Overview

Ambrose Erswell ran away from home in London’s East End when he was seven years old, lived on the streets and joined 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 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’d become a chauffeur. When he saw The Silver King, a melodrama in which the wronged hero is redeemed after making a fortune in a silvermine in South America, he decided that his life must follow a similar trajectory. Like the hero of the play, this cockney lad, who would eventually (in his mid-fifties) become the author’s father, left England and made a fortune in an unlikely business in Australia. The author traces her attraction to the music of the Piraeus underworld and the men who sang the rembetika to her father and to the Music Hall songs she was raised on. 

Full Product Details

Author:   Gail Holst-Warhaft
Publisher:   Colenso Books
Imprint:   Colenso Books
ISBN:  

9781912788460

ISBN 10:   1912788462
Pages:   241
Publication Date:   19 March 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

     List of illustrations   vi Acknowledgements   viii A Word of Introduction   x Dedication   xii        CHAPTER                 ONE    London — East End — 1893   1              TWO   Around Cape Horn   11           THREE   The Silver King   29             FOUR   My Father’s Short War   43              FIVE   The Chauffeur and Another Sea Voyage   53                SIX    The Gamble   69           SEVEN    Cane   79            EIGHT   A Car and a Bride   95              NINE   In-Laws   113               TEN   Gouge   127        ELEVEN    My Parents’ Courtship   141        TWELVE    Rats — And Yet Another Voyage   151    THIRTEEN    Ella — The Americans — I arrive   161   FOURTEEN    Eltham   177        FIFTEEN    Ella and Teddy   189      SIXTEEN    Travelling with My Father   201 SEVENTEEN    My Father the Levendis   215          Afterlife   221  

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Author Information

Born in Australia, Gail Holst-Warhaft is a writer and translator who has published a number of books about modern Greek music and literature, and translated some of Greece’s most important writers into English. Her translations of Greek literature and her own poems have been published in book form and in various journals. While living in Greece in the 1970s she played the harpsichord with some of Greece’s leading composers. She now lives with her husband in Ithaca, upstate New York.

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