Overview

Blighty or Bust is Private Raymond Bailey’s own account of his dramatic escape in 1940 from a Nazi prisoner-of-war column – and his daring 2,000 mile journey from northern France to the safety of British Gibraltar. Along the way Ray has nerve-shredding encounters with German soldiers and the Spanish Civil Guard. Often he is exhausted and starving. Youthful energy and unfailing optimism are all that keep him going. At other times Ray is enveloped in kindness. He is aided and befriended, concealed and cared for, by ordinary French and Spanish people at risk to their own safety. Ray’s escape is remarkable. So too is his memoir. It was written within a year or two of the events it describes, when Ray was just 22. In this book we hear the true voice of a young working-class conscript: simple, straightforward, immediate. And thrillingly readable. Blighty or Bust may be the earliest Second World War soldier’s memoir to have been written. Its author is surely the youngest ever to describe his wartime experiences at such length. Found in a rural auction sale in 2018, it is a treasure unearthed. The original manuscript has been skilfully edited by David Wilkins. David has added just enough background material to place Ray’s experiences in context without intruding into his absorbing story.  

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9781839527937

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The author: Raymond Bailey was born in 1919, the son of a miner. He left school aged fourteen and began work as an apprentice lathe operator at the Vauxhall Car Works in Luton. In 1939 he was in the first wave of young British men called up to fight in the Second World War. After basic training, Ray’s battalion was posted to France and thrown into some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire conflict. In June 1940, just a few weeks after arriving in France, Ray found himself among the thousands of British soldiers captured at the catastrophic Battle of St Valery. Ray’s 80,000 word manuscript account of his subsequent escape from a PoW column and his gruelling 2,000 mile journey to safety is written with a sense of immediacy that is rarely found. He describes events simply, succinctly and in the order that they happened. He does this in nicely constructed sentences and with a natural feel for the rhythm of language. For the kind of story he is telling, this is the perfect approach. The editor: David Wilkins spent most of his working life in the charitable and public sectors. He also taught at university. Outside of work he has long collected old diaries, manuscripts, letters, photo albums and other similar items. In 2019 he gambled on a box of old notebooks at auction and discovered he now owned Ray Bailey’s wartime memoir. Blighty or Bust is David’s second book based on a found memoir (his first book was published in 2017). His many years of research experience and of writing for publication in his professional life have proved invaluable in organising Ray Bailey’s original handwritten memoir for publication in book form. With the minimum of intrusion, he has set Ray’s story into its proper historical context and enabled readers to understand where one individual soldier’s dramatic story fits into the social and military history of the Second World War.

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