THE WORLD OF POPPY DENBY: A HISTORICAL NOTE

In 1920 my great-grandfather, Matthew Gill, was attacked and killed in a working men’s club in the mining village of Crawcrook, County Durham. His assailant (a fellow coal miner) was arrested and charged with murder, but at the trial this was commuted to manslaughter. Matthew left behind his wife, Mary Jane, and five children, including my grandma, Betty, who was fifteen at the time. The story of the “murder” is something I have grown up with, and I have long wanted to write a murder mystery set in a mining village in the North East of England in the 1920s. However, although tragic for my family, there was nothing very exciting about my great-grandfather’s death. It was a cut and dried case. It happened in front of a dozen or so witnesses and the killer was arrested almost immediately. So it was not really an option to fictionalize that story. But the core idea of a murder in a mining village stuck with me.

Another thing that has stuck with me is the memory of my grandfather, the man Betty Gill was to marry. Fred Veitch came from a working-class family in Newcastle. He made a living out of painting and decorating, but in his spare time was a very gifted artist. I never met Fred – he died in his early forties when my dad was only eleven – but I grew up looking at and dreaming about the beautiful landscapes that hung in my childhood home. Fred’s sister once told me that her brother had always wanted to be a professional artist but never had the opportunity, in her words, to “better himself”. His great-granddaughter, my daughter Megan, is also a gifted artist. She was fourteen at the time I started writing this book, the same age as Agnes Robson when the story begins.

So art, mining, and the limited opportunities of gifted working-class people to pursue their dreams became the kernel of this book. Readers will know that Poppy Denby comes from the Northumbrian market town of Morpeth, just up the Great North Road from Newcastle. Morpeth is only a few miles from the mining village of Ashington Colliery. In the 1930s and ’40s Ashington became famous for a group of amateur artists who either were or had been miners. They initially worked with a tutor from Durham University called Robert Lyon, but they soon outgrew the course material and he suggested they start producing their own work. In 1936 they put on an exhibition at the Hatton Gallery in Armstrong College, which now forms part of the modern Newcastle University.

Paintings by members of the Ashington Group (also known as the Pitmen Painters) are still highly acclaimed and widely exhibited to this day. This gave me the idea to have a tutor from Armstrong College travel to Ashington in 1897, and start art courses for the children of miners. This is entirely fictional, but historically plausible, as the managers of Ashington Colliery encouraged and funded a host of recreational and educational activities for the miners and their families. Ashington was set up as a “model mining village” and the welfare of the workers was prioritized. However, two years after this book is set, the 1926 General Strike was to have a devastating effect on the community of Ashington and coal miners across the country.

But in 1924, the North East of England, with its regional capital of Newcastle upon Tyne, was still enjoying the last rays of economic prosperity from the profits of its ship building and armaments factories which thrived during the Great War. The side of Newcastle shown in The Art Fiasco is that of the art, cinema, and theatre loving middle class, centred on the gorgeous Georgian heart of the city known as Grainger Town. Aunt Dot’s row of splendid town houses overlooking Armstrong Park in Heaton, with its bowling greens and tennis courts, was and still is a real place – and yes, the pavilion really was firebombed by suffragettes in 1913.

The Laing Art Gallery is still a cultural hub in the city today. The paintings mentioned in this book (apart from Agnes’ fictional works) were in fact part of the Laing’s collection in the 1920s, when my grandma Betty and her sister Emma would sometimes visit. The curator, Dante Sherman, is an entirely made-up character, and there is no suggestion whatsoever that any of the Laing staff at the time (or since) were involved in procuring dodgy artwork. The layout of the building, with its intersecting galleries and the tower that can only be reached from a staircase onto the roof, is historically accurate. The stables are now part of the gallery’s workrooms, and the staircase – and the tower – are still there.

The only historical tweak I have made in this novel is to bring forward the UK release of The Humming Bird film to autumn 1924 from February 1925. Otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, all historical references in this book are accurate. However, errors are still sometimes made: to err is human, to forgive divine.