1905. Edwardian England. Harriet Loxley, the daughter of a vicar and niece to a prominent Nottingham lace manufacturer, spends her days playing cricket with her brother, scouring the countryside for botanical specimens, and never missing an opportunity to argue the case for political power for women. Given the chance to visit the House of Commons, Harriet witnesses the failure of a historic bill for women’s voting rights. She also meets the formidable Pankhurst women.
The Inspiration for Strait Lace
I wanted to write about a suffragette – to explore the thoughts, feelings and motivations of a woman who would do the extraordinary things the suffragettes did. I wanted her to be an ordinary middle class woman, not one of the great names of the movement, and I wanted her to come from somewhere outside London, somewhere I knew and could recreate in my story.
I lived in Nottingham for several years, working at Raleigh bicycles, training as an accountant, starting a drama club for young people at my church. I biked to work on a route that took me through Nottingham’s history – its memorial gardens, its canal, its deserted lace warehouses.
So, I searched for “Suffragette and Nottingham”. And I hit pay dirt. Elizabeth Crawford, a British author, historian and dealer in suffrage ephemera, had an entry in her fascinating blog, Woman and her Sphere, about Helen Kirkpatrick Watts. Helen was the daughter of a vicar of Lenton. Lenton, now a suburb of Nottingham, was, in 1900, still a village on its edge. It was also where the Raleigh bicycle factory was, or used to be. It has since been demolished and replaced by housing.
Elizabeth Crawford, had been at a conference and heard the story of a teacher in Bristol who set his students a project. One enterprising young woman decided to research the suffragettes and put an advertisement in the local paper asking if anyone had any first hand materials. To her, and her teacher’s surprise, she got a reply from a worker at the Avonmouth docks saying they had a trunk in their possession which had belonged to Helen Kirkpatrick Watts and in it were a quantity of suffrage papers, such as letters between Helen and her parents. The docks allowed the teacher to copy the documents. Those copies are now in the Nottingham city archives.
Elizabeth followed up. She found out more about Helen and her life and you can read that story here https://womanandhersphere.com/2015/06/19/suffrage-stories-helen-watts-and-the-mystery-of-the-unclaimed-trunk/
Helen Watts. Colonel Linley Blathwayt
(Wikimedia Commons)
What captivated me was Helen herself and the mysterious case of the missing trunk. I determined my main character was going to be a middle child of a vicar of Lenton who joined forces with the suffragettes. The trunk was going to feature in a dual-timeline novel involving my character, Harriet, and a 21st century descendent of hers. Well, the dual-timeline novel became a three timeline novel too unwieldy to manage. It is now two books: Strait Lace and Crocus Fields. Crocus Fields will be the next Loxley Hall book. The trunk gets its moment in the limelight in Crocus Fields, but trunks have brief appearances in Strait Lace. Watch out for them.
That sums up the connection between Helen Kirkpatrick Watts and Harriet Loxley. Harriet is not Helen. Harriet’s family is not Helen’s family. Helen had a special connection to one brother. I liked that idea and used it for Harriet, but that brother is not Helen’s bother. Helen was hard of hearing, as they would have called it back then. I toyed with using that quality for my character and decided it would be too dominant and possibly too difficult to pull off.
Helen was one pillar of inspiration – the town of Nottingham and its history was another. Nottingham is a town rich in history and cultural reference. Everyone knows about Robin Hood. I borrowed the Loxley name. I just couldn’t help myself. And then there’s Tennyson’s poem Locksley Hall, with its lines that epitomise exactly what Harriet was up against:
Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain—Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine,Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine—
My Loxleys had to have a Loxley Hall. Harriet’s Uncle George is just a little bit pretentious. And Harriet’s passions were certainly going to be no less than a man’s.
Nottingham is famous for many other things: stocking and lace making; the invention of the machines that founded those industries; Boots the Chemist; Players Cigarettes; Raleigh Bicycles; the caves in the Castle Rock; one of a few pubs claiming to be the oldest in England; and meadows that used to be covered in crocuses. I seized on lace making for the Loxley family background and on crocuses for a theme and a metaphor, which comes into more prominence in Crocus Fields.
Interestingly, as I delved deeper into the history of the town I once lived in, I discovered a piece of its history which was notorious at the time of the suffragettes but seems to be less well known now. The first major reform of the United Kingdom voting system for hundreds of years was in 1832. Getting the legislation through the House of Lords was a long hard fight.
One of the more outspoken opponents to extending the franchise was the Duke of Newcastle, who owned Nottingham Castle and its surrounding deer park. The castle at that time was not the medieval castle of the Sheriff of Nottingham from the tales of Robin Hood. That castle was torn down by the Parliamentarians after the civil war. It was a stately home – a stately home that went up in flames as the citizens of Nottingham took to the streets in protest over the opposition to the Great Reform Bill.
Nottingham Castle on Fire, 10 October 1831
by Henry Dawson
This event and its significance for the suffragettes had to be in my book. And it is. As is the historically accurate arson attack on the Nottingham Rowing Club’s boathouse.
Strait Lace started with a real suffragette and a real city and, as it grew, it was infused with the essence of a city and its people. The early twentieth century city of Nottingham and its lace industry live on in its pages.
Rosemary Hayward
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