Embedded Files
Sarah's Journey
Regional Writers:
It would be easy to see Winfred as writing in the tradition of E. C. Booth, if only because both wrote about the same area of Yorkshire. However, there are important differences. Holtby is not a regional writer; her novels are not confined to one region of Yorkshire. The Land of Green Ginger takes place mostly in Wharfedale, whilst Poor Caroline is set around London and Mandoa, Mandoa is situated in a fictitious African state. Booth tends to use the setting and dialect of Holderness for picturesque effect. His 1908 novel The Cliff End, is full of chapters that have no relevance to the plot but simply increase the regional colouring. The novel was simultaneously published in America as The Post Girl. This is a shortened version of the novel in which self-contained chapters of local colour, like Chapter I, describing a ride on Tankard’s bus or Chapter XX that visits Ullbrigg Post Office are cut, a lot of Yorkshire dialect is curtailed and elaborate descriptions, like those of Farther Mostyn’s drinking glasses (Chap XVII), are reduced.
A similar curtailment of South Riding is not possible; there are no extraneous details. The point is made clear by considering Sarah's journey. This covers more or less the same ground as the ride of Tankard's bus but it does not exist simply to provide amusement at the expense of local accents and characters, it is a crucial exploration of Sarah's 'battlefield' and Sarah's hope and ambitions. Simultaneously it allows Holtby to explore the parameters and paradoxes of Realism. The realism of this part of the book is objective in so far as it describes an observable reality that can still be seen today but subjective in so far as the details that Sarah takes most notice of reveal as much about her as about the surrounding landscape.
The chapter is called 'Miss Burton Surveys a Battlefield' (South Riding, Bk I.V). Sarah arrives at Kingsport station and catches a bus to Kiplington to take up her new job as headmistress. She is in a hurry to board the bus and does not pause to notice the Victorian grandeur of Hull's station, neither the technological triumph of the steel and glass roof nor the Medievalism of the polychromatic tiled Romanesque/Byzantine arches of the entrance:
Hull Station 1: roof and platform Hull Station 2: entrance hall
Once her bus sets off, the text becomes a text within a text as Sarah begins mentally composing a letter to a friend about the sights that catch her eye. What she notices is exactly what would have interested Mass Observation; how the working people of Kingsport make a living and enjoy their leisure. She does not notice any of the buildings of Hull Old Town but her attention is aroused when she glimpses the industries on the banks of the River Hull, transformed by the book into a canal adjoining the River Leame (Humber): 'Then the blank cliffs of warehouses, stores and offices closed in upon her. The docks would be beyond them. She must visit the docks,' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 54). The industry and docks of modern Hull are concentrated at the east end of the city, about a mile and a half from the centre of town. The industries now are mostly petro-chemical, concentrated in Saltend Chemical Park. Nevertheless many of the warehouses on the River Hull would be still recognisable to someone who knew the area in the 1930s. Sarah describes a street 'powdered from the fine white dust of flour mills and cement works, ' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 54). The dust is better controlled but the shores of the River Hull are still dominated by flour mills, processing wheat brought in from the farm lands of Holderness and light industries, though some of the old warehouses are falling apart.
Conceptually and literally this part of the novel is inverted by the Philip Larkin's 'Here'. In 'Here' the journey is into Hull from 'thin thistled' fields. The city is not named but Larkin notes similar details to Sarah: 'grain-scattered streets' and 'barge-crowded water,' The poem concentrates on the 'cut-price' crowd who come into Hull to buy cheap luxury goods. Unlike Sarah, the narrator of 'Here' looks for no points of contact with this crowd. Where Sarah will end her journey on a packed public beach in Kiplington, 'Here' ends seeking the clarity of loneliness on a deserted 'shingle' beach. (Philip Larkin: Collected Poems, London, Faber and Faber, 1988, p 136)
Clarence Flour Mills on the edge of the 'Tall cranes swung towering to Heaven.'
River Hull. Rebuilt in 1952 following (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 54).
bomb damage in WWII.
