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

The steps leading up to economic crisis and the Tory majority in 1931 led also to Adolf Hitler becoming German Chancellor two years later, and, seemingly inexorably, to war six years after that. Those who lived through it will tell you that the slump started in 1928 in the North of England, but it became world news in October 1929 with the Wall Street crash. Between 1930 and 1933, following President Hoover’s decision to raise tariff barriers, world trade fell by two-thirds. Unemployment in America rose to twelve million (it had been but two million in 1920); in 1931 nearly six million were out of work in Germany. In Britain, in the January of the year of Barbara’s birth – 1933 – the same year that Walter Greenwood’s classic novel of life in a northern town during the slump, Love on the Dole, was published – it reached an all-time peak of 2,979,000. The Depression was on. Barbara was born at the height of it.

There is no doubt that there was great suffering in areas of the northwest and northeast of England. Figures of the unemployed seeking ‘relief’ in the workhouses in these regions confirm it, but for some there was a less drastic and emotive story. Barbara’s family seem not to have suffered too badly, even though her father was unemployed ‘for most of my childhood’, and was once reduced to shovelling snow, getting paid sixpence for his work and later telling his daughter: ‘At that time, Barbara, there was a blight on the land.’ The memory went into Act of Will, the ‘blight on the land’ line causing Barbara some grief when her American editor cut it out.

So how did the Taylors make ends meet? ‘My mother worked. She worked at nursing and she did all sorts of things. She was a housekeeper for a woman for a while. Do you remember that part of Act of Will when Christina gives her mother Audra a party? I remember that party, and I remember having those strawberries. My editor in England, Patricia Parkin, said nothing in the book summed up the Depression better than the strawberries. I cried when I wrote it because I remembered it so clearly – when I say, “their eyes shone and they smiled at each other . . .” I mean, I still choke up now!’

‘It’s time for the strawberries, Mam, I’ll serve,’ Christina cried, jumping down off her chair. ‘And you get to get the most, ’cos it’s your birthday.’

‘Don’t be so silly,’ Audra demurred, ‘we’ll all have exactly the same amount, it’s share and share alike in this family.’

‘No, you have to have the most,’ Christina insisted as she carefully spooned the fruit into the small glass dishes she had brought from the sideboard. They had not had strawberries for a long time because they were so expensive and such a special treat. And so none of them spoke as they ate them slowly, savouring every bite, but their eyes shone and they smiled at each other with their eyes. And when they had finished they all three agreed that these were the best strawberries they had ever eaten . . .

The dole, or unemployment benefit, was £1 a week in 1930, thirty shillings for man, woman and child. Barbara’s father may also have received some sort of disability allowance, for he had lost a leg. A day’s work might bring Freda in five shillings, say eighteen shillings a week, cash in hand. That’s only 90p in the British decimalised economy, an old shilling being the current 5p piece, but its value was many times greater. In 1930, best butter cost a shilling a pound, bacon threepence for flank, fourpence-halfpenny for side, fivepence or sixpence for ham, two dozen eggs (small) were a shilling, margarine was fourpence a pound, and one pound of steak and rabbit was a shilling. It was quite possible to live on the Taylor income.

Indeed, there was money over to maintain Barbara’s ‘ironed look from top to toe, in ankle socks, patent leather shoes and starched dresses’. Her parents, she tells us, were well dressed, too. Of course, it was easier to be well dressed in those days. Men wore suits to work whether they were working class or middle class, and few changes of clothing were actually required; women for their part were adept at making do. There is no doubt also that there was the usual Yorkshire care with money in the Taylor household, which Barbara will tell you she has to this day. Certainly, when she was a child there was money left over for her father’s beer, a flutter on the horses and even for summer holidays, taken at the east coast resort of Bridlington, the seaside holiday being a pastime whose popularity was on the increase, while foreign travel remained an elite pursuit for the very rich.

Another apparent anachronism of the depressed 1930s is that it was also the decade of the mass communication and leisure revolution, which facilitated industries that would be Barbara’s playground as an adult. British cinema began as a working-class pastime, films offering escapism, excitement and a new focus for hero worship more palatable than the aristocracy, as well as a warm, dark haven for courting couples. The first talkie arrived in Britain in 1929. By 1934 there was an average weekly cinema attendance of 18.5 million (more than a third of the population), and more than 20 million people had a radio in the home.

