Glimpses of Singapore's Past by Ann Turnbull

My first visit to Singapore, in October 2013, was in response to a family emergency. We stayed in Chinatown, near the General Hospital. The streets there are lined with shophouses whose upper storeys overhang the shop fronts below, creating a covered walkway. These paths, known as the 'five-foot ways', provide much-needed shade and also shelter from the rain.

We saw street sculptures depicting older times and many interesting old houses.

There were plenty of young people around, with children and babies - but I also noticed older people, and was struck by how many of them had bandy legs.

"It's rickets," I was told, "caused by lack of food in childhood. Singapore suffered terribly during the war."

Of course. These people were the children of the late 1930s. Much later, I found out more about World War II in Singapore.

In January 1942 Singapore - then a British colony - came under relentless air attack from Japan. Hundreds of people died, and huge areas of the city were reduced to rubble. By 15th February Singapore had fallen. The next day Japanese soldiers marched into the city. After the war, there was a feeling among people in Singapore that the British had deserted them - and in retrospect it does seem that, had the British mounted a counter-attack at the critical moment, they might have prevailed.

The Chinese community remembers the horror of the Sook Ching - the 'purge through cleansing' - a mass screening and purge of Chinese men aged between 18 and 50 who had supported the war effort in China. About 50,000 men were loaded into lorries, taken to Changi or Sentosa, and shot. There must have been huge numbers of fatherless families left behind. Food was scarce, and people trapped in the city struggled to find anything to eat or anywhere to shelter. It's no wonder that those who are left still carry the scars.

When the British returned in 1945, Singapore was in ruins and its people were struggling to survive. 'People's Restaurants' were set up to provide affordable food, and the city was slowly rebuilt. But the housing shortage persisted for many years.

We were told we should visit the Chinatown Heritage Centre in Pagoda Street - a small museum in a converted shophouse. On entering, we found ourselves in a reconstruction of a tailor's workshop.

There were sewing machines, pattern books and order books on display. A baby's cradle swung from a hook in the ceiling. The tailor ran a successful business, but he and his family and apprentices lived very frugally in the rented premises and worked from around 8am till 9pm.

Upstairs, on the first floor, we were astonished - shocked - to see that all the space except a narrow access corridor had been divided up into cubicles measuring 8' x 8'. These spaces were rented out by the landlord as living accommodation. At night even the corridor was let to labourers who had nowhere else to sleep. There was a single kitchen and toilet shared by more than forty people.

Unlike the kitchen (which must have been impossible to keep clean) the cubicles were made as homely and neat as the inhabitants could manage. Their few personal possessions, photographs and good luck charms were given space; their bowls and spoons and baskets were kept clean; there were children's toys, and a few items of clothing on hooks.

The first cubicle - almost filled by a workbench that doubled as a bed - was home to a carpenter and his pregnant wife; in the next were a hawker, her husband and their children; then four Samsui women (these were female construction workers); a clog-maker and his family; a factory worker with six children. There was even a physician and his family; he ran his practice from here, attending mainly to the very poor whom he could not bring himself to charge.

It was while looking at these people's homes that I noticed, among the pictures pinned to the walls, some images that I recognised: British women with perms and frilly aprons and dazzling smiles - 1950s women. These were the advertisements I remembered from my own childhood. It was only then that I realised how recent all this was.

Chinese immigrants had been coming to Singapore in search of a better life for a hundred years or more. They were known as the 'Sinkeh' - 'newcomers' - and were often drawn by stories of rags to riches.

Most of them were ripped off by existing residents within days of their arrival and left penniless. One man, quoted in the background history display at the museum, said that when he saw coolies, pitch-black with coal dust, at work on the quay, he knew he had come to a hard place. Unless a man had a trade he would become an indentured labourer.

Singapore became a republic in 1965. Although Malay is the national language, in practice everyone speaks English because that is the language of business. Most of the inhabitants are Chinese, and Hokkien Chinese is also widely spoken. The Peranakan community are the descendants of Chinese traders, held up in the Malacca Straits by the trade winds for months at a time, who married local women. Indians have also lived in Singapore since the 19th century, and Little India is a thriving area. The city is full of temples, mosques and churches, reflecting the various communities.

On a second visit as tourists in 2018 we saw and enjoyed all the beautiful gardens, indoor shopping malls, museums and galleries. Having found out about the people's struggle to rebuild and recover since the 1960s, I was more than ever impressed and astonished by Singapore's success.

