Tony Pollard

Dr Tony Pollard is an internationally renowned archaeologist and Director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at Glasgow University. He has carried out pioneering investigations of battlefields in South and North Africa, South America and Europe and as a Forensic Archaeologist has worked with police forces throughout Britain.

He has written numerous papers and articles on archaeology and history and is co-editor of the Journal of Conflict Archaeology. He was the co-presenter of two series of BBC2's archaeological documentary series Two Men in a Trench.

The Secrets of the Lazarus Club is his first novel.

A Cast To Die For

If a reader were to ask which of the real-life characters in The Secrets of the Lazarus Club was my favourite, then they might be surprised to hear that the answer is not Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  Yes, the great engineer has long been a hero of mine and features prominently in the novel but the accolade has to go to a more enigmatic individual by the name of Viscount Ockham.  We know very little about the mysterious Viscount, which to a novelist eager to use imagination to bring a real character to life is an instant attraction.  What makes him irresistible, though, is that he was the grandson of the poet Lord Byron, who in addition to his own great works encouraged Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, and the son of Ada Lovelace, who has gone down in history as the mother of modern computing. 

          Otherwise known as Byron King-Noel and the 12th Baron Wentworth, Viscount Ockham was born into a blue-blooded family and spent his youth in a mansion at Ockham Park, Surrey and an equally impressive house in London.  Yet instead of becoming an army officer or idling on the family estate like many of his class in Victorian Britain, this young man chose to work for Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a manual labourer.   In a yard at Millwall he was employed in the construction of the largest ship the world had ever seen, a vessel which in his more light-hearted moments Brunel referred to as his ‘great babe’.  That was where I found him, as a footnote in one of the many books on the life and work of the engineer. 

          Similarly my own great babe The Secrets of the Lazarus Club has had a long gestation.  It first saw the light of day, at least in part, as a not-so-short short story called Man of Iron, written when I was a student at Glasgow University.  It was a simple tale about Brunel and an invention that doesn’t appear in any of the history books; there was no Ockham and no Lazarus Club back then.  Some of the story’s very few readers enjoyed it but said they thought there was a novel in there trying to get out.   As a diminishing student grant forced me to concentrate on my studies rather than messing around with writing stories, the manuscript was consigned to that graveyard of many an early work, the shoe box under the bed.  Time went by and I eventually gained a PhD, a reasonable reputation as an archaeologist and then a stint as a TV presenter, though archaeology was and always will be my day job. 

          When the urge to write fiction returned I was determined to make a serious stab at a novel.  They say ‘write what you know’ and so I turned to archaeology, trying to create a kind of Indiana Jones for the 21st century.  Quite a bit of work was done but something was missing; perhaps it just wasn’t the right time for the archaeological novel which I’m sure one day will come. 

          It was while going through piles of old paper in what had become several shoe boxes under the bed that I came across my Brunel story again, almost forgotten over the ten or so years since I’d written it.  It was enough to regenerate my interest in the engineer and so, abandoning my dashing archaeologist to the Russian mafia, I set to work on turning Man of Iron into the novel which some had seen in it.   It was during further research into the engineer and his creations that Ockham walked into my life.  With him in the room I knew immediately that there was something extraordinary here and perhaps a much darker and bloodier novel than I had first envisaged.  One of the questions I wanted to answer was why would an aristocrat like Ockham give up a life of privilege to work for Brunel in such a lowly position?  Even I was shocked by the answer the novel provided.

          Ockham and Brunel were to become the first members of the Lazarus Club.   Some of the leading minds of the Victorian era were soon to follow: Charles Darwin, Joseph Bazalgette, Robert Stephenson, Joseph Whitworth, John Scott Russell, Charles Babbage, the wonderfully named Goldsworthy Gurney and a young surgeon called George Philips (who also appeared in the original story).   It was a world dominated by men, but strong women such as Ada Lovelace were also making their mark and none other than Florence Nightingale shows a previously hidden side to her character here.

          These men and women did much to create the modern world in which we live but the shadow of a murkier, less certain time still hung over their activities.  And as events unfold it appears that there may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their engineering triumphs and scientific endeavours.  

          Looming large among these triumphs is Brunel’s ship, the SS Great Eastern, which when launched after many stops and starts in 1858 became the heaviest object ever moved by man.  The long and difficult period of construction on the banks of the Thames provides a vast iron backdrop to some of the novel’s key scenes, and the leviathan’s brooding presence can be felt throughout.  The ship’s labyrinthine interior is reflected in the various twists and turns of the plot and its claustrophobic passages and heat-blasted engine rooms are no less fear-filled than the dimly lit streets of London, in which the forces of evil are afoot.

          Almost an honorary member of the Lazarus Club, the Great Eastern is not just a hunk of metal but another character, and a resilient one at that, for like her creator she survives catastrophic events which should be fatal.  However, unlike Brunel, who due to his limited stature was fondly known as the ‘little giant’, she had size on her side.   She was 692 feet long, had a displacement of 32,000 tons and once built it took six months and every hydraulic ram in the country to get her into the river.   Nobody knows how many men died during her construction, several certainly did during her launch and it is said that before she was finished a riveter and his young assistant fell between her twin hulls and became entombed there.  She was powered by three mighty engines, two turning the paddle-wheels against her flanks and a third propelling a screw at the stern.  Her five great funnels rose up from her decks along with six masts capable of carrying over 18,000 square feet of sail. 

          One of the reasons for the ship’s epic scale was that she was intended to make the voyage to Australia and back and needed to carry enough coal for the round trip.  It came as a bit of a blow to her owners when coal was discovered in Australia.   Then, after a spell carrying passengers across the Atlantic, she was used to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable, shrinking further a world that had already left her behind. She spent her last days ignominiously, hosting sideshows and serving as a massive advertising hoarding.  At last put out of her misery, she was scrapped at the turn of the century, and although the process took more than two years she finally ended up in little pieces, not unlike several other characters in the book.  It is not recorded whether the remains of the two riveters were encountered during the cutting up of her hull.

          From birth to death the ship was an exciting spectacle and drew thousands of sightseers.  They marvelled at the awkward miracle of her launch and pondered the future while witnessing her lingering dismemberment.  In 1867 Jules Verne, whose work includes Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Master of the World, sailed to New York on her, the voyage inspiring one of his lesser known novels The Floating City.   I would like to think that something of the spirit of Verne runs through the pages of my own book. 

          Other writers have also had an influence, and some critics have kindly suggested that the time and place evoked in The Secrets of the Lazarus Club would be recognisable to Charles Dickens, that most accomplished teller of tales from the riverbank.  We know that the author of Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend had dinner with Brunel on more than one occasion; a good example of how the celebrity culture which seems such a modern phenomenon was well established by the mid-19th century, only then it was thinkers, engineers and scientists, and now it’s footballers and reality TV stars.  It is social networking which draws together many of the characters in my novel, never mind that the motives for some might include murder.

The world of the Lazarus Club, based on real people and events, captivated me for a long time and I enjoyed the company of its sometimes eccentric members.  I miss it and will perhaps go back there one day.