullivan. The Bab Ballads and Gilbert's many early musical works gave him much practice as a lyricist even before his collaboration with Sullivan.
Many of the plot elements of the German Reed Entertainments (as well as some from his earlier plays and Bab Ballads) would be reused by Gilbert later in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. These elements include paintings coming to life (Ages Ago, used again in Ruddigore), a deaf nursemaid binding a respectable man's son to a "pirate" instead of to a "pilot" by mistake (Our Island Home, 1870, reused in The Pirates of Penzance), and the forceful mature lady who is "an acquired taste" (Eyes and No Eyes, 1875, reused in The Mikado). During this time, Gilbert perfected the 'topsy-turvy' style that he had been developing in his Bab Ballads, where the humour was derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, however absurd. Mike Leigh describes the "Gilbertian" style as follows: "With great fluidity and freedom, [Gilbert] continually challenges our natural expectations. First, within the framework of the story, he makes bizarre things happen, and turns the world on its head. Thus the Learned Judge marries the Plaintiff, the soldiers metamorphose into aesthetes, and so on, and nearly every opera is resolved by a deft moving of the goalposts ... His genius is to fuse opposites with an imperceptible sleight of hand, to blend the surreal with the real, and the caricature with the natural. In other words, to tell a perfectly outrageous story in a completely deadpan way."
At the same time, Gilbert created several "fairy comedies" at the Haymarket Theatre. This series of plays was founded upon the idea of self-revelation by characters under the influence of some magic or some supernatural interference. The first was The Palace of Truth (1870), based partly on a story by Madame de Genlis. In 1871, with Pygmalion and Galatea, one of seven plays that he produced that year, Gilbert scored his greatest hit to date. Together, these plays and their successors such as The Wicked World (1873), Sweethearts (1874), and Broken Hearts (1875), did for Gilbert on the dramatic stage what the German Reed entertainments had done for him on the musical stage: they established that his capabilities extended far beyond burlesque, won him artistic credentials, and demonstrated that he was a writer of wide range, as comfortable with human drama as with farcical humour. The success of these plays, especially Pygmalion and Galatea, gave Gilbert a prestige that would be crucial to his later collaboration with as respected a musician as Sullivan.
During this period, Gilbert also pushed the boundaries of how far satire could go in the theatre. He collaborated with Gilbert Arthur à Beckett on The Happy Land (1873), a political satire (in part, a parody of his own The Wicked World), which was briefly banned because of its unflattering caricatures of Gladstone and his ministers. Similarly, The Realm of Joy (1873) was set in the lobby of a theatre performing a scandalous play (implied to be the Happy Land), with many jokes at the expense of the Lord Chamberlain (the "Lord High Disinfectant", as he is referred to in the play). In Charity (1874), however, Gilbert uses the freedom of the stage in a different way: to provide a tightly written critique of the contrasting ways that Victorian society treated men and women who had sex outside of marriage. These works anticipated the 'problem plays' of Shaw and Ibsen.
### As director
Once he became established, Gilbert was the stage director for his plays and operas and had strong opinions on how they should best be performed. He was strongly influenced by the innovations in "stagecraft", now called stage direction, by the playwrights James Planché and especially Tom Robertson. Gilbert attended rehearsals directed by Robertson to learn this art first-hand from the older director, and he began to apply it in some of his earliest plays. He sought realism in acting, settings, costumes, and movement, if not in content of his plays (although he did write a romantic comedy in the "naturalist" style, as a tribute to Robertson, Sweethearts). He shunned self-conscious interaction with the audience, and insisted on a style of portrayal in which characters were never aware of their own absurdity, but were coherent internal wholes.
In Gilbert's 1874 burlesque, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the character Hamlet, in his speech to the players, sums up Gilbert's theory of comic acting: "I hold that there is no such antick fellow as your bombastical hero who doth so earnestly spout forth his folly as to make his hearers believe that he is unconscious of all incongruity". Robertson "introduced Gilbert both to the revolutionary notion of disciplined rehearsals and to mise-en-scène or unity of style in the whole presentation – direction, design, music, acting." Like Robertson, Gilbert demanded discipline in his actors. He required that his actors know their words perfectly, enunciate them clearly and obey his stage directions, ideas new to many actors of the day. A major innovation was the replacement of the star actor with the disciplined ensemble, "raising the director to a new position of dominance" in the theatre. "That Gilbert was a good director is not in doubt. He was able to extract from his actors natural, clear performances, which served the Gilbertian requirements of outrageousness delivered straight."
Gilbert prepared meticulously for each new work, making models of the stage, actors and set pieces, and designing every action and bit of business in advance. He would not work with actors who challenged his authority. George Grossmith wrote that, at least sometime, "Mr. Gilbert is a perfect autocrat, insisting that his words should be delivered, even to an inflection of the voice, as he dictates. He will stand on the stage beside the actor or actress, and repeat the words with appropriate action over and over again, until they are delivered as he desires them to be." Even during long runs and revivals, Gilbert closely supervised the performances of his plays, making sure that the actors did not make unauthorised additions, deletions or paraphrases. Gilbert was famous for demonstrating the action himself, even as he grew older. Gilbert himself went on stage occasionally, including several performances as the Associate in Trial by Jury, as substitute for the injured Kyrle Bellew in a charity matinee of Broken Hearts, and in charity matinees of his one-act plays, such as King Claudius in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
## Collaboration with Sullivan
### First collaborations amidst other works
In 1871, John Hollingshead commissioned Gilbert to work with Sullivan on a holiday piece for Christmas, Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old, at the Gaiety Theatre. Thespis outran five of its nine competitors for the 1871 holiday season, and its run was extended beyond the length of a normal run at the Gaiety, However, nothing more came of it at that point, and Gilbert and Sullivan went their separate ways. Gilbert worked again with Clay on Happy Arcadia (1872), and with Alfred Cellier on Topsyturveydom (1874), as well as writing several farces, operetta libretti, extravaganzas, fairy comedies, adaptations from novels, translations from the French, and the dramas described above. Also in 1874, he published his last contribution for Fun magazine ("Rosencrantz and Guildenstern"), after a gap of three years, then resigned due to disapproval of the new owner's other publishing interests.
It would be nearly four years after Thespis was produced before the two men worked together again. In 1868, Gilbert had published a short comic sketch in Fun magazine titled "Trial by Jury: An Operetta". In 1873, Gilbert was asked by the theatrical manager, Carl Rosa, to write a work for his planned 1874 season. Gilbert expanded Trial into a one-act libretto. However, Rosa's wife Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, a childhood friend of Gilbert's, died after an illness in 1874 and Rosa dropped the project. Later in 1874 Gilbert offered the libretto to Richard D'Oyly Carte, but Carte could not use the piece at that time. By early 1875, Carte was managing the Royalty Theatre, and he needed a short opera to play as an afterpiece to Offenbach's La Périchole. He contacted Gilbert, asked about the piece, and suggested Sullivan to set the work. Sullivan was enthusiastic, and Trial by Jury was composed in a matter of weeks. The little piece was a runaway hit, outlasting the run of La Périchole and being revived at another theatre.
Gilbert continued his quest to gain respect in and respectability for his profession. One thing that may have been holding dramatists back from respectability was that plays were not published in a form suitable for a "gentleman's library", as, at the time, they were generally cheaply and unattractively published for the use of actors rather than the home reader. To help rectify this, at least for himself, Gilbert arranged in late 1875 for publishers Chatto and Windus to print a volume of his plays in a format designed to appeal to the general reader, with an attractive binding and clear type, containing Gilbert's most respectable plays, including his most serious works, but mischievously capped off with Trial by Jury.
After the success of Trial by Jury, there were discussions towards reviving Thespis, but Gilbert and Sullivan were not able to agree on terms with Carte and his backers. The score to Thespis was never published, and most of the music is now lost. It took some time for Carte to gather funds for another Gilbert and Sullivan opera, and in this gap Gilbert produced several works including Tom Cobb (1875), Eyes and No Eyes (1875, his last German Reed Entertainment), and Princess Toto (1876), his last and most ambitious work with Clay, a three-act comic opera with full orchestra, as opposed to the shorter works for much reduced accompaniment that came before. Gilbert also wrote two serious works during this time, Broken Hearts (1875) and Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith (1876).
Also during this period, Gilbert wrote, Engaged (1877), which inspired Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Engaged is a parody of romantic drama written in the "topsy-turvy" satiric style of many of Gilbert's Bab Ballads and the Savoy Operas—with one character pledging his love, in the most poetic and romantic language, to every single woman in the play. The story portrays some "innocent" Scottish rustics making a living by throwing trains off the lines and then charging the passengers for services and, in parallel, romance being gladly thrown over in favour of monetary gain. A New York Times reviewer wrote in 1879, "Mr Gilbert, in his best work, has always shown a tendency to present improbabilities from a probable point of view, and in one sense, therefore, he can lay claim to originality; fortunately this merit in his case is supported by a really poetic imagination. In [Engaged] the author gives full swing to his humor, and the result, although exceedingly ephemeral, is a very amusing combination of characters – or caricatures – and mock-heroic incidents." Engaged is still performed today, by both professional and amateur companies.
### Peak collaborative years
Carte finally assembled a syndicate in 1877 and formed the Comedy Opera Company to launch a series of original English comic operas, beginning with a third collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan, The Sorcerer, in November 1877. This work was a modest success, and H.M.S. Pinafore followed in May 1878. Despite a slow start, mainly due to a scorching summer, Pinafore became a red-hot favourite by autumn. After a dispute with Carte over the division of profits, the other Comedy Opera Company partners hired thugs to storm the theatre one night to steal the sets and costumes, intending to mount a rival production. The attempt was repelled by stagehands and others at the theatre loyal to Carte, and Carte continued as sole impresario of the newly renamed D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Indeed, Pinafore was so successful that over a hundred unauthorised productions sprang up in America alone. Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte tried for many years to control the American performance copyrights over their operas, without success.
For the next decade, the Savoy Operas (as the series came to be known, after the theatre Carte later built to house them) were Gilbert's principal activity. The successful comic operas with Sullivan continued to appear every year or two, several of them being among the longest-running productions up to that point in the history of the musical stage. After Pinafore came The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Patience (1881), Iolanthe (1882), Princess Ida (1884, based on Gilbert's earlier farce, The Princess), The Mikado (1885), Ruddigore (1887), The Yeomen of the Guard (1888) and The Gondoliers (1889). Gilbert not only directed and oversaw all aspects of production for these works, but he actually designed the costumes himself for Patience, Iolanthe, Princess Ida, and Ruddigore. He insisted on precise and authentic sets and costumes, which provided a foundation to ground and focus his absurd characters and situations.
During this time, Gilbert and Sullivan also collaborated on one other major work, the oratorio The Martyr of Antioch, premiered at the Leeds music festival in October 1880. Gilbert arranged the original epic poem by Henry Hart Milman into a libretto suitable for the music, and it contains some original work. During this period, also, Gilbert occasionally wrote plays to be performed elsewhere–both serious dramas (for example The Ne'er-Do-Weel, 1878; and Gretchen, 1879) and humorous works (for example Foggerty's Fairy, 1881). However, he no longer needed to turn out multiple plays each year, as he had done before. Indeed, during the more than nine years that separated The Pirates of Penzance and The Gondoliers, he wrote just three plays outside of the partnership with Sullivan. Only one of these works, Comedy and Tragedy, proved successful. Although Comedy and Tragedy had a short run due to the lead actress refusing to act during Holy Week, the play was revived regularly. With respect to Brantinghame Hall, Stedman writes, "It was a failure, the worst failure of Gilbert's career."
In 1878, Gilbert realised a lifelong dream to play Harlequin, which he did at the Gaiety Theatre as part of an amateur charity production of The Forty Thieves, partly written by himself. Gilbert trained for Harlequin's stylised dancing with his friend John D'Auban, who had arranged the dances for some of his plays and would choreograph most of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Producer John Hollingshead later remembered, "the gem of the performance was the grimly earnest and determined Harlequin of W. S. Gilbert. It gave me an idea of what Oliver Cromwell would have made of the character." Another member of the cast recalled that Gilbert was tirelessly enthusiastic about the piece and often invited the cast to his home for dinner extra rehearsals. "A pleasanter, more genial, or agreeable companion than he was it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find." In 1882, Gilbert had a telephone installed in his home and at the prompt desk at the Savoy Theatre, so that he could monitor performances and rehearsals from his home study. Gilbert had referred to the new technology in Pinafore in 1878, only two years after the device was invented and before London even had telephone service.
### Carpet quarrel and end of the collaboration
Gilbert's working relationship with Sullivan sometimes became strained, especially during their later operas, partly because each man saw himself as subjugating his work to the other's, and partly due to their opposing personalities. Gilbert was often confrontational and notoriously thin-skinned, though given to acts of extraordinary kindness, while Sullivan eschewed conflict. Gilbert imbued his libretti with "topsy-turvy" situations in which the social order was turned upside down. After a time, these subjects were often at odds with Sullivan's desire for realism and emotional content. In addition, Gilbert's political satire often poked fun at those in the circles of privilege, while Sullivan was eager to socialise among the wealthy and titled people who would become his friends and patrons.
Throughout their collaboration, Gilbert and Sullivan disagreed several times over the choice of a subject. After both Princess Ida and Ruddigore, which were less successful than the seven other operas from H.M.S. Pinafore to The Gondoliers, Sullivan asked to leave the partnership, saying that he found Gilbert's plots repetitive and that the operas were not artistically satisfying to him. While the two artists worked out their differences, Carte kept the Savoy open with revivals of their earlier works. On each occasion, after a few months' pause, Gilbert responded with a libretto that met Sullivan's objections, and the partnership continued successfully.
In April 1890, during the run of The Gondoliers, however, Gilbert challenged Carte over the expenses of the production. Among other items to which Gilbert objected, Carte had charged the cost of a new carpet for the Savoy Theatre lobby to the partnership. Gilbert believed that this was a maintenance expense that should be charged to Carte alone. Gilbert confronted Carte, who refused to reconsider the accounts. Gilbert stormed out and wrote to Sullivan that "I left him with the remark that it was a mistake to kick down the ladder by which he had risen". Helen Carte wrote that Gilbert had addressed Carte "in a way that I should not have thought you would have used to an offending menial." The scholar Andrew Crowther has commented:
> After all, the carpet was only one of a number of disputed items, and the real issue lay not in the mere money value of these things, but in whether Carte could be trusted with the financial affairs of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert contended that Carte had at best made a series of serious blunders in the accounts, and at worst deliberately attempted to swindle the others. It is not easy to settle the rights and wrongs of the issue at this distance, but it does seem fairly clear that there was something very wrong with the accounts at this time. Gilbert wrote to Sullivan on 28 May 1891, a year after the end of the "Quarrel", that Carte had admitted "an unintentional overcharge of nearly £1,000 in the electric lighting accounts alone."
Gilbert brought suit, and after The Gondoliers closed in 1891, he withdrew the performance rights to his libretti, vowing to write no more operas for the Savoy. Gilbert next wrote The Mountebanks with Alfred Cellier and the flop Haste to the Wedding with George Grossmith, and Sullivan wrote Haddon Hall with Sydney Grundy. Gilbert eventually won the lawsuit and felt vindicated, but his actions and statements had been hurtful to his partners. Nevertheless, the partnership had been so profitable that, after the financial failure of the Royal English Opera House, Carte and his wife sought to reunite the author and composer.
In 1891, after many failed attempts at reconciliation by the pair, Tom Chappell, the music publisher responsible for printing the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, stepped in to mediate between two of his most profitable artists, and within two weeks had succeeded. Two more operas resulted: Utopia, Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896). Gilbert also offered a third libretto to Sullivan (His Excellency, 1894), but Gilbert's insistence on casting Nancy McIntosh, his protégée from Utopia, led to Sullivan's refusal. Utopia, concerning an attempt to "anglicise" a south Pacific island kingdom, was only a modest success, and The Grand Duke, in which a theatrical troupe, by means of a "statutory duel" and a conspiracy, takes political control of a grand duchy, was an outright failure. After that, the partnership ended for good. Sullivan continued to compose comic opera with other librettists but died four years later. In 1904, Gilbert would write, "... Savoy opera was snuffed out by the deplorable death of my distinguished collaborator, Sir Arthur Sullivan. When that event occurred, I saw no one with whom I felt that I could work with satisfaction and success, and so I discontinued to write libretti."
## Later years
Gilbert built the Garrick Theatre in 1889. The Gilberts moved to Grim's Dyke in Harrow in 1890, which he purchased from Robert Heriot, to whom the artist Frederick Goodall had sold the property in 1880. In 1891, Gilbert was appointed Justice of the Peace for Middlesex. After casting Nancy McIntosh in Utopia, Limited, he and his wife developed an affection for her, and she eventually gained the status of an unofficially adopted daughter, moving to Grim's Dyke to live with them. She continued living there, even after Gilbert died, until Lady Gilbert's death in 1936. A statue of Charles II, carved by Danish sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber in 1681, was moved in 1875 from Soho Square to an island in the lake at Grim's Dyke, where it remained when Gilbert purchased the property. On Lady Gilbert's direction, it was restored to Soho Square in 1938.
Although Gilbert announced a retirement from the theatre after the short run of his last work with Sullivan, The Grand Duke (1896) and the poor reception of his 1897 play The Fortune Hunter, he produced at least three more plays over the last dozen years of his life, including an unsuccessful opera, Fallen Fairies (1909), with Edward German. Gilbert also continued to supervise the various revivals of his works by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, including its London Repertory seasons in 1906–09. His last play, The Hooligan, produced just four months before his death, is a study of a young condemned thug in a prison cell. Gilbert shows sympathy for his protagonist, the son of a thief who, brought up among thieves, kills his girlfriend. As in some earlier work, the playwright displays "his conviction that nurture rather than nature often accounted for criminal behaviour". The grim and powerful piece became one of Gilbert's most successful serious dramas, and experts conclude that, in those last months of Gilbert's life, he was developing a new style, a "mixture of irony, of social theme, and of grubby realism," to replace the old "Gilbertianism" of which he had grown weary. In these last years, Gilbert also wrote children's book versions of H.M.S. Pinafore and The Mikado giving, in some cases, backstory that is not found in the librettos.
Gilbert was knighted on 15 July 1907 in recognition of his contributions to drama. Sullivan had been knighted for his contributions to music almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 1883. Gilbert was, however, the first British writer ever to receive a knighthood for his plays alone – earlier dramatist knights, such as Sir William Davenant and Sir John Vanbrugh, were knighted for political and other services.
On 29 May 1911, Gilbert was about to give a swimming lesson to two young women, Winifred Isabel Emery (1890–1972), and 17-year-old Ruby Preece in the lake of his home, Grim's Dyke, when Preece got into difficulties and called for help. Gilbert dived in to save her but suffered a heart attack in the middle of the lake and died at the age of 74. He was cremated at Golders Green and his ashes buried at the churchyard of St. John's Church, Stanmore. The inscription on Gilbert's memorial on the south wall of the Thames Embankment in London reads: "His Foe was Folly, and his Weapon Wit". There is also a memorial plaque at All Saints' Church, Harrow Weald.
## Personality
Gilbert was known for being sometimes prickly. Aware of this general impression, he claimed that "If you give me your attention", the misanthrope's song from Princess Ida, was a satiric self-reference, saying: "I thought it my duty to live up to my reputation." However, many people have defended him, often citing his generosity. Actress May Fortescue recalled,
> His kindness was extraordinary. On wet nights and when rehearsals were late and the last buses were gone, he would pay the cab-fares of the girls whether they were pretty or not, instead of letting them trudge home on foot ... He was just as large-hearted when he was poor as when he was rich and successful. For money as money he cared less than nothing. Gilbert was no plaster saint, but he was an ideal friend.
The journalist Frank M. Boyd wrote:
> I fancy that seldom was a man more generally given credit for a personality quite other than his own, than was the case with Sir W. S. Gilbert ... Till one actually came to know the man, one shared the opinion held by so many, that he was a gruff, disagreeable person; but nothing could be less true of the really great humorist. He had rather a severe appearance ... and like many other clever people, he had precious little use for fools of either sex, but he was at heart as kindly and lovable a man as you could wish to meet.
Jessie Bond wrote that Gilbert "was quick-tempered, often unreasonable, and he could not bear to be thwarted, but how anyone could call him unamiable I cannot understand." George Grossmith wrote to The Daily Telegraph that, although Gilbert had been described as an autocrat at rehearsals, "That was really only his manner when he was playing the part of stage director at rehearsals. As a matter of fact, he was a generous, kind true gentleman, and I use the word in the purest and original sense."
Aside from his occasional creative disagreements with, and eventual rift from, Sullivan, Gilbert's temper sometimes led to the loss of friendships. For instance, he quarrelled with his old associate C. H. Workman, over the firing of Nancy McIntosh from the production of Fallen Fairies, and with actress Henrietta Hodson. He also saw his friendship with theatre critic Clement Scott turn bitter. However, Gilbert could be extraordinarily kind. During Scott's final illness in 1904, for instance, Gilbert donated to a fund for him, visited nearly every day, and assisted Scott's wife, despite having not been on friendly terms with him for the previous sixteen years. Similarly, Gilbert had written several plays at the behest of comic actor Ned Sothern. However, Sothern died before he could perform the last of these, Foggerty's Fairy. Gilbert purchased the play back from his grateful widow. According to one London society lady:
> [Gilbert]'s wit was innate, and his rapier-like retorts slipped out with instantaneous ease. His mind was naturally fastidious and clean; he never asserted himself, never tried to make an effect. He was great-hearted and most understanding, with an underlying poetry of fancy that made him the most delicious companion. They spoke of his quick temper, but that was entirely free from malice or guile. He was soft-hearted as a babe, but there was nothing of the hypocrite about him. What he thought he said on the instant, and though by people of sensitive vanity this might on occasion be resented, to a sensitiveness of a finer kind it was an added link, binding one to a faithful, valued friend.
As the writings about Gilbert by husband and wife Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss (frequent guests at his home) vividly illustrate, Gilbert's relationships with women were generally more successful than his relationships with men. According to Grossmith, Gilbert "was to those who knew him a courteous and amiable gentleman – a gentleman without veneer." Grossmith and many others wrote of how Gilbert loved to amuse children:
> During my dangerous illness, Mr. Gilbert never failed a day to come up and enquire after me ... and kept me in roars of laughter the whole time ... But to see Gilbert at his best, is to see him at one of his juvenile parties. Though he has no children of his own, he loves them, and there is nothing he would not do to please them. I was never so astonished as when on one occasion he put off some of his own friends to come with Mrs. Gilbert to a juvenile party at my own house.
Gilbert's niece Mary Carter confirmed, "he loved children very much and lost no opportunity of making them happy ... [He was] the kindest and most human of uncles." Correspondence between Gilbert and Muriel Barnby, the young daughter of Sir Joseph Barnby, shows his delight in their playful exchange of letters. Grossmith quoted Gilbert as saying, "Deer-stalking would be a very fine sport if only the deer had guns."
## Legacy
In 1957, a review in The Times explained "the continued vitality of the Savoy operas" as follows:
> [T]hey were never really contemporary in their idiom ... Gilbert and Sullivan's [world], from the first moment was obviously not the audience's world, [it was] an artificial world, with a neatly controlled and shapely precision which has not gone out of fashion – because it was never in fashion in the sense of using the fleeting conventions and ways of thought of contemporary human society ... The neat articulation of incredibilities in Gilbert's plots is perfectly matched by his language ... His dialogue, with its primly mocking formality, satisfies both the ear and the intelligence. His verses show an unequalled and very delicate gift for creating a comic effect by the contrast between poetic form and prosaic thought and wording ... How deliciously [his lines] prick the bubble of sentiment. Gilbert had many imitators, but no equals, at this sort of thing ... [Of] equal importance ... Gilbert's lyrics almost invariably take on extra point and sparkle when set to Sullivan's music ... The two men together remain endlessly and incomparably delightful ... Light, and even trifling, though [the operas] may seem upon grave consideration, they yet have the shapeliness and elegance that can make a trifle into a work of art.
Gilbert's legacy, aside from building the Garrick Theatre and writing the Savoy Operas and other works that are still being performed or in print nearly 150 years after their creation, is felt perhaps most strongly today through his influence on the American and British musical theatre. The innovations in content and form of the works that he and Sullivan developed, and in Gilbert's theories of acting and stage direction, directly influenced the development of the modern musical throughout the 20th century. Gilbert's lyrics employ punning, as well as complex internal and two and three-syllable rhyme schemes, and served as a model for such 20th century Broadway librettists and lyricists as P. G. Wodehouse, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Gilbert's influence on the English language has also been marked, with well-known phrases such as "A policeman's lot is not a happy one", "short, sharp shock", "What never? Well, hardly ever!", and "let the punishment fit the crime" arising from his pen. In addition, people continue to write biographies about Gilbert's life and career, and his work is not only performed, but frequently parodied, pastiched, quoted and imitated in comedy routines, film, television and other popular media.
Ian Bradley, in connection with the 100th anniversary of Gilbert's death in 2011 wrote:
> There has been much discussion about Gilbert's proper place in British literary and dramatic history. Was he essentially a writer of burlesque, a satirist, or, as some have argued, the forerunner of the theatre of the absurd? ... Perhaps he stands most clearly in that distinctively English satirical tradition which stretches back to Jonathan Swift. ... Its leading exponents lampoon and send up the major institutions and public figures of the day, wielding the weapon of grave and temperate irony with devastating effect, while themselves remaining firmly within the Establishment and displaying a deep underlying affection for the objects of their often merciless attacks. It is a combination that remains a continuing enigma.
## See also
- W. S. Gilbert bibliography
- Cultural influence of Gilbert and Sullivan
- List of W. S. Gilbert dramatic works
## Notes, references and sources |
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| John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (/ˈruːl ˈtɒlkiːn/, ROOL TOL-keen; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused him to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy.
## Biography
### Ancestry
Tolkien was English, and thought of himself as such. His immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches and pianos in London and Birmingham. The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town of Kreuzburg near Königsberg, which had been founded during the medieval German eastward expansion, where his earliest-known paternal ancestor Michel Tolkien was born around 1620. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien (1663–1746) was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg.
His son, Christian Tolkien (1706–1791), moved from Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747–1813) and Johann (later known as John) Benjamin Tolkien (1752–1819) emigrated to London in the 1770s and became the ancestors of the English family; the younger brother was J. R. R. Tolkien's second great-grandfather. In 1792, John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravell took over the Erdley Norton manufacture in London, which from then on sold clocks and watches under the name Gravell & Tolkien. Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in 1794, but John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen. Other German relatives also joined the two brothers in London. Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them members of the same family as J. R. R. Tolkien, live in northern Germany, but most of them are descendants of people who evacuated East Prussia in 1945, at the end of World War II.
According to Ryszard Derdziński, the surname Tolkien is of Low Prussian origin and probably means "son/descendant of Tolk". Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word tollkühn, meaning "foolhardy", and jokingly inserted himself as a "cameo" into The Notion Club Papers under the literally translated name Rashbold. However, Derdziński has demonstrated this to be a false etymology. While J. R. R. Tolkien was aware of his family's German origin, his knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was "early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father".
### Childhood
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (later annexed by the British Empire; now Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa), to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on 17 February 1894.
As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some believe to have been later echoed in his stories, although he admitted no actual memory of the event and no special hatred of spiders as an adult. In an earlier incident from Tolkien's infancy, a young family servant took the baby to his homestead, returning him the next morning.
When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with nearby towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt Jane's farm Bag End, the name of which he used in his fiction.
Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early.
Tolkien could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read many books. He disliked Treasure Island and "The Pied Piper" and thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was "amusing but disturbing". He liked stories about "Red Indians" (the term then used for Native Americans in adventure stories) and works of fantasy by George MacDonald. In addition, the "Fairy Books" of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him and their influence is apparent in some of his later writings.
Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family, which stopped all financial assistance to her. In 1904, when J. R. R. Tolkien was 12, his mother died of acute diabetes at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which she was renting. She was then about 34 years of age, about as old as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could survive without treatment—insulin would not be discovered until 1921, two decades later. Nine years after her death, Tolkien wrote, "My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith."
Before her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to her close friend, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, who was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics. In a 1965 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled the influence of the man whom he always called "Father Francis": "He was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip. He was—and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the 'liberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about 'Bloody Mary' than the Mother of Jesus—who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists." After his mother's death, Tolkien grew up in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham and attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, and later St Philip's School. In 1903, he won a Foundation Scholarship and returned to King Edward's.
### Youth
While in his early teens, Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Animalic, an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon. At that time, he was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Their interest in Animalic soon died away, but Mary and others, including Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh. The next constructed language he came to work with, Naffarin, would be his own creation. Tolkien learned Esperanto some time before 1909. Around 10 June 1909 he composed "The Book of the Foxrook", a sixteen-page notebook, where the "earliest example of one of his invented alphabets" appears. Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.
In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society they called the T.C.B.S. The initials stood for Tea Club and Barrovian Society, alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, secretly, in the school library. After leaving school, the members stayed in touch and, in December 1914, they held a council in London at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.
In 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollected vividly in a 1968 letter, noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their party of 12 hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn, "the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams". They went across the Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald and on across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass, through the upper Valais to Brig and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.
In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially read classics but changed his course in 1913 to English language and literature, graduating in 1915 with first-class honours. Among his tutors at Oxford was Joseph Wright, whose Primer of the Gothic Language had inspired Tolkien as a schoolboy.
### Courtship and marriage
At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road, Edgbaston. According to Humphrey Carpenter, "Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham teashops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would sit and throw sugarlumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table when the sugar bowl was empty. ... With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love."
His guardian, Father Morgan, considered it "altogether unfortunate" that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman; Tolkien wrote that the combined tensions contributed to his having "muffed [his] exams". Morgan prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with Edith until he was 21. Tolkien obeyed this prohibition to the letter, with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.
On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C. H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt "on the shelf" and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that, because of Tolkien's letter, everything had changed.
On 8 January 1913, Tolkien travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. The two took a walk into the countryside, sat under a railway viaduct, and talked. By the end of the day, Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien's proposal. She wrote to Field and returned her engagement ring. Field was "dreadfully upset at first", and the Field family was "insulted and angry". Upon learning of Edith's new plans, Jessop wrote to her guardian, "I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured gentleman, but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a profession it would have been different."
Following their engagement, Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence. Jessop, "like many others of his age and class ... strongly anti-Catholic", was infuriated, and he ordered Edith to find other lodgings.
Edith Bratt and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and married at St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church at Warwick, on 22 March 1916. In his 1941 letter to Michael, Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife's willingness to marry a man with no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War.
### First World War
In August 1914, Britain entered the First World War. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to volunteer immediately for the British Army. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled: "In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage." Instead, Tolkien, "endured the obloquy", and entered a programme by which he delayed enlistment until completing his degree. By the time he passed his finals in July 1915, Tolkien recalled that the hints were "becoming outspoken from relatives". He was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers on 15 July 1915. He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Rugeley Camp near to Rugeley, Staffordshire, for 11 months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained: "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed." Following their wedding, Lieutenant and Mrs. Tolkien took up lodgings near the training camp. On 2 June 1916, Tolkien received a telegram summoning him to Folkestone for posting to France. The Tolkiens spent the night before his departure in a room at the Plough & Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston, Birmingham. He later wrote: "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then... it was like a death."
#### France
On 5 June 1916, Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais. Like other soldiers arriving for the first time, he was sent to the British Expeditionary Force's base depot at Étaples. On 7 June, he was informed that he had been assigned as a signals officer to the 11th (Service) Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. The battalion was part of the 74th Brigade, 25th Division. While waiting to be summoned to his unit, Tolkien sank into boredom. To pass the time, he composed a poem titled The Lonely Isle, which was inspired by his feelings during the sea crossing to Calais. To evade the British Army's postal censorship, he developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements. He left Étaples on 27 June 1916 and joined his battalion at Rubempré, near Amiens. He found himself commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly from the mining, milling, and weaving towns of Lancashire. According to John Garth, he "felt an affinity for these working class men", but military protocol prohibited friendships with "other ranks". Instead, he was required to "take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters ... If possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty." Tolkien later lamented, "The most improper job of any man ... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."
#### Battle of the Somme
Tolkien arrived at the Somme in early July 1916. In between terms behind the lines at Bouzincourt, he participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig salient. Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith, who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband's death. Edith could track her husband's movements on a map of the Western Front. The Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusiliers, recorded that Tolkien and his fellow officers were eaten by "hordes of lice" which found the Medical Officer's ointment merely "a kind of hors d'oeuvre and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigour." On 27 October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease carried by lice. He was invalided to England on 8 November 1916.
According to his children John and Priscilla Tolkien, "In later years, he would occasionally talk of being at the front: of the horrors of the first German gas attack, of the utter exhaustion and ominous quiet after a bombardment, of the whining scream of the shells, and the endless marching, always on foot, through a devastated landscape, sometimes carrying the men's equipment as well as his own to encourage them to keep going. ... Some remarkable relics survive from that time: a trench map he drew himself; pencil-written orders to carry bombs to the 'fighting line.'"
Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob Gilson of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, who was killed on the first day of the Somme while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont Hamel. Fellow T.C.B.S. member Geoffrey Smith was killed during the battle, when a German artillery shell landed on a first-aid post. Tolkien's battalion was almost completely wiped out following his return to England.
According to John Garth, Kitchener's Army, in which Tolkien served, at once marked existing social boundaries and counteracted the class system by throwing everyone into a desperate situation together. Tolkien was grateful, writing that it had taught him "a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy; especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties".
#### Home front
A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service. During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Lost Tales represented Tolkien's attempt to create a mythology for England, a project he would abandon without ever completing. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps. It was at this time that Edith bore their first child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien. In a 1941 letter, Tolkien described his son John as "(conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-boat campaign) round about the Battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now". Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on 6 January 1918. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered,
> I never called Edith Luthien—but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.
On 16 July 1919, Tolkien was taken off active service, at Fovant, on Salisbury Plain, with a temporary disability pension.
### Academic and writing career
On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant. His first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W. In 1920, he took up a post as reader in English language at the University of Leeds, becoming the youngest member of the academic staff there. While at Leeds, he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V. Gordon; both became academic standard works for several decades. He translated Sir Gawain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College.
In mid-1919, he began to tutor undergraduates privately, most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's College, given that the women's colleges were in great need of good teachers in their early years, and Tolkien as a married professor (then still not common) was considered suitable, as a bachelor don would not have been.
During his time at Pembroke College Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, while living at 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name "Nodens", following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.
#### Beowulf
In the 1920s, Tolkien undertook a translation of Beowulf, which he finished in 1926, but did not publish. It was later edited by his son Christopher and published in 2014.
Ten years after finishing his translation, Tolkien gave a highly acclaimed lecture on the work, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", which had a lasting influence on Beowulf research. Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article is "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to its purely linguistic elements. At the time, the consensus of scholarship deprecated Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. Where Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. In the essay, Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf: "Beowulf is among my most valued sources"; this influence may be seen throughout his Middle-earth legendarium.
According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien began his series of lectures on Beowulf in a most striking way, entering the room silently, fixing the audience with a look, and suddenly declaiming in Old English the opening lines of the poem, starting "with a great cry of Hwæt!" It was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it made the students realize that Beowulf was not just a set text but "a powerful piece of dramatic poetry". Decades later, W. H. Auden wrote to his former professor, thanking him for the "unforgettable experience" of hearing him recite Beowulf, and stating: "The voice was the voice of Gandalf".
#### Second World War
In the run-up to the Second World War, Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. In January 1939, he was asked to serve in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office in the event of national emergency. Beginning on 27 March, he took an instructional course at the London HQ of the Government Code and Cypher School. He was informed in October that his services would not be required.
In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. He served as an external examiner for University College, Galway (now NUI Galway), for many years. In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland (of which University College, Galway, was a constituent college). Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.
### Family
The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel Tolkien (17 November 1917 – 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (22 October 1920 – 27 February 1984), Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien (18 June 1929 – 28 February 2022). Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young.
### Retirement
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. In 1961, his friend C. S. Lewis even nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement. In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cult-figure, but admitted that "even the nose of a very modest idol ... cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!"
Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside resort patronized by the British upper middle class. Tolkien's status as a best-selling author gave them easy entry into polite society, but Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow Inklings. Edith, however, was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess, which had been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place. The genuine and deep affection between Ronald and Edith was demonstrated by their care about the other's health, in details like wrapping presents, in the generous way he gave up his life at Oxford so she could retire to Bournemouth, and in her pride in his becoming a famous author. They were tied together, too, by love for their children and grandchildren.
In his retirement Tolkien was a consultant and translator for The Jerusalem Bible, published in 1966. He was initially assigned a larger portion to translate, but, due to other commitments, only managed to offer some criticisms of other contributors and a translation of the Book of Jonah.
### Final years
Edith died on 29 November 1971, at the age of 82. Ronald returned to Oxford, where Merton College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street. He missed Edith, but enjoyed being back in the city.
Tolkien was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year Honours and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972. In the same year Oxford University gave him an honorary Doctorate of Letters.
He had the name Luthien [sic] engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on 2 September 1973 from a bleeding ulcer and chest infection, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with "Beren" added to his name. Tolkien's will was proven on 20 December 1973, with his estate valued at £190,577 (equivalent to £ in ).
## Views
### Religion
Tolkien's Catholicism was a significant factor in C. S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was dismayed that Lewis chose to join the Church of England. He once wrote to Rayner Unwin's daughter Camilla, who wished to know the purpose of life, that it was "to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks." He had a special devotion to the blessed sacrament, writing to his son Michael that in "the Blessed Sacrament ... you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that". He accordingly encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion, again writing to his son Michael that "the only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion." He believed the Catholic Church to be true most of all because of the pride of place and the honour in which it holds the Blessed Sacrament. In the last years of his life, Tolkien resisted the liturgical changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, especially the use of English for the liturgy; he continued to make the responses in Latin, loudly, ignoring the rest of the congregation.
### Race
Tolkien's fantasy writings have often been accused of embodying a racist attitude. Scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race and to a literary tradition of monsters, and that he was anti-racist in peacetime and during the World Wars. With the late 19th century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, some critics saw the mention of race mixing in The Lord of the Rings as embodying scientific racism. Other commentators saw in Tolkien's orcs a reflection of wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese. Critics have noted, too, that the work embodies a moral geography, with good in the West, evil in the East. Against this, scholars have noted that Tolkien was outraged in peacetime by Nazi racial theory, while during the Second World War he was equally disgusted by anti-German racial propaganda. Other scholars have stated that Tolkien's Middle-earth is definitely polycultural and polylingual, and that attacks on Tolkien based on The Lord of the Rings often omit evidence from the text.
### Nature
During most of his own life conservationism was not yet on the political agenda, and Tolkien himself did not directly express conservationist views—except in some private letters, in which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree-felling. In later years, a number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his writing of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gained increased interest in the value of wild and untamed nature, and in protecting what wild nature was left in the industrialized world.
## Writing
### Influences
Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, drew on a wide array of influences including his philological interest in language, Christianity, medievalism, mythology, archaeology, ancient and modern literature, and personal experience. His philological work centred on the study of Old English literature, especially Beowulf, and he acknowledged its importance to his writings. He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, and Greek language and mythology. Commentators have attempted to identify many literary and topological antecedents for characters, places and events in Tolkien's writings. Some writers were important to him, including the Arts and Crafts polymath William Morris, and he undoubtedly made use of some real place-names, such as Bag End, the name of his aunt's home. He acknowledged, too, John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard, authors of modern adventure stories that he enjoyed. The effects of some specific experiences have been identified. Tolkien's childhood in the English countryside, and its urbanization by the growth of Birmingham, influenced his creation of the Shire, while his personal experience of fighting in the trenches of the First World War affected his depiction of Mordor.
### Publications
#### "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"
In addition to writing fiction, Tolkien was an author of academic literary criticism. His seminal 1936 lecture, later published as an article, revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf by literary critics. The essay remains highly influential in the study of Old English literature to this day. Beowulf is one of the most significant influences upon Tolkien's later fiction, with major details of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings being adapted from the poem.
#### "On Fairy-Stories"
This essay discusses the fairy-story as a literary form. It was initially written as the 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Tolkien focuses on Andrew Lang's work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales. He disagreed with Lang's broad inclusion, in his Fairy Book collections, of traveller's tales, beast fables, and other types of stories. Tolkien held a narrower perspective, viewing fairy stories as those that took place in Faerie, an enchanted realm, with or without fairies as characters. He viewed them as the natural development of the interaction of human imagination and human language.
#### Children's books and other short works
In addition to his mythopoeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters). Other works included Mr. Bliss and Roverandom (for children), and Leaf by Niggle (part of Tree and Leaf), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium.
#### The Hobbit
Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but by sheer accident a book called The Hobbit, which he had written some years before for his own children, came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin, who persuaded Tolkien to submit it for publication. When it was published a year later, the book attracted adult readers as well as children, and it became popular enough for the publishers to ask Tolkien to produce a sequel.
#### The Lord of the Rings
The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what became his most famous work: the epic novel The Lord of the Rings (originally published in three volumes in 1954–1955). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.
Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense backstory of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien strongly influenced the fantasy genre that grew up after the book's success.
The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the UK's "Best-loved Novel". Australians voted The Lord of the Rings "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the 92nd "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted 35th in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited to the English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK's "Big Read" survey, about 250,000 Germans found The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite work of literature.
#### The Silmarillion
Tolkien wrote a brief "Sketch of the Mythology", which included the tales of Beren and Lúthien and of Túrin; and that sketch eventually evolved into the Quenta Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien desperately hoped to publish it along with The Lord of the Rings, but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) declined. Moreover, printing costs were very high in 1950s Britain, requiring The Lord of the Rings to be published in three volumes. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-earth, edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien. From around 1936, Tolkien began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.
Tolkien appointed his son Christopher to be his literary executor, and he (with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay, later a well-known fantasy author in his own right) organized some of this material into a single coherent volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. It received the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978.
#### Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth
In 1980, Christopher Tolkien published a collection of more fragmentary material, under the title Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. In subsequent years (1983–1996), he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials, together with notes and extensive commentary, in a series of twelve volumes called The History of Middle-earth. They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative, and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress for Tolkien and he only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not complete consistency between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien never fully integrated all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to rewrite the book completely because of the style of its prose.
#### Works compiled by Christopher Tolkien
### Manuscript locations
Before his death, Tolkien negotiated the sale of the manuscripts, drafts, proofs and other materials related to his then-published works—including The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham—to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Marquette University's John P. Raynor, S.J., Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After his death his estate donated the papers containing Tolkien's Silmarillion mythology and his academic work to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. The Bodleian Library held an exhibition of his work in 2018, including more than 60 items which had never been seen in public before.
In 2009, a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien had begun co-writing with C. S. Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.
## Languages and philology
### Linguistic career
Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated with Old Norse as his special subject. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including walrus, over which he struggled mightily. In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club". He also had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of Finnish.
Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak. He considered the West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)."
### Language construction
Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for constructing languages. The most developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elven-latin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek.
Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he had concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".
The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings dwarves and dwarvish (alongside dwarfs and dwarfish), which had been little used since the mid-19th century and earlier. (In fact, according to Tolkien, had the Old English plural survived, it would have been dwarrows or dwerrows.) He coined the term eucatastrophe, used mainly in connection with his own work.
## Artwork
Tolkien learnt to paint and draw as a child, and continued to do so all his adult life. From early in his writing career, the development of his stories was accompanied by drawings and paintings, especially of landscapes, and by maps of the lands in which the tales were set. He also produced pictures to accompany the stories told to his own children, including those later published in Mr Bliss and Roverandom, and sent them elaborately illustrated letters purporting to come from Father Christmas. Although he regarded himself as an amateur, the publisher used the author's own cover art, his maps, and full-page illustrations for the early editions of The Hobbit. He prepared maps and illustrations for The Lord of the Rings, but the first edition contained only the maps, his calligraphy for the inscription on the One Ring, and his ink drawing of the Doors of Durin. Much of his artwork was collected and published in 1995 as a book: J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. The book discusses Tolkien's paintings, drawings, and sketches, and reproduces approximately 200 examples of his work. Catherine McIlwaine curated a major exhibition of Tolkien's artwork at the Bodleian Library, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, accompanied by a book of the same name that analyses Tolkien's achievement and illustrates the full range of the types of artwork that he created.
## Legacy
### Influence
While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence and the shaping of the modern fantasy genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy, as in the work of authors such as Ursula Le Guin and her Earthsea series. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". His influence has extended to music, including the Danish group the Tolkien Ensemble's setting of all the poetry in The Lord of the Rings to their vocal music; and to a broad range of games set in Middle-earth.
### Adaptations
In a 1951 letter to publisher Milton Waldman (1895–1976), Tolkien wrote about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which "[t]he cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama". The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to The Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity they bore in style to his own drawings. Tolkien was not implacably opposed to the idea of a dramatic adaptation, however, and sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968. United Artists never made a film, although director John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early 1970s. In 1976, the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was released in 1978 as an animated rotoscoping film directed by Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. It covered only the first half of the story of The Lord of the Rings.
In 1977, an animated musical television film of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass, and in 1980, they produced the animated musical television film The Return of the King, which covered some of the portions of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete. From 2001 to 2003, New Line Cinema released The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of live-action films that were filmed in New Zealand and directed by Peter Jackson. The series was successful, performing extremely well commercially and winning numerous Oscars. From 2012 to 2014, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema released The Hobbit, a series of three films based on The Hobbit, with Peter Jackson serving as executive producer, director, and co-writer. The first instalment, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was released in December 2012; the second, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, in December 2013; and the last instalment, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in December 2014. In 2017, Amazon acquired the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings, for a series of new stories set before The Fellowship of the Ring.
### Memorials
Tolkien and the characters and places from his works have become eponyms of many real-world objects. These include geographical features on Titan (Saturn's largest moon), street names such as There and Back Again Lane, inspired by The Hobbit, mountains such as Mount Shadowfax, Mount Gandalf and Mount Aragorn in Canada, companies such as Palantir Technologies, and species including the wasp Shireplitis tolkieni, 37 new species of Elachista moths, and many fossils.
Since 2003, The Tolkien Society has organized Tolkien Reading Day, which takes place on 25 March in schools around the world. In 2013, Pembroke College, Oxford University, established an annual lecture on fantasy literature in Tolkien's honour. In 2012, Tolkien was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover—to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admired. A 2019 biographical film, Tolkien, focused on Tolkien's early life and war experiences. The Tolkien family and estate stated that they did not "approve of, authorise or participate in the making of" the film.
Several blue plaques in England commemorate places associated with Tolkien, including for his childhood, his workplaces, and places he visited.
The Royal Mint is producing a commemorative £2 coin in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's death.
### Canonization process
On 2 September 2017, the Oxford Oratory, Tolkien's parish church during his time in Oxford, offered its first Mass for the intention of Tolkien's cause for beatification to be opened. A prayer was written for his cause. |
13,150,402 | Tropical Storm Gabrielle (2007) | 1,171,830,406 | Atlantic tropical cyclone | [
"2007 Atlantic hurricane season",
"Atlantic tropical storms",
"Hurricanes in North Carolina",
"Tropical cyclones in 2007"
]
| Tropical Storm Gabrielle was a short-lived tropical cyclone that passed over North Carolina before tracking out to sea. The seventh named storm of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season, Gabrielle developed as a subtropical cyclone on September 8 about 385 miles (620 km) southeast of Cape Lookout, North Carolina. Unfavorable wind shear impacted the storm for much of its duration, although a temporary decrease in the shear allowed the cyclone to become a tropical storm. On September 9, Gabrielle made landfall at Cape Lookout National Seashore in the Outer Banks of North Carolina with winds of 60 mph (97 km/h). Turning to the northeast, the storm quickly weakened and dissipated on September 11.
In advance of the storm, tropical cyclone watches and warnings were issued for coastal areas, while rescue teams and the U.S. Coast Guard were put on standby. The storm dropped heavy rainfall near its immediate landfall location but little precipitation elsewhere. Along the coast of North Carolina, high waves, rip currents, and storm surge were reported. Slight localized flooding was reported. Gusty winds also occurred, though no wind damage was reported. Along the coast of Florida, rough surf drowned one person. Overall damage was minor.
## Meteorological history
A cold front moved off the southeast coast of the United States on September 1. Gradually decaying, the front degenerated into an area of cloudiness and showers just east of the Georgia coast on September 2. Tracking eastward, a weak low-pressure area developed the next day. It slowly became better organized as its motion became erratic, and by late on September 4 the convection had become concentrated to the east of the center. On September 5, a Hurricane Hunters flight indicated the system had not acquired the characteristics of a tropical or subtropical cyclone. Interaction with an upper-level trough resulted in moderate wind shear which suppressed further development, and by September 6 the thunderstorm activity lost much organization. Then, upper-level winds became increasingly favorable, allowing the convection to concentrate about halfway between North Carolina and Bermuda. With a deep-layer ridge to its north, the system turned to a steady west-northwest track. A reconnaissance aircraft flight late on September 7 reported a very elongated center, with peak flight winds of 55 mph (89 km/h) about 100 miles (160 km) northeast of the center. Subsequent to the flight, the center became slightly better organized, and based on the large wind field and the presence of an upper-level low to its west-southwest, the National Hurricane Center classified the system as Subtropical Storm Gabrielle early on September 8 while located about 385 miles (620 km) southeast of Cape Lookout, North Carolina.
Upon becoming a subtropical cyclone, Gabrielle was located in an area of cooler air to its north, dry air to its south and west, southerly wind shear, and cooler water temperatures along its path. Despite these unfavorable conditions, a curved convective band developed in its northern and western quadrants, and the circulation became better defined. Subsequently, the rainbands in its northeastern quadrant dissipated, leaving the well-defined center far removed from the convection. By later that day, the circulation began to become more involved with the remaining convection. Based on evidence of a weak warm-core, the system was re-designated as Tropical Storm Gabrielle late on September 8 about 185 miles (298 km) southeast of Cape Lookout, North Carolina.
Vertical wind shear decreased as the storm passed over the Gulf Stream, allowing a strong convective burst to develop near the center. As it approached the coast of North Carolina, the center re-developed within the deep convection underneath the mid-level circulation, although increased northerly wind shear displaced the center of Gabrielle to the north of the thunderstorm activity. Based on reports from Hurricane Hunters, it is estimated Gabrielle moved ashore at Cape Lookout National Seashore at 1530 UTC on September 9 with winds of 60 mph (97 km/h), though due to the shear the strongest winds remained offshore. Tracking around the ridge over the western Atlantic, the storm turned to the north and north-northeast, emerging into the ocean near Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina early on September 10 as a poorly organized system with convection far to the south of the center. Gabrielle weakened to a tropical depression shortly thereafter, and maintained scattered convection despite unfavorable wind shear as it tracked along the northern portion of the Gulf Stream. By midday on September 11, the circulation had become ill-defined and elongated; failing to meet the criteria of a tropical cyclone, the National Hurricane Center declared Gabrielle dissipating well to the south of Nova Scotia. By early the next day, the remnants of Gabrielle were absorbed by an approaching cold front.
## Preparations
Upon becoming a subtropical cyclone, the National Hurricane Center issued a tropical storm watch from Edisto Beach, South Carolina to Oregon Inlet in North Carolina, including the Pamlico Sound. As the storm approached the coast, the watch south of Cape Fear, North Carolina was discontinued, and a tropical storm warning was issued from Surf City, North Carolina northward to the North Carolina–Virginia state border; a watch was also issued northward to Cape Charles Light on the Delmarva Peninsula, and to New Point Comfort on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, which was upgraded to a warning the next day.
Prior to the arrival of the storm, the National Park Service closed visitor centers and campgrounds along the Outer Banks. For about 12 hours, the ferry between Hatteras and Ocracoke was closed. North Carolina Governor Mike Easley put rescue teams and the National Guard on standby. Residents and tourists were advised to secure loose objects, and to remain indoors. As the storm's effects were expected to be minor, no evacuations were ordered. On Ocracoke Island, boats were hauled out. The threat of the storm forced the cancellation of a fishing tournament at Atlantic Beach, which resulted in effects to the local economy.
Initially, uncertainty in Gabrielle's track led the National Hurricane Center's five-day track forecast cone to include the Mid-Atlantic, southeastern New York, and southern New England. Forecasters predicted rough surf and rip currents, prompting the Coast Guard to perform preparations in the Northeastern United States. On Cape Cod, Massachusetts, an HU-25 Falcon jet flew along the coastline, broadcasting storm advisories to offshore vessels. A Coast Guard patrol boat was deployed offshore for search and rescue. Boaters and mariners were advised to exercise caution, and were told to "make safe decisions". However, the storm passed well to the south with little effect.
## Impact
Rough surf from Gabrielle along the coast of Florida drowned one surfer and forced the rescue of 200 swimmers. Officials at New Smyrna Beach estimated 6 to 9 feet (1.8 to 2.7 m) seas. By early on September 9, the outer rainbands began affecting southeastern North Carolina. Sustained winds of tropical storm force from the storm occurred along coastline, unofficially reaching 44 miles per hour (71 km/h) at Frisco. Wind gusts were stronger, unofficially reaching 61 miles per hour (98 km/h) at Ocracoke. Along the coast, rough surf was reported, and waves reached 10 to 12 feet (3.0 to 3.7 m). Rip currents caused numerous swimmers to be rescued by lifeguards. Heavy rainfall from the storm was confined to near its immediate landfall location, peaking at 9.03 inches (229 mm) at a station 7.2 miles (11.6 km) to the east-northeast of Newport; other areas reported 4 to 8 inches (0.10 to 0.20 m). Two offshore ships observed tropical storm-force winds, though the reports were considered to be overestimated.
In some locations, the rainfall led to flooding, which prevented farmers from harvesting crops. Elsewhere throughout the state, the storm failed to relieve severe drought conditions as it was initially hoped to. The passage of the storm left a portion of NC 12 on Hatteras Island closed for three hours, briefly flooding part of the road. Streets in Morehead City and Beaufort were closed, and several homes and businesses suffered minor flood damage. In Carteret County, the flooding inflicted \$5,000 (2007 USD) in property damage. Storm surge was fairly light along the coast, peaking at 3 feet (0.91 m) above normal at Hatteras Island. Overall damage in the state was minor, including minor beach erosion and some flooded streets. No fatalities were reported.
## See also
- Other storms of the same name
- Timeline of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season
- List of North Carolina hurricanes (2000–present) |
11,242 | Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within | 1,172,772,965 | 2001 animated science fiction film | [
"2000s American animated films",
"2000s English-language films",
"2001 computer-animated films",
"2001 directorial debut films",
"2001 films",
"2001 science fiction films",
"American adult animated films",
"American animated science fiction films",
"American computer-animated films",
"American science fiction action films",
"Animated films based on video games",
"Animated post-apocalyptic films",
"Anime films based on video games",
"Columbia Pictures animated films",
"Columbia Pictures films",
"English-language Japanese films",
"Films about impact events",
"Films based on role-playing video games",
"Films scored by Elliot Goldenthal",
"Films set in 2065",
"Films using motion capture",
"Final Fantasy films",
"Japanese animated science fiction films",
"Japanese computer-animated films",
"Japanese science fiction action films",
"Square Pictures films"
]
| Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is an American-Japanese 2001 computer-animated science fiction film directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy franchise. It was the first photorealistic computer-animated feature film and the most expensive video game-inspired film until the release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2010. The film stars the voices of Ming-Na Wen, Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, James Woods, Ving Rhames, Peri Gilpin, and Steve Buscemi, and follows scientists Aki Ross and Doctor Sid in their efforts to free a post-apocalyptic Earth from the Phantoms, a mysterious, deadly alien race who has driven the remnants of humanity into "barrier cities". Aki and Sid must fight against General Hein, who wants to use more violent means to end the conflict.
Square Pictures rendered the film using some of the most advanced processing capabilities available at the time. A render farm of 960 workstations was tasked with rendering each of the film's 141,964 frames. It took a staff of 200 about four years to complete The Spirits Within. Square intended to make the character of Aki Ross into the world's first photorealistic computer-animated actress, with plans for appearances in multiple films in different roles.
The Spirits Within premiered in Los Angeles on July 2, 2001, and was theatrically released in the United States on July 11. It received mixed reviews, but was widely praised for its characters' realism. Due to rising costs, the film greatly exceeded its original budget toward the end of production, reaching a final cost of \$137 million (equivalent to \$ million in ); it grossed only \$85.1 million at the box office. The film has been called a box-office bomb and is blamed for the demise of Square Pictures.
## Plot
In 2065, Earth is infested by alien life forms known as Phantoms. By physical contact Phantoms consume the Gaia spirit of living beings, killing them instantly, although minor contact may only result in an infection. The surviving humans live in "barrier cities" protected by energy shields that prevent Phantoms from entering, and are engaged in an ongoing struggle to free the planet. After being infected by a Phantom during one of her experiments, scientist Dr. Aki Ross (Ming-Na Wen) and her mentor, Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland), discover a means of defeating the Phantoms by gathering eight spirits: unique energy patterns contained by various lifeforms. When joined, the resulting energy wave can negate the Phantoms. Aki searches for the sixth spirit in the ruins of New York City when she is cornered by Phantoms but rescued by Captain Gray Edwards (Alec Baldwin) and his squad Deep Eyes, consisting of Master Sergeant Ryan Whittaker (Ving Rhames), Neil Fleming (Steve Buscemi) and Corporal Jane Proudfoot (Peri Gilpin). It is revealed that Gray was once romantically involved with Aki.
Returning to her barrier city, Aki joins Sid and appears before the leadership council along with General Douglas Hein (James Woods). Hein is determined to use the Zeus cannon, a powerful weapon aboard a space station, to destroy the Phantoms, though Sid is concerned the cannon will damage Earth's Gaia (a spirit representing its ecosystem). Aki delays the use of the cannon by revealing that she has been infected and the collected spirits are keeping her infection stable, convincing the council that there may be another way to defeat the Phantoms. However, this revelation leads Hein to incorrectly conclude that she is being controlled by the Phantoms. Aki and the Deep Eyes squad succeed in finding the seventh spirit as Aki's infection begins to worsen and she slips into unconsciousness. Her dream reveals to her that the Phantoms are the spirits of dead aliens brought to Earth on a fragment of their destroyed planet. Sid uses the seventh spirit to bring Aki's infection back under control, reviving her.
To scare the council into giving him clearance to fire the Zeus cannon, Hein lowers part of the barrier shield protecting the city. Though Hein intended that only a few Phantoms enter, his plan goes awry and legions of Phantoms invade the entire city. Aki, Sid and the Deep Eyes attempt to reach Aki's spaceship, their means of escape, but Ryan, Neil and Jane are killed by Phantoms. Hein escapes and boards the Zeus cannon's space station, where he finally receives authorization to fire the cannon.
Sid finds the eighth spirit at the crater site of the alien asteroid's impact on Earth at the Caspian Mountains. He lowers a shielded vehicle, with Aki and Gray aboard, into the crater to locate the final spirit. Just before they can reach it, Hein fires the Zeus cannon into the crater, not only destroying the eighth spirit but also revealing the Phantom Gaia. Aki has a vision of the Phantom home planet, where she is able to receive the eighth spirit from the alien particles in herself. When Aki awakens, she and Gray combine it with the other seven. Hein continues to fire the Zeus cannon despite overheating warnings and unintentionally destroys the cannon and himself. Gray sacrifices himself as a medium needed to physically transmit the completed spirit into the alien Gaia. The Earth's Gaia is returned to normal as the Phantoms ascend into space, finally at peace. Aki is pulled from the crater holding Gray's body, and is seen looking into the newly liberated world.
## Production
### Development
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was filmed entirely in English. The original script, written by Sakaguchi, was titled Gaia. The screenplay was later rewritten by Al Reinert and Jeff Vintar. The film was co-directed by Motonori Sakakibara, with Jun Aida and Chris Lee both serving as producers. Lee compared The Spirits Within, the first full-length photorealistic animated film, to Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length cel animated film. In order to keep the film in line with Hironobu Sakaguchi's vision as director, several script rewrites took place, most in the initial stages of production. In April 2000 Square was partnering with Columbia Pictures on the film, making it the first animated feature Columbia had worked on since Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation in 1986. Columbia was given the rights to distribute the film worldwide, with the exception of Asia.
The Spirits Within was completed over a period of four-years, during which approximately 200 people put in a combined 120 years of work on it. The first 18 months of development were spent creating the in-house software SQFlesh, which plugged into the programs Autodesk Maya and RenderMan. The majority of the rest of production was spent on animation. Square accumulated four SGI Origin 2000 series servers, four Onyx2 systems, and 167 Octane workstations for the film's production. The basic film was rendered at a custom render farm created by Square in Hawaii. It housed 960 Pentium III-933 MHz workstations. Character movements were filmed using motion capture technology. Animator Matthew Hackett stated that while motion capture was effective for many of the scenes, in others animators still had to add movements manually. Hand and facial movements were all done manually. Some of General Hein's facial features and poses were based on Hackett. As animators did not want to use any actual photographs in the film, all backgrounds were done using matte paintings. 1,327 scenes in total needed to be filmed to animate the digital characters. The film consists of 141,964 frames, with each frame taking an average of 90 minutes to render. By the end of production Square had a total of 15 terabytes of artwork for the film.
Aki Ross's voice actor, Ming-Na Wen, was selected for a perceived fit between her personality and Aki's. Ming-Na, who found the role via her publicist, said she felt like she had given birth with her voice to the character. She gradually accustomed herself to the difficulty of working without the presence and spontaneity of real actors, and commented that the voice-acting work did not take much time, as she would just go into the studio "once or twice a month for about four months" with no need for make-up and costuming sessions. The workload was so light it did not interfere with her acting commitments in the television series ER.
Sakaguchi said that he was pleased with the film's final cut, and he would not have changed anything if given the chance. The film had high cost overruns towards the end of filming. New funds had to be sourced to cover the increasing production costs while maintaining staff salaries. The film's final cost of \$137 million, which included about \$30 million spent on marketing by Columbia Pictures, escalated from an original budget rumored to be around \$70 million. \$45 million alone was spent on the construction of Square's studio in Hawaii.
### Themes
Director Sakaguchi named the main character after his mother, Aki, who died in an accident several years prior to the production of the film. Her death led Sakaguchi to reflect on what happened to the spirit after death, and these thoughts resurfaced while he was planning the film, eventually taking the form of the Gaia hypothesis. He later explained that the theme he wanted to convey was "more of a complex idea of life and death and spirit", believing that the best way to portray this would be to set the film on Earth. By comparison, Final Fantasy video games are set in fictional worlds. Dan Mayers from Sight & Sound said that the film followed the same theme typically found in Final Fantasy video games: "A party of heroes averts impending global holocaust by drawing on their individual skills, gaining knowledge through challenges and emerging victorious with new-found love and respect for themselves and their companions". Writing in the book Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams, Livia Monnet wrote the film remediated "the notion of life in the neovitalistic, evolutionary biology of Lynn Margulis and in contemporary theories on artificial life", going on to state that the film's exploration of the Gaia hypothesis raised interesting questions regarding the life and death process of both cinema and digital media, as well as contemporary life sciences, cybernetics, philosophy and science fiction. The concept of artificial life and resurrection was also discussed, and compared to similar themes in the 1914 book Locus Solus; the Phantoms in The Spirits Within were considered to be brought to life by various forces: by the alien planet's red Gaia and then by human spiritual energy.
### Character design
Each character's base body model was built from more than 100,000 polygons, plus more than 300,000 for clothing alone. Aki's character model bears 60,000 hairs, each of which were separately and fully animated and rendered. In creating the characters, designers had to transition between using PowerAnimator, Autodesk Maya and RenderMan.
Aki's appearance was conceived by the lead animator of the project, Roy Sato, who created several conceptual designs for Sakaguchi to consider, and then used the selected design as a guide for her character model. Sato perceived Aki's original look as a "supermodel", and subsequently removed her make-up and shortened her hair in order to give her a more intelligent look that would "convince people that she's a scientist". In an interview, Sato described actively trying to make her appear as realistic as possible, making her similar to himself in as many ways as he could in the animation, including elements of his personality through facial expressions. He concluded that Aki ended up being similar to him in almost every way, with the exception that "she's a lot cuter". The model for Aki was designed to closely follow human appearance, with Sakaguchi commenting in an interview: "I think it's OK to look at Aki and be convinced that she's a human".
While Square ruled out any chance of a sequel to The Spirits Within before it was even completed, Sakaguchi intended to position Aki as being the "main star" for Square Pictures, using her in later games and films by Square, and including the flexibility of being able to modify aspects such as her age for such appearances. Ming-Na said that she would be willing if asked to continue voicing Aki. Aki only made one appearance outside of the film; in 2002 she appeared in a demonstration video that Square Pictures made to present to The Wachowskis before developing Final Flight of the Osiris for The Animatrix. The short film, appearing in the DVD's bonus content and featuring her with a slightly modified design, shows her acrobatically dueling a robot from the Matrix setting. Shortly afterwards, Square Pictures was closed and absorbed into Square, which ceased using the character.
### Music and soundtrack
The soundtrack to the film was released on July 3, 2001 by Sony Music. Elliot Goldenthal composed the entire score, as well as the film's theme song, "The Dream Within", which had lyrics written by Richard Rudolf and vocals performed by Lara Fabian. Director Hironobu Sakaguchi opted for the acclaimed Goldenthal instead of Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of the Final Fantasy games' soundtracks, a decision met with mixed opinions as the former was completely unknown to many of the games' fans. The last song on the album and the second and final song to play during the film's credits (after "The Dream Within") is "Spirit Dreams Inside" by Japanese rock band L'Arc-en-Ciel.
The film's score was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with Belgian composer Dirk Brossé conducting. It was recorded in the United Kingdom at the Watford Coloseum and the London AIR Lyndhurst Hall and was mixed at the Manhattan Center Studios in the United States. In the liner notes to the album, Goldenthal describes the soundtrack as combining orchestration techniques associated with the late 20th-century Polish avant-garde, as well as his experiments from Alien 3, and 19th-century Straussian brass and string instrumentation. In the film's 'Making of' featurette, Goldenthal states he used "ghostly choral" music when the Phantoms are emerging, in an attempt to give a celestial feeling, and focused on low brass clusters and taiko drum rhythms for violent scenes. When Aki talks about a dying girl, Goldenthal used a piano in order to give a domestic home-like feeling to a completely foreign environment, also choosing to use a flute each time Aki focusses on Gaia, as he believed it to be the most "human kind of instrument".
The album was met with positive reviews. Neil Shurley from AllMusic, who gave the album 4 out of 5, opined the album would probably have been nominated for an Oscar if the film itself had been more popular, as did the reviewer from Soundtrack Express, who gave the soundtrack 5 out of 5. Christopher Coleman from Tracksounds gave the soundtrack 10 out of 10, saying the feel of the album was "expansive and majestic" and that the score elevated the viewing experience of the film. A review from Filmtracks gave the album 4 out of 5, calling it "an easy album to recommend". Dan Goldwasser from Soundtrack.net also gave the soundtrack 4 out of 5, calling it a "must have".
The album peaked at No. 19 on Billboard'''s Top Soundtracks list and No. 193 on the Billboard 200 on July 28, 2001. The track "The Dream Within" was nominated for "Best Original Song Written for a Film" at the 2002 World Soundtrack Awards, but lost to "If I Didn't Have You" which was composed for Monsters, Inc..
## Release
### Box office
Before the film's release, there was already skepticism of its potential to be financially successful. Chris Taylor from Time magazine noted that video game adaptations had a poor track record at the box office and that it was Sakaguchi's first feature film. The film debuted on July 2, 2001 at the Mann Bruins Theater in Los Angeles, California, and was released in the United States on July 11, where it made \$11.4 million during its opening weekend, ranking in fourth place behind Legally Blonde, The Score and Cats & Dogs. The film would end up making \$32 million in North America and selling 5,961,378 tickets in the United States. The film grossed \$85 million in worldwide box office receipts, including in Japan. 1,456,523 tickets were sold in France, 4,299,604 tickets in other European countries and 446,728 tickets in Brazil. The film achieved average to poor results at the box office in most of Southeast Asia; however, it performed well in Australia, New Zealand and South Korea; 160,100 tickets were sold in Seoul City.
In 2006, Boston.com regarded it as the 4th biggest box office bomb, estimating the film's losses at the end of its cinema run at over \$94 million. In March 2012, CNBC considered it to be the 9th biggest box office bomb.
### Critical reception
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within holds an approval rating of 44% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 144 reviews, with an average rating of 5.30/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "The movie raises the bar for computer animated movies, but the story is dull and emotionally removed". Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, gives the film a score of 49 out of 100 based on 28 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore on opening night gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was a strong advocate of the film; he gave it 31⁄2 stars out of four, praising it as a "technical milestone". While having some minor criticism of the plot, he concluded the reason to see the film was "simply, gloriously, to look at it", especially praising the realism in Aki's face. He also expressed a desire for the film to succeed in hopes of seeing others made in its image, though he was skeptical of its ability to be accepted. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian echoed concerns about the plot, describing it as "adequate" though also stating it quickly slipped into cliche. He also had high praise for the animation in general, though lamented that the character's faces did not look quite real enough.
Writing in a 2007 article about the uncanny valley, John Mangan from The Age cited character's eyes in the film as an example of this phenomenon, where attempts to create realistic humans unintentionally cause revulsion; Peter Travers from Rolling Stone said that it was enjoyable watching the characters at first, "but then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements". Nell Minow from Common Sense Media also expressed concerns about realism in the characters, describing the visuals as stunning overall but finding subtle issues with characters talking and acting. Describing the dialogue as "passable", Nell also said the script read like a reject from Pokémon, and that its "confusing gibberish about the earth's spirit [would] not do justice to the beliefs of environmentalists or pantheists". Todd McCarthy from Variety gave a positive review, praising the voice work and visuals though saying the characters were no more emotionally expressive than those in traditional animation. McCarthy described the acting as "no worse" than the majority of science-fiction films, also saying that as far as video game adaptation films went, The Spirits Within "sure beats Lara Croft: Tomb Raider".
### Reception of Aki Ross
Aki's appearance was received positively by critics, with praise for the finer details of the character model such as the rendering of her hair. Entertainment Weekly named Aki an "it girl", stating that "calling this action heroine a cartoon would be like calling a Rembrandt a doodle". Ruth La Ferla from The New York Times described her as having the "sinewy efficiency" of Alien franchise character Ellen Ripley and visual appeal of Julia Roberts' portrayal of Erin Brockovich. The book Digital Shock: Confronting the New Reality by Herve Fischer described her as a virtual actress having a "beauty that is 'really' impressive", comparing her to video game character Lara Croft. In contrast, Livia Monnet criticized her character as an example of the constantly kidnapped female in Japanese cinema, further "diluted" by her existence solely as a computer-generated character representing "an ideal, cinematic female character that has no real referent".
Writing in the book Action and Adventure Cinema, Marc O'Day described her as among the "least overtly eroticised" female characters in science fiction, though stated that Aki was "transformed in a variety of poses into an erotic fantasy machine" in a bikini photo shoot that was included on the DVD's special features. She appeared dressed in the bikini on the cover of Maxim, and was ranked by the magazine and its readers as one of the sexiest women of 2001, placing at No. 87 out of 100 and becoming the first fictional woman to ever make the list. The same image of her appeared in the "Babes: The Girls of Sci Fi" special issue of SFX.
### Legacy and related media
The merger between Square and Enix, which had been under consideration since at least 2000 according to Yasuhiro Fukushima, Enix chairman at the time, was delayed because of the failure of the film and Enix's hesitation at merging with a company that had just lost a substantial amount of money. Square Pictures was closed in late January 2002, largely due to the commercial failure of The Spirits Within.
The film's CGI effects have been compared favourably with those in later films, such as Avatar (2009). In 2011, BioWare art director Derek Watts cited The Spirits Within as a major influence on the successful Mass Effect series of action role-playing games. In the first episode of the Square Enix-published 2015 video game Life Is Strange, when the lead character interacts with a TV, she mentions the idea of watching the film, and says "I don't care what anybody says, that's one of the best sci-fi films ever made".
Although the film was loosely based on a video game series, there were never any plans for a game adaptation of the film itself. Sakaguchi indicated the reason for this was the lack of powerful gaming hardware at the time, feeling the graphics in any game adaptation would be far too much of a step down from the graphics in the film itself. A novelization was written by Dean Wesley Smith and published by Pocket Books in June 2001. The Making of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a companion book, was published by BradyGames in August 2001. Edited by Steven L. Kent, the 240-page color book contains a foreword by director Sakaguchi and extensive information on all aspects of the film's creation, including concept art, storyboards, sets and props, layout, motion capture and animation, as well as a draft of the full script.
### Accolades
The film won the "Jury Prize" at the 2002 Japan Media Arts Festival. It was nominated for "Best Sound Editing – Animated Feature Film, Domestic and Foreign" at the 49th Golden Reel Awards as well as "Best Animated Feature" at the 5th Online Film Critics Society awards. Conversely, the film was also nominated in the worst screenplay category at the 2001 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, but lost to Pearl Harbor. The film's trailer was nominated for the "Golden Fleece" award at the 3rd Golden Trailer Awards.
### Home media
A two-disc DVD version of the film was released on October 23, 2001, with the Blu-ray edition released on August 7, 2007. Two weeks before it was released the DVD version was listed on Amazon.com as one of the most-anticipated releases, and it was expected to recoup some of the money lost on the film's disappointing box office performance. The DVD was initially a top seller; in February 2002, Jun Aida said that while sales were still strong, they were not good enough to save Square Pictures from closing. Both versions contained two full-length commentary tracks (one featuring Motonori Sakakibara, sequence supervisor Hiroyuki Hayashida, lead artist Tatsuro Maruyama, and creature supervisor Takoo Noguchi; the second featuring animation director Andy Jones, editor Chris S. Capp, and staging director Tani Kunitake) as well as an isolated score with commentary. They also contained a version of the film in its basic CGI and sketch form, with the option of pop-up comments on the film. An easter egg shows the cast of the film re-enacting the dance from Michael Jackson's Thriller. Fifteen featurettes, including seven on character biographies, three on vehicle comparisons and an interactive "Making Of" featurette, were also included. Other features included Aki's dream viewable as a whole sequence, the film's original opening sequence, and intentional outtakes. Peter Bracke from High-Def Digest stated the DVD was "so packed with extras it was almost overwhelming", stating that Sony went "all-out" on the extra features in a likely attempt to boost DVD sales and recover losses. A single-disc edition of the film with significantly less special features was released on August 27, 2002.
As of December 2001, the film grossed \$26.6 million in video rental revenue in the United States, equivalent to 83.4% of its box office gross in the country. The DVD was nominated for "Best DVD Special Edition Release" at the 28th Saturn Awards. Aaron Beierle from DVD Talk gave a positive review of the DVD, rating it 41⁄2 out of 5 stars for audio quality, video quality and special features. Dustin Somner from Blu-ray.com'' gave the Blu-ray version 5 out of 5 stars for video quality and special features, and 41⁄2 stars for audio quality. Peter Bracke gave the Blu-ray version 4 out of 5 stars overall. The film was released in 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in November 2021, with improved audio to Dolby Atmos/TrueHD 7.1 channel format.
## See also
- List of films based on video games |
68,320,723 | Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles | 1,171,418,703 | 2021 American concert film | [
"2020s American animated films",
"2020s English-language films",
"2021 animated films",
"2021 films",
"American films with live action and animation",
"Billie Eilish",
"Concert films",
"Disney+ original films",
"Films directed by Robert Rodriguez",
"Films impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic",
"Films set in Los Angeles",
"Films shot in Los Angeles",
"Rotoscoped films"
]
| Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles is a 2021 American concert film directed by Robert Rodriguez and Patrick Osborne, starring singer-songwriter Billie Eilish. It features performances of all 16 tracks from Eilish's second studio album, Happier Than Ever (2021), at the Hollywood Bowl amphitheater. She is accompanied by other musicians, including her brother Finneas O'Connell and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Inspired by films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Cool World (1992), A Love Letter to Los Angeles blends live action and animation.
Besides directing, Osborne worked on the animation in collaboration with Nexus Studios, Zoic Studios, and Digital Frontier FX, mixing motion capture footage with rotoscoping techniques. Filming took place for one week in Los Angeles, mostly at the Hollywood Bowl, without a live audience due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The crew aimed to avoid making the performances feel too similar, so they produced distinct color palettes and lighting effects for every song. They often recorded Eilish from close distances, wanting to create a sense of intimacy between her and the viewers.
A Love Letter to Los Angeles was released exclusively to Disney+ on September 3, 2021. Critics praised its performances—which they felt were of similar or better quality compared to the songs' studio versions—as well as its animation, cinematography, and setting. It received nominations for Best Austin Film at the 2021 Austin Film Critics Association Awards, Best Music Film at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards, and Best Longform Video at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards.
## Plot
The film begins by showing a two-dimensional, animated version of American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish in a recording studio. Picking up a microphone, she leaves the place and drives a Porsche to visit landmarks around Los Angeles. Meanwhile, her live-action self performs the tracks from her second studio album, Happier Than Ever (2021), at the Hollywood Bowl.
Eilish starts with the song "Getting Older", covered in blue lighting as the camera spins around her. The lights switch to a red-orange color for "I Didn't Change My Number". A symphony orchestra accompanies her during the next two performances, the first of which is "Billie Bossa Nova". While Eilish sings the next song, "My Future", a wide shot depicts her animated counterpart on the rooftop of the Roosevelt Hotel, looking across the Los Angeles skyline and contemplating. The animated version returns to her Porsche to drive around the city at high speed.
Back at the Hollywood Bowl, the live-action Eilish prepares for a performance of "Oxytocin". As she sings the song, red lights pulsate in the background; the screen turns to black and white during two verses, and she belts some of the closing lines. Nighttime passes, and the next morning, the animated Eilish awakes to find herself among the clouds, about to sprout angel wings. For "Goldwing", a children's chorus performs its first verse, an excerpt from a religious hymn. They act as backing vocals for Eilish during the rest of the number, and the orchestra reappears to provide accompaniment to go with electronic music. The choir and orchestra are gone once the next song, "Lost Cause", begins. Eilish's performance is interspersed with shots of the Porsche as it travels through Los Angeles at night.
During "Halley's Comet", Eilish returns with the orchestra for another number, and she looks up to see the eponymous comet pass through the sky. Her animated version, sitting in an empty restaurant, also notices the comet. Eilish delivers a spoken-word interlude with "Not My Responsibility" and monologues about the public's obsession with her physical appearance. Shown as a silhouette against a black and red background, her animated self slowly takes her clothes off, is picked apart into bifurcated clones, and submerges herself in water. She rises from the water then levitates, after which the camera transitions back to her live-action self, about to perform "Overheated" with red lights and smoke around her. With "Everybody Dies", the animated Eilish visits a cemetery, and the orchestra helps with the instrumentals.
For "Your Power", Eilish duets with her brother Finneas O'Connell, who plays the acoustic guitar. Her animated counterpart arrives at the Palladium theater, after which paparazzi gather around the entrance to take pictures. Close-up shots of Eilish's face repeatedly flash on the screen as she sings "NDA" with distorted vocals, and the orchestra appears one final time for "Therefore I Am". During the performance of the title track, the animated Eilish enters the Hollywood Bowl while a spotlight follows her every move. She notices her live-action counterpart, who sees her and smiles at her, and takes a seat at the front row to watch the performance. The live-action Eilish headbangs and thrashes around the stage once the electric guitar appears in the song. She closes the film with the stripped-back "Male Fantasy"; as the song ends, flowers appear all over the Hollywood Bowl. The animated Eilish, still watching, disappears from sight, a smile on her face.
## Cast
- Billie Eilish – vocalist
- Finneas O'Connell – Eilish's brother and close collaborator on music
- Romero Lubambo – guitarist
- Gustavo Dudamel – conductor
- Los Angeles Philharmonic
- Los Angeles Children's Chorus
- Andrew Marshall – drummer
- Brady Heiser – precision driver
## Production
### Development
Eilish was born and spent her formative years in Los Angeles, developing an intense emotional attachment to the city. As she explained on Good Morning America, "I don't think I'd have any of the same anything if it wasn't for my hometown. I owed Los Angeles some love." She came up with Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles as a way to pay tribute to the city, intending it to be about self-reflection and growth. With regard to its visual style, she envisioned it to combine live action and animation, a "dimension that [she had] never experimented in", and felt that Disney would help her with the goal.
Eilish contacted Robert Rodriguez, who she thought was the best candidate for directing, in April or May 2021. He agreed to be involved in the project with his daughter, who was willing to help plan how Eilish's animated counterpart would look. They met with Eilish to discuss ideas for the film and listen to her second studio album, Happier Than Ever, before its release. Rodriguez noticed many of the songs contain explicit lyrics or discuss mature themes, and he wondered how Disney would react including them in the film. For instance, the word fuck appears in the title track, and one verse in "Male Fantasy" mentions using pornography to distract oneself. Disney opted to censor fuck, but not other swear words like shit, damn, or bitches, nor the songs' themes.
Eilish also enlisted the help of Patrick Osborne, an animator for several Disney films, to co-direct and work on the animation and visual design. For the film's setting, she instructed him to create a romanticized depiction of Hollywood, aiming for a vintage noir look. When conceptualizing the aesthetic for A Love Letter to Los Angeles, she drew inspiration from 1980s films. Osborne learned that Eilish was a fan of films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Cool World (1992), which blended live action with animation, so he used them as a benchmark for the visual design. Eilish also told him that she wanted her animated counterpart to feel like an idealized version of herself, and he decided on a femme fatale look for the character to reinforce the film's inspirations.
Work on A Love Letter to Los Angeles began by late June 2021, when Disney+ contacted Nexus Studios about the project. Darkroom and Interscope, Eilish's record labels, handled production for the film in association with Nexus Studios and Aron Levine Productions.
### Filming
Filming for the concert sequences took place at the Hollywood Bowl, without a live audience due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kerry Asmussen directed and choreographed the corresponding scenes. Other musicians who appeared include Finneas O'Connell, drummer Andrew Marshall, guitarist Romero Lubambo, conductor Gustavo Dudamel, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Children's Chorus. They performed all 16 songs from the album in the order that they appear on its track list. To avoid accidentally leaking the album to passersby, everyone on set listened to the performances via headphones.
Principal photography was completed within the first week of July. According to Osborne, the crew's shooting schedule at the Hollywood Bowl was from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. Since A Love Letter to Los Angeles was filmed without a live audience, the crew could move their cameras freely, able to get angles that would be impossible to attain if there were people in the venue. At least 10 cameras were used for acquiring footage, alongside steadicams, cranes, and large Alta-X drones. Scenes that involved the Los Angeles Philharmonic had to be filmed together in one night for production considerations.
For the animated vignettes, the crew recorded in several locations around Los Angeles, using the footage to create the animated character's journey across the city. They placed most of the scenes between each song performance. During filming, they also constructed a reflecting pool, a former feature of the Hollywood Bowl that separated performers from audience members, and built it in place of some of the venue seats. It reflected back to itself, making the Hollywood Bowl look like a full circle instead of a semicircle. In Osborne's view, the caustic motifs reflected by the pool onto the Hollywood Bowl provided visual effects reminiscent of the film Blade Runner (1982).
### Cinematography
Pablo Berron served as the cinematographer for A Love Letter to Los Angeles. He collaborated with aerial director of photography Sam O'Melia, digital imaging technician Dan Skinner, chief lighting technician Konrad Sigurdsson, and Eilish's tour lighting designer Tony Caporale. Once Berron learned everything he needed to know about the project, he was surprised; he compared the shooting schedule to filming four music videos per night. He was relieved that that there would be no crowd during filming because it meant that all the lights would focus on Eilish instead. In an interview with CineD, Berron explained that this approach allowed him to film her at a very close range, and he "really wanted" to do it because it would create a sense of intimacy between her and the viewers.
The crew aimed to avoid making the performances feel too similar to one another. During a Sony Cine interview, Berron said that they initially planned a vintage, "classic Hollywood old-school" look for every concert scene. After gradually getting to know Eilish's personality, which Berron called "high energy", they decided that sticking to one visual atmosphere throughout the film was not appropriate. Hence, during certain songs, the crew used smoke machines and lasers or went "crazy" with operating the handheld cameras. Caporale also assigned each performance its own color palette and lighting effects, and Berron and his crew listened closely to every song to determine when to adjust the lights. They employed only backlighting techniques during close-up shots of Eilish, set up fill lights to tweak the contrast when necessary, and occasionally put "old movie lights" below her as key lighting, to highlight the theatrical elements for some scenes.
### Animation
Osborne worked on the film's animated sequences with Nexus Studios, with assistance from visual effects companies Zoic Studios and Digital Frontier FX. Sallyanne Massimini served as the studios' visual effects supervisor. According to Osborne, Nexus was responsible for animating the "most magical, more surreal parts of the story", while the other studios worked on the more "grounded stuff". He added that around five or six people based in Los Angeles, London, and Sydney worked on the animation.
Animating Eilish provided a "real challenge" for Osborne, who had 12 weeks to do the job. He had little time to capture her physical disposition for the "old-school" version of the rotoscope process, which he had to do before she embarked on the concert sequences. His solution was to put her in a motion capture suit, having previsualized how the scenes for the corresponding shoot would look, and render the resulting animation. To maintain the 1980s look, Osborne did rotoscoping on top of the motion capture animation.
Osborne used the Blender program to edit the motion capture, of which there were around 90 minutes of footage. He and his team made simple storyboards for the animated sequences, around one drawing for each shot. They created about 12 minutes of animated footage, finishing the editing process by the week of August 20, 2021.
## Marketing and release
Eilish announced A Love Letter to Los Angeles on July 22, 2021, eight days before the release of Happier Than Ever. A teaser trailer was revealed alongside the announcement. Another teaser trailer premiered on August 4, and an official trailer premiered 20 days later. The first clip offered a small glimpse of the film's animation; the other two put more focus on that element.
After the trailers were revealed, many journalists immediately compared Eilish's animated character to a Disney Princess, including MTV News's Athena Serrano and Billboard's Gill Kaufman. Ben Pearson of /Film likened her to a less-sexualized version of the character Holli Would from Cool World. Three days before the film screening, Eilish shared a video of the "Oxytocin" performance on social media. Released as a Disney+ exclusive, A Love Letter to Los Angeles premiered worldwide on September 3, 2021. Disney+ made the film available to watch with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos.
## Reception
### Thematic analysis
Larisha Paul, a writer for the Recording Academy, cited freedom from fame as a recurring theme of A Love Letter to Los Angeles. In the film, Eilish's animated counterpart drives through the Highland Park neighborhood, where she used to live before she moved away due to security concerns such as experiences with stalkers. She references similar privacy-breaching encounters in the lyrics to "Getting Older", "Billie Bossa Nova", and "NDA". According to Paul, the animated counterpart, by travelling around several locations in Los Angeles, demonstrates freedom that the live-action Eilish does not possess, reminding viewers of the life she had before the massive success of her debut studio album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019). As she drives, she sees many billboards used to promote Happier Than Ever by the roads of the city. In Paul's view, this reinforces "the ironclad inescapability of fame" and the conversations that result, such as the ones referenced in the "Not My Responsibility" interlude.
In a review for Billboard, Sydney Urbanek analyzed how Los Angeles might connect to the film's plot. Her argument was that the city functions as a setting for the stories told through the album's lyrics—she interpreted the plot as Eilish's attempt to fix her estranged relationship with Los Angeles, caused by certain traumatic experiences discussed in the songs she performs. To back this up, she cited the album's exploration of Eilish's past relationships and lack of privacy. Urbanek also pointed to one line in the penultimate song, the title track, which reads "I'd never treat me this shitty / You made me hate this city." She called its performance the film's culminating moment, a sentiment Paul shared. Discussing Eilish's encounter with her animated counterpart during the scene, Paul said: "[her] ongoing theme of solitude, and the autonomy found within that [...] speaks to the one consistency between where Eilish has been and where she's headed: herself."
### Critical response
Some critics deemed A Love Letter to Los Angeles a film that Eilish's fans would enjoy. Johnny Loftus recommended watching it in a review for the website Decider, certain that it would "make her thriving fan base swoon", and Jennifer Green, an author for Common Sense Media, wrote that Eilish's followers would "enjoy parsing her lyrics for biographical details and references" while viewing the film. Urbanek considered its release as a way to satisfy fans with live performances before they got to see Eilish during the world tour in support of the album. However, she warned against reducing it to a "mere gift" to them: "there's simply too much at work conceptually to dismiss it as [such]."
The Hollywood Bowl setting was a point of commentary for two critics, who praised it for effectively bolstering the film's tribute premise. The New York Times's Teo Bugbee, who called the choice of location as the "best tribute" to Los Angeles, noted how the concert venue was empty for the whole runtime, arguing that this highlighted the city's "star-struck hauntedness" well. Uproxx contributor Rachel Brodsky agreed and found the choice appropriate because of the Hollywood Bowl's significance to Los Angeles's music and film scenes.
The film received some praise for its animation and cinematography. Urbanek lauded the way that A Love Letter to Los Angeles mixed animation with live action footage, and she found the variety in camerawork appropriate for an album that is varied in themes and tones. Loftus focused on its use of lighting, as well as the aesthetic and color schemes employed for the animated sequences; he believed that the sequences succeeded in establishing the mood for the performances despite looking substantially different from the live footage. In contrast to Urbanek and Loftus, Green wrote the scenes of the animated Eilish were unnecessary. For her, the music and the live-action character do enough to convey the right emotions and the stories told by the songs.
The concert numbers were another aspect of the film that critics praised. They thought that the songs' live renditions sounded as good as or better than their studio versions, often attributing the quality to the Los Angeles Philharmonic's involvement. Loftus was impressed by Eilish's voice, which he called "striking"—he sensed improvement in her vocals and saw the film as an opportunity for her to prove her ability to sing live. He concluded that the performances in A Love Letter to Los Angeles rightly emphasized Eilish's artistry, music, and nuanced character in spite of all the media narratives about her.
Callie Ahlgrim of Insider selected the live renditions of some of her favorite tracks from the album—"Oxytocin", "Halley's Comet", and the title track—as the film's highlights. Urbanek thought the title track performance lost some impact as a result of Disney's censorship of the word fuck in the lyrics, but she wrote that the song's cathartic nature was still preserved in the film. The "Goldwing" performance was singled out for praise in several reviews; it was regarded as more beautiful than the song's studio version thanks to the presence of the Children's Chorus, of which Eilish used to be a member. The reviewers found their reunion through the film sentimental.
On a more critical note, Ahgrim was not impressed with the film as a whole, finding that without any memorable conceptual risks or a "palpable buzz" from a live audience, A Love Letter to Los Angeles felt underwhelming like the album itself. Meanwhile, Brodsky wrote the absence of an audience made the viewing experience more heartwarming. For Brodsky, criticisms were instead directed towards the performances' monochrome color schemes and Eilish's vocals, which she thought came across as pre-recorded and not live.
### Accolades
A Love Letter to Los Angeles was shortlisted for Best Austin Film at the 2021 Austin Film Critics Association Awards, held on January 11, 2022. Other contenders included the 2020 releases The Carnivores, The Get Together, and Queens of Pain, as well as the winner Without Getting Killed or Caught (2021). On November 23, 2021, the Recording Academy announced the 64th Annual Grammy Awards nominees, which included A Love Letter to Los Angeles for Best Music Film. The ceremony was held on April 3, 2022, and the documentary Summer of Soul (2021) won the award. A Love Letter to Los Angeles was also nominated for Best Longform Video at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards. |
1,966 | Apollo 10 | 1,172,328,007 | 4th crewed mission of the Apollo space program | [
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| Apollo 10 (May 18–26, 1969) was the fourth human spaceflight in the United States' Apollo program and the second to orbit the Moon. NASA, the mission's operator, described it as a "dress rehearsal" for the first Moon landing (Apollo 11, two months later). It was designated an "F" mission, intended to test all spacecraft components and procedures short of actual descent and landing.
After the spacecraft reached lunar orbit, astronaut John Young remained in the Command and Service Module (CSM) while astronauts Thomas Stafford and Gene Cernan flew the Apollo Lunar Module (LM) to within 14.4 kilometers (7.8 nmi) of the lunar surface, the point at which powered descent for landing would begin on a landing mission. Then they rejoined Young in the CSM and, after the CSM completed its 31st orbit of the Moon, they returned safely to Earth.
While NASA had considered attempting the first crewed lunar landing on Apollo 10, mission planners ultimately decided that it would be prudent to have a practice flight to hone the procedures and techniques. The crew encountered some problems during the flight: pogo oscillations during the launch phase and a brief, uncontrolled tumble of the LM ascent stage in lunar orbit during its solo flight. However, the mission accomplished its major objectives. Stafford and Cernan observed and photographed Apollo 11's planned landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. Apollo 10 spent 61 hours and 37 minutes orbiting the Moon, for about eight hours of which Stafford and Cernan flew the LM apart from Young in the CSM, and about eight days total in space. Additionally, Apollo 10 set the record for the highest speed attained by a crewed vehicle: 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph) on May 26, 1969, during the return from the Moon.
The mission's call signs were the names of the Peanuts characters Charlie Brown for the CSM and Snoopy for the LM, who became Apollo 10's semi-official mascots. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz also drew mission-related artwork for NASA.
## Framework
### Background
By 1967, NASA had devised a list of mission types, designated by letters, that needed to be flown before a landing attempt, which would be the "G" mission. The early uncrewed flights were considered "A" or "B" missions, while Apollo 7, the crewed-flight test of the Command and Service Module (CSM), was the "C" mission. The first crewed orbital test of the Lunar Module (LM) was accomplished on Apollo 9, the "D" mission. Apollo 8, flown to the Moon's orbit without an LM, was considered a "C-prime" mission, but its success gave NASA the confidence to skip the "E" mission, which would have tested the full Apollo spacecraft in medium or high Earth orbit. Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal for the lunar landing, was to be the "F" mission.
NASA considered skipping the "F" mission as well and attempting the first lunar landing on Apollo 10. Some with the agency advocated this, feeling it senseless to bring astronauts so close to the lunar surface, only to turn away. Although the lunar module intended for Apollo 10 was too heavy to perform the lunar mission, the one intended for Apollo 11 could be substituted by delaying Apollo 10 a month from its May 1969 planned launch. NASA official George Mueller favored a landing attempt on Apollo 10; he was known for his aggressive approach to moving the Apollo program forward. However, Director of Flight Operations Christopher C. Kraft and others opposed this, feeling that new procedures would have to be developed for a rendezvous in lunar orbit and that NASA had incomplete information regarding the Moon's mass concentrations, which might throw off the spacecraft's trajectory. Lieutenant General Sam Phillips, the Apollo Program Manager, listened to the arguments on both sides and decided that having a dress rehearsal was crucial.
### Crew and key Mission Control personnel
On November 13, 1968, NASA announced the crew members of Apollo 10. Thomas P. Stafford, the commander, was 38 years old at the time of the mission. A 1952 graduate of the Naval Academy, he was commissioned in the Air Force. Selected for the second group of astronauts in 1962, he flew as pilot of Gemini 6A (1965) and command pilot of Gemini 9A (1966). John Young, the command module pilot, was 38 years old and a commander in the Navy at the time of Apollo 10. A 1952 graduate of Georgia Tech who entered the Navy after graduation and became a test pilot in 1959, he was selected as a Group 2 astronaut alongside Stafford. He flew in Gemini 3 with Gus Grissom in 1965, becoming the first American not of the Mercury Seven to fly in space. Young thereafter commanded Gemini 10 (1966), flying with Michael Collins. Eugene Cernan, the lunar module pilot, was a 35-year-old commander in the Navy at the time of Apollo 10. A 1952 graduate of Purdue University, he entered the Navy after graduation. Selected for the third group of astronauts in 1963, Cernan flew with Stafford on Gemini 9A before his assignment to Apollo 10. With five prior flights among them, the Apollo 10 crew was the most experienced to reach space until the Space Shuttle era, and the first American space mission whose crew were all spaceflight veterans.
The backup crew for Apollo 10 was L. Gordon Cooper Jr as commander, Donn F. Eisele as command module pilot, and Edgar D. Mitchell as lunar module pilot. By the normal crew rotation in place during Apollo, Cooper, Eisele, and Mitchell would have flown on Apollo 13, but Cooper and Eisele never flew again. Deke Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations, felt that Cooper did not train as hard as he could have. Eisele was blackballed because of incidents during Apollo 7, which he had flown as CMP and which had seen conflict between the crew and ground controllers; he had also been involved in a messy divorce. Slayton only assigned the two as backups because he had few veteran astronauts available. Cooper and Eisele were replaced by Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa respectively. Feeling they needed additional training time, George Mueller rejected the Apollo 13 crew. The crew was switched to Apollo 14, which saw Shepard and Mitchell walk on the Moon.
For projects Mercury and Gemini, a prime and a backup crew had been designated, but for Apollo, a third group of astronauts, known as the support crew, was also designated. Slayton created the support crews early in the Apollo program on the advice of McDivitt, who would lead Apollo 9. McDivitt believed that, with preparation going on in facilities across the U.S., meetings that needed a member of the flight crew would be missed. Support crew members were to assist as directed by the mission commander. Usually low in seniority, they assembled the mission's rules, flight plan, and checklists, and kept them updated. For Apollo 10, they were Joe Engle, James Irwin, and Charles Duke.
Flight directors were Gerry Griffin, Glynn Lunney, Milt Windler, and Pete Frank. Flight directors during Apollo had a one-sentence job description: "The flight director may take any actions necessary for crew safety and mission success." CAPCOMs were Duke, Engle, Jack Lousma, and Bruce McCandless II.
### Call signs and mission insignia
The command module was given the call sign "Charlie Brown" and the lunar module the call sign "Snoopy". These were taken from the characters in the comic strip, Peanuts, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. These names were chosen by the astronauts with the approval of Charles Schulz, the strip's creator, who was uncertain it was a good idea, since Charlie Brown was always a failure. The choice of names was deemed undignified by some at NASA, as were the choices for Apollo 9's CM and LM ("Gumdrop" and "Spider"). Public relations chief Julian Scheer urged a change for the lunar landing mission. But for Apollo 10, according to Cernan, "The P.R.-types lost this one big-time, for everybody on the planet knew the klutzy kid and his adventuresome beagle, and the names were embraced in a public relations bonanza." Apollo 11's call signs were "Columbia" for the command module and "Eagle" for the lunar module.
Snoopy, Charlie Brown's dog, was chosen for the call sign of the lunar module since it was to "snoop" around the landing site, with Charlie Brown given to the command module as Snoopy's companion. Snoopy had been associated for some time with the space program, with workers who performed in an outstanding manner awarded silver "Snoopy pins", and Snoopy posters were seen at NASA facilities, with the cartoon dog having traded in his World War I aviator's headgear for a space helmet. Stafford stated that, given the pins, "the choice of Snoopy [as call sign] was a way of acknowledging the contributions of the hundreds of thousands of people who got us there". The use of the dog was also appropriate since, in the comic strip, Snoopy had journeyed to the Moon the year before, thus defeating, according to Schulz, "the Americans, the Russians, and that stupid cat next door".
The shield-shaped mission insignia shows a large, three-dimensional Roman numeral X sitting on the Moon's surface, in Stafford's words, "to show that we had left our mark". Although it did not land on the Moon, the prominence of the number represents the contributions the mission made to the Apollo program. A CSM circles the Moon as an LM ascent stage flies up from its low pass over the lunar surface with its engine firing. The Earth is visible in the background. On the mission patch, a wide, light blue border carries the word APOLLO at the top and the crew names around the bottom. The patch is trimmed in gold. The insignia was designed by Allen Stevens of Rockwell International.
### Training and preparation
Apollo 10, the "F" mission or dress rehearsal for the lunar landing, had as its primary objectives to demonstrate crew, space vehicle and mission support facilities performance during a crewed mission to lunar orbit, and to evaluate the performance of the lunar module there. In addition, it was to attempt photography of Apollo Landing Site 2 (ALS-2) in the Sea of Tranquillity, the contemplated landing site for Apollo 11. According to Stafford,
> Our flight was to take the first lunar module to the moon. We would take the lunar module, go down to within about ten miles above the moon, nine miles above the mountains, radar map, photo map, pick out the first landing site, do the first rendezvous around the moon, pick out some future landing sites, and come home.
Apollo 10 was to adhere as closely as possible to the plans for Apollo 11, including its trajectory to and from lunar orbit, the timeline of mission events, and even the angle of the Sun at ALS-2. However, no landing was to be attempted. ALS-1, given that number because it was the furthest to the east of the candidate sites, and also located in the Sea of Tranquility, had been extensively photographed by Apollo 8 astronauts; at the suggestion of scientist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt, the launch of Apollo 10 had been postponed a day so ALS-2 could be photographed under proper conditions. ALS-2 was chosen as the lunar landing site since it was relatively smooth, of scientific interest, and ALS-1 was deemed too far to the east. Thus, when Apollo 10's launch date was announced on January 10, 1969, it was shifted from its placeholder date of May 1 to May 17, rather than to May 16. On March 17, 1969, the launch was slipped one day to May 18, to allow for a better view of ALS-3, to the west of ALS-2. Another deviation from the plans for Apollo 11 was that Apollo 10 was to spend an additional day in lunar orbit once the CSM and LM rendezvoused; this was to allow time for additional testing of the LM's systems, as well as for photography of possible future Apollo landing sites.
The Apollo 10 astronauts undertook five hours of formal training for each hour of the mission's eight-day duration. This was in addition to the normal mission preparations such as technical briefings, pilot meetings and study. They took part in the testing of the CSM at the Downey, California, facility of its manufacturer, North American Rockwell, and of the LM at Grumman in Bethpage, New York. They visited Cambridge, Massachusetts, for briefings on the Apollo Guidance Computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Instrumentation Laboratory. They each spent more than 300 hours in simulators of the CM or LM at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston and at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. To train for the high-acceleration conditions they would experience in returning to Earth's atmosphere, they endured MSC's centrifuge.
#### Lunar landing capability
While Apollo 10 was meant to follow the procedures of a lunar landing mission to the point of powered descent, Apollo 10's LM was not capable of landing and returning to lunar orbit. The ascent stage was loaded with the amount of fuel and oxidizer it would have had remaining if it had lifted off from the surface and reached the altitude at which the Apollo 10 ascent stage fired; this was only about half the total amount required for lift off and rendezvous with the CSM. The mission-loaded LM weighed 13,941 kilograms (30,735 lb), compared to 15,095 kilograms (33,278 lb) for the Apollo 11 LM which made the first landing. Additionally, the software necessary to guide the LM to a landing was not available at the time of Apollo 10.
Craig Nelson wrote in his book Rocket Men that NASA took special precaution to ensure Stafford and Cernan would not attempt to make the first landing. Nelson quoted Cernan as saying "A lot of people thought about the kind of people we were: 'Don't give those guys an opportunity to land, 'cause they might!' So the ascent module, the part we lifted off the lunar surface with, was short-fueled. The fuel tanks weren't full. So had we literally tried to land on the Moon, we couldn't have gotten off." Mueller, NASA's Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, stated,
> There had been some speculation about whether or not the crew might have landed, having gotten so close. They might have wanted to, but it was impossible for that lunar module to land. It was an early design that was too heavy for a lunar landing, or, to be more precise, too heavy to be able to complete the ascent back to the command module. It was a test module, for the dress rehearsal only, and that was the way it was used.
### Equipment
The descent stage of the LM was delivered to KSC on October 11, 1968, and the ascent stage arrived five days later. They were mated on November 2. The Service Module (SM) and Command Module (CM) arrived on November 24 and were mated two days later. Portions of the Saturn V launch vehicle arrived during November and December 1968, and the complete launch vehicle was erected in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on December 30. After being tested in an altitude chamber, the CSM was placed atop the launch vehicle on February 6, 1969. The completed space vehicle was rolled out to Launch Complex 39B on March 11, 1969—the fact that it had been assembled in the VAB's High Bay 2 (the first time it had been used) required the crawler to exit the rear of the VAB before looping around the building and joining the main crawlerway, proceeding to the launch pad. This rollout, using Mobile Launch Platform-3 (MLP-3), happened eight days after the launch of Apollo 9, while that mission was still in orbit.
The launch vehicle for Apollo 10 was a Saturn V, designated AS-505, the fifth flight-ready Saturn V to be launched and the third to take astronauts to orbit. The Saturn V differed from that used on Apollo 9 in having a lower dry weight (without propellant) in its first two stages, with a significant reduction to the interstage joining them. Although the S-IVB third stage was slightly heavier, all three stages could carry a greater weight of propellant, and the S-II second stage generated more thrust than that of Apollo 9.
The Apollo spacecraft for the Apollo 10 mission was composed of Command Module 106 (CM-106), Service Module 106 (SM-106, together with the CM known as CSM-106), Lunar Module 4 (LM-4), a spacecraft-lunar module adapter (SLA), numbered as SLA-13A, and a launch escape system. The SLA was a mating structure joining the Instrument Unit on the S-IVB stage of the Saturn V launch vehicle and the CSM, and acted as a housing for the LM, while the Launch Escape System (LES) contained rockets to propel the CM to safety if there was an aborted launch. At about 76.99 metric tons, Apollo 10 would be the heaviest spacecraft to reach orbit to that point.
## Mission highlights
### Launch and outbound trip
Apollo 10 launched from KSC on May 18, 1969, at 12:49:00 EDT (16:49:00 UT), at the start of a 4.5-hour launch window. The launch window was timed to secure optimal lighting conditions at Apollo Landing Site 2 at the time of the LM's closest approach to the site days later. The launch followed a countdown that had begun at 21:00:00 EDT on May 16 (01:00:00 UT on May 17). Because preparations for Apollo 11 had already begun at Pad 39A, Apollo 10 launched from Pad 39B, becoming the only Apollo flight to launch from that pad and the only one to be controlled from its Firing Room 3.
Problems that arose during the countdown were dealt with during the built-in holds, and did not delay the mission. On the day before launch, Cernan had been stopped for speeding while returning from a final visit with his wife and child. Lacking identification and under orders to tell no one who he was, Cernan later attested in his autobiography that he had feared being arrested. Launch pad leader Gunther Wendt, who had pulled over nearby after recognizing Cernan, explained the situation to the police officer, who then released Cernan despite the officer's skepticism that Cernan was an astronaut.
The crew experienced a somewhat rough ride on the way to orbit due to pogo oscillations. About 12 minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft entered a low Earth orbit with a high point of 185.79 kilometers (100.32 nautical miles) and a low point of 184.66 kilometers (99.71 nautical miles). All appeared to be normal during the systems review period in Earth orbit, and the crew restarted the S-IVB third stage to achieve trans-lunar injection (TLI) and send them towards the Moon. The vehicle shook again while executing the TLI burn, causing Cernan to be concerned that they might have to abort. However, the TLI burn was completed without incident. Young then performed the transposition, docking, and extraction maneuver, separating the CSM from the S-IVB stage, turning around, and docking its nose to the top of the lunar module (LM), before separating from the S-IVB. Apollo 10 was the first mission to carry a color television camera inside the spacecraft, and mission controllers in Houston watched as Young performed the maneuver. Soon thereafter, the large television audience was treated to color views of the Earth. One problem that was encountered was that the mylar cover of the CM's hatch had pulled loose, spilling quantities of fiberglass insulation into the tunnel, and then into both the CM and LM. The S-IVB was fired by ground command and sent into solar orbit with a period of 344.88 days.
The crew settled in for the voyage to the Moon. They had a light workload, and spent much of their time studying the flight plan or sleeping. They made five more television broadcasts back to Earth, and were informed that more than a billion people had watched some part of their activities. In June 1969, the crew would accept a special Emmy Award on behalf of the first four Apollo crews for their television broadcasts from space. One slight course correction was necessary; this occurred at 26:32:56.8 into the mission and lasted 7.1 seconds. This aligned Apollo 10 with the trajectory Apollo 11 was expected to take. One issue the crew encountered was bad-tasting food, as Stafford apparently used a double dose of chlorine in their drinking water, which had to be placed in their dehydrated food to reconstitute it.
### Lunar orbit
#### Arrival and initial operations
At 75:55:54 into the mission, 176.1 kilometers (95.1 nautical miles) above the far side of the Moon, the CSM's service propulsion system (SPS) engine was fired for 356.1 seconds to slow the spacecraft into a lunar orbit of 314.8 by 111.5 kilometers (170.0 by 60.2 nautical miles). This was followed, after two orbits of the Moon, with a 13.9-second firing of the SPS to circularize the orbit to 113.0 by 109.6 kilometers (61.0 by 59.2 nautical miles) at 80:25:08.1. Within the first couple of hours after the initial lunar orbit insertion burn and following the circularization burn, the crew turned to tracking planned landmarks on the surface below to record observations and take photographs. In addition to ALS-1, ALS-2, and ALS-3, the crew of Apollo 10 observed and photographed features on the near and far sides of the Moon, including the craters Coriolis, King, and Papaleksi. Shortly after the circularization burn, the crew partook in a scheduled half-hour color-television broadcast with descriptions and video transmissions of views of the lunar surface below.
About an hour after the second burn, the LM crew of Stafford and Cernan entered the LM to check out its systems. They were met with a blizzard of fiberglass particles from the earlier problem, which they cleaned up with a vacuum cleaner as best they could. Stafford had to help Cernan remove smaller bits from his hair and eyebrows. Stafford later commented that Cernan looked like he just came out of a chicken coop, and that the particles made them itch and got into the air conditioning system, and they were scraping it off the filter screens for the rest of the mission. This was merely an annoyance, but the particles may have gotten into the docking ring joining the two craft and caused it to misalign slightly. Mission Control determined that this was still within safe limits.
#### The flight of Snoopy
After Stafford and Cernan checked out Snoopy, they returned to Charlie Brown for a rest. Then they re-entered Snoopy and undocked it from the CSM at 98:29:20. Young, who remained in the CSM, became the first person to fly solo in lunar orbit. After undocking, Stafford and Cernan deployed the LM's landing gear and inspected the LM's systems. The CSM performed an 8.3-second burn with its RCS thrusters to separate itself from the LM by about 30 feet, after which Young visually inspected the LM from the CSM. The CSM performed another separation burn, this time separating the two spacecraft by about 3.7 kilometers (2 nautical miles). The LM crew then performed the descent orbit insertion maneuver by firing their descent engine for 27.4 seconds at 99:46:01.6, and tested their craft's landing radar as they approached the 15,000-meter (50,000-foot) altitude where the subsequent Apollo 11 mission would begin powered descent to land on the Moon. Previously, the LM's landing radar had only been tested under terrestrial conditions. While the LM executed these maneuvers, Young monitored the location and status of the LM from the CSM, standing by to rescue the LM crew if necessary. Cernan and Stafford surveyed ALS-2, coming within 15.6 kilometers (8.4 nautical miles) of the surface at a point 15 degrees to its east, then performed a phasing burn at 100:58:25.93, thrusting for just under 40 seconds to allow a second pass at ALS-2, when the craft came within 14.4 kilometers (7.8 nautical miles) of the Moon, its closest approach. Reporting on his observations of the site from the LM's low passes, Stafford indicated that ALS-2 seemed smoother than he had expected and described its appearance as similar to the desert surrounding Blythe, California; but he observed that Apollo 11 could face rougher terrain downrange if it approached off-target. Based upon Apollo 10's observations from relatively low altitude, NASA mission planners became comfortable enough with ALS-2 to confirm it as the target site for Apollo 11.
The next action was to prepare to separate the LM ascent stage from the descent stage, to jettison the descent stage, and fire the Ascent Propulsion System to return the ascent stage towards the CSM. As Stafford and Cernan prepared to do so, the LM began to gyrate out of control. Alarmed, Cernan exclaimed, "Son of a bitch!" into a hot mic being broadcast live, which, combined with other language used by the crew during the mission, generated some complaints back on Earth. Stafford discarded the descent stage about five seconds after the tumbling began and fought to regain control manually, suspecting that there might have been an "open thruster", or a thruster stuck firing. He did so in time to orient the spacecraft to rejoin Charlie Brown. The problem was traced to a switch controlling the mode of the abort guidance system; it was to be moved as part of the procedure, but both of the crew members switched it, thus returning it to the original position. Had they fired Snoopy in the wrong direction, they might have missed the rendezvous with Charlie Brown or crashed into the Moon. Once Stafford had regained control of the LM ascent stage, which took about eight seconds, the pair fired the ascent engine at the lowest point of the LM's orbit, mimicking the orbital insertion maneuver after launch from the lunar surface in a later landing mission. Snoopy coasted on that trajectory for about an hour before firing the engine once more to further fine-tune its approach to Charlie Brown.
Snoopy rendezvoused with and re-docked with Charlie Brown at 106:22:02, just under eight hours after undocking. The docking was telecast live in color from the CSM. Once Cernan and Stafford had re-entered Charlie Brown, Snoopy was sealed off and separated from Charlie Brown. The rest of the LM's ascent-stage engine fuel was burned to send it on a trajectory past the Moon and into a heliocentric orbit.
It was the only Apollo LM to meet this fate; the Apollo 11 ascent stage would be left in lunar orbit to crash, while post-Apollo 11 ascent stages were steered into the Moon to obtain readings from seismometers placed on the surface, except for Apollo 13's ascent stage, which the crew used as a "life boat" to get safely back to Earth before releasing it to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, and Apollo 16's, which NASA lost control of after jettison.
### Return to Earth
After ejecting the LM ascent stage, the crew slept and performed photography and observation of the lunar surface from orbit. Though the crew located 18 landmarks on the surface and took photographs of various surface features, crew fatigue necessitated the cancellation of two scheduled television broadcasts. Thereafter, the main Service Propulsion System engine of the CSM re-ignited for about 2.5 minutes to set Apollo 10 on a trajectory towards Earth, achieving such a trajectory at 137:39:13.7. As it departed lunar orbit, Apollo 10 had orbited the Moon 31 times over the span of about 61 hours and 37 minutes.
During their journey back to Earth, the crew performed some observational activities which included star-Earth horizon sightings for navigation. The crew also performed a scheduled test to gauge the reflectivity of the CSM's high-gain antenna and broadcast six television transmissions of varying durations to show views inside the spacecraft and of the Earth and Moon from the crew's vantage point. Cernan reported later that he and his crewmates became the first to "successfully shave in space" during the return trip, using a safety razor and thick shaving gel, as such items had been deemed a safety hazard and prohibited on earlier flights. The crew fired the engine of the CSM for the only mid-course-correction burn required during the return trip at 188:49:58, a few hours before separation of the CM from the SM. The burn lasted about 6.7 seconds.
As the spacecraft rapidly approached Earth on the final day of the mission, the Apollo 10 crew traveled faster than any humans before or since, relative to Earth: 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph). This is because the return trajectory was designed to take only 42 hours rather than the normal 56. The Apollo 10 crew also traveled farther than any humans before or since from their (Houston) homes: 408,950 kilometers (220,820 nmi) (though the Apollo 13 crew was 200 km farther away from Earth as a whole). While most Apollo missions orbited the Moon at 111 kilometers (60 nmi) from the lunar surface, the distance between the Earth and Moon varies by about 43,000 kilometers (23,000 nmi), between perigee and apogee, throughout each lunar month, and the Earth's rotation makes the distance to Houston vary by at most another 11,000 kilometers (5,900 nmi) each day. The Apollo 10 crew reached the farthest point in their orbit around the far side of the Moon at about the same time Earth's rotation put Houston nearly a full Earth diameter farther away.
At 191:33:26, the CM (which contained the crew) separated from the SM in preparation for reentry, which occurred about 15 minutes later at 191:48:54.5. Splashdown of the CM occurred about 15 minutes after reentry in the Pacific Ocean about 740 kilometres (400 nmi) east of American Samoa on May 26, 1969, at 16:52:23 UTC and mission elapsed time 192:03:23. The astronauts were recovered by USS Princeton. They spent about four hours aboard, during which they took a congratulatory phone call from President Richard Nixon. As they had not made contact with the lunar surface, Apollo 10's crew were not required to quarantine like the first landing crews would be. They were flown to Pago Pago International Airport in Tafuna for a greeting reception, before boarding a C-141 cargo plane to Ellington Air Force Base near Houston.
## Aftermath
Orbital operations and the solo maneuvering of the LM in partial descent to the lunar surface paved the way for the successful Apollo 11 lunar landing by demonstrating the capabilities of the mission hardware and systems. The crew demonstrated that the checkout procedures of the LM and initial descent and rendezvous could be accomplished within the allotted time, that the communication systems of the LM were sufficient, that the rendezvous and landing radars of the LM were operational in lunar orbit, and that the two spacecraft could be adequately monitored by personnel on Earth. Additionally, the precision of lunar orbital navigation improved with Apollo 10 and, combined with data from Apollo 8, NASA expected that it had achieved a level of precision sufficient to execute the first crewed lunar landing. After about two weeks of Apollo 10 data analysis, a NASA flight readiness team cleared Apollo 11 to proceed with its scheduled July 1969 flight. On July 16, 1969, the next Saturn V to launch carried the astronauts of Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon, and four days later the three astronauts returned to Earth, fulfilling John F. Kennedy's challenge to Americans to land astronauts on the Moon and return them safely to Earth by the end of the 1960s.
In July 1969, Stafford replaced Alan Shepard as Chief Astronaut, and then became deputy director of Flight Crew Operations under Deke Slayton. In his memoirs, Stafford wrote that he could have put his name back in the flight rotation, but wanted managerial experience. In 1972, Stafford was promoted to brigadier general and assigned to command the American portion of the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, which flew in July 1975. He commanded the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and retired in November 1979 as a lieutenant general. Young commanded the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission flown in April 1972. From 1974 to 1987, Young served as Chief Astronaut, commanding the STS-1 (1981) and STS-9 (1983) Space Shuttle missions in April 1981 and November 1983, respectively, and retired from NASA's Astronaut Corps in 2004. Gene Cernan commanded the final Apollo lunar mission, Apollo 17, flown in December 1972. Cernan retired from NASA and the Navy as a captain in 1976.
## Hardware disposition
The Smithsonian has been accountable for the command module Charlie Brown since 1970. The spacecraft was on display in several countries until it was placed on loan to the London Science Museum in 1978. Charlie Brown'''s SM was jettisoned just before re-entry and burned up in the Earth's atmosphere, its remnants scattering in the Pacific Ocean.
After translunar injection, the Saturn V's S-IVB third stage was accelerated past Earth escape velocity to become space debris; , it remains in a heliocentric orbit.
The ascent stage of the Lunar Module Snoopy was jettisoned into a heliocentric orbit. Snoopy's ascent stage orbit was not tracked after 1969, and its whereabouts were unknown. In 2011, a group of amateur astronomers in the UK started a project to search for it. In June 2019, the Royal Astronomical Society announced a possible rediscovery of Snoopy, determining that small Earth-crossing asteroid 2018 AV<sub>2</sub> is likely to be the spacecraft with "98%" certainty. It is the only once-crewed spacecraft known to still be in outer space without a crew.
Snoopy's'' descent stage was jettisoned in lunar orbit; its current location is unknown, though it may have eventually crashed into the Moon as a result of orbital decay. Phil Stooke, a planetary scientist who studied the lunar crash sites of the LM's ascent stages, wrote that the descent stage "crashed at an unknown location", and another source stated that the descent stage "eventually impact(ed) within a few degrees of the equator on the near side". Richard Orloff and David M. Harland, in their sourcebook on Apollo, stated that "the descent stage was left in the low orbit, but perturbations by 'mascons' would have caused this to decay, sending the stage to crash onto the lunar surface".
## Images
## See also
- List of artificial objects on the Moon
- List of vehicle speed records |
20,759,225 | The Beatles: Rock Band | 1,173,899,005 | 2009 video game | [
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| The Beatles: Rock Band is a 2009 music video game developed by Harmonix, published by MTV Games, and distributed by Electronic Arts. It is the third major console release in the Rock Band music video game series, in which players can simulate the playing of rock music by using controllers shaped like musical instruments. Centered on the popular English rock group the Beatles, The Beatles: Rock Band is the first band-centric game in the Rock Band series. The game features virtual portrayals of the four band members performing the songs throughout the band's history, including depictions of some of their famous live performances, as well as a number of "dreamscape" sequences for songs from the Abbey Road Studios recording sessions during the group's studio years. The game's soundtrack consists of 45 Beatles songs; additional songs and albums by the Beatles were made available for the game as downloadable content.
The game was released internationally on September 9, 2009, coinciding with the release of new, remastered compact disc versions of the Beatles' albums. It incorporates many of the gameplay features of the Rock Band series; however, it is not an expansion pack for the Rock Band series and content for it and other Rock Band titles is not cross-compatible. Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos described the game as "a new, full game title production built from the ground up". Gameplay mechanics differ slightly from previous Rock Band games, including the addition of a three-part vocal harmony system. Subsequent games in the Rock Band series would reuse these new elements, including vocal harmonies.
The game was developed with the blessing and critical input of Apple Corps, including former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, who both made public appearances promoting the game. George Harrison's son Dhani helped to bridge discussion between Harmonix and Apple Corps, while Giles Martin, son of the Beatles' music producer George Martin, ensured high-fidelity versions of the Beatles' songs would be available.
The Beatles: Rock Band was critically acclaimed, being praised as both as a genuine means of experiencing the music and history of the Beatles and as a standalone music video game. Although the game's sales were considered respectable, with more than half a million units sold during its first month of release in the United States, analysts had projected larger sales volumes and attributed the lower sales to waning interest in the rhythm game genre and the video game industry recovery from the late-2000s recession.
## Gameplay
The Beatles: Rock Band allows players to perform simulated rock music by providing up to six players with the ability to play three different controllers modeled after music instruments (a guitar controller for lead guitar and bass guitar gameplay, a drum controller and up to three microphones for vocals). Players simulate the performance of rock music by using their controllers to play scrolling on-screen notes. For lead and bass guitar, this is accomplished by holding down colored buttons mimicking guitar frets and pushing the controller's strum bar; for drums, this requires striking the matching colored drumhead, or stepping on the pedal to simulate playing bass drum notes. A "Lefty" mode allows left-handed people to play, by switching which colour the beats are given. When singing vocals, the player must sing in relative pitch to the original vocals. A pitch indicator displays the singer's accuracy relative to the original pitch. For songs with multi-part vocals, players need only to stay in tone with the lead singer to score points and keep their performance meter up, but players earn additional scoring bonuses when they successfully complete phrases in harmony.
As in previous Rock Band games, successfully hitting the proper notes in sequence earns points for each player and boosts their "performance meter". Each separate instrument is given a level, defined by their instrument icon, and the average level is also displayed. If a player fails to match the notes, their performance meter drops. If the meter empties, that player is forced to drop out of play, which in turn causes the band's overall performance to drop. Any player to drop out can be "saved" if another player activates "Beatlemania" (referred to as "Overdrive" in other Rock Band titles), which is collected by successfully completing specially marked phrases. These phrases appear in white, and if the phrase is completed, the energy bar, displayed at the bottom of every track, fills by one quarter. Beatlemania can also be used to temporarily increase the number of points the band earns. Activating Beatlemania is specific to each "instrument". For guitar, the controller must be temporarily shifted to an upright position; for drums, a special "cymbal" (Green, or red for "Lefty" mode) is hit; and for vocals, a noise must be registered by the microphone when prompted.
Some alterations to the Rock Band formula were made to preserve the sound of the Beatles' music. Audio cues that provide feedback on how well the band is doing, typically through the crowd cheering, singing along with the lyrics, or booing if the band is failing, are not included. The virtual band members are not booed off the stage if a player fails a song. Rather, the game simply cuts to a "song failed" menu with the option to try again. The song is restarted from the beginning. Variations on Overdrive/Beatlemania activation include the removal of player-controlled audio effects. While guitar players can use the controller's whammy bar on sustained marked note to collect more Beatlemania, this does not alter the sound of the note. There are also no freestyle drum fills in the songs for activating Beatlemania; instead the player continues to perform the correct note sequence before being presented with a note to activate Beatlemania.
Throughout the song, players receive points for every note hit, and this is totalled up and displayed at the end of the song, along with a percentage of how many notes they hit, and a rating: 1 to 5 stars. If the score is close to perfect, normally requiring at least 98% of the notes, the rating is five 'gold' stars, instead of the normal bronze. The score is saved and shown alongside the song in the select screen; over time, as the song is replayed, it shows only the highest score.
### Instrument peripherals
All Rock Band peripherals that were available at the time of the game's release are compatible with their respective console version of The Beatles: Rock Band. Similarly, peripherals designed for The Beatles: Rock Band are backward compatible with other Rock Band titles. Some controllers designed for Guitar Hero games will also work with The Beatles: Rock Band.
Four new instrument peripherals modeled after those used by the Beatles members were introduced alongside the game: a Rickenbacker 325 guitar, a Gretsch Duo Jet guitar, a Höfner bass and a Ludwig drum set. These instrument controllers function similarly to the controllers designed for Rock Band 2, with most alterations being purely aesthetic. A "Limited Edition" bundle of the game includes one Höfner bass guitar controller, one Ludwig-branded drum controller, a microphone, a microphone stand and Beatles-themed postcards. A second, less expensive bundle configuration contains peripherals first introduced with the original Rock Band game; this bundle does not contain a mic stand or postcards. The game was also released as a SingStar bundle with two microphones, and finally as a standalone release. The Rickenbacker and Gretsch guitar peripherals are sold separately.
### Modes
The Beatles: Rock Band features gameplay modes similar to other Rock Band games, playable both locally and online. "Story" mode is similar to the "Career" mode of the first Rock Band game and follows a linear progression through the Beatles history. Optional challenges are available in each story "chapter", tasking players to complete every song in a specific chapter as a single performance. By earning high score ratings for songs or challenges, players will unlock photographs and video clips of the Beatles taken from the Apple Corps' archive to provide "splashes of history". One such unlockable "prize" is an edited version of the 1963 Beatles Christmas Record.
Up to six players can play any song in the game cooperatively via "Solo/Band Quickplay" mode. Two players can also play against one another in Rock Band'''s two competitive modes: "Tug of War", where two players perform alternating sections of songs to outdo the other's performance, and "Score Duel", where each player simultaneously plays the entirety of a song while trying to accumulate the highest score. Tug of War allows players to choose individual difficulty levels, while Score Duel requires that both players play at the same difficulty level. Both competitive modes require that players use the same type of instrument.
Several "Training" modes are available for The Beatles: Rock Band, including tutorials for both guitar/bass and drums. Practice modes are instrument-specific and allow players to practice entire songs or individual sections of songs. Guitar, bass, and drum practice modes allow players to slow the tempos of songs; vocal practice mode helps to emphasize the selected harmony portion of the vocals by adding a generated waveform sound to the selected harmony line in tune with the lyrics. There are also two drum training modes called "Drum Lessons" and "Beatle Beats".
Before playing, a difficulty has to be selected: easy, medium, hard or expert. Expert is a match of the original notes; hard has some note-heavy drum rolls and other difficult or fast notes removed; medium takes away the orange notes (for guitar and bass) and anything else considered tricky. Easy is designed for new players, and gives an easy rhythm for those to settle into the game. However, there are too few notes for it to feel like they're playing the actual tune from the song. A "No Fail" mode has been carried over from Rock Band 2 and is accessible from the band members selection screen rather than from the game's main menu. This mode lets players continue playing even if their performance meter hits rock bottom. In addition, No Fail mode is automatically enabled for any player who chooses the "Easy" difficulty.
## Development
### Conception
Prior to The Beatles: Rock Band, no song by The Beatles, nor a cover of a Beatles song, had been featured in any Guitar Hero or Rock Band title, whether as disc-based or downloadable content. The idea of The Beatles: Rock Band came about during a chance encounter between MTV president Van Toffler and Dhani Harrison, son of George Harrison, at a luncheon sponsored by Robert Earl during the 2006 Christmas holiday, shortly after MTV's acquisition of Harmonix. Dhani, having been familiar with the Guitar Hero franchise and learning of the recent acquisition and plans for Rock Band (in which music from his band, thenewno2, had been featured by way of downloadable content) from Toffler, suggested a game based on the Beatles. Though both Dhani and Toffler considered the concept an unlikely possibility, their meeting nonetheless spurred Dhani into further discussions with Harmonix's president, Alex Rigopulos. At the same time, Dhani helped to introduce the Rock Band concept to the Beatles' company Apple Corps, and the shareholders Olivia Harrison (his mother), Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Yoko Ono. Initial meetings were arranged with the shareholders using an early prototype of the game to garner their interest in the title. One stipulation that the Apple Corps shareholders required of Harmonix was that the game feature songs spanning the band's entire career. Harmonix subsequently created a more complete demonstration that used examples of music and artwork that they envisioned for the game. The five-song demo, which included an early build for "Here Comes the Sun", was finished in February 2008. It was used to gain approval from McCartney, Starr, Ono and Olivia Harrison, effectively bringing them aboard the project as creative partners.
The Apple Corps shareholders considered The Beatles: Rock Band a new way to introduce the band's music to the public. They approved of the songs and venues that would appear in the game, and provided feedback on the artwork, character representations, and storyboards for animation sequences. McCartney and Starr fact-checked certain anecdotes relating to The Beatles while Ono and Harrison provided insight on their late husbands' performances and lyrics. At the developer's request, Ono visited the Harmonix offices late in development to provide critical feedback on several visual elements. In a Wired article, MTV's senior vice president of the games division Paul DeGooyer was quoted saying "She gave the designers hell", with Harmonix head Alex Rigopulos adding, "She really held our feet to the fire". DeGooyer and Rigopulos clarified the statement soon after the article had been published, asserting that the visit was "a high point of the two-year development process" and "has been mischaracterized by some in the press".
Though The Beatles: Rock Band aims to present a visual and musical history of the Beatles, the game does not attempt to replicate periods of turmoil between the band members. Rather, it presents a "fantasy version" of the Beatles to better serve the entertainment purposes of the video game. For example, Starr was estranged from the rest of the band during periods of recording for The Beatles (commonly referred to as the White Album). Thus, he did not perform on certain songs, such as "Back in the U.S.S.R." or "Dear Prudence" In the game, however, the Ringo Starr character plays drums during the animated performance of the song.
### Music production
Preparing the Beatles' songs for Rock Band was a significant technical challenge for Harmonix. The band's earlier songs, recorded on two-track and four-track equipment, needed to be reworked into a multitrack format that is essential in providing feedback to players. Each of the game's four instrument parts need to have their own "stems"—for example, when a player misplays a note from the guitar track, the guitar audio for the song will be temporarily quieted, leaving the other instruments' audio unaffected. Such isolated tracks were not available through the new 2009 remasters, so the team started with the original master recordings.
The development team was able to bring Giles Martin aboard as the game's music producer. Martin had recently completed co-production on the 2006 Love project with his father George Martin and was already familiar with the Beatles catalogue. Through that project, Martin created digital back-up copies of all the original tapes, which aided his work on The Beatles: Rock Band. Using audio forensics software, Martin and his team were able to extract the audio of individual instruments by isolating sounds at certain frequencies with digital filters, thus assuring multitrack capabilities for the Beatles' master recordings. This process, conducted at Abbey Road Studio 52 with the help of Paul Hicks and other Abbey Road recording engineers, reportedly took months to complete.
During the game's development, Harmonix only used low-fidelity versions of the remasters, which were sufficient for programming and note charting; Apple Corps feared that the leak of any high-fidelity remastered track from Abbey Road studios would lead to the unauthorized use of samples of the Beatles' music in remixes. High-fidelity versions of the songs were not implemented until the final publishing of the game. Harmonix performed very little additional remixing upon receipt of these remasters; in some cases, three different guitar parts—lead, solo, and rhythm—were brought into a single cohesive guitar part, slightly raising the volume of the specific guitar track that was used in note tracking to make it easier for the player to follow in the game. The ability for up to three players to sing vocal harmonies, a feature not present in previous Rock Band games, was designed and implemented as an optional feature so as not to be overwhelming to players.
While live recordings of songs, such as "Paperback Writer" at the Budokan, were available, Martin believed some of these renditions were sloppy and would not be enjoyable to play. Instead, he took the studio versions and added audio effects from the live performances to create a "live concert" ambiance. In several instances, the team also opted to slightly restructure the endings to certain songs, particularly those that fade out. Differences in editing between the album versions and in-game versions of songs continued with the release of downloadable content, notably the inclusion of a once-missing final chord at the end of the Abbey Road closer "Her Majesty".
Dhani Harrison has stated the game will include "stuff that has never been heard, never been released". Some of the new material includes band chatter and instrument tunes taken from recorded performances. This audio plays during the loading screens or bookends certain songs. Within the Abbey Road studio, Martin recreated some of the incidental sound, played through speakers but capturing the acoustics of the studio room. In one instance, for example, this process involved recording four people miming the act of drinking tea. The entirety of the game's credits are also made up of this band chatter and studio takes.
In coordination with the art team, sound programmers attempted to realistically map the game's note tracks relative to the real performances by the Beatles. For guitar parts, colored notes were selected not necessarily to match tonally with the music, but to replicate the movement and finger positioning used by the original performers. These were then matched against ten different strumming animations to be used for the virtual depictions of the guitarists. The "Expert" difficulty drum tracks attempt to match every single drum beat that is performed in a song, including some peculiar rhythms brought about by Starr's ambidextrous drumming habits. Vocals were slowed down and broken into phonetic segments, allowing the art team to determine the appropriate facial movement for the virtual characters to go along with the lyrics.
### Art production
Art assets were created with help of Apple Corps, with Harmonix developers gaining access to their unique archive as well as personal photos from the shareholders. Apple Corps had strict desires for how the Beatles were to appear; art director Ryan Lesser noted that the art team's earliest character designs were met with "brutal" responses from Apple, but that this feedback was essential in developing the visual styles of the band. In addition to Apple Corps' material, Harmonix designers watched the eight-part The Beatles Anthology on a weekly basis for further reference on the band. These materials were meticulously reviewed to replicate the outfits that the Beatles wore for each of their concerts, as well as the instruments they used for recordings and live performances.
Although McCartney had hoped technology would allow the virtual band members to appear in hyper-realistic detail, Harmonix opted to start with more exaggerated, cartoon-like designs, gradually scaling them back to appear more realistic. Animation for the Beatles characters was aided by motion capture provided by Beatles tribute band The Fab Four. Dhani Harrison also assisted with modeling for character animation in the game.
The team designed venues that represented parts of the Beatles' history in order to create an atmosphere of authenticity. For example, the set of The Ed Sullivan Show was recreated from photographs and videos, including a rare color photograph in Apple's collection that showed the yellow tint used to enhance the video as shown on black-and-white television sets. The Cavern Club, Shea Stadium, Budokan, Abbey Road Studios and the rooftop of the Apple Corps Headquarters also appear as venues in the game. Fashions of the 1960s were researched to properly apply them to the various virtual crowds at these locations.
Twenty of the game's on-disc songs are associated with "dreamscape" sequences in conjunction with the Abbey Road venue, representing the exclusively studio-based nature of the band in their later years. Animation sequences for songs linked with dreamscapes feature abstract or representative scenery. For example, the sequence for "Octopus's Garden" takes place in an underwater reef, while the sequence for "I Am the Walrus" is reminiscent of the band's psychedelic performance of the song in the 1967 film Magical Mystery Tour. The concept of dreamscapes evolved from brainstorming sessions between Harmonix and Apple Corps.; as Rock Band was a game that celebrated the performance of music, simply portraying The Beatles performing in the Abbey Road studio was not enough, and the dreamscape sequences provided a way to surpass that. While the art team used existing materials as reference, the Apple Corps. shareholders encouraged the team to interpret the songs in new ways. For inspiration, Harmonix looked to Cirque du Soleil's approach in interpreting The Beatles catalogue for the Love stage show. Storyboards for these animated sequences were created using both hand-drawn and 2D computer-generated art. In some cases, the computer-generated elements used in storyboarding were kept as elements in the final venue, such as computer-generated blades of grass in the "Here Comes the Sun" sequence.
The game includes heavily stylized opening and ending cinematics produced in part by Pete Candeland of Passion Pictures, with help from animator Robert Valley and background visuals from Alberto Mielgo. Candeland, who is known for his work animating Gorillaz videos, also produced the opening cinematics for both the original Rock Band and Rock Band 2. Within two and a half minutes, the opening cinematic provides a brief representative history of the band interspersed with numerous references to songs by The Beatles, followed by more metaphorical scenes reflecting their studio albums. Prior to each of the chapters in the game's Story mode, the game presents short introductory animations; these animations were prepared by graphic design studio MK12, who had previously worked on the opening cinematics for movies such as Stranger than Fiction and Quantum of Solace.
### Promotion
The Beatles: Rock Band was first revealed on October 30, 2008 when Harmonix, MTV Games, and Viacom announced an exclusive agreement with Apple Corps, Ltd. to produce the standalone title. Prior to this announcement, industry rumours reported that both Harmonix/MTV Games and Activision were vying for The Beatles songs, the latter for the Guitar Hero franchise. The agreement was the result of 17 months of discussions. John Drake, PR spokesperson for Harmonix, stated that Apple Corps "respected and appreciated what Harmonix does creatively for rhythm games" as part of the success of the deal. Eversheds, the legal firm working for Apple Corps. for both The Beatles: Rock Band and the abandoned remake of Yellow Submarine by Disney, stated that it took six months to complete the complex agreements and paperwork over the copyrights, trademarks, and publishing issues. Viacom's deal with The Beatles' property owners includes royalties with a guaranteed minimum of \$10 million and upwards of \$40 million based on initial sales projections, an amount that chairman Martin Bandier of Sony/ATV Music Publishing has stated to be "not even comparable to anything that has been done before". The licensing of the Beatles' work for the game was considered a critical step in the later negotiations and availability of the band's songs on iTunes about a year after the game's release. A further complication arose about a year after the game's release; Chrysalis Group legally challenged EMI over a previous 1965 agreement whereby EMI would pay Chrysalis up to 1.5% of royalties on sales of the Beatles' records, and claimed that they were owed £500,000 for the two million units sold of The Beatles: Rock Band. EMI asserted that the video game format would not be covered under the concept of a "record" from the 1965 agreement.
The game was released internationally on September 9, 2009. The game's release was planned to coincide with the release of the new, remastered CD versions of The Beatles albums. Footage from The Beatles: Rock Band was revealed for the first time on April 18, 2009, during Paul McCartney's performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. McCartney continued to utilize gameplay footage during his concert performances while touring during the months prior to the game's release. The game was formally showcased on June 1, 2009 at E3 2009. Presented by Harmonix at the beginning of the Microsoft press conference, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr briefly took the stage to discuss the games. Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison also made a brief appearance. The game's E3 demo booth was modeled as a recreation of Abbey Road Studios.
The game's official website was revealed early in 2009, showing only images of the Abbey Road studios and the game's release date. Over time, images of the Beatles' favored instruments appeared in the studio as their game peripheral replicas were announced. On May 5, 2009, the website was updated to include general information and promotional media. Customers who pre-ordered the game from selected vendors received an access code to view exclusive images and media on the site before it was eventually made public.
In August 2009, VH1 Classic aired music videos from the TV special Around The Beatles (1964), Help! (1965), and a music video of the "Birthday" gameplay footage, promoting the launch of The Beatles Rock Band online store. This store was also launched by several segments held on the home shopping channel, QVC, for the game, the Beatles' remastered albums, and other related products; several Harmonix employees were present to demonstrate the game.
A video advertisement for the game featuring the song "Come Together" premiered on August 28, 2009. The spot features a live action recreation of the iconic Abbey Road album cover; as The Beatles cross the road, a crowd of people follow, some of whom are carrying the game's controllers. The advertisement was directed by Marcel Langenegger, who worked with Apple Corps and Giles Martin to build an Abbey Road set at a Hollywood studio, and to blend archival footage of The Beatles into the video. Body doubles, vetted by the Apple Corps shareholders, appear in some shots. On September 8, 2009, Dhani Harrison appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien to promote the game. Harrison and O'Brien (along with Tonight Show web manager Aaron Bleyaert and The Tonight Show Band member Mark Pender) performed the song "Birthday" at the close of the show.
## Soundtrack
The game includes 45 songs from 12 of The Beatles albums recorded during their 1963–1970 tenure with EMI Records. With the exception of Magical Mystery Tour, track information is based on the British-released versions of the albums. Six non-album singles and the mashup track "Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows" from the 2006 remix album Love have also been included. Selections of the soundtrack are under license from Sony/ATV Music Publishing Company. Although Michael Jackson, who owned 50% of the publishing rights to the Beatles songs through Sony/ATV, died in June 2009, the sale of his estate did not affect the songs or the release schedule of The Beatles: Rock Band, according to Harmonix.
### Downloadable content
Additional songs are available for the game as downloadable content. The song "All You Need Is Love" was first to appear as downloadable content, proceeds from which (\$1.40 of the \$2 song cost) are donated to Doctors Without Borders. The song was initially made available as an exclusive for Xbox 360 on the same day the game was released. Within two weeks of the game's release, "All You Need Is Love" was announced by Microsoft and MTV to be the fastest-selling downloadable song across any of the Rock Band platforms, with tens of thousands of downloads; The song had been downloaded more than 100,000 times by the end of September, and by February 2010, had generated over \$200,000 for the charity. The song is now available for download on the Wii and PlayStation 3.
Full albums were also made available as downloadable content; the remaining songs from Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Rubber Soul have since been released on the consoles' respective store services. While there is potential for the entire Beatles catalogue to be made available, this will be unlikely, according to John Drake of Harmonix. Drake identified the costly development process as a potentially prohibitive factor: "Every time we do one song, it's not like Rock Band where we wait for the masters to come in and just author them ... its like, send people to Abbey Road, use the original tape, separate them out ... it costs thousands of dollars." Drake asserted that Harmonix would take sales of the currently announced albums into consideration before continuing development of downloadable content. Harmonix's Foster stated that solo acts from the Beatles' members will not be included as downloadable content for The Beatles: Rock Band; however, he did not rule out the possibility of these acts appearing in other Rock Band games. A three pack of songs from Paul McCartney's 2009 live album, Good Evening New York City, was made available for the main Rock Band series on 5 January 2010. John Lennon's "Imagine" is a part of the Rock Band 3 soundtrack, with the full Imagine album arriving later as downloadable content in celebration of Lennon's 70th birthday. A pack featuring Paul McCartney's band Wings was also released as DLC for Rock Band 3 on December 28, 2010.
The respective downloadable content for The Beatles: Rock Band and other currently available Rock Band titles are not cross-compatible. Furthermore, the songs contained on the Beatles disc are not exportable to other games in the Rock Band series. Harmonix's Chris Foster cited the game's new vocal harmony feature as well as the unique song-specific dreamscape animations as reasons for the lack of exportability to other Rock Band games. John Drake stated that the developer had a responsibility to treat the Beatles' songs as "iconic", and keep its music separated from other songs.
On May 5, 2016, Harmonix ceased downloadable content distribution for The Beatles: Rock Band due to the license expiration, though those that had already purchased the tracks would be able to redownload them in the future.
## Reception
The Beatles: Rock Band received high praise from several media outlets upon release. Regarding the game's cross-generational appeal, Chad Sapieha of The Globe and Mail suggested that the game would spark a new wave of Beatlemania, while Seth Schiesel of The New York Times called it "nothing less than a cultural watershed". Some critics hailed the title as landmark of the music game genre; Randy Lewis of the Los Angeles Times described the game as a "quantum leap forward for the music video game", while Johnny Minkley of Eurogamer called it "the new standard by which all band-specific game experiences will be judged".
Described as an "interactive Beatles experience", the game was considered to bring players closer to the band through both technical and emotional means. By playing each song's respective note chart, players were said to have a better appreciation for the structure and complexity of the compositions and performances by the Beatles. Emotionally, critics commented on the sentimental values of the game's career mode, recalling the history of the band. Critics were mostly positive concerning the visual and aural elements of the game; G4's Abbie Heppe considered it a preferable package to the newly remastered albums, citing song-specific animations as a strong feature. The dreamscape sequences in particular were likened to live performances, praised as "dazzling" and "evocative". However, Schiesel remarked that due to the players' concentration on the note tracks, the animations "serve mostly to entertain onlookers rather than the players themselves". Heppe observed that the color saturation of the background elements as well as the "Beatlemania" visual effects can sometimes contrast poorly with the scrolling notes, making it difficult to play. After the game's release, Harmonix lead designer Chris Foster acknowledged that the visuals can be "too overwhelming for [some players] at moments". The implementation of three-part harmonies, expressed by some to be the most significant addition to the series, was well received.
Critics primarily found fault with the game's length, as the bulk of the game's content can be completed in only a few hours. Will Tuttle of GameSpy questioned whether Harmonix limited the number of songs on release knowing that there would be a market for the game's downloadable content in the near future. The low number of songs, along with the new themed instrument controllers, were found to make the game an expensive proposition for those new to rhythm games. Due to the limited selection of songs on the disc, some critics questioned the specific inclusion of certain songs or the exclusion of more popular songs. Furthermore, critics claimed that the game's complete dedication to the Beatles, without the option for cross-compatibility with Rock Band or vice versa, can potentially lead to tedious play sessions with minimal variety, hampering the social nature of the game. Justin Haywald of 1UP.com considered that in attaching the Rock Band name to the game's title, there was a certain expectation on an expandable library of songs and interoperability with previous Rock Band titles, which The Beatles: Rock Band failed to meet. Some players coming from previous versions of Rock Band would consider the songs in The Beatles: Rock Band to lack technical challenge. However, the less difficult note tracks were seen to be a welcoming benefit for newcomers to the series as well as those attempting to sing along with the harmony portions of the game. For purist fans, some critics noted that the game purposely avoids certain aspects of the Beatles' history; former band members such as Pete Best or collaborators such as Billy Preston or Eric Clapton are never seen during gameplay. Concerning supplemental content, Hilary Goldstein of IGN felt the extra features could have been more substantial, especially in comparison to the additional material that accompanies the remastered CDs.
PC World listed The Beatles: Rock Band as their ninth Best Product of 2009. The game won for Best Music Game on the Spike Video Game Awards 2009. The game won the Family Game of the Year and was nominated for the Outstanding Achievement in Soundtrack 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.
`The game was also nominated for the Best Audio Game Developers Choice Award. The game's official website, published by Harmonix, won the Games-Related category for the 14th Annual Webby Awards. In 2010, the game was included as one of the titles in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.`
The Beatles: Rock Band was used as a finale for each performance of the 125th anniversary season of the Boston Pops Orchestra; the orchestra led the audience in a sing-along to several songs by the Beatles played by the orchestra but synchronized to the visuals from the game.
### E3 reception
The Beatles: Rock Band was well received at the 2009 E3 Convention, and was named the Best Music/Rhythm Game by GameSpot, GameSpy, 1UP.com, and X-Play; the game was also nominated for Best Music or Rhythm game by the Game Critics Awards and IGN. The opening animation video, released at the same time as E3, was praised by the press. It has been described as "surreal" by both the Los Angeles Times and Boing Boing's Offworld blog. Frames Per Second called it "simply stunning", and the Entertainment Weekly blog PopWatch described it as "damned spiffy". The second half of the video, where traditional animation gives way to a combination of computer-aided 2D and 3D scenery has been described as "a mashup of Peter Max and the Unreal Engine... chaperoned by the ghost of Salvador Dalí" by the ECA's GameCulture blog. The opening video was awarded the 2009 British Animation Award for "Best Commissioned Animation" and won a Silver Clio Award in the field of "Television/Cinema/Digital Technique".
### Sales
According to Viacom CEO Philipe Dauman, one quarter of The Beatles: Rock Band inventory was sold during its first week of release, exceeding their expectations. Dauman attributed some success of the game's sales to the price reduction of the PlayStation 3, which occurred a few weeks before the release of The Beatles: Rock Band.
The Beatles: Rock Band was the fourth high-selling game across all platforms in its first week of release in the United Kingdom. According to the NPD Group, The Beatles: Rock Band sold 595,000 units across all offerings for the Xbox 360, Wii, and PlayStation 3 versions during September 2009, respectively in the United States, making the game the 5th, 10th, and 20th top sellers for the month, respectively; only Guitar Hero 5 for the Xbox 360 placed in the top 10 titles selling 210,800 units. Total sales across all platforms in the United States was 595,000 units with revenue between \$59 and 60 million, and was the second highest revenue-generating game behind Halo 3: ODST driven by sales of the bundled units. Though MTV Games was pleased with the sales performance of the game, the sales numbers fell short of the projected values by industry analysts, attributing it to the slow recovery of the video game market from the late-2000s recession. As of December 2009, Harmonix has stated that the game has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. NPD Group data through the end of 2009 reported North American sales of the game at 1.18 and 1.7 million. In considering the comparison of The Beatles: Rock Band sales in North America to the nearly 1 million units sold by Guitar Hero 5, the magazine Advertising Age identified the ability of MTV Games and Harmonix to leverage the music of the Beatles and their other partners in novel and experimental methods among more traditional means. In an October 2010 interview Alex Rigopulos claimed that The Beatles: Rock Band sales were "respectable", having sold "well over three million units", though had not exceeded sales of other Rock Band'' games. |
12,364,593 | Thomas Ellison | 1,165,973,057 | New Zealand rugby union player | [
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| Thomas Rangiwahia Ellison, also known as Tom Ellison or Tamati Erihana (c. 1867 – 2 October 1904) was a New Zealand rugby union player and lawyer. He led the first New Zealand representative rugby team organised by the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU) on their 1893 tour of Australia. Ellison also played in the 1888–89 New Zealand Native football team on their epic 107-match tour, scoring 113 points, and 43 tries with the side.
Born in Ōtākou, Otago Heads, Ellison was educated at Te Aute College, where he was introduced to rugby. After moving to Wellington, Ellison played for the Poneke Football Club, and was selected to play for Wellington province. He was recruited into Joe Warbrick's privately organised Native football team in 1888, and continued to play for both Poneke and Wellington on his return from that tour. In 1892, he started to refine and popularise the wing-forward system of play, which was a vital element of New Zealand rugby's success until 1932. At the first NZRFU annual general meeting in 1893, he proposed that the playing colours of the New Zealand side should be predominantly black with a silver fern—a playing strip that would give the team their famous name of All Blacks. He retired from playing rugby after captaining the 1893 New Zealand side to New South Wales and Queensland, but continued in the sport as a coach and administrator. Ellison was the author of a coaching manual, The Art of Rugby Football, published in 1902.
As well as being one of the first Māori admitted to the bar, practising as a solicitor, and later as a barrister, Ellison also stood unsuccessfully for the Southern Maori parliamentary seat several times. After contracting tuberculosis in 1904, he was briefly institutionalised before dying later that year.
## Early life
Thomas Rangiwahia Ellison was born in Ōtākou at Otago Heads, to Raniera Taheke Ellison and Nani Weller, sometime between 1866 and 1868. He was named after his paternal grandfather, and his middle name, Rangiwahia, was given in honour of his great-uncle. Ellison was Māori: of Ngāi Tahu and Kāti Māmoe tribal heritage through his mother, and of Te Āti Awa heritage through his father. Introduced to rugby at the age of around 14 by his cousins at Ōtākou, Ellison later wrote of his first game:
> ... we were all there for a game, and immediately started on that poor, unprotected ball (which, by the way, consisted of the bladder only). What our main object was I cannot say, but mine was to see more of that ball, and to know more about football, and, before the game was over, which did not last long, I did see more of the ball, as I ripped it in the first scrum; but my other object remained unsatisfied.
After completing his education at Ōtākou Native School, Ellison was awarded a scholarship in 1882 to attend the famous Māori secondary school Te Aute College in the Hawke's Bay. He started playing organised rugby there, and during his final two years played in the school team that won the Hawke's Bay senior club championship. Later in life Ellison claimed that at Te Aute he learned, "nearly all I ever knew of forward play".
After moving to Wellington, Ellison joined the Poneke Football Club in 1885. The Poneke team played junior club rugby at the time, but were promoted to the senior competition after winning all their matches that year. Following their promotion the side won the Wellington club championship each year from 1886 to 1889. Ellison was selected to play for the Wellington provincial team in 1885, and continued to be selected for Wellington until 1892. He eventually earned 23 caps—a large number for the time. Initially Ellison played as a forward or on the wing, but later played half-back.
## New Zealand Native football team
In early 1888 Joe Warbrick attempted to organise a private party of Māori players to tour Great Britain—later known as the New Zealand Native football team. A cousin of Ellison's, Jack Taiaroa, who had toured with the New Zealand team that travelled to New South Wales in 1884, helped Warbrick recruit players for his proposed tour. It was most likely because of Taiaroa that Ellison was persuaded to join Warbrick's Natives team. Warbrick eventually assembled a side that included both Māori and non-Māori New Zealand-born players, and several players born overseas. The final team consisted of 26 players, and toured New Zealand before departing to Melbourne. They then toured Great Britain, Australia, and finally New Zealand again—the trip lasted 14 months. Ellison played mostly as a forward throughout the tour, and played at least 83 of the team's 107 matches; including a minimum of 58 in Britain.
Ellison played all of the Natives' three internationals—against Ireland, Wales, and England. The Ireland match was the first international of the tour, two months after their arrival in the British Isles. The fixture was played at Lansdowne Road, Dublin, on 1 December 1888, with Ellison in the forwards. Ireland led 3–0 at half-time, but the Natives improved considerably in the second-half, scoring four tries. The third try scored was by Ellison after a counter-attack by George Williams. The try was not converted, but the strong finish from the New Zealanders gave the team a 13–4 victory. The Irish press were surprised by the loss and strongly criticised their team, but Ireland went on to defeat Wales later that season. The match against Wales was later that month, 22 December, in Swansea. Again Ellison played in the forwards, and the Natives dominated for significant periods of the match. Ellison made several strong runs, and at one point crossed the try-line only to be carried back into play. They failed to score, however, and Wales were victorious 5–0 (one conversion and two tries to nil).
One of the most notable events of the Natives' tour occurred during the match against England at Blackheath. Owing to a dispute over the formation of the International Rugby Football Board, England had not played an international in nearly two years. This contributed to at least twelve of their team lacking international experience—however many of their players were from strong club and county sides. The match was notable for a dispute between the New Zealanders and the match referee—Rowland Hill. Early in the second half Ellison attempted to tackle the English player Andrew Stoddart, and in the process managed to rip his shorts off. The Natives' players promptly formed a circle around Stoddart to allow him to replace his clothing without being exposed to the gazes of the crowd. While this was happening one of the English players, Frank Evershed, picked up the ball and scored a try. The New Zealanders protested, believing that play had stopped after claiming Stoddart had called "dead ball". Hill awarded the try however, causing several of the Native players to leave the field in protest. The aggrieved players were eventually persuaded to return, but not before Hill had restarted play. Ellison was very critical of Hill; particularly because Hill was also Secretary of England's Rugby Football Union. Writing after the tour, Ellison said of the incident: "gross as these errors were, they were insignificant when compared with another that Mr Hill committed at the outset of the game, viz, refereeing at all in that game".
The team was generally very well received outside London, and especially in north, where rugby was dominated by the working-class. Reaction to the team in the south, where the public school establishment controlled the game, was less positive, and the sportsmanship of the team was criticised. Despite this, Ellison clearly enjoyed the experience of touring with the team, and in 1902 he wrote—"I shall never forget the trip, notwithstanding the extremely heavy programme of fixtures we had to go through. Perhaps the most delightful part of our experiences was tasted not so much on the field of play as off it".
Thomas Eyton, one of the promoters of the tour, said of Ellison's contribution—"His knowledge of the finer points of the game, his weight, strength and activity rendered his services invaluable." Ellison participated in most of the Natives' matches, scoring 113 points, and 43 tries on tour; this included 23 tries in Britain and Ireland, four in New South Wales, five in Queensland, and ten in New Zealand.
## Wing-forward
After completion of the tour, Ellison continued to play for Poneke and Wellington. While playing with his club, Ellison implemented the use of a wing-forward and seven-man scrum positional system. It is not known exactly who invented the position of wing-forward, but Ellison claimed in The Art of Rugby Football that he had developed it; historian Greg Ryan claims the position was developed in northern England, and that Ellison only refined it after discovering it during the Natives' tour. The distinctive feature of wing-forward play was their role of feeding the ball into the scrum, and subsequently holding onto one of the hookers while the ball progressed through the scrum to the half-back. With the wing-forward bound to the side of the scrum, the opposing half-back would then have to manoeuvre past them to tackle the player with the ball; this would increase the amount of time the half-back would have in possession of the ball before their opposite could tackle them. Ellison claimed that he devised the position while playing for Poneke after he "found it impossible for the smartest of referees to detect and amply penalize off-side interferences of opponents bent on spoiling my passes".
Regardless of the origins of the position, Ellison was instrumental in promoting its adoption throughout New Zealand. Although it is unclear whether the wing-forward was used during the 1893 tour of Australia, by the time of the All Blacks' first test match, played during their 1903 Australian tour, the position was engrained within the New Zealand style of play. The use of a wing-forward provoked controversy both in New Zealand, and later in the British Isles after the All Blacks toured there in 1905; wing-forwards were often accused of off-side obstruction of the opposition half-back. According to Ellison however, if the position was implemented properly, then there would be no cause for complaint. The wing-forward continued as a vital component of New Zealand rugby until long-standing complaints from the unions of the Home Nations resulted in the position being outlawed by the International Rugby Football Board in 1932.
## Later rugby career
In 1892, the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU—later renamed New Zealand Rugby Union) was formed by the majority of New Zealand's provincial rugby unions. Ellison was a Wellington provincial administrator, and in 1893 at the inaugural NZRFU annual general meeting proposed the playing strip for the first officially sanctioned New Zealand side—black cap, black jersey with white fern, white knickerbockers and black stockings. The white knickerbockers were eventually replaced with black shorts, and the uniform itself was based upon that worn by the Native team Ellison had toured with. The black uniform inspired the moniker All Blacks—a name which has been adopted by the New Zealand national team since their 1905–06 Northern Hemisphere tour.
The first NZRFU sanctioned New Zealand team was formed to tour New South Wales and Queensland in 1893, and Ellison was selected as their captain. Three other members of the New Zealand Natives' team were also selected for the side. Ellison played seven matches on the tour, including matches against New South Wales and Queensland. The team won ten of their eleven matches—the one loss being to New South Wales in Sydney. In addition to scoring two tries, Ellison kicked six conversions and a goal from a mark to give him 23 points for the tour—the second highest of any player. The tour was the end of his participation in the sport as a player.
Ellison's complete playing record comprised 117 matches, 68 of which were first-class games. He scored a total of 160 career points, including 51 tries. Ellison continued involvement with rugby as a provincial administrator, provincial referee, and manager. As an administrator, he proposed that players be financially compensated for wages missed while on long tours; this was in 1898—nearly a century before rugby relinquished its amateur status. This proposal applied specifically to tours that travelled outside New Zealand; writing at the time regarding the amateur regulations, Ellison said "I think that these laws were never intended to apply to extended tours abroad." In 1902 he published The Art of Rugby Football, a coaching manual on rugby that also included accounts of his experiences as a player. According to journalist Hayden Meikle the book was one of rugby's "pioneering texts", while Greg Ryan wrote that the book "remains a classic work on early rugby strategy."
## Professional and personal life
Outside of his involvement in rugby, Ellison was a lawyer, and was one of the first Māori admitted to the bar. He practised as an interpreter for the Land Courts and as a solicitor; later, he worked as a barrister in the practices of Brandon & Hislop in Wellington. Ellison was also involved in politics, and stood unsuccessfully for the Southern Maori parliamentary seat several times against Tame Parata, as well as working for government consideration of Ngāi Tahu land claims. He married Ethel May Howell, a daughter of John Howell, on 22 March 1899; the couple had three children, only one of whom survived infancy, daughter Hinemura who died in 1989. In 1904 Ellison was struck down with tuberculosis, and was admitted to Porirua Lunatic Asylum before dying on 2 October that same year. Ellison was buried in Ōtākou, Otago Heads, following the original plan of a burial at Karori. Representatives of Ellison's parents intercepted the body in Porirua, and his wife and Public Trustee then agreed for him to be buried at Ōtākou. There his gravestone reads "One of the greatest rugby footballers New Zealand ever possessed".
Ellison's influence on New Zealand rugby is such that Māori researcher Malcolm Mulholland stated he was "arguably the player who contributed the most to New Zealand rugby". In 1916, when discussing the question of the greatest player New Zealand had produced, the pseudonymous "Touchline" wrote: "I am prepared to say that the late T. R. Ellison... was the greatest of them all." He went on to say:
> When occasion demanded, T R. Ellison could take a place among the backs—half or three-quarter—and was a fine coach. He could not only plan out great, deep, wily, and pretty schemes, but personally carry them through to triumphant execution. He could take his place in the front of a scrummage, and hook the ball with the best of them; his tremendous strength enabled him to burst through a pack, and then, when he was clear of the wreckage, and was well in the open, he was a perfect demon.
Ellison has been inducted into the Māori Sports Hall of Fame, and in 2005 was listed as one of New Zealand's Top 100 History Makers. The New Zealand Native Football team was inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame (then the International Rugby Board Hall of Fame) in 2008, the first side awarded the honour.
## See also
- List of 1888–89 New Zealand Native football team matches |
382,952 | Frederick Browning | 1,170,492,765 | British Army general (1896–1965) | [
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| Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Arthur Montague "Boy" Browning, GCVO, KBE, CB, DSO (20 December 1896 – 14 March 1965) was a senior officer of the British Army who has been called the "father of the British airborne forces". He was also an Olympic bobsleigh competitor, and the husband of author Daphne du Maurier.
Educated at Eton College and then at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, Browning was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Grenadier Guards in 1915. During the First World War, he fought on the Western Front, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for conspicuous gallantry during the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917. In September 1918, he became aide de camp to General Sir Henry Rawlinson.
During the Second World War, Browning commanded the 1st Airborne Division and I Airborne Corps and was also the deputy commander of First Allied Airborne Army during Operation Market Garden in September 1944. During the planning for this operation, he was alleged to have said: "I think we might be going a bridge too far." In December 1944 he became Chief of Staff of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command. From September 1946 to January 1948, he was Military Secretary of the War Office.
In January 1948, Browning became Comptroller and Treasurer to Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh. After she ascended to the throne to become Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, he became treasurer in the Office of the Duke of Edinburgh. He suffered a severe nervous breakdown in 1957 and retired in 1959. He died at Menabilly, the mansion that inspired his wife's novel Rebecca, on 14 March 1965.
## Early life
Frederick Arthur Montague Browning was born on 20 December 1896 at his family home in Kensington, London. The house was later demolished to make way for an expansion of Harrods, allowing him to claim in later life that he had been born in its piano department. He was the first son of Frederick Henry Browning, a wine merchant, and his wife Anne "Nancy" née Alt. He had one sibling, an older sister, Helen Grace. From an early age, he was known to his family as "Tommy". He was educated at West Downs School and Eton College, which his grandfather had attended. While at Eton, he joined the Officer Training Corps.
## First World War
Browning sat the entrance examinations for the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, on 24 November 1914. Although he did not achieve the necessary scores in all the required subjects, the headmasters of some schools, including Eton, were in a position to recommend students for nomination by the Army Council. The headmaster of Eton, Edward Lyttelton, put Browning's name forward and in this way he entered Sandhurst on 27 December 1914. He graduated on 16 June 1915, and was commissioned a second lieutenant into the Grenadier Guards. Joining such an exclusive regiment, even in wartime, required a personal introduction and an interview by the regimental commander, Colonel Sir Henry Streatfeild.
Initially, Browning joined the 4th Battalion, Grenadier Guards, which was training at Bovington Camp. When it departed for the Western Front in August 1915, he was transferred to the 5th (Reserve) Battalion. In October 1915 he left it to join the 2nd Battalion at the front. The battalion formed part of the 1st Guards Brigade of the Guards Division. Around this time he acquired the nickname "Boy". For a time he served in the same company of 2nd Battalion as Major Winston Churchill. Upon Churchill's arrival, Browning was given the job of showing him the company's trenches. When Browning discovered that Churchill had no greatcoat, Browning gave Churchill his own.
Browning was invalided back to England with trench fever in January 1916, and, although only hospitalised for four weeks, did not rejoin the 2nd Battalion at the front until 6 October 1916. After being released from hospital, he went on leave for two months. In April he was posted to the 5th (Reserve) Battalion, and then to the Guards Depot at Caterham Barracks. He was assessed each month by a medical board at Caxton Hall, and was not passed as fit for service at the front until 20 September. Browning fought in the Battle of Pilckem Ridge on 31 July 1917, the Battle of Poelcappelle on 9 October and the Battle of Cambrai in November. He distinguished himself in this battle, for which he received the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). The order was generally given to officers in command, above the rank of captain. When a junior officer like Browning, who was still only a lieutenant, was awarded the DSO, this was often regarded as an acknowledgement that the officer had only just missed out on being awarded the Victoria Cross. His citation read:
> For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He took command of three companies whose officers had all become casualties, reorganised them, and proceeded to consolidate. Exposing himself to very heavy machine-gun and rifle fire, in two hours he had placed the front line in a strong state of defence. The conduct of this officer, both in the assault and more especially afterwards, was beyond all praise, and the successful handing over of the front to the relieving unit as an entrenched and strongly fortified position was entirely due to his energy and skill.
He was awarded the French Croix de Guerre on 14 December 1917, and was mentioned in despatches on 23 May 1918. In September 1918, during the Hundred Days Offensive which saw the tide of the war turn in favour of the Allies, Browning temporarily became aide de camp to General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of the British Fourth Army. The appointment only lasted a few weeks, however, before Browning returned to his regiment in early November. He was promoted to the temporary rank of captain, and appointed adjutant of the 1st Grenadier Guards, then part of the 3rd Guards Brigade of the Guards Division, in November 1918.
## Inter-war period
Browning was granted the substantive rank of captain on 24 November 1920. He retained his post as adjutant until November 1921, when he was posted to the Guards' Depot at Caterham Barracks. In 1924 he was posted to Sandhurst as adjutant. He was the first adjutant, during the Sovereign's Parade of 1926, to ride his horse (named "The Vicar") up the steps of Old College and to dismount in the Grand Entrance. There is no satisfactory explanation as to why he did it. After the Second World War this became an enduring tradition, but since horses have great difficulty going down steps, a ramp is now provided for the horse to return.
Other members of staff at Sandhurst at the time included Richard O'Connor, Miles Dempsey, Douglas Gracey, Ronald Brittain and Eric Dorman-Smith. Dorman-Smith and Browning became close friends. Browning relinquished the appointment of adjutant at Sandhurst on 28 April 1928, and was promoted to major on 22 May 1928. Following a pattern whereby tours of duty away from the regiment alternated with those in it, he was sent for a refresher course at the Small Arms School before being posted to the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, at Pirbright.
His workload was very light, allowing plenty of time for sport. Browning competed in the Amateur Athletic Association of England championships in hurdling but failed to make Olympic selection. He did however make the Olympic five-man bobsleigh team as brake-man. An injury incurred during a training accident prevented his participation in the bobsleigh at the 1924 Winter Olympics, but he competed in the bobsleigh at the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in which his team finished tenth. Browning was also a keen sailor, competing in the Household Cavalry Sailing Regatta at Chichester Harbour in 1930. He purchased his own motor boat, a 20-foot (6.1 m) cabin cruiser that he named Ygdrasil.
In 1931, Browning read Daphne du Maurier's novel The Loving Spirit and, impressed by its graphic depictions of the Cornish coastline, set out to see it for himself on Ygdrasil. Afterwards, he left the boat moored in the River Fowey for the winter, and returned in April 1932 to collect it. He heard that the author of the book that had impressed him so much was convalescing from an appendix operation, and invited her out on his boat. After a short romance, he proposed to her but she rejected this, as she did not believe in marriage. Dorman-Smith visited her and explained that it would be disastrous for Browning's career for him to live with Du Maurier without marriage. Du Maurier then proposed to Browning, who accepted. They were married in a simple ceremony at the Church of St Willow, Lanteglos-by-Fowey on 19 July 1932, and honeymooned on Ygdrasil. Their marriage produced three children: two daughters, Tessa (later second wife of David Montgomery, 2nd Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, son and heir of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery) and Flavia (later wife of General Sir Peter Leng), and a son, Christian, known as Kits.
Browning was promoted to lieutenant-colonel on 1 February 1936, and was appointed commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards. The battalion was deployed to Egypt in 1936 and returned in December 1937. His term as commander ended on 1 August 1939; he was removed from the Grenadier Guards' regimental list but remained on full pay. On 1 September, he was promoted to colonel, with his seniority backdated to 1 February 1939, and became Commandant of the Small Arms School.
## Second World War
### Airborne troops
#### Establishment
In mid-May 1940, eight months after the outbreak of the Second World War, Browning, promoted to brigadier, was given command of the 128th (Hampshire) Infantry Brigade (consisting of the 1/4th, 2/4th and 5th Battalions of the Hampshire Regiment). Part of the 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division, which was then commanded by Major-General Robert Pollok, the brigade was a Territorial Army unit that was preparing to join the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France. This was pre-empted by the Dunkirk evacuation and the subsequent fall of France in June, and the division instead assumed a defensive posture. The next few months were spent in numerous activities, the most important of which was training to repel a German invasion of Britain. The severe shortage of equipment that plagued the army during this time made Browning's already formidable task even more difficult. Despite this, he managed to impress his superiors, including his immediate superior, Pollok, who was inspired by the way in which Browning's brigade responded to his command. He recommended Browning for the command of a division, as did Lieutenant-General Francis Nosworthy, commanding IV Corps (the 43rd Division's parent formation), and Lieutenant-General Guy Williams, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Eastern Command, although all three believed that Browning needed more time and experience.
In late February 1941, after handing over the brigade to Brigadier Manley James, Browning succeeded Brigadier The Hon. William Fraser, a fellow Grenadier Guardsman and an old friend, in command of the 24th Guards Brigade Group. Such was his popularity by now within the 128th Brigade, that when Browning left his old command many members of the brigade turned out to cheer him on and wish him well. While the 24th Brigade was not a division, it was perhaps the next best thing to one. The brigade group's objective was to defend London from an attack from the south.
On 3 November 1941, Browning was promoted to the acting rank of major-general, and appointed as the first General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the newly created 1st Airborne Division. The division initially comprised the 1st Parachute Brigade, under Brigadier Richard Gale, and the 1st Airlanding Brigade, under Brigadier George Hopkinson. In this new role he was instrumental in parachutists adopting the maroon beret, and assigned an artist, Major Edward Seago, to design the Parachute Regiment's emblem of the warrior Bellerophon riding Pegasus, the winged horse. Because of this he has been called the "father of the British airborne forces". Browning designed his own uniform. He qualified as a pilot in 1942, and henceforth wore the Army Air Corps wings, which he also designed.
#### Training
Browning supervised the newly formed division as it underwent a prolonged period of expansion and intensive training, with new brigades raised and assigned to the division, and new equipment tested. Though not considered an airborne warfare visionary, he proved adept at dealing with the War Office and Air Ministry, and demonstrated a knack for overcoming bureaucratic obstacles. As the airborne forces expanded in size, the major difficulty in getting the 1st Airborne Division ready for operations was a shortage of aircraft. The Royal Air Force (RAF) had neglected air transport before the war, and the only available aircraft for airborne troops were conversions of obsolete bombers like the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, in particular, felt that the 1st Airborne Division was not worth the drain on RAF Bomber Command's resources.
When Churchill, who was now the Prime Minister, and General George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, visited the 1st Airborne Division on 16 April 1942, they were treated to a demonstration involving every available aircraft of No. 38 Wing RAF—12 Whitleys and nine Hawker Hector biplanes towing General Aircraft Hotspur gliders. At a meeting on 6 May chaired by Churchill, Browning was asked what he required. He stated that he needed 96 aircraft to get the 1st Airborne Division battle-ready. Churchill directed Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal to find the required aircraft, and Portal agreed to supply 83 Whitleys, along with 10 Halifax bombers to tow the new, larger General Aircraft Hamilcar gliders.
In July 1942, Browning travelled to the United States, where he toured airborne training facilities with his American counterpart, Major-General William C. Lee, who soon took command of the US 101st Airborne Division. Browning's tendency to lecture the Americans on airborne warfare made him few friends among the Americans, who felt that the British were still novices themselves. Browning was envious of the Americans' equipment, particularly the Dakota transports. On returning to the United Kingdom, he arranged for a joint exercise to be conducted with the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment (2/503).
#### Operation Torch
In mid–September, as the 1st Airborne Division was coming close to reaching full strength, Browning was informed that Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, would take place in November. When he found that the 2/503 was to take part, Browning argued that a larger airborne force should be utilised, as the vast distances and comparatively light opposition would provide opportunities for airborne operations. The War Office and the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, General Sir Bernard Paget, were won over by Browning's arguments, and agreed to detach the 1st Parachute Brigade, now under Brigadier Edwin Flavell, from 1st Airborne Division and place it under the command of US Lieutenant-General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would command all Allied troops participating in the invasion. After it had been brought to full operational strength, partly by cross-posting personnel from the newly formed 2nd Parachute Brigade, under Brigadier Ernest Down, and had been provided with sufficient equipment and resources, the brigade departed for North Africa at the beginning of November.
The results of British airborne operations in North Africa were mixed, and the subject of a detailed report by Browning. The airborne troops had operated under several handicaps, including shortages of aerial photographs and maps of the target area. All the troop carrier aircrew were American, who lacked familiarity with airborne operations and in dealing with British troops and equipment. Browning felt that the inexperience with handling airborne operations extended to Eisenhower's Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) and that of the British First Army, resulting in the paratroops being misused. He felt that had they been employed more aggressively and in greater strength they might have shortened the Tunisian campaign by some months. The 1st Parachute Brigade was called the "Rote Teufel" ("Red Devils") by the German troops they had fought. Browning pointed out to the brigade that this was an honour, as "distinctions given by the enemy are seldom won in battle except by the finest fighting troops." The title was officially confirmed by General Sir Harold Alexander, commander of the Allied 18th Army Group, and henceforth it applied to all British airborne troops.
#### Allied Force Headquarters posting
On 1 January 1943, Browning was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath. He relinquished command of the 1st Airborne Division to Hopkinson in March 1943 to take up a new post as Major-General, Airborne Forces at Eisenhower's AFHQ. He soon clashed with the commander of the American 82nd Airborne Division, Major-General Matthew Ridgway. When Browning asked to see the plans for Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, Ridgway replied that they would not be available for scrutiny until after they had been approved by the US Seventh Army commander, Lieutenant-General George S. Patton. When Browning protested, Patton backed Ridgway, but Eisenhower and his chief of staff, Major-General Walter Bedell Smith, supported Browning and forced them to back down.
Browning's dealings with the British Army were no smoother. Hopkinson sold the British Eighth Army commander, General Sir Bernard Montgomery, on Operation Ladbroke, a glider landing to seize the Ponte Grande road bridge south of Syracuse. Browning's objections to the operation were ignored, and attempts to discuss airborne operations with the corps commanders elicited a directive from Montgomery that all such discussion had to go through him. The operation was a disaster, as Browning had predicted. Inexperienced aircrew released the gliders too early, and many crashed into the sea; 252 soldiers were drowned. Those that made it to land were scattered over a wide area. The troops captured their objective, but were driven off by an Italian counterattack. Browning concluded that to be effective, the airborne advisor had to have equal rank with the army commanders.
In September 1943, Browning travelled to India, where he inspected the 50th Parachute Brigade, and met with Major-General Orde Wingate, the commander of the Chindits. Browning held a series of meetings with General Sir Claude Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief, India; Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, the Air Officer Commander-in-Chief; and Lieutenant-General Sir George Giffard, the GOC Eastern Army. They discussed plans for improving the airborne establishment in India and expanding the airborne force there to a division. As a result of these discussions, and Browning's subsequent report to the War Office, the 44th Indian Airborne Division was formed in October 1944. Browning sent his most experienced airborne commander, Major-General Ernest Down, to India as GOC of the 44th Division. Formerly the commander of the 2nd Parachute Brigade, Down had succeeded Hopkinson as GOC 1st Airborne Division after Hopkinson had been killed in Italy. Down's replacement as GOC 1st Airborne Division was Montgomery's selection, Major-General Roy Urquhart, an officer with no airborne experience, rather than Browning's choice, Brigadier Gerald Lathbury of the 1st Parachute Brigade. The decision was to become controversial.
US Brigadier-General James M. Gavin, recalled that when he travelled to England in November 1943 to assume command of the 82nd Airborne Division, Ridgway "cautioned me against the machinations and scheming of General F. M. Browning, who was the senior British airborne officer, and well he should have." Gavin was taken aback by Browning's criticism of Ridgway on the grounds that he had not parachuted into Sicily with his troops. US Major-General Ray Barker, who worked in Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), warned him that Browning was "an empire builder", an assessment with which Gavin came to agree.
