Underground warfare

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Củ Chi tunnels, Vietnam

It’s hard for a modern tourist in Vietnam to imagine the horrors of war that happened in such a beautiful country – not one war, but three, against France (1946-1954), America (1965-1975) and China (February-March 1979).

It’s important for a Western visitor to adjust away from the conventional mind-set of films such as Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) and even Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), in which the Americans are the “white hats” and the Viet Cong are the villains.

The Củ Chi Tunnels tourist site lies 1½ hours’ drive from the centre of Saigon, yet this labyrinth of tunnels stretches for at least 75 miles and connects with the Saigon River.

On the ground at Củ Chi it makes more sense to take the local viewpoint, “Why are these bastards bombing my village?”  The ingenuity and the endurance of the six thousand Viet Cong guerrillas are astonishing:  the site shows the contrivances to hide access and ventilation to the tunnels, and the fiendishly clever man-traps that were devised to deter American troops on the ground.

A man demonstrates the manufacture of sandals from American truck tyres, deliberately designed with the brand-name upside down, to persuade troops that the footprints went in the opposite direction to the way the wearer was walking.

There is a below-ground kitchen which emits no smoke to its surroundings.

And we were invited to sample the typical Viet Cong diet of cassava (customarily used as cattle feed in Vietnam) and thin, unappetising tea.

I declined the invitation to traverse a short stretch of tunnel, suitably enlarged for Western tourists:  I decided that crawling on all fours in a claustrophobic space in 30°C temperatures wasn’t necessary to appreciate the rigours of fighting the Americans.

But I’m glad I’ve stood on the ground where these things happened, felt the steamy heat, and seen a sanitised but realistic display of artefacts that connect to the reality of war.

Martyr’s car

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Huế Thiên Mụ Pagoda, Vietnam: Thich Quang Duc’s car

One of the disadvantages of travelling with a group across half a dozen time-zones is the difficulty of managing jet lag.

In my first few days in Vietnam I trudged around more Buddhist temples than I really needed, not because they lacked interest but because I lacked sleep.

In Hanoi I somnambulated my way round the Temple of Literature and up the parade-ground to the Hồ Chí Minh Mausoleum.  I declined the tour-guide’s suggestion of a two-kilometre walk to the Botanical Gardens and cut to the chase by walking across to the unique and evocative One-Pillar Temple, a place of pilgrimage for couples in hope of sons.

In the royal capital of Huế we trudged to the Imperial Citadel, where we gazed at the citadel itself, the site of the Purple Forbidden City (which has virtually ceased to exist) and the Palace of Supreme Harmony.  80% of Hue was flattened by the Americans in 1968, and what remains of the Citadel is pockmarked with bullet holes.  It’s another place that’s full of powerful resonances, but they don’t stand out in the midst of a crowded itinerary.  (The 1968 event is portrayed in the movie Full Metal Jacket (1987), much of which was filmed at Beckton Gas Works.)

But at the Thiên Mụ Pagoda amid a succession of shrines was a poignant surprise – the 1959 Austin car that drove the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức to his self-immolation in June 1963.

The Thiên Mụ Pagoda is significant in the religious conflicts within Vietnam at the time of transition from colonial rule, but it’s very difficult to appreciate in a tourist convoy.

That unexpected link to something familiar and British, however, brought into sudden sharp focus an event that at the time it happened seemed a very long way aw

Greenwich Foot Tunnel

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Greenwich Foot Tunnel, south entrance

Greenwich Foot Tunnel, south entrance

Greenwich is one of the places where smart London overlaps workaday London.

Amidst the grand buildings of the Old Royal Naval College and the National Maritime Museum and the splendid restoration of the Cutty Sark are down-to-earth enjoyments such as the covered Greenwich Market and the celebrated Goddard’s Pie & Mash Shop  [http://www.goddardsatgreenwich.co.uk].

Over the river at Island Gardens is the stunning view of Greenwich that Canaletto painted in the middle of the eighteenth century, largely unchanged.

The best way to reach Island Gardens from the Cutty Sark is by a mundane piece of municipal engineering, the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, designed for the London County Council, shortly after Greenwich became part of London rather than Kent, by Sir Alexander Binnie (1839-1917).

It’s one of the monuments to the work of the energetic Labour Mayor of Poplar, subsequently MP  for Woolwich, Will Crooks (1852-1921), whose campaigns to benefit working people in the East End included the park at Island Gardens (1895), the construction of the Blackwall road tunnel (1897) and the Greenwich (1902) and Woolwich (1912) foot tunnels.

