'James Dodds Tide Lines'

by Ian Collins

 

 

Tide Lines is a hardback book publishes by Jardine Press and is now in stock priced at £35.00

Also available is special signed and numbered slipcased edition priced at £150.00. This includes an exclusive hand printed, signed and numbered linocut.

 

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 Children's History of Colchester

by Andrew Phillips

Come and see this brilliantly entertaining and informative history of our Britain's oldest recorded town. Every Colchester home should have a copy!

                                                    

 

Poems by Dora Love published to mark Holcaust Memorial Week. 2011

After Stutthof Concentration Camp, What Hope? by Dora Love

February 27th to March 3rd is Holocaust Memorial Week and Essex University is marking the anniversay of the liberation of Auschwitz with a week long series of events. Dora Love who has lived in Colchester for many years was one of few survivors of Stutthof Concentration Camp and she is playing a central part in the weeks activities.  After Dora's rescue, as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from tuberculosis, she began scribbling poems on scraps of paper. Now, over fifty years later those poems have finally been published. Dora's book of poems is available at many of the weeks events and at Red Lion Books, price £6.99. 

For further information about the holocaust memorial week please visit: http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/holocaust_memorial_week 

 The following is an article about Dora Love from the Southend County Standard

Dora escaped death camp and found true love

By Louise Mackenzie

AMONG the countless bodies on the pebbles of the shore at Neustadt, Germany, British soldier, Frank Love, spotted a flicker of life.

Scores of men, women and children had died during a seven-day barge voyage from the Stutthof extermination camp in Poland.

Their bodies were taken off the boat and left on the shore. But among the dead a young woman appeared to be still breathing.

Frank went over to her and one year later they were married.

Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27, Dora, 87, tells her remarkable story.

“Yes, it is important to talk about what happened. Who would believe it otherwise?” says Dora, one of fewer than 5,000 Holocaust survivors in the UK.

“No, I don’t feel emotional and, anyway, I learnt a long time ago to hide my emotions.”

Born and brought up in Memel, now Kleipeda, Lithuania, Dora had a idyllic childhood.

She adds: “I had the most wonderful family and childhood. There was so much love in my family.

“I never saw any racial violence going on to my family or friends first of all. At school, the children would sometimes stay away from me, but I would say ‘you either want to be my friend or not’.”

When SS troops invaded Memal, Dora and her family fled east, but the German advance soon caught up with them and they were imprisoned, first in Shaulen ghetto in northern Lithuania.

She adds: “We were taken from the ghetto in trucks to dig for peat to make fire. So many people dropped dead in the freezing cold and hardly anyone came back in the lorries.

“One time, SS officers were knocking on doors to take the men to the synagogue and burn it down. When I answered the door, I saw the SS officer was one of my brother’s friends. He looked at me and turned to the other officers and said ‘no men here’.”

I ask Dora whether she saw, not acts of evil, but also human kindness during that time.

“No,” she says “It is a myth. He said there was no men in the house because he could bring himself to say it.”

Dora, her mother, sister and one of her two brothers were later sent to Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, Poland, where her mother, sister and brother died.

Dora’s father was sent to Dachau and her brother had managed to get to Russia and both survived, although Dora didn’t know her brother’s whereabouts until years after the war ended.

Speaking about life in the camp, Dora adds: “It was a total extermination camp. No one was supposed to leave the camp alive. Other camps were concentration camps and they basically work the people to death, but extermination camps like Belsen and Auschwitz and Stutthof, no one was supposed to live.”

Dora lost her mother, sister and brother in the Stutthof, which was the only camp to never be liberated.

It was only when Dora discovered the front gates were open that she was free and she went with others to Germany, where they were eventually liberated by the British Army.

After Frank took her to hospital she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and put in isolation.

With little else to do in isolation, Dora began writing poems about her time in the extermination camp, which she would in turn scrunch up and throw under the bed.

The poems detailed the shocking suffering and humiliation Dora and her family faced at the hands of the Nazis.

Little did she know Frank, who visited Dora regularly, was secretly keeping each poem and storing them away for safekeeping.

The poems now form the basis of a new book. After Stutthof Concentration Camp What Hope, available to buy from the Red Lion Book Shop, in Colchester.

Picking up the copy of her poetry book, I ask her how she came to write the poems.

“I was bored out of my mind,” exclaims Dora.

“I was in isolation in hospital with absolutely nothing to do. No books to read, nothing.

“Frank would come to see me, give me some paper from his notebook and a pencil and I started writing the poems. I had no idea he was keeping them. It was only later I found out.”

After the war, Dora worked for the British Army, the United Nations and the American Joint Distribution Committee in various reconstruction and resettlement projects, as well as translating for war crimes trials.

But the project she is most proud of is the establishment of the home for Jewish children at Blankenese, a suburb of Hamburg, on the Elbe.

Dora, says: “I always thought it was the men who organised things, but it was the women who did a lot of it after the war looking after the children. It seemed to be in our nature to do it.”

Her husband’s work took her to South Africa, where her two children were born.

Her daughter became a freedom fighter in the South African Underground movement and later a member of the parliament led by Nelson Mandela.

Dora’s son is a professor of neuropathology in Bristol.

Although she is now widowed, she lived together happily with Frank until his death.

Dora settled in Colchester more than 30 years ago and worked as a language teacher in Greyfriars Community College and as a supply teacher at several Colchester schools.

When she retired in 2002, Dora began talking to children and adults all over Essex about her wartime experiences and in 2009 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Essex University.

As I get ready to leave after our meeting, I fumble over taking her business card because she only had one left.

She looked at me laughing: “When you have been through what I have, it does make you very laid back. You don’t worry about the small things anymore. I can get some more cards printed. It doesn’t matter.”

 

© Copyright 2001-2011 Newsquest Media Group

 

 

 

Creative Writing Courses

 

Watch this space for details of Creative Writing courses held at the shop. The first course held in the shop in March/April was a resounding success. The next course will be a 6 week course on Short Story Writing commencing on Monday 6th June here at the shop. Do book early as places are limited.

 

In this richly illustrated volume Ian Collins charts the voyage James Dodds has made from boatbuilder to artist.

THE LIFE AND ART OF JAMES DODDS

In this evocative volume Ian Collins charts the voyage James Dodds has made both from the literal to the poetic and from shipwright to painter, printmaker and fine-press publisher. Richly illustrated with pictures spanning more than three decades of inspired endeavour, the biography adds a supporting cast of artists, poets and other nautical characters.It also includes a wider study of "boats the sea has made" – vernacular vessels from the Shetlands to the Scillies and across the Atlantic to New England which punctuate the artist’s intriguing story.

James and his father, Andrew Dodds. James up the Solvig’s mainmast. c.1974.

 

Invitation card with Fish in a Basket linocut, 1984. James at the Jardine press in Stoke By Nayland, c.1986.

IAN COLLINS offers the perspective of a writer steeped in the art of East Anglia. His engaging text is informed by a decade of writing about James in exhibition catalogues and regional books, and also draws on the artist’s own biographical notes.

TIDE LINES… marks on the shore left at the tide’s highest point, made of whatever flotsam and jetsam, litter and treasure, the sea flings up. The tides’ lunar cycle could also be a metaphor for the ebb and flow of the creative process. The line between land and sea is constant and ever changing, and this state of flux and fixture is the place that art inhabits. From the small craft of the shore line James Dodds has created a truly seaworthy art.