LONDON — Bill Millin, a Scottish bagpiper who played highland tunes as his fellow commandos landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day and lived to see his bravado immortalized in the 1962 film “The Longest Day,” died on Wednesday in a hospital in the western England county of Devon. He was 88.
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Was Charlie Chaplin a Gypsy? | Film | The Guardian
In a bomb-proof concrete vault beneath one of the more moneyed stretches of Switzerland lies something better than bullion. Here, behind blast doors and security screens, are stored the remains of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. You might wonder what more there is to know about Charles Spencer Chaplin. Born in London in 1889; survivor of a tough workhouse childhood; the embodiment of screencomedy; fugitive from J Edgar Hoover; the presiding genius of The Kid and The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator. His signature character, the Little Tramp, was once so fiercely present in the global consciousness that commentators studied its effects like a branch of epidemiology. In 1915, "Chaplinitis" was identified as a global affliction. On 12 November 1916, a bizarre outbreak of mass hysteria produced 800 simultaneous sightings of Chaplin across America.
Though the virus is less contagious today, Chaplin's face is still one of the most widely recognised images on the planet. And yet, in that Montruex vault, there is a wealth of material that has barely been touched. There are letters that evoke his bitter estrangement from America in the 1950s. There are reel-to-reel recordings of him improvising at the piano ("I'm so depressed," he trills, groping his way towards a tune that rings right). A cache of press cuttings details the British Army's banning of the Chaplin moustache from the trenches of the first world war. Other clippings indicate that, in the early 1930s, he considered returning to his homeland and entering politics.
Most startling of all is a document that suggests we might have to revise our most basic assumptions about the man behind the moustache. After Charlie's widow, Oona, died in 1991, their daughter Victoria Chaplin inherited a bureau that had belonged to her father. One drawer remained stubbornly locked. When the locksmith jiggered it open, he found a letter in large, scrawly handwriting. A friendly note from an octogenarian called Jack Hill, who wrote from Tamworth in the 1970s to inform Chaplin that he was not one of south London's most celebrated sons, but that he had entered the world "in a caravan [that] belonged to the Gypsy Queen, who was my auntie. You were born on the Black Patch in Smethwick near Birmingham."
Chaplin's birth certificate has never been located. His mother, Hannah – maiden name Hill – was descended from a travelling family. In the 1880s, the Black Patch was a thriving Romany community on the industrial edge of Birmingham. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Charlie Chaplin was a Gypsy from the West Midlands.
The idea of rewriting Chaplin family history does not faze Michael, his eldest surviving son, and the man who brought Hill's letter to my attention. "It must have been significant to him," he says, "or why would he have kept it?" Perhaps a man who has been spotted in 800 places simultaneously is entirely capable of being born in two places at once.
Like the rest of his siblings, Michael is preparing for a new phase in his father's afterlife. The Chaplin family home, high on the slopes above Montreux, will soon become a museum. We walk together around its unheated spaces, progressing up the curved staircase to the room in which Charles Spencer Chaplin breathed his last. "You could say there were ghosts here," he says, as the last of the day's light drains from the air. "I think we all saw things at certain moments, but I don't know if that was him, or us, or the house. When I went to see him when he was dead, it was extraordinary. He was such a power – and suddenly, looking down at him, you could see that just the shell was there. All that was him had vanished."
Except, of course, that part of Charles Chaplin that the screen has captured for ever – and the man who might yet be conjured from the box files stored in that vault at the foot of the mountain.
The Crystal Palace, 1851
On May 1, 1851, Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations in London's Hyde Park. The first world's fair, the exhibition brought together the best manufactured products of seventy-seven nations. The building in which it was held, nicked-named the "Crystal Palace," was itself a technological marvel of iron and glass devised by Joseph Paxton. More than six million people from many nations visited the exhibition during its five and a half-month run.
Street Scenes in Paris in the 19th Century: A Brown University Library Exhibit
Trollope, Francis Milton, 1780-1803
Paris and the Parisians in 1835. London : R. Bentley, 1836. Vol. 1. Drawing and etching by A. Hervieu, dated 1835.
