Monday, 20 July 2009

1762 Eastwood and D H Lawrence

The life of DH Lawrence has always interested me more than his work and yet when in the February I watched the film made of the D.H Lawrence novel, The Virgin and Gypsy on a new Sky free film channel and which has disappeared as quickly as it started, I wrote about the film and the five novels I have in MySpace Blog 652 (The Rainbow, The Trespasser, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Kangeroo and Sons and Lovers) but I do not remember writing about his life or his birthplace Eastwood. I was by puzzled by this so went through the list of Blogs until I found the writing and then remembered that I had intended to devote more time to his life but other things had become more of the moment

My interest in Lawrence arose from a vague feeling that we had similar personalities although our experiences, relationships and subsequent lives appeared to be very different. With the help of Professor Worthen at Nottingham University and his gift of an on line biography I find that there is more substance to my feeling which I now understand and appreciate.

John Worthen Professor of D H Lawrence studies at the University has published his biography at

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/mss/collections/dhl-resources/biog-full/index.phtml.

As is my practice I am not altering what I have written before finding his biography and will signal where I do.

It was fortunate(fortuitous) that on Wednesday of last week the decision was taken to visit Eastwood in Derbyshire when it looked as if there would be no play on the first day of Durham‘s important County Championship game against Nottinghamshire, the subject of my next writing. In fact there was nearly a full day of play but no regrets at missing the cricket such was excellence of the visit.

There had been much rain the previous day and it was raining when setting off from the Service area Travel Lodge for the Forest, Park and Ride, with more rain along the way and upon arrival. I was therefore reminded of that dreadful day last year when I had set off for the cricket under a similar sky and had been forced to spend several hours sitting in car parks at Newark and Southwell hoping the torrent would stop. It did not, except briefly to visit the Minster, to visit a store and to go for a warm drink as well as the usual what‘s it. I should have planned better about alternative things to do and how to get to the different locations. As explained in the previous writing Tuesday was used to begin get the geography of Nottingham in relation to my place of stay and cricket ground into my head both using the car and the public transport system.

On the city centre walkabout I had visited the Tourist office and collected booklets on the Nottinghamshire essential guide 2009, Nottingham City Guide- where to shop and where to eat and What’s on June to September. Having decided there would be little or no cricket my first inclination was to visit the Museum of Nottingham Life at Brewhouse Yard which appears to be under the Castle walls. There was mention of the recreation of life in the 1920’s and relive World War 11 in a cave air raid shelter. However in the Nottinghamshire Days out guide the first place mentioned was Eastwood close to the Derbyshire border and this became the new destination for the morning.

This led to the discovery of the quick route from the motorway service area Travel Lodge to the Forest Park and Ride, alternatively the Phoenix or Wilkinson Street Park and Ride’s and to the Cricket as about a mile from Trowell services going northwards there is the junction with the A610 which goes within a mile or so of Forest to the east and close to Eastwood in the west. It was a good omen for what became a good and memorable day. The miserable day of a year before was quickly forgotten and as the morning progressed I thought back to an equally memorable experience, visiting Larne in South Wales where Dylan Thomas and his wife had managed to settle for a short while. The only similarly between the two couples is that both spent the great part of their relationship on the move, never having a place to call their own for long. I also remembered the one man show at the Playhouse theatre in which aspects of the life of the poet had been recounted and his work brought to life in a voice which had similarities to that of Thomas where I have a tape of him reciting. It is interesting though that the Wikipedia biography mentions that Dylan Thomas was an influence on the writings of Lawrence. I suspect there is more the collective subconscious and that the transmission through genes of knowledge and visual memory from our ancestors than I understand or fully appreciate, although I doubt if my father knew the work of DH Lawrence or Dylan Thomas at his seminary school in Malta or my mother in her convent school in Gibraltar or subsequently

Eastwood is pronounced Erswod in the distinctive local dialect and is a small town now of some 18000 about 8 miles from Nottingham centre (13k) and 10 miles from Derby. I still think in miles. It is a Domesday Book mentioned places which developed after coal became essential to the industrial revolution and in fact the Midland Railway was formed here, or should I say, there?

