Britain Calling: August 2010

Britain

Roald Dahl Day celebrates the work, life and legacy of one of the world’s best-loved storytellers.

It takes place on his birthday, 12 September, at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre and in the nearby Gipsy House garden in Great Missenden in the south of England, where Dahl lived and worked. The museum’s special events and activities will be overseen by Miss Trunchbull, a character from one of his best selling books Matilda. Behind-the-scenes archive tours will offer a rare chance to view original Matilda manuscripts. Peter Bentley, author of The Great Dog Bottom Swap, will be running workshop sessions. Members of the Royal Shakespeare Company will entertain visitors with Matilda-themed storytelling in anticipation of the RSC’s production Matilda, A Musical opening in Stratford in November. Other events will include guided village trails, magicians and face-painting. Roald Dahl’s garden at Gipsy House, a short walk from the Museum, will be open free of charge for the day. Visitors can take a peek inside the author’s famous Writing Hut (above) and explore the maze and gypsy caravan that inspired Danny the Champion of the World. As well as Matilda, Dahl’s books for children include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and The BFG. Dahl died in 1990. Roald Dahl Day events and activities will also be taking place nationally throughout September.

The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, 81-83 High Street, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire HP16 0AL

Website: www.roalddahlmuseum.org

The Changi Brownlow: Roland Perry

ISBN 0733624642
(978-073-362464-3)
RRP $35.00 August 2010
Hachette Aust Paperback

A moving and powerful story of a group of Australian POWs who organise an Australian Rules Football competition under the worst conditions imaginable - inside Changi prison - and then step into history as they live and die building the infamous Thai-Burma Railway.

This non-fiction book is about Peter Chitty, the farm hand from Snowy River country with unfathomable physical and mental fortitude, and one of seven in his immediate family who volunteered to fight and serve in WW2. The story includes 'Chicken' Smallhorn, the Brownlow-medal winning little man with the huge heart and of officers and doctors like 'Weary' Dunlop, who care for the POWs as they endure malnutrition, disease and often inhuman treatment.

After Singapore falls to the Japanese early in 1942, 70,000 prisoners including 15,000 Australians, are held as POWs at the notorious Changi and adjoining Selerang prisons in Singapore. To amuse themselves and fellow inmates, a group of sportsmen created an Australian Football League, complete with tribunal, selection panel, umpires and coaches. The final game of the one and only season was between 'Victoria' and the 'Rest of Australia'. This attracted more than 12,000 spectators, and a unique Brownlow Medal was awarded in this unlikely setting under the curious gaze of Japanese prison guards.

The match was to be the last one before, in April 1943, Australian POWs were sent from Changi to Thailand to construct a railway and road to be used for the Japanese assault on India. This book follows Peter Chitty and many of the other players on this journey. Half of them would be victims of the brutal conditions, never to return. A total of 23,000 Australian men and Allies died in the trying, depressing circumstances of incarceration and slave labor.

This is a story of courage and the invincibility of the human spirit. The Changi Brownlow highlights not only the Australian love of sport and its power to offer consolation in times of extreme hardship but an unsurpassed strength that helped many of them survive the four-year ordeal.

Roland Perry is well known as the author of a number of cricket books - ranging from biographies of Donald Bradman, Keith Miller, Steve Waugh and Shane Warne, and also accounts of other great tours and teams. Author Location: Melbourne, Victoria.
Tour information on Changi Prison

Struth! Venice's first female gondolier

STRUTH !    

IN his continuing search for the more weird, wacky and wondrous in the world of travel, David Ellis says its taken 900 years, but Venice has finally got its first-ever fully-licenced female gondolier.

Blonde mother of two, Giorgia Boscolo (24) last week passed her final exams after 400 hours of instruction that included propelling a traditional 11-metre, 500-kilogram gondola with a single oar, memorising the names of the extraordinary maze of hundreds of canals around which Venice is built, the quickest routes from point-to-point and to major landmarks, and even having to learn "tourist English."
 
Mrs Boscolo was tested by a panel from the 425-strong Gondoliers' Guild which has been custodian of the ancient skills and traditions of the gondolier since being formed in the year 1094 – and which has previously rejected a number of female applicants, including most-recently a local Venetian and a German-American who has been fighting for twelve years to get a licence (and who recently won court approval to work for a private hotel ferrying its guests only.)

Mrs Boscolo said she learnt her love of working gondolas from her father who spent 40 years on the boats, and said that as a child she would rather spend the day with him on the waters of the canals than playing with friends.
 
And she said that when questioned by her examiners about her physical ability as a woman to propel the long and heavy craft, she told them: "I've given birth to two children, and that was far more difficult and painful."

