Reading The Water (radio) – Chris Yates

Writer Chris Yates explores the spirit of carp fishing at a Wiltshire lake in midsummer.

It seems to be a feature of Chris Yates when he appears on TV, that he doesn’t actually catch fish. That’s not to say that this legendary angler does not catch fish, he would not be as admired as he is if that were the case. And whilst much of that admiration is driven by his wonderful writing, I don’t think that would be quite the same if he had not demonstrated the ability to catch fish. For those unfamiliar with Chris, he held the record for catching the biggest carp in the UK, taking that title from another much-respected angler and writer Dick Walker, who had held it for nearly thirty years.

But it does bring out the point that for many who love to spend time sitting for hours at the bankside, not catching a fish does not mean that time has been wasted. One of my most memorable sessions was a “blank” where I caught nothing but had an unforgettable encounter with a barn owl.

It would be spoiling  of me to say whether or not this recently aired radio programme captures a successful attempt to catch  big carp, but it is rich in Chris’ descriptive language and includes a breath-taking tale about a kingfisher.

Tuppence a bag?

In my mind’s eye feeding birds has always been something for old people. Certainly, I remember from childhood both pairs of grandparents feeding birds and getting great delight from it. But we never fed birds at home when I was a kid and as an adult my attempts had been limited to putting a few scraps out when it snowed when, we are told, birds are going hungry. No-one seems to have told the birds this though, as my offerings were wholly ignored, if not scorned.

 

So, was its age that led me to spontaneously pick up a birdfeeder whilst I was queuing to pay for a new shirt in late spring? And then to buy it too? I don’t know; possibly. I had joined the Ramblers earlier in the year, a group I always thought was for the senior age group. But the story behind that is one for another day.

 

However, at the risk of seeming to be in denial, I don’t actually think it was an age thing. In my mind it was the understanding that British birds are in decline. Hell, every species on the planet seems to be in decline, except rats and humans; and reality TV stars (a mix of the two). And it all feels quite hopeless at times, but birds I hope, are perhaps something I could have an impact on.

 

My thinking is that whilst woodland sustains bird life, as do open fields, the habitats that birds like most are a mixture – hedgerows and woodland fringes. I don’t know if that is a very scientific conclusion, but I notice more birds at the edge of a wood than in the middle of it.

 

My garden backs onto a field and a wooded area and so has quite a few feathered visitors, partly I reckon because it also has several small trees linked by large shrubs.

 

As soon as I put the feeder up it drew in birds. It also drew in squirrels. Luckily, we don’t get many of the grey tree-rats, and a shield made from a poundshop pizza tray with a hole drilled through it mostly kept them at bay over the summer. Mostly. They do still attempt to get at the food, but a cordless doorbell hung nearby usually scares them off and so the birds get most of the food. That’s not to say they don’t go hungry. The feeder was such a success that I got two more and even then, regular topping up was required, though that has slowed as autumn arrived. I also set up a plastic flowerpot saucer as a drinking point/bath and this has been as much of a success if not more, no doubt because of the hot weather we had.

 

Although I put perches on the feeders to make them more accessible, it is largely the tits that feed from them, and we often get between ten and twenty long-tailed, blue, coal and great tits using them at one time. Robins are moderately successful on the feeders and a male blackbird is comically bad at using them. We also get a woodpecker (which I have talked about before) who is a messy eater. However, the food debris on the ground attracts a greater variety of birds with wrens, dunnocks, thrushes, a dopey pigeon and its more elegant collared dove cousins coming into feed.

 

For several reasons, amongst all these avian diners, my favourite visitor is the nuthatch.

 

To begin with, it is because it is the only bird that can hop down (underline) a tree trunk, which is pretty impressive.

 

Then, because it reminds me of the walks my son and I used to take when he was a tot. We would wander through fields and woods, always looking for something to watch or investigate. On one such wombling expedition we had stopped for a snack and were sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, when we spotted a nuthatch on the trunk of an oak. It proceeded to hammer a small acorn into a fissure in the bark, so that it could feed on it, exactly as described in books, but rarely seen in real-life.

