The Parade’s Gone by: Everyday Life in Britain in the twentieth century

＂A history of Britain like you’ve never read before,＂ - BookNews

＂If you like the idea of being a time-traveller you will love The Parade’s Gone By: for it is an eyewitness, day-by-day account of the lives our Great-Grandparents led,＂ - History Now

In 1900 a travelling salesman in London called Thomas Sibley began writing a diary. His journals spanned his entire life from Queen Victoria to the Moon Landings, forming a unique record of the most turbulent century the world has ever seen.

For many years these diaries were lost.

Until now.

Discovered by the author Julian Dutton’s father in a musty old chest at an auction, the resulting book - The Parade’s Gone By - is the story of everyday life in Britain in the twentieth century inspired by Sibley’s journals: a remarkable chronicle of the age seen through the eyes of three generations of an ordinary family.

The story of the twentieth century has been told many times and we are familiar with its broad strokes - Edwardian England, the Great War, the General Strike, the Blitz, Rationing, Rock & Roll, the Sixties. This book tells this wider story but shifts the reader’s gaze from the political, economic and historical to the local, colourful detail of ordinary family life - its struggles, hardships, triumphs and tragedies.

Sibley may have had a walk-on part in our national life but his story has epic moments. In 1915 he saw Zeppelins turn the sky electric white above London. He pressed his young lover Annie against a wall in the East End of London, and kissed her deeply. In 1920 he swam in the sea and watched the minstrels on Brighton Pier. In 1941 while his wife lay dead in his front parlour a German bomb tore his house apart. On his deathbed in the 1970s he took up his diary from 1900 and read of his younger days, when he rode a carriage through the streets of London with the fire of youth in his eyes.

＂... the truth of anything at all doesn’t lie in someone’s account of it.

It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper,

the sale of a house, the price of a ring,＂ - Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

History comes most alive not in the anecdotes of the great, the good or the famous but in the beautiful triviality of the ordinary - how our Great Grandparents spoke, thought, loved, how they spent their days at work, their evenings at play. And perhaps the perfect expression of social history comes to us from the diary. For it is only when we move our gaze from the broader pageant to the intimacy of the individual do we hear and feel the true beating heart of our national story.

＂A breathtaking epic of ordinary life,＂ - Robert Ogden, Bishopsgate Institute.