Gaining her licence means Mrs Boscolo is now qualified to don the traditional white-and-blue striped shirt, black trousers, straw hat and regulation gondoliers' shoes.

And all that remains is to see if she will serenade her passengers with "O Sole Mio" as she ferries them around the canals of Venice, or if she'll have some other surprise up her sleeve.

PLAY THE PLANTER IN YESTER-YEAR HAWAII

David Ellis

THINK Hawaii and the theatre of the mind conjures up pictures of bustling Honolulu, ice-cream stands and T-shirt shops, outriggers off Waikiki, surfboards and sunset cocktails, cornbeef hash, and prime rib topped with lobster tail…

And high-rise hotels and resorts sprawling to the horizon.

But close the eyes and imagine an Hawaii of a yesteryear. An Hawaii of over a century ago with quiet island lanes, beaches with nary a footprint to be seen, a place of lazing back in wicker chairs and rattan lounges, and for taking cocktails in cool breezes on shaded verandahs of gracious plantation homesteads amid palms and banyans…

If the idea appeals, then go back in time on Hawaii's movie-making isle of Kauai: At the Waimea Plantation Cottages, its possible to holiday in a one-time plantation manager's house, take walks on those beaches, sit out under the banyans, or fire up the gas barbecue for lazy evenings watching sunsets straight from a Hollywood props department.

Waimea's cottages go back to the late 19th century when vast sugar plantations enveloped tens of thousands of hectares of Kauai, each with its resident manager, assistant manager and an engineer overseeing the properties and the local Hawaiian and Chinese labor forces.

But with the motor car replacing the horse and sulky, time and distance between plantations were eroded, and by the 1940s with modernisation of mill plant and machinery there was little need to employ managers, assistants and engineers on all properties. Centralisation meant one small team could run a half dozen plantations.

Thus the late-1800s and early-1900s cottages and homesteads fell idle. Until the Waimea Plantation Cottages company came up with the idea of turning them into retreats for those looking for the unusual in self-catering holidays. At first it was thought that each property could operate as a stand-alone holiday unit, but the needs of maintaining and servicing just two or three cottages on each plantation proved too costly.

So it was decided to instead move the disused cottages to one property, with all services at one central point, and local Kauai residents awoke one morning in the 1990s to the sight of the first of several dozen old homesteads and cottages rumbling through their hamlets on caterpillar-like low-loaders enroute to Waimea on the island's south coast.

Once at Waimea they were set down amid 15ha of ocean-front coconut grove next to an historic sugar mill, all nicely spaced apart from each other, and with the coconut grove landscaped with hibiscus hedges for privacy, mown lawns and all myriad manner of tropical plants.

Each cottage was totally refurbished, maintaining the best of their yesteryear traditions, but with mod-cons demanded by latter-day holidaymakers. Original mahogany, rattan and wicker lounge and dining furniture was restored, kitchens fitted with fridges, microwaves, and cooktops, cupboards outfitted with everything needed for a self-catering holiday, master bedrooms equipped with ensuites, and original bathrooms/toilets modernised for other bedrooms.

Cottages and homesteads range from one- to five-bedrooms, with phones, weekly housekeeping, cable TV, 3m-wide verandahs with gas barbecues that can be wheeled out onto the lawns, selections of local magazines, a black-sand beach for walking and casting a line, a guest's pool beachside, and days of local sightseeing by car… from the vast Waimea Canyon, to the sites where over 100 movies and TV series have been made here on Hawaii's so-called Garden Isle.

There's also an excellent informal restaurant on the property – and for a cold drink on a warm day, its own boutique brewery.

The restaurant offers island favourites of beef and seafoods, as well as pizzas from a brick oven, island luau (underground oven) special evenings… and will deliver "sunset dinner" meals to your bungalow, or pack you a picnic lunch to take on a day's drive to one of Kauai's movie sites or national parks.

And to slake the thirst, the plantation's Waimea Brewing Company serves handcrafted home-brews in a yester-year pub atmosphere with multi-ethnic "plantation era" Polynesian, Asian and European light meals available (including wondrously sinful desserts,) and on select nights Hawaiian or blue grass country music.

There is also a full spa on the property.

Waimea Plantation Cottages can be booked through Canada & Alaska Specialist Holidays, 1300 79 49 59.   


