New Releases

The War Poems of David Raikes

edited by Tim Raikes (1947) and David Raikes (1963) Treberfydd

An anthology of poems of David Raikes (1938) was published privately by his family in 1954, nine years after his death, but his work is little known. This selection of his poetry is being published to mark the 75th anniversary of his death, and of VE Day, which followed just three weeks later. It also follows on from ‘Let it be hushed’, an exhibition at the Found Gallery in Brecon which used David’s work as part of its commemoration of VE Day.

This booklet contains 15 of the nearly 60 poems that David Raikes wrote between 1940, when he was 16, and his death when his plane was brought down by enemy fire in

Trafalgar and The Battle of Salamanca by Benito Pérez Galdó The Wisdom of Markets and the Madness of Crowds Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement

translated by Rick Morgan (1964) Brown Dog Books

In these two novels Galdós faithfully records the turbulent times in Spain under the shadow of Napoleon. His hero, Gabriel Araceli, an orphan from Cadiz, witnesses the Battle of Trafalgar as a boy on Spain’s mightiest ship, the Santisima Trinidad. He survives the battle and subsequent shipwreck to continue his adventures which lead him to the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, after which he finally secures both the hand of his beloved Ines and the approval of Wellington. On the centenary of Galdós’s death in 1920, April 1945.

this new translation offers English language readers an opportunity to appreciate a Spanish view of two great events in British military history.

His account is full of incident and well-drawn characters who mingle happily with historical persons and events.

John Nugée (1969)

OMFIF Press

In this light-hearted look at the various sayings and axioms that have grown up in the financial markets, author John Nugée draws on his 40 years in finance to explore the psychology and emotions of the investment world, explaining what the various axioms mean and what they tell us about the mindset of those that work in and make up the City’s markets.

The book explores the human emotions of greed, fear, optimism and stubbornness. It discusses how different people react to risk and losses, the value of intuition and the dangers of consensus, the importance of planning and having a strategy – and the even greater importance of flexibility when the plans go awry. It may not make you into a second Warren Buffett, but it might help to explain where you went wrong on the way.

The book is written in non-technical language, with a minimum of jargon or theoretical economics, and absolutely no equations. It is illustrated throughout with cartoons by Will Assheton. Robin Schofield (Hon Member) Anthem Press

‘Sara Coleridge and the Oxford Movement’ presents Sara Coleridge’s religious writings to modern readers for the first time. It includes extracts from her religious works which have remained unpublished since the 1840s. These writings present a forthright and eloquent challenge to the patriarchal hegemonies of Victorian religion and society. They represent a bold intervention by a woman writer in the public spheres of academia and the Church. Sara Coleridge’s religious writings of the 1840s present the most systematic and original critique of the Tractarian theology developed by John Henry Newman and his Oxonian colleagues. Sara Coleridge advances against a theology which she regards as repressive, authoritarian and conceptually flawed, a radical Protestant religion of inward experience and reason, underpinned by a Kantian epistemology.

The book includes passages selected from Sara Coleridge’s unpublished masterpiece ‘Dialogues on Regeneration’, written in the last two years of her life. This collection of Socratic dialogues is the most original and innovative religious work of the Tractarian era.

espresso Pizza Slow Road to San Francisco A Life of Spearfishing, Diving and Polo

Orlando Kimber (1971) Kindle edition

The book is a collection of short, entertaining and thoughtprovoking essays on leadership, finance, politics, work life, home, health, the environment, science and technology, culture, and international affairs.

Orlando has worked as both a journalist and an adviser to companies worldwide: “I started writing espresso when fighting a major legal action against a corporate bully.” says the author, “I won with costs, but wanted to help others spot the telltale signs of destructive behaviour in the earliest stages. This expanded to cover all the domains of our lives, and not just work.”

During the last twenty years, Orlando has been at the forefront of the digital revolution worldwide; including the launch of the internet in Europe, the BBC’s transition to digital tv, and Europe-wide online music services. Thomas Elliot (1997) & James Elliot (1999) Quadrille Publishing

Everyone loves pizza, right? Saver of parties, empty fridges and hangovers the world over - pizza has come to the rescue of the human race more times than is worth counting. So, if you can’t imagine your world without dough, cheese and tomato, then this is the book for you.

