title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE had mostly to rely on the RAF for its planes. It was engaged in disputes with the RAF from its early days. In January 1941, an intended ambush (Operation Savanna) against the aircrew of a German "pathfinder" air group near Vannes in Brittany was thwarted when Air Vice Marshal Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, objected on moral grounds to parachuting what he regarded as assassins, although Portal's objections were later overcome and "Savanna" was mounted, unsuccessfully. From 1942, when Air Marshal Arthur Harris (""Bomber Harris"") became the Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command, he consistently resisted the diversion of the most capable types of bombers to SOE purposes.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE's first aircraft were two Armstrong Whitworth Whitleys belonging to 419 Flight RAF, which was formed in September 1940. In 1941, the flight was expanded to become No. 138 Squadron RAF. In February 1942, they were joined by No. 161 Squadron RAF. 161 Squadron flew agent insertions and pick-ups, while 138 Squadron delivered arms and stores by parachute. "C" flight from No. 138 Squadron later became No. 1368 Flight of the Polish Air Force, which joined No. 624 Squadron flying Halifaxes in the Mediterranean. By the later stages of the war several United States Army Air Forces squadrons were operating Douglas C-47 Skytrains in the Mediterranean, although by this time their operations had passed from SOE proper to the "Balkan Air Terminal Service". Three Special Duties squadrons operated in the Far East using a variety of aircraft, including the very long-range Consolidated B-24 Liberator.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Nos. 161 and 138 Squadrons were based at RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire though No. 161 Squadron often moved forward to RAF Tangmere, close to the coast in West Sussex, to shorten their flights. The airfield at Tempsford became the RAF's most secret base. (Tempsford had been rejected for Bomber Command's purposes by Harris in March 1942, as it frequently became waterlogged.) RAF Tempsford was designed to look like an ordinary working farm. The SOE used Tangmere Cottage, opposite the main entrance to the base. SOE agents were lodged in a local hotel before being ferried to farm buildings, the "Gibraltar Farm" within the airfield's perimeter track. After final briefings and checks at the farm, the agents were issued firearms in the barn, and then boarded a waiting aircraft.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: The squadrons' first task was to take agents to France who could select suitable fields for their aircraft. Most of these agents were French expatriates, some of whom had been pilots in the French Armée de l'Air. Once the agent was in place and had selected a number of potential fields, 161 Squadron delivered SOE agents, wireless equipment and operators and weapons, and flew French political leaders, resistance leaders or their family members, and downed allied airmen to Britain. Between them, the two squadrons transported 101 agents to, and recovered 128 agents, diplomats and airmen from occupied France.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: 161 Squadron's principal aircraft was the Westland Lysander. It handled very well at low speed and could land from touch down to turn around in only . It had a range of and could carry one to three passengers in the rear cockpit and stores in a pannier underneath the fuselage. It was flown by a single pilot, who also had to navigate, so missions had to be flown on clear nights with a full or near full moon. Bad weather often thwarted missions, German night fighters were also a hazard, and pilots could never know when landing whether they would be greeted by the resistance or the Gestapo.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: The procedure once a Lysander reached its destination in France was described by Squadron Leader Hugh Verity. Once the aircraft reached the airfield the agent on the ground would signal the aircraft by flashing a prearranged code letter in Morse. The aircraft would respond by blinking back the appropriate code response letter. The agent and his men would then mark the field by lighting the three landing lights, which were flashlights attached to poles. The "A" lamp was at the base of the landing ground. 150 metres beyond it and into the wind was the "B" light, and 50 metres to the right of "B" was the "C" light. The three lights formed an inverted "L", with the "B" and "C" lights upwind from "A". With the code passed the pilot would land the aircraft. He then would taxi back to the "A" lamp, where the passengers would clamber down the fixed ladder to the ground, often while the pilot was making a slow U-turn. Before leaving the last passenger would hand off the luggage and then take aboard the outgoing luggage before climbing down the ladder as well. Then the outgoing passengers would climb aboard and the aircraft would take off. The whole exchange might take as little as 3 minutes.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: The Lockheed Hudson had a range greater and could carry more passengers (ten or more), but required landing strips more than double the length of those needed for the Lysander (350 yards vs. 150 yards). It carried a navigator, to ease the load on the pilot, and could also be fitted with navigational equipment such as the "Rebecca" homing transceiver of the Rebecca/Eureka transponding radar system. The Hudson's use with 161 Squadron was developed by Charles Pickard and Hugh Verity. Pickard determined that the Hudson's stall speed was actually some 20 mph slower than its manual stated. Before it was first used on 13 January 1943, 161 Squadron had to send two Lysander aircraft in what they termed "a double" if larger parties needed to be picked up.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: No. 138 Squadron's primary mission was the delivery of equipment, and occasionally agents, by parachute. It flew a variety of bomber-type aircraft, often modified with extra fuel tanks and flame-suppressing exhaust shrouds: the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley until November 1942, the Handley Page Halifax and later the Short Stirling. The Stirling could carry a very large load (18 containers) but the aircraft with the longest range was the Halifax, which when based in Italy could reach drop zones as far away as eastern Poland.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Stores were usually parachuted in cylindrical containers. The "C" type was long, and when fully loaded could weigh up to . The "H" type was the same size overall but could be broken down into five smaller sections. This made it easier to carry and conceal but it could not be loaded with longer loads such as rifles. Some inert stores such as boots and blankets were "free-dropped" i.e. simply thrown out of the aircraft bundled together without a parachute, often to the hazard of any receiving committee on the ground.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Some devices used by SOE were designed specifically to guide aircraft to landing strips and dropping zones. Such sites could be marked by an agent on the ground with bonfires or bicycle lamps, but this required good visibility, as the pilot or navigator of a plane had not only to spot the ground signals, but also to navigate by visible landmarks to correct dead reckoning. Many landings or drops were thwarted by bad weather. To overcome these problems, SOE and Allied airborne forces used the Rebecca/Eureka transponding radar, which enabled a Hudson or larger aircraft to home in on a point on the ground even in thick weather. It was however difficult for agents or resistance fighters to carry or conceal the ground-based "Eureka" transponder equipment.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE also developed the S-Phone, which allowed a pilot or radio operator aboard an aircraft to communicate by voice with the "reception committee". Sound quality was good enough for voices to be recognisable, so that a mission could be aborted in case of any doubts of an agent's identity.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE also experienced difficulties with the Royal Navy, who were usually unwilling to allow SOE to use its submarines or motor torpedo boats to deliver agents or equipment. Submarines were regarded as too valuable to risk within range of enemy coastal defences. They could also carry only small numbers of agents, in great discomfort, and could disembark stores only in small dinghies or canoes, which made it difficult to land large quantities of equipment. SOE nevertheless used them in the Indian Ocean where the distances made it impracticable to use any smaller craft.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: The vessels used by SOE during the early part of the war were clandestine craft such as fishing boats or caiques. They could pass muster as innocent local craft and carry large quantities of stores. They also had the advantage of being largely outside Admiralty control. However, SOE's first small craft organisation, which was set up in the Helford estuary in Cornwall, suffered from obstruction from SIS, which had a similar private navy nearby. Eventually, in spring 1943, the Admiralty created a Deputy Director of Operations (Irregular), to superintend all such private navies. This officer turned out to be the former commander of SIS's craft in the Helford estuary, but his successor in charge of SIS's Helford base cooperated much better with SOE's flotilla. While SIS and SOE (and MI9) landed and embarked several dozen agents, refugees and Allied aircrew, it was impossible to transport large quantities of arms and equipment inland from beaches in heavily patrolled coastal areas, until France was almost liberated.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: After the German occupation of Norway, many Norwegian merchant seamen and fishermen made their way to Britain. SOE recruited several to maintain communications to Norway, using fishing boats from a base in the Shetland Islands. The service became so reliable that it became known as the Shetland Bus. One of its boats and crews launched a daring but unsuccessful attack ("Operation Title") against the German battleship Tirpitz. A similar organisation ran missions to occupied Denmark (and neutral Sweden) from the east coast of Britain. The "Shetland Bus" was unable to operate only during the very long hours of daylight in the Arctic summer, because of the risk that the slow fishing boats would be attacked by patrolling German aircraft. Late in the war, the unit acquired three fast Submarine chasers for such missions. About the same time, SOE also acquired MTBs and Motor Gun Boats for the Helford flotilla.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE also used feluccas to maintain communications between Algiers, and southern France and Corsica, and some caïques in the Aegean.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: In France, most agents were directed by two London-based country sections. F Section was under SOE control, while RF Section was linked to Charles de Gaulle's Free French Government in exile. Most native French agents served in RF. Two smaller sections also existed: EU/P Section, which dealt with the Polish community in France, and the DF Section which was responsible for establishing escape routes. During the latter part of 1942 another section known as AMF was established in Algiers, to operate into Southern France.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: On 5 May 1941 Georges Bégué (1911–1993), a radio operator, became the first SOE agent parachuted into German-occupied France. The American, Virginia Hall, who arrived by boat in August 1941, was the first woman to serve for a lengthy period in France. Andrée Borrel (1919–1944) and Lise de Baissac (1905–2004) became the first women parachuted into France on 24 September 1942. A typical team of a network consisted of an organiser (leader), a radio operator, and a courier. Agents performed a variety of functions including arms and sabotage instructors, couriers, liaison officers and radio operators. Between Bégué's first drop in May 1941 and August 1944, more than 400 F Section agents were sent into occupied France. RF sent about the same number of agents; AMF sent 600 (although not all of these belonged to SOE). EU/P and DF sent a few dozen agents each.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Some networks were compromised, with the loss of many agents. In particular agents continued to be sent to the "Prosper" network headed by Francis Suttill for months after it was controlled by the Germans and most of its agents had been captured. The head of F Section, Maurice Buckmaster was blamed by many as he failed to see signs that the network was compromised.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: To support the Allied invasion of France on D Day in June 1944, SOE and OSS supplemented their agents by air-dropping three-man parties of uniformed military personnel into France as part of Operation Jedburgh. They were to work with the French Resistance to co-ordinate widespread overt (as opposed to clandestine) acts of resistance. 100 men were eventually dropped, with 6,000 tons of military stores (4,000 tons had been dropped during the years before D-Day). At the same time, all the various sections operating in France (except EU/P) were nominally placed under a London-based HQ titled État-major des Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur (EMFFI).


title: Special Operations Executive

text: It took many weeks for a full assessment of the contributions of SOE and the Jedburgh teams to the Allied landings in Normandy, but when it came it vindicated Gubbins' belief that carefully planned sabotage could cripple a modern army. General Eisenhower's staff at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force said that the Jedburghs had "succeeded in imposing more or less serious delays on all the division moved to Normandy". This had prevented Hitler from striking back in the crucial opening hours of Operation Overlord. The most "outstanding example was the delay to the 2nd SS Panzer Division”, Eisenhower's staff said, and added a very personal endorsement, agreeing that the work carried out under Gubbins' leadership played a "very considerable part in our complete and final victory".


