The Hourglass Factory (48 page)

Frankie watches the suffragette as she strides. She is a lanky beautiful Amazon, and there is such nervous determination in her march that for a second the earth crumbles beneath Frankie and she
sees Ebony Diamond, clear as a mirage, her shadow materialising on the wall of Mr Smythe’s corset shop, then hurling Lady Thorne’s brooch at him. She hasn’t thought of Ebony for a
long time but she has a picture of her, secreted from an old poster at Jojo’s that she keeps in a slit of silk, cut with nail scissors into the back of her Blickensderfer case.

The moment unsettles her and makes her wonder for a moment if the suffragette will cause some kind of a scene. They have been increasing their attacks again lately: acid on golf courses,
paintings slashed in public galleries, sometimes bombs set off in deserted buildings.

She looks over at Twinkle, seeing her leaning against the green bandstand rail, and panic takes hold, and she feels a tweak in her back and remembers the inside of the chapel, and a residual
fear she has been left with slides like cold egg yolk down the back of her throat.

But nothing will happen with the suffragette. Not today, not while there are crowds. Mrs Pankhurst has been keen to inform every newspaper on Fleet Street that suffragettes will never endanger
human life except their own. Surely it can only be a matter of time before they are granted what they fight for. Frankie is certain of it, weeks, months at most.

Before Frankie reaches Twinkle, two more figures catch her attention, both making for the edge of the starting post. She recognises the brown woollen suit and stiff wide shoulders of Inspector
Primrose – he had told her he would be at the races – and she sticks two fingers in her mouth to give a shrill whistle. He twitches his head a few times then locks eyes with her and as
he moves to lift his hat she sees that the woman with him has a full pregnant belly pushing out through the fine linen of her pale pink dress. Frankie is embarrassed to have summoned him in such a
common way in front of his wife, but she can’t help crack a grin, showing the gap next to her canine tooth and he nods, albeit reservedly, and turns back to his wife, whose name Frankie
can’t remember although it begins with C.

And now the gunshot has ripped into the sunny sky and the horses are off and Twinkle is impatiently snapping her fingers at Frankie to hurry up. Frankie trots the last few steps, leaping up the
bandstand railings to join Twinkle, and they lean over, watching the horses fill the air with slow thunder. People are bent forward, tense, shouting out names, waving their betting cards in the
air. The cavalcade pounds round the faraway loop at the end of the course, heading back towards the crowds to finish in front of the Royal Box. Suddenly, through the tremor of hooves on turf and
the cries of the crowd comes another sound, a single voice so loud it’s hard to tell if it comes from man or woman. A blur of green, white and purple is moving fast across the field, the tall
woman clinging to her suffragette flag; first she is scurrying low under the race barrier, then striding high, then standing broad, reaching for the King’s horse as its whites widen round its
eyes and its hooves approach, heading straight for her, making the earth shake.

While
The Hourglass Factory
is set against the struggle for women’s votes, it is a work of fiction, and I have frequently altered, fudged and made honest mistakes
with history to suit the story.

There are however true events and people that formed the basis for particular parts of the book, and I’d like to jot a few of them down as it’s my great hope that the story will
pique a curiosity in some readers about this turbulent, shocking and inspiring time. Any historical mistakes made in
The Hourglass Factory
are not a reflection on the excellent sources below
but are mine alone.

