1 comments about Nab End and Beyond: The Road to Nab End and Beyond Nab End (Abacus).

1. This is a story about a family during the early part of the twentieth century. It describes the severe hardships and endurance of the family who were workers in the cotton mills of Lancashire, England. Even though the conditions were very harsh, there is humor and a strong sense of family unity. William Woodruff, who writes this autobiography, gives a history of the plight of the millworkers and the events of these times. Poverty and a harsh class system were against them coupled with the General Strike and the Great Depression. Billy finally leaves Blackburn, Lancashire, at the age of sixteen and heads to London. Beyond Nab End tells the story of Billy's arrival in London, working in a foundry and finally going to Oxford on a scholarship. He describes his life at Oxford, the politics of the times then finally joining the British Army in 1940.
   This book is very well written with meticulous details about life for the average worker of this period. It was a couldn't-put-down book for me. The author transcended his social status and beat a one-in-a-million odds or less to become a great writer.

No comments about Tony Blair (Biography).

No comments about Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells (Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw).

2 comments about Horatio Nelson (Pimlico).

1. Nelson was of course the British Admiral who defeated Napoleon's navies in a number of battles climaxing with Trafalgar and allowed Britian to continue its resistance to France which lead to Napoleon's eventual defeat.

   Nelson's life is interesting as it illustrates how the British Navy was so succesful. Nelson was a person who came from a reasonably poor background. He was assisted into the Navy at a young age and spent most of his early years learning saling and the art of leadership by working as a midshipman in the Navy and Merchant marine. It was a system in which privilage was important but at the same time merit was critical in advancement.

   Nelson's life was also interesting from the point of view that it had aspects of a Mills and Boon romance. He fell in love with the young wife of the elderly British ambassador to Naples, Lady Hamilton. This was an enduring passion which led to the birth of a child.

   Nelson comes across as a man who was brave rather than a person whose tactics were deeply refined. His methods were at variance with the official Navy ordinances which emphasised a well disciplined line of ships bringing a combined weight of fire on the enemy line. At every battle he would simply plough in and order his captains to take on the enemy ship to ship. This was based on the superb training of British sailors who could fire their guns at double the rate of any other nation and the use of a flintlock ignition system to fire the guns which was more accuate than the slow burning matches used by other countries.

   The author is some sort of expert on Nelson and the book is meant to be based on some material which has not been available to previous biographers. It is quite a short book of three hundred pages with reasonably big print. It is easy to read and an insight into one of Britians heroic figures.




2. Ever since his death at the battle of Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson has been an icon of Britishness. Like most Englishmen, I knew him largely as the man whose statue stands atop an enormous column in central London. I knew that he won an important victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile and an even more important one at Trafalgar, which finally ended Napoleon's dream of conquering Britain. I knew that he lost one arm and was blind in one eye. I knew about his famous "England expects..." signal. I knew (from birdwatching holidays in the area) that he was a native of North Norfolk, that he had a notorious affair with a married woman and that, as he lay dying, he asked his friend Thomas Hardy (the sea-captain, not the novelist who was a distant relation) to kiss him. (That story, by the way, seems to be true. Tom Pocock has no truck with the alternative theory that he actually said "Kismet, Hardy"). Apart from that, however, I did not have much more biographical information about him,
   
   I bought Tom Pocock's book after my interest was aroused by a recent trip to Portsmouth, when I visited HMS Victory for the first time since my childhood. This provides a general introduction to Nelson's life. He was the son of a Norfolk clergyman. The family were not particularly well-off financially (one of Nelson's brothers became a middle-ranking Admiralty civil servant, another an unsuccessful shopkeeper), but they had powerful connections, being related to an earlier naval hero, Sir Maurice Suckling, and to the influential Walpole family who had provided Britain's best-known Prime Minister in the eighteenth century. Their patronage was invaluable in securing Nelson's rise to high rank after he had chosen, at the age of twelve, the Navy as a career.
   
   The book details many of the lesser-known parts of Nelson's career. He fought as a young officer in the American War of Independence and took part in an unsuccessful British attempt to invade what is today Nicaragua, then part of Spanish-ruled Central America. He served for a time in the West Indies, where he met his wife Fanny. I was surprised to learn that, for a lengthy period in the late 1780s and early 1790s he was unemployed, having offended influential officials in the Admiralty by what were seen as his over-zealous attempts to enforce laws prohibiting the newly-independent Americans from trading with the British possessions in the Caribbean. His career was saved by the outbreak of war with revolutionary France, and he spent a period commanding the British Fleet in the Mediterranean before the Battle of the Nile raised him to heroic status.
   