PHOTO CAPTIONS:  

 

[] YESTER-YEAR Hawaiian plantation manager's home updated with all

    today's mod-cons

 

[] LARGER cottages are ideal for families

 

[] WAIMEA Plantation Cottages even has its own boutique brewery – and

   a restaurant

 

[] CURL up beachside in your hammock with a good book

SPOTLIGHT ON VANCOUVER

SOAK UP VIBRANT VANCOUVER

See Vancouver by water: Vancouver is surrounded by pristine, shimmering water. Don't let it go to waste! Take a tour on a jetski or seadoo and indulge in the unrivalled glory of Vancouver in summer. Its mountainous skyline and the beauty of Stanley Park on the water's edge is the stuff of postcards. You've got the wind in your hair, the waves at your feet and Vancouver Water Adventures gives you the best motorised personal watercraft excursion possible. www.vancouverwateradventures.com

Attend Bard on the Beach: There's nothing like a little Shakespeare set against the dramatic backdrop of mountains, city, sea and sky. Vancouver Shakespeare Festival runs from 3 June through 25 September, 2010, in the lovely Vanier Park. See all the old favourites: Much Ado About Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, Falstaff ( Henry IV parts 1 & 2) and Henry V. It's a magical combination of Shakespeare with sand and surf for the ultimate summer evening. www.bardonthebeach.org

Stroll through Richmond Night Market: Find a bargain, bring home a treasure, fill your tummy with delicious cuisine from every corner of the globe, or just sit back and watch the people go by. With all the wonder and exotic allure of the famous night markets across Asia, the Richmond Night Market is a bewildering, ever changing array of activities, competitions, celebrations, performers, vendors, and food stalls. Never the same place twice and open every weekend from May through September. www.richmondnightmarket.com

Circumnavigate Stanley Park: Walk, run or cycle around the 9 kilometre Stanley Park Seawall, enjoying spectacular views of the city, North Shore Mountains and Lions Gate Bridge. It is hard to believe this incredible park, with its ancient red cedar forest and amazing wildlife sits smack bang on the edge of the downtown precinct. Visit the park's famed Vancouver Aquarium to see belugas, sharks and alligators.

Visit Granville Island: Go bright and early to grab the best in local produce and seafood, or late at night to absorb the local arts and theatre community. This beautiful waterfront setting is a hub of galleries, artisan shops, cafes and local clothing designers. This is one spot that will be a hit with kids and oldies alike. www.granvilleisland.com

HUNGRY? SINK YOUR TEETH INTO THIS..

Every fan of the vampire-themed movie saga "Twilight" will know that both the blockbuster "New Moon" and "Eclipse" were filmed in Vancouver. While the Twilight cast was in town, they enjoyed some of the city's best restaurants, including:
Glowbal Grill & Satay Bar: If you love Robert Pattinson, you probably already know this Yaletown hot spot was his favourite place for Kobe meatballs. It's also where the star celebrated his 23rd birthday.
Miku Restaurant: The whole cast (especially Kellan Lutz) loved the sushi at this cutting-edge Japanese eatery.
Blue Water Café: Yaletown's destination for seafood, Blue Water Café hosted the "New Moon" wrap-up party as well as the kick-off for "Eclipse."
Elixir Restaurant at Opus Hotel: Both Pattinson and Stewart partied with friends at this chic downtown hotel.

CALLING ALL SHOPAHOLICS

You can't beat the indie vibe of Vancouver designers. See for yourself at Shop Cocoon on Cambie Street, where various designers operate mini-boutiques under one roof. Check out handbags with attitude at Gaya, organic creations at Nixxi and artfully designed classics at Schaart Clothing Company. Kitsilano is home to west-coast style makers like Nicole Bridger, known for her use of sustainable materials. Just ten minutes from Canada Place, from Burrard to Jervis Street, lies the shopping district of Robson Street. We're talking dozens of fashion stores, restaurants and souvenir shops. It's here you'll find Armani, Banana Republic, Body Shop, Club Monaco, Gap, Guess and Zara. Splurged on the basics? Go cheap on accessories. Vancouver's Chinatown, the second largest in North America, is packed with stores peddling inexpensive silk slippers and teeny purses, faux pashminas and jewels. To dazzle is divine!

www.vancouver.com

STRUTH - Best Pub in The Street

STRUTH !    

IN his continuing search for the more weird, wacky and wondrous in the world of travel, David Ellis says there's a street in Scotland far north that's just 2.06m long (6ft 9ins) and has just one address on it – a bistro in the local pub.

Ebenezer Place at Wick in Caithness County, was created in 1883 when Alexander Sinclair built a hotel at the corner of Union and River Streets. As the local council required him to identify his hotel on all faces, Mr Sinclair had "Mackays Hotel" painted on its Union and River Street sides, but "Ebenezer Place" at the top of the short and blunt end where the other two sides met.

