Find out what is happening in your area with the new THP Events Schedule on Facebook

Keep up to date with all our upcoming talks, signings and book launches across the country with our new events schedule on Facebook. There is always something happening with our authors, whether it is at a local Waterstones, museum or at a literary festival. Visit the ‘Events’ tab and see what is happening in your area.

Upcoming events this month include:

• Saturday 10th March 15:45 – 16:45: Shackleton’s Dream author Stephen Haddelsey will be appearing at the ‘Words by the Water’ festival to conduct a talk on Hillary’s epic journey across the Antarctic. He will then end up with a discussion and Q&A session.
• Saturday 17th March 11:00 – 14:00: Bloody British History: Lincoln author Douglas Wynn will be at Waterstones Lincoln for a signing session. Douglas is a renowned local history author with multiple books on Lincolnshire to his name.
• Sunday 18th March 14:00 – 17:00: Portsmouth’s World War Two Heroes author James Daly will be conducting a talk on the lost men and women of Portsmouth at the D-Day museum. The talk will be followed by a signing session opened to all who attend and the general public.
• Saturday 24th March 10:30 – 13:30: Hoylake Then & Now author Jim O’Neil will be launching his book at Hoylake Library. This will include a signing session and a display showcasing some of the Then & Now photos from the book.

 

 

The Reluctant Nazi

When I was studying at Columbia University in New York, a fellow student started a conversation with me saying: “So, you’ve made soap out of my aunt.” He meant it as a joke, but I could only run away to hide my tears.  I was shocked and hurt without, however, at that time feeling implicated in the horrors of the Nazi regime. Growing up in post-war Germany, the Third Reich hadn’t been part of my world.  Then over 60 years later I made two discoveries which changed everything.  The first brought the war back to me in terrifying detail.  The second opened the floodgates to a torrent of questions about my family and the Nazi era.

After my mother’s death, my husband and I were vacationing in her Vienna apartment when I discovered two green notebooks hidden at the back of a book shelf.  Flipping through them, I immediately recognised my grandfather’s tiny precise lettering.  I had spent the happiest years of my childhood with him.  My father had been killed in the war, shot down over England in his single engine fighter plane and my mother had to work full time.  I was moved around, sometimes in Kindertransports, ending up in a convent school in Vienna where I fell ill with scarlet fever.  My grandparents, evacuees from Berlin, were squeezed into one and a half rooms of a farmer’s cottage without running water. The larger room also had to serve as my grandfather’s makeshift eye surgery. Nevertheless they gladly took me in and gave me a loving home. When my grandmother was hospitalized, my grandfather took me on calls to patients on the back of his bike, telling me stories along the way.  Later he taught me Latin and built kites with me. As long as he lived, he was both father and grandfather to me.

The diaries cover the time in 1945 between the fall of Berlin and the beginning occupation when my grandfather worked in cellars and bunkers of central Berlin, a stone’s throw from the Reichstag. Without water, light, or even bandages there was so little he and the other doctors could do to lessen the pain of the wounded and dying.  “Corpses lie in a chapel of the Ziegelstrasse Clinic, for the most part without clothes, men and women together in layers.  Over all hangs the stench of decaying bodies and excrement.”  Reading on into the night I followed my grandfather as he scrambled over the ruins of fallen houses, through streets buried in rubble to reach a medical cellar. The acrid smoke that hung over the city made it hard to breathe.  “Towards evening the sky to the east is a ghastly sea of smoke. I creep out at 10 o’clock at night to the clinic under whistling grenades and bombs, a wilderness of fire and dust, behind it, although already high in the sky, the blood red moon.”

But then the diaries delivered another punch to my stomach.  My grandfather had been a member of the Nazi Party.  I had not known this.  Sixty years after the end of the Third Reich I was confronted in a most immediate way with the problem of German guilt.  Now at last I had to reach some kind of a personal accounting.  I had to try to understand why a gentle and humane and deeply religious man like my grandfather joined the Nazi Party in 1933 although after that he was not active in it.  The words of that student at Columbia came back to me and I experienced that the Third Reich has after effects that span generations.

