It is no secret among my friends and family that I do like to do a bit of cooking and so although I am ruthless about throwing away donated and dated cookery books, old and interesting ones do catch my attention.
So, fellow ordinary cooks – no special stuff here – you might want to read on and be entertained by David de Bethel (the cook book writer and illustrator) as he spends time in the Tyrol oscillating apparently between pestering Anna the cook at a rather posh schloss called ‘the Castle with the Little Red Tower’ and the Knapp’s ‘peasant house.’
Before we start, this was published in 1937 ( there are no mentions of what would have been the political ‘issues’ of the time but plenty of references to the mores of the time.)
I have no idea who he was except to have a quick search and find he wrote other cookery books from his travels in France and perhaps he ended up involved in the New Zealand Players Theatre Trust with his wife Joan who was a potter.
But I haven’t confirmed he is the same man, so let’s just go with the cookery writer.
So here is why he went:
And it must be said, though he is not complimentary about all Austrian cooking, he is later equally willing to report the disdain of Anna for, as he described, the type of English cook who has ‘damned forever the character of the English on the Continent’ by their appalling cooking.
It is a characteristic of old cookery books that they just don’t have the detail you would expect from a Jamie, Nigella, Nigel….
If you bear with me, there will be another piece on a similar vein of ‘Ok if you regularly cook and potter in the kitchen over the years/tears and work out what works with what and how, then you can work this out but if you are not that person, you need a lot more advice on how that recipe is going to work.’
I think it must be that in those days, cooking was much more ‘if you had a cook, they knew how to do it, and if you didn’t, you knew how to do it.’
Prepared meals? What??
Now David, I have to say that stuffed cabbage leaves was one of my specialities in lockdown and my Austrian-born neighbour liked them.
But essentially the cabbage ( and I used Savoy as a much better alternative to white cabbage) was the easy bit – it was the filling and sauce which made the food interesting.
So to have a recipe which is largely about cooking cabbage and only a brief mention of the stuffing, I have to say, sorry, is pretty rubbish.
Mince, rice and parsley could be good but only with a lot more thought and action.
(Happy to supply a better recipe, though I say it myself, if called on to do so.)
David, yes we are on first name terms now, interspersed his recipes with a (slightly florid and Disney-like, but rather charming and interesting diary about the seasons and weather and customs.)
If you are wondering about the recipe for bilberry fritters, essentially it is: make some fritters and add bilberries.
There are times when his recipes have more detail but I have to say a) I would never use the time I have left in life to make a strudel and b) if I should somehow change my mind on that one, I would not be relying on David to tell me how to do it – great read though and love the love letter thing AND CAPITAL LETTERS.
Fungi foraging is much more of a thing now but I remember my grandmother soaking button mushrooms to make sure they were safe to eat and anything other than those white things were never to be countenanced, so I understand David’s comments on this.
By the way, Sarah Gamp was a ‘dissolute, sloppy and generally drunk’ character in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit who always carried an umbrella, so an umbrella became called a Gamp. I am assuming that is what David is referring to.)
I am not sure that ‘most people’ hunt foxes but could tell you a tale of being at a pre-Vienna ball dinner (in my posh days) where talk was of the days they went hunting around the cemeteries of the city….. just saying.
So, thank you David.
I am not sure that I will be doing that many of your recipes (though being a potato fan, Sauerkraut with potato pancakes might feature one day) but it was a great read.
We had assumed that on our holiday we would meet people like us – semi-retired and taking a lucky break to the sun away from the miserable British weather.
Well, there were lots of people taking the break but they were not all like us – young couples, couples with small children, couples of friends, family groups …….. and not many of them were British.
Not that that would have mattered but getting to meet people – if you don’t have kids to pull adults together – turns out to be hard on this holiday.
For example, the hotel’s restaurant was not conducive to mixing. It was a rather vast, airy room but as it was made of marble and stone echoey and noisy.
Think posh marble canteen with a seriously extensive buffet.
We have so far spent a lot of time talking to each other.
On our boat trip, we met a lovely family. He was an award-winning Indian restaurant owner, and he and I talked about what spices he used to make just the right sauce for scallops or venison.
His wife was a primary school teacher and we talked about their Bangladeshi parents’ roots, how she was bringing up the children with their traditional family values, and also how she was making sure their children knew they had to grow up and get their life’s path sorted, so they could do work which helped other people.
I asked if customs and ways of thinking were changing with the generations and she said, ’not much’.
(It reminded me of someone ( an Indian) I heard speak once who said that the 1960s and 1970s immigrants to Britain brought with them the values of the time when they left India or Bangladesh or wherever.
Some of those customs changed over time back in the home country but tended to ossify in the immigrant community.)
We also talked to our excursion guide and the hotel barman, both of course, very nice young men with very good English.
So, as I said in a previous piece, no one in Sharm is from here.
Of course not just the thousands of tourists, but also everyone who works here from cleaners to cooks, to gardeners, to coach drivers, to waiters, to shop keepers to pool lifeguards, from spa staff to reception staff.
They are all young Egyptian men away from home.
(Inside the resorts/compounds, all is immaculate and very pretty but outside the perimeter walls, things are mainly just rock and no one seems to mind/bother.
