The man who might have been king…

Posted on February 7, 2026 by dgm

I’m about half way through ‘If you’re reading this, I’m already dead’, a novel very loosely based on Otto Witte, the acrobat who aspired to become King of Albania in the chaos of Albania’s independence after the Balkan Wars that preceded world war one.

The novel is very silly, but makes for a decent bedtime read.

In the course of the novel, when the hapless group of circus escapees finally arrive in Albania, accompanied by a camel (don’t ask why, this is fiction, not history), they encounter a British spy called Sandy Arbuthnot.

My ears pricked up at this point. I’d read Greenmantle by John Buchan a few weeks ago and that book also features a character known as Sandy Arbuthnot, one of these Empire types who ‘knocks about’ in the backwoods of the Balkans and Turkey, and even if he’s not exactly a spy, he’s certainly a player in the Great Game.

Like the later travel writer Eric Newby, if Arbuthnot was a real person, there would always be a suspicion that he had some sort of connection with British Intelligence.

And then I did something silly.

I typed the string “Sandy Arbuthnot” into wikipedia’s search box.

And there we have it, the undoubtedly fictional Sandy Arbuthnot has his own Wikipedia page.

But it also reveals a more interesting story. John Buchan’s character Sandy Arbuthnot was based (mostly) on Aubrey Herbert, who not only spent a considerable part of his life travelling in Albania and Turkey, was most definitely a player in the Middle Eastern politics of the time, especially during the first world war.

A friend of TE Lawrence, Herbert knew most of the major players in the jockeying for power in the wake of the first world war in the Middle East, and in a you couldn’t make this up moment was apparently offered the throne of Albania.

Twice.

Herbert died young, in 1923 from blood poisoning, just a few months after his brother, George Herbert, Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored Howard Carter’s dig for the tomb of Tutankhamun, died in Cairo from an infected mosquito bite.

Not the man who would be king, but most definitely the man who could have been king…

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Bicycle soldiers

Posted on January 30, 2026 by dgm

Personally, I’ve always liked bicycles.

When I was a lot younger than I am now a bicycle gave me a freedom to explore, as well as providing cheap and reliable transport.

And because I’ve always had a soft spot for bicycles, I’ve also been interested in the history of cycling.

Bicycles were really important at the end of the nineteenth century to both men and women.

To women, because they gave women the freedom to travel without a male chaperone and  allowed them to travel independently. To men, especially working class men, they provided both cheap transport and a way of getting out of industrial towns and their pollution.

But one aspect that had totally escaped my attention was their role in warfare.

Army Cyclist badge, Auckland Museum, Public domain via Wikimedia commons

In fact I only really came across the use of bicycles by the British Army in the first world war when I read Ursula Bloom’s memoir, when she mentions that someone that she knew had joined a cyclist’s battalion.

Image: Imperial War Museum, London

So what were they?

Richard Holmes “Tommy”, his history of British soldiers on the western front in world war one provides a little more detail explaining that cyclist’s battalions were recruited primarily as messengers – radio was in its infancy, and field telephone lines were in continual danger of being broken by shellfire – hence the use of cyclists carrying messages back from the front to the officers behind the lines and also to the artillery.

Indian soldier cyclists during the battle of the Somme, 1916 via the IWM Wikimedia commons image collection

In such a static war as the western front world war one, bicycle soldiers were found to be ineffective by the British, but due to their mobility they were used on the British mainland for anti invasion coastal patrols, and also on the Salonika front in northern Greece to patrol remote villages.

However, other armies have used soldiers on bicycles and a cheap and efficient way of moving troops.

In 1940, Danish soldiers used bicycles to ride to war before being overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht, and the Japanese, when they invaded Malaysia confiscated bicycles from the population and gave them to their soldiers as a way of moving their army without the use of motorised transport.

Tellingly, both Sweden and Switzerland maintained bicycle detachments until the last quarter of the twentieth century, with Switzerland ending their use in the 1970s and Sweden in the early 1980s.

Both armies used custom made, easy to maintain bicycles and also bicycle trailers to transport heavier and bulkier items.

Swedish soldiers carrying anti tank missiles on bicycles – Wikimedia commons

And from the Swedish and Swiss perspective their use made perfect sense.

During wartime, even if they were able to maintain their neutrality, fuel would be scarce (Sweden, Finland and the USSR maintained a strategic reserve of steam locomotives during the cold war as a buffer against fuel shortages. Incidentally, despite rumours to the contrary the United Kingdom did not.), and in a country with well maintained roads, bicycles would provide a cheap and effective way of moving soldiers.

