Latest news with #WinstonChurchill
Daily Record
9 hours ago
- Science
- Daily Record
The uninhabited Scottish island that was once one of the UK's most dangerous places
During the war, Churchill had ordered British scientists to develop biological weapons fearing the Nazis were doing the same Once considered one of the most dangerous places in Britain, a remote Scottish island nicknamed 'Anthrax Island' was off-limits to the public for decades after becoming the secret site of a wartime biological weapons experiment. Gruinard Island, located off the north-west coast of Scotland, was chosen by the British government during the Second World War as the test site for a top-secret programme aimed at weaponising anthrax. At the height of global conflict, Prime Minister Winston Churchill feared Nazi Germany was developing biological weapons and ordered British scientists to do the same, Express reports. Remote, uninhabited and close enough to the mainland for access, Gruinard fitted the bill. But locals in nearby villages such as Laide had no idea what was unfolding across the bay. Rumours began to circulate as sheep, cows and horses mysteriously began dying. The government tried to silence speculation by compensating for the loss of livestock, blaming the deaths on a Greek ship's poor animal disposal. The island's long and complex past stretches well beyond the 20th century. It was mentioned as far back as the mid-16th century by traveller Dean Munro, who noted it was under the control of Clan MacKenzie. Historically, both Ross-shire and Cromartyshire laid claim to the island due to its location between Gairloch and Ullapool. By the late 1700s, with surrounding villages growing into fishing and sheep-farming communities, Gruinard was used for grazing sheep and as a makeshift dock for local fishing activity. Though the 1881 census recorded six residents, no permanent population has existed since. The true extent of the secret tests during World War II remained hidden until a Ministry of Defence film was declassified more than 50 years later. The footage revealed the shocking details: around 80 sheep were placed in exposure crates and positioned to inhale a cloud of anthrax spores released by a small controlled explosion. Scientists wearing cloth overalls, gloves and respirators oversaw the operation as a white powder drifted in the wind towards the animals. Within days, the sheep were dead. Though Churchill's anthrax bomb was never deployed in war, the island was left contaminated, scorched and abandoned. In a desperate attempt to rid it of the toxin, two men from Porton Down, the UK's top chemical and biological research facility, were sent to burn large sections of the heather. That evening, villagers watched thick plumes of smoke rise from the island, unaware of what had been unleashed. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Anthrax, a deadly bacterial disease, especially when inhaled, can be fatal even with medical treatment. Yet for 24 years after the tests, no signage on the island even mentioned the word. It wasn't until the 1980s that public pressure mounted to clean up the site. In 1981, a group of environmental activists calling themselves Dark Harvest launched a bold campaign to force the government to act. The island remained a biological hazard until 1986, when a decontamination team, all vaccinated against anthrax and dressed in protective gear, finally began efforts to cleanse the land. The clean-up took four years, and on 24 April 1990, Gruinard Island was officially declared free of anthrax. In 2022, Gruinard Island made headlines once again when a dramatic blaze engulfed the uninhabited land, sending plumes of smoke into the night sky.
Spectator
14 hours ago
- Business
- Spectator
Do we really need state-funded restaurants?
Two British cities, Dundee and Nottingham, have been chosen as trial sites for a new government scheme to be piloted next year: state-subsidised restaurants. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has put up £1.5 million for the 12-month trial, initiated by the campaign group Nourish Scotland. If the restaurants are successful, they'll be rolled out across Britain – nourishing us all – with a subsidised meal for £3. Inspired by second world war state-funded canteens, they're going to be called 'Public Diners' – clever branding, with its quasi-American vibe. Their branding matters because – as anyone who ever ate greasy slop from a tray at a state-run stolovaya in Soviet Russia remembers – no-frills, state-funded restaurants are intrinsically drained of glamour. Today's fastidious British public will require a touch of coolness to entice them in. Winston Churchill also understood that branding mattered. When those state-funded canteens got going in 1940, he decreed that their name, 'communal feeding centres', was 'an odious expression, redolent of communism and the workhouse'. At one stroke, he transformed their image by branding them 'British Restaurants'. 'Everyone,' he said, 'associates the word 'restaurant' with a good meal.' The slogan for the new Public Diners on Nourish Scotland's website is 'an idea whose time has come'. 