On 20/06/25 09:27, William Hyde wrote:
snip

Just in case I did not previously recommend Banville's "Snow", let me do >>> so now.ÿ It is a mystery, but not involving Quirke.

Writing as Benjamin Black, Banville wrote seven sequential novels about
Quirke. As Banville, he has written four novels classified by Fantastic
Fiction as "Strafford and Quirke" Mysteries. "Snow" is the first of
these four and the eighth in sequence. "Snow" is the only book in which
Quirke is not a principal character but I would recommend the whole
series is best read in publication order.

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Titus G wrote:

On 20/06/25 09:27, William Hyde wrote:
snip

Just in case I did not previously recommend Banville's "Snow", let me do >>>> so now.ÿ It is a mystery, but not involving Quirke.

Writing as Benjamin Black, Banville wrote seven sequential novels about Quirke. As Banville, he has written four novels classified by Fantastic Fiction as "Strafford and Quirke" Mysteries. "Snow" is the first of
these four and the eighth in sequence. "Snow" is the only book in which Quirke is not a principal character but I would recommend the whole
series is best read in publication order.

Thanks. I'd lost track of what Banville is doing.

William Hyde

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On Thu, 26 Jun 2025 17:42:34 -0700, Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever@dslextreme.com> wrote:

Also from Wikipedia, Senior Service was
an expensive filterless cigarette brand
launched in 1925.  "Senior Service" also
is a colloquial name of the British Navy.
I'm assuming that this name is older than
the cigarettes.

The Royal Navy was known as the "Senior Service" at LEAST as far back
as Elizabethan times if not further. The British Army lost it's
"Royal" designation when most of it supported Cromwell against Charles
I and Charles II (which was after Cromwell's death)

So yeah - well before 1925 :) By then of course England / Britain had
had 2 very long reigning Queens Regnant (Elizabeth I and Victoria)

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On Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:47:47 -0700, Paul S Person
<psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

Just a note: I rather think William Hyde's point is that they were for >/officers/, not tars (who were common seamen).

I agree with you though in that era many future officers despite being
"of good class" had been at sea since age 12 - while the Royal Navy
College was created in Napoleonic times, the Royal Navy side of the
Napoleonic wars era (in which most would include the great voyages of
discovery by Captain Cook and others) was fought by men who had grown
up from these boys. It was not uncommon to have 18 year old
Lieutenants who had started their service this way.

One irony of all this is that the present day distribution of cats
throughout the world largely happened thanks to the common seamen of
the Royal Navy who often took cats to sea and often these cats got
loose on land - thus anywhere the Royal Navy had been (which includes
the United States) has the majority of their cats being of the
"British" sort - and the ONLY country that retained their native cat
lines was Egypt whose cats go back more than 3000 years before the
Royal Navy got to Egypt.. For instance while China has cats, most of
the cats in Hong Kong are of the "British" variety which are quite
different from those of China.

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On Sat, 28 Jun 2025 08:52:33 -0700, Paul S Person
<psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

After WW2, this pretty much died (royal sons [and maybe daughters now]
may still spend some time in a military service, but that is generally >temporary). Militaries became both professionalized and very technical
-- just having a title and and income and a winning smile/pleasant >personality was no longer enough. Actual knowledge of how to use the
various types of units (often determined by their equipment) became >necessary.=20

It certainly did - my father-in-law's family had 3 sons (a daughter
had died in childhood before they emigrated to Canada - guess who my
wife was named for?) and as the oldest son my father-in-law was
expected to be a farmer on his father's land - but went to the Ontario
steel mills instead. His two younger brothers went to the Royal
Military College of Canada (think West Point but multi-service) and
one became a career officer and retired as Lt Colonel while his
brother fulfilled his Academy obligations then went to the Canadian
National Research Council where he went on to get his PhD.

There is no way at all the two of them would have gotten Academy
appointments a generation earlier.

My wife told me of Thanksgiving (which remember is in October in
Canada) when in 1973 towards the end of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war the
United States and NATO went to Defcon 3. Which meant that her recently
retired air force uncle was mobilized and a very junior officer rang
her parents' doorbell on Thanksgiving Day and asked if her uncle was
there. The junior officer was told yes then asked if there was a room
in their house where he could talk privately to her uncle. A room was
made available and 1/2 hour later her uncle excused himself from
dinner.

My wife learned many years later that he had been given
pre-mobilization orders and many years later told my wife that had he
actually been mobilized he would have to get to a mobilization point
as quickly as possible for shipment to Norway where his orders told
him he would command a transport squadron. However the Arabs +
Israelis quickly made a ceasefire, Defcon 3 was cancelled and nothing
further of a military nature took place in NATO.

Anybody here who remembers the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (I was in
university at the time) remembers what a shocker it was compared to
1967.

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On Fri, 4 Jul 2025 16:58:56 -0400, William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com>
wrote:

Coincidences do happen. Some names have no connection with their
apparent meaning. A name that circa 1200 sounded like "churchman",
might have come to be pronounced that way in time. Dorothy or Erilar
could perhaps have given us a name for this process.

There are many old things from that era that have somehow survived.
There was a recently published list of dog's names from England in the
13th century and my daughter was thrilled to find our mutt's name on
it (well Bo instead of Beau). Many of the names would be unheard of
today but many have survived to the present day though usually spelled differently since standardization of name spellings didn't really take
hold in England till Tudor times.

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