We Bid You Be Of Hope

(We Bid You Be Of Hope was first published by W.T. Stead  in the Pall Mall Gazette of July 6, 1885. It was the precursor to his great 'Maiden Tribute' articles I reference in my novel The Eighth Circle of Hell.)

The Report of our Secret Commission will be read to-day with a shuddering horror that will thrill throughout the world. After this awful picture of the crimes at present committed as it were under the very aegis of the law has been fully unfolded before the eyes of the public, we need not doubt that the House of Commons will find time to raise the age during which English girls are protected from inexpiable wrong.

The evidence which we shall publish this week leaves no room for doubt–first, as to the reality of the crimes against which the Amendment Bill is directed, and, secondly, as to the efficacy of the protection extended by raising the age of consent. When the report is published, the case for the bill will be complete, and we do not believe that members on the eve of a general election will refuse to consider the bill protecting the daughters of the poor, which even the House of Lords has in three consecutive years declared to be imperatively necessary.

This, however, is but one, and that one of the smallest, of the considerations which justify the publication of the Report. The good it will do is manifest. These revelations, which we begin to publish to-day, cannot fail to touch the heart and rouse the conscience of the English people. Terrible as is the exposure, the very horror of it is an inspiration. It speaks not of leaden despair, but with a joyful promise of better things to come.

Wir heissen euch hoffen! "We bid you be of hope!" Carlyle's last message to his country, the rhythmic with which Goethe closes his modern psalm–that is what we have to repeat today, for assuredly these horrors, like others against which the conscience of mankind has revolted, are not eternal. "Am I my sister's keeper?" that paraphrase of the excuse of Cain, will not dull the fierce smart of pain which will be felt by every decent man who learns the kind of atrocities which are being perpetrated in cool blood in the very shadow of our churches and within a stone's throw of our courts.

It is a veritable slave trade that is going on around us; but as it takes place in the heart of London, it is a scandal–an outrage on public morality–even to allude to it. We have kept silence far too long. There are a few devoted workers who have been labouring for years endeavouring to save those who might well address Gordon's homely reproach to the majority of us : "While you are eating and drinking and resting on good beds, we, and those with me, are watching by night and by day"–working against this great wrong–happy, indeed, if they escaped obloquy and abuse for endeavouring to remind us of our duty. No longer will good men be able with easy conscience to join in that indignant "Hush!" by which the evil-doers have hitherto silenced every attempt to make articulate the smothered wail that rises unceasing from the woeful under-world. There is now an end to that conspiracy of silence by which, after every inquiry, "the door was each time quickly closed upon the question, as the stone lid used to be shut down, in the Campo Santo of Naples, upon the mass of human corpses that lay festering beneath." That "stone lid " is raised now, never again, we may hope, to be closed until something has been done. Under the ruthless compulsion of publicity even those but indifferent honest will do more good than many of the most virtuous when the evil could be hidden out of sight.

That much may be done, we have good ground for hoping, if only because so little has hitherto been attempted. A dull despair has unnerved the hearts of those who face this monstrous evil, and good men have sorrowfully turned to other fields where their exertions might expect a better return. But the magnitude of this misery ought to lead to the redoubling, not to the benumbing of our exertions. No one can say how much Suffering and wrong is irremediable until the whole of the moral and religious forces of the country are brought to bear upon it. Yet, in dealing with this subject, the forces upon which we rely in dealing with other evils are almost all paralysed. The Home, the School, the Church, the Press are silent. The law is actually accessory to crime. Parents culpably neglect even to warn their children of the existence of dangers of which many learn the first time when they have become their prey. The Press, which reports verbatim all the scabrous details of the police courts, recoils in pious horror from the duty of shedding a flood of light upon these dark places, which indeed are full of the habitations of cruelty. But the failure of the Churches is, perhaps, the most conspicuous and the most complete. Christ's mission was to restore man to a semblance of the divine. The Child-Prostitute of our day is the image into which, with the tacit acquiescence of those who call themselves by His name, men have moulded the form once fashioned in the likeness of God.

