A Crooked Rib (35 page)

This novel is a work of the imagination, but its plot and characters draw on historical as well as invented sources. While Fanny Thompson and her family are entirely fictional, the Great Storm did, indeed, shatter The Cobb at Lyme in November 1824, and Sir Richard and Lady Spencer and their family lived in Cobb House, Lyme Regis, from whence they emigrated to Albany, Western Australia. Dates for the voyage vary and since naval records before the later part of the nineteenth century are often arbitrary, I have taken 1835 as the date for the
Buffalo
's voyage. The Spencer's former cottage, Strawberry Hill, is now a national monument. Sir Richard was one of Nelson's captains and his youngest daughter, Eliza Lucy, known to her family as Lucy, married Grey at the age of sixteen, shortly after he had succeeded her late father as Resident in Albany. In places, I have drawn on Lucy's letters and her Australian journal; in others, I have invented her correspondence.

Grey's Aunt Julia Martin was a close friend of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and I found the quoted passage on the flap of an envelope containing one of her letters in the Sir George Grey Special Collections in the Auckland Libraries. Godfrey Thomas, Grey's half-brother, is described in contemporary accounts in Australia and New Zealand, and I have drawn also on his Australian journal. The letter from the Rev. Coles to Governor Grey is taken directly from his letter in the New Zealand National Archives. Godfrey's later abandonment of his mistress and daughter, and his return to England and subsequent marriage there, are factual.

The Selwyns, Roughs, Martins, General Pitt, Miss Cockcraft and other Auckland characters, including the redoubtable Mr Outhwaite who took his wife to a ball in a wheelbarrow, were all known figures in early New Zealand and feature in Una Platts's
The Lively Capital,
which I have used for source material and background. I have also drawn on Lady Martin's
Our Maoris
for her account of the incident with the Watsons at Tauranga and other material. Henry Williams and Octavius Hadfield, the St Hills, Mrs Godley and Mr Nicoll, Eyre, Petrie and Domett are all based on real people. The Gilfillan massacre was an actual event, as was the fire at Government House, but, for the purposes of the narrative, I have sited the fire after Grey's investiture, not before, as was really the case.

Among the Maori characters, Te Rauparaha, Te Rangihaeata, Te Mamaku, Wiremu Kingi, Heke, Hongi, Harata and Waka Nene are based on real people, but Makareta and her immediate family, and Te Toa, are fictional. There has long been speculation that Grey had a Maori mistress whom he took to South Africa, but no evidence has ever been found for this, though Lucy Grey mentions it in her letter to Wilberforce, who dismisses it as a figment of her imagination.

Willie Selwyn's voyage alone on the
Dido
to England at the age of six, the taking of Te Rauparaha, and other events are based in reality, although I have largely re-imagined them in this narrative. Mr Gladstone was, in reality, the godfather of one of the Selwyns' children and a family friend.

Events aboard the
Forte
, the subject of a great scandal in Victorian England, are drawn from an account, first brought to my attention by Edmund Bohan in his biography of George Grey,
To Be a Hero.
The widespread interest in this incident is reflected in newspapers and journals of that time when ‘criminal conversation', a euphemism for adultery, was a serious offence, and any woman who was divorced by her husband, no matter the degree of his own guilt or neglect, was automatically a pariah within society and regarded as the guilty party. After Grey's discovery of notes between his wife and the Admiral, Sir Henry Keppel was the subject of a vendetta by Grey, and though Keppel lived to be ninety-four and ultimately rose to become Father of the Navy, his mid-life naval career was seriously hindered by this. His letters from Cape Town and his journal entry to Lucy are authentic. Other letters relating to this affair, including those between Prince Albert and Bishop Wilberforce, are held in the Royal Archives at Windsor, as is the letter from the Maori chief Tutukaka to Queen Victoria.

Maud Colville is entirely fictional, though her opinions and views of women's enfranchisement, their rights and their station were prevalent among certain women of her class in contemporary England. Her observations on the perilous situation of women of large fortune married to husbands who misused their money, and on women's inability to control their own wealth, mirror the contemporary situation before the enactment of the Married Women's Property Act in 1870 and 1882.

