British victory in the Second World War was won by the British working-class’s blood and sacrifice. Their postwar payback was the NHS, council housing, and — among all the rest — the 11-plus.
The universal state-school pupil exam was based on two premises. It assumed (rightly) that there were clever kids in the lower classes who merited access to higher education. And it operated (wrongly) on the biblical rule: many will be called, few will be chosen (“few” was as low as 10 percent; or, as Clint Eastwood would put it, “Do you feel lucky, punk?”).
What Richard Hines has written is both memoir and biography. It’s the story of two smart-as-paint kids breaking free from the destiny imposed on all the Hineses before them.
Barry and Richard were the children of a Barnsley coal miner. A lovable man, he began life as a boy pit-pony driver and died, prematurely aged by his cruel work, in his early fifties. Barry was born in 1939, Richard, the “nipper” in 1945. Both took the 11-plus. Barry passed but dropped (or was kicked) out of his grammar school. He later got into Loughborough University: redbrick and famously big on sport. Barry was a talented footballer and played in England’s youth team. He became a secondary-modern teacher around where he had been brought up. Secondary “mods” were where those who failed the 11-plus were warehoused until they could be dumped on the world at 15.
Barry took to writing fiction. Why? Because he’d read Animal Farm — Orwell’s fable articulated for him seething anger against the “owners” — the boss class. His first novel, The Blinder (as in playing one), was about football. Soccer was a working-class sport as exploitative as mining. Superstars, like Tommy Lawton, were locked into maximum salaries of £20 and destitution on retirement.
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Barry’s second novel, A Kestrel for a Knave (better known as Kes), was about a Barnsley secondary-modern kid, Billy Casper, who finds spiritual escape in raising and training a wild kestrel chick. The bird is killed, with a poker, and dumped in the dustbin by his brutal elder brother in a fit of rage. What future lies ahead for Billy? The pits (in every sense) and redundancy in his mid-thirties when the pits were closed.
Barry later told his brother that he wrote Kes because “he wanted to produce a book that was critical of an education system which wrote off the majority of children when they were 11 years old”.
“It’s the story of breaking free from the destiny imposed on all their family
Richard himself failed the 11-plus and was duly “written off”. On leaving school at 15 he ended up with an office job in the local council housing department — wearing the kind of neck-tie of which David Cameron disapproves.
Richard is at pains to stress his family were decent working class. But he felt rootless. He spoke two tongues — Yorkshire dialect and “proper” RP. He had escaped the mine but he wanted more out of life than Barnsley Pooterism. Like Barry he was inspired by a book: TH White’s The Goshawk. He decided to do what White had done and train a hawk called “Kes”, using medieval manuals. Much of No Way but Gentlenesse (reflected in the odd title) is taken up with that process and the inner satisfactions it brought him.
Barry’s Kes (obviously based on what Richard had done) was a bestseller. Like Room at the Top and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner it hit the angry proletarian, provincial, mood of the late Sixties. Woodfall films picked it up (as they had those other two novels) to be produced by Tony Garnett and directed by Ken Loach. Congenially bolshy spirits.
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Richard was recruited to train a trio of hawks for the camera. Then came a terrible moment when he discovered while filming that his brother had let it be thought that he, Barry, was the original hawk-trainer. Richard was merely his assistant: “My reaction went deeper than not being recognised for the work I was doing [it] unearthed feelings I didn’t even know I had . . . The only thing in my life I’d done, reasonably well, after lots of research and effort, was to train kestrels . . . It felt as if Barry had stolen my identity.”
After Kes Barry went on to a distinguished career in TV drama and documentary. Richard left hawking behind and grafted his way into school teaching but abandoned what could have been a career to take a film course at Sheffield University. The gamble paid off: he, like Barry, did distinguished TV documentary work and ended up a college professor of media studies.
No Way but Gentlenesse ends with a protest against the criminal waste of the British school education system. “Having been branded a failure at 11,” Richard says, “My own experiences along with years of teaching in schools, making television programmes with people from working-class communities, and working as a university lecturer have convinced me that all of us have something of worth.”
It’s a “gentle” conclusion. Richard left anger to his brother. But there’s a spark or two of rage in this book.
No Way But Gentlenesseby Richard Hines, Bloomsbury, 266pp, £16.99. To buy this book for £14.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134