User:Christy campbell

=Christy Campbell=

Christy Campbell (born November 28, 1951) is a British journalist and award winning author primarily known as an investigative historian.

Biography
Campbell was born in London, England to Irish parents and educated at William Ellis grammar school, north London, and St. Catherine’s College where he read modern history. He subsequently worked for Jane’s Publishing Company, the Sunday Correspondent newspaper, The European  and The Sunday Telegraph where he was defence correspondent reporting from conflicts in the the Gulf, the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia. He is married to the journalist and author, Clare Campbell, and has three children, Maria, Katy and Joe.

Investigative History
He began his cycle of extended historical investigations in 1998 - all of them published by HarperCollins. Campbell’s book The Maharajah’s Box (2000), based on research in the Royal Archives, Windsor, and the India Office Collection at the British Library, told the story of Maharajah Duleep Singh, the last Sikh king of the Punjab, removed from his throne as a boy, brought to England and his career thereafter as a self-proclaimed ‘rebel,’ unwittingly manipulated by the British Foreign Office.

Fenian Fire (2002) revealed the true story of the “Jubilee Plot” conspiracy of 1887, an attempt ostensibly led by by the Irish-American soldier-of-fortune, General Francis Millen, to assassinate Queen Victoria - but which in fact was orchestrated by the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. The real plot was to discredit the Irish politician Charles Stewart Parnell and his Liberal Party allies pushing for Home Rule in the United Kingdom parliament. The story was adapted by Yellow Asylum Films, of Dublin, Ireland, and broadcast by RTE in November 2007.

Phylloxera, How Wine was Saved for the World, (2004, published as The Botanist and the Vintner in the US ) was an exploration of how the prescriptions of post-Darwinian science were at last accepted by French winegrowers in the late 19th century as a remedy against the vine-root sucking insect known as Phylloxera vastatrix, which had been accidentally imported from America. It outlined how the disaster was repeated again when the parasitic aphid (now classified as Daktulosphaira vitifoliae) returned to California in the 1980s. The work won the UK Glenfiddich Food and Drink Book Award for drink book of the year, 2005.

Military History
Band of Brigands (2007) is an in depth exploration of the debut in action of tanks at Flers on during the battle of the Somme in September 1916, the men who crewed them, the Heavy Section Machine Gun Corps, and the subsequent suicide of the unit’s first field commander Lt-Col John Brough. It also tells the story of the British Mark IV tank, D.51 Deborah, excavated in 1998 at Flesquières on the battlefield near Cambrai, northern France. The work was especially commended by the Western Front Association and Great War Forum. His latest investigation is into the formation and wartime role of the Long Range Desert Group and rival ‘private armies’ in north Africa, 1940-42.

Bibilography
War Facts Now, Fontana, 1982. ISBN 0-00-636492-6 (pbk) World War II Fact Book, Macdonald, 1985. ISBN 0-35-610362-5 A-Z of Street Cred, Corgi, 1987. ISBN 0-55-213103-2 (pbk) The VW Beetle: A Celebration of the VW Bug, Hamlyn, 1990. ISBN 0-6-00-56814-8 The Maharajah’s Box, HarperCollins, 2000. ISBN 0-00-257008-4 Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria, HarperCollins, 2002. ISBN 0-00-710483-9 Phylloxera: How Wine was Saved for the World, HarperCollins, 2005. ISBN 0-00-711535-0 Band of Brigands: The First Men in Tanks, Harper Press, 2007. ISBN 0-00-721459-4