Contrary to what is implied by the name Singapore (which means Lion City), there have never been any lions in Singapore!

Nine Men by Ann Turnbull

"I went down to the bottom of the mountains;
The earth with its bars was about me forever..."
(Jonah, 2.6)

Madeley is a former mining town, situated on the East Shropshire coalfield and, since the late 1960s, part of the extensive new town of Telford. There are many reminders of Madeley's industrial past, one of the most poignant being the graves of nine miners, killed in a pit accident in 1864, who lie side by side in the churchyard of the parish church of St Michael. The quote above is part of the inscription on their memorial stone.

The graves are plain, bearing only the initials of each man on their cast-iron covers. The memorial stone gives their names and ages:

   Edward Wallett, 52.
   Benjamin Davies, 35.
   John Tranter, 37.
   Joseph Maiden, 18.
   William Jarratt, 18.
   John Farr, 14.
   John Jones, 14.
   Francis Cookson, 13.
   William Onions, 12.

What shocked me most when I first read this list was how young most of the dead were. Even in 1864 they were regarded as children: the coroner's inquest record states that the victims were three men and six boys. Twenty-two years earlier the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act had prohibited children under eight from working underground. But even in 1864 it would have been quite normal for children to start work at twelve - and no doubt this made an essential contribution to the family income.

The Madeley Wood Company, who owned the mine, were considered to be good employers; they had never employed women underground and were local benefactors. But the shifts were long - twelve hours - and there were no extended breaks in the working day. The men would take it in turns to grab a quick bite to eat. The air they breathed was full of dust and most of them would eventually contract lung diseases. Life expectancy was short.

Madeley's many pits are now hidden under tree-covered mounds. The Brick Kiln Leasow pit at Madeley Wood was an ironstone pit, 220 metres deep. It stood near the top of the steep hill that leads down from Madeley into Ironbridge, and nearly all the miners lived within about half a mile of it. They were a tight-knit community and no doubt many of them were related. Certainly the oldest man on the shift, Edward Wallett, was the father of William Wallett, who was banksman on the day of the accident.

On Tuesday 27th September 1864 at 5.40 pm the shift had just ended and the men were coming up in the device known as 'the doubles' - loops of chain forming seats, with a heavy iron 'bonnet' above to protect them from any falling debris. This device was hooked on to the main chain which was drawn up by the engine at a signal from the 'hooker-on'. The hooker-on that day was Benjamin Davies, an experienced man who'd been doing the job for twenty years.

When the men were about halfway up, the engine man felt the winding chain go slack. He knew at once that the miners had fallen to their deaths. Moments later the doubles, the men, the iron bonnet and the great chain crashed through the layers of thick planks at the bottom of the shaft into four metres of sump water. The thunderous sound brought miners and local people rushing to the scene.

The mutilated bodies were brought up and taken down the hill to the George and Dragon pub, close to where many of the miners lived - and desperate relatives had to be kept outside the room until the bodies had been washed and laid out.

No clear cause was ever found for the accident. The hook and chain were intact, so it was assumed that the hooker-on had somehow failed to properly connect the hook to the chain, and that the hook had slipped out halfway up. Nine men, rather than the permitted maximum of eight, were in the doubles that day. Whether this could have been a factor was unclear. A verdict of accidental death was returned.

This was not an unusual accident - a similar one occurred a few miles away eight years later, when a triple-link chain broke - but it made a deep impression on the community not only because of the large number of miners lost, but because so many were children. One of the dead, 13 year old Francis Cookson, lived in a house only yards from the one where, in the 1980s, my own 13 year old son was able to look forward to a very different future. The Victorians made great strides in child protection and improved working conditions, but one of the most shocking aspects of this story is not the employment of children - my mother started work at 14 - but the long working day, which was still accepted as normal, even for such arduous work. Change comes slowly, and is often hard won.

   This pit pony sculpture is by local artist Gerry Foxall.



We thank Ann Turnbull for this post. Carol Drinkwater will be back next month.

IN SEARCH OF ST WINEFRIDE by Ann Turnbull

Research for a new novel has taken me on the trail of a Welsh saint.

St Winefride's Well is at Holywell, near Flint in north Wales, and was a famous place of pilgrimage both before and after the Reformation.

