Writer of Biography, Short Stories, Children's and Young Adult Fiction
This is going to be a brilliant event at the and the first one that the Oxford Writers Group will have been able to attend since 2019. You can find all the details here…
The fifth Oxib Magazine has a great many fascinating articles written by authors who will be talking about their books and selling them as well at the Book Fair.! I was kindly asked to add an article and I was delighted to do just that… Nile Cat at the Oxford Indie Book Fair.
I was thrilled to be informed that Nile Cat had been awarded a B.R.A.G. Medallion. This is awarded by the Book Readers Appreciation Group. Their mission is to discover talented self-published authors and help them give their work the attention and recognition their readers say it deserves. No wonder then that I was delighted that Nile Cat was awarded the medallion… To find hundreds of other wonderful books do visit the IndieB.R.A.G….. website.
Yesterday I was checking my email and found one from the International Rubery Book Awards concerning the shortlist for 2021 Awards. This was not likely to be particularly interesting and I was about to delete it, when I decided instead to have click glance through the list first. I nearly dropped my phone when I saw Nile Cat was on the shortlist.
Since publishing Nile Cat, my YA Historical Thriller in October 2020, I have spent some time considering how to market the book in a year when everyone who has ever thought about writing a book, has had time to sit down and write, or finish, that book. I decided I would enter some Book Awards ‘just for fun’. For the Indie (self-published) author options are more limited than for traditionally published authors and there are a large number of ‘Book Awards’ out there with high fees for entering, dubious judging procedures, and little credibility in the industry – so I knew I had to do my homework. After some assistance from the wonderful Alliance of Independent Authors’s website – I chose a few of the most reputable awards – and the Rubery was one of the most highly thought of… I never for an instant thought I would reach any shortlist!
But I have – and that’s brilliant. Whilst I love and value the encouragement and support of my friends and family, it is hard to be confident that they really are being honest with you. To know that Nile Cat has been enjoyed by the judges who know nothing about me, is wonderful, and a real confidence booster. So whatever happens with the rest of the judging is fine by me – I have no excuse – I am settling back down into the World of the Nile Cat and starting on the sequel….
All visitors to this website and this blog are always welcome – but there is a particular welcome to those who have come via the HNSNA Conference website. I have only recently joined the Historical Novel Society so this is the first conference I have attended – I have been greatly looking forward to it.
Covid 19 has caused mayhem and tragedy around the world, and there is little doubt that the world we move into post Covid will be different to the one we left. Not all changes will be for the worse however, and maybe the HNS Conference is one example of this.
In the world before Covid, I would not have been able to justify travelling from the UK to San Antonio, however much I wanted to make the trip. The fact that I can attend the conference digitally from my home in the UK is a huge bonus.
For anyone who reads and enjoys historical novels but who hasn’t heard of the HNS – you have been missing out! For anyone who writes historical novels who hasn’t heard of the HNS – you have really been missing out! To find out more – please do visit their website!
William Cecil was born on 13th September 1520. This year therefore we are celebrating the quincentenary of his birth, and there will be events at both Burghley and Hatfield as both branches of the Cecil family mark the birth of an extraordinary man. He survived three different monarchs, each with their own religious beliefs, when many less diplomatic men lost their heads, literally, and he rose to be the most powerful man in England when he was appointed Elizabeth I’s Lord High Treasurer.
In spite of William being my most illustrious ancestor, I have always found it hard to connect with him. He has seemed too grand, too clever, too famous. Maybe the question I should have asked was – what would he have been like to sit next to at dinner? I think he could have been fascinating company. His spy network ran throughout Europe. If someone dropped a pin in the Spanish court, William probably knew about it a few days later.
He remained just a name on the family tree however, until one day I came across a small, rather sad looking book in a family bookcase. On opening it, I found it was signed with what looked like William’s signature, but it wasn’t in the same style as I had seen before. I also had no idea what the little book was except it wasn’t English or Latin! Jon Culverhouse, the wonderful curator of the collections at Burghley, explained that what I had was William’s Greek Primer which he would have used when in May 1535 he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge. He was just fourteen.
