Authors Electric

  ‘Why do you want to republish The Tuesday Boys ?’ my youngest brother asked. My immediate answer would be 'Because I love it,' and I know he agrees with me. Libby Purves and Claudia Myatt say the same. But is that sufficient reason to republish?   The Tuesday Boys is a book about a project to take eight young East London  children sailing. It began in 1975, fifty years ago. Will it make any sense to readers today? On one level, yes, belief in the potential for sail training to widen horizons and change lives has been in existence since the late c18th when the Marine Society began taking boys from London workhouses and providing initial training before they went to sea with the merchant navy. Through the c19th and early c20th, while Britain's need for seafarers remained obvious, charities continued to work to ensure that the most deprived inner city children (boys) had their chance to succeed at sea.  More general charities, such as sea scouts and sea cadets, ...

It seems I may have had some sort of visionary experience at the end of the 1980s and foresaw the whole Trump phenomenon. In the course of filming an interview the other day, I rooted out a book I published in 1990 with Hutchinson Business Books titled “Hype – the Essential Guide to Marketing Yourself”.   By today’s standards it was a pretty mild affair, although I did talk a bit about the advantages of self-publishing, which in those days was still called “vanity publishing”, and which I remember got me a ticking off from the fabulous Libby Purves in the Times . This was not only before the Internet took off, it was also before we were familiar with the term “reality tv” and before we started to sink into the celebrity culture swamp, which has since risen to our chins. I guess if I was writing it today the publishers would suggest a title like “How to Build a Platform for Yourself”. Anyhow, in a summary on the very last page of the book I find I wr...

“On October 6 th , very suddenly, Beedings, Tunbridge Wells, Daphne, dearly loved younger daughter of Francis and Hazel Winstone-Scott. No letters please.” ( Sevenoaks Chronicle & Kentish Advertiser 12.10.1945). Daphne was my mother’s younger sister. She had gone up to her bedroom, that Saturday evening, and shot herself with their father’s WW1 revolver. It was 1945 and she was just fifteen.  I learn now, from checking old newspapers, (oh, the magic of the internet!) that Daphne had suffered periods of illness from the age of six and had spent eighteen months in bed when she was twelve.  I remember that one of my aunts had  told me long ago that Daphne had suffered from kidney disease and committed suicide because she realised she was going to die anyway.  In fact d ialysis was already entering the development stage by 1945 -- but Daphne didn't know that.   A  Daily Mirror  report dubbed her “the girl who would never grow up.” (8.10.1945)...

Once upon a time .... on Peter Duck's foredeck It began back in March when I was invited to give an after supper talk at the Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club in Lowestoft. An enterprising teacher, who is a member of the club, had been reading The Salt-Stained Book to some of the children in years 5 & 6 of a local primary school. She persuaded the club to invite the children in for the day – thirty-six in the morning and the same in the afternoon. We gathered round an enormous mahogany table in the club's conference room, all of us in our best behaviour. In the corner of the room I could see the box into which members used to drop their white or black balls when deciding on the election of a new member. The children learned to tie knots in the club training room and went out onto the pontoons and into the winter storage area to look at boats of many different shapes and sizes. These are children from a former fishing village, perched on the Suffolk coast, bu...