However, it took me many months to reach that point during which time I buried the diaries in the bottom of my desk and did not talk about them even to my husband Mike. After more than a year of silence, my secret finally burst out.  Mike surprised me by urging me to write about this and show not only German guilt but German suffering and how ordinary people get caught in totalitarian regimes.  So I began to tell my grandfather’s story and it became interwoven with my own.

 

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The Diamond Jubilee and its Solid Gold Setting

Her Majesty the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee is tinged with a little sadness along with the celebration because the accession in 1952 had meant the death of Her much-loved father King George VI, whose influence upon Her Majesty and Her own public duties has been profound.

George VI and his consort the late Queen Elisabeth the Queen Mother were deep thinking, deep feeling and committed to their Christian faith.  Although George came to the throne as second choice after the abdication of his elder brother Edward VIII, he filled the role as if it had been designed for him.

In 1939 the royal couple visited North America. The visit was a resounding success and they won over many US citizens (who had previously regarded royalty with some suspicion) with their easy manner, religious devotion and deep sense of duty. It was also on this trip that they forged a real and enduring friendship with President F. D. Roosevelt and his wife that was to bring considerable advantage to the UK during the war that followed.

The royal couple’s visit to the USA as an add-on to a tour of Canada (at a time when war was imminent and expected) was at the personal invitation of the American President to the king who wanted closer ties with the UK established before the outbreak of war. No doubt the king took advice from his government when accepting the invitation, but it was a personal invitation from one head-of-state to another.

The royal visit and conversations between the two leaders had profound and lasting effects. Firstly the American people warmed to George and Elisabeth as a down-to-earth romantic couple without any of the baggage associated with colonialism, which quietened isolationist tendencies to some extent and helped cast the British as friends, allies and fellow democrats. Secondly, the warm friendship and frank exchange of views between the two men set the tone for wartime Anglo-American political relations.

The talks dealt with politics and coming world conditions at the highest level. Roosevelt answered the king’s concerns about the US Neutrality Act with reassurances that the president wanted to help the UK and was trying to convince the American people of its necessity. Cordell addressed mid-west farmers with the scenario of a British defeat that would mean the loss of one of the USA’s best customers and the British and French fleets that were regarded as the USA’s first line of defence. It would also mean that Hitler would be in a position to blackmail Argentina and Brazil, as it would occupy their overseas markets. Other more private conversations dealt with the hope that France and Italy might come to an understanding, US loans to Romania and the difficulties of assisting that country, and a mutual distrust of Russia. However, George prophesied that if the UK didn’t come to an understanding with Russia, Germany probably would.

If London were bombed the USA ‘would come in’, the king recorded, and Roosevelt, he said, hoped that Britain would retaliate in kind if it was. They discussed the ‘destroyers for bases’ idea and long-range US naval support for the Royal Navy’s convoy escorts of merchant shipping bound for the UK. Roosevelt suggested bases in the West Indies, from which US warships and aircraft could cover the western Atlantic, so freeing up the Royal Navy to fight in other theatres.

When war broke out George did his very best to serve his country in every way that he could. He refused evacuation, preferring to face an uncertain future together with his subjects in the country’s capital where he and his family remained throughout the Blitz. Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times in German air raids and on at least one occasion, the king and queen narrowly avoided being killed. On the first occasion they watched the German aircraft flying up the Mall on its way to bomb them.

The king maintained contact with FDR in America and wrote to him on a number of occasions in the British interest asking for destroyers to help with the war effort and reassuring the President that Winston Churchill was the right man for the job when he became prime minister. He tells the president that he really believes that Churchill was born for this moment and was made for the wartime role.

The king and queen toured bombed cities and he himself made a point of visiting troops on the front line in France shortly after the outbreak of war, Malta (1942), North Africa (1943) and Italy (1945). As an old sailor who had served in the Royal Navy at the battle of Jutland in the Great War, he wanted to land with British troops on D-Day (as did Churchill), but had to be content with visiting his forces on the beaches of Normandy 10 days afterwards. He was never reluctant to risk his life for his people or share in their hardships and rationing was applied to the Royal Household as it was to other Britons.

During the war he introduced the George Medal and George Cross to recognise civilian bravery and boosted public morale whenever he could.

After the relief of victory he settled down to help his country win the peace, but suffered the after-effects of the stress of his wartime worries and workload in failing health. He had an excellent relationship with all his prime ministers, making a point of welcoming Clem Attlee’s Labour government. Attlee regarded his king as a ‘broadminded Conservative’, but the king and queen’s Christian ethics and their deep concern for the social welfare of the people (that had pleasantly surprised Eleanor Roosevelt), made George’s relationship with his new prime minister highly productive. They were equally intent on rebuilding a country shattered by war for the benefit of all of its inhabitants. However, it was the king’s relationship with Winston Churchill that was closest where and when they shared the darkest days of the war and the elation of victory together.

When George VI died his body lay in state in Westminster Hall where 300,000 members of the public passed by his coffin to pay their last respects to the people’s king.

 

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Out of the Past

Like many others, I was smitten with Howard Pyle’s tales of Robin Hood. My father made me a longbow of a hickory sapling and playing with it nearly cost me an eye. I was mildly fascinated with the Middle Ages along with history generally. When in High School, I catalogued the weapons from the American Civil War and from exotic sources at the local historical society. I also took an interest in heraldry, but mistakenly felt that knowing more about the cruelty and unsanitary conditions of the Middle Ages would kill any interest.

After the army, university, and the Norwegian merchant marine, I needed a sport that wouldn’t require a team and decided on archery. Then I thought “why not try mediaeval archery?” I looked for information, but found only bits and pieces. Using interlibrary loan, I found more pieced and began a collection of notes. To find the context I read every mediaeval history book I could find. That opened up the whole fascinating and magical world of the Middle Ages.

While others may fixate on an exotic culture like feudal Japan, I was fascinated by the world of my own ancestors, of which small unrecognised reminders remain in language and architecture. It was like discovering an unknown secret world that was all my own. I found recipes from the fourteenth century kitchens of King Richard II. I saw examples of the unsurpassed incredibly beautiful metalwork and illuminated manuscripts from pre-Viking Sweden, Saxon England and the Irish monasteries in Britain and the continent produced during what is known as the Dark Ages. I began developing the skills to make copies of the less elaborate items.

Before the Mary Rose was raised, divers brought up two yew longbows. I got an Oregon yew stave and using the dimensions given in the Badminton Archery book made one of the first replica Mary Rose longbows. With a draw weight of more than 100 pounds, it snapped one linen bowstring after another until my strings improved and the bow was trimmed down. I was unable to properly use it until it was reduced to around sixty pounds draw weight.

Sometimes the Middle Ages seem so close.

Procopius, a Byzantine scholar, was watching a party of Huns riding by when one called out “chaire”. Procopius responded “so you speak Greek?” The rider answered “I am Greek” and stopped to explain reasons for his choice to ride with the Huns. After reading this, I passed a Greek restaurant and asked a server about the word “chaire”. I pronounced it phonetically with a throat clearing kind of ‘ch’. His eyes narrowed. “Who said you dat?’ he asked. “Nobody”, I replied. “I read it. Does it mean something like hello?” He said that it was more like “hey you”. I felt almost as though I had seen the Hun riders myself.

In Iceland my wife and I rented a car to explore the limited paved road available at that time. We had read Njal’s Saga and decided to locate where those events of 1000 A.D had taken place. We passed a sign that pointed to “Hlidarendi”- that’s the farm where Njal’s archer friend Gunnar was killed in a Viking feud. It was difficult to get directions where no one spoke English, German, or even Swedish/Norwegian and we were nearly out of gas when I spotted the sign that said, “Bergthorsvoll”.

That was it, the unchanged name of Njal’s farm!

We drove in and stopped at the back yard gas pump. Several young men working on a truck took no notice of our presence. A woman in the house peered through the curtain. I finally connected with one of the men who knew English. I indicated to the house. “Was that where Njal’s house was?” referring to the dwelling burned out in the feud where Skarphedin drove his ax into a beam before dying in the fire. “Sure” he replied. “One burns down and they build another”, as though it happened a year ago!

It’s odd, but when I see mediaeval remnants like marzipan, mulled wine, a twelfth century cathedral, it’s the feeling you get in a foreign land when you see something of home

 

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No More Heroes?

