George Eric Newby was an English travel author. Newby's best known works include A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Last Grain Race, and Round Ireland in Low Gear.
Early life
Newby was born in Barnes and grew up near Hammersmith Bridge, London. His father, George, was a partner in a firm of wholesale dressmakers, and his mother, Hilda had been a dress model at Harrods. Newby was educated at St Paul's School; after leaving school he worked for two years at the Dorland advertising agency until 1938 when, at the age of 18, he apprenticed aboard the Finnish windjammerMoshulu and took part in the "Grain Race" from Australia to Europe by way of Cape Horn. This voyage was subsequently described in The Last Grain Race and pictorially documented in Learning the Ropes.
Military career
In March 1941 Newby arrived in Fatehgarh, India, stationed as a junior officer in the Rajput Regiment of the British Indian Army. In the six months he spent in Fatehgarh he studied for the Lower Standard Urdu Examination that was required to command native Indian troops abroad. After passing the examination he was posted to North Africa. He served in the Black Watch and the Special Boat Section during World War Two, and was captured during an operation against the coast of Sicily in August 1942. He was later awarded the Military Cross for his part in the raid. Newby was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, PG21, at Chieti, a few miles inland from Pescara on the Adriatic coast, and later to PG49 at Fontanellato, near Parma. Escaping with the other British prisoners after the Italian Armistice, he was helped to hide in the Apennine countryside by a Slovenian anti-fascist woman, Wanda Skof, who married him after the war and became a companion on his travels. These experiences were described in his memoir Love and War in the Apennines, which focuses on how he was helped by ordinary Italians. A film, In Love and War, was made in 2001 based on the book, starring Callum Blue as Newby and Barbora Bobuľová as Wanda. He was free until January 1944, when he was recaptured.
Post-war career
After the war, he worked, off and on for 17 years, in the women's fashion business, before setting out to climb Mir Samir in the Nuristan Mountains of Afghanistan with his friend Hugh Carless in 1956, an expedition later chronicled in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush – probably his most widely known work, and which included a meeting with the English explorer Wilfred Thesiger. From 1964 to 1973, Newby was Travel Editor for The Observer newspaper.
