Mort Ethel

The biography of countryside pioneer Ethel Haythornthwaite
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-83981-230-9
Verlag: Vertebrate Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Pioneer, activist, environmentalist, poet. Ethel Haythornthwaite is virtually unknown, even in her home town of Sheffield - the UK's outdoor city - yet her tireless campaigning led to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 and the creation of the Peak District National Park, protecting a wild and varied landscape so many have fallen in love with. Founder of a local society to protect rural scenery in 1924, she went on to join the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) and become its wartime director. Saviour of the beautiful Longshaw estate, her achievements also include establishing the first green belt in the UK. In Ethel, award-winning author Helen Mort explores the life of this countryside revolutionary who has been overlooked by history. Born into wealth yet frugal, ever restless but infinitely patient, widowed at twenty-two, independent and thoroughly ahead of her time, Ethel Haythornthwaite helped save the British countryside at a time when simply to be a woman was challenge enough. Having been given unrestricted access to Ethel's archive, including hundreds of meticulously written letters, in Ethel, Helen Mort has written letters to Ethel's memory and a paean to her legacy. The beauty and accessibility of the British countryside is the result of passionate campaigning during the inter- and post-war years by groundbreaking figures such as Ethel Haythornthwaite.

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985 and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. She is a multi-award-winning poet and author, and her published work includes poetry, fiction and non-fiction, with a particular interest in women and mountaineering. She is a five-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, and her first poetry collection, Division Street, was shortlisted for the Costa Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize, and won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Her first novel, Black Car Burning, was longlisted for the Portico Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. She has been the Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence and the Derbyshire Poet Laureate, and was named as one of the Royal Society of Literature's 40 under 40 Fellows in 2018. She has written for the Guardian, the Independent and appeared on television and radio. In 2017, she was a judge for the Man Booker International Prize and chair of judges for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature. She has taught creative writing for over ten years and is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. A Line Above the Sky, her first work of narrative memoir, was featured in the Guardian and Evening Standard's 'books to watch' lists and won the Grand Prize at the 2023 Banff Mountain Book Competition. She lives in Nether Edge, Sheffield, with her family and dog, Denver.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mort, Helen