### Operation Market Garden
Browning assumed a new command on 4 December 1943. His Directive No. 1 announced that "the title of the force is Headquarters, Airborne Troops (21st Army Group). All correspondence will bear the official title, but verbally it will be known as the Airborne Corps and I will be referred to as the Corps Commander." He was promoted to lieutenant-general on 7 January 1944, with his seniority backdated to 9 December 1943. He officially became commander of I Airborne Corps on 16 April 1944.
I Airborne Corps became part of the First Allied Airborne Army, commanded by Lieutenant-General Lewis H. Brereton, in August 1944. While retaining command of the corps, Browning also became Deputy Commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, despite a poor relationship with Brereton and being disliked by many American officers. During preparations for one of many cancelled operations, Linnete II, his disagreement with Brereton over a risky operation caused him to threaten resignation, which, due to differences in military culture, Brereton regarded as tantamount to disobeying an order. Browning was forced to back down.
When I Airborne Corps was committed to action in Operation Market Garden in September 1944, Browning's rift with Brereton had severe repercussions. Browning was concerned about the timetable put forward by Major-General Paul L. Williams of the IX Troop Carrier Command, under which the drop was staggered over several days, with only one drop on the first day. This restricted the number of combat troops that would be available on the first day. He also disagreed with the British drop zones proposed by Air Vice Marshal Leslie Hollinghurst of No. 38 Group, which he felt were too distant from the bridge at Arnhem, but Browning felt unable to challenge the airmen.
Browning downplayed Ultra evidence brought to him by his intelligence officer, Major Brian Urquhart, that the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen and the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg were in the Arnhem area, but was not as confident as he led his subordinates to believe. According to Major-General Roy Urquhart, when informed that his airborne troops would have to hold the bridge for two days, Browning responded that they could hold it for four, but later claimed that he had added: "But I think we might be going a bridge too far."
Browning landed by gliders with a tactical headquarters near Nijmegen with Gavin's 82nd Airborne Division. His use of 38 aircraft to move his corps headquarters on the first lift has been criticised. Half of these gliders carried signal equipment but for much of the operation he had no contact with either the British 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem or Major-General Maxwell D. Taylor's US 101st Airborne Division at Eindhoven. His headquarters had not been envisaged as a frontline unit, and the signals section that had been hastily assembled just weeks before lacked training and experience. In his pack, Browning carried three teddy bears and a framed print of Albrecht Dürer's The Praying Hands. After the war, Gavin was criticised for the decision to secure the high ground around Groesbeek before attempting the capture of the road and the railway bridges at Nijmegen. Browning took responsibility for this, noting that he "personally gave an order to Jim Gavin that, although every effort should be made to effect the capture of the Grave and Nijmegen bridges as soon as possible, it was essential that he should capture the Groesbeek Ridge and hold it". Gavin's opinion of Browning was uncomplimentary: "There is no doubt that in our system he would have been summarily relieved and sent home in disgrace."
Browning was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta (II class) by the Polish government-in-exile, but his critical evaluation of the contribution of Polish forces led to the removal of Major-General Stanisław Sosabowski as commanding officer of the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade. Some writers later claimed that Sosabowski had been made a scapegoat for the failure of Market Garden. Montgomery attached no blame to Browning or any of his subordinates, or indeed acknowledged failure at all. He told Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the British Army, that he would like Browning to take over VIII Corps in the event that Sir Richard O'Connor, the GOC, was transferred to another theatre.
### South East Asia Command
Events took a different course. Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command (SEAC), had need of a new chief of staff owing to the poor health of Lieutenant-General Henry Pownall. Brooke turned down Mountbatten's initial request for either Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Nye or Lieutenant-General Sir John Swayne. He then offered Browning for the post, and Mountbatten accepted. Pownall considered that Browning was "excellently qualified" for the post, although Browning had no staff college training and had never held a staff job before. Pownall noted that his "only reservation is that I believe [Browning] is rather nervy and highly strung". For his services as a corps commander, Browning was mentioned in despatches a second time, and was awarded the Legion of Merit in the degree of Commander by the United States government.
Browning served in South East Asia from December 1944 until July 1946; Mountbatten soon came to regard him as indispensable. Browning had an American deputy, Major-General Horace H. Fuller, and brought staff with him from Europe to SEAC headquarters in Kandy, Ceylon. For his services at SEAC, Browning was created a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire on 1 January 1946. His last major military post was as Military Secretary of the War Office from 16 September 1946 to January 1948, although he did not formally retire from the Army until 5 April 1948.
## Later life
In January 1948, Browning became Comptroller and Treasurer to Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth. This appointment was made on the recommendation of Lord Mountbatten, whose nephew Philip Mountbatten was the Duke of Edinburgh. As such, Browning became the head of the Princess' personal staff. Browning also juggled other duties. In 1948 he was involved with the 1948 Summer Olympics as Deputy Chairman of the British Olympic Association, and commandant of the British team. From 1944 to 1962 he was Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club; on stepping down in 1962, he was elected its first admiral.
Upon the death of King George VI in 1952, the Princess Elizabeth came to the throne as Queen Elizabeth II, and Browning and his staff became redundant, as the Queen was served by the large staff of the monarch. The domestic staff remained at Clarence House, where they continued to serve the Queen Mother; the remainder were reorganised as the Office of the Duke of Edinburgh, with Browning as treasurer, the head of the office, and moved into a new and larger office at Buckingham Palace. Like the Duke they served, the office had no constitutional role, but supported his sporting, cultural and scientific interests. Browning became involved with the Cutty Sark Trust, set up to preserve the famous ship, and the administration of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award. In June 1953, Browning and du Maurier attended the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
Browning had been drinking since the war, but it now became chronic. This led to a severe nervous breakdown in July 1957, forcing his resignation from his position at the Palace in 1959. Du Maurier had known he had a mistress in Fowey, but his breakdown brought to light two other girlfriends in London. For her part, du Maurier confessed to her own wartime affair. For his services to the Royal Household, Browning was made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1953, and was advanced to Knight Grand Cross of the order in 1959. He retreated to Menabilly, the mansion that had inspired du Maurier's novel Rebecca, which she had leased and restored in 1943. He was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Cornwall in March 1960. Browning caused a scandal in 1963 when, under the influence of prescription drugs and alcohol, he was involved in an automobile accident in which two people were injured. He was fined £50 and forced to pay court and medical costs. He died from a heart attack at Menabilly on 14 March 1965.
## Legacy
Browning was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde in the film A Bridge Too Far, which was based on the events of Operation Market Garden. A copy of Browning's uniform was made to Bogarde's measurements from the original in the Parachute Regiment and Airborne Forces Museum. Du Maurier responded angrily to early reports of how Browning was portrayed, and wrote to Mountbatten, urging him to boycott the premiere. He did not do so, explaining that proceeds were going to a charity that he supported. After seeing the film he wrote back that he could find nothing detrimental to Browning in it, and did not think that Browning's reputation had been tarnished. He pointed out that Operation Market Garden was a disaster, and blame had to be shared by those in charge, which included Browning. The Parachute Regiment and Airborne Forces Museum, which opened in 1969, was for many years located in Browning Barracks at Aldershot, which had been built in 1964 and named after him. It remained the depot of the Parachute Regiment and Airborne Forces until 1993. The museum moved to the Imperial War Museum Duxford in 2008, and Browning Barracks was sold for housing development. |
8,510,188 | Stanley Savige | 1,157,928,477 | Australian Army soldier and officer | [
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"Australian Army personnel of World War II",
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| Lieutenant General Sir Stanley George Savige, KBE, CB, DSO, MC, ED (26 June 1890 – 15 May 1954) was an Australian Army soldier and officer who served in the First World War and Second World War.
In March 1915, after the outbreak of the First World War, Savige enlisted in the First Australian Imperial Force. He served in the ranks during the Gallipoli Campaign, and received a commission. He later served on the Western Front, where he was twice recommended for the Military Cross for bravery. In 1918, he joined Dunsterforce and served in the Caucasus Campaign, during which he was instrumental in protecting thousands of Assyrian refugees. He subsequently wrote a book, Stalky's Forlorn Hope, about his experiences. After the war he played a key role in the establishment of Legacy Australia, the war widows and orphans benefit fund.
During the early years of the Second World War, Savige commanded the 17th Infantry Brigade in the North African Campaign, the Battle of Greece and Syria–Lebanon Campaign. His outspoken criticism of professional soldiers earned him their rancour. He returned to Australia in early 1942, and later commanded the 3rd Division in the Salamaua–Lae campaign. He ultimately rose to the rank of lieutenant general in the Australian Army, commanding the II Corps in the Bougainville Campaign.
In later life, Savige was a director of Olympic Tyre & Rubber Ltd from 1946 to 1951 and chairman of Moran & Cato Ltd from 1950 to 1951. He was also chairman of the Central War Gratuity Board from 1946 to 1951, and a commissioner of the State Savings Bank of Victoria.
## Early life
Stanley Savige was born on 26 June 1890, in Morwell, Victoria, the eldest of eight children to Samuel Savige, a butcher, and his wife Ann Nora, née Walmsley. Stan Savige left Korumburra State School at the age of twelve to work as a blacksmith's striker. While at Korumburra, he enlisted in the school junior cadets as a bugler. The family moved to Prahran, Victoria, in 1907, where Savige worked at a variety of jobs and served in the Prahran senior cadets for 18 months, from 1907 to 1909. He became a scoutmaster, forming the First Yarra Troop. Savige was an active member of the South Yarra Baptist Church, where he was a Sunday school teacher. Through his church activities, Savige met Lilian Stockton, to whom he became engaged on New Year's Day, 1914.
## First World War
### Gallipoli
Savige enlisted in the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF) on 6 March 1915, and was posted to the 24th Infantry Battalion, which departed Melbourne for Egypt on the transport Euripides on 8 May 1915. He was passed over for a commission due to his lack of education, but was promoted to corporal on 30 April and lance sergeant on 8 May. The 24th Infantry Battalion landed at Gallipoli on 5 September 1915 and took over part of the line at Lone Pine. Savige became company sergeant major on 20 September. There, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant on 9 November 1915. During the evacuation of Gallipoli in December 1915, Savige was one of three officers chosen to serve with the battalion rearguard.
### Western Front
After a brief period of rest and reorganisation in Egypt, the 2nd Division—of which the 24th Infantry Battalion was part—embarked for France on 21 March 1916. Savige became commander of the battalion scout platoon and led a number of night patrols into no man's land. On 12 April, he became battalion intelligence officer and he was promoted to lieutenant on 1 May. Coming to the attention of his brigade commander, Brigadier General John Gellibrand, Savige was attached to 6th Infantry Brigade headquarters as a trainee brigade intelligence officer. "We expected a lot of the new B. I. O.," Gellibrand later recalled, "and we got it." Savige served in operations at Pozières and Mouquet Farm in July and August 1916. At one point he ran through heavy shellfire on an errand. The orderly who went into it with him was never seen again. Savige was promoted to captain on 15 September. On 8 November, he was wounded at Flers but remained on duty. However, on 20 December he was admitted to hospital, suffering from influenza. Savige rejoined the 24th Infantry Battalion on 5 January 1917 and was appointed adjutant on 3 February.
In February 1917, the German Army began a withdrawal from its positions in the Somme sector to the Hindenburg Line. Gellibrand was in temporary command of the 2nd Division, which at this time was opposite the village of Warlencourt. Patrols from the 6th Infantry Brigade found Warlencourt empty and occupied it unopposed. The 24th Infantry Battalion kept in contact with the Germans as they pulled back. On 13 March, the 24th Infantry battalion—now responsible for the entire brigade front—found Grévillers empty and occupied it. By 17 March 1917, the trenches in front of Bapaume were empty and the 6th Infantry Brigade occupied its northern suburbs.
In the Second Battle of Bullecourt during May 1917, the 6th Infantry Brigade managed to penetrate the Hindenburg Line but its hold was precarious, as the 5th Infantry Brigade on its flank had not been able to manage the same feat. The brigade then faced strong German counter-attacks. Savige was in the front trench, where he attempted to coordinate the 24th Infantry Battalion's defence. The situation, Savige realised, was "somewhat serious". Extraordinary tenacity and bravery was required to hold the position. "The 6th Brigade's achievement on this day," wrote Charles Bean, "had few parallels in the history of the AIF. In the whole line of battle from Vimy to near Quéant, theirs had been almost the only success."
Savige was mentioned in despatches for Bullecourt, and recommended for the Military Cross. His citation read:
> For conspicuous gallantry in action at the Hindenburg Line on 3rd May 1917. After assisting to reorganise a party of broken infantry he acted as staff officer to the Senior Officer in the captured position. In this capacity he displayed most commendable coolness, energy and ability, in securing reliable information as to the progress of the action.
Savige was ultimately awarded the Military Cross on 1 January 1918, for both his "consistent good work and devotion to duty" in the period spanning 26 February to 17 March 1917 and his "coolness under fire and tenacity of purpose" during the Second Battle of Bullecourt from April–May 1917. He was mentioned in despatches a second time for his role in the Battle of Passchendaele, although he was originally recommended for a bar to his Military Cross. His citation read:
> For conspicuous gallantry. On the night of the 3rd/4th Oct. he assisted in laying out jumping-off and direction tapes at Zonnebeke on which the attacking battalions formed up. He then checked their correctness —This was done under heavy fire. He then helped to guide the attackers to their positions.
>
> On the night 8th/9th October. he did similar work on Broodseinde Ridge under particularly heavy fire and throughout the attack on the 9th October. he remained in the forward area gathering information and forwarding it to Brigade Headquarters. This Officer has been on many occasions conspicuous for his gallantry.
Although Savige was informed that the citation had gone through, the medal was never gazetted. He became assistant brigade major of the 6th Infantry Brigade on 10 September and was acting brigade major from 22 November until 11 January 1918.
### Iran
Following the abdication of the Russian Tsar in 1917, the Caucasus Front collapsed, leaving Central Asia open to the Turkish Army. The British War Office responded with a plan to send a force of hand-picked British officers and NCOs to organise any remaining Russian forces or civilians who were ready to fight the Turkish forces. A request for Australian officers to participate was sent to the commander of the Australian Corps, General Sir William Birdwood. Some twenty officers, drawn from "the cream of the cream" of Australian leaders, were chosen, including Savige. This force became known as Dunsterforce after its commander, Major General Lionel Charles Dunsterville, the inspiration for the titular character of Rudyard Kipling's novel Stalky & Co. Dunsterforce arrived in Baku in August 1918. It was hoped that, from the Christian Georgian, Armenian and Assyrian people who had supported the Russians and historically feared the Turks, Dunsterforce could raise an army to contain the Turks but "the task proved superhuman".
Following the capture of Urmia by the Turks, Savige discovered tens of thousands of fleeing Assyrian refugees. He deployed a small group of volunteers from his own force, along with refugees, to form a rearguard to hold back the Persians and Kurds who were murdering the refugees and carrying off the young girls as slaves. Official Historian Charles Bean later wrote that:
> The stand made by Savige and his eight companions that evening and during half of the next day against hundreds of the enemy thirsting like wolves to get at the defenceless throng was as fine as any episode known to the present writer in the history of this war.
Savige was subsequently decorated with the Distinguished Service Order for his efforts on this occasion. His citation read:
> For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty during the retirement of refugees from Sain Kelen to Tikkaa Tappah, 26/28th July, 1918; also at Chalkaman, 5/6th August. In command of a small party sent to protect the rear of the column of refugees, he by his resource and able dispositions kept off the enemy, who were in greatly superior numbers. He hung on to position after position until nearly surrounded, and on each occasion extricated his command most skilfully. His cool determination and fine example inspired his men, and put heart into the frightened refugees.
For his services in Iran, Savige was also mentioned in despatches a third time. He later wrote a book about his experiences, entitled Stalky's Forlorn Hope, which was published in Melbourne in 1920. In November 1918, he was evacuated to a hospital in Bombay, suffering an attack of malaria, and returned to Australia in January 1919 on the City of Exeter.
## Between the wars
Savige married Lilian Stockton on 28 June 1919 at the South Yarra Baptist Church. Their marriage produced a daughter, Gwendolyn Lesley, who was born in 1920. Savige also raised his two nephews, Stanley James and William, after his sister Hilda died in 1924. Savige had to struggle to re-establish himself in civilian life. He was unemployed for a time before finding work with a Melbourne wholesale firm. In 1923 he became sole agent for the Returned Soldiers' Mill in Geelong. He was successful as a salesman and eventually became sole agent for all of Australia. In 1930, he ran unsuccessfully for the Victorian Legislative Assembly Electoral district of Caulfield on the Nationalist Party of Australia ticket.
In 1923, Gellibrand founded the Remembrance Club in Hobart, with the aim of encouraging returned servicemen in business. Savige visited Gellibrand in Hobart during August 1923, and Gellibrand urged him to set up a similar club in Melbourne. Soon after Savige's return to Melbourne, a group of ex-servicemen met to say farewell to one of their number who was about to go to England. Savige used this opportunity to bring up the idea of a club similar to Gellibrand's Remembrance Club. After several informal meetings, the Melbourne club's inaugural meeting was held in Anzac House, Melbourne. Legacy Australia was founded as an ex-servicemen's club, but soon became a charitable organisation focusing on war widows and orphans. For the next 26 years, due to his commitment, energy and enthusiasm, Savige's name became inseparable from both the club and the movement.
Savige joined the Militia on 19 February 1920, with his AIF rank of captain. He served with Headquarters 3rd Division—then under Gellibrand—from July 1921 to November 1924. He commanded the 37th Infantry Battalion from 1 December 1924 to 31 July 1928, the 24th Infantry Battalion from 1 August 1928 to 31 May 1935, and the 10th Infantry Brigade from 1 June 1935 to 12 October 1939. Along the way, he was promoted to major on 1 July 1924, lieutenant colonel on 1 July 1926, colonel on 1 June 1935, and brigadier on 1 May 1938. His promotion, while neither meteoric nor exceptional, was still far faster than that enjoyed by regular officers like Frank Berryman, Horace Robertson, or George Alan Vasey, who had been majors in the AIF but remained at that rank for nearly twenty years, only to find themselves junior to Militia officers like Savige. For his part, Savige was a critic of the regulars. While commander of 10th Infantry Brigade, he insisted that Royal Military College, Duntroon graduates serve first as platoon commanders before assuming staff posts, so they could acquire an understanding of the men. He wrote to Gellibrand:
> [Staff Corps] men are taken in hand at an early age and trained only to be soldiers. In peace they are chiefly military clerks with an ability to repeat the contents of the little red books. Some of course get beyond that stage but they are few in number.
## Second World War
### Libya
Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced the decision to form a Second Australian Imperial Force. He further directed that all commands in the new 6th Division would go to militiamen. Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Blamey—who was appointed commander of the 6th Division on 28 September—selected Savige to command its 17th Infantry Brigade, the brigade from Victoria. Savige was given the AIF serial number VX13. He and Blamey had worked together when Blamey had commanded the 3rd Division from 1931 to 1937, and Savige was "almost fanatically loyal to Blamey through bad as well as good times". For regular officers, their exclusion from command positions was "the final straw". Savige suspected—accurately in part—that Staff Corps officers were out to get him. A "general atmosphere of criticism and derogation" infected the force that would eventually sour relations between Blamey and some Staff Corps officers.
Considering its inexperience, Savige's 17th Infantry Brigade was given a complicated role in the Battle of Bardia. While the 2/6th Infantry Battalion made a demonstration on the right, the 2/5th Infantry Battalion, reinforced by part of the 2/7th Infantry Battalion, attempted to follow up the 16th Infantry Brigade's attack, with the remainder of the 2/7th in reserve. The brigade had to move in four directions at once. The plan soon went wrong, as the 2/5th in particular suffered a series of mishaps. By nightfall, Colonel Frank Berryman, the divisional chief of staff, had reached the conclusion that the 17th Infantry Brigade had become too tired and disorganised for further effort. This was only partly due to enemy action; the rest was attributable to Berryman's own plan, which had dispersed the brigade and provided it with inadequate armoured and, in the final stages, artillery support. Savige also bore some of the blame, for failing to ensure that his subordinates understood and carried out the plan.
At the Battle of Tobruk, Savige's 17th Infantry Brigade was again split up and given a secondary role. However, in the advance on Derna, the brigade managed to beat Robertson's 19th Infantry Brigade to Giovanni Berta. By late February, the campaign was over and Savige was tasked with holding a defensive line near El Agheila. He became convinced that German troops were moving into the area, but his concerns were dismissed by the Brigadier General Staff at I Corps, Brigadier Sydney Rowell. A month later, Savige was proven right when the Afrika Korps pounced on the British forces around El Agheila, but by then he and the 17th Infantry Brigade were in Egypt, preparing for the Battle of Greece. Although the campaign had raised doubts about his suitability for command—mostly resulting from his performance at Bardia, but also with regard to the running feud with Vasey, Berryman and Robertson—Savige was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. His citation read:
> Brigadier Savige commanded the 17th Aust. Inf. Bde in the Battles of Bardia (3–5 Jan) Tobruk (21–22 Jan), Derna (24–31 Jan), and the pursuit to Slonta. He showed fine control organisation and leadership throughout, culminating in an excellent example of initiative and drive which broke the enemy flank west of Derna thus accelerating the enemy retreat and final defeat.
### Greece and Syria
The 17th Infantry Brigade was the last to land in Greece, arriving at Piraeus on 12 April. Savige was placed in charge of Savige Force, consisting of the 2/5th, 2/6th, 2/7th and 2/11th Infantry Battalions, with armour, artillery, engineer and other support. He was given the mission of covering the Allied flank around Kalabaka. On 17 April, Savige received orders to withdraw from Kalabaka, leaving only a rearguard behind. The road behind him, however, was packed with vehicles, and a crucial bridge on the only reasonably good road back had accidentally been demolished. Savige elected to disregard his orders and hold his position until the road was clear. He then managed to withdraw, although his driver's foot was broken in an air raid. Savige arrived back in Palestine on 1 May 1941 and began the task of rebuilding his brigade. For the campaign in Greece, he received his fourth mention in despatches.
In June 1941, the 7th Division fought in the Syria–Lebanon Campaign. One of its problems was that it was trying to fight three battles with only two brigades, because the 18th Infantry Brigade that was normally part of the division was engaged in the siege of Tobruk. Accordingly, Savige's 17th Infantry Brigade headquarters was brought in to provide the 7th Division with a third brigade headquarters. Savige was given three battalions that had never worked together before—the 2/3rd and 2/5th Infantry Battalions and 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion. He scored a notable success in the Battle of Damour, which he rated as his most successful battle of the war, although his conduct was not above criticism by Berryman, who felt that Savige had located his headquarters too far back, resulting in failure to seize an important opportunity. Ultimately, though, this had no significant impact on the battle.
By June 1941, Blamey had become concerned about Savige's health. A thorough medical examination in August declared that Savige had reached a stage of complete exhaustion. Blamey therefore decided to send Savige and Brigadier J. J. Murray back to Australia on a recruiting campaign as "a graceful way of retiring with honour two officers who have done useful work in the Middle East but seemed to him unequal to the severe physical demands of fast-moving modern warfare". Savige said goodbye to the three battalions of the 17th Brigade at a special parade at Edsaya in Syria on 15 December 1941. At the time his next post was to have been Director of Recruiting and Propaganda in Australia.
### Defence of Australia
Savige arrived in Australia on 5 January 1942 to find that his new appointment had been changed to commander of the 3rd Division, and he was promoted to the rank of major general two days later. The outbreak of war with Japan prompted a wholesale reorganisation of the forces in Australia and Savige was one of a number of officers with experience in the Middle East who was promoted and given command of a Home Army formation. Savige threw himself into the task of preparing his command for the war, weeding out the physically unfit and incompetent. By May, he had removed some 60 officers. Replacing them was another matter. The division was at less than half strength when Savige assumed command and was filled with large numbers of 18-year-old conscripts. One new arrival was especially welcome: Lieutenant Colonel John Wilton, who was posted as General Service Officer, First Grade (GSO1) in August. Savige later recalled that "I never had a more competent staff, nor such a co-operative team, than that staff after Wilton came along." The 3rd Division moved to southern Queensland in July, where it came under Lieutenant General Edmund Herring's II Corps. In October, Herring succeeded Rowell as commander of New Guinea Force, and Savige became acting corps commander. With his attention focused on the corps, Savige relied on Wilton to supervise the training of the 3rd Division.
### Wau–Salamaua
The 3rd Division was alerted to move to New Guinea in February 1943, but Blamey did not initially intend for Savige to command it, for he felt that "it's very tough going up there", and he still had doubts about Savige's physical fitness. A thorough medical examination cleared the way, and Savige departed for Port Moresby in March 1943. The successful conclusion of the Battle of Wau left the 17th Infantry Brigade—now under Brigadier Murray Moten—at Wau as the only troops in contact with the enemy in the South West Pacific Area. Herring, now in command of New Guinea Force, ordered Savige to threaten the Japanese position at Salamaua; the result was the Salamaua–Lae campaign. Despite the rugged conditions, Savige led from the front. He visited forward positions and flew over frontline areas wearing his scarlet general's cap band to let his men—and any Japanese sniper—know that the general was on the job.
Once again, Savige would not escape controversy. In this case, difficulties arose from the fact that Herring failed to make it clear to Savige and Wilton exactly what was meant by "threaten". What would end up being threatened by Savige's very success was Blamey's plan for the capture of Lae, which called for the Japanese defenders of Lae to be drawn away towards Salamaua. The campaign also included an acrimonious exchange between Savige and American commanders that threatened Allied harmony. This arose, ironically, because of Herring's deliberately vague instructions, which he hoped would ensure Allied harmony.
On 15 August, Blamey and Berryman, now a major general, arrived in Port Moresby. Berryman was sent forward to visit Savige and evaluate his performance, with a brief to pass judgement on Savige's conduct of the campaign—and relieve him if necessary. Although "it was an open secret that Berryman had a very low opinion of Savige's military competence", after surveying the situation for himself, Berryman was forced to admit to Wilton that he "never thought that he would have to admit that Savige was right." Berryman returned to Port Moresby and informed Blamey and Herring that they had misjudged Savige. Nonetheless, in deference to Herring's wishes, Blamey relieved Savige anyway. On 23 August, Savige, bitterly disappointed that he would not see the final capture of Salamaua, handed over the Salamaua operation to the 5th Division under Major General Edward Milford. Savige was awarded a Companion of the Order of the Bath for his services in the Salamaua campaign. His citation read:
> Maj-Gen. Savige had control of the Battle for Salamaua from 30 Jun. 43 till his relief on 26 Aug. 43. The battle was finally won on 11 Sep. 43—the credit for victory must rest with Maj-Gen. Savige during whose period of command, the back of the enemy's defence was broken. The nature of the country rendered great assistance to the defender, and careful planning alone enabled the defences to be overcome. The supplying of our forward troops was also a terrific problem.
>
> Maj-Gen. Savige triumphed over all these difficulties, his men were kept supplied, they were encouraged to endure the most dreadful hardships, and to overcome great difficulties of terrain. Maj-Gen. Savige's plans were well conceived and he saw them carried through. The success achieved is of the greatest importance to the Allied cause, and Maj-Gen. Savige by his fine leadership has made a very real contribution to the ultimate success of the United nations.
>
> The victories won over the enemy at the battles for Mubo and Komiatum were due to his well conceived plans and energetic execution.
### New Guinea
In February 1944, the appointment of Herring as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria led to a vacancy at I Corps, for which General Blamey nominated both Vasey and Savige, but, "having regard to their respective careers", recommended the latter. Army Minister Frank Forde queried Blamey's recommendation, and asked who was the senior officer. Blamey explained that Savige was senior to Vasey—although not as senior as Arthur "Tubby" Allen, James Cannan or Eric Plant. Blamey pointed out that seniority was not the paramount concern for promotion at such a level, and that he was not prepared to recommend these officers at this time, whereupon Forde dropped his objection. General Douglas MacArthur considered Vasey's supersession "outrageous".
On 12 April 1944, Savige's I Corps headquarters moved up from Queensland to relieve that of Berryman's II Corps at Finschhafen. The two staffs had hoped to exchange office equipment, thus saving on shipping, but Advanced LHQ ordered that each should move with all its stores. Instead, the designations of the two corps were exchanged, so that I Corps was still the corps in Australia and II Corps the one in New Guinea. On 20 April, II Corps was ordered to assume the designation and function of New Guinea Force and the existing headquarters of New Guinea Force in Port Moresby was broken up. Savige therefore assumed command of New Guinea Force, his new headquarters opening at Lae on 6 May. At this time, no major combat operations were taking place and activities were winding down in Australian New Guinea. New Guinea Force's main role was rolling up the base installations and shipping units back to Australia. On 9 September 1944, MacArthur discarded the task force organisation. Henceforth the US Sixth Army and Eighth Army and Lieutenant General Vernon Sturdee’s First Army reported directly to him. First Army headquarters arrived at Lae on 1 October and assumed control of Australian troops in New Guinea. At midnight, New Guinea Force was discontinued, and Savige's headquarters became II Corps once more.
### Bougainville
Although geographically the largest of the Solomon Islands, Bougainville was politically part of Australian New Guinea and Prime Minister John Curtin desired that Australia should contribute to the garrison. Savige’s II Corps was ordered to "reduce enemy resistance on Bougainville Island as opportunity offers without committing major forces". "To a commander like General Savige, who was not only deeply imbued with the doctrine of aggressiveness which was an AIF article of faith in both world wars but also burning to end his military career in a swirl of action,"" wrote correspondent John Hetherington, Savige's orders "were invitingly flexible." GHQ reckoned that there were no more than 12,000 Japanese left on Bougainville, while LHQ estimated 25,000. Actually, more than 40,000 Japanese were still alive on Bougainville in November 1944.
Savige's sixth and last campaign of the war was free of controversy about his command. Once again, he had a talented regular officer as chief of staff, Brigadier Ragnar Garrett, with whom he had worked in Greece during 1941 and more recently in New Guinea. Moreover, as a corps commander, tactical details could be left to subordinates, although Savige still had to keep a close eye on them to ensure that they did not take unnecessary risks or incur needless casualties. Savige continued to tour the front lines wearing his scarlet cap band and flying his car flag. He also maintained his concern for, and rapport with, the ordinary soldiers under his command. The final campaign on Bougainville cost 516 Australian lives. Some 8,500 Japanese were killed while 9,800 died of other causes, leaving 23,571 still alive when the war ended. On 8 September 1945, Savige accepted their surrender at Torokina.
## After the war
From October 1945 to May 1946, Savige served as co-ordinator of demobilisation and dispersal. He transferred to the Reserve of Officers on 6 June. Resuming his business interests, he was a director of Olympic Tyre & Rubber Ltd from 1946 to 1951 and chairman of Moran & Cato Ltd from 1950 to 1951. He was also chairman of the Central War Gratuity Board from 1946 to 1951 and from 1951 a commissioner of the State Savings Bank of Victoria. He was a leader in Melbourne's Anzac Day marches, a patron of a number of his former units' associations, and honorary colonel of the 5th Battalion (Victorian Scottish Regiment).
Blamey recommended Savige for a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for the Salamaua campaign in October 1944. A year later, he recommended Savige for a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath for the campaign on Bougainville. Both recommendations were turned down by the Labor government. Following the election of the coalition government in the 1949 election, Blamey wrote to the newly elected Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, requesting honours for his generals. This time he was successful, and Savige was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Military Division) in the King's Birthday Honours on 8 June 1950. In 1953, he travelled to London to represent Legacy at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
## Death
Savige died of coronary artery disease at his home in Kew, Victoria on 15 May 1954. He was accorded a funeral with full military honours at St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne. The service was conducted by the Chaplain of Southern Command and Bishop of Geelong, the Right Reverend Dr J. D. McKie, who told the congregation that "Sir Stanley's greatest virtue was humanity. He had great consideration for his troops. He thought that they were not there just to be used, but to be helped." A crowd of 3,000 mourners watched him laid to rest at Kew Cemetery (now Boroondara General Cemetery). Savige left an estate valued at £66,000. He was survived by his daughter Gwendolyn and his nephew Stanley, his wife having died two months earlier. In his will, he directed that his papers be donated to the Australian War Memorial, where they remain. The War Memorial also holds his portrait by Alfred Cook. In August 2006, Australian-Assyrian community leaders from Sydney and Melbourne gathered to commemorate Savige's role in saving Assyrian refugees in 1918, and the mayor of Morwell, Lisa Price, unveiled a bronze bust of the general.
## See also
- Witnesses and testimonies of the Armenian Genocide |
19,269,991 | Pendle witches | 1,166,933,158 | English witch hunt and trial in 1612 | [
"1612 in England",
"1612 in law",
"17th-century executions by England",
"17th-century trials",
"Borough of Pendle",
"English people executed for witchcraft",
"Executed English women",
"History of Lancashire",
"Lancashire folklore",
"People executed by Stuart England",
"Witch trials in England"
]
| The trials of the Pendle witches in 1612 are among the most famous witch trials in English history, and some of the best recorded of the 17th century. The twelve accused lived in the area surrounding Pendle Hill in Lancashire, and were charged with the murders of ten people by the use of witchcraft. All but two were tried at Lancaster Assizes on 18–19 August 1612, along with the Samlesbury witches and others, in a series of trials that have become known as the Lancashire witch trials. One was tried at York Assizes on 27 July 1612, and another died in prison. Of the eleven who went to trial – nine women and two men – ten were found guilty and executed by hanging; one was found not guilty.
The official publication of the proceedings by the clerk to the court, Thomas Potts, in his The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, and the number of witches hanged together – nine at Lancaster and one at York – make the trials unusual for England at that time. It has been estimated that all the English witch trials between the early 15th and early 18th centuries resulted in fewer than 500 executions; this series of trials accounts for more than two per cent of that total.
Six of the Pendle witches came from one of two families, each at the time headed by a woman in her eighties: Elizabeth Southerns (a.k.a. Demdike), her daughter Elizabeth Device, and her grandchildren James and Alizon Device; Anne Whittle (a.k.a. Chattox), and her daughter Anne Redferne. The others accused were Jane Bulcock and her son John Bulcock, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, Alice Grey, and Jennet Preston. The outbreaks of 'witchcraft' in and around Pendle may suggest that some people made a living as traditional healers, using a mixture of herbal medicine and talismans or charms, which might leave them open to charges of sorcery. Many of the allegations resulted from accusations that members of the Demdike and Chattox families made against each other, perhaps because they were in competition, both trying to make a living from healing, begging, and extortion.
## Religious and political background
The accused witches lived in the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire, a county which, at the end of the 16th century, was regarded by the authorities as a wild and lawless region: an area "fabled for its theft, violence and sexual laxity, where the church was honoured without much understanding of its doctrines by the common people". The nearby Cistercian abbey at Whalley had been dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537, a move strongly resisted by the local people, over whose lives the abbey had until then exerted a powerful influence. Despite the abbey's closure, and the execution of its abbot, the people of Pendle remained largely faithful to their Roman Catholic beliefs and were quick to revert to Catholicism on Queen Mary's accession to the throne in 1553.
When Mary's Protestant half-sister Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 Catholic priests once again had to go into hiding, but in remote areas such as Pendle they continued to celebrate Mass in secret. In 1562, early in her reign, Elizabeth passed a law in the form of the Witchcraft Act 1562. This demanded the death penalty, but only where harm had been caused; lesser offences were punishable by a term of imprisonment. The Act provided that anyone who should "use, practise, or exercise any Witchcraft, Enchantment, Charm, or Sorcery, whereby any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed", was guilty of a felony without benefit of clergy, and was to be put to death.
On Elizabeth's death in 1603 she was succeeded by James I. Strongly influenced by Scotland's separation from the Catholic Church during the Scottish Reformation, James was intensely interested in Protestant theology, focusing much of his curiosity on the theology of witchcraft. By the early 1590s he had become convinced that he was being plotted against by Scottish witches. After a visit to Denmark, he had attended the trial in 1590 of the North Berwick witches, who were convicted of using witchcraft to send a storm against the ship that carried James and his wife Anne back to Scotland. In 1597 he wrote a book, Daemonologie, instructing his followers that they must denounce and prosecute any supporters or practitioners of witchcraft. One year after James acceded to the English throne, a law was enacted imposing the death penalty in cases where it was proven that harm had been caused through the use of magic, or corpses had been exhumed for magical purposes. James was, however, sceptical of the evidence presented in witch trials, even to the extent of personally exposing discrepancies in the testimonies presented against some accused witches.
In early 1612, the year of the trials, every justice of the peace (JP) in Lancashire was ordered to compile a list of recusants in their area, i.e. those who refused to attend the English Church and to take communion, a criminal offence at that time. Roger Nowell of Read Hall, on the edge of Pendle Forest, was the JP for Pendle. It was against this background of seeking out religious nonconformists that, in March 1612, Nowell investigated a complaint made to him by the family of John Law, a pedlar, who claimed to have been injured by witchcraft. Many of those who subsequently became implicated as the investigation progressed did indeed consider themselves to be witches, in the sense of being village healers who practised magic, probably in return for payment, but such men and women were common in 16th-century rural England, an accepted part of village life.
It was perhaps difficult for the judges charged with hearing the trials – Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley – to understand King James's attitude towards witchcraft. The king was head of the judiciary, and Bromley was hoping for promotion to a circuit nearer London. Altham was nearing the end of his judicial career, but he had recently been accused of a miscarriage of justice at the York Assizes, which had resulted in a woman being sentenced to death by hanging for witchcraft. The judges may have been uncertain whether the best way to gain the King's favour was by encouraging convictions, or by "sceptically testing the witnesses to destruction".
## Events leading up to the trials
One of the accused, Demdike, had been regarded in the area as a witch for fifty years, and some of the deaths the witches were accused of had happened many years before Roger Nowell started to take an interest in 1612. The event that seems to have triggered Nowell's investigation, culminating in the Pendle witch trials, occurred on 21 March 1612.
On her way to Trawden Forest, Demdike's granddaughter, Alizon Device, encountered John Law, a pedlar from Halifax, and asked him for some pins. Seventeenth-century metal pins were handmade and relatively expensive, but they were frequently needed for magical purposes, such as in healing – particularly for treating warts – divination, and for love magic, which may have been why Alizon was so keen to get hold of them and why Law was so reluctant to sell them to her. Whether she meant to buy them, as she claimed, and Law refused to undo his pack for such a small transaction, or whether she had no money and was begging for them, as Law's son Abraham claimed, is unclear. According to the 1613 tract "Potts Discovery of Witches", the Devil appeared in the likeness of a black or brown dog with fiery eyes; which Jennet Device later claimed was a spirit familiar of her grandmother named Ball; which spoke twice in English offering to lame him. A few minutes after the encounter with Alizon Device, she said she saw Law stumble and fall, apparently lame, perhaps because he suffered a stroke; he managed to regain his feet and reach a nearby inn. Initially Law made no accusations against Alizon, but she appears to have been convinced of her own powers; when Abraham Law took her to visit his father a few days after the incident, she reportedly confessed, and asked for his forgiveness.
Alizon Device, her mother Elizabeth, and her brother James were summoned to appear before Nowell on 30 March 1612. Alizon confessed that she had sold her soul to the Devil, and that she had told him to lame John Law after he had called her a thief. Her brother, James, stated that his sister had also confessed to bewitching a local child. Elizabeth was more reticent, admitting only that her mother, Demdike, had a mark on her body, something that many, including Nowell, would have regarded as having been left by the Devil after he had sucked her blood. When questioned about Anne Whittle (Chattox), the matriarch of the other family reputedly involved in witchcraft in and around Pendle, Alizon perhaps saw an opportunity for revenge. There may have been bad blood between the two families, possibly dating from 1601, when a member of Chattox's family broke into Malkin Tower, the home of the Devices, and stole goods worth about £1, equivalent to about £117 as of 2018. Alizon accused Chattox of murdering four men by witchcraft, and of killing her father, John Device, who had died in 1601. She claimed that her father had been so frightened of Old Chattox that he had agreed to give her 8 pounds (3.6 kg) of oatmeal each year in return for her promise not to hurt his family. The meal was handed over annually until the year before John's death; on his deathbed John claimed that his sickness had been caused by Chattox because they had not paid for protection.
On 2 April 1612, Demdike, Chattox, and Chattox's daughter Anne Redferne, were summoned to appear before Nowell. Both Demdike and Chattox were by then blind and in their eighties, and both provided Nowell with damaging confessions. Demdike claimed that she had given her soul to the Devil 20 years previously, and Chattox that she had given her soul to "a Thing like a Christian man", on his promise that "she would not lack anything and would get any revenge she desired". Although Anne Redferne made no confession, Demdike said that she had seen her making clay figures. Margaret Crooke, another witness seen by Nowell that day, claimed that her brother had fallen sick and died after having had a disagreement with Redferne, and that he had frequently blamed her for his illness. Based on the evidence and confessions he had obtained, Nowell committed Demdike, Chattox, Anne Redferne and Alizon Device to Lancaster Gaol, to be tried for maleficium – causing harm by witchcraft – at the next assizes.
### Meeting at Malkin Tower
The committal and subsequent trial of the four women might have been the end of the matter, had it not been for a meeting organised by Elizabeth Device at Malkin Tower, the home of the Demdikes, held on Good Friday 10 April 1612. To feed the party, James Device stole a neighbour's sheep.
Friends and others sympathetic to the family attended, and when word of it reached Roger Nowell, he decided to investigate. On 27 April 1612, an inquiry was held before Nowell and another magistrate, Nicholas Bannister, to determine the purpose of the meeting at Malkin Tower, who had attended, and what had happened there. As a result of the inquiry, eight more people were accused of witchcraft and committed for trial: Elizabeth Device, James Device, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock, Jane Bulcock, Alice Grey and Jennet Preston. Preston lived across the border in Yorkshire, so she was sent for trial at York Assizes; the others were sent to Lancaster Gaol, to join the four already imprisoned there.
Malkin Tower is believed to have been near the village of Newchurch in Pendle, or possibly in Blacko on the site of present-day Malkin Tower Farm, and to have been demolished soon after the trials.
## Trials
The Pendle witches were tried in a group that also included the Samlesbury witches, Jane Southworth, Jennet Brierley, and Ellen Brierley, the charges against whom included child murder, cannibalism; Margaret Pearson, the so-called Padiham witch, who was facing her third trial for witchcraft, this time for killing a horse; and Isobel Robey from Windle, accused of using witchcraft to cause sickness.
Some of the accused Pendle witches, such as Alizon Device, seem to have genuinely believed in their guilt, but others protested their innocence to the end. Jennet Preston was the first to be tried, at York Assizes.
### York Assizes, 27 July 1612
Jennet Preston lived in Gisburn, which was then in Yorkshire, so she was sent to York Assizes for trial. Her judges were Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley. Jennet was charged with the murder by witchcraft of a local landowner, Thomas Lister of Westby Hall, to which she pleaded not guilty. She had already appeared before Bromley in 1611, accused of murdering a child by witchcraft, but had been found not guilty. The most damning evidence given against her was that when she had been taken to see Lister's body, the corpse "bled fresh bloud presently, in the presence of all that were there present" after she touched it. According to a statement made to Nowell by James Device on 27 April, Jennet had attended the Malkin Tower meeting to seek help with Lister's murder. She was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging; her execution took place on 29 July on the Knavesmire, the present site of York Racecourse.
### Lancaster Assizes, 18–19 August 1612
All the other accused lived in Lancashire, so they were sent to Lancaster Assizes for trial, where the judges were once again Altham and Bromley. The prosecutor was local magistrate Roger Nowell, who had been responsible for collecting the various statements and confessions from the accused. Nine-year-old Jennet Device was a key witness for the prosecution, something that would not have been permitted in many other 17th-century criminal trials. However, King James had made a case for suspending the normal rules of evidence for witchcraft trials in his Daemonologie. As well as identifying those who had attended the Malkin Tower meeting, Jennet also gave evidence against her mother, brother, and sister.
Nine of the accused – Alizon Device, Elizabeth Device, James Device, Anne Whittle, Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock and Jane Bulcock – were found guilty during the two-day trial and hanged at Gallows Hill in Lancaster on 20 August 1612; Elizabeth Southerns died while awaiting trial. Only one of the accused, Alice Grey, was found not guilty.
18 August
Anne Whittle (Chattox) was accused of the murder of Robert Nutter. She pleaded not guilty, but the confession she had made to Roger Nowell—likely under torture—was read out in court, and evidence against her was presented by James Robinson, who had lived with the Chattox family 20 years earlier. He claimed to remember that Nutter had accused Chattox of turning his beer sour, and that she was commonly believed to be a witch. Chattox broke down and admitted her guilt, calling on God for forgiveness and the judges to be merciful to her daughter, Anne Redferne.
Elizabeth Device was charged with the murders of James Robinson, John Robinson and, together with Alice Nutter and Demdike, the murder of Henry Mitton. Elizabeth Device vehemently maintained her innocence. Potts records that "this odious witch" suffered from a facial deformity resulting in her left eye being set lower than her right. The main witness against Device was her daughter, Jennet, who was about nine years old. When Jennet was brought into the courtroom and asked to stand up and give evidence against her mother, Elizabeth, confronted with her own child making accusations that would lead to her execution, began to curse and scream at her daughter, forcing the judges to have her removed from the courtroom before the evidence could be heard. Jennet was placed on a table and stated that she believed her mother had been a witch for three or four years. She also said her mother had a familiar called Ball, who appeared in the shape of a brown dog. Jennet claimed to have witnessed conversations between Ball and her mother, in which Ball had been asked to help with various murders. James Device also gave evidence against his mother, saying he had seen her making a clay figure of one of her victims, John Robinson. Elizabeth Device was found guilty.
James Device pleaded not guilty to the murders by witchcraft of Anne Townley and John Duckworth. However he, like Chattox, had earlier made a confession to Nowell, which was read out in court. That, and the evidence presented against him by his sister Jennet, who said that she had seen her brother asking a black dog he had conjured up to help him kill Townley, was sufficient to persuade the jury to find him guilty.
19 August
The trials of the three Samlesbury witches were heard before Anne Redferne's first appearance in court, late in the afternoon, charged with the murder of Robert Nutter. The evidence against her was considered unsatisfactory, and she was acquitted.
Anne Redferne was not so fortunate the following day, when she faced her second trial, for the murder of Robert Nutter's father, Christopher, to which she pleaded not guilty. Demdike's statement to Nowell, which accused Anne of having made clay figures of the Nutter family, was read out in court. Witnesses were called to testify that Anne was a witch "more dangerous than her Mother". But she refused to admit her guilt to the end, and had given no evidence against any others of the accused. Anne Redferne was found guilty.
Jane Bulcock and her son John Bulcock, both from Newchurch in Pendle, were accused and found guilty of the murder by witchcraft of Jennet Deane. Both denied that they had attended the meeting at Malkin Tower, but Jennet Device identified Jane as having been one of those present, and John as having turned the spit to roast the stolen sheep, the centrepiece of the Good Friday meeting at the Demdike's home.
Alice Nutter was unusual among the accused in being comparatively wealthy, the widow of a tenant yeoman farmer. She made no statement either before or during her trial, except to enter her plea of not guilty to the charge of murdering Henry Mitton by witchcraft. The prosecution alleged that she, together with Demdike and Elizabeth Device, had caused Mitton's death after he had refused to give Demdike a penny she had begged from him. The only evidence against Alice seems to have been that James Device claimed Demdike had told him of the murder, and Jennet Device in her statement said that Alice had been present at the Malkin Tower meeting. Alice may have called in on the meeting at Malkin Tower on her way to a secret (and illegal) Good Friday Catholic service, and refused to speak for fear of incriminating her fellow Catholics. Many of the Nutter family were Catholics, and two had been executed as Jesuit priests, John Nutter in 1584 and his brother Robert in 1600. Alice Nutter was found guilty.
Katherine Hewitt (a.k.a. Mould-Heeles) was charged and found guilty of the murder of Anne Foulds. She was the wife of a clothier from Colne, and had attended the meeting at Malkin Tower with Alice Grey. According to the evidence given by James Device, both Hewitt and Grey told the others at that meeting that they had killed a child from Colne, Anne Foulds. Jennet Device also picked Katherine out of a line-up, and confirmed her attendance at the Malkin Tower meeting.
Alice Grey was accused with Katherine Hewitt of the murder of Anne Foulds. Potts does not provide an account of Alice Grey's trial, simply recording her as one of the Samlesbury witches – which she was not, as she was one of those identified as having been at the Malkin Tower meeting – and naming her in the list of those found not guilty.
Alizon Device, whose encounter with John Law had triggered the events leading up to the trials, was charged with causing harm by witchcraft. Uniquely among the accused, Alizon was confronted in court by her alleged victim, John Law. She seems to have genuinely believed in her own guilt; when Law was brought into court Alizon fell to her knees in tears and confessed. She was found guilty.
## The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster
Almost everything that is known about the trials comes from a report of the proceedings written by Thomas Potts, the clerk to the Lancaster Assizes. Potts was instructed to write his account by the trial judges, and had completed the work by 16 November 1612, when he submitted it for review. Bromley revised and corrected the manuscript before its publication in 1613, declaring it to be "truly reported" and "fit and worthie to be published".
Although written as an apparently verbatim account, The Wonderfull Discoverie is not a report of what was actually said at the trial but is instead reflecting what happened. Nevertheless, Potts "seems to give a generally trustworthy, although not comprehensive, account of an Assize witchcraft trial, provided that the reader is constantly aware of his use of written material instead of verbatim reports".
The trials took place not quite seven years after the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in an attempt to kill King James and the Protestant aristocracy had been foiled. It was alleged that the Pendle witches had hatched their own gunpowder plot to blow up Lancaster Castle, although historian Stephen Pumfrey has suggested that the "preposterous scheme" was invented by the examining magistrates and simply agreed to by James Device in his witness statement. It may therefore be significant that Potts dedicated The Wonderfull Discoverie to Thomas Knyvet and his wife Elizabeth; Knyvet was the man credited with apprehending Guy Fawkes and thus saving the King.
## Modern interpretation
It has been estimated that all the English witch trials between the early 15th and early 18th centuries resulted in fewer than 500 executions, so this one series of trials in July and August 1612 accounts for more than two per cent of that total. Court records show that Lancashire was unusual in the north of England for the frequency of its witch trials. Neighbouring Cheshire, for instance, also suffered from economic problems and religious activists, but there only 47 people were indicted for causing harm by witchcraft between 1589 and 1675, of whom 11 were found guilty.
Pendle was part of the parish of Whalley, an area covering 180 square miles (470 km<sup>2</sup>), too large to be effective in preaching and teaching the doctrines of the Church of England: both the survival of Catholicism and the upsurge of witchcraft in Lancashire have been attributed to its over-stretched parochial structure. Until its dissolution, the spiritual needs of the people of Pendle and surrounding districts had been served by nearby Whalley Abbey, but its closure in 1537 left a moral vacuum.
Many of the allegations made in the Pendle witch trials resulted from members of the Demdike and Chattox families making accusations against each other. Historian John Swain has said that the outbreaks of witchcraft in and around Pendle demonstrate the extent to which people could make a living either by posing as a witch, or by accusing or threatening to accuse others of being a witch. Although it is implicit in much of the literature on witchcraft that the accused were victims, often mentally or physically abnormal, for some at least, it may have been a trade like any other, albeit one with significant risks. There may have been bad blood between the Demdike and Chattox families because they were in competition with each other, trying to make a living from healing, begging, and extortion. The Demdikes are believed to have lived close to Newchurch in Pendle, and the Chattox family about 2 miles (3.2 km) away, near the village of Fence.
## Aftermath and legacy
Altham continued with his judicial career until his death in 1617, and Bromley achieved his desired promotion to the Midlands Circuit in 1616. Potts was given the keepership of Skalme Park by James in 1615, to breed and train the king's hounds. In 1618, he was given responsibility for "collecting the forfeitures on the laws concerning sewers, for twenty-one years". Having played her part in the deaths of her mother, brother, and sister, Jennet Device may eventually have found herself accused of witchcraft. A woman with that name was listed in a group of 20 tried at Lancaster Assizes on 24 March 1634, although it cannot be certain that it was the same Jennet Device. The charge against her was the murder of Isabel Nutter, William Nutter's wife. In that series of trials the chief prosecution witness was a ten-year-old boy, Edmund Robinson. All but one of the accused were found guilty, but the judges refused to pass death sentences, deciding instead to refer the case to the king, Charles I. Under cross-examination in London, Robinson admitted that he had fabricated his evidence, but even though four of the accused were eventually pardoned, they all remained incarcerated in Lancaster Gaol, where it is likely that they died. An official record dated 22 August 1636 lists Jennet Device as one of those still held in the prison. These later Lancashire witchcraft trials were the subject of a contemporary play written by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches.
In modern times the witches have become the inspiration for Pendle's tourism and heritage industries, with local shops selling a variety of witch-motif gifts. Burnley's Moorhouse's produces a beer called Pendle Witches Brew, and there is a Pendle Witch Trail running from Pendle Heritage Centre to Lancaster Castle, where the accused witches were held before their trial. The X43 bus route run by Burnley Bus Company has been branded The Witch Way, with some of the vehicles operating on it named after the witches in the trial. Pendle Hill, which dominates the landscape of the area, continues to be associated with witchcraft, and hosts a hilltop gathering every Halloween.
Scholar Catherine Spooner argues in an article for Hellebore magazine that with the 400-year anniversary of the Pendle witch trials, the notion of the witches as folk heroes caught the popular imagination. With new cultural productions revisiting the witches' story (Mary Sharratt's Daughters of the WItching Hill (2011) or Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate (2012)), Spooner argues that the Pendle witches have been transformed from "folk devil to folk heroes", and that "their history has become a model of resistance for the disenchanted and disenfranchised".
A petition was presented to UK Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1998 asking for the witches to be pardoned, but it was decided that their convictions should stand. Ten years later another petition was organised in an attempt to obtain pardons for Chattox and Demdike. The later petition followed the Swiss government's pardon earlier that year of Anna Göldi, beheaded in 1782, thought to be the last person in Europe to be executed as a witch.
## Literary adaptations and other media
Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a romanticised account of the Pendle witches: The Lancashire Witches, first published in 1849, is the only one of his 40 novels never to have been out of print. The British writer Robert Neill dramatised the events of 1612 in his novel Mist over Pendle, first published in 1951. The writer and poet Blake Morrison treated the subject in his suite of poems Pendle Witches, published in 1996. Poet Simon Armitage narrated a 2011 documentary on BBC Four, The Pendle Witch Child.
The novel Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (later adapted for television) features several witch characters named after the original Pendle witches, including Agnes Nutter, a prophet burned at the stake, and her descendant Anathema Device. Gaiman confirmed the homage in a 2016 tweet.
The novel The Familiars (2019) by Stacey Halls includes historical figures as characters in a story that is based at the time of the Pendle witch trials. The story focusses on Fleetwood Shuttleworth, a noblewoman who becomes pregnant at the age of seventeen, and becomes involved in the trial of her midwife Alice Gray who is accused of witchcraft.
### 2012 anniversary
Events to mark the 400th anniversary of the trials in 2012 included an exhibition, "A Wonderful Discoverie: Lancashire Witches 1612–2012", at Gawthorpe Hall staged by Lancashire County Council. The Fate of Chattox, a piece by David Lloyd-Mostyn for clarinet and piano, taking its theme from the events leading to Chattox's demise, was performed by Aquilon at the Chorlton Arts Festival.
A life-size statue of Alice Nutter, by sculptor David Palmer, was unveiled in her home village, Roughlee. In August, a world record for the largest group dressed as witches was set by 482 people who walked up Pendle Hill, on which the date "1612" had been installed in 400-foot-tall numbers by artist Philippe Handford using horticultural fleece. The Bishop of Burnley, the Rt Rev John Goddard, had objected to the appearance of the numerals, as what he saw as a "light-hearted" celebration of "injustice and oppression".
Publications in 2012 inspired by the trials include two novellas, The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson and Malkin Child by Livi Michael. Blake Morrison published a volume of poetry, A Discoverie of Witches.
## See also
- Bideford witch trial
- Cunning folk |
51,394,624 | Baltimore railroad strike of 1877 | 1,171,287,135 | Strikes and riots in Baltimore in 1877 | [
"1870s strikes in the United States",
"1877 in Maryland",
"1877 in rail transport",
"1877 labor disputes and strikes",
"19th century in Baltimore",
"Labor disputes in Maryland",
"Labor disputes in the United States",
"Rail transportation labor disputes in the United States",
"Riots and civil disorder in Baltimore"
]
| The Baltimore railroad strike of 1877 involved several days of work stoppage and violence in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1877. It formed a part of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, during which widespread civil unrest spread nationwide following the global depression and economic downturns of the mid-1870s. Strikes broke out along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) on July 16, the same day that 10% wage reductions were scheduled.
Violence erupted in Baltimore on July 20, with police and soldiers of the Maryland National Guard clashing with crowds of thousands gathered throughout the city. In response, President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered federal troops to Baltimore, local officials recruited 500 additional police, and two new national guard regiments were formed. Peace was restored on July 22. Between 10 and 22 were killed, more than 150 were injured, and many more were arrested.
Negotiations between strikers and the B&O were unsuccessful, and most strikers quit rather than return to work at the newly reduced wages. The company easily found enough workers to replace the strikers, and under the protection of the military and police, traffic resumed on July 29. The company promised minor concessions at the time, and eventually enacted select reforms later that year.
## The Long Depression and the Great Strikes
The Long Depression, sparked in the United States by the Panic of 1873, had extensive implications for US industry, closing more than a hundred railroads in the first year and cutting construction of new rail lines from 7,500 miles (12,100 km) of track in 1872 to 1,600 miles (2,600 km) in 1875. Approximately 18,000 businesses failed between 1873 and 1875, production in iron and steel dropped as much as 45 percent, and a million or more lost their jobs. In 1876, 76 railroad companies went bankrupt or entered receivership in the US alone, and the economic impacts rippled throughout many economic sectors throughout the industrialized world.
In mid-1877, tensions erupted in stoppages and civil unrest across the nation in what would become known as the Great Railroad Strike or the Great Strikes. Violence began in Martinsburg, West Virginia and spread along the rail lines through Baltimore and on to several major cities and transportation hubs of the time, including Reading, Scranton and Shamokin, Pennsylvania; a bloodless general strike in St. Louis, Missouri; and a short lived uprising in Chicago, Illinois. In the worst case, rioting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania left 61 dead and 124 injured. Much of the city's center was burned, including more than a thousand rail cars destroyed. What began as the peaceful actions of organized labor attracted the masses of discontented and unemployed workers spawned by the depression, along with others who took opportunistic advantage of the chaos. In total, an estimated 100,000 workers participated nationwide. State and federal troops followed the turmoil as it spread along the rail lines from city to city, beginning in Baltimore, where the movement of troops itself provoked a violent response that ultimately required federal intervention to quell.
## Early events
In early July 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) announced it would reduce the wages of all workers by ten percent. One hundred miles would constitute a day's work, and crews would not receive allowances for time spent on delays at stations. Various meetings of railroad employees followed, and a committee was formed to meet with officers of the railroad. They appealed to the vice president, Mr. King, but he declined to meet.
Most workers accepted the reduction in pay, but the firemen and those who ran the freight trains resolved to stop work in protest. The number of unemployed along the line was so great, owing to the ongoing economic problems, that the company had no difficulty replacing the absent strikers. In response, the strikers resolved to occupy portions of the rail line, and to stop trains from passing unless the company rescinded the wage cuts.
## July 16–19
On July 16, the day the reduction was to go into effect, about 40 men gathered at Camden Junction, 3 miles (4.8 km) from Baltimore, and stopped traffic. Newspapers reported a meeting held by rail workers who were sympathetic to the strike, which by that day included brakemen and engineers as well as firemen.
That same day in Baltimore, hundreds of manufacturing workers declared a strike, and the box-makers and sawyers walked out, demanding a ten percent increase in wages. Newspaper reports counted 140 of the union's 180 members who went on strike. Tin can makers in the city had already been striking for higher wages for a week at this point, and their number amounted to 800, while not more than 100 can makers in the city remained at work according to reports by The Sun.
At around 2:00 am on July 17, the first act of violence in Baltimore emerged. According to the newspaper reports the following day, a westbound train was thrown from the tracks at a switch in a suburb south of the city. The switch had been opened and locked by an unknown person. The engine caught fire, and the engineer and the fireman aboard were severely injured.
That afternoon violence broke out in Martinsburg, West Virginia, between workers and militia guarding a train, prompting the governor of West Virginia to appeal to the President for aid. Strikers occupied stations at Cumberland, Maryland; Grafton, West Virginia; Keyser, West Virginia, and elsewhere, and halted the movement of freight. Newspaper reports counted 400–500 men who had joined the rail strike, and in Martinsburg, 75 trains with 1,200 rail cars sat idle.
That day, The Sun reported the situation in the city:
> One by one the shops have become wholly or partly silent, and very many men, especially in South Baltimore, are without work or the means of providing for their families. This state of affairs is confined not alone to railroad shops, but to other workshops, and a great deal of distress exists among the workingmen of all kinds.
On July 18, the railroad strikers in Baltimore printed and circulated a list of their grievances:
> They had submitted to three reductions of wages in three years; that they would have acquiesced in a moderate reduction; that they were frequently sent out on a trip to Martinsburg, and there detained four days at the discretion of the company, for which detention they were allowed pay but two day's time; that they were compelled to pay their board during the time they were detained, which was more than the wages they received; that they had nothing left with which to support their families; that it was a question of bread with them; that when times were dull on the road they could not get more than fifteen day's work in a month; that many sober, steady economical men became involved in debt last winter; that honest men had their wages attached because they could not meet their expenses; that by a rule of the company any man who had his wages attached should be discharged; that this was a tyranny to which no rational being should submit, and that it was utterly impossible for a man with a family to support himself and family at the reduced rate of wages.
By the end of July 19, the strike had spread through major cities from Baltimore to Chicago. It involved multiple rail companies, and had grown to include a variety of mechanics, artisans, and other laborers. General violence threatened to break out in Pittsburgh and the city was blockaded.
Numerous meetings and conferences of discontented workers continued across the country. A committee representing the strikers (including engineers, conductors, firemen, and brakemen) departed Baltimore to ensure solidarity along the line in demanding \$2 per day. According to the edition of July 20 of The Sun, the city was peaceful, but anxious, as many awaited word of the happenings in Martinsburg, which was seen as the central point of the movement.
## The outbreak of violence
By Friday, July 20, about 250 trains sat idle in Baltimore as a result of the strike. John W. Garrett, president of the B&O, requested that Maryland Governor John Lee Carroll move state troops from Baltimore to Cumberland, where the situation had deteriorated. At 4:00 pm Brigadier General James R. Herbert was ordered by Governor Carroll to muster the troops of the 5th and 6th Regiments, Maryland National Guard, to their respective armories in preparation. With the knowledge that groups of workers had been dispersed along the lines to impede traffic, including the movement of troops, he issued a simultaneous declaration to the people of the state:
> I ... by virtue of the authority vested in me, do hereby issue this my proclamation, calling upon all citizens of this State to abstain from acts of lawlessness, and aid lawful authorities in the maintenance of peace and order.
Crowds gathered at four different points in the city, and along the route it was believed the soldiers would take in order to embark on their trains. Mayor Ferdinand Latrobe issued a proclamation, reciting the riot act and ordering the crowds to disperse, but to no effect. He later sent correspondence to the governor, asking that the garrison not be taken from the city given the current state of affairs. Police commissioners ordered the closing of all barrooms and saloons.
At 6:35 pm, as many workers in the city were finishing their shifts, the alarm was sounded to gather the troops of the 5th and 6th Regiments. This was the first time such an alarm had been used in the city, and it caused a great deal of excitement, and attracted yet more citizens into the streets to witness events.
### The 5th Regiment
Between 135 and 250 men of the 5th Regiment, Maryland National Guard mustered at their armory on the corner of Fifth and Front streets. Each man was equipped with full uniform, a Springfield breech loading rifle, and twenty rounds of ammunition. At 7:00 pm the group began its march toward Camden Station, with the intention to board a train to Cumberland.
Onlookers had gathered to watch the procession, and the soldiers were attacked on Eutaw Street by crowds throwing bricks and stones. No serious damage was done, and they continued until again, on Eutaw near Camden Street, they were stopped by the crowd, who injured several with their missiles.
The order was given and the group formed up across the entire street, from curb to curb. They fixed bayonets and advanced. Shots were fired at the troops, but they successfully moved through the crowd and into the station.
### The 6th Regiment
Around 6:30 pm the soldiers of the 6th Regiment began assembling. Their armory, located on Front Street across from the Phoenix Shot Tower, consisted of the second and third floors of a warehouse, with the only exit being a narrow stairway through which no more than two men could walk abreast.
The men were met with jeers by a crowd of 2,000 to 4,000. This escalated into paving stones thrown through the door and windows of the building. Soldiers who subsequently arrived were beaten and driven away. Additional police were sent for in hopes of clearing the way and relieving the troops of the need to use force against the crowd, but those who arrived were unable to effect any order, and were forced to shelter in the armory along with the soldiers.
Shortly after 8:00 pm, Colonel Peters ordered three companies of 120 men of the 6th to move as commanded by the governor and General Herbert to Camden Station. As they exited, they were assaulted by stones from the crowd, believing those of the 6th Regiment were armed only with blank cartridges. The troops returned fire, with live ammunition as they were equipped, and the frightened crowd retreated west across Fayette Street Bridge.
Given the ongoing clashes, the men of the 6th Regiment, Company B, being the last of the formation to leave the armory, marched south, by way of Front Street, and then west along Baltimore Street, in order to avoid the crowds.
The crowd regained their resolve and, as the body marched near Harrison and Frederick streets, they were attacked in the rear and made to halt by the pressing of the crowd. Without orders, some soldiers fired on the crowd, killing one and wounding between one and three. The crowd shrank back and the soldiers were allowed to continue until they had advanced to the offices of the Baltimore American newspaper, near Holliday Street, where an order was given to halt and two volleys fired into the crowd. They were forced to halt a third time as they turned onto Charles Street, and again fired on the crowd near Light Street. There two men and one boy were killed. From there they followed Charles to Camden Street and on to the station.
### Attack on the depot
Around 8:30 pm, the men of the 5th and 6th regiments met at Camden Station along with about 200 police officers. As reported by The Sun, Governor Carroll and Mayor Latrobe were present at the station, along with B&O vice president King, General Herbert and his staff, and a number of police commissioners. Here they decided that conditions were too dangerous to send any troops away to Cumberland.
The train intended for the transportation of the troops consisted of 11 cars, and the engine was steamed and ready for departure. The crowd fell upon the engine, assailing it with stones, disabling it, and driving off both its engineer and fireman. At 9:15 pm another train was sent down the tracks by some from the crowd, with no one aboard, to wreck itself into yet another train. According to The Sun, the tracks were torn up from Lee Street, along Ohio Avenue to Cross Street, as well as elsewhere in the suburbs. By 10:00 pm the mob that had gathered at the station, and filled the streets for several blocks, numbered as many as 15,000.
The soldiers and police worked to keep the mob at bay, and drove them to the far end of the station near Lee Street. There the mob assailed the buildings of the depot with stones. At 10:30 pm the rioters set fire to passenger cars, the dispatcher's office, and the roundhouse. Some firefighters dispatched to the scene were driven off, and others had their hoses cut when they attempted to set up their pumps, but, under the protection of the police and soldiers, the flames were extinguished. The Sun reported the fires damaged one passenger car and engine, destroyed the dispatcher's office, and damaged the roof of the depot's shed. Two subsequent fires were started in the south of the city, but were dealt with without major damage.
That night Governor Carroll requested federal assistance from President Rutherford B. Hayes, convinced that the state forces were insufficient. Hayes ordered General William Barry, commander at Fort McHenry, to hold all available forces in readiness.
The men of the 5th and 6th stayed at the depot throughout the night and into the next morning. If any needed to leave, they did so in civilian clothes and unarmed, for fear of the crowd should they be discovered to be a member of the militia. Camden Street remained under constant guard by 16 sentinels. They served in two-hour shifts, with four-hours' rest in between.
### Casualties
Sources differ on the total casualties that day. By Stover's account, only 59 men of the 6th reached their destination, and the group suffered 10 killed, more than 20 seriously wounded, and several dozen more with minor injuries. By Stowell's account, only one militiaman was killed, but as many as half of their number deserted along the march. In their struggle to enter Camden Station, the 5th suffered 16 to 24 injuries, but none seriously wounded or killed. Between 9 and 12 civilians were killed, and 13-40 injured.
## Immediate aftermath and sporadic violence
Through the early hours of that Saturday, July 21, many from the 6th Regiment deserted, until only 11 were left, who were then incorporated into the ranks of the 5th. As Governor Carroll recalled: "... the slender force at my command was incompetent to protect the city, or to carry a sense of security to those who had a right be secured ..." That morning, all business remained suspended. The bars in Baltimore remained closed, and a guard of soldiers and police protected workers as they set about the task of repairing the tracks and restoring the station to operating order. Toward nightfall, a battery of artillery was stationed at the depot.
President Hayes released a proclamation in which he admonished:
> all good citizens ... against aiding, countenancing, abetting or taking part in such unlawful proceedings, and I do hereby warn all persons engaged in or connected with said domestic violence and obstruction of the laws to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes on or before twelve o'clock noon of the 22d day of July
After dark, a mob of 2,500–3,000 gathered at Camden Station, jeering the soldiers. The crowd grew increasingly restless until the soldiers guarding the area around the depot were again assaulted with stones and pistol fire. The sentinels were called in, the soldiers assembled, and the command given to "Load, ready, aim!" at the mob was given. The crowd, by then familiar with what was likely to follow, dispersed, and the regiment was not ordered to fire. On Eutaw Street, where the sentinels had remained, the men fixed bayonets, and briefly struggled with the crowd as they attempted and failed to break the line.
Between 9:00 pm and 10:00 pm the guards enacted a strategy whereby the police officers, backed by the bayonets of the soldiers, advanced to the crowd and arrested each a man, who was then taken into the station, disarmed, and held there. The strategy was largely successful, and by 11:00 pm the area around the station was mostly cleared, though sporadic gunfire could be heard throughout the night. Between 165 and 200 were detained in total, and the most violent of the captives were removed and taken to the police station. The news reported that four, including one police officer, were injured in the exchange, and several who resisted arrest were beaten severely.
At the foundry near the Carey Street Bridge, a crowd of more than 100 gathered and threatened to set fire to the area. A contingent of the 5th under Captain Lipscomb arrived, and a volley fired over the heads of the crowd was sufficient to dissuade the crowd. An unsuccessful attempt was also made to burn a B&O transportation barge at Fell's Point. The news reported that 16 were arrested in a confrontation between citizens and the police at Lee and Eutaw, and that during the night, three separate attempts were made to set fire the 6th Regiment armory, but all were frustrated by the remaining garrison there.
Just before midnight, 120–135 marines arrived at the station and reported to the governor, who ordered them to set about capturing the leaders of the mob. Governor Carroll telegraphed and advised President Hayes that order had been restored in the city.
Between 2:00 am and 3:00 am on Sunday morning, July 22, the peace was again broken and fire alarms began to ring throughout the city. To the west, at the Mount Clare Shops of the B&O, a 37-car train of coal and oil had been set on fire. Police, firefighters, and thousands of citizens flocked to the scene. A contingent of 50 marines was dispatched to the area to provide assistance. The cars which had not yet caught fire were detached from those burning, and by the time the flames were extinguished between seven and nine cars had been burned. Between \$11,000 and \$12,000 in damage was sustained.
At 4:00 am another alarm sounded: the planing mills and lumber yard of J. Turner & Cate near the Philadelphia Wilmington & Baltimore rail depot, had been set on fire. The entire property, extending over a full city block, was destroyed. Realizing the severity of the situation, the firefighters concentrated their efforts on trying to save the surrounding structures.
According to news reports, the first passenger trains left the city at 9:00 am, and continued running throughout the day. Around 10:00 am, General W. S. Hancock arrived and was followed by 360–400 federal troops from New York and Fort Monroe, who relieved those guarding Camden Station. They brought with them two 12-pounder artillery pieces. From that point on, the men of the 5th and the federal troops took turns guarding the station.
Around noon, General Henry Abbot arrived at President Street with a battalion of 99 to 114 engineers. As the group advanced toward the armory of the 6th Regiment where they were to be quartered, they were met by a crowd of 500. Jeers from the crowd turned to missiles until one soldier, Private Corcoran, was struck in the head and wounded. Abbot gave orders that his men were to halt and fix bayonets, at which point the crowd scattered.
Throughout the day and the previous, as many as 500 new special police were sworn in, doubling the size of the police force. Each was provided with a star, a revolver and espantoon. The recently arrived regulars brought the garrison of federal troops in the city to between 700 and 800. The vessels Powhatan and Swatara had also been ordered to the city, along with their 500 marines.
News reports recalled court held that day in the southern district, where 195 charges of riot and 17 charges of drunkenness were resolved. That night the city was quiet. A telegram was dispatched from Adjutant General Edward D. Townsend to General Hancock, who had just arrived in the city earlier that day. He was directed to move his men to Pittsburgh, where riots were ongoing.
## The 7th and 8th regiments
Following the cessation of open violence, the city set about forming two new regiments of national guard to expand available forces. The local news recounted on the 24th, that Abbot's engineer corps had re-purposed the armory of the 5th Regiment for use as a recruiting station, toward the goal of forming the newly authorized 8th Regiment, to include a company of artillery. They brought with them from the armory of the 6th, two howitzers, 2,000 rounds of ammunition, and 250 muskets. The Governor and Adjutant General put out a call for volunteers to fill each regiment with 1,000 men. General James Howard was chosen to command the 7th, and General Charles E. Phelps the 8th.
According to reports in The Sun, the following day at 3:00 pm, those who were left of the original 6th Regiment disbanded. No official order was given to this effect, but their duties had by this point been entirely assumed by federal troops, the soldiers of the 5th, and the newly formed 7th and 8th. The armory of the 6th remained guarded by a single police officer.
## Negotiations
On Thursday, July 26, a committee from the engineers, firemen, brakemen, and conductors met with Governor Carroll, as recounted in the following day's newspapers. They presented him with a list of their unanimously adopted demands. The governor informed them that he had no power to satisfy them, which was a matter for the railroad, but assured them he intended to enforce the law and put down violence by any means necessary. The committee in turn maintained they had no connection with the violence, but merely intended to stop work until their demands were met. Carroll's reply was published in the local papers:
> You have more to do than simply abstain from riotous proceedings. You must not stand behind riots and let violators of the law promote the destruction of property. You are responsible for the violence that has been done, whether you were actually engaged in it or not. You on your part must drive away from you the evil-disposed people who have done so much harm, and discountenance in the plainest way everything tending to violence.
The next day, it was reported that some railways throughout the country resumed traffic, though the B&O remained idle. B&O vice president King published a reply to the demands of the strikers, saying that they could not be met for lack of work and low prices for hauling freight. He wrote that the choice of the company was to either lay off many men and retain only those for whom they had work, or to spread what work was to be done among its employees; they chose the latter as the more humane. He continued:
> The experience of the last ten days must satisfy everyone that if freight trains are stopped on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the city of Baltimore is not only deprived of the great commercial advantages which she has heretofore enjoyed, but the entire community is made to feel that all business must be seriously crippled and the price of all kinds of family supplies greatly increased.
Later that evening, second vice president Keyser, upon the request of the strikers, addressed a workingmen's meeting at Cross Street Market Hall, and presented the company's written response reprinted in the papers for the public. The letter, signed by both King and Keyser, stated the company's position as follows: the company would not negotiate on the matter of the 10 percent wage reduction, but it would "be pleased to address itself to the investigation of any of the minor grievances of which the men complained". The Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser reported a general hope that, owing to the imminent increase in traffic due to the transport of harvested crops, the firemen would be able to make daily round trips, thus avoiding layovers, and that the company could arrange for them to return home on passenger trains when this was not feasible.
Keyser's reprinted response advised that the ten percent cut was "forced upon the company", but that he was confident they would be able to provide more full employment, and thus increase wages, due to an abundance of freight to be moved. He said that a system of passes would be arranged to address the issue of idle time caused by delays. He entreated the men that if the situation could not be resolved, it must "bring want and suffering upon all; suffering from which you and your families cannot hope to be exempt." He asserted that, although 90 percent of rail workers had accepted the reduction, the whole business of the railroad and city had been halted due to the 10 percent rejecting them, and resolving to not allow the rest of the men to continue work. He said the rescinding of the wage cuts were "entirely out of the question" and requested the men either return to work, or allow those who would to resume working. As The Sun reported: "A vote was taken, and the proposition of the company was rejected unanimously."
## Resumption of freight traffic
The force gathered at Camden Station at 8:30 am on Saturday, July 29, included 250 federal troops, 250 men of the 5th Maryland Regiment, and 260 policemen. Under this guard, freight traffic once again resumed in and out of Baltimore. That day between 8 and 34 trains were dispatched in total.
The newspapers reported the resumption of business and the glut of stalled products pouring through the city, including:
- 4,000,000 US gallons (15,000,000 L; 3,300,000 imp gal) of petroleum,
- 1,250,000 US bushels (44,000,000 L; 10,000,000 US dry gal; 9,700,000 imp gal) of wheat,
- 250,000 US gallons (950,000 L; 210,000 imp gal) of coal oil,
- 1,463 head of cattle, and
- 90 car loads of coal.
Between the 30th and the 1st, The Sun reported that the remaining strikers had declared they would not interfere, but were confident the company would be unable to find sufficient workers without them, and that by remaining united, they could yet see their terms met. Given notice to report to work on Monday, July 30 or be discharged from the company, most chose discharge, but the company had little trouble in acquiring the workers needed to run the trains.
On Wednesday, August 1, The Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser summarized the situation as it then stood:
> The strikers have gained absolutely nothing by the movement. The ten per cent reduction has been enforced by the four trunk lines, and the only concessions were those that might have been had for asking, without the loss of a single day's work. Such of the strikers as were caught committing criminal acts are now under arrest, and the great majority of the rest are most anxious to resume their places. Some of the railroad companies have discharged every man that took part in the strike, while others have only dropped the ringleaders, and have held out inducements to the others to return to work.
## Aftermath and legacy
By the time peace was completely restored in the city, the cost to the state for suppression of the mob was between \$80,000 and \$85,000. Later that year, the B&O agreed to a number of reforms: crewmen would not be called to work more than an hour before a train's departure, crews were to be paid a quarter of a day's pay if the train they were working was canceled, and passes were to be given for men working who had long layovers. In 1880, the B&O Employees Relief Association was established.
The first parade of the 5th Regiment through the city following the crisis was on October 15. They marched that day with, according to contemporary accounts, 400 counted among their ranks. In 1901, a new armory for the 5th was completed on West Hoffman Street, and is now included on the National Register of Historic Places.
The following year, Governor Carroll addressed the General Assembly of the Maryland Legislature, and offered his appraisal of what had occurred in Baltimore:
> > Undoubtedly the extraordinary depression which has existed for the past four years in all branches of business, compelled the great railway lines to make reductions in their expenditures, and thus the numbers of unemployed have been constantly added to.
> >
> > The want and suffering produced by such a condition of the working classes is always an evil greatly to be deplored, but one, unfortunately, that cannot be reached by immediate legislation. The great and only remedy for unemployed labor, is the revival of business, and the encouragement of a judicious political system by which it will be brought about.
In 2013, a historical marker was placed on the Howard Street side of Camden Station. It was state-funded and coordinated by the Maryland Historical Trust and the Maryland State Highway Administration. The text of the marker was proposed by Bill Barry, Director of Labor Studies at the Baltimore County Community College.
## See also |
21,782,733 | Third Silesian War | 1,168,492,551 | 1756–63 conflict between Prussia and Austria; theatre of the Seven Years' War | [
"Frederick the Great",
"Seven Years' War",
"Silesian Wars"
]
| The Third Silesian War (German: Dritter Schlesischer Krieg) was a war between Prussia and Austria (together with its allies) that lasted from 1756 to 1763 and confirmed Prussia's control of the region of Silesia (now in south-western Poland). The war was fought mainly in Silesia, Bohemia and Upper Saxony and formed one theatre of the Seven Years' War. It was the last of three Silesian Wars fought between Frederick the Great's Prussia and Maria Theresa's Austria in the mid-18th century, all three of which ended in Prussian control of Silesia.
This conflict can be viewed as a continuation of the First and Second Silesian Wars of the previous decade. After the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the War of the Austrian Succession, Austria enacted broad reforms and upended its traditional diplomatic policy to prepare for renewed war with Prussia. As with the previous Silesian Wars, no particular triggering event initiated the conflict; rather, Prussia struck opportunistically to disrupt its enemies' plans. The war's cost in blood and treasure was high on both sides, and it ended inconclusively when neither of the main belligerents could sustain the conflict any longer.
The war began with a Prussian invasion of Saxony in mid-1756, and it ended in a Prussian diplomatic victory with the 1763 Treaty of Hubertusburg, which confirmed Prussian control of Silesia. The treaty resulted in no territorial changes, but Austria agreed to recognise Prussia's sovereignty in Silesia in return for Prussia's support for the election of Maria Theresa's son, Archduke Joseph, as Holy Roman Emperor. The conflict formed part of the ongoing Austria–Prussia rivalry that would shape German politics for more than a century. The war greatly enhanced the prestige of Prussia, which won general recognition as a major European power, and of Frederick, who cemented his reputation as a preeminent military commander.
## Context and causes
While the Seven Years' War was a global conflict among many belligerents, its Central European theatre turned on lingering grudges from the War of the Austrian Succession (1741–1748). The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which had concluded the latter war, confirmed Prussian King Frederick II's seizure of the region of Silesia from the Habsburg monarchy through two Silesian Wars. The defeated Empress Maria Theresa of Austria nevertheless fully intended to retake the lost province and reassert Austria's hegemony in the Holy Roman Empire; after peace was restored, she set about rebuilding her armed forces and seeking out new alliances.
### Unresolved conflicts
Though France and Great Britain recognised Prussia's sovereignty in Silesia under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Austria ultimately refused to ratify the agreement, and Maria Theresa's husband, Holy Roman Emperor Francis I, withheld the Holy Roman Empire's guarantee for Prussian control of the contested province. Prussia, in turn, withheld its assent to the Pragmatic Sanction, thus challenging Maria Theresa's legitimacy as head of the Habsburg monarchy. Despite dynastic links, British King George II viewed Prussia as an ally and proxy of the French, while Empress Elizabeth of Russia saw Frederick's kingdom as a rival for influence in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and feared that Prussia's growing power would obstruct the path of Russia's westward expansion. The political and diplomatic conditions that had led to the previous Silesian Wars still held, and further conflict seemed likely.
In 1746 Maria Theresa formed a defensive agreement with Elizabeth known as the Treaty of Two Empresses, which aligned Austria and Russia against Prussia; a secret clause guaranteed Russia's support for Austria's claims in Silesia. In 1750 Britain joined the anti-Prussian compact in return for guarantees of Austrian and Russian support in the case of a Prussian attack on the Electorate of Hanover, which George also ruled in personal union. At the same time, Maria Theresa, who had been disappointed with Britain's performance as her ally in the War of the Austrian Succession, followed the controversial advice of her Chancellor Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz by pursuing warmer relations with Austria's longstanding rival, the Kingdom of France.
### Diplomatic Revolution
Britain elevated tensions in 1755 by offering to finance the deployment of a Russian army that would stand ready to attack Prussia's eastern frontier. Alarmed by this encirclement, Frederick began working to separate Britain from the Austrian coalition by allaying King George's concern for Hanover. On 16 January 1756 Prussia and Britain agreed to the Convention of Westminster, under which Prussia now undertook to guarantee Hanover against French attack, in return for Britain's withdrawal of its offer of military subsidies to Russia. This move created a new Anglo-Prussian alliance and incensed the French court.
Austria was now seeking warmer relations with France to ensure that the French would not take Prussia's side in a future conflict over Silesia. King Louis XV responded to Prussia's realignment with Britain by accepting Maria Theresa's invitation to a new Franco-Austrian alliance, formalised with the First Treaty of Versailles in May 1756. This series of political manoeuvres came to be known as the Diplomatic Revolution. Russia, likewise upset by the withdrawal of Britain's promised subsidies, drew closer to Austria and France, agreeing to a more openly offensive anti-Prussian coalition in April 1756. As France turned against Prussia and Russia separated from Britain, Kaunitz's plan thus matured into a grand anti-Prussian alliance between Austria, Russia, various lesser German powers, and France.
### Preparations for war
As Austria and Russia made open preparations for renewed war, Frederick became convinced that Prussia would be attacked in early 1757. Rather than wait for his enemies to move at a time of their choosing, he resolved instead to act preemptively, beginning with an attack against the neighbouring Electorate of Saxony, which he correctly believed was a secret party to the coalition against him. Frederick's broad strategy had three parts. First, he meant to occupy Saxony, gaining strategic depth and using the Saxon army and treasury to bolster the Prussian war effort. Second, he would advance from Saxony into Bohemia, where he might set up winter quarters and supply his army at Austria's expense. Third, he would invade Moravia from Silesia, seize the fortress at Olmütz, and advance on Vienna to force an end to the war. He hoped to receive financial support from the British, who had also promised to send a naval squadron into the Baltic Sea to defend Prussia's coast against Russia, if necessary.
To begin, Frederick divided Prussia's armies in three. He placed a force of 20,000 under Field Marshal Hans von Lehwaldt in East Prussia to guard against any Russian invasion from the east, with a reserve of 8,000 standing in Farther Pomerania; Russia should have been able to bring irresistible force to bear against East Prussia, but the King trusted to the slowness and disorganisation of the Imperial Russian Army to defend his north-eastern flank. He also stationed Field Marshal Count Kurt von Schwerin in Silesia with 25,000 men to deter incursions from Moravia and Hungary. Finally, in August 1756 he personally led the main Prussian army of around 60,000 into Saxony, beginning the Third Silesian War.
### Methods and technologies
European warfare in the early modern period was characterised by the widespread adoption of firearms in combination with more traditional bladed weapons. 18th-century European armies were built around units of massed infantry armed with smoothbore flintlock muskets and bayonets. Cavalrymen were equipped with sabres and pistols or carbines; light cavalry were used principally for reconnaissance, screening and tactical communications, while heavy cavalry were used as tactical reserves and deployed for shock attacks. Smoothbore artillery provided fire support and played the leading role in siege warfare. Strategic warfare in this period centred around control of key fortifications positioned so as to command the surrounding regions and roads, with lengthy sieges a common feature of armed conflict. Decisive field battles were relatively rare, though they played a larger part in Frederick's theory of warfare than was typical among his contemporary rivals.
The Silesian Wars, like most European wars of the 18th century, were fought as so-called cabinet wars in which disciplined regular armies were equipped and supplied by the state to conduct warfare on behalf of the sovereign's interests. Occupied enemy territories were regularly taxed and extorted for funds, but large-scale atrocities against civilian populations were rare compared with conflicts in the previous century. Military logistics was the decisive factor in many wars, as armies had grown too large to support themselves on prolonged campaigns by foraging and plunder alone. Military supplies were stored in centralised magazines and distributed by baggage trains that were highly vulnerable to enemy raids. Armies were generally unable to sustain combat operations during winter and normally established winter quarters in the cold season, resuming their campaigns with the return of spring.
## Course
### 1756
#### Invasion of Saxony
Prussian troops crossed the Saxon frontier on 29 August 1756. The Prussian Army marched in three columns: on the right were about 15,000 men under the command of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick; on the left were 18,000 men under the command of the Duke of Brunswick-Bevern; in the centre was Frederick himself, with Field Marshal James Keith commanding a corps of 30,000 troops. Prince Ferdinand was to advance on the town of Chemnitz and proceed to Leipzig, while Bevern was to traverse Lusatia to seize Bautzen. Meanwhile, Frederick and Keith would advance through Torgau to attack the Saxon capital at Dresden. Saxony and Austria were unprepared for Frederick's preemptive strike, and their forces were scattered; as Prussians streamed into the Electorate, the main Saxon army fortified itself at Pirna, and the Prussians occupied Dresden on 9 September against little resistance.
Frederick and the main Prussian army pressed on into northern Bohemia, looking to engage the Austrians under General Maximilian Ulysses Browne before they could join forces with the Saxons. Browne took up a defensible position by the village of Lobositz, where the two forces fought the Battle of Lobositz on 1 October. The engagement ended inconclusively, with the Austrians inflicting significant losses on the Prussians and then retreating in good order; Frederick thus prevented Browne from reinforcing the isolated Saxons, but Browne stopped Frederick's advance into Bohemia. Turning back to the north, the Prussians fully occupied Saxony, even taking Elector Frederick Augustus II of Saxony prisoner, although he was allowed to withdraw to Poland on 18 October. The Saxon army was briefly besieged at Pirna and surrendered on 14 October, after which its men were forcibly incorporated into the Prussian army under Prussian officers. Saxony's treasury was emptied and its currency debased to help fund the Prussian war effort.
### 1757
#### Winter diplomacy
Over the winter of 1756–1757 the belligerents worked to secure their respective alliances and coordinate strategy with their allies. In February William Pitt, the new Leader of the House of Commons and a determined foe of France, persuaded the British Parliament to firmly and finally commit to the Prussian cause against Austria and France, after which Britain began delivering supplies and badly needed subsidies to Berlin. Parliament also approved the deployment of an army of observation to defend Hanover (and Brandenburg) against the coming French invasion from the west, and Frederick again called for a British naval deployment in the Baltic to deter Russia and an increasingly unfriendly Sweden, though nothing came of it.
However, Prussia's aggressive attack on Saxony galvanised the Austrian coalition, and in particular increased France's commitment to offensive war against Prussia. The Imperial Diet met in January in Regensburg, where Maria Theresa won enough German princes to her cause that the Holy Roman Empire declared war on Prussia on 17 January; the Diet called for a 40,000-man Reichsarmee to be assembled and put at Austria's disposal for the liberation of Saxony. In May 1757 the Second Treaty of Versailles strengthened the Franco-Austrian Alliance, with the French agreeing to contribute 129,000 soldiers to the fighting in Germany, along with subsidies of 12 million livres per year until Austria had recovered Silesia.
In return, Austria promised that after the victory was won it would grant France control of the Austrian Netherlands, a long-coveted prize for the French. Russia also committed 80,000 men to the conflict, hoping to seize East Prussia and then exchange that territory with Poland for control of Courland. Sweden also agreed to invade Prussian Pomerania, looking to recovering the territories lost to Prussia after the Great Northern War. In all, then, the Austrian coalition sought a total partition of the Kingdom of Prussia, all while portraying Frederick as the aggressor for making the first move to open war.
#### Bohemian campaign and Battle of Kolín
After wintering in Saxony, Frederick decided to immediately invade Bohemia again, before French or Russian forces could reach the area and support the Austrians. On 18 April 1757 the main Prussian army advanced in multiple columns through the Ore Mountains, seeking a decisive engagement with Browne's forces, while the Silesian garrison under Schwerin advanced from Glatz to join them. On 21 April Bevern's column encountered an Austrian corps led by Count Königsegg near Reichenberg; the ensuing Battle of Reichenberg ended in a Prussian victory, and the Prussian forces continued to advance on Prague.
The invading columns reunited north of Prague, while the retreating Austrians reformed under the command of Prince Charles of Lorraine to the city's east, and on 6 May the two armies fought the Battle of Prague. Both sides suffered heavy casualties, and both Browne and Schwerin were killed, but the Prussians forced the Austrians back into the fortified city, which the invaders then besieged. Learning of the attack on Prague, Austrian commander Count Leopold von Daun advanced from the east with a force of 30,000 men. Daun arrived too late to join the Battle of Prague, but he collected thousands of scattered Austrians who had escaped from the battle; with these reinforcements he slowly moved to relieve the city.
Trying to simultaneously besiege Prague and face Daun, the Prussians were compelled to divide their forces. Frederick led 5,000 troops from the siege to reinforce a 19,000-man army under Bevern at nearby Kolín and assess the situation. Without sufficient force to resist Daun's advance, Frederick decided to withdraw more men from the siege and preemptively attack the Austrian position. The resulting Battle of Kolín on 18 June ended in a decisive Austrian victory; the Prussian position was ruined, and the invaders were forced to lift the siege and withdraw from Bohemia altogether, pursued by Daun's army, which was enlarged by the Prague garrison. The failure to take Bohemia meant the ruin of Frederick's strategy, leaving no prospect of a march on Vienna.
#### East Prussia and Pomerania
Prussia's reversal in Bohemia paralleled the entry of new belligerents on the Austrian side. In mid-1757 a Russian force of 75,000 troops under Field Marshal Stepan Fyodorovich Apraksin invaded East Prussia and took the fortress at Memel. Advancing further, the Russians engaged and defeated a smaller Prussian force led by Lehwaldt in the Battle of Gross-Jägersdorf on 30 August. However, the victorious Russians were unable to take Königsberg, having expended their supplies at Memel and Gross-Jägersdorf, and retreated soon afterwards; recurring difficulties with logistics limited the offensive capabilities of the large Russian army and allowed East Prussia to hold out longer than might have been expected. Sweden, too, declared war on Prussia in September, invading Prussian Pomerania on 13 September with 17,000 men and beginning the Pomeranian War. The need to defend core territories on these fronts reduced Prussia's offensive capacity in Bohemia and Silesia.
#### Battle of Rossbach
In mid-1757 Austrian forces gradually pushed into Prussian-controlled Lusatia, while a combined French and Reichsarmee force under the Prince of Soubise approached the theatre from the west. On 7 September the Austrians under Daun and Prince Charles, advancing into Upper Lusatia, defeated a Prussian force under Bevern and Hans Karl von Winterfeldt at the Battle of Moys, during which Winterfeldt was killed. Prince Charles's army then proceeded westward, hoping to link up with Soubise's force after the latter had traversed Saxony, while Bevern and his army retreated eastward to defend Lower Silesia.
Deterred by the overwhelming Austrian force in Lusatia, Frederick instead led a Prussian army westward into Thuringia to seek a decisive engagement with the approaching Franco-Imperial army before it could unite with Prince Charles and Daun. The Imperials evaded the Prussians, however, and on 10 September Hanover and the British army of observation surrendered to France with the Convention of Klosterzeven, further exposing Prussia's western flank. Meanwhile, between 10 and 17 October a small hussar force under Hungarian Count András Hadik ranged ahead of the main Austrian force to briefly occupy Berlin, ransoming the city for 200,000 thalers and then retreating. In late October the Prussian army reversed course and moved back eastward to Leipzig to defend Prussia's core territory against the various threats it now faced.
After this series of manoeuvres, on 5 November a Prussian corps under Frederick located and engaged Soubise's much larger force near the village of Rossbach in Saxony. The ensuing Battle of Rossbach ended in a stunning Prussian victory, in which Frederick lost fewer than 1,000 men, while the Franco-German force under Soubise lost around 10,000. This victory secured Prussia's control of Saxony for a time, and its effect on the morale of both sides was dramatic. After the embarrassing defeat at Rossbach, French interest in the Silesian War declined sharply, and French forces were soon withdrawn from the Silesian theatre, leaving Rossbach as the only battle between the French and Prussians during the war.
#### Battle of Leuthen
While Frederick's army manoeuvred in western Saxony and Thuringia, the Austrian army of Prince Charles and Daun pressed eastward into Lower Silesia. In November they reached Breslau, where they were opposed by the Silesian garrison under Bevern. The Austrians had overwhelming numbers, and in the Battle of Breslau on 22 November they drove the Prussians from the field. Bevern himself was taken prisoner, and the bulk of his remaining forces retreated toward Glogau, leaving behind some thousands to garrison the city against a siege; the commander of the garrison surrendered Breslau to the Austrians on 25 November in return for safe passage.
When Frederick learned of the fall of Breslau, his 22,000 men marched 274 kilometres (170 mi) in twelve days to regroup with the retreating Prussian troops from Breslau at Liegnitz. The augmented army of about 33,000 men arrived near Leuthen, 27 kilometres (17 mi) west of Breslau, to find 66,000 Austrians in formation around the village. Despite his troops' fatigue from the rapid march, Frederick engaged the superior Austrian force on 5 December and won another unexpected victory in the Battle of Leuthen. The Prussians pursued Prince Charles's defeated army all the way back to Bohemia, while the Austrian and French forces still within Breslau were besieged until their surrender on 19–20 December, bringing the bulk of Silesia back under Prussian control.
#### Winter manoeuvres
After this major defeat, Prince Charles was removed from his command and replaced by Daun, who was now promoted to Field Marshal. Frederick hoped the major victories at Rossbach and Leuthen would bring Maria Theresa to the peace table, but she was determined not to negotiate until she had retaken Silesia. Prussia had already exhausted its treasury in the 1757 campaign, and it now devalued its currency while imposing fresh taxes on occupied Saxony and on the Catholic Church in Silesia to raise funds for the new year. With the Saxon–Silesian front stabilised, Frederick ordered the bulk of his East Prussian forces under Lehwaldt to reinforce Pomerania, predicting that no new Russian advance would come until after the winter. The enlarged Prussian army quickly drove the Swedes back, occupied most of Swedish Pomerania, and blockaded its capital at Stralsund through the winter. Prince Ferdinand, now made commander of the Hanoverian army, launched a series of winter offensives that ended the French occupation of Hanover and eventually drove the French out of Westphalia and across the Rhine, securing Prussia's western flank for the duration of the war.
### 1758
#### Moravian campaign
In January 1758 a Russian army commanded by Count William Fermor again invaded East Prussia, where the few remaining Prussian troops put up little resistance. Frederick abandoned the province to Russian occupation, judging it strategically expendable and preferring to concentrate on achieving another decisive victory in the Silesian theatre to force the Austrians to the peace table. In March France greatly reduced its financial and military commitments to the Austrian coalition with the signing of the Third Treaty of Versailles. As Prince Ferdinand's Prussian–Hanoverian army gradually forced the French out of northern Germany, Prussia and Britain quarrelled over the exact terms of their alliance, with Frederick demanding the commitment of British troops to Germany and the delivery of the long-promised naval squadron in the Baltic, while Pitt insisted on conserving Britain's resources for the wider global war.
At length, on 11 April the British formalised their alliance with Prussia in the Anglo-Prussian Convention, in which they committed to provide Prussia with a subsidy of £670,000 annually (equivalent to £ million in 2022) and to make no separate peace, as well as deploying 9,000 troops to reinforce Prince Ferdinand's army in the Rhineland. Frederick decided that the time had come to invade Moravia and seize the fortified city of Olmütz, as he had planned the previous year, as soon as the last Austrians could be driven from Silesia. Schweidnitz, the last Austrian-occupied stronghold in Silesia, surrendered on 16 April, after which Frederick led a field army into Moravia, reaching Olmütz on 29 April and besieging it on 20 May.
Olmütz was well defended, and the siege was slow and difficult. Frederick hoped to provoke an Austrian counter-attack, but Daun chose to avoid direct engagements with the Prussian force, focusing instead on harassing its supply lines. By late June the city's defences were badly damaged, but the besieging army's supplies were acutely low. On 30 June Austrian forces commanded by General Ernst von Laudon intercepted a massive supply convoy from Silesia bound for the Prussian army at Olmütz and destroyed it in the Battle of Domstadtl. After this loss, the Prussians were forced to break off the siege and withdraw from Moravia, abandoning their final major invasion of Austrian territory during the war.
#### Battles of Zorndorf and Hochkirch
Frustrated in Moravia, the Prussians fortified Saxony and Silesia, while Frederick led an army northward to repel the advancing Russians, who had by then reached the borders of Brandenburg, where they besieged and burned Küstrin. The Prussian troops who had besieged Stralsund through the winter now withdrew to bolster Frederick's force, joining them near the ruins of Küstrin on 22 August. On 25 August a Prussian army of 35,000 men under Frederick engaged a Russian army of 43,000 under Fermor just east of the Oder in Neumark at the Battle of Zorndorf. Both sides fought to exhaustion and suffered heavy casualties, but the Russians withdrew, and Frederick claimed victory.
The Prussians regrouped and marched back to Saxony, where they manoeuvred against Daun's advancing Austrians through September and into October, probing the Austrians' communications but avoiding any decisive engagement. On 14 October Daun surprised the main Prussian army led by Frederick and Keith near Hochkirch in Lusatia, overwhelming them in the Battle of Hochkirch. The Prussians abandoned much of their artillery and supplies, and Keith was killed in action, but the survivors retreated in good order, and Daun declined to pursue them. The Prussians hastily regrouped and entered Silesia to break an Austrian siege of Neisse on 7 November. After this they returned westward to reinforce Dresden in case of an attack by Daun, but the Austrians withdrew to the west without further attacks.
#### Winter quarters
After taking heavy losses at Zorndorf, Fermor's Russian army pulled back to the Baltic coast and across the Vistula, making no further attacks against Prussia in 1758. The withdrawal of Prussian soldiers from Swedish Pomerania led to a renewed Swedish offensive in September, which progressed as far as Neuruppin; but, after failing to unite with either Russian or Austrian forces, the Swedes fell back to Swedish Pomerania for the winter for supplies. Despite their victory at Hochkirch, Daun's Austrians, too, ultimately made little strategic progress in Saxony and were unable to retake Dresden. Eventually, the Austrians were forced to withdraw into Bohemia for the winter, leaving Saxony under Prussian control, while the decimated Prussian army worked to rebuild itself in Saxony and Silesia.
### 1759
#### Battle of Kunersdorf
In April 1759 Frederick led his main army from Saxony into Lower Silesia to keep the Russian army in western Poland separated from Daun's Austrians in Bohemia. Meanwhile, a smaller Prussian force under Frederick's younger brother, Prince Henry, remained in Saxony to harass Bohemia through the Ore Mountains, winning the Battle of Peterswalde and a series of other minor engagements, as well as destroying several Austrian ammunition dumps and bridges before retreating into Saxony. The Russians continued to press into Neumark; on 23 July the new Russian commander, Count Pyotr Saltykov, led 47,000 men in defeating 26,000 Prussians commanded by General Carl Heinrich von Wedel at the Battle of Kay. The Russians advanced westward toward the Oder, while Frederick led reinforcements northward to join Wedel and face Saltykov, leaving Prince Henry and General Heinrich August de la Motte Fouqué to see to the defence of Saxony and Silesia, respectively.
On 3 August Saltykov reached and occupied Frankfurt an der Oder, where he received significant Austrian reinforcements sent from Daun under Laudon's command. Determined to drive back the Russians, who were now within 80 kilometres (50 mi) of Berlin, Frederick joined with the survivors from the Battle of Kay and on 12 August attacked the Russian position around the village of Kunersdorf, east of Frankfurt. The resulting Battle of Kunersdorf was a crushing Russo-Austrian victory, totally scattering the Prussian army and clearing the way to Berlin for the invading coalition. After the battle Frederick believed the war to be totally lost, yet the allies again did not pursue the defeated Prussians or occupy Berlin.
Heavy Russian casualties at Kunersdorf and disagreement between the Russian and Austrian leadership led the cautious Count Saltykov to hold back his forces, giving the Prussians time to regroup. The Russian army's tenuous supply lines through Poland made it difficult to press home the victory so deep in enemy territory, and Prince Henry's manoeuvres in Saxony threatened to cut the Austrians' supply lines, upon which the Russians also partially depended. In September, despite the coalition's overwhelming superiority of force in Brandenburg, both the Russians and Austrians withdrew into Silesia. The coalition's internal conflicts and hesitant leadership had given Prussia a second chance, an event that Frederick later termed the "Miracle of the House of Brandenburg".
#### Saxon campaign
In early September Austrian forces in Bohemia pressed into Saxony, which had been largely emptied of defenders in preparation for Kunersdorf, forcing the surrender of Dresden on 4 September and quickly occupying most of the electorate. Prince Henry's force marched west to contest Saxony again, where a contingent under General Friedrich August von Finck sharply defeated a larger Austrian force at the Battle of Korbitz on 21 September. In response, Daun sent a relief force of his own into Saxony, only to have it destroyed by Prince Henry's Prussians on 25 September at the Battle of Hoyerswerda. Chagrined at the prospect of losing Saxony again, Daun then moved his own main force westward into Saxony, leaving behind the Russians, who withdrew into Poland for the winter.
In November, while the Prussian army worked to rebuild itself in Brandenburg and Silesia, a Prussian corps under Finck positioned itself at Maxen to harass Austrian lines of communication between Saxony and Bohemia. Austrian forces under Daun and Count Franz Moritz von Lacy surrounded and overwhelmed Finck's Prussians on 21 November in the Battle of Maxen, forcing the surrender of the entire Prussian corps. Another smaller Austrian victory in Saxony at the Battle of Meissen on 4 December ended the campaigning year.
### 1760
#### Lower Silesian campaign
In early 1760 Laudon was given his own command in Silesia, independent of Daun, and began campaigning there in March. After an inconclusive engagement with the Prussian garrison near Neustadt on 15 March, Laudon's Austrians gradually advanced through Lower Silesia, besieging Glatz on 7 June. De la Motte Fouqué led a force to relieve the fortress, but Laudon engaged and destroyed them on 23 June at the Battle of Landeshut, taking de la Motte Fouqué prisoner. The principal Prussian force under Frederick started eastward to defend Silesia, but it reversed course upon learning that Daun's main army was moving in the same direction. Temporarily abandoning Silesia to Austrian siege, Frederick led his army back into Saxony and besieged Dresden from 13 July. The Prussians hoped either to take Dresden quickly or at least to divide the Austrians' attention; instead, Daun's army marched westward and forced the Prussians to lift the siege and withdraw on 21 July.
Glatz was taken by the Austrians on 29 July, followed shortly by Liegnitz and Parchwitz, and the Austrian armies of Daun and Lacy returned to join with Laudon's force in Lower Silesia. The Prussians under Frederick and Prince Henry attempted to unite and seek a decisive engagement, while Daun moved to attack Frederick's force with overwhelming numbers. Laudon's corps, moving ahead of Daun's main army, attacked Frederick's position near Liegnitz on 15 August. The resulting Battle of Liegnitz ended in a Prussian victory, with the Prussians defeating Laudon before Daun's larger force could arrive to support him. This reversal disrupted the Austrians' manoeuvres and restored Prussian control of Lower Silesia, as Daun moved his army back into Saxony.
#### Battle of Torgau
A secondary Prussian force under General Johann Dietrich von Hülsen repulsed an Austrian advance into Saxony on 20 August in the Battle of Strehla. The Prussians and Austrians spent September skirmishing and manoeuvring in Silesia, while Saltykov's Russians held back in western Poland. With Prussian forces concentrated in Silesia and Saxony, Brandenburg was left largely undefended. In early October a Russian corps under General Gottlob Heinrich Tottleben advanced through Neumark and joined Lacy's Austrians in briefly occupying Berlin, where they demanded ransoms, seized arsenals and freed prisoners of war. However, the Russians soon pulled back to Frankfurt an der Oder for want of supplies, while Lacy's force moved south to support Daun as he sought a decisive engagement with Frederick in Saxony.
The main Prussian and Austrian armies under Frederick, Daun and Lacy finally faced each other on 3 November near Torgau, where the succeeding Battle of Torgau proved very costly for both sides. In the end the Prussians controlled the field and claimed victory, but both armies were badly weakened and soon retreated to winter quarters. Prussia's pyrrhic victory at Torgau resulted in few strategic gains, since Daun still controlled Dresden, and Laudon's army still had the run of Silesia; the Prussian currency had to again be devalued over the winter to stabilise the army's finances. On the other hand, the Austrians, who had hoped to decide the war once and for all at Torgau, were bitterly disappointed to have suffered still another defeat at the hands of a smaller Prussian force, and Maria Theresa's deteriorating finances were beginning to constrain the Austrian war effort. The battle left the war-making capacity of both sides so depleted that neither retained any realistic prospect of bringing the Silesian War to a decisive close without outside help.
### 1761
#### Dwindling resources
By early 1761 neither side retained the men or supplies needed to mount a major offensive. Prussia could field only 104,000 troops, many of them raw recruits, and there were shortages of even basic supplies like muskets for the infantry. The Prussian army was no longer fit for the sort of aggressive manoeuvers that had previously characterised Frederick's tactics, and the kingdom's situation was desperate. Daun, the chief Austrian commander, also ruled out major offensives for the year and made no plans to even attempt to reconquer Silesia, preferring to concentrate his efforts in Saxony against Prince Henry. Austria's finances were in a state of chaos, and its economy was choked by heavy war taxes. Cooperation between Russian and Austrian forces was breaking down, as the two allied powers grew less willing to pursue each other's goals in the field.
#### Russian advances
Russian Marshal Alexander Buturlin, the new commander of Russia's forces in the theatre, coordinated with Laudon's Austrians to begin an advance in southern Silesia in April. The Prussian garrison under General Karl Christoph von der Goltz dug in around Schweidnitz, while field armies under Frederick, Laudon and Buturlin engaged in a prolonged campaign of manoeuver with no major engagements. The allies ended the campaign with a modest victory by storming the fortress at Schweidnitz on 1 October, after which the Prussians fell back to winter quarters in northern Silesia and Brandenburg.
Meanwhile, Russian forces under Zakhar Chernyshev and Pyotr Rumyantsev had besieged and blockaded the Prussian Pomeranian port of Kolberg beginning on 22 August. The town was strongly defended and held out well, but several Prussian attempts to break the siege were unsuccessful. In October Frederick ordered much of the garrison to withdraw to Berlin and defend Brandenburg; the weakened town finally capitulated on 16 December. The fall of Kolberg cost Prussia its last port on the Baltic Sea, and it gave Russia a way to supply its armies in Central Europe by sea, rather than overland through Poland. The resulting benefits to Russian logistics threatened to tip the balance of power decisively against Prussia the following year.
### 1762
#### The "second miracle"
As 1762 began, the Prussian armies had dwindled to only sixty thousand men, and it was doubtful whether they could prevent a renewed Russian and Austrian advance to Berlin. A total Prussian collapse seemed imminent; the British now threatened to withdraw their subsidies if Prussia did not offer concessions to secure peace, a threat made good later that year by the new British prime minister, Lord Bute. Then, on 5 January 1762, the ailing Russian Empress Elizabeth died. Her nephew and successor, Emperor Peter III, was an ardent admirer of Frederick's, and he at once reversed Elizabeth's foreign policy and ordered a ceasefire with Prussia.
Peter agreed to an armistice with Prussia in March and lifted the Russian occupation of East Prussia and Pomerania, redirecting his armies to Mecklenburg to threaten Denmark with war over his claims on the Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp. On 15 May Russia and Prussia formally ended their war with the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, confirming Prussia's pre-war borders in the north and east. Peter went on to mediate the 22 May Treaty of Hamburg, ending the Pomeranian War between Prussia and Sweden, with all of Prussia's Pomeranian territory preserved. After signing a new alliance with Prussia on 1 June, he even placed Chernyshev's corps of 18,000 Russian troops under Frederick's command; a second "Miracle of the House of Brandenburg" had occurred.
Meanwhile, French morale had been sapped by prolonged British blockades, defeats in North America and India, and a lack of progress in the Rhineland. After Russia's about-face and Sweden's withdrawal, King Louis realised that France was unlikely to gain its promised reward of the Austrian Netherlands. Austria was virtually bankrupt, and without French subsidies Maria Theresa could not afford a new invasion of Silesia; with France similarly exhausted, Louis was no longer willing to finance his ally's war. Since France had never formally declared war on Prussia, he agreed to a ceasefire with Frederick and evacuated Prussia's territories in the Rhineland, ending France's involvement in the war in Germany.
#### Final campaigns
With its flanks now secured, Prussia concentrated all of its remaining strength against Austria. The Prussian army, swollen by forces recalled from the north and soon to be augmented by Chernyshev's Russians, could once again match the Austrians' strength in the field, and in June the Prussians marched again to contest Silesia. However, on 9 July Peter was deposed and replaced by his wife, Empress Catherine II (later to be known as Catherine the Great); Catherine immediately withdrew from the alliance her husband had formed with Prussia, but she did not rejoin the war on the Austrian side.
Despite the loss of their Russian auxiliaries, the Prussians engaged Daun's army on 21 July near Burkersdorf, north-east of Schweidnitz. Frederick persuaded Chernyshev to support the attack, not by actually fighting, but merely by remaining in the area and presenting a potential threat to the Austrians. The resulting Prussian victory in the Battle of Burkersdorf led to the recovery of most of Silesia from Austrian control. Daun's forces withdrew to Glatz, and the Prussians besieged Schweidnitz, recapturing it at length on 9 October. Prussia had won its final Silesian campaign.
In the following months Prince Henry led a secondary army into Saxony, where he engaged the Austrian defenders of Dresden near Freiberg on 29 October; the Battle of Freiberg saw the defenders shattered and pursued back to Dresden, after which Prussian forces occupied the majority of Saxony. Prince Henry's army pursued some Reichsarmee forces into Franconia and raided pro-Austrian principalities in the Holy Roman Empire in November and December. In November Maria Theresa proposed to open peace negotiations, to which Frederick immediately agreed; on 24 November the two belligerents declared an armistice in Saxony and Silesia, and formal peace talks began in late December.
#### Stalemate
By the end of 1762 Prussia had recovered nearly all of Silesia from the Austrians, and after the Battle of Freiberg it controlled most of Saxony outside of Dresden; Austria still held Dresden and the southeastern edge of Saxony, along with the County of Glatz to the south of Silesia. The warring powers in Central Europe had essentially fought to a stalemate. Prussia's finances were stable, but the country had been devastated by battle and enemy occupation, and its manpower was spent. Austria was facing a severe financial crisis and had to reduce the size of its army, greatly decreasing its offensive power; without Russian troops or French subsidies, it had little hope of reconquering Silesia. The other belligerents in the wider Seven Years' War had already begun peace talks; now, negotiators from Austria, Prussia and Saxony convened on 30 December at Hubertusburg palace, near the front lines in Saxony, to discuss terms of peace.
### 1763
#### Treaty of Hubertusburg
Frederick had earlier considered offering East Prussia to Russia in return for Peter's support for his seizure of Saxony, but Catherine's withdrawal meant that Russia was no longer a belligerent and did not participate in the negotiations. The warring parties eventually agreed to simply restore their respective conquests to each other: Austria would withdraw from Glatz, restoring full Prussian control of Silesia, in exchange for Prussia's evacuation of Saxony, which would be returned to Frederick Augustus, who would receive no other reparations from Prussia. With these swaps, the borders in the region arrived precisely back at the status quo ante bellum. Austria made a further concession by formally renouncing its claim to Silesia; in return, Prussia committed to support Maria Theresa's son, Archduke Joseph, in the forthcoming 1764 Imperial election. With that, the belligerents agreed to end the Third Silesian War with the Treaty of Hubertusburg, signed 15 February 1763.
## Outcomes
The return to territorial status quo ante meant that none of the belligerents in the Silesian War gained the prize it had aimed at: Prussia failed to keep any part of Saxony, while Austria was unable to recover its lost province of Silesia, nor did Russia gain any territory at Prussia's expense. Nonetheless, the outcome of the war has generally been considered a diplomatic victory for Prussia, which not only retained Silesia, but also compelled Austria to acknowledge its sovereignty in the province, forestalling any further Silesian Wars. More fundamentally, Prussia showed itself to be a credible rival to Austria by successfully surviving intact what could have become a war of partition.
### Prussia
Prussia emerged from the war as a new European great power, establishing itself as the leading power of Protestant Germany. The kingdom won general recognition of its sovereignty in Silesia, putting a stop to Austria's attempts to recover the province. Frederick the Great's personal reputation was enormously enhanced, as his debts to fortune (Russia's about-face after Elizabeth's death) and to British financial support were soon forgotten, while the memories of his energetic leadership and tactical successes were strenuously kept alive. Prussia had held its own while being simultaneously invaded by Austria, Russia, Sweden, and France, an accomplishment that appeared miraculous to contemporary observers. After 1763, armies around the world sent their officers to Prussia to learn the secrets of the state's outsize military power, making Prussia one of the most imitated states in Europe.
Though sometimes depicted as a key moment in Prussia's rise to greatness, the war nonetheless left the kingdom's economy and population devastated, and much of the remainder of Frederick's reign was spent repairing the damage. To mitigate population losses, the King continued his father's policy of encouraging Protestant refugees from Catholic realms to resettle in Prussia. The repeated currency devaluations imposed to finance the conflict had led to rapid inflation and great economic disruption in Prussia (and in Saxony). After the war the state began using its network of military grain depots and the excise on grains to stabilise food prices and alleviate grain shortages. Prussia also established a rudimentary social welfare system for impoverished and disabled veterans of the Silesian Wars.
Prussia's armed forces had experienced heavy casualties in the war, with around 180,000 men killed, and the officer corps was severely depleted. After the peace the state had neither the money nor the manpower to rebuild the army to what it had been before the war. By 1772 Prussia's standing army was restored to 190,000 men, but few of the officers were veterans of the Silesian Wars. In the succeeding War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–1779) the Prussians fought poorly, despite again being personally led by Frederick, and the Prussian army did not fare well against revolutionary France in 1792–1795. In 1806 the Prussians were shattered by Napoleon's French at the Battle of Jena; only after a series of reforms motivated by the disasters of 1806–1807 did Prussian military power again begin to grow.
### Austria
The war left the Habsburg monarchy deeply in debt, and its armed forces were greatly weakened, with more than 145,000 men dead or missing in the conflict. Austria was not able to retake Silesia or realise any other territorial gains, but it did preserve Saxony from Prussian control, slowing the growth of its new northern rival. Its military performed far more respectably than during the War of the Austrian Succession, which seemed to vindicate Maria Theresa's administrative and military reforms since that war. Thus, the war in great part restored Austria's prestige and preserved its position as a major player in the European system. By agreeing to vote for Archduke Joseph in the Imperial election, Frederick accepted the continuation of Habsburg pre-eminence in the Holy Roman Empire, though this was far less than Austria had hoped to win in the war.
Prussia's confirmation as a first-rate power and the enhanced prestige of its king and army were long-term threats to Austria's hegemony in Germany. The Silesian Wars made clear that the Habsburg monarchy would need sustained reform if it was to retain its dominant position in European power politics. After the disappointment of the Third Silesian War Maria Theresa finally abandoned the hope of recovering Silesia, focusing instead on domestic reforms to better prepare the realm for future conflicts with Prussia. In 1761 the Habsburg monarchy implemented newly centralised administrative and policymaking bodies to streamline what had often been a chaotic executive process. The 1760s and 1770s saw vigorous efforts to improve tax collection, particularly in Lombardy and the Austrian Netherlands, which led to significant increases in state revenues. In 1766 the crown promulgated its first common code of laws, the Codex Theresianus, in an effort to unify the realm's various legal systems. Aiming to increase the peasantry's ability to contribute to the state's tax base, Maria Theresa issued a series of Robot Patents between 1771 and 1778 restricting forced peasant labour in her German and Bohemian lands, and her son would carry the process further with his Serfdom Patent. The state also implemented compulsory primary education and established a system of secular public schools. Beginning with these so-called Theresian reforms, wide-ranging efforts to modernise the Habsburg monarchy over the next half century grew out of Austria's defeat. |
3,156,605 | Hurricane Dog (1950) | 1,170,107,528 | Category 4 Atlantic hurricane | [
"1950 Atlantic hurricane season",
"1950 in Saint Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla",
"1950 in the Caribbean",
"1950 meteorology",
"1950 natural disasters in the United States",
"Category 4 Atlantic hurricanes",
"History of British Antigua and Barbuda",
"Hurricanes in Anguilla",
"Hurricanes in Antigua and Barbuda",
"Hurricanes in Guadeloupe",
"Hurricanes in Montserrat",
"Hurricanes in New England",
"Hurricanes in Saba (island)",
"Hurricanes in Saint Barthélemy",
"Hurricanes in Saint Kitts and Nevis",
"Hurricanes in Saint Martin (island)",
"Hurricanes in Sint Eustatius",
"Hurricanes in the British Virgin Islands",
"Hurricanes in the Leeward Islands",
"Hurricanes in the United States Virgin Islands"
]
| Hurricane Dog was the most intense hurricane in the 1950 Atlantic hurricane season. Prior to reanalysis by the Hurricane Research Division in 2014, it was considered one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, equivalent to Category 5 status on the modern Saffir-Simpson scale, with winds of 185 miles per hour (298 km/h). The fourth named storm of the season, Dog developed on August 30 to the east of Antigua; after passing through the northern Lesser Antilles, it turned to the north and intensified into a Category 4 hurricane. Dog reached its peak intensity with winds of 145 mph (230 km/h) over the open Atlantic, and after weakening it passed within 200 miles (320 km) of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The storm became extratropical on September 12.
Hurricane Dog caused extensive damage to the Leeward Islands, and was considered the most severe hurricane on record in Antigua. Many buildings were destroyed or severely damaged on the island, with thousands left homeless just weeks after Hurricane Baker caused serious damage there. In the United States, the hurricane caused moderate coastal damage, including damage to several boats, and resulted in 11 offshore drownings. Strong winds caused widespread power outages across southeastern New England. There were twelve people missing and assumed dead offshore Nova Scotia. Damage across its path totaled about \$3 million (1950 USD\$, 2009 USD).
## Meteorological history
The exact origins of Hurricane Dog are obscure, due to sparse ship and land observations over the eastern Atlantic Ocean; the storm may have originated from an easterly wave on August 24 near the Cape Verde islands, but there are no observations to support such development. Ships first encountered the storm on August 30, when the SS Sibrodin reported gale-force winds and an area of low pressure about 320 miles (510 km) east-southeast of Antigua. The storm is first documented as a hurricane with winds of 90 mph (145 km/h) late on August 30. With high pressures to its northeast, the storm tracked west-northwestward and rapidly intensified: on August 31 it attained major hurricane status, reaching winds of 130 mph (209 km/h)—the first peak intensity in its life—before entering the Leeward Islands. Early on September 1, Hurricane Dog passed just north of Antigua as the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. A weather station on Antigua reported a pressure of 28.73 inches of mercury (973 mb), though the eye of the hurricane missed the station. After bypassing Antigua, Hurricane Dog weakened slightly, based on reports by reconnaissance aircraft; the cyclone made its first and only landfall over Anguilla with winds of 120 to 125 mph (193 to 201 km/h). The cyclone produced hurricane-force winds over Antigua and the nearby island of Saint Martin, which reported a pressure of 978.7 mb (28.90 inHg).
Early on September 2, Hurricane Dog came under weak steering currents, causing it to drift northward. The cyclone weakened even further: aircraft recorded a central pressure of 962 mb (28.4 inHg), and maximum sustained winds diminished to 115 mph (185 km/h). The storm mostly maintained its intensity for two more days, but on September 4 it began to re-intensify as it turned northwestward. On September 5, Hurricane Dog regained Category 4 intensity about 335 miles (540 km) north of the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic. The hurricane strengthened further after turning to the north, and Hurricane Dog reached its second and strongest peak intensity of 145 mph (233 km/h). On September 6, Hurricane Hunters visually estimated peak winds of 185 mph (300 km/h) about 450 miles (720 km) south-southwest of Bermuda; however, being early in the period of hurricane reconnaissance, such wind speeds—derived from observations of the sea surface—were subjective and sometimes unreliable. In 2014, a reanalysis of HURDAT by the Hurricane Research Division found that the peak winds in Hurricane Dog were more likely 145 mph (230 km/h), marking a reduction in the intensity of Hurricane Dog from Category 5 to Category 4. Nevertheless, while now estimated to have been less intense than assessed operationally in 1950, Dog was a formidable hurricane while over the western Atlantic, producing wave heights of over 100 feet (30 m).
Hurricane Dog maintained its peak intensity for about 12 hours. On September 7, the cyclone attained a central pressure of 948 mbar (27.99 inHg), which was the lowest pressure in association with the hurricane. A building ridge of high pressure to its north caused it to decelerate and weaken steadily for unknown reasons as it turned to the west; by September 9, the intensity had decreased to 75 mph (121 km/h). On September 10, Hurricane Dog began turning to the northwest, and a day later it headed north and then northeast. Late that day, it briefly re-intensified slightly to 100 mph (161 km/h) before transitioning into an extratropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds. The former hurricane passed within 200 miles (320 km) of Cape Cod on September 12. Shortly afterwards, the extratropical remnant turned to the east, losing hurricane winds for several days beginning on September 13. The system eventually turned to the northeast on September 15, and a day later it regained hurricane-force winds as a vigorous extratropical cyclone. Early on September 17, the cyclone struck Scotland with winds of 75 mph (121 km/h), but the system persisted until finally losing its identity north of Scotland on September 18.
## Preparations
In the United States, the threat of the hurricane prompted the National Weather Bureau to issue warnings of gale-force winds, high tides, and rough surf from the Outer Banks of North Carolina to Maine. At least 17 naval ships were moved in preparation for the hurricane. Rhode Island state police officers warned homeowners near the coast to be ready to evacuate, if necessary. There, officials also closed several beaches and canceled ferry travel along the state's southern waterways. On the day of the hurricane's closest approach to the United States, the National Weather Bureau issued storm warnings from Cape May, New Jersey, to Eastport, Maine.
## Impact
Passing through the Lesser Antilles, Hurricane Dog produced a storm surge of 8 feet (2.4 m) in Antigua. Winds on Antigua and Barbuda were estimated at 130 mph (210 km/h), with a gust of 144 mph (232 km/h) recorded at St. John's, Antigua and Barbuda. On Antigua, where hurricane-force winds were reported for six hours, residents considered it the most severe hurricane in history. Hurricane Dog left thousands homeless on Antigua, just weeks after Hurricane Baker caused severe damage on the island. Damage throughout the Lesser Antilles totaled \$1 million (1950 USD\$, 2009 USD), primarily on Antigua and Barbuda, and included many damaged or destroyed homes, ruined crops, blocked roads from washouts or fallen trees, and power outages across the islands. The hurricane resulted in several shipwrecks; two people drowned when their small boat capsized. The hurricane sank a boat on the island of Saint-Barthélemy, where damage amounted to \$70,000 (1950 USD\$, 2009 USD).
Heavy rain fell in the Mid-Atlantic States, leading to flash floods in some locations. In Bel Air, Maryland, a car drove into the swollen Little Gunpowder Falls; three people in the car drowned and a fourth was injured. A further two people drowned in Lexington, Virginia. Though newspaper sources attributed the heavy rainfall to Hurricane Dog, this was not confirmed. The hurricane deposited light to moderate rainfall across southeastern Massachusetts, ranging from around 1 inch (25 mm) to about 4 to 5 inches (100 to 125 mm) near Nantucket. In Provincetown, a car hit a woman—neither the driver nor the victim was able to see due to the rains. A man in Falmouth was paralyzed from the waist downwards after coming into contact with a wet tree limb next to a downed power line.
The hurricane produced high tides and rough surf along the East Coast of the United States, with coastal flooding reported along some beaches in Rhode Island. The hurricane capsized or damaged several boats along the coastline, including two large vessels in Nantucket. In Marblehead, Massachusetts, the surf grounded at least 15 vessels from the harbor onto a coastal causeway. Near Cape Cod, damage to fishermen's assets totaled \$150,000 (1950 USD\$, 2009 USD). Tides along Nantucket were reported at the highest levels since the 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricane. Hurricane Dog produced powerful wind gusts along coastal areas of New England, which caused widespread power outages, including a loss of power to 15 towns on Cape Cod, to hundreds of residences on Nantucket, and to several other locations in the area. Additionally, winds from the hurricane destroyed two small barns and uprooted a few trees, some of which blocked roads. Overall damage was fairly light, totaling about \$2 million (1950 USD\$, 2009 USD)—a much lower total than would have been expected if the hurricane had made landfall. In all, 12 people died in New England as a result of the hurricane. Two ships went missing during the storm along the coast of Nova Scotia, with a crew of six people each; their status is unknown, and they are considered storm fatalities.
## Records, naming, and aftermath
Before scientific reexamination reduced its winds, Hurricane Dog was listed as the second-strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, tied with Hurricanes Gilbert in 1988 and Wilma in 2005; following reanalysis in 2012, the 1935 Labor Day hurricane also met this distinction. Only Hurricanes Camille in 1969 and Allen in 1980 were stronger, peaking at 190 mph (306 km/h). (However, Camille was later found to have been somewhat weaker than originally estimated, with top winds of 175 mph (282 km/h).) During the 1950, 1951, and 1952 seasons, Atlantic hurricanes were named using the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet. However, Hurricane Dog was referred to as "the great hurricane in the central Atlantic" in newspaper reports, and its name was seldom used. Operationally, hurricanes were not referred to by name until 1952.
A relief fund was organized in the aftermath of the hurricane by The Daily Gleaner, a newspaper from Kingston, Jamaica. The newspaper invited its readers to help assist "their suffering fellow-West Indians in the island of Antigua." Four days after the hurricane, the fund totaled £171,000 (1950 GBP, \$ 2009 USD). One Antigua official stated the country "would appreciate voluntary assistance from outside, especially food and clothing". Relief aid was also sent from the United States to the affected islands.
## See also
- List of Atlantic hurricanes |
7,987,684 | Plutonium | 1,170,122,330 | null | [
"Actinides",
"Carcinogens",
"Chemical elements",
"Manhattan Project",
"Materials that expand upon freezing",
"Nuclear materials",
"Plutonium",
"Synthetic elements"
]
| Plutonium is a radioactive chemical element with the symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen, silicon, and hydrogen. When exposed to moist air, it forms oxides and hydrides that can expand the sample up to 70% in volume, which in turn flake off as a powder that is pyrophoric. It is radioactive and can accumulate in bones, which makes the handling of plutonium dangerous.
Plutonium was first synthetically produced and isolated in late 1940 and early 1941, by a deuteron bombardment of uranium-238 in the 1.5-metre (60 in) cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley. First, neptunium-238 (half-life 2.1 days) was synthesized, which subsequently beta-decayed to form the new element with atomic number 94 and atomic weight 238 (half-life 88 years). Since uranium had been named after the planet Uranus and neptunium after the planet Neptune, element 94 was named after Pluto, which at the time was considered to be a planet as well. Wartime secrecy prevented the University of California team from publishing its discovery until 1948.
Plutonium is the element with the highest atomic number to occur in nature. Trace quantities arise in natural uranium-238 deposits when uranium-238 captures neutrons emitted by decay of other uranium-238 atoms.
Both plutonium-239 and plutonium-241 are fissile, meaning that they can sustain a nuclear chain reaction, leading to applications in nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Plutonium-240 exhibits a high rate of spontaneous fission, raising the neutron flux of any sample containing it. The presence of plutonium-240 limits a plutonium sample's usability for weapons or its quality as reactor fuel, and the percentage of plutonium-240 determines its grade (weapons-grade, fuel-grade, or reactor-grade). Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.7 years and emits alpha particles. It is a heat source in radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are used to power some spacecraft. Plutonium isotopes are expensive and inconvenient to separate, so particular isotopes are usually manufactured in specialized reactors.
Producing plutonium in useful quantities for the first time was a major part of the Manhattan Project during World War II that developed the first atomic bombs. The Fat Man bombs used in the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and in the bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945, had plutonium cores. Human radiation experiments studying plutonium were conducted without informed consent, and several criticality accidents, some lethal, occurred after the war. Disposal of plutonium waste from nuclear power plants and dismantled nuclear weapons built during the Cold War is a nuclear-proliferation and environmental concern. Other sources of plutonium in the environment are fallout from numerous above-ground nuclear tests, which are now banned.
## Characteristics
### Physical properties
Plutonium, like most metals, has a bright silvery appearance at first, much like nickel, but it oxidizes very quickly to a dull gray, although yellow and olive green are also reported. At room temperature plutonium is in its α (alpha) form. This, the most common structural form of the element (allotrope), is about as hard and brittle as gray cast iron unless it is alloyed with other metals to make it soft and ductile. Unlike most metals, it is not a good conductor of heat or electricity. It has a low melting point (640 °C, 1,184 °F) and an unusually high boiling point (3,228 °C, 5,842 °F). This gives a large range of temperatures (over 2,500 kelvin wide) at which plutonium is liquid, but this range is neither the greatest among all actinides nor among all metals. The low melting point as well as the reactivity of the native metal compared to the oxide leads to plutonium oxides being a preferred form for applications such as nuclear fission reactor fuel (MOX-fuel).
Alpha decay, the release of a high-energy helium nucleus, is the most common form of radioactive decay for plutonium. A 5 kg mass of <sup>239</sup>Pu contains about 12.5×10<sup>24</sup> atoms. With a half-life of 24,100 years, about 11.5×10<sup>12</sup> of its atoms decay each second by emitting a 5.157 MeV alpha particle. This amounts to 9.68 watts of power. Heat produced by the deceleration of these alpha particles makes it warm to the touch. <sup>238</sup>
Pu due to its much shorter half life heats up to much higher temperatures and glows red hot with blackbody radiation if left without external heating or cooling. This heat has been used in Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (see below).
Resistivity is a measure of how strongly a material opposes the flow of electric current. The resistivity of plutonium at room temperature is very high for a metal, and it gets even higher with lower temperatures, which is unusual for metals. This trend continues down to 100 K, below which resistivity rapidly decreases for fresh samples. Resistivity then begins to increase with time at around 20 K due to radiation damage, with the rate dictated by the isotopic composition of the sample.
Because of self-irradiation, a sample of plutonium fatigues throughout its crystal structure, meaning the ordered arrangement of its atoms becomes disrupted by radiation with time. Self-irradiation can also lead to annealing which counteracts some of the fatigue effects as temperature increases above 100 K.
Unlike most materials, plutonium increases in density when it melts, by 2.5%, but the liquid metal exhibits a linear decrease in density with temperature. Near the melting point, the liquid plutonium has very high viscosity and surface tension compared to other metals.
### Allotropes
Plutonium normally has six allotropes and forms a seventh (zeta, ζ) at high temperature within a limited pressure range. These allotropes, which are different structural modifications or forms of an element, have very similar internal energies but significantly varying densities and crystal structures. This makes plutonium very sensitive to changes in temperature, pressure, or chemistry, and allows for dramatic volume changes following phase transitions from one allotropic form to another. The densities of the different allotropes vary from 16.00 g/cm<sup>3</sup> to 19.86 g/cm<sup>3</sup>.
The presence of these many allotropes makes machining plutonium very difficult, as it changes state very readily. For example, the α form exists at room temperature in unalloyed plutonium. It has machining characteristics similar to cast iron but changes to the plastic and malleable β (beta) form at slightly higher temperatures. The reasons for the complicated phase diagram are not entirely understood. The α form has a low-symmetry monoclinic structure, hence its brittleness, strength, compressibility, and poor thermal conductivity.
Plutonium in the δ (delta) form normally exists in the 310 °C to 452 °C range but is stable at room temperature when alloyed with a small percentage of gallium, aluminium, or cerium, enhancing workability and allowing it to be welded. The δ form has more typical metallic character, and is roughly as strong and malleable as aluminium. In fission weapons, the explosive shock waves used to compress a plutonium core will also cause a transition from the usual δ phase plutonium to the denser α form, significantly helping to achieve supercriticality. The ε phase, the highest temperature solid allotrope, exhibits anomalously high atomic self-diffusion compared to other elements.
### Nuclear fission
Plutonium is a radioactive actinide metal whose isotope, plutonium-239, is one of the three primary fissile isotopes (uranium-233 and uranium-235 are the other two); plutonium-241 is also highly fissile. To be considered fissile, an isotope's atomic nucleus must be able to break apart or fission when struck by a slow moving neutron and to release enough additional neutrons to sustain the nuclear chain reaction by splitting further nuclei.
Pure plutonium-239 may have a multiplication factor (k<sub>eff</sub>) larger than one, which means that if the metal is present in sufficient quantity and with an appropriate geometry (e.g., a sphere of sufficient size), it can form a critical mass. During fission, a fraction of the nuclear binding energy, which holds a nucleus together, is released as a large amount of electromagnetic and kinetic energy (much of the latter being quickly converted to thermal energy). Fission of a kilogram of plutonium-239 can produce an explosion equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT (88,000 GJ). It is this energy that makes plutonium-239 useful in nuclear weapons and reactors.
The presence of the isotope plutonium-240 in a sample limits its nuclear bomb potential, as plutonium-240 has a relatively high spontaneous fission rate (\~440 fissions per second per gram—over 1,000 neutrons per second per gram), raising the background neutron levels and thus increasing the risk of predetonation. Plutonium is identified as either weapons-grade, fuel-grade, or reactor-grade based on the percentage of plutonium-240 that it contains. Weapons-grade plutonium contains less than 7% plutonium-240. Fuel-grade plutonium contains from 7% to less than 19%, and power reactor-grade contains 19% or more plutonium-240. Supergrade plutonium, with less than 4% of plutonium-240, is used in U.S. Navy weapons stored in proximity to ship and submarine crews, due to its lower radioactivity. The isotope plutonium-238 is not fissile but can undergo nuclear fission easily with fast neutrons as well as alpha decay. All plutonium isotopes can be "bred" into fissile material with one or more neutron absorptions, whether followed by beta decay or not. This makes non-fissile isotopes of plutonium a fertile material.
### Isotopes and nucleosynthesis
Twenty radioactive isotopes of plutonium have been characterized. The longest-lived are plutonium-244, with a half-life of 80.8 million years, plutonium-242, with a half-life of 373,300 years, and plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,110 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 7,000 years. This element also has eight metastable states, though all have half-lives less than one second. Plutonium-244 has been found in interstellar space and it has the longest half-life of any non-primordial radioisotope.
The known isotopes of plutonium range in mass number from 228 to 247. The primary decay modes of isotopes with mass numbers lower than the most stable isotope, plutonium-244, are spontaneous fission and alpha emission, mostly forming uranium (92 protons) and neptunium (93 protons) isotopes as decay products (neglecting the wide range of daughter nuclei created by fission processes). The primary decay mode for isotopes with mass numbers higher than plutonium-244 is beta emission, mostly forming americium (95 protons) isotopes as decay products. Plutonium-241 is the parent isotope of the neptunium decay series, decaying to americium-241 via beta emission.
Plutonium-238 and 239 are the most widely synthesized isotopes. Plutonium-239 is synthesized via the following reaction using uranium (U) and neutrons (n) via beta decay (β<sup>−</sup>) with neptunium (Np) as an intermediate:
{^{238}\_{92}U} + {^{1}\_{0}n} -\> {^{239}\_{92}U} -\>[\beta^-] [23.5 \\ \ce{min}] {^{239}\_{93}Np} -\>[\beta^-] [2.3565 \\ \ce d] {^{239}\_{94}Pu}
Neutrons from the fission of uranium-235 are captured by uranium-238 nuclei to form uranium-239; a beta decay converts a neutron into a proton to form neptunium-239 (half-life 2.36 days) and another beta decay forms plutonium-239. Egon Bretscher working on the British Tube Alloys project predicted this reaction theoretically in 1940.
Plutonium-238 is synthesized by bombarding uranium-238 with deuterons (D, the nuclei of heavy hydrogen) in the following reaction:
<math chem>\begin{align}
\ce{ {^{238}\_{92}U} + {^{2}\_{1}D} -\>} &\ce{ {^{238}\_{93}Np} + 2^{1}\_{0}n} \\\\ &\ce{^{238}\_{93}Np -\>[\beta^-] [2.117 \\ \ce d] {^{238}\_{94}Pu} } \end{align}</math>
In this process, a deuteron hitting uranium-238 produces two neutrons and neptunium-238, which spontaneously decays by emitting negative beta particles to form plutonium-238. Plutonium-238 can also be produced by neutron irradiation of neptunium-237.
### Decay heat and fission properties
Plutonium isotopes undergo radioactive decay, which produces decay heat. Different isotopes produce different amounts of heat per mass. The decay heat is usually listed as watt/kilogram, or milliwatt/gram. In larger pieces of plutonium (e.g. a weapon pit) and inadequate heat removal the resulting self-heating may be significant.
### Compounds and chemistry
At room temperature, pure plutonium is silvery in color but gains a tarnish when oxidized. The element displays four common ionic oxidation states in aqueous solution and one rare one:
- Pu(III), as Pu<sup>3+</sup> (blue lavender)
- Pu(IV), as Pu<sup>4+</sup> (yellow brown)
- Pu(V), as PuO<sup>+</sup>
<sub>2</sub> (light pink)
- Pu(VI), as PuO<sup>2+</sup>
<sub>2</sub> (pink orange)
- Pu(VII), as PuO<sup>3−</sup>
<sub>5</sub> (green)—the heptavalent ion is rare.
The color shown by plutonium solutions depends on both the oxidation state and the nature of the acid anion. It is the acid anion that influences the degree of complexing—how atoms connect to a central atom—of the plutonium species. Additionally, the formal +2 oxidation state of plutonium is known in the complex [K(2.2.2-cryptand)] [Pu<sup>II</sup>Cp′′<sub>3</sub>], Cp′′ = C<sub>5</sub>H<sub>3</sub>(SiMe<sub>3</sub>)<sub>2</sub>.
A +8 oxidation state is possible as well in the volatile tetroxide PuO
<sub>4</sub>. Though it readily decomposes via a reduction mechanism similar to FeO
<sub>4</sub>, PuO
<sub>4</sub> can be stabilized in alkaline solutions and chloroform.
Metallic plutonium is produced by reacting plutonium tetrafluoride with barium, calcium or lithium at 1200 °C. Metallic plutonium is attacked by acids, oxygen, and steam but not by alkalis and dissolves easily in concentrated hydrochloric, hydroiodic and perchloric acids. Molten metal must be kept in a vacuum or an inert atmosphere to avoid reaction with air. At 135 °C the metal will ignite in air and will explode if placed in carbon tetrachloride.
Plutonium is a reactive metal. In moist air or moist argon, the metal oxidizes rapidly, producing a mixture of oxides and hydrides. If the metal is exposed long enough to a limited amount of water vapor, a powdery surface coating of PuO<sub>2</sub> is formed. Also formed is plutonium hydride but an excess of water vapor forms only PuO<sub>2</sub>.
Plutonium shows enormous, and reversible, reaction rates with pure hydrogen, forming plutonium hydride. It also reacts readily with oxygen, forming PuO and PuO<sub>2</sub> as well as intermediate oxides; plutonium oxide fills 40% more volume than plutonium metal. The metal reacts with the halogens, giving rise to compounds with the general formula PuX<sub>3</sub> where X can be F, Cl, Br or I and PuF<sub>4</sub> is also seen. The following oxyhalides are observed: PuOCl, PuOBr and PuOI. It will react with carbon to form PuC, nitrogen to form PuN and silicon to form PuSi<sub>2</sub>.
The organometallic chemistry of plutonium complexes is typical for organoactinide species; a characteristic example of an organoplutonium compound is plutonocene. Computational chemistry methods indicate an enhanced covalent character in the plutonium-ligand bonding.
Powders of plutonium, its hydrides and certain oxides like Pu<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> are pyrophoric, meaning they can ignite spontaneously at ambient temperature and are therefore handled in an inert, dry atmosphere of nitrogen or argon. Bulk plutonium ignites only when heated above 400 °C. Pu<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> spontaneously heats up and transforms into PuO<sub>2</sub>, which is stable in dry air, but reacts with water vapor when heated.
Crucibles used to contain plutonium need to be able to withstand its strongly reducing properties. Refractory metals such as tantalum and tungsten along with the more stable oxides, borides, carbides, nitrides and silicides can tolerate this. Melting in an electric arc furnace can be used to produce small ingots of the metal without the need for a crucible.
Cerium is used as a chemical simulant of plutonium for development of containment, extraction, and other technologies.
#### Electronic structure
Plutonium is an element in which the 5f electrons are the transition border between delocalized and localized; it is therefore considered one of the most complex elements. The anomalous behavior of plutonium is caused by its electronic structure. The energy difference between the 6d and 5f subshells is very low. The size of the 5f shell is just enough to allow the electrons to form bonds within the lattice, on the very boundary between localized and bonding behavior. The proximity of energy levels leads to multiple low-energy electron configurations with near equal energy levels. This leads to competing 5f<sup>n</sup>7s<sup>2</sup> and 5f<sup>n−1</sup>6d<sup>1</sup>7s<sup>2</sup> configurations, which causes the complexity of its chemical behavior. The highly directional nature of 5f orbitals is responsible for directional covalent bonds in molecules and complexes of plutonium.
### Alloys
Plutonium can form alloys and intermediate compounds with most other metals. Exceptions include lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium and caesium of the alkali metals; and magnesium, calcium, strontium, and barium of the alkaline earth metals; and europium and ytterbium of the rare earth metals. Partial exceptions include the refractory metals chromium, molybdenum, niobium, tantalum, and tungsten, which are soluble in liquid plutonium, but insoluble or only slightly soluble in solid plutonium. Gallium, aluminium, americium, scandium and cerium can stabilize the δ phase of plutonium for room temperature. Silicon, indium, zinc and zirconium allow formation of metastable δ state when rapidly cooled. High amounts of hafnium, holmium and thallium also allows some retention of the δ phase at room temperature. Neptunium is the only element that can stabilize the α phase at higher temperatures.
Plutonium alloys can be produced by adding a metal to molten plutonium. If the alloying metal is sufficiently reductive, plutonium can be added in the form of oxides or halides. The δ phase plutonium–gallium and plutonium–aluminium alloys are produced by adding plutonium(III) fluoride to molten gallium or aluminium, which has the advantage of avoiding dealing directly with the highly reactive plutonium metal.
- Plutonium–gallium is used for stabilizing the δ phase of plutonium, avoiding the α-phase and α–δ related issues. Its main use is in pits of implosion nuclear weapons.
- Plutonium–aluminium is an alternative to the Pu–Ga alloy. It was the original element considered for δ phase stabilization, but its tendency to react with the alpha particles and release neutrons reduces its usability for nuclear weapon pits. Plutonium–aluminium alloy can be also used as a component of nuclear fuel.
- Plutonium–gallium–cobalt alloy (PuCoGa<sub>5</sub>) is an unconventional superconductor, showing superconductivity below 18.5 K, an order of magnitude higher than the highest between heavy fermion systems, and has large critical current.
- Plutonium–zirconium alloy can be used as nuclear fuel.
- Plutonium–cerium and plutonium–cerium–cobalt alloys are used as nuclear fuels.
- Plutonium–uranium, with about 15–30 mol.% plutonium, can be used as a nuclear fuel for fast breeder reactors. Its pyrophoric nature and high susceptibility to corrosion to the point of self-igniting or disintegrating after exposure to air require alloying with other components. Addition of aluminium, carbon or copper does not improve disintegration rates markedly, zirconium and iron alloys have better corrosion resistance but they disintegrate in several months in air as well. Addition of titanium and/or zirconium significantly increases the melting point of the alloy.
- Plutonium–uranium–titanium and plutonium–uranium–zirconium were investigated for use as nuclear fuels. The addition of the third element increases corrosion resistance, reduces flammability, and improves ductility, fabricability, strength, and thermal expansion. Plutonium–uranium–molybdenum has the best corrosion resistance, forming a protective film of oxides, but titanium and zirconium are preferred for physics reasons.
- Thorium–uranium–plutonium was investigated as a nuclear fuel for fast breeder reactors.
## Occurrence
Trace amounts of plutonium-238, plutonium-239, plutonium-240, and plutonium-244 can be found in nature. Small traces of plutonium-239, a few parts per trillion, and its decay products are naturally found in some concentrated ores of uranium, such as the natural nuclear fission reactor in Oklo, Gabon. The ratio of plutonium-239 to uranium at the Cigar Lake Mine uranium deposit ranges from 2.4×10<sup>−12</sup> to 44×10<sup>−12</sup>. These trace amounts of <sup>239</sup>Pu originate in the following fashion: on rare occasions, <sup>238</sup>U undergoes spontaneous fission, and in the process, the nucleus emits one or two free neutrons with some kinetic energy. When one of these neutrons strikes the nucleus of another <sup>238</sup>U atom, it is absorbed by the atom, which becomes <sup>239</sup>U. With a relatively short half-life, <sup>239</sup>U decays to <sup>239</sup>Np, which decays into <sup>239</sup>Pu. Finally, exceedingly small amounts of plutonium-238, attributed to the extremely rare double beta decay of uranium-238, have been found in natural uranium samples.
Due to its relatively long half-life of about 80 million years, it was suggested that plutonium-244 occurs naturally as a primordial nuclide, but early reports of its detection could not be confirmed. However, its long half-life ensured its circulation across the solar system before its extinction, and indeed, evidence of the spontaneous fission of extinct <sup>244</sup>Pu has been found in meteorites. The former presence of <sup>244</sup>Pu in the early Solar System has been confirmed, since it manifests itself today as an excess of its daughters, either <sup>232</sup>Th (from the alpha decay pathway) or xenon isotopes (from its spontaneous fission). The latter are generally more useful, because the chemistries of thorium and plutonium are rather similar (both are predominantly tetravalent) and hence an excess of thorium would not be strong evidence that some of it was formed as a plutonium daughter. <sup>244</sup>Pu has the longest half-life of all transuranic nuclides and is produced only in the r-process in supernovae and colliding neutron stars; when nuclei are ejected from these events at high speed to reach Earth, <sup>244</sup>Pu alone among transuranic nuclides has a long enough half-life to survive the journey, and hence tiny traces of live interstellar <sup>244</sup>Pu have been found in the deep sea floor. Because <sup>240</sup>Pu also occurs in the decay chain of <sup>244</sup>Pu, it must thus also be present in secular equilibrium, albeit in even tinier quantities.
Minute traces of plutonium are usually found in the human body due to the 550 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests that have been carried out, and to a small number of major nuclear accidents. Most atmospheric and underwater nuclear testing was stopped by the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which of the nuclear powers was signed and ratified by the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union. France would continue atmospheric nuclear testing until 1974 and China would continue atmospheric nuclear testing until 1980. All subsequent nuclear testing was conducted underground.
## History
### Discovery
Enrico Fermi and a team of scientists at the University of Rome reported that they had discovered element 94 in 1934. Fermi called the element hesperium and mentioned it in his Nobel Lecture in 1938. The sample actually contained products of nuclear fission, primarily barium and krypton. Nuclear fission, discovered in Germany in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, was unknown at the time.
Plutonium (specifically, plutonium-238) was first produced, isolated and then chemically identified between December 1940 and February 1941 by Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin McMillan, Emilio Segrè, Joseph W. Kennedy, and Arthur Wahl by deuteron bombardment of uranium in the 60-inch (150 cm) cyclotron at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Neptunium-238 was created directly by the bombardment but decayed by beta emission with a half-life of a little over two days, which indicated the formation of element 94. The first bombardment took place on December 14, 1940, and the new element was first identified through oxidation on the night of February 23–24, 1941.
A paper documenting the discovery was prepared by the team and sent to the journal Physical Review in March 1941, but publication was delayed until a year after the end of World War II due to security concerns. At the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather realized that a slow neutron reactor fuelled with uranium would theoretically produce substantial amounts of plutonium-239 as a by-product. They calculated that element 94 would be fissile, and had the added advantage of being chemically different from uranium, and could easily be separated from it.
McMillan had recently named the first transuranic element neptunium after the planet Neptune, and suggested that element 94, being the next element in the series, be named for what was then considered the next planet, Pluto. Nicholas Kemmer of the Cambridge team independently proposed the same name, based on the same reasoning as the Berkeley team. Seaborg originally considered the name "plutium", but later thought that it did not sound as good as "plutonium". He chose the letters "Pu" as a joke, in reference to the interjection "P U" to indicate an especially disgusting smell, which passed without notice into the periodic table. Alternative names considered by Seaborg and others were "ultimium" or "extremium" because of the erroneous belief that they had found the last possible element on the periodic table.
Hahn and Strassmann, and independently Kurt Starke, were at this point also working on transuranic elements in Berlin. It is likely that Hahn and Strassmann were aware that plutonium-239 should be fissile. However, they did not have a strong neutron source. Element 93 was reported by Hahn and Strassmann, as well as Starke, in 1942. Hahn's group did not pursue element 94, likely because they were discouraged by McMillan and Abelson's lack of success in isolating it when they had first found element 93. However, since Hahn's group had access to the stronger cyclotron at Paris at this point, they would likely have been able to detect plutonium had they tried, albeit in tiny quantities (a few becquerels).
### Early research
The chemistry of plutonium was found to resemble uranium after a few months of initial study. Early research was continued at the secret Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. On August 20, 1942, a trace quantity of this element was isolated and measured for the first time. About 50 micrograms of plutonium-239 combined with uranium and fission products was produced and only about 1 microgram was isolated. This procedure enabled chemists to determine the new element's atomic weight. On December 2, 1942, on a racket court under the west grandstand at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, researchers headed by Enrico Fermi achieved the first self-sustaining chain reaction in a graphite and uranium pile known as CP-1. Using theoretical information garnered from the operation of CP-1, DuPont constructed an air-cooled experimental production reactor, known as X-10, and a pilot chemical separation facility at Oak Ridge. The separation facility, using methods developed by Glenn T. Seaborg and a team of researchers at the Met Lab, removed plutonium from uranium irradiated in the X-10 reactor. Information from CP-1 was also useful to Met Lab scientists designing the water-cooled plutonium production reactors for Hanford. Construction at the site began in mid-1943.
In November 1943 some plutonium trifluoride was reduced to create the first sample of plutonium metal: a few micrograms of metallic beads. Enough plutonium was produced to make it the first synthetically made element to be visible with the unaided eye.
The nuclear properties of plutonium-239 were also studied; researchers found that when it is hit by a neutron it breaks apart (fissions) by releasing more neutrons and energy. These neutrons can hit other atoms of plutonium-239 and so on in an exponentially fast chain reaction. This can result in an explosion large enough to destroy a city if enough of the isotope is concentrated to form a critical mass.
During the early stages of research, animals were used to study the effects of radioactive substances on health. These studies began in 1944 at the University of California at Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory and were conducted by Joseph G. Hamilton. Hamilton was looking to answer questions about how plutonium would vary in the body depending on exposure mode (oral ingestion, inhalation, absorption through skin), retention rates, and how plutonium would be fixed in tissues and distributed among the various organs. Hamilton started administering soluble microgram portions of plutonium-239 compounds to rats using different valence states and different methods of introducing the plutonium (oral, intravenous, etc.). Eventually, the lab at Chicago also conducted its own plutonium injection experiments using different animals such as mice, rabbits, fish, and even dogs. The results of the studies at Berkeley and Chicago showed that plutonium's physiological behavior differed significantly from that of radium. The most alarming result was that there was significant deposition of plutonium in the liver and in the "actively metabolizing" portion of bone. Furthermore, the rate of plutonium elimination in the excreta differed between species of animals by as much as a factor of five. Such variation made it extremely difficult to estimate what the rate would be for human beings.
### Production during the Manhattan Project
During World War II the U.S. government established the Manhattan Project, which was tasked with developing an atomic bomb. The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory, now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The first production reactor that made plutonium-239 was the X-10 Graphite Reactor. It went online in 1943 and was built at a facility in Oak Ridge that later became the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
In January 1944, workers laid the foundations for the first chemical separation building, T Plant located in 200-West. Both the T Plant and its sister facility in 200-West, the U Plant, were completed by October. (U Plant was used only for training during the Manhattan Project.) The separation building in 200-East, B Plant, was completed in February 1945. The second facility planned for 200-East was canceled. Nicknamed Queen Marys by the workers who built them, the separation buildings were awesome canyon-like structures 800 feet long, 65 feet wide, and 80 feet high containing forty process pools. The interior had an eerie quality as operators behind seven feet of concrete shielding manipulated remote control equipment by looking through television monitors and periscopes from an upper gallery. Even with massive concrete lids on the process pools, precautions against radiation exposure were necessary and influenced all aspects of plant design.
On April 5, 1944, Emilio Segrè at Los Alamos received the first sample of reactor-produced plutonium from Oak Ridge. Within ten days, he discovered that reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of the isotope plutonium-240 than cyclotron-produced plutonium. Plutonium-240 has a high spontaneous fission rate, raising the overall background neutron level of the plutonium sample. The original gun-type plutonium weapon, code-named "Thin Man", had to be abandoned as a result—the increased number of spontaneous neutrons meant that nuclear pre-detonation (fizzle) was likely.
The entire plutonium weapon design effort at Los Alamos was soon changed to the more complicated implosion device, code-named "Fat Man". With an implosion weapon, plutonium is compressed to a high density with explosive lenses—a technically more daunting task than the simple gun-type design, but necessary to use plutonium for weapons purposes. Enriched uranium, by contrast, can be used with either method.
Construction of the Hanford B Reactor, the first industrial-sized nuclear reactor for the purposes of material production, was completed in March 1945. B Reactor produced the fissile material for the plutonium weapons used during World War II. B, D and F were the initial reactors built at Hanford, and six additional plutonium-producing reactors were built later at the site.
By the end of January 1945, the highly purified plutonium underwent further concentration in the completed chemical isolation building, where remaining impurities were removed successfully. Los Alamos received its first plutonium from Hanford on February 2. While it was still by no means clear that enough plutonium could be produced for use in bombs by the war's end, Hanford was by early 1945 in operation. Only two years had passed since Col. Franklin Matthias first set up his temporary headquarters on the banks of the Columbia River.
According to Kate Brown, the plutonium production plants at Hanford and Mayak in Russia, over a period of four decades, "both released more than 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment—twice the amount expelled in the Chernobyl disaster in each instance". Most of this radioactive contamination over the years were part of normal operations, but unforeseen accidents did occur and plant management kept this secret, as the pollution continued unabated.
In 2004, a safe was discovered during excavations of a burial trench at the Hanford nuclear site. Inside the safe were various items, including a large glass bottle containing a whitish slurry which was subsequently identified as the oldest sample of weapons-grade plutonium known to exist. Isotope analysis by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory indicated that the plutonium in the bottle was manufactured in the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge during 1944.
### Trinity and Fat Man atomic bombs
The first atomic bomb test, codenamed "Trinity" and detonated on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, used plutonium as its fissile material. The implosion design of "the gadget", as the Trinity device was code-named, used conventional explosive lenses to compress a sphere of plutonium into a supercritical mass, which was simultaneously showered with neutrons from the "Urchin", an initiator made of polonium and beryllium (neutron source: (α, n) reaction). Together, these ensured a runaway chain reaction and explosion. The overall weapon weighed over 4 tonnes, although it used just 6.2 kg of plutonium in its core. About 20% of the plutonium used in the Trinity weapon underwent fission, resulting in an explosion with an energy equivalent to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT.
An identical design was used in the "Fat Man" atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, killing 35,000–40,000 people and destroying 68%–80% of war production at Nagasaki. Only after the announcement of the first atomic bombs was the existence and name of plutonium made known to the public by the Manhattan Project's Smyth Report.
### Cold War use and waste
Large stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium were built up by both the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. The U.S. reactors at Hanford and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina produced 103 tonnes, and an estimated 170 tonnes of military-grade plutonium was produced in the USSR. Each year about 20 tonnes of the element is still produced as a by-product of the nuclear power industry. As much as 1000 tonnes of plutonium may be in storage with more than 200 tonnes of that either inside or extracted from nuclear weapons. SIPRI estimated the world plutonium stockpile in 2007 as about 500 tonnes, divided equally between weapon and civilian stocks.
Radioactive contamination at the Rocky Flats Plant primarily resulted from two major plutonium fires in 1957 and 1969. Much lower concentrations of radioactive isotopes were released throughout the operational life of the plant from 1952 to 1992. Prevailing winds from the plant carried airborne contamination south and east, into populated areas northwest of Denver. The contamination of the Denver area by plutonium from the fires and other sources was not publicly reported until the 1970s. According to a 1972 study coauthored by Edward Martell, "In the more densely populated areas of Denver, the Pu contamination level in surface soils is several times fallout", and the plutonium contamination "just east of the Rocky Flats plant ranges up to hundreds of times that from nuclear tests". As noted by Carl Johnson in Ambio, "Exposures of a large population in the Denver area to plutonium and other radionuclides in the exhaust plumes from the plant date back to 1953." Weapons production at the Rocky Flats plant was halted after a combined FBI and EPA raid in 1989 and years of protests. The plant has since been shut down, with its buildings demolished and completely removed from the site.
In the U.S., some plutonium extracted from dismantled nuclear weapons is melted to form glass logs of plutonium oxide that weigh two tonnes. The glass is made of borosilicates mixed with cadmium and gadolinium. These logs are planned to be encased in stainless steel and stored as much as 4 km (2 mi) underground in bore holes that will be back-filled with concrete. The U.S. planned to store plutonium in this way at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is about 100 miles (160 km) north-east of Las Vegas, Nevada.
On March 5, 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate hearing "the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste". Starting in 1999, military-generated nuclear waste is being entombed at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
In a Presidential Memorandum dated January 29, 2010, President Obama established the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future. In their final report the Commission put forth recommendations for developing a comprehensive strategy to pursue, including:
"Recommendation \#1: The United States should undertake an integrated nuclear waste management program that leads to the timely development of one or more permanent deep geological facilities for the safe disposal of spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste".
### Medical experimentation
During and after the end of World War II, scientists working on the Manhattan Project and other nuclear weapons research projects conducted studies of the effects of plutonium on laboratory animals and human subjects. Animal studies found that a few milligrams of plutonium per kilogram of tissue is a lethal dose.
In the case of human subjects, this involved injecting solutions containing (typically) five micrograms of plutonium into hospital patients thought to be either terminally ill, or to have a life expectancy of less than ten years either due to age or chronic disease condition. This was reduced to one microgram in July 1945 after animal studies found that the way plutonium distributed itself in bones was more dangerous than radium. Most of the subjects, Eileen Welsome says, were poor, powerless, and sick.
From 1945 to 1947, eighteen human test subjects were injected with plutonium without informed consent. The tests were used to create diagnostic tools to determine the uptake of plutonium in the body in order to develop safety standards for working with plutonium. Ebb Cade was an unwilling participant in medical experiments that involved injection of 4.7 micrograms of Plutonium on 10 April 1945 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This experiment was under the supervision of Harold Hodge. Other experiments directed by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the Manhattan Project continued into the 1970s. The Plutonium Files chronicles the lives of the subjects of the secret program by naming each person involved and discussing the ethical and medical research conducted in secret by the scientists and doctors. The episode is now considered to be a serious breach of medical ethics and of the Hippocratic Oath.
The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available relevant records. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the president's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and it uncovered much of the material about plutonium research on humans. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them.
## Applications
### Explosives
The isotope plutonium-239 is a key fissile component in nuclear weapons, due to its ease of fission and availability. Encasing the bomb's plutonium pit in a tamper (an optional layer of dense material) decreases the amount of plutonium needed to reach critical mass by reflecting escaping neutrons back into the plutonium core. This reduces the amount of plutonium needed to reach criticality from 16 kg to 10 kg, which is a sphere with a diameter of about 10 centimeters (4 in). This critical mass is about a third of that for uranium-235.
The Fat Man plutonium bombs used explosive compression of plutonium to obtain significantly higher densities than normal, combined with a central neutron source to begin the reaction and increase efficiency. Thus only 6.2 kg of plutonium was needed for an explosive yield equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT. Hypothetically, as little as 4 kg of plutonium—and maybe even less—could be used to make a single atomic bomb using very sophisticated assembly designs.
### Mixed oxide fuel
Spent nuclear fuel from normal light water reactors contains plutonium, but it is a mixture of plutonium-242, 240, 239 and 238. The mixture is not sufficiently enriched for efficient nuclear weapons, but can be used once as MOX fuel. Accidental neutron capture causes the amount of plutonium-242 and 240 to grow each time the plutonium is irradiated in a reactor with low-speed "thermal" neutrons, so that after the second cycle, the plutonium can only be consumed by fast neutron reactors. If fast neutron reactors are not available (the normal case), excess plutonium is usually discarded, and forms one of the longest-lived components of nuclear waste. The desire to consume this plutonium and other transuranic fuels and reduce the radiotoxicity of the waste is the usual reason nuclear engineers give to make fast neutron reactors.
The most common chemical process, PUREX (Plutonium–URanium EXtraction), reprocesses spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium and uranium which can be used to form a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for reuse in nuclear reactors. Weapons-grade plutonium can be added to the fuel mix. MOX fuel is used in light water reactors and consists of 60 kg of plutonium per tonne of fuel; after four years, three-quarters of the plutonium is burned (turned into other elements). Breeder reactors are specifically designed to create more fissionable material than they consume.
MOX fuel has been in use since the 1980s, and is widely used in Europe. In September 2000, the United States and the Russian Federation signed a Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement by which each agreed to dispose of 34 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium. The U.S. Department of Energy plans to dispose of 34 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium in the United States before the end of 2019 by converting the plutonium to a MOX fuel to be used in commercial nuclear power reactors.
MOX fuel improves total burnup. A fuel rod is reprocessed after three years of use to remove waste products, which by then account for 3% of the total weight of the rods. Any uranium or plutonium isotopes produced during those three years are left and the rod goes back into production. The presence of up to 1% gallium per mass in weapons-grade plutonium alloy has the potential to interfere with long-term operation of a light water reactor.
Plutonium recovered from spent reactor fuel poses little proliferation hazard, because of excessive contamination with non-fissile plutonium-240 and plutonium-242. Separation of the isotopes is not feasible. A dedicated reactor operating on very low burnup (hence minimal exposure of newly formed plutonium-239 to additional neutrons which causes it to be transformed to heavier isotopes of plutonium) is generally required to produce material suitable for use in efficient nuclear weapons. While "weapons-grade" plutonium is defined to contain at least 92% plutonium-239 (of the total plutonium), the United States have managed to detonate an under-20Kt device using plutonium believed to contain only about 85% plutonium-239, so called '"fuel-grade" plutonium. The "reactor-grade" plutonium produced by a regular LWR burnup cycle typically contains less than 60% Pu-239, with up to 30% parasitic Pu-240/Pu-242, and 10–15% fissile Pu-241. It is unknown if a device using plutonium obtained from reprocessed civil nuclear waste can be detonated, however such a device could hypothetically fizzle and spread radioactive materials over a large urban area. The IAEA conservatively classifies plutonium of all isotopic vectors as "direct-use" material, that is, "nuclear material that can be used for the manufacture of nuclear explosives components without transmutation or further enrichment".
### Power and heat source
The isotope plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.74 years. It emits a large amount of thermal energy with low levels of both gamma rays/photons and spontaneous neutron rays/particles. Being an alpha emitter, it combines high energy radiation with low penetration and thereby requires minimal shielding. A sheet of paper can be used to shield against the alpha particles emitted by plutonium-238. One kilogram of the isotope can generate about 570 watts of heat.
These characteristics make it well-suited for electrical power generation for devices that must function without direct maintenance for timescales approximating a human lifetime. It is therefore used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators and radioisotope heater units such as those in the Cassini, Voyager, Galileo and New Horizons space probes, and the Curiosity and Perseverance (Mars 2020) Mars rovers.
The twin Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, each containing a 500 watt plutonium power source. Over 30 years later, each source is still producing about 300 watts which allows limited operation of each spacecraft. An earlier version of the same technology powered five Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Packages, starting with Apollo 12 in 1969.
Plutonium-238 has also been used successfully to power artificial heart pacemakers, to reduce the risk of repeated surgery. It has been largely replaced by lithium-based primary cells, but as of 2003 there were somewhere between 50 and 100 plutonium-powered pacemakers still implanted and functioning in living patients in the United States. By the end of 2007, the number of plutonium-powered pacemakers was reported to be down to just nine. Plutonium-238 was studied as a way to provide supplemental heat to scuba diving. Plutonium-238 mixed with beryllium is used to generate neutrons for research purposes.
## Precautions
### Toxicity
There are two aspects to the harmful effects of plutonium: the radioactivity and the heavy metal poison effects. Isotopes and compounds of plutonium are radioactive and accumulate in bone marrow. Contamination by plutonium oxide has resulted from nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents, including military nuclear accidents where nuclear weapons have burned. Studies of the effects of these smaller releases, as well as of the widespread radiation poisoning sickness and death following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have provided considerable information regarding the dangers, symptoms and prognosis of radiation poisoning, which in the case of the Japanese survivors was largely unrelated to direct plutonium exposure.
During the decay of plutonium, three types of ionizing radiation are released, namely alpha, beta, and gamma. Either acute or longer-term exposure carries a danger of serious health outcomes including radiation sickness, genetic damage, cancer, and death. The danger increases with the amount of exposure. Alpha radiation can travel only a short distance and cannot travel through the outer, dead layer of human skin. Beta radiation can penetrate human skin, but cannot go all the way through the body. Gamma radiation can go all the way through the body. Even though alpha radiation cannot penetrate the skin, ingested or inhaled plutonium does irradiate internal organs. Alpha particles generated by inhaled plutonium have been found to cause lung cancer in a cohort of European nuclear workers. The skeleton, where plutonium accumulates, and the liver, where it collects and becomes concentrated, are at risk. Plutonium is not absorbed into the body efficiently when ingested; only 0.04% of plutonium oxide is absorbed after ingestion. Plutonium absorbed by the body is excreted very slowly, with a biological half-life of 200 years. Plutonium passes only slowly through cell membranes and intestinal boundaries, so absorption by ingestion and incorporation into bone structure proceeds very slowly. Donald Mastick accidentally swallowed a small amount of Plutonium(III) chloride, which was detectable for the next thirty years of his life, but appeared to suffer no ill effects.
Plutonium is more dangerous when inhaled than when ingested. The risk of lung cancer increases once the total radiation dose equivalent of inhaled plutonium exceeds 400 mSv. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the lifetime cancer risk from inhaling 5,000 plutonium particles, each about 3 μm wide, is 1% over the background U.S. average. Ingestion or inhalation of large amounts may cause acute radiation poisoning and possibly death. However, no human being is known to have died because of inhaling or ingesting plutonium, and many people have measurable amounts of plutonium in their bodies.
The "hot particle" theory in which a particle of plutonium dust irradiates a localized spot of lung tissue is not supported by mainstream research—such particles are more mobile than originally thought and toxicity is not measurably increased due to particulate form. When inhaled, plutonium can pass into the bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream, plutonium moves throughout the body and into the bones, liver, or other body organs. Plutonium that reaches body organs generally stays in the body for decades and continues to expose the surrounding tissue to radiation and thus may cause cancer.
A commonly cited quote by Ralph Nader states that a pound of plutonium dust spread into the atmosphere would be enough to kill 8 billion people. This was disputed by Bernard Cohen, an opponent of the generally accepted linear no-threshold model of radiation toxicity. Cohen estimated that one pound of plutonium could kill no more than 2 million people by inhalation, so that the toxicity of plutonium is roughly equivalent with that of nerve gas.
Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Nagasaki survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed. Cohen found these studies inconsistent with high estimates of plutonium toxicity, citing cases such as Albert Stevens who survived into old age after being injected with plutonium. "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."
### Marine toxicity
Investigating the toxicity of plutonium in humans is just as important as looking at the effects in fauna of marine systems. Plutonium is known to enter the marine environment by dumping of waste or accidental leakage from nuclear plants. Although the highest concentrations of plutonium in marine environments are found in the sediments, the complex biogeochemical cycle of plutonium means that it is also found in all other compartments. For example, various zooplankton species that aid in the nutrient cycle will consume the element on a daily basis. The complete excretion of ingested plutonium by zooplankton makes their defecation an extremely important mechanism in the scavenging of plutonium from surface waters. However, those zooplankton that succumb to predation by larger organisms may become a transmission vehicle of plutonium to fish.
In addition to consumption, fish can also be exposed to plutonium by their geographical distribution around the globe. One study investigated the effects of transuranium elements (plutonium-238, plutonium-239, plutonium-240) on various fish living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). Results showed that a proportion of female perch in the CEZ displayed either a failure or delay in maturation of the gonads. Similar studies found large accumulations of plutonium in the respiratory and digestive organs of cod, flounder and herring.
Plutonium toxicity is just as detrimental to larvae of fish in nuclear waste areas. Undeveloped eggs have a higher risk than developed adult fish exposed to the element in these waste areas. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory displayed that carp and minnow embryos raised in solutions containing plutonium isotopes did not hatch; eggs that hatched displayed significant abnormalities when compared to control developed embryos. It revealed that higher concentrations of plutonium have been found to cause issues in marine fauna exposed to the element.
### Criticality potential
Care must be taken to avoid the accumulation of amounts of plutonium which approach critical mass, particularly because plutonium's critical mass is only a third of that of uranium-235. A critical mass of plutonium emits lethal amounts of neutrons and gamma rays. Plutonium in solution is more likely to form a critical mass than the solid form due to moderation by the hydrogen in water.
Criticality accidents have occurred in the past, some of them with lethal consequences. Careless handling of tungsten carbide bricks around a 6.2 kg plutonium sphere resulted in a fatal dose of radiation at Los Alamos on August 21, 1945, when scientist Harry Daghlian received a dose estimated to be 5.1 sievert (510 rems) and died 25 days later. Nine months later, another Los Alamos scientist, Louis Slotin, died from a similar accident involving a beryllium reflector and the same plutonium core (the so-called "demon core") that had previously claimed the life of Daghlian.
In December 1958, during a process of purifying plutonium at Los Alamos, a critical mass was formed in a mixing vessel, which resulted in the death of a chemical operator named Cecil Kelley. Other nuclear accidents have occurred in the Soviet Union, Japan, the United States, and many other countries.
### Flammability
Metallic plutonium is a fire hazard, especially if the material is finely divided. In a moist environment, plutonium forms hydrides on its surface, which are pyrophoric and may ignite in air at room temperature. Plutonium expands up to 70% in volume as it oxidizes and thus may break its container. The radioactivity of the burning material is an additional hazard. Magnesium oxide sand is probably the most effective material for extinguishing a plutonium fire. It cools the burning material, acting as a heat sink, and also blocks off oxygen. Special precautions are necessary to store or handle plutonium in any form; generally a dry inert gas atmosphere is required.
## Transportation
### Land and sea
The usual transportation of plutonium is through the more stable plutonium oxide in a sealed package. A typical transport consists of one truck carrying one protected shipping container, holding a number of packages with a total weight varying from 80 to 200 kg of plutonium oxide. A sea shipment may consist of several containers, each of them holding a sealed package. The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission dictates that it must be solid instead of powder if the contents surpass 0.74 TBq (20 Curies) of radioactive activity. In 2016, the ships Pacific Egret and Pacific Heron of Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd. transported 331 kg (730 lbs) of plutonium to a United States government facility in Savannah River, South Carolina.
### Air
The U.S. Government air transport regulations permit the transport of plutonium by air, subject to restrictions on other dangerous materials carried on the same flight, packaging requirements, and stowage in the rearmost part of the aircraft.
In 2012, media revealed that plutonium has been flown out of Norway on commercial passenger airlines—around every other year—including one time in 2011. Regulations permit an airplane to transport 15 grams of fissionable material. Such plutonium transportation is without problems, according to a senior advisor (seniorrådgiver) at Statens strålevern.
## In popular culture
Plutonium is mentioned in several movies. It is mentioned in the following movies:
- Pu-239
- Back to the Future
- Mission: Impossible – Fallout
- Silkwood
- The Manhattan Project
- Oppenheimer |
20,784,469 | William Barley | 971,797,859 | English bookseller and publisher (1565?–1614) | [
"1560s births",
"1614 deaths",
"16th-century English businesspeople",
"17th-century English businesspeople",
"British music publishers (people)",
"Publishers (people) from London"
]
| William Barley (1565?–1614) was an English bookseller and publisher. He completed an apprenticeship as a draper in 1587, but was soon working in the London book trade. As a freeman of the Drapers' Company, he was embroiled in a dispute between it and the Stationers' Company over the rights of drapers to function as publishers and booksellers. He found himself in legal tangles throughout his life.
Barley's role in Elizabethan music publishing has proved to be a contentious issue among scholars. The assessments of him range from "a man of energy, determination, and ambition", to "somewhat remarkable", to "surely to some extent a rather nefarious figure". His contemporaries harshly criticised the quality of two of the first works of music that he published, but he was also influential in his field.
Barley became the assignee of Thomas Morley, who as well as being a composer held a printing patent (a monopoly of music publishing). He published Anthony Holborne's Pavans, Galliards, Almains (1599), the first work of music for instruments rather than voices to be printed in England. His partnership with Morley enabled him to claim rights to music books, but was short-lived. Morley gave work to the printer Thomas East, and died in 1602. Some publishers ignored Barley's claims, and many music books printed during his later life gave him no recognition.
## Drapers' Company
In a deposition of 1598, Barley refers to his age as "xxxiii yeeres or thereabowt", placing his date of birth around 1565. Evidence suggests that Barley may have been born in Warwickshire. Little else is known about his early life. Barley was in London by 1587, having completed an apprenticeship with the Drapers' Company in that year. He trained as a bookseller under Yarath James, a small-time publisher. James operated out of a shop in Newgate Market, near Christ Church Gate, in the 1580s. His interest in ballads was shared by Barley, who published a number of them during his lifetime. By 1592, Barley had opened his own shop in the parish of St Peter upon Cornhill, whose register recorded his marriage to a Mary Harper on 15 June 1603 and christenings and burials of people associated with his family. He conducted business out of this shop for the next twenty years.