'They are a holistic food system intervention: for public health, climate and the right to food.' (So we're going to be preached at in noun-lumps, as well as fed.) If all goes to plan, we'll soon see these new, climate-friendly, taxpayer-subsidised diners, inspired also by Turkish public restaurants, Mexican public dining rooms and Polish milk bars. Are those countries really now our economic role models? It doesn't give one much confidence in how things are going. Hospitality entrepreneurs and executives are neither pleased nor impressed. These diners are 'a ludicrous idea,' says Hugh Osmond, co-founder of Pizza Express. Luke Johnson, chairman of Gail's, says the idea that state-backed restaurants could operate more efficiently than the private sector is 'beyond a joke'. You can see why they're worried. Life is tough enough for restaurant owners – hit with ballooning, government-enforced overheads – without this new undercutting from state-funded establishments. But you could argue that commercial restaurants have only themselves to blame. Their prices have rocketed far more steeply than people's pay. In the last ten years, the cost of a Pizza Express 'Margherita' pizza has gone up from £7.55 to £14.95. If the British salary had kept pace with the increasing price of a Margherita, it would have risen from £27,600 to £53,000 – whereas in fact it's £37,500. There may well be a need for 'somewhere where all of us can eat without stretching the budget'. 'What could possibly go wrong?' hospitality executives are wondering as they wait for the pilot branches of the diners to open. A contract to run them is expected to be tendered later this year. Though the restaurants themselves will be not-for-profit, the caterers who run them will be expecting to make money – as will the providers of the fittings and the produce. Governments don't have the best reputation when it comes to not being ripped off during the procurement process. The issue of precisely what food to serve is also going to be a minefield. Nourish Scotland's consultation exercise 'showed that there are plenty of challenges ahead when it comes to deciding on what food should be served in a Public Diner'. We're no longer the unfussy wartime population who gratefully scoffed a plateful of boiled cabbage and mashed potato. The food served in those wartime British Restaurants had three chief attributes: it was soft (designed for a nation with a high proportion of false teeth), bland (designed to avoid tummy upsets) and filling (designed to fatten up a thin population). Today's populace won't be so willing to eat up whatever's put in front of them. They'll expect their individual health- and religion-based dietary requirements to be respected. An added complication is that, far from aiming to fatten up the population, this new scheme aims to tackle obesity. The scheme also requires the food to be locally sourced, to fulfil the climate aspect of its brief. As Jeremy Clarkson showed us in the latest series of Clarkson's Farm, locally sourced food is expensive. How will that work, economically, for the taxpayer? It'll be fun seeing what dishes the various branches do decide to serve – and whether the scheme sparks a revival of distinctly British regional food. I hope the Dundee branch offers the local dish Cullen skink (smoked haddock and potato soup with milk), and the Nottingham one Sherwood Forest venison and stilton. Are Public Diners really 'an idea whose time has come', or are they in fact an idea whose time is long gone? The scheme's brochure celebrates, with some nostalgia, those morale-boosting wartime British Restaurants which brought everyone together. There was indeed a great charm about them. Kenneth Clark's wife Elizabeth arranged to borrow paintings from Buckingham Palace to hang on their walls, to cheer everyone up. Today's utopian ideal is that strangers will meet and make friends over their plates of spicy chickpea and potato tagine – and that this will be a new way of falling in love IRL rather than online. But British Restaurants had their moment – and that moment has gone. The government withdrew financial responsibility for them in 1949, and they dwindled away after rationing ended in the mid-1950s. The free market took over, and competitive hospitality businesses survived – or closed down – accordingly. Is this scheme really the best way to spend taxpayers' money? Essentially, those who don't go to the restaurants will be subsidising those who do. Surely our taxes would be better spent teaching schoolchildren how to fry an onion and make a cheap pasta sauce at home. This government is so much better at thinking of new ways of spending our money than of saving it.
AU Financial Review
16 hours ago
- Politics
- AU Financial Review
Chalmers' reform summit will be 3 days of nothingness
Summits have gone downhill since the Tehran Summit of 1943 committed the Allies to two military fronts in the Second World War, paving the way for eventual victory over Nazi Germany. Its successor, the Yalta Conference of 1945, kicked off the Cold War and the takeover of half of Europe by the totalitarian Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. Grown men put away their philosophical differences and Joseph Stalin walked away with, well, everything. Winston Churchill, the great warrior of democracy, together with Franklin Roosevelt, traded off peace for communism and what would be decades of misery for half of Europe.
