William Woodruff
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William Woodruff

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William Woodruff (1916-2008) was a world historian who, in his eighties, wrote two volumes of autobiography: The Road to Nab End and Beyond Nab End. Both books were No 1 bestsellers in Britain. Robert McCrum, writing about The Road to Nab End in the Observer, called it 'A terrific story ... nostalgic, vivid and charming.' William was born in the corner of a carding room in a cotton mill in Blackburn, England, during the First World War. His father was away fighting in France. His mother returned to work two days after giving birth: she had four children to feed. By the time William's father came home, and had sufficiently recovered from being gassed at the Third Battle of Ypres to take up his life as a weaver, the Lancashire cotton textile industry was about to collapse. There followed years of hardship, unemployment and social unrest. From the age of six, through the years of the Great Depression of the early 1930s, William supplemented his family's income by delivering newspapers. He did go to school, but sometimes just to catch up on his sleep. At thirteen his education was considered complete and he became a delivery boy in a grocer's shop. The Road to Nab End is full of the joys of growing up running free in a town full of unforgettable characters, it also conveys the mood of quiet desperation that eventually drove his family to a room in a derelict boarding house at Nab End. 'Once started, it is impossible to put this book down ... the author ... has the historian's gift for bringing to life a particular society at a particular time,' wrote Allan Bullock in the Times Literary Supplement. Beyond Nab End begins with William, at the age of sixteen, running away to London. For two years he worked as a 'sand rat' in an iron foundry (wet sand was used in the casting process). A poster on a train led him to night school, where he discovered a love of learning. In 1936, wonder of wonders, he became a student at Oxford University with the aid of a London County Council Scholarship. How a foundry worker comes to grips with the challenges of an Oxford education makes for a totally refreshing and amusing story. 'Hard times had bred resourcefulness and self-reliance. I knew by experience how to take setbacks. I also knew that nobody owed me a living. I was lucky to have been born and reared in Lancashire; doubly lucky to have been born poor,' he wrote. The Second World War put William's education on hold for six years; he fought in North Africa, Greece and Italy. He called them the years the locusts ate. His wartime experiences became the basis of his autobiographical novel Vessel of Sadness, a stark, yet poetic account of the battle for Anzio. 'Deceptively simple in language and imagery, frightening and upsetting, frank and unflinching in view, Vessel of Sadness helps us understand the nature of man in a world where there is as yet no alternative to the desolation of war' wrote Martin Blumenson in a preface to the book. In 1946 William renewed his academic career. His research focused on world history. 'The Balkanization of the social sciences,' he wrote, 'has brought us to a state of ever-growing general ignorance and dehumanized science. Hence, I have stressed the central role, not of methods or theories or systems, but of humanity ... In seeking to understand the totality, complexity and diversity of the past, I shifted my focus from the parts to the whole; from the nation to the world.' In his Concise History of the Modern World he brings together a lifetime's wisdom and insight into how the present has come to be shaped by the past. www.williamwoodruff.com
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Beyond Nab End

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