Legend tells how Winefride fled from the advances of a suitor named Caradoc. She ran towards the church built by her uncle, St Beuno, but the furious Caradoc caught her and cut off her head. As St Beuno lifted the severed head a spring of water rose from the ground beneath. He restored the head to Winefride's body and his prayers brought her back to life. Caradoc sank into the ground and was never seen again.

The story of a head being restored to the body is one that recurs in folktale and legend. However Winefride herself was a real person who lived in the 7th century. Her Welsh name was Gwenfrewi and she was the daughter of a local prince, Tewyth, and his wife Gwenlo. Caradoc was a chieftain from Hawarden. Winefride became a nun and later joined a community at Gwytherin where she eventually became Abbess. Holywell has been a place of pilgrimage and healing ever since and is the only such shrine to have had an unbroken history of pilgrimage for more than thirteen centuries. Even during the most difficult times for Catholics, during the 16th and 17th centuries, pilgrims still flocked to St Winefride's Well, and many inscriptions cut into pillars in the shrine date from these years.

It is customary for pilgrims to pass through the water three times and then to kneel on St Beuno's stone to complete their prayers. This stone - near the steps in the outer pool - is believed to be the one on which St Beuno sat when instructing St Winefride.

The shrine that now houses the well was built in the early 16th century and is a fine example of Perpendicular Gothic. The statue of the saint dates from 1888. She carries a crook and the palm of martyrdom and there is a thin line around her neck to show where her head was severed. In the picture below you can see the central boss over the well, which shows scenes from St Winefride's martyrdom. Smaller - and very weathered - bosses apparently display the emblems of many noble benefactors, among them Queen Katherine of Aragon and Margaret, Countess of Richmond and mother of Henry VII. Theirs was a time when the fame and popularity of this shrine was at its height.

In 1138 St Winefride's relics were removed to Shrewsbury Abbey. The shrine that was built for her there was destroyed during the dissolution of the abbey in 1540, but part of the reredos remains.

Above it is the beautiful St Winefride Window by Jane Gray, part of which can be seen in this link:
http://www.shrewsburyabbey.com/St%20Winefride.html

King Henry V sought the protection of St Winefride at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, and the following year he visited her relics at Shrewsbury Abbey, before walking in pilgrimage the sixty miles or so to Holywell to give thanks. In June 2016 the Diocese of Wrexham re-enacted this pilgrimage along the route most likely to have been taken by the king. Quoted in the Shropshire Star, the Rt Rev Mark Davies, the Bishop of Shrewsbury, said, "Whether we are able to physically or spiritually take part in this journey, the ancient pathways of Shropshire will remind us of the rich Christian heritage of this country."

A HIDDEN ROMAN VILLA by Ann Turnbull

At Sudeley Castle in the Cotswolds there is a small collection of Roman artefacts, among them a statue of a local deity, Apollo Cunomaglos - the Hound Lord. Most of the items are from the site of a 2nd century Roman villa on the Sudeley estate. In the 1880s Emma Dent, the chatelaine of Sudeley Castle, organised the excavation and protection of the remains of this villa. Several mosaic floors had been found, and people had begun taking away parts of them as souvenirs. Emma had the best-preserved mosaic removed to the castle and a replica made. This can be seen on the terrace at Sudeley. The Roman mosaic was then re-laid in its original place and covered with a tarpaulin to protect it; and some of the remaining walls were built up to a higher level.

Also in the Roman collection at Sudeley is a quote from Bill Bryson, who came upon the villa while out walking. He describes his wonder at finding the remains of this ancient building in a little wood, and how he sat down there and thought about the people who had come to this place and built a home there so very long ago.

It was this quote that made me want to do the walk and find the villa. Spoonley Wood is only 2km from Sudeley, but it was a hot day and the two of us took a wrong turning and had to retrace our steps, so it seemed further. There are no signposts to the villa, no mention of it anywhere.

We crossed several fields of sheep,

and two ploughed fields,

and followed hedgerows; and at last we came to the little wood.

You could easily miss the villa, even though a path leads right through it. We saw a few low walls, a few stones, a great slab that must have been a doorstep, and a mystery object that looked rather like a shallow kitchen sink.

In an open shed roofed with corrugated iron, under a cloth and weighted with stones, was the original of the floor we had seen at Sudeley. We did not uncover it all, just lifted a corner.

