“Any Old Iron” Guest post by Elizabeth Wein

The garden of my house in Perth, Scotland, lost its iron rail fence in World War II – not to an enemy bomb, but to patriotism. All over the United Kingdom, iron railings got chopped down in parks and gardens to support the war effort. Here's a link to a newsreel from 1940 showing men collecting railings in a London park!

https://www.britishpathe.com/video/park-railings-for-munitions

The idea was that the iron would be melted down and used to make ammunition and armour for tanks and ships, although nobody’s really sure if that happened – there’s a rumour that London’s iron railings were all dumped in the Thames, and I’ve been told that Perth’s ended up in landfill on St. Magdalene’s Hill.

Iron rail fences on our road early in the 20^th century

Parliament’s Hansard report for 13 July 1943 tells us that somebody wanted to know what was being done with all that collected iron. Lord Hemingford commented, “It has been felt that an injustice has been done to a very large number of usually uncomplaining and patriotic people. This question of the requisitioning of railings and gates is rather like eczema; it is not very serious, but it is most confoundedly irritating, and causes a vast amount of bad temper.”

(source: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1943/jul/13/requisitioned-railings)

For years, whenever I looked at the stumps of those railings in my garden wall, I thought of them as my house’s wartime scars. What I didn’t realize was that World War II took away something far more tragic from my house than its decorative iron railings. It took away the boy who’d come of age in that house and who’d still lived there when he went to war as a young man, the only child of the couple who lived in that house for forty years. He left my house to go to war and he never came back.

He was a navigator in the Royal Air Force. He was part of a team of “pathfinders,” a dangerous job in which an advance aircraft would have to find and mark an attack site for a bomber squadron, dropping flares in the dark that would light up the enemy target.  On 7 Dec. 1940, he and five other crew members took off from RAF Stradishall in Suffolk in their “Wimpey” – a twin-engined Vickers Wellington bomber. They flew through atrocious weather in the dark to Germany, along with two other pathfinder aircraft, to mark the target for a bombing raid in Dusseldorf. They vanished later that night somewhere over the North Sea – “Aircraft failed to return,” is what the official reports said.

A Wellington crew

(source: https://www.lancs.live/news/lancashire-news/lancaster-bomber-brave-daredevils-who-24064051)

Let me tell you about Chick. (His real name was Charles.) He was a mild-looking young man with dimple in his chin – his RAF portrait is in black and white, but I think he must have been like Kate, his mother, short and lightly built, with brown hair, those amused eyes blue. Robert, Chick’s adoptive father, ran a fishmonger’s shop in Perth, where Chick helped out, but in 1939, with war looming, he joined the Royal Air Force as a reservist.

The road in front of our house in 1934 and 2022

Late in August 1939, just before Germany invaded Poland, one of Chick’s mates who was also a reservist got his calling-up papers. The friend and a few others turned up at Chick’s house – MY house! – at eleven o’clock that night, and they all decided they’d have one last night on the town before they were called into action. Chick drove them from Perth to Dundee where, arriving after midnight, they had a couple of drinks and checked out a couple of all-night coffee stands before heading back to Perth at about three o’clock in the morning.

That’s when Chick ignored a stop sign, was spotted by a waiting policeman, and got pulled over for driving under the influence of alcohol – which apparently he didn’t have a very good head for!

He was fined £10 and given a six month driving ban. He was contrite and honest about what had happened, and solicitor who defended him pointed out that it was Chick’s “first time in trouble”! (Source: Dundee Evening Telegraph, 25 Aug. 1939, page 6).

See my source note there – I got this story from an old newspaper. It’s available online in the British Newspaper Archive. Actually, everything I know about Chick – the details of the colour of his mother’s hair and eyes, the kind of plane he flew, the date of his disappearance, even his nickname – I dug up by accident simply because I just wanted to know more about my own old house.

And in the wider sense, isn’t that the real reason we dig up history – because we want to know more about our own house, our own city, our own people, our own world? To learn from them, to connect to them in their strengths and to correct their weaknesses?

I tell this as a coherent story, as if I knew these people, Chick and his family and friends. But what I know about them I found through scraps, fragments, puzzle pieces that I’ve fit together: RAF war graves memorials, stories and police reports and personal columns in local newspapers, internet queries on ancestry chat boards, wartime bulletins, photographs, voting records, passenger lists for ships and airplanes.

(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_Wellington#/media/File:See_How_Your_Salvage_Helps_a_Bomber_Art.IWMPST14695.jpg)

Look at that – the scrap metal from his own fence railings may have become part of the Wellington bomber that Chick died in.

