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The Story of the Blue-Blooded Rogue behind the Most Notorious City Scandal of the 1920s

The saga of Gerard Lee Bevan’s 1922 fraud conviction, the subject of this book, comprehensively reported at the time in The Times and elsewhere, still fascinates, particularly at a time when our financial institutions have been so ravaged by bad management at vast cost to us, the public, and our descendants.

This Bevan tale is here well told, with a fund of intimate background detail on the principal, his extended family with its complicated banking and financial connections, his women, and numerous other players, including other contemporary fraudsters such as Hatry (a business associate of Bevan’s but not nailed until later) and Bottomley. The author gives us an excellent picture of the society in which they moved; he elegantly sets the scene for us with descriptions of the buildings in which they lived and worked. In the process of helping us laymen to understand the complexity of the dealing that led Bevan to disaster the narrative is laced with a lucid tutorial on the City, finance, banking, share dealing and insurance and reinsurance, without at any time making this heavy reading. This must be the fruit of years of detailed research and the text is supported by a useful bibliography (and indeed several interesting and pertinent illustrations).

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The author has here compiled an extraordinary amount of very detailed information on a range of the German weapons programmes that were in play as the Second World War drew to its bloody close. There is a mass of technical data, often graphically tabulated for comparison, covering air, land and maritime weapons. About three quarters of the book is about aircraft and missiles, but there are also chapters on land weapons (including artillery and tanks, some so huge and heavy that it is amazing nobody spotted their operational uselessness) and submarines large, small and tiny. The whole is supported by an arcane collection of contemporary photographs and excellent technical drawings, and for some devices tabulation of their operational achievements. Throughout, the explanations are lucid and digestable for the layman. For any student of the history of the technology of war this book definitely has a place on the Christmas list.

Not all programmes were ultimately ‘secret’; some devices (like the V1, V2 and the Me262, and the HS293 rocket-propelled glider bomb which managed to include three hospital ships in its successes) did manage to get into service before the war’s close. For others, well, as Gray puts it ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen’. Some of the developments go back to subterfuges skilfully set up to avoid the Versailles Treaty. In the event, many projects were frustrated, disrupted or delayed by Allied bombing campaign, by resource shortages often a second-order effect of that, political infighting between manufacturers, by equipment (and not a few testers) written off during trials, and direct intervention by Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler.

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The back cover states:

"FICTION BASED ON TRUE FACTS

After fleeing the USA for England as a teenager ... George Mallory joins the British Army and ends up serving in Northern Ireland in the 1960s at the height of The Troubles."

The first statement is true: it is fiction. Being set during The Troubles, the book is based on fact. A-a-and ... that just about sums it up. The second statement is also true in that it describes the content of the book. Then, it's off to another world that looks, if you squint, like Londonderry during the troubles. But not a Londonderry familiar to those who served "in the 1960s at the height of The Troubles." I'll also be producing a review of Bravo Two Zero, The 20th Anniversary Edition in the next few days. When the latter work first appeared, there was a lot of doubt cast about the veracity of the story it told. Similarly, a generation ago the "autobiographical" works of Sven Hassel were decried as fiction. The book being reviewed today leaves us no no doubt whatsoever whether it is true or fiction.

I very quickly decided I'd need something to write on and with to record the inaccuracies. Within minutes, before even bothering to get the paper, I decided not to bother. The story told in the book runs to a meagre 189 pages. I believe that any attempt to list the errors and inaccuracies would be longer than the book itself. No, honestly.

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