All things pizza are here - from its history and family tree, to world famous pizzerias and even an exploration into the pizza variants we love to hate (hamburger crust pizza anyone?). The Pizza Pilgrims, Thom and James Elliot, have spent years researching the best pizza that the world has to offer, all while running their own legendary pizza joints across the UK.

Oven fresh and packed with interviews, pizza facts, movie scenes, world records and even pizza tattoos, Pizza is illustrated with all manner of pie-based fun and written with a hearty dose of humour. The perfect companion for the pizza lover in your life. Fact. David Reynolds (1962) Muswell Press

As he moseys from east to west, driving slowly, stopping frequently he meets a huge variety of Americans - white, black, Hispanic, Asian, native American; Christian, Muslim, atheist, Mormon, Mennonite; rich, middling, poor. They talk about everything from slavery, Indian reservations, fracking and forest fires to baseball, beer, the blues, Butch Cassidy, and Marilyn Monroe.

Everyone has something to say about Donald Trump, from those who ‘love him’ to those who ‘hate him’. ‘Reynolds follows the direction of history, the direction taken by explorers and pioneer settlers. As he travels he conjures a vivid picture of the US then and now; its landscape and its people in all their diversity Tony Buxton (1945) 78265

A truly astonishing account of the author’s progression from a laidback spearfishing guide in Sri Lanka to an international celebrity. His services were much in demand by the rich and famous, including the grandson of America’s richest man.

They invited him to their homes, where he experienced a lifestyle that he hardly knew existed and met three of his four wives. His passion was exploring the underwater world where no one else had been. He was the first person to dive in the Maldives, India and Thailand. He eventually ended up in Singapore where he formed a very profitable joint venture with oil giant Exxon to underwater clean tankers. With the money he made, he took up the expensive sport of polo. He was playing in international tournaments all over the world and the life of a veritable Playboy socialising with international celebrities. Among his closest friends were Kings, prime ministers, presidents and movie stars. He finally ended marrying four times and living in the Palace of a wealthy sultan.

SCIENTIST, EXPLORER, SOLDIER, SPY

College Archivist, Clare Sargent, looks at the story of two Radleians who both made their mark abroad. Disclaimer: It should be made clear from the outset that it is not compulsory for Radleian explorers to come to sticky ends.

A.K. Boyd’s 1947 History of Radley College contains a single reference on page 279 to one of the more alarming events of the Edwardian era:

In April 1910, the School was shocked to hear of the murder in Central Africa of the eminent Old Radleian explorer and naturalist, Boyd Alexander.

Kenneth Boyd himself was the Senior Prefect when news reached the school of the murder of one of its great OR heroes, so his use of the word ‘shocked’ nearly forty years later reflects his own memory of the news. In his history it is grouped with other significant events for the school in 1910: the death of John Hetherington, who died of meningitis in the Infirmary in May and in whose memory the Hetherington Scholarship is still awarded, the gift to Chapel of the cross and candlesticks made by George Sedding which are still in use, the newly formed OTC (now CCF) had its first camp at Farnborough and was inspected by Lord Kitchener, and the newly built Dining Hall was used for the first time on 1st November for the All Saints’ Day dinner. Local events juxtaposed against news from the international sphere. in 1891 and his death in Darfur in 1910, and it becomes very clear that being a soldier was simply what allowed him to be an explorer. Indeed, it seems amazing that he any time at all to take part in the ‘relief of Kumassi’. His own explanation can be found in his most celebrated book From the Niger to the Nile, published in 1907:

Every explorer looks upon the map of that part of the world which particularly calls him, and endeavours to find a spot that still affords opportunity for the special powers he may possess for finding out the secrets that it hides. ...with the hope that a locality, showing geographical peculiarities, might also reveal marked differences in its fauna. This last idea naturally took a strong hold on me, for I will now confess that my ruling passion is ornithology, and all my exploration might be described as taking the course pointed out by the birds.

His passion for ornithology began as a schoolboy collecting specimens for his personal museum in his home in Kent. It was undoubtedly fostered by the active Natural History Society at Radley, with its own museum housed in Covered Passage, and the support and encouragement for science introduced at the school by Warden Robert Wilson.

