This photo, held in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, shows the wreck of the Weathersfield, the ship sailed by PGH’s grandfather, John Hicks. The foundering of the ship in 1888 was the trigger for John Hicks, his wife and eight children to emigrate from the Scillies, off Cornwall, to Melbourne, where another branch of the Hicks family had already settled. The  Scilly Islands are known as a holiday retreat for the royal family and prime ministers, now easily accessible by air from Penzance. But in the nineteenth century the inhabitants of the most populous island, St Mary’s, were isolated from the mainland by a forbidding 36-mile stretch of water. Those on the smaller island of St Agnes to the south were even more isolated, surrounded by treacherous ledges and steeples although in the path of the gulf stream that brought them a climate mild enough to protect them from frost and snow in the winter. Hicks families had probably lived on the islands since they were purchased by the Godolphin family in the sixteenth century, most of them on St Agnes.