Book number 7 – Royal Colonnade: a Terrace in Changing Times is now in print.

This is the biography of a Georgian terrace of four houses in Great George Street, Bristol, and all the folk who lived in them since it was built in 1828. It majors on number 12, the home of Testimony Films and my long-time collaborator, Steve Humphries. After 30 years there, Steve is selling up and relocating the company to his house in Olveston in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire. It’s a sad time for him as the house is beautiful and very close to his heart, but he now has the consolation of a book that records not only his long occupation there, but the lives of many successive owners and tenants.

For the moment, this will be privately circulated to a small number of people and local institutions at no cost. In the medium term Steve and I will investigate whether there’s a commercial market for it with a local publisher. House histories are popular – in print and on TV – but I don’t think anyone’s done a whole terrace before.

It was written quickly during the winter Covid lockdown of 2021, based on research by professional house historian Caroline Gurney and with the help of a shelf-ful of histories of Bristol and net searches. It was a joy to write because of the people and events I met along the way.

Unsurprisingly (to me anyway), the residents of Royal Colonnade over nearly two centuries almost always have fascinating stories. There’s the Victorian newly-weds whose union lasts barely a year; the respectable widower who marries an actress who then deserts him to live in sin with a society MP; the shop-girls who save their neighbour from death by fire, the defrocked vicar, the… and so it goes on. Ordinary people with extraordinary stories.

For as long as these stories remain to be uncovered, I will love to reclaim them for posterity.

It’s January 24th 2021 and the Covid news in the UK is dreadful. It’s also snowing! But I have three (at least) reasons to be cheerful.

FIRST: This afternoon my partner Bevan has his first vaccination shot at the Town Hall. We may have to wait another three months for the second, but at least it’s happening and is something – at last – that the govt. seems to be getting right. Not before 100,000 deaths though.

SECOND: The paperback version of my biog of Elaine Madden I Heard My Country Calling, is finally coming out next week (27th) after only six years! I haven’t seen it yet, but my agent says it’s looking good. It will be great to see Elaine in print again, even if this is the worst possible time to have a book out with bookshops and libraries shut. But there’s always Amazon. I’d include a pic of the new cover if I could remember how to add an image… Details: £12.99 Published by the History Press.

THIRD: I’m writing again – Hooray! Can’t believe how much I’ve missed it, and winter lockdown is the perfect time to hunker down with the laptop. It’s the biography of a beautiful house in the centre of Bristol and the people who’ve lived there since 1828. Like every book I’ve ever written, it’s an amazing learning experience: everything from the Bristol Riots of 1831 to Victorian bedroom etiquette. The ‘outside’ history is fascinating enough but the stories of the people ‘inside’ really capture the imagination – they are real to me.

For the moment the book will have a limited, private circulation, but if we can interest a publisher it might get a wider readership. Let’s hope David Olusoga hasn’t completely sewn up the market in house histories…

Long time, no blog.  With two projects completed in pretty quick succession, I’d sort of got in the habit of concentrated writing. No bad thing – but 18 months without a book on the stocks has left me twiddling my thumbs and succumbing to a lot of Emergency Holidays.

Rather than being completely dilatory I am writing the life story of an elderly friend in his 90s. His WW2 service was in India and Indonesia – a theatre I knew next to little about, so it was a good opportunity to learn something. Learning interesting new things is one of the principal joys of non-fiction writing and perhaps what I miss most about not having a project on the go.

So I am learning a bit about the British Indian Army, Jemadars and Subedar Majors, the insurgents who wanted to kick the Dutch out of what was then the Dutch East Indies, and the horrors that surrounded the partition of India at the end of the British Raj.

Though nothing like the scale of the task untaken for Britain’s Greatest Generation, and likely to be read by a handful of people rather than thousands, it’s just as worthwhile and reminds me that life-stories are intrinsically valuable – exceptional or ordinary, thrilling or mundane – especially to those close to the loved-ones who won’t always be with us.

I write this days away from the centenary of the 1918 Armistice with much in the news about those who fell and the impact on those who survived. So perhaps I’m more conscious than usual of the march of time and the need to record the everyday experiences of those who lived through very different and much tougher times. We owe them a debt of gratitude: recording their efforts, however apparently modest, is a worthy act of remembrance.

2019 will, I hope bring new projects. A major series for the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is being pitched to the big international streaming services. There may be an associated book.  The idea for a novel, based on an intriguing and enigmatic character from 20th century history and a house where extraordinary things went on, refuses to go away despite my best efforts to kill it through inactivity.

Something may happen, especially if I have the courage to make it!

Gay’s the Word, the UK’s first serious gay bookshop (as featured in the brilliant 2014 film Pride), hosted the launch this week of our book Not Guilty: Queer Stories from a Century of Discrimination. 

The shop, which has been on lively Marchmont Street, WC1 since 1979, is a tiny treasure-house of fascinating stuff across the spectrum of LGBT+ subjects and writers. The staff are lovely and there’s masses of interest here for everyone, gay or straight.

The manager Jim could not have been more welcoming and gave the book a wonderful introductory endorsement: “of the half dozen books out for the 50th anniversary, this the one I like the best because it represents the experience of the older men who come into the shop”.

