The House has members who span a significant age range. Among the older members are some who saw significant service in the Second World War. This quiz focuses on those peers who saw wartime service. As usual, the first two readers to supply the correct answers will be the winners.
1. I was a prisoner-of-war in Colditz Castle during the war. Who am I?
2. I served in Naval Intelligence in Bletchley Park. I was previously a Landgirl to David Lloyd George. Who am I?
3. I was a Major in the Grenadier Guards and served in NW Europe from 1940 to 1946. I entered the House of Lords in 1945. Who am I?
4. I served in North Africa and Italy during the war and was mentioned in despatches. I later became a Labour MP and Cabinet minister. Who am I?
3. Lord Car(r)ington.
1. Campbell of Alloway
2. Baroness Trumpington
4. Lord Healey
1 Lord Campbell of Alloway
2 Baroness Trumpington
War(time) Service:
Princess Elizabeth was front-paged in khaki women’s ATS uniform, kneeling “somewhere-in-Britain” actually changing an Army 3-tonner’s quite big front wheel…
(but I was far off-cam, in Plymouth, dodging AA shrapnel,in merely a plain navy-blue boiler-suit with nothing underneath, and a tin hat with M white-painted on it (“Messenger”); both of which I proudly had to buy out of my own war-rationed pocket);
(how the local girls were jealous of Elizabeth, because we their local boyfriend- market “sinned” by having the older of our two princesses as our “pin-up-girl”; yet these same local girls took Elizabeth-the-front-page-fighting-volunteer’s side, as a “challenger” of the male-sex, to “get down on your knees and put your shoulders to the wheel”).
More to today’s “peace-building” point, however, every time I watch the Cenotaph march-past, I awaken to a usually utterly forgotten inner-soul, gradually coming to life, and crescendo-ing my (now wisely-experienced “senior”) brain into wanting to go face down on the ground, to inconspicuously crawl under the Great Robes and The Eternal Throne of The Almighty God, bravely but also blubbingly confessing “Lord, I never realised how many millions of better-men-than-I had been doing the ACTUAL fighting and peace-winning – and I am so grievously sorry that I don’t recall nor recognise even one of them” –
whilst still within some other miracle-of-human-life I am nonetheless “singing” with those ten-thousand-times-tenthousand and with their hundreds-of-thousands of lookers-on, when it comes to “O God Our Help In Ages Past”.
Any day as I stand to reach out and tune-in to the Parliamentary channel, to scan the ranks of our Parliamentary Representatives and the Peerage therein, none of whom I now know either alas!, I can’t help agonising deeply, about how far we are, or are not, “winning the peace”, and just how “together” we really have succeeded in becoming.
1125M050911.
It is interesting, even when one does not play, to look at the answers after the fact and so sometimes I do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Campbell,_Baron_Campbell_of_Alloway
This first was an entry that did not actually seem to add much at first blush except straightforward biographical information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Barker,_Baroness_Trumpington
Was the only answer I knew or guessed correctly from memory as I feel certain she had a rather major role in a television documentary on Bletchley operations. however I found no evidence of TV documentaries or the Landgirl thing in my hasty (and doubtless incomplete perusal of this entry).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Carington,_6th_Baron_Carrington
Chris K and his alternate spelling certainly piqued my interest here and the story was far better than I could have hoped a parenthetic letter could be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Healey
It was interesting to go from such nuance over a single or double r to an entry where all honorifics and titles are stripped from the plainest of headings.
It seems to me that these quizzes continuously remind one of the rich nuances of the House of Lords. Certainly, a sign of many more important characteristics of a body when it is so full of little nuances…
One winner this week, Chris K, with all four correct answers: Lord Campbell of Alloway, Baroness Trumpington, Lord Carrington, and Lord Healey. Quite a distinguished quartet. Tory boy is runner up, with two (correct) answers: I was expecting he would be able to name Baroness Trumpington. Thanks also to Frank W. Summers III for some useful links.