Last Letters from Tombreck: War diaries: 1941-1944

‘Tombreck’, a crofter’s cottage three miles south of Keith, Banffshire (now Moray) in the North East corner of Scotland was where Robert John Newlands, the last in a line of ten children, was born and raised. In 1941, at the age of nineteen he joined the R.A.F. and trained as a wireless mechanic. His wartime diary and letters from his family and friends are printed here for the first time. ‘Last letters from Tombreck’ recounts his journey from Keith to Edinburgh, Bolton, Folkestone and then Eastbourne but, more importantly, details his rite of passage from youth to manhood. The personalities of his family and friends are portrayed vividly in their letters, forming, with the diary, a veritable insight in to the everyday life of a service man posted far from home. Being contemporaneously written, ‘Last Letters from Tombreck’ takes you effortlessly back in time to the early 1940s in wartime Britain. Such a book is the truest form of history. Professor George Newlands writes in his foreword: ‘Just occasionally the slow but solid momentum of the perfectly ordinary generates something uniquely and unexpectedly worthwhile. Here we have such a fragment.