OUR OTHER TOUR PROGRAMMES...

Worthy Cause
Some of you will remember Sue Butler, one of our Tour Managers who has been associated with Holts since 1990.  Sue has worked in a variety of roles within the company and, in addition to Tour Managing the occasional tour during the last eight years she has also worked for English Heritage, at Walmer Castle in Kent.

Having retired in October 2011 Sue is not quite ready for the easy life - she is training hard to improve her fitness levels in order to undertake a 350kms Charity Cycle Ride over five day in Rajasthan, India! She has joined an amazing group of women taking part in the second Women v Cancer “Cycle India” challenge – raising funds to support the work of three ladies Cancer Charities:

Breast Cancer Care      -       Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust     -    Ovarian Cancer Action

When Sue signed up for this venture she set herself a target of raising £3000 for these 3 charities and with the help of her family and friends,  is organising a number of fund raising events in order to help her reach her target.  However, every penny will help her to reach this total which is why Holts are taking this opportunity to let you get involved in this incredible venture by making a donation through the “Just-Giving” Web Site should you wish. 

If you would like to support Sue in this very worthy cause the web address for her “Just Giving”page is www.justgiving.com/Susan-Butler.  There are also further details of the cycle ride challenge at www.actionforcharity.co.uk.

Finally, for those of you who have travelled with Sue in the past who might like to contact her direct, her email is sm.butler@btinternet.com.

Proposed 2012 tour programme click here
You can now check out our proposed 2012 tour programme on our LOOKING AHEAD page. As soon as all logistics are confirmed we will indicate that the tour is open for booking. Full details of the tour will be given, including the Itinerary and price

We are already taking bookings for our Falklands War 30th Anniversary tour. The 2011 Zulu War tour is now fully booked and you can now make a booking for the 2012 tour.

Print off the booking form and send it with your deposit. Prices will be fixed for all bookings made from the web before the full brochure is printed.

New Book From Holts Guide

Zulu Rising by Ian Knight - who leads Holts' Anglo-Zulu War tour - is being widely hailed as the definitive new study of the battles of Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift. The book is available in from Macmillans hardback, paperback and e-book (enhanced with an extra colour photo-essay on the battlefields). Some critical reaction to Zulu Rising -

'This is a book with many strengths'
Professor Richard Holmes, The Literary Review.

'In this exceptional book Knight manages to expose many of the Victorian myths while still capturing the kind of epic excitement that makes Zulu so stirring. It is a first-class work of military history, not least for its evocative and extensive use of Zulu sources'
James McConnachie, Sunday Times.

'Knight's ability to capture the reality of the fighting and his combination of precise detail with the bigger picture helps make this book a gripping read.'
Jeremy Black, BBC History Magazine.

'Compelling and authoritative …a true revisionary account…arguably the definitive work.'
TLS.

'A tour-de-force'
Daily Mail.

Holts First Tipperary Tour of the Year
We have just completed our first Tipperary tour this year, a four day tour that is the ideal introduction to the First World War, particularly so for those who have never visited the Western Front before. Our next tour is scheduled for 15-17 July 2011. Click here for further information.

Simon Jones

Accompanied by historian Simon Jones, we visited Es-sex Farm, where the Canadian medical officer John McCrae wrote the poem In Flanders Fields, and Brand-hoek, where another medical officer, Noel Chavasse, VC and Bar, is buried. We explored the front line - the Ypres Salient – so vital to the Allies as it was on the main route to the Channel Ports, and attended the Last Post at the Menin Gate – a simple and poignant ceremony that takes place at 8pm every evening. Travelling south to the Somme, we passed-by many familiar names – reminding us just how much the First World War has entered the collective memory of a na-tion. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, more and more people are taking up the story.

One of the most poignant places on the British front line in the Somme is Mansell Copse where the Devonshire Regiment attacked on 1st July 1916. The young company commander was convinced that if a German machine gun covering his front line position was not de-stroyed before the attack, then surely both he and all his men would be killed. Tragically, he was proved right. Within minutes of H Hour, most of his soldiers lay dead, including himself and the poet William Noel Hodgson. Only two days earlier Hodgson had written a poem Before Action that now seems so tragically prescient; it ends with the words 'Ere the sun swings his noonday sword must say good-bye to all of this; by the delights that I shall miss, help me to die, O Lord'. The Devonshires lost 161 men on 1st July 1916, and they were later carried back by their comrades and buried in their front line trench in Mansell Copse. A wooden cross erected at the time bore the words 'The Devonshires Held this Trench, the Devonshires Hold it Still'. The cross has now been replaced by a stone memorial bearing the same words. The Devonshires still hold the trench, and because of the fine work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), they will continue to hold it in perpetuity.