And the last reason takes me full circle. My paternal grandmother used to put seeds out for the birds. I don’t recall ever seeing any on her feeder, but then there was generally a tribe of us kids thundering between house and garden. But whilst I mightn’t have seen many birds in the flesh (or should that be feather?) back then, I do recall enjoying the boxes the bird seed came in. They had named illustrations of individual species down the sides and it was the nuthatch I liked the best. Something about the colouring and shape set it apart from the others which seemed brown, or dumpy. Or brown and dumpy. I also loved the black bar that ran across its eyes, like the mask of a superhero, or a highwayman, or Zorro, or the Lone Ranger. It was just flat out cool.

And many years later, they still look pretty damn amazing, and even more so in real life.

A Walk on the Mild Side

A couple of years ago I used to do a lot of walking. Each weekend I would take off on a jaunt of between twelve and twenty miles, plus at least one shorter walk midweek. But I developed Plantar Fasciitis in one foot and an orthopaedic problem in the other. The latter resulted in surgery earlier this year. Accordingly, my perambulations through the countryside had ceased and I missed them terribly. By the beginning of this summer I’d managed a few shorter walks, but last Saturday I undertook something more substantial. The walk I had planned was something just over ten miles and I did not honestly know if I could do it.

But there was only one way to find out, and despite a few pediatric twinges I set out. Retracing one’s steps always feels quite tedious, so I always take either a circular route or do what I did on Saturday and take public transport somewhere, then walk home.  This does mean that you are committed, and I wasn’t without trepidation as I set out, with what felt like a heavy pack. In hindsight I did take a few pieces of kit I could have managed without, but most of the weight was food and water. Whilst my load could have been lighter, it was still a good day out, with much to see, including old signs on ancient oaks and the cottage where my father was born eighty years ago.

One of the main delights of these rambles through the country is the wildlife, but whilst I saw many (too many) tree rats, I didn’t see much fauna. At one point I passed a large raptor calling from a tall  conifer, but I couldn’t actually see it; it was, I suspect a buzzard, rather than a red kite. And then apart from a field full of gormless pheasants, I only spotted a moorhen, and brown trout at the river and a large dragonfly, under a motorway bridge of all places.

This lack of critters was disappointing, but perhaps I wasn’t as tuned in as I used to be, or maybe my gait is a noisier one.

Farming, however, was very much in evidence. I stopped to have a few words with a farmer looking after some newly planted native tree saplings and later was held up by a Combine harvesting a field of oats through which my path ran. I was also eyed suspiciously by a group of juvenile sheep lying in the shade and was, inevitably, followed across a field by a small herd of cows.

Breaking for lunch, by the River Pang divided the trip in two and I spent about forty minutes sitting by the chalk stream enjoying the peace and quiet.

It got tougher after that and I definitely enjoyed the first leg more than the second. Although I’m glad to say I finished the walk, I did start to slow down dramatically and so took a shorter route for the end section so that I covered about nine and a half miles, all told.

Nevertheless, it was a good day and one I’ve waited a long time for.

 

 

More Metaphorna

Quite often I notice strange coincidences. They are odd, but I’m not bothered by them, nor read too much into them. In fact, I don’t really read anything into them and although I have written about them in the past, I don’t document every occurrence.  Nor think about them to any real degree. They are curious though.

And so it was the day after I posted here about animal metaphors, that I came across this card.

I had forgotten I had it, and long forgotten where I got it from. Looking at it, the text that would almost certainly have been the reason I picked it up though. It’s immediately recognisable as something from the Two Rivers Press, and I believe by Sally Castle.

On the back is a poem called Masterstroke by Ian House, from one of the publisher’s anthologies. I don’t personally think it’s a very good poem, even though someone was sufficiently taken with it to place excerpts, hand lettered by Sally Castle ,(along the south bank of the Thames at Reading, Berkshire.

