Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Tuesday 30 June 2015

Hooptedoodle #178 - Juveniles!

Quick wildlife interlude - our garden is full of baby birds at the moment, and the Contesse has been busy with her camera. These pictures show some of the juveniles on our garden feeders, being fed or being shown how to use them by their parents.


For the first time, we have a family of Nuthatches - previously we have only seen odd individuals, but this Summer we have some chicks, and you can hear the distinctive chirping song throughout the day. I've never seen a baby Nuthatch before - this one is watching one of his parents working on the peanut feeder, and he appears to be unconvinced about all this silly hanging-upside-down business - none of the other birds seem to do this, and it must be a bit embarrassing.


And here is a rather chunky young Greater Spotted Woodpecker (left - red cap), who looks a bit large to still be getting nuts fed to him by his mum, but he doesn't seem embarrassed at all.

I realise that garden birds are perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, but we get a lot of pleasure from watching them, and they are quite a big part of our life here - we live in a very rural area, and our garden is next to a wood. Anyway - a baby nuthatch is certainly a first for me.

Just one more - this is a video clip my wife took with her iPhone in the car park at our local hospital - this baby Bluetit insisted on sitting on her car windscreen wiper - wouldn't budge off it, so eventually she had to pick it up and place it on a nearby bush. We like to think that its relatives would find it before too long.

Monday 29 June 2015

The Danube - Now I May Have to Go Back!

Regensburg
In September 2013 I went with a friend to realise a long-held fantasy and visit Napoleon's 1809 battlefields on the Danube. If you wish, you can read something of my trip here.

It was a great adventure for me - it's a wonderful part of the world, and we met some marvellous people - I was, as I said at the time, staggered by the kindness and the assistance we received from local enthusiasts. We had to scope our visit carefully, because of the time and funds we had available - we decided, reluctantly, not to visit Aspern-Essling or Wagram, and we never did make it to Landshut, but we spent some excellent days at Abensberg, Eggmühl, Ingolstadt and Ratisbon (Regensburg), and then moved on to enjoy the Army Museum and the cream cakes in Vienna.

Napoleon's 1809 campaign is something of a pet topic. I can hardly claim to possess a great deal of expertise, but it has always had a strong appeal - the Emperor and his Grande Armée maybe in their final glory, fabulous setting in the heartland of ancient Europe; I have spent some years collecting books on the period, and promising myself that, when I was retired, I would make it a serious study to keep my wits sharp.

Well, of course, I have now achieved the retired bit, and our 2013 trip was a great success and something I still think about a lot. As preparation for that visit I struggled to get an overview at the right sort of level to do some planning, and to see how the parts dovetailed. I experienced the latest in a series of ghastly failures to come to grips with Claudio Magris' literary travelogue, Danube, and probably decided, once and for all, that I am not worthy. I made better headway with Patrick Leigh Fermor's epic journals describing his walk along the Danube in the 1930s, but PLF, sadly, did not get to the Regensburg area. On the history front, I found John A Gill's four wonderful books on the 1809 campaign to be too detailed for a fast pass, and promised myself that they will form a major element in the "serious study" period which is yet to come. The general histories, such as David Chandler's and a couple of John Elting's books, did not get into enough detail - excellently written, but aimed at a high enough level to fit into a broader narrative.

Eventually I did my scoping based on F Loraine Petre's 1809 book, plus one by Gunther E Rothenburg - that worked OK, though the maps in Petre's book are beggars to unfold, and are definitely not recommended for windy battlefields. I also brought back a great stack of archive material from the Abensberg museum and elsewhere which has taken a place in the heap for future study.



Well, almost two years later I have finally got hold of just the books I should have had as a starting point. I recently bought James R Arnold's Crisis on the Danube and Napoleon Conquers Austria, which, respectively, cover the whirlwind period at the start of the campaign and the later period near Vienna. Highly recommended - these are moderately sized paperbacks (the latest editions are self-published, primarily because Mr Arnold was not prepared to settle for the kind of quality associated with modern publishing and manufacture), written in a sensible, lucid style of which Petre himself would surely have approved. The level of detail is excellent for an introduction to the subject, or for setting a framework for deeper study. I particularly appreciated the nicely-constructed diplomatic timeline at the beginning of the Crisis volume, and the battle descriptions are clear and concise and supported by useful monochrome maps and illustrations. I am enjoying making good progress through the first volume - this is exactly the sort of overview I could have done with in 2013, and will set me up nicely for a more detailed potter with Gill's books and the Elting & Esposito atlas (and, if I can find a decent one, an appropriate boardgame would be good, to follow the moves). Only things I will miss now will be the beers and the walks and Dampfnudel Uli's steam dumplings.

