RESEARCH: LIFE IN THE WORKHOUSE
In the book I am currently writing the two main characters have spent part of their childhood in a workhouse at the beginning of the 20th century. I do a lot of research for my work and one of the first and best books I bought was 'The Workhouse Encyclopaedia' by Peter Higginbotham who is an acknowledged expert on the subject. This had a list of former workhouses and I found that The Weaver Hall Museum (formerly known as The Salt Museum) in Nantwich, Cheshire, is housed in a former workhouse. Being able to visit Nantwich quite easily, I and my research partner (she accompanies me and asks questions, sometimes awkward ones) went to Nantwich - not so much to visit the museum, as to look at the building. While we were there I saw a notice announcing that there was going to be a Workhouse Study Day in a few weeks, so I signed up to attend.
I had to set off extremely early in the morning to attend the study day; registration was at 9.45 in the morning and I had to catch two buses to get to Nantwich - but there was coffee and biscuits when I arrived!
The day had a varied programme: Roy Clinging, a musician and local historian, told us about the background to some of the songs written about the workhouse and poverty. He and his wife sang several of them, accompanied by a sqeezebox or penny whistle.
I was able to speak to Peter Higginbotham and thank him for replying to a question I had e-mailed him. He told us about the food that was served up to the inmates. He has published several books on aspects of life in the workhouse and I bought a copy of 'The Workhouse Cookbook'.
At the beginning of the workhouse era the food was very poor; bread and butter and bread and cheese alternating for supper; poor quality meat and broth for dinner and bread and beer for breakfast, but it did slowly improve over the years. In 1901 (just before my story is set) The National School of Cookery was instructed to devise a manual of workhouse cookery containing a variety of recipes for soups, main courses and puddings. Mr Higginbotham had come prepared and actually cooked some of the dishes for us to try. Golden Pudding containing flour, fat and golden syrup was extremely nice and most of us enjoyed trying it, but other dishes were not so popular.
In another session workhouse discipline was discussed and Dr Carter used documents from Southwell Workhouse to illustrate his talk. The Workhouse, Southwell, is owned by the National Trust and is the most complete workhouse in existence (half of the Nantwich workhouse had been pulled down). To visit Southwell would mean a journey of 160 miles there and back but a friend of mine has similar interests in social history and her husband was willing to take us there and back. Bless him.
The Workhouse is a fascinating place to visit and is presented as it was in the 19th century although it was still in use in the 20th; renamed Greet House in 1913 to house elderly people, in 1926 a new hospital treated cancer and tuberculosis patients. In 1929 all former workhouses passed from the Guardians who had previously been in charge of them to the local authorities, and Southwell became a Public Assistance Institution which still segregated inmates by sex and age - and those who could were still expected to work. The women's wing was used by the council until 1977 as temporary homeless accommodation in bed-sits for mothers and children awaiting permanent housing. It wasn't until the 1990s that the last of the staff and residents moved away.
When visiting The Workhouse today you can explore the yards separated by high walls for men, women and children. There was only one place in the yards where you could not be overlooked by the Master, whose private rooms and office were in the centre of the complex.
As you go into Southwell there is a video explaining its history and also a scale model showing the various rooms and their relationship to each other.
It is a given that life in the workhouse was very hard. We went down into the cellars, very cold with the only light coming from small round windows high up in the wall at the end of tunnels through the walls which are at least two feet thick. Women used to work down there preparing vegetables for the kitchen, often in water up to their ankles.
The staircases in the house were arranged so that men and women had no contact with each other on their way to and from the dormitories and day-rooms. In the dormitories you could see how the beds had been arranged with a peg in the wall beside each bed to hang up your clothes at night. The guide pointed out that the rooms were well ventilated but were cold in the winter and hot in the summer, especially those near the roof. Windows were frosted so that one section could not see into another, and every aspect of daily life was ruled by routine.
The work of the house was carried out by the inmates; cleaning, cooking, any nursing that was required, laundry and gardening, but you could leave the workhouse by giving only three hours' notice. You had to surrender your workhouse uniform and collect your own clothes, and a man had to take his family with him, but otherwise you were free to leave.
The workhouse was not a prison, but I am sure it often felt like one to the people obliged to live there.
