In this issue: Music and me - and how I met the Beatles...
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 This page updated - to read this month's "essay", scroll down the page...Time to start talking about music and me, I think. I was born into a musical family - that is to say, my Mum played the piano, my Dad played a variety of stringed instruments - we have a photograph of him in fancy dress as a gypsy, playing a violin, but from memory he was never that good on the violin, although he excelled on the mandolin-banjo; my sister Jean, who passed away last month, played the piano, and I played, firstly the recorder (of which more in a moment), then the violin (until the incident with the violin teacher), and finally the guitar, my basic prowess at which I managed to pass on to my two boys, who are both far superior to me; and finally, my violin playing rubbed off on daughter Samantha who went the whole hog and is a Master of Music. So, when I say that I come from a musical family, I'm not talking about more than two generations, I'm talking about my immediate family. My uncles sometimes joined in with stringed instruments such as mandolins, but more often than not they were content to sit and listen as we murdered such classics as Suppé's Poet and Peasant, and tunes from motion pictures such as The Wedding of the Painted Doll. If you were to raise the lid of the piano stool, you would find a massive pile of sheet music, all for the pianoforte. We had one in the house, and my Dad occasionally attempted to tune it, often well enough for Jean to practice her Schubert and her Chopin. There was a time when she was the most gifted musician in the house, but I like to think that when I passed grade three Violin I was starting to overtake her, and by the time I had mastered the basics of guitar playing (jazz and skiffle), she was married and living in a caravan in Charlton Kings, near Cheltenham. Of course, playing an instrument doesn't make you an expert in music. For that, you need to listen. My first instrument, the recorder, was something I was very good at, but it required me to produce a lot of spittle. So much that, my Mum and Dad, being very good with practical jokes of the variety that didn't hurt you mentally, made a cardboard box from a cereal packet (easy, really, just cut the bottom off) and tied it with string to my recorder. I was so good at the recorder (performing regularly in ensemble at my Primary School), that I was sent down the road a few doors to where Mrs Livesey lived, the piano teacher who had made such a brilliant job of teaching Jean. But, to my dismay, I was no good at piano. My left hand wanted to play the same notes, an octave lower, than my right hand, and vice versa. Later, much later, after many years of playing violin and then guitar, I taught myself to play The Old Rugged Cross on our old piano, achieving a very commendable left hand accompaniment. But my greatest love was the guitar. My earliest memories of listening to music are of Listen With Mother. This would have been from 1950 onwards, when I was walking, and looking at picture books by Mabel Lucy Attwell, and learning to read, and when my ears started to tune themselves to the rather pleasant sounds that came out of the box on the small table in the alcove in the front room next to the bay window. The time was 1:45pm, the introductory music was a few notes on the piano, and then Daphne Oxenford or Julia Lang, who both had the sweetest voices on the radio, asked "Are you sitting comfortably?..... Then I'll begin." And they would start to read to me, stories that featured characters such as Larry the Lamb and Dennis the Dachsund and their adventures in Toytown. The programme finished a quarter of an hour later, with Gabriel Fauré's Dolly Suite. The music is beautiful, the stories were especially tailored for us "baby boomers", children born after 1945 celebrations. I was a baby boomer, sister Jean was a war baby, born in 1941. I miss Jean terribly - we spoke often on the phone; she always looked after me in the early days, and we always got on famously, except for that time when I bought the Beatles' first LP, and played it over and over again downstairs on the radiogram, causing her to make her one and only ccomplaint (that I remember) to my Mum, about playing my music too loud. It was different when she wanted to play her Frank SInatra LPs, of course. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Radio was everything in the 1950s. few people had televisions, at least in our street. Our new next door neighbours, the Hughes family, comprising Ida (mother), father (forget his name), Adrian, Norman and Nigel (the ginger-haired twins) and their sister (forget her name too!), had a television, a nine inch screen which was positioned in the hall, into which we were invited to stand and watch the Coronation in 1953. I imagine they moved the TV into the hall from the lounge, which was always kept shut, except on special occasions (to which we were not privy). The parents were Methodists, very strict, and kept themselves and their home private. They kept up with the Gardners, who lived on the opposite corner, because in their opinion, we