The Devil's Acre (42 page)

The Devil’s Acre
is based around a series of historical events, from the factory visits of Lajos Kossuth and Charles Dickens to the seizure of the Russia-bound revolvers at Aix-la-Chapelle. Many of the details about Samuel Colt’s time in London, however, remain unknown. The Colonel seldom left any more than accidental traces of his movements, for obvious reasons. What he did, where he went, who he spoke with and the understandings that were reached can often only be imagined – or deduced, perhaps, from the pattern of contracts he won from the British Government. Letters do survive between Colt and Lord Palmerston, who was the only senior British politician to take a serious interest in the American gun-maker and his Pimlico factory. Although rather vague, they are cordial in tone and contain clear suggestions that the two men intended to meet; and as Palmerston’s power increased, so did the government’s patronage of the Colt Company, despite a marked lack of consensus among British experts over the superiority of the Colonel’s pistols.

Those who staffed the London works are similarly elusive. A few figures appear from minutes, press reports and scraps of correspondence, including the gigantic, peevish foreman Gage Stickney, who betrayed his employer at the Select Committee on Small Arms; Alfred Richards, failed barrister turned press agent, with his sweeping, gentlemanly language and troubled domestic circumstances; the disgruntled
overseer Jabez Alvord, dismissing his charges in a letter to his brother as ‘thick-headed Englishmen’. Many more are unaccounted for, though, and it is here that my own inventions – Benjamin Quill, Walter Noone, Edward Lowry – have been inserted, filling roles that would have existed within the gun factory’s hierarchy.

Records of the men and women from the factory’s lower reaches are even more scant, but Colt’s well-known policy of employing cheap, unskilled workers and then training them up himself would have made the Devil’s Acre his natural recruiting ground. A good number of those he took on would have been Irish – and where there were concentrations of poor Irish in the mid-nineteenth century there was a significant chance that Molly Maguires would be found among them. The Mollys emerged in the 1840s from a long tradition of secret societies in rural Ireland: of ‘whiteboys’ and ‘ribbonmen’ committed to the violent intimidation of their enemies, who were usually oppressive landlords or perceived symbols of English rule. Molly Maguire herself is a creature of myth. Neither her origins, nor her followers’ bizarre tradition of cross-dressing and corking their faces before an attack, have ever received a definitive explanation.

Murderously active throughout the potato famine (a Major Denis Mahon was indeed killed by them in County Roscommon), many Mollys are believed to have scattered in its aftermath, settling in the cities of England and Scotland and emigrating to the new world. They would next come to prominence in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania during the 1860s and 70s, when they waged a long and bloody campaign against mine-owners and their feared Pinkerton detectives. That they had a presence in London is beyond doubt, but there is no evidence that they ever planned a killing as ambitious as that conceived by Pat Slattery. The Irish hatred of Lord John Russell, however, was very real. John MacHale, firebrand Bishop of Tuam, expressed the views of many in a widely-circulated letter to the then-Prime Minister that told him bluntly: ‘if you are ambitious for a monument, the bones of a people, slain with the sword of famine, and piled into cairns more numerous than the ancient
pyramids, will tell posterity of the triumph of your brief but disastrous administration.’

The novel’s other significant characters are a mixture of fact and fiction. Lawrence Street, Lady Cecilia Wardell and Simon Bannan all fall into the latter category, although Bannan shares a few professional features with William Monsell, the actual MP for Limerick in the 1850s. Lord Clarence Paget and Sir Thomas Hastings, on the other hand, are historical figures who served in both the Royal Navy and the Board of Ordnance – and although their respective dispositions towards Samuel Colt are accurately portrayed in these pages, it should be stressed that the personalities given to them are entirely conjectural.

After the collapse of his London enterprise, freed from any pretence to an ‘Anglo-Saxon bond’, the Colonel sold openly to the Russians and anyone else with the money to buy from him, soon recouping his losses from the seizure at Aix-la-Chapelle. Returning to Connecticut in 1856, he finally married Elizabeth Jarvis, gave up the rigours of inter-continental travel and built a magnificent mansion overlooking his Hartford factory. Business boomed, Colt pistols selling in their hundreds of thousands as America drifted towards the Civil War – and the Colonel’s weapons were to be widely used by both the Union and Confederate armies. Sam himself did not live to see the conflict’s resolution. The gun-maker’s dedication to both his business pursuits and his liquor eventually exacted its price and he died in 1861, aged forty-seven.

Although
The Devil’s Acre
is a work of fiction containing numerous fabrications and distortions, many books and sources were consulted for the purposes of research. Perhaps the most important among these was Joseph Rosa’s
Colonel Colt, London,
an engaging and detailed history of the short-lived factory at Bessborough Place. Also useful for getting a sense of Samuel Colt and his London venture were two entertaining biographies – Jack Rohan’s
Yankee Arms Maker: The Story of Sam Colt and his Six-Shot Peacemaker
and William Edwards’s
The Story of Colt’s Revolvers: The Biography of Colonel Samuel Colt
– and the series of swaggering promotional pamphlets published by an anonymous English author (very
probably Alfred Richards) in the early days of the pistol works’ existence.

The novel’s representation of the tangled political world of mid-nineteenth century London was crucially informed by the journalistic sketches of the Victorian parliamentary correspondent E. M. Whitty and several more recent histories, primarily
Parliament, Party and Politics in Victorian Britain
by T. A. Jenkins,
The Triumph of Lord Palmerston
by Kingsley Martin and the early chapters of Trevor Royle’s
Crimea.
Valuable material for the Irish strand of the story was provided by
Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London
by Lynn Lees,
Irish Nationalism and the British State: From Repeal to Revolutionary Nationalism
by Brian Jenkins and Kevin Kenny’s definitive
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires.

