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Frances Campbell-Preston's glorious account of a life lived to the full. Frank, vivid, spanning nearly 90 years, it mirrors the times through which she has lived - its triumphs and tragedies.
Reviewing The Rich Spoils of Time, Hugh Massingberd described it as written 'with a delightful dry humour . . . Handsomely produced and impeccably edited by Hugo Vickers, who wrote the definitive biography of Dame Frances's former employer, Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother (to whom she was a lady in waiting for 37 years), it certainly makes for a fascinating read. . . Of her boss, the author remarks: 'She had dignity, but never pomposity or pretentiousness'. When Dame Frances, approaching 80, began talking about retiring, The Queen Mother cut in: 'Congratulations! You feel marvellous after you're eighty!' There are exquisitely funny vignettes about the characters of Clarence House . . .. . . The family vicissitudes are described with sympathy and wit, not forgetting the strange ministrations of a quack who believed that young Frances's contours could be reduced as if she were a statue by a jet of water plus a sharp rub with a horse brush. The outstandingly vivid wartime chapters remind one how much we owe to the sadly vanishing generation of which Dame Frances Campbell-Preston (born 1918) is such an admirable, modest and down-to-earth ornament.'
FRANCES CAMPBELL-PRESTON
Edited by Hugo Vickers
Hardback, 328 pages + 16 pages of photographs, ISBN 1 904349 47 1
www.hugovickers.co.uk/
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As a contribution to the celebrations marking the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the Dovecote Press reprinted an edition of 750 copies of The Three Dorset Captains at Trafalgar, originally published in 1906 shortly after the centenary of the battle, and of which secondhand copies are now rare.Undoubtedly, the best-known of the trio is Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson's flag-captain at Trafalgar on HMS Victory, who was born at Portesham and put to sea aged twelve as a 'captain's servant'. The two other captains are no less distinguished. Like Hardy, both were knighted and became Admirals of the Blue. Henry Digby was born in Minterne, where he is buried, but before exchanging a life at sea for that of a Dorset squire he was captain of the 64-gun HMS Africa, the smallest ship of the line at Trafalgar. Charles Bullen spent much of his childhood at Weymouth, rising from eleven-year-old first class volunteer on a frigate to become captain of HMS Britannia at Trafalgar.The historian Maureen Attwooll has contributed a lengthy new Introduction describing the background to the book and saying something about the principal characters. The 16 pages of original photographs have all been rescanned and this new edition is enriched by 4 pages of colour plates. There is also a Foreword by the present Lord Digby.Overseas p&p will cost £10.
A.M. BROADLEY & R.G BARTELOT
Hardback, 360 pages, ISBN 1 904349 38 2
£25.00 with overseas p&p afterwards
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The long-awaited, in some cases feared, memoirs of the Baron de Redé, a man who lived his life at the heart of the beau monde, and knew where the aristocratic skeletons lie buried. He has written of his traumatic childhood, his courageous lone voyage to the United States, and how he caught the eye and the heart of one of Europe's most enigmatic figures, Arturo Lopez-Willshaw. Joining Lopez in Paris after the war, he took on the restoration of the Hotel Lambert. With Arturo, and indeed with his wife Patricia, he attended or was host to some of the great balls of the age. In these sparkling memoirs, profusely illustrated with images from his own collection, he talks of his close friendship with Arturo, and after his death with the legendary queen of Paris society, Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. This is an extraordinary, unique life, the like of which could not be lived again in our times. Edited by Hugo Vickers
Extra large format hardback, nearly 200 photographs, paintings and other illustrationsISBN 1 904349 03 X
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