Description
Coalbrookdale is a work of fiction based on the life Joseph Bangham, who lived in the Severn Gorge three hundred years ago. He was employed at the Coalbrookdale ironworks when Abraham Darby was perfecting the use of coal in the production of iron. These developments facilitated the mass production of iron and as the technology spread, industry thrived. This was a pivotal moment in the history of the modern world. This is a story of an ordinary family living at an extraordinary time and in the district known as the ‘cradle of the Industrial Revolution’. Their lives changed fundamentally as an agricultural evolved into an industrial way of life. The book traces the story of the Bangham family as they move from Banghams Wood where they have been coppicing and producing charcoal for decades, across the Gorge to Coalbrookdale when their lives changed fundamentally, regulated not by the seasons but by the demands of the furnace.
As with any family story there is joy as well as tragedy. The many and varied characters interact in ways which sometimes result in unintended consequences, played out against the backdrop of the often brutal 18th Century in England, when a child could be transported to America or even hanged for poaching a rabbit. As for Joseph, did he realise as he laboured at the furnace, he was involved in events that were to change the world? Would those changes be for the better? It seems that even today, we are unsure of the destination. Much has been written about this extraordinary district, but this book offers a different perspective through the lives of some of the ordinary working people who were there at the very beginning.
Paperback : 356 pages
Spellbrooktales –
Review by David Paterson
I should declare an interest here. I have just finished recording the audiobook version of Coalbrookdale. The project has given me great pleasure. I have never read a novel quite like it, out loud or to myself.
We begin in 1713. For generations the Bangham family have been producing charcoal to fuel the iron furnaces dotted around the Severn Gorge. Living in a squatter’s cottage built by grandfather Bangham with his bare hands, they are as rooted to the district as the wood which has come to bear their name. In their close-knit hamlet, never visited by doctor or midwife, the crises of birth and illness are shared with neighbouring families, along with the water pump and the communal hog, spectacularly slaughtered each year.
But the days are numbered for this way of life. Abraham Darby, the pioneering ironmaster, has developed a new way of smelting iron, using coal instead of charcoal. Joe Bangham, the forward-looking eldest son, is not sorry. Realising the market for their charcoal is about to shrink, and hoping to make an escape from a life of drudgery and toil on the land, he strides optimistically across the river to apply for a job at Mr Darby’s fledgling ironworks. As he approaches the kindly principled Quaker, he little suspects he is enlisting as one of the first industrial proletariats. He will receive scant reward from the company to which he dedicates his life.
Meanwhile other members of the family, as much by marriage as hard work, ascend the social ladder. Brother Will, a hot-headed adventurer, even makes it across the Atlantic to the New World. Mixed fortunes await the three sisters who go into service up at The Hall, whose villainous under-butler is the catalyst for much of the novel’s action.
This is “The Bangham Family Story” and (it is no disparagement to say) reads more like a history book than a novel. Adopting a reportage approach free of literary affectation in which concurrent storylines and diverse themes are effortlessly interwoven, Marilyn Freeman (herself a Bangham) chronicles thirty years to 1743 in one smooth sweep. This family is not a patriarchal organisation held together by authority and obligation so much as a network of love and kindness (and occasional jealousy) which, while it loosens over time, survives the early upheavals of the industrial revolution.
Although based on the author’s ancestors, it is a work of fiction, elegantly plotted with some good emotional rollercoastering and a grisly climax. But Freeman maintains an extraordinary level of realism by steadfastly keeping her finger on the pulse of family life. When Joe is put on night shifts, for example, she gives due weight to the resulting disruption to the family’s mealtimes. The imaginative recreation of the world of these people lost to history reads as if it were all fact meticulously researched.
A river runs through it. Repeatedly crossed and re-crossed at the Buildwas Bridge for weddings and funerals, bustling with an ever-increasing traffic of cargo vessels as the Darby works expand, sometimes glittering in the sun, occasionally a deadly torrent, the River Severn abides as the representative image of this fast-flowing poignant novel.