Pansy

David Wragg is a not very talented historian who has, nonetheless, been very well published (his books include a series of four "handbooks" of railway history, one devoted to each of the "Big Four" British railway companies, and two covering the history of the Royal Navy in each of the two World Wars).

However, his editing skills appear to leave much to be desired judging by the constant repetitions and poorly-constructed sentences, and his books seem to be riddled with inaccuracies and inconsistencies.

To take a single example: the question of how many route miles of railway the London & North Eastern Railway started off with, his LNER Handbook says on page 61 "all in all, the LNER inherited 6,307 route miles".

Alas, in the same book he says on page 168 that "the LNER inherited 6,714 route miles or 17,271 track miles of railway".

So somewhere in the course of a hundred-odd pages the LNER seems to have found an additional 400-odd miles of route. Intriguing.

Anyway, given these failings, I suppose we shouldn't be altogether surprised that among his other unattractive traits appears to be low-level homophobia.

In his Royal Navy Handbook 1939-1945 he devotes much space to the Flower class corvettes whose crews heroically accompanied some of the most heavily attacked Allied convoys during the Second World War. These ships, the bulk of the escort fleet, were all named after flowers -- HMS Petunia, Lavender, Narcissus, Wallflower, Periwinkle, Saxifrage, Pink, Buttercup, Heartsease, etc, etc

Wragg, never one to miss a highly intellectual and pertinent joke, tells us on page 175 that "No doubt to the relief of all concerned, there never was an HMS Pansy".

So, in a service whose history was all about, as far as its First Lord Winston Churchill was concerned, "rum, sodomy and the lash", there wasn't a single homosexual serviceman? Not one gay sailor who might have enjoyed or taken comfort from an HMS Pansy? Presumably not a single homosexual who served their country during the entire Second World War?

Or was a cheap, homophobic joke simply too good for Wragg to pass up, eh? Nudge nudge, wink wink, they're all bum-bandits and shirt-lifters, eh...? Not like us, obviously. Oh, no. We're straight as they come.

He'd doubtless describe my complaint as "political correctness gone mad". I'd describe it as being simply about good manners. Wanker.