19 Jun 2024 13:47:43
I was sorry to see the Czechs lose last night especially to the Portuguese. I have a lot of time for them and have been impressed with them on numerous visits to that country.
After all, you've just got to admire any nation which firstly, provided many brave pilots in the Battle of Britain ( there is a huge memorial to the RAF in Prague Cathedral), secondly managed to be the only occupied country to assassinate its Nazi Governor ( Heydrich at terrible cost in retribution ) and lastly to appoint Frank Zappa as its Minister of Culture under President Vaclav Havel himself a poet and playwright!
Come on you Czechs, small but mighty! ??????.
19 Jun 2024 18:34:19
Stokey, Have visited Czech rep for many years have lots of Czech friends , and speak the language, they’re good people. Who historically have every right to dislike us, also visited the site of Lidice, the village raised from the face of the earth, after the assassination of heydreich, people rage about our empire, but the Germans seem to get a free pass for there atrocities, in living memory to a very few, just to add can’t stand the Portuguese football team, cheats and divers, who certainly rode their luck last night,
19 Jun 2024 19:27:25
I'm not sure that we would have even won the Battle of Britain without the Czech and Polish pilots helping the undermanned and overstretched RAF. We owe them a lot.
19 Jun 2024 22:00:57
Legless it wasn’t a matter of helping us, it was their fight as much as ours.
20 Jun 2024 10:56:35
Legless, the Brits are still enormously popular in the Czech Republic ( less so, I thought, in Slovakia when I went to Bratislava last June) despite the argument that we betrayed them to Hitler in 1939 and Stalin in 1945. But even the Czechs accept that we, as a naval power with a tiny Army and even smaller RAF in 1939 couldn’t help a land locked country like Czechoslovakia.
Likewise in 1945, with Europe in ruins and our country exhausted and bankrupt after 6 long years of war against Hitler, there was no appetite for another war this time against Russia. It was wise of Churchill (later Attlee) Roosevelt ( later Truman) and Stalin to come to an agreement at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam to divide Europe up. Tragically Czechoslovakia ( like Poland ) were geographically in the wrong place.
A former colleague of mine of Polish descent ( who spoke Polish and whose house was festooned with Polish flags in football tournaments) used to say “Well, when Mr Poland planted his flag, he couldn’t have chosen a worse spot than between Germany and Russia”! ??
( Stevie I will reply to your post about my Czech connections shortly but Legless, Stella etc might want to scroll past ) ?????.
20 Jun 2024 11:48:01
Stokey I started scrolling past your post a hour ago I've gave up mate ??.
20 Jun 2024 18:27:03
Stevie, my first wife was a German teacher and through friends of friends was asked if we would take in a 16 year old Czech girl who wanted to brush up her English. Her family invited us over for a week presumably to make sure we weren’t complete nutters and we got on like a house on fire. We took my daughter who was 3 or 4 at the time so in 1993.
They were Sudeten Czechs so spoke Czech and German then via my wife to English.
So we enrolled the young lady at Eastwood Comp where she became their star pupil! We’ve been over many times, less since I got divorced in 2009. But my daughters been over with her partner and the young Czech lady met her in Manchester about a month ago, she now has 3 grown up sons of her own.
What’s extraordinary about our Czech friends is that Mum was a School Secretary and Dad was a heating engineer until living in a Hradec Kralove when they got a knock on the door from a Government Official who told them that since the fall of the Communists in 1989 they had inherited loads of property confiscated from Mums grandfather in 1945 because he backed the losing side. This consisted of a state of the art dyeing works employing 30 people, a long stretch of canal and a hydro electric plant, plus an entire village of 30 houses rented to the workers, acres of land, all this up around a small village called Haje near the Polish border and 3 or 4 20 room mansions
The young Czech girl went on to get a business degree from Brno Uni and runs the whole show.
The Dad mourns the “ Golden Age of Communism “ as he calls it because as a heating engineer if the parts didn’t turn up he and his mates just sat around drinking beer and got paid the same. Now he has all these properties to look after with workers knocking on his door all the time about repairs etc! ??
So, I’ve been to Lidice, the battlefield of Kornigrazt ( which the Czechs called Sadowa, Prague 3 or 4 times.
20 Jun 2024 19:00:42
Karlovy Vary, into Poland etc. I have a great regard and affection for the Czechs and always will have. I think I’ve been across the Charles Bridge as much as Trent Bridge! ??.
20 Jun 2024 19:28:21
Sorry Stokey, you lost me again. Shopping list now mentally sorted for tomorrow.
20 Jun 2024 20:07:56
Stokey for an ex flying, you sure your not on lsd my friend ??.
21 Jun 2024 09:45:26
Just thought it was an amazing story of ordinary people becoming overnight millionaires owing to the quirks of history mate. Perhaps I should try LSD and see how it goes!
By the way Stevie I meant to ask you how you came to be involved with the Czechs even to the extent of learning their language?
21 Jun 2024 13:19:16
Bowie, my friend, just to show I’m not exaggerating or on a trip one of their houses in Haje had about 20 rooms and was used by the Communist authorities as an orphanage for around 30 kids!
Anyway, back to my opium pipe …. ?????.
21 Jun 2024 14:18:30
Carrying on the Ronnie Corbett theme mate the other interesting thing is that on one of my trips there 2 reps from a timber products factory came to the house asking my hosts if theyd like to sign a contract to let them get timber from their Forest. Turned out when they looked into it they didn’t know they owned that Forest in the first place but they did. They also unknowingly employed 5 or 6 foresters and fire watchers they didn’t know about either but the Govt hadn’t got round to telling them.