• Non-Fiction

      ‘Chusan’ by Liam D'Arcy Brown 

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      Seaweed
       Number of Views: 38 
      1. Categories:
      2. History,
      3. Naval,
      4. Non-Fiction
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      "The Opium Wars, and the Forgotten Story of Britain's First Chinese Island"

      The author is a sinologist and writer who studied Chinese at Oxford, and then Chinese history in Shanghai, and has travelled extensively in China. This the third book to come out of this, chronicling an aspect of the Opium Wars I suspect almost nobody else in Britain knows anything about. It is intensively and very professionally researched and annotated.

      I came to this book by the back door after a local paper reported an 1842 progress by Queen Victoria being watched by ‘a small Chinese boy in Chinese costume’ who had been brought back to Britain from Chusan (not, incidentally, the orphan Afar mentioned in the book). Let’s just say that Chinese people in rig would have been something of a rarity in provincial Victorian England.

      The word ‘Chusan’ had earlier come into my life as the name of a P&O liner on board which I was entertained to dinner in Hong Kong in 1957. I came to the Opium Wars later via discovering a 3-greats grandfather’s East India Company appointment as an Uncovenanted 4th Class Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in Bengal in 1837, and the serendipitous purchase of ‘The Cree Journals 1837-1856’ by RN Surgeon EH Cree of HMS Rattlesnake (ed. M Levien). Cree was present both at Chusan and at the other main theatre of these wars, Canton, and his journals are copiously illustrated with his charming contemporary watercolour sketches. The author has made good use of some of these as illustrations in ‘Chusan’, unavoidably in black and white. I commend the original, if you can find a copy, to anyone who wants the picturesque background to these times.

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      Porky's War - The Story of a real-life Freddie the Frogman on D-Day by Terry Henson 

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      fails_as_is
       Number of Views: 110 
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      2. History,
      3. Memoire/Battlefield Memoire,
      4. Naval,
      5. Non-Fiction
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      Porky's War       - written by the subject's son, tells the story of his father's wartime experiences as a lad from Paddington conscripted during the Second World War, who found himself in a rather extraordinary position with a particularly special responsibility on D-Day.

      The Allies knew that the Normandy Beaches were fortified with various nasty obstacles to deter and disrupt a landing force, and in order to counter that, specialist Landing Craft Obstacle Clearance Units (LCOCU) were formed to provide that specialist capability to facilitate the successful landing of the amphibious force.
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      'All Hands' by Brian Lavery 

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      Seaweed
       Number of Views: 139 
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      3. Naval,
      4. Non-Fiction
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      "The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy Since 1939"

      “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
      And every single one of them is right!”

      (Kipling)
      This is a third book of a trilogy documenting the ordinary sailors of the Royal Navy whose immediate precursor, ‘Able Seamen’ (here) I reviewed here recently. This volume takes us from 1939 to the present. This is dangerous territory, for it covers the service of much of its potential readership, including my own.

      The first third of the book is devoted to the Second World War, in which a Navy of 130,000, aided by 16,000 reservists, grew to a peak of 790,000 net of thousands of losses, including 50,753 dead and 870 missing. The difference was made up of ‘HOs’ (ratings entered for ‘Hostilities Only’ and conscripts. As with later National Service the Navy was able to some extent pick and choose whom it took, so somewhat raising the educational and social level of the pre-war Lower Deck. The HOs turned into matelots and the oldsters provided a skilled backbone, perhaps in only penny or single numbers in the smaller craft (Lavery quotes Coastal Forces as being 98% HOs).

      Between them all they won a World War, often in the context of watch and watch, dawn and dusk Action Stations, ship’s duties when off watch, and often sea conditions making it impossible to obtain even such sleep as time did allow. In tropical waters ships would be crammed with a full war complement, totally inadequate washing facilities, and of course no air conditioning. In machinery compartments temperatures could easily reach 135ºF, partly due to steam leaks which seemed to be largely avoided in American warship construction.

