I Was Supposed to Be Working on a Book. Then I Found the Cock Road Gang.

One of the problems with working at Mills & Burch is that I am ridiculously curious.

Give me a manuscript and I'll work on the manuscript.

Obviously.

But mention an old building, an unusual name or something that sounds vaguely historical and there's a reasonable chance I'm going to disappear down a research rabbit hole and come back several hours later shouting:

“YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT I'VE FOUND.”

And that's pretty much what happened while I was working on Emma L James BCAc's The Ghosts of the Blue Bowl.

It Started With a Book

I had been asked to work on The Ghosts of the Blue Bowl and, while going through everything, a thought popped into my head.

The Blue Bowl is a real place.

So…

Does it have any interesting history?

This was not technically something I needed to know.

Which has never stopped me before.

I started looking.

And yes.

There was history.

Quite a lot of it.

So naturally I started digging further.

Old records. Local history. Names. Places. Stories that had been passed down. And, as often happens with old places, a mixture of documented history and local folklore where separating absolute fact from a good old story becomes half the fun.

At this point the sensible part of my brain had presumably gone home for the evening.

Because I wasn't just working on Emma's book anymore.

I was investigating.

And Then the Cock Road Gang Appeared

During all this digging I came across the Cock Road Gang.

Now that got my attention.

They were associated with the Kingswood area and form part of its rather colourful local history and folklore.

Which was interesting enough by itself.

Except then names started appearing.

And some of those names looked rather familiar.

So I kept digging.

And that's when things got slightly ridiculous.

Hang On a Bloody Minute…

The further I followed the records and family connections, the more familiar things became.

Because it turned out that someone very close to Mills & Burch has a genuine family connection to the families associated with the Cock Road Gang.

At which point my perfectly sensible publishing research turned into:

WAIT. YOU'RE ACTUALLY RELATED TO THEM?!

Well.

That wasn't on the day's publishing schedule.

Apparently while working on a book I'd managed to wander far enough down the historical rabbit hole to uncover a rather spectacular piece of family history belonging to someone close to us.

I appreciate this information was not remotely necessary for publishing a book.

But come on.

WOOOOOW. How cool is that?

This Is One of My Favourite Parts of Publishing

People tend to think publishing is about manuscripts, covers, proofreading and putting books onto Amazon.

And yes, obviously, there's rather a lot of that.

But books open doors.

A sentence can make you investigate a building.

A building can lead to an old record.

That record gives you a name.

The name leads to a family.

And suddenly you're sitting there researching people who lived hundreds of years ago because you absolutely need to know what happened next.

That's exactly what happened here.

A publishing project became a local-history investigation.

The investigation became genealogy.

And the genealogy unexpectedly landed remarkably close to home.

But There Was Actually a Point to All This

Eventually I did remember that I was supposed to be working on Emma L James BCAc's book.

And here's the really good bit.

All that digging hadn't been wasted.

The deeper I researched the real history surrounding The Ghosts of the Blue Bowl and the area, the more material I discovered that could actually add something to Emma's story.

There were genuine historical details, local stories and bits of folklore that fitted beautifully with the world she'd already created.

So I started weaving some of them into the book.

Not changing Emma's story into mine.

Not turning her book into a history lesson.

But taking some of those fascinating pieces of real history and folklore and carefully integrating them into the fictional story she'd written.

It gave the book something extra.

Behind the fiction, there's now a little thread of real history.

And I absolutely love that.

Available now

The Ghosts of the Blue Bowl

Emma L James BCAc's warm, witty and gently supernatural story brings together a real Hanham pub, local memory and carefully researched history and folklore.

View the book

Because that's another side of what we can do at Mills & Burch.

Sometimes an author gives us a finished manuscript and our job is simply to prepare it for publication.

Sometimes they give us scraps of paper and a brilliant idea.

And sometimes they give us a story that makes me ask one completely unnecessary question…

…which leads to hours of historical research, local folklore, family trees, the Cock Road Gang and the slightly astonishing discovery that someone close to Mills & Burch has a family connection to the very history I was researching.

And somehow, at the end of all that, the book gets better too.

Emma L James BCAc's The Ghosts of the Blue Bowl, complete with some of the real history and folklore I discovered woven into her story, is now available on Amazon.

Which, to be fair, is becoming a full-time job in itself.