We’ve got an exciting line up of new titles to be published in 2012 – why not head over to the “forthcoming” category and check them out?

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Jennie Lee Cobban was brought up in Whalley, Lancashire and attended Clitheroe Royal Grammar School for Girls before gaining a B.A. Honours degree in Ancient History and Archaeology from the University of Manchester in 1974.  After working in television, public relations and teaching, she moved to north London in 1983.  Here, while raising a family, she spent twenty years helping to run Barnet Museum as Archaeology Officer and acting as a liaison point between local heritage groups, the Museum of London and English Heritage.  During this time she wrote numerous articles for local publications, assisted television companies in historical programme research and wrote two local interest books. She was also thrilled to have the opportunity to work alongside her hero and mentor, the late Dr Ralph Merrifield – pioneer of the academic study of the archaeology of ritual and magic – in the research of apotropaic artefacts designed to protect domestic and farm buildings in London and the North West.

Jennie’s first book, Geoffrey de Mandeville and London’s Camelot (1997) came about as a result of people constantly regaling her with ghost stories when she was evaluating threatened archaeological sites prior to their excavation! So in 1997 she decided to gather together the information she had collected over the years and document the ghosts and folklore of Barnet while at the same time taking the opportunity to describe the historical and archaeological mysteries of the area.  During her research she got to know several famous characters in the annals of contemporary witchcraft and magic – notably the Wiccan elder and author Lois Bourne and the late Cecil Williamson, occultist and owner of the Museum of Witchcraft at Boscastle. Her second book, 800 Years of Barnet Market (with Doreen Willcocks, 1999) was written as a special anniversary contribution to the town’s official celebrations of the granting of Chipping Barnet’s market charter by King John in 1199.

Jennie moved back to Lancashire in 2002 to look after her dad and has spent the last ten years re-immersing herself in the history of Pendle and its environs.   In 2004 she published Wall of Silence – an in-depth study of the unsolved murder of her great-uncle Jim Dawson at Bashall Eaves, near Clitheroe, in 1934.

Jennie has been fascinated by the witches of Lancashire since she was a little girl, and has spent her entire adult life gathering information about the history and archaeology of witchcraft and magic.  A small part of this research is presented in her fourth and latest book, The Lure of the Lancashire Witches.  She is presently experimenting with a blog which she is hoping will provide a general discussion platform for the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witches, Samlesbury witches and the witch of Windle.  [link: http://lancashirewitchcraftnewsandviews.blogspot.com/]

Her other interests include film and television, literature, gardening and animal welfare.  She can regularly be found at the RSPCA charity shop in Clitheroe where she enjoys working as part of the dedicated volunteer force.  She has two sons, Daniel and Edward and two cats, Pyewackett and Cleopatra – not to mention five very spoilt ex-battery hens who, over the past six months, have taken enormous pleasure in transforming Jennie’s once beautiful garden into a mud-splattered war zone and eating all her plants.

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The Lure of the Lancashire Witches is out now, £8.95 direct from Carnegie Publishing.

A new history of Cheltenham? When I started thinking about the possibility, I wondered if there was scope. I had written a history of Tewkesbury twenty years ago, but there history is visible all around. Cheltenham does not wear its history so obviously on its sleeve. What it does have is the large and attractive Regency and early Victorian houses and gardens in its centre, and these have been well-researched. But once I looked more widely, all sorts of interesting ideas start to leap out.

Cheltenham’s medieval history was of much more significance to its later development than might be guessed at first glance. A previous book, A thousand years of the English parish, had shown me the importance of the church as a landowner, especially after inclosure, and I was impressed by the effect which the church’s ownership in Cheltenham had on the development of the town. This was an interesting subject of research.

The villages within the modern Borough bave been closely assoicated with, even integrated with Cheltenham itself since William the Conqueror met his parliament at Gloucester and ordered the Domesday survey of his new kingdom. This was the geographical area which I decided to research. At the same time I discovered that Cheltenham had been a small but significant market town in the county, and then overtook all others in the nineteenth century. So I decided to build in comparisons to place Cheltenham in its local context.

For all the glamour of fashionable society drinking the spa water, Cheltenham had, and still has a much more varied society. The traditional neither could nor should be ignored, but the big cache of Borough council records gradually revealed a quite different Cheltenham, starting in the 1930s and extending to the present time, with its encouragement of industries and offices, not least the mysterious and fascinating GCHQ, and its large investment in social housing.

I walked and drove up and down, round and round. Towns are more complicated to describe than rural villages, but in Cheltenham I found both agricultural and rural history to explore as well as the complexities and sheer scale of urban development. Yes, there certainly was scope for a new view of Cheltenham’s past.

Read all about “Cheltenham’s Own” Anthea Jones in September’s edition of The Cheltonian.
Find out even more about Cheltenham’s hidden history by visiting the author’s blog at http://cheltenhamnewhistory.blogspot.com.

Malcolm Greenhalgh was born in Bolton, but his parents were sensible and the family moved to Kirkham in the Lancashire Fylde. From there he spent most of his free time indulging in a passion for wildlife: he watched birds on the Ribble and Wyre estuaries (observations that, in 1975, were published in his book Wildfowl of the Ribble Estuary, with notes on south Morecambe Bay). In his teens the family moved close to the Ribble at Preston, and from there he wandered the Bowland fells and fished the river for trout and salmon. It was from here that his first article was published, about dippers, in an RSPB magazine when he was 17 years old. At Lancaster University he read biology, choosing courses that related to his wildlife interests; whilst there he also spent (too) much time in the Lune valley and on Morecambe Bay. He then studied the relationship between the wading birds and their invertebrate food supplies on the Ribble estuary for his PhD, and lectured until his 40th birthday.

Life begins at forty! MG then gave up paid employment to write about his interests. So for the last 25 years  he has travelled widely (including to the Amazon, West Indies, the High Arctic, and every corner of Europe) with binoculars, pond and butterfly nets, fishing rods and cameras. His books include The Wild Trout and Atlantic Salmon (with artist Rod Sutterby), The Birdwatcher’s Year, The Complete Fly-Fisher’s Handbook: Natural flies and their imitations (with wildlife illustrator Denys Ovenden), The Salmon and Sea Trout Fisher’s Handbook (with Hugh Falkus), The Complete Book of Fly Fishing (with Ed Jaworowski), Collins Guide to the Freshwater Life of Britain and Northern Europe, The Floating Fly, An Encyclopedia of the World’s Fishing Flies and The Ribble (which describes the river and countryside where MG has spent countless hours). Besides wildlife, he is a proud Lancastrian and has written a book on Lancashire food, Flavours of Lancashire and the forthcoming The Great Lancashire Quiz.  He has made too many boring videos/DVDs, appeared on radio and TV many times, and written for a host of magazines.

He lives in south Lancashire and, besides wildlife, his interests include gardening, good food, wine and his grandchildren. There are four things he dislikes: the dreadful offerings on television, the din one has to put up with (piped musack or TV) in supermarkets, hospital waiting rooms and the like, the self-centred rudeness of so many people today, and neighbours’ cats that choose his vegetable beds as their lavatories.

There’s also previews available for Great Liverpudlians and A Wigan Childhood – why not take a look?

We’ll be adding these previews to all our new titles in 2011 over the coming days.

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