Writer's Gramps

I should really be doing more about 1820 but I'm going to take a breather and think about the next project. I enjoy the village stories in Oakhaven and Cairndhu but need to do a rewrite to get them to flow more easily. I want to do them in short story form so that people can read them on the way to work or listen to them in the car. Something that a retired person can read for half an hour just before putting the light out. I'm drawn to the idea because I so enjoyed the Para Handy stories of Neil Munro. You get to know the characters and enjoy half an hour in their company. I think I can do the same with Broon and Jinks and Miss Kirkhope, characters from Best in Show set in Cairndhu. I've written two but they need a bot of work. What has caused this turn of thought is this latest set of riots and demonstrations which will end up like the 1820 insurrection with a clamp down by those entrusted with keeping the peace. For some reason people are reluctant to accept that the po...

Sometimes it is worth looking behind the scenes hostorians put before us. A typical view of history is Churchill's comment that in 1820, "Popular feeling against the conditions of England was now diverted into the condition of the monarchy." This implies that the whole country was absorbed in the domestic confrontation between King George IV and his wife Caroline. It seems more likely that the nation was mildly interested in the affairs at court but still unsettled and forming associations that would become the Labour Party and the Trade Unions. If one digs into the state of the monarchy one finds that in 1787 Parliament had granted £161, 000 to cover the future George IV's debts; that in 1818 his brother William (IV) married a wealthy woman to obtain enough money to cover his debts. As Prince of Wales, George was fat and greedy yet historians refuse to dismiss him in the same way as the struggles of the ordinary people in the land. 1820 was not the time of a constitu...

The attraction of writing about 1820 and the 'Scottish Uprising' is its ambivalence. First, it is claimed by certain parties to be a purely Scottish affair when, in reality, it is the follow on from Peterloo in Northern England. Secondly, it has been promoted as a general uprising of the working people of the country. There is little doubt the general population felt used by the factory owners but did they really want to overthrow the government? There is no indication they were republicans. The Scots had already taken their case for a living wage to the courts, would they have been willing to take up arms if the government had not organised Agents Provocateur and instigated the uprising? On the Government side, why risk a real insurrection with their Agents Provocateur? They must have felt they could control the outcome. What guarantee did they have that the soldiers who would have to enforce law and order wouldn't mutiny? They must have felt from the information they wer...

I’m not like other people, I didn’t get into writing because it was all I wanted to do. When I retired, my hobby was making wooden toys and sailing yachts but things change and I had no workshop and cracked three ribs and was banned from yachts. I came back from South Africa to start a boat yard with my son but after a hard look at the industry and doing the calculations, we gave that up. I then needed something that would make a bawbee or two and needed no more than a pencil and a piece of paper, saw an advert for a writing course with Writers Bureau that promised my money back if I didn’t make more than the cost of the course and had a go. I recovered the cost half way through and then looked at what to do long-term. I didn’t need to make a lot of money for a bit but the rent of our flat went up by 10% a year (Inflation isn’t normally much below that and it had been 17%) It meant the rent at £700 a month would rise by £70 in the first year, not much, but by year 7 it would be £1400...

I don't know how others find it but between researching history and writing a novel, I have to read fiction, otherwise I do journalism and write facts. One of my faourites is Bernard Cornwell because of the way he setas the scene and doesn't climpon the descriptions. He manages to make his characters seeem ordinary people,and not treat them as academic robots. Which brings me to one of my pet hates - academic history. It irritates me when I see a war documentary and it deals with the strategy, mentioning things like - the estimated causualty rate was 30% but that was exceeded by 20% because of lack of intelligence. Those casualties are ordinary people; people who dislike spinach and have blisters from new boots. When I did some research on the Korean war what struck me in one memoir was the comment - and always the refugees. Imagine what it would be like to carry or wheel everything you had in the world, with your children footsore and hungry in a queue that stretched over the ...