Books
The following books are written and/or published by Chris McCooey under his inprint Jak Books and are available by post. (please add £1 per title and make cheque payable to Chris McCooey)
Despatches from the Home Front – the War Diaries of Joan Strange 1939 - 1945. Edited by Chris McCooey
ISBN 0-9523491-0-8 £9.99
Fully illustrated with cartoons, newspaper cuttings and photos Joan records the dramatic events of the world stage as well as the domestic difficulties of living in wartime Worthing in Sussex. Comments on her allotment lie along side speeches from Churchill and Hitler. The diary is a delightful mix of the mundane and the momentous and reveals much about the British character – quiet courage and unfailing optimism during those fataeful years that many still recall..
Tales, Titbits and Trivia of Kent & Sussex
ISBN 0-9523491-9-0 £9.99
Author Chris McCooey has uncovered some extraordinary tales... that of the fruit bat adopted by No 9 Squadron of the RAF which was given the name of Niger Gambia and the rank of Acting Pilot Officer (which turned out to be female and was renamed Nigella) and the Kent family that owned Oliver Cromwell's head before it was reunited with his body in a Cambridge college in 1960. Titbits include the Goudhurst Tit still visible perched beside the village pond and how to get sperm from a falconer's falcon. As for trivia - how did another bird of prey get to name a popular table football game made in Tunbridge Wells and how has the OXO cube got a connection with Hawkhurst?
Smuggling on the South Coast by Christopher McCooey
ISBN 978-1-4456-0459-6 £16.99
This book traces the early history of open smuggling back to the illegal export of England's Golden Fleece - the so-called 'owling' of raw wool to the Continent. The violent heyday of the contraband trade came in the 18th century when heavy taxes on tobacco, tea, brandy and gin made the illegal importation of these supposed 'luxuries' highly profitable. The second half of the book is devoted to the notorious Hawkhurst Gang. The book dispels many misconceptions - the smugglers were not 'honest thieves' but outlaws who protected their infamous trafficking by resorting to wholesale corruption, terrorism and , invariably a result of heavy drinking of their own duty-free spirits.
Freelance - A Writer's Life
£9.99
Since 1986 Chris McCooey has earned his living by freelance writing. This book tells how he developed his craft and gives examples and tips on how to write about travel, gardening, the outdoors, food, houses and homes. There are chapters on how he got started while living in Japan, on studying journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, on interviewing the great and not so good, writing for the record and how to write opinion and comment pieces. And his chapter of general musings record some of the fun he's had giving talks to the good ladies of the Women's Institute in Kent and Sussex and endeavors to entertain inebriated business men with after dinner anecdotes of the freelance writer's life.
FREELANCE can be downloaded from Amazon onto a Kindle for the equivalent of $6 i.e. £3.80.
Kent Characters – Wacky, Weird and Wonderful. Written by Chris McCooey
ISBN 0-9523491-5-9 £9.99
Saints and sinners, rogues and rascals, cons and icons. A total of 36 people with a Kent connection who have made themselves memorable for one reason or another. They include inventors (bathing machine, steam locomotive, helicopter), scientists, writers, collectors, painters (one of whom murdered his father), adventurers, entrepreneurs (the first mail order business) as well as a cricketer, a spy, a miser, a dandy, an ornithologist, a GP, the Red Dean of Canterbury, a hermit who lived in a tree and a Buddhist who fell for a fake countess.
Kent & Sussex Scandals – Sensational, Salacious and Sad. Written by Chris McCooey
ISBN 0-9523491-7-5 £9.99
Writers like HG Wells (predatory womaniser), Edith Nesbit (Bohemian who took younger lovers) and Noel Coward (homosexual affairs), resurrectionists (grave robbers), highway robbers, the prison hulks on the Medway, smugglers and their ‘infamous traffick’, children as young as seven made to climb up chimneys to sweep them, sexually liberated courtesan Kitty Fisher, saucy seaside postcard artist Donald McGill, a shipload of Second World War bombs off Sheerness and a Sevenoaks bank worker who stole off his pensioner customers to buy rare parrots and who was jailed in 2003.
Rogues, Rascals and Rebels of Kent & Sussex. Written by Chris McCooey
ISBN 0-9523491-8-3 £9.99
The Bloomsbury artists who lived and loved in their remote Sussex farmhouse, the Eastbourne GP suspected of mass murder, Alan Clarke legendary lothario, Lee Miller war photographer who posed naked in Hitler’s bath, Grey Owl the Hastings Englishman who reinvented himself as a Red Indian and helped save Canada’s wilderness, the Blackheath tramp Smokey Joe, Rye’s lesbian couple, Charles Dickens’ double life, Dirk Bogarde’s ‘love affairs without carnality’, spunky Cynthia Payne jailed in 1980 for organising sex parties …and more.