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Many agents were captured, killed in action, executed, or died in German concentration camps. More than one-third of 41 female agents of Section F did not survive the war; the death toll for more than 400 male agents was one-fourth and the toll of thousands of French people helping SOE agents and networks was about one-fifth. Of 119 SOE agents captured by the Germans and deported to concentration camps in Germany, only 23 men and three women survived.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE did not need to instigate Polish resistance, because unlike the Vichy French the Poles overwhelmingly refused to collaborate with the Nazis. Early in the war the Poles established the Polish Home Army, led by a clandestine resistance government known as the Polish Secret State. Nevertheless, many members of SOE were Polish and the SOE and the Polish resistance cooperated extensively.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE assisted the Polish government in exile with training facilities and logistical support for its 605 special forces operatives known as the Cichociemni, or ""The Dark and Silent"". Members of the unit, which was based in Audley End House, Essex, were rigorously trained before being parachuted into occupied Poland. Because of the distance involved in air travel to Poland, customised aircraft with extra fuel capacity were used in Polish operations such as Operation Wildhorn III. Sue Ryder chose the title Baroness Ryder of Warsaw in honour of these operations.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Secret Intelligence Service member Krystyna Skarbek ("nom de guerre" Christine Granville) was a founder member of SOE and helped establish a cell of Polish spies in Central Europe. She ran several operations in Poland, Egypt, Hungary (with Andrzej Kowerski) and France, often using the staunchly anti-Nazi Polish expatriate community as a secure international network. Non-official cover agents Elzbieta Zawacka and Jan Nowak-Jezioranski perfected the Gibraltar courier route out of occupied Europe. Maciej Kalenkiewicz was parachuted into occupied Poland, only to be killed by the Soviets. A Polish agent was integral to SOE's Operation Foxley, the plan to assassinate Hitler.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Thanks to co-operation between SOE and the Polish Home Army, the Poles were able to deliver the first Allied intelligence on the Holocaust to London in June 1942. Witold Pilecki of the Polish Home Army designed a joint operation with SOE to liberate Auschwitz, but the British rejected it as infeasible. Joint Anglo-Polish operations provided London with vital intelligence on the V-2 rocket, German troops movements on the Eastern Front, and the Soviet repressions of Polish citizens.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: RAF 'Special Duties Flights' were sent to Poland to assist the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis. The rebellion was defeated with a loss of 200,000 casualties (mostly German executions of Polish civilians) after the nearby Red Army refused military assistance to the Polish Home Army. RAF Special Duties Flights were refused landing rights at Soviet-held airfields near Warsaw, even when requiring emergency landings after battle damage. These flights were also attacked by Soviet fighters, despite the USSR's officially Allied status.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Due to the dangers and lack of friendly population few operations were conducted in Germany itself. The German and Austrian section of SOE was run by Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Thornley for most of the war, and was mainly involved with black propaganda and administrative sabotage in collaboration with the German section of the Political Warfare Executive. After D-Day, the section was re-organised and enlarged with Major General Gerald Templer heading the Directorate, with Thornley as his deputy.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Several major operations were planned, including Operation Foxley, a plan to assassinate Hitler, and Operation Periwig, an ingenious plan to simulate the existence of a large-scale anti-Nazi resistance movement within Germany. "Foxley" was never carried out but "Periwig" went ahead despite restrictions placed on it by SIS and SHAEF. Several German prisoners of war were trained as agents, briefed to make contact with the anti-Nazi resistance and to conduct sabotage. They were then parachuted into Germany in the hope that they would either hand themselves in to the "Gestapo" or be captured by them, and reveal their supposed mission. Fake coded wireless transmissions were broadcast to Germany and various pieces of agent paraphernalia such as code books and wireless receivers were allowed to fall into the hands of the German authorities.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: In Austria a resistance group formed around Kaplan Heinrich Maier. The Maier group was informed very early about the mass murder of Jews through its contacts with the Semperit factory near Auschwitz. SOE was in contact with this resistance group through its colleague G. E. R. Gedye in 1943, but was not convinced of the reliability of the contact and did not cooperate due to security concerns.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Section N of SOE ran operations in the Netherlands. They committed some of SOE's worst blunders in security, which allowed the Germans to capture many agents and much sabotage material, in what the Germans called the 'Englandspiel'. SOE ignored the absence of security checks in radio transmissions, and other warnings that the Germans were running the supposed resistance networks. A total of 50 agents were caught by the Germans and brought to Camp Haaren in the South of the Netherlands. Five captured men managed to escape from the camp. Two of them, Pieter Dourlein and Ben Ubbink, escaped on 29 August 1943 and found their way to Switzerland. There, the Netherlands Embassy sent messages over their controlled sets to England that SOE Netherlands was compromised. SOE set up new elaborate networks, which continued to operate until the Netherlands were liberated at the end of the war. In September 1944, as allied military forces were advancing into the Netherlands, the remaining captured SOE agents were taken by the Germans from Camp Haaren to Mauthausen concentration camp and executed.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: From September 1944 to April 1945, eight Jedburgh teams were also active in the Netherlands. The first team, code named "Dudley" was parachuted into the east of the Netherlands one week before Operation Market Garden. The next four teams were attached to the Airborne forces that carried out Market Garden. After the failure of Market Garden, one Jedburgh team trained (former) resistance men in the liberated South of the Netherlands. In April 1945 the last two Dutch Jedburgh teams became operational. One team code named "Gambling", was a combined Jedburgh/Special Air Service (SAS) group that was dropped into the centre of the Netherlands to assist the Allied advance. The last team was parachuted into the Northern Netherlands as part of SAS operation "Amherst". Despite the fact that operating in the flat and densely populated Netherlands was very difficult for the Jedburghs, the teams were quite successful.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Section T established some effective networks in Belgium, in part orchestrated by fashion designer Hardy Amies, who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Amies adapted names of fashion accessories for use as code words, while managing some of the most murderous and ruthless agents in the field. The rapid liberation of the country by Allied forces in September 1944 provided the resistance with little time to stage an uprising. They did assist the Allies to bypass German rearguards, and enabled the Allies to capture the vital Port of Antwerp intact.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: After Brussels was liberated, Amies outraged his superiors by setting up a "Vogue" photo-shoot in Belgium. In 1946, he was knighted in Belgium for his service with SOE, being named an officer of the Order of the Crown.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: As both an enemy country, and supposedly a monolithic fascist state with no organised opposition which SOE could use, SOE made little effort in Italy before mid-1943, when Mussolini's government collapsed and Allied forces already occupied Sicily.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Two years earlier, in April 1941, in a mission codenamed "Yak", Peter Fleming had attempted to recruit agents from among the many thousands of Italian prisoners of war captured in the Western Desert Campaign. He recruited none. Attempts to search among Italian immigrants in the United States, Britain and Canada for agents to be sent to Italy had similarly poor results.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: During the first three years of war, the most important "episode" of the collaboration between SOE and Italian anti-fascism was a project of an anti-fascist uprising in Sardinia, which the SOE supported at some stage but did not receive approval from the Foreign Office.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: In the aftermath of the Italian collapse, SOE (in Italy renamed No. 1 Special Force) helped build a large resistance organisation in the cities of Northern Italy, and in the Alps. Italian partisans harassed German forces in Italy throughout the autumn and winter of 1944, and in the Spring 1945 offensive in Italy they captured Genoa and other cities unaided by Allied forces. SOE helped the Italian Resistance send British missions to the partisan formations and supply war material to the bands of patriots, a supply made without political prejudices, and which also helped the Communist formations (Brigate Garibaldi).


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Late in 1943, SOE established a base at Bari in Southern Italy, from which they operated their networks and agents in the Balkans. This organisation had the codename ""Force 133"". This later became ""Force 266"", reserving 133 for operations run from Cairo rather than the heel of Italy. Flights from Brindisi were run to the Balkans and Poland, particularly once control had been wrested from SOE's Cairo headquarters and was exercised directly by Gubbins. SOE established a new packing station for the parachute containers close to Brindisi Air base, along the lines of those created at Saffron Walden. This was ME 54, a factory employing hundreds, the American (OSS) side of which was known as "Paradise Camp".


title: Special Operations Executive

text: 1941, SOE helped considerably in anti-Axis propaganda and in preparing the Yugoslav coup d'état which overthrew the pro-Axis regent, Prince Paul. After the pro-British coup succeeded, the Axis Invasion of Yugoslavia ensued. In the aftermath of the German invasion and the Yugoslav capitulation, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia fragmented. Croatia had a substantial pro-Axis movement, the Ustaše. In Croatia and the remainder of Yugoslavia, two resistance movements formed: the royalist Chetniks under Draža Mihailović, and the Communist Partisans under Josip Broz Tito.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Mihailović was the first to attempt to contact the Allies, and SOE despatched a party on 20 September 1941 under Major "Marko" Hudson. Hudson also encountered Tito's forces. Notable members of this party included actor Christopher Lee. Through the royalist government in exile, SOE at first supported the Chetniks. Eventually, however, due to reports that the Chetniks were less effective and even collaborating with German and Italian forces on occasion, British support was redirected to the Partisans, even before the Tehran Conference in 1943.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Although relations were often touchy throughout the war, it can be argued that SOE's unstinting support was a factor in Yugoslavia's maintaining a neutral stance during the Cold War. However, accounts vary dramatically between all historical works on the ""Chetnik controversy"".


