In this issue

• This week: Suffragettes
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

While we were watching the film Amazing Grace – about the struggle by William Wilberforce to end the slave trade – the other day, the conversation turned to another British liberation movement: the suffragettes.

It seems almost inconceivable that, in a country that claimed to be free and democratic, half the population should have been excluded from political life simply because they had differently-shaped bits. But that was the case, even after some of the more archaic property laws concerning women’s property on marriage (it generally went to the husband) were repealed in the late nineteenth century.

John Stuart Mill advocated universal adult suffrage in the 1860s, but this proposal was struck out of the draft legislation which eventually became the 1867 Reform Act, the 1868 Reform (Scotland) Act and the 1868 Reform (Ireland) Act – instead, some of the property qualifications for men were relaxed a little. Nevertheless a peaceful campaign for votes for women began at that time. Unfortunately, MPs showed little inclination towards sympathy for women’s suffrage.

It wasn’t until the turn of the twentieth century that some members of the “suffragist” movement (as this politically moderate campaign was known) lost patience with the failure of successive governments to address the injustice of denying women the vote. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 with a single-issue manifesto: to campaign for immediate legislation granting women equal political rights to those already granted to men. Although independent of political parties, it focused its lobbying efforts on the Liberal Party, the more sympathetic of the two major parties of the day and, from 1905, the party of government.

Frustrated by the continuing reluctance of Liberal leaders (especially Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister from 1908 onwards) to grant women’s suffrage, Pankhurst and the WSPU resorted increasingly to force. Heckling and processions to the Houses of Parliament had already attracted police attention and thus increased publicity for the movement; these were now supplemented with window-smashing, burnings of letters in pillar-boxes, defacing of paintings in galleries, and, from 1912, arson attacks on politicians’ unoccupied homes – including that of David Lloyd George, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. (This particular attack had the effect of causing Lloyd George, previously a sympathiser, to become an outspoken opponent of the cause.)

The response, not unnaturally, was the arrest and imprisonment of many of the suffragettes, including Pankhurst herself on numerous occasions. Those imprisoned often started hunger strikes, which in turn were met with brutal forced feeding – often with catastrophic effects on the women’s health. Eventually the government passed the 1913 “Cat and Mouse” Act, which provided for the temporary release of women on hunger strike, their prison terms to be resumed once their health had recovered.

Possibly the most famous single act of protest by any of the suffragettes was by Emily Davison, who joined the WSPU in 1906 after a university education which included first-class honours from St Hugh’s College, Oxford (but no degree – women were not admitted to Oxford degrees at the time). At the 1913 Derby she stepped out in front of the King’s horse at Tattenham Corner, with a WSPU banner. It’s not clear whether she intended to commit suicide, to stop the King’s horse or simply to cross the track – but she was trampled and knocked unconscious, dying four days later of a fractured skull.

How far the suffragettes were responsible for the granting of women’s suffrage is a matter for debate. Although the Government did eventually promise some concessions (notably after Sylvia Pankhurst – another daughter of Emmeline – had been expelled from the movement for her socialist activities), they weren’t granted until the end of the First World War – by which time women’s work in the munitions factories and elsewhere in the economy, freeing up men for enlistment in the Armed Forces, had radically changed perceptions of their right to a political role. Even so, the 1918 Representation of the People Act granted only propertied women over the age of 30 the right to vote, at the same time as all men over 21 were enfranchised. (Bizarrely, the provisions of the Act meant that a 21-year-old woman could be elected an MP but could not vote for herself.) It was another ten years before women and men were placed on equal terms electorally.

And yet there are still countries where women don’t have the vote even today. It took over a hundred years in the UK from abolition of the slave trade to women’s enfranchisement. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery (in law, at least) in 1962, but is only now allowing men the vote at local level, after centuries of absolute monarchy – how long will it be before Saudi women get the vote, do you think?

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

The BBC website’s history channel is full of interesting things. Why not have a look?

British History Online is a digital library and resource for academic and personal users. There’s some interesting stuff in there including historical maps.

