Kenneth Cummins
Captain Kenneth Alfred Hugo Cummins (6 March 1900 – 10 December 2006) was, at age 106, one of the last surviving British veterans of the First World War. He served in the Royal Naval Reserve in the First World War as a (Temporary) Midshipman (15 July 1918 – 18 January 1919), and then in the Merchant Navy in the Second World War. Kenneth Cummins was born in Richmond, London. His father was an officer in the Merchant Navy. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby, and was a member of the school's Officers' Training Corps when the Great War broke out. He joined P&O as a naval cadet aged 15. He trained at HMS ''Worcester'' for two years, then joined HMS ''Morea'', an armed merchant cruiser on convoy duty from England to Sierra Leone, as a midshipman. On his first voyage, his ship encountered the wreckage of the Canadian hospital ship HMHS ''Llandovery Castle'' to the southwest of Fastnet rock. Against standing orders, the ship had been torpedoed and sunk by ''U-8 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fighting occurring throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific Ocean, Pacific, and parts of Asia. An estimated 9 million soldiers were killed in combat, plus another 23 million wounded, while 5 million civilians died as a result of military action, hunger, and disease. Millions more died in Genocides in history (World War I through World War II), genocides within the Ottoman Empire and in the Spanish flu, 1918 influenza pandemic, which was exacerbated by the movement of combatants during the war. Prior to 1914, the European great powers were divided between the Triple Entente (comprising French Third Republic, France, Russia, and British Empire, Britain) and the Triple A ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Fastnet Rock
Fastnet Lighthouse is a 54m high lighthouse situated on the remote Fastnet Rock in the Atlantic Ocean. It is the most southerly point of Ireland and lies southwest of Cape Clear Island and from County Cork on the Irish mainland. The current lighthouse is the second to be built on the rock and is the tallest in Ireland. First lighthouse Construction of the first lighthouse began in 1853, and it first produced a light on 1 January 1854. The lighthouse replaced an early one built on Cape Clear Island in 1818, partly motivated by the loss of an American sailing packet, '' Stephen Whitney'', in thick fog during November 1847 on nearby West Calf Island causing the death of 92 of her 110 passengers and crew. The new lighthouse was constructed of cast iron with an inner lining of brick and was designed by George Halpin. Costing £17,390, the tower was tall with a high lantern structure on top, giving a total height of around . It had an oil-burning lamp of 38 kilocandelas; in co ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Operation Torch
Operation Torch (8 November 1942 – 16 November 1942) was an Allied invasion of French North Africa during the Second World War. Torch was a compromise operation that met the British objective of securing victory in North Africa while allowing American armed forces the opportunity to engage in the fight against Nazi Germany on a limited scale. It was the first mass involvement of US troops in the European–North African Theatre, and saw the first major airborne assault carried out by the United States. While the French colonies were formally aligned with Germany via Vichy France, the loyalties of the population were mixed. Reports indicated that they might support the Allies. American General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Mediterranean Theater of Operations, planned a three-pronged attack on Casablanca (Western), Oran (Center) and Algiers (Eastern), then a rapid move on Tunis to catch Axis forces (Afrika Korps) in North Africa from the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
North Africa
North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in the west, to Egypt's Suez Canal. Varying sources limit it to the countries of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, a region that was known by the French during colonial times as "''Afrique du Nord''" and is known by Arabs as the Maghreb ("West", ''The western part of Arab World''). The United Nations definition includes Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, and the Western Sahara, the territory disputed between Morocco and the Sahrawi Republic. The African Union definition includes the Western Sahara and Mauritania but not Sudan. When used in the term Middle East and North Africa ( MENA), it often refers only to the countries of the Maghreb. North Africa includes the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, and plazas de so ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Troopship
A troopship (also troop ship or troop transport or trooper) is a ship used to carry soldiers, either in peacetime or wartime. Troopships were often drafted from commercial shipping fleets, and were unable land troops directly on shore, typically loading and unloading at a seaport or onto smaller vessels, either tenders or barges. Attack transports, a variant of ocean-going troopship adapted to transporting invasion forces ashore, carry their own fleet of landing craft. Landing ships beach themselves and bring their troops directly ashore. History Ships to transport troops were used in Antiquity. Ancient Rome used the navis lusoria, a small vessel powered by rowers and sail, to move soldiers on the Rhine and Danube. The modern troopship has as long a history as passenger ships do, as most maritime nations enlisted their support in military operations (either by leasing the vessels or by impressing them into service) when their normal naval forces were deemed insufficient ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Ocean Liner
An ocean liner is a passenger ship primarily used as a form of transportation across seas or oceans. Ocean liners may also carry cargo or mail, and may sometimes be used for other purposes (such as for pleasure cruises or as hospital ships). Cargo vessels running to a schedule are sometimes called ''liners''. The category does not include ferries or other vessels engaged in short-sea trading, nor dedicated cruise ships where the voyage itself, and not transportation, is the primary purpose of the trip. Nor does it include tramp steamers, even those equipped to handle limited numbers of passengers. Some shipping companies refer to themselves as "lines" and their container ships, which often operate over set routes according to established schedules, as "liners". Ocean liners are usually strongly built with a high freeboard to withstand rough seas and adverse conditions encountered in the open ocean. Additionally, they are often designed with thicker hull plating than is found ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
