The file contained a couple of charming photographs of the grass hut occupied by the British Resident in Canton, at the edge of the landing ground which Pan Am coveted; the British Union Flag was still flying in that photo -- which is more than can be said for Pan Am today.

October 7, 2005 (Friday)
London -- Aldershot -- London (England)

OUR Greek publisher, who is two hours ahead of us, already reports in: "I agree. No interviews will be canceled. Journalists want you. Yesterday (noon) a journalist from the biggest newspaper of Greece To Vima ask me to see you and have with you an interview."

I reply at 7:38 am with a suggestion and add: "[. . .]  This will shock my enemies."

Many more people have accepted our invitation for this evening. I anticipate about sixty people coming.

At the Medical Museum at Keogh Barracks nears Aldershot from 11:05 to 12:50 pm. I take photos of Heinrich Himmler's death mask (alleged), dental impressions, and the documents they hold. A useful trip.

Around sixty or seventy turn up, and the room holds them comfortably. I deliver a half-hour talk on Iraq and other topics, and get warm applause, including from Jessica who sits in and listens. That is nice. It is the first time she has heard a talk by me.

October 8, 2005 (Saturday)
 London (England)

A pretty slack day as I talk with Alan H. We put up an announcement of my forthcoming talks programme.

INAUGURATING his forthcoming U.K. lecture series, and welcoming people to his new London home, David Irving addressed an audience of seventy friends and supporters in his Queen Anne's Gate drawing room on the evening of October 7, 2005.

The lecture series will include discussions of British political problems and debates on expert topics selected from his thirty well known books.

Do you want to attend his next London buffet function?" It is on Friday, October 21 at 7 pm: a talk entitled "Field-marshal Rommel in 1944: soldier or traitor?" Apply for details

 

October 9, 2005 (Sunday)
London (England)

My motor is running down too, but not as quickly as B's.

October 10, 2005 (Monday)
London (England)

British Airways offers me £920 [around $1,700] compensation for their ticketing foul up in Miami in August -- twice what I had to pay for the replacement ticket. That's nice.

October 11, 2005 (Tuesday)
London (England)

Ten am. We send a tough message to our Moscow publisher Y., who may be our nemesis if he delays payments that are due:

I am must keep pressing this matter, and we must reach formal agreements with proper advance payments on my books BEFORE you start translating them. We need to receive from you paper copies of the two agreements on THE GERMAN ATOMIC BOMB and MILCH, and payments in full of the advances due under the two agreements:

1. THE GERMAN ATOMIC BOMB. The Virus House. The German Atomic Bomb. This book was published in Russian by the USSR Atomizdat. You have an agreement, requiring immediate payment of an advance of 1,500 euros. You are preventing the pirate edition being published by another Moscow publisher, Centerpolygraph. We have not received payment from you. Please make immediate arrangements for payment.

2. MILCH. The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe. (Based on the papers of Field Marshal Erhard Milch). We have sent you an agreement. The advance owing is 2,500 euros. Mr Shipilov has translated the book for you. We have not received a signed agreement or payment from you. Please make immediate arrangements for payment.

Please reply today with details of payment arrangements and confirmation from Mr B. that he will make the transfer in the next 2-3 days at the latest.

Benté is very disturbed by the thud-thud-thud of helicopters circling overhead all day; the noise is incessant, and she cannot sleep. All it needs now is loudspeakers blaring The Ride of the Valkyrie, and we should be living in front row seats for Apocalypse Now. That's part of the price of living so close to close to Downing-street now. Mr Sanctimonious Blair's personal security seems to take precedence over all else.

Speaking of which: Mysteriously, our new building in Queen Anne's Gate clearly has five floors, when seen from the outside: the two floors just above us, and the roof garden, belong to [...], the second floor, beneath us, is home to [...]; but why is there no First Floor? The concierge affects not to know. The elevator speeds straight from G to 2 -- nothing new to Americans (who don't have a thirteenth floor either); but this is England.

Like the Ghost Station on the Piccadilly Line at the foot of Down Street, opposite where we used to live in Mayfair, there is Something There about which we are not being told.

In the afternoon there is a message from Moscow: Y. have made a cash transfer to London. Tough talk is all these Muscovites understand.

October 12, 2005 (Wednesday)
London (England)

UP at 7:15 a.m.; I escort Jessica to the station, she is fizzing and chuckling all the way. Likes the school so much. On my return, I am again having major computer trouble with America Online repeatedly crashing. I reload it completely on my Mac, losing all my addresses, etc. and it still crashes two minutes after I go online. So for the time being it is "America Offline." How infuriating.

Last week I referred in my answers to a Greek journalist to the little-known 1938 American seizure of two British islands in the Pacific, needed by Pan American Airways as landing grounds -- the Canton Island episode. A reader has sent this useful extract from Collier's Year Book, the 1938 Archive. Its reticent treatment of this episode, in which President Franklin D Roosevelt exploited the Austrian Anschluss crisis as a smokescreen for his own little invasion operation, is noteworthy:

"1938: International Law - Canton and Enderbury Islands. - Announcement was made in Washington, March 3 [1938], that for reasons of commercial aviation and naval strategy, the State and Navy Departments had studied certain [British] islands with a view to pressing claims to their ownership. Two days later formal claim was made to sovereignty over Canton and Enderbury Islands in the Central Pacific Ocean and to lands first visited by Americans in Antarctica. An American occupation expedition [a force of US Marines] landed March 6 on the Pacific Islands, and March 9 Prime Minister Chamberlain told the House of Commons that Great Britain 'reserves her right over the islands.'

"The [U.S.] Department of the Interior April 1 issued a license granting commercial air rights on Canton Island. On Aug. 11 the Department of State announced that Britain and the United States had agreed to set up a régime for their common use of the two islands in connection with international aviation and communications, the question of title being left in abeyance 'for a protracted period'."

So the islands were "studied" by Washington? Five years ago I studied the recently released PRO file on this unattractive little episode (in the Public Record Office, FO.371 series, piece 26,199, a file entitled 'United States claim to certain Pacific Islands' -- it had been closed until 1992).

I found that the file contained a couple of charming photographs of the grass hut occupied by the British Resident on Canton Island, at the edge of the landing ground which Pan Am coveted; the British Union Flag was still flying in that photo -- which is more than can be said for Pan Am today. Is there a lesson here for those who meddled with the British Empire?