Times
4 days ago
- General
- Times
The Battle of Britain — through the eyes of the enemy
E ighty-five years ago this summer Britain was on the back foot — and all eyes were on the skies. France had succumbed to the Germans. British, French and Belgian troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk. Now only the Royal Air Force, supported by a newly established radar system, stood in the way of a German invasion of Britain. Hermann Göring had promised his Führer that his air force, the Luftwaffe, would clear the skies to allow the invasion of southern England — Operation Sea Lion — to begin. The intense aerial combat and RAF victory that ensued over July and August became the stuff of legend, leading Winston Churchill to declare in parliament on August 20, 1940: 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.' Tales of RAF derring-do are legion. But what was it like for the defeated Luftwaffe pilots? A new book, Eagle Days, attempts to answer that question, featuring rare photographs from the German side. Eagle Days by Victoria Taylor (Head of Zeus £25). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members In this propaganda photo a German soldier holds the remains of a British fighter plane shot down over the English Channel SZ PHOTO / SCHERL • Spectrum: Ghana's colourful fantasy coffins — in pictures Luftwaffe airmen are briefed on flight manoeuvres against British maritime targets, August 24, 1940 SZ PHOTO / SCHERL British workers carry the fuselage of a downed German aircraft, August 31, 1940 SZ PHOTO / SCHERL • Spectrum: Sony World Photography Awards 2025 — the best pictures from the shortlist On a hot summer's day, German fighter pilots wait on standby at an airfield SZ PHOTO / SCHERL • Spectrum: Photographs from South Sudan — a population fighting floodwaters German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters prowl the White Cliffs of Dover, September 7, 1940 SZ PHOTO / SCHERL
Observer
4 days ago
- Politics
- Observer
Mad Jack: The Story of the ‘Other' Churchill.
British statesman Winston Churchill was scorned by the Germans and adored by the British during World War II. A hero! But another of the same name, yet unrelated, was also brave, colourful and heroic! This is a 'Boys Own', story if ever there was one. 'Fighting Jack', or 'Mad Jack Churchill', was born John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill, of English/Irish descent, in Colombo, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in 1906, the son of a prominent civil servant and was educated at King William's College, on the Isle of Man. An impetuous youth, he swam and surfed, rode motorbikes, hunted, with guns, bows and arrows, was musically inclined playing several instruments and dabbled in amateur theatre, which remarkably, at 17, led to him being cast as an archer in the 1924 adventure movie, starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr, 'The Thief of Baghdad'. Later, Churchill attended Sandhurst Military College, graduating in 1926. His first wartime experience came soon after, in Burma, now Myanmar, where, as a young officer in the 2nd Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, Churchill's bravery was mentioned in military dispatches. Even so, he left the army to try a career in journalism as a newspaper editor in exotic Nairobi, Kenya. He enjoyed the lifestyle but was always looking for 'different' things to do. He worked for a time as a male model, which was unheard of at the time and playing the bagpipes, claimed second place in the 'Aldershot Tattoo', of 1938, which was quite an achievement. He also represented Great Britain with a meritorious 26th placing, in the World Archery Championships of 1939. The outbreak of war later that year saw Churchill eagerly return to the military and the legend of 'Fighting Jack Churchill' gained prominence as the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force retreated in disarray towards Dunkirk. War correspondents wrote of Churchill, 'sword in hand, charging elite German troops, terrified of having their limbs cleaved, who turned and ran when he shot one of them through the heart with his bow and arrow'. At L'Epinette, when the retreating British forces were surrounded. Historian Christian Ord wrote of Churchill being inspirational to an army of tired, disheartened soldiers, with their backs to the sea at Dunkirk, uncertain of rescue. Yet, as they sank exhausted onto the sands as night fell, amidst the ignominy of retreat, a sword wielding bowman and piper became legend and breathed new life into an army with its tail between its legs. His heroism recognised with the award of the Military Medal, Churchill then joined the elite Commandos in 1941 and at Vagsoy, in Norway in 1941, when their landing craft hit the beach, Churchill marched ashore at the head of his company, playing the bagpipes. Inspiring his men and terrifying the Germans. The fight lasted less than 10 minutes, with most of the enemy killed and no British casualties. The few Germans left alive reported a 'mad swordsman' they couldn't kill and the legend of 'Mad Jack', spread further. Churchill led a similar seaborne landing at Catania in Sicily, marching up the beachhead at the head of his men playing his bagpipes, bullets flying all around, then, handing his 'pipes' to one of his men, he drew his sword and charged like a man possessed, at the enemy observation post, which they captured and took more than forty prisoners. Churchill was awarded a Distinguished Service Order for bravery and the legend grew even more. As the war neared its end, Churchill was captured in Yugoslavia, then, flown to Berlin (the Germans thought he was related to Churchill), he tunnelled his way free but was soon recaptured and moved to a POW camp in Austria, from which incredibly, he escaped and made his way back to Italy, a trek of more than a thousand miles. 'Mad Jack', or 'Fighting Jack', Churchill was undoubtedly bold and brave, yet historians agree, while maybe reckless, he was never careless, with every action, every command, every word, considered and thoughtful. How then, has history forgotten such a genuine hero. His life was, a story, of which it's been said, was 'the best movie never made'.
