ICE,STEEL AND FIRE British Explorers in Peace and War 1921-45 By Linda Parker (Helion and Co 2013)
Madame bought this for me as an extra 80th birthday present on line as the title looked like something that would interest me.
As the title suggests, it deals with a group of men who were in the prime of their lives in the 20s and 30s and who would go on to see active service in WW2. Some of the names became well-known and will be familiar to many on this forum. To my surprise, I found that I had known one of them quite well but in a diiferent context. When I was a schoolboy in the 1950s, Lancelot Fleming was Bishop of Portsmouth and as such had a a close relationship with my school. He was a familiar figure at school events and I remember him as a kindly, elderly churchman. In this book I discovered that, in his youth, he had been a polar explorer working as a geologist on several expeditions and as such was highly regarded by his peers.
If you followed TeeDee's thread on British male role models, any of the characters featured in this book would qualify. Although this is a very recent book and written by a woman, it is reminiscent of the sort of book schoolboys of my generation were encouraged to read as a guide to what an earlier generation of men expected of us when we took our place in a man's world.
The accounts of expeditions are fascinating and the many appendices give interesting insights into the provisioning, equipping and organisation of smaller scale expeditions of the period.
Madame bought this for me as an extra 80th birthday present on line as the title looked like something that would interest me.
As the title suggests, it deals with a group of men who were in the prime of their lives in the 20s and 30s and who would go on to see active service in WW2. Some of the names became well-known and will be familiar to many on this forum. To my surprise, I found that I had known one of them quite well but in a diiferent context. When I was a schoolboy in the 1950s, Lancelot Fleming was Bishop of Portsmouth and as such had a a close relationship with my school. He was a familiar figure at school events and I remember him as a kindly, elderly churchman. In this book I discovered that, in his youth, he had been a polar explorer working as a geologist on several expeditions and as such was highly regarded by his peers.
If you followed TeeDee's thread on British male role models, any of the characters featured in this book would qualify. Although this is a very recent book and written by a woman, it is reminiscent of the sort of book schoolboys of my generation were encouraged to read as a guide to what an earlier generation of men expected of us when we took our place in a man's world.
The accounts of expeditions are fascinating and the many appendices give interesting insights into the provisioning, equipping and organisation of smaller scale expeditions of the period.
