Monthly Archives: July 2012

Sailing’s Nautical Terms

Many of my novels under the name of Jessica Blair are set in the nineteenth century, some of which have a sea element to them. Therefore I am dealing with ships under sail. In 1978 I obtained The Country Life Book of Nautical Terms Under Sail. What a valuable book that has been for me and still is. There are twenty sections each devoted to a particular aspect of the overall subject. Thus we get ‘Masts, Spars, Sails and Rigging,’  ‘Calls and Commands,’  ‘Sailing and Seamanship’, and so on. The book is illustrated with some photographs but mainly with wonderful line drawings which illustrate the subject matter neatly and clearly, making the whole a very comprehensive coverage of the subject. Anyone interested in the sea and sailing will delight in this book, and anyone who needs a reference work of the subject, like me, will find it most valuable. How many times it has been taken down from my bookshelves since 1978 I dread to think.   Happy hunting if ever you try to find one. 

Bomber Command

The Lancaster Bomber

I have just added to my book shelves BOMBER COMMAND Reflections of War, Volume 1, Cover of Darkness 1939 – May 1942 by Martin W. Bowman published by Pen and Sword Books. I served in Bomber Command as a Bomb Aimer with 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron and found this book most interesting as it is so detailed in the operations, presented chronologically, with a lot of first hand accounts and experiences of the crews concerned. The research must have been enormous. Having got the information Martin Bowman has put the experiences over in a very readable way while creating vividly what the Bomber crews went through.  There are to be four more volumes to complete the set. I look forward to seeing them in what should be a very fitting tribute to Bomber Command and the young men who flew the missions that helped bring the war to a conclusive victory sooner than would otherwise have been possible