All my stories begin this way – finding connections between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between daily life and drama, between the past and the present. I hope this gives you some inspiration for finding your own fascinating connections!

Elizabeth Wein is a recreational pilot and the owner of about a thousand maps; flight inspires her young adult novels and non-fiction. Her best-known book, Code Name Verity, was short-listed for the Carnegie award and became a number one New York Times bestseller in 2020. She has published three short novels with Barrington Stoke, including Firebird, which won the Historical Association's Young Quills Award for Historical Fiction in 2019. Look for her latest flight-inspired historical thriller, Stateless, published by Bloomsbury in March 2023.

Visit Elizabeth's website at https://www.elizabethwein.com/

Twitter: @ewein2412

Instagram: ewein2412

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

The link to my info on the Barrington Stoke site: 

Elizabeth's Barrington Stoke books

Elizabeth Wein: Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)

Andrew Carnegie and his Library Legacy - by Barbara Henderson

I for one visit my library regularly. I was there this morning, in fact, editing my current manuscript. I borrow books, I use the reference section. 

Let’s be clear about one thing: without access to libraries, I may never have become a reader. I certainly wouldn’t have obtained a degree, let alone become a writer. I owe libraries a LOT!

 A postcard of the original Carnegie Library in Dunfermline

A key setting in the manuscript I was editing is the Victorian Carnegie Library in Dunfermline in Scotland. I cannot think of a person with a more significant library-legacy than Andrew Carnegie, the founder and funder of that first Carnegie library, and then, wait for it, over 2500 more around the world!

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline in 1835. His family home there was a humble weaver’s cottage, now home to the Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum. In 1848 when Andrew was 12 years old, the Carnegie family emigrated from Scotland to the New World - the United States of America.

The young Andrew began his working life as a messenger in a Telegraph Company. Always keen to seek opportunities to better himself, he soon progressed to telegraph operator after teaching himself Morse Code. Later he became personal assistant to the Superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, rising to the post of Superintendent himself in 1859.

Carnegie was a skilled businessman, investing wisely in a range of industries such as oil and steel. Soon, the Carnegie Steel Company dominated the market in America and morphed into a billion-dollar company – the first company anywhere to do so.

Andrew Carnegie was not only incredibly wealthy, but he hadn’t forgotten his humble roots. His urge to learn had resulted in unprecedented success – now Carnegie wanted to give back by offering the opportunity of a better life to the people of his hometown back in Scotland. The libraries he was able to use as a young man had enabled him to gain new skills and make something of himself. Perhaps it is not surprising that he chose libraries as his vehicle to do good, a pioneer of philanthropy.

To say it in his own words: ‘No millionaire will go wrong… who chooses to establish a free library in any community that is willing to maintain and develop it’.

However, Dunfermline was only the beginning: the following years saw a growing number of free-to-access public libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. Dunfermline’s Carnegie Library was first, opening its doors to the public in August 1883. All it took was an £8,000 grant donated by Carnegie while the rest was raised by taxation through the Public Libraries (Scotland) Act.

I loved learning about the first library for my manuscript, Rivet Boy, due out from Cranachan Publishing in February 2023. The first librarian there was an Edinburgh bookbinder named Mr Alexander Peebles who was chosen from more than 250 applicants and who lived in the flat above the library, aided in his work by a single assistant. More than 2000 volumes were issued on the very first day of its opening. 

The Carnegie library, now combined into a gallery and museum,
still takes pride of place in Dunfermline's centre 

The combination of public money and Carnegie-backed funding proved a popular finance route to other libraries for decades to come, often ornate and impressive buildings like the Central Library in Edinburgh.

Even now, nothing quite beats walking into a building filled with books for me. The smell, the heavy extravagance of knowledge and imagination, billions of letters and words on millions of pages in thousands and thousands of volumes. It’s rare for me to come across snippets of knowledge I hadn’t searched for on the internet, but such is the richness of a library that we can’t underestimate its value – something always, always catches my eye unexpectedly. Libraries almost everywhere are now under threat. I am sure Carnegie would have a word or two to say about that, and so should we.

What was the impression this new library might have made on a young boy, aged 12, just the same age as Andrew Carnegie was when he arrived in the U.S?

We can only guess.  

 

Barbara outside the old entrance to the building

Barbara Henderson is the author of seven historical books for children, six are published by Cranachan, her most recent - The Reluctant Rebel is published by Luath Press. She has won the Historical Association's Young Quills Award for Historical Fiction for Children in 2021 and 2022.

Find out more at barbarahenderson.co.uk

 

The Lost Colony by Catherine Randall

In May this year, I was lucky enough to fulfil a lifetime’s ambition and visit Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Roanoke Island has fascinated me for years, not only because it is the site of the first attempt to settle an English colony on the coast of North America, but because it is the site of the mysterious Lost Colony. 