This is just next to our hotel and you can nip out through a gate to it or along the beach. I think it might be a place where off duty staff can hang out together and have some time away from the guests out of uniform, not having to smile at every passing guest, and just relax. I might of course be wrong.
I know there is another town of worker accommodation – of course there is because there is a large town’s worth of staff to accommodate.
Mahmoud was our lovely excursion guide.
( I am not identifying anyone without their permission here because many Egyptians seems remarkably unimaginative when naming their sons – our hotel’s staff name badges suggest that most are called Mahmoud, Muhammed , Yousef or Hussein.)
He told me that people here work on average three months seven days a week, get about two weeks off and then back to work.
There is no overtime so in the summer he gets about 4 hour’s sleep a night at really busy times.
His rota includes being in charge of transfers from the airport, camel ride trips, boat trips, trips around the old town to see churches and mosques etc etc.
He speaks English, French, some Italian and a little German and his nickname is Mahmoud French to distinguish hime from all his fellow Mahmouds in excursion company.
He earns £100 per month.
He like everyone else in this place relies on tips to make a halfway decent wage.
‘Its our culture,’ he said.
We have been asking about the tipping protocol – and it is a complex business.
We were advised to bring lots of £5 notes by a Sharm el Sheik old hand.
We didn’t bring enough it seems, as they are much more popular than the equivalent in Egyptian pounds.
I was told clearly that for our room cleaner you gave him ( of course it was a him) some money at the start of the holiday and at the end.
You had to hand it in person because he would never pick up any money from your room even if you had packed and left.
You tip the barman at the end of your holiday, likewise the waiter who has looked after you and your table for the majority of your holiday and it is tactful to sit in the same seating area for meals so that there is one waiter who knows he is likely to get a tip rather than sitting in a different place every night and not getting to know and therefore, tipping anyone.
I didn’t know what happens about the many gardeners or other ‘invisible’ staff like the kitchen staff so I asked at reception if there was a tip box which could then be divvied up.
And no there isn’t.
You get to learn a lot when you don’t have ‘people like us’ to talk to, and very instructive it is.
One of the things I like about working in an Oxfam bookshop is the fact that you never know what is going to be donated.
(Mind you it was rather a surprise when a woman came up to the till and asked if we take books – mmm, yes otherwise we would not be a bookshop at all….’Well, lots of charity shops don’t take books these days, you know,’ she said.)
I am convinced if you wait long enough a book on every subject under the sun will pass through our hands – we have recently had a small book on the history of barbed wire and another on Estonian lace knitting patterns just by way of example.
But there are books of which I will have handled hundreds over the years – thankfully the stream of Jeremy Clarkson’s has dried up, but there are many, many regulars which come in with such regularity they are old friends.
We get bouts of best sellers – about two years after they have become popular – Eleanor Ferrante for example, and the once very popular Fifty Shades of Grey – there was one Oxfam bookshop which made a child’s fort out of spare copies of that.
Don’t get those hardly at all now.
Many of our books come from people downsizing, or moving, or from adult children clearing their parents’ house and that means we get collections – the cricket mad father-in-law’s, or aged travel guides to far flung places once visited, or the complete oeuvre of John Grisham.
And every week or so we have to change the window displays to keep our shop looking good.
So, with no ability to order any books, or even know what is going to come through the door, we are mothers of invention, making do, lateral thinking, etc.
I had what I thought was rather a good idea.
In the coming months we will be doing a window display on travel – we keep donated Rough Guides because although dated a) the covers are attractive and b) whilst hotels and restaurants will change over time, monuments and natural wonders do not.
We also have an old oak table in the window and I thought, to compliment the travel guides and travel writing in the window, I would do a table on fictional journeys:
Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Murder on the Orient Express, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Space Odyssey and indeed, The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, Around the World in 80 Days, Alice in Wonderland ( though that might have to be kept back because I am planning a table based on the Mad Hatter’s tea party.)
We could have Robinson Crusoe, Life of Pie, On The Road, The Time Machine, Journey to the Centre of the World, Canterbury Tales, Treasure Island, Swallows and Amazons, The Phantom Tollbooth, Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz, His Dark Materials trilogy.
Well, you get the idea and indeed I was rather chuffed by my idea. Not least because these are not rare books on the whole.
We always have at least some of these books but when I went to look I found one copy of Gulliver’s Travels and a colleague suggested Passage to India.
Now that is not a book we have very often but in the space of two days had three (albeit a bit dog eared) copies.
No Life of Pie though. We have had hundreds of them and always seem have one on the shelves.
No Canterbury Tales, no Treasure Island, only one of the Philip Pullman’s, no Orient Express, indeed not much at all.
That, dear reader, is what comes of having a good idea and having to learn patience.
Likewise, a friend contacted me looking for an old book on botany with lots of colour plates but in bad condition because her mother-in-law wanted to get such a book and have it professionally re-bound for her botany-mad grand-daughter.
Now we often get these. The illustrations a lovely but the plain board covers are not enticing.
They are often half falling apart. I must have handled hundreds of them.
Did we have one, no of course not.
Likewise again, I have dispensed with more Dickens than I have had hot dinners.
The success of the (great read) Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and a re-writing of David Copperfield means that we have had a good dozen requests for the Dickens original.
Bleak House, Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations of course we have those but we are a Copperfield-free bookshop at the moment.
