The Britannia Club is, of course, a fictional establishment, as is the Arabica coffeehouse. Sotheby Manor, the Butterworth Arms, the Hammer and Anvil, the Green Elephant inn, the churches of St. Tobias and St. Julian, Brolly’s music hall, and the village of Wexford Crossing are also fictional. The town of Barchester and the county of Barsetshire are an homage to Anthony Trollope.
I don’t actually know if the town of Chichester had a motor coach service to the surrounding villages during the First World War and the years following. This was a necessary fabrication for plot-related purposes. The hospitals mentioned—Graylingwell and the Royal West Sussex—did indeed exist, but are no longer. Graylingwell’s last psychiatric inpatients were moved out in 2001, and its buildings were sold to developers in 2010. The Royal West Sussex was closed in 1972 following the commissioning of the new St. Richard’s Hospital, and its building became part of a housing development. I will admit that the presence of a morgue in the Royal West Sussex is only a guess on my part, but I believe it to be a reasonable assumption.
I continue to be fascinated by the architecture of Chichester Cross.
Netley Hospital, also known as the Royal Victoria Hospital, fell into gradual decline after the Second World War. It was damaged by fire in 1963 and demolished in 1966.
The Golden Lion pub still operates on King Street. However, the St. James Theatre was pulled down in 1957, despite organised protests and campaigns led by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. A modern office building, without a neoclassical facade, now stands in its place.
A new facility for the newspaper archives in Colindale was completed in 1932, allowing people to consult them directly without the papers’ having to be delivered to the British Museum. Until then, these deliveries were made just once a week. I have taken liberties with just exactly when in the week the deliveries might have been made, allowing Eric Peterkin the convenience of consulting the Sussex newspapers within a day or two of his wanting them. Today, the archives are digitised, and what might once have taken weeks to discover can now be found after a few minutes of an internet search.
I’m only guessing, based on a plan of the British Museum from the 1930s, that public access to the Newspaper Reading Room was from the side entrance on Montague Street.
The Shafi was a real Indian restaurant, opening its doors in 1920. It was not the first of its kind, though by the 1940s it had become something of a social hub for London’s Indian community.
While opium dens did exist in Limehouse in the 1870s, they’d been stamped out by the turn of the century. By 1924, Chinatown’s reputation for drugs and gambling would have been largely unfounded, perpetuated only by the romantic imaginations of the press and a general suspicion of the Chinese. Following the bombings of the Second World War, London’s Chinatown moved out of Limehouse and westward to the area around Gerrard Street. The reputation for opium dens does not appear to have followed it.
The British Broadcasting Company was a commercial venture, unlike the British Broadcasting Corporation we know today. The Company was dissolved in 1926, and its assets transferred to the Corporation.
MI1b was merged with the Navy’s Room 40 team in 1919 to form the Government Code and Cypher School. The GCCS would be housed at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, where its crypto-analytical work would once again prove invaluable. One presumes that the upgraded accommodations helped as well.
Mention is made of the art deco aesthetic. In fact, the name would not come into use until the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, one year after the events of this novel.
Both Shell Shock and Its Lessons and Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses are real texts, representing the birth of studies into what we now call PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. At the time, it was unlikely to have been understood at all by the ordinary civilian. While many soldiers might have recognised something different about themselves or their mates—common tendencies towards certain behaviours, for instance—I doubt if they’d have really understood it either.
It should go without saying that all the weather effects are entirely my invention, with no regard either to how weather patterns work or to what the weather actually was in the various places described at the dates and times mentioned.
It should also go without saying that all the characters of the story are fictional. Mention has been made of certain real-life figures, however: John Archer, Philip Bowden-Smith, Sax Rohmer, Wilfred Owen, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Hobbs, Sigmund Freud, Lady Astor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and, of course, King George V.
King George V felt very strongly that the Victoria Cross, once given, should never be taken away. While the mechanism for its forfeiture remains in place, no Victoria Cross has been forfeited since 1908.