were lower in class, probably because we could not afford a television and neither could we afford a car. Both the Hughes family and the Gardner family bought brand new Ford Anglias on the same day... Norman and Nigel, who were rebellious, weren't Methodists, if anything they were unbelievers, never once went in their father's car. At least, that's how it seemed to me. Back to Radio. In those days, there was The Light Programme, The Home Programme, and The Third Programme. With the relaunch of BBC Radio in the 1960s, these became, respectively, Radio 2, Radio 4, and Radio 3. The bulk of the music was to be found on The Light Programme and the Home Programme, unless you had a love of classical music, in which case you tuned to The Third Programme. I had no knowledge or even a liking for classical music in my formative years - that came much later. As a toddler, I listened to every music programme on the radio: Workers' Playtime, Parade of the Pops, Housewives' Choice, Music While You Work, Henry Hall's Music Night, Friday Night is Music Night, Children's Favourites, Two-Way Family Favourites (which often became Three-Way and even, on occasion, Four-Way Family Favourites). Every programme on the BBC had its own theme tune, of course, and on Children's Favourites I would be regaled with all manner of musical treats, like 'Peter and the Wolf', 'The Ugly Duckling', Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer, Katzenellen Bogen By the Sea', ''The Runaway Train', 'Teddy Bears' Picnic' 'Nellie the Elephant', 'A windmill in Old Amsterdam', 'Sparky's Magic Piano' and my of course, the Oberkirchen Children's Choir singing 'The Happy Wanderer'. As the years progressed and my musical tastes blossomed, I was exposed to simple folk tunes such as Barbara Ellen, and Bobby Shaftoe at school, and various others to which we did country dancing (one of my favourite lessons at school!). I remember one occasion when the Headmaster, a terrifying tyrant called Mr Gillow (whom I didn't like and with whose bullying son I had a run-in in about 1955) brought a gramophone into our lesson and played Smetana's The Bartered Bride Overture. I don't know why, but it made me think about listening to other music - it was exciting, electrifying, hugely enjoyable, and I knew that other music existed because, as I said earlier, we listened to every mucis programme going, including Mantovani, who murdered various light classical pieces. By this time, I had discovered our own wind-up gramophone, which I believe had a built-in speaker, not one of those giant horns you see in the illustrations of the period, and a stack of 78rpm shellac records of performers like Al Bowlly, Harry Roy and his Band, Jack Hylton and his Orchestra, etc., etc. There was a built-in tray holding the needles you needed to replace on a regular basis. In the next road, my Great Uncle Ernie and Aunt Grace lived. He was OK, she was horrible. But he gave me a pile of 78s to play on my newly discovered toy, for which I was very grateful, finding amongst them,, for example, a performance by Django Reinhardt and the Quintette du Hot Club de France. I was delighted to discover later that day that my Dad also had some Django 78s, and these became the flavour of the month for me, so much so that when my French teacher said we all had to give a five minute presentation (in French) to the rest of the class, I chose to speak about the amazing Django Reinhardt. He was Belgian, not French, but the language was the same, wasn't it? By this time, the world had moved on. To 45rpm single records, and 33-and-a-third rpm albums. On the way home from school in 1958, I went past Currys in the Oxbode in Gloucester. On the opposite side of the road was the massive side profile of the five-storey Bon Marché Department store. But Curry's had what I wanted - a radiogram that not only played all three speeds of record, it also had a radio built in. Our radio, the one that I used to listen to Listen With Mother on, was very old, and past its best. At least as far as I was concerned. Mum, Dad and Jean were happy with it. I was not. I was excited by the prospect of being able to put on an album and not have to get up to change the record, but to sit and listen for anything up to a half hour. In those days I could nag for England, and I nagged and nagged and nagged until Mum caved in and went to Currys and signed a hire purchase agreement for the radiogram. Once it was installed, I had other things on which to spend my pocket money and the money from my paper round besides books and comics. And music was starting to become much more important to teenagers like me. Up till now, we had to get our popular music fixes from Radio Luxembourg on frequency 208. I remember the first LP record I bought - it was a truncated performance of Beethoven's 5th Symphony on the Embassy Record Label, which was exclusive to Woolworths. I'd been with my Dad to a working men's club, which was a smoke-filled room in the middle of Gloucester, where a couple of hundred men stood and listened to a gramophone record recital of the symphony. It blew my mind! And once we had the radiograme, I simply had to have it. Years later I started to buy Classics for Pleasure LPs and discovered that the Embassy 10-inch record missed all of the repeats, and was actually very poor value for money. But at least my record collection was up and running. Some record purchases were hit and miss in those days. Everyone in the family loved traditional jazz, and in the very late 1950s, we heard a performance of Blaze Away, a John Philip Sousa march, by a new band called "Mr Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band". There was, in those days, I think, a radio programme devoted to jazz. I was duly sent out on Saturday morning to hunt down a copy. In Gloucester, there was Hickey's Music Shop, of which more later, and the Bon Marché department store. Hickeys didn't have the record, and neither did Bon Marché. What the latter did have was a performance of "Whistling Rufus" by Chris Barber's Jazz Band, and with the money Mum, Dad and Jean had given me to buy Blaze Away, I bought Whistling Rufus. There was much disappointment. But in the end I was forgiven, because my Melody Maker newspaper revealed that Blaze Away was on an album and had not been released as a single. By this time, I was hooked on Acker Bilk, and it coincided with "trad jazz" becoming the hottest thing in British music making. Dozens of new bands surged onto the market, with Dick Charlesworth's City Gents, Terry Lightfoot's Band, The Dutch Swing College Band, Chris Barber's Jazz Band, Kenny Ball's Jazz Men, and Mr Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band, to name just a few. I don't know if it was the name of the band, or the amazingly different and beautiful clarinet of Acker's that hooked me, but for me his was absolutely the best trad jazz band ever, and I set out to follow him and to collect his records. It was about 1961, when Acker changed record labels from the Pye Blue Jazz label to EMI, and at that point, he appointed publicist Peter Leslie, a literary genius, to handle his promotion and to write his record sleeve notes. There is nothing quite like an Accker Bilk sleeve note, which I am in the process of preserving on a special page in Books Monthly. The trad jazz phenomenon was comparatively short-lived, although Acker did shoot to international fame and acclaim with the gorgeous and very memorable Stranger on the Shore, which ensured he was never forgotten, and must have provided him with adequate funds to keep him in comparative luxury until he passed away in 2014. What followed trad jazz in Britain was quite extraordinary, and changed music forever... To be continued... MARCH 2021 The thrill of finding out about new albums (and even the occasional single record or EP) by Mr Acker Bilk and His Paramount Jazz Band came about by me buying, every week, the Melody Maker and the New Musical Express. As I recall, there were sections on traditional jazz - and modern jazz, which I abhorred, always have, and always will - in both papers, which regularly listed the top bands, as voted for by the readers, and even twenty or so years after Django Reinhardt and the Quintette disbanded, they still figured in the top tens, because people with longer memories still voted for them. In 1958 or so, Ken Colyer's Jazz Men were still dominating the traditional jazz scene; Acker Bilk had played with them for a few months in the early 1950s before forming his own ensemble, and in their early days, they specialised in "jazzed-up" versions of Sousa marches, such as Blaze Away, Under the Double Eagle, etc., etc., which were released as 78rpm shellac records on the blue Pye Jazz label. Then in 1960, Bilk employed Peter Leslie, an up and coming pulp fiction writer, to be in charge of his publicity. He changed labels, to EMI; Leslie had the idea of dressing the band members in fancy waistcoats and bowler hats, about which I have written extensively on the Acker Bilk Sleeve Notes Page of this magazine, and which has been updated this month with a further selection of Acker's album notes written by Peter Leslie. That same year Acker's single SUMMER SET reached number five in the UK charts, and the floodgates of traditional jazz in Britain were opened. The Wikipedia page says that bands such as Acker Bilk's, Kenny Ball's and Chris Barber's tried to revive traditional jazz in Britain. I know enough about traditional jazz to know that this wasn't a revival - traditional jazz had always been popular with purists, but there was only one Golden Age of traditional jazz in Britain, and that was in the early 1960s. Those bands weren't "reviving" anything, they were playing the music that they had always loved, emulating their 1920s heroes (Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five etc.), and the British public liked what they heard and trad jazz became the dominant music genre for at least a couple of years, fading away in 1962 as the Beatles wrought the biggest revolution in popular music not just in Britain but all over the world. The 1920s in Britain had seen the boom in "swing" orchestras, like Harry Roy, Jack Hylton etc., and this genre also boomed in Britain in the early 1960s with The Temperance Seven. But the dominant two bands were Acker Bilk's and Kenny Ball's, who had a string of top 40 hits. For me, there