Barley is probably the same William Barley who opened a branch office in Oxford. This action brought him into conflict with the authorities. Barley most likely relied on his assistant, William Davis, to run the Oxford shop while he maintained the business at St Peter upon Cornhill. Davis was arrested in 1599 because Barley had failed to register as a bookseller with Oxford University. The two redeemed themselves though, and in 1603, Barley and Davis were admitted as "privileged persons" of Oxford University. Privileged status at Oxford allowed tradesmen to practice their trade free from the jurisdiction of the town's authorities.
Barley ran afoul of London authorities as well. In September 1591, a warrant was issued for his arrest, although the charge is unknown. Barley also found himself in the midst of a longstanding feud between the Drapers' Company and the Stationers' Company. At the time, the latter held a monopoly over the publishing industry; the Drapers' Company wanted its members to be able to function as publishers and booksellers as well, insisting that it was the "custom of the City" to grant its freemen the right to engage in the book trade.
From 1591 to 1604, Barley was associated with at least 57 works. The exact nature of his involvement is, at times, hard to identify. Some works were printed "for" him, others were "to be sold by" him, and two state that they were printed "by" him. He partnered with notable printers and publishers during this period, including Thomas Creede, Abel Jeffes, and John Danter. With Creede, Barley was involved in the publication of A Looking Glass for London and England (1594) and The True Tragedy of Richard III (1594). During this period, Barley entered none of these works in the Stationers' Register (by entering a title into the register, a publisher recorded their rights to the work). This is probably due to the Stationers' feud with the Drapers'; the Stationers' viewed the ability of non-members to enter works into the register as a special privilege. Thus, Barley relied on others, such as Creede, Jeffes, and Danter, to enter these titles. Whether Barley merely acted as a bookseller for the enterers or, in private agreements with them, actually retained the rights to some of the works remains unclear.
In 1595, the Stationers' Company fined Barley 40 shillings for illicitly publishing a number of works. Three years later, the organisation sued him and a fellow draper, Simon Stafford, for allegedly publishing privileged books. A raid on Barley's former premises found 4,000 copies of the Accidence, a Latin grammar book protected by monopoly. Despite pleading his innocence in court, Barley, along with Stafford, Edward Venge, and Thomas Pavier (who was Barley's apprentice), was found guilty and sentenced to prison. The lawsuit affirmed the Stationers' Company's control over the Elizabethan book trade. Stafford, Pavier, and other draper-booksellers joined the company within a few years so that they could continue their trade. Curiously, Barley did not join them until 1606. The reasons for the delay are debated among scholars. Bibliographer J. A. Lavin suggests that the Stationers' Company rejected Barley because he had no experience in the printing business. Gerald D. Johnson believes that his partnership with Thomas Morley, who held a royal patent on music publishing, allowed him to circumvent any legal obstacles. The Stationers' Company could not interfere with the publication of works under royal grant.
## Music publishing
In Elizabethan England, music printing was regulated by two royal patents issued by the queen: one for metrical psalters (psalms set to music) and one for all other types of music and music paper. The patent-holders thus held a monopoly—only they or their assignees could legally print music. After printer John Day's death in 1584, the patent for metrical psalters transferred to his son Richard Day and was administered by his assignees, who were members of the Stationers' Company. The more general one was awarded to composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd in January 1575. Despite the monopoly, Tallis and Byrd were not successful in their printing endeavours; their 1575 collection of Latin motets called Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur failed to sell and was a financial disaster. After Tallis died in 1585, Byrd continued holding the patent, producing works with his assignee, Thomas East. The monopoly expired in 1596, prompting prospective music publishers such as Barley to take advantage of the resulting power vacuum.
In 1596, despite not having access to a proper music fount, Barley (using the services of Danter and his wood blocks) published The Pathway to Music, a music theory book, and A New Booke of Tabliture, a tutor for the lute and related instruments that included compositions by John Dowland, Philip Rosseter, and Anthony Holborne. Both featured numerous errors, and for the latter, Barley seems not to have gained prior publishing approval from the composers. Dowland disowned A New Booke of Tabliture, calling his lute lessons "falce and unperfect", while Holborne complained of "corrupt coppies" of his work being presented by a "meere stranger". Modern musicologists have labelled the publication "exasperating" and "seedy". Morley criticised The Pathway to Music, stating that the author should be "ashamed of his labour", and that "[v]ix est in toto pagina sana libro" ("there is scarcely a page that makes sense in the whole book"). Despite their flaws, both works seem to have been instrumental in introducing music tutor books to the London market.
Two years later, Morley was awarded the same printing monopoly that Byrd had held. Morley's pick of Barley as an assignee (rather than experienced printers such as East or Peter Short, both of whom had previously worked with Morley) is surprising. Morley may have been looking for help in challenging the metrical psalter patent of Richard Day and his assignees. At that time, East and Short were stationers, and the Stationers' Company was actively enforcing the Day monopoly. Barley, however, was not a stationer, and in 1599 he and Morley published The Whole Booke of Psalmes and Richard Allison's Psalmes of David in Metre. The former was a small pocket edition that was largely based on East's 1592 publication of the same name. This work, although pirated and filled with small errors, provides some evidence of Barley's editorial skill; musicologist Robert Illing notes that if Barley "is to be discredited for roguery, he must also be applauded for his strokes of musical imagination" for successfully compressing such a large work into a pocket-sized production. In Allison's work, the two claimed that they had exclusive rights on the metrical psalter. Duly provoked, Day sued. The outcome of his lawsuit is not known, but neither Barley nor Morley ever published another metrical psalter.
Under Morley, Barley published eight books. The covers of each indicated that they were "printed by" Barley, but examination of the typography reveals this to be unlikely. At least two of the works contain designs that seem to belong to a device used by London printer Henry Ballard. Significant among these eight works is Holborne's Pavans, Galliards, Almains (1599), the first work of music for instruments rather than voices to be printed in England, and the first edition of Morley's influential The First Booke of Consort Lessons (1599).
## Stationers' Company
Barley's relationship with Morley was short-lived. By 1600, Morley had turned to East as his assignee, authorising him to print under his name for three years. Two years later, Morley died, and his music patent fell into abeyance. Unable to rely on the protections and privileges of Morley's monopoly, Barley most likely came under increasing pressure from the Stationers' Company. His financial circumstances also deteriorated after he was the target of a successful lawsuit by a cook named George Goodale, who was seeking payment of a debt of 80 pounds. As a result of the suit, many of Barley's goods were seized, including various books and reams of paper. Barley greatly reduced his output from 1601 to 1605, publishing only six works.
Barley evidently decided that it was futile to continue resisting the Stationers' Company, and on 15 May 1605, he successfully petitioned the Drapers' Company for a transfer to the Stationers' Company. On 25 June 1606, the Stationers' Company admitted him as a member. That same day, the Company's court, which had the authority to resolve disputes between members, negotiated a settlement in a lawsuit Barley had brought against East concerning the copyrights on certain music books. East claimed that since he had lawfully entered the books into the Company's register, the rights of the works belonged to him. Barley disagreed, claiming that the works were his through his partnership with Morley, who had held the royal music patent. The court's compromise settlement recognised the rights of both, stipulating that if East were to print an edition of any of the books in question, he was to acknowledge Barley's name on the imprint, pay Barley 20 shillings, and supply him with six free copies. On the other hand, Barley could not publish any of the books without the consent of East or his wife.
Despite the settlement recognising his claim to Morley's music patent, Barley seemingly found it difficult to enforce his rights, even with his new role as a stationer. Less than half of the known music books published from 1606 to 1613 recognised Barley's rights on the imprint. Barley took Thomas Adams to the Stationers' court in 1609, challenging the copyrights of the music books Adams had published. The court handed down a settlement similar to the one between East and Barley. However, none of the music books Adams published afterward contained any recognition of Barley's patent.
Barley himself published four books under his patent. In March 1612, one of Barley's servants died, possibly from plague. After receiving charitable remuneration from the Stationers' Company, Barley moved, first to the parish of St Katherine Cree, and later to a house on Bishopsgate. Records from St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate indicate his burial on 11 July 1614. His widow, Mary, and their son, William, were legatees of the will of Pavier. Mary Barley, who later remarried, transferred five of her husband's patents to printer John Beale. Some of Barley's remaining copyrights may have also been passed to the printer Thomas Snodham. |
7,501,729 | Tropical Storm Carrie (1972) | 1,171,672,499 | Atlantic tropical cyclone | [
"1972 Atlantic hurricane season",
"1972 natural disasters in the United States",
"Atlantic tropical storms",
"Hurricanes in New England"
]
| Tropical Storm Carrie was a strong tropical storm that affected the East Coast of the United States in early September 1972. The third tropical cyclone of the 1972 Atlantic hurricane season, Carrie formed on August 29 from a complex sequence of meteorological events starting with the emergence of a tropical wave into the Atlantic in the middle of August.
Tracking generally northward throughout its life, Carrie reached an initial peak intensity as a moderate tropical storm before nearly weakening back into tropical depression status. The storm began to intensify in a baroclinic environment after turning toward the northwest, its winds of 70,000 miles per hour (110,000 km/h) as it was transitioning into an extratropical system eclipsed the cyclone's previous maximum strength. The extratropical remnants of Carrie skirted eastern New England before making the landfall in Maine on September 4 and dissipating over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence during the next two days.
Carrie had a minimal impact on the East Coast south of New England, limited to increased swells, gusty winds, and light rainfall. The worst conditions occurred over southeastern New England, where wind gusts reached 84 mph (135 km/h) and rainfall exceeded 1 ft (300 mm). Damage was most severe along and slightly inland from the coast. Thousands of people became stranded on offshore islands of Massachusetts, after dangerous conditions created by the storm prompted the suspension of ferry service. Overall damage was generally light, with total monetary losses valued at \$1,780,000 (), and four deaths are blamed on the storm.
## Meteorological history
The origins of Tropical Storm Carrie are traced back to a tropical wave—an elongated area of low atmospheric air pressure that emerged from the western coast of Africa on August 15, 1972. A relatively strong weather system, the wave progressed westward, but by the time it had reached the Leeward Islands ten days later, it had degenerated substantially. The influence of a nearby upper-level low pressure system caused the disturbance to further deteriorate, and the resultant remnant circulation drifted toward the northwest; by August 28, it was situated at a position just offshore southeastern Florida.
The low pressure system maintained a cold core and had not yet established itself at the surface. On August 29, the low began moving northward in response to an approaching trough. For the first time, a low-level circulation center had been identified in association with the system, and the storm became a tropical depression at 1200 UTC while located east of the central Florida peninsula. The depression tracked steadily northeastward as it gradually intensified.
On August 31, reconnaissance aircraft flying into the cyclone reported maximum sustained winds of up to around 55 mph (89 km/h). Post-storm reanalysis estimated the depression had strengthened into a tropical storm at around 0000 UTC on August 31. Operationally, however, it was not recognized as such until 2200 UTC that day, when it was assigned the name Carrie. At the time, the system was located approximately 350 miles (560 km) east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. A small storm, Carrie slowed drastically in forward movement as it curved northward. By the time it was identified as a tropical storm in real-time, Carrie had already reached its initial peak intensity with maximum sustained winds of 60 mph (97 km/h) and a minimum central pressure of 1,002 millibars (29.6 inHg), and strong wind shear inhibited immediate strengthening as it continue to slow to a drift.
On September 1, Carrie began to weaken, and by early on September 2, it had dwindled to a minimal tropical storm with winds of only 40 mph (64 km/h). Satellite imagery indicated that the storm's center of circulation had become distorted with little or no associated convection. At its weakest, the storm's highest winds were found far from the center, likely generated more by the increasing pressure gradient in relation to an anticyclone to the north than by the low pressure center itself.
A low pressure system moving through the Mid-Atlantic states pulled Carrie northwest, back toward the United States East Coast, at an accelerated forward speed. Later on September 2, the storm had begun to show signs of reorganization, including an improved appearance on satellite imagery and the development of some thunderstorm activity, although significant reintensification was considered unlikely. However, with the advance of a trough embedded in the westerlies, Carrie quickly deepened under the influence of baroclinic processes. While the storm's maximum sustained winds increased, it also began to shed its tropical characteristics and resemble an extratropical cyclone. Moving once again toward the north-northeast, Carrie was declared extratropical by the National Hurricane Center during the late afternoon on September 2.
In the official Atlantic Hurricane Database, however, Carrie is listed as a tropical cyclone until 1800 UTC on September 3, at which point it possessed winds of 70 mph (110 km/h) and a central barometric pressure of 993 mb (29.3 inHg). As a result, these data are considered representative of the storm's peak intensity. Regardless of its status, the storm was a large and intense system as it progressed north and neared New England, generating strong winds and rough surf along the coast. Having fully transitioned into an extratropical system, the storm made landfall near Eastport, Maine on September 4 and slowly weakened as it continued north up the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The cyclone fully dissipated on September 6 in the Gulf.
## Preparations and impact
The pressure gradient between Carrie and the high pressure area to its north produced gusty northeasterly winds, and by extension high seas. In response, the National Weather Service issued small craft warnings starting on September 1 and extending from Massachusetts to the Carolinas. Gale warnings were posted the next day from southern New Jersey to the coast of central New England, and the small craft warnings were brought north to Maine.
On September 3, the threat of continued heavy rainfall necessitated the issuance of flash flood watches throughout eastern Massachusetts, southeastern New Hampshire, and southern and central Maine. Due to rough surf, the beach at Virginia Beach, Virginia, was closed to swimmers on August 31.
### Mid-Atlantic
Carrie had minimal effects on the U.S. East Coast south of the Mid-Atlantic states, limited to moderate winds and generally light rainfall. Precipitation at Norfolk, Virginia, reached 1.12 inches (28 mm) between September 1 and 3, and pressure fell to a modest 1,012 mb (29.9 inHg). Sustained winds were recorded at 28 mph (45 km/h), with only slightly higher gusts, although the Chesapeake Light unofficially reported gusts to near 50 mph (80 km/h). Damage in the area was minimal with the exception of beach erosion, and tides 2.5 feet (0.76 m) above normal triggered minor flooding. Moderate rainfall, approaching or reaching 5 in (130 mm), fell across the southern Delmarva Peninsula. Equally minor effects were felt in the Atlantic City, New Jersey, area, with comparable or even less significant reports of winds and rainfall and damages limited to coastal flooding and beach erosion. Since the adverse weather conditions fell on a portion of the Labor Day weekend, the local resort industry suffered economical losses.
### New England and Canada
The brunt of the storm occurred in southeastern New England, particularly coastal Massachusetts, where strong gusts battered the shore. The distribution of winds resulting from the storm more closely resembled that of a nor'easter than a cyclone of tropical origin, in which the wind field would typically be concentrated closer to its center. Instead, the strongest winds remained well removed from the center of circulation, but were nonetheless severe; gusts reached 84 mph (135 km/h) at Point Judith, Rhode Island, and 69 mph (111 km/h) on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Sustained winds throughout the region were generally below 50 mph (80 km/h). In Boston, Massachusetts, winds gusted to 46 mph (74 km/h). The storm brought down trees and powerlines, blocking roads and damaging property. Structural damage was also evident, especially to buildings under construction, and an entire cottage in Rockland, Maine, was blown off its foundation.
Rainfall in southeastern New England was heavy, locally exceeding 10 in (250 mm). On the island of Martha's Vineyard, a storm total of 12.5 in (320 mm) was reported, the highest known precipitation sum resulting from Carrie. The most torrential rains were usually confined to within 70 mi (110 km) of the coast. The deluge swelled streams, inundated cellars, and washed out a railroad near Eagle Lake, Maine, derailing a train. Along the coast, rough surf caused beach erosion and swamped hundreds of small craft. On September 3, choppy conditions forced the suspension of steamship services to and from the mainland and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Thousands of tourists and seasonal residents became stranded on the islands, creating what officials described as a "logistical problem".
During the height of the storm, around 20,000 Narragansett Electric Company customers lost power, with scattered power outages reported elsewhere throughout New England.
Damage from Tropical Storm Carrie and its extratropical remnants was light. Total monetary damage was estimated at \$1,780,000 (), of which \$1,200,000 in losses was inflicted on Massachusetts. Losses totaled \$350,000 in Rhode Island, \$200,000 in Maine, and \$30,000 in New Hampshire. Four fatalities were attributed to the storm: two in the aftermath of boating accidents in Massachusetts, and two due to rough surf along the coast of Maine. In the aftermath, a local disaster area was declared for the town of Plymouth.
The weakening remnants of Carrie produced strong winds throughout New Brunswick on September 4. In Saint John, where wind gusts reached 97 km/h (60 mph), there were reports of downed telephone wires and trees. Widespread power outages occurred throughout communities in the province. Despite well over an inch of rain at Saint John, no flooding was evident. Fredericton also received fairly heavy rain and gusty wind on the 4th, which was its wettest day of the month but not its windiest. The storm damaged or destroyed numerous boats in Charlo, New Brunswick.
Oceanic currents produced by the storm washed cells of the harmful alga Alexandrium fundyense south and west into the coastal waters of New England. The alga releases toxins that cause shellfish poisoning and is native to the Bay of Fundy. Several weeks after the storm, a massive bloom of the alga occurred offshore the northeastern United States for the first time, and the species bloomed every year post-Carrie.
## See also
- List of Canada hurricanes
- List of wettest tropical cyclones in the United States
- Timeline of the 1972 Atlantic hurricane season |
976,833 | Japanese battleship Ise | 1,136,854,189 | Ise-class battleship | [
"1916 ships",
"Battleships sunk by aircraft",
"Ise-class battleships",
"Maritime incidents in July 1945",
"Second Sino-Japanese War naval ships of Japan",
"Ships built by Kawasaki Heavy Industries",
"Ships sunk by US aircraft",
"Shipwrecks in the Inland Sea",
"World War II battleships of Japan",
"World War II shipwrecks in the Pacific Ocean"
]
| Ise (Japanese: 伊勢) was the lead ship of her class of two dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during the 1910s. Although completed in 1917, she played no role in World War I. Ise supported Japanese forces in the early 1920s during the Siberian Intervention in the Russian Civil War. In 1923, she assisted survivors of the Great Kantō earthquake. The ship was partially modernised in two stages in 1928–1929 and 1931–1932, during which her forward superstructure was rebuilt in the pagoda mast style. Ise was reconstructed in 1934–1937, with improvements to her armour and her propulsion machinery. Afterwards she played a minor role in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Despite the expensive reconstruction, the ship was considered obsolete by the eve of the Pacific War, and did not see significant action in the early years of the war. Following the loss of most of the IJN's large aircraft carriers during the Battle of Midway in mid-1942, she was rebuilt with a flight deck replacing the rear pair of gun turrets to give her the ability to operate an air group of floatplanes; lack of aircraft and qualified pilots meant that Ise never actually operated her aircraft in combat. She participated in the Battle off Cape Engaño in late 1944, where she was one of the ships that decoyed the American carrier fleet supporting the invasion of Leyte away from the landing beaches. Afterwards the ship was transferred to Southeast Asia. In early 1945 Ise participated in Operation Kita, where she transported petrol and other strategic materials to Japan. The ship was then reduced to reserve until American airstrikes in July sank her. After the war Ise was scrapped in 1946–1947.
## Design and description
The Ise class was designed as an improved version of the preceding Fusō class. The ships had a length of 208.18 metres (683 ft) overall, a beam of 28.65 metres (94 ft) and a draught of 8.93 metres (29 ft 4 in) at deep load. They displaced 29,980 long tons (30,460 t) at standard load and 36,500 long tons (37,100 t) at deep load, roughly 650 long tons (660 t) more than the earlier ships. Their crew consisted of 1,360 officers and ratings.
During the ships' modernisation in the 1930s, their forward superstructure was enlarged with multiple platforms added to their tripod masts to create a pagoda mast. Both ships were also given torpedo bulges to improve their underwater protection and to compensate for the weight of the extra armour. These changes increased their overall length to 215.8 metres (708 ft), their beam to 31.75 metres (104 ft 2 in) and their draught to 9.45 metres (31 ft). Their displacement increased by over 5,000 long tons (5,100 t) to 42,001 long tons (42,675 t) at deep load. The crew now numbered 1,376 officers and enlisted men.
### Propulsion
The Ise-class ships had two sets of direct-drive steam turbines, each of which drove two propeller shafts, using steam provided by 24 Kampon Ro Gō water-tube boilers. The turbines were designed to produce a total of 45,000 shaft horsepower (34,000 kW) and give the ships a speed of 23 knots (43 km/h; 26 mph). Ise reached 23.6 knots (43.7 km/h; 27.2 mph) from 56,498 shp (42,131 kW) during her sea trials. Each of the boilers consumed a mixture of coal and oil, and the ships carried enough of both to give them a range of 9,680 nautical miles (17,930 km; 11,140 mi) at a speed of 14 knots (26 km/h; 16 mph).
During their 1930s modernisation, the boilers on each ship were replaced by eight new Kampon oil-fired boilers. The turbines were replaced by four geared Kampon turbines with a designed output of 80,000 shp (60,000 kW) intended to increase their speed to 24.5 knots (45.4 km/h; 28.2 mph). On her trials, Ise reached a top speed of 25.3 knots (46.9 km/h; 29.1 mph) from 81,050 shp (60,440 kW). The fuel storage of the ships was increased, which gave them a range of 7,870 nautical miles (14,580 km; 9,060 mi) at a speed of 16 knots (30 km/h; 18 mph), despite the additional weight.
### Armament
The twelve 35.6-centimetre (14 in) Type 41 guns of the Ise class were mounted in three pairs of twin-gun, superfiring turrets that were numbered one through six from front to rear. The first pair was forward of the main superstructure, the second pair was amidships, and the last ones were aft of the rear superstructure. The ships' secondary armament consisted of twenty 14-centimetre (5.5 in) Type 3 guns in single mounts. Eighteen of these were mounted in casemates in the forecastle and superstructure and the remaining pair were mounted on the deck above them and protected by gun shields. Anti-aircraft defence was provided by four 3rd Year Type 8-centimetre (3 in) anti-aircraft (AA) guns in single mounts. The ships were also fitted with six submerged 53.3-centimetre (21 in) torpedo tubes, three on each broadside.
In 1931–1933 the AA guns were replaced with eight 12.7-centimetre (5 in) Type 89 dual-purpose guns, placed beside the forward superstructure in four twin-gun mounts. Two twin-gun mounts for licence-built Vickers two-pounder (4-centimetre (1.6 in)) light AA guns were also added, while the pair of 14 cm guns on the upper deck were removed.
During the mid-1930s reconstruction, the torpedo tubes were removed and the Vickers two-pounders were replaced by 20 licence-built Hotchkiss 2.5-centimetre (1 in) Type 96 light AA guns in 10 twin-gun mounts. This was the standard Japanese light AA gun during World War II, but it suffered from serious design shortcomings that heavily reduced its effectiveness. According to historian Mark Stille, the twin and triple mounts "lacked sufficient speed in train or elevation; the gun sights were unable to handle fast targets; the gun exhibited excessive vibration; the magazine was too small, and, finally, the gun produced excessive muzzle blast". During the reconstruction the forward pair of 14-centimetre guns in the forecastle were removed and the maximum elevation of the remaining guns was increased to +30 degrees.
### Protection
The Ise-class ships' waterline protective belt had a maximum thickness of 299 mm (11.8 in) of Vickers cemented armour amidships; below it was a strake of 100 mm (3.9 in) armour. The upper armoured deck consisted of two layers of high-tensile steel totaling 55 mm (2.2 in) thick and the lower armoured deck also consisted of two layers of high-tensile steel, but only 30 mm (1.2 in) thick in total. The turrets were protected with an armour thickness of 254 mm (10 in) on the face and 76 mm on the roof. The casemate armour was 149 mm (5.9 in) thick and that of the barbettes was 299 mm thick rather than the originally planned 305 mm.
### Fire control and sensors
While the details of the ship's fire-control instruments are not fully available, Ise was fitted with a gunnery director after completion. In the late 1920s the fire-control systems were upgraded and additional platforms were added to the foremast to accommodate them. A pair of directors for the 12.7 cm AA guns were added in the early 1930s, one on each side of the forward superstructure. The fire-control systems were again upgraded in the mid-1930s and directors were added for the 2.5 cm AA guns. The ship had a 10-metre (32 ft 10 in) rangefinder installed at the top of the pagoda mast at that time. Type 21 air-search radars were installed aboard the ship in mid-1942.
### Aircraft
Ise was briefly fitted with an aircraft flying-off platform for a Mitsubishi 1MF3 fighter on Turret No. 2 in 1927. It was replaced by a platform on Turret No. 5 for a Yokosuka E1Y reconnaissance floatplane in 1928–1929. A catapult and a collapsible crane were fitted on the stern during the mid-1930s modernisation, and the ship was equipped to operate three floatplanes, although no hangar was provided. The initial Nakajima E4N2 biplanes were replaced by Nakajima E8N2 biplanes in 1938.
## Construction and career
Ise, named after Ise Province, one of the traditional provinces of Japan, was laid down at the Kawasaki Heavy Industries shipyard in Kobe on 5 May 1915 and launched on 12 November 1916. Captain Akizawa Yoshima assumed command on 1 December and the ship was completed on 15 December 1917, too late for service in World War I. Ise was assigned to the 1st Division of the 1st Fleet in 1917–1918. Captain Kuwashima Shozo relieved Akizawa on 1 December 1918 and he was relieved in his turn by Captain Furukawa Hiroshi on 20 November 1919. On 29 August 1920, the ship began the first of numerous patrols off the Siberian coast and in northern waters in support of Japan's Siberian Intervention against the Bolshevik Red Army. Captain Yokoo Hisashi replaced Furukawa on 20 November and he was replaced by Captain Nagasawa Naotaro in his turn on 1 December 1921.
On 12 April 1922, while at Yokohama, Ise hosted a delegation which included the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII), and his second cousin, the future Lord Mountbatten of Burma. Captain Kanna Norikazu relieved Nagasawa on 1 December. The ship aided survivors of the Great Kantō earthquake in September 1923. From the early 1920s through the late 1930s, Ise mostly cruised off the coast of China. Little detailed information is available about her activities during the 1920s, although she helped sink the obsolete destroyer Yayoi during gunnery training on 10 August 1926. The ship was overhauled in 1928–1929, during which her forward superstructure was enlarged and her aviation facilities improved.
Between 20 November 1931 and 10 February 1932, Ise had her anti-aircraft armament entirely replaced, her forward superstructure was further enlarged so that it became a pagoda mast, and her stern was modified in preparation for a catapult and crane at Kure Naval Arsenal. These were installed between 14 May and 6 June 1933. On 15 November, she became a training ship. Ise's crew participated in the state funeral of Marshal-Admiral The Marquis Tōgō Heihachirō, victor of the 1905 Battle of Tsushima, on 15 June 1934.
Beginning on 1 August 1935, Ise was drydocked at Kure Naval Arsenal and underwent an extensive reconstruction and modernisation that lasted until 23 March 1937. On 9 April 1938, the ship began the first of her patrols off the southern Chinese coast during the Second Sino-Japanese War that lasted until early 1941. She was transferred to the 2nd Division of the 1st Fleet on 15 November 1940 and became its flagship on 15 November 1941. Captain Takeda Isamu assumed command of Ise on 25 September 1941.
### Start of the Pacific War
To provide distant support for the 1st Air Fleet attacking Pearl Harbor on 8 December, the division, reinforced by the battleships Nagato and Mutsu and the light carrier Hōshō, sortied from Hashirajima to the Bonin Islands and returned six days later. Ise had a minor refit at the Kure Naval Arsenal in 19–25 February 1942. Together with the rest of the division, she pursued, but did not catch, the American carrier force that had launched the Doolittle Raid on 18 April. On 11 May Ise had an accident which flooded her No. 2 engine room. While under repair, the ship was fitted with one of the first experimental Type 21 early-warning radar sets in the IJN, but it was removed shortly afterwards.
Ise and the rest of the 2nd Battleship Division set sail on 28 May with the Aleutian Support Group at the same time most of the Imperial Fleet began an attack on Midway Island (Operation MI). Commanded by Vice-Admiral Shirō Takasu, the division was composed of Japan's four oldest battleships, including Ise, accompanied by two light cruisers, 12 destroyers, and two oilers. Official records do not show the division as part of the larger Midway operation, known as Operation AL; they were to accompany the fleet under Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, but were only to provide support to the Aleutian task force if needed.
### Conversion to a hybrid carrier
The loss of four Japanese aircraft carriers during the Battle of Midway in June severely limited the ability of the IJN to conduct operations and alternatives were sought. Plans for full conversions of battleships into aircraft carriers were rejected on the grounds of expense and, most critically, time, so the IJN settled on removing the rear pair of turrets from the Ise-class ships and replacing them with a flight deck equipped with two rotating catapults. Ise began her conversion on 23 February 1943 and Takeda was relieved by Captain Hase Shinzaburo on 25 April. The ship's No. 5 and No. 6 turrets were replaced by a hangar surmounted by a flight deck. This was not long enough to permit the launch of aircraft or their recovery. Two catapults were installed and the existing crane was moved to the flight deck. The deck was fitted with an extensive system of rails to link each catapult, the storage positions on the deck and the "T"-shaped aircraft lift that moved aircraft between the flight deck and the hangar. It had a capacity of nine aircraft, the remainder being stowed on deck and one on each catapult for a total of 22–24. The ship's air group was intended to consist of a dozen each Yokosuka D4Y Suisei dive bombers (Allied reporting name "Judy"), modified for catapult launching, and Aichi E16A reconnaissance aircraft (Allied reporting name "Paul"). The former had to land either on a conventional carrier or on land bases, whereas the E16A could be hoisted back aboard using a crane, after landing on the water near the ship.
During the conversion, all the 14 cm guns were removed and the ship's anti-aircraft suite was heavily reinforced. The eight 12.7 cm Type 89 guns were supplemented with four additional twin mounts and the existing 2.5 cm Type 96 AA twin-gun mounts were replaced by 19 triple-gun mounts for a total of 57 weapons.
These changes increased the ship's overall length to 219.62 metres (720 ft 6 in) and the removal of the heavy gun turrets and their barbettes reduced her displacement to 39,805 long tons (40,444 t) at deep load, despite the addition of more fuel oil storage. The extra fuel increased Ise's range to 9,500 nautical miles (17,600 km; 10,900 mi). The weight reductions decreased her draught to 9.03 metres (29 ft 8 in). The crew now numbered 1,463 officers and enlisted men.
The rebuild was officially completed on 8 October 1943 and Ise made a sortie to Truk later that month, conveying a detachment of the 52nd Division and supplies. Hase was promoted to rear admiral on 1 November and the ship began formally working up 10 days later. Captain Nakase Noboru relieved Hase on 25 December.
On 25 February 1944, Battleship Division 2 was assigned to the direct control of the Combined Fleet. Ise and her sister ship Hyūga were transferred to the Third Fleet and assigned to the newly reformed Fourth Carrier Division on 1 May, commanded by Rear Admiral Chiaki Matsuda. That same day the 634th Naval Air Group was formed and assigned to the Fourth Carrier Division. On 24 May, a pair of Type 22 surface-search radars were installed aboard the ship. From 31 May to 7 June, Ise's light anti-aircraft armament was reinforced with 47 additional Type 96 AA guns in 12 triple and 11 single mounts, which brought her total to 104 guns. Two Type 2 IFF units were also installed.
On 23 June, the sisters conducted their first catapult training, each with four D4Ys and six E16As aboard; subsequent sessions were conducted on 21 July and 31 August. A pair of Type 13 early-warning radars and an E27 radar detector were installed from 22 to 26 July. From 28 September to 10 October, six racks of 30-tube 12.7 cm anti-aircraft rocket launchers were added. Training of the D4Y and E16A aircrew was slowed by technical problems and was generally conducted from land bases. By 1 October the 634th had on strength 17 D4Ys, of which 6 were serviceable, and 18 E16As, of which 16 were operable.
### Battle off Cape Engaño and afterwards
After the Americans began attacking Japanese installations in the Bonin Islands on 10 October 1944, the aircraft of the Fourth Carrier Division were ordered to prepare for combat by the commander of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Soemu Toyoda. Two days later, the 634th Naval Air Group was reassigned to the Second Air Fleet and began flying to bases in southern Kyushu, among these were nine D4Ys and a dozen E16As assigned to Ise and Hyūga. On 14 October they attacked the aircraft carriers of Task Force 38 near Formosa with little effect and heavy losses. The following day Nakase was promoted to rear admiral.
The ships of the Fourth Carrier Division were assigned to the Main Body of the 1st Mobile Fleet, commanded by Vice-Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa. The Main Body's role was to act as a decoy to attract attention away from the two other forces approaching from the south and west. All forces were to converge on Leyte Gulf on 25 October and the Main Body left Japan on 20 October. By the morning of 24 October, the Main Body was within range of the northernmost American carriers of Task Force 38 and Ozawa ordered an air strike launched by the Third Carrier Division (Ise and Hyūga had no aircraft aboard) to attract the attention of the Americans. This accomplished little else as the Japanese aircraft failed to penetrate past the defending fighters; the survivors landed at airfields on the Philippine island of Luzon. The Americans were preoccupied dealing with the other Japanese naval forces and defending themselves from air attacks launched from Luzon and Leyte and could not spare any aircraft to search for the Japanese carriers until the afternoon. They finally found them, but Admiral William Halsey, Jr., commander of Task Force 38, decided that it was too late in the day to mount an effective strike. He did, however, turn all his ships north to position himself for a dawn attack on the Japanese carriers the next day.
On the morning of 25 October, Ise was positioned astern of the carriers Zuikaku and Zuihō to protect them with her anti-aircraft guns. Her radar picked up American aircraft at a range of 125 nautical miles (232 km; 144 mi) at 07:39. The first attack began at 08:20, with the battleship engaging enemy aircraft with San Shiki anti-aircraft shells from her main guns with unknown effect. She was not heavily attacked, but two bombs fell nearby. The second wave of aircraft attacked at 10:05 and the ship's gunners claimed to have shot down five of the ten dive bombers. Ise was near missed eight times, although one small bomb struck No. 2 turret. The third wave was detected by her radar at 12:28, but it did not attack the battleship, sinking the damaged Zuikaku and Zuihō instead. Ise rescued 98 survivors from Zuihō before the next attack began around 17:26. She was the primary focus of this wave and was attacked by about 85 dive bombers and at least 11 torpedo bombers. Saved by heavy anti-aircraft fire and expert manoeuvring, the battleship dodged all the torpedoes, and was struck by only one bomb, near the port catapult. Roughly 34 near misses damaged her hull plating near the waterline and started a small leak that contaminated a small oil tank and caused minor damage to the port boiler rooms. Splinters from the near misses and the single hit killed 5 crewmen and wounded 71.
The American submarine USS Halibut spotted the Fourth Carrier Division at 17:42 and manoeuvred to attack, missing with six torpedoes at 18:43. At 19:00 Ozawa ordered Matsuda to take his ships south to defend the light cruiser Isuzu and her escorting destroyers that were attempting to rescue survivors of the crippled light carrier Chiyoda despite gunfire from a group of four American cruisers. Unable to locate either group of ships, Ozawa ordered Matsuda to reverse course at 23:30 and head for Amami Ōshima to refuel. Despite being spotted by American submarines en route, the division arrived safely on 27 October. After leaving the island the following day, they were unsuccessfully attacked by the submarine USS Sea Dog before their arrival at Kure on the 29th.
Between 29 October and 8 November, the catapults were removed to improve the firing arcs of No. 3 and No. 4 turrets. Ise and Hyūga departed on 11 November, loaded with troops and munitions for Manila, capital of the Philippines, but news was received of heavy American air attacks on Manila and they were diverted to the Spratly Islands. They arrived on 14 November and their cargo was unloaded so it could be transferred to the Philippines. The 4th Carrier Division was transferred to the 2nd Fleet the following day. Reinforced by the battleship Haruna and three cruisers, the sisters proceeded on to Lingga Island, near Singapore, on 20 November. They arrived two days later and remained there until 12 December when they departed for Cam Ranh Bay, French Indochina, where they were on standby for an attack on an American supply convoy bound for the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. The attack was cancelled on the 30th and the ships sailed for Singapore where they arrived on 1 January 1945 before continuing on to Lingga. That same day the Fourth Carrier Division was transferred to the Southwest Area Fleet.
### Final role
On 6 February, the division sailed for Singapore to participate in Operation Kita. While approaching Singapore, Ise was slightly damaged by a mine. Given temporary repairs at the former British naval base there, Ise, Hyūga, and the light cruiser Ōyodo were loaded with critically needed strategic war supplies (oil, rubber, tin, zinc, and mercury) and 1,150 surplus oil workers to be ferried back to Japan.
The division sailed from Singapore on 10 February and was spotted by the British submarine HMS Tantalus the following day. It was forced to submerge by a maritime patrol aircraft and was unable to attack. On 13 February the submarine USS Bergall unsuccessfully attacked the ships as did the submarine USS Blower. One of Ise's AA guns caused one of Blower's torpedoes to detonate prematurely. Later that afternoon, Ōyodo launched one of her floatplanes which spotted the submarine USS Bashaw on the surface about 22 km (14 mi) ahead of the convoy. Hyūga opened fire with her main guns and forced Bashaw to submerge when one of her shells landed within 1.6 km (0.99 mi) of the submarine. The convoy reached the Matsu Islands, off the Chinese coast, on the 15th and was unsuccessfully attacked by the submarine USS Rasher before they reached Zhoushan Island, near Shanghai that night. The convoy reached Kure on 20 February, having evaded or escaped pursuit by 23 Allied submarines along the way. Nakase was relieved by Captain Mutaguchi Kakuro five days later.
The 4th Carrier Division was disbanded on 1 March and Ise was reduced to first-class reserve. From this time until the surrender of Japan, Ise remained docked at Kure, without fuel or aircraft, and repainted in an olive green camouflage with vari-coloured splotches. The camouflage was not effective against American carrier-based aircraft from Task Force 58 (TF 58) on 19 March, when more than 240 aircraft attacked Kure and Ise was hit by two bombs. Re-designated as a fourth-class reserve ship on 20 April, Ise was towed to the island of Ondo Seto (between Kure and Kurahashijima) to serve as a floating anti-aircraft battery. She was attacked again on 24 July by 60 carrier-based aircraft, whose bombs hit the starboard bow, flight deck, main deck, No. 3 turret and bridge, killing Mutaguchi, other bridge personnel, and around 50 crewmen; many other crewmen were wounded. The ship settled by the bow; it took three days to pump her dry. The IJN planned to drydock her for repairs but she was struck by five 450 kg (1,000 lb) bombs dropped by F4U Corsair fighters from USS Hancock, and eleven more bombs dropped by other aircraft from TF 58 on 28 July. Later that day an attack by 18 USAAF Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bombers was unsuccessful. Ise took on a 15° list to starboard and sank in shallow water. Salvage efforts were abandoned that same day, although some AA guns were stripped from her wreck. The ship was struck from the navy list on 20 November. The underwater portion of Ise's wreck was ignored until the following year and she was scrapped in place by the Kure Dockyard of the Harima Zōsen Corporation from 9 October 1946 to 4 July 1947. |
34,953,952 | The Concert in Central Park | 1,171,282,569 | null | [
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"Albums produced by Phil Ramone",
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| The Concert in Central Park is the first live album by American folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel, released on February 16, 1982, by Warner Bros. Records. It was recorded on September 19, 1981, at a free benefit concert on the Great Lawn in Central Park, New York City, where the pair performed in front of 500,000 people. A film of the event was shown on TV and released on video. Proceeds went toward the redevelopment and maintenance of the park, which had deteriorated due to lack of municipal funding. The concert and album marked the start of a three-year reunion of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.
The concept of a benefit concert in Central Park had been proposed by Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis and promoter Ron Delsener. Television channel HBO agreed to carry the concert, and they worked with Delsener to decide on Simon and Garfunkel as the appropriate act for this event. Besides hits from their years as a duo, their 21-song set list included material from their solo careers, and covers. Amongst them were "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", "The Boxer" and Simon's "Late in the Evening", with the show concluding with a reprise of the latter. Ongoing personal tensions between the duo led them to decide against a permanent reunion, despite the success of the concert and a subsequent world tour.
The album and film were released the year after the concert. Simon and Garfunkel's performance was praised by music critics and the album was commercially successful, peaking No. 6 on the Billboard 200 album charts and being certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The video recordings were initially broadcast on HBO and were subsequently made available on Laserdisc, CED, VHS and DVD. A single was released of Simon and Garfunkel‘s live performance of The Everly Brothers‘s song "Wake Up Little Susie". It reached No. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982 and is the duo's last Top 40 hit.
## Idea and arrangement
### A concert for the park
New York City's Central Park, an oasis that functions as the city's "green lung", was in a state of deterioration in the mid-1970s. Though Central Park had been designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962, at the start of the 1980s, the city lacked the financial resources to spend an estimated US\$3,000,000 to restore or even to maintain the park. The nonprofit Central Park Conservancy was founded in 1980, and began a successful campaign to raise renovation funds.
In the early 1980s, Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis, responsible for New York City's green areas, and Ron Delsener, one of the city's most influential concert promoters, developed the idea of helping Central Park financially with a free open-air concert, under the legal guidance of Bob Donnelly. The city would use profits from merchandising, television, and video rights to renovate the park. Earlier park performances by Elton John and James Taylor showed that this concept could be a success. Davis authorized the project, and Delsener entered discussions with cable TV channel HBO to decide who would perform.
They decided on Simon & Garfunkel, a duo that had formed in New York City in the 1960s and had been one of the most successful folk rock groups through the late 60s/early 70s. Simon & Garfunkel had broken up at the height of their popularity and shortly after the release of their fifth studio album, Bridge over Troubled Water, which is deemed to be their artistic peak and which topped the 1970 Billboard charts for ten weeks; they had grown apart artistically and did not get along well with each other. In the following ten years, both continued musical careers as solo artists and worked together only sporadically on one-off projects. Garfunkel made brief guest appearances at Simon's concerts, which were always successful.
Delsener presented the plan to Paul Simon in the summer of 1981. Simon was enthusiastic about the idea, but questioned whether it could be financially successful, especially given the poor audience attendance of his last project, the autobiographical movie One-Trick Pony. Simon's confidence had declined and he had sought treatment for depression. He questioned whether he and Art Garfunkel could work together, but contacted Garfunkel, who was vacationing in Switzerland. Garfunkel was excited about the idea and immediately returned to the US.
From the promoter's viewpoint, Simon and Garfunkel were ideal choices. Not only were they likely to draw a large crowd to the concert, they also had roots in the city – both had grown up and gone to school in Forest Hills, Queens. Music critic Stephen Holden pointed out that, unlike artists who had left in pursuit of lifestyles offered by other locales, the two had always been a part of New York City. Both gained inspiration from the cityscape and the cultural variety of New York, and they spoke of these influences in their songs.
### Planning and rehearsals
Planning and rehearsals for the concert took about three weeks in a Manhattan theater. The rehearsals were characterized by past tensions that resurfaced between the performers under the intense time pressure. Paul Simon later said: "Well, the rehearsals were just miserable. Artie and I fought all the time." An early concept was for each singer to give a solo performance, with Simon allotted the greater amount of time, and to conclude with the duo performing their joint works. This idea was rejected because, according to Garfunkel, "It didn't seem right to either of us that Paul should be the opening act for Simon & Garfunkel, and for him to follow Simon & Garfunkel didn't make show-business sense".
The two decided to perform most of the show together, with room for each to showcase some solo material. Simon, who had resumed songwriting after a hiatus, interrupted a series of studio recording sessions for the concert preparations. He used the live show as an opportunity to test one of his new songs in front of an audience. Garfunkel also contributed a new song, "A Heart in New York", from his soon-to-be released album Scissors Cut.
The two differed on the presentation of the concert. Garfunkel wanted to recreate the duo's mid-1960s live performances, using only their voices backed by Simon's acoustic guitar. Simon felt that this was impossible, as an injury had rendered him incapable of playing guitar for the full length of a concert, and his newer material was typically arranged for larger ensembles that often included horns and amplified instruments such as electric piano and electric guitar. Garfunkel initially agreed to hire a second guitarist, but later rejected the idea. A group of eleven musicians was assembled for the concert, most of whom were experienced studio musicians and had played on albums involving Simon or Garfunkel and these included Billy Joel's guitarist David Brown, Muscle Shoals guitarist Pete Carr, Anthony Jackson (bass guitar), Rob Mounsey (synthesizer), John Eckert and John Gatchell (trumpets), Dave Tofani and Gerry Niewood (saxophones), Steve Gadd and Grady Tate (drums, percussion), and Richard Tee (piano).
The musical arrangements for the concert were written by Paul Simon and David Matthews. Some songs differed significantly from their original versions; for example, "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" featured more prominent Latin elements and included a salsa break, while the folk rock "Kodachrome" was set as a harder rock song and played together with the Chuck Berry single "Maybellene" as a medley.
Garfunkel had difficulties in the rehearsals. Both men easily recalled their songs from the 1960s, but Garfunkel had to learn the harmonies and arrangements for Simon's solo songs, as modified for the reunion concert. He was also uncomfortable that Simon had rewritten some of the lyrics for their old songs. Despite the need to adapt to Simon and his style, Garfunkel enjoyed some of the songs, and was glad to perform Simon's "American Tune".
News reports and the Michael Doret-designed posters of the Central Park show named the musicians individually and did not bill them as "Simon & Garfunkel"; that the two singers would perform together on stage in a reunion was not officially announced until only a week before the concert when it was published in New York newspapers. The two stated in interviews that further collaboration was not planned.
## Concert
The concert took place on Saturday, September 19, 1981, on the Great Lawn, the central open space of Central Park. The first spectators, many carrying chairs or picnic blankets, arrived at daybreak to secure a good spot. The Parks Department originally expected about 300,000 attendees. Although rain fell throughout the day and continued until the start of the concert, an estimated 500,000 audience members made this the seventh-largest concert attendance in United States history.
The stage backdrop depicted an urban rooftop with water tank and air outlet, symbolic of New York's skyline. At twilight, the backing band went onstage, followed by New York's mayor, Ed Koch, who announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, Simon and Garfunkel!" The duo entered through a side stage door, took center stage amid audience applause, shook hands, and began the concert with their 1968 hit "Mrs. Robinson".
After the second song, "Homeward Bound", Simon delivered a short speech which began, "Well, it's great to do a neighborhood concert." He then thanked the police, the fire department, the park administration and finally Ed Koch. Some of the audience booed at the mention of Koch but applauded as Simon continued by tongue-in-cheek thanking "the guys who are selling loose joints [for] giving the city half of their income tonight."
Simon & Garfunkel played twenty-one songs in total: ten originally recorded by the duo, eight from Simon's solo career, one recorded by Garfunkel, a cover of The Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie", and the medley version of "Maybellene". Each performer sang three songs alone, including one new song apiece. Garfunkel sang the Simon & Garfunkel songs "Bridge over Troubled Water" and "April Come She Will", as well as "A Heart in New York", a song written by Gallagher and Lyle that appeared on his album Scissors Cut, which had been released the previous month. Simon's solo performances were the title song of his 1975 album Still Crazy After All These Years, the number-one single "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover", and the unreleased "The Late Great Johnny Ace", which would appear on his 1983 album Hearts and Bones.
"The Late Great Johnny Ace" was interrupted when an audience member ran to the stage and shouted at Simon: "I need to talk to you!" The man was carried away by security, and Simon finished the song. The incident provoked associations to the song's lyrics, in which Simon speaks of the deaths of Johnny Ace, John F. Kennedy, and John Lennon. Lennon's murder by an obsessed fan had taken place less than a year previously, not far from the concert site. Despite this association, Simon said that he was not afraid of any on-stage incidents. In May 1982 as a guest on Late Night with David Letterman, he explained that while it is not unusual for fans to jump onto the stage with flowers, this action was new to him, but also felt that the man simply appeared intoxicated. His greater concern was that the song's premiere was ruined.
Lyrics referring to the New York area produced audience applause, such as Garfunkel's ode to his home city, "A Heart in New York", which describes from a New Yorker's point of view the first glimpse of the city when returning there by air:
> New York, lookin' down on Central Park, where they say you should not wander after dark
Applause broke out during "The Sound of Silence", when the narrative voice refers to a large crowd of people in the dark:
> And in the naked light I saw ten thousand people maybe more
After the 17th song, "The Boxer", which contained an additional stanza not included in the album version, Simon & Garfunkel thanked the audience and left the stage, but returned to deliver an encore of three songs – "Old Friends / Bookends Theme", "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)", and "The Sound of Silence". Simon then said that their planned use of pyrotechnics had been disallowed, and told the crowd, "Let's have our own fireworks!" Many spectators sparked lighters. The duo then introduced the members of the backing band and gave a final encore, a reprise of "Late in the Evening".
### Set list
All songs composed by Paul Simon unless otherwise noted.
1. "Mrs. Robinson"
2. "Homeward Bound"
3. "America"
4. "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"
5. "Scarborough Fair" (Traditional, arr. by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel)
6. "April Come She Will"
7. "Wake Up Little Susie" (The Everly Brothers (Felice and Boudleaux Bryant))
8. "Still Crazy After All These Years"
9. "American Tune"
10. "Late in the Evening"
1. <li value="11">
"Slip Slidin' Away"
2. "A Heart in New York" (Benny Gallagher, Graham Lyle)
3. "The Late Great Johnny Ace"
4. "Kodachrome/Maybellene" (Simon/Chuck Berry (Chuck Berry, Russ Fratto, Alan Freed))
5. "Bridge over Troubled Water"
6. "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"
7. "The Boxer"
Encore
1. "Old Friends / Bookends Theme"
2. "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)"
3. "The Sound of Silence"
Encore
1. "Late in the Evening" (Reprise)
### Personnel
- Paul Simon – vocals, guitar
- Art Garfunkel – vocals
- Pete Carr, David Brown – guitar
- Anthony Jackson – bass guitar
- Richard Tee – keyboards
- Steve Gadd, Grady Tate – drums
- Rob Mounsey – synthesizer
- John Gatchell, John Eckert – trumpet
- Dave Tofani, Gerry Niewood – saxophone
## Album release
A recording of the concert was released five months later, on February 16, 1982. The audio tracks were processed in postproduction, but Rolling Stone magazine wrote that they were not completely polished, and preserved the roar and the fuzziness of live rock music heard through a loudspeaker. Two songs were not included on the album: the interrupted "Late Great Johnny Ace", and the encore reprise of "Late in the Evening". The album was an international success. It peaked at number six on the Billboard 200 chart, and was certified 2×Multi-Platinum with sales of over 2 million copies in US.
The album sold more than 1,270,000 copies in France, where it was certified Diamond. It was also successful in seven other countries, including New Zealand. The album was released as a double LP and as a single Compact Cassette. In 1988 it was issued as a single CD; various reissues in different formats have occurred, including a 2-CD release containing the two missing songs from the original album. The Concert was recorded by Roy Halee on the Record Plant NY Black Truck with David Hewitt Director, assisted by Phil Gitomer, Steve Barash and John Mathias.
### Track listing
The song "The Late Great Johnny Ace" and the reprise of "Late in the Evening" were not included in the original release of the album but are on the DVD.
## Video release
The concert was filmed for television broadcast and the home video market. It was produced by James Signorelli, and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a specialist in music documentaries who had worked on The Beatles' film Let It Be, and executive produced by Lorne Michaels, who had recently departed the NBC-TV comedy/variety series Saturday Night Live. Simon himself financed the US\$750,000 cost of the staging and the video recording. It is unknown how much HBO paid for the television and video rights of the recording - \$1 million according to some sources, over \$3 million according to others. The film includes the two songs that had not appeared on the album, and at 87 minutes, runs 12 minutes longer.
HBO televised the film, Simon and Garfunkel: The Concert in Central Park, on February 21, 1982, five days after the album was released. The film was later released for sale in VHS, CED Videodisc, LaserDisc, and DVD formats. It sold more than 50,000 copies in the US, where it earned Gold certification for a music longform video. It was broadcast on PBS on August 22, 1988, and again on August 8, 2015.
## Critical reception
The concert and recordings were positively received by music critics. Stephen Holden praised the performance in The New York Times the day after the concert; he subsequently praised the live album in Rolling Stone magazine. He wrote that Simon and Garfunkel were successful in reviving their sound, that the backing band was "one of the finest groups of musicians ever to play together at a New York rock concert", and the rearrangements of Simon's solo material were improvements over the originals. Despite the risks in performing so many acoustic ballads in an open-air concert on a cool night, the songs "were beautifully articulated, in near-perfect harmony."
An October 1981 review in Rolling Stone called the concert "one of the finest performances of [1981]", one that "vividly recaptured another time, an era when well-crafted, melodic pop bore meanings that stretched beyond the musical sphere and into the realms of culture and politics." This reviewer noted that Garfunkel's voice was noticeably restrained in high passages, though still harmonious, and that the evening's only weak spot was the "Kodachrome"/"Maybellene" medley, because neither singer could raise the right level of emotion for the rock songs.
A Billboard reviewer wrote in March 1982, "This 19 song, two record set gloriously recaptures the past with sterling renditions of most of the duo's classics as well as a few of Simon's solo compositions filled out by Garfunkel's harmony." However, Robert Christgau of The Village Voice dismissed the album as "a corporate boondoggle—a classy way for Warner Bros. artist Simon to rerecord, rerelease, and resell the catalogue CBS is sitting on." He felt Simon had been better off without Garfunkel since 1971 and, regarding the duo's interpretations of solo material and the band-format's reinterpretation of old material, "live doubles are live doubles, nostalgia is nostalgia, wimps are wimps, and who needs any of 'em?"
## Aftermath
The duo was disappointed with their performance, particularly Garfunkel, who felt that he sang poorly. Simon said that he did not immediately realize the magnitude of the event: "I didn't get what had happened – how big it was – until I went home, turned on the television and saw it on all the news ... and later that night on the front pages of all the newspapers. Then I got it."
In May 1982, Simon & Garfunkel went on a world tour with legs in Japan, Europe, Oceania, and North America. The European leg of their tour began on May 28, 1982, at the Stadion am Bieberer Berg in Offenbach am Main. This was their first performance in Germany, and had an attendance of around 40,000 spectators.
When they were not on the road, the duo went into the studio to work on what was to be a reunion Simon & Garfunkel album, tentatively entitled Think Too Much, with Garfunkel adding harmony vocals to new songs for which Simon had already laid down some backing tracks. They set a release date of spring 1983 to coincide with their planned North American tour, but after increasingly acrimonious delays and disagreements, Simon told Warner Brothers he could no longer work with Garfunkel and that the project as a collaborative album was cancelled. Garfunkel dropped out of the project, which then became Simon's November 1983 solo album Hearts and Bones.
Several years would pass before Simon & Garfunkel worked together again. Their next joint public appearance was in 1990, when they performed for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When Simon gave another free concert in Central Park on August 15, 1991, he rejected Garfunkel's offer to participate. However, they agreed to perform together in 1993 for 21 sold-out concerts in New York, with half of the show being Paul Simon solo with a band and the other half Simon & Garfunkel, opening the door to future reunion tours.
Simon & Garfunkel's Concert in Central Park raised around \$51,000 for Central Park. Benefit concerts by other musicians followed, and helped to raise awareness of the park's state. With donations from the general public and with the help of wealthy benefactors, the park was restored during the 1980s and gained recognition as a major tourist attraction. As of 2011, donations still make up the majority of the park's budget. Today concerts and other benefits are regularly held on the Great Lawn.
## Chart performance
### Album
### Weekly charts
### Year-end charts
## Certifications and sales |
2,247,002 | Zoo TV Tour | 1,173,295,907 | 1992–93 concert tour by U2 | [
"1992 concert tours",
"1993 concert tours",
"Concert tours of Australia",
"Concert tours of Canada",
"Concert tours of France",
"Concert tours of Germany",
"Concert tours of Ireland",
"Concert tours of Japan",
"Concert tours of Mexico",
"Concert tours of New Zealand",
"Concert tours of the United Kingdom",
"Concert tours of the United States",
"Pixies (band)",
"U2 concert tours"
]
| The Zoo TV Tour (also written as ZooTV, ZOO TV or ZOOTV) was a worldwide concert tour by rock band U2. Staged in support of their 1991 album Achtung Baby, the tour visited arenas and stadiums from 1992 to 1993. It was intended to mirror the group's new musical direction on Achtung Baby. In contrast to U2's austere stage setups from previous tours, the Zoo TV Tour was an elaborately staged multimedia spectacle, satirising television and media oversaturation by attempting to instill "sensory overload" in its audience. To escape their reputation for being earnest and over-serious, U2 embraced a more lighthearted and self-deprecating image on tour. Zoo TV and Achtung Baby were central to the group's 1990s reinvention.
The tour's concept was inspired by disparate television programming, coverage of the Gulf War, the desensitising effect of mass media, and "morning zoo" radio shows. The stages featured dozens of large video screens that showed visual effects, video clips, and flashing text phrases, along with a lighting system partially made of Trabant automobiles. The shows incorporated channel surfing, prank calls, video confessionals, a belly dancer, and live satellite transmissions with war-torn Sarajevo. On stage, Bono portrayed several characters he conceived, including the leather-clad egomaniac "The Fly", the greedy televangelist "Mirror Ball Man", and the devilish "MacPhisto". In contrast to other U2 tours, each of the Zoo TV shows opened with six to eight consecutive new songs before older material was played.
Comprising five legs and 157 shows, the tour began in Lakeland, Florida, on 29 February 1992 and ended in Tokyo, Japan, on 10 December 1993. The tour alternated between North America and Europe for the first four legs before visiting Oceania and Japan. After two arena legs, the show's production was expanded for stadiums for the final three legs, which were branded "Outside Broadcast", "Zooropa", and "Zoomerang/New Zooland", respectively. Although the tour provoked a range of reactions from music critics, it was generally well received. It was the highest-grossing North American tour of 1992, and overall sold around 5.3 million tickets and grossed US\$151 million. The band's 1993 album, Zooropa, was recorded during a break in the tour and expanded on its mass media themes. The tour was depicted in the Grammy Award-winning 1994 concert film Zoo TV: Live from Sydney. Critics regard the Zoo TV Tour as one of rock's most memorable tours—in 2002, Q's Tom Doyle called it "the most spectacular rock tour staged by any band".
## Background
U2's 1987 album The Joshua Tree and the supporting Joshua Tree Tour brought them to a new level of commercial and critical success, particularly in the United States. Like their previous tours, the Joshua Tree Tour was a minimalistic, austere production, and they used this outlet for addressing political and social concerns. As a result, the band earned a reputation for being earnest and serious, an image that became a target for derision after their much-maligned 1988 motion picture and companion album Rattle and Hum, which documented their exploration of American roots music. The project was criticised as being "pretentious", and "misguided and bombastic", and U2 were accused of being grandiose and self-righteous. Their 1989 Lovetown Tour did not visit the United States, and at the end of the tour, lead vocalist Bono announced on-stage that it was "the end of something for U2" and that "we have to go away and ... just dream it all up again", foreshadowing changes for the group.
## Conception
One of U2's inspirations for Zoo TV was a 1989 concert in Dublin that reached a radio audience of 500 million people and was widely bootlegged. Bono said the group were fascinated with the possibilities of radio and how they could be expanded using video to "beam concerts into Peking or Prague for free" or spawn "video bootlegs in cultures where it's hard to get [U2's] music". The wild antics of "morning zoo" radio programmes inspired the band with the notion of taking a pirate television station on tour. They were also interested in using video as a way of making themselves less accessible to their audiences. The band developed these ideas while recording Achtung Baby in Berlin at Hansa Studios. While in Germany, they watched television coverage of the Gulf War on Sky News, which was the only English programming available at their hotel. When they were tired of hearing about the conflict, they tuned into local programming to see "bad German soap operas" and automobile advertisements. The band believed that cable television had blurred the lines between news, entertainment, and home shopping over the previous decade, and they wanted to represent this on their next tour.
The juxtaposition of such disparate programming inspired U2 and Achtung Baby co-producer Brian Eno to conceive an "audio-visual show" that would display a rapidly changing mix of live and pre-recorded video on monitors. The idea was intended to mock the desensitising effect of mass media. Eno, who was credited in the tour programme for the "Video Staging Concept", explained his vision for the tour: "the idea to make a stage set with a lot of different video sources was mine, to make a chaos of uncoordinated material happening together ... The idea of getting away from video being a way of helping people to see the band more easily ... this is video as a way of obscuring them, losing them sometimes in just a network of material."
While on a break from recording, the band invited production designer Willie Williams to join them in Tenerife in February 1991. Williams had recently worked on David Bowie's Sound+Vision Tour, which used film projection and video content, and he was keen to "take rock show video to a level as yet undreamed of". The band played Williams some of their new music—inspired by alternative rock, industrial music, and electronic dance music—and they told him about the "Zoo TV" phrase that Bono liked. Williams also learned about the band's affection for the Trabant, an East German automobile that derisively became a symbol for the fall of Communism; he thought their fondness for the car was "deeply, deeply bizarre". In May, he brainstormed the idea to construct a lighting system of recycled Trabants. Williams, who "always favored a very homemade approach to lighting, over an off-the-shelf one", had previously fashioned fixtures from objects such as trash cans and furniture. He saw the Trabant as the perfect object to light U2's tour, envisioning it as a "suitably surreal and symbolic scenic element". On 1 June 1991, Williams visited the engineering department of Light & Sound Design (LSD) in Birmingham, England, to ask for help with building a prototype.
On 14 June, the first tour production meeting was held; in attendance were Williams, the band, their manager Paul McGuinness, artist Catherine Owens, and production managers Steve Iredale and Jake Kennedy. Williams presented his ideas, which included the Trabant lighting system and the placement of video monitors all over the stage; both notions were well received. Eno's original idea was to have the video screens on wheels and constantly in motion, although this was impractical. Williams and the group proposed many ideas that did not make it to the final stage design. One such proposal, dubbed "Motorway Madness", would have placed billboards advertising real products across the stage, similar to their placement beside highways. The idea was intended to be ironic, but was ultimately scrapped out of fear that the band would be accused of selling out. Another proposed idea was to build a giant doll of an "achtung baby", complete with an inflatable penis that would spray on the audience, but it was deemed too expensive and was abandoned.
By August, a prototype of a single Trabant for the lighting system was completed, with the innards gutted and retrofitted with lighting equipment, and a paint job on the exterior. Williams spent most of the second half of 1991 designing the stage. Owens was insistent that her ideas be given priority, as she thought that men had been making all of U2's creative decisions and were using male-centred designs. With the support of bassist Adam Clayton, she recruited visual artists from Europe and the United States to arrange images that would be used on the display screens. These people included video artist Mark Pellington, photo/conceptual artist David Wojnarowicz, and satirical group Emergency Broadcast Network, who digitally manipulate sampled image and sound. Pellington conceived the idea to flash text phrases on the visual displays, inspired by his collaborations with artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. The concept was first put into practice in the video for Achtung Baby's lead single, "The Fly". Bono devised and collected numerous phrases during development of the album and the tour. Additional pre-recorded video content was created by Eno, Williams, Kevin Godley, Carol Dodds, and Philip Owens.
On 13 November, U2 settled on the "Zoo TV Tour" name and the plans to place video screens across the stage and build a lighting system out of Trabants. McGuinness led a trip to East Germany to buy Trabants from a recently closed factory in Chemnitz, and in January 1992, Catherine Owens began to paint the cars. As she described, "The basic idea was that the imagery on the cars should have nothing to do with the car itself." One such design was the "fertility car", which sported blown-up newspaper personal ads and a drawing of a woman giving birth while holding string tied to her husband's testicles. Williams and Chilean artist Rene Castro also provided artwork for the cars.
## Stage design and show production
The Zoo TV stages were designed by Willie Williams, U2's stage designer since the War Tour of 1982–1983. In place of U2's austere and minimalist productions of the 1980s, the Zoo TV stage was a complex setup, designed to instill "sensory overload" in its audience. The set's giant video screens showed footage of the band members performing, pre-recorded video, live television transmissions, and flashing text phrases. Electronic, tabloid-style headlines ran on crawlers at the ends of the stage. The band's embracing of such technology was meant as a radical departure in form, and as a commentary on the pervasive nature of technology. This led many critics to describe the show as ironic.
To enable such a complex video production, the equivalent of a television studio control room was built for the tour. Williams enlisted Carol Dodds to be video director based on their experience together on Bowie's Sound+Vision Tour and her familiarity with Vidiwalls from a Paula Abdul tour. Dodds operated the tour's "custom-designed interactive video system", and oversaw a crew ranging from 12 people on the arena legs to 18 for the "Outside Broadcast" leg. At the front of house position, the video crew conducted a live mix of the broadcast cameras filming the concert and live television transmissions intercepted by a satellite dish. In the production facility underneath the stage, dubbed "Underworld", engineers intercut the video from the live mix with pre-recorded imagery from LaserDisc players, video tape players, and a Philips CD-i player and routed it to the display screens. In all, content was compiled from 24 different video sources.
Personal computers were used to sequence specific pre-recorded video segments and distribute them to the proper outputs; the engineers could select one or many displays to which to output each content source, whether it be a single video cube or an entire screen. The computers' media controls allowed video content from the disc and tape players, either individual frames or entire segments, to be sequenced, looped, and built into pre-programmed cues. On stage, guitarist the Edge used MIDI pedals to trigger music sequencers, generating SMPTE timecode for coordinating the video cues. Des Broadberry managed the keyboards, sequencers, samples, and MIDI equipment.
Despite the production's complexity, the group decided that flexibility in the shows' length and content was a priority. The Edge said, "That was one of the more important decisions we made early on, that we wouldn't sacrifice flexibility, so we designed a system that is both extremely complicated and high-tech but also incredibly simple and hands-on, controlled by human beings ... in that sense, it's still a live performance." This flexibility allowed for improvisations and deviations from the planned programme. Eno recommended that U2 film their own video tapes so that they could be edited and looped on the video displays more easily, instead of relying entirely on pre-sequenced video. Eno explained: "their show depends on some kind of response to what's happening at the moment in that place. So if it turns out they want to do a song for five minutes longer, they can actually loop through the material again so that you're not suddenly stuck with black screens halfway through the fifth verse." The band shot new video for the displays over the course of the tour.
The set featured a B-stage, a smaller, secondary performance area that connected to the main stage via a catwalk. Zoo TV was U2's first tour to use a B-stage; the band had pursued the idea on previous tours because Bono wanted proximity to the audience, but they had been unsuccessful due to building and fire code restrictions.
Equipment for the sound system was provided by Clair Brothers Audio, which had been working with U2 since 1982. The company's S4 Series II speaker cabinet was the standard model used for Zoo TV; it was based on a prototype designed for the tour and featured built-in time-alignment. The sound engineers decided not to supplement the traditional public address system with delayed speakers for time-alignment, as they wanted the audience to focus their attention on the stage and the multimedia aspects of the show. The stage monitor system used on the Zoo TV Tour was one of the largest and most complex systems at the time. Through "quad monitoring", the monitor engineer used a joystick to pan each band member's mix around the monitor speakers to "follow" their movements on stage. The band members also wore in-ear monitors, which was necessitated by their performing on the B-stage, where they experienced an audio delay from the primary PA speakers behind them and where fewer monitor wedges could be positioned.
Lighting equipment was provided by LSD. Supplementing the traditional lighting rigs were several suspended Trabants that had been retrofitted with light fixtures. The cars were purchased for US\$500–600 each, and when stripped of their interiors, they weighed 900 pounds (410 kg). Approximately US\$10,000 of lighting equipment weighing 400 pounds (180 kg) was installed in the vehicles. A 2.5K HMI Fresnel fixture was mounted to the metal bar that previously held the vehicle's backseat, and was fitted with an LSD ColourMag colour magazine and a dowser; a 5K fixture was originally used but had to be replaced after causing the car to melt after five minutes. Other fixtures installed were: a PAR-64 Ray Light reflector in the headlight bracket; two LSD Mirrorstrobes; eight Molefays behind the front bumper and four behind the rear; and ACL strips behind the radiator grid. Chain hoists were attached to brackets welded onto the wheel hubs, allowing the vehicles to be raised and tilted on their own axles.
Several versions of the stage were used during the tour.
### Arena legs
The first two legs of the tour in 1992 were indoors and used the smallest of the stages. The video system included four 8-foot (2.4 m) Philips Vidiwalls of video cubes, thirty-two 36-inch (910 mm) monitors, and a 16-by-20-foot (4.9 m × 6.1 m) projection screen center-hung from the front truss. The projection screen was used in lieu of an additional video cube wall that proved too costly; Williams called it the "first of many such compromises" during the tour. Dodds' video crew comprised 12 people: four camera operators, four staffers running computers in the front of house position, and four members underneath the stage controlling the video screens. Seven LaserDisc players were used. About 40 feet (12 m) of tracks were laid on top of the walkway to the B-stage for a camera dolly, which could reach a height of 12 feet (3.7 m).
For the arena lighting system, six Trabants were suspended above the stage, and a seventh Trabant by the B-stage doubled as a DJ booth and a mirror ball. Williams originally planned to use 12 cars but scaled back after the tour's video production expanded. The remainder of the lighting system was minimal, comprising 17 spotlights and a "couple of hundred" PAR cans. The ColourMags were controlled by LSD's Simon Carus-Wilson, who had worked with Williams on the Sound+Vision Tour. Two lighting trusses were used to illuminate the audience, consisting of ACL wash fixtures for "little pools of light", eight fixtures to initially brighten the venue, and ultraviolet wash light. The video screens produced enough backlight that few other fixtures were needed for the opening two songs of concerts. The lighting system was controlled with an Avolites QM180 console.
The North American arena shows, many of which featured in-the-round seating, used 72 Clair Brothers S4 Series II speakers, in positions of stage left and right, rear fill stage left and right, and left and right sidefill. For the European arena shows, the number of S4 Series II speakers was reduced to 56, as rear fill and sidefill audio were not required. Clair Brothers' P4 "Piston" cabinets were also used for nearfield/in-fill audio, with two clusters of six speakers each at stage left and right. Bass was provided by six Servo Drive Bass Tech 7 subwoofers. The sound was mixed by sound engineer Joe O'Herlihy and assistant Robbie Adams with an ATI Paragon console and a Clair Brothers CBA console, aided by an inventory of effects intended to replicate the ones used in the studio during the recording of Achtung Baby.
The stage monitor system was mixed underneath the stage with six consoles: two Harrison SM5s (with a 16-channel extender), a Yamaha DMP7, a Soundcraft 200B, and two Ramsa WS-840s for drummer Larry Mullen Jr. The consoles provided capabilities for around 200 audio channels. To avoid audio feedback during B-stage performances, O'Herlihy said, "We 'ring' the system out using a separate EQ". On stage, the monitor speakers consisted of Clair Brothers' 12AM single and double wedge units, with ML18 and MM4T units for sidefill. Steve McCale served as the monitor engineer for Bono, the Edge, and Clayton, and controlled the joystick panning, while Dave Skaff was Mullen's monitor engineer. In-ear monitors were provided by Future Sonics.
The production equipment was transported on 11 trucks supplied by Upstaging Trucking. The stage required 13–14 hours to build and 3–4 hours to disassemble. The crew of 75 people travelled on six buses, while the band flew in a chartered plane.
### North American stadium leg
To redesign the stage for the 1992 North American stadium leg—dubbed "Outside Broadcast"—Williams collaborated with stage designers Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park, both of whom had worked on the Steel Wheels Tour stage for the Rolling Stones. The main stage was expanded to be 248 by 80 feet (76 by 24 m), and the catwalk leading to the B-stage was lengthened to approximately 150 feet (46 m), nearly four times as long as the arena version. The spires of the stage, intended to resemble radio masts, reached as high as 110 feet (34 m), requiring aircraft warning lights approved by the Federal Aviation Administration to be placed on top of them. The stage's appearance was compared to the techno-future cityscapes from Blade Runner and the works of cyberpunk writer William Gibson.
The video projection system consisted of four Vidiwalls, four 15-by-20-foot (4.6 m × 6.1 m) rear projection screens using eighteen GE Talaria 5055 HB light valve projectors, and thirty-six 27-inch (690 mm) Barco monitors. The production control system, which was operated by Dodds and a crew of 18 people, included ten Pioneer LDV8000 LaserDisc players, two Sony Betacam SP BVW-75 tape decks, two Sony 9800 3⁄4-inch SP tape decks, four Ikegami HL-55A CCD cameras, two Sony Video8 Handycams (nicknamed "Bonocams"), and one point-of-view camera. The video equipment cost more than US\$3.5 million.
Williams faced difficulties in designing the outdoor lighting system, as the stage did not have a roof. He settled on using the venues' house spotlights and strategically placing lights in the structure behind the band. About a third of the lighting equipment was lifted by a 100-foot (30 m) tower, requiring 25 short tons (23 t) of ballast. Lighting was also provided by 11 Trabants; two were suspended from cranes while the others were supported by a hydraulic system.
The audio system for the larger stage used 176 speaker enclosures containing 312 18-inch (46 cm) woofers, 592 10-inch (25 cm) mid-range drivers, and 604 high-frequency drivers. The system used about one million watts of power and weighed 60,000 pounds (27,000 kg). U2 were Clair Brothers' first client to use the company's nascent "flying" PA system, which designers were able to position behind the staging area. The front of house position featured three mixing stations, each with 40-channel capabilities. The stage monitor system used 60 speakers, which were mixed from two separate positions, each with two consoles providing 160-channel capacities. On stage, 26 microphones were used.
The North American stadium leg employed a 145-person production crew and 45-person staging crew that travelled on 12 buses and a 40-passenger chartered jet known as the Zoo Plane. Two separate steel sets were used during the tour; while one was in use for a concert, another was in transit to the next venue. The tour required 52 trucks to transport 2.4 million pounds (1.1 kt) of equipment—12 trucks for each of the two steel sets and 28 for the production equipment. The concerts were powered by four generators and 3 miles (4.8 km) of cabling. Stage construction required more than 200 local labourers, 12 forklifts, and a 120-foot-tall (37 m), 40-short-ton (36 t) crane. The million-dollar stage was built in 40 hours and disassembled in six.
### European stadium leg
The outdoor stage used for the 1993 legs of the tour was smaller due to budget concerns, and it discarded the Trabants hung from cranes, instead featuring three cars hanging behind the drum kit. All of the projection screens were replaced with video cubes, as the projectors were not bright enough for the European summer nights when daylight lasted later. The resulting video system used three Digiwalls of 41-inch (1,000 mm) projection cubes, four Vidiwalls (each 4 cubes high by 3 cubes wide), and thirty-six 27-inch (690 mm) Barco monitors. Comprising 178 cubes, the three Digiwalls varied in orientation: 14 cubes high by 6 cubes wide, 9 high by 5 wide, and 7 high by 7 wide. Williams said the new video system was "vastly superior" and that the changes made Zoo TV "the largest touring video facility ever created".
The sound system utilised 144 Clair Brothers' S4 Series II cabinets positioned in "two curved wings". These speaker stacks were 38 feet behind the drum riser and 45 feet behind the primary vocal position. The layout allowed for sightlines of 250 degrees within stadiums. To help focus the sound, the engineers installed a semicircle of Clair Brothers' P4 cabinets, comprising four arrays of six cabinets each, around the perimeter of the stage. Additional P4 speakers were placed on their sides on the edge of the B-stage. Underneath Bono's position at the front of the main stage were 16 Servo Drive sub-bass units. The concert at Roundhay Park in Leeds was supplemented by time-delayed speaker towers from SSE Hire due to the venue's elongated shape, making it the only show on the tour to use delay speakers. For the "Zooropa" monitor speaker system, Radio Station in-ear monitors were provided by Garwood Communications. The monitors were mixed with four Ramsa WS-840 consoles, with Skaff serving as the monitor engineer for Mullen and Clayton, and Vish Wadi for Bono and the Edge.
The European leg featured confetti cannons, provided by Shell Shock Firework Co. and JEM, that shot "Zoo Ecu" banknotes; these were replaced by "Zooropa" condoms in Ireland.
## Planning, itinerary, and ticketing
Rehearsals for the tour began in December 1991 at The Factory in Dublin. The band found it challenging to recreate all the sounds from the new album. They considered using additional musicians, but their sentimental attachment to a four-piece prevailed.
The tour was announced on 11 February 1992, less than three weeks before opening night. The opening leg consisted of 32 arena shows in 31 North American cities, from 29 February to 23 April. Four days after the tour announcement, tickets for some concerts were first put on sale. Though the band had toured North America every year between 1980 and 1987, they had been absent from the region's tour circuit for over four years before Zoo TV. The US concert business was in a slump at the time, and the routing of the first tour's two legs generally afforded only one show per city. This was intended to announce the band's return to major cities, to gauge demand for ticket sales, and to re-introduce the notion of a "hot ticket" to concertgoers.
Ticket sale arrangements varied from city to city, but in each case, a ticket limit per purchase was enforced. The band minimized the amount of shows for which tickets were sold at physical box offices, preferring to sell over the telephone instead. In cities where scalping was rampant, only telephone sales were offered, allowing ticket brokers to cancel duplicate orders. Tickets for the opening show on 29 February in Lakeland, Florida, sold out over the phone in four minutes, with demand exceeding supply by a factor of ten to one. Several cities' telephone systems were overwhelmed when Zoo TV tickets went on sale; Los Angeles telephone company Pacific Bell reported 54 million calls in a four-hour period, while Boston's telephone system was temporarily shut down.
On 19 February, the band departed Dublin for the US to prepare for the tour. While rehearsing in Lakeland for opening night, Eno consulted U2 on the visual aspects of the show. Unlike many of the group's previous tours, which began ahead of or coincident with the release of a new album, Zoo TV started four months after Achtung Baby was released, giving fans more time to familiarise themselves with the new songs. By opening night, the album had already sold three million copies in the US and seven million worldwide.
Details of the second leg of the tour were first released on 30 April with the announcement of four UK arena shows. Ticketing details were kept secret until radio advertisements announced that tickets had gone on sale at box offices. In many cases, tickets were limited to two per person to deter scalping. Due to the production costs and relatively small arena crowds, the European arena leg lost money. McGuinness had planned larger outdoor concerts in Berlin, Turin, Poland, and Vienna to help the tour break even, but only the Vienna concert occurred.
Plans for stadium shows were first mentioned by Iredale in March 1992, but not confirmed until the 23 April announcement of the "Outside Broadcast" leg in North America. It was accompanied by details of two concerts, for which tickets went on sale two days later. While U2 were motivated to play stadiums by pragmatic concerns, they saw it as an artistic challenge as well, imagining what artists Salvador Dalí or Andy Warhol would have done with such spaces. Rehearsals for "Outside Broadcast" began in Hersheypark Stadium in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on 2 August 1992. To accommodate fans who had been camping outside the venue to listen, the band held a public dress rehearsal concert on 7 August, with half-price tickets benefiting five local charities. Technical problems and pacing issues forced refinement to the show. On 5 August, six days before the official leg-opening concert at Giants Stadium, the group delayed the show by a day, due to the difficulty of assembling the large outdoor production. By the time "Outside Broadcast" began, Achtung Baby had sold four million copies in the US.
The "Zooropa" leg was announced in late November 1992, and tickets for the British concerts were put on sale on 28 November. The leg, which began in May 1993, was U2's first full stadium tour of Europe and marked the first time they had visited certain areas. For the "Zoomerang" leg, the band faced difficulties with booking concerts in Sydney, Australia, where they wanted to stage a worldwide television broadcast to end the tour. In early August 1993, after the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust rejected the band's application to perform at the Sydney Football Stadium in November, Bono publicly questioned the city's viability as a candidate to host the 2000 Summer Olympics; the trust's decision was made despite allowing concerts by Madonna and Michael Jackson to be held at Sydney Cricket Ground in November. McGuinness faxed all 29 members of the Sydney Olympics 2000 Bid Committee to inform them of the situation. John Fahey, the Premier of New South Wales, personally intervened to allow the Sydney concerts to take place, and an announcement was made on 15 August confirming them. Tickets for the Sydney and Melbourne shows went on sale on 23 August. Scheduling for the "Zoomerang" leg afforded the band more off-days between shows than previous legs, but this amplified the exhaustion and restlessness that had set in by the tour's end.
Although Zoo TV was listed as co-sponsored by MTV, the group decided against explicit corporate sponsorship. The daily cost of producing the tour was US\$125,000, regardless of whether a show was held on a given day. Band members, especially Mullen, were uncertain that the tour would be profitable. One of their chief concerns was how to procure Philips's costly Vidiwalls, which were priced at US\$4–5 million. No rental company owned the video screens. McGuinness instead lobbied for Philips to provide the equipment at no cost; since U2 were signed to Island Records, which was owned by Philips subsidiary PolyGram, McGuinness and the band thought there was a natural corporate synergy to Philips providing the equipment for a PolyGram artist's tour. PolyGram CEO Alain Levy was unable to convince Philips to help, and the band had to pay for the Vidiwalls themselves; Levy did convince PolyGram to contribute about US\$500,000 to the tour as a gesture of goodwill. In order to defray the heavy expenses of the Pacific shows, U2 asked for large guarantees from local promoters up front, rather than sharing the financial burden as they had in the past. This sometimes caused promoters to raise ticket prices above usual levels, which in turn sometimes resulted in less than full houses. Profit margin was a slim four to five per cent at most sold-out shows.
## Show overview
### Pre-show
During the time between the support acts and U2's performance, a disc jockey played records for the audience. For the 1992 legs, Irish rock journalist and radio presenter BP Fallon filled the role. Originally hired to write the Zoo TV tour programme, he played music inside a Trabant on the B-stage, while providing commentary and wearing a cape and top hat. His official title was "Guru, Viber and DJ". He hosted Zoo Radio, a November 1992 radio special that showcased live performances, audio oddities, and half-serious interviews with members of U2 and the opening acts. At the group's suggestion, Fallon published a book about the tour entitled U2 Faraway So Close. Two other DJs replaced him later on the tour: Paul Oakenfold, who became one of the world's most prominent club DJs by the decade's end; and Colin Hudd. For the 1993 concerts, U2 invited Irish theatre group Macnas to join the tour and perform between the support acts. The troupe wore oversized papier-mâché heads of the members of U2 and playacted a miming parody of them. Writer Bill Flanagan described the performances as "the jesters mocking the kings".
Beginning with the 24 May 1992 show, Fallon played the song "Television, the Drug of the Nation" by hip-hop group the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy just before the lights were turned off and U2 took the stage. The band believed that the song, a commentary on mass media culture, encapsulated some of the tour's principal themes. The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy became one of the support acts for the "Outside Broadcast" leg, and after their stint, "Television" was retained for the remainder of the tour as the pre-show closing song.
After the lights were turned off, one of several video introductions was played on-screen to accompany the group taking the stage. During the "Outside Broadcast" leg, the piece was one by Emergency Broadcast Network that edited together various video clips of US President George H. W. Bush to give the impression of him singing Queen's song "We Will Rock You". A different introduction, created by Ned O'Hanlon and Maurice Linnane of Dreamchaser video productions, was used on the 1993 legs. This introduction reflected U2's growing concern with the volatile political situation in post-communist Europe and the resurgence of radical nationalism at the time. It featured footage from Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia, mixed with sounds from Lenin's Favourite Songs, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and voices asking "What do you want?" in different European languages. A visual of the flag of Europe was displayed, which then crumbled after one of the stars fell off.
### Main set
The concerts began with a fixed sequence of six to eight consecutive Achtung Baby songs, a further sign that they were no longer the U2 of the 1980s. For the opening song, "Zoo Station", Bono entered as his primary stage persona, "The Fly", appearing silhouetted against a giant screen of blue and white video noise interwoven with glimpses of photo-copied animations of the band members. "The Fly" was usually performed next, with the video monitors flashing a rapidly changing array of words and aphorisms. Some of these included "Taste is the enemy of art", "Religion is a club", "Ignorance is bliss", "Watch more TV", "Believe" with letters fading out to leave "lie", and "Everything you know is wrong". During the first week of the tour, media outlets incorrectly reported that the words shown included "Bomb Japan Now", forcing the band to issue a statement denying the claim. Before performances of "Even Better Than the Real Thing", Bono channel surfed through live television programming, and during the song, as random images from television and pop culture flashed on screen, he filmed himself and the rest of the band with a camcorder.
In a Zoo Radio interview, the Edge described the visual material that accompanied the first three songs:
> "'Zoo Station' is four minutes of a television that's not tuned into any station, but giving you interference and shash and almost a TV picture. 'The Fly' is information meltdown—text, sayings, truisms, untruisms, oxymorons, soothsayings, etc., all blasted at high speed, just fast enough so it's impossible to actually read what's being said. 'Even Better Than the Real Thing' is whatever happens to be flying around the stratosphere on that night. Satellite TV pictures, the weather, shopping channel, cubic zirconium diamond rings, religious channels, soap operas ..."
"Mysterious Ways" featured a belly dancer on-stage, tempting Bono and dancing just out of his reach. Initially, Floridian fan Christina Petro filled the role. After appearing outside the venue of the band's final dress rehearsal in a belly-dancing outfit, the crew invited her inside to dance with Bono to lighten the mood. The group liked their interaction and that it made reference to the belly dancer in the song's music video, and she accepted an invitation to join the tour. For the "Outside Broadcast" leg, tour choreographer Morleigh Steinberg took over the role. Performances of "One" were accompanied by the title word shown in many languages, as well as Mark Pellington-directed video clips of buffalos culminating with David Wojnarowicz's "Falling Buffalo" photograph. For "Until the End of the World", Bono often played with a camera, kissing the lens and thrusting it into his crotch, a stark contrast from his more earnest stage behaviour of the past. Beginning with "Outside Broadcast", the band began playing "New Year's Day" afterwards. During "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World", Bono danced with a young female fan from the crowd (a ritual he had done more solemnly on past tours), shared camcorder video filming duties with her, and sprayed champagne. At this point in the show, Mullen sometimes sang a solo performance of "Dirty Old Town".
The group played many Achtung Baby songs very similarly to the way they had appeared on record. Since this material was complex and layered, most numbers featuring pre-recorded or offstage percussion, keyboard, or guitar elements underlying the U2 members' live instrumentals and vocals. The band had used backing tracks in live performance before, but with the need to sync live performance to Zoo TV's high-tech visuals, almost the entire show was synced and sequenced. This practice has continued on their subsequent tours.
Zoo TV was one of the first large-scale concerts to feature a B-stage, where performances were intended "to be the antidote to Zoo TV". The idea had been inspired by the successful informality of the Elvis Presley '68 Comeback Special. Here, the band played quieter songs, such as acoustic arrangements of "Angel of Harlem", "When Love Comes to Town", "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)", and Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love". Many critics compared the B-stage performances to "busking" and singled them out as the shows' highlights.
After leaving the B-stage, U2 often played "Bad" or "Sunday Bloody Sunday", with performances of "Bullet the Blue Sky" and "Running to Stand Still" following. For "Bullet the Blue Sky", the video screens displayed burning crosses and swastikas. During "Running to Stand Still", Bono mimed the actions of a heroin addict from the B-stage, rolling up his sleeves and then pretending to spike his arm during the final lyric. Afterwards, red and yellow smoke flares ignited from either end of the B-stage, before the band re-grouped on the main stage to play older songs with more sincerity. "Where the Streets Have No Name" was accompanied by sped-up video of the group in the desert from The Joshua Tree's photo shoot. U2 often finished their set with "Pride (In the Name of Love)" while a clip from Martin Luther King Jr.'s famed 3 April 1968 "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech was played on the video screens. The group was initially unconvinced that the leap from the rest of the show's irony and artifice to something more sincere would be successful, but they thought that it was important to demonstrate that certain ideals were so strong and true that they could be held onto no matter the circumstance. The group alternated between performing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" acoustically on the B-stage and using it to conclude the main set.
### Encore
Beginning with the "Outside Broadcast" leg, footage from the tour's "video confessional booth" was displayed on the video screens during the intermission. Before each concert, fans were encouraged to visit the booth—a converted chemical toilet near the mix station—and record a 20-second confession. The video crew would then edit together the confessional footage to broadcast later that evening before the encore. The "confessions" varied from a woman flashing her breasts to a man revealing he had injured people in a drunk-driving accident. The inspiration for the video confessional came the day before the "Outside Broadcast" leg officially began.
For encores, Bono returned to the stage as a different alter ego—Mirror Ball Man in 1992, and MacPhisto in 1993. Performances of "Desire" were accompanied by images of Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, Paul Gascoigne, and Jimmy Swaggart, and were meant as a criticism of greed; cash rained the stage and Bono portrayed Mirror Ball Man as an interpretation of the greedy preacher described in the song's lyrics. Bono often made a crank call from the stage as his persona of the time. Such calls included dialing a phone sex line, calling a taxi cab, ordering 10,000 pizzas (the Detroit pizza parlor delivered 100 pizzas during the show), or contacting a local politician. Bono regularly called the White House in an attempt to contact President Bush. Though Bono never reached the President, Bush did acknowledge the calls during a press conference.
"Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" and "With or Without You" were frequently played afterwards. Concerts initially ended with Achtung Baby's slower "Love Is Blindness". Beginning with the "Outside Broadcast" shows, it was often followed by Bono's falsetto take on Elvis Presley's long-time show-closing ballad, "Can't Help Falling in Love", culminating in Bono softly stating that "Elvis is still in the building". Both songs presented a low-key, introspective conclusion to the show, in contrast to the dynamic, aggressive opening; the group also wanted to move away from its tradition of ending concerts with the fan sing-along favourite "40". The night finished with a single video message being displayed: "Thanks for shopping at Zoo TV".
### Guest appearances
On 11 June 1992, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA appeared on-stage in Stockholm for the first time in years to perform "Dancing Queen" with U2; the song had been frequently covered on the tour up to that point. Other guest performers on the tour included Axl Rose, Jo Shankar, and Achtung Baby co-producer Daniel Lanois.
On 19 June 1992, during the European indoor leg, U2 played the "Stop Sellafield" concert in Manchester, alongside Kraftwerk, Public Enemy, and Big Audio Dynamite II, to protest the operation of a second nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield. The following morning, U2 and other protesters participated in a demonstration against the facility organised by Greenpeace. Wearing white radiation suits, the band members landed on the beach at Sellafield in rubber dinghies and placed a 3-kilometre-long (1.9 mi) line of 700 placards on the shore spelling out "React – Stop Sellafield" for the waiting media.
At the first "Outside Broadcast" show on 12 August 1992 at Giants Stadium, Lou Reed performed "Satellite of Love" with the band; he and Bono dueted using their contrasting vocal styles. Bono re-confirmed the singer's influence on the band by announcing, "Every song we've ever written was a rip-off of a Lou Reed song." For the second show and the remainder of the tour, a taping of Reed singing the song was used for a virtual duet between him and Bono.
Novelist Salman Rushdie joined the band on stage in London's Wembley Stadium on 11 August 1993, despite the death fatwā against the author and the risk of violence arising from his controversial novel The Satanic Verses. In reference to the novel's satanic references, Rushdie, when confronted by Bono's MacPhisto character, observed that "real devils don't wear horns". In 2010, Clayton recalled that "Bono had been calling Salman Rushdie from the stage every night on the Zoo TV tour. When we played Wembley, Salman showed up in person and the stadium erupted. You [could] tell from Larry's face that we weren't expecting it. Salman was a regular visitor after that. He had a backstage pass and he used it as often as possible. For a man who was supposed to be in hiding, it was remarkably easy to see him around the place."
## Bono's stage personae
Bono assumed a number of costumed alter egos during Zoo TV performances. The three main personae that he used on stage were "The Fly", "Mirror Ball Man", and "MacPhisto". During performances of "Bullet the Blue Sky" and "Running to Stand Still", he also appeared on stage wearing a military utility vest and cap, and a microphone headset. As this character, he ranted and raved in an act he said was set in the Vietnam War.
To escape their reputation for being overly serious and self-righteous, U2 decided to alter their image by being more facetious. Bono said, "All through the Eighties we tried to be ourselves and failed when the lights were on. Which is what set us up for Zoo TV. We decided to have some fun being other people, or at least other versions of ourselves." The Edge said, "We were quite thrilled at the prospect of smashing U2 and starting all over again." The group viewed humour as the appropriate response to their negative perception and that although their message would not change, they needed to change how they delivered it to their audience.
### The Fly
Bono conceived his "Fly" persona during the writing of the song of the same name. The character began with Bono wearing an oversized pair of blaxploitation sunglasses, given to him by wardrobe manager Fintan Fitzgerald, to lighten the mood in the studio. Bono wrote the song's lyrics as this character, composing a sequence of "single-line aphorisms". He developed the persona into a leather-clad egomaniac, describing his outfit as having Lou Reed's glasses, Elvis Presley's jacket, and Jim Morrison's leather trousers. To match the character's dark fashion, Bono dyed his naturally-brown hair black.
Bono began each concert as The Fly and continued to play the character for most of the first half of the concert. In contrast to his earnest stage persona of the 1980s, as The Fly, Bono strutted around the stage with "swagger and style", exhibiting mannerisms of an egotistical rock star. He adopted the mindset that he was "licensed to be an egomaniac". He often stayed in character away from the tour stage, including for public appearances and when staying in hotels. He said, "That rather cracked character could say things that I couldn't", and that it offered him a greater freedom of speech.
### Mirror Ball Man
As the Mirror Ball Man, Bono dressed in a shining silver lamé suit with matching shoes and cowboy hat. The character was meant to parody greedy American televangelists, showmen, and car salesman, and was inspired by Phil Ochs' Elvis persona from his 1970 tour. Bono said that the character represented "a kind of showman America. He had the confidence and charm to pick up a mirror and look at himself and give the glass a big kiss. He loved cash and in his mind success was God's blessing. If he's made money, he can't have made any mistakes." As the character, Bono spoke with an exaggerated Southern US accent. Mirror Ball Man appeared during the show's encore and made nightly prank calls, often to the White House. Bono portrayed this alter ego on the first three legs of the tour, but replaced him with MacPhisto for the 1993 legs.
### MacPhisto
MacPhisto was created to parody the devil and was named after Mephistopheles of the Faust legend. Initially called "Mr. Gold", MacPhisto wore a gold lamé suit with gold platform shoes, pale makeup, lipstick, and devil's horns on his head. As MacPhisto, Bono spoke with an exaggerated upper-class English accent, similar to that of a down-on-his-luck character actor. The character was created as a European replacement for the American-influenced Mirror Ball Man. The initial inspiration for MacPhisto came from a character in the stage musical The Black Rider, a performance of which Bono and the Edge attended in January 1993. The MacPhisto character was realised during rehearsal the night before U2's first 1993 show. According to Bono, "We came up with a sort of old English Devil, a pop star long past his prime returning regularly from sessions on The Strip in Vegas and regaling anyone who would listen to him at cocktail hour with stories from the good old, bad old days." MacPhisto sang the closing "Can't Help Falling in Love" in an oddly childlike manner that many reviewers found one of the most poignant moments of the show.
As MacPhisto, Bono continued his routine of making in-concert prank calls that had begun with Mirror Ball Man, and he changed his targets with the location of each show. Many of them were local politicians who Bono wished to mock by engaging them in character as the devil. Among his targets were the Archbishop of Canterbury, Helmut Kohl, Bénédict Hentsch, the Pope, Alessandra Mussolini, Hans Janmaat, Bernard Tapie, John Gummer, and Jan Henry T. Olsen. Bono enjoyed making these calls, saying, "When you're dressed as the Devil, your conversation is immediately loaded, so if you tell somebody you really like what they're doing, you know it's not a compliment." The band intended MacPhisto to add humour while making a point. The Edge said: "That character was a great device for saying the opposite of what you meant. It made the point so easily and with real humor." A female Cardiff fan who was pulled on-stage questioned Bono's motives for dressing as the devil, prompting the singer to compare his act to the plot of the C. S. Lewis novel The Screwtape Letters.
## Sarajevo satellite transmissions
Several European shows in 1993 featured live satellite link-ups with people living in Sarajevo as the city was sieged during the Bosnian War. The transmissions were arranged with help from American aid worker Bill Carter. Before their 3 July show in Verona, the band met with Carter to give an interview about Bosnia for Radio Televizija Bosne I Hercegovina. Carter described his experiences helping Sarajevans amidst the dangerous conditions. While in the city, Carter had seen a television interview on MTV in which Bono mentioned the theme of the "Zooropa" leg was a unified Europe. Carter felt such an aim was empty if Bosnia went overlooked, and so he sought Bono's help. He requested that U2 visit Sarajevo to bring attention to the war and break the "media fatigue" that had occurred from covering the conflict. Bono wanted the band to play a concert in the city, but their tour schedule prevented this, and McGuinness believed that a concert there would make them and their audience targets for the Serbian aggressors.
Instead, the group agreed to use the tour's satellite dish to conduct live video transmissions between their concerts and Carter in Sarajevo. Carter returned to the city and was able to assemble a video unit. The band had to purchase a satellite dish to be sent to Sarajevo and had to pay a £100,000 fee to join the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Once set up, the band began satellite link-ups to Sarajevo on a near nightly basis, the first one airing on 17 July 1993 in Bologna. To connect with the EBU satellite feeds, Carter and two co-workers had to traverse "Sniper Alley" at night to reach the Sarajevo television station, and they had to film with as little light as possible to avoid the attention of snipers. This was done ten times over the course of a month. Carter discussed the deteriorating situation in the city, and Bosnians often spoke to U2 and their audience. These grim interviews deviated from the rest of the show, and they were completely unscripted, leaving the group unsure of who would be speaking or what they would say. U2 stopped the broadcasts in August 1993 after learning that the siege of Sarajevo was being reported on the front of many British newspapers. Though this trend had begun before the first link-up, Nathan Jackson suggested that U2's actions had brought awareness of the situation to their fans, and to the British public indirectly.
Reactions to the transmissions were mixed, triggering a media debate concerning the ethical implications of mixing rock entertainment with human tragedy. The Edge said: "A lot of nights it felt like quite an abrupt interruption that was probably not particularly welcomed by a lot of people in the audience. You were grabbed out of a rock concert and given a really strong dose of reality and it was quite hard sometimes to get back to something as frivolous as a show having watched five or ten minutes of real human suffering." Mullen worried that the band were exploiting the Bosnians' suffering for entertainment. In 2002, he said: "I can't remember anything more excruciating than those Sarajevo link-ups. It was like throwing a bucket of cold water over everybody. You could see your audience going, 'What the fuck are these guys doing?' But I'm proud to have been a part of a group who were trying to do something." During a transmission to the band's concert at Wembley Stadium, three women in Sarajevo told Bono via satellite: "We know you're not going to do anything for us. You're going to go back to a rock show. You're going to forget that we even exist. And we're all going to die." Some people close to the band joined the War Child charity project, including Brian Eno. Flanagan believed that the link-ups accomplished Bono's goal for Zoo TV of "illustrating onstage the obscenity of idly flipping from a war on CNN to rock videos on MTV". U2 vowed to perform in Sarajevo someday, and they ultimately fulfilled that commitment with a concert on 23 September 1997 during their PopMart Tour.
## Recording and release of Zooropa
U2 recorded their eighth studio album, Zooropa, from February to May 1993 during an extended break between the third and fourth legs of the tour. The album was originally intended as a companion EP to Achtung Baby, but quickly expanded into a full LP. Recording could not be completed before the tour restarted, and for the first month of the "Zooropa" leg, the band flew home after shows, recording until the early morning and working on their off-days, before travelling to their next destination. Clayton called the process "about the craziest thing you could do to yourself", while Mullen said of it, "It was mad, but it was mad good, as opposed to mad bad." McGuinness later said the band had nearly wrecked themselves in the process. The album was released on 5 July 1993. Influenced by the tour's themes of technology and mass media, Zooropa was an even greater departure in style from their earlier recordings than Achtung Baby was, incorporating further dance music influences and electronic effects. Songs from the album were incorporated into the setlists on the subsequent "Zooropa" and "Zoomerang" legs, most frequently "Numb" and "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)". For the "Zoomerang" leg, "Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car" and "Lemon" were added to the encore and "Dirty Day" to the main set.
## Broadcasts, recordings, and releases
On 9 September 1992, a portion of U2's performance at the Pontiac Silverdome was broadcast live to the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. The band performed "Even Better Than the Real Thing" while VMA host Dana Carvey, dressed as his Garth persona from "Wayne's World", accompanied the band on drums in Los Angeles. A Zoo Radio special included live selections from 1992 shows from Toronto, Dallas, Tempe, and New York City. On 28 and 29 November 1992, a television special entitled Zoo TV Featuring U2 was aired, featuring portions of several "Outside Broadcast" leg shows as well as William S. Burroughs' reading of the sardonic poem "A Thanksgiving Prayer". Directed by Kevin Godley, the programme was broadcast in North America on Fox, and in Europe via Channel 4, Premiere, France 2, Rai Uno, RTVE, TV1000, and Veronica. Several 1992 shows, including the 11 June concert in Stockholm and 27 October concert in El Paso, were broadcast into the homes of fans who had won contests. In October 1992, U2 released Achtung Baby: The Videos, The Cameos, and a Whole Lot of Interference from Zoo TV, a VHS compilation of nine music videos from Achtung Baby. Interspersed between the music videos were clips of so-called "interference", comprising documentary footage, media clips, and other video similar to what was displayed on tour.
Two November 1993 "Zoomerang" shows in Sydney were filmed on consecutive nights as part of a worldwide television broadcast. The 26 November concert was staged as a rehearsal for the production crew in advance of the official filming the following night. However, Clayton, who began drinking excessively on the latter stages of the tour, was unable to perform on 26 November after experiencing an alcoholic blackout. The band ruled out canceling the show, since it was the only opportunity for the production crew to do a dry run of the filming. Bass guitar technician Stuart Morgan filled in for Clayton instead, marking the first time a member of U2 had missed a concert since their earliest days. Clayton recovered in time to play the 27 November show, which was broadcast in the United States on tape-delayed pay-per-view. U2 originally planned to produce the concert with MTV for a January 1994 "triplecast" that would have offered three different perspectives of the show on three separate television channels. After realising they had not fully developed the concept, the group cancelled the "triplecast", denying themselves income that was supposed to make the Pacific leg of the tour profitable. The show was subsequently released as the concert video Zoo TV: Live from Sydney in 1994, and the double CD Zoo TV Live in 2006 to subscribing members of U2's website. The video won the Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video at the 37th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony.
## Reception
### Critical response
Reviews written during the initial arena legs reflected the dramatic change in U2's approach. Many critics published favourable reviews about the tour. The San Francisco Chronicle praised the special effects for supplementing the music. The reviewer wrote, "The often-surrealistic effects always served the songs, not the other way around." The review concluded, "this magnificent multimedia production will serve as a pinnacle in rock's onstage history for sometime [sic] to come". Edna Gundersen of USA Today said that U2 was dismantling its myth and wrote that the show was "a trippy and decadent concert of bedazzling visuals and adventurous music". Melody Maker's Jon Wiederhorn wrote that he expected to dislike the show based upon their past stage history, "But, alas, I cannot be negative about U2 tonight. Their Zoo TV show is visually stunning, musically unparalleled, downright moving and, dammit, truly entertaining." Hot Press' Bill Graham said of the show, "U2 don't so much use every trick in the book as invent a whole new style of rock performance art." For Graham, the tour resolved any doubts he had about the band—particularly about Bono—following their reinvention with Achtung Baby.
Other critics indicated befuddlement as to U2's purpose. The Asbury Park Press wrote that the long string of Achtung Baby song presentations that opened the show made one forget about the band's past, and that "almost everything you knew about U2 a couple years ago is, in fact, wrong now". The Star-Ledger said that the band shortchanged its music with its video presentations and that especially during the opening sequence, "one was only aware of the music as a soundtrack to the real 'show'". It concluded by saying that the group had lost the sense of mystery and yearning that made it great and that they had succumbed to the style of music videos. Jon Pareles of The New York Times acknowledged that U2 was trying to break its former earnest image and that they were a "vastly improved band" for being "trendy" and "funny"; yet, he commented, "U2 wants to have its artifice and its sincerity at the same time—no easy thing—and it hasn't yet made the breakthrough that will unite them."
The stadium legs of the tour received more consistent praise than the arena shows. Critics noted that while the show and its setlist were largely the same as before, the tour mostly benefited from the increased scale. The New York Daily News said that the stage "looked like a city made of television sets—an electronic Oz" and that "glitz was used not as a mere distraction (as it has been by so many video-age artists), but as a determined conceit". Gundersen also made the comparison to Oz, saying that even though the band was dwarfed by the setting, their adventurous musicianship still shone through. She concluded that the group had "deliver[ed] a brilliant high-wire act" between mocking and exploiting rock music clichés, a comparison also made by stage designer Willie Williams. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times said of the outdoor American leg, "Zoo TV is the yardstick by which all other stadium shows will be measured." David Fricke of Rolling Stone said that the band had "regained critical and commercial favor by negotiating an inspired balance between rock's cheap thrills and its own sense of moral burden". He praised the band for "retool[ing] themselves as wiseacres with heart and elephant bucks to burn". Fricke noted that the increased visual effects for the "Outside Broadcast" leg increased the shows' "mind-fuck" factor. Many critics described the tour as "post-modern". The writers of Rolling Stone, in a best-of-1992 issue, named U2 co-winners of "Best Band", while awarding the Zoo TV Tour honours for both "Best Tour" and "Worst Tour".
The Independent praised the "Zooropa" leg, with the reviewer stating, "I came as a sceptic, and left believing I had witnessed the most sophisticated meeting of technical wizardry and mojo priestcraft ever mounted." Dave Fanning of The Irish Times praised the "Zooropa" leg, stating, "If this is the show by which all other rock circuses must be measured, then God help the new music." Fanning observed that the group, particularly Bono, exhibited "style, sex and self-assurance". Billboard wrote, "No one is dancing on the edges of rock'n'roll's contradictions as effectively these days as U2." The stadium legs had their detractors, as NME called the shows a "two-hour post-modernist Pot Noodle advert made by politically naive, culturally unaware squares with the help of some cool, arty people". Graham thought that the scale of the stadium shows led to more predictability and less interaction with the audiences.
### Fan reaction
The group and the music industry were unsure how fans would receive the tour beforehand. During the first week of shows, Bono said, "This show is a real roller coaster ride, and some people will want to get off, I'm sure." He remained optimistic that their devoted fans would continue following them, but cautioned he had no intention of resisting the glamour and fame: "Oh, but it's fun to be carried away by the hype. Where would you be without the hype? ... You can't pretend all the promotion and all the fanfare is not happening." Some hardcore fans, particularly in the US, objected to the tour as a blatant sellout to commercial values, while others misinterpreted the tour's mocking of excess, believing that, according to VH1's Legends, "U2 had 'lost it' and that Bono had become an egomaniac". Many Christian fans were offended by the band's antics and believed they had abandoned their religious faith.
By the outdoor legs, many fans knew what to expect, and Pareles observed that Bono's admonitions to never cheer a rock star were greeted with idolatrous applause; he concluded that the show's message of scepticism was somewhat lost on the audience and that, "No matter what Bono tells his fans, they seem likely to trust him anyway." By the end of the tour's first year, U2 had won over many fans. In a 1992 end-of-year poll, readers of Q voted U2 "The Best Act in the World Today". The band's almost clean sweep of Rolling Stone's end-of-year readers' poll—which included "Best Artist", "Best Tour", and Bono as "Sexiest Male Artist"—reconfirmed for the magazine they were the "world's biggest rock band".
### Commercial performance
On the opening leg of the tour, U2 grossed US\$13,215,414 and sold 528,763 tickets to 32 shows. Sources gave varying box office figures for the band's entire 1992 North American itinerary; Pollstar reported that they grossed US\$67 million from 73 shows, while Billboard reported that they grossed US\$72,427,148 and sold 2,482,802 tickets to 77 concerts. Pollstar's reported gross figure was the highest amount by any touring artist that year, and at the time was the third-highest gross for a North American tour, behind the Rolling Stones' 1989 Steel Wheels Tour and New Kids on the Block's 1990 Magic Summer Tour. U2's three sold-out shows in Foxborough, Massachusetts, grossed US\$4,594,205, ranking fourth on Amusement Business's list of top boxscores for 1992. Zoo TV sold 2.9 million tickets that year for North America and Europe combined.
The "Zooropa" stadium leg in 1993 played to more than 2.1 million people over 43 dates between 9 May and 28 August. In total, the Zoo TV Tour sold about 5.3 million tickets, and reportedly grossed US\$151 million. The band incurred heavy expenses to produce the tour, leading to only a small profit. On the tour's final stop in Japan, McGuinness confirmed that T-shirt sales, which had topped 600,000 in North America in 1992, drove Zoo TV's profitability: "We grossed \$30 million in T-shirt sales. Without those we'd be fucked." Bono later said: "When we built Zoo TV, we were so close to bankruptcy that if 5% fewer people went, U2 was bankrupt. Even in our irresponsible, youthful and fatal disregard of such material matters, it was terrifying."
### Accolades
At the 1992 Billboard Music Awards, U2 won for the No. 1 Boxscore Tour. For the Pollstar Concert Industry Awards of 1992, the band were honoured for the Most Creative Stage Production, and were nominated for Most Creative Tour Package and Major Tour of the Year. For their work on the Zoo TV Tour, Willie Williams and Carol Dodds won an award for Designer of the Year/Lighting at the 1992 Lighting Dimensions International Awards.
## Impact and legacy
### Effect on U2
For the Zoo TV Tour, U2 embraced the "rock star" identity they had struggled with and were reluctant to accept throughout the 1980s. They drew the attention of celebrities, including American presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and they began partying more than they had in the past. During parts of the tour, the band attracted the fashion crowd; Clayton's romantic relationship with supermodel Naomi Campbell and Bono's friendship with supermodel Christy Turlington made them the subjects of unwanted tabloid attention. In May 1993, Campbell announced that she and Clayton were engaged, but by the "Zoomerang" leg, their relationship was fracturing and he was drinking frequently. After missing the group's 26 November 1993 show in Sydney from an alcoholic blackout, Clayton resolved to quit drinking altogether. The incident resulted in tensions within the group during the tour's final weeks as they contemplated whether to reallocate their revenues, which to that point had been split evenly five ways between the band members and McGuinness. Clayton's relationship with Campbell ended in 1994, but another member of U2 found love during the tour. The Edge became close with Morleigh Steinberg during her stint as the tour's choreographer and belly dancer. She moved to Dublin in 1994 to be with him, and they married in 2002.
The tour's two-year length, then U2's longest, exhausted the band as the final legs unfolded. Following the conclusion of Zoo TV, U2 took an extended break from recording as a group. Mullen and Clayton moved to Manhattan, where they sought out music lessons to become better musicians. The Edge and Bono spent most of 1994 living in newly renovated houses in the South of France. The Edge said, "as a band I think [the tour] stretched us all. We were a different band after that and touring was different." Producer Nellee Hooper later told Bono that Zoo TV "ruined irony for everyone".
The Fly and MacPhisto characters appeared in the animated music video to U2's 1995 song "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" from the soundtrack to Batman Forever. Author Višnja Cogan wrote that "the video crystallises and concludes the Zoo TV period and the changes that occurred" during that time. Director Joel Schumacher attempted to create a role for Bono as MacPhisto in Batman Forever, but both later agreed it was not suitable. In the years following the Zoo TV Tour, Bono continued to wear sunglasses in public, leading to it becoming one of his signature trademarks. In October 2014, Bono said that the reason he continued to wear sunglasses was because he suffers from glaucoma.
### Effect on Pixies
The Pixies' stint as a support act caused a controversy that partially contributed to their breakup. In July 1992, Spin featured a cover story titled "U2 on Tour: The Story They Didn't Want You to Read", which detailed author Jim Greer's travels on the tour's first weeks with his unidentified girlfriend (who turned out to be Pixies' bassist Kim Deal). The article featured their criticisms of U2 for the supposed poor treatment the Pixies received. Both groups disagreed and were livid at Deal, particularly Pixies frontman Black Francis. In 1993, following tensions within the group, Francis announced the Pixies had dissolved.
### Future endeavours
As the tour drew to a close, U2 entered prolonged discussions about creating a Zoo TV television channel in partnership with MTV. This never materialised, but in 1997, MTV ran a brief miniseries called Zoo-TV, which featured Emergency Broadcast Network extending their tour role in creating contemporary surrealist satirical video. U2 endorsed the effort as a representation of what the tour would have been like as a news magazine, but their direct role was limited to providing half-financing and outtakes from the Zooropa album. Wired magazine said the series "pushe[d] the edge of commercial—even comprehensible—television".
U2's subsequent concert tour, 1997's PopMart Tour, followed in Zoo TV's footsteps by mocking another social trend, this time consumerism. Paul McGuinness said the group wanted "the production [of PopMart] to beat Zoo TV", and accordingly, the tour's spectacle was a further shift away from their austere stage shows of the 1980s; PopMart's stage featured a 150-foot-long (46 m) LED screen, a 100-foot-tall (30 m) golden arch containing the sound system, and a mirrorball lemon that served as a transport to the B-stage. Although critics were much less receptive to PopMart, in a 2009 interview, Bono said that he considers that tour to be their best: "Pop(Mart) is our finest hour. It's better than Zoo TV aesthetically, and as an art project it is a clearer thought."
In 2005, during their Vertigo Tour, the group often played a short set of songs as a homage to the Zoo TV Tour—"Zoo Station", "The Fly", and "Mysterious Ways"—as part of the first encore; performances of "Zoo Station" included the interference in the background visual effects, and "The Fly" used flashing text effects on the LED screens similar to the Zoo TV visuals.
Bono reprised the MacPhisto character during the band's 2018 Experience + Innocence Tour, using an augmented reality camera filter applied to his face. The band's creative team gave the character a new appearance after envisioning how 25 years of hard living would have changed him. As MacPhisto, Bono commented on sociopolitical events and movements of the time such as the Charlottesville rally. He punctuated these monologues by saying, "when you don't believe that I exist, that's when I do my best work".
### Critical assessment
Critics regard the Zoo TV Tour as one of rock's most memorable tours. During the "Zooropa" leg of the tour, Guy Garcia of Time called Zoo TV "one of the most electrifying rock shows ever staged". In 1997, Robert Hilburn wrote that "It's not unreasonable to think of it as the Sgt. Pepper's of rock tours." In 2002, Tom Doyle of Q called it "still the most spectacular rock tour staged by any band", and in 2013, the magazine listed it as one of the "ten greatest gigs of all time". In 2009, critic Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune said, "Zoo TV remains the finest supersized tour mounted by any band in the last two decades." Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork wrote in a review of Achtung Baby's 20th anniversary reissue, "Even 20 years on, the tour looks like something to behold, a singularly inventive experience that no band—including U2 itself—has been able to really expound upon in a meaningful way." Rolling Stone included the tour on its 2017 list of "The 50 Greatest Concerts of the Last 50 Years"; writer Andy Greene said, "The wall-to-wall video screens also set the scene for every pop spectacle that followed, from Lady Gaga's Monster Ball to Kanye West's Glow in the Dark Tour."
## Tour dates
## See also
- List of highest-grossing concert tours
- List of most-attended concert tours
- Timeline of U2 |
869,748 | Mercenary War | 1,173,672,127 | 3rd-century BC mutiny of part of the Carthaginian army | [
"230s BC conflicts",
"238 BC",
"239 BC",
"240 BC",
"240s BC conflicts",
"3rd century BC",
"Mercenary War",
"Mercenary warfare",
"Military history of Libya",
"Military history of Tunisia",
"Punic Wars",
"Wars involving Carthage"
]
| The Mercenary War, also known as the Truceless War, was a mutiny by troops that were employed by Carthage at the end of the First Punic War (264–241 BC), supported by uprisings of African settlements revolting against Carthaginian control. It lasted from 241 to late 238 or early 237 BC and ended with Carthage suppressing both the mutiny and the revolt.
The war began in 241 BC as a dispute over the payment of wages owed to 20,000 foreign soldiers who had fought for Carthage in Sicily during the First Punic War. When a compromise seemed to have been reached, the army erupted into full-scale mutiny under the leadership of Spendius and Matho. 70,000 Africans from Carthage's oppressed dependent territories flocked to join them, bringing supplies and finance. War-weary Carthage fared poorly in the initial engagements of the war, especially under the generalship of Hanno. Hamilcar Barca, a veteran of the campaigns in Sicily (and father of Hannibal Barca), was given joint command of the army in 240 BC; and supreme command in 239 BC. He campaigned successfully, initially demonstrating leniency in an attempt to woo the rebels over. To prevent this, in 240 BC Spendius and Autaritus tortured 700 Carthaginian prisoners to death (including Gisco), after which the war was pursued with great brutality on both sides.
By early 237 BC, after numerous setbacks, the rebels were defeated and their cities brought back under Carthaginian rule. An expedition was prepared to reoccupy Sardinia, where mutinous soldiers had slaughtered all Carthaginians. However, Rome declared that this would be an act of war and occupied both Sardinia and Corsica, in contravention of the recent peace treaty. This has been considered to be the single greatest cause of war with Carthage breaking out again in 218 BC in the Second Punic War.
## Primary sources
The main source for almost every aspect of the Punic Wars is the historian Polybius (c. 200 – c. 118 BC), a Greek sent to Rome in 167 BC as a hostage. His works include a now-lost manual on military tactics, but he is known today for The Histories, written sometime after 146 BC, or about a century after this war. Polybius's work is considered broadly objective and largely neutral as between Carthaginian and Roman points of view.
Carthaginian written records were destroyed along with their capital, Carthage, in 146 BC and so Polybius's account of the Mercenary War is based on several, now-lost, Greek and Latin sources. Polybius was an analytical historian and wherever possible personally interviewed participants in the events he wrote about. He was on the staff of Scipio Aemilianus when he led a Roman army during the Third Punic War on a campaign through many of the locations of the actions of the Mercenary War. Only part of the first book of the 40 comprising The Histories deals with this war. The accuracy of Polybius's account has been much debated over the past 150 years, but the modern consensus is to accept it largely at face value, and the details of the war in modern sources are almost entirely based on interpretations of Polybius's account. The modern historian Andrew Curry considers that "Polybius turns out to [be] fairly reliable"; while Craige Champion describes him as "a remarkably well-informed, industrious, and insightful historian". Other, later, histories of the war exist, but in fragmentary or summary form. Modern historians also take into account the later histories of Diodorus Siculus and Dio Cassius, although the classicist Adrian Goldsworthy states that "Polybius' account is usually to be preferred when it differs with any of our other accounts". Other sources include inscriptions, coins and archaeological evidence.
## Background
The First Punic War was fought between Carthage and Rome, the two main powers of the western Mediterranean in the 3rd century BC, and lasted for 23 years, from 264 to 241 BC. Rome still exists as the capital of Italy, while Carthage was razed by Rome in a later war; its ruins lie 16 kilometres (10 mi) east of modern Tunis on the North African coast. The two powers struggled for supremacy primarily on the Mediterranean island of Sicily and its surrounding waters, and also in North Africa. It was the longest continuous conflict and the greatest naval war of antiquity. After immense materiel and human losses on both sides, the Carthaginians were defeated. The Carthaginian Senate ordered the commander of its forces on Sicily, Hamilcar Barca, to negotiate a peace treaty; he delegated this to his deputy Gisco. The Treaty of Lutatius was signed and brought the First Punic War to its end. By the treaty's terms, Carthage evacuated Sicily, handed over all prisoners taken during the war, and paid an indemnity of 3,200 talents – 1,000 talents of this was due immediately, the balance over ten years.
While the war with Rome was being played out, the Carthaginian general Hanno, who was one of several Carthaginian Hannos known as "the great", was leading a series of campaigns which greatly increased the area of Africa controlled by Carthage. He extended its control to Theveste (modern Tébessa, Algeria) 300 km (190 mi) south-west of their capital. Hanno was rigorous in squeezing taxes out of the newly conquered territory to pay for both the war with Rome and his campaigns. Half of all agricultural output was taken as war tax, and the tribute previously due from towns and cities was doubled. These exactions were harshly enforced, causing extreme hardship in many areas.
Carthaginian armies were nearly always composed of foreigners; citizens only served in the army if there was a direct threat to the city of Carthage. The majority of these foreigners were from North Africa. Libyans provided close-order infantry equipped with large shields, helmets, short swords and long thrusting spears; as well as close-order shock cavalry carrying spears – both were noted for their discipline and staying power. Numidians provided light cavalry who threw javelins from a distance and avoided close combat, and javelin-armed light infantry skirmishers. Both Spain and Gaul provided experienced infantry; unarmoured troops who would charge ferociously, but had a reputation for breaking off if combat was protracted. The close-order Libyan infantry, and citizen militia when present, would fight in a tightly-packed formation known as a phalanx. Two thousand slingers were recruited from the Balearic Islands. Sicilians and Italians had also joined up during the war to fill the ranks. The Carthaginians frequently employed war elephants; North Africa had indigenous African forest elephants at the time. Roman sources refer to these foreign fighters derogatively as "mercenaries", but Goldsworthy describes this as "a gross oversimplification". They served under a variety of arrangements; for example, some were the regular troops of allied cities or kingdoms seconded to Carthage as part of formal arrangements.
### Mutiny
After receiving orders to make peace on whatever terms he could negotiate, Hamilcar left Sicily in a rage, convinced that the surrender was unnecessary. The evacuation of the Carthaginian army of 20,000 men from Sicily was left in the hands of Gisco. Not wishing the freshly idle soldiers to combine for purposes of their own, Gisco split the army into small detachments based on their regions of origin. He sent these back to Carthage one at a time. He anticipated they would be promptly paid the several years' back pay they were owed and hurried on their way home. The Carthaginian authorities decided to instead wait until all of the troops had arrived and then attempt to negotiate a settlement at a lower rate. Meanwhile, as each group arrived it was billeted inside the city of Carthage where the advantages of civilisation were appreciated to the full after up to eight years under siege. This "tumultuous licentiousness" so alarmed the city's authorities that before the full 20,000 had arrived they were relocated to Sicca Veneria (modern El Kef), 180 km (110 mi) away, even though a significant portion of their arrears had to be paid before they would go.
Freed of their long period of military discipline and with nothing to do, the men grumbled among themselves and refused all attempts by the Carthaginians to pay them less than the full amount due. Frustrated by the Carthaginian negotiators' attempts to haggle, all 20,000 troops marched to Tunis, 16 km (10 mi) from Carthage. Panicking, the Senate agreed to pay in full. The mutinous troops responded by demanding even more. Gisco, who had a good reputation with the army, was brought over from Sicily in late 241 BC and despatched to the camp with enough money to pay most of what was owed. He started to disburse this, with promises that the balance would be paid as soon as it could be raised. The discontent seemed to have abated when, for some unknown reason, discipline broke down. Several soldiers insisted that no deal with Carthage was acceptable, a riot broke out, dissenters were stoned to death, Gisco and his staff were taken prisoner and his treasury was seized. Spendius, an escaped Roman slave who faced death by torture if he were recaptured, and Matho, a Berber dissatisfied with Hanno's attitude towards tax-raising from Carthage's African possessions, were declared generals. The news of a formed, experienced, anti-Carthaginian army in the heart of its territory spread rapidly and many cities and towns rose in rebellion. Provisions, money and reinforcements poured in; an additional 70,000 men according to Polybius. Coins from this period read 'from the Libyans', suggesting they were hired by the United Libyan cities and their leader Zarzas. The pay dispute had become a full-scale revolt threatening Carthage's existence as a state.
## War
### Hanno
Hanno, as the commander of Carthage's African army, took the field. Most of the Africans in his force remained loyal; they were accustomed to acting against their fellow Africans. His non-African contingent had remained quartered in Carthage when the army of Sicily was expelled, and also remained loyal. The few troops still in Sicily were paid up to date and redeployed with Hanno, and money was raised to hire fresh troops. An unknown number of Carthaginian citizens were incorporated into Hanno's army. By the time Hanno assembled this force, the rebels had already blockaded Utica and Hippo (modern Bizerte).
In early 240 BC Hanno set off with the army to relieve Utica; he took with him 100 elephants and a siege train. Hanno stormed the rebels' camp in the Battle of Utica and his elephants routed the besiegers. Hanno's army took over the camp and Hanno himself entered the city in triumph. However, the battle-hardened veterans of the Sicilian army regrouped in the nearby hills and, not being pursued, returned towards Utica. The Carthaginians, accustomed to fighting the militias of the Numidian cities, were still celebrating their victory when the rebels counter-attacked. The Carthaginians fled, with great loss of life, losing their baggage and siege trains. For the rest of the year Hanno skirmished with the rebel force, repeatedly missing opportunities to bring it to battle or to place it at a disadvantage; the military historian Nigel Bagnall writes of Hanno's "incompetence as a field commander".
Rome pointedly declined to take advantage of Carthage's troubles. Italians were prohibited from trading with the rebels but encouraged to trade with Carthage; 2,743 Carthaginian prisoners still held were released without a ransom being required and were immediately enrolled into Carthage's army. Hiero, the king of the Roman satellite kingdom of Syracuse, was allowed to supply Carthage with the large amounts of food it needed and was no longer able to obtain from its hinterland. In late 240 or early 239 BC, the Carthaginian garrisons on Sardinia joined the mutiny, killing their officers and the island's governor. The Carthaginians sent a force to retake the island. When it arrived its members also mutinied, joined the previous mutineers, and killed all of the Carthaginians on the island. The mutineers then appealed to Rome for protection, which was refused. The classicist Richard Miles writes that "Rome was in no shape to embark on yet another war" and wished to avoid acquiring a reputation for supporting mutinous uprisings.
### Hamilcar
At some point during 240 BC the Carthaginians raised another, smaller, force, of approximately 10,000. It included deserters from the rebels, 2,000 cavalry, and 70 elephants. This was placed under the command of Hamilcar, who had commanded the Carthaginian forces on Sicily for the last six years of the First Punic War. The rebels held the line of the Bagradas River with 10,000 men commanded by Spendius. Hamilcar would need to force a crossing if he were to gain access to open country where he could manoeuvre. He did so by a stratagem, and Spendius was reinforced by an additional 15,000 men drawn from the force laying siege to Utica, which the rebels had renewed. The rebel army of 25,000 moved to attack Hamilcar in the Battle of the Bagradas River. What happened next is unclear: it seems Hamilcar feigned a retreat, the rebels broke ranks to pursue, the Carthaginians turned in good order and counter-attacked, routing the rebels, who suffered losses of 8,000 men.
Hamilcar was appointed joint commander of the Carthaginian army, alongside Hanno, but there was no cooperation between the two. While Hanno manoeuvred against Matho to the north near Hippo, Hamilcar confronted various towns and cities which had gone over to the rebels, bringing them back to Carthaginian allegiance with varying mixtures of diplomacy and force. He was shadowed by a superior-sized rebel force, which kept to rough ground for fear of Hamilcar's cavalry and elephants, and harried his foragers and scouts. South west of Utica, Hamilcar moved his force into the mountains in an attempt to bring the rebels to battle, but was surrounded. The Carthaginians were only saved from destruction when a Numidian leader, Naravas, who had served with and admired Hamilcar in Sicily, swapped sides, bringing 2,000 cavalry with him. This proved disastrous for the rebels, and in the resulting battle, they lost 10,000 killed and 4,000 captured.
### Truceless War
Since leaving Carthage, Hamilcar had treated rebels he had captured well and offered them a choice of joining his army or free passage home. He made the same offer to the 4,000 captives from the recent battle. The rebel leaders perceived this generous treatment as the motivation behind Naravas's defection and feared the disintegration of their army; they were aware that such generous terms would not be extended to them personally. To remove the possibility of any goodwill between the sides, Spendius, encouraged by his fellow leader the Gaul Autaritus, had 700 Carthaginian prisoners, including Gisco, tortured to death: they had their hands cut off, were castrated, their legs broken and were thrown into a pit and buried alive. The mercenary leader and skilled polyglot orator Autaritus is cited by Polybius as a chief instigator of this massacre. Hamilcar, in turn, killed his prisoners. From this point, neither side showed any mercy, and the unusual ferocity of the fighting caused Polybius to term it the "Truceless War". Any further prisoners taken by the Carthaginians were trampled to death by elephants.
At some point between March and September 239 BC the previously loyal cities of Utica and Hippo slew their Carthaginian garrisons and joined the rebels. The people of Utica offered their city to the Romans, who, consistent with their response to the mutineers on Sardinia, declined. The rebels previously operating in the area moved south and laid siege to Carthage.
Having a clear superiority in cavalry, Hamilcar raided the supply lines of the rebels around Carthage. In mid-239 BC, he was joined by Hanno and his army, but the two men disagreed as to the best strategy and operations were paralysed. Unusually, the choice of supreme commander was put to a vote of the army – possibly only the officers – and Hamilcar was elected; Hanno left the army. In early 238 BC the lack of supplies forced the rebels to lift the siege of Carthage. They fell back to Tunis, from where they maintained a more distant blockade. While Matho maintained the blockade, Spendius led 40,000 men against Hamilcar. As in the previous year, they stayed to the higher and rougher terrain and harassed the Carthaginian army. After a period of campaigning, the details of which are not clear in the sources, Hamilcar trapped the rebels in a pass or mountain range known as the Saw. Pinned against mountains and with their food exhausted, the rebels ate their horses, their prisoners and then their slaves, hoping that Matho would sortie from Tunis to rescue them. Eventually, the surrounded troops forced their leaders to parley with Hamilcar, but on a thin pretext, he took Spendius and his lieutenants prisoner. The rebels then attempted to fight their way out in the Battle of the Saw and were massacred to a man.
Hamilcar then marched on Tunis and laid siege to it in late 238 BC. The city was difficult to access from both the east and the west, so Hamilcar occupied a position to the south with half the army, and his deputy Hannibal was to the north with the balance. The rebel leaders taken captive prior to the Saw were crucified in full view of the city. Matho ordered a large-scale night attack, which surprised the Carthaginians, who suffered many casualties. One of their camps was overrun and they lost much of their baggage. In addition, Hannibal and a delegation of 30 Carthaginian notables who were visiting the army were captured. They were tortured and then nailed to the crosses previously occupied by Spendius and his colleagues. Hamilcar abandoned the siege and withdrew to the north.
The Senate encouraged reconciliation between Hanno and Hamilcar, and they agreed to serve together. Meanwhile, Matho and his army had left Tunis and marched 160 km (100 mi) south to the wealthy city of Leptis Parva, which had risen against Carthage earlier in the war. Hanno and Hamilcar marched after them with an army totalling perhaps 40,000 including every Carthaginian citizen of military age. The rebels, rather than wait to be besieged, met the Carthaginians in open battle in mid-to-late 238 BC. No details of the battle survive, but the remaining 30,000 rebels were wiped out and Matho captured with few losses to the Carthaginians. Any other prisoners were crucified, while Matho was dragged through the streets of Carthage and tortured to death by its inhabitants. Most of the towns and cities which had not already come to terms with Carthage now did so, with the exceptions of Utica and Hippo, whose inhabitants feared vengeance for their massacre of Carthaginians. They attempted to hold out, but Polybius says that they too "quickly" surrendered, probably in late 238 or very early 237 BC. The surrendered towns and cities were treated leniently, although Carthaginian governors were imposed on them.
### Sardinia
Probably in 237 BC, the indigenous inhabitants of Sardinia rose up and drove out the mutinous garrison, which took refuge in Italy. As the war in Africa came to a close, they appealed again for Roman assistance. This time the Romans agreed and prepared an expedition to seize both Sardinia and Corsica. It is unclear from the sources why the Romans acted differently from three years earlier. Polybius held that this action was indefensible. Carthage sent an embassy to Rome, which quoted the Treaty of Lutatius and claimed they were outfitting their own expedition to retake the island, which it had held for 300 years. The Roman Senate cynically stated that they considered the preparation of this force an act of war. Their peace terms were the ceding of Sardinia and Corsica and the payment of an additional 1,200 talent indemnity. Weakened by 30 years of war, Carthage agreed rather than enter into a conflict with Rome again.
## Aftermath
The Romans required a strong military presence on Sardinia and Corsica for at least the next seven years, as they struggled to suppress the local inhabitants. The seizure of Sardinia and Corsica by Rome and the additional indemnity fuelled resentment in Carthage. Polybius considered this act of bad faith by the Romans to be the single greatest cause of war with Carthage breaking out again nineteen years later. The role of Hamilcar Barca in the victory greatly enhanced the prestige and power of the Barcid family. Immediately after the war, Hamilcar led many of his veterans on an expedition to expand Carthaginian holdings in southern Iberia; this was to become a semi-autonomous Barcid fiefdom. In 218 BC, a Carthaginian army under Hannibal Barca besieged the Roman-protected town of Saguntum in eastern Iberia, providing the spark which ignited the Second Punic War.
The historian Dexter Hoyos writes that "the truceless war ... produce[d] a complete and enduring reversal of Carthage's domestic fortunes and military orientation". Miles agrees there was "a period of profound political transformation". Carthage never regained control over its army: generals continued to be, like Hamilcar, selected by their armies; the troops in Spain effectively became the Barcids' private army. Internally the opinions of both the Barcids and the Popular Assembly increasingly dictated to the old-established bodies of the Senate and the Tribunal.
## See also
- Salammbô: a novel by Gustave Flaubert set during the war
## Notes, citations and sources |
10,951,104 | Treaty of Lutatius | 1,161,558,627 | Peace treaty which ended the First Punic War | [
"241 BC",
"3rd century BC in the Roman Republic",
"3rd-century BC treaties",
"First Punic War",
"Peace treaties",
"Treaties of Carthage",
"Treaties of ancient Rome",
"Treaties of the Roman Republic"
]
| The Treaty of Lutatius was the agreement between Carthage and Rome of 241 BC (amended in 237 BC), that ended the First Punic War after 23 years of conflict. Most of the fighting during the war took place on, or in the waters around, the island of Sicily and in 241 BC a Carthaginian fleet was defeated by a Roman fleet commanded by Gaius Lutatius Catulus while attempting to lift the blockade of its last, beleaguered, strongholds there. Accepting defeat, the Carthaginian Senate ordered their army commander on Sicily, Hamilcar Barca, to negotiate a peace treaty with the Romans, on whatever terms he could negotiate. Hamilcar refused, claiming the surrender was unnecessary, and the negotiation of the peace terms was left to Gisco, the commander of Lilybaeum, as the next most senior Carthaginian on the island. A draft treaty was rapidly agreed, but when it was referred to Rome for ratification it was rejected.
Rome then sent a ten-man commission to settle the matter. This in turn agreed that Carthage would hand over what it still held of Sicily; relinquish several groups of islands nearby; release all Roman prisoners without ransom, although ransom would need to be paid to secure the release of prisoners held by the Romans; and pay an indemnity of 3,200 talents of silver – 82,000 kilograms (81 long tons) – over 10 years. The treaty received its name from the victorious Gaius Lutatius Catulus, who also negotiated the initial draft.
In 237 BC, when Carthage was recovering from a bitter and hard-fought civil war, it prepared an expedition to recover the island of Sardinia, which had been lost to rebels. Cynically, the Romans stated they considered this an act of war. Their peace terms were the ceding of Sardinia and Corsica and the payment of an additional 1,200-talent indemnity – 30,000 kg (30 long tons). Weakened by 30 years of war, Carthage agreed rather than enter into a conflict with Rome again; the additional payment and the renunciation of Sardinia and Corsica were added to the treaty.
## Primary sources
The main source for almost every aspect of the First Punic War is the historian Polybius (c. 200–c. 118 BC), a Greek sent to Rome in 167 BC as a hostage. His works include a now lost manual on military tactics, but he is known today for The Histories, written sometime after 146 BC, or about a century after the end of the war. Polybius's work is considered broadly objective and largely neutral as between Carthaginian and Roman points of view.
Carthaginian written records were destroyed along with their capital, Carthage, in 146 BC and so Polybius's account of the First Punic War is based on several, now-lost, Greek and Latin sources. Only part of the first book of the forty comprising The Histories deals with the First Punic War. The accuracy of Polybius's account has been much debated over the past 150 years, but the modern consensus is to accept it largely at face value, and the details of the treaty in modern sources are almost entirely based on interpretations of Polybius's account. The modern historian Andrew Curry considers "Polybius turns out to [be] fairly reliable"; while Dexter Hoyos describes him as "a remarkably well-informed, industrious, and insightful historian". Other, later, histories of the war and the treaty that ended it exist, but in fragmentary or summary form. Modern historians usually also take into account the histories of Diodorus Siculus and Dio Cassius, and the 12th-century Byzantine chronicler Joannes Zonaras, who relied on much earlier sources, is also sometimes used. All, like Polybius, draw most of their information from even earlier, now lost, accounts. The classicist Adrian Goldsworthy states "Polybius' account is usually to be preferred when it differs with any of our other accounts".
## First Punic War
The Roman Republic had been aggressively expanding in the southern Italian mainland for a century before the First Punic War. It had conquered peninsular Italy south of the River Arno by 272 BC. During this period Carthage, with its capital in what is now Tunisia, had come to dominate southern Hispania, much of the coastal regions of North Africa, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, and the western half of Sicily in a military and commercial empire. In 264 BC Carthage and Rome were the pre-eminent powers in the western Mediterranean. The two states had several times asserted their mutual friendship via formal alliances: in 509 BC, 348 BC and around 279 BC. Relationships were good, with strong commercial links. In 264 BC the two cities went to war over the city of Messana (modern Messina) in the north-eastern tip of Sicily.
The war lasted 23 years, with the maritime aspect the largest and longest naval war of the ancient world. By 249 BC the war had developed into a struggle in which the Romans were attempting to decisively defeat the Carthaginians and, at a minimum, control the whole of Sicily. The Carthaginians were engaging in their traditional policy of waiting for their opponents to wear themselves out, in the expectation of then regaining some or all of their possessions and negotiating a mutually satisfactory peace treaty. Rome was the stronger land-based power and had gained control of most of Sicily. The Carthaginian leadership preferred to expand their area of control in North Africa at the expense of the Numidians, and probably viewed Sicily as a secondary theatre.
From 250 BC the Carthaginians held only two cities on Sicily: Lilybaeum and Drepana; these were well-fortified and situated on the west coast, where they could be supplied and reinforced without the Romans being able to use their superior army to interfere. When Hamilcar Barca took command of the Carthaginians on Sicily in 247 BC he was only given a small army and the Carthaginian fleet was gradually withdrawn. After more than 20 years of war, both states were financially exhausted and were struggling to find sufficient men of military age for their armies and navies. Evidence of Carthage's financial situation includes their request for a 2,000-talent loan from Ptolemaic Egypt, which was refused. Rome was also close to bankruptcy and the number of adult male citizens, who provided the manpower for the navy and the legions, had declined by 17 per cent since the start of the war.
In late 243 BC realising they would not capture Drepana and Lilybaeum unless they could extend their blockade to the sea, the Roman Senate decided to build a new fleet. With the state's coffers exhausted, the Senate approached Rome's wealthiest citizens for loans to finance the construction of one ship each, repayable from the reparations to be imposed on Carthage once the war was won. The result was a fleet of approximately 200 large warships, built, equipped, and crewed without government expense. The Carthaginians raised a larger fleet which they intended to use to run supplies into Sicily. It was intercepted by the Roman fleet under Gaius Lutatius Catulus and Quintus Valerius Falto on 10 March 241 BC and in the hard-fought Battle of the Aegates the better-trained Romans defeated the undermanned and ill-trained Carthaginian fleet. Of the 250 Carthaginian warships, 50 were sunk – 20 of them with all hands – and 70 captured. After achieving this decisive victory, the Romans continued their land operations in Sicily against Lilybaeum and Drepana.
## Treaty
With their relief effort defeated, the Carthaginian Senate was reluctant to allocate the resources necessary to build and man another fleet. In any case, it was probable their Sicilian garrisons would be starved into surrender before that could be done. Instead, it ordered Hamilcar to negotiate a peace treaty with the Romans, on whatever terms he could obtain. After receiving the order to make peace, Hamilcar refused, claiming the surrender was unnecessary. Several modern historians have raised the possibility that for political and prestige reasons Hamilcar did not wish to be associated with the treaty which formalised Carthage's defeat in the 23-year-long war. As the next most senior Carthaginian on the island, it was left to Gisco, the commander of Lilybaeum, to broker the peace terms.
Gisco opened discussions with Catulus, the recently victorious Roman commander on Sicily. It was the long-standing Roman procedure to appoint two men each year, known as consuls, to each lead an army. Catulus's term was near its end and his replacement could be expected to arrive on Sicily shortly. This caused him to be flexible during the negotiations as he was eager to conclude a definitive peace while he still had the authority to, and thus claim the credit for bringing the lengthy war to a close. Gisco and Catulus agreed Carthage would hand over what it still held of Sicily; release all Roman prisoners without ransom, although ransom would need to be paid to secure the release of prisoners held by the Romans; and pay an indemnity of 2,200 talents of silver – 57,000 kilograms (56 long tons) – over 20 years. These terms were referred to Rome for ratification, where they were rejected by the Centuriate Assembly, one of the three Roman popular assemblies. A ten-man commission was then sent to Sicily to settle the matter. The commission was chaired by Catulus's brother Quintus Lutatius Cerco, who by this time had succeeded him as consul. The historian of ancient Rome Adam Ziolkowski argues there was a faction in Rome opposed to the treaty, and possibly to ending the war at all, which was led by the ex-consul Aulus Manlius Torquatus Atticus. This possible disagreement within Roman policy makers was exemplified by Atticus being elected consul again in 241 BC alongside Cerco.
Gisco rapidly agreed to further concessions with the commission: several islands close to Sicily would also be handed over; the indemnity was increased to 3,200 talents, with the additional 1,000 talents payable immediately and the time allowed to pay the balance reduced to 10 years. There were other minor clauses in the final agreement: neither party was to interfere with the other's allies nor make war on them; nor recruit soldiers from the other's territory; nor raise money for public works from the other party's territory. These were all formalised in the Treaty of Lutatius, named after Catulus, who had remained on Sicily as a proconsul. Hamilcar immediately handed over command on Sicily to Gisco, who was left to formally inform Carthage of what had been agreed. Catulus returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph on 4 October.
The views of modern scholars on the treaty are mixed. Nigel Bagnall says that the negotiators on both sides "showed themselves realistic and reasonable in their demands". Adrian Goldsworthy states "the peace terms made it clear that [Carthage] had been defeated" and Richard Miles claims that "the terms agreed in 241 were harsh". On the other hand, Bruno Bleckmann believes the treaty to have been "remarkably moderate" and Howard Scullard states that it was "somewhat lenient" for Carthage.
### Sardinia and Corsica
After Carthage evacuated its 20,000-strong army from Sicily to North Africa it became embroiled with the troops in a pay dispute. Eventually the troops mutinied and a war with Carthage broke out. The news of a formed, experienced, anti-Carthaginian army in the heart of its territory spread rapidly and many cities and towns rose in rebellion; some were freshly conquered and all had been harshly oppressed to finance the recently ended war. They added 70,000 men to the rebel force and supplied food and financial resources. Rome pointedly declined to take advantage of Carthage's troubles and adhered to the terms of the recent treaty. Italians were prohibited from trading with the rebels but encouraged to trade with Carthage; 2,743 Carthaginian prisoners still held were released without a ransom and were immediately enrolled into Carthage's army. Hiero II, the king of the Roman satellite kingdom of Syracuse, was allowed to supply Carthage with the large amounts of food it needed and was no longer able to obtain from its own hinterland. In late 240 or early 239 BC the Carthaginian garrisons on Sardinia joined the mutiny, killing their officers and the island's governor. The Carthaginians sent a force to retake the island. When it arrived its members also mutinied, joined the previous mutineers, and killed all of the Carthaginians on the island. The mutineers then appealed to Rome for protection, which was refused.
Probably in 237 BC the indigenous inhabitants of Sardinia rose up and drove out the mutinous garrison, which took refuge in Roman-controlled Italy. As the war in Africa came to a close, they appealed again for Roman assistance. This time the Romans agreed and prepared an expedition to seize both Sardinia and Corsica. It is unclear from the sources why the Romans acted differently from three years earlier. Polybius held that this action was indefensible. Carthage sent an embassy to Rome, who quoted the Treaty of Lutatius and claimed Carthage was outfitting its own expedition to retake the island, which it had held for 300 years. The Roman Senate stated they considered the preparation of this force an act of war, and demanded Carthage cede Sardinia and Corsica, and pay an additional 1,200-talent indemnity, as peace terms. Weakened by 30 years of war, Carthage agreed rather than again enter into conflict with Rome. The renunciation of Sardinia, which was understood to include Corsica, and the additional payment were added to the treaty as a codicil. Polybius considered this "contrary to all justice" and modern historians have variously described the Romans' behaviour as "unprovoked aggression and treaty-breaking", "shamelessly opportunistic" and an "unscrupulous act".
## Aftermath
For Rome, the treaty marked the start of its expansion beyond the Italian Peninsula. Sicily became the first Roman province as Sicilia, governed by a praetor – with the exception of Syracuse, which remained nominally independent and a close ally of Rome. The Romans required a strong military presence on Sardinia and Corsica for at least the next seven years, as they struggled to suppress the local inhabitants. Henceforth Rome was the leading military power in the western Mediterranean, and increasingly the Mediterranean region as a whole. The seizure of Sardinia and Corsica by Rome and the additional indemnity fuelled resentment in Carthage, which was not reconciled to Rome's perception of its situation. When Carthage besieged the Roman-protected town of Saguntum in eastern Iberia in 218 BC it ignited the Second Punic War with Rome.
## Notes, citations and sources |
10,079,480 | Ehime Maru and USS Greeneville collision | 1,171,934,869 | 2001 maritime collision | [
"2001 disasters in the United States",
"2001 in Hawaii",
"2001 in Japan",
"2001 in international relations",
"Disasters in Hawaii",
"February 2001 events in the United States",
"History of Ehime Prefecture",
"International maritime incidents",
"Japan–United States relations",
"Maritime incidents in 2001",
"Non-combat naval accidents",
"United States Navy in the 21st century",
"United States submarine accidents"
]
| On 9 February 2001, about nine nautical miles (17 km; 10 mi) south of Oahu, Hawaii, in the Pacific Ocean, the United States Navy (USN) Los Angeles-class submarine USS Greeneville (SSN-772) collided with the Japanese fishery high-school training ship Ehime Maru (えひめ丸) from Ehime Prefecture. In a demonstration for some VIP civilian visitors, Greeneville performed an emergency ballast blow surfacing maneuver. As the submarine shot to the surface, it struck Ehime Maru. Within ten minutes of the collision, Ehime Maru sank. Nine of the thirty-five people aboard were killed: four high school students, two teachers, and three crew members.
Many Japanese people, including government officials, were concerned by news that civilians were present in Greeneville's control room at the time of the accident. Some expressed anger because of a perception that the submarine did not try to assist Ehime Maru's survivors and that the submarine's captain, Commander Scott Waddle, did not apologize immediately afterwards. The USN conducted a public court of inquiry, blamed Waddle and other members of Greeneville's crew, and dealt non-judicial punishment or administrative disciplinary action to the captain and some crew members. After Waddle had been questioned by the Naval Board of Inquiry, it was decided that a full court-martial would be unnecessary, and he was forced to retire and given an honorable discharge.
In response to requests from the families of Ehime Maru's victims and the government of Japan, the USN raised Ehime Maru from the ocean floor during October 2001 and moved it to shallow water closer to Oahu. Once there, USN and Japanese divers located and retrieved the remains of eight of the nine victims from the wreck. Ehime Maru was then moved back out to sea and scuttled in deep water. The USN compensated the government of Ehime Prefecture, Ehime Maru's survivors, and victims' family members for the accident. Waddle traveled to Japan in December 2002 to apologize to the ship's survivors and victims' families.
The accident renewed calls by many in Japan for the United States to make more effort to reduce crimes and accidents involving U.S. military personnel who injure or kill Japanese citizens. In response to the accident, the USN changed its policies regarding civilian visits to its ships.
## Incident
### Prelude
On 10 January 2001, Ehime Maru, a Japanese fishing trawler owned by the government of Ehime Prefecture, 191 feet (58 m) in length and measuring 741 gross tons, departed from Uwajima Fisheries High School, a high school in Uwajima, Ehime Prefecture. The ship, captained by Hisao Ōnishi, headed for Hawaii on a planned 74-day voyage to train high school students who were interested in pursuing careers as fishermen. A total of 35 people were on board Ehime Maru: 20 crewmembers, 13 students, and two teachers. The ship's curriculum included long-line tuna fishing, maritime navigation, marine engineering, and oceanography. The ship docked at Honolulu Harbor on 8 February.
On 9 February, USS Greeneville, a U.S. Navy nuclear-powered attack submarine, prepared to depart Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to perform a public relations mission as part of the USN's Distinguished Visitor Embarkation (DVE) program. The program took civilians, members of Congress, journalists, and other "opinion makers" for rides on nuclear submarines to demonstrate the submarines' capabilities; its goal was to demonstrate the need to maintain a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. Greeneville had previously participated in several DVE missions, carrying notable civilians such as Tipper Gore and James Cameron. For this mission, Greeneville was to carry 16 civilian Distinguished Visitors (DVs): eight corporate chief executive officers (CEOs), six of them with their spouses; and a free-lance sports writer with his spouse. The CEOs were in Hawaii to assist a fundraising effort to restore the retired battleship Missouri. This DVE visit had originally been arranged by retired Rear Admiral Richard C. Macke. Accompanying the DV civilians on the mission was Navy Captain Robert L. Brandhuber, Chief of Staff for Rear Admiral Albert H. Konetzni Jr., the commander of the submarine component of the United States Pacific Fleet, abbreviated as COMSUBPAC. The captain of the Greeneville, Commander Scott Waddle, had commanded the submarine during several previous DVE missions.
Before departing for the mission, Commander Waddle was informed that the ship's Analog Video Signal Display Unit (AVSDU) was inoperative. The AVSDU was an analog video monitor, located forward of the submarine's periscope in the control room, that displayed information from the submarine's three sonar stacks and screens. The monitor helped communicate sonar information to the officer of the deck. Waddle decided to continue with the mission without attempting to repair the monitor, believing that it was not a crucial piece of equipment.
Greeneville departed Pearl Harbor on time at 08:00 local time (HST) with a crew of 106 in addition to the 16 DV passengers and Chief of Staff Brandhuber. As the submarine transited the ship channel from Pearl Harbor, Waddle noticed that the weather was "hazier than normal", but he thought that the haze would burn off soon. Greeneville reached its dive point south of Oahu () slightly later than scheduled, at 10:17, and submerged. The DVs were scheduled to be served lunch in two sittings, the first from 10:30 to 11:30 and the second from 11:30 to 12:30. After lunch, the submarine was to display its operational abilities and then return the DVs to Pearl Harbor for a reception that was scheduled to begin at 14:30. The lunch service ran late, and other Greeneville officers repeatedly reminded Waddle that the submarine needed to begin its demonstration maneuvers or it would be late back to port. Finally, at 13:10, Waddle entered the submarine's control room and prepared to execute the demonstration. Fifteen of the 16 DVs and Brandhuber entered the control room to observe the maneuvers.
Meanwhile, at 12:00, Ehime Maru had departed Honolulu harbor en route to fishing grounds about 300 nautical miles (560 km) south () of Oahu. By 12:50, the ship was proceeding at 11 knots (13 mph; 20 km/h) about eight nautical miles (15 km) south of Oahu and was nearing the area where Greeneville was conducting the DVE cruise.
Three crewmen were on duty in Greeneville's sonar room. At 12:30, the submarine's sonar operators detected a surface vessel in the vicinity and designated the contact as "Sierra 12" (S-12). A few minutes later, they detected a second vessel estimated to be about 20 nautical miles (37 km) away (submarine passive sonar does not give range (distance) information), which was designated as "Sierra 13" (S-13). S-13 was Ehime Maru. Also tracking the sonar contacts in the control room was Patrick Seacrest, Greeneville's sole fire control technician on duty at the time. Seacrest was responsible for "determining the course, speed, and range of surface and submerged vessels (or targets) potentially posing a threat to the submarine." At 12:58, Seacrest designated the track of S-13 as heading away from Greeneville's location. Beginning at 13:00, Seacrest elected to discontinue updating the Contact Evaluation Plot (CEP) in the control room. The CEP is a "labor-intensive" paper display that plots ship data and contact information for reference by control room personnel. Seacrest stated that one of the reasons that he decided to stop updating the CEP was that the DV guests were standing between his watchstation and the CEP.
### Collision
Before beginning the maneuvers, Waddle checked the submarine's sonar contacts and noted that there were several surface vessels in the vicinity, but none closer than seven nautical miles (13 km) away. Ehime Maru was one of these vessels. The civilians were spread throughout the control room, with three on the periscope platform and others in front of the fire control station, restricting free access to some of the displays. According to several crewmembers, Waddle, when informed that equipment preparations would further delay the start of the demonstration maneuvers, "seemed frustrated that he couldn't start the maneuvers right away".
For 15 minutes, beginning at 13:15, 46 minutes after the scheduled time, Greeneville performed a series of drastic maneuvers, including high-speed, full-rudder, 35-degree turns side to side, as well as rapid up-and-down movements. Waddle personally directed the maneuvers. According to Waddle, the DVs "were loving it". Waddle adds, "I could barely suppress a smile as I watched the expressions of joy and amazement on the faces of our distinguished visitors". During the maneuvers, several civilians in the sonar room conversed with the sonar technicians, who were at the same time trying to keep track of any sonar contacts in the vicinity.
As the high-speed maneuvers finished at 13:30, Waddle called for Greeneville to perform an emergency dive (called an "emergency deep") followed by an emergency main ballast blow, a maneuver that brings the submarine from a depth of about 400 feet (120 m) to the surface in a few seconds by using high-pressure air to force the water out of the ship's ballast tanks as quickly as possible. The rise is so rapid that the submarine's bow rises high out of the water upon surfacing. Before executing this maneuver, the submarine was required to go to periscope depth to check for ships or dangerous obstacles on the surface. After completing the high-speed maneuvers, standing orders required the submarine to hold a steady course for three minutes to reestablish sonar contact, which had been disrupted by the high speed maneuvers, with any vessels in the area. In this case, however, Waddle ordered the submarine to change course and go to periscope depth after holding the steady course for only 90 seconds.
As Greeneville ascended to periscope depth, Waddle checked the sonar displays and the fire control station monitors, but reported later that he heard and saw nothing to suggest that the previously detected vessels in the area were now any closer to the submarine's position than had been reported before the submarine began the high speed maneuvers. Because the AVSDU was not working, Greeneville's executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Gerald K. Pfeifer, entered the sonar room and observed the contacts on the sonar screens. Pfeifer then stood in the doorway between the sonar and control rooms, but did not communicate any updated sonar information to Waddle in the control room. At 13:34, sonar gained a new contact, designated S-14. Because Greeneville had not maintained a steady, slow course for a sufficient amount of time, the sonar data available to the Fire Control Technician of the Watch FT1 (SS) Patrick Seacrest did not allow accurate determination on Ehime Maru's range or course. Also, due to time constraints ordered by Waddle, the ship did not perform normal maneuvers which would be used to obtain accurate course and range information on the sonar contacts prior to proceeding to periscope depth.
At 13:38, Greeneville reached periscope depth (about 60 feet (18 m) below the surface). At this time, Ehime Maru was about 2,315 yards (2.117 km) or 1.14 nautical miles (2.1 km) away from the submarine and heading in her direction. Although sonar data began to more accurately depict Ehime Maru's true range and bearing at this point, this was not evident to the sonar operators. Lieutenant, Junior Grade Michael J. Coen, the officer of the deck, conducted an initial low magnification periscope search of the area and sighted no ships nearby.
Waddle then took the periscope before Coen could complete the normal high magnification search. Since waves were washing over the periscope, Waddle ordered the submarine to go up another few feet to increase the distance the periscope could view. Waddle then looked through the periscope at the area where he believed the reported surface contacts to be (possibly in error). Although Ehime Maru was at this point heading toward Greeneville's location, Waddle failed to see the ship. Regulations mandated that Waddle conduct a three-minute, 360-degree periscope scan before executing the emergency main ballast blow maneuver. Waddle, however, aware that they were still behind schedule, conducted a short scan, searching primarily in the sector where he believed the known contacts were located, noted that the haze was still present, and saw no ships in the vicinity. At the end of his scan, Waddle announced to the control room crew, "I hold no visual contacts." Waddle later explained how he conducted his periscope search:
> I swept the scope in low power, went to high power, looked, then panned to the right, saw the island [Oahu] ... I can only see the mountain peak, I can't see the mountains ... because of this white haze ... Then I could see an airplane taking off. ... I panned to the right where I thought I would see [S-13] the Ehime Maru. I looked over at the remote repeater [own-ship's data] and I saw the numbers and [thought] that looks right. That's where the guy is. Didn't see him. Then went to low power and then turned to the right. I think ... the Ehime Maru was perhaps further to the right, and as I swept in low power ... missed her. And that's the only explanation that I can think of as to why I missed the vessel.
Meanwhile, Seacrest was monitoring the ship's fire control console, which graphically displayed the relative position, bearing, and speed of any sonar contacts in the area. Seacrest had been monitoring three contacts on his screens, S-12, S-13 (Ehime Maru), and S-14. Absorbed in trying to get a clearer picture on S-14's location, Seacrest failed to report the bearing and range of S-13 (Ehime Maru) to Waddle during Waddle's periscope search, which Seacrest's monitors now showed was about 3,000 yards (2.7 km) away and closing. During Waddle's periscope search, Seacrest was busy operating other control room instruments and did not actively monitor his fire control displays. After the periscope search was over, and hearing Waddle's report of no visual contacts, Seacrest decided that his information for S-13 was incorrect and manually respotted the S-13 contact on his screen to a distance of 9,000 yards (8.2 km) away.
After completing the emergency dive at about 13:40, Waddle invited two of the civilian guests, John Hall, CEO of a Texas oil company, and Jack Clary, a free-lance sports writer from Massachusetts, to operate the controls for the emergency main ballast blow. Clary sat in the helmsman's chair and Hall stood at the high-pressure air valve levers, supervised closely by Greeneville crewmen. After the two civilians had taken their positions, at 13:42:25 Waddle ordered the maneuver executed, and they threw the control levers as instructed. The submarine began its rapid ascent toward the surface.
At 13:43:15, the rapidly ascending Greeneville surfaced directly under Ehime Maru (), and the submarine's rudder sliced Ehime Maru's hull from starboard to port. The people aboard Ehime Maru heard two loud noises and felt the ship shudder from two severe impacts. Ehime Maru's bridge crew looked aft and saw the submarine broach the water next to their ship. Within five seconds Ehime Maru lost power and began to sink. As Waddle watched through Greeneville's periscope, Ehime Maru stood almost vertically on its stern and sank in about five minutes as the people on the fishing ship scrambled to abandon ship.
### Emergency response
At 13:48, Greeneville radioed a distress call to COMSUBPAC at Pearl Harbor for assistance. COMSUBPAC notified the local United States Coast Guard (USCG) unit at 13:55 which began a search-and-rescue effort. The submarine maneuvered towards Ehime Maru's survivors to attempt a rescue. Weather conditions were unhelpful: 15- to 20-knot winds, which, in turn, were producing waves of 8 to 12 feet. Due to these rough seas, the submarine's main deck hatches could not be opened; the only outside access was through the top of the sail through its access trunk. Greeneville, moreover, was still low in the water because it normally took 30 minutes to pump out the remaining water in the ballast tanks after an emergency blow. As the heavy, partially submerged submarine bobbed in the ocean, it also displaced large waves that, in Waddle's opinion, threatened to capsize the life rafts in which Ehime Maru's survivors were gathering. Waddle decided that it would be safer to stand off the submarine from the group of survivors and wait for assistance to arrive. Ehime Maru's survivors, many of them struggling in the diesel fuel released from their sinking ship, were able to gather on the several life rafts that had deployed automatically as their ship sank.
A USCG helicopter arrived at 14:27, noted the survivors in the life rafts, and began searching for any survivors who might still be in the water. At 14:31 and 14:44 respectively, a USCG rigid-hulled inflatable boat and patrol boat arrived and administered first aid to the survivors in the rafts. Media helicopters also arrived during the rescue operation, and the incident was reported quickly by major news organizations. Of the 35 people aboard Ehime Maru (20 crew members, 13 students, and 2 teachers), the USCG rescued 26 people and took them to Oahu for medical treatment. Only one of the survivors had a serious injury, a broken clavicle; he was hospitalized for five days. Nine other people were missing, including four 17-year-old high school students and the two teachers. None of the nine missing were seen by any of the survivors, Greeneville crewmembers, or USCG personnel after the ship sank. Captain Ōnishi stated that the nine missing people were probably in the ship's galley and engine rooms when the ship sank. USCG and USN aircraft and ships searched the ocean around Ehime Maru's last location continuously for 22 days, until 2 March. Two Japanese civilian vessels also joined the search. No remains of the nine missing people were discovered during the search.
## Immediate aftermath
Soon after the incident occurred, Japanese Premier Yoshirō Mori was informed of the accident as he was playing golf in Japan. Acknowledging the message, Mori resumed his round of golf, ending it an hour and a half after the first message, an action for which he was later much criticized, owing in part to the use of stock photographs taken the previous summer showing Mori enjoying his round of golf.
Since the collision involved a commercial vessel, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had jurisdiction to conduct the investigation into the accident. An NTSB official, along with several USN and USCG officers, questioned Waddle and Pfeifer about the incident as soon as Greeneville moored at Pearl Harbor. That same day, Admiral Konetzni removed Waddle as captain of Greeneville and reassigned him to his staff pending the outcome of the accident investigation.
Two days after the sinking, on 11 February, U.S. President George W. Bush apologized for the accident on national television, stating, "I want to reiterate what I said to the prime minister of Japan: I'm deeply sorry about the accident that took place; our nation is sorry." Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also publicly apologized. The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Tom Foley, personally apologized to both Premier Mori and to the Emperor of Japan. The public apologies to the Japanese from the highest American officials caused resentment among some American veterans of the Pacific War and their families, as well as among Asian victims of Imperial Japanese aggression and occupation. Richard Cohen wrote a column in The Washington Post, saying "We've Apologized Enough to Japan", denounced the "hypocrisy" of Japan's recent gestures of compensation and remorse to some of Japan's World War II victims, which he said were offered "grudgingly", while noting that the U.S. had apologized profusely for the accidental collision.
On 11 February, during an "extremely emotional exchange", the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Thomas B. Fargo, personally apologized to families of the Ehime Maru's victims, who had arrived in Hawaii the day before. Several of the family members asked that Ehime Maru be raised from the ocean floor. Waddle had asked to accompany Fargo to apologize to the victims' families as well, but the COMSUBPAC public affairs office told him that he could not. The next day, the family members were taken by boat to view the accident site.
The perceived lack of remorse by Waddle, and reports in the Japanese media that Greeneville had made no effort to assist Ehime Maru's survivors as they waited for almost one hour for rescue angered many Japanese citizens, especially the family members of the missing. One Japanese family member publicly referred to Waddle as, "the most terrible criminal of them all". Another family member, referring to Waddle said, "If you're a man, you should fall on your knees and ask for our pardon!" In response, Waddle delivered letters of apology to the Japanese consulate in Hawaii for delivery to the victims' families during the last week of February.
Japanese government officials publicly expressed concern about the reports that civilians had been at Greeneville's controls during the collision. Japan's foreign minister, Yōhei Kōno, complained that U.S. officials had not provided details of the civilians' involvement, stating, "I cannot help but say it is an extremely grave situation if it were the case that the participation of civilians in the submarine's surfacing maneuver led to the accident."
In February 2001, vice chief of naval operations Admiral William Fallon was given Presidential special envoy status and dispatched to Japan to apologize for the collision. Fallon, along with Ambassador Tom Foley, met with family members of the victims at the Ambassador's official residence in Tokyo and in the Ehime Maru's home port of Uwajima, Ehime Prefecture, bowing deeply and expressing regret on behalf of the United States and President George W. Bush. His deferential show of contrition to the families, performed in front of news cameras, was widely credited with ameliorating a situation that had the potential to damage US-Japan relations.
## Damage to Greeneville
`Greeneville suffered some damage in the collision. Beginning at the 31-foot (9 m) mark on the submarine's rudder, surface tiles had been sheared off, exposing bare metal, and there were several dents on the rudder's leading edge, one of which had punctured the metal skin. A 24-foot (7 m) section of acoustic hull surface treatment tiles below the sail had also been sheared off.`
Greeneville was repaired in a drydock at Pearl Harbor at a cost of US\$2 million. After the repairs were completed on 18 April 2002, the submarine resumed operational status.
## Court of inquiry convenes
In addition to the NTSB investigation, the USN also initiated their own investigation on 10 February. USN Admiral Charles Griffiths was assigned to direct the investigation. Griffiths' team completed a preliminary inquiry report and submitted it to Admiral Fargo on 16 February. The next day, Fargo announced that the USN would convene a court of inquiry, the USN's highest form of administrative hearing.
A USN court of inquiry is similar to a grand jury investigation in civil court. The court has subpoena power and provides legal safeguards for the affected parties, such as the right to be represented by counsel. The court is a military investigative process and as such has no judge. Instead, three admirals comprise the court and make a report based on the evidence presented in the inquiry. Testimony and other evidence presented in the court can later be used in court-martial proceedings.
The inquiry panel into the accident consisted of Vice Admiral John B. Nathman and Rear Admirals Paul F. Sullivan and David M. Stone. At Fargo's invitation the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) sent Rear Admiral Isamu Ozawa to participate in the inquiry as a non-voting adviser. The three named "affected" parties of the inquiry were Waddle, Pfeifer, and Coen, who were present in the hearing room throughout the inquiry. Commander Mark Patton, a classmate of Waddle at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, twenty years ago, was quoted as saying "The general opinion on the waterfront was that it was important that he stand up and take responsibility. We wanted to see that happen. It was important for the public to see that happen. And he did that very well."
The court of inquiry began on 5 March 2001. Representing Waddle as counsel was Charles Gittins, who arrived in Hawaii on 4 March. Family members of the Ehime Maru victims were seated directly behind Waddle in the hearing room and throughout the inquiry frequently reacted very emotionally and vocally to evidence presented during the hearings.
The court called numerous witnesses, including Griffiths, Brandhuber, and Ōnishi. Ōnishi testified that large waves swept him overboard and far from his sinking ship, preventing him from assisting the rest of Ehime Maru's crew as they clung to the sinking ship. Afterwards, Waddle approached Ōnishi and apologized for the accident.
Waddle also apologized to several groups of Ehime Maru family members on 8 and 16 March. One of them, Naoko Nakata, wife of one of the missing crewmembers, asked Waddle to "please tell the truth in court". Soon thereafter, Waddle also apologized again during an interview with a Japanese television network.
Rear Admiral Albert H. Konetzni testified during the inquiry that Waddle and his crew had rushed into Greeneville's final maneuvers without taking enough time to ensure that no other vessels were in the vicinity. In a statement that was widely reported in the media, Konetzni looked at Waddle and said, "I'd like to go over there and punch him for not taking more time".
Seacrest was given testimonial immunity in exchange for his testimony. Pfeifer and Coen submitted unsworn statements to the court and, therefore, did not have to face cross-examination.
Waddle requested immunity in exchange for his offer to testify, but Fargo denied the request, stating that Waddle's testimony was not "essential" in determining the facts of the case. In spite of the denial of immunity, Waddle elected to testify for the court. Waddle stated later that he felt he needed to testify because he had promised some of the Ehime Maru family members that he would do so, he had heard that Greeneville's crew expected him to, and he wanted to get his side of the story into the record.
After hearing testimony from 31 witnesses, the court completed its hearings on 20 March. None of the civilian DVs were asked to testify. The inquiry report was submitted to Fargo on 20 April.
## Findings of the court
The court made several findings, including that Waddle failed to take positive action in response to the non-availability of the AVSDU, nine of the 13 watchstations in and around the control room were manned by substitute personnel, and that one of the sonar operators was unqualified to stand watch. The court also issued numerous opinions, including that the accident was caused by "a series and combination of individual negligence(s) onboard Greeneville," "artificial urgency" by Waddle to rush the submarine through its demonstration schedule as it began to run late, failure to follow standard procedures, the abbreviated periscope search, distractions and obstruction caused by the presence of the civilian guests, crew training deficiencies, overconfidence and complacency, and Waddle's not paying enough attention to ship contact information. The court found that, although Brandhuber was the senior officer present on Greeneville, Waddle as captain was solely responsible for the safe navigation of the submarine. The inquiry report went into great detail on the purpose and rules surrounding the USN's DVE program.
The court recommended against court-martial for the officers involved because of an absence of any "criminal intent or deliberate misconduct." Instead, the court recommended non-judicial punishment for Waddle and Seacrest and administrative action for Brandhuber, Pfeifer, Coen, Greeneville's chief of the boat MMCM/SS Douglas Coffman, and sonar supervisor STS1/SS Edward McGiboney. The court recommended that the USN DVE program continue.
Relatives of Ehime Maru's crewmembers were angry that none of the USN personnel involved would be court-martialed and that Waddle could remain in the USN and would retain his retirement pension. Ryosuke Terata, father of one of the missing students, said with regard to Waddle, "If (he were) in Japan, he would be fired and indicted on charges such as professional negligence resulting in death."
On 23 April, Waddle received an admiral's mast (a form of USN non-judicial punishment) from Fargo at the USN Pacific Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor. Fargo pronounced Waddle guilty of dereliction of duty and improper hazarding of a vessel. He fined Waddle a half-month's pay for two months (fine delayed for six months, and waived after the six months with good behavior), gave him a verbal reprimand, and "made clear that [Waddle's] resignation was expected". Coen also received an admiral's mast in which he was "counseled for failing to execute his duties to ensure the safe navigation of the ship and to properly supervise watch personnel in the control room". Seacrest was admonished at a captain's mast, and Brandhuber, Pfeifer, Coffman, and McGiboney received formal administrative admonishments. The masts and administrative admonishments were documented and placed in the servicemembers' military records, perhaps affecting their future chances for promotions and assignments. Waddle, who had been working at a Navy desk job since being relieved of command, formally retired from the USN on 1 October 2001. Waddle did receive interviews from several private corporations who "put more value in the way Waddle handled himself during the grueling, 12-day court of inquiry than they did in any sort of blame for the collision.". After 10 months of unemployment, Waddle worked as a project manager for an energy company in North Carolina and, in July 2004, started his own business as a consultant, executive coach, and public speaker.
## Salvage and recovery
On 16 February 2001, the USN Supervisor of Salvage and Diving (SUPSALV) and Submarine Development Squadron 5 (SUBDEVRON 5), using the Scorpio remotely piloted underwater vehicle (ROV), located Ehime Maru in 2,000 feet (610 m) of water on the ocean bottom (). During the next two weeks, the USN used the Scorpio and the Deep Drone ROVs to search the ocean bottom around Ehime Maru for the remains of any of its missing crewmembers, without success.
After assessing the technical feasibility and environmental effect of raising Ehime Maru from the ocean bottom, the U.S. government, in June 2001, decided to proceed with recovering the ship from the ocean floor. The USN contracted the Dutch company Smit International and Crowley Maritime Corp., headquartered in Washington state, to salvage the wreck of Ehime Maru. After consultation between the contractors, representatives from the Japanese government, and U.S. government officials, the decision was made not to raise Ehime Maru all the way to the surface but to lift and carry it underwater to shallow water near Oahu. Once there, divers could enter the ship. The operation would be the first to lift something of that size from such a depth. USN Rear Admiral William Klemm directed the recovery operation.
Using the Phoenix III ROV, contractors, beginning on 20 July 2001, first removed Ehime Maru's mast and other items on the ship's decks that could interfere with the lifting operation. Assisted by technical experts from Japan, including one from the company that built Ehime Maru, the Rockwater II contract diving support vessel prepared the ship for lifting beginning the first week of August. After some difficulty, Ehime Maru was lifted off the ocean floor by Rockwater II on 5 October and moved slowly to a location closer to shore. On 14 October the wreck was set down in 115 ft (35 m) of water one statute mile (1.6 km) south of Honolulu International Airport's reef runway.
On 15 October, the first team of USN divers from Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit ONE (MDSU-1) began assessing the sunken vessel. Working in low- to zero-visibility conditions, 66 MDSU-1 and 30 Japanese JMSDF divers from the submarine rescue ship JS Chihaya conducted 526 dives over 29 days, searching the wreck. Ōnishi, relatives of some of the missing crewmembers, and several Japanese government officials observed the operation from the dive support ships. The divers recovered the bodies of eight of the nine missing people (three crewmembers, four students, and the two teachers), many personal effects, and several items unique to the ship, such as its nameplate, bell, anchors, and helm.
`After the recovery was complete, on 25 November, Ehime Maru was lifted, towed back out to sea suspended about 90 feet (27 m) below the towing barge, and scuttled in 6,000 feet (1,800 m) of water 12 nautical miles (22 km) south of Barbers Point. The event was witnessed by three of Ehime Maru's victims' families on board Chihaya. The total cost of the salvage operations was about $60 million.`
## Compensation
On 10 April 2002, the USN signed an agreement to pay the Ehime Prefectural Government US\$11.47 million in compensation for the sinking of Ehime Maru. Some \$8.87 million was to help pay to replace the ship, and the remainder was to pay for counseling and financial aid for the survivors as well as to pay for a memorial ceremony for the victims.
On 14 November 2002, the USN agreed to pay \$13.9 million in compensation to 33 of the 35 families of victims or injured survivors. The remaining two families accepted a \$2.6 million settlement from the USN on 31 January 2003. Before accepting the settlement, the two families had asked for face-to-face apologies from the USN and Waddle, a full investigation into the collision, a reasonable compensation offer, and a promise from the USN to help prevent similar accidents in the future. Masumi Terata, whose teenage son Yusuke died in the accident, said that she was happy that the settlement was behind them, but added that, "My true feeling is that if possible, I want to see my son one more time."
## Waddle's trip to Japan
On 14 December 2002, Waddle, accompanied by Charles Gittins, traveled to Japan to apologize personally to the victims' families. On 15 December, Waddle visited the Ehime Maru memorial at Uwajima Fisheries High School and placed a wreath of white lilies before a monument to the dead, bowed in silence and then read the victims' names aloud. No local officials were present during Waddle's visit, citing statements from some victims' families that they did not want Waddle to visit. Later that day, Waddle met with some of the families of the victims and with some of the survivors. The next day, in Tokyo, Waddle met with Masumi Terata. Speaking of her meeting with Waddle, Terata stated, "I am first and foremost the family member of a victim and Mr. Waddle is first and foremost a victimizer. But when I saw Mr. Waddle as a person who was crying and apologizing, I thought he was apologizing from the heart."
In a press conference on 17 December, Gittins criticized the USN for their continued insistence that Waddle not come to Japan to visit the victims' families. Said Gittins, "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the Navy did not want Scott to come meet with the families and do what is morally right and what is understood in Japanese culture to be the right thing to do". Gittins added that he had received emails from the USN as recently as the week before urging Waddle not to make the visit. Gittins stated that the reason that it took two years for Waddle to make the visit to Japan was because Waddle was forbidden to do so while he was still in the USN and because of financial constraints and fear of litigation after his retirement.
## Effect on Japanese–American relations
After the sinking of Ehime Maru, many Japanese people, including government officials, questioned why civilians were allowed in Greeneville's control room during maneuvers that could place other, uninvolved, vessels at risk. Also, the Japanese expressed concern that the United States Navy did not immediately take full responsibility for the accident, appeared at first to try to conceal information about the DVE program, and did not court martial Waddle or have him personally apologize immediately after the accident. The subsequent effort by the U.S. government to retrieve the victims' remains from the sunken wreck, numerous apologies from U.S. government representatives and Waddle, and the compensation paid to the Ehime government and to the victims' families appear to have assuaged much of the anger directed toward the U.S. government and military. Many Japanese, both government and private citizens, however, continue to demand the U.S. government to make more effort to reduce or eliminate serious accidents and crimes involving U.S. military personnel.
Although the United States and Japan have been strong allies since the end of World War II, the accident involving Ehime Maru showed that the relationship is not always completely harmonious, especially with regard to incidents in which U.S. military personnel or assets injure or kill Japanese citizens or damage their property. In response to crimes committed by U.S. servicemembers against Japanese citizens, such as the 1995 Okinawan rape incident, Japanese citizens and some Japanese government officials have questioned the equality of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan and the issue of responsibility and accountability by the U.S. government concerning the actions of its military members in Japan. In addition, the Japanese have questioned the U.S. commitment to safe operations of its military assets in light of several accidents, including aircraft crashes and other ship collisions that have injured or killed Japanese citizens.
## Later events
Acting on a request from the Japanese government, the State of Hawaii established a non-profit group, the Ehime Maru Memorial Association, on 11 November 2001, to coordinate the activities of placing an Ehime Maru memorial at a site in Hawaii. The monument to the ship was completed on 9 February 2002, at Kakaako Waterfront Park near Honolulu. Each year since the accident, memorial ceremonies have been held on 9 February at Uwajima Fisheries High School in Ehime and at the Ehime Maru monument in Hawaii.
