Your Search Results

      • Local history
        March 2016

        Flushed With Pride

        The Story of Thomas Crapper

        by Wallace Reyburn

        Flushed With Pride celebrates the life and times of Thomas Crapper, the Victorian sanitary ware manufacturer who revolutionised the nation's water closets. This new edition has been updated by Simon Kirby, the Managing Director of the Thomas Crapper Company.

      • Biography: historical, political & military
        March 2016

        Thirty Secret Years

        A.G. Denniston's Work in Signals Intelligence, 1914-1944

        by Robin Denniston

        30 Secret Years reveals how an enterprising Scottish linguist was able to decipher German naval messages in the Admiralty in World War One. Alastair Denniston became head of the British government’s cabinet noir or cipher-breaking bureau in 1919, developed his team of fellow experts between the wars by spying on the Soviets from Whitehall. In 1939 he went on to lead an enlarged body of secret service men and women to Bletchley Park where they solved the vast problems of machine encipherment, enabling Churchill to avoid defeat in 1941 and invade western Europe in June 1944. It is the story of how one man, working in obscurity and total secrecy, influenced the course of world history over 30 years of war and peace, told by his son.

      • Biography: historical, political & military
        March 2016

        Cribs For Victory

        The Untold Story of Bletchley Park's Secret Room

        by Joss Pearson

        Cribs For Victory is a posthumous account of the secret code-breaking process in Bletchley Park’s Fusion Room during World War II by Major Neil Webster, one of the key members of the team involved.  The Fusion Room was the central unit where decrypted German messages obtained from Hut 6 were compared with the corresponding data extracted by the log readers from the daily radio traffic between enemy stations, thus enabling a complete wartime picture of the enemy order of battle to be constructed. Neil Webster’s liaison role between traffic analysis and cryptography meant he was centrally involved in the search for ‘cribs’ – short pieces of enciphered text where the meaning is either known or can be guessed, allowing the whole cipher to be broken. His book describes this intensive search in detail, the intellectual and technical challenge, the personal stories, the setbacks and the triumphs.

      • History: specific events & topics
        March 2006

        Another Man's Shoes

        by Sven Somme

        Another Man's Shoes is a gripping first-hand account of a Norwegian scientist's escape from German custody during the Second World War after his arrest for spying. Written just after the war, Sven Somme vividly describes his 200-mile trek across the mountains, pursued by German soldiers, in a bid to reach Sweden and freedom in 1944.

      • Biography: science, technology & engineering
        March 2016

        Doctor By Nature

        Jonathan Couch: Surgeon of Polperro

        by Jeremy Rowett Johns

        Cornish naturalist bioig

      • Biography: general
        March 2016

        The Smugglers' Banker

        The Story of Zephaniah Job of Polperro

        by Jeremy Rowett Johns

        The Smugglers' Banker reveals for the first time the full story of Zephaniah Job, the remarkable Cornishman who not only masterminded the flourishing contraband trade in Polperro during the Napoleonic wars but also the privateers whose adventures during the wars with France and Spain led to the capture of handsome prizes. Job's flair for business, his association with the Trelawny family and links with those engaged in the smuggling trade brought lasting prosperity to the inhabitants of this remote Cornish fishing village at the end of the 18th century. This exciting and very readable biography, full of new revelations of one of the most extraordinary figures in Cornish history and packed with details of Polperro families of the period, will delight both local historians and visitors to the area.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter