Saving Lives in Scilly

£19.95

Saving Lives in Scilly: The Doctor, the Lighthouse Keeper and their Families

This is the story of the author’s two paternal great-great-grandfathers, both of whom spent over forty years helping to save lives on the Isles of Scilly: Edwin Lewis Davis as the keeper of St Agnes Lighthouse and John Grenfell Moyle as the islands’ only doctor. It also follows the mariners, miners, preachers and teachers of the Moyle and Davis families as they become part of the great Cornish diaspora. We accompany them over the seven seas aboard speedy clippers, to the Antipodes during the gold rush, to the industrial north of England, to lighthouses along rugged coastlines and to the war zones of the Crimea peninsula and the Western Front. With them we enter Victorian classrooms, workhouses, prisons and lunatic asylums.

The book is richly illustrated with images of people, places and mementoes, including the paintings of John Grenfell Moyle, who became a renowned West Country artist. Quotations from contemporary writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Mrs Gaskell help to transport readers into the world inhabited by the author’s forebears and their own. She pays particular attention to the lives of great-grandmothers and great-aunts, which have so often been hidden from history.

Saving Lives in Scilly will appeal to readers with an interest in the sea, the West Country, lighthouses, medicine, the lives of women and in social history. In addition, those keen to explore their family’s past will find inspiration in the author’s journey of discovery.

ISBN: 9781852002176

Size: 217x140mm

Binding: hardback

123 Photos

Length: 284pp

Saving Lives in Scilly: The Doctor, the Lighthouse Keeper and their Families

This is the story of the author’s two paternal great-great-grandfathers, both of whom spent over forty years helping to save lives on the Isles of Scilly: Edwin Lewis Davis as the keeper of St Agnes Lighthouse and John Grenfell Moyle as the islands’ only doctor. It also follows the mariners, miners, preachers and teachers of the Moyle and Davis families as they become part of the great Cornish diaspora. We accompany them over the seven seas aboard speedy clippers, to the Antipodes during the gold rush, to the industrial north of England, to lighthouses along rugged coastlines and to the war zones of the Crimea peninsula and the Western Front. With them we enter Victorian classrooms, workhouses, prisons and lunatic asylums.

The book is richly illustrated with images of people, places and mementoes, including the paintings of John Grenfell Moyle, who became a renowned West Country artist. Quotations from contemporary writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Mrs Gaskell help to transport readers into the world inhabited by the author’s forebears and their own. She pays particular attention to the lives of great-grandmothers and great-aunts, which have so often been hidden from history.

Saving Lives in Scilly will appeal to readers with an interest in the sea, the West Country, lighthouses, medicine, the lives of women and in social history. In addition, those keen to explore their family’s past will find inspiration in the author’s journey of discovery.

ISBN: 9781852002176

Size: 217x140mm

Binding: hardback

123 Photos

Length: 284pp

About the author:

Vyvyen Brendon

After several years at a Devon village school not unlike those which her ancestors attended, Vyvyen moved to Surrey. Here she ended her primary education in the very school once headed by one of her great-aunts. From the girls’ grammar school at which her granny was a pioneer pupil, she entered Oxford University and gained a degree in History.

She has pursued her love of the subject ever since, first as a teacher in a Further Education College, the Open University and St Mary’s School, Cambridge and more recently as an author. She has published four books for A-level students and three for the general reader on the history of children: Children of the Raj, Prep School Children and Children at Sea. It was the last work, involving maritime adventures and disasters, which inspired this family history.