Authors Electric

  His Own Little Ship FB Harnack for Yachting Monthly September saw the publication of Uncommon Courage: the Yachtsmen Volunteers or World War II  in a paperback edition. It’s given me the greatest pleasure particularly as the publisher’s budget -- and editorial goodwill -- was extended to cover 16 extra pages for additional material as well as the inclusion of photographs. People dug deep in their collections to assist. Kate, at the Adlard Coles office, was endlessly patient as I continually wheedled more in; publisher Liz waved ideas through. When I hold its neat pocket-friendly shape now, I feel it's stuffed full of other people's kindnesses. The new frontispiece comes courtesy of Yachting Monthly magazine (thank you YM editor, Theo Stocker). It’s a drawing by FB ‘Fid’ Harnack (b1897) who served in both the first and second world wars. The figure of the officer gazing through binoculars at the yard where his yacht has been laid up, while his ship – is it a destroyer? – ste...

Heading from Yachting Monthly 'RNVR Journal' 1940-45 Since the publication of Uncommon Courage: the Yachtsmen Volunteers of WW2 I’ve become more and more aware how little I know. I worked hard to research the book and can confidently say that I left out much more than I put in. That’s not hard when you’re researching from memoirs, lists, websites and histories. The source material fills several shelves; the book itself is a single volume. Even my bibliography had to be rigorously selective – only including the books I’d used directly in the finished product, not everything else I’d read along the way.  As it was, I got into trouble with the publishers for going over the contracted word count. I hadn’t fully realised how tightly managed their budgets must be and the extent to which rapidly rising paper costs could threaten the viability of a project. I felt rather sorry and amateur when I delivered 15k excess words – but I still fought like a pitbull for my Right to an Index....

Edward Young, pre-war design director at Penguin Books, was the first RNVR (Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve) officer to enter the submarine service. When he completed the training course and travelled to Harwich to take up his first post in October 1940 he was with two equally junior sub-lieutenants: Lionel Dearden from the RN and Jock Tait from the RNR (Royal Naval Reserve).  Dearden was sent out immediately on HMS H49 , while Tait and Young joined H28 . Both were small, elderly submarines with 26 people on board and were sharing the patrol duties off the coast of occupied Holland. In his postwar memoir, One of our Submarines (1952) Young remembered 23 year old Dearden returning that first time, tired and weather-beaten. The other two were eager to hear him talk about his experience: ‘but though we had been in the same training class there was a gulf fixed between us: he had completed a war patrol and we had not.’    On H28 Tait and Young survived a depth ch...