If Chivalry is extinct and Christianity is effete, there is still another, great enthusiasm to which we may with confidence appeal. The future belongs to the combined forces of Democracy and Socialism, which when united are irresistible. Divided on many points they will combine in protesting against the continued immolation of the daughters of the people as a sacrifice to the vices of the rich. Of the two, it is Socialism which will find the most powerful stimulus in this revelation of the extent to which under our present social system the wealthy are able to exercise all the worst abuses of power which disgraced the feudalism of the Middle Ages. Wealth is power, Poverty is weakness. The abuse of power leads directly to its destruction, and in all the annals of crime can there be found a more shameful abuse of the power of wealth than that by which in this nineteenth century of Christian civilization princes and dukes, and ministers and judges, and the rich of all classes, are purchasing for damnation, temporal if not eternal, the as yet uncorrupted daughters of the poor? It will be said they assent to their corruption. So did the female serfs from whom the seigneur exacted the jus primæ noctis. And do our wealthy think that the assent wrung by wealth from poverty to its own undoing will avert the vengeance and the doom?

If people can only be got to think seriously about this matter progress will be made in the right direction. Evils once as universal and apparently inevitable as prostitution have disappeared. Vices almost universal are now regarded with shuddering horror by the least moral of men. Slavery has gone. A slave trader is treated as hostis humani generis. Piracy has disappeared. Intestine war is now almost unknown. Torture has been abolished. May we not hope, therefore, that if we try to do our duty to our sisters and to ourselves, we may greatly reduce, even although we never entirely extirpate, the plague of prostitution? For let us remember that–

     Every hope which rises and grows broad

     In the world's heart, by ordered impulse streams

     From the great heart of God.

And if that ideal seems too blinding bright for human eyes, we can at least do much to save the innocent victims who unwillingly are swept into the maelstrom of vice. And who is there among us bearing the name of man who will dare to sit down any longer with folded hands in the presence of so great a wrong?

The Infernal Narrative (Reprise) and a warning to my own readers.

Some two years ago, I published by first post on this blog. It concerned one of the greatest scandals of Victorian-era Britain and its sensational exposure by the great pioneering journalist WT Stead. This was the so-called Defloration Mania

This was my post:

In 1885, as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Stead wrote a series of sensational articles entitled, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon'. These exposed the widespread trade in very young, virgin girls who were procured for rape and prostitution. Stead's, ‘Infernal Narrative,’ as he called it, revealed to a respectable and prudish Victorian readership a seedy underworld of brothels, procuresses and padded chambers where upper-class gentlemen could revel, ‘in the cries of an immature child'.

Under such sensational headers as, ‘Virgins, Willing and Unwilling,’ ‘The London Slave Market,’ and, ‘Strapping Girls Down,’ the articles threw society into a state of near panic and achieved as a consequence, the implementation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, whereby the age of consent for girls was raised from thirteen to sixteen years.

To demonstrate how easy it was to procure a young girl for prostitution, Stead arranged for the purchase of Eliza Armstrong, the thirteen year-old daughter of a chimney sweep for £5. As a result of what were subsequently considered to be illegal investigative methods, he was convicted of the, ‘unlawful kidnapping of a minor’, and sentenced to three months in prison. Thereafter, every November 10^th, (the anniversary of his conviction), Stead would dress in his prison uniform as a reminder of his, ‘triumph.’ 

My debut novel, The Eighth Circle of Hell, published October 2012 by Thames River Press explores the so-called Victorian Defloration Mania through the experiences of a young, orphan-girl who falls into the hands of a group of powerful, predatory men. Decades after she flees from the horrors of her time with them, advancing senile dementia forces her to once again relive her years of hell.

WT Stead was unbowed on his release from prison and remained convinced of his probity in attempting to break what he considered to be the, ‘conspiracy of silence,’ surrounding the subject. Today, over 125 years after the articles were published, the latest research by the NSPCC suggests that some one in nine children have been contact-abused sexually at some point in their lives. The Maiden Tribute is still being paid today.

