Hello there. Welcome to the Bridgeburn Project.
About the project
The Bridgeburn Project is my attempt to investigate and explore the world of a mostly-forgotten book called The Bridgeburn Days (1956, Gollanczs), and to explore the real story behind the book and its author, Lucy Sinclair. Lucy Sinclair is a nom de plume for Nancy Baty, who was born May 1915 in South Shields, Durham, and died January 2002 in Oxfordshire.
Nancy became a ward of the South Shields Board of Guardians at a very young age, and was brought up in a “cottage home”, a home for pauper children. A group of children lived in each sex-segregated home in a pseudo-family unit, under the care of a housemother. Nancy spent her childhood and adolescence in the home she called ‘Bridgeburn’ in her book, where all the girls were trained for domestic service and all the boys for farm work. When considered mature enough, they were sent into work. Nancy entered domestic service and, I suspect, stayed in it for much of her long life.
When she turned 40, Nancy finished a book about her life in the cottage homes. That book is called The Bridgeburn Days, and while it’s clearly autobiographical it is presented as a novel, with its heroine named Kitty Barrowell. It’s an odd little book, imbued with a strong sense of social justice, especially in the child Kitty’s intelligent musings as she tries to piece together the mysteries of the adult world. Children are frequently beaten, often for obscure reasons and Kitty, rebellious and curious, rails against this. Obviously intelligent, a child who cannot “see a bit of print without getting her nose glued to it”, Kitty is an astute observer of the different life stories of other children in the homes, and ponders why some children are born into the luxury of a loving and well-equipped home, while others are born into cruelty, poverty and despair. She imagines herself travelling along the paths of time to warn future children not to be born – “Don’t come! There’s only Bridgeburn here!”
Why I’m involved
When I was about nine or ten (before the real dawning of the young adult fiction movement) I got hold of a copy of The Bridgeburn Days at a school fair. I was deep into an “old-fashioned” phase, reading LM Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott and various other classics. The Bridgeburn Days looked like one of those books, as its cover depicted a little girl in a frilly pinafore and button boots, but it’s not intended for children. But I loved Kitty, identified with her, and often thought about her and what happened to her.
The Bridgeburn Days was published in 1956 by Victor Gollancsz, under the pseudonym ‘Lucy Sinclair’. It had one printing and is virtually forgotten today except as a reference in some academic works about the lives of children in care. When the Internet came along I searched and searched for an author called Lucy Sinclair and became pretty certain it was a pen-name. In an index to the Gollancsz archives I discovered Lucy’s real name to be Nancy Baty, and using some of the clues in the book began to unravel Nancy’s story and in a small way the story of some of the other people in the books.
Nancy wanted her story told. She didn’t want the lives of all those “homes children”, and the harsh upbringing which bred hardness into them, to be forgotten. And she was a good writer, bringing all these long-dead people to life. I want Nancy to be remembered, and all the other Bridgeburn stories too. I’m trying to uncover those stories.