Helter Skelter

Helter Skelter is the story of one man's improbable journey down the long, twisting slide of English history - from Alfred the Great at the very top to a housing estate in Leicester. With curiosity as his compass and humour as his safety rail, Terry Newman sets out to discover where he really comes from, and how a thousand years of chaos, conquest, scandal, migration, and sheer coincidence somehow produced him.

Armed with free genealogy tools, stubborn determination, and a famously tight approach to research budgets, Terry follows the thread of his ancestry through Roman Britain, Anglo‑Saxon kingdoms, Viking incursions, Norman rule, medieval turbulence, Tudor ambition, and every dynasty that thundered overhead while his ancestors quietly got on with the business of living. Some were kings, nobles, warriors, or merchants; most were worker‑bees who carried the weight of history without ever appearing in it.

Part fact, part inference, part amused guesswork, Helter Skelter blends historical context with personal discovery, filling the gaps where records fade and letting the ancestors speak where evidence is rich. It's a winding, lurching, occasionally chaotic ride - a descent full of bumps, twists, unexpected drops, and the occasional scream - that begins with a legendary king and ends with a lad from Nether Hall wondering exactly where the family silver went missing.

Funny, heartfelt, and refreshingly unpretentious, this is not a textbook, not a genealogy manual, and not quite a memoir. It's the story of England told through one family's unlikely path across forty generations - and the realisation that the past is never as distant as it seems.