It seems that, like many students, he was playing at writing his name in ‘classic’ fashion. In this case he was experimenting with writing his name in Latin – Gulielium Caecilis. As Jon suggested to me, maybe if William had known more Greek at the time, he’d have tried writing his name in Greek – so as he quickly became unusually proficient in Greek, it must have been the fourteen year old boy who wrote this. All rather ‘human’ really and surprisingly endearing!
There will be an exhibition at Burghley House this year to celebrate the quincentenary of William Cecil’s birth – and this little book will be part of the exhibition – so if you want to see it for yourself, you will be able to! Visit Burghley 2020!!
Displacement activities are a problem for any writer. In my case they are a real challenge and the annual 5 or 6 weeks my sheep spend lambing are a particular problem and many things are truly ‘displaced’ particularly sleep – it is extremely hard to write when you sit down… open up the laptop… and immediately fall asleep…
But then to write you need to experience life.. and death… and the lambing season is all about that!
When I tell people I have Cotswold sheep often people (some of whom should know better as they are farmers) say to me is – ‘But why? Surely all sheep want to do is die.’ And it is true that often when you find a sheep ill in the field, it is very ill indeed and will often die. But people shouldn’t forget a sheep is a ‘prey animal’ and this means their instinct to keep up with the flock, and look fine, and therefore not a target for any passing predator is immensely strong – so when you find a sick sheep, it is past caring and probably indeed near death.
The Cotswold lamb on the left of the photo was the final of the triplets to arrive. She was unexpected as mum had been scanned for twins. She arrived in a birth sack of fluid and possibly took a breath of birth fluid before the ewe could get to her to lick her free. She developed pneumonia over the next day or so from the fluid on her lungs – and in spite of my efforts to save her with a hefty dose of antibiotics and feeding her milk through a tu
be into her stomach (not as horrid as it sounds) she lay under the lamp for a day, between her brother and sister, without moving. I was waiting for her to die. I made sure she was comfortable, but there was nothing else to be done. I kept checking her to see if she had breathed her last…
But she kept on going… one laboured breath after another… then in the evening I thought she had gone at last, and gently picked her up. At that moment she lifted her head and stared at me. She was fighting so hard to live; I gave her another feed, some more antibiotics and a painkiller. Half an hour later she was on her feet. And a day later she is feeding from her mum, and jumping round the pen like nothing was ever wrong with her. She might be small, but she really did fight for her life! She wanted to live – she is definitely a sheep, which has no intention of dying!
And so with lambing over, and a good night’s sleep beckoning, there are no excuses left and tomorrow it’s back to writing…
Anyone who has visited this site before may have been bored by the lack of activity recently. I must confess life has got in the way and I did not spend much of 2016 writing… 2017 is going to be different. Picking up a project is always hard, so I have spent some weeks re-engaging with some of the most important characters. It is not always easy to breathe life into the distant past – somehow books and newspaper archives, however intellectually interesting, don’t always have the magic; it takes something special to get the electric connection that brings the past
so close you can hold out your hand and touch it.
For me, this time, it has been the Admiral’s Log, or as the book is actually titled Admiralty Orders 1809… . It stood forgotten and unopened on a family book shelf for decades – yet it’s a piece of living history. It is not beautiful. The pages are dog-eared and water-stained, the writing is hard to read and faded – but as I peer at the pages I can hear the wind in the rigging, the creaking of the masts as Captain Robert Mitford’s ship, the Espoir, cuts through the waves, and the shouts of the topmen as they trim the sails. I can smell the salt and the damp and the staleness of sailors who have been at sea for months. The pages detail the mundane; the way casks containing provisions should be protected from damage, how to prevent the seamen from falling victim to fraudsters when they make their wills, how to store the lemon juice that will protect the men from scurvy, and what precisely should be done in the event of the death of the Purser (a key man on board any naval vessel of the day). The pages also, of course, provide a record of where the Espoir has been, and the tasks undertaken. It may have collected live bullocks to provide fresh meat for a nearby squadron, carried boxes containing thousands of Spanish hard dollars from Gibraltar to Malta, or casks of Madeira wine to London. Other tasks included escorting convoys, seeking out enemy ships, and guarding French prisoners, most notably on the island of Cabrera.
