So for example on one page he writes a date and place on the edge of the page 'Jan 15th 1915. Great Yarmouth.' This puzzled me (and others). Yarmouth was close to where his boat was built, but why 1915? It turns out this is the date of the first German aerial bombing raid on England, when Zeppelins floated silently over East Anglia and dropped explosives at dawn. So why is someone on a round the world voyage, faking his positions and trapped at sea thinking about Zeppelins? I guess we'll never know - and why it was important enough to him to write down.”

Rothwell himself keeps two diaries. One which records his daily life in Laughton, which starts out fulsome at the beginning of the year but loses ground as the year wears on. And then he keeps a notebook for each film he works on. He records thoughts, ideas,and research that might be relevant and dips into them every now and then to remind himself what interested him about the subject in the first place. “I don't like the idea of them being read by other people, because they're part of a process, not something designed for an audience. I think the difficulty with journals and notebooks is it's hard for an outsider to realise whether something in them is significant or not. Which is the problem we had with Crowhurst's logbooks - when is something just a passing thought that shouldn't be given much weight even if on the surface a lot could be made of it?” AM