Snowbow Newsletter March ’22

The Snowbow Newsletter March 2022

I prefer if possible to make the writing of these newsletters as spontaneous and informal as possible, and more as if we’re enjoying an actual conversation rather than a well-thought-out, planned letter, because I look upon most of you as friends and so I should write/talk to you, accordingly, so here goes, and if you should come across a few typographical errors along the way then worry not for seldom does any of us ever enter into a word perfect conversation and also, as happens when having a conversation, I’m quite likely to say something that will upset someone, somewhere in the world, especially in this day and age, so fingers ready to go, here follows some almost everyday conversation…Here we go!
 
“Hello, mate, how are you?… Any chance you could lend me a fiver until next week and I promise to pay it back and……”   Well that sounds like a normal conversation to me, and you can’t blame me for trying can you. Oh well I knew I’d say something that would upset someone, so now I’ll try to concentrate a little more on the content of our latest newsletter, all be it unrehearsed, unplanned and written with a ‘what comes up comes up’ attitude.

Once again I am so sick and tired of all the doom and gloom swirling through the town, cities and countries of today’s world… where have all the good days gone, the ones where smiles were in abundance and people were in the main, so nice to know and be with… Well at least we’ve got each other, so let me say how good it is to be with you all once again and let me try to write it in a way that might just bring us all a smile or two.
 
Part of the   problem most of us have is that we’ve seen and lived through times like this before, but unlike today where the media bombards us around the clock with the worst possible news they can find, our news back in say WW2 or later when Russia was once again threatening us with nuclear war and we had to go to the rescue of Berlin as they tried to cut most of Germany off from the rest of the world… When I think about those days I remember so well how us school kids would once again look up into the sky at any large plane passing in case it was a Russian nuclear bomber, as Moscow threatened, but we all just carried on as normal and it wasn’t until the Cuban affair in 1962 when John Kennedy had had enough and turned on Russia threatening to annihilate them completely that their nutcase of a President, Nilita Khruschev, saw sense and finally backed down.  

Then we had the fall of the Berlin Wall, but what was so important and different then was that no matter how serious things became, TV and Radio news presenters, newspaper and magazine journalists always used to end their presentations or articles on a positive note such as. “As Russian troops surround Berlin, once again we have managed to get supplies through to the desperate people there, and it’s only a question of time before Russia will rue it’s ways and live to regret its actions.”  So we always lived in hope and that hope always managed to win through in the end… Take note news broadcasters and journalists of today!   
 
Thankfully we didn’t have the internet back then, and all that other high-tech 24hr communication equipment, but just the old pencil and paper, and if I were trying to write this back then, if I were fortunate I would probably have had to do it on one of those old heavyweight typewriters of the time, and when you look back now, well they might have been state-of-the-art, but they were big, relatively slow and so cumbersome. 
 
This might surprise you but we get a lot of emails etc., from the younger generation (anyone under ninety!) asking us if our lives were so much freer back then and if, despite all the troubles we had to endure daily from countries like Russia, did we really just carry on as normal with our lives, laughing and playing and having fun, and is it also true that you were much more politer than the people of today, and it is with a feeling of pride that I tell them…
 
It was second nature for any young person to give up their seat on a bus or train to a lady or anyone of age, to open doors for females to pass through, and if taking a lady or any female out to say the pub or a restaurant, the male always paid, plus so much more, all of which to my mind, demonstrated how much we appreciated the women in our lives back then…    Then I joke with the callers, which is always a great way to communicate with them especially when they are so young, and I tell them in a sightly serious sounding tone… “We were so good and nice then we didn’t even pick our noses or break wind.” which really makes them laugh… “No we didn’t and one of the reasons a lot of us never picked our noses was because if  we had to write a letter or a document we either had to do it with pen and paper or if we were lucky on a great big heavy typewriter, which meant having to bang our delicate fingers up and down on its heavy keyboard all day, which severely damaged our once delicately manicured classical hands, which changed their shape into something that looked as though they had been attacked and remoulded by the local blacksmith into things that looked more like stubby looking paws than normal hands, and our poor fingers, instead of being objects of some beauty were instead battered and flattened at the tips.”
 
