Loss, love and the struggle to stay alive in 1912
Jon explains his decision to write an historical novel, A Spring Marrying. He discovered the extraordinary history of the sail trawlers working off the English coast before 1939 whilst making a film for C4. It was the men who crewed them that fascinated him the most. Down in Brixham, Devon, they had four crew – skipper, mate, deckhand, and a cookie who was often only 12 or so. Theirs was an unremitting routine. Danger and death were never far away: it was the most dangerous job in the land. Yet they earned a reputation as supreme, quietly proud seamen, religious, brilliantly able to navigate without charts and survive just about anything. Except, maybe, falling in love with the town’s most complicated young woman.
A Spring Marrying is the new novel from Jon Rosebank
Jimmy Blackbridge is a deckhand on a sail trawler, working out of Brixham, Devon 1912-1914. He is engaged to shop-girl Alice Rogers. But Alice turns out to be far more complex a character than Jimmy at first understands. Discovering the truth draws him into the underworld of this hard-working port.
Throughout this journey, Jimmy must earn a living in the nation’s most dangerous occupation. Working the two-masted ‘smacks’ is arduous but also beautiful, a world of unrelenting labour, supreme skill and unbreakable comradeship.
‘…an historical novel that brings the past alive in human terms and in striking depth of engaging detail.’ Angela Graham, author A City Burning.
Jon says:
I suppose an author might write a book like this because they are mad about boats. And it’s true that I discovered the extraordinary history of the sailing smacks when I made a film about Excelsior, a 1920s sail trawler working out of Lowestoft. I’d always found any excuse to get boats into the films I made.
The smacks down in Brixham were gorgeous, 70-foot gaff-rigged ketches (taller mainmast, with a shorter mizzen mast further back, and two booms on each mast). They had huge ochre sails and a trawl beam with a long net they dragged along the seabed for four hours or so at a time.
But it was the men who crewed them that fascinated me. They had four crew – skipper, mate, deckhand, and a cookie who was often only 12 or so. And they were extraordinary. Theirs was an unremitting routine. Danger and death were never far away: it was the most dangerous job in the land. Yet they earned a reputation as supreme, quietly proud seamen, religious, brilliantly able to navigate without charts and survive just about anything.
And yet their life has been almost completely forgotten. History is never kind to working people and the smacksmen spoke little and wrote less. A Spring Marrying is a serious attempt to re-imagine their lives and the world of their families ashore. The Edwardian poor (alright, it’s 1912-14…) rarely appear in literature and I wanted their story to be told. I wanted their voices to be heard – not only in the poetry of the foresail halyards and the topping lift, but even (insofar as it was possible) in their own Devon dialect.
Even for an historian, the temptation was to romanticise. I can only say that, the closer I grew to the community around Excelsior, and the more I read from the time and since, the more moving I found the smacksmen’s pride in their own mastery and defiance of the odds. There really does seem to have been a profound hope and a quiet humour beating at the heart of their struggle to stay alive and to make a poor living. They were very good at what they did and they knew it.
This, then, is an historian’s recreation of life among the working poor. But having said all that, people tell me that the book is a romance and a page-turning thriller, or just a good read. And that it takes on challenging issues about relationships in a striking way. I hope you will find your own way to enjoy it.
Angela Graham’s full review
Jon Rosebank’s novel, A Spring Marrying, is bursting with nerve and verve. Nerve because we are carried through the twists and turns of the protagonist’s relationship with two potential brides in a notably confident handling of subtleties of motivation. Verve because of the convincing and buoyant rendition of both the characters’ English dialect and the nautical and trade terminology of the pre-World War One community of Devon trawlermen which is the book’s setting. There is no collision or confusion for the reader among these three threads but rather a remarkably fluid interweaving. The world of these Devonian ‘smacksmen’ and their families is realised with particular vividness because we ‘hear’ them in their own speech, and because the nautical detail is delivered in service to the writerly business of grounding us in the scene – we know where we are in the very terms used by the world we are reading about. A historical novel that brings the past alive in human terms and in striking depth of engaging detail.