Frank William Boreham was born in Tonbridge Wells, Kent in March 1871.

From an early age he served the Lord, preaching his first sermon at the age of seventeen and printing his first book at the age of twenty.

Boreham was, apparently, the last student to be personally interviewed by Charles Spurgeon as a prospective student for his Pastor's school. He studied there for a number of years but did not graduate. When James Spurgeon returned from New Zealand to continue his famous brother's work he offered Boreham the opportunity of taking over a small Baptist congregation in Mosgiel, New Zealand. He set sail in January 1895.

It was, as leader of this congregation, that Boreham mastered the art of storytelling and became known around the world.

A year after he began his ministry in New Zealand his British sweetheart, Miss Stella Cottee, who had accepted his marriage proposal, sailed over to join him. Close friend and mentor, Rev. Joseph John Doke officiated at the wedding.

Rev. Doke is famously known to have counselled Boreham to read and to develop methodical reading habits.

"Read my dear man," he exclaimed, one day, springing to his feet in his excitement and pacing the veranda in his characteristic way. "Read; and read systematically; and keep on reading; never give up!"

"But give me a start," I pleaded, "be definite; what shall I read first?"

He walked the whole length of the veranda and back without replying. Then approaching me with eyes that positively burned, he cried with tremendous emphasis, "Begin with Gibbon! Read Gibbon through and through! Don't drop it because the first volume seems dry! Keep right on and you'll soon have no time for bed and no inclination for sleep even if you go there!"

I bought Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the very next day.

From this time on he was known as a voracious reader buying and reading at least one book per week.

The results of Boreham's hunger for the written word and love of history and biography is clearly seen in his writing and it is not difficult to understand why his works have become collector's items.

Boreham wrote 3,000 editorials for the Hobart Mercury. They appeared weekly ever week for 47 years between 1912-1959. He also wrote for the Melbourne Age.

He published 46 books, his last, published only months before his death. was The Tide Comes In in 1958.

A series of five books, published between 1920 and 1928, were taken from 125 sermons on the theme of "Texts that Made History, these were : A Bunch of Everlastings, A Handful of Stars, A Casket of Cameos, A Faggot of Torches, and A Temple of Topaz.

Geoff Pound, former Principal of Whitley College: University of Melbourne, became interested in Boreham's work many years ago, when serving as a Pastor in Dunedin, New Zealand. He has been the visionary behind the decision to re-print a number of Boreham's works, some of which are for sale within Link-Zone. He says:

When I came to Victoria, Australia in 1992 to be a superintendent of churches, I bumped into so many people who said that they’d met Boreham. He had been their pastor at the Armadale Church or at the Kew Baptist church. I have met hundreds of people from different branches of the church and from no church who said: “I used to listen to Boreham’s Wednesday lunch hour sermons at Scots Church in Melbourne’s inner city in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.” It was an institution. What amazed me was the number of people who could remember parts of his sermons that were preached 50 or 60 years ago! When I quizzed them more deeply, what they remembered was usually some truth that was wrapped up in a colourful story.

 Then when I came to Whitley College, I was rummaging through the archives one day when I stumbled across two cartons of books that happened to contain Boreham’s personal copy of his 55 books. For a historian, this was like discovering The Shroud of Turin! They had been donated by the Boreham family to the College soon after F W Boreham died and they had been sitting in the darkness and the dust for 30 years. They are now displayed in our College library.

 I also found in these boxes of memorabilia, five scrapbooks containing many of the 3,000 editorials that Boreham wrote for the Hobart Mercury and the Melbourne Age, every week, for 47 years between 1912-1959. In those boxes I also found the plan in Boreham’s handwriting of the structure of the book he was compiling at the time of his death, in which he was drawing together one of these editorials that was connected to each day of the year. 365 chapters.

We hope you enjoy our selection of Boreham's titles and hope to add more to these as they become available.

Samples of Boreham's writing

In honour of Lord Lister, the famous English surgeon who promoted the idea of a sterile Surgery and clean wounds, Boreham wrote:

".. Within the memory of men still living, Lister stood, with his back to the wall, fighting as a man fight for his life on behalf of that new conception of surgery with which his name will always be associated. He fought, not as a pugilist, but as a knight. There was a winsomeness and a chivalry about his engaging personality that completely disarmed his critics and opponents. He was absolutely sure of his ground, and he exhibited his confidence, not in noisy bluster, but in quiet strength.

