The Postcard
A postcard that was published by Bamforth & Sons Ltd., Publishers, of Holmfirth, England and New York. The artwork was by D. Tempest.
The card was posted in Oundle using a ½d. stamp on Friday the 30th. June 1916. It was sent to:
Miss E. Culpin,
The Limes,
High Street,
Oakham.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"My Dear Elsie,
Just a P.C.
How are you feeling?
I am going tomorrow
to see Mr. Bertram's
mother. Think of me.
Mr. J. is quite alright.
Fond love,
Marjorie."
There's a Long Long Trail A-Winding
"There's a Long, Long Trail" is a popular song of the Great War. The lyrics were by Stoddard King (1889–1933) and the music by Alonzo "Zo" Elliott, both seniors at Yale.
It was published in London in 1914, but a December 1913 copyright (which, like all American works made before 1923, has since expired) for the music is claimed by Zo Elliott.
In Elliott's own words to Marc Drogin shortly before his death in 1964, he created the music as an idle pursuit one day in his dorm room at Yale in 1913.
King walked in, liked the music and suggested a first line. Elliott sang out the second, and so they went through the lyrics. And they performed it—with trepidation—before the fraternity that evening. The interview was published as an article in the New Haven Register and later reprinted in Yankee magazine. In the interview, he recalled the day and the odd circumstances that led to the creation of this historic song.
-- 1914 Sheet Music Edition Lyrics
'Nights are growing very lonely,
Days are very long;
I'm a-growing weary only
List'ning for your song.
Old remembrances are thronging
Thro' my memory
Till it seems the world is full of dreams
Just to call you back to me.
Chorus:
There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And the white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I'll be going down
That long, long trail with you.
All night long I hear you calling,
Calling sweet and low;
Seem to hear your footsteps falling,
Ev'ry where I go.
Tho' the road between us stretches
Many a weary mile,
I forget that you're not with me yet
When I think I see you smile.
Chorus:
There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And the white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I'll be going down
That long, long trail with you.'
The Battle of the Boar's Head
So what else happened on the day that Marjorie posted the card to Elsie?
Well, on the 30th. June 1916, the British launched a diversionary against the Germans at the French village Richebourg-l'Avoué prior to the Somme offensive.
The Sinking of a U-Boat
Also on that day, German submarine SM U-10 struck a mine and sank in the Gulf of Finland with all 29 crew lost.
A New Type of Zeppelin
Also on the 30th. June 1916, the first flight of an aircraft with all-metal stressed skin construction, the Zeppelin-Lindau Rs.II, took place.
Heavy Rain in Australia
Also on that day, the city of Adelaide received 217.9 millimetres (8.58 in) of rain, its highest monthly rainfall since records began in 1839.
Al Hake
The 30th. June 1916 also marked the birth in Sydney of the Australian air force officer Al Hake.
Al, who was a member of the "Great Escape" from German POW camp Stalag Luft III.
He became a forger of Nazi travel documents, and recovering from a mild bout of diphtheria in mid-September 1942, he set up a compass factory in his room in the northern end of Block 103.
The process involved melting pieces of broken Bakelite phonograph records to be fixed to pieces of razor blade which were duly magnetized. Over 200 were produced to be used by escapees.
-- The Great Escape
Al was one of the 76 men who escaped the prison camp on the night of the 24th.–25th. March 1944, in the escape now famous as "the Great Escape".
When the Germans discovered the escape they began extensive well planned manhunts.
Al Hake was one of the prisoners recaptured relatively quickly - on the afternoon of the 27th. March 1944 he and his escape partner Johnny Pohe were brought into the cells at Görlitz suffering the effects of a tough journey in the freezing cold weather. Both were frostbitten, Hake the worse of the two.
Nineteen recaptured officers were loaded into a lorry the following day and moved to Görlitz prison under Gestapo control. Here the numbers of recaptured officers grew until thirty-five were held there.
The prisoners were threatened with death and interrogated harshly, but not physically. On the 30th. March 1944, two of the survivors saw three large sedans with ten Gestapo agents collect six officers, including Al Hake struggling to walk on his frostbitten feet.
They were not seen again; their cremation urn labels stated that they died on the 31st. March 1944 and had been cremated at Görlitz. Al was 27 years of age when he died.
Post-war investigation found that a Gestapo agent named Lux had led the squad who shot the group of six recaptured airmen beside the autobahn near Halbau on the instructions of a senior officer named Scharpwinkel.
Al Hake was one of the 50 escapees who were executed and murdered by the Gestapo. Originally cremated and buried at Sagan, his remains are now buried in part of the Poznan Old Garrison Cemetery.
Al was promoted to warrant officer either in captivity or more likely posthumously.
Post-war investigations saw a number of those guilty of the murders tracked down, arrested and tried for their crimes.
John Daly
The day also marked the death at the age of 70 of the Irish revolutionary leader John Daly.
Daly, who was born in 1845, was a leading member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
Gaston Maspero
Gaston Maspero also died at the age of 70 on the 30th. June 1916.
Gaston, who was born in 1846, was a French archaeologist who developed the Sea Peoples theory for the invasions of ancient Egypt experienced prior to the Late Bronze Age collapse.
While at school Gaston showed a special taste for history, and became interested in Egypt following a visit to the Egyptian galleries of the Louvre at the age of fourteen.
It was while Maspero was in his final year at the École normale in 1867 that friends mentioned his skills at reading hieroglyphics to Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, who was in Paris as commissioner for the Egyptian section of the Exposition universelle.
Mariette gave him two newly-discovered hieroglyphic texts of considerable difficulty to study, and the young self-taught scholar produced translations of them in less than a fortnight, a great feat in those days when Egyptology was still in its infancy. The publication of these texts in the same year established Gaston's academic reputation.
On the 3rd. October 1899, an earthquake at Karnak collapsed 11 columns and left the main hall in ruins.
Maspero had already made some repairs and clearances there (continued in his absence by unofficial but authorized explorers of many nationalities) in his previous tenure of office. Now he set up a team of workmen under French Egyptologists and regularly visited to oversee the reconstruction work, opposing some Romantics who wished the ruins to be left as they were.
In 1903 an alabaster pavement was found in the court of the 7th. Pylon, and beneath it a shaft leading to a large hoard of almost 17,000 statues, with every part of the dig drawn, recorded and photographed.
-- Henri Maspero
Gaston's son Henri Paul Gaston Maspero (15th. December 1883 – 17th. March 1945) was a French sinologist and professor who contributed to a variety of topics relating to East Asia. Henri is best known for his pioneering studies of Daoism.
On the 26th. July 1944, Henri Maspero and his wife, who were still living in Nazi-occupied Paris, were arrested because of their son's involvement with the French Resistance.
Maspero was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he endured its brutal conditions for over six months before dying on the 17th. March 1945, aged 61, only three weeks before the camp's liberation by the U.S. Third Army.
