The Butterfly Effect: A British AAR

[Nathan Madien]

Jésus Christo, I thought I updated my AARs slowly. This takes the cake. I'll slowly read this AAR, since there is a lot of it to read.

And by the time you slowly reach the end of this AAR, you will be right back where you started.

 

[Praetonia]

At this rate we should reach 1945 in approximately 50 years. Hope our host will live that long!

 

[sr999]

So it has come to this. If there was ever an AAR that delurks people, it would be the far, far slower than time one.
As both a student of History and of English, this is a great piece of work and though the gratuitous tech porn was sometimes overwhelming the attention to detail was deeply impressive.
I have no idea when the good Mr Pip (Senior now, as I understand it ) shall post again but I hope he is well and that there might be greater things in store for us all.

So...just to say hi, I exist.

Groan! Another one!

I was like you. Once. In a galaxy far, far, away. Happily lurking for years. Frolicking in my ignorant immunity.

Then... the Pip Factor struck. With... tractor porn.

I carnt reed an I karnt rite
but it don reely matta
coz Iman ozzie farmboy
an I kin driva tractor​

So I came out of the closet. I, too, am a victim of tractor porn. Now I'm now just another doomed pseudo-intellectual verbal diarrheic forumite with *hundreds* of posts per lifetime spewing out of me.

 

[Duritz]

Groan! Another one!

I was like you. Once. In a galaxy far, far, away. Happily lurking for years. Frolicking in my ignorant immunity.

Then... the Pip Factor struck. With... tractor porn.

I carnt reed an I karnt rite
but it don reely matta
coz Iman ozzie farmboy
an I kin driva tractor​

So I came out of the closet. I, too, am a victim of tractor porn. Now I'm now just another doomed pseudo-intellectual verbal diarrheic forumite with *hundreds* of posts per lifetime spewing out of me.

Welcome to the AAR Comrade.

We sit, we wait and we dream of updates... you'll get the hang of it.

Dury.

 

[El Pip]

Chapter CXXIII: An Inconvenient Flight.​

If asked, most senior Whitehall mandarins would tell you that the burning sporting issue of mid 1937 was the debate over the ideal number of balls in an over of cricket; six or eight. While the experimentations underway in the Antipodes with the eight ball over had not been an unalloyed triumph, the improvements were perceived as possibly outweighing the drawbacks. The MCC was therefore considering a similar trial in the English domestic game, perhaps as soon as the next season. If pushed for a sporting issue with wider political implications they would likely suggest the knotty issue of the exact sporting status of Rhodesia. Traditionally a match by a British team against a dominion was a full Test match, while matches against territories or colonies were merely touring matches. As Rhodesia was a "full self governing colony" it didn't fit those neat categories so the various sporting bodies, keen to avoid being dragged into a mess of protocol and politics, were looking for direction on quite what to do. With both cricket and rugby union tours of Southern Africa due in the autumn, the governing bodies were desperately hoping an answer would come before the matches actually happened. While we will return to the murky depths of these politico-sporting conundrums later, it should be clear that Whitehall was not gripped by any sort of football fever. Given the disinterest about football in general, and the World Cup in particular, the question is how did the appearance of the various British Empire teams at the tournament become such a contentious issue within the highest level of the British government?

National pride is certainly part of the explanation; London was just as keen to avoid British teams being seen to depend on German transportation as any other Great Power. Another part of the answer can be found in the question, the issue was not just getting the Home Nations to the tournament but the various other teams from across the Empire. With the Home Nations entering the various other entities (for want of a better word) of the Empire all felt free to take advantage of FIFA's famously lax entry standards and enter the competition. The popular belief that FIFA only asked a team have 11 matching kits and a flag was fairly close to the truth; guided by Jules Rimet's belief in the unifying power of sport, FIFA tended to look for reasons to accept an application instead of strictly applying the formal requirements. Consequently the 1938 World Cup qualification would be blessed by the presence of such teams as Rhodesia, Hong Kong and Mandatory Palestine. While this may, or may not, have been a triumph of the unifying power of sport, it left the British government with a logistical puzzle. Technically London could just have left these scattered teams to make their own way, but the realities of Empire were such that the teams transport would have to have a Union Jack on it, which made the logistics very much London's problem.

