Richard III, Leicester,old friends, burials & books

I left my hometown of Leicester over 45 years ago.



I married and moved to Jerusalem with my husband and family.

 
But although I no longer live in Leicester, I can never totally leave the city as my parents are  buried there. 

While in Leicester on a visit we decided to drive round and see some of our old schools

and past homes

Not to mention the site of my first job as a journalist –

OK I admit it I exaggerate. It was a school holiday job and I was more a gofer than a writer – but the bug was already planted and never gave up.

About six years ago I reconnected again when an old school friend Rosalind Adam  contacted me to see if I would contribute to a book she was compiling of memories of   post-war Leicester through to 1960.

So having returned to Leicester many times in the past few years both literally and psychologically, it wasn’t surprising that I found myself glued to the news media when the story broke about ‘the body in the car park’ . Could it really be the body of that much hated/ much maligned King Richard III?

And when it was proved to be the body of the old King, the question then was – where should he be finally laid to rest?

Again I found myself rooting for Leicester to be the designated burial site.The High Court finally agreed that he should indeed be buried there, as  he had been killed in battle in nearby Bosworth and had been ‘temporarily’  buried beneath the city for several hundred years.

And now for the full circle …..who was commissioned  to write a children’s book on the  history of Richard III?
 None other than my old friend Rosalind whose book will be out in a few week’s time.
Good luck with the book Ros – I’m sure it’ll be a tremendous success.

FOLLOW UP TO RICHARD III AND NAZI POTTERY

My last blog post got a lot of attention and was passed from friend to acquaintance to elderly relatives in an attempt to discover the answer to the mystery of the Nazi pottery that was discovered in the fields of the farm in Thaxted England.


We seem to have solved the riddle with this reply.

Asher Cailingold forwarded your email to me, as I might be able to shed a little more light on explaining the swastika emblem on some pottery found in a field in Thaxted Lodge.
I was on Bachad Hachsharah in England for many years, including 10 years (1944-54) at the Bachad farm in Thaxted, including four years (1950-54) as its manager.
There are two possible explanations:
1. When we took over the farm in 1944 - WW2 was still raging - we found a large hole in one of the fields. We were told that a plane had crashed there earlier in the war, but no one knew its identity. Thus it is possible that this was a German aircraft, which could explain the presence of some cup or other gadget on this plane.
2. During 1944/45, when we needed a larger number of workers, the Essex War Agricultural Committee supplied us occasionally with groups of German POWs, so this could be the source of this piece of pottery.
It was certainly not an item belonging to any of the German origin Chaverim.(members)
I hope this will satisfy your curiosity to some extent.
Well that seems a logical answer, even if it was less exciting than the version  my imagination conjured up.
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The identity of the remains that were excavated in Leicester are still a mystery.
We won’t know if it really is  King Richard III for another six to eight weeks as DNA testing can’t be rushed.

But that hasn’t stopped the authorities in Leicester from starting to cash in on the possibility that this really is the king and all that it would mean for the fame and fortune of this relatively quiet town.

Great plans for coping with the possible upsurge in tourism are already in the making as you will see from this report from the BBC.

Marketing this, possibly much maligned, king could be big business.