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE was unable to establish links or contacts in Hungary before the regime of Miklós Horthy aligned itself with the Axis Powers. Distance and lack of such contacts prevented any effort being made by SOE until the Hungarians themselves dispatched a diplomat (László Veress) in a clandestine attempt to contact the Western Allies. SOE facilitated his return, with some radio sets. Before the Allied governments could agree terms, Hungary was placed under German military occupation and Veress was forced to flee the country.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Two missions subsequently dropped "blind" i.e. without prior arrangement for a reception party, failed. So too did an attempt by Basil Davidson to incite a partisan movement in Hungary, after he made his way there from northeastern Yugoslavia.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Greece was overrun by the Axis after a desperate defence lasting several months. In the aftermath, SIS and another intelligence organisation, SIME, discouraged attempts at sabotage or resistance as this might imperil relations with Turkey, although SOE maintained contacts with resistance groups in Crete. When an agent, "Odysseus", a former tobacco-smuggler, attempted to contact potential resistance groups in Greece, he reported that no group was prepared to co-operate with the monarchist government in exile in Cairo.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: In late 1942, at the army's instigation, SOE mounted its first operation, codenamed Operation Harling, into Greece in an attempt to disrupt the railway which was being used to move materials to the German Panzer Army Africa. A party under Colonel (later Brigadier) Eddie Myers, assisted by Christopher Woodhouse, was parachuted into Greece and discovered two guerrilla groups operating in the mountains: the pro-Communist ELAS and the republican EDES. On 25 November 1942, Myers's party blew up one of the spans of the railway viaduct at Gorgopotamos, supported by 150 Greek partisans from these two organisations who engaged Italians guarding the viaduct. This cut the railway linking Thessaloniki with Athens and Piraeus.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Relations between the resistance groups and the British soured. When the British needed once again to disrupt the railway across Greece as part of the deception operations preceding Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, the resistance groups refused to take part, rightly fearing German reprisals against civilians. Instead, a six-man commando party from the British and New Zealand armies, led by New Zealander Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Edward Barnes, a civil engineer, carried out the destruction of the Asopos viaduct on 21 June 1943. Two attempts by Mike Cumberlege to make the Corinth Canal unnavigable ended in failure.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: EDES received most aid from SOE, but ELAS secured many weapons when Italy collapsed and Italian military forces in Greece dissolved. ELAS and EDES fought a vicious civil war in 1943 until SOE brokered an uneasy armistice (the Plaka agreement).


title: Special Operations Executive

text: A lesser known, but important function of the SOE in Greece was to inform the Cairo headquarters of the movement of the German military aircraft that were serviced and repaired at the two former Greek military aircraft facilities in and around Athens.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Eventually, the British Army occupied Athens and Piraeus in the aftermath of the German withdrawal, and fought a street-by-street battle to drive ELAS from these cities and impose an interim government under Archbishop Damaskinos. SOE's last act was to evacuate several hundred disarmed EDES fighters to Corfu, preventing their massacre by ELAS.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Several resistance groups and Allied stay-behind parties operated in Crete after the Germans occupied the island in the Battle of Crete. SOE's operations involved figures such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, John Lewis, Harry Rudolph Fox Burr, Tom Dunbabin, Sandy Rendel, John Houseman, Xan Fielding and Bill Stanley Moss. Some of the most famous moments included the abduction of General Heinrich Kreipe led by Leigh Fermor and Moss – subsequently portrayed in the film "Ill Met by Moonlight", and the sabotage of Damasta led by Moss.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Albania had been under Italian influence since 1923, and was occupied by the Italian Army in 1939. In 1943, a small liaison party entered Albania from northwestern Greece. SOE agents who entered Albania then or later included Julian Amery, Anthony Quayle, David Smiley and Neil "Billy" McLean. They discovered another internecine war between the Communist partisans under Enver Hoxha, and the republican Balli Kombëtar. As the latter had collaborated with the Italian occupiers, Hoxha gained Allied support.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE's envoy to Albania, Brigadier Edmund "Trotsky" Davies, was captured by the Germans early in 1944. Some SOE officers warned that Hoxha's aim was primacy after the war, rather than fighting Germans. They were ignored, but Albania was never a major factor in the effort against the Germans.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE sent many missions into the Czech areas of the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and later into Slovakia. The most famous mission was Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. From 1942 to 1943 the Czechoslovaks had their own Special Training School (STS) at Chicheley Hall in Buckinghamshire. In 1944, SOE sent men to support the Slovak National uprising.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: In March 1941 a group performing commando raids in Norway, Norwegian Independent Company 1 (NOR.I.C.1) was organised under leadership of Captain Martin Linge. Their initial raid in 1941 was Operation Archery, the best known raid was probably the Norwegian heavy water sabotage. Communication lines with London were gradually improved so that by 1945, 64 radio operators were spread throughout Norway.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: The Danish resistance assisted SOE in its activities in neutral Sweden. For example, SOE was able to obtain several shiploads of vital ball-bearings which had been interned in Swedish ports. The Danes also pioneered several secure communications methods; for example, a burst transmitter/receiver which transcribed Morse code onto or from a paper tape faster than a human operator could handle.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: In 1943 an SOE delegation was parachuted into Romania to instigate resistance against the Nazi occupation at "any cost" (Operation Autonomous). The delegation, including Colonel Gardyne de Chastelain, Captain Silviu Meţianu and Ivor Porter, was captured by the Romanian Gendarmerie and held until the night of King Michael's Coup on 23 August 1944.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Abyssinia was the scene of some of SOE's earliest and most successful efforts. SOE organised a force of Ethiopian irregulars under Orde Charles Wingate in support of the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie. This force (named Gideon Force by Wingate) caused heavy casualties to the Italian occupation forces, and contributed to the successful British campaign there. Wingate was to use his experience to create the Chindits in Burma.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: The neutral Spanish island of Fernando Po was the scene of Operation Postmaster, one of SOE's most successful exploits. The large Italian merchant vessel "Duchessa d'Aosta" and the German tug "Likomba" had taken refuge in the harbour of Santa Isabel. On 14 January 1942, while the ships' officers were attending a party ashore thrown by an SOE agent, commandos and SOE personnel led by Gus March-Phillipps boarded the two vessels, cut the anchor cables and towed them out to sea, where they later rendezvoused with Royal Navy ships. Several neutral authorities and observers were impressed by the British display of ruthlessness.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: As early as 1940, SOE was preparing plans for operations in Southeast Asia. As in Europe, after initial Allied military disasters, SOE built up indigenous resistance organisations and guerrilla armies in enemy (Japanese) occupied territory. SOE also launched ""Operation Remorse"" (1944–45), which was ultimately aimed at protecting the economic and political status of Hong Kong. Force 136 engaged in covert trading of goods and currencies in China. Its agents proved remarkably successful, raising £77m through their activities, which were used to provide assistance for Allied prisoners of war and, more controversially, to buy influence locally to facilitate a smooth return to pre-war conditions.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: In late 1944, as it became clear that the war would soon be over, Lord Selborne advocated keeping SOE or a similar body in being, and that it would report to the Ministry of Defence. Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, insisted that his ministry, already responsible for the SIS, should control SOE or its successors. The Joint Intelligence Committee, which had a broad co-ordinating role over Britain's intelligence services and operations, took the view that SOE was a more effective organisation than the SIS but that it was unwise to split the responsibility for espionage and more direct action between separate ministries, or to perform special operations outside the ultimate control of the Chiefs of Staff. The debate continued for several months until on 22 May 1945, Selborne wrote:


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Churchill took no immediate decision, and after he lost the general election on 5 July 1945, the matter was dealt with by the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. Selborne told Attlee that SOE still possessed a worldwide network of clandestine radio networks and sympathisers. Attlee replied that he had no wish to own a British Comintern, and closed Selborne's network down at 48 hours' notice.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: SOE was dissolved officially on 15 January 1946. Some of its senior staff moved easily into financial services in the City of London, although some of them had not lost their undercover mentality and did little for the City's name. Most of SOE's other personnel reverted to their peacetime occupations or regular service in the armed forces, but 280 of them were taken into the ""Special Operations Branch"" of MI6. Some of these had served as agents in the field, but MI6 was most interested in SOE's training and research staff. Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6 (who was generally known simply as "C") soon decided that a separate Special Operations branch was unsound, and merged it into the general body of MI6.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Gubbins, the last director, was not given further employment by the Army, but he later founded the Special Forces Club for former members of SOE and similar organisations.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: Although the wartime British government considered the activities of the SOE to be lawful, the German invaders, as in World War I and the War of 1870, argued that those engaging in resistance (local resistance fighters and the agents of foreign governments who supported them) were "bandits" and "terrorists", maintaining that all "Francs-tireurs" (and said agents) were engaging in an illegal form of warfare, and, as such, had no legal rights. A view expressed by Fritz Sauckel, the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, making him the man in charge of bringing workers to the factories in Germany for forced labour, who demanded the flight of young French men to the countryside be stopped and called the "maquis" "terrorists", "bandits" and "criminals" for their opposition to lawful authority.


