"DH Lawrence - The truth about a banned genius" - Picture Post magazine visits Eastwood in 1955

In 1955 Picture Post magazine sent its ace reporting team to Eastwood to interview and photograph some locals in search of the true character of controversial author DH Lawrence. Some of the locals sound like right Eastwood characters, especially the miners playing dominoes in the Three Tuns! But they give a nice balanced opinion in the end...

"A new biography of D. H. Lawrence, The Intelligent Heart, has just been published and once more that strange and stormy author is the centre of controversy. Picture Post has itself been searching for the truth behind the Lawrence legends. DIANA STEWART visited Eastwood, the drab mining village where he was born. She spoke with old people who knew him as a boy; who cared nothing for his greatness, and to whom -twenty-five years after his death- he is still just 'Bert'."

Lawrence the boy
who loved his mother
but hated his father

This is what the article said...

LAWRENCE was the son of a miner. For more than half his life, he lived in a mining village. Before he was thirty he had become one of the most controversial novelists of the early Twentieth Century. He was, and still is, one of the few English writers who have attempted to dramatize the strange richness and desolation of the life of the miner.

Yet, from the beginning it was not the simple people, the miners and farmers among whom he grew up, who claimed him as their own, but the unconventional, Bohemian element, whose spiritual home is in Chelsea and Bloomsbury, and who could not exist for twenty-four hours in a colliery village. While some genuinely recognised his obvious talent (Bernard Shaw said, of Sons and Lovers, that only genius could have written it), many were attracted to Lawrence's books mainly because of the notoriety he gained over the banning of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

That section of the reading public who consider it a sign of superiority to be familiar with the works of a banned author, began to claim him as their own. A legend grew up around Lawrence; a legend that created, out of this talented miner's son, a tortured figure, sensual and mystical. A man whose pattern of life was distorted and complicated, and whose writings reflected the dark shadows of his own personal life.

But is this the real truth about the character of D. H. Lawrence? Can these people, who have read and studied his novels, who have talked in terms of symbols and sublimations, and the rest, give us a true picture of what Lawrence, the miner's son, was really like. Can these Lawrence students who, over many a glass of sherry, and in front of many a gas fire, have eagerly discussed the significance of Lawrence's worship of his mother, and the effect of his father's character on his writings really give us the truth about his parents? Or would it not be better to ask the people who lived next door to the Lawrence family who went to school with him the girls he went walking with the people who do not regard him as a great novelist, but just 'Bert Lawrence'?

A visit to Eastwood

Lawrence - the man who
shocked the world.

To meet these people, we have to go to Eastwood. It is a little mining town, in the heart of the Midland coalfields, and close to the borders of the lovely Derbyshire countryside. They are very much alike, these little towns. They have a long, straggling main street, where the miners' wives buy their meat and groceries, look for the latest bargains in the drapery stores, and exchange local gossip with their acquaintances. There is always a cinema, garish and incongruous; and always a local chapel, with its ugly, Victorian façade. In the distance, against the horizon, are the pit heaps; and off the main road run the sloping, cobbled streets, with their little colliery houses, which, like the chapel, date back to Victorian times. Victoria Street, in Eastwood, is one of these; and if you stumble down its steep slope, you come to a narrow-doored house, with long windows. Above the door, is a plaque, rather dirty and shabby. On it, are the words: 'David Herbert Lawrence was born here, September, 1885'.

Ask the young children, who play around the doors, who this man was, and they look shy, shake their heads and run away. The youths who gather at the corner of the street on fine evenings they, too, look vague at the mention of his name. "Don't you knew he wrote books, which have been spoken about all over the world?" They shrug, and, like the children, look puzzled. But there are men and women in Eastwood who remember Lawrence. Old miners and their wives, who went to school with him, played in the gas-lit cobbled streets on winter evenings, and who speak of him as 'young Bert Lawrence', although he has been dead for twenty-five years.

'A sickly little lad'

One such old man keeps a garage at the top of Victoria Street. He was a miner till he was injured in the pit. "Of course I knew Bert Lawrence," he told me. "A sickly little lad, he was. His mother used to dress him in a sailor suit. Always played with the girls. Used to help them to dress their dolls, and such like. We lads used to wait for each other at the end of the close to go to school. Come on Bert', we used to say. But no, he had to wait for the girls." He pauses here, reflectively: "Bit of a sissy, really." The old man had read none of his old playmate's books; not even out of curiosity; although he had heard that Lawrence had made a bit of a name for himself.

Mr. Goddard, aged seventy-nine, knew him well as a little boy. "Used to come into my mother's shop in his sailor suit; always looked a bit untidy. 'Bert', my mother used to say, 'Wipe your nose'." Mr. Goddard had two good-looking sisters. The young Bert, as he grew older used to help them in the evenings with their mangling, or any odd job that they needed doing. "Very helpful, was young Bert," said Mr. Goddard. "But, mind, it were the girls he were interested in, not the rest of the family." Mr. Goddard lowered his voice a trifle when he admitted that he'd read Lady Chatterley's Lover. "Filth, of course," he said, "just plain filth." 

