The Laboratory

Another Saturday, another anniversary. Last week we looked at the Radio Times from 1964, today it's 1914. While the Christmas focus has been on the battlefield football, there's a wealth of information about what was happening back home. First though, here's a 100 year old version of A Christmas Carol. No Muppets, no music. You'll just have to make up your own: http://player.bfi.org.uk/film/watch-christmas-carol-1914/ Anyway, back to the war at home. In his book, The Fateful Year: England 1914 , Mark Bostridge describes how: ...the celebration of Christmas was considered a patriotic duty, the only concession to the war, now four months old, being the replacement of tinsel and paper chains with strings of brightly coloured allied flags. In London, the West End was thronged. In the suburbs, poulterers fairly bulged with geese and turkeys; happily, the cost of Christmas dinner would be only a touch more expensive than in peacetime. All the same, those who went ou...

adapted from Wikipedia : Sir Basil Thomson (1861–1939) was a British intelligence officer, police officer, prison governor, colonial administrator, and writer. After studying at Eton and Oxford (a university career cut short by depression) he secured a cadet position at the Colonial Office, where he assisted the Governor of Fiji from 1884, but was then invalided back to England after contracting malaria. He returned to Fiji after his marriage, and then on to Tonga. Back in Britain, he was admitted to the bar in 1896. Instead of becoming a barrister, Thomson accepted the position of deputy governor at HM Prison Liverpool, then as governor of Northampton, Cardiff, Dartmoor, and Wormwood Scrubs prisons. In June 1913, Thomson was appointed Assistant Commissioner "C" (Crime) of London's Metropolitan Police, which made him the head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at New Scotland Yard. When World War I broke out in 1914, the CID found itself acting as the ...

QUEER PEOPLE By SIR BASIL THOMSON (corrected text from Internet Archive , download PDF ) CHAPTER IV THE FIRST DAYS [OF THE WAR] LIKE most Englishmen, I read of the murder at Sarajevo without a thought that it was to react upon the destiny of this country. It seemed to be an ordinary case of Balkan manners, out of which would proceed diplomatic correspondence, an arrest or two, and a trial imperfectly reported in our newspapers. It did have the immediate effect of postponing a ball at Buckingham Palace on account of the Court mourning, but that was all. During the postponed ball on July 16, so petty were our preoccupations at this moment that when a message came in that Mrs. Pankhurst had just been recaptured under the Cat and Mouse Act. I thought it worth while to find the Home Secretary and repeat it to him. A few days after the murder I met von Kühlmann at luncheon. He can scarcely at that time have expected a rupture of relations, for in talking over Dr. Solf, with whom I ha...