Talk:William Forbes-Sempill, 19th Lord Sempill

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'However...' however!'[edit]

Sorry if this seems a bit out of off-the-mark, but, I've only come across a (very) few, thank goodness - cases, where someone (who needs remedial English classes as well as a spellcheck!) thinks that by overusing a word - in ths case however throughout an entry, makes the entry look...'better.'

It doesn't


It doesn't do anything, except show the person's lack of education and familiarity with the English language.

If I 'seem a bit 'snobbish,' by 'PC' people, tough.

'Knowledge is power,' Period.

Using irrelevant words, using irrelevant words repeatedly is DEstructive.

To whoever was the person who did the 'however;' You want to 'help? 'Go to school!' learn English, learn grammar.

Until then, DON'T 'help,' because your not helping now.

Amendments[edit]

At present we have "During World War I, he enrolled in the Royal Flying Corps; by the end of the war he held the rank of colonel. He became a test pilot and transferred into the Royal Naval Air Service." As the RNAS ceased to exist on 1 April 1918, Sempill could not have transferred to that service after the war. If it is correct that at the end of the War Sempill was a colonel, he must have been in either the Army, RAF (or Royal Marines). Greenshed (talk) 21:05, 21 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Here's the 4 April Staff Appointments notice with WFFS as Major (Temp. Lieut. Col.). January 1918 New years honours etc for the RNAS with his promotion to "Wing-Commander". A brief Obituary in Flight. It seems he was in the RNAS. GraemeLeggett (talk) 21:52, 21 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Imperial Japanese secret intelligence agencies[edit]

Would that mean his handlers were most likely attached to the horrific Kempeitai? Or did the Imperial Japanese military have another agency? 10:54, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

The Fall Of Singapore - The Great Betrayal (BBC Documentary)[edit]

Since most of the so-called information the article is based on, is from this docu, here is my review:

It was bad beyond belief! Allow me to start with the factual errors:

Did you know that the carrier HMS Eagle was a sister ship of the HMS Argus? That by 1930 Japan had a carrier fleet equal in strength to the RN’s? That Japan was an ally of Germany in 1937?

All right, this is just the kind of stupidity in military matters the media display on a regular basis but the BBC made matters much worse than this. Their thesis was that in the early 1920s two ex-RN officers named Rutland and Semphill gave the Japanese the know how that enabled them to attack PH and take Singapore. In order to prove this, the authors used any trick in the book of conspiracy theorists:

They quoted from a lot of MI5 documents but in an interesting manner. More than once the damning evidence were single words from different paragraphs of a letter. Smells like selective quoting with the intention to distort facts. When I hit the stop button on one occasion I was able to read most of the letter. The sensitive piece of aviation technology given away to the Japanese was a ‘Blackburn training aircraft’.

It got better, way better. Next Semphill gave the Japanese secret information about the latest British aviation engine, that the engine ran smoothly at 100 to 150 rpm. And the icing on the cake was that the engine was the Bristol Jupiter, produced under license by Germany, France, the USSR and Japan.

That does not look like espionage to me but advertising. That Semphill was just helping the UK aviation industry to get foreign customers.

Next the makers of the so called documentary used another conspiracy theorists tool. Attributing a effect to a cause even though the two are not connected. The other alleged spy –Rutland- worked for Mitsubishi as a consultant. Right after mentioning this, they showed a full screen picture of the A6M and said that Mitsubishi made the Zero fighter that killed hundreds of allied airmen in the war.

Both bits of information are true but not connected. Rutland worked for Mitsubishi in the early 1920s, the A6M was designed in the late 1930s. Aviation technology had radically changed in the meantime. Nothing what the Japanese designers learned from Rutland was relevant any more.

Later Rutland went to Honolulu and indeed seems to have gathered intel for the Japanese, albeit in a legal manner. Something the Japanese could have done themselves as the naval base can be viewed from public land. By the way, that important bit of info was of course omitted by the makers. Instead they said that ‘Honolulu was Pearl Harbour’. It was, but at the time it wasn’t the base of the US Pacific Fleet. It was just a pit stop the fleet would use for on its way east.

Last but not least, they did not mention with one word that the British air, naval and ground forces in the Far East were all absurdly under strength. No surprise because that would have debunked their carefully constructed conspiracy theory.

IMO the docu can not be considered a credible source. Markus Becker02 (talk) 10:09, 24 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank goodness for a bit of common sense here. I watched the TV programme briefly, and got a VHS tape for future ref. Been waiting for the nonsense to die down, and hoping for a transcript to be available somewhere. I never understood the tenuous link between Sempill and Pearl Harbor, except as a provocation for 'patriotic' Americans. Unsure how to tackle the mess in the article, but I think we probably have to assume that the TV programme does qualify as a generally reliable source (of sensationalist journalism). The article looked OK up to this edit April 2012, just needing minor corrections. My interest is mostly just aircraft, but I hope some interested party will consider re-writing sections of it as if it were a BLP. PeterWD (talk) 12:44, 24 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified (January 2018)[edit]

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Thesis file on Commons[edit]

Just a note to point to a December 2017 thesis PDF file on Commons, author Yanghwan Cho of US Naval Postgraduate School, title NAVAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, NEW TECHNOLOGY, AND ADAPTATION OF THE MILITARY INNOVATION: FOCUSING ON THE CASE OF THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER INNOVATION OF THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY DURING THE INTERWAR PERIOD: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/FEDLINK_-_United_States_Federal_Collection_%28IA_internationalrel1094556886%29.pdf One mention of Sempill by name. PeterWD (talk) 21:46, 28 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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