The Woman of Substance: The Life and Work of Barbara Taylor Bradford

Neither Kendall nor Barbara go along with the Warwick that Shakespeare gives us in the three parts of Henry VI – a ‘bellicose baron of a turbulent time’. Kendall’s Warwick is ‘an amalgam of legend and deeds’, a figure whose character and actions attracted heroic levels of adulation and gave him mythic status throughout the land, as he rode in triumph through his vast estates; a figure who, like Barbara herself and her charismatic heroines, seems to have been marked with a strong sense of destiny from the start. Warwick, writes Kendall, never doubted for one moment that he could achieve what he set out to do: ‘He refused to admit there were disadvantages he could not overcome and defeats from which he could not recover, and he had the courage, and vanity, to press his game to the end. In other words, he is a Western European man, and in him lies concentrated the reason why that small corner of the earth, in the four centuries after his death, came to dominate all the rest.’

From an early age he gave the impression of a man awaiting his moment, of a ‘depth of will’ as yet untapped but equal to any challenge that truly merited his time. And when the moment came, when the dream promised to become the man, he recognised it, gave up his subordinate role without second thought, seized it and won it, not with sleight of hand, subterfuge or trickery, but with valour, the occasion the defeat of the King’s troops in the city of St Albans in 1455.

His role had been as back-up to the dukes of York and Salisbury against forces raised by Somerset from a full quarter of the nobility of England. They had approached the city making clear their intention to rescue the King from the clutches of Margaret of Anjou, beautiful and feisty niece of Charles VII of France and now wife of King Henry and the divisive force in the land. When battle commenced in the narrow lanes that led up to Holywell, York and Salisbury found themselves in serious difficulties and it was then that Warwick took it upon himself to lead his men forward on the run, dashing across domestic gardens and through private houses to attack Somerset’s men from the rear. From the moment his archers burst into St Peter’s Street shouting ‘A Warwick! A Warwick!’ his reputation flew. With ‘Somerset’s host broken,’ as Kendall describes, ‘Warwick, York and Salisbury approached the peaked King, standing alone and bewildered in the doorway of a house, his neck bleeding from an arrow graze. Down on their knees they went, beseeching Henry the Sixth for his grace and swearing they never meant to harm him. Helplessly, he nodded his head. The battle was over.’

There is in Kendall’s Warwick the same unifying robustness to which the nation rises when the England rugby team presses its game to the end, seizing the Webb Ellis trophy against a background of fans clad in the livery of St George. What Kendall is identifying is what attracts Barbara to Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher: the character that won us an Empire and coloured what is understood to be our very Englishness.

It is a spirit often given to excess, bigotry, even fanaticism, so that Barbara can say defensively and with evident contradiction: ‘There was no bigotry in our family. The only thing my father said was, “Nobody listens to Enoch Powell.”’ But there is no hint of fanaticism in Barbara’s ideals. It is not in her character to support it, and through husband Bob, a German Jew, dispossessed by the Nazis as a boy, Barbara is alert to the danger more than most. She would probably avoid politics altogether if she could, and draws any political sting in the novels by introducing a crucial element of compassion in her heroic notion of power.

In the young Warwick, Barbara found the epitome of the person of substance for whom integrity is all. In her novels, power is ‘the most potent of weapons’, and it only corrupts ‘when those with power will do anything to hold on to that power. Sometimes,’ she tells us in full agreement with the Warwick legend, ‘it can even be ennobling.’

The character of Warwick that got through to Barbara encompassed more than soldier values. The fierce loyalties of those times were, in young Warwick’s case, not forged in greed, nor were they all about holding on to, or wresting, power from an opponent for its own sake. Long before he fell out with his protégé Edward and, embittered, took sides against him; long before he ‘sold what he was for what he thought he ought to be’, as Kendall put it, his purpose really was to defend the values which true Englishmen held as good.

Freda made sure that Barbara picked up on this heroic aspect. As a child, her mother ‘instilled in her a sense of honour, duty and purpose’, the need for ‘integrity in the face of incredible pressure and opposition’ and ‘not only an honesty with those people who occupied her life, but with herself’. These noble values arise in Act of Will and A Woman of Substance, but they first found impetus in Freda’s expeditions into Wensleydale; they are what Barbara always understood to be the values of the landscape of her birth. The seed took root when Freda led her by the hand up the hill through Middleham into the old castle keep, even if she was unable to articulate and bring it to flower until she sat down many years later to write A Woman of Substance.

