I am very honoured to be invited to deliver this annual lecture. And undeserving of that honour. Despite having had the temerity to chronicle the doings of an Irish Quaker family across 350 years, I am not a Friend. Nor was my mother, Margaret Evelyn Hind Bell, although it was her family that I portrayed.

Margaret Evelyn Hind Bell (1911-1964)

Anna Bell nee Mercer with her three sons; grandfather John Bell in the middle

Yet throughout my life it has been a thread - if more background warp than foreground and visible weft. Individual Friends have featured in important ways. When at Campbell College, I was involved in the Belfast Schools World Citizenship Association, run by the indomitable Elizabeth Maxwell. In Trinity I had the pleasure of being welcomed as a student, by your own Professor Joe Haughton, to work with him on the then annual Summer School for students from abroad. Then came the formative time of my career, in Oxfam. I am sure you know that there were Friends among the founders of the original Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1942; but you will not, I imagine, have been aware that in the 1960s, when I spent nine years with the organisation, the Chairman of the Executive Committee, the Honorary Treasurer, the Director, the head of the overseas programme, his Deputy and the Director for Asia in the field, and probably more, were all Friends, some of them former members of the Ambulance Unit.

And when Maggie and I moved on - four children being more than an Oxfam salary would support - I found myself working to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Keele in Staffordshire. Who other - albeit completely coincidentally - than Friend and leading expert on Quaker education, Professor Campbell Stewart? Though I stayed in Keele for only three years, it is a matter of great sadness to me that Campbell died in tragic circumstances before my retirement and subsequent work on Quakerly themes.

From Keele I came back to Dublin, to become for fifteen years Chief Executive of the Agency for Personal Service Overseas (APSO), where for a time Joe Haughton was on the Board and where we sponsored the assignments, among many others, of Christopher Moriarty at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and Ian Broad in China with the United Nations Volunteers programme - where I was later to spend ten years to complete my career, in Geneva and then Bonn.

And now, in my retirement? Well, our eldest son, Nick, is a Friend of his own convincement, as is his close friend Pol O Ceallaigh. Our son-in-law Peter Harrison went to school at Leighton Park. Our sister-in-law Sarah, Tim and son James are here with us tonight. Then I made new friends in writing 'Ringing True', such as Ross and Arthur Chapman, who helped me so much. I discovered Bell family members whom I had never met: Ross's wife Robina nee Bell, and Richard Bell and Alan Bell and their families in Belfast. I have met again dear friends, also related, such as William and Florence Bell and Nigel and Edel; and I have encountered anew some friends from way back in student days, such as Christopher, and Neville Keery.

I have always considered myself lucky, not least in my friends. As you know, Quakers have habitually spelt that word with a small and not capital 'f'. Doubtless, upper case was seen as unquakerly, smacking of superfluity! But whether by nature in some of my genes, or by nurture among these many friends, the values of Quakerism are the closest to those I deem my own. I am deeply in your debt.

The words 'Ringing True' resonated particularly with me for the Bells of Trummery, but they apply equally well to Friends in general. What I want to do tonight is to suggest that just about any one of you here, or several working together, can, just as I did, find wonderful relaxation and intellectual challenge, alloyed with a little permissible pride, in exploring the territory that constitutes today's fastest growing hobby - genealogy and family history.

Never mind that Quakerism is already much-charted territory; and never mind the pretension, as in my case, of publishing a full-scale book. Just dip into the truly incredible resources which as Friends in Ireland you have at your fingertips and you will find fifty times as much material at your disposal as the average Irish family can ever hope to have. For example, a book about my Jackson ancestors would be next to impossible: the records are very few of a family who in the mid-1800s were humble farmers around St. Johnstown, Co. Donegal, until one son prospered a little. He lived in Clarlougheask and between about 1880 and 1910 ran the leading building, carpentry and glazing business in Donegal Town. Two of his sons became C of I parsons in the first two decades of the 20th century, one of them my paternal grandfather. And that's about it. By comparison, with the incredibly comprehensive records at Friends' disposal, you can with ease pass on to the next generations simple yet informative documents. Most of what you pass on will be fact, some will have to remain surmise. Much will be text to be culled from documents, but much can be illustrated, too.

Henry and Anna Jane Bell (nee Davis) of Waterford and their family, probably on the occasion of their Golden Wedding on December 31, 1913. That's Robina's and William's father with the spectacles and moustache.

