Monthly Archives: July 2009

The Land of Dreams

The story about the great town of Katikati and how it came to be. Filmed in the many, many hotspots of Katikati by Jessie Berquist, Soraya Dubler and sound technician Charlotte Martin. The Tangible Titans wrote this song for the school prizegiving in 2008 and are now using it to promote Katikati so passing travellers will have a greater insight to how special it really is.

Last British WW1 veteran dies

Last term we watched part of a documentary called ‘World War One in Colour’ and one of the old soldiers who shared their memories on the film was Harry Patch. A memorable line was – “Anyone who tells you that in the trenches that they weren’t scared is a damned liar.”

Patch was Britain’s last survivor of the trenches of World War I and he died last night at 111. Patch was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation. He was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as “mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood.”

Patch did not speak about his war experiences until he was 100. Once he did, he was adamant that the slaughter he witnessed had not been justified.”I met someone from the German side and we both shared the same opinion: we fought, we finished and we were friends,” he said in 2007.”It wasn’t worth it.”

Read more here.

The Kuroshio Sea

This was shot at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan and the main tank called the ‘Kuroshio Sea’ holds 7,500-cubic metres of water and features the world’s second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 metres by 22.5 metres with a thickness of 60 centimetres. Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank.

Death of World War One Veteren

This post will be of interest to the students studying Wilfred Owen. Henry William Allingham, the world’s oldest man and one of the last surviving first world war servicemen, has died at the age of 113.

It was his experiences during the war that defined the man, but for more than 80 years he refused to speak about it. He was finally persuaded to talk about the past by Dennis Goodwin who, as founder of the First World War Veterans’ Association, organised reunions and trips for old soldiers.

“He’d answer the door and not let me in,” recalled Goodwin, his carer and the ghost writer of his memoirs. “He’d say, ‘I want to forget the war, I don’t want to talk about it’. But I sent him letters about the reunions and gradually he let me in and we got talking. Eventually I got him out of his flat in Eastbourne and took him to the pier. He met other veterans and started to think, ‘I could do this’. It was a very slow process – he’s essentially a very private man.”

Once Allingham started talking, it became clear that the scenes he witnessed of soldiers waiting to go over the top at Ypres never left him. “They would just stand there in 2ft of water in mud-filled trenches, waiting to go forward,” he said. “They knew what was coming. It was pathetic to see those men like that. I don’t think they have ever got the admiration and respect they deserved.”

He remembered spending a night in a shellhole in Flanders. “It stank,” he said. “So did I when I fell into it. Arms and legs, dead rats, dead everything. Rotten flesh. Human guts. I couldn’t get a bath for three or four months afterwards.”

Read the whole story here.