Yours Affectionately: The Life & Times of Aidan White
About three years ago, my husband brought home some boxes of letters - they came from the house of an old family friend called Aidan White. Aidan had attended New College Oxford in the 1930s, and his collection of letters were a treasure trove from a forgotten world. The plan was to give them to New College Archive for safekeeping, but as Aidan had been so dear to the family, we didn’t want to let the letters go without first transcribing them.
During Covid lockdown, my wonderful mum agreed to transcribe them. And so, the Aidan Project was born and almost 90,000 words later, lockdown project complete, Mum had finished …and unbelievably, when it came to editing, I didn’t find any mistakes!
This is the latest book from ‘Books by Sarah’ but I couldn’t have published it without my mum. To supplement the letters, I have spent the past few months scanning the many images that accompanied his collection, supplementing them with found pictures and researching the people mentioned and adding footnotes... I’ve truly loved every minute!
So ‘Yours Affectionately: The Life & Times of Aidan White’ is now published. I hope Aidan would be pleased - the book tells his story from first days at Oxford, through his years as an officer in the Second World War, and later as a teacher in Leicester.
We are very fortunate to introduce the book with a wonderful foreword by Dr Timothy Hands, godson of Aidan. Here is a little excerpt from that introduction:
Once upon a time there was a fashion for what was known as Great Man History. It gave little attention to the ordinary and the everyday but concentrated on the extraordinary and the exceptional. This fascinating volume, thank goodness, is the reverse, a labour of love which documents a man of great ability and great character, who inhabited unusual times, but refused to have his head turned by their excesses.
‘Yours Affectionately: The Life & Times of Aidan White’ is available in hardback and paperback (colour versions) and also in paperback (black and white version) and kindle.