Books by "Harry E. Downer"
5 books found
Commemorative History of the Presbyterian Church in Westfield, New Jersey, 1728-1928
by William Kerr McKinney, Harry A. Kniffin
1929
Writer Harry Pearson takes a warm and witty journey around Britain in pursuit of the lost folk sports that somehow still linger on in the glitzy era of the Premier League and Sky Sports to find out how and why they have survived and to meet the characters who keep them going. When Victorian public schoolmasters and Oxbridge-educated gentlemen were taming football, codifying cricket, bringing the values of muscular Christianity to the boxing ring and the athletics field, games that dated back to the pagan era clung on in isolated pockets of rural Britain, unmodified by contemporary tastes, shunned by the media and sport’s ruling elites. Here they remain, small, secret worlds, free from media scrutiny and VAR controversies, wreathed in an arcane language of face-gaters, whack-ups, potties, gates-of-hell and the Dorset flop; as much a part of the British countryside as the natterjack toad and almost as endangered. No Pie, No Priest! travels through Britain in search of the nation’s traditional rural sports, seeking out the championship of Knur and Spell (a Viking forefather of golf) on the West Yorkshire moors; watching Irish Road Bowling in County Armagh (once a surprising interest of England cricket captain Mike Brearley), Popinjay at Kilwinning Abbey in Ayrshire, the Aunt Sally competitions of Oxfordshire, and taking in world championship Stoolball (often considered the dairymaid’s form of cricket) and Toad-in-the-Hole in West Sussex. No Pie, No Priest! combines sports reporting, travelogue and history, and features a cast of bucolic eccentrics and many deeply impenetrable regional accents.
The second novel in the April Grove series, following the lives of working-class families during the Second World War. It is 1940, and the neighbours in April Grove are close knit, patriotic and proud - but the onset of the Blitz tests their loyalties and courage as never before. Betty Chapman meets a devastatingly attractive man in the Land Army, who upsets all her settled ideas; Olive Harker, just married, must now decide whether to risk motherhood; and Nancy Baxter offers comfort to lonely serviceman while her son runs wild... Their stories are played out against the backdrop of a great seaport at war: the horror of the air raid sirens, the naval dockyards buzzing with activity and the overwhelming desire to survive the city's darkest hour...