What Is In This Small Old Book of Lost Royal Secrets?

I found this old limited edition small book of lost Royal secrets in my local country library.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

There it was in front of me among all the other quite ordinary library books.

But it was smaller that the rest.

This old book must have been sitting there for 40 years.

Unloved and unwanted.

The title seemed uninviting.

Who would ever have even picked it up, I thought.

‘The Chaplain: Being Some Further Account of the Days of Bobby Knopwood.’

Who was Bobby Knopwood?

I knew.

But who else would know?

Would you?

Probably not.

He was the Reverend Robert Knopwood, the first chaplain of Tasmania.

I knew from the research I’d been doing for my book and so, for me, it was a rare find.

And that’s how it turned out to be.

Here was the perfect story to introduce my historical romantic paranormal true mystery I had started.

What a find.

I’ll use an extract for my Introduction, I thought.

It’ll set the scene for the bigger picture I had to tell.

Just what I’d been looking for.

Now my book is done and you can buy it here.

In just a few paragraphs the author, Mabel Hookey, related her story of a local Doctor and his wife who were sent from England to the antipodes, Van Diemens Land (Tasmania), on condition that they never returned to England and they never divulged their secret that kept them from returning.

They were believed to receive a mysterious secret regular pension provided they stayed in the new homeland in the early days of the new penal colony.

Why?

There were rumours that he was physician to the King and she was Lady in Waiting to the Queen.

What was their secret?

Nobody ever knew.

Even the author didn’t know.

I know.

The little limited edition book has since disappeared from the library, from the shelves, the catalogue, every record.

Read my book and learn their secret here.

Neil.

PS. Visit my book gallery here.

The Man Who Didn’t Know He Was Prince.

Two hundred years ago the Prince of Wales was in a precarious position. Even his life was in danger. There were reasons. This is my revelation of a legitimate son born from a secret marriage to a Catholic widow. I think they were soul mates but England thought they were trouble.

We have no portraits of him as other famous and even not-so-famous explorers from history do. Has he been a forgotten man, a hero of his time?

Hardly anything is known of him except for his role as Acting Commander of the brig ‘Lady Nelson’.

Could he have been the hitherto unknown father of a legitimate son of the British King George IV from a time when, as the Prince of Wales, he left one mistress after another and then secretly married the Catholic widow and socialite Maria Fitzherbert?

Would Victoria have become Queen had they known about him?

We may never know but, based on the evidence, we can speculate.

In my book ‘Man Steps Off Planet’ I have speculated and reached a shocking conclusion.

Read the evidence I’ve uncovered after extensive research and decide for yourself.

Much of the research has been driven by paranormal events all started by a ghost.

In the end it’s all true (not a novel or a work of fiction).

So who was this unsung hero from over 200 years ago?

He was very active in the story of early British settlement of Australia and New Zealand with a population of mainly convicts.

He understood the native Maroi of New Zealand and fostered harmonious relations between Chief Ti-Pahi and Governor King.

He was in the thick of Australia’s only military coup and was chosen to escort Governor William Bligh back to England to be court marshaled.

There are also heartwarming true stories.

Like when one of his crew fell in love with the Chief’s daughter and stayed behind to marry her.

Or the unbelievable tale of William Buckley, a convict who escaped from a failed settlement near Melbourne 30 years before the city was even founded as “the place for a village”.

He lived with the local aborigines as their leader and was met by the party that sailed from Tasmania to found Melbourne in 1830.

On his many voyages he became friendly with the Reverend Robert Knopwood, the first chaplain of Tasmania, and was heavily involved in the dramatic politics of this early penal colony.

This is only the tip of the iceberg.

You can read how the mystery unfolded for me and my travels around the world chasing clues and searching for evidence to support the little known events surrounding this intriguing historical saga.

Did you enjoy reading this post? Scroll down to follow my blog for future email posts.

Best wishes,

Neil Smith

To read in your browser click here.

To order your copy of the book from the publisher at 10% off click here.

Illustration: ‘Frog Prince’ by YolandaBlazquez on Deviantart.

The Lost Prince of Oz.

Who was this mysterious man without a past, a British seaman who sailed to New South Wales, as Australia was called then, with the notorious William Bligh of ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ fame?

We have no portraits of him as other famous and even not-so-famous explorers from history do.

Has he been a forgotten man, a hero of his time?

