Rationale

FINANCE

The work I do and the published results are financed entirely from my own pocket. I have never asked for, or accepted, payment for my work on 304 Squadron history. In the event that anyone receives a request for money or original artefacts - purporting to be from me – please DO NOT send anything. IT WILL BE A SCAM. What you should do is to report it to your Internet Service Provider as abuse. I would also be grateful if you could forward a copy to me so that I am aware of it. Finally you should delete the message and immediately empty your trash bin.

INFORMATION

This Blog and my back up files would be an awful lot thinner without help and information from the people who read it and the people I contact for information. I value the contributions made by the families and friends of 304 Squadron members and by fellow researchers and professional historians and organisations. I love to see photographs, documents and medals and I love to read emails with information about the lives of the air and ground crew of the squadrons. But emails and scans are perfectly adequate for research and reproduction. PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME PRECIOUS ORIGINALS.

Damaged photographs can be repaired – thanks to the miracles of modern technology – so, unless the faces are missing, even they can be useful. If I have a photo of this type repaired, I will email a copy of the repaired version to the person who sent me the original.

I assume that any information sent to me is sent with the implied permission to use it and any such photographs, copy documents etc. sent to me will be acknowledged to its source and copyright will remain with its owners.

CONTACT

Messages sent to the Blog as comments appear without the sender’s email address. So, if you want, or need, a reply, please include your name and a return email address. All email addresses will be edited out before the message is published on the Blog. This is to avoid my correspondents from a barrage of unwanted spam emails.

Alternatively, contact me directly on one of my regular emails neville.bougourd at gmail.com or neville.bougourd at yahoo.com and replace the at with @, leaving no spaces around the @.  All messages to the Blog are monitored before they are published, with exactly that in mind, only a sick mind would advertise hotels or viagra on a post announcing the death of a hero or a battle for freedom. Abusive messages will be read and dealt with, but they will not be published.

PERSONAL

My work on 304 Squadron and its men would be difficult – if not impossible – without the help that is so freely given by my correspondents. It would also be totally pointless if nobody read the Blog. So, I would like to express my thanks to everyone who has helped me in the past, now and in the future.

Being devoted to only one squadron, it will never achieve the level of hits that some blogs do; but I see this as quality rather than quantity. In the first three years of its existence it has gone up from about 10 hits per day to an average of 2,800 hits per month and has been read in 107 countries as of March 2013.

I am not Polish or, as far as I am aware, of Polish descent. But I do appreciate the heroic Poles who fought for the freedom I now enjoy. I feel a deep sense of shame for the treatment they were subjected to, after the war, by the British and Americans. I am also amazed at the lack of credit given to them by historians generally. This is my contribution towards enlightening anyone who cares to read it, to the debt of honour that we owe to the Poles who were beaten at home, ran away to fight in France, were beaten there then ran away to Britain and fought again. This time they won. As refugees they had no obligation to fight – but fight they did.

Czesc ich pamieci - Honour to their memory - my only words in Polish.

Neville Bougourd

12th March 2013