You know, I may have to go back sometime. I have mentioned the subject to the Contesse. She would not be up for standing in the rain on the Isle of Lobau, I think, but the other aspects of such a trip would probably be fine.

Arnold's website is worth a visit, by the way.


I'm also currently reading John Gribbin's excellent In Search of Schrödinger's Cat - a layman's guide to quantum mechanics. Thus far I have been following the historic development of the ideas - he hasn't lost me yet - and we are fast approaching the bit where I may get a little spinning of the head and a violent craving for caffeine. I am not intimidated - the whole topic is explained in a straightforward, clear manner which I have found to be excellent (even for an absent-minded old goat such as me). Though the academic fields are (literally?) light years apart, Dr Gribbin's book offers a pleasing contrast to the Claudio Magris' volume I mentioned above, which is mostly a monument to its own cleverness.

I am not embarrassed to be seen to be reading popular science - most of the physics I covered in my mathematics degree course would have been very familiar to Good Old Sir Isaac, so this is a rewarding area of, well, gentle enlightenment rather than education, I guess; rewarding if I can avoid explosion of the cortex. There seems little risk of my using this blog to further our shared understanding of the quantum, but it is going well, thus far.

Cortex intact? Check...

Friday 26 June 2015

1809 Spaniards - Milicias Provinciales completed


...and here are the same flags, with attached infantry. Four battalions of provinciales, in M1805 regulation dress, with a proportion of the other ranks in brown jackets instead of white. For what seemed like good reasons at the time, I did one battalion in white, one in brown, and two mixed. All officers have white jackets, since rank has its privileges.

My thanks to my friend Goya for help with the command figures.

These fellows look fine - I'm pleased with them - but this is the militia, gentlemen - in Commands & Colors these fellows suffer triple retreats, so they need to be treated with care. Fortunately they are spread among the line divisions...


I took photos with and without flash, and since I didn't think either was very successful, I've posted both! These guys can now go safely into the box files, and I can start looking at some more cavalry. I'm also giving some thought to a "unit" of British infantry (mixed facings) armed with shovels, to provide some labour for siege trenches. Hmmm - spoiled for choice!

Thursday 25 June 2015

1809 Spaniards - Flags for the Milicias Provinciales

More downloadables from Max Foy's Cheapo Productions Homebrewed Flags department. If these are useful, please feel free to use them - please just mention me if you pass them further. If you click on this image, to get the big version, save that, and print it on your premier-quality paper with the image 50mm high - that will give you flags which are correct for 1/72 or 20mm scale. As I always mention, the green surrounds are not part of the flags, and the resolution will not be good enough to print them any larger than 28mm scale.

Provincial Militia, 1809 - Top, L to R: Granada, Jaen
Bottom, L to R: Ciudad Real, Cordoba

Here, then, are the regulation coronelas for the provinciales of Granada, Jaen, Ciudad Real and Cordoba, all ready to have a bad day at the Battle of Ucles. I hope to have the tabletop units finished,  with their flags, in a day or two, so a photo should appear in the fullness of time.

I confess that I wimped out on the Cordoba flag - I was so impressed by Bueno's prints of blue militia flags for units from the Asturias that yesterday I produced a striking red, non-regulation flag for Cordoba bearing some funky text and the province's coat of arms. It looked fantastic, but after a night worrying about it I replaced it with the normal, boring coronela this morning. Of course I haven't the faintest idea what the unit actually carried into battle, but the version reproduced here is pretty much what they were supposed to carry!

Wednesday 24 June 2015

Fringe Players - tabletop units with an undeserved popularity...

