FROM John Anderson
j.c.anderson@mail.com
John Cooper
I have to report the sad news that John Cooper
passed away recently in San Antonio Texas. We send our condolences
to his wife Dorothy and their two sons.
Those of you who were at the Cap Cod Gathering in 2005 will remember
him putting on a performance of Vinland the Good. It featured
Laura Schneider, complete with tiara as Princess Thorgunna, Fred
Erisman as Leif Ericson and an enthusiastic Phil Nixon as Tryker,
together with members of the Cape Cod chapter.
John himself doubled as the narrator - Nevil Shute. It made up with
gusto anything it may have lacked in performance, rehearsal time
having been very limited.
John and Dorothy came to the York Conference in 2009 and, as ever,
took part enthusiastically. Unfortunately poor health precluded
travel to the UK for the Oxford Conference this year.
John was a naval man and researched the "Barlow" destroyers in
Ruined City (Kindling) and worked up the seven references in the
book to a kind of Greek chorus!
John was a very nice man, a real character, an
enthusiastic Shutist, always keen to learn and participate in
whatever was going on.
There are several reviews of Parallel Motion on
the Amazon website, of which his, under the pseudonym
"incorrigible", gave it 5 stars.
He will be sadly missed by family and friends,
FROM Julian Stargardt
stargardt.friends@gmail.com
Reading John Anderson's notes on the King's
Flight / Queen's Flight / In the Wet I felt drawn to see what links
and information I could find on-line, so here we go.
Photo of the Royal Envoy:
Photo of Royal Envoy in official use for visit
to RAF base:
http://www.afleetingpeace.org/index.php/gallery/gallery/g-a/g-aexx-airspeed-envoy-3709#joomimg
http://www.airteamimages.com/airspeed-envoy_G-AEXX_the-king27s-flight_193683.html
http://www.axis-and-allies-paintworks.com/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?2462
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-941d-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Not an Envoy, but closely related, an Oxford on
display at Duxford....
Duxford
Anyone who has not visited Duxford yet, should go there.... I spent many happy hours there as a school boy in the 1970s helping to restore old aircraft and often at the weekends enthusiasts would fly there war birds in or if they kept them there fly off and conduct mock dog flights.... when the Phantom was retired from the RAFit did a farewell fly-by and aerial show at Duxford. That day the perimeter was packed. With low cloud cover we could hear but not see it until it came down and streaked along the airfield from one end to the other seemingly going vertical at the M-11 end, I have no idea how low it was but it seemed to be about 50-100 feet above the runway and the thrilling booming sound of the jet could be felt rather than heard.... and set off all the car alarms in the car park..... speaking of Duxford and the M-11.... building the M-11 caused controversy, one of the reasons was it truncated the Duxford runway.... this was an issue for Concorde when the prototype was flown into Duxford for display, now that was a fascinating landing to watch.... the proto-type Concorde is slightly smaller than the production models and as it couldn't take off from Duxford's truncated runway, sadly it engines were eventually removed.....
FROM Barry Biglow
babiglow@shaw.ca
The CBC in Canada had a program on the R100
which maybe of interest . The reference is :
cbc.ca/rewind. Program
date November 5, 2015
Not much about Shute but does mention the R100
trip to Canada and Burney
Editor: Search for R100 (no spacing)
FROM Charles D
dalsecl@prtel.com
Quest Aircraft, a relatively new manufacturer
of “Bush Planes”, in Sandpoint, Idaho
http://questaircraft.com/capabilities/float-plane/
FROM Paul Spoff
paulspoff6@aol.com
Air Show – A Little Scary
I wonder if this FAA Sanctioned?? This is
the wildest Air Show I have ever seen!!
A most excellent show. You
will enjoy this.
Missouri Redneck Air Show!
MUST BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED.............
This is an Air Show in Cameron, a small rural
town in Missouri.
The pilots, bike and truck drivers (and the
photographers) are all nuts!!!
This doesn't border on crazy, it IS crazy! Hold
on to your desk, chair,
whatever! Best viewed full screen with volume
UP!.
Click below:
FROM John Gallimore
gallimore.john@wanadoo.fr
I hope I am not 'bursting your bubble'.. but
the film 'Lonely Road' is available..
I have a copy in front of me...
Lonely Road, together with 3 other films is
available on Volume 14 of the Ealing Studios 'rarities' collection.
Here is the link:
However... don't get your hopes up..
Frankly the only thing that justifies this film
being kept in the vaults, is the film itself.
I will give no spoilers..but lets just say that
the last 1/3 rd of the book is cut... yes cut right out...
