If Ethel Haythornthwaite isn’t yet a household name, then she really should be. She was the woman who, in 1924, gathered together a group of Sheffielders that went on to co-found the CPRE—the Campaign to Protect Rural England. After the Second World War she helped set up the National Parks, of which the glorious Peak District was one of the first. She was a passionate lover of the countryside, a tireless campaigner for its preservation from the encroaching ills of industrialisation, and a published poet—her long-form poem The Pride of the Peak was published by Jonathan Cape in 1926, and appears in the second section of this book. The CPRE Peak District and South Yorkshire wanted to honour Ethel in this, their centenary year, by producing a biography, and asked Helen Mort to write it. A local poet and writer, a runner and climber with an intimate knowledge of both Sheffield and the Peak District, I can think of no better person than Helen for the job.
Helen’s presence is there in the book, as she runs through Longshaw and Blackamoor, feeling in the mud under her feet the places that Ethel preserved for us. We hear the poet when she describes the border of Sheffield like a squashed, distorted maple leaf…trampled somehow, softened by rain and then moved by someone’s steel-toe-capped boot. We meet the curious researcher as she walks through Endcliffe Park and up Riverdale to find the site of Ethel’s home on Endcliffe Vale Road. Then there are the letters that Helen writes to Ethel in between chapters, commenting, admiring, asking about her life—mirroring the means of communication that Ethel herself used, day in, day out, to family, to friends, but also those in power, to cajole and persuade them of the importance of her mission. Ethel was no street protester after all, Helen tells us. She used the quieter, more genteel method of letter-writing to achieve her goals.
Ethel was born in 1896 into money, though recently acquired. Her father was Thomas Ward, who made his fortune from scrap metal, crucial for Sheffield’s steel industry during World War One. (Amongst the several intriguing photos in the book I must mention the one of the elephant named Lizzie Ward, leased by Thomas Ward’s firm during the war to cart scrap metal through the streets of Sheffield!) Her mother was Mary Sophia Bassett from the liquorice family. The family were comfortably off, and Ethel was well educated, attending a boarding school in Kent with her sister, Gertie, then studying English literature at university in London. When she returned to Sheffield in 1913 her father had been appointed Master Cutler in Sheffield, a highly prestigious public office—there’s no doubt that his connections helped Ethel in her campaigns.
Very sadly, Ethel suffered a tragic personal loss early on in her life. She’d met and married a young man called Henry Burrows Gallimore in 1916, a Sheffielder and poet, like Ethel. They shared an adoration of the countryside, honeymooning in the Lake District, and the intense passion they experienced on this trip formed the basis for Henry’s poem An Offering, discussed by Helen in some detail in the book. Like so many of his generation he was killed in the First World War, in 1917, aged thirty-one. He and Ethel had been married for just fifteen months and she was a widow at twenty-two. Arguably, this tragedy was the trigger for her life’s work. Ethel’s sister Gertie would drive her out into the Peaks in the years after Henry’s death to help her sister find solace there and heal. As she experienced the beneficial spiritual powers of the countryside, Ethel also became aware of the perils of unbridled development springing up to spoil it. In May 1924 she invited the great and the good of Sheffield to a meeting in the billiard room of Endcliffe Vale House with a view to setting up a committee for the protection of the countryside. The committee soon became the Sheffield wing of the national Council for the Preservation of Rural England, and Ethel its secretary, a post she held till 1980, for over 50 years.
Their mission was at first an aesthetic one, concerned with the effects of modernisation. Ethel and the committee were worried about the ugliness of electricity pylons, the rise of the motor car bringing day trippers into the countryside, and the prevalence of litter. She was keen to get people on board, to help them see what was happening to the beautiful countryside on their doorstep, and was adept at using visual imagery to do so. In 1929 she displayed a collection of litter found in the Peak District in a glass fronted Display Case in Sheffield’s Cutler’s Hall. In the publication The Threat to the Peak, she used Phil Barnes’ photographs to show the ugliness of the huge advertisements placed incongruously on the side of rural buildings. She recognised that petrol stations were now a necessary evil, but did they have to be so unsightly with their medley of strident colours? Ethel was also concerned about housing development, the sprawl of towns overwhelming the countryside, and it wasn’t until 1947, with the passing of the Town and Country Planning Act, that controls on development were introduced. To prevent that sprawl, the association raised money to purchase part of the Longshaw Estate from the Duke of Rutland in 1927, which they then conveyed to the National Trust in 1931. To protect the Blacka Moor Estate, just outside Sheffield and now a wild-life-rich landscape, Ethel used her powers of persuasion on Alderman Graves. He bought the land himself and then handed it over to the city of Sheffield in 1933.
A longer and more drawn out campaign, which was also—and remains—a national issue, was that of the preservation of the Green Belt. The Sheffield CPRE mapped out land around the city to preserve it for the enjoyment and leisure of city folk and Ethel was helped in this by Gerald Haythornthwaite, her second husband, whom she met when he applied for a job with the CPRE in 1935. Their plans were approved by a small majority of Sheffield Corporation in 1938, but the war intervened, and the slum clearances after the war meant there was a desperate need for house building on the edge of Sheffield. Accordingly, development was permitted at Meersbrook, Rivelin and Gleadless despite Ethel and Gerald’s plans. The achievement that had perhaps the widest impact was Ethel’s contribution to the setting up of the National Parks after the war. She was invited to serve on the Hobhouse Committee by the new Labour government in 1945, and their report, published in 1947, led to the founding of the first four National Parks, of which our lovely Peak District National Park is one.
Inevitably a book like this, brought out for a centenary celebration, leads us to reflect on the differences between then and now, and Helen Mort is particularly good at bringing these out. As a wordsmith, she’s aware of the rather different, occasionally patronising, language used in Ethel’s day to describe developments she found objectionable. Though Ethel’s concerns in preserving the countryside were primarily aesthetic, our concerns now are more around the effects of climate change, species preservation, access to the countryside for a wider group of people. Some things, however, are not so different: Ethel’s insistence on the spiritual benefits of the countryside sounds remarkably like the mental health messages we receive today.
What I most enjoyed about the book, though, (as well as the wonderful green flaps and many compelling black and white photographs) was the presence of both biographer and subject, of both Ethel and Helen, in the text. It really does feel like one restless woman looking for another. And in these final words, this coming together of land and language, it’s as if they’ve found each other: Landscape as a constant. As partner. Language as a moor. This is Ethel’s world and she welcomed us to it.
Thanks to Vertebrate Publishing for the review copy. You can order a copy from Vertebrate at https://bit.ly/3QccggK
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