You may recall that we had a book donated to the shop called The First Book of Indian Botany.
Well, it was interesting because it was a first edition but mind you, the spine had come away from the block of pages.
They were all holding together very well but just not attached to the spine.
Now, before you think ho hum, there is a mystery.
So, the pages are, of course, printed but bound in with them are some handwritten notes.
Now, who but the author would get the printers to bind in some notes – perhaps for the second edition?
No one, right?
So, we have the author’s notes.
And who was he?
Well a friend and collaborator of Charles Darwin.
( You might have read something about this in a previous blog, but either way, you have to admit the first edition of a book with handwritten notes by a collaborator, protege and friend of Darwin is looking very promising.)
Daniel Oliver.
He was ‘Librarian of the Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 1860–1890 and Keeper there from 1864–1890, and Professor of Botany at University College, London from 1861–1888. Wikipedia
In fact, he was recommended for the UCL job by Darwin.
There are in the Darwin Correspondence Project (darwinproject.ac.uk) pages of letters to and from Oliver and Darwin, also between Hooker and Darwin mentioning Oliver.
He knew what he was on about in botany.
( And as a small diversion, I dipped into some of these letters, understood nothing of the botany but found Darwin’s humour:
‘Here is a good joke; I saw an extract from Lecoq. Geograph. Bot. & ordered it & hoped that it was a good sized pamphlet & my God nine thick volumes have arrived!’
‘I have written you a frightfully long letter not worth the trouble of decyphering…. Forgive me scribbling at such length, & believe me Yours very sincerely
C. Darwin’)
Anyway, there was also a previous owner’s name on the flyleaf which was deciphered by the sleuth-niece to be Alfred Venning.
She did an amazing amount of research I would never have found on Alfred and I could fill several blogs with what she found and wander about in among those leads and snippets and find more.
But I need to stick, more or less, to the point.
And, more or less, everything below is what the BB’s N discovered and all credit goes to her.
So, Venning was a tea or coffee planter in Ceylon in 1870 but had abandoned that by 1884.
(There is a whole lot of interesting stuff about a parasitic fungus which killed off the coffee plantations in the then Ceylon, and the impact that had of tea and coffee growing in the region but we are not going there now.)
Venning held all sorts of colonial administrative roles but is most remembered ( perhaps apart from the riots about scales and weight units, but no we are not going there) for creating a huge park in Kuala Lumpur, started in 1888.
It is still there now, all 173 acres of it.
Whilst at the time it was a pleasure park – including a golf course – now it is more of a botanical gardens which would have pleased him.
He was, significantly for our story, a botanist.
For the next ten years Venning continued to maintain and improve the park and in 1900 Venning was transferred to Perak where he stayed in the town of Taiping. Whilst there he is recorded as collecting some plants in 1901 or 1902 which ended up in the collection of the Singapore Botanical Herbarium.
‘The Singapore Herbarium was essentially set up by Kew and a system of plant exchanges with other herbariums was set up. This was at a time that Daniel Oliver was keeper of the herbarium at Kew so would have been in regular correspondence with Singapore.
There are no records of the samples Venning collected in the Singapore Herbarium though there are multiple samples under his son’s name dating from 1907 (when the son would have been 24).
He did however donate samples from Ceylon to the Kew herbarium in 1916.
Oliver died in late 1916 but it is possible he would have seen these donations as he was clearly still involved that year as there is a photo dated to 1916 of him and all other subsequent keepers of the herbarium.
This is the best link I have managed to find between them but Kew’s herbarium database is currently down so I am unable to see if these samples are still there.’
So, this was all well and good.
We had Oliver linked to Darwin, we had his notes in bound into the first edition of his book and we had lots of information on the second ( presumably) owner who was also a botanist.
I consulted with our antiquarian book expert and we decided it was probably, even in its dodgy condition, with its provenance worth about £1200 – or at least that was what we were going to ask for it.
As a last thing to do, I contacted Kew to ask them whether they had a second edition of the book so that we could see whether the notes he had made were incorporated and changed the text.
I sent photos and expected, which I got, an automatic reply telling me I could consult with their online archives.
And then I got an email from a nice woman at Kew, I will call Alice, saying she had had a look at my email and checked a few things out – and the handwriting was not Daniel Oliver’s.
What?
Who else would have had that book unbound, inserted their notes and re-bound?
Well I don’t know.
Sleuth-Niece did better than I could and found a sample of Alfred Venning’s handwriting and here it is:
If I had the time and knowledge of botany, I would search out a later edition and compare the notes we have with that text and that would presumably tell me whether Daniel Oliver got an underling/his wife/a colleague to write the notes and then incorporate them.
So the book will be listed in Oxfam online along these lines:
First Book Of Indian Botany – with bound in handwritten notes
First edition. 1869. Macmillan.
Front hinge is broken and front endpaper is detached and the rear hinge is holding on but only just, and will probably break sometime soon.
Block, however, is solid.
There are handwritten notes on ( here I will insert some notes about the notes) bound into the block between pages ( and here I will insert the details.)
The notes do not match Daniel Oliver’s handwriting (as confirmed by Kew) and we have not yet been able to compare with the any second edition of the book to ascertain whether they were incorporated.
