FIRESTARTER BY FRASER GRACE
Firestarter is the story of John Stallon of Great Shelford, condemned to death by bungled hanging on Cambridge Castle Mound in 1834 . Author Fraser Grace, award-winning playwright, lives in Shelford today. His book takes the reader on a bold journey back in time, where the farm workers in prosperous Cambridgeshire lived lives of drear deprivation. But as this brilliant book shows, things were about to become a whole lot harder, harsher and poorer engineered by a series of Parliamentary Acts designed to strip them of what limited agency they had and plunge the working poor into desperation.
Firestarter is dramatic. The sudden onset of havoc a massive conflagration in a little village was a shock to the community. The author brings his imagination to the scenes of devastation, we see the night sky light with flame and feel the danger to everyone there. This book is both a re-creation of historical events and a true-crime mystery. We learn about John Stallon and his family, explore what might have prompted this tall and silent father to , time and again, take on the direst of daring acts. Not that it was hard to do. Farmers and landowners were powerless to stop firestarters, it was easy enough The man who strikes the match found it easy to join the fire -fighters in the panicky pêle mêle of water pails and volunteer helpers.
Fraser Grace’s book explores the thoughts of John Stallon as he goes about his dangerous machinations. But he turns detective too. A knock on the door of a pleasant cottage in Shelford today,is opened by the 21st century owner, Fraser Grace at the ready to interrogate. He is original and super- diligent in this search for the real causes of the fires that inflamed society from the lowest labourer to local peers of the County. This is a new kind of social history and just as revelatory of this not-so-distant past as Mayhew’s accounts of the labouring poor, or Engels horrified reaction to the conditions of Northern factory workers at the very same time as these events in sleepy Cambridgeshire,,. Yet here in an obscure village in ann idyllic-looking countryside there have been few to bring us the drama of ordinary people’s real lives. E.P.Thompson did it for industrialized workers, Fraser Grace for the overlooked and savagely treated peasants of the countryside.
A hugely compelling read, this book spreads its net across the writers of the time, examines the life of the poet John Clare and his tragic fate (on a visit to Cambridge Seamus Heaney explained to me in a brief interview, his intention to spend the whole day at his grave) and the poet James Reynolds Withers, a gifted poet from Weston Colville whose verse includes ‘ The Song of the Incendiary’ ‘as close as it is possible to get to John Stallon’s mindset in that cold overcast December morning at the end of 1831 after he had set the fire at Rectory Farm’.
Firestarter’ is published by Galileo Publications