The Maccabiah Stadium, Tel Aviv, home ground of the Mandatory Palestine football team. The Palestine Football Association (PFA) in theory represented the entire British Mandate of Palestine and picked the international team from the entire population on merit alone, or so they told FIFA. In practice they held strictly to a 'Jews only' policy which, aside from inflaming regional tension yet further, did not pay dividends on the pitch; the 1934 World Cup qualifiers against Egypt had been lost 11-2 on aggregate. The rival Arab Palestine Sports Federation was formed to represent those frozen out by the PFA but found that even FIFA's legendarily lax standards wouldn't permit two teams from the same territory to enter. As the establishment reluctantly started paying attention to football the issue was soon dragged into the ongoing row over the future of the Mandate. The international team became the last throw of the dice of the co-operation lobby, those who hoped that Jew and Arab could be persuaded to work together; if they couldn't work together in a football team, then there was no hope of joint government of the Mandate.​

In passing it is interesting to note that the range of entrants to the World Cup very much reflected the polices of the various Great Powers. At one extreme there was France; in line with Paris' belief that most of her overseas holdings were in fact just parts of France, there was just a single French squad entered. In fairness this doctrine was also applied to team selection and several North African born players would line up along side their colleagues from Metropolitan France. Somewhere in the middle was the Dutch approach which would see both a Netherlands and a Dutch East Indies team attempting to qualify, the latter consisting entirely of players born and raised in that colony, though the various Dutch Caribbean holdings would continue to be represented by the entirely European based Netherlands team. The British approach marked the other extreme, all told there would be nine teams from the British Empire attempting to qualify and they would make up just under a quarter of all the entries. This was not an entirely straightforward procedure, not least due to a very unpleasant row between the Irish Football Association (based in Northern Ireland) and the Football Association of Ireland (based in the the Republic of Ireland), both claimed to represent the whole of Ireland and were picking players from both sides of the border. Eventually FIFA would be forced into making a decision, but in the short term they hoped (correctly) the problem would go away as neither team were going to face each other or be likely to qualify. More relevantly for our purposes the Hong Kong entry was one of more visible signs of increased British attention being paid to the region. As the 'Chinese' international team was entirely made up of the players from the South China league team, which played in the Hong Kong first division, the authorities wanted the population to have a 'national' team to rally behind instead of stoking pro-mainland sentiment.

To return to the question of air travel, the final part of the answer can be found in the seemingly unrelated field of postal delivery, or more accurately the complex interplay of Imperial intrigue, industrial policy and the Royal Mail that was the Empire Air Mail Scheme. As a scheme to transport large volumes of mail long distances around the Empire it naturally attracted the attention of Air Ministry civil servants scrabbling around for a way to transport teams of footballers across the Atlantic and into the heart of South America. Sadly for the civil servants in question they soon found themselves dragged into the massive ongoing row about quite how the mail scheme should be run and what aircraft it should use. The Air Minister, Winston Churchill, having noted the number of biplanes still in commercial air service encouraged this blurring of the lines between the two requirements, he sensed an opportunity to 'modernise' civil aviation by encouraging a new generation of modern and efficient monoplane designs to replace the existing aircraft; the Air Mail variant could be used for air freight, the 'World Cup' variant for general passenger service. As we shall see when we look at the Empire Air Mail Scheme in more detail, extra requirements was the very last thing the scheme needed.

--
Notes:
It's back! Hopefully some of the old readers are still here, but if not I will probably keep going regardless out of a sense of relentless and demented perversity. If any of you are left, if you have seen anybody do an AAR that goes off on such utterly unrelated tangents please let me know, I would probably love it.

Cricket bits are all true, the cricket world may well have had an 8 ball over if the war hadn't rudely interrupted, TTL it may still happen.

On the football the Dutch East Indies did indeed try to qualify for the 1938 world cup, aided by the fact absolutely everyone else in Asia (including Australia and New Zealand) pulled out. TTL football politics are different and Japan and China are different so it goes ahead. FIFA were that lax and Mandatory Palestine existed as a (rubbish) Jewish only international tea, expect that to change TTL. Hong Kong didn't get a team till post war, but the 'Chinese' national team was just a HK league team for many years so I thought they'd want to match that at least. The FAI/IFA row was pretty much OTL, they both claimed they were the only board for the whole country and kept picking each others players. It eventually got resolved in the obvious way, bar some squabbling over who got to inherit the historic records of the previous all Ireland team.

EAMS existed in OTL and it didn't go well, but now it's being 'improved' by Churchill and has a tight and unmissable deadlines. That'll help.

 

[El Pip]

Update above just in case anyone comes to this post first.