In the novel, Paul McGill recognises the woman of substance in Emma with reference to Henry VI – ‘O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide’. The heroic values Barbara garnered in her childhood as a result of Freda’s influence – the sense of honour, duty and purpose – ensures a strong moral code. ‘Emma has such a lot of inner strength,’ as Barbara says, ‘physical and mental strength, but also an understanding heart. She is tough, but tough is not hard,’ an allusion that brings us from Shakespeare to Ernest Hemingway, who once said, ‘I love tough broads but I can’t stand hard dames.’

Emma is tireless, obsessive, ruthlessly determined and dispassionate. She has a ‘contained and regal’ posture, there is an imperiousness about her, but she is also ‘fastidious, honest, and quietly reserved’. She wears a characteristically inscrutable expression and cannot abide timidity where it indicates fear of failing, which she says has ‘stopped more people achieving their goals than I care to think about.’ She is physically strong and has a large capacity for hard work. ‘Moderation is a vastly overrated virtue,’ she believes, ‘particularly when applied to work.’ Emma is ‘tough and resilient, an indomitable woman’, with ‘strength of will’ and ‘nerves of steel’. To her PA, Gaye Sloane, she is ‘as indestructible as the coldest steel’.

To Blackie’s wife, sweet Laura Spencer, with whom Emma lodges, ‘there was something frightening about her’, the feeling that ‘she might turn out to be ruthless and expedient, if that was necessary. And yet, in spite of their intrinsic difference, they shared several common traits – integrity, courage, and compassion.’ While ‘understanding of problems on a personal level, [she] was hard-headed and without sentiment when it came to business. Joe [Lowther, her husband] had once accused her of having ice water in her veins.’ But granddaughter Paula admires Emma’s ‘integrity in the face of incredible pressure and opposition’, and while she can be ‘austere and somewhat stern of eye’ and there is a ‘canny Yorkshire wariness’ about her, when her guard is down it is ‘a vulnerable face, open and fine and full of wisdom.’

References to Middleham are legion in the novels. In Angel, research for a film takes us there. In Where You Belong Barbara chooses it as the site for the restaurant, Pig on the Roof, and there’s a lovely Yorkshire Christmas there. In Voice of the Heart, Francesca Cunningham guides Jerry Massingham and his assistant Ginny to the castle in search of film locations. Key scenes in the film of A Woman of Substance were shot in the village, and when you climb up the main street towards the castle you will see to your right the iron-work canopied shop, which, though placed elsewhere in Barbara’s imagination, became the film location for Harte’s Emporium (Emma’s first shop in her empire).

When I visited Middleham with Barbara, an army of horses clattered down the road from the castle to meet us, descending from the gallops and tipping me straightaway into the pages of Emma’s Secret and Hold the Dream, where Allington Hall is one of the greatest riding stables in all England. Barbara, however, was back in her childhood with Freda: ‘We’d get the bus to Ripon and then my mother had various cousins who drove us from Ripon to Middleham . . .’

In Hold the Dream, past and present find a kind of poetic resolution in this place. Shane O’Neill believes that he is linked to its history through an ancestor on his mother’s side. It is ‘the one spot on earth where he felt he truly belonged’, and at the end he and Emma’s granddaughter Paula come together there. This sense of belonging plays an important role in the author’s own imaginative life: ‘I have very strange feelings there. I must have been about eight or nine when we first went. I thought, I know this place, as if I had lived there. I want to come back’

No matter whether it is Middleham Castle, Studley Royal or Temple Newsam, Barbara readily enters into an empathic relationship with Freda’s favourite places, feeling herself into their history, and it is a strangely intense and markedly subjective relationship. Talking to me about Temple Newsam in Leeds, she said, ‘I can’t really explain this to you – how attracted I was to the place, my mother and I used to go a lot. It was a tram ride, you’d go on the tram to town and then take another tram . . . or was it a bus? I loved it there, I always loved to go and I felt very much at home, like I’d been there before. Yes, déjà vu. Completely.’

‘Can you think why that was?’ I asked her.

‘No. I have no idea.’

‘Did you say anything about it to your mother at the time?’

‘No, she just knew I loved to go.’

When I drove Barbara to Middleham Castle, we had a similar conversation while exploring what remains of the massive two-storey twelfth-century Keep with Great Chamber and Great Hall above, ‘the chief public space in the castle’, I read from a sign. ‘The Nevilles held court here. Walls were colourful with hangings and perhaps paintings. Clothes were colourful and included heraldic designs . . .’

