Before smart phones. Before mobile cell phones. Before every house had a land line. What did you do if you needed to make a telephone call?

It’s often communications technology that catches me out when I’m writing my 1920s-set mysteries. I’ve never been tempted to have my sleuth Marjorie Swallow whip out her smartphone and order an Uber, but old-fashioned telephones can still trip me up.

In an early book, I’d half-written a touching scene of a phone call between the American ambassador in London and his brother in Boston, when I realised that transatlantic phone calls were impossible, before the transatlantic cables carrying them were laid.

There were no direct dial private phone calls either; the village postmistress was quite likely to be the telephone operator, happily listening in to the call she’d put through from your home. It must have been a marvellous job for gossip.

How’re you gonna call?

And that’s always supposing you actually had a telephone in your house or place of work. In my current novel, my sleuth needs to telephone her solicitor. She’s in a small village in rural Northumberland in 1925, at an old-fashioned inn. How many people in the village would have telephones in their houses? Even the pub had gas lamps and open fires, not electricity. So would it really have a telephone?

Maybe not, but the village might have had one. What Miss Swallow needed was a public telephone kiosk. Now, I’m as fond as the next historian of the bright scarlet K2 phone box, designed by architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. The design won a competition by the General Post Office to find a standardised design for their network of kiosks. The K2 is a classic of British design, handsome and cast-iron solid, with its domed roof bearing the royal crest, and panelled windows. But before I could deploy it in 1925 Northumberland, I hit a snag: the K2 was first produced and installed, mainly in and around London, in 1926.

But if there was a K2, presumably there had been a K1? I investigated. There was: the K1 (Kiosk 1) telephone box, designed by the GPO in 1921 and constructed from concrete slabs. However, the design (below), was not popular and some local authorities objected. Eastbourne wanted thatched kiosks to match their public shelters, which must have been tiresome. It was this lack of enthusiasm that led to the competition in 1924, won by Gilbert Scott’s design.

You can find out more about the K1 at the British Telephones website, a comprehensive behemoth of a research rabbit hole which held me fascinated, emerging hours later with far more knowledge than I needed. The site even contains original instructions for the siting and installation of each type of kiosk, should you be interested: “Due regard should be paid to the hinging of the door (left or right) and to the direction of the prevailing wind with a view to placing the kiosk in such a position that the tendency of the wind will be to close the door rather than to open it.”

My main aim in looking up phone boxes had been to check when telephone kiosks were first introduced to Britain. The answer was surprisingly early: 1884, although they did not become common until the early years of the 20th century.

The earliest kiosks had no standard design. Some were simple sheds, others looked like sentry boxes, and some had ornate designs to blend in with the surroundings. You can see some early designs on the British Telephones page on the history of telephone kiosks. I particularly like the fancy rustic one installed at Folkestone public gardens and – yes! – the thatched Eastbourne designs, which look like they’re wearing sombreros.

Only when the various telephone networks were nationalised under the General Post Office in 1912 was there a move to standardise the design. However, the initiative slipped down the agenda when war broke out in 1914, not to be revived until the 1920s.

So the phone box that Marjorie made her call from in 1925 might have been one of the unpopular K1s, or possibly one of the many different types of box that proliferated until the spread of the K2 and later designs.

A tardis topped with a pineapple

The 1924 competition won by Gilbert Scott attracted a wide range of entries and you can see the other designs on the British Telephones website. We might have spent the last century making telephone calls from a tardis topped with a pineapple (Fig 7)!

Most of the GPO (and later British Telecom) boxes can be seen in the National Telephone Kiosk Collection at Avoncroft Museum. The museum has a fine collection, all with working telephones inside. The interior view of a K6 kiosk immediately took me back to student days when I stood shivering in a smelly telephone box with a stack of 10 pence pieces, feeding them in to fund a 20-minute call with my boyfriend back home, to the annoyance of the queue building up behind me.

I don’t know how many public phone boxes there were in Manchester in 1987 (not enough, by my experience) but by the 1950s there were more than 63,000 kiosks in operation around the UK. The rise of the mobile phone, among other pressures, has led to the decline of the great British phone box, but communities across the country have found other uses for them. One of my favourites is their adoption as mini-libraries. Maybe I’ll pop one of the Marjorie Swallow books in, next time I see one, in tribute.

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I had no idea how to address the upper crust of nobility, aristocracy and gentry. I’d never needed to find out. The one titled person of my acquaintance was my next door neighbour in London, Sir William Utting, a lovely chap knighted for services to social work. He was known to his neighbours as Bill (and to the bin-men as Sibyl, a contraction of Sir Bill). But of course that was a conferred knighthood, not an inherited one.

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From everything I’d heard, the correct forms of address were designed specifically to trip up the lower classes, in case we got ideas above our stations. When I wrote my first novel, Unlawful Things, I puzzled over the rules for a bit and decided to call my solitary aristocratic character Lady Joan Cobham. Someone wrote to me in agitation: was she the daughter of a lord? Because if not, she would be addressed as Lady Cobham not Lady Joan. Having pored over the rules a bit more, I decided she was the daughter of a lord, although I’d neglected to specify which variety.

Most of my 1920s mysteries continued to avoid the upper crust. The only Lord I dealt with as a main character was literally a press baron, the first Baron Ravensbourne and proprietor of the Daily Post. His wife was Lady Ravensbourne (I remembered the rule from last time) but she wasn’t in it much.

But the book I’m working on at present lands me squarely in the aristocracy. It’s a classic country house mystery, set in a castle in Northumberland, and the Earl of Ashwick lies dead in his study, the victim of that stalwart of murder investigations, a blunt instrument.

Before I could write another word, I needed to know what to call his wife, his children, and what everyone called him (not Earl, presumably).

I have three cultural references when it comes to the aristocracy: Downton Abbey, Wolf Hall and the Lord Peter Wimsey novels of Dorothy L Sayers. I don’t actually use these fictional resources to check my facts, although I suspect they are all pretty reliable on titles, but it’s helpful to remember things without looking them up (thank you Lady Mary, Lady Peter, and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk).

I remembered seeing a post on Substack that gave dire warnings about how people ruined their historical fiction by getting titles wrong. However, it didn’t get much past the warnings and into the practical stuff, so I purchased the recommended reference book: Titles And Forms of Address: A guide to correct use. It’s so old-school that you can’t buy a proper e-book, only a PDF.

The foreword begins with a reassuring note that correct forms are a matter of convention, not unshakable natural law: “The correct use of titles,” it observes “has generally become established over a long period through the usage followed by the title-holders themselves”.

However, I know this is something people feel strongly about, and in the 1920s it would certainly have been important to get it right, so that’s what I endeavour to do.

The book is divided into sections, beginning (of course) at the top with Royalty. These start with the monarch, then the monarch’s consort, the ‘Prince and Princesses of the Blood Royal and Dukes and Duchesses of the Blood Royal’ which sounds very Harry Potter. There’s no royalty in my book, so I skipped on.

Dukes, Marquesses, Earls and Biscuits

The hereditary peerage, in order of precedence, proceeds to Dukes, Marquesses, Earls, Viscounts and Barons. The titles descends (or devolves) in the oldest direct line, usually from father to eldest surviving son.

I decided on an Earl because a Duke sounded a bit too grand and there aren’t many of them; I wasn’t sure any of my US readers would know what a Marquess was; Viscount reminds me of mint-flavoured chocolate biscuits; and Barons of pantomime. Also, Downton Abbey had an Earl, so I felt we were on familiar territory.

Earls, I learned, may take their earldom from the surrounding territory, or from their family name. In my fictional case, the Earl of Ashwick took his title from the (fictional) surrounding area, while his family name was Embleton (which is also a small village in Northumberland).

How to address him? All peers and peeresses below the rank of Duke are addressed as Lord and Lady in speech, so the Earl of Ashwick would be addressed as Lord Ashwick, unless you were a close chum and could call him Ashwick. The wife of an Earl is a Countess (another trap: Britain has Countesses and Viscounts, but no Counts) so the Earl of Ashwick’s wife is the Countess of Ashwick, addressed as Lady Ashwick.

What about the children?

I was making progress. But what about the children? Once Lord Ashwick was dead, would his son be called Lord Ashwick, too? This was going to get confusing.

I learned with relief (under ‘Addressing the Heir on Succession’) that ‘It is customary to address the heir of a peerage or baronetcy by the courtesy title or other style by which he was formerly known,’ until after the funeral. Thank heavens, the novel is set between the murder and the funeral, so I wouldn’t have to keep referring to the late Lord Ashwick and the living Lord Ashwick.

So what was a ‘courtesy title or other style’? What should I call Lord Ashwick’s eldest son? A ‘courtesy title’, I learned, is one of the lesser titles acquired by the family, which the senior peer would lend his eldest son until his succession. The rank would be from further down the aristocratic tree, so I decided to ignore the biscuits and make him a Viscount. The title of Viscount could be the family name, so I called him Viscount Embleton (no ‘of’), addressed as Lord Embleton. His wife would be Viscountess Embleton, Lady Embleton.

But Lord Ashwick had four children: two sons and two daughters. The second son, I learned with some surprise, had no title at all, but was plain Mr Embleton. The daughters, however, were ‘Lady Rhoda’ and ‘Lady Phyllis’ from birth, and would keep their title even if they married a commoner (think of Lady Mary in Downton Abbey).

The Dowager Countess

And what of the Earl of Ashwick’s widow, after his death? She’d get the title ‘dowager’ lumped in front of her name, becoming the Dowager Countess of Ashwick, but remaining Lady Ashwick. Which must be confusing as there would at some point be two Lady Ashwicks. No wonder the Dowager Countess of Downton in Downton Abbey (deliciously played by Maggie Smith) and her daughter-in-law were so often at daggers drawn. The elder countess must resent sharing her status, and the younger must be determined to claim her own.

There was one question that the book didn’t clearly answer: what was the title of an Earl’s brother? I can answer for a Duke, thanks to Dorothy L Sayers’ fictional Lord Peter Wimsey, brother of Gerald, 16th Duke of Denver. And I know from the last of her Wimsey novels, Busman’s Holiday, that Harriet Vane, on marrying Lord Peter, became the rather ridiculous Lady Peter, not Lady Harriet. (I forgot this when writing about DLS and Bloomsbury last year. Inevitably, someone corrected me in the comments.)

However, if I’m reading Titles and Forms of Address correctly, the earl’s brother, as second son, would not have a title even after his brother acceded to the Earldom. So Mr Embleton remains Mr Embleton, even though he’s now brother of the Earl of Ashwick. Somehow, the persistence of a ‘mister’ in the pack is rather reassuring.

I’d love to know from other authors: what are your guilty secrets? What do you avoid writing about at all costs, because you’re worried about getting it wrong? And if you’ve spotted an error in this post, please please tell me – before the book’s published, ideally!

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I know that long east coast journey to Newcastle well. My grandparents lived in Whitley Bay when I was a child, and I was occasionally packed aboard the Intercity 125 at Kings Cross with my little suitcase, sandwiches, and instructions not to get off until Grandma met me at Newcastle. I’m pretty sure I was eight the first time this thrilling solo journey happened. Times change.

I travelled it again last summer, for a cycling holiday that introduced me to plenty of Northumbrian castles and sparked the idea for the book. It’s a glorious journey through splendid countryside and fine cities like York and Durham, and the coastal section is amazing.

But I’ve never been a trainspotter, so my research into the Flying Scotsman was from a standing start. First question, did I mean the train service or the locomotive? The Flying Scotsman was originally a train service which left Kings Cross every morning at 10am bound for Edinburgh, starting way back in June 1862. The 392-mile journey in 1862 took 10.5 hours. But it wasn’t until 1924 that the locomotive named after the route took to the rails.

The Flying Scotsman locomotive was one of a new type, the ‘Super-Pacific’ engine, commissioned by the new London & North Eastern Railway in 1923. It became famous largely because it was a star exhibit at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, where it was exhibited alongside Stephenson’s Rocket - the newest and the oldest railway engines side by side. King George V visited and (of course) went into the cab to play at being a train driver.

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Don’t worry; I have about as much interest in the specifics of the engine and its revolutionary tender corridor, increased boiler power and, um, so on, as the next non-trainspotter. I’m certainly not going to tell you about it. If you like that sort of thing I direct you to the Railway Wonders of the World website, which I’m sure is very sound on engine numbers and tonnage.

What I needed to know was what it looked like (original livery was a pleasing apple green), what it felt like to travel on the Flying Scotsman, and how long it would take for my sleuth Marjorie Swallow and her companions to reach their destination. Most of the histories I came across quoted the time from London to Edinburgh (or the record-breaking non-stop run that saw the train reach 100mph for the first time in 1934, on an experimental run between London and Leeds). However, some determined digging found an old pamphlet with timetable for the early 1930s in the Science Museum collection, which allowed me to make the necessary calculations.

More importantly, the pamphlet listed the onboard attractions: hairdressing salon (3 shillings for Waving and Curling) and ‘Ladies Retiring Room’ with attendant and all conveniences.

There was an ‘all electric kitchen’ with ‘a first class chef in charge’, and food served in First Class in ‘a private dining room decorated in Louis XVI style’. High tea of ham, bacon and eggs with bread and butter cost 2 shillings sixpence, and you could have tea with a cake or pastry for a shilling. Even more exciting, there was a cocktail bar, with a full cocktail list including the signature Flying Scotsman cocktail, although sadly it doesn’t list the ingredients.

A trawl through the British Newspaper Archive discovered ever-more ways to make the journey fly by: a special ‘cinema saloon’ for the showing of a film in 1924, reported in the Motherwell Times.

The new rolling stock caught the imagination of many newspapers in 1924, particularly the all-electric kitchen with ‘ranges and ovens, grills, tanks and hot plates for the warming of sauces’. The Daily Chronicle’s special correspondent had a tour and marvelled at the ‘mechanical marvel’ with its ‘little switches that control all these appliances’ and lack of ‘dirt and fumes’.

This all sounded absolutely glorious, but I came up short on illustrations or photographs of the interior of the train’s carriages. YouTube is stuffed with videos of the train gliding through the countryside, or of men having a lovely time shovelling coal into the firebox, or tooting the whistle. There aren’t many of ladies sipping cocktails or having their hair Waved and Curled in the salon. And what I probably need is to know about travelling third class, as my characters were likely to do. The 1932 brochure promised that the third class dining cars ‘surpass any previously supplied on this train’, but it doesn’t say what they are like.

The final piece of the jigsaw fell into place with a rather splendid Warner Bros thriller made in 1930, just after films transitioned from silent to talking movies. The Flying Scotsman was filmed largely on the famous train itself. Finally, a view of the third class restaurant! (No Louis XVI, although it does have tablecloths.)