Regimiento de la Muerte, 1809
Most wargames armies have some unit somewhere that turns out to be a bit of an embarrassment – mostly it’s because by rights it shouldn’t be there, and mostly that is because their owner fancied the uniforms, or found the figures cheap at a swapmeet. How many miniature Napoleonic French armies contain a completely inappropriate unit of Mamelukes of the Guard, for example? My own follies in the building up of my Peninsular War armies include a post-1813 line chevaux-legers unit (never set foot in Spain), which I still include in the OOB when it suits – well, they might have appeared (I got some old Garrison figures on eBay); the other was a smashing unit of Les Higgins/PMD Scots Greys – I converted the command figures and everything. This unit still causes me some grief, in retrospect – they were absolutely beautiful, but historically the regiment spent the entire Peninsular War in Britain and – more seriously – they threatened to encourage me to expand my collection to cover Waterloo, with two distinct types of light dragoons and so on. So I sold them on eBay a few years ago, and they went for the starting bid, which was a major heart breaker - not entirely because I am a skinflint, but because I loved them and was insulted.

In this vein, one unit which has always intrigued me is the Regimiento de la Muerte, one of the Spanish “new regiments” raised after the French invasion. These guys appear in just about every known book of uniforms for the Peninsular War, the early use of a British looking uniform is notable, and they became such an iconic Spanish unit (beginning at a time when relatively little was known about that army - by me, certainly) that a lot of tabletop Spanish armies had them. Bueno did a few illustrations of them, though I’m not sure why they have such prominence - Douglas Miniatures, in particular, had only three Spanish Napoleonic figures – a classic line grenadier, with bearskin, and a fusilero and officer of the “Death Regt”. The Death boys will paint up as 1812 blue-uniformed chaps, so they are useful anyway.

I have recently chanced upon a small additional supply of 1812-style S-Range Spaniards, which is very pleasing, and one possibility was that they could be painted up as the Muerte, and thus swell the ranks of my 1809 army, since my 1812 army is probably quite large enough. Problem is that my OOB is based on the battles of Ucles and (a bit) Ocaña, and Muerte were not at either of these places. Out of general interest, I thought I’d check out my JJ Sañudo database, and see what the facts are for Muerte.

Funcken: Who's the guy in the middle, then?
Well now. First thing to note is that their full name was Voluntarios de la Muerte o Victoria, they were raised in 1809, and disbanded 18 months later, and the second thing is that there was a completely different, much more famous light infantry unit named the Voluntarios de la Victoria (this is Volunteers of Victory – nothing at all to do with the city of Vitoria) who were featured in the old S-Range catalogue (SN7s, complete with brimmed hat) and had a long and distinguished war record right through to Toulouse in 1814.

Clonard plate: Left to Right: Voluntarios de la Patria, Leales de Fernando VII,
S
anta Fe, La Muerte, Voluntarios de la Victoria
So what of the iconic Muerte, so well known to wargamers? Since it is not lengthy, and might be of interest, this is their full regimental history:


30 Jan 1809 - Single-battalion unit of line infantry raised by D. Francisco Colombo

18 Mar – present at action of Villafranca

20 Mar – official army return describes them as “Regto de la Victoria”, 1 battalion, strength 500 men, under “Capitan” Colombo

22 Mar – 500 men, under Colombo, present at action of Pontevedra

23 Mar – At Vigo, in Galicia – regt formed into 3 battalions, totalling 1000 men; these were built around 1 company of the “Regto de la Victoria”, 1 company of the line Regto de Zamora and 1 company of the Granaderos Provinciales de Galicia, with a substantial intake of volunteer recruits

24 Apr – Action of Santiago; regiment listed as “Regimiento de la Muerte”, consisting of 3 battalions.

26 Apr – at Caldas de Reyes

2 May – attached to La Carrera’s Division on the Miño, at a strength of 1 battalion [where were the rest?]

June – at the Siege of Tuy

7 Jun – 1 battalion present at Battle of Puente Sampayo, with Noroña’s Divn.

30 Jun – return has “Regto de la Victoria o Muerte” at a strength of 1725 men, which seems unlikely.

3 Jul - …they are once again “de la Muerte”, commanded by Colombo.

18 Oct – Battle of Tomames, 1 battalion with the Vanguard Divn, commanded by Mariscal de Campo Martin de la Carrera – 1 killed, 5 wounded, 1 slightly wounded(?).

23 Nov – Action of Medina del Campo, with La Carrera’s Vanguard Divn.

28 Nov – Battle of Alba de Tormes – 148 men present with La Carrera’s Divn.

18 Dec – Regimental cadre(?) marched to Galicia; 135 men transferred to 1st Voluntarios de Cataluña [which is, in fact, one of the units in my Ucles OOB army].

