Historical Fictions, Fictional Histories - by Katherine Langrish

 

So we were sitting, just us two, tucked into the cosy corner of a pleasant dockside pub in Bristol, looking forward to a good chat over a hot meal before heading out into the frozen grey February air to visit Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s marvellous ship the ss Great Britain. Nothing could have been nicer. Or it would have been, if it hadn’t been for the over-energetic conversation of the three people at the next table: a man, rather full of himself – and two admiring women. The man held forth, the women chipped in, adding supporting anecdotes. Their voices were penetrating. It was impossible to ignore them. We tried to talk between ourselves, but every attempt failed. We were being drowned out.

The man was going on about Iraq and Syria and Jordan and ISIS. After some time he got off the atrocities and moved to the jocular.  ‘… And you know, some people really are called that? Isis - it’s a real name? It’s the name of one of those Egyptian gods? There was this thing in the paper about a baby called Isis, they were wondering if they ought to change her name. And they could, you see, but it would all depend on what her brothers thought. There were three of them, one called Al, one called Kye, and one called Ida.  Ha ha ha!’  Both women laughed heartily. The man leaned back. ‘But that other disaster, the one in Glasgow, the bin lorry that ran away and killed that family. I don’t know what that was all about, the driver says he had a heart attack or something…’

On it went, and on. Ghastly tragedies treated as lunchtime snacks. Our quiet meal was being ruined. D. muttered, ‘It’s like sitting next to a whirlpool, I keep being sucked in sideways.’

‘Maybe we should start a whirlpool of our own,’ I said.

We eyed one another.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Who would have thought they could have kept the old lady locked up in the attic for three years?’

            ‘Terrible,’ I agreed. ‘The family tried to hush it up, but it was a shocking business.’

            ‘And feeding her on nothing but raspberries and brandy, all that time.’

‘To be fair,’ I said, ‘that was all she would eat. She’d insisted on that diet herself. She really could be very difficult.’

‘She was mad, of course.’

‘She was by the end of it.’

‘And then it all came out.’

‘It had to,’ I said, ‘once the neighbours reported the screams. There was money involved, I suppose?’

‘An inheritance,’ he said dourly. ‘All the money from the sheep-frogging empire her great-grandfather established.’

‘Remind me what that was?’

‘They were trying to make woolly jumpers.’

I choked and recovered. ‘No no, that was just an old joke. I’ve remembered about it now.  It was a new technique of twisting wool into a special thread to make the braid, you know, that was used for decorating Army dress uniforms.’

‘Frogging!’ he said, enlightened. ‘Of course!’

‘Yes, for the Hussars and the other regiments. It was a very important business. In the end they were supplying the whole British Army. The family had mills all over Lancashire and Yorkshire. It all started in the 1840’s. Obadiah Blenkinsop was the founder. He was well thought of.’

‘He was a tight-fisted man, a pillar of the Church.’

‘Very moral. He built one of those model villages for his factory hands to live in.’

‘Like Saltaire.’

‘Yes, but this was on the Calder. Unfortunately, he took his obsession with social engineering a little too far –’

‘He wanted to lower birth rates. His employees weren’t allowed more than three children per family.’

‘That’s right. He had little flaps, like cat-flaps, built into the houses so he could spy on his workforce.  They were called Blenkinsop’s Peepholes. Stewards would go the rounds at night to check that no hanky-panky was going on…’

‘If a family had more than three, the spare children would disappear into the mills.’

‘Cruel times.’

‘Fatal. All that dangerous machinery…’

The two women at the next table were still chattering blithely, but I’d noticed that the man had for some time been strangely silent. At this point he pushed back his chair and disappeared to the Gents. When he came back:

‘You’ve heard about the race to register the patent?’ D. asked me.

‘No, tell me!’

