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

The closeness and reliance of Barbara on the family unit was never more clearly shown than in the only time she spent away from home during her early childhood, as an evacuee. The school log reads: ‘1st September 1939, the school was evacuated to Lincoln this morning. Time of assembly 8.30, departure from school, 9, to Wortley Station, departure of train, 9.43.’

The school stayed closed until 15th January 1940: ‘Reopened this morning, three temporary teachers have been appointed to replace my staff, which are still scattered in the evacuation areas. Miss Laithwaite is at Sawbey, Miss Maitland at Ripon, Miss Musgrave at Lincoln and Miss Bolton is assisting at Meanwood Road. The cellars have been converted into air-raid shelters for the Infants. Accommodation in the shelters, 100. Only children over 6 can be admitted for the present.’

‘I went to Lincoln,’ remembers Barbara, ‘but I only stayed three weeks. It was so stupid to send us to Lincolnshire. I remember having a label on me, a luggage label, and my mother weeping as the school put us on a train. I was little. I wasn’t very happy, that I know, I missed my parents terribly. I was very spoiled, I was a very adored child. My mother sent me some Wellington boots, so it must have been in winter. She’d managed to get some oranges and she’d put them in a boot with some other things, but the woman had never looked inside. So, when my father came to get me the oranges were still there and had gone bad. My mother was furious about that.

‘Daddy came to get me. He’d gone to the house and they said, “She’ll be coming home from school any moment.” He said, “Which way is it? I’ll go to meet her.” And I saw him coming down the road and I was with the little girl who was at the house also. I remember it very well because I started to run – he was there on the road with his stick, walking towards me . . . and I’m screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” He said, “Come on, our Barbara, we’re going home.” We stood all the way on the train to Leeds. I was so happy because I missed my parents so much it was terrible. I was crying all the time – not all the time, but I cried a lot, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like being away from them. I loved them so much.’

I lead us back out of the gate and we return to the present with more sadness than joy. Walking further up the lane, which has a dogleg that leads eventually out onto Hill Top Road, we explore a steep track down the hill to the right, which Barbara calls ‘the ginnel’. Later I discover from Doreen Armitage, who also grew up in the area and let us into the church, that this is an ancient weaver’s track: ‘They would bring up the wool to the looms from the barges on the canal there.’ And, sure enough, I see on today’s map that it is marked as a quarter-mile cut-through to the canal across Stanningley Road. Barbara was lost once more in her own memories – the fun she had as a little girl skipping down the ginnel – before again being arrested by the intrusive present: the gardens behind Gisburne’s Garage, once so lovely, have been built upon and obscured.

Despondently we make our way back up the ginnel towards the moor where she would often play after school. Past the main gate of The Towers we emerge from a tunnel of trees into a wide-open space, flanked on our left by an estate of modern houses, which has replaced the ‘lovely old stone houses’ of her youth. Off to the right, we come to what was always referred to as ‘the moor’, but is no more than half an acre of open ground, where now a few strongly built cart-horses are feeding. On the far side of it is a wall and some trees. Barbara at once exclaims: ‘That’s the wall! When you climbed over that wall, you were in something called the Baptist Field – I don’t know why it was called that, but . . . we used to play in that field, some other children and I, we used to make little villages, little fairylands in the roots of the trees, which were all gnarled, with bits of moss and stones and bits of broken glass, garnered from that field, and flowers.’

Memories of the Baptist Field had been magical enough to earn it, too, a place in A Woman of Substance all of forty years later. In the novel, the field promises entry to Ramsden Crags and the Top of the World, symbol of the spirit of Yorkshire.

Barbara’s fictional recipe may involve real places, but it is the feelings recalled from her youth that are especially true in the novels, and overlooking the Baptist’s Field I felt in at the very source of a little girl’s teeming imagination. As with Emma Harte, the years peeled away on her feelings as a child and ‘she had a sudden longing to go up to the moors, to climb that familiar path through the Baptist Field that led to Ramsden Crags and the Top of the World, where the air was cool and bracing and filled with pale lavender tints and misty pinks and greys . . . Innumerable memories assailed her, dragging her back into the past.’ (A Woman of Substance)

‘My father used to walk up here sometimes and go for a drink at the Traveller’s Rest,’ Barbara says, breaking the silence. I had already noted the pub on Hill Top Road. Walking as far as we could up Tower Lane would bring us round to it. Later, Doreen Armitage would recall sitting up there ‘with me father and me Uncle Fred; we used to sit there on a Sunday morning.’ Barbara said she used to sit there with Winston: ‘We were probably waiting for the pub to open, I should think! I used to come here with my father, and we would sit outside and my mother would have a shandy. He liked to go out for his pint, you know, and have his bet . . . Ripon, York, Doncaster races. He bred in me a love of horses and racing.’

