Barry Hines obituary: author of A Kestrel for a Knave

Barry Hines, who has died aged 76, wrote about working-class lives for more than 40 years and, while the results were sometimes gloomy (reality often is), he kept an eye for the decency and hope in people. In his most famous book, A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) – filmed as Kes a year later by Ken Loach – Barry forged the emblem of a ragged generation, Billy Casper.

Everyone knew a Casper: half-boy, half-pigeon, disowned by his family and school, left to shuffle through life in a 10-bob anorak and half-mast trousers. The book’s inclusion on school syllabuses meant it became embedded in the psyche of British cultural life. Almost everyone is aware of Kes, if not of its author, and many adults of a certain age claim it as one of the few books they have read.

Barry said of his work: “My books are all conventional in form. They have a beginning, a middle and a sort of ending – mainly in that order – with the occasional flashback thrown in.” This simplistic explanation was typical of Barry who, in life and writing, disliked anything ornate or untruthful and balked at sentimentality.

Many readers still recall the sadness they felt at the death of the hawk in A Kestrel for a Knave. “How often are dreams realised in real life?” said Hines in a press interview. “I write about real people and show a section of their life, without the Hollywood endings which rarely happen outside Hollywood. Disney offered to make Kes, on the condition that the hawk recovered. Should we have sold out? I know which way would always be right for me.”

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Son of Dick and Annie, Barry was born in the South Yorkshire mining village of Hoyland Common, near Barnsley, where he sought out the rolling fields and rich woods beyond the pithead. He brought this pastoral refuge to A Kestrel for a Knave, to serve as a counterpoint to the agitation in Casper’s life.

Both Barry’s father and grandfather (who was killed in a pit accident) were miners and, despite attending Ecclesfield grammar school, on the outskirts of Sheffield, Barry trained as an apprentice mining surveyor. He was regularly admonished by the miners for “not using his brains” and, chastened, left to enrol at college. He studied physical education at Loughborough Training College, chiefly because he was an outstanding footballer; he had represented England grammar schools in an international match against Scotland. He taught for two years in a London comprehensive before returning north to teach PE – this experience also informed A Kestrel for a Knave, which was set largely in classrooms and on school grounds.

His debut book, The Blinder (1966), was one of the first novels about football. Its protagonist was Lennie Hawk, a young player torn between his love of the game and college studies. Barry was told by a professional footballer that the writer knew “what the game was all about”. He considered this one of the best critiques he had ever received.

Barry was often considered to be part of the generation of celebrated northern writers (and to a lesser extent the angry young man movement) including Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, John Braine and Keith Waterhouse, yet was a decade younger than most of them. He followed A Kestrel for a Knave with a series of novels reflecting the lives of the proletariat – First Signs (1972), The Gamekeeper (1975), The Price of Coal (1979), Looks and Smiles (1981), Unfinished Business (1983), The Heart of It (1994) and Elvis Over England (1998). Three of these books – The Gamekeeper, The Price of Coal and Looks and Smiles – were filmed by Loach, with Barry writing the screenplays.

He wrote intermittently for radio and television. In 1970 his 1965 radio play Billy’s Last Stand, about an exploited labourer, was staged at the Royal Court theatre, London, and a television version was broadcast by the BBC in 1971. He contributed a play, Speech Day (again set in a school), to the BBC’s Play for Today strand in 1973. Another play, Two Men from Derby, broadcast by the BBC in 1976, was based on the experiences of his grandfather who had a great talent for football but, according to Barry, never realised his potential.

Barry’s most memorable television work, the drama-documentary Threads (1984), was set at the height of the cold war and chronicled the effect of a nuclear bomb dropped on a northern city. Despite the overwhelming apocalyptic theme, Barry drove the story into the lives of ordinary people, which served to further hone a sense of desolation. Threads won four Bafta awards from a total of seven nominations.

I first met Barry in 1997 when I had been sent to interview him by a newspaper. He asked me to meet him at his writing den, a small office on the campus of Sheffield Hallam University. I was struck by the starkness of the room: a postcard on the wall, a desk, a pen and a few sheets of paper, and that was about it – no books, computer or telephone. On the floor was a tiny kettle, holding just enough water to fill a single mug.

