Ted Hughes's South Yorkshire

Made in Mexborough

Steve Ely

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137499356
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ted Hughes's South Yorkshire tells the untold story of Hughes's Mexborough period (1938-1951) and demonstrates conclusively that Hughes's experiences in South Yorkshire in town and country, educationally, in literature and love were decisive in forming him as the poet of his subsequent fame.

1

Mytholmroyd

Ted Hughes’s childhood in Mytholmroyd (1930–38) has been very well documented, in his own writings and in literary-biographical work. Accordingly, beyond what is necessary to give an outline sketch of the key features of his family background, the Mytholmroyd area at the time of his residence and his significant early experiences there, information that is elsewhere easily available to the general reader will not here be re-presented. The chapter will focus on those aspects of Hughes’s background and childhood that illustrate the influence of the Mytholmroyd area in forming his personality, temperament, attitudes, interests and world-view, thereby shaping his subsequent poetic development. In doing so, a position will be established that will enable judgements to be made about the relative contributions of Mytholmroyd and Mexborough to Hughes’s formation, drawing out what was distinctive and discrete about the impact of each area on him, as well as identifying any continuity of influence between the two towns.

Edward James Hughes was born on 17 August 1930, at 1 Aspinall Street in the West Riding town of Mytholmroyd, the third child of William and Edith Hughes (née Farrar), brother to Gerald (born 1920) and Olwyn (born 1928). Mytholmroyd is a small (locals still refer to it as a ‘village’) Pennine town situated in the deep valley of the River Calder, about 10 miles west of Halifax. Now as then, it is a mix of the rural and the industrial. Wild heather moorland, even wilder weather and enormous luminous skies dominate the high ground above the valley, the wooded sides of which, intermittently opened up by wind-scoured meadows and outcrops of rugged stone (most notably the huge crag of Scout Rock), pour down the steep slopes of the valley and press tight against the blackened stone buildings of the compact little town.

Textiles were the major industry in 1930s Mytholmroyd, and weaving sheds and clothing factories were prominent in the landscape. The Hughes family had close links to the textiles industry. Sutcliffe Farrar, in Mount Pleasant Mill (also known as Banksfield Clothing Works), was established in 1919 by Hughes’s maternal uncles Walter and Thomas Farrar and their partner John Sutcliffe. The factory still exists today on the same Midgley Road site that it occupied in the 1930s, and is owned by Thomas Farrar’s grandchildren and Ted Hughes’s second cousins, John Farrar and Ellen Crossley.¹ Stone quarrying was another significant local industry, and adjacent to Mytholmroyd railway station, through which no fewer than ‘four lines’ passed, was the ‘West Riding’s largest goods yard’,² from which the squealing wheels of shunting freight trains would echo across the valley, providing an evocative soundtrack through the open skylight window of Gerald’s bedroom as he and Ted busied themselves making the kites and model aeroplanes that they would fly from the hills above their home in the Banksfield area of the town. There was a small commercial centre along and just off the main road, including the Co-op by the ‘Navvy Bridge’ over the canal on Midgley Road, but Gerald Hughes remembers the main alternative work to the textiles industry in 1930s Mytholmroyd as being ‘dairy farming or poultry breeding’ (T&I, 26). Mytholmroyd was an early centre for the intensive farming of poultry, with the Thornbers company being a significant employer in the town.³ The countryside around the town was dotted with small farms devoted to raising sheep and cattle. The short growing season, a product of the cold, wet and windy climate, combined with valley sides too steep to plough to preclude arable farming.

In addition to the railway, the Rochdale Canal and the A646 Halifax to Burnley road ran along the valley bottom through the centre of the town. In the 1930s, these were busy arterial routes connecting Mytholmroyd to the wider industrial regions of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and, ultimately, the ports of Hull and Liverpool. Indeed, although its setting was dramatically wild and rural, Mytholmroyd was very much a ‘muck and brass’ industrial town, the built environment characterized by dense rows of workers’ houses, weaving sheds and mills. The housing stock was mainly stone-built terraced houses, generally more solid, roomy and substantial than the red-brick, sometimes jerry-built terraces of lowland industrial Yorkshire that from the autumn of 1938 would provide the Hughes family’s immediate environment. A handful of larger houses were owned by the more prosperous members of the community, such as Walter Farrar, whose substantial stone dwelling, Southfield, was located at Ewood Gate, opposite the cricket ground at the eastern edge of the town. However, the original soft yellow stone of Southfield was, like all the buildings in Mytholmroyd, stained black by smoke from local coal fires and the industrial emissions of Manchester, carried eastward on the wind.