Shipbuilders in Imabari, Ehime Prefecture, began construction on a new Ehime Maru on 17 April 2002. Upon completion, the new ship sailed to Hawaii, arriving on 17 June 2003. In a ceremony at the Ehime Maru monument, the principal of Uwajima Fishery at the time of the disaster, Kazumitsu Joko (上甲一光 Jōkō Kazumitsu), read a message from Moriyuki Kato, the governor of Ehime Prefecture, addressed to the Hawaiian people. The message stated, in part, "Since the Ehime Maru tragic accident two years ago, the people of Hawaii have shown compassion and warm support."
The NTSB released its report on the accident on 19 October 2005. The NTSB report largely confirmed the USN's inquiry findings, including that Waddle was primarily responsible for the collision. The NTSB report, however, was more critical of the distractions caused by the DV civilians on Greeneville that contributed to the accident. The report concluded that the USN had recognized the "detrimental operating conditions" aboard Greeneville and had taken "additional measures to address the safety of operations" on submarines, including additional restrictions on DVE visitors.
On the 20th anniversary of the incident in February 2021, former commander Scott Waddle published an open letter of apology.
## See also
- INS Vindhyagiri (F42)
- List of submarine incidents since 2000
- USS Hartford and USS New Orleans collision
- USS Fitzgerald and MV ACX Crystal collision, 2017
- Daigo Fukuryū Maru
- 1959 Okinawa F-100 crash
- 1964 Machida F-8 crash
- 1977 Yokohama F-4 crash
- FV Antares |
7,428,368 | Alloxylon flammeum | 1,171,251,597 | Species of tree in the family Proteaceae | [
"Alloxylon",
"Flora of Queensland",
"Garden plants of Australia",
"Ornamental trees",
"Plants described in 1991",
"Proteales of Australia",
"Taxa named by Michael Crisp",
"Trees of Australia",
"Vulnerable flora of Australia"
]
| Alloxylon flammeum, commonly known as the Queensland tree waratah or red silky oak, is a medium-sized tree of the family Proteaceae found in the Queensland tropical rain forests of northeastern Australia. It has shiny green elliptical leaves up to 18 cm (7.1 in) long, and prominent orange-red inflorescences that appear from August to October, followed by rectangular woody seed pods that ripen in February and March. Juvenile plants have large (up to 25 cm (9.8 in) long) deeply lobed pinnate leaves. Previously known as Oreocallis wickhamii, the initial specimen turned out to be a different species to the one cultivated and hence a new scientific name was required. Described formally by Peter Weston and Mike Crisp in 1991, A. flammeum was designated the type species of the genus Alloxylon. This genus contains the four species previously classified in Oreocallis that are found in Australasia.
Alloxylon flammeum is a canopy or emergent tree of the Mabi rainforest community of north Queensland. Its terminal tubular flowers indicate that the species is pollinated by birds. Readily adaptable to cultivation, Alloxylon flammeum prefers a site with good drainage and responds well to extra moisture and fertilisers low in phosphorus. It is listed nationally as vulnerable under the Australian Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) as most of its habitat has been cleared for agriculture and logging.
## Description
In nature, this is a rainforest tree that can reach 33 m (108 ft) in height with a diameter at breast height (dbh) of 0.6 m (24 in), although in cultivation 10 m (33 ft) is more likely. The trunk has light grey bark with brown lenticels. New branchlets and leaves are hairy. The green foliage consists of several distinct juvenile and adult leaf forms, which are arranged alternately along the stems. Very young plants begin with their first two to four leaves having two or three lobes, but then have narrow elliptic leaves with entire margins, measuring 6.5 to 18 cm (2.6 to 7.1 in) long and 1.3–2.2 cm (0.51–0.87 in) wide. These are then succeeded by pinnate juvenile leaves that have two to nine lobes arising at 30 to 40 degrees forwards, and reach 50 cm (20 in) long. They have prominent midveins along the midline of the main leaf and the lobes. The elliptic or obovate (egg-shaped) adult leaves are 8–25 cm (3.1–9.8 in) long and up to 4.5 cm (1.8 in) wide, and sit on 1.5 to 2.5 cm (0.59 to 0.98 in) long petioles.
Occurring in spring (August to October), the bright red or orange-red inflorescences are terminal and well displayed, and consist of anywhere from 10 to 52 individual flowers split into smaller groups of 2 to 20 flowers, arranged in a corymb. The flowers sit atop stalks (known as pedicels) up to 3.5 cm (1.4 in) in length, which arise in pairs off main horizontal stalks within the inflorescence. Each flower consists of a tubular perianth up to 4 cm (1.6 in) long, which partly splits along one side at anthesis to release the thick style. The stigma is contained within a slanting disc-like structure at the tip of the style. The tubular perianth splits into four segments at its tip, and the anther lies in the concave parts within each of these segments. The pedicel and the outer surface of the perianth are pubescent (covered in short fine fur). Flowers are followed by woody rectangular seed pods that sit on long stalks, and are 7–10 cm (2.8–3.9 in) long. Each pod contains 8 to 10 seeds, and is ripe in February and March. Each seed is separated from the others by a membranous separator, and has a long rectangular wing, which is much longer than the seed itself. The seedlings have obovate cotyledons that are 0.8–1 cm (0.31–0.39 in) wide by 1 cm (0.39 in) long.
Alloxylon flammeum can be distinguished from the co-occurring Alloxylon wickhamii by its hairy stems and petioles. It also has brighter flowers than the latter species. The New Guinean species A. brachycarpum resembles A. flammeum but has duller flowers, leaves that are shorter and wider, and fewer hairs on its perianth. A. pinnatum has pinnate (lobed) adult leaves and larger inflorescences made up of 50 to 140 individual flowers. It also has crimson pollen rather than the yellow of A. flammeum.
## Taxonomy
For many years Alloxylon flammeum was mistakenly known as Embothrium (and later Oreocallis) wickhamii—Queensland botanist Frederick Manson Bailey had illustrated it using Embothrium wickhamii in the Queensland Agricultural Journal in 1899. Ferdinand von Mueller had described what is now known as Alloxylon wickhamii but also collected material of A. flammeum at Trinity Bay in 1881, not realising it was a separate species. It was only in the 1980s that botanists realised there were two species in the region—Oreocallis wickhamii and what became known as Oreocallis sp. nova. Peter Weston and Mike Crisp of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney reviewed and recognised the Australian members of the genus Oreocallis as distinct from their South American counterparts, and hence reallocated them to the new genus Alloxylon in 1991. They coined the binomial name of Alloxylon flammeum, the type material having been collected by Garry Sankowsky and Peter Radke from Tolga Scrub in August 1987. Weston and Crisp designated it the type species of the genus Alloxylon. Aside from tree waratah, it has also been called the satin oak, pink silky oak, satin silky oak, red silky oak, red oak, lowland bull oak, and Queensland waratah. The genus name is derived from Ancient Greek allo- "other" or "strange" and xylon "wood" and refers to their unusual cell architecture compared with the related genera Telopea and Oreocallis. The species name flammeum is Latin for "flame-coloured".
Alloxylon flammeum and the other three tree waratah species lie in the subtribe Embothriinae, along with the true waratahs (Telopea), South American Oreocallis, and Chilean firetree (Embothrium coccineum) from South America. Almost all these species have red terminal flowers, and hence the subtribe's origin and floral appearance most likely predate the splitting of Gondwana into Australia, Antarctica, and South America over 60 million years ago. The position, colour and tubular shape of the flowers suggest they are bird-pollinated, and have been so since the Eocene radiation of nectar-feeding birds such as honeyeaters. Cladistic analysis of morphological features within the Embothriinae showed A. flammeum and A. brachycarpum to be sister species, with A. wickhamii as their next closest relative. A. flammeum has yellow pollen grains, like A. brachycarpum and A. wickhamii but unlike all other members of the Embothriinae.
## Distribution and habitat
A plant of the Wet Tropics bioregion, Alloxylon flammeum is found on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland at altitudes of 700 to 820 m (2,300 to 2,700 ft) above sea level. Its range is from Danbulla to the upper Barron River, though most of its rainforest habitat has been cleared for agriculture, and it is found in protected remnants such as Mount Hypipamee National Park, Danbulla National Park, Crater Lakes National Park, Curtain Fig Tree National Park, and Hallorans Hill Conservation Park. Found on basalt- or granite-based soil, it is a component of complex notophyll vine forest or rainforest, where it is a canopy or emergent tree. This forest, also known as Mabi forest, has an uneven canopy layer to around 45 m (148 ft) and significant scrub understory. Here Alloxylon flammeum is found with such species as candlenut (Aleurites rockinghamensis), Argyrodendron spp., fishtail lawyer cane (Calamus caryotoides), rose maple (Cryptocarya onoprienkoana), shining-leaved stinging tree (Dendrocnide photiniphylla), fig trees (Ficus spp.), Queensland maple (Flindersia brayleyana), cabbage crowsfoot (Franciscodendron laurifolium), northern brush mahogany (Geissois biagiana), Atherton turkey bush (Hodgkinsonia frutescens), and red cedar (Toona ciliata).
### Conservation status
Alloxylon flammeum is listed nationally as vulnerable under the Australian Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), which indicates that there is a high risk it will become extinct in the wild in the mid-term future. Before the establishment of the EPBC Act, it was, and currently remains, listed as vulnerable under the state-based Nature Conservation Act 1992. Furthermore, it was listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1997. Most of its habitat has been cleared for agriculture and development. Remaining stands in protected areas are highly fragmented. Furthermore, plants in cultivation are likely to come from a limited genetic pool. With under 2% of its original extent remaining, the rainforest is threatened by invasive plants and grazing by feral and domestic animals.
## Cultivation
Although it is not widely cultivated, Alloxylon flammeum has proven to be by far the most hardy and adaptable (as well as the showiest) member of the genus Alloxylon, and has been grown successfully in as cool a climate as Victoria. It does best in a well-drained soil rich in organic material but low in phosphorus with some shelter when young. Applying mulch to the soil around the plant and extra water in dry spells is beneficial. Fertilisers high in phosphorus content can damage the plant, though fertilisers specifically for Australian native plants can be used. Yellowing of new leaves may indicate chlorosis from iron deficiency and can be remedied with iron chelate or iron sulphate. Its flowers attract birds to gardens. A large tree grows in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney. It is thought that there are more plants in cultivation than there are in the wild.
Propagation is generally by seed although semi-hardened cuttings have also been successful. Cuttings can be slow to strike, and the resulting plants may have weak root systems early on and need to be supported with stakes. Semi-hardened cuttings have been most successful in experiments applying the rooting hormone indole-3-butyric acid at 8000 milligrams per litre concentration, intermittent misting, and a warmer root temperature of 24 °C (75 °F). Plants grown from seed may take seven or eight years to flower, with flowering occurring soon after the foliage changes from juvenile to adult leaves. An alternative method used has been to graft mature scions onto young stock to combine a strong root system with material capable of flowering quickly. The species has also been considered as a rootstock for the considerably harder to grow A. pinnatum. Alloxylon flammeum has potential as a cut flower crop. Its soft silky timber resembles that of oak and is highly regarded. |
1,092,359 | Cretoxyrhina | 1,172,255,254 | Extinct genus of shark | [
"Albian genus first appearances",
"Campanian genus extinctions",
"Cretaceous fish of Europe",
"Cretaceous sharks",
"Cretoxyrhinidae",
"Fossil taxa described in 1835",
"Fossil taxa described in 1958",
"Late Cretaceous fish of Asia",
"Late Cretaceous fish of North America",
"Mooreville Chalk"
]
| Cretoxyrhina (/krɪˌtɒksiˈrhaɪnə/; meaning 'Cretaceous sharp-nose') is an extinct genus of large mackerel shark that lived about 107 to 73 million years ago during the late Albian to late Campanian of the Late Cretaceous. The type species, C. mantelli, is more commonly referred to as the Ginsu shark, first popularized in reference to the Ginsu knife, as its theoretical feeding mechanism is often compared with the "slicing and dicing" when one uses the knife. Cretoxyrhina is traditionally classified as the likely sole member of the family Cretoxyrhinidae but other taxonomic placements have been proposed, such as within the Alopiidae and Lamnidae.
Measuring up to 8 meters (26 ft) in length and weighing over 4,944 kilograms (4.866 long tons; 5.450 short tons), Cretoxyrhina was one of the largest sharks of its time. Having a similar appearance and build to the modern great white shark, it was an apex predator in its ecosystem and preyed on a large variety of marine animals including mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, sharks and other large fish, pterosaurs, and occasionally dinosaurs. Its teeth, up to 8 centimeters (3 in) in height, were razor-like and had thick enamel built for stabbing and slicing prey. Cretoxyrhina was also among the fastest-swimming sharks, with hydrodynamic calculations suggesting burst speed capabilities of up to 70 kilometers per hour (43 mph). It has been speculated that Cretoxyrhina hunted by lunging at its prey at high speeds to inflict powerful blows, similar to the great white shark today, and relied on strong eyesight to do so.
Since the late 19th century, several fossils of exceptionally well-preserved skeletons of Cretoxyrhina have been discovered in Kansas. Studies have successfully calculated its life history using vertebrae from some of the skeletons. Cretoxyrhina grew rapidly during early ages and reached sexual maturity at around four to five years of age. Its lifespan has been calculated to extend to nearly forty years. Anatomical analysis of the Cretoxyrhina skeletons revealed that the shark possessed facial and optical features most similar to that in thresher sharks and crocodile sharks and had a hydrodynamic build that suggested the use of regional endothermy.
As an apex predator, Cretoxyrhina played a critical role in the marine ecosystems it inhabited. It was a cosmopolitan genus and its fossils have been found worldwide, although most frequently in the Western Interior Seaway area of North America. It preferred mainly subtropical to temperate pelagic environments but was known in waters as cold as 5 °C (41 °F). Cretoxyrhina saw its peak in size by the Coniacian, but subsequently experienced a continuous decline until its extinction during the Campanian. One factor in this demise may have been increasing pressure from competition with predators that arose around the same time, most notably the giant mosasaur Tylosaurus. Other possible factors include the gradual disappearance of the Western Interior Seaway.
## Taxonomy
### Research history
Cretoxyrhina was first described by the English paleontologist Gideon Mantell from eight C. mantelli teeth he collected from the Southerham Grey Pit near Lewes, East Sussex. In his 1822 book The fossils of the South Downs, he identified them as teeth pertaining to two species of locally-known modern sharks. Mantell identified the smaller teeth as from the common smooth-hound and the larger teeth as from the smooth hammerhead, expressing some hesitation to the latter. In 1843, Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz published the third volume of his book Recherches sur les poissons fossiles, where he reexamined Mantell's eight teeth. Using them and another tooth from the collection of the Strasbourg Museum (whose exact location was unspecified but also came from England), he concluded that the fossils actually pertained to a single species of extinct shark that held strong dental similarities with the three species then classified in the now-invalid genus Oxyrhina, O. hastalis, O. xiphodon, and O. desorii. Agassiz placed the species in the genus Oxyrhina but noted that the much thicker root of its teeth made enough of a difference to be a distinct species and scientifically classified the shark under the taxon Oxyrhina mantellii and named in honor of Mantell.
During the late 19th century, paleontologists described numerous species that are now synonymized as Cretoxyrhina mantelli. According to some, there may have been as much as almost 30 different synonyms of O. mantelli at the time. Most of these species were derived from teeth that represented variations of C. mantelli but deviated from the exact characteristics of the syntypes. For example, in 1870, French paleontologist Henri Sauvage identified teeth from France that greatly resembled the O. mantelli syntypes from England. The teeth also included lateral cusplets (small enameled cusps that appear at the base of the tooth's main crown), which are not present in the syntypes, which led him to describe the teeth under the species name Otodus oxyrinoides based on the lateral cusplets. In 1873, American paleontologist Joseph Leidy identified teeth from Kansas and Mississippi and described them under the species name Oxyrhina extenta. These teeth were broader and more robust than the O. mantelli syntypes from England.
This all changed with the discoveries of some exceptionally well-preserved skeletons of the shark in the Niobrara Formation in West Kansas. Charles H. Sternberg discovered the first skeleton in 1890, which he described in a 1907 paper:
> The remarkable thing about this specimen is that the vertebral column, though of cartilaginous material, was almost complete, and that the large number of 250 teeth were in position. When Chas. R. Eastman, of Harvard, described this specimen, it proved so complete as to destroy nearly thirty synonyms used to name the animal, and derived from many teeth found in former times.
Charles R. Eastman published his analysis of the skeleton in 1894. In the paper, he reconstructed the dentition based on the skeleton's disarticulated tooth set. Using the reconstruction, Eastman identified the many extinct shark species and found that their fossils are actually different tooth types of O. mantelli, which he all moved into the species. This skeleton, which Sternberg had sold to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, was destroyed in 1944 by allied bombing during World War II. In 1891, Sternberg's son George F. Sternberg discovered a second O. mantelli skeleton now housed in the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History as KUVP 247. This skeleton was reported to measure 6.1 meters (20 ft) in length and consists of a partial vertebral column with skeletal remains of a Xiphactinus as stomach contents and partial jaws with about 150 teeth visible. This skeleton was considered to be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of that year due to the unexpected preservation of cartilage. George F. Sternberg would later discover more O. mantelli skeletons throughout his career. His most notable finds were FHSM VP-323 and FHSM VP-2187, found in 1950 and 1965 respectively. The former is a partial skeleton consisting of a well-preserved set of jaws, a pair of five gills, and some vertebra while the latter is a near-complete skeleton with an almost complete vertebral column and an exceptionally preserved skull holding much of the cranial elements, jaws, teeth, a set of scales, and fragments of pectoral girdles and fins in their natural positions. Both skeletons are currently housed in the Sternberg Museum of Natural History. In 1968, a collector named Tim Basgall discovered another notable skeleton that, similar to FHSM VP-2187, also consisted of a near-complete vertebral column and a partially preserved skull. This fossil is housed in the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History as KUVP 69102.
In 1958, Soviet paleontologist Leonid Glickman found that the dental design of O. mantelli reconstructed by Eastman made it distinct enough to warrant a new genus—Cretoxyrhina. He also identified a second species of Cretoxyrhina based on some of the earlier Cretoxyrhina teeth, which he named Cretoxyrhina denticulata. Originally, Glickman designated C. mantelli as the type species, but he abruptly replaced the position with another taxon identified as 'Isurus denticulatus' without explanation in a 1964 paper, a move now rejected as an invalid taxonomic amendment. This nevertheless led Russian paleontologist Viktor Zhelezko to erroneously invalidate the genus Cretoxyrhina in a 2000 paper by synonymizing 'Isurus denticulatus' (and thus the genus Cretoxyrhina as a whole) with another taxon identified as 'Pseudoisurus tomosus'''. Zhelezko also described a new species congeneric with C. mantelli based on tooth material from Kazakhstan, which he identified as Pseudoisurus vraconensis accordingly to his taxonomic reassessment. A 2013 study led by Western Australian Museum curator and paleontologist Mikael Siverson corrected the taxonomic error, reinstating the genus Cretoxyrhina and moving 'P'. vraconensis into it. In 2010, British and Canadian paleontologists Charlie Underwood and Stephen Cumbaa described Telodontaspis agassizensis from teeth found in Lake Agassiz in Manitoba that were previously identified as juvenile Cretoxyrhina teeth. This species was reaffirmed into the genus Cretoxyrhina by a 2013 study led by American paleontologist Michael Newbrey using additional fossil material of the same species found in Western Australia.
Between 1997 and 2008, paleontologist Kenshu Shimada published a series of papers where he analyzed the skeletons of C. mantelli including those found by the Sternbergs using modernized techniques to extensively research the possible biology of Cretoxyrhina. Some of his works include the development of more accurate dental, morphological, physiological, and paleoecological reconstructions, ontogenetic studies, and morphological-variable based phylogenetic studies on Cretoxyrhina. Shimada's research on Cretoxyrhina helped shed new light on the understandings of the shark and, through his new methods, other extinct animals.
### Etymology
Cretoxyrhina is a portmanteau of the word creto (short for Cretaceous) prefixed to the genus Oxyrhina, which is derived from the Ancient Greek ὀξύς (oxús, "sharp") and ῥίς (rhís, "nose"). When put together they mean "Cretaceous sharp-nose", although Cretoxyrhina is believed to have had a rather blunt snout. The type species name mantelli translates to "from Mantell", which Louis Agassiz named in honor of English paleontologist Gideon Mantell for supplying him the syntypes of the species. The species name denticulata is derived from the Latin word denticulus (small tooth) and suffix āta (possession of), together meaning "having small teeth". This is a reference to the appearance of lateral cusplets in most of the teeth in C. denticulata. The species vraconensis derived from the word vracon and the Latin ensis (from), meaning "from Vracon", which is a reference to the Vraconian substage of the Albian stage in which the species was discovered. The species name agassizensis is derived from the name Agassiz and the Latin ensis (from), meaning "from Agassiz", named after Lake Agassiz where the species was discovered. Coincidentally, the lake itself is named in honor of Louis Agassiz. The common name Ginsu shark, originally coined in 1999 by paleontologists Mike Everhart and Kenshu Shimada, is a reference to the Ginsu knife, as the theoretical feeding mechanisms of C. mantelli was often compared with the "slicing and dicing" when one uses the knife.
### Phylogeny and evolution
Cretoxyrhina bore a resemblance to the modern great white shark in size, shape and ecology, but the two sharks are not closely related, and their similarities are a result of convergent evolution. Cretoxyrhina has been traditionally grouped within the Cretoxyrhinidae, a family of lamnoid sharks that traditionally included other genera resulting in a paraphyletic or polyphyletic family. Siverson (1999) remarked that Cretoxyrhinidae was used as a 'wastebasket taxon' for Cretaceous and Paleogene sharks and declared that Cretoxyrhina was the only valid member of the family.
Cretoxyrhina contains four valid species: C. vraconensis, C. denticulata, C. agassizensis, and C. mantelli. These species represent a chronospecies. The earliest fossils of Cretoxyrhina are dated about 107 million years old and belong to C. vraconensis. The genus would progress by C. vraconensis evolving into C. denticulata during the Early Cenomanian which evolved into C. agassizensis during the Mid-Cenomanian which in turn evolved into C. mantelli during the Late-Cenomanian. It is notable that C. agassizensis continued until the Mid-Turonian and was briefly contemporaneous with C. mantelli. This progression was characterized by the reduction of lateral cusplets and the increasing size and robustness of teeth. The Late-Albian–Mid-Turonian interval sees mainly the reduction of lateral cusplets; C. vraconensis possessed lateral cusplets in all teeth except for a few in the anterior position, which would gradually become restricted only to the back lateroposteriors in adults by the end of the interval in C. mantelli. The Late Cenomanian–Coniacian interval was characterized by a rapid increase in tooth (and body) size, significant decrease of crown/height-crown/width ratio, and a transition from a tearing-type to a cutting-type tooth form. Tooth size of C. mantelli individuals inside the Western Interior Seaway peaked around 86 Ma during the latest Coniacian and then begins to slowly decline. In Europe, this peak takes place earlier during the Late Turonian. The youngest fossil of C. mantelli was found in the Bearpaw Formation of Alberta, dating as 73.2 million years old. A single tooth identified as Cretoxyrhina sp. was recovered from the nearby Horseshoe Canyon Formation and dated as 70.44 million years old, suggesting that Cretoxyrhina may have survived into the Maastrichtian. However, the Horseshoe Canyon Formation has only brackish water deposits despite Cretoxyrhina being a marine shark, making a likely possibility that the fossil was reworked from an older layer.
Phylogenetic studies through morphological data conducted by Shimada in 2005 suggested that Cretoxyrhina may alternatively be congeneric with the genus of the modern thresher sharks; the study also stated that the results are premature and may be inaccurate and recommended that Cretoxyrhina is kept within the family Cretoxyrhinidae, mainly citing the lack of substantial data for it during the analysis.
Another possible model for Cretoxyrhina evolution, proposed in 2014 by paleontologist Cajus Diedrich, suggests that C. mantelli was congeneric with the mako sharks of the genus Isurus and was part of an extended Isurus lineage beginning as far the Aptian stage in the Early Cretaceous. According to this model, the Isurus lineage was initiated by 'Isurus appendiculatus' (Cretolamna appendiculata), which evolved into Isurus denticulatus (Cretoxyrhina mantelli ) in the Mid-Cenomanian, then 'Isurus mantelli' (Cretoxyrhina mantelli ) at the beginning of the Coniacian, then Isurus schoutedenti during the Paleocene, then Isurus praecursor, where the rest of the Isurus lineage continues. The study claimed that the absence of corresponding fossils during the Maastrichtian (72–66 Ma) was not a result of a premature extinction of C. mantelli, but merely a gap in the fossil record. Shimada and fellow paleontologist Phillip Sternes published a poster in 2018 which voiced doubt over the credibility of this proposal, noting that the study's interpretation is largely based on data that had been arbitrarily selected and failed to cite either Shimada (1997) or Shimada (2005), which are key papers regarding the systematic position of C. mantelli.
## Biology
### Morphology
#### Dentition
Distinguishing characteristics of Cretoxyrhina teeth include a nearly symmetrical or slanted triangular shape, razor-like and non-serrated cutting edges, visible tooth necks (bourlette), and a thick enamel coating. The dentition of Cretoxyrhina possesses the basic dental characteristics of a mackerel shark, with tooth rows closely spaced without any overlap. Anterior teeth are straight and near-symmetrical, while lateroposterior teeth are slanted. The side of the tooth facing the mouth is convex and possesses massive protuberance and nutrient grooves on the root, whereas the labial side, which faces outwards, is flat or slightly swollen. Juveniles possessed lateral cusplets in all teeth, and C. vraconensis consistently retained them in adulthood. Lateral cusplets were retained only up to all lateroposterior teeth in adulthood in C. denticulata and C. agassizensis and only up to the back lateroposterior teeth in C. mantelli. The lateral cusplets of C. vraconensis and C. denticulata are round, while in C. agassizensis are sharpened to a point. The anterior teeth of C. vraconensis measure 2.1–3.5 centimeters (0.8–1.4 in) in height, while the largest known tooth of C. denticulata measures 3 centimeters (1.2 in). C. mantelli teeth are larger, measuring 3–4 centimeters (1–2 in) in average slant height. The largest tooth discovered from this species may have measured up to 8 centimeters (3 in).
The dentition of C. mantelli is among the best-known of all extinct sharks, thanks to fossil skeletons like FHSM VP-2187, which consists of a near-complete articulated dentition. Other C. mantelli skeletons, such as KUVP-247 and KUVP-69102, also include partial jaws with some teeth in their natural positions, some of which were not present in more complete skeletons like FHSM VP-2187. Using these specimens, the dental formula was reconstructed by Shimada (1997) and revised by Shimada (2002), it was . This means that from front to back, C. mantelli had: four symphysials (small teeth located in the symphysis of a jaw), two anteriors, four intermediates, and eleven or more lateroposteriors for the upper jaw and possibly one symphysial, two anteriors, one intermediate, and fifteen or more lateroposteriors for the lower jaw. The structure of the tooth row shows a dental structure suited for a feeding behavior similar to modern mako sharks, having large spear-like anteriors to stab and anchor prey and curved lateroposteriors to cut it to bite-size pieces, a mechanism often informally described as "slicing and dicing" by paleontologists. In 2011, paleontologists Jim Bourdon and Mike Everhart reconstructed the dentition of multiple C. mantelli individuals based on their associated tooth sets. They discovered that two of these reconstructions show some notable differences in the size of the first intermediate (I1) tooth and lateral profiles, concluding that these differences could possibly represent sexual dimorphism or individual variations.
#### Skull
Analysis of skull and scale patterns suggests that C. mantelli had a conical head with a dorsally flat and wide skull. The rostrum does not extend much forward from the frontal margin of the braincase, suggesting that the snout was blunt. Similar to modern crocodile sharks and thresher sharks, C. mantelli had proportionally large eyes, with the orbit roughly taking up one-third of the entire skull length, giving it acute vision. As a predator, good eyesight was important when hunting the large prey Cretoxyrhina fed on. In contrast, the more smell-reliant contemporaneous anacoracid Squalicorax's less advanced orbital but stronger olfactory processes was more suitable for an opportunistic scavenger.
The jaws of C. mantelli were kinetically powerful. They have a slightly looser anterior curvature and a more robust build than that of the modern mako sharks, but otherwise were similar in general shape. The hyomandibula is elongated and was believed to swing laterally, which would allow jaw protrusion and deep biting.
#### Skeletal anatomy
Most species of Cretoxyrhina are represented only by fossil teeth and vertebra. Like all sharks, the skeleton of Cretoxyrhina was made of cartilage, which is less capable of fossilization than bone. However, fossils of C. mantelli from the Niobrara Formation have been found exceptionally preserved; this was due to the formation's chalk having high contents of calcium, allowing calcification to become more prevalent. When calcified, soft tissue hardens, making it more prone to fossilization.
Numerous skeletons consisting of near-complete vertebral columns have been found. The largest vertebra were measured up to 87 millimeters (3 in) in diameter. Two specimens with the best-preserved vertebral columns (FHSM VP-2187 and KUVP 69102) have 218 and 201 centra, respectively, and nearly all vertebra in the column preserved; only portions of the tail tip are missing for both. Estimations of tail length calculates a total vertebral count of approximately 230 centra, which is unique as all known extant mackerel sharks possess a vertebral count of either less than 197 or greater than 282 with none in between. The vertebral centra in the trunk region were large and circular, creating an overall spindle-shaped body with a stocky trunk.
An analysis of a partially complete tail fin fossil shows that Cretoxyrhina had a lunate (crescent-shaped) tail most similar with modern lamnid sharks, whale sharks, and basking sharks. The transition to tail vertebrae is estimated to be between the 140th and 160th vertebrae out of the total 230, resulting in a total tail vertebral count of 70–90 and making up approximately 30–39% of the vertebral column. The transition from precaudal (the set of vertebrae before the tail vertebrae) to tail vertebrae is also marked by a vertebral bend of about 45°, which is the highest possible angle known in extant sharks and is mostly found in fast-swimming sharks, such as lamnids. These properties of the tail, along with other features such as smooth scales parallel to the body axis, a plesodic pectoral fin (a pectoral fin in which cartilage extends throughout, giving it a more secure structure that helps decrease drag), and a spindle-shaped stocky build, show that C. mantelli was capable of fast swimming.
### Physiology
#### Thermoregulation
Cretoxyrhina represents one of the earliest forms and possible origins of endothermy in mackerel sharks. Possessing regional endothermy (also known as mesothermy), it may have possessed a build similar to modern regionally endothermic sharks like members of the thresher shark and lamnid families, where red muscles are closer to the body axis compared to ectothermic sharks (whose red muscles are closer to the body circumference), and a system of specialized blood vessels called rete mirabile (Latin for "wonderful nets") is present, allowing metabolic heat to be conserved and exchanged to vital organs. This morphological build allows the shark to be partially warm-blooded, and thus efficiently function in the colder environments where Cretoxyrhina has been found. Fossils have been found in areas where paleoclimatic estimates show a surface temperature as low as 5 °C (41 °F). Regional endothermy in Cretoxyrhina may have been developed in response to increasing pressure from progressive global cooling and competition from mosasaurs and other marine reptiles that had also developed endothermy.
#### Hydrodynamics and locomotion
Cretoxyrhina possessed highly dense overlapping placoid scales parallel to the body axis and patterned in parallel kneels separated by U-shaped grooves, each groove having a mean width of about 45 micrometers. This formation of scales allows efficient drag reduction and enhanced high-speed velocity capabilities, a morphotype seen only in the fastest known sharks. Cretoxyrhina also had the most extreme case of a "Type 4" tail fin, having the highest known Cobb's angle (curvature of tail vertebrae) and tail cartilage angle (49° and 133° respectively) ever recorded in mackerel sharks. A "Type 4" tail fin structure represents a build with maximum symmetry of the tail fin lobes, which is most efficient in fast swimming; among sharks, it is only found in lamnids.
A 2017 study by PhD student Humberto Ferron analyzed the relationships between the morphological variables including the skeleton and tail fin of C. mantelli and modeled an average cruising speed of 12 km/h (7.5 mph) and a burst swimming speed of around 70 km/h (43 mph), making Cretoxyrhina possibly one of the fastest sharks known. For comparison, the modern great white shark has been modeled to reaches speeds of up to 56 km/h (35 mph) and the shortfin mako, the fastest extant shark, has been modeled at a speed of 70 km/h (43 mph).
### Life history
#### Reproduction
Although no fossil evidence for it has been found, it is inferred that Cretoxyrhina was ovoviviparous as all modern mackerel sharks are. In ovoviviparous sharks, young are hatched and grow inside the mother while competing against litter-mates through cannibalism such as oophagy (egg eating). As Cretoxyrhina inhabited oligotrophic and pelagic waters where predators such as large mosasaurs like Tylosaurus and macropredatory fish like Xiphactinus were common, it is likely that it also was an r-selected shark, where many infants are produced to offset high infant mortality rates. Similarly, pelagic sharks such as the great white shark, thresher sharks, mako sharks, porbeagle shark, and crocodile shark produce two to nine infants per litter.
#### Growth and longevity
Like all mackerel sharks, Cretoxyrhina grew a growth ring in its vertebrae every year and is aged through measuring each band; due to the rarity of well-preserved vertebrae, only a few Cretoxyrhina individuals have been aged. In Shimada (1997), a linear equation for calculating the total body length of Cretoxyrhina using the centrum (the body of a vertebra) diameter of a vertebra was developed and is shown below, with representing total body length and representing centrum diameter (the diameter of each band).
TL = 0.281 + 5.746CD
Using this linear equation, measurements were first conducted on the best-preserved C. mantelli specimen, FHSM VP-2187, by Shimada (2008). The measurements showed a length of 1.28 meters (4 ft) and weight of about 16.3 kilograms (36 lb) at birth, and rapid growth in the first two years of life, doubling the length within 3.3 years. From then on, size growth became steady and gradual, growing a mean estimate of 21.1 centimeters (8 in) per year until its death at around 15 years of age, at which it had grown to 5 meters (16 ft). Using the von Bertalanffy growth model on FHSM VP-2187, the maximum lifespan of C. mantelli was estimated to be 38.2 years. By that age, it would have grown over 7 meters (23 ft) long. Based on allometric scaling of a great white shark, Shimada found that such individual would have weighed as much as 3,400 kilograms (3.3 long tons; 3.7 short tons).
A remeasurement conducted by Newbrey et al. (2013) found that C. mantelli and C. agassizensis reached sexual maturity at around four to five years of age and proposed a possible revision to the measurements of the growth rings in FHSM VP-2187. The lifespan of FHSM VP-2187 and maximum lifespan of C. mantelli was also proposed to be revised to 18 and 21 years respectively using the new measurements. A 2019 study led by Italian scientist Jacopo Amalfitano briefly measured the vertebrae from two C. mantelli fossils and found that the older individual died at around 26 years of age. Measurements were also conducted on other C. mantelli skeletons and a vertebra of C. agassizensis, yielding results of similar rates of rapid growth in early stages of life. Such rapid growth within mere years could have helped Cretoxyrhina better survive by quickly phasing out of infancy and its vulnerabilities, as a fully grown adult would have few natural predators. The 2013 study also identified a syntype tooth of C. mantelli from England and calculated the individual's maximum length of 8 meters (26 ft), making the tooth the largest known specimen yet. When applying the allometric scaling used in Shimada (2008), a C. mantelli of such length would yield an estimated body mass of around 4,944 kilograms (4.866 long tons; 5.450 short tons).
The graph below represents the length growth per year of FHSM VP-2187 according to Shimada (2008):
Other species were estimated to have been significantly smaller. C. denticulata and C. vraconensis reached a total body length of up to 4 metres (13 ft) as an adult. Based on allometric scaling, individuals of such length would have weighed about 744 kilograms (1,640 lb). C. agassizensis was even smaller, with an estimated total body length of up to 1.29 metres (4.2 ft) based on a tooth specimen (P2989.152) measuring 12 millimetres (0.47 in) tall.
## Paleobiology
### Prey relationships
The powerful kinetic jaws, high-speed capabilities, and large size of Cretoxyrhina suggest a very aggressive predator. Cretoxyrhina's association with a diverse number of fossils showing signs of devourment confirms that it was an active apex predator that fed on much of the variety of marine megafauna in the Late Cretaceous. The highest trophic level it occupied was a position shared only with large mosasaurs such as Tylosaurus during the latter stages of the Late Cretaceous. It played a critical role in many marine ecosystems.
Cretoxyrhina mainly preyed on other active predators including ichthyodectids (a type of large fish that includes Xiphactinus), plesiosaurs, turtles, mosasaurs, and other sharks. Most fossils of Cretoxyrhina feeding upon other animals consist of large and deep bite marks and punctures on bones, occasionally with teeth embedded in them. Isolated bones of mosasaurs and other marine reptiles that have been partially dissolved by digestion, or found in coprolites, are also examples of Cretoxyrhina feeding. There are a few skeletons of Cretoxyrhina containing stomach contents known, including a large C. mantelli skeleton (KUVP 247) which possesses skeletal remains of the large ichthyodectid Xiphactinus and a mosasaur in its stomach region. Cretoxyrhina may have occasionally fed on pterosaurs, evidenced by a set of cervical vertebrae of a Pteranodon from the Niobrara Formation with a C. mantelli tooth lodged deep between them. Although it cannot be certain if the fossil itself was a result of predation or scavenging, it was likely that Pteranodon and similar pterosaurs were natural targets for predators like Cretoxyrhina, as they would routinely enter water to feed and thus be well within reach.
Although Cretoxyrhina was mainly an active hunter, it was also an opportunistic feeder and may have scavenged from time to time. Many fossils with Cretoxyrhina feeding marks show no sign of healing, an indicator of a deliberate predatory attack on a live animal, leading to the possibility that at least some of the feeding marks were made from scavenging. Remains of partial skeletons of dinosaurs like Claosaurus and Niobrarasaurus show signs of feeding and digestion by C. mantelli. They were likely scavenged carcasses swept into the ocean due to the paleogeographical location of the fossils being that of an open ocean.
### Hunting strategies
The hunting strategies of Cretoxyrhina are not well documented because many fossils with Cretoxyrhina feeding marks cannot be distinguished between predation or scavenging. If they were indeed a result of the former, that would mean that Cretoxyrhina most likely employed hunting strategies involving a main powerful and fatal blow similar to ram feeding seen in modern requiem sharks and lamnids. A 2004 study by shark experts Vittorio Gabriotti and Alessandro De Maddalena observed that the modern great white shark reaching lengths of greater than 4 meters (13 ft) commonly ram its prey with massive velocity and strength to inflict single fatal blows, sometimes so powerful that prey would be propelled out of the water by the impact's force. As Cretoxyrhina possessed a robust stocky build capable of fast swimming, powerful kinetic jaws like the great white shark, and reaches lengths similar to or greater than it, a hunting style like this would be likely.
## Paleoecology
### Range and distribution
Cretoxyrhina had a cosmopolitan distribution with fossils having been found worldwide. Notable locations include North America, Europe, Israel, and Kazakhstan. Cretoxyrhina mostly occurred in temperate and subtropical zones. It has been found in latitudes as far north as 55° N, where paleoclimatic estimates calculate an average sea surface temperature of 5–10 °C (41–50 °F). Fossils of Cretoxyrhina are most well known in the Western Interior Seaway area, which is now the central United States and Canada. In 2013, Mikael Siverson and colleagues noted that during the Turonian or early Coniacian, Cretoxyrhina individuals living offshore were usually larger than those inhabiting the Western Interior Seaway, with some of the offshore C. mantelli fossils like one of the syntypes yielding total lengths of up to 8 meters (26 ft), possibly 9 meters (30 ft).
#### Habitat
Cretoxyrhina inhabited mainly temperate to subtropical pelagic oceans. A tooth of Cretoxyrhina found in the Horseshoe Canyon Formation in Alberta (a formation where the only water deposits found consist of brackish water and no oceans) suggests that it may have, on occasion, swum into partially fresh-water estuaries and similar bodies of water. However, a rework from an underlying layer may be a more likely explanation of such occurrence. The climate of marine ecosystems during the temporal range of Cretoxyrhina was generally much warmer than modern day due to higher atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases influenced by the shape of the continents at the time.
The interval during the Cenomanian and Turonian of 97–91 Ma saw a peak in sea surface temperatures averaging over 35 °C (95 °F) and bottom water temperatures around 20 °C (68 °F), about 7–8 °C (13–14 °F) warmer than modern day. Around this time, Cretoxyrhina coexisted with a radiating increase in diversity of fauna like mosasaurs. This interval also included a rise in global δ<sup>13</sup>C levels, which marks significant depletion of oxygen in the ocean, and caused the Cenomanian-Turonian anoxic event. Although this event led to the extinction of as much as 27% of marine invertebrates, vertebrates like Cretoxyrhina were generally unaffected. The rest of the Cretaceous saw a progressive global cooling of earth's oceans, leading to the appearance of temperate ecosystems and possible glaciation by the Early Maastrichtian. Subtropical areas retained high biodiversity of all taxa, while temperate ecosystems generally had much lower diversity. In North America, subtropical provinces were dominated by sharks, turtles, and mosasaurs such as Tylosaurus and Clidastes, while temperate provinces were mainly dominated by plesiosaurs, hesperornithid seabirds, and the mosasaur Platecarpus.
### Competition
Cretoxyrhina lived alongside many predators that shared a similar trophic level in a diverse pelagic ecosystem during the Cretaceous. Most of these predators included large marine reptiles, some of which already occupied the highest trophic level when Cretoxyrhina first appeared. During the Albian to Turonian, about 107 to 91 Ma, Cretoxyrhina was contemporaneous and coexisted with Mid-Cretaceous pliosaurs. Some of these pliosaurs included Megacephalosaurus, which attained lengths of 9 meters (30 ft). By the Mid-Turonian, about 91 Ma, pliosaurs became extinct. It is thought that the radiation of sharks like Cretoxyrhina may have been a major contributing factor to the acceleration of their extinction. The ecological void they left was quickly filled by emerging mosasaurs, which also came to occupy the highest trophic levels. Large mosasaurs like Tylosaurus, which reached in excess of 14 meters (46 ft) in length, may have competed with Cretoxyrhina, and evidence of interspecific interactions such as bite marks from either have been found. There were also many sharks that occupied a similar ecological role with Cretoxyrhina such as the cardabiodontids Cardabiodon and Dwardius, the latter showing evidence of direct competition with C. vraconensis based on intricate distribution patterns between the two.
A 2010 study by paleontologists Corinne Myers and Bruce Lieberman on competition in the Western Interior Seaway used quantitative analytical techniques based on Geographical information systems and tectonic reconstructions to reconstruct the hypothetical competitive relationships between ten of the most prevalent and abundant marine vertebrates of the region, including Cretoxyrhina. Their calculations found negative correlations between the distribution of Cretoxyrhina and the three potential competitors Squalicorax kaupi, Tylosaurus proriger, and Platecarpus spp.; a statistically significant negative correlation implies that the distribution of one species was affected due to being outcompeted by another. However, none of the relationships were statistically significant, which instead indicates that the trends were unlikely the result of competition.
### Extinction
The causes of the extinction of Cretoxyrhina are uncertain. What is known is that it declined slowly over millions of years. Since its peak in size during the Coniacian, the size and distribution of Cretoxyrhina fossils gradually declined until its eventual demise during the Campanian. Siverson and Lindgren (2005) noted that the age of the youngest fossils of Cretoxyrhina differed between continents. In Australia, the youngest Cretoxyrhina fossils were dated approximately 83 Ma during the Santonian, while the youngest North American fossils known at the time (which were dated in the Early Campanian) were at least two million years older than the youngest fossils in Europe. The differences between ages suggests that Cretoxyrhina may have become locally extinct in such areas over time until the genus as a whole went extinct.
It has been noted that the decline of Cretoxyrhina coincides with the rise of newer predators such as Tylosaurus, suggesting that increasing pressure from competition with the mosasaur and other predators of similar trophic levels may have played a major contribution to Cretoxyrhina's decline and eventual extinction. Another possible factor was the gradual shallowing and shrinking of the Western Interior Seaway, which would have led to the disappearance of the pelagic environments preferred by the shark; this factor does not explain the decline and extinction of Cretoxyrhina elsewhere. It has been suggested that the extinction of Cretoxyrhina'' may have helped the further increase the diversity of mosasaurs.
## See also
- Prehistoric fish
- List of prehistoric cartilaginous fish |
34,420 | Zinc | 1,173,667,534 | null | [
"Alchemical substances",
"Chemical elements",
"Chemical elements with hexagonal close-packed structure",
"Dietary minerals",
"Native element minerals",
"Pyrotechnic fuels",
"Reducing agents",
"Transition metals",
"Zinc"
]
| Zinc is a chemical element with the symbol Zn and atomic number 30. Zinc is a slightly brittle metal at room temperature and has a shiny-greyish appearance when oxidation is removed. It is the first element in group 12 (IIB) of the periodic table. In some respects, zinc is chemically similar to magnesium: both elements exhibit only one normal oxidation state (+2), and the Zn<sup>2+</sup> and Mg<sup>2+</sup> ions are of similar size. Zinc is the 24th most abundant element in Earth's crust and has five stable isotopes. The most common zinc ore is sphalerite (zinc blende), a zinc sulfide mineral. The largest workable lodes are in Australia, Asia, and the United States. Zinc is refined by froth flotation of the ore, roasting, and final extraction using electricity (electrowinning).
Zinc is an essential trace element for humans, animals, plants and for microorganisms and is necessary for prenatal and postnatal development. It is the second most abundant trace metal in humans after iron and it is the only metal which appears in all enzyme classes. Zinc is also an essential nutrient element for coral growth as it is an important cofactor for many enzymes.
Zinc deficiency affects about two billion people in the developing world and is associated with many diseases. In children, deficiency causes growth retardation, delayed sexual maturation, infection susceptibility, and diarrhea. Enzymes with a zinc atom in the reactive center are widespread in biochemistry, such as alcohol dehydrogenase in humans. Consumption of excess zinc may cause ataxia, lethargy, and copper deficiency. In marine biomes, notably within polar regions, a deficit of zinc can compromise the vitality of primary algal communities, potentially destabilizing the intricate marine trophic structures and consequently impacting biodiversity.
Brass, an alloy of copper and zinc in various proportions, was used as early as the third millennium BC in the Aegean area and the region which currently includes Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kalmykia, Turkmenistan and Georgia. In the second millennium BC it was used in the regions currently including West India, Uzbekistan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Israel. Zinc metal was not produced on a large scale until the 12th century in India, though it was known to the ancient Romans and Greeks. The mines of Rajasthan have given definite evidence of zinc production going back to the 6th century BC. To date, the oldest evidence of pure zinc comes from Zawar, in Rajasthan, as early as the 9th century AD when a distillation process was employed to make pure zinc. Alchemists burned zinc in air to form what they called "philosopher's wool" or "white snow".
The element was probably named by the alchemist Paracelsus after the German word Zinke (prong, tooth). German chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf is credited with discovering pure metallic zinc in 1746. Work by Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta uncovered the electrochemical properties of zinc by 1800. Corrosion-resistant zinc plating of iron (hot-dip galvanizing) is the major application for zinc. Other applications are in electrical batteries, small non-structural castings, and alloys such as brass. A variety of zinc compounds are commonly used, such as zinc carbonate and zinc gluconate (as dietary supplements), zinc chloride (in deodorants), zinc pyrithione (anti-dandruff shampoos), zinc sulfide (in luminescent paints), and dimethylzinc or diethylzinc in the organic laboratory.
## Characteristics
### Physical properties
Zinc is a bluish-white, lustrous, diamagnetic metal, though most common commercial grades of the metal have a dull finish. It is somewhat less dense than iron and has a hexagonal crystal structure, with a distorted form of hexagonal close packing, in which each atom has six nearest neighbors (at 265.9 pm) in its own plane and six others at a greater distance of 290.6 pm. The metal is hard and brittle at most temperatures but becomes malleable between 100 and 150 °C. Above 210 °C, the metal becomes brittle again and can be pulverized by beating. Zinc is a fair conductor of electricity. For a metal, zinc has relatively low melting (419.5 °C) and boiling point (907 °C). The melting point is the lowest of all the d-block metals aside from mercury and cadmium; for this reason among others, zinc, cadmium, and mercury are often not considered to be transition metals like the rest of the d-block metals.
Many alloys contain zinc, including brass. Other metals long known to form binary alloys with zinc are aluminium, antimony, bismuth, gold, iron, lead, mercury, silver, tin, magnesium, cobalt, nickel, tellurium, and sodium. Although neither zinc nor zirconium is ferromagnetic, their alloy, ZrZn
<sub>2</sub>, exhibits ferromagnetism below 35 K.
### Occurrence
Zinc makes up about 75 ppm (0.0075%) of Earth's crust, making it the 24th most abundant element. Typical background concentrations of zinc do not exceed 1 μg/m<sup>3</sup> in the atmosphere; 300 mg/kg in soil; 100 mg/kg in vegetation; 20 μg/L in freshwater and 5 μg/L in seawater. The element is normally found in association with other base metals such as copper and lead in ores. Zinc is a chalcophile, meaning the element is more likely to be found in minerals together with sulfur and other heavy chalcogens, rather than with the light chalcogen oxygen or with non-chalcogen electronegative elements such as the halogens. Sulfides formed as the crust solidified under the reducing conditions of the early Earth's atmosphere. Sphalerite, which is a form of zinc sulfide, is the most heavily mined zinc-containing ore because its concentrate contains 60–62% zinc.
Other source minerals for zinc include smithsonite (zinc carbonate), hemimorphite (zinc silicate), wurtzite (another zinc sulfide), and sometimes hydrozincite (basic zinc carbonate). With the exception of wurtzite, all these other minerals were formed by weathering of the primordial zinc sulfides.
Identified world zinc resources total about 1.9–2.8 billion tonnes. Large deposits are in Australia, Canada and the United States, with the largest reserves in Iran. The most recent estimate of reserve base for zinc (meets specified minimum physical criteria related to current mining and production practices) was made in 2009 and calculated to be roughly 480 Mt. Zinc reserves, on the other hand, are geologically identified ore bodies whose suitability for recovery is economically based (location, grade, quality, and quantity) at the time of determination. Since exploration and mine development is an ongoing process, the amount of zinc reserves is not a fixed number and sustainability of zinc ore supplies cannot be judged by simply extrapolating the combined mine life of today's zinc mines. This concept is well supported by data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which illustrates that although refined zinc production increased 80% between 1990 and 2010, the reserve lifetime for zinc has remained unchanged. About 346 million tonnes have been extracted throughout history to 2002, and scholars have estimated that about 109–305 million tonnes are in use.
### Isotopes
Five stable isotopes of zinc occur in nature, with <sup>64</sup>Zn being the most abundant isotope (49.17% natural abundance). The other isotopes found in nature are <sup>66</sup>
Zn (27.73%), <sup>67</sup>
Zn (4.04%), <sup>68</sup>
Zn (18.45%), and <sup>70</sup>
Zn (0.61%).
Several dozen radioisotopes have been characterized. <sup>65</sup>
Zn, which has a half-life of 243.66 days, is the least active radioisotope, followed by <sup>72</sup>
Zn with a half-life of 46.5 hours. Zinc has 10 nuclear isomers, of which <sup>69m</sup>Zn has the longest half-life, 13.76 h. The superscript m indicates a metastable isotope. The nucleus of a metastable isotope is in an excited state and will return to the ground state by emitting a photon in the form of a gamma ray. <sup>61</sup>
Zn has three excited metastable states and <sup>73</sup>
Zn has two. The isotopes <sup>65</sup>
Zn, <sup>71</sup>
Zn, <sup>77</sup>
Zn and <sup>78</sup>
Zn each have only one excited metastable state.
The most common decay mode of a radioisotope of zinc with a mass number lower than 66 is electron capture. The decay product resulting from electron capture is an isotope of copper.
<sup>n</sup>
<sub>30</sub>Zn
+ → <sup>n</sup>
<sub>29</sub>Cu
The most common decay mode of a radioisotope of zinc with mass number higher than 66 is beta decay (β<sup>−</sup>), which produces an isotope of gallium.
<sup>n</sup>
<sub>30</sub>Zn
→ <sup>n</sup>
<sub>31</sub>Ga
+ +
## Compounds and chemistry
### Reactivity
Zinc has an electron configuration of [Ar]3d<sup>10</sup>4s<sup>2</sup> and is a member of the group 12 of the periodic table. It is a moderately reactive metal and strong reducing agent. The surface of the pure metal tarnishes quickly, eventually forming a protective passivating layer of the basic zinc carbonate, Zn
<sub>5</sub>(OH)
<sub>6</sub>(CO<sub>3</sub>)
<sub>2</sub>, by reaction with atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Zinc burns in air with a bright bluish-green flame, giving off fumes of zinc oxide. Zinc reacts readily with acids, alkalis and other non-metals. Extremely pure zinc reacts only slowly at room temperature with acids. Strong acids, such as hydrochloric or sulfuric acid, can remove the passivating layer and the subsequent reaction with the acid releases hydrogen gas.
The chemistry of zinc is dominated by the +2 oxidation state. When compounds in this oxidation state are formed, the outer shell s electrons are lost, yielding a bare zinc ion with the electronic configuration [Ar]3d<sup>10</sup>. In aqueous solution an octahedral complex, [Zn(H
<sub>2</sub>O)<sub>6</sub>]<sup>2+</sup>
is the predominant species. The volatilization of zinc in combination with zinc chloride at temperatures above 285 °C indicates the formation of Zn
<sub>2</sub>Cl
<sub>2</sub>, a zinc compound with a +1 oxidation state. No compounds of zinc in positive oxidation states other than +1 or +2 are known. Calculations indicate that a zinc compound with the oxidation state of +4 is unlikely to exist. Zn(III) is predicted to exist in the presence of strongly electronegative trianions; however, there exists some doubt around this possibility. But in 2021 another compound was reported with more evidence that had the oxidation state of +3 with the formula ZnBeB<sub>11</sub>(CN)<sub>12</sub>.
Zinc chemistry is similar to the chemistry of the late first-row transition metals, nickel and copper, though it has a filled d-shell and compounds are diamagnetic and mostly colorless. The ionic radii of zinc and magnesium happen to be nearly identical. Because of this some of the equivalent salts have the same crystal structure, and in other circumstances where ionic radius is a determining factor, the chemistry of zinc has much in common with that of magnesium. In other respects, there is little similarity with the late first-row transition metals. Zinc tends to form bonds with a greater degree of covalency and much more stable complexes with N- and S- donors. Complexes of zinc are mostly 4- or 6- coordinate, although 5-coordinate complexes are known.
### Zinc(I) compounds
Zinc(I) compounds are very rare. The [Zn<sub>2</sub>]<sup>2+</sup> ion is implicated by the formation of a yellow diamagnetic glass by dissolving metallic zinc in molten ZnCl<sub>2</sub>. The [Zn<sub>2</sub>]<sup>2+</sup> core would be analogous to the [Hg<sub>2</sub>]<sup>2+</sup> cation present in mercury(I) compounds. The diamagnetic nature of the ion confirms its dimeric structure. The first zinc(I) compound containing the Zn–Zn bond, (η<sup>5</sup>-C<sub>5</sub>Me<sub>5</sub>)<sub>2</sub>Zn<sub>2</sub>.
### Zinc(II) compounds
Binary compounds of zinc are known for most of the metalloids and all the nonmetals except the noble gases. The oxide ZnO is a white powder that is nearly insoluble in neutral aqueous solutions, but is amphoteric, dissolving in both strong basic and acidic solutions. The other chalcogenides (ZnS, ZnSe, and ZnTe) have varied applications in electronics and optics. Pnictogenides (Zn
<sub>3</sub>N
<sub>2</sub>, Zn
<sub>3</sub>P
<sub>2</sub>, Zn
<sub>3</sub>As
<sub>2</sub> and Zn
<sub>3</sub>Sb
<sub>2</sub>), the peroxide (ZnO
<sub>2</sub>), the hydride (ZnH
<sub>2</sub>), and the carbide (ZnC
<sub>2</sub>) are also known. Of the four halides, ZnF
<sub>2</sub> has the most ionic character, while the others (ZnCl
<sub>2</sub>, ZnBr
<sub>2</sub>, and ZnI
<sub>2</sub>) have relatively low melting points and are considered to have more covalent character.
In weak basic solutions containing Zn<sup>2+</sup>
ions, the hydroxide Zn(OH)
<sub>2</sub> forms as a white precipitate. In stronger alkaline solutions, this hydroxide is dissolved to form zincates ([Zn(OH)<sub>4</sub>]<sup>2−</sup>
). The nitrate Zn(NO<sub>3</sub>)
<sub>2</sub>, chlorate Zn(ClO<sub>3</sub>)
<sub>2</sub>, sulfate ZnSO
<sub>4</sub>, phosphate Zn
<sub>3</sub>(PO<sub>4</sub>)
<sub>2</sub>, molybdate ZnMoO
<sub>4</sub>, cyanide Zn(CN)
<sub>2</sub>, arsenite Zn(AsO<sub>2</sub>)
<sub>2</sub>, arsenate Zn(AsO<sub>4</sub>)
<sub>2</sub>·8H
<sub>2</sub>O and the chromate ZnCrO
<sub>4</sub> (one of the few colored zinc compounds) are a few examples of other common inorganic compounds of zinc.
Organozinc compounds are those that contain zinc–carbon covalent bonds. Diethylzinc ((C
<sub>2</sub>H<sub>5</sub>)
<sub>2</sub>Zn) is a reagent in synthetic chemistry. It was first reported in 1848 from the reaction of zinc and ethyl iodide, and was the first compound known to contain a metal–carbon sigma bond.
### Test for zinc
Cobalticyanide paper (Rinnmann's test for Zn) can be used as a chemical indicator for zinc. 4 g of K<sub>3</sub>Co(CN)<sub>6</sub> and 1 g of KClO<sub>3</sub> is dissolved on 100 ml of water. Paper is dipped in the solution and dried at 100 °C. One drop of the sample is dropped onto the dry paper and heated. A green disc indicates the presence of zinc.
## History
### Ancient use
Various isolated examples of the use of impure zinc in ancient times have been discovered. Zinc ores were used to make the zinc–copper alloy brass thousands of years prior to the discovery of zinc as a separate element. Judean brass from the 14th to 10th centuries BC contains 23% zinc.
Knowledge of how to produce brass spread to Ancient Greece by the 7th century BC, but few varieties were made. Ornaments made of alloys containing 80–90% zinc, with lead, iron, antimony, and other metals making up the remainder, have been found that are 2,500 years old. A possibly prehistoric statuette containing 87.5% zinc was found in a Dacian archaeological site.
Strabo writing in the 1st century BC (but quoting a now lost work of the 4th century BC historian Theopompus) mentions "drops of false silver" which when mixed with copper make brass. This may refer to small quantities of zinc that is a by-product of smelting sulfide ores. Zinc in such remnants in smelting ovens was usually discarded as it was thought to be worthless.
The manufacture of brass was known to the Romans by about 30 BC. They made brass by heating powdered calamine (zinc silicate or carbonate), charcoal and copper together in a crucible. The resulting calamine brass was then either cast or hammered into shape for use in weaponry. Some coins struck by Romans in the Christian era are made of what is probably calamine brass.
The oldest known pills were made of the zinc carbonates hydrozincite and smithsonite. The pills were used for sore eyes and were found aboard the Roman ship Relitto del Pozzino, wrecked in 140 BC.
The Berne zinc tablet is a votive plaque dating to Roman Gaul made of an alloy that is mostly zinc.
The Charaka Samhita, thought to have been written between 300 and 500 AD, mentions a metal which, when oxidized, produces pushpanjan, thought to be zinc oxide. Zinc mines at Zawar, near Udaipur in India, have been active since the Mauryan period (c. 322 and 187 BCE). The smelting of metallic zinc here, however, appears to have begun around the 12th century AD. One estimate is that this location produced an estimated million tonnes of metallic zinc and zinc oxide from the 12th to 16th centuries. Another estimate gives a total production of 60,000 tonnes of metallic zinc over this period. The Rasaratna Samuccaya, written in approximately the 13th century AD, mentions two types of zinc-containing ores: one used for metal extraction and another used for medicinal purposes.
### Early studies and naming
Zinc was distinctly recognized as a metal under the designation of Yasada or Jasada in the medical Lexicon ascribed to the Hindu king Madanapala (of Taka dynasty) and written about the year 1374. Smelting and extraction of impure zinc by reducing calamine with wool and other organic substances was accomplished in the 13th century in India. The Chinese did not learn of the technique until the 17th century.
Alchemists burned zinc metal in air and collected the resulting zinc oxide on a condenser. Some alchemists called this zinc oxide lana philosophica, Latin for "philosopher's wool", because it collected in wooly tufts, whereas others thought it looked like white snow and named it nix album.
The name of the metal was probably first documented by Paracelsus, a Swiss-born German alchemist, who referred to the metal as "zincum" or "zinken" in his book Liber Mineralium II, in the 16th century. The word is probably derived from the German zinke, and supposedly meant "tooth-like, pointed or jagged" (metallic zinc crystals have a needle-like appearance). Zink could also imply "tin-like" because of its relation to German zinn meaning tin. Yet another possibility is that the word is derived from the Persian word سنگ seng meaning stone. The metal was also called Indian tin, tutanego, calamine, and spinter.
German metallurgist Andreas Libavius received a quantity of what he called "calay" (from the Malay or Hindi word for tin) originating from Malabar off a cargo ship captured from the Portuguese in the year 1596. Libavius described the properties of the sample, which may have been zinc. Zinc was regularly imported to Europe from the Orient in the 17th and early 18th centuries, but was at times very expensive.
### Isolation
Metallic zinc was isolated in India by 1300 AD. Before it was isolated in Europe, it was imported from India in about 1600 CE. Postlewayt's Universal Dictionary, a contemporary source giving technological information in Europe, did not mention zinc before 1751 but the element was studied before then.
Flemish metallurgist and alchemist P. M. de Respour reported that he had extracted metallic zinc from zinc oxide in 1668. By the start of the 18th century, Étienne François Geoffroy described how zinc oxide condenses as yellow crystals on bars of iron placed above zinc ore that is being smelted. In Britain, John Lane is said to have carried out experiments to smelt zinc, probably at Landore, prior to his bankruptcy in 1726.
In 1738 in Great Britain, William Champion patented a process to extract zinc from calamine in a vertical retort-style smelter. His technique resembled that used at Zawar zinc mines in Rajasthan, but no evidence suggests he visited the Orient. Champion's process was used through 1851.
German chemist Andreas Marggraf normally gets credit for isolating pure metallic zinc in the West, even though Swedish chemist Anton von Swab had distilled zinc from calamine four years previously. In his 1746 experiment, Marggraf heated a mixture of calamine and charcoal in a closed vessel without copper to obtain a metal. This procedure became commercially practical by 1752.
### Later work
William Champion's brother, John, patented a process in 1758 for calcining zinc sulfide into an oxide usable in the retort process. Prior to this, only calamine could be used to produce zinc. In 1798, Johann Christian Ruberg improved on the smelting process by building the first horizontal retort smelter. Jean-Jacques Daniel Dony built a different kind of horizontal zinc smelter in Belgium that processed even more zinc.
Italian doctor Luigi Galvani discovered in 1780 that connecting the spinal cord of a freshly dissected frog to an iron rail attached by a brass hook caused the frog's leg to twitch. He incorrectly thought he had discovered an ability of nerves and muscles to create electricity and called the effect "animal electricity". The galvanic cell and the process of galvanization were both named for Luigi Galvani, and his discoveries paved the way for electrical batteries, galvanization, and cathodic protection.
Galvani's friend, Alessandro Volta, continued researching the effect and invented the Voltaic pile in 1800. Volta's pile consisted of a stack of simplified galvanic cells, each being one plate of copper and one of zinc connected by an electrolyte. By stacking these units in series, the Voltaic pile (or "battery") as a whole had a higher voltage, which could be used more easily than single cells. Electricity is produced because the Volta potential between the two metal plates makes electrons flow from the zinc to the copper and corrode the zinc.
The non-magnetic character of zinc and its lack of color in solution delayed discovery of its importance to biochemistry and nutrition. This changed in 1940 when carbonic anhydrase, an enzyme that scrubs carbon dioxide from blood, was shown to have zinc in its active site. The digestive enzyme carboxypeptidase became the second known zinc-containing enzyme in 1955.
## Production
### Mining and processing
Zinc is the fourth most common metal in use, trailing only iron, aluminium, and copper with an annual production of about 13 million tonnes. The world's largest zinc producer is Nyrstar, a merger of the Australian OZ Minerals and the Belgian Umicore. About 70% of the world's zinc originates from mining, while the remaining 30% comes from recycling secondary zinc.
Commercially pure zinc is known as Special High Grade, often abbreviated SHG, and is 99.995% pure.
Worldwide, 95% of new zinc is mined from sulfidic ore deposits, in which sphalerite (ZnS) is nearly always mixed with the sulfides of copper, lead and iron. Zinc mines are scattered throughout the world, with the main areas being China, Australia, and Peru. China produced 38% of the global zinc output in 2014.
Zinc metal is produced using extractive metallurgy. The ore is finely ground, then put through froth flotation to separate minerals from gangue (on the property of hydrophobicity), to get a zinc sulfide ore concentrate consisting of about 50% zinc, 32% sulfur, 13% iron, and 5% SiO
<sub>2</sub>.
Roasting converts the zinc sulfide concentrate to zinc oxide:
2ZnS + 3O2 -\>[t^o] 2ZnO + 2SO2
The sulfur dioxide is used for the production of sulfuric acid, which is necessary for the leaching process. If deposits of zinc carbonate, zinc silicate, or zinc-spinel (like the Skorpion Deposit in Namibia) are used for zinc production, the roasting can be omitted.
For further processing two basic methods are used: pyrometallurgy or electrowinning. Pyrometallurgy reduces zinc oxide with carbon or carbon monoxide at 950 °C (1,740 °F) into the metal, which is distilled as zinc vapor to separate it from other metals, which are not volatile at those temperatures. The zinc vapor is collected in a condenser. The equations below describe this process:
ZnO + C -\>[950^oC] Zn + CO
ZnO + CO -\>[950^oC] Zn + CO2
In electrowinning, zinc is leached from the ore concentrate by sulfuric acid and impurities are precipitated:
ZnO + H2SO4 -\> ZnSO4 + H2O
Finally, the zinc is reduced by electrolysis.
2ZnSO4 + 2H2O -\> 2Zn + O2 + 2H2SO4
The sulfuric acid is regenerated and recycled to the leaching step.
When galvanised feedstock is fed to an electric arc furnace, the zinc is recovered from the dust by a number of processes, predominantly the Waelz process (90% as of 2014).
### Environmental impact
Refinement of sulfidic zinc ores produces large volumes of sulfur dioxide and cadmium vapor. Smelter slag and other residues contain significant quantities of metals. About 1.1 million tonnes of metallic zinc and 130 thousand tonnes of lead were mined and smelted in the Belgian towns of La Calamine and Plombières between 1806 and 1882. The dumps of the past mining operations leach zinc and cadmium, and the sediments of the Geul River contain non-trivial amounts of metals. About two thousand years ago, emissions of zinc from mining and smelting totaled 10 thousand tonnes a year. After increasing 10-fold from 1850, zinc emissions peaked at 3.4 million tonnes per year in the 1980s and declined to 2.7 million tonnes in the 1990s, although a 2005 study of the Arctic troposphere found that the concentrations there did not reflect the decline. Man-made and natural emissions occur at a ratio of 20 to 1.
Zinc in rivers flowing through industrial and mining areas can be as high as 20 ppm. Effective sewage treatment greatly reduces this; treatment along the Rhine, for example, has decreased zinc levels to 50 ppb. Concentrations of zinc as low as 2 ppm adversely affects the amount of oxygen that fish can carry in their blood.
Soils contaminated with zinc from mining, refining, or fertilizing with zinc-bearing sludge can contain several grams of zinc per kilogram of dry soil. Levels of zinc in excess of 500 ppm in soil interfere with the ability of plants to absorb other essential metals, such as iron and manganese. Zinc levels of 2000 ppm to 180,000 ppm (18%) have been recorded in some soil samples.
## Applications
Major applications of zinc include, with percentages given for the US
1. Galvanizing (55%)
2. Brass and bronze (16%)
3. Other alloys (21%)
4. Miscellaneous (8%)
### Anti-corrosion and batteries
Zinc is most commonly used as an anti-corrosion agent, and galvanization (coating of iron or steel) is the most familiar form. In 2009 in the United States, 55% or 893,000 tons of the zinc metal was used for galvanization.
Zinc is more reactive than iron or steel and thus will attract almost all local oxidation until it completely corrodes away. A protective surface layer of oxide and carbonate (Zn
<sub>5</sub>(OH)
<sub>6</sub>(CO
<sub>3</sub>)
<sub>2</sub>) forms as the zinc corrodes. This protection lasts even after the zinc layer is scratched but degrades through time as the zinc corrodes away. The zinc is applied electrochemically or as molten zinc by hot-dip galvanizing or spraying. Galvanization is used on chain-link fencing, guard rails, suspension bridges, lightposts, metal roofs, heat exchangers, and car bodies.
The relative reactivity of zinc and its ability to attract oxidation to itself makes it an efficient sacrificial anode in cathodic protection (CP). For example, cathodic protection of a buried pipeline can be achieved by connecting anodes made from zinc to the pipe. Zinc acts as the anode (negative terminus) by slowly corroding away as it passes electric current to the steel pipeline. Zinc is also used to cathodically protect metals that are exposed to sea water. A zinc disc attached to a ship's iron rudder will slowly corrode while the rudder stays intact. Similarly, a zinc plug attached to a propeller or the metal protective guard for the keel of the ship provides temporary protection.
With a standard electrode potential (SEP) of −0.76 volts, zinc is used as an anode material for batteries. (More reactive lithium (SEP −3.04 V) is used for anodes in lithium batteries ). Powdered zinc is used in this way in alkaline batteries and the case (which also serves as the anode) of zinc–carbon batteries is formed from sheet zinc. Zinc is used as the anode or fuel of the zinc–air battery/fuel cell. The zinc-cerium redox flow battery also relies on a zinc-based negative half-cell.
### Alloys
A widely used zinc alloy is brass, in which copper is alloyed with anywhere from 3% to 45% zinc, depending upon the type of brass. Brass is generally more ductile and stronger than copper, and has superior corrosion resistance. These properties make it useful in communication equipment, hardware, musical instruments, and water valves.
Other widely used zinc alloys include nickel silver, typewriter metal, soft and aluminium solder, and commercial bronze. Zinc is also used in contemporary pipe organs as a substitute for the traditional lead/tin alloy in pipes. Alloys of 85–88% zinc, 4–10% copper, and 2–8% aluminium find limited use in certain types of machine bearings. Zinc has been the primary metal in American one cent coins (pennies) since 1982. The zinc core is coated with a thin layer of copper to give the appearance of a copper coin. In 1994, 33,200 tonnes (36,600 short tons) of zinc were used to produce 13.6 billion pennies in the United States.
Alloys of zinc with small amounts of copper, aluminium, and magnesium are useful in die casting as well as spin casting, especially in the automotive, electrical, and hardware industries. These alloys are marketed under the name Zamak. An example of this is zinc aluminium. The low melting point together with the low viscosity of the alloy makes possible the production of small and intricate shapes. The low working temperature leads to rapid cooling of the cast products and fast production for assembly. Another alloy, marketed under the brand name Prestal, contains 78% zinc and 22% aluminium, and is reported to be nearly as strong as steel but as malleable as plastic. This superplasticity of the alloy allows it to be molded using die casts made of ceramics and cement.
Similar alloys with the addition of a small amount of lead can be cold-rolled into sheets. An alloy of 96% zinc and 4% aluminium is used to make stamping dies for low production run applications for which ferrous metal dies would be too expensive. For building facades, roofing, and other applications for sheet metal formed by deep drawing, roll forming, or bending, zinc alloys with titanium and copper are used. Unalloyed zinc is too brittle for these manufacturing processes.
As a dense, inexpensive, easily worked material, zinc is used as a lead replacement. In the wake of lead concerns, zinc appears in weights for various applications ranging from fishing to tire balances and flywheels.
Cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) is a semiconductive alloy that can be divided into an array of small sensing devices. These devices are similar to an integrated circuit and can detect the energy of incoming gamma ray photons. When behind an absorbing mask, the CZT sensor array can determine the direction of the rays.
### Other industrial uses
Roughly one quarter of all zinc output in the United States in 2009 was consumed in zinc compounds; a variety of which are used industrially. Zinc oxide is widely used as a white pigment in paints and as a catalyst in the manufacture of rubber to disperse heat. Zinc oxide is used to protect rubber polymers and plastics from ultraviolet radiation (UV). The semiconductor properties of zinc oxide make it useful in varistors and photocopying products. The zinc zinc-oxide cycle is a two step thermochemical process based on zinc and zinc oxide for hydrogen production.
Zinc chloride is often added to lumber as a fire retardant and sometimes as a wood preservative. It is used in the manufacture of other chemicals. Zinc methyl (Zn(CH<sub>3</sub>)
<sub>2</sub>) is used in a number of organic syntheses. Zinc sulfide (ZnS) is used in luminescent pigments such as on the hands of clocks, X-ray and television screens, and luminous paints. Crystals of ZnS are used in lasers that operate in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum. Zinc sulfate is a chemical in dyes and pigments. Zinc pyrithione is used in antifouling paints.
Zinc powder is sometimes used as a propellant in model rockets. When a compressed mixture of 70% zinc and 30% sulfur powder is ignited there is a violent chemical reaction. This produces zinc sulfide, together with large amounts of hot gas, heat, and light.
Zinc sheet metal is used as a durable covering for roofs, walls, and countertops, the last often seen in bistros and oyster bars, and is known for the rustic look imparted by its surface oxidation in use to a blue-gray patina and susceptibility to scratching.
<sup>64</sup>
Zn, the most abundant isotope of zinc, is very susceptible to neutron activation, being transmuted into the highly radioactive <sup>65</sup>
Zn, which has a half-life of 244 days and produces intense gamma radiation. Because of this, zinc oxide used in nuclear reactors as an anti-corrosion agent is depleted of <sup>64</sup>
Zn before use, this is called depleted zinc oxide. For the same reason, zinc has been proposed as a salting material for nuclear weapons (cobalt is another, better-known salting material). A jacket of isotopically enriched <sup>64</sup>
Zn would be irradiated by the intense high-energy neutron flux from an exploding thermonuclear weapon, forming a large amount of <sup>65</sup>
Zn significantly increasing the radioactivity of the weapon's fallout. Such a weapon is not known to have ever been built, tested, or used.
<sup>65</sup>
Zn is used as a tracer to study how alloys that contain zinc wear out, or the path and the role of zinc in organisms.
Zinc dithiocarbamate complexes are used as agricultural fungicides; these include Zineb, Metiram, Propineb and Ziram. Zinc naphthenate is used as wood preservative. Zinc in the form of ZDDP, is used as an anti-wear additive for metal parts in engine oil.
### Organic chemistry
Organozinc chemistry is the science of compounds that contain carbon-zinc bonds, describing the physical properties, synthesis, and chemical reactions. Many organozinc compounds are commercially important. Among important applications are
- The Frankland-Duppa Reaction in which an oxalate ester (ROCOCOOR) reacts with an alkyl halide R'X, zinc and hydrochloric acid to form the α-hydroxycarboxylic esters RR'COHCOOR
- On the downside, organozincs are much less nucleophilic than Grignards, and they are expensive and difficult to handle. Commercially available diorganozinc compounds are dimethylzinc, diethylzinc and diphenylzinc. In one study, the active organozinc compound is obtained from much cheaper organobromine precursors.
Zinc has found many uses as a catalyst in organic synthesis including asymmetric synthesis, being cheap and easily available alternative to precious metal complexes. The results (yield and enantiomeric excess) obtained with chiral zinc catalysts are comparable to those achieved with palladium, ruthenium, iridium and others, and zinc becomes a metal catalyst of choice.
### Dietary supplement
In most single-tablet, over-the-counter, daily vitamin and mineral supplements, zinc is included in such forms as zinc oxide, zinc acetate, zinc gluconate, or zinc amino acid chelate.
Generally, zinc supplement is recommended where there is high risk of zinc deficiency (such as low and middle income countries) as a preventive measure. Although zinc sulfate is a commonly used zinc form, zinc citrate, gluconate and picolinate may be valid options as well. These forms are better absorbed than zinc oxide.
#### Gastroenteritis
Zinc is an inexpensive and effective part of treatment of diarrhea among children in the developing world. Zinc becomes depleted in the body during diarrhea and replenishing zinc with a 10- to 14-day course of treatment can reduce the duration and severity of diarrheal episodes and may also prevent future episodes for as long as three months. Gastroenteritis is strongly attenuated by ingestion of zinc, possibly by direct antimicrobial action of the ions in the gastrointestinal tract, or by the absorption of the zinc and re-release from immune cells (all granulocytes secrete zinc), or both.
#### Common cold
#### Weight gain
Zinc deficiency may lead to loss of appetite. The use of zinc in the treatment of anorexia has been advocated since 1979. At least 15 clinical trials have shown that zinc improved weight gain in anorexia. A 1994 trial showed that zinc doubled the rate of body mass increase in the treatment of anorexia nervosa. Deficiency of other nutrients such as tyrosine, tryptophan and thiamine could contribute to this phenomenon of "malnutrition-induced malnutrition". A meta-analysis of 33 prospective intervention trials regarding zinc supplementation and its effects on the growth of children in many countries showed that zinc supplementation alone had a statistically significant effect on linear growth and body weight gain, indicating that other deficiencies that may have been present were not responsible for growth retardation.
#### Other
A Cochrane review stated that people taking zinc supplement may be less likely to progress to age-related macular degeneration. Zinc supplement is an effective treatment for acrodermatitis enteropathica, a genetic disorder affecting zinc absorption that was previously fatal to affected infants. Zinc deficiency has been associated with major depressive disorder (MDD), and zinc supplements may be an effective treatment. Zinc may help individuals sleep more.
### Topical use
Topical preparations of zinc include those used on the skin, often in the form of zinc oxide. Zinc oxide is generally recognised by the FDA as safe and effective and is considered a very photo-stable. Zinc oxide is one of the most common active ingredients formulated into a sunscreen to mitigate sunburn. Applied thinly to a baby's diaper area (perineum) with each diaper change, it can protect against diaper rash.
Chelated zinc is used in toothpastes and mouthwashes to prevent bad breath; zinc citrate helps reduce the build-up of calculus (tartar).
Zinc pyrithione is widely included in shampoos to prevent dandruff.
Topical zinc has also been shown to effectively treat, as well as prolong remission in genital herpes.
## Biological role
Zinc is an essential trace element for humans and other animals, for plants and for microorganisms. Zinc is required for the function of over 300 enzymes and 1000 transcription factors, and is stored and transferred in metallothioneins. It is the second most abundant trace metal in humans after iron and it is the only metal which appears in all enzyme classes.
In proteins, zinc ions are often coordinated to the amino acid side chains of aspartic acid, glutamic acid, cysteine and histidine. The theoretical and computational description of this zinc binding in proteins (as well as that of other transition metals) is difficult.
Roughly 2–4 grams of zinc are distributed throughout the human body. Most zinc is in the brain, muscle, bones, kidney, and liver, with the highest concentrations in the prostate and parts of the eye. Semen is particularly rich in zinc, a key factor in prostate gland function and reproductive organ growth.
Zinc homeostasis of the body is mainly controlled by the intestine. Here, ZIP4 and especially TRPM7 were linked to intestinal zinc uptake essential for postnatal survival.
In humans, the biological roles of zinc are ubiquitous. It interacts with "a wide range of organic ligands", and has roles in the metabolism of RNA and DNA, signal transduction, and gene expression. It also regulates apoptosis. A review from 2015 indicated that about 10% of human proteins (\~3000) bind zinc, in addition to hundreds more that transport and traffic zinc; a similar in silico study in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana found 2367 zinc-related proteins.
In the brain, zinc is stored in specific synaptic vesicles by glutamatergic neurons and can modulate neuronal excitability. It plays a key role in synaptic plasticity and so in learning. Zinc homeostasis also plays a critical role in the functional regulation of the central nervous system. Dysregulation of zinc homeostasis in the central nervous system that results in excessive synaptic zinc concentrations is believed to induce neurotoxicity through mitochondrial oxidative stress (e.g., by disrupting certain enzymes involved in the electron transport chain, including complex I, complex III, and α-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase), the dysregulation of calcium homeostasis, glutamatergic neuronal excitotoxicity, and interference with intraneuronal signal transduction. L- and D-histidine facilitate brain zinc uptake. SLC30A3 is the primary zinc transporter involved in cerebral zinc homeostasis.
### Enzymes
Zinc is an efficient Lewis acid, making it a useful catalytic agent in hydroxylation and other enzymatic reactions. The metal also has a flexible coordination geometry, which allows proteins using it to rapidly shift conformations to perform biological reactions. Two examples of zinc-containing enzymes are carbonic anhydrase and carboxypeptidase, which are vital to the processes of carbon dioxide (CO
<sub>2</sub>) regulation and digestion of proteins, respectively.
In vertebrate blood, carbonic anhydrase converts CO
<sub>2</sub> into bicarbonate and the same enzyme transforms the bicarbonate back into CO
<sub>2</sub> for exhalation through the lungs. Without this enzyme, this conversion would occur about one million times slower at the normal blood pH of 7 or would require a pH of 10 or more. The non-related β-carbonic anhydrase is required in plants for leaf formation, the synthesis of indole acetic acid (auxin) and alcoholic fermentation.
Carboxypeptidase cleaves peptide linkages during digestion of proteins. A coordinate covalent bond is formed between the terminal peptide and a C=O group attached to zinc, which gives the carbon a positive charge. This helps to create a hydrophobic pocket on the enzyme near the zinc, which attracts the non-polar part of the protein being digested.
### Signalling
Zinc has been recognized as a messenger, able to activate signalling pathways. Many of these pathways provide the driving force in aberrant cancer growth. They can be targeted through ZIP transporters.
### Other proteins
Zinc serves a purely structural role in zinc fingers, twists and clusters. Zinc fingers form parts of some transcription factors, which are proteins that recognize DNA base sequences during the replication and transcription of DNA. Each of the nine or ten Zn<sup>2+</sup>
ions in a zinc finger helps maintain the finger's structure by coordinately binding to four amino acids in the transcription factor.
In blood plasma, zinc is bound to and transported by albumin (60%, low-affinity) and transferrin (10%). Because transferrin also transports iron, excessive iron reduces zinc absorption, and vice versa. A similar antagonism exists with copper. The concentration of zinc in blood plasma stays relatively constant regardless of zinc intake. Cells in the salivary gland, prostate, immune system, and intestine use zinc signaling to communicate with other cells.
Zinc may be held in metallothionein reserves within microorganisms or in the intestines or liver of animals. Metallothionein in intestinal cells is capable of adjusting absorption of zinc by 15–40%. However, inadequate or excessive zinc intake can be harmful; excess zinc particularly impairs copper absorption because metallothionein absorbs both metals.
The human dopamine transporter contains a high affinity extracellular zinc binding site which, upon zinc binding, inhibits dopamine reuptake and amplifies amphetamine-induced dopamine efflux in vitro. The human serotonin transporter and norepinephrine transporter do not contain zinc binding sites. Some EF-hand calcium binding proteins such as S100 or NCS-1 are also able to bind zinc ions.
### Nutrition
#### Dietary recommendations
The U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) updated Estimated Average Requirements (EARs) and Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) for zinc in 2001. The current EARs for zinc for women and men ages 14 and up is 6.8 and 9.4 mg/day, respectively. The RDAs are 8 and 11 mg/day. RDAs are higher than EARs so as to identify amounts that will cover people with higher than average requirements. RDA for pregnancy is 11 mg/day. RDA for lactation is 12 mg/day. For infants up to 12 months the RDA is 3 mg/day. For children ages 1–13 years the RDA increases with age from 3 to 8 mg/day. As for safety, the IOM sets Tolerable upper intake levels (ULs) for vitamins and minerals when evidence is sufficient. In the case of zinc the adult UL is 40 mg/day including both food and supplements combined (lower for children). Collectively the EARs, RDAs, AIs and ULs are referred to as Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs).
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) refers to the collective set of information as Dietary Reference Values, with Population Reference Intake (PRI) instead of RDA, and Average Requirement instead of EAR. AI and UL are defined the same as in the United States. For people ages 18 and older the PRI calculations are complex, as the EFSA has set higher and higher values as the phytate content of the diet increases. For women, PRIs increase from 7.5 to 12.7 mg/day as phytate intake increases from 300 to 1200 mg/day; for men the range is 9.4 to 16.3 mg/day. These PRIs are higher than the U.S. RDAs. The EFSA reviewed the same safety question and set its UL at 25 mg/day, which is much lower than the U.S. value.
For U.S. food and dietary supplement labeling purposes the amount in a serving is expressed as a percent of Daily Value (%DV). For zinc labeling purposes 100% of the Daily Value was 15 mg, but on May 27, 2016, it was revised to 11 mg. A table of the old and new adult daily values is provided at Reference Daily Intake.
#### Dietary intake
Animal products such as meat, fish, shellfish, fowl, eggs, and dairy contain zinc. The concentration of zinc in plants varies with the level in the soil. With adequate zinc in the soil, the food plants that contain the most zinc are wheat (germ and bran) and various seeds, including sesame, poppy, alfalfa, celery, and mustard. Zinc is also found in beans, nuts, almonds, whole grains, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and blackcurrant.
Other sources include fortified food and dietary supplements in various forms. A 1998 review concluded that zinc oxide, one of the most common supplements in the United States, and zinc carbonate are nearly insoluble and poorly absorbed in the body. This review cited studies that found lower plasma zinc concentrations in the subjects who consumed zinc oxide and zinc carbonate than in those who took zinc acetate and sulfate salts. For fortification, however, a 2003 review recommended cereals (containing zinc oxide) as a cheap, stable source that is as easily absorbed as the more expensive forms. A 2005 study found that various compounds of zinc, including oxide and sulfate, did not show statistically significant differences in absorption when added as fortificants to maize tortillas.
### Deficiency
Nearly two billion people in the developing world are deficient in zinc. Groups at risk include children in developing countries and elderly with chronic illnesses. In children, it causes an increase in infection and diarrhea and contributes to the death of about 800,000 children worldwide per year. The World Health Organization advocates zinc supplementation for severe malnutrition and diarrhea. Zinc supplements help prevent disease and reduce mortality, especially among children with low birth weight or stunted growth. However, zinc supplements should not be administered alone, because many in the developing world have several deficiencies, and zinc interacts with other micronutrients. While zinc deficiency is usually due to insufficient dietary intake, it can be associated with malabsorption, acrodermatitis enteropathica, chronic liver disease, chronic renal disease, sickle cell disease, diabetes, malignancy, and other chronic illnesses.
In the United States, a federal survey of food consumption determined that for women and men over the age of 19, average consumption was 9.7 and 14.2 mg/day, respectively. For women, 17% consumed less than the EAR, for men 11%. The percentages below EAR increased with age. The most recent published update of the survey (NHANES 2013–2014) reported lower averages – 9.3 and 13.2 mg/day – again with intake decreasing with age.
Symptoms of mild zinc deficiency are diverse. Clinical outcomes include depressed growth, diarrhea, impotence and delayed sexual maturation, alopecia, eye and skin lesions, impaired appetite, altered cognition, impaired immune functions, defects in carbohydrate use, and reproductive teratogenesis. Zinc deficiency depresses immunity, but excessive zinc does also.
Despite some concerns, western vegetarians and vegans do not suffer any more from overt zinc deficiency than meat-eaters. Major plant sources of zinc include cooked dried beans, sea vegetables, fortified cereals, soy foods, nuts, peas, and seeds. However, phytates in many whole-grains and fibers may interfere with zinc absorption and marginal zinc intake has poorly understood effects. The zinc chelator phytate, found in seeds and cereal bran, can contribute to zinc malabsorption. Some evidence suggests that more than the US RDA (8 mg/day for adult women; 11 mg/day for adult men) may be needed in those whose diet is high in phytates, such as some vegetarians. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) guidelines attempt to compensate for this by recommending higher zinc intake when dietary phytate intake is greater. These considerations must be balanced against the paucity of adequate zinc biomarkers, and the most widely used indicator, plasma zinc, has poor sensitivity and specificity.
### Soil remediation
Species of Calluna, Erica and Vaccinium can grow in zinc-metalliferous soils, because translocation of toxic ions is prevented by the action of ericoid mycorrhizal fungi.
### Agriculture
Zinc deficiency appears to be the most common micronutrient deficiency in crop plants; it is particularly common in high-pH soils. Zinc-deficient soil is cultivated in the cropland of about half of Turkey and India, a third of China, and most of Western Australia. Substantial responses to zinc fertilization have been reported in these areas. Plants that grow in soils that are zinc-deficient are more susceptible to disease. Zinc is added to the soil primarily through the weathering of rocks, but humans have added zinc through fossil fuel combustion, mine waste, phosphate fertilizers, pesticide (zinc phosphide), limestone, manure, sewage sludge, and particles from galvanized surfaces. Excess zinc is toxic to plants, although zinc toxicity is far less widespread.
## Precautions
### Toxicity
Although zinc is an essential requirement for good health, excess zinc can be harmful. Excessive absorption of zinc suppresses copper and iron absorption. The free zinc ion in solution is highly toxic to plants, invertebrates, and even vertebrate fish. The Free Ion Activity Model is well-established in the literature, and shows that just micromolar amounts of the free ion kills some organisms. A recent example showed 6 micromolar killing 93% of all Daphnia in water.
The free zinc ion is a powerful Lewis acid up to the point of being corrosive. Stomach acid contains hydrochloric acid, in which metallic zinc dissolves readily to give corrosive zinc chloride. Swallowing a post-1982 American one cent piece (97.5% zinc) can cause damage to the stomach lining through the high solubility of the zinc ion in the acidic stomach.
Evidence shows that people taking 100–300 mg of zinc daily may suffer induced copper deficiency. A 2007 trial observed that elderly men taking 80 mg daily were hospitalized for urinary complications more often than those taking a placebo. Levels of 100–300 mg may interfere with the use of copper and iron or adversely affect cholesterol. Zinc in excess of 500 ppm in soil interferes with the plant absorption of other essential metals, such as iron and manganese. A condition called the zinc shakes or "zinc chills" can be induced by inhalation of zinc fumes while brazing or welding galvanized materials. Zinc is a common ingredient of denture cream which may contain between 17 and 38 mg of zinc per gram. Disability and even deaths from excessive use of these products have been claimed.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states that zinc damages nerve receptors in the nose, causing anosmia. Reports of anosmia were also observed in the 1930s when zinc preparations were used in a failed attempt to prevent polio infections. On June 16, 2009, the FDA ordered removal of zinc-based intranasal cold products from store shelves. The FDA said the loss of smell can be life-threatening because people with impaired smell cannot detect leaking gas or smoke, and cannot tell if food has spoiled before they eat it.
Recent research suggests that the topical antimicrobial zinc pyrithione is a potent heat shock response inducer that may impair genomic integrity with induction of PARP-dependent energy crisis in cultured human keratinocytes and melanocytes.
### Poisoning
In 1982, the US Mint began minting pennies coated in copper but containing primarily zinc. Zinc pennies pose a risk of zinc toxicosis, which can be fatal. One reported case of chronic ingestion of 425 pennies (over 1 kg of zinc) resulted in death due to gastrointestinal bacterial and fungal sepsis. Another patient who ingested 12 grams of zinc showed only lethargy and ataxia (gross lack of coordination of muscle movements). Several other cases have been reported of humans suffering zinc intoxication by the ingestion of zinc coins.
Pennies and other small coins are sometimes ingested by dogs, requiring veterinary removal of the foreign objects. The zinc content of some coins can cause zinc toxicity, commonly fatal in dogs through severe hemolytic anemia and liver or kidney damage; vomiting and diarrhea are possible symptoms. Zinc is highly toxic in parrots and poisoning can often be fatal. The consumption of fruit juices stored in galvanized cans has resulted in mass parrot poisonings with zinc.
## See also
- List of countries by zinc production
- Spelter
- Wet storage stain
- Zinc alloy electroplating
- Metal fume fever
- Piotr Steinkeller |
18,776,332 | R. A. B. Mynors | 1,167,626,918 | British classical scholar (1903–1989) | [
"1903 births",
"1989 deaths",
"Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford",
"Anglo-Saxon studies scholars",
"British classical scholars",
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"British medievalists",
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"Codicologists",
"Corpus Christi Professors of Latin",
"English palaeographers",
"English twins",
"Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford",
"Fellows of the British Academy",
"Kennedy Professors of Latin",
"Knights Bachelor",
"Latin–English translators",
"Members of the University of Cambridge faculty of classics",
"People educated at Eton College",
"People educated at Summer Fields School",
"Presidents of the Classical Association",
"Road incident deaths in England",
"Scholars of Latin literature"
]
| Sir Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors FBA (28 July 1903 – 17 October 1989) was an English classicist and medievalist who held the senior chairs of Latin at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A textual critic, he was an expert in the study of manuscripts and their role in the reconstruction of classical texts.
Mynors's career spanned most of the 20th century and straddled two of England's leading universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Educated at Eton College, he read Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford, and spent the early years of his career as a Fellow of that college. He was Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge from 1944 to 1953 and Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at Oxford from 1953 until his retirement in 1970. He died in a car accident in 1989, aged 86, while travelling to his country residence, Treago Castle in Herefordshire.
Mynors's reputation is that of one of Britain's foremost classicists. He was an expert on palaeography, and has been credited with unravelling a number of highly complex manuscript relationships in his catalogues of the Balliol and Durham Cathedral libraries. His publications on classical subjects include critical editions of Vergil, Catullus, Pliny the Younger, Bede and Cassiodorus. He also was part of the editorial board of the comprehensive edition of the works by Erasmus. The final achievement of his scholarly career, a comprehensive commentary on Vergil's Georgics, was published posthumously. In addition to honorary degrees and fellowships from various institutions, Mynors was created Knight Bachelor in 1963.
## Early life and secondary education
Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors was born in Langley Burrell, Wiltshire, on 28 July 1903 into a family of Herefordshire gentry. The Mynors family had owned the estate of Treago Castle since the 15th century, and he resided there in later life. His mother was Margery Musgrave, and his father, Aubrey Baskerville Mynors, was an Anglican clergyman and rector of Langley Burrell, who had been secretary to the Pan-Anglican Congress, held in London in 1908. Among his four siblings was his identical twin brother Humphrey Mynors, who went on to become Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. The brothers shared a close friendship and lived together in their ancestral home after Roger's retirement.
Mynors attended Summer Fields School in Oxford, and in 1916 entered Eton College as a King's Scholar. At Eton, he was part of a generation of pupils that included the historian Steven Runciman and the author George Orwell. His precocious interest in Latin literature and its transmission was fostered by the encouragement of two of his teachers, Cyril Alington and M. R. James. Alington became an influential mentor and friend since he, like Mynors, was fascinated with the manuscript traditions of medieval Europe.
## Academic career
### Balliol College, Oxford
In 1922, Mynors won the Domus exhibition, a scholarship to study Classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Attending the college at the same time as the literary critic Cyril Connolly, the musicologist Jack Westrup, the future Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Walter Fraser Oakeshott, and the historian Richard Pares, he was highly successful in his academic studies. Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1926, he won the Hertford (1924), Craven (1924), and Derby (1926) scholarships. He was elected to a fellowship at Balliol and became a tutor in Classics. In 1935 he was elevated to a University Lecturership. At the time of his appointment, much of Mynors's teaching focused on the poet Vergil, whose complete works he edited in the following decades.
His tenure at Oxford University saw the beginning of his comprehensive work on medieval manuscripts. From the late 1920s onwards, Mynors was drawn more to matters of codicology than to purely classical questions. He prepared an edition of the 6th-century scholar Cassiodorus, for which he travelled extensively in continental Europe; a critical edition was published in 1937. In 1929, he was appointed librarian of Balliol College. This position gave impetus to create a catalogue of the college's medieval manuscripts. A similar project, a catalogue of the manuscripts housed at Durham Cathedral, was compiled in the 1930s. Mynors's interest in codicology gave rise to a close co-operation with the medievalists Richard William Hunt and Neil Ripley Ker.
In 1936, towards the end of his tenure at Balliol, Mynors met Eduard Fraenkel, then holder of a chair in Latin at Oxford. Having relocated to England because of the increasing discrimination against German Jews, Fraenkel was a leading exponent of Germany's scholarly tradition. His mentorship contributed to Mynors's transformation from amateur scholar to a professional critic of Latin texts. They maintained a close friendship, which exposed Mynors to other German philologists, including Rudolf Pfeiffer and Otto Skutsch.
Mynors spent the winter of 1938 as a visiting scholar at Harvard University. In 1940, after a brief return to Balliol, British involvement in the Second World War led to his being employed at the Exchange Control Department of Her Majesty's Treasury responsible for the administration of foreign currency transactions. At Balliol, Mynors taught from 1926 until 1944, a time during which he mentored a number of future scholars, including the Wittgenstein expert David Pears and the classicist Donald Russell.
### Pembroke College, Cambridge
In 1944, encouraged by Fraenkel, Mynors took up an offer to assume the Kennedy Professorship of Latin at the University of Cambridge. He also became a fellow of Pembroke College. In 1945, shortly after moving to Cambridge, he married Lavinia Alington, a medical researcher and daughter of his former teacher and Eton headmaster, Cyril Alington. The couple had no children. The move to Cambridge meant an advancement of his academic career, but he soon came to contemplate a return to Oxford. He applied unsuccessfully to become master of Balliol College after the position had been vacated by Sandie Lindsay in 1949. The historian David Keir was elected in his stead.
His post at Cambridge caused changes to Mynors's profile as an academic. His duties at Balliol had centred on the supervision of undergraduates, while he was free to focus on palaeographical topics in his research. At Cambridge, Mynors was required to lecture extensively on Latin literature and to supervise research students, a task of which he had little experience. The duties of his university post left little time to get involved in the activities of the college, which led Mynors to regret his departure from Oxford, going so far as to describe the decision as a "fundamental error" in a personal letter.
Although his post was chiefly that of a Latinist, his involvement in the publication of medieval texts intensified during the 1940s. After he was approached by V. H. Galbraith, a historian of the Middle Ages, Mynors became an editor on Nelson's Medieval Texts series in 1946. Working on the series first as a joint editor, and from 1962 as an advisory editor, he edited the Latin text for a number of volumes. He was the principal author of editions of Walter Map's De nugis curialium and of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. In 1947, he collaborated with the Oxford historian Alfred Brotherston Emden, who consulted Mynors for his own work on the history of the University of Oxford while assisting, in turn, with the Balliol catalogue.
### Corpus Christi College, Oxford
In 1953, Mynors was appointed Corpus Christi Professor of Latin and could thus return to Oxford to succeed Eduard Fraenkel. At the time, there was no precedent for such a move between senior chairs at Oxford and Cambridge. Most of his work as an editor of Latin texts took place during this second period at Oxford. Working for the Oxford Classical Texts series, he produced critical editions of the complete works of Catullus (1958) and Vergil (1969), and of Pliny the Younger's Epistulae (1963). Though focusing on classical subjects, he continued to work on manuscripts as a curator at the Bodleian Library. In the 17 years he spent at the college, Mynors sought to maintain its position as a centre of excellence in the Classics and fostered contacts with a new generation of Latinists, including E. J. Kenney, Wendell Clausen, Leighton Durham Reynolds, R. J. Tarrant and Michael Winterbottom.
## Retirement and death
In 1970, Mynors retired from his teaching duties and relocated to his estate at Treago Castle. In addition to an intense dedication to arboriculture, his retirement saw work on a commentary on Vergil's Georgics, which was published posthumously in 1990. He translated the correspondence of the humanist Desiderius Erasmus for the University of Toronto Press, and maintained an interest in the nearby Hereford Cathedral, serving as the chairman of the Friends of the Cathedral from 1979 to 1984. In 1980, the cathedral's parish set up a fund in Mynors's name to acquire a collection of rare books.
On 17 October 1989, Mynors was killed in a road accident outside Hereford on his way back from a day working on the cathedral's manuscripts. He was buried at St Weonards. Meryl Jancey, the cathedral's Honorary Archivist, later revealed that Mynors had on the same day expressed his delight about his own scholarly work on the death of Bede: "He told me he was glad that he had translated for the Oxford Medieval Texts the account of Bede's death, and that Bede had not ceased in what he saw as his work for God until the very end."
## Contributions to scholarship
### Cataloguing manuscripts
Mynors's chief interest lay in palaeography, the study of pre-modern manuscripts. He is credited with unravelling a number of complex manuscript relationships in his catalogues of the Balliol and Durham Cathedral libraries. He had particular interest in the physical state of manuscripts, including examining blots and rulings. For the Balliol archivist Bethany Hamblen, this interest typifies the importance Mynors gave to formal features when evaluating hand-written books.
### Critical editions
A series of critical editions on Latin authors constitutes the entirety of Mynors's purely classical scholarship. Because of his reluctance to emend beyond the transmitted readings, Mynors has been described as a conservative textual critic. This approach is thought to have originated in his tendency to ascribe great historical value to manuscripts and their scribes.
The first of his critical editions is of the Institutiones of Cassiodorus, the first produced since 1679. In the introduction, Mynors offered new insights into the complex manuscript tradition without resolving the fundamental question of how the original text was expanded in later copies. The edition was praised by the reviewer Stephen Gaselee in The Classical Review, who said that it would provide solid foundations for a commentary; writing for the Journal of Theological Studies, Alexander Souter described it as a "definitive edition" and praised Mynors's classification of the manuscripts.
In 1958, Mynors published an edition of the poems of Catullus. His text followed two recent editions by Moritz Schuster (1949) and Ignazio Cazzaniga (1956), with which he had to compete. Taking a conservative stance on the problems posed by Catullus's text, Mynors did not print any modern emendations unless they corrected obvious scribal errors. Contrary to his conservative instincts, he rejected the traditional archaising orthography of the manuscripts in favour of normalised Latin spelling. This intervention was termed by the philologist Revilo Oliver as "the victory of common sense" in Catullan criticism. For the reviewer Philip Levine, Mynors's edition sets itself apart from previous texts by its scrutiny of a "large bulk" of unexamined manuscripts. Writing in 2000, the Latinist Stephen Harrison criticised Mynors's text for the "omission of many important conjectures from the text", while lauding it for its handling of the manuscript tradition.
His edition of Pliny's Epistulae employed a similar method but aimed to be an intermediate step rather than an overhaul of the text. Mynors's edition of the complete works of Vergil revamped the text constructed by F. A. Hirtzel in 1900 which had become outdated. He enlarged the manuscript base by drawing on 13 minor witnesses from the ninth century and added an index of personal names. Its judgement of these minor manuscripts, in particular, is described by the Latinist W. S. Maguinness as the edition's strength. Given the incomplete state of the Aeneid, Vergil's epic poem on the wanderings of Aeneas, Mynors departed from his cautious editorial stance by printing a small number of modern conjectures.
Mynors established a new text of Bede's Ecclesiastical History for the edition he published together with the historian Bertram Colgrave. His edition of this text followed that of Charles Plummer published in 1896. Collation of the Saint Petersburg Bede, an 8th-century manuscript unknown to Plummer, allowed Mynors to construct a new version of the M tradition. Although he did not append a detailed critical apparatus and exegetical notes, his analysis of the textual history was praised by the Church historian Gerald Bonner as "lucid" and "excellently done". Mynors himself considered the edition superficial and felt that its publication had been premature. Winterbottom voices a similar opinion, writing that the text "hardly differ[ed] from Plummer's".
### Commentary on the Georgics
His scholarly legacy was enhanced by his posthumously published commentary on Vergil's Georgics. A comprehensive guide to Vergil's didactic poem on agriculture, the commentary has been lauded for its meticulous attention to technical detail and for Mynors's profound knowledge of agricultural practice. In spite of its accomplishments, the classicist Patricia Johnston has noted that the commentary fails to engage seriously with contemporary scholarship on the text, such as the tension between optimistic and pessimistic readings. In this regard, Mynors's last work reflects his lifelong scepticism towards literary criticism of any persuasion.
## Legacy
During his career, Mynors gained a reputation as "one of the leading classical scholars of his generation". He drew praise from the scholarly community for his textual work. The Latinist Harold Gotoff states that he was an "extraordinary scholar", while Winterbottom describes his critical editions as "distinguished". His Oxford editions of the poets Catullus and Vergil in particular are singled out by Gotoff as "excellent"; they still serve as the standard editions of their texts in the early 21st century.
## Honours
Mynors was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1944 and made a Knight Bachelor in 1963. He was granted honorary fellowships by Balliol College, Oxford (1963), Pembroke College, Cambridge (1965), and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1970). The Warburg Institute honoured him in the same way. Mynors was also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani (it). He held honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Sheffield, and Toronto. In 1983, on his 80th birthday, Mynors's service to the study of Latin texts was honoured by the publication of Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, edited by the Oxford Latinist L. D. Reynolds. In 2020, an exhibition was held at Balliol to commemorate his scholarship on the college library.
## Publications
The following books were authored by Mynors: |
2,777,047 | Aitraaz | 1,171,980,417 | 2004 Hindi romantic thriller courtroom drama film by Abbas-Mustan | [
"2000s Hindi-language films",
"2000s erotic thriller films",
"2000s romantic thriller films",
"2004 films",
"2004 romantic drama films",
"False allegations of sex crimes in fiction",
"Films about sexual harassment",
"Films directed by Abbas–Mustan",
"Films scored by Himesh Reshammiya",
"Films shot in South Africa",
"Hindi films remade in other languages",
"Hindi-language thriller films",
"Indian courtroom films",
"Indian erotic drama films",
"Indian erotic thriller films",
"Indian legal films",
"Indian romantic drama films",
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]
| Aitraaz () is a 2004 Indian Hindi-language romantic thriller film directed by Abbas–Mustan and produced by Subhash Ghai. It stars Akshay Kumar, Priyanka Chopra and Kareena Kapoor.
Aitraaz tells the story of a man accused of sexual harassment by his female superior, and was released on 12 November 2004 to positive reviews. Chopra received widespread critical acclaim for her performance. Loosely based on the 1994 film Disclosure, the film was a commercial success grossing ₹260 million at the box office against a budget of ₹80 million, and has been noted for its bold subject of sexual harassment.
Aitraaz received several accolades, particularly for Chopra. At the 50th Filmfare Awards, Chopra was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress and Best Villain, winning the latter and thus becoming the second (and final) actress to win the award. Chopra also won the Bengal Film Journalists' Association Award for Best Actress and the Screen Award for Best Villain. The film received ten nominations at the 2005 IIFA Awards, winning three.
## Plot
Raj Malhotra is an orphaned person living in Cape Town, South Africa. One day, he comes across glamorous model Sonia Kapoor. They fall in love and begin a live-in relationship, though Raj always feels insecure due to explicit men reactions on Sonia's modelling photos. Upon knowing she is pregnant, Raj wishes to marry her but she refuses and decides to abort the child to pursue her ambitions of wealth, fame and power thinking marriage and child as burden. As a result, they break up.
### 3 years later
Raj, now settled at a rented house in India, is a product engineer for mobile manufacturing company Voice Mobiles. Junior lawyer Priya Saxena visits his house for an interview, mistaking him as his neighbour friend Barrister Ram Chotrani. Raj develops a love at first sight for Priya, who also accepts him and they get happily married.
### 2 years later
Priya is pregnant with Raj's child. They move into their own house, a bungalow, and expect Raj's promotion to CEO. On the company's anniversary, its chairman and Raj's boss Ranjit Roy arrives with his third much younger wife none other than Sonia, which stuns Raj as they encounter each other after 5 years. Sonia, being the new chairperson and managing director, appoints his friend Rakesh as CEO and Raj on the board of directors. Still, Raj behaves to her like a stranger in front of everyone.
Rakesh informs Raj about a defect in the company's new mobile handset, which causes calls to be simultaneously placed to two people—the intended recipient and another random person from the phone's contact list. Raj needs Sonia's authorisation to stop production, and thus visits her at her house. She makes provocative and sexually explicit statements to Raj though he ignores. Later when he dials Rakesh's number, the phone slips down as Sonia comes and sticks to him from the back. Shocked, Raj rejects her advances but Sonia attempts to seduce him. However, he leaves her again.
Next day, Raj learns Sonia has falsely accused him of sexual harassment and attempted rape and that Ranjit demanded that he resign quietly as to not negatively impact the company. At the end of the day, Priya finds the resignation letter in his jacket pocket and asks why. Raj explains what happened the night he visited Sonia and had gotten counsel from Ram earlier who advised him to not chase up the matter. Priya, however feels differently and encourages Raj to not resign, explaining that the lie will be assumed as the truth if he does. Raj gives his case to Ram which goes court, gaining massive media attention, affecting Raj negatively.
Raj's bank manager returns from abroad sometime after Raj's first court hearing with a genuine tape that recorded his visit at Sonia's house due to the defect in the handset. After playing it back with Ram and Priya, Ram submits the tape for forensic testing. However, upon retrieving the tape, Ram is injured in an accident, which was secretly orchestrated by Sonia. Ram's assistant swaps the tape for a destroyed fake one and has it delivered to Sonia, who destroys it. She phones Raj and tells him to meet with her if he wants to have his normal life back. Unbeknownst to Raj however, Priya is also listening to the call. Sonia fantasises of Raj giving in to her but is informed that Priya wants to meet with her instead of Raj. Priya then enters her office and Sonia states that she can save Raj for a price; he would be a keep-man for her for life. Priya refuses the offer and challenges that she can save Raj from going to jail.
With Ram recovering in the hospital, Priya decides to pick up the case as Raj's lawyer. She exposes Sonia and Raj's past relationship and plays Rakesh's voice mail. This ends up in revealing that Rakesh's phone had saved the message. It turns out that Sonia married Ranjit for money, power and status but as he couldn't satisfy her sexually, she tried to resume her relation with Raj.
In the end, Priya wins the case and Ranjit files for divorce from Sonia for the latter's infidelity. Guilt-stricken and humiliated, Sonia commits suicide by jumping from a building.
Months later, Raj and Priya walk with their newborn child as the story ends.
## Cast
The cast is listed below:
- Akshay Kumar as Raj Malhotra
- Priyanka Chopra as Sonia Kapoor Roy
- Kareena Kapoor as Advocate Priya Saxena Malhotra
- Amrish Puri as Ranjit Roy
- Annu Kapoor as Barrister Ram Chotrani
- Paresh Rawal as Advocate Ravi Patel
- Vivek Shauq as Rakesh Sharma
- Preeti Puri as Jenny
- Upasana Singh as Kanchan Chotrani
- Dinesh Lamba as Garv
- Anil Nagrath as Judge Anupam Choudhary
## Production
The director duo Abbas–Mustan took inspiration from National Basketball Association player Kobe Bryant, who was accused of rape by a fan; they began developing the film after reading about his sexual-assault case in the newspapers. Regarding the film's unusual title, they said the word aitraaz was colloquial and suited the subject. Shyam Goel and Shiraz Ahmed wrote the screenplay. Hussain A. Burmawala and R. Verman were responsible for film editing and art direction, respectively.
The film was announced in October 2003 by producer Subhash Ghai, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his production company Mukta Arts. The media reported that Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra were cast in lead roles, making it the third film collaboration between Kumar and Chopra after the highly successful Andaaz (2003) and Mujhse Shaadi Karogi (2004). Kumar was cast as Raj, a working man accused of rape at his workplace; Kapoor portrayed his supportive wife, who goes to extremes to defend him. According to the directors, Kumar was cast against type; he generally played action heroes, and they wanted him to underplay his character. Abbas–Mustan, known for stylish thrillers and intriguing antagonists, cast Chopra in her first negative role. She plays a woman, married to a business magnate more than twice her age, who seeks revenge by falsely accusing her former lover of raping her. Chopra was initially apprehensive about such a bold character, due to the controversial theme of sexual harassment, but Abbas–Mastan and Subhash Ghai convinced her to accept the role. The director duo had previously offered her the lead in their 2002 thriller Humraaz, which she could not accept.
Kumar described his character as "realistic" and a "new-age metrosexual" man. The actor revealed that he enjoyed the strengths and weaknesses of his character, adding "[he] is not afraid to show his feelings and does not feel emasculated by his situation." Kumar further stated: "There's a quiet dignity and heroism associated with my character. He doesn't fight for applause. He fights for his convictions." In an interview with The Tribune, Kapoor remarked that Indian women would identify with her character. She said her character "stand[s] by [Raj] in his moment of distress and helplessness, like every Indian woman would." Chopra described her character Sonia as "charming and focused", commenting that her "philosophy is that she has to achieve her goals at any cost. She knows one thing: that nothing can come in between her desires and herself." Owing to her conservative upbringing, Chopra found it difficult to identify with her "man-eater role". Playing an "extremely negative character" proved a challenge, and she had to mentally prepare herself for an hour before each scene.
Manish Malhotra and Vikram Phadnis designed the costumes and the cinematography was handled by Ravi Yadav. The film was mainly shot in Cape Town, Goa, Pune and Mumbai. Chopra, who was simultaneously filming four other productions, revealed that because of her busy schedule the producers of her other films had to move their sets to the Filmistan Studio, where Aitraaz was being made. She wept during filming of the sexual-harassment scene; it took the directors several hours to remind her she was only playing a character, and further filming was postponed. The music video of the title track "Aitraaz – I Want to Make Love to You" with Kumar and Chopra was shot in one take with a Steadicam. Salim–Sulaiman composed the background score for the film.
## Soundtrack
Aitraaz's soundtrack was composed by Himesh Reshammiya, with lyrics by Sameer. The album contains fifteen songs: seven original, and eight remixes. The vocals were performed by Udit Narayan, Alka Yagnik, Sunidhi Chauhan, Adnan Sami, K.K., and Alisha Chinai. It was released on 24 September 2004 by Sony Music India.
The soundtrack was generally well received by music critics, who praised its lyrics and vocals. Planet Bollywood gave a rating of 7 out of 10, calling it a "good album". Joginder Tuteja of Bollywood Hungama rated the album 3 out of 5, praising "I Want To Make Love To You" (all three versions): "Sunidhi Chauhan is excellent in this wonderfully-composed track that shocks everyone with the intensity of the lyrics and the music". He concluded, "Except for two or three average songs here and there, the majority of songs in Aitraaz do keep you engaged".
The music topped charts on a number of platforms in India. The soundtrack was one of the best-selling Bollywood soundtracks of the year, with 1.5 million units sold according to Box Office India.
## Marketing and release
The first-look poster of the film, with the tagline "In the world of women, you either play by their rules or else ...", was received positively by critics; the film's trailers were also well received. In October 2004, exclusive footage from the film was screened to the trade experts and critics, creating a positive buzz. The film's trailers and the film's music aided its marketing.
Made on a production and marketing budget of million, Aitraaz released on 375 screens on 12 November 2004 during the festive Diwali weekend. It clashed with three other major releases: Veer-Zaara, the coloured version of Mughal-e-Azam, and Naach. The film opened to excellent occupancy in metros and decent at other places. It was the second-best playing release of the week after Yash Chopra's Veer-Zaara. According to Box Office India, the film grossed approximately ₹45 million on its opening weekend and ₹76 million in its first week at the domestic box office. After its run, Aitraaz grossed over ₹278 million at the box office, becoming the tenth highest-grossing Bollywood film of the year. The film was deemed a commercial success.
The DVD of the film was released on 6 December 2004 across all regions in a PAL-format single disc. Distributed by Shemaroo Entertainment, it included a making-of-the-film segment and a photo gallery. The VCD version was released at the same time, and Zee Network bought the exclusive broadcast rights. Aitraaz made its Indian television premiere on 30 October 2005 on Zee Cinema. The film was remade in Kannada as Shrimathi (2011), starring Upendra, Priyanka Trivedi and Celina Jaitley.
## Critical response
Aitraaz received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its direction, music and performances, particularly Chopra's. It was noted for its bold treatment of sexual harassment. Several critics observed that the premise was similar to the American film Disclosure (1994). Writing for the BBC, critic Jay Mamtora praised the film's theme, music and performances, and remarked that "Abbas-Mustaan have done a good job in 'Indianising' the whole concept". He went on to describe it as "a gripping edge of the seat drama that keeps viewers glued to their seats". Taran Adarsh of Bollywood Hungama rated the film 3.5 out of 5, calling it "a well-crafted thriller" and complimenting the directors' opting for "a theme that has been untouched on the Indian screen so far" and the film's "dramatic moments".
Like Mamtora, Adarsh believed that the film belonged entirely to Priyanka Chopra, and was impressed with her understanding of the character, writing that "She sneaks her way through the role like an expert, drawing audience hatred the way a magnet collects iron filings." He also complimented the performances by Kapoor and Kumar. Patcy N of Rediff.com noted the film's appeal to the general public, finding its subject matter "something different from the standard fare on offer". She also praised the music and choreography. Writing for India Today, film critic Anupama Chopra lauded Chopra's "impressive" performance, and deemed the film "good timepass".
Sudhish Kamath of The Hindu commented that "though the first half of the movie is well-paced, the second half sags with the songs and twists forced into the plot to buy time", but stated that it was "passable with its slick production, a few funny lines, glam quotient and star appeal." Subhash K. Jha criticised the film's "dishy digressions" and "peripheral sub-plots", rating it 2 out of 5 overall, but was impressed with the court scene, which he considered "splendid". He also found Chopra's performance to be a triumph, remarking: "A star is born! As the predatory social-climbing seductress who can go to any length to satiate her lust for life, Priyanka Chopra rocks the scene like never before." Jha believed that Kareena was miscast and seemed a little awkward in a non-glamorous role, but "comes into her own in the climactic courtroom sequence", a sentiment echoed by Jitesh Pillai in his review for The Times of India. Pillai gave a rating of 3 out of 5 and noted that "it isn't drama that directors were striving for, yet the film works."
## Accolades
## Explanatory notes |
65,570 | Japanese aircraft carrier Sōryū | 1,158,206,012 | Aircraft carrier of the Imperial Japanese Navy | [
"1935 ships",
"Aircraft carriers sunk by aircraft",
"Attack on Pearl Harbor",
"Maritime incidents in June 1942",
"Scuttled vessels",
"Second Sino-Japanese War naval ships of Japan",
"Ships built by Kure Naval Arsenal",
"Ships of the Battle of Midway",
"Ships sunk by US aircraft",
"Sōryū-class aircraft carriers",
"World War II aircraft carriers of Japan",
"World War II shipwrecks in the Pacific Ocean"
]
| Sōryū (蒼龍, Sōryū, meaning "Blue (or Green) Dragon") was an aircraft carrier built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during the mid-1930s. A sister ship, Hiryū, was intended to follow Sōryū, but Hiryū's design was heavily modified and she is often considered to be a separate class. Sōryū's aircraft were employed in operations during the Second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s and supported the Japanese invasion of French Indochina in mid-1940. During the first months of the Pacific War, she took part in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Wake Island, and supported the conquest of the Dutch East Indies. In February 1942, her aircraft bombed Darwin, Australia, and she continued on to assist in the Dutch East Indies campaign. In April, Sōryū's aircraft helped sink two British heavy cruisers and several merchant ships during the Indian Ocean raid.
After a brief refit, Sōryū and three other carriers of the 1st Air Fleet (Kidō Butai) participated in the Battle of Midway in June 1942. After bombarding American forces on Midway Atoll, the carriers were attacked by aircraft from the island and the carriers Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown. Dive bombers from Yorktown crippled Sōryū and set her afire. Japanese destroyers rescued the survivors but the ship could not be salvaged and was ordered to be scuttled so as to allow her attendant destroyers to be released for further operations. She sank with the loss of 711 officers and enlisted men of the 1,103 aboard. The loss of Sōryū and three other IJN carriers at Midway was a crucial strategic defeat for Japan and contributed significantly to the Allies' ultimate victory in the Pacific.
## Design and description
Sōryū was one of two large carriers approved for construction under the Imperial Japanese Navy's 1931–32 Supplementary Program (the other being her near-sister Hiryū). In contrast to some earlier Japanese carriers, such as Akagi and Kaga, which were conversions of battlecruiser and battleship hulls respectively, Sōryū was designed from the keel up as an aircraft carrier and incorporated lessons learned from the light carrier Ryūjō.
The ship had a length of 227.5 meters (746 ft 5 in) overall, a beam of 21.3 meters (69 ft 11 in) and a draught of 7.6 meters (24 ft 11 in). She displaced 16,200 tonnes (15,900 long tons) at standard load and 19,100 tonnes (18,800 long tons) at normal load. Her crew consisted of 1,100 officers and ratings.
### Machinery
Sōryū was fitted with four geared steam turbine sets with a total of 152,000 shaft horsepower (113,000 kW), each driving one propeller shaft, using steam provided by eight Kampon water-tube boilers. The turbines and boilers were the same as those used in the Mogami-class cruisers. The ship's power and slim, cruiser-type hull, with a length-to-beam ratio of 10:1, gave her a speed of 34.5 knots (63.9 km/h; 39.7 mph) and made her the fastest carrier in the world at the time of her commissioning. Sōryū carried 3,710 tonnes (3,650 long tons) of fuel oil, which gave her a range of 7,750 nautical miles (14,350 km; 8,920 mi) at 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph). The boiler uptakes were trunked together to the ship's starboard side amidships and exhausted just below flight deck level through two funnels curved downwards.
### Flight deck and hangars
The carrier's 216.9-meter (711 ft 7 in) flight deck was 26 meters (85 ft 4 in) wide and overhung her superstructure at both ends, supported by pairs of pillars. Sōryū's island was built on a starboard-side extension that protruded beyond the side of the hull so that it did not encroach on the width of the flight deck. Nine transverse arrestor wires were installed on the flight deck and could stop a 6,000 kg (13,000 lb) aircraft. The flight deck was only 12.8 meters (42 ft) above the waterline and the ship's designers kept this distance low by reducing the height of the hangars. The upper hangar was 171.3 by 18.3 metres (562 by 60 ft) and had an approximate height of 4.6 meters (15 ft 1 in); the lower was 142.3 by 18.3 metres (467 by 60 ft) and had an approximate height of 4.3 meters (14 ft 1 in). Together they had an approximate total area of 5,736 square metres (61,742 sq ft). This caused problems in handling aircraft because the wings of a Nakajima B5N "Kate" torpedo bomber could neither be spread nor folded in the upper hangar.
Aircraft were transported between the hangars and the flight deck by three elevators, the forward one abreast the island on the centerline and the other two offset to starboard. The forward platform measured 16 by 11.5 meters (52 ft 6 in × 37 ft 9 in), the middle one 11.5 by 12 meters (37 ft 9 in × 39 ft 4 in), and the rear 11.8 by 10 meters (38 ft 9 in × 32 ft 10 in). They were capable of transferring aircraft weighing up to 5,000 kilograms (11,000 lb). Sōryū had an aviation gasoline capacity of 570,000 liters (130,000 imp gal; 150,000 U.S. gal) for her planned aircraft capacity of sixty-three plus nine spares.
### Armament
Sōryū's primary anti-aircraft (AA) armament consisted of six twin-gun mounts equipped with 50-caliber 12.7-centimeter Type 89 dual-purpose guns mounted on projecting sponsons, three on either side of the carrier's hull. The guns had a range of 14,700 meters (16,100 yd), and a ceiling of 9,440 meters (30,970 ft) at an elevation of +90 degrees. Their maximum rate of fire was fourteen rounds a minute, but their sustained rate of fire was around eight rounds per minute. The ship was equipped with two Type 94 fire-control directors to control the 12.7-centimeter (5.0 in) guns, one for each side of the ship, although the starboard director on the island could control all of the Type 89 guns.
The ship's light AA armament consisted of fourteen twin-gun mounts for license-built Hotchkiss 25 mm (1 in) Type 96 AA guns. Three of these were sited on a platform just below the forward end of the flight deck. The gun was the standard Japanese light AA weapon during World War II, but it suffered from severe design shortcomings that rendered it largely ineffective. According to historian Mark Stille, the weapon had many faults including an inability to "handle high-speed targets because it could not be trained or elevated fast enough by either hand or power, its sights were inadequate for high-speed targets, it possessed excessive vibration and muzzle blast". These guns had an effective range of 1,500–3,000 meters (1,600–3,300 yd), and a ceiling of 5,500 meters (18,000 ft) at an elevation of +85 degrees. The effective rate of fire was only between 110 and 120 rounds per minute because of the frequent need to change the 15-round magazines. The Type 96 guns were controlled by five Type 95 directors, two on each side and one in the bow.
### Armor
To save weight Sōryū was minimally armored; her waterline belt of 41 millimeters (1.6 in) of Ducol steel only protected the machinery spaces and the magazines. Comparable figures for Hiryū were 90 millimeters (3.5 in) over the machinery spaces and the aviation gasoline storage tanks increasing to 150 millimeters (5.9 in) over the magazines. Sōryū's waterline belt was backed by an internal anti-splinter bulkhead. The ship's deck was only 25 mm thick over the machinery spaces and 55 millimeters (2.2 in) thick over the magazines and aviation gasoline storage tanks.
## Construction and service
Following the Japanese ship-naming conventions for aircraft carriers, Sōryū was named "Blue (or Green) Dragon". The ship was laid down at the Kure Naval Arsenal on 20 November 1934, launched on 23 December 1935 and commissioned on 29 December 1937. She was assigned to the Second Carrier Division after commissioning. Her air group was initially intended to consist of eighteen Mitsubishi A5M ("Claude") monoplane fighters, twenty-seven Aichi D1A2 ("Susie") Type 96 dive bombers, and twelve Yokosuka B4Y ("Jean") Type 96 torpedo bombers, but the A5Ms were in short supply and Nakajima A4N1 biplanes were issued instead. On 25 April 1938, nine A4Ns, eighteen D1A2s, and nine B4Ys transferred to Nanjing to support forces advancing up the Yangtze River. The air group advanced with the successful Japanese offensive, despite the defense by the Chinese Air Force and the Soviet Volunteer Group; it was transferred to Wuhu in early June and then to Anqing. Little is known of its operations there, but its primary role during this time was air defense. One fighter pilot of the group was killed after he shot down a Chinese aircraft. Leaving a few fighters and their pilots behind to serve as the nucleus of a new fighter unit, the air group returned to Sōryū on 10 July. The ship supported operations over Canton in September, but her aircraft saw no aerial combat. She returned home in December and spent most of the next year and a half training.
In September–October 1940, the ship was based at Hainan Island to support the Japanese invasion of French Indochina. In February 1941, Sōryū moved to Taiwan to reinforce the blockade of southern China. Two months later, the 2nd Carrier Division was assigned to the First Air Fleet, or Kido Butai, on 10 April. Sōryū's air group was detached in mid-July and transferred to Hainan Island to support the occupation of southern Indochina. Sōryū returned to Japan on 7 August and became flagship of the 2nd Division. She was relieved of that role on 22 September as she began a short refit that was completed on 24 October. The ship arrived at Kagoshima two days later and she resumed her former role as flagship of the Division.
### Pearl Harbor and subsequent operations
In November 1941 the IJN's Combined Fleet, under Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, prepared to participate in Japan's initiation of war with the United States by conducting a preemptive strike against the US Navy's Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. On 22 November, Sōryū, commanded by Captain Ryusaku Yanagimoto, and the rest of the Kido Butai under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, including six fleet carriers from the First, Second, and Fifth Carrier Divisions, assembled in Hitokappu Bay at Etorofu Island. The fleet departed Etorofu on 26 November and followed a course across the north-central Pacific to avoid commercial shipping lanes. At this time Sōryū embarked 21 Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters, 18 Aichi D3A "Val" dive bombers, and 18 Nakajima B5N torpedo bombers. From a position 230 nautical miles (430 km; 260 mi) north of Oahu, Sōryū and the other five carriers launched two waves of aircraft on the morning of 8 December 1941 (Japan time).
In the first wave, eight of Sōryū's B5Ns were supposed to attack the aircraft carriers that normally berthed on the northwest side of Ford Island, but none were in Pearl Harbor that day; six B5Ns attacked the ships that were present, torpedoing the target ship Utah, causing her to capsize, and the elderly light cruiser Raleigh, damaging her. Two of the B5N pilots diverted to their secondary target, ships berthed alongside "1010 Pier", where the fleet flagship was usually moored. That battleship was in drydock and her position was occupied by the light cruiser Helena and the minelayer Oglala. One torpedo passed underneath Oglala and struck Helena in one of her engine rooms; the other pilot rejected these targets and attacked the battleship California. Her other ten B5Ns were tasked to drop 800-kilogram (1,800 lb) armor-piercing bombs on the battleships berthed on the southeast side of Ford Island ("Battleship Row") and may have scored one or two hits on them. Her eight A6M Zeros strafed parked aircraft at Marine Corps Air Station Ewa, claiming twenty-seven aircraft destroyed in addition to five aircraft shot down.
Sōryū's second wave consisted of nine A6M Zeros and seventeen D3As. The former attacked Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay, losing one Zero to American anti-aircraft guns. On the return trip, the Zero pilots claimed to have shot down two American aircraft while losing two of their own. The D3As attacked various ships in Pearl Harbor, but it is not possible to identify which aircraft attacked which ship. Two of them were shot down during the attack.
While returning to Japan, Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, commander of the First Air Fleet, ordered that Sōryū and Hiryū be detached on 16 December to attack the defenders of Wake Island who had already defeated the first Japanese attack on the island. The two carriers reached the vicinity of the island on 21 December and launched twenty-nine D3As and two B5Ns, escorted by eighteen Zeros, to attack ground targets. They encountered no aerial opposition and launched thirty-five B5Ns and six A6M Zeros the following day. They were intercepted by the two surviving Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-211. The Wildcats shot down two B5Ns before they were shot down themselves by the Zeros. The garrison surrendered the next day after Japanese troops were landed.
The carriers arrived at Kure on 29 December. They were assigned to the Southern Force on 8 January 1942 and departed four days later for the Dutch East Indies. The ships supported the invasion of the Palau Islands and the Battle of Ambon, attacking Allied positions on the island on 23 January with fifty-four aircraft. Four days later the carriers detached eighteen Zeros and nine D3As to operate from land bases in support of Japanese operations in the Battle of Borneo. On 30 January they destroyed two aircraft on the ground and shot down a Qantas Short Empire flying boat flying to Surabaya to pick up refugees.
Sōryū and Hiryū arrived at Palau on 28 January and waited for the arrival of the carriers Kaga and Akagi. All four carriers departed Palau on 15 February and launched air strikes against Darwin, Australia, four days later. Sōryū contributed eighteen B5Ns, eighteen D3As, and nine Zeros to the attack while flying Combat Air Patrols (CAP) over the carriers. Her aircraft attacked the ships in port and its facilities, sinking or setting on fire eight ships and causing three others to be beached lest they sink. The Zeros destroyed a single Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boat; one D3A was lost. The Japanese aircraft spotted a ship on the return trip but had expended all their ordnance and had to be rearmed and refueled before they could attack the vessel. Several hours later, nine of Sōryū's D3As located and bombed an American supply ship of 3,200 gross register tons (GRT), Don Isidro, hitting her five times but failing to sink her. Sōryū and the other carriers arrived at Staring Bay on Celebes Island on 21 February to resupply and rest before departing four days later to support the invasion of Java. On 1 March 1942, the ship's D3As damaged the destroyer USS Edsall badly enough for her to be caught and sunk by Japanese cruisers. Later that day the dive bombers sank the oil tanker USS Pecos. The four carriers launched an airstrike of 180 aircraft against Tjilatjep on 5 March, sinking five small ships, damaging another nine badly enough that they had to be scuttled, and set the town on fire. Two days later they attacked Christmas Island before returning to Staring Bay on 11 March to resupply and train for the impending Indian Ocean raid. This raid was intended to secure newly conquered Burma, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies against Allied attack by destroying base facilities and forces in the eastern Indian Ocean.
### Indian Ocean raid
On 26 March 1942, the five carriers of the First Air Fleet departed from Staring Bay; they were spotted by a Catalina about 350 nautical miles (650 km; 400 mi) southeast of Ceylon on the morning of 4 April. Nagumo closed to within 120 nautical miles (220 km; 140 mi) of Colombo before launching an airstrike the next morning. Sōryū contributed eighteen B5Ns and nine Zeros to the force. The pilots of the latter aircraft claimed to have shot down a single Fairey Fulmar of 806 Naval Air Squadron, plus seven other fighters while losing one of their own. The D3As and B5Ns inflicted some damage to the port facilities, but a day's warning had allowed most of the shipping in the harbor to be evacuated. Later that morning the British heavy cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire were spotted and Sōryū launched eighteen D3As. They were the first to attack and claimed to have made fourteen hits on the two ships, sinking both in combination with the dive bombers from the other carriers.
On 9 April, Sōryū contributed eighteen B5Ns, escorted by nine Zeros, to the attack on Trincomalee. Her B5Ns were the first to bomb the port and her fighters did not encounter any British fighters. Meanwhile, a floatplane from the battleship Haruna spotted the small aircraft carrier Hermes, escorted by the Australian destroyer , and every available D3A was launched to attack the ships. Sōryū contributed eighteen dive bombers, but they arrived too late and instead found three other ships further north. They sank the oil tanker British Sergeant and the Norwegian cargo ship Norviken before they were attacked by eight Fulmars of 803 and 806 Naval Air Squadrons. The Royal Navy pilots claimed three D3As shot down for the loss of a pair of Fulmars; the Japanese actually lost four D3As with another five damaged. While this was going on, Akagi narrowly escaped damage when nine British Bristol Blenheim bombers from Ceylon penetrated the CAP and dropped their bombs from 11,000 feet (3,400 m). Sōryū had six Zeros aloft, along with fourteen more from the other carriers, and they collectively accounted for five of the British bombers for the loss of one of Hiryū's Zeros. After launching the D3As that sank Hermes and the other ships, the First Air Fleet reversed course and headed southeast for the Malacca Strait before recovering their aircraft; they then proceeded to Japan.
On 19 April, while transiting the Bashi Straits between Taiwan and Luzon en route to Japan, Akagi, Sōryū, and Hiryū were sent in pursuit of the American carriers Hornet and Enterprise, which had launched the Doolittle Raid against Tokyo. They found only empty ocean, for the American carriers had immediately departed the area to return to Hawaii. The carriers quickly abandoned the chase and dropped anchor at Hashirajima anchorage on 22 April. Having been engaged in constant operations for four and a half months, Sōryū, along with the other three carriers of the First and Second Carrier Divisions, was hurriedly refitted and replenished in preparation for the Combined Fleet's next major operation, scheduled to begin one month hence. While at Hashirajima, Sōryū's air group was based ashore at nearby Kasanohara, near Kagoshima, and conducted flight and weapons training with the other First Air Fleet carrier units.
### Midway
Concerned by the US carrier strikes in the Marshall Islands, Lae-Salamaua, and the Doolittle raids, Yamamoto was determined to force the US Navy into a showdown to eliminate the American carrier threat. He decided to invade and occupy Midway Island, an action that he was sure would draw out the American carriers. The Japanese codenamed the Midway invasion Operation MI.
On 25 May 1942, Sōryū set out with the Combined Fleet's carrier striking force in the company of Kaga, Akagi, and Hiryū, which constituted the First and Second Carrier Divisions, for the attack on Midway Island. Her aircraft complement consisted of eighteen Zeros, sixteen D3As, eighteen B5Ns, and two preproduction reconnaissance variants (D4Y1-C) of the new Yokosuka D4Y dive bomber. Also aboard were three A6M Zeros of the 6th Kōkūtai intended as a portion of the aerial garrison for Midway.
With the fleet positioned 250 nautical miles (460 km; 290 mi) northwest of Midway at dawn (04:45 local time) on 4 June 1942, Sōryū's part in the 108-plane combined air raid was a strike on the airfield on Eastern Island with eighteen torpedo bombers escorted by nine Zeros. The air group suffered heavily during the attack; a single B5N was shot down by fighters, two more were forced to ditch on the return (both crews rescued), and five (including one that landed aboard Hiryu) were damaged beyond repair. The Japanese did not know that the US Navy had discovered their MI plan by breaking their cipher, and had prepared an ambush using its three available carriers, positioned northeast of Midway.
The carrier also contributed 3 Zeros to the total of eleven assigned to the initial combat air patrol (CAP) over the four carriers. By 07:00 the carrier had six fighters with the CAP that helped to defend the Kido Butai from the first US attackers from Midway Island at 07:10. At this time, Nagumo's carriers were attacked by six US Navy Grumman TBF Avengers from Torpedo Squadron 8 (VT-8) that had been temporarily detached from the Hornet to Midway, and four United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) Martin B-26 Marauders, all carrying torpedoes. The Avengers went after Hiryū while the Marauders attacked Akagi. The thirty CAP Zeros in the air at this time, including the six from Sōryū, immediately attacked the American airplanes, shooting down five of the Avengers and two of the B-26s. The surviving aircraft dropped their torpedoes, but all missed. Sōryū launched three more Zeros to reinforce the CAP, at 07:10.
At 07:15 Admiral Nagumo ordered the B5Ns on Kaga and Akagi rearmed with bombs for another attack on Midway itself. This process was limited by the number of ordnance carts (used to handle the bombs and torpedoes) and ordnance elevators, preventing torpedoes from being stowed belowdeck until after all the bombs were moved up from their magazine, assembled, and mounted on the aircraft. The process normally took about an hour and a half; more time would be required to bring the aircraft up to the flight deck, and to warm up and launch the strike group. Around 07:40 Nagumo reversed his order when he received a message from one of his scout aircraft that American warships had been spotted. Depleted of ammunition, the first six of Sōryū's CAP Zeros landed aboard the carrier at 07:30.
At 07:55, the next American strike from Midway arrived in the form of sixteen Douglas SBD Dauntless bombers of Marine Scout Bomber Squadron 241 (VMSB-241) under Major Lofton R. Henderson. Sōryū's three CAP fighters were among the nine still aloft that attacked Henderson's planes, shooting down six of them as they executed a fruitless glide-bombing attack on Hiryū. At roughly the same time, a dozen USAAC Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses attacked the Japanese carriers, bombing from 20,000 feet (6,100 m). The high altitude of the B-17s gave the Japanese captains enough time to anticipate where the bombs would land and successfully maneuver their ships out of the impact area. Four B-17s attacked Sōryū, but they all missed.
The CAP defeated the next American air strike from Midway, shooting down three of the eleven Vought SB2U Vindicator dive bombers from VMSB-241, which attacked the battleship Haruna unsuccessfully, starting at around 08:30. Although all the American air strikes had thus far caused negligible damage, they kept the Japanese carrier forces off-balance as Nagumo endeavored to prepare a response to news, received at 08:20, of the sighting of American carrier forces to his northeast. Around 08:30 Sōryū launched one of her D4Ys on a mission to confirm the location of the American carriers.
Sōryū began recovering her Midway strike force at around 08:40 and finished shortly by 09:10. The landed aircraft were quickly struck below, while the carriers' crews began preparations to spot aircraft for the strike against the American carrier forces. The preparations were interrupted at 09:18 when the first American carrier aircraft to attack were sighted. These consisted of fifteen Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers of VT-8, led by Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron from Hornet. The three airborne CAP Zeros were landing aboard at 09:30 when the Americans unsuccessfully attempted a torpedo attack on Soryū, but three of the morning's escort fighters were still airborne and joined the eighteen CAP fighters in destroying Waldron's planes. All of the American planes were shot down, leaving George H. Gay Jr.—the only surviving aviator—treading water.
Shortly afterwards, fourteen Devastators from Torpedo Squadron 6 (VT-6) from the Enterprise, led by Lieutenant Commander Eugene E. Lindsey, attacked. Lindsey's aircraft tried to sandwich Kaga, but the CAP, reinforced by three more Zeros launched by Sōryū at 09:45, shot down all but four of the Devastators, and Kaga dodged the torpedoes. Sōryū launched another trio of CAP Zeros at 10:00 and another three at 10:15 after Torpedo Squadron 3 (VT-3) from Yorktown was spotted. A Wildcat escorting VT-3 shot down one of her Zeros.
While VT-3 was still attacking Hiryū, American dive bombers arrived over the Japanese carriers almost undetected and began their dives. It was at this time, around 10:20, that in the words of Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, the "Japanese air defenses would finally and catastrophically fail". At 10:25, Sōryū was attacked by thirteen Dauntlesses from Yorktown's Bombing Squadron 3 (VB-3). The carrier received three direct hits from 1,000 lb (454 kg) bombs: one penetrated to the lower hangar deck amidships, and the other two exploded in the upper hangar deck fore and aft. The hangars contained armed and fueled aircraft preparing for the upcoming strike, resulting in secondary explosions and rupturing the steam pipes in the boiler rooms. Within a very short time the fires on the ship were out of control. At 10:40 she stopped and her crew was ordered to abandon ship five minutes later. The destroyers Isokaze and Hamakaze rescued the survivors. Sōryū was still afloat and showed no signs of beginning to sink by early evening, so Isokaze was ordered to scuttle her with torpedoes so as to allow the destroyers to be used for possible operations that night. The destroyer reported at 19:15 that Sōryū had sunk at position . Losses were 711 crew of her complement of 1,103, including Captain Yanagimoto, who chose to remain on board. This was the highest mortality percentage of all the Japanese carriers lost at Midway, due largely to the devastation in both hangar decks.
The loss of Sōryū and the three other IJN carriers at Midway, comprising two-thirds of Japan's total number of fleet carriers and the experienced core of the First Air Fleet, was a crucial strategic defeat and contributed significantly to the ultimate Allied victory. In an effort to conceal the defeat, the ship was not immediately removed from the Navy's registry of ships, awaiting a "suitable opportunity" before finally being struck from the registry on 10 August 1942. |
3,158,351 | The Kinks | 1,173,506,831 | English rock band (1963–1996) | [
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"The Kinks"
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| The Kinks were an English rock band formed in Muswell Hill, North London, in 1963 by brothers Ray and Dave Davies. They are regarded as one of the most influential rock bands of the 1960s. The band emerged during the height of British rhythm and blues and Merseybeat, and were briefly part of the British Invasion of the United States until their touring ban in 1965. Their third single, the Ray Davies-penned "You Really Got Me", became an international hit, topping the charts in the United Kingdom and reaching the Top 10 in the United States.
The Kinks' music drew from a wide range of influences, including American R&B and rock and roll initially, and later adopting British music hall, folk, and country. The band gained a reputation for reflecting English culture and lifestyle, fuelled by Ray Davies' wittily observational writing style, and made apparent in albums such as Face to Face (1966), Something Else (1967), The Village Green Preservation Society (1968), Arthur (1969), Lola Versus Powerman (1970), and Muswell Hillbillies (1971), along with their accompanying singles including the transatlantic hit "Lola" (1970). After a fallow period in the mid-1970s, the band experienced a revival during the late 1970s and early 1980s with their albums Sleepwalker (1977), Misfits (1978), Low Budget (1979), Give the People What They Want (1981) and State of Confusion (1983), the last of which produced one of the band's most successful US hits, "Come Dancing". In addition, groups such as Van Halen, the Jam, the Knack, the Pretenders and the Romantics covered their songs, helping to boost the Kinks' record sales. In the 1990s, Britpop acts such as Blur and Oasis cited the band as a major influence.
The original line-up comprised Ray Davies (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Dave Davies (lead guitar, vocals), Mick Avory (drums, percussion) and Pete Quaife (bass). The Davies brothers remained with the band throughout its history. Quaife briefly left the band during 1966 and was replaced by John Dalton, though Quaife returned by the end of that year before leaving permanently in 1969, once again being replaced by Dalton. Keyboardist John Gosling was added in 1970 (prior to this, session keyboardist Nicky Hopkins played on many of their recordings). After Dalton's 1976 departure, Andy Pyle briefly served as the band's bassist before being replaced by Argent bassist Jim Rodford in 1978. Gosling quit in 1978 and was first replaced by ex-Pretty Things member Gordon Edwards, then more permanently by Ian Gibbons in 1979. Avory left the group in 1984 and was replaced by another Argent member Bob Henrit. The band gave its last public performance in 1996 and broke up in 1997 as a result of creative tension between the Davies brothers.
The Kinks have had five Top 10 singles on the US Billboard chart. Nine of their albums charted in the Top 40. In the UK, they have had seventeen Top 20 singles and five Top 10 albums. Four Kinks albums have been certified gold by the RIAA and the band have sold 50 million records worldwide. Among numerous honours, they received the Ivor Novello Award for "Outstanding Service to British Music". In 1990, the original four members of the Kinks were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as well as the UK Music Hall of Fame in November 2005. In 2018, after years of ruling out a reunion due to the brothers' animosity and the difficult relationship between longtime drummer Mick Avory and Dave, Ray and Dave Davies announced they were working to reform the Kinks, with Avory also on board. However, comments made by each of the Davies brothers in 2020 and 2021 indicated that in the years since the initial announcement, little (if any) progress had been made towards an actual Kinks reunion for a new studio band album. In 2023, Avory confirmed that the reunion would no longer be taking place due to conflicting opinions of direction between the Davies brothers.
## History
### Formation (1962–1963)
The Davies brothers were born in suburban North London on Huntingdon Road, East Finchley, the youngest and the only boys among their family's eight children. Their parents, Frederick and Annie Davies, moved the family to 6 Denmark Terrace, Fortis Green, in the neighbouring suburb of Muswell Hill. At home the brothers were immersed in a world of varied musical styles, from the music hall of their parents' generation to the jazz and early rock and roll their older sisters enjoyed. Both Ray and his brother Dave, younger by almost three years, learned to play guitar, and they played skiffle and rock and roll together.
The brothers attended William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School (later merged with Tollington Grammar School to become Fortismere School), where they formed a band, the Ray Davies Quartet, with Ray's friend and classmate Pete Quaife and Quaife's friend John Start (although they would also be known as the Pete Quaife Quartet, if the bass player landed a gig for them instead). Their debut at a school dance was well received, which encouraged the group to play at local pubs and bars. The band went through a series of lead vocalists, including Rod Stewart, another student at William Grimshaw, who performed with the group at least once in early 1962. He then formed his own group, Rod Stewart and the Moonrakers, who became a local rival to the Ray Davies Quartet.
In late 1962, Ray Davies left home to study at Hornsey College of Art. He pursued interests in subjects such as film, sketching, theatre, and music, including jazz and blues. When Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated played at the college in December, he asked advice from Alexis Korner, who recommended Giorgio Gomelsky, the former Yardbirds manager, who put Davies in touch with the Soho-based Dave Hunt Band, a professional group of musicians who played jazz and R&B. A few days after the Ray Davies Quartet supported Cyril Stapleton at the Lyceum Ballroom on New Year's Eve, Davies, while still remaining in the Quartet, joined the Dave Hunt Band which briefly included Charlie Watts on drums. In February 1963, Davies left Dave Hunt to join the Hamilton King Band (also known as the Blues Messengers), which had Peter Bardens as pianist. At the end of the spring term, he left Hornsey College with a view to study film at the Central School of Art and Design. Around this time the Quartet changed their name to the Ramrods. Davies has referred to a show the fledgling Kinks played (again as the Ray Davies Quartet) at Hornsey Town Hall on Valentine's Day 1963 as their first important gig. In June, the Hamilton King Band broke up, though the Ramrods kept going, performing under several other names, including the Pete Quaife Band, and the Bo-Weevils, before (temporarily) settling on the Ravens. The fledgling group hired two managers, Grenville Collins and Robert Wace, and in late 1963 former pop singer Larry Page became their third manager. American record producer Shel Talmy began working with the band, and the Beatles' promoter, Arthur Howes, was retained to schedule the Ravens' live shows. The group unsuccessfully auditioned for various record labels until early 1964, when Talmy secured them a contract with Pye Records. During this period they had acquired a new drummer, Mickey Willet; however, Willet left the band shortly before they signed to Pye. The Ravens invited Mick Avory to replace him after seeing an advertisement Avory had placed in Melody Maker. Avory had a background in jazz drumming and had played one gig with the fledgling Rolling Stones.
Around this period, the Ravens decided on a new, permanent name: the Kinks. Numerous explanations of the name's genesis have been offered. In Jon Savage's analysis, they "needed a gimmick, some edge to get them attention. Here it was: 'Kinkiness'—something newsy, naughty but just on the borderline of acceptability. In adopting the 'Kinks' as their name at that time, they were participating in a time-honoured pop ritual—fame through outrage." Manager Robert Wace related his side of the story: "I had a friend ... He thought the group was rather fun. If my memory is correct, he came up with the name just as an idea, as a good way of getting publicity ... When we went to [the band members] with the name, they were ... absolutely horrified. They said, 'We're not going to be called kinky!'" Ray Davies' account conflicts with Wace's—he recalled that the name was coined by Larry Page, and referenced their "kinky" fashion sense. Davies quoted him as saying, "The way you look, and the clothes you wear, you ought to be called the Kinks." "I've never really liked the name," Ray stated.
### Early years (1964–1965)
The band's first single was a cover of the Little Richard song "Long Tall Sally". Bobby Graham, a friend of the band, was recruited to play drums on the recording. He would continue to occasionally substitute for Avory in the studio and play on several of the Kinks' early singles, including the early hits "You Really Got Me", "All Day and All of the Night" and "Tired of Waiting for You". "Long Tall Sally" was released in February 1964, but despite the publicity efforts of the band's managers, the single was almost completely ignored. When their second single, "You Still Want Me", failed to chart, Pye Records threatened to annul the group's contract unless their third single was successful.
"You Really Got Me", a Ray Davies song, influenced by American blues and the Kingsmen's version of "Louie Louie", was recorded on 15 June 1964 at Pye Studios with a slower and more produced feel than the final single. Ray Davies wanted to re-record the song with a lean, raw sound, but Pye refused to fund another session; Davies was adamant, so the producer, Shel Talmy, broke the stalemate by underwriting the session himself. The band used an independent studio, IBC, and went in on 15 July, getting it done in two takes. The single was released in August 1964, and, supported by a performance on the television show Ready Steady Go! and extensive pirate radio coverage, it entered the UK charts on 15 August, reaching number one on 19 September. Hastily imported by the American label Reprise Records, where the band was signed by legendary executive Mo Ostin, it also made the Top 10 in the United States. The loud, distorted guitar riff and solo on "You Really Got Me"—played by Dave Davies and achieved by a slice he made in the speaker cone of his Elpico amplifier (referred to by the band as the "little green amp")—helped with the song's signature, gritty guitar sound. "You Really Got Me" has been described as "a blueprint song in the hard rock and heavy metal arsenal", and as an influence on the approach of some American garage rock bands. After its release, the group recorded most of the tracks for their debut LP, simply titled Kinks. Consisting largely of covers and revamped traditional songs, it was released on 2 October 1964, reaching number four on the UK chart. The group's fourth single, "All Day and All of the Night", another Ray Davies hard rock tune, was released three weeks later, reaching number two in the United Kingdom, and number seven in the United States. The next three singles, "Tired of Waiting for You", "Ev'rybody's Gonna Be Happy" and "Set Me Free", were also commercially successful, with the former topping the UK singles chart.
The group opened 1965 with their first tour of Australia and New Zealand, with Manfred Mann and the Honeycombs. An intensive performing schedule saw them headline other package tours throughout the year with acts such as the Yardbirds and Mickey Finn. Tensions began to emerge within the band, expressed in incidents such as the on-stage fight between Avory and Dave Davies at the Capitol Theatre, Cardiff, Wales, on 19 May. After finishing the first song, "You Really Got Me", Davies insulted Avory and kicked over his drum set. Avory responded by hitting Davies with his hi-hat stand, rendering him unconscious, before fleeing from the scene, fearing that he had killed his bandmate. Davies was taken to Cardiff Royal Infirmary, where he received 16 stitches to his head. To placate the police, Avory later claimed that it was part of a new act in which the band members would hurl their instruments at each other.
Following a mid-year tour of the United States, the American Federation of Musicians refused permits for the group to appear in concerts there for the next four years, effectively cutting off the Kinks from the main market for rock music at the height of the British Invasion. Although neither the Kinks nor the union revealed a specific reason for the ban, at the time it was widely attributed to their rowdy on-stage behaviour. It has been reported that an incident when the band were taping Dick Clark's TV show Where the Action Is in 1965 led to the ban. Ray Davies recalls in his autobiography, "Some guy who said he worked for the TV company walked up and accused us of being late. Then he started making anti-British comments. Things like 'Just because the Beatles did it, every mop-topped, spotty-faced limey juvenile thinks he can come over here and make a career for himself.'"; subsequently a punch was thrown and the AFM banned them.
A stopover in Bombay, India, during the band's Australian and Asian tour had led Davies to write the song "See My Friends", released as a single in July 1965. This was an early example of crossover music, and one of the first pop songs of the period to display the direct influence of traditional music from the Indian Subcontinent. Davies had written "See My Friends" with a raga feel after hearing the early morning chants of local fishermen. Music historian Jonathan Bellman argues that the song was "extremely influential" on Davies' musical peers: "And while much has been made of the Beatles' 'Norwegian Wood' because it was the first pop record to use a sitar, it was recorded well after the Kinks' clearly Indian 'See My Friends' was released." Pete Townshend of the Who was particularly affected by the song: "'See My Friends' was the next time I pricked up my ears and thought, 'God, he's done it again. He's invented something new.' That was the first reasonable use of the drone—far, far better than anything The Beatles did and far, far earlier. It was a European sound rather than an Eastern sound but with a strong, legitimate Eastern influence which had its roots in European folk music." In a widely quoted statement by Barry Fantoni, 1960s celebrity and friend of the Kinks, the Beatles, and the Who, he recalled that it was also an influence on the Beatles: "I remember it vividly and still think it's a remarkable pop song. I was with the Beatles the evening that they actually sat around listening to it on a gramophone, saying 'You know this guitar thing sounds like a sitar. We must get one of those.'" The song's radical departure from popular music conventions proved unpopular with the band's American following—it hit number 10 in the UK, but stalled at number 111 in the US.
Recording began promptly on the group's next project, Kinda Kinks, starting the day after their return from the Asian tour. The LP—10 of whose 12 songs were originals—was completed and released within two weeks. According to Ray Davies, the band was not completely satisfied with the final cuts, but pressure from the record company meant that no time was available to correct flaws in the mix. Davies later expressed his dissatisfaction with the production, saying, "A bit more care should have been taken with it. I think [producer] Shel Talmy went too far in trying to keep in the rough edges. Some of the double tracking on that is appalling. It had better songs on it than the first album, but it wasn't executed in the right way. It was just far too rushed."
A significant stylistic shift in the Kinks' music became evident in late 1965, with the appearance of singles like "A Well Respected Man" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion", as well as the band's third album, The Kink Kontroversy, on which session musician Nicky Hopkins made his first appearance with the group on keyboards. These recordings exemplified the development of Davies' songwriting style, from hard-driving rock numbers toward songs rich in social commentary, observation and idiosyncratic character study, all with a uniquely English flavour.
### Critical success (1966–1972)
The satirical single "Sunny Afternoon" was the biggest UK hit of summer 1966, topping the charts and displacing the Beatles' "Paperback Writer". Before the release of The Kink Kontroversy, Ray Davies suffered a nervous and physical breakdown, caused by the pressures of touring, writing and ongoing legal squabbles. During his months of recuperation, he wrote several new songs and pondered the band's direction. In June 1966, Quaife was involved in an automobile accident, and after his recovery decided to leave the band. Bassist John Dalton, who was initially hired to fill in for the injured Quaife, subsequently became his official replacement. However, Quaife soon had a change of heart and rejoined the band in November 1966, with Dalton going back to his previous job as a coalman.
"Sunny Afternoon" was a dry run for the band's next album Face to Face, which displayed Davies' growing ability to craft musically gentle yet lyrically cutting narrative songs about everyday life and people. Hopkins returned for the sessions to play various keyboard instruments, including piano and harpsichord. He played on the band's next two studio albums as well, and was involved on a number of their live BBC recordings before joining the Jeff Beck Group in 1968. Face to Face was released in October 1966 in the UK, where it was well received and peaked at number eight. It was released in the US in December and was tipped as a potential "chart winner" by Billboard magazine. Despite this, it managed only a meagre chart peak of 135—a sign of the band's flagging popularity in the American market.
The Kinks' next single was a social commentary piece entitled "Dead End Street". It was released in November 1966 and became another UK Top 10 hit, although it reached only number 73 in the United States. Melody Maker reviewer Bob Dawbarn praised Ray Davies' ability to create a song with "some fabulous lyrics and a marvellous melody ... combined with a great production", and music scholar Johnny Rogan described it as "a kitchen sink drama without the drama—a static vision of working class stoicism". One of the group's first promotional music videos was produced for the song. It was filmed on Little Green Street, a small 18th-century lane in north London, located off Highgate Road in Kentish Town. Both "Dead End Street" and its B-side "Big Black Smoke" were recorded with John Dalton on bass, though Quaife had returned by the time the single was released, and appeared in the promotional music video.
The Kinks' next single, "Waterloo Sunset", was released in May 1967. The lyrics describe two lovers passing over a bridge, with a melancholic observer reflecting on the couple, the Thames, and Waterloo station. The song was rumoured to have been inspired by the romance between two British celebrities of the time, actors Terence Stamp and Julie Christie. Ray Davies denied this in his autobiography, and claimed in a 2008 interview, "It was a fantasy about my sister going off with her boyfriend to a new world and they were going to emigrate and go to another country." Despite its complex arrangement, the sessions for "Waterloo Sunset" lasted a mere ten hours; Dave Davies later commented on the recording: "We spent a lot of time trying to get a different guitar sound, to get a more unique feel for the record. In the end we used a tape-delay echo, but it sounded new because nobody had done it since the 1950s. I remember Steve Marriott of the Small Faces came up and asked me how we'd got that sound. We were almost trendy for a while." The single was one of the Kinks' biggest UK successes (hitting number two on Melody Makers chart), and went on to become one of their most popular and best-known songs. Pop music journalist Robert Christgau called it "the most beautiful song in the English language", and AllMusic senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine cited it as "possibly the most beautiful song of the rock and roll era". 45 years later, Ray Davies was chosen to perform the song at the closing of the 2012 London Olympic Games.
The songs on the 1967 album, Something Else by the Kinks, developed the musical progressions of Face to Face, adding English music hall influences to the band's sound. Dave Davies scored a major UK chart success with the album's "Death of a Clown". While it was co-written by Ray Davies and recorded by the Kinks, it was also released as a Dave Davies solo single. Overall, however, the album's commercial performance was disappointing, prompting the Kinks to rush out a new single, "Autumn Almanac", in early October. Backed with "Mister Pleasant", the single became another Top 5 success for the group. At this point, in a string of 13 singles, 12 of them reached the top 10 in the UK chart. Andy Miller points out that, despite its success, the single marks a turning point in the band's career—it would be their last entry into the UK Top Ten for three years: "In retrospect, 'Autumn Almanac' marked the first hint of trouble for the Kinks. This glorious single, one of the greatest achievements of British 60s pop, was widely criticised at the time for being too similar to previous [Ray] Davies efforts." Nick Jones of Melody Maker asked, "Is it time that Ray stopped writing about grey suburbanites going about their fairly unemotional daily business? ... Ray works to a formula, not a feeling, and it's becoming rather boring." Disc jockey Mike Ahern called the song "a load of old rubbish". Dave's second solo single, "Susannah's Still Alive", was released in the UK on 24 November. It sold 59,000 copies, failing to reach the Top 10. Miller states that "by the end of the year, the Kinks were rapidly sliding out of fashion".
Beginning early in 1968, the group largely retired from touring, instead focusing on work in the studio. As the band was not available to promote their material, subsequent releases met with little success. The Kinks' next single, "Wonderboy", released in the spring of 1968, stalled at number 36 and became the band's first single not to make the UK Top Twenty since their early covers. In the face of the band's declining popularity, Davies continued to pursue his personal song-writing style while rebelling against the heavy demands placed on him to keep producing commercial hits, and the group continued to devote time to the studio, centering on a slowly developing project of Ray's called Village Green. In an attempt to revive the group's commercial standing, the Kinks' management booked them on a month-long package tour for April, drawing the group away from the studio. The venues were largely cabarets and clubs; headlining was Peter Frampton's group the Herd. "In general, the teenyboppers were not there to see the boring old Kinks, who occasionally had to endure chants of 'We Want The Herd!' during their brief appearances", commented Andy Miller. The tour proved taxing and stressful—Pete Quaife recalled, "It was a chore, very dull, boring and straightforward ... We only did twenty minutes, but it used to drive me absolutely frantic, standing on stage and playing three notes over and over again." At the end of June, the Kinks released the single "Days", which provided a minor, but only momentary, comeback for the group. "I remember playing it when I was at Fortis Green the first time I had a tape of it", Ray said. "I played it to Brian, who used to be our roadie, and his wife and two daughters. They were crying at the end of it. Really wonderful—like going to Waterloo and seeing the sunset. ... It's like saying goodbye to somebody, then afterwards feeling the fear that you actually are alone." "Days" reached number 12 in the United Kingdom and was a Top 20 hit in several other countries, but it did not chart in the United States.
Village Green eventually morphed into their next album, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, released in late 1968 in the UK. A collection of thematic vignettes of English town and hamlet life, it was assembled from songs written and recorded over the previous two years. It was greeted with almost unanimously positive reviews from both UK and US rock critics, yet failed to sell strongly. One factor in the album's initial commercial failure was the lack of a popular single. It did not include the moderately successful "Days"; "Starstruck" was released in North America and continental Europe, but was unsuccessful. Although a commercial disappointment, Village Green (the project's original name was adopted as shorthand for the long album title) was embraced by the new underground rock press when it came out in January 1969 in the United States, where the Kinks began to acquire a reputation as a cult band. In The Village Voice, a newly hired Robert Christgau called it "the best album of the year so far". The underground Boston paper Fusion published a review stating, "the Kinks continue, despite the odds, the bad press and their demonstrated lot, to come across. ... Their persistence is dignified, their virtues are stoic. The Kinks are forever, only for now in modern dress." The record did not escape criticism, however. In the student paper California Tech, one writer commented that it was "schmaltz rock ... without imagination, poorly arranged and a poor copy of The Beatles". Although Davies later estimated it sold only around 100,000 copies worldwide on its initial release, it has since become the Kinks' best-selling original record. The album remains popular; in 2004, it was re-released in a 3-CD "Deluxe" edition and one of its tracks, "Picture Book", was featured in a popular Hewlett-Packard television commercial, helping to boost the album's popularity considerably.
In early 1969, Quaife again told the band he was leaving. The other members did not take his statement seriously until an article appeared in New Musical Express on 4 April featuring Quaife's new band, Maple Oak, which he had formed without telling the rest of the Kinks. Ray Davies pleaded with him to return for the sessions for their upcoming album, but Quaife refused. Quaife's last recording with the Kinks was the non-album single "Plastic Man" and its B-side "King Kong", released in March 1969. Immediately after Quaife confirmed he would not return, Ray Davies called up John Dalton, who had replaced Quaife three years prior, and asked him to rejoin. Dalton remained with the group until the recording of the album Sleepwalker in 1976.
Ray Davies travelled to Los Angeles in April 1969 to help negotiate an end to the American Federation of Musicians' ban on the group, opening up an opportunity for them to return to touring in the US. The group's management quickly made plans for a North American tour, to help restore their standing in the US pop music scene. Before their return to the US, the Kinks recorded another album, Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). As with the previous two albums, Arthur was grounded in characteristically English lyrical and musical hooks. A modest commercial success, it was well received by American music critics. Conceived as the score for a proposed but unrealised television drama, much of the album revolved around themes from the Davies brothers' childhood; their sister Rosie, who had migrated to Australia in the early 1960s with her husband, Arthur Anning, the album's namesake; and life growing up during the Second World War. The Kinks embarked on their tour of the US in October 1969. The tour was generally unsuccessful, as the group struggled to find cooperative promoters and interested audiences; many of the scheduled concert dates were cancelled. The band did, however, manage to play a few major venues such as the Fillmore East and Whisky a Go Go.
The band added keyboardist John Gosling to their line-up in early 1970; before this Nicky Hopkins, along with Ray, had done most of the session work on keyboards. In May 1970 Gosling debuted with the Kinks on "Lola", an account of a confused romantic encounter with a transvestite, that became both a UK and a US Top 10 hit, helping return the Kinks to the public eye. The lyrics originally contained the word "Coca-Cola", and as a result the BBC refused to broadcast the song, considering it to be in violation of their policy against product placement. Part of the song was hastily rerecorded by Ray Davies, with the offending line changed to the generic "cherry cola", although in concert the Kinks still used "Coca-Cola". Recordings of both versions of "Lola" exist. The accompanying album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One was released in November 1970. It was a critical and commercial success, charting in the Top 40 in the US, making it their most successful album since the mid-1960s. After the success of "Lola", the band went on to release Percy in 1971, a soundtrack album to a film of the same name about a penis transplant. The album, which consisted largely of instrumentals, did not receive positive reviews. The band's US label, Reprise, declined to release it in the US, precipitating a major dispute that contributed to the band's departure from the label. Directly after the release of the album, the band's contracts with Pye and Reprise expired.
Before the end of 1971, the Kinks signed a five-album deal with RCA Records and received a million-dollar advance, which helped fund the construction of their own recording studio, Konk. Their debut for RCA, Muswell Hillbillies, was replete with the influence of music hall and traditional American musical styles, including country and bluegrass. It is often hailed as their last great record, though it was not as successful as its predecessors. It was named after Muswell Hill, where the Davies brothers were brought up, and contained songs focusing on working-class life and, again, the Davies' childhood. Muswell Hillbillies, despite positive reviews and high expectations, peaked at number 48 on the Record World chart and number 100 on the Billboard chart. It was followed in 1972 by a double album, Everybody's in Show-Biz, which consisted of both studio tracks and live numbers recorded during a two-night stand at Carnegie Hall. The record featured the ballad "Celluloid Heroes" and the Caribbean-themed "Supersonic Rocket Ship", their last UK Top 20 hit for more than a decade. "Celluloid Heroes" is a bittersweet rumination on dead and fading Hollywood stars (Mickey Rooney was still alive), in which the narrator declares that he wishes his life were like a movie "because celluloid heroes never feel any pain ... and celluloid heroes never really die." The album was moderately successful in the United States, peaking at number 47 in Record World and number 70 in Billboard. It marks the transition between the band's early 1970s rock material and the theatrical incarnation in which they immersed themselves for the next four years.
### Theatrical incarnation (1973–1976)
In 1973, Ray Davies dived headlong into the theatrical style, beginning with the rock opera Preservation, a sprawling chronicle of social revolution, and a more ambitious outgrowth of the earlier Village Green Preservation Society ethos. In conjunction with the Preservation project, the Kinks' line-up was expanded to include a horn section and female backup singers, essentially reconfiguring the group as a theatrical troupe.
Ray Davies' marital problems during this period began to affect the band adversely, particularly after his wife, Rasa, took their children and left him in June 1973. Davies became depressed; during a July gig at White City Stadium he told the audience he was "fucking sick of the whole thing", and was retiring. He subsequently collapsed after a drug overdose and was taken to hospital. With Ray Davies in a seemingly critical condition, plans were discussed for Dave to continue as frontman in a worst-case scenario. Ray recovered from his illness as well as his depression, but throughout the remainder of the Kinks' theatrical incarnation the band's output remained uneven, and their already fading popularity declined even more. John Dalton later commented that when Davies "decided to work again ... I don't think he was totally better, and he's been a different person ever since."
Preservation Act 1 (1973) and Preservation Act 2 (1974) received generally poor reviews. The story on the albums involved an anti-hero called Mr Flash, and his rival and enemy Mr Black (played by Dave Davies during live shows), an ultra-purist and corporatist. Preservation Act 2 was the first album recorded at Konk Studio; from this point forward, virtually every Kinks studio recording was produced by Ray Davies at Konk. The band embarked on an ambitious US tour throughout late 1974, adapting the Preservation story for stage. Author Robert Polito: "[Ray] Davies expanded the Kinks into a road troupe of perhaps a dozen costumed actors, singers and horn players. ... Smoother and tighter than on record, Preservation live proved funnier as well."
Davies began another project for Granada Television, a musical called Starmaker. After a broadcast with Ray Davies in the starring role and the Kinks as both back-up band and ancillary characters, the project eventually morphed into the concept album The Kinks Present a Soap Opera, released in May 1975, in which Ray Davies fantasised about what would happen if a rock star traded places with a "normal Norman" and took a 9–5 job. In August 1975, the Kinks recorded their final theatrical work, Schoolboys in Disgrace, a backstory biography of Preservation's Mr Flash. The record was a modest success, peaking at number 45 on the Billboard charts.
### Return to commercial success (1977–1985)
Following the termination of their contract with RCA, the Kinks signed with Arista Records in 1976. With the encouragement of Arista's management they stripped back down to a five-man core group and were reborn as an arena rock band. John Dalton left the band before finishing the sessions for the debut Arista album. Andy Pyle was brought in to complete the sessions and to play on the subsequent tour. Sleepwalker, released in 1977, marked a return to success for the group as it peaked at number 21 on the Billboard chart. After its release and the recording of the follow-up, Misfits, Andy Pyle and keyboardist John Gosling left the group to work together on a separate project. In May 1978, Misfits, the Kinks' second Arista album, was released. It included the US Top 40 hit "A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy", which helped make the record another success for the band. The non-album single "Father Christmas" has remained a popular track. Driven by session drummer Henry Spinetti's drumming and Dave Davies' heavy guitar the song "Father Christmas" has become a classic seasonal favorite on mainstream radio. For the following tour, the band recruited ex-Argent bassist Jim Rodford and ex–Pretty Things keyboardist Gordon Edwards. Edwards was soon fired from The Kinks for failing to show up to recordings sessions, and the band recorded 1979's Low Budget as a quartet, with Ray Davies handling keyboard duties. Keyboardist Ian Gibbons was recruited for the subsequent tour, and became a permanent member of the group. Despite the personnel changes, the popularity of the band's records and live shows continued to grow.
Beginning in the late 1970s, bands such as the Jam ("David Watts"), the Pretenders ("Stop Your Sobbing", "I Go to Sleep"), the Romantics ("Hung On You"), and the Knack ("The Hard Way") recorded covers of Kinks songs, which helped bring attention to the group's new releases. In 1978, Van Halen covered "You Really Got Me" for their debut single, a Top 40 US hit, helping boost the band's commercial resurgence (Van Halen later covered "Where Have All the Good Times Gone", another early Kinks song which had been covered by David Bowie on his 1973 album Pin Ups). The hard rock sound of Low Budget, released in 1979, helped make it the Kinks' second gold album and highest charting original album in the US, where it peaked at number 11. In 1980, the group's third live album, One for the Road, was produced, along with a video of the same title, bringing the group's concert-drawing power to a peak that would last into 1983. Dave Davies also took advantage of the group's improved commercial standing to fulfill his decade-long ambitions to release albums of his solo work. The first was the eponymous Dave Davies in 1980. It was also known by its catalogue number "AFL1-3603" because of its cover art, which depicted Dave Davies as a leather-jacketed piece of price-scanning barcode. He produced another, less successful, solo album in 1981, Glamour.
The next Kinks album, Give the People What They Want, was released in late 1981 and reached number 15 in the US. The record attained gold status and featured the UK hit single "Better Things" as well as "Destroyer", a major Mainstream Rock hit for the group. To promote the album, the Kinks spent the end of 1981 and most of 1982 touring relentlessly, and played multiple sell-out concerts throughout Australia, Japan, England and the US. The tour culminated with a performance at the US Festival in San Bernardino, California, for a crowd of 205,000. In spring 1983, the song "Come Dancing" became their biggest American hit since "Tired of Waiting for You", peaking at number six. It also became the group's first Top 20 hit in the UK since 1972, peaking at number 12 in the charts. The accompanying album, State of Confusion, was another commercial success, reaching number 12 in the US, but, like all the group's albums since 1967, it failed to chart in the UK. Another single released from the record, "Don't Forget to Dance", became a US top 30 hit and minor UK chart entry.
The Kinks' second wave of popularity remained at a peak with State of Confusion, but that success began to fade, a trend that also affected their British rock contemporaries the Rolling Stones and the Who. During the second half of 1983, Ray Davies started work on an ambitious solo film project, Return to Waterloo, about a London commuter who daydreams that he is a serial murderer. The film gave actor Tim Roth a significant early role. Davies' commitment to writing, directing and scoring the new work caused tension in his relationship with his brother. Another problem was the stormy end of the relationship between Ray Davies and Chrissie Hynde. The old feud between Dave Davies and drummer Mick Avory also re-ignited. Davies eventually refused to work with Avory, and called for him to be replaced by Bob Henrit, former drummer of Argent (of which Jim Rodford had also been a member). Avory left the band, and Henrit was brought in to take his place. Ray Davies, who was still on amiable terms with Avory, invited him to manage Konk Studios. Avory accepted, and continued to serve as a producer and occasional contributor on later Kinks albums.
Between the completion of Return to Waterloo and Avory's departure, the band had begun work on Word of Mouth, their final Arista album, released in November 1984. As a result it includes Avory on three tracks, with Henrit and a drum machine on the rest. Many of the songs also appeared as solo recordings on Ray Davies' Return to Waterloo soundtrack album. Word of Mouth's lead track, "Do It Again", was released as a single in April 1985. It reached number 41 in the US, the band's last entry into the Billboard Hot 100. Coinciding with the album's release, the first three books on the Kinks were published: The Kinks: The Official Biography, by Jon Savage; The Kinks Kronikles, by rock critic John Mendelsohn, who had overseen the 1972 The Kink Kronikles compilation album; and The Kinks – The Sound And The Fury (The Kinks – A Mental Institution in the US), by Johnny Rogan.
### Decline in popularity and split (1986–1997)
In early 1986, the group signed with MCA Records in the United States and London Records in the UK. Their first album for the new labels, Think Visual, released later that year, was a moderate success, peaking at number 81 on the Billboard albums chart. Songs like the ballad "Lost and Found" and "Working at the Factory" concerned blue-collar life on an assembly line, while the title track was an attack on the very MTV video culture from which the band had profited earlier in the decade. The Kinks followed Think Visual in 1987 with another live album, The Road, which was a mediocre commercial and critical performer. In 1989, the Kinks released UK Jive, a commercial failure, making only a momentary entry into the album charts at number 122. MCA Records ultimately dropped them, leaving the Kinks without a label deal for the first time in over a quarter of a century. Longtime keyboardist Ian Gibbons left the group and was replaced by Mark Haley.
In 1990, their first year of eligibility, the Kinks were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Mick Avory and Pete Quaife were present for the award. The induction, however, did not revive the Kinks' stalled career. A compilation from the MCA Records period, Lost & Found (1986–1989), was released in 1991 to fulfil contractual obligations, and marked the official end of the group's relationship with MCA. The band then signed with Columbia Records and released the five-song EP Did Ya in 1991 which, despite being coupled with a new studio re-recording of the band's 1968 British hit "Days", failed to chart.
The Kinks reverted to a four-piece band for the recording of their first Columbia album, Phobia, in 1993. Following Mark Haley's departure after the band's sellout performance at the Royal Albert Hall, London, Gibbons rejoined the Kinks for a US tour. Phobia managed only one week in the US Billboard chart at number 166; as had by then become usual for the band, it made no impression in the UK. One single, "Only a Dream", narrowly failed to reach the British chart. "Scattered", the album's final candidate for release as a single, was announced, followed by TV and radio promotion, but the record was unavailable in stores—several months later a small number appeared on the collector market. The group was dropped by Columbia in 1994. In the same year, the band released the first version of the album To the Bone on their own Konk label in the UK. This live acoustic album was partly recorded on the highly successful UK tours of 1993 and 1994 and partly in the Konk studio, before a small, invited audience. Two years later the band released a new, improved, live double CD set in the US, which retained the same name and contained two new studio tracks, "Animal" and "To The Bone". The CD set also featured new treatments of many old Kinks hits. The record drew respectable press but failed to chart in either the US or the UK.
The band's profile rose considerably in the mid-1990s, primarily as a result of the "Britpop" boom. Several of the most prominent bands of the decade cited the Kinks as a major influence. Despite such accolades, the group's commercial viability continued to decline. They gradually became less active, leading Ray and Dave Davies to pursue their own interests. Each released an autobiography; Ray's X-Ray was published in early 1995, and Dave responded with his memoir Kink, published a year later. The Kinks gave their last public performance in mid-1996, and the group assembled for what would turn out to be their last time together at a party for Dave's 50th birthday. Kinks chronicler and historian Doug Hinman stated, "The symbolism of the event was impossible to overlook. The party was held at the site of the brothers' very first musical endeavour, the Clissold Arms pub, across the street from their childhood home on Fortis Green in North London."