Maizecor Mill and Street Collapsing warehouse
Her journey reveals her personality and priorities. Where Astell would have been depressed by the poverty in which the inhabitants of Kingsport have to live: 'grim crumbling facades announcing Beds for Men on placards foul and forbidding as gallows signs' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 54), Sarah is attracted by the vitality of the inhabitants. Words that usually have disparaging connotations like 'seething' and 'sluts' become positive in Sarah's description: 'seething with life that was neither dreary nor respectable. ... Pretty little painted sluts minced on high tilted heels off to the pictures or dogs or dirt-track race-courses,' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 54). Here Sarah is charcterised as having 'the gift of being pleased by any form of pleasure,' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 55).
The landscape of work, wealth and economics continues to dominate Sarah's selective vision as the bus runs through the countryside. The modern bus route from Hull to Withernsea runs through Hedon and Patrington that have impressive medieval churches and historic centres:
(http://www.hedon.gov.uk/Core/Hedon-Town-Council/Pages/Gallery_1.aspx, http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/Patrington-Grown-corn-lime-coal/story-11948044-detail/story.html).
In Sarah's view spires are no more important than trees: 'From point to point on the horizon her eye could pick out the clustering trees and dark spire or tower marking a village,' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 55). If readers saw the same landscape through the eyes of Reverend Milward Peckover, no doubt the evidence of medieval devotion would have been more strongly emphasised but what catches Sarah's eye is the economic productivity of the 'flat' 'plain' : 'the corn ripening to gold, the arsenic green of turnip tops, the tawny dun-colour of the sun-baked grass,' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 55).
View from the top of a Hull-Withernsea double-decker bus.
A church tower is at the centre of the trees on the horizon but it merges with the background, as it does in Sarah's gaze.
South Riding is full of careful contrasts. Sarah's enjoyment of what she sees is different from the condescending 'slumming' that brings the shipowner's wife and her friend to the Kingsport Empire. It would not occur to Sarah to patronise the people she observes as the shipowner's wife does: 'You just made our evening for us. Too kind,' (South Riding, Bk VIII.2, p 525). Instead she sees herself as part of this life: 'in love with life and all its varied richness,'(South Riding, Bk I.V, p 55) a worker amongst workers but, like Astell, she is determined to transform the lives she observed: 'This was her battlefield.,' 'Sarah believed in action. She believed in fighting, ' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 55).
This Blakean openness to life gives her a sensuality denied to Astell or Snaith. She enjoys the chances the bus ride offers for 'flirtatious back-chat' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 58). As soon as she arrives in Kiplington she enjoys not only the chance to swim in the sea but to be admired in her swimming costume afterwards, ironically by 'Mr Councillor Alfred Ezekiel Huggins' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 59): 'Aware of approving eyes upon her, she increased, unconsciously and almost imperceptibly, the slight swagger of her walk,' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 60). In this chapter the text turns male voyeurism into comedy rather than threat. As Sarah arrives in Kiplington she notices that 'elderly gentlemen in nautical blue jackets leaned on iron railings and and turned telescopes intended for less personal objects upon the charms of Kingsport nymphs emerging from their final bathe,' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 58). The demeaning and stereotyping implications of the male gaze are explored later in the book when Chapter 7 shows Sarah's reaction to Mrs Hubbard's show.
A telescope on the front at Withernsea.
Devoid of 'elderly gentlemen' at the time of the photograph...
Symbolically the scene shows Sarah's determination to immerse herself in her new community: 'It did not worry her that the narrowing sands were dense with sweating, jostling, sucking, shouting humantity, that the sea-wall was scrawled with ugly chalk-marks, that the town beyond the wall was frankly hideous. This was her own place. These were her own people.' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 59).
Many of the features of Withernsea Sarah observes are still there, though they are not necessarily as 'hideous' as she claims:
Bathers and 'apartment houses' . Cliffs at the north end of Withernsea.
Sarah uses the words 'red' and 'crumbling' to describe the road
on top of the cliff but the words suit the cliff as well.
(South Riding, Bk I.V, p 59).
Nevertheless, even in this 'hideous' landscape Sarah can respond to sensual details, such as the breakwaters:
Breakwaters: Withernsea beach.