Alexander: African expeditions

Boyd Alexander came to A Social, along with his twin brother Robert, in 1887. He represented the school at boxing, but was not in any of the elite sports teams nor a prefect. Consequently, we have no photo of him as a school boy in our records. The Radley Register lists him first and foremost as a soldier. After leaving Radley in 1891 he served in West Africa, initially commissioned in the Gold Coast Constabulary, a militia battalion, and then from October 1900 until 1907 as a lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade. In that time he took part in operations against the Ashanti in the War of the Golden Stool, including what the Register records as ‘the relief of Kumassi’. This was a defining incident in the relationship between the British Empire and the Ashanti kings in which the British representative, Sir Frederick Mitchell Hodgson, after making a serious political blunder concerning the Ashanti royal throne, ended up besieged in a small stockade near the royal compound at Kumasi.

Two relief forces of 1,000 men were sent out to rescue him in June and July 1900, in one of which Boyd Alexander took part whilst still in the militia. But the Register entry then lists the expeditions which he led during the nineteen years between leaving Radley Boyd Alexander (1887)

Alexander was a systematic scientist not just a schoolboy collector. In 1893, two years after leaving school, his first published note appeared in the Zoologist, where he recorded an example of Harcourt’s StormPetrel (Oceanodroma castro), which had been picked up on the beach close to Littlestone, on the coast of Kent. It was the first British example of this species. In the spring and autumn of 1896 much of his time was spent on the coast of Kent studying the nesting-habits of the birds and their migrations, and his observations were published in three papers which appeared in the Zoologist of that year. Many of these observations were especially valuable as recording the movements of the various species on that part of the coast of Kent.

In 1897 he made his first major expedition to the Cape Verde Islands. He spent four months exploring, recording and collecting specimens. His ‘excellent and exhaustive paper’ on the Avifauna of the Cape Verde Islands was published in 1898. His most important discovery was the Raza lark (Spizocorys razae), only met with on the little desert island of Raza, which occupies an area of about three square miles. It is an example of the type of localised, island-based evolution which inspired Darwin’s work in the Galapagos Islands. It is now critically endangered.

In 1898 he joined the ‘Cape to Cairo Expedition’ and explored the lower part of the Zambesi and its tributary, the Kafue River. He identified several new species of birds, again all published in Ibis the journal of the Ornithological Society. He was beginning to be highly regarded as a scientist and explorer. This was confirmed following his expedition to the island of Fernando Po in 1902. Here he discovered a large number of new species, including the long-tailed TreeWarbler (Urolais mariae) representing a new genus and species. The expedition resulted in a series of nearly 500 specimens representing three new genera and 103 species, of which thirty-five proved to be new to science: ‘I owe this remarkable success to having traversed the high ground, my predecessors having confined their attentions to the lowlands.’ His next trip made him world-famous. It must be remembered that this was the era of the great Polar explorations when Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott were planning their race to the South Pole, eventually reaching it in 1911. Boyd Alexander’s expedition across Africa from west to east by its widest extent via Lake Chad also captured the public’s imagination. And like Scott and Amundsen, it was motivated by scientific exploration, specifically ornithology.

The Alexander-Gosling Expedition took three years from 1904 to 1907 to cross Africa from the Niger to the Nile concentrating on exploring the countries bordering Lake Chad. It resulted in the deaths of both Alexander’s companions, his younger brother Claud and his co-leader, Captain GB Gosling (Rifle Brigade). Twenty-nine new species were identified and the west-east route mapped for the first time. For his geographical discoveries Alexander received the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of Antwerp in 1907, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1908. He was also elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Geographical Society of Scotland in 1907 and made a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London. He was still working on the ornithological publications when he was killed in Darfur in Sudan.

Burr: Balkans, Bolsheviks and bugs

The year after Boyd Alexander left Radley another boy who was to become one of its most celebrated explorers and scientists joined the school. Malcolm Burr, B Social 1892, became both a Prefect and a member of the Cricket XI. Unlike Alexander, who was primarily self-educated as an ornithologist and went straight into military service after school, Burr went to New College, Oxford, eventually being awarded a DSc.

For AK Boyd he was an example of the best type of Radleian in an undistinguished period: [Radley] did not attract genius, and rarely first-rate ability;

Two of the new species of birds identified by Alexander during his expeditions across Africa: (left) the Long-Tailed Tree-Warbler (Urolais mariae) and (right) the Raza lark (Spizocorys razae).