The Spectator

Home More than 1,100 imams and Islamic leaders received a letter from Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, and Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, the communities minister, saying: ‘We must show our young people, who may be targeted, that extremists have nothing to offer them.’ Imran Khawaja, from Southall, west London, who had posed for a picture in Syria with a severed head before trying to re-enter Britain, pleaded guilty to four terrorism offences and will be sentenced next month. Sir John Chilcot confirmed that the report of his inquiry into the Iraq war, which took its last evidence in 2011, would not be published until after the election. A workers’ dispute left 1,300 houses in Northern Ireland without water; some people boiled snow.

From The Spectator, 23 January 1915: The Press Bureau has published, at the request of the Russian Embassy, a narrative of the insults, privations, and assaults suffered by Russian subjects in Germany after the outbreak of war. All the facts have been carefully verified, and the names of the chief victims are given. The story of the violent treatment which the staff of the Russian Embassy endured is already well known, but here we have the first detailed evidence of the cruel treatment of the hundreds of Russians who were convoyed to the frontier. As an example we may mention the case of one party of sixty travellers who were not allowed for seventy hours to leave the railway carriages more than once. All this time they were refused not only food but water.

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 23 January 1915: WE have written elsewhere of the raid by German airships on Tuesday night, but may mention here the bare facts. The airships, of which there were apparently three, were seen at 1.30 in the afternoon off the Dutch coast, and they must have reached England after dark. Their presence was unsuspected till bombs began to fall on Yarmouth about 8.30. Considerable damage was done to houses, but some of the bombs did not explode. One bomb actually went right through a house without injuring anybody. A men and a woman, however, were killed. Later King's Lynn was visited by the airships, which on the way dropped bombs near Brancaster, Heacham, Snettisham, and Sandringham.

From The Spectator, 16 January 1915: A VOICE FROM THE FRONT [To the editor of the “Spectator”] SIR,— You may be interested to hear that the other day—in a place which the Censorship regulations forbid me to mention —I saw a number of soldiers surrounding an officer who was reading the Spectator to them; and in another place I saw a private give a packet of treasured cigarettes to a comrade for a three-weeks-old copy of the Spectator. He felt he bad got a good bargain. Pray do all you can to get the men in England to undertake their proper share of the work we are doing out here for them.

From ‘Compulsory Service’, The Spectator, 16 January 1915: COMPULSORY service has not come yet, but it is drawing very near, and will certainly come unless some miracle should intervene—as, for example, the conquest of this country or the sudden collapse of our enemies. Those who dispute our statement that compulsion is coming must be very poor readers of the signs of the times, or else have paid no attention to Lord Haldane's speech in the House of Lords on Friday week. In that speech Lord Haldane, with great emphasis and with perfect clearness, laid down the principle which we have preached in these columns for the last seven or eight years when supporting the policy of Universal National Service.