Publications
My Stray Sussex Angel, by Mark D. Bishop, published June 2013 in Sussex Family Historian (vol. 20 no. 6, article, pp.267-271) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/508977] & CD SFH40 from S.F.H.G.
Preview:Among the various bits and bobs that inhabited my childhood was a collection of travel books contemporary to the 1870s and 1880s. However, they were not about your ordinary European touristy places, no these volumes were about far-away locations that were still largely unknown and uncharted by English explorers. Places like the Tablelands of Venezuela and the hinterlands of Africa that only Livingstone and such explorers had charted. My maternal great-grandfather, John Alfred FORTUNE, had been the original boyhood owner of those books and it is only now that I realise what they meant to him as a young and lonely lad, they had been a panacea for his broken heart. Yet, there is something else that belonged to him, which I have cherished even more over the years and have managed to hold on to by a thread. It is an almost complete, full-colour set of cards giving a pictorial History of the 'Sports and Pastimes of many Nations' that were obviously given as freebees when purchasing miraculous Holloway's Pills. Indeed, the card for Patagonia makes that part of the world look very alluring and reports, 'Often young children are found at play with flamingos by the brookside'; whilst Brazil is, 'the most important country of South America.'