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Derek Leyland Stevenson, a relation of Robert Louis Stevenson, joined 175 Squadron in 1942 and spent the next three years flying
Hurricanes and later Typhoons. His career was far from dull.
He crashed in England, Majorca, Normandy, and Germany but each time, he walked away from his damaged aircraft and it was not long before he was back in the air. After the disastrous Dieppe raid he had to bale out of his Hurricane and was picked up in the English Channel by the Polish destroyer, Slazak.
He injured his back badly when he crashed in Majorca and his attempts to escape back to the war zone make an enthralling adventure
story. From his training days in the West Country, through postings to Norfolk and Northern Ireland his story, whilst eventful in the extreme, is of a man ‘just doing his duty’ over the skies of England and Europe.
At the end of the war he was awarded the DFC. He did not receive the decoration so he politely asked about it and was told to report to the Air Ministry. In a basement room he filled in a form and was then invited to take his pick from a drawer full of them.
Further
details.
240pp, hardback, jacketed, with 50 photographs, maps and illustrations £16.95
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‘I had gone to meet one of the breast surgeons to plan my job as the new Consultant Plastic Surgeon charged with setting up a formal breast reconstruction service for Norfolk, I was told:
‘Women in Norfolk don’t want a breast. They are down to earth farmers,
they have better things to think about, so you are not needed.’
Elaine Sassoon, head of the Department of Plastic Surgery at the Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital, specializing in microsurgery and breast reconstruction, ignored the comment and persevered, and in the
ten years she has spent looking after her breast reconstruction patients she has been constantly impressed by their fortitude, resilience and sense of
humour.
Andrea O’Hare, is an award-winning photographer, based in Northern Ireland.
Together they have created The Boudica Within.
Further
details
ISBN: 978-1-85297-097-0 246 X 214mm 136pp, full colour,
softback, with 100 photographs
£14.95 Order
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Once the pole had been ‘conquered’ by Amundsen and Scott the next great journey was the crossing of the Antarctic continent, first attempted by Filchner in 1912 and then by Shackleton in 1914. As part of the International Geographical Year the Trans-Antarctic Expedition was set up with Vivian Fuchs in charge. He would start from a base on the Weddell Sea and after reaching the Pole, continue to the Ross Sea using supply depots laid by a New Zealand team working from McMurdo and led by the conqueror of Mount
Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary. In January 1956 an advance party of eight men was left at Shackleton base to build accommodation, explore and lay depots to ease the passage of Fuchs’s team the following year.
This account, based on the diary of the young medical officer, shows how close to disaster they came and how lucky they were to survive. Fuchs later admitted
that apart from Scott’s marooned Northern Party theirs was the most severe ordeal
in the history of Antarctic exploration.
Further
details
144pp 16pp colour pictures, 50 photographs, paperback £12.75
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