Yorkshire Social Realist Writers:Home

Yorkshire: traditional boundaries from a map of 1938.

The dotted lines represent the three old Ridings ('third-ings) of Yorkshire.

York was at the centre; Monk Bar opened on city lands but 

Bootham Bar  opened on the North Riding,

Walmgate Bar opened on the East Riding

Micklegate Bar on the West Riding.

These boundaries are re-asserted by The Ridings Society  on Yorkshire Day (August 1).

http://www.yorkshireridings.org/news/introduction-to-the-socie.html

Jonathan Brockbank, Department of English and Related Literature,

University of York

(All text and illustrations C Jonathan Brockbank, unless otherwise noted.)

     The Larkin Statue in the Concourse of Hull Railway Station.                          What looks like a shadow cast by the figure is a quote 

  The statue is 7 foot tall, so Larkin stands head and shoulders                               from Larkin's poem 'The Whitsun Weddings'.

  above ordinary commuters.  This is not the stance of his poetry.             He is shown walking towards the platforms with his back to                                                                                                                                                                    Hull.

  He has been given an oddly Yeatsean hat and a raincoat that 

  flows like a cloak.   These make him look like the archetypal 

 Romantic Poet, an image he was keen to dispel in his life and

                      work after the poetry of his youth.

The end of the poem is quoted on a plaque in King's Cross Station, London,

some 156 miles south of Hull. 

In effect the statue and plaques have 

commemorated Larkin's escape from not dwelling in Yorkshire...

In 2010 the City Council of Hull commemorated Larkin and his work by commissioning 40 artists to customise toad sculptures.  The toad was chosen because of Larkin's 1954 poem 'Toads' that compares work to a toad.  The enterprise proved controversial and the toads were sold off after the 2010 exhibition ended.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-12823841

One has ended up a couple of houses away from the Hotby family home, on Thwaite Street, Cottingham, where Larkin was a reluctant lodger in the days the building was a residential block for students at Hull University:

               Memorial Plaque to the left of the grand porch                                                          54 Bootham, the birthplace of W. H Auden

Nevertheless the Council has chosen a quote from Auden's 'As I Walked Out One Evening' to decorate the entrance to the Council Offices:

And down by the brimming river,

I heard a lover sing,

Under an arch of the railway,

'Love has no ending'

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/as-i-walked-out-one-evening-3/

Auden quote outside the council offices

There has been some difficulty finding a relevant quote.  The office is not close to the river, the buildings replace those of York's first station and the design features a fractured not 'endless' circle.  The council appear not to have noticed that a later line of the poem is:

  In the burrows of the Nightmare

On the positive side an engagement with the landscape of Yorkshire and how it affects life and livelihood might lead Social Realist writers to write guidebooks.  This was a course taken by Halliwell Sutcliffe, whose most long-lasting book was not a novel but a guidebook about the Yorkshire Dales (The Striding Dales 1929) and by Lettice Cooper, who wrote a guidebook for the West Riding (Yorkshire:West Riding, 1950).  The latter includes details about sites she uses in her fiction.

The Social Realist awareness of how personal and impersonal history intertwine leads just as frequently towards autobiography.   Phyllis Bentley's "O Dreams, O Destinations" (1962) is a tantalising autobiography that gives more insight into the economics and appearance of the West Riding and some of the sites of her books, than it gives into her personal history.    Behind these endeavours may lie the example of Wordsworth.   He wrote not only the epic-length auto-biographical The Prelude, exploring the growth of his poetic sensibility amidst the landscape of his boyhood, a poem left unfinished at his death, but also a guidebook: A Guide Through the District of the Lakes  (1810/1835)

Location and Fiction

Realistic works are frequently aimed at a popular rather than an elite audience and popularity attracts commercial exploitation by film and tourist industries.  Unlike the Modernist experimental novels of Virginia Woolf, such as 1925's Mrs Dalloway, Winifred Holtby's South Riding was a best-seller in its day and has remained commercially viable since its publication in 1936.   The intricate plot of South Riding has led to three adaptations; a 1938 film and two TV  productions, a 1974 ITV version in thirteen episodes and a three part BBC compression in 2011.  By contrast there has only been one film adaptation of Mrs Dalloway in 1997.  However the interests of film makers and tourist centres are not identical.  Because South Riding is set in one of the least picturesque parts of Yorkshire, no tourist trail has been developed.  The tourist industry prefers writers located in more conventionally good-looking parts of Yorkshire.       

 Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden would appear to have excellent potential; the book seems to be a love-letter to Yorkshire written by an expatriate proudly rediscovering her roots: ‘ the wind itself had ceased and a brilliant, deep blue sky arched high over the moorland.’(The Secret Garden, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974, Chap 7 p 55 [1911]).   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Hodgson_Burnett)

In fact it is a celebration of Great Maytham Hall, the country house and gardens Burnett owned, a county house located in Kent.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Maytham_Hall).  The house has been transplanted to Yorkshire at the expense of probability. It is only in imagination that a stately home of such fertility and magnitude can be made to exist on the ‘huge moor, which seemed to spread out on all sides and climb up to the sky’ (The Secret Garden, Chap 5 p 42).  As the Brontes knew, the manor houses of Yorkshire existed in the fertile valleys below the fells, not on top of them.  No Yorkshire house can lay claim to a tourist trade based on The Secret Garden.   

If a fiction cannot be located, then tourism may focus on the author.  In the case of the Brontes, tourist exploitation has concentrated on the places inhabited by the Brontes rather than the vaguer locations of the novels.   A 'Bronte Way' has been constructed that winds through the Pennines but stops before it approaches Little Ouseburn near York.  Here, at Thorpe Green Hall, Anne Bronte was a governess and Patrick Bronte was a tutor.   However, as films, television and tourism have firmly identified the Brontes with Pennine landscapes filled with wuthering heights, their connection with other parts of Yorkshire has been obscured. 

The books that tourism has found most easy to adapt are those which combine an eye for local landscape with a nostalgic or comic tone.   A typical case is the books of ‘James Herriot’.  Scottish vet James Alfred Wight discovered Yorkshire in the course of his working life  and turned the experience into a series of short stories/anecdotes in which Yorkshire becomes a land of spectacular scenery and crusty characters, authored under the pseudonym 'James Herriot' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Herriot) .   This engendered a powerful tourist industry, mostly on the strength of the TV series All Creature Great and Small, developed from his books.   The series initially ran from 1978-1990 but remains available on nostalgia channels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Creatures_Great_and_Small_(TV_series). 

‘The World of James Herriot’, is based round a museum of that name at Thirsk but extends to promote the most picturesque parts of his work and leisure life on the Pennines and North York Moors.  The museum happily merges relics of Wight’s life ‘the car he drove’ with recreation of the ‘TV set’ to create a nostalgic blend of fact and fiction. (http://www.worldofjamesherriot.org/)

A more radical tourist transformation of fact and fiction has been wrought on the village of Goathland by the TV adaptation Heartbeat, transmitted between 1992-2010.  This series was based on the Constable books by former policeman Peter Walker writing as ‘Nicholas Rhea’ and Goathland became ‘Aidensfield’ for the purposes of filming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbeat_(UK_TV_series).  Tourists going to Goathland in 2004 found a list of locations advertised at the National Trust Car Park, including warnings of which scenes were filmed elsewhere.   In the village itself some places had changed their name to match the TV series.  The local shop bore the name ‘Aidensfield’ and ‘Scripps Garage’ had an exterior matching the series, but an interior that sold souvenirs. At the height of the series, around 2000, the Coastliner bus, from Leeds to Whitby, would often have to stop outside the village and send passengers into Goathland  via taxi because the village was sealed off for filming.  The commercial power of television had amplified a work of semi-fiction until it has changed the reality of Goathland itself. 

