Blackmore Vale Childhood~A delightful and often moving portrait of growing up in rural Dorset between the two wars.

Hilary Townsend was born in the Blackmore Vale, and lives there still, and this account of her childhood evokes a way of life that has vanished without trace. Her memories are sharply observed, breathing life into her descriptions of the deep dairy farming countryside of the Vale and the small market town of Stalbridge, then the centre of her world.
It was a remote place where change was slow, thrift was ingrained and the agricultural depression meant hard times for almost everyone. Yet the author's delight in the simplest of pleasures, and her boundless interest in everything around her, people as well as places, viewed against the seasonal backcloth of Dorset life at its most sturdy and independent, gives this account of growing-up in the 1930s its freshness and appeal.

HILARY TOWNSEND

Paperback, 144 pages + 8 pages of photographs

ISBN 1 904349 50 1

~~Blackmore Vale Childhood|607|~529~1263~~

Dorset's Forgotten Heroes~The story of more tham 100 Dorset men and women whose exceptional courage or outstanding qualities make them true heroes. Original research by David Beaton has unearthed the story of many Dorset folk whose heroism had until recently almost been forgotten. With 24 pages of black and white illustrations.

DAVID BEATON

Paperback  ISBN 1 874336 99 7

~~Dorset%27s Forgotten Heroes|543|~529~1079~~

Horses & Husbands~The Memoirs of Etti Plesch

When Etti Plesch died in 2003, her obituary in The Times stated; 'Lately she had been compiling her memoirs, which were awaited with some trepidation in international society.' These memoirs are now being published.

Etti Plesch owes her place in The Guinness Book of Records as being the only woman owner to have won the Derby twice, in 1961 and 1980. But what made her a legendary lady of the turf was her 1970 victory over Nijinsky in the Arc de Triomphe.

Her own life was no less extraordinary and adventurous. Born Countess Wurmbrand in 1914 from a noble Austrian family, she was probably the illegitimate daughter of a noted rake. By the age of 40, she had married six husbands, divorcing five of them and losing two to the same woman.

If Horses and Husbands was merely a catalogue of marital indiscretions it would soon weary, but Etti lived through some of the most tumultuous years of the twentieth century and her friendships included many of its famous personalities, from Winston Churchill to Greta Garbo. Occasionally scandalous, often funny, gloriously indiscreet, they are also a portrait of a world and way of life that is now virtually extinct.

EDITED BY HUGO VICKERS

Hardback
208 pages + 16 pages plates
ISBN 978-1-904-34954-9

www.hugovickers.co.uk

~~Horses & Husbands|608|~529~1285~~

Isabel & the Sea~The second of George Millar's much-loved trio of sailing books to be republished by the Dovecote Press, following Oyster River in 2003.

In the summer of 1946, George and his young landlubber bride Isabel set sail in Truant, a 49 foot converted Looe lugger, crossing the Channel to a war-torn Le Havre. From there they sailed up the River Seine to Paris, before threading their way through the French canal network, down the River Rhine and into the Mediterranean at Marseilles.

In 1946 the evidence of war was commonplace. Sunken ships obstructed harbour mouths and passage planning was made hazardous by Isabel gaily throwing overboard the chart showing the position of minefields off the Italian coast. Truant's final cruising ground was around the newly liberated Greek Islands, where George Miller's acutely observed descriptions of Greek social life offer a respite from Truant's increasingly temperamental engines.Isabel & the Sea is a marvellously good read and as Peter Bruce says in his introduction, 'George's seemingly magical powers of description gives us an accurate record of how one couple, with much fortitude, resolution and joie de vivre, skilfully managed to turn the difficult post war period in Europe to their own advantage.'

GEORGE MILLAR

Hardback, 416 pages, 4 pages plates, endpapers, maps ISBN 1 904349 46 3

~~Isabel & the Sea|562|~529~1252~~

Oyster River, One Summer on an Inland Sea~A long-awaited reprint of George Millar's classic account of a summer spent sailing on his 50 foot yawl Amokura in the Gulf of Morbihan, originally published in 1963 and long out-of-print.The now 93-year-old author's wartime experiences of serving with the French Resistance (recalled in Maquis and Horned Pigeon) bring to Oyster River an affection for France and its people that transform it into much more than a cruising log. Fine seamanship combines with a portrait of a rural way-of-life that has now all but vanished from Morbihan's villages and island communities. (July).Casebound with jacket and endpaper map, 272 pages + frontispiece and 8 pages plates.