... At the time of Lister's advent, the situation was desperate. Doctors stood appalled at their own helplessness. The stars in their courses seemed to be fighting against them. Disease was spread by the very people who were seeking most assiduously to cure it. Surgeons carried contagion from patient to patient; nurses bore it from bed to bed on their aprons, bandages, and sponges. To sentence a patient to an operation was like signing his death warrant. Lister was worried to the point of distraction. He resolved to probe the problem to its very heart. As a result, he came to a sensational conclusion. The whole trouble, he announced, was—dirt! So, to the elimination of dirt, in every shape and form, he applied his stately powers. His new crusade awoke a storm of opposition. At the meetings of the British Association held at Leeds in 1869, Lister was roundly charged with arrant stupidity. Four years later, the "Lancet" warned the entire profession against him. At Edinburgh, Professor Caird, then a student, was solemnly adjured to have nothing whatever to do with him. The fierce campaign lasted until 1877, Lister being then 50. In that year the tide turned..."

He wrote of British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli:

".. When he first appeared in Parliament, everybody stared incredulously. Nothing of the kind had been seen at Westminster. There was, we are assured by those who saw him at that time, something irresistibly comic about the amazing spectacle. He appeared in a fantastic and coxcombical costume that he wore with obvious self-consciousness—velvet coat thrown wide open, ruffles on the sleeves, an elaborate embroidered waistcoat from which issued voluminous folds of frill, shoes adorned with red rosettes, black hair pomaded and elaborately curled, his whole person redolent of the perfumes of Araby.

The theatrical young dandy seemed to have burst upon men from some other world. He exhaled an atmosphere totally foreign to that of the classic halls that he had irreverently invaded. His face, his figure, his gait, his dress, his style of speech were all alike sensational. This youthful upstart was out to kill.

But there was method in his madness. Disraeli knew that he had it in him to say things that would sting and stab and startle. He shrewdly realised that those things would strike their hearers with the greater force coming from one whom they had learned to regard as a brainless dandy. His affectation was itself an affectation...."


He wrote for the anniversary of the birthday of the Great Composer, Ludwig Van Beethoven:

"..one of his recent lecturettes on the great musical composers, Mr. Neville Cardus declared that it is the glory of Beethoven that he was essentially a rebel. The statement is provocative. We all have to confess to a sneaking fondness for the man who, right or wrong, stands, like Athanasius, against the world. Nobody has ever been heard to defend the enormity that brought upon Ajax the wrath of all the ancient deities. But the spectacle of Ajax on his lonely rock defying all things, visible and invisible, and daring all the bolts that the gods of Mount Olympus could fling, has appealed to the imagination of every generation, and it is said that even his contemporaries, horrified as they had been by the grossness of his transgression, insisted on his being accorded an honoured sepulture in the island of Leuce, at a spot that was jealously reserved for the bravest of the brave.

... A rebel, then, is a man who smashes the window in a stuffy room and allows us all to breathe. He does a certain amount of damage, but he makes life the sweeter and the fresher for mankind. Copernicus was a rebel! He was born into a world that believed itself to be a small and stationary planet round which sun, moon, and stars, like so many glorified Chinese lanterns, moved for its special illumination and edification. The soul of Copernicus rebelled against this narrow and parochial superstition. He smashed the window and, as a result, his fellow-men, inhaling a purer and healthier atmosphere, gazed in astonishment through the aperture he had so violently created and beheld a universe magnified and multiplied a million-fold. To such rebels—Beethoven in music, Darwin in science, Shaftesbury in industry, Wordsworth in literature, and a thousand others—the world owes a debt it will never be able to compute."

Of Jane Austen, he wrote:

"..She seemed from the first to sense her destiny. She spent all her time taking stock of people, summing them up, and noting particularly their oddities and foibles. Observing something that amused her, she would tiptoe out of the room, slip away to her desk, and jot down a record of the intriguing occurrence. She hated to be caught in the act, and, at the sound of footsteps, would smuggle into her blotting pad the sheet on which she had been scribbling, and look as innocent of authorship as an armless Venus or a mermaid in a submarine cavern.

The delicious little drolleries she daily witnessed in her domestic circle moved her far more deeply than the momentous happenings in the world beyond. Napoleon was a boy of six when Jane Austen was born; she was a girl in her 'teens when the French Revolution reached its tragic and dramatic climax, shaking the civilisation of Europe to its foundations; she was 30 when England was thrilled by the epic of Trafalgar and she lived just long enough to hear of "that world-earthquake, Waterloo.

