Author: bookramblings142

The Ship Beneath The Ice – Mensun Bound

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Mensun Bound was the Director of Exploration for the two trips to the Weddell Sea where they ultimately found Endurance so he is ideally placed to tell the story of finding the wreck. In a decades long career as a marine archaeologist (he is now seventy years old) he has been involved in the discovery of many famous shipwrecks and he tells the story in the beginning of this book of being in a coffee shop with a friend ten years ago and how he came to be looking for Endurance.

The book is actually two books, the first is about the unsuccessful 2019 expedition and was written by the author during the 2021 Covid lock down in Port Stanley, capital of The Falkland Islands which is where he was born. At the time he wrote it he never expected to get a chance to go back and try again so after 204 pages it ends with him and his team defeated. The second half of this volume recounts the unexpected return and the elation of success in 2022 and was written partly on his way back from Antarctica and completed at his home in Oxford. I’ll deal with the two parts separately. The combined book, the first section wasn’t printed independently, was first published by Macmillan in 2022 and my copy is the sixth impression which shows that this was a story a lot of people were interested in. The front cover features a famous floodlit night-time photograph taken by Frank Hurley of Endurance stuck in the ice shortly before she was finally sunk by the enormous pressure on the hull.

The Weddell Sea Expedition 2019

This trip was run under the auspices of Netherlands based The Flotilla Foundation and was mainly a scientific expedition with the search for Endurance added on the end once the data on climate change, species proliferation and ice core sampling in The Weddell Sea had been accumulated by the scientific team. Starting on the 1st January 2019 and in a day by day diary format Bound describes the work of the crew, discoveries made and provides comments as to Shackleton and his crew’s movements over a hundred years earlier. Like Bound I’ve been fascinated by Shackleton and his expeditions since an early age and have numerous books on Antarctic exploration a couple of which I have previously reviewed, see a list at the end of this blog. Most of January is dedicated to getting to Antarctica from South Africa and the scientific research which Bound wasn’t involved in so it is referred to but not in much depth. Where he does get involved is the use of the Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) and the two Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). ROV’s are controlled via a long cable back to the ship, AUV’s are robots which operate on their own for hours on end before returning to the ship for downloading of the data they have gained, both have advantages. ROV’s provide a continuous stream of data back to the ship but are restricted by where the cable lets them go, AUV’s can go anywhere and as the search area in the Weddell Sea for Endurance was under the pack ice this was vital however they aren’t in communication with the ship so you don’t know what they found until they get back. The expedition was to have serious problems with both sorts.

It was the 25th January before the scientific work completed and the ship set out for the last ‘known’ position of Endurance, it’s latitude and longitude had been taken by its captain, Frank Worsley, just before it sank and he was one of the finest navigators at the time but working in very difficult conditions with no readily available flat horizon and very little sight of the sun due to poor weather, how accurate had he been? One of the AUV’s was no longer available after failing during the scientific surveys and on the way to Worsley’s position it was decided to do a test dive with the ROV to the depth of Endurance (approximately 3000 metres), just before it got there the ROV catastrophically failed, this was now the 30th January, time was running out and so was the equipment. It was decided to try to repair the ROV but this meant abandoning the voyage to the search area and heading off to the nearest ice airstrip to get parts which were going to be flown to them. This used up days of possible search time and ultimately failed as the plane couldn’t reach them due to bad weather. Finally deciding to just use the remaining AUV they went back to the search site with just fifty hours of possible dive time available before they had to leave or be locked in the ice just as Endurance had been. We will never know if the AUV found Endurance as it never returned from it’s dive, it also failed. This part of the book ends in dejection all round, but it’s still a fascinating story and if it had been published with no follow up I would still have really enjoyed the book, however better news is to follow.

The Endurance22 Expedition 2022

As can be told by the expedition title this was an all out attempt to find Endurance and was funded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust. It is hardly giving anything away to say that they succeeded, news reports early last year went round the world that the ship was discovered and it’s plastered all over the front cover of the book. But that’s not to say there were no doubts as the days went on and very little was found. This time the brand new SAAB built autonomous vehicles were on armoured fibre optic cables so real time images were retrieved and if necessary the cables could be hauled back to retrieve the submarine. The ice conditions were a lot better for exploration as well with significant breaks so they were on station a couple of days earlier than planned and moving around was much less fraught but even so it looked like time was going to run out before the ship was discovered as the Antarctic winter was setting in and they were in to the last few days that they could remain on station before they found her. Again it is diary entry format so you can follow along with the highs and lows.

The ship was just three miles south from where Worsley had said she was and within the search box defined for the 2019 expedition by Mensun Bound which shows what a superb set of calculations both men had made but there was one very odd coincidence that was only spotted the day after the discovery and that was the date. Shackleton was buried on South Georgia on the 5th March 1922 after dying of a heart attack on his rather nebulous Quest expedition. Endurance was found on the 5th March 2022 exactly one hundred years later. It gets stranger, according to contemporary news reports his funeral service was at 3pm and allowing for a half hour service, regrouping of attendees and the twenty plus minutes to get the coffin from the chapel up to the graveyard they probably got there around 4pm, a few last words at the graveside and Shackleton was probably buried a few minutes after 4pm, Endurance was found at 4:04pm.

It’s a brilliant book, I was hooked all the way through and thoroughly recommend it as a read.

Other Antarctic blog entries

Biography of Tom Crean – who sailed with Scott and Shackleton and was one of the crew members of the James Caird, the lifeboat sailed from Elephant Isle to South Georgia to get help for the rest of the crew of Endurance.