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• tweed heads where to live
• dan harrison elephant
• marinated olives research
• dancing queen glissando
• brewin dolphin expats
• gawdelpus!
• short dumpy carrots
• fancy basmati rice bags
• jimmy carr cat legs
• the history of duchesse potatoes

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“If it is true that men are better than women because they are stronger, why aren’t our sumo wrestlers in the government?”

– Kishida Toshiko, Japanese feminist (1863-1901)

Joke

Readers of William Safire’s “On Language” column in the New York Times were asked to provide fresh meanings for stale words. A sampling of the results:

• Alphabet: The most aggressive wager on the table
• Approbation: Fear of early release from prison
• Bashful: Being harsh or abusive toward someone
• Defibrillator: lie detector
• Ineffable: A guaranteed Grade-A term paper
• Suffragettes: Cheerleading squad for de Sade High

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

In this issue

• This week: Soap
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

(We cover a different topic each week – about anything and everything. If this week’s topic doesn’t interest you, don’t worry – it’ll be about something totally different next time.)

I always find it interesting to look more closely at an everyday product, one which almost everyone uses, but completely takes for granted. A couple of years ago we wrote about salt and its “profound influence on politics, economics, religion, science, and, last but not least, culinary history”.

We received quite a bit of positive feedback about that piece and so I thought we could do something similar again. I happened to be standing in the shower at the time and didn’t have to look very far for a suitable taken-for-granted product – soap.

Various apocryphal stories have it that there was a Mount Sapo where the Romans first discovered soap after sacrificing animals there – the tallow’s supposed to have mixed with wood ash and clay and formed a stuff which made clothes easier to clean, and it was named “sapo” after the mountain. In fact, soap or something like it had already been discovered much earlier, by both the Egyptians and the Indians, and the Romans seem to have had little idea of soap’s cleaning properties; they used to clean themselves using oil and a skin-scraper called a strigil.

Soap really got going as a result of the work of those leaders of mediaeval chemistry: the Muslims. They used vegetable oils, aromatic oils and lye (caustic soda) to produce soaps which were chemically identical to the bars we use today. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that one term for soap made using only vegetable oil and no animal fat is Castile soap, since Castile (in modern-day Spain) is where the Muslim and European civilisations had most contact with each other in the Middle Ages. But that’s just speculation. As for Britain, the earliest mentioned soap-making centres appear to have been Bristol in the 12th century, followed by Coventry, York and Hull about 100 years after that. It wasn’t produced in London in any volume until the 16th century.

Legend has it that the French don’t use soap. Although it seems to be true that the French buy less soap than the British, they’re certainly no strangers to it – Marseille soap, otherwise known as “savon de Marseille”, has been made around that city for about 700 years using broadly the same ingredients: water from the Mediterranean, olive oil (occasionally palm oil, or palm and copra oil) and soda ash from sea plants.

The first famous soap manufacturer was Andrew Pears from Mevagissey in Cornwall, who moved to London in 1789. Apparently while working as a barber in Gerrard Street in Soho he noticed the soft complexions of his clients and realised that there was a market for a gentle soap. Trial and error resulted in his discovering the transparent soap which is still the hallmark of Pears soap. Its advertisement in the late 19th century featuring Millais’s painting Bubbles was famous, as was another featuring Lillie Langtry writing a testimonial: “I first used your soap two years ago, since when I have used no other!” However, humorous magazine Punch did an even more famous lampoon of the testimonial advert, in which a filthy tramp was writing. Pears’ Cyclopaedia later reproduced this as their frontispiece in some editions!

The fact that a soap-making company should turn to publishing a book of useful facts wasn’t anything particularly strange to the late Victorians; industrial philanthropy had caught on widely by then. Perhaps the most lasting testimonial to it was an entire new town: Port Sunlight, built on the Wirral Peninsula by the Lever Brothers for the employees at their new factory there. It incorporated a cottage hospital, schools, a concert hall, swimming pool, church and 800 houses, all of them unique – in all, there are 900 Grade II listed buildings there. Small wonder that it’s been nominated for UNESCO World Heritage Site status.

