‘Tinman’ William Sorrell’s diary entries for 1899 provide an entertaining and intriguing view of the past, every day recording history as it’s happening. They reveal the English village of Rochford at the turn of the 19th century; as the everyday lives and work of his household, shopkeepers, craftsmen, agricultural workers and members of the village community come to life. Their seasonal activities, contemporary recipes and a miscellany of memories and reminiscences of home and family, with anecdotes, stories, a fund of folklore, traditional sayings and weather lore, reveal that the world of 1899, familiar to my Great-grandfather, has changed forever. The recreated Diary was inspired by William’s lifetime reminiscences, family anecdotes and family memories with added detail from research into the period.

The book is available on the Amazon Bookstore as an ebook or paperback.

A few words from the author:

I am not aware whether my forebear William ever kept a diary; so Great Grandfather’s

Country is my recreation of the diary I imagine he may have written in 1899. I was fortunate

that amongst the limited survivals from our family past were two newspaper cuttings

relating to William Sorrell’s death in 1925. (He had been born at The Horse and Groom in

1842.) A lengthy article in one outlined his activities in local public service and reprinted an

earlier newspaper account of William’s lifetime reminiscences. These provided fascinating

details of his life and times, provided me with a starting point and have been incorporated

into his ‘factional’ diary. Added to these are three or four generations of family stories and

anecdotes, mixed with my research into life at the turn of the 19th century, also my more

recent appropriate personal anecdotes from characters living in a rural community.

William’s daily diary entries reveal the microcosm of an English village at the turn of the 19th

century. The everyday lives and work of his household, shopkeepers, craftsmen, agricultural

workers and members of the village community come to life and include anecdotes, stories,

a fund of folklore, traditional sayings and weather lore. Their seasonal activities,

contemporary recipes and a miscellany of memories and reminiscences of home and family

reveal that the world of 1899, familiar to Great Grandfather, has changed forever.