The Month of the Halberstadt.

DIII

Very happy to have a watercolour featured on the December leaf of the Cross and Cockade Society’s annual calendar. A Halberstadt DIII
And another aeroplane featured in December of NEXT year’s one too!
The Halberstadt was most elegant and the first successful German biplane fighter of the Great War. It’s common conjecture to reproduce them as being finished in either natural doped linen or in light blue. Having studied and compared tonalities though, I’ve my own theory that they could have been silver-doped. So that’s what I’ve tried to go for here. Right or wrong? Nobody around who could say…..

Bouch!

We’ve a fine graveyard almost opposite us wherein lie a good many of our illustrious Edinburgh Great and Good.
In the light of my previous post about bridges, here’s a man who’ll long be remembered as the designer of the ill-fated first Tay Railway Bridge.
A man reportedly rather better at self-promotion than he was at stress-calculations.

Bouch

He was pencilled-in to produce the Forth Bridge too. Until the morning of 29th December 1879……
He didn’t last another year after that great fall.
Even in a sun-dappled graveyard, Thomas Bouch remains in shadow.