My Father and the Silver King

Born in 1886, Ambrose Erswell ran away from home in London's East End when he was seven years old, living on the streets and joining a gang of child pickpockets. At nine he signed on as a "ship's boy," on a clipper ship sailing to South America, an experience so grim he vowed never to go to sea again. In a London bicycle shop, where he found a job, he saw his first automobile. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for cars. By twelve years of age he became a chauffeur. When he saw The Silver King, a melodrama in which the wronged hero is redeemed after making a fortune in a silver mine in South America, he made up his mind he would become "The Silver King." Like the hero of the play, this cockney lad, who would become the author's father, left England and made a fortune in an unlikely business in Australia. Piecing his story together from childhood memories, family letters, contemporary accounts of London, shipboard life at the end of the 19thcentury, the Second Boer War, and the Queensland cane fields, the author has written a story about a man inspired by a dream of becoming a rich gentleman, a "Silver King." The book is illustrated, manly by photographs, in colour, sepia and black-and-white.