Rudyard Kipling, centre, with an unidentified group at United Services College about 1880 (source: Kipling family photographs, Bateman’s, East Sussex: National Trust Collections NT 761434.19)
In January 1892 the writer Rudyard Kipling, then aged 25, wrote an exuberant letter to his uncle following his return from a trip to New Zealand:
Read MoreI took this panorama (click to enlarge) in April this year some 500 metres south-east of Guillemont in France, looking south-west in the direction of Albert. It shows, to the left, Leuze Wood beneath the rising sun, and to the right Trones Wood beneath the moon, separated by a distance of about four kilometres. This is one of the most attractive parts of the 1916 Somme battlefield, with beautiful woods, wide expanses of fields and a valley dropping just off to the left, and was utterly tranquil that morning. Yet during August 1916 …
Read MoreThis oil on canvas (55.3 by 86.4 cm) by Thomas Luny sold in Bonham's Marine Sale on 14 September 2004 for £33,460, captioned 'A First Rater, believed to be Nelson's flagship H.M.S. 'Victory' at anchor in Tor Bay, saluting the arrival of the frigate H.M.S. 'Anson' signed 'Luny' and dated 1807 (lower left).' Thomas Luny (British, 1759-1837), born in Cornwall, was a prolific marine artist who was commissioned by the East India Company among others to paint ships and from 1807 was based in Teignmouth in Devon …
Read MoreI created this image by blending two photos, one taken during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and the other by me on the battlefield in 2018. While researching the Imperial War Museum collections I had been struck by the 1916 photo, which seemed to encapsulate much about the battle, and war in general – the bleak vista, the almost casual litter of death, and – looking at it from an archaeologist’s perspective - how much of that could still lie just under the surface, buried in filled-in trenches such as this one …
Read MoreCharles Gerald Cook – Gerald to his family – was born on 28 November 1880 in Billingsley, Shropshire, the son of a coal miner. His parents ran the sub-post office in Billingsley, and at the age of 14 he started work as an Auxiliary Postman. His elder brother John, my mother’s grandfather, was in the Shropshire Rifle Volunteers and fought in the Boer War, but Gerald was only 18 in 1899 and would probably have been considered too young to go …
Read MoreMy historical novel The Sword of Attila prompted thoughts about the similarity of modern ‘Blitzkrieg’ tactics to those of the Hun army of Attila in the 5th century AD. For more on the novel, go to my books page here.
Read MoreIn my novel INQUISITION, Jack and Costas make an astonishing discovery on the wreck of the Schiedam off Cornwall in England. The Schiedam is a real wreck - one of the most fascinating I’ve ever dived on, with a cargo of guns and other objects being brought back from the failed English colony of Tangier in North Africa in 1684. For many years the wreck had been buried in sand …
Read MoreMayflower II, built in 1955-6 and currently under restoration in Mystic, Connecticut, prior to its planned return to Plymouth in time for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the original Mayflower in 1620. The Fortune, which brought Thomas Prence and 33 other settlers to Plymouth Colony in the following year, was only one-third the size of this ship.
This pedigree chart was published in a 1942 book entitled Personal Religion by Douglas Clyde Macintosh, a Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religion at Yale University who used his own family history in England and colonial America to illustrate the association between non-conformism and what he termed ‘personal religion’. He was the grandson of Cotton Mather Everett, at the bottom of the chart, a ship’s physician with the East India Company who settled in 1832 in Canada ...
Read More
My most recent novel, TESTAMENT, contains five chapters of historical fiction – a prologue set at the time of the Phoenicians in the 6th century BC, two chapters set during the British Abyssinia campaign of 1868-9 and another two chapters at Bletchley Park in 1943. That emphasis on historical fiction continues the pattern of my eight previous Jack Howard novels, all present-day thrillers but with settings ranging from the earliest seafaring in the Neolithic to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the final days of the Nazis at the end of the Second World War.