‘You see, Brunel had independently come up with an invention very similar to Blenkinsop’s Sheep-Frogger. The two men found out about it over dinner at a London club, and came to a gentleman’s agreement. They were to race one another to London by canal boat, one travelling along the Grand Union Canal, the other down the Kennet and Avon. The finish was the Patent Office at Somerset House on the Strand: whoever got there first would register the patent. It took weeks.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was a very close thing.  Blenkinsop was ahead, but as he was hurrying along the Strand he happened to look back – and there was a tall stovepipe hat, wagging along above the crowds in hot pursuit.’

‘Brunel’s trademark!’

‘Of course. It must have been a bad moment for Blenkinsop. He put on a spurt, but the two arrived almost simultaneously at Somerset House – only to find the gates shut. Neither of them could get in. There’d been a quarantine order slapped on all foreign patents…’

‘Ah,’ I broke in, ‘that must have been in the middle of the Great Tapioca Epidemic of 1842 –’

But we shall never know more. At this point the three people on the table next to us paid up and departed, and we were left alone to laugh. 

Picture credits:

"Bristol MMB 43 SS Great Britain" Photo by mattbuck. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

"Isambard Kingdom Brunel" by Robert Howlett, 1857, Wikimedia Commons

Author Maths, by Y S Lee

The US/Canadian cover (Candlewick Press)

One of the things I find consistently surprising in historical fiction is how very long it takes to get from one place to another. My Mary Quinn Mysteries (called the Agency series, in North America) are set in London between 1858 and 1860. They’re too urban to make use of the railways that criss-crossed the country and a shade too early for the first intra-city underground trains (the Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863). Most of the travel in my novels takes place either on foot or by horse-power: carriages, cabs, and of course, simply riding on horseback. By 1858, there were also horse-drawn omnibuses that, like our present-day buses, plied regular routes through the city. 

The UK/Australian cover (Walker Books)

The climax of Rivals in the City features a fair amount of running around between locations in central London. One of the first things I did when plotting it was create a chart showing the different sites, the distances between them, and how long it would take to move from one point to another. In order not to spoil the plot (Rivals will be published next week in the U. S. and Canada; it’s already available in the UK), I’ve renamed the locations after four of my favourite North American cities. This, of course, is a fiction upon a fiction; the real locations are London landmarks. Otherwise, here’s what my chart looks like:



Timing the final action

Locations	Distance in miles	Walking (in mins)	Running (in mins)	Horseback (in mins)
Vancouver to Toronto	2.7	54	27	22
Toronto to New York	3.2	64	32	25
New York to Montreal	1.9	41	19	16
Montreal to Vancouver	1.9	40	19	16
New York to Vancouver	1	20	10	8

I assumed an average running speed of about 6 miles/10 km per hour - a pretty fast clip for a woman burdened with heavy clothes on slick, inconsistently paved, and poorly lit urban streets (it’s after dark). But I’m talking about the women of the Agency, an elite detective firm. Not only are they are in excellent physical form, they are responding to an emergency.

I assumed a horse trot of 7-8 mph, since poor road quality and night-time visibility again make it impossible to canter. With horseback, I also needed to allow tie-up time and the need to rest or change horses. Riding turned out to be not much faster than running, but riding made it possible for a character to arrive at an important location looking respectable.

As it worked out, the time elapsed for a series of important messages to be relayed was:

- 57 minutes: for a character to run from Vancouver to Toronto and back again

- 41 minutes, plus delays while tying-up a horse: for a character to ride from Toronto to New York, and then from New York to Montreal

- 30 to 35 minutes, plus time for marshalling and instructions: for a large group to walk quickly from Montreal to Vancouver

This left me with a space of 2 ¼ hours, the minimum period during which my heroine, Mary Quinn, would be alone in “Vancouver” after sounding the alarm. It turned out to be the perfect window of time to allow her to take action, imperil herself, yet receive help at just the right moment.

I love this kind of concrete plotting, and wonder if any of you do the same. How do you work out timelines, near-misses, and rescues?
--
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press), a quartet of novels featuring a girl detective in Victorian London. Rivals in the City, the last in the series, is published in the US and Canada on March 10.

