David Brown’s varied career as a bus driver, shellfish salesman, civil servant and management consultant (among many other jobs) first led to an interest in knowing what his ancestors had done for a living. And then, as his own grandchildren grew up, he began to wonder where his relatives had come from, and how they had fared in life. Starting from a relatively unremarkable upbringing in the Midlands he discovered a family with roots throughout England – in Poland and Russia – and a diaspora stretching across three continents.
A voyage of family discovery reveals poverty and imprisonment in the West Country; the development of new trades in the industrial revolution; a Rabbi who doubles up as a pawnbroker; and middle-class prosperity and tragedy in the Birmingham jewellery trade. Starting with only minimal knowledge of wi...