Sales of newspapers also burgeoned, with door-to-door salesmen offering free gifts for those who registered as readers – it was rumoured that a family could be clothed from head to foot for the price of reading the Daily Express for eight weeks. In 1937 the typical popular daily employed five times as many canvassers as editorial staff. It is interesting that Barbara is wont to say in interview, ‘I’d read the whole of Dickens by the time I was twelve,’ because complete sets of Dickens were a typical ‘attraction’ offered to prospective readers – perhaps to Daily Mirror readers in particular, for ‘When I was a child,’ Barbara once said, ‘we had the Mirror in our house and I have always been fond of it.’

Literacy increased throughout the country at this time, partly due to the expansion of the popular press, the sterling work of libraries and the coming of the paperback book. Allen Lane founded the Penguin Press in 1936 and Victor Gollancz set up the Left Book Club in the same year. Literature, as well as books not classifiable as such, was now available to the masses: 85.7 million books were loaned by libraries in 1924, but in 1939 the figure had risen to 247.3 million.

Freda took full advantage. ‘She was a great reader and force-fed books to me. I went to the library as a child. My mother used to take me and plonk me down somewhere while she got her books.’

Armley Library in Town Street was purpose-built in 1902 at a cost of £5,121.14s. It is five minutes’ walk from the family’s first house in Tower Lane and even less from Greenock Terrace, to which the Taylors repaired during the war. Libraries in the North of England are often supreme examples of Victorian architecture, like other corporation buildings an excuse to shout about the industrial wealth of a city. Though Armley’s is relatively small, there is something celebratory about its trim, and the steps leading up to the original entrance give, in miniature, the feeling of grandeur you find in Leeds or Manchester libraries, for example. What’s more, the architect, one Percy F. Robinson, incorporated a patented water-cooled air-conditioning system in the design. ‘It was a beautiful building,’ Barbara agreed when I told her that I was having difficulty getting access to local archives because it was now closed. ‘Don’t tell me they are destroying it!’ she exclaimed in alarm. It was closed in fact for renovation, and today there is a pricey-looking plaque commemorating Barbara’s reopening of it in November 2003.

‘My mother exposed me to a lot of things,’ Barbara continued. ‘She once said, “I want you to have a better life than I’ve had.” She showed me – she taught me to look, she taught me to read when I was very young. She felt education was very important. She would take me to the Theatre Royal in Leeds to see, yes, the pantomime, but also anything she thought might be suitable. For instance, I remember her taking me to see Sadlers Wells when it came to the Grand Theatre in Leeds. I remember it very well because Svetlana Beriosova was the dancer and I was a young girl, fifteen maybe. I loved the theatre and I would have probably been an actress if not a writer. I remember all the plays I was in, the Sunday School plays: I was a fairy – I have a photograph of myself! – and a witch! And then I was in the Leeds Amateur Dramatics Society, but only ever as a walk-on maid. We did a lot of open-air plays at Temple Newsam, mostly Shakespeare. I have a picture somewhere of me in an Elizabethan gown as one of the maids of honour.’ The involvement of Barbara and some of her school-friends in these plays was organised by Arthur Cox, a head teacher in the Leeds education system, whose wife was a teacher at Northcote School, which Barbara attended from 1945. A friend at the time, June Exelby, remembers: ‘We used to go and be extras in things like Midsummer Night’s Dream – as fairies and things like that. Barbara used to particularly enjoy it. I can’t remember whether she was any good at it.’

Affluence in Armley seemed to rise and fall with the topography of the place. Going west from Town Street at Wingate Junction, which was where the Leeds tram turned around in Barbara’s day, up Hill Top Road and over the other side to St Mary’s Hospital and St Bede’s Church, where Barbara went to dances as a girl, the houses were bigger and owner-occupied by the wealthier professional classes: ‘It was considered to be the posh end of Armley,’ she recalled.