On the other hand, the fact that a soap-making company should be so keen to advertise wasn’t surprising either. As Thomas A. Barratt, Pears’s pioneering advertising manager noted, “Any fool can make soap. It takes a clever man to sell it.” And it was the never-ending quest to sell more soap – directed squarely at the housewives who were buying it – that led to the rise of the soap opera on radio in the 1930s, so called because the soap companies, recognising that the episodic, often romantic dramas with their cliff-hanging instalment endings were just what housewives were looking for, sponsored them up to the hilt. Even nowadays in the UK, when men are almost as likely to watch a soap opera as women, the adverts tend to relate to household products and grocery items.

Next time you wash your hands perhaps you’ll see the humble bar of soap a little differently.

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

The Pharmaceutical Journal has an interesting article about the history of soap, written with a UK focus.

Port Sunlight’s Village Community website has lots of good stuff about the history of the village, its architecture, and some of its showpiece buildings, with plenty of illustrations.

And if you want to find out what’s going on in all the UK TV soaps (yes, including the Aussie ones too), you can do that on the What’s On TV magazine website.

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• neepshed
• pattaya seafood sex
• small small brick briges
• metrication scotland
• boulder of the tinking metal spheres
• why do people make banitza
• the penalty for masturbation in indonesia is decapitation a hoax?
• why do people get so upset about nudity?
• where can you buy bacardi
• infidelity forum

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

Two quotations this time round – from apparently opposing points of view!

“Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre but they are more deadly in the long run.”

– Mark Twain, US author (1835-1910)

“Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.”

– Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister and author (1804-1881)

Joke

A first-grade teacher collected well-known proverbs. She gave each child in her class the first half of a proverb and asked them to come up with the remainder of the proverb. Their insight may surprise you.

• Better to be safe than . . . punch a 5th grader
• It’s always darkest before . . . daylight savings
• You can lead a horse to water but . . . how?
• Don’t bite the hand that . . . looks dirty
• If you lie down with dogs, you’ll . . . stink in the morning
• Happy the bride who . . . gets all the presents
• Don’t put off till tomorrow what . . . you put on to go to bed
• Children should be seen and not . . . spanked or grounded
• You get out of something what you . . . see pictured on the box
• Better late than . . . pregnant

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

In this issue

• This week: Hell’s Kitchen – American style
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

We’re not big fans of reality TV and so-called “celebrities”. However, there are a few exceptions. We loved the British version of The Apprentice – where 12 people from various backgrounds compete, over 12 weeks, to become Alan Sugar’s apprentice. Each week one leaves the show after being told, “You’re fired!” The format of the programme was taken from a series made in America with Donald Trump as the boss seeking an apprentice. We watched a little bit of that but couldn’t stomach the behaviour of most of the people. Obviously it’s essential to be competitive in these contests but these people really took it to extremes.

We were stuck for something to watch and had the opportunity to watch the American version of Hell’s Kitchen, which stars the ubiquitous Gordon Ramsay. (We’ve never seen the British version of it.) We weren’t too keen at first, as we hadn’t enjoyed the American version of The Apprentice. However, bizarre though some of it was, we became completely addicted to it and watched the entire three series of Hell’s Kitchen American style, not once but twice! I’m not sure if I like Ramsay very much but he does make for compulsive viewing.

Hell’s Kitchen pretty much follows the same format as The Apprentice but, instead of consisting of business tasks, it’s set in a kitchen and restaurant where chefs compete to win their own restaurant. Each week one is told, “Hand me your [chef's] jacket,” and has to leave the show. There are challenges and rewards and, unlike The Apprentice, there are also rather harsh punishments (kitchen duties) for the losers.

The programme itself is interesting, especially for anyone keen on cooking. But I think it was the people-watching aspect of it which made it such compulsive viewing. Some of the things they did were just plain weird. It made us wonder how on earth they’d got on such a show in the first place but perhaps that’s what makes “good TV”.

There was Aaron, the man who burst into tears almost every time he was spoken to, never mind shouted at. There was Jen, who practically fell over (literally!) every time something exciting happened – like the first time Gordon Ramsay spoke to her, and any time she won anything. There was Bonnie, who screamed “OH MY GOD!” repeatedly at just about anything. The women all whooped, screamed and leapt about like cheerleaders every time something good happened. The men had their quirks too, but in general weren’t quite so weird.