Perhaps on their 50th wedding anniversary, too, in 1916: Abraham Bell (1840-1919) of Port Clinton, Ottawa County, Ohio, his wife Anngennette Maria nee Elwell and the surviving five of their eight children.

Solitude

Deborah is the niece of the aforementioned Roger Haydock Bell and had already transcribed the tree to 'Family Tree Maker' software on her PC. With her blessing I copied it and began to research some of the individual names and add the results under the software's 'Notes' facility. First of course came Archibald Bell (1617/20-1707), the paterfamilias, who after the birth of a daughter Jane to his wife Ann Purvus, had moved from Arkenholme in the parish of Staplegordon, Dumfriesshire across the border with England, to Branton in Gillsland (today's Brampton) in 1651, when he was about 44.

17th c. map of Eskdale & Liddesdale, by Robert Gordon: National Library of Scotland

Extract from the record of the births of the children of Archibald Bell & Ann Purvus

Extract from the record of the births of the children of Archibald Bell & Ann Purvus: 	
	'at Dirlet (now Markate hill)'			(Mary, June 1655)
	'at Ballyards in ye parish of Ardmagh'		(Richard, November 1657) 
	'at Lishley in ye parish of Ardmagh'		(Alexander, November 1659)
	'at Drumtullan in the parish of Benburb' 	(George, April 1662) 
	'at Ballytullan in the parish of Benburb' 	(Elizabeth, April 1665)
	'at Tannahmoore in the parish of Shankell'	(Sarah, March 1669)

Map of Trummery and neighbourhood: by the kindness of Bob Sinton. Note how well placed it was.

Trummery House, which the family had from 1728 until 1902

With their added help I began to research things more seriously, when I could get over from England to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) on Balmoral Avenue, Belfast - just a few hundred yards south of the Friends Burying Ground, as it happens. Thanks to the generosity of Friends, PRONI's Personal Names Index lists most of the names that appear in the Minutes of the Monthly Meetings which constituted the Ulster Quarterly Meeting: the reference T/1062 will point you to hundreds of them. The Marriage Certificates are particularly revealing, since, as remains the practice, all witnesses present appended their names. (Your only problem is to distinguish who can possibly be who, among the three Richard Bells, three John Allens, Samuel Greens, Benjamin Haughtons or whatever, signing simultaneously!) In PRONI these Certificates, Family Records, wills, leases and other documents can be followed up on microfilm. The originals are stored in the Strong Room of the Lisburn Friends Meeting House, under the care of the ever-helpful Muriel Cameron.

Among other things, these old records illustrate just how concerned were the early Friends - largely ostracised from the mainstream of society - to be seen to act in conformity with the law. And to list the many injustices done to them, in the hope - usually the vain hope - of some redress. So we see Archibald or his sons, in common with scores of other Friends, fined, distrained of possessions, even jailed, for refusal to pay tithe or to take the oath as members of a jury: (the latter they saw as unnecessary to secure their honesty). Such discrimination and fines persisted, believe it or not, until disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1871. Nor did Oxford, Cambridge or Trinity admit dissenters (or Catholics) until late in the 19th century.

It came as news to me that, from two of Archibald's sons, Richard and Alexander, onward for some six generations, and again like many other Friends, the Bells had been tanners. Doubtless they raised cattle in Trummery on the meadowy bank of the Lagan, and tanned the hides six miles away in streams on the outskirts of Lurgan, in oak bark bought from the Brownlows.

Tanning, as illustrated in Diderot's famous Encyclopedie

They were of course tradesmen, these Bells, because as dissenters they were also barred from the professions. At 17% on average, Quakers counted for disproportionate numbers among the members of the twenty-five trade guilds headquartered in Dublin in 1749. In tanning they counted for an astonishing 45%. You may have seen that in his BBC television series, Tony Robinson included tanning among the worst jobs in the world! David M. Butler has noted in his book that Friends in Belfast first gathered in the house of Samuel Alexander (a tanner and the husband of Ann Bell of the family), and later 'in the loft of his tan-yard at 155 North Street'. In a 20th century letter John Mitton Douglas wondered had Samuel turned the 'perfume' off on Saturday nights in time for Meeting on First Day!

