Cruising around the West Indies

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Six weeks in Gibraltar

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Cruising around the West Indies

John Julius Norwich Writer

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And we went on to Tobago, which was lovely, and to St Vincent and to St Lucia and Montserrat where I had a frightful row with a drunken dentist, I remember, who I was not consulting professionally, but he was just picking quarrels on the beach. And last stop Bermuda, and home in time for Christmas, so it was perfectly wonderful cruise.

And the other good thing about being a writer was that I didn't have to work watches. If I'd been a seaman, that'd be the port watch and the starboard watch, and every other night or every other day you would've been on duty and couldn't go ashore. I could go ashore whenever I liked, as long as I'd finished my work and didn't have anything urgent to do, I could go ashore. So I had far more freedom and much less discipline, really, than anybody else. Well, I mean, I wasn't the only one. There was another, a very nice man called Frank Sutcliffe, who was also working in the Captain's office. We slung our hammocks together. And he was preparing to be a classical organist. I don't know whether he made the grade, but he was jolly musical.

John Julius Norwich (1929-2018) was an English popular historian, travel writer and television personality. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, at Eton, at the University of Strasbourg and on the lower deck of the Royal Navy before taking a degree in French and Russian at New College, Oxford. He then spent twelve years in H.M. Foreign Service, with posts at the Embassies in Belgrade and Beirut and at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva. In 1964 he resigned to become a writer. He is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice, the Byzantine Empire and, most recently, 'The Popes: A History'. He also wrote on architecture, music and the history plays of Shakespeare, and presented some thirty historical documentaries on BBC Television.

Title: Cruising around the West Indies

Listeners: Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.

Tags: Tobago, St Vincent, St Lucia, Montserrat, Bermuda

Duration: 1 minute, 17 seconds

Date story recorded: 2017

Date story went live: 03 October 2018