However, there is one line, a metaphor, that I like immensely:

“A coot snails upstream”

For birds without webbed feet, coots are fairly quick swimmers. But whilst their long, lobed toes work well as paddles, they are not super-efficient and they appear to be labouring when they are going against the flow, so that their pace is snail-like. Also, at those times, as they push their necks forward with each stroke. Their movement also resembles a snail’s wavelike motion. And finally, when on the water they have a profile that calls to mind the garden gastropod. It’s a great analogy.

Curious that the majority of these metaphors feature birds though.

Must be a coincidence.

Flora and Metaphorna

Back in the early days of this blog I wrote that I enjoyed the description Simon Armitage gave in his book Walking Away of wrens “squirting about in the undergrowth” and dolphins “darning the water”.

Those metaphorical lines have stayed with me and although I haven’t seen a dolphin first hand for some years, I cannot see a wren without thinking of the noisy little birds squirting the environment with their song.

Another that I picked up recently was from Dark Skies by Tiffany Francis, which I have just done a magazine review on. She describes goldcrests as “jigging about like hot popcorn”.

There were other metaphors and although “a wasp on a yoga ball” doesn’t  for me conjure being alone on a hill, I did like long-tailed tits being referred to as toffee apples and lollipops, though I think the latter the better description by far.

I must have read other animal metaphors down the years,  but only Simon Armitage’s have stayed with me, though goldcrest popcorn and long-tailed lollipops may well do so.

Actually, there is another that I recall, but wish I didn’t. In at least two of his books Richard Mabey refers to the silhouette of (probably) a swift as a “crossbow”. This I never liked, partly because it is not particularly accurate but mostly, I suspect, because that metaphor is like a crossbow, a graceless thing.

Beagle, Eiger, Eagles and Anthrax

Lately there has been so much good radio on and I have been putting a post together on a few programmes linked by nature, but it keeps coming.

On Thursday I caught programme number 4 of 5 about the search for the remains of the ship on which Charles Darwin made his discoveries. It was pretty engaging and so I just have to go to the BBC iPlayer and listen to the Hunting the Beagle series from the beginning.

This was followed Friday by a piece of climbing and broadcasting history. Dating from 1966 Men Against the Eiger featured Dougal Haston, the first Briton to climb the Eiger by the direct route.

And yesterday I caught Windbreakers, Sea Eagles and Anthrax in which poet Richard Price relives childhood summer holidays on a beach in the North-west highlands of Scotland.

All good stuff and I look forward to next week’s radio.

Meanwhile I need to finish that post I’m working on.

Bright Eyed and Bushy Tailed

Two years ago, I canoed the length of Loch Ness. It was a very special adventure on many levels.

It was the first time I had been in a canoe since I was a child. It was the first time I had been to that part of Scotland and there were several other firsts which embellished the enjoyment and memory of the trip. Judging which was best is difficult, so I haven’t even tried, but seeing a wild otter was a surprising and amazing experience.  Not least of all as it bobbed up very close to the boat.

 

As an angler, fish sign is something I’m always looking for, often subconsciously, and I had seen absolutely none anywhere on the Loch, something I suspect adds to the atmospheric aura of the place. Since the water is stained dark from the surrounding soil, this would seem to limit plant growth and there isn’t the level of vegetation you might usually find in a lake. Accordingly, I suspect that Loch Ness has a very small biomass given its size and so I had to wonder what the otter was feeding on.

 

Another animal encounter also thrilled me. The Dipper is the only swimming songbird in the world, diving underneath the water to gather food, something made possible by having denser bones than other birds. They are somewhere around the size of a blackbird with dark brown/dark grey plumage, with a bright, white throat and bib. Having only ever seen them on TV I was really pleased to spot one on a rock where a small stream cascaded into the great Loch.

 

Being on the water gives you a different perspective of the world and the natural world treats you with a different perspective too.

 

If you are walking along a riverbank unless you are very lucky a heron will, long before you get near, take-off and vanish with a few loping beats of its wings. If you are in a canoe they will, more often than not, remain statue-still as you float by. Similarly, from the river bank a kingfisher is a split-second streak of electric blue that fizzes through your vision. If you are afloat you get a longer, although still brief encounter as you watch an azure speck working the riverside.

 

A few weeks ago, I was back in Scotland. This latest adventure was another canoe trip, this time along the River Spey, from Aviemore to the sea.

 

I was happy to see a Dipper and there were also quiet a few other birds.  Oystercatchers are easily recognisable, a small ducky sized black and white bird with a red-orange cigar of a beak, and matching long legs. They are usually found on the coast. Or at least so I thought. A month before the Spey trip I was canoeing the River Wye and had seen a handful on one of the shingle beaches that are a feature of that beautiful meandering watercourse. However, there were plenty all along the Spey. All along and overhead; their distinctive cry heard long into the evening It was a nice sound to lull you to sleep as we bedded down, well before the late June sunset. That and the croaking cry of the heron were the soundtrack of the trip

 

But like my earlier Scottish trip, it was a rare mammal that really made an impact. My grandfather told me he last saw a Red Squirrel in our home county around 1930, so they have been gone a long time from my part of the world, but they still persevere elsewhere in the British Isles. And although I have been to Scotland a number of times, I had never even thought to look out for one.
It was only as we were getting ready to set out on day one that another of the party (who is also from the South) mentioned that he’d seen red squirrels when he did the trip last year that I realised it was an option. And, as if on cue, shortly afterwards one scampered through a nearby tree. I was, I suspect, disproportionately excited but it was a delightful and unexpected encounter. Luckily the experience is etched in my mind’s eye, because taking a photo (into the sun) of the little creature proved to be less than a brilliant success, as you can see.

In Clover

Just as a lucky clover has three leaves, the Friday before last I counted myself thrice lucky.

Firstly, that I had a day off work. After cleaning, fixing and packing away my kit from a recent canoe trip, I spent a few soggy hours in the garden doing some different fixing and tidying, much to the annoyance of the birds that visit our feeders, who sat twittering in trees and bushes.

My second blessing was that amongst all the birds which thronged to eat once I was safely indoors was a woodpecker. Predominantly black and white, with a red cap that marked it as a juvenile. I confess I had to look that up, as birds are an aspect of nature where my knowledge is quite poor. Shy and hard to photograph it was a delight to see it. As you can see, my attempt to take a snap gave a result not unlike the same quality found in photos where people claim to have filmed Bigfoot. I will try and do better.

And the third boon was good radio to listen to whilst I was doing all this.

In keeping with the trilogy theme, three programmes stood out.

Firstly “Just a Simple Old New Zealand Bee-Keeper”, which was a 30-minute interview with Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hilary

Then, “Plants: From Roots to Riches”. This is not a series I have heard before (something I must rectify) and the episode, Botanical Medicine, was fascinating not least of all how it explained, that the conditions in which a plant grows can affect its efficacy as a source of medicine.

And finally, “Who Was Opal?”, told the tale of nature lover Opal Whiteley, a curious and mysterious figure, who wrote a best-selling and controversial book about her childhood in lumber camps. The programme described an intriguing but tragic figure who would, I think, have enjoyed the thought of being remembered.

Max Wenner Mystery part two

Following on from my earlier piece on Max Wenner and his mysterious death, I have been doing more research. That sounds a bit more involved than the truth of the matter, which is that I have acquired a copy of “So It Was”, Michael A. Wenner’s autobiography. He was the nephew of Max, and so the first section of his book gives plenty of detail on his Wenner forebears, including his Uncle Max, who actually features on the cover, holding a hawk, as described in my earlier piece.

I was relieved to find  that the story I had pieced together was broadly correct. And, of course the biog. gave a lot more detail and background. Some minor details in my piece were incorrect. For instance, what I stated (repeating someone else’s mistake) was a photo of Max and his brother is it seems a picture of the brother and some Icelanders. However, I suspect that it was actually Max who took the photo, because the book emphasizes Max’s keen interests in the natural world and photography.

