4th July 2025
Following the publication of The Line of Sixteen: Searching for my children’s great, great grandparents, I was invited by Helen Hart, the Publishing Director of SilverWood Books, to be in the spotlight for the regular “Meet the Author” Social Media Feature on its Facebook site (https://www.facebook.com/silverwoodbooks).
The Feature makes use of a short questionnaire on the author’s background and writing.
Name/Pen name
John Rigg
Where are you from/where are you based?
I was born and brought up in Leeds, Yorkshire. However, I have lived in Milngavie, just to the north of Glasgow, for over 30 years.
Do you write full time or do you have a ‘day job’?
I am a retired civil servant. I do not write full time and, therefore, I have the luxury of choosing when to research/write and fit this in around other activities. My non-fiction writing principally covers watching sport – SilverWood Books has published three books in my An Ordinary Spectator series – and family history. The recently published The Line of Sixteen: Searching for my children’s great, great grandparents is my first book in the latter category.
How has your other work influenced your writing?
In the Senior Civil Service, an important part of my working day was spent drafting some form of written communication, including briefing notes for Ministers and/or other senior officials. At different times, these covered the economy, post-school learning and EU funding. It goes without saying that such briefing needed to be clear, accurate and succinct. That experience has undoubtedly stood me in good stead in my post-SCS life.
A related point is that it emphasised to me that I should be quite clear on exactly whom I am writing for. With The Line of Sixteen, it’s obviously the case that any family history of this type risks having a limited interest for those not in the family itself. Accordingly, by also discussing the detailed research methodology that has underpinned the book, I have sought to provide valuable insights on the sources to be explored and the pitfalls to be avoided when compiling any family history.
What is your favourite book?
For the presentation of historical material, I am a great admirer of Neil MacGregor, for example his Germany: Memories of a Nation (2016). He addresses a huge (and, as we know, at times, hugely disturbing) subject by focusing on specific physical items – a beer tankard, a coin, a medal, and so on – to illustrate the key points that he wishes to make. This also helps to place the reader firmly in the times about which MacGregor is writing: in other words, to add a sense of real-life existence to the names and dates.
Did this book inspire any aspects of your book? If so, how?
Whatever the particular genre of a history book – economic, social, family, etc – there usually tends to be a broadly consistent approach: researching, writing, checking, editing, illustrating, sourcing… A challenging task is to think about the structure that would be most appropriate for the volume. As mentioned, Neil MacGregor brilliantly used his selected physical objects. For The Line of Sixteen, I focused on my (adult) children’s great, great grandparents – of whom, there were 16, of course – each of whom I could then use as the basis from which go back and forward through the generations.
Where is your writing space?
Technically, the study, where I have a laptop and desktop. However – as with many SilverWood authors, I suspect – the real writing “space” is inside my head, perhaps subconsciously, where the kernel of an idea is formed and then developed over time. When that time comes, I find that I can write the initial (very rough) draft quite quickly, after which I like to take my time on the fine-tuning.
Are you currently working on anything new?
One of the inevitable consequences of publishing a family history is that new information and stories are revealed after the book has gone to print. I was fortunate that, at the proof-reading stage of The Line of Sixteen, I was able to include a last-minute reference in a footnote to a distant relative who died in Vermont, USA, in 2024 at the age of 104 – my first centurion. Subsequently, I have discovered someone else who was imprisoned in Stalag Luft 3 in 1943 (though he was transferred to another POW camp before The Great Escape!). I shall post occasional blogs on my website – An Ordinary Spectator – to bring the (never-ending) story up to date. The same forum will also be used for further blogs on watching sport – particularly football, cricket and rugby (league and union) – to complement the books in the An Ordinary Spectator series. Finally – though certainly not least – I am writing a third novel (under my JR Alexander persona), the first two of which are available on Kindle.
How does it feel to be a published author?
I have mentioned in a previous “Meet the Author” that there is an obvious satisfaction in seeing a project completed and produced to a high standard. This is definitely the case with The Line of Sixteen as the production challenges were more demanding than for the three sports books.
There is also a sense of pride in the subject matter. As stated on the dust jacket, there are no Prime Ministers in the narrative – no Admirals of the Fleet or Poets Laureate. But there are a host of “ordinary” – and heroic – people, whose resilience, courage and determination have taken the family story through to the present day. On the various branches of the family tree, they were the ones who experienced the Great Famine in the Ireland of the 1840s and the horrors of the First World War trenches and the perils of service in the Merchant Navy during the Second World War – and whose personal stories deserve to be told.
An Ordinary Spectator 