Barry did not go in for social protocol, asking how you were and whether you had had a pleasant journey. This wasn’t for effect or to invoke power play; he had other things on his mind. After a few minutes, it didn’t matter anyway, because he had an aura that coalesced kindness with straight talking. In short, he felt good to be around. During our conversation he often repeated the word “wondrous”. A lot of things were wondrous: being able to work as a writer and not down the pit; Barnsley FC’s current form; the standard of scriptwriting on Coronation Street; American crime novels. He sang the word, much like a kid would having just learned it.

When I set up an independent publishing company, Pomona, in 2003, Barry was one of the first writers I approached. I asked if I could republish Looks and Smiles and The Price of Coal. Both are light on narrative but heavy with truth. Mick Walsh, the protagonist in Looks and Smiles, wants to be a motorcycle mechanic but bad luck, inexperience and tough economic times prevent him getting a job. The book is a postcard from the grubby economic wasteland of the early 1980s. The Price of Coal was a vehicle for Barry to scrutinise class politics. The bosses of Milton colliery are delighted when the Prince of Wales agrees to visit and they begin to spend on a “top show” – painting the offices and planting flowers. Down below, deep in the earth, the lives of the miners are at risk due to faulty machinery and decaying pit-props. The tragic outcome is inevitable.

Writers can be very fussy and precious about their work and I imagined I might encounter a more anxious and vain Barry Hines. He remained the same person I had met in that tiny room. He was flattered by my interest, trusting me with the covers and contract, happy to help. We sold only a few hundred copies but Barry did not seem to mind. Later, I learned that he had a folder of unpublished work labelled “Early poetry, short stories”. From this we assembled an anthology, This Artistic Life, containing stories dating back mainly to the late 60s and early 70s. It was his last book.

Barry was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2007. He and his wife, Eleanor, had moved from Sheffield back to Hoyland Common. “It’s like I have never been away,’’ he said at the time. ‘‘When I went into the local working men’s club, after nearly 40 years, the blokes just said ‘Ayup Barry’ and went back to their cards. That quiet acceptance makes me feel at home. It is very pretty round here now that all the tips have been landscaped and there are nice walks.”

Many years ago, another writer congratulated Barry on his “iron integrity”. This very quality probably led to him becoming an overlooked figure in later life. He had too much pride and dignity to kowtow to agents and publishers and pushy PR people. They could all bugger off – a rejoinder typical of many of Barry’s characters and why, ultimately, his books were so well loved.

He survived by Eleanor, and his children, Tom and Sally, from a previous marriage.
Mark Hodkinson

Tony Garnett writes: I worked on four films with Barry Hines: Kes, The Price of Coal (a two-parter for the BBC in 1977) and Born Kicking (1992). Barry’s character and his writing were all of a piece: direct, simple and honest. His simplicity was hewn out of a close analysis of others and their place in a society riven by class interests. To the end, he knew which side he was on. He had been born to the sound of clogs, on their way to Rockingham pit, where his father worked.

The miners were his own extended family, a family his work defended through the decades. Their story is one of dignity and of humour in adversity. He told it with compressed fury.

He had never drifted far from Hoyland Common, content to sit sipping a pint there with his miner neighbours. He would go to London for meetings, an obedient dog at his heels, but was not impressed by London parties or famous people. Everyone talked too much. Empty vessels, he said.

Barry was an angry man with a sweet nature. He was loyal. His blue eyes were like shining lamps: you could see into them, they shone out at you, assuming your honesty. He was without guile and only ever wrote about what he knew. Through the characters he created, he became the voice of his community. What they thought of his work in South Yorkshire was more important to him than any London critic’s opinion.

As a teenager he played football for England grammar schools and he could have turned professional. Instead, he became a teacher in a secondary modern near Barnsley and, typically, when writing the first draft of A Kestrel for a Knave, sought notes from the children in his class. They were, after all, the experts.

In The Price of Coal he revealed not only his angry compassion for the daily dangers of mining, but an acknowledgment of the feudal backwardness in his community. That saddened this republican, but he understood the resilience of ancient ideologies: after all, the miners around him once worked underneath, and enriched, Earl Fitzwilliam’s Wentworth estate. He dealt with it through affectionate satire.

His first love being football, it was fitting that our last work together was Born Kicking, a fantasy around the first female footballer to play for England. He would have been glad to see the women’s game gain in confidence.

Barry would look puzzled if you said he was an Englishman. He detested patriotism. He despised professional Yorkshiremen, too: that celebrity which demeans as it caricatures. But he was a Yorkshireman, nonetheless: in independence, in humour, in canniness and in sheer bloody stubbornness.

Like so many, I loved and respected him.