Go into any reasonably-sized second hand bookshop. If fortune is smiling the fiction and non-fiction will have been separated, and the fiction shelved in alphabetical order. Somewhere down at floor level, on the far right-hand side, more often than not you will find a large run of squat, thick hardcovers bound in varying shades of a dark blue. Dustjackets are rarer than hens’ teeth. Worn gold lettering will usually proclaim that these novels were published by Heinemann. They may be part of something called the Severn Edition. Their author was someone called Francis Brett Young. Birmingham is not usually thought of as a place of visions. The city, and the surrounding area of the modern West Midlands known as the Black Country, is even today usually thought of as consisting only of dirty, industrial wasteland. Any vision or imagination is crushed by the relentless commercialism and urban sprawl of Birmingham.
Although this is still very much a current stereotypical view, often held by the people who have never visited the region, there was more truth to it during the first half of the twentieth century.
Francis Brett Young consistently celebrated the industrial Black Country and city of Birmingham in his novels. He also ranged widely through nearby rural areas of Worcestershire, Staffordshire, and the Welsh Marches. Part of that area often known as the ‘Heart of England’ became his personal territory in a whole series of novels published over forty years. His own unique and enduring vision of the beauty and squalor – and the sublime quality of the region – filled their pages, worked out through the lives of a gallery of vivid characters, ranging from the merely sentimental to the truly monstrous.
Francis Brett Young was born in Halesowen on 29 June 1884. The son of a doctor, he wanted a literary education, but studied medicine at the University of Birmingham, qualifying as a GP himself. From an early age, through walks and bicycle tours, he got to know the region that became the setting for much of his work.
Young wrote much poetry, eventually publishing several collections. But it was as a writer of prose, and often poetic and exalted prose, that he excelled. In later years, as a successful novelist, Young often attributed his skills and enjoyment of observing people and human nature to his ‘medical eyes’ acquired during his training.
He married Jessie Hankinson in 1908, and continued his writing while practising medicine. But it wasn’t long before Francis Brett Young’s true creative life began, when he seriously started putting into words his literary vision. In the Preface to his novel The House Under the Water, he later wrote, ‘If it be true that the child is the father to the man, it is even more true to say that the child is father to the writer. In every childhood there are, I suppose, certain features in the physical environment which exercise a preponderating effect on the imagination. Such, for me, without doubt, was the building of the Elan Valley reservoirs which impounded the wild waters of the Rhayader Massif in Radnorshire, diverting them from their natural outlet, which was by way of the Wye and the Bristol Channel to the Atlantic, into the sewers of a city which lay on the eastern side of the central watershed, and discharging them finally, by way of the Trent, into the North Sea.’
This, then, was the basis of Young’s creative vision. He conceived of a whole series of Midlands novels set ‘like beads along the string’ that was the scheme’s pipeline. Utilizing much of the border country also popularized by such authors as A. E. Housman and Mary Webb, Young joined the ranks of novelists who wrote in the English regional tradition, investing his West Midlands and Border settings with the verisimilitude of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. The novels reprinted in the Severn Edition even have attractive stylized maps as their endpapers.
It was to be the beginning of a distinguished career. Young’s first novel, Undergrowth, was published in 1911. Written in collaboration with his brother, Young later described it as a ‘superficial and amateurish attempt, deeply influenced by the writings of Mr Arthur Machen. The Machnery was obvious, and the treatment was vitiated by a vague and rather shallow mysticism.’
But Young’s literary career was now underway, and he remained on his own terms a popular and successful novelist until his death. As well as his Midlands novels, he wrote historical novels, and several books set in Africa. The Great War saw Young serving in German East Africa (now part of modern Tanzania) fighting the forces of the legendary Paul von Lettow Vorbeck, and these experiences provided him with plenty of material. South Africa was a source for some of Young’s later fiction.
