978–1–137–49934–9 Copyrighted Material – 978–1–137–49934–9

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 © Steve Ely 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–49934–9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ely, Steve. Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire : made in Mexborough / Steve Ely. pages; cm ISBN 978–1–137–49934–9 (hardcover) 1. Hughes, Ted, 1930–1998. 2. Poets, English—20th century—Biography. I. Title. PR6058.U37Z665 2015 821'.914—dc23 [B] 2015012345 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 Contents Acknowledgements viii Note on Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1 Mytholmroyd 8 2 Mexborough 32 3 Old Denaby 59 4 Crookhill 76 5 Mexborough Grammar School 109 6 The Poems 147 7 Made in Mexborough 182 Notes 195 Bibliography 214 Index 221 vii Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 Introduction On the afternoon of Saturday, 22 October 2011, I was in Mytholmroyd, listening to Keith Sagar give a talk as part of the Elmet Trust’s annual Ted Hughes Festival – and trying to suppress a growing sense of frustration. My frustration had nothing to do with Keith’s presen- tation, which was typically engaging and enlightening. Nor had it been provoked by any of the other lectures and performances I had attended, which had been similarly worthwhile. My issue was with the central premise of the festival itself. Hundreds of people had gath- ered in Mytholmroyd to celebrate the life and work of Ted Hughes, who had been appropriated by the town and the Elmet Trust as ‘Mytholmroyd’s Poet Laureate’1 and seemingly universally accepted as such by the wider literary world. Yet, as anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of his life knows, Hughes spent only his first eight years in Mytholmroyd, leaving the town with his family in 1938 and subsequently returning (to the town itself and to the wider Upper Calder Valley area) for only relatively brief visits and sojourns.2 Although it is undeniable that Hughes’s early years in Mytholmroyd were hugely significant to his development, there is another Yorkshire town with a greater claim to be regarded as the place that formed him as a poet. When the Hughes family left Mytholmroyd in 1938, they relo- cated to Mexborough, 40 miles to the south in the West Riding’s coal and steel belt, roughly equidistant between the larger centres of Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley. Ted Hughes spent the next 13 years in Mexborough, during which many of the distinctive inter- ests and attitudes that would characterize his maturity emerged and 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 2 Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire coalesced. It was in Mexborough that his already established love of the countryside and animals evolved through activities such as shooting and trapping into a more observational approach in which the first stirrings of an ecological conscience can be seen. It was in Mexborough that Hughes’s lifelong obsession with fishing, which would so influence his life and work, really began. At Mexborough Grammar School, he resolved to become a poet and received a first- class education that exposed him to the artistic and intellectual influences – William Shakespeare, Ludwig van Beethoven, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Henry Williamson, the Bible, folklore and mythology, to name but a few – that were to inform his mature work. At Mexborough, Hughes took the first steps to becoming a ‘man of letters’, not only writing his first poems, but publishing reviews, short stories and skits in the school magazine, The Don & Dearne (which he also sub-edited), writing, cast- ing and directing dramatic revues, and acting in plays. His winning of an Open Exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge, which deci- sively set him on course for the rest of his life, was in no small way enabled by the support provided by his charismatic English teacher, John Fisher. In Mexborough, Hughes had his first girlfriends, fell in love for the first time and developed precocious and distinctive attitudes to male–female relationships that he would elaborate and refine in his mature work. Finally, at this time he evolved the highly individualistic artistic temperament and powerfully charismatic per- sonality that came to be associated with him in later life, which, for want of a better term, might be called his ‘poetic persona’. There can be no doubt that Ted Hughes evolved into the poet of his subsequent fame during his Mexborough period. Sitting in that Mytholmroyd lecture room, my frustration broke into audibility in an involuntary, and thankfully sotto voce, outburst: ‘We’re in the wrong place!’ My breach of decorum resulted in a few quiz- zical looks from the turned heads in the seats immediately adjacent, but I am pleased to report that Keith’s talk was otherwise undisturbed by my contribution. Nevertheless, that moment was the genesis of this book. Prior to the 2011 Elmet Trust festival, I had already made some rather desultory researches into Hughes’s Mexborough period, provoked by the fact that published biographical and critical materi- als carried so frustratingly little information about it. In the process of making these initial enquiries, I found that the lacuna in critical Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 Introduction 3 and biographical work about his South Yorkshire period was reflected in the almost total amnesia about Hughes in Mexborough itself. The town has no bronze statue of the poet, no Ted Hughes Trail, no Ted Hughes Festival, no Ted Hughes Theatre, no information boards or leaflets, no literary, civic or community groups committed to cel- ebrating, promoting and commemorating Hughes’s life and work, no colony of artists and writers drawn to the area by its association with Hughes – most of which, of course, are evident in Mytholmroyd and the surrounding area. Granted, the library in the newly rebuilt Mexborough School is named for Hughes (and was formally opened by his wife, Carol, in 2009) and obviously many individuals in the area are aware of his former residence in the town. However, this only throws into sharper relief the absence for over half a century of any wider recognition of the fact that one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century lived in Mexborough for the most formative years of his life. On 23 April 2013, a blue plaque commemorating his residence there was fixed to the wall of the former Hughes family home at 75 Main Street. However, it was the local publicity gener- ated by my research for this book that had spurred a quartet of South Yorkshiremen – poet Jack Brown, sculptor Graham Ibbeson, artist Ashley Jackson and the then Mayor of Doncaster, Peter Davies – to erect the commemoration. None of the quartet is from Mexborough. The librarian of Mexborough School, Carol Kay, has struggled in vain to generate interest in Hughes beyond the school. Attempts by local societies to commemorate the poet have fizzled out. At Manor Farm (now a pub and restaurant), once the heart of Hughes’s Old Denaby stamping grounds and a landscape at least as important to his development as Mytholmroyd’s high moorland or the ‘happy valley’ of Crimsworth Dene, I found that neither the bar manager, her staff nor any of the patrons had any idea that Ted Hughes had an association with the building in which we were all standing – or, sadly, had any idea who on earth ‘Ted Hughes’ was. Mr Stanley, the farmer who gave me permission to roam over the fields and copses of the attached farmland, seemed similarly unaware of Hughes’s identity and existence. Parallel to this, scholars and academics seem to have shown little sustained interest in Hughes’s Mexborough period. Elaine Feinstein’s Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet is a notable exception. Feinstein has 10 pages3 covering 1938–51, including some original research, and she Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–49934–9 4 Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire is clearly aware of the importance of the period to Hughes’s development.

Load more