End of original post.

Since that first first post there have been numerous arrests and convictions of celebrities and notables for child sex offences. Over the next few days, I intend to publish Stead's original articles in full, making no apology for the season. Please find below, Stead's warning to readers of the Pall Mall Gazette. The articles were later to spark the Northumberland Street riots.

Notice To Our Readers: A Frank Warning

(Published in the Pall Mall Gazette. July 4^th, 1885)

The Criminal law Amendment Bill, it is said, will be abandoned owing to the late period of the session and the difficulty of finding time to carry it through the Commons. That measure deals with a subject the importance of which has been admitted by both parties, and is based upon the urgent recommendation of a House of Lords Committee of which the Marquis of Salisbury was a prominent member.

It has thrice been passed through the House of Lords, and now for the third time it is threatened with extinction in the House of Commons. The public, it is said, is not interested in the subject, and the bill, therefore, may safety be abandoned. That we are told is the calculation in high quarters. But if Ministers think of allowing the bill to drop because the public is not keenly alive to its importance, it is necessary to open the eyes of the public, in order that a measure the urgency of which has been repeatedly admitted may pass into law this session. We have, therefore, determined, with a full sense of the responsibility attaching to such a decision, to publish the report of a Special and Secret Commission of Inquiry which we appointed to examine into the whole subject. It is a long, detailed report, dealing with those phases of sexual criminality which the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was framed to repress. Nothing but the most imperious sense of public duty would justify its publication. But as we are assured on every hand, on the best authority, that without its publication the bill will be abandoned for the third time, we dare not face the responsibility of its suppression. We shall, therefore, begin its publication on Monday, and continue to publish de die in diem until the whole infernal narrative is complete. But although we are thus compelled, in the public interest, to publish the case for the bill, or rather for those portions of it which are universally admitted to be necessary, we have no desire to inflict upon unwilling eyes the ghastly story of the criminal developments of modern vice. Therefore we say quite frankly to-day that all those who are squeamish, and all those who are prudish, and all those who prefer to live in a fool's paradise of imaginary innocence and purity, selfishly oblivious to the horrible realities which torment those whose lives are passed in the London Inferno, will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the three following days. The story of an actual pilgrimage into a real hell is not pleasant reading, and is not meant to be. It is, however, an authentic record of unimpeachable facts, "abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived."

But it is true, and its publication is necessary.

King Arthur: Garters, Vaults and Watery Tarts

This is a re-blog of a guest piece I first wrote for Susie Douglas' excellent blog at www.bordersancestry.co.uk Do take opportunity to have a look, especially if you are of Scottish border blood.

When I was a very young boy growing up on South Tyneside in the 1960s, I have a distinct recollection of being able to look out of my bedroom window, over the lights of Gateshead and the Team Valley to the rising hills in the west. I can also recall my father pointing out of my window many, many times and telling me that ‘over that hill’ lay Camelot. Back then of course, it was firmly accepted that if King Arthur had existed at all, he would most certainly have been a Welsh king; associated with the South West of the country, to Cornwall perhaps or to Hampshire or Gwent.

It was over forty years later, when my father was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and I was grasping for something to stimulate conversation with him that I happened to mention it back to him. He grinned and said, ‘aye,’ and it would seem now that he might well have been right.

There is a legend, which has persisted for centuries, centred on that part of Hadrian’s Wall country called Sewingshields. Here, where the Great Whin Sill drops away steeply into spectacular, north-facing cliffs is an area known as the Fogy Moss.

The legend runs something like this:
Good King Arthur and his queen Lady Guinevere together with several of the Knights of the Round Table lie in an enchanted sleep in a vast underground vault somewhere near to the site of Sewingshields Castle. They are destined to slumber there until, ‘The End of Days,’ which is a time when there will be a great need for them and the British nation will call upon them to rise again. Then will they be awoken. They sleep with a knight’s garter, a sword and a bugle-horn. To break the enchantment, one need only to draw the sword, cut the garter and sound a note on the bugle.