Biography of Sir Ernest Shackleton – written by fellow Antarctic explorer Sir Ranulph Feinnes

Something Borrowed Someone Dead – M C Beaton

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Marion Chesney wrote 157 books between 1979 and her death in 2019, 72 of which were as M C Beaton which was the name she used mainly for her mystery romances featuring Hamish Macbeth (35 titles) and Agatha Raisin (33 titles plus a companion volume). She also wrote under the names of Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward, Sarah Chester and even 64 books (mainly historical romances) under her real name. Something Borrowed, Someone Dead was first published in 2013 as the 24th Agatha Raisin story. As can be seen from the sheer number of books published she is extremely popular but this is the first one of her books, and certainly the last, I have read, and I wouldn’t have picked up this one except that I spotted it in a charity shop for £2 and having heard the name decided to find out if she was any good. I knew the local secondhand bookshop sells out of her works almost as fast as they come in, so I thought they must have something to recommend them.

OK lets start with the positive point. The book is set in the fictional Cotswold village of Piddlebury and I can definitely believe that the Cotswolds (a region in south west central England) would have a place called Piddlebury after all they have Stow in the Wold, Moreton in the Marsh, Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter so why not Piddlebury. That however was the last thing I believed in throughout the book, the characters introduced for this novel are mere cyphers with no depth to them, the plot is so ridiculous as to be safely ignored and it frankly felt like a formulaic box ticking exercise on behalf of the author. Lots of random characters that have appeared before so readers recognise them even if they have nothing to do within the story – tick. No explanation as to who the hell these characters are for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t read their way through the previous 23 novels – tick. Doomed romance, in this case an odd romantic entanglement between the lead characters’ ex husband and her much younger member of staff who gets mistaken for his daughter when he takes her on holiday to Barcelona – tick. Lead character in constant desperate need for a romantic involvement with any apparently available male (a la the worst of Mills and Boon from the nineteen seventies and eighties) – tick.

I thought for a while that if I ignored the dreadful ‘romance’ part of the book the mystery would get my attention but as it became less and less believable as a possible real situation I frankly lost interest and only finished the book because I was writing this blog. Thank goodness it was only 198 pages long and at no point did I need to engage my brain in understanding what was going on as it was all so superficial. It’s quite possible, and indeed almost certain, that I am the wrong demographic for M C Beaton and I’m glad to say that the book has already been passed on the the secondhand bookshop that does have customers that want to read it.

The Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin books are still being written, and are now credited to M C Beaton and R W Green who is Rod Green, husband of Chesney’s publisher Krystyna Green, see here for how he came to take on the mantle of these characters. Other fiction titles that have been continued after the authors death, such as the James Bond novels by various authors including Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Horowitz amongst others, The Hitch-hikers Guide to The Galaxy sixth book by Eoin Colfer, Peter Rabbit by Emma Thompson and many other examples have not continued the odd and somewhat creepy fiction of the original author being involved. It would be much more honest to simply give the author as R W Green as clearly M C Beaton has no input having been dead for almost four years, so equally clearly the publisher doesn’t feel the characters are strong enough to continue on their own without the Beaton tag.

Puffin Picture Books illustrated by Paxton Chadwick

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Paxton Chadwick was a well known artist who was born in Manchester in 1903 but after marrying his first wife he moved to Suffolk and took a post of art teacher at Neill’s Summerhill School in Leiston Suffolk which is where he lived for most of the rest of his life. His natural history artworks are justifiably celebrated and this blog looks at the four books he illustrated for Puffin Picture Books, three of which he also wrote. Sadly Chadwick died in 1961 before he completed his fourth title for Puffin Picture Books and so there was a gap in the series at number 116 out of the 120 volumes in the set. Number 116 was eventually published by The Penguin Collectors Society in 1995, see the end of this blog for more details as to how it came about.

Puffin Picture Books was an imprint of Penguin Books originally aimed at children of all ages with counting, spelling and story titles alongside works on shipping, agriculture, nature of all kinds and pastimes such as stamp collecting and building models. Gradually the fiction titles were phased out leaving the educational works, a lot of which would nowadays be categorised as Young Adult for their reading demographic. Starting in 1940 they were the first series of books published by Penguin that were aimed at children but are also excellent illustrated monographs to be read and enjoyed by all ages.

PP81 – Wild Flowers

Written and illustrated by Chadwick this is the first edition printed April 1949 and it was reprinted a further four times making it the most reprinted of the four Paxton Chadwick Puffin Picture Books. As soon as you open the book it is clear why it was so popular, unlike any other Puffin Picture Book this one is almost full colour throughout (pages 2 and 3 which describe the structure of a flower are in black and white), normally half the illustrations would be in black and white and the pictures are beautiful. I particularly like the double page centre spread comparing a Great Mullein and a Foxglove see above. In total there are sixty one different plants illustrated and described giving their flowering season and if they are annual, biennial or perennial species. You also get the common English name along with the Latin and some more information as to how to identify the plant making it the best reference work on British wild flowers published by Penguin up to that point and not superseded until John Hutchinson and Edgar Hahnewald’s Wild Flowers in Colour was published by them in April 1958 which covered five hundred species.

The book won a National Book League (NBL) award for its quality of production.

PP93 – Pond Life

This is the only one of the four books just to be illustrated and not written by Paxton Chadwick, but rather by Jean Gorvett, about whom I can find nothing, this is the only book she appears to have written and I have been unable to find any biographical details on the internet. Regardless of the difficulty of finding information about the author the book was first printed in February 1952, going on to be reprinted twice by Penguin and then re-appeared as a hardback in 1971 under the title of Life in Ponds in the USA by McGraw-Hill with a completely different cover of male and female mallards, which was taken from page 25 of this original softback edition.

