Six Degrees of Historical Separation

There’s a game that has been around for a few years that I absolutely love. It’s based on the idea of six degrees of separation; the theory that everyone in the world is a maximum of six steps away from each other so that a chain can be established to connect any two people. A while ago the BBC History magazine introduced a game called six degrees of historical separation – a challenge to see how broad a spectrum of historical characters you could connect in six steps. I’ve been playing it ever since and I challenge you to do the same!

Here’s one of my favourites, William Craven to Nellie Melba!

1.William First Earl of Craven 1608 – 1697. Soldier, cavalier, secret second husband of Elizabeth of Bohemia.

2.Elizabeth of Bohemia, 1596 – 1662, daughter of King James I, married Frederick the Elector Palatine, who was offered the throne of Bohemia in 1619.

3. Bedrich Smetana 1824 – 1884 A Czech composer whose music was inspired by Bohemian history and legends. His orchestral music includes the symphonic poem Richard III.

4. Richard III, King of England from 1483 – 1485, re-interred in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.

5. Thomas Cook 1808 – 1892, born in Melbourne Derbyshire, was also buried in Leicester. He founded the world’s first travel agency Thomas Cook and Sons in 1872 and offered “Grand Circular Tours of Europe” and trips to Egypt and the United States.

6. Dame Nellie Melba, 1861 – 1931 was an operatic soprano and one of the most famous singers of the Victorian era. She trained in Melbourne Australia and took the pseudonym "Melba" from the city. 

Okay, so maybe I have too much time on my hands! But if you like historical research and obscure facts, have a go at creating your own six degrees of historical separation!

Vanished Mansions

I love stately homes, visiting them, taking in all the art and artefacts, the details of who has lived there down the ages. I love ruins too. They can be poignant and romantic and you can let your imagination run wild about the history and the people who inhabited them. But there’s a third category of historic house that I enjoy; the ones that have disappeared. They are like ghosts, mysterious, lost. Two of the houses that inspired my current manuscript are “lost” houses.

The first, Hamstead Marshall in Berkshire, pictured above, was known as Hamstead Marshall Palace, a house of the size and grandeur to rival Blenheim. Hamstead was intended for a queen, Elizabeth of Bohemia, the sister of King Charles I, and it was reputedly modelled on the castle in Heidelberg where she had spent the early years of her married life. It was grand and fabulously luxurious. A contemporary described it as having not only bathrooms but rooms with the specific purpose of “reposing after bathing.” The servants’ quarters included a distillery, a spicery, and a confectionery.

Hamstead Marshall burned down in 1718 when workmen were making renovations and accidentally left a

brazier unattended on the roof. All that is left of the house now are some magnificent gateposts that stand in the parkland, marking out where the drive and gardens once were. The site of the former house and its wonderful parterre is now a field and plenty of floor tiles and window glass from the building can be found just lying around on the ground. On the day I visited it felt like a lonely and windswept place.

The other house I’ve drawn on for background research suffered the same fate, but much more recently. Coleshill House in Oxfordshire was built around the same time as Hamstead Marshall and inspired by fashionable European houses of the period. It

had a grand entrance hall and beautiful ornate plasterwork ceilings. Builders were finishing renovations to the house in 1952 when a fire broke out and despite the efforts of fire brigades from three counties, the house was so badly damaged that it had to be demolished. I draw on the newspaper reports of the fire in my new book as they vividly recreate the sheer monumental destruction of such a beautiful house. Today there is a garden planted on the site of the house that marks out its walls and windows in a design that keeps the memory of Coleshill alive. I hope that in my manuscript I too will be able to bring Hamstead Marshall and Coleshill House back to life and people their ballrooms and corridors once again with characters from a lost age.