The Year's Blogs: 12 of the best from 2020 2020 saw sustained activities on the Antoine Vanner Writing-Front, Covid-19 notwithstanding. The ninth book of the Dawlish Chronicles, Britannia's Morass, was published in December (click here for details) and blog articles continued to appear at a rate of two per week. These last related to [...]
The 9th Dawlish Chronicle is now available – details at end of article Christmas Day 1914: The Cuxhaven Raid On Christmas Day 1914 three Royal Navy seaplane carriers, Engadine, Riviera and Empress launched a total of seven floatplanes to attack the German Zeppelin base at Cuxhaven, some 25 km north of Bremerhaven. The force had been escorted to striking distance [...]
The loss of HMS Doterel: Disaster off Punta Arenas 1881 Chile’s Punta Arenas, on the Brunswick Peninsula, to the northern side of the Strait of Magellan, is probably the most southerly city in the world. It was originally established as a penal colony by the Chilean government in 1848 to assert sovereignty over the Strait – [...]
The Princess Alice Disaster, 1878 Though it is now largely forgotten, one of Britain's worst maritime catastrophes occurred on the River Thames in 1878 , just downriver from London when the excursion steamer Princess Alice was sunk in a collision. It is strange that some disasters, such as the loss of the Titanic in 1912, live on in [...]
Life at sea in the Royal Navy, late 1860s Scott, 1903 I’ve recently been dipping again into the memoirs of Admiral Sir Percy Scott (1853 -1924), one of the key figures in the modernisation of the Royal Navy in the late 19th and early 20th [...]
Guest Blog by Alan Wren The Ambush of SS Persia, 1915 Introduction by Antione Vanner: I wrote a blog article some time ago (click here) about two tragedies that happened on the same day, December 30th 1915. One was the loss by accidental magazine explosion of the Royal Navy armoured cruiser HMS Natal at [...]
HMS Black Joke engages a slaver, 1831 Following Britain’s abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 and end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Royal Navy was to be involved in suppression of the trade in the North and South Atlantic until about 1860. Earlier blogs (Click here and here) have illustrated the hazards [...]
Guest Blog by Penelope Fisher "Sea Lord and Me" Introduction by Antoine Vanner: Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher Copyright R.Fisher I have been fascinated for decades by the character and achievements of Admiral Lord John “Jacky” Fisher (1841 - 1920). A human whirlwind who revolutionized not just the Royal [...]
A British cruiser 2000 miles up the Amazon: HMS Pelorus 1909 As a prisoner on HMS Bellerophon, prior to his exile on St. Helena, Napoleon told its commander, Captain Maitland, that, "If it had not been for you English, I should have been Emperor of the East; but wherever there is water to float [...]
Nightmare in the Baltic 1874 Merchant Service in the mid-19th Century Baron Walter Runciman In a recent bog (click here to read it) I drew on the memoirs of Baron Walter Runciman (1847 –1937), a classic case of a poor boy of high initiative “making good”. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, he ran away [...]