We are now back to the normal layout of Puffin Picture Books, after the anomaly of ‘Wild Flowers’, so colour only appears on alternate double page spreads. The text is the same chatty style that was familiar from the books written by Chadwick himself and is clearly aimed at a child from about nine to twelve years of age whom has access to a decent sized pond and is interested in what can be found there and is looking for a beginners guide. The first section ‘How to Enjoy Ponds’ discusses how to catch various creatures and suggests a suitable net, various jars for examining your catches and of course don’t forget your wellington boots. We then go on through plants, molluscs, insects, larger animals, fish and finally birds such as ducks and moorhens that you could expect to encounter. The final section discusses how to stock an aquarium so you can continue your pond life watching on rainy days.

Like Wild Flowers the book received an NBL award despite, in my opinion, the least inspiring cover of any of the Puffin Picture Books but the book itself is excellent.

PP105 – Wild Animals in Britain

Again written and illustrated by Chadwick, Wild Animals in Britain was printed in April 1958 and was never reprinted. This was not uncommon with Puffin Picture books, indeed 66 of the 119 books issued in this series by Penguin were not reprinted, so the fact that his first two books went through multiple printings says a lot for how well received Chadwick’s books were. The title of this one is somewhat inaccurate as the only creatures included are mammals and reptiles but I suppose ‘Wild mammals and Reptiles in Britain’ is a bit wordy for a title. In all forty one species are illustrated, thirty five mammals and six reptiles ranging from the insectivores such as hedgehogs and shrews, through bats, rodents, hares and rabbits along with the bigger mammals such as badgers, foxes and various species of deer. Amongst the reptiles are the two snakes above, and there is a particularly fine painting of a grass snake on the rear cover. It’s a lovely book and the inclusion of brown on the pages that would normally be just black and white (as seen on the page with the snakes) just lifts the book above the normal format Puffin Picture Books.

PP116 – Life Histories

Written and illustrated by Chadwick this book was to be his final work as he died during its production which had started back in 1958 and was nearly complete by his death. Just how complete would become clear when the Penguin Collectors Society approached his widow, Lee Chadwick in the early 1990’s to see what, if anything, still survived. The final agreed text was known to exist in Bristol University archives and Lee confirmed that the plates were at The London College of Printing and when checked were found to be in excellent condition but needing some work before they could be used. This preparation of the plates was done by Sheila Fisher (nee Dorrell) who had been at the Manchester School of Art in the 1930’s when Chadwick had worked there and after the war became his assistant. However there was a further problem, the book needed to be properly designed and typeset in as sympathetic way as possible to the original 1960’s plans and here John Miles stepped in, he had been employed by Penguin back in the 1950’s as assistant to the head designer Hans Schmoller. By getting this remarkable group of people together, all of whom were in their seventies or eighties including Lee Chadwick to do some final editing the book was finally printed March 1996, some thirty five years after it had originally planned to be issued. There were just a thousand copies printed, the first one hundred of which were signed by Lee Chadwick, John Miles and Sheila Fisher. Penguin Books agreed to the edition having the original PP116 number assigned back in 1961. The book came with a twelve page booklet by Steve Hare entitled ‘The Life History of Life Histories’ which details the long gestation of this project and reprints sections of letters between Penguin Books and Paxton Chadwick regarding the work he was doing.

Conscious of the cost pressures that were signalling the end of Puffin Picture Books Chadwick designed the book to just use yellow and blue apart from the black text and line drawings but even so there would be just four more Puffin Picture Books produced after number 116. The creatures featured in this volume tend to be ones that undergo some sort of metamorphosis during their life cycle or have some elusive part of their existence such as eels and their trip to the Sargasso Sea so there is always something different about their entire life span. It makes it a very interesting read and such a pity that it never came out in the sixties for its target audience and that even now you are unlikely to find a copy due to its very limited print run.

The ultimate publication of Life Histories is a fitting tribute to Paxton Chadwick, an artist lost early at just fifty eight years old to an undiagnosed cancer.

Galápagos Diary – Hermann Heinzel and Barnaby Hall

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The fourth book in my natural history themed August reading material is a book I originally used as reference material. Although entitled Galápagos Diary, this book is far more than a journal of a 1995 trip round most of the islands in the Galápagos archipelago by artist and author Hermann Heinzel and teenage photographer Barnaby Hall. The book was first published in 2000 and you can see why it took so long to come out as it is a truly beautiful book, heavily illustrated with sketches and photographs. But the reason I bought this copy in 2002 is that I travelled to the Galápagos that year, to mark a significant birthday, and needed a guide to the wildlife, especially the birds. Heinzel I had already heard about as he has illustrated several ornithological volumes including the classic Collins handbook ‘Birds of Britain and Europe’. Originally born in Germany, Heinzel has lived for many years in France and knew Rod and Jenny Hall and their son Barnaby, Jenny and Barnaby had been to Galápagos in 1994 and Barnaby assured Heinzel that he had seen Cattle Egrets there which surprised the naturalist who suspected that what he had really seen was Great Egrets but Baranby was certain so they decided to go together during the school holidays the following year and so the expedition was planned. Not only to see if Cattle Egrets had indeed made it to the islands but also to attempt to see all the endemic species of birds to be found there.