This, Marazan, and So Distained are for me the
best NSN books of his 'John Buchan' era.
I find the films made from NSN novels very
variable From very good..'A town like Alice Australian TV mini
series..via the ok..Far country..or no Highway..(where rule 1 was to
find the physical opposite of the principal characters.. to the
abysmal..( the one no one talks about).
Hope this helps..
Keep shuting straight.
FROM Mary Andrews
muandrews@msn.com
Shute books are available from a delightful
shop called BEYOND THE SEA in Lincolnville beach, maine, usa.
the owner seeks them out and has a good supply of nearly all the
titles. you may contact at
info@Beyond The
SeaMaine.com or find on
facebook.com/beyond
the sea or call at 207-789-5555
FROM Robert Price
robandkate@me.com
You publish occasional reading suggestions from
readers, and I have long had an interest in Shute-like novels with
technical content. You opined at a lack of newsletter input in the
November issue so I am including a list of those I believe might be
enjoyed by Shute readers.
I consider these 'Science and Engineering in
Fiction' titles to be great reads, mostly novels, containing
engineering or technically skilled characters, technical content of
reasonable accuracy, adventure, flying, sailing, problem solving,
Lab Lit, time travel backward and forward, etc. Some Science
Fiction, but no Fantasy. See Amazon, Google or Wiki for descriptions
and other works by authors.
Some of the titles are from a 21 Jan 2010 MGPL
Webrary Nuts and Bolts Novels of Engineers and
Engineering, by Sarah Flowers, Morgan Hill, CA library, who
requested credit: “Compiled by the subscribers of the Fiction_L
mailing list.” Some are from a list compiled by John Varley in the
Author’s Note in Millennium. Some more are from IEEE
Spectrum, Hans' antenna blog http://www.aetherczar.com/?p=1829
Still more are from a list by Donald Lehr, architect, and yet others
have been unearthed by this list author, Rob Price.
Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room.
John Ball, Miss One Thousand Spring
Blossoms.
Pierre Boulle, Bridge On / Over the
River Kwai, filmed.
Ray Bradbury, A Sound of Thunder.
Robert Byrne, Thrill, Mannequin, Skyscraper, The
Dam, The Tunnel.
Willa Cather, Alexander’s Bridge,
Google download.
Clare Clark, The Great Stink.
Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of
Paradise, All the Time in the World.
Michael Crichton, Andromeda Strain, Timeline.
L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness
Fall, The Bronze God of Rhodes and An
Elephant for Aristotle, and a non-fiction history of
engineering, The Ancient Engineers.
A. Den Doolaard, Roll Back the Sea,
English translation from Dutch.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, story, The
Engineers Thumb.
James Fleming, Thomas Gage.
Eric Flint, et al, 1632 series
and many offshoots.
Michael Flynn, a series, Firestar, Rogue
Star, Lodestar and Falling Stars.
Also The Wreck of the River of Stars uses same
technology.
Ken Follett, trilogy Pillars of the
Earth, World Without End, 3rd available
2017.
Dick Francis, Decider.
Leo Frankowski, Copernick’s
Rebellion, and the seven Conrad Stargard series.
Ernest K. Gann, Island in the Sky and
many others, some filmed.
Max Frisch, Homo Faber, filmed
as Voyager.
Dewey Gram, The Ghost and the
Darkness, novel based on film.
Zane Grey, The U.P. Trail,
Google download.
Robert Harris, Enigma.
John Hersey, A Single Pebble.
Stefan Jaeger, The Jackhammer
Elegies.
Rob Johnson, editor, Short Lines,
collection of classic railroad stories, many by famous writers in
general, including O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Frank Norris, Jack
London, Christopher Morley and Rudyard Kipling.
Bob Judd, The Race, Formula
1, Burn, Spin, etc, under other
names overseas.
Francis Lynde, The Fire Bringers,
and Empire Builders, Google downloads.
Malcolm MacDonald, The World From
Rough Stones and The Silver Highways.
Thomas A. McMahon, Loving Little
Egypt.
Bob Mahoney, Damned to Heaven.
John P. Marquand, Sincerely, Willis
Wayde.
James Michener, The Source and Space.
Larry Niven, Ringworld and
sequel The Ringworld Engineers.
H. Beam Piper, Space Viking and Lord
Kalvan of Otherwhen, final installment in Paratime stories.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead,
filmed, and Atlas Shrugged.
Harold Robbins, The Carpetbaggers.
Nevil Shute (Norway), No Highway, Beyond
the Black Stump, A Town Like Alice, Trustee
From the Toolroom plus non-fiction autobiography, Slide
Rule. Several filmed.