The phrase ‘The Heroic Era’ was first used by the polar historian J. Gordon Hayes to denote those Antarctic expeditions which took place between 1901 and 1917, including those led by Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, Mawson, de Gerlache, Borchgrevink, von Drygalski, Nordenskjöld, Bruce, Charcot, Shirase and Filchner. The phrase is still commonly used and continues to provide a very convenient shorthand for those expeditions launched between the turn of the nineteenth century and the end of the First World War. Unfortunately, it has also come to represent an entirely artificial demarcation in the attitudes, challenges, risks and achievements of the expeditions included within the Heroic Era and those which followed.

In fact, expeditions like Vivian Fuchs’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE) of 1955-58, were in many ways, products of the heroic tradition and certainly the men who took part in the TAE did not draw any distinction between themselves and their predecessors. In 1960, George Lowe, a 1953 Everest veteran who accompanied the TAE as cameraman, linked the expedition to those of Scott and Amundsen, stating that: ‘Amundsen with his dogs or Scott on foot walked the 1,800 desperate miles. Amundsen averaged 17 miles a day with his dog teams and returned according to plan; Scott averaged a dozen miles a day and died tragically within a hundred miles of his base…. in the future there will be no place for the lightly-equipped hardy dash which was the spirit in which our expedition was conceived’. More recently, Professor Rainer Goldsmith, medical officer to the expedition’s 1955-57 Advance Party, called the TAE ‘the last of the Heroic expeditions – full stop!’

The funding mechanisms for the TAE certainly owed a great deal to the Heroic Era. In seeking backing for his Nimrod and Endurance expeditions Shackleton became a master at playing on the egos of wealthy backers such as James Caird and Janet Stancomb-Wills; at obtaining sponsorship from companies who saw the potential of advertising through association; at drumming up popular support through the shrewd manipulation of the press; and at coercing a reluctant establishment to cough up additional funds through methods little short of moral blackmail. Learning from the master, Fuchs used all of these strategies with great success and even added some more of his own devising.

In some people’s minds, the TAE’s energetic pursuit of a detailed scientific programme and its use of state-of-the-art technology, including radio, aeroplanes and caterpillar tractors, served to divorce it from the more muscular form of heroic exploration. But all the heroic expeditions included scientists – or at least variously-gifted amateurs charged with the completion of experiments in fields such as geology, meteorology, magnetism, biology and bacteriology. Admittedly, Shackleton viewed science as yet another means by which to attract funding but others, Mawson in particular, placed it at the very heart of their plans. Fuchs, like Mawson, was a professional scientist – but he, too, used science as much as a means to an adventurous end as an end in itself. So far as equipment is concerned, innovative technology formed a part of almost every early foray into Antarctica: Scott used a hot-air balloon on his Discovery Expedition; Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition (1907-09) trialled a motorcar on the ice; Mawson’s AAE took wireless and an aeroplane; and, finally, the Endurance Expedition itself carried mechanical tractors of various designs. Technology and heroism are not mutually exclusive.

In addition, in spite of modern innovations, Antarctic exploration remained extraordinarily dangerous. The 1950s witnessed a grim catalogue of accidents and fatalities in the region. In October 1956, one of the first US P2V Neptunes to land at McMurdo Sound crashed on the ice, killing three men outright and mortally injuring a fourth and two years later a Globemaster crash at Cape Hallett killed another six. Three tractor drivers died as a result of plunging through the sea ice or into crevasses at McMurdo Sound, Little America and Mirny, the Soviet base. Worst of all, in October 1958, an Argentinian supply vessel, the Guarain, foundered in the Weddell Sea with the loss of thirty-six hands. Despite the development of better vehicles, aircraft, radio beacons and other safety equipment travel in the Antarctic, even in the immediate vicinity of well-established bases, remained an extremely perilous undertaking.

Of course, the phrase ‘The Heroic Era’ does not simply denote positive or admirable characteristics and, if the TAE exhibited many of the Heroic Era’s attributes of courage, stoicism, innovation and even entrepreneurship, it also suffered from many of the earlier period’s negative features, such as obsolete and inadequate equipment (including some of the tractors which proved nearly as temperamental as those used by Shackleton), poor planning and a lack of cohesion. At times, partly but not exclusively as a result of Fuchs’s own conservatism, it also revealed a failure to learn from the mistakes of other expeditions or to benefit from the ideas and inventiveness of other nations – particularly the United States.

