Park Lane is a novel but its story is inseparable from its historical setting:
Mrs Pankhurst held rallies in Campden Hill Square and Glebe Place, and the evening and afternoon unfolded exactly as described here. The Suffragists and Suffragettes disliked each other and the WSPU’s HQ was in Mrs Pattie Hall’s flat in Maida Vale, though not necessarily in Lauderdale Mansions. When the flat was raided by the police in May 1914, stones and machetes were found there. Lloyd George’s house was bombed, and the Cat and Mouse Act was continuously being passed over in favour of the question of Home Rule for Ireland. The Gretna Green rail disaster was the worst rail crash in the United Kingdom, involved five trains, and a total of 226 people died. And Dartmouth House, now the English Speaking Union in Mayfair, was a nursing home run by the Countess of Lytton who, as Pamela Plowden, had been Winston Churchill’s first great love.
The first Sir William Masters, Bea’s great-grandfather, was inspired by Thomas Brassey, regarded by many as the greatest railway builder the world has seen. And the Brasseys, like the fictional Masters, lived in a house on Park Lane which was sold at the end of the First World War. The Brasseys’ house had attached to it an Indian Durbar Hall that was filled with ethnographical trophies brought back from travels abroad. The family were ardent, and influential, Suffragists – in particular one Muriel Brassey, who was tiny in stature but huge in character. She had a daughter (rather than a daughter’s friend) who ‘bolted’ to Kenya, but that is the subject of another book …
London, October 2011