I've been fantasising that all these years those involved in I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue have been using the game of Mornington Crescent to pass on knowledge to those cognoscenti who have deciphered the code about how to get into this secret world.
They started off using broadcasts of the 'Today' programme as evidence that Britain still exists, and then some bright spark realised they could layer all sorts of additional messages onto other programmes.
Edinburgh of course works its underground for every tourist bawbee - but there's no mystery about the various cellars and a bit of street (and no ghosts either tbh). Liberton Cove otoh is genuinely mysterious.
Well, no ghosts that are publicly known about, anyway. I rather expect they’re there anyway.
So Mornington Crescent didn’t start with the Ship? I’ve never played it but all these years I’ve just thought of it exclusively as a game thread on the Ship… I didn’t know it went beyond that or originated elsewhere at all. 😮
So Mornington Crescent didn’t start with the Ship? I’ve never played it but all these years I’ve just thought of it exclusively as a game thread on the Ship… I didn’t know it went beyond that or originated elsewhere at all. 😮
It is the the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger.
So Mornington Crescent didn’t start with the Ship? I’ve never played it but all these years I’ve just thought of it exclusively as a game thread on the Ship… I didn’t know it went beyond that or originated elsewhere at all. 😮
if you go to the disambiguation link, the (game) version is available there. I'm not sure that the brackets work outside the wonderful world of Wikipedia.
And, of course, it's greatest trophy is the legendary Armitage Shanks Bowl
(I'll let someone else explain that to poor ChastMastr, who will be even more bemused)
And, of course, its greatest trophy is the legendary Armitage Shanks Bowl
(I'll let someone else explain that to poor ChastMastr, who will be even more bemused)
Was this not found and venerated by its acolyte, Kimberly Clark?
I find it hard to believe, that apart from command and control centres we're distracted from, that there aren't actual deep military store sites including helicopters and other multi-role aircraft, armour, artillery. The odd Rolls Royce small nuclear reactor. All vacuum packed and ready to emerge once the fallout has tailed off. Assuming a nuclear war. With enough fuel and food for the first century. For 10,000. Britain would be one of the worst affected places on Earth of course. As in annihilated. The 10,000 would have to colonise the isles of Scotland and beyond. Survive by fishing mainly. That's without nuclear winter. So not much materiel necessary really. Nuclear power and freeze dried food and medicines. Other collapses are available. Theoretically. Covid on steroids. Including virtual. A limited nuclear war. Rapid climate change. Watched the superb Comer in the not bad The End We Start From last night.
Far too optimistic.
But my fallacy of incredulity doesn't cut it really does it. How far does a state go to prepare for once a millennium or ten catastrophes? What proportion of its GNP?
I suppose one must project to enemies that we'll still be here. For limited values of 'we'. So round again one iterates.
I find it hard to believe, that apart from command and control centres we're distracted from, that there aren't actual deep military store sites including helicopters and other multi-role aircraft, armour, artillery. The odd Rolls Royce small nuclear reactor. All vacuum packed and ready to emerge once the fallout has tailed off. Assuming a nuclear war. With enough fuel and food for the first century. For 10,000. Britain would be one of the worst affected places on Earth of course. As in annihilated. The 10,000 would have to colonise the isles of Scotland and beyond. Survive by fishing mainly. That's without nuclear winter. So not much materiel necessary really. Nuclear power and freeze dried food and medicines. Other collapses are available. Theoretically. Covid on steroids. Including virtual. A limited nuclear war. Rapid climate change. Watched the superb Comer in the not bad The End We Start From last night.
Far too optimistic.
But my fallacy of incredulity doesn't cut it really does it. How far does a state go to prepare for once a millennium or ten catastrophes? What proportion of its GNP?
I suppose one must project to enemies that we'll still be here. For limited values of 'we'. So round again one iterates.
You’ve just lived through a COVID pandemic that we were utterly unprepared for… why on Earth would you find it hard to believe that we in the UK aren’t sitting on large reserves of military stuff??
We’re just not. We were until about 1992 then it was largely sold off. We couldn’t cover a fire strike now because the Green Goddesses are mostly gone.
Storing things costs money, it’s mostly gone. The warehouses at Donnington full of Lee Enfield No8 rifles are no more.
I believe that, for many years, the London Flood Control centre was in the old Kingsway tram tunnel ... one of the first places which would get flooded if the Thames should overflow!