The Lost Colony of Roanoke is one of the longest-standing
historical mysteries in North America

In 1584 Queen Elizabeth I gave one of her favourite courtiers, Sir Walter Raleigh, a royal charter granting him permission to explore and colonise lands not already held by ‘any Christian prince’. I am sorry to say they didn’t give a second thought to the Native Americans who already lived there. The main aim of the enterprise was to bring back gold and silver from the New World, chiefly by establishing a base in North America from which the English could raid the Spanish treasure ships which had been ploughing the Atlantic between Spain and the Americas for a century.

Sir Walter Raleigh was the force and often the finance behind
the exploration and colonisation of North Carolina but
he never actually visited it himself

Three voyages were sent to North Carolina over a four-year period from 1584 to 1587.

The 1584 voyage was a short exploratory voyage. The captains and crew of the two ships established good relations with the local Algonquian tribe and reported back that Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks was a highly suitable place for a settlement.

In 1585, another expedition, consisting mainly of sailors and soldiers, was sent to Roanoke Island with the aim of discovering more about the area and establishing a base there.

This is a reconstruction of the type of ship in which the colonists would
have sailed. It is moored at Roanoke Island Festival Park

After building an earthen fort, the majority of the expedition departed, leaving behind just 107 men, mainly soldiers, but also including a scientist named Thomas Hariot, and an artist, John White. Hariot and White wrote and drew detailed accounts of the lands and waters around Roanoke, giving Europeans their first view of this unfamiliar land and its people.

However, things did not go well for these colonists – much of the food supplies they had brought from England were lost in a storm almost as soon as they arrived, and they had to rely on food supplies from the Algonquian tribe. Relationships between the tribe and the colonists became strained, marked by misunderstandings and sometimes violence, and they culminated in the killing of the Chief by the leader of the colonists. When Sir Francis Drake appeared at Roanoke on his way back from raiding Spanish ships, the colonists gladly accepted his offer to take them home to England.

Nevertheless in 1587, a third expedition set sail from England in an attempt to establish a proper colony in North America. The destination this time was supposed to be north of Roanoke, near Chesapeake Bay. Earlier explorations had concluded that this would be a more suitable place for a permanent settlement. However, due to arguments between the leader, John White, and the pilot navigating them, the 117 colonists – men, women and children – were deposited at Roanoke Island with the pilot refusing to go any further. There were other problems too. The local tribes were less than friendly, after their treatment by earlier colonists, and it soon became clear that the colonists’ food supplies were inadequate. They had also arrived too late to plant for a harvest that year.

 

The only good news for the 1587 colonists was the birth of John White’s granddaughter,
Virginia Dare, the first European child to be born in America

They decided that John White must return to England for supplies. In the meantime, the colonists would split into two groups – one venturing onto the mainland to find a better site for a permanent settlement, the other remaining on Roanoke.  It was also agreed that if they left the colony before White’s return they would carve their destination on a tree.

John White promised to return immediately, but in the event he was not able to return for three long years.

 

The view from Roanoke Island. The colonists must have gazed
at this view, longing for their leader to return

When White finally returned in 1590, the settlement was silent. The colonists had completely disappeared. The only clue to where they might have gone were the words CROATOAN carved into a post and CRO carved in a tree. Croatoan was the name of an island further south, but White wasn’t able to investigate because a hurricane forced the ships to return to England. No evidence has ever been found that the colonists reached Croatoan Island, and no one has ever found definite evidence that they moved further inland.

Artist’s impression of John White’s return to Roanoke

The fate of the Lost Colonists is a mystery to this day.

Writing Challenge

For today’s writing challenge, I’d like you to use this historical mystery as the start for a piece of creative writing. What do you think happened to the Lost Colonists? Did they explore further inland and live with local tribes? Did they try to sail back to England and end up somewhere completely different?  Did they go to Croatan Island but get swept away by a hurricane? Did something weird and wonderful happen to them? Let your imagination run wild! Happy writing!

Book Recommendation 

This week I also have a book recommendation for you. This children’s novel by American author Rebecca Behrens is all about a modern girl’s search for the truth behind the Lost Colony when she is forced to spend a summer on Roanoke Island with her botanist mum. It is magical and mysterious and conjures up the feel of the island perfectly. It’s available online in the UK. If you’re interested in the Lost Colony, I would highly recommend it. 

 

The White Phoenix by Catherine Randall is an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London, 1666. It was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021.

Published by the Book Guild, it is available from bookshops and online retailers.

For more information, go to Catherine’s website: www.catherinerandall.com