The Thorn Tree, Mansfield Road, Eastwood

Although brought up in the teetotal ethos of the Band of Hope, Lawrence wrote a surprising amount about pubs, from the Ram Inn at Beauvale (see earlier blog) to the Punchbowl in Mapperley, Nottingham. The second chapter of Aaron's Rod is set in the fictional 'Royal Oak', in reality the Thorn Tree, illustrated in the damaged photo above.

Now demolished, this stood on Mansfield Road opposite Cockerhouse Lane. In the novel the landlady, Mrs Houseley, is described as: 'a large, stout, high-coloured woman with a fine profile, probably Jewish', which doesn't seem to match the only woman in this picture. In the book she ran a special bar parlour for 'superior' customers, as she is fond of 'intellectual discussion'.

It is noteworthy that the landlady of the Thorn Tree, Ellen Wharton, was licensed to brew and sell beer, such a role being an acceptable way for a woman at that time to run her own business.

Was this the original of Mellor's cottage?

The photos shows the derelict gamekeeper's cottage in High Park Wood at Moorgreen. Today, apparently, it still stands but is more overgrown than shown in the picture.Several of Lawrence's early works, such as The White Peacock and 'Shades of Spring', are set in this area and involve gamekeepers, who can be seen as forerunners of Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Lawrence must have known this cottage, which appears to have been solidly built if small, from his walks in the area, and clearly found the ambiguous social position of the gamekeeper fascinating. Both Annable in The White Peacock, and Mellors, are portrayed as men who have deliberately chosen their role, somewhat outside the class system, which they have rejected after flirting with the middle class. They are made the spokesmen of the 'natural', instinctive life, and to some extent may be seen as aspects of Lawrence's own persona.

Who painted the Engine Lane Mural?

This mural contrasts two aspects of Eastwood life, illustrating two quotes from Lawrence's writing. On the left is a mining scene: 'there was a sort of inner darkness like the gloss of coal in which we moved and had our being.' This is taken from the essay 'Nottingham and the Mining Country' (1930). The right-hand panel is captioned: 'the east was tender with a magenta flush under which the land lay still and rich...', a quotation from Sons and Lovers (1913).

The underground scene shows a group of miners in a remarkably spacious tunnel; contemporary accounts speak of far more cramped conditions in most local pits. The illustration of the family out for a walk seems even more bizarre: not only is the sky pale blue rather than magenta, but the quote is from a scene in the novel when Miriam and Paul are walking alone.

In its current position it is unseen by most visitors to the town. It would be interesting to know who painted the mural, and under what circumstances?

Barefoot in the park

In Nottingham, that dismal town
where I went to school and college
They've built a new university
for a new dispensation of knowledge

Built it most grand and cakeily
out of the noble loot
derived from shrewd cash-chemistry
by good Sir Jesse Boot

This is not Lawrence's finest poem, but it does reveal the extent of his quarrel with the University of Nottingham, as it was written many years after he had left the University College, as it was then. His hostility may have been partly due to his disillusion with the standard of teaching he experienced there in 1906.

But this seems especially ironic today, since not only has the university provided a home for the only statue of Lawrence in the world (as far as I know), but also hosts the DH Lawrence Research Centre, the DH Lawrence Pavilion, and helps to support the DH Lawrence Heritage Centre in Eastwood. Most would consider that this repays anything that the university owes to one of its most renown students.

The statue can be found outside the east entrance to the Law and Social Science building.

Lawrence Festival 2012

The 2012 DH Lawrence Festival will run from the 6th to the 19th September, based at the Lawrence Heritage Centre in Eastwood. In addition to the Lawrence birthday lecture, to be given by Dr Andrew Harrison on September 11th, the writer's birthday, there is a varied programme of talks, walks and exhibitions. Full details can be found by following this link:

http://www.broxtowe.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=7025

This year's exhibition explores the controversy around the exhibition of Lawrence's paintings that was shown at the Warren Gallery in 1929, which led to the infamous police raid and the confiscation of many of the paintings on the grounds of pornography.

