‍“I HAVE always admired the British and sometimes made them the heroes of my stories,” said French author Jules Verne, in a wonderful interview I have just read in the Strand Magazine of 200 years ago.

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‍Writer Marie Belloc tracked him down in a quiet French provincial town, where the man who gave us Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, lived quietly with his wife, Honorine and his pet dog Follet.

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‍“I consider members of the English race make excellent heroes, especially where a story of adventure or scientific pioneering work is about to be described,” he said. “I thoroughly admire the pluck and go-ahead qualities of the nation which has planted the Union Jack on so great a portion of the Earth’s surface.”

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‍Jules, we learn, was up at 5am every day to start writing and finished at 11am before going for a long walk with his black French labrador Follet. He was in bed and asleep by 8.30pm.

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‍“I always try and make my books as true to life as possible,” he told writer Marie, “I take numerous notes out of papers, books, magazines and scientific reports that I come across and I subscribe to 20 newspapers. I put all these notes in files under different subjects for later… astronomy, meteorology, physiology and new discoveries. Sometimes I carry these notes around in my brain for years.

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‍“My book Around the World in Eighty Days was the result of reading a tourist advertisement in a newspaper. The paragraph that caught my interest mentioned that nowadays it would be possible for a man to travel around the globe in 80 days and it flashed into my mind that the traveller, profiting by a difference of meridian, could be made to either gain or lose a day during that period of time, which was the whole point of my story.

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‍“You will remember that my hero, Phileas Fogg, owing to this circumstance, arrived home in time to win his wager, instead of, as he imagined, a day too late!”

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‍Marie was led through the charming, old-fashioned house at No.1 Rue Charles Dubois, on the corner of a countrified street in Amiens by Honorine. They walked through a courtyard overlooking a garden of great beeches shading wide expanses of well-kept lawns with flower beds and broad gravel paths.

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‍A row of shallow stone steps led them to a conservatory filled with plants and flowering shrubs. At the top of a staircase was the room where the great writer worked and slept. Marie described it as a tiny cell. A plain wooden desk was in front of the large window and opposite was a little camp bed where Jules would wake up and see the dawn breaking over Amiens cathedral. Nearby were two busts of Molière and Shakespeare.

‍Another door opened to a huge library full of books, newspapers and magazines with one wall of cardboard pigeonholes full of over 20,000 notes the writer had made.

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‍Jules appeared as he always dressed, in the sombre black clothes of most Frenchmen of the professional classes. His coat was decorated with the red button denoting that the wearer possessed the high distinction of being an officer of the Legion of Honour.

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‍As they sat talking, Marie asked why so many of his books were geographical and scientific romances. “I had always been devoted to the study of geography,” he said, “while others delight in history and historical research.

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‍“My love for maps and the great explorers of the world led to my composing a long series of geographical stories. But I always tried to make even the wildest of my romances as realistic and true to life as possible. I do not pose as a scientist, but I esteem myself fortunate as having been born in an age of remarkable discoveries and perhaps still more wonderful inventions.”

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‍He went on to agree with Marie that the fair sex played only a small part in his stories. He said: “Whenever there is a necessity for the feminine element to be introduced you will find it there. But love is an all-absorbing passion and leaves room for little else in the human breast.

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‍“My heroes need all their wits about them and the presence of a charming young lady might now and then sadly interfere with what they have to do. And I am careful what I describe. I scrupulously avoid any scene which a boy would not like to think his sister would read.”

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‍Jules revealed that his favourite writer was Charles Dickens. “His books possess pathos, humour, incident, plot and descriptive power. His fame may smoulder but will never die.”

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‍As for his own work, he added: “I never begin writing without knowing what the beginning, the middle and the end of the book will be. I always have about half a dozen plots floating in my mind. If I ever find myself hard up for a subject, I will know it is time to put down my pen.”

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‍There’s more, much more of course. Fascinating

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‍THE OLD PIPE THAT HOLDS FLEETING MOMENT OF HISTORY

‍JUST a rusting old pipe, eh? Well, a bit more than that. Inside is our old friend the polluted subterranean River Fleet flowing over a railway line in Kentish Town all the way to Fleet Street. 

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‍“We thought for years it was a gas pipe. But it’s not. It’s a river,” a woman walking her dog over the railway lines told writers Martin Plaut and Andrew Whitehead researching their book Curious Kentish Town. 

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‍This is the only time the historic Fleet emerges from its underground lair between Hampstead Heath and the Thames where it tumbles through an overspill sluice near Blackfriars Bridge.

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‍NAVY CAT SIMON VC: A TALE OF VALOUR THAT TOUCHED HEARTS

‍WHEN Ordinary Seaman George Hickinbottom rescued an undernourished and sickly kitten wandering the Hong Kong dockyards in March 1948, he did the Royal Navy, his crew mates and the British nation a huge favour.