The old miners, who gather to smoke and play dominoes at the local 'hut', more or less agree with Mr. Goddard. "A bit crude", is their summing-up of one of the greatest novelists of the Twentieth Century.

Mr. Arthur Neville, of Eastwood, knew him well. Lawrence was a habitue of the Neville household. They all loved his high spirits, and were fascinated by his knowledge of wild plants and flowers. He loved the country with a passion that was to express itself later in the delicate and beautiful descriptions of the countryside that are to be found in all his works. Arthur's brother, was Lawrence's confidant at high school. The two young men were numbered amongst the 'bright lads' of the village. 

One day, they had been helping with the harvest, at Haggs Farm (Willeys Farm of Sons and Lovers), and at night they did not return. Old Mr. Neville thought that they had been with girls from the farm. Furiously, he ordered young Arthur to "fetch our George home". Later, when Lawrence was to run away with the attractive wife of a local professor, the whole family, with the exception of George, turned against him.

The men, while they speak affectionately of him always, infer that Lawrence's preference for women's company implied that he was a little wild. But the women who knew him do not think so. Mrs. Brice, one of the 'girls of the mangle', is the sister of Mr. Goddard. She is seventy,  and must have been very lovely as a girl. She smiles when she speaks of Lawrence as a young man. "There was no harm in Bert", she says. " 'I like all girls,' he used to say to me, but I haven't one of my own'." 

He used to escort her from chapel, which the young Lawrences attended three times every Sunday, and after the choir practice, when Bert's high-pitched voice could be heard, soaring above all the rest. What did this attractive young woman and the young Lawrence talk about, as they wandered home? "Oh, flowers and wild plants. Bert loved the countryside, and there wasn't anything he didn't know about growing things."

One gay old lady, a cousin by marriage, and a friend of Lawrence in his teens, laughed at the idea of Bert being wild. "Actually, Bert was rather strait-laced," she said. "Once, a friend of his got a girl into trouble, and he never spoke to him again!" "Prudish", was the way he was described by another old lady, whose son was later to figure in The White Peacock. "Wouldn't stand a dirty joke, wouldn't Bert. 'That's enough,' he'd say, if anybody started to tell one." If one asks if the love affair between Miriam and Paul, of Sons and Lovers, his autobiographical novel, was authentic, the women, at least. are emphatic that "there was nothing in it, it was the brothers he went to see," or "his mother liked him to go to Haggs Farm because the butter and eggs he got did him good."

He adored his mother

He was a mother's boy', they will tell you. And it is very obvious that he adored her, and that his love for her at that time overrode every other consideration. He nursed her, as she lay dying, and laid her out after her death. One gathers that the scene of Mrs. Morel's death in Sons and Lovers, is absolutely authentic. His passionate love for his mother was to have a fundamental effect on Lawrence's character and, later, his writing.

The violent, emotional opposition between the æsthetic Mrs. Lawrence and the uncomplicated, uninhibited character of Lawrence's father, was to lay the basis for the theme of the male and female conflict which runs so constantly through his novels, and which tortures the characters of the men and women whom he created. He hated his father, because his voice and movements were harsh; because, against his mother's lightness, he represented the darkness of the pits, lying deep beneath the fields of Eastwood. He presents him in his novels always as a brute, drunken and lurching: sometimes pathetic, sometimes abject, never noble.

The house in The Breach - Lawrence grew up here after his family left
the house in Victoria Street. Only the tenants have changed

Yet, the truth, from the lips of those who know the Lawrence family well, gives a completely different picture of the man who was his father. The old colliers. indignantly deny that he was a drunkard. They say that the men, coming home from work, in their pit dirt, have to drink to clear their dust-coated throats and lungs. Old Lawrence and his buddy used to call at the Three Tuns public house, in Eastwood, on their way home from work. His friend was a brilliant piccolo player, and the original of Aaron Sisson, the flute player of Aaron's Rod. Many of the habitués of the Three Tuns still remember the two old men. But no one ever saw Lawrence's father the worse for drink.

Lawrence blamed his father for his poor health because he locked his pregnant mother out one night, in a fit of temper. The scene is described exquisitely in Sons and Lovers, Lawrence thought that this had an effect on his unborn self, because, through the experience, Mrs. Lawrence caught a severe chill. But the old miners will tell you that the truth was that old Mr. Lawrence was a good trade unionist, who came out with his mates for better wages, and that when Mrs. Lawrence was pregnant with Herbert Lawrence, she had to go without food herself to feed the family. It was malnutrition which laid the seeds of the disease that was, later, to kill her, and which helped to make Lawrence a sickly child.

An old friend of D. H. Lawrence waxes eloquent on the subject of the Lawrence menage. Asked his opinion of old Mr. Lawrence, he paused for a full half-minute, then banged his fist on the table, and shouted: "I'll tell you what he was the most hen-pecked man in Eastwood! His wife used to pick his pit clothes up wi' tongs; wouldn't touch 'em wi' her hands; enough to turn any man to drink!"