As well as giving family background and some personal details about Max , it has suggested some further lines of research. One of which is the Royal Flying Corps, in which Max served as a pilot during World War One. This may have been where he began his interest in photography as at that point in time military aircraft had a more observational role (including photographic reconnaissance), rather than being used for combat.

On Max’s demise the book is rather brief, but does introduce a curious new element. It says as follows “I must have been around fifteen in the mid to late ’30s when Max – returning by air from a visit to Essen, the home of a German lady of whom after Dolly’s death he had grown fond – unaccountably fell to his death from the aircraft. One of his fellow passengers was a Mr John Vincent Cain, a colourful entrepreneur and former smuggler of arms and planes to Franco – and possibly a not too reliable witness. The Daily Express reported Mr Cain as stating that he had watched my uncle ‘hurry on to the airliner at Cologne and…pen sheet after sheet of note-paper at furious speed; thrust the notes into his pocket and suddenly disappear into the back compartment..The letters stated to have been written were missing when Max’s body was found and were never recovered.’

I find it a little odd that the book’s author has relied on a newspaper article to tell this part of his  history, after all he was fifteen years of age at the time; hardly a child, but perhaps his recall failed him, nonetheless it does seem strange to me.

The newspaper tale is not entirely accurate since, as we have seen, the letter (singular) was found on the poor man’s body.

What is also curious is the presence of an arms smuggler in the story.  This only adds weight to the Agatha Christie-esque colour of the whole tale.

I shall in due course update my earlier piece, to include more of the background to Max Wenner, provided by this biography. And there are of course more lines of research to take forward, not least of which is the curious Mr Cain, for whom my initial research has proved largely fruitless.

The Max Wenner Mystery

Max Wenner was a person who was referred to in a previous blog post, having fleetingly been mentioned in the book The Prince of Poachers.

That slight reference really engaged my interest and since then I have done a little internet research. By that I mean I have looked for the full story and, having failed to find one, have pulled together various references (from the links at the foot of this page), some of which are prime sources and  others not, to piece together the story. The picture that emerges is a hazy, but intriguing one. It could perhaps form the basis of a film, certainly a book and undoubtedly a documentary for television. But that is not to trivialise, however, one man’s tragic demise.

So let’s start with my own original datum point, the book excerpt. Quoting it in full, starting by talking of Long Mynd moor it says:

“I think it must be the ideal spot for a gliding club; there seemed to be very few windless days. A German gentleman, Max Wenner, was a leading light in this gliding idea there. He fell – or was he pushed? – out of a plane over the Channel. He was staying in a pub in Minsterly. Somehow Father was in on the search of his rooms. I remember seeing a gun in the shape and size of a fountain pen that fired a three-sided bullet.”

This is, my research has shown, is very much a mixture of vagueness and error – mostly the latter.

The man in question was an Englishman of Swiss extraction (not German) and very anti-gliding, which he felt disturbed the grouse on the Long Mynd moor shoot. He was co-owner of that shoot, which explains why the author’s father, one of the shoot’s gamekeepers, was present when the rooms were searched (or perhaps just cleared). Though mention of him having rooms at a pub is curious as Wenner lived fairly locally. And finally, his death was on the other side of the Channel and not above it.

Mr Max Victor Wenner was of Swiss descent from a family of wealthy textile manufacturers who had settled in England during the 19th century. Born around 1888, he was the son of Alfred Wenner and his wife Malvine (nee Egloff). Alfred had initially been married to Louise Egloff. They had three children together before she died aged just 25. He subsequently wed her older sister, having six more children.

Albert’s family wealth came from the textile industry and that is no doubt what drew him to the cotton capital of Manchester. He had premises in the city at Greenwood Street and seems to have diversified his business interests, and articles can be found where he is selling drilling machines and “an invention of improvements in fire bars and grates.”

The family lived in Earnscliffe Villa, a large house in Alderley Edge, Cheshire.

Albert died in 1911 at around 56 years of age. The following year, Max Wenner gives his address as Woodside, Trafford Road, Alderley Edge, though I don’t know if this is solely his home, or the whole family relocated following the patriarch’s death.

