South Riding

Book 28: Virago Modern Classics

by Winifred Holtby, Marion Shaw

Genres: Classics; Historical Fiction; World War I; Small Town & Rural; Women's Fiction; Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Winifred Holtby's greatest novel was published posthumously Winifred Holtby's masterpiece is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Sarah Burton, the fiery young headmistressof the local girls' school; Mrs Beddows, the district's first alderwoman--based on Holtby's own mother; and Robert Carne, the conservative gentleman-farmer locked in a disastrous marriage--with whom the radical Sarah Burton falls in love. Showing how public decisions can mold the individual, this story offers a panoramic and unforgettable view of Yorkshire life.

Release date: March 10, 2011

Publisher: Audible Studios

Print pages: 544

Sample

Winifred Holtby, who had met my mother in the autumn of 1919, when both were students at Somerville College, Oxford, was,
like her, a writer. The two young women had rented a flat in Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, after leaving university, and together
tried to break into the world of journalism and writing books. Both were regarded as unconventionally progressive writers,
addressing topics like birth control not much discussed in respectable society. After my mother married in 1925, she and my
father shared their home with Winifred. And after by brother John and I were born she shared in our early upbringing too.
With eyes the colour of cornflowers and hair the pale gold of summer wheat in her native Yorkshire Wolds, Winifred couldn’t
easily be overlooked. Indeed, she might have been a descendant of the Vikings who had ravaged and occupied so much of the
east coast of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire centuries before. Tall – nearly six feet – and slim, she was incandescent with the
radiance of her short and concentrated life. For she died, aged thirty-seven, when I was only five.


South Riding, Winifred Holtby’s masterpiece, was born of two powerful factors in her life: her deep roots in the Yorkshire countryside
and her fascination with the comedies and tragedies of local government. The first was nourished by accompanying her father,
David Holtby, around his Rudston farm in the wolds of the East Riding, a land of rich earth and huge skies. The second began
with admiration for her mother, the formidable Alice Holtby, the first woman to become an alderman on East Riding County Council.
The young Winifred pieced together her mother’s career from minutes of local government committees and newspaper cuttings
thrown away in wastepaper baskets, an early example of investigative journalism.


South Riding, like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, is an invented place. That place is, however, steeped in the traditions of Yorkshire, the stoicism, humour and directness of its people, the majesty
of its hills and skies. It is also a story of the often painful confrontation between the old ways of farming, shaped by the
immutable disciplines of the seasons and the weather, governed by territorial and family loyalties, and the new apostles of
progress and radical change. In a grand novel redolent of the compassion and generosity of its author, Winifred embodied these
conflicting cultures in her heroes, the modern-minded headmistress, Sarah Burton, and the melancholy passionate landowner,
Robert Carne, with whom, despite their profound differences, she fell deeply in love.


South Riding somehow triumphed over the heavy odds against its publication; Alderman Mrs Holtby and other members of her extended family
detested the exploration of their lives and their public work. Descriptions of illness, poverty, death, desire and love, the
companions of human existence, were eschewed as intrusive, even vulgar. Winifred’s touching, indeed beseeching prefatory letter
to her mother, Alderman Mrs Holtby, tells the reader about the gulf of incomprehension between mother and daughter. To the
end, Alice Holtby opposed the book’s publication.


Winifred, its author, wrote under the shadow of a death sentence. She had contracted scarlet fever as a schoolgirl, which developed
into Bright’s disease, sclerosis of the kidneys. She was often in the care of doctors and nursing homes, the radiance of her
exuberant joy in life dimmed by sickness. Yet her generous spirit was unable to refuse help to her friends, to the poor, the
homeless and the desperate. In the last few months of her life, as she fought to complete South Riding, she also cared for her sick niece Anne, for her mother, and for my brother John and me when my mother (Vera Brittain), Winifred’s
dearest friend, was coping with my father’s serious illness and her own father’s suicide.


My mother did all she could to make amends. She edited South Riding, gradually overcame the opposition of Alderman Mrs Holtby and her associates, and advocated the novel in every way she could.
That in 1936 it won several of the great literary prizes and became a much praised film in 1938 directed by Victor Saville,
with Ralph Richardson among its leading actors, was some compensation for the suffering of its own making. It is the great
epic of local government, a monument to the tens of thousands who serve their fellow human beings at the grassroots where
things grow.