Note also that during the Festival the National Heritage Open weekend will allow access to several Lawrence-related properties in the district such as the Breach House and Beauvale Priory Farm which are not usually open to the public.

A pair of Stands

One important component of Lawrence's view from the Walker Street house was of Crich, a village on one of the first hills of Derbyshire, as seen from the Nottinghamshire border. In Sons and Lovers Paul Morel leads a party of family and friends on a hike from Alfreton via Crich to Ambergate:

At last they came into the straggling grey village of Crich. Beyond the village was the famous Crich Stand that Paul could see from the garden at home.

But the Crich Stand that they visited was not the tower we see today, built as a war memorial to the Sherwood Foresters after the Great War in 1923 (below). The hike described in Sons and Lovers is based on a real-life visit at Easter 1905, when Crich Stand was a shorter tower (above). Like its successor, this was built on the edge of Crich limestone quarry to take advantage of the magnificent view from its height of nearly 1,000 feet above sea level. As visitors still find, it is possible to see as far as Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire:

They saw the hills of Derbyshire fall into the monotony of the Midlands that swept away south.

The Three Tuns or The Moon and Stars

Just round the corner from the Walker Street house in Eastwood, the Three Tuns pub still offers a warm welcome. It is a substantial building, apparently dating from an early stage in the town's growth, and has given its name to the lane running parallel to Nottingham Road.

This was Arthur Lawrence's local, and features in Sons and Lovers as 'The Moon and Stars', where Mr Morel helps out during the wakes in the first chapter, while Mrs Morel passes by, full of disapproval:

'As she crossed the open ground in front of the Moon and Stars she heard men shouting, and smelled the beer, and hurried a little, thinking her husband was probably in the bar.'

The wakes, or annual fair, was held on the large open space in front of the pub, now the car park. Lawrence also used this event in The White Peacock, where it is moved to Cossall (Cossethay in the novel), though clearly he is describing the Eastwood fair, and even uses the pub's real name:

The organ flared on – the husky woman came forward to make another appeal. Then there was a lull. The man with the lump on his chest had gone inside the rag to spar with the other fellow. The cocoanut man had gone to the “Three Tunns” in fury, and a brazen girl of seventeen or so was in charge of the nuts. The horses careered round, carrying two frightened boys.

Today the pub displays a collection of Lawrence photographs on the walls, and also provides a good selection of decent beers - Arthur Lawrence would certainly approve!

Where have all the cowslips gone?

In Sons and Lovers , one spring day Paul, Miriam and Clara go for a walk from Haggs Farm up the hill to High Park Wood:

They found at the top of the hill a hidden wild field, two sides of which were backed by the wood, the other sides by high loose hedges ... The field itself was coarse, and crowded with tall big cowslips that had never been cut ... It was like a roadstead crowded with tall fairy shipping.

Today it is easy to follow the track uphill from the Mill, but finding the 'wild field' is more difficult. The wood must have changed considerably in the past century, although the bluebells which Lawrence saw 'flowed over into the field' are still there. Yet I failed to find a single cowslip.

In the novel these flowers form the basis of a debate among the walkers about the morality of picking wild flowers. Clara argues against, while Paul and Miriam, in different ways, feel it doesn't matter. Illogically, I wondered if there was a connection between the fictional harvesting of the flowers and their disappearance today. Later I found a couple of clumps (pictured above) by the roadside on the track to Annesley, but in general they have become quite rare in this district.

No go at Wingfield Manor

Sons and Lovers contains a detailed description of an Easter walk made by Paul Morel with friends and family from Alfreton to Ambergate. Separate accounts by Ada Lawrence and Jessie Chambers confirm that the walk really took place, in 1905. The highlight of the day was a visit to the ruins of Wingfield Manor, which provoked a lengthy and lyrical description: 'The young folk were in raptures.They went in trepidation, almost afraid that the delight of exploring this ruin might be denied them ...'.

