It gives me great pleasure to welcome Lucinda Neall to the blog today. Lucinda is the daughter of Michael MccGwire who was a midshipman in 1942 and served on the H.M.S Rodney during Operation Pedestal. He later went on to have a distinguished career as an academic after serving in the Royal Navy. Lucinda is a…
Thomas Horn as a young man I have recently returned from a writing retreat at Anam Cara in Ireland, where I had the chance to share some of the poems from Convoy. I came back to find an email from Thomas Horn’s grand daughter, Moya. She had read the Convoy blog posts about the men…
Thus far with these biographical sketches I’ve introduced you to my taid, my mother, a couple of RAF pilots and the captain of a merchant ship so now it is the turn of the army. Whilst doing the research for Convoy I was fortunate enough to make contact with Paul Lazell who owns a splendid…
With thanks to Lindsay Stanberry-Flynn and Rebecca Gethin who have been asking me thoughtful and thought-provoking questions about how the book came together and featuring Convoy on their blogs. Lindsay’s blog Rebecca Gethin Featured-writers
Tom Neil had already fought in the Battle of Britain when he was posted to Malta in the summer of 1941. He is well known for his books on his wartime experiences; Gun Button to Fire, Onward to Malta, Questions of Guilt (short stories), Flight into Darkness (short stories). His most recent book is Silver…
A brief word of explanation about these biographical sketches. These will mostly be about the things I found out about these men for which there wasn’t room in Convoy. They do all feature in the poems but there is so much more to tell about their lives. Each one of them could do with a…
Earlier in the year I promised to provide some biographical details about the men who are in the poems in Convoy. The only place to start is with my grandfather, Jim, taid as I called him (Welsh for grandfather). He was a merchant seaman all his life and first went to sea in 1919 at…
HQS Wellington is currently hosting an exhibition about Operation Pedestal, which took place seventy years ago. During the summer holidays I took my sons to see it and the ship. To be honest this was really an outing for mum as I wanted to have a look round the ship and although I’ve done plenty…
I have one of my academic colleagues, Jonathan Rix to thank for reminding me of John Pudney’s poems. He was enthusing about some of Pudney’s RAF poems – Smith and Missing Smith, living on air, Your astral body A mechanic wonder Your anger an affair Of fire and thunder. So I’ve been reading his collected poems, published in…