Hurrah for the wavy navy
Uncommon courage: The Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II
Julia Jones (Bloomsbury, £20)
AS a boy, I was enthralled by Peter Scott’s television broadcasts from the Wildlfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, which he had founded in 1946. Scott was the son of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott who, in his dying letter from near the South Pole, urged Peter’s mother to ‘make the boy interested in natural history’ if she could, adding that it was ‘better than games’.
‘I like a few amateurs around. It reminds you that there is an outside world’
It wasn’t only the wildfowl that he talked about so engagingly that fascinated me, or his oils and watercolours of geese in flight (even in black and white, as television then was); there was something in his voice, eternally calm, bespeaking some deep wisdom. It wasn’t until later, that I learned he was in fact Lt-Cdr Peter (later Sir Peter) Scott RNVR, DSC and Bar. His book’s subtitle, , referred principally to the motor torpedo boats (MTB) that relied on speed and daring rather than on armour and heavy firepower, and I realised how even more peremptory his words would have been in action.
