Holtby Anderby Wold

In 'Pavements at Anderby' 'Anderby' is clearly Rudston.  In Winfred's first novel Anderby Wold (1923) the farm, so successfully run by the dynamic Mary Robson and her stolid husband John, seems somewhere between Rudston and the estate of Sledmere.   The novel opens with a social visit in which the status and achievement of Mary is made clear through the jealous eyes of John's sister Sarah, invited to celebrate the paying off of the farm mortgage. This is akin to the opening of a Jane Austen novel such as Sense and Sensibility, where the economic and social parameters governing a woman's opportunities are made ominously clear.  

There are important differences.  Jane Austen's books end with a marriage where the heroine has miraculously combined love with economic security; Anderby Wold explores Mary's realisation of the romantic sterility of her marriage as she gradually falls in love with another man.   Jane Austen does not question the social hierarchy that affords rich livings to the few and poverty for the many, other than by distinguishing between the paternal patronage offered by the feudal Darcy and the degrading patronisation offered by Lady Catherine De Bourgh in Pride And Prejudice.  Anderby Wold observes the breakdown of a rural system of tradition and deference as the farm workers of the Wolds become unionised and go on strike.   Mary takes the men's demands bitterly and personally: 'You've know me for eight and twenty years ... I tell you that you're being offered a fair wage.'  Anderby Wold, London, Virago, 1984, p246) Though the strike is resolved relatively quickly, by the end Mary gives up farming.  The end of the old feudal order is hinted at in the chapter titles; the book moves from 'Full Suzerainty', through 'The Kingdom' to 'Abdication'.   There is a biographical strain here as well.  Winifred's father gave up farming after a farm strike and the family moved from the Wolds to the suburban village Cottingham, adjoining Hull (Shaw, p31-2).   

The sharpest combination of these two themes of socially imprisoned woman and the price of privilege come in the short story 'The Creditors'.  Here, after the death of her controlling father, spinster  Lucy Purdon discovers the income that supports her genteel life in the spa town of Harrogate is based on slum dwellings in the mining town of Mortock.  Though Mortock is invented, Harrogate is real enough, and remains a desirable spot for refined retirement, however funded.   

Unlike, Lucy, Mary is aware of and involved in the production of her livelihood.  The basis of the wealth of hre farm is the rich chalk soil of the Wolds: 'Beyond, the bank dropped abruptly two or three feet to a tangle of tall sweet grasses, between the dark hedge and solid golden wall of wheat.' ( Anderby Wold, p211).  'Golden' is more than a decorative word.  The land has been rich and created riches: 'since those far-off years when the Danes broke in across the headland' (Anderby Wold, p240).  Though the Wolds are hills, the northern curve of the range, from Driffield to Bridlington,  have gentle slopes which allow ploughing from base to summit. 

Looking south from Rudston churchyard. 

Both valley and hills are ploughed and planted.  Plantation woods dominate the skyline to provide shelter for game birds and windbreaks for farms.

Ironically the chapter called 'The Fruitful Ground' shows this territory as ripe for political agitation.   Simultaneously the fertility of Anderby Wold  points out the infertile, childless, sexless marriage in which Mary is trapped.   Anderby is a small place, policed by gossip, fruitful in rumours, inhabited by many who are jealous of Mary, either personally or politically and are glad to watch her fall.  

Despite her pretentions to queenship, Mary is no more than a well-off landowner, whilst the Darcy of Anderby Wold is Sir Charles Seton, who seems based on Sir  Mark Sykes of Sledmere, a village and stately home ten miles east of Rudston.  

Sledmere

Sir Mark Sykes was part of the Sykes family based in the house and estate of Sledmere, a family with an ambitious history of building.    One of his forebears, Sir Tatton Sykes,  is commemorated by the Sir Tatton Sykes monument of 1857  that stands beyond the Capabilty Brown landscape of Sledmere House on a ridge of the Wolds. The name 'Tatton' is taken from the Tatton family that married into the Sykes family. 

The Tatton Sykes Monument, stands beside the B1252

like a stone rocket, awaiting launch.  It is visible for 

miles from the south. 

The Tatton Sykes Monument depicts Sir Tatton Sykes as he wanted to be remembered by posterity: ‘loved him as a friend and honoured him as a landlord’ as the inscription that circles the monument states.  It shows him as a countryman and horseman, no doubt a hunter, a figure reminiscent of Carne in South Riding but neither Carne’s house, nor estate, is a match for Sledmere.

         Sir Tatton Sykes, Baronet, as mounted gentleman                                    At each corner of the monument is a monogram of his initials.

            One facet of the monument reveals                                                                        A close-up shows a house above the plough;

             the source of his wealth; the plough.                                                                        not a stately home, like Sledmere, but a

                                                                                                                                    place more like Rudston House or Maythorpe Hall.  

The Monument is surrounded by a moat.  No doubt the gate pillars originally had a gate isolating this construction  from common passers-by.  Originally a key could be obtained from the nearby lodge so people could ascend the building and look out of the windows at the top.  Now a view plaque points out the sites visible from the base, including the Humber Bridge, some 35 miles south.   

    The moat is the dark line in the foreground; the gate posts are                 The view to the south.  In the foreground is the weed-choked moat,

                    on the left opening from the B1252 .                                              beyond are agricultural fields; the blue haze on the horizon is

                                                                                                                   the hinterland of Beverley, Hull and the River Humber.     

Anderby Wold  does not mention the grandeur of the estate of Sledmere and the stately home at the heart of it, but the link between the fictional Sir Peter and the actual Sir Mark is that both hold waggon competitions.  Chapter XIII depicts 'Waggon Day' in June when both waggons and horses are decorated.  The chapter is called 'The Shadow on the Wheat'.  In the context of the story, set in 1912, this refers to the looming labour difficulties but, looked at from the perspective of 1923,  Holtby would be aware that Sykes’ organisation of waggoners was undertaken with the possibility of a war in mind and the wagons that are seen gaily decorated in Chapter  XIII of Anderby Wold would have seen service in France two years later.  Anderby wold spells 'waggoners' and 'waggon' in the older style with two 'g's; South Riding uses the more modern form 'wagon'.   

The Sykes family commemorated their men's  exploits in France with the Wagoner’s Memorial.   This employs a cartoon style to show Germans burning churches and attacking women in Belgium before being driven off by gallant Yorkshiremen.

 The Wagoner's Monument beside the B1253 

that curves past Sledmere  House.

Unlike the aristocratic structure of the nearby 

Eleanor Cross and Tatton Sykes monument , it is 

low and squat.   The wall behind encloses some of the 

work buildings of the estate.

The top panels curving round the monument show a pre-war work force labouring happily on the land, without a hint of discontent, let alone strikes, before dutifully enlisting for war.

This panel is called 'Mobilisation' .  The sturdy labourer in the middle               The caption below this carving says: "This was the course of the 

is being given what appear to be call-up papers by the soldier on the                annual competition. 'The Sun' (? the inscription is worn), Fimber                                            right.                                                                                                              Fields".

                                                                                                                   Fimber is a village 5 miles south west of Sledmere on the B1251.

Evidently part of 'Wagon Day' was a competitive circuit of a course marked out in a field, designed to train the wagoners in moving army supplies fast over challenging landscapes.   Anderby Wold  does not show this but South Riding depicts a wagon event as one of the highlights of the Flintonbridge Agricultural Show: 'the wagoners driving at a hand [hard?] gallop down the track and between the stakes that left only an inch or two on each side of the thundering wheels.  It was impossible not to catch one's breath as they swept rattling past the stand.' (South Riding, p293).  Something similar must have taken place in Fimber Fields.    

The largest agricultural show in the East Riding is the Driffield Show, that has been going on since the 1850s.   This would seem to make 'Flintonbridge' into Driffield, though it is not sited where Driffield is on Holtby's preliminary sketch map of South Riding.  

                                                              Returning to the wagoners of the monument:

Here ordinary labourers bid their women-folk farewell and walk

to Driffield or York to enlist.

                      The need for them to go is evident,                                                           These photos show how the narrative

                   the Germans are committing atrocities,                                                    is arranged.  Top = pre-war, middle = transition

                   burning churches and killing women in                                                     bottom = war.  In the bottom picture one brave

                      Belgium and France, (bottom panel).                                                    Yorkshireman holds off a mob of Germans, one

                                                                                                                               armed with a saw-edged bayonet, whilst wagoners

                                                                                                                          calmly unload a wagon, though the sky is filled with shells.

Immediately after the war and again in the 1950s-60s there was a cultural inclination to treat accounts of German atrocities in Belgium as incidents invented or exaggerated by propaganda.  In recent years historians have reexamined the use of force against civilians by the German army during WWI and seen this as a calculated tactic to intimidate populations in the hope of holding down conquered territory and deterring resistance.  (See Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Cultur and Mass Killing in the first world War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007).  As part of this policy elements of the German battle fleet attacked the Yorkshire coast on December 15-16 1914 (http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/raid_yorkshire_coast_1914.html).  Winifred Holtby was in Scarborough when Scarborough was shelled during this raid; she incorporated the raid in her 1924 novel The Crowded Street. 

When the novelist Edith Wharton wrote her reports of the French front line in Fighting France From Dunkerque to Belport (1914-15), she did not report hearsay accounts of atrocities against civilians but interviewed survivors of the destruction of Gerbervilller herself (Republished reprint 2013, p48-52).  

As far as the memorial is concerned, all ends happily as a German flees a Tommy in a scene captioned 'Marne':

Nothing about this monument reminds the viewer that the Battle of the Marne was the start, not the finish of a war that would grind on until 1918, by which time even the smallest Wolds villages had sent and lost men in the war.    Anderby Wold expects all its readers to know that that this is the fate awaiting the world of fiction and fact in 1912.