The 840 Coastliner terminates in the small coastal town of Whitby, which features in the reminiscences of Herriot, and was used for several scenes of Heartbeat.  Despite this, Whitby’s most famous literary connection is being mentioned in Dracula, a book that uses realistic description to move gleefully beyond the limits of social or any other sort of realism.  In a book concerned with the collision between the rational and the irrational, possibly the least rational incident is Dracula’s decision to travel from Transylvania to London via the Baltic.  It is equally irrational of Dracula to pick off so many of the crew that they can’t cope with a storm…   It has more to do with a visit made by Bram Stoker to Whitby in which he admired the cliff top graveyard and may have picked up some of the legends of ghostly black dogs; the ‘Guytrash’ of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.  In all events Whitby has responded gratefully and distinctively.  Noticing the town had become a magnet for the Goth fashion sub-cult, the town has formalised the arrangement by running two Goth Weekends a year, one in spring and one in autumn, carefully sited outside the summer seaside holiday season.   The fantasy of one 19th century writer has become an economic reality, though this has caused some tensions within the community.    In 2011 notices were placed in the graveyard forbidding the taking of photographs of Goths in the churchyard. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8798943/Goths-banned-from-Dracula-graveyard.html

Nevertheless there are various websites devoted to Goths posing in the graveyard in various imaginative garbs: http://www.whitbygothicphotos.co.uk/.  Evidently none have been translated to the point where they cannot be detected by cameras…  

Though tourism does not mind blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, Yorkshire tourist trails and plaques do not frequently run into the problems described in James W Loewen's Lies Across America: What Our Historical Sites Get Wrong, (New York, The New Press, 1999).  Here Loewen points out that many 'historical' monuments in the United States of America actually celebrate the division of America by supporting the racism associated with the secessionist Southern States.  This extends to the creation of false sites, such as a monument to the Confederate dead in Montana when Montana did not exist at the time of the Civil War (Chp 15, pps 102-8).  The problems in Yorkshire are different.  One difficulty is frequently too many not too few sites.  

This telegraph pole next to Hartshead Church connects the site with:

1] The Kirklees Way, a 73 mile long-distance footpath that follows a picturesque circuit of the area.

https://www.ldwa.org.uk/ldp/members/show_path.php?path_name=Kirklees+Way

2] The Spen Way Heritage Trail, a 21 mile walk based round the cultural and historical sites of the Spen Valley.

 http://www.spenvalleycivicsociety.org.uk/things-to-do/spen-way-heritage-trail

3] The Luddite Trail, two walks visiting sites connecting with the Luddite movement.

 http://www.spenvalleycivicsociety.org.uk/things-to-do/luddite-trail

As Patrick Bronte was once a curate in this church, the building features on The Bronte Way as well.  This is a 43 mile trail taking in  the Pennine sites associated with the Brontes.   http://www.bronte-country.com/bronte-way.html  Possibly the telegraph pole was already too crowded to mention this walk...

With so much to choose from, often tourist markers create an ideology through omission not distortion, dominated by perceptions of what might bring visitors to the region.  As tourism becomes a more important money-maker than the heavy industries that dominated the  Calder and Colne valleys, so the trails move into more controversial territory.  

The Luddite Trail

The Luddite Trail is the best example.  It was created in September 2015, several years after a booklet called On The Trail of the Luddites was written by Lesley Kipling and Nick Hall.   Their tour was 'unofficial' in so far as it had no way-markers or council plaques.    The unveiling of an 'official' stature to the Luddites in Liversedge was accompanied by a demonstration because many of the issues confronted by the Luddites are still live. (see Caldervale after the Luddites pages)  The Luddites raised the question of whether men should serve machines or machines men and whether an economy should be run for the benefit of profit or community.   The possible answers to these questions have been heavily politicised and polarised between right and left wing factions from 1812 until today; these issues are the equivalent to the questions about state independence and race raised by the American Civil War.       Where the American Civil War and its symbols, especially the Army of North Virginia 'Confederate' flag, remain controversial in the public eye, the British Civil War has become an entertainment entrusted to enactors who depoliticise the events.  The Battle of Marston Moor may be re-enacted, not the execution of Charles I.   Re-enactments of Civil War battles have become part of the entertainment/tourist industry; re-enactments of Luddite machine-breaking and raiding are part of political protests that occur at Anarchist Book Fairs and historic locations.

 https://undergroundhistories.wordpress.com/living-history/