Portsmouth, Alien Invasion – Home Defence
Defending the city of Portsmouth from the Squirmy Munge was vitally important, of course, but as a popular phrase of the time reminded citizens “Defence starts at your doorstep!” and so it was that many homes in and around the island became highly fortified structures. Popular means of improving one’s house included: Asbestos coating, to act as fire retardant. Steel shutters for the windows to protect from shrapnel. Holy water fonts (as some people considered – and weren’t dissuaded from considering by the church who sold and installed the fonts – that the aliens were sent by Satan). Electrified door knockers (eventually forbidden in the city owing to high numbers of postmen requiring hospitalisation and a general acceptance that that Squirmy Munge probably wouldn’t knock anyway). But there were also some very innovative attempts at protecting property too. Two streets in Milton painted a mural of grass, trees, and large boulders on their rooftops in an attempt to fool any passing Squirmy Munge fighter bombers into targeting elsewhere. Either the aliens were not fooled or they were just clumsy or lucky because an evening raid in October 1921 proved very costly for the neighbourhood with two thirds of the buildings...
Portsmouth, Alien Invasion – Women’s Defence Force
We’ve already seen that the women of Portsmouth kept their spirits high even as the Squirmy Munge attacked the city during the 1915-1923 war but don’t think for one second that their role in the conflict was limited to playing football under daylight UFO raids; the Portsmouth women were organised, aggressive, and adept in all the ways of warfare. Nothing’s really changed. A familiar sight in the city was that of the Women’s Defence Force patrols of between one and two dozen heavily armed fighters patrolling the streets making sure no Munge incursion took place. The WDF were involved in countless engagements with the aliens and were credited as being the main reason for the Defence of Copnor Road in August of 1921. Membership of the Portsmouth Women’s Defence Force was considered a great honour and rumours were rife of men allegedly donning disguises in order to fight alongside the courageous females of the city although no documented evidence of this actually having occurred...
Portsmouth, Alien Invasion – Defy Them Poster
We’ve already seen that one way in which the citizens of Portsmouth kept their spirits up during the alien invasion by the Squirmy Munge of the early part of the twentieth century was through comics, and in particular the well-received Commander Pompey publication. Another way, and one common with most of the greater wars in recent centuries, was through motivational posters, the most famous of which was the Defy Them poster that first started appearing on walls in and around the city in late 1919. Present day Portsmouth has a thriving local art scene and it can clearly be seen that this talent was alive and well in 1919 too. However, it’s not just the wonderful example of art deco design that made this particular war poster so famous. It happens to have a rather bizarre history to it too. A tale started circulating in the city of a young woman named Abigail Ball. Abigail – it was claimed – had been walking through the Baffins area of Portsmouth when a Squirmy Munge landing craft dropped onto the ground in front of her. As the hatch on the craft hissed open and too afraid to run or scream Abigail did the first thing she could think of and performed an interpretive dance routine. The hatch closed up, the craft lifted off, and Abigail lived to tell her tale. Quite a fanciful story but it proved popular among the locals. The posters started to appear not long after and dancing to defy became a regular pastime for the people of Portsmouth. It was believed that the elusive and mysterious Abigail herself had designed, printed, and put up the posters as each one had the signature “Ball, A” on the back in fine print. However, in 1927 – long after the alien invasion had been repelled – in an interview with the local newspaper a Mrs Jenny Smith of Buckland admitted that she had invented the Abigail story and had produced the posters not because of any fighting spirit but rather to drum up trade for her ballet school which had been on the verge of financial collapse owing to the war. As is the nature of these things most people decided to disbelieve this version of the events and the legend of Abigail Ball and the Defy Them poster lives on to this...
Portsmouth, Alien Invasion – Collaborators
Collaboration with the enemy is probably an inevitability. In war some people do what they can to survive even at the cost of their neighbours’ lives; it’s understandable and difficult to forgive without the buffer of time to consider all the reasons. In 1920 there was no buffer of time as the people of Portsmouth were into their fifth year fighting off the Squirmy Munge and collaborators were looked upon with utter contempt and dealt with quite brutally. We saw in a previous article on the alien invasion of Portsmouth that the subject of collaboration with the enemy was a sore subject for the locals. For a couple of years before 1920 collaborators – people who passed information onto the Squirmy Munge or who were even deemed to fail to resist with typical Pompey spirit – would quietly disappear in the night but when a small group of pro-invaders supporters started to voice opposition to the war and advocated capitulation a more public demonstration of what it meant to be a Portsmouth citizen was needed. In March of 1920 the first public centrifugion of collaborators took place. Traitors were tied by ropes to the “Spinning Stick” (better names were sought but there was a war going on and catchily-titled execution methods were in short supply) and spun to death. That year was particularly warm on the south coast and these public displays, though grisly, provided a cooling breeze as they operated making them very...
Portsmouth, Alien Invasion – Commander Pompey
It wasn’t just through grit, determination, and a steady flow of munitions and inventive weaponry that the people of Portsmouth fought back the alien invasion by The Squirmy Munge in the years following World War I; literature would also play a huge part. However, unlike the writers during the great war who had favoured poetry and depressing the hell out of anyone unlucky enough to come across a passage, in Portsmouth it was to comic books that authors turned and the tales they featured were far more uplifting. Many comic strips and characters blossomed in this period in history and one of the most popular of them all was Commander Pompey. Always accompanied by his scientist sidekick Southsea Belle the commander engaged in both defending the city from The Squirmy Munge and taking the fight directly to the enemy in any of its hideouts on the moon, under the sea, or in the hills. Of course, he wouldn’t be a true Portsmouth hero if there wasn’t a little dig at the city’s neighbours down the coast every now and then...
Alien Erotica
Via The Toast and the mind of Mallory Ortberg is a fantastically funny piece of Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body, featuring instantly recognisable yet unarguably disgusting acts of sexual intercourse such as: They licked one another as if they were food, but they were not food. And: Some sort of gel...
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