HOLTBY: South Riding, 1936 - Part 1, The Setting

A view of Holderness from the top of Burton Agnes Manor House.

The flat agricultural land runs as far as Hull twenty five miles to the south.

Dimly visible on the horizon is a wind farm; a recent addition to the economics of the landscape. 

Then and now Holderness is one of the least developed areas of Yorkshire.  It has

• One major city, Hull, dependent on docks and the chemical industry.  

• One important agricultural centre, Driffield, with a famous annual agricultural show and showground. 

• One large seaside resort, Bridlington, that used to be important for fishing. 

• Two smaller seaside towns Hornsea and Withernsea.   The latter is so little know it once sold tee-shirts with the legend: 'Where the **** [sic] is Withernsea?'.  

• One ancient town, Beverley, with a medieval street-plan, gate and Minster and elegant Georgian town-houses.  

The land is agriculturally rich.  In the Middle Ages this wealth supported priories and churches but the fall in agricultural prices since WWI and the rise of mechanisation has meant that the riches of farming have become industrialised, and support large factory-like farms, not village communities.  South Riding accurately observes the world to come.  The  'motor-tractor that reaped and thrashed in one tremendous effort' is 'still a monster' (South Riding Bk V.6, p 335).  It is a 'monster'  in two senses of the word; an exception and wonder and a threat.    Mechanisation of agricultural labour  has increased the movement of population from the country to the city and caused social problems as Hull and the seaside towns have tried to cope with piecemeal expansion.  South Riding describes Kiplington as 'the waste-paper basket of the South Riding' (South Riding II.4, p 126), the place where the unemployed and semi-employed end up trapped by poverty.  Despite this history of profitable farming, there are only two major stately homes in the region, Burton Agnes and Burton Constable, though there are many large farm houses, some surrounded by mansion-like grounds.   The east coast is subject to fierce erosion.  There are beautiful medieval churches inland, such as Patrington and Swine; many others on the coast have been washed away, as plaques on the sea front of Withernsea testify:

                                 The Spa, Bridlington                                                                                               A Wall-plaque commemorates

     The present spa building replaced the 1896 complex that was                                                  a musician who played at the first Spa.

       destroyed by fire in 1906.  It has been recently modernised.

     http://www.thespabridlington.com/redevelopment-history/history/

Part of the town's renovation strategy involves the use of artworks:

                   Silk-screen glass panels in gardens by the Spa                                       Enigmatic words collaged onto the prom. 

Winifred's Outlines

Winifred's sketch map seems to represent her preliminary not final ideas; the geography of South Riding evolved as the book developed.  The dotted line signifying 'Projected Roads' does not link Kiplington to Kingsport, as it will do in the book, (east-west) but runs from Flintonbridge to one of the two 'Cold Harbours' on the map (north-south).   By the time the book was written,  'Cold Harbour' seems to be located on the bank of the 'River Leame' (Humber), rather than on the east coast.   A few slips add to the geographical inconsistencies.  Page 24 refers to 'Pidsea Buttock', page 578 to 'Pudsea Buttock'; 'Pidsea' is right according to the map and shows the derivation of the name from the real village of 'Burton Pidsea'.   This is not a coastal settlement, it is west of Withernsea, half-way to Hull.   Such slips are a poignant reminder that the book appeared after Winifred's death, without a full revision by the author.   What is clear from the map is that the book's focus will be on the southernmost parts of the riding, where economic need is at its most intense.   

Fields between Hull and Withernsea: productive, not picturesque.

It is not a landscape like the one above that allows Lydia Holly to experience 'rapture'.  For that she looks away from the land: 'The fields that changed colour from week to week, springing or ripening, but the sea altered from hour to hour and Lydia loved it.'  Nevertheless even the seascape does not inspire her or divert her mind from the squalor around her as completely as exploring the pastoral/Arcadian landscape of Midsummer Night's Dream: 'she became sharply conscious of a very different beauty.'  (South Riding, Bk I.3 p 36).  Her neighbour, Fred Mitchell, who lends her the Collected Works understands such reading only as a kind of self-help: 'Better try to improve your mind.  Read something worthwhile.' (South Riding, Bk I.3 p 37) As the book makes ruthlessly clear access to and appreciation of 'higher' culture will not allow either Lydia or Fred to escape the poverty trap in which they have been caught.  The only outlet for Lydia's dramatic talents are the shows of Madame Hubbard.  The only theatre shown is the Kingsport Empire, putting on a variety bill (South Riding, Bk VIII.2).   The implication is that it takes a rich complex economy to produce a rich complex culture. 