But as that "corner" did not have a door in it, Mr Sinclair had to install one – and as soon as he did so, the Council then recognised the "corner end" of the hotel as an official address because it gave access to Mackays Hotel, and thus Ebenezer Place – all 2.06m of it – was declared an official street and an official mail delivery address.

Today Mackays Hotel still occupies the corner, with the one and only address on Ebenezer Place the No 1 Bistro within the hotel.

And interestingly, as well as laying claim to being the world's shortest street, Ebenezer Place has another interesting bit of history to it: Robert Louis Stevenson spent some of his childhood in Wick while his father built a breakwater in the local bay.

Stevenson Jnr later made reference to Ebenezer Place at "the five hand way" (Union Street, River Street, Bridge Street, Station Road and The Cliff that all joined at Ebenezer Place) in his novel Treasure Island.

BALI HAI IS CALLING – COME TO ME, COME TO ME…

David Ellis

Chances are you've never heard of Ambae Island or Makana Mountain. And having agreed on that, you're probably not really interested in reading any further.

But hang on, you've doubtless heard of, and maybe even read the book Tales of the South Pacific, or at least seen the movie. So you would know of the mysteriously rumbling and beautiful Bali Hai that kept rearing its volcanic peak throughout that movie.

And therein lies today's tale. For despite the fact they're thousands of kilometres apart, with one in the Southern and the other in the Northern Hemisphere, Ambae and Makana are virtually one, as inextricably linked as the divergent yarns that American author James A. Michener cobbled together for his classic volume Tales of the South Pacific in the 1940s.

Ambae dozes in the sun off the island of Santo in northern Vanuatu, and Makana stands majestically on the northern-most of the Hawaiian islands, Kauai.

But with its bag of tricks, Hollywood made them the-one when it came to making the movie South Pacific.

James A. Michener went to Vanuatu, then known as the New Hebrides, as an Intelligence Officer with the US Navy during the Pacific War, and later switched over to working as a Supply Officer. It was this latter role that enabled him to move around the islands, meeting the many characters whom he later melded into Tales of the South Pacific when he returned to New York and civilian life as a book editor at war's end.

Santo was a major America supply base in the war effort, and it was to off-shore Ambae that the local expatriate planters sought safety for their families.

Not that their concerns were about the war. Rather, they locked up their wives and daughters on Ambae because it was Out-of-Bounds to the thousands of women-less troops stationed on Santo.

Ambae had a high central peak that actually contained a lake, which in turn contained a volcanic crater. The mountain dominated the island and fascinated Michener, who referred to it as Vanicoro in his book, but when they made the stage show South Pacific, it was renamed Bali Hai.

And when it came to the follow-on movie, Hollywood just wasn't interested in going all the way to the far-flung and presumably-godforsaken New Hebrides to shoot scenes of pretty beaches, dense jungles and a rumbling volcano – even if Michener had written his book there.

Instead Hollywood chose the closer Kauai in Hawaii, and kept the name Bali Hai for the ever-rumbling mountain, while for the beach scenes the producers chose Kauai's Lumahai and Polihale Beaches, and for the jetty where the nurses and supplies kept coming ashore, took over a trade-ship jetty in the island's Hanalei Bay

Finally for the garden scenes around the oddly octagonal-shaped home of the French planter, Emille de Beche it used the Allerton Botanical Gardens that were once home in royal times to Hawaii's Queen Emma.
 
(The unique de Beche home on Santo really was octagonally-shaped and was recreated in a Hollywood studio, while Bloody Mary's trade-store-cum-home did exist as it appeared in the movie, and today still stands forlorn and empty under a great rain tree.)

But when it came to finding a nice volcanic peak next to a beach on Kauai for their Bali Hai, even Hollywood was stumped.  So their cameramen went inland to Makana Mountain in the Limahuli National Tropical Botanical Gardens – and to hide the fact it wasn't a stand-alone volcano behind the beach, had artists superimpose a wreath of cloud around its foothills in every frame of the master footage.

You can join a fascinating tour of the major movie sites on Kauai – a staggering 80-plus movies and TV series have been shot there, and they're still at it – or simply get a car, pick up a Film Location Map and do it yourself, but you won't learn as much as you do from the film-tour operators.

And while you're there, don't miss Limahuli Botanical Gardens' unique Hawaiian native plants, archaeological sites, and the engrossing tales and legends you'll hear from the guides.

And of course get pics of yourself in front of Bali Hai – but remember the locals still call it Makana and not Bali Hai.

And they say they're enormously proud of that.


