‘The Dangerous Book for Boys’ by Conn and Hal Iggulden
The memory of playing with my trainset as a boy is actually a memory of my father playing with my trainset. In similar vein I suspect Conn Iggulden’s ‘The Dangerous Book for Boys’ will appeal more to nostalgic fathers than to sons. The author of the ‘Emperor’ books has created an Aladin’s cave of boys’ own treasures including; the morse code, how to tie knots in rope, the laws of cricket, the Kings and Queens of England and Scotland, and how to make a tree-house. Hopefully in this age of screen dominated entertainment boys can still enjoy learning the Solar system or how to skin a rabbit from a book. There are over a hundred other similar diversions for a long dry summer – or a wet Sunday indoors.
‘Vulcan 607’ by Rowland White
In the sphere of Toys for Boys none comes bigger than an Avro Vulcan B2 Delta bomber. In ‘Vulcan 607’ Rowland White tells the epic story of the mission to bomb the landing strip at Port Stanley during the Argentine occupation of the Falklands. The one-shot, no second chance, bombing raid took the crew 16 hours and required 17 inflight refuellings. Accompanied by colour photograhs and using extensive interviews with the combatants, Falkland Island residents and British High Command Rowland White has written a contemporary miltary history that reads like a thriller.
‘Ships of West Cumberland’ by Desmond G. Sythes
To an older form of transport just as appealing to boys of all ages - from cruising at 500 knots at 50,000 feet down to 15 knots at sea-level. ‘Ships of West Cumberland’ is a series of republished newspaper columns recounting the local history of sailing and shipbuilding along our coast from the 1700s to the 1890s. Des Sythes was the one-time lighthouse keeper at St Bees and originally published the articles collected in this book in the Whitehaven News in the 1969.
Among the many stories in this wonderful little book is that of the Whitehaven built ‘Kitty’; launched in 1765 she continued to sail for a further 118 years before being lost in a gale. This stood as a record length of service for a West Cumberland built ship until surpassed this year by the ‘Dunboyne’. Launched in February 1888 she is still afloat, renamed the ‘a.f. Chapman’, in the service of the Sewedish Tourist Board as a Youth Hostel in Stockholm harbour.
This gem of a book icludes over 40 photographs and other illustrations of West Cumbrian shipping in the yards of Maryport, Workington, Harrington and Whitehaven as well as pictures of these fine vessels in full sail at sea.