Seascape near Withernsea.  

The boulders and the wooden breakwater are attempts to preserve the shore-line. 

The sea is a constant and ominous presence in South Riding; an area that cannot be shaped or cultivated for the benefit of mankind. 

High and Low Culture 1

To the rich 'shipowner's wife from London' and her 'artist friend' the show at the Empire and its audience are evidence of the north's lack of sophistication: 'We may not be highly refined here in the north ... but you must admit we do enjoy ourselves.' (South Riding, Bk VIII.2, p 515).  However, as Holtby makes clear, the audience are desperate to be entertained to take their minds off 'sickness, unemployment and loss.' (South Riding, Bk VIII.2, p 521).  The text does not set up a facile opposition between 'high' and 'low' art and come out in favour of either, instead it sets up an intricate series of tensions.  The shipowner's wife describes drinking in the bar at the Empire as 'all too he-mannish and Hemingway for words.' (South Riding, Bk VIII.2, p 520).  Simultaneously Holtby sets up an ironical observation about how Hemingway and his values have been reduced to camp cliche and draws readers' attention to the way the chapter concerns the attempts of Hicks, Heyer and Sawdon to maintain their manhood and self-worth in the face of adversity.   The chapter is self-contained enough to be a short story on a Hemingway-like theme of memory, loss and repression.   

Ironically South Riding's popular success has deterred intellectual interest.  The book has remained in print since first publication, its popular appeal being reinforced by a film in 1938 and two television serialisations; by ITV in 1974 and by the BBC in 2011.  The 1938 film removed most of the politics to clear the way for romance and a happy ending.  The BBC adaptation cut the book to a three part mini-series, which centred on the sexual choices facing Sarah Burton, though it kept the original ending.   Only the ITV television adaptation attempted to preserve the scale and scope of the book by producing a serial in 13 hourly parts.  

South Riding  is a large and complex text that knowingly negotiates its way between apparently contradictory genres within its framework to invite interpretation from unexpected perspectives such as Marxist soap-opera or Mass Observation melodrama.   

Marxist soap opera    

The main plot in South Riding is the planned course of a new road and the difference this will make to people's lives.  The planning of the road reveals the class tensions and contradictions that pervade the South Riding.  The initial agreement for the road comes about through an alliance of the business interests of Councillors Snaith and Huggins, supported by the socialist Councillor Astell against the farming interest represented by Robert Carne.  

If the book had followed a simple pattern of melodrama, Snaith and Huggins' self-interest would have been shamed by the contrast with the transparent but reductive honesty of Carne; Carne would have been the representative of traditional rural honesty that saw through and exposed the greed of the townsfolk.  In fact Carne is too short-sighted to suspect corruption until Huggins tries to cut him a deal in Book VII, Chapter 3, close to the end of the book, and he is sued for libel as he rashley denounces Snaith and Huggins.   Carne is similarly short-sighted in his view of social obligations.  He understands his duty to his tenants but does not understand how similar social obligations are taken up by modern, urban democracy.   