They were lucky not to visit the Manor today, since they would have no chance of exploration now. Despite being  what is ludicrously called in the 'care' of English Heritage, the site has been effectively closed to the public for the last few years, except for the occasional day when pre-booked parties can visit. English Heritage have produced no clear reason for denying access to one of the most remarkable historic sites in the North Midlands.

The photo shows the east side of the manor on a misty, frosty winter's morning.

Fanny's chapel?

The photo shows the current state of what was Moorgreen Congregational Chapel, an eighteenth-century structure which is now private housing. This appears to have been the location of the chapel featured in Lawrence's early short story 'Fanny and Annie'. Fanny has reluctantly returned to the district to marry Harry, her long-term sweetheart, but suffers the embarrassment of hearing him denounced as a philanderer from the floor of the chapel during a harvest festival service:

Morley was a hamlet on the edge of the real country, and in its little Congregational Chapel Fanny and Harry had first met ... and again the little old chapel was a bower, with its famous sheaves of corn, and corn-plaited pillars, its great bunches of grapes, dangling like tassels from the pulpit corners ... .

It seems likely that Lawrence based his story on a real incident, as he generally did, and it provides a particularly vivid insight into the morality of the non-conformist tradition that was so powerful in late-Victorian Eastwood. Half of the chapel is currently for sale, at £250,000.

The desolation of the Haggs

The photo shows all that can be seen of Haggs Farm from the public road, a glimpse of red brick buildings, though there is a better view from High Park Wood opposite.

But the farm was the emotional centre of Lawrence's world for a number of years: 'Only to be there was an exhilaration and a joy to him'. At that time the Chambers family were the tenant farmers, and Lawrence became close friends with several of them, especially Jessica, the 'Miriam' of Sons and Lovers. But the farm and its surroundings also features in a number of short stories, including his first, 'A Prelude', while it can be argued that the description of Mellor's hut in his last work, Lady Chatterley's Lover, has its origins in a similar place in the adjoining Willey Spring Woods.

According to Ann Howard, Jessie's niece, writing in 1985, the farm belonged to the Barber family, who loathed Lawrence on account of his portrait of them as the Criches in Women in Love. Consequently they have denied all access to the farm to Lawrence lovers, and resisted appeals for its preservation. It's remarkable that a quarrel nearly a century old can still be festering today.

From the sublime to ...

This branch of Iceland, on the corner of Albert Street and Nottingham Road in Eastwood, stands on the site of the Congregational Chapel which Lawrence attended for years, and which he described as:

Then the chapel was like home. It was a pretty place, with dark pews and slim, elegant pillars, and flowers. And the same people had sat in the same places ever since he was a boy.

The chapel, which was  demolished in the 1960s, was not only a place of worship.The various social groups which met there, such as the Literary Society, did much to foster the cultural interests of Lawrence's circle.

In a late story titled 'Autobiographical Fragment' Lawrence imagined himself falling asleep in a Derbyshire cave and waking up a thousand years later. A new civilization has emerged, and on visiting Eastwood the author finds:

We came out on top into a circular space, it must have been where our Congregational Chapel stood, and in the centre of the circle rose a tower shaped tapering rather like a lighthouse, and rosy-coloured in the lamplight. Away in the sky, at the club-shaped tip of the tower, glowed one big ball of light.

Sadly, our current civilization has replaced the 'Congo' not with a phallic symbol, but with a cut-price supermarket.




Eastwood Congregational Chapel interior

Misreadings?

On May 5th the Guardian Review featured a leading article by Blake Morrison titled 'Dream Country', concerning the British Library's new exhibition 'Writing Britain', about writers and landscape. According to Morrison, Lawrence was one of a group of writers, alongside Dickens and Bennett, who wrote of 'towns and cities', a genre that Morrison christens 'gritlit'.

It is curious that Lawrence should be included in this category when he repeatedly stated his horror of urban England, and located all his memorable scenes in rural settings, particularly in his greatest work such as The Rainbow or Women in Love. After leaving England in 1912 he rarely lived in a city, preferring small communities which perhaps reflected the semi-rural village of Eastwood where he had grown up.