My depiction of London life in the 1850s is based on various Victorian publications, including the social commentary of Henry Mayhew, Adolphe Smith and Thomas Beames (especially Beames’s gruelling
The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective),
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
English Notebooks,
which offer an amusingly acerbic American view of the metropolis and its people, Peter Cunningham’s
Hand-Book of London, Past and Present,
Charles Manby Smith’s
The Little World of London
and the anonymous and evocatively titled
London By Night, or the Bachelor’s Facetious Guide to All the Ins and Outs and Nightly Doings of the Metropolis.
A number of modern histories also proved helpful; Jerry White’s
London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God,
Liza Picard’s
Victorian London,
Lynda Nead’s
Victorian Babylon,
Felix Barker and Peter Jackson’s
The History of London in Maps
and Isobel Watson’s
Westminster and Pimlico Past: A Visual History
were all regularly consulted.

Sincere thanks are due to my agent, Euan Thorneycroft, and my editor, Susan Watt; also Katie Espiner, Clare Hey, Alice Moss, James Annal and the team at HarperCollins; Jennifer Custer, Kate Munson and everyone at AM Heath; the family and friends who have given me help, encouragement or advice over the past couple of years; and most of all to my wife Sarah, who made it possible.

Ideas, interviews & features…

ONE OF THE
major attractions for me of Colonel Colt’s Thames-side gun factory as the subject for a novel was the chance to write about Victorian London. I knew from the outset that each strand of the narrative would lead the story through some very different parts of the mid-nineteenth century metropolis. Sam Colt, in his efforts to win the custom of the government, would barge his way into the innermost sanctums of the British Empire; his conscience-stricken secretary Edward Lowry would inhabit a threadbare, overcrowded world of cheap lodgings and chop-houses; and the Irishmen from the factory floor, residents of the appalling slums that give the book its name, would drink and plot in the city’s lowest taverns, and brawl in its most fetid lanes.

My research into the main locations of the novel held a number of surprises, by far the greatest of which was the character of Victorian Westminster. I’d already picked up a little about the Pimlico of the period, where stuccoed squares were gradually being laid out across reclaimed marshland under the direction of Thomas Cubitt. A speculator and master builder of keen social ambition, Cubitt wanted his nascent neighbourhood to rival aristocratic Belgravia to the north, and was immediately hostile towards any new commercial or industrial premises that tried to set up there – hence his insistence that the Colt Company remove the painted slogan
from its roof. I was also aware that Millbank, the next district along the Thames, was home to the Victorians’ largest inner-city prison, a vast panopticon that stood where Tate Britain does today. Westminster, however, was a complete shock. I’d expected it to be broadly similar to its modern incarnation, given over almost entirely to politics and affairs of state. This was not what I discovered.

In 1853, the year the novel opens, the building of the Palace of Westminster was at an advanced stage; although the towers at each end were still under construction, both the Commons and the Lords were already in use. Yet only a short distance from this imposing neo-Gothic edifice, literally just around the back of Westminster Abbey, lay the Devil’s Acre, one of the most infamous slums in the whole of London. The Victorians called such areas ‘rookeries’, as their occupants were believed to arrange themselves as rooks fill their nests – by simply cramming into the available space until it could hold no more of them. To outsiders, even to other Londoners well used to dirt and horse-dung, the squalor of the rookeries was overpowering. Dotted with open cess-pits, heaped with all sorts of refuse including animal carcases, they hummed with disease and desperation.

The proximity of Parliament to such a place did not pass without comment at the time. Thomas Beames, journalist, street preacher and city missionary, regularly ventured into London’s grimmest corners to perform works of charity and evangelism. He had this to say in 1852 about the divided nature of Westminster:
‘It is at once the seat of a palace and a plague spot; senators declaim, where sewers poison; theology holds her councils, where thieves learn their trade; and Europe’s grandest hall is flanked by England’s foulest grave-yard.’

Along with others such as Henry Mayhew, Beames tried to mobilise opinion on this issue, but without success; rookeries would persist to the end of the century and beyond. Indeed, in the 1850s the only official response was to embark on a series of urban clearances, wide channels being carved through the dilapidated alleys and yards to make way for new roads. Tens of thousands were displaced, worsening conditions in the surviving slums as these refugees were added to their populations. The Devil’s Acre was slowly compressed by the development of Victoria Street, a long avenue designed to provide a direct connection between Parliament and Belgravia, the address of many a lordly townhouse.

I knew that there would be a stark contrast between the horrors of the Devil’s Acre and the other settings of the story, particularly the luxurious dining rooms, hotels and gentlemen’s clubs toured by Colonel Colt in the course of his business, and felt that this would serve as a powerful illustration of one of the defining characteristics of Victorian London. However, I also wanted to show that some,
like Amy Rea, did manage to scrape together a semblance of a respectable life in the rookery; and that others, such as her husband and his friends, had good reason to remain in its dank, maze-like streets. As was often noted by contemporaries, the rookeries offered an effective haven from the law, sheltering countless thieves and prostitutes. The police only ever made occasional forays within their precincts, and would usually face violent resistance when they did so. For those plotting to steal weapons from Colonel Colt – to use them to assassinate a prominent politician on the steps of the new Parliament – the Devil’s Acre would be the perfect place to hide.

Matthew Plampin,

London, May 2010

How did you find writing the Difficult Second Novel? How did it compare with the experience of writing your debut?

Like many writers, I’d spent a long time working on my first book,
The Street Philosopher,
and it was rather disconcerting to leave it behind and move on to something new. I was also acutely aware of how the two novels might compare with one another and decided that I would employ a more straightforward structure in
The Devil’s Acre,
with only one chronological strand and fewer narrative points of view. I wanted something tighter, set in a single city with the fate of every main character bound closely to Colonel Colt’s progress.