I lived here years ago, when men wore frills and finery and let their hair grow into long lovelocks, before the queen's fair name was breathed upon, before the war.
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Though William Lovelock was born in London, his family were originally of Berkshire extraction and two of his great-uncles had emigrated to Australia in the 19th century, long before he did.Lovelock, Yann: Lovelocks in Counterpoint, Lovelock Lines 5, p.14 He was educated at Emanuel School, Wandsworth, and started piano lessons at the age of six and organ lessons at twelve. At the age of sixteen, he won an organ scholarship to the Trinity College of Music, where he studied with C. W. Pearce and Henry Geehl. After service as an artilleryman in World War I, he returned to Trinity College and graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1922. He then joined the teaching staff and later obtained a doctorate in composition in 1932.
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The main focus of the novel is on the three Lovelock brothers and their dependents. It begins in South Island, where the Lovelocks have arrived in the 1860s to prospect for gold, but soon moves to North Island, where the brothers settle on the Porangi River to mine coal, fell timber and attempt iron founding. Although the river is fictitious, it is vividly imagined and a clue is given that it is based on the Mokau River, which is 'nearby and has a not dissimilar history'. This appears as one of several literary tricks that Shadbolt plays at the beginning, seemingly quoting from the 'revised' version of The Shell Guide to New Zealand, which Shadbolt had authored earlier (although there is no 1979 revision, as claimed).
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Sir Thomas Meautys (1592–1649) with a long lovelock. William Prynne, a puritan pamphleteer, wrote Health's Sickness. The Unloveliness of Lovelocks (1628), in which he states that for men to wear their hair long was "unseemly and unlawful unto Christians", while it was "mannish, unnatural, impudent, and unchristian" for women to cut it short. He related the story of a nobleman who was dangerously ill, and who, on his recovery, "declared publicly his detestation of his effeminate, fantastic lovelock, which he then sensibly perceived to be but a cord of vanity, by which he had given the Devil holdfast to lead him at his pleasure, and who would never resign his prey as long as he nourished this unlovely bush", and so he ordered the barber to cut it off.
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The three brothers approach the colonial enterprise with different aspirations. Herman is a Utopian largely insulated from reality; Richard is a compromising capitalist ever watchful for the main chance; James is an idealistic agriculturalist bounded by narrow horizons. It is their womenfolk who are more grounded in reality and interested in relationships, although the persona adopted by the author gives their concerns little sympathy and sees their significance as mainly limited to sexual partnership. Others have observed ‘the predominant focus on male characters in Shadbolt’s fiction’ as a limitation.The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, see above The title of the novel seems to be explained by a prefatorial “Author’s Note”, which thanks 'Phillipa Goodyear, of the New Zealand College for Psychic Studies, for her most material help in locating the original Lovelocks’.
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As soon as Lord Lindsey had begun to fear that the disputes between the King and Parliament must end in war, he had begun to exercise and train his tenantry in Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, of whom he had formed a regiment of infantry. With him was his son Montagu Bertie, Lord Willoughby who had seen some service against the Spaniards in the Netherlands, and after his return had been made a captain in the Lifeguards, and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Anthony van Dyck has left portraits of the father and the son; the one a bald-headed, alert, precise-looking old warrior, with the cuirass and gauntlets of earlier warfare; the other, the very model of a cavalier, tall, easy, and graceful, with a gentle reflective face, and wearing the long lovelocks and deep-point lace collar and cuffs characteristic of Queen Henrietta's Court. As Lord Lindsey was a most experienced soldier of 59 years of age at the start of the English Civil War, King Charles I had appointed him General-in-chief of the Royalists for the Battle of Edgehill.
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