Scratching Shed Publishing

In meeting local people and seeking out Yorkshire’s most attractive places, the writers present an engagingly personal and inspiring portrait of what Yorkshire can offer to visitors once they know precisely where to look. From secret waterfalls, to remote farmhouses and fords, to picture-postcard villages, to ancient castles, to moorland peaks and tarns, to countryside churches and chapels or ruined abbeys, to picturesque pubs, Yvette and Walter discover all that’s best in rural Yorkshire and its delightful dales. Their day-long journeys include trips to Coverdale, Bishopdale, Raydale, Deepdale, Kingsdale, Birkdale, Cotterdale, Arkengarthdale and Grisedale – and many more besides. Also provided are details of where to eat and drink, where to stay overnight, or where to go walking or cycling if you want to abandon the car for a while. Beautifully illustrated, A Day in a Dale is the perfect bedside companion to have you dale-dreaming, or for taking out in the car as you visit for yourself the enchanting locations described. Paperback, full colour throughout, 256 pages.

Border City Blues is the previously untold story of rugby league football in the proud Cumbrian city of Carlisle. Author Alan Tucker – a former chairman of the club – shares his inside view of the highs and lows and ups and downs of life in English rugby league’s most northerly outpost. Complete with an introduction by the New Zealand rugby league legend Dean Bell, the bulk of the book is a season-by-season account of the city’s longest-surviving professional outfit, Carlisle Border Raiders. From their birth in the early-1980s to ‘merger’ with Barrow in 1997, it is a dramatic story of struggle against the odds and a faithfully produced insight into just what it takes to get a new sport up and running in often quite unsympathetic territory. Added to this is a detailed statistical analysis of every season in the Border Raiders’ existence, including league tables, match-by-match records and individual player contributions. Border City Blues also takes care to acknowledge the history of amateur rugby league in Carlisle, courtesy of the city’s junior, ladies and open-age teams. And it brings the story right up to date with the post-1997 launch of the Carlisle Centurions summer conference set-up. The book also provides short histories of the city’s original thirteen-a-side club, Carlisle City, who flared briefly in 1928; and the amateur side of the same name in 1950-52. All in all, this is a valuable and timely addition to the rugby league bookshelves that no treasurer of sporting heritage should be without.

Although BBC rugby league commentator and former St. Helens and Widnes forward Ray French represented his country at both codes of rugby and has, for the past thirty years, written and broadcast extensively on the sport, his latest book is far more than a look back at his life in the game. In Ray French… and Rugby, he presents the story of a man who has for the past six decades straddled and enjoyed both oval ball codes as a spectator, player, coach, administrator and commentator. He calls upon his experiences on and off the pitch to consider the problems facing both sports, the relationship between them, the values and appeal of both games, and offers his strong, passionate and controversial opinions on their future. Naturally concentrating on rugby league, the passion in his life, he provides an abundance of humorous anecdotes and stories surrounding incidents and the characters within the game. Already the author of seven titles, Ray French looks upon this as being the definitive book on his career and everything associated with it.

This is the story of Iby Knill, whose inspirational and moving account of holocaust survival was featured recently on the BBC television series My Story. In her book, Iby tells of her early childhood in Czechoslovakia and of how her parents – alarmed at the persecution of Jews in Germany – smuggled her over the border to Hungary. The Woman Without A Number also reveals how she was caught by the security police and then imprisoned and tortured, not only as a result of her Jewish connections but for having entered Hungary illegally and for aiding the resistance movement. Eventually, Iby was sent to the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. In June 1944, Iby Knill left Auschwitz-Birkenau by volunteering to travel as a nurse with a slave labour transport of 500 women. Once transported to Lippstadt, she was put in charge of a hospital unit and risked her life protecting the weak and helpless from the gas chambers. Appearing for the first time in print, The Woman Without A Number is a truly remarkable tale that has waited sixty years to be told.

The fifth and latest book in Scratching Shed Publishing’s Rugby League Classics range is Eddie Waring’s The Great Ones and Other Writings. First published in 1969, the original Great Ones has assumed almost mythical status among followers of the 13-a-side football code thanks, in large part, to its rarity. The book is Waring’s personal take on some of the greatest rugby league players of all time, all of it written in his own idiosyncratic and entertaining style. Also included in this new edition is Waring’s highly readable account of the 1946 Indomitables Tour of Australia and New Zealand, along with assorted other writings from various publications which reveal that there was much more to this legendary broadcaster than met the eye – and ear! Rebranded as part of the Rugby League Classics range, this fifth book in a popular series also comes complete with a brand new introduction by esteemed rugby league writer Harry Edgar and an afterword by Eddie’s son, Tony Waring.