I had not known about tanning, but had known, although in the most general of terms, that the Bells had been much involved in linen. So I arranged to visit Brenda Collins, Research Officer with the Linen Centre and Museum in Lisburn, who kindly photocopied for me Alan Gailey's seminal article on the 'Ballyhagan Inventories', and other key references. The Inventories and the accompanying Wills comprise full details of the possessions of 27 men of the Ballyhagan Meeting who died between 1716 and 1740.

Ballyhagan Meeting House as it is thought to have looked c. 1675

But that is already to leap forward about a century. Doubtless over the four generations up to 1800 or so, the tanner Bells and their cousins had been typical farmers of the times, producing enough food to feed themselves, selling some from the room they would refer to as the 'shop', while at the same time growing some flax and spinning and weaving it, artisan-style in the house.

Artisan scutching and hackling of flax

R B McDowell, now in his nineties and a legend in his own lifetime to those of us who went to Trinity (almost as much for his after-dinner humour as for the brilliance of his academic output!), has written about that century:

"...Of course during the eighteenth century the linen industry though important was still in a primitive stage. The spinners and weavers were farmers with simple machines working in their own homes and usually having few or no employees except their own families. The drapers who acted as middlemen were also small men, transacting business at a number of clamorous markets held in the streets of towns little larger than villages. Just about the close of the eighteenth century we can detect symptoms of the great movement which was to alter the whole way of life of substantial areas in the province. Here and there a weaver forged ahead, adding looms and building up an establishment. Bleachers, who always required some capital, were beginning to buy up webs on a large scale, bleach them, and market them."

Typical of these new men were some of Archibald Bell's great and great-great grandsons. Fleeting pen-portraits of some of them can be put together from memoirs written privately, or from the 'hatch-match-and dispatch' columns and advertisements in newspapers such as the remarkable Belfast News Letter, founded in 1737 and still going strong. One of them, John Bell (1773-1828), was probably not the first Bell to go into linen, but clearly was the first of them, indeed one of the first in Ireland, to opt for cotton.

Cotton manufacture in the north-east of Ireland survived only for a generation. In 1790, cotton was being worked on 8,000 spindles: eleven years later on 50,000. however, it proved more important for its impact in terms of industrialisation and modernisation than for its volume. Located close to larger towns rather than the deeper countryside, and with the application of steam power, it marked the beginning of the break with cottage-based production. By 1825 the sound of the shuttle could be heard from most houses in Belfast's Sandy Row and adjacent neighbourhoods. John Bell built a cotton spinning mill in Stoneyford near Derriaghy and owned another in the then Margaret Street, Belfast.

Probably the only visible remains of a Bell mill in Belfast: a frontage in Margaret Street (nowadays Kent Street)

The Second or 'New' mill of John & Richard Bell & Co. at Ballyclare Green. Note the reservoir. The Ordnance Survey said that the mill's water 'is managed with much ingenuity and economy'.

The last field of handkerchiefs to be grass-bleached by Kirkpatrick Brothers Ltd at Ballyclare Green, in 1934

The death mask of John Bell (1773-1828)

"a valuable member of the Society of Friends. Nature seemed with liberal hands to have endowed this eminent merchant with many qualities of sterling worth unmixed with any alloy that could contaminate the mind or deteriorate the heart. Integrity, foresight, industry, perseverance, candour, accurate and extensive knowledge, the result of a comprehensive intellect and great experience, were the faithful guides which led him through a long course of well-merited prosperity to wealth, honour, and commercial eminence."

The obituary ended:

"In respect of religion, although firmly attached to the Society of which he was a member and an ornament, he was liberal towards those who entertained different opinions from him. In private life he evinced the most amiable disposition. His conversation was always instructive, and manifested decision and soundness of judgment. In his domestic character he was a most affectionate husband and father, a kind and indulgent master. His funeral which took place on Wednesday, showed how much he was respected, more than sixty coaches, chaises, etc/ etc - with a most respectable company, many of them from distant parts of the country attended upon the occasion and accompanied the remains of this good man to the place of interment at Hillsborough, where he now sleeps in the silent tomb."

