General Strike – I Walk Alone

Research Rabbit Hole – Southampton Parks 1926

The town of Southampton was once surrounded by ancient fields where townspeople grew crops in summer and grazed animals in winter. By law, all crops had to be harvested by 1 August, Lammas Day, so the fields were called Lammas Lands. In 1844, the Marsh Improvement Act allowed the council to drain the Saltmarsh around the new Terminus Station. To compensate the townspeople for losing this common grazing land, the council agreed to turn the other Lammas Lands into parks. The Central Parks were laid out in the late 1850s, and old OS maps of the time show the layout has changed very little since. Southampton’s wonderful parks are still a prominent feature to this day, and they also feature in many of my books. Making sure I got things right required a good deal of research.

Land Fit For Heroes

Plagued was never going to be a standalone book. Even as I was writing and researching it, other characters were clamouring to have their stories told. Their voices were so loud, it was hard to decide who to listen to at times. Three voices were especially loud, Lenny, Laura and Percy, who’d all had bit parts in Plagued but demanded their place in the spotlight. It took a while to quieten them enough to work out their story, and even longer to research and write it. Now it’s done and thanks to all the wonderful people who helped me along the way, Land Fit For Heroes is now in print.

Coming soon…

Times of change and strife are often the ones that stand out in history and the years between the wars were certainly filled with both. The men who came back from the Great War had been promised a land for for heroes, but what they got was very different. The war left behind both economic and political turmoil, and what peace there was, was uneasy. There were still wars being waged, the Turkish War of Independence, the Polish Soviet War, the Irish War of Independence, the Rif War, problems between the Italians and Libya, the Americans and Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic to mention just a few. Politically too, the world was changing, with the slow rise of both communism and fascism. America may have experienced a period of financial boom in the early 1920’s but Britain faced an unemployment crisis more persistent and severe than any since industrialisation. The ordinary, working-class men who had come back from the war faced terrible hardships. In Southampton, the men of the docks were some of the worst affected.

Southampton docks and Southampton dockers

Research for my second book A Land Fit For Heroes, took me to Southampton Docks during the General Strike of 1926. It should have been easy. In my time working for a cruise company, I’d donned the obligatory hi-vis jacket and wandered around the docks more than once. The problem was, the docks I’d seen in the twenty first century were a far cry from the docks I was writing about. In fact, a lot of the docks as we know them today didn’t exist back then. The western dock had not been built and the sea still lapped at the platforms of Southampton station at high tide. There were no hi-vis jackets back then either. Health and safety wasn’t something the dockers of the mid 1920’s worried about too much.

Lockdowns, redundancies and strikes

In early November 2020 a second lockdown began. At the same time, Commando was told he was under threat of redundancy. The second thing somewhat eclipsed the first, obviously. Escaping into the past was a blessing in many ways. Learning about the General Strike and the terrible depravations the strikers went through during those nine May days in 1926 put things into perspective.

Research is vital

In late October 2020 the news was depressing. COVID cases and deaths were rising. Despite local lockdowns and a new, tiered system of restrictions, there were murmurings about another total lockdown. Businesses were going bust, and unemployment was rising fast. Everywhere I looked there were rumblings of discontent, conflicting information and vociferous opinions that made me wonder if the virus had affected peoples’ capacity to reason. To my mind, no one had definitive answers and, no matter what the government did, or said, they couldn’t win. In the end, I decided the only thing to do was ignore it all, worry about my own health and safety and concentrate on the second big writing project I’d recently started.

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