Writer was in a league of his own
David Storey Writer BORN JULY 13, 1933 – DIED MARCH 27, 2017, AGED 83
ALMOST 60 years after David Storey’s debut novel This Sporting Life was published, it remains in a league of its own. Based on Storey’s own experiences as a professional rugby player, the novel follows the fortunes of a hero on the playing field set against his ill-fated relationship with his widowed landlady.
Storey’s highly personal novel earned him the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award and three years later it was turned into a feature film starring Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts, both of whom secured Oscar nominations. He would go on to write a string of award-winning novels and plays including the books Flight Into Camden and Pasmore, and the plays The Restoration Of Arnold Middleton, The Contractor, Home and The Changing Room.
Born in Wakefield, the third son of a miner, Frank, and his wife, Lily, Storey’s work drew on his Yorkshire working-class background.
He was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School and decided as a teenager he wanted to become an artist but his father – who was desperate for his son to go to university – said he would have to fund the fees for art college himself.
Aged 18, Storey signed for Leeds, however he soon joined the Slade School of Fine Art in London, travelling north for matches, earning £6 a week, and writing novels on the train. “It had a very poor effect on the other players who were all young coal miners – this artist swanning in for matches,” he said. “At the Slade meanwhile I was seen as a bit of an oaf. I only really felt at home on the train, where the two different parts of my life came together.”
He played for Leeds “A” team for four seasons in the early 1950s, as second-row and loose-forward, but he missed the further payment that would have come from graduating into the first team. The idea for This Sporting Life came from a match at Leeds, when Storey was still in his teens. “I was in the second row with a player who was playing out his last days,” he recalled. “At one moment the ball was at my feet and I realised that if I picked it up I’d get my face kicked. And I hesitated just that amount and he didn’t, and he got his face kicked. He came up with a very bloody mouth, not knowing what had happened to his teeth. He just turned to me and said: ‘You **** ’. The guilt induced by that was enormous, which was what prompted me to start writing about it.”
His arrival on the literary scene coincided with the second wave of working-class writers who followed the “angry young men”, but Storey claimed that rather than counting Kingsley Amis and John Osborne among his influences his commitment to literature came about at school after hearing the poem Chanson d’automne by Paul Verlaine.
His second novel, Flight Into Camden, was another award winner, as was Saville, which follows a mining family from the late 1930s and earned Storey the 1976 Booker Prize.
Equally as well known for his plays, he saw a clutch of his best offerings – In Celebration, The Contractor, Home and The Changing Room – all showcased at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Home was later made into a film as was In Celebration.
In later life he produced a collection of poems and continued to write and paint. An exhibition of his work was held at The Hepworth Wakefield gallery last summer.
His wife Barbara died in 2015 and he is survived by their four children.