The love affair between Fanny and Te Toa is entirely imagined, but the problems within the Greys' marriage have been well documented and appear to have arisen after the death of their only child as an infant. Te Toa's observations and concerns about the New Zealand Company and others seeking to obtain Maori land are based on contemporary disquiet about this from both Maori and Pakeha sources. Hadfield's life at the pa in Otaki and Waikanae is drawn directly from the letters of his contemporaries, and from his own journal and letters in the appendices to Barbara MacMorran's biography, in which he relates how he managed to win favour with the chief at Otaki when he first arrived there. It is Hadfield, too, who documents how Te Rauparaha wished to learn to read and write and occasionally attended services at Otaki because he was fond of an English breakfast.

Lucy Grey did enter the Servite order for a brief period. In reality, she and Grey later reunited after thirty-five years of separation, but it was a disaster and they separated again, and died within ten days of each other. The unhappy state of their marriage has been noted by contemporary observers.

Governor Grey was, and remains, a complex character, one of the main reasons for my wishing to portray him through both actual and fictionalised sources.

Judy Corbalis

May 2015

I am very pleased to be able to express my profound gratitude to the following: Her Majesty the Queen, for permission to use the letters between Prince Albert and Bishop Wilberforce, and the letter from the Maori chief to Queen Victoria, all held in the Royal Archives at Windsor; Archives New Zealand: Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga; National Library of New Zealand; Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand; Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries; The British Library; The National Maritime Museum; The Public Records Office, London; The Philpott Museum, Lyme Regis; Albany History Society, Western Australia.

I am enormously indebted to Edmund Bohan for his generosity in allowing me to draw freely on the material in his biography of Sir George Grey,
To Be A Hero
(Harper Collins New Zealand Ltd. 1998) and for his kindness and patience in giving me information and advice about incidents in the lives of the Greys. It was he who directed me to the Newcastle Papers, and to B.J. Dalton’s
Historical
Studies
for further information and source material for details of the Keppel Affair aboard HMS
Forte
.

I have also drawn on nineteenth-century sources that are not only relevant to my story but contemporary with it, including:

Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge the holders of material which is still in copyright, and to credit and acknowledge source material. Any inadvertent mistakes or omissions can be corrected in future editions.

In particular, I want to acknowledge the huge debt I owe to my publisher, Harriet Allan, whose constant sound advice has been invaluable and whose unwavering belief that I would, eventually, deliver this manuscript, gave me the impetus to keep going. I really appreciate her resilience, forbearance, patience and expertise.

I wish, too, to thank Paul Lynton for his valuable and unstinting assistance with New Zealand history and the geography of early Auckland; Ronda Armitage for her many readings of the text, her useful suggestions, and for accompanying me to Lyme Regis; Win and Bruce Lynch for all their help with information about Waikanae in Hadfield’s time; and special thanks to Penelope Hoare for her generosity and friendship.

Very grateful thanks for help and advice are due, too, to the following: Roger Cazalet, Graham Davies, Alison Derrett, Jillian Ewart, Vivien Green, the late Janet Hicks, Witi Ihimaera, Donald Kerr, Phillip King, the late Margaret Mahy, Neel Mukherjee, Rose Walker.

Enormous thanks to Jane Parkin and Kate Stone and Anna Bowbyes at Penguin Random House for all their careful work on the manuscript, and for being so patient and helpful.

Last but not least, I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of a Hawthornden Fellowship in the writing of this novel.

Judy Corbalis was born and grew up in New Zealand but now lives in London. A former Hawthornden Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Women Leaders at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and was the inaugural Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she currently holds the post of Academic Support Tutor.

She has adapted her own work for radio and has written and fronted television programmes for children. Her children’s books have been published by Deutsch, Hodder and Scholastic — children love them for their humour and the fact that no character behaves as expected. Her new children’s book,
Get That Ball
, illustrated by Korky Paul, will be published by Andersen Press in 2016. Her adult novels include
Tapu
, and
Mortmain
, shortlisted for the 2009 Encore Award.

She is married to the sculptor Phillip King, PPRA, and makes frequent visits to New Zealand.