Welcome to Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires

Welcome to my blog - Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires – the ramblings of a repressed writer. Now you may be wondering why I chose this slightly unusual title. Well it all started back in 2006 when I undertook to investigate what happened to my elusive great-grandfather Benjamin Dalton with a view to writing up his story in a two or three page essay. As it turns out Benjamin was quite a character. He even created a new branch of the family by using the D’Alton surname when he married my great-grandmother Caroline Dickson in 1902. As I researched further I discovered the interesting exploits of other ancestors. What started out as a seemingly simple exercise soon turned into a mammoth project chronicling the wider family history. Nearly two hundred pages later the resultant book - Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires - is still a work in progress. Along the way I have discovered long lost relatives around the world and had the privilege of working with some interesting researchers.

As a child I enjoyed writing both fiction and non-fiction. In high school I wrote for the school paper and had aspirations of becoming a journalist. But life sometimes has other ideas and sends you in a different direction. My experiences researching Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires is a bit like a metaphor for life. Just when you think you have made it life hits you with something else and sends you down a different road. This happened to me when my wife died suddenly and unexpectedly in January 2019 and I was left as an unemployed single parent. So many things happened in that short space of time and I fully experienced the Miners, Mercenaries and Millionaires phenomenon.

It was my son who reminded me of the joy and artistic expression of writing. After his mother’s death he created a blog (https://darthfandom.blogspot.com/) under the name of Darth Fandom and has since expanded his writing ideas and concepts even further. Towards the middle of 2019 I was asked to write a book for the De Hoop Collection (https://www.dehoopcollection.com/). We chose to go for a photo book style which was something new for me. That book, Melkkamer – A Pictorial History, will be printed shortly and made available at the various accommodation sites of the De Hoop Nature Reserve, Cape, South Africa. I would love to pick up a few similar projects and hope that I don’t have to wait as long as John Galsworthy who wrote of his early years as a writer – ‘For...eleven years, I made not one penny out of what I, but practically no others, counted as my profession’.