Shirley Williams, 2010

In February 1935 Winifred Holtby, staying in Hornsea on the Yorkshire coast in order to escape the distractions and fatigue
of life in London, wrote to her friend Vera Brittain to say that she had received ‘a very nice letter from Virginia Woolf
asking if I would like to write an autobiography for the Hogarth Press’. She does not say if she was tempted by the invitation.
In any case she would be dead within eight months, and during the time left to her she was occupied in finishing her last
novel, South Riding.


South Riding is now the major reason Winifred Holtby is remembered, along with her friendship with Vera Brittain. But when Virginia Woolf
wrote to Winifred, South Riding was still being written. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth had, however, recently been published to great acclaim, but Winifred’s presence in it towards the end would not itself have
justified an autobiography. So the Hogarth invitation, in addition to those from two other publishers who had approached her,
rested on other claims. These related primarily to Winifred’s reputation as one of the most successful and prolific journalists
writing in London at the time. She was also well known as a feminist, particularly as a member of the Six Point Group and
a director of the feminist journal Time and Tide, and as an anti-war propagandist: she had lectured for years for the League of Nations Union and had recently contributed
to Margaret Storm Jameson’s powerful collection of antiwar essays, Challenge to Death. To a lesser extent she was also known as the writer of the five novels, respectfully but unobtrusively received, which preceded
South Riding. From the perspective of the Hogarth Press, she would also have been highly regarded as a campaigner for the unionisation
of black workers in South Africa, Leonard Woolf being a member of the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperialism and having
had considerable contact with Winifred over such matters.


Although the South Riding is a fictional place, it can be located as a triangle from Hull (Kingsport in the novel) to Bridlington
(Hardrascliffe), down the coast to take in Withernsea (Kiplington) and out along the strange landscape of Spurn Point, a windblown
peninsula flanked on one side by the Humber (the Leame) estuary and on the other by the North Sea. Winifred Holtby grew up
on the edge of this area, the daughter of a successful farmer in the village of Rudston near Bridlington. Though she became
a cosmopolitan, well-travelled journalist and campaigner, this forgotten corner of England remained her emotional home, the
location of her first novel, Anderby Wold, and, most fittingly, of her last one. She drew on people she knew for her novels, notably in South Riding on her mother for Mrs Beddows and for Robert Carne on a bankrupt relative who kept a racing stable and had to sell his horses
to pay his debts: ‘His aristocratic wife went mad & and is now in an asylum. What a family we are, to be sure.’1 The changing fortunes of such a traditionalist figure as Carne were familiar to her through her parents who gave up farming
after the war, no longer able to manage new agricultural methods and employment practices.


The novel is also placed squarely in contemporary time, even to the extent of incorporating the Silver Jubilee celebrations
of 6 May 1935. The structure of the novel around sub-committees of the County Council draws on the Local Government Act of
1929, which gave greater powers to local councils, and enabled Winifred to address areas where changes needed to be made:
Education, Public Health, Mental Deficiency, Highways and Bridges, Housing and Town Planning. Winifred’s sense of social responsibility
can be traced back to her mother’s charitable work in Rudston, and her knowledge of local government to her mother’s work
as the first woman Alderman in the East Riding. This political commitment would not always sit easily with Winifred’s desire
to be a novelist: ‘I feel the whole world is on the brink of another catastrophic war’, she wrote to Phyllis Bentley in 1933
shortly before she began to write South Riding, ‘& to go & shut oneself up in a cottage writing an arcadian novel … seems to me a kind of betrayal. That’s the worst
of being 50% a politician. I can’t get out of my head my responsibility for contemporary affairs … but I want to write this particular novel & the one after – (I have three in my head).’ South Riding manages to combine Winifred’s responsibility to contemporary affairs with an enthralling narrative of the lives of a range
of characters, across social classes and differing political persuasions, in her imagined community.


South Riding is a novel dominated by the destinies of women. Some, like Mrs Holly, cannot survive their circumstances but her daughter
Lydia will transform hers. The quasi mother–daughter relationship of Sarah Burton and Mrs Beddows is an echo of Winifred’s
relationship with her mother and goes to the heart of her feminism. Although Winifred’s mother had achieved much in her public
life, she was critical of Winifred’s wider ambitions and was constrained by conventional notions of female duty. Like her,
Mrs Beddows ‘might have gone anywhere, done anything; but she would always set limits upon her powers through her desire not
to upset her husband’s family.’ Sarah, on the other hand, believes ‘in being used to the farthest limit of one’s capacity’
and her feminism is in line with an extraordinarily farsighted pamphlet Winifred published in 1929, A New Voter’s Guide to Party Programmes, written to encourage newly enfranchised women to play their part in a democratic society. Very much in keeping with Six
Point Group philosophy it advocates, amongst much else, equal pay and opportunities, maternity grants, the right of married
women to engage in paid work, and an international feminism leading to an Equal Rights Convention to be ratified by all member
states of the League of Nations.