Hardly anything is known of him except for his role as Acting Commander of the brig ‘Lady Nelson’.

Could he have been the hitherto unknown father of a legitimate son of the British King George IV from a time when, as the Prince of Wales, he left one mistress after another and then secretly married the Catholic widow and socialite Maria Fitzherbert?

Would Victoria have become Queen had they known about him?

We may never know but, based on the evidence, we can speculate.

In my book ‘Back to the Wall’ I have speculated and reached a shocking conclusion.

Read the evidence I’ve uncovered after extensive research and decide for yourself.

Much of the research has been driven by paranormal events all started by a ghost.

In the end it’s all true (not a novel or a work of fiction).

So who was this unsung hero from over 200 years ago?

He was very active in the story of early British settlement of Australia and New Zealand with a population of mainly convicts.

He understood the native Maroi of New Zealand and fostered harmonious relations between Chief Ti-Pahi and Governor King.

He was in the thick of Australia’s only military coup and was chosen to escort Governor William Bligh back to England to be court marshaled.

There are also heartwarming true stories.

Like when one of his crew fell in love with the Chief’s daughter and stayed behind to marry her.

Or the unbelievable tale of William Buckley, a convict who escaped from a failed settlement near Melbourne 30 years before the city was even founded as “the place for a village”.

He lived with the local aborigines as their leader and was met by the party that sailed from Tasmania to found Melbourne in 1830.

On his many voyages he became friendly with the Reverend Robert Knopwood, the first chaplain of Tasmania, and was heavily involved in the dramatic politics of this early penal colony.

This is only the tip of the iceberg.

You can read how the mystery unfolded for me and my travels around the world chasing clues and searching for evidence to support the little known events surrounding this intriguing historical saga.

Did you enjoy reading this post? Scroll down to follow my secret blog for future email posts.

Best wishes,

Neil
My Author Website

To read in your browser click here.

To order your copy of the book from the publisher at 10% off click here.

 

 

How A Simple Ancestry Search Ended Up In A British Royal Bedroom 200 Years Ago

How did an innocent genealogical project to trace a family tree end up in the bedrooms of the Oxford University some 200 years ago and, shockingly, in the bedrooms of George, Prince of Wales?

Along the way three secret messages emerged, each with three specific clues to a mystery, plus a ghost also with her own secret clue.

At one point the two merged, the genealogical facts and the orally transmitted clues, into previously unknown territory.

The revelations, if true, were astounding.

If I were to draw any conclusion from all of the circumstantial evidence in my book it would be this.

The Acting Commander of the Tall Ship ‘Lady Nelson’, Lieutenant James Simmons, which sailed under his command from 1803, was the legitimate son of George, Prince of Wales.

Legitimate son?

The Prince spent several summers at his Brighton Pavilion (illustrated above) with his soul mate, Mrs Maria Fitzherbert.

Many residents were sure that she was pregnant each year.

And this was following a secret marriage between the couple, which was flatly denied in Parliament by the Prince’s mate and leader of the Whigs, Charles James Fox.

But there are witnesses who swore that the marriage did take place and, furthermore, the Pope ruled it to be a valid marriage.

So what of any children who may have been quietly dispatched on one of the early convict ships that conveniently sailed to the new colony on the other side of the world, Australia, at the time.

And what of other children who probably ended up in organisations for orphaned children or as trainee boys on sailing ships, as I suggest Lieutenant James Simmons may have, to later be given the command of the ‘Lady Nelson’.

Then he and his ship, as is on the record, were responsible for the founding of Hobart and Launceston in Tasmania and for rescuing a failed convict settlement inside the Heads 30 years before the town of Melbourne was settled.

One of the convicts, William Buckley, escaped and lived with the aborigines for the next 30 years and became a local folk hero. It’s an amazing story.

Lieutenant Simmons and the ‘Lady Nelson’ did much to foster early harmonious relations between the Governor of New South Wales (Australia) and the New Zealand Maori.

I invite you to read the amazing untold story of an unsung hero from 200 years ago, all but forgotten in the history books, who deserves a more prominent place in history.

And much more.

“You have discerned an amazing story,” says Writer’s Digest. “It’s got everything it needs to be a blockbuster.”

It’s a true story full of twists and turns.

Grab your copy and read it for yourself here.

Best Wishes.

Neil.

I’ve Done Some Crazy Things In My Life.

