Carmen Callil explores her roots in a book that is a miracle of research and whose writing is fuelled by righteous anger – a story of Empire, migration and the poverty and injustice of nineteenth-century England
In this remarkable book, Carmen Callil discovers the story of her British ancestors, beginning with her great-great-grandmother Sary Lacey, born illegitimate in 1808, an impoverished stocking frame worker in Leicestershire. Through detailed research, we follow Sary from slum to tenement and from pregnancy to pregnancy. We also meet George Conquest, a canal worker and the father of one of Sary’s children. George was sentenced – for stealing a piece of hemp – to seven years’ transportation to Australia, where he faced the extraordinary brutality of convict life. Meanwhile, Mary Ann Brooks and her father John, a silversmith, travel across the seas from Lincolnshire to escape the Workhouse and life as a skivvy.
But for George
