Eliza Asbury - Her Cottage and Her Son

Eliza Asbury lived between Birmingham and the Black Country during the ferment of the vast eighteenth century industrial revolution that was to transform the world. She had a difficult marriage, lost a beloved daughter in infancy and lived in a community at Great Barr where hostility to her Methodist faith was never far from the surface.

Nevertheless for over fifty years her little cottage was a regular place of worship and her only son Frank was to go to America to become Bishop Francis Asbury, the first Protestant Bishop in North America.

This book tells the inspiring story through Eliza's eyes, uncoupling many of the myths that have grown up about the Asbury family. Using original sources it charts the frustrating thirty year correspondence between mother and son, when letters sometimes took a year to arrive at the intended destination.

David Hallam is a Methodist Local Preacher and lives in Smethwick, which like Great Barr is part of the Black Country Borough of Sandwell. He is a former Member of the European Parliament where he represented Shropshire, Herefordshire and parts of Worcestershire. During his five year term David was President of the Parliament's Prayer Breakfast. David is a public relations consultant.