A stream runs nearby, and the OS map shows at least one spring near the villa. The site was quiet and peaceful, and wonderfully free of all explanation. I enjoy the "Roman experience" as much as anyone - places with videos, labels and reconstructions - but this quiet place allowed me to daydream about the villa and the lives of its inhabitants: to imagine the people who lived there going about their work; children playing by the stream; a cat sunning itself on a wall. Perhaps Apollo Cunomaglos, the Hound Lord, once had an altar in this house?

It was summer, the trees were in full leaf and the brambles were dense; they blocked our way and our view. If there was any more to see there, we didn't discover it. So we walked back, leaving the ancient house to peace and birdsong and the ripple of the stream.

Thank you, Bill Bryson. And thank you, Emma Dent.


More information and photos of the site and the mosaic floor can be seen at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonley_Wood_Roman_Villa

Mary Hoffman is away

"Here lyeth Quene Kateryn" by Ann Turnbull

From Cleeve Hill in the Cotswolds you can look down and see Sudeley Castle, close to the small town of Winchcombe.

Sudeley has been restored, but some of the ruins of earlier buildings remain - notably the walls and tall Gothic windows of Richard III's banqueting hall, and the shell of a 15th century tithe barn, which now houses an enchanting garden of roses, hollyhocks, clematis and wisteria.

Sudeley - a stronghold since Anglo-Saxon times - was slighted after the Civil Wars and left uninhabitable. For two centuries it was used by tenant farmers for sheltering animals, and some of its stones were carried away. King Charles I's campaign bed - a great demountable four-poster of solid carved oak - lay forgotten in a barn on the estate. And the body of Queen Katherine Parr lay buried beneath a wall in the ruined chapel and was not rediscovered for more than two hundred years.

Katherine Parr? Well, when Henry VIII died in 1547, Sudeley passed to Thomas Seymour, who went on to marry the king's widow, Katherine Parr. So Katherine came to live at Sudeley, along with Thomas's ward, the eleven-year-old Lady Jane Grey. Sadly, Katherine's time at Sudeley was short - little more than a year. She became pregnant and died of puerperal fever a week after the birth, aged thirty-six. When her lead coffin was discovered and opened in 1782, her body was found to be wrapped in six layers of linen cerecloth, which had kept it perfectly preserved (though later openings eventually reduced it to dust.)  In the 19th century the chapel was rebuilt and re-dedicated as St Mary's Church, and Katherine was laid in a marble tomb inscribed with the words found on her coffin, "Here lyeth Quene Kateryn, wife to Kyng Henry VIII..."

The castle was sensitively restored by John and William Dent, wealthy glove-makers, who bought it in 1837. Since then, the present owners have built up some fascinating collections and exhibitions. Emma Dent, the Victorian chatelaine, was a great collector, and there is a room full of antique lace and embroidery, including a 16th century lace canopy said to have been made by Anne Boleyn for the christening of Princess Elizabeth. Emma also devoted energy to both buildings and gardens, and can be seen below, in topiary, sitting in her herb garden, reading a book - though she was so busy with good works around Winchcombe (providing almshouses, a school, a new church, a piped water supply, teaching at a night school and running sewing classes) that it's hard to imagine she had much time to sit and read.

Some highlights of the exhibitions for me were:

Katherine Parr's privy, curtained and upholstered in crimson velvet.

The Vertue drawings - copies of thirty-three portraits by Holbein of members of the Tudor court.

Charles I's despatch box, in which he kept all his correspondence during the Civil War - one of the spoils of the battle of Naseby.

Charles I's campaign bed - now restored and refurnished.

Katherine Parr's books and her letter to Thomas Seymour accepting his marriage proposal.

Oh, and the Roman mosaic - another thing for which we have to thank Emma Dent. But that will be the subject of a separate blog...

A Teenager at Work in 1960 by Ann Turnbull

I had just turned seventeen when I started work in London in 1960.

I'd spent the past four years at technical school on a commercial course.  This involved shorthand and typing, general studies and O-Level GCEs.

My first job was at the headquarters of the National Union of Teachers.  For this change of lifestyle my mother provided me with two suits: an olive green one of hers, and a new navy-blue one.  There were many rules about dress in those days.  Your skirt should not show below the hem of your coat; your slip should not show below your skirt; bra straps must never show; necklines were high and cleavage unseen.  Hair was permed or put in rollers or pin curls at night to give it body.  To protect it from the weather we all wore printed nylon headscarves.

