“Some people are obsessed with collecting stamps or old cars,” my friend Mike Ivory used to say. “So what is unusual about being obsessed with a country?” The land of his obsession was Slovakia, where he knew every village or settlement, wooden church, country lane or stream, together with their medieval names.
Yet Mike, who has died aged 78, could not find a publisher for his travel guide to his favourite country, although Michelin, AA, Berlitz, National Geographic, Fodor’s and others repeatedly printed his four guidebooks to his second great love, the Czech Republic. They also published his guides to Hungary, Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Australia – and, naturally, Britain.
Mike was the embodiment of the old-fashioned British explorer, something he had been preparing for from childhood by devouring geography books and teaching himself Russian.
His mother Betty (nee Hall), a hairdresser to genteel ladies – the future politician Alan Clark’s mother, Jane, among them – had ambitions for her son but no money to fulfil them. Her husband, Elly, was a drunkard who leeched off the family’s fading hotel. Betty left him before Mike was born during an air raid in Folkestone, Kent.
He won a place at Sir Roger Manwood’s, a boarding grammar school in Sandwich. The living conditions were spartan and the beatings were harsh, not least for producing a secret satirical journal that mocked the teachers. “That is how I learned to rely only on myself and dare to follow an untrodden path,” Mike told me. A scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford, to study German, French and Italian (1959-62) was his reward.
During his gap year in Germany he sneaked into east Berlin. That “gloomy world, with ever-present slogans about creating a paradise on earth strikingly contrasting with its obvious bleakness” fascinated him. Czechoslovakia and Hungary were next.
After postgraduate courses in urbanism and landscape architecture at Newcastle University (1965-67), he worked as a town planner in Switzerland and the UK. He married a colleague, Isobel Catchpole, in 1973. She died in 1975. Mike then moved on to university lecturing in Cheltenham (at what is now the University of Gloucestershire), Montreal (where he taught in French) and Birmingham. From 1991 until his death, he devoted himself to the guidebooks.
He is survived by his stepchildren, Penny, Tom and Charlie, and his Slovak partner of 30 years, Alexandra Bolla, who was, in Mike’s words, the finest outcome of his passion for her country.
