The Valley
Authors: Richard Benson
Praise for
The Valley
‘
The Valley
is an oral record of the 20th century from the mouths of those at the bottom of the pile … The inhabitants of Dearne Valley have never been commemorated in literature before, and the likes of Winnie and Juggler are unlikely to be seen again *****’
Daily Telegraph
‘For an unvarnished, well-crafted story of the human side of mining, there won’t be anything better than
The Valley
’
Independent
‘How many social reports have you read that combine the epic sweep of
Gone With the Wind
with the microscopic intensity of Tolstoy … Extraordinary’
Sunday Express
‘A sprawling masterpiece … Social history as it is meant to be. Neither novel nor documentary, it is a compelling hybrid of both’
Yorkshire Post
‘Benson recreates the valley over a century through a kaleidoscope of lives … He transforms the long littleness of life into an epic, and a masterpiece’
Intelligent Life
‘
The Valley
is a landmark history, not because we know for sure that all these things happened just as Benson says they did, but because things like that did happen all the time’
Literary Review
‘The moving history of four generations of one Yorkshire mining family. Through them emerges the story of 20th century working-class England’
Woman & Home
‘The fascinating story of four generations from the same mining family whose way of life has now disappeared’
Daily Express
‘An intensely enjoyable account of four generations of a mining family’
Sunday Times
‘Four generations of a Yorkshire mining family as a way of telling the story of 20th century working-class England: meticulous, vivid, engrossing’
Evening Standard
Summer Reading
For my family
Contents
Workmates at Manvers Main Colliery
7 The Knuckleduster and the Wedding Ring
9 The Boy Who Came Back from the Dead
15 I Always Cry at a Brass Band
22 Victorian Underwear and Science-fiction Shoes
24 The Man Who Came Second in the Bad Luck Competition
26 By the Light of the Silvery Moon
27 How Do You Get Away? Who Do You Have To Ask?
37 The Two Wives of Roy Fox Hollingworth
38 You’re Never Telling Me You’re Going to Do it on the Street?
39 The Beautiful, Beautiful Glowing Light
41 A Pork Pie and a Pint of Milk
47 You Can’t Just Fling a Hook in a River
49 Husbands and Lovers, Fathers and Mothers
50 My Arms Won’t Go Fast Enough for This Modern Drumming
52 The Future is a Foreign Country
54 What Are You Doing for Money?
55 What I Did in the War, Daddy
56 Because You Don’t Know My Wife
62 I Think He’s Trying to Tell Me That He Loves Me
63 I’ve Got Somebody Here Who Wants to See You
66 Born Wi’t Silver Spoon in Thy Gob
69 From the Flames to the Winds
Â
This is a book about real people, places and events. Its stories are taken from my own memory, from my family's memories, from interviews with relatives and other people who were involved with the family, and from historical research. The national and international events that bear on the experiences of people in these stories are written about from the points of view of those people. I have tried to show how politics and economics touched individuals' lives, but I do not present the book as a comprehensive or objective history.
When I started my research I wanted to write about a place changing through time. However, as I gathered memories and information, I realised that I was, inevitably, collecting individual stories rather than assembling a single narrative that encapsulated the history of the place â the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire â in which most of the action takes place. This made me wonder if I should turn the stories into a novel. A novel would certainly have been neater, because a novelist orders significant events whereas in actual life they occur in inconvenient clumps. In a novel characters behave more or less as you expect them to, while actual people can be surprising and inconsistent and so more difficult for both writer and reader to assimilate. And the novelist need not spend time trying, as I tried, to stand up family anecdotes about spirits and ghosts that are, at least by the conventional standards of corroboration, unverifiable.
The problem was that too many of the things people did, and too many of the things that happened to them, would not be credible in fiction. In fiction, a character who is told their legs are permanently paralyzed but who learns to walk again through what seems to be sheer mental effort would seem unconvincing in the extreme. The same is true of a soldier whose life is saved from a bullet by a brass button on his uniform; a young mother who is visited by reassuring spirits when science and the church have failed her; or a middle-aged woman of puritan morals who has an extra-marital love affair with a man fourteen years her junior. Â Such people and experiences did occur in my family stories though, so non-fiction it had to be.
Details. On the few occasions I appear, I write about myself in the third person as âRichard'. This was the least unsatisfactory of various unsatisfactory alternatives. To protect some people's privacy certain names have been changed, and the details of certain places left unspecified. The thoughts and feelings of characters who were dead at the time of writing are based on their accounts as told to surviving family members. Where possible, events have been checked against historical records, and I have used those records in the descriptions of some locations. In some cases prior to 1930, I have taken conversations recalled in passed-down family stories, and recreated them in made-up dialogue based on my knowledge of the speech and mannerisms of the people speaking. I list these passages, with the sources for the stories, online at
richardbenson.com/thevalley
.
It is true that some of the accounts of historical events that follow may test one's credulity. However, to doubt them would be to ignore a rule well known to people familiar with the history of South Yorkshire, mining villages and the Hollingworth family: namely, that the more improbable and absurd an event seems to be, the more likely it is to have actually happened.
Simplified to show only people mentioned in the text.