Those Belfast and Ballyclare Bells were descended from old Archibald's son George. Also from George, but remaining in Lurgan, were the ancestors of Thomas Bell, known to Quaker genealogists as Thomas Bell of Ballydown, to distinguish him from umpteen other Thomases. The Lurgan firm of Thomas Bell & Co. was named for him, but following his early death was directed by his father Abraham and then his brother Samuel Alexander Bell and, later, Edwin George Bell. As the advertisement shows:

Advertisement for Thomas Bell & Co.

Cousins from my mother's side of the family, descended from Archibald's son Richard, ran one of the linen mills in Whitehouse, just to the north of Belfast.

Belfast Lough seen from Art's Fort with the Grimshaw and Bell mills at Whitehouse

Part of the interest for you in family history, as I found for myself, might be to trace the extent to which your forebears remained faithful to Quakerism. Does the Bells' record bear scrutiny in this respect? First, all the known marriages of Archibald's children appear to have been within the fold. Of his grandchildren, nine certainly married conventionally with Friends, and another three probably remained members. Misdemeanours in relation to marriage were the cause of at least four others being disowned. Married out 'to someone unknown to us' or, more rarely, 'of a different persuasion', or married 'with a preest', were among the grounds. (As most here will know, but perhaps not some of our guests, Friends did and do not feel the need for a 'hireling ministry', as they used to call it, to mediate the relationship between the individual and his or her God).

Among the great-grandchildren, there were six families comprising some twenty-nine children. There is adequate data for about twenty-two of them. Seven certainly married Friends and in all probability another seven did also. But the bachelor Jacob Bell (born 1749) who had inherited Trummery House became a Methodist. And six of his siblings or cousins, possibly seven, married out. The children of one branch kicked over the traces good and proper: of the six known, four in relation to marriage and one because he 'procured a substitute for the army, his father …countenanced him therein'. Friends seek to be pacifist.

In the next generation - great-great grandchildren born for the most part between the 1760s and 1780s - there were some twelve households. For two there are no records of the children at all, and for another two insufficient data. Of the balance of eight, six households show a probably unanimous commitment to the faith of their fathers. In all, of some thirty-two persons on whom there is adequate evidence, three married out and one was disowned for inability to meet his just debts, a ground for disownment which we have not met so far; two simply ceased to be Friends.

Victorian times saw a steadying of the ship. There were fewer disownments for marriages 'out'. Several Bells - even of those eventually very successful in business - experienced disownment for inability to pay their just debts. But the overall image is of a number of 'weighty quakes', such as the wealthy James Greer Bell of Tullylish House, who invested greatly in Ireland's first railways:

James Greer Bell and his second wife, Eliza Greer Bell

Edward Bell of Mullicarton

Elias Hughes Bell

By the 20th century, perhaps only three branches of the family in Ireland retained membership of the Society as the guiding focus of their lives: the Waterford branch, Robina's and William's people; and those of Alan and of Richard Bell in Belfast: all three branches had originated in Lurgan.

How had this family come to some prominence in Ulster's industrial expansion? First, the traditional Quaker values of honesty in dealings of course counted for a lot: people would find they could place trust in Friends and so came back to do further business with them. But it takes more than that. Second, education played an important part. In the hundred years following its founding in 1794, no less than seventy Bells of the family were pupils at Prospect Hill School,

Friends School, Lisburn

Brookfield Agricultural School, now sadly disused

Remember that you don't have to pursue family history in strict chronological sequence: you can afford to nip down the occasional byway! Sometimes you will come across an interesting chunk of information on an individual ancestor which will deflect you for a time. For example, Ross Chapman asked me one day whether I had ever heard of William Bell (1797-1871) who in 1837 had launched, edited, paid for and distributed 'The Irish Friend'. When in my ignorance I said 'no', he passed me a photocopy of an article by a former Editor of 'The Friend', which acknowledged that this effort of William's was the first newspaper for Friends on this side of the Atlantic. At its highest point, it was being read by about half the Quaker households in these islands.

William Bell (1797-1871)

Anti-slavery earthenware, which Tim and I have inherited: doubtless sold to raise funds for the cause

Abraham Bell (1778-1856)

An Abraham Bell & Son draft for £5 sterling, a remittance from America in favour of Denis Delany Senior of Parsonstown, cashed on St Stephen's Day 1850

Despite the apparent 'superfluity' of their material prosperity, these American Bells remained for some generations well within the Quaker fold. Abraham was on the Friends' Indian Affairs Committee, seeking to remedy the injustices done to the Seneca Indians in particular.