Author Daniel Oliver was a friend, correspondent, botanical advisor and protege of Charles Darwin.
He was Professor of Botany for University College London and head of the Herbarium at Kew.
Previous owner’s name on the flyleaf is Alfred Venning, a colonial administrator and botanist who is most famous for creating the Perdana Gardens in Kuala Lumpur, then called the lake Gardens.
We cannot be sure that the notes were made by Venning.
Whilst we cannot make any direct connection between Venning and Oliver, we do know that Venning did donate botanic samples from Ceylon to the Kew herbarium in 1916 – which was the year Oliver died.
We have more search on possible connections between Venning, Kew and Oliver and for more information, please get in touch.
There is probably a lot more research to be done on this little book, but it is unique.
First editions of it are rare and these bound-in handwritten notes make it a one off.
This small, damaged book is a mystery waiting to be solved and a link to botany research with a direct connection to Charles Darwin.
Whoever buys it will you please let us know what you find out.
This is what Cambridge University says about the book:
Well known among his contemporaries for his unrivalled knowledge of aberrant plants, Daniel Oliver (1830–1916) ran the herbarium at Kew Gardens and held the chair of botany at University College London, for which he was recommended by Charles Darwin. Although Oliver never visited India, his expertise in Indian botany grew considerably after he worked with an enormous number of dried specimens rescued from the cellars of the East India Company. In this book, first published in 1869, he sets out the basics of botanical study in India for the absolute beginner. It includes instruction on the anatomy of simple plants, lessons in collection and dissection, and explanations of botany’s often dense terminology. Annotated diagrams appear throughout, in both microscopic and macroscopic views. Rigorous and carefully structured, Oliver’s book remains an excellent resource for novice botanists and students in the history of science.
The Directory of Clubs (1887) book came into the shop recently and there is little to say about it except what it says itself on the mores, values and attitudes of the time so I will let it ‘speak’.
Except to say that when I was living in Europe but had work in London, I looked around for a club to join so that I would have an overnight base here.
The Liberal Club would have been convenient but one visit confirmed I was the only woman within sight and the youngest (then) by about 40 years.
It was a half-hearted search on the basis that I did not really want to join the kind of people who sat in leather armchairs with their friends from Eton days and discussed off-shore bank accounts and how the poor should get off their lazy asses and get a job.
I should have stuck with it and joined The University Women’s Club but too late now.
( Mind you, there is a bit of me that could embrace the idea of coming up from the country for a night or two to see a couple of exhibitions, do cocktails and dine with a few friends and visit my dressmaker…..)
According to Wikipedia:
‘Men’s clubs were also a place for gossip. The clubs were designed for communication and the sharing of information. By gossiping, bonds were created which were used to confirm social and gender boundaries. Gossiping helped confirm a man’s identity, both in his community and within society at large. It was often used as a tool to climb the social ladder. It revealed that a man had certain information others did not have. It was also a tool used to demonstrate a man’s masculinity. It established certain gender roles. Men told stories and joked. The times and places a man told stories, gossiped, and shared information were also considered to show a man’s awareness of behaviour and discretion. Clubs were places where men could gossip freely. Gossip was also a tool that led to more practical results in the outside world. There were also rules that governed gossip in the clubs. These rules governed the privacy and secrecy of members. Clubs regulated this form of communication so that it was done in a more acceptable manner.’
And,
‘Discussion of trade or business is usually not allowed in traditional gentlemen’s clubs, although it may hire out its rooms to external organisations for events.’
‘In recent years the advent of mobile working (using phone and email) has placed pressures on the traditional London clubs which frown on, and often ban, the use of mobiles and discourage laptops, indeed any discussion of business matters or ‘work related papers’.’
Mmm, I cannot quite believe that men of business and politics spend their time just discussing the cricket or how best to get the gardener to prune roses.
We are on a holiday I never expected we would be on – the days were when we bought a Rough Guide, booked a flight and a hire car and took it from there.
But these days we have more limitations and the Best Beloved gets like a bear with a sore head in January/February so here we are.
( Before you read on, an apology that this is one of several pieces about another holiday. Please bear in mind, we don’t jaunt all the time and it is true that there is more time to write when you haven’t got a list of things to do and place to be when you are on holiday.
And, of course I have lots of holiday photos to share with you.)
But I will quite understand that reading the holiday rambles of lucky people may not be your thing so feel free to leave now and no doubt you have a list of things to do too.)
‘Here’ is a lovely hotel complex with two pools, a children’s pool, several terraces, overlooking the sea the beach and then the Red Sea and 317 rooms scatted in lovely gardens.
I am not complaining.
We are technically in Egypt but Sharm el Sheik is 300-hotel totally-tourist place.
There is a negligible local population – and I mean negligible.
Every one of the army of people making our hotel complex immaculate, serving at tables, sweeping up bougainvillea blossoms every morning, cleaning the pools at sunrise and sunset, gently rolling the sand on the beach to eradicate yesterday’s footprints, reception staff, bar staff, cooks, room cleaners ( including folding towels into heart or swan shapes), those keeping the marble floors free of any dust or footprints – all of them come from somewhere else.
They are all in the hotel’s various liveries and all are smiling, polite and helpful.
We are here at the end of January which is the quietest month – and therefore really pleasant because they have time to stop at chat and there is an air of peacefulness about the place.
