Kevin J. Last – författare
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4 produkter
4 produkter
328 kr
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This story began a hundred years ago when a child became the inspiration for his famous father, A. A. Milne, who created one of the best known children's characters in recent history. His parents wanted a girl and to begin with treated him as one. They were initially quite distant from him and his upbringing was left to a loyal and loving nanny. Unfortunately, this left Christopher Robin Milne terminally shy and lacking in self-confidence. Unable to escape from the shadow of his fictional self, he became an object of continued interest from a non-understanding public. His salvation started with being sent away to Stowe School, going to Cambridge and joining the Army in the Second World War as a sapper. After an unhappy and directionless time immediately post-war in London, he eventually married and, very successfully, ran a bookshop in the South West for twenty-one years. His life was dominated by a love of the countryside, learned at his parents' country home, Cotchford Farm in Hartfield, East Sussex, and much later in Devon. How he turned his life round, against the odds, is the subject of this biography.
168 kr
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William Young was the son of gentleman farmer Henry Young who owned Cotchford Farm in the mid-nineteenth century. At the age of just twenty-three William left the farm for what we might now term a 'gap year’ working in Canada. This book, based on his own diary from 1854/5, tells the fascinating story of his journey via Liverpool and onwards on a three-masted schooner to New York, Buffalo and eventually Lake Erie. The voyage had its own perils, a long way from transatlantic travel today. Unbeknown to our diarist, the ship he travelled on was part of a criminal enterprise and eventually suffered both mutiny and wreck. In the mill towns on Lake Erie Young proves an indispensable worker both on crops and stonework. Just as he is about to return to England he is beset with difficulties..... His is a young, clear voice on life a hundred and sixty years ago.
Semi-Detached Suburban Mr Jones
A Rolling Stone from Cheltenham to Cotchford Farm
Inbunden, Engelska, 2024
274 kr
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The third and final volume of Kevin J. Last’s books about Cotchford Farm, Hartfield, East Sussex in three different eras. Semi-Detached Suburban Mr Jones is set in the 1960s and tells the story of Brian Jones, the only middle class member of the Rolling Stones and how he came to purchase Cotchford Farm as a country retreat away from the Stones London life. Despite the fact that he was founder of the group, Jones's increasingly wild behaviour ensured that Mick Jagger eventually became the group's leader. Harking back to his roots, Jones saw himself as a Sussex country gentleman but it all went impossibly wrong due to a vicious East End builder, Frank Thorogood, who made life hell for him with Jones eventually drowning in his own swimming pool in suspicious circumstances. How and why this happened is examined in close detail.
266 kr
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Tracks: A Journey Through Metro-Land tells the story of Metro-land and the development of suburbia that grew alongside the Metropolitan Railway. Originally the brainchild of eminent Victorians, the Metropolitan grew to become the queen of underground lines, eventually expanding to a point some fifty miles outside London. Author Kevin J. Last describes how the concept of Metro-land was an aspiration for several levels of society, promising a better lifestyle well away from the deprivations of wartime. The idea that the working man could live comfortably outside the 'smoke' in individually designed houses would mean that he could also thrive at work, largely due to the regular service offered by the new railway. This was quite exceptional in that, while nominally an underground line, most of the Met's route was above ground and, in length, went far beyond other similar lines, far out into the Buckinghamshire countryside. Not marked on any map, Metro-land is as much a concept of the mind as a real place.