Quakers and the Red Indians

Thomas Christy Bell and his wife Eliza Hough Jackson

E-mail is another remarkable tool at your disposal, which has greatly speeded up researching data and reduced the cost of doing so to a minimum. For me it was also the means of solution to a mystery. A message was forwarded to me by Deborah Bell, which she had had from her uncle, Samuel Alexander Bell in Australia. It had come from one Antonio Herrera Vaillant in Caracas, Venezuela, a great-great grandson of Richard Maxwell Bell (c. 1775-1847). The family tree said Richard had married Candelaria Yrady, 'daughter of the Governor of Cuba'. It had been as romantic a puzzle as any in all my researches, for months defeating my attempts to solve it. It turned out that as a young man Richard had captained a ship, plying its trade between 'the Congo' and Cuba. He clearly prospered, married Candelaria, who proved to be the daughter of his business partner, and became one of the richest men in Cuba. His sugar and coffee plantations were based on slave labour and it is difficult to think that his own cargoes as a younger man had not included them.

Rusting equipment from one of the old sugar plantations in Demajagua, Cuba

My biggest regret has been that so relatively little has been recorded about the Bell womenfolk, particularly those of the 17th and 18th centuries. We know nothing but the name of old Archibald's wife, whereas we know he attended Half-Yearly Meeting here in Dublin in 1698, and that Edmondson, the founder of Quakerism in Ireland, stayed with him shortly before Archibald died in 1707. Of course we know of the misdeeds of the men as well as the achievements, and few if any of the Bell women were ever disowned for anything other than marriage 'out' - only one or two whose businesses failed, for inability to meet their just debts. A Deborah Bell of the 19th century was a visiting evangelical minister, in the Quaker sense of the word, across the Irish Sea, as it seems Archibald had been in his time; and Wilhelmina Bell cared for her father William in Richmond, Indiana, after his strokes, and clearly was a fine Friend in her own right.

Wilhelmina Bell and her husband George N. Jones

Sara Bell (1855-1946), who features in The Quakri at Lurgan and Grange as 'fair Sissilia Bella'

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943)

Their seventeenth century had been uprooting, peripatetic, zealous, persecuted.

An English Quaker Yearly Meeting of the 17th century. Courtesy, the Fairclough Collection, University of Leicester

'Winding, Warping and Weaving' in the late 18th century

George Langtry Bell and his wife Clara Jane nee Moore

Bellevue, Lurgan

Believed to be (?) of Anna Hull Bell nee Mercer (1832-1888), wife of John Bell 'Junior' and a great-grandmother of the author (?)

Their twentieth possibly something of a comedown: sacrificial (surprisingly in the First World War), quiet, modest (yet in the work of Henry Bell of Waterford for the poor of that city, quite remarkable).

Leonard Moore Bell and his wife Margaret Mary nee Graham in 1910

'The first modern house in Ulster', at Moyallan; designed by G.P and R.H. Bell

Man in his environment! Professor Marc Bell while visiting the Mentawi people of Siberut off Sumatra in 1993

Who knows for the twenty-first?

Edward Samuel Bell, born 2005

What you haven't got - the single biggest snag for most people in Ireland, from which Friends are not altogether immune - is the fact that we Irish scored a dreadful 'own goal' in Civil War times in destroying the 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 Censuses (and much else) when the Four Courts were shelled. That wouldn't have been quite so disastrous if the British hadn't already pulped the Censuses for 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 - for shelf space. Cultural suicide and genocide combined... Thus, for anything much beyond 1850 we are driven back on parish records - and the Penal Laws didn't exactly encourage the maintenance of those, where 95% of Ireland's population were concerned - Friends' records are almost unique in their ability to overcome these obstacles.

If I were the world's dictator, you would actually be compelled to write a modest autobiography! The Chinese are said to say that when anyone dies a whole library is lost. As I am sure you can, I can think of many people, quite 'ordinary' people on the surface, who have died, and whose story should have been chronicled and whose knowledge and wisdom should have been passed on, but is lost for ever.

