Book Reviews

The themes of Stephen Bunker’s book are likely to be familiar to many members: Bedfordshire’s substantial contribution to the ‘secret war’ against Nazi Germany and the work of Bletchley Park, the Political Warfare Executive and the Special Operations Executive. The

This is Dick Dawson’s second book about Bedfordshire. The first, “Scraunchings from Beneath the Dottle Tree”, dealt with rural life in the county a hundred years ago. Dick is a local journalist who produces a weekly column on local history.

The author of this book, Violet Tompkins, is better known to our members as Mrs. Groocock, who has talked to us on Lady Anne Clifford and Castle Ashby. She is, however, a Bedford girl born and brought up in the

An authoritative and well-illustrated guide to eleven important public sculptures in Bedford town centre, with notes on the statues and the sculptors. The statues chosen include those of John Howard (1894) and Sir William Harpur (1768), the memorials to the

A highly readable, well-illustrated and informative account of the history of the estate village of Old Warden, its inhabitants and their relationship with the ‘Squires’ – the landowning Ongley and Shuttleworth families from the 18th to 20th centuries. Written by

Ian is to be congratulated on producing a very accessible, affordable, but also very informed addition to the histories of Bedford. No comprehensive history of Bedford has been published since Joyce Godber’s “The Story of Bedford” in 1978. Ian not

The architectural writer Ian Nairn (1930-83), who was born in Bedford, cruelly dismissed his birthplace as ‘the most characterless county town in England.’ OBM and conservation architect Victor Farrar utterly refutes this jaundiced view, by presenting a splendid celebration of

Nobody knows more about Bedford’s past, especially from Victorian times until the present day, than Richard Wildman. He has a positively encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject, so any book by him on the town’s history is to be warmly welcomed.

It is rare for the author of a local history book to have to start by creating his own archive, but this is what Stuart Antrobus did in writing the history of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) in Bedfordshire during,

‘Peacocks’ has been part of Bedford life since its foundation in 1901 by Walter Peacock – as auctioneers, estate agents, valuers and surveyors. This ‘memoir’ provides an authoritative, but personal insight into the history one of the town’s best-known companies,