Malvine died in 1925 aged 77 by which time, or following which, Max had moved to Garthmeilio Hall, Langwm, Conwy, North Wales.

Max was keen on the outdoors, particularly birds and more generally shooting and fishing.

He was elected to the British Ornithologists Union in 1912 and appears in their publication “Ibis” and  a number of other periodicals. For example a 1926 issue of The Field quotes him talking about stoats’ interest in the guts from rabbits he’d shot and there are a number of articles on birds carrying his name, including one from December 1933 on “Vipers Preying on Young Birds” – including photographs.

His brother Captain Alfred Emil Wenner was a British Army officer and the pair were photographed earlier that year on 14th July, by the River Thvera in Iceland, after they had caught 55 Salmon by lunchtime, with another 22 landed afterwards.

Much of this family biographical information comes from the WebPages of the State Archive of St Gallen in Switzerland, which also includes photographs of Earnscliffe Villa,  Garthmeilio Hall and of Max and his wife. In one, which I think might be at Garthmeilio Hall judging by the balustrade in the background, he looks very much the countryman. Wearing a heavy jacket, plus-fours, thick socks and stout shoes, he stands before the camera with a hawk perched on his left hand.

By 1934 Max was living at Batchcott Hall. when he bought the manor of Church Stretton, to the east of Long Mynd moor. Manor here seems to be in the sense of a tract of land, rather than a manor house. He was one of three owners of Long Mynd, and it might be assumed that this ownership came with the manor. Batchcott is a hamlet to the north of the moor.

He owned 6,000 acres in all and spent a large sum improving the hall and building a bird sanctuary and lakes for trout fishing.

He’s also said to have put a lot of effort into developing shooting on the moor and so when gliding started there in the summer of 1934 he did not approve. Though It’s not clear whether that was due to thinking that the gliders themselves disturbed the birds, or because of the hoi-polloi, who came to watch the engineless planes, tramping across the land (it does seem to have been a spectator sport). Legal action followed, presumably initiated by Wenner and partners, with a four-day hearing closing on 15th March 1935 with Justice Crossman “effectively” banning flying gliders from Long Mynd, as it “interferes with grouse shooting”.

Wenner is described as “devoted” to his wife, Martha Alice Spinner, known as “Dollie”. She was about eight years his senior and aged around 58 passed away in July 1936.

He was in the habit of flying to Germany and Switzerland for winter sports.

On one of those winter sports trips in Switzerland, he befriended the 34 year-old Olga Buchenshultz. She was secretary to the Swedish Consul-General at the German town of Duren.

The friendship developed and they became engaged to be married in the second half of 1936.

Olga apparently had doubts whether a German woman should marry an Englishman, perhaps because of the European political situation, or was this to do with the 15 year age gap – probably not as that was not unusual at the time, I would suspect his recent bereavement.

Whatever the case during Wenner’s visit to Olga in Kupferdreh, a district in the south east of the German city of Essen on December 30 she promised to marry him. Wenner’s brothers and sisters it seems were aware and agreeable to this engagement.

On Monday 4th January 1937 Wenner started the journey back to England taking a Belgian airliner from Cologne to Brussels.  Fellow passengers described him as seeming agitated and spending 20 minutes writing a single letter of many pages, which he put in his pocket and then left the compartment going to the rear of the plane.

The aircraft was flying at 3,000 above unbroken cloud over Limburg, when the other passengers heard a bang and felt the plane lurch. This was ascribed to the plane’s rear door slamming shut and they seem to have guessed what the reason for that was and a nurse was who was onboard fainted.

The man’s body was tragically found four days later on 8^Th January, in a forest outside Genk, Belgium. It was apparently unblemished apart from “a scratched nose and buttons torn from his coat, there was no visible sign of injury”, apparently due to the trees slowing his fall. An unfinished letter to Olga was found in his pocket.

Belgian officials called his death a “mysterious accident” and it seems one of his brothers looked into matters speaking to Fraulein Buchenschultz.

