Sir Thomas More by Hals Holbein (Accessed via Wikipedia ) During lockdown, we had Time. Remember that? I was in my probationary year of teaching: almost certainly among the most exhausting years for any profession. All my time had been taken up with school work, and I regularly stayed at school until after 6pm, having arrived there at eight in the morning. Now, children, this is not sustainable and, very soon, I decided I didn’t like working where I was. Then I realised that I didn’t like teaching at all. But, in fact, neither was particularly true: I just needed to be true to myself and to say no, which would give me the ability to manage my work/life balance in a more appropriate way. What does this have to do with historical fiction, I hear you say? Well, during March 2020, we went into lockdown and suddenly I went from working ten-hour-days to ten-hour-weeks. I met up with my class on Google Meet, I put work up for them on a meticulously designed Google Classroom, but I just h...
It's #HistFicThursdays, and I'm delighted to offer you a fabulous guest post from R J Lloyd, as part of his Coffee Pot Book Club tour. Discover the personal nature of this book, and why the author chose to tell Enoch's story in Burning Secret. But first, let's meet the book...
Blurb
Inspired by actual events, Burning Secret is a dramatic and compelling tale of ambition, lies and betrayal.
Born in the slums of Bristol in 1844, Enoch Price seems destined for a life of poverty and hardship-but he’s determined not to accept his lot.
Enoch becomes a bare-knuckle fighter in London’s criminal underworld. But in a city where there’s no place for honest dealing, a cruel loan shark cheats him, leaving Enoch penniless and facing imprisonment.
Undaunted, he escapes to a new life in America and embarks on a series of audacious exploits. But even as he helps shape history, Enoch is not content. Tormented by his past and the life he left behind, Enoch soon becomes entangled in a web of lies and secrets.
Will he ever break free and find the happiness he craves?
Influenced by real people and events, Enoch’s remarkable story is one of adventure, daring, political power, deceit and, in the end, the search for redemption and forgiveness.
Burning Secret is available via this Universal Link.
Guest Post
After retiring as a senior police officer, I turned my detective skills to genealogy, tracing my family history to the 16th century. However, after 15 years of extensive research, I couldn't track down my great-great-grandfather, Enoch Price, whose wife, Eliza, had, in living memory, helped raise my mother.
As a young girl, my mother could only remember hushed conversations about her nan's husband, Enoch, going to Florida to open a corset factory.
In June 2011, my cousin Gillian, a skilled family history researcher, after several dead-ends, called to say that she had found him through a fluke encounter. Susan Sperry from California, who had recently retired, decided to explore the box of documents given to her thirty years before by her mother, which she had never opened. In the box, she found references to her great-grandfather, Harry Mason, a wealthy hotel owner and powerful American politician from Jacksonville, Florida, who had died in 1919. It soon transpired that Susan's great-grandfather, Harry Mason, was, in fact, Enoch Price. From this single thread, the extraordinary story of Harry Mason began to unravel, leading me to visit the States to meet my American cousins. It was Susan Sperry and Kimberly Mason, direct descendants, who persuaded me to write Burning Secret, not as a biography, but as a thriller, merging fact with fiction, to tell the story of the extraordinary adventurer, rogue and chancer that he was.
Burning Secret took another eleven years to research and write, and sadly, both Susan and Kimberly passed away before the novel was complete.
The more I researched, the more I realised how much more I needed to explore. Enoch is listed in the London Gazette as a bankrupt and was bound for two in the debtors' prison, from which few emerged unscathed. Abandoning his wife and three young daughters, he made for Florida. It was here, in Jacksonville, that he carved out his future, and, by hook or by crook, he amassed a fortune and became a powerful politician. While all of this time, his wife, Eliza, and daughters languished in poverty in the slums of Bristol, England.
Harry played a historically significant role in Jacksonville, arriving in 1881, only sixteen years after the end of slavery and the American Civil War, when Florida had fought on the defeated Confederate side. In 1888, Jacksonville was decimated by a deadly outbreak of Yellow Fever, and in 1901, the city was razed to the ground by the Great Fire of Jacksonville. Harry played a pivotal role in each of these catastrophes. Yet, undaunted, he was the promoter who, against fierce public opposition, brought the 1894 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship fight between Gentleman Jim Corbett and Charlie Mitchell to Jacksonville. His most outstanding achievement was building the Hotel Mason, Jacksonville, on the junction of Bay and Julia, which opened on 31 December 1913. The largest and most opulent hotel in Florida (demolished in 1978).
Surprisingly, whilst many of Harry's friends, business partners and historically important contemporaries are recorded in Jacksonville to this day, one must dig very deep into obscure records to find his name, and only one photograph of him survives, taken in 1903 when he was elected to the House of Representatives.
Harry is buried alongside his American wife at Evergreen Cemetery, Jacksonville, Florida.
Now, let's meet the author:
It was his cousin Gillian who, after several more dead-ends, called one day to say that she had found him through a fluke encounter. Susan Sperry from California, who had recently retired, decided to explore the box of documents given to her thirty years before by her mother, which she had never opened. In the box, she found some references to her great grandfather, Harry Mason, a wealthy hotel owner from Florida who had died in 1919. It soon transpired that Susan’s great grandfather, Harry Mason, was, in fact, Enoch Price.
From this single thread, the extraordinary story of Harry Mason began to unravel, leading R J Lloyd to visit the States to meet his newly discovered American cousins, and it was Susan Sperry and Kimberly Mason, direct descendants, who persuaded R J Lloyd to write the extraordinary story of their ancestor.
R J Lloyd graduated from the University of Warwick with a degree in Philosophy and Psychology and a Masters in Marketing from UWE. Since leaving a thirty-year career in policing, he’s been a non-executive director with the NHS, social housing, and other charities. He lives with my wife in Bristol, spending his time travelling, writing and producing delicious plum jam from the trees on his award-winning allotment.
Thank you for featuring RJ Lloyd today, with such a fascinating post.
ReplyDeleteCathie xx
The Coffee Pot Book Club