Moorgreen Colliery produced over 1 million tons of coal a year and Eastwood Hall was used as the Area office of the National Coal Board and was used for several crisis meetings during national miner’s strike which was at its height when I attended an International Management course at Henley and studied coal as part of devising a strategy for fuel in the 21st century. The evidence was that cheaper coal could be purchased from central Europe and given the long term harmful effects of coal mining on health, and the Communist control of the Union it was rational to have a strategy which provided for less dependency on home produced coal and switch to nuclear produced energy. There was no prospect of alternative energies being brought into meaningful production for 50 years, climate change or no climate change.

However there was the social and political dimension. I had made my name at the four week course by arranging with the college to hire a motorcycle rider to bring a letter from the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher which asked the man appointed by the college to act as chief adviser to the government (a military man used to taking orders) that whatever the evidence British coal production had to continue at a level several times the rational economic projection. To sugar having to doctor his advice a peerage was hinted at which was unnecessary given his background, but I had put in to explain to some of the business executives that some of us who worked in local government knew more of how the system worked than they and that working behind the scenes was at times more effective that the upfront self publicists who were more easy to shoot at and bring down. The advice that had been given to me by a senior official of Home Office over lunch in Leeds before I became a chief officer had been well taken.

I had become interested in the special nature of coal mining communities since reading How Green was my Valley, a novel about a poor coal mining family in the South Wales coalfields, written in fact not my a man with roots in the community, but who had talked with the older generation of those who were alive when its author wrote and published the book in 1939. This aspect reinforces my view that it is often the outsider who can understand and comment with greater honesty. Not having read a biography based on his letters of which eight volumes have been edited and published I can only guess at the cause of his preoccupation with sexual orientation and activity and his need to be so explicit in his writings as my impression is that he made himself an outsider rather than being a natural one and that his preoccupation was rooted on his relationship with his mother and the relationship between his mother and father. She was and remained not just an outsider in the coal mining community but was the instigator of using family resources to get as far away as possible from the communal life of mining by moving home several times within the town where her husband worked down the pit.(since writing this I learn that they moved as much if not more before then)

My interest in mining communities and how they operated developed when spending a month in Scotland organising the final lap of the Holy Loch march and demonstrations and had been sent to the Court House in Edinburgh and then to the Headquarters of the Scottish Miner’s Union where I had passed over a cheque for several thousand pounds to Abe Moffat, then President of the Union where he and his brother was entertaining Pat Arrowsmith and the other core matchers to Malt whisky after being the first group to dare march down Princess Street, contrary to political orders from London. In those days Scotland was fiercely divided between Conservative and Labour left communities which had resulted in getting no cooperation from any official in Dumbarton, for example, but where the local police chief at Clydebank which borders the county capital asked how many of his officers I thought would be needed to stop all traffic and ensure the march passed without incident. Similarly local politicians at Gourock and Greenock ordered three of its most senior local government officers to meet me to establish which schools were to be used to feed and accommodate the marchers and supporters on the night before taking the MacBride Ferries to Dunoon and Holy Loch. The company had appreciated the commercial opportunity which the demonstration provided and had one of its busiest days. I mention this having heard a programme on Sunday while I travelled home where the MacBride ferries had managed to begin a Sunday service to outer Hebrides whose Calvinist community Lewis and Harris had prevented the change to maintain strict adherence to the Bible Sabbath, until this weekend.

In Fife the coal miners had gone some way to taking control of their community in a way which was closer to Trotsky’s vision of socialism that the fascist reality of Stalin. It is one of the ironies of the twentieth century that Britain joined forced with Stalin against Hitler despite the fact that Stalin did to his own people what the Germans and their Quisling’s did the Jewish and gypsy races. Such is the nature of war and of government

I mention all this because it is only until tourism replaced the industries of the industrial revolution did the good citizens of Eastwood appear to love D H Lawrence as much as they appear to do today and it is said that they were glad to see the back of when he ran off to Germany with his lover, rarely returning to England during the last two decades of his comparatively short life. At root is British ambivalence and hypocrisy about adult sexuality and which continues to result in Britain having more unwanted teenage pregnancies than any other “advanced” economic nation in the world. Part of the problem is that until the last ten years Britain did not like children and still hates teenagers. In fairness Eastwood is considered the first place in the UK to adopt the Boston approach with is pavement marked Freedom trail having a blue line to guide visitors to the 11 sites connected with DH Lawrence, and the University of Nottingham has developed a department concentrated on research and study into the life and works of a writer who is considered to have been crucial to the development of 20th century creative contemporary writing.