Dominoes at the "local" (The Three Tuns)
"Bert's dad? Why he was the most hen-pecked man in Eastwood!" - the old miners say

The simple fact, as these miners and their wives tell it, is that he and his wife were hopelessly unsuited. And the little boy in the sailor suit, sensitive to the disharmony between his beloved mother and his collier father, was to store his impressions of the discord that can exist between man and woman and, later, to translate it, in unforgettable terms, in books like Women in Love and The White Peacock. 

Yet, the one man who remained in touch with D. H. Lawrence throughout his writing life, Mr. William Hopkins, of Eastwood, has recorded the fact that Lawrence confessed to him, on what was to be his last visit to Eastwood, that he had misjudged his father. And so, as one goes searching through the little town, for those still living who knew Lawrence, a picture is gradually built up. Of the young pupil at Nottingham University College, with school records that speak unenthusiastically of his English: "Herbert Lawrence's language is much too flowery." Of the young pupil teacher of seventeen, fighting almost physically with his class of rough collier lads; and running, literally in tears, to the headmaster, exclaiming that "he could not keep order".

'No stamina'

The man who knew this head teacher, still lives, and quotes him as saying: "No good, that young Lawrence, no stamina." One sees him, too, in the eyes of the old men and women, who remember him because he was such fun at parties, with such inventive genius for games and charades.

And yet, no one really discusses him. In many of these areas there are Dickens societies and Shakespearian groups; but there is no Lawrence cult. Literally, no one seems to have studied his books; and very few read him. The few who do, discuss his novels in an intensely personal way.

The husband of the original of The Lost Girl, speaks kindly of him, but says that he will never forgive him for his portrayal of his wife. Two sisters never spoke to each other for twenty years, because their mother, a completely respectable woman, was the original of a certain rather colourful character in one of Lawrence's earlier novels. One of the sisters had approved the draft; the other had not seen it till after publication. 

A woman teacher at a local school, who was fascinated by Lawrence when she was a child, because he wore a beard and had a bath every night (she used to watch the bath water coming out of the pipes at the back of the house), confesses that she likes his stories mainly because she likes to trace who the characters are supposed to be.

Of all those who knew him as a youth, none seemed to have suspected that there was an unusual man in their midst. None seemed to sense his genius, though all recognised his difference, and his restlessness, which was to drive him, finally, to the other side of the world.

One can believe, on the evidence, that the woman with whom he eloped, was his first love; and, from what we know of his life after he left Eastwood, his only real love.

"The sharp contrast to the greyness of the pit yards,
the yellow corn of the countryside..."

One interesting factor emerges. It is true that he hated Eastwood, loathed the ugliness of the pit heaps and the harsh mechanism of the mines. He resented almost to madness the grey lives, as he saw them, of the mining families. When he left Eastwood, he undoubtedly experienced a sense of escape; and yet, the finest of his works were written about these mining villages. Many of his short stories, with their working-class settings, and books like Sons and Lovers, will live as a monument to Lawrence long after many of his other works are forgotten.

When he muddied his thoughts with the confused ideas of the semi-bohemian, Chelsea-cum-Bloomsbury type, which we meet in books like Aaron's Rod, many feel that he began to deteriorate as a writer, and to become less happy as a human being. Beside the clear-cut characters of his miners and working men and women, how tiresome seem some of his later characters, who turn and twist endlessly in the circle of their own limited egos.

It seems as though, in spite of himself, in spite of his delicate perception of colour and texture (which, as much as sensuality, drove him from a child to seek the company of girls and women), in spite of his complete difference from the rough-voiced colliers around him, Lawrence did belong. Only when he tried to repudiate his own, did his writing lose touch with reality and become less satisfying. Eastwood, with all its drabness, gave to Lawrence the one great essential that a writer needs reality.

Suffering, gaiety, struggle, courage; the young Bert saw these every day of his life. He saw, too, in sharp contrast to the greyness of the pit yards, the yellow corn of the countryside around Eastwood, the overwhelming colour of the spring. The very vividness of the contrast must have passionately inspired the young Lawrence. All this wealth of human material and natural beauty, he was able to pour into his early books.

The miners of Eastwood, coming home from work, tired and black with the dust of the pit; the miners' wives, busy with the small events of their daily round; the children, playing in the lamplight in the dark winter evenings, do not know it, but D. H. Lawrence has made them immortal. Some day they will claim him as their own.

End of article.

If you want to read the original version of the article in the Dec 1955 Picture Post, the link to it is below. There are some fabulous old adverts for Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts, Cadbury's Drinking Chocolate, Aero bars, etc. and a hilarious and slightly disturbing one of Bob Monkhouse modelling a "stylish" Christmas dressing gown...

Original article, click here (be patient it is quite big. Best to download it then look at it.)

Picture Post was a photojournalistic magazine published in the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1957. It is considered a pioneering example of photojournalism and was an immediate success, selling 1,700,000 copies a week after only two months. It has been called the UK's equivalent of Life magazine. It was heavy on adverts some of which are fascinating from a 21st century point of view...

A young Bob Monkhouse models a natty dressing gown!
An early form of Photoshopping maybe??