The book is split into three sections, pages 1 to 158 cover the diary of their travels with lovely hand drawn maps showing where on each island they stopped, with drawings and photographs mainly done at the time. A sample page, seen above, deals with part of the time they spent travelling around one of the inhabited islands, San Christobel, the birds drawn by Heinzel are North American Bobolinks which as the name implies are visitors to the islands rather than endemic. Below is a page featuring what for me was the most surprising bird I saw in Galápagos, the endemic Galápagos Penguin. Bearing in mind the island group is on the equator I really wasn’t expecting to see penguins but these photographed by Barnaby on Bartolome, which is where I also spotted them, prove that sometimes animals are not where you think they should be.

The next section is the species guide and takes up pages 159 to 261, this is entirely done by Hermann Heinzel using sketches and completed paintings of each of the endemic species, no photographs are used in this section. On this trip they failed to see just 3 of the 59 types of breeding species of bird on the islands, just the Marsh Owl, the Painted Rail and the rarest of all, the Mangrove Finch eluded them. In all they saw 66 species and they were all sketched by Heinzel and the three breeding birds they didn’t find had been seen and drawn by him on previous trips so it is a complete guide. Along with the drawings you get a map where they spotted the bird and notes relating to each sighting. The page below is for the Lava Gull, a bird that seems to be everywhere as you can tell by the notes which state that they saw examples on half the days they were in the Galápagos and I spotted them on multiple occasions.

The final section is a nine page checklist of Galápagos birds, both endemic and visitors which invites you to tick off species as you see them but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. It is not just a list but also includes which islands they are to be found on. Despite being able to fly, with the exception of the penguin and oddly the cormorant which has become flightless since arriving in the island group, the birds tend to stick to specific islands where their needs are best catered for. The islands have surprisingly different habitats even though they are a relatively small group and a tiny number of species can be seen from every island, even including those that can be expected to be seen going past.

It was a very useful book when in Galápagos and also later on trying to identify each bird I photographed. Perhaps surprisingly I have no memory of actually reading the diary at the time, I appear to have just used it as a guide to tell what I had been looking at. That is definitely a pity as it is an interesting read as well as a beautiful book.

If you are interested in the photographs I took in 2002 they can be found here:

San Cristobal and Bartolome

Santiago and Genovesa

Seymour and Santa Cruz

Life on Earth – David Attenborough

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The first in a colossal series of adventures round the world and what would eventually be seen as an incredible lifetimes work is my third natural history book for August but really it is possibly the most significant book and programme series by Attenborough in his career as it totally changed both television’s view of natural history and the global influence of such programmes. Nobody, not even David Attenborough, foresaw back in the late 1970’s just where this would lead and that almost fifty years after he started planning Life on Earth that he would still be writing and presenting on huge television wildlife spectaculars. Attenborough had started out in television back in the mid 1950’s, always with a natural history theme to his work and after the massive success of Zoo Quest, which started in 1954 and which had Atttenborough as the presenter at short notice after the originally planned presenter fell ill, he became a familiar face on British television. In 1965 however his career took a different direction when he became controller of BBC2, one of the then just three TV channels in the UK and ultimately rose to Director of Programmes, taking over control of the output of both BBC channels in 1969. Amazingly despite the high pressure management role he now had he still managed to fit in presenting the occasional wildlife programme. In 1972 when offered the ultimate top job in British television, that of Director General of the BBC he declined and abruptly resigned.

Why? Well he missed the hands on presenting role where he had made his name and after a short TV wildlife series in Asia he started planning an altogether more ambitious work ‘Life on Earth’ a series of thirteen 55 minute long programmes each of which would focus on one aspect of life and would try to tell as much of the whole story from the first single cellular creatures through to the incredible diversity of today. The series took years to film and was well in advance of anything seen before from any television channel anywhere in the world when it was first broadcast weekly between 16th January and 10th April 1979. It was an immediate hit and the accompanying book, which was released as the first episode was broadcast was already into its third reprint by the time the series had finished. My copy is the first revised edition and amazingly the tenth printing dated September 1979, just nine months after it first came out.

Back then you couldn’t record, or buy for watching again, TV programmes so you saw it when it was first broadcast and then all you had was the book and that probably explains the massive amount of reprints. Whilst reading this book again, for probably the first time in over forty years, I watched the entire series again on the DVD set that came out in 2003 and I have to say it has stood up remarkably well.

The book closely follows the structure of the television series with thirteen chapters each of which is dedicated to an episode, so we start with the first appearance of life three thousand million years ago and by the end of the first chapter get to the beginning of multicellular life. But this first chapter, like the first episode is also an introduction to the series and begins laying out just what a massive project it was to be. Reading and alternating watching the programmes made me appreciate how similar but also how different the two media are. The book can go into detail that watching a presenter speil through on screen would be potentially overbearing. With the video you want to concentrate on the wonderful pictures but in the book where there are a dozen or so images per chapter you want to get immersed in the words and can take in more information at one sitting, so the two formats complement one another.

What you also are aware of looking back from today is that Life on Earth whilst groundbreaking and feeling spacious at the time in giving almost twelve hours television and 311 pages in the book, feels nowadays like a rapid flit through its subject. Chapter eight of Life on Earth entitled ‘Lords of the Air’ covers the whole subject of birds in just thirty pages, I also have the book for the much later series ‘The Life of Birds’ (1998) which oddly takes the same total number (311) pages to cover just birds over ten chapters again mirroring the episodes of that TV series. So vastly more information and detail but ‘The Life of Birds’ and the other follow up series would not have existed if ‘Life on Earth’ had not been such a resounding worldwide success. The book is an interesting read and an excellent start for anyone who wants to get a grasp on the development of species and how our planet has become populated with countless different creatures. One point that should be made is that the emphasis is on creatures that are alive today, yes dinosaurs are mentioned and fossils shown but only on the way to modern examples. There is no specific chapter on the hundreds of millions of years that dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Frankly something had to go to get the vast subject still within the time frame for the television shows and you can’t go out and film dinosaurs so they are mainly dealt with in passing.

