Jeff Dawson – författare

The full story of England and the 1970 World Cup.Mexico, the summer of 1970: Pelé, Brazil 4 Italy 1 in the Final, Gordon Banks'' save against Brazil, Bobby Moore and the Bogotá bracelet, Bobby Charlton''s substitution, televised match action (in colour), the single ''Back Home'', the Esso coin collection . . . all these and more, the familiar and the not-so-well-known, feature in Jeff Dawson''s account of the 1970 World Cup, the sexiest World Cup of all time. Using interviews with players involved and personal childhood recollections, and having studied hours of videotape, Jeff Dawson pieces together the events of Mexico 70, inviting the reader to ''taste the Brooke Bond, smell the B & H and feel what it was like that English summer, switching on GOOD MORNING MEXICO with Frank Bough - and also to remember what it was like when England had a decent international side.

The dramatic story of the sinking of the Dunedin StarNovember 9th, 1942. Amid the cloaking gloom of the Liverpool docks lay the Dunedin Star. A ship of the Blue Star Line, she was bound for the Middle East, her consignment of munitions for the 8th Army supplemented by twenty-one fare-paying civilians escaping the Blitz for the colonies, all forced to take the long haul round the Cape.As an unescorted merchantman sailing U-boat infested waters, Dunedin Star''s passage was, at best, a risky undertaking. But her eventual fate was to defy all expectation. Three weeks into her voyage, her hull mysteriously holed, Dunedin Star ran aground off Namibia''s infamous Skeleton Coast - five hundred miles of raging surf and burning desert, the most violent and desolate shore on earth. Sixty-three men, women and children were to defy mountainous waves and unfathomable odds to reach land . . . but their struggle for survival had only just begun.From interviews with survivors, eyewitness testimony, historical resources and personal journals, Dawson skilfully reconstructs the Dunedin Star''s doomed voyage, the terror of the wilderness and the painstaking rescue missions. From the grim waters of the North Atlantic to the blistering African wastes, he narrates a classic tale of pluck, set against the backdrop of World War II.