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211 Squadron enquiries To find your way around the pages of this website, you might want to start on the Site summary page, which is like a map of the site with comments. Or use the Site search page to find what you are looking for. For more information about 211 Squadron RAF and its men, contact me if you wish and I’ll help if I can.
All other enquiries Citing this website Linking to this site Linking to individual pages 211 Squadron Survivors Association This 211 Squadron website has never been formally connected with the Association. It is simply a personal effort of mine, as a son of 211 Squadron Sgt Observer Nobby Clark. Over the years I’ve enjoyed very cordial relations with a good many ex-members of 211 Squadron and its Association, and with their families. Deeply appreciated, their interest and assistance have contributed greatly to the richness of this 211 Squadron history as it stands today. In October each year, a group of Burma-era members of 177 Squadron and 211 Squadron continue to gather for dinner in London. Contributing website material What the site does lack is a better chronological account from official records. Future updates will therefore concentrate on transcripts of extant 211 Squadron records, with the aim of making a more complete record of the Squadron and its members. Many wonderful pictures and narratives have been contributed by the boys or their close family. I cannot adequately express my thanks for their generosity, in the quality and variety of the material put forward to date by Squadron members or their families, either to me directly or through Adrian Fryatt, Elizabeth Kaegi or Ian Carter. Blunders New material Contributors need not feel that they must toil over drafting a fully-formed story. I will happily compile a piece myself from whatever you care to share (and indeed much prefer to do so). The briefest biographical details, an old letter, even just a Service Record Form 543: a page or smaller addition can be made from quite small beginnings. Having said all that, a number of ex-members of 211 Squadron have put forward their own stories as first-person narratives. Deeply appreciated, in the main these appear word-for-word (with any amplifications of mine clearly shown in the usual way, in square brackets). If you have something that you think should be part of this story, please contact me.
The site is always growing and every piece is accorded all the care I can give it. Given the amount of work in hand at any point, material put forward will take at least several months to appear and may very well take much longer. On scanning images Options in scanners or in software that offer to email images at smaller sizes should be avoided at all costs. For the clearest results that will display well on screen, please scan original B&W photos as grayscale for preference, at 300dpi, with no sharpening, no enhancements, no corrections of any kind, preferably without adding any text to the image. And most importantly, please: at the highest practical level of JPEG quality. If you are unfamiliar with these terms or with your scanner or software options, please check their Help functions, or ask for help from family & friends, or just ask me. Before you send images, please check that they are sharp and clear eg with the Windows Picture & Fax Viewer. Press the + button several times and you should still see a crisp image, free of little blocks of tone and free of “sharpening” haloes. Internet practice Printing the site First check Page Setup in your browser, and either select Shrink to fit or set page margins to the smallest allowable. You might like to try printing 2-up and both sides, if your printer set-up allows it. Through your browser, check your Print/Printer/Properties options. At any update, current pages are likely to be revised and new pages added. See the Site Updates page for details. Site navigation In this simplest possible website layout, each page is just one mouse-click away from every other page. The order of material is a sensible compromise between background, chronology, theatre, and individual narrative. So on this site, the Home page is an active page with useful content that briefly introduces the Squadron, the aim of making such a record, and the navigation menu: the long list of page name links that sits at the top of the left hand column on this and every page. To go from one page to another, just pick a link and click. The foot of each page carries another simpler set of links: to the Home page, the Site summary, on to the Next page or back to the Previous page, or to the Enquiries page or the Site Search page. To go to the page you last looked at, use your browser’s Back button. Within-page navigation: Most pages are quite long. Use your keyboard [Home] [End] [Page Up] [Page Down] keys, click-and-drag the scroll bar on the right, or use the mouse scroll-wheel to move up and down each page. The Squadron summary page acts as a narrative site map, introducing the site pages in context, again with live links. Screens and browsers All pages are without frames and free of pop-ups, cookies, animations and sounds. They should work well in any recent browser. For ease of reading, you may wish to set your browser’s viewing options to a sans serif font like Arial, at medium size or smaller. For printing, I choose to reset to Times New Roman. Photographs Image sources are invariably acknowledged on this site. Some photographs came with brief captions or descriptions and these are indicated in the text. In the majority of cases, the captions are my own original work, as are the extended comments. With few exceptions, photographs on this site are reproduced as near as practicable to their original state: monochrome, in their entirety (ie full-frame), near original size and with little or no enhancement. The images come from a variety of sources varying greatly in quality, from original prints and negatives, from 60 year-old half-tone newsprint and photogravure, from copy negatives and prints, from photocopies, from laser and inkjet prints, and from scans of every level of quality. For Web purposes the images are stored as grayscale, in JPEG (.jpg) format, at a notional 72ppi and at or near the highest JPEG “quality” level (ie web quality not archival quality). This way, pages will load with reasonable speed and print at reasonable quality but individual images will neither enlarge or print well. The space limit offered by my Internet service provider is most generous but to deter image theft and to leave plenty of room for growth there are no thumbnail links to higher quality pictures. If you need higher resolution copies of photographs from this site, contact me. Stripping and reposting images from websites like this without asking, without attribution, without a link to the source, and without their carefully developed captions is bad practice. It is slipshod, dishonest and an insult: to the men, to the intelligence of readers, and to future researchers. And yes, I do find and pursue breaches. Patiently, politely, repeatedly and with success. And I do not care how long it takes or how far I have to go. Error 404 Page not found On spam On-line archival preservation Preservation of this site and future access are both assured, for the short term and the long term, with two independent archive sets:
Other Internet archives For other web-archive programmes, see the NLA PADI page http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/topics/92.html or try this Austrian summary of National and State links http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~aola/links/WebArchiving.html. The Internet Archive also known as the Wayback Machine offers a hands-off but very imperfect alternative. Although frequent, the archive copies there are often quite incomplete (frequently lacking images and/or pages in whole or in part). More problematically, to find the archived copies of any site, you must first know the right URLs or addresses of that site while it existed. For this site, they were: Copyright Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland, under the terms of the Click-Use Licence. The 211 Squadron badge is British Crown Copyright/MoD, reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Britannic Majesty’s Stationery Office. Conditions of use Requests for permission to reproduce any of the content in any form should be directed to me in the first instance, at the address above. By respecting copyright and condition of use, you are showing respect to the men who served, to their story, and to future researchers. www.211squadron.org © D Clark & others 1998–2010 |
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