Following on from this morning's post about the Grand Old Lady, HMS Warspite, here is another account of a British warship armed with 15 inch guns.  However,  HMS Roberts wasn't a battleship, she was a monitor - a specialised shore bombardment ship designed to get the 15 inch inch guns which could flatten any target on earth much closer to shore.

The original trilogy consists of 1)  The White Mountains  (1967)  Link:  Tripods book 1, The White Mountains, by John Christopher: Amazon Kindle Store 2)  The City of gold and Lead  (1967) Link:  3)  The Pool of Fire  (1968) Twenty years later John Christopher added a prequel, 4) When the Tripods came (1988)   Many years ago, as a pre-teen, I found a copy in a school library of " The White Mountains " which was the first volume of John Christopher's "Tripods" trilogy. I read it avidly, then located the second and third books at the city library and read them avidly too. In 1984 and 1985, two seasons of a television series were broadcast which covered the first two books of the trilogy. Sadly a third season which would have covered the events of the third and concluding volume of the story, " The Pool of Fire " was cancelled, proving that state corporations like the BBC are capable of making decisions as bad as the most notorious ca...

HMS Warspite , affectionately known to Royal Navy sailors from Admiral Cunningham down as the " Grand old lady, " was at the heart of the action in two word wars, often under the fiercest attack, never defeated. She had fifteen battle honours, more than any other ship. Her 15-inch guns were lethally effective and one of them scored the longest-range battleship-to-battleship hit in the history of naval warfare - a hit on the enemy flagship which made the opposing admiral order his whole force to withdraw. This is the story of the 15-inch guns which provided HMS Warspite and a whole generation of Royal Navy capital ships with their main armament and why they were the most successful naval guns of the 20th century.

An extra music spot this week, one of our contributors had posted this clip from the original Pink Panther film (1963) and more than sixty years later it is still both a total earworm and visually entrancing. Be warned that if you click on the video below and watch and listen to it, this tune may well be repeating yourself in your head for weeks. Look carefully at the background and you will see the film's main protagonist played by David Niven enjoying the performance; a great actor but he probably didn't have to act very hard! Also a great comic performance by Peter Sellers as the bumbling French detective, Inspector Clouseau, initially one of the two people in the room who isn't paying attention to Fran Jeffries but he soon gets dragged into the act. The character was brought back for the subsequent Pink Panther films such as "A shot in the dark." Fran Jeffries (May 18, 1937 – December 15, 2016) was an American singer, dancer, actress, and model. He...

Hat tip to Dr M.F. Khan for posting this story of wartime heroism on X.  here . The picture is from the archives of the Imperial War Museum. "In 1943, Paris - a woman sits in a Gestapo interrogation room, her feet bleeding, her body broken. The officers across from her know she's holding secrets. Names of British agents. Locations of resistance safe houses. Intelligence that could dismantle entire networks across France. They've already started the torture. Her toenails are being removed, one at a time. Soon they'll use heated irons on her back. They'll lock her in darkness for weeks. They'll promise her life in exchange for just one name. She's a 30-year-old mother of three. Not a soldier. Not a spy by training. Just a French-born housewife who was living quietly in England until Hitler's armies swallowed her homeland. That's when Odette Sansom made a choice that most of us will never have to make. She left her three daughters behind and volunteere...