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by Hervey Benham
| Hardback in Very Good condition, in a Good Dust Jacket. The book in Pale Blue cloth, has white lettering across spine. Pictorial end-papers. The Dust Jacket , grubby, has small pieces missing on top/bottom of spine and flap joints. Small nicks in top/bottom edges, 2.5cm closed tear up from bottom edge in front cover, unclipped, complete.
First published in GB 1955 by George G. Harrap & Co Ltd.
240 pages, illustrated with 32 plates in half-tone, and 13 illustrations in text by Roger Finch.
15cm x 21.4cm x 3.1cm.
Weight: 475gms.
Cover price: 18/-.
'Once Upon A Tide' is a colourful picture of the ships and seamen of our east coast seaboard as they were in the two centuries which lie just beyond the reach of memory - the period from Defoe to Dickens.
The author believes that this was the golden age of coastal shipping, and he describes the days when every town which could contrive a link with the sea turned its face to the water-side. Nowadays, their quays are likely to be deserted, and uncared for. The focus is on the football ground.
Mr Benham's research has uncovered a mass of interesting information that touches many aspects of life. First and foremost there are the changes that have come about in shipping. Medieval crayers and cromsters, and the square-rigged ketches of the seventeenth century made way for the brigs and sloops of the eighteenth, and these in turn gave place to the schooners and, finally, to the sailing barges, which now keep alive the last flicker of the old tradition.
This is a book of particular interest to East Coast yachtsmen and all students of maritime history and British coastal shipping, but there is plenty, too, for the general reader. There are press-gangs, smugglers, wreckers, and pirates, combined with commercial enterprises, social customs and the ebb and flow of coastal towns' fortunes.
Hervey Benham was educated at Colchester Royal Grammar School and at Charterhouse. During the last war he served in the Royal Navy, was wounded and invalided out. Now he is the editor of the 'Essex County Standard' at Colchester. He lives at West Mersea, in Essex, is married, and has a daughter.
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Publisher: George G. Harrap & Co Ltd
ISBN:
Condition: VG / G |
Issue No.: 1st
1955
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| Postage & Handling to UK mainland: £4.00 | Price: £4.00
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