This is the last of four podcasts about novelists who saw action in various wars. Some were already published authors, while others were young men whose literary careers blossomed in later years.
PART THREE – THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Click on the image below. This will take you to my Soundcloud page where you can listen to the podcast.
This is a series of four podcasts about novelists who saw action in various wars. Some were already published authors, while others were young men whose literary careers blossomed in later years.
PART THREE – THE GREAT WAR
Click on the image below. This will take you to my Soundcloud page where you can listen to the podcast.
This is a series of four podcasts about novelists who saw action in various wars. Some were already published authors, while others were young men whose literary careers blossomed in later years.
Click on the image below. This will take you to my Soundcloud page where you can listen to the podcast.
This is a series of four podcasts about novelists who saw action in various wars. Some were already published authors, while others were young men whose literary careers blossomed in later years.
Click on the image below. This will take you to my Soundcloud page where you can listen to the podcast.
The town of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire prides itself on its connection with the Fens, the primeval flatlands of huge freshwater lakes, interspersed with reed beds and small settlements clinging to the occasional patches of high ground. The truth is, of course, that these Fens have been Fens in name only for two hundred years or more, since the great engineers and speculators of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drained the meres to make it the finest farming land in Britain.
Locals – and geologists – will quickly set you right on the fact that Wisbech sits on the very northern edge of the old Fenland. To the north of the town was Marshland, which was still wet, flat and featureless, but with the crucial difference that the water was salt water, and the reclaimed land was very different from the fertile peat of the Fens.
Wisbech sits on the River Nene, which rises on a lonely hill in Northamptonshire, and flows into The Wash some ten miles north of Wisbech. In medieval times, the outflow of the Nene was a treacherous delta of ever-changing creeks and channels, and it is part of folklore that King John’s baggage train was swept to its doom when local guides took a chance with a capricious incoming tide. By the mid nineteenth century, however, a succession of engineers had imposed their will over nature, and the river from Wisbech to the sea was safely confined between high banks.
In the autumn of 1885, a man murdered his wife by the banks of the river. Listen to the podcast to hear the full story. Be warned – the story ends in a grisly and gruesome manner.
After a brief visit to Bermondsey, the podcast is this week back on home territory in Wisbech, to tell the sad saga of a man with a debilitating mental condition who was left to roam the streets, with dire consequences for the person who loved him the most.
This is the tale of a ghastly pair of opportunists in Victorian London. Frederick Manning turned a blind eye to his wife, Marie, while she dispensed her favours to a rich customs official, Patrick O’Connor. The pair prepared a grave for him under their kitchen floor, and having murdered him, tried to escape with all his money. Inevitably, they were caught, and provided yet another job for William Calcraft, the Lord High Executioner.
It is March 1861. We are in the little village of Parson Drove, Cambridgeshire. The Fens, which Samuel Pepys found so unpleasant when he visited in 1663, have all been drained. He described it as “a Heathen place”, and the events described in this podcast do not give the lie to his opinion. Click the link to listen.
This is a tale of brutality – and total incompetence. An elderly man is battered to death, and his killers escape with a safe containing small change. Get the full story by clicking the podcast link.
fullybooked2017 