Harold Heslop, 1898-1983

Harold Heslop was born 1 October 1898 in New Hunwick, near Bishop Auckland in County Durham into a mining family. Although he started at the Grammar School at Bishop Auckland, his father's relocation to Boulby led to him working in the ironstone mine there at the age of 13. The death of his mother, and his father's subsequent re-marriage led to Heslop moving to South Shields and working at the Harton Colliery. Here he joined the Durham Miners Association and became active in the Independent Labour Party during the tumultuous years after the First World War. In 1923 he earned a scholarship to study at the Central Labour College in London, the alma mater of many of the leading lights of the next generation in left wing politics. At this time he also wrote his first published novel: although it did not find a publisher in England until 1934, Goaf was translated into Russian by Zinaida Vengerova-Minskaia as Pod vlastu uglya . This tale of mining in the north-east sold half a million copies in Russia and made Heslop's name there.

Although he returned to South Shields, with his wife Phyllis, in 1926 and resumed work at Harton and his political activity, the contraction of the coal industry continued and by the end of 1927 Heslop had been put out of work. The Heslops moved to London, staying at first with Phyllis' mother while he took various short-term jobs. His next novel The gate of a strange field was published in 1929, and Journey beyond in 1930. Late in that year he was invited to Russia to a conference in Kharkov, the Second Plenum of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature. He travelled via Leningrad and Moscow, visiting the vast building sites of the new Soviet Union, and attended a state trial in Moscow (the Industrial Party trial 25 November - 7 December 1930). Back in England he continued writing and his political activity, later finding work organising travel to Russia in the London branch of the Russian trade mission. He published The crime of Peter Ropner and Goaf in 1934 and Last cage down in 1935, and with his friend Bob Ellis, a highly experienced left wing journalist, he produced a commentary on the abdication crisis of 1936 under the joint pseudonym J. Lincoln White The abdication of Edward VIII: a record with all the published documents .

After the destruction of his house in London in July 1940 he rejoined his family, who had been evacuated to Taunton where he was to stay for the rest of his life. In 1946 The earth beneath was published, and although it was his most successful book it also proved to be the last one to appear before his death. In spite of writing plays, screenplays, novels and political studies, only his autobiography Out of the old earth would be published, in part and posthumously, in 1994. In addition to his writing, he continued to campaign politically, now on behalf of the Labour Party in the south west of England. Harold Heslop died 10 November 1983.

Andy Croft states in his preface to Out of the old earth, Almost alone, Harry Heslop created the mining-novel in Britain and won respect for it : apart from his crime thriller The crime of Peter Ropner his novels were firmly set in the mining community he had grown up in and, with Out of the old earth, provide narratives of that life that cannot be matched elsewhere for sympathy, detail and honesty. His characters are not merely ciphers, and their dilemmas are not simply resolved by the solutions of politicians or unions. Life in the Durham coalfield during this period, which saw both its greatest productivity and the greatest sufferings of its workforce, is recorded and reflected upon by a man who lived through the struggle and found the words to commemorate it.

From the guide to the Harold Heslop Papers, 1920s-1980s, (Durham University Library, Archives and Special Collections)