Barbara’s father, Winston Taylor, was born on 13th June 1900 at 6 Wilton Place, Armley, the first child of Alfred and Esther Taylor. ‘Daddy was called after Winston Churchill, who had just escaped from the Boer War.’ On Barbara’s admission, Winston is Vincent Crowther in Act of Will, the firstborn of Alfred and Eliza Crowther. He is also Emma Harte’s brother, Winston, in A Woman of Substance. ‘The fictional Winston Harte looked like him, thought like him, and had many of his characteristics,’ Barbara told me.

I also learn that she based Emma Harte’s father, ‘Big Jack Harte’, who, as a Seaforth Highlander, fought the Boers in 1900 and ‘could kill a man with one blow from his massive fist’, on Winston’s father, big Alfred Taylor, ‘because a certain ingredient of physical strength was required in the character of Emma’, the woman of substance she was concocting.

‘I loved my grandfather. He was in my mind when I created Jack Harte. He had a moustache, all lovely and furry white, and white hair. Big man, big moustache. He used to hold me on his knee, give me peppermints and tell me stories about when he was a Sergeant Major in the Seaforth Highlanders. He loved me and I loved him.’

Grandpa Alfred Crowther in Act of Will also serves as a Sergeant Major in the Seaforth Highlanders, and in A Woman of Substance Emma’s first husband, Joe Lowther, and Blackie O’Neill join the regiment in the First World War.

The real-life Alfred Taylor, who occasioned these many references in Barbara’s fiction, is described as a forgeman on his son Winston’s birth certificate and as a cartman on Winston and Freda’s marriage certificate. Barbara remembers him as the latter, as the Co-op drayman – the man who looked after the horses and drove the cart carrying stores for the Armley link in Britain’s first supermarket chain.

The senior Taylors lived five minutes away from Tower Lane in Edinburgh Grove, off Town Street. ‘The house was a Victorian terraced house with a series of front steps, but also a set of side steps leading down to the cellar kitchen. It was a through-house, not a back-to-back, but I can’t remember if there were doors on both sides. They then moved to 5 St Ives Mount, two streets closer. This was also a Victorian terraced house with front steps down to the cellar kitchen, where you’d always see my grandmother baking. Both were tall houses as I recall.

‘I also liked my grandmother, Esther Taylor. Her maiden name was Spence. She was very sweet and not quite Alfred Crowther’s wife in Act of Will. Eliza Crowther is always the voice of doom, saying, “Happiness, that’s for them that can afford it.” My real grandmother was full of other sayings like, “A stitch in time saves nine”, “You’d better watch your p’s and q’s”, though I do remember her baking like Mrs Crowther – bacon-and-egg pies (we’d call them quiche Lorraine today), also apple pie, and sheep’shead broth and lamb stews. On Saturday morning I used to go for her to the Co-op, but we didn’t call it the Co-op, it was called the Cworp – Armley dialect, I suppose. You could buy everything at the Cworp. It had a meat department, vegetables, groceries, cleaning products . . . She loved me. I think I was her favourite.’

All was as Barbara remembered of her grandparents’ houses, and she went on to tell me about the rest of the Taylor brood. ‘Winston had a sister called Laura, who lived in Farsley, was married and had a child. She was my favourite aunt. She died of lung cancer during the war, when I was about seven; she died at home and it was a horrible death. I remember going to see her. She was a very heavy smoker. After Laura died, her husband went to live with his family with their little boy, but died not long after. Laura Spencer in A Woman of Substance was based on my Aunt Laura, except our family were not Catholic. She was sweet and gentle and so good.