The book has lots of wonderful wildlife photographs inside and perhaps my favourite is the one above of a three toed sloth taken in Panama by David Attenborough himself, one of nineteen photos in the book that he took. The cover photo of a Panamanian Red-eyed Tree Frog, which became an icon of the series, was also taken by Attenborough. Reliving a television milestone which I remember watching enthralled back when I was a teenager has been a great experience, the book appears to be out of print at the current time but due to the huge numbers sold over the decades it is very easy to get a copy.

The Year of Sitting Dangerously – Simon Barnes

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So this August I am devoting to natural history and by contrast with last week’s book from the 18th century this is so contemporary that it was written during the various covid lockdowns here in the UK and was first published by Simon & Schuster on the 13th April 2023. Simon Barnes was looking forward to a trip to South Africa as a guide on a wildlife tour when all of a sudden he wasn’t going anywhere, so decided to really not go anywhere and just sit in a chair at the bottom of his garden for a year and record his experiences. Now Barnes is lucky, he lives in the Norfolk Broads, an extensive flat wetland area to the east of the UK so his bird watching possibilities just sitting at home are considerably better than the average town dweller, although by the nature of it being a flat open landscape (the highest point in Norfolk is just 344 feet (105m) above sea level) he was rather exposed to the elements.

Oddly, although he had decided to do this he didn’t explain what he was doing to his family for several months, they must have assumed that he was having a rather strange reaction to being forced to go nowhere. He is actually quite fastidious about sitting out and noting whatever he sees which is why the book runs to 336 pages from Sunday 27th September 2020 to Monday 27th September 2021, the extra day signalling that he intends to continue sitting out and making notes whenever he can going forward. It isn’t an end to his experiment but a continuation of an experience he has grown to love regardless of the discomfort sometimes. I have included a couple more sample passages below so you can see the changes to the writing style as the year progresses. I think he gets more poetic as he sinks more and more into the communion with nature that his self imposed routine gives him.

There is humour and drama aplenty as he follows the lives of the various creatures he is observing, from the majestic marsh harriers swooping across his eyeline to the much bullied buzzards, which every bird seems engaged in driving away. The herons in the lakes and marshes just beyond the river flowing past his seat and the great flocks of corvids (rooks, jackdaws and crows mainly) that are often seen, to the gay pair of male swans that encroach into his garden and one morning had clearly been roosting overnight in his chair judging by the mess. Through the year we see the animals that live here all the time along with the seasonal visitors, them pairing off in the summer months and hopefully raising young although obviously not in the case of the gay swans the relationship between them only slowly dawns on Barnes as he watches them, initially trying to work out which was the female. We also get brief insights into his family life, especially his increasing frail father who is finding living alone in London through covid lock downs particularly difficult.

I was really looking forward to reading what he saw on my birthday, in early June, and was somewhat disappointed to find that he actually did manage to get away for a weeks family holiday boating on the broads which coincided with the day in question so there were no entries between the 8th and 14th June. I am always intrigued when reading diaries to see what the person was up to on my birthday, it adds something personal to the reading experience, however it wasn’t to be with this book. That however was the only slight let down in a book I have thoroughly enjoyed and definitely learnt from. His descriptions of birds, mammals, and in the later chapters insects as he starts to take more notice of them as well are really good especially as he explains how he determines which species he is actually looking at from bird calls, flight patterns, the shape of wings and other features and what they tell you about the way the bird looks for food or finds a mate. I am by no means a bird watcher although I do watch birds when they are around, a fine but important distinction I think. I no longer have a garden, but when I did I had numerous feeders up to attract birds, nowadays I am restricted to what I can see from my living room window although that does quite often include buzzards wheeling over the valley so it’s not all bad.

Each month starts with a beautiful pencil sketch of a bird that features in the chapter. These drawings were done by Simon Barnes’ wife, the artist Cindy Lee Wright. The one I have included above is the lovely picture of a robin which starts the chapter ‘February’. I have a certain fondness for robins, they are definitely the bird least bothered by human presence near them here in the UK and used to perch watching me as I worked in my garden in case I unearthed anything worth eating.

I can definitely recommend this book, the idea of just sitting in one place for a year and writing about what was seen from that vantage point could have been dull but I found myself racing through the pages totally drawn in by the gentle and engaging tone of the writing.

The Natural History of Selborne – Gilbert White

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To start off my latest August group of books, which this time is focused on natural history, I am beginning with a classic of the genre, Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne first published in 1789, along with his Antiquities of Selborne, which initially was usually included but nowadays is largely omitted leaving just his famous work The Natural History. Both of these books consist of a series of letters, which in the case of Antiquities none of were never actually posted to anyone and in The Natural History several were also not posted but were instead created to match the rest of the content. The ones that were posted are to two different people over a period of almost two decades, but even these have been edited for publication so the whole is rather contrived. Gilbert White was the curate of Selborne on four separate occasions living in what was his grandfathers vicarage and his younger brother John, who is mentioned several times in the book as providing extra information was a vicar in Gibraltar. He is now famous for this book, which was one of the first true natural history volumes based on studies of wild fauna rather than dead examples. That is not to say White didn’t make use of freshly shot birds to complete his analysis but he was rare in studying live animals and how they reacted with the environment to give colour to his studies.

