Townend, William And Now England

Published in the United States in 1939 under the title The Rescue of Captain Leggatt. A very interesting English novel set during the period October through December 1938 and apparently published just prior to the start of the Second World War. Townend focuses on the 47 year old captain of the British freighter COTSWOLD and looks at the world through his exceedingly pessimistic eyes. Germany’s rearmament, Britain’s appeasement policy, Japan’s rapacious commercial policies in the Far East and the German takeover of Czechoslovakia all play out in the background as Captain Leggatt embarks on a North Atlantic voyage from London to New York and back. Leggatt has a pathological hatred of Germans (explained by the fact that his first wife had died aboard a torpedoed ferry on the Irish Sea in 1918), as well as anger at the British government and key industrialists for allowing the British merchant marine to decline so precipitously after World War I. The novel’s high point is an exciting mid-ocean rescue by the COTSWOLD of crew off the sinking German freighter JOHANNA NEUMANN during a blizzard in raging seas, an incident which appears to have been inspired by the famous 1924 rescue at sea of the crew of the sinking freighter ANTIGOGNE by the American vessel PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT. The novel’s one failing – and it’s a major one – is a soap opera quality which reveals itself in a mind numbing series of coincidences that bring key characters together for a series of denouements. Nonethless, Townend does quite successfully conjur that bleak period between Munich and Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.