By using simple single speed bicycles that need little in the way of specialist maintenance, or indeed any maintenance beyond fixing punctures and keeping the chain clean and lubricated.

In a time when bicycles were still used as transportation, changing a tyre or an inner tube would be a skill most people would already have.

Swedish conscripts fixing their bicycles – Swedish Army museum via Wikimedia commons

And as experience in the Vietnam war showed, bicycles can be incredibly valuable as a means of transporting supplies, especially during a partisan or asymmetric conflict.

And bicycle warfare does not just belong to history, there are unconfirmed reports of Ukrainian soldiers in the current conflict using bicycles to transport attack drones to the front line…

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Queen Victoria died 125 years ago today

Posted on January 22, 2026 by dgm

Queen Victoria died 125 years ago today, on 22 January 1901. as memorialised by the Vicar of Ingleton, North Yorkshire, in the parish register

Queen Victoria’s reign, was like our own time, a time of great change and innovation with the industrial revolution, the development of a large urban working class, large scale migration to the colonies and the United States, the development of railways and steamships, speeding and simplifying communication and trade, and a cheap and affordable postal service, not to mention a global telegraph network.

She herself was simply the Queen Empress, and after her nervous breakdown following the death of Albert had little or nothing to do with the process of governance.

So how best to remember her? Well I came across this story from New Zealand that seems a fitting mix of modernity, cultural clashes and tradition…

Licking the queen

The Māori name for stamps is pane kuini (‘queen’s head’). Māori initially found the concept confusing, as in Māori culture the head is sacred and licking the head of the most prestigious person in the Empire seemed odd.

And that does seem to typify her reign…

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More Balkan ephemera…

Posted on January 17, 2026 by dgm

An Albanian 1 Lek coin from 1931.

Albania, in the early part of the twentieth century, had a complex, and at times farcical history.

Emerging from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after the Balkan wars, at first the European powers attempted to impose a German princeling as king – after all such a move had worked reasonably well in both Bulgaria and Romania a generation earlier.

Needless to say, this time it didn’t.

The would be King of Albania was deposed before he’d ever properly been installed and a republic declared. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, shrewder than he is often portrayed as being, said it would probably have been better if an Ottoman prince had been installed.

In the midst of this chaos at the start of world war one, Otto Witte, an Austrian acrobat and fantasist claimed he had been mistaken by one Albanian faction for a nephew of the Ottoman sultan and had been invited to be king.

The story is almost certainly baloney, even if the police in Berlin during the Weimar republic allowed Witte to style himself ex-king of Albania on his id card.

As it was, for a few years it didn’t matter. During world war one the Albanian polity was occupied first by retreating Serb forces, who did not treat the local population well, followed by both Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria occupying the north and east of the country, not to mention other parts of Albania being occupied by Greece, France and Italy, but eventually, at the end of the first world war, Albania finally became a republic in more than name.

Power struggles within the government eventually resulted in the president, Ahmed Zogu, declaring himself Zog I and king of Albania in 1928. During Zog’s reign, Albania increasingly came under the influence of Mussolini’s Italy and was eventually invaded by Italy and made an Italian protectorate at the beginning of the second world war.

Not surprisingly, Zog needed a founding myth for Albania, given that it was little more than a loose confederation of feuding clans, and fastened on Alexander the Great and his Illyrian grandmother, Eurydice, as a better sounding story, and comfortably in the past, than any event in the more recent history of Albania.

Hence the coins of his period have Alexander, modelled after a classical period Greek coin of Alexander the great on the obverse and Alexander charging on his horse Bucephalus on the reverse, the design echoing Italian coins of the period in harking back to a heroic classical past

as in these Italian 50 centesimi of the period – Mussolini’s fascist era coin on the left with the Roman eagle, and the 1920’s version, showing a pride of four lions, celebrating equality, aeqvitas, as in the French ideal of Liberté Egalité Fraternité, on the right.

In Albania the coinage was replaced during the Italian occupation by coins bearing an effigy of Victor Emmanuel III of Italy on the obverse and fascist iconography and the Albanian eagle on the reverse.

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Ursula’s war…

Posted on January 9, 2026 by dgm

Over the last few days I’ve been reading Ursula Bloom’s memoir of her life as a young woman during the first world war.

It’s not history, it’s very much a personal memoir, but on another level it is an important resource describing how people in Britain on the Home Front felt about the war and a developing sense of cynicism about its progress.