‘Then there was Olive, married to Harry Ogle. He had a motorbike and sidecar. He was in the RAF during the war. They never had children. And Aunt Margery, always called Madge . . . she was beautiful.’

Aunt Margery, I was to learn, had the ‘uncommon widow’s peak above the proud brow’ that was Emma Harte’s and granddaughter Paula’s in A Woman of Substance, and Vincent’s in Act of Will. It did not belong to Barbara, as I had imagined.

‘Madge lived in Lower Wortley. She was married, but didn’t have children either. I remember I was her bridesmaid when I was six. Olive was another favourite aunt. Everybody loved Olive. She managed a confectioner’s shop, Jowett’s at Hyde Park Corner – in Leeds, not London! – and I used to go and see her there. She used to let me serve a customer now and then. She lived in this house at twenty-one Cecil Grove, just the other side of the Stanningley Road, by Armley Park.

‘We would go on picnics together. She always took her knitting. On one occasion, so the story goes, I nearly drowned. Olive suddenly looked up and said to Uncle Harry, “Where’s Barbara?” They couldn’t see me. Then, far out in the river, they saw my dress caught on a dead branch, they saw me actually bob up and go under the water again and I was flailing around because I couldn’t swim. But the branch had hooked into my dress and was holding me up. Today I have a terrible fear of the sea where I can’t put my feet on the bottom. I panic, which I think must go back to that. They got me out in the end, soaked and crying, and dried the dress in the sun, but you know the English sun! They took me home to their house and Auntie Olive ironed the dress and got me back home looking like the starched child that I was.

‘So, Daddy had three sisters, and they spoiled me to death, of course, because two of them didn’t have children. Their brothers were Winston – my father – Jack, Bill, and Don, the youngest, who sadly died just recently. He and his wife, Jean, my one surviving aunt, had a daughter, Vivienne, my only cousin.

‘Jack and Bill Taylor lived at home with my grandmother and never married. I didn’t know them very well. Jack was in the army during the war, I think, and Bill was in minesweepers off the coast of Russia and places like that. Afterwards they came home and lived with my grandma, and then when she died they continued to live in that house – two bachelors, very straight, but very dour. I used to go and see my grandmother, and they would be sitting in their chairs and nobody spoke. I hated it. I wasn’t scared of them, I paid not a blind bit of notice because my focus was somewhere else.

Barbara says she owes her good looks to her father, and that ‘he was very good-looking, dark-haired, green-eyed. My father in particular was always very well dressed and very well groomed, and even today I can’t stand ungroomed men. Any man that I ever went out with before I knew my husband was always good-looking, always well dressed and well groomed. I loved my father. He would have charmed you.’ In Act of Will, Vincent, Winston’s fictional persona, boasts an almost feminine beauty, though ‘there never was any question about his virility’. Barbara describes him in fact and fiction as a natural star, charismatic, one who drew others (especially women) to him by force of personality, dashing looks and more than his fair share of beguiling charm . . . plus he had ‘the gift of the gab’.

Family legend boosted his reputation further with the adventurous story that at fourteen he ran away to sea and signed up in the Royal Navy, forging his father’s signature on the application form. Barbara gives the story to Emma Harte’s brother Winston in A Woman of Substance. It is not too far from the truth. The real Winston did join the Navy, but not until shortly before his sixteenth birthday. His naval record shows that he signed on as Boy (Class II) on 20th May 1916 in Leeds, that he had previously worked as a factory lad, and that he was at this stage quite small – height 5 ft 1 in, chest 31.5 ins. His first attachment was to HMS Ganges, a second-rate, 2284 ton, 84-gun ship with a ship’s company of 800, built of teak in 1816 at the Bombay Dockyard under master shipbuilder Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia. By the time Winston joined it, Ganges was a shore-bound training establishment for boys at Shotley Gate. He remained in the Navy until 16th July 1924, when he was invalided out with a serious condition, which could have led to septicaemia and may have been the reason why he subsequently had one leg amputated.