'A breakwater of soft satiny wood polished by a thousand tides ran down to the sea.'
(South Riding, Bk I.V, p 59)
Other features have been changed. The 'Floral Hall' is imported from Hornsea and no mention is made of 'The Castle', the twin towers that once controlled entrance to Withernsea pier. Unfortunately for Withernsea the pessimistic economic analysis delivered on Kiplington has not changed much: 'Summer had come but the visitors, the money-spenders on whom the little town lived, were not arriving. The sands might be crowded with day trippers but they carried their own picnic parcels with them and bought nothing except the jugs of tea, 2d., 4d, 6d, sold from the wooden booths.' (South Riding, Bk V.I, p 272). Withernsea/Kiplington is too close to Hull/Kingsport and close to nowhere else ; Hull/Kingsport day-trippers are the most likely visitors.
High Culture/Low Culture 2: From Madame Hubbard Has Highly Talented Pupils to Seaside Surrealism
A "Grand Gala Evening"
Not only the economy but also the culture of South Riding is in transition. In an echo of Tess of the d'Urbervilles , who speaks standard English to her social superiors and dialect to her intimates, Elsie, the servant at Maythorpe is 'trilingual':'she talked B.B.C. English to her employer, Cinema American to her companions, and Yorkshire dialect to old milkmen like Eli Dickson,' (South Riding, Bk I.I, p 18). There is one glimpse of the traditional culture that once obtained amongst the rural labourers; the fiddler on the stairs of Maythorpe (South Riding, Bk VI.5, p 439) but oral culture has shrunk to a mouth organ on a bus playing 'reminiscences of Jack Payne,' (South Riding, Bk V.I, p 400). Jack Payne was a BBC dance-band leader, playing popular music from Britain and the USA. A sample of his repertoire from 1931 can be heard at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyIA7qLzrw .
Mr Holly does not sing the traditional songs his grandfather might have but a selection of sentimental numbers drawn from Victorian parlour entertainment: 'Daisy, Daisy', 'The Lost Chord' 'Sweet Genevieve', 'Drink to me Only' and 'Londonderry Air' (South Riding, Bk V.I, p 404-6). All the lower class characters share a keen awareness of modern popular culture. For some, like Mrs Brimsley, the cinema is a form of escape. She both enjoys 'the big romance' that 'brought tears to her eyes' and 'filled her with vague longings,' and is critical of its unreality: 'there's not much time for that sort of thing in a real illness' (South Riding, Bk V.I, p 397) . Others hope that their children might live this dream. At Mrs Hubbard's concert Sarah is told about 'our Jennie' who 'wants to go on the films,' (South Riding, Bk I.7, p 81).
The conversation occurs during Mrs Hubbard's "Grand Gala Evening" where 'MADAME HUBBARD and her very Highly Talented Pupils' entertain the populace of Kiplington at the Floral Hall (South Riding, Bk I.7, p 75). Withernsea does not have a Floral Hall; Winifred has imported the building of that name from Hornsea.
Hornsea Floral Hall
According to old photographs it was once an elegant glass and iron building
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JuPl7xQih3U/T10udPJPY1I/AAAAAAAAAIY/U1g_vSj-QDc/s1600/floral+Hall.jpg
Sarah's description is less than flattering:
'the pretentious desolation of the barn-like Floral Hall.'
(South Riding, Bk I.4, p 59).
The concert puts Sarah in a new perspective. Previously readers have been told of her 'gift of being pleased by any form of pleasure,' (South Riding, Bk I.V, p 55); Mrs Hubbard tests that capacity to destruction. What disturbs Sarah is the sexualisation of children and the commodification of women shamelessly practised by the show:
"Some of us are rather naughty!"
Their place was taken by a line of minxes, lifting abbreviated skirts, winking sophisticated eyes with so vivid an imitation of music-hall naughtiness that Sarah gasped.
(South Riding, Bk I.7, p 78)
The book has been careful to show that this reaction does not come from any socially conditioned puritanism. Readers have seen that Sarah enjoys flirtation and being sexually admired by a male gaze but the crucial difference is that she does so on her own terms. She has not been made to believe this is the only kind of valid femininity. Her initial reaction is: 'They're too good for this: it's a shame!,' (South Riding, Bk I.7, p 79) .
This reaction is placed in three unexpected contexts. The first is not realised by Sarah. Though Sarah recognises a talented teacher in Madame Hubbard, she bans her pupils from attending Madame Hubbard's classes because of the clash with the values she wants to create in Kiplington Girls' High School. It might occur to readers, as it does not to Sarah, that beauty contests and film roles might prove a more effective means of escape from the 'waste paper basket' of the South Riding than education. After all, Miss Sigglesthwaite has found that her 'scholarship at Cambridge' and 'distinguished mind' (South Riding, Bk VI.2.. p 366) have done nothing more than trap her in an unrewarding job in this neglected corner of Yorkshire. The second is when Sarah decides, as Orwell or a Mass Observation spectator might, that the culture she witnesses is what the children need to deal with the lives they will lead:
Jokes about ripe cheese and personal hygiene - ("Take your feet off the table Father, and give the cheese a chance!"), about child-birth and deformity and deafness - were not these perhaps necessary armaments for defence in a world besieged by poverty, ugliness, squalor and misfortune?'
(South Riding, Bk I.7, p 82)
The third is Sarah's sudden collapse into tears as the concluding patriotic medley reminds her of the losses of the Great War and her fear of a war to come. Mrs Marsh sympathises with her: ' "It takes you like that sometimes. I know. I lost my man,"' (South Riding, Bk I.7, p 85). It is a twist unanticipated by Mass Observation; the observer becomes the observed.
Seaside Surrealism
In 1934 the British painter Paul Nash went to live in Swanage, a tourist town similar to Withernsea, albeit one third larger, on the Dorset coast. Here he discovered what he called 'Seaside Surrealism'. He looked for a domestic English equivalent of the exotic eerie emptiness of Georgio De Chirco's towns, the bizarre encounters described by Comte de Lautremont and the possibilities suggested by found objects and found it in an English holiday town.
The photographs he took of Swanage and the pictures he based on the town remove 'sweating, jostling, sucking, shouting humanity' and show empty scenes in which human constructions confront nature. Sometimes he responds to the abstract functional modernism of sea defences, at other times he was intrigued by the monuments and leisure architecture created for seaside towns.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-swanage-t01771/text-catalogue-entry
All of these potentials are present at Withernsea:
The sweeping uncluttered Modernist lines of the promenade and its benches.
'The Castle': the entrance to a pier that no longer exists. Behind the facade, nothing.
Withernsea's lighthouse stands inland, surrounded by the town, like the enigmatic towers Chirico painted
Withernsea lighthouse in the style of De Chirico.
If Snaith's Red House is where Winifred's map shows, i is more likely to be Kiplington's Lighthouse he sees
rather than that of 'Leame Hook' (Spurn Head)
Sarah's tastes are not avante-garde however. She is an amused realist. Whilst her body sensually enjoys the 'salty chill of the North Sea,' (South Riding, Bk I.4, p 58) her mind sociologically observes the 'spotted youths' and little girls with rat-tailed hair' who swim beside her, (South Riding, Bk I.4, p 59). She does not turn her mind to Andre Breton's surrealist dictum: 'nothing but the marvelous is beautiful.'
The chilly North Sea. Notice how muddy the inshore waters are.
Feminism
What temporarily dissolves the class and cultural barriers between Sarah and Mrs Marsh at the Grand Gala is a mutual appreciation of their femininity and vulnerability: 'They had shared an experience,' (South Riding, Bk I.7, p 85). Astell refuses to allow himself any similar softening, indeed he comes to feel that South Riding is irrelevant to the work he wants to do. He sees the front-line as being the Clyde amidst a militant workforce that he believes will become the Leninist shock-troops of a Bolshevik revolution. By contrast Sarah realises that the struggle for feminism is equally intense throughout the country. This revolution will not be won by one spectacular, violent upheaval but by constant cultural change; Sarah has to wage an unending war of attrition against those who think a woman's place is in the home. This attitude cuts across classes and across genders. Sarah's deputy head, Dolores believes most of her pupils will only 'help their mothers run lodging houses till they marry,' (South Riding, Bk I.7, p 72), whilst Mr Holly takes it as axiomatic that Lydia, his eldest girl, will take over the duties of a mother to her siblings when Mrs Holly dies.