It is said that one day, many years ago, a shepherd sat knitting as he tended his flock on the common land close by Sewingshields. By chance, his ball of wool rolled away from him and fell down into a deep cleft in the rocks. Clambering down in order to search for it, he discovered a hidden cavern. The floor was thick with toads and newts and suchlike creatures and there were bats flickering around in the air, so he made sure he was quick to retrieve his wool and be gone. But then, just as he was about to climb back out, he noticed the light of a bright blue, magical fire flickering far away in the depths of the cave. Summoning all his courage, he followed it and eventually came across a great, cavernous vault where King Arthur and Lady Guinevere, together with their knights and hounds lay, just as the prophesy had said, in a deep, enchanted sleep. Sure enough; with them were the sword, the garter, and the bugle-horn.

Remembering the legend, the shepherd drew the sword and used it to cut the garter. As he did so, Arthur, Guinevere and the knights all began to stir and awaken and the poor, simple shepherd took fright. He thrust the sword back into its scabbard and fled the vault without blowing the horn which would have woken them all fully. Guinevere and the knights immediately fell back into their slumbers and only Arthur remained awake.

Guessing what had happened King Arthur bellowed these words after the shepherd:

‘Oh, woe betide that evil day,
On which this witless wight was born.
Who drew the sword, the garter cut,
But never blew the bugle-horn.’

Recovering his wits, the shepherd searched again for the vault but alas, it was in vain; the entrance was nowhere to be found.

There was indeed a real Sewingshields Castle. It was built on an island rising out of the boggy lands of the Fogy Moss and owned by one Sir Robert Ogle in the early 15th Century. However it was probably no more than a single tower, defended by a ditch to the west and certainly not the ‘many-towered Camelot’ of Romantic legend. In the 1541 View of the Castles, Towers, Barmekyns, and Fortresses of the Frontier of the East and Middle Marches, Sewingshields (Sewyngeshealles) Castle was noted as ‘an old towre of thinherytaunce of John Heron of Chypchase esquier in great decaye in the rooffe & flores & lyeth waste & unplenyshed.’ By 1847, it had been reduced by decay and pilferage of the stone to a ruin of 1.5 metres or so in height and by the end of the 19th Century all traces of it had gone barring the by-then rather ploughed-out ditch, stagnant fishponds and a smattering of rubble.

‘No towers are seen,
On the wild heath, but those that Fancy builds.
And save a fosse that tracks the moor with green,
Is naught remains to tell of what may there have been.’

Harold the Dauntless, Sir Walter Scott
-on the Castle of the Seven Shields (Sewingshields).

Another example of local Arthurian folklore tells how Cummin (Comyn, Cumin), a great chieftain of the ‘Old North’ came to Sewingshields Castle in order to visit King Arthur. When he departed to go back to his own country, he took with him a gold cup which Arthur, as a token of friendship, had given to him. However, a number of Arthur’s sons (or retainers depending on which version of the tale you read) coveted the cup for themselves. They duly followed Cummin, caught up with his entourage and put him to death at a place called Haughton Common. King Arthur, on hearing of the crime and the grave affront to his hospitality, caused a cross to be erected at the place as a penance and a memorial. That memorial is called Cumming's Cross to this day.

Some way to the east of the site of Sewingshields Castle is the Broomlee Lough. This is one of a number of small lakes which populate the area and one very much steeped in legend and folklore.



By local tradition, this is the very lake where Arthur received the sword Excalibur from the ‘Lady of the Lake,’ (or, as the Monty Python team would have it, the ‘Watery Tart’), and where it was hurled back over the waters by the knight Sir Bedivere of the Sinews. Certainly anyone who has ever down looked over Broomlee Lough from the high ridge of the Whin Sill won’t help but to feel the magic of the place.

