ARmy Rumour SErvice

‘We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do…
‘We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too!
‘We've fought the Bear before... and while we're Britons true,
‘The Russians shall not have Constantinople…’
Chorus to Macdermott’s War Song, GW Hunt, 1878

The Dawlish Chronicles September 1877 - February 1978

The background to this novel is the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8, of which I suspect most British people know little, perhaps not even that this where we got the word ‘Jingoism’. Vanner has clearly studied it in great depth, and appears to have the political and strategic background off pat. Briefly, Russia, on a pretext of saving her co-religionists in Bulgaria from Moslem atrocity and tyranny, attacked Turkey and pressed on in order to put the Ottoman Empire out of business once for all by taking Istanbul. It had tried and failed to do in the 1850s, but Britain and France decided that a Russia with unfettered access to the Mediterranean could not be tolerated, still less perhaps the chaos that would result from the resulting power vacuum in the Middle East.

Vanner’s hero, Commander Nicholas Dawlish RN, has been sent to Turkey to take charge of naval matters in the eastern end of the Black Sea and so help to frustrate Russia’s advance. Vanner has the technology weighed off, too, in his description of the warships of the time and their armament, and the action cracks along at a rapid pace, pulling the reader into such a credible narrative that one almost forgets this is fiction. The motivation of the British Government is thus to support Turkey covertly so as to avoid having to intervene overtly. Meanwhile both sides vie with each other in a litany of abominable atrocity against the adherents of the opposite religion, in a tit-for-tat that gets ever more extreme and brings incalculable suffering to non-combatants across the entire sphere of action. Dawlish has to square his conscience on this one because his duty to Britain requires him to fight for a morally indefensible regime. Johnny Turk was of course still in the massacre business in the 1920s.
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If there are two things I hate in life it is marketing birds, people with stupid fucking names, SUFC, the Welsh, bald people, gingers, traffic cops, horses, yoghurt, sex, the Scotch and old age pensioners in shitty little foreign cars…

This book ticks two of my boxes. Marketing birds and silly names.

A shame, because it is a canny book. An interesting tale of a young officer and his journey. Written by somebody called Jonny. Nobody is called Jonny other than limp twats with funny haircuts who are waiting for their parents to die so they can inherit. Lets face it, if your Mum said you were called ‘Jonny’ you would lamp the bitch and say “Nah, you can call me Kev”.

Then we come to marketing Birds. This book is billed as “Sex in the City for Boys”. Elsewhere it is billed as “50 Shades of Grey for Men”. Who dreams up this shite? Marketing birds. You may be cute honey, but get a job in a chip shop. Because you are to flogging books what Kim Jong-Il was to stand up comedy. I am not a boy and 50 Shades was for bored middle class birds. So if men who buy books is your target market, I am somewhere over the horizon washing my flip-flops.

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I chose to review this book as the title is the motto of the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, a Corps I spent more than a little time in. I thought it was going to be a new take on the history of my old Corps so dived right in but soon realised it wasn't the link was to the main character who was an armourer in REME who was discharged from service as a result of a courts martial.

Despite the somewhat misleading title, the book can be said to actually reflect the Corps motto as the main character Mark Harrison spends most of the book either engaged in fighting or scheming to get one over on his enemies, so calling the book “By skill and by fighting” whilst misleading in one way is totally accurate in another!

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