NEW BOOK ABOUT BARNT GREEN


“Hail, Salubrious Spot!

(How’s Your Rupture?)

by

GAVIN BANTOCK


Also as a .pdf DOWNLOAD

AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON WORLD WIDE

Memories of the village as it was in the 1940s & 1950s

With Writings & Illustrations

by

ANTON BANTOCK & CUILLIN BANTOCK
















Please see also the  NEW BOOK ON BARNT GREEN page on this website.


Product details

PDF Files (4) : 361 pages (320 illustrations, 187 in colour)

Publisher: Machinami Tsushinsha (Feb 2011)

Language: English

ISBN 978-4-9905452-1-8 C0022

Product Dimensions: 25.5 x 18 x ? cm

Product Descriptionlivepage.apple.com

Book Description

A fascinating, personal portrait of an English village, its people and

its life in the 1950s

Product Description

Hail, Salubrious Spot! (How’s Your Rupture?) is a highly evocative account of a smallWorcestershire village as it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Part history, part guidebook and part personal memoir, it presents a richly detailed picture of Barnt Green, a typical English hamlet of the period, with closely-observed and occasionally mildly irreverent descriptions of many of the actual people who lived there in those years. Written by the British poet and dramatist Gavin Bantock, with contributions by his elder brothers Anton and Cuillin, who have enriched the book with their original artwork as well as written extracts – they are grandsons of the English composer Sir Granville Bantock (1868 – 1946) – it also parades an extraordinary portrait gallery of members of their talented and wilfully unconventional family who lived in the village from 1930 for nearly seventy years. Other relatives and local people have also contributed their vivid memories.

Copiously illustrated with photographs, original paintings, sketches and maps (320 in all, 187 in colour), the book (361pp) stands as a monument of mid-twentieth century English life and times, and is a rich treasury of a delightful rural haven that has preserved its natural beauty to this day. Barnt Green and its environs provided the inspiration for such epic creations as J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings and Godfrey Baseley’s long-running radio soap opera The Archers, now in its sixtieth year. The authors walk the reader through the length and breadth of the village, road by road, lane by lane, and over the fields and across woodlands, describing the local waterways and the crucial railway system and its peculiar division of the village into ‘Strivers‘ and ‘Arrivers‘.


Readers’ comments:

“Your pages about Hewell Road and others made me see the place very clearly,

though I never walked down any of those roads!”


“This is a book many Barnt Green residents will find fascinating; its edginess is, I suppose, part of its nature.”