Hello! Firstly thanks for subscribing to Fifty From Fifty and welcome to the first post proper. You can expect around about another 50 of these, unless of course you choose to unsubscribe which you can do so at anytime via the link at the bottom of this email. Obviously I hope you’ll stick around though.
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I suspect this will at times be a little self-indulgent nostalgia on my part, after all it’s me looking back over 50 years of life and remembering things that have happened to me and the lessons that I have learnt but I hope it will be interesting too. I’m conscious that memories are notoriously unreliable at times but in preparing to write this first post, I did manage to list well over 50 things to talk about, so hopefully some of it is more or less accurate. Which brings me to what I want to tell you about today……
As I’ve gotten older I’ve developed more of an interest in history than I ever had as a child. In particular military history and political history. In terms of military history my main interest is the Second World War, but from the perspective of war correspondents, artists and photographers. Whilst some were signed up as soldiers many of them never carried guns, their weapons were their pens and pencils, paintbrushes and cameras.
I’ll come back to talk about some of these again I suspect but as a primary school age child I really had no concept that these people existed. The Second World War to me was about Commando comics and playing with my mates reenacting scenes from movies we’d watched on the telly - if only we’d known then that most of those movies were completely inaccurate!
At that age though I was an avid reader. One of my favourite books was Clive King’s “Stig of the Dump”.
I dare say that you’ve read this too at some point? The cover above is pretty iconic, created by Edward Ardizzone who earlier in his career was a war artist:
I own both of these books, purchased probably 40 years apart, not realising at the time that they were the same person, and that those drawings (and words in the case of the latter diary) would peak my interests at such different times in my life.
Edward Ardizzone died in 1979, but had such a profound influence on my young life as a children’s book illustrator, which was his career after the war and his role as an official war artist. He illustrated many children’s books and wrote and illustrated many of his own too.
In my later life he were to have that profound influence again as I tracked down various books, articles and other media on war correspondents, artists and photographers. Many of whom died doing their unarmed duty but bought the war to the civilian populations at home through their words and images long before we had a 24/7 news cycle or social media was a thing.
I came across his name in a compendium about war artists and doing further research suddenly realised who he was and where our paths had crossed before. I had no clue that the war artist and the children’s writer/illustrator were the same person.
This wasn’t the past haunting me but it does prove that you never know when something from the past will appear back in your life at a later date.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it? Leave me a comment if you feel like it, and if this isn’t for you feel free to unsubscribe, no hard feelings!
I’m aiming to post something once a week for the next 50 weeks or so, but I haven’t quite yet worked out a timetable, so service might be intermittent to begin with.