Acclaimed by Graham Greene as one of the best short story writers of the twentieth century, H. E. Bates, in full Herbert Ernest Bates, was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire on 16th May 1905. He was a popular writer whose work covered many genres. He wrote poetry, plays and essays on the country and on gardening, but is best known as a novelist and master short-story writer.
Bates attended Kettering Grammar School, where he met his English master, Edmund Kirby, who was to instil in Bates a love of literature and inspired his ambition to become a writer. With his poem ‘Armistice Day, November 11th 1920’, the school magazine – ‘that universal graveyard of budding poets’ – gave him ‘the first of a host of embarrassments of seeing myself in print’.[1]
Bates left school at 16 and found his first job as a junior reporter in the Wellingborough office of the Northampton Chronicle. Not settling here he moved on to work as a warehouse clerk for a Rushden leather merchant. This job had the advantage of allowing him the time to write. Left unsupervised he finished his daily tasks by 9.30am and then spent the rest of the day working on his own writing. It was in this Rushden office that he wrote his first novel, The Two Sisters.
His early short stories, essays, and novels in the 1920s were highly praised, but he became well known as a writer about the countryside and the life of the agricultural labourer with The Poacher (1935); A House of Women (1936); Through the Woods (1936); My Uncle Silas (1940), widely enjoyed for its earthy, Rabelaisian humour; and The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1941). From 1932 he also wrote a regular column ‘Country Life’ for the Spectator. His love of the Northamptonshire countryside is reflected in his books. His detailed observations of country life and character and his descriptions of the Northamptonshire landscape and architecture are a delight to read. He describes Fotheringhay as a village ‘with a superb church standing like a small lost cathedral over the graves of kings’ and Lilford as a place with ‘a stone humpbacked bridge over the Nene that is not equalled anywhere in England.’[2]
Bates married Marjorie Helen Cox at Rushden in 1931. They moved to Kent and made their home at The Granary in the village of Little Chart. There Bates created a beautiful garden out of what had originally been a wilderness.
World War II made Bates famous. Commissioned as a writer for the Royal Air Force in 1941, as "Flying Officer X" he gained great popularity with The Greatest People in the World (1942) and How Sleep the Brave (1943), collections of stories that conveyed the feel of flying in wartime. Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), about a British bomber crew forced down in occupied France (and the focus of Northamptonshire’s upcoming centenary celebrations), remains one of Bates’ best-selling novels. The sights and sounds of Bates’ last overseas assignment in the RAF, a tour of India and Burma to gather material for writing stories of the war with Japan, influenced three novels published in this country and in America under his own name. These novels, The Purple Plain (1946), The Jacaranda Tree (1948) and The Scarlet Sword (1950) also helped to earn Bates a new reputation as a novelist of power.
In his post-war novels and stories Bates reached the height of his powers. From The Nature of Love (1954) to A Moment in Time (1964) and The Triple Echo (1970), he developed consistently in subtlety, depth, and strength as a novelist, and in The Darling Buds of May (1958) he created a realistic, lovable farm family, the Larkins. Some critics felt that these stories were too lightweight in content, but the reading public was delighted and took them to its heart as it had with Bates’ Uncle Silas stories in the early 1940s. Colonel Julian (1955) demonstrates his range in the short story, and the autobiographical The Vanished World (1969) and The Blossoming World (1971) show that he retained his power to capture the mood of the passing moment.
Bates was created a CBE in June 1973 and died on January 29, 1974, in Canterbury, Kent.
Bates was an avid reader and library user from a very young age. His local library at Rushden features in his story The Bride comes to Evensford (1943). When this was published Bates himself was already a much requested author there! Today the Bates collection at Rushden library includes: a comprehensive collection of books by Bates, including some limited editions; magazines to which he contributed; biographical, critical and other studies of HE Bates and a file containing cuttings from the local and national press about Bates’ life and work.
[1] Eads, Peter, The Life and Times of HE Bates, (Northampton, Northamptonshire Libraries and Information Service, 1988), p.2
[2] Eads, Peter, The Life and Times of HE Bates, (Northampton, Northamptonshire Libraries and Information Service, 1988), p.13-14
The Life and Times of H.E. Bates by Peter Eads, which includes a comprehensive bibliography of Bates' work is available to buy from Northamptonshire Libraries and Information Service (£3.99). To order your copy please use the contact details on the right or complete the online 'Contact us' form.
Please use the Related Links below to:
- view Northamptonshire: Sense of Place for digitised images from our Bates collection
- register interest in the recently launched H.E. Bates Society. Run in partnership by the Northamptonshire Libraries & Information Service and Northampton Writers’ Group.
- visit the Literature Northants website and find out more about what's happening in Northamptonshire