Stephen Wade

The history of the British prison system only had systematic records from the middle of the nineteenth century. Before that, material on prisoners in local gaols and houses of correction was patchy and minimal. In more recent times, many prison records have been destroyed. In Tracing Your Prisoner Ancestors, crime historian Stephen Wade attempts to provide information and guidance to family and social history researchers in this difficult area of criminal records. His book covers the span of time from medieval to modern, and includes some Scottish and Irish sources. The sources explained range broadly from central calendars of prisoners, court records and gaol returns, through to memoirs and periodicals. The chapters also include case studies and short biographies of some individuals who experienced our prisons and left some records.

There has always been fascination with crime, deviance and punishment; from the days of the highwayman to the Luddites and in the foul deeds of Peter Sutcliffe. Add to that, the continuing allure of the unsolved case, which has long provided material for true crime and fiction writers. In Stephen Wade’s casebook, Murder in Mind he looks at his favourite investigations in his home county of Yorkshire, rich with villainous acts, painstaking investigations and outright injustices. Read about Leeds’ most notorious female killer Louie Calvert and why he believes her conviction and hanging could have been a travesty; famous hangmen, Chartist rebels, and the many cases open to fresh investigation such as those of Bill o’ Jacks, Mr Blum and Emily Pye. Murder in Mind brings together Stephen’s journeys into the criminal underworld, including his work as a writer in prisons and his research in the murder archives as he attempts to uncover and understand why such heinous acts are committed. The basis for this book was created in the `Yorkshire Ripper’ years, when the impact of that series of murders sparked the crime writer in him and his tutor, Stanley Ellis, worked on the notoriously misleading `Ripper Tapes.’ Since then Stephen has written over 70 non-fiction titles - many of them on the history of crime and the law - but this is something different, a mixture of memoir, reflection and the realisation that murder often happens down the street.

Bert Hannam was a dapper, charismatic figure in the Scotland Yard of the post-war years. As a young sergeant he made his name in London, and soon became a presence in the world of criminal investigation. When the most dramatic and sensational murders of the mid-fifties came along, he was in the thick of the action, being involved in a variety of controversial trials and enquiries. Hannam also went out as troubleshooter to the shires as well, being involved in the tragic and unsolved murder of Emily Pye, one of a host of horrific ‘corner shop murders’ of the time. Stephen Wade provides a biography and case book of one of the most compelling lives caught up in the criminal justice system at a time when war and its aftermath turned society inside-out.

Leeds at War 1939-1945 is a comprehensive account of the citys experience of the war, covering in expert detail life on the Home Front set against the background of the wider theatres of war. The narrative of that global conflict is given with a focus on the trials and ordeals that faced the people of Leeds as they cheered their men and women fighters off to war, were bombed and saw their children evacuated to rural areas. Rare insights into the life of war-torn Leeds are included, along with untold stories from the footnotes of that history, from the air-raid shelters to the internment issues. The book incorporates the unique human record of that struggle from memoirs and memories, so that the reader sees the war bottom up from the ordinary people, although the military experiences of Leeds' citizens are not ignored. More controversial topics are also touched upon, such as anti-Semitism, labour troubles and crime, to give a full and fascinating picture of a great city facing profound trials of endurance, courage, and that true Yorkshire grit that has been the hallmark of the citys rise to prominence in Britain.

Once there was a Roman settlement on what is now Filey Brig. In Holderness, a prosperous town called Ravenser saw kings and princes on its soil, and its progress threatened the good people of Grimsby. But the Romans and the Ravenser folk are long gone, as are their streets and buildings sunk beneath the hungry waves of what was once the German Ocean. _Lost to the Sea: The Yorkshire Coast & Holderness_ tells the story of the small towns and villages that were swallowed up by the North Sea. Old maps show an alarming number of such places that no longer exist. Over the centuries, since prehistoric times, people who settled along this stretch have faced the constant and unstoppable hunger of the waves, as the Yorkshire coastline has gradually been eaten away. County directories of a century ago lament the loss of communities once included in their listings; cliffs once seeming so strong have steadily crumbled into the water. In the midst of this, people have tried to live and prosper through work and play, always aware that their great enemy, the relentless sea, is facing them. As the East Coast has lost land, the mud flats around parts of Spurn, at the mouth of the Humber, have grown. Stephen Wade s book tells the history of that vast land of Holderness as well, which the poet Philip Larkin called the end of land .

_Lost to the Sea: Norfolk & Suffolk_ relates the stories of how the human communities along the coast of these counties maintained their struggle with the sea. From very early Neolithic times, when global changes created the Continental Shelf and raised the cliffs along Britain's eastern shorelines, through Roman and medieval times, the first villages and towns were gradually established, only to be faced with the problem of the sea's incursions onto agricultural land. In the 1950s, Rowland Parker's classic study of Dunwich, a key town of Suffolk engulfed, set the scene for a long-standing interest in how the sea's challenge has been met. There have been successes and failures, and Stephen Wade tells the story of the seaside holiday towns and fishing communities that have had to struggle for survival. In this book, the reader will find stories of the people involved in this titanic effort through the centuries. The narrative moves down the coast from Hunstanton to Southwold, tracing the losses and the gains, not only in measurements of land, but in the tough human experience of that environmental history.

Grimsby in the Great War is a detailed account of how the experience of war impacted on the seaside town of Grimsby from the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, to the long-awaited peace of 1918. Grimsby and Cleethorpes were among the most vulnerable and exposed British towns in August 1914 when the Great War broke out. Situated on the North Sea, and facing the German Baltic fleet, their vessels were to face the mines and the U-boat torpedoes as the war progressed. But this is merely one of the incredibly dramatic and testing developments in the wartime saga of 1914-18, which impacted on the the town of Grimsby. Written into the greater story are the achievements of the Grimsby Chums and the other regiments containing Grimsby men, and the amazing story of the Home Front experience, from the local shell factory staffed largely by women, to the War Hospital Supply Depot and the Women s Emergency Corps.Throughout this compelling book, Stephen Wade documents the town's remarkable stories of heroism, determination and resolution in the face of the immensity of the war and its seemingly endless tests and trials of Grimsby's mettle."

The enduring legacy of those who said ‘No’. January 2016 marks the centenary of the Military Service Act, which brought in conscription after the large-scale loss of manpower in the major campaigns of the Western Front. The Act was to create a sustained and dramatic confrontation between the military establishment and the various groups of pacifists and conscientious objectors. Across the land, those who would not fight found themselves hauled before tribunals, standing before panels appointed to decide their fate – often prison or internment. No More Soldiering looks at the lives and experiences of those men and women who would not fight Kaiser Bill’s army and suffered as a consequence, from Fenner Brockway, who faced solitary confinement in jail, to Ithel Davies, who found himself interned in Ireland. Being a ‘conchie’, it could be argued, was just as tough as facing the enemy in a trench.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by.Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse."Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy.Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.