Of other notables who originated in Eastwood is one William A Pickering who was the effective controller of the Straits Settlement at a time when my maternal great grandfather was stationed and progressed back to being a Sargeant having been reduced to the ranks on court marshal while serving in Malta the home land for at least ten generations of my father. The Eastwood Colliers Male Voice Choirs is one the oldest surviving colliery choirs in the UK.

The key to understand D H Lawrence is that his mother a pupil teacher married someone described as a barely literate miner and which I suggests accounts for works such as the Virgin and Gypsy where the daughter of a vicar has a sexual encounter with an inarticulate married traveller and the fine married Lady Chatterley has several vividly described sexual encounters with a gamekeeper who i believe was also a man of few words. It could be argued that Lawrence was advocating that women should give way and enjoy their lust rather than marry someone otherwise incompatible and was therefore reproaching his mother, or perhaps his writing an running off with an educated woman of loose sexual morals was his way of expressing prolonged adolescent rebellion against her and realising that his father was in fact not a bad man. Mrs Lawrence appears to have never recovered from the financial disaster which father suffered and forced her and her sisters into the lace industry sweat shop. Marriage was her first escape route and with a strong religious based determination for self and family improvement she instilled love of good books as well as the drive to escape the everyday communality of mine work class life which is that much more intense than elsewhere in England although appears general in the Celtic based communities as I was to find when moving to a job which covered the Catholic tribal estates of Jarrow and Hebburn and were stronger than the coal miner estates of South Shields. His mother would have hated his writing and subsequent lifestyle.

It would be interesting to learn the discussion before the decision to rename his primary school, the Beauvale School the Greasley Beauvale D H Lawrence Primary School. Attached to former two up and two down house into which Lawrence was born is a small area used to show a ten minute video and where there is a graphic family history and a time line together with a poster on his work which includes images from his paintings consider pornographic in their day. The guide advised that although children visited the house as part of their understanding of how people lived at the end of the Victorian era they were not shown these images although one suspects that the older pupils have seen more graphic today. One wonders what the children are told about the person whose school has been renamed. Far from a school being renamed in middle America I assume his books are still being banned if not burnt. However it has to be said that many children in mining communities grew up with a clear understanding of the basics of humans sexuality at an early age and I encountered some horrific examples of the sexual abuse of children the Yorkshire mining community where I held a management position in the later 1960’s. In one notable instance the man had turned to his daughters with a degree of collusion from the mother who was relieved of her duties and one daughter had only shopped the man when he brought back drinking colleagues and offered her to them and to a younger sister

However these isolated cases should be viewed in the context that one third of the 140 people killed in one Durham mine in the days before the creation of the National Coal Board were aged between ten years and seventeen. Both were and remain unacceptable but there needs to be perspective and context.

A brave attempt has been made to fill the two up and two down home of his early years at Eastwood 8a Victoria Street with authentic period furniture for the lifestyle insisted upon by his mother who created lace which she put in her parlour window for sale display. A parlour reserved for important visitors. Even during the first years of the marriage when the five children were born, Lawrence was the fourth of three sons and two daughters, the family home had two additional spaces to those of most mine worker families. There was a spacious outhouse wash house and where no doubt Mr Lawrence was expected to wash down after a shift before entry into the home, and there was a substantial roof space with skylight which could have been used a sa bedroom. Although there is uncertainty about its condition and access during the period in 1880‘s when a family home. .

