In a beautiful part of Dorset, in southern England, lies the ghost village of Tyneham.

In 1943, the War Department requisitioned the village to exand the area for troops to practice in preparation for D-Day.

The villagers were given just 28 days notice to quit, and they had to leave just 6 days before Christmas,  but were promised they could return after the war.

As the villagers were about to leave they put a note on the church door that read:

‘Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.‘

In 1947, the War Department went back on their word. No-one, not even the villagers were allowed on the land at all until 1975, not even to tend to graves of deceased family members. The village remains military land to this day, with occasional public openings.

It was on one of these ‘open’ days that I was able to take many photographs. Only the church and the schoolhouse remain in good condition.

I took many photographs when I was there. It is an interesting, but a sad place too,  given its history

Ghost Village is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

A Tour Around Maidstone Museum is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

You’ll Never look at a MONOPOLY Game the same way again.  Starting in 1941, an increasing number of British Airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape.

Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful and accurate map, one showing not only where stuff was, but also showing the locations of ’safe houses’ where a POW on-the-lam could go for food and shelter.

Paper maps had some real drawbacks — they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush.

Someone in MI-5 (similar to America’s OSS) got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It’s durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads, and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever. At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd.

When approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort. By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U.K. Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, ‘games and pastimes’ was a category of item qualified for insertion into ‘CARE packages’, dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners  of war.

Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington’s, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were.

When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece. As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington’s also managed to add:

1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French currency, hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!

British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission, how to identify a ‘rigged’ Monopoly set – by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking
square.

Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged
Monopoly sets Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to use this
highly successful ruse in still another, future war. The story  wasn’t declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen
from Waddington’s, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.It’s always nice when you can play that ‘Get Out of Jail’ Free’ card!

Monopoly At War is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

I was reading Rob Sellen’s Snippets over on Posterous, and he mentioned Weymouth and Bridport. That lead me to recall my own travels to that part of the world, and my family connections with the area.

It is a most beautiful part of the English coastline, and parts of it have World Heritage Status. Located on the south coast of the United Kingdom, the nominated site comprises approximately 155km of undeveloped coastline and countryside. The cliff exposures along the Dorset and East Devon coast provide an almost continuous sequence of rock formations spanning the Mesozoic Era, or some 185 million years of the Earth’s history.

Anyway, I digress. My grandmother, who lived in Kent, headed south west to Bridport in 1928, at the tender age of 16 to become a nurse, and is pictured here at that time.

It wasn’t a life-long career for her, as she met and married my grandfather six years later, and he was always proud to tell you that grandmother never worked another day in her life after they married. Different standards from a different era indeed.

The depression years didn’t affect the UK as much as it did the US, and my grandfather was in a safe job as a boilermaker in His Majesty’s Dockyard, Chatham. He remained employed there, having had just this one employer for life, until he retired in 1968.

Bridport’s beach, if you like, is at West Bay. Bridport is a few miles inland up the River Brit. In fact, West Bay was named Bridport Harbour until the Great Western Railway decided to rename it around 1884, when there was an attempt to relaunch the area as a vacation resort, after the local shipbuilding had declined.  The photograph to the right is of my late grandfather at West Bay sometime in the 1970’s.

The railway no longer runs to West Bay, passenger service finally ceasing in 1930, although freight traffic hung on until 1962. There have been proposals to build a two foot narrow gauge line along the former GWR Route.

Bridport & West Bay is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

The Irish have St Patrick’s Day; The United States has Indepence Day and the English have St. Georges Day.

St. George is the patron saint of England. This from Wikipedia:

A traditional custom at this time was to wear a red rose in one’s lapel, though with changes in fashion this is no longer common. Another custom is to fly or adorn the St George’s Cross flag in some way: pubs in particular can be seen on April 23 festooned with garlands of St George’s crosses. However, the modern association of the St George’s Cross with sports such as football, cricket and rugby means that this tradition is rare outside this context. It is customary for the hymn “Jerusalem” to be sung in cathedrals, churches and chapels on St George’s Day, or on the Sunday closest to it.

If you don’t have a red rose, then have some honest to goodness English Real Ale instead!

