Riding the Tides
About
As industry reshapes England, the Bangham family must navigate ambition, justice, and the moral cost of progress.
Set in the Severn Gorge in 1748, Riding the Tides continues the story of the Bangham family as the forces unleashed at Coalbrookdale ripple outward, altering lives in unexpected ways.
While Joseph Bangham and his kin endure the relentless labour of Darby’s ironworks, his brother Richard follows a very different path. Through marriage into a prosperous Bridgnorth merchant family, Richard rises socially—yet his ascent brings its own compromises, testing loyalty, conscience, and family bonds.
As the Banghams’ fortunes diverge, they are drawn into the harsh realities of eighteenth-century England’s justice system. Encounters with the law expose the brutal practice of prisoner transportation to America and the human cost borne by the enslaved, at a time when early anti-slavery voices are only just beginning to be heard.
Through moments of hope, loss, and moral reckoning, Riding the Tides explores the widening gap between progress and principle. At its heart lies the same haunting question faced by Joseph Bangham and his family: when technological change reshapes the world, can anyone truly foresee where its currents will lead?
Part Two of the Bangham Family Saga.
Praise for this book
Marilyn Freeman, a late-comer to fiction writing, is an inspiration to all of us who are hoping our later years will be our most productive. Now with five novels to her name, she can be relied upon for vibrant believable characters, robust page-turner plots and a fine understanding of the human heart and family dynamics. In the Coalbrookdale novels we have the bonus of an engaging history lesson and a factual narrative style which moves along at a gallop.
Freeman has imagined the lives of her real-life ancestors who lived in the Severn Gorge in the 18th century, several of whom are recorded in company records as having been employed by the Darby Iron Company. This leads her into an exploration of what it meant for families who for generations had been living off the land to find themselves in "the cradle of the industrial revolution."
"Coalbrookdale" followed the fortunes of the Bangham family from 1713 to 1742. It ended with the principle protagonist, Joe Bangham, worn out after years of toil, reflecting bitterly that the thriving coke-fuelled iron industry, to which as a young man he had enthusiastically dedicated himself, has made the bosses rich without sharing any of the wealth with him.
The sequel, "Riding the Tides", opens in 1748 with Joe's 17 year-old son Benjamin staggering home after a gruelling week at the furnace, full of news of an industrial breakthrough which will lead to an explosion in the production of wrought iron.
Over the next twenty years the furnaces and foundries proliferate, the air of the dale becomes ever thicker with smoke and noise, the labouring population burgeons and with it destitution, squalor and social unrest. While the ironmasters prosper, their workforce sees little improvement in their conditions. It is by means of the more traditional trades - teaching, commerce, carpentry - that certain members of the Bangham family move up the social ladder. We see family ties (which seemed unbreakable in Coalbrookdale) attenuated under the strain of diverging social status, and the emergence of an incipient working class.
While Part One of the Bangham family story was primarily a domestic drama, Part Two expands onto a larger canvas, engaging grander social and political themes. A poor harvest, rising grain prices, starvation, inequality, political activism, a brutal justice system, and the power of love. These are the tides which drive the action, and Freeman navigates them effortlessly to produce a compelling story in which events unfold naturally one from another and themes merge seamlessly. While our hero Walter Bangham languishes in gaol for his participation in a "food riot", his lover Susan attends the burial of an aunt who had been too malnourished to survive childbirth. Grief, anger, love and pride in "her man" all fuse in her heart.
If the dominant image in Coalbrookdale was the River Severn, in Part Two it is the cruel and terrifying Atlantic Ocean. On the far side is a land of opportunity for those brave enough to venture there, and a place of punishment for felons lucky enough to escape the gallows. It also harbours a horror of which most people at home are only dimly aware, despite their economic ties to it: slavery. Mentally scarred by his encounter with that abomination, Walter (we are told at the end) will devote his later life to the abolition movement.
Riding The Tides (The Bangham Family Story Part 2) (which I have just had the pleasure of producing as an audiobook - out soon) is a reminder of the many forgotten heroes who made sacrifices for a better world, and that ours is, in spite of all, a better world.
Now to tackle global warming...