The surface markers of this unobtrusive piece of engineering are the two elegant brick, glass-domed entrance buildings.

Because it’s a public highway, the Greenwich foot tunnel is open twenty-four hours a day, though the lifts don’t operate at times of low demand.  (Sometimes the whole tunnel is closed for maintenance, and pedestrians are recommended to use the Docklands Light Railway instead.)

The tunnel is less trouble than hopping across on the Docklands Light Railway – and it’s free.  The tunnel is worth the walk:  at the north end, consider the section of reinforced lining that resulted from bomb damage in the Second World War.

 

Bus for sale – £45

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London Bus Museum, Brooklands: T31

London Bus Museum, Brooklands: T31

The London Bus Museum, not to be confused with the London Transport Museum at Covent Garden, presents a chronological collection of London-area buses from the age of horse-drawn transport to the late twentieth century, artfully displayed like a sort of art gallery of buses, in a purpose-designed building at the Brooklands Museum in Surrey.

Pride of place is given to T31, a 1929 AEC Regal single-decker which was built for the old London General Omnibus Company, carried passengers for London Transport until 1952 and then served as a training vehicle until 1956.

It was the very last surviving London Transport bus that had originated with General, and was bought by a group of enthusiasts off the road for £45.

During its long career the rear entrance was moved to the front, and the petrol engine changed for diesel.  Its restoration to original condition took until 1979, and it was bought by the London Bus Museum in 1994.

Part of T31’s historical appeal is that it’s the very first British bus ever to be taken into preservation – a truly far-sighted act of faith in 1956, when the idea of retaining out-of-date workaday vehicles such as trams, buses and trains was widely ridiculed.

Tram for sale – £10

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National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Southampton 45

National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Southampton 45

In the extensive fleet of preserved trams at the National Tramway Museum at Crich, Derbyshire, none is more precious than Southampton 45, a 1903 open-top double-decker which was designed specifically to fit the medieval Bargate in the centre of Southampton.

It survived thanks to members of the Light Railway Transport League (now the Light Rail Transit Association).  The League had been founded in 1937 to campaign for the retention of light rail as urban and interurban transport, but witnessed the inexorable decline of street tramways in Britain before their eventual renaissance at the end of the century.

During a farewell tour of Southampton tramways in 1948, a group of League members took the opportunity to buy 45 for £10, despite the lack of anywhere to store, let alone display it.

Through the 1950s, Southampton 45 led a peripatetic existence, first stored in a tram depot in Blackpool and then displayed in the open air at the Montagu Motor Museum in Hampshire.

When the Crich site became available 45 at last had a permanent home, and now forms part of the running fleet of this splendid museum, the very first British tram to be preserved.

Subsequently, three more Southampton trams have been rescued.  Two of them are being restored by the Southampton District Transport Heritage Trust.

Stone-by-stone analysis

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All Saints' Church, Brixworth, Northamptonshire

All Saints’ Church, Brixworth, Northamptonshire

If I could only have one subscription to a historical association it would be with the Ancient Monuments Society:  http://www.ancientmonumentssociety.org.uk.  Their periodic newsletter is a fount of information about historic buildings and books about historic buildings, listing events and tours, including mine.  The annual Transactions is learned and authoritative:  the 2014 edition, for instance, ranges from Birmingham Town Hall to parkland buildings associated with hunting, Catholic buildings in Norwich, parsonages and the early conservation movement in Edinburgh Old Town.

The book-review section of the Transactions delves deep into the realms of scholarship.  The titles reviewed usually cost tens of pounds;  the reviewers make learned distinctions between ‘axiometric’ (which hasn’t yet reached the dictionary) and ‘axonometric’, and ‘homogenous’ and ‘homogeneous’, and express enthusiasms that would not be understood in my local pub:  “Parochial benching is more than ever a hot topic just now”  “…a fascinating account of the decorative use of the iron punch, which woodwork aficionados will find riveting”.

Richard Halsey’s review of the latest study of Brixworth Church, Northamptonshire, [http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Anglo-Saxon-Church-Brixworth-Northamptonshire/dp/1842175319/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1399276060&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Anglo-Saxon+Church+of+All+Saints%27+Brixworth+Northamptonshire+survey+excavation+and+analysis] reminds me of how much further investigation of historic buildings can go than would ever occur to the casual visitor.

The late-eighth century church of All Saints’, Brixworth, is the largest surviving Anglo-Saxon building in England.  Though it was altered in the tenth, thirteen and nineteenth centuries, it’s our best opportunity to appreciate the scale of long vanished Saxon cathedrals such as Canterbury and Winchester.  It’s a supremely important monument in the catalogue of buildings, not only in England but in northern Europe as a whole.

