Anne Lister and Shibden Hall

Shibden Hall, home for a time to Anne Lister (bottom centre), "wife" of Ann Walker (top right), subject of Sally Wainwright's forthcoming series, Gentleman Jack, as played by Maxine Peake (in 2010) and Suranne Jones in the new series

Gentleman Jack
Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax, Scott and Bailey, To Walk Invisible, Unforgiven amongst many others) is currently preparing an 8-part mini-series about a Yorkshire heroine/anti-heroine/larger-than-life personality, Anne Lister. Anne is going to be played by Suranne Jones, having been played in a one-off film by Maxine Peake in the 2010 Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister. The production should be broadcast on the BBC and on HBO during 2019. A family outing to Shibden Hall perched on a south-facing slope in Halfax’s happy valley revealed plenty and to spare about the remarkable Anne Lister.

Images of Anne Lister, Maxine Peake (top right) playing her in 2010, and Helena Whitbread (bottom left) whose careful work has helped decode the millions of words of Anne's secret diaries

A woman ahead of her (and our) time
Determined to become an independent, commercially successful woman, the free-thinking Anne took on the testosterone-heavy might of Industrial England and, in many ways, triumphed. In surprising ways. Having had a passionate affair with a doctor’s daughter, Mariana Belcombe, (an affair that continued after Mariana’s marriage to a wealthy man, an affair that combusted during a weekend in Scarborough), Anne inherited Shibden Hall without the means for its upkeep or to fulfil her plans to enter the coal industry as a mine-owning entrepeneur. She was also lonely. So began a campaign to woo wealthy heiress Ann Walker. Unbelievably (but truthfully) they had their union blessed in a church and wore wedding rings. Despite the sneering of the gentry who nicknamed Anne Lister Gentleman Jack (the title of Sally Wainwright’s script), Anne and Ann were notorious celebrities and were invited to the unlikeliest of soirées.

Shibden Hall

Go to Shibden Hall
Anne’s ambitions to climb mountains and travel to Persia proved her undoing and she contracted a fever aged 49 in what is now modern day Georgia. The grieving Ann had Anne embalmed and took six months to transport the body back to Halfax – you can only imagine the trauma of that journey in the winter of 1840 to 1841. Ann Walker’s own story is just as astonishing as Anne Lister’s. What happened to both women and how we know as much as we do owes a great deal of thanks to a woman called Helena Whitbread who narrates some of the features of Anne’s life in a display at Shibden Hall. The hyperlinks in the first paragraph of this blog will reveal more. I’m looking forward to Gentleman Jack being broadcast but, in the meantime, a visit to Shibden Hall is to be recommended. And, to recover from your awestruck wonder at Anne’s life, call in to nearby Dove Cottage nurseries and hidden garden (open March to September.) Smell nature. Anne Lister, you are remembered. You were a marvel. A force of nature.

The hidden garden at Dove Cottage Nursery near Shibden Hall

God's Own Country

The four principals of Francis Lee's film: Josh O'Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart

Atop the Yorkshire moors
There have been several memorable films shot on Yorkshire locations: the TV Brontë biography by Sally Wainwright To Walk Invisible is a recent good example. I have vivid memories of the visceral 2011 Wuthering Heights directed by Andrea Arnold. From childhood there are of course The Railway Children and Kes. There are notable black and white films of This Sporting Life and Billy Liar as well as popular comedies like Brassed Off, Four Lions and The Full Monty. An American Werewolf in London famously started on the moors and A Month in the Country showed parts of North Yorkshire other than the famous rooflines of Castle Howard (Brideshead Revisited.) The moors are hard to capture but a recent cinema trip has done just that – in a stunningly-photographed tale of muddy love among farmers.

Filmed in Yorkshire: Brideshead Revisited, Billy Liar, The Railway Children, Wuthering Heights, An American Werewolf in London, Brassed Off, Four Lions, A Month in the Country, Kes, This Sporting Life, The Full Monty

God’s Own County….
Angry, miserable, tormented Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) lives with his stroke-stricken Dad, farmer Martin (Ian Hart) and gritty grandmother, Deirdre (Gemma Jones). They struggle to “manage” even though Johnny shouts “I’ll manage” time and again. The family have a broken past and are clinging to their beasts and their land in the hope of making a living. Their lives endure, despite illness and scraping their pennies together. For one week only, Martin brings in the gentle, capable Romanian migrant, Gheorghe (Alex Secareanu) to help Johnny with the lambing – in the hope that Martin himself will be back on the farm before too long. You hope Martin will recover because it becomes obvious that not many people would want to graft such unsociable hours in such conditions; Gheorghe was “the only bugger who applied.” Thankfully, the film suggests, Gheorghe’s less rigid thinking might mean the farm will diversify after the credits roll and maybe survive Brexit.

