Gray Connolly Profile picture
Nov 10 13 tweets 11 min read
It is Armistice Day tomorrow - in 1918, at the 11th Hour, of the 11th Day, of the 11th Month, the guns fell silent ... good wishes to all who are commemorating #RemembranceDay Image
Good morning all on this Armistice Day/ #RemembranceDay , the 104th anniversary of the Great War's end. Australia's Great War (1914-1919):
- national population of 5m
- 416,809 enlisted
- more than 60,000 killed in action
- 156,000 wounded, gassed, or taken prisoner Image
My grandfather in Aug 1918 with his beloved sister Vera before going to France. My late grandfather would arrive for the Allied advance to the Nov 11 armistice. Like many, he would feel guilty for having survived. So many friends killed & wounded in the Great War. #RemembranceDay Image
My grandfather, 2LT Connolly, was 19 & a reinforcement officer in the British Expeditionary Force in late 1918. He passed well before I was born & many records were destroyed in WW2. Indebted to @TJGodden for making these drawings that allow me to glimpse his war. #RemembranceDay Image
My great+ uncles served @HAC_TheCompany (the oldest continuing squadron/regiment in the British Army & a sort of 'Hooray Henry' unit in the 19thC) in the Boer War and then for all of the Great War. Some would then be detached to the Royal Garrison Artillery. #RemembranceDay ImageImage
Lieutenant PJ Connolly, RNVR, served in HMS Erebus during WW1 & after in the ill-fated Russian intervention. By all accounts a good officer, he went back to sea as a merchant mariner after the war & died before WW2 broke out.
naval-history.net/OWShips-WW1-03…
#RemembranceDay ImageImageImage
My uncles, Nicholas and Timothy, who would make careers in the British Army, serving in the BAOR, Ulster, one in Aden, before rejoining the family business .... and writing letters to the Torygraph on reviving the Latin Mass #RemembranceDay ImageImage
I was most grateful to be invited to speak this morning at the #RemembranceDay / Armistice Day service at the Bowral war memorial in the Southern Highlands. The war memorial lists the numerous southern highlanders who served in every war & operation from the Boer War to today. ImageImageImageImage
The audio of my address this morning to the #RemembranceDay / Armistice Day service at the Bowral war memorial in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, Australia.

soundcloud.com/graham-connoll…
Please feel free to post below for #ArmisticeDay / #RemembranceDay and share any familial reminiscences here #LestWeForget ImageImage
Good morning all & especially to all those commemorating #ArmisticeDay #RemembranceDay or #VeteransDay . "Lest We Forget"
[Will Longstaff's "Menin Gate at Midnight" or "Ghosts of Menin Gate" (1927)] Image
Good morning all on this Thirty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time. Also, good morning to all Veterans throughout the former British Empire on this #RemembranceSunday

[Chaplain Gleeson conferring the Last General Absolution on the Royal Munsters at Rue du Bois in France, May 1915] Image

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More from @GrayConnolly

Nov 12
If you were born in 1900 in the UK - such as Mountbatten - by the time you turned 50 you had been through
- the Great War and the collapse of almost every other major European empire and monarchy
- the worst Depression since the 1890s if not ever
- all six years of World War II
The British documentary series that Lord Mountbatten narrates on his life & times is fascinating - his recollection of his Russian relatives, the Romanovs, and his feelings, even in the 1970s, for the Grand Duchess Maria he hoped to marry, is moving

The future King George VI was born in 1895 and as "the spare", as a 20 year old Midshipman, served at the battle of Jutland as a turret officer in the dreadnought HMS Collingwood, where, he was Mentioned In Dispatches Image
Read 4 tweets
Oct 28
The Twitter management fired by Musk had it coming. Musk's idea of the platform as a neutral public square could always have been implemented but there was a determined desire by the now departed team to meddle. That journos are now ignored/not boosted is hardly the world's end.
Everyone who is on Twitter complains about Twitter -perhaps whining is an essence of the human condition - but I actually find it very useful for first reports of breaking news as well as my own public filing cabinet for what I find interesting. People can follow/unfollow idc
I will also say that if you use twitter in good faith & are not a complete mutant (albeit all of us will err at times) then you can meet and debate interesting people. I have never understood having an anonymous account to go mad - life is short & seems a waste of precious time.
Read 7 tweets
Oct 20
I have had a few people send me this @MarginalRevolt post by @tylercowen on Classical Liberals vs the New Right (also saw @clairlemon post on it). I found it quite interesting. Am not a philosopher but will add some dissenting observations below here.

marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
The piece is written with an American audience in mind, and, while the American caste system requires everything to be neurotically related to recent times & esp the Trump years, because of the desultory effect of US politics, this has spread to my inbox ... hence this ....
I think the post is good in setting out both sides of the liberal/Tory divide (which is essentially what the divide is). Americans may not use Whig/Tory terminology but that essentially is what it is. If you speak English you have been (re)fighting this same war for centuries.
Read 13 tweets
Oct 20
Lidia Thorpe’s personal life is entirely her business and there are no issues relating to it & her Senate duties that could not have been handled discretely through proper law enforcement & private parliamentary channels. #auspol
If appeals to decency and good sense are useless … then I would remind you that the politics of rumour and innuendo that you tolerate if not promote for your opponent will almost certainly be used against you or someone you support #auspol
I assume that the media that is now gleefully exploring Lidia Thorpe’s personal life would be happy to have the Canberra press gallery’s ‘after dark’ shenanigans exposed to the public glare? #auspol
Read 4 tweets
Oct 18
Very courageous ABC Media Watch on the ABC’s links to LGBTIQ lobby group ACON and the ABC’s failure to cover the Tavistock closure in the UK as well as related trans/sports issues

This is simply absurd by response but shows why what Media Watch did was actually very brave
There are very good people in the ABC who know there are real problems on this issue and are trying to fix them from the inside. I realise many here are tired but give the ABC and media watch credit where it is due. Praise what you want more of from the ABC
Read 4 tweets
Oct 1
Munich bought the British Empire valuable time and space esp as Japan was a threat in the Pacific. Everyone remotely serious in British politics at the time knew this - why Chamberlain was lauded across the political spectrum & by King George VI.
Did a thread here as a corrective to rampant idiocy

In the 1930s, especially in the British Empire, built & secured as it was by seapower, the idea of fighting yet another continental war over squabbling Europeans was unattractive. That was a bipartisan view, esp as so many families were missing fathers, uncles, and sons, from WW1
Read 4 tweets

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