As Astell realises, Snaith is not a hypocrite: 'He did not pretend to be a philanthropist when in truth he was raking in profits.' (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 504).    Snaith wants to reconstruct South Riding in his own image: 'This was his world.  He had largely helped to build it.'  (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 511)  Winifred makes Snaith's vision of the future resemble that of her contemporary H.G. Wells.  For both men the past is associated with chance and filth and the future with planning and cleanliness: 'the unending battle against dirt and inconvenience.' (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 505).  Wells' ideas were national and international whilst Snaith's are determinedly local, but Snaith's idea of child-care would fit well within Wells' 1905 A Modern Utopia: 'Here, behind this green door, is the birth control clinic, behind that blue one a mothers' and babies' club,' (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 500). As the description goes on, an ironic resemblance to Aldous Huxley's distopian Brave New World seems intended. 'He would plant a garden for the nursery school, where brown-limbed children would roll like living flowers, in their sun suits of blue and yellow and vermilion,' (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 500)., sounds suspiciously close to: 'Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns' (Brave New World, London,Chatto and Windus, 1967 [1932] Chap III p 23).     Nevertheless birth control and hygienic surroundings are clearly more humane options than those obtained in the shacks where Mrs Holly lives in an almost constant state of pregnancy until childbirth finally kills her: 

'Suntrap'  house

 The Moderne style inverts the traditional.  The roof is flat, instead of pitched, the windows as large as possible, often curving round the corner of a building.  The semi-detached houses look back to Georgian models in their use of bay-windows and the symmetrical arrangement of windows and doors; this symmetry has been compromised by out-of-character modernisations of the upper window and lower door in the house on the right.  By contrast the the 'suntrap' is aggressively asymmetrical and depends on technological advances that allows its metal-framed windows to dominate its walls .   Both houses are close to each other in the same street on the outskirts of Copmanthorpe, near York.  Flat roofs and white rendering proved less suited to a British than a Mediterranean climate; the International house to the right of the building on the right had a pitched roof put on in the 1980s to replace the flat roof.  

Both Huggins and Snaith are responding to the larger economic movement South Riding depicts, the movement of population from the land to the town and the struggles of national and local government to cope with those left unemployed or needy by the wake of the great depression of 1929.   In Snaith's view, the solution involves:

1. the use of money from national and local government

2. the building of a garden village to combine the most attractive features of town and country

3. the ending of class struggle through the construction of a consumerist society.    

'The garden city will bring to the South Riding a quite different type or rate-payer.  These tenants in our council houses belong to a new generation - the age of the easy purchase system, of wireless and electricity and Austin Sevens.' (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 504).   Snaith's sociology anticipates many of Keynes's ideas and the developments in English society since 1960.  Such a village will be expensive: 'The rates will go up again a little.' (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 504), but Snaith believes he will be supported in creating an aspirational not dependent lower class.

Contemporary popular culture shows that Snaith is right in assuming many people would want to live in the world he wants to create.  It is the life-style affectionately mocked but aspired to in George Formby's 1937 film Feather Your Nest.  Significantly the film was nearly called Marriage By Installments  (http://www.georgeformby.co.uk/films/nest/report1.html).   The theme song 'When We Feather our Nest' jokes about the size of most houses young couples might be able to afford: 'The parlour's small, seven feet by four' and the anomalies of paying on installments: 'We've got a garage, but don't forget/We can't afford a car just yet,' but celebrates the privacy and intimacy allowed by such houses:

A lovely bathroom, and all brand new,

You'll splash me, yes, and I'll splash you,

We'll see quite a lot of each other, too,

When we feather our nest!

(George Formby Complete, Ed Andrew Bailey and Peter Foss, London, Wise Publications,  pps 98-99) 

Simultaneously the song shows how distant Snaith is from popular culture.  Madame Hubbard would enjoy the innuendos that are the essence of George Formby's songs; Councillor Snaith would fastidiously recoil.

From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.

Though Astell is simply labeled 'a socialist', Holtby provides clues to indicate he is a Marxist-Leninist.  From this point of view, Astell sees Garden Villages as mere amelioration and would probably regard popular culture as false consciousness that gives the inhabitants no insight into their conditions or control of 'raw materials, transport and industry.'  (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 507).   He leaves the area with relief to work in Glasgow where the cadres necessary for Lenin's violent transformation of society may be formed through 'an organising job on the Clyde.' (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 506). 

 Наш Джордж

The book turns to advantage the open-ended nature of a soap plot; it ends, rather than concludes, leaving readers with a disturbing variety of questions both personal and impersonal.    Will the road bring the benefits Snaith expects?  Will Astell's Leninist revolution happen? Will Lydia get to university?   Will there be another war? The text's structure makes it clear that human problems outlast the life of any human.

