Guest Blogger

My dad is just beyond cool...

The other Roman wall between Glasgow and Edinburgh is called the Antonine Wall and it was a great earthen wall and now it's a great ditch but nonetheless still very interesting. As for the Wodes history tells us there were non-Romanized Celtic tribes so there could have been Wodes as there were definitely a people in Scotland called Picts and some of our ancestors descend from the Picts like the Bealls and we have four families of them, the most famous being Col. Ninian Beall who captured by the British was deported to the colonies where he became quite famous and a colonel in the Revolutionary war, plus he was one of the 10 or so land owners who sold property to the US government to create Washington,DC. What was outstanding about Ninian was his great height, he was reported to be 7 foot tall with red hair.

As for the Celtic tribes history tells us that they initially fought the Romans and lost and like the Indians they were driven west to the borders of Wales and their lands taken from them, Cornwall and the outer fringes of England by the German tribes of Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Frisians who were initially invited in as mercenaries by the Romans who were leaving, so later the Danes moved in and established Danelaw, they were defeated in turn and absorbed. Hard to believe that all of this German background of England affected WWII history so many years later when Adolf Hitler considered England to be German but little did he realize that there was little about the English people that remained German, it affected his carrying out the war, he held back at Dunkirk and never thought England would declare war on Germany, he figured wrong and in the end it led to his defeat. Before the war he was spending a great amount of time with the Mitford sisters Unity and Diana and the Chancellery in Berlin was the place where Diana Mitford married Sir Oswald Mosley, he obviously was spending too much time listening to the wrong English.

(l to r) Jessica, Nancy, Diana, Unity and Pamela Mitford, pictured in 1935. Not pictured is Deborah.

Interesting thing about Diana Mitford Mosley, her husband if he hadn't become openly a Fascist could have been Prime Minister of England where he would have been a whole lot more useful to his cause than coming out openly in the Black Shirts, after their imprisonment during WWII in England they moved to France and settled down next to the Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis Warfield Simpson of Baltimore and the two families became great friends, I guess they had lots to talk about since they all knew Hitler, Diana was exceedingly beautiful and retained her beauty into her 90s when she died, the whole story of the Mitfords, Wallis Warfield and the Duke plus Mosley is fascinating, I actually heard and saw Sir Oswald Mosley speak in Trafalgar Square in 1961, what a tremendous speaker but was so anti-American as I remember.