They took him to what was then a naval hospital, Chapel Allerton in Leeds. Today there is still a specialist limb unit there. Barbara recalls that when he was lying in hospital, ‘He said to his mother, “I don’t want to have it off because I won’t be able to dance.” His mother said, “Winston, forget dancing. If you don’t have the leg off, you won’t live.” Gangrene was travelling so rapidly that it had got to the knee. That was why it was taken off very high up. And so he couldn’t dance, but he did go swimming. You can swim with one leg and two arms. He went swimming in Armley Baths.’

One can only speculate on the impact the loss would have had on one so sociable, though Barbara marks him out as pragmatic: ‘I think I take after my father in that way. He didn’t really give a damn what people thought, it was take it or leave me.’ Yet, however brave Winston was, losing a leg would have been a huge thing; it would have taken tremendous determination to lead a normal life. Barbara agreed: ‘He had to prove himself constantly, I think. I didn’t know that when I was growing up.’

The artificial leg he was given was the best available and made of holed aluminium, which according to the specialist at Chapel Allerton would have been light and possibly easy enough to manoeuvre to allow Winston to engage in his favourite pastime, though perhaps not the jitterbug, which was sweeping the country in the years leading up to the war. Some years before rock ’n’ roll, the jitterbug involved the disgraceful practice of leaving hold of your partner and improvising fairly frantic steps on your own. In Act of Will, when Audra meets Vincent at a dance, it is the less demanding waltz that brings them together:

Audra had almost given up hope that he would make an appearance again when he came barrelling through the door, looking slightly flushed and out of breath, and stood at the far side of the hall, glancing about. At the exact moment that the band leader announced the last waltz he spotted her. His eyes lit up, and he walked directly across the floor to her and, with a faint smile, he asked her if she would care to dance.

Gripped by a sudden internal shaking, unable to speak, Audra nodded and rose.

He was taller than she had realised, at least five feet nine, perhaps six feet, with long legs; lean and slenderly built though he was, he had broad shoulders. There was an easy, natural way about him that communicated itself to her instantly, and he moved with great confidence and panache. He led her on to the floor, took her in his arms masterfully, and swept her away as the band struck up ‘The Blue Danube’.

During the course of the dance he made several casual remarks, but Audra, tongue-tied, remained mute, knowing she was unable to respond coherently. He said, at one moment, ‘What’s up then, cat got your tongue?’

She managed to whisper, ‘No.’

Barbara’s parents married on 14th August 1929. Winston was living at 26 Webster Row, Wortley, at the time, and described himself on their marriage certificate as a general labourer, while Freda, of 1 Winker Green, Armley, described herself as a domestic servant even though she had been working as a nurse. ‘I don’t actually know where they met,’ admitted Barbara. ‘Probably at a dance. If my father couldn’t really dance any more because of the leg, perhaps he went just to listen to the music. I actually do think he met her at a dance; they used to have church dances and church-hall dances.’

Although Barbara adored her father, when she was a child there was little openly expressed of the love they shared. ‘He didn’t verbalise it perhaps in the way that Mummy did,’ but the depth of it was expressed in a touching scene one day, which had to do with his artificial leg, symbol of the man’s vulnerability.

It had been snowing and Barbara was walking with her father in Tower Lane when he fell and couldn’t get up because of the slippery snow. ‘He was down on his back, and there was nobody around, and he told me what to do. He said, “Go and find some stones and pile them up in the snow, near my foot.” He was able to wedge his artificial leg against the stones in order to lever himself up. I got him sitting up, I couldn’t lift him. I was six or seven years old. But he managed to heave himself to his feet eventually.’

But at least she had helped him, as she had always longed to do, and now he realised what a practical, efficient doer of a little girl he had fathered. The leg brought him close to her again when he died in 1981. ‘My mother said, “Your father wanted his leg taken back to the hospital.” So my Uncle Don drove me there with it, and three spare legs, and when I handed them over I just broke down in floods of tears. It was like giving away part of him and myself. I was very close to Mummy, but I was close to my father in a different way.’

After Barbara was born in 1933, however, relations between Winston and Freda were not all they might be. I knew that Barbara’s mother Freda didn’t always see eye to eye with Grandma Taylor. In Act of Will tension between wife and mother-in-law is created by Vincent being the favourite son – Grandma Crowther is forever undermining her daughter-in-law’s position. In reality as in the fiction, Winston, I learned, was Esther Taylor’s favourite, and Barbara recalls her father going ‘maybe every day to see his mother. Why do I think my mother always used to say, “I know where you’ve been, you’ve been to . . .”?’