Sarah Burton’s speech to the girls of her school at the end of the novel echoes this philosophy: ‘Question your government’s
policy, question the arms race, question the Kingsport slums, and the economics of feeding children, and the rule that makes
women have to renounce their jobs on marriage, and why the derelict areas are still derelict.’ To Sarah all these issues are
interrelated; feminism isn’t a separate political affiliation, it radiates out into all areas of life. Yet because this is
a novel about complex human beings, and not a political tract, it recognises that Sarah can’t reform women’s lives on her
own: it is Machiavellian Alderman Snaith who will provide a bursary for Lydia Holly’s education, and it is feckless Mr Holly’s
flirtatious ways that win a stepmother for the younger Holly children so that Lydia can take advantage of it. As the novel
frequently recognises, salvation comes from unlikely sources.


One of the most sensitive issues for feminism during the inter-war period was that women outnumbered men by a million and
a half, with a consequent increase in the number of unmarried women. The spinster was a figure of both fear and ridicule,
and some of Winifred’s most robust journalism was concerned in defending her. At a time when many ‘superfluous’ women must
have had memories of unfinished love affairs and frustrated sexual passion, South Riding offered an alternative model for life. Sarah Burton’s is not the spinster hood of rejection and defeat but a triumphant second best: ‘I was born to be a spinster, and by God, I’m going to spin,’ she says: ‘I shall build up a great
school here … I shall make the South Riding famous.’


The increasing tensions between Winifred and her mother, exacerbated by Alice Holtby’s expectations that Winifred would always
put family duties, sometimes quite trivial ones, before her political and literary commitments, came to a head, posthumously,
over South Riding and pitted Alice against Vera Brittain, whom Winifred had wisely appointed as her literary executor, and whose relationship
with Alice had never been harmonious. Winifred’s magpie habit of picking up fragments from her own and her mother’s life to
use in her novels was deeply upsetting to Alice who would have prevented publication of South Riding if she could. This was vividly illustrated in Winifred’s use of a land-purchase scandal in Hull in 1932, leading to a Public
Enquiry, eagerly reported by the local press and also watched by Winifred, sitting in Hull’s Guildhall making pencil jottings
and sketches. The Snaith-Huggins-Dolland scheming in South Riding closely resembles the Hull scandal. Alice Holtby denounced the account of this in the novel as a ‘travesty’ and resigned
from the County Council: ‘I could not have sat among them again.’2 Vera was unshakeable in her determination to publish the novel, correctly believing that this was Winifred’s most fitting
memorial. She immediately recognised its quality; correcting the typescript in the first month after Winifred’s death, full
of admiration, she looked up at Winifred’s photograph and thought, ‘I shall never do anything to equal this! I shall never
produce work worthy of you, of your kindness and wisdom and pity!’3

South Riding was written in the teeth of the Depression and the grim conditions of the early 1930s are reflected in the novel’s many impoverished
and ailing characters, from the ex-servicemen at Cold Harbour Colony, the Holly family and the Mitchells at the Shacks to
the lack of custom at The Nag’s Head. In Europe another war was looming, foreshadowed in South Riding in the sight of war planes practising over the North Sea. As Vera was leaving the nursing home where Winifred was dying in
September 1935 she was confronted by a placard: ‘“Abyssinia” mobilises”. Everything that Winifred and I had lived & worked
for – peace, justice, decency – seemed to be gone.’4

Amidst this darkening European landscape, with Germany violating the Treaty of Locarno, South Riding was published on 2 March 1936, and was chosen as the English Society’s Book of the Month. ‘Why couldn’t this have happened
before?’ Vera wrote. ‘Why couldn’t she have lived to know it? Oh my poor sweet! And in her life she always felt that no book of hers really came off.’5 But South Riding really did ‘come off’; 16,000 copies were sold within five days of publication, 40,000 in the first year in the UK and nearly
20,000 in America. It has never been out of print since its first publication and has earned Somerville College, Oxford, nearly
£500,000 under the terms of Winifred’s will which bequeathed the royalties on any manuscripts published after Winifred’s death
to endow a scholarship at the College for mature students. This characteristic endowment makes a touching link with the opportunity
that Lydia Holly has because of a similar bursary.


