£4.99
The Diary of the Smyth-Wailey’s is the first novel in The Smyth-Wailey Volumes.
Researching a family history can’t erase the fact that what you don’t know and try to set down, you’ll never really know. The facts are like émigré years, seen through the haze of distance, with blurred lines and distorted perspectives like beads of rain through a blanket of mist.
Even without the huge dispersals, the families of Liverpool are drawn to some degree part of the city’s passed messages and quickened diurnal hours.
“We couldn’t be more pleased that Tony chose Writing on the Wall to publish The Diary of the Smyth-Wailey’s. Tony’s work always concerns the sea, the dreams and change it engenders, now he explores how his own family tree took to the water, its branches spreading across the ocean to the New World, and in doing so recovers them, even when they have been lost without a trace, and discovers himself, and once again, Liverpool – his city that is always ‘another place.'”
– Mike Morris and Madeline Heneghan, Co-Directors at Writing on the Wall
Tony Wailey was born in Liverpool in 1947. He is the author of eight books, including pocket sized novels and three collections of poetry. Originally a seaman, his work concerns the cosmopolitan nature of the maritime city. He wrote Edgy Cities with Steve Higginson, which had at its central theme the historic flows of people and ideas to and from Liverpool. His latest work concerns the context of place in the narratives of family history. In this second volume of the Diary of the Smyth Waileys, he still finds it amazing that his great uncle, John Brown Wailey, sailed on deck as a fully-fledged, able-bodied seaman aboard a 400-ton sailing ship from San Francisco to Sydney in 1885. He was just nineteen. A hundred years later, Wailey was awarded a Doctorate for his work on Liverpool’s Sea Going Communities and its Seaman’s Union. He realises now how little he knew.