One thing that struck us as particularly odd happened after one of the contestants won $1,000 to spend in a kitchen equipment and cook shop. The shop sold all kinds of goodies of interest to the keen cook, and the contestant, among other things, bought one of Gordon Ramsay’s cookbooks. As it turned out, this contestant also won the next challenge, which was to reproduce Gordon Ramsay’s signature dish after tasting it, without a recipe. The others then accused her of cheating because she had read that book. How can reading a book be cheating? If I were to be going on that show (no thanks!) I would’ve read every Gordon Ramsay book I could lay my hands on, and practised as many recipes as I could. But apparently this was unacceptable to the American contestants.

There was bitching and back-stabbing, plotting and scheming. It was quite amazing the lengths that the contestants would go to in their attempts to sabotage the others.

Of course, there’s a limit to what can be shown in about 40 minutes, but we often felt we weren’t getting the full story. Apart from the bleeping out and pixellating of all the profanities (apparently this is only for US viewers; the programmes are shown uncensored in several other countries, including the UK), there was a lot going on which we weren’t told about. For example, the prize for winning the show was to become Head Chef of your own restaurant with a $250,000 salary and a share of the profits. We were interested to find out what had become of the winner of the first series, and whether s/he was still Head Chef of that restaurant. After a bit of digging on the Internet we discovered that the prize is only for one year – a pretty important fact which was never once mentioned on the show.

So perhaps “reality TV” isn’t quite as real as it seems…

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

Find out about Hell’s Kitchen straight from the horse’s mouth. Warning – all the winners are pictured on this page so if you haven’t seen the series and think you might like to, this is a spoiler.
Fox TV: Hell’s Kitchen

And if you’re interested in finding out all the gen about the TV chefs, where better than the BBC’s website?
BBC Food: Chefs’ Biogs

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• michael fish clothing
• dwarves cocaine platters
• adult babies in spain
• his is gregoriava from bulgaria. i saw her snatch this morning during her warm up and it was amazing
• expat witches
• flubbadubbadubbadub
• funny stuff to do in a hotel
• this is the tale curly wurly assorted creams
• weird insect reproduction
• emma s wild world

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“Recipe:  A series of step-by-step instructions for preparing ingredients you forgot to buy, in utensils you don’t own, to make a dish the dog wouldn’t eat.”

– Anon.

Joke

A visiting sheikh from the Middle East is at a party in London. The food makes him thirsty and he sends his private aide to collect water several times.

He demands water for the fifth time but the aide comes back without water. The sheikh demands to know why.

The aide explains, “Other guest is sitting on waterhole in bathroom.”

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

In this issue

• This week: Website usability
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

Sorry. We’ve not sent the newsletter for a couple of weeks. We were in Kuala Lumpur on holiday and then busy re-launching another of our websites when we got back. To use the words of our friend Martin Pickering, we started off sending the BE newsletter weekly and ended up sending it weakly.

Never mind, we’re back and this week’s subject is website usability. For anyone new to the newsletter, don’t be put off! We cover a great variety of subjects in our newsletters, and this sort of issue gets featured only on the rare occasions when it’s likely to have an impact on our readers – so stay subscribed!

This is a subject which has interested me immensely for a long time. I even did my MSc dissertation on it. But don’t worry, I’m not going to get all technical on you. (Fat chance!) The reason that usability is at the front of my mind this week is because of the re-launch of our other website.

Now, you might think that if a website is nice and easy to use and provides the visitor with a good experience, then that website will be more profitable than one which is difficult to use. Not necessarily so!

Here’s a quote from my dissertation:

Nutley (2005) discussed how today’s sites have become so easy to use that the customer can get through the transaction process too quickly and easily. This is good for customer retention, but if the customer misses all the other messages on the site, then it is bad for increased sales. Paradoxically, usability may be counter-productive.

This is talking about an e-commerce website (a website which sells things). However, we’ve had a very similar experience this week with our little content site (a website which provides information; in this case, the information is provided to the user free of charge and the money comes from advertising).