Other passengers flew on in another plane to Croydon (Britain’s major international airport at the time) where they spoke to the press and the story was reported in newspapers as far away as Singapore and Australia.

Shortly before his death Max had made a will. This was perhaps sensible given his wife’s passing. I’m assuming here that she was a significant, if not his sole beneficiary. However, in light of his curious demise, one might view this differently, particularly as he left Olga Buchenshultz, £2,000 “in case anything should happen to me before our marriage.”

The will was proved in May 1937 and he left a large part of his estate, including Church Stretton manor and his share if the grouse moor to his friend and former agent William Humphrey, a renowned breeder of English Setters.

According to one reference I came across Max Wenner is said to have been ‘well connected in the highest political circles, both in England and Germany” and so it has been supposed that his unusual death had a “connection with espionage”. But I have found no prime source for this speculation.

As a true-life story, it does have the ring of an Agatha Christie novel.

Returning to the origins of my research, the mention of a fountain pen that fired bullets does make us in these times think of James Bond, but back in an era when the sword-stick was not uncommon, pen-guns were not necessarily the preserve of spies and spooks and this was a man who would have been au fait with many firearms.

The mention of Wenner having rooms in a pub at Minsterley is curious though, as it is not far from his home (about 32 miles by road) but is perhaps a mistake by an unreliable source.

All in all, it is an intriguing, but tragic tale.

There is a follow up piece to this post.

 

SOURCES

 

http://www.ukairfieldguide.net/airfields/Church-Stretton

http://www.ukairfieldguide.net/airfields/Long-Mynd

https://m.facebook.com/graysgundogs/posts/1797086413838175

https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/salop/vol10/pp72-120

https://www.churchstretton.co.uk/

http://mvsetters.com/MrHumphrey.html

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Mynd

https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/auk/v051n02/p0271-p0278.pdf

https://www.lax-a.net/good-old-times-in-iceland/

https://www.pestsmart.org.au/behaviour-of-stoats/

http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/singfreepressb19370204.2.87

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/58778222

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/47776628

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11954611

http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/straitstimes19370106-1.2.41

https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/34404/page/3617/data.pdf

http://scope.staatsarchiv.sg.ch/detail.aspx?ID=114333

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/results/1937-01-01/1937-12-31?basicsearch=max%20wenner%201937&exactsearch=false&retrievecountrycounts=false

https://prabook.com/web/michael.wenner/564292

http://scope.staatsarchiv.sg.ch/Detail.aspx?ID=114334

https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=444746.0

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1474-919X.1914.tb06642.x

https://archive.org/stream/britishbirds2319unse/britishbirds2319unse_djvu.txt

https://archive.org/stream/ibis_21914brit/ibis_21914brit_djvu.txt

https://archive.org/stream/britishbirds2219unse/britishbirds2219unse_djvu.txt

http://scope.staatsarchiv.sg.ch/Detail.aspx?ID=114211

http://scope.staatsarchiv.sg.ch/detail.aspx?ID=114197

https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/24001/page/3514/data.pdf

https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/articles/tm4_mach19.pdf

A Prince Amongst Poachers – Bill Tuer

A Prince Amongst Poachers – Bill Tuer – C C Publishing (Chester) 2004

Despite wracking my brains I have been unable to think of a book that I have read which I found such hard going. Not because it was heavy, or traumatic, or anything; after all I have read some quite turgid “classics” and some exceedingly dry educational texts. No this was hard going because it was all over the place.

Starting with the title. You would expect, not unreasonably, that it would be full of tales about clandestine hunting, getting one over on the rural powers that be and narrow escapes, but there is scarcely any poaching in it. There is a little bit of trout tickling and some stealing of breeding pheasants from a rival estate, but mostly the book describes the activities of a gamekeeper’s son centred around raising birds for the wealthy to slaughter for fun, which is pretty much the opposite of poaching. Still I suppose Prince of Poachers has a more poetic and better alliterative ring to it than Toady to the Toffs.