Undergrowth turned out to be the precursor of The House Under the Water, in which the theme of a Welsh valley being drowned by a new reservoir is handled with considerable energy and vividness. I will return to that novel later, but here I also want to consider another of the novels set along the string of the Elan Valley scheme pipeline. Both Cold Harbour and The House Under the Water are skilfully-written novels, easily transporting the reader into strange worlds within easy reach of the urban West Midlands. They are the sort of novels which make you want to get out an Ordnance Survey map in order to check out all the topographical details.
Cold Harbour (1924) is a novel that drew praise from H. P. Lovecraft. In his long essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, HPL wrote, ‘Much subtler and more artistic [than Gerald Biss’ The Door of the Unreal], and told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the several characters . . . an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated.’ Its power is drawn from Young’s ability to suggest the uncanny and dark places that can exist up any apparently quiet country lane, even within a few miles of the centre of Birmingham.
The entire novel is told as a series of interlocking narratives, in the tradition of Machen’s The Three Impostors. An urbane Prologue sets the scene, and the oral storytelling has the effect of focusing on the reader the immediacy and the insidious creeping wrongness of Cold Harbour, its inhabitants, and history.
The speakers are enjoying the warm Italian night on a terrace in Capri (an autobiographical touch, as the Youngs lived on Capri throughout the 1920s). The safety and intimacy of this framing setting contrasts with the story of two of the visitors and their recent encounter with Cold Harbour. The atmosphere of the old house and its ancient setting, beautiful as it seems on the surface, reaches the hundreds of miles to the peace of the Italian coast, and spreads its damp chill English spell. There seems to be no way of totally escaping it.
A couple, Ronald and Evelyn Wake, break down in their car while returning from holiday. They stumble across Cold Harbour when they shelter at a nearby inn. The house is set in a sublime Black Country landscape. – ‘Its beauty was singularly inhuman and its terror – for it was terrible, you know – elemental.’ The couple find out about the house, and when Evelyn Wake meets Mr Furnival, the owner, he invites the couple to Cold Harbour. They find the house to be ‘. . . in another plane, dimension, whatever you like to call it, of existence . . . ’
Furnival turns out to be a whirlwind of a man: genius, scholar, bigot, sadist. He has been discredited in the West Midlands, and yet had returned and immured himself and his family at Cold Harbour, turning in on himself and partially merging ‘personalities’ with the house, and its hidden, violent, and scandalous past.
In the chapter entitled ‘En-Dor’ the Wakes actually pay the visit to Cold Harbour, and get the feeling that ‘ . . . on the plane of practical geography it doesn’t exist’ (in the Bible, En-dor is the place where a medium lived, see 1 Samuel 28:7). It is Furnival’s ideal home, and the Wakes hate it immediately. Left alone with Mrs Furnival, Evelyn finds out about the apparitions and manifestations that she and her (now grown-up) children have seen over the years. Mrs Furnival had become a Roman Catholic, and even all of the power and expertise available to the Church has been of no use in cleansing the place. Mr Furnival constantly taunts his wife over her conversion, and has nothing to do with what he considers to be his wife’s delusions, and sees nothing wrong whatsoever with Cold Harbour.
Slowly, with relentless logic, the Wakes come to the conclusion that Furnival is either ‘a devil or a criminal lunatic’, who, to gratify his innate lust for power after his downfall, has made himself master of the house and all who live in it – right down to endangering their very souls. They soon come to the conclusion that Furnival has ‘talents’ – telepathy and hypnotism among them – which he uses to torment his wife, and tantalize his guests. Later, when they had been able to take their leave, the Wakes felt ‘. . . as though the whole course of our lives had been changed, as if they’d been thrust out of their normal, peaceful orbit by a blow from something dark and invisible whirling out of space’.
In the chapter entitled ‘Symposium’ the speakers and listeners on the Italian terrace debate what they have seen and heard, and try to account for it. Perhaps Furnival has made himself a focus for the evil forces already existing at Cold Habour, due to its history down from pre-Roman times. Furnival has become a possibly willing slave. Only an ‘act of Providence’ – active good – could remedy this.
