Imagining post-industrial Britain

This chapter explores Hines’s conception of Britain after the miners’ strike, and the difficulty he experienced in fictionalising those divisive events. While his 1994 novel The Heart of It is a metafictional account of a writer’s coming retrospectively to understand the strike through his father’s experience, three plays Hines wrote about it remain in draft form and never appeared in the public realm. Both Shooting Stars (1990) and Born Kicking (1992), take unexpected views on Hines’s staple subject of football and its social role, in relation respectively to the effect of unexpected wealth on a working-class man, and what happens if the footballer is a woman. Elvis Over England (1998), Hines’s last published novel, is a road journey undertaken by an unemployed steelworker who starts to confront his past by means of Elvis’s songs. Although critics and Hines himself predicted that Elvis Over England would end up on the screen, it was never filmed.

Introduction

While this book is by no means a biography, the importance of environment in Barry Hines’s writing means that insight into his background and the journey to his writing career introduces us to the recurrent preoccupations of his work. The son and grandson of a miner, Hines grew up in Hoyland Common, a pit village between Rotherham and Barnsley in the heart of South Yorkshire’s Dearne Valley. Hines passed the 11-plus examination and attended Ecclesfield Grammar School, on the outskirts of Sheffield, from 1950 to 1957. This experience shaped Hines’s long-standing and vociferous criticism of the grammar school system: ‘Just because I sat down one morning when I was 10 years old and got a few more sums right than my mates seemed no reason for trying to make me into a snob’, he observed in 1975....

Conclusion

The death of Barry Hines was announced on 20 March 2016, and the tributes in print and on social media were heartfelt and wide-ranging. Hines’s work was lauded by well-known personalities such as the actor Kathy Burke, who likened him to ‘JK’ (Rowling), while the Barnsley-born novelist Joanne Harris noted how she ‘hated and loved him at the same time for writing the world I saw every day, and for giving me hope to escape it’, and the footballer-turned-actor Vinnie Jones referred to ...

Thatcherism and South Yorkshire

This chapter traces the effects of Thatcherism on Hines’s work, and on the region and communities he depicts. His screenplay for the 1981 film Looks and Smiles takes an art-cinematic form to explore the pressures of the era’s unemployment on young people, in his fourth and final collaboration with Ken Loach, while the unproduced play Fun City offers a blackly comic view of the era’s schooling. Unfinished Business (1983) examines the possibilities of social freedom for women, while 1984’s Threads is an exceptionally bleak documentary drama about the effects of nuclear war. Tracing the screenplay’s archival history reveals the detail of Hines’s aesthetic and political practice.

The politics of hope in 1970s Britain

This chapter focuses on a period of extremely fruitful aesthetic production for Hines, in terms of the novels and screenplays that followed A Kestrel for a Knave. During the 1970s, Hines’s political energies were directed towards considering the institutions and structures of life at a time of active struggle for workers’ rights. Thus industrial action is evident in his novel First Signs (1972), and the pair of Plays for Today The Price of Coal (1977) looks back at the miners’ strikes of the early 1970s even as it anticipates the catastrophic strike of 1984-5. 1973’s Play for Today Speech Day is an experimental play about the class-related implications of education and the dim prospects for school-leavers, his novel The Gamekeeper (1975) about class injustice in relation to private land-ownership. Tom Kite is an unproduced screenplay about the potential offered by football for a working-class man to escape his origins.

Poetry with purpose and the journey to Kes

This chapter traces the roots of Barry Hines’s poetic realist style in those examples of his writing which appeared before A Kestrel for a Knave (1968). These include the 1965 play Billy’s Last Stand, which gives an absurdist form to its social-realist content, and Hines’s first novel The Blinder (1966), in which his abiding theme of the battle between intellectual and sporting prowess is first introduced. It was on the strength of the promise shown in The Blinder that A Kestrel for a Knave was filmed as Kes, and we argue that Hines’s best-known novel anticipates its own cinematic realisation in its use of visual technique and description.