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Shrewsbury's famous Nag's Head is a fine example of a late-Medieval coaching inn. It is visited and photographed by tourists and locals, but few know much about its history. Bernard O'Connor's latest book on Shropshire provides a selection of over 250 years of newspaper articles that detail the sales, auctions, meetings, landlords, landladies, births, marriages, deaths, inquests - and much more - to reveal life in the Nag's Head.
About the author
Bernard O'Connor has taught Geography, History, Religious Education, Citizenship and English in Britain, Australia, Taiwan and China. Now living in the Shropshire Hills, UK, he has researched many aspects of local history. His first publications were on the social, economic, archaeological and environmental impact of the 19th and 20th century coprolite industry in the UK, France, Spain and the United States. This was open-cast mining of phosphatic nodules, thought by some at the time to be fossilised dinosaur droppings. He has also researched and published work on RAF Tempsford, described as Churchill's Most Secret Airfield during WW2. From here the RAF's Special Duties Squadrons (and for a time the US Carpetbaggers) sent in over 600 secret agents and supplied the many resistance groups in occupied Europe. He has published numerous accounts of the women agents, sabotage training and sabotage operations (including blackmail sabotage) in Norway, Denmark, Holland (the Netherlands), Belgium, France, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Gibraltar He has written accounts of German-trained agents infiltrated into Britain; Soviet Comintern agents brought to Britain and infiltrated by SOE into Western Europe; Spanish Republicans trained for missions in Spain, and surrendered or captured anti-fascist Soviet, Austrian and German soldiers who were trained for SOE sabotage and subversion missions. Recently he has published a five-volume account of Hitler's R-Netz, stay-behind wireless operators, saboteurs, espionage agents and assassins in France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Italy. He is an accomplished speaker and Zoom presenter.