### Solo work and recognition (1998–present)
The band members subsequently focused on solo projects, and both Davies brothers released their own studio albums. Talk of a Kinks reunion circulated (including an aborted studio reunion of the original band members in 1999), but neither Ray nor Dave Davies showed much interest in playing together again. Meanwhile, former members John Gosling, John Dalton and Mick Avory had regrouped in 1994 and started performing on the oldies circuit along with guitar-player/singer Dave Clarke as the Kast Off Kinks.
Ray Davies released the solo album Storyteller, a companion piece to X-Ray, in 1998. Originally written two years earlier as a cabaret-style show, it celebrated his old band and his estranged brother. Seeing the programming possibilities in his music/dialogue/reminiscence format, the American music television network VH1 launched a series of similar projects featuring established rock artists titled VH1 Storytellers. Dave Davies spoke favourably of a Kinks reunion in early 2003, and as the 40th anniversary of the group's breakthrough neared, both the Davies brothers expressed interest in working together again. However, hopes for a reunion were dashed in June 2004 when Dave suffered a stroke while exiting an elevator, temporarily impairing his ability to speak and play guitar. Following Dave's recovery, the Kinks were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in November 2005, with all four of the original band members in attendance. The induction helped fuel sales for the group; in August 2007, a re-entry of The Ultimate Collection, a compilation of material spanning the band's career, reached number 32 on the UK Top 100 album chart and number one on the UK Indie album chart. Quaife, who had been receiving kidney dialysis for more than ten years, died on 23 June 2010, at the age of 66. In 2018, long-time bassist Jim Rodford died at the age of 76. In 2019, keyboardist Ian Gibbons died of cancer. Gosling died on 4 August 2023, at the age of 75.
#### Aborted reunion plans (2018–2023)
In June 2018, the Davies brothers said they were working on a new Kinks studio album with Avory. In July 2019, the band again said they were working on new music. However, in a December 2020 interview with The New York Times, Ray Davies did not indicate that much work has been done, saying "I'd like to work with Dave again—if he'll work with me." When asked about a reunion in an interview published January 2021, Dave Davies said "We've been talking about it. I mean there's a lot of material and, you know, it could still happen."
In March 2023, Avory laid to rest rumours of a reunion, citing differences between the Davies brothers: "I don't think it's possible now – one thing, health-wise. And I don't think we could ever work it out because Dave wanted to do it one way, and Ray wanted to do it the other – which was quite normal thinking for them. [...] Ray thought [of] doing it as an 'evolution tour' – you have different people who came into the band and what songs they recorded on and what songs affected them. I thought that would be more interesting. But I think Dave just wanted 'a band' – not particularly with me in it. Just reform something like they had when I left – just a band with him and Ray in it, really."
## Live performances
The first live performance of the Ray Davies Quartet, the band that would become the Kinks, was at a dance for their school, William Grimshaw, in 1962. The band performed under several names between 1962 and 1963—the Pete Quaife Band, the Bo-Weevils, the Ramrods, and the Ravens—before settling on the Kinks in early 1964. Ray has stated that a performance at Hornsey Town Hall on Valentine's Day 1963 was when the band were truly born.
The Kinks made their first tour of Australia and New Zealand in January 1965 as part of a "package" bill that included Manfred Mann and the Honeycombs. They performed and toured relentlessly, headlining package tours throughout 1965 with performers such as the Yardbirds and Mickey Finn. Tensions began to emerge within the band, expressed in incidents such as the on-stage fight between drummer Mick Avory and Dave Davies at The Capitol Theatre, Cardiff, Wales on 19 May. After finishing the first song, "You Really Got Me", Davies insulted Avory and kicked over his drum set. Avory responded by hitting Davies with his hi-hat stand, rendering him unconscious, before fleeing from the scene, fearing that he had killed his bandmate. Davies was taken to Cardiff Royal Infirmary, where he received 16 stitches to his head. To placate police, Avory later claimed that it was part of a new act in which the band members would hurl their instruments at each other. Following their summer 1965 American tour, the American Federation of Musicians refused permits for the group to appear in concerts in the United States for the next four years, possibly due to their rowdy on-stage behaviour.
In April 1969 Davies helped negotiate an end to the American Federation of Musician ban on the group, which allowed plans for a North American tour. However, over the next few years, Davies went into a state of depression, not helped by his collapsing marriage, culminating in his onstage announcement that he was "sick of it all" at a gig in White City Stadium, London in 1973. A review of the concert published in Melody Maker stated: "Davies swore on stage. He stood at The White City and swore that he was 'F...... [sic] sick of the whole thing' ... He was 'Sick up to here with it' ... and those that heard shook their heads. Mick just ventured a disbelieving smile, and drummer [sic] on through 'Waterloo Sunset.'" Davies proceeded to try to announce that the Kinks were breaking up as the band were leaving the stage, but this attempt was foiled by the group's publicity management, who pulled the plug on the microphone system.
## Musical style
The Kinks started out playing the then popular R&B and blues styles; then, under the influence of the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" recording, developed louder rock and hard rock sounds. Due to their pioneering contribution to the field, they have often been labelled as "the original punks". Dave Davies was "really bored with this guitar sound—or lack of an interesting sound" so he purchased "a little green amplifier ... an Elpico" from a radio spares shop in Muswell Hill, and "twiddled around with it", including "taking the wires going to the speaker and putting a jack plug on there and plugging it straight into my AC30" (a larger amplifier), but didn't get the sound he wanted until he got frustrated and "got a single-sided Gillette razorblade and cut round the cone [from the centre to the edge] ... so it was all shredded but still on there, still intact. I played and I thought it was amazing." The jagged sound of the amplifier was replicated in the studio; the Elpico was plugged into the Vox AC30, and the resulting effect became a mainstay in The Kinks' early recordings—most notably on "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night".
From 1966 onwards, the Kinks came to be known for their adherence to traditions of English music and culture, during a period when many other British bands dismissed their heritage in favour of American blues, R&B and pop styles. Ray Davies recalled that at a distinct moment in 1965 he decided to break away from the American scene, and write more introspective and intelligent songs. "I decided I was going to use words more, and say things. I wrote 'A Well Respected Man'. That was the first real word-oriented song I wrote ... [I also] abandoned any attempt to Americanise my accent." The Kinks' allegiance to English styles was strengthened by the ban placed on them by the American Federation of Musicians. The ban cut them off from the American record buying public, the world's largest musical market, forcing them to focus on Britain and mainland Europe. The Kinks expanded on their English sound throughout the remainder of the 1960s, incorporating elements of music hall, folk, and baroque music through use of harpsichord, acoustic guitar, mellotron, and horns, in albums such as Face to Face, Something Else by the Kinks, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), creating some of the most influential and important music of the period.
Beginning with Everybody's In Show-biz (1972), Ray Davies began exploring theatrical concepts on the group's albums; these themes became manifest on the 1973 album Preservation Act 1 and continued through Schoolboys In Disgrace (1976). The Kinks were less commercially successful with these conceptual works, and were dropped by RCA which had signed them in 1971. In 1977 they moved to Arista Records, who insisted on a more traditional rock format. Sleepwalker (1977), which heralded their return to commercial success, featured a mainstream, relatively slick production style that would become their norm. The band returned to hard rock for Low Budget (1979), and continued to record within the genre throughout the remainder of their career, combining this with pop music in the 1980s with albums such as Give the People What They Want and songs such as "Better Things".
## Legacy
The Kinks are regarded as one of the most influential rock acts of the 1960s and early 1970s. Stephen Thomas Erlewine called them "one of the most influential bands of the British Invasion". They were ranked 65th on Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" list.
Artists influenced by the Kinks include punk rock groups such as the Ramones, the Clash, Blondie, and the Jam, heavy metal acts including Van Halen and Britpop groups such as Oasis, Blur and Pulp. Craig Nicholls, singer and guitarist of the Vines, described the Kinks as "great songwriters, so underrated". Pete Townshend, guitarist with the Kinks' contemporaries the Who, credited Ray Davies with inventing "a new kind of poetry and a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very, very beginning." Jon Savage wrote that the Kinks were an influence on late 1960s American psychedelic rock groups "like the Doors, Love and Jefferson Airplane". Music writers and other musicians have acknowledged the influence of the Kinks on the development of hard rock and heavy metal. Musicologist Joe Harrington stated: "'You Really Got Me', 'All Day and All of the Night' and 'I Need You' were predecessors of the whole three-chord genre ... [T]he Kinks did a lot to help turn rock 'n' roll (Jerry Lee Lewis) into rock." Queen guitarist Brian May credited the band with planting "the seed which grew into riff-based music."
They have two albums, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (No. 384), and Something Else by the Kinks (No. 478) on Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. They have three songs on the same magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list as updated in September 2021: "Waterloo Sunset" (No. 14), "You Really Got Me" (No. 176), and "Lola" (No. 386). A musical, Sunny Afternoon, based on the early life of Ray Davies and the formation of the Kinks, opened at the Hampstead Theatre in April 2014. The musical's name came from the band's 1966 hit single "Sunny Afternoon" and features songs from the band's back catalogue.
In 2015, it was reported that Julien Temple would direct a biopic of the Kinks titled You Really Got Me, but as of 2021 nothing had come of the project. Temple previously released a documentary about Ray Davies titled Imaginary Man.
## Members
Past members
- Ray Davies – lead and backing vocals, rhythm guitar, keyboards, harmonica (1963–1996)
- Dave Davies – lead guitar, backing and lead vocals, occasional keyboards (1963–1996)
- Mick Avory – drums, percussion (1963–1984)
- Pete Quaife – bass, backing vocals (1963–1966, 1966–1969; died 2010)
- John Dalton – bass, backing vocals (1966, 1969–1976)
- Andy Pyle – bass (1976–1978)
- Jim Rodford – bass, backing vocals (1978–1997; died 2018)
- John Gosling – keyboards, piano, backing vocals (1970–1978; died 2023)
- Gordon Edwards – keyboards, piano, backing vocals (1978–1979; died 2003)
- Ian Gibbons – keyboards, piano, backing vocals (1979–1989, 1993–1997; died 2019)
- Mark Haley – keyboards, piano, backing vocals (1989–1993)
- Bob Henrit – drums, percussion (1984–1996)
Major album contributors
- Rasa Davies – backing vocals from Kinks (1964) to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
- Bobby Graham – drums, percussion on select tracks from Kinks (1964) and Kinda Kinks (1965; died 2009)
- Nicky Hopkins – keyboards, piano from The Kink Kontroversy (1965) to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) (died 1994)
- Clem Cattini – drums, percussion on select tracks from The Kink Kontroversy (1965) and drum overdubs on Misfits (1978)
## Discography
The Kinks were active for over three decades between 1963 and 1996, releasing 24 studio and 4 live albums. The first two albums were differently released in UK and US partly due to difference in popularity of the extended play format (the UK market liked it, the US market did not, so US albums had the EP releases bundled onto them), and partly due to the US albums including the hit singles, and the UK albums not; after The Kink Kontroversy in 1965 the albums were the same. There have been somewhere between 100 and 200 compilation albums released worldwide. Their hit singles included three UK number-one singles, starting in 1964 with "You Really Got Me"; plus 18 Top 40 singles in the 1960s alone and further Top 40 hits in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Kinks had five Top 10 singles on the US Billboard chart. Nine of their albums charted in the Top 40. In the UK, the group had seventeen Top 20 singles along with five Top 10 albums. The RIAA has certified four of the Kinks' albums as gold records. Greatest Hits!, released in 1965, was certified gold for sales of 1,000,000 on 28 November 1968—six days after the release of The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, which failed to chart worldwide. The group would not receive another gold record award until 1979's Low Budget. The 1980 live album One For The Road was certified gold on 8 December 1980. Give The People What They Want, released in 1981, received its certification on 25 January 1982, for sales of 500,000 copies. Despite not selling at the time of its release,The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society was awarded a gold disc in the UK in 2018 for selling more than 100,000 copies. ASCAP, the performing-rights group, presented the Kinks with an award for "One of the Most Played Songs Of 1983" for the hit single "Come Dancing".
Studio albums
- Kinks (1964)
- Kinda Kinks (1965)
- The Kink Kontroversy (1965)
- Face to Face (1966)
- Something Else by the Kinks (1967)
- The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
- Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969)
- Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (1970)
- Percy (1971)
- Muswell Hillbillies (1971)
- Everybody's in Show-Biz (1972)
- Preservation Act 1 (1973)
- Preservation Act 2 (1974)
- Soap Opera (1975)
- Schoolboys in Disgrace (1975)
- Sleepwalker (1977)
- Misfits (1978)
- Low Budget (1979)
- Give the People What They Want (1981)
- State of Confusion (1983)
- Word of Mouth (1984)
- Think Visual (1986)
- UK Jive (1989)
- Phobia (1993)
Live albums'''
- Live at Kelvin Hall (1967)
- One for the Road (1980)
- Live: The Road (1988)
- To the Bone (1994)
- BBC Sessions: 1964–1977 (2001)
## See also
- Do It Again'', 2009 documentary film
- Freakbeat
- Swinging London |
466,684 | Territorial Force | 1,155,714,710 | Former volunteer reserve component of the British Army | [
"Army Reserve (United Kingdom)",
"Military units and formations disestablished in 1920",
"Military units and formations established in 1908",
"Reserve forces of the United Kingdom"
]
| The Territorial Force was a part-time volunteer component of the British Army, created in 1908 to augment British land forces without resorting to conscription. The new organisation consolidated the 19th-century Volunteer Force and yeomanry into a unified auxiliary, commanded by the War Office and administered by local county territorial associations. The Territorial Force was designed to reinforce the regular army in expeditionary operations abroad, but because of political opposition it was assigned to home defence. Members were liable for service anywhere in the UK and could not be compelled to serve overseas. In the first two months of the First World War, territorials volunteered for foreign service in significant numbers, allowing territorial units to be deployed abroad. They saw their first action on the Western Front during the initial German offensive of 1914, and the force filled the gap between the near destruction of the regular army that year and the arrival of the New Army in 1915. Territorial units were deployed to Gallipoli in 1915 and, following the failure of that campaign, provided the bulk of the British contribution to allied forces in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign. By the war's end, the Territorial Force had fielded twenty-three infantry divisions and two mounted divisions on foreign soil. It was demobilised after the war and reconstituted in 1921 as the Territorial Army.
The force experienced problems throughout its existence. On establishment, fewer than 40 per cent of the men in the previous auxiliary institutions transferred into it, and it was consistently under strength until the outbreak of the First World War. It was not considered to be an effective military force by the regular army and was denigrated by the proponents of conscription. Lord Kitchener chose to concentrate the Territorial Force on home defence and raise the New Army to reinforce the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France, a decision which disappointed the territorials. The need to replace heavy losses suffered by the BEF before the New Army was ready forced Kitchener to deploy territorial units overseas, compromising the force's ability to defend the homeland. To replace foreign-service units, the Territorial Force was doubled in size by creating a second line which mirrored the organisation of the original, first-line units. Second-line units assumed responsibility for home defence and provided replacement drafts to the first line. The second line competed with the New Army for limited resources and was poorly equipped and armed. The provision of replacements to the first line compromised the second line's home defence capabilities until a third line was raised to take over responsibility for territorial recruitment and training. The second line's duties were further complicated by the expectation, later confirmed, that it too would be deployed overseas.
Territorial units were initially deployed overseas to free up regular units from non-combat duties. On the Western Front, individual battalions were attached to regular army formations and sent into action, and the territorials were credited with playing a key role in stopping the German offensive. The first complete territorial division to be deployed to a combat zone arrived in France in March 1915. Territorial divisions began participating in offensive operations on the Western Front from June 1915 and at Gallipoli later that year. Because of the way it was constituted and recruited, the Territorial Force possessed an identity that was distinct from the regular army and the New Army. This became increasingly diluted as heavy casualties were replaced with conscripted recruits following the introduction of compulsory service in early 1916. The Territorial Force was further eroded as a separate institution when county territorial associations were relieved of most of their administrative responsibilities. By the war's end, there was little to distinguish between regular, territorial and New Army formations.
## Background
The British Army of the late 19th century was a small, professional organisation designed to garrison the empire and maintain order at home, with no capacity to provide an expeditionary force in a major war. It was augmented in its home duties by three part-time volunteer institutions, the militia, the Volunteer Force and the yeomanry. Battalions of the militia and Volunteer Force had been linked with regular army regiments since 1872, and the militia was often used as a source of recruitment into the regular army. The terms of service for all three auxiliaries made service overseas voluntary. The Second Boer War exposed weaknesses in the ability of the regular army to counter guerrilla warfare which required additional manpower to overcome. The only reinforcements available were the auxiliaries – nearly 46,000 militiamen served in South Africa and another 74,000 were enlisted into the regular army; some 20,000 men of the Volunteer Force volunteered for active service in South Africa; and the yeomanry provided the nucleus of the separate Imperial Yeomanry for which over 34,000 volunteered.
The war placed a significant strain on the regular forces. Against a background of invasion scares in the press, George Wyndham, Under-Secretary of State for War, conceded in Parliament in February 1900 that instead of augmenting the regular army's defence of the British coast, the auxiliary forces were the main defence. The questionable performance of the volunteers, caused by poor standards of efficiency and training, led to doubts in both government and the regular army about the auxiliary's ability to meet such a challenge. The war also exposed the difficulty in relying on auxiliary forces which were not liable for service overseas as a source of reinforcements for the regular army in times of crisis. In 1903, the Director of General Mobilisation and Military Intelligence reported an excess of home defence forces which could not be relied upon to expand the army in foreign campaigns. The utility of such forces was brought further into question by British military planning; the Royal Navy formed the primary defence against invasion, and studies in 1903 and 1908 concluded that the threat of invasion was negligible, despite popular perceptions to the contrary.
## Reform efforts
The first reform efforts were undertaken in 1901 by William St John Brodrick, Secretary of State for War. They were designed to improve the training of the auxiliary forces and transform the yeomanry from cavalry to mounted infantry. Brodrick's efforts were met with opposition from auxiliary interests in the government, and the yeomanry in particular proved resistant to change. A royal commission on auxiliary forces concluded in 1904 that the volunteer organisations were not fit to defend the country unaided and that the only effective solution would be to introduce conscription. This option, regarded as political suicide by all parties, was immediately rejected. Brodrick's successor, H. O. Arnold-Forster, also failed to overcome opposition to his reform efforts. In December 1905, a Liberal government took office, bringing in Richard Haldane as the Secretary of State for War. His vision was for a nation that could be mobilised for war without resorting to conscription – a "real national army, formed by the people". His solution was the Territorial Force, financed, trained and commanded centrally by the War Office and raised, supplied and administered by local county territorial associations.
Haldane was able to overcome opposition and pass the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907 which created the force, though not without compromise. His plan to give civic, business and trade union leaders a major role in running the county territorial associations was significantly reduced in the face of opposition to civilian encroachment in military affairs. Instead, the associations were chaired by Lord Lieutenants and run by traditional county military elites. Militia representatives refused to accept Haldane's plans to allocate a proportion of the militia as a reserve for the regular army and incorporate the remainder into the Territorial Force. After three attempts to persuade them, Haldane abolished the militia and created the Special Reserve.
Crucially, Haldane's efforts were based on the premise that home defence rested with the navy and that the imperative for army reform was to provide an expeditionary capability. His reorganisation of the regular army created a six-division Expeditionary Force, and his plan was for the Territorial Force to reinforce it after six months of training following mobilisation. Representatives of the existing auxiliary forces and elements within the Liberal party opposed any foreign service obligation. To ensure their support, Haldane declared the Territorial Force's purpose to be home defence when he introduced his reforms in Parliament, despite having stressed an overseas role eight days previously. The last-minute change caused significant difficulties for the force throughout its existence.
## Formation
The Territorial Force was established on 1 April 1908 by the amalgamation of the Volunteer Force and the yeomanry. The Volunteer Force battalions became the infantry component of the Territorial Force and were more closely integrated into regular army regimental establishments they had previously been linked to; for example, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Volunteer Battalions of the regular army's Gloucestershire Regiment became the regiment's 4th, 5th and 6th Battalions (Territorial Force). The infantry was organised into 14 territorial divisions, each of three brigades. The yeomanry regiments became the mounted component of the Territorial Force, organised into 14 mounted brigades. Brigades and divisions were equipped with integral supporting arms along regular army lines, comprising territorial units of artillery (totalling 182 horse and field batteries), engineers and signals, along with supply, medical and veterinary services. Each territorial unit was assigned a specific role either in coastal defence, supplementing 81 territorial companies of the Royal Garrison Artillery manning fixed defences, or as part of the mobile Central Force. Training was managed by a permanent staff of regular army personnel attached to territorial units.
Recruits to the Territorial Force had to be aged between 17 and 35. They enlisted for a four-year term which could be extended by an obligatory year in times of crisis. Members could terminate their enlistment on three months' notice and payment of a fine. Recruits were required to attend a minimum of 40 drill periods in their first year and 20 per year thereafter. All members were required to attend between eight and fifteen days of annual camp. The force was liable to serve anywhere in the UK. Members were not required to serve overseas but could volunteer to do so. Haldane, who still regarded the force's primary function to be the expansion of the Expeditionary Force, hoped that up to a quarter of all territorials would volunteer on mobilisation. The Imperial Service Obligation was introduced in 1910 to allow territorials to volunteer in advance. It was illegal to amalgamate or disband territorial units or transfer members between them.
### Reception
The reforms were not received well by the auxiliaries. The exclusion of the militia rendered Haldane's target of just over 314,000 officers and men for the Territorial Force unattainable. The new terms of service imposed an increased commitment on members compared to that demanded by the previous auxiliary institutions. By 1 June 1908, the force had attracted less than 145,000 recruits. Despite considerable efforts to promote the new organisation to the former auxiliary institutions, less than 40 per cent of all existing auxiliaries transferred into it.
The county territorial associations emphasised pride in a local territorial identity in their efforts to recruit new members, and used imagery of local scenes under attack to encourage enlistment. In general, the force attracted recruits from the working class, though they were mainly artisans rather than the unskilled labourers who filled the ranks of the regular army. In some units, middle and working classes served together. Units which recruited from the more affluent urban centres contained a significant proportion of well-educated white-collar workers. Territorial officers were predominantly middle class, meaning that in some units there was little to separate officers from other ranks in terms of social status.
Territorial officers were regarded as social inferiors by the regular army's more privileged officer corps. The territorials' relatively narrow social spectrum resulted in a less formal system of self-discipline than the rigid, hierarchical discipline of the regular army, feeding a professional prejudice against the amateur auxiliary. The regular army had no more faith in the territorials' abilities than it had in those of the force's predecessors. Territorial standards of training and musketry were suspect, and the reputation of the territorial artillery was so poor that there were calls for it to be disbanded. Regular officers, fearing for their career prospects, often resisted postings as territorial adjutants. The Army Council predicted that, even after six months of intensive training on mobilisation, the force would not reach a standard at which two territorial divisions could be considered the equal of one regular division as planned. In 1908 and 1914, it was decided that two of the army's six expeditionary divisions should be retained in the UK for home defence, so ineffective was the Territorial Force perceived to be in the role to which it had been assigned.
## Conscription debate and pre-war problems
In 1910, Lord Esher, pro-conscription chairman of the London County Territorial Association, wrote in the National Review that the country would have to choose between an under-strength voluntary auxiliary and compulsory service. In his opinion, the Territorial Force was the last chance for the volunteer tradition, and its failure would pave the way for conscription. Advocacy for compulsory service was led by the National Service League (NSL), which regarded reliance on a naval defence against invasion as complacent and a strong home army as essential. A bill sponsored by the NSL in 1909 proposed using the Territorial Force as the framework for a conscripted home army. When that failed, the league became increasingly antagonistic towards the auxiliary. The force was denigrated for its excessive youth, inefficiency and consistently low numbers, and ridiculed in the popular press as the "Territorial Farce". The NSL's president – the former Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, Lord Roberts – enlisted the support of serving officers in a campaign against it, and in 1913 the Army Council declared its support for conscription. Even prominent members of the force itself favoured compulsory service, and by April 1913 ten county territorial associations had expressed support for it.
The relationship between the county territorial associations and the War Office was often acrimonious. The associations frequently complained about excessive bureaucracy and inadequate finance. The military authorities begrudged the money that could have been spent on the regular army being wasted on what they perceived as an inefficient, amateur auxiliary. Efforts to provide adequate facilities, for example, were undermined by slow responses from the War Office which, when finally forthcoming, often rejected the associations' plans outright or refused to allocate the full financing requested. In 1909, the Gloucestershire association complained that "most of our association are businessmen and are unable to understand why it takes ten weeks and upwards to reply" after waiting for a response to its proposed purchase of a site for a field ambulance unit. Somerset lost three sites for a proposed new drill hall because the War Office took so long to approve plans, and Essex had to wait five years before it received approval for the construction of new rifle ranges. Good facilities were regarded by the associations as important for efficiency, unit esprit de corps and recruitment, and the authorities' parsimony and apparent obstruction were seen as undermining these.
The force failed to retain large numbers of men after their initial enlistment expired, and it consistently fell short of its established strength. It reached a peak of 268,000 men in 1909 when invasion scares prompted a surge in recruitment, but by 1913 numbers had declined to less than 246,000, and the officer corps was nearly 20 per cent under-subscribed. In 1910, a third of the force had not completed the minimum level of musketry training. Only 155,000 territorials completed the full 15-day annual camp in 1912, and around 6,000 did not attend at all. In 1909, some 37 per cent of the rank and file were under 20 years old; in the opinion of the Inspector-General of the Home Forces, this proportion rendered the force too immature to be effective. In 1913, approximately 40,000 territorials were under 19 years old, the minimum age at which they could volunteer for service overseas. Barely seven per cent of the force had accepted the Imperial Service Obligation, seriously compromising its viability as a reinforcement for the Expeditionary Force. Because the military authorities regarded the Territorial Force as weak and saw no value in an auxiliary that was not liable for foreign service, they prioritised expenditure on the regular army, leaving the force armed with obsolete weapons.
## First World War
On the outbreak of the First World War, Lord Kitchener by-passed the Territorial Force and, with the approval of the military authorities, raised instead the New Army of volunteers to expand the regular army. His decision was based not only on professional prejudice – he regarded the territorials as a joke, led by "middle-aged professional men who were allowed to put on uniform and play at soldiers" – but also on an appreciation of the constraints imposed by the force's constitution. He feared that the county territorial associations would be unable to cope with the task of recruiting and training large numbers. He also believed that because so few territorials had thus far volunteered for foreign service, the Territorial Force was better suited for home defence than as a means of expanding the army overseas.
### Mobilisation and training
At the end of July, territorial Special Service Sections began patrolling the east coast. On the day before the declaration of war, the 1st London Brigade was dispersed by platoons to protect the rail network between London and Southampton. The remainder of the Territorial Force was mobilised on the evening of 4 August 1914, and war stations were quickly occupied by those units with bases located nearby. By 6 August, for example, units of the Wessex Division were concentrated at Plymouth while those of the Northumbrian Division took up positions in the east coast defences, and the following day elements of the Welsh Division were gathered in the area of Pembroke Dock. Some formations assembled close to their bases before moving on to their war stations; the Highland Division, for example, gathered at various locations north of Edinburgh before proceeding to Bedford, north of London. Defence duties resulted in some divisions being dispersed; a brigade of the West Riding Division, for example, was deployed to watch the east coast while the rest of the division guarded railways and munitions factories inland, and the brigades of the East Anglian Division were widely scattered about East Anglia.
On 13 August 1914, Kitchener signalled a willingness to deploy overseas those territorial units in which 80 per cent of the men (reduced to 60 per cent at the end of the month) had accepted the Imperial Service Obligation. Despite the low uptake before the war, 72 per cent of the rank and file volunteered for foreign service by the end of September. The first full territorial divisions to be deployed overseas were used to free up imperial garrisons. The East Lancashire Division was sent to Egypt in September, and three territorial divisions had been deployed to India by January 1915. Territorial battalions released regular troops stationed at Aden, Cyprus, Gibraltar and Malta. Five regular army divisions were created from the troops released by the territorials' deployments. The extent to which territorials accepted the obligation varied considerably between battalions; some registered 90 per cent or more acceptance, others less than 50 per cent. The difficulties were not restricted to the rank and file, and many battalions sailed for foreign service with officers who had been newly promoted or recruited to replace those who had chosen to remain at home.
The territorials faced difficulties as they trained up to operational standard. Some artillery units did not get an opportunity to practise with live ammunition until January 1915. Rifle practice suffered due to lack of rifles, practice ammunition and ranges on which to use them. Because there was insufficient transport, a motley collection of carts, private vehicles and lorries were pressed into service. The animals used to pull the non-motorised transport or mount the yeomanry ranged in pedigree from half-blind pit ponies to show horses. The Territorial Force competed with the New Army for recruits, and the War Office prioritised the latter for training and equipment. Many of the regular army staff posted to territorial units were recalled to their parent regiments, and those professionals that still remained were transferred to territorial reserve units in January 1915. Training proved difficult for formations that were widely dispersed as part of their defence duties, and was complicated for all by the need to reorganise the territorial battalions' outdated eight-company structure to the army's standard four-company battalion.
#### Second line
On 15 August, county territorial associations began raising second-line units to replace those scheduled for foreign service. The ranks of the second line were filled by those territorials who could not or did not accept the Imperial Service Obligation. In November, associations started raising third-line units to take over from the second-line units the responsibility for providing replacement drafts to territorial combat units. Territorial battalions were numbered according to line so that, for example, the three lines of the 6th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, became the 1/6th, 2/6th and 3/6th Battalions. In May 1915, territorial divisions were numbered in order of their deployment overseas; the East Lancashire Division, for example, became the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division.
Second-line units immediately assumed that the third line would take over their home-based duties, in the belief that second-line divisions would be deployed overseas. Many second-line battalions refused to take recruits who had not accepted the Imperial Service Obligation, a practice that was not officially sanctioned until March 1915 when the option to enlist only for home service was abolished. The deployment of second-line units overseas was officially endorsed in mid 1915. Until the third line was ready, the conflicting demands to supply drafts, defend the homeland and prepare for deployment caused problems for the second line. In May 1915, Kitchener informed the War Cabinet that the second line was so denuded of trained men as to render it unreliable for home defence. Only in 1916 could the War Office promise that the second line would no longer be trawled for replacements to be sent to the first line. By this time, second-line battalion establishments had been reduced to 400 men, less than half the number normally serving in an infantry battalion at full strength. It took on average 27 months to prepare a second-line formation for active service, compared to eight months for the first line, and the second line often lacked sufficient weapons and ammunition. The desire among the second-line commanders to maintain a level of training and efficiency in readiness for their own deployment led to friction with their first-line counterparts, who accused the second line of holding back the best men and sending sub-standard replacements to the first line.
### Western Front
When the regular army suffered high attrition during the opening battles in France, Kitchener came under pressure to make up the losses. With the New Army not yet ready, he was forced to fall back on the territorials. Despite the preference of General Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces, for the Territorial Force to be deployed to the Western Front in complete brigades and divisions, it was deployed piecemeal. Because of the pressing need for troops, individual battalions were sent as soon as they reached a degree of efficiency and attached to regular brigades. There was little logic in the choice of units deployed. Some that had been positively assessed remained at home while less well prepared units were deployed, often without enough equipment and only after being hastily brought up to strength. The first territorial unit to arrive was the 1/14th Battalion (London Scottish), London Regiment, in September 1914. By December, twenty-two infantry battalions, seven yeomanry regiments, and one medical and three engineer units had been sent.
Territorial battalions were initially allocated to line-of-communication duties for up to three weeks before being assigned to regular army brigades. From February 1915, with 48 infantry battalions in-country, they were sent directly to their host divisions. On arrival at the front, the territorials would spend several days in further training behind the lines before undergoing a period of trench acclimatisation. When the battalion was considered proficient, or when the pressure to relieve a regular unit became too severe, the territorials were allocated their own sector of the front. The time between arriving at brigade and taking over the trenches varied from between six days to one month.
#### Filling the gap
The territorials were thrown into the defensive battles of the initial German offensive during the Race to the Sea. Among the first to see action was the London Scottish, which suffered 640 casualties on 31 October 1914 during the Battle of Messines. It was in action again during the First Battle of Ypres in November, and was praised as a "glorious lead and example" to the rest of the Territorial Force by Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). As the territorials completed their training and the threat of invasion receded, complete divisions were deployed to combat theatres. The first to depart was the 46th (North Midland) Division, which arrived on the Western Front in March 1915. By July, all 14 first-line divisions had been deployed overseas.
The Northumberland Brigade of the Northumbrian Division became the first territorial formation larger than a battalion to fight under its own command when it participated in an abortive counter-attack on 26 April 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres. It suffered 1,954 casualties and earned a personal congratulation from French. The division had deployed only three days earlier; the rest of its units were attached piecemeal to other formations and immediately thrown into the desperate fighting, earning further praise from French for their tenacity and determination. Several other territorial battalions attached to regular army formations fought with distinction in the defence of Ypres, at the cost of heavy casualties. The three battalions of the Monmouthshire Regiment were temporarily amalgamated into a single composite battalion, as were three battalions of the London Regiment. Battlefield amalgamations were a military necessity which threatened the legal protections on territorial unit integrity.
Although the territorials were proving their worth in defensive operations, the commanders of the regular formations to which they were attached still did not trust their abilities. The regulars regarded the primary function of the territorials to be the release of regular battalions for offensive operations. The territorials were employed in the construction and maintenance of trenches, and generally performed only supporting actions in the attacks at Neuve Chapelle and Aubers Ridge in early 1915. An exception was the 1/13th Battalion (Kensington), London Regiment. During the Battle of Aubers Ridge, the Kensingtons became the first territorial battalion to be deployed in the first wave of a major assault, and was the only battalion to achieve its objective on the day. But the Territorial Force had filled the gaps created in the regular army by the German offensive of 1914, and French wrote that it would have been impossible to halt the German advance without it.
#### First divisional operations
The 51st (Highland) Division participated in an attack on 15 June 1915 in the Second Action of Givenchy, part of the Second Battle of Artois. The division had lost several of its original battalions to piecemeal deployment and had been brought up to strength only a month before it arrived in France, largely by the attachment of a brigade from the 55th (West Lancashire) Division. It was the first experience in assault for the two battalions that spearheaded the division's attack. They succeeded in reaching the German second line of defences, but when the regular forces on their right did not the territorials were forced to retire with heavy losses. A professionally planned and executed assault by the 47th (1/2nd London) Division was one of the few successes in the Battle of Loos on 25 September, but the 46th (North Midland) Division suffered 3,643 casualties in a failed assault against the Hohenzollern Redoubt on 13 October. To Lieutenant-General Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the First Army, the 46th Division's failure demonstrated that "some territorial units still need training and discipline".
By the summer of 1915, six complete territorial divisions had been deployed to France. Many of the 52 territorial units still attached to regular army formations were returned to their own parent commands. This allowed the professionals to remove from their formations an element made awkward by its specific terms of service. The regulars found the territorials to be slow to move and recuperate, and better in static defence than attack. Nevertheless, the reshuffle indicated that the Territorial Force had exceeded the expectations of the military authorities, and the territorials' time with the regulars generally resulted in a strong camaraderie and mutual respect between the two. French reported in February 1915 the praise of his commanders for their territorials, who were "fast approaching, if they had not already reached, the standards of efficiency of the regular infantry".
#### Battle of the Somme
There were eight first-line territorial divisions on the Western Front at the start of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. Two of them, the 46th (North Midland) Division and the 56th (1/1st London) Division, went into action on the first day in a disastrous attack on the Gommecourt Salient, a diversionary operation conducted by the Third Army. Two more territorial divisions, the 48th (South Midland) and the 49th (West Riding), were among the initial 25 divisions of the Fourth Army, which bore the brunt of the fighting during the four and a half months of the Somme offensive. The 49th Division was committed piecemeal on the first day to the fighting around the Schwaben Redoubt, and two battalions of the 48th Division were attached to the 4th Division and participated in the first day's fighting. The 48th Division itself went into action on 16 July, and by the end of September the remaining four territorial divisions – the 47th (1/2nd London), 50th (Northumbrian), 51st (Highland) and 55th (West Lancashire) – had relieved battle-weary units and gone into action.
Although the 46th Division's poor performance at Gommecourt cemented a perception that it was a failed unit and the 49th Division's standing was little better, the territorials generally emerged from the Somme with enhanced reputations. This was echoed by Brigadier-General C. B. Prowse, a brigade commander in the 4th Division, who commented, "I did not before think much of the territorials, but by God they can fight." The Battle of the Somme marked the high point of the Territorial Force as a recognisable entity distinct from the regular and New Army forces. It suffered some 84,000 casualties during the offensive, and the indiscriminate replacement of these with recruits who had been conscripted into the army rather than volunteering specifically for the Territorial Force marked the beginning of the end for the territorial identity.
#### Second-line deployment
Fourteen second-line divisions were formed during the war, eight of which were deployed overseas. The first to fight in a major battle was the 61st (2nd South Midland) Division. Its constituent units were raised in September and October 1914, and their training was indicative of the difficulties faced by the second line in general. New recruits paraded without uniforms until October and lived at home until the division assembled in January 1915. The infantry was equipped with old Japanese Arisaka rifles, antique Maxim machine-guns and dummy Lewis guns constructed from wood. The divisional artillery, having initially drilled with cart-mounted logs, was equipped first with obsolete French 90 mm cannons, then with outdated 15-pounder guns and 5-inch howitzers handed down from the first line. The division was not issued with modern weapons until it began intensive training in March 1916, in preparation for its deployment to France at the end of May. Battalion strengths fluctuated throughout training as men were drafted to first-line units. The division was still only at two-thirds strength when it attacked at the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916 alongside the Australian 5th Division. The heavy casualties suffered by the Australians were blamed on the failure of the territorials' assaulting battalions to take a key position.
### Gallipoli
By August 1915, four territorial infantry divisions and a yeomanry mounted division, deployed without its horses as infantry, had reinforced British Empire forces engaged in the Gallipoli Campaign. Their landings were chaotic; the 125th (Lancashire Fusiliers) Brigade, for example, landed nearly a week before the other two brigades of the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division. The infantry were rushed into battle without any opportunity to acclimatise, and the 54th (East Anglian) Division did not receive any formal instruction about the nature of the campaign for the first four weeks of its participation in it. Some battalions of the 53rd (Welsh) Division were second-line units and had still been supplying replacement drafts to first-line units, and the division was given only two weeks notice that it was to go to Gallipoli.
The 42nd Division impressed the regulars with its spirit in the Third Battle of Krithia on 4 June. The 155th (South Scottish) Brigade of the 52nd (Lowland) Division assaulted with such determination in July that it overran its objective and came under fire from French allies. The 156th (Scottish Rifles) Brigade suffered over 50 per cent casualties in the Battle of Gully Ravine on 28 June, and a battalion of the 54th Division was slaughtered when it advanced too far during an attack on 12 August. The same month, the yeomen of the 2nd Mounted Division suffered 30 per cent casualties during the Battle of Scimitar Hill, and had to be relieved by six dismounted yeomanry brigades which landed in October.
The campaign ended in withdrawal in January 1916. Although Hamilton, appointed to command the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in March 1915, praised the courage of the territorials, he criticised the performance of the 53rd and 54th Divisions. His comments failed to recognise the difficulties the two divisions had faced with the loss of many of their trained men transferred to other units before their arrival at Gallipoli. Lieutenant-Colonel E. C. Da Costa, GSO1 of the 54th Division, refuted accusations by Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, commander of IX Corps, that the division lacked attacking spirit and was badly led. Da Costa claimed that its poor performance was entirely due to the way it had been "chucked ashore" and thrown into a poorly-coordinated and ill-defined attack.
### Egypt, Sinai and Palestine
Following a successful British defence of the Suez Canal, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) was formed in March 1916 and went over to the offensive against German and Ottoman forces in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign. The EEF comprised forces from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and India, and the British contribution was predominantly territorial. Most of the infantry was provided by the four territorial divisions that had fought at Gallipoli. When the 42nd Division was transferred to France in March 1917, it was replaced in July by the second-line 60th (2/2nd London) Division. The latter, having already fought during the Battle of Doiran in Salonika, played a key role in the capture of Jerusalem on 9 December.
The yeomanry provided 18 dismounted regiments which fought as infantry and, in 1917, were formed into the 74th (Yeomanry) Division. This division was transferred to France in 1918 along with the 52nd (Lowland) Division. Five brigades of yeomanry fought in the mounted role, and in 1917 three of them were formed into the Yeomanry Mounted Division. The yeomanry mounted some of the last cavalry charges ever made by British forces; the Charge at Huj on 8 November 1917 by the 1/1st Warwickshire Yeomanry and 1/1st Queen's Own Worcestershire Hussars, followed five days later with a charge by the 1/1st Royal Bucks Hussars in the Battle of Mughar Ridge. By the end of a campaign in which the EEF had advanced across the Sinai, through Palestine, and into Syria, territorial casualties numbered over 32,000 – 3,000 more than those suffered by British regular, Australian, New Zealand and Indian forces combined.
### Late war
The much maligned 46th (North Midland) Division redeemed itself in 1918 in a hazardous attack during the Battle of St Quentin Canal. The operation was successfully spearheaded by the 137th (Staffordshire) Brigade, which included two battalions that were almost disbanded because of their alleged poor performance at Gommecourt two years earlier. The seven untested second-line divisions saw their first actions in 1917. They generally suffered, undeservedly, from poor reputations, although the 58th (2/1st London) and 62nd (2nd West Riding) Divisions were well regarded by the war's end. The 51st (Highland) Division, whose men labelled themselves as "duds" after a slow start, and the two London first-line divisions were among the best in the BEF by 1918. A reputation for dependability resulted in the 48th (South Midland) Division being transferred to Italy to relieve the regular 7th Infantry Division in March 1918. Several territorial divisions overcame poor initial impressions to become effective, dependable formations by the end of the war. The 61st (2nd South Midland) Division, for example, blamed for the failure at Fromelles, was commended by Lieutenant-General Hubert Gough, commander of the Fifth Army, as the best performing of his 11 front-line divisions in the initial onslaught of the German spring offensive in March 1918.
As the war progressed, Britain began to struggle with manpower shortages, prompting changes which affected the territorials. The 63rd (2nd Northumbrian) and 65th (2nd Lowland) Divisions had already been disbanded in July 1916 and March 1917 respectively. The remaining four home-based divisions lost their territorial affiliation when they were reconstituted as part of the Training Reserve over the winter of 1917/1918. In early 1918, every brigade in the BEF was reduced from four to three battalions. The reductions targeted second-line and New Army units, and resulted in the amalgamation of 44 territorial battalions and the disbandment of a further 21. In July, the 50th (Northumbrian) Division was left with a single territorial battalion when it was reorganised following heavy losses during the Spring Offensive. Its other territorial battalions, having fought in most battles since the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, were reduced to a cadre or disbanded. All but one battalion in each brigade of the 53rd (Welsh) Division and the 60th (2/2nd London) Division in Palestine were transferred to France and replaced with Indian battalions in 1916. The 75th Division was formed in Egypt in March 1917 with territorial units transferred from India, though it too was subsequently 'indianised'. Several territorial battalions from the 42nd (East Lancashire), 46th (North Midland) and 59th (2nd North Midland) Divisions were reduced to training cadres, demobilised or disbanded shortly before the war's end. The apparent cull of territorial units added to the grievances harboured by the Territorial Force about its treatment by the military authorities.
## Erosion of the territorial identity
Many territorial battalions had strong individual identities based on the geography of their recruitment. The ranks had been filled by men who, at least until direct voluntary recruitment into the Territorial Force ceased in December 1915, had chosen the force in preference to the new or regular armies. They had elected to join local regiments and been imbued with an esprit de corps during their training in those regiments' own second and later third lines. The strong sense of locality was reinforced by a shared civilian background – it was not uncommon for territorials to be employed in the same office, mill or factory – and many territorial memoirs betray a sense of family or club. A similar sentiment was exploited in raising the New Army pals battalions, but in the Territorial Force this was reinforced by a pedigree that New Army units did not possess; most territorial units could trace a lineage back to the early or mid 19th century through units of yeomanry or volunteers which had for generations been a part of local communities and social life.
### Replacements
In the first half of the war, territorial casualties were generally replaced with drafts from a battalion's own reserve. Although there were some cases of replacements being sourced from different regions or non-territorial units, in mid-1916 the ranks of the territorial units were still largely populated by men who had volunteered specifically for service as a territorial in their local regiment. The legal protections for this were stripped away by the Military Service Acts of 1916. These permitted the amalgamation and disbandment of units and the transfer of territorials between them, introduced conscription, and required territorials either to accept the Imperial Service Obligation or leave the force and become liable for conscription.
The last recruits to voluntarily enlist in a specific unit of the Territorial Force before the choice was removed, and who had trained in that unit's third line alongside neighbours and colleagues, had been drafted to their front-line units by May 1916. In September 1916, the regiment-based system for training New Army units was centralised into the Training Reserve. Separately, the 194 territorial third-line units were amalgamated into 87 Reserve Battalions. They retained responsibility for supplying replacements to the first- and second-line units, but when unable to do so, replacements were sent from the Training Reserve. The system was organised by region, so even if a battalion did not receive replacements from its own regiment they were generally sourced from an appropriate locality, but it did not guarantee unit integrity.
After the heavy losses sustained during the Somme offensive, dilution of the territorial identity accelerated because of the influx of replacements who had no territorial affiliation. Some units still maintained a regional identity; the 56th (1/1st London) Division, for example, retained its essentially London character despite the fact that the four battalions of its 168th Brigade received replacements from at least 26 different regiments during the battle. Others experienced substantial dilution by the end of the offensive; the 149th (Northumberland) Brigade, for example, received large numbers of replacements from East Anglia, Northamptonshire, London and the Midlands. By March 1917, a significant proportion of the men in the second-line 61st (2nd South Midland) Division came from outside the South Midlands due to the replacement of losses suffered at the Battle of Fromelles. By the end of the year, the same trend could be seen in the first-line 48th (South Midland) Division.
The indiscriminate replacement of casualties prompted rueful comments about the damage being done to the nature of the Territorial Force. The historian C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, serving with the 1/4th Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment, lamented that, by the end of 1916, the battalion had "lost its exclusive Berkshire character which, at the beginning of the war, had been its unique possession". For the 1/6th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, losses during the Battle of the Somme had damaged its "territorial influence". Criticisms of the drafting system were voiced in the House of Commons, and territorial representatives expressed concern that the force's unique character was being lost. Military authorities stated their desire to replenish units with replacements from the same regiment or regimental district, but stressed that the Military Service Acts had removed any obligation to do so and that military expediency sometimes necessitated not doing so.
As the availability of men of military age dwindled, it became increasingly difficult to source replacements from some sparsely populated regions. The largely rurally recruited 48th (South Midland) and 54th (East Anglian) Divisions became increasingly diluted as the war progressed, while the more urbanised recruitment areas of the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division allowed it to remain essentially a Lancashire formation throughout. By the war's end, very few battalions still retained more than a handful of men who had embarked with them at the start of the war. The territorial units that fought in 1917 and 1918, subject to the same system of replacements as the rest of the British land forces, bore little resemblance beyond a geographic origin to those that had sailed in 1914 and 1915. By 1918, there was little to differentiate between regular, territorial and New Army divisions.
### Territorial grievances
Failure to guarantee the integrity of its units was the most contentious of several grievances felt by the territorials against what they perceived as a hostile and patronising attitude from the military authorities. Territorial officers and specialists such as doctors, vets, drivers, cooks and dispatch riders received less pay than their counterparts in New Army and regular units. Officers were considered junior to their regular counterparts of the same rank, leading some to remove the 'T' insignia from their uniforms as a badge of inferiority, and commanders of second-line brigades and third-line battalions were a rank lower than their regular counterparts. Although the Territorial Force provided many officers for the regular army, very few were appointed to higher commands, despite pre-war promises by Haldane that they would be. In 1918, government efforts to defend the military record on senior territorial promotions failed to acknowledge that most were temporary and in home units. Ian Macpherson, Under-Secretary of State for War, conceded that just ten territorial officers commanded brigades and only three had been promoted to highest grade of General Staff Officer. The territorials received scant recognition for their early enthusiasm. The Army Council refused to grant any special decorations for those who had accepted the Imperial Service Obligation before the war. The Territorial War Medal, awarded to those who had volunteered for service overseas in the first months of the war, was denied to volunteers who had been held back even though they rendered invaluable service training the rest of the army. Those who served in India received no campaign medal.
The three territorial divisions sent to India in 1914 felt penalised by their early readiness. The men were placed on lower, peacetime rates of pay; gunners had to purchase equipment that should have been issued; officers attending courses were not fully reimbursed for their hotel expenses; and non-commissioned officers promoted after arrival had to protest before they received the pay increase to which they were entitled. The divisions were still stationed there at the war's end, despite promises made by Kitchener that they would be redeployed to France within a year. Indications that they would be the first to be demobilised proved false when the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Afghan War forced the government to retain some territorial units in India until 1920. The poor treatment of the territorials in India resulted in low support across south-west England and the home counties, the regions from which the three divisions were recruited, when the Territorial Force was reconstituted after the war.
#### County territorial associations
The county territorial associations experienced a steady erosion of responsibilities as the war progressed. Although disappointed by Kitchener's decision to bypass the Territorial Force, the associations assisted in recruiting the New Army alongside their own work raising and equipping territorial units. The Cambridgeshire, Denbighshire and East Riding associations, for example, together raised 11 New Army units in December 1914. The associations performed remarkably well in equipping their units, despite the fact that the War Office prioritised New Army units and, in the case of the Leicestershire associations, threatened to penalise manufacturers who dealt with any institution other than the War Office. The competitive nature of the system led to supply according to highest bidder rather than military necessity and, in consequence, inflated prices. As a result, the territorials were relieved of responsibility for the purchase and supply of equipment in favour of a centralised system in May 1915.
In December 1915, direct recruitment into the Territorial Force ceased. The next year, the associations were rendered largely superfluous when administration of several territorial services, including the second- and third-line units and Home Service Battalions, was taken from them. In March 1917, many territorial depots were shut down as a result of War Office centralisation, and later the same year territorial records offices were closed. The Council of County Territorial Associations met in September to discuss the loss of responsibilities and the apparent erosion of the Territorial Force. A delegation in October to Lord Derby, Secretary of State for War, resulted only in the associations being given responsibility for the Volunteer Training Corps (VTC). Regarded as a poor substitute for the Territorial Force, the VTC was recruited from those not eligible for active service, mainly due to age. It was widely denigrated as "Grandpa's Regiment" and "George's Wrecks", from the armbands inscribed with the letters "GR" (for Georgius Rex), which was all the uniform the government was initially willing to provide them with.
## Post-war
Between August 1914 and December 1915, the Territorial Force had attracted nearly 726,000 recruits, approximately half the number that had volunteered for the New Army over the same period. It had raised 692 battalions by the war's end, compared with 267 regular or reserve battalions and 557 New Army battalions. The force deployed 318 battalions overseas, compared to the New Army's 404, and fielded 23 infantry and two mounted divisions on foreign soil, compared to the New Army's 30 infantry divisions. Seventy-one awards of the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for valour, were made to territorial soldiers, including two of only three bars ever awarded. The territorials had suffered some 577,000 casualties in the period 1914–1920. Compromised in conception and ridiculed in peacetime, the Territorial Force had filled the gap between what was effectively the destruction of the regular army in the opening campaigns of the war and the arrival of the New Armies in 1915.
Demobilisation of the Territorial Force commenced in December 1918, and the debate about its reconstitution was begun. The service rendered by the force during the war and the considerable political influence it possessed ensured its survival, but there was an extended discussion about what role it should play. In the absence of any invasion threat, there was no requirement to maintain a significant force for home defence, and a part-time body of volunteers could have no place in the imperial garrison. With conscription established as the means of expanding the regular army in a major conflict, which the Ten Year Rule anyway regarded as unlikely, there was no need to maintain a body of volunteers for this role. The only purpose military authorities could find for the Territorial Force was the provision of drafts to reinforce the army in medium-scale conflicts within the empire. Accordingly, the War Office recommended in March 1919 that the force should be liable for service overseas and receive no guarantees about unit integrity.
Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War responsible for reconstituting the force, considered a mandatory imperial obligation unfair and resisted its imposition. The territorial representatives recognised the necessity of such an obligation, but opposed the force being used simply as a reserve of manpower for the army, rather than operating as a second line in its own brigades and divisions as Haldane had intended. Territorial support for the imperial obligation eventually persuaded Churchill to accept it, and concerns about unit integrity were allayed by "The Pledge", Churchill's promise that the force would be deployed as complete units and fight in its own formations. The final sticking point was resolved by the resurrection of the militia to provide reinforcement drafts to the regular army.
Another issue was military aid to the civil power during the industrial unrest that followed the war. The thinly-stretched army was reluctant to become involved, so Churchill proposed using the territorials. Concerns that the force would be deployed to break strikes adversely affected recruitment, which had recommenced on 1 February 1920, resulting in promises that the force would not be so used. The government nevertheless deployed the Territorial Force in all but name during the miner's strike of April 1921 by the hasty establishment of the Defence Force. The new organisation relied heavily on territorial facilities and personnel, and its units were given territorial designations. Territorials were specially invited to enlist. Although those that did were required to resign from the Territorial Force, their service in the Defence Force counted towards their territorial obligations, and they were automatically re-admitted to the Territorial Force once their service in the Defence Force was completed.
The Territorial Force was officially reconstituted in 1921 by the Territorial Army and Militia Act 1921 and renamed in October as the Territorial Army. The difficulties posed in the war by an auxiliary that maintained a separate identity from the regular army were still enshrined in the reconstituted auxiliary. They were finally addressed by the Armed Forces (Conditions of Service) Act, passed on the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, by which restrictions on territorial terms of service and transfer between units were removed and territorial status was suspended for the duration. The next war would be fought from the start by a single, integrated army.
## See also
- Territorial Force Nursing Service |
47,623,689 | Hawaii Sesquicentennial half dollar | 1,065,687,152 | 1928 United States coin | [
"Cultural depictions of James Cook",
"Currencies introduced in 1928",
"Early United States commemorative coins",
"Fifty-cent coins",
"History of Hawaii",
"United States silver coins"
]
| The Hawaii Sesquicentennial half dollar was struck in 1928 by the United States Bureau of the Mint in honor of the 150th anniversary of Captain James Cook's landing in Hawaii, the first European to reach there. The coin depicts Captain Cook on the obverse and a Hawaiian chieftain on the reverse. Only 10,000 were struck for the public, making the coin rare and valuable.
In 1927, the legislature of the Territory of Hawaii passed a resolution calling on the U.S. government to produce a commemorative coin for the 150th anniversary of Cook's arrival in Hawaii. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon thought the occasion important enough that, unusually for him, he did not oppose such an issue. The bill for the Hawaii half dollar passed through Congress without opposition or amendment, and became the Act of March 7, 1928 with the signature of President Calvin Coolidge.
Sculptor Chester Beach made the plaster models for the coins from sketches by Juliette May Fraser. Beach had some trouble gaining approval for his designs, as there were issues raised by the Mint and by Victor Stewart Kaleoaloha Houston, Hawaii Territory's delegate to Congress. These concerns were eventually addressed, and the coin went into production. Although the issue price, at \$2, was the highest for a commemorative half dollar to that point, the coins sold out quickly and have risen in value to over a thousand dollars.
## Inception
The Hawaii Sesquicentennial half dollar was proposed because of the observances there for the 150th anniversary of Captain James Cook becoming the first European to reach the Hawaiian Islands or, as it was termed then, "its discovery". Planners decided on a date for the celebrations as August 1928, halfway between the sesquicentennial of Cook's landing in January 1778 and of his death in the islands in February 1779. A resolution was passed by the legislature of the Territory of Hawaii to give the celebrations official status, and to ask the federal government to have the armed forces participate. The resolution requested that Washington invite the United Kingdom (Cook's allegiance) and other nations. It also asked the federal government to issue a half dollar and postage stamps in honor of the anniversary. At the time, commemoratives were not sold by the government—Congress, in authorizing legislation, designated an organization which had the exclusive right to purchase the coins at face value and vend them to the public at a premium. In the case of the Hawaii half dollar, the Cook Sesquicentennial Commission of Hawaii was the designated group.
Bruce Cartwright, Jr. was in charge of choosing a coin design for the Cook commission. Mrs. Ethelwyn Castle, a civic-minded person, arranged for him to meet Juliette May Fraser, a local artist. Cartwright had prepared cartoon-style drawings, with the portrait of Cook based on a Wedgwood plaque that had been owned by Queen Emma, showing the explorer facing right. Within two days, Fraser had produced sketches. On November 2, Charles Moore, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, wrote to Assistant Director of the Mint Mary M. O'Reilly that Juliette Fraser's sketches were excellent and would translate well into a coin.
The Commission of Fine Arts met and, at the suggestion of sculptor-member Lorado Taft, decided to ask Buffalo nickel designer James Earle Fraser (no relation) who would be most suitable to turn the sketches into plaster models, from which the Mint could make coinage dies and hubs. James Fraser suggested Peace dollar designer Anthony de Francisci, but sculptor Chester Beach was engaged instead.
## Legislation
Numismatic historian Don Taxay thought it likely that members of the House Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures had agreed to support a Hawaii half dollar prior to a bill being submitted, as preparations had already begun. Legislation for such was introduced into the House of Representatives by the territory's delegate to Congress, Victor Stewart Kaleoaloha Houston, on December 5, 1927. It was referred to the coinage committee, of which New Jersey Congressman Randolph Perkins was the chair, and which held hearings on the bill on January 23, 1928. Delegate Houston appeared in support of his bill, and to the surprise of committee members, had gotten a statement from Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, stating that Mellon did not oppose the bill. Usually, when a commemorative coin was proposed, Mellon argued that a medal should be issued instead. This had been the case for the Norse-American medal three years previously; its sponsor, committee member Ole J. Kvale of Minnesota, had scuttled plans for a coin because of Treasury Department opposition. Congressman Kvale was "very much interested in learning what powers of persuasion have been exercised by the gentleman from Hawaii to bring out such a favorable report". Kvale, a Norse-American, asked, "why this discrimination against two and a half million people in the United States has come about in favor of about 35,000 whites in that Territory?"
Houston stated he had not lobbied the Treasury for the coin, and Perkins, before promising to find out more information, speculated that perhaps it was because the coins were to be issued far from the continental United States. Houston told the committee that the coin was "something that may be kept by those who attend the celebration as a memorial of it and will be available to foreigners who come there, as well as our own people who celebrate the occasion". Kvale stated he would vote for the bill. Mississippi's Bill G. Lowrey noted that as he had said before, he would not vote for any coin bill; Perkins agreed that Lowrey had made his position clear. Perkins issued a report on February 1, 1928, recounting the history behind the proposed coin and indicating his committee's support.
The bill was passed without objection by the House of Representatives on February 20, 1928. The bill was received by the Senate the following day and was referred to the Committee on Banking and Currency. On February 27, South Dakota's Peter Norbeck reported the bill back to the Senate without amendment, and included in the report a letter from Secretary Mellon to Perkins dated February 13, in which Mellon expanded on his reasons for not opposing the Hawaii coin legislation. Mellon stated that only a token number of pieces would be issued, and that the celebration, sponsored by the territorial government, was of national significance. The bill was passed by the Senate on March 2 without recorded opposition and was enacted on March 7 with the signature of President Calvin Coolidge. It provided for the issuance of up to 10,000 half dollars in honor of the sesquicentennial, with the commission's profits from the coin to be used toward establishing a Captain James Cook collection in the territorial archives.
## Preparation
Once Beach accepted the commission on March 12, 1928, Juliette Fraser's sketches were forwarded to him. On April 7, he sent completed models to the Mint and photographs to the Fine Arts Commission. Both the Mint and Houston responded with criticism, the former that the relief of the coin was high and difficult to reduce to coin-sized hubs. On April 19, Mint Chief Engraver John R. Sinnock wrote in a memorandum that the coin would be very hard to produce because the area of greatest relief on each side was in the same part of the design. Beach agreed to lower any high points that might cause the Mint difficulty.
Delegate Houston had a long list of quibbles about the coin's design. For example, Beach had placed an anklet on the chief's leg; Houston felt such an item would not have been worn. Beach defended some of his choices, such as the anklet (which was removed when Houston insisted), and promised to comply with the remainder. This did not satisfy Houston, who was also unhappy about the shape of the palm tree on the coin, and Beach modified the design again. Beach forwarded final models, indicating that he would only consider making changes if the Mint requested it. He wrote to Moore, "I think the proper thing for Mr. Houston to do would be to take the sculptor and family to Hawaii and let us live in the cocoanut trees for a while and absorb the atmosphere of that paradise."
The coin was endorsed by the Commission of Fine Arts; on May 9, O'Reilly wrote to Beach that the design had received Secretary Mellon's approval.
## Design
The obverse depicts Captain James Cook. He faces towards a compass needle and the words CAPT. JAMES COOK DISCOVERER OF HAWAII; thus, his gaze is westward. IN GOD WE TRUST is to the right, the name of the country above, and the denomination below. The words HALF DOLLAR are flanked by eight triangles, four on each side. These represent the eight largest volcanic islands of Hawaii: Oahu, Maui, Kauai, the "Big Island" of Hawaii, Niihau, Lanai, Kahoolawe, and Molokai. The designer's initials, CB, are found to the right of the base of the bust.
The reverse is based on a statue of King Kamehameha I of Hawaii, designed by Thomas R. Gould, and intended "to symbolize the past and future glory of the Kingdom of Hawaii". The sculpture that stands in downtown Honolulu (1883) is a replacement for one that sank while being transported from Germany; the original (1880) was later salvaged and stands at Kohala on the island of Hawaii. The coin features a Hawaiian chieftain in ceremonial dress surmounting the top of a hill, with his arm extended in greeting. He represents Hawaii rising from obscurity. The palm tree that rises above him is intended to signify romance. A Hawaiian village at Waikiki Beach with Diamond Head nearby are seen behind him, representing history and antiquity. The design is almost free of lettering, with only "E PLURIBUS UNUM" ("Out of many, one") and 1778 1928 to be seen. Ferns are visible under that Latin motto: Houston wanted the plants removed, but Beach insisted on retaining them to balance the design. Juliette Fraser had made a number of sketches, all with the same basic design elements, but with the chieftain in various poses and with Diamond Head in different positions.
Art historian Cornelius Vermeule, in his volume on U.S. coins and medals, wrote that the obverse "is too crowded, despite the large, flat, clothed bust" and that the various elements of the reverse design "are all too much for one small coin". He deemed "the coin honoring Hawaii in 1928 ... no more a credit to Chester Beach than was the Lexington Concord coin [of 1925]".
## Production, distribution, and collecting
The Philadelphia Mint coined 10,008 Hawaii Sesquicentennial half dollars in June 1928, with the eight pieces above the authorized mintage reserved for inspection and testing at the 1929 meeting of the annual Assay Commission. Fifty of the ten thousand were specially finished as sandblast proof pieces, to be presented to various individuals and institutions, such as members of the Cook commission, President Coolidge, and the British Admiralty. Of the remainder, half were to be sold on the Hawaiian Islands, half reserved for orders from elsewhere. The Bank of Hawaii took charge of distribution on behalf of the Cook commission. The price was \$2 per coin, the highest for a half dollar commemorative to that point.
Sales began October 8, 1928; supplies were quickly exhausted. Numismatists Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen, in their book on commemoratives, write that while "there was never any scandal about these coins", there were unconfirmed rumors of hoards of coins, totaling as many as 1,500, taken from the allocation for Hawaiians and kept off the market. One such grouping, of 137 pieces, comprised coins from an allotment for the Bank of Hawaii for sale to its employees. When the coin the bank put on display was stolen, the bank president took the others off sale, and they remained in the vaults until 1986, when they were sold at auction. Many Hawaii Sesquicentennial half dollars were purchased by non-collectors and display the effects of poor handling.
The Captain Cook Memorial Collection, purchased in part with funds raised from the coins, is now in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. The Hawaii Sesquicentennial coin is the scarcest commemorative half dollar by design; according to R.S. Yeoman's A Guide Book of United States Coins published in 2015, it lists for between \$1,850 and \$11,000 depending on condition. The sandblast proofs are listed for up to \$50,000 but none has recently been sold at auction—an exceptional specimen of the regular type sold for \$25,850 in 2013. At least three different counterfeits are known.
## See also
- Early United States commemorative coins |
210,873 | Kingdom Hearts (video game) | 1,172,885,932 | 2002 video game | [
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"Video games scored by Yoko Shimomura",
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| is a 2002 action role-playing video game developed by Square for the PlayStation 2 video game console. It is the first game in the Kingdom Hearts series and is the result of a collaboration between Square and The Walt Disney Company. An expanded re-release of the game featuring new and additional content, Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, was released exclusively in Japan in December 2002. The Final Mix version of the game was later remastered in high definition and released globally as a part of the Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix collection for the PlayStation 3. The game was later ported and released as part of the bundled Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix collection for PlayStation 4 in March 2017, Xbox One in February 2020, Windows in March 2021, and Nintendo Switch in February 2022.
The game combines characters and settings from Disney animated features with those from Square's Final Fantasy series, in addition to original characters and worlds created for the game. It follows the adventures of Sora, a cheerful teenager who fights against the forces of darkness alongside Donald Duck, Goofy and other Disney characters. The game was a departure from Square's standard role-playing games, introducing a substantial action and hack and slash element to the gameplay. The score was composed by Yoko Shimomura. Kingdom Hearts has an all-star voice cast and includes many of the Disney characters' official voice actors. It was longtime Square character designer Tetsuya Nomura's first time in a directorial position.
Kingdom Hearts received critical and commercial success and was praised for its unusual combination of action and role-playing, its unexpectedly harmonious mix of Square and Disney elements, and Shimomura's music. It was a large presence in the 2002 holiday season, receiving numerous year-end game awards, and went on to achieve Sony "Greatest Hits" status. The game's success spawned a franchise and numerous sequels, with the Kingdom Hearts series going on to ship over 36 million copies worldwide and becoming one of Square's most popular franchises. Kingdom Hearts is the tenth best-selling PlayStation 2 game of all time, and is considered by some gaming publications to be one of the greatest video games of all time.
## Gameplay
Kingdom Hearts is influenced by its parent franchise, Final Fantasy, and carries gameplay elements over into its own action-based, hack and slash system. The main battle party consists of three characters: Sora, Donald Duck, and Goofy. Sora is directly controlled by the player from a third person camera angle. All other party members are computer-controlled, though the player can customize their behavior to an extent through the pause menu. Donald and Goofy comprise the party in most areas, but nearly every level features a character who may replace them. For instance, Jack Skellington can join Sora's party in Halloween Town, but cannot accompany the player elsewhere. In some worlds, the party changes its appearance, has abilities unique to that world or both; the characters can fly in Neverland, acquire aquatic forms in Atlantica which enable them to survive underwater, and gain Halloween costumes in Halloween Town to blend in with the locals.
Like traditional role-playing games, Kingdom Hearts features an experience point system that determines character development. As enemies are defeated, the player characters gain experience and grow stronger, gaining access to new abilities. Unlike other games of its type, Kingdom Hearts allows a degree of character development customization through a short tutorial found at the beginning of the game. The tutorial allows the player to select from one of three main attributes―strength, defense, or magic―for Sora to excel in and one to lack in. By choosing certain options, the player may manipulate how Sora learns abilities, grows statistically, and gains levels. Donald, Goofy, and any other additional party members are assigned specific areas of strength from the outset. Donald excels in magic, while Goofy excels in defense and special attacks.
The game progresses linearly from one story event to the next, usually presented as a cutscene, though there are numerous side quests available that provide benefits to the characters. Players may also choose the order in which they tackle some areas. Most of the gameplay occurs on interconnected field maps where battles take place. Combat in Kingdom Hearts occurs in real time and involves pressing buttons to initiate attacks by the on-screen character. An action menu, similar to those found in Final Fantasy games, found at the bottom left of the screen provides other combat options such as using magic and items, although players can also assign selected magic spells that can be instantly used whilst holding the shoulder button. As players progress through the game, they can receive certain Disney characters as summons, such as Dumbo and Tinker Bell, each with their own unique abilities. There is also a context-sensitive option at the bottom of the menu, usually used for interacting with the environment or performing special attacks. This menu is manipulated by using the right analog stick or digital pad, while movement is controlled by the left analog stick, allowing the player to navigate the menu while avoiding or approaching enemies.
Sora, along with his allies, both possess a Hit Point (HP) meter and a Magic Point (MP) meter, which increase as they gain experience and level up. The MP meter is divided into various segments that are used up whenever that character performs magic, with more powerful magic consuming more MP. MP can be replenished by performing melee attacks or using items. The HP meter determines the character's health, reducing whenever a character takes damage, although it can be replenished by using healing items or spells. If one of Sora's allies runs out of health, they will be knocked out temporarily until someone heals them. However, if Sora loses all of his health, the game ends and the player must resume play from the beginning of an area or boss. Defeating enemies causes various orbs to fall: green orbs which replenish health, blue orbs which restore MP, and yellow orbs which represent Munny, the game's currency, and can be used to purchase new items.
### Gummi Ship
The Gummi Ship is the mode of travel between the various worlds in the game. The gameplay for piloting the vessel is different from the rest of the game as it switches to a rail shooter format. The player controls the Gummi Ship from a rear third-person perspective as it travels in an outer space setting. While traveling, the player must avoid obstacles and defend against enemy ships that attempt to destroy the player's vessel by firing missiles or ramming it. Surviving the route allows access to the next world. Once the player's gummi ship is destroyed, it will have the option to either return to the world selection menu or retry the level. At the beginning of the game, there are few options available to customize the vessel, but as the game progresses, new weapons, engines, and armor become available. Different pre-designed blueprints can be found throughout the game that can be used to quickly construct Gummi Ships. Geppetto also gives the player different Gummi Ship designs based on the number of Heartless defeated. From the start, the player can travel between worlds by using "Normal Drive", which initiates the rail shooter-like minigame. Later in the game, Sora can acquire a "Warp Drive", which allows instant travel between previously visited worlds without having to play the minigame. However, worlds that have not been visited cannot be accessed with Warp Drive and must be discovered normally first.
## Plot
### Setting
The universe of Kingdom Hearts is a collection of various levels, referred to as "worlds", through which the player must progress. Fourteen worlds out of which thirteen can be accessed in the game and one, Disney Castle, is shown in cutscenes. Additional worlds are mentioned by various characters but are inaccessible because they have been destroyed by the Heartless. Ten Disney worlds are based on fiction, primarily from the Disney animated features canon, and the other four were created by Square specifically for the game.
The graphics and characters of each world were designed to resemble the artwork style of each Disney film. Each Disney world is inhabited by characters from the film: including Hercules and Philoctetes in Olympus Coliseum, and Aladdin, Jasmine and Jafar in Agrabah. Each world is disconnected from the others and exists separately. Most characters in the world are unaware of other ones, with few exceptions. Players travel from one world to another via Gummi Ship.
The worlds created specifically for the game mirror the overall appearance of the other worlds and feature either new characters or ones from several Final Fantasy games. The new worlds include: the Destiny Islands, where the story opens; Traverse Town, which serves as a launching point for most of the game; Hollow Bastion, which many of the Final Fantasy characters call home; and the End of the World, a large, dark world created from the remnants of various worlds consumed by the Heartless. The main characters travel from world to world to seal each "Keyhole", this protects the world from the Heartless and ultimately from destruction. They also try to minimize their interaction with characters of other worlds to maintain a balance of separation. This sometimes requires Sora, Donald and Goofy to blend in with the world inhabitants by changing their physical appearance.
### Characters
The collaboration between Disney and Square resulted in a mixture of familiar Disney and Square characters, as well as several new characters created and designed by Tetsuya Nomura. The primary protagonist of the game is Sora, a 14-year-old boy chosen to wield the Keyblade—a weapon which is a cross between a key and a sword—for battling darkness. The game also features two friends from his home world, Riku and Kairi. For most of the game, Sora is joined by Donald Duck and Goofy. Donald, the court wizard, and Goofy, captain of the royal guard, are sent from Disney Castle to find the Keyblade. The three join forces to search for King Mickey Mouse, Kairi, and Riku. The primary antagonist is Ansem, who seeks power and knowledge by using dark beings called the Heartless. The Heartless, hearts corrupted by darkness, serve as most of the enemies encountered in the game and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Maleficent, from the 1959 film Sleeping Beauty, leads a group of Disney villains that seeks to use the Heartless for their own gain.
As a game meant to explore the fictional universes of various Disney films, over one hundred Disney characters are featured in various capacities. While many serve as major characters in the story, others appear in cameo roles, such as the One Hundred and One Dalmatians playing a part in a side-quest. Most worlds also feature a Disney villain whom the player must defeat. The player can summon various Disney characters to fight alongside Sora in battle, causing Donald and Goofy to withdraw from the battlefield for the duration of the summon. Available summoned characters include the Genie from Aladdin, Tinker Bell from Peter Pan, and Simba from The Lion King, among others.
Square also incorporated several characters from the Final Fantasy series into the game, though the characters were slightly altered to fit the game's back-story. On the Destiny Islands, the player meets younger versions of Tidus and Wakka from Final Fantasy X, and Selphie from Final Fantasy VIII. In Traverse Town, the player encounters Squall Leonhart (also known as "Leon") from Final Fantasy VIII, as well as Aerith, Cid, and Yuffie from Final Fantasy VII. Rikku from Final Fantasy X was originally set to appear, but was replaced by Yuffie. Cloud and Sephiroth, both from Final Fantasy VII, make appearances in Olympus Coliseum, where the player can fight them in tournaments. The emphasis on characters from later Final Fantasy installments stems from Nomura's hesitation to use characters he did not design. The game also uses other Final Fantasy icons such as the Moogles who mediate item synthesis.
### Story
Sora, Riku, and Kairi build a raft with the intent to leave their home world of Destiny Islands to explore new worlds. On the night before the planned voyage, the islands are attacked by the Heartless, and Riku and Kairi disappear. Before the Heartless consume the islands, Sora mysteriously obtains the Keyblade, a weapon effective against the Heartless. Meanwhile, King Mickey has left his own world to deal with the increasing number of Heartless, leaving instructions for Donald and Goofy to find the "key" that will protect the worlds from the encroaching darkness. Donald and Goofy use the Gummi Ship to travel to Traverse Town, where they find Sora after he has drifted there from his destroyed world. The three decide to travel together – Donald and Goofy to find Mickey, and Sora to find Kairi and Riku – traveling to various worlds and sealing "Keyholes" in the worlds that, when sealed, prevent the "heart" of those worlds from being consumed by the Heartless. Meanwhile, a group of Disney villains led by Maleficent seek out the seven Princesses of Heart to unlock the final keyhole that leads to Kingdom Hearts, a repository of knowledge and power, and the source of all hearts. Maleficent also finds Riku and recruits him into her services, manipulating him into believing that Sora abandoned him.
Sora and his friends eventually arrive at Hollow Bastion, Maleficent's headquarters, where Riku takes the Keyblade from Sora, revealing himself to be its intended user with Sora only receiving it in his absence; Donald and Goofy reluctantly leave Sora as per their orders. Sora later challenges Riku, stating that his heart derives strength from his friends, inspiring Donald and Goofy to return to him and regaining control of the Keyblade. After the three defeat Maleficent, Sora finds Kairi's comatose body and confronts Riku, who is now possessed by Ansem, a figure who has been manipulating Maleficent from the beginning to open the way to Kingdom Hearts. Ansem reveals Kairi as the seventh Princess of Heart, her heart having transferred into Sora's body when the Destiny Islands were destroyed. After defeating the possessed Riku, Sora impales himself with Ansem's Keyblade, which is designed to unlock hearts, releasing both his and Kairi's hearts; Kairi's heart returns to her body, in turn completing the final Keyhole, while Sora becomes a Heartless. Kairi recognizes Sora's Heartless, and the light in her heart restores him to human form.
After Kairi gives him a good luck charm, Sora and his group venture to the End of the World, the remnants of the worlds destroyed by the Heartless, to confront Ansem as he reaches the Door to Darkness, with the notion that Kingdom Hearts lies within. After a battle, Ansem calls upon Kingdom Hearts to aid him, believing it to be the ultimate reservoir of darkness. However Ansem is destroyed when the door opens, revealing light. Also beyond the door are Mickey and Riku, who help Sora and his friends close the door before Sora and Mickey lock it with their Keyblades from both sides. The worlds lost to the Heartless reconstruct themselves; as the Destiny Islands reform, Kairi returns there while Sora is forced to part with her. Sora, Donald, and Goofy resolve to find Riku and Mickey.
## Development
The initial idea for Kingdom Hearts began with a discussion between Shinji Hashimoto and Hironobu Sakaguchi about Super Mario 64. They were planning to make a game with freedom of movement in three dimensions like Super Mario 64 but lamented that only characters as popular as Disney's could rival a Mario game. Tetsuya Nomura, overhearing their conversation, volunteered to lead the project and the two producers agreed to let him direct. A chance meeting between Hashimoto and a Disney executive in an elevator—Square and Disney having previously worked in the same building in Japan—allowed Hashimoto to pitch the idea directly to Disney. Nomura struck down a number of proposals from Disney in order to pursue his own concept featuring an original character not based on a Disney property. The production team consisted of over one hundred members from both Square and Disney Interactive. The game began development in February 2000 and originally focused more on the gameplay with a simple story to appeal to Disney's target age range. After executive producer Hironobu Sakaguchi told director Tetsuya Nomura the game would be a failure if it did not aim for the same level as the Final Fantasy series, Nomura began to develop the story further. When choosing the Disney worlds to include in the game, Nomura and his team tried to pick worlds that had distinctively different looks. They also tried to take into account worlds with Disney characters that would be interesting. Thanks to support from Disney's then-president and current chairman and chief executive Bob Iger, the team had few restrictions on which worlds they could use from the Disney franchises. However, they tried to remain within each character's boundaries set by their respective Disney films. In a June 2013 interview, Nomura stated the name of the game was inspired by Disney Theme Parks, particularly Animal Kingdom, which had recently opened when development on the game began. However, Nomura could not secure the IP as just Kingdom. Later on, when the development team began to think about "hearts" as a core part of the story, it was decided to combine the two to form the title Kingdom Hearts. Outside contractors Telecom Animation Film Company, and Kazuhide Tomonaga helped animate the game by being the animation supervisors.
Additional content was added to the North American release that was absent in the initial Japanese release: new optional bosses, one of which, Kurt Zisa, was named after the winner of the official website's "Name-In-Game" sweepstakes, an extra difficulty level, and a teaser of Kingdom Hearts II accessible by meeting certain criteria. Nomura included the teaser in order to gauge fan reaction to the possibility of a sequel; he felt that if the idea was unpopular, then it would be best to leave certain events in the game unexplained. The new content was later added to the Japanese re-release Kingdom Hearts Final Mix. Final Mix included further additional content such as new items, cutscenes, and enemies, such as a new secret boss that sets up the sequel. The new content further hinted at plotlines that would be explained in sequels. Some content omitted from Kingdom Hearts was later added into Kingdom Hearts II. A world based on The Lion King, for instance, was unfeasible because an additional program was required to process movement on four legs—a necessity since Sora would become a lion in that world. Due to time constraints, the developers left out an optional boss battle, similar to the Sephiroth battle, against Tifa Lockhart. She was later included in Kingdom Hearts II as a more developed character.
### Audio
#### Music
Yoko Shimomura composed and produced the music of Kingdom Hearts. While there are arranged melodies derived from previous Disney films, most of the soundtrack consists of original themes written specifically for the game by Shimomura. The opening orchestration and ending credits theme were arranged and orchestrated by Kaoru Wada and performed by the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. The main vocal theme for the original Japanese release is titled "Hikari" (光). The English version of "Hikari," "Simple and Clean," was used in the Western releases and the Japanese re-release, Final Mix. Both versions were composed and performed by Hikaru Utada. Her involvement, along with the Japanese song title, was announced in January 2002. Utada was the only singer Nomura had in mind for the Kingdom Hearts theme song. This marked the first time Utada had produced a song for a video game. The single, "Hikari," was released in Japan on March 20, 2002 and proved to be very popular; by August 2002, it had sold over 860,000 copies in Japan. The Kingdom Hearts soundtrack was released on a two CD set on March 27, 2002, in Japan and a year later in the United States. The soundtrack was later included in the Kingdom Hearts Original Soundtrack Complete, which was released in Japan on March 28, 2007. Music from Kingdom Hearts was also included in Shimomura's best works compilation album Drammatica.
#### Voice cast
Kingdom Hearts featured well-known voice actors for both the Japanese and English versions. The Japanese version featured Miyu Irino as Sora, Risa Uchida as Kairi, and Mamoru Miyano as Riku. Other voice actors included Kōichi Yamadera, Hideo Ishikawa, and Maaya Sakamoto. A special effort was made to preserve the official voice actors of characters from the Disney movies used in Kingdom Hearts. Some of the voice actors from the related television series or direct-to-video sequels were chosen over the original voice actors from films, where applicable (e.g. Dan Castellaneta as Genie, rather than Robin Williams). The English version featured Haley Joel Osment as Sora, David Gallagher as Riku, and Hayden Panettiere as Kairi. Other voice actors included Billy Zane as Ansem, Christy Carlson Romano as Yuffie, David Boreanaz as Leon, James Woods as Hades, and Mandy Moore as Aerith.
### Promotion
Kingdom Hearts was announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 2001. Initial details were that it would be a collaboration between Square and Disney Interactive and would feature worlds developed by both companies and Disney characters. New characters were designed by Nomura and included Sora, Riku, Kairi, and the Heartless. A playable demo was available at the Tokyo Game Show in 2001. The gameplay of the demo showcased many action role-playing game elements that would be included in the final product. To help market the English release of the game, Square launched the official website in April 2002, which featured trailers, a "Name-In-Game" sweepstakes, and other Internet content. On May 14, 2002, a press release announced a list of the English voice actors. The list included Haley Joel Osment, David Gallagher, and Hayden Panettiere as the three new characters introduced in the game. It also announced that many of the Disney characters would be voiced by the official voice actors from their respective Disney films. Other marketing efforts included auctions of the game and related items before the North American release and a Consumer Demo Day in San Francisco, California.
## Re-releases
Multiple versions of Kingdom Hearts have been released. The first was the original Japanese release, followed by the North American and PAL releases, which includes additional content. The game was later re-released in Japan as Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, which features the content of the North American/PAL release, as well as more new content.
### Final Mix
Originally released only in Japan on December 26, 2002, Kingdom Hearts Final Mix has several events and a number of gameplay tweaks that are not in previous releases. Spoken dialogue is in English, with Japanese subtitles. New scenes, clarifying certain plot points, such as Riku's journey and foreshadowing of Kingdom Hearts II, were included, but no new dialogue was recorded. A gameplay option allows the player to skip cutscenes after seeing them once. The optional bosses first included in the English version were introduced to Japanese players for the first time, along with a new fight against "Unknown Man," in an attempt to raise interest for the sequel.
In another attempt at foreshadowing, a video titled "Another Side, Another Story 【 deep dive 】" plays at the ending if the player accomplishes certain tasks. New music tracks incorporated were "Disappeared" and "Another Side." The "Night on Bald Mountain" and "One-Winged Angel" tracks from the English version were included as well. Other changes include new abilities, new weapons, new items, additional and recolored enemies, and gameplay tweaks to make the game easier for the player, along with two new levels of difficulty. When first released, Final Mix included either a deck of Kingdom Hearts cards or special music CD. A limited "Platinum Edition" version of Kingdom Hearts Final Mix was later released with an action figure of Sora, a sticker set, and sketches of some of the main characters.
It was released for the first time in North America, Europe and Australia as part of Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix.
### HD 1.5 Remix
During August 2011, Nomura expressed desire to release a high definition rerelease of the game though he had yet to confirm such plans. In September 2012, Square Enix announced Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix, a compilation for the PlayStation 3, that includes both Kingdom Hearts Final Mix and Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories in HD and trophy support. The character models from Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance were used as a base for the game's characters. The gameplay of the original Kingdom Hearts was modified to play more like Kingdom Hearts II. Additionally, the collection includes HD cinematic scenes from Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. It was released in Japan on March 14, 2013, in North America on September 10, 2013, on September 12, 2013, for Australia, and September 13, 2013, for Europe.
In June 2013, Nomura stated that the original game assets for Kingdom Hearts had been lost some time ago. He explained, "[The game data] was lost, so we had to research, and we had to dig out from the actual game what was available and recreate everything for HD. We had to recreate all the graphics and it was actually not that easy."
In October 2016, Square Enix announced a single-disc compilation release of Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix and Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix for the PlayStation 4. It was released on March 9, 2017, in Japan, and was released on March 28, 2017, in North America, and March 31, 2017, in Europe. Additional pieces of free downloadable content for the PS4 version released in June 2017 added a Theater mode for Kingdom Hearts Final Mix and an extended scene for Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days.
On November 14, 2019, Square Enix announced that both Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix and Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix were coming to Xbox One, marking the Xbox debut of the first 2 Kingdom Hearts games and spinoffs. The two games are combined into a collection titled Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 Remix, and released on February 18, 2020.
## Related media
Both Square and Disney also released numerous types of merchandise before and after the release of the game. Merchandise ranged from toys and figurines to clothing items and books. Like the Final Fantasy games, Square released an Ultimania book on Kingdom Hearts in Japan following the release of the game and a revised edition following the release of Final Mix. In North America, a strategy guide was released by Brady Games. It featured a comprehensive walkthrough and a sticker activity journal. A manga series based on the game was released in Japan and the United States. A novel series also based on the game was released in Japan. It was authored by Tomoco Kanemaki and illustrated by Shiro Amano. The novel series consists of two volumes and was released in North America on March 25, 2008.
The game was adapted into a manga by Shiro Amano. The story follows the events that took place in the game with a few minor differences to account for the loss of interactivity a video game provides. Some events that took place in the Final Mix version were also included. The manga was originally serialized in Japan by Enterbrain's Famitsū PS2, but has since been released worldwide in four volumes. The volumes have been published in English in the United States by Tokyopop. The first volume was released on October 11, 2005, and the fourth volume was released on July 10, 2006. The entire series was later released in a boxed set on October 10, 2006. The manga series has had moderate success. The first volume was ranked 95th in USA Today's "Top 150 best sellers" during the week of its release. IGN praised Amano's artwork and commented on wanting to replay the game after reading. They criticized the lack of new content and stated the transition from game to print lost most of the story's appeal. The series was followed by others based on the game's sequels: Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II.
## Reception
Kingdom Hearts sold very well. During the first two months of its North American release it was one of the top three highest-selling video games and was among the top selling titles during the 2002 Christmas and holiday season. In November 2002, UBS Warburg listed it as the 6th highest console game in terms of sales during the week of November 5. At the end of April 2003, Square announced that Kingdom Hearts had sold its millionth copy in the United States, which made it eligible for PlayStation's "Greatest Hits" status, and over 3.0 million worldwide. Sales reached 1.2 million in Japan in the first quarter of 2004, and broke 4.0 million worldwide. In December 2005, the NPD Group listed it as "one of the top ten best-selling PlayStation 2 titles of all time in North America." By July 2006, Kingdom Hearts had sold through 2.6 million copies and earned \$100 million in the United States alone. Next Generation ranked it as the seventh highest-selling game launched for the PlayStation 2, Xbox or GameCube between January 2000 and July 2006 in that country. As of December 2006, Kingdom Hearts had shipped over 5.6 million copies worldwide with 1.1 million in PAL regions, 1.5 million in Japan, and 3.0 million in North America. As of 2006, the original game and the Final Mix version had sold 6 million copies on PS2. As of March 2022, the Kingdom Hearts series has shipped more than 36 million copies worldwide.
### Critical response
The game received critical acclaim among reviewers. In IGN's Best of 2002 awards, it was nominated for "PS2's Best Game of 2002 Editor's Choice Award" and was a runner up for "PS2's Best Game of 2002 Reader's Choice Award." In 2007, the website listed Kingdom Hearts as the 22nd best PlayStation 2 game of all time. Critics commended the visuals, orchestral score, voice acting, and hybrid action-adventure and role-playing feel to the game, with acclaim for its mix of Square and Disney elements. IGN named it "Best Art Style/Direction," runner-up for "Best CG Graphics," and honorable mention for "Best Animation" in IGN's 2003 list of "Best Looking Games on PS2." GameSpy listed Kingdom Hearts twice in its "Top 25 Video Game Cinematic Moments." GamePro stated that the graphics were "gorgeous," giving them high marks. The audio was also praised, particularly the quality of the voice-overs and musical score. GamePro had positive comments on the overall audio and gave that aspect a perfect score.
Criticism about the gameplay was mixed. Many reviews complained that the camera was at times frustrating and the Gummi Ship portions were out of place. GameSpot cited "tedious" gameplay and Gummi Ship sections as "pale imitations of the Star Fox series," but stated that the combat was fun, particularly the boss fights. Dengeki Online commented on the camera controls, saying that the camera would often run into objects while being rotated by the player. GamePro compared the battle system to "old N64 Zelda games" and had positive comments about Donald and Goofy's artificial intelligence.
GameSpot commented that the concept of mixing the serious elements of Final Fantasy with the lighter elements of Disney seemed impossible, but was pulled off quite well. Because of that they awarded Kingdom Hearts "Best Crossover Since Capcom vs. SNK" in their 2002 Best and Worst of the Year awards. GameSpy noted that the periodic departure from the main plot into the Disney side stories was disappointing, and when the original plot builds to a climax, "the story fails to gel thanks to a confusing mish-mash of vague terms and symbolism that probably made more sense in the director's head than in this final product." Aside from the plot, they stated that the overall package was worth playing through to the end. G4TV awarded it "Best Story" at their 2003 G-Phoria awards show. Fan response was also positive; Kingdom Hearts was voted as the 19th best game of all-time by readers of the Japanese magazine Famitsu, 16th by the users of website GameFAQs, and 92nd by IGN users. Kingdom Hearts ranked ninth on IGN's most recent "Top 25 PS2 Games of All Time" list. It ranked first on GamesRadar's "Top 7 Disney Games" list in 2009. It was also a nominee for the Best Game Award from the CESA Game Awards<sup> [ja]</sup> for 2001–2002. In the making of the 2004 video game Fullmetal Alchemist and the Broken Angel the developers, Racjin, looked at other titles for inspiration, particularly Kingdom Hearts when making the game.
During the 6th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated Kingdom Hearts for "Console Role-Playing Game of the Year" and outstanding achievements in "Animation", "Art Direction", and "Character or Story Development".
## Sequels
Dark Seeker Saga
Kingdom Hearts was followed by several sequels, becoming the first game in the Kingdom Hearts series. It was followed by a direct sequel, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, on the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, which was released in Japan on November 11, 2004. Kingdom Hearts II is the third game in the series, set one year after Chain of Memories, and was released in Japan on December 22, 2005, for Sony PlayStation 2. Like the first game it was re-released as Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix alongside a PS2 remake of Chain of Memories. A Kingdom Hearts game was developed exclusively for V CAST, Verizon Wireless's broadband service, and was released on October 1, 2004, in Japan and on February 4, 2005, in the United States. In November 2008, Kingdom Hearts coded was released for mobile phones in Japan, the game takes place after the events of Kingdom Hearts II. A followup, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, was developed for the Nintendo DS and released in Japan on May 30, 2009, and in North America on September 29, 2009. A prequel was released in Japan on January 9, 2010, entitled Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, for the PlayStation Portable, which takes place 10 years before the events of Kingdom Hearts. The following title in the series was Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance for the Nintendo 3DS, released in 2012. At E3 2013, Kingdom Hearts III was announced to be in development for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, before being released in January 2019, followed by a downloadable content expansion titled Kingdom Hearts III Re Mind in early 2020. The following title, Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, set after the Re Mind scenario, was then released in Japan on November 11, 2020, and worldwide two days later.
During Square Enix's 20th anniversary event for the franchise in April 2022, a mobile title, Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link, was announced for iOS and Android devices, with a closed beta arriving in August, while the next mainline installment, Kingdom Hearts IV, was also revealed to be in development. |
8,249,455 | Hoysala literature | 1,171,960,640 | Literature in the Kannada and Sanskrit languages produced by the Hoysala Empire (1025–1343) | [
"History of literature in India",
"Hoysala Empire",
"Indian literature",
"Kannada literature",
"Literature of Karnataka"
]
| Hoysala literature is the large body of literature in the Kannada and Sanskrit languages produced by the Hoysala Empire (1025–1343) in what is now southern India. The empire was established by Nripa Kama II, came into political prominence during the rule of King Vishnuvardhana (1108–1152), and declined gradually after its defeat by the Khalji dynasty invaders in 1311.
Kannada literature during this period consisted of writings relating to the socio-religious developments of the Jain and Veerashaiva faiths, and to a lesser extent that of the Vaishnava faith. The earliest well-known brahmin writers in Kannada were from the Hoysala court. While most of the courtly textual production was in Kannada, an important corpus of monastic Vaishnava literature relating to Dvaita (dualistic) philosophy was written by the renowned philosopher Madhvacharya in Sanskrit.
Writing Kannada literature in native metres was first popularised by the court poets. These metres were the sangatya, compositions sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument; shatpadi, six-line verses; ragale, lyrical compositions in blank verse; and tripadi, three-line verses. However, Jain writers continued to use the traditional champu, composed of prose and verse. Important literary contributions in Kannada were made not only by court poets but also by noblemen, commanders, ministers, ascetics and saints associated with monasteries.
## Kannada writings
### Overview
Beginning with the 12th century, important socio-political changes took place in the Deccan, south of the Krishna river. During this period, the Hoysalas, native Kannadigas from the Malnad region (hill country in modern Karnataka) were on the ascendant as a political power. They are known to have existed as chieftains from the mid-10th century when they distinguished themselves as subordinates of the Western Chalukyas of Kalyani. In 1116, Hoysala King Vishnuvardhana defeated the Cholas of Tanjore and annexed Gangavadi (parts of modern southern Karnataka), thus bringing the region back under native rule. In the following decades, with the waning of the Chalukya power, the Hoysalas proclaimed independence and grew into one of the most powerful ruling families of southern India. Consequently, literature in Kannada, the local language, flourished in the Hoysala empire. This literature can be broadly subdivided as follows: works dominated by the themes of Jain writings, contrasting works by Veerashaiva writers not belonging to the vachana poetic tradition, rebuttals to Shaiva writings from Jain writers, early brahminical works (Vaishnava), works from the birth of the Bhakti (devotional) movement in the Kannada-speaking region, writings on secular topics, and the first writings in native metres (ragale, sangatya and shatpadi).
As in earlier centuries, Jain authors wrote about tirthankars (saints), princes and other personages important to the Jain religion. Jain versions of the Hindu epics such as the Ramayana and Bhagavata (tales of Hindu god Krishna) were also written. According to R. Narasimhacharya, a noted scholar on Kannada literature, more Jain writers wrote in Kannada than in any other Dravidian language during the "Augustan age" of Kannada literature, from the earliest known works to the 12th century. The Veerashaiva writers, devotees of the Hindu god Shiva, wrote about his 25 forms in their expositions of Shaivism. Vaishnava authors wrote treatments of the Hindu epics, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata. Breaking away from the old Jain tradition of using the champu form for writing Kannada literature, Harihara penned poems in the ragale metre in Siva-ganada-ragalegalu (1160). His nephew Raghavanka established the shatpadi tradition by writing a unique version of the story of King Harishchandra in Harishchandra Kavya (1200). Sisumayana introduced the sangatya metre in his Anjanacharita and Tripuradahana (1235). However, some scholars continued to employ Sanskritic genres such as champu (Ramachandra Charitapurana), shataka (100 verse compositions, Pampa sataka) and ashtaka (eight line verse compositions, Mudige ashtaka).
The exact beginnings of the haridasa movement in the Kannada-speaking region have been disputed. Belur Keshavadasa, a noted Harikatha scholar, claimed in his book Karnataka Bhaktavijaya that the movement was inspired by saint Achalananda Dasa of Turvekere (in the modern Tumkur district) in the 9th century. However, neither the language used in Achalananda Dasa's compositions nor the discovery of a composition with the pen name "Achalanada Vitthala", which mentions the 13th-century philosopher Madhvacharya, lends support to the 9th-century theory. Naraharitirtha (1281), one of earliest disciples of Madhvacharya, is therefore considered the earliest haridasa to write Vaishnava compositions in Kannada. Secular topics were popular and included treatises on poetry (Sringararatnakara) and writings on natural sciences (Rattasutra), mathematics (Vyavaharaganita), fiction (Lilavati), grammar (Shabdamanidarpana), rhetoric (Udayadityalankara) and others.
Important contributions were made by some prominent literary families. One Jain family produced several authors, including Mallikarjuna, the noted anthologist (1245); his brother-in-law Janna (1209), the court poet of King Veera Ballala II; Mallikarjuna's son Keshiraja (1260), considered by D. R. Nagaraj, a scholar on literary cultures in history, to be the greatest theorist of Kannada grammar; and Sumanobana, who was in the court of King Narasimha I and was the maternal grandfather of Keshiraja. Harihara (1160) and his nephew Raghavanka (1200), poets who set the trend for using native metres, came from a Shaiva family (devotees of the god Shiva).
The support of the Hoysala rulers for the Kannada language was strong, and this is seen even in their epigraphs, often written in polished and poetic language, rather than prose, with illustrations of floral designs in the margins. In addition to the Hoysala patronage, royal support was enjoyed by Kannada poets and writers during this period in the courts of neighbouring kingdoms of the western Deccan. The Western Chalukyas, the Southern Kalachuris, the Seuna Yadavas of Devagiri and the Silharas of Kolhapur are some of the ruling families who enthusiastically used Kannada in inscriptions and promoted its literature.
Writers bilingual in Kannada and Telugu gained popularity which caused interaction between the two languages, a trend that continued into modern times. The Veerashiva canon of the Kannada language was translated or adapted into Telugu from this time period. Palkuriki Somanatha (1195), a devotee of social reformer Basavanna, is the most well-known of these bilingual poets. The Chola chieftain Nannechoda (c. 1150) used many Kannada words in his Telugu writings. After the decline of the Hoysala empire, the Vijayanagara empire kings further supported writers in both languages. In 1369, inspired by Palkuriki Somanatha, Bhima Kavi translated the Telugu Basavapurana to Kannada, and King Deva Raya II (c. 1425) had Chamarasa's landmark writing Prabhulingalile translated into Telugu and Tamil. Many Veerashaiva writers in the court of the 17th century Kingdom of Mysore were multilingual in Kannada, Telugu and Sanskrit while the Srivaishnava (a sect of Vaishnavism) Kannada writers of the court were in competition with the Telugu and Sanskrit writers.
Information from contemporary records regarding several writers from this period whose works are considered lost include: Maghanandi (probable author of Rama Kathe and guru of Kamalabhava of 1235), Srutakirti (guru of Aggala, and author of Raghava Pandaviya and possibly a Jina-stuti, 1170), Sambha Varma (mentioned by Nagavarma of 1145), Vira Nandi (Chandraprabha Kavyamala, 1175), Dharani Pandita (Bijjala raya Charita and Varangana Charita), Amrita Nandi (Dhanvantari Nighantu), Vidyanatha (Prataparudriya), Ganeshvara (Sahitya Sanjivana), Harabhakta, a Veerashaiva mendicant (Vedabhashya, 1300), and Siva Kavi (author of Basava Purana in 1330).
### Jain epics
During the early 12th-century ascendancy of the Hoysalas, the kings of the dynasty entertained imperial ambitions. King Vishnuvardhana wanted to perform Vedic sacrifices befitting an emperor, and surpass his overlords, the Western Chalukyas, in military and architectural achievements. This led to his conversion from Jainism to Vaishnavism. Around the same time, the well-known philosopher Ramanujacharya sought refuge from the Cholas in Hoysala territory and popularised the Sri Vaishnava faith, a sect of Hindu Vaishnavism. Although Jains continued to dominate culturally in what is now the southern Karnataka region for a while, these social changes would later contribute to the decline of Jain literary output. The growing political clout of the Hoysalas attracted many bards and scholars to their court, who in turn wrote panegyrics on their patrons.
Nagachandra, a scholar and the builder of the Mallinatha Jinalaya (a Jain temple in honour of the 19th Jain tirthankar, Mallinatha, in Bijapur, Karnataka), wrote Mallinathapurana (1105), an account of the evolution of the soul of the Jain saint. According to some historians, King Veera Ballala I was his patron. Later, he wrote his magnum opus, a Jain version of the Hindu epic Ramayana called Ramachandra Charitapurana (or Pampa Ramayana). Written in the traditional champu metre and in the Pauma charia tradition of Vimalasuri, it is the earliest extant version of the epic in the Kannada language. The work contains 16 sections and deviates significantly from the original epic by Valmiki. Nagachandra represents King Ravana, the villain of the Hindu epic, as a tragic hero, who in a moment of weakness commits the sin of abducting Sita (wife of the Hindu god Rama) but is eventually purified by her devotion to Rama. In a further deviation, Rama's loyal brother Lakshmana (instead of Rama) kills Ravana in the final battle. Eventually, Rama takes jaina-diksha (converts to Digambara monk), becomes an ascetic and attains nirvana (enlightenment). Considered a complementary work to the Pampa Bharatha of Adikavi Pampa (941, a Jain version of the epic Mahabharata), the work earned Nagachandra the honorific "Abhinava Pampa" ("new Pampa"). Only in the Kannada language do Jain versions exist of the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, in addition to their brahminical version.
Kanti (1108), known for her wit and humour, was one of the earliest female poets of the Kannada language and a contemporary of Nagachandra, with whom she indulged in debates and repartees. Rajaditya, a native of either Puvinabage or Raibhag (the modern Belgaum district), was in the Hoysala court during the days of King Veera Ballala I and King Vishnuvardhana. He wrote in easy verse on arithmetic and other mathematical topics and is credited with three of the earliest writings on mathematics in the Kannada language: Vyavaharaganita, Kshetraganita and Lilavati. Udayaditya, a Chola prince, authored a piece on rhetoric called Udayadityalankara (1150). It was based on Dandin's Sanskrit Kavyadarsa.
### Age of Harihara
Harihara (or Harisvara, 1160), who came from a family of karnikas (accountants) in Hampi, was one of the earliest Veerashaiva writers who was not part of the Vachana poetic tradition. He is considered one of the most influential Kannada poets of the Hoysala era. A non-traditionalist, he has been called "poet of poets" and a "poet for the masses". Kannada poetry changed course because of his efforts, and he was an inspiration for generations of poets to follow. Impressed by his early writings, Kereya Padmarasa, the court poet of King Narasimha I, introduced him to the king, who became Harihara's patron. A master of many metres, he authored the Girijakalyana ("Marriage of the mountain born goddess – Parvati") in the Kalidasa tradition, employing the champu style to tell a 10-part story leading to the marriage of the god Shiva and Parvati. According to an anecdote, Harihara was so against eulogising earthly mortals that he struck his protégé Raghavanka for writing about King Harishchandra in the landmark work Harishchandra Kavya (c. 1200). Harihara is credited with developing the native ragale metre. The earliest poetic biographer in the Kannada language, he wrote a biography of Basavanna called Basavarajadevara ragale, which gives interesting details about the protagonist while not always conforming to popular beliefs of the time. Ascribed to him is a group of 100 poems called the Nambiyanana ragale (also called Shivaganada ragale or Saranacharitamanasa – "The holy lake of the lives of the devotees") after the saint Nambiyana. In the sataka metre he wrote the Pampa sataka, and in the ashtaka metre, the Mudige ashtaka in about 1200.
Famous among Vaishnava writers and the first brahmin writer (of the Smartha sect) of repute, Rudrabhatta wrote Jagannatha Vijaya (1180) in a style considered a transition between ancient and medieval Kannada. Chandramouli, a minister in the court of King Veera Ballala II, was his patron. The writing, in champu metre, is about the life of the god Krishna. Leading to the god's fight with Banasura, it is based on an earlier writing, Vishnupurana.
Nemichandra, court poet of King Veera Ballala II and the Silhara King Lakshmana of Kholapur, wrote Lilavati Prabandham (1170), the earliest available true fiction (and hence a novel) in Kannada, with an erotic bent. Written in the champu metre, with the ancient town Banavasi as the background, it narrates the love story of a Kadamba prince and a princess who eventually marry after facing many obstacles. The story is based on a c. 610 Sanskrit original called Vasavadatta by Subhandu. His other work, Neminathapurana, unfinished on account of his death (and hence called Ardhanemi or "incomplete Nemi"), details the life of the 22nd Jain tirthankar Neminatha while treating the life of the god Krishna from a Jain angle.
Palkuriki Somanatha, a native of modern Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh, is considered one of the foremost multi-lingual Shaiva (or Shiva-following) poets of the 12th and 13th centuries. Historians are divided about the time and place of his birth and death and his original faith. He was adept in the Sanskrit, Telugu and Kannada languages. He was a devotee of Basavanna (the founder of the Veerashaiva movement), and all his writings propagate that faith. It is generally accepted that he was born a brahmin and later adopted the Shaiva faith, although according to the scholar Bandaru Tammayya he was born a Jangama (follower of the Shaiva faith). His time of birth has been identified as either the 12th century or late 13th century. In Kannada, his most important writings are Silasampadane, Sahasragananama and Pancharatna. His well-known poems, written in the ragale metre, are Basava ragale, Basavadhya ragale and Sadguru ragale. He is known to have humbled many Vaishnava poets in debates.
Other well-known personalities from the 12th century included several Jain writers. These include Aggala, who authored Chandraprabhapurana (1189), an account of the life of the eighth Jain tirthankar Chandraprabha; Sujanottamsa, who wrote a panegyric on Gomateshwara of Shravanabelagola; and Vritta Vilasa, who authored Sastra sara and Dharmaparikshe (1160). The latter was Vilasa's version of the Sanskrit original of the same name written by Amitagati c. 1014. In this champu writing, the author narrates the story of two Kshatriya princess who went to Benares and exposed the vices of the gods after discussions with the brahmins there. The author questions the credibility of Hanuman (the Hindu monkey god) and the Vanaras (monkey-like humanoids in the Hindu epic Ramayana). Although controversial, the work sheds useful information on contemporary religious beliefs. Kereya Padmarasa, a Veerashaiva poet patronised by King Narasimha I, wrote Dikshabodhe in the ragale metre in 1165. He would later become the protagonist of a biographical work called Padmarajapurana written by his descendant Padmanaka in c. 1400. The brahmin poet Deva Kavi authored a romance piece called Kusumavali (1200), and brahmin poet Kavi Kama (12th century) authored a treatise called Sringara-ratnakara on the rasa (flavor) of poetical sentiment. Sumanobana (1170) was a poet-grammarian and the Katakacharya ("military teacher") under King Narasimha I. He was also a priest in Devagiri, the Seuna Yadava capital.
### Jain–Veerashaiva conflict
Harihara's nephew and protégé, the dramatic poet Raghavanka of Hampi, whose style is compared to that of 10th-century poet Ranna, was the first to establish the shatpadi metre in Kannada literature in the epic Harishchandra Kavya (1200). According to L. S. Seshagiri Rao, it is believed that in no other language has the story of King Harishchandra been interpreted in this way. The writing is an original in tradition and inspiration that fully develops the potential of the shatpadi metre. The narration has many noteworthy elegiac verses such as the mourning of Chandramati over the death of her young son Lohitashva from snake bite. The very writing that made Raghavanka famous was rejected by his guru, Harihara. His other well-known writings, adhering to strict Shaiva principles and written to appease his guru, are the Siddharama charitra (or Siddharama Purana), a larger than life stylistic eulogy of the compassionate 12th-century Veerashaiva saint, Siddharama of Sonnalige; the Somanatha charitra, a propagandist work that describes the life of saint Somayya (or Adaiah) of Puligere (modern Lakshmeshwar), his humiliation by a Jain girl and his revenge; the Viresvara charita, a dramatic story of the blind wrath of a Shaiva warrior, Virabhadra; the Hariharamahatva, an account of the life of Harisvara of Hampi; and Sarabha charitra. The last two classics are considered lost.
In 1209, the Jain scholar, minister, builder of temples and army commander Janna wrote, among other classics, Yashodhara Charite, a unique set of stories in 310 verses dealing with sadomasochism, transmigration of the soul, passion gone awry and cautionary morals for human conduct. The writing, although inspired by Vadiraja's Sanskrit classic of the same name, is noted for its original interpretation, imagery and style. In one story, the poet tells of the infatuation of a man for his friend's wife. Having killed his friend, the man abducts the wife, who dies of grief. Overcome by repentance, he burns himself on the funeral pyre of the woman. The stories of infatuation reach a peak when Janna writes about the attraction of Amrutamati, the queen, to the ugly mahout Ashtavakra, who pleases the queen with kicks and whip lashes. This story has piqued the interest of modern researchers. In honour of this work, Janna received the title Kavichakravarthi ("Emperor among poets") from his patron, King Veera Ballala II. His other classic, Anathanatha Purana (1230), is an account of the life of the 14th tirthankar Ananthanatha.
Andayya, taking a non-conformist path that was never repeated in Kannada literature, wrote Madana Vijaya ("Triumph of cupid", 1217–1235) using only pure Kannada words (desya) and naturalised Sanskrit words (tadbhava) and totally avoiding assimilated Sanskrit words (tatsamas). This is seen by some as a rebuttal meant to prove that writing Kannada literature without borrowed Sanskrit words was possible. The poem narrates the story of the moon being imprisoned by the god Shiva in his abode in the Himalayas. In his anger, Kama (Cupid, the god of love, also called Manmata) assailed Shiva with his arrows only to be cursed by Shiva and separated from his beloved. Kama then contrived to rid himself of Shiva's curse. The work also goes by other names such as Sobagina Suggi ("Harvest of Beauty"), Kavane Gella ("Cupid's Conquest") and Kabbigara-kava ("Poets defender"). Kama has an important place in Jain writings even before Andayya. The possibility that this writing was yet another subtle weapon in the intensifying conflict between the dominant Jains and the Veerashaivas, whose popularity was on the rise, is not lost on historians.
Mallikarjuna, a Jain ascetic, compiled an anthology of poems called Suktisudharnava ("Gems from the poets") in 1245 in the court of King Vira Someshwara. Some interesting observations have been made by scholars about this important undertaking. While the anthology itself provides insight into poetic tastes of that period (and hence qualifies as a "history of Kannada literature"), it also performs the function of a "guide for poets", an assertive method of bridging the gap between courtly literary intelligentsia and folk poetry. Being a guide for "professional intellectuals", the work, true to its nature, often includes poems eulogising kings and royalty but completely ignoring poems of the 12th-century vachana canon (Veerashaiva folk literature). However, the selection of poems includes contributions from Harihara, the non-conformist Veerashaiva writer. This suggests a compromise by which the author attempts to include the "rebels".
Other notable writers of the early 13th century were Bhanduvarma, author of Harivamsabhyudaya and Jiva sambhodana (1200), the latter bearing on morals and renunciation, and written addressing the soul; Balachandra Kavi Kandarpa, the author of the Belgaum fort inscription who claimed to be "master of four languages"; Maghanandycharya, the author of an extinct commentary on the Jain theological work Sastrasara Samuccaya-tiku (1209) for which there are references, and the available commentary called padarthasara giving a complete explanation of Sanskrit and Prakrit authoritative citations; Hastimalla, who wrote Purvapurana; Chandrama, author of Karkala Gomateshvara charite, and Sisumayana, who introduced a new form of composition called sangatya in 1232. He wrote an allegorical poem called Tripuradahana ("Burning of the triple fortress") and Anjanacharita. The latter work was inspired by Ravisena's Sanskrit Padma charitra. Somaraja, a Veerashaiva scholar, wrote a eulogy of Udbhata, the ruler of Gersoppa, and called it Sringarasara (or Udbhatakavya, 1222). Other Jain writers were Parsva Pandita, author of Paravanathapurana, and Gunavarma II, the author of the story of the ninth Jain tirthankar Pushpadanta called Pushpadanta purana (both were patronised by the Ratta kings of Saundatti). Polalva Dandanatha, a commander, minister, and the builder of the Harihareshwara temple in Harihar, wrote Haricharitra in 1224. He was patronised by King Veera Ballala II and his successor, King Vira Narasimha II. Puligere Somanatha authored a book on morals called Somesvarasataka.
### Consolidation of grammar
Keshiraja was a notable writer and grammarian of the 13th century. He came from a family of famous poet-writers. Although five of Keshiraja's writings are not traceable, his most enduring work on Kannada grammar, Shabdamanidarpana ("Mirror of Word Jewels", 1260), is available and testifies to his scholarly acumen and literary taste. True to his wish that his writing on grammar should "last as long as the sun, the moon, the oceans and the Meru mountain lasted", Shabdamanidarpana is popular even today and is considered a standard authority on old Kannada grammar. It is prescribed as a textbook for students of graduate and post-graduate studies in the Kannada language. Although Keshiraja followed the model of Sanskrit grammar (of the Katantra school) and that of earlier writings on Kannada grammar (by King Amoghavarsha I of the 9th century and grammarian Nagavarma II of 1145), his work has originality. Keshiraja's lost writings are Cholapalaka Charitam, Sri Chitramale, Shubhadraharana, Prabodhachandra and Kiratam (or Kiratarjuniyam).
A major development of this period that would have a profound impact on Kannada literature even into the modern age was the birth of the Haridasa ("servants of Hari or Vishnu") movement. This devotional movement, although reminiscent in some ways of the Veerashaiva movement of the 12th century (which produced Vachana poetry and taught devotion to the god Shiva), was in contrast intimately devoted to the Hindu god Vishnu as the supreme God. The inspiration behind this movement was the philosophy of Madhvacharya of Udupi. Naraharitirtha (1281) is considered the first well-known haridasa and composer of Vaishnava devotional songs in Kannada. Before his induction into the Madhva order, he had served as a minister in the court of Kalinga (modern Orissa). The Vaishnava poetry however disappeared for about two centuries after Naraharitirtha's death before resurfacing as a popular form of folk literature during the rule of the Vijayanagara Empire. Only three of Naraharitirtha's compositions are available today.
Other writers worthy of mention are Mahabala Kavi, the author of Neminathapurana (1254), an account of the 22nd Jain tirthankar Neminatha, and Kumudendu, author of a Jain version of the epic Ramayana in shatpadi metre called Kumudendu Ramayana in 1275. The effort was influenced by Pampa Ramayana of Nagachandra. Kumara Padmarasa, son of Kereya Padmarasa, wrote the Sananda Charitre in shatpadi metre. Ratta Kavi, a Jain noble, wrote a quasi-scientific piece called Rattasutra (or Rattamala) in 1300. The writing bears on natural phenomena such rain, earthquakes, lightning, planets and omens. A commentary on the Amara Khosa, considered useful to students of the language, called Amara Khosa Vyakhyana was written by the Jain writer Nachiraja (1300). Towards the end of the Hoysala rule, Nagaraja wrote Punyasrava in 1331 in champu style, a work that narrates the stories of puranic heroes in 52 tales and is said to be a translation from Sanskrit.
## Sanskrit writings
The Vaishnava movement in the Kannada-speaking regions found momentum after the arrival of the philosopher Ramanujacharya (1017–1137). Fleeing possible persecution from the Chola King (who was a Shaiva), Ramanujacharya sought refuge initially in Tondanur and later moved to Melkote. But this event had no impact on Vaishnava literature in Hoysala lands at that time. However, the teachings of Madhvacharya (1238–1317), propounder of the Dvaita philosophy, did have a direct impact on Vaishnava literature, in both the Sanskrit and Kannada languages. This body of writings is known as haridasa sahitya (haridasa literature).
Born as Vasudeva in Pajaka village near Udupi in 1238, he learnt the Vedas and Upanishads under his guru Achyutapreksha. He was initiated into sanyasa (asceticism) after which he earned the name Madhvacharya (or Anandatirtha). Later, he disagreed with the views of his guru and began to travel India. He successfully debated with many scholars and philosophers during this time and won over Naraharitirtha, a minister in Kalinga, who would later become Madhvacharya's first notable disciple. Unlike Adi Shankaracharya (788–820) who preached Advaita philosophy (monism) and Ramanujacharya who propounded Vishishtadvaita philosophy (qualified monism), Madhvacharya taught the Dvaita philosophy (dualism).
Madhvacharya taught complete devotion to the Hindu god Vishnu, emphasising Jnanamarga or the "path of knowledge", and insisted that the path of devotion "can help a soul to attain elevation" (Athmonathi). He was however willing to accept devotion to other Hindu deities as well. He wrote 37 works in Sanskrit including Dwadasha Sutra (in which his devotion to the god Vishnu found full expression), Gita Bhashya, Gita Tatparya Nirnaya, Mahabharata Tatparya Nirnaya, Bhagavata Tatparya Nirnaya, Mayavada Khandana and Vishnu Tattwa Nirnaya. To propagate his teachings he established eight monasteries near Udupi, the Uttaradhi monastery, and the Raghavendra monastery in Mantralayam (in modern Andhra Pradesh) and Nanjanagud (near modern Mysore).
The writings of Madhvacharya and Vidyatirtha (author of Rudraprshnabhashya) may have been absorbed by Sayanacharya, brother of Vidyaranya, the patron saint of the founders of the Vijayanagara empire in the 14th century. Bharatasvamin (who was patronised by Hoysala King Ramanatha) wrote a commentary on Samaveda, Shadgurusishya wrote commentary on Aitareya Brahmana and Aranyaka, and Katyayana wrote Sarvanukramani. A family of hereditary poets whose names have not been identified held the title "Vidyachakravarti" (poet laureate) in the Hoysala court. One of them wrote Gadyakarnamrita, a description of the war between Hoysala king Vira Narasimha II and the Pandyas, in the early 13th century. His grandson with the same title, in the court of king Veera Ballala III, composed a poem called Rukminikalyana in 16 kandas (chapters) and wrote commentaries (on poetics) on the Alankarasarvasva and Kavyaprakasa. Kalyani Devi, a sister of Madhvacharya, and Trivikrama, his disciple, wrote commentaries on the Dvaita philosophy. To Trivikrama is ascribed a poem narrating the story of Usha and Aniruddha called Ushaharana. Narayana Pandita composed Madhwavijaya, Manimanjari and a poem called Parijataharana. The Jain writer Ramachandra Maladhari authored Gurupanchasmriti.
## Literature after the Hoysalas
Literary developments during the Hoysala period had a marked influence on Kannada literature in the centuries to follow. These developments popularised folk metres which shifted the emphasis towards desi (native or folk) forms of literature. With the waning of Jain literary output, competition between the Veerashaiva and Vaishnava writers came to the fore. The Veerashaiva writer Chamarasa (author of Prabhulingalile, 1425) and his Vaishnava competitor Kumaravyasa (Karnata Bharata Kathamanjari, 1450) popularised the shatpadi metric tradition initiated by Hoysala poet Raghavanka, in the court of Vijayanagara King Deva Raya II. Lakshmisa, the 16th–17th century writer of epic poems, continued the tradition in the Jaimini Bharata, a work that has remained popular even in the modern period. The tripadi metre, one of the oldest in the Kannada language (Kappe Arabhatta inscription of 700), which was used by Akka Mahadevi (Yoganna trividhi, 1160), was popularised in the 16th century by the mendicant poet Sarvajna. Even Jain writers, who had dominated courtly literature throughout the classical period with their Sanskritic champu style, began to use native metres. Among them, Ratnakaravarni is famous for successfully integrating an element of worldly pleasure into asceticism and for treating the topic of eroticism with discretion in a religious epic written in the native sangatya metre (a metre initiated by Hoysala poet Sisumayana), his magnum opus, the Bharatadesa Vaibhava (c. 1557).
Though the Vaishnava courtly writings in Kannada began with the Hoysala poet Rudrabhatta and the devotional song genre was initiated by Naraharitirtha, the Vaishnava movement began to exert a strong influence on Kannada literature only from the 15th century on. The Vaishnava writers consisted of two groups who seemed to have no interaction with each other: the Brahmin commentators who typically wrote under the patronage of royalty, and the Bhakti (devotion) writers (also known as haridasas) who played no role in courtly matters. The Bhakti writers took the message of God to the people in the form of melodious songs composed using folk genres such as the kirthane (a musical composition with refrain, based on tune and rhythm), the suladi (a composition based on rhythm) and the ugabhoga (a composition based on melody). Kumara Vyasa and Timmanna Kavi were well known among the Brahmin commentators, while Purandara Dasa and Kanaka Dasa were the most notable of the Bhakti writers. The philosophy of Madhvacharya, which originated in the Kannada-speaking region in the 13th century, spread beyond its borders over the next two centuries. The itinerant haridasas, best described as mystic saint-poets, spread the philosophy of Madhvacharya in simple Kannada, winning mass appeal by preaching devotion to God and extolling the virtues of jnana (enlightenment), bhakti (devotion) and vairagya (detachment).
Vachana poetry, developed in reaction to the rigid caste-based Hindu society, attained its peak in popularity among the under-privileged during the 12th century. Though these poems did not employ any regular metre or rhyme scheme, they are known to have originated from the earlier tripadi metrical form. The Veerashaivas, who wrote this poetry, had risen to influential positions by the Vijayanagara period (14th century). Court ministers and nobility belonging to the faith, such as Lakkanna Dandesa and Jakkanarya, not only wrote literature but also patronised talented writers and poets. Veerashaiva anthologists of the 15th and 16th centuries began to collect Shaiva writings and vachana poems, originally written on palm leaf manuscripts. Because of the cryptic nature of the poems, the anthologists added commentaries to them, thereby providing their hidden meaning and esoteric significance. An interesting aspect of this anthological work was the translation of the Shaiva canon into Sanskrit, bringing it into the sphere of the Sanskritic (marga or mainstream as opposed to desi or folk) cultural order.
## See also
- Kannada literature
- Sanskrit literature
- Indian literature |
46,659,847 | Heavy metals | 1,167,472,106 | Loosely defined subset of elements that exhibit metallic properties | [
"Metallic elements",
"Metals",
"Sets of chemical elements"
]
| Heavy metals are generally defined as metals with relatively high densities, atomic weights, or atomic numbers. The criteria used, and whether metalloids are included, vary depending on the author and context. In metallurgy, for example, a heavy metal may be defined on the basis of density, whereas in physics the distinguishing criterion might be atomic number, while a chemist would likely be more concerned with chemical behaviour. More specific definitions have been published, none of which have been widely accepted. The definitions surveyed in this article encompass up to 96 out of the 118 known chemical elements; only mercury, lead and bismuth meet all of them. Despite this lack of agreement, the term (plural or singular) is widely used in science. A density of more than 5 g/cm<sup>3</sup> is sometimes quoted as a commonly used criterion and is used in the body of this article.
The earliest known metals—common metals such as iron, copper, and tin, and precious metals such as silver, gold, and platinum—are heavy metals. From 1809 onward, light metals, such as magnesium, aluminium, and titanium, were discovered, as well as less well-known heavy metals including gallium, thallium, and hafnium.
Some heavy metals are either essential nutrients (typically iron, cobalt, and zinc), or relatively harmless (such as ruthenium, silver, and indium), but can be toxic in larger amounts or certain forms. Other heavy metals, such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead, are highly poisonous. Potential sources of heavy metal poisoning include mining, tailings, smelting, industrial waste, agricultural runoff, occupational exposure, paints and treated timber.
Physical and chemical characterisations of heavy metals need to be treated with caution, as the metals involved are not always consistently defined. As well as being relatively dense, heavy metals tend to be less reactive than lighter metals and have far fewer soluble sulfides and hydroxides. While it is relatively easy to distinguish a heavy metal such as tungsten from a lighter metal such as sodium, a few heavy metals, such as zinc, mercury, and lead, have some of the characteristics of lighter metals; and lighter metals such as beryllium, scandium, and titanium, have some of the characteristics of heavier metals.
Heavy metals are relatively scarce in the Earth's crust but are present in many aspects of modern life. They are used in, for example, golf clubs, cars, antiseptics, self-cleaning ovens, plastics, solar panels, mobile phones, and particle accelerators.
## Definitions
There is no widely agreed criterion-based definition of a heavy metal. Different meanings may be attached to the term, depending on the context. In metallurgy, for example, a heavy metal may be defined on the basis of density, whereas in physics the distinguishing criterion might be atomic number, and a chemist or biologist would likely be more concerned with chemical behaviour.
Density criteria range from above 3.5 g/cm<sup>3</sup> to above 7 g/cm<sup>3</sup>. Atomic weight definitions can range from greater than sodium (atomic weight 22.98); greater than 40 (excluding s- and f-block metals, hence starting with scandium); or more than 200, i.e. from mercury onwards. Atomic numbers of heavy metals are generally given as greater than 20 (calcium); sometimes this is capped at 92 (uranium). Definitions based on atomic number have been criticised for including metals with low densities. For example, rubidium in group (column) 1 of the periodic table has an atomic number of 37 but a density of only 1.532 g/cm<sup>3</sup>, which is below the threshold figure used by other authors. The same problem may occur with definitions which are based on atomic weight.
The United States Pharmacopeia includes a test for heavy metals that involves precipitating metallic impurities as their coloured sulfides." In 1997, Stephen Hawkes, a chemistry professor writing in the context of fifty years' experience with the term, said it applied to "metals with insoluble sulfides and hydroxides, whose salts produce colored solutions in water and whose complexes are usually colored". On the basis of the metals he had seen referred to as heavy metals, he suggested it would be useful to define them as (in general) all the metals in periodic table columns 3 to 16 that are in row 4 or greater, in other words, the transition metals and post-transition metals. The lanthanides satisfy Hawkes' three-part description; the status of the actinides is not completely settled.
In biochemistry, heavy metals are sometimes defined—on the basis of the Lewis acid (electronic pair acceptor) behaviour of their ions in aqueous solution—as class B and borderline metals. In this scheme, class A metal ions prefer oxygen donors; class B ions prefer nitrogen or sulfur donors; and borderline or ambivalent ions show either class A or B characteristics, depending on the circumstances. Class A metals, which tend to have low electronegativity and form bonds with large ionic character, are the alkali and alkaline earths, aluminium, the group 3 metals, and the lanthanides and actinides. Class B metals, which tend to have higher electronegativity and form bonds with considerable covalent character, are mainly the heavier transition and post-transition metals. Borderline metals largely comprise the lighter transition and post-transition metals (plus arsenic and antimony). The distinction between the class A metals and the other two categories is sharp. A frequently cited proposal to use these classification categories instead of the more evocative name heavy metal has not been widely adopted.
### List of heavy metals based on density
A density of more than 5 g/cm<sup>3</sup> is sometimes mentioned as a common heavy metal defining factor and, in the absence of a unanimous definition, is used to populate this list and, unless otherwise stated, guide the remainder of the article. Metalloids meeting the applicable criteria–arsenic and antimony, for example—are sometimes counted as heavy metals, particularly in environmental chemistry, as is the case here. Selenium (density 4.8 g/cm<sup>3</sup>) is also included in the list, though it falls marginally short of the density criterion and is less commonly recognised as a metalloid but has a waterborne chemistry similar in some respects to that of arsenic and antimony. Other metals sometimes classified or treated as "heavy" metals, such as beryllium (density 1.8 g/cm<sup>3</sup>), aluminium (2.7 g/cm<sup>3</sup>), calcium (1.55 g/cm<sup>3</sup>), and barium (3.6 g/cm<sup>3</sup>) are here treated as light metals and, in general, are not further considered.
## Origins and use of the term
The heaviness of naturally occurring metals such as gold, copper, and iron may have been noticed in prehistory and, in light of their malleability, led to the first attempts to craft metal ornaments, tools, and weapons. All metals discovered from then until 1809 had relatively high densities; their heaviness was regarded as a singularly distinguishing criterion.
From 1809 onwards, light metals such as sodium, potassium, and strontium were isolated. Their low densities challenged conventional wisdom and it was proposed to refer to them as metalloids (meaning "resembling metals in form or appearance"). This suggestion was ignored; the new elements came to be recognised as metals, and the term metalloid was then used to refer to nonmetallic elements and, later, elements that were hard to describe as either metals or nonmetals.
An early use of the term heavy metal dates from 1817, when the German chemist Leopold Gmelin divided the elements into nonmetals, light metals, and heavy metals. Light metals had densities of 0.860–5.0 g/cm<sup>3</sup>; heavy metals 5.308–22.000. The term later became associated with elements of high atomic weight or high atomic number. It is sometimes used interchangeably with the term heavy element. For example, in discussing the history of nuclear chemistry, Magee notes that the actinides were once thought to represent a new heavy element transition group whereas Seaborg and co-workers "favoured ... a heavy metal rare-earth like series ...". In astronomy, however, a heavy element is any element heavier than hydrogen and helium.
### Criticism
In 2002, Scottish toxicologist John Duffus reviewed the definitions used over the previous 60 years and concluded they were so diverse as to effectively render the term meaningless. Along with this finding, the heavy metal status of some metals is occasionally challenged on the grounds that they are too light, or are involved in biological processes, or rarely constitute environmental hazards. Examples include scandium (too light); vanadium to zinc (biological processes); and rhodium, indium, and osmium (too rare).
### Popularity
Despite its questionable meaning, the term heavy metal appears regularly in scientific literature. A 2010 study found that it had been increasingly used and seemed to have become part of the language of science. It is said to be an acceptable term, given its convenience and familiarity, as long as it is accompanied by a strict definition. The counterparts to the heavy metals, the light metals, are alluded to by The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society as including "aluminium, magnesium, beryllium, titanium, lithium, and other reactive metals."
## Biological role
Trace amounts of some heavy metals, mostly in period 4, are required for certain biological processes. These are iron and copper (oxygen and electron transport); cobalt (complex syntheses and cell metabolism); zinc (hydroxylation); vanadium and manganese (enzyme regulation or functioning); chromium (glucose utilisation); nickel (cell growth); arsenic (metabolic growth in some animals and possibly in humans) and selenium (antioxidant functioning and hormone production). Periods 5 and 6 contain fewer essential heavy metals, consistent with the general pattern that heavier elements tend to be less abundant and that scarcer elements are less likely to be nutritionally essential. In period 5, molybdenum is required for the catalysis of redox reactions; cadmium is used by some marine diatoms for the same purpose; and tin may be required for growth in a few species. In period 6, tungsten is required by some archaea and bacteria for metabolic processes. A deficiency of any of these period 4–6 essential heavy metals may increase susceptibility to heavy metal poisoning (conversely, an excess may also have adverse biological effects). An average 70 kg human body is about 0.01% heavy metals (\~7 g, equivalent to the weight of two dried peas, with iron at 4 g, zinc at 2.5 g, and lead at 0.12 g comprising the three main constituents), 2% light metals (\~1.4 kg, the weight of a bottle of wine) and nearly 98% nonmetals (mostly water).
A few non-essential heavy metals have been observed to have biological effects. Gallium, germanium (a metalloid), indium, and most lanthanides can stimulate metabolism, and titanium promotes growth in plants (though it is not always considered a heavy metal).
## Toxicity
Heavy metals are often assumed to be highly toxic or damaging to the environment. Some are, while certain others are toxic only if taken in excess or encountered in certain forms. Inhalation of certain metals, either as fine dust or most commonly as fumes, can also result in a condition called metal fume fever.
### Environmental heavy metals
Chromium, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead have the greatest potential to cause harm on account of their extensive use, the toxicity of some of their combined or elemental forms, and their widespread distribution in the environment. Hexavalent chromium, for example, is highly toxic as are mercury vapour and many mercury compounds. These five elements have a strong affinity for sulfur; in the human body they usually bind, via thiol groups (–SH), to enzymes responsible for controlling the speed of metabolic reactions. The resulting sulfur-metal bonds inhibit the proper functioning of the enzymes involved; human health deteriorates, sometimes fatally. Chromium (in its hexavalent form) and arsenic are carcinogens; cadmium causes a degenerative bone disease; and mercury and lead damage the central nervous system.
Lead is the most prevalent heavy metal contaminant. Levels in the aquatic environments of industrialised societies have been estimated to be two to three times those of pre-industrial levels. As a component of tetraethyl lead, (CH
<sub>3</sub>CH
<sub>2</sub>)
<sub>4</sub>Pb, it was used extensively in gasoline from the 1930s until the 1970s. Although the use of leaded gasoline was largely phased out in North America by 1996, soils next to roads built before this time retain high lead concentrations. Later research demonstrated a statistically significant correlation between the usage rate of leaded gasoline and violent crime in the United States; taking into account a 22-year time lag (for the average age of violent criminals), the violent crime curve virtually tracked the lead exposure curve.
Other heavy metals noted for their potentially hazardous nature, usually as toxic environmental pollutants, include manganese (central nervous system damage); cobalt and nickel (carcinogens); copper, zinc, selenium and silver (endocrine disruption, congenital disorders, or general toxic effects in fish, plants, birds, or other aquatic organisms); tin, as organotin (central nervous system damage); antimony (a suspected carcinogen); and thallium (central nervous system damage).
### Nutritionally essential heavy metals
Heavy metals essential for life can be toxic if taken in excess; some have notably toxic forms. Vanadium pentoxide (V<sub>2</sub>O<sub>5</sub>) is carcinogenic in animals and, when inhaled, causes DNA damage. The purple permanganate ion MnO is a liver and kidney poison. Ingesting more than 0.5 grams of iron can induce cardiac collapse; such overdoses most commonly occur in children and may result in death within 24 hours. Nickel carbonyl (Ni(CO)<sub>4</sub>), at 30 parts per million, can cause respiratory failure, brain damage and death. Imbibing a gram or more of copper sulfate (CuSO<sub>4</sub>) can be fatal; survivors may be left with major organ damage. More than five milligrams of selenium is highly toxic; this is roughly ten times the 0.45 milligram recommended maximum daily intake; long-term poisoning can have paralytic effects.
### Other heavy metals
A few other non-essential heavy metals have one or more toxic forms. Kidney failure and fatalities have been recorded arising from the ingestion of germanium dietary supplements (\~15 to 300 g in total consumed over a period of two months to three years). Exposure to osmium tetroxide (OsO<sub>4</sub>) may cause permanent eye damage and can lead to respiratory failure and death. Indium salts are toxic if more than few milligrams are ingested and will affect the kidneys, liver, and heart. Cisplatin (PtCl<sub>2</sub>(NH<sub>3</sub>)<sub>2</sub>), an important drug used to kill cancer cells, is also a kidney and nerve poison. Bismuth compounds can cause liver damage if taken in excess; insoluble uranium compounds, as well as the dangerous radiation they emit, can cause permanent kidney damage.
### Exposure sources
Heavy metals can degrade air, water, and soil quality, and subsequently cause health issues in plants, animals, and people, when they become concentrated as a result of industrial activities. Common sources of heavy metals in this context include mining, smelting and industrial wastes; vehicle emissions; motor oil; fuels used by ships and heavy machineries; construction works; fertilisers; pesticides; paints; dyes and pigments; renovation; illegal depositing of construction and demolition waste; open-top roll-off dumpster; welding, brazing and soldering; glassworking; concrete works; roadworks; use of recycled materials; DIY Metal Projects; incinerators; burning of joss paper; open burning of waste in rural areas; contaminated ventilation system; food contaminated by the environment or by the packaging; armaments; lead–acid batteries; electronic waste recycling yard; and treated timber; aging water supply infrastructure; and microplastics floating in the world's oceans. Recent examples of heavy metal contamination and health risks include the occurrence of Minamata disease, in Japan (1932–1968; lawsuits ongoing as of 2016); the Bento Rodrigues dam disaster in Brazil, high levels of lead in drinking water supplied to the residents of Flint, Michigan, in the north-east of the United States and 2015 Hong Kong heavy metal in drinking water incidents.
## Formation, abundance, occurrence, and extraction
Heavy metals up to the vicinity of iron (in the periodic table) are largely made via stellar nucleosynthesis. In this process, lighter elements from hydrogen to silicon undergo successive fusion reactions inside stars, releasing light and heat and forming heavier elements with higher atomic numbers.
Heavier heavy metals are not usually formed this way since fusion reactions involving such nuclei would consume rather than release energy. Rather, they are largely synthesised (from elements with a lower atomic number) by neutron capture, with the two main modes of this repetitive capture being the s-process and the r-process. In the s-process ("s" stands for "slow"), singular captures are separated by years or decades, allowing the less stable nuclei to beta decay, while in the r-process ("rapid"), captures happen faster than nuclei can decay. Therefore, the s-process takes a more or less clear path: for example, stable cadmium-110 nuclei are successively bombarded by free neutrons inside a star until they form cadmium-115 nuclei which are unstable and decay to form indium-115 (which is nearly stable, with a half-life 30,000 times the age of the universe). These nuclei capture neutrons and form indium-116, which is unstable, and decays to form tin-116, and so on. In contrast, there is no such path in the r-process. The s-process stops at bismuth due to the short half-lives of the next two elements, polonium and astatine, which decay to bismuth or lead. The r-process is so fast it can skip this zone of instability and go on to create heavier elements such as thorium and uranium.
Heavy metals condense in planets as a result of stellar evolution and destruction processes. Stars lose much of their mass when it is ejected late in their lifetimes, and sometimes thereafter as a result of a neutron star merger, thereby increasing the abundance of elements heavier than helium in the interstellar medium. When gravitational attraction causes this matter to coalesce and collapse, new stars and planets are formed.
The Earth's crust is made of approximately 5% of heavy metals by weight, with iron comprising 95% of this quantity. Light metals (\~20%) and nonmetals (\~75%) make up the other 95% of the crust. Despite their overall scarcity, heavy metals can become concentrated in economically extractable quantities as a result of mountain building, erosion, or other geological processes.
Heavy metals are found primarily as lithophiles (rock-loving) or chalcophiles (ore-loving). Lithophile heavy metals are mainly f-block elements and the more reactive of the d-block elements. They have a strong affinity for oxygen and mostly exist as relatively low density silicate minerals. Chalcophile heavy metals are mainly the less reactive d-block elements, and period 4–6 p-block metals and metalloids. They are usually found in (insoluble) sulfide minerals. Being denser than the lithophiles, hence sinking lower into the crust at the time of its solidification, the chalcophiles tend to be less abundant than the lithophiles.
In contrast, gold is a siderophile, or iron-loving element. It does not readily form compounds with either oxygen or sulfur. At the time of the Earth's formation, and as the most noble (inert) of metals, gold sank into the core due to its tendency to form high-density metallic alloys. Consequently, it is a relatively rare metal. Some other (less) noble heavy metals—molybdenum, rhenium, the platinum group metals (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum), germanium, and tin—can be counted as siderophiles but only in terms of their primary occurrence in the Earth (core, mantle and crust), rather the crust. These metals otherwise occur in the crust, in small quantities, chiefly as chalcophiles (less so in their native form).
Concentrations of heavy metals below the crust are generally higher, with most being found in the largely iron-silicon-nickel core. Platinum, for example, comprises approximately 1 part per billion of the crust whereas its concentration in the core is thought to be nearly 6,000 times higher. Recent speculation suggests that uranium (and thorium) in the core may generate a substantial amount of the heat that drives plate tectonics and (ultimately) sustains the Earth's magnetic field.
Broadly speaking, and with some exceptions, lithophile heavy metals can be extracted from their ores by electrical or chemical treatments, while chalcophile heavy metals are obtained by roasting their sulphide ores to yield the corresponding oxides, and then heating these to obtain the raw metals. Radium occurs in quantities too small to be economically mined and is instead obtained from spent nuclear fuels. The chalcophile platinum group metals (PGM) mainly occur in small (mixed) quantities with other chalcophile ores. The ores involved need to be smelted, roasted, and then leached with sulfuric acid to produce a residue of PGM. This is chemically refined to obtain the individual metals in their pure forms. Compared to other metals, PGM are expensive due to their scarcity and high production costs.
Gold, a siderophile, is most commonly recovered by dissolving the ores in which it is found in a cyanide solution. The gold forms a dicyanoaurate(I), for example: 2 Au + H<sub>2</sub>O +1⁄2 O<sub>2</sub> + 4 KCN → 2 K[Au(CN)<sub>2</sub>] + 2 KOH. Zinc is added to the mix and, being more reactive than gold, displaces the gold: 2 K[Au(CN)<sub>2</sub>] + Zn → K<sub>2</sub>[Zn(CN)<sub>4</sub>] + 2 Au. The gold precipitates out of solution as a sludge, and is filtered off and melted.
## Properties compared with light metals
Some general physical and chemical properties of light and heavy metals are summarised in the table. The comparison should be treated with caution since the terms light metal and heavy metal are not always consistently defined. Moreover, the physical properties of hardness and tensile strength can vary widely depending on purity, grain size and pre-treatment.
These properties make it relatively easy to distinguish a light metal like sodium from a heavy metal like tungsten, but the differences become less clear at the boundaries. Light structural metals like beryllium, scandium, and titanium have some of the characteristics of heavy metals, such as higher melting points; post-transition heavy metals like zinc, cadmium, and lead have some of the characteristics of light metals, such as being relatively soft, having lower melting points, and forming mainly colourless complexes.
## Uses
Heavy metals are present in nearly all aspects of modern life. Iron may be the most common as it accounts for 90% of all refined metals. Platinum may be the most ubiquitous given it is said to be found in, or used to produce, 20% of all consumer goods.
Some common uses of heavy metals depend on the general characteristics of metals such as electrical conductivity and reflectivity or the general characteristics of heavy metals such as density, strength, and durability. Other uses depend on the characteristics of the specific element, such as their biological role as nutrients or poisons or some other specific atomic properties. Examples of such atomic properties include: partly filled d- or f- orbitals (in many of the transition, lanthanide, and actinide heavy metals) that enable the formation of coloured compounds; the capacity of most heavy metal ions (such as platinum, cerium or bismuth) to exist in different oxidation states and therefore act as catalysts; poorly overlapping 3d or 4f orbitals (in iron, cobalt, and nickel, or the lanthanide heavy metals from europium through thulium) that give rise to magnetic effects; and high atomic numbers and electron densities that underpin their nuclear science applications. Typical uses of heavy metals can be broadly grouped into the following six categories.
### Weight- or density-based
Some uses of heavy metals, including in sport, mechanical engineering, military ordnance, and nuclear science, take advantage of their relatively high densities. In underwater diving, lead is used as a ballast; in handicap horse racing each horse must carry a specified lead weight, based on factors including past performance, so as to equalize the chances of the various competitors. In golf, tungsten, brass, or copper inserts in fairway clubs and irons lower the centre of gravity of the club making it easier to get the ball into the air; and golf balls with tungsten cores are claimed to have better flight characteristics. In fly fishing, sinking fly lines have a PVC coating embedded with tungsten powder, so that they sink at the required rate. In track and field sport, steel balls used in the hammer throw and shot put events are filled with lead in order to attain the minimum weight required under international rules. Tungsten was used in hammer throw balls at least up to 1980; the minimum size of the ball was increased in 1981 to eliminate the need for what was, at that time, an expensive metal (triple the cost of other hammers) not generally available in all countries. Tungsten hammers were so dense that they penetrated too deeply into the turf.
In mechanical engineering, heavy metals are used for ballast in boats, aeroplanes, and motor vehicles; or in balance weights on wheels and crankshafts, gyroscopes, and propellers, and centrifugal clutches, in situations requiring maximum weight in minimum space (for example in watch movements).
In military ordnance, tungsten or uranium is used in armour plating and armour piercing projectiles, as well as in nuclear weapons to increase efficiency (by reflecting neutrons and momentarily delaying the expansion of reacting materials). In the 1970s, tantalum was found to be more effective than copper in shaped charge and explosively formed anti-armour weapons on account of its higher density, allowing greater force concentration, and better deformability. Less-toxic heavy metals, such as copper, tin, tungsten, and bismuth, and probably manganese (as well as boron, a metalloid), have replaced lead and antimony in the green bullets used by some armies and in some recreational shooting munitions. Doubts have been raised about the safety (or green credentials) of tungsten.
Because denser materials absorb more radioactive emissions than lighter ones, heavy metals are useful for radiation shielding and to focus radiation beams in linear accelerators and radiotherapy applications.
### Strength- or durability-based
The strength or durability of heavy metals such as chromium, iron, nickel, copper, zinc, molybdenum, tin, tungsten, and lead, as well as their alloys, makes them useful for the manufacture of artefacts such as tools, machinery, appliances, utensils, pipes, railroad tracks, buildings and bridges, automobiles, locks, furniture, ships, planes, coinage and jewellery. They are also used as alloying additives for enhancing the properties of other metals. Of the two dozen elements that have been used in the world's monetised coinage only two, carbon and aluminium, are not heavy metals. Gold, silver, and platinum are used in jewellery as are, for example, nickel, copper, indium, and cobalt in coloured gold. Low-cost jewellery and children's toys may be made, to a significant degree, of heavy metals such as chromium, nickel, cadmium, or lead.
Copper, zinc, tin, and lead are mechanically weaker metals but have useful corrosion prevention properties. While each of them will react with air, the resulting patinas of either various copper salts, zinc carbonate, tin oxide, or a mixture of lead oxide, carbonate, and sulfate, confer valuable protective properties. Copper and lead are therefore used, for example, as roofing materials; zinc acts as an anti-corrosion agent in galvanised steel; and tin serves a similar purpose on steel cans.
The workability and corrosion resistance of iron and chromium are increased by adding gadolinium; the creep resistance of nickel is improved with the addition of thorium. Tellurium is added to copper (tellurium copper) and steel alloys to improve their machinability; and to lead to make it harder and more acid-resistant.
### Biological and chemical
The biocidal effects of some heavy metals have been known since antiquity. Platinum, osmium, copper, ruthenium, and other heavy metals, including arsenic, are used in anti-cancer treatments, or have shown potential. Antimony (anti-protozoal), bismuth (anti-ulcer), gold (anti-arthritic), and iron (anti-malarial) are also important in medicine. Copper, zinc, silver, gold, or mercury are used in antiseptic formulations; small amounts of some heavy metals are used to control algal growth in, for example, cooling towers. Depending on their intended use as fertilisers or biocides, agrochemicals may contain heavy metals such as chromium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, or lead.
Selected heavy metals are used as catalysts in fuel processing (rhenium, for example), synthetic rubber and fibre production (bismuth), emission control devices (palladium), and in self-cleaning ovens (where cerium(IV) oxide in the walls of such ovens helps oxidise carbon-based cooking residues). In soap chemistry, heavy metals form insoluble soaps that are used in lubricating greases, paint dryers, and fungicides (apart from lithium, the alkali metals and the ammonium ion form soluble soaps).
### Colouring and optics
The colours of glass, ceramic glazes, paints, pigments, and plastics are commonly produced by the inclusion of heavy metals (or their compounds) such as chromium, manganese, cobalt, copper, zinc, selenium, zirconium, molybdenum, silver, tin, praseodymium, neodymium, erbium, tungsten, iridium, gold, lead, or uranium. Tattoo inks may contain heavy metals, such as chromium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. The high reflectivity of some heavy metals is important in the construction of mirrors, including precision astronomical instruments. Headlight reflectors rely on the excellent reflectivity of a thin film of rhodium.
### Electronics, magnets, and lighting
Heavy metals or their compounds can be found in electronic components, electrodes, and wiring and solar panels where they may be used as either conductors, semiconductors, or insulators. Molybdenum powder is used in circuit board inks. Ruthenium(IV) oxide coated titanium anodes are used for the industrial production of chlorine. Home electrical systems, for the most part, are wired with copper wire for its good conducting properties. Silver and gold are used in electrical and electronic devices, particularly in contact switches, as a result of their high electrical conductivity and capacity to resist or minimise the formation of impurities on their surfaces. The semiconductors cadmium telluride and gallium arsenide are used to make solar panels. Hafnium oxide, an insulator, is used as a voltage controller in microchips; tantalum oxide, another insulator, is used in capacitors in mobile phones. Heavy metals have been used in batteries for over 200 years, at least since Volta invented his copper and silver voltaic pile in 1800. Promethium, lanthanum, and mercury are further examples found in, respectively, atomic, nickel-metal hydride, and button cell batteries.
Magnets are made of heavy metals such as manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, niobium, bismuth, praseodymium, neodymium, gadolinium, and dysprosium. Neodymium magnets are the strongest type of permanent magnet commercially available. They are key components of, for example, car door locks, starter motors, fuel pumps, and power windows.
Heavy metals are used in lighting, lasers, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Flat panel displays incorporate a thin film of electrically conducting indium tin oxide. Fluorescent lighting relies on mercury vapour for its operation. Ruby lasers generate deep red beams by exciting chromium atoms; the lanthanides are also extensively employed in lasers. Gallium, indium, and arsenic; and copper, iridium, and platinum are used in LEDs (the latter three in organic LEDs).
### Nuclear
Niche uses of heavy metals with high atomic numbers occur in diagnostic imaging, electron microscopy, and nuclear science. In diagnostic imaging, heavy metals such as cobalt or tungsten make up the anode materials found in x-ray tubes. In electron microscopy, heavy metals such as lead, gold, palladium, platinum, or uranium are used to make conductive coatings and to introduce electron density into biological specimens by staining, negative staining, or vacuum deposition. In nuclear science, nuclei of heavy metals such as chromium, iron, or zinc are sometimes fired at other heavy metal targets to produce superheavy elements; heavy metals are also employed as spallation targets for the production of neutrons or radioisotopes such as astatine (using lead, bismuth, thorium, or uranium in the latter case). |
66,125,339 | It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School | 1,172,235,740 | 1996 documentary film | [
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| It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School is a 1996 American documentary film directed by Debra Chasnoff and Helen Cohen. It provides educators with information on how to teach elementary schoolchildren to be tolerant of gay and lesbian people. The film was noted as the "first of its kind" and was generally well received, although there was some backlash from conservatives. It was released in several film festivals, and had screenings in the 2000s.
The documentary received little support from PBS, owing to backlash from the American Family Association. Prior to airing the film, television stations received calls, letters, and e-mails from people who did not want PBS program directors to broadcast It's Elementary. The film was awarded the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary, Best Documentary at the Reeling Film Festival, and the Silver Spire from the San Francisco International Film Festival, among other awards. The film had two sequels: That's a Family! and It's Still Elementary.
## Background
Debra Chasnoff wanted to direct an educational video series that deals with teaching children about issues involving people who are homosexual, but she learned that there was not much information about the topic that was aimed towards educators. She said, "The current conservative political climate, which is incredibly hostile to the mere mention of homosexuality, has made many teachers afraid of talking to kids about gays and lesbians". The lack of available information motivated Chasnoff to continue trying to complete the film. Chasnoff and producer Helen Cohen talked to American teachers who already had curricula involving gay people. It was hard for them to gain entry into the schools, as multiple staff and parents did not want to be recorded. Some of the parents kept their children away from the school during filming. The schools are in San Francisco and New York City, as well as Madison, Wisconsin, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chasnoff said in 1999, "Sadly, part of the reason I think the film is being picked up is because of the time. Our campaign falls within the same window of time that the Matthew Shepard murder and trial are going on, the murder of Billy Jack Gaither, and now Colorado", referring to the homophobic language that had been used to harass the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.
## Synopsis
Directed by Chasnoff and Cohen, the film was described by the book Voices of Transgender Children in Early Childhood Education as "the first of its kind" to provide educators with information on how to prevent discrimination against people who are gay. It focuses on the education of elementary schoolchildren to not be intolerant of those who are gay or lesbian. In the film, first-grade through eighth-grade students talk about LGBTQ subjects. The younger children were often more accepting of those who are LGBTQ. The film has two versions: one of which is just under 40 minutes long, and the other of which is 78 minutes long. The cut version was created as a training version.
The teachers that were surveyed had various teaching methods of educating about homosexuality. The educators included a fourth-grade teacher who "encourages her students to brainstorm on the words 'gay' and 'lesbian', and to talk about the roots of their associations, assumptions, and attitudes". An eighth-grade teacher dismantled stereotypes about people who are gay or lesbian while also having their students interview a gay man and a lesbian woman. A principal of an elementary school held a photography event at the school named "Love Makes a Family", in which "families with gay and lesbian couples at the heads of households" are depicted. A girl with lesbian parents read a Mother's Day essay about her mothers. A fifth-grade teacher noticed that her students have no issues with pictures and stories of children and their gay parents. A Puerto Rican teacher stated that her heritage was part of her not being open to LGBTQ matters.
## Release
It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School was released in several film festivals. The film was released on VHS in 1996 by New Day Films, and it was released on DVD in 2008 by the same distributor. The DVD includes closed captioning, Spanish subtitles, educator resources, and special features like deleted scenes, an interview with the director, and the sequel It's Still Elementary. Also included is a 136-page guide about how to use the film within school systems and communities. The June 8, 1999 issue of The Advocate reported that the film would be broadcast on at least 60 PBS stations. Chasnoff and Cohen started a campaign to motivate people to ask local television stations for the film to be aired. In 1999, PBS refused to televise the film on its national affiliate stations, but the broadcaster sold the airing rights to other stations by using an independent company. At the time of a June 7, 1999 article in The Baltimore Sun, 89 public television stations decided to air the film, 80 of them refused to carry it, and 53 of them had not made a decision. The film did not receive much support from PBS for its first television broadcast because of backlash from the American Family Association (AFA). Prior to airing the film, television stations received calls, letters, and e-mails from people who did not want PBS program directors to broadcast It's Elementary. Program director of KCWC Ruby Calvert said, "I've had lots and lots of calls from people in Wyoming," adding that she was struggling with scheduling the film.
## Reception and influence
The film received a positive reception from the National Education Association (NEA) president and the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA). The NEA president said in response to the film, "Schools cannot be neutral when we're dealing with issues of human dignity and human rights." Starting with its release, more than 3,000 educational institutions obtained the film. It has been shared in thousands of settings within the United States and internationally. A 1999 journal article from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom states that the film has "inspiring footage shot in schools across the country" and that it is "a topic that often leaves adults tongue-tied".
The film won Best Documentary at the Frameline Film Festival, the Reeling Film Festival, the Turin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and the Santa Barbara Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. It was awarded the CINE Golden Eagle for Teacher Education and Best Educational Film at the Northern Lights International Film Festival. The film was awarded the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary in 1997. The film received the Silver Spire from the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Silver Apple from the National Educational Media Market, and the Audience Award from the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival.
Conservatives such as the head of the Family Defense Council were upset with its release. Chasnoff and Cohen received backlash from groups that claimed that they "were promoting a homosexual agenda" and brainwashing children into a "homosexual lifestyle". Conservatives in Idaho were against public broadcasting of the film and set up billboards opposing the film. The American Family Association responded to the film with one of their own, titled Suffer the Children: Answering the Homosexual Agenda in Public Schools. Author Jamie Campbell Naidoo said that the AFA's film takes quotes from It's Elementary out of context and makes it seem that the children are being "taught to be homosexual in the classroom".
Philanthropist James Hormel contributed \$12,000 to the funding of It's Elementary. The revelation of this fact was one of the factors that caused his 1997 nomination for an ambassadorship to be blocked by the United States Senate, with conservative senators expressing concerns that Hormel was involved in advocating for the "gay lifestyle". Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire said that the film discredits a speech that Smith gave in the Senate in which he describes education programs about gay people as "trash".
## Legacy
The Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University held a 2008 screening for the short version of the film and its sequel It's Still Elementary. A discussion was held after the films by the director of the Franklin County Education Council, Brad Mitchell, and teachers from Pink T.I.G.ers who attempt to prevent homophobia in schools. A 2018 screening was held at the Frameline Film Festival in honor of posthumously awarding Chasnoff the 2018 Frameline Award. The Frameline Film Festival said that the film "boldly turned the minefield of teaching about LGBTQ issues in elementary schools into a navigable playing field" and "was instrumental in bringing queer issues into elementary school curricula." The book Voices of Transgender Children in Early Childhood Education used the film as an example of LGBTQ issues included in academia for young students. The sequel It's Still Elementary was used as an example of the success of LGBTQ programs in schools, including a decrease in bullying and more inclusion.
## Sequels
Ginny Markell, the president of the PTA, presented one of the film's sequels, That's a Family!, at the White House. That's a Family! shows children talking about homosexual households and other families that differ from the common household. The families include parents that are "divorced, adoptive, guardian, parents with drugs, multi-racial, multi-religious, or disabled". The film was directed by Chasnoff. It was released in 2000, and is 34 minutes long.
Another sequel was released, titled It's Still Elementary. The film is a follow-up of the lives of the students and teachers of the first film. Similar to the first two films, It's Still Elementary was directed by Chasnoff. It was released in 2007, and is 47 minutes long. |
46,365,673 | Airport Central railway station | 1,172,922,448 | Underground station in Perth, Western Australia | [
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| Airport Central railway station is an underground Transperth commuter rail station at terminals one and two of Perth Airport in Western Australia. The station is located on the Airport line and is one of three stations that were built as part of the Forrestfield–Airport Link project.
The contract for the Forrestfield–Airport Link, which consists of 8 kilometres (5 mi) of twin bored tunnels and three new stations, was awarded to Salini Impregilo and NRW Pty Ltd in April 2016. Construction on Airport Central station began in March 2017 following preparatory work. By January 2018, excavation was complete and, in May 2018, the two tunnel boring machines (TBMs) reached the station after tunnelling from High Wycombe. The TBMs left the station tunnelling north-west the following month, and construction of the rest of the station started. As well as the station, a 280-metre (920 ft) elevated walkway was built by Georgiou Group, linking the station to the airport's terminal T1.
Originally planned to open in 2020, the line officially opened on 9 October 2022. It is served by trains every twelve minutes during peak and every fifteen minutes outside peak and on weekends and public holidays. At night, trains are half-hourly or hourly. The journey to Perth station takes eighteen minutes.
## Description
Airport Central station is located adjacent to the air traffic control tower at Perth Airport terminals one and two (T1 and T2). To the east, the adjacent station is High Wycombe station. To the north-west, the adjacent station is Redcliffe station, which leads to Perth station and connections to the other lines on the Transperth system.
The station has three levels: a below-ground platform level, a below-ground concourse level above the platform level, and an above-ground entrance level which connects to a 280-metre-long (920 ft) elevated walkway called the Skybridge. The Skybridge crosses over a car park towards T1, with lifts and stairs connecting the Skybridge to external ground level approximately 200 metres (660 ft) east of T2. Linking the entrance level to the concourse level are two lifts and three escalators, which are the longest operational escalators in the southern hemisphere at 35 metres (115 ft) long and 15 metres (49 ft) high, although they On the concourse are fare gates and toilets. Linking the concourse to the platform are two lifts, two pairs of escalators, and two sets of stairs. The platform level consists of an island platform 12.5 metres (41 ft) wide and 150 metres (490 ft) long at a depth of 17 metres (56 ft) below ground level. Each of the two platform edges can accommodate a six-car Transperth train.
The station takes its name from the Airport Central precinct, which encompasses the area around T1 and T2. Rather than be located directly next to T1, the station is placed centrally within the precinct so that it is as close as possible to any future terminals. Under the Perth Airport master plan, terminals three and four near Redcliffe station will be replaced by new terminals in the Airport Central precinct. The master plan states that new terminals will be connected to the station via an extension of the Skybridge or by a new underground walkway. A proposed hotel next to the station may also be connected to the Skybridge.
### Public art
The design of the roof is based on the contours of aircraft. There is a two-part artwork along the northern and southern interior walls of the station by Anne Neil and John Walley entitled Journeys. The artwork along the northern wall consists of multi-coloured petal-shaped objects designed to evoke birds and flight. On the southern wall are 50 glass panels with an artwork designed to "describe the Noongar connection to the river and estuary waters, and the journeys traditionally taken in accordance with the six seasons." Within the Skybridge, audio plays reflecting upon the significance of the Swan River and the Whadjuk country to the Noongar people. The audio consists of a narrative voiceover by a traditional custodian, animal sounds, and an original musical score. The audio changes throughout the day, mimicking the journey along the Swan River. There is also artwork along the Skybridge walls and travellators designed by Jade Dolman and Crispian Warrell of Nani Creative.
## History
During initial planning, the station was called Consolidated Airport station due to the planned consolidation of all passenger terminals to the precinct. The station was built by the Public Transport Authority (PTA) as part of the Forrestfield–Airport Link project, which involved the construction of 8 kilometres (5 mi) of twin bored tunnels from High Wycombe to Bayswater and two other stations: Forrestfield (later renamed High Wycombe) and Belmont (later renamed Redcliffe) stations. The station was renamed to its present name in April 2016 upon the awarding of the main contract, worth \$1.176 billion, to a joint venture of Salini Impregilo and NRW Pty Ltd (SI/NRW). At the time the contract was signed, the station was expected to be in operation by 2020. Weston Williamson and GHD Woodhead were appointed by SI/NRW as the designers of the three stations. The construction of the Skybridge was under a different contract, awarded to Georgiou Group in late 2018 at a cost of \$31 million. The Skybridge was funded partly from an \$8.6 million contribution by Perth Airport and partly from the Forrestfield–Airport Link budget; the construction was managed by Perth Airport.
In late 2016, work began on reorganising the airport's car park and car rental booths to make way for the Airport Central station construction site. The station box was planned to be excavated and constructed between March 2017 and February 2018. During this time a headstone from the 1890s was discovered. Construction on the station began in May 2017, starting with the construction of diaphragm walls. The station's design was released on 28 May 2017. The diaphragm walls were completed in July 2017, allowing excavation to begin on 14 July. Excavation was completed in January 2018 and construction of the concrete base slab commenced the following month. The base slab was completed by April 2018.
The two tunnel boring machines (TBMs) were planned to arrive at Airport Central station in late-February and late-March 2018, having tunnelled from High Wycombe. This was delayed after the first TBM, Grace, was stopped on 14 February following a ground disturbance issue. This also caused the second TBM, Sandy, to stop on 28 March so that it would not be tunnelling next to Grace. The two TBMs restarted in April. TBM Grace arrived at the station on 8 May, and TBM Sandy arrived on 19 May. After undergoing maintenance, both TBMs left the station in July, tunnelling towards Redcliffe. Construction on other elements of the station commenced after that, including staircases and infrastructure for the escalators and lifts.
In November 2018, construction on the Skybridge started. Construction on Airport Central station's steel structure and the concrete concourse slab began in early 2019. The 35-metre-long (115 ft) escalators were installed in May and June 2019. In mid-2019, construction of the platform and ventilation structures at the eastern and western ends of the station began and the modules for the Skybridge began to be lifted into place. By November 2019, the concourse slab and the steel lift frames were complete and the Skybridge was connected to the station. The Skybridge achieved practical completion in early 2020. By March 2020, the station was 70 percent complete and the roof was beginning to be installed. The roof was mostly complete by June 2020, allowing work such as the fit-out of escalators and lifts and the installation of cladding along the walls to commence.
On 18 December 2018, state Transport Minister Rita Saffioti announced that the opening date of the project had been delayed from 2020 to 2021. In May 2021, Saffioti announced that the project had been delayed again, this time with the opening date being in the first half of 2022. Following the state budget on 12 May 2022, the government changed its position on the line's opening date, saying it would open some time later in the year. On 16 August, the opening date was revealed to be 9 October 2022, which is when the station did open.
## Services
Airport Central station is served by the Airport line on the Transperth network. These services are operated by the PTA via its Transperth Train Operations division. To the east, the line terminates at the next station, High Wycombe. To the west, the line joins the Midland line two stations along at Bayswater, running along that line to Perth station, before running along the Fremantle line to terminate at Claremont station. Airport line trains stop at the station every twelve minutes during peak on weekdays and every fifteen minutes outside peak and on weekends and public holidays. At night, trains are half-hourly or hourly. The last train leaves at about 2 am with the next train arriving approximately four to five hours later – 5:30 am on weekdays in 2022 – which has been criticised for not being early enough for fly-in fly-out workers, whose flights typically leave in the early morning. The Mining and Energy Union called for the government to tweak the train schedule. The transport minister has said that the line needs to be closed for maintenance overnight but that she would look at what could be done. The Airport line caters to about 80 percent of flights.
The station was predicted to have average daily boardings of 6,100 upon opening, rising to 11,000 in 2031. The journey to Perth station takes eighteen minutes. The station is in fare zone two, and there is no surcharge. South-west of the station is a bus stop which is used by rail replacement bus services to Perth and High Wycombe as well as bus route 37, which travels to Oats Street station. |
4,327,318 | Thistle, Utah | 1,160,114,611 | null | [
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| Thistle is a ghost town in Spanish Fork Canyon in southeastern Utah County, Utah, United States. During the era of steam locomotives, the town's primary industry was servicing trains for the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad (often shortened to D&RG, D&RGW, or Rio Grande). The fortunes of the town were closely linked with those of the railroad until the changeover to diesel locomotives, when the town started to decline.
In April 1983, a massive landslide (specifically a complex earthflow) dammed the Spanish Fork River. The residents were evacuated as nearly 65,000 acre-feet (80,000,000 m<sup>3</sup>) of water backed up, flooding the town. Thistle was destroyed; only a few structures were left partially standing. Federal and state government agencies have said this was the most costly landslide in United States history, the economic consequences of which affected the entire region. The landslide resulted in the first presidentially declared disaster area in Utah.
U.S. Route 6 (US‐6), U.S. Route 89 (US‐89) and the railroad (now part of Union Pacific Railroad's Central Corridor) were closed for several months, until they were rebuilt on a higher alignment overlooking the area. The remains of Thistle are visible from a view area along US‐89 or from the California Zephyr passenger train.
## Geography
Thistle is about 65 miles (105 km) southeast of Salt Lake City, at the confluence of the two primary tributaries to the Spanish Fork River, Thistle Creek and Soldier Creek. This confluence, at an elevation of 5,043 feet (1,537 m), is also the junction of two naturally formed routes across the mountains of central Utah. The primary route crosses the Wasatch Mountains, via the Wasatch Plateau and Soldier Summit. This route was carved by the tributaries of the Price River on the eastern side of the mountains and the Spanish Fork on the west. In addition, Thistle Creek provides a route south from Thistle towards the communities of the Sanpete and Sevier valleys. The Spanish Fork flows northwest from Thistle, towards and through the city of Spanish Fork, before reaching Utah Lake.
These natural paths have provided the route of several transcontinental trails, highways and railroads since their discovery. The named transportation arteries passing through Thistle include: US‐6 (originally numbered US-50), US‐89, the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad's Utah Division (now part of Union Pacific Railroad's Central Corridor) and D&RGW's Marysvale Branch line (abandoned because of the landslide).
## History
The trade route on which Thistle lies was used by Indian tribes before the arrival of European settlers; two Ute chiefs, Taby and Peteetneet, led tribal migrations through the canyon each spring and fall. The first recorded journey by Europeans to modern Thistle was the Domínguez–Escalante expedition, which explored the territory with Indian guides. A small group of Utes inhabiting the canyon frequently raided the newcomers, and as a result were forcibly relocated in the 1870s.
Most of Thistle's residents were railroad employees sent to live in the town, but there were some who had settled before the railroads arrived. The first settlers were part of the Mormon migration to Utah, and the first of these was the Pace family, who migrated from Nauvoo, Illinois, reaching Thistle in 1848. Fifth-generation descendants of the Pace settlers continued to operate a family-owned cattle ranch until the town was evacuated. Other settlers included Mormons who originally settled elsewhere in Utah but subsequently arrived to homestead fertile ground on Billies Mountain, on the north wall of the canyon. Among them was the mountain's presumed namesake, William Johnson. Homesteading was practiced in Thistle until the early 1900s. Until the arrival of the railroads, the town's economy was based mainly on farming and ranching, although there was also some mining activity in the region, including a vein of asphaltum that was mined between 1892 and 1914.
### Railroads
The first railroad track laid through Thistle was a narrow-gauge spur line servicing coal mines near today's Scofield Reservoir, built in 1878 by the Utah and Pleasant Valley Railway. By 1890, the Denver and Rio Grande Western, which acquired the line in a foreclosure sale in 1882, had rebuilt the line to standard gauge. The D&RGW connected this line with one they had built west from Colorado, completing a link from Salt Lake City to Denver.
The railroad built several facilities in Thistle to service and prepare trains for the change in grade and curvature of the line. The railroad placed helper engines on eastbound trains at Thistle for the ascent to Soldier Summit. The town provided a meal service for the trains until the use of on-board dining cars eliminated the need for meal stops.
Thistle saw more rail traffic with the construction of the Marysvale Branch line. This line branched from the main at Thistle, following modern US‐89 towards mines near Marysvale. Another line through Thistle, paralleling the D&RGW main, was built by the Utah Railway. The two lines were later combined into a dual-track main line as part of a trackage rights agreement between the two companies.
Rail traffic through Thistle continued to increase as the Rio Grande cooperated with connecting railroads, making the rail line through Thistle a bridge line for transcontinental rail traffic. The growth of Thistle was closely tied to the success of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad throughout the era of steam locomotives.
At its peak, around 1917, Thistle had about 600 residents. The town's railroad infrastructure included a five-stall roundhouse, depot, machine shop, and structures to restock passing trains with sand, coal and water. Non-railroad infrastructure included general stores, a post office, barber shop, saloon, pool hall, bakeries and restaurants. The largest building was a two-story schoolhouse, built in 1911.
In the 1950s, the Denver & Rio Grande Western began to phase out steam locomotives in favor of diesel locomotives, which require less maintenance. With the change in technology, Thistle faded in importance. Gradually the town shrank in population; the passenger depot was torn down in 1972 and the post office closed in 1974. By 1983, only a few families remained in Thistle.
### Landslide
Rio Grande maintenance personnel began noticing unstable ground downstream from Thistle years before the landslide occurred. Maintenance crews repaired the track on several occasions, but they did not fully investigate the problem. Beginning with the remnants of Hurricane Olivia, the autumn and winter of 1982–83 featured record-breaking snow and rainfall. As the spring thaw melted the winter snow, the mountains in the area became saturated with water.
By April 1983, track deformation was a serious issue. On April 13, the division track master flew to Denver to explain the situation at a specially-called staff meeting. On the same day, a Utah Highway Patrol officer struck a newly created buckle in the highway that threw him against the roof of his vehicle. By the end of the day, a full maintenance crew was struggling to keep US‐6/US‐89 open. All trains were limited to speeds less than 10 miles per hour (16 km/h), and were accompanied by maintenance personnel who had to continually work to keep the tracks in line. The last train to pass through downtown Thistle was the westbound Rio Grande Zephyr, on April 14, 1983 at about 8:30 p.m. That night, both US‐6/US‐89 and the rail line were closed. One westbound freight train that had already left Denver was turned back. All through trains between Denver and Salt Lake City were rerouted to Union Pacific Railroad's Overland Route through Wyoming. By April 16, the tracks were completely buried and a voluntary evacuation order was issued for the town.
On April 17, a final attempt to keep the landslide from blocking the flow of the river failed. That day, the Utah Department of Transportation and the Rio Grande announced plans to abandon the existing transportation arteries and build new corridors. Both the highway and railroad would be re-routed by blasting a path scaling the north wall of Spanish Fork Canyon. The new arteries would pass the slide by dynamiting through Billies Mountain, also along the north canyon wall. Engineers estimated the dam created by the toe of the landslide would eventually reach 200 to 300 feet (60 to 90 m) tall. The evacuation order was changed from voluntary to mandatory. Volunteers transported as many people and belongings as possible to the small town of Birdseye, about five miles (8 km) south. Most residents were able to recover only a fraction of their belongings; some had less than two hours' notice before the water reached their house. Thistle's oldest resident celebrated her 90th birthday at the evacuation center in Birdseye. By the 18th, the waterline had reached the rooftops of the 22 previously occupied houses. By the 19th, an entire mountain was moving at about two feet (0.6 m) per hour, and US‐6/US‐89 was buried by 50 feet (15 m) of soil.
Governor Scott Matheson requested federal aid to deal with the situation. After a visit to the area by the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. president Ronald Reagan issued the first presidential disaster area declaration for the state of Utah. The landslide eventually formed a dam that created a lake three miles (5 km) long and over 200 ft (60 m) deep. Concerned the dam could fail, the state of Utah decided to build a tunnel to re-route the flow of the river. The residents of downstream Spanish Fork were told to be prepared to evacuate. Engineers estimated that if the dam failed, they would have 30 to 45 minutes notice before the water reached the city.
### Aftermath
Thistle was almost completely destroyed. Most wooden buildings were carried away in the floodwaters. The state installed a temporary pumping station to prevent the lake from overflowing the dam; patrol boats skimmed up the floating remains of the town to prevent the debris from blocking the pumps. Most remains were either naturally deposited or placed on the eastern shore of the lake.
By autumn, the tunnels to restore the flow of the river and drain the lake were operational. Shortly after, debates among former residents, neighboring residents, and government agencies began on what to do with the dam created by the landslide; some wanted to make the lake permanent. The state engineer commissioned a study to determine if the landslide dam could be used to retain water; it recommended building a new dam upstream from the landslide, rather than attempting engineering work on the landslide dam.
In the years following, the former residents of Thistle filed various lawsuits to recover their losses. In one, they claimed that their property was taken to rebuild the road and railroad without just compensation. Another lawsuit claimed negligence on the part of the D&RGW. The residents argued that the railroad's maintenance workers knew the ground was unstable; however, they only repaired the track. The residents contended the slide could have been prevented by using a water drainage system to relieve pressure at the head of the unstable area. They further contended that such a system could have been put in place had the railroad thoroughly investigated the problem upon first noticing it. The engineering firm employed by the Rio Grande said that their studies indicated the crown of the landslide was about 300 feet (90 m) above the level of the tracks, and that the Rio Grande did not know the true size of the unstable area until the slide was in motion. A jury absolved the D&RGW of responsibility. The plaintiffs appealed the decision, and a second trial in 1993 resulted in a \$1.1 million award for the landowners (equivalent to \$ million in 2023). The D&RGW filed suit against the Utah Railway over sharing the costs from the landslide. The Utah Railway had an ownership interest in the line, based on a track-sharing agreement.
#### Economic effects
The landslide closed the main railroad for three months, and US‐6 and US‐89 for eight months, during which time transportation between the communities of eastern and southeastern Utah and the rest of the state was substantially impaired. Security for the isolated part of Utah County was temporarily assigned to the Utah Highway Patrol.
The economic effects of the closure of these transportation arteries were felt throughout the western United States; the closure devastated rural Utah. The operations of coal mines, uranium mines, turkey farms, animal feed companies, gypsum mines, and cement and clay factories were severely impacted. At least two trucking firms and one oil-producing firm suspended or ceased operations. Southeastern Utah's tourism industry suffered without access for visitors from the north and west. Some people who lived and worked on opposite sides of the landslide area suddenly had commutes exceeding 100 miles (160 km). The highway patrol temporarily closed a weigh station at Peerless (a location along the US‐6 corridor near Helper) and built a temporary weigh station near Salina (along I-70 about 90 miles (140 km) south of Thistle), which saw a sudden increase in truck traffic. The highway patrol estimated the temporary facilities inspected 57,000 trucks and made 80 arrests.
The direct cost of the landslide was estimated at \$200 million (equivalent to \$ million in 2023). However, some estimates of the total cost reached as high as \$400 million (equivalent to \$ million in 2023). The D&RGW estimated the slide cost them \$80 million in lost revenue (equivalent to \$ million in 2023), averaging \$1 million for each day that the tracks were out-of-service. This figure included \$19 million in payments to the Union Pacific for the use of their lines. The United States Geological Survey and the state of Utah have called the Thistle landslide the most costly ever in the United States.
#### Railroad
To expedite construction, the railroad had crews in Utah focused on grading the new path and boring a 3,000-foot (910 m) tunnel, while crews in Colorado built track segments that were transported to site. On July 4, 1983, at 3:05 p.m., safety inspectors declared the line ready for operation. At 3:12 p.m., the centralized traffic control signals gave a green light to the first train to pass through the Thistle area since the slide began, an eastbound freight train coming from the Southern Pacific Railroad at Ogden, destined for Herington, Kansas. Although the line's re-opening on Independence Day was coincidental, the first train became part of the local holiday celebrations. The first passenger train to use the new alignment was the California Zephyr, on July 16.
Debates ensued over the fate of the Marysvale Branch line. The mines at the end of the line had long closed; the last train to traverse the entire length of the line passed through in 1970. Still, farmers and industry in the Sevier and Sanpete Valleys generated enough traffic that the line broke even most years. However, this line was severely damaged, with several washed-out bridges and railroad tracks draping over the sides of newly created cliffs. The railroad determined that at best it would take years to recover the cost of rebuilding the line.