The 2013 study edited by David Parson and Diana Sutherland is the result of forty years’ research by the Brixworth Archaeological Research Committee [BRAC].  Part of Diana Sutherland’s contribution to the knowledge about the church involved using a scaffold to map each stone in the Saxon masonry to determine its geology and petrology.

That’s aeon away from walking in, taking a few photos and buying a guidebook, as I did.

Richard Halsey points out that forty years of funded research yields sufficient data to pack a 326-page book and still leaves significant questions unanswered:  what was the Saxon roof like?  why was the original west end demolished and replaced by the tenth-century tower?  why was such a huge church built in this place?

There’s so much more to learn that feeds into scholarship about the distant past, and particularly about other surviving pre-Norman churches:  http://www.interestingtimestours.co.uk/index.php?mact=CGBlog,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=44&cntnt01returnid=87.

Life saver

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Douglas, Isle of Man: (foreground left) – Sir William Hillary memorial; (background right) – Tower of Refuge

Douglas, Isle of Man: (foreground left) – Sir William Hillary memorial; (background right) – Tower of Refuge

The seas off Douglas, Isle of Man, are vicious and innumerable vessels and sailors have perished, often within sight of land.

At least fifty boats of the four-hundred-strong Douglas herring-fishing fleet sank, with the loss of at least 161 lives, on September 21st 1787.

An early lifeboat, provided by the 4th Duke of Athol, was launched in 1803, but was not replaced after its loss in a storm in 1814.

Sir William Hillary (1774-1847), who lived at Fort Anne above Douglas Harbour, witnessed the Royal Navy cutter Vigilant in difficulty in Douglas Bay on October 6th 1822:  he gathered a volunteer crew and saved the lives of the 97 people on board.

Later, after the brig HMS Racehorse sank off Langness with the loss of six crew and three Manx rescuers, he made a public “Appeal to the British Navy on the Humanity and Policy of Forming a National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck”.

For lack of Admiralty support he raised £115 from a group of insurance companies to launch the Douglas-based rescue-vessel True Blue.

The following year he founded the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck (as it was originally called), and its first boat, Nestor, was based at Douglas.

Nestor was destroyed during the rescue of the City of Glasgow off Douglas Head on October 19th 1830:  Sir William and his crew, together with the entire complement of the ship, were rescued by the True Blue.

Sir William also led the rescue of the entire crew of the packet-boat St George when it foundered on Conister Rock in the middle of Douglas Bay in 1830.

Two years later Sir William built the distinctive Tower of Refuge on the rock both as an eye-catcher and as a practical place of safety in case of shipwreck:  its cost was divided between a public appeal (£101), the harbour commissioners (£75) and Sir William himself (£78).

Sir William Hillary could not swim.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Cruising the Mekong River

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Mekong River, Vietnam

Mekong River, Vietnam

The second great surface-travel experience of the Great Rail Journeys’ ‘Vietnam, Cambodia & the Mekong Delta’ [http://www.greatrail.com/tours/vietnam-cambodia-and-the-mekong-delta.aspx#VMG4] is the day-long speedboat-ride up the Mekong River to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.

We spent the whole of Sunday sailing up the Mekong River from a place I’d never heard of, Cần Thơ, on a speedboat, a relaxing and revealing experience because the Mekong, with its various tributaries and distributaries, is a working river.

Its vessels range from tiny craft to huge coasters, carrying sand, rice and bricks to the coast, and there are ro-ro ferries of various sizes plying crossings at intervals.   The distributary from which we started was as wide as the Mersey at Liverpool;  upstream we joined a channel that was nearer to the width of the Humber at Grimsby.

There was a particularly impressive stretch of river lined with brick kilns, pouring out black smoke, a reminder that the smokestack industries that Britain eliminated after the Second World War remain in the Far East.

Before leaving Vietnam the crew topped up the tanks with fuel, while members of our group tried to work out what two young boys were doing in the water.  It appeared they were washing a dead pig.

The Vietnamese formalities were negligible:  our passports were processed by the boat crew, and all we had to do was get off the boat, sit around for five minutes and get back on again.  There was no attempt to match the passports to the people whatsoever.

In between the two border posts the crew lowered the Vietnamese flag at the bow and raised the Cambodian one, which seemed a polite gesture at least.