title: Special Operations Executive

text: The mode of warfare encouraged and promoted by SOE is considered by several modern commentators to have established the modern model that many alleged terrorist organisations emulate. Two opposed views were quoted by Tony Geraghty in "The Irish War: The Hidden Conflict Between the IRA and British Intelligence". M. R. D. Foot, who wrote several official histories of SOE wrote,


title: Special Operations Executive

text: In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Peggy Carter was recommended to the SOE by her brother Micheal, where she starts her career as a field agent.


title: Screen printing

text: Screen printing is a printing technique where a mesh is used to transfer ink (or dye) onto a substrate, except in areas made impermeable to the ink by a blocking stencil. A blade or squeegee is moved across the screen to fill the open mesh apertures with ink, and a reverse stroke then causes the screen to touch the substrate momentarily along a line of contact. This causes the ink to wet the substrate and be pulled out of the mesh apertures as the screen springs back after the blade has passed. One colour is printed at a time, so several screens can be used to produce a multi-coloured image or design.


title: Screen printing

text: Traditionally, silk was used in the process. Currently, synthetic threads are commonly used in the screen printing process. The most popular mesh in general use is made of polyester. There are special-use mesh materials of nylon and stainless steel available to the screen-printer. There are also different types of mesh size which will determine the outcome and look of the finished design on the material.


title: Screen printing

text: The technique is used not only for garment printing but for printing on many other substances, including decals, clock and watch faces, balloons, and many other products. Advanced uses include laying down conductors and resistors in multi-layer circuits using thin ceramic layers as the substrate.


title: Screen printing

text: Screen printing first appeared in a recognizable form in China during the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD). It was then adapted by other Asian countries like Japan, and was further created using newer methods.


title: Screen printing

text: Screen printing was largely introduced to Western Europe from Asia sometime in the late 18th century, but did not gain large acceptance or use in Europe until silk mesh was more available for trade from the east and a profitable outlet for the medium discovered.


title: Screen printing

text: Early in the 1910s, several printers experimenting with photo-reactive chemicals used the well-known actinic light–activated cross linking or hardening traits of potassium, sodium or ammonium chromate and dichromate chemicals with glues and gelatin compounds. Roy Beck, Charles Peter and Edward Owens studied and experimented with chromic acid salt sensitized emulsions for photo-reactive stencils. This trio of developers would prove to revolutionize the commercial screen printing industry by introducing photo-imaged stencils to the industry, though the acceptance of this method would take many years. Commercial screen printing now uses sensitizers far safer and less toxic than bichromates. Currently, there are large selections of pre-sensitized and "user mixed" sensitized emulsion chemicals for creating photo-reactive stencils.


title: Screen printing

text: A group of artists who later formed the National Serigraph Society, including WPA artists Max Arthur Cohn, Anthony Velonis and Hyman Warsager, coined the word "serigraphy" in the 1930s to differentiate the artistic application of screen printing from the industrial use of the process. "Serigraphy" is a compound word formed from Latin "sēricum" (silk) and Greek "graphein" (to write or draw).


title: Screen printing

text: Historians of the New York WPA poster shop give sole credit to Anthony Velonis for establishing Silkscreen methods used there, a reputation bolstered by the publication of his 1937 booklet "Technical Problems of the Artist: Technique of the Silkscreen Process." Guido Lengweiler has corrected this misunderstanding in his book, "A History of Screen Printing", published in English in 2016. Outgrowths of these WPA poster shops, at least two New York City studios in wartime started decorating ceramic tiles with fire-on underglaze applied by silkscreen starting as early as 1939: Esteban Soriano and Harold Ambellan's Designed Tiles.


title: Screen printing

text: The Printers' National Environmental Assistance Center says, "Screenprinting is arguably the most versatile of all printing processes. Since rudimentary screenprinting materials are so affordable and readily available, it has been used frequently in underground settings and subcultures, and the non-professional look of such DIY culture screenprints have become a significant cultural aesthetic seen on movie posters, record album covers, flyers, shirts, commercial fonts in advertising, in artwork and elsewhere.


title: Screen printing

text: Credit is given to the artist Andy Warhol for popularising screen printing as an artistic technique. Warhol's silk screens include his 1962 Marilyn Diptych, which is a portrait of the actress Marilyn Monroe printed in bold colours. Warhol was supported in his production by master screen printer Michel Caza, a founding member of Fespa.


title: Screen printing

text: Sister Mary Corita Kent gained international fame for her vibrant serigraphs during the 1960s and 1970s. Her works were rainbow coloured, contained words that were both political, and fostered peace and love and caring.


title: Screen printing

text: American entrepreneur, artist and inventor Michael Vasilantone started to use, develop, and sell a rotatable multicolour garment screen printing machine in 1960. Vasilantone later filed for a patent on his invention in 1967 granted number 3,427,964 on 18 February 1969. The original machine was manufactured to print logos and team information on bowling garments, but was soon directed to the new fad of printing on T-shirts. The Vasilantone patent was licensed by multiple manufacturers and the resulting production and boom in printed T-shirts made this "garment" screen printing machine popular. Screen printing on garments currently accounts for over half of the screen printing activity in the United States.


title: Screen printing

text: Graphic screen-printing is widely used today to create mass- or large-batch produced graphics, such as posters or display stands. Full colour prints can be created by printing in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black).


title: Screen printing

text: Screen printing lends itself well to printing on canvas. Andy Warhol, Arthur Okamura, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Harry Gottlieb and many other artists have used screen printing as an expression of creativity and artistic vision.


title: Screen printing

text: Another variation, digital hybrid screen printing, is a union between analog screen printing and traditional digital direct-to-garment printing, two of the most common textile embellishment technologies in use today. Essentially, digital hybrid screen printing is an automatic screen-printing press with a CMYK digital enhancement located on one of the screen print stations. Digital hybrid screen printing is capable of variable data options, creating endless customizations, with the added ability of screen print specific techniques.


title: Screen printing

text: A screen is made of a piece of mesh stretched over a frame. The mesh could be made of a synthetic polymer, such as nylon, and a finer and smaller aperture for the mesh would be utilized for a design that requires a higher and more delicate degree of detail. For the mesh to be effective, it must be mounted on a frame and it must be under tension. The frame which holds the mesh could be made of diverse materials, such as wood or aluminum, depending on the sophistication of the machine or the artisan procedure. The tension of the mesh may be checked by using a tensiometer; a common unit for the measurement of the tension of the mesh is Newton per centimeter (N/cm).


title: Screen printing

text: A stencil is formed by blocking off parts of the screen in the negative image of the design to be printed; that is, the open spaces are where the ink will appear on the substrate.


title: Screen printing

text: Before printing occurs, the frame and screen must undergo the pre-press process, in which an emulsion is 'scooped' across the mesh. Once this emulsion has dried, it is selectively exposed to ultra-violet light, through a film printed with the required design. This hardens the emulsion in the exposed areas but leaves the unexposed parts soft. They are then washed away using a water spray, leaving behind a clean area in the mesh with the identical shape as the desired image, which will allow passage of ink. It is a positive process.


title: Screen printing

text: In fabric printing, the surface supporting the fabric to be printed (commonly referred to as a pallet) is coated with a wide 'pallet tape'. This serves to protect the 'pallet' from any unwanted ink leaking through the screen and potentially staining the 'pallet' or transferring unwanted ink onto the next substrate.


title: Screen printing

text: Next, the screen and frame are lined with a tape to prevent ink from reaching the edge of the screen and the frame. The type of tape used in for this purpose often depends upon the ink that is to be printed onto the substrate. More aggressive tapes are generally used for UV and water-based inks due to the inks' lower viscosities and greater tendency to creep underneath tape.


title: Screen printing

text: The last process in the 'pre-press' is blocking out any unwanted 'pin-holes' in the emulsion. If these holes are left in the emulsion, the ink will continue through and leave unwanted marks. To block out these holes, materials such as tapes, speciality emulsions and 'block-out pens' may be used effectively.


title: Screen printing

text: The screen is placed atop a substrate. Ink is placed on top of the screen, and a floodbar is used to push the ink through the holes in the mesh. The operator begins with the fill bar at the rear of the screen and behind a reservoir of ink. The operator lifts the screen to prevent contact with the substrate and then using a slight amount of downward force pulls the fill bar to the front of the screen. This effectively fills the mesh openings with ink and moves the ink reservoir to the front of the screen. The operator then uses a squeegee (rubber blade) to move the mesh down to the substrate and pushes the squeegee to the rear of the screen. The ink that is in the mesh opening is pumped or squeezed by capillary action to the substrate in a controlled and prescribed amount, i.e. the wet ink deposit is proportional to the thickness of the mesh and or stencil. As the squeegee moves toward the rear of the screen the tension of the mesh pulls the mesh up away from the substrate (called snap-off) leaving the ink upon the substrate surface.


title: Screen printing

text: There are three common types of screen printing presses: flat-bed, cylinder, and rotary. A development of screen printing with flat screens from 1963 was to wrap the screen around to form a tube, with the ink supply and squeegee inside the tube. The resulting roller rotates at the same speed as the web in a roll-to-roll machine. The benefits are high output rates and long rolls of product. This is the only way to make high-build fully patterned printing/coating as a continuous process, and has been widely used for manufacturing textured wallpapers.


title: Screen printing

text: Textile items printed with multi-coloured designs often use a wet on wet technique, or colours dried while on the press, while graphic items are allowed to dry between colours that are then printed with another screen and often in a different colour after the product is re-aligned on the press.


title: Screen printing

text: Most screens are ready for re-coating at this stage, but sometimes screens will have to undergo a further step in the reclaiming process called dehazing. This additional step removes haze or "ghost images" left behind in the screen once the emulsion has been removed. Ghost images tend to faintly outline the open areas of previous stencils, hence the name. They are the result of ink residue trapped in the mesh, often in the knuckles of the mesh (the points where threads cross).


