The end of yet another year approaches, with more worries about global warming. We at Woodcutts are seriously thinking of opting out of these happenings, after all we haven’t had one aeroplane take off or land here, and for that matter no large ships have docked here, nor have we any factory chimneys belching smoke, however we do have two 4x4s and the occasional bonfire, but in the case of the latter at least we are preventing material going to landfill. The only street lighting is from the moon, and there is no constant rush of through traffic, with the exception of the main Sixpenny Handley/ Tollard Royal by-pass, which we in the suburbs don’t really accept as part of Woodcutts. We do occasionally have a heavy goods vehicle down the lane, but they certainly don’t try it a second time; especially articulated vehicles, which find they can’t turn around and have to reverse the quarter of a mile back out.
With the roads and other facilities not improved for at least thirty years, possibly when the last house was built here, there has been no population explosion as in the rest of the world. (Please see back copies of the Downsman for the annual census that is taken occasionally.) In fact since there are no plans to build more houses here, we don’t expect the situation to change. Nor do we expect to lose any land due to change in sea levels because of global warming, so the population density remains the same.
Despite whatever we might wish, global warming is occurring whether we like it or not. How much blame can be laid at man’s doorstep is still not agreed, but we can be absolutely certain that the dramatic rise in world population over the last century, the use of fossil fuels and the ‘improving lifestyles’ of the developing nations, particularly India and China, to elevate them to the ranks of the so called ‘developed nations’, is having a serious environmental effect, as can be seen in the next picture.
Global warming is with us, and unless we disagree with some of the greatest scientists of our age, we must concede that we are heading for some serious consequences. Even our gardens are going to suffer quite severely with small amounts of climate change. If we get prolonged dry spells particularly in summer, water will become too scarce to use on flower gardens and lawns, and despite the increased CO2 which is essential for photosynthesis and growth, most plants will suffer. They will get rid of the larger, early leaves and produce fewer, smaller thicker ones where the stomata (breathing holes), are fewer in number and more protected. This of course will lead to less productive lifestyles, which are already showing up in onions and cauliflowers, while longer growing seasons, providing there is sufficient water for irrigation, will improve yields of potatoes and most root crops, particularly carrots.
Some species require a period of vernalisation, where the seed is naturally subjected to quite specific times of low temperatures, and will not sprout unless these are achieved. This could result in selected seeds being kept in freezers or fridges. Other plants require wood chilling times, before they awaken properly and produce fruit; the blackcurrant bushes are examples here, and growers are already experiencing reduced yields.
So all in all, there are some advantages to the gardener, and some disadvantages in the short term, while in the long term there could be many serious problems to gardening as we know it.
Potatoes will have to be planted at the first opportunity each year, with earlier blight attacks probable, especially where irrigation is used. Foliage will die back earlier in the autumn, and crops will have to be harvested sooner. In my case, that will have to be before Christmas as I have still two rows of my harvest to dig. The main crop variety I grow, Sarpo Mira, is available only from Thompson and Morgan, and has a very high resistance to blight and seems to be unpalatable to slugs to some extent. So for all gardeners who are always behind with everything, this is the variety to grow.
My early gardening career was much influenced by an elderly gentleman, who for our purposes here, we will call ‘Old Bob’. He was a prolific potato grower and always grew enough for his family throughout the year, his many chickens and a pig or two in the pig sty. Everyone knew of his great affinity to potato growing and of his great sense of urgency at harvest time.
Come September, because in Old Bob’s eyes, no potatoes should be harvested before then because the skin would not be set, he would be asked by everyone who came across him, “How are your spuds this year Bob?” All would get the same reply, year in and year out, “Not so good this yeer, sumes as big as peas, sumes as big marbles and the rest is litl’uns.” He would say this without a smile or change in voice, this was mainly because he had to talk through his clenched teeth, because they were holding his pipe, which was considerably heavier than it should be because of it being held together with copious amounts of Elastoplast.