“Yes, that’s why so many never picked their noses back then, not because we were too polite to do so but because the ends of our fingers were so flattened from banging away on those keyboards that no matter how hard we tried we just couldn’t get them up our hooters to do any picking!”  Again they would fall about laughing and ask. “But why didn’t you break wind as well?”   “Yeah, well one of the reasons was that we didn’t get much food back then but more important, our clothes were made from much thicker material then, take my sea-going uniform for example, which was made from really thick and heavy material, so thick that if you did accidentally break wind and let one go, thereby  releasing your body gasses accordingly,  instead of them just escaping in the normal way as they would today, they would instead get trapped inside your trousers or whatever you were wearing and whizz around and around like mad, building up pressure until their forces became too great and they finally exploded and broke free with such force that often the victim inside the thick clothing just took off like a rocket”!.
 
Well by now most youngsters are howling with laughter.  “Did that ever happen to you?” They often ask.  “Well no because I made holes in my clothes so any accidental farts had an escape, but that was because I was intelligent, but others weren’t so fortunate… I well remember the 3rd Engineer on an Elder Dempster Line ship called the Aureol, who was caught in such a situation and when is wind finally managed to escape he suddenly found himself whizzing straight out the top of the ship’s funnel and up into deepest space, as did the Head Waiter on the very posh Cunard liner, the Caronia, who unfortunately was caught by an excessive  attack of the old wind just as he was about to daintily silver serve his multi-millionaires table with their eagerly awaited Vietnamese Pho soup! 
 
As the wind swirled around inside his thick uniform, desperately searching for an escape route from the confines, the pain it caused made his whole face suddenly deform in screaming agony and as it did so his knobbly knees bent double as his tummy gave out an uncontrollable loud rumble.  He struggled to speak… “Was that the ship’s siren I heard?”  “I don’t think so.” Answered a monocled trillionaire sitting at his table… But the embarrassment quickly grew as the power of his gasses shot around the inside of his uniform searching for a way to escape and all the poor old Head Waiter could do was hope for the best as prepared himself for the worst…   Other waiters, knowing what was about to happen all dived for cover, but just like old Putin, the poor Head Waiter was beyond help and beyond any physical control his whole uniform split from top to bottom as a thunderous roar ripped it apart and the escaping gasses lifting him straight out of his shiny shoes and then sending him streaking through the air, straight over the heads of all his very rich dinners and on towards a wide open porthole, which thanks to his training at the Vindicatrix Sea Training School he managed to navigate straight through before turning hard a port, and then driven by the thunderous roar of his ever increasing gasses he turned in an upwardly direction and just like a NASA rocket fired into space, he quickly disappeared  into what was really quite a beautiful, starry night, but sadly, he was never ever seen or heard of again… which was a bit of a shame in a way because as they were nearing the end of a world cruise he was expecting some really good tips from his passengers.”  Oh how those young callers laughed.
 
When they asked if the stories were true, I told them that back in those days if something could possibly happen then it almost certainly did at sea…    Actually, you would be surprised at the stories our Snowbow customers tell us about things that happened to them when they were at sea, stories unbelievably funny and amazingly true, and when making our video series ‘The Great Liners,’ if I get the chance I try to use some of those stories in the script, not just because they are so funny and true, but because we at Snowbow know how important it is for us to try keep the memories of the heyday of our sea days alive forever.

Lots of you are asking if we’re making anymore DVDs and all I can say is that I hope so, but as I’ve explained before, we don’t get any financial support to do all this work, which is such a shame because even after having worked on this for well over thirty years now, we still have lots of film that in 95% of cases has never been made public before, and I’m not talking about film of the Mrs taking a bath either, but really fascinating footage of all kinds of ships… We even found rare old film of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition, but we really do have great problems because everything we do costs money that unfortunately we just don’t have and the only way we can possibly get it is when you so kindly buy the DVDs, of which there are now fifty… Yes that’s right, 50, which if a broadcaster such as the BBC had made from scratch, would have cost several millions of pounds
 
I wish we had a magic money tree because all these films must be saved and to make things worse, Corona virus and Putin’s war have made things even more difficult, so do order some from us and even better, if you win a pile of loot on the old National Lottery, then buy the whole series, because we still do that special offer, so if you bought the whole 50 then you’d get 16 of them for free (no wonder we’re skint!) but seriously, we will try as hard as we possibly can to make more programmes no matter how difficult that will be and in the meantime you can at least enjoy some good programmes that you will really like… Oh, our series The Great Liners has been voted the best maritime video series in the whole world, so we’re very proud of that.
 