5 Feb 1810 – Possible that 1st Vols de Cataluña present at defence of Badajoz.

15 Jun – 1 battalion in Galicia, with Imaz’s “Vanguardia Provisional” division.

1 Jul – regiment disbanded – remaining strength absorbed by the Regimiento de Lobera.

And that, it seems, was that. It would appear that the battalions served separately, and their war service was brief but active – the numbers seem to have fluctuated wildly, though this may just be dodgy record keeping, and I would guess that the bulk of the men in the ranks had little training or experience. I have no wish to disapprove of anyone who served in defence of his native land, but the unit seems to be notable primarily because plates of their uniform survive rather than as a result of any particularly distinguished combat record. I shan’t bother adding them to my 1809 line-up – not least because they didn’t exist until some months after my target OOB.

I find Sañudo’s database a veritable goldmine of information – a great find.




Monday 22 June 2015

The Pride and the Passion (1957)

I was reminded by a post on Stryker's splendid blog of my appreciation of CS Forester's two novels of Napoleonic land warfare in the Peninsular War - Death to the French and The Gun - and of the travesty of a film version of The Gun which staggered into cinemas in 1957, under the title The Pride and the Passion.


It would be possible to devote a very long criticism to this film, highlighting the complete lack of respect to both history and Forester's fine book, the awful characterisations and accents, the unrelenting flood of moronic national stereotypes and, especially, the spectacular switch of the plot to replace one of the guerrilla leaders with Sophia Loren; I shall rise above all this, and I merely offer a couple of glimpses, for those who have not seen this epic and for those who, like me, have seen it but may not be able to believe how bad it was.

Behind the impressive branding this was, as you will observe, a joint production by the Reader's Digest and Miss Bentham's class at Beaconsfield Primary School, but it cannot be faulted on expense or dedication to tasteless excess. Here is the assault on Avila, which is stirring stuff, though you may feel that the French could have been a bit more businesslike about the defence. I recall that my cousin and I, after we had seen it, were not surprised that poor old Sophia was wounded in the chest, since, if only from the point of view of proportional surface area, that seemed a very high probability. Shame, though.


Whatever else the French could have done better, I certainly hope they executed the uniform consultant - and you've seen nothing - wait till you see the cavalry. I was tempted to see how cheaply I could get a DVD of this film, but I haven't found one cheap enough yet. I shall continue to keep an eye open. In the meantime, perhaps you would join me in a quiet salute to the real CS Forester.

Wednesday 17 June 2015

An Important Anniversary


18th June, of course, is just like any other day, and this year it happens to fall on a Thursday, but, as you go about your business today, do not forget that this is an important anniversary. As anyone with the slightest awareness of history knows, on this day in 1892 the first Macadamia nuts (which are native to New Guinea and Australasia) were planted in Hawaii.


For anyone with more of an interest in military and political history, this is also the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty (or Pacification) of Berwick (1639), by which Charles I was forced to acknowledge that he had been defeated - expensively and embarrassingly - by the Scots, and this brought to an end the First Bishops' War. He followed this up with the equally successful Second Bishops' War, and - since he was now on a bit of a roll - then proceeded to declare war on his own parliament, which caused a great deal of unpleasantness and killed a lot of people - including himself.

Oh well.

Bishops' Wars

Saturday 13 June 2015

Hooptedoodle #177 - TB Maund - A Prince Among Nerds


I have occasionally mentioned here my interest in buses - I have also emphasised that it stops short of being a hobby, as my little box of model buses stops short of being a true collection. This is a matter of policy. My focus, if there is one, is on the nostalgia associated with vintage buses from my home town and the surrounding area during my childhood, which is a bit contrived, I guess, as are a lot of old men's follies, but there is something profoundly special about buses for a man of my age, in a way which may be less obvious to, even less easily understood by, someone from a later generation.

For a start, public transport was an ever-present in the 1950s and 1960s - just about everything I ever did, everywhere I went, involved buses - half the childhood conversations I can remember seem to have taken place on the bus. Life was arranged around bus routes and bus timetables - and the limits of everything acceptable and decent were defined by the times of the last bus home. I knew people whose families owned cars, of course, but my family never had one until after I had gone away to university (you don't suppose that was deliberate, do you?). Buses were, and remain, important to me.

