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French colonies, wartime ordeals, Bayswater estate plans and Caribbean trade run throu...

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French colonies, wartime ordeals, Bayswater estate plans and Caribbean trade run through this week’s twentieth-century selection. Where the Doodle Bugs Crashed in Kent plots summer 1944 V-1 flying-bomb impacts along ‘Bomb Alley’. Leslie C. Hunt’s The Prisoners’ Progress follows the remnant of the British Army captured after Dunkirk in June 1940 on their forced march to a German POW camp; the maps were drawn in captivity and published in Britain in 1941 while Hunt was still a POW. Extraordinarily, they passed both German and British censors. The Church Commissioners’ 1955 Paddington Estate sale plans document neighbourhoods in Bayswater and Westbourne Grove. We also feature French colonial maps from Paul Pelet’s extensive 1902 series; his Indochina maps provide a revealing comparison with the Vietnam Conflict Map of 1965. Germany, the Beautiful Travel Country (1938) presents Nazi propaganda in the guise of a cheerful tourist map. Cuban tobacco and United Fruit’s Bananaland map the plantations and trade of the Caribbean and Central America. A decorative Rioja wine map (1970) joins a distinctive 1926 ‘bubble’ map of Chablis vineyards.

French colonies, wartime ordeals, Bayswater estate plans and Caribbean trade run through this week’s twentieth-century selection. Where the Doodle Bugs Crashed in Kent plots summer 1944 V-1 flying-bomb impacts along ‘Bomb Alley’. Leslie C. Hunt’s The Prisoners’ Progress follows the remnant of the British Army captured after Dunkirk in June 1940 on their forced march to a German POW camp; the maps were drawn in captivity and published in Britain in 1941 while Hunt was still a POW. Extraordinarily, they passed both German and British censors. The Church Commissioners’ 1955 Paddington Estate sale plans document neighbourhoods in Bayswater and Westbourne Grove. We also feature French colonial maps from Paul Pelet’s extensive 1902 series; his Indochina maps provide a revealing comparison with the Vietnam Conflict Map of 1965. Germany, the Beautiful Travel Country (1938) presents Nazi propaganda in the guise of a cheerful tourist map. Cuban tobacco and United Fruit’s Bananaland map the plantations and trade of the Caribbean and Central America. A decorative Rioja wine map (1970) joins a distinctive 1926 ‘bubble’ map of Chablis vineyards.

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