Not quite - this is an extract from the quite long Wiki article on the tram subway:
Until the opening of the Thames Barrier in 1984, a portable building near the north of the tunnel was used as a flood control headquarters for the Greater London Council.
I daresay the portable building was on the level, rather than on the northern ramp, so yes, it might well have been in danger of flooding...
(The article also refers to a Goon Show episode, in which Minnie and Henry, as conductress and driver, hide in the subway for over 2 years, to ensure that they work The Last Tram...)
@betjemaniac - point taken about the dispersal of former strategic stores, but we'll never know if everything has been got rid of...will we?
I daresay you're right about general unpreparedness, though.
It seems to me that, as a country, we have a very Woosterish approach to preparing for the future. It's stupid, but it's cheap. Sums up post-Brexit life in the Septic Isle, from my experience.
I find it hard to believe, that apart from command and control centres we're distracted from, that there aren't actual deep military store sites including helicopters and other multi-role aircraft, armour, artillery. The odd Rolls Royce small nuclear reactor. All vacuum packed and ready to emerge once the fallout has tailed off. Assuming a nuclear war. With enough fuel and food for the first century. For 10,000. Britain would be one of the worst affected places on Earth of course. As in annihilated. The 10,000 would have to colonise the isles of Scotland and beyond. Survive by fishing mainly. That's without nuclear winter. So not much materiel necessary really. Nuclear power and freeze dried food and medicines. Other collapses are available. Theoretically. Covid on steroids. Including virtual. A limited nuclear war. Rapid climate change. Watched the superb Comer in the not bad The End We Start From last night.
Far too optimistic.
But my fallacy of incredulity doesn't cut it really does it. How far does a state go to prepare for once a millennium or ten catastrophes? What proportion of its GNP?
I suppose one must project to enemies that we'll still be here. For limited values of 'we'. So round again one iterates.
You’ve just lived through a COVID pandemic that we were utterly unprepared for… why on Earth would you find it hard to believe that we in the UK aren’t sitting on large reserves of military stuff??
We’re just not. We were until about 1992 then it was largely sold off. We couldn’t cover a fire strike now because the Green Goddesses are mostly gone.
Storing things costs money, it’s mostly gone. The warehouses at Donnington full of Lee Enfield No8 rifles are no more.
So, no freeze dried, vacuum packed ark? No greased Armalites and a million rounds? Not obsolete stuff you could still drop a man at a mile with? So after the bang we go with a whimper? In to the night. Surely the state intends to survive anything?
The state (or the leaders thereof) may well intend, or hope, to survive, but the rest of us probably don't matter much...as I said earlier, those who get vaporised first will be the lucky ones.
IIRC, it was Ken Livingstone, then Leader of the GLC, who said he'd rather be killed in the first blast than have to spend the aftermath in a nuclear bunker with Mrs Thatcher. I think he was being a bit sanguine, expecting there to be room made for him, but he always had a good sense of irony.
I find it hard to believe, that apart from command and control centres we're distracted from, that there aren't actual deep military store sites including helicopters and other multi-role aircraft, armour, artillery. The odd Rolls Royce small nuclear reactor. All vacuum packed and ready to emerge once the fallout has tailed off. Assuming a nuclear war. With enough fuel and food for the first century. For 10,000. Britain would be one of the worst affected places on Earth of course. As in annihilated. The 10,000 would have to colonise the isles of Scotland and beyond. Survive by fishing mainly. That's without nuclear winter. So not much materiel necessary really. Nuclear power and freeze dried food and medicines. Other collapses are available. Theoretically. Covid on steroids. Including virtual. A limited nuclear war. Rapid climate change. Watched the superb Comer in the not bad The End We Start From last night.
Far too optimistic.
But my fallacy of incredulity doesn't cut it really does it. How far does a state go to prepare for once a millennium or ten catastrophes? What proportion of its GNP?
I suppose one must project to enemies that we'll still be here. For limited values of 'we'. So round again one iterates.
You’ve just lived through a COVID pandemic that we were utterly unprepared for… why on Earth would you find it hard to believe that we in the UK aren’t sitting on large reserves of military stuff??
We’re just not. We were until about 1992 then it was largely sold off. We couldn’t cover a fire strike now because the Green Goddesses are mostly gone.
Storing things costs money, it’s mostly gone. The warehouses at Donnington full of Lee Enfield No8 rifles are no more.
So, no freeze dried, vacuum packed ark? No greased Armalites and a million rounds? Not obsolete stuff you could still drop a man at a mile with? So after the bang we go with a whimper? In to the night. Surely the state intends to survive anything?
I hinted earlier in the thread, but go away and read up on BURLINGTON. There’s loads on the web. It was a colossal waste of time and money indulged in because successive governments felt they needed to be seen to be doing something. Even when it was clear that a) the USSR knew exactly where it was and b) it wouldn’t survive a hit.
1992 was the moment when the government decided they could save the money and just stop pretending.
The whole point of trident (rightly or wrongly) is that an aggressor has to know that they can utterly destroy the UK and will still have to face things coming the other way afterwards.
There's the labyrinth of tunnels under Box Hill, used for WW2 arms storage ... and, so people have said, Britain's strategic reserve of old steam locomotives (for when the oil runs out).
Some of them were open to the public in the mid 1980s- I visited & didn't see any locomotives.
I very much doubt if there ever was a strategic reserve of steam locomotives...although, if such a reserve did exist, they would probably have been of more recent provenance - those built in the 1940s/50s were of simple and robust design.
Finland, however, did store a number of locomotives following the end of regular steam traction in 1975. Most were scrapped in the 1980s/90s, but a few have been preserved. Some are wood-burners (birch trees are plentiful in Finland!).
There are more steam locomotives held on preserved lines around the country than could ever have been stored under Box Hill, and many of them are even being kept in working order.
Though the strategic value of a reserve of steam locos has basically become zero since we stopped mining coal in the UK.
I find it hard to believe, that apart from command and control centres we're distracted from, that there aren't actual deep military store sites including helicopters and other multi-role aircraft, armour, artillery. The odd Rolls Royce small nuclear reactor. All vacuum packed and ready to emerge once the fallout has tailed off. Assuming a nuclear war. With enough fuel and food for the first century. For 10,000. Britain would be one of the worst affected places on Earth of course. As in annihilated. The 10,000 would have to colonise the isles of Scotland and beyond. Survive by fishing mainly. That's without nuclear winter. So not much materiel necessary really. Nuclear power and freeze dried food and medicines. Other collapses are available. Theoretically. Covid on steroids. Including virtual. A limited nuclear war. Rapid climate change. Watched the superb Comer in the not bad The End We Start From last night.
Far too optimistic.
But my fallacy of incredulity doesn't cut it really does it. How far does a state go to prepare for once a millennium or ten catastrophes? What proportion of its GNP?
I suppose one must project to enemies that we'll still be here. For limited values of 'we'. So round again one iterates.
You’ve just lived through a COVID pandemic that we were utterly unprepared for… why on Earth would you find it hard to believe that we in the UK aren’t sitting on large reserves of military stuff??
We’re just not. We were until about 1992 then it was largely sold off. We couldn’t cover a fire strike now because the Green Goddesses are mostly gone.
Storing things costs money, it’s mostly gone. The warehouses at Donnington full of Lee Enfield No8 rifles are no more.
So, no freeze dried, vacuum packed ark? No greased Armalites and a million rounds? Not obsolete stuff you could still drop a man at a mile with? So after the bang we go with a whimper? In to the night. Surely the state intends to survive anything?
Ah, that explains a lot. I thought, and still think, Box Hill is somewhere in Surrey, near Dorking. Box Tunnel, though, the one in that photograph, is nowhere near it. It's between Corsham and Bath. It gets its name because at its west end is a village called Box. It's the Corsham area, not Surrey, that has the underground quarries, as does Coombe Down just south of Bath. I've been told it's to do with a slightly odd property of Bath stone. Similar tunnels at Bradford on Avon have been used for the commercial cultivation of mushroom on a large scale.
There was an urban legend of mothballed steam engines, reputedly Granges, under a hill somewhere, waiting like King Arthur to be recalled in the nation's hour of need, but in the version I heard, they were supposed to be somewhere in Shropshire. It was even part of the legend that it must be true because there was no record of their having been scrapped.
This, though, has long since been demonstrated to be a fantasy.
Somewhere on a dark corner of the internet, years back, I read a take on the strategic steam reserve that I hadn’t come across before. This chap was swearing blind that he worked at Box or Rudloe Manor, that the steam reserve had definitely been there, but he had either witnessed or been involved with (can’t remember which now) cutting them all up in the early 80s.
And he had put up a couple of photos!
Probably fake/pinched from photos of Woodhams or Cashmores, but different to the standard tale.
ETA: I've mentioned the intriguing question of how many steam engines might be available for national emergency use on the Railway thread in Heaven, to avoid derailing this thread...
Comments
They started off using broadcasts of the 'Today' programme as evidence that Britain still exists, and then some bright spark realised they could layer all sorts of additional messages onto other programmes.
Not really. Most of the underground raves in London happened in abandoned warehouses or fields.
Well, no ghosts that are publicly known about, anyway. I rather expect they’re there anyway.
It is the the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger.
To quote Surtees.
Wikipedia is your friend: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
Edit: I don't know how to fix this link
(I'll let someone else explain that to poor ChastMastr, who will be even more bemused)
No. Everyone deceives. It's an axis of intelligence. Everyone's got something to hide. In every interaction. Good job too.
Can we not accuse "everyone" of being a liar in "every interaction," please?
Was this not found and venerated by its acolyte, Kimberly Clark?
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
But my fallacy of incredulity doesn't cut it really does it. How far does a state go to prepare for once a millennium or ten catastrophes? What proportion of its GNP?
I suppose one must project to enemies that we'll still be here. For limited values of 'we'. So round again one iterates.
IYSWIM.
I have no doubt that there's a lot of military stuff we don't know about...
You’ve just lived through a COVID pandemic that we were utterly unprepared for… why on Earth would you find it hard to believe that we in the UK aren’t sitting on large reserves of military stuff??
We’re just not. We were until about 1992 then it was largely sold off. We couldn’t cover a fire strike now because the Green Goddesses are mostly gone.
Storing things costs money, it’s mostly gone. The warehouses at Donnington full of Lee Enfield No8 rifles are no more.
Until the opening of the Thames Barrier in 1984, a portable building near the north of the tunnel was used as a flood control headquarters for the Greater London Council.
I daresay the portable building was on the level, rather than on the northern ramp, so yes, it might well have been in danger of flooding...
(The article also refers to a Goon Show episode, in which Minnie and Henry, as conductress and driver, hide in the subway for over 2 years, to ensure that they work The Last Tram...)
@betjemaniac - point taken about the dispersal of former strategic stores, but we'll never know if everything has been got rid of...will we?
I daresay you're right about general unpreparedness, though.
So, no freeze dried, vacuum packed ark? No greased Armalites and a million rounds? Not obsolete stuff you could still drop a man at a mile with? So after the bang we go with a whimper? In to the night. Surely the state intends to survive anything?
IIRC, it was Ken Livingstone, then Leader of the GLC, who said he'd rather be killed in the first blast than have to spend the aftermath in a nuclear bunker with Mrs Thatcher. I think he was being a bit sanguine, expecting there to be room made for him, but he always had a good sense of irony.
I hinted earlier in the thread, but go away and read up on BURLINGTON. There’s loads on the web. It was a colossal waste of time and money indulged in because successive governments felt they needed to be seen to be doing something. Even when it was clear that a) the USSR knew exactly where it was and b) it wouldn’t survive a hit.
1992 was the moment when the government decided they could save the money and just stop pretending.
The whole point of trident (rightly or wrongly) is that an aggressor has to know that they can utterly destroy the UK and will still have to face things coming the other way afterwards.
It’s not about surviving.
You’ll find the former by searching for Central Government War Headquarters.
Yep, read all that. Obsolete for 70 years. Great distraction. Like Dieppe was for the 4 rotor Enigma pinch.
Some of them were open to the public in the mid 1980s- I visited & didn't see any locomotives.
Finland, however, did store a number of locomotives following the end of regular steam traction in 1975. Most were scrapped in the 1980s/90s, but a few have been preserved. Some are wood-burners (birch trees are plentiful in Finland!).
Though the strategic value of a reserve of steam locos has basically become zero since we stopped mining coal in the UK.
Spur off the line within the tunnel.
There's the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. That's got to count for something.
Actually, the spur was before the tunnel and led into a separate mouth beside the main one and the underground quarries. https://tinyurl.com/3cfm95ya
There was an urban legend of mothballed steam engines, reputedly Granges, under a hill somewhere, waiting like King Arthur to be recalled in the nation's hour of need, but in the version I heard, they were supposed to be somewhere in Shropshire. It was even part of the legend that it must be true because there was no record of their having been scrapped.
This, though, has long since been demonstrated to be a fantasy.
And he had put up a couple of photos!
Probably fake/pinched from photos of Woodhams or Cashmores, but different to the standard tale.
But I cannot vouch for their truth!
That's what They want you to think, but who knows?