title: Screen printing

text: A method of stencilling that has increased in popularity over the past years is the photo emulsion technique:


title: Screen printing

text: Screen printing is more versatile than traditional printing techniques. The surface does not have to be printed under pressure, unlike etching or lithography, and it does not have to be planar. Different inks can be used to work with a variety of materials, such as textiles, ceramics, wood, paper, glass, metal, and plastic. As a result, screen printing is used in many different industries, including:


title: Screen printing

text: In screen printing on wafer-based solar photovoltaic (PV) cells, the mesh and buses of silver are printed on the front; furthermore, the buses of silver are printed on the back. Subsequently, aluminum paste is dispensed over the whole surface of the back for passivation and surface reflection. One of the parameters that can vary and can be controlled in screen printing is the thickness of the print. This makes it useful for some of the techniques of printing solar cells, electronics etc.


title: Screen printing

text: Solar wafers are becoming thinner and larger, so careful printing is required to maintain a lower breakage rate, though high throughput at the printing stage improves the throughput of the whole cell production line.


title: Screen printing

text: To print multiple copies of the screen design on garments in an efficient manner, amateur and professional printers usually use a screen printing press, which is a colloquial term as most screen printing machines are vastly different from Offset Printing Presses. Many companies offer simple to sophisticated printing presses. These presses come in one of three types, Manual (also referred to as Handbench), Semi-Automatic, and Fully Automatic. Most printing companies will use one or more semi-automatic or fully automatic machines with manual machines for small runs and sampling.


title: Screen printing

text: Whilst Manual Screen Printing can be done with Carousels, Handbenches (both of which are often referred to colloquially as presses) or even on to tables. Semi and Fully-Automatic machines are broken into two main categories; Flatbed Printers (Poster, Art Printing or other flat substrates) and Carousels and Oval Machines (Garments and other apparel, amongst other textiles). Both which are fundamentally similar in terms of automation but differ in areas such as physical footprint and upgrade paths.


title: Screen printing

text: These machines are much faster and use either pneumatic pressure generated by air compressors or use electric motors to draw the squeegees, rotate and raise or lower pallets removing much of the manual labour from the task - resulting in significant reductions in operator fatigue as well as more consistent results.


title: Screen printing

text: In electronic design automation, the silk screen is part of the layer stack of the printed circuit board (PCB), and the top and bottom sides are described in individual Gerber files like any other layers (such as the copper and solder-stop layers). Typical names for these "service print overlays" include codice_1/codice_2 aka codice_3/codice_4 or codice_5/codice_6 (EAGLE), codice_7/codice_8 (KiCad), codice_9/codice_10 (TARGET), codice_11/codice_12 (Fritzing), codice_13/codice_14 (OrCAD), codice_15/codice_16 (PADS), codice_17/codice_18 (WEdirekt) or codice_19/codice_20 (Gerber and many others).


title: Newspeak

text: Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of the 1949 dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", by George Orwell. In the novel, the Party created Newspeak to meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania. Newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will. Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing Ingsoc orthodoxy.


title: Newspeak

text: In "The Principles of Newspeak", the appendix to the novel, Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most of the rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. The political contractions of Newspeak—"Ingsoc" (English Socialism), "Minitrue" (Ministry of Truth), "Miniplenty" (Ministry of Plenty)—are described by Orwell as similar to real examples of German and Russian contractions in the 20th century. Like "Nazi" ("Nationalsozialist"), "Gestapo" ("Geheime Staatspolizei"), "politburo" (Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), "Comintern" (Communist International), "kolkhoz" (collective farm), and "Komsomol" (communist youth union), the contractions in Newspeak, often syllabic abbreviations, are supposed to have a political function already in virtue of their abbreviated structure itself: nice-sounding and easily pronounceable, their purpose is to mask all ideological content from the speaker.


title: Newspeak

text: The word "Newspeak" is sometimes used in contemporary political debate as an allegation that one tries to introduce new meanings of words to suit one's agenda.


title: Newspeak

text: Orwell was interested in linguistic questions and questions pertaining to the function and change of language. This can be seen in his essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946) as well as in the Appendix to "Nineteen Eighty-Four". As in "Politics and the English Language", the perceived decline and decadence of the English Language is a central theme in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Newspeak. In the essay Orwell criticises standard English, with its perceived dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and high-flown rhetoric, which he would later satirise in the meaningless words of "doublespeak", the product of unclear reasoning. The conclusion thematically reiterates linguistic decline: "I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this may argue that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development, by any direct tinkering with words or constructions."


title: Newspeak

text: Orwell's main objection against this decline of the English language is not so much based on aesthetic grounds, but rather that for him the linguistic decline goes hand-in-hand with a decline of thought, the real possibility of manipulation of speakers as well as listeners and eventually political chaos. The recurring theme in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" of a connection between authoritarian regimes and (authoritarian) language is already found in "Politics and the English Language":


title: Newspeak

text: Newspeak is a constructed language, of planned phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, like Basic English, in which Orwell showed interest while working at the BBC during the Second World War (1939–1945), but soon came to see the disadvantages of. Newspeak has considerable similarities to the system of Basic English proposed by Charles Kay Ogden in 1930. Basic ('British American Scientific International Commercial') English was a controlled language and designed to be an easy-to-learn English with only 850 core words. Like Newspeak, the Basic vocabulary is classified into three categories, two of them with two subcategories. The classification systems, however, do not coincide.


title: Newspeak

text: The political purpose of Newspeak is to eliminate the expression of the shades of meaning inherent in ambiguity and nuance from Oldspeak (Standard English). In order to reduce the language's function of communication, Newspeak uses concepts of simple construction, such as pleasure vs. pain and happiness vs. sadness. Additionally, "goodthink" and "crimethink" linguistically reinforce the State's totalitarian dominance of the people of Oceania. The Party's long-term goal with regard to the new language is for every member of the Party and society, except the Proles—the working-class of Oceania—to exclusively communicate in Newspeak, by A.D. 2050.


title: Newspeak

text: In Newspeak, English root words function as both nouns and verbs, which reduce the vocabulary available for the speaker to communicate meaning. For example, "think" is both a noun and a verb, thus, the word "thought" is not functionally required to communicate the concepts of thought in Newspeak and therefore is not in the Newspeak vocabulary.


title: Newspeak

text: As personal communication, Newspeak is to be spoken in staccato rhythm, using words that are short and easy to pronounce. The Party intends to make speech physically automatic and intellectually unconscious in order to diminish the possibility of critical thought occurring to the speaker. English words of comparative and superlative meanings and irregular spellings were simplified into regular spellings; thus, "better" becomes "gooder" and "best" becomes "goodest". The prefixes "plus-" and "doubleplus-" are used for emphasis (for example, "pluscold" meaning "very cold" and "doublepluscold" meaning "extremely cold"). Adjectives are formed by adding the suffix "–ful" to a root-word, e.g. "goodthinkful" means "Orthodox in thought."; while adverbs are formed by adding the suffix "–wise", e.g. "goodthinkwise" means "In an orthodox manner".


title: Newspeak

text: The intellectual purpose of Newspeak is to make all anti-Ingsoc thoughts "literally unthinkable" in terms of words. As constructed, Newspeak's vocabulary communicates the exact expression of sense and meaning that a member of the Party could wish to express, while excluding secondary denotations and connotations, eliminating the ways of indirect thinking that allow a word to have additional meanings. The linguistic simplification of Oldspeak into Newspeak was realised with neologisms, the elimination of ideologically undesirable words, and the elimination of the politically unorthodox meanings of words.


title: Newspeak

text: The word "free" still existed in Newspeak, but only to communicate the absence of something, e.g. "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free of weeds". The word could not denote free will, because intellectual freedom was no longer supposed to exist in Oceania. The limitations of Newspeak's vocabulary enabled the Party to effectively control the population's minds, by allowing the user only a very narrow range of spoken and written thought; hence, words such as: "crimethink" (thought crime), "doublethink" (accepting contradictory beliefs), and "Ingsoc" communicated only their surface meanings.


title: Newspeak

text: In the story of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the lexicologist character Syme discusses his editorial work on the latest edition of the "Newspeak Dictionary":


title: Newspeak

text: The words of the A vocabulary describe the functional concepts of daily life (e.g. eating and drinking, working and cooking). It consists mostly of English words, but they are very small in number compared to English, while for each word, its meanings are "far more rigidly defined" than in English.


title: Newspeak

text: The words of the B vocabulary are deliberately constructed for political purposes to convey complex ideas in a simple form. They are compound words and noun-verbs with political significance that are meant to impose and instill upon Oceania's citizens politically correct mental attitudes required by the Party. In the appendix, Orwell explains that the very structure of the B vocabulary (the fact that they are compound words) carries ideological weight. The large amounts of contractions in the B vocabulary—for example, the Ministry of Truth being called Minitrue, the Records department being called Recdep, the Fiction Department being called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department being called Teledep—is not done simply to save time. Like with examples of compound words in the political language of the 20th century—Nazi, Gestapo, Politburo, Comintern, Inprecor, Agitprop, and many others—Orwell remarks that the Party believed that abbreviating a name could "narrowly and subtly" alter a word's meaning. Newspeak is supposed to make this effort a conscious purpose:


title: Newspeak

text: The B words in Newspeak are supposed to sound pleasant, while also being easily pronounceable, in an attempt to make speech on anything political "staccato and monotonous" and, ultimately, mask from the speaker all ideological content.


