John Leeming seems to have been a remarkable man. Born in 1895 into a middle-class Mancunian family, Leeming was an accomplished glider pilot by the age of fifteen. Some sixteen years later, and already a successful businessman, he founded the Lancashire Aero Club, the UK’s first-ever aero club for enthusiastic amateur pilots. In the 1930s,…
Literature
Old Soldiers Never Die – by Private Frank Richards. DCM MM
This extraordinary memoir catalogues the experience of the author as he underwent four years in the western front trenches without even being wounded – an outcome that he himself rates as a twenty thousand to one shot. Private (he refused many offers of promotion) Frank Richards was born in 1883 and, according to Google, was…
GBH by Ted Lewis
Published in 1980 this was Lewis’s last book before he died of the drink aged 42. A very large proportion of my (male) friends would put Get Carter into their list of top ten films, the Michael Cain version that is. Lewis wrote the underlying novel in 1970 first published as Jack’s Return. This book,…
Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes
I have a friend who owns an original, signed photograph by Robert Capa, it is one of his most precious pictures. It shows three women walking across an arid landscape that one presumes to be Spain(from the date and the title). The woman in the lead is the oldest, followed by a girl in her…
Major Thompson Lives In France and Major Thompson and I – by Pierre Daninos
Contributed to Raceweb by “High Rise” First published in 1955 then again in 1957 – this is a musing on the differences between the French and English as seen through the eyes of the Major himself. Daninos first came across the English when acting as a French army liaison officer with the BEF during its…