Commander Kelly's Football team! |
The American Conservative tour on London resumes with a tour of Arsenal Football Club's home in London. Emirates stadium in Holloway is now where you will find the legendary Arsenal Football Club playing its home games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_F.C.). Arsenal was founded in 1886. The team was created by fifteen workingmen employed at the Royal Arsenal in Woolich that supplied weapons and munitions to the British military. Each of the workingmen / partners put up sixpence for their interest in the team (then called "Dial Square") and a another bloke kicked in three shillings to buy the ball for a team's first game!
Go Gunners! (Photo: Lari Abraham) |
Commander Kelly at Emirates Stadium (Photo: Lari Abraham) |
Emirates stadium was completed in 2006 and features a pair of historic brass cannon at the front. Arsenal is not bashful about celebrating its military roots. Consider how very different this is from the names of professional sports franchises in the USA. Our most violent and aggressive national sport, NFL football, features only three vaguely combative historical team names -- the Patriots, Raiders and Buccaneers. The US Constitution has at the Second amendment and millions of Americans support the NRA, but what US professional team would dare to put a gun on its uniform? The Cowboys of Dallas, for example, may have had six-shooters, but you won't find any on Tony Romo! The British, however, are fiercely proud of their island heritage and the role that their armed forces have played in building an Empire that, in general, advanced the cause of liberty around the world.
Soviet Philately |
Napoleon and his guns |
Artillery is by far the deadliest and most effective form of land-based armament; in the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II the vast majority of combat deaths were caused by artillery (source: Wikipedia). The father of the creator of James Bond, Valentine Fleming, was killed by an artillery shell in World War I.
Any list of world-famous artillerymen must begin with Napoleon, who commanded the French Republican guns that drove the British from Toulon in 1793. He was promoted to Brigadier General at the age of 24 after this feat. He defeated a royalist insurrection on October 5, 1795 (13 Vendemiaire) with a famous "whiff of grapeshot" advancing himself further. Other great artillerymen include the German philosopher Friedrich Nietszche who once wrote, "had God thought of 'heavy artillery' he would never have created the world". The American President who dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, Harry Truman, was a proud veteran of battery "B" in World War I.
|
GO GUNNERS!
You can now purchase Commander Kelly's
No comments:
Post a Comment