Tuesday, 15 October 2013
Wednesday, 9 October 2013
Second title for 1 November announced today
With apologies for the delay, we are now able to give you the details of our second title to be published on 1 November. Chris Quinton’s popular novel GAME ON, GAME OVER,
which has previously been published elsewhere, is the fascinating tale
of Scott and John, the mysterious man he meets and becomes attracted to
on an archaeological dig in Tajikistan – and almost immediately loses
sight of, possibly forever.
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that we didn't publish best-seller statistics as usual on the first of the month. The simple reason is that unfortunately we missed our window of opportunity; the Kindle sales figures vanish from sight quite quickly after the end of the relevant month and are then unavailable for two weeks until they reappear in the form of a downloadable report, and this time we're just going to have to wait for that before we can tell you which book sold most strongly in September. This is what tends to happen when you're trying to do too many things all at once, unfortunately!
Meanwhile, plans are already well in hand for our 1 February publications and our plans for the rest of 2014 are shaping up nicely; watch this space for further details!
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that we didn't publish best-seller statistics as usual on the first of the month. The simple reason is that unfortunately we missed our window of opportunity; the Kindle sales figures vanish from sight quite quickly after the end of the relevant month and are then unavailable for two weeks until they reappear in the form of a downloadable report, and this time we're just going to have to wait for that before we can tell you which book sold most strongly in September. This is what tends to happen when you're trying to do too many things all at once, unfortunately!
Meanwhile, plans are already well in hand for our 1 February publications and our plans for the rest of 2014 are shaping up nicely; watch this space for further details!
Tuesday, 1 October 2013
New title[s] for 1 November announced today!
There’s a slight variation to our usual procedure this time; we’re only able to announce one new title to you at the moment, but it’s a biggie! OF DREAMS AND CEREMONIES is the eagerly-awaited sequel to Julie Bozza’s popular BUTTERFLY HUNTER and continues the story of Dave and Nicholas; now staying with Nicholas’s family in England, there are so many plans and preparations to be made that Dave wishes they could just skip ahead to the honeymoon – a honeymoon which, as it turns out, is not exactly uneventful!
For legal reasons (i.e., we won’t own the rights for another few days!) we are going to have to keep you in suspense about our second publication this time; we’ll be announcing the details of it on Thursday 10 October. They will both, however, be on sale as usual from 1 November.
Those of you who are especially quick off the mark may already have noticed the 'stealth-release' of our two 1 August titles, Jane Elliot's MONTANA RED and Cimorene Ross's THE EAGLE'S WING, which have been available on both Amazon and Smashwords since the weekend; they are now also available to buy from AllRomance eBooks.
On a sad note, we’d like to say how sorry we are that Rainbow E-Books have ceased trading. They were always very friendly and a positive delight to deal with, and even though their share of the market wasn’t exactly massive they did sell quite a lot of books for us which we truly appreciated. We wish everyone concerned the very best of luck in whatever they choose to undertake next.
For legal reasons (i.e., we won’t own the rights for another few days!) we are going to have to keep you in suspense about our second publication this time; we’ll be announcing the details of it on Thursday 10 October. They will both, however, be on sale as usual from 1 November.
Those of you who are especially quick off the mark may already have noticed the 'stealth-release' of our two 1 August titles, Jane Elliot's MONTANA RED and Cimorene Ross's THE EAGLE'S WING, which have been available on both Amazon and Smashwords since the weekend; they are now also available to buy from AllRomance eBooks.
On a sad note, we’d like to say how sorry we are that Rainbow E-Books have ceased trading. They were always very friendly and a positive delight to deal with, and even though their share of the market wasn’t exactly massive they did sell quite a lot of books for us which we truly appreciated. We wish everyone concerned the very best of luck in whatever they choose to undertake next.
Sunday, 15 September 2013
AUTHOR GUEST BLOG NUMBER FOUR: Jane Elliot
RESEARCHING FOOD IN THE WILD WEST
Like all historical novelists, I do a ton of research for my books. Full disclosure – I am not a historian, I use the internet for research, and I fudge my dates. Still, there’s a lot of information that I’ve learned over the years that paints a fascinating portrait of life on the western frontier and I thought I’d share some of that with you.
(This post mostly deals with food, since that is a topic of near-universal interest. If you’d like to hear more about sheep breeding, dry land farming, and/or what gunfights and prostitution was really like in the old west (spoiler: not like it is in my books), let me know. I always enjoy rambling about research.)