Much of British World War One history focuses on generals, the hell of the Western Front, and very little on how people at home in Britain felt.

Bloom’s memoir helps correct that.

A clergyman’s daughter, living with her slowly dying mother, first in St Albans and then in Walton on the Naze in Essex, Bloom was a member of the genteel poor of the Edwardian era, living on a small fixed income which she supplemented by playing piano to accompany silent films in the cinema, she started the war full of the Edwardian certainties of Britain’s position in the world.

But when the army didn’t perform as well as expected, not to mention the navy, doubts began to creep in as to how well the war was actually going. Even the Daily Mail, Bloom’s newspaper of choice, couldn’t manage to maintain an upbeat tone, especially when Field Postcards ceased to be a novelty and often brought news of a loved one being wounded and in a field hospital.

Bloom habitually refers to the new post-1914 volunteer army as ‘Fred Karno’s Army’ that replaced the British Expeditionary Force due to its disorganisation and the way it consisted of half trained squaddies commanded by officers straight out of public school – Fred Karno was a well known slapstick comedian of the time who had a touring troupe.

Bloom also describes the impact of inflation on the genteel precariat on fixed incomes – things that were affordable became unaffordable, and, coupled with increases in income tax, began to hollow out the bottom end of Edwardian middle class.

Households could no longer afford maids and cooks, and the Aunt Mildreds, who had formerly managed quite well on small fixed incomes found it increasingly hard to manage.

Rationing in a sense was their salvation, as they had to live on a poorer meaner diet than before, and shortages of meat and potatoes, among other things, helped disguise that they simply couldn’t afford meat every day.

Other things stand out. Living on the Essex coast, Bloom would sit, in the blackout, watching the Zeppelin raids on the Thames estuary.

(As an aside I tried researching some of these raids using Welsh Newspapers Online. It’s quite clear from the reports that the British authorities heavily censored the reports of zeppelin raids, where they occurred and what damage there had been, perhaps for fear of spreading panic among the civilian population, or simply trying to curb war weariness.

On the other hand, perhaps because the Zeppelin raids worried the population so much, they were keen to publicise successes

As in the shooting down of L15, which Bloom witnessed. The Royal Flying Corps officer responsible for shooting down L15 was in fact from New Zealand, something the British papers seem not to mention, although it was headline news in New Zealand.)

As I say, an interesting resource, and a valuable counterweight to the ‘big men’ style of much of military history, especially where World One is concerned.

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Austro Hungarian Field Postcard 1915

Posted on January 1, 2026 by dgm

I’ve acquired an AustroHungarian field postcard for my little collection of world war one ephemera

Compared to British examples it’s quite simple.

On the front of the card there’s a section on the left – helpfully labelled in the principal languages of the empire – for the sender to write their name and a return address

In this example there’s only a name, the unit name and address is given in the official purple stamp, in other examples I’ve seen there might be a line like ‘Feldpost 306‘ to give the number of the appropriate field post office.

Unlike British examples the rear of the card is blank for a simple message – no restrictive list of pre printed messages or warnings that the card will be destroyed if a personal message is added, as on the British ones.

The card is labelled Feldkorrezpondenzkarte – Field correspondence card- and that’s exactly what it is, a means for soldiers at the front to send short messages home for free.

Here the message is quite short and accompanied by a scrawl in pencil in a different had, presumably by the censor.

If you want to know more about German and AustroHungarian field postcards I’ve come across an informative blogpost with some good example images

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The Stepaniak code…

Posted on December 30, 2025 by dgm

Recently, I’ve been rereading Death of a Schoolboy by Hans Koning.

Long out of print it’s a novel about Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Franz Ferdinand and paints a compelling portrait of alienation and radicalisation. It’s also one of the books that sparked my interest in the last days of the Austro Hungarian Empire.

After the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro Hungarian throne, Princip and his co conspirators are arrested, beaten up and put in solitary confinement, where they find they can communicate with each other using the ‘Stepaniak Code’ by tapping on the heating pipe.

Given that I’ve been researching Sergei Stepaniak, Constance Garnett and the Friends of Russian Freedom, there is no way that this would not pique my interest.

The code probably has other names, but in Sergei Stepaniak’s book Underground Russia describing the Narondnaya Volya (People’s Will) group of anti tsarist terrorists in the 1880s he mentions the use of the code.

The code is breathtakingly simple and made up of a set of long and short taps, and has the merit that, while clumsier than morse code, there’s no appreciable learning curve, and providing you know how the code works it’s easy enough to make yourself a crib.

