On this day

(27-03-2012 09:06 )bombshell Wrote:  1963: Railways to be slashed by a quarter

It was on this day in 1963 that a report entitled "The Reshaping of British Railways" was published. It became known as the "Beeching Report", after the then Chairman of British Rail Dr Richard Beeching and in the popular press the "Beeching Axe". Beeching wasn't a railwayman in any way, shape or form, he had been seconded from ICI on the then unheard of salary for a public servant of £24,000 a year (Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was only paid £10,000).

His brief was to sort out the railways, which were losing what in today's terms was close to £1 billion a year, and quickly. His solution was to close a third of the passenger rail network, totally restructure the rail freight system, and bring about the complete abolition of steam engines.

Beeching became known as "the most hated civil servant in history" and with the benefit of hindsight many of the rail closures seem to have been almost criminally shortsighted, but at the time circumstances were very different. Petrol was cheap, more and more people were getting cars and the railways had been in serious decline for years. Over 3,000 miles of passenger lines had already been closed in the period from 1948 - 1962.

The most damning statistic was that 50% of the route mileage carried just 1% of the passengers. The rural branch lines, which had been built without any central planning, meant that some small towns had more than one station on different lines which had originally been built as competitors. Now they got a two or three hourly service (if that) which hardly anybody used, but the upkeep costs of maintaining the infrastructure was crippling.

As with the withdrawal of any public facility there were protests, but it was pointed out that if the demonstators actually used the trains in anything like the numbers that turned out to campaign there would be no problem.

The Labour Party campaigned against major rail closures in the 1964 General Election, even promising in some constituencies to reopen the local railway lines within a week. They won the election by a whisker, but once in power they redefined "major" and the closures continued (two-thirds of the closures actually happened under Labour rule). Some lines were saved due to special local considerations eg poor roads in the area which were often impassable due to the winter weather, and some lines were saved due to political expediency, such as in the north of Scotland and especially the Heart of Wales line, which just happened to pass through no fewer than SEVEN marginal constituencies (the government's overall majority at the time was just four!).

In 1965 Beeching put forward a largely forgotten second report, which proposed concentrating resources on a small number of major trunk lines but would have meant further drastic closures. If Beeching II had gone ahead there would have been no trains west of Plymouth, nothing at all in Wales apart from the main line to Swansea in the south and Holyhead in the north and even the line from Newcastle to Edinburgh would have been closed.

This was a step too far and Beeching was quietly returned to ICI where he stayed until his retirement. The rail closures continued into the early 70s when the first oil crisis gave the West a wake-up call and with just a few limited exceptions brought the programme to a halt but it was also realised that the closures hadn't brought the expected savings. Indeed, a number of lines have been reopened in recent years and more are planned.

The general opinion nowadays among objective rail experts is that a third of the closed lines should never have been built in the first place, and were doomed from the start. Another third should have been saved but only if we knew then what we know now as regards oil prices, the environment and road congestion etc. As for the other third, it was a toss up as to whether they could or should have been saved or not, depending on whether savings could have been made.

Beeching became Baron Beeching of East Grinstead, and remained unrepentant about his role in the closures: "I suppose I'll always be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping."

He died in 1985, aged 71.

845 – Paris is sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok, who collects a huge ransom in exchange for leaving.

1881 - P.T. Barnum and James Bailey merged their circuses to form the Greatest Show on Earth.

1910 – Henri Fabre becomes the first person to fly a seaplane, the Fabre Hydravion, after taking off from a water runway near Martigues, France.

1930 - The names of the Turkish cities of Constantinople and Angora were changed to Istanbul and Ankara.

1941 - English novelist Virginia Woolf, suffering from depression, filled her overcoat pocket with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex and drowned herself. Her body was not found until 18th April.

1942 - British commandos destroyed the U-boat base at St Nazaire. The destroyer Campbeltown rammed the dock gates at 20 knots with five tons of explosives on board.

1979 – Operators of Three Mile Island's Unit 2 nuclear reactor outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania fail to recognize that a relief valve in the primary coolant system has stuck open following an unexpected shutdown. As a result, enough coolant drains out of the system to allow the core to overheat and partially melt down.

2003 – In a friendly fire incident, two A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft (from the United States Idaho Air National Guard's 190th Fighter Squadron) attack British tanks participating in the invasion of Iraq.

2005 – The 2005 Sumatra earthquake rocks Indonesia, and at magnitude 8.7 is the fourth strongest earthquake since 1965.

(28-03-2012 12:15 )skully Wrote:  2005 – The 2005 Sumatra earthquake rocks Indonesia, and at magnitude 8.7 is the fourth strongest earthquake since 1965.

Many people do not realise that the Richter Scale is not linear, but based on a complicated scale of logarithms and square roots.

For example, an earthquake of magnitude 5.0 is actually 31 times more powerful than a magnitude 4.0.

A magnitude 8.0 earthquake releases the equivalent amount of energy as a 15 megaton nuclear bomb, but a magnitude 9.0 releases around a colossal 480 megatons. This compares to just the 43 tons (not even kilotons!) released by the 2007 Kent earthquake which affected the Dover and Folkestone area.