The first thing to know is that food choices and availability varied wildly between the eastern costal states and the rest of the country. In the east, food was abundant and remarkably varied, with one restaurant serving over 200 different kinds of meat (each cut of meat from an animal was counted separately, and in addition to standard livestock, they also served squirrel, opossum, venison, and other wild game). The land was fertile and water was plentiful, which meant large crop yields, and the north-south stretch of the coastline covered a large temperature range, allowing for a wide variety of different crops to be grown.
Once you got past the eastern mountain ranges, however, finding adequate food supplies grew significantly more challenging. The land was fertile, but dry, which limited crop yields and variety, and the lack of easy transportation for the earlier half of the century meant that getting supplies from other locations was difficult, if not impossible.
One of the most fascinating articles I’ve ever read about food in the 1800s can be found here (http://www.oregonpioneers.com/FoodChoices.htm). Most interesting for me is the standard list of supplies carried on the Oregon Trail. A lot of what you’d expect is on the list (flour, beans, bacon), but there are some practical items that I’d never thought of, including baking soda (called saleratus at the time) and dried fruit (which was much more commonplace and cheaper then than it is now).
The full list: flour, pilot bread, bacon, rice, coffee, tea, sugar, dried beans, dried fruit, saleratus [baking soda], salt, corn meal, ground corn, vinegar.
This list is pretty much my pantry when writing my books (where everyone lives conveniently close to a supply town:), but the reality is that many of these items wouldn’t be available to the average frontier family. For them, the bulk of their supplies would come from their vegetable garden, from the animals that they hunted, and from the wild plants that they gathered. Salt was absolutely vital for the preservation of meat and vegetables, while sugar was necessary to make dried fruit palatable (and often played a part in preserving as well).
As for the luxuries: coffee came in the form of green, unroasted beans. They would be roasted and ground right before being either simmered in the cook pan or, in the latter part of the century, brewed in percolators. Chocolate was actually available as early as the late 1700s, in some parts of the country (read: east coast), and by 1850 it was available on both coasts. Surprisingly enough, it was sometimes found on the Oregon Trail, where some wagons carried the makings of hot chocolate, though it more closely resembled coffee than it did today’s hot chocolate. Canned foods first became readily available in the latter part of the century, with the first modern-day can opener patented in the 1860s and both Borden and Campbell’s opening up canning factories in the decades immediately after.
In general, food on the western frontier was fatty, salty, and high in calories. The hard work that they had to put in just to feed themselves, however, meant that many families struggled just to meet their basic calorie needs. For them, that simple list of trail supplies would have been a feast to remember.
Follow Jane on Twitter: @IMJaneElliot
Like all historical novelists, I do a ton of research for my books. Full disclosure – I am not a historian, I use the internet for research, and I fudge my dates. Still, there’s a lot of information that I’ve learned over the years that paints a fascinating portrait of life on the western frontier and I thought I’d share some of that with you.
(This post mostly deals with food, since that is a topic of near-universal interest. If you’d like to hear more about sheep breeding, dry land farming, and/or what gunfights and prostitution was really like in the old west (spoiler: not like it is in my books), let me know. I always enjoy rambling about research.)
The first thing to know is that food choices and availability varied wildly between the eastern costal states and the rest of the country. In the east, food was abundant and remarkably varied, with one restaurant serving over 200 different kinds of meat (each cut of meat from an animal was counted separately, and in addition to standard livestock, they also served squirrel, opossum, venison, and other wild game). The land was fertile and water was plentiful, which meant large crop yields, and the north-south stretch of the coastline covered a large temperature range, allowing for a wide variety of different crops to be grown.
Once you got past the eastern mountain ranges, however, finding adequate food supplies grew significantly more challenging. The land was fertile, but dry, which limited crop yields and variety, and the lack of easy transportation for the earlier half of the century meant that getting supplies from other locations was difficult, if not impossible.
One of the most fascinating articles I’ve ever read about food in the 1800s can be found here (http://www.oregonpioneers.com/FoodChoices.htm). Most interesting for me is the standard list of supplies carried on the Oregon Trail. A lot of what you’d expect is on the list (flour, beans, bacon), but there are some practical items that I’d never thought of, including baking soda (called saleratus at the time) and dried fruit (which was much more commonplace and cheaper then than it is now).
The full list: flour, pilot bread, bacon, rice, coffee, tea, sugar, dried beans, dried fruit, saleratus [baking soda], salt, corn meal, ground corn, vinegar.