‘Did it used to annoy Freda, his going to see his mother every day?’ I asked.

‘Probably. I should imagine it would. Don’t you think it would?’

I thought it would be perfectly natural, particularly given the proximity of the houses. Extended families were supposed to be the great boon of working-class life, and Freda with her small child would surely have warmed to such support. Wortley, Farsley and Armley – Freda was surrounded by the entire Taylor family and she had been otherwise alone, having been brought up in Ripon.

Barbara’s mother was not by nature big on company however, so perhaps she didn’t find it easy to ‘fit in’ to this extended family scene, which at first must have seemed quite overpowering. She was ‘a very sweet, rather retiring, quiet woman’ in Barbara’s words, ‘rather reserved, shy, but with an iron will’. Freda told Barbara little about her past, only that her parents had brought her up in Ripon and that her father had died. ‘Her mother Edith then married a man called Simpson. There were three daughters, Freda, Edith and Mary, and two sons, Frederick and Norman. I don’t know, to tell you the honest truth, but as far as I remember there was only one Simpson, Norman Simpson.’

I would discover that Freda always had a particularly strong desire to return to the tiny city where she was brought up: ‘My mother always wanted to be in Ripon,’ Barbara recalled. ‘All the time.’

‘You mean, some time after you were born, when you were eight, nine or ten?’ I asked.

‘No, much younger, I went back as a baby.’ Freda took Barbara back to Ripon from when she was a baby and constantly throughout her childhood. Was this a kind of escape? I wondered. Was marriage into the Taylor family so difficult an adjustment? It seemed unlikely, given that Barbara made Winston out to be such a catch and Freda as a woman who, in spite of her reserve, could fight her own corner with Esther.

In the novels we are given a number of reasons for a marriage hitting hard times. In Act of Will Audra is criticised by her mother-in-law for failing to see that her desire to go out to work is flouting the working man’s code, which says that if a wife works, her husband loses his dignity. This is odd, as the mills of Armley and Leeds were filled with working wives, and pretty soon we discover that the real problem is that Audra comes from a better class background. She has fallen on hard times, but – she the lady, he the working man – it can never work, the mother-in-law says.

There may have been similar strife for Freda and Winston. There is speculation that Freda had come, or may have had the impression that she had come, from better stock than Winston. We know that mother-in-law Esther Taylor sounded warnings to Freda that giving Barbara ideas above her station would lead only to trouble. Her counterpart in Act of Will does the same. In the North of England there was a nasty word for girls with big ideas – ‘upstart’. Barbara notes in the novel, ‘the lower classes are just as bad as the aristocracy when it comes to that sort of thing. Snobs, too, in their own way.’

In Everything to Gain, on the other hand, the cause of strife is laid firmly at the husband’s door. Mallory Keswick’s father is ‘very much a woman’s man, not a man’s man . . . He adores women, admires them, respects them . . . he has that knack, that ability to make a woman feel her best – attractive, feminine and desirable. [He] can make a woman believe she’s special, wanted, when he’s around her, even if he’s not particularly interested in her for himself.’

In Act of Will we sense the same about Vincent. There are arguments not only about Audra’s highfalutin ideas, but about Vincent’s drinking and a ‘fancy woman’, and fears that he will leave home and never come back. ‘“Go back to your fancy woman,” I heard that,’ said Barbara. ‘That happened when I was little, I remembered it and I did ask Grandma, “What’s a fancy woman?” And I know that my mother rejected Winston constantly. No, she didn’t talk about it, but I knew about it somehow when I was in my teens. How do children know things?’

Recently, as guest on BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, Barbara admitted that she hadn’t been able to write Act of Will until after her parents had died, ‘because I really wrote in a sense about this very tumultuous marriage that they had. They were either in each other’s arms or at each other’s throats. He was very good-looking and he had an eye for the girls at times.’ Later, she said to me, ‘But that’s life. I think Winston had a bit of an eye for the ladies, but that doesn’t mean that he did much about it. Listen, the more I write, the more I read of other people’s lives, the more I realise how terribly flawed we all are.’