The site is a directory of links to British newspapers online. It was getting plenty of visitors but making very little money – in fact, less than it cost us to maintain it. Given that we earn our living online, we sought advice on how to make that site pay for itself rather than costing us money to provide people with a free service.

The suggested changes were very radical, so we hesitated to go the whole hog for fear of putting off all the site’s visitors. But we implemented some of them. The result was that we changed an ugly little site (designed by me about five years ago when I had the crazy idea that I might become a web designer) into what one visitor called a “nightmare”.

Basically the old version of the site, although ugly, was very easy to use. It was easy to find what you were looking for and to find your way around (navigation). The new version confused people and a number of visitors gave feedback saying they wouldn’t return unless we changed it back to the old version and its simple navigation.

So, should we go back to the old easy-to-use site? I think probably not. Why? Because this new version is bringing in some money now, rather than making a loss. It seems – counter-intuitively – that there is profit in reducing usability. Oh, the joys of making a living online.

Profits aren’t everything, of course, but we have to eat too so for the time being we’ll leave that website as it is. I’m in no hurry to try the same experiment on BE, though.

This is a very complex subject, and one which affects all Internet users; I’ve barely scratched the surface of it here. I hope you’ll give your views on it.

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not comment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

Just so you can see what all the fuss was about, here’s a link to the site we’ve just redesigned:
British Newspapers Online

My dissertation is on flowtheory.com and is free to download (594KB PDF). It’s a bit boring in places but may be of use to anyone who has an interest in website usability.

Satcure.net is one of Martin Pickering’s sites – about satellite and digital TV. I thought that since I’ve quoted him above, he deserved a mention here. Also, without Martin my dissertation would never have been submitted on time. (I’d thought an email version was acceptable and discovered at the eleventh hour that they wanted a hard copy printed and bound in a specific way. Eeek! Martin saved the day.)

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• masturbation and constipation
• appreciate being made aware of gc.ca
• army institutionalised
• how to please your boyfriend orally [Tell him he's lovely, perhaps?]
• british opinion of the beach boys
• helen simpson 33 from nottingham was wearing
• animal vulva and dick
• greek yogurt total back in australia
• welliebobs
• a wee tatty

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more ‘user-friendly’ Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words, ‘user-friendly’ on the cover.”

– Bill Gates, US software tycoon (1955- )

Joke

A newsboy was standing on the corner with a stack of papers, yelling, “Read all about it! Fifty people swindled! Fifty people swindled!”

Curious, a man walked over, bought a paper and checked the front page. Finding nothing, the man said, “There’s nothing in here about fifty people being swindled.”

The newsboy ignored him and went on yelling: “Read all about it! Fifty-one people swindled!”

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

In this issue

• This week: the Holocaust
• Virtual Snacks
• Bizarre Searches
• Quotation and joke

This week

Dave and I have been reading Vikram Seth’s book, Two Lives. For those who haven’t read or heard about it, Two Lives is a biography about Seth’s great-uncle Shanti – referred to in the book as “Shanti Uncle” – and Shanti’s wife, Henny, who was a German Jew. The couple met when Shanti left India to study dentistry in Berlin in the early 1930s; he found lodgings with Henny’s mother, Ella Caro. Shanti had to leave Germany in 1936 to find work (the Nazis refused to allow him to work in dentistry even as a university professor’s assistant); but he and Henny met again in London in July 1939 when Henny’s employer (whose wife had been Jewish) helped her get out of Germany.

The book is a compelling read, and I’m reluctant to give away too much about it as that would spoil it for those of you who have yet to read it. But, as you might guess, there are some horrific passages describing the fate of Henny’s mother and her sister Lola, both of whom were unable to get out of Berlin before the outbreak of war. After being forced to give up their home and move to a far smaller flat in a block marked out for Jewish tenants, the two were “resettled”. In May 1943 Ella Caro – by now aged 71, and in poor health – was sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in what’s now the Czech Republic; this was something of a “show camp” where a thin veneer of respectability was maintained for the benefit of Red Cross inspectors. In fact, the overcrowding, cruelly inadequate rations and insanitary conditions meant that many of the inmates soon died; Ella died five months after her deportation.

