A Literary Thread

Thanks for the Heads Up on 'A Fair Wind for London'! Being a trustee of the East Coast Sail Trust who operate 'Thalatta', I figured it made a lot of sense to read a bit of her history! Now ordered through Amazon...thanks again Black Diamond...I might have missed this one otherwise.
 
Pleasure, Cobra, it's an easy read and well penned, a skill that passed to all three of his sons, one of whom has Marmite politics and attracts a lot of media attention. Being an old Tollesbury lad, I remember well the story about the Memory being bought by Fellowship Afloat, who employed Divine Finance, or were telling porkies about how empty their piggybank was!
 
Haven't read James Wentworth Day's Rum Owd Boys but his Coastal Adventure, published in 1949, is mainly about Essex: "Marshes and the Sea; Shooting and Fishing; Wildfowl and Waders and Men who sail in Small Boats". It contains evocative descriptions of wartime winter wildfowling aboard the smack MN9 Joseph T (called Joseph and Mary in the book), Canvey, Foulness, Potton, Wallasea, Tollesbury, Maldon and Mersea, barges, smuggling, a lament for the J Class and much more...

Wentworth Day's extremely non-PC views of post-war Burnham with its "...horde of would-be yachtsmen who flail up and down in their shiny little boats, leaving usually to leeward a faint odour of the juniper berry... they are merely lineal descendants of the Cockneys..." would surely never get published these days. And if he had had his way, the RCYC clubhouse on the Burnham waterfront would never have been built...
 
What about the books by KM Peyton? I cannot remember the titles but when I was a youth I read a whole set of them from my local library, all novels based on Essex smacks and barges.
 
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