The Cowley Motor Company factory they mention is still operational and building the Mini to this day (although now owned by the German automaker BWM!)

As both town and gown, it's always nice to read about Oxford history. The article doesn't touch on the huge contribution made by students "in the trenches" too so to speak; the UK upper-classes having an unusually strong military tradition. I was reflecting today about the exceptional poetry that came out of the UK during WWI, and I guess academic progress in the UK during WWII is perhaps that war's equivalent

Can someone explain the title? I get that it's a reference to Churchill's famous "We shall fight on the beaches" speech [0], but why "buttery"? Does it have some particularly significance with regards to Oxford?

0: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-fin...

Somewhat related, being a book on science and world war 2:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1127842.Most_Secret_War

Dr R V Jones' Most Secret War is amazing, funny, easy to get into, and tells a great story too:

"R.V. Jones's account of his part in British Scientific Intelligence between 1939 and 1949. It was his responsibility to anticipate German applications of science to warfare, so that their new weapons could be countered before they were used. Much of his work had to do with radio navigation, as in the Battle of the Beams, with radar, as in the Allied Bomber Offensive and in the preparations for D-Day and in the war at sea.

He was also in charge of intelligence against the V-1 (flying bomb) and the V-2 (rocket) retaliations weapons and, although the Germans were some distance away from success, against their nuclear weapons."

I come from Coventry. More damage was done after the war by the city council than the Germans ever did.

It is one of the few places that I think should have been permanently wiped off the map. It's been an absolute hole since the 1970s.