Randal and Singkey on the “tube.”

Big purse!

Nutcracker Boxer Shorts.  hmmmmm

This advert for candles was lovely and had a train!

Gingerbread world of Selfridges

Most importantly is Selfridges’ contribution to Kids Company.   Our friends Lisa and Mark in the Central Basin here volunteer to help on Christmas Day when several thousand children come to have a Christmas meal and can bring their family or friends.  They are fed and entertained for the day.  At the end they are all given boxes with food and gifts to take home.  If they live far, volunteer taxis drive them.  Quite amazing event.

Lovely music that sounded as if he were plucking stings.

This unexpected memorial to the animals that served during the wars was very moving.

The mule’s ear has been rubbed shiny I think.  I know I gave it a pat.

A memorial to horses in British and Territorial Calvary

Lieutenant-Colonel  Edwin H. Richardson, OBE, FZS, and the English Airedales

In Britain Major Richardson had been training war dogs, for use with the Red Cross, as early as the 1890s, and in 1902 he was shown on an Ogden’s cigarette card captioned ‘Rendering First Aid.’ The card showed a photograph of the Major, as an ‘injured’ man, with a collie dog bearing the Red Cross insignia. Richardson’s fellow officers would spend their summers, with their regiments, doing manoeuvres not far from his home on the east coast of Scotland, and although Richardson had no official sanction, the officers would gladly try his dogs under simulated battle conditions as the soldiers trained. Some of the officers were so impressed that they wrote to the War Office asking that the idea be given recognition. 

His dogs were used during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and in 1910 were the first ever to be used by a British Police force in Hull. They had been tried three years earlier by the North Eastern Railway Company police who had grown tired of continual thefts, arsons and assaults on their officers. The reduction in these and other crimes was significant. They were later used in Glasgow, Nottingham and Liverpool, the latter at one point had 20 of Richardson’s Airedales. By 1912 Richardson and his dogs were world-renowned. Amongst his many patrons were Czar Nicholas of Russia and one regiment, the Hussars of the Imperial Guard, had 23 Airedales, supported by Doberman Pinscher’s and German Shepherd Dogs.

Despite the popularity of the German Shepherd Dog, Richardson’s English Airedales were by far the more favoured breed for use as police and war dogs, a point that was to prove somewhat disillusioning to the German military who used Airedales at the outbreak of WW1, Max von Stephanitz saying "…although shepherd dogs who had been tried out in one special regiment finished all their tests with full honours – English dogs were chosen as War dogs for German rifle battalions…" Airedales had outperformed all other purebreds! 

The  Great War – 1914-19

With the advent of the Great War of 1914-19 War dogs were truly put to the test and passed on all counts as the German military, who had 6,000 dogs ready for immediate use, used the dogs ability to the full on the battlefield as sentry, ambulance and messengers. Although using different species of dogs (Alsatians were popular), the Belgian, Bulgarian, Dutch, French (who did not discriminate on the basis of breed, it was the dog that was important), Russian and Swedish military all had canine units functioning in some capacity during the war, except the British. They all, like the Germans, used dogs for sentry, ambulance, messengers, line layers and as draught dogs carting munitions and weapons. 

Major Richardson made several unsuccessful attempts to get the British Government to use dogs but it wasn’t until 1917, at the Battle of Vimy Ridge, France, where two of his dogs, the first to be trained as messengers and sent to the Front with Canadian troops, proved their worth by bringing news of the successful attack on Vimy Ridge, the dogs being used because all telephone lines were broken and visual signaling was impossible. The British Government conceded, the War Office asking Richardson to set up a War Dog School at Shoeburyness. Within a week of being asked, Richardson had sold his home and moved to Shoeburyness where intensive training commenced. http://jetofiada.tripod.com/Story.htm

A Holiday Amusement Park had been set up in Hyde Park

Shooting into the sun which finally came out for a bit!

Every store window was dressed up for Christmas

These are all from Harrods’

I liked the scene of the women having tea.

The stuff of days past…..

The luxury of great stationary and time to write and receive letters by mail. 

The Tower of London strung lights on its trees.