Chapter 4: The Heartlands: Five Key Areas

Excerpt from Chapter 4

Eastwood and Brinsley

Lawrence used his home town of Eastwood as a setting for several key works, notably Sons and Lovers, the most autobiographical of his novels, where it is called Bestwood and his family become the Morels. In The Rainbow the Brangwen family move to Eastwood, now called Beldover, in the latter part of the book, and so the first part of Women in Love, which continues the story of the Brangwen sisters, is also set in the town. The same applies to parts of The Lost Girl, Mr Noon and Aaron’s Rod. It is more difficult to locate the setting for some short stories, but it seems likely that ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter’, ‘Her Turn’, ‘Adolph’, ‘The Christening’, ‘You Touched Me’, ‘Fanny and Annie’, ‘Strike Pay’ and ‘Tickets Please’, among others, have an Eastwood basis.

A graphic introduction to the origins of Eastwood is provided in the opening pages of Sons and Lovers, where the historical background is sketched in:

 And all over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among the corn-fields and the meadows. And the cottages of these coalminers, in blocks and pairs here and there, together with odd farms and homes of the stockingers, straying over the parish, formed the village of Bestwood.

 The original centre had been around the church of St Mary on Church Street, but later the focus moved up to the Nottingham Road, which is like a spine to the town, running east-west along the ridge. Shops were built along this route, with the market place at one end, where the road to Derby dropped down into the Erewash valley:

 Mrs Morel loved her marketing. In the tiny market-place on the top of the hill, where four roads, from Nottingham and Derby, Ilkeston and Mansfield, meet, many stalls were erected. Brakes ran in from surrounding villages. The market-place was full of women, the streets packed with men. It was amazing to see so many men everywhere in the streets.

The development of mining

The building of the Nottingham Canal in the late-eighteenth century encouraged a steady growth in coal production in the first half of the nineteenth century, but it was the arrival of the Midland Railway that really boosted the industry. This opened up the London market and more mechanised, deeper mines were sunk. These required a larger labour force, and so more housing was built for them in the town, on the north-facing slope. The population of Eastwood grew rapidly, increasing from less than 2,000 in 1861 to over 5,000 in 1893.

Although miners suffered seasonal short-time working they were normally well-paid compared with other Midlands trades, such as textile workers. By 1914 Eastwood miners had average earnings of nearly 10 shillings per shift; by comparison agricultural workers could only earn 20 shillings per week. As a result many families migrated into the area, some from older coal fields such as Staffordshire, to work either in the mines or in ancillary trades. Lawrence’s paternal grandfather John, for example, was a tailor who worked for the Barber Walker company making pit clothes.