Things start to ramp up in February – halt-terms and all – and keep going up and up.
Despite, or maybe because of the fact, the heat ramps up too, British people come in their thousands and I mean thousands.
Apparently, there can be 10 planes a day from the UK into Sharm just from two holiday companies – and there are others.
And that is just the Brits. Apparently the Czech’s like summer here, the Russians come all year round, the French ( always adventurous when they leave France, come for the nights in the dessert), some Italians and Germans, but no Scandinavians because they don’t like that might heat – I am with the Scandis.
You can just imagine the fleets of transfer coaches just driving endlessly backwards and forwards all day and well into the evening.
The kitchen staff working flat out in up to 40 degree heat outside never mind inside.
The room cleaners dealing with the chaos a family of two adults and two kids can wreak on they room on a daily basis.
The shaded pool loungers occupied from early mornings.
Our last minute all-inclusive deal means we were given a green bracelet which means everything is free – all food, all drinks – the latter came as rather a surprise when I went to the bar to order some wine, of course I did.
The overwhelming majority of the lovely army of staff are young, fit, healthy and often handsome Egyptian men.
I have seen one woman on reception one day, and one woman opening the door for you as you go into the restaurant.
It is a cultural thing.
Egypt has a very young population which may explain why they have put several steps all over the place – from one bit of the bar to another, from there to reception, from one poolside to another, from the terrace to ‘our’ terrace. And there is a flight of 22 steps from the bar to the restaurant level.
Except for the flight, none of them have handrails which is a little challenging for anyone with balance and walking issues – the Best Beloved says it will do him good but a unbalanced man tackling shiny marble steps with two sticks is a bit anxiety-inducing.
A few handrails around the place would be good. Mind you there is always some nice young man leaping forward to help if necessary.
Seeing endless young men running lightly up and down them without a thought makes me jealous for my youth, leave alone the BB.
Another surprise was the fact that the Wifi here is, well rubbish.
In our room there is none.
Needless to say the best place to get any reception is in reception which explains why I am practically sitting on the reception staff’s knee to post this.
And why reception has a scattering of lone people checking their phones at any time of day or night.
I am not sure why the Wifi is bad across Egypt and especially in the tourist Mecca that is Sharm.
Maybe, President El Sisi prefers it that way – a lot of controlling regimes do.
But I was told that one of the reasons why it is bad in hotels is that all the staff, away from home, with no Netflix and not much to do in their time off, download movies using up all the bandwidth. Good on them.
Meanwhile, the rooms were clearly designed a built some years ago because there just aren’t enough plug points to charge up – and that’s just the two of us leave alone if you had kids with you.
So it is either the lamp or the laptop – that sort of thing.
A paltry complaint but rather a surprising one in this day and age.
But really we are living for a week in a luxurious bubble.
I used to spend time working on intense short summer schools with 100 PhD students.
You barely thought of the outside world, let alone ventured into it, you were in this other, entirely separate place for days on end.
That was in university accommodation of greater or lesser comfort and quality.
This feels a bit like that except without the students, the work demands and the lack of comfort.
It was billed as a few hours in the lovely waters of the Ras Mohammed National Park, with stops to snorkel among the coral, have lunch on the boat and go to Egypt’s little Maldive-like island in turquoise sea.
Well….
First of all, it was windy and I mean gale force windy. Unusual by even the usual winds of February.
The captain, crew and fellow passengers were surprised, but we given our history of bringing bad weather to bemused fellow holidaymakers, really shouldn’t have been.
Very luckily, the sea was not rolling so no seasickness, phew.
But it was cold.
The crew were fleeced up and sensibly stayed in the downstairs room when they could.
The passengers were out to get their money’s worth and stayed out on deck – at least for a while.
Most of us were British and included a range from those of us (not just me) who decided pretty early on that as a poor swimmer and novice snorkeler and already quite chilled (not out, just cold) not going in was the best option, to those who wild-swam in northern England and were going in come hell or high water.
Including one young woman who was determined to get a waterproof case for her phone and film every minute of her snorkel from the moment she jumped in.
( Her travelling companion got her swimsuit on twice and twice decided not to get in, causing a noticeable soupçon of friction.)
We were motoring along in the wind when I noticed a couple of birds just above the high rigging.
Gulls? no, wrong noise, wrong look but then what do I know about Egyptian birds?
The captain noticed them too and shouted down to the crew, presumably, ‘Oi someone up here now!’
He took one of the higher wires and the summoned crew member took another.
They gently flicked the wires which kept the birds away from the boat but they still wheeled around for quite a while and were lovely.
Turns out they are white falcons which are a sight to see.
But the reason they were flicked at was because if they poo and it lands on your clothes you will never get the stain out.
Presumably tourists must be protected in every and all ways.
There are protected ares of the park at certain times to let turtles breed and areas where tourist boats are banned to let coral recover.
Mind you, bearing in mind this is the quietist month of the year and plane-load after plane-load arrive in the summer, it was quite a shock to see the size of the ‘flotilla’ of tourist boats on the same route as us.
I counted nineteen.
However, it is a navy military area which means like military areas in the UK, they are a haven for wildlife.
All kinds of different fish including an eagle ray which I was called to the side of the boat by a crew member to see.
Actually, I had a) never heard of an eagle ray and b) could only see a darker smudge in the water.
Needless to say though, a crew member was sent in with a waterproof camera to go and get some decent shots so we could all see it.
Meanwhile, our lovely and tactful excursion guide needed rescuing.
He was sitting next to a British woman who clearly did not do tact, had embarked on a conversation with him about the current Israeli war and I overheard her saying something along the lines of, ‘ well whatever, you have to feel sorry for those poor Israelis….’
I guessed her understanding of Middle East politics was not extensive.
I interrupted them with a question about the timings of the trip – something anodyne and a chance to change the subject.
‘We go to the White Island then back towards Sharm and there is another snorkelling stop,’ he said.
‘What?’ she said, ‘ I thought we were going to the national park.’
‘We are in it, ‘ I said.
‘But we are at sea,’ she said.
‘It is a maritime national park,’ I said.
‘Are you sure? I’ve never heard of one of those. Is it just in Egypt?’
I was even more convinced she probably was not the best person to break the unwritten code that everyone else had stuck to of not asking awkward political questions of the Egyptians we met.
Anyway, we got to the famous Maldives look-alike White Island.
I have to say that a sandbar in an admittedly lovely turquoise sea will not have the Maldives’ tourist authority quaking in their sandals.
There are sharks in the Red Sea, the BB’s daughter told him.
And I was told by the excursion guide (once rescued) that parts of the national park could be shut when there are sharks around.
That evening the Best Beloved admitted that he had wondered about sharks and had thought he might strap some nail scissors to his ankle in case he met a shark and apparently they don’t like to be stabbed in their gills.
OK, so he is being attacked a shark who is being asked to wait just there until he could swim behind its massive mouth fitted with hundreds of very sharp teeth, and hold still whilst he stabbed at its gills - with some nail scissors.
I was sitting minding everyone else’s business in a hotel bar/eatery at Gatwick airport the other evening.
People watching is one way of describing it. I like to try and think what the story is behind people sitting there.
The Best Beloved and I were staying the night, before venturing to an unknown-to-us destination but more of that another time.
Anyway, I glanced over to the check-in desk and saw two women and two men.
The two men were clean cut, short haired and good looking in a kind of neutral way and likewise the women, though they had long hair pulled into glossy, and unsurprisingly, very tidy buns.
Mormon missionaries, I thought (instantly).
Going home to Utah having perhaps spent time in Crawley, Billingshurst, Croydon and for time off for good behaviour some of the villages of the Surrey Hills.
I speculated on their reports to the Elders’ committee.
How many times did they turn up on someone’s doorstep, say their spiel, get invited in for a cup of tea and hear, ‘ This is such a revelation, I had no idea. Where do I sign and when can I join?’
Meanwhile, a large group had been gathering in the seating areas around where we were sitting.
People joined in twos and threes and fours and all seemed to know at least a few other people.
At first I thought it would be a family gathering, but as more and more people arrived, that didn’t make sense.
There was no obvious common factor – older, younger, men, women, rather smart, not so bothered about that sartorial nonsense, tall, short, all white and middle class.
Indeed one of the women who seemed to know everyone and as I watched morphed into the woman in charge, was dressed in an ill-fitting tracksuit.
Not that there is anything wrong with that but if you had asked me to pick out the leader it wouldn’t have been her.
However, the trim looking young man – well, in his 40s which was young by the group’s standards – I would have earmarked into the role and indeed he was joint organiser.
Assumptions/prejudices all my own.
They were bussed out to the terminal to check in with their passports and luggage and then came back for a group meal which a few of them declined in favour of a beer and an early night.
Several women had been sitting next to us and one – in her late 60s and very elegantly casual had declared it is past six o’clock ‘ where we are going’ so lets order some wine.
So, who were they and where were they going?
In the end curiosity got the better of me and I gently tugged at her sleeve as they stood to go to check in and asked her.
It was an amalgamation of three golf club’s members going to Portugal for 10 days of sun and teeing off.
I was a bit disappointed.
I had already mentally tried on a group of witches and wizards based on one person’s green and pink hair and the off-beat religious theme which I had already got going in my head.
And I really liked the idea there wizards in slacks and colourful.
In a widely optimistic thought on behalf of the Best Beloved, I had hoped they might be the inaugural convocation/convention of peripheral neurology specialists from across the country who were looking for people about whom they could do an in-depth study and treat at the same time.
Retired stand-up comedians, the world-renowned group who between them decided on all the bizarre paint shade names we have these days – remember elephant breath?
Graham Greene super fans.
Or a jolly and interesting group of people who might end up in the same resort and hotel we were going to.
Anyway, golf in Portugal it was, and I hope they are having a very good time.
Once they had left, I was left with a group of Chinese looking young men sitting on stools around a table and eating a mix of pizza and dumplings.
They looked as if food was a fuel rather than a culinary delight and they were dressed in T shirts with random slogan and decorations.
They were, I decided some kind of manual workers, eating and then going to get some rest before they had to start again on whatever they were doing.
I wondered what workers they were, and why Chinese – on the basis that you don’t see many manual Chinese workers in Britain.
But they, and we, had eaten and gone before I got much time to speculate.
