Love and Loss at the Beach Hotel by Francesca Capaldi (guest post)

 

I'm thrilled to invite Francesca Capaldi to my blog today. Francesca shares her insight into researching materials for the historical saga.

Love and Loss at the Beach Hotel

Can true love win the day?

Hetty Affleck is working as a maid at the prestigious Beach Hotel in Littlehampton. Her beau, Lorcan, is away at war and has recently stopped replying to her letters but she is determined to keep her spirits up. When she meets wealthy shipbuilder's son Victor Perryman, they pass the time of day and they both feel a connection but she can’t allow herself to think anything more of it - not only does she have Lorcan to think of, but she and Victor are divided by wealth and class.

Yet they meet again and Hetty is charmed and intrigued by Victor and his openness towards her. It becomes harder to ignore the attachment growing between them.

When Lorcan comes back on leave, Hetty is forced to face her true feelings. Who does she really love, and can that love conquer everything in its path?

Purchase Links

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3zAql23

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/love-and-loss-at-the-beach-hotel

Apple: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/love-and-loss-at-the-beach-hotel/id6504192817

Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/love-and-loss-at-the-beach-hotel/francesca-capaldi/9781804368466

 

Author Bio –

Francesca has enjoyed writing since she was a child. Born in Worthing and brought up in Littlehampton in Sussex, she was largely influenced by a Welsh mother who loved to tell improvised stories. A history graduate and qualified teacher, she decided to turn her writing hobby into something more in 2006, when she joined a writing class.

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Writing as both Francesca Capaldi and Francesca Burgess, she has had many short stories published in magazines in the UK and abroad, along with several pocket novels published by DC Thomson.

 

Her Welsh World War 1 sagas were inspired by the discovery of the war record of her great grandfather, a miner in South Wales. Heartbreak in the Valleys was a finalist in the Historical Romance category of the Romantic Novelists’ Association Awards (RoNAs) in 2021. Her latest series, The Beach Hotel, is set in her own childhood town, where her Italian father had a café on the riverside. The first in that series, A New Start at the Beach Hotel, won the Romantic Saga Award in the RoNAs in 2024.

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Francesca is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association and the Society of Women Writers and Journalists. She currently lives on the North Downs in Kent with her family and a cat called Lando Calrission.

 

Social Media Links –

Website & Blog: https://www.francesca-capaldi.com/

Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/FrancescaCapaldiAuthor

Twitter/X: https://x.com/FCapaldiBurgess

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/francesca.capaldi.burgess/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@francesca.capaldi.author

Researching Love and Loss at the Beach Hotel

I know research isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s always been something I’ve loved, ever since I did a course on it during my history degree, back in my youth. In those days, I used to sit in a records’ office, or in the library, scrolling through microfiche machines to find what I was looking for on the census or on a tithe map.

 

Whilst researching Love and Loss at the Beach Hotel and the other novels in that series, I have spent time at Littlehampton library and in the museum there, but these days so many documents are available online.

 

When I was doing research for my first historical sagas, the Wartime in the Valleys series, I discovered a wonderful newspaper resource on the Library of Wales website, with Welsh papers up to 1919. I learnt about the extensive chapel events, charity collection days, concerts and plays, what films were on at the picture house, what kind of shops there were, dodgy medical cures, detailed court cases… I could go on. If you think general life came to a standstill in World War 1, it certainly didn’t.

 

Now I’m writing the Beach Hotel series, although set in Sussex, those newspapers are still useful in showing day to day life, what’s going on in the war and rationing. However, there are many other very useful and fascinating websites to explore.

 

The 1911 census was ideal for seeing who was registered as living at the Beach Hotel. There’s a manager and his wife and children for starters. Then there’s a housekeeper, storekeeper, bookkeeper, nurse/midwife, four types of maids (chamber, house, staff and stillroom), a barmaid, porters, a cook and a waiter. Only live-in staff would have been recorded though. I know from a later document, from the 1950s, that there would have been around fifty or so staff members in all.

 

Five years later, any list would have looked very different, as all the men qualified to enlist would have gone to war, and their posts must have been taken by women, or sometimes older men.

 

Although the census was useful for seeing what was around the town, even more useful was Kelly’s 1915 Directory of Sussex. This gave me a clearer picture of facilities, types of shops and of businesses. I was intrigued by obsolete wonders like the ‘Fancy Repository’. The Library of Scotland’s historical OS maps helped me to see the layout of the town at the time.

 

Believe or not, I can even check on the weather on any given day, thanks to the Met Office digital archive.

 

Another useful place online has been the Bygone Littlehampton page on Facebook. Here, people with connections to the town post historical information and photographs. I’ve posted photographs on there myself, albeit more recent ones that my father took in the 1960s and 1970s.  

 

Only about half of my research is done online though. When I started looking, I was amazed how many books there were on old Littlehampton. Quite a few I’ve found in second hand shops in the area. One of them, Little Hampton Long Ago I’ve had since I was a teenager, which shows how long I’ve had an interest in the history of the place.

 

The clothes of the era changed quite a lot during the war, especially for women. Hems became shorter and liberty bodices replaced corsets. Towards the end of the decade, Dresses started to take on the look of the fashions of the 1920s. I found a wonderful book which is made up of illustrations and descriptions from Sears Catalogue. It’s interesting to see just how much women’s fashions changed in that era, from the starchy post-Victorian gowns of 1909 to the much more liberal clothing of 1919.

 

In just one day I’ve often found myself researching some very different aspects of life, including entertainments, children’s games, Christmas decorations, menus, popular songs and flying boats (as that’s what Hetty’s potential beau, Victor Perryman, builds). It’s very easy to get distracted.

 

The main aim of writing an historical novel is always to create a compelling story including jeopardy and twists and turns, and with a satisfactory outcome for the characters. But I also feel like I’m taking a journey into a foreign country, discovering a different culture, yet with people who have many of the same problems and emotions that we experience today. I find it fascinating, and I hope my readers do to.