I’ve swum at the nude beach on Fire Island off Long Island, New York, with a cute school teacher from New Jersey.

I’ve been to the Statue of Liberty.

I’ve known the delight of floating down the Grand Canal in Venice in a water taxi with an Italian nurse with the voice of Sophia Loren.

I helped to launch Animal Liberation here in Australia.

I was the first member of the Permaculture Association started in the 1970s by two academics from a Tasmanian (Australia) university.

It’s become a world phenomenon in the race to save the planet helping individuals and communities introduce a sustainable agriculture into their lives.

I was kicked off a commune a group of us started on 40 acres of land north of Melbourne in the 1970s for opposing questionable practices that would turn it into a religious sect.

I’ve sat with channels who’ve had books published of their words (for example, ‘Earth to Tao’ and ‘Tao to Earth’).

An article I wrote for a local newspaper about the Swiss-Italian gold miners who came to the Central Highlands goldfields in the 1850s was the inspiration for the annual ‘Hepburn Springs Swiss-Italian Festa’.

For a while I ran ‘The Springs Whole Health Group’ with monthly speakers on subjects ranging from hypnotherapy and reflexology to water divining and ley lines relating to health.

I’ve lived in a caravan parked by the roadside in a small country town in the Aussie bush where I became lovingly known as King of the Hippies.

On the side of a hill near a lake in the north of Italy I enjoyed an outdoor family feast of Italian food and wine served beneath a canopy of vines in a magical setting resembling a movie set.

I’ve run my own one-man freelance advertising copywriting business for over 10 years in Melbourne.

My first big ad presentation was at a week long client conference on the steamy tropical South Pacific island of Fiji.

How did I survive being left homeless, penniless, jobless and friendless when my business and I were declared bankrupt and I lost everything?

Before all of that I worked at the Melbourne office of the second largest ad agency in the world now known as McCann’s.

A campaign I created, wrote and produce for meat pies and donuts won an award at the annual National Television Society Awards in 1972.

I had a fairytale reunion with my 21 year-old daughter living on the famous Gold Coast of Australia.

I’ve been twice married, have 2 grown daughters and 3 adorable granddaughters.

I live now in a beautiful seaside resort town across the bay from the city of Melbourne where the Annual Mussel Festival and Annual National Celtic Festivals are held.

I’ve authored 4 books (not novels).

“Either write something worth reading,” wrote famous American author Ernest Hemingway, “or do something worth writing.”

I reckon that’s what I’ve done in my crazy life.

To receive future blog posts click the Follow button below.

Best wishes.

Neil

I know Dr Desailly’s Royal secret

Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) 1855

“At Rokeby, where the road branches off from Skillion Hill, through Glebe Farm on its way to Cambridge,” wrote Mabel Hookey in a small limited edition book published over 40 years ago, “there is an old cottage, once the home of Dr and Mrs Desailly. It was built in 1826, by William Hance and was one of the early landmarks of the locality.

“There was a certain cachet about the Desaillys, and a hint of strangeness as of exotic birds blown from their course by adverse winds. It was whispered that Dr Desailly’s English practice had been at the court of George IV, and that his beautiful wife had been a Lady in Waiting to Queen Caroline.

“What were they doing in this antipodean outpost?

“They held no official position, nor were they of the free settlers who were beginning to trickle into the colony. They did not swell the ranks of those unfortunates [convicts] who had left their country for their country’s good, nor were they political exiles.

“A vessel under special charter brought them to Van Diemen’s Land [Tasmania], and they always had plenty of money, derived from a mysterious pension, paid regularly and with great secrecy.

“Uneventful years went by. The doctor settled into his practice at Clarence Plains at Kangaroo Point.

“More years passed, but the secret that barred the Desailly’s return to England was as closely kept as ever.

“Apparently the young people had no inkling of what it was. Their descendants knew nothing of it. No doubt the district gossiped but, there was so little to go [on] that conjecture was baffled.

“Could it possibly have had anything to do with the divorce proceedings between George IV and Queen Caroline? This supposition was as good as another.

“In 1861 Mrs Desailly died, aged 77, and was buried in Rokeby churchyard.

“The Doctor’s last years were passed at Bellerive in the two-gabled house next to the old church.

“I have talked with elderly people,” wrote Hookey, “who could remember the frail old man in his hooded carriage, drawn by a black, white-faced horse, driven by his coachman, Paddy Swan.