One other item about the Flying Scotsman in the British Newspaper Archive caught my eye: when it was late, it made the papers. Imagine if the hour-long delay of a train from London to York made the papers today!

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed the post, do give it a heart. I write about writing, books, research and being an indie author every couple of weeks. This Writing Life and The Stories Behind The Story are free to read. Why not subscribe now?

Next time: indie author superstar Jo Penn shares her research loves and secrets.

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I’d promised to talk about how to write a historical mystery. I’ve written six of them, so I ought to know. When I sat down to think about it, I realised there are five distinct phases.

1: Inspiration.

My inspiration comes primarily from times and places. The 1920s in England are a time of enduring fascination. I’m drawn to periods of intense social change, and in particular changes in the role of women in society. The shadow of the First World War loomed large over the 1920s, making lasting changes that upended society. Men in their tens of thousands disappeared to fight - and those that returned were often damaged physically or mentally, haunted by what they’d experienced. While the men were away, women stepped up to do ‘men’s work’ in the factories, on the land, in transport systems and beyond.

Of course working class women had always worked, as my heroine Marjorie Swallow, a shop-keeper’s daughter, occasionally reminds her wealthy employer. But middle class women were stepping out of the domestic sphere, finding independence, discovering that they too had the skills and abilities to take their place in the wider world. And then, when the damaged men came home looking for comfort and familiarity, they found that the women had changed too. It was a recipe for fireworks - and the upheavals of the Roaring Twenties were just one response to it.

Places have always been a big inspiration. Generally, I write about the places I like to hang out - the garden squares of Bloomsbury, where I lived and worked for a time; the beaches and boulevards of Nice in the south of France, where I had many happy holidays.

I’m also attracted to certain worlds, like the lost golden age of newspapers in Fleet Street, or the super-competitive gardeners of the Chelsea Flower Show. Sometimes I simply wander a neighbourhood I like, looking for anything that sparks my interest, like a blue plaque indicating a famous author who lived there, or a narrow alleyway that looks like you wouldn’t want to go down there on a dark and foggy night.

2: Sources.

Research is both a necessity and joy, and a trap. Like many writers, I’ve been known to dive down rabbit holes after one fact, emerging hours later with a hatful of entirely different ones that have no bearing at all on my narrative. However, it’s possibly the bit I enjoy the most.

Visiting places in real life is the best bit but I also dive into history books, and find memoir and autobiography particularly fascinating. I loved reading memoirs by retired journalists for Death on Fleet Street, for example - anything that exposes the language and customs of a world unto itself.

And if I’m looking for nuance, language and social concerns of the time, contemporary fiction written in the period I’m researching is both fun to read and great for picking up things like idiom and expressions. A favourite source is the British Newspaper Archive, which has online facsimiles of local newspapers going back centuries. A browse through the BNA for the time and place I’m writing about can be inspiring.

3: The story.

After the research, it’s time to sit down and write the story. One of the reasons I indulge my love of research is that it can often provide sparks of story ideas. When I wrote Death At Chelsea, the story wasn’t coming together in a way that excited me, until I learned about the role of the plant hunter in early 20th century plant design. These intrepid explorers hunting India and China for new plant species to bring back to Britain were a big part of the garden scene at the time. I read memoirs of one plant hunter, then created my own, whose travels in the mountains of the Himalayas on the hunt for the Himalayan Sapphire Lily became a crucial part of the plot.

Research can also give texture - like the newspaper report of a punch-up over a game of bridge in the posh Kingsgate Castle Hotel, which gave me an idea for one of the characters in Murder On The White Cliffs.

This all feeds into the motivations of the characters, which should be the drivers of the plot. Whenever a scene isn’t working, it’s inevitably because I haven’t properly thought through who wants what in the scene, and I’m trying to push the characters around like chess pieces. They tend not to like that. But writing historical fiction means understanding motives of the time, and that ties into the social code.

For example, someone might be desperate enough to murder if they are terrified that what they see as a shameful secret is about to be exposed. But that secret is only shameful because of those social codes. Homosexual relationships, children out of wedlock and so on are only secrets worth protecting if they’re condemned by society. And the difficulty of divorce, especially for women, may have led some to see murder as the only escape from an intolerable marriage.

Finally, while writing, I have to remember the crime writer’s unofficial code: the clues have to be there, and you have to hide them in plain sight. It’s a lot like stage magic. I’ll quietly drop in a clue, then make something dramatic or funny happen, so the reader forgets about it or doesn’t notice.

4: Fact-checking

There’s an army of readers out there determined to pick up on historical anachronism! Writing historical fiction means constantly asking myself whether something is right for the time, and checking (Wikipedia followed by primary sources, where possible). Did people use the expression ‘don’t get your knickers in a twist’ in the 1920s? Could you place an urgent telephone call from London to Washington in 1923? (No, and no. Nobody got their knickers in a twist until the 1960s, and you’d have to send a telegram then follow up with a letter).

Writing about real places has its own challenges. I spent half a day trying to find out whether the statue of Eros was in Piccadilly Circus in 1922. (It was, but it was removed a couple of years later for the redevelopment of the underground station.)

I check what the weather was doing. Death At Chelsea was a different book once I’d discovered that May 1923 was one of the wettest so far that century, and visitors waded knee-deep in mud.

5: Does it work?

None of my research, story-construction or fact-checking matters unless it works for the reader. I have an army of 1920s mystery fans who read the first draft of every mystery, to let me know if it worked. Did they ‘buy’ the story? Did they guess the killer in chapter 1? Did anything strike them as off, or drag them out of the story?

If so, I’ll try to fix it. I’ll also ask them to check I haven’t succumbed to historical writer syndrome and included a whole lot of research they don’t need to know about. That can go in the historical note at the back, or in this newsletter. The fascinating facts, the surprising tid-bits… that’s what The Stories Behind The Story is here for.

Thank you kindly for reading, and please do hit ‘heart’ if you enjoyed it. It really helps.

I’d pitched it as a wander through the literary history of this corner of south east London, close to the flat where I lived for 10 years and where part of my first novel, Unlawful Things, was set. The area is surprisingly rich in literary interest, not to mention maritime history. The festival then asked me to record it as an audio tour, which is still online, if you’d like to listen.

A month ago, someone who’d found that tour online got in touch. They are organising a tour of literary tourists from the US, with a particular interest in Christopher Marlowe. Would I deliver the walk for them in real life?

Having revisited the walk in preparation I thought I’d share the highlights with you.

First stop: New Cross Road and Charles Dickens.

Dickens rented a flat in New Cross Road, at the inland end of Deptford High Street. At the time he was writing his great novel set along the Thames, Our Mutual Friend, which begins with Lizzie Hexham and her father Gaffer in their rowing boat, dragging a drowned man from the water at Limehouse. It’s possible that the flat was a convenient place for Dickens to meet his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan, while he worked on the novel. Dickens described the areas as “The flat country tending to the Thames, where Kent and Surrey meet, and where the railways still bestride the market gardens that will soon die under them.” The railways are still very much there, but as he predicted, Deptford is short on market gardens these days.

From New Cross Road we walk down lively Deptford High Street, past the market and under the railway bridges. We then have a choice: detour through the grounds of the magnificent baroque St Paul’s Church, or keep on to Albury Street, a charming street of well-preserved early 18th century terraced houses, which Sky O’Neill wrote about here. And a nice addendum: the carvings of angels above the door casings may have been by Grinling Gibbons, the sculptor, who had a workshop nearby.

Cross over Creek Road and down McMillan Street to Deptford Green.

Second stop: St Nicholas Church, Deptford Green.

I’ve written previously about how the striking gothic skulls of St Nicholas’ Church drew me into the church, and lit the spark for my first novel, Unlawful Things. The skulls are still worth a look (there’s a legend that they inspired Deptford’s sea-faring pirates to design the Jolly Roger flag). They may have denoted a burial ground with a plague pit, however. And the plague pit may be where Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan Age’s other great playwright, is buried. He was certainly laid to rest in the church yard, after his violent and early death.

There’s a plaque on the wall, bearing lines from Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s best-known play: ‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight’. And so Marlowe, like Faustus, was cut off in his prime. I’ll come back to his death later in the walk along Deptford Strand.

Third stop: Watergate Street steps.

The streets all around Deptford are filled with memories of ship-building and sea-faring, and the names reflect that. We’ve passed Stowage, then Benbow Street (named for Admiral Benbow, also commemorated in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in the Benbow Tavern). We’ve been past the Ahoy! centre, a charity which teaches sailing, rowing and power-boating on the Thames. Watergate Street, unsurprisingly, leads down to the waterside steps between Paynes Wharf and the Master Shipwright’s House (barely visible behind a high wall).

From the riverside terrace at Paynes Wharf you can see down to Greenwich, where the Royal Naval College sits atop the demolished Tudor palace of Placentia. Placentia, also known as Greenwich Palace, explains why Christopher Marlowe was in Deptford in 1593: he was on bail, with instructions to report to the court. The court was at Greenwich, so Marlowe needed to be nearby.

Up on the hill in Greenwich Park is the Royal Observatory, which was the target of the Russian spy and terrorist in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. It was inspired by a true story of a French anarchist who died while planning to blow up the observatory in 1894. Conrad was a Polish sailor who worked in the merchant navy for eight years before coming ashore in London and becoming a writer. His description of the eastern reaches of the Thames, at the start of his novel Heart of Darkness, leads him to conclude that ‘this, too, was one of the dark places of the earth.’

We now have to go inland around one of the last of the commercial wharves in Deptford, sadly no longer in use and currently undeveloped. We skirt around to Sayes Park, all that’s left of diarist and gardener John Evelyn’s magnificent Sayes Court and gardens.

Fourth stop: Sayes Park, mulberry tree.

The mulberry tree, three hundred years old, was supposedly planted on behalf of Czar Peter the Great. The Russian ruler had an extended stay here, which contributed to the destruction of the garden, once known as the finest private garden in England. Scott H tells the story of the Czar’s visit most entertainingly here.

John Evelyn lived a long life, from 1620 to 1706, and kept a diary from the age of 20. He lived in tumultuous times: events included the execution of Charles I, the interregnum of Oliver Cromwell and the Restoration of Charles II, the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London in 1666. From 1652, he lived at Sayes Court in Deptford, next to the Royal Dockyard, in a property belonging to his wife’s family.

Evelyn had some surprisingly modern interests – in 1660 he wrote The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated, the first book written on the growing air pollution problem in London, and in 1664 Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees, written as an encouragement to landowners to plant trees.

We continue through Deptford to the stamping ground of another 17th century diarist, Samuel Pepys. Pepys Park leads down to the riverfront again, where the remains of the Royal Navy’s storehouses, workshops, contractors and docks can be glimpsed.

Fifth stop: Foreshore, Deptford

Pepys was appointed Clerk of Works for the Navy Board, shortly after Charles II was restored to the throne. He became very rich in the process – not just through his salary of £350 a year, but because of the bribes he took for granting contracts to supply the navy. He records many visits to Deptford, often to deal with supplies at the stores, or to pay off ships – which meant paying the sailors when they came ashore after a voyage. He was very friendly with John Evelyn and there are records of him enjoying a good dinner and gossip about King Charles II at Sayes Court.

Here’s a diary extract: Tuesday 9 October 1660 “This morning to Deptford, to pay off two ships. To Whitehall, where I met with Sir W. Pen, and so with him to Redriffe [an old name for Rotherhithe] by water, and from thence walked over the fields to Deptford (the first pleasant walkI have had a great while), and in our way had a great deal of merry discourse, and find him to be a merry fellow and pretty good natured, and sings very bawdy songs.”

Deptford had been a maritime centre long before Pepys. At the time when Christopher Marlowe made his final trip to Deptford Strand, it was famous as the site of the dry dock of the Golden Hind, Sir Francis Drake’s ship, which had circumnavigated the globe a few years previously. If you look right over the river wall from Pepys Park’s playground, you can see the entrance to the dry dock where it was kept after the voyage.

Just along the foreshore is Drake’s Steps, where Queen Elizabeth knighted the seafarer on his return to London. Although Drake is not a literary figure, his voyages had a big impact on the literary scene. The golden age of Shakespeare and Marlowe opened up a wider world: dangerous sea voyages (Twelfth Night), unknown lands (the island in The Tempest), non-European characters like Tamberlaine the Great and Othello. Britain, once a damp island off the north west coast of Europe, became the hub of a maritime empire, with ships bringing in goods, people and stories.

Sixth stop: Deptford Wharf.

So what happened to Christopher Marlowe? We know from the inquest that he spent the last day of his life, 30th May 1593, in a house owned by a widow called Eleanor Bull, somewhere along Deptford Strand. He met three men: Ingram Frizer, a money-lender; Nicolas Skeres, a conman and extortionist; and Robert Poley, a political informer. All three had links to the Elizabethan secret service.

Marlowe too had been employed by Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spymaster – and that is the link between them. They spent the morning talking, then had lunch and walked in the garden. At six in the evening, they came in and had supper.

The story goes that there was an argument, a quarrel about ‘the sum of pence owed’ for ‘the reckonynge,’ or bill. Ingram Frizer was sitting at the table. He had his back to Marlowe, who lay on a bed. Marlowe leapt up in anger, took Frizer’s dagger and hit him about the head. Frizer struggled with Marlowe for the dagger.

The Coroner’s report said: ‘And so it befell, in that affray, that the said Ingram in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of 12 pence, gave the said Christopher a mortal wound above his right eye of the depth of two inches and the width of one inch.’ Marlowe ‘then and there instantly died.’

The inquest was held the next day, Friday 1 June, at the site of the crime, and included a viewing of Marlowe’s body. Coroner William Danby concluded that Frizer killed Marlowe ‘in the defence and saving of his own life’.

Marlowe was buried the same day, in an unmarked grave in St Nicholas Churchyard.

Immediately along the river South Dock Marina Boat Yard. Boat-building continues at Deptford to this day. And fiction set in Deptford also continues, some of it exploring the many theories that have circulated over the centuries about Marlowe’s death, and whether he actually died at all.

Anthony Burgess’ A Dead Man in Deptford, and Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers, both have their own recreation of what happened in Deptford on May 30, 1593. And the circumstances that led to that appointment are at the heart of the mystery behind Unlawful Things.

I hope you enjoyed this amble through Deptford’s literary history. Do get in touch if you’d like to book a group for a historical/literary walk in Deptford, Southwark, Bloomsbury or Canterbury. I love sharing the research that I’ve uncovered for my novels and would be happy to discuss bespoke tours.

Thank you for reading, and do kindly give this post a heart to help spread the word.

It’s one of those thrillers that start promisingly, then go a bit weird and can’t take much in the way of ‘why didn’t they just shoot him?’ plot analysis.

