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Eric Newby 1940.
The son of parents in the dressmaking
trade, George Eric Newby was born in
Hammersmith on 6th December 1919.
Educated at St Paul’s School, Barnes,
he left at 17 to work in an advertising
agency. In 1938, he served as a deckhand
on the Finnish windjammer Moshulu
taking part in the 1938 ‘Grain Race’.
The unofficial competition pitted sailing
ships racing to transport their cargo of grain from Australia to Europe via Cape Horn. Moshulu was the fastest ship that year, completing the journey in 91 days. Commenting that the mast he had to climb was ‘as tall as Nelson’s Column’ when he wasn’t looking after the ship’s pig, Newby took hundreds of photographs on the voyage. In 1956, he wrote the bestselling book The Last Grain Race.
Soon after the outbreak of war, Newby trained at Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Black Watch in 1940. Serving firstly in India, where he learned Urdu, and later in North Africa, he was one of the early members of the SBS. However, in August 1942, he was captured during a raid on the Sicilian coast and became a POW. In 1943, he escaped and was sheltered in the Apennine Mountains by locals, including a Slovene woman named Wanda Skof. Recaptured in 1944, he spent the remainder of the war as a POW before returning to the UK, where he was awarded the MC for his actions during the Sicily raid.
Securing a posting back to Italy on a commission to trace and reward Italians who had helped the allies, he was reunited with Wanda and they married. He later wrote Love and War in the Apennines, which was made into a film in 2001. For the next 20 years, Newby led two parallel lives. The first was conventional in the fashion industry, including four years as the ladies’ dress buyer for John Lewis and, in this way, he supported his young family. The second was as a travel writer, where he and Wanda would decamp to far-flung parts of the world for months at a time.
In 1964, he became travel editor of The Observer while continuing to churn out travel books, often writing two at the same time. He also became an expert photographer, enabling him to dispense with an assistant and illustrate his own books. Indeed, his
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