The book starts with forty four letters to the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, the first nine of which were never posted and were written much later to form an introduction to the book when White decided to publish his notes on local wildlife and plants. These describe the village of Selborne and the surrounding countryside and so give a useful if somewhat tedious background to the observations that he then goes on to make. The second batch of sixty six letters are to English lawyer, naturalist and one time Vice President of The Royal Society the Honorable Daines Barrington and again several of these were never posted especially letters fifty six to sixty five, which are concocted from White’s daily journals and provide interesting details of weather extremes he has experienced in the village including winter temperatures of below zero degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Centigrade) with ice forming below the beds in his house. These also include an account of the effect of a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland from June 1783 to February 1784 which killed around a quarter of the population of Iceland and left volcanic ash in the skies over Europe for months.

the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man … The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. 

Letter LXV

One of the frequent issues raised in the various letters is the possibility of bird migration, at the time this was merely a suggestion that it might happen with the majority view, including that of Barrington, being that birds that were not seen all year round hibernated through the winter even though no birds had ever been found in such a torpid state. White is in favour of migration but doesn’t believe that something as small and frail as a bird could travel long distances so keeps going back to the hibernation theory and indeed on at least one occasion caused a potential site for ‘sleeping’ birds to be dug up searching for them. Needless to say they found nothing. But his observations and attempts to understand the natural world from them was pioneering and one of the letters regarding the usefulness of earthworms was undoubtedly an influence on Charles Darwin a hundred years later when he wrote his monograph on the subject.

Four of the letters to Daines Barrington are in the form of monographs and were published in the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society which is the worlds oldest scientific journal, started in 1665, and still in print. These four letters are by their nature longer and more detailed than the others and concern four related bird species which attracted White’s particular attention. Letter XVI is about House Martins, letter XVIII discusses Swallows, Letter XX details the habits of Sand Martins and letter XXI deals with Swifts. These are excellent articles on the differences and similarities between the four species and were ground breaking observations at the time (December 1773 to September 1774). In my opinion the letters to Barrington tend to be more interesting than the ones to Pennant which are more deferential to the addressee as Pennant had published several books on natural history including a four volume British Zoology. It is noticeable however that although there have been at least three hundred editions of The Natural History of Selborne and it has never been out of print since first coming out in 1789 I cannot find any currently in print editions of any of Thomas Pennant’s works.

My copy is the Penguin Books first edition from March 1941, which was originally planned to be a part of a second set of Penguin Illustrated Classics following the original ten from May 1938 but this set never happened. However this explains why this book, along with Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which will be covered later this year, has lovely wood engravings within the text, some of which I have included above, unlike other Penguin Main Series books which are just plain text as these two were designed before the continuation of Illustrated Classics was shelved. The engravings in this volume are by the wonderful artist Clare Leighton who despite being born and brought up in England had moved to America by the time she did these pictures for Penguin and where she continued to live for the rest of her life, dying in 1989 at the age of ninety one.

The Club of Queer Trades – G K Chesterton

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The Club of Queer Trades is an organisation that only admits members who earn their living from a unique perspective. Having come up with this concept Chesterton wrote six excellent short stories based around a narrator called Charlie “Cherub” Swinburne, his friend, and retired judge, Basil Grant and Basil Grant’s younger brother Rupert Grant who is a private detective. Between them they experience several odd encounters with The Club.

In the individual reviews below I’m just going to set up the unusual story in each one to avoid giving away the queer trade and the denouement of each tale.

The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

Major Brown is a perfectly respectable retired military gentleman whose passion is growing ever increasing varieties of pansies so when he is encouraged by a vendor of such plants to look over a wall near where he lives and sees spelt out in a bed of pansies “Death to Major Brown” he is more than a little perturbed. He enters the house, finds a rather unusually decorated room and speaks for a while with a somewhat enigmatic woman before hearing a noise and confronting a large man in the cellar, they fight and Major Brown comes away with the mans coat as the man himself escapes. Totally confused by his experiences the Major comes to consult Rupert Grant, who suggests that they should go to the address found on an envelope in one of the coats pockets. When they do this, instead of the confrontation expected by Rupert, the Major is simply presented with an invoice.

The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation

This story is quite a bit simpler than the first in that it revolves around a character called Mr Wimpole who has developed a reputation as a great wit at dinner parties in London if a rather cruel one as witnessed by Basil and Charlie when they pay a call on Lord Beaumont one evening. They are still in the hallway when after a gale of laughter from the dining room Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh emerges.

“Now, my dear chap,” began Lord Beaumont hastily.

“I tell you, Beaumont, I won’t stand it,” exploded the large old gentleman. “I won’t be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer like that. I won’t be made a guy. I won’t—”

Upon being calmed down and re-entering the dining room it is clear from another bout of laughter that Cholmondeliegh had been made a fool of again.

But what is really going on here? It’s not what it seems to be.

The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit

Rupert was dressing for dinner, for he was due to go out with Basil when the Reverend Ellis Shorter unexpectedly called on him, apparently at the suggestion of Major Brown. He had a very strange tale of being set upon and forcibly being dressed as an old woman and made to commit a crime at gun point by a group of five apparently old women who were in reality cross dressed younger men. The vicar was bald headed and with substantial whiskers but these were concealed by the poke bonnet he was forced to wear, the abduction was apparently carefully planned. He had only finally escaped from them when they walked past a policemen and he pretended to be drunk so that the officer would take an interest in what was going on.

