Search results for ""Author Phyllida Scrivens""

The Great Thorpe Railway Disaster of 1874 is the third title from Norwich writer and biographer Phyllida Scrivens, who lives less than half a mile from the site of the fatal collision. At Norwich Thorpe Station on 10 September 1874, at Norwich station a momentary misunderstanding between the Stationmaster, Night Inspector and young Telegraph Clerk, resulted in an inevitable head-on collision. The residents of the picturesque riverside village of Thorpe-Next-Norwich were shocked by a deafening peal of thunder', sending them running through the driving rain towards a scene of destruction. Surgeons were summoned from the city, as the dead, dying and injured were taken to a near-by inn and boatyard. Every class of Victorian society was travelling that night, including ex-soldiers, landowners, clergymen, doctors, seamstresses, saddlers, domestic servants and a beautiful heiress. For many months local and national newspapers followed the story, publishing details of subsequent deaths, manslaughter trial and outcomes of unprecedented compensation claims. The Board of Trade Inquiry concluded that it was the most serious collision between trains meeting one another on a single line of rails [ ] that has yet been experienced in this country.' Using extensive research, non-fiction narrative, informed speculation and dramatised events, Phyllida Scrivens pays tribute to the 28 men, women and children who died that night, revealing the personal stories behind the names, hitherto only recorded as a list.

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Escaping Hitler is the true story, covering ninety years, of a fourteen-year-old boy Gunter Stern who, when Adolf Hitler threatened hisfamily, education and future, resolved to escape from his rural village of Nickenich in the German Rhineland. In July 1939 Gunter boarded a bus to the border with Luxembourg, illegally crossed the river and walked alone for seven days through Belgium into Holland, intent on catching a ferry to England and freedom. The outcome was not exactly as he had planned.The author gathered her information through interviews with Gunter, now known as Joe Stirling, and with those closest to him. During an emotional 'foot-stepping' journey in September 2013 the author visited Gunter's birthplace, met with a school friend, discovered the apartment in Koblenz where he fled following Kristallnacht in 1938, drove the route of Gunter's walk through Europe and retraced the final steps of his parents prior to their deportation to a Nazi death camp in Poland during 1942.

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