But I adore it for lovely cocky bespectacled Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, demonstrating his lack of deference for posh men, especially posh men in charge of him, and showing his appreciation of the finer things in life, like freshly-ground coffee and shapely bottoms in tight skirts.

In my favourite scene, Palmer trundles his trolley around the supermarket - still a novelty in early 1960s Britain - nonchalantly picking up the more expensive of the newly-available tinned goods and explaining to his boss how it’s worth paying more for better quality French mushrooms (‘It’s not just the label, Sir, these do have better flavour.’).

Harry Palmer’s interest in food was of course all down to the author of The IPCRESS File novel, Len Deighton. His career as a graphic designer and and his love of cooking led to his wonderful series of Cookstrips, a stylish and user-friendly mash-up of cartoon strip and recipe instructions. In a delightful crossover, one of the Cookstrips is seen pinned up in Harry Palmer’s kitchen in The Ipcress File.

Reading the obituaries after Deighton’s death last week, I learned that he’d been on the film set to show Michael Caine how to make an omelette in the correct way, and indeed it’s Deighton’s hands on film when he cracks two eggs with one hand, because Caine couldn’t get the hang of it.

A spy who flirted but had a professional respect for his female colleagues, offered to cook them ‘the best meal you’ve ever had’, dressed sharply and wasn’t afraid to show his emotions or to do the supermarket run? Stand aside, Mr Bond. There’s a New Man in town.

Len Deighton of course didn’t just write Harry Palmer. I’m mid-way through reading the first Bernard Samson trilogy, which begins with Berlin Game, set in 1983. It’s a cracking story and goes to the heart of the grubby business of betrayal. In the afterword, Deighton talked about how he came to develop the series after writing a war story in which he regretted not being able to integrate the domestic and romantic life of his characters with the ‘battlefield conditions at the airbase’.

‘Out of these ponderings came the idea that one could have a story in which wives and girlfriends were shoulder to shoulder with the fighting men. What about superior to them and in authority over them? And why not a spy story?’ he wrote.

Why not indeed?

‘Now the domestic dimension would not be so domestic. Pillow talk would concern matters of life and death. Fidelity would not just be to the marriage vows, but to the Official Secrets Act,’ he observed.

It was a quietly subversive approach to espionage fiction. Compared to the disposable Bond Girls of Ian Fleming, or the heavily male Circus of John Le Carré, I appreciated Deighton’s inclusion of the ‘wives and girlfriends’ on an equal footing.

Watching the classic John Le Carré 1970s series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy recently (for ‘work’ again, you understand), the almost entirely male cast felt jarring. About the only woman mentioned, poor George Smiley’s wife Anne, is only ever referred to, sneeringly, for her sexual activity. The most recent Bond film, which introduced a family for 007, seems to have killed him off forever.

I have one more book to thank Len Deighton for, which made my research into 1960s London immeasurably more fun: his London Dossier of 1967. It came about, he said, because he was haranguing a publisher as a party about how he should employ people who really knew the city to write a proper guidebook, which wouldn’t stick to the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace. He was promptly handed the job and rounded up experts on the topics he wanted covered.

It has chapters on teenagers and their Carnaby Street hang-outs (‘Top Twenty sounds pour from the doorways of Lord John, Tre Camp and the Carna B Hive…. boys try on trousers two inches too tight from every angle’); night-clubs (‘Dolly’s is a long dark room with coats at one end and loos at the other. There’s no real food and no gambling, but there’s plenty of drink and dancing… Gleaming through the gloom are Mick Jagger’s white trousers… A first rule of these clubs is that celebrities are ignored’); food (‘Instead of central heating, the English have puddings’); Soho’s Italian restaurants (‘Pasta has become the staple diet of Londoners) and the criminal underworld (‘Getting a gun is possible although risky. The thing to do is ask around. No one will actually look very interested but stay around and later that night a car may well draw up alongside and the offer will be made… £25 would be fair.’).

A treasure trove of information and exactly the sort of thing bound to make a visit to London go with a swing.

Was Len Deighton a proto-feminist? Well, probably not. But he humanised his spies, respected the domestic sphere and was at least interested in the women in his novels, unlike his more celebrated spy-writing colleagues. He took the free-wheeling spirit of 1960s London and spun it into stylish and modern thrillers. And he seems to have had a lot of fun doing it, which is inspiration enough for me.

This time, I’m considering how the county influenced his work, from earliest satire to perhaps his most celebrated novel. Photos my own, except where indicated.

Sketches by Boz and Pickwick Papers

Working as a journalist in London, the young Charles Dickens wrote an affectionate and rowdy satire of Chatham, the naval dockyard town on the Medway where he spend his happiest childhood years, in one of his earliest forays into fiction.

Sketches by Boz, serialised in Bentley’s Miscelleny magazine, included stories from the archives of Mudfog, a lightly-disguised Chatham:

Sketches was shortly followed by wildly-popular The Pickwick Papers, which began life as the satirical records of a sporting club, but soon became a narrative of the adventures of the genial, accident-prone Mr Pickwick and friends. Much of the narrative is set in London, but on occasion they take a trip out to Kent and walk through countryside familiar to Dickens from his childhood ramblings:

This was of course Cobham Hall, which I wrote about in January because it made its way into my first novel, Unlawful Things. At the time when Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers, he was occupying chambers in Furnival Inn, Holborn, unaware that he would eventually buy the grand Gads Hill Place, a few miles’ walk from the hall.

In these early writings, Kent serves largely as a bucolic backdrop to the satirical comedy, perhaps reflecting his agreeable memories of his early life in Chatham.

The Personal History of David Copperfield

In David Copperfield, Kent plays a more substantive role. In this most autobiographical of novels, young David escapes from the London factory in which he has been incarcerated by his cruel stepfather and walks to Kent, ending up at Broadstairs where he seeks refuge with Betsey Trotwood, his eccentric aunt. By 1849, when Dickens wrote Copperfield, he had been holidaying in Broadstairs for a decade, renting the impressive Cliff House for his growing family. Perhaps, like young David, he had come to see it as a place of escape offering refuge from the toil of London.

The clifftop cottage in Broadstairs believed to be the original of Aunt Trotwood’s home is now a small museum to Dickens.

Great Expectations

But the iconic Kent scene in all of Dickens work is the unforgettable opening to Great Expectations, on the foggy north Kent marshes of the Thames estuary. The escaped convict Magwich lurches up from behind a tombstone to find young Pip, who had been visiting his parents and brothers in their last resting place.

This is the church yard of St James Church, Cooling, where the real little row of children’s gravestones is a stark reminder of the high infant mortality on the marshes, where Marsh Fever (malaria) was all around. Even on a sunny day, as it was when I visited, that heartbreaking row of little stones brings a chill.

I love the way Dickens gave a poignant childish understanding to Pip’s description of the tombs:

Dickens visited Chalke, a village now almost swallowed up by Gravesend, for his honeymoon, and the Old Forge there is a possible model for Joe Gargery’s blacksmith shop where Pip is brought up ‘by hand’ by his sister. The marshes to the east of Chalke are still eerie places, the estuary shore lined with abandoned forts and the rotting remains of ships - perhaps the prison hulks that Magwich had escaped from.

At the end of the novel, the narrative returns to this stretch of the Thames, as Pip and his friend Herbert attempt to get Magwich away by boat before he is arrested as a returned convict. They row him down the river in an attempt to pick up the steamer from Gravesend, but are overtaken by officers.

There’s a glorious passage of description as they row downriver:

“There was the red sun, on the low level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into black; and there was the solitary flat marsh; and far away there were the rising grounds, between which and us there seemed to be no life, save here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.”

Rochester, the nearest city to Dickens in Gad’s Hill, provided multiple sources of inspiration. The riverside cathedral city is a strange twin to Chatham’s dockyard bustle: a dignified presence just upstream from Chatham, with its brooding ancient castle and cathedral set among quaint streets.

Rochester’s Restoration House is said to be the original of Miss Havisham’s creepy mansion in Great Expectations, where she mouldered away in her wedding dress with the wedding feast still set, years after being left at the altar.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Dickens’ final novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, tantalisingly left unfinished at the time of his death in 1870, is set almost entirely in a fictionalised version of Rochester, re-named Cloisterham. There are many scenes set in the cathedral, which even now has a rather dark, heavy presence, pre-dating the airy Norman architecture of Canterbury. Then there is Jasper the organist’s gatehouse, described with some menace:

One of the most photographed buildings in Rochester is Eastgate House, which served at the model for the Nuns’ House, also known as “Miss Twinkleton’s Seminary for Young Ladies”, home of the delightfully sulky heroine Rosa Budd.

My favourite street in Rochester is the Georgian terrace of Minor Canon Row, facing the cathedral close. In Drood, it is naturally the home of minor canon Septimus Crisparkle, the improbably attractive hero of the tale.

Dickens found richness and menace in ‘Cloisterham’, leavened with passages that showed he still enjoyed the social satire of his earliest work downriver at ‘Mudfog’. Alas, we will never resolve the mystery of Edwin Drood’s disappearance, although many people have tried. Dickens died in his Gad’s Hill home while still writing the manuscript.

A big thank you

Thank you so much for reading The Stories Behind the Story. It has been a delight to share with you all the research that went into my own novels (I wrote about Dickens, Rochester and the North Kent marshes in Folly Ditch.) I hope you’ve enjoyed this behind the scenes look into a historical fiction writer’s work.

I’m taking a break from writing about the research that underpins my novels for a few months. For one thing, I’m all caught up! I’ve written about the 1920s research that underpinned my Marjorie Swallow detective novels, from Bloomsbury to Fleet Street to the Chelsea Flower Show. I’ve guided you around Canterbury and Deptford in the footsteps of Christopher Marlowe, and the Soho of William Blake, for my Helen Oddfellow mysteries.

I’m now deep in the research for the next book. Someone wise once told me that you shouldn’t tell people too much about your work in progress, or your brain will think you’ve already written it and lose the urgency to get it down on paper. So I won’t do that.

Instead, I’ll write occasional posts about what I’m up to, and share great articles I’ve read elsewhere about history and books. I’d also like to continue to host other historical authors to talk about their research - do get in touch if you’d like to be featured. I’ll pause paid subs while I’m working it all out. In the meantime, do explore the archive - and maybe even read one or two of the novels!

As ever, give this a heart or a repost if you enjoyed it.

My fourth novel, Folly Ditch, sees my literary sleuth Helen Oddfellow investigating a Dickensian murder mystery linked to Oliver Twist, while getting tangled up in a brutal modern-day trafficking gang. In the process of my research, I walked in Dickens’ footsteps; visited the Dickens Museum in London; dug through the theatrical archive at Kent University and read dozens of books by and about the great man.

I’ll do a couple of posts about Dickens, as there’s so much to say. This week I’ll look at Dickens’ life in Kent, and next time at Kent in Dickens’ novels.

To begin at the beginning, Charles Dickens was born in neither London nor Kent, but in Portsmouth in 1812, where his father John was employed by the naval pay office. Five years later, as part of a naval reorganisation after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, John Dickens was sent to Chatham in Kent, where the Medway River flows into the Thames Estuary and the Royal Naval Dockyard serviced the ships.

Charles had a great time living at the newly-built 2 Ordnance Terrace, Chatham. There was plenty for a young boy to explore: the house overlooked the lively naval dockyard and the Medway river was alive with shipping and pleasure craft. His neighbours were carpenters, blacksmiths and rope makers. The dockyards were mechanising fast – new ironworking facilities had been built in 1808, the rope making workshop was mechanised in 1809, one of the earliest steam powered saw mills was built in 1815 and a new stone dry dock with steam-powered pumping system was finished in 1820.

Charles and his sister were initiated early into the pubs of Chatham. He recollected them being hoisted onto a table by his father at the Mitre Tavern, to perform ‘The Cat-Meat Man’s Song’ and other songs of the sea, for the amusement of the customers. There were also trips on the river, and he wrote of sailing aboard the small naval yacht The Chatham, down to Sheerness on naval business, catching the tide through the marshes and mudflats, forts and islands in the muddy shore.

The boy Charles walked with his father into the surrounding countryside and there’s a famous story that John Dickens pointed to a country house that Dickens admired, telling him that if he worked hard, he could live somewhere like that one day. The house was Gad’s Hill Place, and of course it became Dickens’ final home.

But the Kentish idyll didn’t last. The family moved to London when Dickens was aged 11. He remembered taking the stage coach alone from Rochester to London, having been left behind to finish his term at school. School wasn’t to last, either. Aged 12, Charles was taken out of school and set to work in a factory making boot-blacking, while his father and younger siblings were in the Marshalsea Prison in south London, for debt. His childhood ended here, and he looked back on Chatham as a golden period.

Dickens did manage some further education after his father was relieved by an inheritance from the prison, then went to work as a shorthand writer, journalist and writer of short stories. He began to establish himself as a writer and married Catherine, daughter of a former employer, in 1836.

His first instinct after their marriage seems to have been take her back to Kent. The young couple had their honeymoon in the village of Chalk, between Rochester and Gravesend. The cottage they stayed in no longer exists but there is one survival of their stay - the Old Forge, a possible later model for the Gargery house and blacksmith’s shop in Great Expectations.

From 1839 onwards, with children in tow, Dickens and Catherine began holidaying regularly in Kent’s seaside town of Broadstairs. He eventually rented a fine big house on the cliff top (below, originally Fort House but now called Bleak House in honour of the author), where he loved to write and entertain. There are accounts of swimming, walks on the cliffs to Ramsgate, boat trips from the pier, regattas, and dancing at the Tivoli Gardens.

There’s a suggestion of less wholesome activities. He wrote to his friend Maclise, encouraging him to visit, with the words: “There are conveniences of all kinds at Margate (do you take me?) and I know where they live.” Hmm.

In 1855, Dickens saw the freehold of the Gads Hill house he had admired as a child, up for sale. ‘It was the spot and the very house – literally a dream of my childhood’ – he told his friend Wills. He decided to buy it. By March 1856 it was his, and he planned to use it as a summer residence and let it out in the winter.

Much work was needed on the water supply and plumbing. Water had to be pumped up from a spring daily by a horse-drawn mechanism. He used it as an escape during the end of his increasingly unhappy marriage to Catherine. One night he walked from London home in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, to Gads Hill – a distance of 30 miles.

In 1860 Dickens sold Tavistock House, his London residence, and – although he took a London house each season – Gads Hill became his main home.

By the mid nineteenth century, Dickens was no longer taking the stage coach from Rochester to London. The advent of the railways had brought Kent and London within a few hours’ travel of each other. This led to Dickens’ involvement in one of the worst early railways tragedies, the Staplehurst train crash.

