David Lowther

My mother and father took me to see The Dam Busters at the old Olympia Cinema in Queen Street in Cardiff in 1955. From that moment on I was hooked on the Second World War and grew up in South Wales watching movies, reading books and speaking to witnesses who had either fought in the conflict, read about it in their newspapers or suffered from Luftwaffe bombing. And there was plenty of evidence still about; bomb sites, injured veterans and defence installations. Every year on Battle of Britain Day I went to RAF St Athan to marvel at the Spitfires and Hurricanes and watch The First of the Few at the Astra cinema.

Fast forward twenty years and I found myself teaching Sixth Formers British History 1909-1939. Whilst I didn't actually cover the Second World War, the Thirties, and in particular Appeasement, were an important part of the syllabus. I didn't have to drum up any enthusiasm to inspire my students. It was already there. In 1977 I watched a BBC documentary about Appeasement, and especially the government's attempted manipulation of the print, radio and newsreel media. This was Before Hindsight and thirty years later it provided me with the inspiration to write my first novel The Blue Pencil which was published by Sacristy Press in 2012. The BFI archive were good enough to let me watch a 16mm print of Before Hindsight. I'm still waiting for it to appear on the BFI Player.

My only non-fiction title Liberating Belsen: Remembering the Soldiers of the Durham Light Infantry, appeared in 2015, quickly followed by my second novel Two Families at War, a crime story set in the London Blitz. The hero of The Blue Pencil, a crusading liberal journalist called Roger Martin makes a welcome return in my most recent tale The Summer of '39 where the IRA, aided and abetted by the German Secret Service, conduct a nine month long bombing campaign on the British mainland just before the outbreak of war. There's a secondary plot about the threat to a Jewish refugee in London from the Gestapo as well as a thrilling escape from Berlin on the very eve of the German invasion of Poland. Two adolescent boys from London's East End help Roger to uncover the IRA/Nazi plot and have proved to be so popular that I'm planning a fourth novel which re-introduces them on the eve of D-Day.

Each of my three novels are based on fact and many real characters find themselves interacting with fictional ones. Of course, these things didn't happen but they might well have done! All four books are available on Kindle and as a paperback and are published by Sacristy Press.