GEORGE MILLAR

Hardback  ISBN 1 904349 26 9

~~Oyster River, One Summer on an Inland Sea|554|~529~544~~

Out of Town
A Life Relived on Television~Over 60,000 copies now sold

The bestselling autobiography of the famous broadcaster's childhood and early youth. 'His descriptions of the countryside bring it alive in a way few other writers, with the possible exception of H.E.Bates, have ever done'. SAGA

For twenty-five years Jack Hargreaves's television programme 'Out of Town' gained him an immense following for its glorious mixture of rural ways and country life. His memories of the people, places and animals that were later to shape his broadcasts are certain to appeal to all those who share his love of the English countryside.

JACK HARGREAVES

Paperback 8 pages of photographs ISBN 0 946159 46 7

Also read about Jack's bestselling sequel, The Old Country

~~Out of Town, A Life Relived on Television|553|~529~543~~

The Old Country~A second volume of autobiography mixed with country lore by the well-known broadcaster and author of Out of Town.

JACK HARGREAVES

Paperback  ISBN 0 946159 59 9

~~The Old Country|555|~529~545~~

Trying to Please~The long-awaited memoirs of the distinguished writer and broadcaster

'Poor old baby, he's only trying to please.' So said John Julius Norwich's nurse after his birth in 1929. That he has successfully lived up to her words is a tribute to an appetite for life allied to a remarkable gift for friendship.

John Julius Norwich's parents were Duff and Diana Cooper: the former a cabinet minister, his mother a famous beauty. In 1940 the 11-year-old John Julius was evacuated to Canada, returning 2 years later across an Atlantic full of U-boats. Wartime Eton followed. Then came the British Embassy in Paris, where his father was Britain's post-war ambassador. With his mother John Julius watched French troops cross the Rhine under enemy fire and witnessed the Nuremberg Trials. National Service in the navy was followed by Oxford. In 1952 John Julius married and joined the Foreign Office, serving first in Belgrade and then in Beirut - inspired postings that sowed the seeds of his delight in the Byzantine and Ottoman worlds.

After leaving the Foreign Office John Julius found success as an author, television presenter and panellist on BBC radio Round Britain Quiz. A secret affair produced a daughter, placing an inevitable strain on his marriage. By the 1970s he had a second wife, and a working year that combined writing, broadcasting and lecturing.

Happily, Trying to Please is no mere list of achievements, but an engaging and often amusing account of its author's past that breathes fresh life into the worlds he describes.

JOHN JULIUS NORWICH

Hardback

384 pages + 24 pages plates

ISBN 978-1-904-34958-7

~~Trying to Please|555|~529~1310~~

Somerset's Forgotten Heroes~The story of more than 80 Somerset men and women whose exceptional courage or outstanding qualities make them true heroes. Original research by Roger Evans has unearthed the story of many Somerset folk whose heroism had until recently been almost forgotten.

Roger Evans

Paperback  ISBN 1 904349 32 3

~~Somerset%27s Forgotten Heroes|428|~529~1080~~

The Rich Spoils of Time~'A delightfully self-effacing and humorous autobiography full of fascinating glimpses of a hidden world' Country Life

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/

~~The Rich Spoils of Time|608|~529~1253~~

Tyneham, A Lost Heritage~The classic portrait of Dorset's most famous village. The Elizabethan manor house of Tyneham was Lilian Bond's home until 1914. Her account of growing up in the isolated coastal community in the years leading up to the 1st World War vividly evokes a way of life that ended when the Army forced the villagers to leave their homes in 1943, never to return.

LILIAN BOND

Paperback  ISBN 0 946159 18 1

~~Tyneham, A Lost Heritage|539|~529~547~~

William Barnes, The Dorset Poet~SPECIAL OFFER - REDUCED PRICE FROM £8.95 TO 3.95

A comprehensive selection of poetry and prose by the greatest and most popular of the English dialect poets.

ED. CHRIS WRIGLEY

Paperback  ISBN 0 946159 17 3

~~William Barnes, The Dorset Poet|557|~529~548~~