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    Around the World in 80 Years
    Around the World in 80 Years
    Around the World in 80 Years
    Ebook212 pages31 minutes

    Around the World in 80 Years

    By Eric Newby

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    About this ebook

    An illustrated ebook documenting the hugely varied and always entertaining career of one of Britain’s best-loved travel writers.

    Born in London in 1919, Eric Newby was educated at St Paul’s School. He began his travelling career in a perambulator commuting between Hammersmith Bridge and such seaside resorts as Frinton. In 1938 he persuaded his father to have him apprenticed to the four-masted Finnish barque Moshulu and, with camera in tow, sailed in the last Grain Race from Australia to Europe by way of Cape Horn – the beginning of a lifelong passion for both travel and photography.

    During the war Newby served in the Black Watch and the Special Boat Service and was awarded the Military Cross. It was as a prisoner of war in Italy that he first met Wanda, his beloved wife and travelling companion of many years. Following the War he spent ten years as a commercial traveller and in a London couture house before resuming his travelling career when he decided to take A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

    Whatever else he was doing, he has always travelled on a grand scale, whether under his own steam or as Travel Editor of the Observer. Over the years he has mined the richly comic seam of his varied experiences to produce many popular travel classics, such as Slowly Down the Ganges, Love and War in the Apennines, A Traveller’s Life, A Small Place in Italy and A Merry Dance Around the World. In all of his adventures his camera has never been far from his side, and the 250 photographs reproduced in this volume represent some of his finest work. Newby’s accompanying recollections are full of his trademark self-deprecating humour and highly observant sense of the incongruous.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateFeb 21, 2013
    ISBN9780007404193
    Around the World in 80 Years
    Author

    Eric Newby

    Eric Newby was born in London in 1919. During World War II, he served in the Special Boat Section and was captured. He married the girl who helped him to escape, and for the next 50 years she was at his side on many adventures. After the war, he worked in the fashion business and book publishing but travelled on a grand scale, sometimes as the Travel Editor for the Observer. He was made CBE and awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Guild of Travel Writers. He died in 2006.

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      Book preview

      Around the World in 80 Years - Eric Newby

      Introduction

      In a Surrey lane aged about three and a half having suffered a mishap.

      Myself and Father, somewhere on the South Coast, c. 1920

      In a Thames backwater with my father, aged about seven.

      To have reached the age of eighty years more or less unscathed is by no means une affaire mince, an insignificant matter, which is how a French friend of more or less the same age described it. How I contrived to reach sixty and then seventy without noticing it is still a mystery to me. When I was young, sixty-five was the age when bank managers (a species now becoming extinct) used to retire. They were good, clean living chaps who, in the not too distant past had played cricket and rugger on Saturdays against teams from other banks. This was the moment when, having arrived at the age of sixty-five, they were given gold watches, and in the nicest possible way told to make themselves scarce (otherwise given the chop). It was said, and widely believed, that within a year of receiving their awards – and marching orders – many of them would be dead. But being eighty-eight plus is a different matter (mince) altogether. This is the time when sprightly septuagenarians start giving up their seats to us eighty-year-olds on public transport and those who bid us ‘mind how you go!’ really mean it.

      What was I doing when I passed through a number of ‘valleys of death’ unscathed? I am still trying to remember what I was up to all those years, when I could have been the recipient of a gold watch, if I had been a bank manager. Some of the time I must have been managing something myself– something I have never been conspicuously good at.

      Only recently have I begun to appreciate the fascination my father must have felt when he himself was well over eighty and met a gentleman who had presented him with a visiting card on which were embossed the words ‘Mr Thos. W. Bowler,’ followed by an address in Walton-on-Thames which conjured up visions of a rather fine riverside house. To which my father had added the following codicil in neat pencil: ‘Met on train. The originator of the Bowler Hat?’ Like a man of the Renaissance my father was constantly being overcome by the wonders of the world in which he lived. Walking down a street he would suddenly glimpse some odd cloud formation, or a man with a goitrous protuberance, and without warning would stop in his tracks in order to enjoy the sight more closely.

      As a result the simplest excursion made by our family resembled an extended streetfighting patrol in hostile territory, its members taking up entire streets.

      My father, unknown date

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