Hi Carole

Speech after long silence! Been busy producing various books. I'm pleased to announce that Family Fortunes has now been published by Shoestring Press, Nottingham, price £8.95. (Contact me for an author's discount price of £7.50!) The book has 19 photos of the Smith and related families (Flannery, Martin, Derbyshire, Thomason, Minshull, Lea, Barlow, Bennett, Lawton) and their local environment, including a cover picture of Church Street and Ike Smith's hardware and bicycle shop in the early 1930s, and a fold-out Ordnance Survey map of the Cockhedge, Church Street and School Brow ('Skoo Brew') area in 1893. I hope to be able to send you the cover photo when I get electronic copy from the printers.

The cover blurb is as follows:

For more than a century and a half, from the 1810s to the 1970s, the Smith family lived in and around the half square mile of School Brow, the original site of Saxon and medieval Warrington, Lancashire, before it became the urban wasteland it is today. Drawing on public record as well as family anecdote, ‘Family Fortunes’ re-imagines the lives of five generations of this quintessentially English, conservative and Protestant working-class family, its fortunes interwoven with the nation’s economic and imperial destiny through the main local employer, Rylands Bros, initially a supplier of sailcloth for the Fleet and then a manufacturer of wire for most of the world. A second sequence, ‘Journeys to War’, places this local and personal history within the wider context of relations between poetry, politics and war, by evoking key moments in the lives of a number of poets from Aeschylus to Lowell.

Stan Smith has written eight books on modern and contemporary poetry, including two on W. H.Auden, and edited several collections on literature and politics in the 1930s, globalisation, travel writing, modernism and postmodernism. His most recent books are Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity (Irish Academic Press, 2005) and Poetry and Displacement (Liverpool University Press, 2007). This is his first collection of poetry. He says that his primary influence in writing it was The Sopranos.

Best

Stan

Here is a Cover display of Stan's book "Family Fortunes", compiled from the Front & Back Cover Images sent to me by Stan. (It might take a few seconds to load)......


Stan, thank you so much for the information you provided about your book. Fascinating!! I'm looking forward to reading it, as soon as I can. This must surely be of interest especially to anyone researching their families' history of the Warrington area.

I'll be in contact with you off-site Stan, about the other lovely images you sent me from your book, as to displaying these on the Smith List site.

Carole
--------------------------------------------

Quote:

...Stan's Smith interests page under recompilation for move to main Smith List site

& page was completed at the new site at Smith List p12: ID 33-SSM

Finally got back to these interests after a long fallow period during which I retired, and had 2 computer crashes, from which I am only now reconstituting data and and links.

I expect to be back tracking down Warrington Smiths (and their various out-groups) in the next few months, and have recently heard from some old and some new contacts, including Celia (who is on this site I think) and Susan (who possibly isn't.

Late last year I established a link with my father's wartime quarrying company in the Royal Engineers, serving in North Africa and Italy from 1943-45, most of whom derived from two slate mining communities in Blaenau, North Wales. I was able to reconstitute the sometimes cryptic entries in his war diary, identifying where he travelled as a dispatch rider, by comparing his entries with the memoirs of the company's second-in-command, compiled by HIS son. One discovery that surprised us both was that his father (the officer, that is) had been able to get a second-hand bike for him (new bikes were virtually impossible because of the war, and second-hand ones were almost as rare) as a reward for passing his exams, from my grandad's shop in Warrington, arranged at a remove from Italy by my dad. He still remembered visiting Warrington with his mother to collect the bike, presumably in 1943 or 44.

Hi Stan,

Great to hear from you, long time no speak! Thanks for the update. That's interesting about your dad and his travels, how wonderful to have his wartime diary! That's a lovely story about your dad helping his second-in-command to get the bike for his son - from your grandad's Warrington Bike shop via Italy!

I've updated an old note of mine I just noticed in the last post, up above, to link to
your Smith interests page at the main site. Hope everything there is in order now. Been so busy, just haven't had time to keep in touch with all you members individually, and still have a lot of catching up to do!! (So... what's new!, I hear you saying!!)
Anyway - talk again soon Stan.
Carole