Old Bob was just one of the many country characters whom I have known, and there is a book waiting to be written about him. In today’s world where everyone needs to conform, there just aren’t the characters that there used to be. How things change as you grow older, I certainly didn’t expect to be surrounded by oil seed rape, in this part of the countryside, or anywhere else for that matter. All the arable fields in direct contact to the few grassland fields here, are drilled with this green brassica. However, in the past the seeds of this crop have been grown for oil extraction, mostly for human consumption with some of the residue used for animal feed. Now of course, a large amount of what is sown is harvested under contract for bio fuels, mostly after being exported to Germany, where bio-diesel has become an important part of the economics of fuel. There are many points for and against this change, with the most important being either the increase in cost of wheat because of the smaller acreage grown and the huge amount of rape flowering in the spring, which effects so many people with chest complaints. Another point which as yet has not been spoken of much, is the way in which this huge increase in acreage will influence the wildlife of the areas where it is to be grown. Not simply because of the actual acreages, but because of the agrochemicals which will of necessity be used, with special mention of insecticides. These among other things will seriously effect the wild insects, but also the honey bees, which are so important to the honey production in this country.
We could go on and on about changes, which both global warming and man’s quest for an ‘improved life style’ could affect. The best we can do is to try and control our own ways of life styles and enjoy the more positive side of global warming.
Thank you for reading the article and God Bless you.
194th Company Labour Corps (formerly 17448 Devonshire Regiment)
Historians, when discussing the Great War, often refer to 1917 as being ‘the hardest year’, when all the participants were bedevilled by failure of one kind or the other and, perhaps, none more so than in Russia where civil unrest in the March led to the collapse of the Russian royal family. For several months a power struggle existed that culminated in the Bolsheviks seizing power under Lenin in the November, an act that led to a Russo-German armistice on the 5th December, 1917.
From the outset in August 1914, much had been expected from the armies that faced each other across the various fronts but particularly so in France and Flanders where neither of the main protagonists could claim to be in the ascendancy. Few need reminding of the terrible casualties of what by the onset of winter 1917, marked three years of trench warfare that for the soldier and politician alike the prize of victory appeared as elusive as ever. The situation was ever more becoming like a nightmarish game of chess in which the endgame looked to be drifting towards an agreed stalemate but with neither player willing, or able, to make the necessary overtures to bring a settlement to the seemingly insurmountable problems that stood in the way of a win for one side or the other. For the German High Command events on their Eastern Front allowed them to bolster their forces in the west, though not at the total expense of releasing all their eastern divisions.
For Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, British supremo in charge of our armies on the Western Front, 1917 was probably the most testing year of his command for not only did he have to accommodate his French opposite number, General Robert Nivelle, but he often found himself at serious odds with his political masters and in particular the prime minister of the day, David Lloyd George. Amongst the myriad of problems (and he must have been very mindful of events in Russia) that beset Haig was the question of manpower and in particular to find ways of lessening the burden of general day-to-day maintenance from the shoulders of troops coming out of the line and into the rest areas. Although his divisional commanders had considerable numbers of support personnel at their command, the increasing complexity of modern warfare and the relatively limited area over which the battles of 1917 had been fought (without serious gain to either side) meant that the rear areas were, invariable, in a poor state of repair with the multitude of communications systems being continually broken up by long-range shellfire. Thus, throughout 1917, a process of ‘combing out’ of the British Expeditionary Force was ongoing and as a consequence thousands of soldiers like Private Henry William Lucas were, as in his case, withdrawn from their battalions and seconded to the Labour Corps.
I began this profile by referring to 1917 as being ‘the hardest year’ for despite the entry into the conflict by the United States of America (it would be 1918 before their considerable resources of men and equipment would be ready for action), it was the hard pressed British and French armies that would continue to carry the fight to the enemy. The campaigns of the spring and early summer have been touched upon in previous profiles, but it was Third Battle of Ypres that was to cause so much misery to our forces and, I suspect, bring about the death of Henry William Lucas of the 194th Company Labour Corps.
Begun on the 31st of July, the outcome of this offensive has all the hall marks of the misery endured on the Somme in 1916, and plenty more besides. I will quote now from an early passage in chapter 5 of Denis Winter’s Haig’s Command – A Reassessment. Here Winter is referring to a book written in 1934, by an Oxford don, one Cyril Cruttwell, who had experienced at first hand the nightmare of ‘Third Ypres’ and in particular the fighting that took place around the tiny village of Passchendaele in the Ypres Salient; ‘All the combatants on either side regarded it as the culmination of horror. The rain was pitiless, the ubiquitous mud speedily engulfed man and beast if a step was taken astray from the narrow duckboards upon which descended a perpetual storm of shells and gas. Some of the pictures in the Imperial War Museum preserve an aspect of the macabre grotesqueness of this blasted and mangled land. Long-distance gun-fire and the art of night-bombing had developed so much during the last year that reserves and resting troops were kept in a fever of perpetual apprehension. Men’s nerves were badly frayed before they took part in the fighting and had little chance of healing when they were withdrawn from it.’