Apologies for the ridiculous delay but as the parents among you are doubtless well aware free time is a luxury I've barely had these past couple of years, worse what little I time I did have was spent on getting some professional qualifications to increase the number of letters I can put after my name. With all that behind me I can now return to Butterfly and the ridiculous research of tiny details in the pursuit of allegedly writing a HOI2 AAR.

Welcome to the new readers, the backlog of old comments was far too intimidating for me to go through but rest assured form this point on I will g back to my good habits of responding to every comment.

Finally, and without wanting to get people's hopes up, maybe, just maybe I can see my way clear to returning to a gap of mere weeks between updates instead of 18 months or so, but no promises.

 

[TheExecuter]

Holy...

....its alive!

How is (are?) the child(ren)?

My little boy is two now...and thus I only have time to write very late at night. I've moved on to gameplay AARs, so i will gracefully admit defeat and proclaim this AAR officially the slowest story on the boards.

I'll need to catch up again...as I vaguely recall we were speculating about the possibilities of dirigible monoplane possibilities for this world cup...

Welcome back!

 

[Kurt_Steiner]

Hi, daddy Pip.

Cricket? Football? Pah! We want tanks!

 

[Davout]

Overs in Australia and New Zealand (including Test matches) were 8 ball up to 1979. We changed back to 6 ball when Thommo and Lillee left to join Packer's circus.

 

[caffran]

wow!! welcome back pippy.

I have to admit I had given up on this continuing, so glad I was wrong.

Of course, now I have to go back and re-read the whole thing to get back up to speed.

 

[Karelian]

 

[bdr10]

After previous update I checked this site every few days, then every couple of weeks and then once in a blue moon, but still nothing. And then today....
Welcome back.

 

[Praetonia]

It lives.

 

[El Pip]

TheExecuter - Still just the one little girl, who is dedicated to being a small ball of endearing menace.

I'm impressed at the variety of your AARs, cycling and naval grand strategy, though I had hoped you would finally reveal the secret(s) of the Last Mission. Ah well, naval pron will have to suffice as an alternative.

Kurt_Steiner - Hello Kurtie, you wouldn't want me to come back with a relevant and on topic update would you? That would be a betrayal of one of the pillars of this AAR?!

Davout - Far more complicated than that, especially in New Zealand. Let these undoubtedly heavily bearded chaps explain - http://acscricket.com/?page_id=464

caffran - This is my magnum opus and I will always come back to it, no matter how long it takes. As always, I recommend you skip the first few chapters, particularly now as some of the photos have vanished. I'm trying to fix that, but as always time is a challenge.

Karelian / Praetonia - Butterfly was only sleeping. A very long, deep sleep admittedly...

bdr10 - I am delighted and amazed to have such a loyal following, I can only hope you think the wait was worth it.

 

[El Pip]

In reference to the above, I've been going back through fixing the broken picture links in the early chapters. But can I just fix them? No. I've found myself expanding the little bits of text under the pictures to include more detail and all the little bits I've found out since I first wrote those chapters. Also to explain some of things I just sort of glossed over. I probably glossed over them as they didn't really matter, but this is Butterfly damnit!

Rest assured I'm not changing any of the plot, if I was doing it again I would but I'm committed now. Anyway should make things a bit more bearable, or at the very least longer, for those doing a re-read.

 

[Nathan Madien]

*takes a moment to absorb the update*

Yup. El Pip definitely wrote that. No "Paul is Dead"-esque imposter could replicate his attention to detail.

As we shall see when we look at the Empire Air Mail Scheme in more detail, extra requirements was the very last thing the scheme needed.

"In more detail" is El Pip speak for "You will know more about the Empire Air Mail Scheme than you know your significant other."

 

[Jape]

"In more detail" is El Pip speak for "You will know more about the Empire Air Mail Scheme than you know your significant other."

Butterfly Effect, or; I crammed 1938 inside my head.

I await an update Pip, with a mixture of excitement and fear.

 

[Davout]

Check out the history of Qantas for an interesting perspective on the logistics of the Empire Air Mail Scheme from the other end of hte line and the forces driving the upgrades in aircraft. Digging out my Ivan Southall books in anticipation.

 

[Duritz]

Welcome home El Pip. The Antipodean crew, all reporting for duty!

Dury.

Did I mention tank pron???

 

[H.Appleby]

Pippy! What a wonderful thing to see upon my return to the Paradox forums after almost a year and a half of absence.

You've lost not an iota of your talent or your inimitable prose style! Best to you, Mrs. Pip and La Pipita!