Well, I've decided to post the weblinks I've long been promising – all three of them. I thought there would be more. I certainly asked a lot more people and organisations for permission to link to their sites. It's a shame, I think you would have got a kick out of some of the sites and might even have found out some interesting things.
But the rules are that I have to get permission to link to other sites. One Scottish regimental museum gave me a definite “no”. For some reason it was felt that only victories should be discussed. Maybe the guys who died in military disasters are somehow second-class dead soldiers, whose stories should never be told. However, the majority of people I contacted simply didn't reply. Indifference is a terrible thing. Not so much in the case of the weblinks: no-one's life is going to be ruined because a site wasn't linked to. But indifference can be an awfully destructive force. Like some boss that can't be bothered to check his facts before giving some poor sod an undeserved lousy reference. Repeat that kind of behaviour a couple of times and someone's career is ruined. Years ago I read a book about a guy who wrote a book about his life being chased around New Guinea by hostile head-hunting types. His “escaping head-hunters” book was a great success and he moved to London to pursue a career as a full time writer. He found big city anonymity and big city indifference far more challenging to deal with than being hunted through the jungle – at least the tribesmen cared enough to want to kill him. I'm not kidding, that's what he said. I think far more people die in this world because no-one gives a toss whether they live or die than are killed through maliciousness.

You just never know who you're talking to. Years ago I was running a message across to the Lerwick offices of BBC Radio Shetland. There was a woman I didn't know there. She asked me when I was going back to Bolton. I was being mixed up with my room-mate and fellow reporter on the Shetland Times, Denis “The Bolton Wanderer” Mann. I said I was Paul Cowan. The stranger said she knew a Paul Cowan. I was aware of the guy; he'd been the editor of the Stornoway Gazette. His boss was famously eccentric, to say the least, having reputedly once fired his whole reporting staff on one paper, and having once offered me a job without interview. Anyway, I reeled off a bunch of stories about this fellah's supposed crazy behaviour. It was only then that I asked the stranger how she knew the man in question. “I'm his wife”, she said. She left that hanging in the air for a few long long seconds and then added “But you're right about him, I'm getting a divorce”.
Then there was the time that Lindsay Herron was explaining to me how he'd got his job on the Highland News in Inverness through his dad's freemasonry contacts. “The interview was even held in the Masonic Hall,” he explained. I liked Lindsay. I'm not sure if I bothered to tell him that the job he'd got had been promised to me. I was just waiting for a start date which never came through. At the time I was mystified. As I say, you just never know who you're talking to.

As the veterans of the Second World War get older, time is running out if they are to be interviewed for books about the conflict. These histories are very popular but perhaps a little controversial. The Duke of Wellington once remarked that it is no more possible to tell the whole story of a battle than it is to recount all the details of a court ball. Wise words indeed.
Of course, the move away from history as seen only from the point of view of the great and the good, with little or no input about the experiences of the lumped proletariat, must be a good thing. But just how accurate are the veterans' memories? Sometimes seeing them interviewed on the TV I get the feeling that their repeating things they read in books. It's easier to give a young researcher or interviewer what they expect to hear than to tell the truth. Sometimes that truth is too hard to explain to someone who wasn't there. If you have to ask; you’ll never understand. A check of service records can show that the veteran being interviewed wasn't there during the events he is recounting. But that doesn't mean there is a deliberate deception. Memory is a strange thing; particularly memory of traumatic events in which some kind of coping mechanism has kicked in. The sequence of events can be re-arranged to create a coherent narrative. But that can distort the story of what was at the time a very confused and fast moving action. Sometimes the mind just blanks-out unpleasant and traumatic events. Then a young interviewer shows up and asks for your memories. You try to fill in the void with stuff you don't really remember. I've been in some unpleasant situations and to be honest all I remember is the amusing and funny stuff that happened. Let's not forget that for many years no-one was interested in what the veterans had to say, and a lot of them didn't want to talk about it. Everyone just wanted to put the war behind them and get on with life. Rusted memories being taken out of the brainbox after so many years of being locked up and then polished up for an interviewer may not be entirely reliable. Real history is messy, confused, and often unpleasant. Personal memory is, and has to be, far more forgiving.

