Duff Hart-Davis

A rich account of the impact of the Second World War on the lives of people living in the farms and villages of Britain. On the outbreak of war, the countryside was invaded by service personnel and evacuee children by the thousand; land was taken arbitrarily for airfields, training grounds and firing ranges, and whole communities were evicted. Prisoner-of-war camps brought captured enemy soldiers to close quarters, and as horses gave way to tractors and combines farmers were burdened with aggressive new restrictions on what they could and could not grow. Land Girls and Lumber Jills worked in fields and forests. Food or the lack of it was a major preoccupation and rationing strictly enforced. And although rabbits were poached, apples scrumped and mushrooms gathered, there was still not enough to eat. Drawing from diaries, letters, books, official records and interviews, Duff Hart Davis revisits rural Britain to describe how ordinary people survived the war years. He tells of houses turned over to military use such as Bletchley and RAF Medmenham as well as those that became schools, notably Chatsworth in Derbyshire. Combining both hardship and farce, the book examines the profound changes war brought to Britain s countryside: from the Home Guard, struggling with the provision of ludicrous equipment, to the role of the XII Corps Observation Unit. whose task was to enlarge rabbit warrens and badger setts into bunkers for harassing the enemy in the event of a German invasion; to the unexpected tenderness shown by many to German and Italian prisoners-of-war at work on the land. Fascinating, sad and at times hilarious, this warm-hearted book tells great stories and casts new light on Britain during the war."

A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939-45

Our Land at War

The Heights of Rimring

Traces the life and work of Raoul Millais, a prominent 20th-century sporting artist. Much of the text comes from Millais' own writings, covering episodes in his life to do with his family, upbringing and friends.

His Life and Work

Raoul Millais

The bleak volcanic landscape of the remote Ascension Islands, 800 miles from its nearest neighbour St Helena, was described by a naval officer in the 1850s as one of the strangest places on earth. Man has since transformed this heap of clinker, slag and cinders into pockets of greenery. Into an almost perfect natural vacuum the early settlers brought many plants and animals which escaped and went wild. Today the giant green turtles still return to lay their eggs on the beaches, the seabird colonies festoon the cliffs and the island's small permanent human population thrives in one of the world's most isolated locations.

Ascension - the Story of a South Atlantic Island

In this absorbing memoir Duff Hart Davies looks back over fifty years of watching, stalking and writing about deer. Throughout the text he captures the grace and mystery of this elusive creature.

In the Woods and on the Hill - A Stalker Looks Back

Among the Deer

Philip de László (1869-1937) was the pre-eminent portrait artist working in Britain between 1907 and 1937. He painted nearly 3,000 portraits, including kings and queens, four American presidents and countless members of the European nobility. There has been no biography of him since 1939, and this new account of both his life and his work draws on previously untapped material from the family archive of over 15,000 documents. It establishes the intrinsic importance of his art and re-positions him alongside his great contemporaries John Singer Sargent, Sir John Lavery and Giovanni Boldini. Born into a humble family in Budapest in 1869 he was ennobled by the Emperor Franz Joseph and from 1912 became known as Philip de László. From an early age he was driven by an unshakable vocation to succeed as an artist. He studied in Budapest, Munich and Paris, soon turning to portraiture as his vocation, and in 1894 received his first important commission from the royal family of Bulgaria, followed in 1899 by the Emperor Franz Joseph and, in 1900, Pope Leo XIII.

His Life and Art

Philip de László

A rich account of the impact of the Second World War on the lives of people living in the farms and villages of Britain.

Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45

Captain Alan Hillgarth was just 15 years old when he found himself aboard the HMS Bacchante as World War I broke out. Within months he'd fought at Gallipoli, bayoneted an attacking Turkish soldier, and been shot in the head and leg. Such was the preamble to an extraordinary career, and a fascinating life.

Man of War

Jim Corbett became the hero of thousands of impoverished local families in the remote Indian region of Kumaon when, throughout the 1920s and 30s, he answered their pleas to rid them of the man-eating tigers and leopards which were ravaging their populations. Man-eaters roamed a region of hundreds of square miles over several years, killing the defenceless villagers at will: for example the Champawat man-eater had killed over 434 people in six years, the Panar maneater over 400. Jim, one of 15 children, was born in 1875 to the local post-master in Nainital, and taught himself as a barefoot boy in his local jungle to become, in his spare time one, of the most skilled trackers of his day, fluent in the local dialects, patient beyond endurance and an excellent shot. Duff Hart Davis' biography threads together the life of this very private, unassuming Indian railway clerk. Often through Jim's own written words, Duff sets out the highlights of Jim's adventures in sequence and in context, thus thowing light on Jim's remarkable character.