The residents of Richfield pressured the Rio Grande to use the portion of the line that was still intact and build a connection to an existing Union Pacific line (the Sharp Subdivision) near Nephi, roughly parallel to State Route 28. However, the railroad determined with the additional cost of acquiring land for the new right-of-way, the cost would be comparable to rebuilding the old route. In addition, the Rio Grande would have to pay trackage rights to the Union Pacific for the connection from Nephi, which would further erode profits on a line that was barely profitable. In the end, the Rio Grande sold the line to a scrap dealer who dismantled it. Since the line's closure, there have been multiple proposals to rebuild it. Studies note the loss of railroad access to the region has affected the ability of local industries to compete with producers in other regions that have rail access. A 2002 study placed the cost of rebuilding the modified routing of the Marysvale Branch line at \$80 million, while a 2015 study placed the cost of rebuilding the line as far south as Salina at \$110 million (equivalent to \$ million in 2023). The 2015 study listed restoring rail access to the region as one of three priorities for new freight rail lines in a study presented by the Utah Department of Transportation detailing the current state of Utah's rail infrastructure. It specifically noted an increase of coal hauling trucks on highways and streets in the area due to the loss of rail access.
#### Highways
The new alignment of US‐6/US‐89 was opened on December 30, 1983. The dedication was planned for the next day, but lines of cars formed at the barricades as soon as news broke that the highway was complete. Some were residents anxious to see the area or visit relatives they had not seen since the slide; others were truck drivers frustrated by long detours. The Highway Patrol requested the ceremony be canceled and the highway opened early, as they were unable to disperse the crowds.
When the first traffic flowed, crews had not finished some final tasks, such as striping the roadway. Motorists saw a relocation with several mountain cuts built high up the canyon wall, with a view of the slide and former lake. The roadbed was not expected to last, as weather conditions had been unfavorable when the asphalt was laid. Two mountain cuts were unstable, requiring several months of work before they could be left unattended. During this time, the state stationed two full-time watches at the cuts, who would close the road while falling rocks were cleared. The cut through Billies Mountain was described by the construction crews as a new, man-made mountain pass.
The pending completion of the again-rebuilt US‐6/US‐89, with properly laid asphalt and stable rock cuts, was announced in November 1984, 18 months after the closure of the original alignment. Starting in 1993, the Utah Department of Transportation began discussions with former Thistle residents to build a memorial to the town. The department maintains a view area overlooking the townsite along US‐6/US‐89.
### Coal Hollow fire
On August 4, 2018, a lightning bolt sparked a large fire in Spanish Fork Canyon. More than 30,000 acres (47 sq mi; 120 km<sup>2</sup>) of land were destroyed by the fire. Residents of the canyon were evacuated as a precaution. The fire affected Thistle, extending construction projects. Later that year vandals burned one of the remaining homes to the ground.
## Geology and climate
The landslide area near Thistle is a valley formed in a depression in an area of bedrock known as the Charleston–Nebo thrust plate. The rock in this plate dates from the Permian and Pennsylvanian to the Jurassic periods, but the plate appears to have formed elsewhere and moved to the modern Thistle area during the Late Cretaceous epoch. The layers of sedimentary rock above the thrust plate are younger, dating to the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. The rock debris in the landslide itself comes from the North Horn and Ankareh formations.
The area around Thistle has always been prone to landslides. Pre-historic landslides created the more gentle slopes that made the area usable as a transportation corridor across the Wasatch Mountains. Minor landslides have been frequently observed, and continue to occur. The largest recorded landslides are the 1983 slide which destroyed the town, and a smaller one in 1998.
The climate at downstream Spanish Fork is classified as arid with four distinct seasons. Temperatures range from an average high of 92 °F (33 °C) in July and an average low of 20 °F (−7 °C) in January. Except for the spring months, precipitation averages less than 2 inches (5.1 cm) per month.
## See also
- List of ghost towns in Utah
- Other effects of the 1983 flooding
- Utah Flood of 1983
- Colorado River Floods of 1983
- Great Salt Lake#West Desert Pumping Project – engineering effort to mitigate the flooding
- Other towns established by the railroad to service or aid trains over the grade of the Wasatch Plateau
- Mill Fork, Utah
- Tucker, Utah
- Colton, Utah
- Soldier Summit, Utah
- Helper, Utah |
10,534,014 | American Cream Draft | 1,166,089,542 | American draft horse breed | [
"Conservation Priority Breeds of the Livestock Conservancy",
"Horse breeds originating in the United States"
]
| The American Cream Draft is an American breed of draft horse, characterized by the cream or "gold champagne" color of its coat. It was developed in Iowa during the early twentieth century from a cream-colored mare named Old Granny. A breed registry was formed in 1944 but became inactive for several decades when breed numbers dropped due to the mechanization of farming. It was reactivated in 1982 and population numbers have slowly grown since then. It is a rare breed: its conservation status is considered critical by The Livestock Conservancy and the Equus Survival Trust.
## Characteristics
American Creams have refined heads, with flat facial profiles that are neither concave nor convex. They have wide chests, sloping shoulders and short, strong backs. Their ribs are well sprung, and they are short-coupled with well-muscled hindquarters and with strong well-proportioned legs set well apart. They are sure-footed with strong hooves, and their movement is free and easy. According to enthusiasts, the breed has a calm, willing temperament, particularly suited for owners who are new to handling draft horses. Mares stand high and weigh 1,500–1,600 pounds (680–730 kg), while stallions and geldings stand and weigh 1,800 pounds (820 kg) or more.
The ideal coat color for the breed is a medium cream with pink skin, amber eyes and a white mane and tail. The characteristic cream color of the breed is produced by the champagne gene. Recognized colors include light, medium and dark cream, with amber or hazel eyes. A cream mare with dark skin and a light mane and tail may be accepted by the registry as foundation stock, while stallions must have pink skin and white manes and tails to be registered. Purebred American Cream foals that are too dark to be accepted into the main breed registry may be recorded into an appendix registry. The appendix will also accept half-bred Cream Draft horses crossed with other draft bloodlines if they meet certain requirements, and the registry provides an upgrade system that uses appendix horses to strengthen genes, increase breed numbers, and allow more diversified bloodlines.
### Color genetics
The champagne gene produces diluted color, and the gold champagne body color, light skin, light eyes, and ivory mane and tail associated with the American Cream Draft are produced by the action of the champagne gene on a chestnut base coat. In the adult horse, the skin is pink with abundant dark freckles or mottling, and the eyes are hazel or amber. The eyes of champagne foals are blue at birth, darkening as they age, and a foal's skin is bright pink. The breed registry describes foals' eyes as "almost white", which is consistent with the nature of the champagne blue foal eye, which is creamier than other types of blue eye.
Champagne is a dominant trait, based on a mutation in the SLC36A1 gene. The mapping of the gene was announced in 2008, and the American Cream Draft cross was among the breeds studied. The authors of this study noted that it was difficult to distinguish between homozygous and heterozygous animals, thus distinguishing champagne from incomplete dominant dilutions such as the cream gene. However they noted that homozygotes may have less mottling or a slightly lighter hair color than heterozygotes. Anecdotal reports also note mild differences, including lighter freckling, skin and hair coat, though eye color remains the same.
Dark-skinned American Cream Draft horses are actually chestnuts, as the breed is not homozygous for the champagne gene; only one allele is needed to produce the proper color. Champagne dilutes any base coat color, and in the American Cream Draft, the underlying genetic base color is chestnut. As of 2003, scientists have not found the breed to carry the cream gene, even though breeders refer to the desired color as "cream". The American Cream Draft is never cremello or white, and though the gold coat color with a white mane and tail resembles palomino, the breed's defining characteristics are the result of the champagne gene.
### Junctional epidermolysis bullosa
The autosomal recessive genetic disease junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB) has been found in some American Cream Drafts. This is a lethal genetic disorder that causes newborn foals to lose large areas of skin and have other abnormalities, normally leading to euthanasia of the animal. It is most commonly associated with Belgian horses, but is also found in other draft breeds. A DNA test was developed in 2002, and JEB can be avoided as long as two carriers are not bred to one another. The American Cream registry states that it has "been pro-active in testing its registered animals since JEB was discovered".
## Breed history
The American Cream Draft descends from a foundation mare named Old Granny. She was probably foaled between 1900 and 1905, and was first noticed at an auction in Story County, Iowa, in 1911 and purchased by Harry Lakin, a well-known stock dealer. She was eventually sold to Nelson Brothers Farm in Jewell, Iowa. Her breeding is not known, but she was cream-colored and many of her foals were as well; they sold for above-average prices because of their color. Her cream-colored coat, pink skin and amber eyes are defining standards for the breed, and the color is now known as gold champagne. In 1946, two years after the breed registry was formed, 98 percent of the horses registered could be traced back to Old Granny.
In 1920, a colt of Old Granny's named Nelson's Buck No. 2 impressed veterinarian Eric Christian to the point that Christian asked the Nelsons not to geld him. They agreed to let him remain a stallion, and he sired several cream-colored foals, though only one was registered: a colt named Yancy No. 3, whose dam was a black mare of Percheron breeding. Yancy sired Knox 1st, born in 1926 to an unregistered bay mare of mixed Shire ancestry. From this sire line, in 1931, a great-great-grandson of Nelson's Buck was born, named Silver Lace No. 9. Silver Lace was to become one of the most influential stallions of the American Cream breed. His dam was a Belgian mare with light chestnut coloring, and she is credited with Silver Lace's size – at 2,230 pounds (1,010 kg) he weighed considerably more than most of his bloodline. Silver Lace quickly became a popular stallion in Iowa. However, stallions standing for public stud service in Iowa were required to be registered with the Iowa Department of Agriculture, and this agency only allowed horses of recognized breeds. As Silver Lace was not registered with any breed registry, his owners created a breeding syndicate, and mare owners who bought shares in the "Silver Lace Horse Company" could breed their mares to him. However, his main breeding career coincided with the economic struggles of the Great Depression, and Silver Lace was at one point hidden in a neighbor's barn to prevent his sale at auction. Another significant foundation stallion was Ead's Captain, whose bloodlines appear in about one-third of all American Cream Drafts.
Around 1935, despite the Depression, a few breeders started to linebreed and inbreed cream-colored horses to fix their color and type. In particular, C.T. Rierson began buying cream-colored mares sired by Silver Lace and developing the American Cream breed in earnest. In 1944, a breed association, the American Cream Association, was formed by 20 owners and breeders and granted a corporate charter in the state of Iowa. In 1950, the breed was finally recognized by the Iowa Department of Agriculture, based on a 1948 recommendation by the National Stallion Enrollment Board.
The mechanization of farming in the mid-20th century led to a decrease in the overall draft horse population, and with Rierson's death in 1957, American Cream Draft numbers began to decline. By the late 1950s there were only 200 living American Creams registered, owned by only 41 breeders. The registry became inactive until 1982 when three families who had retained their herds reactivated and reorganized the registry. In 1994, the organization officially changed its name to the American Cream Draft Horse Association (ACDHA).
### 1990s to the present
In 1982, owners began blood-typing their horses, and by 1990, genetic testing found that "compared with other draft breeds and based upon gene marker data, the Creams form a distinct group within the draft horses." The American Cream Draft was found to have a genetic relationship with the Belgian breed that was no closer than the ones it had with the Percheron, Suffolk Punch and Haflinger breeds. Registry records dating to the early 20th century show no bloodlines other than draft breeding. As of 2000 there were 222 registered horses, a number that increased to 350 as of 2004. Of these, 40 were "tracking horses" – either purebred American Creams that did not meet color requirements or crossbred horses that mix American Cream and other draft blood, but still meet the physical requirements for the registry. These tracking horses are allowed by certain regulations to be used as breeding stock, with the resulting foals able to be registered as purebred American Creams. Around 30 new horses are registered each year. The Livestock Conservancy considers the breed to be at "critical" status, meaning that the estimated global population of the breed is less than 2,000 and there are less than 200 registrations annually in the US. The Equus Survival Trust also considers the population to be "critical", meaning that there are between 100 and 300 active adult breeding mares in existence today. To help replenish numbers, the ACDHA has developed regulations to permit foals to be registered when produced via methods such as artificial insemination and embryo transfer. Careful use of the appendix registry also allows numbers to increase.
The American Creams that live in Colonial Williamsburg have been called "the most famous of all American Cream Draft horses". In the village they are used for wagon and carriage rides, and as of 2006, there is a breeding program run by Colonial Williamsburg that is working to increase breed numbers. |
408,198 | King vulture | 1,153,617,586 | Large bird found in Central and South America | [
"Birds described in 1758",
"Birds of Central America",
"Birds of South America",
"Birds of the Caribbean",
"Cathartidae",
"Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus"
]
| The king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa) is a large bird found in Central and South America. It is a member of the New World vulture family Cathartidae. This vulture lives predominantly in tropical lowland forests stretching from southern Mexico to northern Argentina. It is the only surviving member of the genus Sarcoramphus, although fossil members are known.
Large and predominantly white, the king vulture has gray to black ruff, flight, and tail feathers. The head and neck are bald, with the skin color varying, including yellow, orange, blue, purple, and red. The king vulture has a very noticeable orange fleshy caruncle on its beak. This vulture is a scavenger and it often makes the initial cut into a fresh carcass. It also displaces smaller New World vulture species from a carcass. King vultures have been known to live for up to 30 years in captivity.
King vultures were popular figures in the Mayan codices as well as in local folklore and medicine. Although currently listed as Least Concern by the IUCN, they are decreasing in number, due primarily to habitat loss.
## Etymology, taxonomy and systematics
The king vulture was originally described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae as Vultur papa, the type specimen originally collected in Suriname. It was reassigned to the genus Sarcoramphus in 1805 by French zoologist André Marie Constant Duméril. The generic name is a Neo-Latin compound formed from the Greek words σάρξ (sarx, "flesh", the combining form of which is σαρκο-) and ῥάμφος (rhamphos, "crooked beak of bird of prey"). The genus name is often misspelled as Sarcorhamphus, improperly retaining the Greek rough breathing despite agglutination with the previous word-element. The bird was also assigned to the genus Gyparchus by Constantin Wilhelm Lambert Gloger in 1841, but this classification is not used in modern literature since Sarcoramphus has priority as the earlier name. The species name is derived from Latin word papa "bishop", alluding the bird's plumage resembling the clothing of one. The king vulture's closest living relative is the Andean condor, Vultur gryphus. Some authors have even put these species in a separate subfamily from the other New World vultures, though most authors consider this subdivision unnecessary.
There are two theories on how the king vulture earned the "king" part of its common name. The first is that the name is a reference to its habit of displacing smaller vultures from a carcass and eating its fill while they wait. An alternative theory reports that the name is derived from Mayan legends, in which the bird was a king who served as a messenger between humans and the gods. This bird was also known as the "white crow" by the Spanish in Paraguay. It was called cozcacuauhtli in Nahuatl, derived from cozcatl "collar" and cuauhtli "bird of prey".
The exact systematic placement of the king vulture and the remaining six species of New World vultures remains unclear. Though both are similar in appearance and have similar ecological roles, the New World and Old World vultures evolved from different ancestors in different parts of the world. Just how different the two are is currently under debate, with some earlier authorities suggesting that the New World vultures are more closely related to storks. More recent authorities maintain their overall position in the order Falconiformes along with the Old World vultures or place them in their own order, Cathartiformes. The South American Classification Committee has removed the New World vultures from Ciconiiformes and instead placed them in Incertae sedis, but notes that a move to Falconiformes or Cathartiformes is possible. Like other New World vultures, the king vulture has a diploid chromosome number of 80.
### Fossil record and evolution
The genus Sarcoramphus, which today contains only the king vulture, had a wider distribution in the past. The Kern vulture (Sarcoramphus kernense), lived in southwestern North America during the mid-Pliocene (Piacenzian), some 3.5–2.5 million years ago). It was a little-known component of the Blancan/Delmontian faunal stages. The only material is a broken distal humerus fossil, found at Pozo Creek, Kern County, California. As per Loye H. Miller's original description, "[c]ompared with [S. papa] the type conforms in general form and curvature except for its greater size and robustness." The large span in time between the existence of the two species suggests that the Kern vulture might be distinct, but as the fossil is somewhat damaged and rather non-diagnostic, even assignment to this genus is not completely certain. During the Late Pleistocene, another species probably assignable to the genus, Sarcoramphus fisheri, occurred in Peru. A supposed king vulture relative from Quaternary cave deposits on Cuba turned out to be bones of the eagle-sized hawk Buteogallus borrasi (formerly in Titanohierax).
Little can be said of the evolutionary history of the genus, mainly because remains of other Neogene New World vultures are usually younger or even more fragmentary. The teratorns held sway over the ecological niche of the extant group especially in North America. The Kern vulture seems to slightly precede the main bout of the Great American Interchange, and it is notable that the living diversity of New World vultures seems to have originated in Central America. The Kern vulture would therefore represent a northwards divergence possibly sister to the S. fisheri – S. papa lineage. The fossil record, though scant, supports the theory that the ancestral king vultures and South American condors separated at least some 5 mya.
### Bartram's "painted vulture"
A "painted vulture" ("Sarcoramphus sacra" or "S. papa sacra") is described in William Bartram's notes of his travels in Florida during the 1770s. This bird's description matches the appearance of the king vulture except that it had a white, not black, tail. Bartram describes the bird as being relatively common and even claimed to have collected one. However, no other naturalists record the painted vulture in Florida and sixty years after the sighting its validity began to be questioned, leading to what John Cassin described as the most inviting problem in North American ornithology. An independent account and painting was made of a similar bird by Eleazar Albin in 1734.
While most early ornithologists defended Bartram's honesty, Joel Asaph Allen argued that the painted vulture was mythical and that Bartram mixed elements of different species to create this bird. Allen pointed out that the birds' behavior, as recorded by Bartram, is in complete agreement with the caracara's. For example, Bartram observed the birds following wildfires to scavenge for burned insects and box turtles. Such behavior is typical of caracaras, but the larger and shorter-legged king vultures are not well adapted for walking. The crested caracara (Caracara cheriway) was believed to be common and conspicuous in Bartram's days, but it is notably absent from Bartram's notes if the painted vulture is accepted as a Sarcoramphus. However, Francis Harper argued that the bird could, as in the 1930s, have been rare in the area Bartram visited and could have been missed.
Harper noticed that Bartram's notes were considerably altered and expanded in the printed edition, and the detail of the white tail appeared in print for the first time in this revised account. Harper believed that Bartram could have tried to fill in details of the bird from memory and got the tail coloration wrong. Harper and several other researchers have attempted to prove the former existence of the king vulture, or a close relative, in Florida at this late date, suggesting that the population was in the process of extinction and finally disappeared during a cold spell. Additionally, William McAtee, noting the tendency of birds to form Floridian subspecies, suggested that the white tail could be a sign that the painted vulture was a subspecies of the king vulture.
## Description
Excluding the two species of condors, the king vulture is the largest of the New World vultures. Its overall length ranges from 67 to 81 cm (26–32 in) and its wingspan is 1.2 to 2 m (4–7 ft). Its weight ranges from 2.7 to 4.5 kg (6–10 lb). An imposing bird, the adult king vulture has predominantly white plumage, which has a slight rose-yellow tinge to it. In stark contrast, the wing coverts, flight feathers and tail are dark grey to black, as is the prominent thick neck ruff. The head and neck are devoid of feathers, the skin shades of red and purple on the head, vivid orange on the neck and yellow on the throat. On the head, the skin is wrinkled and folded, and there is a highly noticeable irregular golden crest attached on the cere above its orange and black bill; this caruncle does not fully form until the bird's fourth year.
The king vulture has, relative to its size, the largest skull and braincase, and strongest bill, of the New World vultures. This bill has a hooked tip and a sharp cutting edge. The bird has broad wings and a short, broad, and square tail. The irises of its eyes are white and bordered by bright red sclera. Unlike some New World vultures, the king vulture lacks eyelashes. It also has gray legs and long, thick claws.
The vulture is minimally sexually dimorphic, with no difference in plumage and little in size between males and females. The juvenile vulture has a dark bill and eyes, and a downy, gray neck that soon begins to turn the orange of an adult. Younger vultures are a slate gray overall, and, while they look similar to the adult by the third year, they do not completely molt into adult plumage until they are around five or six years of age. Jack Eitniear of the Center for the Study of Tropical Birds in San Antonio, Texas reviewed the plumage of birds in captivity of various ages and found that ventral feathers were the first to begin turning white from two years of age onwards, followed by wing feathers, until the full adult plumage was achieved. The final immature stages being a scattered black feathers in the otherwise white lesser wing coverts.
The vulture's head and neck are featherless as an adaptation for hygiene, though there are black bristles on parts of the head; this lack of feathers prevents bacteria from the carrion it eats from ruining its feathers and exposes the skin to the sterilizing effects of the sun.
Dark-plumaged immature birds may be confused with turkey vultures, but soar with flat wings, while the pale plumaged adults could feasibly be confused with the wood stork, although the latter's long neck and legs allow for easy recognition from afar.
## Distribution and habitat
The king vulture inhabits an estimated 14 million square kilometres (5,400,000 sq mi) between southern Mexico and northern Argentina. In South America, it does not live west of the Andes, except in western Ecuador, north-western Colombia and far north-western Venezuela. It primarily inhabits undisturbed tropical lowland forests as well as savannas and grasslands with these forests nearby. It is often seen near swamps or marshy places in the forests. This bird is often the most numerous or only vulture present in primary lowland forests in its range, but in the Amazon rainforest it is typically outnumbered by the greater yellow-headed vulture, while typically outnumbered by the lesser yellow-headed, turkey and American black vulture in more open habitats. King vultures generally do not live above 1,500 m (5,000 ft), although are found in places at 2,500 m (8,000 ft) altitude east of the Andes, and have been rarely recorded up to 3,300 m (11,000 ft) They inhabit the emergent forest level, or above the canopy. Pleistocene remains have been recovered from Buenos Aires Province in central Argentina, over 700 km (450 miles) south of its current range, giving rise to speculation on the habitat there at the time which had not been thought to be suitable.
## Ecology and behavior
The king vulture soars for hours effortlessly, only flapping its wings infrequently. While in flight, its wings are held flat with slightly raised tips, and from a distance the vulture can appear to be headless while in flight. Its wing beats are deep and strong. Birds have been observed engaging in tandem flight on two occasions in Venezuela by naturalist Marsha Schlee, who has proposed it could be a part of courtship behaviour.
Despite its size and gaudy coloration, this vulture is quite inconspicuous when it is perched in trees. While perched, it holds its head lowered and thrust forward. It is non-migratory and, unlike the turkey, lesser yellow-headed and American black vulture, it generally lives alone or in small family groups. Groups of up to 12 birds have been observed bathing and drinking in a pool above a waterfall in Belize. One or two birds generally descend to feed at a carcass, although occasionally up to ten or so may gather if there is significant amount of food. King vultures have lived up to 30 years in captivity, though a male transferred from the Sacramento Zoo to the Queens Zoo is over 47 years old. Vivian, a female King Vulture at Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, TX, turns 70 years old in 2022, and is the oldest known King Vulture in an AZA-accredited facility. Their lifespan in the wild is unknown. This vulture uses urohidrosis, defecating on its legs, to lower its body temperature. Despite its bill and large size, it is relatively unaggressive at a kill. The king vulture lacks a voice box, although it can make low croaking noises and wheezing sounds in courtship, and bill-snapping noises when threatened. Its only natural predators are snakes, which will prey upon the vulture's eggs and young, and large cats such as jaguars, which may surprise and kill an adult vulture at a carcass.
### Breeding
The reproductive behaviour of the king vulture in the wild is poorly known, and much knowledge has been gained from observing birds in captivity, particularly at the Paris Menagerie. An adult king vulture sexually matures when it is about four or five years old, with females maturing slightly earlier than males. The birds mainly breed during the dry season. A king vulture mates for life and generally lays a single unmarked white egg in its nest in a hollow in a tree. To ward off potential predators, the vultures keep their nests foul-smelling. Both parents incubate the egg for the 52 to 58 days before it hatches. If the egg is lost, it will often be replaced after about six weeks. The parents share incubating and brooding duties until the chick is about a week old, after which they often stand guard rather than brood. The young are semi-altricial—they are helpless when born but are covered in downy feathers (truly altricial birds are born naked), and their eyes are open at birth. Developing quickly, the chicks are fully alert by their second day, and able to beg and wriggle around the nest, and preen themselves and peck by their third day. They start growing their second coat of white down by day 10, and stand on their toes by day 20. From one to three months of age, chicks walk around and explore the vicinity of the nest, and take their first flights at about three months of age.
### Feeding
The king vulture eats anything from cattle carcasses down through corpses of monkeys and other arboreal mammals to beached fish and dead lizards. In densely forested areas, mammals likely to include many of the abundant sloths (Choloepus/Bradypus) whose combined ranges coincide largely with that of this vulture, but elsewhere it has adapted well to domestic livestock. Principally a carrion eater, there are isolated reports of it killing and eating injured animals, newborn calves and small lizards. Although it locates food by vision, the role smell has in how it specifically finds carrion has been debated. Consensus has been that it does not detect odours, and instead follows the smaller turkey and greater yellow-headed vultures, which do have a sense of smell, to a carcass, but a 1991 study demonstrated that the king vulture could find carrion in the forest without the aid of other vultures, suggesting that it locates food using an olfactory sense. The king vulture primarily eats carrion found in the forest, though it is known to venture onto nearby savannas in search of food. Once it has found a carcass, the king vulture displaces the other vultures because of its large size and strong bill. However, when it is at the same kill as the larger Andean condor, the king vulture always defers to it. Using its bill to tear, it makes the initial cut in a fresh carcass. This allows the smaller, weaker-beaked vultures, which can not open the hide of a carcass, access to the carcass after the king vulture has fed. The vulture's tongue is rasp-like, which allows it to pull flesh off of the carcass's bones. Generally, it only eats the skin and harder parts of the tissue of its meal. The king vulture has also been recorded eating fallen fruit of the moriche palm when carrion is scarce in Bolívar state, Venezuela.
## Conservation
This bird is a species of least concern to the IUCN, with an estimated range of 14 million square kilometres (5,400,000 sq mi) and between 10,000 and 100,000 wild individuals. However, there is evidence that suggests a decline in population, though it is not significant enough to cause it to be listed. This decline is due primarily to habitat destruction and poaching. Although distinctive, its habit of perching in tall trees and flying at altitude render it difficult to monitor.
## Relationship with humans
The king vulture is one of the most common species of birds represented in the Maya codices. Its glyph is easily distinguishable by the knob on the bird's beak and by the concentric circles that make up the bird's eyes. Sometimes the bird is portrayed as a god with a human body and a bird head. According to Maya mythology, this god often carried messages between humans and the other gods. It may also be used to represent Cozcacuauhtli, the thirteenth day of the month in the Aztec calendar (13 Reed). An ocellated turkey (Meleagris ocellata) was also considered to be the bird depicted, but the hooked bill and wattle point to the raptor.
The bird's blood and feathers were also used to cure diseases. The king vulture is also a popular subject on the stamps of the countries within its range. It appeared on a stamp for El Salvador in 1963, Belize in 1978, Guatemala in 1979, Honduras in 1997, Bolivia in 1998, and Nicaragua in 1999.
Because of its large size and beauty, the king vulture is an attraction at zoos around the world. The king vulture is one of several bird species with an AZA studbook, which is kept by Shelly Collinsworth of the Fort Worth Zoo. |
648,216 | Sholay | 1,171,522,635 | 1975 film by Ramesh Sippy | [
"1970s Hindi-language films",
"1970s Urdu-language films",
"1970s action adventure films",
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"1970s adventure comedy films",
"1970s masala films",
"1975 Western (genre) films",
"1975 films",
"Film censorship in India",
"Films about organised crime in India",
"Films about outlaws",
"Films about widowhood in India",
"Films adapted into television shows",
"Films directed by Ramesh Sippy",
"Films scored by R. D. Burman",
"Films shot in Karnataka",
"Films with screenplays by Salim–Javed",
"Indian 3D films",
"Indian Western (genre) films",
"Indian action adventure films",
"Indian action comedy films",
"Indian adventure comedy films",
"Indian buddy films",
"Indian epic films",
"Indian films about revenge",
"Indian musical films",
"Sholay",
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]
| Sholay (, ) is a 1975 Indian Hindi-language action-adventure film directed by Ramesh Sippy, produced by his father G. P. Sippy, and written by Salim–Javed. The film is about two criminals, Veeru (Dharmendra) and Jai (Amitabh Bachchan), hired by a retired police officer (Sanjeev Kumar) to capture the ruthless dacoit Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan). Hema Malini and Jaya Bhaduri also star, as Veeru and Jai's love interests, Basanti and Radha, respectively. The music was composed by R D Burman.
The film was shot in the rocky terrain of Ramanagara, in the southern state of Karnataka, over a span of two and a half years. After the Central Board of Film Certification mandated the removal of several violent scenes, Sholay was released with a length of 198 minutes. In 1990, the original director's cut of 204 minutes became available on home media. When first released, Sholay received negative critical reviews and a tepid commercial response, but favourable word-of-mouth publicity helped it to become a box office success. It broke records for continuous showings in many theatres across India, and ran for more than five years at Mumbai's Minerva theatre. The film was also an overseas success in the Soviet Union. It was the highest-grossing Indian film ever at the time, and was the highest-grossing film in India up until Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994). By numerous accounts, Sholay remains one of the highest-grossing Indian films of all time, adjusted for inflation.
Sholay is often regarded as one of the greatest and most influential Indian film of all time. It was ranked first in the British Film Institute's 2002 poll of "Top 10 Indian Films" of all time. In 2005, the judges of the 50th Filmfare Awards named it the Best Film of 50 Years. The film is a Dacoit Western (sometimes called a "Curry Western"), combining the conventions of Indian dacoit films with that of Spaghetti Westerns along with elements of Samurai cinema. Sholay is also a defining example of the masala film, which mixes several genres in one work. Scholars have noted several themes in the film, such as glorification of violence, conformation to feudal ethos, debate between social order and mobilised usurpers, homosocial bonding, and the film's role as a national allegory. The combined sales of the original soundtrack, scored by R. D. Burman, and the dialogues (released separately), set new sales records. The film's dialogues and certain characters became extremely popular, contributing to numerous cultural memes and becoming part of India's daily vernacular. In January 2014, Sholay was re-released to theatres in the 3D format.
## Plot
Jai and Veeru are small-time crooks who are released from prison, where they are recruited by a former Inspector Thakur Baldev Singh to capture a notorious dacoit named Gabbar Singh wanted for ₹50,000, as the duo had saved Thakur from a train robbery which makes Thakur to recruit them for the mission with an additional ₹20,000 reward. The duo leave for Thakur's village in Ramgarh, where Gabbar is residing and terrorizing the villagers.
After reaching Ramgarh, Veeru falls for Basanti, a feisty talkative horse-cart driver. Jai meets Thakur's widowed daughter-in-law Radha and falls for her, who later accepts his feelings. The two thwarts Gabbar's dacoits, who came to extort money. During the festival of Holi, Gabbar's gang attacks the villagers where they corner Jai and Veeru, but the duo manage to attack and chase them away from the village. The duo are upset at Thakur's inaction (when Jai and Veeru were cornered, Thakur had a gun within his reach, but does not help them) and consider calling off the mission. Thakur reveals that few years ago, Gabbar had killed his family members (except Radha), and had both his arms cut off, where he concealed the dismemberment by always wearing a shawl, which is the sole reason why he could not use the gun.
Realizing this, Jai and Veeru take an oath that they will capture Gabbar alive. After learning the duo's heroics, Gabbar kills the local imam Rahim Chacha's son Ahmed and forces the villagers to make Jai and Veeru surrender to him. The villagers refuse and instead get the duo to kill few of Gabbar's henchmen. Gabbar retaliates by having his men capture Veeru and Basanti. Jai arrives and attacks the hideout, where the trio are able to flee Gabbar's hideout with dacoits in pursuit. Shooting from behind a rock, Jai and Veeru nearly run out of ammunition. Unaware that Jai was wounded in the gunfight, Veeru is forced to leave for more ammunition and also to drop Basanti at a safe place.
Jai sacrifices himself by using his last bullet to ignite dynamite sticks on a bridge from close range, killing Gabbar's men. Veeru returns, and Jai dies, leaving Radha and Veeru devastated. Enraged, Veeru attacks Gabbar's den and kills his remaining men where he catches Gabbar and nearly beats him to death. Thakur appears and reminds Veeru of the vow to hand over Gabbar alive. Thakur uses his spike-soled shoes to severely injure Gabbar and his hands. The police arrive and arrest Gabbar for his crimes. After Jai's funeral, Veeru leaves Ramgarh and finds Basanti waiting for him on the train.
## Cast
## Production
### Development
The screenwriter pair Salim–Javed, consisting of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, began narrating the idea for Sholay as a four-line snippet to filmmakers in 1973. The idea was rejected by two producer/director teams, including directors Manmohan Desai and Prakash Mehra. About six months after the release of Zanjeer (1973), Salim-Javed contacted G. P. Sippy and his son Ramesh Sippy, and narrated the four-line snippet to them. Ramesh Sippy liked the concept of Sholay and hired them to develop it. The original idea of the film involved an army officer who decided to hire two ex-soldiers to avenge the murder of his family. The army officer was later changed to a policeman because Sippy felt that it would be difficult to get permission to shoot scenes depicting army activities. Salim-Javed completed the script in one month, incorporating names and personality traits of their friends and acquaintances. The film's script and dialogues are in Hindustani; Salim-Javed wrote the dialogues in Urdu script, which was then transcribed by an assistant into Devanagari script so that Hindi readers could read the Urdu dialogues.
The film's plot was loosely styled after Akira Kurosawa's 1954 samurai cinema film, Seven Samurai. Sholay is a defining example of the Dacoit Western film, combining the conventions of Indian dacoit films, especially Mehboob Khan's Mother India (1957) and the Dilip Kumar and Nitin Bose film Gunga Jumna (1961), with that of Westerns, especially Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns such as Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) as well as The Magnificent Seven (1960). It also has some plot elements borrowed from the Indian films Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971) and Khote Sikkay (1973). A scene depicting an attempted train robbery was inspired by a similar scene in Gunga Jumna, and has also been compared to a similar scene in North West Frontier (1959). A scene showing the massacre of Thakur's family has been compared with the massacre of the McBain family in Once Upon a Time in the West. Sholay may have also been influenced by Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, such as The Wild Bunch (1969) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
The character Gabbar Singh was modelled on a real-life dacoit of the same name who had menaced the villages around Gwalior in the 1950s. Any policeman captured by the real Gabbar Singh had his ears and nose cut off, and was released as a warning to other policemen. Gabbar Singh was also influenced by larger-than-life characters in Pakistani author Ibn-e-Safi's Urdu novels, Dilip Kumar's dacoit character Gunga from the film Gunga Jumna who speaks with a similar mixed Khariboli and Awadhi dialect, and villains from Sergio Leone's films. Sippy wanted to do away with the clichéd idea of a man becoming a dacoit due to societal issues, as was the case in other films, and focused on Gabbar being an emblem of pure evil. To emphasise the point of Gabbar being a new type of villain, Sippy avoided the typical tropes of dacoits wearing dhotis and pagris and sporting a Tika and worshipping "Ma Bhavani"; Gabbar would be wearing army fatigues. The character of the jailer, played by Asrani was influenced by Adolf Hitler. Javed Akhtar brought a book on World War II which had several pictures of Hitler posing to set the typical posture of the character in the film. Asrani spiced up his character with some ideas about Hitler's speech delivery he had heard from a teacher in FTII. The trademark 'Ha Ha' at the end of his monologues was inspired by a similar performance by Jack Lemmon in The Great Race. Soorma Bhopali, a minor comic relief character, was based on an acquaintance of actor Jagdeep, a forest officer from Bhopal named Soorma. The real-life Soorma eventually threatened to press charges when people who had viewed the film began referring to him as a woodcutter. The main characters' names, Jai and Veeru, mean "victory" and "heroism" in Hindi.
### Casting
The producers considered Danny Denzongpa for the role of bandit chief Gabbar Singh, but he could not accept it as he was committed to act in Feroz Khan's Dharmatma (1975), under production at the same time. Amjad Khan, who was the second choice, prepared himself for the part by reading the book Abhishapta Chambal, which told of the exploits of Chambal dacoits. The book was written by Taroon Kumar Bhaduri, the father of fellow cast member Jaya Bhaduri. Sanjeev Kumar also wanted to play the role of Gabbar Singh, but Salim-Javed "felt he had the audience's sympathy through roles he'd done before; Gabbar had to be completely hateful."
Sippy wanted Shatrughan Sinha to play the part of Jai, but there were already several big stars signed, and Amitabh Bachchan, who was not very popular yet, lobbied hard to get the part for himself. He was cast after Salim-Javed recommended him for Sholay in 1973; Bachchan's performance in their first collaboration, Zanjeer, convinced Salim-Javed he was the right actor for the part. Salim-Javed were also impressed with Bachchan's performance in Raaste Kaa Patthar (1972), and at Bachchan's request, Dharmendra had personally put in a word for him. All these factors ensured that the role was Bachchan's.
As cast members had read the script ahead of time, many were interested in playing different parts. Pran was considered for the role of Thakur Baldev Singh, but Sippy thought Sanjeev Kumar was a better choice. Initially, Salim-Javed approached Dilip Kumar to play Thakur's role, but he turned down the offer; Dilip Kumar later said it was one of the few films he regretted turning down. Initially, Dharmendra was also interested to play the role of Thakur. He eventually gave up the role when Sippy informed him that Sanjeev Kumar would play Veeru if that happened, and would thus be paired with Hema Malini, who Dharmendra was trying to woo. Dharmendra knew that Kumar was also interested in Malini. Malini was reluctant to play the role of a tangewali, more so after Sippy told her that the film belongs to Sanjeev Kumar and Amjad Khan, but she trusted Sippy to give her a meaty role, given that he had played a huge role in essaying her stardom through their previous collaborations.
During the film's production, four of the leads became romantically involved. Bachchan married Bhaduri four months before filming started. This led to shooting delays when Bhaduri became pregnant with their daughter Shweta. By the time the film released, she was pregnant with their son Abhishek. Dharmendra had begun courting Malini during their earlier film Seeta Aur Geeta (1972), also directed by Sippy, and used the location shoot of Sholay to further pursue her. During their romantic scenes, Dharmendra would often pay the light boys to spoil the shot, thereby ensuring many retakes which would allow him to spend more time with her. The couple married five years after the film's release.
### Filming
Much of Sholay was shot in the rocky terrain of Ramanagara, a town near Bangalore, Karnataka. The filmmakers had to build a road from the Bangalore highway to Ramanagara for convenient access to the sets. Art director Ram Yedekar had an entire township built on the site. A prison set was constructed near Rajkamal Studios in Bombay, also outdoors, to match the natural lighting of the on-location sets. One part of Ramanagara was for a time called "Sippy Nagar" as a tribute to the director of the film. As of 2010, a visit to the "Sholay rocks" (where much of the film was shot) was still being offered to tourists travelling through Ramanagara.
Filming began on location on 3 October 1973, with a scene featuring Bachchan and Bhaduri. The film had a lavish production for its time (with frequent banquets and parties for the cast), took two and a half years to make, and went over budget. One reason for its high cost was that Sippy re-filmed scenes many times to get his desired effect. "Yeh Dosti", a 5-minute song sequence, took 21 days to shoot, two short scenes in which Radha lights lamps took 20 days to film because of lighting problems, and the shooting of the scene in which Gabbar kills the imam's son lasted 19 days. The train robbery sequence, shot on the Bombay–Poona railway route near Panvel, took more than 7 weeks to complete.
Sholay was the first Indian film to have a stereophonic soundtrack and to use the 70 mm widescreen format. However, since actual 70 mm cameras were expensive at the time, the film was shot on traditional 35 mm film and the 4:3 picture was subsequently converted to a 2.2:1 frame. Regarding the process, Sippy said, "A 70 mm [sic] format takes the awe of the big screen and magnifies it even more to make the picture even bigger, but since I also wanted a spread of sound we used six-track stereophonic sound and combined it with the big screen. It was definitely a differentiator." The use of 70 mm was emphasised by film posters on which the name of the film was stylised to match the CinemaScope logo. Film posters also sought to differentiate the film from those which had come before; one of them added the tagline: "The greatest star cast ever assembled – the greatest story ever told".
### Alternate version
The director's original cut of Sholay has a different ending in which Thakur kicks Gabbar onto a nail on one of the two poles that Gabbar had used to chain Thakur when he had cut off his arms, stabbing him in the back and killing him, along with some additional violent scenes. Gabbar's death scene, and the scene in which the imam's son is killed, were cut from the film by India's Censor Board, as was the scene in which Thakur's family is massacred. The Censor Board was concerned about the violence, and that viewers may be influenced to violate the law by punishing people severely. Although Sippy fought to keep the scenes, eventually he had to re-shoot the ending of the film, and as directed by the Censor Board, have the police arrive just before Thakur can kill Gabbar. The censored theatrical version was the only one seen by audiences for fifteen years. The original, unedited cut of the film finally came out in a British release on VHS in 1990. Since then, Eros International has released two versions on DVD. The director's cut of the film preserves the original full frame and is 204 minutes in length; the censored widescreen version is 198 minutes long.
## Themes
Scholars have noted several themes in the film, such as glorification of violence, conformation to feudal ethos, debate between social order and mobilised usurpers, homosocial bonding, and the film's role as a national allegory.[^1]
Koushik Banerjea, a sociologist in the London School of Economics, notes that Sholay exhibits a "sympathetic construction of 'rogue' masculinity" exemplified by the likeable outlaws Jai and Veeru. Banerjea argues during the film, the moral boundary between legality and criminality gradually erodes. Film scholar Wimal Dissanayake agrees that the film brought "a new stage in the evolving dialectic between violence and social order" to Indian cinema. Film scholar M. Madhava Prasad states that Jai and Veeru represent a marginalised population that is introduced into conventional society. Prasad says that, through the elements of revenge included in the plot and the application of Jai and Veeru's criminality for the greater good, the narrative reflects reactionary politics, and the audience is compelled to accept feudal order. Banerjea explains that though Jai and Veeru are mercenaries, they are humanised by their emotional needs. Such dualism makes them vulnerable, in contrast to the pure evil of Gabbar Singh.
Gabbar Singh, the film's antagonist, was well received by the audience, despite his pervasive sadistic cruelty. Dissanayake explains that the audience was fascinated by the dialogues and mannerisms of the character, and this element of spectacle outweighed his actions, a first for Indian melodrama. He notes that the picturisation of violence in the film was glamourised and uninhibited. He further notes that, unlike earlier melodramas in which the female body occupies the audience's attention as an object of male fetish, in Sholay, the male body becomes the centrepiece. It becomes the battleground where good and evil compete for supremacy. Dissanayake argues that Sholay can be viewed as a national allegory: it lacks a comforting logical narrative, it shows social stability being repeatedly challenged, and it shows the devaluation of human life resulting from a lack of emotions. Taken together, these elements comprise the allegorical representation of India. The narrative style of Sholay, with its violence, revenge, and vigilante action, is occasionally compared by scholars to the political unrest in India at the time of its release. This tension culminated in the Emergency (rule by decree) declared by prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1975.
Dissanayeke and Sahai note that, although the film borrowed heavily from the Hollywood Western genre, particularly in its visuals, it was successfully "Indianised". As an example, William van der Heide has compared a massacre scene in Sholay with a similar scene in Once Upon a Time in the West. Although both films were similar in technical style, Sholay emphasised Indian family values and melodramatic tradition, while the Western was more materialistic and restrained in its approach. Maithili Rao, in Encyclopedia of Hindi Cinema, notes that Sholay infuses the style of the Western genre into a "feudalistic ethos". Ted Shen of the Chicago Reader notes Sholay's "hysterical visual style" and intermittent "populist message". Cultural critic and Islamic scholar Ziauddin Sardar lampoons the film in his book The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, both for its caricature and stereotyping of Muslim and women characters, and for what he calls mockery of innocent villagers. Sardar notes that the two most prominent Muslim characters in the film are Soorma Bhopali (a buffoonish criminal), and an impotent victim of the bandits (the imam). Meanwhile, the sole function of one female character (Radha) is to suffer her fate in silence, while the other female lead (Basanti) is just a garrulous village belle.
Some scholars have indicated that Sholay contains homosocial themes. Ted Shen describes the male bonding shown in the film as bordering on camp style. Dina Holtzman, in her book Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora, states that the death of Jai, and resultant break of bonding between the two male leads, is necessary for the sake of establishing a normative heterosexual relationship (that of Veeru and Basanti).
## Music
R. D. Burman composed the film's music, and the lyrics were written by Anand Bakshi. The songs used in the film, and released on the original soundtrack are listed below. Following that is a list of unused tracks and dialogues which were released later on an updated soundtrack.
The song "Mehbooba Mehbooba" was sung by its composer, R. D. Burman, who received his sole Filmfare Award nomination for playback singing for his effort. The song, which is often featured on Bollywood hit song compilations, is based on "Say You Love Me" by Greek singer Demis Roussos.
"Mehbooba Mehbooba" has been extensively anthologised, remixed, and recreated. A version was created in 2005 by the Kronos Quartet for their Grammy-nominated album You've Stolen My Heart, featuring Asha Bhosle. It was also remixed and sung by Himesh Reshammiya, along with Bhosle, in his debut acting film Aap Kaa Surroor (2007). "Yeh Dosti" has been called the ultimate friendship anthem. It was remixed and sung by Shankar Mahadevan and Udit Narayan for the 2010 Malayalam film Four Friends, and also in 2010 it was used to symbolise India's friendship with the United States during a visit from President Barack Obama.
Several songs from the soundtrack were included in the annual Binaca Geetmala list of top filmi songs. "Mehbooba Mehooba" was listed at No. 24 on the 1975 list, and at No. 6 on the 1976 list. "Koi Haseena" was listed at No. 30 in 1975, and No. 20 in 1976. "Yeh Dosti" was listed at No. 9 in 1976. Despite the soundtrack's success, at the time, the songs from Sholay attracted less attention than the film's dialogue—a rarity for Hindi language films. The producers were thus prompted to release records with only dialogue. Taken together, the album sales reached an unprecedented 500,000 units. By 1979, the soundtrack went Platinum (equivalent to 1 million sales at the time), becoming one of the top-selling Bollywood soundtracks of the 1970s.
Music critic Oli Marlow reviewed the soundtrack in 2013, calling it a unique fusion of religious, folk, and classical music, with influences from around the world. He also commented on the sound design of the film, calling it psychedelic, and saying that there was "a lot of incredible incidental music" in the film that was not included in the soundtrack releases. In a 1999 paper submitted to London's Symposium on Sound in Cinema, film critic Shoma A. Chatterji said, "Sholay offers a model lesson on how sound can be used to signify the terror a character evokes. Sholay is also exemplary in its use of soundmatching to jump cut to a different scene and time, without breaking the continuity of the narrative, yet, intensifying the drama."
## Reception
### Box office
Sholay was released on 15 August 1975, Indian Independence Day, in Bombay. Due to lackluster reviews and a lack of effective visual marketing tools, it saw poor financial returns in its first two weeks. From the third week, however, viewership picked up owing to positive word of mouth. During the initial slow period, the director and writer considered re-shooting some scenes so that Amitabh Bachchan's character would not die. When business picked up, they abandoned this idea. After being helped additionally by a soundtrack release containing dialogue snippets, Sholay soon became an "overnight sensation". The film was then released in other distribution zones such as Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, and Hyderabad on 11 October 1975. It became the highest-grossing Hindi language film of 1975, and film ranking website Box Office India has given the film a verdict of All Time Blockbuster.
Sholay went on to earn a still-standing record of 60 golden jubilees across India, and was the first film in India to celebrate a silver jubilee at over 100 theatres. It was shown continuously at Bombay's Minerva theatre for over five years. Sholay was the Indian film with the longest theatrical run until Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) broke its record of 286 weeks in 2001.
Exact figures are not available on the budget and box-office earnings of Sholay, but film trade sources provide estimates of its success. According to Box Office India, Sholay earned about ₹150 million in net income (valued at about US\$16,778,000 in 1975) in India during its first run, which was many times its ₹30 million (valued at about US\$3,355,000 in 1975) budget. Those earnings in India were a record that remained unbroken for nineteen years, which is also the longest amount of time that a film has held the record for being the highest grossing film in India. Its original gross was increased further with re-releases during the late 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. The film's total gross revenue in India amounted to ₹350 million (\$39.15 million). Box Office India estimates the film's total footfalls in India as over 100 million tickets sold. The film was also an overseas success in the Soviet Union, where it was released in 1979. The film sold 48.4 million tickets during its initial run at the Soviet box office, before eventually selling 60 million tickets including re-runs. The film was also released in China, as two parts in 1988.
It was the highest-grossing Indian film ever up until Disco Dancer (1982), and the highest-grossing film in India up until Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994). In 1985, India Today estimated that the film drew a total audience of 250 million over the years, which is comparable to the number of tickets sold by some of the world's highest-grossing films of all time adjusted for inflation. It is often cited that, after adjusting the figures for inflation, Sholay remains one of the highest-grossing films in the history of Indian cinema, although such figures are not known with certainty. Box Office India estimated ₹1.63 billion as Sholay's adjusted domestic net income in 2008, while Times of India estimated over ₹3 billion as the adjusted domestic gross in 2009. Mid-Day estimated the film's total adjusted gross as ₹15 billion (\$million) in 2014.
### Critical response
Initial critical reviews of Sholay were negative. Among contemporary critics, K.L. Amladi of India Today called the film a "dead ember" and "a gravely flawed attempt". Filmfare said that the film was an unsuccessful mincing of Western style with Indian milieu, making it an "imitation western—neither here nor there." Others labelled it as "sound and fury signifying nothing" and a "second-rate take-off" of the 1971 film Mera Gaon Mera Desh. Trade journals and columnists initially called the film a flop. In a 1976 article in the journal Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, author Michael Gallagher praised the technical achievement of the film, but otherwise criticised it stating, "As a spectacle it breaks new ground, but on every other level it is intolerable: formless, incoherent, superficial in human image, and a somewhat nasty piece of violence".
Over time, the critical reception to Sholay greatly improved; it is now considered a classic, and among the greatest Hindi-language films. In a 2005 BBC review, the well-rounded characters and simple narrative of the film were commended, but the comical cameos of Asrani and Jagdeep were considered unnecessary. On the film's 35th anniversary, the Hindustan Times wrote that it was a "trailblazer in terms of camera work as well as music," and that "practically every scene, dialogue or even a small character was a highlight." In 2006, The Film Society of Lincoln Center described Sholay as "an extraordinary and utterly seamless blend of adventure, comedy, music and dance", labelling it an "indisputable classic". Chicago Review critic Ted Shen criticised the film in 2002 for its formulaic plot and "slapdash" cinematography, and noted that the film "alternates between slapstick and melodrama". In their obituary of the producer G.P. Sippy, The New York Times said that Sholay "revolutionized Hindi filmmaking and brought true professionalism to Indian script writing".
### Awards
Sholay was nominated for nine Filmfare Awards, and the only winner was M. S. Shinde, who won the award for Best Editing. The film also won three awards at the 1976 Bengal Film Journalists' Association Awards (Hindi section): "Best Actor in Supporting Role" for Amjad Khan, "Best Cinematographer (Colour)" for Dwarka Divecha, and "Best Art Director" for Ram Yedekar. Sholay received a special award at the 50th Filmfare Awards in 2005: Best Film of 50 Years.
## Legacy and cultural influence
Sholay has received many "Best Film" honours. It was declared the "Film of the Millennium" by BBC India in 1999. It topped the British Film Institute's "Top 10 Indian Films" of all time poll of 2002, and was voted the greatest Indian movie in a Sky Digital poll of one million British Indians in 2004. It was also included in the magazine Time's "Best of Bollywood" list in 2010, and in IBN Live's list of the "100 greatest Indian films of all time" in 2013.
Sholay inspired many films and pastiches, and spawned a genre of films, the "Curry Western", which is a play on the term Spaghetti Western. A more accurate label for the genre is the Dacoit Western, due to its roots in earlier Indian dacoit films such as Mother India (1957) and Gunga Jumna (1961). It was also an early and most definitive masala film, and a trend-setter for "multi-star" films. The film was a watershed for scriptwriters in Hindi language films, who were not paid well before Sholay; after the film's success, its writing duo Salim-Javed became stars in their own right and script writing became a more respected profession. The BBC has described Sholay as the "Star Wars of Bollywood", comparing its impact on Hindi language films to the impact that Star Wars (1977) later had on Hollywood, while comparing Gabbar Singh to Darth Vader.
Certain scenes and dialogues from the film earned iconic status in India, such as "Kitne aadmi the" (How many men were there?), "Jo dar gaya, samjho mar gaya" (One who is scared is dead), and "Bahut yaarana laagta hai" (Looks like you two are very close) – all dialogues of Gabbar Singh. These and other popular dialogues entered the people's daily vernacular. Characters and dialogues from the film continue to be referred to and parodied in popular culture. Gabbar Singh, the sadistic villain, ushered in an era in Hindi films characterised by "seemingly omnipotent oppressors as villains", who play the pivotal role in setting up the context of the story, such as Shakal (played by Kulbhushan Kharbanda) of Shaan (1980), Mogambo (Amrish Puri) of Mr. India (1987) and Bhujang (Amrish Puri) of Tridev (1989). Filmfare, in 2013, named Gabbar Singh the most iconic villain in the history of Indian cinema, and four actors were included in its 2010 list of "80 Iconic Performances" for their work in this film.
The film is often credited with making Amitabh Bachchan a "superstar", two years after he became a star with Zanjeer (1973). Some of the supporting actors remained etched in public memory as the characters they played in Sholay; for example, Mac Mohan continued to be referred to as "Sambha", even though his character had just one line. Major and minor characters continue to be used in commercials, promos, films and sitcoms. Amjad Khan acted in many villainous roles later in his career. He also played Gabbar Singh again in the 1991 spoof Ramgarh Ke Sholay, and reprised the role in commercials. The British Film Institute in 2002 wrote that fear of Gabbar Singh "is still invoked by mothers to put their children to sleep". The 2012 film Gabbar Singh, named after the character, became the highest-grossing Telugu film up to that point. Comedian Jagdeep, who played Soorma Bhopali in the film, attempted to use his Sholay success to create a spinoff. He directed and played the lead role in the 1988 film Soorma Bhopali, in which Dharmendra and Bachchan had cameos.
In 2004, Sholay was digitally remastered and shown again to packed theatres in India, including Mumbai's Minerva, where it had run successfully 29 years earlier. An attempt to remake Sholay, Ram Gopal Varma's film Aag (2007), starring Amitabh Bachchan as the villain, was a commercial and critical disaster. Because of television and home media, Sholay is widely available and still popular. Twenty years after its release, Sholay was first shown on the Indian DD National television channel, where it drew the highest ratings ever for an Indian film broadcast. Video game producer Mobile2win released the "Sholay Ramgarh Express" game for mobile phones in 2004, along with other Sholay themed content such as wallpapers, video clips, and ringtones. Sholay Adventures, a 2014 Indian animated television film adaptation of Sholay aired on Pogo TV. In 2019, a film titled The Sholay Girl, based on the stunt woman Reshma Pathan, was released. Pathan had worked as the body double for Malini in the film.
Sholay has been the subject of two books and many articles. Wimal Dissanayake and Malti Sahai's Sholay, A Cultural Reading (1992) attempts a comprehensive scholarly study that sets the film within the broader history of popular cinema in India. Anupama Chopra's Sholay: The Making of a Classic (2000) provides an inside look at the film's production based on interviews with the director, stars, and crew members.
Sholay has been labelled by Chopra as the gold standard in Indian cinema, and a reference point for audiences and trade analysts. Over the years, the film has reached a mythic stature in popular culture, and has been called the greatest Hindi film of all time. It belongs to only a small collection of films, including Kismet (1943), Mother India (1957), Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994), which are repeatedly watched throughout India, and are viewed as definitive Hindi films with cultural significance. The lasting effect of Sholay on Indian cinema was summarised by Anupama Chopra, when in 2004 she called it "no longer just a film, [but] an event". In the 2000 book Sholay: The Making of a Classic, the noted director Shekhar Kapur stated "there has never been a more defining film on the Indian screen. Indian film history can be divided into Sholay BC and Sholay AD". The film was jointly released in Pakistan by Geo films and Mandviwalla Entertainment on 17 April 2015, almost 40 years after its theatrical release. The film's premiere in the country was held in Karachi.
Screenwriter V. Vijayendra Prasad, responsible for a number of blockbusters in the early 21st century, including the South Indian franchise Baahubali and the Hindi film Bajrangi Bhaijaan (starring Salim's son Salman Khan), cited Sholay as a major inspiration on his work.
## 3D re-release
Filmmaker Ketan Mehta's company Maya Digital was responsible for converting Sholay into the 3D format. Mehta was approached by G. P. Sippy's grandson, Sasha Sippy, about the project in 2010. In March 2012, Shaan Uttam Singh, the grandson of producer G. P. Sippy, said that he would sponsor a conversion of the film to 3D, and release it in late 2012; this was later postponed to late 2013, and eventually finalised for 3 January 2014. It took ₹250 million (US\$3.1 million) to convert Sholay'' to 3D.
Under the leadership of computer animator Frank Foster, 350 people worked to convert the film into the digital 3D format, for which every scene had to be individually restored, colour-corrected and re-composited in 3D to match the depth. New set-pieces, particularly those suited to the new format were also included, such as digital logs which scatter in the direction of the camera during the first half of the film when the train collides with them, the gunshot scene which frees Jai and Veeru from their handcuffs, and panoramic views of Gabbar's hideout in the caves.
The theatrical trailer and release date were unveiled by the original script-writers Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar. The two original leads, Bachchan and Dharmendra, were also involved in promoting the re-release. The film was released in 1,000 screens in India, and additional screens overseas. It earned approximately ₹100 million (US\$1.3 million) during its re-release, not enough to recover its conversion cost.
## See also
- List of highest-grossing Indian films
- Gabbar Singh Gujjar, the real bandit Gabbar Singh.
[^1]: For glorification of violence, see Wimal Dissanayake, Malti Sahai, Sholay: A Cultural Reading (Delhi: Wiley Eastern, 1992), 115-19. ; for feudal ethos, see Hrishikesh Ingle, "Regionalist Disjuncture in Bollywood", in Vikrant Kishore et al., eds., Salaam Bollywood: Representations and interpretations (London: Routledge, 2016), 202. ; on social order/disorder, see Dissanayake, "The Concepts of Evil and Social Order in Indian Melodrama: An Evolving Dialect", in Melodrama and Asian Cinema, ed. Dissanayake (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); on homosocial bonding, Dinah Holtzman, "Between Yaars: The Queering of Dost in Contemporary Bollywood Films", in Rini Bhattacharya et al., eds., Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 118-22. ; as national allegory, John Hutnyk, Global South Asia on Screen (NY: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018), 206. . |
58,587,946 | The Holocaust in Slovakia | 1,168,363,026 | Systematic dispossession, deportation, and murder of Jews in the Slovak State | [
"Antisemitism in Slovakia",
"Germany–Slovakia relations",
"Jewish Slovak history",
"Murder in Slovakia",
"Slovakia during World War II",
"The Holocaust by country",
"The Holocaust in Slovakia"
]
| The Holocaust in Slovakia was the systematic dispossession, deportation, and murder of Jews in the Slovak State, a client state of Nazi Germany, during World War II. Out of 89,000 Jews in the country in 1940, an estimated 69,000 were murdered in the Holocaust.
After the September 1938 Munich Agreement, Slovakia unilaterally declared its autonomy within Czechoslovakia, but lost significant territory to Hungary in the First Vienna Award, signed in November. The following year, with German encouragement, the ruling ethnonationalist Slovak People's Party declared independence from Czechoslovakia. State propaganda blamed the Jews for the territorial losses. Jews were targeted for discrimination and harassment, including the confiscation of their property and businesses. The exclusion of Jews from the economy impoverished the community, which encouraged the government to conscript them for forced labor. On 9 September 1941, the government passed the Jewish Code, which it claimed to be the strictest anti-Jewish law in Europe.
In 1941, the Slovak government negotiated with Nazi Germany for the mass deportation of Jews to German-occupied Poland. Between March and October 1942, 58,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp and the Lublin District of the General Governorate; only a few hundred survived until the end of the war. The Slovak government organized the transports and paid 500 Reichsmarks per Jew for the supposed cost of resettlement. The persecution of Jews resumed in August 1944, when Germany invaded Slovakia and triggered the Slovak National Uprising. Another 13,500 Jews were deported and hundreds to thousands were murdered in Slovakia by Einsatzgruppe H and the Hlinka Guard Emergency Divisions.
After liberation by the Red Army, survivors faced renewed antisemitism and difficulty regaining stolen property; most emigrated after the 1948 Communist coup. The postwar Communist regime censored discussion of the Holocaust; free speech was restored after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. The Slovak government's complicity in the Holocaust continues to be disputed by far-right nationalists.
## Background
Before 1939, Slovakia had never been an independent country; its territory was part of the Kingdom of Hungary for a thousand years. Seventeen medieval Jewish communities have been documented in the territory of modern-day Slovakia, but significant Jewish presence was ended with the expulsions following the Hungarian defeat at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Many Jews immigrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jews from Moravia settled west of the Tatra Mountains, forming the Oberlander Jews, while Jews from Galicia settled east of the mountains, forming a separate community (Unterlander Jews) influenced by Hasidism. Due to the schism in Hungarian Jewry, communities split in the mid-nineteenth century into Orthodox (the majority), Status Quo, and more assimilated Neolog factions. Following Jewish emancipation, complete by 1896, many Jews adopted the Hungarian language and customs to advance in society.
Although they were not as integrated as the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, many Slovak Jews moved to cities and joined all the professions; others remained in the countryside, mostly working as artisans, merchants, and shopkeepers. Jews spearheaded the nineteenth-century economic changes that led to greater commerce in rural areas; by the end of the century some 70 percent of the bankers and businessmen in the Slovak uplands were Jewish. Although a few Jews supported Slovak nationalism, by the mid-nineteenth century antisemitism had become a theme in the Slovak national movement, Jews being branded "agents of magyarization" and "the most powerful prop to the [Hungarian] ruling classes", in the words of historian Thomas Lorman. In the western Slovak lands, anti-Jewish riots broke out in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848; more riots occurred due to the Tiszaeszlár blood libel in 1882–1883. Traditional religious antisemitism was joined by the stereotypical view of Jews as exploiters of poor Slovaks (economic antisemitism), and national antisemitism: Jews were strongly associated with the Hungarian state and accused of sympathizing with Hungarian at the expense of Slovak ambitions.
After World War I, Slovakia became part of the new country of Czechoslovakia. Jews lived in 227 communities (in 1918) and their population was estimated at 135,918 (in 1921). Anti-Jewish riots broke out in the aftermath of the declaration of independence (1918–1920), although the violence was not nearly as serious as in Ukraine or Poland. Slovak nationalists associated Jews with the Czechoslovak state and accused them of supporting Czechoslovakism. Blood libel accusations occurred in Trenčin and in Šalavský Gemer in the 1920s. In the 1930s, the Great Depression affected Jewish businessmen and also increased economic antisemitism. Economic underdevelopment and perceptions of discrimination in Czechoslovakia led a plurality (about one-third) of Slovaks to support the conservative, ethnonationalist Slovak People's Party (Slovak: Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana: HSĽS). HSĽS viewed minority groups such as Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, and Romani people as a destructive influence on the Slovak nation, and presented Slovak autonomy as the solution to Slovakia's problems. The party began to emphasize antisemitism during the late 1930s following a wave of Jewish refugees from Austria in 1938 and anti-Jewish laws passed by Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
## Slovak independence
The September 1938 Munich Agreement ceded the Sudetenland, the German-speaking region of the Czech lands, to Germany. HSĽS took advantage of the ensuing political chaos to declare Slovakia's autonomy on 6 October. Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest and HSĽS leader, became prime minister of the Slovak autonomous region. Catholicism, the religion of 80 percent of the country's inhabitants, was key to the regime with many of its leaders being bishops, priests, or laymen. Under Tiso's leadership, the Slovak government opened negotiations in Komárno with Hungary regarding their border. The dispute was submitted to arbitration in Vienna by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Hungary was awarded much of southern Slovakia on 2 November, including 40 percent of Slovakia's arable land and 270,000 people who had declared Czechoslovak ethnicity.
HSĽS consolidated its power by passing an enabling act, banning opposition parties, shutting down independent newspapers, distributing antisemitic and anti-Czech propaganda, and founding the paramilitary Hlinka Guard. Parties for the German and Hungarian minorities were allowed under HSĽS hegemony, and the German Party formed the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel militia. HSĽS imprisoned thousands of its political opponents, but never carried out a sentence of capital punishment. Un-free elections in December 1938 resulted in a 95-percent vote for HSĽS.
On 14 March 1939, the Slovak State proclaimed its independence with German support and protection. Germany annexed and invaded the Czech rump state the following day, and Hungary seized Carpathian Ruthenia with German acquiescence. In a treaty signed on 23 March, Slovakia renounced much of its foreign policy and military autonomy to Germany in exchange for border guarantees and economic assistance. It was neither fully independent nor a German puppet state, but occupied an intermediate status. In October 1939, Tiso, leader of the conservative-clerical branch of HSĽS, became president; Vojtech Tuka, leader of the party's radical fascist wing, was appointed prime minister. Both wings of the party struggled for Germany's favor. The radical wing of the party was pro-German, while the conservatives favored autonomy from Germany; the radicals relied on the Hlinka Guard and German support, while Tiso was popular among the clergy and the population.
## Anti-Jewish measures (1938–1941)
### Initial actions
Immediately after Slovakia was established as a state in 1938, the government began firing its Jewish employees. The Committee for the Solution of the Jewish Question was founded on 23 January 1939 to discuss anti-Jewish legislation. The state-sponsored media demonized Jews as "enemies of the state" and of the Slovak nation. Jewish businesses were robbed, and physical attacks on Jews occurred both spontaneously and at the instigation of the Hlinka Guard and Freiwillige Schutzstaffel. In his first radio address following the establishment of the Slovak State in 1939, Tiso emphasized his desire to "solve the Jewish Question"; anti-Jewish legislation was the only concrete measure that he promised. The persecution of Jews was a key element of the state's domestic policy. Discriminatory measures affected all aspects of life, serving to isolate and dispossess Jews before they were deported.
In the days after the announcement of the First Vienna Award, antisemitic rioting broke out in Bratislava; newspapers justified the riots with Jews' alleged support for Hungary during the partition negotiations. Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official who had been sent to Bratislava, coauthored a plan with Tiso and other HSĽS politicians to deport impoverished and foreign Jews to the territory ceded to Hungary. Meanwhile, Jews with a net worth of over 500,000 Czechoslovak koruna (Kčs) were arrested in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent capital flight. Between 4 and 7 November, 4,000 or 7,600 Jews were deported, in a chaotic, pogrom-like operation in which the Hlinka Guard, the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel, and the German Party participated. The deportees included young children, the elderly, and pregnant women. A few days later, Tiso canceled the operation; most of the Jews were allowed to return home in December. More than 800 were confined to makeshift tent camps at Veľký Kýr, Miloslavov, and Šamorín on the new Slovak–Hungarian border during the winter. The Slovak deportations occurred just after Germany's deportation of thousands of Polish Jews, attracted international criticism, reduced British investment, increased dependence on German capital, and were a rehearsal for the 1942 deportations.
Initially, many Jews believed that the measures taken against them would be temporary. Nevertheless, some attempted to emigrate and take their property with them. Between December 1938 and February 1939, more than 2.25 million Kčs were transferred illegally to the Czech lands, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom; further amounts were transferred legally. Slovak government officials took advantage of the circumstances to purchase the property of wealthy Jewish emigrants at a significant discount, a precursor to the state-sponsored transfer of Jewish property as part of Aryanization. Interest in emigration among Jews surged after the invasion of Poland, as Jewish refugees from Poland told of atrocities there. Although the Slovak government encouraged Jews to emigrate, it refused to allow the export of foreign currency, ensuring that most attempts remained unsuccessful. No country was eager to accept Jewish refugees, and the tight limits imposed by the United Kingdom on legal emigration to Mandatory Palestine prevented Jews from seeking refuge there. In 1940, Bratislava became a hub for Aliyah Bet operatives organizing illegal immigration to Palestine, one of whom, Aron Grünhut, helped 1,365 Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, and Austrian Jews emigrate. By early 1941, further emigration was impossible; even Jews who received valid United States visas were not allowed transit visas through Germany. The total number of Slovak Jewish emigrants has been estimated at 5,000 to 6,000. As 45,000 lived in the areas ceded to Hungary, the 1940 census found that 89,000 Jews lived in the Slovak State, 3.4 percent of the population.
### Aryanization
Aryanization in Slovakia, the seizure of Jewish-owned property and exclusion of Jews from the economy, was justified by the stereotype (reinforced by HSĽS propaganda) of Jews obtaining their wealth by oppressing Slovaks. Between 1939 and 1942, the HSĽS regime received widespread popular support by promising Slovak citizens that they would be enriched by property confiscated from Jews and other minorities. They stood to gain a significant amount of money; in 1940, Jews registered more than 4.322 billion Slovak koruna (Ks) in property (38 percent of the national wealth). The process is also described as "Slovakization", as the Slovak government took steps to ensure that ethnic Slovaks, rather than Germans or other minorities, received the stolen Jewish property. Due to the intervention of the German Party and Nazi Germany, ethnic Germans received 8.3 percent of the stolen property, but most German applicants were refused, underscoring the freedom of action of the Slovak government.
The first anti-Jewish law, passed on 18 April 1939 and not systematically enforced, was a numerus clausus four-percent quota of the numbers of Jews allowed to practice law; Jews were also forbidden to write for non-Jewish publications. The Land Reform Act of February 1940 turned 101,423 hectares (250,620 acres) of land owned by 4,943 Jews, more than 40 percent of it arable, over to the State Land Office; the land officially passed to the state in May 1942. The First Aryanization Law was passed in April 1940. Through a process known as "voluntary Aryanization", Jewish business owners could suggest a "qualified Christian candidate" who would assume at least a 51-percent stake in the company. Under the law, 50 businesses out of more than 12,000 were Aryanized and 179 were liquidated. HSĽS radicals and the Slovak State's German backers believed that voluntary Aryanization was too soft on the Jews. Nevertheless, by mid-1940 the position of Jews in the Slovak economy had been largely wiped out.
At the July 1940 Salzburg Conference, Germany demanded the replacement of several members of the cabinet with reliably pro-German radicals. Ferdinand Ďurčanský was replaced as interior minister by Alexander Mach, who aligned the anti-Jewish policy of the Slovak State with that of Germany. Another result of the Salzburg talks was the appointment of SS officer Dieter Wisliceny as an adviser on Jewish affairs for Slovakia, arriving in August. He aimed to impoverish the Jewish community so it would become a burden on non-Jewish Slovaks, who would then agree to deport them. At Wisliceny's instigation, the Slovak government created the Central Economic Office (ÚHÚ), led by Slovak official Augustín Morávek [cs; de; sk] and under Tuka's control, in September 1940. The Central Economic Office was tasked with assuming ownership of Jewish-owned property. Jews were required to register their property; their bank accounts (valued at 245 million Ks in August 1941) were frozen, and Jews were allowed to withdraw only 1,000 Ks (later 150 Ks) per week. The 22,000 Jews who worked in salaried employment were targeted: non-Jews had to obtain Central Economic Office permission to employ Jews and pay a fee.
A second Aryanization law was passed in November, mandating the expropriation of Jewish property and the Aryanization or liquidation of Jewish businesses. In a corrupt process overseen by Morávek's office, 10,000 Jewish businesses (mostly shops) were liquidated and the remainder – about 2,300 – were Aryanized. Liquidation benefited small Slovak businesses competing with Jewish enterprises, and Aryanization was applied to larger Jewish-owned companies which were acquired by competitors. In many cases, Aryanizers inexpert in business struck deals with former Jewish owners and employees so the Jews would keep working for the company. The Aryanization of businesses did not bring the anticipated revenue into the Slovak treasury, and only 288 of the liquidated businesses produced income for the state by July 1942. The Aryanization and liquidation of businesses was nearly complete by January 1942, resulting in 64,000 of 89,000 Jews losing their means of support. For Jews, Aryanization resulted in disaster as the manufactured Jewish impoverishment was resolved by their deportation in 1942.
Aryanization resulted in an immense financial loss for Slovakia and great destruction of wealth. The state failed to raise substantial funds from the sale of Jewish property and businesses, and most of its gains came from the confiscation of Jewish-owned bank accounts and financial securities. The main beneficiaries of Aryanization were members of Slovak fascist political parties and paramilitary groups, who were eager to acquire Jewish property but had little expertise in running businesses. During the Slovak Republic's existence, the government gained 1,100 million Ks from Aryanization and spent 900–950 million Ks on enforcing anti-Jewish measures. In 1942, it paid the German government another 300 million Ks for the deportation of 58,000 Jews.
### Jewish Center
When Wisliceny arrived, all Jewish community organizations were dissolved and the Jews were forced to form the Ústredňa Židov (Jewish Center, ÚŽ, subordinate to the Central Economic Office) in September 1940. The first Judenrat outside the Reich and German-occupied Poland, the ÚŽ was the only secular Jewish organization allowed to exist in Slovakia; membership was required of all Jews. Leaders of the Jewish community were divided about how to respond to this development. Although some argued that the ÚŽ would be used to implement anti-Jewish measures, more saw participation in the ÚŽ as a way to help their fellow Jews by delaying the implementation of such measures and alleviating poverty. The first leader of the ÚŽ was Heinrich Schwartz, who thwarted anti-Jewish orders to the best of his ability: he sabotaged a census of Jews in eastern Slovakia which was intended to justify their removal to the west of the country; Wisliceny had him arrested in April 1941. The Central Economic Office appointed the more cooperative Arpad Sebestyen as Schwartz's replacement. Wisliceny set up a Department for Special Affairs in the ÚŽ to ensure the prompt implementation of Nazi decrees, appointing the collaborationist Karol Hochberg (a Viennese Jew) as its director.
### Forced labor
Jews serving in the army were segregated into a labor unit in April 1939 and were stripped of their rank at the end of the year. From 1940, male Jews and Romani people were obliged to work for the national defense (generally manual labor on construction projects) for two months every year. All recruits considered Jewish or Romani were allocated to the Sixth Labor Battalion, which worked at military construction sites at Sabinov, Liptovský Svätý Peter, Láb, Svätý Jur, and Zohor the following year. Although the Ministry of Defense was pressured by the Ministry of the Interior to release the Jews for deportation in 1942, it refused. The battalion was disbanded in 1943, and the Jewish laborers were sent to work camps.
The first labor centers were established in early 1941 by the ÚŽ as retraining courses for Jews forced into unemployment; 13,612 Jews had applied for the courses by February, far exceeding the programs' capacity. On 4 July, the Slovak government issued a decree conscripting all Jewish men aged 18 to 60 for labor. Although the ÚŽ had to supplement the workers' pay to meet the legal minimum, the labor camps greatly increased the living standard of Jews impoverished by Aryanization. By September, 5,500 Jews were performing manual labor for private companies at about 80 small labor centers, most of which were dissolved in the final months of 1941 as part of the preparation for deportation. Construction began on three larger camps – Sereď, Nováky, and Vyhne – in September of that year.
### Jewish Code
In accordance with Catholic teaching on race, antisemitic laws initially defined Jews by religion rather than ancestry; Jews who were baptized before 1918 were considered Christian. By September 1940, Jews were banned from secondary and higher education and from all non-Jewish schools, and forbidden from owning motor vehicles, sports equipment, or radios. Local authorities had imposed anti-Jewish measures on their own; the head of the Šariš-Zemplín region ordered local Jews to wear a yellow band around their left arm from 5 April 1941, leading to physical attacks against Jews. In mid-1941, as the focus shifted to restricting Jews' civil rights after they had been deprived of their property through Aryanization, Department 14 of the Ministry of the Interior was formed to enforce anti-Jewish measures.
The Slovak parliament passed the Jewish Code on 9 September 1941, which contained 270 anti-Jewish articles. Based on the Nuremberg Laws, the code defined Jews in terms of ancestry, banned intermarriage, and required that all Jews over six years old wear a yellow star. The Jewish Code excluded Jews from public life, restricting the hours that they were allowed to travel and shop, and barring them from clubs, organizations, and public events. Jews also had to pay a 20-percent tax on all property. Government propaganda boasted that the Jewish Code was the strictest set of anti-Jewish laws in Europe. The president could issue exemptions protecting individual Jews from the law. Employed Jews were initially exempt from some of the code's requirements, such as wearing the star.
The racial definition of Jews was criticized by the Catholic Church, and converts were eventually exempted from some of the requirements. The Hlinka Guard and Freiwillige Schutzstaffel increased assaults on Jews, engaged in antisemitic demonstrations on a daily basis, and harassed non-Jews judged insufficiently antisemitic. The law enabled the Central Economic Office to force Jews to change their residence. This provision was put into effect on 4 October 1941, when 10,000 of 15,000 Jews in Bratislava (who were not employed or intermarried) were ordered to move to fourteen towns. The relocation was paid for and carried out by the ÚŽ's Department of Special Tasks. Although the Jews were ordered to leave by 31 December, fewer than 7,000 people had moved by March 1942.
## Deportations (1942)
### Planning
The highest levels of the Slovak government were aware by late 1941 of mass murders of Jews in German-occupied territories. In July 1941, Wisliceny organized a visit by Slovak government officials to several camps run by Organization Schmelt, which imprisoned Jews in East Upper Silesia to employ them in forced labor on the Reichsautobahn. The visitors understood that Jews in the camps lived under conditions which would eventually cause their deaths. Slovak soldiers participated in the invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union; they brought word of the mass shootings of Jews, and participated in at least one of the massacres. Some Slovaks were aware of the 1941 Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre, in which 23,600 Jews, many of them deported from Hungary, were shot in western Ukraine. Defense minister Ferdinand Čatloš and General Jozef Turanec reported massacres in Zhytomyr to Tiso by February 1942. Both bishop Karol Kmeťko and papal chargé d'affaires Giuseppe Burzio confronted the president with reliable reports of the mass murder of Jewish civilians in the Ukraine. Slovak newspapers wrote many articles attempting to refute rumors that deported Jews were mistreated, pointing to general knowledge by mid-1942 that deported Jews were no longer alive.
In mid-1941, the Germans demanded (per previous agreements) another 20,000 Slovak laborers to work in Germany. Slovakia refused to send gentile Slovaks and instead offered an equal number of Jewish workers, although it did not want to be burdened with their families. A letter sent on 15 October 1941 indicates that plans were being made for the mass murder of Jews in the Lublin District of the General Government to make room for deported Jews from Slovakia and Germany. In late October, Tiso, Tuka, Mach, and Čatloš visited the Wolf's Lair (near Rastenburg, East Prussia) and met with Adolf Hitler. No record survives of this meeting, at which the deportation of Jews from Slovakia was probably first discussed, leading to historiographical debate over who proposed the idea. Even if the Germans made the offer, the Slovak decision was not motivated by German pressure. In November 1941, the Slovak government permitted the German government to deport the 659 Slovak Jews living in the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to German-occupied Poland, with the proviso that their confiscated property be passed to Slovakia. This was the first step towards deporting Jews from Slovakia, which Tuka discussed with Wisliceny in early 1942. As indicated by a cable from the German ambassador to Slovakia, Hanns Ludin, the Slovaks responded "with enthusiasm" to the idea.
Tuka presented the deportation proposals to the government on 3 March, and they were debated in parliament three days later. On 15 May, parliament approved Decree 68/1942, which retroactively legalized the deportation of Jews, authorized the removal of their citizenship, and regulated exemptions. Opposition centered on economic, moral, and legal obstacles, but, as Mach later stated, "every [legislator] who has spoken on this issue has said that we should get rid of Jews". The official Catholic representative and Bishop of Spiš, Ján Vojtaššák, only requested separate settlements in Poland for Jews who had converted to Christianity. The Slovaks agreed to pay 500 Reichsmarks per Jew deported (ostensibly to cover shelter, food, retraining and housing) and an additional fee to the Deutsche Reichsbahn for transport. The 500 Reichsmark fee was equivalent to about USD\$125 at the time, or \$ today. The Germans promised in exchange that the Jews would never return, and Slovakia could keep all confiscated property. Except for the Independent State of Croatia (which paid 30 Reichsmarks per person), Slovakia was the only country which paid to deport its Jewish population. According to historian Donald Bloxham, "the fact that the Tiso regime let Germany do the dirty work should not conceal its desire to “cleanse” the economy and ultimately the society in the name of 'Christianization'".
### First phase
The original deportation plan, approved in February 1942, entailed the deportation of 7,000 women to Auschwitz and 13,000 men to Majdanek as forced laborers. Department 14 organized the deportations, while the Slovak Transport Ministry provided the cattle cars. Lists of those to be deported were drawn up by Department 14 based on statistical data provided by the Jewish Center's Department for Special Tasks. At the border station in Zwardon, the Hlinka Guard handed the transports off to the German Schutzpolizei. Slovak officials promised that deportees would be allowed to return home after a fixed period, and many Jews initially believed that it was better to report for deportation rather than risk reprisals against their families. On 25 March 1942, the first transport departed from Poprad transit camp for Auschwitz with 1,000 unmarried Jewish women between the ages of 16 and 45. During the first wave of deportations (which ended on 2 April), 6,000 young, single Jews were deported to Auschwitz and Majdanek.
Members of the Hlinka Guard, the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel, and the gendarmerie were in charge of rounding up the Jews, guarding the transit centers, and eventually forcing them into train cars for deportation. A German officer was stationed at each of the concentration centers. Official exemptions were supposed to keep certain Jews from being deported, but local authorities sometimes deported exemption-holders. The victims were given only four hours' warning, to prevent them from escaping. Beatings and forcible shaving were commonplace, as was subjecting Jews to invasive searches to uncover hidden valuables. Although some guards and local officials accepted bribes to keep Jews off the transports, the victim would typically be deported on the next train. Others took advantage of their power to rape Jewish women. Jews were only allowed to bring 50 kilograms (110 lb) of personal items with them, but even this was frequently stolen.
### Family transports
Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office, visited Bratislava on 10 April, and he and Tuka agreed that further deportations would target whole families and eventually remove all Jews from Slovakia. The family transports began on 11 April, and took their victims to the Lublin District. During the first half of June 1942 ten transports stopped briefly at Majdanek, where able-bodied men were selected for labor; the trains continued to Sobibor extermination camp, where the remaining victims were murdered. Most of the trains brought their victims (30,000 in total) to ghettos whose inhabitants had been recently deported to the Bełżec or Sobibor extermination camps. Some groups stayed only briefly before they were deported again to the extermination camps, while other groups remained in the ghettos for months or years. Some of the deportees ended up in the forced-labor camps in the Lublin District (such as Poniatowa, Dęblin–Irena, and Krychów). Unusually, the deportees in the Lublin District were quickly able to establish contact with the Jews remaining in Slovakia, which led to extensive aid efforts. The fate of the Jews deported from Slovakia was ultimately "sealed within the framework of Operation Reinhard" along with that of the Polish Jews, in the words of Yehoshua Büchler.
Transports went to Auschwitz after mid-June, where a minority of the victims were selected for labor and the remainder were killed in the gas chambers. This occurred for nine transports, the last of which arrived on 21 October 1942. From 1 August to 18 September, no transports departed; most of the Jews not exempt from deportation had already been deported or had fled to Hungary. In mid-August, Tiso gave a speech in Holič in which he described Jews as the "eternal enemy" and justified the deportations according to Christian ethics. At this time of the speech, the Slovak government had accurate information on the mass murder of the deportees from Slovakia; an official request to inspect the camps where Slovak Jews were held in Poland was denied by Eichmann. Three more transports occurred in September and October 1942 before ceasing until 1944. By the end of 1942, only 500 or 600 Slovak Jews were still alive at Auschwitz. Thousands of surviving Slovak Jews in the Lublin District were shot on 3–4 November 1943 during Operation Harvest Festival.
Between 25 March and 20 October 1942, almost 58,000 Jews (two-thirds of the population) were deported. The exact number is unknown due to discrepancies in the sources. The deportations disproportionately affected poorer Jews from eastern Slovakia. Although the Šariš-Zemplín region in eastern Slovakia lost 85 to 90 percent of its Jewish population, Žilina reported that almost half of its Jews remained after the deportation. The deportees were held briefly in five camps in Slovakia before deportation; 26,384 from Žilina, 7,500 from Patrónka, 7,000 from Poprad, 4,463 from Sereď, and 4,000 to 5,000 from Nováky. Nineteen trains went to Auschwitz, and another thirty-eight went to ghettos and concentration and extermination camps in the Lublin District. Only a few hundred survived the war, most at Auschwitz; almost no one survived in Lublin District.
### Opposition, exemption, and evasion
The Holy See opposed deportation, fearing that such actions from a Catholic government would discredit the church. Domenico Tardini, Vatican Undersecretary of State, wrote in a private memo: "Everyone understands that the Holy See cannot stop Hitler. But who can understand that it does not know how to rein in a priest?" According to a Security Service (SD) report, Burzio threatened Tiso with an interdict. Slovak bishops were equivocal, endorsing Jewish deicide and other antisemitic myths while urging Catholics to treat Jews humanely. The Catholic Church ultimately chose not to discipline any of the Slovak Catholics who were complicit in the regime's actions. Officials from the ÚŽ and several of the most influential Slovak rabbis sent petitions to Tiso, but he did not reply. Ludin reported that the deportations were "very unpopular", but few Slovaks took action against them. By March 1942, the Working Group (an underground organization which operated under the auspices of the ÚŽ) had formed to oppose the deportations. Its leaders, Zionist organizer Gisi Fleischmann and Orthodox rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl, bribed Anton Vašek, head of Department 14, and Wisliceny. It is unknown if the group's efforts had any connection with the halting of deportations.
Many Jews learned about the fate awaiting them during the first half of 1942, from sources such as letters from deported Jews or escapees. Around 5,000 to 6,000 Jews fled to Hungary to avoid the deportations, many by paying bribes or with help from paid smugglers and the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair; about one third of those who fled to Hungary survived the war. Many owners of Aryanized businesses applied for work exemptions for the Jewish former owners. In some cases this was a fictitious Aryanization; other Aryanizers, motivated by profit, kept the Jewish former owners around for their skills. About 2,000 Jews had false papers identifying themselves as Aryans. Some Christian clergy baptized Jews, even those who were not sincere converts. Although conversion after 1939 did not exempt Jews from deportation, being baptized made it easier to obtain other exemptions and some clergy edited records to predate baptisms.
After the deportations, between 22,000 and 25,000 Jews were still in Slovakia. Some 16,000 Jews had exemptions; there were 4,217 converts to Christianity before 1939, at least 985 Jews in mixed marriages, and 9,687 holders of economic exemptions (particularly doctors, pharmacists, engineers, and agricultural experts, whose professions had shortages). One thousand Jews were protected by presidential exemptions, mostly in addition to other exemptions. As well as the exempted Jews, around 2,500 were interned in labor camps, and a thousand were serving in the Sixth Labor Battalion. When the deportations were halted, the government knew the whereabouts of only 2,500 Jews without exemptions.
## Hiatus (1943)
During 1943, enforcement of anti-Jewish laws lessened, and many Jews stopped wearing the yellow star. Nevertheless, the remaining Jews – even those with exemptions – lived in constant fear of deportation. The ÚŽ worked to improve conditions for laborers in the Slovak camps and to increase productivity, to strengthen the incentive to keep their workers in Slovakia. In 1943, the labor camps earned 39 million Ks for the Slovak State. The halt in deportations from Slovakia enabled the Working Group to launch the Europa Plan, an unsuccessful effort to bribe SS chief Heinrich Himmler to spare the surviving Jews under German occupation. It also smuggled aid to Jews in Poland, and helped Polish Jews escape to Hungary via Slovakia. In late April 1944 two Auschwitz escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, reached Slovakia. The Working Group sent their report to Hungary and Switzerland; it reached the Western Allies in July.
After the Battle of Stalingrad and other reversals in the increasingly unpopular war in the east, Slovak politicians realized that a German defeat was likely. Some HSĽS politicians (especially those in the radical faction) blamed economic setbacks on the Jews and agitated for the deportation of the remaining population. On 7 February 1943, Mach announced at a rally in Ružomberok that the transports would soon resume. In early 1943, the Hlinka Guard and Department 14 prepared for the resumption of deportations: registering Jews, canceling economic exemptions, and hunting down Jews in hiding. A plan to dispatch four trains between 18 and 22 April was not implemented. In response to the threatened resumption, Slovak bishops issued a pastoral letter in Latin on 8 March condemning antisemitism and totalitarianism and defending the rights of all Jews. Germany put increasing pressure on the Slovak State to hand over its remaining Jews in 1943 and 1944, but Slovak politicians did not agree to resume the deportations.
In late 1943, leading army officers and intelligentsia formed the Slovak National Council to plan an insurrection; the council united both Communist and democratic opponents of the regime. Other anti-fascists retreated to the Carpathian mountains and formed partisan groups. Preparations for the uprising evoked mixed feelings in the remaining Slovak Jews, who feared that an uprising would bring about a crackdown on their community. Underground groups organized at the Sereď and Nováky labor camps. Slovak authorities began to re-register Jews in January 1944, prompting some to flee to Hungary. On 19 March 1944 Germany invaded Hungary, including Carpathian Ruthenia and the areas ceded by Czechoslovakia in 1938. The Slovak Jews who had fled to Hungary tried to return, but many were arrested at the border and deported directly to Auschwitz. The Slovak ambassador in Budapest, Ján Spišiak, issued documents to 3,000 Jews allowing them to legally cross the border, bringing the total number of Jews in Slovakia to 25,000. Between 14 May and 7 July 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, most to Auschwitz; including many Slovak Jews in the country. To counter the perceived security threat of Jews in the Šariš-Zemplín region with the front line moving westward, on 15 May 1944 the Slovak government ordered Jews to move to the western part of the country.
## Resumption of deportations (1944–1945)
### German invasion
Concerned about the increase in resistance, Germany invaded Slovakia; this precipitated the Slovak National Uprising, which broke out on 29 August 1944. The insurgent forces seized central Slovakia but were defeated on 27 October at Banská Bystrica. Partisans withdrew to the mountains and continued their guerrilla campaign into 1945. A new government was sworn in, with Tiso's cousin Štefan as prime minister; Jozef remained president. The papal chargé d'affaires Burzio met with Tiso on 22 and 29 September, reportedly calling Tiso a liar when the president denied knowledge of deportations. Pius XII instructed Burzio to tell Tiso that the Vatican condemned the persecution of individuals for their race or nationality. The United States and Switzerland issued formal protests against the deportation of Jews. Slovak propaganda blamed the Jews and Czechs for the uprising. Nevertheless, the Slovak government preferred the concentration of Jews in concentration camps in Slovakia to their deportation. Tiso asked for the Germans to spare at least baptized Jews and those in mixed marriages, but his requests were ignored.
The uprising provided the Germans with an opportunity to implement the Final Solution in Slovakia. Anti-Jewish actions were nominally controlled by the Slovak Ministry of Defense, but in practice the Germans dictated policy. Unlike the deportations of 1942, the roundups of Jews were organized and carried out by German forces. SS officer Alois Brunner, who had participated in the organization of transports of Jews from France and Greece, arrived in Slovakia to arrange the deportation of the country's remaining Jews. The SS unit Einsatzgruppe H, including Einsatzkommandos 13, 14, and 29, was formed to suppress the uprising immediately after it began and round up Jews and Romani people. Local collaborators, including SS-Heimatschutz (HS), Freiwillige Schutzstaffel and the Hlinka Guard Emergency Divisions (POHG), were essential to Einsatzgruppe H's work. Collaborators denounced those in hiding, impersonated partisans, and aided with interrogations.
After the uprising began, thousands of Jews fled to the mountainous interior and partisan-controlled areas around Banská Bystrica, including many who left the labor camps after the guards fled. Around 1,600 to 2,000 Jews fought as partisans, ten percent of the total insurgent force, although many hid their identity due to antisemitism in the partisan movement. Anti-Jewish legislation in the liberated areas was canceled by the Slovak National Council, but the attitude of the local population varied: some risked their lives to hide Jews, and others turned them in to the police. Unlike in 1942, the death penalty was in effect for rescuers; the majority provided help for a fee, although there were also cases of selfless rescues. Many Jews spent six to eight months in makeshift shelters or bunkers in the mountains, while others hid in the houses of non-Jews. Regardless, Jews required money for six to eight months of living expenses and the help of non-Jews willing to provide assistance. Some of the Jews in shelters had to return home later in the winter, risking capture, because of the hunger and cold. Living openly and continuing to work under false papers was typically only possible in Bratislava.
### Roundups
Jews who were captured were briefly imprisoned at local prisons or the Einsatzgruppe H office in Bratislava, from which they were sent to Sereď for deportation. Local authorities provided lists of Jews, and many local residents also denounced Jews. In the first half of September there were large-scale raids in Topoľčany (3 September), Trenčín, and Nitra (7 September), during which 616 Jews were arrested and imprisoned in Ilava and Sereď. In Žilina, Einsatzkommando 13 and collaborators arrested hundreds of Jews over the night of 13/14 September. The victims were deported to Sereď or Ilava and thence to Auschwitz, where most were murdered. Einsatzgruppe H reported that some Jews were able to escape because of insufficient personnel, but that both Germans and Slovaks generally supported the roundups and helped track down evaders. After the defeat of the uprising, the German forces also hunted the Jews hiding in the mountains. Although most victims were arrested during the first two months of occupation, the hunt for the Jews continued until 30 March 1945, when a Jewish prisoner was taken to Sereď just three days before the camp was liberated.
Some Jews had been arrested in Bratislava by 20 September. The largest roundup was carried out in the city during the night of 28/29 September by Einsatzkommando 29, aided by 600 HS and POHG collaborators and a Luftwaffe unit that guarded the streets: around 1,600 Jews were arrested and taken to Sereď. Some 300 Jews with foreign citizenship were temporarily housed in a castle in Marianka. Brunner raided the castle on 11 October; all but three of the prisoners were taken to Sereď and deported to Auschwitz on 17 October. In mid-October, an office was established at the former Jewish Center to hunt down Jews in hiding, which tortured captured Jews into revealing the names and addresses of other Jews. The one to two thousand Jews left in Bratislava were ordered to turn themselves in on 20 November or face imprisonment, but few did so. Half of the Jews arrested after 19 November were in Bratislava, most in hiding with false papers. Henri Dunand of the Red Cross provided funding for a clandestine group led by Arnold Lazar, which provided money, food, and clothing to Jews in hiding in Bratislava.
### Deportation
Sereď concentration camp was the primary facility for interning Jews before their deportation. Although there were no transports until the end of September, the Jews experienced harsh treatment (including rape and murder) and severe overcrowding as the population swelled to 3,000 – more than twice the intended capacity. Brunner took over the camp's administration from the Slovak government at the end of September. About 11,700 people were deported on eleven transports; the first five (from 30 September to 17 October) went to Auschwitz, where most of the victims were gassed. The final transport to Auschwitz, on 2 November, arrived after the gas chambers were shut down. Later transports left for Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, and Theresienstadt.
Two small transports left Čadca for Auschwitz on 1 and 5 September; Fatran estimates that the total number of deportees was about 400. In September and October, at least 131 people were deported from Slovakia via Zakopane; two of the transports ended at Kraków-Płaszów and the third at Auschwitz. A transport from Prešov, departing 26 November, ended up at Ravensbrück. According to a Czechoslovak criminal investigation, another 800 Jews were deported in two transports from eastern Slovakia on 16 October and 16 December. Details on the transports leaving from locations other than Sereď is fragmentary, and the total number of deportees is not known. Slovak historian Ivan Kamenec estimated that 13,500 Jews were deported in 1944 and 1945, of whom 10,000 died, but Israeli historian Gila Fatran and Czech historian Lenka Šindelářová consider that 14,150 deportees can be verified and the true figure may be higher. The Slovak regime also transferred several hundred political prisoners to German custody. Deported to Mauthausen concentration camp, many died there.
### Massacres
After the German invasion, about 4,000 people were murdered in Slovakia, mostly by Einsatzgruppe H, but with help from local collaborators. About half (2,000) of the victims were Jews; other victims included partisans, supporters of the uprising, and Romani people. One of the first executions occurred in the Topoľčany district, where Einsatzkommando 14 began its mass roundups of Jews. Many of the arrested Jews were taken to Sereď for deportation, but 53 were shot in Nemčice on 11 September. The largest execution was in Kremnička, a small village 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) away from Banská Bystrica. Upon the capture of the rebel stronghold, Jews, partisans, Romanis, and others arrested in the area were held in the prison in the town. Of these, 743 people were brought to Kremnička for execution in a series of massacres between November and March, by Einsatzgruppe H and the POHG. Victims included 280 women and 99 children; half were Jewish. Hundreds of people were murdered at the nearby village of Nemecká, where the victims' bodies were burned after they were shot. Zvolen's Jewish cemetery was used as an execution site; 218 bodies were exhumed after the end of the war.
## Aftermath
The Red Army captured Slovakia by the end of April 1945. Around 69,000 Jews, 77 percent of the prewar population, had been murdered. In addition to the 10,000 to 11,000 Jews who survived in Slovakia, 9,000 Jews returned who had been deported to concentration camps or fled abroad, and 10,000 Jews survived in the Hungarian-annexed territories. By the end of 1945, 33,000 Jews were living in Slovakia. Many survivors had lost their entire families, and a third suffered from tuberculosis. Although a postwar Czechoslovak law negated property transactions arising from Nazi persecution, the autonomous Slovak government refused to apply it. Heirless property was nationalized in 1947 into the Currency Liquidation Fund. Those who had stolen Jewish property were reluctant to return it; former resistance members had also appropriated some stolen property. Conflict over restitution led to intimidation and violent attacks, including the September 1945 Topoľčany pogrom and the Partisan Congress riots in August 1946. Polish historian Anna Cichopek-Gajraj estimates that at least 36 Jews were murdered and more than 100 injured in postwar violence.
Josef Witiska [de; fr; sv], the commander of Einsatzgruppe H, committed suicide in 1946 during extradition to Czechoslovakia; Wisliceny was tried, convicted and executed in Bratislava in 1948. Tiso (who had fled to Austria) was extradited to Czechoslovakia, convicted of treason and collaboration, sentenced to death on 15 April 1947, and executed three days later. According to the court, his "most immoral, most unchristian, and most inhuman" action was ordering the deportation of the Slovak Jews. Other perpetrators, including Tuka, were also tried, convicted, and executed. Both Tiso and Tuka were tried under Decree 33/1945, an ex post facto law that mandated the death penalty for the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising; their roles in the Holocaust were a subset of the crimes for which they were convicted. The authors of some of the more egregious antisemitic articles and caricatures were prosecuted after the war. The trials painted Slovak State officials as traitors, thereby exonerating Slovak society from responsibility for the Holocaust.
The Czechoslovak government supported Zionism, insisting that Jews assimilate into Czechoslovak culture or emigrate to Palestine. Jews who had declared German or Hungarian nationality on a prewar census were stripped of their citizenship, losing any right to restitution, and were threatened with deportation. Most Jews in Slovakia emigrated to Israel or other countries in the years after the war. Emigration accelerated in 1948 after the Communist coup and nationalization of many businesses after the war. The number of Jewish communities decreased from the postwar high of 126 to 25, while the population decreased by 80 percent. Only a few thousand Jews were left by the end of 1949. Many of those who chose to stay changed their surnames and abandoned religious practice to fit in with the Slovak middle class. In 2019, the Jewish population was estimated at 2,000 to 3,000.
## Legacy
The government's attitude to Jews and Zionism shifted after 1948, leading to the 1952 Slánský trial in which the Czechoslovak government accused fourteen Communists (eleven of them Jewish) of belonging to a Zionist conspiracy. Political censorship hampered the study of the Holocaust, and memorials to the victims of fascism did not mention Jews. In the 1960s, which were characterized by a liberalization known as the Prague Spring, discussion of the Holocaust opened up. The Academy Award-winning 1965 film, The Shop on Main Street, focused on Slovak culpability for the Holocaust. Following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, authorities cracked down on free expression, while anti-Zionist propaganda, much of it imported from the Soviet Union, intensified and veered into antisemitism after Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War.
A nationalist resurgence followed the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, leading to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 and the nationalist Mečiar government. After Mečiar's fall in 1998, the Slovak government promoted Holocaust remembrance to demonstrate the country's European identity before it joined the European Union in 2004. During the 1990s, many memorials were constructed to commemorate Holocaust victims, and in October 2001 Slovakia designated 9 September (the anniversary of the passage of the Jewish Code) as Holocaust Victims and Racial Hatred Day. The National Memory Institute was established in 2002 to provide access to the records of both the Slovak State and Communist state. The post-Communist government enacted laws for the restitution of Jewish property, but residency and citizenship requirements prevented emigrants from filing claims. In 2002, ten percent of the value of the nationalized heirless property was released into a fund that paid for Jewish education and Holocaust memorials. As of January 2019, Yad Vashem (the official Israeli memorial to the Holocaust) has recognized 602 Slovaks as Righteous Among the Nations for risking their lives to save Jews.
Political scientist Jelena Subotić states that the Slovak State is "a paradox for postcommunist Slovakia’s identity construction" because it is seen as the first independent Slovak state. If considered fully independent, then it takes greater responsibility for the deportation of Jews during the Holocaust, but if not, then it loses its role as legitimation for the current Slovak state. Holocaust relativism in Slovakia tends to manifest as attempts to absolve the Tiso government of blame by deflecting responsibility onto Germans and Jews. A 1997 textbook by Milan Stanislav Ďurica and endorsed by the government sparked international controversy (and was eventually withdrawn from the school curriculum) because it portrayed Jews as living happily in labor camps during the war. Tiso and the Slovak State have been the focus of Catholic and ultranationalist commemorations. The neo-Nazi Kotleba party, which is represented in the national parliament and the European Parliament and is especially popular with younger voters, promotes a positive view of the Slovak State. Its leader, Marian Kotleba, once described Jews as "devils in human skin". Members of the party have been charged with Holocaust denial, which has been a criminal offense since 2001.
## See also
- Historiography of the Holocaust in Slovakia |
44,503,418 | Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event | 1,172,783,967 | Mass extinction event about 66 million years ago | [
"Cenozoic volcanism",
"Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary",
"Events in the geological history of Earth",
"Events that forced the climate",
"Evolution of mammals",
"Hypothetical impact events",
"Late Cretaceous extinctions",
"Megatsunamis",
"Mesozoic volcanism",
"Meteorological hypotheses",
"Paleogene extinctions",
"Prehistoric dinosaurs"
]
| The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event, also known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction, was a sudden mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, approximately 66 million years ago. The event caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. Most other tetrapods weighing more than 25 kilograms (55 pounds) also became extinct, with the exception of some ectothermic species such as sea turtles and crocodilians. It marked the end of the Cretaceous Period, and with it the Mesozoic era, while heralding the beginning of the Cenozoic era, which continues to this day.
In the geologic record, the K–Pg event is marked by a thin layer of sediment called the K–Pg boundary or K–T boundary, which can be found throughout the world in marine and terrestrial rocks. The boundary clay shows unusually high levels of the metal iridium, which is more common in asteroids than in the Earth's crust.
As originally proposed in 1980 by a team of scientists led by Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, it is now generally thought that the K–Pg extinction was caused by the impact of a massive asteroid 10 to 15 km (6 to 9 mi) wide, 66 million years ago, which devastated the global environment, mainly through a lingering impact winter which halted photosynthesis in plants and plankton. The impact hypothesis, also known as the Alvarez hypothesis, was bolstered by the discovery of the 180 km (112 mi) Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula in the early 1990s, which provided conclusive evidence that the K–Pg boundary clay represented debris from an asteroid impact. The fact that the extinctions occurred simultaneously provides strong evidence that they were caused by the asteroid. A 2016 drilling project into the Chicxulub peak ring confirmed that the peak ring comprised granite ejected within minutes from deep in the earth, but contained hardly any gypsum, the usual sulfate-containing sea floor rock in the region: the gypsum would have vaporized and dispersed as an aerosol into the atmosphere, causing longer-term effects on the climate and food chain. In October 2019, researchers reported that the event rapidly acidified the oceans, producing ecological collapse and, in this way as well, produced long-lasting effects on the climate, and accordingly was a key reason for the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.
Other causal or contributing factors to the extinction may have been the Deccan Traps and other volcanic eruptions, climate change, and sea level change. However, in January 2020, scientists reported that climate-modeling of the extinction event favored the asteroid impact and not volcanism.
A wide range of terrestrial species perished in the K–Pg extinction, the best-known being the non-avian dinosaurs, along with many mammals, birds, lizards, insects, plants, and all the pterosaurs. In the oceans, the K–Pg extinction killed off plesiosaurs and mosasaurs and devastated teleost fish, sharks, mollusks (especially ammonites, which became extinct), and many species of plankton. It is estimated that 75% or more of all species on Earth vanished. However, the extinction also provided evolutionary opportunities: in its wake, many groups underwent remarkable adaptive radiation—sudden and prolific divergence into new forms and species within the disrupted and emptied ecological niches. Mammals in particular diversified in the Paleogene, evolving new forms such as horses, whales, bats, and primates. The surviving group of dinosaurs were avians, a few species of ground and water fowl, which radiated into all modern species of birds. Among other groups, teleost fish and perhaps lizards also radiated.
## Extinction patterns
`The K–Pg extinction event was severe, global, rapid, and selective, eliminating a vast number of species. Based on marine fossils, it is estimated that 75% or more of all species were made extinct.`
The event appears to have affected all continents at the same time. Non-avian dinosaurs, for example, are known from the Maastrichtian of North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and Antarctica, but are unknown from the Cenozoic anywhere in the world. Similarly, fossil pollen shows devastation of the plant communities in areas as far apart as New Mexico, Alaska, China, and New Zealand.
Despite the event's severity, there was significant variability in the rate of extinction between and within different clades. Species that depended on photosynthesis declined or became extinct as atmospheric particles blocked sunlight and reduced the solar energy reaching the ground. This plant extinction caused a major reshuffling of the dominant plant groups. Omnivores, insectivores, and carrion-eaters survived the extinction event, perhaps because of the increased availability of their food sources. No purely herbivorous or carnivorous mammals seem to have survived. Rather, the surviving mammals and birds fed on insects, worms, and snails, which in turn fed on detritus (dead plant and animal matter).
In stream communities, few animal groups became extinct, because such communities rely less directly on food from living plants, and more on detritus washed in from the land, protecting them from extinction. Similar, but more complex patterns have been found in the oceans. Extinction was more severe among animals living in the water column than among animals living on or in the sea floor. Animals in the water column are almost entirely dependent on primary production from living phytoplankton, while animals on the ocean floor always or sometimes feed on detritus. Coccolithophorids and mollusks (including ammonites, rudists, freshwater snails, and mussels), and those organisms whose food chain included these shell builders, became extinct or suffered heavy losses. For example, it is thought that ammonites were the principal food of mosasaurs, a group of giant marine reptiles that became extinct at the boundary. The largest air-breathing survivors of the event, crocodyliforms and champsosaurs, were semi-aquatic and had access to detritus. Modern crocodilians can live as scavengers and survive for months without food, and their young are small, grow slowly, and feed largely on invertebrates and dead organisms for their first few years. These characteristics have been linked to crocodilian survival at the end of the Cretaceous.
After the K–Pg extinction event, biodiversity required substantial time to recover, despite the existence of abundant vacant ecological niches.
### Microbiota
The K–Pg boundary represents one of the most dramatic turnovers in the fossil record for various calcareous nanoplankton that formed the calcium deposits for which the Cretaceous is named. The turnover in this group is clearly marked at the species level. Statistical analysis of marine losses at this time suggests that the decrease in diversity was caused more by a sharp increase in extinctions than by a decrease in speciation. The K–Pg boundary record of dinoflagellates is not so well understood, mainly because only microbial cysts provide a fossil record, and not all dinoflagellate species have cyst-forming stages, which likely causes diversity to be underestimated. Recent studies indicate that there were no major shifts in dinoflagellates through the boundary layer.
Radiolaria have left a geological record since at least the Ordovician times, and their mineral fossil skeletons can be tracked across the K–Pg boundary. There is no evidence of mass extinction of these organisms, and there is support for high productivity of these species in southern high latitudes as a result of cooling temperatures in the early Paleocene. Approximately 46% of diatom species survived the transition from the Cretaceous to the Upper Paleocene, a significant turnover in species but not a catastrophic extinction.
The occurrence of planktonic foraminifera across the K–Pg boundary has been studied since the 1930s. Research spurred by the possibility of an impact event at the K–Pg boundary resulted in numerous publications detailing planktonic foraminiferal extinction at the boundary; there is ongoing debate between groups which think the evidence indicates substantial extinction of these species at the K–Pg boundary, and those who think the evidence supports multiple extinctions and expansions through the boundary.
Numerous species of benthic foraminifera became extinct during the event, presumably because they depend on organic debris for nutrients, while biomass in the ocean is thought to have decreased. As the marine microbiota recovered, it is thought that increased speciation of benthic foraminifera resulted from the increase in food sources. Phytoplankton recovery in the early Paleocene provided the food source to support large benthic foraminiferal assemblages, which are mainly detritus-feeding. Ultimate recovery of the benthic populations occurred over several stages lasting several hundred thousand years into the early Paleocene.
### Marine invertebrates
There is significant variation in the fossil record as to the extinction rate of marine invertebrates across the K–Pg boundary. The apparent rate is influenced by a lack of fossil records, rather than extinctions.
Ostracods, a class of small crustaceans that were prevalent in the upper Maastrichtian, left fossil deposits in a variety of locations. A review of these fossils shows that ostracod diversity was lower in the Paleocene than any other time in the Cenozoic. Current research cannot ascertain whether the extinctions occurred prior to, or during, the boundary interval.
Approximately 60% of late-Cretaceous Scleractinia coral genera failed to cross the K–Pg boundary into the Paleocene. Further analysis of the coral extinctions shows that approximately 98% of colonial species, ones that inhabit warm, shallow tropical waters, became extinct. The solitary corals, which generally do not form reefs and inhabit colder and deeper (below the photic zone) areas of the ocean were less impacted by the K–Pg boundary. Colonial coral species rely upon symbiosis with photosynthetic algae, which collapsed due to the events surrounding the K–Pg boundary, but the use of data from coral fossils to support K–Pg extinction and subsequent Paleocene recovery, must be weighed against the changes that occurred in coral ecosystems through the K–Pg boundary.
The numbers of cephalopod, echinoderm, and bivalve genera exhibited significant diminution after the K–Pg boundary. Most species of brachiopods, a small phylum of marine invertebrates, survived the K–Pg extinction event and diversified during the early Paleocene.
Except for nautiloids (represented by the modern order Nautilida) and coleoids (which had already diverged into modern octopodes, squids, and cuttlefish) all other species of the molluscan class Cephalopoda became extinct at the K–Pg boundary. These included the ecologically significant belemnoids, as well as the ammonoids, a group of highly diverse, numerous, and widely distributed shelled cephalopods. Researchers have pointed out that the reproductive strategy of the surviving nautiloids, which rely upon few and larger eggs, played a role in outsurviving their ammonoid counterparts through the extinction event. The ammonoids utilized a planktonic strategy of reproduction (numerous eggs and planktonic larvae), which would have been devastated by the K–Pg extinction event. Additional research has shown that subsequent to this elimination of ammonoids from the global biota, nautiloids began an evolutionary radiation into shell shapes and complexities theretofore known only from ammonoids.
Approximately 35% of echinoderm genera became extinct at the K–Pg boundary, although taxa that thrived in low-latitude, shallow-water environments during the late Cretaceous had the highest extinction rate. Mid-latitude, deep-water echinoderms were much less affected at the K–Pg boundary. The pattern of extinction points to habitat loss, specifically the drowning of carbonate platforms, the shallow-water reefs in existence at that time, by the extinction event.
Other invertebrate groups, including rudists (reef-building clams) and inoceramids (giant relatives of modern scallops), also became extinct at the K–Pg boundary.
### Fish
There are fossil records of jawed fishes across the K–Pg boundary, which provide good evidence of extinction patterns of these classes of marine vertebrates. While the deep-sea realm was able to remain seemingly unaffected, there was an equal loss between the open marine apex predators and the durophagous demersal feeders on the continental shelf. Within cartilaginous fish, approximately 7 out of the 41 families of neoselachians (modern sharks, skates, and rays) disappeared after this event and batoids (skates and rays) lost nearly all the identifiable species, while more than 90% of teleost fish (bony fish) families survived.
In the Maastrichtian age, 28 shark families and 13 batoid families thrived, of which 25 and 9, respectively, survived the K–T boundary event. Forty-seven of all neoselachian genera cross the K–T boundary, with 85% being sharks. Batoids display with 15%, a comparably low survival rate. Among elasmobranchs, those species that inhabited higher latitudes and lived pelagic lifestyles were more likely to survive, whereas epibenthic lifestyles and durophagy were strongly associated with the likelihood of perishing during the extinction event.
There is evidence of a mass extinction of bony fishes at a fossil site immediately above the K–Pg boundary layer on Seymour Island near Antarctica, apparently precipitated by the K–Pg extinction event; the marine and freshwater environments of fishes mitigated the environmental effects of the extinction event.
### Terrestrial invertebrates
Insect damage to the fossilized leaves of flowering plants from fourteen sites in North America was used as a proxy for insect diversity across the K–Pg boundary and analyzed to determine the rate of extinction. Researchers found that Cretaceous sites, prior to the extinction event, had rich plant and insect-feeding diversity. During the early Paleocene, flora were relatively diverse with little predation from insects, even 1.7 million years after the extinction event.
### Terrestrial plants
There is overwhelming evidence of global disruption of plant communities at the K–Pg boundary. Extinctions are seen both in studies of fossil pollen, and fossil leaves. In North America, the data suggests massive devastation and mass extinction of plants at the K–Pg boundary sections, although there were substantial megafloral changes before the boundary. In North America, approximately 57% of plant species became extinct. In high southern hemisphere latitudes, such as New Zealand and Antarctica, the mass die-off of flora caused no significant turnover in species, but dramatic and short-term changes in the relative abundance of plant groups. Another line of evidence of a major floral extinction is that the divergence rate of subviral pathogens of angiosperms sharply decreased, which indicates an enormous reduction in the number of flowering plants.
Due to the wholesale destruction of plants at the K–Pg boundary, there was a proliferation of saprotrophic organisms, such as fungi, that do not require photosynthesis and use nutrients from decaying vegetation. The dominance of fungal species lasted only a few years while the atmosphere cleared and plenty of organic matter to feed on was present. Once the atmosphere cleared, photosynthetic organisms, initially ferns and other ground-level plants, returned. In some regions, the Paleocene recovery of plants began with recolonizations by fern species, represented as a fern spike in the geologic record; this same pattern of fern recolonization was observed after the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. Just two species of fern appear to have dominated the landscape for centuries after the event.
Polyploidy appears to have enhanced the ability of flowering plants to survive the extinction, probably because the additional copies of the genome such plants possessed allowed them to more readily adapt to the rapidly changing environmental conditions that followed the impact.
### Fungi
While it appears that many fungi were wiped out at the K-Pg boundary, it is worth noting that evidence has been found indicating that some fungal species thrived in the years after the extinction event. Microfossils from that period indicate a great increase in fungal spores, long before the resumption of plentiful fern spores in the recovery after the impact. Monoporisporites and hypha are almost exclusive microfossils for a short span during and after the iridium boundary. These saprophytes would not need sunlight, allowing them to survive during a period when the atmosphere was likely clogged with dust and sulfur aerosols.
The proliferation of fungi has occurred after several extinction events, including the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the largest known mass extinction in Earth's history, with up to 96% of all species suffering extinction.
### Amphibians
There is limited evidence for extinction of amphibians at the K–Pg boundary. A study of fossil vertebrates across the K–Pg boundary in Montana concluded that no species of amphibian became extinct. Yet there are several species of Maastrichtian amphibian, not included as part of this study, which are unknown from the Paleocene. These include the frog Theatonius lancensis and the albanerpetontid Albanerpeton galaktion; therefore, some amphibians do seem to have become extinct at the boundary. The relatively low levels of extinction seen among amphibians probably reflect the low extinction rates seen in freshwater animals.
### Non-archosaurs
#### Turtles
More than 80% of Cretaceous turtle species passed through the K–Pg boundary. All six turtle families in existence at the end of the Cretaceous survived into the Paleogene and are represented by living species.
#### Lepidosauria
The living non-archosaurian reptile taxa, lepidosaurians (snakes, lizards and tuataras), survived across the K–Pg boundary.
The rhynchocephalians were a widespread and relatively successful group of lepidosaurians during the early Mesozoic, but began to decline by the mid-Cretaceous, although they were very successful in South America. They are represented today by a single genus (the Tuatara), located exclusively in New Zealand.
The order Squamata, which is represented today by lizards, snakes and amphisbaenians (worm lizards), radiated into various ecological niches during the Jurassic and was successful throughout the Cretaceous. They survived through the K–Pg boundary and are currently the most successful and diverse group of living reptiles, with more than 6,000 extant species. Many families of terrestrial squamates became extinct at the boundary, such as monstersaurians and polyglyphanodonts, and fossil evidence indicates they suffered very heavy losses in the K–Pg event, only recovering 10 million years after it.
#### Non-archosaurian marine reptiles
Giant non-archosaurian aquatic reptiles such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, which were the top marine predators of their time, became extinct by the end of the Cretaceous. The ichthyosaurs had disappeared from fossil records before the mass extinction occurred.
### Archosaurs
The archosaur clade includes two surviving groups, crocodilians and birds, along with the various extinct groups of non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
#### Crocodyliforms
Ten families of crocodilians or their close relatives are represented in the Maastrichtian fossil records, of which five died out prior to the K–Pg boundary. Five families have both Maastrichtian and Paleocene fossil representatives. All of the surviving families of crocodyliforms inhabited freshwater and terrestrial environments—except for the Dyrosauridae, which lived in freshwater and marine locations. Approximately 50% of crocodyliform representatives survived across the K–Pg boundary, the only apparent trend being that no large crocodiles survived. Crocodyliform survivability across the boundary may have resulted from their aquatic niche and ability to burrow, which reduced susceptibility to negative environmental effects at the boundary. Jouve and colleagues suggested in 2008 that juvenile marine crocodyliforms lived in freshwater environments as do modern marine crocodile juveniles, which would have helped them survive where other marine reptiles became extinct; freshwater environments were not so strongly affected by the K–Pg extinction event as marine environments were.
#### Pterosaurs
Two families of pterosaurs, Azhdarchidae and Nyctosauridae, were definitely present in the Maastrichtian, and they likely became extinct at the K–Pg boundary. Several other pterosaur lineages may have been present during the Maastrichtian, such as the ornithocheirids, pteranodontids, a possible tapejarid, a possible thalassodromid and a basal toothed taxon of uncertain affinities, though they are represented by fragmentary remains that are difficult to assign to any given group. While this was occurring, modern birds were undergoing diversification; traditionally it was thought that they replaced archaic birds and pterosaur groups, possibly due to direct competition, or they simply filled empty niches, but there is no correlation between pterosaur and avian diversities that are conclusive to a competition hypothesis, and small pterosaurs were present in the Late Cretaceous. At least some niches previously held by birds were reclaimed by pterosaurs prior to the K–Pg event.
#### Birds
Most paleontologists regard birds as the only surviving dinosaurs (see Origin of birds). It is thought that all non-avian theropods became extinct, including then-flourishing groups such as enantiornithines and hesperornithiforms. Several analyses of bird fossils show divergence of species prior to the K–Pg boundary, and that duck, chicken, and ratite bird relatives coexisted with non-avian dinosaurs. Large collections of bird fossils representing a range of different species provide definitive evidence for the persistence of archaic birds to within 300,000 years of the K–Pg boundary. The absence of these birds in the Paleogene is evidence that a mass extinction of archaic birds took place there.
The most successful and dominant group of avialans, enantiornithes, were wiped out. Only a small fraction of ground and water-dwelling Cretaceous bird species survived the impact, giving rise to today's birds. The only bird group known for certain to have survived the K–Pg boundary is the Aves. Avians may have been able to survive the extinction as a result of their abilities to dive, swim, or seek shelter in water and marshlands. Many species of avians can build burrows, or nest in tree holes, or termite nests, all of which provided shelter from the environmental effects at the K–Pg boundary. Long-term survival past the boundary was assured as a result of filling ecological niches left empty by extinction of non-avian dinosaurs. The open niche space and relative scarcity of predators following the K-Pg extinction allowed for adaptive radiation of various avian groups. Ratites, for example, rapidly diversified in the early Paleogene and are believed to have convergently developed flightlessness at least three to six times, often fulfilling the niche space for large herbivores once occupied by non-avian dinosaurs.
#### Non-avian dinosaurs
Excluding a few controversial claims, scientists agree that all non-avian dinosaurs became extinct at the K–Pg boundary. The dinosaur fossil record has been interpreted to show both a decline in diversity and no decline in diversity during the last few million years of the Cretaceous, and it may be that the quality of the dinosaur fossil record is simply not good enough to permit researchers to distinguish between the options. There is no evidence that late Maastrichtian non-avian dinosaurs could burrow, swim, or dive, which suggests they were unable to shelter themselves from the worst parts of any environmental stress that occurred at the K–Pg boundary. It is possible that small dinosaurs (other than birds) did survive, but they would have been deprived of food, as herbivorous dinosaurs would have found plant material scarce and carnivores would have quickly found prey in short supply.
The growing consensus about the endothermy of dinosaurs (see dinosaur physiology) helps to understand their full extinction in contrast with their close relatives, the crocodilians. Ectothermic ("cold-blooded") crocodiles have very limited needs for food (they can survive several months without eating), while endothermic ("warm-blooded") animals of similar size need much more food to sustain their faster metabolism. Thus, under the circumstances of food chain disruption previously mentioned, non-avian dinosaurs died out, while some crocodiles survived. In this context, the survival of other endothermic animals, such as some birds and mammals, could be due, among other reasons, to their smaller needs for food, related to their small size at the extinction epoch.
Whether the extinction occurred gradually or suddenly has been debated, as both views have support from the fossil record. A study of 29 fossil sites in Catalan Pyrenees of Europe in 2010 supports the view that dinosaurs there had great diversity until the asteroid impact, with more than 100 living species. More recent research indicates that this figure is obscured by taphonomic biases and the sparsity of the continental fossil record. The results of this study, which were based on estimated real global biodiversity, showed that between 628 and 1,078 non-avian dinosaur species were alive at the end of the Cretaceous and underwent sudden extinction after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Alternatively, interpretation based on the fossil-bearing rocks along the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada, supports the gradual extinction of non-avian dinosaurs; during the last 10 million years of the Cretaceous layers there, the number of dinosaur species seems to have decreased from about 45 to approximately 12. Other scientists have made the same assessment following their research.
Several researchers support the existence of Paleocene non-avian dinosaurs. Evidence of this existence is based on the discovery of dinosaur remains in the Hell Creek Formation up to 1.3 m (4 ft 3.2 in) above and 40,000 years later than the K–Pg boundary. Pollen samples recovered near a fossilized hadrosaur femur recovered in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone at the San Juan River in Colorado, indicate that the animal lived during the Cenozoic, approximately 64.5 Ma (about 1 million years after the K–Pg extinction event). If their existence past the K–Pg boundary can be confirmed, these hadrosaurids would be considered a dead clade walking. The scientific consensus is that these fossils were eroded from their original locations and then re-buried in much later sediments (also known as reworked fossils).
#### Choristodere
The choristoderes (semi-aquatic archosauromorphs) survived across the K–Pg boundary but would die out in the early Miocene. Studies on Champsosaurus' palatal teeth suggest that there were dietary changes among the various species across the K–Pg event.
### Mammals
All major Cretaceous mammalian lineages, including monotremes (egg-laying mammals), multituberculates, metatherians, eutherians, dryolestoideans, and gondwanatheres survived the K–Pg extinction event, although they suffered losses. In particular, metatherians largely disappeared from North America, and the Asian deltatheroidans became extinct (aside from the lineage leading to Gurbanodelta). In the Hell Creek beds of North America, at least half of the ten known multituberculate species and all eleven metatherians species are not found above the boundary. Multituberculates in Europe and North America survived relatively unscathed and quickly bounced back in the Paleocene, but Asian forms were devastated, never again to represent a significant component of mammalian fauna. A recent study indicates that metatherians suffered the heaviest losses at the K–Pg event, followed by multituberculates, while eutherians recovered the quickest.
Mammalian species began diversifying approximately 30 million years prior to the K–Pg boundary. Diversification of mammals stalled across the boundary. Current research indicates that mammals did not explosively diversify across the K–Pg boundary, despite the ecological niches made available by the extinction of dinosaurs. Several mammalian orders have been interpreted as diversifying immediately after the K–Pg boundary, including Chiroptera (bats) and Cetartiodactyla (a diverse group that today includes whales and dolphins and even-toed ungulates), although recent research concludes that only marsupial orders diversified soon after the K–Pg boundary.
K–Pg boundary mammalian species were generally small, comparable in size to rats; this small size would have helped them find shelter in protected environments. It is postulated that some early monotremes, marsupials, and placentals were semiaquatic or burrowing, as there are multiple mammalian lineages with such habits today. Any burrowing or semiaquatic mammal would have had additional protection from K–Pg boundary environmental stresses.
## Evidence
### North American fossils
In North American terrestrial sequences, the extinction event is best represented by the marked discrepancy between the rich and relatively abundant late-Maastrichtian pollen record and the post-boundary fern spike. A highly informative sequence of dinosaur-bearing rocks from the K–Pg boundary is found in western North America, particularly the late Maastrichtian-age Hell Creek Formation of Montana. Comparison with the older Judith River Formation (Montana) and Dinosaur Park Formation (Alberta), which both date from approximately 75 Ma, provides information on the changes in dinosaur populations over the last 10 million years of the Cretaceous. These fossil beds are geographically limited, covering only part of one continent.
The middle–late Campanian formations show a greater diversity of dinosaurs than any other single group of rocks. The late Maastrichtian rocks contain the largest members of several major clades: Tyrannosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, Triceratops, and Torosaurus, which suggests food was plentiful immediately prior to the extinction.
Plant fossils illustrate the reduction in plant species across the K–Pg boundary. In the sediments below the K–Pg boundary the dominant plant remains are angiosperm pollen grains, but the boundary layer contains little pollen and is dominated by fern spores. More usual pollen levels gradually resume above the boundary layer. This is reminiscent of areas blighted by modern volcanic eruptions, where the recovery is led by ferns, which are later replaced by larger angiosperm plants. A study of fossilized fish bones found at Tanis in North Dakota suggests that the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction happened during the Northern Hemisphere spring.
### Marine fossils
The mass extinction of marine plankton appears to have been abrupt and right at the K–Pg boundary. Ammonite genera became extinct at or near the K–Pg boundary; there was a smaller and slower extinction of ammonite genera prior to the boundary associated with a late Cretaceous marine regression. The gradual extinction of most inoceramid bivalves began well before the K–Pg boundary, and a small, gradual reduction in ammonite diversity occurred throughout the very late Cretaceous.
Further analysis shows that several processes were in progress in the late Cretaceous seas and partially overlapped in time, then ended with the abrupt mass extinction. The diversity of marine life decreased when the climate near the K–Pg boundary increased in temperature. The temperature increased about three to four degrees very rapidly between 65.4 and 65.2 million years ago, which is very near the time of the extinction event. Not only did the climate temperature increase, but the water temperature decreased, causing a drastic decrease in marine diversity.
### Megatsunamis
The scientific consensus is that the asteroid impact at the K–Pg boundary left megatsunami deposits and sediments around the area of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, from the colossal waves created by the impact. These deposits have been identified in the La Popa basin in northeastern Mexico, platform carbonates in northeastern Brazil, in Atlantic deep-sea sediments, and in the form of the thickest-known layer of graded sand deposits, around 100 m (330 ft), in the Chicxulub crater itself, directly above the shocked granite ejecta. The megatsunami has been estimated at more than 100 m (330 ft) tall, as the asteroid fell into relatively shallow seas; in deep seas it would have been 4.6 km (2.9 mi) tall.
### Fossils in sedimentary rocks deposited during the impact
Fossiliferous sedimentary rocks deposited during the K–Pg impact have been found in the Gulf of Mexico area, including tsunami wash deposits carrying remains of a mangrove-type ecosystem, evidence that after the impact water sloshed back and forth repeatedly in the Gulf of Mexico, and dead fish left in shallow water but not disturbed by scavengers.
## Duration
The rapidity of the extinction is a controversial issue, because some theories about its causes imply a rapid extinction over a relatively short period (from a few years to a few thousand years), while others imply longer periods. The issue is difficult to resolve because of the Signor–Lipps effect, where the fossil record is so incomplete that most extinct species probably died out long after the most recent fossil that has been found. Scientists have also found very few continuous beds of fossil-bearing rock that cover a time range from several million years before the K–Pg extinction to several million years after it.
The sedimentation rate and thickness of K–Pg clay from three sites suggest rapid extinction, perhaps over a period of less than 10,000 years. At one site in the Denver Basin of Colorado, after the K–Pg boundary layer was deposited, the fern spike lasted approximately 1,000 years, and no more than 71,000 years; at the same location, the earliest appearance of Cenozoic mammals occurred after approximately 185,000 years, and no more than 570,000 years, "indicating rapid rates of biotic extinction and initial recovery in the Denver Basin during this event." Models presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union demonstrated that the period of global darkness following the Chicxulub impact would have persisted in the Hell Creek Formation nearly 2 years.
## Chicxulub impact
### Evidence for impact
In 1980, a team of researchers consisting of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, and chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel discovered that sedimentary layers found all over the world at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary contain a concentration of iridium many times greater than normal (30, 160, and 20 times in three sections originally studied). Iridium is extremely rare in Earth's crust because it is a siderophile element which mostly sank along with iron into Earth's core during planetary differentiation. As iridium remains more abundant in most asteroids and comets, the Alvarez team suggested that an asteroid struck the Earth at the time of the K–Pg boundary. There were earlier speculations on the possibility of an impact event, but this was the first hard evidence.
This hypothesis was viewed as radical when first proposed, but additional evidence soon emerged. The boundary clay was found to be full of minute spherules of rock, crystallized from droplets of molten rock formed by the impact. Shocked quartz and other minerals were also identified in the K–Pg boundary. The identification of giant tsunami beds along the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean provided more evidence, and suggested that the impact might have occurred nearby, as did the discovery that the K–Pg boundary became thicker in the southern United States, with meter-thick beds of debris occurring in northern New Mexico.
Further research identified the giant Chicxulub crater, buried under Chicxulub on the coast of Yucatán, as the source of the K–Pg boundary clay. Identified in 1990 based on work by geophysicist Glen Penfield in 1978, the crater is oval, with an average diameter of roughly 180 km (110 mi), about the size calculated by the Alvarez team.
In a 2013 paper, Paul Renne of the Berkeley Geochronology Center dated the impact at 66.043±0.011 million years ago, based on argon–argon dating. He further posits that the mass extinction occurred within 32,000 years of this date.
In 2007, it was proposed that the impactor belonged to the Baptistina family of asteroids. This link has been doubted, though not disproved, in part because of a lack of observations of the asteroid and its family. It was reported in 2009 that 298 Baptistina does not share the chemical signature of the K–Pg impactor. Further, a 2011 Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) study of reflected light from the asteroids of the family estimated their break-up at 80 Ma, giving them insufficient time to shift orbits and impact Earth by 66 Ma.
Additional evidence for the impact event is found at the Tanis site in southwestern North Dakota, United States. Tanis is part of the heavily studied Hell Creek Formation, a group of rocks spanning four states in North America renowned for many significant fossil discoveries from the Upper Cretaceous and lower Paleocene. Tanis is an extraordinary and unique site because it appears to record the events from the first minutes until a few hours after the impact of the giant Chicxulub asteroid in extreme detail. Amber from the site has been reported to contain microtektites matching those of the Chicxulub impact event. Some researchers question the interpretation of the findings at the site or are skeptical of the team leader, Robert DePalma, who had not yet received his Ph.D. in geology at the time of the discovery and whose commercial activities have been regarded with suspicion.
### Effects of impact
In March 2010, an international panel of 41 scientists reviewed 20 years of scientific literature and endorsed the asteroid hypothesis, specifically the Chicxulub impact, as the cause of the extinction, ruling out other theories such as massive volcanism. They had determined that a 10-to-15-kilometer (6 to 9 mi) asteroid hurtled into Earth at Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The collision would have released the same energy as 100 teratonnes of TNT (420 zettajoules)—more than a billion times the energy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Chicxulub impact caused a global catastrophe. Some of the phenomena were brief occurrences immediately following the impact, but there were also long-term geochemical and climatic disruptions that devastated the ecology.
The re-entry of ejecta into Earth's atmosphere included a brief (hours-long) but intense pulse of infrared radiation, cooking exposed organisms. This is debated, with opponents arguing that local ferocious fires, probably limited to North America, fall short of global firestorms. This is the "Cretaceous–Paleogene firestorm debate". A paper in 2013 by a prominent modeler of nuclear winter suggested that, based on the amount of soot in the global debris layer, the entire terrestrial biosphere might have burned, implying a global soot-cloud blocking out the sun and creating an impact winter effect. If widespread fires occurred this would have exterminated the most vulnerable organisms that survived the period immediately after the impact.
Aside from the hypothesized fire and/or impact winter effects, the impact would have created a dust cloud that blocked sunlight for up to a year, inhibiting photosynthesis. Freezing temperatures probably lasted for at least three years. At Brazos section, the sea surface temperature dropped as much as 7 °C (13 °F) for decades after the impact. It would take at least ten years for such aerosols to dissipate, and would account for the extinction of plants and phytoplankton, and subsequently herbivores and their predators. Creatures whose food chains were based on detritus would have a reasonable chance of survival.
The asteroid hit an area of carbonate rock containing a large amount of combustible hydrocarbons and sulfur, much of which was vaporized, thereby injecting sulfuric acid aerosols into the stratosphere, which might have reduced sunlight reaching the Earth's surface by more than 50%, and would have caused acid rain. The resulting acidification of the oceans would kill many organisms that grow shells of calcium carbonate. According to models of the Hell Creek Formation, the onset of global darkness would have reached its maximum in only a few weeks and likely lasted upwards of 2 years.
Beyond extinction impacts, the event also caused more general changes of flora and fauna such as giving rise to neotropical rainforest biomes like the Amazonia, replacing species composition and structure of local forests during \~6 million years of recovery to former levels of plant diversity.
### 2016 Chicxulub crater drilling project
In 2016, a scientific drilling project obtained deep rock-core samples from the peak ring around the Chicxulub impact crater. The discoveries confirmed that the rock comprising the peak ring had been shocked by immense pressure and melted in just minutes from its usual state into its present form. Unlike sea-floor deposits, the peak ring was made of granite originating much deeper in the earth, which had been ejected to the surface by the impact. Gypsum is a sulfate-containing rock usually present in the shallow seabed of the region; it had been almost entirely removed, vaporized into the atmosphere. Further, the event was immediately followed by a megatsunami sufficient to lay down the largest known layer of sand separated by grain size directly above the peak ring. The impactor was large enough to create a 190-kilometer-wide (120 mi) peak ring, to melt, shock, and eject deep granite, to create colossal water movements, and to eject an immense quantity of vaporized rock and sulfates into the atmosphere, where they would have persisted for several years. This worldwide dispersal of dust and sulfates would have affected climate catastrophically, led to large temperature drops, and devastated the food chain.
## Alternative hypotheses
Although the concurrence of the end-Cretaceous extinctions with the Chicxulub asteroid impact strongly supports the impact hypothesis, some scientists continue to support other contributing causes: volcanic eruptions, climate change, sea level change, and other impact events. The end-Cretaceous event is the only mass extinction known to be associated with an impact, and other large impacts, such as the Manicouagan Reservoir impact, do not coincide with any noticeable extinction events.
### Deccan Traps
Before 2000, arguments that the Deccan Traps flood basalts caused the extinction were usually linked to the view that the extinction was gradual, as the flood basalt events were thought to have started around 68 Mya and lasted more than 2 million years. The most recent evidence shows that the traps erupted over a period of only 800,000 years spanning the K–Pg boundary, and therefore may be responsible for the extinction and the delayed biotic recovery thereafter.
The Deccan Traps could have caused extinction through several mechanisms, including the release of dust and sulfuric aerosols into the air, which might have blocked sunlight and thereby reduced photosynthesis in plants. In addition, Deccan Trap volcanism might have resulted in carbon dioxide emissions that increased the greenhouse effect when the dust and aerosols cleared from the atmosphere. The increased carbon dioxide emissions also caused acid rain, evidenced by increased mercury deposition due to increased solubility of mercury compounds in more acidic water.
In the years when the Deccan Traps hypothesis was linked to a slower extinction, Luis Alvarez (d. 1988) replied that paleontologists were being misled by sparse data. While his assertion was not initially well-received, later intensive field studies of fossil beds lent weight to his claim. Eventually, most paleontologists began to accept the idea that the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous were largely or at least partly due to a massive Earth impact. Even Walter Alvarez acknowledged that other major changes might have contributed to the extinctions.
Combining these theories, some geophysical models suggest that the impact contributed to the Deccan Traps. These models, combined with high-precision radiometric dating, suggest that the Chicxulub impact could have triggered some of the largest Deccan eruptions, as well as eruptions at active volcanoes anywhere on Earth.
### Multiple impact event
Other crater-like topographic features have also been proposed as impact craters formed in connection with Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction. This suggests the possibility of near-simultaneous multiple impacts, perhaps from a fragmented asteroidal object similar to the Shoemaker–Levy 9 impact with Jupiter. In addition to the 180 km (110 mi) Chicxulub crater, there is the 24 km (15 mi) Boltysh crater in Ukraine (65.17±0.64 Ma), the 20 km (12 mi) Silverpit crater in the North Sea (59.5±14.5 Ma) possibly formed by bolide impact, and the controversial and much larger 600 km (370 mi) Shiva crater. Any other craters that might have formed in the Tethys Ocean would since have been obscured by the northward tectonic drift of Africa and India.
### Maastrichtian sea-level regression
There is clear evidence that sea levels fell in the final stage of the Cretaceous by more than at any other time in the Mesozoic era. In some Maastrichtian stage rock layers from various parts of the world, the later layers are terrestrial; earlier layers represent shorelines and the earliest layers represent seabeds. These layers do not show the tilting and distortion associated with mountain building, therefore the likeliest explanation is a regression, a drop in sea level. There is no direct evidence for the cause of the regression, but the currently accepted explanation is that the mid-ocean ridges became less active and sank under their own weight.
A severe regression would have greatly reduced the continental shelf area, the most species-rich part of the sea, and therefore could have been enough to cause a marine mass extinction, but this change would not have caused the extinction of the ammonites. The regression would also have caused climate changes, partly by disrupting winds and ocean currents and partly by reducing the Earth's albedo and increasing global temperatures.
Marine regression also resulted in the loss of epeiric seas, such as the Western Interior Seaway of North America. The loss of these seas greatly altered habitats, removing coastal plains that ten million years before had been host to diverse communities such as are found in rocks of the Dinosaur Park Formation. Another consequence was an expansion of freshwater environments, since continental runoff now had longer distances to travel before reaching oceans. While this change was favorable to freshwater vertebrates, those that prefer marine environments, such as sharks, suffered.
### Multiple causes
Proponents of multiple causation view the suggested single causes as either too small to produce the vast scale of the extinction, or not likely to produce its observed taxonomic pattern. In a review article, J. David Archibald and David E. Fastovsky discussed a scenario combining three major postulated causes: volcanism, marine regression, and extraterrestrial impact. In this scenario, terrestrial and marine communities were stressed by the changes in, and loss of, habitats. Dinosaurs, as the largest vertebrates, were the first affected by environmental changes, and their diversity declined. At the same time, particulate materials from volcanism cooled and dried areas of the globe. Then an impact event occurred, causing collapses in photosynthesis-based food chains, both in the already-stressed terrestrial food chains and in the marine food chains.
Based on studies at Seymour Island in Antarctica, Sierra Petersen and colleagues argue that there were two separate extinction events near the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, with one correlating to Deccan Trap volcanism and one correlated with the Chicxulub impact. The team analyzed combined extinction patterns using a new clumped isotope temperature record from a hiatus-free, expanded K–Pg boundary section. They documented a 7.8±3.3 °C warming synchronous with the onset of Deccan Traps volcanism and a second, smaller warming at the time of meteorite impact. They suggested that local warming had been amplified due to the simultaneous disappearance of continental or sea ice. Intra-shell variability indicates a possible reduction in seasonality after Deccan eruptions began, continuing through the meteorite event. Species extinction at Seymour Island occurred in two pulses that coincide with the two observed warming events, directly linking the end-Cretaceous extinction at this site to both volcanic and meteorite events via climate change.
## Recovery and diversification
The K–Pg extinction had a profound effect on the evolution of life on Earth. The elimination of dominant Cretaceous groups allowed other organisms to take their place, causing a remarkable amount of species diversification during the Paleogene Period. The most striking example is the replacement of dinosaurs by mammals. After the K–Pg extinction, mammals evolved rapidly to fill the niches left vacant by the dinosaurs. Also significant, within the mammalian genera, new species were approximately 9.1% larger after the K–Pg boundary. After about 700,000 years, some mammals had reached 50 kilos (110 pounds), a 100-fold increase over the weight of those which survived the extinction.
Other groups also substantially diversified. Based on molecular sequencing and fossil dating, many species of birds (the Neoaves group in particular) appeared to radiate after the K–Pg boundary. They even produced giant, flightless forms, such as the herbivorous Gastornis and Dromornithidae, and the predatory Phorusrhacidae. The extinction of Cretaceous lizards and snakes may have led to the evolution of modern groups such as iguanas, monitor lizards, and boas. The diversification of crown group snakes has been linked to the iotic recovery in the aftermath of the K-Pg extinction event. On land, giant boid and enormous madtsoiid snakes appeared, and in the seas, giant sea snakes evolved. Teleost fish diversified explosively, filling the niches left vacant by the extinction. Groups appearing in the Paleocene and Eocene epochs include billfish, tunas, eels, and flatfish. Major changes are also seen in Paleogene insect communities. Many groups of ants were present in the Cretaceous, but in the Eocene ants became dominant and diverse, with larger colonies. Butterflies diversified as well, perhaps to take the place of leaf-eating insects wiped out by the extinction. The advanced mound-building termites, Termitidae, also appear to have risen in importance.
It is thought that body sizes of placental mammalian survivors evolutionarily increased first, allowing them to fill niches after the extinctions, with brain sizes increasing later in the Eocene.
Evidence from the Salamanca Formation suggests that biotic recovery was more rapid in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern Hemisphere.
## See also
## Explanatory notes |
31,342,615 | All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes | 1,150,492,882 | 1986 memoir by Maya Angelou | [
"1986 American novels",
"African-American autobiographies",
"Books by Maya Angelou",
"Novels about writers",
"Novels set in Ghana",
"Random House books"
]
| All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, published in 1986, is the fifth book in African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou's seven-volume autobiography series. Set between 1962 and 1965, the book begins when Angelou is 33 years old, and recounts the years she lived in Accra, Ghana. The book, deriving its title from a Negro spiritual, begins where Angelou's previous memoir, The Heart of a Woman, ends — with the traumatic car accident involving her son Guy — and closes with Angelou returning to America.
As she had started to do in her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and continued throughout her series, Angelou upholds the long tradition of African-American autobiography. At the same time she makes a deliberate attempt to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Angelou had matured as a writer by the time she wrote Traveling Shoes, to the point that she was able to play with the form and structure of the work. As in her previous books, it consists of a series of anecdotes connected by theme. She depicts her struggle with being the mother of a grown son, and with her place in her new home.
Angelou examines many of the same subjects and themes that her previous autobiographies covered. Although motherhood is an important theme in this book, it does not overwhelm the text as it does in some of her other works. At the end of the book, she ties up the mother/son plot when she leaves her son in Ghana and returns to America. According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, "Angelou's exploration of her African and African-American identities" is an important theme in Traveling Shoes. By the end of the book, Angelou comes to term with what scholar Dolly McPherson calls her "double-consciousness", the parallels and connections between the African and American parts of her history and character. Racism continues to be an important theme as she learns more about it and about herself. Journey and a sense of home is another important theme in this book; Angelou upholds the African-American tradition of the slave narrative and of her own series of autobiographies. This time she focuses on "trying to get home", or on becoming assimilated in African culture, which she finds unattainable.
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes received a mixed reception from critics, but most of their reviews were positive.
## Background
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, published in 1986, is the fifth installment of Maya Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The success of Angelou's previous autobiographies and the publication of four volumes of poetry had brought Angelou a considerable amount of fame by 1986. And Still I Rise, published in 1978, reinforced Angelou's success as a writer. Her first volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
As writer Hilton Als states, Angelou was one of the first African-American female writers to publicly discuss her personal life, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books, something she continues in Traveling Shoes. Writer Julian Mayfield, who calls her first autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings "a work of art that eludes description", states that Angelou's work sets a precedent not only for other Black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole.
Als called Angelou one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices. For example, while Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute. Her husband Paul Du Feu talked her into publishing the book by encouraging her to "tell the truth as a writer" and "be honest about it". Through the writing of her life stories Angelou has become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women. It made her, as scholar Joanne Braxton has stated, "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".
According to McPherson, Traveling Shoes is "a mixture of Maya Angelou's personal recollection and a historical document of the time in which it is set", the early 1960s. This was the first time that many Black Americans, due to the independence of Ghana and other African states, as well as the emergence of African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, were able to view Africa in a positive way. Ghana was "the center of an African cultural renaissance" and of Pan-Africanism during this time.
## Title
According to Angelou, the title of Traveling Shoes comes from a spiritual. African-American scholar Lyman B. Hagen reports that the title comes from the spiritual "All God's Chillun Got Wings", Angelou's "clever reference" to her ongoing search for a home while being aware of "our ultimate home". The title demonstrates Angelou's love of African-American spirituals and deep sense of religion that appears in all of her works. Critic Mary Jane Lupton finds the appearance of the word "traveling" purposeful, since it emphasizes the journey theme, one of Angelou's most important themes of the book. Like Angelou's previous volumes in her series, the title contributes to its plot and thematic impact.
## Plot summary
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes begins as Angelou's previous book, The Heart of a Woman, ends: with her depiction of a serious automobile accident involving her son Guy. After spending two years in Cairo, they come to Accra to enroll Guy in the University of Ghana, and the accident occurs three days after they arrive. Following Guy's long convalescence, they remain in Ghana, Angelou for four years, from 1962 to 1965. Angelou describes Guy's recovery, including her deep depression. She is confronted by her friend Julian Mayfield, who introduces her to writer and actor Efua Sutherland, the Director of the National Theatre of Ghana. Sutherland becomes Angelou's "sister-friend" and allows her to cry out all her pain and bitterness.
Angelou finds a job at the University of Ghana and "falls in love" with the country and with its people, who remind her of African Americans she knew in Arkansas and California. As the parent of an adult, she experiences new freedoms, respects Guy's choices, and consciously stops making her son the center of her life. She creates new friendships with her roommates and native Africans, both male and female. She becomes part of a group of American expatriates whom she calls the "Revolutionist Returnees", people such as Mayfield and his wife Ana Livia, who share her struggles.
Angelou strengthens her ties with Africa while traveling through eastern Ghanaian villages, and through her relationships with several Africans. She describes a few romantic prospects, one of which is with a man who proposes that she become his "second wife" and accept West African customs. She also becomes a supporter of Ghana president Kwame Nkrumah and close friends with tribal leader Nana Nketsia and poet Kwesi Brew. During one of her travels through West Africa, a woman identifies her as a member of the Bambara tribe based solely upon her appearance and behavior, which helps Angelou discover the similarities between her American traditions and those of her West African ancestors.
Although Angelou is disillusioned with the nonviolent strategies of Martin Luther King Jr., she and her friends commemorate his 1963 march on Washington by organizing a parallel demonstration in Ghana. The demonstration becomes a tribute to African-American W.E.B. Du Bois, who has died the previous evening. A few pages later, she allies herself with Malcolm X, who visits Ghana in 1964 to elicit the support of Black world leaders. He encourages Angelou to return to America to help him coordinate his efforts, as she had done for King in The Heart of a Woman. While driving Malcolm X to the airport, he chastises her for her bitterness about Du Bois' wife Shirley Graham's lack of support for the civil rights movement.
Angelou and her roommates reluctantly hire a village boy named Kojo to do housework for them. He reminds her of her brother Bailey, and he serves as a substitute for her son Guy. She accepts a maternal role with Kojo, helping him with his schoolwork and welcoming the thanks of his family. Traveling Shoes, like Angelou's previous autobiographies, is full of conflicts with Guy, especially surrounding his independence, his separation from his mother, and his choices. When she learns that he is dating a woman older than her, she reacts with anger and threatens to strike him, but he patronizes her, calls her his "little mother", and insists upon his autonomy from her.
The African narrative in Traveling Shoes is interrupted by "a journey within a journey" when she decides to join a theatrical company in a revival of The Blacks, a play by French writer Jean Genet. As she had done in New York City and described in her previous autobiography The Heart of a Woman, she plays the White Queen and tours Berlin and Venice with the company, which include Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Lou Gossett Jr. and Roscoe Lee Browne. While in Berlin, she accepts a breakfast invitation with a racist, wealthy German family.
The book ends with Angelou's decision to return to America. At the airport, a group of her friends and associates, including Guy, are present to wish her farewell as she leaves. She metaphorically connects her departure from the African continent with the forced enslavement of her ancestors and her departure from Guy.
## Genre
All seven of Angelou's installments of her life story continue the long tradition of African-American autobiography. Starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou made a deliberate attempt while writing her books to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development has often led reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction. Angelou expressed in a 1989 interview her opinion that she was the only "serious" writer to choose the genre to express herself. Angelou reports not one person's story, but the collective's. She represents the convention in African-American autobiography, which serves as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people. As Angelou had done in her previous autobiographies, she uses elements of the African-American slave narrative, including as Lupton puts it, "the journey, the quest for freedom; [and] empathy for the horrors suffered by slaves".
All of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. Although Angelou referred to her books as autobiographies in 1983 interview with African-American literature critic Claudia Tate, she acknowledged that there are fictional aspects to all her books, with the tendency to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth". When speaking of her unique use of the genre, Angelou acknowledges that she follows the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'". McPherson states that Angelou is a master of this autobiographical form, especially the "confrontation of the Black self within a society that threatens to destroy it", but departs from it in Traveling Shoes by taking the action to Africa. Lupton, referring to the journey motif in the book, insists that its narrative point of view is "again sustained through the first-person autobiographer in motion".
Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to all her books, although there is less fictionalization in Traveling Shoes than in her previous autobiographies. Her approach parallels the conventions of many African-American autobiographies written during the abolitionist period in the US, when truth was often censored for purposes of self-protection. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of African-American autobiography, but insists that Angelou has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form. Journalist George Plimpton asked her in a 1998 interview if she changed the truth to improve her story; she stated, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about". Although Angelou has never admitted to changing the facts in her stories, she fictionalizes them to make an impact and to enhance her readers' interest. Angelou's long-time editor, Robert Loomis stated that she could have rewritten any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader.
## Style
For the first and only time in Angelou's series, she repeats the same episode in detail—her son's automobile accident—at the end of her fourth autobiography The Heart of a Woman and the beginning of this one, a technique that both centralizes each installment and connects each book in the series with each other. Additionally, each volume "ends with abrupt suspense". It also creates a strong and emotional link between the two autobiographies. Angelou has said that she used this technique so that each book would stand alone and to establish the setting in Traveling Shoes—"who she was and what she was doing in Africa".
In Traveling Shoes, Angelou has matured as a writer to the point that she can experiment with form. For the first time, instead of using traditional numbered chapters, the book consists of anecdotes separated with a few inches of white space. Lupton calls these segments "short stories or vignettes", a technique that Angelou had used before, to portray dynamic characters such as Malcolm X. Angelou's stories are told within the context of her entire life story, but each vignette can be read or analyzed individually, without harming the text's consistency. Most of Angelou's anecdotes no longer focus on the famous or her family, but on Ghanaians; for example, according to Lupton, her description of her houseboy Kojo is her most delightful character sketch in the book.
In Traveling Shoes, Angelou continues to demonstrate her strengths as an autobiographer, especially her ability to connect emotionally with her audience, which Lupton calls her "superb use of language in recording moments of emotional intensity". As in her previous books, Angelou uses inventive metaphors and personifications of abstract objects and concepts. Even her descriptions exhibit the style, developed after years of maturity as a writer, of "displaying vivid and captivating sentences and phrases". Angelou's self-portrait of a Black woman and her ability to communicate her misfortunes destroys stereotypes and demonstrates "the trials, rejections, and endurances which so many Black women share". Hagen calls this book "reflective" and its writer "introspective and deeply moved".
Even though Traveling Shoes can be read on its own, Angelou connects the events in this book with her previous volumes, as she had done throughout her series. As McPherson states, "Everyday experiences serve as links to Angelou's past and thus embody powerful meanings". Events that occur in this book and Angelou's responses to them evoke earlier moments in her previous books; for example, Angelou responds to her son's accident with muteness, as she had responded to her rape in Caged Bird. As is customary in autobiography in general, she uses the literary convention of flashbacks in order to tie this book to its predecessors. She uses humor, another convention she has used before, both to criticize racism and to balance her weighty insights. She also uses quotes from literary sources, especially the Bible, which demonstrates that she has not lost contact with her family roots as she searches for a home and for her identity.
Traveling Shoes is "more tightly controlled" than Angelou's previous books, most likely due to the dominance of the travel motif. Setting, always an important element for Angelou, becomes even more important in this book. Unlike her previous books, most of this book's action occurs in one setting, Accra, which contributes to and is tightly connected with her personal development. Angelou's feelings towards living in Ghana are ambivalent, which provides Traveling Shoes with richness and depth. Many feel that Angelou's inclusion of her tour with The Blacks to Berlin and Venice as a digression that detracts from the African setting, but Lupton sees it as a contribution to her character development and provides the book with a "universal quality" as Angelou reaches beyond the confines of her personal life and encounters racism in Germany. During this trip, she comes to see her fellow African-Americans differently, as more spirited than the Africans she has met in Ghana.
## Themes
### Motherhood
A major theme in Traveling Shoes, one that many critics overlook, is Angelou's love for her son. The theme of motherhood is one of Angelou's most consistent themes throughout her series of autobiographies, although it does not overwhelm this book as it does in Gather Together in My Name and Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas. Motherhood is present in many of the book's subthemes—her relationship with her houseboy Kojo, her delight in being called "Auntie" by many African children, and her feelings toward "Mother Africa". Traveling Shoes begins with Guy's accident, his long recovery, and his mother's reaction to it, thus universalizing the fear of every parent—the death of a child. The main character is a mother of a grown son, so liberation from the daily responsibilities of motherhood is emphasized, but it is complicated by the recognition that part of motherhood is letting go, something Angelou struggles with. Confrontations between Angelou and Guy are minimal, consisting of their conflict over his choice of dating a much-older woman and of his demands for autonomy after she returns from the Genet tour. Angelou seems to vacillate between wanting to supervise him and wanting to let go throughout this book. In this way, as Lupton says, the motherhood theme, like the identity theme, is "dual in nature".
Like many of her previous books, Angelou is conflicted about her feelings towards Guy, and is skilled at expressing it in this book. One way she expresses her conflict is through her reluctant relationship with Kojo. She compares her feelings for Kojo with the pain of childbirth, and he serves as substitute for Guy. At the end of the book Angelou leaves Guy in Africa to continue his education, suggesting, as Lupton puts it, the "apparent end of the mother/son plot". Lupton also reports that some reviewers have criticized Angelou for "the willful cutting of the maternal ties that she established throughout the series", but Angelou implies in Traveling Shoes that motherhood is never over.
### Race/Identity
Angelou's exploration of her African and African-American identities is an important theme in Traveling Shoes. The alliances and relationships with those she meets in Ghana contribute to Angelou's identity and growth. Her experiences in Ghana helped her come to terms with her personal and historical past, and by the end of the book she is ready to return to America with a deeper understanding of both the African and the American parts of her character. McPherson calls Angelou's parallels and connections between Africa and America her "double-consciousness", which contribute to her understanding of herself.
Angelou is able to recognize similarities between African and African-American culture; as Lupton puts it, the "blue songs, shouts, and gospels" she has grown up with in America "echo the rhythms of West Africa". She recognizes the connections between African and American Black cultures, including the children's games, the folklore, the spoken and non-verbal languages, the food, sensibilities, and behavior. She connects the behavior of many African mother figures, especially their generosity, with her grandmother's behaviors. In one of the most significant sections of Traveling Shoes, Angelou recounts an encounter with a West African woman who recognizes her, on the basis of her appearance, as a member of the Bambara group of West Africa. As Lupton states, these and other experiences in Ghana demonstrate her maturity, as a mother who is able to let go of her adult son, as a woman who is no longer dependent upon a man, and as an American who is able to "perceive the roots of her identity" and how they affect her personality.
Angelou comes to terms with her difficult past, both as a descendant of Africans taken forcibly to America as slaves and as an African-American who has experienced racism. As she tells interviewer Connie Martinson, she brought her son to Ghana to protect him from the negative effects of racism because she did not think he had the tools to withstand them. She remains in Accra after his accident because it was traumatic for her as well—so traumatic it reduces her to silence, similar to her muteness after she was raped as a child in Caged Bird. Her friend Julian Mayfield introduces her to Efua Sutherland, who becomes Angelou's "Sister friend" and allows her to cry out her pain, grief, and fear, something Angelou later admitted went against her American upbringing of emotional restraint.
Racism, an important theme in all of Angelou's autobiographies, continues to be important in this book, but she has matured in the way she deals with it in Traveling Shoes. For the first time in Angelou's life, she "does not feel threatened by racial hate" in Ghana. She finds a strong support system there, and as Hagen states, she "has come far from the mute, shy little girl of Stamps, Arkansas". As Hagen states, Angelou "is not yet ready to toss off the stings of prejudice, but tolerance and even a certain understanding can be glimpsed". This is demonstrated in Angelou's treatment of the "genocidal involvement of Africans in slave-trading", something that is often overlooked or misrepresented by other Black writers. Angelou is taught an important lesson about combating racism by Malcolm X, who compares it to a mountain in which everyone's efforts, even the efforts of Shirley Graham Du Bois, whom Angelou resents, is needed.
Angelou learns lessons about herself and about racism throughout Traveling Shoes, even during her brief tour of Venice and Berlin for The Blacks revival. She revives her passion for African-American culture as she associates with other African-Americans for the first time since moving to Ghana. She compares her experiences of American racism with Germany's history of racial prejudice and military aggression. The verbal violence of the folk tales shared during her luncheon with her German hosts and Israeli friend is as significant to Angelou as physical violence, to the point that she becomes ill. Angelou's first-hand experience with fascism, as well as the racist sensibilities of the German family she visits, "help shape and broaden her constantly changing vision" regarding racial prejudice.
### Journey/Home
> I never agreed, even as a young person, with the Thomas Wolfe title You Can't Go Home Again. Instinctively I didn't. But the truth is, you can never leave home. You take it with you; it's under your fingernails; it's in the hair follicles; it's in the way you smile; it's in the ride of your hips, in the passage of your breasts; it's all there, no matter where you go. You can take on the affectations and the postures of other places and even learn to speak their ways. But the truth is, home is between your teeth.
>
> --Maya Angelou, 1990
The journey, or travel, is a common theme in American autobiography as a whole; as McPherson states, it is something of a national myth to Americans as a people. This is also the case for African-American autobiography, which has its roots in the slave narrative. Like those narratives that focus on the writers' search for freedom from bondage, modern African-American autobiographers such as Angelou seek to develop "an authentic self" and the freedom to find it in their community. McPherson states, "The journey to a distant goal, the return home, and the quest which involves the voyage out, achievement, and return are typical patterns in Black autobiography".
The travel motif is seen throughout Angelou's series of autobiographies, emphasizing what Lupton describes as Angelou's "continuing journey of the self". Angelou continues the travel motif in Traveling Shoes, as evidenced in the book's title, but her primary motivation in living in Africa, as she told interviewer George Plimpton, was "trying to get home". Angelou relates not only her own journey of an African-American woman searching for a home, but the journeys of other Black expatriates at the time, to whom McPherson compares the descriptions of white expatriates in Europe in the 1920s by Ernest Hemingway and Henry James.
Angelou was one of over two hundred Black American expatriates living in Accra at the time. She was able to find a small group of expatriates, humorously dubbed "the Revolutionary Returnees", who became her main source of support as she struggled with her place in African culture—"the conflicting feelings of being 'home' yet simultaneously being 'homeless,' cut off from America without tangible roots in their adopted black nation". For many Black Americans, it was the first time they were able to positively identify with Africa. Angelou describes the group of Black American expatriates as "a little group of Black folks, looking for a home". Reviewer Jackie Gropman has stated that Angelou presents her readers with "a wealth of information and penetrating impressions of the proud, optimistic new country of Ghana". Angelou also presents a "romanticized" view of Africa. She "falls in love" with Ghana and wishes to settle into her new home "as a baby nuzzles in a mother's arms".
Angelou soon discovers that her fellow Black expatriates "share similar delusions" and that their feelings towards Ghana and its people are not reciprocated. Lupton states, "Angelou's alliance with the African-American community often focuses on their indignation over the Ghanaians' refusal to fully welcome them". Angelou uses the parallel demonstration to King's 1963 March on Washington to demonstrate both her and her fellow expatriates' tenuous relationship with Africa and her desire for full citizenship and assimilation, an "unattainable goal that falls outside of her desire for assimilation" and something she can never acquire in Ghana. Not only is Angelou a Black American, whether she likes it or not, "she is a Black American in exile". Houston A. Baker Jr., in his review of Traveling Shoes, states that Angelou is unable to experience a connection with what Angelou calls the "soul" of Africa, and that Angelou speculates that only the American Black, forcibly displaced and taken from the home of her ancestors, can truly understand "that home is the place where one is created".
Angelou's issues are resolved at the end of Traveling Shoes when she decides to leave Guy to continue his education in Accra and return to America. The final scene of the book is at the Accra airport, with Angelou surrounded by Guy and her friends as they wish her farewell. Even though she "forsakes her new embraced alliance with Mother Africa," she claims she is "not sad" to be leaving. She calls her departure a "second leave-taking", and compares it to the last time she left her son, with his grandmother in Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas when he was a child, and to the forced departure from Africa by her ancestors. As Lupton states, "Angelou's journey from Africa back to America is in certain ways a restatement of the historical phase known as mid-passage, when slaves were brutally transported in ships from West Africa to the so-called New World".
## Critical reception
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes was greeted with both praise and disappointment, although reviews of the book were generally positive. According to the Poetry Foundation, "Most critics have judged Angelou's subsequent autobiographies in light of her first, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings remains the most highly praised". Hagen states that Traveling Shoes, as in her previous books, demonstrated Angelou's "broad appeal" to both her readers and her critics. The book's accuracy was verified by her close friend and fellow expatriate Julian Mayfield.
Even though Traveling Shoes is Angelou's fifth book in her series of autobiographies, it is able to stand on its own. Houston A. Baker Jr., in his review of the book, called Angelou "one of the geniuses of Afro-American serial autobiography". Interviewer Connie Martinson told Angelou, "You make me, the reader ... live through it with you". Scholar Eugenia Collier, writing when the possibility of the publication of consequent autobiographies in Angelou's series was uncertain, considered Traveling Shoes "the apex toward which the other autobiographies have pointed". Hagen considered Traveling Shoes "another professional, rich, full, journeyman text", and saw a higher-quality of writing, especially her "often lyrical and soaring" prose, than in her previous books. Other reviewers agree. Reviewer Janet A. Blundell found the book "absorbing reading", and reviewer Jackie Gropman stated that the "prose sings".
Some critics were less favorable in their views of All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. Even though the book left interviewer Russell Harris with "a haunting feeling", he found the book more "pedantic" than her previous books, and thought that it contained fewer fictional aspects compared to Angelou's other autobiographies. Scholar John C. Gruesser found the conflicts in the book unresolved and the ending "too easily manufactured at the last minute to resolve the problem of the book". Reviewer Deborah E. McDowell agreed, and found the resolution of the plot to be "stereotyped and unauthentic".
Comparisons have been drawn between this work and the travel writing of Noo Saro-Wiwa in her work Looking for Transwonderland.
## Popular culture
The first line of the pop song "Twist in My Sobriety" by Tanita Tikaram uses the title of Angelou's book, "All God's children need travelling shoes", to open the song as the first verse in the first stanza. |
2,685,970 | Priestfield Stadium | 1,157,378,372 | Association football stadium in Kent, England | [
"Brighton & Hove Albion F.C.",
"English Football League venues",
"Football venues in England",
"Gillingham F.C.",
"Sports venues completed in 1893",
"Sports venues in Kent"
]
| Priestfield Stadium (popularly known simply as Priestfield and officially known from 2007 to 2010 as KRBS Priestfield Stadium and from 2011 as MEMS Priestfield Stadium for sponsorship purposes) is a football stadium in Gillingham, Kent. It has been the home of Gillingham Football Club since the club's formation in 1893, and was also the temporary home of Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club for two seasons during the 1990s. The stadium has also hosted women's and youth international football matches and a London Broncos rugby league match.
The stadium underwent extensive redevelopment during the late 1990s, which has brought its capacity down from nearly 20,000 to a current figure of 11,582. It has four all-seater stands, all constructed since 1997, although one is only of a temporary nature. There are also conference and banqueting facilities and a nightspot named The Factory. Despite having invested heavily in its current stadium, Gillingham F.C. has plans to relocate to a new stadium.
## History
New Brompton Football Club, the forerunner of Gillingham Football Club, formed in June 1893. At the same time an area of land in Gillingham was acquired by the club's founders, the purchase being funded through an issue of 1,500 £1 shares. The stadium was initially referred to simply as the Athletic Ground and subsequently named Priestfield Road until 1947, after one of roads leading to it. A pitch was laid and a pavilion erected, and the first matches at Priestfield were staged on 2 September 1893. New Brompton's reserve team played Grays, followed immediately by the first match for the club's first team, against Woolwich Arsenal's reserves. The admission charge for the two matches was 3d. A newspaper report on the matches noted that the club had recently purchased an additional acre and three-quarters of ground and had accepted a contract for the construction of a stand containing 500 seats. Most spectators stood on terracing, banked earth, or simply along the perimeter of the pitch, as was the case at most football grounds at the time. In order to raise funds to assist with the running of the football club, New Brompton allowed the ground to be used for other events, such as smoking concerts, fêtes, athletics meetings and a ladies' football match. Sheep were allowed to graze on the pitch during the week, a common practice at many grounds at that time. In 1899, a second stand was added along part of the Gordon Road side of the ground, reportedly built by off-duty dock workers in exchange for beer and cigarettes.
By 1908, the total number of seats had been increased to 800 and terracing added at the Rainham end of the ground. In 1912, the club's first Supporters' Association was formed, its initial project being to raise the necessary funds to construct terracing at the opposite end of the ground. Two years later the club, which had changed its name to Gillingham F.C. in 1913, secured a bank loan of £1,570 which was used to build a new grandstand, but just a month after it was completed the stand was severely damaged by high winds, which ripped off the roof and twisted most of the ironwork. The club sued the contractors, but it took a further three months for the damage to be repaired.
A new attendance record was set in 1924 when an FA Cup match against First Division leaders Cardiff City drew a crowd of 19,472. This record stood until 1948, when 23,002 fans watched Gillingham take on Queens Park Rangers in the FA Cup, with many more turned away. In the same year the club, which had lost its place in the Football League ten years earlier after failing to gain re-election, produced a glossy brochure as part of its bid to be elected back into the league. The facilities at Priestfield were highlighted as one of the club's strengths in the brochure, which listed the ground's capacity as "between 25,000 and 30,000" but stated that plans had been drawn up to increase the capacity to 50,000, with 5,000 seats.
The ground underwent its most extensive redevelopment to date in 1955, at a total cost of £28,500. The previously sloping pitch was levelled, the terracing that occupied part of the Gordon Road side of the ground replaced, and new covered accommodation, known as the Stanley Stand, erected between the Rainham End and Gordon Road Stand. The first floodlights were erected in 1963, at a cost of over £14,000, but this was to be the last significant development work at Priestfield for over thirty years. By the early 1980s the capacity of the ground was listed as 22,000, although this was reduced to 19,000 when the Gordon Road Stand was closed for safety reasons. In 1987, a clock was erected at the corner of the Rainham End and the Stanley Stand, dubbed the Lord Sondes Clock in honour of Henry Milles-Lade, 5th Earl Sondes, a member of the club's board of directors. The clock was removed during later stadium redevelopment work.
New owner Paul Scally took over at the club in 1995 and soon instigated a programme of redevelopment which completely transformed the formerly run-down ground. A new Gordon Road Stand was built in 1997 at a cost of more than £2 million. A vote of supporters initially proposed that the new stand be named "The Paul Scally Stand", but this was rejected by its namesake as he felt "uncomfortable and embarrassed" by the idea. Two years later the Rainham End terracing was replaced with a new all-seater stand, with the sports centre behind it demolished and replaced with a car park.
The main stand on the northern side of the pitch was demolished in 1999, along with a section of away terracing, to be replaced with a new state-of-the-art facility dubbed the Medway Stand, but the work was beset by problems. Due to serious delays with the building of the new stand, the club was forced to spend most of the subsequent season first with that side of the ground completely empty, then later with building work ongoing. Supporters were not able to sit in the new stand until the latter stages of the 1999–2000 season, and even then many of the facilities had not been finished. The stand also caused severe financial problems for the club, as its facilities eventually cost significantly more than the original estimate. The stand was named following a vote by Gillingham supporters.
The fourth side of the ground was redeveloped in 2003 when the Town End terracing was removed and a temporary stand put in its place, named after the late football commentator and Gillingham supporter Brian Moore. It was hoped that work would begin on a permanent Brian Moore Stand in 2004, but due to talk of relocating the club to a new ground and the club's current financial problems, this has been put on hold.
On 1 June 2007, the stadium was officially renamed KRBS Priestfield Stadium as part of a sponsorship deal that lasted three years with the Kent Reliance Building Society. In 2011 another such deal led to the rebranding of the stadium as MEMS Priestfield Stadium.
## Structure and facilities
The pitch is surrounded by four all-seater stands – the Medway Stand, the Rainham End, the Gordon Road Stand and the Brian Moore Stand. All are covered with the exception of the Brian Moore Stand. The Medway Stand, which replaced the old Main Stand and part of the terracing at each end, is the largest and northernmost of the four. It has two tiers with a row of twenty executive boxes between the top and bottom tier. The stand also contains the changing rooms, physiotherapy facilities, club offices and club shop. The Rainham End, located behind the goal at the eastern end of the pitch, opened in 1999 and houses 2,400 fans. This stand, like the terrace it replaced, is known for housing the club's most vocal supporters. The Gordon Road Stand, which seats 2,600, was opened in 1997 and is opposite the Medway Stand. Due to planning requirements, the stand had a height restriction placed upon it, making it significantly lower than the other three sides of the ground, and due to the road layout behind it is narrower at one end than the other. A gantry for television cameras is located on the roof of this stand.
Opposite the Rainham End is the Brian Moore Stand. This stand is a temporary one, and accommodates visiting supporters. It occupies the site of the former Town End terracing, which was unusual in that it had a pronounced slope, with one end of the terracing being higher up than the other. In 1955 the pitch, which previously sloped at that end of the stadium, was levelled out but the gradient of the Town End was left unchanged.
The state of the stadium's pitch caused the club severe problems in 2003. A number of fixtures had to be postponed due to the state of the pitch, which was described as resembling a ploughed field, and the surface had to be heavily sanded before an FA Cup match against Leeds United. At the end of the season, taking advantage of the demolition of the old Town End, which allowed better access to the pitch, the club had the drainage system replaced and a completely new pitch laid.
Added to the new stands were several new developments. The Conference and Banqueting Centre, which is located behind the Rainham End, comprises the Great Hall, which can accommodate up to 600 delegates for events, and twenty smaller delegate rooms. The centre is connected to the Medway Stand, thus allowing views from the banqueting suite onto the pitch, and is also licensed for wedding ceremonies. The Blues Rock Café nightspot, located within the Medway Stand, is open between four and five nights a week and stages live music and screenings of major sporting events. The club purchased many of the fixtures and fittings for these new developments at discounted prices when the furnishings of the Millennium Dome were sold off upon its closure.
## Future
Former Gillingham chairman Paul Scally made it clear that he intended to relocate the club away from its current stadium, announcing in September 2003 that "there is no future for the club at the Priestfield". In 2004, the club outlined plans for a new stadium at Cuxton but abandoned them soon afterwards due to the cost of improving transport links to the site. At the time Scally stated that he anticipated the club moving within four years, but by 2007 the proposed date had been pushed back to 2010. In March 2017, he again identified Mill Hill, on the east of the A289 Yokosuka Way, as his preferred site for a new stadium, re-iterated that this was necessary for the club to have ambitions of future Premier League football, and that he would be launching a bond scheme to fund the early stages of the development.
Despite the proposed move, the club promoted its facilities, in conjunction with Medway Council, as a possible training base for athletes competing in the 2012 Summer Olympics, saying:
> The Medway Stand is fully equipped with physio rooms, a hydrotherapy pool, a sauna and steam rooms to assist with the athletes' training, and a lounge bar, a cinema and a snooker room for them to enjoy during their free time. The club's offices, media centre and press room could also provide the coaches with a good administrative base. We are excited about the prospect of international athletes benefiting from our excellent facilities in preparation for London 2012.
In December 2007, Gillingham shareholders passed a resolution to sell the ground to Priestfield Developments Ltd, a company wholly owned by Paul Scally, for £9.8m as part of a restructuring of the club's debts. The deal was to allow three years use of the stadium at £1 p.a., with the club meeting running costs, with tenure secured for a further seven years at a rent as yet unspecified. In 2011, however, the club purchased the stadium back for around 10% of the fee paid by Priestfield Developments.
## Other uses
The stadium has occasionally been the "home" of clubs other than Gillingham. In 1895, Woolwich Arsenal played a Second Division home game against Burton Swifts at Priestfield after their own Manor Ground had been closed by the Football League for five weeks after crowd trouble at a match there earlier that year. Over a century later, during the 1997–98 and 1998–99 seasons Brighton & Hove Albion played their home matches at Priestfield, as they had entered a ground-share agreement with Gillingham as a result of the sale of their Goldstone Ground to property developers. The move, undertaken by the club after a plan to groundshare with Portsmouth fell through, was a controversial one for Brighton's fans, who faced a 150 mi (240 km) round trip to each home game. The two clubs subsequently became embroiled in a dispute over the charges levied by Gillingham for the hire of the ground, which was eventually settled out of court in 2001. In May 2012 the London Broncos hosted a rugby league match at the stadium, the first Super League match to be staged in Kent, and the club later announced the possibility of making Priestfield their permanent home venue with effect from 2013, although this did not occur.
In April 2006, the ground hosted the England women's team's World Cup Qualifier against Austria, achieving a gate of 8,068 (a higher attendance than Gillingham's average home gate for the 2005–06 season). Priestfield has also been the venue for home matches for the England youth team, including a November 2007 match against their counterparts from Ghana.
A greyhound racing track was opened around the outside of the pitch in December 1927. The racing was independent of the National Greyhound Racing Club and as such was known as a flapping track.
## Records
The highest attendance recorded at Priestfield was 23,002 for a match against Queens Park Rangers in the FA Cup 3rd round on 10 January 1948. The highest Football League attendance was 20,128 against Millwall in the Third Division South on 2 September 1950. The record modern (all-seated) attendance is 11,418, set on 20 September 2003 against West Ham United in the First Division.
The highest seasonal average attendance for league matches at Priestfield since Gillingham returned to the Football League in 1950 was 12,576 in the 1951–52 season. Gillingham's lowest seasonal average was 2,979 in the 1994–95 season, although Brighton recorded a lower figure of 2,328 in the 1997–98 season.
## Transport
The stadium is approximately 0.5 mi (1 km) from Gillingham railway station, which lies on Southeastern's Chatham Main Line from London Victoria to Dover Priory and Ramsgate. The station is also the southern terminus of the North Kent Line, which connects to London Charing Cross. |
3,551,125 | SMS Weissenburg | 1,172,955,281 | Battleship of the German Imperial Navy | [
"1891 ships",
"Boxer Rebellion",
"Brandenburg-class battleships",
"Brandenburg-class battleships of the Ottoman Navy",
"Ships built in Stettin"
]
| SMS Weissenburg was one of the first ocean-going battleships of the Imperial German Navy. She was the third pre-dreadnought of the Brandenburg class, which also included her sister ships Brandenburg, Wörth, and Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm. Weissenburg was laid down in 1890 in the AG Vulcan dockyard in Stettin, launched in 1891, and completed in 1894. The Brandenburg-class battleships were unique for their era in that they carried six large-caliber guns in three twin turrets, as opposed to four guns in two turrets, as was the standard in other navies.