Ebony’s Albert Hall leap was – as Twinkle notes – inspired by a suffragette named Isabel Kelley, who broke into Dundee’s Kinnaird Hall via a skylight during a political
meeting from which women were barred. I read about this and many more of the suffragettes’ more radical activities in a book called
The Militant Suffragettes
(1973) by Antonia Raeburn.
Other great suffragette reads are the Pankhurst sisters’ books,
Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote
(1959) by Christabel Pankhurst, and
The Suffragette Movement
(1911)
by E. Sylvia Pankhurst, which details the ghastly violence of Black Friday. Constance Lytton’s diary is available online – although I was privileged to hold the original at the National
Archives – and describes not only her heroic attempts to expose the prison authorities’ double standards over treatment of women from different classes, but also gives a chilling
verbatim account of force-feeding. Speaking of verbatim, I used several of Emmeline Pankhurst’s speeches (sometimes anachronistically) when putting words into her mouth during her interview
with Primrose. I hope her spirit will forgive me for taking this liberty but I wanted to convey as accurately as possible her position on violence, and this seemed to be the best way. For this I
consulted period newspaper sources, but my additional suffragette research also included
Votes For Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes
(2000) ed. Joyce Marlow,
The Suffragettes In
Pictures
(1996) by Diane Atkinson, and
Vindication: A Postcard History of the Woman
’
s Movement
(1995) by Ian McDonald, all fantastic reads.

The character of Evelina Haverfield who features briefly was indeed alleged to have led police horses ‘out of their ranks’ as noted in several sources. I’d like to think she
did this by charming them and making them sit, however it’s sadly doubtful this was the case. William Reynolds is inspired by a man named William Ball who went to prison and was force-fed for
the women’s cause, afterwards being transferred to Colney Hatch. The treatment of Ball was far more shocking than that of Reynolds, as is detailed in the Museum of London’s online
records. I completely fabricated his affair.

Twinkle, believe it or not, also has her roots in a real person, although I used only the barest facts of this woman’s life. Catherine Walters aka Skittles was the last of the great
Victorian courtesans. I first read about her years ago in
The Mammoth Book of Heroic and Outrageous Women
(1999) ed. Gemma Alexander, which was incidentally also the first place I came
across Emmeline Pankhurst (an excellent Christmas present for a teenage girl; thank you, Auntie Ros).

For information relating to the work of Scotland Yard and the suffragettes I am grateful to the National Archives. For police history background I used the memoir
At Scotland Yard: being the
experience during twenty-seven years
’
service by John Sweeney, late Detective Inspector, CID
(1904),
When I was at Scotland Yard
(1932) by Chief Inspector James Berrett,
Joan Lock’s
Scotland Yard Casebook
(1993), and
The Police Code and General Manual of the Criminal Law, Fifteenth edition
(1912), by Sir Howard Vincent (revised by the
commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis). I also particularly want to acknowledge William Thomas Ewens’s enthralling memoir
Thirty Years at Bow Street Police Court
(1924) from
which I shamelessly poached the true story of the suffragette court riot and the egg being thrown at the clerk.

The act of a policeman dressing up as a woman to go undercover may seem ridiculous, but Joan Lock cites this as having happened during the Whitechapel investigation (though surprisingly never
during the era of the suffragettes). I couldn’t resist adding it in.

As for corsets, Valerie Steele’s book,
The Corset: A Cultural History
(2001) was a great place to read about the history of these fascinating objects, including the man who inspired
The Hourglass Club. And David Kunzle’s extraordinary
Fashion & Fetishism: Corsets, Tight-Lacing and Other Forms of Body-Sculpture
(New ed 2004) was invaluable in helping me get my
head round the paradoxical allure of subjugation and sexual liberation in corset fetishism.

As regards London, my deepest apologies to the denizens of the city I love so much for any inaccuracies of place or distance I might have thrown in. I spent three wonderful years living in
London but for additional information on its history I am grateful to Peter Ackroyd’s
London: The Biography
(2000)
,
Stephen Inwood’s
A History of London
(1998), and
probably the most enjoyable read of all my research, Judith Summers’s firecracker of a book,
Soho: A History of London
’
s Most Colourful Neighbourhood
(1989)
.

Female journalists were not uncommon during the era, as I discovered from Elizabeth L. Banks’s
Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl
(1902) and Michelle Elizabeth Tusan’s
Women
Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain,
(2005) (and from those indefatigable bastions of sexism, The ‘Ladies Pages’ in contemporary period newspapers to whose editors
I must also express my gratitude). I read about the news agency tape machines and the anatomy of newspaper-making in Henry Leach’s
Fleet Street from Within: The Romance and Mystery of the
Daily Paper
(1905) and about newspaper history in Dennis Griffiths’s
Fleet Street: Five Hundred Years of the Press
. Other books of great use were
The Edwardians: The Remaking of
British Society
(1975) by Paul Thompson, and
Edwardian Life and Leisure
(1973) by Ronald Pearsall.

Richard Anthony Baker’s brilliant book
British Music Hall: An Illustrated History
(2005) introduced me to the National Vigilance Association, the history of the London Coliseum and
the song ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’, and also The Great Lafayette’s remarkable stage trick, The Lion’s Bride, the inspiration for Ebony’s
disappearing act. On the subject of outrageous tricks, the presence of nitrocellulose in the red dye on old decks of playing cards is true, and according to folklore has been used in the past to
create deadly bombs. Christian de Ryck of the International Playing-Card Society was kind enough to look into this for me and confirm it.

While suffragettes were arrested and sent to prison for a wide range of arson activities in the early twentieth century, I have tried to be faithful to their ethos in presenting them as holding
human life sacred. It is true that some acts of arson, such as Gladys Evans setting fire to the Dublin Theatre during a visit from Asquith in 1912, would seem to contradict this, however it is not
clear whether actions such as this were sanctioned by the WSPU in advance, or merely supported retrospectively in view of the fact that no one was hurt.

The same goes for an alleged plot to assassinate the Prime Minister in 1909. Although attributed to ‘suffragettes’ in the media there is nothing to indicate that this was an official
WSPU plan. At any rate, the line taken by Emmeline Pankhurst was that the only people in danger of harm from suffragette activities were suffragettes themselves. This was unfortunately fulfilled on
several occasions, the most famous being Emily Wilding Davison’s protest at the 1913 Derby.

My deepest thanks go to the army of people bigger and more fearsome than the Hourglass Factory seamstresses who contributed to the creation of this book.

First of all I am massively grateful to Daisy Parente at Lutyens & Rubinstein for having the enthusiasm of a champion and a fantastic reader’s eye that helped shape the story.
Similarly, enormous thank you to Clare Hey at Simon & Schuster for her brilliant and invaluable editing, and for making the learning process fun along the way. Huge thank you also to Jane
Finigan at L&R, Carla Josephson, Helen Mockridge, Leena Lane and the team at Simon & Schuster who worked on the book.

For their tireless encouragement I owe a debt of gratitude to The Scottish Book Trust, particularly Will Mackie, Claire Marchant-Collier, Caitrin Armstrong and also Helen Croney for her time and
expert PR advice. The Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award I received allowed me to work on the book in the beautiful surroundings of Cove Park as well as giving me the financial support I needed
to redraft it. Thank you to Beatrice Colin for her words of endorsement on the opening chapters. To receive encouragement from a writer whose work I love was a dream come true and kept me
motivated.

Huge thanks to Harry Man, Araminta Whitley and Sophie Hughes for suggestions that helped shape early drafts; to Lainey Johr for reading the very first draft, Lynsey May for reading the nearly
last draft and Caraigh McGregor for advice on Northern Irish accents – I’m privileged to have both their great friendship and their feedback. Rhoda MacDonald is an absolute pearl for
turning her bedroom into a writer’s retreat during one of my redrafts, as are Rose Filippi and Rosie Watts for being so passionate about seeing the finished book that giving up was never an
option.

I conducted most of my research through books – and made a good deal of it up – but on the occasion I wanted to check a fact with a human being I was very grateful to have Evangeline
Holland, of the excellent Edwardian Promenade website, patiently responding to my emails with her encyclopaedic knowledge of the era.

Finally the greatest thanks of all go to my family, Liz and Richard Ribchester for encouraging their wayward daughter, to my brother Tim, and to Chris, Keith and Lidia for the support. And for
reasons too numerous and complex to describe, I thank my other half, Alex.