title: Newspeak

text: The words of the C vocabulary are scientific and technical terms that supplement the linguistic functions of the A and B vocabularies. These words are the same scientific terms in English, but many of them have had their meanings rigidified in order to, just like with the A vocabulary, attempt to prevent speakers from being able to express anti-government thoughts. Distribution of the C vocabulary is limited, because the Party do not want the citizens of Oceania to know more than a select few ways of life or techniques of production. Hence, the Oldspeak word "science" has no equivalent term in Newspeak; instead, these words are simply treated as specific technical words for speaking of technical fields.


title: Newspeak

text: Newspeak's grammar is greatly simplifed compared to English. It also has two "outstanding" characteristics: Almost completely interchangeable linguistic functions between the parts of speech (any word could function as a verb, noun, adjective, or adverb), and heavy inflectional regularity in the construction of usages and of words. Inflectional regularity means that most irregular words were replaced with regular words combined with prefixes and suffixes. For example, the preterite and the past participle constructions of verbs are alike, with both ending in "–ed." Hence, the Newspeak preterite of the English word "steal" is "stealed," and that of the word "think" is "thinked." Likewise, the past participles of "swim, give, bring, speak," and "take" were, respectively "swimmed, gived, bringed, speaked," and "taked," with all irregular forms (such as "swam, gave," and "brought") being eliminated. The auxiliaries (including "to be"), pronouns, demonstratives, and relatives still inflect irregularly. They mostly follow their use in English, but the word "whom" and the "shall" and "should" tenses were dropped, "whom" being replaced by "who" and "shall" and "should" by "will" and "would".


title: Newspeak

text: Therefore, the Oldspeak sentence "He ran extremely quickly" would become "He runned doubleplusspeedwise".


title: Newspeak

text: This is a list of Newspeak words known from the novel. It does not include words carried over directly from English with no change in meaning, nor does it include regular uses of the listed affixes (e.g. "unbellyfeel") unless they are particularly significant.


title: Newspeak

text: The novel says that the Ministry of Truth uses a jargon "not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words" for its internal memos. As many of the words in this list (e.g. "bb", "upsub") come from such memos, it is not certain whether those words are actually Newspeak.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Sid and Nancy (also known as Sid and Nancy: Love Kills) is a 1986 British biographical film directed by Alex Cox, co-written with Abbe Wool, and starring Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb. The film portrays the life of Sid Vicious, bassist of the punk rock band the Sex Pistols, and his destructive relationship with girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The film also features supporting performances from David Hayman, Xander Berkeley, and Courtney Love.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1986, and was released theatrically in the United States in November of that same year. Although it failed to recoup its production budget at the box office, the film was received positively by most critics and developed a cult following.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: On 12 October 1978, police are summoned to the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, where they find Nancy Spungen dead. Her boyfriend, Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, is taken into custody. Sid is driven to a police station and told to describe what happened.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: A little more than a year earlier, in 1977, close friends and band members Sid and Johnny Rotten meet Nancy, a heroin-addicted American groupie who had come to London to bed the Sex Pistols. Sid dismisses her at first, as her intentions are obvious, but begins dating her after feeling sympathy for the rejection she faces from fellow punk performers. The two swiftly bond over heroin use, and it is implied that Nancy introduces Sid to the drug.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Sid and Nancy fall deeply in love, but their self-destructive, drug-fueled relationship frays Sid's relationship with the rest of the band. Nancy is distraught when Sid departs on a month-long American tour without her. The tour is notably disastrous, with Sid strung out of his mind, often drunk or on methamphetamine, and physically violent. Phoebe, Sid's friend and road manager, unsuccessfully attempts to help him stop drinking. Meanwhile, Nancy remains in London, staying with her friend Linda, a dominatrix. Although several of Sid's friends and acquaintances warn him of Nancy's devastating effect on his life, Sid stubbornly ignores these warnings. On 17 January 1978, in the midst of the group's American tour, the band breaks up.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Sid reunites with Nancy in New York City, and he attempts to start a solo career with Nancy as his manager. The two visit Paris to begin recording sessions, but the trip is unfruitful. Sid is quickly dismissed in the music industry as a has-been, and he and Nancy descend deeper into heroin addiction; Nancy also begins suffering from severe depression, and the couple eventually make a suicide pact. Nancy brings Sid to Philadelphia to meet her family, who are horrified by the couple's reckless behavior and physical state. Sid and Nancy return to New York and settle in the Hotel Chelsea, where they live in squalor and depend on opiates supplied by their drug dealer, Bowery Snax.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Their love affair ends tragically one night when, during an argument in which Sid announces his plans to stop using heroin and return to England to restart his life, a suicidal Nancy begs him to kill her. She attacks him and they fight in a drug-induced haze, leading to him stabbing her, although whether it was intentional is left to interpretation. They fall asleep and later Nancy awakes and stumbles into the bathroom, where she collapses and dies. Sid is bailed out temporarily by his mother, who is also a heroin addict. After Sid wanders to a pizzeria and eats a pizza, some street kids convince him to dance with them. A taxi appears and picks Sid up, and he believes he finds Nancy alive in the back seat. The two embrace as the cab drives off.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: The film, originally titled "Love Kills", is largely based on the mutually destructive, drug- and sex-filled relationship between Vicious and Nancy. Vicious' mother, Anne Beverley, initially tried to prevent the film from being made. After meeting with director Cox, however, she decided to help the production; for example, Beverley gave Oldman Vicious' own heavy metal chain and padlock to wear in the film. Some of the supporting characters are composites, invented to streamline the plot.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: According to director Cox, he had originally considered Daniel Day-Lewis for the part of Sid Vicious; however, Cox offered Oldman the part of Vicious after seeing him play the lead role of Scopey in a 1984 production of Edward Bond's "The Pope's Wedding". Oldman twice turned down the role before accepting it, because, in his own words: "I wasn't really that interested in Sid Vicious and the punk movement. I'd never followed it. It wasn't something that interested me. The script I felt was banal and 'who cares' and 'why bother' and all of that. And I was a little bit sort-of with my nose in the air and sort-of thinking 'well the theatre – so much more superior' and all of that." He reconsidered based on the salary and the urging of his agent. He lost weight to play the emaciated Vicious by eating nothing but "steamed fish and lots of melon", but was briefly hospitalized when he lost too much. Oldman later dismissed the performance, saying: "I don't think I played Sid Vicious very well".


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Courtney Love recorded a video audition for the role of Spungen. Cox was impressed by Love's audition, but has said the film's investors insisted on an experienced actress for the co-leading role. Therefore, instead, Cox wrote the minor role of Gretchen, one of Sid and Nancy's New York junkie friends, specifically for her benefit. Cox would later cast Love as one of the leads in "Straight to Hell" (1987). Chloe Webb, who had appeared in several small television roles at the time, was instead cast in the role of Spungen.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: In his 2007 autobiography, Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash revealed that the casting director hired all five members of Guns N' Roses as extras for a club scene, having coincidentally scouted them in different locations without their knowledge. He said "all of us showed up to the first day of casting, like 'Hey...what are you doing here?'" However, Slash was the only one in the group to stay for the entire shoot.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Webb and Oldman improvised the dialogue heard in the scene leading up to Spungen's death but based it on interviews and other materials available to them. The stabbing scene is fictionalized and based only on conjecture. Cox told the "NME": "We wanted to make the film not just about Sid Vicious and punk rock, but as an anti-drugs statement, to show the degradation caused to various people is not at all glamorous."


title: Sid and Nancy

text: The original music is by Pray for Rain, Joe Strummer, and The Pogues. A track by Tears for Fears ("Swords and Knives") was also recorded for the film but was rejected by the filmmakers for not being "punk" enough. The track later appeared on the band's "Seeds of Love" album in 1989.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Prominent musicians made appearances in the film including Circle Jerks, Love, Iggy Pop, Nico and Edward Tudor-Pole of Tenpole Tudor.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: The film was primarily shot in London and New York City, though additional photography (particularly the sequences of the Sex Pistols' North American tour) was completed in Los Angeles and El Centro, California.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: From the 65 reviews collected by review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an overall approval rating of 88%, with the consensus: "Visceral, energetic, and often very sad, "Sid & Nancy" is also a surprisingly touching love story, and Gary Oldman is outstanding as the late punk rock icon Sid Vicious." Roger Ebert gave "Sid and Nancy" four-out-of-four in his review for "The Chicago Sun-Times", writing that Cox and his crew "pull off the neat trick of creating a movie full of noise and fury, and telling a meticulous story right in the middle of it." Appearing on "The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers", Ebert said, to agreement from Rivers and applause from the audience, that Oldman "definitely won't be [Oscar] nominated – and should be", this being for the reason that "Hollywood will not nominate an actor for portraying a creep, no matter how good the performance is". In a subsequent article on Oldman, Ebert referred to the movie's titular couple as "punk rock's "Romeo and Juliet"."


title: Sid and Nancy

text: In his book "Sid Vicious: Rock N' Roll Star", Malcolm Butt describes Webb's performance as Spungen as "intense, powerful, and most important of all, believable." Oldman's portrayal of Vicious was ranked #62 in "Premiere" magazine's "100 Greatest Performances of All Time". "Uncut" magazine ranked Gary Oldman as #8 in its "10 Best actors in rockin' roles" list, describing his portrayal as a "hugely sympathetic reading of the punk figurehead as a lost and bewildered manchild." In 2011, "Total Film" said of the performance: "It's an early high point in Oldman's varied career that showed just what the young actor was made of. Playing the part of an icon known and beloved by many comes with its own demands and risks, but Oldman more than rises to the challenge, completely transforming into the troubled punk bassist." The magazine described Oldman's rendition of "My Way" as "fantastic – [it] might even be better than Sid's original version." In 2003, "Rolling Stone" ranked "Sid and Nancy" as the third-best rock movie ever made, and in 2014, "ShortList" named it the ninth-greatest music biopic of all time.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Not all reviews of the film were positive. Leslie Halliwell, in a negative appraisal, reiterated a line from a review that appeared in "Sight & Sound": "Relentlessly whingeing performances and a lengthy slide into drugs, degradation and death make this a solemnly off-putting moral tract."


