Norman Davey

Norman Davey (5 May 1888 – 6 June 1949) was an English engineer, soldier and professional writer.

Quotes

• Far beneath where our airmen fly,
  Slowly the Garrison guns go by.
  Breaking through bramble and thorn and gorse
  Towed by engines or dragged by horse,
       The great guns,
       The late guns,
     That slowly rumble up
  To enable Messrs. Vickers to converse with Messrs. Krupp.
  • "R. G. A.", in Punch, vol. 147 (December 30, 1914), p. 532

• By Charing Cross in London Town
  There runs a road of high renown,
  Where antique books are ranged on shelves
  As dark and dusty as themselves.
  And many booklovers have spent
  Their substance there with great content,
  And vexed their wives and filled their homes
  With faded prints and massive tomes.
  • "The Booklover", in Punch, vol. 150 (June 21, 1916), p. 414

• By the canal in Flanders I watched a barge’s prow
  Creep slowly past the poplar-trees; and there I made a vow
  That when these wars are over and I am home at last
  However much I travel I shall not travel fast.
  Horses and cars and yachts and planes: I’ve no more use for such;
  For in three years of war’s alarms I’ve hurried far too much;
  And now I dream of something sure, silent and slow and large;
  So when the War is over — why, I mean to buy a barge.
  • "By the Canal in Flanders", in Punch, vol. 153 (September 5, 1917), p. 180

Guinea Girl (1921)

Guinea Girl: A Melodrama (London: Chapman & Hall, 1921)

• Monte Carlo itself is a fairy city given over to the worship of the hazard: a toy town, designed for the entertainment of the idle and the rich: a stage, particularly furnished with properties to deceive the vulgar, to intrigue folk of a small imagination. ... It is a shrine at which the artificial is natural: the useless, of use: the unreal, real: the false, true: a temple in which the painted cardboard is gold and silver: the wooden sword, Excalibur; and the paste, jewels.
  But Monaco, or rather the harbour of Monaco, is of a reverse order, for, here, the natural is artificial: not the useless of use, but the useful, useless: not the unreal, real, but the real, unreal. It is a place of essential and primitive things which are, here, accidental and secondary.
  • Ch. 21

• He was concerned now more with livelihood than with life: Goddess, Planet or Mortal, he had no longer any thought of Venus.
  • Finale in a Minor Key

External links

• Canal at La Bassee, showing destroyed bridge
• Gunboat Mary Rose, Officer R.n.v.r. and Crew. Ravines, Furnes Canal
• Jef Leempoels – Canal in Flanders