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‍For the trembling little fellah turned out to be no ordinary feline when he joined the men of HMS Amethyst and was later to become the only cat to ever win the animal world’s VC, the Dickin Medal for his bravery.

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‍It was a wonderful story reported widely by the British Press that had many readers moved to tears. The plucky cat even ended up in the pages of Time magazine and appeared in newspapers worldwide.

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‍Seaman George nicknamed his new friend Simon and smuggled him aboard ship under his tunic. Simon soon won the hearts of the crew and eventually even the captain, Bernard Skinner, who had cats at home. He would roar with laughter when Simon, learned how to fish ice cubes out of water jugs and slept in his skipper’s gold-braided hat.

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‍They became so close that Simon would follow him every day on his rounds and come to him whenever he whistled. More importantly, he began to catch mice between the narrow decks of the ship. But then he progressed … to rats! They were a threat to food supplies and health, carrying diseases that spread in the hot summers.

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‍It was the time of the Chinese Civil War and one dawn the Amethyst was ordered up the Yangtse River to act as a guard ship for the British Embassy in Nanjing.

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‍But the ship, displaying Union Jacks and flying the white ensign, only got 100 miles upriver before being shelled by Nationalist shore batteries.

‍The wheelhouse and bridge were hit, and the Amethyst ran aground on a mudbank with a 15ft hole in the bulkhead as the rebels continued to batter it. Twenty-five men were killed including Skinner. Simon was hit by shrapnel and crawled under some wreckage where he collapsed.

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‍The crew found him and nursed him back to health. His whiskers and eyebrows had been singed off and he had dried blood from wounds on his back and legs. He also had facial burns; was weak, frightened and badly dehydrated with a weak heart. The ship’s doctor cleaned and stitched him, but he was not expected to last the night. Simon, however, was back on patrol in a week, killing the rats which he proudly left at cabin doors.

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‍Eventually the First Lieutenant, now in command of Amethyst despite a severe injury himself, managed to get the ship refloated and it was moved a couple of miles upriver, away from the main Communist guns. But the weeks of being trapped turned into months and the rats threatened the lives of the crew.

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‍Simon roamed from bunk to bunk sleeping with the crewmen. They adored him. And he was vital for survival.

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‍The rats had run amok over the ship since the bombing and even invaded the stranded men’s quarters and kitchen. They were led by a vicious black monster rat, nicknamed Mao Tse-tung who ruled the nooks and crannies of the ship. Simon would often return from his patrol cut and bleeding to get patched up by the men. The number of rats went down.

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‍One night the monster Mao appeared in front of the crew. Simon, weak as he was, didn’t hesitate and leapt at his neck, killing him after a ferocious fight. Now he was promoted to Able Seaman. Simon was loved so much he was requested by the wounded and dying men in the ship’s hospital for comfort.

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‍The siege lasted 101 days until the night of July 30, 1949, when the Amethyst left under cover of darkness as communist guns blasted it from the shore. Soon it was in the open sea heading for Plymouth where the crew were honoured by King George V1 and Simon awarded the Amethyst campaign ribbon as the crowd on the dockside cheered.

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‍But Simon had to be quarantined for six months in Surrey where hundreds of Brits queued to see him. He was due a visit from the Lord Mayor of London and other dignitaries, but he had lost his strength and lay motionless. Crew members took it in turns to sit with him all night. He died of enteritis. Some say of a broken heart being away from his friends in the crew. 

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‍Newspapers reported: “His spirit slipped quietly away to sea.”

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‍Simon was buried in the PDSA’s animal cemetery at Ilford. A specially made casket held his small body, wrapped in cotton wool, and draped with the Union Jack. He was awarded the Dicken Medal for bravery posthumously.

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‍MAKING LOVE IS GOOD FOR YOU, SAID HEMINGWAY

‍LEGENDARY novelist Ernest Hemingway had many lovers during his champagne-and-absinthe-soaked life that ended with alcoholism, depression, paranoia and suicide at the age of 61, on July 2, 1961. In the 1930s he was interviewed many times by Esquire Magazine. And his advice to budding writers in one of them was … make love.

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‍“Never think about a story you are working on before you begin again the next day,” he said. “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time.

‍“But if you think about it consciously or worry about it, you will kill it, and your brain will be tired the next morning before you start.”

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‍Exercise is important, he added, so that your body gets tired.

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‍“A perfect way is to make love with someone you love,” he said. “That is better than anything. But afterwards, when you are empty, it is necessary to read something, anything, in order not to think or worry about your work until you can do it again.

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‍“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

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‍TERRY MANNERS

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‍16 June 2025