The pre-revolutionary Russian alphabet consisted of thirty five characters. Drawn on a 6×6 grid you get something like this

Position 36 is left blank, and each letter is represented by a sequence of long and short taps, for example Б is one short and two long and Ф is four short and four long.

Clumsy, but like texting in 1990s before even T9 predictive text was a thing, and you had to tap through the character options on the keypad, it was possible to get quite quick at it.

And it’s not just a Cyrillic thing. It’s easy enough to adapt to other languages and scripts.

For example, if you decided that you didn’t need to use the letter Z, you could make a 5×5 crib like this for English

If you were using another language, let’s say German or Swedish that uses extra accented characters you might add an extra row to accommodate them.

But the point remains, the code itself is breathtakingly simple, so simple that one can make one’s own crib on a scrap of paper, all you need know is the size of the grid and whether long taps signify a horizontal or vertical position on the grid…

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Stalin in London

Posted on December 27, 2025 by dgm

Earlier this year I read ‘Young Stalin‘ by Simon Sebag-Montefiore – the book was published nearly twenty years ago but is still an interesting read. (The book is still in print and second hand copies are available online for a few dollars.)

Police mugshot following his arrest in 1908

To an extent the book humanises the monster and shows Stalin to be a more complex individual than the standard caricature – Stalin apparently liked to grow flowers in his garden and to read novels, besides having a string of lovers as a young man.

Not quite what you expect of a man who sent millions to their deaths, at times almost on a whim.

Stalin was not well travelled – unlike some of the other revolutionaries he simply did not have the money or connections to exile himself abroad, although he did live for a time in Vienna, and spent a few weeks in London in the run up and during the 1907 RSDLP congress.

The rest of his time he was either on the run, in prison, or sentenced to internal exile, at one time to a remote indigenous community in the Arctic.

Stalin’s command of English was poor – he may have understood more than he let on, but he certainly was not fluent, and relied on interpreters later in life.

There’s a comment in Sebag-Montefiore’s book that in London, Stalin would often attend Anglican high church services, ostensibly to improve his English by listening to the priest’s homily.

But the question is, why Anglican services, and not some preachy wordy methodist or protestant church?

And I think the answer is simple, and again humanises the monster.

Stalin was alone, with little money and could barely speak English. Maybe he did go to Anglican services to improve his English, but perhaps also as he’d nearly become a priest after several years in the Orthodox seminary in Tblisi, he also missed the colour and spectacle of an Orthodox mass, and settled for the smells and bells of Anglicanism to soothe his homesickness and loneliness, while surrounded by the damp greyness of London.

Strange to think of a strange bearded man standing at the back of a very middle class English event – one wonders what the very middle class church goers of suburban London would have thought if they realised that that strange man would one day be the leader of the Soviet Union…

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Snow on their boots

Posted on December 21, 2025 by dgm

I’ve been working up at the Athenaeum for one morning a week cataloguing their historic book collection, and last Friday I catalogued some books written by Ursula Bloom.

There seemed to be rather a lot of books by Ms Bloom, she was obviously very popular with the users of the Athenaeum in the 1950s, so out of curiosity, I typed her name into wikipedia, and found a rather more interesting story than I imagined – I’d sort of envisaged her as a 1950s equivalent to Jilly Cooper but with less sex but just as many straining jodhpurs and heaving bosoms.

And that doesn’t seem to be an unfair characterisation of much of her work, but as often happens, if you scratch beneath the surface, you find a much more interesting person.

At the start of world war one she was working as a cinema pianist – her parents had separated and she was living in genteel poverty along with her mother in St Albans. (A cinema pianist was the person who played the musical accompaniment to silent movies – in itself quite interesting as it shows the sort of jobs open to middle class young women, and probably not quite what her piano teacher had envisaged)

She later wrote an autobiography describing life on the home front in world war one, rationing, zeppelin raids and the general atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion.

In her description of the start of world war one, she mentions the rumour that there were secret trains ferrying Russian reinforcements to support the British Expeditionary Force at Mons, where things were not going terribly well for the British – pushed back by the German army after an initial advance into Belgium, the British army attempted to stop the German advance at Mons.

They didn’t. They both suffered and inflicted heavy casualties, but the British army did slow the German advance enough to allow the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force to withdraw towards the French border.

The first Battle of Mons is also significant in that it was the first time in seventy years that a British army had fought anything other than a colonial war.

