The Man Behind A Name in a Notebook

Joe Murdoch - a Found Father

Just a sentence in my father’s notes gave me the character Joe Murdoch. That's all I had to build what was the most influential character in Matthew's story.

I knew that Joe's name had been passed down from Matthew, himself, to his son and his grandson and finally to my father. They were accurate, but could I find anything about the real Joe? No. That was it. No date. No description. Just a name, sitting there like a seed in the fertile soil of my writer’s garden.

I knew Joe was connected to Matthew; the young man at the heart of my novel, A Legacy Forged. I knew he mattered. But beyond that single name, Joe Murdoch was a complete mystery to me.

So I did what family saga writers do, I went looking for him in the corners of my mind and the life I had lived. I had so many unanswered questions about Joe, but where could I find the answers? It turned out that they lay within my family.

A Family Effort

As an ex-soldier himself, my husband is a man who knows his military history, and when I needed to understand how a Scottish soldier might realistically have ended up settling in Birmingham in the early nineteenth century, he was my guide. Between us we worked out that if Joe had served as a Sergeant — and a Sergeant in the Scots Greys, of course — he would have been entitled to an army pension, especially if he was medically discharged. That pension would have been enough to purchase the machinery needed to set himself up as a precision toolmaker and millwright.

My son, who is both a trained metallurgist and an ex-soldier himself, lent his expertise to the technical heart of the novel — including the extraordinary detail of what a caisson actually is and what happens when one explodes in battle. (More on that in a moment. It's not for the faint-hearted and also, a spoiler alert.) My son was the lead in advising me in the chapter Tempering The Apprentice. It's amazing what you learn as a 'histfic' author when you start asking why and how.

Then there was my father, whose notes started all of this in the first place.

Joe Murdoch, as he exists in A Legacy Forged, was built by real people. That feels right to me, somehow. Because Joe himself is a man who understands that we are all shaped by the people who love us.

The Scots Greys at Waterloo

Spoiler Alert Bit - Skip to 'The Father Matthew Never Had' Joe's story begins in 1815, on the muddy, catastrophic fields outside Waterloo.

He is twenty-seven years old. He has already served his country for over ten years. He is not a fighter in the conventional sense — he is an Armourer, skilled in repairing firearms, cannons, weaponry, and armour for the cavalry serving alongside him. He has also learned carpentry and wheelwrighting along the way, and these practical, precise skills will define the rest of his life and the life of Matthew, all the way to my own generation. But wait! Those skills also lie in my son, the metallurgist and ex-soldier.

But back to Waterloo. On 18th June 1815, Joe is ankle-deep in mud. What the history books don't always tell you is that electrically-charged volcanic ash had caused weeks of ceaseless torrential downpours across Europe that summer, turning the ground to what I can only describe as black treacle. The Scots Greys had marched fifty miles in those conditions the day before.

Joe is repairing a damaged caisson — a two-wheeled cart used to carry artillery ammunition. Beside him is a carpenter-wheelwright named Jenkins, and a young apprentice trooper called Jim Matthews, barely old enough to have enlisted. Joe has taken a liking to Jim. He sees potential in the lad and wants to teach him to stay calm under pressure. To do good work even when the world is screaming around you. We learn about Joe here and understand where he learned the skills to manage a livewire like Matthew.

In that muddy hell, a French cannonball finds them.

The loaded caisson explodes with the force — as I wrote it — of Hades' own fury. Joe is blasted backwards. Fragments drive into his ribs and abdomen. The air is sucked from his chest. Then darkness takes him.

Jim Matthews had stood between Joe and the worst of the blast. The young trooper gave his life protecting the man who was trying to teach him.

Joe drifts. For days, consciousness comes and goes. And somewhere in that drift — suspended between the battlefield and whatever lies beyond it — something happens to him. He dreams he is being lifted towards the clouds. They part. Light floods in.

A man of no particular religion, Joe becomes acutely aware of something he can only call inner-faith. He surrenders to it, and gratefully lets it take him.

This is not the end of Joe Murdoch. But it is where Joe Murdoch as a vital part to my story begins.

The Road to Birmingham

After surgery that leaves him badly scarred, Joe is eventually moved to Fort Pitt military hospital in Kent, where he fights off infection after infection. The doctors are not optimistic. He shouldn't have survived at all.

I spent weeks reading about Waterloo, what happened to the injured (the bones of the dead were used for agricultural fertiliser) and the new hospital in Chatham. It was the first of the deep research rabbit-holes I descended into and it taught me that the pleasure in researching was equal to writing.

I digress, Joe does what Joe does best. He keeps going.

When an officer from the Scots Greys finally visits to confirm that his days of service are over, it is not all bad news. Joe's reputation precedes him. The officer recommends the Gun Quarter in Birmingham — the beating heart of British firearms manufacturing for nearly two centuries — and provides him with a reference. Joe writes to a couple of companies and secures himself a job. (Different times — my son on leaving the army wrote over 150 job applications.)

Joe finds a small property to rent on Campbell Street. He begins to build a life.

This is where the army pension becomes quietly significant. A Sergeant's pension was a genuine income, modest but reliable. And for Joe, it was the key that bought him machinery and independence. He was to create his own small business as a precision toolmaker and millwright, but before any of that, Joe needed just one other thing. Something that no pension could buy — a community; a group of people who would help an army veteran make it in Industrial Revolution Brum.

The Quakers of Bull Street

Within two years of coming back from Waterloo, Joe still hasn't settled. He's grateful for his work at the Rifle House on Water Street — it has sharpened his skills in precision engineering — but making weapons sits uneasily with him. The near-death experience on that Belgian field changed something within him. And then, because all fiction stories need a stroke of luck, he finds his people.

They meet at a regular gathering on Bull Street, not far from his place of work. They are called the Society of Friends. We know them better as the Quakers.

The Quakers in nineteenth-century Birmingham were not a fringe group. They were engineers, millwrights, businesspeople. They were people of enormous practical capability and moral seriousness. Their view of the world was rooted in pacifism, in simplicity, in the belief that there is something of God (a light) within every person. For a man who had just spent a decade in the service of war and watched a boy die in his place, this was a new piece of the life-puzzle for Joe.

The Quakers helped Joe move away from the Rifle House. Some among them were millwrights themselves, and they recognised his skills. They encouraged him to use his army pension to purchase the machinery he needed. With their support, he built his small business from scratch — and thanks to his integrity and his hard work, it began to thrive.

Joe had found his business. And he had found his peace.

The Father Matthew Never Had - The Found Father

This is the part of Joe's story that I spent time considering, because it is not really about Joe at all. It is about what Joe brings to the whole story and the impact Joe has on Matthew’s bloodline. I fell in love with Joe and I really wanted him to influence the rest of the family saga in a way that only DNA can.

When Matthew Seller arrives in Birmingham — sore, lost, and carrying the invisible wounds of a childhood under a cruel father — it is Joe Murdoch who sees him clearly and becomes his Found Father. It is Joe who takes the time to understand how Matthew ticks. It is Joe who teaches, steadies, and believes in him with a consistency that Matthew has never known from a man before.

Matthew, when he finally finds his voice in this story, says it simply: I owe everything to Joe.

Joe healed something in Matthew that his own father had broken. He continued the work that two men who touched the life of Matthew on the canal had begun. Joe took over from Nigel Beck and Bert Austin and made Matthew the man he became — the man the entire Seller family line would grow from.

That is no small legacy. It is one of many legacies in the whole family saga.

Why Joe Matters to Me

He is not the hero of A Legacy Forged, though in a sense, maybe he is. Joe, however, is at its moral centre. The moral code of honesty and integrity upon which Seller & Son was based is the absolute underpinning of this family saga. From here on, the reader will see what happens to the legacy Joe Murdoch created through Matthew. The integrity of the business, in the end, is what my father fought for. The ghosts of Joe and Matthew must have sat with him when difficult decisions were being made.

All my father left me was that sentence about Joe. That’s what I started with. It seems apposite that, with a little help from the people I love, I managed to find the man behind the name and fall just a little bit in love with him too. I hope you love him as much as I do.

A Legacy Forged is available here. It is Book One of the Seller & Son Saga.

If Joe's story moved you, I'd love to hear about it. Drop a comment below or find me on social media.