If I’m being unfair and the author was an ace poacher who chose not to write about his less than legal activities, then fair enough, but if that is the case – then call your book something else!!

The opening chapter talks about the shit-house at the end of the garden and the Romans building Stonehenge. Having read it three times I was still none the wiser as to what the author was trying to say. My best guess is that he was trying to indicate that he learned more from listening and watching his old dad than anywhere else. But that doesn’t actually seem to be borne out by the book, where he talks mostly about learning from the village blacksmith. Whatever the case, the opening chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book which is beset by non-sequiturs, pet phrases and part stories. An example of the latter is where he talks about his father making a driptorch to burn heather. He doesn’t say why, and I assume that the heather regrowth was either food or better cover for the grouse. He then says he “put one together in a hurry to remove some gentleman who had been causing some trouble in a cornfield in Belgium.” This was presumably a wartime event, but we are left to wonder why it was necessary to burn down a cornfield.

The book’s digressions and conversational style made me initially think it was a book made from transcripts of recorded conversations.  But I’m not sure it is, even though the thirty-seven (!) short chapters do come across as a collection of anecdotes.

About two thirds of the way through it shifts away from the land to WW2. This is certainly the best written section if the book, which isn’t saying much, and more interesting because it is slightly more factual.

It is not a book entirely without merit, I laughed out loud at the tale of dropping a live chicken down the school mistress’s chimney, and was genuinely moved by the sad tale of how, aged 10, young “Billy- Lad” had to put down his lifelong pet dog. And though it was of no interest to me, royal biographers would doubtless get over-excited at the involvement of a twenty-something Edward VIII in pinching the pheasants.

There are a couple of interesting people mentioned in the text who I was not previously aware of. Firstly, the uniquely named Dr Buck Ruckston, a murderer who the author claims to have caught after serving him with petrol. This doesn’t tally with the reported facts of the case , but the court record does refer to petrol being purchased.

The second person is really fascinating, despite, or perhaps because of, only being mentioned in six short lines. It really is a shame there isn’t more on him. Max Wenner is described as a German who fell, or was pushed, out of a plane over the Channel and owned of a gun the shape and size of a fountain pen. Quite how you can touch on such an interesting individual and not elaborate I don’t know. But then perhaps the author did not know more.

The author comes across as an inventive and practical man, and perhaps an amusing raconteur, but alas that does not translate into making this book a very engaging or amusing read. This is a great shame, as with a co-writer, I don’t doubt a half-decent memoire of the early 20^th century English countryside could have been created.

The Worst Journey in the World – plus Penguins

On the way home, the Friday before last I was listening to a download of this BBC programme about Penguins, which included the Antarctic, which is not particularly surprising since it’s the part of the globe we most associate with penguins.

As with all episodes of BBC Radio 4’s Natural Histories, it was engaging and educational. I was unaware that penguins were regarded as key food source by mariners, so much so that they very nearly went the way of the Great Auk and the Dodo. Nor did I know that Penguin Books might have been named after any one of a number of creatures including Phoenix, Dolphin, Kiwi, Camel and Woodpecker.

The programme also referenced Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s book The Worst Journey in the World which describes an Antarctic expedition to collect penguin eggs in the hope that the link between birds and reptiles could be found in these avian embryos.

This book was coincidentally the 100th title that Penguin published.

Later on the journey I switched to radio which was already broadcasting a programme which I later found out was a 2002 edition of Off The Page, in which writers Jenny Diski and Francis Spufford, joined host Chris Bigsby to talk about solitude versus loneliness.

At the point where I tuned in it was talking about staying at nunneries. Not something that grabbed my interest and I almost turned it off, but out of laziness more than anything, did not do so.

But soon the programme shifted into a different direction and was soon talking about the Antarctic -if I had been listening a to the show from the beginning I would have expected this as both authors had written about the continent.

And so, it was not surprising that Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s book was again discussed.

But something of an odd coincidence that downloaded and live programmes should have something in common, when one was chosen and the other tuned into at random.

A portent that I should read that book no doubt.