Programme  Reminder

Final meeting of our season, to be at the St Georges and Priorslee Parish Rooms at7.30 p.m. on May 6

May 6                          Neil Clarke, The Holyhead Road. As one of our own members, Neil, a well-known local transport historian, who grew up locally, is a particularly welcome speaker. There is just one problem about this meeting: if, as now seems increasingly likely,  it is decided to hold a General Election on this date, we will have to rearrange the programme to leave the hall free to be a polling station; but we will cross that bridge later.

 ###############################################################################

THE GREEK FIRE

. . . is a sort of Phosphorus, which adheres to any body which it touches; burns like water, and cannot be extinguished even by that element. The effects of phosphorus are well known; but two things prevent its being adopted;--In the first place, it costs a prestigious sum, and is not effectual unless used in considerable quantity; in the second it is so terrible that, were it actively to be employed, neither soldiers nor sailors could be found to make use of it; beside brave men revolt at certain death, brought even upon enemies; and the most resolute will not encounter it. The feeling lately awakened by the terrible catastrophe of the two Spanish ships is a great and a very recent example of this. The fate of the men excited pity in the English, who assisted the sufferers. They were willing to fight with them, but they could not see them blown up and drowned. The Greek Fire, if used, would terminate in the death of all the combatants, and the destruction of the fleets engaged; therefore it never will nor can be used by brave men even in the most desperate contacts. We are mistaken if a Shemir did not propose the use of this terrible means of destruction to the Prince of Condé, now in England, who, like a true descendant of the great Condé, revolted at the idea, and turned the Shemir with disgrace from his army, then in Germany, during the Seven Years War.

Louis the fifteenth acted in a similar manner with a chemist who proposed it to him at Versailles about sixty years ago.

Shrewsbury Chronicle 7 8 1801

The above paragraph shows a touching belief that modern soldiers will not use ‘unfair’ weapons.

A Shemir was perhaps a Samarian. The Prince of Condé led an army of émigré French nobles in Germany in the 1780s

Greek fire was ‘wet fire’ (Πυρ ‘υγρόν) or ‘sea fire’ (Πυρ θαλασσιον). It was employed in naval battles from at least the 5c BC. An early use was at Platea in 429 BC. It may not in fact have been phosphorus at all. In the 7c AD the Greeks of Constantinople possessed  wet fire, apparently composed in this instance of sulphur, naptha and quicklime, which could be thrown out of siphons, and which they used to destroy a Saracen fleet. The secret of its composition was jealously guarded. The siphon was a wooden tube cased in bronze. Although phosphorus is abundant in nature in compounds, if the ancient Greeks possessed the ability to isolate the element phosphorus they must have had a chemical ability in advance of the 17c.

Conditions . . . certainly seem very bad. From everyone’s people I get the same sort of letter I get from you. Everyone is servantless, no one visits anyone else or goes away, and the food seems as hard to get hold of in other places as in London now. . . . the great fear in the army and all its appurtenances out here is . . . that the civil population at home will fail us by losing heart—and so of course morale—just at the most critical time . . . before America can really come in and the hardships of the winter are not yet over.

Letter from a nurse in France, 1918

V Brittain, Testament of Youth, 401

A particular consequence of the Great War was the great social revolution which deprived the upper classes of almost all domestic servants.

America entered the war effectively in Spring 1918 and brought about the final defeat of Germany. Up to this point Germany had been on the verge of winning.