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Fishlock, Trevor

Trevor Fishlock is a writer, broadcaster and foreign correspondent. He has worked in over seventy countries, and was correspondent for The Times and The Daily Telegraph. He has written books about Wales, India, Russia and America, and has presented over 150 television programmes about life and history in Wales. His most recent book, A Gift of Sunlight: The fortune and quest of the Davies sisters of Llandinam, was published in 2014.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [3] 59; [10] 89; [20] 63; [27] 59; [38] 60

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20040901161645

Well-salted

Trevor Fishlock on Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

It is laconic and simple, non-romantic in that Slocum refuses to be a lone hero struggling against the terrifying sea. Rather, he is at home in the ocean wilderness, insisting that ‘the wonderful sea charmed me from the first’. Spray is his companion as much as a boat: ‘The Spray enjoyed many civilities while she rode at anchor.’ Revisiting Sailing Alone after more than thirty years, I was reminded of Slocum’s trick of appearing as a self-effacing guest, reading and cooking while the trusty Spray gets on with the job of sailing, holding her course with the wheel secured.
20060601104726

Extra for the Bath

Trevor Fishlock on Monica Dickens, My Turn to Make the Tea

At the end of My Turn to Make the Tea, Monica Dickens’s autobiographical local newspaper saga, her heroine Poppy is fired for an act of noble sabotage and replaced by ‘a lad of sixteen fresh from school’. I was that boy. At least, as I turned the pages, I hoped I would be. From the age of 14 I wanted the excitement of a newspaper life, to wear the golden trilby. I saw destiny in our evening paper’s ad for a trainee. I got the job. Instead of being a teenager I would be a junior reporter. My father bought me a blue suit, a maroon tie and a pen. I’d seen the films so I knew I would find a noisy chaos of reporters at squalid desks jabbing typewriters beneath a cumulus of smoke. Someone showed me the mysteries of sub-editors, compositors and inky-aproned printers, servants of the gigantic presses. The place reeked of tobacco, ink, paper, hot metal and canteen fry. I inhaled.
20081201160640

Unparliamentary Words

Trevor Fishlock on Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan

In the summer of 1980 The Times sent me to Delhi. My first foreign posting, it rewarded all my hopes of adventure. India and Pakistan were at the heart of my reporting. I also wrote from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Early on 23 June Sanjay, the politically powerful younger son of the Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, crashed his sports plane in Delhi and died. It was a big story and I was only three weeks into the job.
20100901114140 Trevor Fishlock on Winifred Loraine, Robert Loraine, Soldier, Actor, Airman

High Flyer

Trevor Fishlock on Winifred Loraine, Robert Loraine, Soldier, Actor, Airman

Robert Loraine was a magnificent man in a flying machine. I first encountered his story in an Anglesey meadow where he had two of his many crashes. Soon afterwards I chanced on a biography of him in a second-hand bookshop. Robert Loraine, Soldier, Actor, Airman was as wrecked as one of his flimsy aircraft. A restorer made it shelfworthy so that from time to time I can marvel at Loraine’s reckless courage. As a distinguished actor he had played d’Artagnan on the London stage and he seemed to stay in character when he swapped sword for joystick. ‘He had the soul of a poet,’ Jules Védrines, his French mechanic, observed, ‘and a poet does not make a reliable pilot.’

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