Publishing seems to attract characters, and a notable one was Irving Farren. Bald and hobbit-like (although we don't think he had the hairy feet...), Irving Farren was an editor at Herbert Jenkins who followed me to Arms & Armour Press. He had a remarkable talent, impish sense of humour, was sensitive and sympathetic. I understand that his colleagues called him ‘Irv the Perv’; those were days of innocence. Our introduction to him at Herbert Jenkins was when he ghosted a pleasant biography, the sort of mid-list book which would not be published today. I cannot remember the title, or the lady author, and Irving said that the author also could not remember anything at all. He invented her adventures, which were set in Canada, adventures that he felt the lady must have had (including child birth). Part of the story was set in the little town of Flim Flam, about which she remembered nothing and so he set about inventing this remote logging township. He was astonished when I set about illustrating the books, and actually obtained some photographs which included Flim Flam and which was as he described. Irving worked in a secretarial bureau, and could type accurately at a very fast rate (and these were the days before electronic typewriters, and a long time before word processors). He had had a career beforehand in show business. In World War II, before call up, he had been a jitterbug champion (and said that Lionel Blair as a youth was in awe of him). He did not serve with distinction, and was once put on a charge as a telephonist for disconnecting telephones when he heard no-one speaking: they were in fact timing the commencement of an artillery barrage. In the office we often called him Irving F., and when one day I reversed this to F-ing Irv he collapsed in hysterics, and said that they had never even called him that in the army. After demobilisation, he was a member of a close harmony group for several years, and broadcast, but never made the big time. He was a great admirer of Ella Fitzgerald, and always went backstage when she performed in London. He had every record she ever produced personally autographed, and was devastated when there was burglary at his home and they were stolen. But then for whatever reason he had to leave the secretarial bureau precipitately, and he was left high and dry and desperate for a job. He came round to Herbert Jenkins and asked for any work going. The only spare opening was in our combined reception/post room/trade counter, and he grabbed it. He charmed the ladies in the firm, and soon set up a weekly sweepstake on the final figures of the postage meter. We got suspicious however when he won too frequently; yes, he was holding mail back in order to come closest to the target. He was soon moved up however to the top of the building and to the role of editor. We had a lot of fun. Once we caught a bus together, and because he smoked (like a chimney) he went upstairs. I was on the bus for only a short while, but he would be on it for a long journey. As I departed, I told the bus conductor 'watch out for that guy; he's perfectly all right but he's only been out of hospital for a little while, and mustn't get excited'. Irving said that every time the conductor came up the stairs he looked at him. And so Irving avoided catching his eye. But looked at him as he passed. This developed, and by the time the journey finished they were both extremely twitchy. He stayed at Herbert Jenkins after it was taken over and I departed, but after about five years he joined me at my new Arms & Armour Press. He could bring clarity to the most awful manuscript, and was my Jimminy Cricket. He brought lots of humour, and perspective, to editing books at Arms & Armour Press, and wrote a spoof blurb: GERMAN HALF-TRACKS OF WORLD WAR TWO Here, for the first time - in a book for which the world has long been waiting - is the complete, unexpurgated, thrilling behind-the-scenes inside story of the German Half-Tracks (as the title implies) of World War Two, or, as it is sometimes called, the Second World War. Exciting chassis, never before seen, are here fully exposed many of them shown from various provocative and enthralling angles. Lugs, hub-caps and rear-lights are frankly discussed, and steering-wheels of all types are seen in the harsh light of reality. Did Opel make the first Schleppmachengewerkenfahre Skd. Zf. 29? Was Hanomag responsible for the first reversible underwater (unterwasser) half-tracked latrine-wagon? These questions, and many others, are answered here without compromise. The half-tracked vehicles that rumbled west (and east - and sometimes even north and south) carrying the Nazi fiends on their doomed race to conquer the world are described in detail in this searing expose of engine-capacities and weight-loads. Two thousand black-and-white illustrations - most of them of the same vehicle - lavishly depict the transport that swept into the fire and fury of the calamitous struggle. Valuable appendices breathtakingly list spare parts, conversions for winter sports, Red Cross munitions trucks, mini-half-tracks for carrying framed photographs of Hitler, and the top-secret half-tracked liverwurst sausage that could be driven to beleaguered troops and cut into slices with the special ramrod-slicer attached to the sausage-skin camouflage cover. One of the main attractions of this splendid volume is German Half-Tracks of World War Two's Pin-Up of the Decade pull-out centre-spread of a completely stripped half-track, full-frontal and in colour. Other daring never-before-published photographs include Hermann Goering looking at a half-track, Goebels with his back to a half-track, and Julius Streicher sitting in his office thinking about a half-track. German Half-Tracks of World War Two will prove an indispensable addition to the library of all who are interested in collecting German half-tracks of World War Two. It will, of course, be of less interest to those who are merely interested in collecting Germans. And it will be of no interest all to those who collect bus-tickets of World War One - although they just might be titillated by the section of pornographic pictures that follow the exhaustive and exhausting bibliography. This is an up-to-date, amended, revised and corrected edition of the original German Half-Tracks of World War Two (published last week). Irving lived unusual hours, and ate irregularly and poorly. He complained about indigestion, but when he did not come into the office without any word, we alerted his family after a day or so. And, alas, they found him dead; it wasn't indigestion, it was heart disease. There was a tradition at Arms & Armour Press that on one's birthday one gave one's colleagues some cake. After Irving died I maintained the tradition for him for several years, thinking how happy he would have been that I was paying for his cake. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 116 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com