An e-mail

04.01.20

Yesterday evening we watched episode 6 of The Crown.

Our friend John Jones has sent an e-mail responding to posts featuring “A Moment Of War” and Thelwell Ponies:

‘I read “A Moment of War” a few years back and while I remembered the illustrations, the cover was unfamiliar. On checking I found that my copy is the edition published in Penguin Books in 1992 and that the cover does use a different illustration, by Roger Coleman, but inside the illustrations are the same as your Viking copy and happily Penguin name Keith Bowen as the illustrator. He has produced a lot of work portraying Snowdonia, which was my father’s home, and the shepherds of that area. Another interesting association for me is that in the spring of 1937 Southampton was the port of entry to the UK for some 4,000 Basque child refugees (Los Niños) who were evacuated after the bombing of Guernica. Their arrival from Bilbao on SS Habana is commemorated by a plaque on the Civic Centre.

I enjoyed seeing the Thelwell cartoon too. Anyone who can draw well and be humorous at the same time is exceptionally talented. By chance the Friends of Southampton’s Museums, Archives and Galleries (which Margery helped to set up in 1976) will be having a talk on Norman Thelwell later this month. The speaker is Tim Craven, a former Curator of Southampton Art Gallery. No doubt we will hear a great deal about “small, fat, hairy ponies ridden at full-tilt by alarming young ladies”.’

I have appended these comments as P.S.s to the relevant posts.

24 comments

  1. I had never heard of Basque refugees coming to England but a belated “Well done, Mr Baldwin!” The bombing of Guernica, and how the Germans chose the day and the exact times of day to kill the maximum numbers of civilians is fairly astounding

  2. I’m catching up with your posts. Thank you for sharing your friend’s e-mail. It was good of him to give you all that information. Those poor children after Guernica! It makes me think, too, of your friend who came to England a bit later through the Kindertransport.

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