As I fight to decipher the Log’s secrets I am hoping to find answers to specific questions, which no other source has yet answered. What exactly was Robert Mitford doing in Egypt, and when? Did he assist in the building of the Egyptian navy? And was he really offered Cleoptra’s needle, now standing on the Embankment in London, as his reward? To try and find the answers to these questions will keep me reading late into the night…
A few weeks ago there was a message on my answering machine. This was unusual as for once it wasn’t from someone trying to sell me green energy or trying ‘to assist me to reclaim mis-sold PPI’. It was from someone who had discovered my website following his own discovery in his mother’s attic following her death. When he and his wife were clearing out th
e attic, they had come across a picture which his parents had bought many years before.
This was a nice, but not particularly exciting oil painting of Bury St Edmunds Cathedral. It had long ago lost its frame and had been left forgotten in the attic for numerous years.
However 
on the reverse there was a surprise – they discovered this beautifully illustrated ‘Address’ which must have been presented to my grandfather to mark his 21st birthday, which was only shortly after he had joined the Grenadier Guards. It is ‘signed’ by all the workers on the Didlington Estate and is a wonderful and rather unusual piece of family history.
It is perhaps interesting to see just how many Carters were working on the estate at that time – exactly how they were related to Howard Carter is currently unknown.
Also exactly how the Address found its way to that Suffolk attic and how it ended up as the back of an oil painting of Bury St Edmunds Cathedral is a mystery – one guess regarding the painting is that during the shortages of WW2 someone wanted to paint the picture and the only piece of board available was the reverse of the ‘Address’. It is a miracle it survived undamaged, and it is a miracle that it has come home!
That it has, is entirely due to the internet alerting one kind person that I might be interested in it – I owe them a huge debt of gratitude for their persistence in tracking me down… thank you!
With just four Cotswold ewes still to lamb the last few weeks have been pretty busy. Lambing is always a time of late nights and little sleep. There are always life and death dramas and every year some new challenge arises. This year has been no exception.
But when it all goes well it is just the best time in the world at Queenford. Seeing a well-fed contented lamb curled up beside its mother is so satisfying. Seeing healthy lambs racing and leaping round the field is fantastic and makes those late nights all worthwhile.
The bond between a ewe and her lambs is incredibly strong and each year I find myself amazed by it afresh. That is not to say that there aren’t some scatty ewes out there who seem to forget they have ever had a lamb – but in Cotswolds that is rare! They are generally excellent milky mums which keep their lambs safe!
I thought any visitors to this site might like to see a few photos of this year’s new arrivals….
Yesterday it was reported that Isis had destroyed much of the site of Nimrud near Mosul and had moved on to begin bulldozing the site of Hatra. Previously they had proudly published photos of the destruction of historically priceless artefacts held in the Mosul Museum. Of course the members of Isis have committed appalling and unspeakably brutal crimes against fellow human beings, so why should any of us be surprised that such people who have no respect for the living, should have any respect for their history?
We should all be horrified that one group of blinkered fanatics should be able to destroy the heritage that belongs to all of us. We are all the poorer because of their wanton vandalism. I have never visited the ruins of Nimrud or Hatra and now I never will. How dare they take the possibility of visiting the birth place of civilisation away from me, from you, from any of us.
I find that these particular acts of vandalism seem almost personal. Firstly because the museum and library at Didlington Hall held many Assyrian artefacts, though it was the Babylonian stone tablets that William Tyssen-Amherst particularly valued. He was fascinated by the history of the written word and thus these ancient tablets with their ancient texts held particular importance for him. He would have been appalled by the deliberate destruction in Assyria.
His interest could only have been heightened by the fact that it had been a cousin of his father-in-law, Admiral Robert Mitford, who had travelled with Austen Henry Layard when he first visited the long forgotten historical sites of Assyria.