There is, again by local tradition, a vast treasure hidden beneath the waters of the Broomlee Lough. The story goes that long ago, the then lord of Sewingshields Castle was compelled to flee the country for fear of his life. Being unable to carry away with him his great hoard of gold, he resolved to sink it into the deepest part of the lough. Once he had done so, he wove an enchantment over the treasure that it should never be recovered except by the use of ‘Twa twin yauds, twa twin oxen, twa twin lads, and a chain forged by a smith of kind’. (In other words, two twin horses, two twin oxen, two twin lads and a chain forged by a seventh-generation blacksmith – seven souls in total). Finding the location of the treasure is supposedly quite easy for it is said that the surface of the lough where the gold was sunk is disturbed by neither wind nor gale. The tricky part lies in finding the yauds, oxen, lads, and chain necessary to satisfy the enchantment.

North of Sewingshields lie two great outcrops of sandstone. These are called the King’s and the Queen’s crags, the king here being Arthur and the queen Guinevere. The origin of the names is this:

King Arthur, being seated on one of the rocks was talking with his queen who herself was engaged in dressing her, 'back hair’. Something the queen happened to say offended Arthur. He seized a rock which lay near him, and heaved it at her – a distance of about a quarter of a mile. The queen, with great skill and no little strength herself caught it upon her comb and deflected the blow. The rock fell between them where it lies to this very day. As proof of the tale, one may see the marks of the comb still upon it. The stone probably weighs around twenty tons.

Finally, near the farm-house of Sewingshields, several whinstone columns rise up rather curiously in front of the high cliffs. One of these in particular is called by some, King Arthur’s, (and by others King Ethel's) Chair. It was apparently ‘a single, many-sided shaft, about ten feet high, and had a natural seat on its top, like a chair with a back.’ However it, ‘was most wantonly overturned a few years since by a mischievous lad, well known in the neighbourhood, but unworthy of punishment by the mention of his name. Vulgar malignity loves to torment the orderly and ingenuous by destroying works, which time has sanctified and rendered objects of their veneration.’ (Hodgson’s Northd Part III Vol II.)

Although I have focussed here on the legend and lore associated with the country around Sewingshields Castle, (since this is where I set my novel Red Dragon-White Dragon,) rather similar folklore occurs widely across Northumberland, Cumbria and the Borders Region and indeed throughout the north. In particular the legends associated with the Eildon Hills near Melrose are very much akin to those of the hidden vault at Sewingshields. In fact such is the power and romance of Arthurian legend that association has been claimed by a very large number of places right throughout Britain.

Increasingly however, scholarly opinion seems to be that Arthur was a real, historical figure of the early medieval period and that he held power across several fortified sites in the North of England and the Borders. (A court known specifically as ‘Camelot’ was not actually mentioned until the late 12th Century when it appeared in the Chrétien de Troyes' poem Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart.)

As to the veracity of Arthurian Legend itself, no less a person than Sir Winston Churchill once said: “It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides.”

As to the question of whether or not King Arthur once commanded the moorlands of Sewingshields, I know of one person at least, now sadly passed away, who would have said, ‘aye,’ to that.

The 2013 Titles Launch, Thames River Press.

Monday, October 28th saw the official launch of many of the titles published in 2013 by Thames River Press.

It was a truly memorable evening, not least for Storm St Jude, which swept across southern and eastern England that morning and unfortunately kept several of the authors from attending. St Jude - the patron saint of desperate causes - thankfully kept well away from the Masons' Arms in Mayfair however, and the event was a huge success.

A writer's life can often be a virtual and lonely one and it was fabulous to meet and chat with one's fellow stable of authors and indeed the staff of Thames River Press itself.

Thanks also to Mr Darin Jewell, the literary agent, who organised and hosted the evening.

Here is my slide show of the evening:

This Means You!

As regular readers of my novels and my blogs will know, I have a deep interest in mental health, and especially in the attitudes and stigmas which surround it.

Earlier this month was World Mental Health Day and I was delighted to volunteer to help out with my local county council's display at the city library where I live. We had four people to man the stand; three professionals and me, prominent signage and a table brimming with questionnaires and leaflets. And over the course of the day, we had pretty much no interest at all from the general public!