While the wars in South Africa had shown that there were deficiencies in British tactics in dealing with what were essentially guerilla forces, it was not until Mons that there was any real inkling that things might be different this time around and it might not be the glorious adventure that war was sometimes portrayed as in the popular literature of the time.

In the wake of the near disaster at Mons, there were widespread rumours that Russian reinforcements had been sent all the way from Siberia by way of Archangel in the north of Russia, and then by ship to the north of Scotland, bypassing neutral Norway. They had apparently been seen with snow still in the fur of their hats, and numbered up to ten thousand men.

The authorities were sufficiently worried to try to downplay the story, planting articles in the newspapers that what people had seen were Gaelic speaking soldiers from Ross-shire in Scotland – it might even have been more or less true, but looking at the newspapers of the time there was clearly a widespread belief that Russian reinforcements had come to the aid of British forces in Belgium.

It is almost certainly a case of mistaken identity – I doubt if the inhabitants of the south of England at the end of the Edwardian era, were familiar with the sound of spoken Gaelic, but what is interesting is that people quite clearly wanted to believe that the near disaster at Mons would turn out all right, and given that the newspapers of the time were trumpeting Russian successes in the east, particularly against Austria-Hungary, it’s perhaps natural that the Russians would be seen as potential saviours of what Kaiser Wilhelm allegedly described as ‘a contemptible little army‘.

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Edwardian paranoia

Posted on November 30, 2025 by dgm

The Edwardian era was an unsettling time for Britain.

Queen Victoria had died, and with her the certainties of the late Victorian era. People were unsure of what, exactly, was Britain’s place in the world, and if there would be a war.

And you see this reflected in the popular fiction of the time. One trope was ‘invasion fiction’, such as Erskine Childers’ Riddle in the Sands, a variant on espionage fiction where some dastardly foreign power, usually Germany (after all Britain was locked in a naval arms race with Germany, as expensive and deadly as the later Soviet US arms race), was going to mount a sneaky invasion and overwhelm an incompetent and bumbling British government, and square jawed chaps would have to take it on themselves to do something about it.

And in the Edwardian era Britain, fearing attack, made alliances.

First with France, despite lingering suspicions dating back to the Napoleonic era, not to mention some more recent colonial disputes, but at least they could agree that Germany was a threat to them both.

Britain’s other ally was Imperial Russia, the third member of the triple entente.

Russia was a nasty repressive autocratic state.

People disappeared, people were sent in exile to Siberia, but yet there was money to be made as the Russian economy was beginning to boom, new factories, a new middle class, railways to be built, and so on.

At the same time there were all these escapees from Russia. Some were poor Jews fleeing persecution, some were equally poor political dissidents choosing life in the East End of London over internal exile, or worse a labour camp somewhere in the trackless wastes of Siberia.

Tolerated, Edwardian Britain was quite liberal in allowing dissidents and exiles in, something that was recognised by at least some of the exile groups, including the RSDLP, the forerunner of the Bolsheviks. The RSDLP, who were appreciative of being able to hold their congresses in exile with minimal interference by the authorities actually went out of their way to avoid being involved in any violent activity in Britain.

After all, they might need somewhere to escape to if the revolution didn’t play out the way they expected.

And the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police, were in England as well, sometimes co-operating with the British police, sometimes carrying out what the KGB later called мокрые делы – wet jobs – assassinations, and sometimes, especially after Sidney Street and the Houndsditch murders, with the connivance of the authorities.

There were of course other sorts of dissidents, ones like Sergei Stepniak, who was a gentleman, who spoke nicely about literature and art, quite unlike these strange slightly frightening men with strong accents and and their talk of violence and revolution, and who attracted groups of supporters such as the Friends of Russian Freedom. (While its helpful to think of the various factions within the dissident community as separate groupings there was a continuum – Fanny Stepniak, Sergei Stepniak’s widow helped organise Lenin’s 1907 RSDLP congress in London.)

And some of these supporters helped the dissidents by smuggling banned books and pamphlets into Russia.

Constance Garnett did so, and was so frightened by the experience she dumped all the material she was smuggling and escaped back to Britain as quickly as possible.

Russia was a frightening place where frightening, violent, things happened.

And this was reflected in the espionage fiction of the time. Hence novels like Tom Bevan’s Runners of Contraband, a tale of smuggling forbidden books and other material into Russia.

It’s probably not great fiction, but just as during the cold war bookshops always had a shelf or two of espionage fiction, it’s a symptom of how Russia was viewed by the Edwardians…

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