Tower Lane, where Barbara lived with Freda and Winston, is a pretty, leafy little enclave of modest but characterful, indigenous-stone cottages. It is set below Hill Top but hidden away from the redbrick industrial terraces off Town Street to the east, in which most of the working-class community lived. It must have seemed a magical resort to Barbara in the first ten years of her life, and certainly she remembered Armley with a fairytale glow when she came to write about it in A Woman of Substance and Act of Will, Emma Harte and Audra Kenton both coming upon it first in the snow.

Audra saw at once that the village of Upper Armley was picturesque and that it had a quaint Victorian charm. And despite the darkly-mottled sky, sombre and presaging snow, and a landscape bereft of greenery, it was easy to see how pretty it must be in the summer weather.

In A Woman of Substance, it is ‘especially pretty in summer when the trees and flowers are blooming,’ and in winter the snow-laden houses remind Emma explicitly of a scene from a fairytale:

Magically, the snow and ice had turned the mundane little dwellings into quaint gingerbread houses. The fences and the gates and the bare black trees were also encrusted with frozen snowflakes that, to Emma, resembled the silvery decorations on top of a magnificent Christmas cake. Paraffin lamps and firelight glowed through the windows and eddying whiffs of smoke drifted out of the chimneys, but these were the only signs of life on Town Street.

It is a little girl’s dream. Although the description is unrecognisable of Armley today, and its ‘mundanity’ is again deliberately discarded when Barbara selects Town Street as the spot where Emma Harte leases a shop and learns the art of retail, setting herself on the road to making millions, we accept it because it was plausible to the imaginative little girl who lived and grew up there: ‘There are a number of good shops in Town Street catering to the Quality trade,’ Blackie tells Emma when she first arrives:

They passed the fishmonger’s, the haberdasher’s, the chemist’s, and the grand ladies’ dress establishment, and Emma recognised that this was indeed a fine shopping area. She was enormously intrigued and an idea was germinating. It will be easier to get a shop here. Rents will be cheaper than in Leeds, she reasoned logically. Maybe I can open my first shop in Armley, after the baby comes. And it would be a start. She was so enthusiastic about this idea that by the time they reached the street where Laura Spencer lived she already had the shop and was envisioning its diverse merchandise.

Today, beyond Town Street’s maze of subsidiary terraces, where Barbara’s father Winston’s family once lived, stand Sixties tower blocks and back-to-back housing with more transient tenants not featured in Barbara’s fiction. And at the end of the line stands Armley Prison, its architectural purpose clearly to strike terror into the would-be inmates. This does register in A Woman of Substance – future architect Blackie O’Neill calls it a ‘horrible dungeon of a place’. Nearly a century later, multiple murderer Peter Sutcliffe – ‘the Yorkshire Ripper’ – added to its reputation.

Now, twenty-five per cent of Armley’s inhabitants are from ethnic minorities where English is a second language. The great change began as Barbara left for London in the 1950s. As a result, the culture of Armley village today is unlike anything she remembers, even though, according to local headmistress Judy Blanchland, inhabitants still feel part of a tradition with sturdy roots in the past, and have pride in the place. Certainly there is continuity in generations of the same families attending Christ Church School. The school, and the church opposite, remain very much the heart of the local community, with around 100 attending church on Sunday, seventy adults and some thirty children. There always has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the two, even if changing the name of Armley National School, as it was in Barbara’s day, to Christ Church School did cause something of a stir.

Barbara enrolled there on 31st August 1937, along with eleven other infants. Her school number was 364 until she was elevated to Junior status in 1941, when it became 891. Alan Bennett, born on 9th May 1934, one year after Barbara, joined on 5th September 1938, from his home at 12 Halliday Place. The families didn’t know one another. ‘My mother used to send me miles to a butcher that she decided she liked better [than Bennett’s shop on Tong Road]. It was all the way down the hill, almost on Stanningley Road.’ After leaving the school, the two forgot they had known one another until the day, fifty years later, when they were both honoured by Leeds University with a Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa degree.

Bennett became a household name in England from the moment in 1960 that he starred in and coauthored the satirical review Beyond the Fringe with Dudley Moore, Peter Cooke and Jonathan Miller at the world-famous Edinburgh Arts Festival. Later the show played to packed audiences in London’s West End and New York. He was on a fast-track even at Christ Church School, passing out a year early, bound for West Leeds High School, according to the school log. From there the butcher’s son won a place at Oxford University.

