Wartime Friends

Wartime Friends is a tale of unbreakable bonds in times of strife, by bestselling author Margaret Dickinson. It is 1940s coastal Lincolnshire and Carolyn Holmes is keen to do what she can for the war effort. Raised on the family farm, she is prevented by her mother, Lilian, from going to secretarial college after leaving the local grammar school, although nothing is too good for her brother, Tom. Phyllis Carter, a widow from the Great War, lives close by with her son, Peter, who works on the farm. Peter and Carolyn are great friends but do not see a future together, although it is the dearest wish of both Phyllis and Lilian to see them marry. After their home town is caught in an air raid, Peter decides to volunteer – to the distress of his mother, who makes life difficult for Carolyn as she blames her for not marrying Peter and keeping him safe at home. Carolyn leaves to join the ATS, where she meets Beryl Morley, who will become a lifelong friend. After their basic training, Carolyn and Beryl are posted to Beaumanor Hall as ‘listeners’, the most difficult of signals intelligence gathering, intercepting enemy messages which are then sent to Bletchley Park for deciphering. As the war unfolds and their work becomes even more vital, Carolyn and Beryl’s friendship strengthens and, in the dangerous times that follow, they will both need the support of the other as they face personal troubles of their own and the lives of those they love are put at risk.

The Second World War saw many people consigned to long periods of exile, far from home. How did the exiled keep in touch with home? Why were some exiles silent when others wrote frequently and at length? Posted in Wartime explores the nature of such exile and considers what could be written in diaries and letters, given that letters were censored and diaries were, at best, frowned upon. At the books heart are the stories of three very different exiles: a Liberty Ship captain; a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps; and an airman in Iraq and Palestine. Set alongside those are the experiences of a number of celebrated wartime exiles whose diaries and letters are both extensive and detailed, and whose stories loosely connect with the journeys of the three main protagonists; they include the travel writer Freya Stark, the photographer Cecil Beaton, and the playwright Nol Coward.* Exhibition of Cecil Beaton photography (of the Duchess of Devonshire and her set) at Chatsworth, March 2016 to January 2017.* The reopening of the British Postal Museum & Archive as The Postal Museum in London in 2017* 100th anniversary of the Imperial War Museum, London, 2017*75 years since the release of Noel Cowards film about the Navy at war, In Which We Serve (1942)* 75 years (on 15 April) since the authors father sailed to the Middle East in Winston Special convoy WS18* 100 years (in November 2017) since the Balfour Declaration (Middle East)* 70 years since Indian independence.

As a British airman of the Second World War, Jim Auton dropped bombs on enemy targets all over central and eastern Europe. He was also engaged in a number of low flying operations, organised in order to drop containers of explosives and ammunition in an effort to assist groups of partisans in enemy occupied countries. After the war, he was to enter the cut-throat world of international trade, setting up an extensive network of clients in the industrial areas of the western world. It was during this time that an opportunity arose to revisit all those bombing targets and areas where he had supported secret underground resistance forces during the war.??Working undercover on the stated objective of investigating potential East/West trading opportunities, he was to discover, to his great dismay, the final fates of the various partisan operations that he had so bravely endeavoured to assist. He was to discover that many of the Poles and Czechoslovaks who had assisted British units during the conflict had either been killed or imprisoned by the Communist authorities. He argues that, once victory over Nazi Germany had been secured, British and allied governments betrayed these resistance workers who had so bravely served the cause and paid such a significant contribution towards the allied war effort. ??In this, his second work of autobiographical memoir, Auton provides an enthralling first-hand account of intrigue, assassination, espionage and shameful betrayal on both sides of the Iron Curtain.??Jim Auton MBE holds the following awards - Presidential Gold Order of Merit (Poland), Presidential Gold Medal for Merit (Czech), Polish Cross of Valour, Czech Military Cross, Warsaw Uprising Cross, Armia Krajowa Cross and four Slovak and Russian medals. He was appointed as British Honorary Pilot of the Czechoslovak Air Force and he holds an Attendance Diploma from the Polish Senior Officers' Flying School at Deblin. After retirement in 1980 he became an authorized researcher in the archives at the Auschwitz death camp. He is the founder of the Air Bridge Memorial adjacent to the Polish war graves at Newark on Trent.

Read between the front lines: The stories of three Canadian female journalists stationed in England and France during the First World War. Europe: 1914–18. Mary MacLeod Moore, a writer for Saturday Night Magazine, covered the war’s impact on women, from the munitions factories to the kitchens of London’s tenements. Beatrice Nasmyth, a writer for the Vancouver Province, managed the successful wartime political campaign of Canadian Roberta MacAdams and attended the Versailles Peace Conference as Premier Arthur Sifton’s press secretary. Elizabeth Montizambert was in France during the war and witnessed the suffering of its people first-hand. She was often near the fighting, serving as a canteen worker and writing about her experiences for the Montreal Gazette. The reportage from these three women presents an insightful, moving, funny, and compelling body of observations of a devastating conflict, from underrepresented points of view. Firing Lines is based on the letters, articles, and books they wrote, as well as the records of those who knew them. The book offers a fresh perspective on a war that touched nearly every Canadian family and changed our sense of ourselves as a nation.

Clearly the favourite character of Canada’s overseas troops during World War II, "Herbie" had a penchant for getting into some of the most bizarre predicaments imaginable. With feet that generally led to trouble and a nose like a disillusioned banana, Herbie provided Canadian soldiers with a daily ration of laughter at a time when humour was often at a premium. No figure before or since boosted so effectively the spirit of Canadians overseas. As J.D. MacFarlane, Editor of The Maple Leaf, stated so aptly: "War can be funny as hell. Things happen to soldiers that shoudn’t happen to a human – crazy situations that add touches of humour to an otherwise grim business ... Herbie helped to win the war with laughs."

Letters written to Everett Hazlett.

Mastering Wartime is the first comprehensive study of a Northern city during the Civil War. J. Matthew Gallman argues that, although the war posed numerous challenges to Philadelphia's citizens, the city's institutions and traditions proved to be sufficiently resilient to adjust to the crisis without significant alteration. Following the wartime actions of individuals and groups-workers, women, entrepreneurs-he shows that while the war placed pressure on private and public organizations to centralize, Philadelphia's institutions remained largely decentralized and tradition bound. Gallman explores the war's impact on a wide range of aspects of life in Philadelphia. Among the issues addressed are recruitment and conscription of soldiers, individual responses to wartime separation and death, individual and institutional benevolence, civic rituals, crime and disorder, government contracting, and long-term economic development. The book compares the wartime years to the antebellum period and discusses the war's legacies in the postwar decade.

Since the heyday of Ian Fleming’s fantasy superspy James Bond, the novels of John le Carré have held up to readers across the world a sombre, fascinating picture of decline, deception and ethical ambiguity. In this study, originally published in 1986, the first to include an interpretation of A Perfect Spy, Eric Homberger argues that within the tradition of the spy thriller of John Buchan and ‘Sapper’ a ‘space’ was created by Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene for serious writing. From The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) to The Little Drummer Girl (1983) and A Perfect Spy (1986), le Carré has used that space to make a searching investigation of the nature of post-Imperial Britain. In the process he has become the peer of Conrad and Greene in the recognition that the spy novel is a literary form capable of the highest artistic seriousness.