Well, dear reader imagine my surprise when my Mormons turned out to be an long haul aircraft crew and likewise my Chinese workers appeared in uniforms with lots of gold braid (and I noticed on the departures board there was a flight to Shanghai).
On the way to a friend’s birthday the car broke down rather dramatically ( clutch into gear box, yes indeed ouch and expensive ) but luckily we managed to limp to very nearby lay-by and called the AA to rescue us.
All very well organised and we were given a timeframe and rather surprisingly the number plate of the AA van heading in our direction.
I did wonder why that was necessary considering I didn’t expect many fake AA vans to be pulling up into random lay-by.
But it wasn’t an AA van – none of the yellow and black distinctive markings. It was the right size and shape but was metallic grey with ‘customer service’ on the side.
Once the nice man had diagnosed the problem, opened the back of his anonymous looking van, pulled out the piece of kit to hitch our car to it, and we had all set off for home, we found out more.
Apparently, he was one of about 30 AA people across the country who were specially trained to deal with problems with very expensive make cars – McLaren, Tesla, Lamborghini, posh Porsches etc.
These select few get taken to the production lines and factories and get to know all about the ins and outs of these cars.
Apparently, if you drive a McLaren, there is some piece of kit in it which will inform the factory of a problem, assess how significant it is, whether you an safely get home in it, or to where you are going if you had put that address into the GPS.
Once the factory has that information, they call the unaware driver with advice – and then our AA man is dispatched to sort things out.
And these posh makes don’t want any hoi polloi knowing that whatever car they could never afford sometimes breaks down.
So, our AA man and his van are in disguise – not so much of an issue when you have a 12 year old Citroen Picasso….
So, when he is not dealing with posh cars and their owners, he makes time to rescue us.
I said I presumed that very posh cars don’t often breakdown and he just smiled, rather enigmatically, I thought.
I have been on a search to find the full name and hope the history of a man whose letter was slipped into a book he sent to someone.
And someone else donated to our Oxfam bookshop.
But meanwhile, it being a book about an Admiral, I have fallen into more naval history than I ever thought I would want to know – but it turns out I do.
So, if you have missed previous episodes, we are with a biography of Admiral Duncan (famous in his day for beating the Dutch navy in 1797) written by his grandson and therefore not exactly dispassionate.
As you can see, it was given by the Ear of Camperdown (author) to Maria’s grandfather.
Given that only 100 copies were published it is (hopefully) bound to be worth a bit – always welcome.
But it was the letter inside which was, at least to me, as interesting as the book – admirable though the Admiral no doubt was.
So, I wanted to find out who Patrick was, who Maria was, who her grandfather was and the very longest of shots, who Sir John was.
I have had a lot of help with this sleuthing and first thanks go to a very nice man at Savills estate agents in Guernsey. Let’s call him Richard.
Because with no surnames to go on, the address was my starting point.
And, what do you know, Savills the estate agents, had sold Patrick and Maria’s house in 2019. Well, I am not sure that it looked just like this when they lived in it, and it was sold some 30 years ago – it was a great lead.
I sent them an email and asked if they knew anything about the people who had lived there and, lets call him Richard, came back to me and said he did.
He gave me Patrick’s surname and told me Maria was a fairly renowned local artist.
What a stroke of luck was that?
Maria first:
Here are some of her paintings – the first was painted in 1995 which was the year she died and if I could be doing something as creative as that in my final year, I would be very pleased.
As mentioned before my Best Beloved’s niece is an ace sleuther and she found a reference in a piece about Patrick which mentioned that he had served in the Navy under Maria’s father, Rear-Admiral ‘Burgoo’ Burges Watson.
And her grandfather, recipient of the book, was also Rear-Admiral Burges Watson.
He was a few posh-sounding things in his career; naval aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria, and Admiral Superintendent of the Malta Dockyard for example.
So, that is Maria and her grandfather and now for Patrick.
He turns out to have quite a history.
He says in the letter that he was a ‘snottie’ (a junior midshipman) ‘in the flagship during the Invergordon mutiny.’ 1931
The flagship was HMS Hood which was later to become famous for all the wrong reasons.
‘In May 1941, Hood and the battleshipPrince of Wales were ordered to intercept the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiserPrinz Eugen, which were en route to the Atlantic, where they were to attack convoys. On 24 May 1941, early in the Battle of the Denmark Strait, Hood was struck by several German shells, exploded, and sank with the loss of all but 3 of her crew of 1,418. Due to her publicly perceived invincibility, the loss affected British morale.’ Wikipedia
Now I am no naval historian – though goodness knows I have spent so much more of my time than I had expected trawling through the stuff – Patrick was actually serving under his (future) father in law on Nelson.
(Perhaps you can have more than one flagship in a gathering of soon-to-be-mutinous ships?)
Anyway, that makes the link, but Patrick had lots more to tell us.
He had to leave the Navy because of poor eyesight and went to join a trading house in Singapore – as you do.
But when war broke out he came home and joined the Royal Navy Reserve Personnel.
This is what the Imperial War Museum cite under the Special Forces Roll of Honour:
But an obituary ( which I am sorry I cannot credit because I have lost the link) adds more dramatic colour to his life.
I have put it in wholesale below.
