Step Into The Story

Today I went to Wantage to do some research for my current manuscript. The book is set in 1813 and has as its hero an Irish soldier of fortune held in England as a prisoner during the Napoleonic Wars. The story of the French prisoners of war in England has fascinated me since I came across a footnote about them in a book about the Battle of Trafalgar. I hadn't really thought about the fate of prisoners of war in that era; I didn't even know that there were any, let alone that they were shipped to Britain and held in some cases for the duration of the conflict. The rank and file were incarcerated in prison hulks moored in places like Chatham, or locked up in what we would now call maximum security jails. Dartmoor Prison was built specifically to house French POWs in the Napoleonic Wars. At the height of the war there were a staggering 60 000 French prisoners in Britain and several thousand officers. This seems like a huge number of enemy prisoners in the country and it is no wo...

This is the Craven State Carriage, a Victorian coach said to rival in magnificence Queen Victoria's royal carriage (she would not have been amused)! It is part of the carriage collection at Arlington Court, a National Trust property in Devon where you can not only go to view some wonderful horse-drawn coaches but you can try your hand at driving one as well. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to go to an illustrated talk about the history of carriages, given by Colin Henderson, who had been the Queen's Head Coachman. Not only did he have some wonderful anecdotes about the Golden Jubilee but he had also worked as a riding specialist and stuntman on a number of films and included the role of highwayman on his CV! He gave us a brisk trot through the early history and background of carriages - the word coach, for instance, comes from the Hungarian Kote - but it was when we got onto the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that my note-taking went into overdrive beca...

Yawn! That's the sound of the Sad Puppy waking up from a few month's happy snoozing in the sun to discover that as at least six months have passed it must be time for the UK broadsheets to have another go at romantic fiction. A few months ago The Guardian newspaper made a slight tactical error when they asked Julie Bindell to comment on Mills & Boon romances and it became clear in the course of her remarks that she hadn't read one for thirty years. So this time the Guardian had a Cunning Plan - get Tanya Gold to claim that she was a M&B junkie and that way the paper wouldn't be caught short fielding someone who hadn't picked up a romance book in decades. Why should we doubt Tanya's romance-reading credentials? Only because there were some odd discrepancies in the article. Oh, and also because most romance readers are very proud to support the genre whereas it seemed to make Tanya feel quite nauseous. It also seemed that every M&B book Tanya had rece...

Last weekend we did the wonderful "Smugglers' Run" at Martlesham in Suffolk. With a name like that this walk was always going to be fascinating - not only is it a walk around a particularly picturesque part of the county, it's packed full of interesting facts for history buffs! The walk starts in Woodbridge where there is the last remaining working tide mill in the UK. It dates from the 12th century, was working up until 1957 and was restored in 1982. The mill is situated on the River Deben, a waterway frequently used by the smuggling fraternity. One incident in Woodbridge Haven in 1739 records that a smuggler's cutter was stranded by the tide and the preventive officers were able to seize brandy and tea. The smugglers were clearly an audacious lot for they not only raised affidavits for the recovery of their goods, but also managed to have the master of the grounded cutter that they were using to ferry the goods in press-ganged into serving on HMS Boyne which pr...