This list is pretty much my pantry when writing my books (where everyone lives conveniently close to a supply town:), but the reality is that many of these items wouldn’t be available to the average frontier family. For them, the bulk of their supplies would come from their vegetable garden, from the animals that they hunted, and from the wild plants that they gathered. Salt was absolutely vital for the preservation of meat and vegetables, while sugar was necessary to make dried fruit palatable (and often played a part in preserving as well).
As for the luxuries: coffee came in the form of green, unroasted beans. They would be roasted and ground right before being either simmered in the cook pan or, in the latter part of the century, brewed in percolators. Chocolate was actually available as early as the late 1700s, in some parts of the country (read: east coast), and by 1850 it was available on both coasts. Surprisingly enough, it was sometimes found on the Oregon Trail, where some wagons carried the makings of hot chocolate, though it more closely resembled coffee than it did today’s hot chocolate. Canned foods first became readily available in the latter part of the century, with the first modern-day can opener patented in the 1860s and both Borden and Campbell’s opening up canning factories in the decades immediately after.
In general, food on the western frontier was fatty, salty, and high in calories. The hard work that they had to put in just to feed themselves, however, meant that many families struggled just to meet their basic calorie needs. For them, that simple list of trail supplies would have been a feast to remember.
Follow Jane on Twitter: @IMJaneElliot
Friday, 6 September 2013
New review of THE EAGLE'S WING
Over at MM Good Book Reviews, a reviewer named Thommie has recently pronounced on Cimorene's THE EAGLE'S WING.
We wish it was a review of unqualified praise, but unfortunately the
gentle tone (described as 'passive' in the review) did not quite meet
this particular reviewer's requirements. Oh well, we all want different
things from our reading matter and it's impossible to please everyone -
better luck next time, we hope!
"The obstacles this pair had to overcome lost their importance, the victory over them lost its shine, and the most intense scene in the entire story that should have been when Keret finally gives himself willingly to Lucius, was barely touched in the haste of telling the tale."
"The obstacles this pair had to overcome lost their importance, the victory over them lost its shine, and the most intense scene in the entire story that should have been when Keret finally gives himself willingly to Lucius, was barely touched in the haste of telling the tale."
Monday, 2 September 2013
New review of FOOL's RUSH
Yes, and it's by Elisa Rolle again. This time she's turned her
attention to the third book in Chris's 'Fool's Odyssey' sequence, FOOL'S RUSH, and we think it's fair to say that she enjoyed it:
Picking Barcellona has setting for the novel is again a perfect choice, the Barrio Antico and the Ramblas are a mix of modern and ancient, that well reflect the development of the story: the time is a near future, 2042, but the theme is a classical gothic one, vampires.
I would dare to say that, while you will for sure enjoying reading the whole series, Fool’s Rush has all the merits to be also a perfect standalone novel.
We're sure that all those readers - and there are plenty of you - who like their M/M romance with a strong plot and a supernatural twist will be queueing up to agree with Elisa on this one!
Picking Barcellona has setting for the novel is again a perfect choice, the Barrio Antico and the Ramblas are a mix of modern and ancient, that well reflect the development of the story: the time is a near future, 2042, but the theme is a classical gothic one, vampires.
I would dare to say that, while you will for sure enjoying reading the whole series, Fool’s Rush has all the merits to be also a perfect standalone novel.
We're sure that all those readers - and there are plenty of you - who like their M/M romance with a strong plot and a supernatural twist will be queueing up to agree with Elisa on this one!
Sunday, 1 September 2013
Statistics for August
Fascinatingly, and for the first time ever (I think), we've had a
three-way tie for the 'Best Selling Title' trophy this month! Julie's BUTTERFLY HUNTER and THE APOTHECARY'S GARDEN romped ahead and dead-heated with numbers of sales through our distribution partners, but newcomer Cimorene Ross's THE EAGLE'S WING came storming along the rails and sold precisely the same number from the website!
Meanwhile, we will shortly be uploading the last of our titles to Smashwords (we'll let you know when we have), and we're busy preparing the two books we'll be publishing on 1 November - the details of which will be announced here on 1 October, so watch this space!
Meanwhile, we will shortly be uploading the last of our titles to Smashwords (we'll let you know when we have), and we're busy preparing the two books we'll be publishing on 1 November - the details of which will be announced here on 1 October, so watch this space!
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