Sussex Heroes – Brave, Resourceful and True. Written by Chris McCooey
ISBN 0-9523491-3-2 £6.95
The heroic deeds of 32 men and women, and one dog, include service men and women awarded the nation’s highest honour in wartime, Sir Archibald McIndoe the plastic surgeon, Sir Harry Johnston who discovered the okapi and fought slavery, Rye’s lifeboat crew who all died tragically (and needlessly) in 1928, bare knuckle boxer Tom Sayers, a bishop and a couple of vicars – all heroic in their own ways.
Kent Heroes – Brave, Resourceful and True. Written by Bowen Pearse
ISBN 0-9523491-6-7 £9.99
The story of three dozen men and women who were adventurers, daredevils or just ordinary people doing something extraordinary, like the Londoner on a day trip to Rochester in 1926 who saved a little girl from drowning but perished in the attempt. There are famous people like Will Adams who became a samurai in 17th century Japan, Sir Philip Sydney and General James Wolfe but also unsung heroes like ordinary policemen doing their duty and the WAFF Daphne Pearson, the first woman to be awarded the George Cross. There is also a chapter on animal heroes.
Sussex Characters – Wacky, Weird and Wonderful. Written by Bowen Pearse
ISBN 0-9523491-4-0 £6.95
Saints and sinners, rogues and rascals, cons and icons, memorable people, including the Great Omi tattooed from head to toe, the acid bath murderer of Crawley, Bob Copper who saved many folksongs from being forgotten, the champagne socialist of Brighton, the parachutist Dolly Shepherd and a ghost hunter, a pervert and the creator of Winnie the Pooh.
Kent Women – Famous, Infamous, Unsung. Written by Bowen Pearse
ISBN 0-9523491-1-6 £9.99
Including a sexologist (Marie Stopes), a gardener, a courtesan (Kitty Fisher), a musician, saints, murderers, philanthropists, actresses, writers (Richmal Crompton and Enid Blyton), eccentrics, Charles Dickens’ mistress Nelly Ternan, the ‘first bitch of Fleet Street’ Jean Rook, Anne Boleyn, Mrs Beeton, the Biddenden Maids and Pocahontas who is buried in Gravesend.
Potholes, Pigs and Paradise – a Chiddingstone Memoir by Edwina Hall
£10.00
Edwina Hall’s memoir begins when she was 18 in 1940. She remembers those fateful war years and tells about her joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force as a Driver, Mechanical Transport. One job she had to do was to collect a Hurricane pilot, John Hall, who had been repatriated as a prisoner-of-war, and deliver him to his home in Kent. He had injured his leg so badly when he bailed out of his plane just before capture that it had to be amputated. By the time Edwina got John home they had fallen in love. They married six weeks later and John returned to flying duty despite his disability. After the war they take The Blacksmith’s Arms, a rural pub and then farm at Oakenden, near Chiddingstone. It’s a memoir of life in and around a Kent village and is written with warmth and charm and is an affectionate tribute to her family and friends.
Images of England - Southborough and High Brooms complied by Chris McCooey
ISBN 0-7524-1153-5 £9.99 Published by Tempus
A fascinating collection of over 200 old photographs of the Kent towns with the author placing an emphasis when writing the comprehensively researched captions on ‘social history’, portraying individual characters and everyday occurrences as well as showing famous views of important buildings. There are ten sections: People, Buildings and Streets, Events and Celebrations, Transport, Sport and Leisure, Military, Work, Schooldays, Outlying Districts and Salomons and Broomhill.
Voices of Southborough and High Brooms by Chris McCooey
ISBN 0-7524-2054-2 £12.99 Published by Tempus
A collection of reminiscences by local people, recorded and transcribed in their own words. The author has collected childhood memories, recollections of tasks and routines in everyday life that have vanished or changed beyond recognition, and experiences from school and work. Well-known local employers are featured including Twort’s cricket ball factory, the brickworks in High Brooms and the Salomon’s estate. There are also tales from hospitals, the local council, the fire brigade and church leaders as well as reminiscences from local sports men and women. The text is accompanied by a wide range of photographs and other illustrations.
BIRDS, BEASTS AND BACCHANALIA by Chris McCooey
ISBN 0-9523491-9-1 £9.99 -->
Why Thomas a Becket banned nightingales and the delicacy that once were wheatears. The dog hanged at Tyburn and the one who adopted a badger cub; the big cats roaming wild today; Sussex dragons; Timothy the tortoise; Winnie-the-Pooh. Gin distilling in Maidstone; drunken hop pickers; the debauchery of the future George IV in Brighton, and the England rugby prop forward who drank a bottle of aftershave.
