Search Results for: Tim elkington

I was last in Rhodes in 1959, the largest of the Dodecanese Islands, as the Elkington family returned home from our tour in Cyprus. What I remembered most were the huge fortifications and the stack of stone cannonballs. Nor did they disappoint as I had imagined they might, partly because the giant tour ships have been pushed away from the harbour, so they don’t dwarf what were equally gigantic constructions in their own day.

The scale of the tourist industry beyond the Old Town beggars belief, as we saw as we sailed in along the coast. A useful summary of relevant history of the Old Town can be found here. Elaine and I found a wonderful restaurant – the Café Auvergne – at the foot of the Street of the Knights. Highly recommended.

We were introduced to the ruins of Our Lady of the Castle, a rare Gothic church in the region, to pebble mosaics, and to some of the extraordinary defensive architecture created by the Crusader Knights. The palace of the Grand Masters is stunning, though owing a good deal to the rebuilding – and ambitions – of the Italian occupation forces in the 1930s. First time I think I had seen the dating series tracking time from the founding of the Fascist state.

At the end of our second day in Rhodes, we head for Symi, a neoclassical port town whose pastel-coloured buildings tumble down the hills on either side of its bay.

Kos was a bit of a shock when we arrived and docked within the shadow of Nerantzia castle, originally built by the Knights of St John. It is described here. Somewhat raucous by contrast with other islands we have visited. But once we got inside the castle and then out into the hinterland, to visit the Asklepieion, things settled down. The island was once famed for its wine – and for this huge shrine to Asklepios, the god of healing.

Also struck by the modern, floating shrines to Captain Jack Sparrow, of Pirates of the Caribbean fame, given that our own captain – Captain Ergun Malatyali – has much of the pirate to him. He is great company, excellent at engaging his passengers, but you only need to squint a bit to be reminded of the pirates who were such a feature of these waters for so long – and one of the key reasons that there were so many hilltop castles and fortifications.

Probably the best-known story of a pirate captive was that of Julius Caesar. As John Leonard recalled:

Julius Caesar, a prominent investor in the region, once endured an infamous kidnapping by pirates (74 BC), records the biographer Plutarch (Jul. Caes. 1,2), near the Dodecanese island of Pharmakoussa (Farmakonisi). Ultimately ransomed after thirty-eight days, during which he calmly wrote poetry and speeches, Caesar promptly hired a ship, tracked down his former captors and had them crucified. 

This, for me at least, was one of the real highlights of this remarkable series of islands. For me a real joy was our visit to the Castle of Pantelli, in fact three castles built one around the other, reviewing the history of fortification from the early works of the Knights of St John through to the arrival of gunpowder. And bastions.

While we were there, Michael did a tour de force presentation on the battles that raged across the island in October-November 1943, as the British were outwitted and Leros passed from Italian to German hands. Strong elements of Louis de Bernières’ Captain Correlli’s Mandolin lay in wait for some of the captured Italians.

The Greek curator of the castle, not a happy camper for other reasons, mentioned that the father of Ginger Baker, drummer with Cream, was among the British and Commonwealth forces killed. Their last signal: “Situation desperate.” Later, we visited a Commonwealth cemetery: hugely poignant.

Earlier, we had walked around Lakki Town, into which we had sailed that morning, once called Porto Lago, and a major Italian military town in the 1930s. The architecture is eerie. As Peter Sommers’ brochure put it: “built in the style of ‘Razionalismo’, an odd combination of fascist aesthetics, Bauhaus modernism and Art Deco eclecticism.”

One link to the books that I have been devouring as we sailed was that the Italians used seaplanes as a key means of scouting and communications at the time – and we saw the crane that used to list the seaplanes into and out of the water. On the flight across to Bodrum I had finished Graham Hoyland’s powerful Merlin.

One link here was the speech that my father, Tim, did at the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby back in 2015, to thank them for all their engines he had flown behind.

After the castle and cemetery, we had a glorious lunch at a small winery, the Hatzidakis Winery, in Smalou. I thought their dry white wine exquisite – indeed bought a couple of bottles to take home. Fell in love with the co-owner, Haridimos, and we said goodbye with an embrace.

Then we set sail for a cove off Kalymnos, en route to Kos.

A couple of days ago, on 27 May, we arrived in Bodrum, Turkey, after a nightmarish passage through Gatwick, with immense waiting times, though EasyJet was fine once we were actually aboard. We had decided to take a Peter Sommer expert-led cruise around the Dodecanese Islands in a gulet called the Aegean Clipper.

The trip involved 10 of we travellers and a crew of some 5-6, with the captain understudied by his daughter, one of several of his children now captains, or en route to taking the helm.

The photographs in this series are clustered in 12 postings, from 29 May when we first boarded the Aegean Clipper, to 12 June, when we got back to Bodrum – though that would prove to be quite another adventure.

How wonderful that the judges decided that the best garden of the 2022 Chelsea Flower Show was the Rewilding Britain Garden. Even before I knew it had won the top award, it was the one I picked when asked by a Royal Horticultural Society guide for my favourite stand.

And how wonderful, too, to be invited to the Chelsea Flower Show last night, by the RHS – for their President’s dinner, hosted by Keith Weed, former head of sustainability at Unilever.

This was towards the end of a day that began with a car ride out to the Four Seasons Hotel in Hampshire with Volans colleague Charlene Cranny, to kick off a session on ESG agenda for private equity firm Oakley Capital. Fascinating, broad-ranging exchange. Torrential rain as we returned suggested the Flower Show could be damp at times.

Elaine and I had seen the Gardener’s World programme coverage of the gardens earlier in the week – so it was beyond wonderful to be able to walk into some of our favourites. Among mine was the RAF Benevolent Fund exhibit, though obviously with Battle of Britain pilot father I had something of a vested interest. The extraordinary story behind the sculptor, John Everiss’s, involvement is told on the linked webpage.

Also loved the Bees for Development stand, where we talked about the organisation’s evolution and work with the founder, Dr Nicola Bradbear. Walked off with their 2021 impact report and will follow up. Fascinating to see beekeepers becoming champions of environmental restoration in Africa.

A parallel venture is Honey Care Africa, whose triple bottom line mission attracted me to them when I first encountered their founder, Farouk Jiwa, at the World Economic Forum some twenty years ago.