December 28th 1939

Wednesday December 28th

Otto Langsdorf*, captain of the Admiral Graf Spee, committed suicide in Buenos  Aires last night. When he spoke for himself, he spoke like a good seaman and a gentleman. For lack of a better explanation, I like to think that this is his last protest to his ignoble government, who gave him orders not to fight. Too good a man to waste.

The 32000 ton German liner Columbus** scuttled herself off the North American coast to avoid capture by a British destroyer. It is learned from neutral sources that the other cruiser that the “Salmon” damaged was the Blucher***.

*Wikipedia names him as Hans Langsdorff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Langsdorff
**More details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Columbus_(1922)
***This would appear to be incorrect. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Salmon_(N65)#Construction_and_career

This is the 100th blip posted to Lorna's journal. When we started this project, we anticipated that every entry would be like this one, i.e. a photograph from the pages of Lorna's war diary with a transcript of her words. We also thought that our main audience would be immediate family members.

We did not expect to end up blipping on Lorna's behalf every day, drawing on her earlier writing and art work to fill the gaps between war diary entries. This was made possible from mid-November 2019 thanks to the discovery of an archive of Lorna's work held by her niece. Even when we started photographing items from the archive, we doubted that many others would be interested in this 'extra' material. It would appear that they are.

Nor did we think that we would start planning trips next year around the country to places associated with Lorna, notably Cambridge and Malvern - watch this space! We have also developed a fascination with the Second World War. Such is the power of Blipfoto!

Thank you to everyone who is travelling with us back to Lorna's time. We appreciate every comment on this journal, and look forward to sharing more by/about Lorna over the coming months.