Barbara interrupted me: ‘I have always been attracted to Middleham and I have always had an eerie feeling that I was here in another life, hundreds of years ago. I know it; why do I know it all? How do I know it all? Was I here? I know this place, and it is not known because I came in my childhood.’

From outside came the sound of children playing. We made our way gingerly up steps nearly one thousand years old, the blue sky our roof now, held in place by tall, howling, windowless walls that supported scattered clumps of epiphytic lichen and wild flowers. Barbara stood still in the Great Hall, taking it all in with almost religious reverence. Then, inevitably, the larking children burst in. She turned, her look silencing them before even she opened her mouth: ‘Now look, you’ve got to stop making a lot of noise. You’re disturbing other people. This is not a place for you to play!’ It was as if they had desecrated a church. We descended to areas which were once kitchens and inspected huge fireplaces at one time used as roasting hearths, and discovered two wells and a couple of circular stone pits, which a signpost guide suggested may have been fish tanks.

‘It was much taller than this, it has lost a lot,’ she sighed, and then asked, ‘Would it have been crenellated?’

I said I thought that likely, adding, ‘It is gothic, dark,’ before my eyes returned to the wild flowers in search of a lighter tone. ‘Look at the harebells,’ I said, but Barbara was not to be deterred. She had come from New York to be there, she wanted me to grasp a point.

‘I don’t understand why I have this feeling. I don’t understand why it is so meaningful to me.’

‘There is a very strong sense of place here,’ I agreed.

‘For me there is.’

I felt a compulsion to test the subjectivity of Barbara’s vision. ‘I think anyone would find that there is a strong sense of place here,’ I said.

She leapt back at me immediately: ‘No, no, I know this, I have been here, not in this life.’ Then, as suddenly, the spell was broken: ‘And then you see, you can go down here . . . I had the feeling as a child, I thought I knew it. I had this really strong pull, and I don’t know why. I feel I was here in that time, in the Wars of the Roses. I feel that I lived here in the time of Warwick.’

An ability to empathise with the spirit of place is a characteristic of all writers grouped together in the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, not least William Wordsworth, whose poem, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .’ was one of Freda’s favourites and crops up time and again in Barbara’s novels. The verses tell of an empathic moment in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, near Ullswater in the Lake District, where the poet and his sister, Dorothy, come upon the most beautiful daffodils they have ever seen: ‘Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and peeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew them over the lake . . . ever glancing, ever changing,’ Dorothy recorded in her diary. But Barbara’s déjà vu experiences are different in an important respect from those of the Romantics. For her, sympathetic identification with Middleham Castle or Temple Newsam or Studley Royal always carries with it a conviction not only that the past is contained in the present, but of herself as part of it. The Romantic notion of empathy is absolutely the opposite of this: it is the disappearance of self. Empathy between Keats and the nightingale was contingent on the poet becoming the immortal spirit of the bird. Barbara’s feeling that she has been to a place before, in another life perhaps, comes from somewhere else. The ‘experience’ carries a sense of belonging. She seems on the verge of finding out more about herself by being there. It has something to do with identity.

Also inherent in what she terms déjà vu (literally ‘already seen’) is a feeling of disassociation with what is felt to have been experienced before; a sense of loss, a sense that there is a past which was hers and has been lost to her. Such a sense of loss can be a powerful inspiration for an author. For instance, Thomas Hardy’s novels were inspired by the loss he felt deeply of the land-based, deep-truth culture into which he had been born at Bockhampton in Dorset in the nineteenth century, and we will see that only after Barbara made 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.

CHAPTER TWO

Beginnings

‘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 by David Kallinski in A Woman of Substance for having built statues and fountains rather than helping the poor, although in fact he provided the land for the foundation – in 1872 – of Christ Church, Armley, where Barbara was christened, received her first Communion and attended service every Sunday, going to Sunday School there as well. He gave towards the building of it and appointed its first vicar, the Reverend J. Thompson, who served a longer term (thirteen years) than any vicar since.

Barbara likes to say that she was ‘born in 1933 to ordinary parents in an ordinary part of Leeds and had a similarly ordinary childhood,’ but there was nothing unexceptional in the times into which she was born. The industrial revolution had finally ground to a halt. Two years before she was born, in the General Election of 1931, the Conservatives had romped home with some twelve million votes, the party having been elected to stem the economic crisis. It was the last year they would enjoy anything like that tally for some time to come.