The Life of Jim Corbett

Hero of Kumaon

Popularly known as India's latterday Jim Corbett and 'tiger man', 87-year-old Billy Arjan Singh is by any standards an extraordinary man. At Tiger Haven, his home in a magical spot on the edge of the jungle in UP, Singh's experiments with bringing up three orphaned leopards, and also Tara, a tiger cub that he imported from a zoo in England, shot him into both limelight and controversy. His aim was to see if Tara's instincts would make her revert to the wild when she became mature. They did, and over the years, she produced four litters of cubs, thus proving his contention that it is possible to supplement dwindling wild stocks with zoo-born animals. But when it was discovered that the tigress had Siberian genes in her ancestry, he was accused of having introduced a 'genetic cocktail'into the jungle. Undeterred, Singh remained a champion of the forest and its denizens. It was almost entirely due to his advocacy that in 1973 the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, authorized the creation of the Dudhwa National Park. Now, in his eighties, comes recognition for his efforts. In March 2005, he received the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation award - a global honour administered by the World Wildlife Fund, that serves to recognize outstanding contributions in international conservation. In this affectionate biography, the British author Duff Hart-Davis tells the story of a man absolutely dedicated to the cause of animals, who has given fifty years of his own life to their conservation.

Honorary Tiger: The Life of Billy Arjan Singh

Filled with vivid, eye-popping illustrations and photographs, this fascinating true tale of the great naturalist chronicles his struggle to complete his masterpiece--the epic The Birds of America. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

America's Greatest Naturalist and the Making of The Birds of America

Audubon's Elephant

In the early days Marleybone Cricket Club's facilities were primitive and the pitch was regarded as one of the most dangerous in the land. This text describes how Lord's has evolved into the magnificent arena it is today.

An Architectural History of Lord's

Pavilions of Splendour

In a desperate attempt to rescue an American general and to retrieve a document critical to the future of the West, a secret expedition, headed by a bitter British agent brought out of retirement, struggles through the awesome Himalayas

For the very first time,The War That Never Was tellsthe fascinating story of a secret war fought by British mercenaries in the Yemen in the early 1960s. In a covert operation organised over whisky and sodas in the clubs of Chelsea and Mayfair, a group of former SAS officers - led by the irrepressible Colonel Jim Johnson - arranged for a squadron of British mercenaries to travel to the remote mountain regions of the Yemen, to arm, train and lead Yemeni tribesmen in their fight against a 60,000-strong contingent of Egyptian soldiers. It was one of the most uneven running battles ever waged; the Egyptians fielded a huge, professionally-trained army. The British fought back at the head of a ragtag force of tribal warriors and, ultimately, won. Egypt's President Nasser described the battle in the Yemen as 'my Vietnam'. It's a fascinating, forgotten, and rip-roaringly entertaining pocket of British military history, much in the spirit of Ben MvIntyre's bestselling Agent Zigzagand Operation Mincemeat.

The War That Never Was

The bleak, volcanic island of Ascension, 800 miles from its nearest neighbour St Helena, was described by a Victorian naval officer as 'one of the strangest places on the face of the earth'. It is still exceedingly odd. Uninhabited when it was taken over by the British in 1815, it was an almost perfect natural vacuum - a triangular heap of lava and ash. When the Royal Marines brought in plants and animals, some flourished, others died. Tropical forest now clothes the peak of Green Mountain, and feral donkeys haunt the plains. As sea birds swarm around the coast, radar stations monitor space from the tops of rust-red cinder cones, and primeval, giant green turtles lumber up the beaches to nest. The island's history is short but extraordinary.

The Story of a South Atlantic Island

Ascension

Eileen Alice Soper

When Eileen Soper died in 1990, executors found a profusion of watercolours and a large number of her drawings at her home in Hertfordshire. It was as a painter of wildlife - the aspect this book concentrates on - that she came into her own. This is the sequel to Wildings.

Duff Hart-Davis

About

Books

Join the club