As the text makes clear changing expectations will take money as well as time. Throughout the book Sarah is having to plead for more spending on girls' education: ' How would you like to run a school with a basement full of black beetles?' (South Riding, Bk II.4, p 126) as well as trying to re-educate the expectations of not only society but her pupils. Sarah divides them into three groups that have different 'spontaneous' interests: breeding, game-playing and social justice and she expects little social awareness from the first two groups(South Riding, Bk II.4, p 125).
Within the text Lydia Holly would seem to be Sarah's greatest triumph, a girl who is given a scholarship that will allow her the education to escape The Shacks. However this triumph is placed in an ironic and tragic perspective. The death of Lydia's mother has given her a bitterness she is never likely to outgrow: 'Lydia hated it, [the baby] refusing to give tenderness to what killed her mother' (South Riding, Bk VII.2, p 444) even if it has given her a determination to succeed 'all the more because of her hostility' (South Riding, Bk VIII.5,p 554). If she becomes a school teacher eventually will her life be any better than Miss Sigglesthwaite?
Miss Sigglesthwaite is among the first women to win scholarships at Cambridge (South Riding, Bk VI.2 p 367). She is an accomplished scientist, who was encouraged to research, but she could not afford to do so for no one would pay her to do so (South Riding, Bk III.5, p 187). Instead she finds herself forced to teach, a job she hates, in order to support her mother and sister. Though her mind is part of the twentieth century, she is trapped by 19th century job opportunities and expectations. When she resigns, the only job she can find is the almost extinct position of 'lady's companion' (South Riding, Bk VIII.5, p 472), the job Osbert Sitwell's Before the Bombardment assumed would not survive the changes introduced by the Great War. Sarah regrets the waste of a good mind: '"So there goes the most distinguished scientist we have ever had on our staff - or ever will have," she thought, and her heart rebuked her.'(South Riding, Bk VIII.5, p 473).
Freud
South Riding is a Freudian book in so far as it has carefully absorbed Freud's central ideas about the repression and sublimation of sexual energy and the unpredictable patterns in which sexuality might be expressed. The text does not use Freud's distinctive terms but is just as detached and objective in its analysis of human behaviour and reference to what society could regard as 'perversions'.
Like Freud, Holtby is interested in hysteria. The repressed sexuality and anger of Miss Sigglesthwaite are eventually expressed as violent rage as she hits one of her pupils, Midge Carne. She has been provoked by Midge, a girl who is described in the first chapter as having 'an outburst of hysteria' exactly like that her mother Muriel had. This was caused by Muriel's 'announcement that she was going to bear his [Carne's] child', (South Riding, Bk I.1, p 23). In the mother's case this attack of hysteria has a sexual source; she realises that she has lost control of her own body, but she makes her resented fertility into a form of perverse power. As Midge grows up Muriel taunts her husband, claiming that Midge is not his. Eventually the mother goes mad, leaving behind the problem of Midge. Are Midge's attacks the attempts of a bored child to get attention or a hereditary mental disorder? The book finishes without resolving the question of her sanity or her parentage. She is adopted by her mother's father. In the days before DNA testing, all that can be know is that Midge is unquestionably her mother's daughter.