You know something, writing this has just given me an idea of how we might be able to raise some more money to help us with our work and at the same time bring you all lots of fun and laughter, for I have still been banging away on me old typewriter, this time writing two books, the first being ‘Jumping For Balloons,’ and one thing’s for sure, this book will make you laugh for it is basically my life story, which is almost unbelievable but I promise you, every word in it is absolutely true….
 
It’s a second print run as the first sold out quite quickly, but they are both limited to just 200 copies and this 2nd run has much larger print than the initial one, which will make it so much easier and enjoyable to read.

Here then is the actual book and as you can see from its cover description of being A Bio Comedy Drama, it’s far from being your regular autobiography, which are usually about some famous TV or film star you’ve never heard of, and written by ghost writers, whereas mine is not only about my life but in many ways also about your own lives, for I take you back in time to those wonderful old days and write about just how it really was to have lived and grown up then, starting as a small child in WW2.      People today are forever complaining how difficult life and things are for them, but few if any really know how difficult life was for anyone living during WW2 or the ensuing years  of rationing and hardship, yet we did it all with hardly a complaint and it all comes out in these books in a way that as you read so the old memories of those days come back and you realise just how extremely difficult it was for every one of us back then…
 
At the start of WW2 I slept in a draw with a gasmask over my head in and when just a little older, queued up for food at the local store from the very early hours until I managed to eventually get served many hours later… (Two potatoes and a cabbage!) If I was lucky.
 
Occasionally, well perhaps once a week, I actually got a bath, but not one all warm and lovely in a big relaxing bath filled with fragrant smelling bubbles,  but a little old metal pan with about two inches of almost lukewarm water in it, just once a week… Yep, no luxury warm towels then, or come to that, any heating in the house at all, and yet despite all this most of us still have so many fond memories of those days, days when almost everyone was so nice and helpful to each other, despite the thousands of  big bombs that fell down on top of us every night.
 
I could go on forever, but I must say… thank god that we didn’t have the internet, iPhone’s and everything else back then because if we had, imagine how today’s wokes would have coped with everyday life let alone listening to the radio spelling out scenes like Dunkirk or the hell of the Blitz… Then they would know what real hardship is and all without screams of  “Help, help… I’m mentally ill.”  But instead just everyday conversations  as people just continued with their everyday lives as if everything was normal.

One thing’s for sure, this book will bring back memories to all of you who lived in or through the war, but it is full of so many other amazing stories, telling of life at school or how, with father’s away at war and mothers working from dawn to dusk in aircraft factories, offices or even driving trucks or buses, us kids were left to look after ourselves at very young ages, and we would often spend the whole day on our own, roaming through the countryside and eating berries and even leaves when hungry, and not come home again until the end of the day in the hope of being given something to eat, yet no one panicked or worried about us for we were all so much more independent then and quite capable of looking after ourselves. I even came up one day with my pockets full of live ammunition and I was only five, and another day found a prisoner of war camp where the inmates felt so sorry for this little bedraggled mess that was me and actually cooked me egg and chips, the best meal I ever had in the whole war and possibly, the best meal ever!

The book has more than its share of funny stories as well, and I do mean funny and not so-called funny as from the mouths of all the hopelessly unfunny comedians of today.   In fact when I read through it again it even makes me laugh as it follows me through life to my early days at sea, then into show business where I worked in films, TV and  the record business as a pop star, each one packed with really funny happenings and days.    And forget all the plastic surgery worn by many of today’s so-called stars, for we didn’t perform at places like  Caeser’s Palace in Las Vegas for millions and millions, no, we performed at real places such as the Workingmen’s  Clubs up north for just a couple of quid a night, places that were more dangerous than even Afghanistan at its worst, especially if the clubs compere introduced you to the obviously hostile audience as being an act from Down South, where upon a volley of empty beer bottles and broken glasses took to the air and headed straight for us, yet strangely enough, even in the middle of such hostility we still managed to win the battle and within a few minutes have them all laughing and even bringing full bottles of beer up to the stage for us to drink, and by the time we had finished our piece they really didn’t want us to go, but go we did, for often we would play to as many as four different clubs a night before heading back to our five star hotel, or should I say our freezingly cold B&B with its straw stuffed mattress bed and a couple of old blankets to help us survive the night…but we still loved it and often laughed ourselves to sleep.