Despite these shortfalls in attitudes and equipment, however, the fact remains that the TAE was astonishingly successful, achieving practically every one of its scientific and geographical goals – and it is not going too far to call it the most successful British Antarctic expedition ever. Modern equipment and superior knowledge were essential to the success of the expedition – but more essential still were the characteristics of the participants: their courage, endurance and stoicism. And there can be very little doubt that, had any of these men travelled back in time to join the men of Scott’s, Shackleton’s or Mawson’s expeditions, they would have been immediately accepted as kindred spirits. The ‘Heroic Era’ may have ended with the Endurance Expedition – but the Age of Heroes continues.

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Mentioning the Unmentionable

Not surprisingly, day-to-day existence in Antarctica presents a huge range of problems – many of them relating to subjects which, in more temperate climes, would be matters of simple, unconsidered routine. Of these problems, some have been often and openly discussed in books and documentaries, others have been considered taboo. Among the latter is the daily and unavoidable issue of urination and defecation in a region where external temperatures can plunge as low as –129 degrees Fahrenheit, making frostbite an ever-present threat. To anyone who has experienced frostbite or viewed photographs of frostbitten fingers or toes, swollen, blackened and rotting, it is impossible not to wince at the thought of the suffering of Victor Campbell, who sustained frostbite of the genitals during Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition. According to Ken Blaiklock, dog-driver on the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE) and holder of the Polar Medal (with three bars), it is a subject of universal interest but which few except children are uninhibited enough to raise with polar veterans.

The greatest challenges are encountered during travel, particularly on the bleak, windswept Polar Plateau. Here explorers have always tried to time their bodily functions to coincide with routine stops. On reasonably clement days, the shelter in the lee of a sledge or vehicle gives adequate protection from frostbite, while sledging diets tend to generate large, soft and easily passed stools, limiting the time that explorers expose themselves to the elements. During blizzard conditions, however, the need to prevent open garments filling with drift snow make it both difficult and hazardous to leave the safety of one’s tent. In these situations, explorers have traditionally used empty food tins for urination, always taking the greatest care not to spill the contents onto their sleeping bags, and, so far as possible, defecated immediately before striking camp, using the simple expedient of a hole dug beneath the rolled back ground sheet.

Primitive though such arrangements might appear, their effectiveness only really became questionable when the explorers were incarcerated for days on end by relentless blizzards or, much worse, when one or more of their number was struck down by dysentery, an ailment usually caused by polluted pemmican. The conditions inside a tent inhabited by one or more sick men can only be imagined and the urge to break camp and push on through even the worst conditions must have been almost irresistible.

Inevitably, perhaps, Antarctic travel has generated its own very specific brand of toilet humour. For instance, Dr Allan Rogers of the TAE, who was always alert to the physiological quirks of the environment, observed what he termed an ‘amusing phenomenon’ when the men urinated into recent snow: ‘The wind soon cut away the adjacent softer snow’, he noted, ‘… leaving the hard ice behind like an upside down yellow fir tree. These were christened “Uromites”’. The three-weekly need to carry 40-gallon latrine barrels out of the expedition hut also generated an unexpected benefit as the barrels actually served as visibility markers for meteorological observations and as landmarks. Few expeditions, one assumes, have found such a useful function for their frozen excreta – though, given the mores attaching to the subject, for all we know, Antarctica might be littered with these rather unusual aids to navigation!

 

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Keeper of the Flame

All too often, death – whether of a coalminer or a general – is followed by the dispersal of their belongings and records. Sometimes this process happens over a lengthy period, as items are divided among children and children’s children; sometimes it is almost instantaneous, perhaps through the break up and sale of an estate. There are, however, exceptions to this rule – and none is more remarkable than the fate of the papers and possessions of the Heroic Era Antarctic explorer, Joseph Russell Stenhouse.