So, if nothing else, please leave for your children, your nephews or nieces - and this may be an ideal way for you to start - a simple pen-portrait of a page or couple of pages on each of the relations in the generation or two before you, whom you can recall personally or document. Illustrate them with a few photographs (making sure that the photos are properly labelled). By the way, start doing this now, while some of the previous generation are still around to help you check the facts. The perennial tragedy of family history is that we leave it too late to speak with those who are making the history. This approach need cost you nothing at all. If you find you have enough to make a book, you may like to know that mine has cost me about £2,400 net to publish, in 400 copies. It has given me six years of enjoyment and, as an acquaintance wisely put it, 'You couldn't have been a member of a golf or health club for £400 a year'.

I continue to quarry new bits of information about the Bells: I have unearthed details of three further families on whom there had been the scantest of information in 'Ringing True'. One of them produced the certificate given to Elias Wellington Bell on being apprenticed to the famous shipyard in Belfast - signed personally by Edward James Harland and Gustavus William Wolff in 1869.

Alex Bell had a career in the postal service in Northern Ireland:

Belfast's telegram boys, of whom Alex Bell is third from right in the third row down

The certificate from NASA recording Henry Bell of Seattle's contribution to securing the first high-resolution photographs of the surface of the moon

A Harvey William Bell saddle-tank locomotive

You will find, too, that you need to modify or correct things which you get wrong first time round. I referred in the book to what was termed 'an impropriety' on the part of one of the many John Bells of the family as a peccadillo: he had been rebuked for illuminating his windows. I had not realised that the refusal to do this was customary - Quakers did not celebrate 'times and seasons' such as Christmas, in the sense of church festivals. I had been unaware of the significance of the impropriety. I found this illustrated with a delightful small poem, supposedly addressed to King George III by Quaker abolitionist bookseller and printer James Phillips, ca. 1789: I thought you'd like to hear it:

Thy faithful Friends this brief Address
Do send to thee, O King.
It grieves us to the guts to see
Such folly in the nation
For candles stuck in windows are
To us abomination.

With wishes for a lengthened reign
This address we dare not better.
For tho' thou'st been a rare good King
The next may be a better.

There is another danger, too: of finding that your research into some relative detail begets a quite new and much larger area that you then find you want to tackle. I am engaged now on two further topics, both of which stemmed from 'Ringing True'. When in Ohio, I was shown a bunch of some 150 letters, known as the 'Sinton Letters' or 'O'Brien papers', written by the Quaker Greeves family of Bernagh, Dungannon (who were also at times connected with the Bells by marriage). Dating from between 1818 and the 1840s, the Letters were written to their emigrant daughter Anne in America. She had married William O'Brien of Carlow, not at the time a member, but attending Meeting.

Bernagh in Dungannon: Anne Greeves and William O'Brien were married from the house

I sometimes think that it is well you left this fine, but wretched country where strife and animosity prevail between prodestant & catholick, there was a number of lives lost this last summer near Coal ­Island of both parties, the latter the most, and in several other places as well as there. The orangemen makes a point to parade on the 12th of 7mo, the aniversary of the battle of the Boyne which the other party cant bear and they frequently comes to blows and many lives lost. It is hoped that the parliment in the next sessions will put a stop to the above processions, which will much relieve the country.

I also have in mind to excerpt some of the more interesting pieces about colonialism, slavery, women's ministry and the like, from William Bell's The Irish Friend and perhaps publish them alongside Bernard Canter's essay on the newspaper from the 1960s and a revised account of William's life.

The Irish Friend

As you can see, family history and genealogy start as an interest that becomes a hobby, and then degenerate to the stages of avocation and obsession! Will I complete these new efforts and find publishers for them? Thereby hangs a tale. We were attending a lunch of the Oxford Region of the British Association of Former UN Civil Servants. We were a bit early, so I sat down with a glass of Guinness. After a few moments another, elderly, member, Oliver Knowles, (now 90) sat down beside me and said 'And what are you doing in your retirement, young man?' I said I was working on a book. 'About what?' he said. 'About my mother's Quaker family' I replied, 'but I have no idea whether it will ever see the light of day - I haven't even begun to think about a publisher'. 'That is very interesting', he said: 'I happen to be a Quaker myself. The publisher you need is Sessions of York'. I couldn't eat the lunch quickly enough to get home and check out the Sessions website!

The rest, as they say, is history - well, a tiny, infinitesimal bit of history. Whether it is well-formed I must leave to your judgement, but it is mine own!

The cover of 'Ringing True'