was only ever Acker Bilk - or Mr Acker Bilk, as Peter Leslile defined him - and his Paramount Jazz Band. They were far and away the very finest musicians on the trad jazz circuit, and if you listen to Jelly Roll Morton's classic single "Doctor Jazz" and compare it with Acker's "Stomp Off, Let's Go", you can hear what Acker was trying to achieve, and how brilliantly he succeeded. There is footage on YouTube of Acker and his band playing "In a Persian Market Place", a light classical "bonbon" by Ketelbey, arranged by Acker, showcasing the brilliance of the Paramount Jazz Band in all its glory. I urge you to watch it, it is terrific, and shows an ensemble at the top of its game. The other reason for my choosing Acker above all others in the trad jazz field is the plethora of literature produced by Peter Leslie's BILK MARKETING BOARD, which was the name of the publicity machine that ensured that Acker dominated the trad jazz phenomenon that swept Britain from 1960-1962. When Acker wrote a tune which he called "Jenny" after his daughter, (subsequently renamed Stranger on the Shore to accompany a hugely successful children's TV serial) I was delighted, because it meant that my hero (who hailed from the West Country, just as I did) would still be dominating the charts even though music was changing in Britain. The announcement of the album, with Acker backed by the Leon Young String Chorale, was made in the NME and Melody Maker, with the caveat that it would be issued in the United States about five months before it would be released in Britain. I was by that time a subscriber to a record company - like the Companion Book Club, which sent you a monthly selection which you could keep or return - and they also announced the US release of the Stranger On the Shore Album. I ordered it through them, which meant that I had the precious LP in my hands five months before it was released over here; and I treasured it just like all of the other Acker Bilk albums. The sleeve notes were again written by the marketing and literary genius, Peter Leslie, and you'll find this on the Acker Bilk page in Books Monthly, too. Trad Jazz, and particularly Acker Bilk's renderings of it, have remained favourites of mine right up to the present day. Most of those brilliant Acker Bilk albums have been released as CDs, but the CD producers have not recognised how important the sleeve notes were and are, which is why I have taken it upon myself to reproduce them in Books Monthly. It is literature, after all. The late 1950s and early 1960s are imprinted on my memory as my Golden Age of music - or discoveries, of passions, of formative years. In 1958 my dear Gran died. I only ever had one grandparent, the other three all died before I was born. She was precious to me - I have only the fondest memories of her. In 1958 I was eleven years old (when she died - I reached twelve later in the year). Mum and Dad decided I might be too young to attend her funeral, and so I was packed off to spend the day with sister Jean in her place of work in Cheltenham, in a Grace Bros., style store called Wolfe and Hollander, where she worked as a secretary. I was given a ten shilling note (a fortune in those days) and told to go and spend it, to buy something I really wanted, so that the day would be remembered as a good one, and not as a dark one, the day they buried Gran. I went first into a branch of W H Smith and bought THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, and then into a record shop, where I bought THE BALLAD OF TOM DOOLEY by the KINGSTON TRIO. I was heavily into my music by then, books and music were my principal hobbies. When the weather was too bad for outdoor play, like football, I was happy to sit in the front room playing my records and reading my books.  Like
my three children after me, I always maintained that I could do my
homework with my music playing in the background. It worked for me, and
it worked for them! At school, the arguments raged about who was best -
Elvis Presley or Cliff Richard. One of my rivals for being best at
Spanish, a boy we called "Pedro" Smith (Smith was his real name, Pedro
was his nickname, first name was really Peter), insisted on championing
Elvis, but for the purposes of just being different, I championed Cliff
Richard - even though he didn't interest me at all. If anything, he was
a bit wet for me, but I was happy to debate the various records of the
two men who dominated pop music in 1958 and on into the beginning of
the 1960s. In 1962, recovering from my abuse at the hands of the
peripatetic violin teacher, with whom I reached and passed Grade 3, I
was looking for a musical challenge, for the violin had lost its
appeal. I found an old guitar in a cupboard upstairs at home, and tuned
it so that it played a chord. I spent hours teaching myself to play,
sitting in front of the big mirror in Mum and Dad's room, and then
realised that I should really be tuning it properly. This I did, and
set about teaching myself all over again, sometimes with the aid of the
Bert Weedon book, sometimes without. This coincided with my discovery
of the breathtaking genius of Django Reinhardt - I even gave a speech