There is so much for you to read and enjoy, and I’ve even illustrated it for you as well, just in case like me you have difficulty in reading!     Anyway, I’ve written this to hopefully bring you something to enjoy in the much troubled world we live in today, and if I can succeed in making you laugh or just writing something that brings back happy memories to you, then that will have made all my hours of writing so worthwhile… I’ve even written stories that could well get me shot, stories revealing just how corrupt show business was back then (and still is, revealing how one of TV’s biggest game shows was stolen and even name the names responsible, who are/were some of our biggest celebrities who until now must feel that they’ve got away it scot-free and yet despite all this we still managed to have amazing times and endless laughter.
 
I won’t write any more about the content of the book but I can let you see several of the wonderful comments we’ve received from some of you who have managed to get a copy, which I have to say really helps to make all the effort to write these books so worthwhile.
 
 
Hi Ulla
I’ve already read chapter 2 and nearly fell out of my chair laughing at the Des, Plate and “Daphne” experience.  Can’t wait to read more!    Thank Des for the very kind way he signed the book for me.
Bob, South Wales.
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I was just another bloke when I went away to sea, but then one day something happened that changed my life forever… no I didn’t win the football pools, it was far better than that for I met… Des, and from that day on I had the best years of my life… it was terrific and not a single day passed by without him doing something that would have us all in stitches… He really is the funniest person I ever met and that all comes through in this most enjoyable book, which isn’t so much about life at sea but life as it used to be in the Good Old Days… How the memories come flooding back… Great!
Ken Orpin,   Kent.
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I hadn’t even heard of Des Cox when I first came across this book, but the cover looked sort of different so I got it and I am so pleased I did, because what at first looked like just another book on the book stores shelves, this  one turned out to be quite remarkable and I can say in all honesty, I have never laughed so much in all my life.   But it’s not just the laughter it’s the unique way its written and illustrated and the way it manages to take you on a journey back through time, especially to those devasting years of WW2, years, and as I was born in 1950 it is a time and experience I knew precious little about until now, when I found the book somehow managed to take me back to that time in such a way that I felt I was there for real, and that’s when I first appreciated just how hard life was for everyone back then…  
 
It’s a wonderful book and Des, thank you for all the fun and laughter it has given me… Please write more.
 
Margaret Murdoch.
Widnes.
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I met Des when I was 28 and working in the music business.  At the time I was a shy, sober person but when I met him all that changed forever.
Des and I happened to share a flat in Chelsea in the so-called Swinging Sixties, which in those days was the centre of the universe.   We soon became familiar faces in all the best clubs and bars where Des entertained customers with his impersonations and wit. Des and I had so many hilarious escapades that it is hard to remember them all, but boy, did we help the sixties swing.    He has written many funny stories about this in his book; however, I can recall some that He’s overlooked, like the time we took Roy Orbison to a large variety club in the North of England to perform. Des was also performing. He looked at one of the men in the front of the vast audience, stepped down and stroked his cheek, and said in his camp voice ‘Oh you are awful but I do like you’ and minced off deliberately tripping over his own feet. It was funnier to watch than to relate. However, present at the time was an unknown comedian who incorporated this into his own act and then went on to become a household name. Yes, his name was Dick Emery! And Des’s words… ‘Oh you are awful but I like you’ became his catch phrase and used by almost everyone in the whole country.
Some of the stories in this book can be hard to believe but I can certainly vouch, for my part, they are true.   Des is the funniest ad-lib person I have ever met or am likely to meet, and being in the business I seen them al from London’s West End to Las Vegas …  He is as entertaining now as he was back then and still has a magic in commanding any audience, so do read and enjoy!
Mike De Havilland.
Rickmansworth.
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Hello there… I somehow found this book and it looked different in an interesting way, and being the avid book reader that I am, I started to scan the opening pages to get an idea of whether it would be worth reading in full, but as I read so I slowed down and found myself settling down into my favourite armchair and reading on, but this time at a normal speed and taking in every word…  It is like no other book I have ever read as it takes you on a truly fascinating journey through the valleys of Des Cox’s mind, valleys that have something of everything in them, and as I journeyed on so I could feel that I was immersing myself into those fascinating valleys, for it was a world in which I just felt I belonged.     Many of the stories are almost beyond belief but the more I read the more I realised that they were all true… How could anyone have a life like that!   On top of all that, he has a wonderful, natural way of making you laugh for his sense of humour would leave even the best comedians in the world struggling to keep up with him, so if you read this and are considering buying a copy then get one now whilst you still can, because at the moment it is only a special small print edition and when they’re all gone there might not be anymore. Or, if the books becomes famous as indeed it should, this early edition could be worth a lot of money. It is a great book that opens up secrets of a world I knew so little about… Wonderful.
 
