Baroness Emma Orczy’s Divided Loyalties in the 1910s and 20s

The aim of this article is to examine the ambivalent attitudes of the British-Hungarian popular writer Baroness Emma Orczy towards involvement in the Great War. In the 1910s Orczy participated in British military recruitment drives, whilst also maintaining cultural ties with her homeland of Hungary. The questions this study attempts to answer are: what kind of strategies of identification did Orczy employ in order to come to terms with supporting both the Allies and the Central Powers? And: whether through her contrasting stances the operation of a hybrid identity can be captured.

Popular Religious Traditions, British Military Recruitment and the Social Construction of Masculinity in Colonial Haryana

It is generally assumed that colonial institutions and ideologies shaped the contours of masculinity in British India. This paper explores endogenous factors and attempts to supplement as well as contest such approaches and interpretations which claim that masculinity in India was a colonial construction. The emphasis is on folk traditions, religious customs, qaumi (folk) tales and physical culture akh???s (gymnasia) among the Jats in colonial Haryana,1 which went into the making of dominant masculinity in this region. The paper draws upon vernacular language materials and newspapers to analyse the different ways in which the socially endogenous forces constructed this masculinity. It argues that a complex interaction of popular religious traditions, qaumi narratives, military recruitment, marital caste designation, ownership of land, superior caste behaviour and strong bodily physique came to ideologically link and construct dominant masculinity in colonial Haryana.

Posted to Germany: Early Cold War Canadian Military Policy and Its Impact on One Family’s Experience

In the summer of 1954, military surgeon Major Robert Elliott was posted to the British Military Hospital in Iserlohn, Germany, to provide medical care to Canadian soldiers, members of the 5,500-strong Canadian Brigade that had earlier been stationed there as part of Canada’s commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Like many other military families, Elliott’s family had to remain behind until suitable accommodation for them could be found. Based on the letters that Elliott wrote home to his wife during their eight-month separation, this article provides a glimpse of how both old and new Canadian military policies during the early Cold War period had an impact on his work and his family. The Canadian government’s decision to place the Brigade under British control reflected, in part, the long-standing attachment to Britain, but Elliott was often frustrated with how imperial/colonial relations played out in the hospital setting. And the military’s initial reluctance to officially allow dependents to join their loved ones overseas, a new phenomenon in Canadian military life, undoubtedly contributed to his confusion and anxiety over when family quarters would finally be finished.

British naval assistance at the twilight of empire: The case of Abu Dhabi, 1966–1968

Britain long sought to establish, develop and utilise local military capabilities across its empire. In its informal empire among the Arab Gulf Sheikhdoms of Eastern Arabia, Britain increasingly encouraged – and often cajoled – its protégés to build up their own security forces as London's moment in the Middle East was coming to an end. The scholarly literature on imperial assistance to local forces is invariably army-centric; little attention is given to how powers such as Britain helped establish local naval forces. This article seeks to address this imbalance by describing how British naval institutions supported the establishment of the local naval force in Abu Dhabi in the years immediately before British withdrawal from the region in 1971. This case study expands the historiography of British military assistance to cover naval forces and describes the repertoire of support provided by the Royal Navy and Navy Department.

Heat illness experience at BMH Shaibah, Basra, during Operation TELIC: May–July 2003

This is an observational study of heat-related illness in UK Service Personnel deployed into summer conditions in Northern Kuwait and Southern Iraq. Among 622 hospitalisations reported during a 9-week period at the historical British Military Hospital, Shaibah, 303 consecutive admissions are reviewed in detail. Several clinical syndromes attributable to thermal stress were observed. These ranged from self-limiting debility to life-threatening failures of homeostasis, with 5.0% developing a critical care requirement. Hyponatraemia was a commonly occurring electrolyte disturbance by which, relative to the local reference range, a majority of heat-attributed admissions were affected. Reductions in measured serum sodium could be profound (<125 mmol/L in 20.1% of all heat-related casualties). Hypokalaemia was observed in half of cases, though only a minority were affected by severely low potassium (<2.5 mmol/L in 4.0%). Despite preventive measures prescribed on hospital discharge, illness and significant biochemical derangements could recur upon return to duties in the heat. We reiterate the need for primary prevention of heat illness wherever possible and importance of early, effective interventions to treat and protect Service Personnel from secondary injury. We also highlight the requirement for comprehensive assessment to inform prognostication and occupational decision-making in relation to extreme climatic heat, including aeromedical evacuation. We draw additional attention to the contribution of psychological factors in select cases and identify research questions to improve understanding of environment-induced incapacitation in general.

Geomorphological Analysis in an Open-Source GIS for a Context of Peri-Urban Archaeology: The Medieval Settlement of San Lorenzo in Carmignano (Foggia, Italy)

The archaeological investigations conducted at the medieval site of San Lorenzo in Carmignano, just outside the city of Foggia, Italy, fall within a broader context of archaeological research on earthworks in the Middle Ages, in the area of the Tavoliere plain. The settlement is attested as a casale since 1092, in 1166 it was classified as a castrum, until the Late Medieval abandonment. Evident traces of ditches and embankments, over an area of over 25 ha, were already visible in the aerial photos, taken during the Second World War by British military aircrafts and analysed by J. Bradford. Since 2005, stratigraphic excavations have been undertaken by the Department of Humanities of the University of Foggia and, more recently, it has been possible to obtain satellite images and high-resolution digital models of the land from satellite data, orienting research on the analysis of micro-relief, aimed at finding the traces relating to the earth fortifications still perceptible on the site. The integration between the data obtained from modern satellite images and those returned by the pioneering archaeological aerial photography of the 40 s of the last century allowed to shed new light on a relevant settlement in the context of the landscape and medieval population of northern Puglia.