The other thing about old buses is the photographs in the hobby books - wow! - time-capsule stuff. Some bus enthusiast taking a routine photograph of the number 82 driving along Park Road in 1953 is just another old picture of a bus, but if it wasn't for the bus enthusiast no-one in his right mind would ever have taken a casual picture of Park Road otherwise, so these old snaps are a goldmine of social history - absolute nostalgia bomb. I bought a couple of old books, to fill in some of the huge gaps in my understanding of the subject, and I was hooked. I am still concentrating on what used to be termed the North West (a term which must have mystified anyone from Fort William), but I have branched out (ha!) into trams, local railways and the Mersey Ferries, and my time horizons have widened a lot.

One common thread that I picked up on straight away is that a large proportion of these books is the work of one Thomas Bruce Maund - TB Maund - the high priest of Northern transport. I have learned to associate his name on the cover with a guarantee of a well-written, balanced, thorough presentation, and (OCD bonus point) I believe that I have not been aware of any transposed pictures, misprints, spelling errors or even incorrect punctuation. Mr Maund is the business. Bus-spotting may be another classic example of a minority interest (no-one ever got rich publishing books about Birkenhead buses), but it is blessed - TBM is a perfect example of the sort of quiet superhero without whom hobbies would be impossible - a man whose love of his subject becomes a treasure trove for those who come after.

Mr Maund is, of course, very famous in his field (though he would have hated the very idea), but I had never heard of him until last year. I have more of his works on order - this time a 2-volume history of the Mersey Ferries - and I know they will be excellent. He died just a couple of years ago - after a lifetime of painstaking research and careful, flawless documentation; he died before I had even heard of him, but I hope you will forgive me if I extend this off-topic post to offer a small tribute to him - this was his obituary in the journal of the proceedings of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, of which TBM was, of course, a Fellow.




Obituary: Thomas Bruce Maund FCILT

Renowned transport historian and author Thomas Bruce Maund, former bus company manager and author of some of the most authoritative transport history books, died on 1st October 2013 at the age of 89. 
He was born in Wallasey on 10th August 1924 and had remarkable personal memories of trams and buses in the Merseyside area, which he was able to date back as far as the age of four. He was almost certainly the last person alive with clear memories of the operation of Wallasey trams, the system having closed on 30th November 1933.

He attended the Oldershaw School in his home town and his first job was as a junior railway clerk in a local goods office. After army service in Africa towards the end of the Second World War and for a period thereafter, he began work in the bus industry in 1948. Initially he worked for Basil Williams’s Hants and Sussex operation, involved in what he described as: ‘the seamy side of what appeared to be a glossy operation’. The following year he obtained a position with Ribble Motor Services, where he was known as Tom. He served the company for 18 years, with the parent company and with Standerwick, latterly as District Traffic Superintendent in Blackpool and finally Preston. For a time in 1966/67, he was seconded to the Traffic Research Corporation to work on the Merseyside Area Land Use/Transport Study (MALTS) project. 

In early 1970, he took the opportunity to move abroad when he took up a position with United Transport in Kenya, working for Kenya Bus Service in Nairobi. Staying with United Transport, he moved on to South Africa in 1973, where he worked for African Bus Service in Pretoria, Greyhound Bus Lines in Krugersdorp and Rustenburg Bus Services in Rustenburg, before finishing his working days at United Transport’s head office in Johannesburg. 
He took a great interest in training and further education, lecturing at colleges at Blackpool and Preston and at Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg. He was a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Transport, having studied for his Institute exams in his early Ribble days. He retired in 1987 and he and his wife Kathleen (Kay, who died in 2002) returned to the UK in 1992 and made their home in Prenton, Wirral. 
Alongside his professional career, Bruce was developing a reputation as a thorough researcher of transport history and a prolific author of his findings.

He could trace his interest in transport back to the late 1920s, having vivid memories of the introduction of double-deck buses in his home town on 4th April 1928. His family accepted his interest but, in his own words: ‘All attempts to wean me off my “mania” failed.’ His adventurous nature took him on a solo trip to Liverpool via the ferry at the age of six (which he never told his family about!), and he remembered seeing Ribble buses in Lime Street, shortly after the company had changed its terminal arrangements. The Ribble terminus gave him a ready source of used tickets, and by the age of 10 he was already what he described as a serious ticket collector, identifying different types of ticket and forming them into sets. After school, he was often to be found watching traffic movements at the busy Seacombe ferry terminus and committed the full contents of the Wallasey Corporation destination blind to memory. Over 70 years later, he could still recite this verbatim. 