The biggest recorded UK earthquake in recent years was in Lincolnshire in 2008, which came in at 5.2 on the Richter Scale. The biggest ever in the UK was recorded at 6.1 with its epicentre off the coast of Yorkshire near the Dogger Bank in 1931. The last reported UK fatality was in 1940 when an elderly woman fell down the stairs after a 4.7 earthquake hit North Wales.

Earthquakes or earth tremors hit the UK frequently, but are too faint and insignificant to be felt by the public.

The British Geological Survey records several occurences of tremors each year, but very rarely do these shores receive one of the magnitude mentioned by mr williams, or indeed the one I'm mentioning here.

This talk of quakes leads me to recur my experiences, when I was woke in the night to the quake that hit Dudley, West Midlands in 2002. The first thing I noticed was the sound of metallic banging on the walls. I realised it was the sound of the radiators being shook. I got out of bed and stood for around thirty seconds - as I was standing in the room, I could feel, and see, it shaking. It was one of those instances where its late at night and you're half asleep so not really taking in whats happening. Even though it was only thirty seconds, the banging and shaking was quite frightening. I stayed up the whole of that night watching news reports and waiting if another came.

The next morning, when I went to work, I noticed some minor damage to the office - a few sections of brickwork displaced in the street and some damage to the brickwork in the office's basement.

The Dudley quake measured 4.8 on the Richter scale. Thank god we don't have to contend with quakes that hit California, India and Japan on a regular basis which reach far higher measurements.

The link from the BBC News website to the Dudley quake is below.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2275158.stm

1971: Calley guilty of My Lai massacre
Lieutenant William Calley has been found guilty of murder at a court martial for his part in the My Lai massacre which claimed the lives of 500 South Vietnamese civilians.
The 27-year-old commander could receive the death penalty or life imprisonment after the massacre which saw US soldiers open fire on civilians in My Lai and neighbouring villages in central Vietnam in March 1968.

Lieutenant Calley was in charge of Charlie Company, a unit of the American Division's 11th Infantry Brigade, who were on a mission to root out the communist 48th Viet Cong Battalion fighters.

Brutal killings

The Viet Cong were not in the village and instead more than 500 unarmed civilians were brutally killed in an unprovoked attack by US troops.

Lieutenant Calley will be sentenced in the next few days after the verdict was announced at Fort Benning, Georgia today.

The jury of six army officers spent 13 days weighing up evidence from a four month trial.

They rejected his claim he was merely following orders in a military chain of command instilled in him since joining the army.

Lieutenant Calley faced four charges:

the murder of at least 30 "oriental human beings" at a junction of two trails
killing 70 others in a ditch
shooting a man who approached him with his hands raised begging for mercy
killing a child running from the ditch where the 70 died.
He was found guilty on the first three charges, although the number of the first was slashed from 30 to one because of conflicting evidence, and the death toll in the second charge was reduced to 20.

The final charge was reduced to assault with intent to kill a child of which he was found guilty.

Three of Lieutenant Calley's senior officers will be tried on charges arising from the massacre, two men junior to him have already been tried and acquitted and charges against 19 others have been dropped.

Charges came after the army commissioned an investigation into the cover-up of the massacre which became known as the Peers inquiry.


E-mail this story to a friend




Watch/Listen

Calley could face the death penalty


Charles Wheeler reflects on the trial







In Context
The massacre came to light a year after it happened after investigative media reports.
The crimes included murders, rape, sodomy, maiming and assault of civilians.

The Peers inquiry recommended charges should be brought against 28 officers and two non-commissioned officers involved in the concealment of the massacre.

Lieutenant Calley was the only one to be convicted and he was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour.

Within three days he was out of prison, pending appeal, on the personal instructions of President Richard Nixon.

He spent the next three years under house arrest at Fort Benning in Georgia.

Freed on bail in 1974 his sentence was then cut to 10 years but he was paroled later that year after completing one third of his sentence.


Stories From 29 Mar
1971: Calley guilty of My Lai massacre
1981: Triumph at first London Marathon
1971: Manson sent to gas chamber
1967: Bombs rain down on Torrey Canyon
1999: Hanratty family wins right to appeal

1632 - The Treaty of Saint-Germain was signed, returning Quebec to French control after the English had seized it in 1629.

1867 - The British Parliament passed the British North America Act to create the Dominion of Canada.

1871 - Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall in London. The hall was originally supposed to have been called The Central Hall of Arts and Sciences, but the name was changed by Queen Victoria to Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences when laying the foundation stone, as a dedication to her deceased husband and consort Prince Albert.

1886 - Coca-Cola went on sale. It was marketed as a "brain tonic" and claimed to relieve exhaustion. It was invented by Dr. John Pemberton.

1912 - The last entry in British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott's diary. He died in Antarctica, along with the rest of his party, whilst returning from the South Pole.

1940 - The Bank of England introduced thin metal strips into banknotes as an anti-forgery device.