Weissenburg served with I Division during the first decade of her service with the fleet. This period was generally limited to training exercises and goodwill visits to foreign ports. These training maneuvers were nevertheless very important to developing German naval tactical doctrine in the two decades before World War I, especially under the direction of Alfred von Tirpitz. Weissenburg, along with her three sisters, saw only one major overseas deployment during this period, to China in 1900–1901, during the Boxer Uprising. The ship underwent a major modernization in 1904–1905.
In 1910, Weissenburg was sold to the Ottoman Empire and renamed Turgut Reis, after the famous 16th century Turkish admiral. The ship saw heavy service during the Balkan Wars, primarily providing artillery support to Ottoman ground forces. She also took part in two naval engagements with the Greek Navy—the Battle of Elli in December 1912, and the Battle of Lemnos the following month. Both battles were defeats for the Ottoman Navy. After the Ottoman Empire entered World War I, she supported the fortresses protecting the Dardanelles through mid-1915, and was decommissioned from August 1915 to the end of the war. She served as a training ship from 1924 to 1933, and a barracks ship until 1950, when she was broken up.
## Design
Weissenburg was the third of four Brandenburg-class battleships, the first pre-dreadnought battleships of the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy). Prior to the ascension of Kaiser Wilhelm II to the German throne in June 1888, the German fleet had been largely oriented toward defense of the German coastline and Leo von Caprivi, chief of the Reichsmarineamt (Imperial Naval Office), had ordered a number of coastal defense ships in the 1880s. In August 1888, the Kaiser, who had a strong interest in naval matters, replaced Caprivi with Vizeadmiral (VAdm—Vice Admiral) Alexander von Monts and instructed him to include four battleships in the 1889–1890 naval budget. Monts, who favored a fleet of battleships over the coastal defense strategy emphasized by his predecessor, cancelled the last four coastal defense ships authorized under Caprivi and instead ordered four 10,000-metric-ton (9,800-long-ton; 11,000-short-ton) battleships. Though they were the first modern battleships built in Germany, presaging the Tirpitz-era High Seas Fleet, the authorization for the ships came as part of a construction program that reflected the strategic and tactical confusion of the 1880s caused by the Jeune École (Young School).
Weissenburg, named for the Battle of Weissenburg of 1870, was 115.7 m (379 ft 7 in) long overall, had a beam of 19.5 m (64 ft) which was increased to 19.74 m (64 ft 9 in) with the addition of torpedo nets, and had a draft of 7.6 m (24 ft 11 in) forward and 7.9 m (25 ft 11 in) aft. She displaced 10,013 t (9,855 long tons) as designed and up to 10,670 t (10,500 long tons) at full combat load. She was equipped with two sets of 3-cylinder vertical triple expansion steam engines that each drove a screw propeller. Steam was provided by twelve transverse cylindrical Scotch marine boilers. The ship's propulsion system was rated at 10,000 metric horsepower (9,900 ihp) and a top speed of 16.5 knots (30.6 km/h; 19.0 mph). She had a maximum range of 4,300 nautical miles (8,000 km; 4,900 mi) at a cruising speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). Her crew numbered 38 officers and 530 enlisted men.
The ship was unusual for its time in that it possessed a broadside of six heavy guns in three twin gun turrets, rather than the four-gun main battery typical of contemporary battleships. The forward and after turrets carried 28 cm (11 in) K L/40 guns, while the amidships turret mounted a pair of 28 cm guns with shorter L/35 barrels. Her secondary armament consisted of eight 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK L/35 quick-firing guns mounted in casemates and eight 8.8 cm (3.45 in) SK L/30 quick-firing guns, also casemate mounted. Weissenburg's armament system was rounded out with six 45 cm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes, all in above-water swivel mounts. Although the main battery was heavier than other capital ships of the period, the secondary armament was considered weak in comparison to other battleships.
Weissenburg was protected with nickel-steel Krupp armor, a new type of stronger steel. Her main belt armor was 400 millimeters (15.7 in) thick in the central citadel that protected the ammunition magazines and machinery spaces. The deck was 60 mm (2.4 in) thick. The main battery barbettes were protected with 300 mm (11.8 in) thick armor.
## Service history
### In German service
#### Construction – 1897
Weissenburg was the third of four ships of the Brandenburg class. Ordered as battleship "C", she was laid down at the AG Vulcan shipyard in Stettin in May 1890 under construction number 199. The third ship of the class to be launched, Weissenburg slid down the slipway on 30 June 1891. She was informally commissioned for sea trials on 28 August 1894, which lasted until 24 September. The ship formally entered service on 10 October, under the command of then-Kapitän zur See (Captain at Sea) Wilhelm Büchsel [de] with Korvettenkapitän (Corvette Captain Eduard von Capelle as the executive officer. Weissenburg then underwent further trials, which ended on 12 January 1895, after which she was assigned to I Division of the Maneuver Squadron, where she was initially occupied with individual training. Toward the end of May, more fleet maneuvers were carried out in the North Sea, concluding with a visit by the fleet to Kirkwall in Orkney. The squadron returned to Kiel in early June, where preparations were underway for the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. Tactical exercises were carried out in Kiel Bay in the presence of foreign delegations to the opening ceremony.
On 1 July, the German fleet began a major cruise into the Atlantic; on the return voyage in early August, the fleet stopped at the Isle of Wight for the Cowes Regatta. The fleet returned to Wilhelmshaven on 10 August and began preparations for the autumn maneuvers that would begin later that month. The first exercises began in the Helgoland Bight on 25 August. The fleet then steamed through the Skagerrak to the Baltic; heavy storms caused significant damage to many of the ships and the torpedo boat S41 capsized and sank in the storms—only three men were saved. The fleet stayed briefly in Kiel before resuming maneuvers, including live-fire exercises, in the Kattegat and the Great Belt. The main maneuvers began on 7 September with a mock attack from Kiel toward the eastern Baltic. Subsequent maneuvers took place off the coast of Pomerania and in Danzig Bay. A fleet review for Kaiser Wilhelm II off Jershöft concluded the maneuvers on 14 September. The year 1896 followed much the same pattern as the previous year. Individual ship training was conducted through April, followed by squadron training in the North Sea in late April and early May. This included a visit to the Dutch ports of Vlissingen and Nieuwediep. Additional maneuvers, which lasted from the end of May to the end of July, took the squadron further north in the North Sea, frequently into Norwegian waters. The ships visited Bergen from 11 to 18 May. During the maneuvers, Wilhelm II and the Chinese viceroy Li Hongzhang observed a fleet review off Kiel. On 9 August, the training fleet assembled in Wilhelmshaven for the annual autumn fleet training.
Weissenburg and the rest of the fleet operated under the normal routine of individual and unit training in the first half of 1897. The typical routine was interrupted in early August when Wilhelm II and Augusta went to visit the Russian imperial court at Kronstadt; both divisions of I Squadron were sent to accompany the Kaiser. They returned to Neufahrwasser in Danzig on 15 August, where the rest of the fleet joined them for the annual autumn maneuvers. These exercises reflected the tactical thinking of the new State Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt (RMA—Imperial Navy Office), Konteradmiral (KAdm—Rear Admiral) Alfred von Tirpitz, and the new commander of I Squadron, VAdm August von Thomsen. These new tactics stressed accurate gunnery, especially at longer ranges, though the necessities of the line-ahead formation led to tactical rigidity. Thomsen's emphasis on shooting created the basis for the excellent German gunnery during World War I. During the firing exercises, Weissenburg won the Kaiser's Schießpreis (Shooting Prize) for excellent accuracy in I Squadron. On the night of 21–22 August, the torpedo boat D1 accidentally rammed and sank one of Weissenburg's barges, killing two men. The maneuvers were completed by 22 September in Wilhelmshaven. In early December, I Division conducted maneuvers in the Kattegat and the Skagerrak, though they were cut short due to crew shortages.
#### 1898–1900
From 20 to 28 February, Weissenburg briefly served as the divisional flagship. The fleet followed the normal routine of individual and fleet training in 1898 without incident, and a voyage to the British Isles was also included. The fleet stopped in Queenstown, Greenock, and Kirkwall. The fleet assembled in Kiel on 14 August for the annual autumn exercises. The maneuvers included a mock blockade of the coast of Mecklenburg and a pitched battle with an "Eastern Fleet" in the Danzig Bay. A severe storm, striking the fleet as it steamed back to Kiel, caused significant damage to many ships and sank the torpedo boat S58. The fleet then transited the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and continued maneuvers in the North Sea. Training finished on 17 September in Wilhelmshaven. Weissenburg again won the Kaiser's Schießpreis (Shooting Prize) during the maneuvers. In December, I Division conducted artillery and torpedo training in Eckernförde Bay, followed by divisional training in the Kattegat and Skagerrak. During these maneuvers, the division visited Kungsbacka, Sweden, from 9 to 13 December. After returning to Kiel, the ships of I Division went into dock for their winter repairs.
On 5 April 1899, the ship participated in the celebrations commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Eckernförde during the First Schleswig War. In May, I and II Divisions, along with the Reserve Division from the Baltic, went on a major cruise into the Atlantic. On the voyage out, I Division stopped in Dover and II Division went into Falmouth to restock their coal supplies. I Division then joined II Division at Falmouth on 8 May, and the two units then departed for the Bay of Biscay, arriving at Lisbon on 12 May. There, they met the British Channel Fleet of eight battleships and four armored cruisers. The German fleet then departed for Germany, stopping again in Dover on 24 May. There they participated in the naval review celebrating Queen Victoria's 80th birthday. The fleet returned to Kiel on 31 May.
In July, the fleet conducted squadron maneuvers in the North Sea, which included coast defense exercises with soldiers from the X Corps. On 16 August, the fleet assembled in Danzig once again for the annual autumn maneuvers. The exercises started in the Baltic and on 30 August the fleet passed through the Kattegat and Skagerrak and steamed into the North Sea for further maneuvers in the German Bight, which lasted until 7 September. The third phase of the maneuvers took place in the Kattegat and the Great Belt from 8 to 26 September, when the maneuvers concluded and the fleet went into port for annual maintenance. The year 1900 began with the usual routine of individual and divisional exercises. In the second half of March, the squadrons met in Kiel, followed by torpedo and gunnery practice in April and a voyage to the eastern Baltic. From 7 to 26 May, the fleet went on a major training cruise to the northern North Sea, which included stops in Shetland from 12 to 15 May and in Bergen from 18 to 22 May. On 8 July, Weissenburg and the other ships of I Division were reassigned to II Division.
#### Boxer Uprising
During the Boxer Uprising in 1900, Chinese nationalists laid siege to the foreign embassies in Beijing and murdered Baron Clemens von Ketteler, the German minister. The widespread violence against Westerners in China led to an alliance between Germany and seven other Great Powers: the United Kingdom, Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the United States, France, and Japan. Those Western soldiers in China at the time were too few in number to defeat the Boxers; in Beijing there was a force of slightly more than 400 officers and infantry from the armies of the eight European powers. At the time, the primary German military force in China was the East Asia Squadron, which consisted of the protected cruisers Kaiserin Augusta, Hansa, and Hertha, the small cruisers Irene and Gefion, and the gunboats Jaguar and Iltis. There was also a German 500-man detachment in Taku; combined with the other nations' units, the force numbered some 2,100 men. Led by the British Admiral Edward Seymour, these men attempted to reach Beijing but were forced to stop in Tianjin due to heavy resistance. As a result, the Kaiser determined an expeditionary force would be sent to China to reinforce the East Asia Squadron. The expedition included Weissenburg and her three sisters, six cruisers, ten freighters, three torpedo boats, and six regiments of marines, under the command of Generalfeldmarschall (General Field Marshal) Alfred von Waldersee.
On 7 July, KAdm Richard von Geißler, the expeditionary force commander, reported that his ships were ready for the operation, and they left two days later. The four battleships and the aviso Hela transited the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and stopped in Wilhelmshaven to rendezvous with the rest of the expeditionary force. On 11 July, the force steamed out of the Jade Bight, bound for China. They stopped for coal at Gibraltar on 17–18 July and passed through the Suez Canal on 26–27 July. More coal was taken on at Perim in the Red Sea, and on 2 August the fleet entered the Indian Ocean. On 10 August, the ships reached Colombo, Ceylon, and on 14 August they passed through the Strait of Malacca. They arrived in Singapore on 18 August and departed five days later, reaching Hong Kong on 28 August. Two days later, the expeditionary force stopped in the outer roadstead at Wusong, downriver from Shanghai. By the time the German fleet had arrived, the siege of Beijing had already been lifted by forces from other members of the Eight-Nation Alliance that had formed to deal with the Boxers.
Since the situation had calmed, the four battleships were sent to either Hong Kong or Nagasaki, Japan, in late 1900 and early 1901 for overhauls; Weissenburg went to Hong Kong, with the work lasting from 6 December 1900 to 3 January 1901. From 8 February to 23 March, she stopped in German Tsingtau, where she also conducted gunnery training. On 26 May, the German high command recalled the expeditionary force to Germany. The fleet took on supplies in Shanghai and departed Chinese waters on 1 June. The ships stopped in Singapore from 10 to 15 June and took on coal before proceeding to Colombo, where they stayed from 22 to 26 June. Steaming against the monsoons forced the fleet to stop in Mahé, Seychelles, to take on more coal. The ships then stopped for a day each to take on coal in Aden and Port Said. On 1 August they reached Cadiz, and then met with I Division and steamed back to Germany together. They separated after reaching Helgoland, and on 11 August, after reaching the Jade roadstead, the ships of the expeditionary force were visited by Admiral von Koester, who was now the Inspector General of the Navy. The following day the expeditionary fleet was dissolved. In the end, the operation cost the German government more than 100 million marks.
#### 1901–1910
Following her return from China, Weissenburg was taken into the drydocks at the Kaiserliche Werft (Imperial Dockyard) in Wilhelmshaven for an overhaul. In late 1901, the fleet went on a cruise to Norway. The pattern of training for 1902 remained unchanged from previous years; I Squadron went on a major training cruise that started on 25 April. The squadron initially steamed to Norwegian waters, then rounded the northern tip of Scotland, and stopped in Irish waters. The ships returned to Kiel on 28 May. Before the start of the annual fleet maneuvers in August, Weissenburg was involved in an accident that damaged her ram bow; to ready the ship for the exercises, wooden reinforcement beams were installed in the bow. After the maneuvers, she was decommissioned on 29 September, with the new battleship Wettin taking her place in the division.
The four Brandenburg-class battleships were taken out of service for a major reconstruction. During the modernization, a second conning tower was added in the aft superstructure, along with a gangway. Weissenburg and the other ships had their boilers replaced with newer models, and also had their superstructure amidships reduced. The work included increasing the ship's coal storage capacity and adding a pair of 10.5 cm guns. The plans had initially called for the center 28 cm turret to be replaced with an armored battery of medium-caliber guns, but this proved to be prohibitively expensive. On 27 September 1904, Weissenburg was recommissioned, and replaced the old coastal defense ship Hildebrand in II Squadron. The two squadrons of the fleet ended the year with the usual training cruise into the Baltic, which took place uneventfully. The first half of 1905 similarly passed without incident for Weissenburg. On 12 July, the fleet began its annual summer cruise to northern waters; the ships stopped in Gothenburg from 20 to 24 July and Stockholm from 2 to 7 August. The trip ended two days later, and was followed by the autumn fleet maneuvers later that month. In December, the fleet took its usual training cruise in the Baltic.
The fleet conducted its normal routine of individual and unit training in 1906, interrupted only by a cruise to Norway from mid-July to early August. The annual autumn maneuvers occurred as usual. After the conclusion of the maneuvers, Weissenburg had her crew reduced on 28 September and she was transferred to the Reserve Formation of the North Sea. She participated in the 1907 fleet maneuvers, but was decommissioned on 27 September, though she was still formally assigned to the Reserve Formation. She was reactivated on 2 August 1910 to participate in the annual maneuvers with III Squadron, though the sale of Weissenburg and Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm to the Ottoman Empire was announced just a few days later. On 6 August, she left the squadron and departed Wilhelmshaven on the 14th in company with Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm. They arrived in the Ottoman Empire on 1 September.
### In Ottoman service
In late 1909, the German military attache to the Ottoman Empire had begun a conversation with the Ottoman Navy about the possibility of selling German warships to the Ottomans to counter Greek naval expansion. After lengthy negotiations, including Ottoman attempts to buy one or more of the new battlecruisers Von der Tann, Moltke, and Goeben, the Germans offered to sell the four ships of the Brandenburg class at a cost of 10 million marks. The Ottomans chose to buy Weissenburg and Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, since they were the more advanced ships of the class. The two battleships were renamed after the famous 16th-century Ottoman admirals, Turgut Reis and Hayreddin Barbarossa, respectively. They were transferred on 1 September 1910, and on 12 September the German Reichsmarineamt formally struck them from the naval register, backdated to 31 July. The Ottoman Navy, however, had great difficulty equipping Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin; the navy had to pull trained enlisted men from the rest of the fleet just to put together crews for them. Both vessels suffered from condenser troubles after they entered Ottoman service, which reduced their speed to 8 to 10 knots (15 to 19 km/h; 9 to 12 mph).
#### Italo–Turkish War
A year later, on 29 September 1911, Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire to seize Libya. Turgut Reis, along with Barbaros Hayreddin and the obsolete central battery ironclad Mesudiye had been on a summer training cruise since July, and so were prepared for the conflict. The day before Italy declared war, the ships had left Beirut, bound for the Dardanelles. Unaware that a war had begun, they steamed slowly and conducted training maneuvers while en route, passing southwest of Cyprus. While off the island of Kos on 1 October, the ships received word of the Italian attack, prompting them to steam at full speed for the safety of the Dardanelles, arriving later that night. The following day, the ships proceeded to Constantinople for a refit after the training cruise. Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin sortied briefly on 4 October, but quickly returned to port without encountering any Italian vessels. During this period, the Italian fleet laid naval mines at the entrance to the Dardanelles in an attempt to prevent the Ottoman fleet from entering the Mediterranean. Maintenance work was completed by 12 October, at which point the fleet returned to Nagara inside the Dardanelles.
Since the fleet could not be used to challenge the significantly more powerful Italian Regia Marina (Royal Navy), Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin were primarily kept at Nagara to support the coastal fortifications defending the Dardanelles in the event that the Italian fleet attempted to force the straits. On 19 April 1912, elements of the Italian fleet bombarded the Dardanelles fortresses, but the Ottoman fleet did not mount a counterattack. The negative course of the war led many naval officers to join a coup against the Young Turk government; the officers commanding the fleet at Nagara threatened to bring the ships to Constantinople if their demands were not met. With tensions rising in the Balkans, the Ottoman government signed a peace treaty on 18 October, ending the war.
#### Balkan Wars
After watching Italy successfully seize Ottoman territory, the Balkan League declared war on the Ottoman Empire in October 1912 to seize the remaining European portion of the Empire, starting the First Balkan War. By this time, Turgut Reis, as with most ships of the Ottoman fleet, was in a state of disrepair. Her rangefinders and ammunition hoists had been removed, the pipes for her pumps were corroded, and the telephone lines no longer worked. On 7 October, the day before the Balkan League attacked, Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin were anchored off Haydarpaşa, along with the cruisers Hamidiye and Mecidiye and several torpedo boats. Ten days later, the ships departed for İğneada and the two battleships bombarded Bulgarian artillery positions near Varna two days thereafter. The ships were still suffering from boiler trouble. Both battleships took part in gunnery training in the Sea of Marmara on 3 November, but stopped after firing only a few salvos each, as their main battery mountings were not fully functional.
On 7 November, Turgut Reis shelled Bulgarian troops around Tekirdağ. On 17 November, she supported the Ottoman III Corps by bombarding the attacking Bulgarian forces. The ship was aided by artillery observers ashore. The battleship's gunnery was largely ineffective, though it provided a morale boost for the besieged Ottoman army dug in at Çatalca. By 17:00, the Bulgarian infantry had largely been forced back to their starting positions, in part due to the psychological effect of the battleships' bombardment. On 22 November, Turgut Reis sortied from the Bosporus to cover the withdrawal of Hamidiye, which had been torpedoed by a Bulgarian torpedo boat earlier that morning.
##### Battle of Elli
In December 1912, the Ottoman fleet was reorganized into an armored division, which included Barbaros Hayreddin as flagship, two destroyer divisions, and a fourth division composed of warships intended for independent operations. Over the next two months, the armored division attempted to break the Greek naval blockade of the Dardanelles, which resulted in two major naval engagements. The first, the Battle of Elli took place on 16 December 1912. The Ottomans attempted to launch an attack on Imbros. The Ottoman fleet sortied from the Dardanelles at 09:30; the smaller craft remained at the mouth of the straits while the battleships sailed north, hugging the coast. The Greek flotilla, which included the armored cruiser Georgios Averof and three Hydra-class ironclads, sailing from the island of Lemnos, altered course to the northeast to block the advance of the Ottoman battleships.
The Ottoman ships opened fire on the Greeks at 09:50, from a range of about 15,000 yd (14,000 m). Five minutes later, Georgios Averof crossed over to the other side of the Ottoman fleet, placing the Ottomans in the unfavorable position of being under fire from both sides. At 09:50 and under heavy pressure from the Greek fleet, the Ottoman ships completed a 16-point turn, which reversed their course, and headed for the safety of the straits. The turn was poorly conducted, and the ships fell out of formation, blocking each other's fields of fire. Around this time, Turgut Reis received several hits, though they inflicted only minor damage to the ship's superstructure and guns. By 10:17, both sides had ceased firing and the Ottoman fleet withdrew into the Dardanelles. The ships reached port by 13:00 and transferred their casualties to the hospital ship Resit Paşa.
##### Battle of Lemnos
The Battle of Lemnos resulted from an Ottoman plan to lure the faster Georgios Averof away from the Dardanelles. The protected cruiser Hamidiye evaded the Greek blockade and broke out into the Aegean Sea; the assumption was that the Greeks would dispatch Georgios Averof to hunt down Hamidiye. Despite the threat to Greek lines of communication posed by the cruiser, the Greek commander refused to detach Georgios Averof from its position. By mid-January, the Ottomans had learned that Georgios Averof remained with the Greek fleet, and so Kalyon Kaptanı (Captain) Ramiz Numan Bey, the Ottoman fleet commander, decided to attack the Greeks regardless. Turgut Reis, Barbaros Hayreddin, and other units of the Ottoman fleet departed the Dardanelles at 08:20 on the morning of 18 January, and sailed toward the island of Lemnos at a speed of 11 knots (20 km/h; 13 mph). Barbaros Hayreddin led the line of battleships, with a flotilla of torpedo boats on either side of the formation. Georgios Averof, with the three Hydra-class ironclads and five destroyers trailing behind, intercepted the Ottoman fleet approximately 12 nautical miles (22 km; 14 mi) from Lemnos. At 10:55, Mecidiye spotted the Greeks, and the fleet turned south to engage them.
A long-range artillery duel that lasted for two hours began at around 11:55, when the Ottoman fleet opened fire at a range of 8,000 m (26,000 ft). They concentrated their fire on Georgios Averof, which returned fire at 12:00. At 12:50, the Greeks attempted to cross the T of the Ottoman fleet, but the Ottoman line led by Barbaros Hayreddin turned north to block the Greek maneuver. The Ottoman commander detached the old ironclad Mesudiye after she received a serious hit at 12:55. After Barbaros Hayreddin suffered several hits that reduced her speed to 5 knots (9.3 km/h; 5.8 mph), Turgut Reis took the lead of the formation and Bey decided to break off the engagement. By 14:00, the Ottoman fleet reached the cover of the Dardanelles fortresses, forcing the Greeks to withdraw. Between Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin, the ships fired some 800 rounds, mostly of their main battery 28 cm guns but without success. During the battle, barbettes on both Turgut Reis and her sister were disabled by gunfire, and both ships caught fire.
##### Subsequent operations
On 8 February 1913, the Ottoman navy supported an amphibious assault at Şarköy. Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin, along with two small cruisers provided artillery support to the right flank of the invading force once it went ashore. The ships were positioned about a kilometer off shore; Turgut Reis was the second ship in the line, behind her sister Barbaros Hayreddin. The Bulgarian army resisted fiercely, which ultimately forced the Ottoman army to retreat, though the withdrawal was successful in large part due to the gunfire support from Turgut Reis and the rest of the fleet. During the battle, Turgut Reis fired 225 rounds from her 10.5 cm guns and 202 shells from her 8.8 cm guns.
In March 1913, the ship returned to the Black Sea to resume support of the Çatalca garrison, which was under renewed attacks by the Bulgarian army. On 26 March, the barrage of 28 and 10.5 cm shells fired by Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin assisted in the repelling of advance of the 2nd Brigade of the Bulgarian 1st Infantry Division. On 30 March, the left wing of the Ottoman line turned to pursue the retreating Bulgarians. Their advance was supported by both field artillery and the heavy guns of Turgut Reis and the other warships positioned off the coast; the assault gained the Ottomans about 1,500 m (4,900 ft) by nightfall. In response, the Bulgarians brought the 1st Brigade to the front, which beat the Ottoman advance back to its starting position. On 11 April, Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin, supported by several smaller vessels, steamed to Çanakkale to provide distant cover for a light flotilla conducting a sweep for Greek warships. The two sides clashed in an inconclusive engagement, and the main Ottoman fleet did not sortie before the two sides disengaged.
#### World War I
In the summer of 1914, when World War I broke out in Europe, the Ottomans initially remained neutral. In early November, the Black Sea Raid of the German battlecruiser Goeben, which had been transferred to the Ottoman navy and renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim, resulted in declarations of war by Russia, France, and Great Britain. By this time, Turgut Reis was laid up off the Golden Horn, worn out from heavy service during the Balkan Wars. Admiral Guido von Usedom, the head of the German naval mission to the Ottoman Empire, sent her and Barbaros Hayreddin to Nagara to support the Dardanelles forts. They remained on station from 14 to 19 December, before returning to Constantinople for repairs and gunnery training. On 18 February 1915, they departed for the Dardanelles and anchored in their firing positions. During this period, their engines were stopped to preserve fuel, but after the threat of British submarines increased, they kept steam up in their engines to preserve their ability to take evasive action; the steamer Üsküdar was moored in front of the battleships as a floating barrage. By 11 March, the high command decided that only one ship should be kept on station at a time, alternating every five days, to allow the ships to replenish stores and ammunition.
On 18 March, Turgut Reis was on station when the Allies attempted to force the straits. She did not engage the Allied ships, as her orders were to open fire only in the event that the defenses were breached. This was in part due to a severe shortage of shells. On 25 April, both Turgut Reis and Barbaros Hayreddin were present to bombard the Allied troops that had landed at Gallipoli that day. At 07:30 that morning, the Australian submarine fired several torpedoes at Turgut Reis but failed to score any hits. Turgut Reis returned to Constantinople later that day as planned. While she was bombarding Allied positions on 5 June, one of Turgut Reis's forward guns exploded; four men were killed and thirty-two were wounded. She returned to Constantinople for repairs, and the navy suspended bombardment operations—Barbaros Hayreddin having suffered a similar accident on 25 April. On 12 August, Turgut Reis was laid up at the Golden Horn after Barbaros Hayreddin was torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine. At some point in 1915, some of Turgut Reis's guns were removed and employed as coastal guns to shore up the defenses protecting the Dardanelles.
On 19 January 1918, Yavuz and the light cruiser SMS Breslau, which had also been transferred to Ottoman service under the name Midilli, sailed from the Dardanelles to attack several British monitors stationed outside. The ships quickly sank HMS Raglan and HMS M28 before turning back to the safety of the Dardanelles. While en route, Midilli struck five mines and sank, while Yavuz hit three mines and began to list to port. The ship's captain gave an incorrect order to the helmsman, which caused the ship to run aground. Yavuz remained there for almost a week, until Turgut Reis and several other vessels arrived on the scene on 22 January; the ships spent four days trying to free Yavuz from the sand bank, including using the turbulence from their propellers to clear sand away from under the ship. By the morning of 26 January, Yavuz came free from the sandbank and Turgut Reis escorted her back into the Dardanelles.
Turgut Reis was laid up again on 30 October 1918, and was refitted at the Gölcük Naval Shipyard from 1924 to 1925. After returning to service, she served as a stationary training ship based at Gölcük. At the time, she retained only two of her originally six 28 cm guns. Two main turrets were removed and installed as a part of the heavy coastal battery Turgut Reis, situated at the Asian coast of the Dardanelles Strait. Both turrets are preserved with their guns (two L/40 and two L/35). She was decommissioned in 1933 and was thereafter used as a barracks ship for dockyard workers, a role she filled until 1950, when she began to be broken up at Gölcük. By 1953, the ship had been broken down into two sections, and these were sold to be dismantled abroad. Demolition work was finally completed between 1956 and 1957. |
514,897 | Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands | 1,166,921,616 | Fourth carrier battle of the Pacific campaign of World War II | [
"1942 in Japan",
"1942 in the Solomon Islands",
"Battles and operations of World War II involving the Solomon Islands",
"Battles of World War II involving Japan",
"Battles of World War II involving the United States",
"Conflicts in 1942",
"Military history of Japan during World War II",
"Naval battles of World War II involving Japan",
"Naval battles of World War II involving the United States",
"October 1942 events",
"Pacific Ocean theatre of World War II",
"World War II aerial operations and battles of the Pacific theatre",
"World War II naval operations and battles of the Pacific theatre"
]
| The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, fought during 25–27 October 1942, sometimes referred to as the Battle of Santa Cruz or Third Battle of Solomon Sea, in Japan as the Battle of the South Pacific (Japanese: 南太平洋海戦 Minamitaiheiyō kaisen), was the fourth aircraft carrier battle of the Pacific campaign of World War II. It was also the fourth major naval engagement fought between the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy during the lengthy and strategically important Guadalcanal campaign. As in the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and the Eastern Solomons, the ships of the two adversaries were rarely in sight or gun range of each other. Instead, almost all attacks by both sides were mounted by carrier- or land-based aircraft.
In an attempt to drive Allied forces from Guadalcanal and nearby islands and end the stalemate that had existed since September 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army planned a major ground offensive on Guadalcanal for 20–25 October 1942. In support of this offensive, and with the hope of engaging Allied naval forces, Japanese carriers and other large warships moved into a position near the southern Solomon Islands. From this location, the Japanese naval forces hoped to engage and decisively defeat any Allied (primarily U.S.) naval forces, especially carrier forces, that responded to the ground offensive. Allied naval forces also hoped to meet the Japanese naval forces in battle, with the same objectives of breaking the stalemate and decisively defeating their adversary.
The Japanese ground offensive on Guadalcanal was underway with the Battle for Henderson Field while the naval warships and aircraft from the two adversaries confronted each other on the morning of 26 October 1942, just north of the Santa Cruz Islands. After an exchange of carrier air attacks, Allied surface ships retreated from the battle area with the fleet carrier Hornet sunk, and another fleet carrier, Enterprise, heavily damaged. The participating Japanese carrier forces also retired because of high aircraft and aircrew losses, plus significant damage to the fleet carrier Shōkaku and the light carrier Zuihō.
Santa Cruz was a tactical victory and a short-term strategic victory for the Japanese in terms of ships sunk and damaged, and control of the seas around Guadalcanal. However, Japan's loss of many irreplaceable veteran aircrews proved to be a long-term strategic advantage for the Allies, whose aircrew losses in the battle were relatively low and quickly replaced. The Japanese had hoped for and needed a bigger, more decisive victory. The fact that the naval battle was won just after the land battle was lost meant that the opportunity to exploit their victory in the battle had already passed.
## Background
On 8 August 1942, Allied forces, predominantly from the United States, landed on Japanese-occupied Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and the Florida Islands in the Solomon Islands. The landings on the islands were meant to deny their use by the Japanese as bases for threatening the supply routes between the U.S. and Australia, and to secure the islands as starting points for a campaign with the eventual goal of neutralizing the major Japanese base at Rabaul while also supporting the Allied New Guinea campaign. The landings initiated the six-month-long Guadalcanal campaign.
After the Battle of the Eastern Solomons on 24–25 August, in which the fleet carrier USS Enterprise was heavily damaged and forced to sail to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, for a month of major repairs, three U.S. carrier task forces remained in the South Pacific area. The task forces were based around the fleet carriers USS Wasp, Saratoga, and Hornet plus their respective air groups and supporting surface warships, including battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, and were primarily stationed between the Solomons and New Hebrides (Vanuatu) islands. In this area of operations, the carriers were charged with guarding the line of communication between the major Allied bases at New Caledonia and Espiritu Santo, supporting the Allied ground forces at Guadalcanal and Tulagi against any Japanese counteroffensives, covering the movement of supply ships to Guadalcanal, and engaging and destroying any Japanese warships, especially carriers, that came within range. The area of ocean in which the U.S. carrier task forces operated was known as "Torpedo Junction" by U.S. forces because of the high concentration of Japanese submarines in the area.
On 31 August, Saratoga was torpedoed by Japanese submarine I-26 and was out of action for three months for repairs. On 15 September, Wasp was hit by three torpedoes fired by Japanese submarine I-19 while supporting a major reinforcement and resupply convoy to Guadalcanal and almost engaging the Japanese carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku, which withdrew just before the two adversaries came into range of each other's aircraft. With power knocked out from torpedo damage, Wasp's damage-control teams were unable to contain the ensuing large fires, and she was abandoned and scuttled.
Although the U.S. now had only one operational carrier, Hornet, in the South Pacific, the Allies still maintained air superiority over the southern Solomon Islands because of their aircraft based at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. However, at night, when aircraft were not able to operate effectively, the Japanese were able to operate their ships around Guadalcanal almost at will. Thus, a stalemate in the battle for Guadalcanal developed—the Allies delivered supplies and reinforcements to Guadalcanal during the day, and the Japanese did the same by warship, referred to as the "Tokyo Express" by the Allies, at night—with neither side able to deliver enough troops to the island to secure a decisive advantage. By mid-October, both sides had roughly an equal number of troops on the island. The stalemate was briefly interrupted by two large-ship naval actions. On the night of 11–12 October, a U.S. naval force intercepted and defeated a Japanese naval force en route to bombard Henderson Field in the Battle of Cape Esperance. But just two nights later, a Japanese force that included the battleships Haruna and Kongō successfully bombarded Henderson Field, destroying most of the U.S. aircraft there and inflicting severe damage on the field's facilities.
The U.S. made two moves to try to break the stalemate in the battle for Guadalcanal. First, repairs to Enterprise were expedited so that she could return to the South Pacific as soon as possible. On 10 October, Enterprise received her new air group (Air Group 10) and on 16 October, she left Pearl Harbor; and on 23 October, she arrived back in the South Pacific and rendezvoused with Hornet and the rest of the Allied South Pacific naval forces on 24 October, 273 nmi (506 km; 314 mi) northeast of Espiritu Santo.
Second, on 18 October, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Allied Commander-in-Chief of Pacific Forces, replaced Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley with Vice Admiral William Halsey, Jr. as Commander, South Pacific Area: this position commanded Allied forces involved in the Solomon Islands campaign. Nimitz felt that Ghormley had become too myopic and pessimistic to lead Allied forces effectively in the struggle for Guadalcanal. Halsey was reportedly respected throughout the U.S. naval fleet as a "fighter". Upon assuming command, Halsey immediately began making plans to draw the Japanese naval forces into a battle, writing to Nimitz, "I had to begin throwing punches almost immediately."
The Japanese Combined Fleet was also seeking to draw Allied naval forces into what was hoped to be a decisive battle. Two fleet carriers—Hiyō and Jun'yō, as well as the light carrier Zuihō—arrived at the main Japanese naval base at Truk Atoll from Japan in early October and joined Shōkaku and Zuikaku. With five carriers fully equipped with air groups, plus their numerous battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, the Japanese Combined Fleet, directed by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, was confident that it could make up for the defeat at the Battle of Midway. Apart from a couple of air raids on Henderson Field in October, the Japanese carriers and their supporting warships stayed in the northwestern area of the Solomon Islands, out of the battle for Guadalcanal and waiting for a chance to approach and engage the U.S. carriers. With the Japanese Army's next planned major ground attack on Allied forces on Guadalcanal set for 20 October, Yamamoto's warships began to move towards the southern Solomons to support the offensive and to be ready to engage any enemy ships, especially carriers, that approached to support the Allied defenses on Guadalcanal.
## Prelude
On or around 11 October a large force consisting of aircraft carriers, battleships, and their escorts departed Truk for an extended sortie in support of an October Guadalcanal offensive. On the same day a major reinforcement convoy reached Guadalcanal, but a force of supporting heavy cruisers was prevented from bombarding Henderson Field and turned back in what became known as the Battle of Cape Esperance. What followed were three heavy bombardment missions conducted by battleships and heavy cruisers between 13 October and 16 October (this was the heaviest naval attack on the airfield in the entire campaign), the first and third of those conducted by vessels detached from Vice admiral Nobutake Kondō's Advance Force. Starting midnight on 14 October, another major convoy consisting of four transports unloaded the bulk of their cargo successfully, including tanks and heavy artillery. On 15 October, the destroyer Meredith, while escorting the tug Vireo pulling a resupply barge, was spotted and sunk by aircraft from Zuikaku and Shokaku. On 17 October, Hiyō and Jun'yō launched a strike force to attack transports off Lunga Point, but caused no damage. The large body of warships would remain in the waters around Guadalcanal until after fighting in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands had ceased and returned to Truk at the end of October. The recently commissioned carrier Hiyō was originally part of the fleet, but a fire in her engineering room on 21 October forced her to retire to Truk for repairs. On 25 October, 6 bombers and 12 fighters from Jun'yo attacked Henderson Field, but did little damage.
From 20 to 25 October, Japanese land forces on Guadalcanal attempted to capture Henderson Field with a large-scale attack against the U.S. defenders. The attack was decisively defeated with heavy casualties for the Japanese. Incorrectly believing that the Japanese army troops had succeeded in capturing Henderson Field, the Japanese sent warships from the Shortland Islands toward Guadalcanal on the morning of 25 October to support their ground forces on the island. Aircraft from Henderson Field attacked the convoy throughout the day, sinking the light cruiser Yura (with some help from B-17s out of Espiritu Santo) and damaging the destroyer Akizuki.
Despite the failure of the Japanese ground offensive and the loss of Yura, the rest of the Combined Fleet continued to maneuver near the southern Solomon Islands on 25 October in the hope of engaging Allied naval forces in a battle. The Japanese naval forces now comprised four carriers (two large, one medium, one light), Hiyō having departed, with a combined aircraft complement of approximately three Shokaku-class fleet carriers.
The Japanese naval forces were divided into three groups: the "Advanced" force of Jun'yō, four heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and seven destroyers commanded by Kondō in heavy cruiser Atago with a support group consisting of two battleships and two destroyers under the command of Rear Admiral Takeo Kurita; the "Main Body" of Shōkaku, Zuikaku, and Zuihō plus one heavy cruiser and eight destroyers, commanded by Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo aboard Shōkaku; and the "Vanguard" force of two battleships, three heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and seven destroyers, commanded by Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe in the battleship Hiei. In addition to commanding the Advanced force, Kondo acted as the overall commander of the three forces.
On the U.S. side, the Hornet and Enterprise task groups, under the overall command of Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, swept around to the north of the Santa Cruz Islands on 25 October, searching for the Japanese naval forces. The U.S. warships were deployed as two separate carrier groups, separated from each other by about 10 nmi (19 km; 12 mi). A U.S. PBY Catalina reconnaissance seaplane based in the Santa Cruz Islands located the Japanese Main Body carriers at 11:03. However, the Japanese carriers were about 355 nmi (657 km; 409 mi) from the U.S. force, just beyond carrier aircraft range. Kinkaid, hoping to close the range to be able to execute an attack that day, steamed towards the Japanese carriers at top speed and, at 14:25, launched a strike force of 23 aircraft. But the Japanese, knowing that they had been spotted by U.S. aircraft and not knowing where the U.S. carriers were, turned to the north to stay out of range of the U.S. carriers' aircraft. Thus, the U.S. strike force returned to its carriers without finding or attacking the Japanese warships.
## Battle
### Carrier action on 26 October: first strikes
At 02:50 on 26 October, the Japanese naval forces reversed direction and the naval forces of the two adversaries closed the distance until they were only 200 nmi (370 km; 230 mi) away from each other by 05:00. Both sides launched search aircraft and prepared their remaining aircraft to attack as soon as the other side's ships were located. Although a radar-equipped Catalina sighted the Japanese carriers at 03:10, the report did not reach Kinkaid until 05:12. Therefore, believing that the Japanese ships had probably changed position during the intervening two hours, he decided to withhold launching a strike force until he received more current information on the location of the Japanese ships.
At 06:45, a U.S. scout aircraft sighted the carriers of Nagumo's main body. At 06:58, a Japanese scout aircraft reported the location of Hornet's task force. Both sides raced to be the first to attack the other. The Japanese were first to get their strike force launched, with 64 aircraft, including 21 Aichi D3A2 dive bombers, 20 Nakajima B5N2 torpedo bombers, 21 A6M3 Zero fighters, and 2 Nakajima B5N2 contact aircraft on the way towards Hornet by 07:40. This first strike was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Shigeharu Murata, while the fighter cover was led by Lieutenants Ayao Shirane and Saneyasu Hidaka. Also at 07:40, two U.S. SBD-3 Dauntless scout aircraft, responding to the earlier sighting of the Japanese carriers, arrived and dove on Zuihō. With the Japanese combat air patrol (CAP) busy chasing other U.S. scout aircraft away, the two U.S. aircraft were able to hit Zuihō with both their 500-pound bombs, causing heavy damage and preventing the carrier's flight deck from being able to land aircraft.
Meanwhile, Kondo ordered Abe's Vanguard force to race ahead to try to intercept and engage the U.S. warships. Kondo also brought his own Advanced force forward at flank speed so that Jun'yō's aircraft could join in the attacks on the U.S. ships. At 08:10, Shōkaku launched a second wave of strike aircraft, consisting of 19 dive bombers and five Zeros, and Zuikaku launched 16 torpedo bombers and 4 Zeros at 08:40. The second strike leader was Lieutenant Commander Mamoru Seki, while the fighter cover was led by Lieutenant Hideki Shingo. Thus, by 09:10 the Japanese had over 100 aircraft on the way to attack the U.S. carriers.
The U.S. strike aircraft were running about 20 minutes behind the Japanese. Believing that a speedy attack was more important than a massed attack, and because they lacked fuel to spend time assembling prior to the strike, the U.S. aircraft proceeded in small groups towards the Japanese ships, rather than forming into a single large strike force. The first group—consisting of 15 Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers, 6 Grumman TBF-1 Avenger torpedo bombers, and eight Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters, led by Lieutenant Commander William J. "Gus" Widhelm from Hornet—was on its way by about 08:00. A second group—consisting of three SBDs, nine TBFs (including the Air Group Commander's), and eight Wildcats from Enterprise—was off by 08:10. A third group—consisting of nine SBDs, ten TBFs (including the Air Group Commander's), and seven F4Fs from Hornet—was on its way by 08:20.
At 08:40, the opposing aircraft strike formations passed within sight of each other. Lieutenant Hidaka's nine Zuihō Zeros surprised and attacked the Enterprise group, attacking the climbing aircraft from out of the sun. In the resulting engagement, four Zeros, three Wildcats, and two TBFs were shot down, with another two TBFs and a Wildcat forced to return to Enterprise with heavy damage. The remaining Zuihō Zeros, having exhausted their ammunition, withdrew from the action.
At 08:50, the lead U.S. attack formation from Hornet spotted four ships from Abe's Vanguard force. Pressing on, the U.S. aircraft sighted the Japanese carriers and prepared to attack. Three Zeros from Zuihō attacked the formation's Wildcats, drawing them away from the bombers they were assigned to protect. Thus, the dive bombers in the first group initiated their attacks without fighter escort. Twelve Zeros from the Japanese carrier CAP attacked the SBD formation, shot down two (including Widhelm's, though he survived), and forced two more to abort. The remaining 11 SBDs commenced their attack dives on Shōkaku at 09:27, hitting her with three to six bombs, wrecking her flight deck, and causing serious damage to the interior of the ship. The final SBD of the 11 lost track of Shōkaku and instead dropped its bomb near the Japanese destroyer Teruzuki, causing minor damage. The six TBFs in the first strike force, having become separated from their strike group, did not find the Japanese carriers and eventually turned back towards Hornet. On the way back, they attacked the Japanese heavy cruiser Tone, missing with all their torpedoes.
The TBFs of the second U.S. attack formation from Enterprise were unable to locate the Japanese carriers and instead attacked the Japanese heavy cruiser Suzuya from Abe's Vanguard force but caused no damage. At about the same time, nine SBDs from the third U.S. attack formation—from Hornet—found Abe's ships and attacked the Japanese heavy cruiser Chikuma, hitting her with two 1,000 lb (450 kg) bombs and causing heavy damage. The three Enterprise SBDs then arrived and also attacked Chikuma, causing more damage with one bomb hit and two near-misses. Finally, the nine TBFs from the third strike group arrived and attacked the smoking Chikuma, scoring one more hit. Chikuma, escorted by two destroyers, withdrew from the battle and headed towards Truk for repairs.
The U.S. carrier forces received word from their outbound strike aircraft at 08:30 that Japanese attack aircraft were headed their way. At 08:52, the Japanese strike force commander sighted the Hornet task force—the Enterprise task force was hidden by a rain squall—and deployed his aircraft for attack. At 08:55, the U.S. carriers detected the approaching Japanese aircraft on radar—about 35 nmi (65 km; 40 mi) away—and began to vector the 37 Wildcats of their CAP to engage the incoming Japanese aircraft. However, communication problems, mistakes by the U.S. fighter control directors, and primitive control procedures prevented all but a few of the Wildcats from engaging the Japanese aircraft before they began their attacks on Hornet. Although the U.S. CAP, including fighter pilot Swede Vejtasa, was able to shoot down or damage several dive bombers (the formation leader Lieutenant Sadamu Takahashi had to abort the dive due to the damage), most of the Japanese aircraft commenced their attacks relatively unmolested by U.S. fighters.
At 09:09, the anti-aircraft guns of Hornet and her escorting warships opened fire as the 20 untouched Japanese torpedo planes and remaining 16 dive bombers commenced their attacks on the carrier. At 09:12, a dive bomber placed its 250 kg semi-armor-piercing "ordinary" bomb dead center on Hornet's flight deck, across from the island, which penetrated three decks before exploding, killing 60 men. Moments later, a 242 kg high-explosive "land" bomb struck the flight deck, detonating on impact to create an 11 ft (3.4 m) hole and kill 30 men. A minute or so later, a third bomb hit Hornet near where the first bomb hit, penetrating three decks before exploding, causing severe damage but no loss of life. At 09:14, a dive bomber was set on fire by Hornet's anti-aircraft guns; the pilot, Warrant Officer Shigeyuki Sato, deliberately crashed into Hornet's stack, killing seven men and spreading burning aviation fuel over the signal deck.
At the same time as the dive bombers were attacking, the 20 torpedo bombers were also approaching Hornet from two different directions. Despite suffering heavy losses from anti-aircraft fire, including Murata, the torpedo planes planted two torpedoes in Hornet's side between 09:13 and 09:17, knocking out her engines. As Hornet came to a stop, a damaged Japanese dive bomber approached and purposely crashed into the carrier's side, starting a fire near the ship's main supply of aviation fuel. At 09:20, the surviving Japanese aircraft departed, leaving Hornet dead in the water and burning. Twenty-five Japanese and six American aircraft were destroyed in this attack, including 12 dive bombers, ten torpedo planes and at least one Zero.
With the assistance of fire hoses from three escorting destroyers, the fires on Hornet were under control by 10:00. Wounded personnel were evacuated from the carrier, and an attempt was made by the heavy cruiser USS Northampton under Captain Willard A. Kitts to tow Hornet away from the battle area. However, the effort to rig the towline took some time, and more attack waves of Japanese aircraft were inbound.
### Carrier action on 26 October: post-first strike actions
Starting at 09:30, Enterprise landed many of the damaged and fuel-depleted CAP fighters and returning scout aircraft from both carriers. However, with her flight deck full, and the second wave of incoming Japanese aircraft detected on radar at 09:30, Enterprise ceased landing operations at 10:00. Fuel-depleted aircraft then began ditching in the ocean, and the carrier's escorting destroyers rescued the aircrews. One of the ditching aircraft, a damaged TBF from Enterprise's strike force that had been attacked earlier by Zeros from Zuihō, crashed into the water near the destroyer USS Porter. As Porter rescued the TBF's aircrew, she was struck by a torpedo, possibly from the ditched aircraft, causing heavy damage and killing 15 crewmen. After the task force commander ordered the destroyer scuttled, the crew was rescued by the destroyer USS Shaw which then sank Porter with gunfire ().
As the first wave of Japanese strike aircraft began returning to their carriers from their attack on Hornet, one of them spotted the Enterprise task force, which had now emerged from the rain squall, and reported the carrier's position. The second Japanese aircraft strike wave, believing Hornet to be sinking, directed their attacks on the Enterprise task force, beginning at 10:08. Again, the U.S. CAP had trouble intercepting the Japanese aircraft before they attacked Enterprise, shooting down only 2 of the 19 dive bombers as they began their dives on the carrier. Attacking through the intense anti-aircraft fire put up by Enterprise and her escorting warships, Seki's division attacked first and scored no hits. Next attacked the division led by Lieutenant Keiichi Arima that scored hits on the carrier with two 250 kg semi-AP "ordinary" bombs, where the first one was released by Arima's pilot, Petty Officer Kiyoto Furuta. The 2 bombs killed 44 men and wounded 75, and caused heavy damage to the carrier, including jamming her forward elevator in the "up" position. In addition, Arima's division also achieved a near-miss with another bomb. However, ten of the nineteen Japanese bombers were lost in this attack, including Seki's, with two more ditching on their return.
Twenty minutes later, the 16 Zuikaku torpedo planes arrived and split up to attack Enterprise. One group of torpedo bombers was attacked by two CAP Wildcats, again including Vejtasa, which shot down three of them and damaged a fourth. On fire, the fourth damaged aircraft purposely crashed into the destroyer Smith, setting the ship on fire and killing 57 of her crew. The torpedo carried by this aircraft detonated shortly after impact, causing more damage. The fires initially seemed out of control until Smith's commanding officer ordered the destroyer to steer into the large spraying wake of the battleship USS South Dakota, which helped put out the fires. Smith then resumed her station, firing her remaining anti-aircraft guns at the torpedo planes.
The remaining torpedo planes attacked Enterprise, South Dakota, and the cruiser Portland, but all of their torpedoes missed or failed, causing no damage. The engagement was over at 10:53; 9 of the 16 torpedo aircraft were lost in this attack. After suppressing most of the onboard fires, at 11:15 Enterprise reopened her flight deck to begin landing returning aircraft from the morning U.S. strikes on the Japanese warship forces. However, only a few aircraft landed before the next wave of Japanese strike aircraft arrived and began their attacks on Enterprise, forcing a suspension of landing operations.
Between 09:05 and 09:14, Jun'yō had arrived within 280 nmi (320 mi; 520 km) of the U.S. carriers and launched a strike of 17 dive bombers and 12 Zeros, under the command of Lieutenant Yoshio Shiga. As the Japanese main body and advanced force maneuvered to try to join formations, Jun'yō readied follow-up strikes. At 11:21, the Jun'yō aircraft arrived and dove on the Enterprise task force. The dive bombers scored one near miss on Enterprise, causing more damage, and one hit each on South Dakota and light cruiser San Juan, causing moderate damage to both ships. Eight of the seventeen Japanese dive bombers were destroyed in this attack, with three more ditching on their return.
At 11:35, with Hornet out of action, Enterprise heavily damaged, and the Japanese assumed to have one or two undamaged carriers in the area, Kinkaid decided to withdraw Enterprise and her screening ships from the battle. Leaving Hornet behind, Kinkaid directed the carrier and her task force to retreat as soon as they were able. Between 11:39 and 13:22, Enterprise recovered 57 of the 73 airborne U.S. aircraft as she retreated. The remaining U.S. aircraft ditched in the ocean, and their aircrews were rescued by escorting warships.
Between 11:40 and 14:00, the two undamaged Japanese carriers, Zuikaku and Jun'yō, recovered the few aircraft that returned from the morning strikes on Hornet and Enterprise and prepared follow-up strikes. It was now that the devastating losses sustained during these attacks became apparent. Lt. Cmdr. Masatake Okumiya, Jun'yō's air staff officer, described the return of the carrier's first strike groups:
> We searched the sky with apprehension. There were only a few planes in the air in comparison with the numbers launched several hours before... The planes lurched and staggered onto the deck, every single fighter and bomber bullet holed ... As the pilots climbed wearily from their cramped cockpits, they told of unbelievable opposition, of skies choked with antiaircraft shell bursts and tracers.
Only one of Jun'yō's bomber leaders returned from the first strike, and upon landing he appeared "so shaken that at times he could not speak coherently".
At 13:00, Kondo's Advanced force and Abe's Vanguard force warships together headed directly towards the last reported position of the U.S. carrier task forces and increased speed to try to intercept them for a gun battle. The damaged carriers Zuihō and Shōkaku, with Nagumo still on board, retreated from the battle area, leaving Rear Admiral Kakuji Kakuta in charge of the Zuikaku and Jun'yō aircraft forces. At 13:06, Jun'yō launched her second strike of seven torpedo planes led by Lieutenant Yoshiaki Irikiin, which were escorted by eight Zeros led by Lieutenant Shirane. At the same time, Zuikaku launched her third strike of seven torpedo planes, two dive bombers, and five Zeros, under the command of Lieutenant (jg) Ichirō Tanaka. Most of the torpedo planes were armed with an 800 kg armor-piercing bomb. At 15:35, Jun'yō launched the last Japanese strike force of the day, consisting of four dive bombers and six Zeros, again under the command of Lieutenant Shiga.
After several technical problems, Northampton finally began slowly towing Hornet out of the battle area at 14:45, at a speed of only five knots. Hornet's crew was on the verge of restoring partial power, but at 15:20, Jun'yō's second strike arrived, and the seven torpedo planes attacked the almost stationary carrier. Although six of the torpedo planes missed, at 15:23, one torpedo struck Hornet amidships, which proved to be the fatal blow. The torpedo hit destroyed the repairs to the power system and caused heavy flooding and a 14-degree list. With no power to pump out the water, Hornet was given up for lost, and the crew abandoned ship. The third strike from Zuikaku attacked Hornet during this time, where B5N level bombers hit the sinking ship with one 800 kg bomb. All of Hornet's crewmen were off by 16:27. During the last Japanese attack of the day, a dive bomber from Jun'yō's third strike dropped one more 250 kg semi-AP bomb on the sinking carrier at 17:20.
After being informed that Japanese forces were approaching and that further towing efforts were infeasible, Halsey ordered Hornet sunk. While the rest of the U.S. warships retired towards the southeast to get out of range of Kondō's and Abe's oncoming fleet, the destroyers USS Mustin and Anderson attempted to scuttle Hornet with multiple torpedoes and over 400 shells, but she still remained afloat. With advancing Japanese naval forces only 20 minutes away, the two U.S. destroyers abandoned Hornet's burning hulk at 20:40. By 22:20, the rest of Kondō's and Abe's warships had arrived at Hornet's location. The destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo then finished Hornet with four 24 in (610 mm) torpedoes. At 01:35 on 27 October 1942, she finally sank, at approximately . Several night attacks by radar-equipped Catalinas on Jun'yō and Teruzuki, knowledge of the head start the U.S. warships had in their retreat from the area, plus a critical fuel situation apparently caused the Japanese to reconsider further pursuit of the U.S. warships. After refueling near the northern Solomon Islands, the Japanese ships returned to their main base at Truk on 30 October. During the U.S. withdrawal from the battle area towards Espiritu Santo and New Caledonia, while taking evasive action from a Japanese submarine, South Dakota collided with the destroyer Mahan, heavily damaging Mahan.
## Aftermath
Both sides claimed victory. The Americans stated that two Shōkaku-class fleet carriers had been hit with bombs and eliminated. Kinkaid's summary of damage to the Japanese included hits to a battleship, three heavy cruisers, and a light cruiser, and possible hits on another heavy cruiser. In reality, Shōkaku, Zuihō, and Chikuma were the only ships hit during the battle, none of which sank. For their part, the Japanese asserted that they sank three American carriers, one battleship, one cruiser, one destroyer, and one "unidentified large warship". Actual American losses comprised the carrier Hornet and the destroyer Porter, and damage to Enterprise, the light cruiser San Juan, the destroyer Smith and the battleship South Dakota.
The loss of Hornet was a severe blow for Allied forces in the South Pacific, leaving Enterprise and Saratoga as the only operational Allied carriers in the entire Pacific theater. As Enterprise retreated from the battle, the crew posted a sign on the flight deck: "Enterprise vs Japan". Enterprise received temporary repairs at New Caledonia and, although not fully restored, returned to the southern Solomons area just two weeks later to support Allied forces during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. There she played an important role in what turned out to be the decisive naval engagement in the overall campaign for Guadalcanal when her aircraft sank several Japanese warships and troop transports during the naval skirmishes around Henderson Field. The lack of carriers pressed the Americans and Japanese to deploy battleships in night operations around Guadalcanal, one of only two actions in the entire Pacific War in which battleships fought each other, with South Dakota again being damaged while two Japanese battleships were lost.
Although the Battle of Santa Cruz was a tactical victory for the Japanese in terms of ships sunk, it came at a high cost for their naval forces, as Jun'yō was the only active aircraft carrier left to challenge Enterprise or Henderson Field for the remainder of the Guadalcanal campaign. Zuikaku, despite being undamaged and having recovered the aircraft from the two damaged carriers, returned to home islands via Truk for training and aircraft ferrying duties, returning to the South Pacific only in February 1943 to cover the evacuation of Japanese ground forces from Guadalcanal. Both damaged carriers were forced to return to Japan for extensive repairs and refitting. After repair, Zuihō returned to Truk in late January 1943. Shōkaku was under repair until March 1943 and did not return to the front until July 1943, when she was reunited with Zuikaku at Truk.
The most significant losses for the Japanese Navy were in aircrew. The U.S. lost 81 of the 175 aircraft that were available at the start of the battle; of these, 33 were fighters, 28 were dive-bombers, and 20 were torpedo bombers. However, only 26 pilots and aircrew members were lost. The Japanese fared much worse, especially in airmen; in addition to losing 99 aircraft of the 203 involved in the battle, they lost 148 pilots and aircrew members, including two dive bomber group leaders, three torpedo squadron leaders, and eighteen other section or flight leaders. The most notable casualties were the commanders of the first two strikes – Murata and Seki. Forty-nine percent of the Japanese torpedo bomber aircrews involved in the battle were killed, along with 39% of the dive bomber crews and 20% of the fighter pilots. The Japanese lost more aircrew at Santa Cruz than they had lost in each of the three previous carrier battles at Coral Sea (90), Midway (110), and Eastern Solomons (61). By the end of the Santa Cruz battle, at least 409 of the 765 elite Japanese carrier aviators who had participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor were dead. Having lost so many of its veteran carrier aircrew, and with no quick way to replace them—because of an institutionalized limited capacity in its naval aircrew training programs and an absence of trained reserves—the undamaged Zuikaku was also ordered to return to Japan. Jun'yo remained and provided air support during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Zuikaku returned just in time to cover the withdrawal of the forces from Guadalcanal.
Admiral Nagumo was relieved of command shortly after the battle and reassigned to shore duty in Japan. He acknowledged that the victory was incomplete:
> [T]his battle was a tactical win, but a shattering strategic loss for Japan ... Considering the great superiority of our enemy's industrial capacity, we must win every battle overwhelmingly in order to win this war. This last one, although a victory, unfortunately, was not an overwhelming victory.
In retrospect, despite being a tactical victory, the battle effectively ended any hope the Japanese Navy might have had of scoring a decisive victory before the industrial might of the United States placed that goal out of reach. Historian Eric Hammel summed up the significance of the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands as, "Santa Cruz was a Japanese victory. That victory cost Japan her last best hope to win the war."
Military historian Dr. John Prados offers a dissenting view, asserting that this was not a Pyrrhic victory for Japan, but a strategic victory:
> By any reasonable measure the Battle of Santa Cruz marked a Japanese victory—and a strategic one. At its end, the Imperial Navy possessed the only operational carrier force in the Pacific. The Japanese had sunk more ships and more combat tonnage, had more aircraft remaining, and were in physical possession of the battle zone... Arguments based on aircrew losses or who owned Guadalcanal are about something else—the campaign, not the battle.
In Prados' view, the real story of the aftermath is that the Imperial Navy failed to exploit their hard-won victory.
## See also
- Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service
- Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II
- United States Navy in World War II
- Pacific Theater aircraft carrier operations during World War II
### World War II carrier-versus-carrier engagements
- Battle of the Coral Sea
- Battle of Midway
- Battle of the Eastern Solomons
- Battle of the Philippine Sea
- Battle off Cape Engaño |
52,407,939 | Yugoslav torpedo boat T7 | 1,134,934,980 | Sea-going torpedo boat operated by the Royal Yugoslav Navy | [
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| T7 was a sea-going torpedo boat operated by the Royal Yugoslav Navy between 1921 and 1941, after spending World War I in Austro-Hungarian Navy service. Originally 96 F, she was a 250t-class torpedo boat, and saw active service during World War I, performing convoy, patrol, escort and minesweeping tasks, and anti-submarine operations. Following Austria-Hungary's defeat in 1918, 96 F was allocated to the Navy of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which later became the Royal Yugoslav Navy, and was renamed T7. At the time, she and the seven other 250t-class boats were the only modern sea-going vessels of the fledgling maritime force.
During the interwar period, T7 and the rest of the navy were involved in training exercises and cruises to friendly ports, but activity was limited by reduced naval budgets. The ship was captured by the Italians during the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. After her main armament was modernised, she served with the Royal Italian Navy under her Yugoslav designation, conducting coastal and second-line escort duties in the Adriatic. Following the Italian capitulation in September 1943, she was handed over by the Germans to the Navy of the Independent State of Croatia. She was driven aground by British motor torpedo boats in June 1944 and destroyed by the British Army to prevent her salvage.
## Background
In 1910, the Austria-Hungary Naval Technical Committee initiated the design and development of a 275-tonne (271-long-ton) coastal torpedo boat, specifying that it should be capable of sustaining 30 knots (56 km/h; 35 mph) for 10 hours. This specification was based upon an expectation that the Strait of Otranto, where the Adriatic Sea meets the Ionian Sea, would be blockaded by the hostile forces during a future conflict. Under such circumstances, there would be a need for a torpedo boat that could still sail from the Austro-Hungarian Navy (German: kaiserliche und königliche Kriegsmarine) base at the Bocche di Cattaro (Bay of Kotor) to the Strait during the night, locate and attack blockading ships and return to port before morning. Steam turbine power was selected for propulsion, as diesels with the necessary power were not available, and the Austro-Hungarian Navy did not have the practical experience to run turbo-electric boats. Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino (STT) of Trieste was selected for the contract to build the first eight vessels, designated as the T-group. Another tender was requested for four more boats, but when Ganz & Danubius reduced their price by ten percent, a total of sixteen boats were ordered from them, designated as the F-group. The F-group's designation signified the location of Ganz & Danubius' main shipyard at Fiume. 96 F was the fifteenth boat of the F-group to be fully completed.
## Description and construction
The 250t-class F-group boats had a waterline length of 58.5 metres (191 ft 11 in), a beam of 5.8 m (19 ft), and a normal draught of 1.5 m (4 ft 11 in). While their designed displacement was 266 tonnes (262 long tons), they displaced about 330 tonnes (325 long tons) when fully loaded. The crew consisted of 38–41 officers and enlisted men. The boats were powered by two AEG-Curtiss steam turbines driving two propellers, using steam generated by two Yarrow water-tube boilers, one of which burned fuel oil and the other coal. The turbines were rated at 5,000 shaft horsepower (3,700 kW) with a maximum output of 6,000 shp (4,500 kW), and were designed to propel the boats to a top speed of 28 knots (52 km/h; 32 mph). They carried 20 tonnes (19.7 long tons) of coal and 34 tonnes (33.5 long tons) of fuel oil, which gave them a range of 1,200 nautical miles (2,200 km; 1,400 mi) at 16 knots (30 km/h; 18 mph). The F-group had two funnels rather than the single funnel of the T-group. Due to inadequate funding, 96 F and the rest of the 250t class were essentially coastal vessels, despite the original intention that they would be used for "high seas" operations. They were the first small Austro-Hungarian Navy boats to use turbines, and this contributed to ongoing problems with them.
The boats were armed with two Škoda 66 mm (2.6 in) L/30 guns, and four 450 mm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes. They could also carry 10–12 naval mines. 96 F was the second-to-last of its group to be completed, and was laid down on 24 February 1915, launched on 7 July 1916 and completed on 23 November of that year.
## Career
### World War I and the interwar period
During World War I, 96 F was used for convoy, patrol, escort and minesweeping tasks, and anti-submarine operations. In 1917, one of the 66 mm (2.6 in) guns on each boat of the class was placed on an anti-aircraft mount. On the night of 11 May 1917, the Huszár-class destroyer Csikós, accompanied by 96 F and two other 250t-class boats, were pursued in the northern Adriatic by an Italian force of five destroyers, but were able to retire to safety behind a minefield. On 3 June, the destroyers Wildfang and Csikós, along with 96 F and another 250t-class boat, had a brief encounter with three Italian MAS boats off the mouth of the Tagliamento river in the far north of the Adriatic.
96 F survived the war intact. In 1920, under the terms of the previous year's Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye by which rump Austria officially ended World War I, she was allocated to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (KSCS, later Yugoslavia). Along with three other 250t-class F-group boats, 87 F, 93 F and 97 F, and four 250t-class T-group boats, she was transferred in March 1921 to the Navy of the KSCS, which later became the Royal Yugoslav Navy (Serbo-Croatian Latin: Kraljevska Jugoslovenska Ratna Mornarica, KJRM). Renamed T7 in KJRM service, she and the other seven 250t-class boats were, at the outset, the only modern sea-going vessels in the KJRM. In 1925, exercises were conducted off the Dalmatian coast, involving the majority of the navy. In May–June 1929, six of the eight 250t-class torpedo boats accompanied the light cruiser Dalmacija, the submarine tender Hvar and the submarines Hrabri and Nebojša, on a cruise to Malta, the Greek island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea, and Bizerte in the French protectorate of Tunisia. It is not clear if T7 was one of the torpedo boats involved. The ships and crews made a very good impression while visiting Malta. In 1932, the British naval attaché reported that Yugoslav ships engaged in few exercises, manoeuvres or gunnery training due to reduced budgets.
### World War II
In April 1941, Yugoslavia entered World War II when it was invaded by the German-led Axis powers. At the time of the invasion, T7 was assigned as the flagship of the 3rd Torpedo Division located at Šibenik, which included her three F-group sisters. On 8 April, the four boats of the 3rd Torpedo Division, along with other vessels, were tasked to support an attack on the Italian enclave of Zara (Zadar) on the Dalmatia coast. They were subjected to three Italian air attacks and, after the last one, sailed from the area of Zaton into Lake Prokljan, where they remained until 11 April. On 12 April, the 3rd Torpedo Division arrived at Milna on the island of Brač, and refused to follow orders to sail to the Bay of Kotor. All four F-group boats, including T7, were captured by the Italians.
T7 was then operated by the Italians under her Yugoslav designation, conducting coastal and second-line escort duties in the Adriatic. Her guns were replaced by two 76 mm (3 in) L/40 anti-aircraft guns, but no other significant alterations were made to her. The Italians capitulated in September 1943, and once under German control, T7 was handed over to the Navy of the Independent State of Croatia, serving under her Yugoslav designation. Her crew came under the influence of the Yugoslav Partisans, and were preparing to mutiny when the Germans intervened. On 24 June 1944, she and the German S-boats S 154 and S 157 of the 7th S-Boat Flotilla were sailing between Šibenik and Rijeka, protecting German sea supply routes along the Adriatic, when they were attacked by the Royal Navy Fairmile D motor torpedo boats MTB 659, MTB 662 and MTB 670 near the island of Kukuljari, south of Murter Island. Considering T7 one of the few significant threats to British vessels in the region, the British commander ordered MTB 670 to launch a torpedo attack. The two torpedoes missed, so the MTBs pursued and approached the ship from abaft the beam. T7 opened fire at 150 yards (140 m). The MTBs returned fire with their forward and port guns, and within 30 seconds they had disabled T7*'s weapons and set her ablaze. At a speed of about 12 knots (22 km/h; 14 mph), T7 suddenly veered starboard, narrowly avoiding a collision with MTB 662* (it is not known whether her steering was damaged or if her crew was attempting to perform a ram) before running aground on Murter Island. The MTBs rescued 21 crew. The British crews later examined the wreck, capturing five more sailors and leaving her flooded and burning. A British Army demolition team destroyed the hulk to ensure it could not be salvaged. |
63,727 | Alan Shepard | 1,169,334,486 | American astronaut, first American in space, lunar explorer (1923–1998) | [
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"People from Pebble Beach, California",
"People who have flown in suborbital spaceflight",
"People who have walked on the Moon",
"People with Ménière's disease",
"Pinkerton Academy alumni",
"Recipients of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor",
"Recipients of the Distinguished Flying Cross (United States)",
"Recipients of the NASA Distinguished Service Medal",
"Recipients of the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal",
"Recipients of the Navy Distinguished Service Medal",
"United States Astronaut Hall of Fame inductees",
"United States Naval Academy alumni",
"United States Naval Aviators",
"United States Naval Test Pilot School alumni",
"United States Navy astronauts",
"United States Navy personnel of World War II",
"United States Navy rear admirals (lower half)"
]
| Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. (November 18, 1923 – July 21, 1998) was an American astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot, and businessman. In 1961, he became the second person and the first American to travel into space and, in 1971, he became the fifth and oldest person to walk on the Moon at age 47.
A graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Shepard saw action with the surface navy during World War II. He became a naval aviator in 1946, and a test pilot in 1950. He was selected as one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts in 1959, and in May 1961 he made the first crewed Project Mercury flight, Mercury-Redstone 3, in a spacecraft he named Freedom 7. His craft entered space, but was not capable of achieving orbit. He became the second person, and the first American, to travel into space, and the first space traveler to manually control the orientation of his craft. In the final stages of Project Mercury, Shepard was scheduled to pilot the Mercury-Atlas 10 (MA-10), which was planned as a three-day mission. He named Mercury Spacecraft 15B Freedom 7 II in honor of his first spacecraft, but the mission was canceled.
Shepard was designated as the commander of the first crewed Project Gemini mission, but was grounded in October 1963 due to Ménière's disease, an inner-ear ailment that caused episodes of extreme dizziness and nausea. This was surgically corrected in 1968, and in 1971, Shepard commanded the Apollo 14 mission, piloting the Apollo Lunar Module Antares. At age 47, he became the fifth, the oldest, and the only one of the Mercury Seven astronauts to walk on the Moon. During the mission, he hit two golf balls on the lunar surface.
Shepard was Chief of the Astronaut Office from November 1963 to August 1969 (the approximate period of his grounding), and from June 1971 until his retirement from the United States Navy and NASA on August 1, 1974. He was promoted to rear admiral on August 25, 1971, the first astronaut to reach that rank.
## Early life
Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. was born on November 18, 1923, at 64 Hampstead Road in Derry, New Hampshire, to Alan Bartlett Shepard Sr. and Pauline Renza Shepard (née Emerson). He had a younger sister, Pauline, who was known as Polly. He was one of many famous descendants of Mayflower passenger Richard Warren. He was related to Scottish emigrants from Berneray in the Outer Hebrides, through the Shepard line. Alan Bartlett Shepard Sr., known as Bart, worked in the Derry National Bank, owned by Shepard's grandfather. Bart joined the National Guard in 1915 and served in France with the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. He remained in the National Guard between the wars, and was recalled to active duty during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Shepard attended Adams School in Derry, where his academic performance impressed his teachers; he skipped the sixth grade, and proceeded to middle school at Oak Street School in Derry, where he skipped the eighth grade. He achieved the Boy Scouts of America rank of First Class Scout. In 1936, he went to the Pinkerton Academy, a private school in Derry that his father had attended and where his grandfather had been a trustee. He completed grades 9 to 12 there. Fascinated by flight, he created a model airplane club at the academy, and his Christmas present in 1938 was a flight in a Douglas DC-3. The following year he began cycling to Manchester Airfield, where he would do odd jobs in exchange for the occasional ride in an airplane or informal flying lesson.
Shepard graduated from Pinkerton Academy in 1940. Because World War II was already raging in Europe, his father wanted him to join the Army. Shepard chose the Navy instead. He easily passed the entrance exam to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1940, but at sixteen was too young to enter that year. The Navy sent him to the Admiral Farragut Academy, a prep school for the Naval Academy, from which he graduated with the Class of 1941. Tests administered at Farragut indicated an IQ of 145, but his grades were mediocre.
At Annapolis, Shepard enjoyed aquatic sports. He was a keen and competitive sailor, winning several races, including a regatta held by the Annapolis Yacht Club. He learned to sail all the types of boats the academy owned, up to and including USS Freedom, a 90-foot (27 m) schooner. He also participated in swimming, and rowed with the eight. During his Christmas break in 1942, he went to Principia College to be with his sister, who was unable to go home owing to wartime travel restrictions. There he met Louise Brewer, whose parents were pensioners on the du Pont family estate, and, like Renza Shepard, were devout Christian Scientists. Owing to the war, the usual four-year course at Annapolis was cut short by a year. He graduated with the Class of 1945 on June 6, 1944, ranked 463rd out of 915, and was commissioned as an ensign and awarded a Bachelor of Science degree. The following month he became secretly engaged to Louise.
## Naval service
After a month of classroom instruction in aviation, Shepard was posted to a destroyer, USS Cogswell, in August 1944; it was US Navy policy that aviation candidates should first have some service at sea. At the time the destroyer was deployed on active service in the Pacific Ocean. Shepard joined it when it returned to the naval base at Ulithi on October 30. After just two days at sea Cogswell helped rescue 172 sailors from the cruiser USS Reno, which had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, then escorted the crippled ship back to Ulithi. The ship was buffeted by Typhoon Cobra in December 1944, a storm in which three other destroyers went down, and battled kamikazes in the invasion of Lingayen Gulf in January 1945.
Cogswell returned to the United States for an overhaul in February 1945. Shepard was given three weeks' leave, in which time he and Louise decided to marry. The ceremony took place on March 3, 1945, in St. Stephen's Lutheran Church in Wilmington, Delaware. His father, Bart, served as his best man. The newlyweds had only a brief time together before Shepard rejoined Cogswell at the Long Beach Navy Yard on April 5, 1945. After the war, they had two children, both daughters: Laura, born in 1947, and Julie, born in 1951. Following the death of Louise's sister in 1956, they raised her five-year-old niece, Judith Williams—whom they renamed Alice to avoid confusion with Julie—as their own, although they never adopted her. They eventually had six grandchildren.
On Shepard's second cruise with Cogswell, he was appointed a gunnery officer, responsible for the 20 mm and 40 mm antiaircraft guns on the ship's bow. They engaged kamikazes in the Battle of Okinawa, where the ship served in the dangerous role of a radar picket. The job of the radar pickets was to warn the fleet of incoming kamikazes, but because they were often the first ships sighted by incoming Japanese aircraft, they were also the most likely ships to be attacked. Cogswell performed this duty from May 27, 1945, until June 26, when it rejoined Task Force 38. The ship also participated in the Allied naval bombardments of Japan, and was present in Tokyo Bay for the Surrender of Japan in September 1945. Shepard returned to the United States later that month.
In November 1945, Shepard arrived at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas, where he commenced basic flight training on January 7, 1946. He was an average student, and for a time faced being "bilged" (dropped) from flight training and reassigned to the surface navy. To make up for this, he took private lessons at a local civilian flying school—something the Navy frowned on—earning a civil pilot's license. His flying skills gradually improved, and by early 1947 his instructors rated him above average. He was sent to Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida for advanced training. His final test was six perfect landings on the carrier USS Saipan. The following day, he received his naval aviator wings, which his father pinned on his chest.
Shepard was assigned to Fighter Squadron 42 (VF-42), flying the Vought F4U Corsair. The squadron was nominally based on the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the ship was being overhauled at the time Shepard arrived, and in the meantime the squadron was based at Naval Air Station Norfolk in Virginia. He departed on his first cruise, of the Caribbean, on Franklin D. Roosevelt with VF-42 in 1948. Most of the aviators were, like Shepard, on their first assignment. Those who were not were given the opportunity to qualify for night landings on a carrier, a dangerous maneuver, especially in a Corsair, which had to bank sharply on approach. Shepard managed to persuade his squadron commander to allow him to qualify as well. After briefly returning to Norfolk, the carrier set out on a nine-month tour of the Mediterranean Sea. He earned a reputation for carousing and chasing women. He also instituted a ritual of, whenever he could, calling Louise at 17:00 (her time) each day.
Normally sea duty alternated with periods of duty ashore. In 1950, Shepard was selected to attend the United States Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. As a test pilot he conducted high-altitude tests to obtain information about the light and air masses at different altitudes over North America; carrier suitability certification of the McDonnell F2H Banshee; experiments with the Navy's new in-flight refueling system; and tests of the angled flight deck. He narrowly avoided being court-martialed by the station commander, Rear Admiral Alfred M. Pride, after looping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and making low passes over the beach at Ocean City, Maryland, and the base; but Shepard's superiors, John Hyland and Robert M. Elder, interceded on his behalf.
Shepard's next assignment was to VF-193, a night fighter squadron flying the Banshee, that was based at Naval Air Station Moffett Field, California. The squadron was part of Commander James D. "Jig Dog" Ramage's Air Group 19. Naval aviators with experience in jet aircraft were still relatively rare, and Ramage specifically requested Shepard's assignment on the advice of Elder, who commanded VF-193's sister squadron, VF-191. Ramage made Shepard his own wingman, a decision that would save Ramage's life in 1954, when his oxygen system failed and Shepard talked him through a landing. As squadron operations officer, Shepard's most important task was imparting his knowledge of flying jets to his fellow aviators to keep them alive. He served two tours on the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany in the western Pacific. It set out on a combat tour off Korea in 1953, during the Korean War, but the Korean Armistice Agreement ended the fighting in July 1953, and Shepard did not see combat.
Rear Admiral John P. Whitney requested Shepard's services as an aide de camp, but Shepard wanted to fly. Therefore, at Shepard's request, Ramage spoke to the admiral on his behalf, and Shepard was instead sent back to Patuxent. He flight tested the McDonnell F3H Demon, Vought F-8 Crusader, Douglas F4D Skyray and Grumman F-11 Tiger. The Vought F7U Cutlass tended to go into an inverted spin during a snap roll. This was not unusual; many aircraft did this, but normally if the pilot let go of the stick the aircraft would correct itself. When he attempted this in the F7U, Shepard found this was not the case. He was unable to break out of the spin and was forced to eject. In 1957, he was project test pilot on the Douglas F5D Skylancer. Shepard did not like the plane, and gave it an unfavorable report. The Navy canceled orders for it, buying the F8U instead. He also filed an unfavorable report on the F11F after a harrowing incident in which the engine failed on him during a high-speed dive. He managed to restart the engine and avoid a fatal crash.
Shepard was an instructor at the Test Pilot School, and then entered the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island. He graduated in 1957, and became an Aircraft Readiness Officer on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet. By this time he had logged more than 3,600 hours of flying time, including 1,700 hours in jets.
## NASA career
### Mercury Seven
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. This shattered American confidence in its technological superiority, creating a wave of anxiety known as the Sputnik crisis. Among his responses, President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Space Race. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established on October 1, 1958, as a civilian agency to develop space technology. One of its first initiatives was publicly announced on December 17, 1958. This was Project Mercury, which aimed to launch a man into Earth orbit, return him safely to the Earth, and evaluate his capabilities in space.
NASA received permission from Eisenhower to recruit its first astronauts from the ranks of military test pilots. The service records of 508 graduates of test pilot schools were obtained from the United States Department of Defense. From these, 110 were found that matched the minimum standards: the candidates had to be younger than 40, possess a bachelor's degree or equivalent and to be 5 feet 11 inches (1.80 m) or less. While these were not all strictly enforced, the height requirement was firm, owing to the size of the Project Mercury spacecraft. The 110 were then split into three groups, with the most promising in the first group.
The first group of 35, which included Shepard, assembled at the Pentagon on February 2, 1959. The Navy and Marine Corps officers were welcomed by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, while the United States Air Force officers were addressed by the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General Thomas D. White. Both pledged their support to the Space Program, and promised that the careers of volunteers would not be adversely affected. NASA officials then briefed them on Project Mercury. They conceded that it would be a hazardous undertaking, but emphasized that it was of great national importance. That evening, Shepard discussed the day's events with fellow naval aviators Jim Lovell, Pete Conrad and Wally Schirra, all of whom would eventually become astronauts. They were concerned about their careers, but decided to volunteer.
The briefing process was repeated with a second group of 34 candidates a week later. Of the 69, six were found to be over the height limit, 15 were eliminated for other reasons, and 16 declined. This left NASA with 32 candidates. Since this was more than expected, NASA decided not to bother with the remaining 41 candidates, as 32 candidates seemed a more than adequate number from which to select 12 astronauts as planned. The degree of interest also indicated that far fewer would drop out during training than anticipated, which would result in training astronauts who would not be required to fly Project Mercury missions. It was therefore decided to cut the number of astronauts selected to just six. Then came a grueling series of physical and psychological tests at the Lovelace Clinic and the Wright Aerospace Medical Laboratory. Only one candidate, Lovell, was eliminated on medical grounds at this stage, and the diagnosis was later found to be in error; thirteen others were recommended with reservations. The director of the NASA Space Task Group, Robert R. Gilruth, found himself unable to select only six from the remaining eighteen, and ultimately seven were chosen.
Shepard was informed of his selection on April 1, 1959. Two days later he traveled to Boston with Louise for the wedding of his cousin Anne, and was able to break the news to his parents and sister. The identities of the seven were announced at a press conference at Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1959: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. The magnitude of the challenge ahead of them was made clear a few weeks later, on the night of May 18, 1959, when the seven astronauts gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch their first rocket launch, of an SM-65D Atlas, which was similar to the one that was to carry them into orbit. A few minutes after liftoff, it spectacularly exploded, lighting up the night sky. The astronauts were stunned. Shepard turned to Glenn and said: "Well, I'm glad they got that out of the way."
### Freedom 7
Faced with intense competition from the other astronauts, particularly John Glenn, Shepard quit smoking and adopted Glenn's habit of taking a morning jog. On January 19, 1961, Gilruth informed the seven astronauts that Shepard had been chosen for the first American crewed mission into space. Shepard later recalled Louise's response when he told her that she had her arms around the man who would be the first man in space: "Who let a Russian in here?" During training he flew 120 simulated flights. Although this flight was originally scheduled for April 26, 1960, it was postponed several times by unplanned preparatory work, initially to December 5, 1960, then mid-January 1961, March 6, 1961, April 25, 1961, May 2, 1961, and finally to May 5, 1961. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, and the first to orbit the Earth. It was another body blow to American pride. When Shepard heard the news he slammed his fist down on a table so hard a NASA public relations officer feared he might have broken his hand.
On May 5, 1961, Shepard piloted the Mercury-Redstone 3 mission and became the second person, and the first American, to travel into space. He named his spacecraft, Mercury Spacecraft 7, Freedom 7. He awoke at 01:10, and had breakfast consisting of orange juice, a filet mignon wrapped in bacon, and scrambled eggs with his backup, John Glenn, and flight surgeon William K. Douglas. He was helped into his space suit by suit technician Joseph W. Schmitt, and boarded the transfer van at 03:55. He ascended the gantry at 05:15, and entered the spacecraft five minutes later. It was expected that lift off would occur in another two hours and five minutes, so Shepard's suit did not have any provision for elimination of bodily wastes, but after being strapped into the capsule's seat, launch delays kept him in that suit for over four hours. Shepard's endurance gave out before launch, and he was forced to empty his bladder into the suit. Medical sensors attached to it to track the astronaut's condition in flight were turned off to avoid shorting them out. The urine pooled in the small of his back, where it was absorbed by his undergarment. After Shepard's flight, the space suit was modified, and by the time of Gus Grissom's Mercury-Redstone 4 suborbital flight in July, a liquid waste collection feature had been built into the suit.
Unlike Gagarin's 108-minute orbital flight in a Vostok spacecraft three times the size of Freedom 7, Shepard stayed on a suborbital trajectory for the 15-minute flight, which reached an altitude of 101.2 nautical miles (116.5 statute miles; 187.4 kilometers), and then fell to a splashdown 263.1 nautical miles (302.8 statute miles; 487.3 kilometers) down the Atlantic Missile Range. Unlike Gagarin, whose flight was strictly automatic, Shepard had some control of Freedom 7, spacecraft attitude in particular. Shepard's launch was seen live on television by millions. It was launched atop a Redstone rocket. According to Gene Kranz in his 2000 book Failure Is Not an Option, "When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, 'The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.'"
After a dramatic Atlantic Ocean recovery, Shepard observed that he "didn't really feel the flight was a success until the recovery had been successfully completed. It's not the fall that hurts; it's the sudden stop." Splashdown occurred with an impact comparable to landing a jet aircraft on an aircraft carrier. A recovery helicopter arrived after a few minutes, and the capsule was lifted partly out of the water to allow Shepard to leave by the main hatch. He squeezed out of the door and into a sling hoist, and was pulled into the helicopter, which flew both the astronaut and spacecraft to the aircraft carrier USS Lake Champlain. The whole recovery process took just eleven minutes. Shepard was celebrated as a national hero, honored with ticker-tape parades in Washington, New York and Los Angeles, and received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal from President John F. Kennedy. He was also awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Shepard served as capsule communicator (CAPCOM) for Glenn's Mercury-Atlas 6 orbital flight, which he had also been considered for, and Carpenter's Mercury-Atlas 7. He was the backup pilot for Cooper for the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission, nearly replacing Cooper after Cooper flew low over the NASA administration building at Cape Canaveral in an F-102. In the final stages of Project Mercury, Shepard was scheduled to pilot the Mercury-Atlas 10 (MA-10), which was planned as a three-day mission. He named Mercury Spacecraft 15B Freedom 7 II in honor of his first spacecraft, and had the name painted on it, but on June 12, 1963, NASA Administrator James E. Webb announced that Mercury had accomplished all its goals and no more missions would be flown. Shepard went as far as making a personal appeal to President Kennedy, but to no avail.
### Project Gemini; Chief Astronaut
Project Gemini followed on from Project Mercury. After the Mercury-Atlas 10 mission was canceled, Shepard was designated as the commander of the first crewed Gemini mission, with Thomas P. Stafford chosen as his pilot. In late 1963, Shepard began to experience episodes of extreme dizziness and nausea, accompanied by a loud, clanging noise in the left ear. He tried to keep it secret, fearing that he would lose his flight status, but was aware that if an episode occurred in the air or in space it could be fatal. Following an episode during a lecture in Houston, where he had recently moved from Virginia Beach, Virginia, Shepard was forced to confess his ailment to Slayton, who was now Director of Flight Operations, and seek help from NASA's doctors.
The doctors diagnosed Ménière's disease, a condition in which fluid pressure builds up in the inner ear. This syndrome causes the semicircular canals and motion detectors to become extremely sensitive, resulting in disorientation, dizziness, and nausea. There was no known cure, but in about 20 percent of cases the condition went away by itself. They prescribed diuretics in an attempt to drain the fluid from the ear. They also diagnosed glaucoma. An X-ray found a lump on his thyroid, and on January 17, 1964, surgeons at Hermann Hospital made an incision on his throat and removed 20 percent of his thyroid. The condition caused Shepard to be removed from flight status. Grissom and John Young flew Gemini 3 instead.
Shepard was designated Chief of the Astronaut Office in November 1963, receiving the title of Chief Astronaut. He thereby became responsible for NASA astronaut training. This involved the development of appropriate training programs for all astronauts and the scheduling of training of individual astronauts for specific missions and roles. He provided and coordinated astronaut input into mission planning and the design of spacecraft and other equipment to be used by astronauts on space missions. He also was on the selection panel for the NASA Astronaut Group 5 in 1966. He spent much of his time investing in banks, wildcatting, and real estate. He became part owner and vice president of Baytown National Bank and would spend hours on the phone in his NASA office overseeing it. He also bought a partnership in a ranch in Weatherford, Texas, that raised horses and cattle. During this period, his secretary Gaye Alford had two "mood-of-the-day" photographs taken of Shepard, one of a smiling Al Shepard, and the other of a grim-looking Commander Shepard. To warn visitors of Shepard's mood, she would hang the appropriate photograph on the door of her boss's private office. Tom Wolfe characterized Shepard's dual personalities as "Smilin' Al" and the "Icy Commander".
### Apollo program
In 1968, Stafford went to Shepard's office and told him that an otologist in Los Angeles had developed a cure for Ménière's disease. Shepard flew to Los Angeles, where he met with William F. House. House proposed to open Shepard's mastoid bone and make a tiny hole in the endolymphatic sac. A small tube (endolymphatic-subarachnoid shunt) was inserted to drain excess fluid. The surgery was conducted on May 14, 1968 at St. Vincent's Hospital in Los Angeles, where Shepard checked in under the pseudonym of Victor Poulos. The surgery was successful, and he was restored to full flight status on May 7, 1969.
Slayton put Shepard down to command the next available Moon mission, which was Apollo 13 in 1970. Under normal circumstances, this assignment would have gone to Cooper, as the backup commander of Apollo 10, but Cooper was not given it. A rookie, Stuart Roosa, was designated the Command Module Pilot. Shepard asked for Jim McDivitt as his Lunar Module Pilot, but McDivitt, who had already commanded the Apollo 9 mission, balked at the prospect, arguing that Shepard did not have sufficient Apollo training to command a Moon mission. A rookie, Edgar Mitchell, was designated the Lunar Module Pilot instead.
When Slayton submitted the proposed crew assignments to NASA headquarters, George Mueller turned them down on the grounds that the crew was too inexperienced. So Slayton asked Jim Lovell, who had been the backup commander for Apollo 11, and was slated to command Apollo 14, if his crew would be willing to fly Apollo 13 instead. He agreed to do so, and Shepard's crew was assigned to Apollo 14.
Neither Shepard nor Lovell expected there would be much difference between Apollo 13 and Apollo 14, but Apollo 13 went disastrously wrong. An oxygen tank explosion caused the Moon landing to be aborted and nearly resulted in the loss of the crew. It became a joke between Shepard and Lovell, who would offer to give Shepard back the mission each time they bumped into each other. The failure of Apollo 13 delayed Apollo 14 until 1971 so that modifications could be made to the spacecraft. The target of the Apollo 14 mission was switched to the Fra Mauro formation, the intended destination of Apollo 13.
Shepard made his second space flight as commander of Apollo 14 from January 31 to February 9, 1971. It was America's third successful lunar landing mission. Shepard piloted the Lunar Module Antares. He became the fifth and, at the age of 47, the oldest man to walk on the Moon, and the only one of the Mercury Seven astronauts to do so.
This was the first mission to broadcast extensive color television coverage from the lunar surface, using the Westinghouse Lunar Color Camera. (The same color camera model was used on Apollo 12 and provided about 30 minutes of color telecasting before it was inadvertently pointed at the Sun, ending its usefulness.) While on the Moon, Shepard used a Wilson six-iron head attached to a lunar sample scoop handle to drive golf balls. Despite thick gloves and a stiff spacesuit, which forced him to swing the club with one hand, Shepard struck two golf balls, driving the second, as he jokingly put it, "miles and miles and miles". Analysis of high-resolution film scans of the event determined the distance to be about 24 yards (22 m) for the first shot and 40 yards (37 m) for the second.
For this mission Shepard was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal. His citation read:
> The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Distinguished Service Medal to Captain Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr. (NSN: 0-389998), United States Navy, for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished service in a position of great responsibility to the Government of the United States, as Spacecraft Commander for the Apollo 14 flight to the Fra-Mauro area of the Moon during the period 31 January 1971 to 9 February 1971. Responsible for the on-board control of the spacecraft command module Kittyhawk and the lunar module Antares in the gathering of scientific data involving complex and difficult instrumentation positing and sample gathering, including a hazardous two-mile traverse of the lunar surface, Captain Shepard, by his brilliant performance, contributed essentially to the success of this vital scientific moon mission. As a result of his skillful leadership, professional competence and dedication, the Apollo 14 mission, with its numerous tasks and vital scientific experiments, was accomplished in an outstanding manner, enabling scientists to determine more precisely the Moon's original formation and further forecast man's proper role in the exploration of his Universe. By his courageous and determined devotion to duty, Captain Shepard rendered valuable and distinguished service and contributed greatly to the success of the United States Space Program, thereby upholding the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.
Following Apollo 14, Shepard returned to his position as Chief of the Astronaut Office in June 1971. In July 1971 President Richard Nixon appointed him as a delegate to the 26th United Nations General Assembly, a position in which he served from September to December 1971. He was promoted to rear admiral by Nixon on August 26, 1971, the first astronaut to reach this rank, although McDivitt had previously been promoted to brigadier general, an equivalent rank in the Air Force. He retired from both NASA and the Navy on July 31, 1974.
## Later years
Shepard was devoted to his children. Frequently, Julie, Laura and Alice were the only astronauts' children at NASA events. He taught them to ski and took them skiing in Colorado. He once rented a small plane to fly them and their friends from Texas to a summer camp in Maine. He doted on his six grandchildren as well. After Apollo 14, he began to spend more time with Louise, and started taking her with him on trips to the Paris Air Show every other year, and to Asia. Louise heard rumors of his affairs. The publication of Tom Wolfe's 1979 book The Right Stuff made them public knowledge, but she never confronted him about it, nor did she ever contemplate leaving him.
After Shepard left NASA, he served on the boards of many corporations. He also served as president of his umbrella company for several business enterprises, Seven Fourteen Enterprises, Inc. (named for his two flights, Freedom 7 and Apollo 14). He made a fortune in banking and real estate. He was a fellow of the American Astronautical Society and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, a member of Rotary, Kiwanis, the Mayflower Society, the Order of the Cincinnati, and the American Fighter Aces, an honorary member of the board of directors for the Houston School for Deaf Children, and a director of the National Space Institute and the Los Angeles Ear Research Institute. In 1984, together with the other surviving Mercury astronauts and Betty Grissom, Gus Grissom's widow, Shepard founded the Mercury Seven Foundation, which raises money to provide college scholarships to science and engineering students. It was renamed the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation in 1995. Shepard was elected its first president and chairman, positions he held until October 1997, when he was succeeded by former astronaut Jim Lovell. As of 2022, daughter Laura Churchley leads the foundation's Board of Trustees.
In 1994, he published a book with two journalists, Jay Barbree and Howard Benedict, called Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon. Fellow Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton is also named as an author. The book included a composite photograph showing Shepard hitting a golf ball on the Moon. There are no still images of this event; the only record is TV footage. The book was turned into a TV miniseries in 1994.
Shepard was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 1996 and died from complications of the disease in Pebble Beach, California, on July 21, 1998. Shepard's widow Louise had planned to cremate his remains and scatter the ashes, but before she was able to do that, she died from a heart attack—on August 25, 1998, at 17:00, which, coincidentally, was the same time of day at which he had always phoned her when they were apart. They had been married for 53 years. Their family decided to cremate them both, and their ashes were scattered, together, from a Navy helicopter, over Stillwater Cove, in front of their Pebble Beach home.
On December 11, 2021, twenty-three years after his death, Shepard's daughter, Laura Shepard Churchley, flew in space as well while aboard the non-NASA Blue Origin's New Shepard 5 spaceship.
## Awards and honors
Shepard was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President Jimmy Carter on October 1, 1978. He also received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1981; the Langley Gold Medal on May 5, 1964; the John J. Montgomery Award in 1963; the Lambert trophy; the SETP Iven C. Kincheloe Award; the Cabot Award; the Collier Trophy; and the City of New York City Gold Medal for 1971. He was awarded honorary degrees of Master of Arts from Dartmouth College in 1962, D.Sc. from Miami University in 1971, and Doctorate of Humanities from Franklin Pierce College in 1972. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1977, the International Space Hall of Fame in 1981, and the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on May 11, 1990.
The Navy named a supply ship, USNS Alan Shepard (T-AKE-3), for him in 2006. The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, New Hampshire, is named after Shepard and Christa McAuliffe. In 1996, the entirety of I-565 (which passes in front of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, home to both the Saturn V Dynamic Test Vehicle and a full-scale vertical Saturn V replica) was designated the "Admiral Alan B. Shepard Highway" in his honor.Interstate 93 in New Hampshire, from the Massachusetts border to Hooksett, is designated the Alan B. Shepard Highway, and in Hampton, Virginia, a road is named Commander Shepard Boulevard in his honor. His hometown of Derry has the nickname Space Town in honor of his career as an astronaut. Following an act of Congress, the post office in Derry was designated the Alan B. Shepard Jr. Post Office Building. Alan Shepard Park in Cocoa Beach, Florida, a beach-side park south of Cape Canaveral, is named in his honor. The City of Virginia Beach renamed its convention center, with its integral geodesic dome, the Alan B. Shepard Convention Center. The building was later renamed the Alan B. Shepard Civic Center, and was razed in 1994. At the time of the Freedom 7 launch, Shepard lived in Virginia Beach.
Shepard's high school alma mater in Derry, Pinkerton Academy, has a building named after him, and the school team is called the Astros after his career as an astronaut. Alan B. Shepard High School, in Palos Heights, Illinois, which opened in 1976, was named in his honor. Framed newspapers throughout the school depict various accomplishments and milestones in Shepard's life. Additionally, an autographed plaque commemorates the dedication of the building. The school newspaper is named Freedom 7 and the yearbook is entitled Odyssey. Blue Origin's suborbital space tourism rocket, the New Shepard, is named after Shepard.
In a 2010 Space Foundation survey, Shepard was ranked as the ninth most popular space hero (tied with astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Gus Grissom). In 2011, NASA honored Shepard with an Ambassador of Exploration Award, consisting of a Moon rock encased in Lucite, for his contributions to the U.S. space program. His family members accepted the award on his behalf during a ceremony on April 28 at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Maryland, where it is on permanent display. On May 4, 2011, the U.S. Postal Service issued a first-class stamp in Shepard's honor, the first U.S. stamp to depict a specific astronaut. The first day of issue ceremony was held at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
Each year, the Space Foundation, in partnership with the Astronauts Memorial Foundation and NASA, present the Alan Shepard Technology in Education Award for outstanding contributions by K–12 educators or district-level administrators to educational technology. The award recognizes excellence in the development and application of technology in the classroom or to the professional development of teachers. The recipient demonstrates exemplary use of technology either to foster lifelong learners or to make the learning process easier.
## In popular culture
- 1965 British TV series Thunderbirds – the character of Alan Tracy was named after him.
- 1983 film The Right Stuff – played by Scott Glenn.
- 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon – played by Ted Levine.
- 2001 opening montage, Star Trek: Enterprise.
- 2002 film Race to Space – played by Mark Moses.
- 2005 BBC TV series Space Race – played by Todd Boyce.
- 2007–2012 BioWare video game series Mass Effect – main protagonist Commander Shepard is named after him.
- 2015 ABC TV series The Astronaut Wives Club – played by Desmond Harrington.
- 2016 film Hidden Figures – played by Dane Davenport.
- 2020 Disney+ TV Series The Right Stuff – played by Jake McDorman.
"Shepard's Prayer" is attributed to Shepard, with the phrase supposed to have been uttered by him while he awaited liftoff aboard the Freedom 7. It is usually quoted as "Dear Lord, please don't let me fuck up", although Shepard claimed the words to be "Don't fuck up, Shepard". |
6,126,226 | Gender Bender (The X-Files) | 1,116,317,844 | null | [
"1994 American television episodes",
"1994 in American television",
"Androgyny in fiction",
"Fiction about shapeshifting",
"Television episodes set in Massachusetts",
"The X-Files (season 1) episodes",
"Transgender-related television episodes"
]
| "Gender Bender" is the fourteenth episode of the first season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files, premiering on the Fox network on January 21, 1994. It was written by Larry and Paul Barber, directed by Rob Bowman, and featured a guest appearance by Nicholas Lea, who would later appear in the recurring role of Alex Krycek. The episode is a "Monster-of-the-Week" story, a stand-alone plot which is unconnected to the series' overarching mythology.
The show centers on FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal, called X-Files. In this episode, Mulder and Scully begin investigating a series of murders following sexual encounters. The two soon discover that a member of a religious sect living in Massachusetts may be responsible—and may not be human.
The episode was inspired by producer Glen Morgan's desire for "an episode with more of a sexy edge"; the writers found it difficult to write a story that showed sex as scary and introduced an Amish-like community as well. "Gender Bender" was seen by approximately 6.8 million households in its initial broadcast. The episode has subsequently been met with mixed critical responses, facing criticism for its abrupt deus ex machina ending. Academic analysis of the episode has placed it within a science-fiction tradition that attributes a powerful, supernatural element to physical contact with aliens. It has also been seen as reflecting anxieties about emerging gender roles in the 1990s.
## Plot
In a dance club, a young man is taken by a young woman, Marty (Kate Twa), for casual sex. The man dies afterwards, and Marty leaves the room as a man (Peter Stebbings). FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are called to the scene; Mulder believes that the man's death was caused by a fatal dose of pheromones. There is also ambiguity in similar murders as to the gender of the killer. Evidence from the crime scene leads the duo to an Amish-like community in Massachusetts, which Mulder calls the Kindred.
Mulder approaches some of the Kindred, only to be shunned. Meanwhile, Scully befriends a member, Brother Andrew (Brent Hinkley), who is reluctant to talk. While shaking hands with him, Scully appears entranced, not coming to until Mulder catches her attention. The agents visit the Kindred's remote community, where they are asked to surrender their guns before entering. Mulder and Scully are invited to dinner. When the Kindred refuse to allow Scully to treat Brother Aaron, a sick participant at the table, Brother Andrew states that the Kindred take care of their own. Meanwhile, in another nightclub, a man convinces a girl to dance with him by touching her hand.
When the Kindred escort the agents out of the village, Mulder comments on the lack of children in the community and states that he recognizes some of the faces from photographs taken in the 1930s. Curious, he returns to the village that night and hears chanting as a procession of the Kindred moves to a barn. Scully is led off by Brother Andrew, who claims to be able to give her information about the murderer, whom he calls Brother Martin. Downstairs in the barn, the group can be seen bathing Brother Aaron's body in watery clay. Mulder hides in a crevice, where he discovers that the sick man has been buried alive and has begun to take on feminine features. Meanwhile, Brother Andrew uses his power to seduce Scully. She is unable to resist and is on the verge of succumbing before Mulder comes to her aid. The agents are again escorted out of the village.
Another man, Michel (Nicholas Lea), is having sex with the female form of Brother Martin in a parked car before a patrol officer interrupts them. As Michel suddenly starts retching, the officer is attacked by Brother Martin, who changes into a man and escapes. In the hospital Michel reluctantly reveals to Mulder and Scully that when he looked out of the car, the girl he was with "looked like a man". The agents are alerted about activity on a previous victim's credit card, which was stolen by Brother Martin. The agents chase Brother Martin into an alley, only to have the Kindred appear and take him away. The following morning the agents return to the Kindred's dwelling, which now appears deserted. The tunnels are blocked entirely with the white clay. Mulder and Scully walk into the nearby field where they find a large crop circle, suggesting that the Kindred are aliens.
## Production
While discussing the installment's origins, producer Glen Morgan said that he "wanted an episode with more of a sexy edge". It proved difficult to portray sex as convincingly scary, which caused the producers to introduce the concept of "people like the Amish who are from another planet". "Gender Bender" was penned by freelance writers Larry and Paul Barber, whose initial draft focused heavily on the contrast between the farming community of the Kindred and a version of city life "with very sexual connotations", influenced by the works of Swiss artist H. R. Giger. This script went through various rewrites during the development process, including the removal of a scene where someone's crotch rots away, to address concerns about the content of the episode. The chants uttered by the Kindred were not in the script handed in by the Barbers; they were added later by producer Paul Rabwin.
The character of Marty was portrayed by two actors—Kate Twa plays their female form and Peter Stebbings the male. Twa was the first of the two to be cast, leading producer R. W. Goodwin to base the casting of Stebbings mostly on his "very strong resemblance" to the actress. This resemblance was exploited in a scene showing Twa morphing into Stebbings; Goodwin felt that the two actors were too similar for the effect to be readily apparent, "zapp[ing] the energy out of the moment". Nicholas Lea, who played a would-be victim in the episode, returned to the series in a recurring role as Alex Krycek, beginning with the second season's "Sleepless". Twa also returned that season, playing a former colleague of Scully in "Soft Light".
"Gender Bender" marked Rob Bowman's directorial debut on the series; he became one of the series' most prolific directors, even directing the 1998 film adaptation, The X-Files: Fight the Future. Bowman found "Gender Bender" a difficult episode to work on—the script had initially called for lantern light to illuminate several scenes, but this was found to be unworkable. In addition, an interior set constructed to represent the catacombs under the Kindred's barn was so encumbering to film in that a second unit crew were required to reshoot a large degree of camera coverage. This need for extra footage necessitated an additional day of filming for scenes featuring Duchovny.
The exterior shots of the village inhabited by the Kindred were filmed at a farm preserved from the 1890s in Langley, British Columbia, Canada, while interior sets were built on a soundstage. The small town visited by the agents was filmed on location in Steveston, British Columbia—a location which was revisited to film the first-season episode "Miracle Man". The music used in the episode's nightclub scenes was recycled from composer Mark Snow's earlier work on the television film In the Line of Duty: Street War.
## Themes
"Gender Bender" has been interpreted as representing contemporary sexual anxieties in a figurative manner, conflating seduction with alien abduction. M. Keith Booker has described the Kindred's shapeshifting as representative of contemporary sexual anxieties caused by the changing gender roles of the decade, coupled with "a basic fear of sexual contact". Antonio Ballesteros González has stated that the episode is representative of the series' exploration of both seduction and abduction, noting that "both are seen as part of sexual aggression", further describing the episode's villain as representing "the fear of sex and reproduction". The lethal nature of the Kindred's touch has been cited as representing the potency of their sexual repression; and has been placed within a science-fiction tradition that depicts aliens or outsiders with a potent touch, alongside similar depictions in the films Communion and E.T., and the novel The Puppet Masters.
## Broadcast and reception
"Gender Bender" originally aired on the Fox network on January 21, 1994, and was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on December 22, 1994. The episode earned a Nielsen household rating of 7.2, with a 12 share. It was viewed by 6.8 million households and 11.1 million viewers, meaning that roughly 7.2 percent of all television-equipped households, and 12 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode.
"Gender Bender" received mixed to positive reviews from critics. Matt Haigh, writing for Den of Geek, reviewed "Gender Bender" positively, feeling that it was "a nicely refreshing and original idea", with "strikingly atmospheric" sets and "impressively spooky" villains. Zack Handlen, writing for The A.V. Club, praised the episode, awarding it an "A". He felt that the plot was "a perfect mixture of scientific theory, unsubstantiated rumor, and memorable visuals". Handlen felt that the episode represented the ideal plot for The X-Files, featuring someone briefly interacting with supernatural phenomena without ever learning the truth of their experience. Anna Johns, writing for TV Squad, was positive toward the episode. Johns stated she "totally loved it".
In a retrospective of the first season in Entertainment Weekly, "Gender Bender" was rated "B−", being described as a "clever idea" that was "undermined by a bushel of burning questions". Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated "Gender Bender" one-and-a-half stars out of five, finding that it "finishes up ... entirely clichéd". Shearman felt that Bowman's direction, and the contrast between "decadent" night-life and the "restraint and denial" of the Kindred, were highlights of the episode. He also felt that it approached its themes too conservatively and tamely, leaving a "boring" end result. In his book The Nitpicker's Guide for X-Philes, author Phil Farrand has highlighted several inconsistencies in the episode, focusing on the implausible nature of the ending. Farrand cites the mention of the Kindred's pheromones containing human DNA and their use of the English language when in private as elements which seem incongruous for an alien race.
The episode faced criticism from the crew over its ending using a deus ex machina to indicate that the Kindred may have been aliens. Producer James Wong felt that the episode's ending seemed overly abrupt and unexpected, describing it as appearing "like we tried to play a trick on the audience to make them say 'Ooh, what the heck was that?'". He added that the lack of a real connection to the episode's plot meant that the revelation lost any sense of catharsis for the viewer. Morgan said that the episode "went too far. At what point do we become unbelievable?" When asked about the similarity between the Kindred and the Amish, series creator Chris Carter noted that "they [the Amish] don't watch TV, so I wasn't worried about it". |
9,115,526 | Socialist Soviet Republic of Abkhazia | 1,170,178,369 | Soviet country (1921–1931) | [
"1931 disestablishments in the Soviet Union",
"20th century in Georgia (country)",
"Communism in Georgia (country)",
"Early Soviet republics",
"Former countries of the interwar period",
"Former socialist republics",
"Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic",
"History of Abkhazia",
"History of the Caucasus under the Soviet Union",
"Politics of Abkhazia",
"Post–Russian Empire states",
"Russian-speaking countries and territories",
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"States and territories established in 1921"
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| The Socialist Soviet Republic of Abkhazia (SSR Abkhazia) was a short-lived republic within the Caucasus region of the Soviet Union that covered the territory of Abkhazia, and existed from 31 March 1921 to 19 February 1931. Formed in the aftermath of the Red Army invasion of Georgia in 1921, it was independent until 16 December 1921 when it agreed to a treaty that united it with the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (Georgian SSR). The SSR Abkhazia was similar to an autonomous Soviet republic, though it retained nominal independence from Georgia and was given certain features only full union republics had, like its own military units. Through its status as a "treaty republic" with Georgia, Abkhazia joined the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which united Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian SSRs into one federal unit when the latter was formed in 1922. The SSR Abkhazia was abolished in 1931 and replaced with the Abkhaz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Georgian SSR.
During its existence, the SSR Abkhazia was led by Nestor Lakoba, who served officially as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars but controlled the republic to such an extent that it was jokingly referred to as "Lakobistan". Due to Lakoba's close relationship with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, collectivisation was delayed until after Abkhazia was incorporated into Georgia. Abkhazia remained a major tobacco producer in this era, growing over half of the USSR's supply. It also produced other agricultural produce, including tea, wine, and citrus fruits, leading to Abkhazia being one of the wealthiest regions in the Soviet Union. Its sub-tropical climate also made it a prime holiday destination, with Stalin and other Soviet leaders owning dachas (holiday homes) in the region and spending considerable time there.
An ethnically diverse region, Abkhazia was nominally led by the Abkhaz people, who made up less than 30 per cent of the population. Other major groups included Georgians, Armenians, Greeks, and Russians. Even though they did not form the majority, the Abkhaz were heavily favoured and the Abkhaz language was promoted as a result of the korenizatsiia policies of the era. An Abkhaz national identity was promoted through these policies, leading to the rise of Abkhaz nationalism. The main legacy of the SSR Abkhazia is that for the first time in modern history, it created a defined geographic entity under the name of Abkhazia. Though the quasi-independent republic was downgraded in 1931, the Abkhaz people did not forget that it had existed. With the advent of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, Abkhaz leaders called for their state to be re-formed and secede from Georgia, citing the SSR Abkhazia as a precedent. This led to them restoring the 1925 SSR Abkhazian constitution, which led to the 1992–1993 war between Abkhazian secessionists and Georgia, and the modern Abkhaz–Georgian conflict.
## History
### Background
The Russian Empire annexed Abkhazia in the early nineteenth century and had consolidated its authority over the region by 1864. Reluctant to create ethno-territorial units, the Russian authorities incorporated the region into the Kutais Governorate. Large-scale population transfers saw the ethnic composition of Abkhazia radically altered, with thousands of ethnic Abkhaz expelled and ethnic Mingrelians brought in to replace them. After the 1917 February Revolution, which ended the Russian Empire, the status of Abkhazia became contested and was unclear. Free from Russian rule, it considered joining the Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus in 1917, but ultimately decided against this due to the distance between Abkhazia and the rest of the groups involved. In February 1918, Abkhaz Bolsheviks attempted to create a commune—a similar system to the soviets (councils) being formed in Russia. This effort was unsuccessful and the Bolshevik leaders, Efrem Eshba and Nestor Lakoba, fled. The Abkhaz People's Council (APC) was formed in the aftermath and effectively controlled the region. When the Democratic Republic of Georgia was formed in May 1918, it annexed Abkhazia, considering it an integral part of its territory. Georgia never fully established control of the region, leaving the APC to rule it until the Bolshevik invasion of 1921.
The status of Abkhazia was confirmed in the Georgian constitution of 1921. Article 107 guaranteed "Abkhazeti (district of Soukhoum)" autonomy for "the administration of their affairs". The constitution was proclaimed after the Red Army invasion of Georgia in February 1921; the nature of the promised autonomy was never determined. According to the historian Timothy Blauvelt, this had a lasting legacy in the region because it marked the first time in modern history Abkhazia was defined as a distinct geographic entity.
### Formation
On 15 February 1921, the Red Army invaded Georgia. Abkhazia was invaded two days later. Eshba and Lakoba returned to Abkhazia before the invasion and formed a Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) in preparation for a Bolshevik government. Sukhumi, the capital, was captured on 4 March. With fighting in Georgia continuing, the Revkom, who did not expect to be the sole authority over Abkhazia, took advantage of the confusion and moved to declare Abkhazia an independent republic. They sent a telegram to Moscow asking for advice on how to proceed, and suggested joining the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, but Sergo Ordzhonikidze—a leading Bolshevik and the leader of the Caucasus Bureau (Kavbiuro)—dismissed the idea. As a result, on 31 March 1921, it declared that "at the will of workers a new Socialist Soviet Republic of Abkhazia is born." This made Abkhazia a nominally independent republic with the understanding on both the Abkhaz and Georgian sides that eventually Abkhazia would join the newly formed Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (Georgian SSR). Until then it was regarded as being completely detached from Georgia and was treated as such. The Georgian Revkom, the governing body of the Georgian SSR, welcomed Abkhazia in a telegram on 21 May 1921, and said the form of relations should be settled during the first Workers' Congresses of both republics.
### Status
The Abkhaz Revkom, in a position of power, was reluctant to schedule a congress to determine the future status of Abkhazia because it would mean relinquishing control over the region. The Kavbiuro forced the Revkom to act and negotiations for a treaty between Abkhazia and Georgia began in October 1921. The result, signed on 16 December 1921, was a two-article treaty:
> 1\. SSR Georgia and SSR Abkhazia enter into political, military and financial-economic union.
> 2. In order to fulfill the aforementioned goal both governments declare the merging of the following Commissariats: a) military, b) finance, c) peoples' agriculture, d) post and telegraph, e) ChKa, f) RKI, g) People's Commissariat of Justice, and h) [Commissariat of] Sea Transport.
The treaty united the two states, leaving Abkhazia as a "treaty republic" nominally subservient to Georgia. The special status of Abkhazia within Georgia was reinforced in the 1922 Georgian constitution, which mentioned the "special union treaty" between the two. The 1925 Abkhazian constitution noted it was united with Georgia "on the base of a special treaty". On 13 December 1922, while united with Georgia, Abkhazia joined the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (TSFSR), along with Armenia and Azerbaijan. This new federation was created ostensibly for economic purposes, but was more likely done to consolidate Soviet control over the region, which had been contentious. Abkhazia was mostly treated as an autonomous region of Georgia, though unlike other autonomous states in the Soviet Union, it had its own national symbols—a flag and coat of arms—and national army units, a right only given to full republics. The coat of arms was initially described in the 1925 constitution as being "composed of a golden hammer and sickle on the background of the Abkhazian landscape with inscription in the Abkhaz language 'SSR Abkhazia'". This was slightly modified in 1926, when the republican (and Soviet-wide) motto "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" was written in Abkhaz, Georgian, and Russian (previously it had only been written in Abkhaz). It also had its own constitution, created on 1 April 1925, another right only granted to full republics.
The union with Georgia was not popular among the Abkhaz populace or leadership. It was also received poorly in Georgia, where it was regarded as a ploy by the Bolsheviks to divert Georgian hostility from the authorities in Moscow towards the Abkhaz, as the Georgians were one of the most hostile groups towards the Bolsheviks. As the only "treaty republic" in the USSR, the exact status of the SSR Abkhazia concerned the Soviet and Georgian authorities, which did not want other regions to demand a similar status. To resolve this it was decided to downgrade Abkhazia, and on 19 February 1931, it was re-formed as the Abkhaz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, subservient to the Georgian SSR while remaining a member of the TSFSR. The move was met with public protests, the first large-scale protests in Abkhazia against the Soviet authorities.
## Politics
Initially, the Abkhaz Revkom, led by its chairman Efrem Eshba, controlled Abkhazia until a more permanent body could be established. On 17 February 1922 the Council of People's Commissars was established, and Nestor Lakoba was elected its Chairman, becoming the head of government of the republic; this was a formality for Lakoba, who had effectively been in control of Abkhazia since the Bolsheviks took control in 1921. Alongside Eshba, he had been a leading Bolshevik in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Lakoba and Eshba led two abortive attempts to seize Abkhazia in February and April 1918. After the latter attempt failed, they both fled, only returning in March 1921 after Bolshevik control had been consolidated; Eshba was soon transferred to other positions, leaving Lakoba alone as the head of Abkhazia.
Lakoba effectively controlled Abkhazia as a personal fiefdom, which was jokingly referred to as "Lakobistan", and his status as supreme leader of the republic was never contested or challenged. He resisted many of the repressive policies that were being implemented elsewhere in the Soviet Union, including collectivization. Lakoba also financially supported the Abkhaz nobility, which he was able to do because of his close personal relationship with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
## Economy
Abkhazia was a major producer of tobacco during the Soviet era. In the 1930s, it was responsible for up to 52 per cent of the Soviet Union's tobacco exports. Other agricultural products, including tea, wine, and citrus fruits—especially tangerines—were produced in large quantities, making Abkhazia one of the most well-off regions in the entire Soviet Union, and considerably richer than Georgia. The export of these resources turned the region into "an island of prosperity in a war-ravaged Caucasus". Several factories were also built in the region as part of the overall development of the Soviet Union, though they had less impact on the overall economic strength of Abkhazia.
Abkhazia was also prized as a major holiday destination for both the Soviet elite and the general population. Stalin visited annually throughout the 1920s and was joined by his associates from the Kremlin, who used this time to gain his trust. As host, Lakoba grew increasingly close to Stalin and became a confidant of his, allowing him to keep his dominant position over Abkhazia. This was most apparent when Lakoba refused to implement collectivisation, arguing that there were no kulaks (affluent peasants) in the state. Such a policy was defended by Stalin, who said the anti-kulak policy did not "take account of the specific peculiarities of Abkhaz social structure and made the mistake of mechanically transferring Russian models of social engineering to Abkhaz soil". Collectivisation was first carried out after Abkhazia was downgraded in 1931, and fully implemented in 1936 after Lakoba's death.
Throughout the SSR's existence, the Soviet ruble was its official currency.
## Demographics
The SSR Abkhazia was an ethnically diverse region, whose demographics changed considerably in the decades after its annexation by Russia. Up to 100,000 Abkhaz had been deported in the late nineteenth century, mainly to the Ottoman Empire. By the time the SSR Abkhazia was formed, ethnic Abkhaz comprised less than 30 per cent of the population. The korenizatsiia (nativization) policy implemented in this era, which was to promote minority groups within the USSR, saw the numbers of Abkhaz increase: between 1922 and 1926, ethnic Abkhaz grew by roughly 8%, while the number of ethnic Georgians dropped by 6%. Thus, according to the 1926 Soviet census, the only census conducted during the SSR's existence, the number of ethnic Abkhaz reached 55,918 or around 28% of the total population (which numbered 201,016), while the number of Georgians was around 67,494 (36%). Other major ethnic groups counted in the 1926 census were Armenians (25,677, or 13%), Greeks (14,045, or 7%), and Russians (12,553, or 6%).
The script used for the Abkhaz language was modified during the era of the SSR Abkhazia. Under korenizatsiia the Abkhaz were not considered one of the "advanced" peoples in the USSR, and thus saw an increased focus on their national language and cultural development. As part of these policies, Abkhaz—along with many other regional languages in the USSR—was Latinized in 1928, moving it away from the original Cyrillic-based script. Emphasis was placed on developing Abkhaz culture, which was heavily promoted and financed. To further this, an Abkhazian Scientific Society was created in 1922, while an Academy of Abkhazian Language and Literature was founded in 1925.
In recognition of the multiple ethnic groups within Abkhazia, Article 8 of the 1925 Abkhaz constitution called for three official languages—Abkhaz, Georgian, and Russian—while a later amendment stated, "all nationalities populating the SSR Abkhazia are guaranteed the right of free development and use of the native language both in national-cultural and in general state agencies". Most of the population did not understand Abkhaz so Russian was the dominant language of government while local regions used the language that was most prevalent there.
## Legacy
The exact status of Abkhazia as a "treaty republic" was never clarified during its existence, and historian Arsène Saparov has suggested even officials at the time did not know what the phrase meant. The status had symbolic meaning to the Abkhaz people, who never forgot they had, at least in theory, an independent state. With the advent of glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s, calls for Abkhazia to restore its status began. An assembly at Lykhny in 1989 called for the Soviet authorities to make Abkhazia a full union republic, claiming the SSR Abkhazia as a precedent for this move. When Abkhazia declared independence in 1990, it requested the restoration of the 1925 constitution, which called for Abkhazia and Georgia to unite, allowing for the possibility of a future union between the two states. The restoration of the 1925 constitution was a pretext for the 1992–1993 war and the ensuing dispute over the status of Abkhazia, which has led to Abkhazia being de facto independent of Georgia since 1992. |
19,916,594 | Acetic acid | 1,171,754,587 | Colorless and faint organic acid found in vinegar | [
"Acetic acids",
"Acids in wine",
"Antiseptics",
"Commodity chemicals",
"E-number additives",
"Flavors",
"Household chemicals",
"Organic compounds with 2 carbon atoms",
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"Photographic chemicals",
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| Acetic acid /əˈsiːtɪk/, systematically named ethanoic acid /ˌɛθəˈnoʊɪk/, is an acidic, colourless liquid and organic compound with the chemical formula CH<sub>3</sub>COOH (also written as CH<sub>3</sub>CO<sub>2</sub>H, C<sub>2</sub>H<sub>4</sub>O<sub>2</sub>, or HC<sub>2</sub>H<sub>3</sub>O<sub>2</sub>). Vinegar is at least 4% acetic acid by volume, making acetic acid the main component of vinegar apart from water and other trace elements.
Acetic acid is the second simplest carboxylic acid (after formic acid). It is an important chemical reagent and industrial chemical, used primarily in the production of cellulose acetate for photographic film, polyvinyl acetate for wood glue, and synthetic fibres and fabrics. In households, diluted acetic acid is often used in descaling agents. In the food industry, acetic acid is controlled by the food additive code E260 as an acidity regulator and as a condiment. In biochemistry, the acetyl group, derived from acetic acid, is fundamental to all forms of life. When bound to coenzyme A, it is central to the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats.
The global demand for acetic acid is about 6.5 million metric tons per year (t/a), of which approximately 1.5 t/a is met by recycling; the remainder is manufactured from methanol. Vinegar is mostly dilute acetic acid, often produced by fermentation and subsequent oxidation of ethanol.
## Nomenclature
The trivial name "acetic acid" is the most commonly used and preferred IUPAC name. The systematic name "ethanoic acid", a valid IUPAC name, is constructed according to the substitutive nomenclature. The name "acetic acid" derives from the Latin word for vinegar, "", which is related to the word "acid" itself.
"Glacial acetic acid" is a name for water-free (anhydrous) acetic acid. Similar to the German name "Eisessig" ("ice vinegar"), the name comes from the ice-like crystals that form slightly below room temperature at 16.6 °C (61.9 °F) (the presence of 0.1% water lowers its melting point by 0.2 °C).
A common symbol for acetic acid is AcOH, where Ac is the pseudoelement symbol representing the acetyl group CH<sub>3</sub>−C(=O)−; the conjugate base, acetate (CH<sub>3</sub>COO<sup>−</sup>), is thus represented as AcO<sup>−</sup>. (The symbol Ac for the acetyl functional group is not to be confused with the symbol Ac for the element actinium; the context prevents confusion among organic chemists). To better reflect its structure, acetic acid is often written as CH<sub>3</sub>−C(O)OH, CH<sub>3</sub>−C(=O)OH, CH<sub>3</sub>COOH, and CH<sub>3</sub>CO<sub>2</sub>H. In the context of acid–base reactions, the abbreviation HAc is sometimes used, where Ac in this case is a symbol for acetate (rather than acetyl). Acetate is the ion resulting from loss of H<sup>+</sup> from acetic acid. The name "acetate" can also refer to a salt containing this anion, or an ester of acetic acid.
## History
Vinegar was known early in civilization as the natural result of exposure of beer and wine to air, because acetic acid-producing bacteria are present globally. The use of acetic acid in alchemy extends into the third century BC, when the Greek philosopher Theophrastus described how vinegar acted on metals to produce pigments useful in art, including white lead (lead carbonate) and verdigris, a green mixture of copper salts including copper(II) acetate. Ancient Romans boiled soured wine to produce a highly sweet syrup called sapa. Sapa that was produced in lead pots was rich in lead acetate, a sweet substance also called sugar of lead or sugar of Saturn, which contributed to lead poisoning among the Roman aristocracy.
In the 16th-century German alchemist Andreas Libavius described the production of acetone from the dry distillation of lead acetate, ketonic decarboxylation. The presence of water in vinegar has such a profound effect on acetic acid's properties that for centuries chemists believed that glacial acetic acid and the acid found in vinegar were two different substances. French chemist Pierre Adet proved them identical.
In 1845 German chemist Hermann Kolbe synthesised acetic acid from inorganic compounds for the first time. This reaction sequence consisted of chlorination of carbon disulfide to carbon tetrachloride, followed by pyrolysis to tetrachloroethylene and aqueous chlorination to trichloroacetic acid, and concluded with electrolytic reduction to acetic acid.
By 1910, most glacial acetic acid was obtained from the pyroligneous liquor, a product of the distillation of wood. The acetic acid was isolated by treatment with milk of lime, and the resulting calcium acetate was then acidified with sulfuric acid to recover acetic acid. At that time, Germany was producing 10,000 tons of glacial acetic acid, around 30% of which was used for the manufacture of indigo dye.
Because both methanol and carbon monoxide are commodity raw materials, methanol carbonylation long appeared to be attractive precursors to acetic acid. Henri Dreyfus at British Celanese developed a methanol carbonylation pilot plant as early as 1925. However, a lack of practical materials that could contain the corrosive reaction mixture at the high pressures needed (200 atm or more) discouraged commercialization of these routes. The first commercial methanol carbonylation process, which used a cobalt catalyst, was developed by German chemical company BASF in 1963. In 1968, a rhodium-based catalyst (cis−[Rh(CO)<sub>2</sub>I<sub>2</sub>]<sup>−</sup>) was discovered that could operate efficiently at lower pressure with almost no by-products. US chemical company Monsanto Company built the first plant using this catalyst in 1970, and rhodium-catalyzed methanol carbonylation became the dominant method of acetic acid production (see Monsanto process). In the late 1990s, the chemicals company BP Chemicals commercialised the Cativa catalyst ([Ir(CO)<sub>2</sub>I<sub>2</sub>]<sup>−</sup>), which is promoted by iridium for greater efficiency. This iridium-catalyzed Cativa process is greener and more efficient and has largely supplanted the Monsanto process, often in the same production plants.
### Interstellar medium
Interstellar acetic acid was discovered in 1996 by a team led by David Mehringer using the former Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Association array at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory and the former Millimeter Array located at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. It was first detected in the Sagittarius B2 North molecular cloud (also known as the Sgr B2 Large Molecule Heimat source). Acetic acid has the distinction of being the first molecule discovered in the interstellar medium using solely radio interferometers; in all previous ISM molecular discoveries made in the millimetre and centimetre wavelength regimes, single dish radio telescopes were at least partly responsible for the detections.
## Properties
### Acidity
The hydrogen centre in the carboxyl group (−COOH) in carboxylic acids such as acetic acid can separate from the molecule by ionization:
CH<sub>3</sub>COOH ⇌ CH<sub>3</sub>CO−2 + H<sup>+</sup>
Because of this release of the proton (H<sup>+</sup>), acetic acid has acidic character. Acetic acid is a weak monoprotic acid. In aqueous solution, it has a pK<sub>a</sub> value of 4.76. Its conjugate base is acetate (CH<sub>3</sub>COO<sup>−</sup>). A 1.0 M solution (about the concentration of domestic vinegar) has a pH of 2.4, indicating that merely 0.4% of the acetic acid molecules are dissociated. However, in very dilute (\< 10<sup>−6</sup> M) solution acetic acid is \>90% dissociated.
### Structure
In solid acetic acid, the molecules form chains, individual molecules being interconnected by hydrogen bonds. In the vapour at 120 °C (248 °F), dimers can be detected. Dimers also occur in the liquid phase in dilute solutions in non-hydrogen-bonding solvents, and a certain extent in pure acetic acid, but are disrupted by hydrogen-bonding solvents. The dissociation enthalpy of the dimer is estimated at 65.0–66.0 kJ/mol, and the dissociation entropy at 154–157 J mol<sup>−1</sup> K<sup>−1</sup>. Other carboxylic acids engage in similar intermolecular hydrogen bonding interactions.
### Solvent properties
Liquid acetic acid is a hydrophilic (polar) protic solvent, similar to ethanol and water. With a relative static permittivity (dielectric constant) of 6.2, it dissolves not only polar compounds such as inorganic salts and sugars, but also non-polar compounds such as oils as well as polar solutes. It is miscible with polar and non-polar solvents such as water, chloroform, and hexane. With higher alkanes (starting with octane), acetic acid is not miscible at all compositions, and solubility of acetic acid in alkanes declines with longer n-alkanes. The solvent and miscibility properties of acetic acid make it a useful industrial chemical, for example, as a solvent in the production of dimethyl terephthalate.
### Biochemistry
At physiological pHs, acetic acid is usually fully ionised to acetate.
The acetyl group, formally derived from acetic acid, is fundamental to all forms of life. When bound to coenzyme A, it is central to the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats. Unlike longer-chain carboxylic acids (the fatty acids), acetic acid does not occur in natural triglycerides. However, the artificial triglyceride triacetin (glycerine triacetate) is a common food additive and is found in cosmetics and topical medicines.
Acetic acid is produced and excreted by acetic acid bacteria, notably the genus Acetobacter and Clostridium acetobutylicum. These bacteria are found universally in foodstuffs, water, and soil, and acetic acid is produced naturally as fruits and other foods spoil. Acetic acid is also a component of the vaginal lubrication of humans and other primates, where it appears to serve as a mild antibacterial agent.
## Production
Acetic acid is produced industrially both synthetically and by bacterial fermentation. About 75% of acetic acid made for use in the chemical industry is made by the carbonylation of methanol, explained below. The biological route accounts for only about 10% of world production, but it remains important for the production of vinegar because many food purity laws require vinegar used in foods to be of biological origin. Other processes are methyl formate isomerization, conversion of syngas to acetic acid, and gas phase oxidation of ethylene and ethanol.
Acetic acid can be purified via fractional freezing using an ice bath. The water and other impurities will remain liquid while the acetic acid will precipitate out. As of 2003–2005, total worldwide production of virgin acetic acid was estimated at 5 Mt/a (million tonnes per year), approximately half of which was produced in the United States. European production was approximately 1 Mt/a and declining, while Japanese production was 0.7 Mt/a. Another 1.5 Mt were recycled each year, bringing the total world market to 6.5 Mt/a. Since then the global production has increased to 10.7 Mt/a (in 2010), and further; however, a slowing in this increase in production is predicted. The two biggest producers of virgin acetic acid are Celanese and BP Chemicals. Other major producers include Millennium Chemicals, Sterling Chemicals, Samsung, Eastman, and Svensk Etanolkemi [sv].
### Methanol carbonylation
Most acetic acid is produced by methanol carbonylation. In this process, methanol and carbon monoxide react to produce acetic acid according to the equation:
The process involves iodomethane as an intermediate, and occurs in three steps. A catalyst, metal carbonyl, is needed for the carbonylation (step 2).
1. CH<sub>3</sub>OH + HI → CH<sub>3</sub>I + H<sub>2</sub>O
2. CH<sub>3</sub>I + CO → CH<sub>3</sub>COI
3. CH<sub>3</sub>COI + H<sub>2</sub>O → CH<sub>3</sub>COOH + HI
Two related processes exist for the carbonylation of methanol: the rhodium-catalyzed Monsanto process, and the iridium-catalyzed Cativa process. The latter process is greener and more efficient and has largely supplanted the former process, often in the same production plants. Catalytic amounts of water are used in both processes, but the Cativa process requires less, so the water-gas shift reaction is suppressed, and fewer by-products are formed.
By altering the process conditions, acetic anhydride may also be produced on the same plant using the rhodium catalysts.
### Acetaldehyde oxidation
Prior to the commercialization of the Monsanto process, most acetic acid was produced by oxidation of acetaldehyde. This remains the second-most-important manufacturing method, although it is usually not competitive with the carbonylation of methanol. The acetaldehyde can be produced by hydration of acetylene. This was the dominant technology in the early 1900s.
Light naphtha components are readily oxidized by oxygen or even air to give peroxides, which decompose to produce acetic acid according to the chemical equation, illustrated with butane:
2 C<sub>4</sub>H<sub>10</sub> + 5 O<sub>2</sub> → 4 CH<sub>3</sub>CO<sub>2</sub>H + 2 H<sub>2</sub>O
Such oxidations require metal catalyst, such as the naphthenate salts of manganese, cobalt, and chromium.
The typical reaction is conducted at temperatures and pressures designed to be as hot as possible while still keeping the butane a liquid. Typical reaction conditions are 150 °C (302 °F) and 55 atm. Side-products may also form, including butanone, ethyl acetate, formic acid, and propionic acid. These side-products are also commercially valuable, and the reaction conditions may be altered to produce more of them where needed. However, the separation of acetic acid from these by-products adds to the cost of the process.
Similar conditions and catalysts are used for butane oxidation, the oxygen in air to produce acetic acid can oxidize acetaldehyde.
2 CH<sub>3</sub>CHO + O<sub>2</sub> → 2 CH<sub>3</sub>CO<sub>2</sub>H
Using modern catalysts, this reaction can have an acetic acid yield greater than 95%. The major side-products are ethyl acetate, formic acid, and formaldehyde, all of which have lower boiling points than acetic acid and are readily separated by distillation.
### Ethylene oxidation
Acetaldehyde may be prepared from ethylene via the Wacker process, and then oxidised as above.
In more recent times, chemical company Showa Denko, which opened an ethylene oxidation plant in Ōita, Japan, in 1997, commercialised a cheaper single-stage conversion of ethylene to acetic acid. The process is catalyzed by a palladium metal catalyst supported on a heteropoly acid such as silicotungstic acid. A similar process uses the same metal catalyst on silicotungstic acid and silica:
C<sub>2</sub>H<sub>4</sub> + O<sub>2</sub> → CH<sub>3</sub>CO<sub>2</sub>H
It is thought to be competitive with methanol carbonylation for smaller plants (100–250 kt/a), depending on the local price of ethylene. The approach will be based on utilizing a novel selective photocatalytic oxidation technology for the selective oxidation of ethylene and ethane to acetic acid. Unlike traditional oxidation catalysts, the selective oxidation process will use UV light to produce acetic acid at ambient temperatures and pressure.
### Oxidative fermentation
For most of human history, acetic acid bacteria of the genus Acetobacter have made acetic acid, in the form of vinegar. Given sufficient oxygen, these bacteria can produce vinegar from a variety of alcoholic foodstuffs. Commonly used feeds include apple cider, wine, and fermented grain, malt, rice, or potato mashes. The overall chemical reaction facilitated by these bacteria is:
C<sub>2</sub>H<sub>5</sub>OH + O<sub>2</sub> → CH<sub>3</sub>COOH + H<sub>2</sub>O
A dilute alcohol solution inoculated with Acetobacter and kept in a warm, airy place will become vinegar over the course of a few months. Industrial vinegar-making methods accelerate this process by improving the supply of oxygen to the bacteria.
The first batches of vinegar produced by fermentation probably followed errors in the winemaking process. If must is fermented at too high a temperature, acetobacter will overwhelm the yeast naturally occurring on the grapes. As the demand for vinegar for culinary, medical, and sanitary purposes increased, vintners quickly learned to use other organic materials to produce vinegar in the hot summer months before the grapes were ripe and ready for processing into wine. This method was slow, however, and not always successful, as the vintners did not understand the process.
One of the first modern commercial processes was the "fast method" or "German method", first practised in Germany in 1823. In this process, fermentation takes place in a tower packed with wood shavings or charcoal. The alcohol-containing feed is trickled into the top of the tower, and fresh air supplied from the bottom by either natural or forced convection. The improved air supply in this process cut the time to prepare vinegar from months to weeks.
Nowadays, most vinegar is made in submerged tank culture, first described in 1949 by Otto Hromatka and Heinrich Ebner. In this method, alcohol is fermented to vinegar in a continuously stirred tank, and oxygen is supplied by bubbling air through the solution. Using modern applications of this method, vinegar of 15% acetic acid can be prepared in only 24 hours in batch process, even 20% in 60-hour fed-batch process.
### Anaerobic fermentation
Species of anaerobic bacteria, including members of the genus Clostridium or Acetobacterium can convert sugars to acetic acid directly without creating ethanol as an intermediate. The overall chemical reaction conducted by these bacteria may be represented as:
C<sub>6</sub>H<sub>12</sub>O<sub>6</sub> → 3 CH<sub>3</sub>COOH
These acetogenic bacteria produce acetic acid from one-carbon compounds, including methanol, carbon monoxide, or a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen:
2 CO<sub>2</sub> + 4 H<sub>2</sub> → CH<sub>3</sub>COOH + 2 H<sub>2</sub>O
This ability of Clostridium to metabolize sugars directly, or to produce acetic acid from less costly inputs, suggests that these bacteria could produce acetic acid more efficiently than ethanol-oxidizers like Acetobacter. However, Clostridium bacteria are less acid-tolerant than Acetobacter. Even the most acid-tolerant Clostridium strains can produce vinegar in concentrations of only a few per cent, compared to Acetobacter strains that can produce vinegar in concentrations up to 20%. At present, it remains more cost-effective to produce vinegar using Acetobacter, rather than using Clostridium and concentrating it. As a result, although acetogenic bacteria have been known since 1940, their industrial use is confined to a few niche applications.
## Uses
Acetic acid is a chemical reagent for the production of chemical compounds. The largest single use of acetic acid is in the production of vinyl acetate monomer, closely followed by acetic anhydride and ester production. The volume of acetic acid used in vinegar is comparatively small.
### Vinyl acetate monomer
The primary use of acetic acid is the production of vinyl acetate monomer (VAM). In 2008, this application was estimated to consume a third of the world's production of acetic acid. The reaction consists of ethylene and acetic acid with oxygen over a palladium catalyst, conducted in the gas phase.
2 H<sub>3</sub>C−COOH + 2 C<sub>2</sub>H<sub>4</sub> + O<sub>2</sub> → 2 H<sub>3</sub>C−CO−O−CH=CH<sub>2</sub> + 2 H<sub>2</sub>O
Vinyl acetate can be polymerised to polyvinyl acetate or other polymers, which are components in paints and adhesives.
### Ester production
The major esters of acetic acid are commonly used as solvents for inks, paints and coatings. The esters include ethyl acetate, n-butyl acetate, isobutyl acetate, and propyl acetate. They are typically produced by catalyzed reaction from acetic acid and the corresponding alcohol:
CH<sub>3</sub>COO−H + HO−R → CH<sub>3</sub>COO−R + H<sub>2</sub>O, R = general alkyl group
For example, acetic acid and ethanol gives ethyl acetate and water.
CH<sub>3</sub>COO−H + HO−CH<sub>2</sub>CH<sub>3</sub> → CH<sub>3</sub>COO−CH<sub>2</sub>CH<sub>3</sub> + H<sub>2</sub>O
Most acetate esters, however, are produced from acetaldehyde using the Tishchenko reaction. In addition, ether acetates are used as solvents for nitrocellulose, acrylic lacquers, varnish removers, and wood stains. First, glycol monoethers are produced from ethylene oxide or propylene oxide with alcohol, which are then esterified with acetic acid. The three major products are ethylene glycol monoethyl ether acetate (EEA), ethylene glycol monobutyl ether acetate (EBA), and propylene glycol monomethyl ether acetate (PMA, more commonly known as PGMEA in semiconductor manufacturing processes, where it is used as a resist solvent). This application consumes about 15% to 20% of worldwide acetic acid. Ether acetates, for example EEA, have been shown to be harmful to human reproduction.
### Acetic anhydride
The product of the condensation of two molecules of acetic acid is acetic anhydride. The worldwide production of acetic anhydride is a major application, and uses approximately 25% to 30% of the global production of acetic acid. The main process involves dehydration of acetic acid to give ketene at 700–750 °C. Ketene is thereafter reacted with acetic acid to obtain the anhydride:
CH<sub>3</sub>CO<sub>2</sub>H → CH<sub>2</sub>=C=O + H<sub>2</sub>O
CH<sub>3</sub>CO<sub>2</sub>H + CH<sub>2</sub>=C=O → (CH<sub>3</sub>CO)<sub>2</sub>O
Acetic anhydride is an acetylation agent. As such, its major application is for cellulose acetate, a synthetic textile also used for photographic film. Acetic anhydride is also a reagent for the production of heroin and other compounds.
### Use as solvent
As a polar protic solvent, acetic acid is frequently used for recrystallization to purify organic compounds. Acetic acid is used as a solvent in the production of terephthalic acid (TPA), the raw material for polyethylene terephthalate (PET). In 2006, about 20% of acetic acid was used for TPA production.
Acetic acid is often used as a solvent for reactions involving carbocations, such as Friedel-Crafts alkylation. For example, one stage in the commercial manufacture of synthetic camphor involves a Wagner-Meerwein rearrangement of camphene to isobornyl acetate; here acetic acid acts both as a solvent and as a nucleophile to trap the rearranged carbocation.
Glacial acetic acid is used in analytical chemistry for the estimation of weakly alkaline substances such as organic amides. Glacial acetic acid is a much weaker base than water, so the amide behaves as a strong base in this medium. It then can be titrated using a solution in glacial acetic acid of a very strong acid, such as perchloric acid.
### Medical use
Acetic acid injection into a tumor has been used to treat cancer since the 1800s.
Acetic acid is used as part of cervical cancer screening in many areas in the developing world. The acid is applied to the cervix and if an area of white appears after about a minute the test is positive.
Acetic acid is an effective antiseptic when used as a 1% solution, with broad spectrum of activity against streptococci, staphylococci, pseudomonas, enterococci and others. It may be used to treat skin infections caused by pseudomonas strains resistant to typical antibiotics.
While diluted acetic acid is used in iontophoresis, no high quality evidence supports this treatment for rotator cuff disease.
As a treatment for otitis externa, it is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
### Foods
Acetic acid has 349 kcal (1,460 kJ) per 100 g. Vinegar is typically no less than 4% acetic acid by mass. Legal limits on acetic acid content vary by jurisdiction. Vinegar is used directly as a condiment, and in the pickling of vegetables and other foods. Table vinegar tends to be more diluted (4% to 8% acetic acid), while commercial food pickling employs solutions that are more concentrated. The proportion of acetic acid used worldwide as vinegar is not as large as commercial uses, but is by far the oldest and best-known application.
## Reactions
### Organic chemistry
Acetic acid undergoes the typical chemical reactions of a carboxylic acid. Upon treatment with a standard base, it converts to metal acetate and water. With strong bases (e.g., organolithium reagents), it can be doubly deprotonated to give LiCH<sub>2</sub>COOLi. Reduction of acetic acid gives ethanol. The OH group is the main site of reaction, as illustrated by the conversion of acetic acid to acetyl chloride. Other substitution derivatives include acetic anhydride; this anhydride is produced by loss of water from two molecules of acetic acid. Esters of acetic acid can likewise be formed via Fischer esterification, and amides can be formed. When heated above 440 °C (824 °F), acetic acid decomposes to produce carbon dioxide and methane, or to produce ketene and water:
CH<sub>3</sub>COOH → CH<sub>4</sub> + CO<sub>2</sub>
CH<sub>3</sub>COOH → CH<sub>2</sub>=C=O + H<sub>2</sub>O
### Reactions with inorganic compounds
Acetic acid is mildly corrosive to metals including iron, magnesium, and zinc, forming hydrogen gas and salts called acetates:
Mg + 2 CH<sub>3</sub>COOH → (CH<sub>3</sub>COO)<sub>2</sub>Mg + H<sub>2</sub>
Because aluminium forms a passivating acid-resistant film of aluminium oxide, aluminium tanks are used to transport acetic acid. Metal acetates can also be prepared from acetic acid and an appropriate base, as in the popular "baking soda + vinegar" reaction giving off sodium acetate:
NaHCO<sub>3</sub> + CH<sub>3</sub>COOH → CH<sub>3</sub>COONa + CO<sub>2</sub> + H<sub>2</sub>O
A colour reaction for salts of acetic acid is iron(III) chloride solution, which results in a deeply red colour that disappears after acidification. A more sensitive test uses lanthanum nitrate with iodine and ammonia to give a blue solution. Acetates when heated with arsenic trioxide form cacodyl oxide, which can be detected by its malodorous vapours.
### Other derivatives
Organic or inorganic salts are produced from acetic acid. Some commercially significant derivatives:
- Sodium acetate, used in the textile industry and as a food preservative (E262).
- Copper(II) acetate, used as a pigment and a fungicide.
- Aluminium acetate and iron(II) acetate—used as mordants for dyes.
- Palladium(II) acetate, used as a catalyst for organic coupling reactions such as the Heck reaction.
Halogenated acetic acids are produced from acetic acid. Some commercially significant derivatives:
- Chloroacetic acid (monochloroacetic acid, MCA), dichloroacetic acid (considered a by-product), and trichloroacetic acid. MCA is used in the manufacture of indigo dye.
- Bromoacetic acid, which is esterified to produce the reagent ethyl bromoacetate.
- Trifluoroacetic acid, which is a common reagent in organic synthesis.
Amounts of acetic acid used in these other applications together account for another 5–10% of acetic acid use worldwide.
## Health effects and safety
Concentrated acetic acid is corrosive to skin. These burns or blisters may not appear until hours after exposure.
Prolonged inhalation exposure (eight hours) to acetic acid vapours at 10 ppm can produce some irritation of eyes, nose, and throat; at 100 ppm marked lung irritation and possible damage to lungs, eyes, and skin may result. Vapour concentrations of 1,000 ppm cause marked irritation of eyes, nose and upper respiratory tract and cannot be tolerated. These predictions were based on animal experiments and industrial exposure.
In 12 workers exposed for two or more years to acetic acid airborne average concentration of 51 ppm (estimated), produced symptoms of conjunctive irritation, upper respiratory tract irritation, and hyperkeratotic dermatitis. Exposure to 50 ppm or more is intolerable to most persons and results in intensive lacrimation and irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, with pharyngeal oedema and chronic bronchitis. Unacclimatised humans experience extreme eye and nasal irritation at concentrations in excess of 25 ppm, and conjunctivitis from concentrations below 10 ppm has been reported. In a study of five workers exposed for seven to 12 years to concentrations of 80 to 200 ppm at peaks, the principal findings were blackening and hyperkeratosis of the skin of the hands, conjunctivitis (but no corneal damage), bronchitis and pharyngitis, and erosion of the exposed teeth (incisors and canines).
The hazards of solutions of acetic acid depend on the concentration. The following table lists the EU classification of acetic acid solutions:
Concentrated acetic acid can be ignited only with difficulty at standard temperature and pressure, but becomes a flammable risk in temperatures greater than 39 °C (102 °F), and can form explosive mixtures with air at higher temperatures (explosive limits: 5.4–16%).
## See also
- Acetic acid (data page)
- Acids in wine |
342,611 | Seagram Building | 1,172,456,921 | Office skyscraper in Manhattan, New York | [
"1950s architecture in the United States",
"1958 establishments in New York City",
"Ludwig Mies van der Rohe buildings",
"Midtown Manhattan",
"Modernist architecture in New York City",
"New York City Designated Landmarks in Manhattan",
"New York City interior landmarks",
"Office buildings completed in 1958",
"Office buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Manhattan",
"Park Avenue",
"Philip Johnson buildings",
"Seagram",
"Skyscraper office buildings in Manhattan"
]
| The Seagram Building is a skyscraper at 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe along with Philip Johnson, Ely Jacques Kahn, and Robert Allan Jacobs, the high-rise tower is 515 feet (157 m) tall with 38 stories. The International Style building, completed in 1958, initially served as the headquarters of the Seagram Company, a Canadian distiller.
Phyllis Lambert, daughter of Seagram CEO Samuel Bronfman, heavily influenced the Seagram Building's design, an example of the functionalist aesthetic and a prominent instance of corporate modern architecture. A glass curtain wall with vertical mullions of bronze and horizontal spandrels made of Muntz metal form the building's exterior. On Park Avenue is a pink-granite public plaza with two fountains. Behind the plaza is a tall elevator lobby with a similar design to the plaza. The lowest stories originally contained the Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants, which were replaced respectively by the Grill and Pool restaurant and the Lobster Club. The upper stories contain office spaces of modular construction.
Seagram revealed plans for the building in July 1954, when it announced construction of its headquarters on the up-and-coming commercial strip of Park Avenue. After Lambert objected to Pereira & Luckman's original design, Mies was selected as the architect that November. The building's construction began in late 1955 and finished in 1958, although the official certificate of occupancy was not granted until 1959. The Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA) purchased the building in 1979, and it remained Seagram's headquarters until 2001. TIAA sold the building in 2000 to Aby Rosen's RFR Holding LLC, which has continued to operate the structure.
Upon opening, the Seagram Building was widely praised for its architecture. Described in The New York Times as one of "New York's most copied buildings", the Seagram Building has inspired the designs of other structures around the world. Within New York City, the Seagram Building helped influence the 1961 Zoning Resolution, a zoning ordinance that allowed developers to construct additional floor area in exchange for including plazas outside their buildings. In 1989, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Seagram Building's exterior, lobby, and The Four Seasons Restaurant as official city landmarks. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.
## Site
The Seagram Building is at 375 Park Avenue, on the east side of the avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. The building was never officially named for its original anchor tenant, Canadian conglomerate Seagram, and is legally known only by its address. The building is assigned its own ZIP Code, 10152; it was one of 41 buildings in Manhattan that had their own ZIP Codes as of 2019. The land lot has a frontage of 295 feet (90 m) on 52nd Street to the south, 200 feet (61 m) on Park Avenue to the west, and 302 feet (92 m) on 53rd Street to the north. The site slopes down to the east.
The 53rd Street side contains an alley about 7 feet (2.1 m) wide, facing 100 East 53rd Street; the alley allows the Seagram Building to remain symmetrical despite the site's irregular shape. Other nearby buildings include 345 Park Avenue across 52nd Street to the south; 399 Park Avenue across 53rd Street to the north; Lever House diagonally across Park Avenue and 53rd Street; and the Racquet and Tennis Club Building and Park Avenue Plaza across Park Avenue to the west. In addition, 599 Lexington Avenue and the Citigroup Center, as well as the New York City Subway's Lexington Avenue/51st Street station (served by the ), are on Lexington Avenue less than one block to the east.
During the late 19th century, the Seagram Building's site had included the original Steinway & Sons piano factory, as well as tenements made of brick or brownstone. The Park Avenue railroad line had run in an open-cut in the middle of Park Avenue until the 1900s. The construction of Grand Central Terminal in the early 20th century covered the line, spurring development in the surrounding area, known as Terminal City. The adjacent stretch of Park Avenue became a wealthy neighborhood with upscale apartments, including the Montana Apartments, on the site of the piano factory. Largely commercial International Style skyscrapers replaced many of the residential structures on Park Avenue during the 1950s and 1960s. These skyscrapers included the Seagram Building, Lever House, the Union Carbide Building, and the Pepsi-Cola Building. When the Seagram site was assembled in the early 1950s, it contained the Montana Apartments and four smaller row houses and apartment buildings.
## Architecture
German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed the Seagram Building in the International Style. Philip Johnson was the co-architect and the partnership of Ely Jacques Kahn and Robert Allan Jacobs were the associate architects. Numerous consultants were involved in the building's design, including mechanical engineers Jaros, Baum & Bolles; structural engineers Severud-Elstad Krueger; electrical engineer Clifton E. Smith; lighting consultant Richard Kelly; acoustics consultant Bolt Beranek and Newman; graphics consultant Elaine Lustig; and landscape architects Charles Middeleer and Karl Linn.
Phyllis Lambert, a Bronfman family member and the daughter of Seagram CEO Samuel Bronfman, whose idea it was to develop the building, did not impose a budget on Mies. Lambert said the Seagram Building was supposed to "be the crowning glory of everyone's work, his own, the contractor's, and Mies's". The architects used new or redesigned materials if they believed these innovations provided an improvement over existing products. The design used costly, high-quality materials, including bronze, travertine, and marble. The lavish interior, overseen by Johnson, was designed to ensure cohesion with the appearance of the facade. The Seagram Building was the first office building in the world to use extruded bronze on a facade, as well as the first New York City skyscraper with full-height plate glass windows.
### Form
The Seagram Building occupies half the site and is recessed 90 feet (27 m) behind Park Avenue. The building's main section is a 38-story high-rise slab topped by a mechanical story; it does not include any setbacks. The slab rises 515 feet (157 m) above ground. As planned, the slab measured 95 by 145 feet (29 by 44 m). Along the eastern end of the slab is a narrow shaft with an emergency-exit stair, which is sometimes referred to as the "spine". The spine, which forms part of the building's framework, contains restrooms on the sixth to tenth floor and offices above.
There are two five-story wings east of the main slab, facing 52nd and 53rd Streets. The 10-story central section between the wings is sometimes characterized as a "bustle". As planned, the "bustle" measured 90 by 85 feet (27 by 26 m) while the wings measured 90 by 200 feet (27 by 61 m). The April 1955 edition of Architectural Forum described the relative simplicity of the building's massing as "a no-setback building but a building all set back".
#### Plaza
A pink granite plaza with pools and greenery lies on the western side of the Seagram Building. The plaza is raised slightly above sidewalk level on Park Avenue, with three steps leading from the center of the Park Avenue frontage. A low granite retaining wall runs on either side of the flight of steps, extending around to 52nd and 53rd Streets, where they flank the building. There are marble caps atop the retaining walls on the side streets. At the eastern ends of the retaining walls on 52nd and 53rd Streets are granite steps from street to lobby, above which are travertine canopies. The parapets on the side streets each measure 3.75 feet (1.14 m) wide by 180 feet (55 m) long and are made of 40 pieces of green Italian marble.
The plaza is largely symmetrical with rectangular pools placed on the northwest and southwest corners. The southern pool contains a bronze flagpole, the only deviation from the design's symmetry. The water level of the pools is just below that of the plaza. The cluster of fountain jets at the center of either pool is not part of the original design. The pools measure 46 feet (14 m) wide by 70 feet (21 m) long and each contain 60,000 U.S. gallons (230,000 L; 50,000 imp gal) of water recirculated every two-and-a-half hours. The initial plan had been to place abstract sculptures in the plaza. Mies abandoned this when he could not find a sculptor he felt could produce work suited for the landscape. East of both pools are three planting beds with ivy and a gingko tree. These planting beds had contained weeping beeches before November 1959, when they were replaced with hardier gingko trees. The plaza contains a heating system to prevent ice buildup. At the building's completion, the plaza's surface required daily vacuuming with a sweeper.
From its construction, the plaza was intended not only as an urban green space but as a point of interest. Architecture critic Lewis Mumford said of the plaza: "In a few steps one is lifted out of the street so completely that one has almost the illusion of having climbed a long flight of stairs." In its simplicity, the plaza's design was a marked contrast to the Channel Gardens in front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which architectural writer Robert A. M. Stern describes as being known for its festiveness.
### Facade
The northern, southern, and western ends of the slab overhang the plaza and are supported by bronze-clad columns at their perimeters, forming an arcade in front of the entrance. Each column measures 3 by 3 feet (0.91 by 0.91 m) across and two stories tall. The arcade's ceiling contains recessed light fixtures within a ceramic tile surface. The first-story walls behind the arcade contain full-height glass panes. Above the arcade, on the western side of the building, is a marquee made of Muntz metal, with recessed lighting. The bases of the wings on 52nd and 53rd Streets, beneath the first story, are clad in granite and contain entrances to the restaurant and bar spaces inside. The eastern portions of both wings contain garage doors, while the eastern wall of the 53rd Street wing is faced in brick. The eastern section of the 52nd Street wing has an entrance that leads to the Grill and Pool restaurant while bypassing the main lobby. A similar entrance exists on the 53rd Street wing to the Brasserie restaurant.
The curtain wall begins above the lower stories and is composed of non-structural glass walls, which are colored amber-gray. The glass panels cover about 122,000 square feet (11,300 m<sup>2</sup>) and are designed to be heat- and glare-resistant. Because the windows are sealed permanently, and the tower rises with no setbacks, the Seagram Building's window washing team could not use standard window-washing equipment. Therefore, a custom-made pneumatic scaffold was installed, with a 27-foot-wide (8.2 m) deck that covers six columns of windows at a time. Behind each window, Mies sought to avoid irregularity when window blinds were drawn. As a result, the building uses window blinds with slats angled in 45-degree positions, allowing the blinds to be set in three positions: fully open, halfway open, or fully closed.
The facade used 1,500 metric tons (1,500 long tons; 1,700 short tons) of bronze, manufactured by General Bronze. The glass panes are set within vertical bronze mullions made from 4.5-by-6-inch (110 by 150 mm) extrusions of I-beams. The bronze mullions separate the facade into 30-foot-wide (9.1 m) bays, or vertical spaces between columns; each bay contains five windows per floor. The tops and bottoms of the mullions are tapered, exposing their cross-sections. The Seagram Building's mullions are only for aesthetics and are thus susceptible to thermal expansion and contraction. At the building's completion, General Bronze said the facade would need to be cleaned twice a year with soap, water, and lemon oil to prevent discoloration; this work could be performed using the window-washing scaffold. Spandrels, made of Muntz metal, separate the windows on each story horizontally, which gives them an appearance similar to that of copper. A sample facade section, tested in a wind tunnel in 1956, was resistant to winds of up to 100 miles per hour (160 km/h).
The design of the slab's facade is carried onto the wings and "bustle". The "spine" on the eastern side of the slab is clad with serpentine marble panels instead of glass because of the presence of shear walls made from concrete. The curtain-wall facade cost \$18 per square foot (\$190/m<sup>2</sup>), equivalent to Error in convert: Needs the number to be converted (help) in . Above the 38th story is a triple-height mechanical story with a louvered screen.
### Features
The superstructure is a steel frame covered with concrete and gypsum. At the time, American building codes required that all structural steel be covered in a fireproof material, such as concrete, because improperly protected steel columns or beams may soften and fail in confined fires. The concrete core shear walls rise to the 17th floor, while the diagonal core bracing, with shear trusses, extends to the 29th floor. The structural system also includes steel columns whose centers are 27.75 feet (8.46 m) apart. The Seagram Building's heating and air conditioning systems are divided into two sections: a basement unit serving the 20th story and all floors below, and a roof unit serving the 21st story and all floors above. Ducts for utilities such as electric, telephone, and closed-circuit television cables were embedded into the concrete floor slabs.
The Seagram Building has 849,014 square feet (78,876.0 m<sup>2</sup>) of floor space, including three basement stories. Two of the basement levels originally contained a 150-space parking garage, connected to the lobby via its own elevator. Starting in 2019, the garage was renovated into a 35,000-square-foot (3,300 m<sup>2</sup>) gym known as the Seagram Playground. To attract younger employees, the gym was designed in a contrasting style to the original building. It contains a multipurpose basketball, pickleball, and volleyball court with a climbing wall. The gym could also be used as a 150-seat theater with eight tiers of wooden bleachers. The basements also contain storage, loading platforms, and service areas for the first-floor occupants.
Inside the building were the Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants, originally designed by Philip Johnson. The restaurant interiors were decorated with numerous artworks. These included the Seagram murals by Mark Rothko, which he claimed were intended to sicken the patrons of the Four Seasons Restaurant, as well as Pablo Picasso's painted curtain Le Tricorne, designed for the Ballets Russes in 1919. By 2017, the building housed three restaurants owned by Major Food Group: the Pool, the Grill, and the Lobster Club. The Pool was merged with the Grill in 2020, though a separate event space called the Pool Lounge continues to operate.
#### Lobby
Unlike designs in Beaux-Arts office buildings, the Seagram Building's lobby lacks a central space, instead leading visitors directly from the plaza to the elevators or restaurants. The lobby is designed as if it were an extension of the plaza, leading Mumford to write: "Outside and inside are simply the same." It is divided into three parts: a western section facing the plaza; a central section with elevators; and an eastern section facing the restaurant space.
The western part of the lobby has three bronze revolving doors and is interrupted by two bronze columns. The central section comprises three corridors connecting the western and eastern thirds of the lobby, within four elevator and stair enclosures, whose walls are clad with travertine. There are three elevators on each corridor's north and south walls—a total of eighteen elevators. The elevators abutting the northern corridor serve floors 25–38; those in the center corridor serve floors 2–10; and those in the southern corridor serve floors 10–25. The northernmost and southernmost elevator enclosures have fire stairs exiting to the plaza, and all enclosures have mechanical spaces and service closets. The interiors of the elevator cabs contain stainless steel and bronze mesh panels, while the ceilings contain white panels that illuminate each cab. Above the elevator doors are fluorescent lights installed in the doorway soffits. The central third of the lobby contains mailboxes, a standpipe alarm box, and service doors made of bronze.
The eastern section has two additional revolving doors within the northern and southern glass walls. A cross-passage connects the two sets of doors. There are service doors on the eastern wall of the cross-passage, as well as an elevator control panel, a fire station panel, and directories on the western wall. From the cross-passage, a set of travertine steps connects to the restaurant spaces that originally comprised the Four Seasons Restaurant.
Throughout the entire lobby, the 24-foot (7.3 m)-tall ceiling is made of black cement and 1-by-1-inch (25 mm × 25 mm) gray glass mosaic tiles. Recessed within the lobby ceiling are lights with dimmers. The floors, walls, and columns are also clad with travertine. The exterior walls of the lobby contain bronze mullions within which the exterior glass panes are set. A horizontal bronze bar, about 42 inches (110 cm) above the floor level, surrounds the exterior walls. The horizontal bronze bar was installed in the 1970s per New York state building regulations. Signs in the lobby were originally designed in a square serif font custom-made for the Seagram Building.
#### The Grill and Pool
The Grill and Pool (formerly the Four Seasons Restaurant) occupy two stories in the Seagram Building's "bustle", east of the lobby and main shaft. The upper story is just above the lobby, while the lower story is at ground level near 52nd and 53rd Streets. When they opened as separate restaurants in 2017, the Grill served mid-20th-century cuisine while the Pool largely served seafood. The Grill and Pool, named after the rooms of the same name in the former Four Seasons, contains similar design features to the lobby. It has travertine walls and floors, cement ceilings with gray-glass mosaic tiles, and bronze engaged piers. The original Four Seasons had five dining rooms, preserved in the modern-day Grill and Pool restaurant. The Pool is on the north side of the first floor; the Grill is on the south side. There are two dining areas on a balcony above the Grill, as well as a balcony above the Pool. A staircase leads down from the Grill Room to a separate entrance lobby and foyer on 52nd Street.
The Grill and Pool are discrete 60-by-90-foot (18 by 27 m) rooms. Both major rooms and their auxiliary spaces have 20-foot-high (6.1 m) ceilings with gridded off-white aluminum panels and recessed lighting. The outer walls are glass curtain walls, containing metal curtains that ripple from air released by hidden ventilating ducts. Running north–south between them is a corridor, which is at the top of the stairs leading from the eastern lobby. A glass wall and bronze double doors separate the corridor from the main lobby. The corridor's north and south walls contain doors leading to vestibules outside either room. The Pool is centered around a 20-by-20-foot (6.1 by 6.1 m) white marble pool. On the eastern side of the Pool, a staircase connects to a mezzanine on a podium slightly above the main floor. The Grill had a lounge in its northwest corner and a bar at its southwest corner. The two private dining rooms are on a balcony raised above the main Grill, accessed by separate staircases and separated from the main Grill by walnut paneled doors.
#### The Lobster Club
The Lobster Club is at ground level on 53rd Street, immediately below the Pool room, within the space formerly occupied by Brasserie. It serves Japanese seafood. Philip Johnson had designed the original interior, which was damaged in a fire and redesigned by Diller + Scofidio from 1995 to 1999. During a 2017 renovation, the Lobster Club was redesigned by Peter Marino.
The entrance connects to a lobby with restrooms to the east, a coat check to the west, and the dining room to the south. The main dining room is slightly above the 53rd Street lobby, reached by a set of stairs. The lobby is on the north wall of the main dining room, while kitchens and waiters' stations are on the south wall. A second dining room is reached through a doorway at the center of the west wall. A door on the south wall leads to a fire stair to the lobby. The Lobster Club's main dining room has brightly colored furniture and upholstery, 150 drip-painted concrete floor tiles by artist Laura Bergman, and three bronze-partitioned booths on the south wall. There is a bar on the eastern side of the dining room. The second dining room is a private suite with white partition walls, red terrazzo flooring, and metal sculptures.
The Brasserie had seated 150 patrons. When used by Brasserie, the foyer had contained a stone wall, and a video camera displayed images of patrons entering from the street, with an LCD sign announcing every customer's entry. The main dining room had a "U"-shaped counter surrounded by circular tables and glass-partitioned dining alcoves. The room had wooden panels on its walls; a set of plates designed by Picasso was mounted onto the wooden paneling. The side walls contained booths, an allusion to the original booths that Johnson had designed for the space. The west wall contained a bar on its northern section and a dining alcove on its southern section. The bar, alcove, and second dining room had carpeted floors; the main dining room had wooden floors. The ceiling was made of flat plaster with recessed lighting fixtures. The rear wall of the main dining room contained a double-paned glass wall, behind which sculptures were placed. The men's and women's bathrooms used the same cast-resin sink and were decorated with hexagonal tiles.
#### Office stories
The office stories were intended to contain executive suites. The office floors generally have a flexible plan, arranged in modules around the elevator core. The flexibility of the office stories derives from the superstructures' wide bays. In general, each of the second through fourth stories has about 28,000 square feet (2,600 m<sup>2</sup>) of rentable office space; the fifth through tenth stories, around 18,600 square feet (1,730 m<sup>2</sup>); and the upper stories, around 12,000 square feet (1,100 m<sup>2</sup>). Johnson mainly oversaw the interior design; all the materials were custom-designed for the Seagram Building.
The elevator landings have green terrazzo floors, travertine walls, gray elevator-door surrounds, and gypsum ceilings. The remaining office stories used 55.5-by-55.5-inch (141 by 141 cm) modules. The elevator doors, suite doors, and partitions were designed to rise from floor to ceiling, which made the openings appear as though they were part of the paneling. Partition panels were designed with washable materials, which became standard after they were used in the Seagram Building. Doorknobs were made of lever handles instead of round knobs. The ceilings are acoustically tiled dropped ceilings. Each story's ceiling is surrounded by luminous tiled panels, activated by a timer, which are arranged in a consistent band measuring about 11.5 feet (3.5 m) wide. The luminous panels, in turn, contain vinyl diffuser panels measuring 4 feet 3 inches (1.30 m) wide. The rest of each story uses indirect lighting. Air conditioning fixtures are placed only 11 inches (280 mm) above the floor slab, enabling the windows to be full-height glass walls.
The Seagram Company occupied the second through eighth stories when the building was completed. Philip Johnson, Phyllis Lambert, and J. Gordon Carr collaborated in the design of the Seagram offices. The offices had a reception room, containing tapestries and a travertine wall with Seagram's seal. There was also an executive office with furniture designed by Mies. The executive suites contained an oak-paneled dining room and kitchen, which could double as a conference room. On three sides of the fifth floor were offices with oak paneling, luminous ceilings, and ocher carpeting. The outer offices on the fifth story were wider than on other floors, signifying that story's function as an "important" floor. The fourth floor contained several large spaces for meetings and receptions, including a 69-by-36-foot (21 by 11 m) assembly room that could be partitioned into three sections. Floor-to-ceiling travertine partitions walled off the restrooms in the Seagram suites. Another feature of the Seagram suites was display lights that could retract into the ceiling when they were not being used. Architectural Forum described Seagram's offices as setting "a high standard" for subsequent tenants.
## History
After the 1933 repeal of Prohibition in the United States, Seagram Distiller's CEO Samuel Bronfman began planning a large Manhattan headquarters, though this plan was not executed for almost two decades. Bronfman decided the headquarters should be situated somewhere on Park Avenue between 50th and 59th Streets, which was becoming a commercial area.
### Development
#### Initial plans
In 1951, the company bought a 50,950-square-foot (4,733 m<sup>2</sup>) lot on the eastern side of Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Street, across from Lever House, for \$4 million (equivalent to \$ million in ). Bronfman sought to develop a structure that would be considered an "important building". He wanted the building to be completed by 1957, coinciding with the company's centenary. According to Philip Johnson, the earlier Lever House had set an example for the construction of what became the Seagram Building. Ely Jacques Kahn sent a letter and a brochure to Bronfman in July 1951, requesting an interview with him. The next month, prominent lawyer Alfred L. Rose wrote a letter to Bronfman endorsing Kahn and Jacob's work. Kahn, working with several rental agents, sketched numerous diagrams for the massing of a hypothetical tower on the site, which they called "Operation Skytop". The only extant diagram, labeled as "scheme 2", depicted a bulky tower rising from several shallow setbacks.
Bronfman met with Charles Luckman, the former president of Lever Brothers soap company, in June 1954. Bronfman told Luckman that he intended to build a 35-story office tower topped by an imported English castle. In July 1954, Seagram announced it would build a 34-story tower designed by Luckman and William Pereira, his partner in the firm Pereira & Luckman. The structure was projected to cost \$15 million (equivalent to \$ million in ). Luckman, who had overseen the development of Lever House, said he was "very happy to come back to Park Avenue for a repeat performance". Seagram's building, as originally planned, would have contained a four-story base of marble and bronze topped by a 30-story metal-and-glass shaft. The design would have provided for an auditorium, film screening room, display rooms, and executive offices, as well as interior garden courts. Pereira & Luckman filed plans for the tower with the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) the same month.
Pereira & Luckman's design attracted negative criticism when it was announced. According to the August 1954 edition of Architectural Forum, critics likened the building's appearance to an "enormous cigarette lighter" and "big trophy". Lambert, Bronfman's 27-year-old daughter, was living in Paris when she saw a rendering of Pereira & Luckman's plan in the New York Herald Tribune's Paris edition. Recounting the incident, Lambert said she had been "boiling with fury" at the proposal. Lambert wrote a letter to her father that August, arguing that any new headquarters should be a "contribution" to the city in addition to serving as a symbol of Seagram. In a 2013 book recalling the building's development, Lambert wrote, "This letter starts with one word repeated very emphatically [...] NO NO NO NO NO."
#### Modified plans
At his friend Lou Crandall's suggestion, Bronfman relented, allowing his daughter to find an alternate architect. Pereira & Luckman's design was still publicly marketed as a "preliminary model" but, as Interiors's managing editor Olga Gueft said, media reports suggested the original plan "had been dumped overboard". Lambert became acquainted with Johnson, then the departmental director of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. Following his recommendation, Lambert examined several leading modernist architects and conducted several interviews. Lambert selected Mies van der Rohe to design the building in November 1954; she described Mies's buildings, such as 860–880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, as "sublimely urban". Bronfman, having approved Mies's selection, designated his daughter as the building's planning director. Lambert received an annual salary of \$20,000 from this position. Because Mies was not a licensed architect in New York state, Johnson was selected as a co-architect. At the time, Johnson had never designed a skyscraper before, so Crandall convinced Bronfman to hire Kahn and Jacobs as associate architects.
Mies, who had never designed a project in New York City, wished to design a simple slab. He was dissatisfied with the setbacks in most skyscrapers designed after the passage of the 1916 Zoning Resolution. Mies considered three alternatives for a slab behind a large plaza, with a facade divided into multiple bays. One plan called for a square tower; the second plan called for a 3-by-7-bay rectangle with three bays on Park Avenue; and the third plan called for a 5-by-3-bay rectangle with five bays facing Park Avenue. He created several scale models for the proposed structure. Ultimately, Mies selected the third plan, which Lambert praised. After the architects were selected, Seagram purchased some 9,000 square feet (840 m<sup>2</sup>) of adjacent land for \$900,000 (equivalent to \$ million in ). The land acquisition allowed the building to be set back from Park Avenue while complying with the 1916 Zoning Resolution.
#### Construction
Mies filed updated plans with the DOB in March 1955; the structure was projected to cost \$20 million (equivalent to \$ million in ). The DOB records listed Mies's plans as a modification to Pereira & Luckman's original plans, rather than completely new ones. At the time, 20 of 250 existing tenants on the site had left. The April 1955 issue of The New York Times described the proposed tower as one of several on Park Avenue that "add up in sum to a boom". Upon Bronfman's suggestion, the architects specified that the tower would be made of bronze and glass. Kahn had sketched an alternative design for the Seagram Building, which called for a significantly different massing than the one Mies had proposed. Lambert disapproved of the alternative plan, saying that Kahn was "undermining Mies's decisions", and Kahn ultimately acquiesced to using Mies's design.
Demolition of existing buildings on the site began in September 1955 and was completed in March 1956. Mies moved to a nearby apartment to oversee the Seagram Building's development, and he applied for membership in the American Institute of Architects (AIA)'s New York division, but was rejected in December 1955. He took the AIA rejection as an affront and moved back to Chicago, placing Johnson in full control of the building's design. Kahn wrote in his diary that the project had encountered delays in April 1956. When Mies received a license to practice architecture in New York, he rejoined the project that June.
Construction of the superstructure began in May 1956, with the first major steel column installed at the beginning of the next month. Seven hundred workers fitted over 5,000 individual pieces of steelwork together, which weighed in aggregate 25 million pounds (11 kt). Because of a no-idling rule implemented in Midtown Manhattan, some truckers were ticketed while delivering steel beams to the work site, prompting them to strike temporarily until the rule was changed to allow deliveries. The steelwork's construction involved bolting steel beams, rather than riveting them, to reduce noise; this work received an official "Quiet City Award" from the city. During construction, Lambert convinced the builders to carry through Mies's original design, including minor details such as the brick bonding, which was hidden from view. The superstructure was topped out during December 1956, The building's bronze and glass facade was installed starting in September 1956 and was completed in April 1957. According to Kahn's diary, the architects discussed "violent changes" to the building's cost and design in July 1957, though these changes were not implemented.
The Seagram Company moved into its offices in December 1957, and the Department of Buildings granted a temporary certificate of occupancy the next year. The Seagram Building officially opened on May 22, 1958, with the Seagram Company leasing the office space that it did not occupy. The Department of Buildings granted a permanent occupancy certificate in 1959. Including the \$5 million land purchases, the project was estimated to cost \$43 million, or about \$50 per square foot (\$540/m<sup>2</sup>). The construction cost per square foot was about twice that of similar buildings in the city. Seagram vice president Arthur S. Margolin said in a 1989 interview that the building had cost approximately \$40 million.
### 20th century
#### Seagram ownership
By July 1958, ninety percent of the Seagram Building's space was rented. Tenants were willing to pay \$7 to \$8.30 per square foot (\$75.3 to \$89.3/m<sup>2</sup>) for space on the upper floors, compared to an average of about \$5 to \$5.25 per square foot (\$53.8 to \$56.5/m<sup>2</sup>) for ordinary new buildings. In the building's first year of operation, the office space was expected to earn about a 13 percent return on investment. Cushman & Wakefield was hired as the rental agency. Among the initial occupants were "a number of industrial and service corporations" involved in manufacturing, as well as Bethlehem Steel and Maruzen Oil. The building also housed Goodson-Todman Productions; the sales headquarters of Eagle Pencil; an industrial designer; a property manager; an art producer; a direct-mail advertising company; and various other commercial tenants. Restaurant Associates took ground-level space for the Four Seasons and Brasserie restaurants, which opened in 1959. Ultimately, the Seagram Building's luxuriously designed spaces had 115 tenants, which were drawn partly because of Mies's international stature. By 1961, there was a waiting list for space in the Seagram Building.