The Revolutions of South Riding

No one is more aware of this than Councillor Astell.  He knows he is dying of TB.   Fatality intensifies the conflict between his mind and his feelings: 'His ruthless theory guided uneasily his tender heart.' (South Riding, Bk V.6, p 338).  The 'ruthless theory' is his commitment to a revolution that he believes will be as violent as the Russian Revolution: 'All revolutions are bloody and barbarous'  (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 507) .  Snaith warns him 'the English don't take easily to revolution,'  (South Riding, Bk VIII.1, p 507) but the book makes clear both are caught up in a larger revolution; an economic revolution.   

Skilfully South Riding shows the conflict and collusion between the different types of  'revolution' that are taking place in Holderness.   There is an economic revolution, as the Industrial Revolution completes its transformation of Agrarian England.   There is a feminist revolution, as women start to explore and inhabit the new roles created after the Great War.  There is a political revolution, as socialism becomes a mainstream doctrine and economic praxis that can attract shades of opinion as different as the militant Astell, the sentimental Huggins and the technocratic Snaith.  Human agency is involved with the direction of these currents but without an economic base none will succeed.   Sarah's school will be useless unless it is largely rebuilt.  The garden village will remain an idea unless it attracts funding and this funding will mostly have to come from outside the region.  The old feudal system of the South Riding cannot pay for this kind of transformation.  To that extent Carne is right, this garden village is an imposition on the landscape and the rate-payer but Carne's day has passed.  Carne is, as Astell puts it 'a survivor of the feudal system' ( (South Riding, Bk II.4, p127) and, if Carne is any guide, this system is doomed in a world where agriculture no longer assures wealth.

Economic Revolution: Passages from Charity to Dirigisme 

The book is precise about Carne's social position, he is a 'gentleman-farmer', not aristocracy.  Though his family has been admired by generations of inhabitants of South Riding, this simply shows how limited the wealth and social structure of the old South Riding has been.   As Alderman Beddows says: 'When I was a child we all looked up to the Carnes like gods.  They might not have a title but they were gentry.'((South Riding, Bk VIII.4 p 545).    Lord Sedgemere, the head of the aristocratic family Carne marries into, regards him as an upstart and fortune-hunter.     True aristocracy proves too expensive a luxury for Carne's resources, even before his wife goes mad.  The point is made through Maythorpe Hall that the Carnes have owned for five hundred years.   As Mrs Beddows points out, by the end of the book, not only is the property mortgaged but all the treasures collected by the family over centuries have been sold off: 'Then he got a mortgage on the farm.  I suppose you know it all belongs to the bank now?  Then he began to sell his own possessions, the silver cups, the family portrait' (South Riding, Bk VIII.4, p 547).

According to a Guardian article, Maythorpe Hall is based on White Hall, outside the village of Patrington, which Winifred would have observed travelling to Withernsea on the now derelict Hull-Withernsea branch line: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/19/south-riding-winifred-holtby-rereading

St Peter's School, York

Robert Carne was educated here.   At such expensive private schools pupils were expected to realise that they were society's leaders and that their social privilege entailed social responsibility. 

  However the school's most famous non-fictional old boy is Guy Fawkes...

Charity vs. Dirigisme

Coming from the background he does, Carne's idea of social responsibility is traditional.   He understands his duties to his tenants and he understands charity, at least to the extent of sympathising with 'a poor devil down on his luck', (South Riding, Bk V.6, p 347).  By contrast Snaith prefers not to face the poor, attempting to eradicate poverty through dirigisme; the directing of state funds towards economic development.  Astell aligns with neither man but finds himself on a committee distributing Public Assistance in Yarrold.    