1945 – World War II: Last day of V-1 flying bomb attacks on England.

1973 - America's involvement in the Vietnam War ended when, two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops left South Vietnam. Hanoi freed the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam at the same time.

1974 – NASA's Mariner 10 becomes the first spaceprobe to fly by Mercury. It was launched on November 3, 1973.

1981 - The first London marathon took place, with around 7,000 entrants.

1990 – The Czechoslovak parliament is unable to reach an agreement on what to call the country after the fall of Communism, sparking the so-called Hyphen War.

2004 - The Republic of Ireland became the first country in the world to ban smoking in all work places, including bars and restaurants.

2004 – Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia join NATO as full members.

2010 – Two female suicide bombers hit the Moscow Metro system at the peak of the morning rush hour, killing 40.

1775 - The British parliament passed an act forbidding its North American colonies to trade with anyone other than Britain.

1842 – Anesthesia is used for the first time, in an operation by the American surgeon Dr. Crawford Long.

1858 - Hyman L. Lipman of Philadelphia patented the pencil with an eraser attached on one end.

1867 - U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward reached agreement with Russia to purchase the territory of Alaska for $7.2 million. At the time, many called it Seward's Folly.

1936 - Britain announced the construction of 38 warships, the largest construction programme for 15 years.

1944 - The allied bombing raid on Nuremberg. 795 aircraft were despatched from along England's east coast , including 572 Lancasters, 214 Halifaxes and 9 Mosquitos. The bombers met German fighter resistance at the coasts of Belgium and the Netherlands. In total, 95 bombers were lost, making it the largest Bomber Command loss of World War II.

1974 - Red Rum won the Grand National at Aintree for second year running.

1987 - The picture 'Sunflowers', painted by Vincent van Gogh was sold at auction by Christie's for £24,750,000.

1998 - Rolls-Royce was purchased by German automaker BMW.

2006 – The United Kingdom Terrorism Act 2006 becomes a law.

1492 – Queen Isabella of Castille issues the Alhambra decree, ordering her 150,000 Jewish subjects to convert to Christianity or face expulsion.

1836 - The first monthly installment of "The Pickwick Papers" by Charles Dickens was published in London.

1889 - The Eiffel Tower officially opened in Paris. It was designed by French engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel.

1896 - The first zip fastener was patented in the U.S. by its inventor, Whitcomb Judson.

1917 - The United States purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million.

1959 - The (14th) Dalai Lama reached India after fleeing Chinese suppression in Tibet and was granted political asylum and began his exile.

1966 – The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the Moon.

1973 - Racehorse Red Rum won the Grand National Steeplechase in a record time of 9 min 1.9 sec., a record that remained unbroken for 16 years. He is the only horse to have won the Grand National three times.

1990 – 200,000 protestors take to the streets of London to protest against the newly introduced Poll Tax.

1994 – Human evolution: The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull.

(31-03-2012 12:55 )skully Wrote:  1917 - The United States purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million.

The Danes insisted on (and got) the $25 million in Gold! The United States had been interested in the islands for years because of their strategic position near the approach to the Panama Canal and because of the fear that Germany might seize them to use as U-boat bases during World War I.

The islands form part of the Lesser Antilles, and were discovered in the days of Christopher Columbus. The original indiginous population was almost completely wiped out after the arrival of European settlers through enslavement and disease, and now the bulk of the population of 135,000 is descended from slaves of Afro-Caribbean origin. The three main islands to the west of the group (St Thomas, St John and St Croix) form the US Virgin Islands; the group to the east (including Tortola and Virgin Gorda), form the British Virgin Islands.

The American Dollar is the official currency is both the US and British sectors but for some strange reason cars drive on the left in both juristictions, despite most of the vehicles in the American zone being left-hand drive!

1873 - The British steamer RMS Atlantic (a transatlantic ocean liner of the White Star Line) ran onto rocks and sank off Nova Scotia, killing 547. It remained the deadliest civilian maritime disaster in history until the sinking of the Danish liner SS Norge in 1904

1924 – Adolf Hitler is sentenced to five years in jail for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch. However, he spends only nine months in jail, during which he writes Mein Kampf.

1929 - The yo-yo was introduced by Louie Marx.

1949 – The 26 counties of the Irish Free State become the Republic of Ireland.

1960 - The first weather satellite in the world, TIROS-I, was launched from Cape Canaveral.

1973 - Britain introduced VAT (Value Added Tax). It replaced Purchase Tax and Selective Employment Tax.

1989 - Despite threats of non-payment, the Community Charge or Poll Tax was introduced in Scotland

1990 - Up to 1,000 prisoners staged a riot at Strangeways Prison in Manchester in a violent protest against overcrowding. It was the longest prison riot in British history and lasted until 25th April. One remand prisoner died.

1998 - A world record price for a musical instrument. A 1727 Stradivarius violin was sold at Christie's for £947,500.

2001 – Same-sex marriage becomes legal in the Netherlands, the first country to allow it.