The New number One

by Geoffrey Lewis

The third volume of the Michael Baker series begins in 1948: The reality of life on Britain’s nationalised waterways is affecting the families who live and work on the canals. More changes threaten as a post-war world raises new demands for faster, cheaper transport, and old ways become out-moded as business and industry look to a different future.

Against this shifting backdrop, Michael and Harriet, Ginny, Carrie and Alby Baker together with other characters familiar from the last two volumes of this story carry on their lives, coping with ever more difficult times as the demand for their services slowly declines. But all is not gloom – new traffics are won as old ones are lost, and new carriers appear to take over as others depart…

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Geoffrey Lewis was an English Turkologist and the first professor of Turkish at the University of Oxford. He is known as the author of Teach Yourself Turkish and academic books about Turkish and Turkey.

Lewis was born in London in 1920 and educated at University College School and St John's College, Oxford (MA 1945, DPhil 1950; James Mew Arabic Scholar, 1947).

At St John's College Lewis initially studied Classics. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he served from 1940 to 1945 as a radar operator in the Royal Air Force. Posted primarily in Libya and Egypt, he taught himself Turkish through local Turkish acquaintances, from the Turkish newspaper Yedi Gün available in Cairo, and from Turkish translations of English classics sent to him by his wife. He returned to Oxford in 1945 with his newly acquired interest in Turkish and on the advice of H. A. R. Gibb took a second BA degree in Arabic and Persian as groundwork for Ottoman Turkish, which he finished with first-class honours (not achieved in this double subject since Anthony Eden in 1922) in just two years. He spent six months in Turkey before pursuing his doctoral work on a medieval Arabic philosophical treatise at St John's College.

Turkish was not taught at Oxford before Lewis was appointed to his academic post in 1950; it was through his efforts that it became established in the Oxford syllabus of Oriental studies by 1964.

Reviews

[Rikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lewis uses a lot of dialect written phonetically which will put off some readers, and his insistence on listing the places the boats go through, whilst interesting the first time, has become an annoyance since it doesn't add to the story. "What story?" Unlike 'A Girl At The Tiller' there is no suspense in this book, and the funding for the new number one is too obvious. Vicars will approve of the reduction of all life to a series of hatchings, matchings and dispatchings which continue apace, with little other in the way of plot devices, and everyone is just too nice - I know these books are an apologetic for the boaters, but the rose tinted view of life on the boats lacks grit or reality.

This book does serve to give a bit of social commentary on the decline of the trade on the waterways in the post war period, and even introduces the rise of the pleasure craft that have now replaced it, but even this is simplistic, and many of the complaints from boaters against managers where probably true throughout the nineteenth century as well.