I loved being out at work.  By the beginning of 1961 I was earning £10 a week - a good wage at the time.  I paid my parents £3 a week, and probably paid about the same amount again in train fares from north Kent.  The morning train journey was crowded, and most people smoked, so a thick fug filled the carriage.  You usually had to stand, and men would open their newspapers and rest them on your head.  I soon began to think about moving to a bedsitter in London.

In 1962 I changed to a job in the litigation department of a firm of solicitors in Fleet Street.  Solicitors' offices demanded high standards and were always busy, and I enjoyed that.  The work was interesting, since it involved people and conflict.  Solicitors in those days did not advertise, and they certainly didn't chase accident victims.  Their headed notepaper was discreet and simply carried the name and address of the firm; the word "solicitors" did not appear.

All the solicitors working there were men, and from well-to-do families.  We girls each worked for one of them.  My boss, although quite a young man, always addressed me as "Miss Turnbull"; our relationship was friendly but formal.

In the secretaries' room we would chat about boyfriends, hairstyles, nights out, wedding plans.  Girls expected to be engaged by around eighteen or twenty, and married at about twenty-two.  Soon after, they would leave to have a family.

By now I was earning ten guineas a week, plus luncheon vouchers worth 2/6d each.  I flitted in and out of the shops in the Strand in my lunch hour, buying lipsticks and eye-liner and little straight knee-length dresses.  Fashions were changing, getting freer.  I abandoned my girdle and walked down the Strand feeling wobbly-bottomed.  I grew my hair long and wore it hanging loose - though I put it in a topknot for work.  In the evenings I'd go out with a boyfriend to pubs or folk clubs where everyone smoked and your eyes smarted and mascara ran.

Around this time I left home and, for the next few years, lived in a succession of bedsits and flats in central London.  A cheap bedsitter cost about £3.10s.0d., and would have a gas-ring - on which I attempted nothing more adventurous than Vesta curries.  I often ate out in Wimpy bars and cheap cafes.  Dalton's Weekly was the place to find accommodation.  Shared flats often had ads for a "third" or "fourth" girl, but many of these said "graduate preferred".  I had never met a graduate, and I developed an aversion to these elite people who couldn't face sharing with the likes of me.

Moving those few miles to live in London gave me the freedom of the city.  I loved London, and still do.  The Sixties - that fabulous decade - did not begin in 1960, but by 1963 it was on its way.  I moved into a mixed-sex flat.  I heard the voice of Joan Baez for the first time - a transforming experience.  I hung out in CND headquarters in Carthusian Street.  I went to Bunjie's folk club off Leicester Square.  I went on demos.  I went to student balls at UCL (yes, I finally got to know those graduates!)  I had some of my poems printed in small magazines, and in evenings and lunch-hours I sat and wrote my big historical novel and dreamed of publication.

June competition

We have two sets of books to give away this month:

Ann Turnbull is one of our History Girl Reservists, to whom we are very grateful. She asks the question:
'If you felt compelled to emigrate, where would you go - and why?' She wrote about travelling with a baby in the seventeenth century here.

Five winners may choose either Alice in Love and War or Seeking Eden. You can read about them here and here.

And new History Girl Manda Scott, who will be joining us full time in August, offers five copies of The Eagle of the Twelfth, which she wrote about here 

She asks: 'If you could rewrite history by changing the outcome of just one big battle, which one would it be - and why?'

As always, the competitions are limited to UK readers. Closing date 9th July.

Travelling with a baby in 1645 by Ann Turnbull

It's a pleasure to welcome to the blog today Ann Turnbull, whose third book in the Quaker Trilogy is out this month. Seeking Eden is published by Walker Books. Will and Susannah, who first appeared in No Shame, No Fear and returned in Forged in the Fire, here travel to Pennsylvania with their children. This is the story of their oldest child, Josiah and his struggles with love, religious intolerance and the question of slavery.

In the midst of writing these novels, Ann also wrote one called Alice in Love and War, for which she found out a lot of practical detail about what a woman in the seventeenth century might have had to deal with when travelling with a baby:

Ann Turnbull

It’s 1645. There’s a war on. And a young woman is on the road, travelling with a four-week-old baby who is not her own child. How is she going to keep the baby alive? What did people do in the days before infant formula? This was one of the questions I had to research for my Civil War novel, Alice in Love & War.