In the Prefatory Letter, Winifred praises local government as ‘the first line of defence thrown up by the community against
our common enemies’ of poverty and ignorance. South Riding is probably the only novel in English to be about local government but this unpromising topic is transformed into a humane
study of a community. Council proceedings and the Councillors themselves are certainly used to focus on political issues,
but also to provide a nexus of interaction between complex individuals. As Mrs Beddows says towards the end of the novel,
‘all this local government, it’s just people working together – us ordinary people, against the troubles that afflict us all.’
This is echoed in Sarah’s view of the crowds at the Jubilee celebrations, ‘we are members one of another. We cannot escape
this partnership. This is what it means – to belong to a community; this is what it means, to be a people.’ This is the novel’s
overall message; although there is death and decline in plenty, there is also a sense of the vitality and potential of this
piece of England. There will be a new school, women will not die unnecessarily in childbirth, new houses and roads will be
built. Even though Winifred believed there would be another war, South Riding gives an assurance, perhaps a qualified one, that the communal efforts that have achieved these advances will survive.


Marion Shaw, 2010

My dear mother,


Because you are a county alderman and because this book concerns a county council, I feel that I owe you a certain explanation
and apology.


I admit that it was through listening to your descriptions of your work that the drama of English local government first captured
my imagination. What fascinated me was the discovery that apparently academic and impersonal resolutions passed in a county
council were daily revolutionising the lives of those men and women whom they affected. The complex tangle of motives prompting
public decisions, the unforeseen consequences of their enactment on private lives appeared to me as part of the unseen pattern
of the English landscape.


What I have tried to do in South Riding is to trace that pattern. I have laid my scene in the South East part of Yorkshire, because that is the district which I
happen to know best; but the South Riding is not the East Riding; Snaith, Astell and Carne are not your colleagues; the incidents
of the schools, housing estates and committees are not described from your experience. I have drawn my material from sources
unknown to you. You had no idea that this was the novel I was writing. Alderman Mrs. Beddows is not Alderman Mrs. Holtby.
Though I confess I have borrowed a few sayings for her from your racy tongue, and when I describe Sarah’s vision of her in
the final paragraph, it was you upon whom, in that moment, my thoughts were resting.


It may seem to you that in my pattern I have laid greater emphasis upon human affliction than you might consider typical or
necessary. But when I came to consider local government, I began to see how it was in essence the first-line defence thrown
up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment. The battle is not faultlessly conducted, nor are the motives of those who take part
in it all righteous or disinterested. But the war is, I believe, worth fighting, and this corporate action is at least based
upon recognition of one fundamental truth about human nature – we are not only single individuals, each face to face with
eternity and our separate spirits; we are members one of another.


Therefore I dedicate this story, such as it is, to you, who have fought so valiant a fight for human happiness. I am conscious
of the defects, the clumsiness and limitations of my novel. At least let me record one perfect thing: the proud delight which
it has meant to me to be the daughter of Alice Holtby.


LOVELL BROWN, a young reporter on the Kingsport Chronicle.


SYD MAIL, his senior.


COUNCILLOR ROBERT CARNE of Maythorpe Hall, a sporting farmer.


ALDERMAN FARROW, a memory.


ALDERMAN ANTHONY SNAITH, a rich business man.


A FAT REPORTER, from the Yorkshire Record.


ALDERMAN MRS. BEDDOWS, née Emma Tuke.


COUNCILLOR SAXON, a local celebrity.


ALDERMAN GENERAL THE HONOURABLE SIR RONALD TARKINGTON, K.C.M.G., D.S.O., of Lissell Grange, Chairman of the South Riding County Council.


LEET OF KYLE HILLOCK, a farmer.


COUNCILLOR CAPTAIN GRYSON, a retired regular army officer.


LORD KNARESBOROUGH, a pre-war beau of Muriel Carne. COUNCILLOR PEACOCK, member for Cold Harbour Division.


COUNCILLOR (afterwards Alderman) ASTELL, a Socialist.


MISS L. P. HOLMES, retiring head mistress of Kiplington High School for Girls.


MISS SARAH BURTON, M.A. (Leeds), B.Litt. (Oxon), the new head mistress.


