Finding Pollie Wells

In 1874 a young woman called Pollie Wells wrote to her brother Charlie at Southampton. Exactly a hundred years later I saved the letter from the flames – her niece, an old lady called Miss Hooley, was about to throw it into the fire. I set out to find Pollie. Finding Pollie Wells is the story of that search which was only resolved after another near half-century.

It began in Shawford, Winchester and eventually returns there, taking in all parts of England, though mostly the counties of Sussex and Essex, with brief sorties to Ireland, and the Ashanti Empire in the former Gold Coast of Africa, with even a brief mention of the planet Mars. It has our family – we are the only Bristol people in it – (my blog, my rules), and is less about Pollie than the man she believed to be her husband, a Victorian con man who left an exhausting  trail of havoc wherever he went. The exploits of such persons, eternal badly behaved children, are not confined to Netflix. His name, among several, was William Jackson Oughton Giles.

Now read on…….Click the link below:

Finding Pollie Wells