Here is the entry from Cockburn's Diary Ramsgate Life in the
First Word War, for today 100 years ago:
“Tuesday August 4th 1914
This mornings papers were more reassuring. That is to say
the Government, although still striving for peace, were resolutely determined
to uphold the honour of the country and to fulfil its obligations to its
friends. Sir Edward Grey's fine speech on the situation was reported fully, and
gave great satisfaction to everyone. Few developments occurred during the day,
until the evening it was reported that England had given Germany notice that
unless she gave a satisfactory reply before midnight tonight to our request for
the withdrawal of the German troops from Belgium, England would declare War on
Germany. As we learned the next day England did declare war on Germany at 11 pm
on Tuesday 4th August 1914, a truly memorable day in the history of the world,
how memorable, the future alone can tell.”
We went to Sandwich yesterday to look at some books, and then on
to have a picnic lunch by the river there.
We have just started on the song "Oh My Darling,
Clementine" and I suggested that they sang it in the car, on the way to
Deal. Obviously this is a song that appealed to the younger of the two sisters,
so she sang all the way while the older sister only sang sporadically between
consulting her mobile phone.
On arrival in Sandwich the older sister had gone a bit green, so
we determined that as motion sickness is caused by the fluid sloshing about in
the inner ear, in time to the motion of the car. And while one sister’s fluids
were doing this the other sister’s fluids were sloshing about in time with
Clementine, which apparently doesn’t cause motion sickness; something that
would be unpleasant for the audience if it did.
So having made this important scientific breakthrough we
investigated deeper Sandwich. With Clementine and the Isle of Thanet – being
flattish – there are no canyons and hence no echo.
However Sandwich is a town that now has too many churches and
some of them have been. What? I don’t really know. Deconsecrated? I think,
anyway they are open to the public and one of them apart from having medieval
people who looked at the gorgon, sphinx, well something like that, and turned
into stone, one of them has a whacking great echo.
Anyway as there was no one else about we all tried out
Clementine at the top of our voices, in my case out of tune, and appreciated
the echo.
As some of you probably know at one time I was in the god
bothering business, so I have some specialist input about it, my conclusion
here was, what with it being Sunday god was a bit sick of hymns. Just after
this we found some fairly good books at a very reasonable price, so thank you
god.
Still on the Clementine theme, I wanted to hear The Black
and White Minstrels rendition. This is a bit tricky as our collection of
classical records and our collection of rock music records is in alphabetical
order, but the great pile of records that fall into some peculiar bracket,
which I loosely think of as music to be ashamed of is in a terrible muddle.
I guess this is mostly the music that we were mostly
listening to in the 60s when I think it best to pretend that we mostly listened
to. What? The really cool – now there’s a word that says cool – you know,
Doors, Stones, Velvet Underground, Hendrix.
Anyway I have made a start on alphabeticlising the heap.
Oh yes the bank holiday, any one know why we didn’t
get one to celebrate the outbreak of WW1? Pertinent here as we got an extended
on 100 years ago.