Happy St. George’s Day is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

• The father of transplant surgery, Alexis Carrel, was a French surgeon who learnt how to repair flesh from the best seamstresses in Lyon in the early 1890s. He died under suspicion of being a Nazi collaborator.
• The first man to have a hand transplant was New Zealander Clint Hallam, in 1998. Eventually, Clint asked to have the hand amputated as it wasn’t working out as well as he’d hoped.
• An estimated 100,000 people worldwide (including 50,000 in the USA alone) have been lobotomised, including some children, largely thanks to the dedication of the infamous Walter Freeman. He invented the so-called ‘ice-pick’ lobotomy, using the sharp instrument to break through the skull into the brain.
• Nose jobs first emerged in Europe in the 16th century when a breakout of syphilis raged across the continent. As well as rashes and sores, a tell-tale sign was the sinking of the nose into itself. It was seen as an amoral and unclean disease.
• The “father of plastic surgery” was Italian Gaspare Tagliacozzi, who developed an “arm flap procedure” to replace the nose. A patient’s arm had to be strapped to their nose for more than a month to allow the skin to grow from the arm onto the face. This skin would later be shaped into a nose.
• Surgery (in particular using heart-lung machines) is only possible because of an anti-clotting agent called heparin, which is found in cows. The anti-clotting needs to be reversed at the end of the operation so that the patient doesn’t bleed. Protamine, which comes from salmon sperm, is used to reverse the effect.
• In 1946, Sir Harold Gillies, who had famously pioneered plastic surgery during the First World War, performed a hugely controversial operation – a sex change – on Laura Dillon. Laura became Michael Dillon.
• One of the first steps towards mind control was demonstrated on a bull in Spain in the Sixties. Professor Delgado believed electro-stimulation of the brain could control behaviour. He proved his case by standing in a bull ring with an enraged bull. He then stopped the animal in its tracks at the touch of a button.
• In 1903, American socialite and beauty Gladys Deacon had hot wax injected into her face, at the age of 22, to perfect her nose. It melted and destroyed her looks. She ended up in a psychiatric hospital where she died, in 1977, at the age of 96.
• In the 18th century, tooth decay in aristocrats soared because of increasing access to sugar. They began implanting paupers’ teeth to replace the rotten ones. At best, these dropped out after a month or two, at worst, the recipients caught syphilis or gonorrhoea.

Some Facts about the History of Surgery is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

For at least a century, Charleston, South Carolina, has been known as the Holy City.

It’s not that its residents are any more God fearing or devout than the rest of the nation, and it’s not that the folks here are any better behaved than anywhere else either.

Quite simply, if you wander around downtown Charleston, you’ll find churches of various denominations everywhere.

There are many to be found on Charleston’s ‘Museum Mile’ which takes in a large part of the downtown end of Meeting Street, and where you can find at least a dozen churches, and other places of worship.

St Philips Episcopal Church, situated in Church Street, and pictured here to the left, has been a designated National historic Landmark since 1973.

St Mathews German Lutheran Church, which is situated in King Street, next to the Francis Marion Hotel, was practically destroyed in a fire in 1965. The spire came crashing down and  lodged itself 18 feet into the ground on the south side of the building’s entrance. There is a commemorative plaque there to mark the spot.

In Charleston, one can also find French Huguenot, and Greek Orthodox churches, as well as a Synagogue.

As well as being places of Worship, and almost all of the many churches downtown are still in regular use; they provide a fascinating insight into the history of Charleston from its founding as an English colony in 1670,  up to the present day.

The Holy City is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

Round-the-clock drinking in England and Wales became a reality after new licensing laws came in force on this day three years ago, as part of the Licensing Act, 2003.

More than 1,000 pubs, clubs and supermarkets were granted 24-hour licenses to sell alcohol, according to government figures. This is actually quite a small percentage, when you consider there are over 65,000 pubs alone in the UK

Around 40% of premises applied to vary their licenses by either extending their opening by an hour or two or by offering late food and entertainment.

A survey by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport concluded that about 3,000 of 200,000 premises licensed under the new act have obtained 24-hour licenses, and 25% were supermarkets.

The British Beer &  Pub Association said the last orders rush at 11pm, and drinking against the clock, were widely recognized to be among the main problems in the past.

Many premises have opted only for a modest increase in opening hours, particularly between Thursday and Sunday.

About 50% pubs and bars are said to now close at midnight rather than 11pm – with some clubs and late bars shutting at 3am, instead of 2am.

24 Hours is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

This park is located just outside Summerville, SC.

In 1697, settlers from Dorchester, Massachusetts, who had originally come from Dorchester,  England, founded a town here.

The church was built in 1719; a town fair was established in 1723, and even a Free school (which unusual for the time, educated girls too), in 1734.

The town prospered as a trade center for around a hundred years, but as the frontier moved inland, and after the British destroyed much of the town during the American Revolution, the town was largely abandoned by 1800.

Dorchester State Park is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

Cove Inlet was the site of a trolley bridge that linked Mount Pleasant to Sullivan’s Island from 1898 to 1927.

There had been a bridge of one sort on another there though since the Revolutionary War.

Pitt Street Trolley 1898-1927 is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog