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fountain reflection in the gardens of temple newsam leeds.temple newsam a tudor-jacobean mansion and historic estate situated in leeds england. birthplace of lord darnley and gardens designed by capability brown in the 18 century.
Members of the U.S. Army Aviation Reaction Force, Task Force Brawler carry a simulated wounded soldier on a litter to a CH-47 Chinook on the flightline at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, Feb. 22, 2018. U.S. Air Force pararescuemen, assigned to the 83rd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron, conducted integration and medical training with members of the ARF to be able to provide the highest level of tactical capability to combatant commanders. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Tech. Sgt. Gregory Brook)
An F/A-18 aircraft is towed toward a Royal Canadian Air Force CC-177 Globemaster for transport back to Canada, as part of the Interim Fighter Capability Project at RAAF Base Williamtown, Australia, February 7, 2020.
Photo: Sergeant Vincent Carbonneau, Canadian Forces Combat Camera
20200207ISA0008D002
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À la base Williamtown de l’Aviation royale australienne (RAAF) en Australie, un avion F/A 18 se fait remorquer vers un CC-177 Globemaster de l’Aviation royale canadienne, lequel le transportera au Canada dans le cadre du Projet de capacité des chasseurs provisoires, le 7 février 2020.
Photo : Sergent Vincent Carbonneau, Caméra de combat des Forces canadiennes
20200207ISA0008D002
Croome Court is a mid 18th century Neo-Palladian mansion surrounded by an extensive landscaped parkland at Croome D'Abitot, near Pershore in south Worcestershire. The mansion and park were designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown for George Coventry, 6th Earl of Coventry, and was Brown's first landscape design and first major architectural project. Some of the internal rooms of the mansion were designed by Robert Adam.
The mansion house is owned by Croome Heritage Trust, and is leased to the National Trust who operate it, along with the surrounding parkland, as a tourist attraction. The National Trust own the surrounding parkland, which is also open to the public.
Location[edit]
Croome Court is located near to Croome D'Abitot, in Worcestershire,[1] near Pirton, Worcestershire.[2] The wider estate was established on lands that were once part of the royal forest of Horewell.[3] Traces of these older landscapes, such as unimproved commons and ancient woodlands, can be found across the former Croome Estate.[4]
House[edit]
Croome Court South Portico
History[edit]
The foundations and core of Croome Court, including the central chimney stack structure, date back to the early 1640s.[5] Substantial changes to this early house were made by Gilbert Coventry, 4th Earl of Coventry.[6]
In 1751, George Coventry, the 6th Earl, inherited the estate, along with the existing Jacobean house. He commissioned Lancelot "Capability" Brown, with the assistance of Sanderson Miller, to redesign the house and estate.[7][1] It was Brown's "first flight into the realms of architecture" and a "rare example of his architectural work",[8] and it is an important and seminal work.[9] It was built between 1751 and 1752, and it and Hagley Hall are considered to be the finest examples of Neo-Palladian architecture in Worcestershire. Notable Neo-Palladian features incorporated into Croome Court include the plain exterior and the corner towers with pyramidal roofs (a feature first used by Inigo Jones in the design of Wilton House in Wiltshire).[1] Robert Adam worked on the interior of the building from 1760 onwards.[10]
The house has been visited by George III,[2][11] as well as Queen Victoria[7] during summers when she was a child, and George V (then Duke of York).[11]
A jam factory was built by the 9th Earl of Coventry, near to Pershore railway station, in about 1880, to provide a market for Vale of Evesham fruit growers in times of surplus. Although the Croome connection with jam making had ceased, during the First World War, the building was leased by the Croome Estate Trust to the Huddersfield Fruit Preserving Company as a pulping station.[12]
The First World War deeply affected Croome, with many local casualties, although the house was not requisitioned for the war effort. This is possibly because it was the home of the Lord Lieutenant of the County, who needed a residence for his many official engagements.[13]
During the Second World War Croome Court was requisitioned by the Ministry of Works and leased for a year to the Dutch Government as a possible refuge for Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands; to escape the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. However, evidence shows that they stayed two weeks at the most, perhaps because of the noise and fear created by the proximity of Defford Aerodrome. They later emigrated to Canada.[14]
In 1948 the Croome Estate Trust sold the Court, along with 38 acres (15 ha) of land, to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Birmingham, and the mansion became St Joseph's Special School, which was run by nuns[15] from 1950[11] until 1979.[15]
The house was listed on 11 August 1952; it is currently Grade I listed.[10]
In 1979 the hall was taken over by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Hare Krishna movement), who used it as their UK headquarters and a training college[16] called Chaitanya College,[15] run by 25 members of the movement.[16] During their tenure they repainted the Dining Room.[17] In 1984 they had to leave the estate for financial reasons. They held a festival at the hall in 2011.[16]
From 1984 onwards various owners tried to use the property as a training centre; apartments; a restaurant and conference centre; and a hotel and golf course,[15] before once more becoming a private family home,[2][15] with outbuildings converted to private houses.[15]
The house was purchased by the Croome Heritage Trust, a registered charity,[18] in October 2007,[19] and it is now managed by the National Trust as a tourist attraction. It opened to the public in September 2009, at which point six of the rooms had restored, costing £400,000, including the Saloon. It was estimated that another £4 million[2][20] to £4.8 million would be needed to restore the entire building. Fundraising activities for the restoration included a 2011 raffle for a Morgan sports car organised by Lord and Lady Flight. After the restoration is complete, a 999-year lease on the building will be granted to the National Trust.[21] An oral history project to record recollections about Croome was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.[15] As of 2009, the service wing was empty and in need of substantial repair.[22]
Exterior[edit]
The mansion is faced with Bath stone,[7] limestone ashlar, and has both north and south facing fronts. It has a basement and two stories, with three stories in the end pavilions. A slate roof, with pyramid roofs over the corner towers, tops the building, along with three pair-linked chimneys along the axis of the house.[10]
Both fronts have 11 bays, split into three central sets of three each, and one additional bay each side. The north face has a pedimented centre, with two balustraded staircases leading to a Roman Doric doorcase. The south face has a projecting Ionic tetrastyle portico and Venetian windows. It has a broad staircase, with cast stone sphinxes on each side, leading to a south door topped with a cornice on consoles. The wings have modillion cornice and balustrade.[10]
A two-story L-shaped service wing is attached to the east side of the mansion. It is made of red brick and stone, with slate roofs.[10] It was designed by Capability Brown in 1751-2.[22] On the far side of the service wing, a wall connects it to a stable court.[10]
Interior[edit]
The interior of the house was designed partially by Capability Brown, with plasterwork by G. Vassalli, and partially by Robert Adam, with plasterwork by J. Rose Jr. It has a central spine corridor. A stone staircase, with iron balusters, is at the east end.[10]
The entrance hall is on the north side of the building, and has four fluted Doric columns, along with moulded doorcases. To the east of the entrance hall is the dining room, which has a plaster ceiling and cornice, while to the west is a billiard room, featuring fielded panelling, a plaster cornice, and a rococo fireplace. The three rooms were probably decorated around 1758-59 by Capability Brown.[10] The dining room was vibrantly repainted by the Hare Krishnas in the 1970s-80s.[17]
The central room on the south side is a saloon, probably by Brown and Vassalli. It has an elaborate ceiling, with three panels, deep coving, and a cornice, along with two Ionic fireplaces, and Palladian doorcases.[10] George III was entertained by George Coventry, the 6th Earl, in the house's Saloon.[2] A drawing room is to the west of the saloon, and features rococo plasterwork and a marble fireplace.[10]
To the east of the saloon is the Tapestry Room.[10] This was designed in 1763-71, based on a design by Robert Adam, and contained tapestries and furniture covers possibly designed by Jacques Germain Soufflot, and made by Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins.[23] Around 1902 the ninth Earl sold the tapestries and seating to a Parisian dealer. In 1949 the Samuel H. Kress Foundation purchased the ceiling, floor, mantlepiece, chair rails, doors and the door surrounds, which were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1958. In 1959 the Kress Foundation also helped the Metropolitan Museum acquire the chair and sofa frames, which they recovered using the original tapestry seats.[7][23] A copy of the ceiling was installed in place of the original.[10] As of 2016, the room is displayed as it would have looked after the tapestries had been sold, with a jug and ewer on display as the only original decoration of the room that remains in it. The adjacent library room is used to explain what happened to the tapestry room;[17] the former library was designed by Adam, and was dismantled except for the marble fireplace.[10]
At the west side of the building is a long gallery,[10] which was designed by Robert Adam and installed between 1761 and 1766. It is the best preserved of the original interior (little of the rest has survived in situ).[1] It has an octagonal panelled ceiling, and plaster reliefs of griffins. A half-hexagonal bay faces the garden. The room also contains a marble caryatid fireplace designed by J Wilton.[10] As of 2016, modern sculptures are displayed in empty niches along the Long Gallery
wikipedia
Aerial view of Ditchingham Hall - grade 1 listed building in Norfolk. Classical style country house built for the Reverend John Bedingfield in about 1715. Set in around 2,000 acres of parkland landscaped by Capability Brown.
Partly used as a USAAF hospital in WW2.
Norfolk aerial image
BIG ISLAND, Hawaii (Nov. 12, 2019) - Twenty helicopters from 25th Combat Aviation Brigade traveled 200 miles to provided troop lift capability to air assault the Gimlets of 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division from Wheeler Army Airfield to Pohakuloa Training Area (PTA) on Big Island of Hawaii, Nov. 12. CH-47 Chinook helicopters assigned to the Hillclimbers of 3rd Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment along with UH-60 Blackhawks assigned to 2nd Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment were used in the execution of this large muscle movement to move Soldiers and equipment intra-island for the upcoming exercise. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Sarah D. Sangster) 191112-A-XP872-315
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The first Galileo Full Operational Capability satellite (SAT 5) during preparations inside the S5A building, before fuelling operations, on 30 July 2014.
The launch of the two Galileo satellites, aboard a Soyuz rocket, is set for August 2014, from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
The definition, development and in-orbit validation phases of the Galileo programme were carried out by ESA and co-funded by ESA and the EU. The Full Operational Capability phase is managed and fully funded by the European Commission. The Commission and ESA have signed a delegation agreement by which ESA acts as design and procurement agent on behalf of the Commission.
Credit: ESA–S. Corvaja, 2014
PHILIPPINE SEA (Nov. 20, 2022) USS Chancellorsville (CG 62) along with Carrier Strike Group (CSG) 5 units conduct tri-lateral operations with JS Setogiri (DD 156) of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) and HMAS Stalwart (A304) of the Royal Australian Navy, to focus on allied interoperability training in the areas of sustainment capability and high end warfighting in the Philippine Sea. Chancellorsville is forward-deployed to U.S. 7th Fleet in support of security and stability in the Indo-Pacific and is assigned to Commander, Task Force (CTF) 70, a combat-ready force that protects and defends the collective maritime interest of its allies and partners in the region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Justin Stack)
Broadway Tower is a folly on Broadway Hill, near the village of Broadway, in the English county of Worcestershire, at the second-highest point of the Cotswolds (after Cleeve Hill). Broadway Tower's base is 1,024 feet (312 metres) above sea level. The tower itself stands 65 feet (20 metres) high.
The "Saxon" tower was the brainchild of Capability Brown and designed by James Wyatt in 1794 in the form of a castle, and built for Lady Coventry in 1798–99. The tower was built on a "beacon" hill, where beacons were lit on special occasions. Lady Coventry wondered whether a beacon on this hill could be seen from her house in Worcester — about 22 miles (35 km) away — and sponsored the construction of the folly to find out. Indeed, the beacon could be seen clearly.
Over the years, the tower was home to the printing press of Sir Thomas Phillipps, and served as a country retreat for artists including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones who rented it together in the 1880s. William Morris was so inspired by Broadway Tower and other ancient buildings that he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877.
Today, the tower is a tourist attraction and the centre of a country park with various exhibitions open to the public at a fee, as well as a gift shop and restaurant. The place is on the Cotswold Way and can be reached by following the Cotswold Way from the A44 road at Fish Hill, or by a steep climb out of Broadway village.
Near the tower is a memorial to the crew of an A.W.38 Whitley bomber that crashed there during a training mission in June 1943.
Gripen E has a substantially developed capability compared to previous versions. The aircraft is based on the same smart design and innovative technological solutions, which leads to considerable savings compared to other alternatives.
Gripen E has a more powerful engine with the capacity to operate for a longer duration and carry more weapons and payload. New electronic radar, upgraded presentation systems in the cockpit and modern avionics (aircraft electronics) enhances the ability to perform successful missions.
Read the full press release here:
www.saabgroup.com/en/About-Saab/Newsroom/Press-releases--...
This beautiful fallow deer was photographed in Petworth Park during the rutting season.
The fallow deer (Dama dama) is a ruminant mammal belonging to the family Cervidae. This common species is native to western Eurasia, but has been introduced widely elsewhere. It often includes the rarer Persian fallow deer as a subspecies (D. d. mesopotamica), while others treat it as an entirely different species (D. mesopotamica).
Petworth House and Park in Petworth, West Sussex, England, has been a family home for over 800 years. The estate was a royal gift from the widow of Henry I to her brother Jocelin de Louvain, who soon after married into the renowned Percy family. As the Percy stronghold was in the north, Petworth was originally only intended for occasional use.
Petworth, formerly known as Leconfield, is a major country estate on the outskirts of Petworth, itself a town created to serve the house. Described by English Heritage as "the most important residence in the County of Sussex", there was a manorial house here from 1309, but the present buildings were built for the Dukes of Somerset from the late 17th century, the park being landscaped by "Capability" Brown. The house contains a fine collection of paintings and sculptures.
The house itself is grade I listed (List Entry Number 1225989) and the park as a historic park (1000162). Several individual features in the park are also listed.
It was in the late 1500s that Petworth became a permanent home to the Percys after Elizabeth I grew suspicious of their allegiance to Mary, Queen of Scots and confined the family to the south.
The 2nd Earl of Egremont commissioned Capability Brown to design and landscape the deer park. The park, one of Brownâs first commissions as an independent designer, consists of 700 acres of grassland and trees. It is inhabited by the largest herd of fallow deer in England. There is also a 12-hectare (30-acre) woodland garden, known as the Pleasure Ground.
Brown removed the formal garden and fishponds of the 1690âs and relocated 64,000 tons of soil, creating a serpentine lake. He bordered the lake with poplars, birches and willows to make the ânaturalâ view pleasing. A 1987 hurricane devastated the park, and 35,000 trees were planted to replace the losses. Gracing the 30 acres of gardens and pleasure grounds around the home are seasonal shrubs and bulbs that include lilies, primroses, and azaleas. A Doric temple and Ionic rotunda add interest in the grounds.
Petworth House is a late 17th-century mansion, rebuilt in 1688 by Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset, and altered in the 1870s by Anthony Salvin. The site was previously occupied by a fortified manor house founded by Henry de Percy, the 13th-century chapel and undercroft of which still survive.
Today's building houses an important collection of paintings and sculptures, including 19 oil paintings by J. M. W. Turner (some owned by the family, some by Tate Britain), who was a regular visitor to Petworth, paintings by Van Dyck, carvings by Grinling Gibbons and Ben Harms, classical and neoclassical sculptures (including ones by John Flaxman and John Edward Carew), and wall and ceiling paintings by Louis Laguerre. There is also a terrestrial globe by Emery Molyneux, believed to be the only one in the world in its original 1592 state.
For the past 250 years the house and the estate have been in the hands of the Wyndham family â currently Lord Egremont. He and his family live in the south wing, allowing much of the remainder to be open to the public.
The house and deer park were handed over to the nation in 1947 and are now managed by the National Trust under the name "Petworth House & Park". The Leconfield Estates continue to own much of Petworth and the surrounding area. As an insight into the lives of past estate workers the Petworth Cottage Museum has been established in High Street, Petworth, furnished as it would have been in about 1910.
Kathy Lueders, program manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, speaks, as Former astronaut Bob Cabana, director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, left, and Astronaut Mike Fincke, a former commander of the International Space Station look on during a news conference where it was announced that Boeing and SpaceX have been selected to transport U.S. crews to and from the International Space Station using the Boeing CST-100 and the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2014. These Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts are designed to complete the NASA certification for a human space transportation system capable of carrying people into orbit. Once certification is complete, NASA plans to use these systems to transport astronauts to the space station and return them safely to Earth. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
A new fighter with a deployment capability to assist troops on the battle field. Called the Sparrow because of the slim profile and red accents, this bird will do more than peck at you!
Newton House is in the grounds of Dinefwr Castle, close to Llandeilo in West Wales. It was formerly the main residence of the Rice (Rhys) family, elevated to the peerage as the Lords Dynevor. The residence had been restored to an estate house of the later Victorian era into the early Edwardian period. It is surrounded by a deer park which was landscaped by Capability Brown.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background
The Imperial Japanese Army Air Force's fighter force, especially the Nakajima Ki-43, had been underestimated in its capability, numbers and the strategy of its commanders. Within a few months, Japanese forces had conquered vast areas of the Pacific and South East Asia. During these campaigns, the ill-prepared Allied air forces in the Pacific suffered devastating losses.
Because of political and cultural ties between the United Kingdom and Australia, British manufacturers were the main source of RAAF aircraft. However, the British aircraft industry had long been hard-pressed to meet the needs of the RAF. Although United States companies had enormous aircraft manufacturing capacity, their output was now intended first and foremost for US air units. Even if aircraft built overseas did become available, they would be shipped long distances in wartime conditions, with consequent delays and losses. As a consequence, CAC came into its own with the development of the Boomerang fighter, which was not operational before late 1942.
Following the outbreak of war with Japan, 51 Hurricane Mk IIs were sent as a stop-gap in crates to Singapore, with 24 pilots, the nucleus of five squadrons. They arrived on 3 January 1942, by which time the Allied fighter squadrons in Singapore, flying Brewster Buffalos, had been overwhelmed in the Malayan campaign. Even though the Hurricanes were a significant progress, they suffered in performance.
Because of inadequate early warning systems, Japanese air raids were able to destroy 30 Hurricanes on the ground in Sumatra, most of them in one raid on 7 February. After Japanese landings in Singapore, on 10 February, only 18 serviceable Hurricanes remained out of the original 99. After Java was invaded, some of the pilots were evacuated by sea to Australia. 31 Hurricane airframes, which had been on the wayby ship, not been assembled and lacked Merlin engines, were directed to Australia in the wake of events.
From these unfinished machines, the Hurricane Mk. VI was quickly devised: the airframes were mated with P&W Twin Wasp engines, which were produced under license at the CAC plant in Lidcombe, Sydney, for the RAAF's Boomerang and Bristol Beaufort. It was clear from the start that these Twin Wasp-powered machines would rather be stop-gaps and no true fighters, rather fighter bombers and more suited for the ground attack role. Hence, like the latest fighters at the time, planning for the Mk. VI included automatic cannons. As no such weapons were manufactured locally, a British-made Hispano-Suiza 20 mm which an Australian airman had collected as a souvenir in the Middle East was reverse engineered – and four of them replaced the eight and partly twelve 0.303 machine guns of the original Mk. IIB machines. Additionally, the pilot received extra armor plating, and the wings were reinforced for external ordnance.
The RAAF Mk. VI Hurricanes carried A60-02 through -32 registrations. As a side note, A60-01 was a single Hurricane Mk.I serialled V-7476. This aircraft served with No.2 and 3 Communications Flights RAAF and was used on occasion for experimental work at RAAF Base Laverton on the outskirts of Melbourne. The aircraft was scrapped in 1945.
The Hurricane Mk. VIs actively took part in Pacific operations with RAAF’s No. 4 Squadron and No. 5 Squadron, being joined by Boomerangs in early 1943. They were operated in New Guinea and during the Solomon Islands Campaign as well as the Borneo Campaign, mostly in the close support role and with marked success.
Flying in pairs (one to observe the ground, the other to observe the air around them), their tasks included bombing, strafing, close infantry support and artillery spotting. When attacking larger enemy formations, the Hurricanes often operated in conjunction with the smaller and much more agile Boomerang fighter. In this role, a Boomerang would get in close to confirm the identity of the target and mark it with a 20 lb (9 kg) smoke bomb with the "cooperating" Hurricane, Beaufort or Havoc delivering the major ordnance in a quick run and from a safer distance. The partnership between RAAF planes and Royal New Zealand Air Force Corsair fighter bombers during the Bougainville Campaign was said to be particularly effective.
The Australian Hurricane Mk. VIs soldiered on until early 1945, when they were finally retired. The Twin Wasp engines were used for spares, all airframes were scrapped, no plane survived the war.
General characteristics:
Crew: 1
Length: 32 ft 3 in (9.84 m)
Wingspan: 40 ft 0 in (12.19 m)
Height: 13 ft 1½ in (4.0 m)
Wing area: 257.5 ft² (23.92 m²)
Empty weight: 5,745 lb (2,605 kg)
Loaded weight: 7,670 lb (3,480 kg)
Max. takeoff weight: 8,710 lb (3,950 kg)
Maximum speed: 331 mph (531 km/h)
Range: 650 mi (1.045 km)
Service ceiling: 36,000 ft (10,970 m)
Rate of climb: 2,303 ft/min (11.7 m/s)
Wing loading: 29.8 lb/ft² (121.9 kg/m²)
Power/mass: 0.15 hp/lb (0.25 kW/kg)
Engine: 1× Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp radial engine, 1,200 hp (895 kW)
Armament: 4× 20 mm (0.787 in) Hispano or CAC cannons; 2x 45-gallon (205 l) drop tanks or 2× 250 or 500 lb (110 or 230 kg) bombs
The kit and its assembly
The Hurricane Mk. VI is a whif, even though with little effort but a good story behind it. The original idea to mate a Hurricane with a radial engine came when I found a drawing of a Russian Hurricane, mated with a Schwezow ASch-82 engine. It looked… interesting. Not certain if this had been done for sure, but a great inspiration.
While browsing through the scrap heap I later found a Twin Wasp engine – that fueled the idea of a respective conversion. The Russian option was dead, but when I checked contemporary planes I came across the small Boomerang, and the historical facts were perfect for an obscure Australian Hurricane variant.
The rest was quickly done: the basic kit is a Hurricane Mk. IIC (Trop) from Hobby Boss, the Twin Wasp comes from a wrecked Matchbox PB4Y Privateer. The original Merlin was simply cut away and replaced by the "new" and relatively small radial engine. A surprisingly easy task, even though I had to widen the area in front of the cockpit by about 1mm to each side. With some putty and a new exhaust pipe with flame dampers, the surgical part was quickly done. A pilot was added, too, in order to distract from the rather bleak cockpit.
To make the plane look more interesting and suitable for a display on the ground, the flaps were lowered (scratch-built) and vertical and horizontal stabilizer were moved away from OOB neutral position. Additionally, the cooler under the fuselage was omitted, what creates together with the radial engine a very different side view. This "Aussie'cane" looks stout but disturbingly realistic, like a Boomerang’s big brother!
Only other changes/additions are a pilot figure and two wing hardpoints, holding bombs. The rest is OOB.
Painting
I have always been a fan of all-green RAAF WWII planes, so I chose such a simple livery. Inspiration came from real-life 4. Squadron Boomerangs, so I adopted the “QE” code and tried to mimic the overall look.
Interior surfaces were kept in Humbrol 78 ('Cockpit Green', dry-painted with light grey). The plane was painted with “Foilage Green” on all outer surfaces - a tone which seems to be heavily debated. Most sources claim FS 34092 (Humbrol 149) as a nowaday's replacement, but to me, this color is just too green and blue-ish. IMHO, “Foilage Green” has a rather yellow-ish hue - Humbrol 75 ("Bronze Green") would be better, if it wasn't too dark.
After some trials I settled for Humbrol 105 ("Army Green"). I think it is a sound compromise. It resembles FS 34096, but is (much) less grey-ish and offers that yellow hue I was looking for. Heavy weathering was done, esp. at the panel lines with dry-painted FS 34096 (Testors) and some panels "bleached" with Humbrol 86 ("Light live Green"). After deacls had been applied, some dry brushing with olive drab and light grey added to the worn and faded look, as well as flaked paint around the engine and the wings' leading egdes and soot stains at exhausts and guns. I wanted to emphasize the harsh climate conditions and duties of this fictional machine.
Only other colors are typical white quick recognition markings on tail and wings, painted with a mix of Humbrol 130 and 196 for a very light grey, with some white dry painting on th eleading edges.For a final clear coat, I used a matte varnish which still has a light gloss to it - “Foilage Green” and RAAF finishes were AFAIK supposed to be semi-matte and of higher quality that USAF paintjobs.
Markings come mostly from the scrap box. The RAAF insignia were taken from a Vultee Vengeance aftermarket sheet by Kanga Decals, which also provided the mid sea grey codes. The Australian registration numbers were improvised with single white letters from TL Modellbau decal sheets.
All in all I am happy with the result - a simple measure, a good story and even a very simple livery that allows room for imagination and painting effects. A nice lil' whif, the "Aussie'cane" Mk. VI.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
The Spartan was born as a humanoid-type weapon from the United Nations Military ambulatory weapons program. The MBR-07 Spartan was the second-place participant, the winning design became the Main Battle Robot-Series 04 family of Destroids that included the Tomahawk and specialized variants like the Defender and the Phalanx. The Spartan and its unique chassis had been specifically designed for close hand-to-hand combat, and therefore produced a less prolific family of battle robots for the U.N. Spacy - even though it filled a vital, tactical niche that the 04 family simply could not fill.
Unlike the MBR-04 series, the MBR-07 Spartan series was developed jointly by Centinental and the Kransmann Group. Another significant divergence from the MBR-04 series was the absence of any auxiliary generator, due to the increased power of the main engine. The rugged silhouette had a wide range of motion in addition to the swivel capability of the waist and wrists, making the 07 chassis much more agile than the rather static 04 basis, and its structure could absorb a lot of physical punishment.
Development of the MBR-07 followed one year and two months after the first MBR-04 series Destroids began design in 2003. The Spartan then entered trial production in February 2005, and, by January 2008, the first serial production Mk. I units were rolled out and handed over to frontline units.
The Spartan Mk. I was, true to its original design and mission philosophy, fully dedicated to hand-to-hand combat. As such, the initial Mk. I variant relied - except for a pair of Bifors missile launcher clusters with 12 self-guided short/mid-range rockets per launcher in the shoulders - on direct enemy contact with hand strikes, blocks and kicks. Only a massive combat mace was available as an optional auxiliary weapon, the Destroid’s large hands precluded the use of other hand weapons like the GU-11 gun pod from the VF-1 Valkyrie fighter.
While this form of martial arts attacks delivered critical blows to Zentraedi and their mecha, this rather limited tactical configuration soon turned out to leave the initial Spartans vulnerable to air and mid-range attacks. In consequence, the armament suite was quickly augmented, leading to the Spartan Mk. II, which became the primary production and service variant. The Mk. II update included a pair of Mauler RQV-10 anti-aircraft laser guns, mounted in a remote-controlled barbette on top of the hull that covered the complete upper hemisphere, and a retractable Astra TZ-IV gun cluster featuring a laser gun, a 32 mm machine cannon, a 180 mm grenade launcher, a 12.7 mm Machine Gun and a flamethrower – the same installation that was also used in the MBR-04 Tomahawk. Since close combat was still the Spartan’s primary mission, the versatile weapon array was hidden and protected under a newly designed forward central hatch, which necessitated a reconstructed upper body section with a set-back cockpit. In this form, the Spartan Mk. II entered mass production, and all early Mk. I units produced until May 2008 were later, during normal overhauls or during repairs, upgraded to Mk. II units. However, these converted Mk. Is remained easy to recognize because they typically retained the original leg design with four horizontal ribs on the lower legs instead of just two oblique reinforcements on the Mk. II production models. However, there was no differentiating designation between the old and new Mk. II Spartans, since the Destroids were all the same “under the hood”.
From the start, the Spartan was popular among its pilots and maintenance crews, and it was easy for a VF pilot to handle because the VF Battroid mode cockpit was actually based upon the MBR-07’s design concept. Although the Spartan achieved high mobility performance, problems developing the engine and power transmission system delayed production and early models were prone to fail under harsh battle conditions that called for sustained high-power output. With the introduction of the Mk. II, however, these problems had been eradicated. Considerable numbers of Spartans were built and deployed to the front lines due to high acclaim for its operation, which combined heavy armor, high mobility and a good protection level for the pilot. The Spartan was also actively used in suppression of Zentraedi insurgencies (e. g. during the Highlander City airport incident in late 2011) and served with U.N. Spacy frontline units until 2012.
General characteristics:
Equipment Type: main battle robot, series 07
Government: U.N. Spacy
Manufacturer: Centinental/Kransmann
Introduction: June 2008
Accommodation: 1 pilot only
Dimensions:
Height: 11.31 meters (to shoulder), 11.27 meters (overall)
Length: 6.1 meters
Width: 8.3 meters
Mass: 28.2 metric tons
Power Plant:
Gigenheimer Roy DT2004 thermonuclear reactor, developing 3.200 shp
Propulsion:
1x quadruple rocket nozzle installed beneath the engine cover in the rear chassis,
for increased mobility, plus several vernier nozzles around the hull for Zero-G manoeuvers
Armament:
2x Norman Banks CH2-TYPED claw hand with 5-finger manipulators
2x Bifors close-in self-guided rocket launcher with 12 rockets per launcher
1x optional metallic club (for hand-to-hand combat)
The kit and its assembly:
This modified 1:100 Destroid Spartan was inspired by a line art drawing found in the source book “Macross Perfect Memory”, showing an early Mk. I variant of this unique and somewhat odd-looking mecha. I had this build on my agenda for a while (read: at least 10 years…) and already stashed away a vintage Arii kit from the 15th Macross anniversary edition released in the late Nineties.
Apparently, the Spartan Mk. I primarily differs from its better-known later sibling through a simplified central body section, giving it an even more hunchbacked silhouette, and upon closer inspection of the benchmark drawing I also found detail differences on the lower legs. Otherwise, the Mk. II kit could be used OOB, just with some general detail upgrades, since the vintage Arii kit is not without (a lot of) weaknesses.
For the different legs, the original oblique ribs in the calves were sanded away, the surfaces evened-out, and four more or less horizontal ribs per calf were added, made from styrene profile material. The same stuff was also used to add vertical ribs on front and back of the calves – a general Spartan detail that the 1:100 kit lacks.
Creating the new central body section was more demanding. In order to retain the original attachment points, I just cut away the central body’s front half, retaining the rounded, lower “floor” plate as a connection to the hips, which remained OOB. The new front end was fully scratched; at its core it consists of a (clear) protective cover for a Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush head, with a slit cut out. A round insert, a piece from an aircraft model display, was glued into the opening from behind. In order to blend this core donor part into the rest of the body and to mimic the Mk. I’s outlines from the drawing, I added side fairings that were cut from 1.5mm styrene sheet, plus a chin fairing made of 0.5mm sheet. The rest was filled with putty and sculpted as good as possible after the only benchmark sketch of the Spartan Mk. I had at hand. While the result looks a little tweedy (the visor slit appears to be a little too large and the chin became quite wide and edgy), I think that the overall look is not too bad for such a scratch attempt?
The Spartan Mk. II’s laser barbette disappeared and more ribs, again made from styrene profiles, were added to the lower “cheeks”. The cockpit hatch came from the Mk. II kit and was blended into the upper hull through PSR – the benchmark drawing does not show it, but the perspective might hide it and I’d assume that the Mk. I Spartan would certainly have a similar cockpit to the Mk. II. The small sensor “head unit” behind the cockpit was fully scratched, too, from styrene profile material and some leftover bits.
So far, so good, but some general words of warning concerning the Arii Spartan kit: while the small model already features “modern” details like vinyl caps for many of its joints, this is neither an easy nor a pretty build. Fit is mediocre at best and you will have to PSR practically every seam. Furthermore, the model generally lacks some important surface details which apparently fell victim to an easy production – even the bigger 1:72 kit is missing them!
Furthermore, the green styrene of my specimen turned out to be quite brittle – this might the a sign of age, though, since my model was more than 20 years old. For instance, the bolts that hold the arms in their vinyl-capped joints immediately sheared off upon first dry-fitting! Critical damage… The same happened to the pen that holds the upper body to the hip section with a ball joint (actually not providing much mobility, though). Oh, and, by the way, the legs do notoriously not hold well (if at all) to their hip joints – they simply tend to fall off. Together with a rather concave/toed-in leg position from the hips downwards, this is another general flaw of the 1:100 kit – except for major modifications I have no other idea how to improve this. On this build I did not do anything about this problem, though.
In order to save the arms and keep the mobile I rigorously drilled up the original joints with the hidden vinyl caps and replaced them fully with 6mm styrene tubes. The bolts on the inner arms were also fully replaced with 4mm styrene tubes that fit snuggly into the new 6mm fairings. The broken hip ball joint was replaced by a prosthetic carved from more durable sprue material, glued to the central pen. Nerve-wrecking, but fortunately invisible problems.
While opening the shoulder rocket launchers is a general option for any Spartan kit (the interior would have to be fully scratched, though), I did not invest the work into this Mk. I conversion – primarily because I already did this stunt on an authentic/improved Mk. II model.
Concerning armament, builders should be warned that the 1:100 kit (also) completely lacks the retractable weapon cluster that is hidden under the openable “nose hood”. This has to be scratched if the builder wants to display the Spartan Mk. II with blazing internal guns. The 1:72 kit is better in this respect, the gun cluster is even retractable, but even this model has lots of space for improvement.
A further weak point is the interior of the missile launchers’ exhaust ports: a vertical seam runs through them, and there’s hardly a chance to avoid that visible flaw unless you replace the interior or, as I did, hide the weak spots under some plastic mesh.
Furthermore, all Imai/Arii Spartan kits lack the Destroid’s optional but very characteristic battle mace – and since the Mk. I only carries limited internal weaponry, I decided to scratch one for my model. It was created from styrene tubes and profiles, plus parts from a syringe needle protective cover. It was built in two parts, so that it can be put into the Spartan’s hands on demand.
Painting and markings:
The Destroid Spartan comes almost invariably in an overall dark green livery, with (very) light grey hands and missile launcher covers and a red “nose hood” for the hidden weapon cluster. However, in episode 15 of the Macross TV series, a blue Spartan Mk. II makes an appearance, and I used this alternative livery as an inspiration for my Mk. I conversion.
The paint scheme remained simple, though, and I went for an overall dark petrol blue (Humbrol 77 Navy Blue) as basic color. The light grey highlights were painted with RAL 7035 (Humbrol 196). Since the Mk.I lacks the Mk II’s characteristic red “nose hood”, I also painted the missile launcher exhausts in light grey for more overall contrast. The visor and the optic in the sensor turret were laid out with silver and painted with translucent green paint. Visible joint covers on the legs (hips and knees) were covered with paper tissue, drenched with thinned white glue, in order to add some volume and fill the wide gaps esp. in the knee openings, and painted black (Revell 06, RAL 7021 Tar Black) for good contrast to the dark blue hull.
The hull was thoroughly weathered with a heavier black ink wash and a total of three dry brushing turns: the first, generous treatment with Revell 79 (RAL 7031, a rather bluish blue-grey), followed by the second turn around the edges with Humbrol 79 (Blue Grey, quite similar to RAL 7031 but more greyish). Decals followed next, mostly taken from the OOB sheet, just with a few extra stencils, the red tactical code from a Destroid Tomahawk on the “nose”, and the "Martha Ann” nose art on the left calf (which belongs to a WWII A-26 Invader, taken from a PrintScale sheet). On top of that, a final dry-brushing turn, this time with Humbrol 157 (RAF Azure Blue), was added, before the model was sealed with acrylic matt varnish.
At this late stage I eventually added some fine red lines to the calves, cut from 1mm decal stripes. I found after dry-fitting the major components, that the model lacked some color contrast to the all-over blue (the lack of the red nose hood changes the Spartan’s look considerably), and I think these small red highlights help somewhat? These markings appear on the Spartan Mk. II (too), but they are not included in the OOB sheet, so that I had to improvise again.
Before final assembly, I additionally dry-brushed the lower leg and arm edges with aluminum and light grey, simulating wear from close combat. Dust on the lower hull areas was finally simulated with grey-brown mineral pigments, carefully dabbed onto the model with a dry, soft brush.
The result of this model conversion turned out to be a little ambiguous: creating a Mk. I Spartan is not too easy, and my built is certainly not perfect – but I think that the model conveys the general outlines well. After all, I only had limited reference material at hand, and the donor parts define to a certain degree what can be achieved. The blue livery suits the Spartan well, even though – due to the lack of the characteristic red nose hood – it looks a little dull and uniform? Nevertheless, a nice addition to my Macross mecha collection, also as a sister ship to my (authentic) Spartan Mk. II model. The Destroid family keeps growing. :D
DPAC & UK Uncut protest against benefit cuts at DWP - 31.08.2012
Following their earlier joint protest that morning at the Euston headquarters of ATOS Origin - the French IT company which has sponsored the paralympics, despite its role in forcing tens of thousands of severely sick and disabled people off their life-saving benefits after declaring them "Fit for Work" following the seriously flawed Work Capability Assessment stipulated by the Dept. fo0r Work and Pensions (DWP), DPAC and UK Uncut activists descended on the Westminster headquarters of the DWP and protested outside.
Several activists managed to get inside the entrance foyer of the government building, which was the trigger for a short-but-overly-aggressive encounter with a large number of Territorial Support Group police who waded into the disabled and able-bodied protesters to force them away from the front of the building which houses the offices of Secretary for State for Work and Pensions Ian Duncan Smith and Minister for Disabled People Maria Miller.
During the quite unnecessary action against the peaceful protesters - several in wheelchairs - one disabled man was thrown out of his wheelchair to the ground, breaking his shoulder. Another man's motorised wheelchair was broken in the fracas, and one man was arrested.
Some of the protesters managed to speak to Maria Miller, MP, and told her to her facve how much misery and human despair her department's policies of demonisation of the disabled - portraying them publicly as workshy scroungers and benefits cheats, even though Disability Benefit fraud is extremely small, only 0.4% of the overall benefits budget, despite frequent, outrageous lies peddled by the DWP and minister Ian Duncan Smith as it behaves no better than the German government in the years running up to World War II as they turn the public against the very weakest, most vulnerable members of the British population, blaming disabled people for the country's economic misery - cause by corrupt bankers.
All photos © 2012 Pete Riches
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I went for a walk around Petworth Park to see the deer during the rutting season, strange groaning and belching sounds echoed around the park. The clash of antlers could be heard for miles as the males showed off their virility to potential mates. This stag bellows shortly after winning a dual with a rival, then struts off to take over the harem.
The fallow deer (Dama dama) is a ruminant mammal belonging to the family Cervidae. This common species is native to western Eurasia, but has been introduced widely elsewhere. It often includes the rarer Persian fallow deer as a subspecies (D. d. mesopotamica), while others treat it as an entirely different species (D. mesopotamica).
Petworth House and Park in Petworth, West Sussex, England, has been a family home for over 800 years. The estate was a royal gift from the widow of Henry I to her brother Jocelin de Louvain, who soon after married into the renowned Percy family. As the Percy stronghold was in the north, Petworth was originally only intended for occasional use.
Petworth, formerly known as Leconfield, is a major country estate on the outskirts of Petworth, itself a town created to serve the house. Described by English Heritage as "the most important residence in the County of Sussex", there was a manorial house here from 1309, but the present buildings were built for the Dukes of Somerset from the late 17th century, the park being landscaped by "Capability" Brown. The house contains a fine collection of paintings and sculptures.
The house itself is grade I listed (List Entry Number 1225989) and the park as a historic park (1000162). Several individual features in the park are also listed.
It was in the late 1500s that Petworth became a permanent home to the Percys after Elizabeth I grew suspicious of their allegiance to Mary, Queen of Scots and confined the family to the south.
The 2nd Earl of Egremont commissioned Capability Brown to design and landscape the deer park. The park, one of Brownâs first commissions as an independent designer, consists of 700 acres of grassland and trees. It is inhabited by the largest herd of fallow deer in England. There is also a 12-hectare (30-acre) woodland garden, known as the Pleasure Ground.
Brown removed the formal garden and fishponds of the 1690âs and relocated 64,000 tons of soil, creating a serpentine lake. He bordered the lake with poplars, birches and willows to make the ânaturalâ view pleasing. A 1987 hurricane devastated the park, and 35,000 trees were planted to replace the losses. Gracing the 30 acres of gardens and pleasure grounds around the home are seasonal shrubs and bulbs that include lilies, primroses, and azaleas. A Doric temple and Ionic rotunda add interest in the grounds.
Petworth House is a late 17th-century mansion, rebuilt in 1688 by Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset, and altered in the 1870s by Anthony Salvin. The site was previously occupied by a fortified manor house founded by Henry de Percy, the 13th-century chapel and undercroft of which still survive.
Today's building houses an important collection of paintings and sculptures, including 19 oil paintings by J. M. W. Turner (some owned by the family, some by Tate Britain), who was a regular visitor to Petworth, paintings by Van Dyck, carvings by Grinling Gibbons and Ben Harms, classical and neoclassical sculptures (including ones by John Flaxman and John Edward Carew), and wall and ceiling paintings by Louis Laguerre. There is also a terrestrial globe by Emery Molyneux, believed to be the only one in the world in its original 1592 state.
For the past 250 years the house and the estate have been in the hands of the Wyndham family â currently Lord Egremont. He and his family live in the south wing, allowing much of the remainder to be open to the public.
The house and deer park were handed over to the nation in 1947 and are now managed by the National Trust under the name "Petworth House & Park". The Leconfield Estates continue to own much of Petworth and the surrounding area. As an insight into the lives of past estate workers the Petworth Cottage Museum has been established in High Street, Petworth, furnished as it would have been in about 1910.
U.S. Air Force Major Alex Berry, training officer for the 151st Operations Support Squadron and Lt. Col. Cliff Woodman, a pilot assigned to the 191st Air Refueling Squadron, return from a readiness exercise on March 5, 2022 at Roland R. Wright Air National Guard Base. The Air National Guard provides the capability to deploy U.S. Air Force assets anywhere in the world within hours and help sustain them in a conflict. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech Sgt. Danny Whitlock)
By adding integrated battery monitoring with engine auto start and stop capability onto the Kenworth T680 Advantage, truck fleets and operators could realize even greater fuel savings potential. The Kenworth T680 Advantage has been Kenworth's most fuel-efficient truck since 2014. It begins with the optimized powertrain combination of the PACCAR MX-13 engine and the Eaton Fuller Advantage™ automated transmission, Dana’s Spicer® AdvanTEK® 40 tandem drive axles, and the Kenworth aerodynamic package. As a result, the latest T680 Advantage with 76-inch sleeper offers up to a 5 percent fuel economy improvement* compared to the earlier T680 76-inch sleeper with 2013 PACCAR MX-13 engine, Eaton UltraShift® PLUS LAS 10-speed transmission, and Dana DSP40 6x4.
*Individual fuel economy improvement will vary depending on use, road conditions and other factors.
PHILIPPINE SEA (Sept. 29, 2020) - Guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam (CG 54) steams ahead during an air power demonstration, showcasing firepower capability and maneuverability while at sea in the Indo-Pacific region. Events included formation flybys, high-speed aerial turns and rocket shoots by aircraft attached to Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 5, and a 5-inch gun shoot from Antietam. CVW-5 is currently embarked on the Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76). Ronald Reagan, the flagship of Carrier Strike Group 5, provides a combat-ready force that protects and defends the United Sates, as well as the collective maritime interests of its allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Quinton A. Lee) 200929-N-WS494-1074
** Interested in following U.S. Indo-Pacific Command? Engage and connect with us at www.facebook.com/indopacom | twitter.com/INDOPACOM |
www.instagram.com/indopacom | www.flickr.com/photos/us-pacific-command; | www.youtube.com/user/USPacificCommand | www.pacom.mil/ **
Harcourt Arboretum
The University of Oxford Arboretum
Acquired by the University in 1947 from the Harcourt family. It is now an integral part of the tree and plant collection of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden.
The original Pinetum, which forms the core of the arboretum, was laid out by William Sawrey Gilpin in the 1830s. Gilpin was a leading promoter of the picturesque style of planting and advised the Harcourt family on the establishment and layout of the arboretum. The trees are now mature, with Giant Redwoods and Monkey-Puzzle trees in the collection.
The arboretum also contains some of the finest conifer collections in the UK all set within 130 acres of historic Capability Brown landscape. The grounds include a 10-acre typical English woodland and a 37-acre summer flowering meadow.
The auto start and stop feature combined with the Kenworth Idle Management System for the Kenworth T680 76-inch sleeper enables truck operators to more effectively manage climate control and other hotel loads during truck downtime. The battery-based APU system for air conditioning is linked directly into the T680 ducting system. An optional fuel-fired heater provides full engine-off heating capability. The integrated system extends air conditioning performance and is appreciated by drivers who want cool comfort in their sleepers during their rest period.
PHILIPPINE SEA (June 16, 2022) Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65) launches a Standard Missile (SM) 6 during the coordinated multi-domain, multi-axis, long-range maritime strikes against EX-USS Vandegrift as part of Valiant Shield 2022 (VS 22). Exercises such as Valiant Shield allows the Indo-Pacific Command Joint Task Force the opportunity to integrate forces from all branches of service to conduct long-range, precise, lethal, and overwhelming multi-axis, multi-domain effects that demonstrate the strength and versatility of the Joint Task Force and our commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. Benfold is assigned to Commander, Task Force (CTF) 71/Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 15, the Navy’s largest forward-deployed DESRON and U.S. 7th Fleet’s principal surface force and is on routine deployment as part of Carrier Strike Group (CSG) 5.(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Arthur Rosen)
Sheffield Park gardens in West Sussex were designed by Capability Brown, still regarded as our greatest landscape designer. The gardens are just awesome in the autumn and reflect just how great a vision Brown had.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
After the success of the Soviet Union’s first carrier ship, the Moskva Class (Projekt 1123, also called „Кондор“/„Kondor“) cruisers in the mid 1960s, the country became more ambitious. This resulted in Project 1153 Orel (Russian: Орёл, Eagle), a planned 1970s-era Soviet program to give the Soviet Navy a true blue water aviation capability. Project Orel would have resulted in a program very similar to the aircraft carriers available to the U.S. Navy. The ship would have been about 75-80,000 tons displacement, with a nuclear power plant and carried about 70 aircraft launched via steam catapults – the first Soviet aircraft carrier that would be able to deploy fixed-wing aircraft.
Beyond this core capability, the Orel carrier was designed with a large offensive capability with the ship mounts including 24 vertical launch tubes for anti-ship cruise missiles. In the USSR it was actually classified as the "large cruiser with aircraft armament".
Anyway, the carrier needed appropriate aircraft, and in order to develop a the aircraft major design bureaus were asked to submit ideas and proposals in 1959. OKB Yakovlev and MiG responded. While Yakovlev concentrated on the Yak-36 VTOL design that could also be deployed aboard of smaller ships without catapult and arrester equipment, Mikoyan-Gurevich looked at navalized variants of existing or projected aircraft.
While land-based fighters went through a remarkable performance improvement during the 60ies, OKB MiG considered a robust aircraft with proven systems and – foremost – two engines to be the best start for the Soviet Union’s first naval fighter. “Learning by doing”, the gathered experience would then be used in a dedicated new design that would be ready in the mid 70ies when Project 1153 was ready for service, too.
Internally designated “I-SK” or “SK-01” (Samolyot Korabelniy = carrier-borne aircraft), the naval fighter was based on the MiG-19 (NATO: Farmer), which had been in production in the USSR since 1954.
Faster and more modern types like the MiG-21 were rejected for a naval conversion because of their poor take-off performance, uncertain aerodynamics in the naval environment and lack of ruggedness. The MiG-19 also offered the benefit of relatively compact dimensions, as well as a structure that would carry the desired two engines.
Several innovations had to be addresses:
- A new wing for improved low speed handling
- Improvement of the landing gear and internal structures for carrier operations
- Development of a wing folding mechanism
- Integration of arrester hook and catapult launch devices into the structure
- Protection of structure, engine and equipment from the aggressive naval environment
- Improvement of the pilot’s field of view for carrier landings
- Improved avionics, esp. for navigation
Work on the SK-01 started in 1960, and by 1962 a heavily redesigned MiG-19 was ready as a mock-up for inspection and further approval. The “new” aircraft shared the outlines with the land-based MiG-19, but the nose section was completely new and shared a certain similarity to the experimental “Aircraft SN”, a MiG-17 derivative with side air intakes and a solid nose that carried a. Unlike the latter, the cockpit had been moved forward, which offered, together with an enlarged canopy and a short nose, an excellent field of view for the pilot.
On the SK-01 the air intakes with short splitter plates were re-located to the fuselage flanks underneath the cockpit. In order to avoid gun smoke ingestion problems (and the lack of space in the nose for any equipment except for a small SRD-3 Grad gun ranging radar, coupled with an ASP-5N computing gun-sight), the SK-01’s internal armament, a pair of NR-30 cannon, was placed in the wing roots.
The wing itself was another major modification, it featured a reduced sweep of only 33° at ¼ chord angle (compared to the MiG-19’s original 55°). Four wing hardpoints, outside of the landing gear wells, could carry a modest ordnance payload, including rocket and gun pods, unguided missiles, iron bombs and up to four Vympel K-13 AAMs.
Outside of these pylons, the wings featured a folding mechanism that allowed the wing span to be reduced from 10 m to 6.5 m for stowage. The fin remained unchanged, but the stabilizers had a reduced sweep, too.
The single ventral fin of the MiG-19 gave way to a fairing for a massive, semi-retractable arrester hook, flanked by a pair of smaller fins. The landing gear was beefed up, too, with a stronger suspension. Catapult launch from deck was to be realized through expandable cables that were attached onto massive hooks under the fuselage.
The SK-01 received a “thumbs up” in March 1962 and three prototypes, powered by special Sorokin R3M-28 engines, derivatives of the MiG-19's RB-9 that were adapted to the naval environment, were created and tested until 1965, when the type – now designated MiG-SK – went through State Acceptance Trials, including simulated landing tests on an “unsinkalble carrier” dummy, a modified part of the runway at Air Base at the Western coast of the Caspian Sea. Not only flight tests were conducted at Kaspiysk, but also different layouts for landing cables were tested and optimized as well. Furthermore, on a special platform at the coast, an experimental steam catapult went through trials, even though no aircraft starts were made from it – but weights hauled out into the sea.
Anyway, the flight tests and the landing performance on the simulated carrier deck were successful, and while the MiG-SK (the machine differed from the MiG-19 so much that it was not recognized as an official MiG-19 variant) was not an outstanding combat aircraft, rather a technology carrier with field use capabilities.
The MiG-SK’s performance was good enough to earn OKB MiG an initial production run of 20 aircraft, primarily intended for training and development units, since the whole infrastructure and procedures for naval aviation from a carrier had to be developed from scratch. These machines were built at slow pace until 1968 and trials were carried out in the vicinity of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The MiG-SK successfully remained hidden from the public, since the Soviet Navy did not want to give away its plans for a CTOL carrier. Spy flights of balloons and aircraft recognized the MiG-SK, but the type was mistaken as MiG-17 fighters. Consequently, no NATO codename was ever allocated.
Alas, the future of the Soviet, carrier-borne fixed wing aircraft was not bright: Laid down in in 1970, the Kiev-class aircraft carriers (also known as Project 1143 or as the Krechyet (Gyrfalcon) class) were the first class of fixed-wing aircraft carriers to be built in the Soviet Union, and they entered service, together with the Yak-38 (Forger) VTOL fighter, in 1973. This weapon system already offered a combat performance similar to the MiG-SK, and the VTOL concept rendered the need for catapult launch and deck landing capability obsolete.
OKB MiG still tried to lobby for a CTOL aircraft (in the meantime, the swing-wing MiG-23 was on the drawing board, as well as a projected, navalized multi-purpose derivative, the MiG-23K), but to no avail.
Furthermore, carrier Project 1153 was cancelled in October 1978 as being too expensive, and a program for a smaller ship called Project 11435, more V/STOL-aircraft-oriented, was developed instead; in its initial stage, a version of 65,000 tons and 52 aircraft was proposed, but eventually an even smaller ship was built in the form of the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carriers in 1985, outfitted with a 12-degree ski-jump bow flight deck instead of using complex aircraft catapults. This CTOL carrier was finally equipped with navalized Su-33, MiG-29 and Su-25 aircraft – and the MiG-SK paved the early way to these shipboard fighters, especially the MiG-29K.
General characteristics:
Crew: One
Length: 13.28 m (43 ft 6 in)
Wingspan: 10.39 m (34 ft)
Height: 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in)
Wing area: 22.6 m² (242.5 ft²)
Empty weight: 5.172 kg (11,392 lb)
Max. take-off weight: 7,560 kg (16,632 lb)
Powerplant:
2× Sorokin R3M-28 turbojets afterburning turbojets, rated at 33.8 kN (7,605 lbf) each
Performance:
Maximum speed: 1,145 km/h (618 knots, 711 mph) at 3,000 m (10,000 ft)
Range: 2,060 km (1,111 nmi, 1,280 mi) with drop tanks
Service ceiling: 17,500 m (57,400 ft)
Rate of climb: 180 m/s (35,425 ft/min)
Wing loading: 302.4 kg/m² (61.6 lb/ft²)
Thrust/weight: 0.86
Armament:
2x 30 mm NR-30 cannons in the wing roots with 75 RPG
4x underwing pylons, with a maximum load of 1.000 kg (2.205 lb)
The kit and its assembly:
This kitbash creation was spawned by thoughts concerning the Soviet Naval Aviation and its lack of CTOL aircraft carriers until the 1980ies and kicked-off by a CG rendition of a navalized MiG-17 from fellow member SPINNERS at whatifmodelers.com, posted a couple of months ago. I liked this idea, and at first I wanted to convert a MiG-17 with a solid nose as a dedicated carrier aircraft. But the more I thought about it and did historic research, the less probable this concept appeared to me: the MiG-17 was simply too old to match Soviet plans for a carrier ship, at least with the real world as reference.
A plausible alternative was the MiG-19, esp. with its twin-engine layout, even though the highly swept wings and the associated high start and landing speeds would be rather inappropriate for a shipborne fighter. Anyway, a MiG-21 was even less suitable, and I eventually took the Farmer as conversion basis, since it would also fit into the historic time frame between the late 60ies and the mid-70ies.
In this case, the basis is a Plastyk MiG-19 kit, one of the many Eastern European re-incarnations of the vintage KP kit. This cheap re-issue became a positive surprise, because any former raised panel and rivet details have disappeared and were replaced with sound, recessed engravings. The kit is still a bit clumsy, the walls are very thick (esp. the canopy – maybe 2mm!), but IMHO it’s a considerable improvement with acceptable fit, even though there are some sink holes and some nasty surprises (in my case, for instance, the stabilizer fins would not match with the rear fuselage at all, and you basically need putty everywhere).
Not much from the Plastyk kit was taken over, though: only the fuselage’s rear two-thirds were used, some landing gear parts as well as fin and the horizontal stabilizers. The latter were heavily modified and reduced in sweep in order to match new wings from a Hobby Boss MiG-15 (the parts were cut into three pieces each and then set back together again).
Furthermore, the complete front section from a Novo Supermarine Attacker was transplanted, because its short nose and the high cockpit are perfect parts for a carrier aircraft. The Attacker’s front end, including the air intakes, fits almost perfectly onto the round MiG-19 forward fuselage, only little body work was necessary. A complete cockpit tub and a new seat were implanted, as well as a front landing gear well and walls inside of the (otherwise empty) air intakes. The jet exhausts were drilled open, too, and afterburner dummies added. Simple jobs.
On the other side, the wings were trickier than expected. The MiG-19 kit comes with voluminous and massive wing root fairings, probably aerodynamic bodies for some area-ruling. I decided to keep them, but this caused some unexpected troubles…
The MiG-15 wings’ position, considerably further back due to the reduced sweep angle, was deduced from the relative MiG-19’s landing gear position. A lot of sculpting and body work followed, and after the wings were finally in place I recognized that the aforementioned, thick wing root fairings had reduced the wing sweep – basically not a bad thing, but with the inconvenient side effect that the original wing MiG-15 fences were not parallel to the fuselage anymore, looking rather awkward! What to do? Grrrr…. I could not leave it that way, so I scraped them away and replaced with them with four scratched substitutes (from styrene profiles), moving the outer pair towards the wing folding mechanism.
Under the wings, four new pylons were added (two from an IAI Kfir, two from a Su-22) and the ordnance gathered from the scrap box – bombs and rocket pods formerly belonged to a Kangnam/Revell Yak-38.
The landing gear was raised by ~2mm for a higher stance on the ground. The original, thick central fin was reduced in length, so that it could become a plausible attachment point for an arrester hook (also from the spares box), and a pair of splayed stabilizer fins was added as a compensation. Finally, some of the OOB air scoops were placed all round the hull and some pitots, antennae and a gun camera fairing added.
Painting and markings:
This whif was to look naval at first sight, so I referred to the early Yak-38 VTOL aircraft and their rather minimalistic paint scheme in an overall dull blue. The green underside, seen on many service aircraft, was AFAIK a (later) protective coating – an obsolete detail for a CTOL aircraft.
Hence, all upper surfaces and the fuselage were painted in a uniform “Field Blue” (Tamiya XF-50). It’s a bit dark, but I have used this unique, petrol blue tone many moons ago on a real world Kangnam Forger where it looks pretty good, and in this case the surface was furthermore shaded with Humbrol 96 and 126 after a black in wash.
For some contrast I painted the undersides of the wings and stabilizers as well as a fuselage section between the wings in a pale grey (Humbrol 167), seen on one of the Yak-38 prototypes. Not very obvious, but at least the aircraft did not end up in a boring, uniform color.
The interior was painted in blue-gray (PRU Blue, shaded with Humbrol 87) while the landing gear wells became Aluminum (Humbrol 56). The wheel discs became bright green, just in order to keep in style and as a colorful contrast, and some di-electric panels and covers became very light grey or bright green. For some color contrast, the anti-flutter weight tips on the stabilizers as well as the pylons’ front ends were painted bright red.
The markings/decals reflect the early Soviet Navy style, with simple Red Stars, large yellow tactical codes and some high contrast warning stencils, taken from the remains of a Yak-38 sheet (American Revell re-release of the Kangnam kit).
Finally, after some soot stains with graphite around the gun muzzles and the air bleed doors, the kit was sealed with a coat of semi-matt acrylic varnish and some matt accents (anti-glare panel, radomes).
A simple idea that turned out to be more complex than expected, due to the wing fence troubles. But I am happy that the Attacker nose could be so easily transplanted, it changes the MiG-19’s look considerably, as well as the wings with (much) less sweep angle.
The aircraft looks familiar, but you only recognize at second glance that it is more than just a MiG-19 with a solid nose. The thing looks pretty retro, reminds me a bit of the Supermarine Scimitar (dunno?), and IMHO it appears more Chinese than Soviet (maybe because the layout reminds a lot of the Q-5 fighter bomber)? It could even, with appropriate markings, be a Luft ’46 design?
8.14.2012
On Fear
Our positive capability.
by Mary Ruefle
I suppose, as a poet, among my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility. Part of what I mean—what I think I mean—by “imbecility” is something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby unintentionally cruel. It was a Master who advised that we speak little, better still say nothing, unless we are quite sure that what we wish to say is true, kind, and helpful. But how can a poet, whose role is to speak, adhere to this advice? How can anyone whose role is to facilitate language speak little or say nothing?
I don’t know if other poets have this fear, but if they do not, I reason it will only increase the anguish of the outcome if it one day passes into being. To pass into being—now there’s a fear no one ever had. No one ever feared being born, even when all those responsible for the event were fraught with fear for the unborn. And if I may segue to a child at the age of four, I recall watching her beingapproached by a dog that was, well, much larger than the girl herself. The girl’s face was astonishing to watch. It was completely elastic and changed from an expression of wonder and glee: Please come to me doggie and we shall play oh what happiness to be approached by you—to—in less than ten seconds—an expression of sheer terror: Fear! fear! doggie will eat me up and mommie is far away. As the dog slowly crossed the room, in what could not have been more than two minutes, the girl’s face changed expressions so many times I gave up counting. As she oscillated between feeling secure and insecure, it struck me that her face would probably continue to change, albeit at a slower rate, every time she was approached by a dog for the next couple of years, one day coming to rest on that expression that was likely to signify forever after how this human being felt about dogs.
But something seemed to be missing from my neat little formula; surely the dog’s face was important, too? This dog was eager and friendly, if a bit clumsy, but what if the next dog took a good-sized chunk out of the child’s face? I asked the poet Tony Hoagland what he thought about fear. He said fear was the ghost of an experience: we fear the recurrence of a pain we once felt, and in this way fear is like a hangover. The memory of our pain is a pain unto itself, and thus feeds our fear like a foyer with mirrors on both sides. And then he quoted Auden: “And ghosts must do again/What gives them pain.” It is interesting to note that this idea—fear’s being the ghost of pain, or imaginary pain—figures in psychological torture by the cia; in fact, their experiments with pain found that imaginary pain was more effective than physical pain—poets, take note—and thus psychological torture more effective than physical torture. Here is an excerpt from their Exploitation Training Manual, written in 1983:
The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain.
Although I have never been bitten by a dog, I am scared to death of them, as I am of all living creatures, including myself and my own fragmentation in the long hall of mirrors. James Ward, a British psychologist, broke with religion as a young man in 1872 but found himself a bundle of reflexes over which he had no choice and no control. He said: “I have no dread of God, no fear of the Devil, no fear of man, but my head swims as I write it—I fear myself.” What do I mean by fear? Why I mean that thing that drives you to write—but let us step out of the foyer, and back onto the street, back down the road, and make our approach somewhat more slowly.
Sometime after I had already written the pages you are about to sit through, I realized I had been using the wrong word throughout. Dread is a more accurate version of what I am thinking about, and I have Julian of Norwich, a fifteenth-century anchorite, to thank for pointing this out. In her Revelations of Divine Love, the account of a vision she had during an illness in her thirty-first year, she says, “I believe dread can take four forms.” In a nutshell, the first of these forms is what I will describe as the unconscious emotion fear—your very first response to the smell of smoke, the sound of thunder, the sight of flames, the slap. The second form of dread is the anticipatory dread of pain, either physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological, and that, folks, covers nine-tenths of the world’s surface. The third form of dread is doubt, or despair. And the fourth form of dread is “born of reverence,” the holy dread with which we face that which we love most, or that which loves us the most.
Dread. I like it better than the word fear because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there. But I have not used the word dread in what follows. I have used the word fear. And fear is an older word—it can be found in Old English, while dread enters the language in Middle English.
Neurobiologists have distinguished emotions from feelings, though I am afraid our language has for so long used the two terms as equivalent currency that it is a hopeless task to expect any listener to hear one word and not think of the other. Emotions are hardwired, biological functions of the nervous system such as fear, terror, sexual attraction, and hunger-impelled action (also called “feeding behaviors”). They are each purely physical reactions over which one has no control, and they are common to all animals with a central nervous system. The emotion of fear is what drives all animals away from life-threatening situations, and that is not the kind of fear I have in mind. Feelings, on the other hand, are more complicated and involve cognitive reactions that combine, or can be combined, with emotions, memories, experience, and intelligence. That is the kind of fear I have in mind—the feeling of fear that involves an intelligent, cognitive reaction. Fear that requires self-consciousness.
(Don’t be alarmed, scientists are not studying feelings, they are only studying emotions, divorced from cognition, as they travel in recognizable systems throughout the brain and the body.)
At this juncture it might be instructive of me to look up at you and say, “Try putting less emotion, and more feeling, into your poems.” The fact that neurobiologists have publicly announced the separation of emotion from feeling should be heartening news to poets everywhere, for it implies that to have feelings is on par with highly sophisticated cognitive systems. Feelings are not subpar. On the other hand, lest we forget, let me repeat: to be more emotional and less cognitive is to be less evolved than the species is able to be. It is to be like a four-year-old child. Feelings seem to represent a place where emotions combine with intelligence and experience to create a highly personal thought process that results in an individual’s worldview.
And that is where I want to take up our fear again. I asked a doctor about fear. The doctor said, “The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, if I don’t successfully insert an emergency trach—a hole in the throat—someone will die from lack of oxygen. So I mechanically do what I have been trained to do. Someone is there, periodically calling out the oxygen saturation—95, 90, 88, 83, 79—and the lower it gets the more of an emergency it becomes. And the funny thing is, I ask for the count. It is part of the procedure, but I work as if I am not listening—procedural concentration is all.”
I asked a pilot about fear. The pilot said, “The only way to overcome fear is to do what you are trained to do. Fear is overcome by procedure. For example, I was flying a test jet alone at thirty thousand feet and there was a leak in my oxygen mask I didn’t know about. I temporarily lost consciousness, and when I came to I was at fifteen thousand feet heading straight for the ground, nose down, completely out of control—and I was still groggy, still fighting for consciousness. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. Those were the only thoughts I had, and I continued to have them until I leveled out at five thousand feet.” Then the doctor and the pilot, who were in the same room with me, looked at me and said, “So, have you ever had any poetry emergencies?”
I was a fool on a fool’s errand. Out of the fear of being a fool, I wanted to tell them that the fear they were trained to overcome was an emotion and not a feeling; after all, these were both life-threatening situations and their reactions were pure instinct, albeit professional ones. But I have professional instincts as well, professional instincts I employ while writing a poem. I was hopelessly confused and felt my sense of self-worth losing altitude; in situations like this I pick up the phone and call my friend, the German philosopher. “Reinhard,” I shouted into the phone, “What do you think about fear?” “Yikes!” he shouted back, “I am afraid of dogs.” At last, a friend. And then he quoted Nietzsche: “The degree of fearfulness is one measure of intelligence.” It was better than I had hoped. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. “Fear is to recognize ourselves.” As far back as I could remember, every minute of my life had been an emergency in which I was paralyzed with fear. Feelings of fear, being at least in part cognitive, and therefore thoughts, often constitute knowledge. For instance, the knowledge that one is going to die. This is a fear one can have while lying in a hammock on a beautiful day. And it can lead to an emergency of feeling that often results in a poem. “Thank you,” I said, before hanging up, and then I heard my friend Reinhard say, “Faulkner, however, said that for a writer, the basest of all things is to be afraid.” My mind quickly came to the conclusion Faulkner was drunk at the time. But perhaps he was thinking about writer’s block, the inability of a writer to do that which is most natural to him: to encounter fear, to face fear; a fear of being alone with fear...
Roethke: “Fear was my father, Father Fear./His look drained the stones.”
Auden: “Fear gave his watch no look.”
Neruda: “When I was a young poet I was full of fear like a real rat in a corner.”
And what are we to make of Wordsworth, “Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”?
Or Milton’s “equal poise of hope and fear”? Or Blake’s “fearful symmetry”?
Which is more inexpressible, the beautiful or the terrifying? Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his last, troubled sonnets, cries out, “O which one? is it each one?” Lorca says,
The poet who embarks on the creation of the poem (as I know by experience), begins with the aimless sensation of a hunter about to embark on a night hunt through the remotest of forests. Unaccountable dread stirs in his heart.
And Edmond Jabès, in The Book of Questions: “If you bend over your page...and do not suddenly tremble with fear, throw away your pen. Your writing would have little value.”
And George Oppen, who said, “Great artists are those, in the end, who do not have a failure of nerve.” Afraid, yes, but there they are, having locked themselves alone in a room with fear. Or as someone else might put it: “Blank pages—shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.”
I think it is time to list some concrete fears:
fear of death
of illness
of pain
of suffering
of despair
of not understanding
of disturbance or reversal of powers
of being unloved
of the unknown or strange
of destruction
of humiliation
of degradation
of poverty
of hunger
of aging
of unworthiness
of transgression
of punishment
of making a mistake
of loss of dignity
of failure
of oblivion
of outliving the mind
of eating an anchovy
These are not simian fears. These are human fears.
Barry Lopez, in his study of the Arctic called Arctic Dreams, makes this interesting observation:
Eskimos do not maintain this intimacy with nature without paying a certain price. When I have thought about the ways in which they differ from people in my own culture, I have realized that they are more afraid than we are. On a day-to-day basis, they have more fear. Not of being dumped into cold water from an umiak, not a debilitating fear. They are afraid because they accept fully what is violent and tragic in nature. It is a fear tied to their knowledge that sudden, cataclysmic events are as much a part of life, of really living, as are the moments when one pauses to look at something beautiful. A Central Eskimo shaman named Aua, queried by Knud Rasmussen about Eskimo beliefs, answered, “We do not believe. We fear.”
Lopez goes on to chastise those who think hunting peoples such as the Eskimos are living in perfect harmony with nature. Nervous awe and apprehension are born out of proximity and attention. The greater the intimacy between these cultures and nature, the greater the tension. The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it. You can in your own minds recall the long Judeo-Christian tradition of fearing God. Or you can perhaps remember having read The Wind in the Willows as a child, or to a child, and encountering that magnificent, odd, and out-of-place chapter entitled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” where Mole and Rat go in search of Otter’s lost son and find, on the very edge of dawn, Nature personified in the august presence of a terrifying and benevolent satyr, half man, half animal:
“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”
“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”
Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.
Fear is the greatest motivator of all time. Conflict born of fear is behind our every action, driving us forward like the cogs of a clock. Fear is desire’s dark dress, its doppelgänger. “Love and dread are brothers,” says Julian of Norwich. As desire is wanting and fear is not-wanting, they become inexorably linked; just as desire can be destructive (the desire for power), fear can be constructive (fear of hurting another); fear of poverty becomes desire for wealth. Collective actions are not exempt from these double powers; consider this succinct and frightening sentence written by John Berger:
Everywhere these days more and more people knock their heads against the fact that the future of our planet and what it will offer or deny to its inhabitants, is being decided by boards of men who control more money than all the governments in the world, who never stand for election, and whose sole criterion for every decision they take is whether or not it increases or is prone to increase Profit.
But has it ever been any different? Races everywhere have always been at the mercy of collective desire and collective fear, sometimes their own, sometimes others’.
The impulse toward order is born of fear and desire, and the impulse toward chaos is born of the same. The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott believed artists were people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.
Think of the simplest caricature of a poet, the kind that might be used as a generic figure in a cartoon. Which comes to mind, the forlorn, melancholy, sadly loitering one, suicidal in blue breeches, or the happy eater and drinker, the smeller of roses, the carouser, the gusto-bearing, sun-loving one? In Epicurean atomic theory, “the world functions because from the outset there is a lack of balance.” The French novelist Georges Perec, devoted to mathematical literary forms—he wrote a novel without the letter e in it—speaks of anti-constraints within a system of restraints. He quotes the painter Paul Klee: “Genius is ‘an error in the system.’” (Those of you who have heard lectures on the sonnet may recall that this is often, precisely, the point.) The world functions because of fear, because of the error, the anti-constraint, the anti-perfect, the anti-balance. We stumble. We fall.
We fail. And so desire to progress, to become better poets, to eradicate a disease, to become better people, to perfect that which is perpetually imperfect. The biblical “fall” is just such an anti-constraint. The apple was fear. (And remember, fear is knowledge, according to Nietzsche.) The apple set the world in motion by forcing Adam and Eve to migrate out of the Perfect. “Fear is to recognize ourselves,” said the philosopher. One of the fears a young writer has is not being able to write as well as he or she wants to, the fear of not being able to sound like X or Y, a favorite author. But out of fear, hopefully, is born a young writer’s voice: “But now,” says Kierkegaard,
to strive to become what one already is: who would take the pains to waste his time on such a task, involving the greatest imaginable degree of resignation?...But for this very reason alone it is a very difficult task...precisely because every human being has a strong natural bent and passion to become something more and different.
It is very easy to read those words, and very hard to enact them. Elsewhere Kierkegaard says, “What is education? I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself.”
There are poets who are resigned to not being able to save the world, who barely have enough time to catch up with themselves and the attendant mystery of their fear and being. I suppose Szymborska was one of them. Here is her compatriot Miłosz describing her:
In Szymborska we are divided not into the flesh and a surviving oeuvre...but into “the flesh and a broken whisper”; poetry is no more than a broken whisper, quickly dying laughter.... When it is not the perfection of a work that is important but expression itself, “a broken whisper,” everything becomes, as it has been called, écriture.... To talk about anything, just to talk, becomes an operation in itself, a means of assuaging fear.
Much as I am sympathetic to the theory of écriture, I find it—confusing. For why is it meaningless to write with no other function than to assuage fear? Doesn’t that function in itself have a meaning? And why fear the dismantling of language’s semantic function, its being representational of meaning, when that is but one more fear that will drive those in opposition to écriture to write? And certainly this “theory” is no theory at all but a centuries-old practice: “He seemed to be depressed, for he went on writing” reads a twelfth-century Japanese text. Or take Rilke: “I have taken action against fear. I sat up the whole night and wrote; and now I am as thoroughly tired as after a long walk in the fields at Ulsgaard.” Even a bitter poem is a small act of affirmation, and I wonder if we can’t say the same thing about a meaningless poem (if such a thing exists). But Miłosz, who would most certainly disagree, is, to his immortal credit, a knight of faith, and I am but a knight of resignation. Like Kierkegaard: “As far as I am concerned, I am able to describe most excellently the movements of faith; but I cannot make them myself.” The Danish philosopher’s famous essay Fear and Trembling is a rumination on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. God asked Abraham to kill Isaac, Abraham’s long-awaited and cherished son, and in the essay Kierkegaard grapples with how an act of murder can become a pleasing, good, and holy act in the eyes of God. It takes faith, a faith Kierkegaard minutely examines and describes, but one that he cannot in the end claim for himself, as devout as he is. He remains what he dubs a knight of resignation, a state that, for all it is worth, is still a state of sin. To be sure, I am “using” Miłosz here for my own purposes. He knows perfectly well he is not a saint. In an interview he has stated—and proved—that he is a man of contradiction. In other words, an ordinary man. But I admire his insistence on an objective reality, his faith in a world and an order that does not exist exclusively in the mind. And he is quite provocative at the end of his essay “The Sand in the Hourglass”:
If in our moments of happiness, mastery, ecstasy, we say Yes to heaven and to earth, and all we need is misfortune, sickness, the decline of physical powers to start screaming No, this means that all our judgments can be refuted tomorrow and that it is easy to mistake our life for the world. It is not obvious, however, why weakness—whether of a particular person or of an entire historical era—should be privileged and why the old nihilist from Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape should be closer to the truth than he himself was when he was twenty years old.
Miłosz closes his essay with an astonishing and succinct remark of Simone Weil’s: “‘I am suffering.’ It is better to say this than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’”
Fear belongs to man, not to the world. The world feels no fear, at any time, in any place. We are “an unhappy people in a happy world”—Wallace Stevens’s last stance. Feelings of fear—personal, cognitive fear—allow us to feel anguish while lying in a hammock on a beautiful day, allow us to feel as if our life were threatened when the sky is blue and the meadow at peace. Raymond Queneau:
The poet is never “inspired, if by inspiration we mean...a function of the poet’s mood, the temperature, the political situation, subjective accidents, or the subconscious.
The poet is never inspired because he is the master of what others assume to be inspiration.... He’s never inspired because he’s always inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposal, obedient to his will, receptive to his guidance.
And I want to say the poet is never afraid because he is unceasingly afraid, and therefore cannot become that which he already is, though of course, Mr. Kierkegaard reminds us, he must; you might say fear is the poet’s procedure, that which he has been trained to concentrate on.
What an odd thing to say; what a terrible thing to say. Surely someone is saying to himself, “Gee whiz, hasn’t she ever heard of negative capability?” As a matter of fact, I have; those words have become like a sickness unto death for me. As often as I have used them myself, I wish there were a moratorium on them for a decade, so overused are they, so bandied about that they have come to mean just about anything one wants them to, especially a bebop version of Be Here Now, or a diffusive religious awe in which the poet wanders, forever in a stupor. As with most famous sayings, we are given only a fragment of the paragraph from which it comes. “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact reason”: the letter was written by John Keats on a Sunday, late in December of 1817, from Hampstead, and addressed to his brothers George and Tom. The year 1817 is, relatively speaking, quite early in Keats’s career, though only four years before his death; the letter was written before George left for America, before Tom died, before John met Fanny Brawne, before he was sick, and before he had written what are considered his finest poems. One of the things you have to remember about Keats is that his development as a poet was telescoped into an intensely short period of time in which he passed through as many stages as another poet may experience in a life three times as long. Although the letter in its entirety is too long to quote here, you’ll have to trust me when I say that only the last quarter of it puts his definition of negative capability into context. Here is that context:
Several things dovetailed in my mind, at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
The passage is a bit like the us Constitution. By that I mean that it may be interpreted to suit the purposes of a great many people who are at odds with one another. For instance, nothing prevents someone from saying that the essential definition means: once depressed, stay depressed. Of the passage relating to Coleridge there is no doubt: all you have to know is that Coleridge was the great intellectual among the Romantics, the great thinker. But an interesting and further complicating key is provided by the phrase “isolated verisimilitude.” Verisimilitude means “having the appearance of a truth; probable,” so that Keats is saying something like this: “Coleridge would pass over a probability that someone else would accept as the truth because Coleridge is not content with appearance or probability.” If we add to this the idea of isolating, which implies distinction or differentiation, we can’t help but think that Keats has searched the penetralium of mystery at least long enough to isolate a probable truth that is, unto him, sufficient. And this is a far cry from the non-isolating attitude that most of us associate with negative capability. Following this, Keats does a remarkable thing—he sums up something he has not even elaborated on. He says, “This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” What does this mean? For where was there ever any mention of Beauty in the original definition? And do you see how this last bit could be used as a defense by the most archly formal poet or by his worst nemesis? And if I presume to understand negative capability, am I then incapable of it, since it is the capability of being in the presence of an uncertainty without reaching to understand it? And finally, we always intimately connect John Keats with negative capability as if he possessed it himself, as if he were speaking of himself, when he was not thinking or speaking of himself at all but of Shakespeare—and who among us amounts to squat compared to Him—of whom we can be as uncertain as we like without reaching after facts, because there are none? Shakespeare’s reputation as a god is enhanced tenfold by the mysterious circumstances of his being. As is always the case, the unknown raises the stakes and the stature and the flag of the formidable before which we bow and do worship in unaccountable dread. Keats sought to understand much in his life; his poems and letters are full of urgent searching, of the kinds of questions that arise in the minds of passionate youth. He says in another letter:
You tell me never to despair—I wish it was as easy for me to observe the saying—truth is I have a horrid Morbidity of Temperament which has shown itself at intervals—it is I have no doubt the greatest Enemy and stumbling block I have to fear—I may even say that it is likely to be the cause of my disappointment.
One has only to look at the opening lines of a majority of his poems to see him in a state of uncertainty, mystery, doubt—that is, fear:
“When I have fears that I may cease to be”
“Glory and loveliness have Pass’d away”
“My spirit is too weak—mortality”
“O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind”
“In a drear-nighted December”
“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale”
“If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d”
“O what can ail thee, knight at arms”
“Why did I laugh tonight?”
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains”
The suffering in these poems remains intact; it is neither resolved nor negated. What happens for the most part is, the poems dissolve, finally, into the cream of the physical world. If negative capability works at all, it works in reverse, a kind of negative negative capability—which would make it positive—where very real anxiety and irritability over mystery and doubt enable the poet—no, propel him—into the world of the eye, the pure perceptual habit that checks all cognitive drives, not before they’ve begun but after they’ve begun, and done their damage. In the words of a painter, the abstract expressionist Pat Adams—
That marveling rush of wonder at sheer multiplicity and differentiation of stuff when surfaces of heightened materiality, of encrusted and layered imprinting are generated to entangle our attention and delay cognition
—until it seems that perpetual fear is a propellant into the innocent, fearless, and vulnerable world of the senses. So that the poet paralyzed with fear lying in a hammock on a beautiful day—unhappy man in a happy world—does not suffer any less when he looks around him; he does not cease to suffer, he only ceases to try to understand.
It was the last nostalgia: that he
Should understand. That he might suffer or that
He might die was the innocence of living, if life
Itself was innocent.
—From Esthétique du Mal, by Wallace Stevens
We do not know the etymology of the word fear. That is, the makers of dictionaries are unsure of it. But there is a good chance that it is related to the word fare in its oldest sense, which is to pass through, to go through, as in, How did you fare at the dentist’s? or Fare-thee-well or, He fared in this life like one whose name was writ in water.
Keats died at an age when no one should have to die. I wonder if the young are less afraid of dying, or more afraid of dying, than the old. I am no longer young. I am old enough to understand and know that it is not death I am afraid of, it’s dying. Dying is the act, most often painful, that leads to death, while death itself is as painless as the feeling you had before you were born—no feeling at all, you didn’t care one way or another (feeling is caring one way or another). But what do I know? Blessed Brother André, currently under investigation for sainthood, said, “If we knew the value of suffering, we would ask for it.” Though others can, I cannot fathom that remark, let alone embrace it. Nor am I a Buddhist, one who believes suffering is based on ignorance, and that ignorance can be eradicated; actually, I do believe that suffering is based on ignorance (if the Third Reich had not been ignorant, millions would not have had to perish), but I don’t believe ignorance can be eradicated. Actually, I do believe ignorance can be eradicated, but in the way of a weed—it will only pop up again someplace else. When Brother André asks us to embrace suffering, is he saying, “If we knew the value of ignorance, we would ask for it?” Should we finally and willingly cease to understand? I have often said I would rather wonder than know. Is that a youthful stance, a Keatsian stance? Is that—could it be—negative capability? Should one mature beyond it? I don’t know. Rilke advises the young to “live the questions now,” because the answers can only be revealed in time, the extension of which they do not possess. Much like Keats himself says, in a letter, that certain lessons can only be learned on the touchstone of the heart, that is, through direct experience.
What has life taught me? I am much less afraid than I ever was in my youth—of everything. That is a fact. At the same time, I feel more afraid than ever. And the two, I can assure you, are not opposed but inextricably linked. I am more or less the same age Emily Dickinson was when she died. Here is what she thought: “Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of us would be Lunatics!” The calm lunatic—now that is something to aspire to.
Stowe Landscape Gardens, Buckinghamshire, designed by Capability Brown. Pentax 67II, 75mm lens, polariser, 81 warm up and tripod. Velvia 100 film.
Scanned from a 120 film slide.
The reflection makes it look very wonky, it's not really; because all the water would run out.
While photographing McWay Falls this past weekend, I thought I'd try the video capability of my camera. While I'm not very adept at post production, I think this clip gives a fair indication as to the power of the Pacific Ocean along the California Coast. I check the swell reports on a regular basis and this day appeared almost "magically" out of nowhere, so it was a last minute decision to make the four hour drive.
McWay Falls has an 80 foot drop. I couldn't believe the height of these breaks. The entire show lasted just over two hours before the swells disappeared. I once saw a film print of a break pushing over the tops of the trees on Saddle Rock. This was about three years ago. It really grabbed my attention and I was nearly in a state of disbelief. I thought then, "That's the shot I want to get at McWay Falls!" Timing is everything. The air was full of salt spray and the light was early morning behind the mountains and trees, mostly. I tried my best. I'm hoping someday the swells will push in during the evening hours. They have to reach a height of at least 30 feet to compete with what we saw this day. High tide helps as well. I felt lucky to have witnessed this magnificent event.
See this amazing break captured during the previous set of swells.
I put together several video clips that I took between 6:30am - 8:30am and posted the 6:45 minute video on YouTube. If you have the interest and the time, please enjoy. Here's the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kugawMBMtvE
Good luck! Have fun! Don't forget to support our state parks! Leash your dogs where permitted. Leave them when they are not permitted.
Naval Services Culinary Arts Team, (NSCAT), took part in exercise Joint Caterer at the Defence Capability Centre, Shrivenham, defending the tri-service title. Picture: LA(Phot) Paul Hall
On the 14th October 2015 the Naval Services Culinary Arts Team, (NSCAT), took part in Exercise Joint Caterer at the Defence Capability Centre, Shrivenham., defending the tri-service title.
Exercise Joint Caterer is aimed at providing Caterers, Chefs and Stewards a competition that further develops their culinary skills and builds team spirit for the ultimate benefit of the Armed Forces as a whole.
FX150286
Consent forms completed
Stowe evolved from an English Baroque garden into a pioneering landscape park. The progression is of the greatest interest. Although the end result does not have quite the drama which one might expect from such a famous place, there are many fine buildings and composed scenes. In the 1690s Stowe had a modest early-Baroque parterre garden, owing more to Italy than to France. This has not survived. In the 1710s and '20s Charles Bridgeman (garden designer) and John Vanburgh (architect) designed an English Baroque park, inspired by the work of London, Wise and Switzer. In the 1730s William Kent and James Gibbs were appointed to work with Bridgeman, who died in 1738. Kent and Gibbs designed more temples. Stowe began to evolve into a series of natural pictures, to be appreciated from a perambulation rather than from a central point. Kent's Temple of Ancient Virtue (1734) looks across the Elysian Fields to the Shrine of British Worthies. A Palladian Bridge was made in 1744. In the 1741 Lancelot 'Capability' Brown was appointed head gardener. He worked with Kent until the latter's death in 1748 and his own departure in 1751. Bridgeman's Octagonal Pond and Eleven Acre Lake were given a 'natural'shape. Brown made a Grecian Valley which, despite its name, is an abstract composition of landform and woodland. As Loudon remarked in 1831, 'nature has done little or nothing; man a great deal, and time has improved his labours'. Stowe is said to be the first English garden for which a guide book was produced. The Cobham monument has been restored and shows the owner in Roman dress.
Ugbrooke House
Ugbrooke House is a stately home in the parish of Chudleigh, Devon, England, situated in a valley between Exeter and Newton Abbot.
It dates back over 900 years, having featured in the Domesday Book. Before the Reformation the land belonged to the Church and the house was occupied by Precentors to the Bishop of Exeter. It has been the seat of the Clifford family for over four hundred years, and the owners have held the title Baron Clifford of Chudleigh since 1672.
The 9th Baron Clifford was an aide-de-camp to Edward VII and entertained royalty, both Edward VII and George V, at Ugbrooke Park.
The house, now a Grade I listed building, was remodelled by Robert Adam, while the grounds were redesigned by Capability Brown in 1761.The grounds featured what were possibly the earliest plantings of the European White Elm Ulmus laevis in the UK.The gardens are now Grade II* listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.[4] The house and gardens are open to the public for a limited number of days each summer.
Baron Clifford of Chudleigh
Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, of Chudleigh in the County of Devon, is a title in the Peerage of England. It was created in 1672 for Thomas Clifford. The title was created as "Clifford of Chudleigh" rather than simply "Clifford" to differentiate it from several other Clifford Baronies previously created for members of this ancient family, including the Barony of de Clifford (1299), which is extant but now held by a branch line of the Russell family, having inherited through several female lines.
Baron Clifford of Chudleigh is the major surviving male representative of the ancient Norman family which later took the name de Clifford which arrived in England during the Norman Conquest of 1066, feudal barons of Clifford, first seated in England at Clifford Castle in Herefordshire, created Baron de Clifford by writ in 1299. The family seat is Ugbrooke Park, near Chudleigh, Devon.
Notable members of this branch of the Clifford family include antiquarian Arthur Clifford (grandson of the 3rd Baron), Victoria Cross recipient Sir Henry Hugh Clifford (son of the 7th Baron), Catholic clergyman William Clifford (son of the 7th Baron) and colonial administrators Sir Bede Clifford (son of the 10th Baron) and Sir Hugh Clifford (grandson of the 7th Baron). The family is also related to the notable recusant Weld family, of Lulworth Castle, through the 7th Baron's marriage to the daughter of Cardinal Thomas Weld.
Barons Clifford of Chudleigh (1672)
Thomas Clifford, 1st Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1630–1673)
Hugh Clifford, 2nd Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1663–1730)
Hugh Clifford, 3rd Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1700–1732)
Hugh Clifford, 4th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1726–1783)
Hugh Edward Henry Clifford, 5th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1756–1793)
Charles Clifford, 6th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1759–1831)
Hugh Charles Clifford, 7th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1790–1858)
Charles Hugh Clifford, 8th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1819–1880)
Lewis Henry Hugh Clifford, 9th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1851–1916)
William Hugh Clifford, 10th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1858–1943)
Charles Oswald Hugh Clifford, 11th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1887–1962)
Lewis Joseph Hugh Clifford, 12th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1889–1964)
Lewis Hugh Clifford, 13th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1916–1988)
Thomas Hugh Clifford, 14th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (b. 1948)
The heir apparent is the present holder's son Hon. Alexander Thomas Hugh Clifford (b. 1985)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SASEBO, Japan (Jan. 18, 2018) Machinist's Mate 1st Class Francisco Cejajimenez uses a furnace inspection device to check the interior of the No. 2 boiler in the forward main machinery room of the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6). Bonhomme Richard, forward-deployed to Sasebo, Japan, is serving forward to provide a rapid-response capability in the event of a regional contingency or natural disaster. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Diana Quinlan/Released)
SAC 01 NATO Strategic Airlift Capability Boeing C-17A Globemaster III - cn F-207 landing @TRD/ENVA 10.02.16 NATO Cold Response Exercise 2016
When the 1st Duke of Marlborough and his architect, John Vanbrugh, surveyed Queen Anne's gift of Woodstock Park, they saw an awkward valley of marshland. Vanbrugh reimagined this marsh as ornamental water - crossed by the “finest bridge in Europe”.
The Duke duly approved Vanbrugh’s design, and building of The Grand Bridge began in 1708.
The main arch was eventually keyed in 1710, measuring 31 metres (101ft) wide and containing more than 30 rooms. Yet the bridge never quite scaled the heights of Vanbrugh’s intentions, as the arcaded superstructure that was planned to crown the bridge was never completed.
Still, it proved a stunning addition to Blenheim Palace – particularly when Capability Brown built a dam and cascade near Bladon, allowing the River Glyme to flow through the lower parts of the bridge.
The resulting ‘natural’ lakes on either side gave purpose to Vanbrugh’s heroic structure, prompting Sir Sacheverell Sitwell to remark: “The lake at Blenheim is the one great argument of the landscape gardener. There is nothing finer in Europe”.
The interior of a SpaceX Crew Dragon shows accommodations for flight crew and supplies. SpaceX is developing the Crew Dragon in partnership with NASA's Commercial Crew Program to re-establish human-rated launch capability to the International Space Station from the United States. Photo credit: SpaceX
This has been a turning point in the history of the Headquarters Multinational Corps Northeast (HQ MNC NE). With the successful completion of the exercise „Brilliant Capability 2016”, the Corps – Custodian of Regional Security – has become operationally capable to assume command of the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, also referred to as the “spearhead force”. I strongly believe that our team effort will provide tremendous value to NATO. – said Lieutenant General Manfred Hofmann, the Corps Commander, on the occasion of the Distinguished Visitors Day, which took place in Szczecin, 2nd June.
In Perth for a major refit
Med Pumper with Rescue capability
2002 M.A.N. 260 hp, ZF series Auto trans.Optional)
Waterous 2 stage, PTO driven
Approx 3600 litres/min @ 10 Bar (150 psi) for Low Pressure stage
Approx 400 litres/min @ 28 Bar (410 psi) for High Pressure stage
Rosenbauer RM601 Manual Turret 1600-4000 litres/min
63-83 metres
2 reels, 60 metres each of 25mm booster hose on electric rewind Reels
Waterous Oil-less electric primer
1200 litres Fibre glass or Poly construction
120 litres, Post pump injection via FoamPro 2001 Series Foam injection Unit
200 litres, Utilising Feecon's Around the Pump Proportioner
Fully Welded Aluminium Frame
Aluminium
'AS' Brand roller shutter type doors
Zumro stemlight
Sirenco 200 Watt system
2x Forward, 2x Rear Twin element revolving Beacons and 4x emergency strobes
094A0281
Broadway Tower is a folly on Broadway Hill, near the village of Broadway, in the English county of Worcestershire, at the second-highest point of the Cotswolds (after Cleeve Hill). Broadway Tower's base is 1,024 feet (312 metres) above sea level. The tower itself stands 65 feet (20 metres) high.
The "Saxon" tower was the brainchild of Capability Brown and designed by James Wyatt in 1794 in the form of a castle, and built for Lady Coventry in 1798–99. The tower was built on a "beacon" hill, where beacons were lit on special occasions. Lady Coventry wondered whether a beacon on this hill could be seen from her house in Worcester — about 22 miles (35 km) away — and sponsored the construction of the folly to find out. Indeed, the beacon could be seen clearly.
Over the years, the tower was home to the printing press of Sir Thomas Phillipps, and served as a country retreat for artists including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones who rented it together in the 1880s. William Morris was so inspired by Broadway Tower and other ancient buildings that he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877.
Today, the tower is a tourist attraction and the centre of a country park with various exhibitions open to the public at a fee, as well as a gift shop and restaurant. The place is on the Cotswold Way and can be reached by following the Cotswold Way from the A44 road at Fish Hill, or by a steep climb out of Broadway village.
Near the tower is a memorial to the crew of an A.W.38 Whitley bomber that crashed there during a training mission in June 1943.
Stowe Landscape Gardens, Buckinghamshire, designed by Capability Brown. Pentax 67II, 75mm lens, polariser, 81 warm up and tripod. Velvia 100 film.
Scanned from a 120 film slide.
Went to Gatton Park today but this time the privately owned part not belonging to the National Trust. The Royal Alexandra and Albert School own it but on the first Sunday of each month from May to September it opens it's grounds to the public for the princely sum of £4. Worth every penny! The grounds were originally designed by Capability Brown.
This is the view from the rear of Gatton Hall which was once owned by the Colman family (Colman's Mustard), purchased in 1888 by Sir Jeremiah Colman as the family home.
Listing Text
NORTH CRAY ROAD
1.
5005
(west side)
North Cray
TQ 47 SE 4/14 Five Arch Bridge
II
2.
250 yds north-north-west of Church of St James. Circa 1781. Much rebuilt
5-arched footbridge, incorporating weir on north side. Round arches, graded
in size ; curved parapet with ends curving outwards. Now largely of yellow
brick, but with red brick on each side; courses of flint below stone band;
stone parapet much replaced in cement. The bridge linked the 2 former estates
of North Cray Place and Foots Cray Place, as part of Lancelot Brown's landscaping
of both parks. (See Dorothy Stroud's 'Lancelot Brown').
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background
The Imperial Japanese Army Air Force's fighter force, especially the Nakajima Ki-43, had been underestimated in its capability, numbers and the strategy of its commanders. Within a few months, Japanese forces had conquered vast areas of the Pacific and South East Asia. During these campaigns, the ill-prepared Allied air forces in the Pacific suffered devastating losses.
Because of political and cultural ties between the United Kingdom and Australia, British manufacturers were the main source of RAAF aircraft. However, the British aircraft industry had long been hard-pressed to meet the needs of the RAF. Although United States companies had enormous aircraft manufacturing capacity, their output was now intended first and foremost for US air units. Even if aircraft built overseas did become available, they would be shipped long distances in wartime conditions, with consequent delays and losses. As a consequence, CAC came into its own with the development of the Boomerang fighter, which was not operational before late 1942.
Following the outbreak of war with Japan, 51 Hurricane Mk IIs were sent as a stop-gap in crates to Singapore, with 24 pilots, the nucleus of five squadrons. They arrived on 3 January 1942, by which time the Allied fighter squadrons in Singapore, flying Brewster Buffalos, had been overwhelmed in the Malayan campaign. Even though the Hurricanes were a significant progress, they suffered in performance.
Because of inadequate early warning systems, Japanese air raids were able to destroy 30 Hurricanes on the ground in Sumatra, most of them in one raid on 7 February. After Japanese landings in Singapore, on 10 February, only 18 serviceable Hurricanes remained out of the original 99. After Java was invaded, some of the pilots were evacuated by sea to Australia. 31 Hurricane airframes, which had been on the wayby ship, not been assembled and lacked Merlin engines, were directed to Australia in the wake of events.
From these unfinished machines, the Hurricane Mk. VI was quickly devised: the airframes were mated with P&W Twin Wasp engines, which were produced under license at the CAC plant in Lidcombe, Sydney, for the RAAF's Boomerang and Bristol Beaufort. It was clear from the start that these Twin Wasp-powered machines would rather be stop-gaps and no true fighters, rather fighter bombers and more suited for the ground attack role. Hence, like the latest fighters at the time, planning for the Mk. VI included automatic cannons. As no such weapons were manufactured locally, a British-made Hispano-Suiza 20 mm which an Australian airman had collected as a souvenir in the Middle East was reverse engineered – and four of them replaced the eight and partly twelve 0.303 machine guns of the original Mk. IIB machines. Additionally, the pilot received extra armor plating, and the wings were reinforced for external ordnance.
The RAAF Mk. VI Hurricanes carried A60-02 through -32 registrations. As a side note, A60-01 was a single Hurricane Mk.I serialled V-7476. This aircraft served with No.2 and 3 Communications Flights RAAF and was used on occasion for experimental work at RAAF Base Laverton on the outskirts of Melbourne. The aircraft was scrapped in 1945.
The Hurricane Mk. VIs actively took part in Pacific operations with RAAF’s No. 4 Squadron and No. 5 Squadron, being joined by Boomerangs in early 1943. They were operated in New Guinea and during the Solomon Islands Campaign as well as the Borneo Campaign, mostly in the close support role and with marked success.
Flying in pairs (one to observe the ground, the other to observe the air around them), their tasks included bombing, strafing, close infantry support and artillery spotting. When attacking larger enemy formations, the Hurricanes often operated in conjunction with the smaller and much more agile Boomerang fighter. In this role, a Boomerang would get in close to confirm the identity of the target and mark it with a 20 lb (9 kg) smoke bomb with the "cooperating" Hurricane, Beaufort or Havoc delivering the major ordnance in a quick run and from a safer distance. The partnership between RAAF planes and Royal New Zealand Air Force Corsair fighter bombers during the Bougainville Campaign was said to be particularly effective.
The Australian Hurricane Mk. VIs soldiered on until early 1945, when they were finally retired. The Twin Wasp engines were used for spares, all airframes were scrapped, no plane survived the war.
General characteristics:
Crew: 1
Length: 32 ft 3 in (9.84 m)
Wingspan: 40 ft 0 in (12.19 m)
Height: 13 ft 1½ in (4.0 m)
Wing area: 257.5 ft² (23.92 m²)
Empty weight: 5,745 lb (2,605 kg)
Loaded weight: 7,670 lb (3,480 kg)
Max. takeoff weight: 8,710 lb (3,950 kg)
Maximum speed: 331 mph (531 km/h)
Range: 650 mi (1.045 km)
Service ceiling: 36,000 ft (10,970 m)
Rate of climb: 2,303 ft/min (11.7 m/s)
Wing loading: 29.8 lb/ft² (121.9 kg/m²)
Power/mass: 0.15 hp/lb (0.25 kW/kg)
Engine: 1× Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp radial engine, 1,200 hp (895 kW)
Armament: 4× 20 mm (0.787 in) Hispano or CAC cannons; 2x 45-gallon (205 l) drop tanks or 2× 250 or 500 lb (110 or 230 kg) bombs
The kit and its assembly
The Hurricane Mk. VI is a whif, even though with little effort but a good story behind it. The original idea to mate a Hurricane with a radial engine came when I found a drawing of a Russian Hurricane, mated with a Schwezow ASch-82 engine. It looked… interesting. Not certain if this had been done for sure, but a great inspiration.
While browsing through the scrap heap I later found a Twin Wasp engine – that fueled the idea of a respective conversion. The Russian option was dead, but when I checked contemporary planes I came across the small Boomerang, and the historical facts were perfect for an obscure Australian Hurricane variant.
The rest was quickly done: the basic kit is a Hurricane Mk. IIC (Trop) from Hobby Boss, the Twin Wasp comes from a wrecked Matchbox PB4Y Privateer. The original Merlin was simply cut away and replaced by the "new" and relatively small radial engine. A surprisingly easy task, even though I had to widen the area in front of the cockpit by about 1mm to each side. With some putty and a new exhaust pipe with flame dampers, the surgical part was quickly done. A pilot was added, too, in order to distract from the rather bleak cockpit.
To make the plane look more interesting and suitable for a display on the ground, the flaps were lowered (scratch-built) and vertical and horizontal stabilizer were moved away from OOB neutral position. Additionally, the cooler under the fuselage was omitted, what creates together with the radial engine a very different side view. This "Aussie'cane" looks stout but disturbingly realistic, like a Boomerang’s big brother!
Only other changes/additions are a pilot figure and two wing hardpoints, holding bombs. The rest is OOB.
Painting
I have always been a fan of all-green RAAF WWII planes, so I chose such a simple livery. Inspiration came from real-life 4. Squadron Boomerangs, so I adopted the “QE” code and tried to mimic the overall look.
Interior surfaces were kept in Humbrol 78 ('Cockpit Green', dry-painted with light grey). The plane was painted with “Foilage Green” on all outer surfaces - a tone which seems to be heavily debated. Most sources claim FS 34092 (Humbrol 149) as a nowaday's replacement, but to me, this color is just too green and blue-ish. IMHO, “Foilage Green” has a rather yellow-ish hue - Humbrol 75 ("Bronze Green") would be better, if it wasn't too dark.
After some trials I settled for Humbrol 105 ("Army Green"). I think it is a sound compromise. It resembles FS 34096, but is (much) less grey-ish and offers that yellow hue I was looking for. Heavy weathering was done, esp. at the panel lines with dry-painted FS 34096 (Testors) and some panels "bleached" with Humbrol 86 ("Light live Green"). After deacls had been applied, some dry brushing with olive drab and light grey added to the worn and faded look, as well as flaked paint around the engine and the wings' leading egdes and soot stains at exhausts and guns. I wanted to emphasize the harsh climate conditions and duties of this fictional machine.
Only other colors are typical white quick recognition markings on tail and wings, painted with a mix of Humbrol 130 and 196 for a very light grey, with some white dry painting on th eleading edges.For a final clear coat, I used a matte varnish which still has a light gloss to it - “Foilage Green” and RAAF finishes were AFAIK supposed to be semi-matte and of higher quality that USAF paintjobs.
Markings come mostly from the scrap box. The RAAF insignia were taken from a Vultee Vengeance aftermarket sheet by Kanga Decals, which also provided the mid sea grey codes. The Australian registration numbers were improvised with single white letters from TL Modellbau decal sheets.
All in all I am happy with the result - a simple measure, a good story and even a very simple livery that allows room for imagination and painting effects. A nice lil' whif, the "Aussie'cane" Mk. VI.
Temple Newsam (historically Temple Newsham), (grid reference SE357322) is a Tudor-Jacobean house in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, with grounds landscaped by Capability Brown.
The estate lends its name to the Temple Newsam ward of Leeds City Council, in which it is situated, and lies to the east of the city, just south of Halton Moor, Halton, Whitkirk and Colton. It is one of nine sites in the Leeds Museums & Galleries group.
The house is a Grade I listed building, defined as a "building of outstanding or national architectural or historic interest". The stables are Grade II* listed ("particularly significant buildings of more than local interest"), and ten separate features of the estate are Grade II listed ("buildings of special architectural or historic interest"), including the Sphinx Gates and the Barn.[1] Temple Newsam House is one of Leeds Museums and Galleries sites.[2] It is also part of the research group, Yorkshire Country House Partnership.[3]
History
1066 to 1520
In the Domesday Book of 1086 the manor is listed as Neuhusam (meaning new houses) and was held by Ilbert de Lacy and his sons.[4] Before the Norman Conquest of 1066 it had been held by Dunstan and Glunier, Anglo-Saxon thanes.[4] In about 1155, Henry de Lacy gave it to the Knights Templar, who built Temple Newsam Preceptory on a site near the present house.[5] The Templars farmed the estate very efficiently, with 1100 animals.[6] In 1307 the Templars were suppressed, and Edward II granted the manor to Sir Robert Holland who held it until 1323 when he was deprived of his estates.[6] The Templars tried to retake the estate but they were forced to surrender and in 1327 it was granted to Mary de St Pol, the Countess of Pembroke, who held the manor for 50 years.[6] In 1377 by royal decree the estate reverted to Philip Darcy, 4th Baron Darcy de Knayth (1341–1398).[6] It then passed through several members of the Darcy family, until it was inherited by the 21-year old Thomas, Lord Darcy in 1488.[7] Between 1500 and 1520 a Tudor manor house, known as Temple Newsam House, was built on the site.[8] It has also been spelled "Newsham" in the past.[9]
An oil on panel painting by Hans Eworth of Henry Stuart and his brother Charles Stuart in a grand interior based on a print by Hans Vreedman de Vries
An oil on panel painting from 1563 by Hans Eworth of Henry Stuart and his brother Charles Stuart in a grand interior based on a print by Hans Vreedman de Vries which may reflect Temple Newsam's Great Chamber
1500 to 1650
In 1537 Thomas, Lord Darcy was executed for the part he played in the Pilgrimage of Grace and the property was seized by the Crown.[7] In 1544 Henry VIII gave it to his niece Lady Margaret Douglas (Countess of Lennox), and she lived there with her husband Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox.[7] Their son Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who was born in the house in 1545 and educated there, married Mary, Queen of Scots, by whom he was the father of King James VI of Scotland and I of England.[10] A portrait of Henry and his brother was probably intended to represent the interior of Temple Newsam despite being based on a print of an ideal interior.[11] Following the marriage in 1565, Temple Newsam was seized by Queen Elizabeth I and was managed by an agent.[12]
In 1609 King James I, successor to Elizabeth, granted the estate to his Franco-Scottish second cousin Ludovic Stewart, 2nd Duke of Lennox (1574–1624), who was a favourite of the King and given many titles and estates, including farmland and coalmines in the local area.[13] Despite his opportunities, Ludovic was in constant debt and he mortgaged the estate in 1614 for the sum of £9,000 (around £860,000 in today's money).[14] In 1622 Lennox began the sale of the estate to Sir Arthur Ingram (c. 1565 – 1642), a Yorkshire-born London merchant, civil servant, investor in colonial ventures and arms dealer, for £12,000, which he paid in two instalments, the last in July 1624, after Lennox's death.[14] During the next 20 years the mansion was rebuilt, incorporating some of the previous house in the west wing.[8] The north and south wings were rebuilt and the east wing was demolished after a bad fire in 1635.[15] Arthur's son, also called Arthur, inherited the estate with its debts and continued the building and renovation work.[16] Six months after Charles I was beheaded in 1649, Arthur Ingram the younger was declared delinquent and he compounded his estates and retired to Temple Newsam.[17]
1650 to 1900
After the death of Arthur the younger's eldest son, Thomas, in 1660, Temple Newsam was inherited by Arthur's second son, Henry Ingram, 1st Viscount of Irvine (created a peer of Scotland as Baron Ingram and Viscount of Irvine in 1661 - although the family used the English form "Irwin").[18] In 1661, Henry married Lady Essex Montagu, daughter of Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester, a favourite of Charles II.[18] The estate then passed through Henry's two sons and five grandsons, the last being Henry Ingram, 7th Viscount of Irvine.[18] The 4th Viscount brought back paintings from his Grand Tour of 1704-7.[19] Extant receipts from 1692 show women as well as men were employed to work the estate in haymaking.[20] In 1712, William Etty designed a new approach to the house, with a bridge and ponds.[21][22] In 1714, Temple Newsam was inherited by Rich Ingram, the 5th Viscount, and his wife Ann who spent a vast fortune furnishing the house and creating the East Avenue.[19] Between 1738 and 1746, Henry Ingram, 7th Viscount of Irvine remodelled the west and north wings of the house, creating new bedrooms and dressing rooms and the picture gallery.[23] A painting in Leeds City Art Gallery by Philippe Mercier of c. 1745 shows Henry and his wife standing in front of Temple Newsam House.[24]
A coloured engraving made in 1699 by J Kip after a drawing by Leonard Knyff showing an aerial view of the house and estate at Temple Newsam
1699 Engraving by J Kip after a drawing by Leonard Knyff
In the 1760s, Charles Ingram, 9th Viscount of Irvine, employed Capability Brown to re-landscape the park on the insistence of his wife, Frances Shepheard, daughter of Samuel Shepheard.[25] Reflecting her interest in pastoral landscape design, Frances is depicted as a shepherdess in a portrait by Benjamin Wilson at Temple Newsam.[25] Both Frances and Charles were actively involved in the design and implementation.[26] Some aspects of Brown's plan depicted in paintings by James Chapman and Michael Angelo Rooker were never completed such as a large lake near the house.[26] Extant financial records show that in 1759 women as well as men were employed as garden labourers.[20] After Charles died in 1778, Frances rebuilt the south wing in 1796; she lived at Temple Newsam until her death in 1807.[27] Charles and Frances's eldest daughter Isabella Ingram, (Marchioness of Hertford) (d.1834) who inherited Temple Newsam, was the mistress of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) from 1806 to 1819. In 1806, George visited Temple Newsam and presented Isabella with Chinese wallpaper, which she hung in the small Drawing Room next to the Great Hall in around 1820, embellished with cut out birds from Audubon's The Birds of America (now worth £7.5 million).[28] Lady Hertford inherited the house in 1807; after her husband died in 1822 she spent the season in London, and the rest of the time at Temple Newsam where she involved herself in charitable works including distributing food and clothing to the local people.[29] She allowed the servants to hold an annual supper and ball at Temple Newsam.[29] Reports of poachers were made during 1826 and 1827.[30] During the last years of Isabella's life, the canal, railway and roads encroached on the estate as well as coal mining; and she dealt with the companies setting these up.[29] In 1820 the novelist Sir Walter Scott published Ivanhoe featuring a Templar preceptory named Temple Stowe, believed to have been modelled on Temple Newsam; the name is preserved in local road names such as Templestowe Crescent.[31] At her death in 1834, Isabella left Temple Newsam to her widowed sister, Frances Ingram Shepheard, wife of Lord William Gordon, who died in 1841.[32]
Temple Newsam House from Morris's Country Seats (1880)
In 1841 the estate was inherited by Hugo Charles Meynell Ingram (d. 1869), son of Elizabeth Ingram, sister of Frances Ingram (Lady Gordon), who made no alterations to the estate.[33] In 1868, the Prince of Wales stayed at Temple Newsam during his visit to Leeds to open the Fine Art Exhibition in the New Infirmary; temporary triumphal arches were erected on the estate.[34] Following Hugo Charles's death, his son Hugo Meynell-Ingram (d.1871) inherited Temple Newsam; two years later, at his death, his wife Emily Meynell Ingram (d.1904) inherited the estate.[33] Emily spent a large part of her widowhood at Temple Newsam; she developed it considerably by replacing the sash windows and remodelling the dining room, great staircase and Lord Darnley's room.[33] Emily bequeathed Temple Newsam to her nephew Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax.[8]
20th century
In 1909, 610 acres (2.5 km2) of the estate at Knostrop were compulsorily purchased by Leeds Corporation to build a sewage plant.[35] During the First World War (1914–17) the south wing of the house was turned into a hospital by Edward Wood and his wife Dorothy. Edward Wood fought in France as part of the Yorkshire Hussars, whilst Dorothy oversaw the running of the hospital as part of the Mayors War Committee.[36] In 1922 Edward Wood sold the park and house to Leeds Corporation for a nominal sum, placing covenants over them to ensure their preservation for the future.[35]
On 19 October 1923, Temple Newsam was opened to the public along with a golf course.[37] In the Derby Daily Telegraph newspaper, Temple Newsam was compared to Hampton Court.[37] Despite many people visiting the house and using the golf course, the Corporation lost money during the first decade mostly due to poor farming practices.[37] In July 1932, the Great Yorkshire Show was held at Temple Newsam and was a great success.[37] Preparations for war were made as early as April 1939, and in August, small items were being packed up for storage.[37] In September 1939, Temple Newsam was closed to the public and items were moved there for storage from Leeds City Art Gallery.[37] It was decided that objects would be displayed, and the house was officially reopened in November 1939, when it was again likened to Hampton Court in the press.[37]
Architecture
Photograph of entrance porch of Temple Newsam House, Leeds, showing at top the word 'FATHER', below a mullioned window, below a raised portico with coat of arms above a doorway flanked by two Ionic columns on each side.
Entrance Porch 17th century
Photograph of the west front of Temple Newsam
Centre of Temple Newsam west front
Remains of the early 16th century house were retained in the new building, including the brickwork and bay windows in the centre of the west front.[38] The plan of the new house was a conservative E-shape.[38] The Long Gallery and entrance hall in the south wing followed Elizabethan and early Jacobean styles.[38] The entrance porch has Classical columns but they are of Flemish design, rather than following correct Italian design.[38] There are Tudor doorways and timberwork in the cellars, which are largely Tudor in date.[39] Tudor features have also been discovered beneath later layers of decoration, including Lord Darcy's crest scratched into the plaster in the Blue Damask room.[40] An inventory of 1565 indicates that the hall, great chamber (later the dining room), gallery and chapel (later the kitchen) were probably where they are now.[40] There is a Tudor doorway in the north wing which was probably the entrance to the original chapel.[41]
In the 17th century, the south and north wings were rebuilt and the east wing demolished, replaced by a low wall with an arched gateway, giving the house a fashionable 'half-H' appearance.[39] It is possible that the man who made plans for the alteration was Bernard Dinninghof of York.[41] There is also some resemblance to designs by Inigo Jones.[42] Round the top of the house, letters appear in a balustrade, declaring the piety and loyalty of Sir Arthur Ingram: 'ALL GLORY AND PRAISE BE GIVEN TO GOD THE FATHER THE SON AND HOLY GHOST ON HIGH PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WILL TOWARDS MEN HONOUR AND TRUE ALLEGIANCE TO OUR GRACIOUS KING LOVING AFFECTION AMONGST HIS SUBJECTS HEALTH AND PLENTY BE WITHIN THIS HOUSE.'[38] The chapel in the north wing retains some 17th century features, such as armorial stained glass, probably by Henry Gyles and a carved wooden pulpit by Thomas Ventris, made around 1636, with geometric patterns, pilasters and friezes.[38] The walls had panels of Old Testament figures, painted by John Carleton.[38] An inventory dated 1667 records that the House had 66 rooms and 11 outhouses.[39] An engraving by Kip and Knyff dated 1699 is an accurate representation of the house, showing the varying height of the house and some buildings that were later demolished, including the arched gateway flanked by two small lodges and a detached garden building dating from the mid 1670s.[23]
Photograph of stone and brick Sphinx gate piers at Temple Newsam, c. 1760 by Lancelot Brown based on designs published by Lord Burlington in 1738 and used at Chiswick
Sphinx gate piers, c. 1760
Photograph of the mid-18th century stable block at Temple Newsam showing the pediment
Stable Block at Temple Newsam, added by Henry, 7th Lord Irwin
In 1718, the steward of Temple Newsam suggested an underground service passage to link the north and south wings to the 5th Viscount, who agreed.[43] This tunnel linked the original kitchens in the south wing to the rest of the house.[44] In 1738, Henry, 7th Viscount Irwin wrote to his mother describing the neglected state of the house with windows coming away and cracked brickwork.[23] The house was almost entirely remodelled by Henry.[38] He wanted to follow Palladian design and used craftsmen from York to do so.[45] He widened the gallery, improved the ceiling and windows and created additional rooms.[23] The gallery, completed around 1746, has fine Rococo carvings with overmantle paintings of classical scenes by Antonio Joli.[19] There are also elaborate gilded Rococo ornamental candle holders.[19] The gallery ceiling has detailed stucco work including a medallion of King George I.[19] The ceilings in the new Saloon and Library, made from the old Long Gallery, were decorated by Thomas Perritt and Joseph Rose.[45] The doorcases are elaborately carved, probably by Richard Fisher.[45] Two chimney pieces in the Saloon were based on designs by William Kent.[45] The distinctive sphinx gate piers by Lancelot Brown constructed in 1768 were based on designs published by Lord Burlington in 1738 and used at Chiswick.[45][1] The main rooms in the west wing were redecorated and the windows were replaced with sliding sash windows.[45] A large pedimented stable block was built to the north of the house, in 1742 and probably designed by Daniel Garratt, also in the Palladian style.[45][46] A painting by Mercier of around 1749, also shows a planned block to the south and a low wall connecting the north and south wings which were never completed.[23][21]
In 1796, Frances Shepheard employed a Mr Johnson to alter and reface the south wing in a style which tried to copy that of Sir Arthur Ingram's original house.[45] Her approach was a departure from the designs for the wing commissioned by her dead husband from John Carr and Robert Adam, as well as the landscaping by Capability Brown who was also consulted about rebuilding the south wing.[45] The wing was made two storeys high throughout with a suite of reception rooms on the ground floor with state bedchambers above.[27] In the 1790s, the kitchens were moved to the north wing and the original kitchen became a brushing room where servants brushed down nobles returning from hunting parties.[44]
At the end of the 19th century, Emily Meynell Ingram replaced the sash windows with stone mullions and leaded lights and rebuilt the north porch adding the Meynell Ingram coat of arms over the doorway.[27] She redecorated several rooms and had the great oak staircase installed.[27] The dining room, great staircase and Lord Darnley's room were remodelled in Elizabethan style.[33] In 1877, Emily converted the library at the east end of the gallery into a chapel.[47]
Coalmining on the estate
Estate records show the existence of coal pits in and around the park in the seventeenth century and Bell Wood to the south of the house would have had bell pits for coal extraction. A colliery at Halton village was leased to a number of different individuals from 1660 through to at least the 1790s. The leases generally required the leaseholder to supply coals to Temple Newsam house.[48]
In 1815, William Fenton, one of the 'Coal Kings' of Yorkshire,[49] began the sinking of a mine shaft on the estate at Thorpe Stapleton. The colliery was named Waterloo to commemorate the famous battle of that year.[50] Waterloo Colliery was operated as a royalty concession with contracted 'rents' for coal extracted going to the Temple Newsam landowner. Fenton also had a village built for his workers on land between the River Aire and the Aire and Calder navigation. The village was initially called Newmarket but then became Irwin Square on ordnance survey maps[51] and Ingram Place on census lists, but it was commonly simply known as Waterloo. The Yorkshire, Lancashire and England cricketer Albert Ward was born here in 1865. The village had two rows of cottages and a school building. It was connected to the colliery by a wooden footbridge over the river.[52] Deep coal mining on the estate ended with the closure of the Temple Pit of Waterloo Main Colliery in 1968.
Temple Newsam House
Opencast mining on the estate began in May 1942. Seven sites were exploited to the south of the house almost entirely destroying Capability Brown's landscape. One site reached within 330 feet (100 m) of the South Terrace. It continued at the Gamblethorpe site as far as Dawson's Wood, in full view of the house, until 1987.[53] No trace of the opencast remains now as the parkland was re-landscaped.
In 2019 there was a temporary exhibition about coal mining at Temple Newsam which was called 'Blot on the Landscape'.[54]
House and estate today
The house and estate are owned by Leeds City Council and open to the public. The house has undergone substantial restoration to its exterior. There is an established programme of restoring rooms back to known previous configurations, reversing the numerous intrusive installations and modifications that took place during the building's "art museum" phase.
The wider estate is made up of woods (the second largest part of the Forest of Leeds).[55] There are sporting facilities for football, golf, running, cycling, horse-riding and orienteering. There is an innovative children's playground opened in 2011 which caters for both disabled and able-bodied children.[56] Pegasus Wood, to the south of the house, commemorates veterans of the Normandy Landing at Pegasus Bridge in 1944.[57]
Photograph of brick barn at the Home Farm, Temple Newsam
Great Barn, Home Farm, Temple Newsam
The Home Farm, open to the public, has a barn built in 1694 and is the largest working rare breeds farm in Europe, and only one of 16 nationally approved by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. Breeds include Gloucester, Kerry, Irish Moiled, Red Poll, White Park, British White, Beef Shorthorn, Vaynol and Belted Galloway cattle; Kerry Hill; Whitefaced Woodland and Portland sheep, and Golden Guernsey goats.[58] The farm was targeted by arsonists twice in 2011 with damage caused to buildings, and some animals killed.[59]
There are extensive gardens, with a celebrated rhododendron walk and six national plant collections: Aster novi-belgii (Michaelmas daisies), Phlox paniculata, Delphinium elatum (Cultivars), Solenostemon scutellarioides (sys. Coleus blumei), Primula auricula and Chrysanthemum (Charm and Cascade cultivars).[60] Within the Walled Garden there are 800 yards of herbaceous borders.[61]
Collections
There are substantial holdings of fine and decorative art which are designated by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) as being of national significance.[62]
Of most significant historical and cultural interest is the Chippendale Society collection of Chippendale works that are on permanent loan.[63] In his book "Britain's Best Museums and Galleries", Mark Fisher (a former DCMS minister) gave the museum an excellent review. When interviewed on Front Row, Radio 4, November 2004 Fisher placed Temple Newsam House in the top three non-national museums in the country, along with Birmingham's Barber Institute and the Dulwich Picture Gallery.[64]
The National Trust Property ,Croome has a landscaped park designed by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. View towards church. Taken with 10-20mm
Ugbrooke House
Ugbrooke House is a stately home in the parish of Chudleigh, Devon, England, situated in a valley between Exeter and Newton Abbot.
It dates back over 900 years, having featured in the Domesday Book. Before the Reformation the land belonged to the Church and the house was occupied by Precentors to the Bishop of Exeter. It has been the seat of the Clifford family for over four hundred years, and the owners have held the title Baron Clifford of Chudleigh since 1672.
The 9th Baron Clifford was an aide-de-camp to Edward VII and entertained royalty, both Edward VII and George V, at Ugbrooke Park.
The house, now a Grade I listed building, was remodelled by Robert Adam, while the grounds were redesigned by Capability Brown in 1761.The grounds featured what were possibly the earliest plantings of the European White Elm Ulmus laevis in the UK.The gardens are now Grade II* listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.[4] The house and gardens are open to the public for a limited number of days each summer.
Baron Clifford of Chudleigh
Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, of Chudleigh in the County of Devon, is a title in the Peerage of England. It was created in 1672 for Thomas Clifford. The title was created as "Clifford of Chudleigh" rather than simply "Clifford" to differentiate it from several other Clifford Baronies previously created for members of this ancient family, including the Barony of de Clifford (1299), which is extant but now held by a branch line of the Russell family, having inherited through several female lines.
Baron Clifford of Chudleigh is the major surviving male representative of the ancient Norman family which later took the name de Clifford which arrived in England during the Norman Conquest of 1066, feudal barons of Clifford, first seated in England at Clifford Castle in Herefordshire, created Baron de Clifford by writ in 1299. The family seat is Ugbrooke Park, near Chudleigh, Devon.
Notable members of this branch of the Clifford family include antiquarian Arthur Clifford (grandson of the 3rd Baron), Victoria Cross recipient Sir Henry Hugh Clifford (son of the 7th Baron), Catholic clergyman William Clifford (son of the 7th Baron) and colonial administrators Sir Bede Clifford (son of the 10th Baron) and Sir Hugh Clifford (grandson of the 7th Baron). The family is also related to the notable recusant Weld family, of Lulworth Castle, through the 7th Baron's marriage to the daughter of Cardinal Thomas Weld.
Barons Clifford of Chudleigh (1672)
Thomas Clifford, 1st Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1630–1673)
Hugh Clifford, 2nd Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1663–1730)
Hugh Clifford, 3rd Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1700–1732)
Hugh Clifford, 4th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1726–1783)
Hugh Edward Henry Clifford, 5th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1756–1793)
Charles Clifford, 6th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1759–1831)
Hugh Charles Clifford, 7th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1790–1858)
Charles Hugh Clifford, 8th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1819–1880)
Lewis Henry Hugh Clifford, 9th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1851–1916)
William Hugh Clifford, 10th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1858–1943)
Charles Oswald Hugh Clifford, 11th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1887–1962)
Lewis Joseph Hugh Clifford, 12th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1889–1964)
Lewis Hugh Clifford, 13th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1916–1988)
Thomas Hugh Clifford, 14th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (b. 1948)
The heir apparent is the present holder's son Hon. Alexander Thomas Hugh Clifford (b. 1985)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Temple Newsam (historically Temple Newsham), (grid reference SE357322) is a Tudor-Jacobean house in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, with grounds landscaped by Capability Brown.
The estate lends its name to the Temple Newsam ward of Leeds City Council, in which it is situated, and lies to the east of the city, just south of Halton Moor, Halton, Whitkirk and Colton. It is one of nine sites in the Leeds Museums & Galleries group.
The house is a Grade I listed building, defined as a "building of outstanding or national architectural or historic interest". The stables are Grade II* listed ("particularly significant buildings of more than local interest"), and ten separate features of the estate are Grade II listed ("buildings of special architectural or historic interest"), including the Sphinx Gates and the Barn.[1] Temple Newsam House is one of Leeds Museums and Galleries sites.[2] It is also part of the research group, Yorkshire Country House Partnership.[3]
History
1066 to 1520
In the Domesday Book of 1086 the manor is listed as Neuhusam (meaning new houses) and was held by Ilbert de Lacy and his sons.[4] Before the Norman Conquest of 1066 it had been held by Dunstan and Glunier, Anglo-Saxon thanes.[4] In about 1155, Henry de Lacy gave it to the Knights Templar, who built Temple Newsam Preceptory on a site near the present house.[5] The Templars farmed the estate very efficiently, with 1100 animals.[6] In 1307 the Templars were suppressed, and Edward II granted the manor to Sir Robert Holland who held it until 1323 when he was deprived of his estates.[6] The Templars tried to retake the estate but they were forced to surrender and in 1327 it was granted to Mary de St Pol, the Countess of Pembroke, who held the manor for 50 years.[6] In 1377 by royal decree the estate reverted to Philip Darcy, 4th Baron Darcy de Knayth (1341–1398).[6] It then passed through several members of the Darcy family, until it was inherited by the 21-year old Thomas, Lord Darcy in 1488.[7] Between 1500 and 1520 a Tudor manor house, known as Temple Newsam House, was built on the site.[8] It has also been spelled "Newsham" in the past.[9]
An oil on panel painting by Hans Eworth of Henry Stuart and his brother Charles Stuart in a grand interior based on a print by Hans Vreedman de Vries
An oil on panel painting from 1563 by Hans Eworth of Henry Stuart and his brother Charles Stuart in a grand interior based on a print by Hans Vreedman de Vries which may reflect Temple Newsam's Great Chamber
1500 to 1650
In 1537 Thomas, Lord Darcy was executed for the part he played in the Pilgrimage of Grace and the property was seized by the Crown.[7] In 1544 Henry VIII gave it to his niece Lady Margaret Douglas (Countess of Lennox), and she lived there with her husband Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox.[7] Their son Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who was born in the house in 1545 and educated there, married Mary, Queen of Scots, by whom he was the father of King James VI of Scotland and I of England.[10] A portrait of Henry and his brother was probably intended to represent the interior of Temple Newsam despite being based on a print of an ideal interior.[11] Following the marriage in 1565, Temple Newsam was seized by Queen Elizabeth I and was managed by an agent.[12]
In 1609 King James I, successor to Elizabeth, granted the estate to his Franco-Scottish second cousin Ludovic Stewart, 2nd Duke of Lennox (1574–1624), who was a favourite of the King and given many titles and estates, including farmland and coalmines in the local area.[13] Despite his opportunities, Ludovic was in constant debt and he mortgaged the estate in 1614 for the sum of £9,000 (around £860,000 in today's money).[14] In 1622 Lennox began the sale of the estate to Sir Arthur Ingram (c. 1565 – 1642), a Yorkshire-born London merchant, civil servant, investor in colonial ventures and arms dealer, for £12,000, which he paid in two instalments, the last in July 1624, after Lennox's death.[14] During the next 20 years the mansion was rebuilt, incorporating some of the previous house in the west wing.[8] The north and south wings were rebuilt and the east wing was demolished after a bad fire in 1635.[15] Arthur's son, also called Arthur, inherited the estate with its debts and continued the building and renovation work.[16] Six months after Charles I was beheaded in 1649, Arthur Ingram the younger was declared delinquent and he compounded his estates and retired to Temple Newsam.[17]
1650 to 1900
After the death of Arthur the younger's eldest son, Thomas, in 1660, Temple Newsam was inherited by Arthur's second son, Henry Ingram, 1st Viscount of Irvine (created a peer of Scotland as Baron Ingram and Viscount of Irvine in 1661 - although the family used the English form "Irwin").[18] In 1661, Henry married Lady Essex Montagu, daughter of Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester, a favourite of Charles II.[18] The estate then passed through Henry's two sons and five grandsons, the last being Henry Ingram, 7th Viscount of Irvine.[18] The 4th Viscount brought back paintings from his Grand Tour of 1704-7.[19] Extant receipts from 1692 show women as well as men were employed to work the estate in haymaking.[20] In 1712, William Etty designed a new approach to the house, with a bridge and ponds.[21][22] In 1714, Temple Newsam was inherited by Rich Ingram, the 5th Viscount, and his wife Ann who spent a vast fortune furnishing the house and creating the East Avenue.[19] Between 1738 and 1746, Henry Ingram, 7th Viscount of Irvine remodelled the west and north wings of the house, creating new bedrooms and dressing rooms and the picture gallery.[23] A painting in Leeds City Art Gallery by Philippe Mercier of c. 1745 shows Henry and his wife standing in front of Temple Newsam House.[24]
A coloured engraving made in 1699 by J Kip after a drawing by Leonard Knyff showing an aerial view of the house and estate at Temple Newsam
1699 Engraving by J Kip after a drawing by Leonard Knyff
In the 1760s, Charles Ingram, 9th Viscount of Irvine, employed Capability Brown to re-landscape the park on the insistence of his wife, Frances Shepheard, daughter of Samuel Shepheard.[25] Reflecting her interest in pastoral landscape design, Frances is depicted as a shepherdess in a portrait by Benjamin Wilson at Temple Newsam.[25] Both Frances and Charles were actively involved in the design and implementation.[26] Some aspects of Brown's plan depicted in paintings by James Chapman and Michael Angelo Rooker were never completed such as a large lake near the house.[26] Extant financial records show that in 1759 women as well as men were employed as garden labourers.[20] After Charles died in 1778, Frances rebuilt the south wing in 1796; she lived at Temple Newsam until her death in 1807.[27] Charles and Frances's eldest daughter Isabella Ingram, (Marchioness of Hertford) (d.1834) who inherited Temple Newsam, was the mistress of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) from 1806 to 1819. In 1806, George visited Temple Newsam and presented Isabella with Chinese wallpaper, which she hung in the small Drawing Room next to the Great Hall in around 1820, embellished with cut out birds from Audubon's The Birds of America (now worth £7.5 million).[28] Lady Hertford inherited the house in 1807; after her husband died in 1822 she spent the season in London, and the rest of the time at Temple Newsam where she involved herself in charitable works including distributing food and clothing to the local people.[29] She allowed the servants to hold an annual supper and ball at Temple Newsam.[29] Reports of poachers were made during 1826 and 1827.[30] During the last years of Isabella's life, the canal, railway and roads encroached on the estate as well as coal mining; and she dealt with the companies setting these up.[29] In 1820 the novelist Sir Walter Scott published Ivanhoe featuring a Templar preceptory named Temple Stowe, believed to have been modelled on Temple Newsam; the name is preserved in local road names such as Templestowe Crescent.[31] At her death in 1834, Isabella left Temple Newsam to her widowed sister, Frances Ingram Shepheard, wife of Lord William Gordon, who died in 1841.[32]
Temple Newsam House from Morris's Country Seats (1880)
In 1841 the estate was inherited by Hugo Charles Meynell Ingram (d. 1869), son of Elizabeth Ingram, sister of Frances Ingram (Lady Gordon), who made no alterations to the estate.[33] In 1868, the Prince of Wales stayed at Temple Newsam during his visit to Leeds to open the Fine Art Exhibition in the New Infirmary; temporary triumphal arches were erected on the estate.[34] Following Hugo Charles's death, his son Hugo Meynell-Ingram (d.1871) inherited Temple Newsam; two years later, at his death, his wife Emily Meynell Ingram (d.1904) inherited the estate.[33] Emily spent a large part of her widowhood at Temple Newsam; she developed it considerably by replacing the sash windows and remodelling the dining room, great staircase and Lord Darnley's room.[33] Emily bequeathed Temple Newsam to her nephew Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax.[8]
20th century
In 1909, 610 acres (2.5 km2) of the estate at Knostrop were compulsorily purchased by Leeds Corporation to build a sewage plant.[35] During the First World War (1914–17) the south wing of the house was turned into a hospital by Edward Wood and his wife Dorothy. Edward Wood fought in France as part of the Yorkshire Hussars, whilst Dorothy oversaw the running of the hospital as part of the Mayors War Committee.[36] In 1922 Edward Wood sold the park and house to Leeds Corporation for a nominal sum, placing covenants over them to ensure their preservation for the future.[35]
On 19 October 1923, Temple Newsam was opened to the public along with a golf course.[37] In the Derby Daily Telegraph newspaper, Temple Newsam was compared to Hampton Court.[37] Despite many people visiting the house and using the golf course, the Corporation lost money during the first decade mostly due to poor farming practices.[37] In July 1932, the Great Yorkshire Show was held at Temple Newsam and was a great success.[37] Preparations for war were made as early as April 1939, and in August, small items were being packed up for storage.[37] In September 1939, Temple Newsam was closed to the public and items were moved there for storage from Leeds City Art Gallery.[37] It was decided that objects would be displayed, and the house was officially reopened in November 1939, when it was again likened to Hampton Court in the press.[37]
Architecture
Photograph of entrance porch of Temple Newsam House, Leeds, showing at top the word 'FATHER', below a mullioned window, below a raised portico with coat of arms above a doorway flanked by two Ionic columns on each side.
Entrance Porch 17th century
Photograph of the west front of Temple Newsam
Centre of Temple Newsam west front
Remains of the early 16th century house were retained in the new building, including the brickwork and bay windows in the centre of the west front.[38] The plan of the new house was a conservative E-shape.[38] The Long Gallery and entrance hall in the south wing followed Elizabethan and early Jacobean styles.[38] The entrance porch has Classical columns but they are of Flemish design, rather than following correct Italian design.[38] There are Tudor doorways and timberwork in the cellars, which are largely Tudor in date.[39] Tudor features have also been discovered beneath later layers of decoration, including Lord Darcy's crest scratched into the plaster in the Blue Damask room.[40] An inventory of 1565 indicates that the hall, great chamber (later the dining room), gallery and chapel (later the kitchen) were probably where they are now.[40] There is a Tudor doorway in the north wing which was probably the entrance to the original chapel.[41]
In the 17th century, the south and north wings were rebuilt and the east wing demolished, replaced by a low wall with an arched gateway, giving the house a fashionable 'half-H' appearance.[39] It is possible that the man who made plans for the alteration was Bernard Dinninghof of York.[41] There is also some resemblance to designs by Inigo Jones.[42] Round the top of the house, letters appear in a balustrade, declaring the piety and loyalty of Sir Arthur Ingram: 'ALL GLORY AND PRAISE BE GIVEN TO GOD THE FATHER THE SON AND HOLY GHOST ON HIGH PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WILL TOWARDS MEN HONOUR AND TRUE ALLEGIANCE TO OUR GRACIOUS KING LOVING AFFECTION AMONGST HIS SUBJECTS HEALTH AND PLENTY BE WITHIN THIS HOUSE.'[38] The chapel in the north wing retains some 17th century features, such as armorial stained glass, probably by Henry Gyles and a carved wooden pulpit by Thomas Ventris, made around 1636, with geometric patterns, pilasters and friezes.[38] The walls had panels of Old Testament figures, painted by John Carleton.[38] An inventory dated 1667 records that the House had 66 rooms and 11 outhouses.[39] An engraving by Kip and Knyff dated 1699 is an accurate representation of the house, showing the varying height of the house and some buildings that were later demolished, including the arched gateway flanked by two small lodges and a detached garden building dating from the mid 1670s.[23]
Photograph of stone and brick Sphinx gate piers at Temple Newsam, c. 1760 by Lancelot Brown based on designs published by Lord Burlington in 1738 and used at Chiswick
Sphinx gate piers, c. 1760
Photograph of the mid-18th century stable block at Temple Newsam showing the pediment
Stable Block at Temple Newsam, added by Henry, 7th Lord Irwin
In 1718, the steward of Temple Newsam suggested an underground service passage to link the north and south wings to the 5th Viscount, who agreed.[43] This tunnel linked the original kitchens in the south wing to the rest of the house.[44] In 1738, Henry, 7th Viscount Irwin wrote to his mother describing the neglected state of the house with windows coming away and cracked brickwork.[23] The house was almost entirely remodelled by Henry.[38] He wanted to follow Palladian design and used craftsmen from York to do so.[45] He widened the gallery, improved the ceiling and windows and created additional rooms.[23] The gallery, completed around 1746, has fine Rococo carvings with overmantle paintings of classical scenes by Antonio Joli.[19] There are also elaborate gilded Rococo ornamental candle holders.[19] The gallery ceiling has detailed stucco work including a medallion of King George I.[19] The ceilings in the new Saloon and Library, made from the old Long Gallery, were decorated by Thomas Perritt and Joseph Rose.[45] The doorcases are elaborately carved, probably by Richard Fisher.[45] Two chimney pieces in the Saloon were based on designs by William Kent.[45] The distinctive sphinx gate piers by Lancelot Brown constructed in 1768 were based on designs published by Lord Burlington in 1738 and used at Chiswick.[45][1] The main rooms in the west wing were redecorated and the windows were replaced with sliding sash windows.[45] A large pedimented stable block was built to the north of the house, in 1742 and probably designed by Daniel Garratt, also in the Palladian style.[45][46] A painting by Mercier of around 1749, also shows a planned block to the south and a low wall connecting the north and south wings which were never completed.[23][21]
In 1796, Frances Shepheard employed a Mr Johnson to alter and reface the south wing in a style which tried to copy that of Sir Arthur Ingram's original house.[45] Her approach was a departure from the designs for the wing commissioned by her dead husband from John Carr and Robert Adam, as well as the landscaping by Capability Brown who was also consulted about rebuilding the south wing.[45] The wing was made two storeys high throughout with a suite of reception rooms on the ground floor with state bedchambers above.[27] In the 1790s, the kitchens were moved to the north wing and the original kitchen became a brushing room where servants brushed down nobles returning from hunting parties.[44]
At the end of the 19th century, Emily Meynell Ingram replaced the sash windows with stone mullions and leaded lights and rebuilt the north porch adding the Meynell Ingram coat of arms over the doorway.[27] She redecorated several rooms and had the great oak staircase installed.[27] The dining room, great staircase and Lord Darnley's room were remodelled in Elizabethan style.[33] In 1877, Emily converted the library at the east end of the gallery into a chapel.[47]
Coalmining on the estate
Estate records show the existence of coal pits in and around the park in the seventeenth century and Bell Wood to the south of the house would have had bell pits for coal extraction. A colliery at Halton village was leased to a number of different individuals from 1660 through to at least the 1790s. The leases generally required the leaseholder to supply coals to Temple Newsam house.[48]
In 1815, William Fenton, one of the 'Coal Kings' of Yorkshire,[49] began the sinking of a mine shaft on the estate at Thorpe Stapleton. The colliery was named Waterloo to commemorate the famous battle of that year.[50] Waterloo Colliery was operated as a royalty concession with contracted 'rents' for coal extracted going to the Temple Newsam landowner. Fenton also had a village built for his workers on land between the River Aire and the Aire and Calder navigation. The village was initially called Newmarket but then became Irwin Square on ordnance survey maps[51] and Ingram Place on census lists, but it was commonly simply known as Waterloo. The Yorkshire, Lancashire and England cricketer Albert Ward was born here in 1865. The village had two rows of cottages and a school building. It was connected to the colliery by a wooden footbridge over the river.[52] Deep coal mining on the estate ended with the closure of the Temple Pit of Waterloo Main Colliery in 1968.
Temple Newsam House
Opencast mining on the estate began in May 1942. Seven sites were exploited to the south of the house almost entirely destroying Capability Brown's landscape. One site reached within 330 feet (100 m) of the South Terrace. It continued at the Gamblethorpe site as far as Dawson's Wood, in full view of the house, until 1987.[53] No trace of the opencast remains now as the parkland was re-landscaped.
In 2019 there was a temporary exhibition about coal mining at Temple Newsam which was called 'Blot on the Landscape'.[54]
House and estate today
The house and estate are owned by Leeds City Council and open to the public. The house has undergone substantial restoration to its exterior. There is an established programme of restoring rooms back to known previous configurations, reversing the numerous intrusive installations and modifications that took place during the building's "art museum" phase.
The wider estate is made up of woods (the second largest part of the Forest of Leeds).[55] There are sporting facilities for football, golf, running, cycling, horse-riding and orienteering. There is an innovative children's playground opened in 2011 which caters for both disabled and able-bodied children.[56] Pegasus Wood, to the south of the house, commemorates veterans of the Normandy Landing at Pegasus Bridge in 1944.[57]
Photograph of brick barn at the Home Farm, Temple Newsam
Great Barn, Home Farm, Temple Newsam
The Home Farm, open to the public, has a barn built in 1694 and is the largest working rare breeds farm in Europe, and only one of 16 nationally approved by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. Breeds include Gloucester, Kerry, Irish Moiled, Red Poll, White Park, British White, Beef Shorthorn, Vaynol and Belted Galloway cattle; Kerry Hill; Whitefaced Woodland and Portland sheep, and Golden Guernsey goats.[58] The farm was targeted by arsonists twice in 2011 with damage caused to buildings, and some animals killed.[59]
There are extensive gardens, with a celebrated rhododendron walk and six national plant collections: Aster novi-belgii (Michaelmas daisies), Phlox paniculata, Delphinium elatum (Cultivars), Solenostemon scutellarioides (sys. Coleus blumei), Primula auricula and Chrysanthemum (Charm and Cascade cultivars).[60] Within the Walled Garden there are 800 yards of herbaceous borders.[61]
Collections
There are substantial holdings of fine and decorative art which are designated by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) as being of national significance.[62]
Of most significant historical and cultural interest is the Chippendale Society collection of Chippendale works that are on permanent loan.[63] In his book "Britain's Best Museums and Galleries", Mark Fisher (a former DCMS minister) gave the museum an excellent review. When interviewed on Front Row, Radio 4, November 2004 Fisher placed Temple Newsam House in the top three non-national museums in the country, along with Birmingham's Barber Institute and the Dulwich Picture Gallery.[64]
A visit to Charlecote Park for an afternoon visit to this National Trust property in Warwickshire. Near Stratford-upon-Avon. A deer park with a country house in the middle of it.
Charlecote Park (grid reference SP263564) is a grand 16th-century country house, surrounded by its own deer park, on the banks of the River Avon near Wellesbourne, about 4 miles (6 km) east of Stratford-upon-Avon and 5.5 miles (9 km) south of Warwick, Warwickshire, England. It has been administered by the National Trust since 1946 and is open to the public. It is a Grade I listed building.
The Lucy family owned the land since 1247. Charlecote Park was built in 1558 by Sir Thomas Lucy, and Queen Elizabeth I stayed in the room that is now the drawing room. Although the general outline of the Elizabethan house remains, nowadays it is in fact mostly Victorian. Successive generations of the Lucy family had modified Charlecote Park over the centuries, but in 1823, George Hammond Lucy (High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1831) inherited the house and set about recreating the house in its original style.
Charlecote Park covers 185 acres (75 ha), backing on to the River Avon. William Shakespeare has been alleged to have poached rabbits and deer in the park as a young man and been brought before magistrates as a result.
From 1605 to 1640 the house was organised by Sir Thomas Lucy. He had twelve children with Lady Alice Lucy who ran the house after he died. She was known for her piety and distributing alms to the poor each Christmas. Her eldest three sons inherited the house in turn and it then fell to her grandchild Sir Davenport Lucy.
In the Tudor great hall, the 1680 painting Charlecote Park by Sir Godfrey Kneller, is said to be one of the earliest depictions of a black presence in the West Midlands (excluding Roman legionnaires). The painting, of Captain Thomas Lucy, shows a black boy in the background dressed in a blue livery coat and red stockings and wearing a gleaming, metal collar around his neck. The National Trust's Charlecote brochure describes the boy as a "black page boy". In 1735 a black child called Philip Lucy was baptised at Charlecote.
The lands immediately adjoining the house were further landscaped by Capability Brown in about 1760. This resulted in Charlecote becoming a hostelry destination for notable tourists to Stratford from the late 17th to mid-18th century, including Washington Irving (1818), Sir Walter Scott (1828) and Nathaniel Hawthorn (c 1850).
Charlecote was inherited in 1823 by George Hammond Lucy (d 1845), who married Mary Elizabeth Williams of Bodelwyddan Castle, from who's extensive diaries the current "behind the scenes of Victorian Charlecote" are based upon. GH Lucy's second son Henry inherited the estate from his elder brother in 1847. After the deaths of both Mary Elizabeth and Henry in 1890, the house was rented out by Henry's eldest daughter and heiress, Ada Christina (d 1943). She had married Sir Henry Ramsay-Fairfax, (d 1944), a line of the Fairfax Baronets, who on marriage assumed the name Fairfax-Lucy.
From this point onwards, the family began selling off parts of the outlying estate to fund their extensive lifestyle, and post-World War II in 1946, Sir Montgomerie Fairfax-Lucy, who had inherited the residual estate from his mother Ada, presented Charlecote to the National Trust in-lieu of death duties. Sir Montgomerie was succeeded in 1965 by his brother, Sir Brian, whose wife, Lady Alice, researched the history of Charlecote, and assisted the National Trust with the restoration of the house.
Charlecote Park House is a Grade I Listed Building
Listing Text
CHARLECOTE
SP2556 CHARLECOTE PARK
1901-1/10/19 Charlecote Park
06/02/52
(Formerly Listed as:
Charlecote Park House)
GV I
Formerly known as: Charlecote Hall.
Country house. Begun 1558; extended C19. Partly restored and
extended, including east range, 1829-34 by CS Smith;
north-east wing rebuilt and south wing extended 1847-67 by
John Gibson. For George and Mary Elizabeth Lucy.
MATERIALS: brick, that remaining from original building has
diapering in vitrified headers, but much has been replaced in
C19; ashlar dressings; tile roof with brick stacks with
octagonal ashlar shafts and caps.
PLAN: U-plan facing east, with later west range and south
wing.
EXTERIOR: east entrance front of 2 storeys with attic;
3-window range with long gabled projecting wings. Ashlar
plinth, continuous drip courses and coped gables with finials,
sections of strapwork balustrading between gables; quoins.
2-storey ashlar porch has round-headed entrance with flanking
pairs of Ionic pilasters and entablature, round-headed
entrance has panelled jambs, impost course and arch with lion
mask to key and 2 voussoirs, strapwork spandrels and stained
glass to fanlight over paired 4-panel doors; first floor has
Arms of Elizabeth I below projecting ovolo-moulded
cross-mullion window, with flanking pairs of Composite
detached columns; top balustrade with symmetrical balusters
supports Catherine wheel and heraldic beasts holding spears;
original diapered brick to returns.
3-light mullioned and transomed window to each floor to left,
that to first floor with strapwork apron. Large canted bay
window to right of 1:3:1 transomed lights with pierced
rosettes to parapet modelled on that to gatehouse (qv) and
flanked by cross-mullioned windows, all with moulded reveals
and small-paned sashes; C19 gables have 3-light
ovolo-mullioned windows with leaded glazing.
Wings similar, with 2 gables to 5-window inner returns,
ovolo-moulded cross-mullioned windows. Wing to south has much
diaper brickwork and stair window with strapwork apron.
East gable ends have 2-storey canted bay windows dated 1852 to
strapwork panels with Lucy Arms between 1:3:1-light transomed
windows; 3-light attic windows, that to north has patch of
reconstructed diaper brickwork to left.
Octagonal stair turrets to outer angles with 2-light windows,
top entablatures and ogival caps with wind vanes, that to
south mostly original, that to north with round-headed
entrance with enriched key block over studded plank door.
North side has turret to each end, that to west is wholly C19;
3 gables with external stacks with clustered shafts between;
cross-mullioned windows and 3-light transomed stair window on
strapwork apron; 2-light single-chamfered mullioned windows to
turrets.
Single-storey east range of blue brick has 2 bay windows with
octagonal pinnacles with pepper-pot finials and arcaded
balustrades over 1:4:1-light transomed windows; central panel
with Lucy Arms in strapwork setting has date 1833; coped
parapet with 3 gables with lights; returns similar with
3-light transomed windows.
Range behind has 3 renewed central gables and 2 lateral stacks
each with 6 shafts; gable to each end, that to south over
Tudor-arched verandah with arcaded balustrade to central arch
and above, entrance behind arch to left with half-glazed door,
blocked arch to right; first floor with cross-mullioned window
and blocked window, turret to right is wholly C19. South
return has cross-mullioned window to each floor and external
stack with clustered shafts.
South-west wing of 2 storeys; west side is a 7-window range;
recessed block to north end has window to each floor, the next
4 windows between octagonal pinnacles; gabled end breaks
forward under gable with turret to angle; rosette balustrade;
stacks have diagonal brick shafts, gable has lozenge with Lucy
Arms impaling Williams Arms (for Mary Elizabeth Lucy).
Cross-mullioned windows, but 2 southern ground-floor windows
are 3-light and transomed.
South end 4-window range between turrets has cross-mullioned
windows, but each end of first floor has bracketed oriel with
strapwork apron with Lucy/Williams Arms in lozenge and dated
1866, rosette balustrade with to each end a gable with 2-light
single-chamfered mullioned window with label, and 3 similar
windows to each turret, one to each floor.
East side has 3-window range with recessed range to right.
South end has Tudor-arched entrance and 3-light transomed
window, cross-mullioned window and 3-light transomed window to
first floor and gable with lozenge to south end; gable to
full-height kitchen to north has octagonal pinnacles flanking
4-light transomed window and gable above with square panel
with Lucy/Williams Arms to shield; recessed part to north has
loggia with entrance and flanking windows, to left a
single-storey re-entrant block with cross-mullioned windows;
first floor has 5 small sashed windows. South side of
south-east wing has varied brickwork with mullioned and
transomed windows, 2 external stacks and 2 gables with 3-light
windows.
INTERIOR: great hall remodelled by Willement with wood-grained
plaster ceiling with 4-centred ribs and Tudor rose bosses;
armorial glass attributed to Eiffler, restored and extended by
Willement; wainscoting and panelled doors; ashlar fireplace
with paired reeded pilasters and strapwork to entablature, and
fire-dogs; white and pink marble floor, Italian, 1845.
Dining room and library in west wing have rich wood panelling
by JM Willcox of Warwick and strapwork cornices, and strapwork
ceilings with pendants; wallpaper by Willement; dining room
has richly carved buffet, 1858, by Willcox and simple coloured
marble fireplace, the latter with bookshelves and fireplace
with paired pilasters and motto to frieze of fireplace, paired
columns and strapwork frieze to overmantel with armorial
bearings; painted arabesques to shutter backs.
Main staircase, c1700, but probably extensively reconstructed
in C19, open-well with cut string, 3 twisted balusters to a
tread, carved tread ends and ramped handrail;
bolection-moulded panelling in 2 heights, the upper panels and
panelled ceiling probably C19.
Morning room to south of hall has Willement decoration: white
marble Tudor-arched fireplace with cusped panels; plaster
ceiling with bands.
Ebony bedroom, originally billiard room, and drawing room to
north-east wing have 1856 scheme with cornices and
Jacobean-style plaster ceilings; white marble C18-style
fireplaces, that to Ebony Bedroom with Italian inserts with
Lucy crest. Drawing room has gilded and painted cornice and
ceiling, and large pier glasses.
Rooms to first floor originally guest bedrooms: doors with
egg-and-dart and eared architraves; C18-style fireplaces, that
to end room, originally Ebony Bedroom, has wood Rococo-style
fireplace with Chinoiserie panel; 1950s stair to attic.
South-east wing has c1700 stair, probably altered in C19, with
symmetrical balusters with acanthus, closed string; first
floor has wall and ceiling paintings: land and sea battle
scenes painted on canvas, male and female grisaille busts.
First floor has to west the Green Room, with Willement
wallpaper and simple Tudor-arched fireplace with
wallpaper-covered chimney board; adjacent room has marble
fireplace.
Death Room and its dressing room to east end have wallpaper of
gold motifs on white, painted 6-panel doors and architraves,
papier-mache ceilings; bedroom has fireplace with marble
architrave. Adjacent room has bolection-moulded panelling with
c1700 Dutch embossed leather. Stair to attic has c1700
balusters with club-form on acorn. Attics over great hall and
north-east and south-east wings have lime-ash floors and
servants' rooms, each with small annex and corner fireplace;
some bells.
South wing has kitchen with high ceiling and 2
segmental-arched recesses for C19 ranges; Tudor-arched recess
with latticed chamber for smoked meats over door.
Servants' hall has dark marble bolection-moulded fireplace and
cornice; scullery has bread oven, small range, pump and former
south window retaining glass.
First floor has to south end a pair of rooms added for Mary
Elizabeth Lucy in her widowhood; bedroom to east with deep
coved cornice and Adam-style fireplace, sitting room to west
similar, with gold on white wallpaper, white marble fireplace
with painted glass armorial panels and 1830s-40s carpet; door
to spiral timber turret staircase.
Nursery has fireplace with faceted panels and C19 Delft tiles;
probably 1920s wallpaper.
Other rooms with similar fireplaces and coloured glazed tiles.
While dating back to the C16, the house is one of the best
examples of the early C19 Elizabethan Revival style. Property
of National Trust.
(The Buildings of England: Pevsner, N & Wedgwood, A:
Warwickshire: Harmondsworth: 1966-: 227-9; The National Trust
Guide to Charlecote Park: 1991-; Wainwright C: The Romantic
Interior).
Listing NGR: SP2590656425
This text is from the original listing, and may not necessarily reflect the current setting of the building.
A look around the inside of the house / hall.
Downstairs rooms.
The Library