Page 117 - The Wish Stream Year of 2022

ERIC NEWBY
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 adver- tising agency. In 1938 he served as a deck hand on the Finnish Windjammer Moshulu taking part in the 1938 ‘Grain Race’. The unofficial competi- tion 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. Comment- ing that the mast he had to climb was ‘as tall as Nelson’s Column’, Newby took hundreds of photographs on the voyage and, in 1956, wrote the best-selling 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 learnt Urdu, and later North Africa, he was one of the early members of the Special Boat Sec- tion. However, in August 1942, he was captured during a raid on the Sicilian Coast and became a Prisoner of War. In 1943, he escaped and was sheltered in the Apennine moun-
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 dis-
tains by locals, including a Slo- vene 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 a Military Cross for his actions during the Sicily Raid.
Soon after the outbreak of war, Newby trained at Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Black Watch in 1940.
pense with an assistant and illustrate his own books. Indeed, his 1975 World Atlas of Exploration secured his financial future for life. In 1994 he was awarded the CBE and given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the British Guild of Travel Writers. He was also surprised by Eamonn Andrews and his red book for an episode of This Is Your Life.
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 sec- ond was as a travel writer where he and Wanda would decamp to far-flung parts of the world for months at a time.
Newby’s books were written for easy reading and dotted with self-deprecating humour and, although the quality of his output diminished with age, the quantity did not. Some journalists com- mented unkindly, but truthfully, that he ‘was writ- ten out’ – but he could not stop producing works and his last book; A Book of Lands and Peoples was published when he was 84. Survived by Wanda and their two children, Eric Newby CBE MC died in Guildford on 20th October 2006.
HISTORICAL 115