Richard Whitmore

Announcing details of Richard Whitmore’s

latest book

The photomontage on the book’s dust jacket depicts Reginald Hine (foreground) and his biographer at the ruins of Minsden Chapel, near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where the historian’s ashes are scattered. Above is the barn owl that haunted Hine in the final days of his life.

This is Richard’s tenth book, and one he regards as his most significant. It began when he experienced a vivid dream recalling a long-forgotten encounter in the 1950s. This led him into one of the most intriguing stories of his long career. The Ghosts of Reginald Hine is a factual biography set in the medieval Hertfordshire market town of Hitchin where in 1949 the community was devastated by the shocking death of one of its most prominent and popular citizens.

Reginald Hine, a lawyer and historian, had first put his town on the map in the 1920s when his two-volume History of Hitchin was acclaimed nationally as a model for future historians to follow. Later, Confessions of an Uncommon Attorney, about life in an Edwardian country solicitor’s office, sold world wide and became recommended reading for lawyers young and old.

Few were aware that this flamboyant figure had a dark and mystical side to his character; one haunted by periods of acute depression, nightmares and demonic images. This mental anguish was aggravated by the punishing work schedule Hine gave himself; writing late into the night in the struggle to complete his histories. Because his legal work was interrupting his researches and writing, the historian began to develop a pathological dislike for The Law - the profession ‘into which it has not pleased God to call me.’ He began to flout its rules - with tragic results - and his death under the wheels of a steam train left many questions unanswered.

After five years of research, during which he was given access to family archives and legal documents of the period, the author has produced an intriguing and long overdue biography that reveals his subject in a new and unexpected light. It is a book that is both poignant and entertaining.

Priced at £20.00, The Ghosts of Reginald Hine is published by Mattingley Press as a limited edition of 1,000 copies and is available from:

Eric T. Moore Books

24 Bridge Street

Hitchin

Hertfordshire SG5 2DF

England

Telephone: 01462-450497

E-mails: booksales@erictmoore.co.uk

Website: www.erictmoore.co.uk

If you wish your copy to be mailed to you please add £3.00 to cover the cost of postage and packaging in the UK; £5.00 for Europe and £8.00 for the rest of the world.

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Richard wrote his first book in 1974 'to keep his hand in' after the BBC had moved him from reporting duties to the newsreaders' desk. "In those days, newsreaders played no part in compiling the bulletins," he recalls. "they simply read what was put in front of them. I soon found that I missed writing very much, so authorship began more or less as a hobby." Of Uncommon Interest (Spurbooks 1975) featured a collection of the more sensational news stories that occurred in his home county during Victorian and Edwardian times. Following that, he was commissioned by London publishers B.T.Batsford (now part of Salamander Books Ltd) to produce two books featuring photographs from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries - Victorian and Edwardian Hertfordshire from Old Photographs (1976) and Victorian and Edwardian Crime and Punishment (1978). The latter, which contains a fascinating collection of police and prison photographs from all over the country, received enthusiastic reviews in national and provincial journals and was later to form the basis of Richard's one-man show Dark Corners.

His next book was Mad Lucas - The Strange Story of Victorian England's Most Famous Hermit, published in 1983 in conjunction with North Hertfordshire District Council. The book recounts the extraordinary life of James Lucas, a wealthy Victorian landowner who developed a paranoid fear of his relatives and barricaded himself inside the family mansion, where he remained in a state of siege for 25 years. However, unlike other hermits and once protected by the stout iron bars of his kitchen cell, he took a positive delight in meeting and arguing with the rest of the world. A wild biblical figure with waist-length hair and blackened limbs covered only by an old blanket he lived a life, quite literally, of sackcloth and ashes - but always with a gun by his side. With the Victorians' unhealthy obsession for freaks Lucas quickly became a national curiosity and thousands of all classes, from tramps to the nobility, travelled to Hertfordshire to see him. Charles Dickens reviled him in a long essay - Tom Tiddler's Ground - published in the Christmas Edition of his magazine All The Year Round in 1861. With the benefit of modern psychiatry, Richard's book sets out for the first time to discover the personal traumas that made James Lucas become - as Dickens unkindly described him - "a nasty reversal of the laws of human nature."

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In 1986 Richard was invited by Nicholas Battle of Countryside Books to work on a second version of Of Uncommon Interest adding several extra stories. This publication, re-titled Hertfordshire Headlines, was an immediate success and has since been re-printed several times. The book also marked the beginning of an association between writer and publisher that continues today after more than 15 years. During this time Countryside Books have published four more of Richard's works. The Villages of Hertfordshire, (1995) with photographs by John Bethell; Hertfordshire's Queen, (1997) a celebration of The Queen Mother?s lifelong association with the county; Hertfordshire Privies, (1998) containing people's hilarious personal memories of those 'bucket and chuck it' days and Hertfordshire - The Way We Were (2002) recalling events during the Forties, Fifties and Sixties.

For further information on these publications, contact:

Countryside Books,

2 Highfield Avenue

NEWBURY

Berkshire

RG14 5DS

Telephone: Newbury (01635) 43816

Fax: Newbury (01635) 551004

Website: www.countrysidebooks.co.uk

E-Mail: info@countrysidebooks.co.uk

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