All this took a long time to explain as the Rev. Shorter was very unlike his name and was surprisingly long winded in telling his tale so that there was no chance for Rupert to go to his acquaintances home for dinner and indeed Basil would probably be already back at his home so he suggested going to see him only to find that he had also not made it to the meal as he had been called on by an elderly vicar with an unbelievable tale. Just what was going on? Basil had already worked it out.

The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent

Lieutenant Drummond Keith was an interesting character and like Major Brown a retired military man but not as successful in rising through the ranks as the Major, this means that he is also quite poor and like a lot of the poor moved around London from rented property to rented property struggling to find one he can both afford and enjoy. He had few possessions indeed we are introduced to him by means of this small collection of items.

He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking, large-bladed spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine. These always went into every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in quite undisguised, tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of the poetic gutter boys in the little grey streets.

I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old regimental sword. But this raised another odd question about him. Slim and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was quite grey, though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its blackness, and his face was careworn under its almost Italian gaiety. To find a middle-aged man who has left the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant is unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and solid this fact, like his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman no good.

We meet the Lieutenant as he calls on and also borrows £100 from Basil who seems to regard him as a good friend, and he then says he is heading to his house agent. Rupert however is not convinced that Drummond is all that he seems and insists on going to the agent with him much to the irritation of Drummond who nevertheless acquiesces. After a short meeting with Mr Montmorency regarding his new property they leave and Drummond is caught up in a street brawl which Rupert incorrectly accuses him of instigating. The policeman who takes his address later reports that there is no such house as The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey. So where is our mysterious Lieutenant? Basil is sure he can find him.

The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd

This story is an outlier, as I fail to see how Professor Chadd would raise an income from his eccentricity so he cannot be regarded as a member of The Club. Indeed the professor had invented a new language where he expressed himself via dance, nowadays interpretive dance is well known but this may be the first time it is described in literature.

The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady

In this final tale Rupert and Charlie are walking along a quiet road in London when they hear a female voice from a basement saying “When shall I get out? When shall I get out? Will they ever let me out?” Upon being rebuffed by the gentlemen living in the house they determine to return with Basil who doesn’t seem in the least concerned regarding the lady in the cellar and appears to strike up friendly terms with the two homeowners. Rupert and Charlie are concerned however and decide to take the men prisoner whilst they rescue the woman. This they duly due in an unintentionally comic manner with Basil assisting in the conflict but when they make their way down to the basement the lady refuses to leave her captivity and it is only when Basil also descends that she agrees to go.

This story has a surprise ending, set several months after the apparent end of the tale where it is finally revealed whose queer trade had led to the locking up of the old lady and the reason for her initial refusal to be rescued. I loved this final twist so I’m not about to give it away here.

The short stories originally appeared in Harpers Weekly between December 1903 and July 1904 before being first published as a collection by Harper and Brothers in 1905. My copy is the Penguin Books first edition from October 1946 which is in remarkably good condition for a paperback book that is approaching its 77th birthday and which is printed on the fairly poor paper stock still in use this close to the end of the war. I have previously reviewed one of Chesterton’s earliest novels ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill‘ written in 1904 but which was set in 1984 and which inspired George Orwell to also set his classic dystopian novel published in 1948 in the same year. Almost a hundred years after its first publication The Club of Queer Trades is still in print which I suggest says a lot for its quality and I have to agree. Chesterton wrote many superb books along with hundreds of short stories, several of which have disappeared out of print over the years but his best are still easily available. At some point in the future I will cover the five volumes, plus a few uncollected tales, of Father Brown short stories for which he is nowadays most famous but I recommend him as one of those rare authors where if ever you encounter one of his books it is almost certainly worth reading. Oh and as for Professor Chick and his own new trade, he is never mentioned again after the introduction so I have no idea what he did.

The Phantom Atlas – Edward Brooke-Hitching

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Edward Brooke-Hitching is one of the researchers for the very popular and long running BBC quiz programme QI also known as the QI Elves and turned his love of unusual trivia into his first book ‘Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports’. The Phantom Atlas was his second publication, coming out in November 2016 and very much draws on his love of maps and his own incredible collection of them. Since then he has done three more atlases, one of which ‘The Golden Atlas’ which illustrates famous explorers routes with contemporary maps, I also have in my library. This book however is particularly fascinating as it deals with places that don’t exist yet made it onto maps either in error or in some cases as deliberate fakes. The first of these I want to highlight from the book was one I already knew about and that is The Mountains of Kong.

As can be seen from the map above there is an apparently unbroken line of mountains running across the entire African continent and variations of these appeared on over forty maps by various different cartographers probably starting with James Rennell in 1798. The map illustrated here is by John Cary from 1805 and shows the Mountains of Kong running right across from almost the west coast to eastern Africa and the equally fictitious Mountains of the Moon which were believed to be the source of the River Nile. It was not until 1889 when Louis Gustave Binger gave a talk in Paris and explained that he had been to the site of the Mountains of Kong and not only were there no mountains but there wasn’t even a decent sized hill in sight. However of the over fifty places described and illustrated in detail in the book this is the only one I already knew about, a 6,000km range of mountains that were regularly mapped for almost a century without actually existing being possibly the largest geographical error you can get.

Most of the errors with islands that simply don’t exist is down to faulty navigation and the rediscovery of islands already mapped in their correct location but some are simply works of fiction including at least three islands ‘discovered’ by Benjamin Morrell, one of which he named after himself.

