Glasgow – Sullatober Dalton

July 30, 2022

304 words

Tagged Billy Connolly, Children, dalton, Glasgow, Naples

What’s new in Napoli

It seems the politicians of Naples want to make the same mistake they made in Glasgow. The Neapolitans want to forbid the hanging of washing on lines that stretch across the street, not to please […]

Books / Fergus Findlay: Drover / Sullatober Dalton / Uncategorized

October 16, 2020

296 words

Tagged Charles II, Glasgow, Highlanders, Scottish History, Stuart times

The reflection of Bubbles in the Cauldron

In researching the Stuarts it was interesting to find that the area in which the 1820 novel Bubbles in the Cauldron was set saw an earlier uprising in 1679 when the Presbyterian Covenanters defeated the […]

Books / Character Development / Short Story / Sullatober Dalton / Uncategorized

August 17, 2020

169 words

Tagged 1820, Clyde, dalton, Glasgow, Last armed uprising

1820

It’s two hundred years since the last armed insurrection on mainland Britain, the setting for Bubbles in the Cauldron, which is just released by Amazon under the name of Graham Dalton. The uprising was the […]

Books / Character Development / Fergus Findlay: Drover / Sullatober Dalton

July 12, 2020

371 words
4

Tagged dalton, Glasgow, Graham family, Jacobites, Macdonald

Jacobite Risings – Lenman

Story lines from the Jacobites.

Books / Character Development / Fergus Findlay: Drover / Sullatober Dalton / Uncategorized

June 28, 2020

415 words
2

Tagged 1840, Bonnie Prince Charlie, dalton, Finding story lines, Glasgow

The last Jacobite

Why I won’t write Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Glasgow wife, Clementina Walkinshaw’s story

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It is at the point where Clementina Walkinshaw from Glasgow joins Prince Charles Edward Stuart in France that I lose interest in writing the story. Charles beat Clementina, using her as a “Submissive whipping post”. I could write about wife beating and family abuse as a journalist, a spectators report telling how disgusted it made me feel, but to write being beaten in character as Clementina would depress me. I could not know, nor do I want to explore, what would motivate me to hit a woman in anything but an extremity self defence, nor do I wish to explore how it feels as a woman to be beaten by someone you love. When I was a boy at junior school, we were playing Tag and I caught a girl who turned and gave me such a look that, from the shock of it, I have needed to be considerably provoked to become even aggressive with a female for well nigh eighty years. Back to Clementina, she became pregnant and one can only imaging in what circumstances that took place. The child was a girl and, in character, despite living as man and wife with Clementina for eight years, Charlie refused to make it legitimate. Nevertheless, the daughter, Charlotte, adored her father and left her son and two daughters in the care of their grandmother, Clementina, in order to nurse the disgusting dissolute alcoholic, who had contributed nothing but the slaughter of Culloden to humanity, through his last years before dying herself two years later. From what I have discovered of her, the children would have enjoyed a full measure of love from their grandmother.
Clementina’s grandson, after life as a Russian general and visiting India and America, died following a coach accident in Stirling and his remains lie in Dunkeld Cathedral. Having found his story, I am using it to give a backstory in the novel, Bubbles in the Cauldron, set in the another uprising, that of 1820, I am busy with.
One of my reasons for avoiding writing about abuse in character is the memory of how we reacted to the violence in the old gangster movies. The goodie always won but I’m sure there were some sadists who enjoyed and were even motivated to imitate the tortures and violence the ‘baddies’ perpetrated. The way in which paedophiles search for pornography inclines me to think it motivates such behavior and I have no wish to encourage abusive behavior.

Shadows in the heather

Books / Character Development / Sullatober Dalton / Uncategorized

June 22, 2020

291 words
3

Tagged Bonnie Prince Charlie, dalton, Glasgow, Jacobites, Scottish History

Opening to Clementina and the Prince

The early chapter of Clementina and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

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It’s al very well to have a Bonnie Prince Charlie story about a Glasgow wife and a bairn buried in Dunkeld but where to start. I like to start in the action, not dilly dally with what a person’s granny had for breakfast but I don’t like to mislead a reader either. The Walkinshaw story starts with the father of the bride joining the Old Pretender’s army and thereby creating a bond between James and the father but that would be a kind of Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe story set in the 1715 rebellion with it’s back story to the union of 1707 and maybe even the Darien project. Not an honest introduction to a family saga where the main characters are Miss Walkinshaw, her daughter and the domestic squabbles between the bonnie prince and his common law wife.(It’s actually reported they were actually married but Charlie thought it a joke.)
So, where to start? Maybe Clementina Walkinshaw leaves her father in a stormy scene that brings out the religious differences. Walkinshaw was a Protestant, not Presbyterian but Episcopalian and Charlie was Catholic. Remember this is Glasgow and deeply split. Even after WW2, the Catholic and Government (Presbyterian) schools closed at different times to avoid fights. She can bring up that he was in the ’15 but no detail.
Having started there, the relationship between Walkinshaw and the royal James needs to come later, Maybe when Carolina meets Bonny Prince Charlie’s father, he tells her about it. That would make it tragic; a nice touch.
All right, how does Clementina, a merchant’s daughter, meet the prince? All we need is generality around which some detail can be fixed. Let’s see it through Clementina’s eyes.

