45 pages • 1 hour read
A Kestrel For A Knave
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Background
Authorial Context: Barry Hines and British Social Realism
Hines was a celebrated English author and playwright and one of the most prominent figures in British Social Realism, a literary, theatrical, and cinematic movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He was born and spent his early life in the Hoyland Common, a mining village in Yorkshire. Upon graduating from Loughborough College, he took a job in a comprehensive school in Barnsley. Here, he would write his novels in the school library after the children had gone home.
These experiences had a major impact on his art, which would mainly be concerned with the lives of working-class miners and those stuck in the neglect and poverty of mining villages in the North of England, particularly the communities surrounding the Yorkshire coal industry. He wrote dialogue in the vernacular of Barnsley, where much of his work is set, and went into great detail when describing the natural world of the countryside that surrounded mining towns.
This ties heavily into British Social Realism, a mid-20th-century movement drawing from the longer tradition of social realism in art and literature. Broadly, Social Realism focuses on realistically portraying the lives and struggles of ordinary people, with specific focus on social issues and economic struggles affecting the working class. The goal of the artists and writers of the movement was to expose the deteriorating conditions of the working classes in Europe and, later, in the United States—an expressly political goal.
The British Social Realism of the 1950s and 60s was primarily a movement in theater and cinema, but Hines’s novel shares the goals and aesthetic of the movement, so much so that the novel was adapted into a film of the same title, directed by British Social Realist luminary Ken Loach. Named one of the 10 best films of the 20th century by the British Film Institute (BFI), this film was released in 1970 and became a cornerstone of the movement. Other influential British Social Realist films include John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963).
Hines found additional inspiration for A Kestrel for a Knave from the childhood experience of his younger brother, Richard, who caught and tamed a kestrel that he named Kes, just as Billy does in the novel. Richard Hines later published a memoir of his experience with the real Kes, titled No Way but Gentlenesse: A Memoir of How Kes, My Kestrel, Changed My Life. Barry Hines passed away in his home village of Hoyland Common on March 18, 2016.
Historical Context: Education Reforms and Pit Closures
In the mid-1960s, coal mining was the dominant industry in Yorkshire, with tens of thousands of working-class men employed in the coal fields. The mining industry in Yorkshire stretches back centuries, but became culturally and economically dominant with the rapid industrialization and coal-powered railroads of the mid-19th century. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, there was constant tension between miners and mine owners over pay and working conditions. The mines, or “pits,” were dangerous, with numerous deadly disasters occurring between the early 1800s and the 1970s, and miners as young as 15 were often expected to work long hours of physically exhausting labor. In addition to the threat of explosions and floods, there was the risk of contracting black lung, a chronic and potentially deadly respiratory illness caused by exposure to coal dust. This illness only became more prevalent with the introduction of heavier machinery in the mid-20th century. Many communities surrounding the mines were nearly entirely devoted to providing labor to the industry. In A Kestrel for a Knave, Billy is repeatedly reminded of the expectation that he’ll be working down the mines himself, a fate he dreads. Young boys and men in mining communities were often dismissively referred to as “pit fodder” for the overwhelming likelihood that they’d end up working in the mines.
By the late 1960s, the time period in which the novel is set, the economic boom surrounding coal was slowing down as cheaper, imported oil and gas made coal a less economically viable energy source. Many coal seams were exhausted, and the government, which had nationalized the industry under the National Coal Board (NCB) in 1947, moved to consolidate the industry around the most productive mines, leading to many closures and increasing production while greatly reducing workforce. By the time of the infamous Aberfan disaster in Wales in 1966, when a waste tip (a mountain of mining waste hundreds of feet high) collapsed and swept downhill, engulfing a school and killing 116 children and 28 adults, many suspected that the industry’s days were numbered. Though A Kestrel for a Knave is set roughly four years before the Aberfan disaster, this atmosphere of doom and uncertainty hangs over the narrative. Billy is nearly 15, the age at which school was no longer compulsory and children could enter full-time work. Corralled into mining yet watching his only potential career vanish before his eyes, things seem hopeless, as they did to many back then in those communities. Following this time period, however, years of educational reform were introduced, allowing for new opportunities.
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