At the time of Barefoot on the Cobbles, Harry Tuke was the head gardener at Clovelly Court. We meet him in the summer of 1909, when Daisy has just come to work for him as a live-out servant. I wanted to explain Daisy’s move to Torquay and her rather unusual role there as a gardener. To place her as the Tuke’s employee not only help to do this but also gave me the opportunity of making the Tuke’s son a love interest for Daisy.

A Yorkshireman by birth, Harry was in Clovelly in 1893, when he married Eliza Brenchley from Kent in Clovelly church. By this time, Harry was in his thirties and it seems likely that he had just taken up his post at the Court. The Tukes had just one son. As head gardener, Harry’s home was Gardener’s Cottage, close to the church, the Court and the gardens that he tended. He worked for the estate for over forty years, retired to rooms over the stables and died there in 1936. He was involved in the life of All Saints Church, being both a sidesman and a member of the Parochial Church Council.

Harry Tuke’s role as a senior servant to Mrs Hamlyn and his home, which was away from the cobbled street, set him apart from Clovelly’s fishermen. His family were consigned to an ambivalent social milieu, not quite a villager, yet lacking the status of the respectable middle-class.

‘Mr Tuke had noticed the allure that the garden held for Daisy and the thoughtful gentleman had begun to tell her more about the plants and how to tend them.’

Barefoot on the Cobbles will be published on 17 November 2018. More information about the novel can be found here. Copies will be available at various events in the weeks following the launch or can be pre-ordered from Blue Poppy Publishing or the author.