Public Battles, Private Wars

A few months ago I wrote about a book set in the 1960s, arguing that it could legitimately be seen as a historical novel.

As policeman get younger, so it seems does history. I've been reading Laura Wilkinson's Public Battles, Private Wars, which is set in the Miners’ Strike of 1984/5. The events described happened just thirty years ago – nowhere near the agreed minimum for a historical novel. (Few people will accept that anything less than forty years ago could possibly be described as historical.) Yet the world described is barely recognisable: nobody has a mobile phone, or an Internet connection. The story starts with Mandy Walker trying to get on in life by attending a typing class: there are no word processors and the typewriters have ribbons. Will younger readers even understand what Laura Wilkinson is talking about?

It's not material changes that mark this off as a different world, though: it's a whole way of life and the social attitudes that go with it. Mandy lives in a mining village. Life is defined by the pit and the men who go down it. Women stay at home, cook, and bring up the kids. Their sons will, in turn, go down the pit. Their daughters may dream of escape but their highest aspiration is likely to be to work (like Mandy's schoolfriend Ruth) as a local primary school teacher, trapped forever in the mining community.

Not many people much under fifty will have any conception of how important mining used to be, not only economically, but socially. The destruction of the mining industry destroyed whole communities and, with them, a way of life. Ancient certainties about the roles of men and women crumbled. The Labour movement was divided and never really recovered. There are still families split by ancient memories of scabs and picket line violence.

It’s impossible to write about the Miners’ Strike without being political. It was, ultimately, a political strike. The irony was that people were striking for the right to see their sons inherit jobs that were dirty, dangerous and, in some senses, degrading. And the women who supported them were fighting to maintain a way of life in which women would always be second class citizens. (Life in a pit village was defined by your work in the pit and women were, by law, forbidden from working as miners.)

Laura Wilkinson’s characters are caught in this dilemma. Writing from a committed feminist perspective, she highlights the way that Mandy’s life is limited by the pit, her marriage and the hierarchy of the village. In the book, as the strike continues, Mandy grows and develops as the men move inexorably toward defeat.

At times, as a man in 2014, I found revisiting the Guardian Women’s Page of those days intensely irritating. But (returning, belatedly, to my initial point) it is a historical novel. The attitudes expressed were the attitudes of the time. Reading it gives an insight into huge social and political changes that young people who have grown up with New Labour and post-feminism can have little understanding of.

There are all kinds of reasons why historical novels can be worthwhile. One is that it is only by understanding our history that we can truly understand ourselves. Watch The Call Centre and see the young people of South Wales earning their living by selling home insulation on the phone and mock their salon tans and their limited ambitions if you will. But the reason that some of the main employers in that part of the world are call centres goes back to the events of 1984 and, if some of the young people seem to struggle with their lives, those are the lives that Britain gave them when it closed the pits with no idea of what would come next.

Writing this, I feel an anger that I had forgotten for thirty years. Sometimes we should feel angry, and Laura Wilkinson has written a worthwhile reminder of why.



Laura Wilkinson's Public Battles, Private Wars is published by Accent Press and, at the time of writing, is on sale at 99p on Kindle.

Beyond the Call of Duty

His Majesty's Confidential Agent has been written as the first of a series of books which will follow the adventures (initially real, but increasingly fictional as the series goes on) of James Burke. My hero owes more than a little to Flashman and, although it's not intended as primarily military history, you can't set a series of adventure stories around the Napoleonic wars without there being a lot of military stuff in them. So it was interesting for me to read Fred Lilley's book Beyond The Call Of Duty. His hero, Charles Sherrington Bagshott, has been at all the most exciting British military engagements from Burma in 1853 to Sudan in 1883, bravely fighting for Queen and country.

I really, really wanted to hate this book. Any book which starts (apparently without any irony) with the famous aphorism Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, is alien to our modern way of thinking. Surely people rejected this notion once Wilfred Owen had thoroughly discredited it in World War I? Lilley, though, seems to have missed modern attitudes to colonial warfare altogether. In a blog post of his, he claims, with an innocence that one almost has to admire, that British troops never took reprisals against civilian populations. Anybody who knows anything about the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, to name just one example close to my heart, will know that that is rubbish.

Packing so many campaigns into one book, means that the book reads more like a series of very short stories than a single novel. It provides an instant summary of the British Army actions in the mid- 19th century and, somewhat my irritation, it proves to be very good.

Because I researched the Indian Mutiny quite carefully for my own book, Cawnpore, I read that bit with particular care, in order to see how historically accurate this novel is. The answer is that, like most people (probably including me in some of my books), Lilley gets quite a lot of the fine detail wrong. He does, however, have a good grasp of the general sweep of history and of the role that the British Army played. More importantly, in terms of reading pleasure, it's really rather well written. It's not a long book and it races from one thrill packed incident to another without too much time for the reader’s interest to flag. There are some attempts to make Bagshott into a rounded and credible figure (he's given an Indian wife and twin sons, for example) but he remains somewhat two-dimensional. This is probably inevitable, given the sort of book that it is, and not necessarily that much of a bad thing. Lilley sees the British Army as officered by brave, patriotic men who are convinced of the rightness of their cause and don't think too much about the politics of the situations they find themselves in. Bagshott epitomises these values to the point of caricature and any attempts to turn him into a "real" person with self-doubt and moral uncertainties would undermine the whole raison d'être of the book.

When I was born, Empire Day was still celebrated every 24^th May. In my lifetime, the Empire has gone from being a source of pride to something that the British feel vaguely ashamed of. My books, The White Rajah and Cawnpore, both try to show that the relationship between colonisers and the people they colonised was less black-and-white than we tend to see it nowadays. To that extent, Beyond The Call Of Duty is a useful antidote to the contemporary view that British colonialism was a wholly bad thing that is best forgotten about. That doesn't make its underlying assumptions and attitudes right, but it does make an interesting read.

Buy it for a Guardian reader for Christmas.

Review sites

Someone has just said that they'd like to review my book, but want to know a good site. Here's two:

(1) Amazon. Go to the book's page on Amazon (in the uk it'shttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Majestys-Confidential-Agent-James-Burke-ebook/dp/B00JZZS5JY) Scroll down to 'Customer Reviews'. Click the button to say you want to write a review. You can only write a review if you're registered with Amazon, but if you have ever bought anything from them, you are. When you've written it, click the button saying you want to read over what you've written and then click the button to publish it. Done!
(2) Goodreads. You have to be registered to post on Goodreads, but it's a nice site and it's free. 'His Majesty's Confidential Agent' is athttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22071282-his-majesty-s-confidential-agent. Immediately below the details of the book is a section headed 'My Review' Click on the green text that says 'Add a review'. You can use the same text as for Amazon if you want.

Reviews make a big difference to books that have limited marketing budgets behind them, so if you did like 'His Majesty's Confidential Agent', please let people know. Remember that you don't need to write a long review. Just a couple of lines saying what you thought of the book will help.

Many thanks.

Take Two

If you missed my post here on the Industrial Revolution in Scotland, or if you would like to see an extended version with extra photographs, check out the English History Authors blog.

Meet my main character.

This is part of a continuing series called, “Meet My Main Character.” It is the brain child of Debra Brown who is the Administrator of English Historical Fiction Authors, a really worthwhile website for anyone interested in obscure bits of British history. (Debra’s an American, so the whole England/Scotland/Wales bit tends to pass her by.)  The main website, despite the name, doesn’t have so much to do with fiction. This does. 

1) What is the name of your character? Is he fictional or a historic person?

James Burke was a spy for the British during the Napoleonic Wars. He was a real person and the story is based around real events in his life. That said, he was a very good spy, so there’s a lot we don’t know about him. This means that I get the chance to tell a good story without too much fear of being told I’m definitely wrong.

2) When and where is the story set?

It starts in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1792, but the story pivots on the British invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806. It takes in Spain and Brazil as well, though. People in those days travelled around much more than most of us realise.

3) What should we know about him?

James’ father is an impoverished gentleman in Ireland, living off the rents of tenant farmers. Although this gives him the status of ‘gentleman’, there is no money to enable him to live the lifestyle that James wants. James is desperate to get away from Ireland and make a success of himself in Society. He decides his best bet is to join the army but, to his horror, he finds himself caught in intelligence work. He’s a snob and a social climber and hates being a spy, but he’s good at the work. He’s also never slow to take advantage of any opportunities to make money or influential friends that may come his way in his adventures.

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his life?

He realises that there are more important things than personal advancement and he risks a lot for a cause he has come to believe in. More immediately, people keep threatening to kill him.

5) What is the personal goal of the character?

He starts out by wanting to make a lot of money and move in the highest levels of Society. On a day-to-day level, he cares about completing his mission for Britain and surviving in the conflicts between England, Spain, France, and South American rebels. Later, he gets caught up in the politics of South American independence and realises that there is more to life than his personal advancement. Unsurprisingly, there’s a girl involved.

6) Is there a title for this novel, and can we read more about it?

It’s called His Majesty’s Confidential Agent. There’s more about it HERE. There’s a sequel on the way, provisionally called Burke in Egypt. Yes, he gets around!

7) When can we expect the book to be published?

It was published by Accent Press at the beginning of May. Burke in Egypt should be published later this year.

Thanks for visiting the post. The next ‘Meet My Main Character’ post will be by Jane Pollard  in two days’ time (on Wednesday).

The Cover

So here it is: the new cover for 'The White Rajah'.

The background picture is a contemporary picture of Kuching in Borneo, where the story is set. The sword featured is a kris. I'll be posting more about those soon.

'The White Rajah' is officially republished next month, but it looks like it should be available on Amazon in the next day or two. I'll let you know.

Strawberry Hill House

This weekend I finally got around to visiting Strawberry Hill House. It’s only a couple of miles or so away from us, and it's ridiculous but we never been there since it was opened to the public a few years ago. It's supposed to mark the start of the Gothic revival in British architecture and it was built over several decades in the second half of the 18th century. It was finished in 1776, so it pre-dates the period of my latest book, Burke in the Land of Silver, though not by much.  

The house was built by Horace Walpole, the son of Britain's first Prime Minister. He had acquired land near the Thames at Twickenham. It was an attractive location, with many grand houses on the stretch of the river from Kew Palace to Hampton Court. Neighbours included Henrietta Howard, who had been the mistress of King George II. Alexander Pope, who had died in 1744 had lived less than half a mile away and built his famous grotto in Twickenham.

Walpole’s book, The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, is regarded as Britain's first Gothic novel. Walpole was a huge fan of Gothicism and decided to build himself a small but perfect Gothic palace. The result is shown in the photo below:

Strawberry Hill House. Photo reproduced under Wiki Commons licence

Walpole’s grand design stretched as far as the round tower. The small section that stretches beyond the tower (with an outdoor staircase leading to the first floor) was built later as a ballroom and other rooms were added to the original house. The whole thing, as built by Walpole, combined a Gothic grandeur with a very domestic scale. If you count the windows, you’ll see that it’s not that large. Indeed, it was intended only as a summer villa and was closed up in the winter. Staff there will tell you that it is still very cold on chilly days.

The building was always intended to be open to visitors. Originally it housed Walpole's impressive collection of art, although one of his descendants sold all of it off in 1842, having gone bankrupt. The idea was that a journey through the house should take you from its dark, mysterious entrance hall through rooms lit by skylights and stained-glass windows, until you arrived in the great State Rooms, full of light and gilding. The photo below shows the Gallery. Fifty-six feet long, thirteen wide and seventeen high, this is the most splendid room in the house. The gold leaf used on the ceiling was the most expensive single element of the restoration. As with all the other detail in the house, the Gothic elements have been shamelessly stolen from elsewhere. In this case, the ceiling is a copy of that in one of the side aisles of the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey. Although visually convincing, it is not really a fan vault, since it does not support the roof, being made of papier mache.

 The Gallery at Strawberry Hill House. 

Originally, the walls here (mostly covered with red damask) would have had a lot more paintings on them. The paintings were lost when Walpole’s collection was sold off, although they are gradually being replaced with copies.

The use of other materials to give the effect of stone is common throughout the building. Many of the apparently stone walls and ceilings are brick and wood panelling, carefully painted to give the appearance of stone. Similarly, some of the fireplaces, which may look like stone or marble, are painted wood. A good example is the chimney piece in the Library. (The painting that would have hung in the middle has been located and the gap will soon be filled with a copy of it.) Again, the details are copied from genuinely Gothic elements: in this case the chimney piece is based on the tomb of John of Eltham Earl of Cornwall in Westminster Abbey while the stone work is copied from the tomb of Thomas Duke of Clarence at Canterbury.

The Library. 

Our visit to Strawberry Hill vastly improved a wet and miserable Bank Holiday. I recommend it.

Nearest station: Strawberry Hill (from Waterloo). The house is a five to ten minute walk from the station: follow the sign at the end of each platform.