Across the Broken Years: Hardship, Brutality and Resilience 300 years. One Family.

By Kit Sadgrove

A Legacy of Survival
Beaten each week at a Catholic boarding school, Kit Sadgrove grew up in a world ruled by fear and silence. But this remarkable memoir goes far beyond the school gates. Woven through his own harrowing yet hopeful story is the tale of his ancestors-lives marked by hardship, resilience, and astonishing adventure.

Step into the shadows of a Georgian workhouse, where Sadgrove's great-great-grandmother clung to life while burying two children there. Sail into battle during the Napoleonic Wars as a 14-year-old recruit. Stand on the boggy soil where his ancestors eked out a living - and the aristocratic ballrooms of Dublin where they finally danced. Follow his mother, as she flees the advancing Nazis, and Victor, his father, as he takes the surrender of the German forces in WWII.

From bomb-making and scrubbing toilets on North Sea rigs to riding freight trains across America, Sadgrove's life is anything but ordinary. Spanning 300 years, this gripping memoir is part family saga, part personal reckoning-and every word of it a true story.

True stories:
Attacked by a highwayman
Two public hangings
Condemned to a hulk prison ship
Fighting the nascent US navy
Attacking Napoleon's army

Living in the slums of London
A bigamous marriage
My family's 2.1m ($2.8m) forgeries
We are bankrupt
The biggest fraud ever

Our aircraft manufacturing business in 1916
Surviving the Irish Famine in 1845
The Irish insurrection 1916
Going to war in Mesopotamia
Getting the first ever self-winding wrist watch

Being Master and Matron of a workhouse
Sending orphan children out to work in the streets
Life as a gunner in WW1
Finding love in Rome
Living in a house without electricity

Sent to boarding school at age 5
Surviving on sugar sandwiches
Beaten for not being good at maths
Encounters with 11 paedophiles
Confessing to masturbation

The right eyeball of a martyred saint
Thomas Becket's skull
A thorn from Jesus' crown of thorns
18 mortal sins
The things have stolen

A knife attack in church
Death from work related silicosis
Weekly corporal punishments
The first supermarket
Working at a strike bound construction site

Cleaning toilets in the North Sea
Hitchhiking across the USA
Riding freight trains
My first sexual encounters
Women I have known

My work colleague is killed by a drunk
I become a millionaire
Planning for a nuclear war
My protest outside the US embassy
I create a national newspaper
Me and Arthur Scargill
I become a fake priest

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0G4RX3YJD
• ISBN13: 9798230488378
• Release Date: November 2025
• Publisher: Blackford Books
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"