The Woman of Substance: The Life and Work of Barbara Taylor Bradford. Piers Dudgeon
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her return in imagination to the landscape of her birth, and drew on the values that she associated with it, could she write the novels that made her famous.
But unlike Hardy, Barbara was not born into the culture or spirit of the times that inspired these values, and there was nothing that she could give me about her past to suggest that something in her identity had been lost to the passing of the times of which Middleham, Temple Newsam or Studley Royal belonged. I was, however, strongly aware that these experiences occurred and had been repeated on many occasions in the company of her mother. The image came to mind of Freda standing hand-in-hand with her daughter in the Keep at Middleham. Everything seemed to lead back to Freda. Why had Freda thought it so important to take Barbara to these places? Was it a committed mother’s desire to share their history, or can we see in the intensity of feeling that the trips engendered something more?
Interestingly, Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ poem is used in Barbara’s novel Her Own Rules to demonstrate that Meredith Stratton has a problem of identity – a terrible feeling of loss, of being robbed, of being incomplete, which is resolved in the novel when she discovers who her mother is. Meredith hears the poem and thinks she has heard it before – but not here, not in this life. It is the first of many so-called déjà vu experiences linked to Meri’s true identity, her secret past. ‘Her Own Rules is about a woman who doesn’t know who she really is,’ as Barbara confirmed.
Was this how it was for Freda? Was she, like Meredith Stratton, drawing something from the spirit of the place that answered questions about her own identity? Was she sublimating the sense of loss, which her daughter noticed in her but could never explain, in the noble spirit of places like Middleham, Temple Newsam, Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal? And did the intensity of the experience encourage her daughter Barbara, with whom she was ‘joined at the hip’, to identify with their history and experience this déjà vu?
Freda’s very being was redolent of the sense of loss which permeates not only the narrative but also some of the best imagery of Barbara’s novels, as when the winter sets in ‘for its long and deadly siege’ and the landscape is ‘brush-stroked in grisaille’ – a technique to which Barbara alludes not only in A Woman of Substance but also in The Women in His Life and Act of Will invariably to describe a beauty pained by loss.
Barbara, who knew no more about Freda’s problems than I did at the time of our trip to Middleham, allowed only that her mother did definitely want her to have a fascination for the history of the places they visited. But she herself had connected these déjà vu experiences with Meredith Stratton’s search for her roots of existence, and, as I mulled over our trip to Middleham, I remembered her appraisal that the fundamental theme of all her novels – including A Woman of Substance – is one of identity: ‘to know who you are and what you are’.
It would be some time, however, before the burden of the theme could be laid at Freda’s door.
‘I was the kind of little girl who always looked ironed from top to toe, in ankle socks, patent leather shoes and starched dresses. My parents were well dressed, too.’
Barbara was born on 10th May 1933 to Freda and Winston Taylor of 38 Tower Lane, Upper Armley, on the west side of Leeds. ‘Tower Lane was my first home,’ Barbara agreed, ‘but I was born in St Mary’s Hospital in the area called Hill Top. My mother, being a nurse, probably thought it was safer.’
Hill Top crests the main road a short walk from Tower Lane. St Mary’s Hospital is set back from the road and today more or less hidden behind trees within its own large site. A map dated the year of Barbara’s birth still carries the hospital’s original name, ‘Bramley Union Workhouse’ (Bramley is the next ‘village’ to the west of Armley). The Local Government Act of 1929 had empowered all local authorities to convert workhouse infirmaries to general hospitals, and by the time Barbara was born, it was probably already admitting patients from all social classes.
As the crow flies, Armley is little more than a mile and a half west of the centre of Leeds, which is the capital of the North of England, second only to London in finance, the law, and for theatre – the Yorkshire Playhouse being known as the National Theatre of the North. More than 50,000 students of its two universities and arts colleges also ensure that it is today one of the great nights out in the British Isles. Straddling the River Aire, which, with the Aire & Calder Navigation (the Leeds canal), helped sustain its once great manufacturing past, Leeds is positioned at the north end of the M1, Britain’s first motorway, almost equidistant between London and Edinburgh.
Armley, now a western suburb of the city, sits between the A647 Stanningley Road, which connects Leeds to Bradford, and Tong Road a mile to the south, where the father of playwright Alan Bennett, a contemporary of Barbara’s at school, had his butcher’s shop.
Armley’s name holds the secret of its beginnings, its second syllable meaning ‘open place in a wood’ and indicating that once it was but a clearing in forest land. Barbara will appreciate this. Oft heard celebrating the ‘bucolic’ nature of the Armley of old (it is one of her favourite adjectives both in the novels and in life), she recalls: ‘In the 1930s this was the edge of Leeds. There were a lot of open spaces . . . little moors – so called – fields, playing fields for football, as well as parks, such as Gott’s Park and Armley Park.’ There is still a fair today on Armley Moor, close to where Barbara first went to school: ‘Every September the fair or “feast” came, with carousels, stalls, candy floss, etc. We all went there when we were children.’
The Manor of Armley and, on the south side of Tong Road, that of Wortley, appear in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Ermelai and Ristone respectively. Together they were valued at ten shillings, which was half what they had been worth before the Normans had devastated the North in 1069. In King William’s great survey of England, Armley is described as comprising six carucates of taxable land for ploughing, six acres of meadow and a wood roughly one mile by three-quarters of a mile in area.
Not until the eighteenth century did the village come into its own, thanks to one Benjamin Gott, who was the outstanding figure among the Leeds woollen manufacturers of the industrial revolution. He was born in Woodall, near Calverley, a few miles west of the town, in 1762. At eighteen, he was apprenticed to the leading Leeds cloth merchant, Wormald and Fountaine. By 1800 the Fountaines had bowed out and in 1816 the Wormald family sold up too. Just how far all this was down to manoeuvring on the part of the acquisitive Gott does not come down to us. What is clear is that long before the firm was renamed Benjamin Gott and Sons it was his energy that made it the most successful woollen firm in England.
Gott’s mills – Bean Ing on the bank of the Aire, and a second one in Armley – brought railway terminals, factories and rows of terraced houses for workers, so that Armley was already part of Leeds by the mid-nineteenth century and the whole area was covered in a pall of smoke. So bad was the pollution that as early as 1823 Gott was taken to court. At his trial, the judge concluded that ‘in such a place as Leeds, which flourishes in consequence of these nuisances, some inconveniences are to be expected.’
Such attitudes made Gott a rich man. He bought Armley lock, stock and smoky barrel, built himself a big house there and hung it with his European art collection. Like many Victorian entrepreneurs, he was a philanthropist – he built a school and almshouses, organised worker pensions and gave to the Church’s pastoral work in the area. After he died in 1840, two sons carried on the business, made some improvements to the mill, but refused to compromise the quality of their high-grade cloths and take advantage of the ready-made clothing industry, which burgeoned after 1850, preferring to exercise their main interest as art and rare-book collectors. Inevitably their markets shrank. When one of the next generation went into the Church, parts of Bean Ing were let out, and by 1897 one tenant had a lease on the entire building.
William Ewart Gott, the third-generation son who stayed in Armley, is lambasted