When he was killed in 1941, it might have been expected that much of Stenhouse’s story would have been lost with the same degree of finality as his body was lost, pulled down beneath the surface of the Red Sea with the wreckage of his ship. But Stenhouse’s wife, Gladys, had now lost two husbands without the comfort of a marked grave to act as the pivot for her grief. Her first husband had been Aeneas Mackintosh, whose body had never been recovered from the waters of McMurdo Sound after he was lost during Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition. Perhaps to establish some kind of memorial to her second lost husband, Gladys now determined to maintain an archive of his papers, including diaries, letters, photographs, maps and drawings. This decision to preserve as much as she could of her husband’s extraordinary life, has resulted in the survival of what must be one of the most comprehensive records of any Heroic Era explorer in existence.

In terms of the Endurance Expedition, my particular good fortune was to be allowed by Stenhouse’s family to study his original water-stained journals. Although a photocopy has been deposited at the Scott Polar Research Institute, this copy does not tell the full story. In the extraordinarily tense and febrile atmosphere predominating on board the Aurora during her 10 month drift among the pack ice between May 1915 and February 1916, the temperamental and volatile Stenhouse often resorted to his diary in order to give vent to his pent-up feelings. His diaries are punctuated by explosions of suppressed wrath and frustration but, when he handed them to Shackleton for the preparation of the official account, South, he carefully excised these entries – usually by pasting pieces of blank paper over the controversial passages. Only by handling the original journals, by being able to identify the disguised passages and to hold them to the light, is it possible to read the unexpurgated version – allowing insights into Stenhouse’s thoughts and feelings which are not available to those working from copies.

Of course, the Stenhouse family archive does have some holes. Like many seamen, from the earliest days to the advent of electronic communications, when at sea Stenhouse maintained a ‘serial letter’ to his wife – completed much like his ship’s log, day-by-day and week-by-week, until he could dispatch it in chunks via passing ships heading back to England. Stenhouse wrote one such letter during the National Oceanographic Expedition (NOE) of 1925-27, during which he commanded Captain Scott’s old ship, Discovery. Unfortunately, this letter was subsequently destroyed – quite deliberately. Why? Of course, we’ll probably never know for sure, but it seems highly likely that this letter revealed in very stark terms the dark side to Stenhouse’s character.

The commonly held picture of Stenhouse is that of a hearty, courageous and skilled mariner of the ‘salt of the earth’ mould. In reality, he was an altogether more complex and, indeed, more difficult individual. During the NOE, an initial disparity of interests and character between Stenhouse and the chief scientific officer, Stanley Kemp, eventually turned into outright hostility and an antagonism so pronounced that it came close to destroying the expedition altogether. Although all but a few revealing sheets of Stenhouses’s serial letter have been lost, by reading the official correspondence and minutes of the Discovery Committee it is possible to appreciate the violence of the discord on board ship and the contribution made to that discord by what the expedition surgeon, Dr E.H. Marshall, described as Stenhouse’s pathological behaviour.

In a period when the psychological effects of extended subjection to extreme stress were only just beginning to be appreciated, it is hardly surprising that Stenhouse’s malaise, a combination of deep-rooted depression and the unavoidable effects of over a decade of supreme responsibility and gruelling physical and mental activity, should not be fully understood – and equally understandable that his wife should wish to conceal these barely understood traits. Some holes in the Stenhouse archive were therefore deliberately generated. Others reflect the force of circumstances outside Gladys Stenhouse’s control.

Of those mysteries left unresolved by the Stenhouse family papers, perhaps the greatest was that surrounding the circumstances of his death. That he had been killed while serving with the Royal Navy during the Second World War was certain; but beyond those few bald facts, little was known. Two accounts were known to exist, but neither of had been written by people who had actually witnessed the event and they contained fundamental contradictions. Without at least one eye-witness account to rely upon the exact circumstances of Stenhouse’s death would remain uncertain, and my book without a proper conclusion.

As is so often the case for those writing biographies of historical Britons, it was the National Archives at Kew that finally ended the speculation. In this instance, the answers were to be found in the dog-eared and well-hidden Admiralty minutes of a Board of Inquiry into the loss of His Majesty’s Tug Taikoo on 12 September 1941. These minutes, which include the word-for-word transcripts of interviews with the survivors, revealed precisely how Stenhouse, the survivor of so many near-misses – during his time as a Merchant Navy officer on the great sailing ships; as an Antarctic explorer; as a highly decorated U-boat hunter; and as a combatant during the Allied intervention in North Russia – had finally met his fate. Every biographer should thank God for the National Archives – and thank God, too, for that bureaucratic imperative which still insists upon the taking of such copious minutes.