I thought it might be a good idea to put some links on this site to other sites which could be of interest to you. It's a time consuming process because I have to get permission from the other site operators to link to them. This often involves someone seeking an OK from a high-up in a veterans' or regimental association. So far, I've only had one definite “No”. That was from a regimental association which didn't want to be associated with the words “military disasters”. That made me a little sad. I would have thought that a soldier is just as dead regardless of whether the battle they fought in was a victory or a defeat. The defeats are all too often swept under the carpet. What I found was that the basic Scottish soldier didn't change much over the centuries. Poor generalship, lack of training, and sheer bad luck were often the factors that made the difference between triumph and disaster. I feel sorry that the soldiers who fought and died in lost battles are somehow regarded as less worthy of having their stories told than those who were on the winning side.
Speaking of whitewashes: I see demands for an inquiry into the 1948 Batang Kali Massacre in what was then Malaya refuse to die down. Good. I don't think the people who deny the need for an inquiry realise just what a great weapon the lack of information about the massacre is for anti-British propagandists. Some of the claims these people make are outrageous but as long as the British Government insists on hiding the truth, they have a clear run. What amazes me is that so many people still don't believe that a patrol from the Scots Guards did murder 24 ethnic Chinese at a rubber plantation. I saw a former senior soldier quoted as saying he thought there has already been a satisfactory inquiry. I presume this means he accepts the male plantation workers were indeed all killed while trying the escape. If that's what he did mean, I wonder if he's ever troubled himself to wonder why there were no workers wounded while trying to escape.

B’ e smachd nan Albannach air malairt bian a bhrùth Canèidianaich Eòrpach siar gu na Rockies agus a chur air chois cogadh fearainn a bheir ort samhlachadh iomadh de bhuidheann dhrugaichean an là an-diugh ri clann Sgoil Shàbaid.
I got a big kick out of this. For those who don't read Gaelic, it's translation into that language of a paragraph from my book How the Scots Created Canada. It appeared recently on a Scottish Government sponsored website.
I only speak a smattering of Gaelic, though I understand more. In fact, that may have got me in trouble in the past. I remember waiting outside a phone box on Harris when the woman using the phone popped her head out and asked if I had a pen on me. I told her I didn't. I'd swear she asked in English. She insisted she'd asked in Gaelic and became very suspicious of me due to my denial that I spoke the language. Actually, it's just possible she did ask in Gaelic. That was the language of many of my little playmates when I was a toddler in Lanarkshire. A knitwear factory had opened nearby and many of the workers there were from the Gaelic-speaking islands of Lewis and Harris. I also had an uncle, by marriage, who tried to teach me. I think I can ask for a drink of water/milk/whisky and ask “How are you doing?” I also know a couple of obscenities and some pidgin Gaelic I picked up when I worked on a sail boat in the waters off Knoydart. But back when I was kid, there was a little encouragement to speak Gaelic. English was the language you needed to master if you were going to get on in life. When a bunch of us asked when we were at high school about learning the language, we were told “no chance”. Mind you this was the same school which made it impossible to study Ordinary Grade History and Geography in Third and Fourth Year.
Anyway, it turned out there was a point to learning Gaelic. About the time I was finishing my journalism course, millions of pounds were pumped into Gaelic broadcasting. Almost anyone who spoke Gaelic and could do joined-up writing was being signed-up as a television or radio reporter. A couple of folk who were able to take advantage of this development did very well, I'm sure I heard one of them reporting from China for the BBC a couple of years back. Oh, I can also “Get out of here” in Gaelic. I wonder why my uncle taught me that one. Anyway, Gaelic reminds me of being a little kid playing on the street outside the block of flats which was home in those days and that's why I got such a kick out of seeing even a couple of sentences I wrote translated into the “Language of Eden”. My world then didn't stretch much further than the length of that street and indeed it was a kind of Eden for a little kid.