There is a sense in which industrialization in Mytholmroyd evolved much more organically from a prior context of independent farmers and artisans than was the case in many other industrialized areas; one thinks of the utterly transformational effects of the establishment of large-scale textile industries on larger centres such as Manchester, for example, which almost completely effaced the former built environment and swamped the indigenous population with incoming migrant workers, effectively erasing the previous culture. Similar devastating effects can be seen in Yorkshire’s coalfield areas, where farming hamlets with populations of no more than 200–300 were transformed by the sinking of pits into bustling small towns of 10,000 people or more within a single generation. In contrast, the textile industry of the Upper Calder Valley evolved over centuries from outsourced piece-work carried out by local artisans, farmers and their families in their homes, to small-scale weaving sheds and ultimately factories, many owned by local families with long-established roots in the area. Dual occupations remained common. John Farrar recalls that members of Ted Hughes’s maternal grandmother’s family, the Smiths, were ‘yeoman farmers’ in the village of Hathershelf above Mytholmroyd, but notes that members of the household supplemented the family income by working in the mills.⁴ Eking out a living from the unforgiving landscape was difficult, and even farmers who owned their holdings found it necessary to develop additional income.

One consequence of the more organic way in which the textile industry developed in Mytholmroyd was that the historical and pre-industrial traditions of the town were not obliterated by the industrial revolution as they were in so many places. Hughes’s sister Olwyn recalls an idyllic childhood in Mytholmroyd, an important part of which were the community traditions and celebrations

that marked the slow turning of the year – the spring gathering of docks (for dock pudding, eaten at breakfast, possibly unique to that valley, a local cure for all winter’s ills), when the children would scour the area for docks and sell carrier bags full from door to door for sixpence. Then Mayday with little celebrations and Maypole dancing […] the summer gathering of bilberries on the moors […] the council procession with children and adults dressed up to represent some theme […] chapel concerts, special services […] a children’s chorus […] the entire area’s preparations for the big Guy Fawkes fire.⁵

The local history website midgleywebpages.com provides more details of these archaic traditions, describing the mummer-like ‘Pace Egg Play’, performed by village boys each Easter, and the ceremonial bearing of rushes into local churches (‘rush-bearing’) each September.⁶ Industrialized Mytholmroyd remained rooted in its traditions and connected to its landscape and environment, in which local people, particularly children, participated communally in what Olwyn characterizes as ‘cared for, involving activity’.⁷

Olwyn’s fond remembrance of her early childhood notwithstanding, life in 1930s Mytholmroyd was hard. Foreign competition was beginning to have impacts on the textile industry, which had started its drawn-out decline, with mills already becoming derelict.⁸ The depression of that decade hit particularly hard in the industrial north, with unemployment and short-time working hitting families hard. Indeed, in 1937 Billy Hughes’s employer, F&H Sutcliffe of Hebden Bridge, experienced a downturn in its business and reduced its employees to three-day working. Unable to support his family with his ‘short-time’ wage, Billy Hughes was forced to seek alternative work, and secured a job as a joiner on a ‘government […] building contract’ in Glamorgan, South Wales. Gerald Hughes reports that his mother was ‘miserable’ at being separated from Billy, who would have had to live away from home for weeks on end (T&I 63). Those times of privation are also alluded to in Hughes’s autobiographical poem ‘Source’, which narrates how Edith Hughes had to take on sewing work at home, probably outsourced from her brothers’ factory, to augment the family’s income (CP 757).

The legacy of the First World War cast a continuing pall over the area – in the physical absence of the dead, the engrained, slow-burning bereavement of their families, the memories and disturbance of the survivors of the trenches – adding to the general sense of malaise. The aftermath of the war affected almost every family in the region and the Hugheses were no exception. Billy Hughes was famously one of only 17 survivors of his regiment (the Lancashire Fusiliers), his life saved at Gallipoli by the memento-packed notebook he kept in his chest pocket, which deflected the shrapnel that would otherwise have killed him. His subsequent heroism at Ypres (in saving the lives of wounded soldiers stranded in no-man’s land, at considerable risk to his own life) was to win him the Distinguished Conduct Medal.⁹ Ted Hughes’s uncle Walter was ‘machine-gunned’ in northern France serving with the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, spending 48 horrific hours being sniped at in no-man’s land before his rescue.¹⁰ Walter’s brother Thomas, who served in the Royal Engineers, was badly gassed in 1917; complications arising from his wartime injuries contributed to his death 30 years later.¹¹ The legacy of the Great War made a significant and lasting impression on Ted Hughes and affected his sense of the whole region, which he saw as being in a perpetual state of ‘mourning for the First World War’.¹²