The reward of a Royal Enfield bicycle (cost £3 19s 9d) for passing the grammar school scholarship widened his horizons and he undertook ambitious cycle trips to places as far afield as Greater Manchester and the Potteries. He also got as far as Birmingham to visit his aunt unannounced, but she was out at the time and he and his bicycle caught the train home. Until this time, Bruce was unaware of the existence of any other bus enthusiasts, although he had a small set of contacts with whom he corresponded in connection with his ticket collection. One of these was the tramway expert W H Bett who lived in Birmingham and who persuaded him to take up membership of the Light Railway Transport League. Through the LRTL Merseyside area representative he met Peter Hardy, who, before being called up for war service, had been researching the history of Liverpool bus routes. This initial contact awakened Bruce’s serious interest in road passenger transport history, as well as starting a long friendship that lasted until Peter Hardy’s death in 1986. 
Through Peter Hardy, Bruce met a wide range of other enthusiasts, including Omnibus Society North Western Branch founder member Jack Baker. He joined the OS in 1943 and was one of its longest-standing members at the time of his death. He acted as the Branch’s visits secretary for a short time, helping to organise a fine array of summer visits that reached, in that pre-motorway era, as far as Darlington and Northampton. In the winter he was involved in arranging a programme of meetings with guest speakers. He subscribed to Buses Illustrated from its first edition in 1949 and it was fitting that the month he died coincided with the current buses calendar displaying a picture of Wallasey PD2 No 54. 

His first piece of published work was an article about Bere Regis and District which he wrote for Modern Transport while based at Salisbury during the latter years of the war, for which he was paid £5. He followed this up with a piece on Kenya Buses when posted to that country by the army in 1945–47. With respect to the bus industry, in his own words he had become: ‘interested in everything but as a consequence became expert on nothing’. He therefore made the decision to concentrate on the Merseyside area because that was what he knew best and began work in the early 1950s on what was much later to emerge as the five volume Liverpool Transport series, jointly authored with John Horne. He revelled in making new discoveries from minute books or other records, and in debunking some oft-repeated untrue statement. His first publication was a booklet in 1958 for the Omnibus Society on Transport in 
Rochdale and District, much of this being based on material left to the OS through the estate of a deceased member who had been researching the subject. This was followed soon afterwards by one on Local Transport in Birkenhead and District based on Bruce’s own research. He went on to author or co-author a total of 28 books during his lifetime. 
Through well-known Liverpool photographer and enthusiast Norman Forbes, Bruce was introduced to John Horne, who Forbes was aware was ploughing a similar furrow with respect to research on Liverpool. The Horne/Maund partnership produced the first volume of Liverpool Transport in 1975 (published by the LRTL) and the lavish set of books – including a significantly rewritten version of the first volume in 1995 – stands as probably the most thorough piece of published transport research on any UK city. It was all the more remarkable for the fact that for the majority of the period Bruce was living in South Africa and much of his contribution to the research was conducted on trips back to the UK, where he and Kay would work as a team at the Public Record Office and local archives to record as much information as they could in their limited time available.


Following his return to the UK in retirement, Bruce’s output averaged almost a book a year, with detailed books on Crosville, Ribble and St Helens (the latter jointly with Mervyn Ashton) and a series of illustrated soft-backed books for a Wirral-based publisher of local interest titles. Although predominantly targeted towards buses, his researches widened to cover titles on tramways (a Birkenhead and Wallasey title with Martin Jenkins in 1987), two volumes on Mersey Ferries (the second one again jointly with Martin Jenkins), and three railway books. He was persuaded to write up some of his previously unpublished material on Birkenhead and early bus services in South Lancashire and these were published by the Omnibus Society, the latter being his final title in 2011. He also undertook editing work for publishers such as Venture Publications and NBC Books, and was often asked to provide text verification for other transport titles. 
This prodigious volume of published work is a fitting legacy to a man who devoted a large part of his life to his research and, importantly, ensured it reached a wide public. Although at times appearing stern – and with what could be viewed as unreconstructed opinions forged in different times – Bruce was loyal to his friends and colleagues and a devoted family man. He is survived by his two sons Derek and Philip, granddaughter Vanessa and great-grandsons Liam and Ethan.

Charles Roberts and Ken Swallow