Martin Campbell was born in Greenock, Scotland. He worked as a psychologist and university lecturer in London, New York, Edinburgh and St Andrews. His first historical fiction novel, Sailor’s Heart, is available in paperback, Kindle and as an audiobook from Amazon. His next book 1856: Croton Oil and Pecuniary Profit will be published in June 2024.
Besides writing, Martin also enjoys sea fishing and playing poker, with little returns on either of these activities.
I write historical fiction by accident. I am not a historian, nor a novelist. I am a psychologist.
Five years ago, while walking around the largest artificial lake in the UK, surrounded by the largest man-made woodland in Europe, I met a very old man, a fellow walker.
“Terrible what they did to those poor sailors down there,” was the first thing he said to me, pointing at the lake and shaking his head.
It was a choice between checking my watch and quickly moving on, or finding out what the hell he was talking about.
That random comment about sailors became, for me, a research interest, then an almost obsessive need to know about a little-known aspect of WWII naval history. I discovered that the British Admiralty had set up an onshore psychiatric facility, HMS Standard, to "recycle" Royal Navy sailors who had broken down. These were men who had suffered “nervous exhaustion” or “combat stress” in battle.
It took me two years of research in naval archives and psychiatry journals to sort out historical fact from fiction and to find out what happened to sailors at this facility. The fact was more incredible than any fiction.
The remains of HMS Standard now lie at the bottom of the lake, Kielder Water, after the valley was flooded when a dam was built.
My first thought was to publish my research in one of the many reputable psychology or history journals, where the story would be read by a handful of academics and students and just as quickly forgotten. The more research that I did, however, the more I became convinced that this important piece of history should be made more relatable and, above all, more accessible to a wider audience.
I had the basic historical facts about what was referred to in academic writing of the time as The Kielder Experiment, or A Submerged Site of Therapeutic Endeavour. These facts alone told a remarkable story, but I was keen to fill in the gaps. I wanted to explore the background to “the experiment”, the people involved, their motives and emotions.
In my professional life, I was familiar with research methods: systematic reviews of evidence, testing hypotheses and investigating causal relationships. To write a readable dramatization of real events at HMS Standard needed a very a different approach to research, however. What was required were fine details, minutiae of the past that described and explained why the people–the doctors, the navy officers and the sailors of the time–behaved the way that they did. My exploration of the WWII medical and historical records, revealed little information about day-to-day life in this isolated facility, set in moorland, 30 miles from the nearest town.
There were many aspects of local and national life during wartime that I had never considered until I began writing. What did people wear, how did they speak, what did they eat, how did they suffer during the war, what were their attitudes? The most important of these questions, for purposes the book at least, was how the general public and the Royal Navy viewed sailors who were no longer able or no longer willing to fight for their country in a time of war. Were they men who had reached a psychological breaking point, in need of treatment and recovery? Or were they all just cowards, malingerers and poltroons, not to be pitied but despised? Are these views different today?
HMS Standard in NE England was where 842 men who had broken down at sea were received and "processed" between 1941-1944. Some men were never returned to duty. These were the basic statistics that got me started in writing historical fiction.
I can honestly say that I have learned as much about “human nature” in all its forms in my five years of historical research and writing as I have from my thirty years working as a psychologist.
I hope that readers learn as much from the book Sailor’s Heart as I did from writing it.
Find out more about "Sailor's Heart" here.
No comments:
Post a Comment