BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: One Fine Day
By Ian Marchant
Published by September Publishing, rrp £12.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Ian Marchant, a regular presenter on ‘Open Country’, Radio 4, and diarist for Church Times, is dying. Side by side with his discovery of his soon-to-arrive demise, he delves into his family history. He is lucky to discover that he can trace it back a long way, to one Jean-Jacques de Marchant of Namur, Belgium 1435 to 1518, his 14x great great-grandfather!
More relevant to his book, and to us Sussex, and honorary-Sussex folk, his 12x great-great-grandfather was born here in the county, in Preston. His father worked in the iron trade, and probably fled Namur as war ripped through his country, with ironworks a military target. One of the most arresting passages in this fascinating book is a wee rant about Faragist attitudes to immigration and treatment of the Channel, ‘a road’, as ‘a barrier’. On a ‘points-based’ system, in the fifteenth century, the de Marchants would have scored highly and been invited in alongside many other refugee ironworkers.
SUSSEX WEALD IRONWORKS
Marchant offers a number of excellent and chatty historical info dumps throughout the book, and his ancestor’s trade allows him to give us a great picture of the history of ironworks, and of how the Sussex Weald evolved as a prime location for the industry.
He also drops in fascinating and relevant insights into other areas of our history. His approach offers a commentary on our times and his own personal story, seen through the prism of a diary kept between 1714 and 1728. This was kept by his 7x great great-grandfather, Thomas Marchant. Throughout the book, Ian Marchant draws parallels not only with Thom’s times and ours, but more directly and personally, between his ancestor and himself, proving himself, too, to be a great diarist. The book moves across time, and his contemporary telling of, for example, February 22nd 2020 is matched to Thom’s diary entry for 22nd February 1720, though as the book goes on it is Thom and his century that gets the lion’s share albeit mostly as told, superbly, by Ian.
Thus, one of his history lessons for us involves the shift from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian – we moved to the latter in England in 1752, so Thom’s calendar is in fact eleven days adrift from ours today. Thus, the twelfth of May today was by Thom’s calendar May 1st. This gives us the delicious observation, after noting the arrival of martins and swallows, of blooming bluebells and apple-trees, that ‘much of the old weather lore, and therefore the traditional farming year, is eleven days out’ – his May Day and ours occur at different times.
ROOTS OF THE LEWES BONFIRE
Other threads gives us the evolution of ‘clock-time’; the history of underpants and hygiene (you had to be there), and flax (also, it turns out, about… underpants); the history of ‘natural history’ at Hurstpierpoint; the odd eighteenth-century taxes on windows and candles, and the collection of taxes; the church in the eighteenth century, Anglican, but Catholic and Dissenter too; the roots of the Lewes Bonfire; literacy and vernacular Bibles; the position of the ‘yeoman’ in society; a good deal on dung and dirt; some interesting suppositions regarding ‘the Great Pretender’ and Jacobite intrigue; not to mention folk song…
And, too, the role played by a previous owner of Thom’s estate, Little Park Farm at Albourne, in the English Civil War, and as a consequence a potted history of the restoration, then of William and Mary, and the very topical relevance of William’s Act of Settlement, and his 1689 Declaration of Rights. The latter, enacted by Parliament as our Bill of Rights is why such a fuss was made over Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament, why the Supreme Court far from ‘committing treason’ quite rightly found against him, and why, in turn, Boris committed treason against us, the people, by passing laws that now do allow proroguing by the office of the Prime Minister alongside other acts of treason that in effect make of England an executive sovereignty not a Parliamentary one in which our ‘chosen’ ‘representatives’ nominally enact ‘our’ will.
DESTRUCTION OF BRIGHTON IN THE GREAT STORM OF 1703
Another lesson is given on the thermometer, and its role in founding modern chemistry – of Christiaan Huygens he writes that ‘if you were odd enough to want to rank seventeenth-century scientists in order of importance, he’s always going to be in your top four, along with Newton, Descartes and Galileo’. This is placed in a chapter that is in part about climate change, through the lens of measurement of temperature. Thom’s life coincided with the later Frost Fairs, at the latter end of the Little Ice Age. Marchant notes that it was said during Covid that the UK experienced the biggest slump in 300 years, ‘none of them said what caused the massive hit 300 years ago, but actually, it was a weather event, the Great Frost of 1709’. He describes the hit food supply took as crops failed and prices exploded upwards, and the destruction of much of Brighton in the Great Storm of 1703.
‘Accurate temperature measurement, as well as making industrialisation possible, also shows that we’re doomed, unless… unless what?’… He quotes from Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, ‘In the midst of life, we are in death’. This quote resonates on several levels in this wonderfully engaging book, and clearly not simply because Marchant is dying, as he notes are we all, sooner or later, a fact he treats as just that, a matter-of-fact truth.
I thoroughly recommend this book. About a third of the way through, he says that he wishes he ‘could magic’ Thom’s wife, ‘Elizabeth’s diary into existence, the equivalent of Thom’s but about how the house rather than the farm was run’, and I wish he could, too, as I’m certain he’d create as wonderful a companion volume with it to this One Fine Day.
One Fine Day is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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