30 AUGUST 1930, Page 29

Those who recall Sir Francis Doyle's stirring ballad, " Right

on our flank the crimson sun went down," will like to find the story of the loss of the Birkenhead' retold in equally stirring prose in Captain F. H. Shaw's Famous Shipwrecks (Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 12s. 6d.). On the ' Birkenhead' the brave—in this case mostly new-recruited soldiers—" died without flinching in the bloody surf," as did elsewhere many a sea-hero on the ' Titanic,' the Lusitania,' and at the burning, on her maiden voyage of the ' Kent East Indiaman.' These are but a few of the thrilling tales of sea-disaster and sea- gallantry retold by Captain Shaw, who brings to his task a very marked power of descriptive narrative and whose own long experience of the sea enables him to give the appropriate setting to each great story.