We ended our tour at the magnificent Thiepval Memorial designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, and bearing the names of over 72,000 British and South Af-rican soldiers who lost their lives in the Somme and for whom there is no known graves. It is a quiet and tranquil place now, just serving to emphasise the contrast with 1916.

Elizabeth Speller's quest to find her great-uncle Rupert Howard
Elizabeth Speller, novelist and writer of non-fiction, and her daughter Abi-gail had a very special reason for coming on this tour – to visit the grave of Elizabeth's great-uncle Rupert Howard. Elizabeth's story is told in her book Sunlight on the Garden and reproduced below:

Elizabeth Speller

Rupert Howard had disappeared, it seemed without trace. We all knew that he had died in the First World War. Geraldine had kept that picture of him in his uniform by her bed for the rest of her life, although the picture was now lost. So it was impossible to check for indentifying details. But he was never on any of the Howard family trees. I checked the censuses and tracked him down aged 15 in 1901 at a rather second-rate boarding school, and this provided his date of birth. Part of the answer was eventu-ally revealed in his birth certificate. He was illegitimate, like his two older sisters, so only Ada was named as a par-ent and he was not a Howard at all. Legally he was a Cur-tis, grandson of a butcher, not the great-nephew of a duke. His parents' subsequent marriage could not legitimize him at that time.

But what of his death? Geraldine had been so pitifully pre-cise in naming the very minute of her loss: 'Our Darling Rupert killed in France 11.45, September 2nd 1916. He died an officer and a gentleman.' My grandmother had told me long ago that he was wounded and in hospital but had died of chickenpox. I checked the records of deaths in action. Nothing. I checked with the extensive records of the War Graves Commission. No Englishman of the right name and age lay in their tidy care. I began to think he was another family myth. Perhaps he had done something unspeakable. Perhaps he had never died, only escaped and the son killed in action was a story developed to add lustre to family history. Perhaps he was a deserter and shot?

Finally a friend who worked as a researcher found Rupert with the help of an archivist at Kew. Letters had shown Gerald Howard's inability to countenance his oldest son not holding a com-mission but Rupert's illegitimacy seemed to be an impediment to acceptance as an officer in a smart regiment at the beginning of the war, before losses had made such matters less important. The professional historian at Kew explained Empire regiments were less fussy when it came to awkward birth certificates and he brought out the registers first for South Africa, where Rupert had once spent a year, and then for Canada. There he was. In the end he had managed to obtain a commission in the 88th Battalion the Canadian Infantry, part of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. Rupert's papers survive in army archives. The Canadian archives were easily accessed. Suddenly there was his signature, clear and confident as he joined his regiment in January 1916, using his father's surname. It was the month conscription was introduced. Eight months later he was dead. He died during the Battle of the Somme and was laid to rest as the aristo-cratic sounding Lieutenant Rupert Howard in the Military Cemetery at Ovillers. The price of his name was that he was not buried as an Englishman; his corner of a foreign field was forever Canada. For the young man born Rupert Curtis to a housemaid and her noble lover, the preju-dice of the age almost hid him for ever.

On the other hand, of the 3439 soldiers buried at Ovilliers, only 1080 were ever identified at all.

Elizabeth Speller
www.elizabethspeller.com

The Secret Garden

Oxford at War - Christ Church 20-23 March 2011
Our Oxford at War tour, which included visits to Blenheim and Bletchley, was blessed with some lovely sunny weather that added lustre to the 'dreamy spires' of this great university town. Dinner in the Great Hall and staying in such an historic college on its own 150 acre site, yet in the very heart of the city, proved a rare treat for our travellers. A 'behind the scenes' tour revealed some real gems: Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky Tree, Alice's secret garden and the secret door itself, so rarely used but open on the day of our visit.

The Great Hall

John Croft CBE

Graham Wallace and the re-constructed Colossus Computer

We also enjoyed an excellent lecture from Pro-fessor Gary Sheffield on the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry —a fascinating description of the life of one fine regiment of the line, reminding us that the British Army's regimental system is best described as 'a loose confederation of units'!

Our Bletchley veterans who spoke to us at Christ Church gave us some unique insights. Mavis Batey described how she joined the Foreign Office believing that she might be in 'HUMINT' like Mata Hari, but concluding that her legs might not be quite up to it! Instead, she went to Bletchley at the age of 19, becoming an early codebreaker working with Dilly Knox—later breaking the code that helped Admiral Cunningham to win the Battle of Matapan.