Francis Lee, director, with cast and producer Manon Ardisson at the Edinburgh Film Festival and cinematographer Joshua James Richards on location in Yorkshire

Believable (grunting) masculinity
There was plenty to talk about after watching the film: in particular, how much sympathy does Johnny deserve given his frequent alcohol-induced vomiting, emotionless shagging and his thuggish refusal to say anything positive to the people who were making an effort to connect with him? (Patsy Ferran’s university friend, Robyn, gave a poignant hint of Johnny’s potential in the eyes of his old school friends)  I felt that Josh O’Connor’s performance was a pitch-perfect portrayal of an emotionally stunted man – and, for me, the film’s depiction of his agonising steps to a better way of being was one of the most moving things I’ve seen in cinema for ages. And all against the background of the Yorkshire moors!

He’s just going to be a runt
The rest of the actors were equally believable in their characterisations: Alex Secareanu played Gheorghe with integrity and magnetism. Gemma Jones and Ian Hart inhabited their steadfast roles with raw naturalism. I don’t want to include any spoilers but those who’ve seen it will know what I mean when I say Deirdre’s laundry/ironing scenes and Martin’s bath-time scene displayed acting skills of the highest order. The poster gives away that the film becomes a love story between Johnny and Gheorghe and their relationship drives the film’s plot, but the unfussy visual symbols (the white trail of an aeroplane, hands, gloves, jumpers/skin, clothes or lack of them, food, milk/cheese, spit, vomit, blood, mud, water, stone, walls, fences, doors, lambs, flowers, the fragility of living things) meant the film operated on a sweeping landscape bigger than two men in love. Sometimes you can’t let a runt fail…. people, like premature lambs, deserve a chance to live a life. They might only need a new coat (or jumper) –  I know this to be true, both from my years of teaching and from life’s bruises. Congratulations to the director, Francis Lee, local lad, for creating a celluloid work of art. And hats off to cinematographer, Joshua James Richards, for capturing the bleak beauty of what is, in my view, a universalised Yorkshire story with a beating heart.

Fish Finger Butties

Back in Yorkshire
After a week on Anglesey it was good to touch down in time to catch the final afternoon of the Saltaire Festival. The beaches, castles, walks and bridges of north Wales will appear in a future blog but, for now, I’m commemorating the joys of tucking in to a Fish Finger Butty (with a glass of prosecco!), listening to the music and soaking up the atmosphere of my adopted “village”, Saltaire. (I noticed I was not alone in gravitating towards the Fish Finger Heaven stand….)

A sense of place; images of Saltaire including the day of the Tour de Yorkshire

Sense of place
I’ve written elsewhere about the concept of “home” (having felt roots in Wakefield, Manchester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Helsinki, Sheffield, Leek, Bingley, Badby, Dorking and even in Sorrento, Italy and Wengen, Switzerland….) One good thing about Saltaire, though, is that it has risen to a sense of itself through a series of cultural and entrepreneurial decisions. When Jonathan Silver invested in the purchasing of Salt’s Mill in 1987 he boosted the local economy, leisure and work opportunities and promoted David Hockney’s work through gallery space in the converted mill. Regular events like the Advent Windows or the Open Gardens ensure there are often reasons to walk around the World Heritage site. So it’s always good to come “home.”

2017 Saltaire Festival - band at top = the excellent Backyard Burners

The School's The Thing

A leaf on The Greenwood Tree, Michael Thompson and Robert Lister

Back to the street across the ford at the River Avon
And so back to Stratford-upon-Avon, this time for a retirement present for my Shakespeare buddy, Michael. We’re enthusiasts for productions of Shakespeare and, in particular since the mid-1970s, the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company. And so I planned a geek day of exhibitions, walks and tourist attractions; things that you can fit in when the demands of paid work are in the past. Luckily for me, I also had a secret weapon for two bits of the day: actor Robert Lister, the partner of Pat, one of my long-standing friends from the world of drama teaching.

The Play's The Thing exhibition at the RSC and the view across the Great Garden at New Place to the theatres

A leaf for his pages
I included a picture of The Greenwood Tree in my blog about New Place, but I didn’t know that Rob and Pat already had an engraved leaf there so it was a thrill to find it on the wall when Rob helped us envision the outline of the roofspace and floor plan of New Place.

Busts in the Schoolroom decorated by pupils at the current school on site

Ripe voice of Raconteur
Rob is a journeyman actor, known for work with the RSC, National, English Touring Theatre, one-man site-specific shows and as Lewis Carmichael in The Archers. On this occasion he was a vivid storyteller bringing to life not only New Place but also the extraordinary Schoolroom and Guildhall, renovated in recent years and opened to the public.

The cradle of the bard's imagination and a very very early Tudor rose (the first ever depicted?)

The child is father of the man
It is inconceivable that Shakespeare didn’t attend the Schoolroom above the Guildhall in Stratford, given the status of his father, John Shakespeare, as alderman, chief magistrate and bailiff at various times. One of the more romantic concepts illustrated in the displays at the Schoolroom and Guildhall was how likely it was that the child Shakespeare would have observed petty trials and travelling actors as his father presided over the Court of Record and granted licenses to the touring companies. The trial scenes in plays like The Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale surely had their seeds sown here. And did the young Shakespeare leave with one of the companies when he was in his early 20s, father of three young children but, critically, son of a man who was facing financial ruin by then? Shakespeare travelled and then started to commute between Warwickshire and the capital, desperate to find a level of success – as he eventually did as actor, writer and, most significantly for his family’s economics, as theatre shareholder and landowner in both London and Stratford.

The Guild of the Holy Cross, next door to the Guildhall with a stained glass window depicting Edward VI and John Shakespeare and extraordinary wall paintings

Soaring Tethered

Breakfast, dinner, tea
School dinners were always school dinners during the 1960s and 1970s. You gave the teacher your “dinner money.” I can’t remember when I started talking about lunch when I meant dinner. I haven’t graduated to dinner to mean tea and still say “what’re we having for tea?” (meaning what many call dinner.) Supper was always supper. Then a few years ago I learned some people talk about “kitchen supper” but I always thought of supper as being in your pyjamas sitting in front of the coal fire….(usually bread and dripping or a crumpet toasted on a toasting fork.) I can’t imagine sitting in the kitchen having supper….

Class
I imagined as a child I would always be working class. Then I did A Levels, went to the University of Manchester, lived abroad in Finland for a year and became a teacher. At what point on that journey did I become middle class? Does it matter? Why even think about it? Is it a social invention to keep people in line and control them? Does class exist? It clearly obsesses the British nation, and often troubles, niggles and unsettles me. I think it confuses and divides people. Two related memories have stuck in my mind.

Memory One
The first memory was on the night before being taken to university (in my older brother, Mick’s, car; my parents never owned a car.) I sat on the stairs in my house on Eastmoor Estate in Wakefield and wept like a baby – barrels of snot pouring down my chin – wishing I wasn’t always called the “brainy one.” Within a month or so at university I’d got over that feeling and was reading like a madman and writing essays that were competitively brainy (so brainy that when I came across one recently I didn’t understand the argument one bit.) So my grief about leaving home was short-lived. Something drove me on to devour education and aspire to be as brainy as possible. (Though lacking in common sense, as I think my wife, daughters and sister might testify….)

Burst balloon – memory two
The second memory I have is of listening to one of my favourite writers, Alan Garner, lecture about his own dislocation from his “class.” He was lecturing about writing and mental health and being honest about a personal experience when he felt he had had a nervous breakdown. He saw education and moving away from home akin to being blown up like a balloon. The balloon gets bigger and floats away, getting bigger, seeing further and wider, getting perspective, gaining height. Sometimes the balloon bursts. (How he felt about his own nervous breakdown.) The balloon needs sticking back together. Patching up. Before it can be inflated again. Sometimes, though, the balloon floats but it remains tethered to the ground, to its base, to where it came from. And it can be pulled back to its roots and bounce back again freely when it wants. And soar. And return. And soar again. Soaring tethered.