The Gang of St Bride's, page 27
part #9 of Penny Green Series
Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to design the new cathedral and the building, as we know it today, was formally declared complete in 1711. Its iconic dome is one of the largest cathedral domes in the world. St Paul's survived the Blitz in WWII, despite many buildings around it being completely destroyed. The cathedral has been a filming location for Mary Poppins and Harry Potter. It was the tallest building in London until 1965 when the BT Tower opened.
Ludgate Circus sits at a crossroads between Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill. Lud Gate once stood here and was the westernmost gate in the Roman city walls. This area is supposedly the burial place of the legendary Welsh king, King Lud. It’s not clear if King Lud actually existed or not - he features in the 12th century book 'History of the Kings of Britain' by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Lud Gate was demolished in the 18th century and Ludgate Circus was constructed in the 1860s and 70s. The King Lud pub was built in the 1870s and sadly closed in 2005, the building is now a restaurant.
The subterranean River Fleet is one of London’s ‘Lost Rivers’ which have been largely covered over by roads and buildings and integrated into London’s sewers. The Fleet runs from Hampstead in north London down to its outlet beneath Blackfriars Bridge. Apparently you can still hear the river these days through a grating in Ray Street, Clerkenwell.
If The Gang of St Bride’s is the first Penny Green book you’ve read, then you may find the following historical background interesting. It’s compiled from the historical notes published in the previous books in the series:
Women journalists in the nineteenth century were not as scarce as people may think. In fact they were numerous enough by 1898 for Arnold Bennett to write Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide in which he was keen to raise the standard of women’s journalism:-
“The women-journalists as a body have faults… They seem to me to be traceable either to an imperfect development of the sense of order, or to a certain lack of self-control.”
Eliza Linton became the first salaried female journalist in Britain when she began writing for the Morning Chronicle in 1851. She was a prolific writer and contributor to periodicals for many years including Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words. George Eliot – her real name was Mary Anne Evans - is most famous for novels such as Middlemarch, however she also became assistant editor of The Westminster Review in 1852.
In the United States Margaret Fuller became the New York Tribune’s first female editor in 1846. Intrepid journalist Nellie Bly worked in Mexico as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Despatch in the 1880s before writing for New York World and feigning insanity to go undercover and investigate reports of brutality at a New York asylum. Later, in 1889-90, she became a household name by setting a world record for travelling around the globe in seventy two days.
The iconic circular Reading Room at the British Museum was in use from 1857 until 1997. During that time it was also used as a filming location and has been referenced in many works of fiction. The Reading Room has been closed since 2014 but it’s recently been announced that it will reopen and display some of the museum’s permanent collections. It could be a while yet until we’re able to step inside it but I’m looking forward to it!
The Museum Tavern, where Penny and James enjoy a drink, is a well-preserved Victorian pub opposite the British Museum. Although a pub was first built here in the eighteenth century much of the current pub (including its name) dates back to 1855. Celebrity drinkers here are said to have included Arthur Conan Doyle and Karl Marx.
Publishing began in Fleet Street in the 1500s and by the twentieth century the street was the hub of the British press. However newspapers began moving away in the 1980s to bigger premises. Nowadays just a few publishers remain in Fleet Street but the many pubs and bars once frequented by journalists – including the pub Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese - are still popular with city workers.
Penny Green lives in Milton Street in Cripplegate which was one of the areas worst hit by bombing during the Blitz in the Second World War and few original streets remain. Milton Street was known as Grub Street in the eighteenth century and was famous as a home to impoverished writers at the time. The street had a long association with writers and was home to Anthony Trollope among many others. A small stretch of Milton Street remains but the 1960s Barbican development has been built over the bombed remains.
Plant hunting became an increasingly commercial enterprise as the nineteenth century progressed. Victorians were fascinated by exotic plants and, if they were wealthy enough, they had their own glasshouses built to show them off. Plant hunters were employed by Kew Gardens, companies such as Veitch Nurseries or wealthy individuals to seek out exotic specimens in places such as South America and the Himalayas. These plant hunters took great personal risks to collect their plants and some perished on their travels. The Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican is worth a read. Written in 1891 it documents his journeys in Colombia and demonstrates how plant hunting became little short of pillaging. Some areas he travelled to had already lost their orchids to plant hunters and Millican himself spent several months felling 4,000 trees to collect 10,000 plants. Even after all this plundering many of the orchids didn’t survive the trip across the Atlantic to Britain. Plant hunters were not always welcome: Millican had arrows fired at him as he navigated rivers, had his camp attacked one night and was eventually killed during a fight in a Colombian tavern.
My research for The Penny Green series has come from sources too numerous to list in detail, but the following books have been very useful: A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain by Michael Patterson, London in the Nineteenth Century by Jerry White, London in 1880 by Herbert Fry, London a Travel Guide through Time by Dr Matthew Green, Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Onslow, A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide by Arnold Bennett, Seventy Years a Showman by Lord George Sanger, Dottings of a Dosser by Howard Goldsmid, Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter by Albert Millican, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London by Andrew Mearns, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin, The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant edited by Liz Stanley, Mrs Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light, Revelations of a Lady Detective by William Stephens Hayward, A is for Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup, In an Opium Factory by Rudyard Kipling, Drugging a Nation: The Story of China and the Opium Curse by Samuel Merwin, Confessions of an Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy, The Pinkertons: The Detective Dynasty That Made History by James D Horan, The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre and The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-breaking by Simon Singh, Dying for Victorian Medicine, English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor by Elizabeth T. Hurren, Tales from the Workhouse – True Tales from the Depths of Poverty by James Greenwood, Mary Higgs and others, Sickness and Cruelty in the Workhouse - The True Story of a Victorian Workhouse Doctor by Joseph Rogers, Mord Em’ly by William Pitt Ridge, Alice Diamond And The Forty Elephants: Britain's First Female Crime Syndicate by Brian Macdonald. The British Newspaper Archive is also an invaluable resource.
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News reporter Penny Green is committed to her job. But should she impose on a grieving widow?
The brutal murder of a doctor has shocked 1880s London and Fleet Street is clamouring for news. Penny has orders from her editor to get the story all the papers want.
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The Churchill & Pemberley Series
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1932. Armed with a handbag and fuelled by cake, Annabel Churchill is a mature yet tenacious private detective. Together with her quirky sidekick, Doris Pemberley, she’s determined to solve mysteries and chase down criminals in the sleepy Dorset village of Compton Poppleford.
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