Wet nurses were the obvious and best solution. The higher levels of society tended to use them as a matter of course, though by the 17th century there was much debate about the pros and cons, and Protestants often saw it as their religious duty to breastfeed.


When a wet nurse was sought, it was vital to find the right woman for the job. Jane Sharp, a 17th century midwife, gave a long list of recommended qualities, the most important of which was that the wet nurse should have given birth to a child of the same sex as the one to be nursed. The nurse should be of good character and pleasant temperament. A woman with a physical defect such as a squint or “black ill-favoured teeth” should be rejected, since any characteristic of the nurse would be passed to the child through the milk. A sanguine complexion was desirable – as were ‘handsome’ nipples!

After the birth, in order to encourage the milk to come in, the mother was advised to express the colostrum by hand and (alas!) to discard it. Sometimes a woman would suckle new-born puppies to bring in her milk. Meanwhile, her baby was probably being fed by a neighbour or someone else who was already breast-feeding. This would continue for a few days until the mother’s milk came in.
If there had been a difficult delivery both the exhausted mother and her child might be offered sweetened wine until breast-feeding could be established.

But what if the mother’s milk failed, or she died, and there was no wet-nurse to be found? Cow’s milk was considered unsuitable, though ass’s milk might be used. But often the answer was ‘pap’. This was made from barley bread or oatmeal steeped in water and then boiled in milk. It was sometimes used as a supplementary feed, but could also be given when there was no mother’s milk available. One wonders whether a newborn baby could thrive on it, but clearly it was widely used. Feeding a baby in this way was called ‘dry-nursing’ or ‘bringing up by hand’.

Feeding bottles - ‘pap boats’ - were often made of pewter with a screw-on top that doubled as a nipple.

Nappies would also have been a problem for a woman on the move with a young child. She would probably have put rags inside the swaddling bands and washed them when she could. It must have been a difficult and messy business, and the swaddling would have made it tempting not to unwrap the baby as often as necessary. In Alice in Love & War I describe sphagnum moss being used on occasion. It seems a likely option, though I have found no record of its use in Britain.

The practice of swaddling may have made travelling with a baby easier as the infant was completely immobilised. (I have a memory of seeing, somewhere, a picture of a firmly swaddled baby hanging from a hook on the wall while its mother does the housework. It appears quite contented.)
Swaddling was believed to help the limbs grow straight and true, and babies were swaddled for about nine months - though the amount of binding would be reduced as they grew more active, and there must have come a time when the baby began to make its own wishes known.

Much of the information about both wet and dry nursing was found for me by Dr Sara Read, who lectures at Loughborough University. Sara has recently published an article on the menopause 
in Notes and Queries.



Alice in Love & War was published by Walker Books in 2009.

The very good news is that Ann Turnbull has joined the History Girls as one of our Reservists. You can read about her at the end of the About Us Page, is the section about our Reservists, who are on standby to fill in when one of our regulars has a crisis, so that your daily fix of a post on this blog is not interrupted.

Friends, Faith and Far Horizons

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm delighted to be writing today about three of my favourite books for young people: Ann Turnbull's Quaker Trilogy. The third book, Seeking Eden, was published last Thursday. I read it at once and adored it as I had the previous two. For those who haven't read the books, here is a very brief review of each:

No Shame No Fear
is the story of a girl from a family of Friends who leaves home to find work in a nearby town. There she meets Will who is drawn away from his father’s Anglican faith to the Friends both spiritually, and by Susanna’s beauty. But a new law is about to come into force, outlawing religious gatherings outside the Anglican church, and Susanna and Will are both to find their faith tested in the time to come. No Shame No Fear was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize.

Forged in The Fire

follows the fortunes of the young couple some years later. Will is working in London, trying to establish himself so that they can marry. Susanna follows him there. Their struggles to overcome the long time they have spent apart are further threatened by plague and then by the Fire of London.

Seeking Eden

Will and Susanna have decided to leave London, where they have been cruelly persecuted for their faith. Inspired by William Penn and the colony he has founded in the new world, they hope to start again and build a new life on distant shores. The story is told from the point of view of their son Josiah, who is every bit as rebellious and determined as his father was, with all his mother's impulsiveness too. His relationship with his parents is troubled as he goes through his teen years. Jos wants to be a man, to be independant and to make his own way in the world. But in America, Jos is to be faced with difficult choices himself. Can he reconcile the slave trade with the principles he has been taught? And what consequences will his choices have for his relationship with his family and with the girl he loves?