in my class about Django, all in French, it was something we all had to
do, and I chose to talk about a Belgian! But as well as the 78rpm
records Dad had dug out of his collection, there were leaflets, concert
programmes, sheet music, many of which had pictures of Django, some of
which showed him playing that amazing Macaferri guitar. I had to have a
guitar of my own, and it had to look something like Django's. So off I
went to Hickey's the big music shop in Northgate, in Gloucester city
centre, and looked for a guitar with a cutaway, at a price I could
afford. I found one which probably looked more like Roy Rogers's
guitar, but never mind. It was a Rosetti guitar, white with a thin dark
line all the way round the edge. The one pictured doesn't have the edge
stripe, but it's identical in every other respect. My eldest son Martin
still has it. My guitar cost £3, and I paid a deposit of ten shillings,
the remainder to be paid in weekly instalments, which took most of my
paper round money. At last I had a decent guitar of my own, and, what
was more important, I could play it! About this time also, the Light Programme on BBC radio started a programme called Saturday Skiffle Club - an hour-long programme celebrating the boom in skiffle, headed by Lonnie Donnegan, who had previously played with the Chris Barber Jazz Band. In 1960, the programme dropped the word "skiffle" and was extended to two hours, and became a secondary source of finding out about new and forthcoming records in the trad jazz boom. Make no mistake, trad jazz was everywhere for the best part of two years. Every weekly magazine for girls had portrait pictures of those all-important trad jazz purveyors. There was no doubt, the three "Bs", Barber, Ball and Bilk (Chris, Kenny and Acker respectively) were outstanding. There were others who tried to copy Acker Bilk, bands like Dick Charlesworth's City Gents, who also dressed snazzily, but they lacked something that Acker's band had, and that was Peter Leslie and the Bilk Marketing Board, not to mention the outstanding talent of Acker and his fellow band musicians. When Uncle George came to stay with us in the summer holidays, he calmly announced that Johnny Mortimer, Acker's trombonist, was a nephew of his, which means that I was related to one of the Paramount Jazz Band, if only by marriage! I was thrilled beyond belief at this news! And with Stranger On the Shore becoming the best-selling record of 1962, he and the Paramount Jazz Band left all the other trad jazz bands behind. Coincidentally, the Beatles were beginning to become known - LOVE ME DO and the issue of their first album, PLEASE PLEASE ME in early 1963 were indicators of something quite extraordinary, and the banter at school no longer included Cliff Richard, it was all about Elvis vs The Beatles, and no prizes for guessing who won! On the Acker Bilk page in this issue of Books Monthly you'll see a poster showing Acker Bilk and the Beatles. This would have been in 1962, when the Beatles played in Gloucester Odeon, a support act for Acker. In 1962, this would have been, and I frequently walked through the city after getting off the bus that took us from school on the way home. It was a two-bus journey, the first bus dropping us off in Westgate, and then a walk through to the bus station in King's Square; and I would spend a lot of time in Hickey's music shop, buying the occasional single, of which there was a box in the left hand side of the shop. I went into the shop looking for a copy of Ray Charles (and the Ray-lets) singing WHAT'D I SAY, and found a cover version by Bobby Darin. I was aware of three older youths, all wearing long black overcoats, messing about in the right hand side of the shop, taking guitars down off the wall and playing them, much to the dismay and anger of Mr Hickey, who was an old-fashioned nd rather intolerant shopkeeper. These youths could only mean one thing to him -trouble! I saw them coming towards me out of the corner of my eye, and one of them said "what record are you getting, then", in a deep, gruff Liverpool accent. I didn't want any trouble, so I handed him the single, and he grinned, and said: "Good choice, Kid", and handed it back. I paid for my record and left the shop, realising as I walked to King's Square in order to board the bus home, that it had been John, Paul and George in the music shop, the guys who had asked me what record I was buying! Ringo would have been out in the city with his camera, he was always taking photographs. I couldn't wait to tell the boys in my class the following day - I had been in Hickeys' music shop when the Beatles were there! Wow! Wow! Wow! Trad Jazz took a back seat when I bought my PLEASE PLEASE ME album. I played it over and over again, as loud as I dared, and Jean still complained, asking my Mum to make me "turn it down". For me, the world of music changed overnight with the Beatles as it did for so many other millions of people. From pooh-poohing rock and roll, preferring trad jazz (and a small number of select classical pieces), I was desperate for Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, but first and foremost, the Beatles... To be continued...
Yours
Retro Magazine - the latest issue - out now!