Mavis Batey

John Croft, CBE was an under-graduate at Christ Church when asked by his tutor one day if he 'would like to do something really useful for the war effort'. Not knowing what to expect, he signed up, and spent 9 months at Bletchley before moving to Park Lane in London where, late in the war, he was decoding Russian messages being sent from Moscow by an ex-Metropolitan policeman – a communist re-cruit to the Comitern. He later realised that he was witnessing the beginning of the Cold War, as predicted by Churchill.

At Bletchley, our guide was Dr Brian Oakley, who had known many of the original Bletchley codebreakers and has done much research in recent years. He showed us the original 'Huts' where the codebreakers worked, the bike-shed that Alan Turing commandeered as his office on hot days, and the little cottage where codebreaking began in September 1939.

A very special treat was to see the reconstructed Colossus computer and to meet some of the team who rebuilt it without any blueprints and with discarded Post Of-fice analogue components from de-commissioned telephone exchanges. A re-markable story, and a remarkable machine that works in exactly the way it did during the war.

Dr Brian Oakley

A visit to Blenheim Park and a talk on the Hidden Winston earlier in our tour fitted well with our later tour at Bletchley. Following a letter written directly to Churchill by Alan Turing and others, early in the war, asking for more people and resources, the Prime Minis-ter directed that they should receive all that they demanded. When Churchill later visited Bletchley, en route to his ancestral home at Blenheim, he was surprised to see just how much Bletchley had grown as a result of that letter. By the end of the war, some 12,000 people worked at Bletchley—these were, as Churchill described them 'My geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled'.

Bletchley is a truly inspiring and fascinating place, and Holts will definitely be returning there next year—to pick up on the extraordinary Intelligence War both at Bletchley and elsewhere. Keep an eye out on a website for further information.

Holts' Winter Weekend 2011
The first tour this year was the annual Holts Winter Weekend, when we were joined by 33 guests, most of whom are well-established Holts travellers. Indeed, quite a few have com- pleted more than twenty tours over the years. It was very good to be among so many old friends.

This year we were based in the beautiful city of Hereford, where we had a guided tour of the Cathedral, built in the 12th century, along with the Chained Library and the extraordinary Mappa Mundi, a 13th century map in which scholars of the day interpret the world in spiritual and geographical terms. Beyond the city, we visited Kilpeck, a fascinating Medieval village, with the remains if its motte and bailey castle. A thriving town in the 13th century, it had a regular Friday market and an annual fair, an important place, since it received several visits from King John.

We also went to Hay-on-Wye, and few of our travellers resisted the temptation to buy at least one book! On our second day, we visited Mortimer's Cross, where Dr Mike Jones guided around us around the site of this decisive battle in the War of the Roses that took place on 2nd February, 1461. It was here that the York- ists and the young Edward, Earl of March (later King Edward VI) defeated the Lancastrian forces from Wales. Their leader, Owen Tudor (father of King Henry VII) was to face an even worse fate than defeat on the battlefield. Captured in the aftermath of the battle, he was taken immediately to Hereford town square and executed.

We concluded our Winter Weekend in the lovely town of Ludlow, with lunch at the splendid Feathers Hotel, a Jacobean inn built in the early 17th century. During lunch, following an ex- haustive consultative session over dinner the previous evening, the destination for our 2012 Winter Weekend was announced. We will be going to Norwich!

An unexpected bonus this year was a short talk by our coach driver, Mike Worton, MBE. Twelve years ago, Mike formed the charity Chernobyl 2000 (www.chernobyl2000.co.uk) to help the people of Belarus who have suffered greatly, not only from the legacies of com- munism, but also the decontamination caused by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 (25 years ago this year). Only 1% of Belarus has remained untouched by the decontamination and, as a predominantly rural country, its economy has suffered greatly. There have also been shocking human side-effects such as multiple cancers among children. No one could have failed to be moved by Mike's commitment and passion for the work he and his helpers are doing for the people of Belarus. Several times a year Mike leads a convoy of trucks from his home town of Evesham, carrying medical supplies, equipment for schools, clothes, blankets and bedding and many other es- sential items that are so easily discarded in the affluent West. Mike Worton's story was a truly inspiring one, and we were all privileged to meet this remarkable man.

Work is currently being done on this page. If you have any items which you think may be of interest to other Holts' travellers, please send them to info@holts.co.uk