The first new knowledge as a consequence of reading the first chapter of the biography by Professor Worthen is that there were ten pits within walking distance of their home and that his father had three brothers also miners which suggests something of the fight his wife had towards keeping the family separate from the rest of mining community way of life. The chapter also explained that in fact they had moved to various mining villages where the best paid work was available before coming and settling in Eastwood. The financial disaster of the family is also explained as an industrial injury to her engine fitter husband who had been pensioned off and from whom she may gained the willingness to move to where the best paid work was and which would have made Norman Tebbit proud and her father had moved away from his family roots to Sheerness in Kent for the work which was to injure him. Given just how dangerous mining was at the time it is also understandable that she wanted her sons to do anything other than follow in their father’s footsteps. However it was the quickly deteriorating relationship between his mother and father that dominated the lives of the children and the evidence is that his mother poisoned his and his brother’s relationship and one presumes those of his sisters towards the father who appears content to have spent his evenings drinking with his workmates and only returning drink to insist on his marital rights. Professor Worthen is careful to present a balanced portrait of the husband who is not known to have walked out on the relationship and did not drink the family out of the basics of food and rent. Personally I have not time for anyone who criticises the lifestyle of anyone who spent their working life in dangerous and hot cramped conditions in prolonged physical activity a constant dusty atmosphere and then wanted to drink in the company of others who had undergone the same experience day after day, week after week, and year after year. This is why I shed no tear about the abolition of underground mining although I would not object to the conscripting of the bastard bankers and market speculators or putting them last in the queue for the Swine flu vaccinations along with the senior politicians and civil servants who went along with the fraud.

According to Professor Worthen the shop did not do well and he suggests Mrs Lawrence lacked the ability to sell the goods added to which must have been her unwillingness to accept let alone show respect to the miners and their ways. It would added insult to injury for Mrs Lawrence when they moved into a larger house but in a worse neighbourhood called the Breach when D H was two years of age and she would have fought all she could to move again.

D H, he was known as Bert after his middle name of Herbert, attended the Beauvale Board school from the age of seven until his thirteen year when he won a scholarship to Nottingham High School only the second son of miner to do so in the county and first from the school ever to go to the High School. He did so when the sons of miners at the school would have started down the pit or taken the first work available to them. It is my understanding that 1891 was also the year that the family moved to a lager house in Walker Street where Gavin Gillespie in his unique biography with photos

http://www.lawrenceseastwood.co.uk/ explains why the plaque in Walker Street is attached to the wrong house and should be next door and which is privately owned and occupied. There is the recreation of part of Beauvale class room at Durban House Heritage centre. This includes desks which open to reveal artefacts related to the Lawrence children. The small display makes the point that at the time learning was through listening and repetition.

The visit to Eastwood commenced with coffee at Durban House which was once the offices of the Barber, Walker Coal Company built in 1976. British Coal put the building up for auction in 1987 and was vandalised almost beyond repair until bought by the local authority in 1995 It was then fully restored by Broxtowe Council at a cost of £1 million and used to develop the connection with DH Lawrence who appears to have used the building as where Paul Morel went to collect his father‘s wages in Sons and Lovers. The display is part of the first floor which is shared with a photographic exhibition of people and places in Iceland. A major part of the ground floor is taken up with Coffee shop and restaurant which upon arrival was recovering from have been used a for a golden wedding party the previous evening and where the holding of special meals appears to form its essential income to offset the running costs of the project which is reported to cost the Council £150000 a year or approximately £5 per visitor. In February of this year the Council decided to reduce its funding by £60000. Given that the connection with DH and his family is limited and less than of 100 people a day are reported to visit continuation without additional funding support is questionable.

I was impressed by everything at Durban House and that a personal guide spent an hour with us touring the small centre at Victoria Street where as much was made of the space as buildings several times its area. I assumed there was close circuit TV at Durban House, but the guide was in part security at Victoria Street. My only regret is that the weather changed once more with heavy rain so the inclination was to find somewhere to park the car for the packed lunch rather than follow the trail further. However I believe I will return, more to show support that out of a burning urge to follow the rest of the trail.

Although D H won the scholarship he struggled at the High School and Professor Worthen describes him as even more as a fish out of water that at the Board school where he was bullied because he did not behave as a typical working class boy and preferred the company of girls.

