NEWBY Eric

One of the first books that I came across while researching my father’s time in Italy was “Love and War in the Apennines”, by Eric Newby, which enabled me to immerse myself in the “Life and Times” of a POW “On the Run”.

Eric Newby – Idiosyncratic travel writer from another age, and author of the classic ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush‘

“Although A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) is the comic masterpiece Newby will be remembered by, Love and War revealed another side to what on the surface was an uncomplicated nature, a compelling tenderness and compassion. There are passages of great depth, quite beyond the range of ordinary travel writing.

Few travel writers have left behind them such a blaze of fun and evocation, stimulants that affect a reader’s imagination like an electric charge. It is very sad indeed that we shall never again see that ubiquitous trilby perched with the precision of a lightning conductor above that handsome, weatherbeaten face, or hear once more the heart-warming chuckle.” – Obituary by Edward Mace George of The Guardian (Monday 23rd October 2006)

Extract from Wikipedia – Military Career

During the Second World War, Newby was commissioned in the Black Watch in 1940. As a junior officer in the Rajput Regiment of the British Indian Army, he studied for six months of 1941 in Fatehgarh, India, for the Lower Standard Urdu Examination that was required to command Indian troops abroad. After passing the examination he was posted to North Africa.

He served in the Black Watch and the Special Boat Section, and was captured during an operation against the coast of Sicily in August 1942. He was awarded the Military Cross in 1946 for his part in the raid.

Newby was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, PG 21, at Chieti, a few miles inland from Pescara on the Adriatic coast, and later to PG 49 at Fontanellato, near Parma. Escaping with Michael Gilbert and other British prisoners after the Italian Armistice, he was helped to hide in the Apennine countryside by a Slovene anti-fascist woman, Wanda Skof, who married him after the war and became a companion on his travels. These experiences were described in his memoir Love and War in the Apennines, which focuses on how he was helped by ordinary Italians. A film, In Love and War, was made in 2001 based on the book, starring Callum Blue as Newby and Barbora Bobuľová as Wanda. He was free until January 1944, when he was recaptured.