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The Apley Legion: A Parade of Servicemen from a Shropshire Estate

The Apley Legion: A Parade of Servicemen from a Shropshire Estate

by Graham Jones (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2014

    $13.95
Synopsis

Apley Hall is said to be P G Wodehouse's inspiration for Blandings Castle. His characters were eccentric, however it is the real characters whose lives will intrigue and endure. These are their stories. Labourers, tradesmen and the gentry banded together, put on uniform and served in almost every campaign of the twentieth century. Some never returned. Apley men witnessed historic events, atomic tests, state funerals and the invasion of Normandy. The story might have been different had Hitler won the war and used the Hall as a country retreat, but ordinary men stood in the way: the carpenter who defused the bombs, the plasterer who flew through flak on a thousand-bomber raid, the forester behind the lines in Burma. The procession of lads march on, going out to protect the nation and return to the peace of the Shropshire countryside.

$13.95

Quantity

2 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 424
 Publisher: SilverWood Books Ltd
Published: 10 Feb 2014
ISBN 10: 178132137X
ISBN 13: 9781781321379

Author Bio
Graham Jones spent his childhood and youth on Apley Estate. He attended the village school, shared a classroom with evacuees from Liverpool and watched convoys of American troops pass by to help liberate Europe. He travelled the world but was always drawn back to the fields of his boyhood. A member of the Apley Park Branch of the Royal British Legion for more than fifty years, he knew personally many of the characters in this book. The eccentric Baron Berners remembered Apley as 'an earthly paradise for children', and so it was for Graham and his pals. Small boys were free to roam and explore every woodland track and watery hollow, build dens and sail rafts on the Severn. They committed acts of vandalism, lit fires, stole garden produce, poached rabbits in the hedgerows and fish from the river. With knives, catapults and airguns, they killed wildlife and practised tribal warfare, but they had respect for the village bobby, the old soldiers of the Great War and their heroes who returned from far-flung battlefields in 1945. This book is dedicated to their memory and to the generations that followed, the lads who served in Malaya, Korea, Northern Ireland, the Gulf and Afghanistan.