With the best will in the world, no ‘keeper of the flame’ will ever be able to answer every question or fill every hole. Indeed, sometimes, and often with the purest of motives, they might actually have created the holes themselves. If, indeed, Gladys did destroy selected material, then she was in good company. Think of Tom Moore and John Murray arguing over Byron’s memoirs in front of the glowing hearth in Murray’s offices in 1824. And that is where the biographer steps in…

 

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Dead Image – A Detective Sergeant Best Mystery

The explosion was heard twenty miles away. It killed boatmen and wrecked the exotic villa of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the fashionable St John’s Wood artist. But what caused the 1874 Regents Park Explosion? Fenian bombs? Sabotage by rival railways or other firms? Or was it something personal?

Dead Image is a double murder mystery set in historic Victorian London. Using well researched canal history to create a completely authentic story, Joan Lock displays her expertise as an ex-policewoman in this fascinating insight into a world of contrasting wealth and poverty.

Below is an exclusive look at the first chapter of the book including a piece about the authors writing experiences.

The Antarctic Junk Yard- or, Cats, Weasels and Other Beasts of Burden

Scattered across the frozen wastes of Antarctica an intrepid restorer of historic vehicles will find a motley collection of rusting hulks upon which to practise his skills. Between 1907 and the present day, a huge range of vehicles have been tried, tested and ultimately abandoned amid the ice and snow. A few, like the ‘motor-crawler’ taken by the Ross Sea Party of Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition and one of the Tucker Sno-cats used by Vivian Fuchs to complete the first crossing of the continent have been retrieved and now take pride of place in the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch and the Science Museum in London. And attempts are even now being made to salvage what remains of the Heath-Robinson ‘air-tractor’ used on Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14. But most of these vehicles are lost forever, buried in snowdrifts or, in the case of the vehicles carried on the Endurance and at least one bright red Ferguson farm tractor of 1950s vintage, lying at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

During the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration, most expedition leaders saw mechanised transport as much as a gimmick to raise the profile of their expeditions prior to departure as a practical means by which to further their plans. Certainly, if they had relied too heavily upon their various machines to attain their exploratory objectives, disappointment would have come early. Shackleton’s Arrol-Johnston motor car and Mawson’s propeller-driven ‘air-tractor’ were both quickly abandoned once in the Antarctic.

Scott’s attitude was different. He firmly believed that if his motor sledges met expectations they would substantially reduce the strain placed on his ponies during the depot-laying journeys. But, in spite of testing in Norway, these failed too as a result of overheating and big-end failure – though to their credit they negotiated 50 miles with a payload of 3,000lb. They also marked the advent of tracked vehicles in the Antarctic and were the forerunners of the tanks of WWI.

Real success came only in 1928 when Richard Byrd took a Ford ‘Snowmobile’ on his first American Antarctic expedition. The Snowmobile, which was virtually a car on skis and tracks, proved much more useful than its predecessors, contributing to the unloading and transportation of stores and completing a journey of 75 miles before being abandoned.

Even more impressive were the vehicles of Byrd’s second expedition of 1933-35. They included two Snowmobiles, three Citröen cars and one ‘Cletrack’ crawler tractor. The latter was capable of hauling 5 tons and, with the vehicle itself weighing 6 tons, represented the first move away from the light vehicles previously favoured. By the end of 1935, the motor convoy had logged more than 11,500 miles – though the majority of this was made up of load carrying from the Bay of Whales to Little America II, rather than inland exploratory journeys.

Byrd’s third expedition was more ambitious still. Its 34-ton ‘Snow Cruiser’ was 55ft long, 20ft wide and 15ft high; it contained living quarters and a laboratory and carried a year’s supply of food and enough fuel for 5,000 miles. It even possessed a roof attachment for an aeroplane. It was also a resounding failure because its four huge wheels gave a contact area with the ice of just 8 square feet. In essence, it failed for exactly the same reasons that Shackleton’s Arrol-Johnston car had failed more than 30 years earlier.