MIDGE CARNE, Carne’s fourteen-year-old daughter.


ELSIE, Carne’s maid.


APPLETON, labourer on Carne’s farm.



TOPPER BEACHALL, labourer on roads at Maythorpe. MISS MALT, once governess to Midge.


WILLIAM CARNE, Robert’s younger brother, architect at Harrogate. BARON SEDGMIRE, Carne’s father-in-law.


CASTLE, Carne’s foreman.


MRS. CASTLE, his wife.


DOLLY CASTLE, his daughter.


MURIEL CARNE, née Sedgmire, Carne’s wife, in a mental home.


GEORGE HICKS, Carne’s groom.


ELI DICKSON, a dairy-farmer, tenant of Carne.


MR. BANNER, killed in the hunting field.


POLLY, Mr. Dickson’s pony.


MR. AND MRS. TADMAN, grocers of Kiplington.


COUNCILLOR TUBBS, member of County Council.


THE REV. MILWARD PECKOVER, Rector of Kiplington.


CHLOE BEDDOWS, Ph.D., daughter of Mrs. Beddows, Lecturer in English at the Sorbonne.


DR. DALE, D.D., Congregational minister at Kiplington.


COLONEL COLLIER, Chairman of Governors of the High School.


MR. DREW, estate agent, Governor of High School.


MR. BRIGGS, a lawyer, Governor of High School.


CISSIE TADMAN, daughter of the Tadmans, pupil at High School.


MR. FRETTON, manager of Midland Bank, Kiplington.


WENDY BEDDOWS, granddaughter of Alderman Mrs. Beddows.


JIM BEDDOWS, auctioneer, Mrs. Beddows’ husband.


MR. FRED MITCHELL, insurance agent.


NANCY MITCHELL, his wife.


PEGGY MITCHELL, his baby daughter.


BARNABAS HOLLY, builder’s labourer.


ANNIE HOLLY, his wife.


BERT HOLLY, his son, aged 16.


LYDIA HOLLY, his daughter, aged 14.


DAISY HOLLY, his daughter, aged 12.


ALICE HOLLY, his daughter, aged 8.


GERTIE HOLLY, his daughter, aged 7.


KITTY HOLLY, his daughter, aged 4.


LEN HOLLY, his son, aged 10 months.


MADAME HUBBARD, a draper’s wife, runs dancing classes.


MR. HUBBARD, her husband.


GLADYS HUBBARD, their daughter.


MISS TUDLING, head mistress of elementary school, Maythorpe.


PAT AND JERRY, campers at the Shacks.


GRANDPA SELLARS, father-in-law to Topper Beachall.


WILLY BEDDOWS, Mrs. Beddows’ son, a widower.


MR. CROSS, a member of the Rescue and Preventive Committee at York.


SYBIL BEDDOWS, Mrs. Beddows’ spinster daughter.


COUNCILLOR ALFRED EZEKIEL HUGGINS, of Pidsea Buttock, haulage contractor and lay preacher.


MRS. HARROD, friend of Mrs. Beddows.


MISS TATTERSALL, head mistress of the South London United School for Girls.


PATTIE, Sarah Burton’s married sister.


TERRY BRYAN, a singer.


NELL HUGGINS, wife of Councillor Huggins.



FREDA ARMSTRONG, her married daughter.


MRS. RANSOM, worshipper at the Methodist Church, Kiplington.


MISS DOLORES JAMESON, Classics Mistress at the High School.


PHILIP (PIP) PARKHURST, Miss Jameson’s fiancé.


BILL HEYER, an ex-serviceman small-holder.


AGNES SIGGLESTHWAITE, B.Sc., Science Mistress at the High School.


JEAN MARSH, pupil to Madame Hubbard.


MRS. MARSH, her mother.


GRACIE PINKER, another pupil.


MRS. PINKER, her mother.


ROY CARBERY, friend of Sarah Burton, killed in War.


OLD MR. COSTER, an old sportsman.


MR. LAIDLOW, a farmer near Garfield.


MR. STATHERS, small-holder, tenant of Snaith.


COUNCILLOR BEALE, member of South Riding Council.


MRS. BARKER, a Methodist at Spunlington.


BESSY WARBUCKLE, a girl at Spunlington.


REG AYTHORNE, marries Bessy Warbuckle.


POLICE SERGEANT BURT OF LEEDS, friend of Sawdon.


TOM SAWDON, landlord of the Nag’s Head, Maythorpe.