Mika,   Jerusalem
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And now to the second book, which is fictional but based on true stories and completely different from the first book, Jumping For Balloons Vol 1.   I first thought of writing this when I was serving at sea on the good old Rangitata,  a passenger cargo ship that operated between the UK and New Zealand, via the Caribbean, Panama and Pitcairn Island of Mutiny on the Bounty fame.   It was a long voyage, especially crossing the vast Pacific Ocean, which alone took several weeks but on one such voyage, which is a long time as sea even for an ardent sailor let alone first time at sea passengers, whom for it was an eternity.
 
On the 15th day at sea the Captain summoned me to the bridge to tell me that they had seen smoke coming from Henderson Island, a small uninhabited island in mid Pacific, and had decided to put a boat ashore there to investigate.   What the boat found was a somewhat bedraggled man who had been shipwrecked there for some four years, together with his pet monkey… They brought both of them back to our ship and we then took them on to Pitcairn Island.   On the short voyage to Pitcairn the man we had rescued told me his story, which as Ship’s Writer at the time, I had to write out in detail ready for the Immigration Authorities in New Zealand.
 
After a brief stop at Pitcairn we continued to New Zealand but unfortunately because of quarantine restrictions in New Zealand we had to leave the monkey behind on Pitcairn, but the man we rescued had to come with us… The separation of leaving his monkey after just the two of them having been together for four long years broke his heart and he suffered badly. Six weeks later, having discharged and loaded fresh cargo in New Zealand ready for the homeward voyage we set sail for Pitcairn.   I will write about all this in my life story but for the time being I’ll just add that when we reached Pitcairn the Islanders brought the monkey out to our ship and when they came alongside the monkey leapt out of their small boat, grabbed hold of a rope ladder hanging from the open deck and scampered up it and straight into the arms of the rescued man, where the two of them just hugged and cried with emotion.
 
Unfortunately when we set sail again we had to leave the monkey behind on Pitcairn Island because of American quarantine restriction in Panama, and so they were separated once again with the monkey so unhappy on Pitcairn and the poor man to be taken to Panama with us.  The whole crew of the Rangitata felt so sorry for him that we had a collection and managed to raise enough money to get the monkey back to America, although the process took two years… One day the ship received a cable while at sea, a cable that the Captain read out to everyone aboard…  
 
I would like to thank you all for your kindness and what you have done and thanks to you all, both Chicko (The monkey) and I are back together again and are so happy. 
 
That is just one of the true stories that happened to me during my seagoing life that inspired me to write this book, Christmas Island, but there are so many other equally as fascinating stories of things that also happened to me, all of which have come together to make this book come true, so here is that book together with a little more information
re its content.

Christmas Island

… is a completely different South Sea Island from the two official ones we know, for the one in this book is a fictional one where the most amazing things happen. The end result is a wonderful story not bound by any of the rules and restraints that many of today’s publishers impose upon their authors, so to stifle all freedom of speech and imagination yet amazingly this is basically a very simple story of a battle between good and evil, but the way it is treated and written is far from simple for it’s the equivalent of popping to your corner café for a plate of egg and chips and end up being served with a three-star Micheline gourmet delight and like such a delight, once you take the first bite of the first page you will want to enjoy every little mouthful for as so often is the case  it’s the simplest of dishes that taste the best, and in this book, although so basically simple it is indeed amongst the very  best. Just a story about a battle between the good and the bad but told in a way no one has ever attempted to tell before, and it really is a book you will read over and over again.   The Good verses the Bad, which is something practically all of us have experienced at some time or other in our lives, as do the ordinary everyday people in this book, who find their reasonably straight forward lives become entangled in a ginormous web of merciless evil that is hell-bent on destroying us all forever.  There are moments of despair and hopelessness, huge tension and sadness, but Christmas Island also manages to bring us fun and laughter and all in all we fall in love with the wonderful characters we meet, which makes the final decisive battle between the good and the bad even more finger bitingly, agonisingly tense… Can just a few ordinary people succeed against the might of enormous satanic powers of evil, in a huge battle to save our whole planet from being taken over by those warped supernatural forces of evil.

