Battersea Girl: Tracing a London Life

Ellen Tregent was born in 1888 and died in 1988—her lifetime encompassing an unprecedented century of social change and world upheaval. In Battersea Girl, Martin Knight charts his grandmother's long and eventful life and the lives of her siblings. They encounter abject poverty, disease, suicide, war, and inevitably death, but as they do, they maintain their spirit as stoical people who were determined to make the most of their lives.