The aspect which interests me most was his actual relationship with his mother. She obviously had a major influence on his life but did she express demonstrable affected and if not why not, born as he had been after she appears to have become disillusioned and antagonistic towards her husband. I will resist temptation go over my own upbringing in a working class household of a builder’s labourer by three sisters in two rooms one which was occupied by another sister who was deaf, dumb, blind and eventually bedridden from meningitis and fifth sister until she went for training a sa nurse and then contracted TB and was sent to a convalescent hospital where she died after refusing to have her operation. Although I had no father and was hidden from visiting members of the extended family and other refugees from the small community of Gibraltar I had good contact with my uncle and his youngest son and my mother was a distance figure who showed no positive feelings towards me but high behavioural standards based in fundamentalist and simple Catholicism. I was fortunate to attend a small private Catholic where I was picked on by the only working class lad but my educational roller coastal as due to being sickly for the greater part of one year and then being placed in the wrong year level and stream for my educational level having been made to undertake the same school year twice which was a humiliation and when despite moving from C to A stream over the course of the first year and taking the second stream form prize in the third year I never felt at home and missed out on having a single classmate from Wallington in any of the streams or years. Like D H I went to work at the age of sixteen and was as much a fish out of water there until I found channels for my creativity and imagination before after going to Ruskin College and the Oxford university experience, having chosen to go to prison as a civil offender rather than teacher training college at the age of twenty one.

It was illness which altered the life of DH first his own which led to his fist job at Haywood’s surgical factory in Nottingham as her son who ws working in London died within a day of her arrival to try and nurse him. It is recorded that she took little interest in the rest of her family after that and in fact it was a sister who was left to care for DH during his serious illness.

It was the move to Walker Street and mother’s devotion to chapel which was to have a profound influence on D H as the house overlooked the open countryside and Professor Worthen mentions his father would pick wild mushrooms on his way across the fields to work. His mother became friends with the wife of a farmer who attended the same chapel and she would have encouraged DH in his friendship with family and their youngest daughter Jessie who worshipped D H from meeting him. Despite the statement that his mother lost interest in her family it was she who was behind getting a place as pupil teacher establishment in Eastwood. D H would receive an hour’s teaching from the headmaster before school started, such was the impression made by DH with his application and natural intelligence. However it was the need to attend the pupil teacher centre at Ilkeston which brought him into contact with a wide range of others with a similar interests to himself. One cannot underestimate the value of such experience, especially if you feel and are told you are doing well. It was here that DH had contact with intellectually based socialists and free thinkers and found their views were similar to his own.

Jessie Chambers also attended the centre as did his youngest sister and his relationship with both, especially Jessie appears to contributed to the formation of his own creative voice The combination of experiences led him not just to sitting an examination to train as a certificated teacher but to be placed in the first class of the first division. He would attend University College in Nottingham but first he had to work full time as paid teacher at the Eastwood British Schools. It was during this time that he tried to write, poems at first and then a draft of what became the White Peacock.

Did he write letters during this time? Did ever write about his own adolescent development and sexual orientation. I read somewhere that he is reputed to have said an infatuation with a young 16 year old miner was the purist form of love he had experienced and one cannot but speculate that his writing about women as sex objects to essentially physically orientated working class men was in part to hide his own insecurity as a heterosexual male. However I have not read enough of his life and it is decades since reading any of his novels to make any judgements. I need to write about the cricket but will return to Lawrence if I can before the next travels and experiences. I need to make one further point to test further. It was evident from the visit to Durban House that Lawrence used not just his experiences of places in his writings but also his experience of relationships. This does not reflect a lack of imagination or creativity but the drive to express the truth, the reality of his experience. A local Mine owner was called Chatterley for example. However it is not possible to do this, to portray the truth even within a fictional setting without having an adverse effect on relationships with those living and even with those departed there is the likelihood of alienating some if not all of those who knew the individuals concerned, especially their family and friends.

I just also mention that rather than eat lunch in a rain drenched Eastwood car park i went off in search of the Shipley Country Park whose had been noticed on the way. However entering Shipley I had first noticed a small marker sign just after the car topped a hill but did notice an overgrown sign at the bottom of a wall intended for vehicles coming from the opposite direction. Both signs lead to an industrial area at the end of which is a 640 acre former colliery site which has become important open space with some 18 miles of paths and a number of lakes and ponds and major reservoir to one boundary. There is an interesting path called the trim track close to the main car park area and visitors sent which has been designed for elders to undertake light exercise in the open air. The visitors centre, education facility and cafe restaurants is also excellent. It is a gem of an open space and I forgive the locals for wanting to keep the facility for themselves. There was once a major country house within the grounds long since demolished and where the Squire’s lady ran off with the Earl of Shrewsbury.

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