Lawrence never wrote in defence of the proletariat, as Morrison claims, being too complex a writer for such easy pigeon-holing. Perhaps the fact that the same article claims that Birkin was a character in The Rainbow (in fact he is introduced in the first chapter of Women in Love, 'Sisters') shows how closely the critic has read these novels.

Goodbye to Felley Mill

For years Felley Mill has been just a heap of brick rubble beside the overgrown mill pond, but now most of this has been removed. The result can be seen above, making this desolate spot seem even bleaker.

Felley Mill was one of Lawrence's key places in the Moorgreen district, having a role in three novels: as 'Strelley Mill' in The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers, and just as 'the mill' in Women in Love, where Birkin takes lodgings. In each case it is described in idyllic terms:

The closes were so beautiful, with the brook under all its sheltering trees, running into the pond that was set with two green islets.
(The White Peacock)

There is a mill marked here on a map of 1765, predating the reservoir, and it seems likely that it originally belonged to Felley Priory nearby. Thanks to recent heavy rain the upper mill pond, which was dry last year, has now been partly refilled (below).

Cold winter at Mountain Cottage

When Lawrence and Frieda were expelled from Cornwall in 1918 under the draconian wartime regulations they were homeless and nearly broke. Unable to continue a peripatetic life in borrowed houses they, somewhat reluctantly, accepted his sister Ada's offer to rent for them a cottage near her home in Ripley. This was the aptly-named Mountain Cottage,  just outside the upland village of Middleton-by-Wirksworth, on the road leading down to the Via Gellia.

Lawrence may not have relished returning to his home district and the confines of his family, but his letters from this period show that there were positive aspects, such as seeing his sisters' children. He described it as:

... a bungalow on the brow of the steep valley at Via Gellia - near Cromford. ... It is a nice place - with pleasant little grounds, and two rough fields.

It was secluded but also Spartan:

Pamela (his sister Emily) is lamenting because the eggs in the pantry have all frozen and burst. I have spent half an hour hacking ice out of the water tub ...

That post-war winter must have been unusually cold, but even today snow tends to linger at this altitude. The one story that clearly belongs to this district is 'Wintry Peacock', set on the other side of the valley around Ible, but Lawrence must also have become familiar with Cromford, which he needed to walk through to reach the mainline station there. This would later provide him with the setting for the vicarage in The Virgin and the Gipsy, under the fictional name of Papplewick. Today a blue plaque marks the Lawrences' residence here.

The Ram Inn, then and now

For the son of a dedicated teetotaller, pubs feature quite frequently in Lawrence's work. In his first novel, The White Peacock, the Ram Inn (above) was the home of Meg the barmaid, who George Saxton carts off (literally) to the Registry Office in Basford one fine morning. In describing the course of their courtship Lawrence provides an intriguing picture of pub life at the turn of the 20th century:

It was Saturday night, so the bar parlour of the Ram Inn was fairly full. … The men talked on the most peculiar subjects: there was a bitter discussion as to whether London is or is not a seaport – the matter was thrashed out with heat; then an embryo artist set the room ablaze by declaring there were only three colours, red, yellow and blue, and the rest were not colours, they were mixtures: this amounted almost to atheism and one man asked the artist to dare to declare that his own brown breeches were not a colour, which the artist did, and almost had a fight for it ...
(The White Peacock)

The Inn was on Dovecote Lane between Hill Top and Moorgreen. A new Ram Inn was later built on the other side of the road, though today named The Dovecote. The original pub is now a pair of houses, shown below:

Lawrence's voice: from the Breach?

