ALL GOOD BOOKS

A hectic start to the New Year in Tonto world. March already? WTF is that all about?

There’s been one or two ups and downs. Let’s start with the ups … Tonto has just signed a splendid new book for September: We Are Not Manslaughterers by Martin Knight.

Martin is a prolific writer with an interesting backlist here on amazon.

Here’s some info on the book:

Derby Day 1919 was a day of celebration in Epsom, Surrey, it being the first Derby Stakes to be run back in Epsom since the First World War broke out five years earlier. The euphoria of peace and relief rolled across a squally Epsom Downs. The return of the world’s most famous horse race to its rightful home was a sure sign that life generally was returning to normal. Close to a million people descended on the small rural town that afternoon. With the card finished and Grand Parade the 33-1 victor, the masses streamed home by train, bus, horse and cart and foot and the town’s pavements and pubs were left once again in peace to the locals.
 
Yet only fifteen days later twelve Epsom policemen found themselves defending their quiet, country police station against a 400-strong rioting mob in a vicious hour-long battle of Rorke’s Drift/Zulu proportions. At the end of it many were injured and the dependable Station Sergeant Thomas Green lay dead, his head cracked open from a vicious blow with a bar torn from the station’s own police cell.
 
However, the rioters were not drunken revellers from the racecourse or locals incensed by some injustice or other; they were soldiers, many who had seen gruelling action in France and Belgium and were loyal to the King. Canadian troops stationed at the nearby Woodcote Park Convalescence Camp were bent on releasing their comrades who had been arrested earlier in the evening and locked up in police cells following a minor disturbance in one of the town’s pubs.
 
The murder of a gallant policeman defending his station against the odds was a momentous event then, as it would be now, and never before or since has a policeman died in England at the hands of a mob on police property. Yet the media coverage was relatively subdued, public outrage contained and the path to justice tightly managed. No indictment for murder was ever made. Charges against five Canadians were reduced from manslaughter to riotous assembly and the defendants had been arrested, tried, sentenced, imprisoned, released and were on their way back to their homeland before the year was out.
 
We Are Not Manslaughterers traces the events that led to that final explosion of violence and frustration on June 17, 1919 and explores the reasons why the Government of the day were so keen not to allow the case to become a cause celebre. Future King Edward VIII was scheduled to tour the colonies, including Canada, to thank them for their extraordinary sacrifice for the mother country in World War One. To do this against a backdrop of Canadian soldiers being hung in prisons across Britain did not bear contemplation. Former Prime Minister Lord Rosebery, future Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the then incumbent Prime Minister David Lloyd-George are among the historical figures who were faced with the potential fall-out from the murder; the worst case scenario being the disintegration of the British Empire. Justice was not done for Sgt Green and even his murderer concurred with this.
Among a number of subsequent twists and turns, which include the two daughters of Sgt Green emigrating to Canada soon after, a confession to the murder ten years later and a backdrop of venereal disease this book also unearths a strand to the story which has never been publicly connected and explains even more why the authorities were so keen to wrap up and bury this case so hurriedly and completely as they did. Sgt Thomas Green, it emerges, was not the only fatality of the Epsom riot.
 
Martin Knight, author of Battersea Girl, Common People and George Best’s final autobiography has uncovered and illuminated a fascinating and entertaining slice of social history that is laced with intrigue and mystery as well as a formidable cast of late-Victorian characters.

Martin & Stu sign book deal in York

So, the celeby wedding book is off, Manslaughterers replaces it. A new one gets signed up for October on Tuesday, Shakespeare & Love moves forward to July, Faces was on, then off, then on now definitely off as is My Life on Mars – both due to ‘creative differences’. We’re also looking to get two books signed up by a non-fiction writer I have great admiration for – more news as it happens. So, we lost three titles in three days but gained two and looking to get two more. All good fun.

Robert Endeacott will soon be released from his writing prison if he manages to complete DisRepute: Revie’s England this weekend. He’s been struck down with a rarer form of man illness that I’ve never encountered yet and will be back in the land of the living very soon. His new book will be out in June.