My Father and the Silver King

Ambrose Erswell ran away from home in London’s East End when he was seven years old, lived on the streets and joined a gang of child pickpockets. At nine he signed on as a “ship’s boy” on a clipper ship sailing to South America — an experience so grim he vowed never to go to sea again. In a bicycle shop, where he found a job, he saw his first automobile. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for cars. By twelve years of age he’d become a chauffeur. When he saw The Silver King, a melodrama in which the wronged hero is redeemed after making a fortune in a silvermine in South America, he decided that his life must follow a similar trajectory. Like the hero of the play, this cockney lad, who would eventually (in his mid-fifties) become the author’s father, left England and made a fortune in an unlikely business in Australia. The author traces her attraction to the music of the Piraeus underworld and the men who sang the rembetika to her father and to the Music Hall songs she was raised on.