Earlier this week, I put three questions to the author, which she has responded to below. I'd like to welcome Ann Turnbull to the History Girls. It's a pleasure to have you with us.

Ann, can you tell us what drew you to writing about the Friends (Quakers) in the first place?

Thank you, Marie-Louise. It's lovely to be here.
In the early 1980s I began attending Quaker meetings and was involved with Friends for several years. I read the testimonies of the early Friends and felt inspired and fascinated by their unswerving commitment to their faith. When I read about whole communities being in prison and their children keeping the meetings going, I knew there was a story there – but it was nearly twenty years before I began to tell it.

Reading Seeking Eden, I’m very aware that you must have done a great deal of research in order to portray Pennsylvania, Barbados, the work of merchants and apprentices and the experience of Tokpa the slave in such an apparently effortless way. Could you tell us how you went about this?

I used mostly books – heaps of them - and museum visits. I also got hold of videos of Delaware and Pennsylvania, and a film, The New World. I use bibliographies to find titles and the internet to track down books. In particular I look for first-hand accounts. My ‘bible’ was Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, which was incredibly useful for finding out about the country, the wildlife and plants, and how the settlement of Philadelphia was managed. Of course there are always questions you can’t find an answer to, so there is quite a lot of guesswork in the details. I would have loved to have found the journal of an ordinary settler from the 1680s, but no such luck! However, William Penn was a great communicator; his writings give a vivid picture of this new land and its inhabitants – he was, after all, often writing to attract wealthy backers and new settlers. For the merchants and apprentices, I found a copy of a 1948 book about Quaker merchants in early Philadelphia which told me almost everything I needed to know.
Barbados was easier. I used a tourist guide and the Sufferings of Early Quakers covering America and the West Indies. This gave me detailed first-hand records of what was happening to Friends in Barbados at the time. I usually buy rather than borrow books as I don’t have easy access to major libraries, but I did spend a few days in Birmingham’s reference library and the wonderful university library.
For Tokpa’s memories and experience I visited museums: the Africa galleries at the British Museum (I went there three times!) and the Museum of Slavery in Liverpool, which was full of inspiring exhibits. I worked hard to verify everything - though I’m sure I got things wrong. But in the end you can’t get everything right. You can only try to make the story ‘true’ in the sense that you have imaginatively entered the minds of your characters and the world they inhabit.

What did you most enjoy about writing Seeking Eden and what did you find most difficult?

I like a challenge – and these were big, difficult themes and an environment that was new to me. I found that exhilarating. And I enjoyed, as always, the actual writing and construction of the story and seeing the characters evolve. 

The most difficult things?  Writing about places I had not visited – not being able to go to the libraries and museums in Philadelphia and walk around in the places where the first settlers lived.   Trying to imagine the inner lives of Tokpa and Miata and to create a convincing voice for Tokpa.   Fearing that it would never work, and trying to get it done on time (I was months late delivering!)

Ann, thank you so much for joining us today, and I hope that some of our followers will be inspired to read your wonderful books.

Lady Susan (I wish!): by Sue (the peasant) Purkiss

In days of yore, when knights of old rode out into primeval swamps and did battle against Tyrannosaurus Rex – well, okay, when I was young – I used to read a lot of historical fiction. There was an excellent library in our town:  given by Andrew Carnegie, it was, and still is, the most impressive building in Ilkeston’s market square. I borrowed as many books each week as I was allowed to, and then went to work there as a Saturday girl, which meant that I could borrow as many as I liked.

I read a lot of everything, non-fiction as well as fiction, but historical fiction was an enduring favourite – Geoffrey Trease, Henry Treece (Have I got those the right way round?), Mary Renault, somebody who wrote bodice rippers about a girl called Angelique (Sergeanne Golon? Can that be right? What an excellent name…), Jean Plaidy – anything I could get my hands on. (Except Georgette Heyer. For some reason I didn’t take to her, though I know she has many fans among the History Girls.) Gail Rebuck has recently written an article about some research into how reading fiction develops empathy. It’s always good when research confirms what you knew already. I certainly used to enter fully into the worlds of the books I read, and feel that I was indeed the young Queen Elizabeth, the tragic Mary Queen of Scots, the gorgeous Angelique (though that really was a bit of a stretch).

