Gareth Davies Posted 16 April , 2016 Share Posted 16 April , 2016 The PM's Twitter page has just published this Tweet: Are they a year out? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keithmroberts Posted 16 April , 2016 Share Posted 16 April , 2016 The volume of Haig's war diaries and letters refers to Haig being summoned on Saturday 15 April 1916 to a meeting at Downing Street attended among others by Lord Kitchener and the PM. No mention of a meeting on the 16th. In 1915 Haig appears to have been busy with his duties in France. Keith Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brummell Posted 16 April , 2016 Share Posted 16 April , 2016 They are surely a year out. The offensive wasn't even discussed until the Chantilly conference in December 1915 - certainly not planned in detail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gareth Davies Posted 16 April , 2016 Author Share Posted 16 April , 2016 Indeed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gareth Davies Posted 16 April , 2016 Author Share Posted 16 April , 2016 I know that the tweet could be brushed off as a simple typo but to me it sums up the ill-informed and slapdash approach being taken with regard to the Somme 100. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ron Clifton Posted 16 April , 2016 Share Posted 16 April , 2016 And Haig wasn't C-in-C in April 1915. It is a typo, but I agree with Gareth - it's slapdash. Ron Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gareth Davies Posted 16 April , 2016 Author Share Posted 16 April , 2016 I have pointed that out to No 10 and DCMS on Twitter but I don't hold out much hope of them changing it anytime soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phil andrade Posted 16 April , 2016 Share Posted 16 April , 2016 PM actually made a statement in 2014 that two hundred thousand British troops were killed on the first day of the Somme. Par for the course, I'm afraid. What's in a year ? Phil ( PJA) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gareth Davies Posted 16 April , 2016 Author Share Posted 16 April , 2016 There's quite a lot wrong with getting the year wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Tom Posted 17 April , 2016 Share Posted 17 April , 2016 I do not play twitter, but would be interested to know if anyone has pointed out the errors. Old Tom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gareth Davies Posted 17 April , 2016 Author Share Posted 17 April , 2016 Oh yes, loads of people have. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Ridgus Posted 17 April , 2016 Share Posted 17 April , 2016 I know that the tweet could be brushed off as a simple typo but to me it sums up the ill-informed and slapdash approach being taken with regard to the Somme 100.GarethYour recent ironic thread on 'revisionism' is increasingly, and depressingly, appearing to be not an exaggeration but just a precise reflection on the actual state of knowledge amongst those running the show David Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gareth Davies Posted 17 April , 2016 Author Share Posted 17 April , 2016 It's almost as if I got together with No 10 and planned the typo to prove a point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeMeech Posted 17 April , 2016 Share Posted 17 April , 2016 PM actually made a statement in 2014 that two hundred thousand British troops were killed on the first day of the Somme. Par for the course, I'm afraid. What's in a year ? Phil ( PJA) Hi The trouble is it is not just 'politicians' (or rather their aides) that are getting details wrong, even 'academic' historians seem to be having problems. For example 'Reckless Fellows' by Edward Bujak (Professor of History at Harlaxton College), I B Tauris and Co. Ltd. 2015, on page 4: "Shockingly, over half the 14,166 pilots who lost their lives in the war did so in training." This is endnoted as from Joshua Levine's 'On a Wing and a Prayer: The untold story of the Pioneering Aviation Heroes of WW1, in their own words (London, 2008) page 63. I suspect the figures come from Dennis Winter's 'The First of the Few' (1982), page 36 which states: "Put statistically, the official figures at the end of the war listed 14,166 dead pilots, of who 8,000 had died training in the UK." Of course the 'Official Figure' say no such thing, these are easily found as they were published in the 'Appendices Volume of War in the Air' in 1937, Appendix XXXVI, page 160. (Total British air service casualties, all causes 16,623). The DVD-ROM of 'Airmen Died in the Great War 1914-1918' has the details of 9,350 Air Service dead all ranks (men and women) from all causes. So what we have is an academic quoting a secondary source quoting a secondary source which was wrong in the first place. It is a shame as 'Reckless Fellows' is quite a good book on RFC/RAF Harlaxton Aerodrome. However, Politicians, their aides as well a media researchers tend to depend on 'historians' writing on WW1 so if 'historians' are getting it 'wrong' still after 100 years what can we expect from the non 'expert'! Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phil andrade Posted 17 April , 2016 Share Posted 17 April , 2016 Some of the errors beggar belief.Simple arithmetic is lacking.One such error, alluding to those first day of the Somme casualties, was a statement that, of the nearly sixty thousand British casualties, sixty per cent were officers.I forget where and when I read this. The reality was, of course, that casualty rates were sixty per cent for officers and forty per cent for other ranks ( am I right ? I hope so ! )...but this has been conflated into sixty per cent of all casualties being officers. How bloody preposterous !Phil ( PJA) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ron Clifton Posted 17 April , 2016 Share Posted 17 April , 2016 There are three kinds of untruth: lies, damned lies and statistics. Ron Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phil andrade Posted 18 April , 2016 Share Posted 18 April , 2016 How right you are, Ron....but in the case I allude to, how I wish it was a case of lying, instead of damned ignorance and ineptitude !Phil ( PJA) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Filsell Posted 18 April , 2016 Share Posted 18 April , 2016 Simple mistakes happen - ask Haig! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhilB Posted 18 April , 2016 Share Posted 18 April , 2016 Simple mistakes happen - ask Haig! Contributory negligence, surely? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dragon Posted 18 April , 2016 Share Posted 18 April , 2016 Gareth Davies, on 16 Apr 2016 - 8:56 PM, said:Gareth Davies, on 16 Apr 2016 - 8:56 PM, said:There's quite a lot wrong with getting the year wrong. Indeed. I had to contact the people responsible for a county's Heritage Environment Record to let them know that unless the people who erected the memorials to the dead of the Great War were gifted with remarkable prescience, none of them were constructed in 1904. The compilers of the record had noticed a couple of blobs on the 1904 OS maps in roughly the same spots as the Great War memorials were built. Therefore, they argued, the blob must be the war memorial and accordingly it must have been put up in 1904. I looked at the maps. The blobs could have been anything: large trees, milestones, signs. But not monuments to the Great War. Gwyn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PhilB Posted 18 April , 2016 Share Posted 18 April , 2016 Maybe the locals added to, or replaced, existing Boer War memorials? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ron Clifton Posted 18 April , 2016 Share Posted 18 April , 2016 That's certainly a possibility, Phil, but it wouldn't be difficult for the heritage people to get off their out of their offices occasionally, to look at the actual memorials and check. It is their county, after all, and they ought to know about these things. Ron. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dragon Posted 18 April , 2016 Share Posted 18 April , 2016 I don't think they were originally Boer War memorials, looking at them on Google Streetview. (Would communities knock down a memorial that had been there for only 15 years with names very much in living memory and replace it with another?) There were at least ten "1904" Great War memorials and in my view it's unlikely that ten+ communities would have had Boer War memorials. But I don't know and it might explain some mistakes. What the HER people were doing was getting volunteers to work from a list of war memorials, find what they thought were the war memorials on old OS maps, date them according to the map, and compare the footprint with modern maps and Google Streetview. All online. You would think that a volunteer could be persuaded to have a walk down her or his high street and just look. They were doing the same with drill halls (which is why I came across the revised date for the start of the Great War - 1914 obviously means give or take a decade). Thus there were seven drill halls which were in the wrong place or wrongly dated. They would see a footprint of a chapel and think, oh, that must have been the drill hall. They didn't know what a drill hall was so they didn't know what they were looking for. Just an oblong building, presumably, like a church hall. But however it happened, it ought to have occurred to someone that dating a Great War memorial as 1904 was just wrong. Gwyn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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