Barbara and I walked the area together in the summer of 2003, mourning the fact that generally little seems to have been done to retain the nineteenth-century stone buildings of her birthplace. Even many of the brick-built worker terraces, which have their own period-appeal, have been daubed with red masonry paint in a makeshift attempt to maintain them. There was, however, enough left to remind Barbara of her childhood there.

We drove up Town Street towards Tower Lane, where she lived until she was about ten. At Town Street’s west end, you can filter right into Tower Lane or left into Whingate, site of the old tram terminal and the West Leeds High School, now an apartment block. (See 1933 map in the first picture section.) The small triangular green between Town Street and Whingate which appears at this point must have been a talking point for Barbara and her mother from earliest times, if only on account of its name – Charley Cake Park – mentioned in both A Woman of Substance and Act of Will. ‘Laura told me that years ago a man called Charley hawked cakes there,’ says Blackie. Emma believes him, but only because no-one could invent such a name for an otherwise totally insignificant strip of grass.

As we wind our way towards Barbara’s first home, she has a mental picture of ‘me at the age of three, sitting under a parasol outside 38 Tower Lane, near a rose bush. It is a lane, you know,’ she emphasises, ‘and it was a tiny little cottage where we lived. Do you think it is still there? We got off the tram here . . . Whingate Junction . . . then we walked across the road and up Tower Lane, and there was a very tall wall, and behind that wall were . . . sort of mansions; they were called The Towers.’

At the mouth of the lane she points to a cluster of streets called the Moorfields: ‘That used to be where the doctor I went to practised – Doctor Stalker was his name. One of those streets went down to the shop where I got the vinegar. Did I tell you about the vinegar? Boyes, a corner shop, that’s where I used to get it. I wonder if that’s still there?’

The vinegar turns my mind to Barbara’s penchant for fish and chips. I had heard that when she comes to Yorkshire she likes nothing better than to go for a slap-up meal of fish and chips, mushy peas, and lashings of vinegar. That very night I would find myself eating fish and chips with her in Harrogate. Nothing odd, you might say, about a Yorkshire woman eating a traditional Yorkshire meal, only Barbara has her posh cosmopolitan heroes and heroines do it in the novels too, and has herself been known to request, and get, a bottle of Sarson’s served at table in the Dorchester Grill.

What is Emma Harte, the woman of substance’s favourite dish? Fish and chips, preceded by a bowl of vegetable soup, served in Royal Worcester china of course, the only concession to Emma’s transformation. Again there is this feeling of fairytale about it all, except that one knows that the writer has herself made the same journey as Emma Harte, and that she does in fact order fish and chips too. The desire seems to pass down the generations, so that Emma’s grandson, the immensely wealthy Philip McGill Amory, insists on eating fish and chips with his wife Madelena – what matter if she is wearing a Pauline Trigère evening gown?

‘My mother used to send me to get the household vinegar from Mr Boyes,’ Barbara continues, ‘and she sent me with a bottle because it was distilled from a keg, and when I returned with it she’d always look at the bottle and say, “Look at this, he’s cheating me!” Until one day she went in herself with the bottle and she said to Mr Boyes, “You’re cheating me. I never get a full bottle,” and apparently Mr Boyes replied, “Eeh, ah knows. Tha’ Barbara’s drinking it.” He was very broad Yorkshire, and it’s true, I did drink a bit of it on the way home. Even today I like vinegar on many things, but especially on cabbage . . .

‘There’s Gisburne’s Garage!’ I slow down as we pass the garage on our right at the mouth of the lane, and she points out an old house, pebble-dashed since she was a girl. ‘This was where Mrs Gisburne lived and it had a beautiful garden in the back. But where this is green there used to be a pavement, surely . . . but maybe it wasn’t, perhaps I am seeing . . .’

This is the first time that Barbara has set foot in the place for fifty years. What will turn out to be real of her childhood memories? What part of imagination? Childhood memories play tricks on us. She looks for the ‘tall wall’ that she remembers should be on our left, containing the mansions known as The Towers. There is a wall, but it is not tall, nor have the original blackened stones been touched since the four- or five-foot construction was built all those years ago.