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Andrew Schofield was ranked #1 in "Uncut" magazine's "10 Worst actors in rockin' roles", which described his performance as Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon) as a "short-arse Scouse Bleasdale regular never once looking like he means it". Commentary on the Criterion DVD dismisses the film's portrayal of Lydon as wholly inaccurate. Paul Simonon of The Clash also criticised the movie for portraying Lydon as "some sort of fat, bean-slurping idiot."


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Although not a box office success, generating $2,826,523 in the U.S. on a $4 million budget "Sid and Nancy" has become a cult hit; Yahoo! Movies described the film as a "poignant and uncompromising cult classic".


title: Sid and Nancy

text: Strummer claimed to have met with Alex Cox for the first time after the completion of the film, at a wrap party, but this is not entirely accurate. The wrap party was the conclusion of the London phase of the filming, which was followed by filming in Los Angeles and New York City, performed by a largely different crew. The pair's meeting involved discussion over soundtrack work for the film, not the film's script.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: In a later interview, Lydon was asked the question, "Did the movie get anything right?" to which he replied: "Maybe the name Sid." Cox's attitude toward his subjects was negative; one of the reasons he was attracted to the project was that he was afraid that if someone else made it, it would portray its subjects as "real exemplars of Punk, rather than sold-out traitors to it." He acknowledged that Lydon's hatred of the movie was "understandable, given that it was based on incidents from his life and centred around one of his friends." Neither original bassist Glen Matlock nor guitarist Steve Jones have been as outspoken about the movie as Lydon, although Lydon claimed that drummer Paul Cook was more upset over the movie than he was.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: According to Cox, both he and Andrew Schofield (who played Lydon in the film) did meet with Lydon before the filming. According to Cox, Lydon noticed that Schofield was, like Cox, a Liverpudlian, rather than a Londoner like Lydon, and encouraged him to play the part as a Scouser rather than a Londoner. Cox took this as a sign that both of them agreed that it would be better to portray a more fictionalized version of the characters rather than a cold re-telling of facts. Cox claims that Lydon drank heavily at these meetings, which may explain why Lydon did not recall them. Cox stated in a book that contrary to Lydon's claims, his meeting with Schofield was not after the film's completion, but rather before Schofield had even been given the part. He was offered the part the next day.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: The official soundtrack contains no songs by either the Sex Pistols or Sid Vicious. Much of the film's soundtrack (as opposed to soundtrack album) was composed by Dan Wool (of Pray for Rain) and Joe Strummer, who was contractually limited to contribute only two songs. Strummer continued to contribute more (unpaid) work because of his interest in the project and composing for film in general. This additional material was credited to fictitious bands in the credits, so as to keep Strummer's label, Epic Records, from knowing what he had done. Another large portion of the music was composed by The Pogues.


title: Sid and Nancy

text: "Sid and Nancy" was first released on DVD by The Criterion Collection in the late 1990s; this version has since gone out of print. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the video distributor of the catalog of Embassy Pictures, which released the film on VHS) released the film on DVD in 2000. The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray and DVD on 24 August 2017.


title: The Jam

text: The Jam were an English mod revival/punk rock band formed in 1972 at Sheerwater Secondary School in Woking, Surrey. They released 18 consecutive Top 40 singles in the United Kingdom, from their debut in 1977 to their break-up in December 1982, including four number one hits. As of 2007, "That's Entertainment" and "Just Who Is the 5 O'Clock Hero?" remain the best-selling import singles of all time in the UK. They released one live album and six studio albums, the last of which, "The Gift", reached number one on the UK Albums Chart. When the group disbanded in 1982, their first 15 singles were re-released and all placed within the top 100.


title: The Jam

text: While the Jam shared the "angry young man" outlook and fast tempo of the mid-1970s British punk rock movement, in contrast with it the band wore smartly tailored suits reminiscent of English pop-bands in the early 1960s and incorporated mainstream 1960s rock and R&B influences into its sound, particularly from the Who's work of that period and also drew influence from the work of the Kinks and the music of American Motown. This placed the act at the forefront of the 1970s–1980s nascent Mod Revival movement. With many of the band's lyrics about working class life, Jam biographer Sean Egan commented that they "took social protest and cultural authenticity to the top of the charts."


title: The Jam

text: The band drew upon a variety of stylistic influences over the course of their career, including 1960s beat music, soul, rhythm and blues and psychedelic rock, as well as 1970s punk and new wave. The trio were known for their melodic pop songs, their distinctly English flavour and their mod image. The band launched the career of Paul Weller, who went on to form the Style Council and later his solo career. Weller wrote and sang most of the Jam's original compositions and played lead guitar, using a Rickenbacker 330. Bruce Foxton provided backing vocals and prominent basslines, which were the foundation of many of the band's songs, including the hits "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight", "The Eton Rifles", "Going Underground" and "Town Called Malice" mainly using a Rickenbacker 4001 or a Fender Precision Bass, as well as, on rare occasions, an Epiphone Rivoli.


title: The Jam

text: The Jam formed at Sheerwater Secondary School in Woking, Surrey, England, in 1972. The line-up consisted of Paul Weller on bass and lead vocals with various friends. They played their first gigs at Michael's, a local club. The line-up began to solidify in the mid-1970s with Weller, guitarist/vocalist Steve Brookes and drummer Rick Buckler. In their early years, their sets consisted of covers of early American rock and roll songs by the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. They continued in this vein until Weller discovered the Who's debut album "My Generation" and became fascinated with Mod music. As he said later, "I saw that through becoming a Mod it would give me a base and an angle to write from, and this we eventually did. We went out and bought suits and started playing Motown, Stax and Atlantic covers. I bought a Rickenbacker guitar, a Lambretta GP 150 and tried to style my hair like Steve Marriott's circa '66." Eventually Brookes left the band, but although they advertised for a new guitarist (Gary Webb later known as Gary Numan claims to have failed an audition) he was not replaced. Up to this point Weller had been playing bass and Foxton had been the band's second guitar player; he persuaded Foxton to take over bass duties and developed a combined lead/rhythm guitar style influenced by the Who's Pete Townshend as well as Dr. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson. The line-up of Weller, Foxton, and Buckler would persist until the end of the Jam's career.


title: The Jam

text: Throughout their career, the Jam were managed by Weller's father, John Weller, who then managed Paul's subsequent career until his death in 2009.


title: The Jam

text: In the following two years, the Jam gained a small following around London from playing minor gigs, becoming one of the new lights on the nascent punk scene. In many ways, however, they stood out from their punk peers. Though they shared an "angry young men" outlook, short hair, crushing volume and lightning-fast tempos, the Jam wore neatly tailored suits where others wore ripped clothes, played professionally where others were defiantly amateurish, and displayed clear 1960s rock influences where others were disdainful (at least ostensibly) of such music (which had been a major influence on the "stadium rock" and "prog rock" of the 1970s). Indeed, the band were tagged by some journalists as "revivalists". They were signed to Polydor Records by Chris Parry in early 1977.


title: The Jam

text: On 29 April 1977, Polydor released the Jam's debut single, "In the City", which charted in the Top 40 in the UK. On 20 May, the band released their debut album of the same name. The album, like those of the Clash and Sex Pistols, featured fast, loud and pointed songs. What set it apart from the records of those two bands was its more prevalent 1960s rock influences. The Jam covered Larry Williams's "Slow Down" (also covered by the Beatles) and the theme song of the 1960s TV series "Batman", which was somewhat of a standard for 1960s rock bands. Their originals revealed the influence of Motown Records, the Beatles and the Who.


title: The Jam

text: The Jam had political lyrics, condemning police brutality ("In the City") and expansionist development ("Bricks And Mortar"). However, one of their most openly political songs, "Time For Truth", bemoaned the decline of the British Empire and expressed disparaging sentiments about "Uncle Jimmy" (the Prime Minister, James Callaghan) in no uncertain terms ("Whatever happened to the great Empire?" / "I think it's time for truth, and the truth is you lost, Uncle Jimmy"). These pro-Empire sentiments and ostentatious displays of the Union Flag began to earn the group the tag of "Conservative".


title: The Jam

text: After the non-LP single "All Around the World" nearly reached the UK Top 10, the Jam, having achieved a notable and loyal following in such a short time, were pressed to produce more material quickly. Their second album, "This Is the Modern World", was released later in 1977. Bruce Foxton, generally considered a lesser songwriter than Weller, contributed two songs to the LP ("Don't Tell Them You're Sane" and "London Traffic"), both of which attracted criticism. His composing output gradually decreased, leaving Weller firmly established as the band's chief songwriter.


title: The Jam

text: In March 1978, the Jam released "News of the World", a non-album single that was both written and sung by Foxton. It charted at No. 27 in the UK, and was the band's second biggest hit to date. This was the only Foxton solo composition to be released as a Jam A-side. When the band went back into the studio to record a third album of primarily Foxton contributions, their songs were dismissed by producers as poor, and they held off recording an album in hopes that Weller would once again find inspiration. "News of the World" is now used in the opening theme of the BBC television show "Mock the Week".


title: The Jam

text: Returning to his hometown of Woking, Weller spent much of his time listening to albums by the Kinks and coming up with new songs. The Jam released their next single, the double A-side "David Watts"/"'A' Bomb in Wardour Street". "David Watts" was a cover of a Kinks song, throughout which Weller and Foxton traded lead vocals. "'A' Bomb in Wardour Street" was a Weller original. One of their hardest and most intense songs, Weller cursed the violent thugs that plagued the punk rock scene over a taut two-chord figure. It became their most successful 7" since "All Around the World".


