UFO Info Week-End

The film attracted a domestic audience of 20 million – a figure not matched until the release

The film attracted a domestic audience of 20 million – a figure not matched until the release of Star Wars in 1977, and accounting for nearly half the entire population of wartime Britain.Now, on the eve of the 90th anniversary of the Somme, a team of documentary-makers and historical experts, including specialists from the Imperial War Museum, National Army Museum and Scotland Yard, has for the first time subjected the film to critical scientific analysis.The team used techniques ranging from satellite analysis of trench locations to professional lip-reading and the latest facial-recognition software to prove the genuine nature of nearly all the battle scenes in the film. But far from the swift, decisive master-stroke that most were expecting, the battle swiftly descended into a hideous war of attrition, fought in the stinking, blood-spattered trenches of the western front.The carnage has gone down in historical infamy, not least because of Malins’s shocking footage – arguably the first film of battle in British military history.When Malins’s footage was released in British cinemas the following month under the simple title The Battle of the Somme, it was a sensation. You can hear stories about relatives, but actually seeing him there made it absolutely real. It was very moving; the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and for a brief moment I was in that picture with him.”The first day of the Battle of the Somme was the bloodiest 24 hours in the history of the British Empire.

By the next morning, nearly 60,000 young men – a large number of them civilian volunteers – would be lying dead or wounded on the killing fields of north-western France.The Allied forces were attempting to break through German lines along a 25-mile front – both north and south of the River Somme. When he looks towards the camera, the family resemblance is incredible: he has a jawline and an expression on his face which look just like my father and my brother.”I remember my grandfather as an avuncular, bald-headed man who sat me on his knee and played the harmonica. To see him so much younger and about to go into that horrible carnage was a very powerful experience. Certainly, some scenes were re-enacted and filmed for propaganda purposes. But now, using a series of new scientific techniques, analysts have proved for the first time that most of the images are genuine, enabling them to identify many of the combatants and trace their surviving relatives.One descendant who got to “meet” her grandfather, Captain Dawson, thanks to the documentary-makers was Anne Dawson.The young captain, so fearlessly preparing to lead the advance – filmed that morning by the celebrated cinematographer Geoffrey Malins – miraculously survived the multiple gunshot wounds he sustained in the assault and was invalided back to Britain. He died in the mid-1960s, when Ms Dawson was still a small child.”I knew that my grandfather had been injured at the Somme, but to actually, physically, see him there was amazing,” said Ms Dawson, a former ITV newsreader and mother of two from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.”I was just fascinated to see him, and it was great for my daughters to be able to see their great-grandfather too.

A few seconds later, he was also one of the first to be cut down by German machine-gun fire.For decades, historians have argued over the veracity of the film shot that morning, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. As commander of the company, he was one of the first on to the parapet. The German lines had been subjected to heavy bombardment for an entire week, and the Allies had the advantage of vastly superior numbers.
As the order came just after dawn to send the troops over the top, Captain Dawson was captured on film ushering his men, of the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers, along the trench. The Prince of Wales will be asked to support demands for British troops to leave Iraq when he meets the parents of soldiers killed in the Gulf war in private this week.

Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall have invited several of the most prominent critics of Tony Blair’s policy on Iraq to Highgrove this Thursday, including Reg Keys, who stood against the Prime Minister in his Sedgefield constituency at last year’s general election.. Sheltering in a sunken road near the French village of Beaumont Hamel on 1 July 1916, Captain Edmond McNaghten “Pongo” Dawson believed the first British thrust during the Battle of the Somme would be swift and decisive. “An induced abortion is safer the earlier it is performed,” it states.Roger Smith, a Christian ethics campaigner, said he opposed any relaxation of the law. “This issue is where the debate starts and finishes: women’s rights against those of the unborn We have to give precedence to the life that has no voice. We’ve plenty of advocates for women, but who are the advocates for the ones without a voice?”. Women should have the right to ask for earlier and quicker abortions to save unnecessary distress and anxiety, Britain’s doctors will be told this week.