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In Ludd's Name
It is the second decade of the Nineteenth Century in early Industrial Revolution Nottingham. The emerging hosiery industry is the only means of livelihood for hundreds of refugees from the surrounding agricultural villages who have fled to the town in search of a less hazardous way of life.
They are herded into hastily-built constructed slums, and grudgingly paid subsistence wages for a skilled product which is funding several private fortunes among the more wealthy entrepreneurs.
The terms if international trade, blighted by the Napoleonic Wars, render the hosiery product hard to sell in Europe, while at the same time forcing the domestic food prices ever upward. Starvation and disease are rife in the festering courtyards of the resentful workers, who are desperate for a champion to their cause.
Into the tinderbox someone throws a lighted fuse called Ned Ludd…
Other works in progress:
Canary Child (late 2013 - jointly written by A R Dance and myself)
The lives of two girls who work alongside each other in the Chilwell Shell Filling Factory in 1918 are brought tragically to an end by the biggest civilian explosion in British history. Fifty years later, the ghost of one of them sets a local schoolteacher on a mission to locate her orphaned son, in the course of which she will eventually find the love of her life.
A Worm in the Silk (2014)
The sequel to "In Ludd's Name", in which one of the survivors of the 1812 riots returns to Nottingham as a mature successful man, in time to rekindle a childhood romance against the backdrop of the burning of the Beeston Silk Mill and Nottingham Castle during the Reform Bill Riots of 1831.
Love and Conscience (2015)
The story of John and Lucy Hutchinson, dramatized from the Memoirs which she left behind of life in Civil War Nottingham, where John was the Governor of the Castle.
About David:
David was born in Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, in 1945, and spent his childhood years in nearby Beeston. After attending Church Street Infants School and Beeston Manor Junior, he went on to Nottingham High School, and then Nottingham University, where he graduated in Law in 1967.
After a varied career in law, as an academic, a solicitor in private practice, a public prosecutor and a stipendiary magistrate, David emigrated to Queensland, Australia, where he was appointed Solicitor for Prosecutions for that state. He is now Associate Professor of Law at Bond University, on Queensland's Gold Coast, and has finally found the time to combine his penchant for writing with his life-long love of history.