While most people will not have heard of Edward Ledwich Mitford, he was one time companion to one of the most famous archaeologists of the nineteenth century. Layard was of course, the excavator of the great ancient Assyrian civilisations of Nineveh and Nimrud. His discoveries in Assyria caught the imagination of the Victorians. He was the Howard Carter of the Victorian age, and Nineveh, the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Mitford was there in 1839 when Layard took his first steps on the path to his great discoveries when they visited Nineveh, Nimrud, Hatra, Babylon and many more sites of great historic importance. When Mitford eventually got round to publishing the story of his travels in the snappily entitled A Land March from England to Ceylon: Forty Years Ago’ in 1884, the Tyssen-Amhersts were one of the first to order his newly published book. Layard too wrote of his travels and described his memories of the start of the great adventure when in 1894 he published his own version of his Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia:
In 1839, Edward Ledwich Mitford,’ wrote Layard, ‘a young Englishman who had been connected with a mercantile house at Mogador in Morocco, and who had made some interesting excursions through little known parts of that dangerous country, desired to establish himself in Ceylon as a coffee planter. Like myself he wished to leave England as soon as possible; but being of an adventurous disposition and dreading the sea, he had formed a plan of going by land through Europe, Central Asia and India. He proposed to me that we should do the journey together.’
It was the beginning of the most extraordinary journey. The two men had numerous adventures and escaped almost certain death on many occasions. Their visit to the ruined city of Hatra was just one more adventure as an extract from the Amherst Chronicles illustrates…
‘While they were in Mosul, Layard and Mitford were told of some spectacular ruins that they should visit at Hatra, some sixty or seventy miles to the south. They were warned that the Arabs of the region would be hostile and previous parties attempting to visit the ruins had been attacked. Layard and Mitford were not to be easily deterred. Mitford writes ‘not withstanding this [advice], and the assurance of the natives that it was impossible, and that we should never escape to return, we weighed all the objections at their real value, and resolved on persevering in our design; it will be generally found that when there is resolution, nothing is impossible.’
They set off into the lawless hills in a small party of five, with four guns, plenty of ammunition, cloaks, which would act as their beds if necessary, and no provisions except a bag of biscuits. Mitford explains they were ‘trusting to our guns for any addition to our frugal meals.’
Their first day’s journey was a delightful ride over sloping hills of gypsum covered with flowers, soft ranunculus, pink stocks and white Star of Bethlehem along the banks of the Tigris, which was ‘varied with broad green islands,’ and the weather was beautiful. However things were less wonderful once they had descended into the cultivated plains and arrived at Hammam Ali, a village of mud huts some 18 miles south of Mosul, where they would stop for the night. The village was almost deserted, its residents having blocked their doors with barriers of mud and stones while they followed their flocks across the ‘grass-clad plains’. The huts seemed likely to provide the perfect shelter for the travellers who broke down a few doors ‘but were repulsed by the myriads of fleas that issued from them.’ Mitford explains that ‘in this climate when a hut or a room is shut up and uninhabited for a short time the fleas multiply to such an extent as to blacken the walls; and the clothes of anyone who ventures in are immediately covered with these sharp-set pests.’
The night was spent in the shelter of an open stable. But while the night might not have been comfortable, the view was memorable, for Layard in particular. Across the Tigris they could see a marvellous sight. Layard wrote years later[1]:
‘As the sun went down, I saw for the first time the great conical mound of Nimrud rising against the clear evening sky. It was on the opposite side of the river and not very distant, and the impression that it made upon me was one never to be forgotten. After my visit to Küyünjik and Nebi Yunus, opposite Mosul, and the distant view of Nimrud, my thought ran constantly upon the possibility of thoroughly exploring, with the spade, those great ruins.’
The ruins of Hatra were extensive. Mitford described their visit…
‘This is a remarkable Babylonian ruin, composed of a mass of artificial mounds, on the bank of the river; the circumference of the ruins is 4685 yards, about 2 2/3 miles; and the highest part, which has probably been a citadel, rises about 140 feet above the plain.’
The party spent two days exploring, measuring, conjecturing and wondering about the ruins and the people who once inhabited them. They also found time for some game shooting, which meant they ate well that night.
Thanks to the outrageous behaviour of a group of ill-educated fanatics, these wonderful ruins will never provide the same pleasure and fascination for future generations. Answers to questions about our past will never now be answered. We are all diminished by this destruction, but none more so than than the men who perpetrated this crime against humanity, and who will doubtless move onto commit further acts of devastation. The Mitfords and the Amhersts will surely be turning in their graves, but they will not be alone!
[1] Layard 1903: 311
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