Seventeen people were killed and a great deal of damage was done. Winifred wrote vividly about it for the school magazine: ‘Over the town hung a mantle of heavy smoke, yellow, unreal, which made the place look like a dream city, far, far away. Only the road was real, and the tight pain that caught us across our breast – it was not fear but something inexplicable that hurt, and yet in some strange way was not wholly unpleasant. Someone was down; with a bang they fell full length on the road and lay winded; then someone picked her up and they ran together . . .’

Her talent as a writer was recognised early and encouraged both by her teachers and her parents: her mother published a book of her poems when she was still at school. She won a scholarship to Somerville College in Oxford, and spent the interval between school and college terms as a probationer nurse in London. It was round about this time, in 1916, that ‘Bill’, a childhood friend, but several years older than Winifred, came home wounded from the war and declared his passionate love for her. She was too immature and unsure of herself to accept his love, and ‘Bill’ returned to the front feeling bitter and rejected. Later she realised that she was, after all, in love with him; but although he remained in her life, their relationship was never satisfactory or fulfilling. He was wounded for a second time, but it seems that he suffered more psychologically, becoming detached and disillusioned and unable to commit to anything.

Winifred went up to Somerville, but by the end of her first year felt ‘unbearably marooned in this half-dead, war-time city of elderly dons, women students, and wounded men on crutches’. She applied to join the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) in France, and spent a year there, in rather less danger than she had experienced in Scarborough, though she saw plenty of suffering. She returned to Somerville in 1919, and it was here that she met Vera Brittain (famous for her autobiography Testament of Youth), who was to share most aspects of her life until she died.

Still not greatly impressed by Oxford, Vera and Winifred certainly stimulated each other. It was a kind of folie à deux, but in a good way, and after leaving college they determined to conquer the literary world together, writing novels, journalism, and taking prominent roles in the Women’s Movement nationally and internationally. Winifred travelled all over Europe, and went on a lecture tour to South Africa at the age of 27. By her thirties, she was suffering bouts of ill health, and she died tragically young at 37, soon after finishing South Riding. Vera Brittain wrote a fascinating and moving account of her life in Testament of Friendship.

Adapting South Riding for television has been a fascinating challenge. When Stan Barstow adapted it in the 70s (with Dorothy Tutin in the lead), he had thirteen 50-minute episodes to play with – we had only three hours in which to tell a complex story. Inevitably, some characters and plotlines had to go, and readers coming to the book after watching the adaptation will find many new things to marvel at. But I hope we’ve been successful in capturing the essence of the novel, and in introducing Winifred Holtby to a new generation of readers.

Andrew Davies

Prefatory Letters to Alderman Mrs. Holtby

MY DEAR MOTHER,

Because you are a county alderman and because this book concerns a county council, I feel that I owe you a certain explanation and apology.

I admit that it was through listening to your descriptions of your work that the drama of English local government first captured my imagination. What fascinated me was the discovery that apparently academic and impersonal resolutions passed in a county council were daily revolutionising the lives of those men and women whom they affected. The complex tangle of motives prompting public decisions, the unforeseen consequences of their enactment on private lives appeared to me as part of the unseen pattern of the English landscape.

What I have tried to do in South Riding is to trace that pattern. I have laid my scene in the South East part of Yorkshire, because that is the district which I happen to know best; but the South Riding is not the East Riding; Snaith, Astell and Carne are not your colleagues; the incidents of the schools, housing estates and committees are not described from your experience. I have drawn my material from sources unknown to you. You had no idea that this was the novel I was writing. Alderman Mrs. Beddows is not Alderman Mrs. Holtby. Though I confess I have borrowed a few sayings for her from your racy tongue, and when I described Sarah’s vision of her in the final paragraph, it was you upon whom, in that moment, my thoughts were resting.

It may seem to you that in my pattern I have laid greater emphasis upon human affliction than you might consider typical or necessary.