Stuarts, Salford, the BBC and Bawdiness
I'd been asked to do an interview about The Jacobites' Apprentice at the new BBC studios in Salford.
The day before, I took a phone call from a friend who asked me whether I thought they'd ask me about Salford's Mayoral candidates. I was non-plussed, thought it might be a reference to my previous post on Blogger.Com - and then realised that a former colleague, Ian Stewart, is himself a candidate for the elected mayor's position. It was therefore a "Stuart" in-joke. Anyway, needless to say, it didn't come up in the interview.
Instead, Andy Crane (BBC Radio Manchester Drive Time and Saturday Breakfast Show) pressed me with some searching and more relevant questions. How does an ex-union official come to be a historical novelist? Was I aware of the link between Manchester and Bonnie Prince Charlie before doing the basic research? Is it one of those novels that teaches you facts or, rather, simply uses the history to fuel a story? And then this...
Q. You've said that the book contains a modest amount of bawdiness. Is it easy to write bawdy literature?
A. It's a lot easier to write it as David Ebsworth than as myself. That's partly the reason for the pen name. And I think that a lot of people will tell you the same. That if you write under a pen name, you can write in a completely different way.
Q. Do you become somebody else then? When you're writing?
A. Of course! Don't we all become somebody else, put on a different persona, when we go to work?
Q. But it can't have been just the bawdiness that you wanted to write about?
A. Oh, good heavens, no! It was because when I started writing Jacobites, I had this idea in my head that all those Manchester merchants involved in the '45 were as we would think of modern entrepreneurs. Pillars of society. And, of course, these were actually guys who were up to their necks in all sorts of dodgy stuff. They were manufacturing fustian and other textiles - of course they were. But they were also running the local brothels, the gin houses, the cockfighting pits. And often involved in smuggling.
Q. Tea smuggling, according to the book! How do you smuggle tea? When I think of tea being transported, I think of massive crates. Can you smuggle those? Who was doing it and how?
A. Again, lots of those were Manchester merchants who tied themselves into the tea smugglers. The Mersey and the Irwell were navigable all the way to Manchester and they used to bring in shipments of tea upriver, store the crates in warehouses near Quay Street. At the time, tea smuggling was as profitable and criminal as cocaine and heroine smuggling would be today. It was a pretty vicious industry. When I was developing the story, the television series that was grabbing everybody's attention was "Deadwood", and the more I watched it the more I thought, My god, Manchester in 1745 looks like Deadwood!
My thanks to Andy Crane and his editor for hosting the interview - and thanks also to the various listeners who turned up later in the day for my book signing at Waterstones in the Arndale Centre.

From Shaun Ryder to Historical Fiction

Last Saturday, the Guardian carried an astonishing piece which I took to be an ill-timed April Fool's article. It seems that the Prime Minister has asked Shaun Ryder to advise the Tories on how they might better "connect" with "ordinary people". The following link will take readers there so they can see for themselves.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/apr/01/cameron-shaun-ryder-advise-tories
My initial reaction was, "Say no more!" I find it hard to fathom that anybody should seriously believe that we would think more highly of a Prime Minister who either (a) would admit to not being "in touch" with "ordinary people" in the first place; or (b) consider that being seen "eating pasties" or appearing on "reality TV" is in any way admirable in a country's leader.
But now I'm simply ranting, when my original intention was to explain how I suddenly find myself in the strange situation of describing myself as "an author" and why this is relevant to the Shaun Ryder nonsense.
I've spent most of my working life either as a voluntary trade union activist or, later, as a full-time union official. It was work that I loved - every day of it, even though some of it was pretty tough. I spent some of that time, at meetings with new members, or in schools and colleges, explaining what trade unionism was all about... its background and history. Not dry historical Tolpuddle Martyr stuff (important as that is!) but the stories of everyday people who'd needed or supported the unions, including those who'd worked with sister unions abroad, in Spain, South Africa, Colombia, the Philippines. I was often struck by how little most "ordinary people" in Britain know about that rich part of our culture - far less, for example, than in Spain or France.
When I retired in 2008, I therefore started doing some more voluntary work for the North West TUC, producing a series of Audio-Magazines called "Union Hour". These included articles and interviews about "current affairs"; about trade union history and its personalities; and about "working class culture". And, yes, such a thing does exist and continues to thrive. And, no, it's not about fish and chips or flat caps.
These Audio-Magazines caused me to interview some amazing people - ninety-one year old Jack Jones, the iconic trade union leader from the '70s; or Che Guevarra's daughter when she was on a speaking tour of the UK. And they introduced me, in a totally new way, to the hidden stories of the towns and cities of the North West.
So it was that I came across the little-known tale of Manchester's part (and that of Wrexham, Warrington, Ormskirk, Preston, Carlisle, etc) in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Most people know a little about the Bonnie Prince Charlie story but few will be able to recount anything of Francis Townley, Dudley Bradstreet or Beppy Byrom and the way that they influenced that story's outcome. There was a gap, I decided, in all the histories of the period - since none of them told me anything about the "ordinary people" who sat at the story's heart. So I started writing The Jacobites' Apprentice, recently published by SilverWood Books. It took me almost two years, and I then went on to write The Republicans' Assassin - a very different tale, set towards the end of the Spanish Civil War. My third book, The Castaways' Disciple, is set a thousand years in the future - even though I still think of it as historical fiction.
At the centre of each of them, I hope, will be the "ordinary people" who've helped to shape history and, in future blogs, I hope to share some of backstage experiences of writing these novels; the everyday lives of the characters that live within their pages; the options and dilemmas in plotting the stories - that readers might like to help me resolve; and maybe just a bit more about David Ebsworth and his travels. I've got a separate website...
http://www.davidebsworth.com
...and I'm always happy to receive comments about its content.
Meanwhile, when I read the Guardian article, I was struck by how little the "ordinary people" of Britain want to see gimmicks and spin in their politics, and therefore how little Shaun Ryder must understand about those of us "ordinary people" whose views he now seems to think himself capable of representing. Personally, I'm looking for nothing else in our politicians than... as much honesty as this inceasingly complex world can possibly allow; absolute integrity; and a genuine care and affection for all levels of our society.
Come to think of it, that's pretty much what I'm looking for from my own work too - but I won't be asking Shaun Ryder for any advice!!