In the encounter between Agnes Sigglesthwaite and Midge, Holtby brings two popular story patterns to a disturbing climax. A more conventionally feminist novel might have described Agnes's struggle to get to Cambridge and concluded with her triumphant acceptance of a degree. Similarly the story of Midge at school subverts another winning formula; the girls' school story. The genre came into being before the First World War, pioneered by its most successful author Angela Brazil, who had became famous by the 1920s. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/rare-books/authors/angela-brazil.shtml
In outline the story of Midge looks like a standard Brazil plot; a lonely girl who feels she's an outsider, becomes a popular member of a school elite. In practice Midge becomes popular because she focuses the school elite's snobbery into deriding Miss Sigglesthwaite as 'the sigglesback - a bony little creature - cold-blooded - lives in mud', (South Riding, Bk VI.2, p 365). As part of a post-Freudian generation their derision has a sexual edge: 'The sigglesback never mates; it is too bony. Also it has a most peculiar smell. It builds nests in its hair for breeding purposes', (South Riding, Bk VI.2, p 367). This book is bluntly called 'Mental Deficiency'. Specifically this has to do with the visit paid by Mrs Beddows to the South Riding Mental Hospital but the subtitle hangs over Midge and Miss Sigglesthwaite. Simultaneously it ironises the courtship of Barney Holly and Jessy Brimsley and the encounter between Sarah and Carne. Chapter 6's heading 'Two in a Hotel are Temporarily insane', reinforces the point.
Sarah struggles throughout the text to reconcile her sexual needs and her role as headmistress. Book 1.5 introduces the conflict as comedy: 'Sarah was about to wink back when she remembered that she was nearly forty and a head mistress,' (South Riding, Bk I.5, p 53) and the final glimpse of Sarah, 'aware of approving eyes upon her,' does not suggest the pain this conflict will cause, (South Riding, Bk I.5, p 60). Sarah's conflict is intensified because, like Mary in Anderby Wold, she is sexually attracted to a political enemy. This attraction is treated with sympathy and irony. Sarah enjoys and is defined by her independence but, when she helps Carne deliver a calf, she finds herself responding sexually to his mastery: 'Sarah found a strange satisfaction in obeying his commands, accepting his domination, working with him in silent co-operation,' (South Riding, Bk III.6, p 197). By contrast there is no sexual attraction between herself and her political ally Astell. Sarah tries to decide if she is in love with Carne but her longing for him is predominantly physical. Dancing makes this clear: 'And suddenly this contact of her body with his, which she desired so hungrily, became unbearable,' (South Riding, Bk VI.6, p 417). The conflict between desire and reputation, what Freud might have called one of the discontents of civilisation, is temporarily won by desire. The text turns the incident into dark comedy, not least because where Sarah sees the encounter as 'the end' , (South Riding, Bk VI.6, p 425), Carne is complacent and does not realise what Sarah risks: 'He had not been surprised by her advances. He knew that women found him attractive and he liked them,' Double standards survive.
Elsewhere Sarah can be frank and unembarrassed about human sexual possibilities. In 1928 the Well of Loneliness was banned because of its 'invert' theme, in 1933 Sarah can consider Lydia's openly and calmly: 'she's not more homosexual than any other romantic adolescent, ' (South Riding, Bk IV.4, p 208 ). The text places this frankness amidst a gallery of case-studies; Snaith, who has been sexually abused as a child and lives amongst neutered cats, Huggins, who struggles to reconcile his passionate religious and sexual urges, and Muriel, whose obsession with horses and riding, darkens the sexual struggle between herself and her husband Carne.
Primitive Methodist Chapel Burstwick
Huggins is a Methodist, not a Primitive Methodist but he would have preached in buildings with similar architecture.
War
Of all the characters in South Riding, Sarah is the one most aware of the threat of a second world war. The memories of the First World War that overcome her during Madame Hubbard's concert are intensified by fears that anything she creates will be destroyed in the conflict to come. Snaith and Astell are too preoccupied by their plans to think of external threats, though Astell eventually addresses the problem in a letter to Sarah: 'even if another war should come and gas choke your girls and bombs shatter your classrooms, something will have changed, something will have been made better by the good work you did there, ' (South Riding, Epilogue at a Silver Jubilee, p 578). Astell is aware this reassurance is irrational and insubstantial: 'That's as near to mysticism as I ever get,' (South Riding, Epilogue at a Silver Jubilee, p 578) , but it is all that the book can offer. Astell has had a Jewish wife but it is Sarah whose Jewish friend Ernst has been murdered in Hitler's Germany: 'some said, beaten to death at the Dachau concentration camp,' (South Riding, Bk V.3, p 303 ). Her fears of a possible war against totaslitarian countries inform her hopes and plansfor her school and her country. The internalisation of these fears ins indicated by the way her perception of Mussolini's appearance and personality informs the sexual tension between her and Carne: 'he's just like Mussolini,' (South Riding, Bk VII.5, p 480 ).