Read MoreThis 'thing of beauty born in suffering' was devised by my great-great uncle Lieutenant Norman Gibbins of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in 1917. He had been severely wounded by a shell near Loos in June 1916, and after a year spent recuperating was back in France in July 1917. He would appear to have created this chess problem while recovering from a fall from a horse. Fortunately, he was evacuated sick to England shortly before the start of the Third Battle of Ypres, in which his battalion was virtually annihilated ...
Read More
Click on the image below to read a piece I've written for the National Trust's Natural Lizard blog, devoted to the natural history and history of the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, England. My blog is about the influence of my shipwreck discoveries in these waters on my novels, and the fine line between reality and imagination in creating archaeological fiction.
Read More
A plan dated 1 December 1802 showing the framing disposition of 72 vessels of the Cruizer class lauched between 1803 and 1809, including HMS Primrose (National Maritime Museum ZAZ 4140).
Last July I dived with a team from Atlantic Scuba on the wreck of HMS Primrose, a Royal Navy sloop that struck the Manacles rocks east of Falmouth during a winter gale in 1809. Of some 126 crew and passengers aboard, only one person survived. The wreck has been extensively salvaged by divers, and today only a few artefacts are visible among rocky fissures and gullies at about 12 to 15 metres depth, under dense growths of kelp. Our dives were carried out in conjunction with an evaluation ...
Read More
In late May this year I visited the Great War battlefields of northern France on the trail of my grandfather Tom Verrinder, who served with his brother Edgar in the 9th Lancers on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918. I began my visit where my grandfather had his 'initiation into warfare', as he termed it, on the Somme battlefields of 1916. On the first day of the battle, on 1 July, his regiment had been poised with the rest of the cavalry to follow the infantry through the German lines, but when the breakthrough never happened the cavalry were dismounted and used for battlefield clearance - to find wounded men and to bring together and bury the bodies of the fallen ...
Read More
My brother Alan and I had the exciting experience last autumn of diving in the St Lawrence River on a submerged canal lock dating from the 19th century …
Read MoreOne of my most memorable recent dives was last October in only a few metres of water at the head of Deadman Bay, near Kingston at the eastern extremity of Lake Ontario in Canada …
Read MoreThis blog contains a summary of the ancestry of Rebecca Brandon, also known as Rebecca de Daniel Brandon and Rebecca Rodrigues Brandão, who was born in London in 1783 and died at Purnea near the Himalayan foothills in India in 1820. Rebecca was a Sephardic Jew from a family of merchants who had fled the Inquisition in Portugal in the mid-18th century. She was my four-times great grandmother, the wife of Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel) John Littledale Gale of the East India Company’s Bengal Army ...
Read More
From Devil's Kitchen towards Castell y Geifr
I took these photos during several climbing trips up the Glyders in north Wales in early January 2016. Except for the last two, taken from Y Foel Goch westwards, all of these were taken on the route past Llyn Idwal up Devil's Kitchen on the way to Glyder Fawr. Click to enlarge.
Read More
Click on the link below to read a blog I wrote for one of my publisher's sites on my favourite scene in the film Master and Commander.
Read More
My account a few postings back of the military career of Captain Thomas Edward Gordon, 14th Light Dragoons (my great-great-great grandfather), has led me to look at the careers of two of his wife’s uncles, one an officer in the East India Company Army and the other in the British cavalry. Together the careers of these three men cover most of the big wars of the earlier part of Victoria's reign– the first Anglo-Sikh War of 1845-6 and the second of 1848-9, the Crimean War of 1854-6 and the Indian Mutiny of 1857-9. They encompass some of the most glorified moments of war in the Victorian age, epitomised in Crimea by the 'Thin Red Line' of the 93rd Highlanders and the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava ...
Read More
I had to take my daughter to Wiltshire yesterday and had a few hours at Avebury, probably the most impressive prehistoric site in Britain - indeed anywhere in the world. It was a windswept, overcast afternoon, good for black and white photography. Several of the stones you see here had fallen and have been re-erected, but some have stood since they were first raised almost five thousand years ago.
Read More
