Unearthingour buried stories

IF YOUR knowledge of history from school is one part half-remembered battles, two parts best-forgotten reigns and three parts dull, dull, dull, take a lesson with Felicity Goodall.

She paints a picture of the past that's not deadly grey but living colour, and an assault on more than the visual sense. She has a nose for a story.

Stroll back with her to 1852 through the pages of Lost Plymouth, her new history of the city.

There she follows Robert Rawlinson, the inspector sent by the government to report on the place with the worse housing and public health of any city in Europe, bar Warsaw.

"In the slums of Plymouth there was one toilet for every 250 people," she says. "Imagine the stench."

I can and I don't want to.

But Felicity has a surprise. "It hung over Plymouth like a pall: the smell of sugar." Sugar refining was a big and sweetly odorous business in the city in that era.

From there, she follows a thread with a twist.

"Rawlinson cited the example of Market Alley, a narrow passage with a row of dirty privies and one tap shared between 145 people. Three hundred years earlier the city had been provided with sparkling Dartmoor water by Drake's Leat, water described in 1853 as 'pure and of exquisite brilliancy', but it was polluted en route."

The Drake link takes her to a contemporary of Sir Francis, John Hawkins, infamous as being a pioneer of the slave trade.

Now, many people know that sugar was a vital part of that evil business; Africans were shipped to the Americas to work on plantations and the produce returned to England. As a result sugar- refining became a big business in several English ports.

But while Plymouth was tainted as one of the birthplaces of the slave trade, and the smell of one of its 'by-products' hung over the city, few are aware that the port played an important role in ending the horror of slavery.

Felicity, having moved effortlessly from the mid-19th century to the late 16th, just as quickly moves to the late 18th and back to the 19th. "Less well-known is the role of Plymouth in the abolition of the slave trade," she says.

"The Government sent a Royal Navy officer to Liverpool in 1788 to report on conditions in ships known to be involved in the slave trade. He chose a ship entirely at random and took measurements which were presented to a (Parliamentary) Select Committee in 1790. But exactly the same dimensions were published two years earlier by the Plymouth Committee of Abolitionists Against Slavery."

Felicity speculates, quite reasonably, that the information was leaked to abolitionists in Plymouth through RN connections – it is unlikely that the 'anti' brigade would have been allowed access to a slave ship by traders, and one of the investigating Navy officer's contemporaries was the brother of a leading campaigner for slavery to be outlawed.

What isn't speculation, though, is Felicity's detailing of key witnesses from Plymouth whose harrowing testimony helped swing public opinion towards ending slavery. They were sailors from slave ships who testified about the true details of the trade and the brutality that was commonplace on the vessels.

That deft weaving of themes and stories is a characteristic of Felicity's book. Her history has the feel of the results of research by a dogged detective, but presented in journalistic fashion, grabbing the reader's attention.

Her start point was Crispin Gill's Plymouth – A New History (1993), although Felicity relished the opportunity to go back to original sources, including the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office. "Staff there told me I was reading stuff that nobody had read since it was put in the archives 200 years ago," she says proudly.

"I loved it. If I could spend my entire life there, I'd be happy."

Even officials records have their colour and flavour of life, she says. Among the formal documents and reports are details Felicity cherishes, the first-hand accounts of the lives of ordinary people; the complaints about brothels and the behaviour of soldiers and sailors; the conditions endured by the masses – all little insights into how it must have felt to live day by day in centuries past.

That interest in the everyday, the snippets and sagas of 'ordinary' people, fits with Felicity's background in journalism.

She trained in local newspapers and then worked for news agency Reuters and as a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and the Daily Express, when her husband Alan's job took them to Norway for three years.

A move into radio followed her return to the UK. Her work as a producer included a history series, Age To Age, for Radio 4. Lost Plymouth is her fifth book, following Lost Devon and volumes on stories of life in Britain during World War Two and the conscientious objectors of World War One. She also wrote a play for Radio 4, A Change Of Heart, about the first woman news editor in Fleet Street.

For the Devon book, Felicity could draw on some local knowledge. Although she grew up as 'an army brat' with many moves, Felicity has family connections in the South Hams, spent many holidays there, and she and Alan chose to settle near Kingsbridge to bring up their two children, now 18 and 15.

