Tom Chesshyre is staff writer for the Times. In To Hull and Back, he admits that most of his travel writing is about exotic places on the planet. However, in this engaging little volume, he takes long weekends in twelve areas of Britain that are unlikely to be anyone’s choice of a holiday resort. (At least, eleven of them are not – the last one, Hell in the Scilly Isles is, to quote him ‘Not such a bad place’.)

Chesshyre approaches each of these places with an open mind – as far as it is possible to do that when, for example, Slough’s greatest fame is Betjeman’s poem ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough …’ He visits the Slough Trading Estate, Salford’s Lowry Centre, a variety of Hull pubs, Bletchley Park (in his section on Milton Keynes) and the Tower Museum in Derry (on a Bogside trip), invariably finding the inhabitants of Britain’s depressed areas friendly and sometimes entertaining.

‘Entertaining’ is an appropriate word for this sortie into Britain’s darkest corners. It doesn’t exactly make you want to reserve a week in Salford or South Shields but it is an eye-opening and intriguing glance into ‘unsung’ areas if Britain. I picked up lots of cameos of information – like the fact that when he was a lonely old man of nearly eighty, L S Lowry admitted in an interview “I have no close friends at all. I’ve never been married.  I’ve never had a girl, in fact. And now I’m nearly eighty, I think it’s too late to start.”

Chesshyre says, “If Unsung Britain has an (unofficial) artist, it has to be L S Lowry.” One could add that if Unsung Britain has to have an author, it is Tom Chesshyre.

A tradition that was suppressed in 2006 was for a British ambassador, quitting his post, to write a valedictory dispatch that was widely circulated to other members of the diplomatic service, to the British Government and to the Prime Minister, even.

This was an opportunity for the retiring diplomat to get some of his grudges off his chest and to tell the unvarnished truth about the people he had been living and working with for the past few years. Matthew Parris and Andrew Bryson have ferreted out some of these dispatches which are sometimes very amusing and almost invariably non p.c.

I have found it entertaining just to dip into this book, reading the dispatches of a series of ambassadors to a given country and coming up with spicy comments like that of a retiring ambassador from Tunisia who complained that ‘Even the most educated [Tunisians] are apt to be bewildered over the diffence between right and left … which means hazards on the roads.’

The comments of retiring ambassadors to Switzerland seem amusingly relevant. Way back in 1970 one diplomat commented on the Swiss getting to their offices at 7 a.m. and the rush hour not being until 6.30 in the evening, that people will wish you a pleasant Sunday and not a pleasant weekend and that while it took a week for London packers to pack his effects when he left London, it had taken the Swiss packers just three days to perform the same task. Familiar eh?

This very funny text has much more of the same.

This is the third and last of a gloomy series. Last week I talked of ‘Fear of the Collar’, an account of the misery of small boys in the Artane industrial School in Ireland in the middle of the last century. it wasn’t just the boys!

Frances Reilly was abandoned at the age of two by her mother, together with her sister Loretta and the baby Sinnead outside Nazareth House Convent, an orphanage in Belfast run by nuns, the Poor Sisters of Nazareth. Her account of the misery she suffered, beatings, hard labour, appalling food, abuse and emotional destruction, is harrowing.

In particular, she was the victim of a sadistic nun, Sister Thomas, and the treatment she received at this woman’s hands shocks the reader.

Even the farming family who claimed that they were providing a haven for the child, molested her sexually.

Frances resisted and, when she took to absconding from the convent, was ultimately placed in a remand home which was, if anything, worse than the original convent.

There was no escape for these tortured children as the police had faith in the convent and returned the escapees to yet another beating after each sortie.

Frances Reilly’s spirit never died and years later, she faced the perpetrators of the injustice in court. This is a dramatic account of the dreadful situation of thousands of children.

Last week I wrote about The Auschwitz Violin. The concentration camps of the middle of the last century still have the power to shock. However, I didn’t think that I would be feeling a similar reaction as I write about the Artane Industrial School of Patrick Touher’s account.

In Fear of the Collar, he tells us how, as an orphan, a few days short of his eighth birthday, he was admitted to the Industrial School. He left a country paradise and an adoptive family that he loved, to be incarcerated in one of the immense industrial schools that were set up by the Christian Brothers in Ireland.

It isn’t just the inhumanity of a dormitory with 180 beds, head to toe, lined up, (and that was just one of five, the older boys had 200 in a dormitory), the hard labour and the ferocious discipline that shock, it is the physical and sexual abuse that the small boys suffered at the hands of their ‘carers’.

The boys stayed in the school until their sixteenth birthday and were then launched into the world, ill prepared, with minimal qualifications or education. Touher tells us of his own struggles, despite his skill as a baker, acquired in the school. The horrors recounted in this text have been the subject of a subsequent enquiry. The reader wonders how such inhumanity could have been the norm for orphaned children.

Looking for something different to read over Christmas, I found the Penguin Great Ideas Series. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, and The House of the Dead are number 74 in the series that has works like Swift’s The Tale of the Tub, Thomas More’s Utopia, and Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

I was moved and impressed by both the book and the film of Aleksandr Soljenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and it was a surprise to find that this Dostoevsky had written much the same a hundred years earlier. Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, for his liberal activities.