title: The Jam

text: It was not until their next single, "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight", that the Jam really regained their former critical acclaim. The song was a dramatic account of being mugged by thugs who "smelled of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many right-wing meetings". Around this time, the Jam slimmed their team of two producers to one, Vic Coppersmith-Heaven, who helped develop the group's sound with harmonised guitars and acoustic textures. In 1978, the Jam released their third LP, "All Mod Cons", which included three previously released tracks among the 12 in total: "David Watts", "'A' Bomb In Wardour Street", and "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight". (It also contained two songs Polydor had previously rejected for single release, the manic "Billy Hunt" and the acoustic ballad "English Rose".)


title: The Jam

text: Following two successful and critically acclaimed non-LP singles, "Strange Town" and "When You're Young", the band released "The Eton Rifles" in advance of their new album. It became their first top 10, rising to No. 3 on the UK charts. November 1979 saw the release of the "Setting Sons" album, another UK hit, and their first chart entry in the US, albeit at 137 on the "Billboard" 200. The album began life as a concept album about three childhood friends, though in the end many of the songs did not relate to this theme. Many of the songs had political overtones; "The Eton Rifles" was inspired by skirmishes between demonstrators on a "Right to Work March" – a campaign initiated by the left-wing Socialist Workers Party – and pupils from Eton College; "Little Boy Soldiers" was an anti-war multi-movement piece in the vein of Ray Davies. Another notable song from the album was Bruce Foxton's "Smithers-Jones", originally a b-side to "When You're Young". The song is almost unanimously considered to be his greatest contribution to the Jam. Recorded with electric rock instrumentation for the single release, "Smithers-Jones" was given a complete makeover for the "Setting Sons" album with a string arrangement.


title: The Jam

text: The band's first single of 1980 was intended to be "Dreams of Children", which combined bleak lyrics lamenting the loss of childhood optimism with hard-edged, psychedelic instrumental backing and production. Due to a labelling error, however, the A- and B-sides of the single were reversed, resulting in the more conventional "Going Underground", the single's planned flipside, getting much more airplay and attention. As a result, only "Going Underground" was initially listed on the charts, although the single was eventually officially recognised (and listed) as a double A-side by the time the release reached No. 1 in the UK. When promoting the album in the United States, the group appeared on "American Bandstand", performing "(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave", a cover of the hit song by the Motown girl group Martha and the Vandellas. They also appeared on the short-lived American sketch comedy series "Fridays", playing the songs "Private Hell" and “Start”.


title: The Jam

text: "Sound Affects" was released in November 1980. Paul Weller said that he was influenced by The Beatles' "Revolver" and Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall" also. Indeed, several of the songs recall "Revolver"-era swirling psychedelia, such as "Monday", "Man in the Corner Shop", and the acoustic "That's Entertainment". According to Weller he wrote "That's Entertainment", a bitter slice-of-life commentary on the drudgery of modern working-class life, in around 15 minutes upon returning inebriated from the pub. Despite being only available as an import single, it peaked at No. 21 on the UK charts, an unprecedented feat. It is now arguably the Jam's most celebrated song. Despite the group's lack of commercial success in America, it even made American magazine "Rolling Stone"s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.


title: The Jam

text: "Start!", released before the album, became another No. 1 single. It had a very similar bass line, rhythm guitar and guitar solo to The Beatles' "Revolver" cut "Taxman", but was arranged as an otherwise completely different song. Some contemporary American R&B influence, including Michael Jackson, show up in Buckler's driving beats that power the album (such as on "But I'm Different Now"), and most obviously in Foxton's funk-influenced bassline in "Pretty Green". The album also reveals influences of post-punk groups such as Wire, XTC, Joy Division, and Gang of Four. The album was a No. 2 hit in the UK and peaked at No. 72 on the US Billboard charts, their most successful American album.


title: The Jam

text: Two non-LP singles, "Funeral Pyre" and "Absolute Beginners", abandoned the psychedelic pop of "Sound Affects"; "Absolute Beginners" (named after a cult novel of the same title) had a more R&B-flavoured sound, and "Funeral Pyre" was influenced by post-punk music. "Absolute Beginners" would reach No. 4 on the UK charts. While missing the US pop charts, its video received regular rotation on budding cable channel MTV. "Funeral Pyre" is built around Buckler's drumming, and aside from the "Sound Affects" track "Music for the Last Couple", is the only song in the group's catalogue that carries a joint Buckler/Foxton/Weller writing credit. "Funeral Pyre" and "Music for the Last Couple" are the only songs for which Buckler receives any writing credit.


title: The Jam

text: The 1982 release "The Gift" – the band's final studio LP – was a massive commercial success, peaking at No. 1 on the UK charts while spending an unprecedented 16 weeks on the US "Billboard" Hot 100. It featured several soul, funk, and R&B-stylised songs; most notably the No. 1 hit "Town Called Malice", which boasts a Motown-style bassline somewhat reminiscent of The Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love". The song included work by Keith Thomas and Steve Nichol, who later became well known as members of the R&B groups Legacy and Loose Ends respectively. "Town Called Malice", a reality-based tale about dealing with hardship in a small, downtrodden English town, is one of a handful of Jam songs Weller still performs (along with "That's Entertainment", "Man in the Corner Shop", "Strange Town", "Art School", "Start!" and "In the Crowd"). When "Town Called Malice" reached number one the group had the honour of performing both it and its double A-side, "Precious" on "Top of the Pops" – the only other band to be accorded this honour being the Beatles. After the string-laden soul ballad "The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had to Swallow)" peaked at No. 2, the band followed with their finale and another No. 1, "Beat Surrender". The latter featured Tracie Young on vocals; a few months later, she also guested on The Style Council's debut single "Speak Like a Child".


title: The Jam

text: To universal surprise, on 30 October 1982 Weller announced his intention to disband the Jam after a short concert tour of the UK had been completed. They also made their final appearances on "Top of the Pops" and "The Tube" to promote "Beat Surrender". The tour included five consecutive nights at the Wembley Arena, all of which sold out within twenty minutes of tickets becoming available. The last date on the original itinerary had been scheduled for 9 December 1982 at Guildford Civic Hall, close to the band's hometown of Woking. However, due to ticket demand, an additional date was added at the Brighton Conference Centre on 11 December 1982 for their last performance.


title: The Jam

text: The decision to split was solely Weller's. Explaining at the time that he disliked the idea of continuing for as long as possible simply because they were successful, he later told the Daily Mirror in advance of a 2015 Sky documentary on the band, "I wanted to end it to see what else I was capable of, and I'm still sure we stopped at the right time. I'm proud of what we did but I didn't want to dilute it, or for us to get embarrassing by trying to go on forever. We finished at our peak. I think we had achieved all we wanted or needed to, both commercially and artistically." Weller's decision to move on, announced by his father, the band's manager, at an extraordinary band meeting in the summer of 1982, "came as a shock" to Buckler and Foxton, who wanted to keep the band together. Buckler told the "Woking News and Mail" in 2012: "It was like we were going to be driving over a cliff at the end of the year, and you keep thinking 'Well, maybe he'll change his mind'’." Both Buckler and Foxton described the experience as bitter, but in later years both expressed understanding, if not complete acceptance.


title: The Jam

text: Following the split, Foxton did not speak to Weller for over 20 years, and Buckler said in 2015 that he still had not spoken to Weller since, despite repeated attempts by Buckler and Foxton in 1983 and 1984 to meet up with and talk to Weller. As the farewell tour neared its end, Polydor released a live album titled "Dig the New Breed", a collection of songs from various concert performances over the band's five-year career which, while commercially successful, met with mixed reviews. The month after the final concert in Brighton, Polydor re-released all sixteen of the band's singles, nine of which re-entered the UK charts on 22 January 1983.


title: The Jam

text: A five-CD box set "Direction Reaction Creation", featuring all of the Jam's studio material (plus a disc of rarities) peaked at No. 8 on the UK Albums Chart upon its release in 1997; an unprecedented achievement for a box set. In 2002, Virgin Radio counted down the top 100 British music artists of all-time as polled by listeners and the Jam were No. 5 on the list. Weller made two other appearances in the poll; as part of The Style Council at No. 93 and as a solo artist at No. 21.


title: The Jam

text: In early 1983, Weller announced the formation of a new band, The Style Council, a duo with keyboard player Mick Talbot, formerly of the minor mod revival band The Merton Parkas. They would eventually split in 1989. He subsequently embarked on a successful career as a solo artist.


title: The Jam

text: Following a short stint recording demos with Jake Burns and Dolphin Taylor, previously of Irish punk outfit Stiff Little Fingers, Bruce Foxton released his debut single "Freak" on Arista Records. Entering the UK Singles Chart at No. 34 on 30 July 1983, it eventually peaked at No. 23 and secured an appearance on Top of the Pops. Foxton's solo album "Touch Sensitive" followed in 1984, but subsequent singles "This Is The Way", "It Makes Me Wonder" and "SOS: My Imagination" failed to enter the Top 40. A final single "Play This Game To Win" was released on Harvest Records in November 1986.


title: The Jam

text: Bruce Foxton went on to replace Ali McMordie in a reformed Stiff Little Fingers in 1990, remaining with the band until January 2006, when he quit to pursue other projects. Later that year he joined Simon Townshend (Pete Townshend's brother), and Mark Brzezicki and Bruce Watson (both of Big Country) in the band Casbah Club, which released an album called "Venustraphobia".


title: The Jam

text: After the Jam split, Rick Buckler formed Time UK with Jimmy Edwards and Ray Simone, formerly of Masterswitch, ex-Tom Robinson Band guitarist Danny Kustow and (briefly) former Radio Stars/Sparks bassist Martin Gordon. The band released three singles "The Cabaret", "Playground of Privilege" and "You Won't Stop" before folding. In 1986, Buckler and Foxton released the single "Entertain Me" under the name Sharp.