Martin Cruz Smith, Rose and The
Indians Won.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the
Plains, non-fiction story, Google download.
Elleston Trevor, The Flight of the
Phoenix, filmed.
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur's Court.
John Varley, Millennium.
Jules Verne, From The Earth to the
Moon and Round the Moon. Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, annotated translation by Walter
James Miller in 1976 explains terrible inaccuracies, problems and
omissions in the English standard Louis Mercier aka Mercier Lewis
translation.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle and
story, Report on the Barnhouse Effect.
Carey Wallace, The Blind Contessa's
New Machine.
Samuel Merwin & Henry Kitchell Webster, Calumet
K and The Short Line War.
Andy Weir, The Martian.
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells, The
Time Machine, multiply filmed.
Martin Woodhouse and Robert Ross, Leonardo Da
Vinci series, The Medici Guns, The
Medici Hawks, The Medici Emerald.
Martin Woodhouse, Giles Yeoman series, Tree
Frog, Bush Baby, Mama Doll, Blue
Bone, Moon Hill.
Harold Bell Wright, The Winning of
Barbara Worth, Google download.
Thank you and good reading to all!
FROM Nick Shaporal
nickshapowal@aol.com
May I ask please that you publish in the
Newsletter my proposal to form a Shute reading and discussion group
in Northern Britain? Said reading group to meet at mutually
agreeable location/locations from, say, the Scottish central belt,
to Northern England, including possibly the ferry towns for Northern
Ireland, wherever most attendees may find most convenient.
Email interest to myself at nickshapowal@aol.com please?
FROM Sally Chetwynd
brasscastlearts@gmail.com
I appreciate the explanation of King's
Flight-Queen's Flight by John Anderson in this Nov 2015 newsletter.
What a feather in Shute's engineering cap to have acquired the
contract for the King's "Airforce One!"
I have been reading Shute for 45 years and have
been most fortunate to have acquired hardcover copies of all his
titles. As far as my favorite Shute books, three or four of them
take turns as my favorite at any given time. These are
An Old Captivity, Requiem for a Wren,
A Town Like Alice, and The Far Country.
I enjoy all of his titles with the exception of On The
Beach, which creeps me out, with good reason. That was his
intent, and he communicated that warning well.
I gave a copy of ATLA to a fellow employee recently; we may have a new member soon, if she enjoys Shute as much as the rest of us.
FROM Richard Wynn
umfundisi1@btinternet.com
Some thoughts on Nevil Shute’s portrayal of
characters.
Shute, like any artist, paints superb pictures
with his stories. But all pictures have principal subjects, and
there are people in the pictures who, though important to the story,
play a lesser role. We’re all acquainted with Jean Paget, Tom
Cutter, Theodore Honey, Carl Zlinter, and so on. But what about
those whose names only appear briefly in Shute’s books? What
about Annie McConchie, the Coombargana cook in ‘Requiem for a Wren’?
Without her wisdom and advice to Alan, things couldn’t really
have moved ahead as well as they did. I think of Madé Jasmi in
‘Round the Bend’, F/Lt.Pat Johnson and Flight Officer Stevens in
‘Pastoral’, Dick King in ‘Trustee from the Toolroom’, Tim Archer in
‘The Far Country’ and Dr.Mitchison in ‘In the Wet’. All of
these had a part to play, be it ever so small, but Shute
paints them in to the picture anyway.
I’m sure many will add exhaustively to the above list - what about contributing your special character and we’ll see what others think.
FROM Ralph
Nickerson
nickerson_botswana@yahoo.co.uk
Editor:
Respons to Larry Dittmer
Regarding your comments on NS in a recent
Newsletter, just downloaded - very well put, if I may say so.
I've read and re-read Shute for close to 60
years now, and the periods between readings are probably getting
shorter! Like yourself, I think, having just finished a novel(*)
by this remarkable writer I seem to feel better about myself, my
neighbours and the whole blasted human race, for about 3 days.
How does he do it?
I've enjoyed many, many authors - male, female,
contemporary, 19th. century and earlier, of many genres - since I
was a kid, but have never felt moved to join an appreciation society
till I heard of this NS gathering. It is good to feel that
others, at least English speakers from the last century, share one's
upliftment and pleasure.
Vive le Shute!
(*) Not that all are quite as good as the best, to my mind. "Ruined City", despite some typically good stuff, involved an imaginary European country, which was not to my taste. But "Trustee" and "Pied Piper" and "Far Country"? Wonderful!
