Authors Electric

Probably due to my advanced age, assembling a memoir, among my  various writing projects, throws me back to a childhood that I remember in a time that now seems more like history than recollection.   Original "Hollywoodland" sign, 1938 I was a pup before television, computers, the internet, social media, the polio vaccine, jet airliners, the cold war, and nuclear weapons.  My boyhood memories blend with what my parents heard intently on our radio - a sleek, deco, maple-panelled, 1930s Philco cabinet in the living room that broadcast soap operas, the evening news, mysteries, variety shows and Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats."  My memories span from America's post-WW2 rise to free world leadership to its present, self-immolation, from the Great Depression's end and Allied leadership to being led by a self-destructive, traitorous, sociopathic president who commands the American miliary to forget the Constituion, and turn on fellow citizens. UT & fa...

De-censoring, un-editing, dis-interring and resisting the temptation to airbrush Catherine Hichens  with a portrait of her husband by Peter Scott Rather late in the process of preparing the HMS Beehive edition of We Fought Them in Gunboats (WFTIG to its friends) I decided that it felt a little like restoring an old painting – scraping off accumulated layers of nicotine, dust or flaky varnish to reveal the freshness and accuracy of the original. I imagined seeing as if through new eyes, being transported back to the artist’s studio or the picture’s first unveiling, spotting fine detail that had been buried under the residue of time. I know nothing about picture restoration so I googled a specialist Fine Art site and was immediately taken aback by the plethora of potential problems and promised expert techniques to address them. Was my painting torn or punctured; stained or discoloured; cracked and flaking; overpainted or altered? Had it been damaged by fire, smoke, mould or wate...

When U-711x returned to Harstad on Feb 24 1945 she carried an unexpected load in her starboard torpedo tube. It was the body of an Englishman but this man wasn’t dead as they’d expected when they’d picked him from the freezing Barents Sea, he was, miraculously, alive. They should never have taken him on board. They’d surfaced, briefly, as the wind had begun whipping the sea into a foam-flecked gale. They had wanted to see the wreckage of their victim. A British corvette. They knew they’d hit her. Everyone in the boat had felt the detonation. They had cheered. It was their first real success. No one liked to think too much about the fishing vessel they’d stopped late in the previous summer. It had had eight civilians on board – Norwegians, heading for Shetland – though they refused to admit their destination. Five men, a woman and two children. They’d sunk the boat and landed the people in Lodingen. They didn’t need to take them all the way back to Hammerfest. They hadn’t come from...

German ship losses WW1 I start this blog with two images and some disembodied faces . The first of the images are the roughcast concrete walls in the Laboe naval memorial on the Kieler Fiord.  There are two walls facing across the main chamber. They are slate-grey like an officer’s field uniform and crammed with the thick black outlines of sunken ships.  They record the Kaiserliche marine and K reigsmarine losses in two world wars. It was the diagrammatic aspect that I found chilling. It encouraged one to compare and contrast 11 U-Boote lost in the first war with 840 in the second. 46 Luftschiffe in the first, none in the second -- as if this was about technological change not human lives. The crammed outlines on the second wall were unforgettable. They represented 120,000 dead and missing men German ship losses WW2 Shipwrecks around the British Isles (all)  The second image may not exist. I imagine it is night and I can see the lights from a constant series of wreck b...

Frederick Norway (Nevil Shute Foundation) Nevil Shute Norway was born in 1899, part of the generation whose schooldays were overcast by the ever growing Roll of Honour as younger schoolmasters and older contemporaries died in the First World War. As a teenager he came to believe that ‘I was born for one end which was to go into the army and do the best I could before I was killed.’ ( Slide Rule )  His older brother Frederick did exactly that, leaving university in his first year to join the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and arriving in France at the end of December 1914. Fred survived the 2 nd battle of Ypres in the spring of 1915, but was wounded in trenches near Armentieres and died aged 19 in Wimereux hospital with his mother by his side. The Norway family were living in Ireland then: Arthur Norway was secretary to the Post Office and the depleted little family was thus directly involved in the Easter Rising of 1916. Arthur was briefly imprisoned in Dublin Castle as Patri...