By contrast, around the same time, the UK's two biggest supermarkets; Tesco and Asda, were forced to remove Halloween costumes from their stores depicting 'mental patients'. One of the biggest newspapers, The Sun had a drooling front page headline (incorrectly) claiming that 1,200 persons in the UK had been killed by 'mental patients.'



In this 21st Century, it seems that many of us have precisely the same fears, stigmas and prejudices as our Victorian forbears did and that these are fed, naively or cynically, by our media and peers. Yet ironically, some 1-in-4 of us will experience mental health issues which will require medical intervention, no matter how 'mentally strong' we might consider ourselves to be. I have required such intervention personally and may well require it again in the future, as may you!

I have produced two novels to date, published by Thames River Press and featuring the Victorian husband and wife investigative partnership Atticus & Lucie Fox. Atticus I have shown to be highly logical and methodical and Lucie, insightful, aware and sensitive, (as might well befit a retired nurse). In my current work-in-progress, I am now describing Atticus' time as a medium-term 'inmate' of the West Riding of Yorkshire Pauper Lunatic Asylum in the 1870s and how he was nursed back to health by his nurse Lucie.

Many of you might know Atticus Fox by now:
Intelligent? Yes.
Determined? Absolutely.
Resilient? Certainly.

A murderous, swivel-eyed, drooling cleaver-wielding monster? Of course not. No more than you or I.

Humbled.

Voting for The Peoples' Book Prize closed on 31st August, and thank you, thank you, to all those who were kind enough to vote, and to try to vote for The Eighth Circle of Hell.Several people left comments in addition to their vote and I was truly humbled when I read them. I'm not the most confident of writers and it can take me a day or two even to pluck up the courage to read a review. Comments like these, and like a good review, are a real boost for me especially.

These were the comments reproduced in full:

Reader Comments

A fantasticly moving portrayal of terrible acts. This is a book which has never left my thoughts since reading it almost a year ago.

The title of Gary's book, The Eighth Circle of Hell, definitely describes what this story entails. A very difficult subject to read but the author portrays how and why this type of abuse happens. Heartbreaking non-stop read.

Go for it!

Best of luck.

it is a very good read

All the best, Gary!

This is very powerful writing. Although the subject matter isn't comfortable to read, Gary draws you in so that you are attracted at the same time as being repulsed. I love the split time frame which racks up the tension - what will happen when they reach Elizabeth's former home.

A painful subject matter too often glamorised, Gary Dolman’s novel strips this away to reveal the truth in all its darkness. Intelligent, sensitive writing, Dolman draws his characters beautifully - a deeply moving, often disturbing story expertly told!

Amazing book. Dark, but incredibly well researched

This book was heart wrenching and compelling! It was an emotional and captivating story to which I found myself caught in the tidal waves! I loved this book it is a well written story about a dark and disturbing time!

Well done ! Great news :)

A thoroughly riveting read.

This was a fantastic, memorable read, very dark, but wonderfully written. Absolutely the best book I have read this year.

Compelling read

A beautifully written book with a story woven in historical fact. Atticus Fox is the detective who tries to solve the mystery of Elizabeth Wilson, a woman who was horribly sexually abused as a young girl in Victorian England. The characters are engaging and the story is heart-rending with a satisfying conclusion. Gary Dolman has dealt with this harrowing subject in a sensitive but compelling manner.

Brilliant and dark. A deserving winner.

loved it!

A difficult topic, written well in a sensitive manner. Applause to Gary Dolman! - Annie Acorn

A Special Request!

My debut novel, The Eighth Circle of Hell is up for the People’s Book Prize at present.

As you may well have read in previous posts, this is a special novel for me personally as it got me literally from one day to the next during a very difficult time in my life. But more importantly, it also tells the story of some of the forgotten victims of the dark side of the Victorian era.

It wasn't written for profit, or even for publication when I began, but just for the story.

I would be really, really grateful if you would lend your support and vote for the book at:

http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/book.php?id=919

Many, many thanks!