FROM Gadepalli Subrahmanyam
gsmani174@gmail.com
Larry Dittmer's opinion is well founded: we do
not need to promote Nevil Shute Novels - they create a fan
themselves. When I gave 'A Town Like Alice' to a new reader, he
asked for more, and then I gave him 'Pied Piper' in order not to
overdo things I am waiting for some time, before I give him my next
couple 'No High Way'and ''Ruined City'. With these, I am sure, I
will be able to add another fan to the eternal Shutist club.
P.S:My collection of Nevil Shute paper backs, mostly in Pan editions have become dog eared due to frequesnt use. I would like to acquire fresh set for posterty. Can any readers suggest a way ?
FROM Simon Allen
sca@Heysford.co.uk
I would guess that the link I'm about to past
has been viewed and commented on before but:
Wiki: British Royal Family Aircraft has a good summary of
the various machines over the years.
I attach a photograph taken at Croydon Aerodrome in (probably) the mid 1930s. Standing in front of the Envoy are my paternal grandmother, my father (tall in the centre) and my uncle. The photograph would have been taken by my grandfather who was a pilot in the First War and sold aircraft (as well as motorcars and motorbikes) and many dealings in civil aviation between the wars.
FROM Tony Woodward
awoodward03@rogers.com
Only today I noticed that Lonely Road is
available from
Moviemail.com in the Ealing Studios Rarities Collection: Volume
14
packaged with The Water Gipsies, The Sign of
Four and Feather Your Nest. Yeah right, but the entire package of 4
films is available at £6.66 and I have just ordered it.
I look forward to hearing from other members about this movie...
FROM Adrian Featherstone
adrianfeatherstone@gmail.com
What
Happened to the Corbetts – a postscript
“It Might Happen”
was the title of an article in “Flight” magazine of 6 April 1939.
Written by the late Sir Francis Chichester, he said that his
thoughts were inspired by just having read “What Happened to the
Corbetts”. Although he takes slight issue with one detail (the
technology of the sextant described for navigation by the enemy
bombers in “the Corbetts”), Mr Chichester emphasises his agreement
that bombers could be – and will be – navigated by sextant
observations to their target. He says in the article that he really
wished the book could be issued to every family in the land; he is
sure that everyone would start taking practical precautions once
they read of the potential horrors to come.
Mr Chichester wrote
a further article in “Flight” magazine, serialised in 4 parts in
August / September 1939, under the title “Bombing by Celestial
Navigation”, describing in detail a methodology for accurate
celestial navigation to a far-away destination.
Sir Francis
Chichester was not only a single-handed round-the-world yachtsman
(1967) but before that a pioneering aviator. He flew his own
aircraft from England to Australia in December 1930 / January 1931.
Later, he was the
first to fly solo from New Zealand to Australia across the Tasman
Sea. As his seaplane could not carry enough fuel for the whole
journey, he undertook it in three legs, stopping at Norfolk Island
and Lord Howe Island. It was a remarkable feat of navigation
to find these small islands (less than 10 miles across) in the
expanse of ocean, and he developed his own technique for navigating
to them by sextant. His aircraft was wrecked in a storm while moored
at one of the islands and he repaired it himself with the help of
the islanders.
References : “Flight” magazine from 1909-2005 is archived on-line, digitally scanned and searchable. “The Lonely Sea and the Sky” by Sir Francis Chichester, pub. 1964.
FROM Richard Michalak
richardmichalak@icloud.com
I have made a 3d model of R-100 which you can
see online at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb1n20_5RoQ
I made it because I am teaching myself 3D
modelling and it seemed like a good idea to make something that
nobody can visit for real any more.
It was a lot of work but was very rewarding and
I learnt a lot and I have no doubt the idea would have appealed to
Nevil Shute given his own interest in model making.
In the course of making it I came across a film
of its making:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGaMhJOthw4
In the interior scenes of the film everyone
smokes like a chimney so the shots were certainly done before the
gas bags were filled because, unlike R-101, R-100 was a strictly
non-smoking ship. (R-101 had a special smoking room)
Sadly its a a very low res copy.
For the greater good and the Shute Foundation archives, I have saved a copy of the film to my computer should it disappear from youtube as it's watermarked by a video licensing company who might take it down.
FROM Richard Thorn
thornduo@meic.com
I am trying to find a copy of Wings, the
Newsletter of the Literary Guild of America which was published in
March 1940. In this particular issue there is an article written by
Nevil Shute on the background to his novel An Old Captivity.
I would welcome an electronic scan of this article, and would of course pay any costs involved.
Wow, lost of copy this month. Keep that up please.
From the Netherlands, where the weather is fine, Happy Holidays and a good
start into 2016.
See you all next month.