But before I leave you to read that, I couldn’t find Sir John. It was always going to be a very small needles in the haystack of Sir Johns so I am not so disappointed.
To have found Patrick, Maria and her grandfather has been more than enough.
Commander Patrick Whinney, who has died aged 92, landed and collected agents from the French and Italian coasts during the Second World War.
Once inside the shipping lanes, he had to navigate with pinpoint accuracy on quietened auxiliary engines towards a rendezvous before rowing ashore in a dinghy; often he would be unsure whether there were passengers to pick up or he was entering a trap.
Though calamity often threatened, no agents were lost in transit. When one important group of Italians, led by a general, were to be collected from a beach near Orbitello, Whinney and his right-hand man, Petty Officer Jim Bates, paddled their dinghies carefully through the surf with Tommy guns cocked; but when he gave the password there was no reply. Bates could see a huddle of men silhouetted up the beach and, fearing that the Italian party was under hostile control, he whispered: “Shall I let ’em have it, sir?” “No, wait,” said Whinney, who repeated the challenge twice more. At last came the response: “Giuseppe”, followed by a question: “English?” When Whinney replied “Yes”, six men flung themselves down the beach and into the dinghies.
As they steamed back to Bastia on Corsica at 40 knots in a USN patrol boat, the general showed Whinney the ancient automatic with which he had been about to shoot him. Their courier had been gone a week, and they suspected a trap themselves. One of the group had thought Whinney sounded German; it was not until the third challenge that the general, whose wife was English, had been convinced that all was well.
Patrick Fife Whinney was born on January 5 1912, the son of an Army officer whose family had the accountancy firm Whinney Smith and Whinney (later part of Ernst and Young). Patrick’s elder brother, Reginald, was awarded the DSC and Bar in destroyers escorting convoys in the North Atlantic.
Patrick Whinney went to Dartmouth in 1925, and as a midshipman served under his future father-in-law, Rear Admiral “Burgoo” Burges Watson, in the battleship Nelson. But poor eyesight forced him to leave the service and join a trading house in Singapore.
On the outbreak of war Whinney immediately returned home and was commissioned in the RNVR. With another young intelligence officer, Steven Mackenzie, he was sent as liaison officer to the French Admiral Darlan’s headquarters outside Paris. At the Fall of France, Whinney escaped in the Canadian destroyer Fraser, and survived when the ship was run down and sunk by the anti-aircraft cruiser Calcutta on the night of June 25 1940.
Back in London, Whinney reported to Ian Fleming, who sent him to the newly-created Directorate of Operations (Irregular), where his early naval training was of great assistance to Captain Frank Slocum, who had neither adequate or trained staff.
On August 3/4 1940 Whinney undertook his first clandestine mission. This was in a commandeered French-built motor dispatch vessel to land agents at Ouistreham, on what would later be famous as Sword Beach. His next mission, to Sein in Brittany, involved escorting Breton fisherman who had taken refuge at Newlyn; Whinney recalled being met off the train in Cornwall by a Russian Grand Duke, also in RNVR uniform.
Early in 1941 Whinney acted as liaison officer on board Le-Rhin, a French cargo vessel being refitted at Barry for special operations; it was no easy task, as the French crew had little knowledge of English or of naval procedures. Despite the opposition of de Gaulle’s Free French in London, the ship was placed under the White Ensign and renamed Fidelity. She sailed from the United Kingdom to land Special Operations Executive agents in southern France and to recover escaped British servicemen. Whinney and Mackenzie were awarded the Croix de Guerre in April 1943.
When Whinney’s loan to SOE was over, he was sent to Gibraltar to organise all irregular naval operations in the Western Mediterranean. After a brief return to London, and a visit to Spain to arrange for the covert purchase of fishing boats to augment his flotilla, he travelled to North Africa to reconnoitre suitable advanced bases and requisition Italian-type local craft for operations to the Italian mainland and islands; his flotilla was known, for cover purposes, as the African Coastal Flotilla.
Whinney spent 1943 at Slocum’s headquarters in London, controlling Mediterranean operations, then was sent to set up an advanced operational base at Bastia, using a mixture of borrowed British, American and Italian craft. Since the same craft were rarely loaned consecutively, Whinney had to train each crew in special operations, while commanding the base and planning and co-ordinating other operations. He personally took charge of the first 18 operations. Shortly afterwards a temporary illness forced him to relinquish his command and return to England where, after sick leave, he was given liaison duties with French special forces, and also awarded the DSC for his gallantry, enthusiasm and devotion to duty in hazardous operations.
After the war Whinney joined the diplomatic service. He spent many years in Athens, and then went into cosmetics business with a wartime colleague. In the 1960s he settled on Guernsey, where he helped his wife to found the Coach House Gallery.
From 1981 he became involved in the Guernsey Cheshire Home. Returning from a committee meeting at which it had been plain that the home faced a six-figure hole in its finances, on a whim Whinney walked into the local television studio where he found Sarah Montague, then a budding journalist, on duty alone. Whinney charmed her into giving him an interview, and held forth so eloquently that, a few days later, an anonymous cheque arrived for the sum required.
Patrick Whinney, who was appointed OBE in 1998, died on November 15, 2004. He married in 1939 Maria Burges Watson, who died in 1995; they are survived by three daughters.
thereluctanthousewife 