On 13 January 1942 hundreds of army and air force servicemen due to sail from Durban on the British troopship City of Canterbury refused to board the vessel in defiance of their commanders and of the British Military and Naval authorities in South Africa. Gerry Rubin sees this unusual and dramatic incident in the round. Besides examining the legal case itself, its precedents and its outcome, he looks at both the human factors involved and at the wider background. In so doing he deals with a little-mentioned aspect of the war but one familiar to hundreds of thousands of servicemen: the journey by troopship via the Cape to the Middle and Far East.

"Private Property, Government Requisition and the Constitution, 1914-1927" ranges widely over different types of property, including aerodromes, ships, hotels, pubs, alcoholic drinks and foodstuffs, the history of whose requisition by the wartime state is carefully documented. It shows how the state, in this as in many areas, was forced to act by immediate pressures, often improvising rights over areas of life previously outside the power of government; by doing so it documents a key stage in the growth of centralised power in modern Britain.