John Hay Library Starred Books Collection
John Hay Library Starred Books Collection
The Tuileries Gardens were built in 1644 by the same designer responsible for the garden at Versailles. Although they underwent considerable architectural changes in the centuries to follow, the Tuileries Gardens became one of Paris's most popular recreational gathering places. By the 19th century, the gardens offered Parisians and tourists alike a peaceful setting featuring small bodies of water, public walkways, various terraces and pavilions, as well as numerous statues, all of which made the gardens the ideal setting for leisure activities. The Tuileries Gardens continue to attract visitors today, and are located adjacent to the Louvre in the first arrondissement.
Bill Millin, Scottish Piper, Dies at 88
Bill Millin playing the bagpipes in an undated photograph from World War II. The cause was complications from a stroke, his family said. Mr. Millin was a 21-year-old private in Britain’s First Special Service Brigade when his unit landed on the strip of coast the Allies code-named Sword Beach, near the French city of Caen at the eastern end of the invasion front chosen by the Allies for the landings on June 6, 1944. By one estimate, about 4,400 Allied troops died in the first 24 hours of the landings, about two-thirds of them Americans. The young piper was approached shortly before the landings by the brigade’s commanding officer, Brig. Simon Fraser, who as the 15th Lord Lovat was the hereditary chief of the Clan Fraser and one of Scotland’s most celebrated aristocrats. Against orders from World War I that forbade playing bagpipes on the battlefield because of the high risk of attracting enemy fire, Lord Lovat, then 32, asked Private Millin to play on the beachhead to raise morale. When Private Millin demurred, citing the regulations, he recalled later, Lord Lovat replied: “Ah, but that’s the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn’t apply.” After wading ashore in waist-high water that he said caused his kilt to float, Private Millin reached the beach, then marched up and down, unarmed, playing the tunes Lord Lovat had requested, including “Highland Laddie” and “Road to the Isles.” With German troops raking the beach with artillery and machine-gun fire, the young piper played on as his fellow soldiers advanced through smoke and flame on the German positions, or fell on the beach. The scene provided an emotional high point in “The Longest Day.” In later years Mr. Millin told the BBC he did not regard what he had done as heroic. When Lord Lovat insisted that he play, he said, “I just said ‘O.K.,’ and got on with it.” He added: “I didn’t notice I was being shot at. When you’re young, you do things you wouldn’t dream of doing when you’re older.” He said he found out later, after meeting Germans who had manned guns above the beach, that they didn’t shoot him “because they thought I was crazy.” Other British commandos cheered and waved, Mr. Millin recalled, though he said he felt bad as he marched among ranks of wounded soldiers needing medical help. But those who survived the landings offered no reproach. “I shall never forget hearing the skirl of Bill Millin’s pipes,” one of the commandos, Tom Duncan, said years later. “As well as the pride we felt, it reminded us of home, and why we were fighting there for our lives and those of our loved ones.” From the beach, Private Millin moved inland with the commandos to relieve British paratroopers who had seized a bridge near the village of Ouistreham that was vital to German attempts to move reinforcements toward the beaches. As the commandos crossed the bridge under heavy German fire, Lord Lovat again asked Private Millin to play his pipes. In 2008, French bagpipers started a fund to erect a statue of Mr. Millin near the landing site, but the fund remains far short of its $125,000 goal. Bill Millin was born in Glasgow on July 14, 1922, the son of a policeman, and lived with his family in Canada as a child before returning to Scotland. After the war, he worked on Lord Lovat’s estate near Inverness, but found the life too quiet and took a job as a piper with a traveling theater company. In the late 1950s, he trained in Glasgow as a psychiatric nurse and eventually settled in Devon, retiring in 1988. He visited the United States several times, lecturing on his D-Day experiences. In 1954 he married Margaret Mary Dowdel. He is survived by their son.
Pegasus Archive
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: August 19, 2010
London life through a Frenchman's eyes | Art and design | The Observer
via guardian.co.uk
Adelina Patti as Harriet in Martha, 1861Photograph: Camille Silvy/Private Collection, Paris
Evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk
via guardian.co.uk
British Pathé archive clip showing boats returning from Dunkirk with some of the almost 350,000 British servicemen that were evacuated from battle
Sally Mann: The Family and the Land |The Observer
via guardian.co.uk
Sally Mann is perhaps best known for the controversy that attended her series Immediate Family when it was first exhibited in America in the early 90s. It featured black and white images of her three children, often naked or partially naked, as they played and posed in the woods, lakes and rivers around her home in rural Virginia.