Women, history and historical fiction, for today I am News Central - Gillian Polack

My post this month is about events, for I am surrounded by them right now. I want to talk about just two of them here: the first is Women’s History Month for 2015, which started today, and the second is the first ever Historical Novel Society Conference Downunder in three weeks.

I’ve been involved in Australia’s Women’s History Month celebrations since before Australia had any. I was one of the very small number of women targeted by Helen Leonard in 1999. She said “We need a Women’s History Month. Let’s make it March so that we can get the benefit of America’s Women’s History Month.” And so we decided it would be so, over coffee. When people ask, I can still show them the location of the rather small coffee table, at a café in Canberra.

Last year I handed all my papers to Lulu Respall-Turner (another of the founders) and the year before gave the electronic files to the Women’s History Month committee. So that’s it from me. Except it isn’t, because every year I throw a small shindig on my blog.

This year I will have a group of women writers who are talking about things that are quite personal.

It struck me that we (women) have fewer hero narratives than men. We not often the centre of narratives. So this year, throughout March, a group of living women are at the centre of narratives, often their own. If March weren’t so short, there would be more of these stories by women writers about themselves or people close to them: I ran out of days and had to stop asking writers I wanted to hear from. I strongly suspect I need a full year with this subject, and that even then I’d only scratch the surface.

I didn’t tell any of the writers “I want your hero stories” – but women being women, that is what I’m getting. There's an astonishing amount of hero-story in everyday problems (Campbell described heroes from the wrong direction, I suspect). The first post has already gone up, and is Wendy Orr talking about breaking her neck. One of Australia’s most successful fiction writers emerged into public awareness about the same time as she was crippled, she was told, for life. 

The posts will be at both my writerly blog and on LiveJournal throughout March. You can find Wendy’s story here and here.

One of the Women's History Month launches, from the early days. Carmen Lawrence launching in the Speaker's garden at Parliament House, Canberra. Photograph: Gillian Polack (of course).

And now, for the Historical Novel Society. I first encountered it more years ago than I can think of. It was members of the HNS who brought me into the historical fiction fold by saying “Yes, we know you don’t write historical fiction, it, but you can advise those of us who do.” 

This is the first time the HNS has run a conference in Australasia. It's in Sydney in just a few weeks. The first evening is at the State Library, which is a building I always have time for. I’m hoping this conference will be the first of many and that its Australian chapter will be as vigorous as those elsewhere.

The conference brings together those of us from all corners of history-in-fiction, including fantasy and, of course, the Middle Ages. Felicity Pulman is launching three books there (or rather, I am launching them for her, a fact that intimidates me), there will be super-sessions for writers, and the program is just amazing. So many of Australia’s best writers, and they all love history! You can find more about it from the HNS website.

Note: This post is shorter than usual because I’m full of books. One coming out now (my new novel) and one in June (history!) and it’s peak teaching period and even finding time to breath feels difficult. Next month I’ll write something extra-juicy to make up. In the meantime, have a nice picture of a medieval mikvah in Montpellier (I took this in 2011). And no, I have no idea why I have an alliterative tendency today. No doubt I'll recover from it eventually.

Child migrants to Australia by Rosemary Hayes

Some years ago I was asked by my then publisher, Penguin Australia, to write a story about child migration to Australia, a subject about which I knew nothing. However, from the moment I began to research it, I became totally hooked, and the resulting book ‘Blood Ties’ was published in 2001.

There were many religious and philanthropic organisations in the UK who sent children overseas ‘for a better life’ but it seemed sensible to focus on one – Barnardo’s – whose history was well documented and whose archives I could access.

In my editing days I had worked on a children’s book about Dr Barnardo, so I knew something about him and his work.  He started his first ‘ragged school’ in London in 1867 which gave a basic education to poor children.  Then, in 1870, the first boys’ home, in Stepney, was opened.  This gave food and shelter to desperate boys and, following the death from exposure of an 11 year old who was turned away because the shelter was full, their policy was never to refuse entry to a needy child. Indeed a sign was posted outside the home ‘No destitute child ever refused admission.’ 

In 1876, Barnardo’s home for girls was opened in Barkingside and it is still there today; this is where I began my research. The place is no longer surrounded by leafy countryside as it was in the late 19^th century and the buildings have long ceased to house destitute girls, but there is a library there where friendly staff showed me records and explained how the home was run and the original thinking behind the child migration scheme, which began in the late 19^th century and continued until 1967. But more of that later.

For its time, the Barkingside home was enlightened.  Children were not housed in some grim institution, but in cottages which surrounded a large green area and each cottage had a ‘cottage mother’ who looked after up to 20 girls  Many of these cottage mothers were, apparently, well meaning, well bred, Godfearing spinsters and although some were loving and sympathetic to their charges, others had little understanding of the needs of children and were more rigid in disciplining them. However, a lot of the girls must have come with overwhelming problems and it can’t have been an easy job.

The girls’ home was looking to the future, too.  When they were old enough, girls worked in a purpose build steam laundry on the site and were also trained for domestic service.

There was a church on the site, too, and a church choir in which many of the girls sang, and celebrations held to mark such anniversaries as Empire Day.

However, not all children in Barnardo’s care remained in the homes. Many were boarded out or emigrated. First to Canada then, after the First World War children began to be settled in large numbers in Australia. The Australian authorities welcomed immigration from Britain as a means of tackling the labour shortage after the war and curbing non-white immigration from Asia. Barnardo’s sent its first official party of 47 boys in 1921. They were followed two years later by 32 girls. The charity sent a total of 2,784 children to Australia, mostly in the years before 1939. Emigration was suspended during the Second World War and resumed in 1947 but the numbers sent after the war were much smaller and the scheme finally ended in 1967.

What did surprise me, when I was reading through the experiences of ex-Barnardo’s children who had emigrated to Australia, was the randomness of the whole thing.  It seemed that children were selected, shown a few pictures of life in Australia and told that that’s were they were going then, a few weeks later, they were on board ship.

Children were encouraged to see Barnardo’s as their family and weren’t allowed to access their records. In some cases, emigrating children were told that their parents were dead, even though this may not have been true.  It was a very different age and it was genuinely thought that this could help a child make a fresh start. The emphasis at that time was on moral and physical welfare rather than emotional wellbeing.

My story ‘Blood Ties’ was based on an amalgam of the experiences of emigrant children and I based the Australian part of the story on the home at Picton in New South Wales. Here, all the children, to an extent, helped run the place, doing domestic and gardening jobs, then, when they were old enough most of the boys were sent to work on farms and the girls into domestic service.  Some of these ex-Barnardo’s children looked back with gratitude and had only good to say of the organization, others had had less than happy experiences.  Many of them, in later life, began searching for their roots.

‘Blood Ties’ tells the story of a young Australian musician, Katie, who is diagnosed with leukemia shortly before her grandmother dies.  Only then does the family learn that Gran was a Barnardo’s child, sent from England to live in the Picton home. Time is running out for Katie and as the family searches desperately for a bone marrow match, Katie begins to relive her gran’s experiences through a series of vivid dreams.

One of the letters I received from readers was from an ex-Barnardo’s boy, then in his seventies, who was still searching for his natural family and was convinced he knew the grandmother in the story. I hated telling him that she was fictional but his letter was a powerful reminder of the importance of roots, of knowing where you come from, who you are, and of the psychological damage that can haunt you all your life if you do not.

In its time, child migration was considered an appropriate response to the social problems of the day, even if, by today’s standards, the practice seems cruel. Charities genuinely believed that migration gave children a chance to escape from poverty and offered them a fresh start in a healthier environment. These ideas continued largely unchallenged until after the Second World War when the emphasis shifted towards keeping children and their families together in their own communities.

(Mary Hoffman is still away but in a different place)