The Life of LTC Rolt : Where Engineering Met Literature

In 1926, Tom Rolt who was then sixteen years old, abandoned his public school education. Havingtaken a job with a small firm of agricultural engineers, he realised that he had found his life's calling.But the way ahead was neither smooth nor easy. Having secured a premium apprenticeship, the firmwhich took him on foundered and although he eventually qualified as a mechanical engineer, the1930s depression made it almost impossible to find regular employment.Nothing daunted, with the encouragement of his mysterious companion 'Cara', he turned to writing.His literary career flourished alongside his association with the Vintage Sports Car Club, the InlandWaterways Association and the Talyllyn Railway. Between his Inland Waterways Association andTalyllyn phases, Angela, his first wife, left him to join Billy Smart's Circus, and Sonia -an actress-turned-boatwoman - would become his second wife. Over the course of his life, he produced overthirty books, their subject matters ranging from canals and railways to engin

eering biography;company histories; a collection of accomplished ghost stories and a topographical survey ofWorcestershire. He also wrote polemics about the plight of the craftsman in a world which reliedincreasingly upon mass production.In this book, the first full-length biography of Tom Rolt and a complement to his auto-biographicalLandscape trilogy, Victoria Owens draws upon his surviving letters and unpublished manuscripts totell the story of the engineer-turned-writer who made Britain's industrial past the stuff of enduringliterature. [Publisher's text].

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