“His secret died with him . . .”

Or so it was thought – until now.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

Right there in my small local country library I found a numbered limited edition copy – number 365 of only 750 copies printed – of a book published in 1970 (originally published in 1943) titled ‘The Chaplain: Being Some Further Account of the Days of Bobby Knopwood’.

The Reverend Robert Knopwood was the first chaplain of Tasmania. As it happens he plays a significant role in my story later in the book.

Quite unexpectedly Mabel Hookey provided me with the perfect opening to my story, setting the scene for the mystery that had unfolded for me before leaving Australia for the New York under my own strange circumstances.

Curiously, when I went back to borrow the book again to check on the material I am quoting here I discovered to my surprise that it was no longer in the library catalogue or on the shelves, having sat there for possibly the last forty years. A search on Amazon shows the book as “out of print”.

Then when I wrote to the publisher in Tasmania requesting permission to quote from the book I received no reply. It was as if the book had never existed.

Never mind, because I know Dr Desailly’s Royal secret.

To read more go to my website HERE.

For amazing reviews of the book CLICK HERE

To order direct from the publisher with a 10% discount CLICK HERE.

Best wishes.

Neil

Reference: ‘The Chaplain: Being Some Further Account of the Days of Bobby Knopwood’ by Mabel Hookey, Fuller’s Bookshop, Tasmania, 1970.

Illustration: The site of Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) 1855

Wild White Man

‘Frederick William Woodhouse ‘The First Settlers Discover Buckley’

He’s been called the Wild White Man.

Here’s why.

A number of convicts had escaped from the Sullivan’s Bay settlement in the south, just 15 years after the first convicts arrived to establish the first settlement at Sydney Harbour in 1788.

All but one had either been killed, disappeared or returned in desperation to give themselves up.

The one surviving escapee, William Buckley, has been written into the local folklore and the Australian vernacular. To have ‘Buckley’s hope’ – or just ‘Buckley’s’ – has come to mean to have little hope.

This extraordinary story of survival in a natural and hostile environment is told in my book ‘Back to the Wall’.

He was found by a group of aborigines whose leader had only just died and, since Buckley was over six feet tall and the first white man they’d ever seen, they believed him to be the returned spirit of their deceased leader.

The Wathaurong aborigines cared for him and taught him their social order and ways of survival in the bush.

They even gave him a wife.

For 32 years the ‘wild white man’ Buckley lived with these original inhabitants on a peninsula south-west of present-day Melbourne and across the bay from Sullivan’s Cove.

As a young boy I’d come with my family for our annual holidays to this very spot. I recall standing in awe at the entrance to Buckley’s Cave beneath the lighthouse where he is said to have lived.

I would imagine this huge man with a wild beard and long unkempt hair residing inside in the darkness watching me standing there on the sand outside.

He truly captured my imagination as a boy even though, at the time, I knew only vaguely of him as an Aussie version of Robinson Crusoe.

Read more, order your copy here.

Fast forward 32 years to John Batman’s famous landing party sailing from the new settlement in Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), with the intention of claiming the site on which Melbourne now stands.

John Batman was the son of a convict mother and convict father and was married to a convict woman.

He set out from Van Diemen’s Land in 1835 with a party of three European servants and seven aborigines.

They sailed up the river known by the aborigines as Yarra Yarra (meaning ‘flowing water’), declaring this to be “the place for a village”.

A short distance upstream he negotiated the purchase of the land on which Melbourne now stands with the local aboriginal tribe at a spot right behind the playing fields of my old high school.

He purchased a hundred thousand acres of land in exchange for flour, blankets, scissors, tomahawks, looking-glasses, various items of clothing and alcohol.

His party then returned to Van Diemen’s Land.

A few months later an advance party returned to settle permanently on their new land which, unknown to them, was illegal without the approval of the Crown (which they didn’t have).

On landing at Indented Head inside Port Phillip Bay not far from Buckley’s Cave they ran into a wild white man dressed the same as the natives.

It was William Buckley the convict who had escaped 32 years earlier. He had forgotten how to speak English, speaking instead the language of his aboriginal tribe.

He was persuaded to go with the party of settlers and was eventually granted a pardon after agreeing to work between the two races to help relationships between them.

So how does this strange story of the ‘wild white man’ fit in with the mystery in the book?

What other fascinating true stories are told in my book?

Find out HERE.

Neil