The career of Edward Thompson in TTL was initially not terribly different from our world. He served in the British Army during the First Great War, and afterwards returned to work in the railways. His career sharply diverged from OTL when he was not named as Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London and North Eastern Railway; JF Harrison was named to that position instead. British railway historians in TTL have debated if Thompson was denied this post primarily due to his abrasive personality, or else for not being considered as completely politically reliable. Regardless of the case, an embittered Thompson left Britain after the end of the SGW for Australia, where he remained did the rest of his life.
TL-191: After the End
- Thread starter David bar Elias
- Start date
The career of Edward Thompson in TTL was initially not terribly different from our world. He served in the British Army during the First Great War, and afterwards returned to work in the railways. His career sharply diverged from OTL when he was not named as Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London and North Eastern Railway; JF Harrison was named to that position instead. British railway historians in TTL have debated if Thompson was denied this post primarily due to his abrasive personality, or else for not being considered as completely politically reliable. Regardless of the case, an embittered Thompson left Britain after the end of the SGW for Australia, where he remained did the rest of his life.
I'd say it would likely be the former. I assume American Labrador is canon to the books, and it'd be absurd for Quebec to take everything but the last mile inland from the coast, which is what their historical maximum claim went to for some reason.
How's Portugal doing ITTL apart from reforming their colonial empire into the Federation? How did they fare with neutrality during GW1 ITTL? Was there a semi-fascist (semi-actionist ITTL) corporatist dictatorship like IOTL? The general instability of the First Republic would make the 1926 coup inevitable, leading to the creation of the Estado Novo dictatorship of OTL. Was there also something like the Carnation Revolution that ousted said dictatorship?
Let's add in Friedrich Ebert, Hermann Goering, Otto Grotewahl, Erich Hoekner, Alfred Hugenberg, Wilhelm Pieck, Ernst Thalmann, Walter Ulbricth , and Otto Wels.
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The closest equivalent in TTL is United States Public Broadcasting (USPB), which is somewhat analogous to PBS and the BBC from our world.
In 2021, London, Ontario is known as Franklin, Ontario; the name only changed in TTL when US settlers became a plurality of London’s population.
Prince Rupert wasn’t renamed. However, the Queen Elizabeth Islands are known in 2021 as the Mahan Islands, after Alfred Thayer Mahan.
In 2021, China, in spite of the economic and social upheavals caused by the Great Housing Crash, still has one of the world’s fastest growing economies. China is also one of the world’s great powers. China in TTL does have some of the same economic and structural issues as in our world regarding economic development and the environment, however.
The Beano and The Dandy did not exist in TTL.
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The family of Georges Remi (an analogue to our world’s Georges Remi, with the same name) left Brussels after the end of the First Great War, rather than accept the offer of German citizenship offered to all residents of the former country. Initially settling in France, Remi’s parents, disillusioned at the bleak postwar economic environment, left for the Empire of Brazil.
Although the Brazilians had sided with the Central Powers at the end of the war, they were perfectly willing to allow Francophone immigrants, provided they assimilated quickly. Georges Remi would eventually gain fluency in Portuguese, even if he could never lose the accent that marked him as an immigrant. Remi, whose family settled in Rio de Janeiro, would work as a freelance journalist, beginning with French-language newspapers. Remi would later gain distinction as one of Brazil’s first major film critics and writers, publishing a book on what he considered Brazil’s cinematic “landmarks” in 1970. He died in 1985.
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Tom Moore doesn’t exist in TTL.
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The analogue to Ian Fleming in TTL was Robert Fleming, born on a slightly different date to our world. Robert Fleming was more academically gifted than Ian Fleming in OTL, and had a natural talent for languages. By the end of his life, Robert Fleming was proficient in 16 foreign languages. Fleming’s linguistic skills event gained him a prestigious position at the Foreign Office by the mid-1930s.
Quickly becoming bored of the Foreign Office, Fleming decided to travel abroad. From 1937 until the outbreak of the Second Great War in 1941, Fleming travelled and lived throughout the British Empire in Asia, including India, Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore. He was in Singapore at the outbreak of war in 1941. He rushed back to Britain to enlist as quickly as was possible.
Once in Britain, Fleming quickly came to the attention of recruiters working for the newly formed Ministry for Economic Warfare. Fleming accepted the offer to join what would become known as Special Operations, a unit which would operate behind enemy lines for the purpose of sabotage, among other activities. He would spend the duration of the SGW on the Western Front.