 The
March 2021 issue of Yours Retro magazine has brilliant features on Rock
Hudson, Sandra Dee, Secret War TV series, Gerry and the Pacemakers and
much much more - it's the very best magazine on the newsstands! Out
now, and utterly terrific!Keep
scrolling down for five brilliant new titles from Girls Gone By
Publishers - 1: Lorna
Hill: The Secret Published
24th November 2020
The Secret is
the 14th, and final, title in the Sadler’s Wells series. GGBP first
published this in 2002, and ever since then have been constantly asked
to reprint it.This is the story of Vanessa and Sam – two babies found
in the rubble of a theatre after an earthquake in Lorna Hill’s
favourite imaginary eastern European nation Slavonia. One is the
grandchild of a Northumbrian baronet whose daughter was dancing at the
theatre when the earthquake hit, the other is the child of one of the
theatre’s dressers. But which is which? The grandparents don’t know the
sex of their baby, so both are brought to England. In the end, the
little girl, Vanessa, stays with the baronet, takes up ballet and goes
to the Royal Ballet School. The little boy, Sam, is brought up in Byker
by the sister of a village woman who couldn’t have a baby of her own.
But are they the right way around? Jim Mackenzie has written an
excellent introductory article on ‘The World of The Secret, focussing
on the Newcastle area he knows so well. Lorna
Hill’s daughter, Vicki, wrote an article for our first printing of The
Secret, which we have included here – on how her mother saw the
story continuing in the next book (never, alas, to be written). It's
every young girl's dream to be a ballet dancer, and Lorna's Sadlers
Wells series encapsulates that dream to perfection. In a kind of
parallel to Monica Edwards's pony-driven series, and inspired by her
daughter Vicki, who actually lived the dream, Lorna's stories are
inspiring, character driven and fulfilling. The Secret, the final
Sadlers Wells story, combines the compelling mystery of the babies,
Vanessa and Sam, found following an earthquake in Slavonia, with the
fulfilment of Vanessa's desire to be a ballet dancer. This is the kind
of story that was serialised (in picture strip form) in Schoolfriend
and Girls Crystal comics and annuals in the 1950s, and was required and
desired reading for schoolgirls of that era. A superb story,
brilliantly told. 2:
Sylvia
Gower: The World of Elizabeth Goudge Published
15th December 2020 
The World of Elizabeth Goudge was
privately
published by the late Sylvia Gower in 2001, and is incredibly difficult
to get hold of now. There are copies advertised on Amazon from £800! We
are delighted to be publishing a new edition at a somewhat cheaper
price … £13 + overseas postage. Sylvia Gower wrote about Elizabeth
Goudge’s life and writing, and shared her experience of visiting the
locations which inspired the settings in her books – for instance,
Wells which becomes the fictional Torminster. Sylvia Gower also
explored “the
reasons for their success and evergreen appeal for today’s readers”.
Since 2001, many of Elizabeth Goudge’s books have remained consistently
in print.
GGBP have published not only those we have in print today but
also Sister
of the Angels, currently out of print. We have discovered that the
Goudge Memorial Cross in New Milton has disappeared, just leaving the
grave. We should like to restore this, and a Just
Giving page has been set up to do
this. If you would like to donate, please do so – please do *not* send
money to GGBP if you are unable to donate through the Just Giving page
– ask someone else to do it for you. Elizabeth Goudge is best known to me as one of the romantic novelists I discovered and devoured during the 1950s, when I was reading anything and everything in sight! I had no idea at that time that she had also written children's stories, and I had quite forgotten that fact until GGBP sent me this wonderful insight into the life and career of one of Britain's most popular romantic novelists of the 20th century. Sylvia Gower's book is a fascinating read, and as books about authors go, it's one of the best I've read for a long time. A comparatively long and fruitful life saw Elizabeth established as a firm favourite for hundreds of thousands of eager readers. Superb. 3:
Helen
Barber: The Bettany Twins and the Chalet School Published
16th October 2020 
Which Bettany Twins? Read below … It’s
1944. A world war is raging and the girls of the Chalet School are
determined to play their part. But for Peggy and Bride Bettany, there
is exciting news: their father Dick, twin brother of the School’s
founder, is on his way back from India in spite of the war, and with
him will be their mother and the young brother and sister they have
never met. How will they adjust to living together as a family under
one roof – First Twins Peggy and Rix, singletons Bride and Jackie, and
Second Twins Maeve and Maurice? How will Maeve settle in at the Chalet
School, so different from anything she has ever known? And what is the reason
for the mysterious burglaries at the new Bettany home, The Quadrant?