LILY SAWDON, his wife.


MRS. DEANE, Christian Scientist in Leeds.


CHRISSIE BEACHALL, married to Topper.


ELSIE AND DORIS WATERS, broadcast entertainers.


MRS. CORNER, landlady to Astell.


ELLEN WILKINSON, Socialist M.P.


MISS PARSONS, Matron at the High School.


BEN LATTER, Socialist M.P., once engaged to Sarah Burton.


JAN VAN RAALT, South African farmer, once engaged to Sarah Burton.


MISS MASTERS, English Mistress at the High School.


JILL JACKSON, pupil at the High School.



MISS BECKER, Games Mistress at the High School.


MISS RITCHIE, Junior Mistress.


MR. TURNBULL, a farmer near Maythorpe.


BLACK HUSSAR, Carne’s heavyweight hunter.


SIR RUPERT CALDERDYKE, founder of Cold Harbour Colony.


MRS. BRIMSLEY, small-holder at Cold Harbour.


GEORGE AND NAT, her sons.


MR. AND MRS. CHRISTIE, servants to Snaith.


CHADWICK, a warehouse builder.


SIR JOHN SIMON, a tom cat owned by Alderman Snaith.


BERYL GRYSON, pupil at High School.


EDIE SIGGLESTHWAITE, sister of Science Mistress.


PROFESSOR GELDER, scientist at Cambridge.


URSULA CROSSFIELD, Jim Beddows’ sister.


MR. CROSSFIELD, her husband.


ROSE CROSSFIELD, their daughter.


COLONEL WHITELAW, Alderman, Chairman of Public Assistance Committee.


MRS. GREY, Nancy’s mother.


MR. STILLMAN, an undertaker.


REX, an Alsatian, bought by Tom Sawdon.


DR. STRETTON, specialist at Kingsport.


SIR WILSON HEMINGWAY, specialist at Leeds.


PRATT, a commercial traveller.


AN EX-OFFICER, camping at the Shacks.



LADY COLLIER, aunt of Colonel Collier.


ERNST, German Communist friend of Sarah Burton.


VIOLET ALCOCK, Bert Holly’s girl.


MATRON AT THE LAURELS, Harrogate.


DR. MCCLENNAN, psychiatrist at Harrogate.


MR. THOMPSON, a Relieving Officer.


MILLIE ROPER, a dressmaker.


MRS. BRASS, a jeweller’s wife.


MRS. SNAGG, landlady to Millie Roper.


RICKY BARNES, a carrier.


DAVID SHIRLEY, a coal merchant.


MRS. POLLIN, a drug taker.


MRS. FORD, an inmate of the County Mental Hospital.


DR. FLINT, Medical Officer at the County Mental Hospital.


MOTHER MAISIE, inmate at County Mental Hospital.


KATE THERESA, a kitten at the Mental Hospital.


MISS TREMAINE, a deaconess.


SPURLING, an employee of Huggins.


BERTIE BEDDOWS, son of Jim and Emma, gassed in France.


PETER BEDDOWS, grandson of Alderman Mrs. Beddows.


STANLEY DOLLAN, retired solicitor, afterwards Councillor.


MISS EMILY TEASDALE, Board of Education Inspector.


MISS VANE, succeeds Miss Sigglesthwaite as Science Mistress.


DR. WYTTON, Medical Officer of Health for South Riding.


MR. EDWIN SMITHERS, Clerk to the County Council.


MR. PRIZETHORPE, County Librarian.


COMMANDER STEPHEN KING-HALL, broadcasts a description of the Silver Jubilee Procession.

Young Lovell Brown, taking his place for the first time in the Press Gallery of the South Riding County Hall at Flintonbridge,
was prepared to be impressed by everything. A romantic and inexperienced young man, he yet knew that local government has
considerable importance in its effect on human life. He peered down into the greenish gloom and saw a sombre octagonal room,
lit from three lofty leaded windows, beyond which tall chestnut trees screened the dim wet June day. He saw below him bald
heads, grey heads, brown heads, black heads, above oddly foreshortened bodies, moving like fish in an aquarium tank. He saw
the semi-circle of desks facing the chairman’s panoplied throne; he saw the stuffed horsehair seats, the blotting-paper, the
quill pens, the bundles of printed documents on the clerk’s table, the polished fire-dogs in the empty grates, the frosted
glass tulips shading the unignited gas-jets, the gleaming inkwells.


His heart bea