Three Days Of Fire

Bristol, October 1831.At half past six on the morning of 8 October, the House of Lords rejects the Second Reform Bill — 199 to 158. The news travels by mail-coach to Bristol edged in black, as if for a death.Bristol is a city of a hundred thousand souls with only six thousand who can vote. Seventeen thousand have signed for reform. Manchester has none. Boroughbridge, where the Recorder sits for forty-eight electors, has two.When Sir Charles Wetherell, Recorder of Bristol, who told Parliament the city opposed reform, arrives to open the assizes on 29 October, the city erupts.For three days Queen Square burns. The Mansion House is sacked. The Council House, the Custom House, the Excise Office, the Bishop's Palace are broken. Three prisons fall — the Bridewell, the Lawford's Gate Bridewell, and the New Gaol on the New Cut, a hundred thousand pounds of stone taken in hours. Wine runs from the corporation cellars — three hundred dozen bottles — and the crowd drinks from hats.One hundred and nineteen special constables, a hundred constables, ninety-three soldiers at first. Mayor Charles Pinney and Colonel Thomas Brereton watch order dissolve.Based entirely on real documented names, places, dates and verbatim quotes. No invented characters. No invented streets. What happened in Bristol happened as written here — three days of fire that cost £300,000, sent 114 to trial, 31 to death, and on 27 January 1832 hanged four men atop the New Gaol they had helped burn.THE THREE DAYS OF FIRE is a clean, literary historical novel by Bradley Julies, told in twenty chapters from the black-edged news to the scaffold and beyond.