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Landscape conjured some magic images
THE Evening News is indebted to Dr Kevin Leighton, of Newby, who informed the newspaper of three more writers with links to the area. Firstly Brenda English. During the 1960s and 1970s she wrote 12 short novels set in the Whitby, Esk Valley and Newtondale areas.
DIARIST John Evelyn wrote about the East Riding during the 17th Century Civil War. One of the most eminent gentlemen of the time, he was a member of the Royal Society and its secretary in 1673. He visited Beverley on August 16 1654 and wrote of it: "We went to Beverley, a large town with two stately churches, St John's (the Minster) and St Mary's, not much inferior to the best of our cathedrals."
IT WAS the coast that drew Elizabeth Gaskell to the area. She and her two daughters, Julia and Meta, went to Whitby for a week or 10 days at 1 Abbey Terrace, West Cliff. From here she set out to research the background of the old press gangs who used to swoop down on the fishing village and ports, and carry off any strong men they could find to serve in the Royal Navy.
Out of her researches Mrs Gaskell, whose North and South was turned into a BBC drama series, created Sylvia's Lovers, one of her finest novels, published in 1863. Her knowledge of whaling and its dangers was mainly derived from Dr William Scoresby.
Like his father, who had invented the crow's nest as a lookout point on ships, the younger William had been captain of a whaler before being ordained and becoming Vicar of Bradford Parish Church (now the cathedral).
Set during the Napoleonic wars, the author gives a vivid picture of a press gang attacking homecoming sailors in Monkshaven (Whitby) who have landed from Greenland.
SUSAN HILL was born in Scarborough and later referred to the town in her novel A Change for the Better and some short stories, especially Cockles and Mussels. She attended Scarborough Convent School, where she became very interested in the theatre and literature.
Her family left Scarborough in 1958 and moved to Coventry where her father worked in the car and aircraft factories. She took A levels in English, French, History and Latin and then she went to King's College, London University, to read English. By this time she had already written her first novel which was published by Hutchin-son in her first year at university.
Her first serious novel, Gentlemen and Ladies, was published in 1968. This was followed in quick succession by A Change for the Better, I'm the King of the Castle, The Albatross, Strange Meeting, The Bird of Night, A Bit of Singing and Dancing and In the Springtime of Year, all written and published between 1968 and 1974. In 1975 she married Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells and they moved to Stratford upon Avon. Their first daughter, Jessica, was born in 1977. Hill has founded her own publishing company, Long Barn Books.
Hill expressed an interest in the traditional English ghost story which relies on suspense and atmosphere to create its impact, similar to the classic ghost stories by Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. She has said that she wanted to write something similar.
The Woman in Black, with its electric atmosphere of the ghostly moors with the mysterious woman in black, was turned into a play in 1987 and it quickly became a sensation. The play, adapted by the late Stephen Mallatratt and staged at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, is still running in the West End of London and was also filmed for a TV movie in 1989.
Hill wrote another ghost story with similar ingredients, The Mist in the Mirror, in 1992. She also wrote a sequel to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca entitled Mrs De Winter in 1993. Since 2004 Hill has begun a strand of crime novels featuring Detective Simon Serallier, the first of which, The Various Haunts of Men, did well commercially despite very mixed reviews.
WINIFRED Holtby’s associations with East Yorkshire give the reader the chance to explore one of the most interesting landscapes in the whole country, covering an area from Hull and the Wolds right along the coast to Scarborough and Ravenscar.
It includes Rudston, the village five miles west of Bridlington where she was born on June 23 1898, in Rudston House in Long Street, and in whose peaceful churchyard she is buried; Hull; Beverley; and Hornsea and Withernsea, which she combined to portray as Kiplington in South Riding, made into a TV series in the 1930s with Dorothy Tuton and Nigel Davenport in the lead roles.
Completed only a few weeks before her death on September 29 1935, South Riding, her most famous novel, was published in 1936. The plot centres around problems and schemes connected with education, health, unemployment and housing, in addition to the intermingling of the private lives of the characters who crowd the novel. The strands of humour and compassion woven into the novel prove that Winifred Holtby (pictured below) knew and understood the people of the area, and of Yorkshire in general.