Lawrence’s upbringing in an East Midlands mining community gave his work more than a physical setting.  It also provided him with a particular tone of voice which, at its most distinctive, contributes to the appeal that so many readers have found in his best work:

They came to the silent house. He took the key out of the scullery window, and they entered.  All the time he went on with his discussion. He lit the gas, mended the fire, and brought her some cakes from the pantry. She sat on the sofa quietly, with a plate on her knee. She wore a large white hat with some pinkish flowers. It was a cheap hat, but he liked it.
(Sons & Lovers)

Here the story is developed in short, simple sentences which parallel narrative speech. His tone can be characterised as natural and informal, with a touch of sardonic humour that sprang from his working -class roots, the product of generations of scraping by, with the expectation that life is unlikely to improve. At the heart of working -class culture is the instinct for deflating humbug and pomposity, as in this description of Baron Skrebensky:

When Anna was about ten years old, she went with her mother to spend a few days with the Baron Skrebensky. He was very unhappy in his red-brick vicarage. He was a vicar of a country church, a living worth a little over two hundred pounds a year, but he had a large parish containing several collieries, with a new, raw, heathen population. He went to the north of England expecting homage from the common people, for he was an aristocrat. He was roughly, even cruelly received. But he never understood it. He remained a fiery aristocrat. Only he had to learn to avoid his parishioners.
(The Rainbow)

Lawrence's old school sold

Greasley Beauvale School, on the corner of Dovecote Road and Mill Road, which Lawrence attended from 1890 to 1898, was recently sold by Savills. At auction it failed to meet the reserve price of £250,000 and was subsequently sold privately, apparently for conversion into housing.

It is an impressive building with three wings which meet at the central entrance shown in the photo. As an indication of the birth rate in the district when it was built in 1878, it was designed to hold 550 children, including 150 infants. With class sizes well over 50 it must have been a daunting place to teach in.

Although Lawrence later went on to win a county scholarship to Nottingham High School from here, with the help of the headmaster's coaching, he at first found the school's atmosphere oppressive. Being a sensitive and rather frail child he found playground life difficult to cope with, and some of the antipathy he later felt for Eastwood may be traced back to his suffering at the hands of more boisterous boys.

It will be interesting to see how the developers use the link with Lawrence in marketing the maisonettes.

Vine Cottage revival?

This is the current sad state of Vine Cottage, home of Lawrence's Aunt Polly, and the house featured in his early, brilliant short story 'Odour of Chrysanthemums'. The building is just beside the track leading up to Brinsley Headstocks, and was originally next to the colliery railway, as described in the story:

At thge edge of the ribbed level of sidings squat a low cottage, three steps down from the cinder track. A large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof.

The owner of the cottage, who lives in Brinsley, is currently attempting to restore the property.
Given the loss of other Lawrentian landmarks such as Marsh Farm, and the closing-off of Haggs Farm, it's to be hoped that this iconic house can be preserved.

The Mystery of Marsh Farm

Was this the house that Lawrence called Marsh Farm in The Rainbow, the home of the Brangwen family? The photo is taken from his sister Ada's book about DHL, and is labelled 'Marsh Farm'. Other sources say that his model was called Aqueduct House, named for the nearby canal aqueduct. It was apparently right beside the canal embankment, and the building was demolished and replaced by the current bungalow called 'Pipswood'.

Given that Lawrence almost always portrayed real places, this raises two questions. Does the picture show the building that occupied this site in the late nineteenth century? According to Harry Moore, it was 'an old stone farm', which had been lived in for two centuries by the Fritchley family. But the 1901 census for Cossall only lists one Fritchley in the village, who was living with his in-laws.

The second question is why Lawrence chose this place for a key role in what is arguably his finest novel. Although it does correspond to the setting described in the book, the location today seems too cramped and hemmed-in for the drama he creates. It would be good to know whether he had any links with the family at the real-life farm, or if he simply chose this spot to allow for a convincing flood in chapter IX?

The View from Walker Street

This is the view today from outside No. 8 Walker Street, the house Lawrence lived in for the critical years of boyhood and adolescence. The ash tree which used to keep him awake at night, the slag heaps and the colliery winding gear have all gone, but the open view towards Brinsley and Underwood remains. From the bedroom windows he claimed you could see Crich Stand in the Derbyshire hills, and this sight seemed to have almost mystical significance for the young lad, suggesting a wider world beyond the confines of Eastwood town.