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Winifred Holtby
A simulacrum after a simulacrum...
A drawing based on the 1939 portrait by Frederick Howard Lewis, based on a photograph of Winifred.
The end and the beginning are close. The plaque commemorating Winifred Holtby’s birthplace stands on the gate of a large house beside a farm, Rudston House in the valley below the church yard of Rudston where her grave lies.
Winifred Holtby: Plaque on gate-post, Rudston House Winifred Holtby's Grave, Rudston Churchyard
The plaque reminds viewers of Winfred's public importance. By contrast the grave, as Marion Shaw 's biography The Clear Stream (London,
Virago, 2011) points out,reclaims the private Winifred. The grave records Holtby the daughter, not Hotlby the novelist.
Against this view it can be pointed out that Winifred ends the 'Prefatory Letter to ALDERMAN MRS HOLTBY', the 'explanation and apology' that opens up South Riding, with the words: 'At least let me record one perfect thing: the proud delight which it has meant to me to be the daughter of Alice Holtby'.
The gravestone echoes Winfred's assertion of the bond between her and her mother.
Rudston House, entrance to driveway. Rudston House, concealed from the road
The plaque is on the left gate post. by high fence and large trees.
It is a measure of the ambiguity of Holtby’s fame that the plaque is not a large official blue one, but a small private tribute on the gate post of a house that protects its privacy with high trees and a long drive. It was here Winifred grew up in a family of gentleman farmers in a house that encodes status as withdrawal, rather than display.
Winifred’s Grave
Winifred Holtby is buried in Rudston churchyard. The Christian churchyard bears evidence of the Neolithic religious monuments that once dominated the landscape. An old bank cuts between higher and lower churchyard. This could be part of a bank marking the edge of the first graveyard or part of the Neolithic henge monuments that lie to the north of Rudston. These ‘henges’ were earthworks, usually in large curving shapes, that delineated sacred ground.
The bank separates the upper and lower churchyard, running through the middle of this photograph between house and tree.
Centuries of ploughing have left little trace of the henges in the fields near Rudston; what is remorselessly evident is the largest standing stone in Britain that probably formed the focus of the henge complex. It stands in the highest point of the churchyard. The church was built some 9 metres to the south of the monolith, as if sharing whilst displacing its authority. As the stone has almost as much of its bulk underground as above ground, toppling it would be difficult.
The Rudston monolith
The Sexton's Tale:
These traces of prehistory did not prove much of an inspiration for Winifred. The monolith is mentioned in the humorous short story ‘The Sexton’s Tale’, where it is the hammer of Rud, a Robin Hood like figure, who hates clergy and Norman barons. In this tale the standing stone is Rud's 'little hammer' that comes down 'smack on the wicked Baron's head' before 'the villagers set light to the church and burn it down, all except the tower' (Pavements at Anderby, London, Collins, 1937, 'The Legend of Rudston' 1935, pps75-83, p 82). The tone is comic, the style is light dialect, but the story coincides with Stalin's 'Five Year Plan of Atheism' in which Russian churches were destroyed and priests executed. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2012/05/stalins-five-year-plan-for-atheism/.
In this perspective the comedy becomes darker and the irony exists at the expense of Left as well as Right. A similar stance is evident in her book Eutychus; or the Future of the Pulpit (1928), where her Everyman, Eutychus falls asleep during a humanist sermon influenced by H. G. Wells. (Shaw, p 213). In other contexts Winifred expressed a revulsion for the history of the church: 'it is bloodstained' (Shaw, p 36). 'The Sexton's Tale' allows some of this anger to be expressed and yet mocked.
Pavements at Anderby:
A mosaic floor of a Roman villa was discovered at Rudston by a farmer in 1933 and is now displayed in the Hull and East Riding museum (http://www.mylearning.org/rudston-venus-mosaic/p-4310/)
The discovery forms the basis of Winifred's ominous short story 'Pavements at Anderby: A.D. 707-A.D. 3406' (Pavements at Anderby, pps 15-30) She changes the mosaic from a representation of Venus with a mirror and apple, to a 'girl in a grey -blue tunic, her black hair bound with red, starting back in dismay from a fallen mirror' (p 19). The mosaic now represents the fall of Rome and the man who commissions it, Flavius, is killed three years afterwards by 'red-haired pirates' (p 20). In 1933 the mosaic is unearthed by Ted Burroughs and it makes his fortune until he is killed in a second world war, that breaks out in 1951: 'he rushed out in frenzied anguish and fell under the chance-dropped bomb that scattered the fine mosaic.' (p 25). So far the story embodies a pessimism akin to Oswald Spengler. In Spengler's 1926-28 book The Decline of the West he traces a constant pattern in history; the rise of civilisations, their defeat by barbarians and the gradual re-creation of civilisation by the barbarians. Yeats' 1938 poem 'Lapis Lazuli' is a brief, intense summary of Spenglerean ideas showing the work of craftsmen destroyed by barbarians who eventually become craftsmen in turn. It is a pessimism associated with the political right of the 1930s, rather than the left. Winifred's story moves away from right-wing pessimism when it jumps to A.D. 3406 but the tone becomes more ambiguous. No actual war seems imminent but it appears the price of peace is constant vigilance. The man and woman who have been forced to retire, decide to return to the 'unending struggle against the forces of chaos and destruction, since no retreat in the world held lasting safety, and peace and beauty were brought by constant effort,' (p 30).
