Month: April 2017

Inukshut – Kevin Acott

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Inukshut is the second chapbook in Kevin Acott’s series as he travels down from Vancouver to San Francisco via Seattle, Washington State and Oregon.

“In March this year, I went to a First Nations restaurant in Vancouver and had one of the best meals of my life. While I was waiting to be served, the manager bought me a book to read. It was a book about the systematic removal, abuse and stripping of identity of hundreds of thousands of First Nations, Metis and Inuit children in Canada. Earlier that day, I’d been reading on the Guardian website about the forced deportation of children from the UK to Australia and the discovery of the remains of hundreds of  babies in a mass grave in Tuam in Galway.  I found myself momentarily resenting the bloke in the restaurant for showing me the book: all I wanted was an ‘exotic’ meal…”
Kevin Acott

Kevin Acott is a London-based model, cult singer, poet and astronaut. He’s currently having a few months off to wander about a bit, take photos, hang around, watch, be watched, talk, listen, write down everything everyone says to him, worry about injuries to Spurs players and eat cheese.

This book is dedicated to Misha, to the Salmon ‘n’ Bannock in Vancouver and to the survivors, families, journalists and supporters who are keeping the fight going.

Inukshut
Kevin Acott
Published April 2017
ISBN  978-1-910578-49-0
A6 Size,
16 printed pages,
Colour
Acott Travel Chapbook 2
SLB058
Print run of 100
Price – £5
Inukshut (£5 + £1.20 P&P to UK and Worldwide Addresses)

Lost in the Jungle – Paul Belloni Du Chaillu

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Title: Lost in the Jungle: Narrated for young people
Author:  Paul Belloni Du Chaillu
Publisher: Sampson Low and Marston
Year: 1870

Paul Belloni Du Chaillu (1835 – 1903) was a French-American traveller, zoologist, and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern European outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. In his youth, he accompanied his father to the west coast of Africa where, at a station on the Gabon, he was educated by missionaries and acquired an interest in and knowledge of the country, its natural history, its natives, and their languages before emigrating to the U.S. in 1852.

He was sent in 1855 by the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia on an African expedition. Until 1859, he explored the regions of West Africa in the neighbourhood of the equator, gaining considerable knowledge of the delta of the Ogooué River and the estuary of the Gabon. During his travels from 1856 to 1859, he observed numerous gorillas and brought back dead specimens and presented himself as the first white European person to have seen them.

A subsequent expedition, from 1863 to 1865, enabled him to confirm the accounts given by the ancients of a pygmy people inhabiting the African forests. Du Chaillu sold his hunted gorillas to the Natural History Museum in London and his “cannibal skulls” to other European collections; a cased group can be seen in the Ipswich Museum in Suffolk, England.

Paul Du Chaillu also collected and identified a number of new species to science during his travels. He was the first person to scientifically describe the giant otter shrew (Potamogale velox).

He was a member along with a variety of mostly literary figures in author J. M. Barrie’s amateur cricket team, the “Allahakbarries”. He died following a stroke of paralysis at St. Petersburg, while on a scholarly visit to Russia. He is interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

This book is twinned with Breathe Through This If You Can: The truths of Virginia Dare, lost colonist by Kevin Acott (pub.2017) read more about it here.

 

Rescue Work by Women among Women – Mary Hannah Steer

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Miss Mary H. Steer

Title: Rescue Work by Women among Women
in Women’s Mission by A. Burdett-Coutts
Author: Miss Mary Hannah Steer
Publisher: Sampson Low, Marston & Co
Year: 1893

Mary Hannah Steer was born in 1846 at Torpoint, Cornwall. She was the eldest child of five children born to Joseph and Hannah Steer. Her father was a Congregational Minister who had a number of different ministries, including that of the Congregational church in Tottenham.  Mary became a committed Christian at a very young age and helped her father in his church work. She never married and remained a deeply religious woman.

Miss Mary H. Steer  wrote her paper on Rescue Work by Women among Women in a collection edited by Baroness Burdett-Coutts. She was always clear that her work was ‘Christian but undenominational’.

“without this merging of our lives into theirs, and a serious and practical study of the world in which these poor degraded ones live, we shall never make the headway we desire in saving that are called the ‘lapsed classes’ … casual visiting among the poor is so often of such little avail in spite of well-meaning efforts.”

Steer made contact with women through ‘the doubles’ (lodging-houses providing double rooms with no questions asked). She would ask them round for tea, and with a mix of patience, advice and prayer she would gently push forward with her pioneering work. She acquired a house in Prince’s Square that accommodated six women, and in 1884 three houses in Betts Street (Stepney/Wapping) which was a street of the worst possible repute. In 1888 a new refuge and night shelter was opened in Betts Street by Adeline, Marchioness of Tavistock (later the Duchess of Bedford), who was a keen supporter of Steer’s work. The night shelter in Stepney catered for destitute women, and was able to accommodate 18 women. The refuge was very close to the sites of the Jack the Ripper murderers and at that time, panic and hysteria were rife in Stepney. The team also conducted ‘rescue work among fallen women’, and preventive work with girls. They established a mother and baby home (for seven mothers) in Walthamstow  and in due course  five children’s homes, in outer London.

Mary Steer was a friend of Annie McPhearson and Dr Barnardo. Like them she enthusiastically supported and promoted schemes to send destitute and vulnerable children to Canada where, she believed, they would be able to make a better useful Christian life than would be the case if they stayed in England.

This is twinned with Absolute Truths by Feven Em, Sogol Sur, Rosie Rosenberg (pub.2017). Read more about it here.