Leseproben

An Opening
Come climb, come wander, come and view a thing More vast, unclenchable than aught before … (The Pride of the Peak) Ethel Haythornthwaite was a pioneer: an activist, a leader and a poet. But you can walk around her home town asking people if they’ve heard of her and be greeted by puzzled silence. ‘Ethel who?’ We begin in the landscape Ethel grew up in: the centre of England, on the gritstone lip of Sheffield, home to over 580,000 people and countless more stories. It is a city whose place in the public imagination has been shaped by steelworks, by buffer girls, by cutlery and by The Full Monty; known for its proximity to moors and rock-climbing destinations, hills and dales, neat villages, the extraordinary variety of neighbouring Derbyshire. A green city, a city of direct action, fights to defend street trees. Half the preserve of Arctic Monkeys’ first album and half the wildness fought for in the Kinder mass trespass of 1932. ‘My God, how does one write a Biography?’ Virginia Woolf once asked, words that would haunt those who tried, like her acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee. How does anyone begin? Is it audacious to even try? If this is to be an account of Ethel Haythornthwaite, it is also an account of the Peak District, the landscape she saw herself utterly entwined with. Then where does the Peak District begin? Addressing each question only reveals another. In The Threat to the Peak, published in 1931, Ethel would write: It is perhaps best to approach the Peak District from the south. We can thus observe, as we traverse it to its northern limit, the increasing wildness of the landscape. Nature gradually reasserts herself and man’s dominance declines until we reach the high moors where she is still in undisputed possession, and where the struggle for life is waged on a scene and greater scale and among elemental conditions of greater intensity than those that prevail in the warmer and more sheltered parts. There is a sense here of the Derbyshire landscape intensifying, growing into itself almost. As a child in Chesterfield, I would have first approached that landscape from the south-east side of what is now the national park, noticing how the undulations became rocky waves. The journey north-west across to the Snake Pass when we travelled to my grandparents’ house in Oldham certainly felt imbued with a sense of growing drama, from sheep-grazed fields to misty tops beyond the reservoir at Ladybower. I always longed to get out of the car and run into the ominous, hammered-silver sky. As an adult, as someone who has written about Derbyshire obsessively in fiction and poetry, who has climbed and walked and run marathons across the breadth of it, I no longer see the Peak District as something which ‘begins’. If I try to think of it, I see the road between grit-encircled Hathersage and Sheffield. As you leave the Hope Valley and the road flattens near Surprise View, there’s a Welcome to Sheffield sign. Soon after, another that says, Welcome to Derbyshire. A little further down the road and you pass Welcome to Sheffield again. You are weaving in and out of a defined landscape, one whose definition has acquired almost sacred significance, passing through these hallowed borders in an almost nonchalant way. John Ruskin’s famous caricature of Sheffield city as ‘a dirty picture in a golden frame’ is a beguiling one, but it no longer rings true either, however apt it may have been in South Yorkshire’s industrial heyday. My objection is not just to the ‘dirty picture’ (Sheffield in 2024 is a map of green space as well as a hive of industries). This ‘frame’ is not golden and fixed. It is the spreading bruise of purple autumn heather and the mottled greys of wet limestone. It is light touching the early morning water at Redmires; how the whole scene changes in an instant, from thick mist to sudden, clarifying sun. It might ‘surround’ Sheffield, but it is permeable. The city and the moors bleed into one another, mixed watercolours. There is a constant exchange between them, osmosis. The city returns the glance of the countryside and vice versa. They are porous. It is a dynamic which requires compassion, responsibility and a degree of regulation – an understanding that urban and rural spaces influence each other. The extraordinary life of Ethel Haythornthwaite is emblematic of that complex porosity. She drew on an industrial family fortune and the social networks of the city to protect and preserve the ‘wild’ places of Derbyshire. The ‘dirty picture’ reinforcing the ‘golden frame’. In turn, she was partially motivated by wanting to maintain the rich natural resources and unique spaces of the Peak District for city people, for the returning heroes of the Second World War. In a sense, there was no separation. The binary of rural and urban can be unhelpful. Our fates are intertwined: an idea which is returning to popular discourse as we contemplate the bleak effects of our current climate emergency. This book is not a straight line. Its edges are permeable too. It is an account of one restless woman looking for another, in the imprints under Burbage Edge, in the flow of the river at Froggatt, under the thin veil of night that falls in winter over the Longshaw Estate, when the stars make moorland frost glitter with spectral promise. It is something like the flexible boundary between the crucible of Sheffield, forged by hot metal, and the land around it. To return to Ruskin’s dirty picture, it is the places where the gold rubs off on the canvas, casting it in a different light, at least for a second. Who was Ethel Haythornthwaite and why do I owe my whole life as I know it to her? She was, as all interesting people are, myriad. She was a poet and a philanthropist, gentle and fierce, a quiet revolutionary who has been overlooked by history. She was motivated by grief and by hope. She was a Methodist who attended seances. She was an advocate and a diplomat, a sister and a friend, a woman who kept an orderly house but hated domestic work. She came from wealth, but she was frugal. She was interested in legacy, but lived for the immediacy of walking on Stanage, lines of poetry swarming in her head. She was restless and infinitely patient. Perhaps I should not think of myself as answering my question but hers: what is this life that’s stirring in my veins? In Matthew Kelly’s book The Women Who Saved the English Countryside, he identifies four key figures in the protection of landscape: Sylvia Sayer, Octavia Hill, Beatrix Potter and Pauline Dower. Everything that Kelly says of his four pioneers was also true of Ethel: Without their work, more land would be enclosed, more land would be built on, more footpaths and access to open spaces would have been lost. Like Ethel, ‘the four were convinced that the experience of urbanisation and industrialisation alienated humanity from nature, having a terrible effect on human well-being, diminishing our capacity to even recognise our unhappiness’. As such, they ‘advocated forms of environmental citizenship that identified land as public goods from which flow collective rights’. It’s here that I imagine Ethel Haythornthwaite leaning over my shoulder and muttering, ‘and responsibilities. Don’t forget those.’ Like Ethel, they all came from privileged economic backgrounds. Like Ethel, they were all artists; this doesn’t surprise me, since art connects us to the embodied self, the non-abstracted body and therefore to the land, what Nan Shepherd recognised in her prose as: Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body. Essential body, essential breath. Ethel was a woman who ‘saved’ the British countryside too. But she is difficult to categorise, difficult to capture, mysterious to us. Perhaps this makes her even more compelling. That she achieved what she achieved with a female body, subject to regulation and comment and constraint, is even more remarkable. Ethel lived between 1894 and 1986 and was doing some of her most vital work between the 1930s and 1960s. In her account of the life of poet Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark contextualises the hill that a woman with public aspirations had to climb even in the 1950s. She describes a speech given by Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson at Plath’s 1955 Smith commencement, titled ‘A...