Books / Character Development / Fergus Findlay: Drover / Short Story / Sullatober Dalton / Uncategorized

June 17, 2020

331 words
2

Tagged Bonnie Prince Charlie, Dunkeld, Finding story lines, Glasgow, Scottish History

A Royal Stuart story line from Glasgow

People ask where I find stories and the answer is they find me. I’ve talked already about my interest in the Stuarts and in order to justify something in Bubbles in the Cauldron, I turned […]

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People ask where I find stories and the answer is they find me. I’ve talked already about my interest in the Stuarts and in order to justify something in Bubbles in the Cauldron, I turned to them and found Bonnie Prince Charlie’s grandson was buried in Dunkeld. I did some idle browsing about him and found a story asking to be written. When Charlie was making his way through the area Bubbles is set in, he met and had an association with a girl called Clementina Walkinshaw, the youngest of ten girls. She followed him to the continent and they had a daughter, Charlotte. With her father-in-law’s help Clementina left Charlie after years of abuse and went into a convent in France. Charlie refused to give her any support and it was the same father-in-law, James, The Old Pretender, who supported her. Charlotte wrote to her father and he invited her to Rome, provided she left her mother behind. Charlotte refused to do that at first but when she eventually did, she was created Duchess of Albany. Charlotte decided to marry but, being of royal blood needed her father’s permission, which he refused. With no other option she became the lover of Ferdinand de Rohan, the Archbishop of Bordeaux and from that union came the lad buried in Dunkeld. In the end, Charlotte did leave her mother to go to care for her drunken sot of a father.
It is interesting to note that Clementina’s father has a story himself. Having been captured with the Old Pretender’s army, escaping from Stirling Castle to live in France until reprieved by the British government, he started a weaving company, Calton. (mentioned in a Burns song?) Being a Protestant, he refused to help his daughter after she converted to Catholicism, but was he the reason his great grandson was visiting Scotland when he died?
So many possible story lines and I have only mentioned the grandson in passing.

Books / Character Development / Fergus Findlay: Drover / Sullatober Dalton / Uncategorized

June 6, 2020

267 words
4

Tagged Glasgow, Insurrection, Scottish History, Smugglers, Spies

SPies and smugglers

Scotland in 1820.

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The attraction of writing about 1820 and the ‘Scottish Uprising’ is its ambivalence. First, it is claimed by certain parties to be a purely Scottish affair when, in reality, it is the follow on from Peterloo in Northern England. Secondly, it has been promoted as a general uprising of the working people of the country. There is little doubt the general population felt used by the factory owners but did they really want to overthrow the government? There is no indication they were republicans. The Scots had already taken their case for a living wage to the courts, would they have been willing to take up arms if the government had not organised Agents Provocateur and instigated the uprising?
On the Government side, why risk a real insurrection with their Agents Provocateur? They must have felt they could control the outcome. What guarantee did they have that the soldiers who would have to enforce law and order wouldn’t mutiny? They must have felt from the information they were getting from their spies, that the support for real armed rebellion was scanty and that the soldiers were angry at the ingratitude of the nation after they had fought Napoleon.
Smuggling was rife. Ships docking in the Clyde were half empty when the Revenue examined them, yet Glasgow was growing on its imports.
French privateers were raiding in the estuary under the noses of the Royal Navy. Were they pirates, or was their work organised by local merchants to avoid duty in both Britain and France?
This was 1820 and any of these is a story in its own right.

1820

Books / Character Development / Fergus Findlay: Drover / Sullatober Dalton / Uncategorized

June 3, 2020

302 words

Tagged Academic History, Bernard Cornwell, dalton, Glasgow, Korean War

Refugee status

Refugee status

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I don’t know how others find it but between researching history and writing a novel, I have to read fiction, otherwise I do journalism and write facts. One of my faourites is Bernard Cornwell because of the way he setas the scene and doesn’t climpon the descriptions. He manages to make his characters seeem ordinary people,and not treat them as academic robots. Which brings me to one of my pet hates – academic history. It irritates me when I see a war documentary and it deals with the strategy, mentioning things like – the estimated causualty rate was 30% but that was exceeded by 20% because of lack of intelligence. Those casualties are ordinary people; people who dislike spinach and have blisters from new boots. When I did some research on the Korean war what struck me in one memoir was the comment – and always the refugees. Imagine what it would be like to carry or wheel everything you had in the world, with your children footsore and hungry in a queue that stretched over the next hill and back over the one you have just crossed. A long column of hopelessness. Not going anywhere, just away. They, like the slaves of the tobacco and cotton plantations, are the forgotten army. We know them as a group but not really people. In a way that is why I wanted to write about ordinary people caught up in the uprising of 1820. By that time, Glasgow was growing into the major European tobacco port yet the ordinary people were little better than the slaves on the tobacco farms. There were rich families in Glasgow but the bulk were living in extreme poverty, a poverty with nothing to lose that breeds mindless violence.

The caption for the ‘Scarecrow’ in the picture was ‘Who cares a hoot?’

1820

Uncategorized

January 12, 2016

88 words
1

Tagged Aberdeen, Bloemfontein, Cambridge, dalton, Glasgow

The name’s the thing

Having been in South Africa, which, being more recent, has place names that tell something about the place, I’ve become interested in place names all over. Oxford and Cam,bridge, I can see as Ox – […]

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Having been in South Africa, which, being more recent, has place names that tell something about the place, I’ve become interested in place names all over. Oxford and Cam,bridge, I can see as Ox – ford and Cam – bridge and I can understand Aberdeen is the Aber or the mouth of the river Dee, Glasgow seems to be the green glen and Edinburgh is the town, or burgh at E(dwin’s) dun or castle but what is Kingston Bagpuize, or Autermuchty, for that ,matter.
Sullatober Dalton

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