A bit of Roman history …… the search for an artist …… and a lesson on never throwing things away

I don’t now know how many editions of the History of The English Speaking Peoples I bought back in 1969, but this copy is the only one to survive.

The cover tells me there were to be 112, but I doubt I bought more than a couple.

The marketing plan seems a good one.  

Take extracts from Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples, juxtapose his text with articles by some of the leading historians of the 1960s, throw in some pictures and maps along with biographies of leading historical figures and for 4/6 you had a bargain.

Well, I thought so as issue No.2 will testify.

Despite the passage of over half a century I can remember being drawn to the edition because of its connection with the Romans who captured my imagination when I was no more that eight and have stayed with me ever since.

In the winter of 1969 I would have been 18 and I almost certainly picked it up from Wilcox’s at the top of Well Hall Road and sold everything from books sweets and magazines to cards and stationary.

I guess my collection never went beyond the Romans, and Mr. Churchill’s chronicles of the Saxons, Vikings and Normans were lost to me.

But this edition was read and read again and offered up some fascinating images of which the picture of a Roman legionary set against a photograph of Trajan’s Column was a favourite.

I am not sure how many of the four legions which invaded Britain in 43 AD were equipped with the new body armour which came into use late in the Emperor Tiberius’s reign and it may be some were still wearing mail shirts.

Still that picture which came with a set of notes remained with me as the go to guide to the Roman army till I came across the books of Peter Connolly six or so years later.

And I have often wanted to reproduce it ….. but the ethics of copyright have always stopped me, which is how I went looking for the artist Julian Allen who is credited as painting it.

The plan was to ask his permission, but sadly he died in 1998, leaving me to search for his Estate.

In the meantime I have become interested in Mr. Allen who was born in 1942, studied at the Cambridge School of Art and the Central  College of Art in London and then went onto work for various newspapers as a “freelance illustrator and reporter”, before moving to America and continuing both as an artist working for publications as well as a freelance artist with “amassing an impressive list of clients including Esquire, GQ, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time, among others. In 1988 he was among five prominent illustrators invited to Korea and Japan to visit art colleges, teach workshops, and give lectures”.**

Added to this while working for The New York magazine "he covered such diverse subjects as: the Watergate scandal; the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East (where he was injured in a bomb explosion); the Entebbe rescue; gypsies in New York; the bicentennial of the Revolutionary War; youth gangs in the South Bronx and numerous stories about New York subculture, crime, politics and food”. 

I could go on but I suggest you follow the link to the biography which is posted on the Norman Rockwell Museum site which has an archive of his work.

And that is one of those nice bits of serendipity as around the time I bought the magazine I had discovered the paintings of Norman Rockwell who I first came across in my grandmother’s house in Derby in copies of the Saturday Evening Post.  

Just how that American publication got to Derby is a mystery I never thought to pursue, but some of them came back to London with me.

All of which is perhaps another story for another time.

Pictures; cover from History of the English Speaking Peoples, The Legions March, Julian Allen, map of the Roman Empire, and inside page, Purnell, 1969

*The Roman Army Peter Connolly, 1975, & Greece and Rome at War, 1981, Peter Connolly

** The Norman Rockwell Museum, https://www.illustrationhistory.org/artists/julian-allen