‘That wall used to seem so high when I was a child,’ she says in amazement. ‘Anyway, these are called The Towers and this is where Emma had a house and they were considered to be very posh. It was all trees here.’

The Towers stretched many floors above us and must have seemed to a child’s eye to reach into the sky. Their castellated construction of blackened West Riding stone gives them a powerful, gothic feel, and it was the majesty of the site that captured Barbara’s wonder when she was growing up here. Her eyes must have fallen upon the building virtually every day during her most impressionable years, whenever she emerged from the garden of her house opposite:

The Towers stood in a private and secluded little park in Upper Armley that was surrounded by high walls and fronted by great iron gates. A circular driveway led up to the eight fine mansions situated within the park’s precincts, each one self-contained, encircled by low walls and boasting a lavish garden. The moment Emma had walked into the house on that cold December day she had wanted it, marvelling at its grandness and delighted with its charming outlook over the garden and the park itself.

A Woman of Substance

But where was No. 38 Tower Lane, supposedly opposite the tall wall of The Towers? There is No. 42 and 44 . . . but no label indicating No. 38. ‘We were thirty-eight,’ Barbara insists as she alights from the car to get a better look. We move through a gate into a front garden, and, set back from the lane, we see what might have once been a row of three tiny, terraced stone cottages, all that was left of the courtyard where they lived, ‘the small cul-de-sac of cottages,’ as she wrote in A Woman of Substance, describing the neighbourhood of Emma’s childhood home.

‘This seems very narrow,’ she says as we make our way gingerly down the flagged path like trespassers in time. ‘They’ve knocked it all down, I think, and turned it into this. All right, well, I’ll find it! There was a house across the bottom,’ she muses for her own benefit. ‘This, the first of the line [of cottages] was number thirty-eight. You went down some steps. Here it was a sort of garden bit, and where the trees are . . . There were three cottages along here and then a house at the bottom, which has gone. Wait a minute, are there three cottages or only two? Have they torn our house down? Well, this is the site of it anyway.’ Her voice breaks as she says this. ‘There were three houses there. There was our cottage, the people in the corner and the lady at the bottom. There were three houses.’ She then shows me the site of their air-raid shelter, where she and Freda would sit when the sirens sounded during the early years of the war. In the whole of the war only a handful of bombs actually fell on Leeds, but the preparations were thorough, the windows of trams and shops covered with netting to prevent glass shattering all over the place from bomb blast, entrances to precincts and markets sandbagged against explosions.

‘I went to school with a gas mask, I remember,’ said Barbara. ‘We all had them in a canvas bag on our shoulders and there used to be a funny picture of me with these thin little legs – I’ve got thin legs even today – thin little legs with the stockings twisted and a coat and the gas mask and a fringe. My mother was cutting her rose bushes and I was playing with my dolls’ pram that day in 1940 when a doodlebug, a flying bomb, came over, and she just dropped everything and dragged me into the air-raid shelter. I vaguely remember her saying to my father later – he was out somewhere – “Oh, I never thought I’d see that happen over England.”’

No. 38 Tower Lane had two rooms downstairs and two bedrooms on the upper floor. That is all: a sweet, flat-fronted cottage; a tiny, humble abode. The house at the bottom of the garden is long gone. Its absence offers by way of recompense a spectacular view across the top of Leeds, although Barbara’s interest, as we walk the area, is only in how things were, and how they are no more.

Being an only child had various repercussions. Her parents will have been able to feed and clothe Barbara to a better standard than most working-class children, which we know to have been the case. But it would have set Barbara apart for other reasons, too – single-child families were unusual in those days before family planning, and in the single-child home the emphasis was on child-parent relationships rather than sibling friendships and rivalries, which can affect a child’s ability to relate to other boys and girls at school; although when things are going well between child and parents it can make the relationship extra-special. ‘There were plenty of times,’ she says, ‘when I just knew that we were special, the three of us. I always thought that we were special and they were special. I think when you are an only child you are a unit more. I always adored them. Yes, rather like Christina does in Act of Will.’