The idea for this book came to me while sitting in a South London coffee shop. I was gazing at the funeral directors opposite and something in its name, Constable & Toop, leapt out at me. Once I had written down the name, a skeleton of the story appeared very quickly on the rest of the page. I should point out that beyond sharing the same shop space in Honor Oak, the funeral business described in these pages bears no relation to its namesake and inspiration.
The story is set in 1884, the forty-seventh year of Queen Victoria’s reign. Mourning was an important part of Victorian culture. The queen herself had worn nothing but black for over two decades, since the death of her beloved husband, Albert. Following her example, mourning rituals became more elaborate, funerals increasingly lavish, and the newly developed cemeteries boasted magnificent monuments to the wealthy dead. Death was a national obsession and, for those in the undertaking business, a lucrative occupation. By the 1880s, there had been attempts by the National Funeral and Mourning Reform Association to curb the excesses of mourning, but many of the rituals and associated costs lingered on.
In the world of Victorian fiction, writers penned ghost stories exploring what happened after death. In the world of fact, newspapers pored over the lurid details of murders, turning the victims and murderers into celebrities. The more gruesome the better. In the autumn of 1888 they would become obsessed with the killings of London’s most infamous killer, sensationally christening the anonymous murderer roaming the streets of Whitechapel Jack the Ripper.
Amongst the books I found especially useful while researching this story were Catharine Arnold’s Necropolis: London and Its Dead, Charles Dickens Junior’s Dictionary of London (a guide to London published in 1888) and a number of ghost stories written by his father and other great nineteenth-century writers. Lee Jackson’s excellent website, The Victorian Dictionary, was also an invaluable source when it came to recreating historically convincing dialogue.
But my main method of research was to take long walks around London. Once you start looking, you realise that London is crammed with dates, stories and history. Reading the plaques and signs, and studying the buildings themselves, can provide as much information as opening a book on the subject. Soon the entire city transformed into a huge interactive museum to explore, each turn of a corner transporting me to another aspect of its rich history. These walks, intended to flesh out details of the story, actually fed the ever-growing plot.
On a cold January day, I wandered into Drury Lane Theatre and explained to the man on the door that I was looking for an old haunted theatre. He informed me that Drury Lane was not only the oldest theatre in London, but the most haunted in the world. Later that day a tour guide, actor and writer by the name of David Kerby-Kendall took me on a tour and told me about many of these ghosts, but it was the story of the Man in Grey which instantly grabbed me.
The ghost of Paddy O’Twain was an invention of my own but the location of his pub came from the discovery of a plaque outside The Tipperary on Fleet Street, detailing the pub’s history and giving its original name, The Boar’s Head.
St Paul’s of Shadwell has been a favourite church of mine since I used to live in the area. It boasts the graves of seventy-five sea captains and has links with Captain Cook himself. When I went to look around, a pastor by the name of Andrew Sercombe was kind enough to let me in. A list inside revealed the name of the rector in 1884, although I was entirely responsible for Rector Bray’s dubious character and for the story of the unfortunate bell-ringer.
On buses and trains, in coffee shops and pubs, I wrote this book, while London’s history bled into the pages. My daily wanderings took me to many valuable places of research including the Museum of London, the Museum of Transport, Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood and the archive section of Lewisham Library.
Many of the houses, pubs and streets are of my own invention, but I hope have the ring of truth to them. I also took a number of liberties with historical details. Although this was a period of rapid suburban growth I have exaggerated the extent of that development in Honor Oak and the surrounding area. I hope that anyone who notices any of the liberties I have taken will forgive them in the name of fiction.
I also hope that I will be forgiven by those dizzied by the sheer number of characters who worked their way into this story. Following its inception in that Honor Oak coffee shop, as I wandered the streets of London with my notebook, this book grew very rapidly and spread in many unexpected directions, very much like nineteenth-century London itself.