The committee sees its main task as distinguishing between what the Victorians called the deserving and undeserving poor.   Astell despises the 'grudging ameliorations'  offered and his part in offering them (South Riding, Bk V.6, p 335).  He is not surprised to find that the judgments of his fellow committee members on who is 'deserving' and who is not, have a class bias but he is distressed to find himself equally prejudiced against Fred Mitchell, the unemployed insurance clerk, who has fallen from the ranks of the lower middle class.  Astell turns to Mitchell a 'face stern with dislike and forced benevolence', (South Riding, Bk V.6, p 345) and it is Carne and Whitelaw, Astell's class enemies, who offer Mitchell human contact.  Astell is left 'chewing the bitter cud of self-contempt', ( South Riding, Bk V.6, p 346) and decides he must return to the Clyde and fight ' to change the system', (South Riding, Bk V.6, p 347).

The chapter draws attention to the unspoken pun that runs through the book; how humane can society afford to be?   Different classes have different answers, but it is Carne's class that is becoming historically and literally bankrupt and Snaith's that is flourishing. 

Bureaucracy 

Each book of South Riding begins with a quote in convincing bureaucratic language supposedly taken from a local government meeting.  The book that follows shows the humanity that lies behind these declarations, counterbalancing empathy with irony.  Carne, Snaith, and Huggins all have humane impulses towards the lower classes but each has a partial view in both senses of the word; they see only part of the problems of the region they administer and their sympathies are drawn more towards certain sections of society than others.  The 'Public assistance' chapter makes explicit what is implicit  throughout the rest of  text; the contrast between the impersonal language of government and the human cost of governing and being governed.  In turn this intensifies the creative tension between the text's function as sociological reportage and 'human interest' novel.  The open ended 'soap opera' nature of the narrative prevents any complacent reassurance at the end of the book; the text has inscribed a small slice of human, political and economic into its construction making clear the larger forces that operate beyond and outside the text.   

Mass Observation

This awareness of larger forces is embedded within the book's sociological investigation.  In this respect the text anticipates the Mass Observation project.   The Mass Observation Website presents the undertaking as politically neutral: 'This organisation was founded in 1937 by a group of people, who aimed to create "an anthropology of ourselves".  They recruited a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain.'    http://www.massobs.org.uk/a_brief_history.htm

This website: 'Visual Culture and Mass Observation' makes the political objectives of the organisation clearer: 'In its original guise, Mass Observation (M-O) was an organization dedicated to the documentation of everyday life amongst the British working classes.'

The site sees the origins of Mass Observation as part of a left-wing movement within both fiction and non-fiction arising in the 1930s: '

  'Prior to 1937, many of those who were eventually involved in Mass Observation (or at least at its fringes), and more generally, Left-leaning cultural organizations, found other ways to express their concerns over the rise of the Right.  George Orwell’s now famous homage (in the form of social criticism) to coal miners in northern England, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), alongside J.B. Priestley’s discussion of class division in English Journey (1933) and Walter Greenwood’s account of Depression era Salford, Love on the Dole (1933), attempted to illuminate the catastrophe at hand, while equally criticizing the government for its lack of attention to the effects of unbridled capitalism – that is, in the words of Orwell, “the real ugliness of industrialism".'

http://archiveadventure.wordpress.com/mass-observation-a-history/

South Riding is part of this list of predecessors, though it adds an interesting twist to such works by pointing out the suffering of a region that is largely un-industrialised and by deploying a plot in which technology might relieve not intensify poverty.  Nonetheless it is significant that Astell is as sharp an observer of poverty and hypocrisy as Orwell.    Astell walks through Yarrold, not noticing what would appeal to a tourist: 'warm rose buildings that piled themselves against the exquisite height of Yarrold Parish church, a legacy of twelfth century devotion, its delicate grey stone melting into the quivering summer sky of nineteen-thirty-three.' (South Riding, Bk V.6, p 345).  Instead he notices, 'poverty and disease, stunted rickety children, the monotony of women's battle against dirt, cold and inconvenience.' (South Riding, Bk V.6, p 336).    The novel makes both worlds equally present in the minds of its readers.

Winfred shows how such observation were becoming part of the 'Scientific' approach of a Marxist or Leftist in 1933 but the novel gives these ideas an unexpected twist when depicting Sarah's reactions to 'everyday life amongst the British working classes'.  Sarah is given the opportunity during the bus journey that opens up the South Riding to both her and the readers.