At the Cambodian border post a short distance upriver there was the full performance of queuing at a window, and much stamping and scribbling by a heavily uniformed officer, while the lady from the boat stapled slips into passport pages.  The process was lubricated by another member of the boat crew silently and dutifully delivering a couple of cases of Tiger Beer behind the counter.

The Cambodian stretch of the river contrasts starkly with downstream.  Suddenly the industry, the river-traffic and the populace vanished, and for well over an hour we travelled past fields with very few signs of activity and none of prosperity.

It’s clear that this place is decades behind its neighbour.  When you read up the history the reasons are obvious:  this is a nation with a tragic past of urban depopulation, genocide, famine.  No Cambodian family is untouched by this late-1970s trauma, yet apparently more than half its young population have no direct memory of it.

There are oddities about being in Cambodia.

A member of our group darkly remarked that the BBC News feed was running nine minutes late.

 

Reunification Express

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Vietnamese State Railways, Hanoi Station: Reunification Express

Vietnamese State Railways, Hanoi Station: Reunification Express

One of the highlights – and for me the raison d’être – of Great Rail Journeys’ ‘Vietnam, Cambodia & the Mekong Delta’ holiday [http://www.greatrail.com/tours/vietnam-cambodia-and-the-mekong-delta.aspx#VMG4] was the opportunity to travel the whole way from Hanoi to Saigon by rail.

Vietnam’s North-South Railway, built by the French colonial government between 1899 and 1936, was heavily bombed by the Americans.  It triumphantly reopened as the Reunification Express in 1976.

In Great Rail Journeys’ itinerary this journey starts with a so-called “soft sleeper” from Hanoi to the royal capital of Hue, and thanks to this operator’s standards of customer care I had a four-berth compartment entirely to myself and a comprehensive collection of food and drink supplies to last till morning.

The most spectacular part of the North-South Railway is the stretch south of Huế, where the line hugs the coast as it climbs through the Hai Van Pass in a series of sharp curves, viaducts and tunnels:  http://www.seat61.com/Vietnam.htm#Watch_the_video.

Visitors knock the Vietnamese State Railways but from my observation they’re efficiently run.

It’s hardly surprising that a thousand-mile route that takes thirty-odd hours to traverse will experience delays:  one of our trains reached us an hour late and arrived at its destination almost on time;  presumably there’s slack in the timetable to compensate for eventualities.  Some speed restrictions are as low as 5kph, where eighty-year-old infrastructure that took a severe hammering through a series of wars is being brought up to modern standards.

At any rate, the crews always turned up, we were never decanted on to a replacement bus service and there were no leaves on the line.

Caudwell’s Mill

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Caudwell's Mill, Rowsley, Derbyshire

Caudwell’s Mill, Rowsley, Derbyshire

One of the most attractive Derbyshire places to visit for morning coffee, lunch or afternoon tea is Caudwell’s Mill at Rowsley, a few minutes’ drive from Chatsworth or Haddon Hall:  http://www.caudwellsmill.co.uk.

The mill itself was built to produce flour and animal feed by John Caudwell in 1874, and he and his son Edward modernised it by replacing the original millstones with roller mills to make finer, purer flour for baking, and installing water turbines to power them.  The last phase of this installation, by the manufacturer Amme, Giesecke & Konegen, was in progress in August 1914:  the German labourers were promptly sent home but the engineers, having finished their work, were apparently interned in the Isle of Man until 1919.  Edward Caudwell eventually settled the bill in 1924.

Caudwell’s ran as a going concern until 1977, by which time it was recognised as an intact, complete example of a distinct phase in the development of modern milling technology.

It was listed Grade II* and taken over by a trust with support from the landowner, the Duke of Rutland’s Haddon Estate, the local planning authority, the Peak Park Planning Board, and a small army of local people, industrial archaeologists and millers with financial assistance from, among others, the Architectural Heritage Fund, the Carnegie (UK) Trust, the Countryside Commission, the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Science Museum.

The mill itself is open to the public, a fascinating warren of band-driven machines, hoists and Archimedean screws.  One of the turbines generates the electricity for the site.  The mill shop sells flour, oats and yeast – everything you need for quality home baking.  In the surrounding yard are craft-shops, a blacksmith, an upholsterer, a glass-maker and a jewellery maker:  artisans | Caudwell’s Mill at Rowsley (caudwellsmill.co.uk).  

The café is vegetarian and provides the sort of cream cakes that look as if they’d qualify as five-a-day:  hlaf cafe | Caudwell’s Mill at Rowsley (caudwellsmill.co.uk).

All this lies beside the waters of the River Wye, in one of the most beautiful of Derbyshire valleys.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.