Morrell’s Island along with another of his fakes, Byers’s Island survived on charts for well over a century and both even made it through the British Admiralty’s 1875 cull of 123 islands from their charts that they didn’t believe existed although three of these turned out to exist after all. It is details like this that make Brooke-Hitching’s book so fascinating, he also has sections of the fabulous beasts included on various ancient maps such as Blemmyes a race of headless people with their faces in their chests that appear on the Nuremberg Chronicle map or the Sea Pig from The Carta Marina. It is the vast array of old maps illustrated in the book that are its prime interest to myself, I have a few old maps but nothing like the collection that Brooke-Hitching has to hand. One final example from the book shows just how far back this false history goes with the Cassiterides which the ancient Greeks believed were where the Phoenicians sourced their tin.

The map above is from 1694 and includes the Tin Islands as they became known as a somewhat enlarged and moved version of the Isles of Scilly which was pretty close to reality as the actual source was Cornwall, the English mainland county just to the east of these islands.

There are lots more examples of dodgy geography in the book which is well worth acquiring if you have any interest at all in maps, at over 250 pages it superbly covers its subject and from the acknowledgements at the back it is clear that Brooke-Hitching does indeed own a lot of the maps featured in his work. The book was published by Simon & Schuster who have also published Brooke-Hitching’s other works.

The Time Machine – H G Wells

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First published in 1895 The Time Machine largely created a whole new genre of fiction, for this was the first use of the phrase ‘time machine’ applied to a device to enable time travel and the first time such a machine was described. I bought my edition new in 1975 and because the title story is basically a novella, being just under one hundred pages long, the book also includes another of Wells’ short stories ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’, more of which later on in this review.

Throughout the book the main protagonist and inventor of the machine, is simply referred to as ‘The Time Traveller’, no other name is given and indeed only one of the characters we meet at the start and end of the story, which is set in what was then the present day, i.e. late Victorian London, is named, if we get anything for the others it is simply their professions. The story starts with ‘The Time Traveller’ hosting his weekly dinner club of friends and producing an intricate model of what he claims, to pretty well universal disbelief, is a time machine, placing it on a table he adjusts a lever and it vanishes. He then leads the incredulous small party into his laboratory and shows them the almost complete full size version. He explains that he will complete it in the next few days and will tell them all about his adventures at the following weekly gathering. He arrives late for this meal and is clearly dirty, injured and limping so he apologises, goes to wash and change and then after ravenously eating his fill heads off to the smoking room to tell his tale.

The story he tells of a journey into the far future to the year 802701 where he meets a race of small people called the Eloi who appear to have an idyllic lifestyle, eating the abundant fruit growing all around them, living in huge partially ruined buildings and having no need to work or otherwise stress themselves. It soon becomes clear however that they are terribly afraid of the dark. The Time Traveller however has a very specific and different fear, which is that in the morning when he goes back to his machine he finds that it has disappeared and he is therefore trapped in the future. The descriptions of how The Time Traveller gradually works out what the true and terrifying situation that the Eloi are in and the dangers posed by the subterranean Morlocks who had taken his machine is wonderfully done. You can see him slowly working out the real relationship, after several false starts, between the two races that have descended from man as he knew it and the disgust he feels at his conclusions until eventually he manages to retrieve his machine and escape.

The various radio, TV and film dramatisations of the book have varied wildly in their use of the original material so I recommend reading the story as Wells intended. It’s an extremely good tale and as I wrote at the start of this review it gave birth to a whole genre of travellers in time using a machine of some sort to do so.

The illustration on the cover is by Alan Lee now best known for his work as conceptual designer, with John Howe, on the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films but is a book illustrator par excellence see the Folio Society limited edition of The Wanderer I reviewed back in early 2020. As I would expect from an artist with his attention to detail the machine and indeed the attacking Morlocks are exactly as described in the book.

The Man Who Could Work Miracles

Also set in late Victorian England, this story was first published in 1898, we have if anything a more amazing tale than ‘The Time Machine’ as we follow the misadventures of a man who unexpectedly finds he has developed miraculous powers. Mr Fotheringay starts the tale in a bar where an argument was unfolding regarding the impossibility of miracles to demonstrate his point he gets agreement that the oil lamp in front of them would not be able to continue functioning normally if it was upside down and then says “Turn upsy-down without breaking, and go on burning steady”. To everyone’s amazement, including his own, the lamp does exactly that, but he finds that he has to expend considerable mental effort to hold it like that so it soon crashes to the ground. This was his first miracle but would definitely not be his last.

Fotheringay experiments with his power when he returns home and in the morning continues outside with ever wilder attempts which he sometimes gets wrong by not wording exactly what he wants to happen precisely. Until when surprised by a policeman whom he had accidentally hit with his stick he sends him to Hades and then repents and decides to move him to San Francisco presumably because it is far away and marginally better than Hell. Ultimately, again whilst not considering his words fully, he causes massive death and destruction and realising his mistake for his last miracle returns everyone and everything back to the bar just before he upturned the lamp and also removes his ability to perform miracles. It’s a really fun story and again Wells is experimental in his style with a fantasy story set in his present day,

I always associate Wells with late Victorian times, possibly because of books like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds both of which were written in the 1890’s but he wrote throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century, dying in 1946 at the age of 79. Until writing earned him enough money to give up he mainly worked as a teacher, indeed he was A A Milne’s first science teacher. The Time Machine was his first novel but he had been writing short stories and journalistic articles for several years before that honing his skills that would make him a world famous author.