History – Page 3 – www.chrisrcook.com

Archivery: UKUSA Agreement (1946)

In June of 2010, the National Archives released copies of the 1946 US-UK intelligence sharing agreement generally known as the ‘UKUSA Agreement‘. These files were, at one point, stored here. Alas, time and link rot comes for us all, and all that following that link will get you now is a ‘404 – Page Not Found’ error.

So I’ve extracted them all from the Wayback Machine and attached them below!

The core of the UKUSA agreement is covered in HW80/4, with the files HW80/1-3 and HW80/5-11 covering various amendments and procedures.

HW80/1 (PDF, 2.5mb)Download

Maps – The Early April 2024 Update

It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these but… here are 511 additional map images of Northumberland (using the old Meridian) from the ‘Ordnance Survey Maps – Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952’ series.

Interesting places covered this update include:

Holy Island

Brewery Horses Making Hay / BBC Nationwide (1974)

Another interesting spot of archive footage – Brewers drays trotting around Sunderland!

Douglas Adams’ Desk and Office in 1996?

This appears to be Douglas Adams’ nicely messy office and his cable spaghetti’d computer setup – complete with what appears to be a fantastic stack of external SCSI drives. Taken from this clip of October 1996’s ‘Break The Science Barrier with Richard Dawkins‘, this footage was likely filmed in the summer of that year.

FOLK as ROUGH as IRON Filings – Omnibus (1971)

And the BBC Archive has coughed up a lovely spot of old industrial folk music from the early 1970s. It’s certainly worth a listen and it’d be nice if the entirety of that edition of Omnibus somehow managed to make it to iPlayer…

HMS St. Vincent Takes In Sail

An interesting little bit of history today; one of the few surviving bits of film of a British warship under sail to be taken while she was still part of the Royal Navy.

First laid down in Devonport in 1810 and launched just before Waterloo in 1815, HMS St. Vincent – a 120-gun first-rate ship of the line – managed to hang on as an armed training vessel until she was scrapped in 1906.

Dibnah Dibnahing

It was a totally different world back then…

A Deltic in Malton

A set of images from the 19^th August, 2023 Malton stop of Deltic 55009 – renamed and renumbered for this trip as 55013 ‘The Black Watch’ – as part of the Kings Cross to Scarborough Coronation Railtour. Apparently it broke down it’s the way home and the tour ended up getting in very late.

The Banana Warehouse Demolition

A couple of shots of what remains of the Banana Warehouse on Piccadilly. When I was younger I used to be fascinated by the Sinclair C5 that used to sit on the pavement outside. Apparently it was later moved out of the elements and onto a shelf inside the building.