Near East

"Cecil Beaton was my next door neighbour when I was growing up, and was one of the reasons why I got interested in this era in the first place. He died when I was 10 but I remember him very well – not least when one of our bantam cockerels escaped into his garden. We all went round searching for it in his beautiful flower beds, him with a huge straw hat on and a magnificent butterfly net that he was trying to catch it with. Another memory I have of him is Bianca Jagger being photographed in his garden. The brilliant thing about him is that not only did he take really good photographs, but he was also the most fantastically perceptive and at times very caustic diarist. The gist of his diaries is in this book Near East . You can also find his original diaries in St John’s College, Cambridge. I have used them a lot for my books because his descriptions of people are absolutely on the button. At the beginning of the war he didn’t know what to do. He was obviously not the military type, but then he found his niche as a Ministry of Information photographer, particularly attached to the Air Ministry. His most iconic photograph was of the blitz victim Eileen Dunne, the girl with the bandaged head clutching her teddy bear. It was on the front cover of Life magazine in September 1940, and was a massive PR coup for us. It really showed the Americans how Britain was suffering, and helped turn the tide on those there who were against going to war. Next he did a series of photographs of some RAF fighter pilots, which actually included Geoff Wellum. Then he was sent to the Middle East, and was in Cairo in the spring of 1942. He went to places like Jordan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, as well as out into the Western desert. Near East chronicles this time, and there is just so much colour. The characters really come to life. You can smell the wind and the sand. It is a really wonderful book. Although it is unfortunate that his amazing photography rather overshadows his really quite brilliant writing ability."