Fleming never talked publicly about his experiences in Special Operations.
In 1944, following the German superbomb attack and the end of the SGW, Fleming would accept an offer of recruitment into the Australian military, surprising his interlocutor with his fluency in Japanese. During the first postwar generation after the end the SGW, Fleming would play key roles in the creation of the Australia Irregular Forces (AIF), the Australian equivalent to the USA’s postwar Grey Berets. However, Fleming never recovered psychologically from his experiences in the SGW, or the shock of Britain’s catastrophic defeat in that conflict. Retiring from active service in 1967, on the eve of Australia’s long feared war against Japan, he was discovered dead in his Melbourne apartment, from what was later determined to be alcohol poisoning.
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Is China trying a policy of sinclification in Tibet? What are the reactions of the international community in that regard? What about Xinjiang, does China also control it as well?
New Brunswick was originally named for the Duchy of Brunswick in Germany. The US authorities saw no need to alter the name.
The Chinese government, by 2021, is still encouraging Han Chinese citizens to settle both in Tibet and Xinjiang. In 2021, the only country that regularly denounced China’s settlement policies in Tibet is Bharat. However, this is primarily related to the acrimonious rivalry between Bharat and China.
Bharat, following the Tibetan War in TTL’s 1970s, also accepted a large number of Tibetan refugees, including the Dalai Lama.
These questions would be better answered on one of the other threads. To make a long story short, Portugal in TTL was more politically stable in comparison to our world during the early 20th Century. There wasn’t an analogue in TTL to either the Estado Novo regime or the Carnation Revolution.
The analogue to Enid Blyton in TTL was Mary Blyton, born on a slightly different date compared to our world. Mary Blyton was also a talented writer, but never made a career out of it; she wound up pursuing a musical career instead, which stemmed from her natural talent with the piano and from her eventual enrollment at the Guildhall School of Music. It was during this time that Blyton developed a lifelong love for musical composition and writing lyrics.
Blyton’s life, like those of her generation, was shaped irrevocably by the British loss in the First Great War, and the resulting bleak social, political, and economic climate. Blyton’s ambitions of breaking into the London theater scene, or of one day becoming a famous classical composer, were dashed by a harsh postwar economic environment that did not favor artists. In 1926, frustrated by life in London and in response to the street violence that marked the previous year’s General Strike, Blyton left Britain for Australia, eventually settling in Melbourne.
Life was not initially easy for Blyton in Australia. However, she was able to break into Melbourne’s emerging theater scene, initially as a musician attached to several East End productions. Her career took a sharp change for the better when her lyrics for an unfinished musical book (initially imagined as a drama on the life of an immigrant) came to the attention of another British expatriate becoming involved in the Melbourne theater scene: PG Wodehouse.
Although Blyton was not pleased with Wodehouse transforming her imagined musical drama into a satirical comedy on British expatriate life in Melbourne, which was first performed in 1929 as The Toorak Triumph, it proved to be a start of her successful career in the Melbourne theater world. Blyton, influenced by Woodhouse’s own productions, and through collaboration with her husband (who had also started in the Melbourne theater would as a composer) became more cynical and satirical in her work. Blyton was a prolific composer and lyricist, and would complete the book and lyrics for over three dozen musicals, although not all would be performed during her lifetime.
In 2021, the most famous Blyton musical in both Australia and the United States is The Librarian of Dandenong, originally performed in 1940. This musical, described my multiple cultural historians as an “anti-romance,” tells the story of a librarian whose love of reading and ambitions for an independent life are gradually crushed by her family and friends, as they pressure her to accept the courtship of a man who turns out to be a criminal on the run.
In 1962, Mary Blyton would be awarded a Commonwealth of Australia Prize for her contributions to the country’s musical theater. She died in 1974.
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In TTL, Archibald Sinclair served in the British Army on the Western Front during the First Great War. However, unlike in our world, he did not serve as an aid de camp to the commander of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. Sinclair was killed in action in 1916 in France during a German offensive that occurred alongside the Battle of Verdun.
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I am afraid that I don’t know which James Cunningham who you’re referring to.
So it looks like them not joining GW1 actually benefitted them ITTL.
That is arguably the case with Portugal, as well as the Italian Empire in TTL.