In 1949 the Norwegian-British-Swedish Antarctic Expedition took the American-built Weasel to its base at Maudheim. The Weasels had a dubious reputation: their fan belts broke, they wore out an endless supply of tracks, they had to be handled with extreme caution and they could not be relied upon to pull more than 1½ tons. Taken together, these limitations made using the Weasel for an unsupported journey of any length a distinctly risky business.

Despite these disadvantages, when in the immediate post-war period Vivian Fuchs began to consider the possibility of completing a land-crossing of Antarctica, he initially assumed that Weasels would provide the primary motive power. In addition to the issues relating to reliability, however, he knew that it would be difficult to obtain sufficient numbers of a vehicle which was produced only in small quantities and was already in high demand as a result of increased polar activity on the part of the United States.

Fortunately for the fulfilment of Fuchs’s ambitions, the desire to exploit the Arctic’s mineral reserves resulted, at just the right moment, in the development of an altogether more suitable vehicle. Designed and built by the American Tucker Corporation, the ‘Sno-cat’ was intended primarily to facilitate the repair and maintenance of telephone lines in northern Canada and Alaska. Powered by a 200hp V8 petrol engine and capable of 15mph, its greatest advantage lay in its unique traction system, designed to provide almost 100 per cent traction even when turning in soft snow. The Sno-cat had two major disadvantages, however: it was enormously expensive and very limited in numbers. These factors made it impossible for Fuchs to rely solely upon the Sno-cat. Instead, he and his engineers were forced to make do with what they could get and, in real terms, that meant a motley convoy of Sno-cats, Weasels, a Canadian Muskeg tractor and, most bizarre of all, Ferguson farm tractors.

One Ferguson plunged to the bed of Vahsel Bay when the sea ice broke away. Another was abandoned when the rest of the vehicles pushed into the interior. The Weasels eventually performed much better than might have been expected, but all were left mouldering on the Polar Plateau as they broke down or fuel began to run low. The Muskeg, too, was abandoned to save petrol. Only the expedition’s four Sno-cats completed the crossing, though by the time they reached the Ross Sea some of them were held together, quite literally, with lengths of rope and chunks of timber.

Today, like so many of their predecessors, most of Fuchs’s vehicles still lie strewn along the 2,000-mile route which he forged across Antarctica: sorry testament, perhaps, to man’s wastefulness and his willingness to litter a once pristine natural environment; but surely, too, a wonderful monument to his versatility in overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

 

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A Disturbing Documentary- Theresienstadt

When it comes to mistakes made by the Nazis in their production of propaganda films then one documentary known as Theresienstadt or  Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer gifts a city to the Jews) has to top them all..

 

Conscious of the growing criticism of their concentration camps and the awkward rumours as to what took place within their gates, in June, 1944 the Nazis thought it would be a good idea for the International Red Cross to visit one of their camps so as to assure the world that all the terrible stories about the camps were untrue. The camp they decided to show was Theresienstadt not far from Prague. Of course, the Nazis went to some lengths to give a face lift to the camp before the Red Cross arrived. So, they built shops where the Jews could work, made more food available, reduced the number of inmates and so forth, and it is sad to report that when the Red Cross arrived they were completely duped by what they saw and gave the camp a clean bill of health.

 

The Nazis were so delighted by the success of their ruse that they decided to make a film of the camp which would be circulated to friendly and neutral countries to assure their allies that the negative reports from the Western powers were exaggerated and untrue. What’s more they arranged for a famous Jewish film director who was actually a prisoner in the camp to make the film. For whatever the reason the Jewish director and the inmates did participate in the making of the film, probably because they had little choice but possibly also because they believed that the increased food volumes and improved living conditions in the camp would continue. Sadly, this was not the case.

 

As soon as shooting of the film was complete, all the inmates, including the film director and his wife were shipped off to Auschwitz and were never to be heard of again. However, it is another instance of how the Nazis made errors of judgement since, although the shooting of the film was finished, the final version of the film was a long way from completion and some other director had to be enrolled to complete the task. The result was that the film was not available for screening until March, 1945,  by which time it was far too late. The Allies had already arrived in Europe and were coming face to face with real camps such as Belsen –so that any propaganda advantage to be gained from the Theresienstadt film had been lost… Indeed it was only ever screened in Prague itself and only around 20 minutes of the original film survive today. What a complete waste of time and effort – not to mention human life – all to create a lie!

 

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