On 9 June 1865, Dickens was on the tidal boat train from Folkestone to Charing Cross with his probable lover, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. The train collected passengers from the steamer from France, and left at different times according to the tides.

Work was taking place on a railway bridge at Staplehurst and track had been removed. The foreman had misread the complicated, tide-dependent timetable and thought no train was due. The train driver tried to brake when he saw a red flag, but had insufficient time. The engine and first carriage made it across, the next carriages plunged into the dry river bed below. Ten people were killed and forty injured.

Dickens, Mrs Ternan and Ellen Ternan were in the second carriage, which was half on and half off the bridge. Dickens escaped and tended to the victims, administering comfort with his flask of brandy. Before he left, he took a terrible risk and climbed back into the damaged carriage.

As he wrote in the afterward to Our Mutual Friend, “When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage — nearly turned over a viaduct, and caught aslant upon the turn — to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. [...] I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book: — THE END.”

“The worthy couple” were not Mrs Ternan and Ellen, who had tactfully withdrawn from the scene as soon as they had escaped the carriage, but Mr and Mrs Boffin, characters in Our Mutual Friend, his novel in progress. Dickens had the manuscript of a chapter including the Boffins with him on the train. Our Mutual Friend is my absolute favourite of his novels, but even I don’t think he should have risked his life to save one chapter!

His health never really recovered from the accident. Five years (to the day) after the Staplehurst crash, Dickens collapsed at home in Gads Hill, aged only 58, probably from a stroke. He was still writing, and the manuscript in hand was left unfinished, The Mystery of Edwin Drood forever unsolved. He died the next day without regaining consciousness.

Dickens had left instructions that he wished to be buried in the local church at Shorne. Then someone said he had previously asked for a spot in Rochester Cathedral. However, a public clamour ensured that London got him back at last, and he’s buried in Westminster Abbey.

Thank you for reading The Story Behind The Stories. If you’d like to find out more about my novel Folly Ditch, you can find it here. If you’re a Dickens obsessive and know why I called it Folly Ditch, drop a note in the comments!

For the next book I’m exploring Soho in the early 1960s, when the boutiques of Carnaby Street clothed swinging Londoners, and artists whiled away boozy afternoons in the Colony Room. A couple of years ago, I wrote about the night clubs and jazz musicians of 1920s, in The Soho Jazz Murders. But my first foray into Soho fiction, The Peacock Room, took me to the eighteenth century, to the London of William Blake.

In the book, London tour guide (and literary sleuth) Helen Oddfellow takes a group of students on a walk around London to see the places associated with my favourite poet, self-published author, artist and all-round mystic, William Blake. I’d like to take you on that same tour. Photos, except where noted, are my own.

In 1757, William Blake was born upstairs in 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick Street), above the shop that housed the family’s hosiery business. The Blakes, Catherine and James, were respectable tradespeople of the type then common in Soho. The house they lived in has long gone, replaced by a brutalist high rise housing estate (William Blake House) and shops. But the smaller streets around – Marshall Street, Ingestre Place, Berwick Street, Soho Square – still have traces of those old Georgian houses and the trades they represented.

Blake enters the record in St James’ Church on Piccadilly, where he was christened in the Grinling Gibbons font still standing in Wren’s elegant Palladian church.

I’m guessing that was not Blake’s only visit to the font – as soon as I saw it, it reminded me of Blake’s 1808 watercolour The Temptation And Fall of Man.

Although he was an urban child, and lived in London for almost all of his life, the young Blake roamed widely south of the city into the countryside, to Dulwich, Croydon, Bromley and other rural retreats.

During one of these walks, his first biographer Alexander Gilchrist reports: “On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it is, as he will in after years relate, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he has his “first vision.” Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”

Although there were no signs of angels in the trees when I last visited, Peckham Rye is still a popular green space and commemorates Blake’s vision with a totem pole topped with carved angels – incongruous but probably quite Blakean.

But his days of freedom were numbered. In 1772, Blake was apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire, in Great Queen Street. This is where he learned his trade, and how he supported himself and his family.

Right opposite is the Freemason’s Hall, the United Grand Lodge of England. Although the current building is 20^th century, Blake would have seen its predecessor being built while he was an apprentice. Could this be where he got his interest in masonic iconography? A more definite influence was that Basire sent his young apprentice to copy monuments in Westminster Abbey. The elongated, Gothic style stayed with him.

Ten years later, Blake met and married his wife Catherine, the daughter of a market gardener from Battersea. The Blakes moved firstly to Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) then on his father’s death back to 27 Broad Street, next to the family home, where Blake set up a print shop with James Parker, who had been a fellow apprentice at Basire’s engraving business in Great Queen Street.

Shortly afterwards, in 1785, the Blakes moved to bigger accommodation just around the corner in 28 Poland Street. They lived in a narrow house of four storeys plus basement, with a front and back room on each floor. Neighbours included dress-makers, artists, lodging houses and coffee houses, not to mention the local workhouse. Satirist Thomas Rowlandson lived at number 50.

Blake worked as a printer, studied as an artist and had his own print shop. He published prints from, among others, his friend and fellow-artist Henry Fusili. Here Blake wrote the manuscript that became known as An Island in the Moon, which satirized literary society. At the time he had been attending a literary salon in nearby Fitzroy Place, which is thought to be a target for the satire. He also completed his illustrated Songs of Innocence poems, as well as his longer poem sequence, Tiriel. Blake’s beloved younger brother Robert lived in Poland Street with them for a time, and died in 1787, nursed to the end by his brother.

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In 1790, Catherine and William moved south of the river to 13, Hercules Buildings in Lambeth, and stayed for 10 years. Hercules Road is close to the river, between Lambeth and Westminster bridges. The area is now dominated by criss-crossing railways, but in the late 18^th century it was a mixture of marshland, rapidly-growing industries, market gardens, pleasure gardens and a circus run by Philip Astley, who also built Hercules Buildings, supposedly naming it after the circus strongman.

Blake set up his printing press in the spacious three-storey house. For the first time he had a garden, with a grapevine and a summer house. He wrote some of his greatest works here, including Songs of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He was also working successfully as an engraver, with a decent income.

There are traces of Lambeth in many of his poems, not least of the great Albion Mill on Blackfriars Road, the first great factory in London. It burned down the year after the Blakes arrives in Lambeth, and its blackened hulk seems to have inspired the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of the poem we now know as Jerusalem.

Hercules Buildings have been demolished and replaced with flats, but under the railway bridges nearby is a delightful surprise – a gallery of mosaic renderings of Blake’s poems and artworks, created by local artists.

In 1800, Blake lived outside of London for the only time, in a cottage by the sea in Felpham, Sussex. He had a patron, poet Thomas Hayley, and worked on engravings for him. Although at first all went well and he enjoyed his first encounter with the sea, the relationship became too restrictive and the Blakes moved back to London in 1803, to lodgings in South Molton Street.

During this time Blake’s fortunes declined, although some of his most startling work was done here – such as his visionary portrait of The Ghost of a Flea, which his friend, mystic John Varley, said was painted after Blake saw it in a vision during a seance. This is the only one of his London homes still standing, although the Ministry of Waxing was probably not there in his day.

Finally, we come to Fountain Court, the last stop on our tour, and the place where Blake died. Nowadays its a rather sinister cut-through from Strand down to the Thames. Blake and his wife lived in two rooms here, and he died sitting up in bed, singing hymns.

As religious dissenters, Blake and Catherine were buried in Bunhill Fields. Their exact burial sites were unclear and they had a joint headstone. Detective work has found the sites and in 2018, a new grave marker was unveiled, after fundraising by the Blake Society. Other inhabitants of Bunhill Fields include Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s Progress Blake illustrated. Work is underway to create a memorial to Catherine.

My research on Blake’s life and works informed my 2020 thriller The Peacock Room, set in the fictional Russell University, where Helen Oddfellow tracks down the author of disturbing Blakean poison-pen letters and unravels a mystery about a Blake poem. Find out more about it here.

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Here she shares her research process, a few favourite finds, and thoughts on the differences between Europe and the US during that interwar period.

ASL: Tell us a bit about your books, and where the original idea to write about the 1920s came from.

SZ: It’s kind of weird how I came to write a historical fantasy set in the 1920s, but it was also inevitable.

I’ve always loved history. It was my favourite subject in school. Though it’s true that, as a teenager, I was especially drawn to ancient history, I’ve always loved history in all its aspects.

On the other hand, I’ve been a fantasy reader since my teen years. For a very long time, I read epic fantasy, especially when it was history-inspired. And because most of that kind of fantasy was inspired by medieval and ancient history, I became addicted to anything concerning that, from books to TV documentaries.

But there was also something else I loved, though I realised that much more slowly: the interwar years.

I blame that on my granny. When I was very little, I would watch old Hollywood noir and mystery films with her on TV. These were mostly films from the 1930s and 1940s. I’m pretty sure that my love for mystery and for Art Deco comes from those films.

So, as you can see, the stage was pretty much set when, in the late 2000s, I came across the Dieselpunk genre. The moment I read the word, I knew I belonged to it. Speculative fiction, set in the interwar years. I mean, of course I thought that!

ASL: Do you have a research background? If not, how did you go about researching your first historical novel?

SZ: I don’t have a research background, but as I mentioned, I’ve always loved history and was eager to learn more abotu it, whether through books or TV. In my earliest tiny library, you’d have found more books about history than novels.

It’s my love for history that led me to decide to be as historically accurate as possible, even if it was fantasy.

The problem was that, up to that point, I had focused on ancient history. I knew basically nothing about the 1930s. And I won’t deny it, it felt daunting at first.

I thought, “I’d better start with an overview of the time”, and I bought one of the very few books about the interwar years translated into Italian. It was The Anxious Decades by Michael E. Parrish. It covers both the 1920s and the 1930s, and it’s the book that shifted my attention to the 1920s. Yes, the 1930s were the time I knew from the films I used to watch as a child, But the 1920s slowly grew on me as I read the book. That sense of anticipation, that need to experiment, the many evolutions in the way people lived, thought and felt. And also, the many similarities with the time we are living now.

By the time I finished the book, I decided the 1920s were my time!

Yet, as I’ve said, there was very very little about that translated into Italian, there was basically nothing written in Italian. Therefore, I combed Amazon for books about the American Roaring 1920s. Between 2010 (when I first outlined my Chicago story) and 2015 (when I wrote my novella set there), I read tens of books and I don’t know how many websites.

Then, in 2016, I decided I wanted to explore the 1920s in Europe too, thinking it must be quite similar to the American 1920s.

Well, not so in the least. There are, of course, many similarities, but there are also very strong differences. I fell in love with 1920s Berlin and the Weimar Republic, and I started working on two stories set there.

ASL: What is your favourite resource for research?

SZ: While at the beginning I did most of my research online, I now prefer to research books first.

There are a few things I don’t like about the net when starting researching a topic I know little about. The result will only be connected to your research. Google will look for the answer to your specific enquiry, very rarely will it deviate from there. When you research a very specific topic, like the 1920s or a specific aspect of the 1920s, after a while, the results you’ll get from Google will start to repeat. Most of what you’ll come up with (when you know little abotu the topic) will be quite surface-level

When you research on books, you’ll gain a broader understanding of the topic. No books will simply answer your questions. They will cover many aspects of the topic you’ve chosen, some of which you previously didn’t know anything about. You’ll come across unexpected information. This unexpected information will enlarge your understanding of the era in a way that you couldn’t have planned. Books often cover a topic much more in detail than what you can find on the net. Sometimes, even what you really want to know, but that’s all good in the end.

This said, I like to use both methods. Generally, I start from a book about a general topic, like I did with Parrish’s book. That will give me a general sense of the subject and some key concepts. I’ll then look for more books about those key concepts, which will give me more insights into the topic I’m researching. And some of those topics will be very very specific.

Here is where the internet becomes really useful. You can find very specific resources on the net when you know what to look for.

So while at the beginning I would start with internet research and then try to go more specific on books, I now do the reverse: I start with books and then I go specific on the net.

ASL: Can you share two or three favourite ‘finds’ while doing your research?

SZ: One topic I love to research, and about which I see a lot of misinformation, is the New Woman. In the 1920s, we have the more mature incarnation of her, but the story started in the late 1890s.

It’s an exciting transformation, probably one of the boldest in history.

Women moved from being basically confined to home and family, to being more in control of their lives, working outside the house and becoming more independent, moving into the public sphere. They moved from wearing more than 11 layers of clothing to wearing little more than a frock, which may seem like just fashion, but it reveals an incredible social and even political transformation. The evolution of women’s fashion of that time and what that evolution meant on a social level is one of the most fascinating things I’ve researched.

Another topic I never expected to love the way I do is the Great War.

For many years, as I researched the 1920s, I avoided the Great War. I thought I wasn’t really interested, because my focus has always been on people’s lives. I love social history. Historical events and famous historical people are interesting, of course, but to me, never as much as the normal lives of normal people.

Yet, as I mentioned, at a certain point, I shifted from the American Roaring Twenties to Europe and what I discovered right away is that, while I could research the American 1920s with no need to look into the war, there was absolutely no way to research the European 1920s without any notion of the Great War. You simply can’t. These are two intertwined eras in the history of Europe.

So I forced myself to read about it... and wouldn’t you know? I fell in love.

I discovered that the history of WWI wasn’t just politics and military strategy, but it was about people. It was about society and how it evolved. When I first started researching the Great War, I realised I cared deeply for those people, and when I wrote my own articles about it, I sometimes found my eyes wet.

Today, I feel that in some parts of the world, the 1910s and the 1920s, different as they certainly are, are just one era.

ASL: What’s your best tip for authors approaching research?

SZ: Be extremely curious and extremely inquisitive. Don’t be content with the first answer you find. Go deeper. Find connections.

Everything is connected in history, and when you start to see those connections, your understanding of the era you are researching will become much deeper.

Thanks very much to Sarah for sharing her thoughts. You can find her here:

Website: https://theoldshelter.com/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@oldshelter

Pinterest: https://it.pinterest.com/SarahZamaAuthorAndCoach/_saved/

Intagram: https://www.instagram.com/jazzfeathers/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SarahZamaAuthor#

You can download her novel Sea Phantom free from her website.

Cobham Hall is one of the best-preserved Elizabethan manor houses in the country. The first known building at Cobham was a Roman villa dating back to 300AD, although Cobham Hall traces its roots to Baron Cobham’s hall, built in 1208. The first baron’s family came over from Normandy with William I in 1066, and took a liking to the fertile woodlands and valleys of Kent.

Fast forward a few centuries and the hall was in the hands of the tenth baron, William Brooke, when Elizabeth I was on the throne. William rebuilt the hall, adding the two wings with their octagonal turrets from around 1584. The central hall was remodelled by a later owner, in 1662.

