Bill Jackson – författare

Educated at Campbell College, Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin, Bill Jackson retired in 1999 from a career with Oxfam, the Irish public service and the United Nations.

That emigration tore Irish families apart is a given, but rarely is the separation chronicled across three generations.

These hitherto unpublished letters describe the life of an Ulster Quaker shop-keeping family whose daughter married and emigrated in 1818. They bring out the fears of parents who will never see their child again and the preoccupations of sisters and brothers who remained behind, caring for the parents and themselves hoping just as much for material success, romance and marriage, as well as for spiritual fulfilment.

They reveal along the way the situation of Irish Friends in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the difficulties of making one’s way, whether in unsettled Tyrone or settler upstate New York.

Among other things, just about everyone who was anyone in Dungannon and its hinterland is mentioned – for good or ill. Armagh, Dublin and Lisburn also feature, as do New York, Buffalo and Collins. There is everything here, from jilting to murders, bankruptcies to fashions, potato prices to politics. The events of the times stud the background. In Ireland, visits by Dungannon’s absentee landlords, the proscription of unionist and nationalist parades, O’Connell’s trial for sedition, the possibility ‘of propelling vessels by steam’, Queen Victoria’s opening of the Queen’s College, Belfast. In America, an encounter with Napoleon’s brother, the opening of the Erie Canal, the ball given in New York for Charles Dickens, the abolitionist cause, various presidential elections, P. T. Barnum’s hoax exhibition of the ‘Feejee Mermaid’

These couple of hundred simple family letters throw a candid but sympathetic light on life as it was lived in Ulster and on the Lake Erie shore nearly two centuries ago.

Some of the most creative of human expression has originated in the collision of cultures. So it is with this extraordinary archive. The Corporal and the Celestials publishes for the first time a truly absorbing collection of photographs of China in the early years of the twentieth century, taken by a young corporal of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, James Hutchinson, when stationed there from 1909. His battalion was guarding the British Legation in Peking and Concession in Tientsin in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which had seen the massacre of civilian and military personnel of the foreign powers and of Christian Chinese.

Despite the alien and volatile setting, Hutchinson, born in Co. Laois, was fascinated by the ancient civilisation of ‘the Celestials’ and its dawning modernisation. He not only photographed it but, incredibly, developed his prints and lantern slides without benefit of darkroom: 140 of the best are here reproduced, including 18 of those he hand-coloured. It is by any standards a remarkable portrayal of a civilisation to which few westerners had had access.

Wounded later at Gallipoli, Hutchinson re-settled with his family in Northern Ireland in the 1920s, where he gave talks on his experiences. These commentaries, together with his photographs of the great monuments and the people of China and of his comrades-in-arms, make for a very personal, uniquely Irish and visually stunning record of a transient moment when the paths of two great empires, the British and the Chinese, collided.

Rediscover the sense of wonder and adventure as you ride across the United States along with Bryan, Stig, Bill, Hal, and Vaughn. Rediscover the hospitality of strangers. Remember the joy of overcoming your own self-doubts and proving your mettle to those who say you don''t have what it takes. Revisit the natural beauty of America from the seat of a bicycle and rekindle your sense of wonder.

In 1972, five college graduates set out on a remarkable transcontinental bicycle journey from North Carolina to Oregon. This true story of determination, camaraderie, and finding strength and kindness of strangers along the way invites the reader to recall or imagine the the beauty of America and of finding yourself on the journey.

Presented in a daily-journal style, The Road Taken brings the gritty reality of the hard work of the journey into focus while remembering that any quest requires attention to the goal. Read along as the cyclists get separated along the way, inviting you to join not one, but two incredible stories of biking across America.