Best known as the longest-serving editor of The Friend, Henry Stanley Newman was a true Victorian: energetic, outward-looking and civic-minded. Born a grocer's son and raised to conform to a quiet form of Quakerism, he broke the mould with his evangelism both at home and abroad, spearheading a significant revival of the religion during a turbulent and potentially divisive time in its history.

But it was his passion for the life- changing power of education that really set him apart. Henry Stanley Newman cared deeply for young people and through the Leominster Orphan Homes, the Orphans' Printing Press and the Leominster Adult Schools, three interlinked organisations that he founded, it is no exaggeration to say that he touched a generation and helped transform a town.

This is the story of an ordinary life, extraordinarily well lived.