There is some personal history involved in The Trial of Lotta Rae as well as a wider one. Lotta Rae hails from Spitalfields, bordering London’s East End and City streets. Those streets she walks with her father, I walked with my own in the early 1970s when we lived in the, still under construction, Barbican. It was my father’s own fascination with history, particularly that of ancient Rome, that attracted him to the Barbican, built on the Roman wall that had marked the original square mile of Londinium. It was said that the uplifting of the earth had disturbed the bones of the Plague victims buried beneath and you could feel in the air a haunting. I certainly could sense the ghosts of the past around me.
My walk to school would lead me past the Whitbread brewery on Chiswell Street. Founded in 1750, it had become the world’s largest brewery by the 1780s. In the early 1970s, the brewery still operating, I would watch the great white dray horses draw cartloads of barrels from the yard, through the stone archway. That original archway and much of the building remain today but Whitbread is long gone. But the working brewery I witnessed allowed me to set Lotta’s own working life there. It is also there, in 1906, she meets her nemesis.
I would also often pass the Old Bailey, enthralled as a child by its grandeur. The court we know today was opened to much fanfare in 1907 and it is in that year the book’s trial is set. During my research I was fascinated to learn that the building’s smooth Portland stone masks what lies beneath: the more sullied stone of the notorious Newgate jail, demolished to make way for the court, but much of its stone serving as the court’s skeleton.
Studying early 20th century rape cases I learned something of the attitudes and beliefs of the time. Doctors often testified that conception could not occur without consent. Consequently, pregnancy could not result from a rape. Also, if a woman had walked willingly with a man, many considered any resulting sexual contact therefore consensual. The jury comprised twelve men of property and good standing. And no woman was allowed in the public gallery, the subject matter deemed unsuitable for feminine ears.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Emmaline Pankhurst on Black Friday
Similarly, I studied Parliamentary debates and Bills on both Male and Female suffrage. Before the First World War, only landed, wealthy men were entitled to vote but not the common man. And certainly no women. Pankhurst’s Suffragettes were militant, causing uproar. November 18th, 1910 would become an infamous date. On that day the Suffragettes marched on Westminster but were driven back by mounted police. The struggle, the violence that followed led to outrage and blazing headlines, accusations of police brutality and calls for a public inquiry, becoming known as Black Friday. Suffragettes, often imprisoned, would engage in hunger strikes and I read first-hand accounts of the horrific force-feeding.
The period in which the book is set has always fascinated me. The turn of the 20th century. That precipice before the Great War was a time of such great hope and promise. Lloyd George had declared his ambition that soon ‘… poverty and the wretchedness of human degradation will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests.’ To this end, the Liberal Government had introduced radical welfare measures for both old and young. There were incredible scientific advances. And women were rising up and finding their voice. All that hope only to be vanquished by the darkness of a war which stole and damned a generation. I see that period like the lighted and glowing Titanic sailing with pride and confidence towards its iceberg. Yet the savagery of that war spawned a fairer world. Innocence having died on those battlefields of France, none was so willing to bow to King and country with the destruction that had brought. And so came social revolution. Now the vote was granted to the common man and to women of property, over the age of thirty. Women who had proven themselves able to do the work of absent men refused to once again be shackled.
And I found echoes our own age. The Spanish flu of 1918. So called not because it originated in Spain but because a neutral Spain had no need censor their press to keep morale high. Consequently, they were first to report the pandemic, so like the Covid we have lived with. That we live with still.
Siobhan MacGowan is the author of The Trial of Lotta Rae.
Aspects of History Issue 9 is out now.