But one day, it struck me that, living as I did on a council estate in an ex-mining town in the East Midlands, actually my ancestral self would probably not have been a princess or a Lady Susan at all – she would have been a skivvy or a peasant, living in a hovel rather than a castle. I’d read a book about the development of houses – I knew just how dreadful those picturesque thatched cottages really would have been. I wouldn’t have learned how to read, I wouldn’t have had gorgeous dresses and jewels, I wouldn’t have gone to court – I’d have been lucky to have a piece of ribbon and a hunk of dry cheese to call my own. I was outraged. How unfair was that?

So does historical fiction always take for its subjects the great and the (possibly) good? No, of course it doesn’t. There are lots of examples of books which take for their subject ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. Back in the day, one of my favourite novels was Mist Over Pendle, by Robert Neill. This was one of the very few books which I borrowed over and over again. It told the true story of the Witches of Pendle, three witches with the fantastic names of Demdike, Chattox and Squinting Lizzie, who were accused and tried in Lancashire in the sixteenth century. But it told the story from the point of view of Margery, the young cousin of the local magistrate whose job it was to deal with the witches. What do I remember about it? I remember the atmosphere of brooding menace, like Pendle Hill which loomed over the countryside. But most of all I remember a description of a new dress Margery had. It was made in glorious colours, scarlet and russet and gold, and there were all these wonderful words I’d never come across before, like ‘sarsnet’ and ‘kirtle’. I could see the brightness of the colours, feel the luxuriant texture of the fabrics, experience the pleasure as Margery and I put it on for the first time. All by itself, that description was enough to take me into that place, that time, that story. (Incidentally, I looked Mist Over Pendle up, for the purpose of this post, and discovered that after being out of print for many years it was reprinted last year. So I’ve sent off for a copy – which is risky, I know: I hope it will live up to my memory of it.)

More recently, there have been masses of books about ordinary people: for example, Ann Turnbull’s Civil War story,  Alice In Love And War. This tells the story of a girl who follows the army in search of adventure.  Alice plunges you into visceral reality – you come to know the detail of how it would feel to be on the road in the seventeenth century. I particularly remember a description of camp followers making a meal over a fire. It’s vivid and convincing; you can practically feel the dirt crusted beneath your finger nails, feel the exhaustion and discomfort, smell the soup cooking in the pot. Alice’s story is every bit as compelling as that of the young Elizabeth Tudor.

And yet, and yet – the stories of Elizabeth and the other Tudors clearly exert a huge fascination over both writers and readers. They are the subjects of so many books, by Jean Plaidy, Dorothy Dunnet, Philippa Gregory and our own Harriet Castor to name but a few. Is it more rewarding to write about real – and ruling – figures from history? And if so, why?

I must admit I used to read historical fiction partly as a way of learning about history. At my school, history was deathly dull. It seemed to consist largely of lists of  the inventions and advantages of the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions. So there’s one reason to read, and therefore to write about real figures – to bring history alive.

Another is that you already have the bones of a story there: all you have to do is add the flesh and the lovely clothing. Against that, there is a panoply of experts who are ready to pounce on any inaccuracy, any tinkering with historical fact. (You can avoid this if you go back early enough. That’s one of the good things about writing about the Dark Ages, as I found when I wrote about Alfred the Great – there aren’t too many incontrovertible facts, so there’s plenty of room for poetic license.)

Perhaps too there is something about historical figures and verisimilitude. One of the things novels have to do is convince you, while you’re reading, that the imagined world is a perfectly coherent and possible one. Perhaps the inclusion of historical figures provides a shortcut to this conviction – ie Henry VIII was real, he’s in this book, so the world of this book is real…? I certainly think it’s quite a canny move to have the occasional historical figure dropping in, even if the rest of the book is about ordinary people. When I read Mary Hooper’s Fallen Grace, I was thrilled when Charles Dickens had a walk-on part. It was almost like spotting a celebrity in the street. And it acted like an anchor: an assurance that this world and all the things that were happening in it were perfectly possible.

I like both kinds of HF. I like books about the movers and shakers of past times because they explore the complexity behind the time line, the extent to which the quirks of individual personalities influence great events. But I also like books about ‘ordinary’ people, the flotsam and jetsam on the sea of history. After all, that’s what most of us would have been. (Although maybe, just maybe, if I went far enough back I might have been an aristocratic Lady Susan? No? Oh well, all right then. I’ll just go off and scrub the steps. I know my place…)