The rest of the story then comes to light. By an amazing coincidence, on their return to London, the Wakes had chanced to meet one of the Furnivals’ relatives. But the help they planned together was too late. In a diffuse and somewhat contrived ending, the story is wound up, and the Furnivals and Cold Harbour seem to be destroyed.
Cold Harbour deserves to be better known as one of the best described and nastiest ‘haunted’ houses in literature. So, too, the character of Mr Furnival as one of the most compelling villains. What is perhaps more chilling is the lack of certainty in this judgement. Surely Furnival is a master villain and a severely warped man. But if it is overbearing genius and pride that brought him down, his boundless ambition that allowed him to overestimate his great gifts and allow forces of corruption in to corrupt them, then he becomes all the more deserving of sympathy and pity. Furnival comes to be more like Satan in Paradise Lost, or Wentworth in Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell, than the usual rather one-dimensional horror-novel evil character.
Cold Harbour shows a hell on earth: hell because it was possibly created, and certainly sustained, by what is good in humanity going wrong, becoming tainted and out of true. Young shows this process with exquisite clarity and precision – the compassionate precision of a medical man. And where Young isn’t precise, the diffuseness gives glimpses of spaces as it were between the walls of reality we build and experience around ourselves. It might be dangerous – and it is certainly alluring.
In 1929, the Youngs returned to England, and moved to a house in the Lake District. They remained there until 1932, when they purchased Craycombe House, a small estate set in the Worcestershire countryside in which Young continued to set his expanding series of novels.
The House Under the Water saw publication in 1932, and this turned out to be Young’s more considered and developed treatment of the great theme of his youth: the construction of the Elan Valley scheme to supply Welsh water to Birmingham.
Whilst Cold Harbour was a house set high above the Black Country, and swiftly destroyed by fire, Nant Escob was set deep in a Welsh valley and slowly drowned by water.
Unlike the more narrowly focused Cold Harbour, The House Under the Water has a much larger human interest element, mainly concerning the romantic ramifications of the Tregaron family, and their removal from Worcestershire to Nant Escob, leading to Griffith Tregaron’s eventual abandonment of the house and valley to the forces which came to dam the Garon and drown the entire landscape.
Although the later novel doesn’t have the somewhat claustrophobic impact of the earlier one, nevertheless Young’s leisurely storytelling contains many fine and vivid descriptive passages, and a constant sense of foreboding as the situation in the novel’s title gets ever closer. The House Under the Water is very much an outdoors novel, blending the elemental actions of the forces of nature with the characters’ attempts to live with them, and then harness and finally overcome them. Griffith Tregaron is an able counterpart to Humphrey Furnival in his engineering ability and desire to mould the land and his family to his own wishes and ambitions.
In 1944 Francis Brett Young suffered a heart attack. Shortly afterwards, the Youngs visited South Africa again, and settled there. Francis Brett Young died in Cape Town on 28 March 1954.
In his lifetime Young was widely admired, although not uncritically. Some found the romantic element in his novels to be shallow and over-sentimental. He also encountered the problem of the novelist who carefully constructs a background and writes a series set in the same part of the country – the accusation of repetition and the sense that one Young novel is very much like any other.
Young’s literary legacy now seems to be largely confined to rows of dusty blue volumes near the floor in second-hand bookshops. As in the case of his contemporary Huge Walpole (1884-1941), a visibly high production rate during his lifetime, after death resulted in the disappearance of his backlist and a fairly quick decline into relative obscurity. Together with both authors’ perceived unfashionable qualities – their leisurely styles, length of their novels, and a general air of unreality when set against the wartime and postwar world and its changes – the example of the career of Francis Brett Young is a case in point.
Since his death Young has always had at least a small but devoted following. There is a Francis Brett Young Society, and a Newsletter is published regularly. With time his best work will, with luck, once more find its way onto more prominent shelves, and intelligent film and TV adaptations will appear. The effort will not have been wasted. And a uniquely personal vision, a piece of England set in amber, will remain.
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