FAREWELL, HANNAH
How story of the ‘lonely lady of Low Birk Hatt Farm’ touched the nation and made her a unique TV star
IT WOULD have been a hard life for anyone. For a frail spinster in her 40s, with no running water, no electricity and little company, it was an existence almost beyond comprehension.
Hannah Hauxwell’s death at 91 brought to a close a remarkable chapter in the life of the Dales that made her the most famous Yorkshirewoman of her time, and the most respected. When an ITV documentary about her struggle to survive the High Pennine winter was broadcast in 1973, the nation took her to its heart. Few could believe that a corner of the country could have been so untouched by the 20th century, and in a rare national coming-together, in solidarity and admiration, food parcels began to arrive by the hundred.
SHE WAS not yet 50 but her weathered face betrayed her.
Hannah Hauxwell, bowed but not beaten by the unforgiving North Pennine climate, had already lived what would for most people have been two lifetimes – when suddenly she became a celebrity.
In the suburban warmth of the 1973 winter, the sight of a fellow Briton struggling to survive without electricity or running water, and with an income of less than £200 a year, convulsed the nation in sorrow and pity, and food parcels began to arrive literally by the truckload.
She was, for a while, the most famous Yorkshirewoman on the planet. But when death emerged yesterday, at 91, she was once more a solitary figure.
It was a story that had begun with an article in The Yorkshire
Post about “the lonely lady of Low Birk Hatt Farm”. It had been in her family for a century and she had lived there since she was three. Now, she farmed its 80 acres alone.
Her mother had died 12 years before; her uncle three years after that. It was so remote that her groceries had to be left by the roadside, two miles away.
A thousand feet above sea level and taking in some of England’s most forbidding terrain, it was, said the article, “an upland place far from a world she tends to ignore”.
But a couple of years later, when television came calling, the world did, too.
The serene dignity with which she conducted her life reconnected older viewers especially with a Britain they thought they had lost, and the tears they shed for her were almost palpable.
It was the late Barry Cockcroft, a producer at Yorkshire Television with a keen visual sense, that had made her a star. His documentary, Too Long
a Winter, was a work of art on 16mm film, an intimate yet unintrusive portrait of a handful of Dales characters whom time, it seemed, had forgotten.
Inside the tumbledown farmhouse in the lonely Baldersdale valley, Hannah sipped tea and in her softly lilting Teesdale tones spoke of the simple joy of walking the lanes around the farm. “If I haven’t money in my pocket it’s one thing no-one can rob me of,” she said.
Literate and God-fearing, her plight – though she didn’t see it as such – triggered a wave of sorrow and perhaps guilt.
No-one at YTV was prepared for the outpouring of emotion that followed. The phone lines to Leeds were jammed with people wanting to know what they could do for her. In the days that followed, so many people sent food parcels that a helicopter had to be scrambled to get them out to her.
“It was one of the most memorable broadcasting nights I remember,” said John Fairley, who as head of documentaries had been executive producer of the film. “Her extraordinary strength of character and charm, in the most challenging of circumstances, enthralled the whole country. Hannah became instantly renowned as the epitome of a way of life in the Yorkshire Dales. She remained so through all her time on the farm, and afterwards in retirement.”
There were more films about Hannah in the coming years. The cameras followed her to the Women of the Year gala at the Savoy, where she was a guest of honour, and eventually she was persuaded out of Low Birk Hatt, to Europe and America, and to a garden party at Buckingham Palace, before finally selling her few remaining cattle and upping sticks to Cotherstone, six miles away, over the Yorkshire border into County Durham.
“It was all very dainty,” she said of the party at the palace. “There were little pancakes and tiny cakes. Which, for the occasion, I suppose was quite nice, but if you’d been doing half a hard day’s work, it would have left quite a gap.”
She was asked what she liked most about her new home. “The heating,” she said. “And the bathroom.
“I was just thinking yesterday – when I was late, as always, getting ready – I haven’t a pan of water to boil up and a bucket of cold water to mix in when it got hot.”
I suppose there is a happy medium. It would, I think, be nicer to see rather more people and hear something of what is going on in the world – Hannah Hauxwell in 1970.
We arrived one summer to see her neighbour’s tractordrawn baling machine trundling down the meadow. Hannah marvelled at the speed of the operation. Freda had baked a sponge cake for her; we were asked to leave it “under the calf bucket”, an upturned bucket, anti-dog device, near the back door of the farmhouse – the late journalist WR ‘Bill’ Mitchell, writing in The Yorkshire Post.
I think the time might come when I can’t stay here. But as long as I can, I would like... I’m very much attached to the place. It’s home. As long as I can, I think the old house and me will stay together – Hannah Hauxwell in 1973.
Hannah’s gentleness, her winning smile and her guileless authenticity stole the nation’s heart in an instant. Thousands of wellwishers sent messages to Hannah via YTV, and enough money was sent in by viewers to finally connect electricity to Hannah’s farm – John Willis, then a researcher and later head of documentaries at YTV, recalling Hannah in the book, Heartbeat and Beyond: Memoirs of 50 Years of Yorkshire Television.
I don’t do so badly. But sometimes in winter time I haven’t always time to get a meal, much less cook one. All my time and energy’s taken up with looking after the cattle. I don’t get about as swiftly. One doesn’t get about as quickly as they used to or do things as easily – Hannah Hauxwell in 1988.
Summertime visitors to Low Birk Hatt included Kit Calvert, a great Dales character, who shared with Hannah a rock-hard religious faith. They walked arm-inarm on a flagged path beside the farmhouse, with Hannah holding a muck-fork. And, of course, she wore Wellingtons, “my best friends” – WR Mitchell.
The beauty - to me there’s nowhere like it, never will be. And whatever I am, wherever I am, this is me. This is my life. And if there’s a funny old person in years to come, a ghost walking up and down here, it’ll be me. A big part of me, wherever I am, will be left here. That’s me. There’s nowhere else – Hannah Hauxwell, on leaving Low Birk Hatt Farm in 1988.
HANNAH HAUXWELL was, in many respects, a pioneer of reality television. This reluctant celebrity was the iconic Dales farmer whose daily struggles in one of North Yorkshire’s most desolate outposts earned international fame, and respect, following the broadcast of Too Long a Winter, the acclaimed 1973 documentary inspired by an article in this newspaper.
It led to Yorkshire Television’s phone lines being jammed for three days with offers of help, and a campaign set up to supply electricity to the remote Low Birk Hatt Farm where she had lived alone since the age of 35 following the death of her parents and uncle. A rare interview in 2011, on the eve of her 85th birthday, provided a fascinating insight into the Dales’ most famous daughter. She’d been repairing her bed mattress for years. Asked if it would be simpler to buy a new one, her reply epitomised her approach to life: “It fits the bed perfectly.”
Yet, while Hannah Hauxwell remained a reclusive figure right up until her death, her spirit had a wider resonance. Small in stature, but big in heart, her toil shone a light on farming families and the neglected role of women in a male-dominated industry. She lived a down-to-earth life like no other and will be remembered as an icon of Yorkshire.