Of course, the good people are not a force of power at all but just ordinary people whose only wish is to help make our world as beautiful and as safe as anywhere could ever be, so when they find themselves having to fight against such massive forces of evil they are completely out of their depth, but even so, fear had no place in their vocabulary…     
 
The end result is a wonderful story more in keeping with how authors used to write their books, free of unnecessary meddling and interference, making almost every book different, as opposed to all being of a similar type as so many are today.    In short, once you start to read the very first page the whole story will become one you feel is a part of your own life and although basically so simple to read and enjoy, you will find yourself reading it over and over again and, if you have any, then even reading it to your grandchildren for it really is one of the best Christmas Stories ever written.

Here are just a few of the really nice reviews we’ve received.
 
What do I think of this book… well it’s difficult to put into a few words but it’s a story unlike anything I’ve ever read before and I am a passionate reader and one that’s not the easiest to please, for I often find myself putting a book down after reading just a few pages and just knowing that I’m never going to enjoy it, but this one had the opposite effect on me and not only did I read on… I also couldn’t put it down and when I eventually reached the end of the wonderful journey it took me on, and surviving its surprising and incredible end, to my astonishment I picked it up and read it all over again for there’s just something very special indeed about it.
           
Jackie Hill, Derby.
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The cover of this book caught my eye, which can often mean disaster, but I’m so pleased I got it for together with all its wonderful characters and artwork it  is one of the best books I have ever read. Come on Des, please write some more.      
 
Sylvia Wynn, Leytonstone, London.
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I sailed the world when I was a seafarer and when I read this book, Des’s way of writing  took me back to those wonderful seafaring days, reminding me of all the stories and strange happenings I witnessed…If only I had the ability to turn my stories into such a wonderful book, because I really did enjoy reading this and am about to do so all over again… Well done Des.             
 
Gerry Mason, ex-ship’s carpenter, Shaw Savill Line.
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I’ve often bought books on the internet and many times I’ve regretted it, but thankfully this was a very lucky find and one I fell totally  in love with it… I’m sure most of the characters in it will become classics as they take you on one of life’s long and winding pathways, through the many wonders and tribulations of life and yet you just have to go on reading and enjoying every word of this exciting and colourful  journey… It really rates up with the best and that includes the interesting artwork all of which is unique
               
Jonathan Myrie, Stockholm.
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This book is truly something else and once you pick it up its almost impossible to put down… How good it is to get a book that tells a story that is so exciting and imaginative…I’ve read it three times already, and I will keep it forever.
           
Mia Fischer, Cologne
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There is so much happening throughout the book and at times I found myself clutching my fists as I tried to help the wonderful yet simple characters in the story fight what appears to be an impossible battle against the huge powers of evil and yet the stories are so well balanced light and colour that take you into worlds of beauty and happiness, all of which combine to create a book with a story unlike any other I know, a book that not only you will enjoy and also, if like me, will happily read to my grandchildren because like so many great stories, this one is without age or anything other than just being a story for everyone to enjoy.
 
Amanda George, Ruislip.                          
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So there you are, just a few comments that might help you on your way, but I am pretty confident that both books are ones you will enjoy… When I first managed to write the first draft of Christmas Island my manager at the time fell in love with it and suggested I write a screenplay, which I duly did, only to find that no fewer than nine major film companies asked for the film rights including Disney,  But my manager, who at the time managed many top Hollywood film directors and producers from his Los Angeles office, asked some of them to read it as well and they all came back with the same thoughts which were; It was a great story but because I had experience in film making I had restricted my imagination so that screen special effects as they were then, would be able to deal with all the scenes.,, So they made the following suggestion; that we put the story on ice for a while and wait a few years for new technology to arrive that would be able to deal with any story, thereby giving me the freedom to let my imagination go as far as it wanted to. So reluctantly we put the script away until a future date and as the years rolled by I basically forgot all about it until just very recently.    
 
