Uncle does not often go on holiday as very few hotels provide beds big enough for elephants. At Sunset Beach he hopes for a real rest and change, but almost at once fifty camels, led by the courteous Claudius, arrive with news of trouble at his great castle of Homeward. From this moment his attempts to have a holiday are interrupted by one unexpected happening after another. Uncle and his faithful followers rescue holiday-makers from the sinister Wheel House, use paraballoons at the Fun Fair, and face a fearful monster at Water-Step Hill. There’s the noisy braying affair of Idleass and Hot Donk; Fishy William at Comfort Cove; breakfast with the miraculous Singing Flower; high tea with the Glenmore Giraffes. A succession of fantastic adventures lead to the awesome moment when Uncle is chained and helpless at the mercy of the Badfort Crowd in Beaver Hateman’s Chamber of Horrors. Can Uncle possibly escape this time?
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
J.P. Martin (1879-1966) was born in Yorkshire into a family of Methodist ministers. He took up the family vocation, serving when young as a missionary to a community of South African diamond miners and then, during the First World War, as an Army chaplain in Palestine and Egypt, before returning to minister to parishes throughout the north of England. He died at eighty-six from a flu caught while bringing pots of honey to his parishioners in cold weather. Martin began telling Uncle stories to entertain his children, who later asked him to write them down so that they could read them to their own children; the stories were finally published as a book in 1964, when Martin was eighty-four. The jacket to the first edition of Uncle notes that “the inspiration for these stories seems to come from the industrial landscape that [Martin] knew as a child….He still likes to take his family and friends on walks through industrial scenes. He also enjoys painting the wild and beautiful landscape where he lives. It is not enough to say he loves children; he is still continually visited by them.”