Why a Booktrail?
1900s: Eve Williams is about to discover just how the other half really live …
Netherwood (Netherwood 1)
What you need to know before your trail
Above stairs: Lord Netherwood keeps his considerable fortune ticking over with the profits from his three coal mines in the vicinity. It’s just as well the coal is of the highest quality as the upkeep of Netherwood Hall, his splendid estate on the outskirts of town, doesn’t come cheap. And that’s not to mention the cost of keeping his wife and daughters in the latest fashions– and keeping the heir, the charming but feckless Tobias, out of trouble.
Below stairs: Eve Williams, is the wife of one of Lord Netherwood’s most stalwart employees. When her ordered existence amid the terraced rows of the miners’ houses is brought crashing down by the twin arrivals of tragedy and charity, Eve must look to her own self-sufficiency, and talent, to provide for her three young children. And it’s then that ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ collide in truly dramatic fashion…
Travel Guide
Netherwood
Netherwood is fictional but is a mining town somewhere in Yorkshire. Yorkshire had a huge mining heritage and Selby in particular was a major centre of this. The National Mining Centre in Wakefield in Yorkshire is a must see to find out more about the heritage of this part of the world and how mining affected those upstairs and down.
New Mill Colliery is nearby and is where many of the men of the village work. The book looks at those at Netherwood Hall and those who live in the village itself. A village typical of Yorkshire villages at that time:
“The streets ran at right angles to each to her, forming threes dies of a square, the fourth side being complete by the privies, which were housed in a long, low-roofed building divided into separate stalls, one for each family. A narrow entry part way down Watson Street led into the yard, enabling residents and visitors to enter the house via the back.Nobody used the front doors. They could have been bricked up and not be missed.”
Don’t forget to read and make the Yorkshire recipes at the end of the novel and to pick up and use a few of the Yorkshire expressions sprinkled throughout the text.
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: Netherwood
Author/Guide: Jane Sanderson Destination: Yorkshire Departure Time: 1904
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