The Drug of Hope (ePub)

A soldier rescued Francois mother along her way to a hospital in the winter of 1947, the coldest winter in two hundred years. When her child was born, she named him Napoleon at the soldiers request.

When Francois was eleven, his father left for Lebanon to visit his ill mother and never returned. Believing that his father had died, the family moved to Wilmslow and his mother remarried Lawrence Jones. However, the marriage collapsed and his mother placed Francois and his sister in a childrens home. Several months later, they were rescued from the hands of abusive foster parents by their mother to start a new life in a small flat in Cheetham Hill, Manchester.

At sixteen, Francois left school to become an articled accountant, but he soon became bored and joined the army at the age of seventeen. Nicknamed Jonah, he became the leader of a group of four friends called The TerribleTwins, and they enjoyed several adventures together until he left the army when he was twenty-one.

With his name abbreviated to Frank Jones, he spent two years in retail management with H. Samuel. He left the retail trade and became an industrial engineer working at Cheshire Council and then the City of Bradford Metropolitan Council. He specialized in office automation, helped design early word processing systems, and was involved in several controversial implementations that resulted in trade union strikes before staff accepted the new technology.

Franks early work in office automation led to minor celebrity, and he became a lecturer and writer on the development of technology in business, coauthoring two books and several articles. From 1979 onward, Frank built and managed a series of small software companies that traded all over the world.

He has been married three times and has six children. He now lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.