MAY SINCLAIR was one the most prolific, most modern and most well-connected writers of the early 20th Century. She was regarded as the best female novelist of her day, both in Britain and America, and yet in the early 21st Century, few people have heard of her.
On Tuesday, September 19, though, as part of the Richmond Walking and Books Festival, a tour will visit the places in Reeth where she stayed and from which she drew inspiration for her best novels.
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She was born in Cheshire in 1865 and was an active feminist and suffragist, once saying she would “tug and kick” her way out of the restrictive conventions applied to women in her lifetime.
Between 1912 and 1918, she retreated to Victoria Cottage on Reeth High Row, near the Black Bull, to concentrate on her writing. During this period, she produced her most highly regarded novels, Mary Olivier: A Life, and The Three Sisters. In the novels, the dale is weaved into her own, complicated life story and emotions.
Helen Clifford, curator of the Swaledale Museum, is leading the walk in May’s footsteps of May as part of this month’s Richmond and Walking and Book Festival.
She stumbled across May by accident. “I became aware of her in 2010 when I found a 1920s guide book to Swaledale in which she was described as ‘a famous novelist’,” she says. “I was intrigued as had I not heard of her.
“I discovered that she was very famous and influential. She was friends with Thomas Hardy, HG Wells, TS Eliot and Charlotte Mew amongst others.
“She had to write to earn money. Her prolific output is not of a uniformly good standard, but the two novels she wrote in Swaledale are exceptional.”
Helen believes that the Swaledale landscape was inspirational to May and that “her descriptions are almost photographic”, so she provides a fascinating insight to the dale of 100 years ago.
The walk is followed by afternoon tea at the Burgoyne Hotel, which she refers to as Hill House as that was its name when she was in Reeth.
She says in Mary Olivier: “The long house on the top of the Green was gay with rows of pink and white sun-blinds stuck out like attic roofs.”
Then she takes her readers inside Hill House, describing it as she found it in the 1910s, with stuffed fish and love birds in the entrance hall where she also found “drapes of dying amber and the dapple of walnut wood”.
Hill House was built in 1783 as a very visible sign that Reeth, the capital of the leadmining industry, was thriving. The new prosperity had enabled the village to reorientate itself away from being a humble huddle near the crossing over the River Arkle to a settlement of grand townhouses around the spacious green with Hill House on the highest ground.
But when May arrived, Reeth’s fortunes were in reverse as leadmining died. The dale’s population had plummeted from 1,700 to 580 and many houses were abandoned.
Hill House, though, was still occupied by the village’s principle landowner, George Robinson. He was married to Emma Mangles, of a Richmond family. They didn’t have any children so on their deaths, in 1922, Hill House passed to Emma’s sister, Matilda Burgoyne Johnson. She was newly widowed and had inherited £110,000 (about £4m in today’s values) from her husband whose family had made their fortune in Durham pubs, breweries and coalmines.
Mrs Burgoyne-Johnson breezed forcefully into Hill House, with her butler, cook, housemaids, laundrymaids, gardener and chauffeur – so many that a new wing was built onto what she insisted on calling Burgoyne House – and with a hyphen appearing out-of-nowhere in her surname. She was a staunch Tory and changed the political complexion of the previously Liberal dale.
During the Second World War, Burgoyne House was requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence and soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk marched out from the railhead at Darlington to be stationed there.
After the war Burgoyne House became a hotel and, as the Echo’s restaurant reviewer, Malcolm Warne, said in 2018, it is “unquestionably the most imposing building in the village, queen of all she surveys below her and beyond in wider Swaledale”.
In The Footsteps of May Sinclair” starts at 1pm at the Swaledale Museum on Tuesday, September 19, and is followed by afternoon tea at the Burgoyne Hotel. Tickets are £20, including the tea, and are available via Richmond Information Centre or booksandboots.org.
ON WEDNESDAY (September 20) in Richmond Town Hall, Joanna Williams will be talking about her book, The Great Miss Lydia Becker: Suffragist, Scientist and Trailblazer, as part of the festival.
Lydia, from Manchester, was a botanist and an astronomer who founded the National Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1867, campaigning for women to get the Parliamentary vote.
For the next decade or so, she was on an almost continuous tour of the country, speaking at rallies and meetings. On at least two occasions, she spoke at well attended meetings in Darlington – in 1872, in the Mechanics Institute, and in 1874, in Central Hall.
This meeting was chaired by the Darlington mayor, Henry Fell Pease, and in the Echo’s long report of it, it said that “by her tact and humorous method of dealing with the subject, (she) rivetted the attention of the audience”.
Her touring was so relentless that it affected her health, and she died in 1890 in Geneva where she had gone in search of a better climate. In its obituary, the Echo said that “Miss Becker was a clear thinker and an effective platform speaker, and she occupied a foremost position as a champion of her sex”.
Tickets are £10. To book, and for more information about the festival, go to booksandboots.org
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