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      Man of War 

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      Seaweed
       Number of Views: 414 
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      2. History,
      3. Memoire/Battlefield Memoire,
      4. Naval,
      5. Non-Fiction
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      They have taken the men that were careless lads at Dartmouth in 'Fourteen ..
      … They were not rated too young to teach, nor reckoned unfit to guide
      When they formed their class on Helles' beach at the bows of the “River Clyde” ...
      … They have borne the bridle upon their lips and the yoke upon their neck,
      Since they went down to the sea in ships to save the world from wreck-
      Since the chests were slung down the College stair at Dartmouth in 'Fourteen ..       ...
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      Britain Begins 

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      Seaweed
       Number of Views: 389 
      1. Categories:
      2. History,
      3. Non-Fiction,
      4. Non-Naval
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      Barry Cunliffe is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Oxford. However this is no dry work of archaeology; it is comprehensive history of us, the British, and how we came to be, and as readable as any encyclopaedic primer of this scope and detail can be. Our story starts with the hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic repopulating our islands after the last ice receded, enjoying horse meat as reindeer grew scarcer. Between a quarter to a half of us have a female line going back to these people, and two exact current matches for mitochondrial DNA have been found to Cheddar Man who died in 7150BC. ...
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      An English Affair 

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      Seaweed
       Number of Views: 298 
      1. Categories:
      2. History,
      3. Memoire/Battlefield Memoire,
      4. Non-Fiction,
      5. Non-Naval
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      Davenport-Hines was drawn to the Profumo scandal of 1963 as a topic because much of the drama was played out close to where he spent his childhood. For me this is an interesting reprise of something that entertained everyone as a bit of light relief in between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of John F Kennedy. It is also a most valuable corrective. Like most of the public I accepted the ongoing press revelations at the time without engaging any critical faculty. The actual facts can however now be seen, thanks to this author, as greatly at variance with what was fed to us all at the time and which is still trotted out as ‘history’.

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      THE FINAL WHISTLE by Stephen Cooper 

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      Ageing_Gracefully
       Number of Views: 362 
      1. Categories:
      2. History,
      3. Memoire/Battlefield Memoire,
      4. Naval,
      5. Non-Fiction
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      The Great War in Fifteen Players

      Over the course of the next couple of years, in the run up to the World War 1 centenary commemorations there will be a load of books about the First World War, or Great War as it was called then. Many of these will be analysis of particular battles/generals/armies/operational fronts and hugely interesting and important to the military historian, both professional and amateur. However, amongst these books will be wee gems like The Final Whistle which brings an insight to the soldier rather than the conflict. What Stephen Cooper has brought here is a book covering 15 men who all had a playing connection to Rosslyn Park Rugby Club who did not make it back home. Like many other clubs and institutions, Rosslyn Park had a long Roll of Honour; out of approx 350 members who served during WW1 84 were killed, died of wounds or illness. The nature of rugby football at that time meant these men came from a middle-class to upper-middle class background and the majority, though not all, were commissioned.

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      ‘Secret Flotillas’ by Brook Richards 

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      Seaweed
       Number of Views: 547 
      1. Categories:
      2. History,
      3. Naval,
      4. Non-Fiction
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      Clandestine Operations to Brittany 1940-44

      Imagine you are looking down through time and space at the Second World War. First you see a swirl of nations at each others’ throats. Then you zoom to look at the fighting side. Zoom again to focus on naval matters. Vast battles in the Atlantic and Pacific surge before you. Close in some more to look at lesser actions, and away from the oceans to the English Channel. A part of what you now see is Coastal Forces, frail, small boats dashing in the dark to close with the enemy. As a sideshow to this, there is the clandestine insertion and retrieval of personnel from occupied Europe. This tiny fragment of the war, never looked at categorically by anyone else, is the subject of this book. Operations of this nature by air have been fully before the public for many years but the seaborne side of it was, like the operations themselves, in darkness until this author brought it to notice in 1996.

      The original book has now been expanded, particularly to cover operations in the Mediterranean more fully. This has meant splitting the work into two parts and what is here presented covers operations at home, specifically between the West Country and Brittany although there is a nod towards seaborne support for resistance in Norway. I eagerly await the second part! Richards has had full access to official records here and elsewhere, and as that doyen of Special Operations, MRD Foot, writes in a Foreword “This is not a piece of history that will need writing again: it is conclusive”.

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