   Much of Nelson's time in the Mediterranean was spent in the Kingdom of Naples, at that time an important British ally, and it was here that he met the love of his life, Emma Hamilton, for whom he was eventually to leave his wife. (Emma's husband, Sir William Hamilton, was the British Ambassador to the King of Naples). Naples was also the scene of one of the more controversial episodes in Nelson's career, his part in the suppression of the short-lived Parthenopean Republic founded after the French captured the city. Paradoxically, the Republic only commanded support among the city's aristocracy and intelligentsia, whereas the Neapolitan sans-culottes remained resolutely loyal to their King, and within a few months it was overthrown by a monarchist guerrilla army led by a Cardinal of the Church, whereupon the King took the opportunity to wreak bloody revenge upon the revolutionaries. In this he was aided by Nelson who saw them as traitors to their country and collaborators with an occupying enemy power. Another controversial episode came a few years later when Nelson gave evidence at the trial of Edward Despard, an old friend who had been accused of treason for his alleged involvement in a plot to murder King George III and stage a coup d'etat. (Despard was eventually convicted and sentenced to death).
   
   Of Nelson's three great victories, the most hard-fought was the Battle of Copenhagen when the Danes inflicted losses on the British fleet nearly as great as those they themselves suffered. At the Nile and Trafalgar, by contrast, the French fleets were routed without the loss of a single British ship. Pocock accounts for the overwhelming nature of these victories by reference to the superior seamanship of the British sailors and the superior marksmanship and rate of fire of the British gunners, but leaves unanswered the wider question of why, in an age when France's army was the strongest in Europe, her navy should have been so inferior to its British counterpart. (There were a number of other questions about Nelson's victories that I would have liked to have seen answered).
   
   Nevertheless, to be fair to the author, this book was written as a fairly short account of Nelson's life, at just over 300 pages, very much for the general reader rather than the specialist in naval warfare. Pocock writes as much about Nelson the man as Nelson the hero; you will find more here about Lady Hamilton than you will about questions of naval tactics or strategy. The prose is lucid and fluent, and there is much of biographical interest.

1 comments about King George V.

1. Kenneth Rose is an excellent scholar and this book is about scholarship--debunking the myths and telling the straight story about King George V and the politicians with whom he dealth. My only wish is that I could know more about George V the man, but this is the same objection that I've had of all scholarly biographers of Kings.

No comments about Russia (Biography of Nations).

No comments about 'Life that is Exile': Daniel Corkery and the search for Irish Ireland.

No comments about East With Ensa: Entertaining the Troops in the Second World War.

No comments about Nelson: The Essential Hero (Wordsworth Military Library).

1 comments about Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure.

1. This 1977 biography has been reissued this year, the 90th anniversary of the Rising, in its original form. It is difficult to imagine a subject for a biography which would be more capable of stiring controversy. It is also difficult to imagine an author taking a more reasoned, scholarly, and evenhanded approach to their subject.
   
   This biography manages to humanize a man who is often reduced, in character and deed,to a faceless political icon. The book is thorough in relating his work in the Gaelic League, his writings, his tenure as a schoolmaster, and the development of his political philosophy and activism.
   
   Finally, the book allows the reader a firm basis with which to independently evaluate Pearse the man. This is not to say that the work is inchoate, for the very title itself, The Triumph of Failure, reveals a steely frame upon which the facts are sculpted. By this it is meant that the book breathes life into a subject whose reality is given fair treatment rather than obscured by an ideological or euhemeristic approach.
   
   The author notes in the 2006 preface that she has been constantly in controversy with those who use or condone the use of violence to accomplish political ends. The author does make judgments about Pearse with respect to his character and the Rising. She notes that Pearse was an exponent "...of a romantic morality which sanctined the the sacrafice of self and others in the pursuit of self-realization." It is clear that the Rising was in the author's eyes an undemocratic insurrection.
   
   It is also clear that the author has attempted, and in my view successfully, to produce a balance and fair biography of Pearse the man which in some respects must be fairly described as sympathetic.
   
   
   It is well worth the time and it is written in a clear and reader-friendly style.