D. H. LAWRENCE AS TROUBLEMAKER

Richard West finds the novelist's home village split over his reputation

THE break-away of Nottinghamshire from the National Union of Mineworkers came just in time to mark the centenary of the most famous miner's son in the county, D. H. Lawrence. What is more, Lawrence was keenly involved in the miners' dispute of 1926, which ended up with the Notts men returning to work, quarrelling with the National Executive, and eventually founding their own breakaway 'Spencer' union, named after a local Labour MP, of What we now call 'moderate' views.

Last year, I twice went to Eastwood to visit the cottage, now a museum, where Lawrence was born on 13 September 1885. It is at 18A Victoria Street, on the side of Scargill Walk. There is also at Eastwood a Scargill Avenue, named after a 19th- century clergyman and philanthropist. Lawrence intended to call his story, The Lost Girl, Scargill Street. However, the miners of Eastwood did not side with Arthur Scargill, the President of the NUM, during the recent strike. The pit where Lawrence's father worked is shut but the Other at Eastwood (it also appears in Sons and Lovers) remained at work in spite of

desultory pickets and much in the Pit community. Even without the miners' strike, this sprawling village would still have been split down the middle over the Lawrence centenary, which comes to a head next month and September. The trouble he caused during his life-time has not dimi- nished, 55 years after his death in New Mexico.

It was not Lawrence's sexual writing that shocked the locals; nor even the fact that he ran away with the wife of a don at Nottingham University. His niece, Mrs Margaret Needham, a jolly 75-year-old Who now lives over the border in Der- byshire, told me that Uncle Bert was really rather prim. The only time he was cross With her as a child was when he saw her almost naked. When Margaret went to visit her uncle in Switzerland in 1928, he gave her some of the paintings that later were to be banned in London. Last year she saw them again in New Mexico, and thinks they Should come back to Eastwood: 'I don't think Uncle's pictures were Obscene. Mother was a prude, but she loved that picture from a Boccaccio story. I've seen disgusting pictures but nothing of Uncle's ever disgusted me. . . Uncle Bert was marvellous with children. What remember best was singing round the piano. I don't think that he had a good voice but he had a good memory. He especially liked the old hymns such as "Onward, Christian Soldiers".'

The amiable and sardonic Enid Good- band, curator of the museum and high priestess of the Lawrence shrine, says that her hero's fault was refusing to disguise the Eastwood people he put in his books, or even to change the names. For example,

one of the two main families in Sons and Lovers had the odd name Leivers; but there were no less than four Leivers families in Eastwood at the time. Another heroine, a girl who runs away with an Italian, was clearly identifiable as an East- wood woman. Her husband threatened to 'knock Lawrence's block off, according to Mrs Goodband.

Some of Eastwood has always sneered at the thousands of pilgrims to 18A Victoria Street, most of them from the United_ States and from Japan, where Sons and Lovers is now a set book for English students. 'The Japs must think we're a lot of sex maniacs' was one comment I heard

in Lawrence's father's favourite pub. The approaching festival has brought a Chatter- ley Art Gallery, close to the White Peacock tea room. The Three Tuns public house has decorated its D. H. Lawrence Saloon Bar with what the landlord says is a photograph of the writer taken in 1930, which shows him with thick lips, plump face, a white goatee beard, wearing a stiff collar and fluffy tie. 'There's been a lot of howls about the picture, the landlord says, but he stands by its authenticity as vouched for by the brewery's public relations de- partment.

Still more controversy surrounds the unhappy events of 1926. In that year the. private coal owners locked out the miners because they refused to agree to a reduc- tion in wages. The Trades Union Congress ordered a General Strike in support of the miners. When this failed, the miners stayed out, suffering real distress to the point of starvation. The Nottinghamshire men, thinking resistance was hopeless and self- defeating, went back to work and formed the Spencer Union.

During that summer of 1926, D. H. Lawrence went to stay with his sister (Margaret Needham's mother) in Derby- shire, from where he went to see the effects of the lock-out in mining communities such as Eastwood. 'There's a lot of misery. . . the families living on bread and margarine and potatoes — nothing more. The women have turned into fine Communists. . . . You would hardly believe your eyes. . . I saw the miners and the pickets — and policemen — it was like a spear through one's heart.'

Although Lawrence was far from being a socialist, he nourished a hate for the coal-owning class, for industrialism, the ugliness of the Midlands. He poured this hatred into the novel that began as an indictment of the lock-out of 1926, 'the great ache of unrest and stupor of dicon- tent' he had seen at Eastwood, but which was to end, after three revisions, as Lady Chatterley's Lover. The erotic fame of this book, its satanism and silliness, have come to obscure some excellent passages of diatribe against the hideousness of indust- rial England. 'The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tever- shall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal dust, the

pavements wet and black ' That was a fair description of Eastwood in the Twen- ties.

One of the characters in Lady Chatterley expresses Arthur Scargill's view of the coal

industry's future. 'They say Tevershall's done, finished: only a question of a few more years, and it'll have to shut down.

And New London'll go first. My word, won't it be funny when there's no Tever- shall pit working. It's bad enough during a strike, but, my word, if it closes for good, it'll be like the end of the world.' A friend, William Hopkin has described Lawrence's last visit to Eastwood: 'He and I went over the old ground. When we reached Felley Dam he stood looking over at the Haggs. I sat down by the pool and when I turned to look at him he had a terrible look of pain on his face. When we got back I asked him when he would come again, and he said "Never! I hate the damned place.' "(From The Priest of Love by Harry T. Moore.) When Lawrence first tried to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover, an outcry arose over the sexual incidents between Lady Connie and Mellors, the gamekeeper; at Eastwood there was still more fury over what seemed to be references to actual people. Eastwood, like `Tevershall', had two pits, both of which were in danger of closing, and one of which. has already closed. The survivor is due to be closed soon by the National Coal Board. The impotent cuckold Sir Clifford Chatterley was, in other ways, not hard to identify with the Barber family who owned the pits and several thousands of acres around Lamb-close House, which is also described in the novel. When I called there in December, I learned that Sir William Barber would not on any account talk to anyone about D. H. Lawrence. The bitter- ness goes on. Furthermore I discovered from White's History, Gazetteer and Direc- tory of Nottinghamshire that at the turn of the century there lived at Eastwood

Mellors, Thomas, fruiterer and confectioner also Chatterley, George, colliery agent.

Afterwards Mrs Goodband told me that Chatterley was the right-hand man of the Barber family, and had wanted to sue D. H. Lawrence for using his name.

The novelist, A. N. Wilson, tells me that on a recent visit to Cambridge he asked an intense girl student of English if she and her friends still read D. H. Lawrence. 'No,' came the furious answer. 'His father was a scab.' This may be unfair on D. H. (or 'H. D. Lawrence' as he appeared over one of his early articles for the Manchester Guardian). Many visitors to the museum during the strike last year wore 'Coal Not Dole' and 'Dig Deep for the Miners' badges. Several Lawrentians I met in Eastwood favoured the strike, including Mrs Goodband herself, who insists that Lawrence would have been 'on the side of the miners', as she put it. I did not canvass the view of Lawrence's niece, Mrs Mar- garet Needham; however, she says that in the very last letter she got from 'Uncle Bert' he said of the 1926 dispute: 'The strike has been too everlasting for the mercy of God. Coal has been the making of England and it looks like being the breaking of England.'