New AcquisitionsThe Voyage of a Lifetime; Laurence L Longstaff; Wordsell Press, 2004; CA 16509.
‘It hasn’t been a bad voyage,’ concludes the author in this account of his busy life. To Australia as a little boy with his parents; back to England, and a Merchant Navy apprenticeship in the 1930s; employment in engineering throughout the Second World War; boat restoration projects, a few season’s Thames Estuary sailing and eventual emigration to New Zealand in 1952. There are interesting but brief references to events of those times: passing the barque Herzogin Cecile, unknowingly on her way to shipwreck; crossing Biscay as the Flying Enterprise struggled for survival not far away and best of all, a fascinating description of his ship’s laborious break-out from the ice-bound port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov.
In 216 pages the author describes, often in great detail, his days from infancy to 1952, but uses a further 64 only to cover from 1952 to retirement in 1978. I thought that this unbalanced the book in a curious way, especially as it appears that he and his wife continued to be just as active; their family increased from three to five and they built two more boats as well as a house. The soft-back book handles well and is in clear, easy-to-read print, but unfortunately the many in-text illustrations are of mediocre quality with two being nearly undecipherable. - EC
Page prepared 29 March 2005
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