Quite a crowd braved a wet evening for Waitrose refreshments and to hear the testimony of Terry, Stephen and Ed. They all feature in the book with different but equally moving and instructive stories about the discrimination they faced in the ’70s and ’80s and how they fought back.

Terry and Stephen also appear in Steve Humphries’ documentary, now called Convicted for Love, to be shown in the UK on More 4 on Monday 10th July at 9pm.

I was specially pleased that so many of the men we interviewed were able to come to the launch, many of them with their husbands/partners. It was great to be able to welcome them and show them the book for the first time.

We were both on signing duty and the shop did a brisk trade. Here Steve signs the book for Stephen…

…and below I’m talking to lovely Jim from the bookshop and doing my impersonation of someone dragged through a hedge backwards. But at least I’m smiling! Behind me is old friend and well-known journalist David Hepworth, whose current book on the demise of the rock star, Uncommon People is storming up the charts.  Jealous, moi?

 

Not Guilty is published by Biteback (thank you Olivia for producing a quality product in double-quick time and Isabelle for publicity) at £12.99. You can get it at Gay’s the Word or – if you’re not handy for Marchmont Street – here.

That’s the second book written in the past 12 months. There will now be a short intermission while I summon the creative energy to decide what to do next. Until then…

This is the title (at the moment) of my latest book and the reason for the long blogging silence. It’s an oral history based on the lives of 20 or so gay men over the past 100 years and again it’s a collaboration with Steve Humphries, who is making a Channel 4 documentary to accompany it (as I like to think of it, though it’s really the other way round).

Like the Aberfan book, it had to be written in a matter of weeks. What made this possible was the power and lucidity of the stories the book and doc are built around. Stories like Alex Purdie’s…  Alex was an out gay man in the 1930s when ‘out’ and ‘gay’ had different meanings. He got a taste for frocks and lipstick from the age of 5 and spent much of the war in both as part of an army concert party entertaining the troops in the Far East.

His story, and the many others of ‘ordinary’ gay men in the book remind us that gay rights have been hard-won since the 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised sex acts between men (women who love women have never been criminalised) 50 years ago. We’ve come far, especially since the late 1990s, but with bumps along the way like AIDS and Section 28 which set the cause back years.

Trump, Brexit and the rise of the far-right in Europe are bad news for all minority groups – which make handy targets for hatred in troubled times. We take nothing for granted: hard-won rights, whether they benefit us directly or not, have to be defended.

Not Guilty: Queer Stories from a Century of Discrimination published by Biteback. Book and Channel 4 documentary out June 2017 (probably).

 

… is currently encased in an attractive flesh-coloured plastic moonboot, secured by big strips of Velcro which stick annoyingly to the carpet and everything else.

A fractured metatarsal. It happened on a cobbled drive outside our hotel on Day 3 of the holiday, so I ended up sampling more books than planned. I kicked off with the Mollie Panter-Downes short stories, which didn’t disappoint. The Susan Hill crime thriller was pretty pedestrian but All the Light We Cannot See lived up to the hype: a sort-of love story set in WW2 St Malo. It’s long and the ‘fractured narrative’ demands concentration, but I found it involving. In fact I was crying by the final pages.

Another brick-sized tome I really enjoyed was Priscilla: the Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France,  an intriguing antidote to Elaine’s heroic story. Very different women with polar opposite responses to war.  But with eerie similarities too…

After all this reading I still had 2 days of enforced sitting by the pool in prospect so I was reduced to picking up The Lake District Murder  from the hotel library – the best of a ropey old bunch, much of it in Swedish.  This was a tedious 1935 crime procedural without any character development or local colour but full of technical detail about the inside of petrol tankers. I waded to its bleedin’ obvious conclusion while waiting in my wheelchair for airside assistance at the airport.

So, quite a literary holiday on the whole.

As I’m not writing at the moment, there’s a chance to catch up on reading, and the upcoming holiday means a break from the usual routine – shopwashcooktellysleep – and some lazy days ahead in which to do nothing but enjoy other people’s writing.

I love the Persephone Books list – they republish forgotten 20th century gems, many by women writers. The writing is generally so precise, so literate – and so redolent of times past, some of which I just about remember from my childhood in the 1950s.  At the moment I’m reading Noel Streatfield’s The Saplings.  She’s famous for children’s books, notably Ballet Shoes, but she writes wonderfully for adults too.

Next up for the holiday, another Persephone: a short story collection by Mollie Panter-Downes. Better known for her regular column, Letters From London, for the New York Times during WW2, she evokes the atmosphere of the Blitz-torn capital in much of her other writing so I’m really looking forward to her short stories, Good Evening, Mrs Craven.

Fiona at Pitshanger Bookshop recommended All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner  Looks interesting, and there’s even a WW2 dimension – my obsession and inspiration.  Judging by the swoony reviews (which can’t always be trusted) it promises to be a page-turner.  And, for light relief, a Susan Hill crime yarn, The Various Haunts of Men, the first in her Simon Serrailler series. It’s set in a fictional small cathedral city, so I shall imagine that it’s Chichester, a small cathedral city on England’s south coast which I know very well.

Happy Christmas!  Or to my American readers, Happy Holidays!  Keep writing – and reading – and see you next year.