The House of the Dead  is a fictional recreation of the time Dostoevsky spent in the Siberian convict prison through his fictionalized narrator, Alekzandr Petrovich Goryanchikov. The extract in the Penguin Great Ideas Series presents the first impressions of the aristocrat, on his arrival in the prison. We meet much the same range of prisoners, the same desperate fights for food and the same human degradation that Soljenitsyn so graphically describes.

It is not a pretty topic but a great read!

To write a large and consistently amusing history book by simply taking a journey around the house you live in, discussing what is to be seen there and what used to be seen, might seem a surprising idea. Although perhaps unusual, it certainly works. Even the fuse-box- a recent addition to the house – provides a fruitful topic. Passing from the wartime black-out (more dangerous than bombing) to the dangers of lighting a house with candles or the surprising inconveniences of gas, we are informed about the rise and fall of the whale-oil industry and the beginnings of the ‘oil age’.

Most of us are probably familiar with Desmond Morris‘s The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo as well as some of his ‘Watching‘ series. It was a friend who was enjoying his Christmas Watching who told me of its existence. I was able to obtain my Amazon copy through a supplier for 1p (plus the postage, of course, but I do wonder about the economics of that service!).

Like Scrooge, I am tempted to say ‘Bah, humbug’ about many of the aspects of Christmas – the endless eating and drinking, the shrieking plastic toys and the blatant commercialism of the whole thing. Desmond Morris was, therefore, a very refreshing read.

His book is composed of very short chapters (53 of them) that answer questions all prefaced with ‘Why’. Most of us are aware that many of the Christmas customs are related to pagan rites and celebrations that originally had nothing to do with the birth of Christ. Morris gives the background of these (mince pies, the yule log, the tree etc.) in easily digestible format.

Some of the facts are surprising. Who would have guessed that the red Santa Claus outfit was introduced by the Coca Cola company as late as 1933! There are intriguing anecdotes too, like the explanation of the stockings children hang up.

This is an entertaining read for the Christmas skeptic!

The Dulwich Picture Gallery in East London is currently hosting a gloriously colourful exhibition of the works of the Group of Seven. I have long been a lover of the wild and majestic paintings of the various artists who came together in the nineteen-twenties and thirties but I have never before seen some of the bright sketches or vast canvasses that are on show in this exhibition.

The exhibition traces the links with Scandinavian art and with the impressionists and expressionists who were the fore-runners of the movement then gives an area to each of the artists in turn, with explanations of their specific styles and focuses.

These artists travelled by canoe, and, supported by the Canadian Government reached remote areas of the wilderness of Canada that had not formerly been considered subjects for art.

The final section of the exhibition is dedicated to the breathtaking works of Lawren Harris, who travelled as far as the Canadian Arctic to paint ice scenery. The results were spectacular, and, in the Dulwich they are displayed in darkened rooms with light directed onto the works. We can only applaud the wisdom of the Government that was prepared to recognise this group of artists who broke with tradition and coped with such hardship in their tents and canoes, in order to record the beauty of the Canadian landscape.

This most unusual book came my way. The Redstone Book of the Eye is a picture book. What else could it be? Its 282 pages take us through photographs, optical illusions, paintings, drawings and a host of unusual and teasing images.

With very little text, we are led through an intriguing visual journey that includes pictures of eyes themselves, what the eye sees on the street, comic aspects of vision, what a child sees, satire, camera effects and strange aspects of perception.

Something is sure to bring the ‘reader’ to a sudden pause. ‘Where is the fish?’ or ‘Where is the driver?’ says the caption. Where indeed! Five minutes later, we discern the missing driver of the cab in the clouds above the houses. Thefish is tangled in the trees and the polar bear has been transformed to a cloud.

This is a Julian Rothenstein book, published by Square Peg.On the cover, Quentin Blake claims that books by Julian Rothenstein are ’extraordinary’. Indeed, it is certainly a long way from what one considers ‘ordinary’.

Last week I looked at Diana Preston’s study of Captain Scott’s last disastrous journey, the long haul to the South Pole,  for which the preparations were underway exactly a hundred years ago. Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen (now published as The Last Place on Earth) is a fascinating parallel read even if only because of the very different image the two authors project.

The material is basically the same, though Huntford, as the one-time Scandinavian correspondent of the Observer, has also told the story of the parallel journey, undertaken successfully by Amundsen. Amundsen reached the South Pole on December 15th and returned safely to his base Framheim. Scott reached it on January 17th and perished with Wilson and Bowers, of scurvy and starvation, only miles from their base.

Where Diana Preston looks with some sympathy at the miscalculations and errors of Scott and gives some credit to his claims that dreadful weather and sheer bad luck led to the disaster, Huntford has no room for sympathy. Amundsen, with his dog sleds was fifty miles away and had similar conditions, yet his calculations of supplies were accurate. His men knew how to ski and used dogs rather than the appallingly selected horses that Titus Oates had to accept – totally unsuited to the Antarctic conditions.

Even details like the type of goggles are examined. (Amundsen’s were better and avoided the snow-blindness that Scott’s team suffered).

Reading these two accounts and Scott’s journals together is a salutary lesson to anyone who accepts that what he reads is the truth.