The Lords of Cobham Hall were favourites with Queen Elizabeth, who visited at least once. She was especially fond of William Brooke’s son Henry, making him Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and a Garter Knight on his accession to the title. However, the family came crashing down after opposing the accession of James IV of Scotland to the English throne on Elizabeth’s death.

Both Henry and his younger brother George were involved in plots against James, arrested and tried for treason. George, who was involved in a bizarre plot to kidnap King James, may have incriminated his brother in an attempt to save his own neck. It didn’t work: George was executed on Tower Hill in December 1603.

Henry, Lord Cobham, was accused alongside Sir Walter Raleigh, another of Elizabeth’s former favourites to come a cropper under her successor. Henry spent years in the Tower of London, although eventually his life was spared. Like his brother, he seems to have tried to deflect blame onto his co-conspirator, possibly because he had been told that Raleigh had informed on him.

In Raleigh’s testimony during his treason trial he asks for Henry to be brought to court so he could question him, believing that Henry’s word was the main evidence against him. His request is denied, although it later established a principle in English law that witnesses should be brought to court for cross-examination. During my research for Unlawful Things I visited the National Archives and viewed the records of Raleigh’s trial, including the death warrant signed by the judges and given the royal seal.

Henry Brooke was attainted as a traitor and his lands confiscated and ended up in the hands of the Dukes of Lennox, then passed to the Darnley family. The Brookes never recovered their former fortunes.

I discovered a lot of this history in a fascinating volume published in 1959, The Lords of Cobham Hall, by Esme Wingfield-Stratford, a relative of one of the later owners of the hall. At the time I was playing with ideas for my plot, and looking for an Elizabethan-era house to visit as inspiration. My father-in-law, who lived in Cobham for many years, suggested a visit to Cobham Hall and leant me the book.

The hall has been a girl’s boarding school since 1962, but is open to the public on occasion. I did the tour, marvelling at the ancient oak panelling, ornate marble fireplaces and the magnificent Gilt Hall, where cherubs playing instruments peek down from the ceiling.

All the time, my mind was whirring. Anyone who has researched a book (or anything else) will know the feeling. Suddenly, everything you see or hear about connects back to the work. My nascent plot involved a (fictional) missing manuscript by the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, associate of Walter Raleigh. Raleigh has been accused by some of having a hand in Marlowe’s death, perhaps because Marlowe knew too much about Raleigh’s secrets. And now here was William Brooke, Lord of Cobham Hall, co-accused with Raleigh a decade after Marlowe’s death. And the house of Marlowe’s patron Thomas Walsingham, nephew of Elizabeth I’s spymaster Francis Walsingham, was barely an hour’s ride away. Hmmm.

I was unable to resist a little re-writing of history. What if the Brooke family had recovered their fortunes, and Cobham Hall with them? What if they suspected someone had framed their ancestor to protect a dangerous secret? What if the secret was still hidden somewhere in the hall? And what did the death of Christopher Marlowe have to do with all this?

Nothing outside of my imagination, of course. But it was a fine example of how a passing interest in a beautiful location can send my imagination scampering off on a trail of ‘what if…’ that would take four years to untangle into a coherent plot.

There was plenty more to find out about Cobham Hall, although thankfully I resisted the temptation to stuff everything I found out into the novel. The Cobham estate was a favourite haunt of Charles Dickens, who drank in the Leather Bottle pub in Cobham Village, and immortalised the place in The Pickwick Papers. There’s a rather chilling mausoleum, ripe with Masonic imagery, built by the Darnleys but never used (apparently an argument with the Bishop of Rochester meant it was never consecrated). For cricket fans, Cobham Hall and the Darnley family are renowned as the home of the Ashes, after Ivo Bligh, later Eighth Earl of Darnley, led the victorious English cricket team against Australia in 1883 and brought home the "Ashes" to Cobham Hall. Perhaps best not to dwell on that after the most recent England tour.

I was unable to resist using the mausoleum in my plot, especially as it had been abandoned for many years and is quite isolated on a hill above the woodlands. I mean, what better place to leave a dead body (or someone you expected to be dead soon) than a repository for the dead?

The story eventually became Unlawful Things, the first of my thrillers featuring literary historian Helen Oddfellow. I’ve written about how Deptford and Canterbury inspired Helen’s adventures in Unlawful Things and The Crimson Thread. I’ll do a post at some point about the Soho of William Blake, as featured in The Peacock Room, and the north Kent marshes of Charles Dickens, which inspired Folly Ditch.

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Decorations

Got your tree up yet? Londoners in 1925 would have thought you a bit mad if you had. The house wouldn’t be decorated until Christmas Eve, meaning you could skip 24 days of sweeping up pine needles and knocking over Christmas cards.

Christmas trees were definitely a thing, having been popularised during Victorian times. Fir trees were imported from Scandinavia on Christmas tree ships, to be dressed on Christmas Eve and left in place until Twelfth Night.

The branches were hung with tinsel garlands made of thin-pressed tin, big glass baubles and home-made paper decorations. Electric fairy lights were beginning to be introduced, but many people still wired little candles onto the tree.

You might even have an early artificial tree, made from goose feathers dyed green and small enough to decorate the dinner table.

And it wasn’t just the tree that was decorated. Red streamers and paper chains were popular, as were paper lanterns. Basically, the entire place was a fire hazard - maybe another good reason not to have them up all month.

1925 Gift Guide!

Forget the lovely (and eye-wateringly pricy) guides in all the magazines and shoppy Substacks. I could spend hours browsing newspaper advertisements for Christmas presents in the 1920s. Happily, the British Newspaper Archive beat me to it with a blog about the top 1920s presents. Are you ready for this?

1. A handkerchief. ‘The always acceptable useful Gift,’ according to The Bystander in 1924. ‘Acceptable’ sets the bar a bit low for a present, don’t you think?

2. A pencil. ‘Everybody loves good pencils, and has a use for them,’ says The Sphere. I may be one of the few people in 2025 who would love a box of Blackwing pencils in my stocking.

3. Cigarettes. ‘There are few things that can give greater pleasure,’ says The Tatler. Not to mention cancer. I’ll pass.

Perhaps it’s not a surprise that letters to the Daily Mirror suggest that presents could be a let-down. “I must confess that most presents I have received in my life had been utterly useless,” grumped one correspondent. Money, as always, seems to have done the trick.

The BNA list does have some attractions – I’d be very happy with a ‘set of gin cocktails’ or a cocktail shaker, not to mention ‘a black velveteen frock’ to wear to a dance. There’s also music: gramophones, a banjo or ukelele or even a cinematograph. Men, sadly, got the usual fare: safety shaver, socks, ties, handkerchiefs, or mufflers. But to really spoil the woman in your life, what about the latest household gadget: a vacuum cleaner!

Note to men in my life: my home is not my hobby.

Food

Turkeys were popular and becoming a new tradition for the wealthy, although many people wouldn’t stretch to that. Goose, rabbit or pheasant made an appearance on many Christmas dinner tables, while according to The Bystander, the Chelsea Pensioners preferred roast pork - and collected their Christmas meal to eat alone in their rooms, despite efforts to organise a communal feast.

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Ham was expensive but popular, as were cheeses with chutney or pickles, Christmas puddings and mince pies, although no brandy butter - it hadn’t been invented yet. You’ll have to make do with Bird’s Custard on your pud. And cranberry sauce was a thing for the future; British turkeys were dressed with British gravy.

I enjoyed coming up with a festive menu for Mrs Jameson’s Christmas Eve party, although I stopped short of the infamous ‘Empire Pudding’, which attempted to add ingredients from every country in the British Empire into one pudding.

Entertainment

You could listen in to the radio, especially if you’d received a set for Christmas. Mind you, there isn’t much choice: Bow Bells get things going at 10.15, followed by “Bible Reading from Studio,” then “Organ music from St Mary-Le-Bow” until it’s time for the Christmas Day Service from Canterbury Cathedral at 3pm (note, no King’s speech until 1932, when George V was persuaded to give a radio broadcast, using a speech written by Rudyard Kipling). It looks up a bit with an adaptation of Dickens’ Christmas Carol at 5.30pm, followed by Dance Music and a Military Band. In a fine early example of BBC self-flagellation, the BBC’s chairman admitted “the BBC programmes are not all that we should like them to be, but we are doing our best.”

Then again, you could go to the theatre: Sybil Thorndike in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII for the high-brows, women showing off their legs in pantomime for everyone else.

Or you could stay at home and play games from this selection on offer at Marshall and Snelgrove. I remember a similar horse-racing game at my grandparents’ house at Christmas, which may well have been a similar vintage.

I’ll end with one family memory of Christmas games, from the 1970s not the 1920s. We played Charades every year. And every year my lovely grandmother (the original Marjorie) got up to mime digging in the garden. We all waited politely, then ‘guessed’ Gardener’s World, her favourite TV programme. Which it was, every single time. She was clearly very satisfied with this outcome, as she never tried another charade.

Thank you for reading this peek into Christmas Past. I’ll be back on Christmas Eve with Marjorie Swallow’s Christmas.

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“At the back of theatre-world one finds the Bohemian resorts of London: the night clubs, the cosy little supper restaurants, and the café bars.” In the 1920s as today, Soho was the place to go in London to have fun.

Stephen Graham’s 1925 book of essays, London Nights, begins with the doss-houses, down-and-outs and night workers of London (see last post ) but it has room for the pleasure-seekers, too.

I particularly enjoyed his description of the 1920s café bars, ‘thronged at midnight’, where ‘Frenchwomen and Italians dispense refreshments, talking in English but calculating in their own tongue.’

Very reminiscent of that Soho institution, Bar Italia on Frith Street, dispensing excellent Italian coffee to night-time revellers since 1949 and still going. I take my coffee mid-morning now, but I joined that queue for espresso to fuel me through the early hours many times in the 1990s.

Graham describes the ‘Armenian Café, with its clanking of dominoes and its Easterns* sipping thick Turkish coffee’, with racks of ‘red fezes for those who wish to become Turks or Tartars for the evening; the narghile and the hookah are at your disposal and you may exchange at a step the atmosphere of Shaftesbury Avenue for the atmosphere of Smyrna or Constantinople.’ Cultural appropriation wasn’t something journalists worried about in the 1920s. It sounds fun, as does the Roma cafe opposite, where ‘chorus girls often resort to discuss their domestic troubles and rivalries over a cup of coffee and a bun.’

But it’s Ham Yard that sounds jolliest after midnight. It was ‘a gaily-lighted open court which is jingling with music and song, while overhead, laughter and the noise of merriment surges upwards to the dull sky’. It was fringed by night clubs: The Pavilion, the Last Club, the ‘friendly and genial Ham and Bone Club’.

There was a café bar which stayed open all night, doing ‘a thriving trade in sirops and coffees’ and acting as ‘a sort of information bureau. Go in there, get into talk with the folk who are drinking and arguing, and you can find all you need to know about the night life of the district’.

In the yard were hawkers selling matches, roast-chestnut men wheeling their barrows, loungers watching the fun and ‘the police stand and consider and sometimes take notes.’

Now, I wish I’d found this little book before writing my first 1920s mystery, Blackmail In Bloomsbury. I knew there were nightclubs near Ham Yard, but it looked on my vintage OS map like a rather obscure little corner, a suitably dark street to locate the underground Caravanserai club where Marjorie goes to confirm an alibi. In the book, Marjorie gets into a nasty moment while being pursued by villains into Ham Yard, and has to be rescued by Frankie, a regular at the Caravanserai. If only I’d known that Marjorie could have learned all she needed from the café bar and enjoyed a cup of coffee under the watchful eye of the police!

There’s always a frisson to reading history about a place after I’ve written and published a book set there: what did I get wrong? Well, I got Ham Yard wrong, but it’s a delight to learn the true story. Ham Yard today is much smarter: home to the glossy-looking Ham Yard Hotel.

Some café bars were domestic, ‘merely the front rooms of seventeenth century dwelling houses, hardly capable of holding more than twenty people; rooms with panelled walls and fine old fireplaces’ where ‘outsiders and strangers do not seem to be entirely welcome’. Others are more menacing, with illegal gambling common.

‘One I know is an empty house, long since boarded up and padlocked. You enter by a ladder from a place where a van is kept… You climb the dank, dark stairs and in a shuttered top-back room heavily hung with old muslin curtains you are introduced to a small but select company of sharpers. A person with a cool head can go anywhere.’

Not everyone, of course, had a cool head. Graham recounts sights familiar to anyone who has passed through the West End around closing time: ‘friends conducting to a cab a gentleman whose legs have failed him, a wife trying to detach a husband from a railing, a soldier trying to get his girl to stop shouting at him and come home.’

A policeman, he says, described his duties at such times as ‘getting the population to bed.’

I was amused by Graham’s description of an attempt to find an opium den in Limehouse, the Chinatown of the 1920s, with ‘a Bohemian priest who prides himself on being found in the company of publicans and sinners’.

‘Going into a Chinese resort at random,’ they found themselves in a restaurant where customers ‘were busily employed putting away chop suey with long chopsticks,’ when the clergyman called out: “Where can I smoke?”

‘“Oh, lor!” said the girl in a whisper. “What d’ye mean? Smoke opium, that’s all lies.”’

However, another visitor explained there were plenty of opium-smoking clubs, ‘but the police are hot on them now’. The Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 had outlawed opium and cocaine. The man offered to take them to a club run by his brother-in-law. They drank whisky from tea-cups with ‘a bright young impudent hussy with drop earrings’. The priest ‘got a little scared’ and went home. Graham does not relate whether he went to the opium-smoking club. I was relieved that they did exist; an opium den is a key location in my second 1920s book, The Soho Jazz Murders.

Staying in the East End, Graham gives a lively account of visiting a music hall on a Saturday night, sitting in the gallery where the floors were covered in peanut shells and ‘there was a whispering, grating chorus from the whole gallery of the cracking of hundreds of monkey-nuts, a rustling sound which never ceased’.

The revue included ‘bare legged girls’ who ‘marched past as soldiers’, concert parties singing ‘glees’, and ‘a naughty girl [who] pointed a giddy toe at the circles and made love to the men.’ The audience cat-called, blew toy trumpets and sang along with the choruses. While many songs were drowned out by the audience’s noise, ‘everyone settled down and was happy when the orchestra stuck up ‘Oh, how I love my darling’.

Graham describes a moment of unity, where ‘Dock youth sang, rolled their bodies rhythmically, beat time with their feet, got together and forgot anything else.’

But Graham is at his best describing the West End. I read with particular interest his account of Piccadilly Circus, also an important night-time location in Blackmail In Bloomsbury. This time, it sounds like I got it right.

