Across the Broken Years: Hardship, Brutality and Resilience 300 years. One Family.
Paperback
Publisher: Blackford Books
Published: Nov 21 2025
Pages: 282
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.64 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A Legacy of Survival
Beaten each week at a Catholic boarding school, Kit Sadgrove grew up in a world ruled by fear and silence. But this remarkable memoir goes far beyond the school gates. Woven through his own harrowing yet hopeful story is the tale of his ancestors-lives marked by hardship, resilience, and astonishing adventure.
Two public hangings
Condemned to a hulk prison ship
Fighting the nascent US navy
Attacking Napoleon's army Living in the slums of London
A bigamous marriage
My family's 2.1m ($2.8m) forgeries
We are bankrupt
The biggest fraud ever Our aircraft manufacturing business in 1916
Surviving the Irish Famine in 1845
The Irish insurrection 1916
Going to war in Mesopotamia
Getting the first ever self-winding wrist watch Being Master and Matron of a workhouse
Sending orphan children out to work in the streets
Life as a gunner in WW1
Finding love in Rome
Living in a house without electricity Sent to boarding school at age 5
Surviving on sugar sandwiches
Beaten for not being good at maths
Encounters with 11 paedophiles
Confessing to masturbation The right eyeball of a martyred saint
Thomas Becket's skull
A thorn from Jesus' crown of thorns
18 mortal sins
The things have stolen A knife attack in church
Death from work related silicosis
Weekly corporal punishments
The first supermarket
Working at a strike bound construction site Cleaning toilets in the North Sea
Hitchhiking across the USA
Riding freight trains
My first sexual encounters
Women I have known My work colleague is killed by a drunk
I become a millionaire
Planning for a nuclear war
My protest outside the US embassy
I create a national newspaper
Me and Arthur Scargill
I become a fake priest
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