I’ve been so busy preparing The Bristol Suffragettes for publication (expected in May) that I haven’t had a chance to write a blog for ages. With publication date drawing near, though, I’ve been thinking about dates quite a bit, and in particular how hard they, and other details, are to pin down. Surprisingly, that’s true even for recent and well-recorded events such as the suffrage campaign. You’d think that with newspapers, books, recordings and films available for us to consult, not to mention diaries and autobiographies, it would be comparatively easy to sort out the facts.   Well, it isn’t!    Take the case of the suffragettes who hid overnight in the organ in the Colston Hall, Bristol in 1909 to interrupt local MP Augustine Birrell’s speech the next day. According to A Nest of Suffragettes in Somerset by B M Willmott Dobbie (1979), the suffragettes were Elsie Howey and Vera Wentworth and the event took place on 2 May. Dobbie includes a rousing description of...

I went to see Githa Sowerby’s 1924 play, The Stepmother , at The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond on 16 February 2013. Before this production the play had never been performed in public (there was a private performance in 1924). In fact Sowerby, the author of a critically acclaimed play about a bullying industrialist, Rutherford & Son (1912), had been largely forgotten. Over the years there have been rumblings of a revival of interest in Githa Sowerby (1876 – 1970). In 1980 the Theatre Upstairs put on an abridged version of Rutherford & Son . The Times Literary Supplement in 1994 talked of the “uncovered greatness of Githa Sowerby” in a review of a production of the play at the Cottesloe Theatre. Then she sank back into obscurity until 2009 with the publication of a biography by Pat Riley ( Looking for Githa ); the unveiling of a plaque at her Gateshead home; a revival of Rutherford & Son by Northern Stage; and other events in Tyneside to commemorate the Gateshead-born...

When Mrs Pankhurst spoke at a suffrage meeting in Battersea Town Hall with local suffragette Charlotte Despard, she was puzzled by hecklers' calls for “the old brown dog”. Who was the old brown dog, and what connection did it have with the campaign for female suffrage? The old brown dog was the victim of vivisection at the hands of Professor William Bayliss (1860–1924) at University College London in 1903. Two female students witnessed   the procedure: Louise Lind-af-Hageby (1878–1963) and Liesa Schartau. Louise Lind-af-Hageby was born in Sweden but settled in England in 1902. She attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College before going on to study medicine with her friend Liesa Schartau.   The women noticed that the dog had already been subjected to one procedure. The law at that time forbade the use of an animal for more than one experiment; it had to be destroyed. They reported the incident to Stephen Coleridge (1854–1936) of the Anti-vivisection Society, who publicly acc...

One of the voyage accounts I read while writing my novel  To the Fair Land was The Adventures of Mark Moore: late an officer in the British Navy (1795).* Moore combined a naval career in British, American, Tuscan, Portuguese and Swedish services with a career in the theatre as an actor manager, touring Britain, France and Flanders. His was a rackety, wandering life which zigzagged between the sea and the stage, and from prosperity to bankruptcy. Moore was born in Boston, America in 1739. His father had emigrated from Ireland and was a wine merchant. He died when Moore was three. When the boy was thirteen he was sent to near-by Cambridge to study. “I did not waste much of the midnight oil,” he confessed. He was much more interested in spending time with Hallam’s theatrical company which was touring in Rhodes Island. Stage-struck, Moore ran away to join the company when they went to Barbados. Hallam’s company, founded by Lewis Hallam (1714-1756) and his wife (?-1773), was the f...

I’ve just read The Weekes Family Letters, the correspondence between Hampton Weekes (1780-1855) during his time as a student at St Thomas’s Hospital in 1801-2, to his family at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex. Hampton Weekes came from a medical family: his father and younger brother Dick were both doctors (surgeon-apothecaries). His Father Richard had studied at St Thomas’s before him, and Dick was due to study there when Hampton had finished. His mother was dead and his step-mother Elizabeth died in 1802. She brought with her a daughter, Fanny. Hampton also had two sisters, Mary Ann and Grace, who with their step-sister helped run the family’s medical practice. Besides being illuminating about the practice of medicine and the attitudes and beliefs of eighteenth-century practitioners and patients, the letters give a vivid insight into the life of a close and affectionate family. (The exception is the step-mother, who the Weekes children were not particularly fond of.)   They share advi...

I went to see Wild Oats by John O’Keefe at Bristol Old Vic last night (17 September 2012). It was a real treat to be back in the Old Vic after its refurbishment. It now has a “pit” instead of stalls, but the seats are new and much more comfortable than the old ones, and in place of the dusty carpet there's an oak floor. The painted and gilded theatre looks lovely, and the names of many great actors and playwrights lettered on the walls – Cibber, Vanbrugh, Shakespeare, Steele – evokes its great heritage. The design is based on the eighteenth-century configuration of the theatre – balconies, colours, stage – but is fully modern too. So its inaugural production is a modern reworking of the 1791 play by John O’Keefe. Wild Oats was written by Irish playwright John O’Keefe (1747 – 1833). Originally an artist, O’Keefe became a writer when his eye sight began to fail. He was blind by 1781. He left Ireland and his unfaithful wife in 1781, and during his writing career produced farces, ...

I’ve been reading the Newfoundland Journal of Aaron Thomas, Able Seaman in HMS Boston. The voyage, which Thomas embarked on at the age of 32, lasted from 1794 to 1795. The Journal is a fascinating insight into life on board ship from an ordinary sailor’s viewpoint, especially as Thomas is good company for a reader. He’s lively and funny, takes a keen interest in everything about him, and has a good eye for an anecdote. He’s just the sort of eighteenth-century seaman I could make a hero of in a novel. So I thought until I was reminded with a shock that Thomas was, indeed, of the eighteenth century. It happened that he was staying in a public house in Portugal Cove in Newfoundland. Here, seeing a pile of live lobsters, he hit on a trick to give him and the company “recreation and mirth”. With the landlady’s help he and his companions began “the frolic” by hanging live lobsters on a horse’s tail and mane. They then put four live lobsters on a cat’s tail: “The moment the Claws embrac’d h...