Despite living in Devon, Felicity says she knew pretty well only one thing about Plymouth before she began her research – and that 'fact' turned out to be half-wrong.

"I'd been told it was the most bombed city outside London and that was why so many of its historic buildings were gone," she says, "but of course I soon learned it was the planners, not the German bombers, who got rid of so much."

She was happy to throw herself into a new project and find out more, especially about the man and woman in the street.

"I've always had a passion for history and Age To Age fitted with journalism because it was about making connections across history, linking the present day with the past.

"Stories like that show you that the past isn't another country. They were just like us and their concerns were just like ours.

"I'm interested in the ordinary people, not so much the bigwigs."

So Sir Francis Drake and Robert Falcon Scott get their mention, but Felicity is keener to shed light on less well-known figures, or at least those who should be better known.

She champions the story of Tobias Furneaux, born in Swilly House (which gave its name to the estate that is now North Prospect), who was explorer Captain James Cook's right-hand man and became the first person to sail around the world in both directions.

There's also star treatment for the Rev Robert Hawker, who in the 1790s opened the first purpose-built Sunday school in England and was a pioneer of what was then the outlandish practice of educating the masses.

But mostly she gives a voice to those who rarely had one: the great number of Plymouth people who struggled to get by, and the majority of them women, who were treated harshly by history.

"Plymouth was known as the 'city of women' because there were so many people on land," she says.

"So many men were at sea, either in the Navy or fishing."

Plymouth had a large number of prostitutes – 900 aged under 15 in 1861 – but the sex trade flourished not only because of the demands of so many military men but also due to the desperation of some women.

"Many women were doing it because they were in casual marriages, the men were at sea for months or years and they didn't know if they'd be coming back, and they had no income." Sailors were paid at the end of deployments and most servicemen, unlike civilians, were not legally obliged to provide for their wives and children until the law was changed in 1877. "The women had to put food into the mouths of their children."

The Government cracked down on prostitutes because of the high rates of sexually-transmitted disease among servicemen. The result was the Contagious Diseases Acts (of 1864, 1866 and 1869) which brought shame, humiliation and increased poverty among women in Plymouth. "The acts were like the hated 'Sus' law of the 1980s. Police could arrest any woman suspected of being a prostitute, and subject her to an intimate examination by a male surgeon. Any woman found on the streets after dark – and in winter that could be 4pm – was a potential suspect."

The infected women were imprisoned in the Royal Albert Hospital (the tower in Washbourne Close, Devonport, is a remnant of that building; see our Looking Back section today, on page 23).

"It was an inequity that a whole city could be blacklisted because of its venereal disease rate, but to lay the fault at the door of women was just appalling," says Felicity, with rising indignation.

She is just as passionate in her condemnation of the often indiscriminate, over-zealous and short-sighted removal of much of the city's Elizabethan-era housing in the latter 19th and early and mid-20th centuries.

Why so, after highlighting Plymouth's enduring poverty? In the mid-19th century there were nine people per dwelling in the city, compared to the national average of five and a half.

"I understand it's very unfair of us with hindsight to condemn everything the planners did when people lived in such terrible, terrible poverty," she says. "The planners should have learned their lesson by the 1960s, but they didn't.

"What's left? Devonport has more buildings of interest than Plymouth and they aren't loved."

Nor does the city make enough of its military history, she says, not even the famous connections, such as with Drake or the less-publicised gems such as the remains of the first military barracks in Britain, in the Citadel, and dating from the 16th century.

If you think those sound like harsh words from an outsider who doesn't care for the city, think again.

Felicity says: "When visitors came to stay with me I used to take them around the beautiful South Hams but not now. I take them to see some of the hidden history of Plymouth. It's amazing."

As she does her mini-personal tours, she chooses to connect with Plymouth's famous figures from history, but also 'those who were with him: the Joe Bloggs, ordinary people like you and me. Theirs are the stories I want to tell.'

And in Lost Plymouth, you can find them.

Lost Plymouth is published by Birlinn on December 4 at £16.99.