Poole, UK

[jb7]

Christopher, me too.

Going to have to remember to be more polite to you in future-

[cjbroadbent]

...Did you by any chance do RN (commando) Photo Course at Hamworthy?

No such thing as photography then there. RM, not RN, so I did a lot of damage to an LCT. We are talking about 1955.

[adrian tyler]

Mental lint. Many threads converge in that area.

Two teenage years in Lyme Regis, and later weekend trips from Hampshire to climb on the cliffs between Swanage and Kimmeridge. One week's leaping in and out of landing craft and two-man kayaks in Poole Harbour. An early infatuation with Thomas Hardy. An amateur interest in the history of the Baltic timber and Norwegian codfish trades, and the decline of the Hanse. A C16th historian for a wife. A personal epiphany while pondering on why penguins are called penguins. A whole bunch of maiden aunts and grannies in love with Bournemouth and Studland. Too many hours spent gawping at the Robert White website....

nice ...

[r.e.]

The great advice here got me well started.

Poole led me to Dorchester, where the Dorset records are kept and where the county museum has some paintings that I wanted to see, then Exeter, where the Devon records are kept, then Dartmouth. On the night that an awful lot of people got stranded for hours on the roads around Exeter I finally decided that I had had enough of the weather, and the next morning told a travel agent to get me immediately the hell out of the UK for a week This led to a flight to Morocco, where I went to Rabat/Salé, an important port for the Corsairs that preyed on merchant shipping during the era on which I'm working. Meanwhile, while in the bookshop at Exeter Cathedral, I picked up a superb book by a local academic named N.A.M Rodgers on the history of the Royal Navy that has led me in some new directions.

This was a great overview trip and I'll be back in May with a more focused research and photographic agenda. Glad that I took a Mamiya 7 as a sketching camera instead of a 4x5. One thing that I learned is that I'm going to need a serious wide angle lens when I go back. The clearance for photographs of a number of the buildings that I'm interested in, especially in the old part of Poole, is very tight.

Again, thanks all. Joseph, got your e-mail. We were in Yarmouth the same day. My crowd went for a long walk, got thoroughly soaked and dried out in front of a fire, over several beer, at The Bugle

[jb7]

Glad it worked out well-

I must have a tremendous lack of imagination,
the idea of going to Morocco from there never occurred to me...

I was in the Bugle on New Year's Eve-
from about 2.30 until about 4, had some Beer Battered Cod, as well as several pints of fizzy pop,
then back to the mainland on a big black RIB as the sun went down...