William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Copyright © Joshua Levine 2017
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Joshua Levine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Map by John Gilkes
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Excerpt from The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1937), reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell; (Victor Gollancz 1937, Martin Secker & Warburg 1959, Penguin Books 1962, 1989, Penguin Classics 2001). Copyright © 1937 by Eric Blair. This edition copyright © the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1986; and Copyright © 1958 and renewed 1986 by the Estate of Sonia B. Orwell, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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Source ISBN: 9780008227876
Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008227883
Version: 2017-05-22
To Lionel who inspired me.
To Peggy whom I hope to inspire.
To Philip Brown, Eric Roderick, Harold ‘Vic’ Viner and Charlie Searle with thanks.
Contents
3 The Long and the Short and the Tall
One afternoon, sitting in the National Archives in Kew, I opened a file containing a report by Commander Michael Ellwood. Commander Ellwood was in charge of communications during the Dunkirk evacuation, and he wrote, in passing, of a Marconi transmitter/receiver that was used for a very short time before it broke down – due to ‘sand in the generator’.
This seemed surprising. How had sand got inside this precious piece of equipment? The Marconi TV5 was a sizeable box, and the memory of Laurel and Hardy delivering a piano in The Music Box flashed through my mind. Had two particularly clumsy ratings dropped it on the beach? Had Captain William Tennant, the Senior Naval Officer Dunkirk, yelled at them in frustration when they told him what they had just done to his only piece