HMS Viceroy Of India
RMS ''Viceroy of India'' was an ocean liner of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O). She was a British Royal Mail Ship on the Tilbury–Bombay route and was named after the Viceroy of India. In World War II, she was converted to and used as a troopship. She was sunk in the Mediterranean in November 1942 by . Building P&O ordered the ship from Alexander Stephen and Sons of Glasgow in 1927. She was originally to be called ''Taj Mahal'', after the 17th-century mausoleum of Mumtaz Mahal in Agra. She was laid down in April 1927, launched in September 1928 and completed in March 1929. She cost £1,090,987 She had six water-tube boilers with a combined heating surface of that supplied steam at 400 lbf/in2 to two turbo generators. These supplied current to electric motors with a combined rating of 3,565 NHP that drove twin screw propellers. British Thomson-Houston (BT-H) of Rugby, Warwickshire built the turbo-generators and motors. Each turbo-generator ra ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
George Herbert, 5th Earl Of Carnarvon
George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, (26 June 1866 – 5 April 1923), styled Lord Porchester until 1890, was an English peer and aristocrat best known as the financial backer of the search for and excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Background and education Styled Lord Porchester from birth, he was born at 66 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, London, the only son of Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon, a distinguished Tory statesman, by his first wife Lady Evelyn Stanhope, daughter of Anne and George Stanhope, 6th Earl of Chesterfield. Aubrey Herbert was his half-brother. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He inherited the Bretby Hall estate in Derbyshire from his maternal grandmother, Anne Elizabeth, Dowager Countess of Chesterfield in 1885, and succeeded his father in the earldom in 1890. He was High Steward of Newbury. Family Lord Carnarvon married Almina Victoria Maria Alexandra Wombwe ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
SS Macedonia
SS is an abbreviation for ''Schutzstaffel'', a paramilitary organisation in Nazi Germany. SS, Ss, or similar may also refer to: Places *Guangdong Experimental High School (''Sheng Shi'' or ''Saang Sat''), China *Province of Sassari, Italy (vehicle plate code) *South Sudan (ISO 3166-1 code SS) *SS postcode area, UK, around Southend-on-Sea * San Sebastián, Spanish city Arts, entertainment, and media *SS (band), an early Japanese hardcore punk band * ''SS'' (manga), a Japanese comic 2000-2003 *SS Entertainment, a Korean entertainment company *''S.S.'', for Sosthenes Smith, H. G. Wells pseudonym for story ''A Vision of the Past'' *SS, the production code for the 1968 ''Doctor Who'' serial ''The Wheel in Space'' *''Sesame Street'', American kids' TV show Language *Ss (digraph) used in Pinyin * ß or ss, a German-language ligature * switch-reference in linguistics *'' Scilicet'', used as a section sign * (''in the strict sense'') in Latin *Swazi language (ISO 639-1 code "ss") Scien ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Spanish Flu
The 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, commonly known by the misnomer Spanish flu or as the Great Influenza epidemic, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented case was March 1918 in Kansas, United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history. The pandemic broke out near the end of World War I, when wartime censors suppressed bad news in the belligerent countries to maintain morale, but newspapers freely reported the outbreak in neutral Spain, creating a false impression of Spain as the epicenter and leading to the "Spanish flu" misnomer. Limited historical epidemiologic ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Port Jackson
Port Jackson, consisting of the waters of Sydney Harbour, Middle Harbour, North Harbour and the Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers, is the ria or natural harbour of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The harbour is an inlet of the Tasman Sea (part of the South Pacific Ocean). It is the location of the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge. The location of the first European settlement and colony on the Australian mainland, Port Jackson has continued to play a key role in the history and development of Sydney. Port Jackson, in the early days of the colony, was also used as a shorthand for Sydney and its environs. Thus, many botanists, see, e.g, Robert Brown's '' Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen'', described their specimens as having been collected at Port Jackson. Many recreational events are based on or around the harbour itself, particularly Sydney New Year's Eve celebrations. The harbour is also the starting point of the Sydney to Hob ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Quarantine
A quarantine is a restriction on the movement of people, animals and goods which is intended to prevent the spread of disease or pests. It is often used in connection to disease and illness, preventing the movement of those who may have been exposed to a communicable disease, yet do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis. It is distinct from medical isolation, in which those confirmed to be infected with a communicable disease are isolated from the healthy population. Quarantine considerations are often one aspect of border control. The concept of quarantine has been known since biblical times, and is known to have been practised through history in various places. Notable quarantines in modern history include the village of Eyam in 1665 during the bubonic plague outbreak in England; East Samoa during the 1918 flu pandemic; the Diphtheria outbreak during the 1925 serum run to Nome, the 1972 Yugoslav smallpox outbreak, the SARS pandemic, the Ebola pandemic and extensive qu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |