Plodding along

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1825, Cambridge, Gregory 1, Gregory Hardiman, Regency, research, writing

Goodness, I had forgotten quite how slow it is writing the first book in a series.  To be fair, I didn’t realise at the time that “Fatal Forgery” was the first in that series – I thought it was a standalone book until Sam caught hold of me and wouldn’t let go – but I certainly noticed that I speeded up the writing through the series.  I thought maybe it was just me becoming a really good writer (hah!) but it turns out that the magic ingredient was familiarity: familiarity with my characters, and familiarity with the location.  And as I embark on “Gregory 1”, both of those are missing.

Yes, I have been canny enough to stick with a familiar timeframe: “Gregory 1” is set in 1825, which is the same year as for “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  But I’m already finding that 1825 in modern, exciting, capital city London is not the same as 1825 in staid, academic, market town Cambridge.

And as for the other things that are slowing me down, it’s the usual stumbling blocks for the writer of historical fiction.  You start out with a simple sentence: He turned left into Sidney Street and headed for the market to buy fish for his meal.  Now, was it “Sidney Street”, or should I go with the nineteenth-century alternative of “Sidney-street”?  And I’m writing about a Tuesday – was the market in Cambridge on Tuesdays?  And were the fish sellers there every market day?  And were they actually in the main market, or near the “beast market” around the corner?  Perhaps he can do without a meal today!  I’m not complaining – well, not much – but it’s been a bit of a shock to go from days when I could quite happily pour out two or three thousand words, to feeling exhausted after only five hundred.  But at least this time, as I know already that it’s a series, I can comfort myself that time spent now on learning the details will be a good investment for future books.  Now, back to that fish: will Gregory choose Colchester oysters, salmon or herrings? Or even a tasty eel…

Like a pig in press

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archive, Cambridge, Gregory 1, library, Metropolitan Police, newspaper, Plank 7, research, Samuel Plank

I am having just the most fun.  For some unknown reason (I guess I once showed an interest in the website) I have had an email from a newspaper archive service offering me a free three-day weekend pass to their records.  Three days of snooping around in old newspapers, especially given that I am library-starved during lockdown – yes please!  In short, you can put in any search term and time frame and the service rootles through its “20,200+ newspapers from the 1700s–2000s”.  It’s not comprehensive – sadly, there’s no sign of the “Cambridge Chronicle” that was published on Fridays in the 1820s and would have been useful for my new Cambridge-set series – but there’s certainly enough to keep me going.

I have written a long list of search terms, trying to think of anything that might be useful for “Plank 7” or the Cambridge series, while hoping that I don’t stumble across anything that contradicts something I have written in an earlier Sam book.  I have been clipping and saving like a demon, and have devised a new file-naming convention so that I can see at a glance which topic it covers (Crockford’s gambling club, Met Police, counterfeiting, university constables, etc.).  This has made me realise that the articles I had sourced before, in the good old days when I could go into a real-life archive, are named rather chaotically, so I need to go back through those and rename and reorganise them.  Don’t feel sorry for me for one single second: I’m in seventh heaven when I’m researching and organising.

I have also taken the opportunity to search for my own surname in the press; it’s unusual enough to accumulate only 393 matches between 1802 and today (and some of those are mis-readings of the words “grassy” and “grocery”).  I was hoping for something glamorous or scandalous or wealthy, but sadly the high point of the family’s achievements seems to be a W E Grossey triumphing after “close and spirited competition” to win the Church of Ireland Young Men’s Society Elocution Competition in 1891.

A man of many words

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Cambridge, dialect, glossary, Gregory Hardiman, London, Norfolk, research, Samuel Plank, slang, vocabulary

As I mentioned a little while ago, I am concentrating some energy on making sure that Gregory sounds sufficiently different to Sam – but when I get caught up in the plot and am steaming ahead with the action, there we are again with Sam.  So I have taken a little break and have been researching suitable Norfolk and military words with which I can make Gregory sound like his own man.  I don’t want to make him a comic figure – far from it – but a few choice words of dialect and we’ll soon having him sounding a world away from that metropolitan Londoner.

It seems that the Norfolk dialect – sometimes called Broad Norfolk – is itself a blend of many influences.  Several words still in use today – such as spink, meaning finch (the bird) – are Anglo-Saxon.  Others – staithe (landing place), flag (yellow iris) and grup (shallow trench) – are Danish in origin, left over from the Viking occupation of East Anglia in the ninth century.  Still others have entered the dialect from the continent, brought in by the seventeenth century influx of Protestant refugees from Flanders and France.  A good example of this type of word is plain, which in Norfolk is used to signify a town or village square. The same word (spelt slightly differently) is found in exactly the same context in Eindhoven in the Netherlands and in Beziers in France.  More useful perhaps for Gregory’s everyday life will be blar (to cry or weep), loke (a blind alley) and – my favourite – fumble-fisted (clumsy).

Perhaps understandably, most of the period-specific military slang I have unearthed concerns insults, alcohol and army life.  The different branches of the forces had a friendly rivalry: the cavalry called the infantry foot wobblers, while the navy called soldiers being transported on their ships shifting ballast – and everyone called the Grenadiers bacon bolters (it seems to be a reference to their greed).  Drummers were sheepskin fiddlers, ensigns were rag carriers, and anything French was parleyvous.

It seems that my usual glossary at the end of each book is going to be a mixed bag, with words from the Regency period, and from Norfolk, and from the military – I shall have to devise a code to avoid confusion (of me, I mean, not of my savvy readers – and there’s another word from French).

Decisions, decisions

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Cambridge, Gregory Hardiman, plotting, research, Samuel Plank, series

Sam Plank was not meant to live as long as he has done.  When I first wrote “Fatal Forgery” he was only a bit player, but I liked him so much that I rewrote the whole thing from his point of view.  And then I loved him so much that I turned it into a series.  So the Sam in “FF” was a bit accidental: whatever characteristics I gave him there, almost unthinkingly, I then had to carry on into subsequent books.

But Gregory is different.  He already knows that he’s going to have five stories, so he’s in it for the long haul – and so the choices I make now carry much more weight.  I already know quite a bit about his background – his age, where he’s from, what he did before coming to Cambridge – as these were part of my initial research into whether writing about a university constable was even practical.  But as for his life in Cambridge, it’s still all to play for.

Where did he work?  Now, I know what you’re going to say: he worked at the university as a constable.  But that was only a part-time job: constables did most of their work in the evenings, making sure that “junior members of the university” (undergraduates) were safely tucked up in their colleges by 10 pm.  So what did he do with the rest of his time?  (Spoiler alert: I’m fairly sure he’s an ostler.)  And where did he live?  Whatever I decide now, he and I will have to put up with it for at least five books.  It’s nail-biting stuff.  But I think we’re there.  And one enormous, unforeseen benefit of working on Gregory rather than Sam is that – even in times of lock-down – I was able to go out on my bike yesterday and gaze at the house where he lived.

(My husband has just looked over my shoulder at my to do list: the last entry reads “Decide where to find the body”.  That will teach him to be nosy.)

Every book starts with a single paragraph

Tags

Cambridge, Gregory Hardiman, plotting, research, Samuel Plank, Scrivener, writing

The good news is that my plan has gone, well, according to plan.  I did my last bit of general, background, “I don’t know quite what I’ll need but this sounds interesting, and oh, that’s good too, I’d better read that just in case” research on Sunday.  I tell you, those Victorian chroniclers were a gossipy lot – so much so that it sent me off down a rabbit-hole researching defamation law!  Surely you can’t say that, I kept thinking, but apparently they did.  Symbolically I have moved the towering pile of research tomes off my writing desk and onto the floor and will now rely on the notes I took in Scrivener (my research and writing program).

The really good news is that I have indeed started the actual writing.  Well, to be fair, it’s only one paragraph – but it’s a whole paragraph!  This means that I have settled on the outline plot for the first Gregory book.  It’s set in 1825, because that’s the year of the Act for the better Preservation of the Peace and good Order in the Universities of England – which gave Oxford and Cambridge universities the powers to appoint constables.  The Act was passed in July 1825, but my story is starting in February of that year – and that’s all I’m telling you.  Except that valuable artworks, books and bottles of wine are disappearing from one of the colleges…

And the bad news is that no-one has bought a single one of my books – or even downloaded the free guide to the Sam series – since last Thursday.  Here I am, slaving away, wearing my fingers to nubs writing whole paragraphs (well, one whole paragraph) and no-one cares.  Harrumph.

Those were the days

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Cambridge, church, Gregory Hardiman, Regency, research

Beware flashes of inspiration!  I am a demon for making sure that my plots make sense in their time-frame.  (Indeed, one of my most treasured reviews comments that “[Sam and Wilson] do not crack the case in a matter of a quick fortnight, but weeks, months, pass with the crime in hand on-going with other, everyday things, happening in the background”.)  For the Sam series, my main concern was to ensure that things happened in the right order, and that big events did not pass without comment.  But for the Gregory series, my goodness, the calendar takes on the most enormous significance.

Cambridge in the 1820s was a very religious place – the town, and especially the university.  As a result, church high days and holidays were observed without exception, and other events were timetabled to fit in with them.  I found a wonderful – and enjoyably quirky – guide to the university year published by a former university officer in 1854, and I thought, I know, I’ll quickly work my way through it and create a handy ten-year calendar for the 1820s.  Oh the naivete – it has taken me most of the day.

There are certain events whose date is fixed from year to year: there’s Christmas Day, of course, and the Michaelmas (i.e. autumn) term always started on 10 October and finished on 16 December.  But many things move from year to year.  Some are pegged onto other dates – for instance, the Proclamation of the Markets always happened on the second Saturday after the start of the Michaelmas term.  And many depend on Easter, which in turn dictates the start and end dates of the Lent (i.e. summer) term.  Some of these make your head spin.  Have a go at this one: the annual sermon in Burwell was given by the Vice-Chancellor on (wait for it) Midlent Sunday, which is the fourth Sunday after Ash Wednesday.  I am now going to lie down in a darkened room with a cold flannel over my eyes.

Rotten to the cor(poration)

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Cambridge, Gregory Hardiman, plotting, research, The Times, writing

Everyone advises having a routine during lock-down, to manufacture a feeling of achievement and progress, and mine is quite simple: in the morning I do my normal job (these days it involves using Teams or Zoom or Webex to deliver training to people – and take a peek into their lounges at the same time) and in the afternoon I work on the Gregory series.  My plan is to draw a line under my main research this weekend, and – taa dah! – start writing on Monday afternoon.  We’ll see.

But with the current focus on the excellence or otherwise of our public institutions and political structures, I thought a reminder that “t’was ever thus” might offer some perspective.  In 1833, the British central government became sufficiently concerned about the poor standard of local government to set up the Municipal Corporations Commission.  In The Times of 16 November 1833, an article was published commenting on the enquiry of that commission, and specifically on its findings in Cambridge: “Probably no judicial investigation into a public trust ever brought to life more shameless profligacy or more inveterate dishonesty, more bare-faced venality in politics, a more heartless disregard of the claims of the poor in the perversion of funds left for their benefit, or a more degrading subservience to the views of the rich when they appeared in the shape of patrons or distributors of places, a more insatiable cupidity in the corporate officers to enrich themselves with the corporate property, or a more entire neglect of their duties and functions as magistrates, than are presented by the evidence now before us.”  No pussy-footing around in those days, was there?

There’s no denying that there was room for improvement in Cambridge – it was the most rotten of rotten boroughs.  At the time, the municipal affairs of a population of over 20,000 were controlled by 158 freemen, of whom forty didn’t even live in Cambridge.  In the fourteen years leading up to the enquiry, the Commission found that the local Corporation had spent £480 for public purposes – and £1,300 on slap-up dinners.  One alderman had bought Corporation land worth £150 for one guinea (that’s £1.05); another had paid £40 for two acres in Hills Road, which he sold a year later for £400.  And a councillor told the Commissioners rather indignantly that he thought that the Corporation members had every right to expend their income on themselves and their friends: “As it was only Corporation property I would not make the same calculation for a stranger as for a friend.  I would make a little difference, and sometimes a great difference, in favour of a friend – because it was only Corporation property.”

Things had to change.  In came the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which had the effect in Cambridge of reducing the number of aldermen to ten and increasing the number of councillors to thirty – all whom were to be elected by locally-resident rate-payers.  It surprised no-one when, in the first elections after this, every alderman who stood for re-election was defeated.

Sign up, sign up!

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Cambridge, Gregory Hardiman, historical fiction, marketing, publicity, research, update

I know, I know – I’ve been distracted again!  But this time – rare for me – this post is actually topical.  I was reading about the history of Cambridge and I came across several stories about when the bubonic plague hit town in the seventeenth century.  Well, it had been there before, but the seventeenth century was bad, with dangerous outbreaks in 1610, the 1620s, 1630 and then the big one (the Great Plague, as we all learned in primary school) in the 1660s.

Now I’m baffled as to why more of you don’t sign up for my monthly updates – which elaborate on the historical details behind the books – so this is a bit of a teaser.  The update that is scheduled to go out on 1 May is all about plague and pestilence in historical Cambridge, but I won’t tell you much here, apart from a couple of taster highlights:

• The expert at the time was a German “plague doctor” called Dr Milne
• Windows were removed from churches to allow fresh air to blow through
• Forty pest-houses were built on Coldham’s Common, which is still a green area and presumably home to lots of skeletons.

If you’re keen to know more, sign up for the monthly updates!  (And if plague is not your bag, the June update features a hot air balloon and a water velocipede – my research is nothing if not wide-ranging.)

Paying it forward

Tags

bulldog, Cambridge, constable, Gregory Hardiman, research, university constable

I know that in my last post I said that I would be stopping research for a while, but I did just want to remind you that when you are doing your own research, it is always worth asking for help.  I was searching for any documents on constables in Cambridge in the 1820s and came across an advert for a talk about proctors and bulldogs (that’s the slang term for constables) that had been given some years ago at a local historical society.  The speaker had an unusual name so was fairly easy to track down; I sent her an email and she agreed to talk to me.  (She actually lives only a few streets away but of course we cannot meet in person for the time being.)

She said at the outset that she was more of an expert in late Victorian Cambridge, and that she knew very little about the university constables, but she was so generous with her suggestions and book recommendations and views on Cambridge history that I now have several new avenues to explore.  I have ordered a couple of old books (it’s the only shopping I can do these days, apart from food) on the history of the town because – thanks to this conversation – I now realise that I need to have much more of an understanding of the relationship (often but not always vexed) between the corporation, the university and the townspeople.

So if you come across someone who has written an article or given a talk that is even only tangentially relevant to your research, do email or call them – you never know where their knowledge might lead you.  And one day, you’ll be the one sharing your research and paying it forward.

Horse artists and bird stuffers

Tags

Cambridge, Gregory 1, newsletter, Regency, research

With a whole weekend of social isolating at my disposal, I allowed myself the luxury of a deep-dive into Pigot’s.  What, you’ve never used this amazing resource?  Let me enlighten you.  James Pigot started out as a publisher of general directories and in 1811 he began publishing trade directories for Manchester.  His big project – the Commercial Directory – was first published in 1814, and in 1823 he expanded to other cities, including London.  And in 1830 our hero brought out his “National Commercial Directory; Comprising a Directory and Classification of the Merchants, Bankers, Professional Gentlemen, Manufacturers and Traders of the Cities, Towns, Sea-Ports and Principal Villages of the Following Counties, viz Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire”.  Catchy title!  But it does what it says on the tin: it’s basically the forerunner to the Yellow Pages.  And for getting the flavour of daily life at the time, it’s fantastic.

For instance, in 1830 Cambridge was the place of business for four artists (including one “horse artist”), two bird stuffers, four breeches makers, thirty-three butchers (four of them women), several chymists [sic] (including “Isaiah Deck, practical chymist to the Duke of Gloucester, and mineralogist”), numerous “coal and corn merchants” (not a combination we would imagine today), plenty of (non-university) professors and teachers (including the polyglot Frederick de Boetticher, who offered lessons in Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch and Russian), 110 pubs and taverns – and one dentist, one piano tuner and one coroner.  It certainly tells you a great deal about people’s interests, concerns and priorities.

I am also taking this opportunity to plan ahead with my monthly behind-the-scenes research newsletters, so do sign up if you’d like more fascinating detail about life in the 1820s, in both London and Cambridge.