As any regular cinema goer knows, special effects today are truly amazing and seem to be able to do almost anything to bring stories to life, so at last I was free to write whatever I wanted to write, without concern for how it might work in a film or TV, so what we have today is both the book and a whole new screenplay…
 
Now of course I can’t guarantee that film/TV makers will still be interested in the film rights, but every film/TV company in the world is always searching for great stories and having read the initial draft I would have thought the chances are quite high that they will want to read this, and therefore should it be made into a feature film then the value of one of these special edition books (There’s only 100 of them) will go through the roof, so that’s another good reason to get a copy while you can.
 
There is also another very good reason to get these books and that is because every penny we get from their sales will go to helping us produce more Great Liners DVDs, so all in all it would be great if you can help, especially as the books and DVDs will be worth having anyway and we here at Snowbow will be able to save so much more rare maritime film for posterity, so it won’t only be us who will enjoy watching them but also people in say a thousand years’ time’ allowing them to be able to turn back the hands of time to our age and to see for themselves just what life was like in the age that I and I’m sure so many of you will always remember as being the best years of our lives…
 
Talking about the best years of our lives, wouldn’t it be great to be able to set sail on a ship like the ones shown in the very rare posters below.

Well if you’ll forgive the expression, we’re on the job and looking for some great cruises… We’ve also being offered the chance of having our own cruise ship, but in all truth that isn’t something that I feel like taking on alone, for it’s a hell of a lot of work as we know from experience, but one way or another (we might become involved in a sort of association/partnership with an exisiting cruise line, which would solve a lot of problems, so we promise to let you know as soon as we possibly can… Saving this, I could always pick up a second hand one from London’s Sepentine, but that would have to be rowed of course.
 
What else is there… Well having hit the global top ten charts with the records I released not too long ago, I do want to record and release more and to that end I have written some good songs, so it’s all go as usual and time is always a premium  but hey, if we get a cruise ship then I could perform my songs and some comedy when we’re althogether again…  In the meantime the LP is taken from a live show and adlibbed so anything goes and it usually does, so much so that when you listen to it, it’s almost as if you are there on the ship for real.

A little Ray of Happiness

What else is there… Well the Scout film is proving popular and so it should because it was shot all over the world and is the only such film to tell the whole story of Scouting from it’s birth on Brownsea Island right through to modern day, which gives it a running time of approximately 70 mins, so if you were ever involved in the Scouts or have children or grandchildren who are scouts, then do get a copy for them all to enjoy.

Just a tiny taster of the magnificent Award Winning DVDs from our TV series The Great Liners, showing rare archive film of practically every ship, port and shipyard in the world, ranging from the smallest coasters to the most famous ocean liners ever…  Each DVD has a running time of 60 mins plus, and 97%  of their content is rare archive film of shipping, unique to u,s and all filmed during the Golden Age of Ocean Travel… If you have an interest in ships and have  never seen one of these DVDs before, then you really should, for produced to the highest broadcast standards, without a doubt they are far more enjoyable to watch than most programmes on our TV’s today.  So get them now while you still can, for everything has to come to an end at some time and when tha happens then it will be too latefor you to do so.     
 
 You can order from our website at:   www.snowbow.co.uk  or if you prefer you can call us direct on:    00 44 (0) 1273 585391 or 584470       Des’s LP costs £12 99p + postage.     The Scout film £17. 95 + postage, the books £12. 95 + postage and the DVDs £17. 95 + postage, and we’re still running our special offer whereby for every two Great Liners DVDs you buy you get a 3rd one of your choice free… You can’t get better than that can you.
 
All the income from everything we sell will be used to help us fund future productions of The Great Liners…   So thank you for all the greatly appreciated help and support you have given us and we hope that the work we do can help to add a little cheer and more to all of you wherever you are in the world.   Oh, and a warning, if ever you should come with us on one of our wonderful Maritime Memory Cruises; you could end up like this!….

 

Washed Up

If you wanted any item you order from us signed, then just let me know and your wish will be granted.
 
Best wishes,
 
Des.