But none of these things moved her. There is no suggestion of them in her manuscripts. Her mind dwelt in a fairyland of its own. In that enchanted realm, political convulsions did not matter; big battalions did not matter; sensational discoveries did not matter; nothing mattered but human life and human love, human passions and human emotions. And, as a consequence, her tales belong, not to the age in which they were first told, but to all the ages that have been and to all the ages yet to be..."

Of Jules Verne, he wrote:

"..At the age of 20, Jules Verne, whose birthday we mark today, burst upon Paris. For years he had cherished romantic dreams of tasting the bohemian life of the capital. He arrived to find the city in the throes of revolution. Blood was flowing in the streets; paving stones were being torn up to build barricades; the king was being bundled off the throne.

Bewildered and dumbfounded, Jules Verne felt as a man might feel who, having accepted an invitation to stay with a relative, reaches the house just as his host, in a fit of drunken fury, is smashing the windows and setting fire to the furniture.

Five years later, Paris having regained her sanity, one might meet, on the Champs Elysses, a young dandy of striking, open face, with curly hair falling about his massive forehead. He wears an immaculate velvet jacket and an elaborate bow tie. As a law student, he has become fond of Paris and has written a sheaf of trifles, including daring flights of fancy, modelled partly on Alexandre Dumas and partly on Edgar Allan Poe. For Jules Verne has not yet found Jules Verne.

... It was in 1863, at the age of 35, that he found his metier. It was the age of the balloon... Giving rein to his fancy, Jules Verne exploited the passion of the period. He published his "Five Weeks in a Balloon" and felt in his very bones that he had pegged his claim to world-wide renown.

... Keeping himself abreast of the science of his time, he allowed his vivid imagination to go just one step ahead. He regarded each sensational invention as embryonic; it foretold a still greater wonder. For this reason, there was something prophetic about him; many of his wildest imaginings were but the shadows of things to come."

To mark the anniversary of the death of Governor William Bligh, famous for the mutiny that occurred upon the HMS Bounty in 1789 and also for later taking the position of Governor of New South Wales in 1804.

"... Some of the most eminent writers of all time, including Lord Byron and George Borrow, have undertaken to elucidate for us the mystery of Bligh's enigmatic individuality, but have left us in a welter of hopeless confusion.

Bligh was a faggot of contradictions, an inextricable tangle of inharmonious and hostile qualities. He could be as suave as a courtier, as shrewd as a plenipotentiary, as brave as a lion, and as ferocious as a tiger. He could produce a smile that, conferred upon a subordinate, would make the young officer feel as if he had been invested with a knighthood; and he could unleash a temper that would send a shudder through a battleship or rock Government House to its very foundations.

In the turbulent hurricane of his stormy life, the gale twice reached peak proportions. The first was when, on April 28, 1789, the mutineers of the Bounty turned him adrift, with 18 companions, in an open boat. The second was when, on January 26, 1808—the 20th anniversary of the foundation of Australia—he was seized by his enemies at Government House, Sydney, and placed under arrest. Four hundred troops marched from their barracks to the tune of "The British Grenadiers" and, swarming into Government House, soon made the Governor their prisoner."

To mark the 77th anniversary of the sudden death of George Eliot, who Boreham called "the greatest feminine novelist of all time

"... she stands in our literature as the audacious pioneer of introspective romance. She lays the soul bare. She was instinctively an analyst, a scientist, a philosopher. She knew better than any other English writer how to dissect a character whilst seeming only to tell a tale. Her predecessors had told their stories as though they were spectators witnessing the pageant which they so graphically described. George Eliot seems to be in the secrets of the actors. She scrutinises their motives, their sensations, their passions; she tells the tale from the inside. Others wrote from the circumference; she wrote from the centre.

... Spiritually, her story is a tragedy. One wonders why. Her early days were spent in the quietude of the countryside. Perhaps, as she wandered about those winding lanes and lovely bridlepaths, she became too contemplative, too introspective, too much addicted to the analysis of feelings. Perhaps, dwelling so exclusively on the abstract and the ideal, her fresh young spirit became unfitted for its rude impact with the actual and the real. At the age of 21 she formed the friendship of Charles Bray and, shortly afterwards, undertook the translation into English of the works of Strauss and Feuerbach. These studies froze her faith. Like a ship that breaks from its moorings, as Principal Fairbairn puts it, she drifted imperceptibly away. Charming as the novels are, it is difficult to resist the conviction that, had she concontrived to preserve the crystal faith of her girlhood, her pages would have been still more enticing.