Take Back Your Freedom
The story does not make it clear what 'constant effort' entails. The rise of dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, preaching doctrines of aggression, war and anti-feminism, represented a particular challenge to Holtby as a pacifist, socialist and feminist. Her journalism of the 1930s shows how alive to the threat she was (Shaw, 158/9). Her play Take Back Your Freedom (1934) cannot imagine a solution to the rise of the Oswald Mosely-like Arnold Clayton, except assassination.
Had she lived through World War II, this pragmatism might have caused tension with Vera Brittain's idealism. During the war Brittain reasserted her pacifist credo: 'humiliation with honour' in two short works: Humilation With Honour and Seed of Chaos (US title Massacre by Bombing). The former imagines offering generous peace terms to try to break the hold Hitler has over Germany; the second deplores the killing of civilians in the bombing offensive against Germany. The latter text was attacked by George Orwell in Tribune ('As I Please' 19 May, 1944 http://www.orwelltoday.com/orwellwaryoungwhy.shtml) and by President Roosevelt (Vera Brittain One Voice: Pacifist Writings From the Second World War, Int. Y. Aleksandra Bennett, London, Continuum, 2005, p.xviii). Brittain's fervent Christian defence: 'I must take Christ as my guide before even the President.' (Bennett, p.xix) is not one Winfred would have shared.
Winifred knew how important bombing would be in the next war. When she stayed at Hornsea and Withernsea she was aware of the RAF bombing training that went on at Mappleton, on the coast between the two resorts. The erosion of 2012 exposed evidence: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2177528/Landslide-uncovers-1-000-deadly-WW2-bombs-Mappleton-beach-East-Riding.html
The bombing campaign of 1941-45 might have forced her to ask some of the awkward questions Orwell raised in opposition to Seed of Chaos. Orwell's essay pragmatically exposes the assumption at the heart of civilian objections to aerial warfare and total war:
'The catchwords used in this connection are "killing civilians", "massacre of women and children" and "destruction of our cultural heritage". It is tacitly assumed that air bombing does more of this kind of thing than ground warfare,'
He ends with the most radical question: 'Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?'
It is a question raised by total war in two ways:
The World Wars of the Twentieth Century depended on conscription, training civilians as rapidly as possible, to be parts of forces designed to kill . The distinction that many countries, such as Britain, traditionally sought to make between small armed forces and the bulk of the population was instantly broken down. Conscription in Britain also included women. Though they did not actually fight, as in Russia, they performed essential jobs that released men for the front line.
Women who work in factories or on the land are providing supplies that sustain the armed effort of their country. As essential cogs in the war machine are they not equally legitimate targets?
Regional Writing:
Early reviewers saw Winfred as writing in the tradition of E. C. Booth, if only because both wrote about the Holderness area of Yorkshire. However, there was nothing regional about Winifred's life or her politics:
1917: Somerville College Oxford
1918: WAACS
1922: Lives with Vera Brittain in London. Lectures for League of Nations union
1926: Lecture tour in South Africa. Helps unionise black labourers.
1931: Works for prospective Labour MP Gordon Caitlin (Vera's husband) in his unsuccessful attempt to be elected.
(Shaw, pxi-xiii)
Her international perspective on politics were most clearly reflected in 1933's Mandoa! Mandoa!, a satirical novel set in a fictitious African country and 1931's equally satirical Poor Caroline. Here Caroline's London based campaign to Christianise the morality of the cinema, attracts self-interested support from individuals whose origins and ambitions are global and anything but moral.
Nevertheless the bulk of her work explores her family roots in Yorkshire. 1923's Anderby Wold is set near Rudston and incorporates a fictionalised version of the 1918 farm strike that caused her father to give up farming. (Shaw, xii). 1924's The Crowded Street shows pre-war suburban life in a fictionalised Cottingham and the shelling of Scarborough. 1927's The Land of Green Ginger combines glimpses of Hull with the Pennine setting of East Witton, where her mother's family came from. 1935's South Riding is closely enough based on her mother's career as a Hull alderman to cause tension between the two. Each of these books is pervaded by powerful socialist and feminist themes that effectively de-regionalise the novels. The struggle for unionisation is similar in the Wolds and the Veld; the obstacles to feminism are found in Coverdale just as much as in Hull. Each text is aware of history as a continuous process and Holtby attempts to identify the most significant strands of continuity and development.
Coverham Abbey, Coverdale, west of East Witton where Winifred's mother came from: history as process.
What was once an abbey, endowed by Richard III, became a private home after the dissolution of the monasteries.
What was once land reserved for a metaphorical flock, dedicated to the Good Shepherd, is now grazed by real sheep.
The typical Pennine dry-stone walls that fence in the sheep have been reinforced by shaped blocks of ashlar that one were part of the monastery.
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