Was it near Passchendaele that Henry was wounded? Unfortunately, I am not able to say with any degree of certainty on which part of the Western Front that he was soldiering in the late autumn of 1917, but, in the parlance of the day, somewhere along this shell-torn land he caught ‘a blighty’, a wound of such severity that having being evacuated to the rear area it was decided he should be despatched, with all speed, to a hospital in England. In Henry’s case it was to Bagshott Hospital in Nottingham that he was taken and it was there, on the 15th of November, 1917, a Thursday, that he died in his 30th year, his parents William and Matilda Lucas upon learning the dread news requesting that his body be brought back to the village for burial.
Thus, it came to pass that on the Monday following his release from suffering that the Revd Ernest Hasluck led the service of commitment in the quiet setting of St. Mary’s churchyard. At least for his grieving parents they could gain a sense of closure for their beloved son was now resting in the peaceful surroundings of his home village. For countless thousands of parents, wives, family and friends of those who fell in the Great War no such closure could be afforded for the bodies of their loved ones lay where they fell, swallowed up in the morass of the battlefields of France and Flanders, many never to be found despite the meticulous searches carried out in the months following the armistice of 1918.
When everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.
Bought myself a camouflage coat last winter, now I can’t find it anywhere.
I get most daily exercise pushing my luck.
Don’t you find it worrying that doctors call treating you their ‘practice’?
My friend used to live in a car tyre until he got a puncture; he now lives in a flat.
3 blokes get talking in a pub. The first says “I’m a sculptor, I’m really into rock” The second says “I’m a cobbler, I like a bit of sole”. The third says “I’m a truck driver; I’m strictly middle of the road”
Patient: “Are you sure this cream will cure my spots?”
Dr: “Sorry, I never make any rash promises.”
Q: Why was the archaeologist always depressed?
A: Because his career was in ruins.
Sheep
Mary always had one and so did little Bo Peep.
These girls were always with them because they loved their sheep.
A flock of sheep to most of us all look exactly the same,
but to someone who’s a shepherd, he knows them all by name.
He says they all are different, like the markings on their ears.
They all have different characters. He’s known them all for years.
In Spring we think of little lambs frolicking by the gate.
It’s hard to think that later on they’re chops upon your plate.
The jersey that you’re wearing to keep you nice and warm,
to knit this is only possible because the sheep are shorn.
They help us get to sleep at night, we count them one by one.
So get yourself a cuddly sheep, they really are quite fun.
There’s lots of different sorts of sheep - a few you never knew.
So come along and meet some like ewe and ewe and ewe
I’m Robbie yeah, and since I was a boy I’ve been writing my name everywhere I go.
It was Robbie in the wet sand, Robbie in the snow.
Robbie scratched in gravel, Robbie scrawled on walls.
I’ve chalked my name on pavements, in schools and shopping malls.
I’ve been making out my territory and others had better beware.
These streets belong to Robbie. Challenge me if you dare.
Robbie tells my story, it speaks of history. Read my name and wonder at this boy of mystery.
Now my story has moved up a notch as I spray my name these days.
I’m the aerosol king of the junction with my artistic displays.
And I love to travel about noticing my name.
It gives me a heck of a buzz, it gives me a taste of fame.
It’s great when I’m walking a street and knowing that round the next bend
Is a place where I wrote my name. It’s like meeting up with a friend.
Robbie tells my story, it speaks of history. Read my name and wonder at this boy of mystery.
I’d like to see my name in lights, I’d like to see it glow.
And sometimes at night I imagine the stars put on a show.
And looking up at the sky you can guess at my elevation.
My name across the heavens in a brand new constellation.
It’s the ultimate piece of graffiti that no-one else could top.
I’d be Robbie universally.
End of story. Full stop.
Welcome to the Psychiatric Hotline
If you are obsessive compulsive please press 1 repeatedly.
If you are co-dependant please ask someone to press 2.
If you are paranoid delusional we know who you are and what you want. Just stay on the line so we can trace this call.
If you are multiple personalities please press 3, 4, 5 and 6.
If you are schizophrenic listen carefully and a little voice will tell you which number to press.
If you are a manic depressive it doesn’t matter which number you press. No-one will answer.
If you are anxious just start pressing numbers at random.
If you’re phobic don’t press anything.
If you’re anal-retentive please hold