PHOTO CAPTIONS:  

[] BALI HAI is calling – Kauai's Makana Mountain became Bali Hai in Hollywood's South Pacific.

[] THE real Bali Hai: Vanuatu's Ambae Island off the island of Santo

[] BLOODY Mary's tradestore still stands abandoned and forlorn on Santo Island

[] JAMES A Michener returned to Vanuatu in 1992.                                 

Cliveden House: WEEKEND OF SEX, SPIES, LIES AND DOWNFALLS

THE Astor's sprawling Cliveden House on 150ha on the banks of the River Thames.

David Ellis

FORTY NINE years ago this month British socialites, the 2nd Viscount and Lady Astor invited some friends to their stately Cliveden House on the banks of the Thames just outside London, for a summer's weekend of partying, tennis, croquet, boating on the river, and generally having a good time.

Little would they realise that their weekend would take on dimensions greater than anyone could have imaged: it resulted in one of Britain's greatest sex scandals, a spy expose, a suicide, the downfall of one of the country's most senior Cabinet Ministers – and ultimately the fall of the government itself.

Cliveden House has seldom been out of the public eye since the first "house" was built on its 150ha (375 acres) in 1666 by the 2nd Duke of Buckingham as an escape-hole with his mistress, burned down in 1795, and its replacement destroyed by fire in 1849.

To the horror of many, including "an astonished" Queen Victoria, the now-third Cliveden House was bought in 1893 by America's wealthiest man – William Waldorf Astor, who confounded British society even more by becoming a naturalised British subject, and going on to also purchase Hever Castle that brought with it the title Viscount Astor.

Astor's wife died prematurely and in 1906 he gave Cliveden to his son, Waldorf as a wedding gift, and moved himself into Hever Castle.

The newly-weds lost no time in inviting political leaders, writers, film stars, artists and other celebrities to lavish weekends at Cliveden House, amongst them Charlie Chaplin, Mahatma Gandhi, F.D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Joseph Kennedy, T.E. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling and aviatrix Amy Johnson.

The Astor's were generous to a fault, and in WWI built a hospital in their grounds for the Canadian Red Cross; this was dismantled at war's end, and when WWII erupted the Astor's again offered the site for another hospital

And in 1942 they donated the entire property to the British National Trust, with the proviso they could live there for as long as they wished – giving the Trust 250,000 English pounds (around AU$15.2-million today) for its perpetual upkeep.

It was in 1961 the Astor's included amongst guests Britain's then Minister of War, John Profumo and his glamorous actress wife Valerie Hobson, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, and the President of Pakistan to a summer party on the weekend of July 8th at Cliveden.

Also invited to stay in the property's separate Spring Cottage was a London society osteopath, Stephen Ward who took with him several friends including 19-year old fun-loving, Christine Keeler and a Russian Assistant Naval Attache, Captain Yevgeny Ivanov.

FUN-time Christine Keeler at the time
of her illicit relationship with Britain's
then-Minister of War, the married
John Profumo.

At one stage of the balmy July evening, Profumo and others wandered down to the swimming pool to investigate sounds of much gaiety, and it was here he set eyes for the first time on Christine Keeler; within days they were lovers.

It lasted only several months before Profumo ended the relationship, but a question was raised in parliament by an Opposition member; Profumo categorically denied any improper relationship – and was floored when Keeler sold "their" story to a London newspaper.

Worse, she revealed she had been sleeping at the same time with the Russian Naval Attache, Ivanov – who, even worse-still it emerged, was a Soviet spy.

Profumo confessed to the House of Commons he had lied, and resigned.

The British government, hell-bent to distance itself from the scandal, bizarrely charged the osteopath Stephen Ward (who'd introduced Profumo and Keeler at Cliveden House,) with living off immoral earnings from Keeler's other relationships; Ward committed suicide before his case ended.

SPRING COTTAGE in the grounds of Cliveden House
– in which Christine Keeler stayed during
that ill-fated weekend in July 1961.

The current operators of Cliveden House, von Essen hotels have put together an intriguing Profumo Affair package there on the night of July 30: a mere 497.50pp British Pounds (AU$880pp) gets twin-share, a "Scandal Tour" walk around the property with long-time "Affair" researcher and expert Rupert Gavin, a Champagne and canapé reception, and a further "inside" talk over a 3-course dinner with wine by Rupert Gavin as to what secrets of The Profumo Affair his research suggests the government is still so determined to hide.

Next morning there's full English breakfast and use of the property's indoor and outdoor pools, tennis and squash courts, gym and hot tubs.

If you'd like a stay at Cliveden House, now a stately home hotel, visit www.clivedenhouse.co.uk