The illuminated advertisements of Piccadilly Circus were still new: ‘There is always a crowd on the southern corner of Piccadilly, staring at the sky signs – at the car with the silver wheels; at the red crystal bottle which pours port into a waiting glass [top left in the photo above]… at the baby with the illuminated forelock sucking a bottle of Nestle’s Milk…’ although the gawpers were not habituès of Soho.

‘The nightly crowd does not give the illuminations a thought. Its mind is on Scott’s or Rayner’s bar, on the “Troc”, on the Pavilion chorus, on the Regent Palace lounge. Every one is on pleasure bent.’ In my book, Marjorie was heading for the New Criterion, where the Italian Roof Garden was the place to be seen. (For more, see my own post on Piccadilly Circus.)

Graham notes the numbers of girls among the crowd, in the latest fashions: ‘the summer girl with slashed skirt, the public-house hussy with a bunch of bobbed, hennaed hair, regulars, pirates, the cerised lips, the pencilled brows, starers, loiterers, hurriers.’ Not so different, then, from the crowds of teenagers who sit around Eros on his pedestal today.

However, there are differences. ‘A prominent notice at the Trocadero informs that no lady can be admitted to the café unaccompanied’ and ‘You cannot take wife or mother’ to the ‘naughtier cafes’, although at the Regents Palace lounge ‘you see old ladies who have refused to go home sharing some of the rapture of Piccadilly… sipping ice-cream soda with the air of one used to such dissipation’.

Now that Madam JoJo has closed down, and I don’t have the stamina for dancing all night at G-A-Y, perhaps that’s my future role in Soho nightlife. All I need is to find a café bar that will serve me ice-cream soda.

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* Graham, like other writers of his time, used racial epithets in his descriptions. Some of these are offensive, as are some of his attitudes. I hope this one is vague enough not to cause upset.

A few weeks ago a parcel dropped through the letter box. A small red cloth-bound book with gold letters on the spine: London Nights, Stephen Graham. I looked inside. ‘Studies and sketches of London at night… First published in 1925.’

‘Hope this will be of interest,’ said the note from my friend Christina. It certainly was.

‘Our days are democratic; our nights are feudal,’ the book began, in arresting style. ‘Though dukes and tramps may walk Piccadilly in the sunlight hours, there is no such companionship in the night. Then doss house and mansion are like serf’s hut and baronial castle… the past has a stronger hold on the night than the day.’

Graham seemed much more interested in the doss house than the mansion. As he observed, ‘if one would understand our human society aright one must begin one’s study not at the top, but at the bottom.’

And so he begins his rounds of rough sleepers on the embankment opposite the Palace of Westminster, where ‘every seat is occupied by a man or woman staring at the water,’ periodically moved on by a policeman. He tours the all-night coffee stands, meeting MPs after a late-night sitting, sex workers, drunks, weary tradesmen, soldiers, ‘a fresh complexioned dandy in full evening dress’ who ‘breathed a desire for a beef sandwich’. Every stall has rumours of the night the Prince of Wales himself visited and treated everyone with the words: “It’s all on me. Perhaps one of you’ll do the same for me some day when I’m out”.

Stephens makes trips to London’s pre-dawn markets: Covent Garden’s fruit, vegetables and flowers, where ‘porters pass with as many as six bushel baskets [of strawberries] on their heads, their faces unconcerned under these marvellous hats’, the butchers of Smithfield with sides of beef ‘prodigious and ponderous, mantled with suet’, the Thames-side halls of Billingsgate, where porters unload boats of fish.

This last I found particularly intriguing, conjuring up a vision of London’s working river that has been lost:

‘Outside porters are unlading a Norse boat of herrings, and we sidle past them down to the river shore. What a sight! On the quay a brazier is burning; on the water is a shadowy trawler with hanging lanterns; a gangway from the ship to the quay, and on it a procession of dark figures with bent backs and boxes on them,’ bringing up the fish.

He visits a doss house in West India Docks, where ‘I rubbed my shiny hands in the gutter of the roadway’ to dirty them, ‘planked down eightpence’ for a bed and went through to a dormitory of 40 men. He notes the cleanliness of the sheets and floor, the small size of the beds, as the lodgers ‘lay in their beds and smoked clay pipes and read their evening papers by the never-extinguished electric light’. The men slept naked, either because they had no night clothes or because they preferred not to risk picking up bedbugs on their underclothes.

Despite his dirty hands, the men knew full well Stephens was not one of them. One voiced his suspicion that he was ‘Dahn from Scotland Yard.’ Stephens protested that ‘I only came in to see what it was like,’ and they grunted and lost interest. I wonder what they really thought of this tourist in their midst, although he sounds for the most part like a man who fits in everywhere.

Stephens was a prolific author, explorer and journalist. When I read the list of his books at the start of the volume, I realised I’d read one before: The Gentle Art of Tramping, which is both a practical guide to long-distance hiking and a philosophy of life, reissued in 2008. Sadly I seem to have lost the book; possibly I loaned it to someone and it has yet to find its way home.

He was quite the adventurer, in the mould of Patrick Leigh Fermor or George Orwell, walking across Russia and America, joining Russian pilgrims on their trip to Jerusalem, ‘Tramping with a poet (Vachel Lindsay) in The Rockies’. In 1939 he enlisted in the Scots Guards as a private, rather than taking a commission, because ‘to serve in the ranks is a unique opportunity to get to know the working man,’ as he wrote in his subsequent book, A Private In The Guards.

A contemporary review of London Nights in the New York Times appreciated his interest in the everyday: ‘The down-and-outers, the professional beggars, the tramps, the criminals, the women of the streets, all the wandering flotsam and jetsam of the night is washed against him as he proceeds on his way. And he accepts each one without too much comment or asperity, for this kindliness of purpose is a part of his charm as a human being and of his importance as a commentator on humanity.’

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There are chapters on prisons and prison visiting, on churchyards and their (living) inhabitants, on ‘human derelicts’. For all his sympathy, Stephens is a man of his time: he believes that ‘drink and immorality’ are the main causes of destitution.

He writes: ‘Our beggars are… the victims of loose sexual morality, promiscuous and filthy living in slum dwellings, of drink, of a sloppy mentality.’ His attitudes are a reminder that even sympathetic figures from 100 years ago do not think as people today; some of the language would not pass in polite society in the 21st century.

Yet if this all makes the book sound rather gloomy, it is not. For Stephens notices that ‘London is more beautiful by night; there is a poetry in it which is missed by day’. He captures those flashes of beauty. For example, on dawn at Billingsgate: ‘The first fires of East London lifted their human incense into a pure dawn. Silver became opal, but all the petty towers and corner-bits of offices became falsely grand in relief against the morning. The East became a great altar with many smokes.’

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Stephens is mostly a congenial companion, rendering with wit the banter of the streets, entertaining prisoners in Wandsworth Gaol with tales of his explorations in Canada, going along with the crowd at a ‘confidence auction’ on a street corner.

He is also entertaining on the after-dark entertainments of the city. As this post is getting rather long, I’ll return to pleasure-seeking in 1920s London at night next time.

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When I worked as a medical writer in Bloomsbury, I occasionally wandered along Great James Street, passing the town house bearing a plaque to Dorothy L Sayers. I sometimes mused about how wonderful her life must have been, living in this elegant quarter of London and writing clever detective stories about her sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey and her alter ego, detective writer Harriet Vane.

Years later, I read Francesca Wade’s excellent Square Haunting, which tells the story of five women who lived in the delightfully academic Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, including (for a year) Dorothy L Sayers. I realised that DLS’s Bloomsbury life was far from idyllic – but nonetheless provided plenty of material for her detective novels.

And when I came to write my own detective novels, set in 1920s London, I couldn’t help but be influenced by the neighbourhood, which features in the first in my series, Blackmail In Bloomsbury.

DLS in Bloomsbury

Dorothy L Sayers moved to Bloomsbury in December 1920, after a life spent largely in Oxford (where she was born, studied for her degree and later worked for Blackwells) and her parental home in rural East Anglia.

Mecklenburgh Square

Her first Bloomsbury address was 44 Mecklenburgh Square, where she rented ‘a lovely Georgian room with three great windows’ and a balcony onto the square. She wrote to her parents: ‘The landlady is a curious, eccentric-looking person with short hair and thoroughly understands that one wants to be independent.’

The house was ‘full from attic to basement.’ She attended lots of parties, visited nightclubs, had tea parties and was even taken to lunch at the Ritz, despite her modest income.

This income was patched together, mixing teaching with French translation and the money she received for her published poetry. She often worked at the British Museum’s reading room, visited the National Gallery and indulged in ‘Grand Guignol’ plays at the Little Theatre in the West End. She fell in love with an unpleasant-sounding, unsuccessful literary writer, John Cournos, who despite her hopes had no intention of marrying her. (She later took literary revenge with his depiction as Philip Boyes, poison victim in Strong Poison.)

In January 1921 DLS started writing her first detective novel, which she told her mother was to begin ‘with a fat lady found dead in a bath with nothing on but her pince-nez’. The novel, which became Whose Body?, was the first to feature the aristocratic Piccadilly-dwelling detective Lord Peter Wimsey. She wrote of her delight in furnishing the wealthy Lord Peter’s luxurious apartment with Aubusson carpets and grand piano, while she was unable to scrape together the money for curtains for the big windows in Meckleburgh Square.

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The book was finished over the summer in her parents’ rectory in East Anglia, but in December 1921 she had bad news: 44 Mecklenburgh Square was to be sold and she was required to find new lodgings.

Great James Street

Happily, she found rooms nearby, at 24 Great James Street, a ‘small but very pretty’ three-bedroom flat. She lived there until 1929, and kept the address for the rest of her life.

Her first decade at Great James Street was eventful, to say the least. In 1923 Whose Body? was published and her career as a detective novelist was launched. She also found lucrative, steady employment at advertising agency SH Benson (close by in Kingsway), and - less happily - embarked on a disastrous affair with a married man, resulting in a concealed pregnancy. She gave birth secretly to John Anthony in January 1924, and her son went to live with DLS’s cousin Ivy Shrimpton. Most of her friends and family knew nothing of the child’s existence until after DLS’s death, when her son was named as her heir.

Two years after the birth, she married artist Oswald Atherton Fleming, known as Mac, and they lived together in the St James Street flat, which was extended into a maisonette when they took the rooms above in 1928. However, the following year they bought a house in Witham, Essex, and moved there in 1929.

It’s unclear how successful the marriage was, but perhaps it is significant that DLS retained St James Street and used it as a London pied a terre, coming up to town for meetings with her publishers and to attend meetings of the Detection Club, which she co-founded in 1930 and for which she acted as president in 1949 to 1957. Although she had not written detective fiction for almost two decades, only her sudden death in 1957 put an end to her membership of the Detection Club. But her Bloomsbury period had already made its mark on her fiction.

Bloomsbury in DLS’s novels

Whose Body?, 1923. Tangentially Bloomsbury.

12A Great Ormond Street: While the body in question was discovered in a bath in Battersea, police inspector Charles Parker ‘occupied a Georgian but inconvenient flat’ in Great Ormond Street, ‘for which he paid a pound a week.’ He is summoned from the ‘burnt porridge’ being prepared for breakfast, to indulge in bacon and kidneys with Lord Peter in Piccadilly. Great Ormond Street, behind the famous hospital, is a pretty and verdant street of handsome houses.

24 Russell Square: Only Wimsey’s warning prevents Parker from sharing a taxi with the murderer to 24 Russell Square; a journey that might have resulted in another body. Russell Square, then as now, is a busy and impressive junction surrounding a public garden.

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Strong Poison, 1930. The most Bloomsbury of DLS’s novels.

Woburn Square: House belonging to solicitor Norman Urquhart, where his cousin, the literary novelist Philip Boyes, dies. Woburn Square is a narrow rectangle of tall, narrow houses tucked away in UCL, now mostly housing academic departments.

Southampton Row: Chemist shop where Miss Harriet Vane, Philip Boyes’ former lover, buys two ounces of commercial arsenic. Southampton Row is a busy thoroughfare with many commercial offices and shops.

100 Doughty Street: Location of Miss Harriet Vane’s small flat, where she turns down Mr Boyes’s proposal of marriage shortly before his death. Doughty Street, once home to Charles Dickens and family, is a quiet street off the main Bloomsbury drag. Number 100 doesn’t seem to exist any more (possibly it’s now part of John Street) but Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby lived at number 58 (pictured).

Bedford Row: offices of solicitor Norman Urquhart, where Miss Murchison from the ‘Cattery’ takes a post as secretary. Bedford Row is in the heart of legal Bloomsbury, just south of Great James Street.

Mecklenburgh Square: ‘By the way, I should try the garden in Mecklenburgh Square. A thing might lie a long time under those bushes’. Lord Peter advises Inspector Parker where to look for a discarded medicine bottle.

Bloomsbury parties: The exact locations aren’t given, but the ‘round of the studios’ that Marjorie Phelps takes Lord Peter on sound very Bloomsbury: the Russian musicians with their samovar, frying sausages, piano and declaiming poet; the studio over a mews with gramophone, frying kippers, smell of oil paints and discussions of DH Lawrence and free love.

The Nine Rings in Gray’s Inn Road: The pub where Mr Boyes stops on his way home from Doughty Street to Woburn Square.

Gaudy Night, 1935. A love-letter to Oxford - and a farewell to Bloomsbury

Mecklenburgh Square: home of Miss Harriet Vane. “Harriet Vane sat at her writing table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square. The late tulips made a brave show in the Square garden and a quartet of early tennis players were energetically calling the score of a rather erratic and unpractised game.” The novel soon moves to Oxford, but these cheerful opening lines can perhaps be read as a fond farewell to Bloomsbury.

Busman’s Honeymoon, 1937. An Oxford-Bloomsbury blue-stocking

By the opening of the final novel in the series, Lady Harriet Wimsey (nee Vane) is in possession of a large town house in Audley Square, Mayfair, and an Elizabethan farmhouse in Hertfordshire. However, the opening chapter has ‘Mirabelle, Countess of Severn and Thames’ writing to Lord Peter’s mother the Dowager Duchess of Denver, asking how she feels about her ‘amorous sweet devil of a son’ marrying ‘an Oxford-Bloomsbury blue-stocking’. Whatever her social advancement, DLS seems to be saying, Oxford and Bloomsbury are in her blood.

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Canterbury featured heavily in my first novel, Unlawful Things, as the place where the playwright Christopher Marlowe was born and grew up in Elizabethan times. He would have seen Queen Elizabeth I at least once, I think - she visited the city in 1573, when he was a boy of nine or ten, processing through the streets in great pomp.