Another feature of Mytholmroyd that coloured Hughes’s subsequent attitude to the region was what he later characterized as a particularly dour form of Protestant Christianity. Mount Zion Methodist church, which the Hughes family attended every Sunday,¹³ physically dominated Aspinall Street – the view from Ted’s bedroom window was permanently in the shadow of its towering façade – and the town was served by several other churches and chapels, including St Michael’s Anglican Church and Mytholmroyd Methodist Church on Scout Road. Methodism dominated, not only in Mytholmroyd but across the whole region, and Hughes was to characterize its main products as stultifying Sundays¹⁴ and a puritanical morality that crushed spontaneity and suppressed joy (‘Mount Zion’, CP 480).

We gain a paradoxical impression of Hughes’s natal town. In the 1930s Mytholmroyd was a hard-pressed industrial town in which people laboured long and hard in physically demanding jobs, often to make no more than a meagre living. This sense of small gains hard won combines with a scrubbed-fingernail Methodism, with its theology of thrift and respectability, the communal psychological debilitation caused by the lingering aftermath of the First World War, the unrelenting weather and challenging landscape, to create a sense of a grim and even oppressive place. At the same time, however, the wooded slopes of the valleys and the moorland of the high tops provided the opportunity for escape and release into a scenery of ecstatic grandeur, and, as we have seen from Olwyn Hughes’s testimony, a strong sense of community and tradition rooted the inhabitants in their landscape and bound them together. This is the topographical and cultural context against which we must seek an understanding of Ted Hughes and his family.

William ‘Billy’ Hughes

Billy Hughes was born in Mytholm (near Hebden Bridge, 3 miles west along the valley from Mytholmroyd). Billy’s father, ‘Crag Jack’ Hughes, was an incomer to the insular valley, an Irishman from ‘Manchester or Liverpool’. ‘A great singer’ who ‘enjoyed company’ (T&I 5), Jack Hughes worked as a dyer, and seems to have been something of a local character, remembered in the family as a convivial man¹⁵ and a ‘local sage and scribe’, friendly with the local Methodist minister and the Catholic priest alike, both of whom came to pay their respects on his death bed (he died in his early 40s of tuberculosis), the minister bearing ‘flowers’, the priest ‘whisky’ (P&C 33).

After his death, Jack Hughes’s widow Polly (née Major) brought up young Billy and his siblings John and Mary-Alice as a single parent. Gerald mentions a tradition recounted by his grandmother that her forebears included an army officer (‘Major Major’) who was stationed on Gibraltar at some time during the nineteenth century and who married a Spanish girl (T&I 5). Ted later accounted for his sister Olwyn’s looks by citing the ‘Spanish blood’ that entered the Hughes strain in this period, and he took pride in both the Irish and Spanish bloodlines in his ancestry (P&C 275). Although Gerald fondly recalls how the Hughes children would visit Grandma Polly Hughes in her house-cum-sweetshop at 4 King Street, Mytholm, there was no further extended family of either Hugheses or Majors in close proximity, and his father’s family does not seem to have exerted a significant influence on young ‘Teddy’ Hughes.

Photographs of Billy Hughes in his 20s and 30s show a tall, barrel-chested, physically imposing man. Gerald characterizes him as ‘fit and energetic’. John Farrar relates that Billy had played professional football for Derby County, ‘before Edith stopped him because she wanted him home on Saturdays’.¹⁶ In what is perhaps a variant recollection of a common underlying story, Gerald recalls that his father turned down the opportunity to play professionally for ‘a large Northern club’ and concurs with John Farrar that Edith disapproved of Billy’s footballing, because it kept him away from home on Saturdays. No doubt part of the reason why Billy sometimes did not arrive home until 11 or 12 o’clock after a Saturday afternoon match was because he had a few post-match pints with ‘the lads’ afterwards, a source of friction between footballing widows and their husbands to this day. However, given that Billy continued to play club football for Hebden Bridge into the late 1920s and possibly into the 1930s, an alternative (or supplementary) reason for his decision to turn down a career as a professional footballer may have been financial – Gerald confirms that his father’s wages as a joiner would almost certainly have been higher than the pay of a journeyman footballer in those days of the maximum wage and reduced out-of-season rates, and his employment ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Mytholmroyd
• 2 Mexborough
• 3 Old Denaby
• 4 Crookhill
• 5 Mexborough Grammar School
• 6 The Poems
• 7 Made in Mexborough
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index