By contrast with Sarah, many of the inhabitants of South Riding, find it hard to deal with thoughts of a new war because they have not recovered from the traumas of World War I. Huggins sees a bomber and fighter in training and responds: 'Pretty things, eh? '(South Riding, Bk VII.3, p 451 ). His labourer, Spurling is less enchanted: 'When you don't think what they're for,' (South Riding, Bk VII.3, p 451). Consequently Huggins finds painful memories revive: 'He had lived through air raids even if he had not, like Spurling, been to Flanders,' (South Riding, Bk VII.3, p 451).
Here Holtby reminds readers of the Zeppelin attacks on Hull in the Great War; eight raids that killed 54 people in total:
L!4 leaves Nordholtz to attack Hull, March 4-5, 1916
Nevertheless this does not stop Huggins putting up a 'huge Union Jack' in his yard on Jubilee Day: (South Riding, Epilogue at a Silver Jubilee, p 578)
'Pretty things, eh?'
The most modern heavy bomber that the RAF had in 1933 was the Handley Page Hinaildi. (serving 1925-35)
Its fuselage was metal but otherwise it was similar to its Great War predecessors.
A Hinaildi is imagined in flight over the coast south of Hornsea.
The Gloucester Gauntlet, an RAF fighter in use from 1933-1943
Some saw action in North Africa up to 1940.
This machine is illustrated flying over Hornsea
By 1935 Britain was starting to rearm and new airfields were built at Driffield and Finningley. By 1943 Yorkshire had 41 front-line and service airfields capable of supplying heavy bombers for the '1,000 Bomber' night raids on Germany. Winifred observed the RAF using Mappleton beach, between Hornsea and Withernsea, for bombing practice in spring of 1935 (Shaw, p 61), but she would not live to see the heavy bombers of World War II. Where the Heyford carried 2,000 pounds of bombs on its wings, the four engined Halifaxes and Lancasters were capable of carrying 12,000 and 22,000 pounds of bombs, respectively, internally. (http://www.raf.mod.uk/) At their most intense, raids started firestorms in Hamburg, (1943) Darmstadt (1944) and Dresden (1945)
http://www.onlinemilitaryeducation.org/posts/10-most-devastating-bombing-campaigns-of-wwii/
A Handley-Page Heyford; the latest RAF heavy bomber of 1934. (served 1937-41)
This aircraft is carrying bombs and swinging round over Barmston to 'attack' Mappleton.
All these aircraft were dangerously obsolete compared to all the planes the Luftwaffe sent to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
They were even outmatched by the contemporary Italian airforce, that was not as advanced as the German.
For more details of these planes see: http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/cosford/
The last view readers get of South Riding is an air view as Sarah flies over the county on Jubilee Day. The ominous implication is that this is the view a bomber will have in the next war: 'This is England, Sarah thought. The bulwark that no longer fortifies,' (South Riding, Epilogue at a Silver Jubilee, p 578) In this perspective the large Union flag Huggins displays in his yard shrinks to 'a solitary dot of colour,' (South Riding, Epilogue at a Silver Jubilee, p 578) and Sarah's crash anticipates the disasters of a war to come.
South Riding Legacy:
Air Raid Memorial:
Modern Hull pays testimony to the hopes and fears of Sarah Burton and her creator. A second world war did break out as Sarah feared: 'She longed to save and to redeem them, no longer from the nauseating inadequacy of the well-intentioned Hubbards, but from the splintering shrapnel, the fog of poison gas.' (South Riding, Book 1, Chapter 7, p85). Though poison gas was not used, many civilians died in the constant air-raids that tried to close down Hull, then Britain's third largest port. The memorial is in Cottingham Municipal Cemetery, where Philip Larkin is buried.
'Kingston-Upon- Hull In Memory of those civilians killed in enemy air raids over this city 1939-45'
The writing appears out of focus but the metal letters are raised from the stone backdrop and cast shadows.