In its early years, the Seagram Building and its plaza were used for displays and exhibitions. For instance, in 1958, the building held an art show to celebrate the 13th anniversary of the United Nations. A sculptured head from the Mesoamerican Olmec civilization was displayed in the plaza in 1965. The World Monuments Fund displayed a moai head in the Seagram Building's plaza in 1968 to draw attention to the artifacts on Easter Island, which were seen as endangered. Atmospheres and Environment XII, an environmental steel sculpture by Louise Nevelson, was installed at the Seagram Building's plaza in 1971. Other sculptures or artworks erected in the Seagram Building and plaza included Barnett Newman's sculpture Broken Obelisk, displayed in 1967, as well as Jean Dubuffet's sculpture Milord la Chimarre, displayed in 1974.
In 1963, the New York City government gave the Seagram Company an award for the building's "notable contribution" to the city and raised the company's property taxes. The recalculated tax assessment of \$21 million was based on the potential value if the building were to be demolished, whereas Seagram fought to keep the assessment at \$17 million, based on the rental income it earned. The higher tax assessment was upheld by the New York Court of Appeals, a decision the Regional Plan Association criticized as potentially destroying "the hope of great commercial architecture in New York State". Architectural writer Ada Louise Huxtable called the tax a beginning of the city's "architectural annihilation", saying the higher tax assessment was a "special method of taxing architectural excellence".
There was still high demand for office space in Midtown Manhattan, despite a myriad of new development in the area. For example, when real estate investment firm Realty Equities moved its headquarters to the Seagram Building in 1968, another company immediately offered to sublet Realty's space at a much higher price. Even the Seagram Company found its own headquarters' rent to be too high, giving up half of its 150,000 square feet (14,000 m<sup>2</sup>) in the building and moving approximately 600 of its 983 employees elsewhere in 1972. In a letter to mayor John Lindsay, Seagram officials attributed the relocation in part because of the high tax assessment on the Seagram Building. In 1971, building management conducted what city officials believed was the first voluntary fire drill at a New York City office building.
#### Sale
During the 1970s, Seagram received several offers for the building from potential buyers, and the company contemplated selling it and leasing back its own space. However, Seagram had decided to retain ownership of the building by 1976, as it brought publicity to the company. The same year, Bronfman's son and Seagram's president Edgar Bronfman Sr. asked the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to grant city-landmark status to the building. The move surprised mayor Abraham Beame, since the city's landlords typically attempted to prevent their buildings from being listed as landmarks. The LPC ultimately did not hold a hearing for the Seagram Building. LPC rules specified that individual New York City landmarks be at least 30 years old at the time of their designation; the building had been completed only 18 years earlier. Bronfman proposed that the LPC allow designations of buildings less than 30 years old if their owners supported landmark status, but no action was taken on the proposal.
In February 1979, Seagram offered the tower for sale at \$75 million. In the absence of official landmark status, the company mandated that the new owner preserve the exterior and public spaces in their original condition. The new owner was obligated to keep the building for at least fifteen years, and would have to take over the high land-assessment taxes. Seagram sold the building to the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA) for \$85.5 million in June 1979, leasing some space back from them. This fee included \$70.5 million for the structure and \$15 million for the underlying land. As part of the sale, the building retained the "Seagram" name, although it was only identified on signage by its address. For decades after the sale, Lambert continued to be involved with the Seagram Building's operation.
The TIAA, like the Seagram Company, supported landmark status for the building. In early 1988, just over thirty years after the Seagram Building had been completed, the TIAA filed documentation with the LPC requesting that the Seagram Building's exterior, lobby, and plaza be considered for landmark status. The Four Seasons' operators also separately endorsed landmark designation for their restaurant's interior in the Seagram Building. On October 3, 1989, the LPC designated the Seagram Building's exterior, the lobby, and the Four Seasons Restaurant as landmarks. The Four Seasons was only the second restaurant interior in the city to be designated a landmark, after Gage and Tollner in Brooklyn. The New York City Board of Estimate ratified all three designations in January 1990. While the TIAA had strongly supported the exterior and lobby landmark designations, it sued the LPC in 1990 to have the designation for the Four Seasons removed. The TIAA argued that the restaurant was personal property and that the designation would force the restaurant to continue operating even if the owners wished to close it. The state's Court of Appeals upheld the designation in 1993. The Brasserie, not covered in any of the landmark designations, was renovated in 1999 after being damaged by a fire in 1995.
### 21st century
Real estate investor Aby Rosen entered a contract in October 2000 to purchase a majority ownership stake in the building for \$375 million, completing his purchase that December. At the time, 99.5 percent of the building's space was occupied, but only six original tenants remained. The following year, the Seagram Company moved its headquarters out of the building. Rosen's RFR Holding retained ownership of the Seagram Building. Meanwhile, French media conglomerate Vivendi, which acquired the Seagram Company in 2000, started selling off the building's art in 2003 to raise money. RFR received the LPC's permission in 2005 to transfer unused development rights at the Seagram Building site to a neighboring building. In exchange, the Seagram Building's owners would be required to keep the facade in near-original condition. The Seagram Building was nominated for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) on January 12, 2006, and was added to the NRHP on February 24, 2006. RFR did not have full ownership of the Seagram Building until 2013, when it purchased a 14 percent stake from Harry Lis.
In 2015, RFR decided to terminate Four Seasons' and the Brasserie's leases ahead of schedule, and the restaurants were closed. RFR proposed changes to the Four Seasons' interior, including removing the glass wall between the Grill Room and Pool Room, as well as converting the wine cellar to restrooms. The LPC rejected RFR's proposal to change the interior of The Four Seasons Restaurant, except for a carpet replacement, which the commission allowed. Annabelle Selldorf restored the physical structure while William Georgis oversaw the interior design. The Grill and the Pool were opened within the former Four Seasons space in mid-2017. That year, architect Peter Marino designed the Lobster Club within the former Brasserie space in the basement. In addition, the facade was restored in 2016, and RFR spent \$400,000 to install waterproofing on the fountains and \$250,000 to renovate the plaza benches. RFR was also planning to change the underground garage, which did not have landmark status. Initially, RFR did not seek the LPC's permission to change the landmark-designated Four Seasons interior, only requesting permission in late 2017 after the renovations were completed. The LPC retroactively approved the renovations nearly two years later, with some modifications. To conform to the plans that the LPC had approved, the Pool's lounge room was closed in December 2019 for a one-month renovation. The next month, the Grill took over the Pool because of higher demand for cuisine in the Grill.
Rosen announced in mid-2020 that he would renovate much of the garage into the Seagram Playground, a communal workers' space and gym, over the following one and a half years. The communal space was announced as a way to attract tenants in light of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, as well as the departure of Wells Fargo, a major tenant. The Seagram Playground was completed in August 2022 for \$25 million; at the time, 80 percent of the space in the building was occupied. Curbed wrote that the Seagram Playground was one of several large investments that Rosen had made in "prime midtown real estate at a time when it hasn't exactly bounced back" from the pandemic. The building was almost fully occupied by the end of 2022, after firms such as Blue Owl Capital and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice signed or renewed their leases. Rosen and his partner Michael Fuchs sought to refinance the Seagram Building by early 2023, as a \$783 million commercial mortgage-backed security loan on the building was expected to mature at the end of the year; the loan was extended that May.
## Impact
### Reception
When the Seagram Building was completed, Lewis Mumford described the structure as a "Rolls-Royce" of buildings and wrote that "it has the aesthetic impact that only a unified work of art carried through without paltry compromises can have". In 1957, Thomas W. Ennis of The New York Times wrote the building was "one of the most notable of Manhattan's post-war buildings" and characterized its design as the high point of Mies's career. Similarly, Progressive Architecture described the Seagram Building as "probably the most heralded new building in the U.S." in 1958. According to Architectural Forum in 1958, "Seagram challenges accepted skyscraper practice all the way down the line." At a meeting of the Italian Cultural Institute the following year, architect Gino Pollini said the Seagram Building was "a masterpiece of functional and esthetic architecture".
Critical acclaim for the Seagram Building continued. Eight years after the building opened, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that it was "dignified, sumptuous, severe, sophisticated, cool, consummately elegant architecture". The New York Times Magazine described the lobby in 1975 as one of "The Ten Best Lobbies in New York". In 1981, architectural writer G. E. Kidder Smith found the building and its features to be "in toto incomparable". According to Jerold Kayden, who wrote about the building in 2000, the Seagram Building "remains the city's quintessential International Style masterpiece of 'tower in the park' architecture". Ricardo Scofidio of Diller Scofidio + Renfro said the construction of the Seagram Building "was the first time you really realized that architecture brought something to the city that didn't exist". In 2001, architecture critic Herbert Muschamp referred to it as "the Building of Two Millenniums," writing that it encompassed "everything essential in Western architecture".
While the public and architectural critics generally appreciated the Seagram Building, there were also comments about the design's drawbacks. Stern stated that there were negative remarks about the plaza's "austerity" and the exterior's lack of purity. Stern cited architect Louis Kahn, who believed the rear "spine" took away from the purity of the slab, though Kahn also said the hidden wind bracing made the building appear like "a beautiful bronze lady in hidden corsets". While Mumford largely praised the design, he found the plaza's pools and fountains to be a "gross defect" in what was otherwise a "masterpiece". Italian architecture writers Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, in their 1976 book Modern Architecture, wrote that the Seagram Building stood "aloof from the city" and saw the juxtaposition as a symbol of absence. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright dismissed the building as "a whisky bottle on a playing card."
### Architectural recognition
The Fifth Avenue Association called the Seagram Building the best edifice constructed on Park Avenue between 1956 and 1957. The city government gave the Seagram Company an award in 1963 for the building's positive impact on the city's beauty. The Board of Trade awarded its 1965 architecture prize to the building, citing its plaza, form, and material. The following year, the Municipal Art Society (MAS) gave a bronze plaque to the building, recognizing it as a "modern landmark". Philip Johnson received the city's Bronze Medallion for the Seagram Building's design in 1979. Simultaneously, the AIA's New York division gave the Seagram Company a special citation recognizing the company's "most elegant contribution to the art of architecture and the care with which it is maintained". The AIA further recognized the Seagram Building in 1984 with a Twenty-five Year Award for its "ability to stand to the test of time".
### Design influence
The Seagram Building's plaza was popular immediately when the building opened, being frequented by both office workers and tourists. In 1971, the plaza was the setting of a planning study by sociologist William H. Whyte, whose film Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, produced with the Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS), records the daily patterns of people socializing around the plaza. Whyte praised the plaza as allowing a sense of choice, in that patrons could lie down or sit on the ledges or steps, despite their relatively plain design.
The plaza's presence helped influence the 1961 Zoning Resolution, a zoning ordinance that allowed New York City developers to increase their edifices' maximum floor areas in exchange for adding open space in front of their buildings. This was in sharp contrast to the "wedding cake" model of the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which had required setbacks at intervals of several stories, similar to a wedding cake. Even before the 1961 zoning codes had been implemented, some New York City buildings followed the Seagram's model of a slab behind a plaza, such as the Time–Life Building at 1271 Avenue of the Americas, the former Union Carbide Building at 270 Park Avenue, and the One Chase Manhattan Plaza building at 28 Liberty Street. Twenty acres (8.1 ha) of plazas were built in New York City in the decade after the zoning-code revision.
Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times in 1976 that the Seagram Building was one of "New York's most copied buildings", its design having been copied in several structures internationally. According to William H. Jordy, these structures included 270 Park Avenue and the Inland Steel Building. Mies reused the building's design for towers in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Toronto, and a replica of the Seagram Building was constructed at the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Paradise, Nevada. According to writer E. C. Relph, the design was "widely plagiarised in various colours and shapes by other architects", though Relph considered some of the other towers to be "devoid of interesting copies".
In mid-2005, the Skyscraper Museum in Lower Manhattan asked 100 architects, builders, critics, engineers, historians, and scholars, among others, to choose their 10 favorites among 25 of the city's towers. The Seagram Building came in second place behind the Chrysler Building, with 76 respondents placing it on their ballots.
## See also
- List of New York City Designated Landmarks in Manhattan from 14th to 59th Streets
- National Register of Historic Places listings in Manhattan from 14th to 59th Streets |
203,813 | Red-necked grebe | 1,162,716,338 | Species of migratory aquatic bird | [
"Birds described in 1783",
"Holarctic birds",
"Podiceps",
"Taxa named by Pieter Boddaert"
]
| The red-necked grebe (Podiceps grisegena) is a migratory aquatic bird found in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Its wintering habitat is largely restricted to calm waters just beyond the waves around ocean coasts, although some birds may winter on large lakes. Grebes prefer shallow bodies of fresh water such as lakes, marshes or fish-ponds as breeding sites.
The red-necked grebe is a nondescript dusky-grey bird in winter. During the breeding season, it acquires the distinctive red neck plumage, black cap and contrasting pale grey face from which its name was derived. It also has an elaborate courtship display and a variety of loud mating calls. Once paired, it builds a nest from water plants on top of floating vegetation in a shallow lake or bog.
Like all grebes, the Red-necked is a good swimmer, a particularly swift diver, and responds to danger by diving rather than flying. The feet are positioned far back on the body, near the tail, which makes the bird ungainly on land. It dives for fish or picks insects off vegetation; it also swallows its own feathers, possibly to protect the digestive system. The conservation status of its two subspecies—P. g. grisegena found in Europe and western Asia, and the larger P. g. holboelii (formerly Holbœll grebe), in North America and eastern Siberia—is evaluated as Least Concern, and the global population is stable or growing.
## Taxonomy
The red-necked grebe was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1781 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Colymbus grisegena in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The type locality was subsequently designated as France. The red-necked grebe is now placed in the genus Podiceps that was erected by the English naturalist John Latham in 1787. The genus name Podiceps comes from Latin podicis, "vent" or "anus", and pes, "foot", and is a reference to the placement of a grebe's legs towards the rear of its body. The species name grisegena is from Latin griseus (grey) and gena (cheek) and refers to the face pattern of the breeding adult.
Grebes are small to medium-large water birds with lobed, rather than webbed, toes. There are several genera, of which the most widespread is Podiceps with nine species, one recently extinct. The red-necked grebe's closest relative is the fish-eating great crested grebe of Europe and western Asia. It is possible that the red-necked grebe originally evolved in North America and later spread to Europe, where a change of diet to include more insects helped to reduce competition with its larger cousin. Fossils of the species dating to the middle Pleistocene have been found in Italy.
The red-necked grebe has two subspecies, the nominate subspecies P. g. grisegena in Europe and western Asia, and P. g. holboelii (Holboell's grebe, named for Danish explorer of Greenlandic birds Carl Peter Holbøll) in North America and eastern Siberia. The east Asian birds have slightly smaller bills than the American form, although the differences are too small to merit separation as a third subspecies.
## Description
The red-necked grebe is a medium-large grebe, smaller than the great crested grebe of Eurasia, and the western and Clark's grebes of North America, but noticeably larger than other northern grebe species. The adult of the nominate European subspecies is 40–50 cm (16–20 in) long with a 77–85 cm (30–33 in) average wingspan, and weighs 692–925 g (24.4–32.6 oz). In breeding plumage, it has a black cap that extends below the eye, very pale grey cheeks and throat, a rusty red neck, dark grey back and flanks, and white underparts. The eyes are dark brown and the long, pointed bill is black with a yellow base.
The winter plumage of the red-necked grebe is duskier than that of other grebes; its dark grey cap is less defined, and merges into the grey face, and a pale crescent that curves around the rear of the face contrasts with the rest of the head. The front of the neck is whitish or light grey, the hind neck is darker grey, and the yellow of the bill is less obvious than in summer. Although the red-necked grebe is unmistakable in breeding plumage, it is less distinctive in winter and can be confused with similar species. It is larger than the Slavonian (horned) grebe, with a relatively larger bill and a grey, rather than white face. It is closer in size to the Eurasian great crested grebe, but that species is longer-necked, has a more contrasting head pattern, and always shows white above the eye.
The sexes are similar in appearance, although the male averages heavier than the female. Chicks have a striped head and breast, and older juveniles have a striped face, diffuse blackish cap, pale red neck and extensive yellow on the bill.
The subspecies P. g. holboelii is larger than the nominate race at 43–56 cm (17–22 in) length, with a 61–88 cm (24–35 in) wingspan, and a weight of 750–1,600 g (26–56 oz). The plumages are the same as those of the nominate race, although the adult's bill is more extensively yellow. The difference in size between the sexes is greater than for this subspecies that for P. g. grisegena.
The red-necked grebe flies with its long neck extended and its large feet trailing behind the body, which gives it a stretched-out appearance. The relatively small wings are grey with white secondaries, and beat very rapidly. Its small wing area means that the grebe is unable to take off from land, and needs a lengthy run across water to gain the speed needed for take-off. Like all grebes, the red-necked is an expert swimmer; it uses its feet for propulsion underwater, and steers by rotating its legs, since its tail is too short for this purpose.
This is one of the most vocal grebes during the breeding season, but, like its relatives, it is mainly silent for the rest of the year. It has a loud, wailing or howling display call uooooh, given by a single bird or a pair in duet, by night or during the day, and often from cover. Long sequences of up to 60 consecutive notes may be delivered during singing encounters between rival territorial birds. A great variety of quacking, clucking, hissing, rattling and purring calls are also given, with much individual variation.
## Distribution and habitat
Breeding takes place in shallow freshwater lakes, bays of larger lakes, marshes, and other inland bodies of water, often less than 3 ha (7.4 acres) in extent and less than 2 m (6.6 ft) deep. The red-necked grebe shows a preference for waters in forested areas or, further north, in shrub tundra, and favours sites with abundant emergent vegetation, such as reedbeds. The best breeding habitat is fish-ponds, which have an abundance of food in addition to meeting the other requirements. The American subspecies is less tied to a high aquatic plant density, and sometimes breeds on quite open lakes.
All populations are migratory and winter mainly at sea, usually in estuaries and bays, but often well offshore where fish are within diving reach near shallow banks or islands. The preferred passage and wintering habitat is water less than 15 m (49 ft) deep with a sand or gravel bottom, scattered rocks and patches of seaweed. During winter, birds typically feed alone and rarely aggregate into flocks, but on migration, concentrations of over 2000 individuals may occur at favoured staging sites. Migration is usually at night, but may occur during the day, especially when over water. This is particularly noticeable in autumn on the Great Lakes, when up to 18,000 birds may pass Whitefish Point on Lake Superior; these are thought to be Canadian breeders heading for the Atlantic Ocean to winter. This easterly route is longer than that to the Pacific, but avoids the Rockies.
The breeding range of the red-necked grebe overlaps with that of the Slavonian grebe, although the latter species tends to be displaced from sites suited to both. The red-necked grebe prefers an inland temperate climate, and is less successful near coasts and in subarctic and warm temperate zones. It is usually a lowland bird, breeding below 100 m (330 ft), although has nested at up to 1,800 m (5,900 ft) in Turkey.
The nominate subspecies breeds from southern Sweden and Denmark through central and eastern Europe east to western Siberia, and winters mainly in the North and Baltic Seas, with smaller numbers in the Adriatic, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Mediterranean and on inland lakes. P. g. holboelii breeds in North America in Alaska, western and central Canada, and the northern US east to Minnesota; in Asia it nests in eastern Siberia from Kamchatka south to Hokkaido and west to Mongolia. The Asian birds winter at sea from Japan to the East China Sea, and American breeders winter in the Pacific, mainly from southern Alaska to British Columbia (with smaller numbers south to California), and in the Atlantic from Newfoundland and Labrador to Florida. Some birds remain on the Great Lakes if they are sufficiently ice-free. This species occurs as a rare winter vagrant in Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of northern and western India.
## Behaviour
### Breeding and survival
Red-necked grebes usually nest as isolated pairs with more than 50 m (160 ft) between neighbouring nests, although semi-colonial nesting may occur in suitable sites, where up to 20 pairs each defend a linear territory. Semi-colonial breeding is more likely to occur in prime locations, such as large floating mats of vegetation with no connection to the shoreline. Such sites, safe from most predators and large enough to provide some wind and wave protection, have grebes nesting much closer than shoreline breeders, down to 10 m (33 ft). Pairs nesting in these colonies produce larger clutches of eggs, which hatch earlier in the season and result in larger broods. The territory is defended with various threat displays, including wing-spreading, hunching, and bill-thrusting; pairs breeding in colonies are more aggressive, less likely to leave the nest unguarded and show a greater tendency to move out of sight of the colony when not incubating. Breeding is often in loose association with gulls or other colonial water birds.
The monogamous pair forms in April or May on migration or at the breeding water, and a highly vocal courtship ritual commences. The elaborate breeding performance includes head-shaking, a head-lowered "cat" display, parallel rushes in an upright position and mutual presentations of green weeds, and culminates in a "penguin" dance in which pair members raise the whole body upright, breast to breast.
Like all grebes, the red-necked grebe nests near water into which it can escape, since the position of the legs far back on the body prevents fast movement on land. It often breeds further within reed beds than other grebes. The nest is a floating platform of plant matter anchored to submerged or emergent vegetation, in water 0.5–0.75 m (20–30 in) deep, and with the bulk of nest below the water line. Egg-laying mainly takes place from mid-April to May in Europe, and somewhat later, from mid-May to June, in North America. Parents may leave the nest for significant periods of time during the night, possibly to evade nocturnal predators. It is unclear whether this is for self-protection or to protect the eggs by diverting attention from the nest; the clutch does not appear to suffer from this temporary abandonment, whatever the reason.
The red-necked grebe lays four or five (range one to nine) dull white or pale blue eggs, which average 3.4 cm (1.3 in) in breadth, 5.1 cm (2.0 in) in length, and weigh about 30.5 g (1.08 oz), of which 10% is shell. Parents take turns to incubate the eggs for 21–33 days until the precocial downy chicks hatch; they immediately climb onto the parent's back, where they spend most of their time until they are 10–17 days old. The young may be fed by the parents for up to 54 days after fledging, and can fly at 50–70 days. The parents do not interfere with the feeding of their chicks when they are still being carried. Later they care for the younger chicks for longer, and are aggressive with the older offspring. This equalises the post-fledging survival of all chicks, and encourages their independence. The brood may be split, so that each parent feeds only some of the chicks. This spreads the feeding demand equally between the parents.
After breeding the adults moult their wing feathers and are temporarily flightless; migration commences once the flight feathers have regrown. The red-necked grebe is normally single-brooded, although second broods and re-nesting after a clutch has been lost may extend nesting into July or August.
Eggs may be destroyed and chicks killed by a range of predators, including the raccoon in North America and the carrion crow in Europe. Pike may take swimming chicks. On average, for each adult, 0.65 young birds are still alive by their fourth month, although the mortality rate for the adult is unknown. Red-necked grebes attempt to evade birds of prey by diving; when feeding, dives average less than 30 seconds, although escape dives are more prolonged.
### Feeding
On the breeding grounds, the red-necked grebe feeds mainly on invertebrates including adult and larval aquatic insects, such as water beetles and dragonfly larvae, crayfish and molluscs. Fish (such as smelt) may be important locally or seasonally, especially for the American subspecies, and crustaceans can constitute up to 20% of the grebe's diet. Birds breeding at the coast often make foraging flights to inland lakes or offshore areas to feed.
Aquatic prey is obtained by diving or by swimming on surface with the head submerged, and terrestrial insects and their larvae are picked off vegetation. A line slanting downward from the eye to the tip of the opened lower mandible may be used for sighting on prey before diving or when swimming under water. The grebe probably opens its bill and looks down the eye-line toward its target. European breeders, which have to compete with the larger great crested grebe for fish, eat a greater proportion of invertebrates than the longer-billed American subspecies, although both races eat mainly fish in winter. Birds of the nominate subspecies from the northernmost breeding populations in Finland and Russia, beyond the range of great crested grebe, have a longer and more slender bill than those further south, reflecting a greater proportion of fish in the diet where their main competitor is absent. If food is scarce, parents may desert unhatched eggs, or allow the smallest chicks to starve, although the latter strategy appears not to be particularly efficient in protecting the older chicks.
Like other grebes, the red-necked grebe ingests large quantities of its own feathers, which remain in the bird's stomach. Feathers are not only swallowed by adults, mainly during self-preening, but are often fed to the young, sometimes within a day of hatching. These feathers soon decompose into a felt-like, amorphous mass. The function of the feathers in the stomach is unknown, although it has been suggested that they help to protect the lower digestive tract from bones and other hard, indigestible material.
## Status
The red-necked grebe has a large range, estimated at 1–10 million square kilometres (0.4–3.8 million square miles), and a global population of 150,000–370,000 individuals, with P. g. holboellii about twice as numerous as the nominate race. The population trend has not been quantified, but it is not believed to meet the thresholds for the population decline criterion (declining more than 30% in ten years or three generations) of the IUCN Red List. For these reasons, the species is evaluated as Least Concern.
The red-necked grebe is one of the species to which the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA) applies. Parties to the Agreement are required to engage in a wide range of conservation strategies which are describes in a detailed action plan. The plan is intended to address key issues such as species and habitat conservation, management of human activities, research, education, and implementation.
The Red-necked Grebe was hunted by humans in northern Europe in the Mesolithic and Paleolithic periods, but there is no evidence that there is any significant level of hunting at the present time. In North America, there are potential threats from pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and pesticides such as DDT which cause reduced reproductive success due to egg sterility and eggshell thinning. Breeding areas may be threatened by the modification and degradation of lakes and by human disturbance from water-based recreational activities. There is no evidence to suggest that these threats could result in a significant risk to the overall population; more than 70% of North American red-necked grebes breed in Canada, where the population is stable or increasing. |
15,384,087 | Terms of Endearment (The X-Files) | 1,169,970,865 | null | [
"1999 American television episodes",
"Pregnancy-themed television episodes",
"Television episodes about demons",
"Television episodes set in Virginia",
"The X-Files (season 6) episodes"
]
| "Terms of Endearment" is the seventh episode of the sixth season of the American science fiction television series The X-Files, and originally aired on the Fox network on January 3, 1999. Written by David Amann and directed by Rob Bowman, "Terms of Endearment" is a "Monster-of-the-Week" story, unconnected to the series' wider mythology. It earned a Nielsen rating of 10.5 and was watched by 18.7 million people on its initial broadcast. The performance given by guest actor Bruce Campbell attracted positive comments, but the plot was criticized.
The show centers on FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who work on cases linked to the paranormal called X-Files. Mulder is a believer in the paranormal, while the skeptical Scully has been assigned to debunk his work. In the installment, an unborn child is apparently abducted from its mother's womb by a demon after the prospective parents discover that their child has birth defects. After Agent Spender dismisses the assignment as irrelevant to the X-Files, Mulder and Scully steal the case and investigate the creature. While looking into the report, the duo discover that Wayne Weinsider (Campbell) is a child-abducting demon.
"Terms of Endearment", an inversion of the 1968 film Rosemary's Baby, was the first episode written by The X-Files' executive story editor David Amann, a staff member who later became a regular contributor to the series. Campbell, already well known as a cult film actor in several Sam Raimi horror movies, was cast as Wayne Weinsider. Many of the episode's special effects were created without elaborate computer-generated effects. Critics have complimented the episode's unique representation of its antagonist, who has been classified as a sympathetic villain.
## Plot
In Hollins, Virginia, Wayne Weinsider (Bruce Campbell) and his pregnant wife Laura (Lisa Jane Persky) learn via an ultrasound scan that their unborn child has bizarre physical abnormalities, such as horn-like protrusions. Wayne appears to be especially distraught after hearing the news. That night, Laura has a terrifying dream in which a demon-like figure snatches the baby from her womb. When she wakes up, the couple discover that Laura has seemingly miscarried.
Laura's brother, local deputy sheriff Arky Stevens, reports her story to the X-Files section at the FBI. Agent Jeffrey Spender (Chris Owens) discards the report, but Mulder (David Duchovny) fishes the shredded report out of Spender's trash can and travels to Virginia. After Mulder interviews the Weinsiders, the police, who suspect an illegal abortion according to Scully (Gillian Anderson), search the property. Meanwhile, Wayne confesses to Laura that he destroyed evidence, claiming she aborted the child while in a trance-like state. He convinces Laura that his story is true, and when the police find remains of the baby in the garden furnace, Laura turns herself in. When Wayne visits Laura in jail, she becomes suspicious of him and is horrified to see a bite wound she delivered to the demon that attacked her on Wayne's neck. To evade detection, Wayne sucks out Laura's soul, but the EMT is able to save her life, much to his surprise, although she is comatose.
Mulder discovers that Wayne has another wife, Betsy Monroe, who is also pregnant. A background check of Wayne finds that he is a Czech immigrant who originally went by the name of Ivan Veles and has been widowed several times. Mulder suspects that Wayne is a demon who is trying to have a normal baby, and terminates pregnancies when the fetus exhibits demonic traits. After Betsy tells Wayne that her recent sonogram uncovers some irregularities in the baby's bone structure, Wayne proceeds with his abortion plan. Betsy then has a dream similar to Laura's, but recognizes the dream-demon as her husband and confronts him. As Mulder and Scully are driving to Betsy's home, they are met by a distraught and bloody Betsy driving Wayne's car, apparently having just lost her baby. The agents seek out Wayne and catch him digging in Betsy's backyard. Confronted, Wayne claims that he is digging up evidence before he is shot by a deputy. Wayne is taken to the hospital and placed in a bed next to Laura. When he sees her next to him, Wayne opens his mouth and returns her soul to her body, allowing her to recover as he dies.
Mulder and Scully discover the skeletal remains of several human babies in Betsy's yard, none with deformities, leading Mulder to deduce that Betsy is also a demon who is unable to have demonic offspring unless impregnated by another demon. Unlike Wayne, she has been terminating pregnancies that resulted in non-demonic babies – the very kind Wayne has been so desperate to have. As a demon, Betsy recognized Wayne as a male of her kind, which enabled her to stop him from extracting her baby and then frame him for the deaths of the buried babies in her yard.
In the final scene, Betsy is seen driving away in Wayne's convertible with a car seat from which a baby's mottled, clawed hand protrudes. She smiles at her child, momentarily revealing her demonic eyes.
## Production
### Background
"Terms of Endearment" was written by The X-Files executive story editor David Amann, making it his first writing contribution to the series. The concept for "Terms of Endearment" was "about the fifth or sixth idea" Amann came up with for the show. Amann's original idea was to write what he described as "Rosemary's Baby in reverse". He explained, "I had this idea [for doing the episode] not from the point of view of the hapless woman unwittingly impregnated, but from the point of view of the devil". Amann pitched his idea to series creator Chris Carter, who gave him the commission to write the rest of the episode.
According to Amann, the initial draft was "heavier on pure shock value and lighter on humor and human interest". In this version, the demon was shown as removing a serpent from Laura's womb and not a demon baby. In addition, the story unraveled in a more "linear" fashion and showed a demon husband going from human wife to human wife, killing them if unsuccessful in delivering a human baby. The series' regular writers felt that this initial version of the story had a certain "inevitability" to it. Carter suggested that the second woman should be a demon. Amann later admitted that this addition made the story "work well". Kerry Fall from DVD Journal suggested that the plot revolved around "the wives and lives of a demon trying to have a normal child."
The score for "Terms of Endearment" was composed by series regular Mark Snow, who used Gregorian chants to give the atmosphere a "creepy" feel. The 1995 song "Only Happy When It Rains" by alternative rock group Garbage plays several times in the episode, most notably when Betsy Monroe drives away with her demon baby. The quote "Zazas, zazas, nasatanada zazas", supposedly uttered by Laura Weinsider while in trance, is what the occultist Aleister Crowley used to open the 10th Aethyr of the Thelemic demon Choronzon. "Terms of Endearment" is not the first occasion that the series drew influence from Crowley; a high school from the episode "Die Hand Die Verletzt" was named after him as well.
### Casting
Rick Millikan selected Lisa Jane Persky, who was at the top of his casting "wish list", for the role of Laura. In the middle of filming, a cast member withdrew from the production for religious reasons. A mother withdrew her baby from the cast during the final run-through of the "cursed-birth" scene. Although a fan of the show, as a devout Catholic she was uncomfortable with her child representing a demon. Director Rob Bowman was sympathetic to her concerns, and the casting staff was able to find a replacement baby in less than 45 minutes. It was the first time during the filming of the series that a cast-member withdrew for religious reasons.
Bruce Campbell, known for taking leading roles in Sam Raimi horror movies such as The Evil Dead trilogy, was cast as the episode's antagonist Wayne Weinsider. Campbell had previously worked for the Fox network on his short-lived series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., which began as the lead-in show for The X-Files during the first season. Fox had initially assumed that Brisco County, Jr. was going to be the more successful series, while The X-Files was more unappreciatively referred to as "the other drama Fox ordered that spring". Several of the individuals who worked on the failed Brisco County, Jr. series later found a career working on The X-Files, which led Campbell to call the process a "coming home" experience.
Campbell first met both Duchovny and Anderson during the promotional campaigns for both series in 1993. He commented that, although Duchovny was known for playing a serious role on the show, in real life he was quite a funny person. During shooting, Campbell and Duchovny entertained themselves on set by pranking the crew members, eventually stopping it when crew members became upset. Although Campbell had a positive opinion of working on the show, he commented that the nature of the show did not allow for much improvisation, describing the production as a "well oiled machine".
### Filming
The first five seasons of the series were mainly filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia, and production of the show's sixth season was based in Los Angeles, California. The principal outdoor filming for "Terms of Endearment" took place around Pasadena, called "the most East Coast-like part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area" by Andy Meisler in his book The End and the Beginning. The car featured in the episode was a Chevrolet Camaro Z28 convertible. Meisler sardonically wrote that General Motors had "no qualms about seeing their vehicles driven onscreen by a relative of Satan".
Several of the special effects used in the episode were created in a "low-stress" manner that did not rely wholly on computer-generated imagery. During the childbirth scene, gas-burners were set a distance away from a fire-proof bed. The scene was then filmed with a long lens to give the effect that the fire was mere inches away from the bed. Producer John Shiban said that the film crew made "a big deal out of the eyes" to make the scene frightening. The devil sonogram was created by using the videotape of a real sonogram of a crew member's wife. The videotape was then edited to give it a demonic look.
The burnt baby skeleton was built from scratch. Originally, the crew had planned on renting a real fetal skeleton, but the \$3,000 cost forced them to make their own. Office manager Donovan Brown noted that, "we got two or three of those adults skeleton models, cut a foot or so off a leg here and shortened an arm there, glued them together to a plaster model of a fetal skull we found, and put together something that worked wonderfully".
## Themes
A main theme in the episode is the horror of child birth. Amann describes the episode as an inversion of the 1968 horror film Rosemary's Baby which is about a woman scared of giving birth to a demonic baby. As with many other episodes of the series, "Terms of Endearment" is heavily influenced by horror films, and features gothic imagery. In addition to Rosemary's Baby and other Roman Polanski films, the episode shows stylistic references to the 1972 film The Exorcist and the 1981 film The Evil Dead. The influence of the genre extends to the casting of Campbell, an actor unfamiliar to the mainstream public but with a prominent cult following among horror fans.
The main antagonist of "Terms of Endearment", Wayne Weinsider, is a child-murdering demon. However, the episode plays against genre archetypes by turning Wayne into a sympathetic villain. Critics have pointed out that the character's presentation was not entirely negative. Some have commented that Campbell humanized the character, portraying him in a manner that adds likability to a character who could have been more sinister. By the time Wayne is defeated, the audience is led to partially identify with him. He ultimately sacrifices himself to save the life of his wife, showcasing heroic qualities and subverting the way that villains are often portrayed in the genre.
## Broadcast and reception
### Initial ratings and reception
"Terms of Endearment" originally aired on the Fox network on January 3, 1999, with a tagline of "Born to raise hell. Tonight, something terrifying is about to be born". It earned a Nielsen rating of 10.5, with a 15 share, meaning that roughly 10.5 percent of all television-equipped households, and 15 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode, which was viewed by 18.70 million viewers. It later aired in the United Kingdom and Ireland on Sky1 on April 18, 1999, and received 0.62 million viewers, making it the eighth most watched television show that week.
Upon its first broadcast, the episode received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Michael Liedtke and George Avalos, in a review of the sixth season in The Charlotte Observer, called the episode "just plain bad." Sarah Stegall awarded the episode two stars out of five, positively comparing it to the work of Roman Polanski, but criticizing its failure to deliver truly scary material. Stegall mused that "Terms of Endearment" lacked the edgy writing of some of the best episodes of the series, though she did note that Campbell "turns in a good performance with mediocre material". She also criticized the depiction of religious material, comparing it negatively to other episodes with religious themes including "Revelations" and "Miracle Man".
Paula Vitaris from Cinefantastique gave the episode a mixed review and awarded it two stars out of four, calling it a disappointment. Vitaris heavily criticized Mulder's line: "I'm not a psychologist"—reportedly an ad lib from Duchovny himself—noting that it undermines established continuity within the series including the character's background in psychology. Tom Kessenich, in his 2002 book Examination: An Unauthorized Look at Seasons 6–9 of the X-Files, praises the installment, saying, "Place a devil in the plot and I'll follow you to see what you can cook up. ... I enjoyed this tale of a devil looking to be just a normal dad immensely." In his view the episode showed a return to the earlier horror-based narratives the series was known for; though he praises the casting of Campbell, he writes that moments between Mulder and Scully are lacking.
### Later reception
In the years following "Terms of Endearment"'s original broadcast, critical reception improved. Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, gave three stars out of five, describing it as "a very brave story". Shearman and Pearson felt that the episode suffered from its attempt to balance comedy and horror, "not having enough comedy to explore the premise properly, and not enough suspense to provide much drama". However, both Persky and Campbell were praised for their acting, despite the perceived shallowness of the latter's character. David Wharton of Cinema Blend called Campbell's performance "lowkey" and subtle, commenting that he portrayed Wayne Weinsider "a bit less madcap than many of the roles that he's known for". Wharton praised the casting, describing it as "against type", which he claimed worked well because the material of the episode was more serious and dramatic than usual for the series.
Emily VanDerWerff from The A.V. Club gave the episode a positive review and awarded it a "B". She praised Campbell's acting, calling him "the best thing about" the installment, and complimented the entry's general concept. VanDerWerff stated that after several humorous stories in a row, "Terms of Endearment" was a "return to form" for the series, bringing the season back to the more straightforward monster-of-the-week format. VanDerWerff did, however, note that the episode's biggest weaknesses were its limited use of Scully and its over-the-top use of Spender as a villain. Another critic from The A.V. Club, Zack Handlen, commented that "Terms of Endearment" was notably more influenced by horror than the following week's "The Rain King". Edward Olivier of The Celebrity Cafe stated that the installment strayed away from regular X-Files formula, showcasing Campbell in a "major role".
Retrospective reviews of "Terms of Endearment" with regards to the series as a whole were mixed. In a run-down of The X-Files guest stars who left a lasting impression, Lana Berkowitz from the Houston Chronicle included Campbell, calling him the "demon who wants to be a father." Christine Seghers of IGN described the entry as a "creepy standout" from the sixth season, and named Campbell's guest appearance as the sixth best of the series. Campbell's performance was called "moving" by Seghers, who viewed that Campbell managed to deliver a performance that "completely shed his trademark snark". Cinefantastique later named the dream sequence from "Terms of Endearment" as the ninth scariest moment in The X-Files. Andrew Payne from Starpulse cited the episode as the second most disappointing of the series, calling the premise "lame". Payne stated that only "Chinga", an episode written by author Stephen King, wasted its potential more.
## Impact
Following his involvement with this episode, Campbell was considered as a possible contender for the role of John Doggett, a character that would appear in the eighth season. Over a hundred actors auditioned for the role. Due to a contractual obligation, Campbell could not take any work during the filming of his series Jack of All Trades. On potentially being cast as the series regular, Campbell mused, "I had worked on an X-Files episode before, and I think they sort of remembered me from that. It was nice to be involved in that – even if you don't get it, it's nice to hang out at that party." The character was eventually portrayed by actor Robert Patrick. Later in Campbell's novel Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way, he joked that Patrick "stiffed him out of the role".
"Terms of Endearment" was the first entry of the series written by Amann, who beforehand had unsuccessfully pitched several ideas for the show. Based on the success of this episode, Amann went on to write several more episodes for the series, such as "Agua Mala" later in the same season. During the ninth season, Amann became one of the main supervising producers and had writing involvement in several episodes, most notably "Release" and "Hellbound".
Chris Owens, who portrayed Jeffrey Spender on the show, was negatively affected by the episode. Following the premiere of "Terms of Endearment", he received "strange reactions" from people on the street who were displeased with his character. In the series, the character staunchly disbelieves in the paranormal, and tries to remove the initial report about child-abducting demons in the episode, only for it to be salvaged by Mulder and Scully. People were so annoyed by the nature of the character that Owens was pestered during his everyday life; during one incident, a person angrily called him a "paper shredder". |
44,262,802 | Blank Space | 1,173,602,186 | 2014 single by Taylor Swift | [
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| "Blank Space" is a song by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, from her fifth studio album, 1989 (2014). The song was released to US radio stations as the second single from 1989 on November 10, 2014, by Republic Records in partnership with Big Machine. Swift co-wrote "Blank Space" with its producers Max Martin and Shellback. In the lyrics, she conceived the song as a satirical self-referential nod to her reputation as a flirtatious woman with a series of romantic attachments, which blemished her once-wholesome girl next door image. Musically, it is an electropop song with minimal hip hop-influenced beats.
"Blank Space" spent seven weeks atop the US Billboard Hot 100 and was certified eight times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It also topped charts in Australia, Canada, Iceland, Scotland, and South Africa. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported that "Blank Space" was one of the best-selling singles of 2015. Critics praised the song's production and Swift's songwriting; some picked it as 1989's highlight. The song earned three nominations at the 58th Grammy Awards, including two general categories: Record of the Year and Song of the Year. It featured on decade-end lists by such publications as Billboard, Rolling Stone, and Slant Magazine.
Joseph Kahn directed the music video for "Blank Space", which depicts Swift as a jealous woman who acts erratically upon suspecting her boyfriend's infidelity. Photography took place mostly at Oheka Castle, with a few additional scenes shot at Woolworth Estate. The video won Best Pop Video and Best Female Video at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. Swift included "Blank Space" on the set lists for three of her concert tours: the 1989 World Tour (2015), Reputation Stadium Tour (2018), and the Eras Tour (2023). The song has been adapted into cover versions of different genres by several rock musicians, including I Prevail and Ryan Adams.
## Background
Inspired by 1980s synth-pop with synthesizers, drum pads, and overlapped vocals, Taylor Swift decided to move away from the signature country styles of her previous releases and incorporate a straightforward pop production for her fifth studio album, 1989, which was released in 2014. The recording process began in mid-2013 concurrently with the start of Swift's headlining world tour in support of her fourth studio album Red. On 1989, Swift and Swedish producer Max Martin served as executive producers. Martin and his frequent collaborator Shellback produced seven out of 13 songs on the album's standard edition.
Having been known as "America's Sweetheart" thanks to her wholesome and down-to-earth girl next door image, Swift saw her reputation blemished due to her history of romantic relationships with a series of high-profile celebrities. The New York Times asserted in 2013 that her "dating history [had] begun to stir what feels like the beginning of a backlash", questioning whether Swift was in the midst of a quarter-life crisis. The Tampa Bay Times observed that until the release of 1989, Swift's love life had become a fixed tabloid interest and overshadowed her musicianship. Swift disliked the media portrayal of her as a "serial-dater", feeling that it undermined her professional works, and became reticent to discuss her personal life in public. The tabloid scrutiny on her image prompted her to write satirical songs about her perceived image, in addition to her traditional romantic themes.
## Lyrics and music
Talking to GQ in 2015, Swift said that she envisioned "Blank Space" to be a satirical self-referential nod to the media perception of her image as "a girl who's crazy but seductive but glamorous but nuts but manipulative". She admitted that she had felt personally attacked for a long time before realizing "it was kind of hilarious". She co-wrote the song with its producers, Max Martin and Shellback.
"Blank Space" follows the verse–chorus song structure. The lyrics in the verses are clipped, "Magic, madness, heaven, sin", which musicologist Nate Sloan said to set a mysterious and dreadful tone. At one point, Swift describes herself as a "nightmare dressed like a daydream". The refrain alludes to Swift's songwriting practice taking inspiration from her love life: the lyrics, "Got a long list of ex-lovers / They'll tell you I'm insane / But I've got a blank space, baby", are followed by a brief silence and then a clicking retractable pen sound, and Swift concludes the refrain, "And I'll write your name." After the song's release, the line "Got a long list of ex-lovers" was misheard by some audience as "All the lonely Starbucks lovers", which prompted internet discussions including a response from Starbucks themselves.
Swift told NME in 2015 that when "Blank Space" was released, "[half] the people got the joke, half the people really think that [she]was like really owning the fact that [she was] a psychopath". According to Sloan, the narrator of "Blank Space" is unreliable, and therefore it is open to interpretation whether the song is a true portrayal of Swift's character or not. In contemporary publications, journalists commented that the track represented 1989's lighthearted view on failed relationships and departed from the idealized romance on Swift's past albums. Others wrote that Swift made fun of her image and the media discourse surrounding her celebrity, which later served as the foundation for her sixth studio album Reputation (2017), an album exploring her public experiences and the media gossip.
Martin and Shellback employed a sparse production for "Blank Space" as Swift wanted the song to emphasize the lyrics and vocals. Musically, "Blank Space" is an electropop song that is set over minimal hip hop-influenced beats. The song incorporates synthesizers, percussioned guitar strums, and layered backing vocals. In the refrain, Swift sings in her higher register and the production crescendos with faster programmed drums. Some contemporary critics compared the song's minimal production to the music of New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde's music, specifically her 2013 album Pure Heroine.[^1] Spin's Andrew Unterberger wrote that as with the rest of 1989, "Blank Space" embraces 1980s pop music authenticity while incorporating a modern twist. Baesley thought that the minimal production may "sound bright and easy, but it's anything but the latter to create", and he called it "weapons-grade, professional pop".
## Release and commercial performance
Republic Records in partnership with Swift's then-label Big Machine announced in late October 2014 that "Blank Space" would serve as the second single from 1989, following the lead single "Shake It Off" in August. The song impacted US rhythmic crossover radio on November 10, 2014. The following day, Republic and Big Machine promoted the song to US hot adult contemporary and contemporary hit radio. A CD single version of "Blank Space" was released in Germany on January 2, 2015, by Universal Music Group.
"Blank Space" debuted at number 18 on the US Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated November 15, 2014. The single reached number one in its third week on the chart, supported by the release of its music video. It took the number-one position from 1989's lead single "Shake It Off", making Swift the first and to date, the only woman ever in Billboard Hot 100 chart history to succeed herself at the top spot. "Blank Space" remained atop the Billboard Hot 100 for seven consecutive weeks. As of July 2019, "Blank Space" has sold 4.6 million copies in the United States. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the single 8× Platinum, which denotes eight million units based on sales and track-equivalent on-demand streams. On the Hot 100 chart dated August 19, 2023, "Blank Space" re-entered at number 49, after it gained in streams as Swift had been performing it on the Eras Tour. It rose to number 46 the following week.
The single also reached number one in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and Scotland. It peaked atop the Euro Digital Song Sales, a Billboard component chart, and the Finnish Download Chart. "Blank Space" charted within the top five of national record charts, at number two in New Zealand, Poland, Slovakia, number three in Bulgaria, number four in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Israel, the UK, and number five in Lebanon. It received multi-platinum certifications in Australia (8× Platinum), Canada (4× Platinum), New Zealand (4× Platinum), and the UK (2× Platinum). According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the song was the eighth best-selling song of 2015, with 9.2 million track-equivalent units.
## Critical reception
The song received widespread acclaim. Upon the release of 1989, Shane Kimberline of musicOMH called "Blank Space" one of the album's best songs. PopMatters's Corey Baesley lauded it as "easily a candidate for the best pop song of 2014". Sydney Gore from The 405 deemed "Blank Space" the album's highlight, and Aimee Cliff from Fact labeled it one of Swift's "most enjoyable songs to date" for portraying Swift's love life in a larger-than-life manner. Drowned in Sound's Robert Leedham wrote that Swift succeeded in experimenting with new musical styles on 1989, specifically choosing "Blank Space" as an example.
The Observer critic Kitty Empire picked "Blank Space" as a song that showcased Swift's musical and lyrical maturity, calling it "an out-and-out pop song with an intriguingly skeletal undercarriage". Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Mikael Wood selected the track as one of the album's better songs because of Swift's songwriting craftsmanship. The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica deemed the song "Swift at her peak" that "serves to assert both her power and her primness". The Independent's Andy Gill was less enthusiastic, calling it a "corporate rebel clichéd [sic]" song.
Retrospective reviews of "Blank Space" have been positive. Critic Alexis Petridis of The Guardian in 2019 declared "Blank Space" the best single Swift had released, praising its success in transforming Swift's image from a country singer-songwriter to a pop star thanks to its "effortless" melody and witty lyrics. Rolling Stone reviewer Rob Sheffield wrote: "Every second of 'Blank Space' is perfect." Paste in 2020 described the song as "remarkably well-made, infectiously catchy, and legitimately funny", and named it the best song on 1989. Selja Rankin from Entertainment Weekly also dubbed "Blank Space" the best track on the album, praising the over-the-top lyrics and its catchy 1980s pop sound.
### Accolades
Rolling Stone ranked "Blank Space" sixth on their list of the best songs of 2014, 73rd on their list of the best songs of the 2010s decade, and 357th on their list of the greatest songs of all time. Time named it as the ninth best song in their year-end list. The song placed at number three on The Village Voice's annual year-end Pazz & Jop critics' poll of 2014. Stereogum and Uproxx ranked the song at numbers 49 and 72 on their lists of the best songs of the 2010s decade, respectively. Billboard named it one of the 100 "Songs That Defined the Decade". Katie Atkinson wrote that the single consolidated Swift's trademark autobiographical storytelling in music while "setting the standard for a new, self-aware pop star" in poking fun at her perceived image. On Slant Magazine's list of the 100 best singles of the 2010s, "Blank Space" ranked 15th. In 2021, Rolling Stone placed the song at number 357 on its list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
"Blank Space" won Song of the Year at the 2015 American Music Awards. At the 2016 BMI Awards, the song was one of the Award-Winning Songs that helped Swift earn the honor Songwriter of the Year. It earned a nomination for International Work of the Year at the 2015 APRA Awards in Australia. At the 58th Annual Grammy Awards in 2016, "Blank Space" was nominated in three categories—Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Solo Performance.
## Music video
### Development and release
Joseph Kahn directed the music video for "Blank Space". Swift approached Kahn with the idea for treatment, desiring the video to portray her self-deprecation as a "crazy villain" akin to the lyrics. According to Kahn, Swift envisioned "Blank Space" as "a video addressing this concept of, if she has so many boys breaking up with her maybe the problem isn't the boy, maybe the problem is her". Photography took place at two locations in Long Island: primary shooting took place at Oheka Castle, with a few additional scenes shot at Woolworth Estate. The video was shot over three days in September 2014; the last day was dedicated to film American Express Unstaged: Taylor Swift Experience, an interactive 360° mobile app in collaboration with American Express. For the video, Swift was thorough in choosing the concepts and imagery. Kahn spoke of his working experience with Swift on Mashable: "When you have an artist wanting to test her imaging, it's always great territory to be in".
Kahn took inspirations from Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange for the video's symmetrical framing style, calling it "a really funny way to approach a pop video". The video begins as Swift's love interest (played by model Sean O'Pry) drives a Shelby AC Cobra towards Swift's mansion. Upon arrival, he and Swift quickly become a loving couple. They engage in various romantic activities together, dancing, painting a portrait for the boyfriend, walking along the estate grounds, and riding horses into the woods. Halfway through the video, Swift notices him texting someone, and the couple begins to fall apart. They begin to fight, and Swift shows erratic behaviors such as throwing vases, slashing the painted portrait, and burning her boyfriend's clothes, which drives him to end the relationship. At a high point, Swift uses a golf club to destroy her boyfriend's car, a reference to Tiger Woods' 2009 cheating scandal. As the boyfriend leaves the estate, a new man (played by Andrea Denver) approaches, offering Swift a new hope for love.
Swift planned to premiere to the video on Good Morning America on November 11, 2014, but Yahoo! accidentally leaked it a day before. Swift posted the video onto her Vevo account quickly after the leak. The interactive app American Express Unstaged: Taylor Swift Experience, featuring the 360° video version of "Blank Space", was released concurrently. The user can choose to either follow Swift and her love interest throughout the linear storyline, or leave the storyline to explore other rooms in the mansion and find interactive easter eggs, such as Swift's childhood photos. The app was available for free on mobile app stores. Kahn talked to Rolling Stone that the app was created with "superfans" who wanted to "feel even closer to Swift" in mind.
### Reception
Upon release, media outlets compared the narrative of the video to that of Gone Girl, in the sense that both Swift and Gone Girl's protagonist "[strip] away the romantic sheen she's given all her relationships in the past". Randall Roberts from the Los Angeles Times wrote that Swift delivered an "Oscar-worthy" performance. Billboard praised the video's cinematic quality and aesthetics, and found Swift's self-referential portrayal amusing, which served as "icing on the blood-filled cake". Columnist Jessica Valenti from The Guardian complimented Swift's portrayal of her perceived image and dubbed the video "a feminist daydream", where "the narrow and sexist caricatures attached to women are acted out for our amusement, their full ridiculousness on display".
USA Today in 2017 named the video Swift's best music video up to date, calling it a "pure 'art' form". Spin also dubbed it the greatest video Swift had done so far, praising the video's combination of glamorous aesthetics and hilarious depiction of Swift's reputation. Entertainment Weekly in 2020 picked "Blank Space" as the best video among 1989 singles, describing it as "the only music video that can be earnestly described as 'Kubrickian'." The video for "Blank Space" won Best Pop Video and Best Female Video at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. It earned a nomination for Best International Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards Japan. The American Express Unstaged: Taylor Swift Experience app won Original Interactive Program at the 67th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. Rolling Stone placed "Blank Space" at number 67 on its list of 100 greatest music videos of all time.
## Live performances and other versions
Swift performed "Blank Space" during the "1989 Secret Session", live streamed by Yahoo! and iHeartRadio on October 27, 2014. Swift premiered the song on television at the 2014 American Music Awards, where she recreated the narrative of the music video, acting as a psychopathic woman who acts erratically towards her boyfriend. She again performed the song on The Voice on November 25, at the 2014 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show on December 2, and during Capital FM's Jingle Bell Ball 2014 in London, broadcast on December 5.
On February 25, 2015, Swift opened the 2015 Brit Awards with a rendition of "Blank Space". At the beginning of the performance, Swift sang the song in front of a white background featuring silhouettes of backup dancers. The song was part of the set lists for three of Swift's concert tours—the 1989 World Tour (2015), Reputation Stadium Tour (2018), and the Eras Tour (2023). On September 9, 2019, Swift performed the song at the City of Lover one-off concert in Paris, France. She performed the song again at the We Can Survive charity concert on October 19, 2019, in Los Angeles. At the 2019 American Music Awards, where Swift was honored Artist of the Decade, she performed "Blank Space" as part of a medley of her hits. She again performed the song at Capital FM's Jingle Bell Ball 2019 in London, and at iHeartRadio Z100's Jingle Ball 2019 in New York City.
Following the song's debut at the 2014 American Music Awards, rapper Pitbull uploaded a remix featuring his rap verse to SoundCloud on December 15, 2014. Retro music group Postmodern Jukebox transformed the song into a 1940s-inspired track in their cover. Rock band Imagine Dragons performed a slowed down rendition of the song sampling Ben E. King's "Stand by Me" at BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge in February 2015. Metalcore band I Prevail released a post-hardcore cover of "Blank Space" as their debut single in December 2014. The cover reached number nine on Billboard Hot Rock Songs and number 90 on the Billboard Hot 100, and received a platinum certification by the RIAA, which denotes one million track-equivalent units.
Rock singer Ryan Adams covered "Blank Space" on his 2015 track-by-track cover album of Swift's 1989. On his rendition, Adams incorporated stripped-down, acoustic string instruments, contrasting the original's electronic production. Indie singer Father John Misty released a cover version of the song in the style of the rock band the Velvet Underground in 2015. The cover is a reinterpretation of Adams's version and is built on the melody of the song "I'm Waiting for the Man".
## Credits and personnel
Credits are adapted from 1989 album liner notes.
- Taylor Swift – vocals, background vocals, songwriter, shouts
- Max Martin – producer, songwriter, keyboards, programming
- Shellback – producer, songwriter, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion, programming, shouts, stomps
- Michael Ilbert – audio recording
- Sam Holland – recording
- Cory Bice – recording assistant
- Serban Ghenea – mixing
- John Hanes – mixing engineer
- Tom Coyne – mastering
## Charts
### Weekly charts
### Year-end charts
### Decade-end charts
### All-time chart
## Certifications
## Release history
## "Blank Space (Taylor's Version)"
A re-recorded version of "Blank Space", titled "Blank Space (Taylor's Version)", is scheduled for release on October 27, 2023, as part of 1989 (Taylor's Version), Swift's fourth re-recorded album. The song is a part of the re-recorded music from Swift following the dispute over the ownership of the masters of her older discography.
## See also
- List of Billboard Hot 100 number ones of 2014
- List of Billboard Hot 100 number ones of 2015
- List of Billboard'' Adult Contemporary number ones of 2015
- List of Canadian Hot 100 number-one singles of 2014
- List of number-one singles of 2014 (Australia)
- List of number-one singles of 2015 (South Africa)
- List of most-viewed YouTube videos
[^1]: |
50,226 | William Wilberforce | 1,171,979,341 | English politician and abolitionist (1759–1833) | [
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| William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 – 29 July 1833) was a British politician, philanthropist and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780, and became an independent Member of Parliament (MP) for Yorkshire (1784–1812). In 1785, he underwent a conversion experience and became an evangelical Christian, which resulted in major changes to his lifestyle and a lifelong concern for reform.
In 1787, Wilberforce came into contact with Thomas Clarkson and a group of activists against the slave trade, including Granville Sharp, Hannah More and Charles Middleton. They persuaded Wilberforce to take on the cause of abolition, and he soon became a leading English abolitionist. He headed the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade for 20 years until the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.
Wilberforce was convinced of the importance of religion, morality and education. He championed causes and campaigns such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice, British missionary work in India, the creation of a free colony in Sierra Leone, the foundation of the Church Mission Society and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. His underlying conservatism led him to support politically and socially repressive legislation, and resulted in criticism that he was ignoring injustices at home while campaigning for the enslaved abroad.
In later years, Wilberforce supported the campaign for the complete abolition of slavery and continued his involvement after 1826, when he resigned from Parliament because of his failing health. That campaign led to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which abolished slavery in most of the British Empire. Wilberforce died just three days after hearing that the passage of the Act through Parliament was assured. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to his friend William Pitt the Younger.
## Early life and education
Wilberforce was born in Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, on 24 August 1759. He was the only son of Robert Wilberforce (1728–1768), a wealthy merchant, and his wife, Elizabeth Bird (1730–1798). His grandfather, William (1690–1774), had made the family fortune in the maritime trade with Baltic countries. He had twice been elected mayor of Hull.
Wilberforce was a small, sickly and delicate child with poor eyesight. In 1767, he began attending Hull Grammar School, which at the time was headed by a young, dynamic headmaster, Joseph Milner, who was to become a lifelong friend. Wilberforce profited from the supportive atmosphere at the school, until his father's death in 1768. With his mother struggling to cope, the nine-year-old Wilberforce was sent to a prosperous uncle and aunt with houses in both St James's Place, London, and Wimbledon, at that time a village 7 miles (11 km) south-west of London. He attended an "indifferent" boarding school in Putney for two years. He spent his holidays in Wimbledon, where he grew extremely fond of his relatives. He became interested in evangelical Christianity due to his relatives' influence, especially that of his aunt Hannah, sister of the wealthy merchant John Thornton, a philanthropist and a supporter of the leading Methodist preacher George Whitefield.
Wilberforce's staunchly Church of England mother and grandfather, alarmed at these nonconformist influences and at his leanings towards evangelicalism, brought the 12-year-old boy back to Hull in 1771. Wilberforce was heartbroken at being separated from his aunt and uncle. His family opposed a return to Hull Grammar School because the headmaster had become a Methodist, and Wilberforce therefore continued his education at nearby Pocklington School from 1771 to 1776. Influenced by Methodist scruples, he initially resisted Hull's lively social life, but, as his religious fervour diminished, he embraced theatre-going, attended balls, and played cards.
In October 1776, at the age of seventeen, Wilberforce went up to St John's College, Cambridge. The deaths of his grandfather and uncle, in 1774 and 1777 respectively, had left him independently wealthy and as a result he had little inclination or need to apply himself to serious study. Instead he immersed himself in the social round of student life and pursued a hedonistic lifestyle, enjoying cards, gambling and late-night drinking sessions – although he found the excesses of some of his fellow students distasteful. Witty, generous and an excellent conversationalist, Wilberforce was a popular figure. He made many friends, including the more studious future Prime Minister William Pitt. Despite his lifestyle and lack of interest in studying, he managed to pass his examinations and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1781 and a Master of Arts degree in 1788.
## Early parliamentary career
Wilberforce began to consider a political career while still at university and during the winter of 1779–1780, he and Pitt frequently watched House of Commons debates from the gallery. Pitt, already set on a political career, encouraged Wilberforce to join him in obtaining a parliamentary seat. In September 1780, at the age of 21 and while still a student, Wilberforce was elected Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull, spending over £8,000, as was the custom of the time, to ensure he received the necessary votes. Free from financial pressures, Wilberforce sat as an independent, resolving to be "no party man." Criticised at times for inconsistency, he supported both Tory and Whig governments according to his conscience, working closely with the party in power, and voting on specific measures according to their merits.
Wilberforce attended Parliament regularly, but he also maintained a lively social life, becoming an habitué of gentlemen's gambling clubs such as Goostree's and Boodle's in Pall Mall, London. The writer and socialite Madame de Staël described him as the "wittiest man in England" and, according to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the Prince of Wales said that he would go anywhere to hear Wilberforce sing. Wilberforce used his speaking voice to great effect in political speeches; the diarist and author James Boswell witnessed Wilberforce's eloquence in the House of Commons and noted, "I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale."
During the frequent government changes of 1781–1784, Wilberforce supported his friend Pitt in parliamentary debates. In autumn 1783, Pitt, Wilberforce and Edward Eliot (later to become Pitt's brother-in-law), travelled to France for a six-week holiday together. After a difficult start in Rheims, where their presence aroused police suspicion that they were English spies, they visited Paris, meeting Benjamin Franklin, General Lafayette, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, and joined the French court at Fontainebleau.
Pitt became Prime Minister in December 1783, with Wilberforce a key supporter of his minority government. Despite their close friendship, there is no record that Pitt offered Wilberforce a ministerial position in this or future governments. This may have been due to Wilberforce's wish to remain an independent MP. Alternatively, Wilberforce's frequent tardiness and disorganisation, as well as his chronic eye problems that at times made reading impossible, may have convinced Pitt that his trusted friend was not ministerial material. When Parliament was dissolved in the spring of 1784, Wilberforce decided to stand as a candidate for the county of Yorkshire in the 1784 general election. On 6 April, he was returned as MP for Yorkshire at the age of twenty-four.
### Conversion
In October 1784, Wilberforce embarked upon a tour of Europe which would ultimately change his life and determine his future career. He travelled with his mother and sister in the company of Isaac Milner, the brilliant younger brother of his former headmaster, who had been Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, in the year when Wilberforce first went up. They visited the French Riviera and enjoyed the usual pastimes of dinners, cards, and gambling. In February 1785, Wilberforce returned to London temporarily, to support Pitt's proposals for parliamentary reforms. He rejoined the party in Genoa, Italy, from where they continued their tour to Switzerland. Milner accompanied Wilberforce to England, and on the journey they read "The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul" by Philip Doddridge, a leading early 18th-century English nonconformist.
Wilberforce's spiritual journey is thought to have changed course at this time. He started to rise early to read the Bible and pray and kept a private journal. He underwent an evangelical conversion, regretting his past life and resolving to commit his future life and work to the service of God. His conversion changed some of his habits, but not his nature: he remained outwardly cheerful, interested and respectful, tactfully urging others towards his new faith. Inwardly, he underwent an agonising struggle and became relentlessly self-critical, harshly judging his spirituality, use of time, vanity, self-control and relationships with others.
At the time, religious enthusiasm was generally regarded as a social transgression and was stigmatised in polite society. Evangelicals in the upper classes, such as Sir Richard Hill, the Methodist MP for Shropshire, and Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, were exposed to contempt and ridicule, and Wilberforce's conversion led him to question whether he should remain in public life. He sought guidance from John Newton, a leading evangelical Anglican clergyman of the day and Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London. Both Newton and Pitt counselled him to remain in politics, and he resolved to do so "with increased diligence and conscientiousness". Thereafter, his political views were informed by his faith and by his desire to promote Christianity and Christian ethics in private and public life. His views were often deeply conservative, opposed to radical changes in a God-given political and social order, and focused on issues such as the observance of the Sabbath and the eradication of immorality through education and reform. As a result, he was often distrusted by progressive voices because of his conservatism, and regarded with suspicion by many Tories who saw evangelicals as radicals, bent on the overthrow of church and state.
In 1786, Wilberforce leased a house in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, in order to be near Parliament. He began using his parliamentary position to advocate reform by introducing a Registration Bill, proposing limited changes to parliamentary election procedures. In response to the need for bodies for dissection by surgeons, he brought forward a bill to extend the measure permitting the dissection after execution of criminals such as rapists, arsonists, burglars and violent robbers. The bill also advocated the reduction of sentences for women convicted of treason, a crime that at the time included a husband's murder. The House of Commons passed both bills, but they were defeated in the House of Lords.
### Abolition of the transatlantic slave trade
#### Initial decision
The British initially became involved in the slave trade during the 16th century. By 1783, the triangular route that took British-made goods to Africa to buy slaves, transported the enslaved to the West Indies, and then brought slave-grown products such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton to Britain, represented about 80 per cent of Great Britain's foreign income. British ships dominated the slave trade, supplying French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and British colonies, and in peak years carried forty thousand enslaved men, women and children across the Atlantic in the horrific conditions of the middle passage. Of the estimated 11 million Africans transported into slavery, about 1.4 million died during the voyage.
The British campaign to abolish the slave trade is generally considered to have begun in the 1780s with the establishment of the Quakers' anti-slavery committees, and their presentation to Parliament of the first slave trade petition in 1783. The same year, Wilberforce, while dining with his old Cambridge friend Gerard Edwards, met Rev. James Ramsay, a ship's surgeon who had become a clergyman on the island of St Christopher (later St Kitts) in the Leeward Islands, and a medical supervisor of the plantations there. What Ramsay had witnessed of the conditions endured by the enslaved peoples, both at sea and on the plantations, horrified him. Returning to England after fifteen years, he accepted the living of Teston, Kent in 1781, and there met Sir Charles Middleton, Lady Middleton, Thomas Clarkson, Hannah More and others, a group that later became known as the Testonites. Interested in promoting Christianity and moral improvement in Britain and overseas, they were appalled by Ramsay's reports of the depraved lifestyles of slave owners, the cruel treatment meted out to the enslaved, and the lack of Christian instruction provided to the enslaved people. With their encouragement and help, Ramsay spent three years writing An essay on the treatment and conversion of African slaves in the British sugar colonies, which was highly critical of slavery in the West Indies. The book, published in 1784, was to have an important impact in raising public awareness and interest, and it excited the ire of West Indian planters who in the coming years attacked both Ramsay and his ideas in a series of pro-slavery tracts.
Wilberforce apparently did not follow up on his meeting with Ramsay. However, three years later, and inspired by his new faith, Wilberforce was growing interested in humanitarian reform. In November 1786, he received a letter from Sir Charles Middleton that re-opened his interest in the slave trade. At the urging of Lady Middleton, Sir Charles suggested that Wilberforce bring forward the abolition of the slave trade in Parliament. Wilberforce responded that he "felt the great importance of the subject, and thought himself unequal to the task allotted to him, but yet would not positively decline it". He began to read widely on the subject, and met with the Testonites at Middleton's home at Barham Court in Teston in the early winter of 1786–1787.
In early 1787, Thomas Clarkson, a fellow graduate of St John's, Cambridge, who had become convinced of the need to end the slave trade after writing a prize-winning essay on the subject while at Cambridge, called upon Wilberforce at Old Palace Yard with a published copy of the work. This was the first time the two men had met; their collaboration would last nearly fifty years. Clarkson began to visit Wilberforce on a weekly basis, bringing first-hand evidence he had obtained about the slave trade. The Quakers, already working for abolition, also recognised the need for influence within Parliament, and urged Clarkson to secure a commitment from Wilberforce to bring forward the case for abolition in the House of Commons.
It was arranged that Bennet Langton, a Lincolnshire landowner and mutual acquaintance of Wilberforce and Clarkson, would organise a dinner party in order to ask Wilberforce formally to lead the parliamentary campaign. The dinner took place on 13 March 1787; other guests included Charles Middleton, Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Windham MP, James Boswell and Isaac Hawkins Browne MP. By the end of the evening, Wilberforce had agreed in general terms that he would bring forward the abolition of the slave trade in Parliament, "provided that no person more proper could be found".
The same spring, on 12 May 1787, the still hesitant Wilberforce held a conversation with William Pitt and the future Prime Minister William Grenville as they sat under a large oak tree on Pitt's estate in Kent. Under what came to be known as the "Wilberforce Oak" at Holwood House, Pitt challenged his friend: "Wilberforce, why don't you give notice of a motion on the subject of the Slave Trade? You have already taken great pains to collect evidence, and are therefore fully entitled to the credit which doing so will ensure you. Do not lose time, or the ground will be occupied by another." Wilberforce's response is not recorded, but he later declared in old age that he could "distinctly remember the very knoll on which I was sitting near Pitt and Grenville" where he made his decision.
Wilberforce's involvement in the abolition movement was motivated by a desire to put his Christian principles into action and to serve God in public life. He and other evangelicals were horrified by what they perceived was a depraved and un-Christian trade, and the greed and avarice of the owners and traders. Wilberforce sensed a call from God, writing in a journal entry in 1787 that "God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners". The conspicuous involvement of evangelicals in the highly popular anti-slavery movement served to improve the status of a group otherwise associated with the less popular campaigns against vice and immorality.
## Early parliamentary action
On 22 May 1787, the first meeting of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade took place, bringing like-minded British Quakers and Anglicans together in the same organisation for the first time. The committee chose to campaign against the slave trade rather than slavery itself, with many members believing that slavery would eventually disappear as a natural consequence of the abolition of the trade. Wilberforce, though involved informally, did not join the committee officially until 1791.
The society was highly successful in raising public awareness and support, and local chapters sprang up throughout Great Britain. Clarkson travelled the country researching and collecting first-hand testimony and statistics, while the committee promoted the campaign, pioneering techniques such as lobbying, writing pamphlets, holding public meetings, gaining press attention, organising boycotts and even using a campaign logo: an image of a kneeling slave above the motto "Am I not a Man and a Brother?", designed by the renowned pottery-maker Josiah Wedgwood. The committee also sought to influence slave-trading nations such as France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Holland and the United States, corresponding with anti-slavery activists in other countries and organising the translation of English-language books and pamphlets. These included books by former enslaved men, Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, who had published influential works on slavery and the slave trade in 1787 and 1789 respectively. They and other free blacks, collectively known as "Sons of Africa", spoke at debating societies and wrote spirited letters to newspapers, periodicals and prominent figures, as well as public letters of support to campaign allies. Hundreds of parliamentary petitions opposing the slave trade were received in 1788 and following years, with hundreds of thousands of signatories in total. The campaign proved to be the world's first grassroots human rights campaign, in which men and women volunteers from different social classes and backgrounds worked to end the injustices suffered by others.
Wilberforce had planned to introduce a motion giving notice that he would bring forward a bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade during the 1789 parliamentary session. However, in January 1788, he was taken ill with a probable stress-related condition, now thought to be ulcerative colitis. It was several months before he was able to resume work, and he spent time convalescing at Bath and Cambridge. His regular bouts of gastrointestinal illnesses precipitated the use of moderate quantities of opium, which proved effective in alleviating his condition, and which he continued to use for the rest of his life.
In Wilberforce's absence, Pitt, who had long been supportive of abolition, introduced the preparatory motion himself, and ordered a Privy Council investigation into the slave trade, followed by a House of Commons review.
With the publication of the Privy Council report in April 1789 and following months of planning, Wilberforce commenced his parliamentary campaign. On 12 May 1789, he made his first major speech on the subject of abolition in the House of Commons, in which he reasoned that the trade was morally reprehensible and an issue of natural justice. Drawing on Thomas Clarkson's mass of evidence, he described in detail the appalling conditions in which enslaved people travelled from Africa in the middle passage, and argued that abolishing the trade would also bring an improvement to the conditions of existing slaves in the West Indies. He moved twelve resolutions condemning the slave trade, but made no reference to the abolition of slavery itself, instead dwelling on the potential for reproduction in the existing slave population should the trade be abolished. With the tide running against them, the opponents of abolition delayed the vote by proposing that the House of Commons hear its own evidence, and Wilberforce, in a move that has subsequently been criticised for prolonging the slave trade, reluctantly agreed. The hearings were not completed by the end of the parliamentary session, and were deferred until the following year. In the meantime, Wilberforce and Clarkson tried unsuccessfully to take advantage of the egalitarian atmosphere of the French Revolution to press for France's abolition of the trade, which was, in any event, to be abolished in 1794 as a result of the bloody slave revolt in St. Domingue (later to be known as Haiti), although later briefly restored by Napoleon in 1802. In January 1790, Wilberforce succeeded in speeding up the hearings by gaining approval for a smaller parliamentary select committee to consider the vast quantity of evidence which had been accumulated. Wilberforce's house in Old Palace Yard became a centre for the abolitionists' campaign and a focus for many strategy meetings. Petitioners for other causes also besieged him there, and his ante-room was thronged from an early hour, like "Noah's Ark, full of beasts clean and unclean", according to Hannah More.
Interrupted by a general election in June 1790, the committee finally finished hearing witnesses, and in April 1791 with a closely reasoned four-hour speech, Wilberforce introduced the first parliamentary bill to abolish the slave trade. However, after two evenings of debate, the bill was easily defeated by 163 votes to 88, the political climate having swung in a conservative direction in the wake of the French Revolution and in reaction to an increase in radicalism and to slave revolts in the French West Indies. Such was the public hysteria of the time that even Wilberforce himself was suspected by some of being a Jacobin agitator.
This was the beginning of a protracted parliamentary campaign, during which Wilberforce's commitment never wavered, despite frustration and hostility. He was supported in his work by fellow members of the so-called Clapham Sect, among whom was his best friend and cousin Henry Thornton. Holding evangelical Christian convictions, and consequently dubbed "the Saints", the group lived in large houses surrounding the common in Clapham, then a village to the south-west of London. Wilberforce accepted an invitation to share a house with Henry Thornton in 1792, moving into his own home after Thornton's marriage in 1796. The "Saints" were an informal community, characterised by considerable intimacy as well as a commitment to practical Christianity and an opposition to slavery. They developed a relaxed family atmosphere, wandering freely in and out of each other's homes and gardens, and discussing the many religious, social and political topics that engaged them.
Pro-slavery advocates claimed that enslaved Africans were lesser human beings who benefited from their bondage. Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect and others were anxious to demonstrate that Africans, and particularly freed slaves, had human and economic abilities beyond the slave trade, and that they were capable of sustaining a well-ordered society, trade and cultivation. Inspired in part by the utopian vision of Granville Sharp, they became involved in the establishment in 1792 of a free colony in Sierra Leone with black settlers from Britain, Nova Scotia and Jamaica, as well as native Africans and some whites. They formed the Sierra Leone Company, with Wilberforce subscribing liberally to the project in money and time. The dream was of an ideal society in which races would mix on equal terms; the reality was fraught with tension, crop failures, disease, death, war and defections to the slave trade. Initially a commercial venture, the British government assumed responsibility for the colony in 1808. The colony, although troubled at times, was to become a symbol of anti-slavery in which residents, communities and African tribal chiefs, worked together to prevent enslavement at the source, supported by a British naval blockade to stem the region's slave trade.
On 2 April 1792, Wilberforce again brought a bill calling for abolition of the slave trade. The memorable debate that followed drew contributions from the greatest orators in the house, William Pitt and Charles James Fox, as well as from Wilberforce himself. Henry Dundas, as Home Secretary, proposed a compromise solution of gradual abolition of the trade, over a number of years. This was passed by 230 to 85 votes, but Wilberforce believed that it was little more than a clever ploy, with the intention of ensuring that total abolition would be delayed indefinitely.
### War with France
On 26 February 1793, another vote to abolish the slave trade was narrowly defeated by eight votes. The outbreak of war with France the same month effectively prevented any further serious consideration of the issue, as politicians concentrated on the national crisis and the threat of invasion. The same year, and again in 1794, Wilberforce unsuccessfully brought before Parliament a bill to outlaw British ships from supplying enslaved people to foreign colonies. He voiced his concern about the war and urged Pitt and his government to make greater efforts to end hostilities. Growing more alarmed, on 31 December 1794, Wilberforce moved that the government seek a peaceful resolution with France, a stance that created a temporary breach in his long friendship with Pitt.
Abolition continued to be associated in the public consciousness with the French Revolution and with British radical groups, resulting in a decline in public support. In 1795, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade ceased to meet, and Clarkson retired in ill-health to the Lake District. However, despite the decreased interest in abolition, Wilberforce continued to introduce abolition bills throughout the 1790s.
The early years of the 19th century once again saw an increased public interest in abolition. In 1804, Clarkson resumed his work and the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade began meeting again, strengthened with prominent new members such as Zachary Macaulay, Henry Brougham and James Stephen. In June 1804, Wilberforce's bill to abolish the slave trade successfully passed all its stages through the House of Commons. However, it was too late in the parliamentary session for it to complete its passage through the House of Lords. On its reintroduction during the 1805 session, it was defeated, with even the usually sympathetic Pitt failing to support it. On this occasion and throughout the campaign, abolition was held back by Wilberforce's trusting, even credulous nature, and his deferential attitude towards those in power. He found it difficult to believe that men of rank would not do what he perceived to be the right thing, and was reluctant to confront them when they did not.
### Final phase of the campaign
Following Pitt's death in January 1806, Wilberforce began to collaborate more with the Whigs, especially the abolitionists. He gave general support to the Grenville–Fox administration, which brought more abolitionists into the cabinet; Wilberforce and Charles Fox led the campaign in the House of Commons, while Lord Grenville advocated the cause in the House of Lords. A radical change of tactics, which involved the introduction of a bill to ban British subjects from aiding or participating in the slave trade to the French colonies, was suggested by the maritime lawyer James Stephen. It was a shrewd move, since the majority of British ships were now flying American flags and supplying enslaved people to foreign colonies with whom Britain was at war.
A bill was introduced and approved by the cabinet, and Wilberforce and other abolitionists maintained a self-imposed silence, so as not to draw any attention to the effect of the bill. The approach proved successful, and the new Foreign Slave Trade Bill was quickly passed, and received royal assent on 23 May 1806. Wilberforce and Clarkson had collected a large volume of evidence against the slave trade over the previous two decades, and Wilberforce spent the latter part of 1806 writing A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was a comprehensive restatement of the abolitionists' case. The death of Fox in September 1806 was a blow, but was followed quickly by a general election in the autumn of 1806. Slavery became an election issue, bringing more abolitionist MPs into the House of Commons, including former military men who had personally experienced the horrors of slavery and slave revolts.
Wilberforce was re-elected as an MP for Yorkshire, after which he returned to finishing and publishing his Letter, in reality a 400-page book which formed the basis for the final phase of the campaign. Lord Grenville, the Prime Minister, was determined to introduce an Abolition Bill in the House of Lords, rather than in the House of Commons, taking it through its greatest challenge first. When a final vote was taken, the bill was passed in the House of Lords by a large margin. Sensing a breakthrough that had been long anticipated, Charles Grey moved for a second reading in the Commons on 23 February 1807. As tributes were made to Wilberforce, whose face streamed with tears, the bill was carried by 283 votes to 16. Excited supporters suggested taking advantage of the large majority to seek the abolition of slavery itself, but Wilberforce made it clear that total emancipation was not the immediate goal: "They had for the present no object immediately before them, but that of putting stop directly to the carrying of men in British ships to be sold as slaves." The Slave Trade Act received royal assent on 25 March 1807.
## Personal life
In his youth, William Wilberforce showed little interest in women, but when he was in his late thirties his friend Thomas Babington recommended 25-year-old Barbara Ann Spooner (1771–1847) as a potential bride. Wilberforce met her two days later on 15 April 1797, and was immediately smitten; following an eight-day whirlwind romance, he proposed. Despite the urgings of friends to slow down, the couple married at the Church of St Swithin in Bath, Somerset, on 30 May 1797. They were devoted to each other, and Barbara was very attentive and supportive to Wilberforce in his increasing ill health, though she showed little interest in his political activities. They had six children in fewer than ten years: William (born 1798), Barbara (born 1799), Elizabeth (born 1801), Robert (born 1802), Samuel (born 1805) and Henry (born 1807). Wilberforce was an indulgent and adoring father who revelled in his time at home and at play with his children.
## Other concerns
### Political and social reform
Wilberforce was highly conservative on many political and social issues. He advocated change in society through Christianity and improvement in morals, education and religion, fearing and opposing radical causes and revolution. The radical writer William Cobbett was among those who attacked what they saw as Wilberforce's hypocrisy in campaigning for better working conditions for enslaved people while British workers lived in terrible conditions at home. "Never have you done one single act, in favour of the labourers of this country", he wrote. Critics noted Wilberforce's support of the suspension of habeas corpus in 1795 and his votes for Pitt's "Gagging Bills", which banned meetings of more than 50 people, allowing speakers to be arrested and imposing harsh penalties on those who attacked the constitution. Wilberforce was opposed to giving workers' rights to organise into unions, in 1799 speaking in favour of the Combination Act, which suppressed trade union activity throughout Britain, and calling unions "a general disease in our society". He also opposed an enquiry into the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in which eleven protesters were killed at a political rally demanding reform. Concerned about "bad men who wished to produce anarchy and confusion", he approved of the government's Six Acts, which further limited public meetings and seditious writings. Wilberforce's actions led the essayist William Hazlitt to condemn him as one "who preaches vital Christianity to untutored savages, and tolerates its worst abuses in civilised states."
Wilberforce's views of women and religion were also conservative. He disapproved of women anti-slavery activists such as Elizabeth Heyrick, who organised women's abolitionist groups in the 1820s, protesting: "[F]or ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions—these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture." Wilberforce initially strongly opposed bills for Catholic emancipation, which would have allowed Catholics to become MPs, hold public office and serve in the army, although by 1813, he had changed his views and spoke in favour of a similar bill.
More progressively, Wilberforce advocated legislation to improve the working conditions for chimney-sweeps and textile workers, engaged in prison reform, and supported campaigns to restrict capital punishment and the severe punishments meted out under the Game laws. He recognised the importance of education in alleviating poverty, and when Hannah More and her sister established Sunday schools for the poor in Somerset and the Mendips, he provided financial and moral support as they faced opposition from landowners and Anglican clergy. From the late 1780s onward, Wilberforce campaigned for limited parliamentary reform, such as the abolition of rotten boroughs and the redistribution of Commons seats to growing towns and cities, though by 1832, he feared that such measures went too far. With others, Wilberforce founded the world's first animal welfare organisation, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). He was also opposed to duelling, which he described as the "disgrace of a Christian society" and was appalled when his friend Pitt engaged in a duel with George Tierney in 1798, particularly as it occurred on a Sunday, the Christian day of rest.
Wilberforce was generous with his time and money, believing that those with wealth had a duty to give a significant portion of their income to the needy. Yearly, he gave away thousands of pounds, much of it to clergymen to distribute in their parishes. He paid off the debts of others, supported education and missions, and in a year of food shortages, gave to charity more than his own yearly income. He was exceptionally hospitable, and could not bear to sack any of his servants. As a result, his home was full of old and incompetent servants kept on in charity. Although he was often months behind in his correspondence, Wilberforce responded to numerous requests for advice or for help in obtaining professorships, military promotions and livings for clergymen, or for the reprieve of death sentences.
### Evangelical Christianity
A supporter of the evangelical wing of the Church of England, Wilberforce believed that the revitalisation of the church and individual Christian observance would lead to a harmonious, moral society. He sought to elevate the status of religion in public and private life, making piety fashionable in both the upper- and middle-classes of society. To this end, in April 1797, Wilberforce published A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of This Country Contrasted With Real Christianity, on which he had been working since 1793. This was an exposition of New Testament doctrine and teachings and a call for a revival of Christianity, as a response to the moral decline of the nation, illustrating his own personal testimony and the views which inspired him. The book proved to be influential and a best-seller by the standards of the day; 7,500 copies were sold within six months, and it was translated into several languages.
Wilberforce fostered and supported missionary activity in Britain and abroad, and was involved with other members of the Clapham Sect in various evangelical and charitable organisations. He was a founding member of the Church Missionary Society (since renamed the Church Mission Society) and an early vice-president of the London Society for promoting Christianity among the Jews (later the Church's Ministry Among Jewish People). Horrified by the lack of Christian evangelism in India, Wilberforce used the 1793 renewal of the British East India Company's charter to propose the addition of clauses requiring the company to provide teachers and chaplains and to commit to the "religious improvement" of Indians. The plan was unsuccessful due to lobbying by the directors of the company, who feared that their commercial interests would be damaged. Wilberforce tried again in 1813, when the charter next came up for renewal. Using petitions, meetings, lobbying and letter writing, he successfully campaigned for changes to the charter. Speaking in favour of the Charter Act 1813, he criticised the East India Company and their rule in India for its hypocrisy and racial prejudice, while also condemning aspects of Hinduism including the caste system, infanticide, polygamy and suttee. "Our religion is sublime, pure beneficent", he said, "theirs is mean, licentious and cruel".
### Moral reform
Greatly concerned by what he perceived to be the degeneracy of British society, Wilberforce was also active in matters of moral reform, lobbying against "the torrent of profaneness that every day makes more rapid advances", and considered this issue and the abolition of the slave trade as equally important goals. At the suggestion of Wilberforce and Bishop Porteus, King George III was requested by the Archbishop of Canterbury to issue in 1787 A Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, as a remedy for the rising tide of immorality. The proclamation commanded the prosecution of those guilty of "excessive drinking, blasphemy, profane swearing and cursing, lewdness, profanation of the Lord's Day, and other dissolute, immoral, or disorderly practices". Greeted largely with public indifference, Wilberforce sought to increase its impact by mobilising public figures to the cause, and by founding the Society for the Suppression of Vice. This and other societies in which Wilberforce was a prime mover, such as the Proclamation Society, mustered support for the prosecution of those who had been charged with violating relevant laws, including brothel keepers, distributors of pornographic material, and those who did not respect the Sabbath.
The writer and clergyman Sydney Smith criticised Wilberforce for being more interested in the sins of the poor than those of the rich, and suggested that a better name would be the "Society for suppressing the vices of persons whose income does not exceed £500 per annum". The societies were not highly successful in terms of membership and support, although their activities did lead to the imprisonment of Thomas Williams, the London printer of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Wilberforce's attempts to legislate against adultery and Sunday newspapers were also in vain; his involvement and leadership in other, less punitive, approaches were more successful in the long-term, however. By the end of his life, British morals, manners, and sense of social responsibility had increased, paving the way for future changes in societal conventions and attitudes during the Victorian era.
### Emancipation of enslaved Africans
The hopes of the abolitionists notwithstanding, slavery did not wither with the end of the slave trade in the British Empire, nor did the living conditions of the enslaved improve. The trade continued, with few countries following suit by abolishing the trade, and with some British ships disregarding the legislation. The Royal Navy patrolled the Atlantic intercepting slave ships from other countries. Wilberforce worked with the members of the African Institution to ensure the enforcement of abolition and to promote abolitionist negotiations with other countries. In particular, the United States had abolished the slave trade after 1808 and Wilberforce lobbied the American government to enforce its own mandated prohibition more strongly.
The same year, Wilberforce moved his family from Clapham to a sizeable mansion with a large garden in Kensington Gore, closer to the Houses of Parliament. Never strong, and by 1812 in worsening health, Wilberforce resigned his Yorkshire seat, and became MP for the rotten borough of Bramber in Sussex, a seat with little or no constituency obligations, thus allowing him more time for his family and the causes that interested him. From 1816, Wilberforce introduced a series of bills which would require the compulsory registration of enslaved people, together with details of their country of origin, permitting the illegal importation of foreign slaves to be detected. Later in the same year he began publicly to denounce slavery itself, though he did not demand immediate emancipation, as "They had always thought the slaves incapable of liberty at present, but hoped that by degrees a change might take place as the natural result of the abolition."
In 1820, after a period of poor health, and with his eyesight failing, Wilberforce took the decision to further limit his public activities, although he became embroiled in unsuccessful mediation attempts between King George IV, and his estranged wife Caroline of Brunswick, who had sought her rights as queen of the realm. Nevertheless, Wilberforce still hoped "to lay a foundation for some future measures for the emancipation of the poor slaves", which he believed should come about gradually in stages. Aware that the cause would need younger men to continue the work, in 1821 he asked fellow MP Thomas Fowell Buxton to take over leadership of the campaign in the Commons. As the 1820s wore on, Wilberforce increasingly became more of a figurehead for the abolitionist movement, although he continued to appear at anti-slavery meetings, welcoming visitors, and maintaining a busy correspondence on the subject.
The year 1823 saw the founding of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery (later known as the Anti-Slavery Society), and the publication of Wilberforce's 56-page "Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies". In his treatise, Wilberforce urged that total emancipation was morally and ethically required, and that slavery was a national crime that must be ended by parliamentary legislation to gradually abolish slavery. Members of Parliament did not quickly agree, and government opposition in March 1823 stymied Wilberforce's call for abolition. On 15 May 1823, Buxton moved another resolution in Parliament for gradual emancipation. Subsequent debates followed on 16 March and 11 June 1824 in which Wilberforce made his last speeches in the House of Commons, and which again saw the emancipationists outmanoeuvred by the government.
## Last years
Wilberforce's health was continuing to fail, and he suffered further illnesses in 1824 and 1825. With his family concerned that his life was endangered, he declined a peerage and resigned his seat in Parliament, leaving the campaign in the hands of others. Thomas Clarkson continued to travel, visiting anti-slavery groups throughout Britain, motivating activists and acting as an ambassador for the anti-slavery cause to other countries, while Buxton pursued the cause of reform in Parliament. Public meetings and petitions demanding emancipation continued, with an increasing number supporting immediate abolition rather than the gradual approach favoured by Wilberforce, Clarkson and their colleagues.
In 1826, Wilberforce moved from his large house in Kensington Gore to Highwood Hill, a more modest property in the countryside of Mill Hill, north of London, where he was soon joined by his son William and family. William had attempted a series of educational and career paths, and a venture into farming in 1830 led to huge losses, which his father repaid in full, despite offers from others to assist. This left Wilberforce with little income, and he was obliged to let his home and spend the rest of his life visiting family members and friends. He continued his support for the anti-slavery cause, including attending and chairing meetings of the Anti-Slavery Society.
Wilberforce approved of the 1830 election victory of the more progressive Whigs, though he was concerned about the implications of their Reform Bill which proposed the redistribution of parliamentary seats towards newer towns and cities and an extension of the franchise. In the event, the Reform Act 1832 was to bring more abolitionist MPs into Parliament as a result of intense and increasing public agitation against slavery. In addition, the 1832 slave revolt in Jamaica convinced government ministers that abolition was essential to avoid further rebellion. In 1833, Wilberforce's health declined further and he suffered a severe attack of influenza from which he never fully recovered. He made a final anti-slavery speech in April 1833 at a public meeting in Maidstone, Kent. The following month, the Whig government introduced the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery, formally saluting Wilberforce in the process. On 26 July 1833, Wilberforce heard of government concessions that guaranteed the passing of the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery. The following day he grew much weaker, and he died early on the morning of 29 July at his cousin's house in Cadogan Place, London.
One month later, the House of Lords passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which abolished slavery in most of the British Empire from August 1834. They voted plantation owners £20 million in compensation, giving full emancipation to children younger than six, and instituting a system of apprenticeship requiring other enslaved peoples to work for their former masters for four to six years in the British West Indies, South Africa, Mauritius, British Honduras and Canada. Nearly 800,000 African enslaved people were freed, the vast majority in the Caribbean.
### Funeral
Wilberforce had left instructions that he be buried with his sister and daughter at St Mary's Church, Stoke Newington, just north of London. However, the leading members of both Houses of Parliament urged that he be honoured with a burial in Westminster Abbey. The family agreed and, on 3 August 1833, Wilberforce was buried in the north transept, close to his friend William Pitt. The funeral was attended by many Members of Parliament, as well as by members of the public. The pallbearers included the Duke of Gloucester, the Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham, and the Speaker of the House of Commons Charles Manners-Sutton.
While tributes were paid and Wilberforce was laid to rest, both Houses of Parliament suspended their business as a mark of respect.
## Legacy
Five years after his death, sons Robert and Samuel Wilberforce published a five-volume biography about their father, and subsequently a collection of his letters in 1840. The biography was controversial in that the authors emphasised Wilberforce's role in the abolition movement and played down the important work of Thomas Clarkson. Incensed, Clarkson came out of retirement to write a book refuting their version of events, and the sons eventually made a half-hearted private apology to him and removed the offending passages in a revision of their biography. However, for more than a century, Wilberforce's role in the campaign dominated the history books. Later historians have noted the warm and highly productive relationship between Clarkson and Wilberforce, and have termed it one of history's great partnerships: without both the parliamentary leadership supplied by Wilberforce and the research and public mobilisation organised by Clarkson, abolition could not have been achieved.
As his sons had desired and planned, Wilberforce has long been viewed as a Christian hero, a statesman-saint held up as a role model for putting his faith into action. Contemporary evangelical and conservative movements in North America appropriate his name and example in their activism. In particular, the strategies of Wilberforce and other abolitionists are invoked by anti-abortion activists, who controversially equate the abolition of slavery with ending abortion.
More broadly, Wilberforce has also been described as a humanitarian reformer who contributed significantly to reshaping the political and social attitudes of the time by promoting concepts of social responsibility and action. In the 1940s, the role of Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect in abolition was downplayed by historian Eric Williams, who argued that abolition was motivated not by humanitarianism but by economics, as the West Indian sugar industry was in decline. Williams' approach strongly influenced historians for much of the latter part of the 20th century. However, more recent historians have noted that the sugar industry was still making large profits at the time of the abolition of the slave trade, and this has led to a renewed interest in Wilberforce and the evangelicals, as well as a recognition of the anti-slavery movement as a prototype for subsequent humanitarian campaigns.
## Memorials
Wilberforce's life and work have been widely commemorated in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. In Westminster Abbey, a seated statue of Wilberforce by Samuel Joseph was erected in 1840, bearing an epitaph praising his Christian character and his long labour to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself.
In Wilberforce's home town of Hull, a public subscription in 1834 funded the Wilberforce Monument, a 31-metre (102 ft) Greek Doric column topped by a statue of Wilberforce, which now stands in the grounds of Hull College near Queen's Gardens. Wilberforce Memorial School for the Blind in York was established in 1833 in his honour. Wilberforce's birthplace was acquired by the city corporation in 1903 and, following renovation, Wilberforce House in Hull was opened as Britain's first slavery museum In 2006, the University of Hull established the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation in a building beside Wilberforce House.
Various churches within the Anglican Communion commemorate Wilberforce in their liturgical calendars, and Wilberforce University in Ohio, United States, founded in 1856, is named after him. The university was the first owned by African-American people, and is an historically black college. In Ontario, Canada, Wilberforce Colony was founded by black reformers, and inhabited by freed slaves from the United States.
Amazing Grace, a film about Wilberforce and the struggle against the slave trade, directed by Michael Apted and starring Ioan Gruffudd as William Wilberforce was released in 2007 to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Parliament's anti-slave trade legislation.
## Works
## See also
- List of abolitionist forerunners
- List of civil rights leaders |
17,481,711 | Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men | 1,166,225,828 | Volumes mostly written by Mary Shelley | [
"1830s books",
"Biographical dictionaries by occupation",
"International biographical dictionaries"
]
| The Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men comprised ten volumes of Dionysius Lardner's 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846). Aimed at the self-educating middle class, this encyclopedia was written during the 19th-century literary revolution in Britain that encouraged more people to read.
The Lives formed part of the Cabinet of Biography in the Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Within the set of ten, the three-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835–37) and the two-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838–39) consist of biographies of important writers and thinkers of the 14th to 18th centuries. Most of them were written by the Romantic writer Mary Shelley. Shelley's biographies reveal her as a professional woman of letters, contracted to produce several volumes of works and paid well to do so. Her extensive knowledge of history and languages, her ability to tell a gripping biographical narrative, and her interest in the burgeoning field of feminist historiography are reflected in these works.
At times Shelley had trouble finding sufficient research materials and had to make do with fewer resources than she would have liked, particularly for the Spanish and Portuguese Lives. She wrote in a style that combined secondary sources, memoir, anecdote, and her own opinions. Her political views are most obvious in the Italian Lives, where she supports the Italian independence movement and promotes republicanism; in the French Lives she portrays women sympathetically, explaining their political and social restrictions and arguing that women can be productive members of society if given the proper educational and social opportunities.
The Lives did not attract enough critical attention to become a bestseller. A fair number were printed and sold, however, and far more copies of the Lives circulated than of Shelley's novels. Some of the volumes were illegally copied in the United States, where they were praised by the poet and critic Edgar Allan Poe. Not reprinted until 2002, Mary Shelley's biographies have until recently received little academic appreciation.
## Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia
During the first quarter of the 19th century, self-improvement literature became an important portion of the book market: "it was the age of the 'Family Library' edition". In his article on the Cabinet Cyclopaedia, Morse Peckham writes that this "revolution in literacy, [was] partly the result of the spread of liberal ideas by the French Revolution, [and] partly of the desire to combat those ideas by teaching the poor to read the Bible and religious tracts [... It] was to have an effect on modern society almost as profound as the industrial and agricultural revolutions". Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, published between 1829 and 1846, was one of the most successful of these enterprises, which also included John Murray's Family Library and the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Although intended for the "general reader", the series was aimed specifically at the middle class rather than the masses: each volume cost six shillings, prohibiting purchase by the poor. The advertisements for the Cyclopaedia describe the expected audience as "merchants, captains, families, [and] new-married couples". The prospectus assured its readers that "nothing will be admitted into the pages of the 'CABINET CYCLOPAEDIA' which can have the most remote tendency to offend public or private morals. To enforce the cultivation of religion and the practice of virtue should be a principal object with all who undertake to inform the public mind."
The series was divided into five "Cabinets": Arts and Manufactures, Biography, History, Natural History, and Natural Philosophy. The advertisement claimed these covered "all the usual divisions of knowledge that are not of a technical and professional kind". Unlike other encyclopedias of the time, Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia arranged its articles topically rather than alphabetically. The series eventually contained 61 titles in 133 volumes and customers could purchase a single volume, a single cabinet, or the entire set. The first volume was published in December 1829 by Longman, Reese, Orme, Browne, Greene, and John Taylor. Thirty-eight identified authors contributed (others are unidentified); Mary Shelley was the only female contributor and the eighth most productive.
Reverend Dr. Dionysius Lardner, a science lecturer at University College London, started the Cabinet Cyclopaedia in 1827 or 1828. The authors who contributed to the volumes spanned the political spectrum and included many luminaries of the day. James Mackintosh, Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, and Connop Thirlwall wrote histories; Robert Southey wrote naval biographies; Henry Roscoe wrote legal biographies; John Herschel wrote on astronomy and the philosophy of science; August De Morgan wrote on mathematics; David Brewster wrote on optics; and Lardner himself wrote on mathematics and physics. Authors were usually paid about £200 for each volume, though some contracts were much higher or lower. For example, Irish poet Thomas Moore was contracted to write a two-volume History of Ireland for £1,500. One of the reasons the overall project ran into difficulty may have been that it overpaid well-known writers. Peckham speculates that the reason many of the famous writers listed on the prospectus never participated was because of the project's financial problems. The 19 substitute contributors were, he writes, "at the time and subsequently a far less distinguished group than Lardner had originally announced".
The books were relatively expensive to print, because of the Corbould and Finden illustrations, the images for the scientific volumes, and the use of Spottiswoode's printing house. In order to cut costs, the publishers decided to use small print and narrow margins. An estimated 4,000 copies of the first edition of the early volumes were printed, but the print run would probably have fallen to 2,500 since the sales did not pick up after 1835. As it became clear that the series was not going to take off, fewer review copies were sent out and advertisements became smaller. Lardner's interest in the project may also have waned, as he paid less attention to its business dealings. However, some volumes of the Cabinet Cyclopaedia remained in print until 1890.
Because of the popularity of encyclopedias at the beginning of the 19th century, the Cabinet Cyclopaedia did not receive enough critical notice to make it a bestseller. Often the reviews were "perfunctory". However, some individual writers received attention. Moore, for example, was given a front-page spread in the Literary Gazette for his history of Ireland. Shelley's volumes received 12 reviews in total—a good number—but "her name was never fully exploited" in the project; whether by her choice or Lardner's, it is unclear. Nevertheless, Peckham writes that "the Cyclopaedia on the whole was a distinguished and valuable work", and some of the individual volumes became famous.
## Mary Shelley's contributions
Written during the last productive decade of Mary Shelley's career, her contributions fill about three-quarters of these five volumes and reveal her to be a professional woman of letters. They demonstrate her knowledge of several languages and historical research covering several centuries, her ability to tell a gripping biographical narrative, and her interest in the burgeoning field of feminist historiography. She "wrote with many books to hand – reading (or rereading) some, consulting others, cross-referring, interweaving abridged and paraphrased source material with her own comment". Shelley combined secondary sources with memoir and anecdote and included her own judgments, a biographical style made popular by the 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81). She describes this technique in her "Life of Metastasio":
> It is from passages such as these, interspersed in his letters, that we can collect the peculiar character of the man – his difference from others – and the mechanism of being that rendered him the individual that he was. Such, dr Johnson [sic] remarks, is the true end of biography, and he recommends the bringing forward of minute, yet characteristic details, as essential to this style of history; to follow which precept has been the aim and desire of the writer of these pages.
William Godwin's theories of biographical writing significantly influenced Shelley's style. Her father believed that biography could tell the history of a culture as well as serve a pedagogical function. Shelley felt that her nonfiction works were better than her fiction, writing in 1843 to publisher Edward Moxon: "I should prefer quieter work, to be gathered from other works—such as my lives for the Cyclopedia—& which I think I do much better than romancing."
The 18th century had seen a new kind of history emerge, with works such as David Hume's History of England (1754–63). Frustrated with traditional histories that highlighted only military and monarchical history, Hume and others emphasised commerce, the arts, and society. Combined with the rise of sensibility at the end of the 18th century, this "produced an unprecedented historical interest in the social, the inward, and particularly the realm of affect". These topics and this style explicitly invited women into the discussion of history as both readers and writers. However, since this new history often subordinated the private sphere to the public, women writers took it upon themselves to bring "sentimental and private elements" to the centre of historical study. In this way, they argued for the political relevance of women, claiming, for example, that women's sympathy for those who suffered enabled them to speak for marginalised groups, such as slaves or the poor.
Shelley practised this early form of feminist historiography. Biographical writing was, in her words, supposed to "form as it were a school in which to study the philosophy of history" and to teach "lessons". These "lessons" consisted, most frequently and importantly, of criticisms of male-dominated institutions, such as primogeniture. She also praises societies that are progressive with regard to gender relations—she wrote, for example, "No slur was cast by the [Renaissance era] Italians on feminine accomplishments ... Where abstruse learning was a fashion among men, they were glad to find in their friends of the other sex, minds educated to share their pursuits".
Shelley was particularly interested in tying private, domestic history to public, political history. She emphasises romance, the family, sympathy, and compassion in the lives of the people she writes about. This is particularly true in her essays on Petrarch and Vincenzo Monti. Her belief that these domestic influences would improve society, and that women could be at the forefront of them, ties her approach to that of other early feminist historians such as Mary Hays and Anna Jameson. Shelley argues that women possess a "distinctive virtue" in their ability to sympathise with others and should use this ability to improve society. She castigates Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, for abandoning his children at a foundling hospital, decrying the "masculine egotism" associated with his philosophy—a criticism similar to the one she makes of Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein (1818).
Unlike most of her novels, which had a print run of only several hundred copies, the Lives'''s print run of about 4,000 for each volume became, in the words of one scholar, "one of her most influential political interventions". However, Shelley's biographies have not been fully appreciated until recently. The Lives were not reprinted until 2002, and little study has been made of them because of a critical tradition that "dismiss[es] the Lives as hack work churned out rapidly in order to pay off debts".
## Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal
The three-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal contains numerous biographies of writers and thinkers of the 14th to 18th centuries. The first volume was published on 1 February 1835, the second on 1 October 1835, and the third on 1 November 1837. An unlicensed edition of the first two volumes was published in the United States by Lea and Blanchard in 1841.
### Italian Lives
The Italian Lives constitute the first two volumes of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal. The poet, journalist, and literary historian James Montgomery contributed the biographies of Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso. Historian of science Sir David Brewster contributed that of Galileo. Mary Shelley contributed the rest: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Lorenzo de' Medici, Marsiglio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano, Bernardo Pulci, Luca Pulci, Luigi Pulci, Cieco da Ferrara, Burchiello, Boiardo, Berni, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Vittoria Colonna, Guarini, Chiabrera, Tassoni, Marini, Filicaja, Metastasio, Goldoni, Alfieri, Monti, and Ugo Foscolo. Although there has been some confusion regarding the attribution of these biographies, the Lives's recent editor, Tilar Mazzeo, notes that Shelley claimed authorship of all of these and granted Montgomery and Brewster's authorship of the others in her letters.
Shelley began the Italian Lives on 23 November 1833 and by December was working methodically: she wrote the Lives in the morning and read novels and memoirs in the evening. She added the revision of her novel Lodore (1835) and the checking of its proofs to this already busy schedule. She worked on the Italian Lives for two years and was probably paid £140 for each volume. By the time she began working on the Lives, Shelley had spent 20 years studying Italian authors and had lived in Italy for five years. Her major sources for the biographies were first-person memoirs and literature by the authors, aided by scholarly works. Shelley had gained much of her knowledge of these authors in Italy when she was researching her historical novel Valperga (1823); the rest she obtained from her own books or those of her father, the philosopher William Godwin. She had limited access to books at this time and was thus restricted to those she owned or could borrow from friends. Shelley copied sections from some of these works in a manner that would today be termed plagiarism, but, as Mazzeo explains, because the standards of intellectual property and copyright were so different in the early 19th century, Shelley's practice was common and not considered unethical. She writes, "Mary Shelley's objectives in the Italian Lives were to gather what had been said by these authors and about them and to infuse the work with her own judgements on their interest and credibility."
To supplement her printed sources, Shelley interviewed Gabriele Rossetti and other Italian expatriates in London for the modern biographies. Mazzeo writes that "her lives of the contemporary Italian poets – Alfieri, Monti and Foscolo – are unquestionably the most personal and most inspired of the two volumes". Of all of the volumes Shelley contributed to the Cabinet Cyclopaedia, Italian Lives is, according to editor Nora Crook, the "most overtly political". Shelley was a friend to the Italian exiles and a proponent of the Risorgimento; she reveals her republicanism by depicting Machiavelli as a patriot. She continually praises writers who resist tyranny by "cultivat[ing] private virtue and inner peace". In the first volume of the Italian Lives her primary goal was to introduce lesser-known Italian writers to English readers and build up the reputation of those who were already known, reflecting the view she expressed in her travel narrative Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844): "Italian literature claims, at present, a very high rank in Europe. If the writers are less numerous, yet in genius they equal, and in moral taste they surpass France and England".
Shelley specifically addressed gender politics in her biography of the 16th-century poet Vittoria Colonna, highlighting her literary achievements, her "virtues, talents, and beauty", and her interest in politics. However, Shelley was careful to describe feminine virtues in their historical context throughout the Italian Lives. For example, her analysis of the cavalier servente system in Italy, which allowed married women to take lovers, was rooted in an understanding that many marriages at the time were made not for love, but for profit. She refused to indict any particular woman for what she saw as the faults of a larger system.
Little has been written on the contributions by Montgomery or Brewster. According to Mazzeo, Montgomery's biographies, which draw a picture of the subject's character and incorporate autobiographical material, are written in a "digressive though not unengaging manner". He is less concerned with factual accuracy, although he identifies his sources, and more interested in developing "extended parallels between Italian and English literature". Brewster includes descriptions of 16th-century scientific experiments in his formally written biography of Galileo, as well as information on other Renaissance natural philosophers. According to Mazzeo, "Brewster's pious religiosity infuses the work and his opinions".
Ninety-eight review copies of the first two volumes were distributed, eliciting five reviews. Some of these were simply short advertisements for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Mazzeo writes that the "commentary on both volumes was mixed and often contradictory, but on balance positive; prose style, organisation and use of source materials were the three most often identified points of discussion". The first volume was declared to be unorganised, the second volume less so. Reviewers did not agree on the value of frequently using primary sources, nor on the elegance of the writing style. The Monthly Review dedicated the most substantial review and extracts to the volumes, writing that "we by no means think highly of the volume as a whole", complaining that it presented facts and dates without context. However, the reviewer praised two of Mary Shelley's biographies: Petrarch and Machiavelli. According to Mazzeo, the reviewer "notes, in particular, her efforts to question conventional assumptions about Machiavelli by returning to autobiographical materials and credits her with originality on this point". Graham's Magazine, in a piece probably by its co-editor, Edgar Allan Poe, positively reviewed the unauthorized American edition.
### Spanish and Portuguese Lives
The Spanish and Portuguese Lives constitute the third volume of the Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal. Except for the biography of Ercilla, whose author is unknown, Mary Shelley wrote all of the entries in this volume: Boscán, Garcilaso de la Vega, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Luis de León, Herrera, Sá de Miranda, Jorge de Montemayor, Castillejo, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Vicente Espinel, Esteban de Villegas, Góngora, Quevedo, Calderón, Ribeiro, Gil Vicente, Ferreira, and Camões.
During the two or three years that Mary Shelley spent writing the Spanish and Portuguese Lives from 1834 or 1835 to 1837, she also wrote a novel, Falkner (1837), experienced the death of her father, William Godwin, started a biography of him, and moved to London after her son, Percy, entered Trinity College, Cambridge. She had more difficulty with these Lives than with the other volumes' biographies, writing to her friend Maria Gisborne: "I am now about to write a Volume of Spanish & Portugeeze [sic] Lives – This is an arduous task, from my own ignorance, & the difficulty of getting books & information". According to Lisa Vargo, a recent editor of the Spanish and Portuguese Lives, Spanish books were hard to come by in England and not much was known regarding Shelley's subjects. However, Shelly ended one plaintive letter to another friend: "The best is that the very thing which occasions the difficulty makes it interesting – namely – the treading in unknown paths & dragging out unknown things – I wish I could go to Spain." While living in Harrow, she refused to go to the British Library in London, writing: "I would not if I could – I do not like finding myself a stray bird among strange men in a character assimililating [sic] to their own". At this time, the British Library had special tables for women in the reading room. While some scholars see her refusal to work there as a mark of "feminist protest" others see it as "matter of comfort and practicality", since the reading rooms were "noisy, badly lit, and poorly ventilated". Shelley's continual problems with finding sources mean that her biographies are based on relatively few works. However, Vargo writes that "there is always a sense of an engaged and intelligent mind at work weighing what should be included, what seems accurate". Shelley tended to focus on obtaining accounts written by people who knew the authors, and when translations of the authors' works were unavailable or poor, she provided her own.
Shelley's biographies begin by describing the author, offering examples of their writings in the original language and in translation, and end by summarising their "beauties and defects". She also discusses the problems of writing biography itself, engaging in a written dialogue with the theories of her now-dead father. In "Of History and Romance" Godwin had written that for the genius, "I am not contented to observe such a man upon the public stage, I would follow him into his closet. I would see the friend and the father of a family, as well as the patriot". Shelley and Godwin had seen the negative effects of this approach when Godwin published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), his biography of Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Its frank description of Wollstonecraft's affairs and suicide attempts shocked the public and sullied her reputation. Shelley criticises this technique in her biographies, concerned that such works perpetuate "follies". She is even more concerned that often an absence of information regarding a particular writer is interpreted as evidence that the writer was insignificant.
Overall, the Spanish Lives, according to Vargo, "tells a story of the survival of genius and moral independence in spite of oppression by public institutions, both individually and nationally". Shelley argues that Spain's literature is directly related to its politics and seeks to inspire her readers by outlining a national literature stretching back to Lucan which represents the best characteristics of Spanish identity: "originality", "independence", "enthusiasm", and "earnestness".
## Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France
The two-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France includes the following works by Mary Shelley: Montaigne, Corneille, Rochefoucauld, Molière, Pascal, Madame de Sévigné, Boileau, Racine, Fénelon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Madame Roland, and Madame de Staël. Rabelais and La Fontaine are by an as yet unidentified author. Shelley was the only contributor to Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia to give such pride of place to female biographical subjects. In these volumes, "she stretched the definition of 'Eminent Literary Men' not just by including two more women but by her choice of a quartet of French revolutionary personalities who were political actors more than, or as much as writers: Condorcet and Mirabeau, Mme Roland and Mme de Staël". As Clarissa Campbell Orr, a recent editor of the French Lives, explains, this choice "represents a concerted attempt to disassociate the early ideals of the French Revolution from its subsequent extremism and state-authored bloodshed".
Mary Shelley worked on the French Lives from the end of 1837 until the middle of 1839 and she was paid £200 upon their completion. No other substantial projects occupied her during this time and research materials were easily accessible; she even subscribed to a specialist circulating library to acquire books. She wrote to her friend Leigh Hunt of the project, "I am now writing French Lives. The Spanish ones interested me—these do not so much – yet, it is pleasant writing enough – sparing one imagination yet occupying one & supplying in some small degree the needful which is so very needful."
Mary Shelley spoke French fluently and was knowledgeable about 17th- and 18th-century French literature. Although she was distilling other works, the biographies are still deeply personal works and have autobiographical elements. Orr writes that they "are the culmination of her work for Lardner, and represent the final stage of a sustained overview of four literatures. Few British women of letters in the 1830s could command this extensive range and write so confidently about four national cultures." Orr compares Shelley to the 19th-century historical writers Lady Morgan, Frances Trollope, Anna Jameson, and Agnes and Eliza Strickland. Shelley's assessment of French literature was not as generous as her evaluation of Italian literature. She criticized its artificiality, for example. However, the biographies are "written with a sprightly narrative thrust and an agreeable tone". She also often provided her own translations and focused on themes that resonated with her own life.
The French Lives provided Shelley with a way to celebrate literary women, particularly salonniéres. In her life of Madame de Sévigné, Shelley celebrates "her chaste widowhood; her loyalty as a friend; [and] her maternal devotion". However, Orr writes that it is difficult to see a pattern in the way Shelley addresses gender issues in these volumes. She argues that "the most consistent 'feminism' displayed throughout [the second volume of French Lives] lies in her examination of French attitudes toward love, marriage, and sexuality". Shelley sympathetically portrays customs such as taking lovers, explaining the custom in the context of France's arranged marriages. Overall, Orr explains, Shelley's "historical sympathy for the varied circumstances of women's relationships mirrors her personal practice of understanding and assisting those of her women friends who transgressed moral norms". The biographies of Roland and Staël focus on their abilities and the social forces that both helped and hindered them from succeeding. Shelley argues that women are as intellectually capable as men, but lack a sufficient education and are trapped by social systems such as marriage that restrict their rights. The emphasis that Shelley places on education and reading reflect the influence of her mother's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In these two biographies, Shelley reinforces contemporary gender roles while at the same time celebrating the achievements of these women. She describes Roland through traditionally feminine roles:
> She was her husband's friend, companion, amanuensis; fearful of the temptations of the world, she gave herself up to labour; she soon became absolutely necessary to him at every moment, and in all the incidents of his life; her servitude was thus sealed; now and then it caused a sigh; but the holy sense of duty reconciled her to every inconvenience.
Shelley also defends Roland's "unwomanly" actions, however, by arguing that they were "beneficial" to French society. Shelley's most overt feminist statement in the French Lives comes when she criticises Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), writing "his ideas ... of a perfect life are singularly faulty. It includes no instruction, no endeavours to acquire knowledge and refine the soul by study; but is contracted to mere domestic avocations".
Sixty review copies of each volume were sent out, but only one short notice of the first volume of French Lives has been located, in the Sunday Times. The volumes were bootlegged in the United States by Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia and reviewed by Edgar Allan Poe in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine'' in 1841. He wrote, "a more valuable work, when considered solely as an introduction to French literature, has not, for some time, been issued from the American press".
## See also
- Mary Shelley bibliography |
13,069,334 | Hotel Chevalier | 1,172,457,550 | 2007 short film directed by Wes Anderson | [
"2000s American films",
"2000s English-language films",
"2000s French films",
"2007 films",
"2007 romantic drama films",
"2007 short films",
"American drama short films",
"American prequel films",
"American romantic drama films",
"English-language French films",
"Films directed by Wes Anderson",
"Films set in Paris",
"Films set in hotels",
"Films shot in Paris",
"Films with screenplays by Wes Anderson",
"Fox Searchlight Pictures films",
"French drama short films",
"French prequel films",
"French romantic drama films"
]
| Hotel Chevalier is a 2007 short film written and directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman as former lovers who reunite in a Paris hotel room, the 13-minute film acts as a prologue to Anderson's 2007 feature The Darjeeling Limited. It was shot on location in a Parisian hotel by a small crew and self-financed by Anderson, who initially intended it to be a stand-alone work. Its first showing was at the Venice Film Festival première of the feature film on September 2, 2007, and it made its own debut later that month at Apple Stores in four U.S. cities.
The day after the film's première, it was made freely available from the iTunes Store for one month, during which time it was downloaded more than 500,000 times. The film garnered acclaim from reviewers, who compared it favorably to The Darjeeling Limited and praised its richness, poignancy, and careful construction.
## Plot
In a hotel lobby, the concierge answers a phone call from a guest's room. Jack (Jason Schwartzman) lies on a hotel bed in a yellow bathrobe, watching the black-and-white American war film Stalag 17 and reading the newspaper. After ordering room service from the concierge in broken French, he receives a call from Rhett, his ex-girlfriend. She tells him she is on her way from the airport and asks for his room number. Despite objecting that he did not tell her she could come, Jack consents nevertheless. He then hurriedly attempts to tidy the room – pausing to play the opening bars of the song "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?" by Peter Sarstedt on his stereo system – and runs a bath.
Jack is again lying on the bed, now in a gray suit. Hearing a knock, he starts the song playing again before opening the door to Rhett (Natalie Portman). After staring at him for several seconds, Rhett breaks the silence by asking what music is playing. Receiving no response, she steps into the room and presents Jack with a bouquet of flowers. When she moves to kiss him on the mouth, he turns his head away and they embrace instead. He closes the door and asks how she found him; she replies that it "wasn't actually that hard". She moves around the room browsing through his possessions, brushes her teeth with his toothbrush and declines to take the bath he had run for her.
Stepping back into the bedroom, Rhett turns to face the man and confronts him, asking slowly "what the fuck is going on?" Jack motions for her to join him on the bed and at her prompting, he reveals in the ensuing conversation that he has been living in the hotel room for "more than a month", and that he had left to escape their relationship. They lie back on the bed looking at one another before being interrupted by the arrival of room service. Once alone again, the two kiss and Jack begins to undress Rhett. They have an uncomfortable exchange about not having slept with other people and when Jack notices bruises on her arm after undressing her further, Rhett chooses not to comment on them. Lying on top of him, she tells Jack that she does not want to lose his friendship, that she loves him and never meant to hurt him. He responds coldly that he "will never be [her] friend", but holds her when she embraces him. "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?" starts again and Jack offers to show Rhett his view of Paris.
Rhett is perched against an armoire, Jack approaches and covers her naked body with the yellow bathrobe, and the two move towards the window. After they step out on the balcony, Jack draws a toothpick from his pocket and hands it to Rhett with an upwards nod, which she reciprocates. After looking out for another few seconds she clasps his neck lightly and they step back inside.
## Cast
- Jason Schwartzman as Jack Whitman
- Natalie Portman as Rhett
## Background and production
Wes Anderson first approached Schwartzman and Portman about Hotel Chevalier in 2005. Schwartzman and Anderson had previously worked on Rushmore (1998), Anderson's cult second feature, and had been living together in Schwartzman's Paris apartment in the months leading up to the shoot. Portman was approached after the director obtained her email address from Scott Rudin, executive producer of 2004's Closer in which she starred. The actors appeared for free, and Anderson financed the remainder of the production himself.
It was filmed at the Hôtel Raphael in Paris, on Avenue Kléber, two blocks south-southwest of the Arc de Triomphe. The Hôtel Raphael had previously been used as a setting for the films Love in Paris (1996) and Place Vendôme (1998). It was shot by a crew of 15 in Panavision and used props from Anderson's apartment. Filming took two and a half days, and editing (done on Anderson's computer) another week. Despite his use of a wardrobe from prestigious fashion designer Marc Jacobs and a handmade suitcase from Louis Vuitton, the director described the production as "like making a student film".
Anderson initially intended it to be a stand-alone short film, but shortly before filming commenced, he realized that Jack (Schwartzman) bore a close resemblance to one of the protagonists of a feature film he was writing at the time. That film would begin production a year later as The Darjeeling Limited. Chevalier takes place two weeks before Jack joins his two older brothers on a journey in India in Darjeeling. The dialogue between the characters at the end of Chevalier is recounted by Jack to his brothers at the close of the feature film, in the form of an excerpt from a short story he has composed. Rhett (Portman) has a brief cameo in the feature. Fox Searchlight Pictures, the studio that backed Darjeeling, was unaware of the short until the feature had been made and claimed to have no financial interest in it.
## Release
Hotel Chevalier was screened as part of the program at the world première of The Darjeeling Limited at the 64th Venice International Film Festival on September 2, 2007. The short had its own première at Apple Stores in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Santa Monica, California, on September 25. Anderson, Schwartzman and Portman appeared at the New York screening in SoHo, after which they held a questions-and-answers session with the audience. The short was made available the following day as a free download from Apple's iTunes Store. On September 28, it preceded the showing of the feature on the opening night of the 2007 New York Film Festival. A press release posted before the première described the short as "the brief coda to a doomed romance and the prologue to The Darjeeling Limited".
The film was withdrawn from iTunes after having been available for download for a month. It had been dismissed by USA Today columnist Susan Wloszczyna before its iTunes release as an amuse-bouche that was "destined to be a mere footnote",. It was downloaded nearly 500,000 times during its run, and received wide acclaim. Following its withdrawal from iTunes, the short was distributed in theaters as the prologue to the feature-length film. Although The New York Times reported in October 2007 that distributor Fox Searchlight Pictures intended to promote Chevalier as a competitor for the Best Live Action Short Film of the Academy Awards, it was not among that year's nominations. It was included as an extra feature on the Darjeeling 2008 DVD release, and Anderson's screenplay for the short was published in the Winter 2007 issue of the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story.
## Critical reception
Hotel Chevalier was one of the year's most discussed short films, and attracted considerable praise from film critics, who compared it favorably to The Darjeeling Limited. Gary Susman of Entertainment Weekly described it as "an exquisite short story where we learn not much but exactly enough about these two characters", adding that "Chevalier sees Anderson working in his customary jewel-box/dollhouse mode, but the form and length really suit each other here." Armond White of New York Press judged the short "moving and genuinely contemporary", citing its "lost-girl poignancy". The film drew some attention for Portman's brief, partial nude scene, and for her bruised body. Portman expressed disappointment at this undue focus, saying "[i]t really depressed me that half of every review ... was about the nudity". The episode made the actress reconsider the wisdom of this aspect of her performance, and she subsequently swore off nude appearances in film.
While The Darjeeling Limited did receive generally positive reviews—having attained a 68% approval rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes—many of the champions of Hotel Chevalier tended to combine praise of Chevalier with subtle shots at Darjeeling. Portman's performance as Rhett was praised by TIME reviewer Richard Corliss, who declared her to be "a comic actress in fresh bloom" in the "beguiling vignette", and expressed his wish that her role in Darjeeling had been greater. The feature, he felt, lacked "the feeling and wit of the short film". Stephanie Zacharek of Salon concurred, stating that "the untold story of Hotel Chevalier is 10 times more interesting, and infinitely richer, than the one told outright in ", and calling the short "very close to perfect". The Guardian columnist Danny Leigh contrasted the lukewarm reception of the feature among bloggers and critics with the "genuine ardour" that greeted the "perfectly measured narrative" of Chevalier. He proposed that the constraints of the short-film format suited Anderson, whose trademark deadpan humor, idiosyncratic set designs and choice of soundtrack inclined to exhaust the viewers' patience in a feature-length work. A. O. Scott of The New York Times hailed Chevalier as "a small gem" in comparison to the "overstuffed suitcase" of the feature, and wrote that "It is worth seeking out, not only because it fleshes out part of the story of the Whitman brothers but also because, on its own, it is an almost perfect distillation of Mr. Anderson's vexing and intriguing talents, enigmatic, affecting and wry." |
64,577,253 | Radoje Pajović | 1,172,421,616 | Yugoslav and Montenegrin historian (1934–2019) | [
"1934 births",
"2019 deaths",
"Montenegrin historians",
"University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy alumni",
"Writers from Nikšić"
]
| Radoje Pajović (14 April 1934 – 2 June 2019) was a Yugoslav and Montenegrin historian who worked at the Institute of History at the University of Montenegro for forty years. He has been dubbed "the most prominent Montenegrin historian" of events in Montenegro during World War II by the Montenegrin historian Srđa Pavlović, and Professor Kenneth Morrison, author of the 2009 book Montenegro: A Modern History, asserts that Pajović is one of the most prominent Montenegrin historians in general.
Pajović received the "13 July Award" from the National Assembly of Montenegro and the "19 December Award" from the city of Titograd, the capital of Montenegro. His most notable works were Kontrarevolucija u Crnoj Gori: četnički i federalistički pokret 1941–1945 [Counterrevolution in Montenegro: The Chetnik and Federalist Movements 1941–1945], published in 1977; Pavle Đurišić: kontroverzni četnički vojvoda [Pavle Đurišić: Controversial Chetnik Duke], first published in 1987 and then supplemented and expanded and re-published in 2005; and Crna Gora kroz istoriju [Montenegro Through History], also published in 2005. He was the author or co-author of twelve books and the editor of more than twenty, and he published around one hundred articles and other contributions. In the 1990s, some Montenegrin historians attempted to rehabilitate the World War II Chetniks who collaborated with the Axis powers, and Pajović was among the historians who opposed this politically motivated historical revisionism. Towards the end of his academic career and in retirement, Pajović was a vocal advocate for Montenegrin independence and identity.
## Early life, education and family
Radoje Pajović was born on 14 April 1934 in the village of Drenovštica in the Nikšić municipality of Zeta Banovina in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the son of Ilija and Stana (née Perunović). He did not remember his mother because she died when he was young. His father later married a woman named Ljubica. He completed elementary school in Drenovštica. His family was actively involved in the anti-fascist struggle in Montenegro during World War II, and in his childhood he associated himself closely with the movement on an emotional level.
Pajović completed high school in Nikšić, then in 1957 he commenced studying at the Department of History at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. He spent a year working in the archives of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Montenegro, before commencing work the following year for the Institute of History at the Pedagogical College in Cetinje (later the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro). He received his doctorate from the University of Belgrade in 1970, and his doctoral dissertation was entitled Četnički federalistički pokret u Crnoj Gori 1941–1945 [The Chetnik Federalist Movement in Montenegro 1941–1945]. Pajović married a woman named Ljilja and they had two children: a daughter, Tanja, and a son, Neven. Ljilja died in 2013 and the loss affected him a great deal.
## Career
Pajović worked at the Institute of History for forty years from 1958 until his retirement in 1997. He mainly concentrated on the modern history of Montenegro, specialising in World War II, and was "highly respected both at home and abroad", according to the historian Marijan Mašo Miljić, head of the Archives of the Historical Institute of Montenegro at the University of Montenegro. In his later career, Pajović explored the earlier history of Montenegro, including the medieval Duklja state and Zeta province. He authored or co-authored twelve books, the most notable of which were Kontrarevolucija u Crnoj Gori: četnički i federalistički pokret 1941–1945 [Counterrevolution in Montenegro: The Chetnik and Federalist Movements 1941–1945] published in 1977, Pavle Đurišić: kontroverzni četnički vojvoda [Pavle Đurišić: Controversial Chetnik Duke], first published in 1987 and then supplemented and expanded and re-published in 2005, and Crna Gora kroz istoriju [Montenegro Throughout History] also published in 2005. The first two works have been particularly valued by historians. The prolific Yugoslav and Serbian historian Branko Petranović observed that Pajović's 1977 book was an "important analytical study" in Montenegrin historiography, the broadest examination to that point in time of the counter-revolutionary forces in Montenegro during World War II, and that it left no doubt about the motives and collaboration of Chetniks and separatists in Montenegro during the war. The historian Kenneth Morrison, Professor of Modern Southeast European History at De Montfort University, described Pajović's book on Đurišić as an "excellent analysis".
Pajović also edited more than twenty books, published around one hundred articles and other contributions, and according to Miljić he made a "significant contribution to Montenegrin historiography". He participated in the writing of the history of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and the history of the League of Communists of Montenegro. Pajović was the president of the Association of Historians of Montenegro and also a member of the presidency of the Association of Historians of Yugoslavia. He was also a member of many expert panels, committees and commissions. The recipient of many awards, Pajović received the "19 December Award" in 1977 from the city of Titograd, the capital of the Socialist Republic of Montenegro, and the "13 July Award" the following year from the National Assembly of Montenegro for his contributions to science. He was a founding member of the Doclean Academy of Sciences and Arts, Matica crnogorska and Montenegrin PEN during the difficult period of the breakup of Yugoslavia. According to Miljić, as an academic Pajović made a major contribution to the Institute of History during his time there.
## Views on Montenegrin independence and identity
Pajović belonged to a group of Montenegrin historians who consistently advocated for the independence of Montenegro and affirmed Montenegrin ethnicity. Montenegro had centuries of largely autonomous existence under the Ottoman Empire before becoming fully independent in 1878, but expansion into areas surrounding "Old Montenegro" – an area around Cetinje largely free of Ottoman incursions which developed specific Montenegrin characteristics – meant that significant parts of the population in the new areas of the state did not closely identify with Montenegrin statehood or identity, many identifying as Serbs or Muslims rather than as Montenegrins. In late 1918, Montenegro was unified with the Kingdom of Serbia and soon after, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (KSHS, Yugoslavia from 1929), and Montenegrin opposition to the union was crushed. Pajović wrote that Montenegro had been violently annexed by the Kingdom of Serbia in 1918, a position supported by the Montenegrin historian Srđa Pavlović, adjunct professor and research associate at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta, in his 2018 book Balkan Anschluss: The Annexation of Montenegro and the Creation of the Common South Slavic State.
Pajović also claimed that historical evidence confirms the existence of an autocephalous Montenegrin Orthodox Church (CPC), and that it had been unlawfully abolished by force by Prince Regent Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1920. This forms part of an argument between proponents of a separate Montenegrin church and those who oppose it in favour of the wider Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC). This was examined by František Šístek, assistant professor at the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2011. Šístek observes that after the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć was abolished by the Ottomans in 1766, Montenegro – which remained beyond effective Ottoman control – became a de facto sovereign territory, with all ecclesiastical power in the hands of the hereditary prince-bishops who ruled Montenegro. At this point, proponents of the autocephaly of the CPC claim the church, which had already enjoyed de facto independence for a considerable time, fulfilled all the canonical conditions for autocephaly. The CPC was also defined as autocephalous by several Montenegrin laws around the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. The SPC and its supporters claim that the abolition of the patriarchate of Peć was unlawful and uncanonical and therefore the re-establishment of the SPC as the only orthodox church in Montenegro in 1920 was merely a revival of the unlawfully abolished patriarchate. In turn, the supporters of the CPC claim that its own abolition in 1920 was illegal and invalid and that its autocephalous status remains valid. According to the Office of International Religious Freedom, United States Department of State (OIRF), the 2011 census indicated that approximately 72 per cent of Montenegro's population was Orthodox, but the census did not differentiate between adherents of the two churches, and there is no consensus on the estimates of numbers of their adherents. Data from 2020 collected by the non-governmental organisation the Center for Democracy and Human Rights indicates that about 90 percent of the Orthodox population of Montenegro is associated with the SPC, with the remainder associated with the CPC. The Montenegrin government asserts that adherence to the CPC is higher than this data indicates.
During the interwar period Montenegrin political parties and identity were brutally suppressed by the KSHS/Yugoslav authorities. Yugoslavia was invaded and partitioned by the Axis powers during World War II and Montenegro was occupied by Fascist Italy. After the outbreak of resistance directed towards the occupiers, a civil war raged across Yugoslavia during World War II between the communist-led Partisans and those aligned with the Axis powers. In Montenegro, the latter included the pro-independence Greens and the Serb-chauvinist Chetniks. By November 1944, the Italians had capitulated and the Partisans had wrested control of Montenegro from the Germans and the collaborationist forces. Pajović has been praised for his objective writing about collaboration with the Axis powers in Montenegro during World War II, which is absent any bias due to his family's active involvement in the struggle against fascism. During the 1990s, in the countries that emerged from the dissolution of Yugoslavia, a politically motivated popular trend in historiography was the historical rehabilitation of World War II figures who collaborated with the Axis powers and were involved in massacres of civilians during the war. Pajović was one of the historians who refused to engage in historical revisionism in favor of the collaborationist Chetniks. When reflecting on the political struggles that followed, he fiercely opposed any attempt to rehabilitate the Chetniks and those that pursued Greater Serbia policies more broadly. These included attempts to erect monuments in honor of Puniša Račić and Pavle Đurišić. Račić was a Montenegrin Serb politician during the interwar period who murdered three and wounded two more Croat politicians on the floor of the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in June 1928, and Đurišić was an Axis collaborator who carried out many massacres in the Sandzak region of Montenegro during World War II. Pajović also criticised the 2015 rehabilitation by the Serbian Supreme Court of the World War II Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović which, based on the evidence, Pajović considered unfounded.
In 2012, the Montenegrin historian Nebojša Čagorović asserted the need for a reassessment of the history of the interaction between anti-fascism and Montenegrin identity. At the conclusion of World War II, thousands of Chetniks and other collaborationist troops from Montenegro were captured by the Partisans as they attempted to escape from Yugoslav territory to surrender to the Western Allies. These troops were killed by the Partisans in what the historian Jozo Tomasevich describes as "preventative defense" and an "act of mass terror and brutal political surgery, similar to that practised by the [Chetniks] earlier in the war". In a paper published in the journal History, Čagorović criticised Pajović for stating, in reference to these crimes, "committing evil in order to be protected from it, is not evil at all".
After World War II, Montenegro was established as a socialist republic within a federated Yugoslavia, which muted many of those who had promoted a separate Montenegrin identity, but Serb-nationalist ideas remained below the surface outside the region around Cetinje. From the mid-1970s, greater autonomy for the constituent republics of Yugoslavia resulted in the development of a stronger and more distinct Montenegrin identity including the establishment of Montenegrin cultural institutions. In the 1980s, Serbian nationalism was on the rise, with claims that Montenegrins were a branch of the Serb nation, and in fact that they were, "the best of Serbs". This occurred in the context of an economic crisis which enveloped Yugoslavia during the 1980s and undermined the legitimacy of the Montenegrin branch of the Yugoslav communist party, which Serbian nationalists in Montenegro exploited in late 1988 and early 1989 to take control. When Croatia declared independence in 1991, Yugoslav troops from Montenegro, supported by Montenegrin reservists and the Montenegrin government, besieged and attacked Dubrovnik, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, to widespread international condemnation. After briefly trying to take a line independent of the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević, Montenegro became a constituent but subordinate part of a federation of Serbia and Montenegro known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which became the political union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003. Montenegro became a fully independent country following the 2006 referendum which supported independence by a slim majority.
Pajović advocated for Montenegro to be a "free, civil democratic, socially just and multi-religious and multicultural society". In January 2019, Pajović stated that Serbian clero-nationalist circles were spreading false information claiming that the human rights of Serbs in Montenegro were in danger. He condemned as gross and false propaganda the 2019 assertion by the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Irinej, that the situation of Serbs in Montenegro was worse than in the genocidal Independent State of Croatia during World War II. Pajović also condemned the insults by Amfilohije, the Serbian Orthodox Metropolitan of Montenegro, about Montenegrins who asserted their Montenegrin identity, in which Amfilohije stated that such people were "bastards" of the World War II Montenegrin communist and Partisan leader Milovan Djilas. Amfilohije also described these Montenegrins as "oxen" and "faeces". Pajović accused the same clero-nationalist groups of historical revisionism against the anti-fascist struggle in Montenegro and its legacy.
## Death and legacy
Pajović died suddenly on 2 June 2019, aged 85, and was buried the following day at the Čepurci cemetery in Podgorica. In December 2019, the Association of Fighters and Anti-Fascists in Nikšić organised a tribute to Pajović, led by the historian Živko Andrijašević. Andrijašević – the author of the standard historical dictionary of Montenegro, Istorijski Leksikon Crne Gore – stated that Pajović's most significant work was his 1977 book Kontrarevolucija u Crnoj Gori: četnički i federalistički pokret 1941–1945 [Counterrevolution in Montenegro: The Chetnik and Federalist Movements 1941–1945], and asserted that its conclusions had stood the test of time. This has subsequently been echoed by Nada Tomović – head of the history department at the University of Montenegro – who referred to the book as a "masterpiece". Andrijašević went on to say that Pajović did not modify his historical conclusions for political purposes, but remained true to the facts. At the same event, Adnan Prekić – assistant professor of history at the University of Montenegro – stated that no-one explained Yugoslav political movements during the interwar period and World War II as well as Pajović. Andrijašević concluded by decrying the fact that the event had to be organised by the Association of Fighters and Anti-Fascists and not by the Institute of History. He continued, condemning Pajović's former colleagues at the Institute who specialised in World War II history for not attending the event, stating that this was indicative of a malaise within the study and teaching of history in Montenegro.
According to Miljić, Pajović's historical work constitutes a significant legacy. Pajović has been acknowledged by Pavlović as "the most prominent Montenegrin historian" of the events of World War II in Montenegro. Morrison, author of the 2009 book Montenegro: A Modern History asserts that Pajović is one of the most prominent Montenegrin historians in general.
## Selected bibliography
Pajović's works were published in both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts of Serbo-Croatian throughout the former Yugoslavia and its successor states.
### As sole author
### As co-author |
41,518,250 | Sultanate of Singora | 1,146,421,519 | Heavily fortified port city in southern Thailand | [
"1605 establishments in Thailand",
"Archaeological sites in Thailand",
"Former countries",
"Former countries in Thai history",
"Former sultanates",
"Songkhla province"
]
| The Sultanate of Singora was a heavily fortified port city in southern Thailand and the precursor of the present-day town of Songkhla. It was founded in the early 17th century by a Persian, Dato Mogol, and flourished during the reign of his son, Sultan Sulaiman Shah. In 1680, after decades of conflict, the city was destroyed and abandoned; remains include forts, city walls, a Dutch cemetery and the tomb of Sultan Sulaiman Shah. An inscribed cannon from Singora bearing the seal of Sultan Sulaiman Shah is displayed next to the flagpole at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, London.
The sultanate's history was documented in accounts, letters and journals written by British and Dutch East India Company traders; its destruction was discussed in books and reports authored by representatives of the French embassies to Siam in the mid 1680s. Sultan Sulaiman's family history has also been chronicled: Princess Sri Sulalai, a consort of King Rama II and mother of King Rama III, was descended from Sultan Sulaiman; present-day descendants include the 22nd Prime Minister of Thailand and a former Navy admiral. Sources pertaining to the Singora cannon include articles published in academic journals and letters written by General Sir Harry Prendergast, commander of the Burma Expeditionary Force that captured Mandalay in the third Anglo-Burmese War.
## History
### Early history
The Sultanate of Singora, sometimes known as Songkhla at Khao Daeng, was a port city in the deep south of Thailand and precursor of the present-day town of Songkhla. It was located near the southern tip of the Sathing Phra peninsula, on and around the foothills of Khao Daeng Mountain in Singha Nakhon. British and Dutch East India Company traders called the city Sangora; Japanese officials knew it as Shinichu; contemporary French writers used the names Singor, Cingor and Soncourat.
Singora was founded in the early 17th century by Dato Mogol, a Persian Malay-Muslim who accepted Siamese suzerainty and paid tribute to the Kingdom of Ayutthaya. The port was said to be ideal and able to accommodate more than 80 large vessels; a network of overland and riverine routes expedited trans-peninsular trade with the Sultanate of Kedah. Jeremias van Vliet, Director of the Dutch East India Company's trading post in Ayuthaya, described Singora as one of Siam's principal cities and a major exporter of pepper; French traveller and gem merchant John Baptista Tavernier wrote about the city's abundant tin mines. A Cottonian manuscript at the British Library discusses Singora's duty-free policy and viability as a hub for regional trade:
> itt were not amiss to build a strong howse in Sangora which lyeth 24 Leagues northwarde of Patania, under the gouerment of Datoe Mogoll, vassall to the King of Siam: In this place maie well the Rendezvouz bee made to bring all thinges together that you shall gather for the provideing of the ffactories of Siam, Cochinchina, Borneo and partlie our ffactorie in Japan, as you shall gather according to the advises thereof, And hither to bring all such wares as wee shall gather from the foresaid places to bee sent to Bantam and Jaccatra: this howse willbee found to bee verie Necessarie, for the charges willbee too highe in Patania besides inconveniences there; which charges you shall spare at Sangora: there you pay no Custome, onlie a small gift to Datoe Mogoll cann effect all here.
Dato Mogol died in 1620 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Sulaiman. A period of turmoil erupted ten years later when the Queen of Pattani branded the new ruler of Siam, King Prasat Thong, a usurper and tyrant. The queen withheld tribute and ordered attacks on Ligor (present-day Nakhon Si Thammarat) and Bordelongh (present-day Phatthalung); Ayuthaya responded by blockading Pattani with an army of 60,000 men, as well as enlisting the help of the Dutch people in capturing the City. Singora became involved in the dispute and in 1633 sent an envoy to Ayuthaya requesting help. The outcome of this request is not known, but Dutch records show that Singora was severely damaged and the pepper crop destroyed.
### Independence
In December 1641 Jeremias van Vliet left Ayuthaya and sailed to Batavia. He stopped en route at Singora in February 1642 and presented Sulaiman with a letter of introduction from the Phra Khlang (known by the Dutch as the Berckelangh), the Siamese official responsible for foreign affairs. Sulaiman's response sheds light on his attitude towards suzerainty:
> On the 3rd of February the delegate van Vlieth landed at Sangora and was received by the governor, who was angry at the Berckelangh's letter, saying that his country was open to the Netherlanders without Siamese introduction and that the letter had not been necessary. This and other haughty acts displeased the Hon. van Vlieth.
Later that year Sulaiman declared independence from Ayuthaya and appointed himself Sultan Sulaiman Shah. He modernised the port, ordered the construction of city walls and moats, and built a network of forts that spanned the harbour to the summit of Khao Daeng. Trade flourished: the city was frequented by Dutch and Portuguese merchants and enjoyed amicable relations with Chinese traders. Ayuthaya tried at least three times to reclaim Singora during Sulaiman's reign; each attack failed. One naval campaign ended in ignominy when the Siamese admiral abandoned his post. To help fend off overland assaults, Sulaiman assigned his brother, Pharisees, to strengthen the nearby town of Chai Buri in Phatthalung.
Sultan Sulaiman died in 1668 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Mustapha. A war with Pattani broke out soon after, but despite being outnumbered more than four to one, Singora rejected attempts at mediation by the Sultan of Kedah and trusted in its army of experienced soldiers and cannoneers. During the late 1670s Greek adventurer Constance Phaulkon arrived in Siam. He sailed to the country from Java on a British East India Company vessel and, heeding orders from his employer, promptly embarked on a mission to smuggle arms to Singora. His escapade ended in failure when he was shipwrecked.
### Destruction
In 1679 Ayuthaya mounted a final offensive to quash the Singora rebellion. Samuel Potts, a British East India Company trader based in Singora, recorded the city's preparations for war:
> This King has fortified his City, gunned his Forts upon the hills, making all the provision he can for his defence, not knowing how soon the King of Siam will oppose him.
In a letter dated August 1679 Potts informed his East India Company colleague that the Siamese fleet had arrived and stressed the impending danger. The events that followed were decisive: in 1680, after a siege lasting more than six months, Singora was destroyed and abandoned. Contemporary French sources document the city's destruction and provide a wealth of detail. The head of the French East India Company's operations in Ayuthaya described how Singora's "trés bonne citadelle" had been razed after a war of more than thirty years; a missionary working in Ayuthaya in the mid 1680s told how the King of Siam sent his finest ships to destroy the sultanate "de fond en comble" (from top to bottom). Simon de la Loubère, France's envoy to Siam in 1687, recounted a story about a French cannoneer who crept into the city one night and single-handedly captured the sultan:
> Some have upon this account informed me a thing, which in my opinion, will appear most incredible. 'Tis of a provincial named Cyprian, who is still at Surat in the French Company's Service, if he has not quitted it, or if he is not lately dead: the name of his Family I know not. Before his entrance into the Companies service, he had served some time in the King of Siam's Army in quality of Canoneer (...) Cyprian wearied with seeing the Armies in view, which attempted no persons life, determin'd one night to go alone to the Camp of the Rebels, and to fetch the King of Singor into his Tent. He took him indeed, and brought him to the Siamese General, and so terminated a War of above twenty years.
While Loubère's account of life in 17th-century Siam was well received by his contemporaries in France, the veracity of his tale about Cyprian and Singora's demise has been questioned. An article published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, for example, described it as "a story which might have passed in a romantic age, but it is too improbable for history". In a memo dated 1685 a French East India Company official claimed that Singora was finally captured by means of a ruse. Thailand's Ministry of Culture supports this version of events and discusses a spy who tricked his way into the city, enabling Siamese troops to enter and burn it to the ground.
### Cession to France
In 1685 Siam attempted to cede Singora to France: the hope was that the French East India Company, supported by a garrison of troops, could rebuild the city, establish a trading post and counter the strong regional Dutch influence. The city was offered to France's envoy to Siam, the Chevalier de Chaumont, and a provisional treaty signed in December; Siamese ambassador Kosa Pan sailed to France the following year to ratify the cession. The French, however, were not interested: Secretary of State for the Navy, the Marquis de Seignelay, told Kosa Pan that Singora was ruined and of no further use, and asked for a trading post in Bangkok instead.
## Landmarks
After Singora had been destroyed, Sultan Sulaiman's sons were pardoned and assigned to new positions in Siam. Later generations of Sultan Sulaiman's family were closely connected with Siamese royalty: two of Sulaiman's descendants commanded armed forces led by Prince Surasi in the 1786 conquest of Pattani; Princess Sri Sulalai, a consort of King Rama II and mother of King Rama III, was also descended from Sultan Sulaiman. Present-day descendants include Admiral Niphon Sirithorn, a former Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Thai Navy General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, the 22nd Prime Minister of Thailand; and a family of silk weavers at the Muslim village of Phumriang in Surat Thani.
### The forts at Khao Daeng
Thailand's Ministry of Culture details the remains of fourteen forts on and around Khao Daeng Mountain. Forts 4, 8 and 9 are well preserved and characterise the sultanate's military architecture: fort 4 can be reached by ascending a flight of steps that starts behind the archaeological information centre, fort 8 is accessible via a stairway near the Sultan Sulaiman Shah mosque, fort 9 sits atop a small motte near the main road leading from Singha Nakhon to Ko Yo Island. Forts 5 and 6 occupy the upper slopes of the mountain and offer panoramic views of Lake Songkhla and the Gulf of Thailand. The two pagodas on the summit of Khao Daeng were built on the base of fort 10 during the 1830s to commemorate the suppression of rebellions in Kedah.
In her book In the Land of Lady White Blood: Southern Thailand and the Meaning of History, Lorraine Gesick discussed a manuscript from Wat Pha Kho in Sathing Phra. The manuscript (which in Gesick's opinion dates from the late 17th century) consists mainly of an illustrated map about ten metres long that depicts Sultan Sulaiman's forts at Khao Daeng. A microfilm of this manuscript, made by American historian David Wyatt, is kept at the Cornell University Library.
### The tomb of Sultan Sulaiman Shah
Located in a Muslim graveyard about 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) north of Khao Daeng, the tomb of Sultan Sulaiman Shah is housed in a small, Thai-style pavilion surrounded by large trees. The cemetery is mentioned in the Sejarah Kerajaan Melayu Patani (History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani), a Javi account drawn mostly from the Hikayat Patani. The text describes Sultan Sulaiman as a Muslim raja who died in battle and the cemetery as "full of nothing but jungle". The tomb is an object of pilgrimage in the deep south of Thailand, where Sultan Sulaiman is revered by Muslims and Buddhists alike.
### The Dutch cemetery
About 300 metres (980 ft) from the tomb of Sultan Sulaiman is a Dutch cemetery known locally as the Vilanda Graveyard. The cemetery is located within the grounds of a PTT petroleum complex; permission is needed to gain access. In 1998 an investigation of the cemetery was conducted using ground-penetrating radar. The survey yielded detailed radargrams showing subsurface lime coffins that belonged to Singora's 17th-century Dutch community. A paper discussing these findings was presented to the IV meeting of the Environmental and Engineering Geophysical Society in Barcelona, September 1998.
## The Singora cannon
Following Singora's destruction, Siamese troops seized and sent to Ayuthaya an inscribed cannon. The cannon remained there until it was captured during the Burmese-Siamese war of 1765–1767 and transported to Burma. It was then taken by the British in the third Anglo-Burmese War (1885–1887) and shipped to England. In 1887 it was presented to the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London and put on display next to the flagpole in the grounds of the Figure Court. The cannon bears eleven inscriptions, nine of which have been carved in Arabic characters and inlaid with silver. One inscription refers to the engraver, Tun Juma'at Abu Mandus of Singora; another is set within a circular arabesque design and reads "The seal of Sultan Sulaiman Shah, the Victorious King".
Sources pertaining to the Singora cannon's journey to London include the Hmannan Yazawin (the first official chronicle of Burma's Konbaung Dynasty) and reports written by General Sir Harry Prendergast, commander of the Burma Expeditionary Force that captured Mandalay in the third Anglo-Burmese war. The Hmannan Yazawin provides an inventory of weapons taken by the Burmese after the sack of Ayuthaya, noting that most guns were destroyed and only the finest pieces conveyed to Burma. Correspondence between General Prendergast and his superiors in India details ordnance seized during the Burma campaign and lists cannon sent as presents to Queen Victoria, the Viceroy of India, British governors of Madras and Bombay, the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Portsmouth and Plymouth dockyards, and the Royal Hospital Chelsea. A letter at the Royal Hospital refers to the Singora cannon as a Burmese trophy gun received from the Government of India in October 1887. |
4,315,113 | Russet sparrow | 1,171,077,480 | Small passerine bird found in Asia | [
"Birds described in 1835",
"Birds of East Asia",
"Birds of Eastern Himalaya",
"Birds of the Himalayas",
"Passer",
"Taxa named by Coenraad Jacob Temminck"
]
| The russet sparrow (Passer cinnamomeus), also called the cinnamon or cinnamon tree sparrow, is a passerine bird of the sparrow family Passeridae. A chunky little seed-eating bird with a thick bill, it has a body length of 14 to 15 cm (5.5–5.9 in). Its plumage is mainly warm rufous above and grey below. It exhibits sexual dimorphism, with the plumage of both sexes patterned similarly to that of the corresponding sex of house sparrow. Its vocalisations are sweet and musical chirps, which when strung together form a song.
Three subspecies are recognised, differing chiefly in the yellowness of their underparts. The subspecies rutilans and intensior breed in parts of eastern Asia, where they are usually found in light woodland, and the subspecies cinnamomeus breeds in the Himalayas, where it is usually associated with terrace cultivation. The russet sparrow is the typical sparrow of human habitations in towns where the house and Eurasian tree sparrows are absent. In the southern part of its range, the russet sparrow prefers higher altitudes, but in the north it breeds by the sea. The russet sparrow is known well enough in the Himalayas to have a distinct name in some languages, and is depicted in Japanese art.
This sparrow feeds mainly on the seeds of herbs and grains, but it also eats berries and insects, particularly during the breeding season. This diet makes it a minor pest in agricultural areas, but also a predator of insect pests. While breeding, it is not social, as its nests are dispersed. It forms flocks when not breeding, although it associates with other bird species infrequently. In some parts of its range, the russet sparrow migrates, at least to lower altitudes. Its nest is located in a tree cavity, or a hole in a cliff or building. The male chooses the nest site before finding a mate and uses the nest for courtship display. The typical clutch contains five or six whitish eggs. Both sexes incubate and feed the young.
## Taxonomy
The English ornithologist John Gould described a specimen of the russet sparrow collected in the Himalayas at a meeting of the Zoological Society of London in December 1835 under the binomial name Pyrgita cinnamomea. His description was included in the volume of the society's proceedings for 1835 that was published on 8 April 1836. Its specific name comes from the Neo-Latin cinnamomeus, "cinnamon-coloured". The russet sparrow was described as Fringilla rutilans, by the Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck, from a specimen collected in Japan. Temminck's description is contained in his Nouveau recueil de planches coloriées d'oiseaux which was issued in 102 livraisons or parts between 1820 and 1839. It was at one time believed that the livraison containing the description of the russet sparrow was issued in 1835 but it has now been established that it appeared sometime in 1836 but as the precise date is not known under the rules of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature it is deemed to have been published on 31 December 1836. Most taxonomists give priority to Gould's publication and use the binomial name Passer cinnamomeus for the russet sparrow.
The russet sparrow has usually been placed in the genus Passer, and within this genus it is seen as a part of the "Palearctic black-bibbed sparrow" group, which includes the Eurasian tree sparrow as well as the house sparrow. It has generally been seen as a close relation of the house sparrow, and Richard Meinertzhagen even considered it to be the same species as the Somali sparrow, one of the house sparrow's closest relatives.
However, studies of mitochondrial DNA indicate that the russet sparrow is an early offshoot or basal species among the Palearctic black-bibbed sparrows. While mitochrondrial DNA suggests speciation in Passer occurred during the Miocene and Pliocene, British ornithologist J. Denis Summers-Smith estimated that the russet sparrow separated from the other Palearctic black-bibbed sparrows about 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, during the last glacial period. During this time, sparrows would have been isolated in ice-free refugia, such as the lower Yangtze valley, which Summers-Smith considered the most likely centre of evolution for the russet sparrow.
Thirteen subspecies have been described, but only three are widely recognised, these differing largely in the colour of their underparts. The subspecies Passer cinnamomea rutilans breeds in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and southeastern and central China. The subspecies intensior, described in 1922 by Walter Rothschild from Yunnan, breeds in southwest China and parts of India, Burma, Laos, and Vietnam. In a large part of Sichuan intensior intergrades with P. c. rutilans, and a number of subspecies names have been proposed for the intergrades. The nominate subspecies cinnamomeus, described by Gould from the northwestern Himalayas, breeds from northern Arunachal Pradesh to Nuristan in Afghanistan.
## Description
The russet sparrow is a small chunky bird, with plumage warm rufous in overall colour. It is a medium-sized sparrow at 14 to 15 cm (5.5–5.9 in) and 18 to 22.5 grams (0.63–0.79 oz). It has a thick bill suited to eating seeds, which is black on the breeding male, horn-coloured on the non-breeding male, and yellowish with a dark tip on the female. Wingspans for males range between 6.8 to 8.2 cm (2.7–3.2 in) and those for females from 6.7 to 7.7 cm (2.6–3.0 in). Tail, bill, and tarsus lengths are 4.3 to 5.1 cm (1.7–2.0 in), 1.1 to 1.3 cm (0.43–0.51 in), and 1.6 to 1.8 cm (0.63–0.71 in), respectively.
Measurements for the russet sparrow vary geographically, between the three subspecies, and also within the Himalayan subspecies cinnamomeus. The subspecies cinnamomeus is generally larger than the others, and within this form there is a tendency for birds at higher altitudes to be larger, and a clinal variation in size with the smallest birds in the west of the range and the largest in the east.
The iris is chestnut in colour. The legs of both sexes are pale brown to pinkish-brown. The flight of all sparrows is swift, and that of the russet sparrow is described as swifter and more direct than that of the Eurasian tree sparrow.
### Plumage
The sexes differ, or are dimorphic, in their plumage, and have a similar pattern to that in the corresponding sex of house sparrow. There is some variation between the three subspecies, especially in the colouration of the underparts. Birds of the subspecies rutilans are off-white on their cheeks and the sides of their necks, and have pale grey underparts. Birds of the subspecies intensior have a pale yellow wash on their underparts and cheeks, as well as darker upperparts, while those of the subspecies cinnamomeus have a heavy yellow tinge to their underparts.
Moult is poorly recorded, the only records coming from Sakhalin and Himachal Pradesh. In Sakhalin, moult occurs in August and September, between the breeding season and migration. In Himachal Pradesh, aviculturalist G. A. Perreau observed captive and wild birds and reported that they were yellow from December to spring and whitish during the remainder of the year, a pattern which may be atypical.
The breeding male is bright russet or cinnamon red on its upperparts from its crown to its rump, with a black streaking on its mantle. It has a small black bib and black around its eye, separated from the russet of its crown by a very thin white supercilium, a stripe running from the bill to the rear of the head. The side of its neck and cheek are off-white, and its underparts are pale grey or washed with yellow, varying geographically. Shoulders and greater coverts are chestnut, and its median coverts are black at the base with white at the tips. The rest of the wing is light brown with black tinges. Its tail is blackish brown, edged with ashy brown. The non-breeding male differs little from the breeding male, being paler with more orange upperparts. The only species with which the male is easily confused is the Eurasian tree sparrow, which differs in its black cheek spot and brown back.
The female has mostly pale brown upperparts, and pale grey underparts, so it resembles the female house sparrow. It differs from the house sparrow in its slightly darker, russet-tinged plumage. It has a conspicuous cream supercilium from above its eye nearly around its head, and a bold dark brown stripe through its eye. It has mostly greyish brown wings and a back streaked with black and buff. The juvenile is similar to the female, though more pale and sandy. As the male reaches its first winter, it resembles the adult, differing in less bold chestnut and a dusky bib.
### Voice
The russet sparrow's vocalisations are described by most sources as "the sweetest and most musical" of any sparrow. Its basic call is a cheep or chilp, similar to that of other sparrows. This call is monosyllabic, unlike the house sparrow's chirrup call, and is softer than that of the other sparrows. This call is given as a flight call, or by displaying males. Recorded variations include a chweep given by males at the nest and a trilled cheeep. Sometimes the male strings calls together and sings them in a strident tone, to create a sort of short song, transcribed as cheep chirrup cheeweep or chreet-chreet-chreet. The song is interspersed with sibilant chu-swik notes similar to those of the white wagtail. A thin swee swee vocalisation not unlike that of an Indian robin has been reported, but the context of this call is unrecorded. During territorial disputes, males give a rapid chit-chit-chit call.
## Distribution and habitat
The russet sparrow is found in parts of eastern Asia and in the Himalayas. It is not known whether its distribution is continuous between these two areas, since the political sensitivity of the Brahmaputra River's valley near the China-India border makes the area less accessible to ornithologists. In the Himalayas the russet sparrow breeds from the far northeast of India through southeastern Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh to Kashmir and Nuristan in Afghanistan. Here, the russet sparrow makes short movements to lower altitudes between November and April in many areas.
In eastern Asia, the russet sparrow is found in Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, a small part of mainland Russia, Japan, southern Korea, and part of northern China, where it is mostly migratory. It is distributed through southern China and Taiwan, and the mountainous parts of Burma, southern Northeast India, Laos, and Vietnam, where it is mostly resident. The russet sparrow also occurs as a winter visitor in southern Japan, the further south of China, and northern Thailand. In eastern Asia, the autumn migration occurs between August and November.
The russet sparrow appears to be abundant in most habitats across most of its very large range, and in the some areas it is among the most common birds. In Southeast Asia, its range has contracted at lower elevations due to global warming, but it has also moved higher at high elevations and it remains common. Although its global population has not been quantified, it is assessed for the IUCN Red List as least concern for global extinction.
Breeding takes place in mountains and uplands across most of the range. This preference for high altitudes is influenced by latitude: in the farthest south of its range it never breeds below 2,500 metres (8,200 ft) above mean sea level, but in the northernmost part of its range it often breeds by the sea. In eastern Asia, the russet sparrow prefers light woodland, but it is sometimes found in towns and agricultural areas. In Sakhalin, it breeds mostly in riparian forest. In Hokkaidō, the russet sparrow finds a greater food supply for its young in more remote forests, and has greater reproductive success.
In the Himalayas, it is strongly associated with terrace cultivation, and it probably only spread to the Himalayas when these agricultural practices arrived 3000 to 4000 years ago. In towns where it occurs alongside the house or tree sparrow, it is found in gardens and less built up areas. In those hill stations in India where both the house and the russet sparrow occur, the house sparrow breeds around more-built up areas and bazaars, whereas the russet sparrow is "rather more up market at the larger houses with gardens and open spaces". In towns where it is the only sparrow, it is not dependent on trees, breeding around houses and eating scraps in streets. In the winter, migratory birds occur in open cultivated land and riverine grasslands, but are never far from shrubs or trees.
## Behaviour
In many aspects of its behaviour, the russet sparrow is similar to the house and Eurasian tree sparrows. Like them, it feeds on the ground, but spends most of its time perching on branches. Unlike those species, it prefers open, exposed branches for perching. The russet sparrow is described as shy and wary by some observers, but J. Denis Summers-Smith found it approachable in Indian hill stations. Flocking russet sparrows feed close to the ground, moving forward as birds from the rear of a flock move to the front, in what is called "roller feeding".
Outside its breeding season, the russet sparrow is gregarious and forms flocks to find food, though it infrequently associates with other birds. Wintering flocks tend to keep away from human habitation. The russet sparrow is also social at night during the winter, and it forms large communal roosts in trees and bushes. In the breeding season, the female roosts in the nests and the male nests in foliage nearby.
The adult russet sparrow is mostly a seed-eater, eating the seeds of herbs and weeds as well as rice, barley, and other grains. Berries, such as those of the kingore (certain Berberis spp.), are also eaten when available. Nestlings are fed mostly on insects, especially caterpillars and larval beetles obtained on trees and flying insects caught by aerial pursuit. During the breeding season adults also consume insects.
Mortality rates in the russet sparrow have not been studied, but it is known that many young birds die from Isospora infections, to which the bird has little resistance. Other recorded parasites of the russet sparrow include Protocalliphora blowflies, and Menacanthus chewing lice.
### Breeding
The russet sparrow's breeding season is short, lasting about three months. The Himalayan subspecies cinnamomeus has been recorded breeding from April to August, the nominate subspecies breeds from May to July, and the subspecies intensior is believed to breed in March. During its breeding season, the russet sparrow is not gregarious, and its nests are dispersed uniformly rather than clustered. Its nests are most frequently built in tree cavities, often disused woodpecker nests. The russet sparrow has been recorded breeding alongside the Eurasian tree sparrow and white wagtail in black kite nests, taking advantage of the territorial defence of the kites to avoid nest predation. Other nest locations include the eaves of thatched roofs, stone walls and embankments, and electric junction boxes. In Bhutan, it nests in holes in the outer walls of monasteries, often alongside the Eurasian tree sparrow. In Sakhalin, it will sometimes build free-standing nests in bushes. The russet sparrow also uses the disused nests of the red-rumped swallow, and a pair of russet sparrows has been recorded attempting to oust a pair of black-crested tits from their nest.
The male chooses the nest site, and uses it for his courtship display, spending much time calling nearby. When a female comes near a male at his nest the male begins to display by raising his head, drooping his wings, pushing his chest forward, and lowering his tail. He then bows up and down in front of the female, who will lunge and then fly away if unreceptive. Both sexes take part in building the nest, which consists of a loose, untidy bunch of dry grass which fills the nesting cavity, lined with fur and feathers for warmth.
Eggs are elongated ovals, with a fine texture and a slight gloss. They are whitish in overall colour with a grey tinge and brown spots, streaks, or blotches. The average size of the egg is 19.2×14.2 millimetres (0.75×0.55 in). Eggs are similar to those of the Eurasian tree sparrow, differing in a duller colour and more narrow shape, though they cannot be separated from those of the other sparrows with certainty. Two clutches of four or sometimes five or six eggs are laid in a year. In Hokkaidō, clutches are laid between early May and early July, with two peaks in laying around mid May and late June. Both sexes incubate and feed the young, with the male often being more active in feeding the nestlings. In Hokkaidō, nestlings hatch weighing about 2 to 5 grams (0.071 to 0.176 oz), and fledge fourteen or fifteen days after hatching, weighing 15 to 55 grams (0.53 to 1.94 oz). The common cuckoo has been recorded in old literature as a brood parasite of the russet sparrow.
## Relationships with humans
In parts of the range, the russet sparrow inhabits towns, and in most of its range, it occurs near cultivation, and is a minor pest of agriculture. Though it damages crops, it also feeds its nestlings largely on insect pests. In China, the russet sparrow has been recorded as a captive bird, kept with the Eurasian tree sparrow. In Japan it was eaten in the 1870s and sold in the Yokohama game market. The russet sparrow is known well enough in the Himalayas that in most languages it has a different vernacular name from the Eurasian tree sparrow. Examples of these vernacular names include lal gouriya in Hindi and kang-che-go-ma in Tibetan. The Japanese artist Hokusai portrayed the russet sparrow, and due to this, it has appeared on postage stamps featuring Japanese art in Japan, The Gambia, and Guyana. |
51,265,418 | Lancashire Fusiliers War Memorial | 1,092,807,929 | War memorial in Bury, UK | [
"1922 sculptures",
"Buildings and structures in Bury, Greater Manchester",
"Grade II* listed buildings in Greater Manchester",
"Grade II* listed monuments and memorials",
"Lancashire Fusiliers",
"Military history of Lancashire",
"Monuments and memorials in Greater Manchester",
"Royal Regiment of Fusiliers",
"War memorials by Edwin Lutyens",
"Works of Edwin Lutyens in England",
"World War I memorials in England",
"World War II memorials in England"
]
| The Lancashire Fusiliers War Memorial is a First World War memorial dedicated to members of the Lancashire Fusiliers killed in that conflict. Outside the Fusilier Museum in Bury, Greater Manchester, in North West England, it was unveiled in 1922—on the seventh anniversary of the landing at Cape Helles, part of the Gallipoli Campaign in which the regiment suffered particularly heavy casualties. The memorial was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Lutyens was commissioned in light of a family connection—his father and great uncle were officers in the Lancashire Fusiliers, a fact noted on a plaque nearby. He designed a tall, slender obelisk in Portland stone. The regiment's cap badge is carved near the top on the front and rear, surrounded by a laurel wreath. Further down are inscriptions containing the regiment's motto and a dedication. Two painted stone flags hang from the sides.
The memorial was unveiled by Lieutenant General Sir Henry de Beauvoir De Lisle on 25 April 1922, using the novel method of pressing an electric button. The remaining funds were spent on drums and bugles for the regiment and donated to the Lancashire Fusiliers' compassionate fund. After the Lancashire Fusiliers were amalgamated into the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in 1968, the memorial was adopted by the new regiment and rededicated to all fusiliers killed in action. It originally sat outside the Lancashire Fusiliers' headquarters in Wellington Barracks but was relocated when the barracks closed in the 1970s. It was moved again in 2009, this time to sit in a public park renamed Gallipoli Gardens, outside the Fusilier Museum, which moved at the same time. The memorial was designated a grade II listed building in 1992. It was upgraded to grade II\* in 2015 (on the centenary of the Cape Helles landing), along with two other memorials related to the Gallipoli Campaign; later that year it was recognised as part of a national collection of Lutyens' war memorials.
## Background
In the aftermath of the First World War and its unprecedented casualties, thousands of war memorials were built across Britain. Amongst the most prominent designers of memorials was the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, described by Historic England as "the leading English architect of his generation". Lutyens established his reputation designing country houses for wealthy clients. After the war, which had a profound effect on him, he devoted much of his time to memorialising its casualties. He became a public figure through his design for The Cenotaph on Whitehall in London, which became Britain's national memorial. This, along with his work for the Imperial War Graves Commission, led to commissions for war memorials across Britain and the empire. As well as memorials for towns and cities, Lutyens was commissioned to design memorials for several private companies and regimental associations, including the Lancashire Fusiliers. These tended to be the least controversial of Lutyens' war memorials—a site was readily available (in this case the regiment's home barracks) and fundraising was straightforward.
Lutyens' father was Captain Charles Henry Augustus Lutyens (1829–1915), formerly an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers. Captain Lutyens, himself the son of an army officer, spent most of his military career in Canada; he served during the time of the Crimean War but spent it as a musketry instructor in Hythe, Alberta. The architect's great uncle, Major Engelbert Lutyens, also served in the regiment, which is noted on a plaque by the memorial. Engelbert was an orderly officer to Napoleon Bonaparte while the Lancashire Fusiliers guarded the latter during his exile in Saint Helena earlier in the 19th century. In light of his family connections with the regiment, Lutyens waived his fee for the memorial.
The Lancashire Fusiliers (previously the 20th Regiment of Foot) was swollen by thousands of volunteers during the First World War, predominantly recruited from the towns to the north and west of Manchester (an area which was then in south-eastern Lancashire but has since become part of Greater Manchester). Many of the recruits signed up with neighbours, colleagues, social clubs, and other groups following the creation of the pals battalions. By the end of the war, it had grown to 30 battalions, including Territorial Force and New Army units. The 1st Battalion was stationed in Karachi at the outbreak of war in 1914 and was immediately shipped back to England and from there to the Mediterranean. It played a prominent role in the landing at Cape Helles (part of the Gallipoli Campaign, under the control of the 29th Division) on 25 April 1915, during which its members famously earned "six Victoria Crosses before breakfast". The Lancashire Fusiliers' beach was later named "Lancashire Landing". The 1st was transferred to France in March 1916. The 2nd Battalion was immediately posted to France and spent the remainder of its war on the Western Front, where it was involved in intense fighting. Its first engagement was the Battle of Le Cateau. The regular battalions were joined by multiple New Army battalions, some of which joined the fighting in France and Turkey, while others were held in reserve or posted to garrison ports around Britain. Both of the regular battalions and multiple territorial and New Army units participated in some of the largest battles of the war, including (among others) the Somme and Passchendaele (the Third Battle of Ypres).
## Commissioning
By the end of the war, 13,642 Lancashire Fusiliers had been killed, including 600 at Cape Helles alone. The regiment earned 18 Victoria Crosses (including the "six before breakfast"), more than any other infantry regiment. The loss of so many men, and the losses at Gallipoli in particular, deeply affected the local community in Lancashire and especially Bury, where the regiment was headquartered. A ceremony to commemorate the Cape Helles landing has taken place every year since 1916 in the parish church, which contains a memorial to the Lancashire Fusiliers' efforts at Cape Helles, placed by the crew of HMS Euryalus (which carried the bulk of the 1st battalion to Gallipoli).
In light of the regiment's heavy losses, there was a strong feeling that their war efforts should be commemorated. This led Colonel George Wike to convene a meeting in Salford on 9 January 1919, where a committee was established with the mandate to raise £30,000 for a permanent memorial and a compassionate fund for soldiers and their families. Lutyens first travelled to Bury in September 1920 at the invitation of Colonel Wike. In a letter to his wife, Emily, he described the town as a "desolate spot". He was received by Wike and a group of other colonels, and dined with several of the regiment's officers. While touring potential locations for the memorial, he proposed a site outside the regimental headquarters in Wellington Barracks, to which the committee agreed.
## Design
The memorial was built by John Tinline of Bury, a local stonemason. It consists of a single tall, tapering obelisk in Portland stone (similar to the pair on Lutyens' Northampton War Memorial) standing on a square base with a cornice where the two parts meet. Below the base is a carved frieze which sits on a pedestal of two rectangular blocks. The whole structure rests on a rectangular plinth and at the very bottom are two shallow circular steps. On the front and rear of the obelisk are carvings of the Lancashire Fusiliers' cap badge and the inscription "XX" (referring to the 20th Regiment of Foot, from which the Lancashire Fusiliers evolved) in gilded lettering, surrounded by a carved laurel wreath. On the front, below the wreath, the regiment's motto, OMNIA AUDAX ("daring in all things", awarded for the fusiliers' service in the Second Boer War), is inscribed. To either side are carved, painted flags: the King's Colour to the north (left when the memorial is viewed from the front) and the colour of 1st Battalion, the Lancashire Fusiliers to the south (right). The obelisk itself is 4 metres (13 ft) tall and the whole memorial is 6.9 metres (23 ft) tall.
The remaining inscriptions are all to the lower part of the structure. The dates of the First World War are carved just below the obelisk, and the dedication TO THE LANCASHIRE FUSILIERS THEIR DEEDS AND SACRIFICES FOR KING AND COUNTRY on the upper part of the pedestal. Below those, on the lower part of the pedestal and on the plinth, are later inscriptions: the dates of the Second World War and the further dedication AND ALL FUSILIERS WHO DIED IN SUBSEQUENT CAMPAIGNS (the latter added after the Lancashire Fusiliers' amalgamation in the 1960s). The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner opined that the memorial is one of the few beautiful public artefacts in an otherwise "drab" group of towns, and "more moving in its modesty" compared to some of Lutyens' grander designs for municipal war memorials.
## History
The memorial was unveiled by Lieutenant General Sir Henry de Beauvoir De Lisle—commander of the 29th Division, under which the 1st battalion was organised—on 25 April 1922, specifically chosen as the seventh anniversary of the Cape Helles landing. The general gave a speech in which he referenced the Gallipoli landings and the "six Victoria Crosses (VCs) before breakfast", after which he performed the unveiling by the then-novel method of an electric button. Lutyens was unable to attend the ceremony but sent a cable. Other dignitaries included several local mayors, Captain Richard Willis (recipient of one of the six VCs), three generals, and the Rector of Bury who led prayers. In addition to the memorial itself, spare funds were spent on drums and bugles for the regiment and donated to the fusiliers' compassionate fund out of a desire that the living benefit from the funds. The drums and bugles were formally presented to the regiment at the unveiling ceremony, at the conclusion of which the bugles were used to sound the Last Post. They are now on display in the Fusilier Museum, adjacent to the memorial's site in Bury. Lutyens designed one other obelisk as a regimental memorial, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry War Memorial in Cowley, Oxford, which was unveiled the year after the Lancashire Fusiliers' memorial. The two memorials are similar, though the OBLI's is more modestly decorated.
When the Lancashire Fusiliers were amalgamated with other fusilier regiments into the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in 1968, the new regiment adopted the memorial and rededicated it to commemorate all fusiliers killed in the line of duty. It stood in its original location outside the regimental headquarters at Wellington Barracks for over 40 years, but the barracks closed with the amalgamation and were mostly demolished in the 1970s. As a result, the memorial was moved to the side of Bolton Road, outside the front gate of the former barracks. In 2009, Sparrow Park was redeveloped as Gallipoli Gardens and the Fusilier Museum moved there from the former regimental headquarters. The war memorial was dismantled and repaired before being re-installed next to the museum. Lutyens' grandson, Lord Ridley, unveiled the memorial in its new location on 27 September (the day before the official reopening of the museum), after which the Rector of Bury, the Reverend John Findon, led a dedicatory service.
The Lancashire Fusiliers memorial was designated a grade II listed building on 2 September 1992. It was upgraded to grade II\* in April 2015, along with Deal War Memorial in Kent and the memorial to the 29th Division (under which the 1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers was organised) at Stretton-on-Dunsmore in Warwickshire, to mark the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. Historic England further recognised the Lancashire Fusiliers memorial as part of a "national collection" of Lutyens' war memorials in November 2015. Listed building status offers legal protection from demolition or modification; grade II\* is reserved for "particularly important buildings of more than special interest" and applied to about 5.5% of listings.
## See also
- Grade II\* listed buildings in Greater Manchester
- Grade II\* listed war memorials in England
- Listed buildings in Bury |
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