Happily, there are several maps of Canterbury dating from the sixteenth century, to give us an idea of how the city looked in Elizabethan times. It’s surprisingly recognisable today, with the city walls, the river and the Cathedral Close all clearly marked. You can even see St George’s Church (right of the cathedral, marked 10) where Marlowe was christened in 1564. He lived close by and attended the King’s School in the cathedral grounds. The church’s clock tower is still there, although the rest of the church disappeared in Canterbury’s ‘Baedeker Blitz’ of 1942.

Canterbury had been living through interesting times when Christopher was born to John, a shoe-maker, and his wife Katherine. The roller-coaster of Tudor politics and religion had during the previous 40 years seen the destruction of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, the dissolution of the monastic foundation set up to tend the shrine, closure of St Augustine’s Abbey, and persecution of both Catholics and Protestants as the crown passed from Henry to Edward to Mary and finally Elizabeth.

For 400 years, pilgrims had travelled from ‘every shire’s end’ to Canterbury, to visit the shrine of the ‘holy blisful martyr’ Thomas Becket, the archbishop murdered in his cathedral in 1170. When I arrived in Canterbury 16 years ago, on foot from London, I walked in the steps of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales pilgrims.

The quarrel between church and state which culminated in Becket’s death was mostly won by the church, as King Henry II (who probably ordered the murder) had to back down on his demands for more power over the clergy. He did penance in Canterbury, walking barefoot through the streets to the cathedral, where he knelt at Becket’s tomb and kept vigil overnight.

Pilgrims were accommodated in inns and hostels, including the Eastbridge Hospital (not numbered, but spanning the eastern branch of the river on the map). This fascinating, ancient place was built just 20 years after Becket’s death, and comprised an undercroft where weary pilgrims stretched out after their journey, a chapel and a dining hall, as well as permanent lodging for elderly poor of the parish. Today, in a pleasing example of continuity and run by the same religious foundation, it has almshouses, a chapel and a small museum (sadly currently closed for extensive restoration work).

But when Christopher Marlowe was a boy, Eastbridge’s chapel was a school room. Why? To preserve the foundation from the chilly winds of change blowing through Canterbury. It is possible, although unproven, that Marlowe learned his letters there, before moving to the more advanced King’s School, which he attended with a scholarship from age 13.

But there were other winds of change in Canterbury in those years, and they blew from France. Kent, separated from France by just 22 miles of sea, has been a destination for refugees for centuries. And during Marlowe’s childhood, the refugees were French Protestants, Huguenots, especially those escaping from the horrific St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris in 1572. There were so many that they overwhelmed the ‘French Church’ established in the crypt of the cathedral and were given the church of St Alphege to worship in, just opposite the King’s School where Marlowe studied.

Did Marlowe hear the stories of the terrible events in Paris from those refugees? It seems likely. Twenty years on, one of his most popular plays was The Massacre At Paris, which depicts in graphic detail the mob violence that saw thousands dead in three days of horror.

Marlowe wasn’t a stranger to violence himself. After leaving Canterbury for Cambridge University, where he probably became a spy for the Elizabethan secret service led by Francis Walsingham, he moved to East London to write for the theatre. There he was caught up in street fighting that led to his arrest for a murder in Hog Lane, Shoreditch. On his last visit to Canterbury, Marlowe was arrested for a knife fight with a tailor, William Corkine, in Mercery Lane. The lane is picturesque, with Tudor buildings overhanging the pavements, framing a view of the Christchurch Gate and the Cathedral beyond. It’s not hard to imagine a pair of Elizabethan men tussling here (although perhaps without Subway and Pret to nip into afterwards).

On each of these occasions, Marlowe escaped conviction, although he was imprisoned for several months after Shoreditch. He also escaped conviction for inciting a metalsmith to counterfeit money in the Netherlands, and for charges of blasphemy, atheism, Catholicism, and libel. He seemed to have been remarkably lucky. Or maybe someone was watching his back.

Until his luck ran out. When Marlowe died in 1593, at the age of 29, he was on bail and due to appear before the court at Greenwich. He’d been accused of crimes including blasphemy and atheism, after an anti-religious tract was found in rooms he had shared with fellow writer Thomas Kyd. Kyd, under torture, unsurprisingly said the papers were Marlowe’s. Marlowe was arrested at the home of his patron, Thomas Walsingham (nephew of the spy-master) and summoned to appear at Greenwich.

He never made it. On 30 May, he accepted an invitation to spend the day with three men in the house of Eleanor Bull on The Strand, Deptford. The story recorded by the coroner was that a fight broke out over the bill, and hot-head Marlowe struck out with his knife (“the dagger aforesaid to the value of 12d”. Ingram Frizer, one of the men in the room, turned the knife back on him in self-defence. The knife penetrated Marlowe’s eye socket, “of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then & there instantly died”.

Was it an assassination? Quite possibly. All four men in that room had connections with the Secret Service. Perhaps someone didn’t want one of their agents appearing before the court, talking for his life. Perhaps they were worried about the tales he might tell, if he did. In the chilling phrase used by one of his accusers, perhaps someone decided that ‘his mouth should be stopp’d’ forever.

What did he know? Well, that’s catnip to a mystery writer, of course. But I thought back to Marlowe’s childhood, growing up in Canterbury, within living memory of the destruction of the shrine of Thomas Becket. The thing is, nobody knows what happened to the saint’s body. The shrine was pillaged for gold and jewels, taken back to London for Henry VIII’s treasury. Another Thomas, Thomas Cromwell, supervised the destruction. There are stories: that St Thomas’ body was burned, or even shot out of a cannon. It may have been quietly reburied in the cathedral close. (Hilary Mantel, in The Mirror and the Light, has it mouldering away in Thomas Cromwell’s cellar.)

Nobody now knows. But presumably, when it happened, people did know. And when Marlowe was a boy, some of those people would have been alive. Some of the monks, perhaps, who might have become school teachers after the old foundation was dissolved. School teachers for the new school room being set up at Eastbridge?

It’s always the ‘what ifs?’ that get my imagination running as an author. Anyway, that’s the rabbit hole that my literary sleuth Helen Oddfellow started down in my first book, Unlawful Things, and where she returned for The Crimson Thread, which is set entirely in Canterbury and involves chasing down clues among the tombs of the cathedral.

I talked about Canterbury and how it inspired my writing on author Joanna Penn’s podcast Books and Travel, if you’d like to hear more. I met Jo in the Cathedral Lodge, when she had completed her own pilgrimage to Canterbury and was researching her novel inspired by Canterbury, Tomb of Relics.

Or you can join my guided walk around Canterbury on November 1, as part of the Canterbury Festival. The walk, Murder And Mystery In Canterbury, will take in some of the more gory stories from Canterbury’s past. Perfect for All Hallows Day. Why not join me?

Murder And Mystery walk

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The skull and crossbones leered down from the gateposts, stony guardian of the dead. ‘Let’s go in,’ I said lightly, as we passed the church of St Nicholas at Deptford Green, Easter 2009. I’d lived nearby for a decade, but not taken the time to step inside before. It’s no exaggeration to say that visit changed my life.

I didn’t find God, but I did find Christopher Marlowe, and with him the subject of my first novel. There’s a plaque in the church yard, which reads: ‘Near this spot lie the mortal remains of Christopher Marlowe, who met his untimely death in Deptford on May 30, 1593. Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight. Doctor Faustus.’

I knew Marlowe, of course. I’d studied Doctor Faustus, his best-known play, as an English literature student, admired the soaring rhetoric of Faustus’ final speech and wondered why anyone thought Elizabethan clowning was funny. I’d seen productions of the play, with its age-old story of the man who sells his soul to the devil and lives a charmed life, until Mephistopheles comes to collect his soul.

But I knew almost nothing about the playwright. Now, I was intrigued. We popped into the church while on a walk from London to Canterbury, in the footsteps of Chaucer’s pilgrims. When we arrived at Canterbury three days later, I discovered that Marlowe had been born in the cathedral city. That sealed my fate. I set out to find out what had happened to bring about Christopher Marlowe’s ‘untimely death’.

I wasn’t alone. The story of the shoe-maker’s son from Canterbury, who wrote six acclaimed plays and sundry erotic poetry and was stabbed to death in Deptford at the age of 29, has been irresistible to writers and historians for centuries. It was this story of a talented trouble-maker from the age of Shakespeare that was to form the backbone for what eventually became Unlawful Things.

Where to begin? With the plays and poems, then the biographies, of which there are many, even though the man himself left only a few tantalising archival traces. Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe is the ur-text for anyone interested in Marlowe’s murder, and he’s done the heavy lifting of research into the inquest and the teeming network of conspirators and spies. David Riggs The World of Christopher Marlowe set the scene for the period. I read these, then chased down myriad rabbit holes into the secret service, the world of Elizabethan theatre, Marlowe’s patrons and associates. To save listing all the books, I’ll link to the Marlowe Society’s suggested bibliography, which contains enough about his life, death, and whether he was really Shakespeare to make your head spin. This was before Ros Barber’s masterful verse novel The Marlowe Papers was published (I almost gave up when it was, it’s so good).

Secondary sources are great, but for the novel I’d begun writing I needed more. I visited Corpus Christie College in Cambridge to see Old Court, where Marlowe spent years as a student. Marlowe was almost sent down in disgrace because the university authorities suspected his frequent absences as being a sign he was about to defect to the Roman Catholic seminary at Rheims, like other rebellious young student – except he was actually a spy, working for the Elizabethan secret service, probably reporting on his fellow students. (Really. I’m not making this stuff up.)

I toured the college’s Parker Library, which housed treasures that Marlowe might have seen himself, and the little garden with a mulberry tree, wondering if Marlowe had ever eaten its fruit.

I went to Canterbury (more in the next post) to see the remains of the church where he was baptised and the school where he studied. And I saw a production of perhaps his goriest play (crowded field), The Massacre At Paris, presented in the remains of the theatre where it was first shown, back in 1592.

The foundations of the Rose Theatre were rediscovered in 1989, close to the remains of The Globe, during excavation for an office block. The offices were built but the foundations preserved after a heroic campaign by the Rose Theatre Trust to prevent the site being destroyed. It’s used occasionally as a performance space while archeological work continues. Watching a performance of a Marlowe play, in the space where it was first performed, was spine-tingling. I couldn’t resist putting it into the book.

But how did anyone know Marlowe’s plays were first performed at the Rose? One of my most jaw-dropping moments was discovering that the most important historical archive of Elizabethan theatre was held at a school down the road from me.

The owner of the Rose was Philip Henslowe, who kept a meticulous document usually described as his diary, although it was more of a ledger and accounts book. It contains accounts for the Rose (right down to the cost of the nails and actor’s costumes) as well as records of which plays he bought from which playwrights, how much he paid for them, which plays were performed on which dates, and how much money they took. From that record book we know that he was an enthusiastic Marlowe fan, producing among others Tamburlaine The Great (parts 1 and 2), Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta, as well as The Massacre At Paris. He also bought plays from Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson and more.

Henslowe’s daughter Joan married one of the leading actors at the Rose, Edward Alleyne. Alleyne was a superstar of Elizabethan theatre, the man who first played Tamberlaine and Doctor Faustus on stage. He also made money from owning taverns; enough to retire to the countryside and buy himself a manor. He decided on the rural bliss of Dulwich, where he set up a school for poor boys of the parish. The school, Dulwich College, now has the highest fees of any in Britain and alumni include PG Wodehouse (and less happily, Nigel Farage).

The school holds Alleyne’s archived papers, including Henslowe’s diary and Alleyne’s letters to and from Henslowe while the acting company was touring, including the year of 1593, when plague closed the London theatres and the troupe took to the road, no doubt spreading germs around the country as they went.

I got in touch with the college. Was it possible to see Henslowe’s diary and the letters of 1593? It was. Amazed, I presented myself at the school reception and was taken to the inner sanctum of the library, where the archivist unboxed the precious papers. Not surprisingly, you can’t take them out of the room. Sadly this rule wasn’t enforced in the nineteenth century, and the documents are full of holes where Victorian autograph hunters snipped out the signatures of the giants of Elizabethan theatre, where they countersigned for their payments.

The originals are hard to read, so I referred to the official transcripts as well. But as I worked back and forward around May 30 1593, I was struck by something odd. There was not a single mention in any of the letters of the sudden, scandalous and potentially disastrous death of Christopher Marlowe, the star playwright of the Rose Theatre.

At the start of May, Alleyne wrote affectionately from Chelmsford and asks after his ‘mouse’ (his pet name for Joan) and their children. No letters for the rest of May, or in June. In July, Henslowe wrote to Alleyne sombrely of the toll of death from plague among their neighbours, concluding with the words ‘All else is well.’ But was it?

Later that month, Edward Alleyne wrote asking his wife Joan to dye his orange stockings black (probably a good call) and to plant parsley in the spinach bed. But the death of their money-spinning playwright? Not a word.

Why not? For someone constructing a mystery novel, this was the dog that didn’t bark. Eagerly I wove it into my plot. By that point my novel was growing monstrously in all directions at once, but at the heart of it was a literary sleuth, Helen Oddfellow, and her quest for a lost final play by Christopher Marlowe. A play which contained a secret so important that some people would kill for it, even today…

But the root of my story, I decided, wasn’t in Deptford, where it ended. It was in Canterbury. And more of that next time.

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Thanks to George’s work, we were able to stay as guests of the Venerable English College, an ancient foundation on Via di Monserrato, in one of the most charming quarters of Rome. The English College has been preparing Englishmen for the Catholic priesthood since 1579, some 30 years after Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself head of the Church of England. However, it was first a hostel for English pilgrims to Rome, founded in 1362.

Behind the thick wooden doors are tranquil courtyard gardens, sweeping marble staircases, a gilded chapel of great beauty and comfortable guest suites. There’s a precious archive and library full of treasures, including letters about potential spies sent by Elizabeth I’s secret service. Many of the priests who trained and bravely returned to England after the break with Rome were martyred for their faith. They are remembered in memorials in the chapel.

On our first evening, replete with pasta and wine, I stretched out on my bed and gazed at the high, painted coffered ceiling in wonder. I’d never slept in a place so full of history.

The next morning I woke early and opened the shutters. The narrow street was quiet, the sky high above an untroubled blue. A pair of nuns opened the doors of the church across the street, stopping to speak to the beggar sitting on the steps. A young priest hurried past, sunglasses on and a cigarette in his hand, talking with animation into a mobile phone. All around, bells began to chime: seven o’clock and the city was waking up.

I’d barely arrived, and already I knew I wanted to write about this place.

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We had a wonderful few days visiting Caravaggio paintings in churches, wandering the flower market of the nearby Piazza Campo dei Fiori (Giordano Bruno, hero of SJ Parris’ historical mysteries, was executed for heresy there), visiting the exquisite Villa Farnese with its Raphael frescos, and walking the beautiful Via Giulia, with its ivy-draped arch.