Lola Caro was sent to the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She apparently survived for a while as fit for slave labour – if she had had a child or been ill, she would have been sent straight to the gas chambers (if she hadn’t already died in the dreadful overcrowding of the cattle trucks that were used as transport). But before too long she would have been too weak to work. The book’s description of the gas chambers is remorseless in its matter-of-fact portrayal of the killings. I had always thought that the deaths were relatively rapid, with almost immediate loss of consciousness. In fact they took several minutes of gradual and agonising suffocation. Those victims who survived longest would claw their way over the bodies of the already dead in a vain attempt to reach breathable air.

There are many accounts of similar Nazi atrocities. Roman Polanski’s film, The Pianist (based on the autobiography of Polish virtuoso Wladyslaw Szpilman) contains several horrific scenes. But what makes them so horrific is not just the violence – shocking though that is – but the routine, casual, random way in which it’s perpetrated. There’s one particular scene where the work-team Szpilman’s in are made to halt, and a number of them are made to step forward and lie down before being shot through the head. At no point is any reason given for these killings, or why the people singled out have been chosen; it’s just random brutality.

But it’s also distressing to hear about what happened after the war in Germany. Many of Henny and Shanti’s former friends in Berlin were unwilling to face up to the fact that they had acquiesced in the persecution and murder of the Jews. Some even complained that they were suffering unjustly through the devastation of their country by the Allies, or not receiving the same welfare benefits as those few German Jews who had managed to survive the Nazis’ brutality. It’s as if the whole nation was in denial.

(On which subject, I was shocked to see – while searching for a relevant quotation for this week’s newsletter – just how prevalent the notion still is that the extermination camps and the gas chambers never actually existed. I knew there were one or two nutters around still peddling that myth – like David Irving, or the Ku Klux Klan’s David Duke – but I never really expected there to be so many.)

This is not to single out the Germans. Sadly, there are plenty of other instances where one race or nation has persecuted or exterminated members of another. That includes the British, who were responsible for the extermination of native Tasmanians in the first half of the nineteenth century – to say nothing of the slave trade which brought so much wealth to Great Britain in the eighteenth century and so much misery to the peoples of western Africa. And the Germans at least have had the honesty to admit to their crimes; the Holocaust is a core part of the curriculum in their schools, and it’s a crime in Germany to deny that it took place.

Something to think about, perhaps, the next time you see an anti-German headline in The Sun or hear someone spouting about the benefits the Empire brought the world.

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not ccomment and tell us?

Virtual Snacks

Just a few suggestions if you have a little time to spare:

Here’s a rather shocking story from 2002 about some white Tasmanians attempting to cash in on benefits for Aborigines.

[Obsolete content and links removed]

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

• pigeon sex parts
• images of oily rubber
• splinter of darkness
• blast the balls
• sex shop electrical
• in my perfect school
• continental cockroaches
• changing head of photo fun
• men tips for sex india masturbation
• nippy & nigel

Till next time…
Happy surfing!

Kay & Dave
Editor & Deputy Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

“In Maidanek, Poland, there was only one place where the children were treated kindly: at the entrance to the gas chamber each one was handed a sweet.”

– Gideon Hausner, Israeli jurist, main prosecutor at Adolf Eichmann’s trial and Chairman of Yad Vashem (1915-1990)

Joke

(We normally like to include a joke on a similar theme to the newsletter itself. That’s obviously not appropriate this week, so we’ve chosen something totally different instead.)

Two Scots, Archie and Jock, are sitting in the pub discussing Jock’s forthcoming wedding.

“Och, it’s all going magic,” says Jock. “I’ve got everything organised already, the flowers, the church, the cars, the reception, the rings, the minister, even ma stag night.”

Archie nods approvingly.

“Hell, I’ve even bought a kilt to be married in,” continues Jock.

“A kilt?” asks Archie. “That’s braw, you’ll look pure smart in that. What’s the tartan?”

“Och,” says Jock, “I’d imagine she’ll just be in white.”

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)