The air raid casualties were around 1,200 killed and 3,000 injured (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_Blitz). The shipping that sailed from Hull was intensively targeted as well. Not only members of the Royal Navy but also civilian sailors of the Merchant Navy and fishing trawlers were killed. The Roll of Honour at http://www.mnahull.org.uk/memorial.html shows how international such crews were.
Winifred Holtby School:
There is a Winifred Holtby Academy, for 11-16 year olds, where the Lydia Hollys of modern Hull can be educated.
The Winifred Holtby Academy
Photo C Tom McCarthy IT & Web consultant, Winifred Holtby Academy 2014
Sarah would have envied the clean, modernist lines and the extrovert modern sculpture, but most of all she would have envied the fact this is a purpose built school. Sarah has to cope with a grudgingly assembled improvisation: ‘four grim tall apartments houses were bought cheap on Kiplington North Cliff,...walls were knocked down; dining rooms became classrooms’ (Book 1, Chapter 2 p23). As Sarah discovers, the place is insanitary and ‘beetle-haunted’ (Book 1, Chapter 7, p73).
Hull University:
Of more interest to the Reverend Milward Peckover, one of the governors of Kiplington Girl’s High School, might be the expansion of the University of Hull since its foundation in 1927.
Or perhaps not. The Reverend Peckover's ambitions for his daughters are more snobbish and traditional, except in their implicit feminism: 'They might even do what he had never done - win scholarships to Oxford and the Sorbonne,' (Book 1 Chapter 2, p24).
The oldest parts of Hull university have an atmosphere of a private school or a town hall; modern concrete extensions provide a pragmatic contrast.
The Derwent Building The Brynmore Jones Library, modern extension
Philip Larkin worked here.
The Larkin Building.
This is the entrance to the brick building glimpsed on the right of the Brymor library in the previous photograph.
http://www2.hull.ac.uk/
Opposite the main entrance to the university, what is now the International Office has an unexpected literary connection, commemorated in the blue plaque to the left of the white part of the banner.
The International Office
It was here that J. R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, recovered after being sent back to England from the Somme in 1917.
http://www2.hull.ac.uk/news_and_events-1/news_archive/2013newsarchive/november/blueplaquejrrtolkien.aspx
The Tolkien Plaque
South Riding is permeated with memories of World War I, through the memories of many of its protagonists. In Lord of the Rings Tolkien's memories of the Somme are translated into the poisoned landscapes of Mordor and The Dead Marshes.
Holtby Gardens:
Other developments might be less congenial to the socialist Winifred. A new housing development of 'stunning, 2,3,4, bedroom homes' is aimed at 'young professionals and growing families'. The kind of 'growing families' they have in mind are probably not like the Hollys...
A sign of the times, some 200 meters away from the Holtby's
Cottingham house Bainesse
The Humber Bridge and Humberside
In 1928 there was a more ambitious plan for revitalising Holderness than a mere road. This was the date of the first proposal to build a bridge over the Humber to improve transport links with the south. The Great Depression forced cancellation of the plans. The bridge was eventually built between 1973 and 1981 as a road bridge.
(http://www.humberbridge.co.uk/explore_the_bridge/bridge_history_and_detail/history.php)
Under the Humber Bridge on the north bank
The bridge formed the centre-point of the new county of ‘Humberside’ that, on April 1 1974, united territory on the north and south banks of the Humber as one administrative unit. The county was not popular and was eventually dissolved on April 1 1996. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberside)
The Humber Bridge: in Holtby's day on the left was Yorkshire; on the right Lincolnshire.
According to popular oral history, construction was delayed in the drought summer of 1976 when hordes of ladybirds descended on the bridge, biting the workforce.
South Riding stops before it is clear what economic impact the new road will have on the Kingsport/Kiplington area but the effect of the Humber Bridge has been equivocal. Despite having the highest toll fees in Britain, the bridge has had constant problems with debt and in 2012 the government deferred £150 million of this debt. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humber_Bridge).
Nevertheless it is a striking piece of architecture and has become one of the landmarks of the lowlands of the Humber basin.
Under the bridge, looking towards Lincolnshire
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