It enabled her to create such memorable characters as Sarah Burton, the indomitable headmistress; Robert Carne, the impoverished landowner-farmer whose ancestors had owned his estate for more than 400 years; and the resourceful alderman, Mrs Beddows.
The plot owes much to the council work of Mrs Holtby, the first women to be elected to the East Riding County Council in March 1923 and who later became an alderman. Winifred Holtby did not seek direct information from her mother, who would have probably refused to supply it. Instead she extracted old agendas of the East Riding County Council meetings from the dining room waste-paper basket after Mrs Holtby had gone to bed.
She fictionalised Rudston in Anderby in Anderby Wold. She never seems to have forgotten any of her early experiences, not even the bombardment of Scarborough and the east coast by warships of the German fleet in December 1914.
At the time she was a boarder – one of her contemporaries was novelist Jilly Cooper’s mother – at Queen Margaret’s School in the town, and wrote down her impressions which were later published in a Cumberland newspaper. She used the same event in her novel The Crowded Street (1924).
In July 1918 she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps as a private, but in October 1919 she returned to Somerville College, Oxford. Here, she and Vera Brittain met and became firm friends, and they encouraged each other as they both embarked on writing careers.
It is easy to visit many of the places portrayed in South Riding including Beverley (Flintonbridge). But the beginning and the end of any exploration of Winifred Holtby country must be Rudston.
WHITBY’S most famous 20th century author is Storm Jameson, whose ancestors had lived in the area for more than 600 years. Her father was a sea captain, and her mother was a member of a well-known and old-established family shipping firm.
Her autobiography, Journey From the North (1969), gives an interesting account of her life, authorship and experiences.
It provides an illuminating picture of her native town, as well as her keen interest in, and work fo,r international literature and affairs. She wrote 45 books – novels, essays, short stories and criticism – between 1919 and 1979, as well as her lengthy autobiography.
She married the writer Guy Chapman, but continued to publish as Storm Jameson. Whitby provided her with the model for Danesacre, a town she records in several of her books. She often returned home to visit her family, and also lived for a time at Ruswarp. From 1929 she occupied a house that overlooked the fields and moors not far from Whitby, where she wrote her novel A Day Off (1933).
Although many of her novels are on worldwide subjects, her Yorkshire books, and especially those based on the life of the port, give a good impression of Whitby at the turn of the century.
The Pot Boils and the Scum Rises was published in 1919, followed in 1927 by The Lovely Ship. She started the series with the aim of telling the story of Mary Hansyke, later Mary Harvey, from her birth in 1841 to her death in 1923.
She based this on the life of her own grandmother, who had descended from a long line of shipbuilders and had taken over the business herself.
In another of her novels, Company Parade (1934), she gives an account of how one of the characters, Russell Harvey, and her mother attend the 1921 Armistice Day service at St Mary’s Church, and describes the view from the church door overlooking the harbour, the hills around it and the sea.
ROBIN JARVIS has written a series of popular fantasy novels which include the Whitby Witches triology, which won the Lancashire Libraries award.
Whitby Witches is about orphans eight-year-old Ben and his older sister, Jennet, who are invited by an old family friend to live with her in Whitby. The two children hope their move will be permanent – if this time they can keep Ben's strange powers secret. Unbeknown to the children, Aunt Alice has a few secrets of her own. So does Whitby.
This plot was inspired and fed by Jarvis’ visits to the town. He said: “The first time I visited Whitby, I stepped off the train and knew I was somewhere very special. It was a grey, drizzling day but that only added to the haunting beauty and lonely atmosphere of the place. Listening to Carmina Burana on my headphones, I explored the ruined abbey on the clifftop. The place was a fantastic inspiration.
“In The Whitby Witches I have interwoven many of the existing local legends, such as the frightening Barguest, whilst inventing a few of my own, most notably the aufwaders.”
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Weather for Scarborough
Friday 25 May 2012
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