Helen’s latest contribution to the annals of the Chalet School is a
typical EBD mix of school, family and adventure. It answers many of the
questions fans have been asking years. How could Dick resign his job in
India in Tom but
still have it in Three
Go? How did eight-year-old Maeve react to being given woolly reins
as a welcome-home gift? Did Peggy really ‘come the eldest sister’ over
Maeve, as suggested in The
Wrong Chalet School, or was Maeve simply reacting to having an
elder sister at all? And why, oh why, was Dick returning to England
when clearly it is still the middle of the Second World War? Three sets
of Bettany twins: Madge and Dick, Peggy and Rix, Maeve and Maurice. One
Chalet School, the pivot around which their lives revolve. And a most
intriguing quest! The Bettany Twins and the Chalet School was published on 16th
October 2020. Now
the first of two new Chalet School stories by the two best known and
best of the new generation of Chalet School books. The Chalet School
remains by far the most popular girls' school series, and whilst there
are upwards of fifty excellent original titles by EBD, the new authors
continue to thrill with their fill-in stories. First off, Helen Barber
takes a long hard look at Dick, Madge's brother, and in the course of
this adventure, answers several mind-puzzling questions that have beset
CS readers for many years. The Bettany Twins and the Chalet School is a
thrilling mix of adventure and family and will be essential reading for
all fans of the series. A beautiful front cover heralds what's inside
and the story never disappoints. You can read about Katherine Bruce's
The Chalet School in Guernsey below, but first it's time to look at the
fourth Daneswood title by Phyllis Matthewman. 4:
Phyllis
Matthewman: A New Role for Natasha Published
23rd November 2020 
A New Role for Natasha is Daneswood No 4 Every
girl has to be a new girl at some time or another but this difficult
stage soon passes. It did not pass too easily for Natasha Vaughan.
School life to her was strange and bewildering. To the girls at
Daneswood the new girl was odd and incomprehensible. Her careful and
correct speech, her precise manners and her prim politeness set her
apart from the others. The cover of this most excellent adventure is reminiscent of the pulp fiction covers of the 1950s, but really, it's just an excellent, beautiful illustration of a pivotal scene in A New Role for Natasha. Once again, it's the kind of story I used to read in my sister's weekly comics, and the big mystery? No spoilers, just to say that it has something to do with the Lorna Hill title above. A superb, romantic (in the broadest sense of the word) mystery that has all the elements of a smashing super girls' school story! Excellent! 5:
Katherine
Bruce: The Chalet School in Guernsey Published
13th November 2020 
After fleeing the terrors of Nazism, the Chalet School has settled into their new home in Guernsey and now the second term on its island home begins. Some old friends are delighted to return to their beloved school, but in among the new arrivals is one who has a history with the school. Mélanie Kerdec was a member of a group called the Mystic M who terrorised the school some years previously, where their bad deeds culminated in the kidnapping of Sybil Russell. Now Mélanie has come as a pupil to the school she detests and is determined to show that she has by no means forgiven or forgotten the past. Even
with that excitement, outside affairs cannot be ignored and the war
continues to intrude as rationing affects both lessons and Guiding. An
island-wide air raid drill gives the senior girls an exciting evening,
and the war on the Continent leaves one mistress grief-stricken. Worse
is to come as an investigator arrives to learn more about the previous
term’s dramatic plane crash. When he cannot promise that the Channel
Islands will be safe from future conflict, those in authority must
consider leaving Guernsey to find a safe place for them to live for as
long as the war lasts. And
finally, the new Chalet School "fill-in" by Katherine Bruce. Both
Katherine and Helen produce CS stories that are actually (for me) hard
to tell apart from those written originally by EBD. It's a well known
fact that the Germans eventually occupied the Channel Islands, but the
events in this stirring tale occur before the occupation, giving free
rein to the girls to indulge in their usual high jinks and secret
society stuff. I really can't fault this one as a CS story, it has
everything! Absolutely enthralling! The small print: Books Monthly, now well into its 23rd year on the web, is published on or slightly before the first day of each month by Paul Norman. You can contact me here. If you wish to submit something for publication in the magazine, let me remind you there is no payment as I don't make any money from this publication. If you want to send me something to review, contact me via email at paulenorman1@gmail.com and I'll let you know where to send it.
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My very good
friends at Girls Gone By Publishers just sent me a package of five of
their latest books, and you can read about them at the bottom of this
page:
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