I had an idea of what I needed in Rome for my book. My senior sleuth Mrs Jameson, a wealthy American widow who had moved to London after a peripatetic life in Europe, had a secret. She’d lived in Rome with her husband, a notorious artist, in the early years of the twentieth century. In the first book, Blackmail In Bloomsbury, she receives a letter: “We know what happened in Rome.” I knew, too. But I wasn’t telling my readers!

One hot morning, we walked across the River Tiber to view the astonishing golden mosaic interior of Santa Maria Trastevere. We had breakfast at a pavement cafe (where I was startled by a very large, glossy rat which popped up from under the wooden terrace) and walked up the narrow streets painted in shades of ochre and terracotta.

Suddenly I spotted what I’d been looking for: a religious foundation attached to a hospital. We walked up narrow steps, viewed the quiet chapel and the tranquil cloisters, where olive trees sat in pots before faded frescos. I smiled. The nuns here would be the keepers of Mrs Jameson’s secret!

I kept that place in my mind through the next five books, and finally returned to it in the epilogue of Murder On The White Cliffs this year. I flicked through my photographs, retraced our steps on Googlemaps until I found the place. I asked George (my nun consultant) for advice on a fictional name for the foundation. I researched Rome in 1924, noting with surprise that Mussolini was already well established as Il Duce, after taking power in Italy following the March on Rome two years’ previously.

I browsed old photographs of Rome in the twenties, noting the lack of motorised traffic (compared to London), the clothes people wore, the uniforms of the Blackshirts. I read up on Rome in the 1920s in the invaluable blog Jazz Age Club, and decided the Hotel de Russie (which ‘owed its name to the fact that it was the preferred hotel of members of Russian royalty’) would suit Mrs Jameson nicely. I invented a palazzo on the Via Giulia, so Mrs Jameson could have lived just a street away from the English College.

When I came to write the epilogue, the words flew onto the page. It was by far the easiest chapter of the book to write. The memories of Rome were as fresh in my mind as the day I first saw them, two years previously. It’s not just about getting the history right; it’s about the atmosphere, the sights and smells and the things that strike you as a foreign visitor. Even that rat gets a quick cameo!

It was extremely satisfying to finally answer all the questions that Marjorie, my narrator and Mrs Jameson’s assistant, had been accumulating during the previous five books. The question of what happened in Rome came home to haunt Mrs Jameson in Murder On The White Cliffs, and the relationship between Marjorie and her employer was strained to breaking point. Only by returning to Rome could I tie up all those questions and bring the series to a natural close.

Murder On The White Cliffs will be the last Marjorie Swallow book in this series - although I may return to see what she’s up to next year. After six books in two years, I need a break! I’ll send one more post about research for the Marjorie books on July 24, publication day, then I’m taking a break here (I’ll pause paid subs) until September.

Thank you for reading about how Rome inspired my writing. Please do leave a heart if you enjoyed it, and help other people to find my writing.

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The 80s, fair to say, was not a high point for Margate. Package holidays to Spain and France had put paid to staying visitors, and day-tripping teenagers didn’t have money for much more than a bag of chips and a paddle in the sea. Although some livened things up with the occasional riot.

But the town has had many ups and downs since Londoners started to enjoy the fashionable new pursuit of sea-bathing from the fine white sands of Margate back in the 1730s. The gentry came down by sailing boats, but the advent of the steam boat in the early 19th century and the railway midcentury brought crowds of revellers. Margate’s reputation as a seaside resort for the masses was sealed.

While writing Murder On the White Cliffs I was keen to send my young sleuth Marjorie Swallow for a romp around Margate, as relief from the increasingly tense atmosphere in Kingsgate Castle.

But what was Margate like in the 1920s?

Jolly good fun, by the sounds of it. Unless perhaps you were TS Eliot, who sat at the Nayland Rock shelter overlooking the beach in 1921 and wrote:

On Margate Sands

I can connect

Nothing with nothing

in The Waste Land.

For less poetic types, there were wherries for pleasure trips up and down the coast, pleasure gardens, Punch and Judy shows, donkey-rides, music halls and theatres, dance halls, cinemas and tea-rooms, public houses and pavilions, concert halls and winter gardens.

My first question when I began my research was whether Dreamland, the amusement park that preceded Bembom Brothers, was in operation when Marjorie arrived in 1924, and if so could she have a ride on the scenic railway?

I was delighted to discover that Dreamland and its iconic rollercoaster opened in 1921. John Henry Iles, who bought the site in December 1919, had opened theme parks all over the world and was inspired by the Coney Island park in New York.

He planned Dreamland as an American-style pleasure garden and amusement park, with the scenic railway as its star attraction. It was constructed of wood by local carpenters to plans provided by Iles. Despite more than one fire (and after serious restoration work) the railway still runs at the reopened Dreamland today.

An incredible half a million people reportedly rode the mile-long scenic railway in the first three months of its opening. You get a marvellous view of the town from the top of the first ‘hill’ - and the town gets a marvellous earful of your screams as you plunge back down.

Henry Iles also brought other funfair rides including a ‘Joy Wheel’ and a water ride, the ‘River Caves’. The landscaped gardens included tea gardens and the former ice-rink was transformed into a ballroom, while a cinema was built at the front of the site (in the place where the lovely 1930s art deco building stands today).

But the history of the Dreamland site goes back further than that. A town centre railway terminus was built on the land, once a salt marsh, in 1866. However, the public railway service was never put into operation, and the unused terminus was sold off to speculators who built a restaurant and dance hall. Things really got going in 1870, when the site - called The Hall By The Sea - was taken over by the flamboyant circus entrepreneur ‘Lord’ George Sanger.

Sanger turned the site into pleasure gardens, with slide-shows, tea-gardens, carousels and a menagerie, linked to Sanger’s travelling circus. Inmates of this establishment included at various times bears, lions, tigers, monkeys, porcupines, wolves and pelicans. A brochure of attractions lists ‘feeding time’ at 4.30pm, between the afternoon concert and the Grand Ball to be held in the evening. Sanger died in 1911. He’s a fascinating character who hand-reared lion cubs – I’d love to write about him sometime. The zoo in Margate’s Dreamland persisted into the 1970s.

Dreamland eventually became Bembom Brothers’ theme park, then closed down altogether. Happily, Dreamland was revived and re-opened in 2015, with renovated versions of the classic rides –including the original scenic railway. Here I am in 2015, enjoying a ride on the ferris wheel.

The other thing I needed for my book was a theatre. Two of my characters are actors and singers, performing in a musical version of The Scarlet Pimpernel in Margate. On the night of the murder (there’s always a murder) Marjorie and Mrs Jameson visit the theatre to watch the show.

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Margate had two theatres in the 1920s - the Theatre Royal on Addington Street, the Hippodrome Theatre on Cecil Square. Only the former remains; built in 1874 and described by The Era newspaper as “one of the most elegant and comfortable theatres in the kingdom”. Sadly it is currently closed, although Thanet District Council says it is seeking funding for a full restoration, with a planned reopening in 2027. For more about the Theatre Royal, see this post by Luke Bigg who writes excellent posts on Margate’s history.

Borrowing Cats

Margate Archive: Two Forgotten Landmarks

Welcome to another look at Margate’s past! This week, we're delving into the stories of two historic landmarks—both witnesses to the town’s changing fortunes. First, the storied London Hotel, once a lively social hub, and then the Theatre Royal, a venue that has entertained Margate for centuries yet now faces an uncertain future…

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a year ago · 3 likes · Luke Bigg

But two streets away was the Hippodrome, formerly the Grand Theatre, which opened in 1898. The Era approved of this too: “a handsome, commodious, and well-appointed theatre”. It was renamed in 1905 and fitted with electricity, with twice nightly music hall performances, interspersed with periods as a repertory theatre and later a cinema. Sadly it was demolished in the 1960s and replaced with a red-brick municipal library. But it was bigger than the Theatre Royal, so seemed more fitting for the show I wanted to stage in the book.

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Margate seems to attract fictional representations. I recently enjoyed the film Empire Of Light, set in and around the Margate cinema in the 1980s and starring Olivia Coleman. Director Sam Mendes, who filmed the production in 2022, stayed in the town while working on the script, and many local people were drafted in as extras.

Currently the BBC is filming The Dream Lands, an adaptation of the dystopian coming-of-age novel Dreamland by Rosa Rankin Gee. I was lucky enough to meet Rosa on a writing course a few years ago and I’m thrilled that her haunting, prescient book is getting a dramatic outing.

Murder On The White Cliffs is on track to publish at the end of July. If you enjoyed this post, please do give it a ‘heart’ – it really does prompt the pesky old algorithm to show it to other people who might like it. And it would be a nice reward for managing to write this article without once referencing the annoying earworm by 1980s comedy singers Chaz And Dave. (Sorry.)

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She comes down to two choices, both blessed with sandy beaches and easy transport to London. There’s Margate, which even in the 1920s had ‘kiss me quick’ associations with cheap and cheerful entertainment, questionable behaviour and working class culture. Or there’s Broadstairs, with its literary associations (Charles Dickens was a big fan), quaint harbour and genteel tea rooms.

Marjorie dips into the Rough Guides of the day, the Ward Lock & Co Pictorial and Descriptive Guides. These distinctive red-covered books covered Britain as well as continental Europe, with an emphasis on ‘travel practicalities’ such as the railway or steamer from London, ease of hiring bath chairs and boats, local churches and other amenities.

But I already had a hotel in mind. I had seen the imposing Kingsgate Castle on clifftop walks between the two seaside towns. About halfway between Broadstairs and Margate, it would give me the opportunity to contrast the genteel and raucous side of the English seaside. Kingsgate itself has a long history as a smuggler’s haunt, and was given its royal appellation by Charles II, who supposedly made an emergency landing there during a storm in the channel, while en route to Dover.

The crenellated and towered edifice was built in the seventeenth century as a rather large folly, one of a number in the area built for the eccentric Henry Fox, later Lord Holland. It originally provided stabling and staff accommodation (and enhanced the view) for Holland House, the mansion Fox had built in the bay.

The castle was later owned by the media mogul Lord Northcliffe (giving an inadvertent link to my previous Marjorie Swallow mystery, Death On Fleet Street) where he entertained friends and made part of the grounds into the North Foreland golf course.

In 1923 the castle was bought by a local hotelier and turned into a smart hotel. It’s still there, although now divided into the inevitable luxury flats. But the secluded cliff-top location and tunnel down to the beach made the hotel pretty irresistible as a setting for a 1920s murder mystery.

Advertisements in The Gentlewoman magazine make clear that the aim was for an upmarket, sporting clientele with a penchant for golf and tennis. It attracted a theatrical crowd, including the actors John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft.

However, a rather lurid story carried in all the newspapers of 1924 showed a different side to the guests at the Kingsgate Castle. Captain Seymour, a retired Indian Army officer, was charged with committing grievous bodily harm on a fellow-guest after an evening game of bridge got a little too heated.

According to the Daily Express, “It was stated that during a private bridge party Mr. Kerman wished to leave, and said that the game was monotonous. Captain Seymour asked him to go outside. Criticisms had been passed during the play, and afterwards Captain Seymour attacked Mr. Kerman… A detective sergeant said that Captain Seymour said when arrested : ‘I can tell you this, that he will get another socking from me when this is all over.’”

Naturally, I squirrelled this away for use at a crucial point of my story.

My favourite description of the hotel, however, comes from the pages of Signpost, by WG McMinnies, a 1930s ‘independent guide to pleasant ports of call’. It’s rather a good publication, with personal accounts of visits to each of the restaurants, hotels and inns listed, as well as maps and a key to the facilities on offer.

Mr McMinnies reports of Kingsgate Castle:

“This is such a wonderful place that it's difficult to know where to start. It's got everything that you expect a castle to have - turrets, battlements, towers, a fierce-looking portcullis leading into a most charming paved courtyard. And last, a remarkable position on top of the white cliffs of north foreland. Indeed you can have tea or a cocktail on the terrace on this side of the castle, pitching your cherry stones straight into the sea… My general impression was of extreme comfort combined with a certain air of friendliness.”

Exactly the sort of place to test the staff’s friendliness with a murder or two.

Naturally, I looked up WG McMinnies. Major McMinnies was an RAF officer during the first world war, and also wrote a 1918 book, Practical Flying, before setting off around Britain to write his guides. I’m rather tempted to write a book about the flying major!

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A curious footnote that I discovered while writing Murder On The White Cliffs is that the iron staircase down to the beach from Kingsgate Castle may have been the inspiration for John Buchan’s classic 1915 spy novel The 39 Steps. There are almost as many theories about the book’s inspiration as there are steps, but hear me out!

Buchan wrote the book in St Cuby’s, a house near Broadstairs, and the steps to the beach from that house are commonly thought to be the inspiration. However, writing in his fascinating blog Secrets of Kingsgate Castle, former castle resident David Evans writes: “For starters, the Castle stairs – unlike those at St Cuby’s – were clearly visible from the cliffs as described in the book and, from the beach, led up to a metal door in the cliff-face behind which was another staircase that spiralled up through the chalk into the bowels of the building. The external staircase is no longer there, but photos show it to have been welded from three sections and the individual steps may have well numbered 39… Kingsgate Bay, with its remote sandy beach, would have been an ideal place for a boat to moor in at high tide, unlike the more rocky beach beneath St Cuby’s.”

There’s another link. “At one point, before his death, Scudder [a character in The 39 Steps] disguises himself as a certain ‘Captain Digby’ – the name of the pub that stood then, as it does now, directly opposite Kingsgate Castle, and which Buchan doubtless patronised while staying nearby.”

I love the idea that John Buchan was inspired by Kingsgate Castle and the Captain Digby pub, both of which feature in Murder On the White Cliffs. Captain Robert Digby was the nephew of Lord Holland, a captain in the English navy. The Captain Digby was built as another of Lord Holland’s follies, and also looks like a mini-castle. Its beer garden has the best view of any pub in Kent.

Incidentally, Charles Dickens’s holidays in Broadstairs sound fun. There are accounts in his letters of swimming, walks on the cliffs towards Ramsgate, boat trips from the pier, regattas, and dancing at the Tivoli Gardens. Not only that, but he seems to have popped over to Margate when he wanted to misbehave. A letter to his friend Maclise includes the ambiguous words: “There are conveniences of all kinds at Margate (do you take me?) and I know where they live.” Yes Charles, we take you.

Next time, I’ll take a look at some of the attractions in 1920s Margate, where Marjorie and her friend Frankie spot some bad behaviour in the Dreamland tea gardens…

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