H.E. Bates Companion

The following 2004 essay by Eleanor Evans is reprinted from the Literature Online database.

H(erbert) E(rnest) Bates (1905-1974), British novelist and short-story writer, was born on 16 May 1905 in Rushden, Northamptonshire, the eldest child of Albert Ernest Bates and his wife Lucy Lucas. Bates grew up in a lower-middle-class family and proved himself a bright but not outstanding student, gaining a place at Kettering Grammar School but leaving school aged sixteen. He then worked as a clerk to a local solicitor.

Despite lacking a literary background, Bates began writing short stories for his own amusement, and contributed one of these to the publisher Jonathan Cape in the early 1920s. The novella, entitled 'The Seekers', was rejected. Undaunted, Bates sent a second work to them, The Two Sisters, which they published in 1926. It was well received by the critics, with the Times Literary Supplement stating: '[the novel] has freshness and great descriptive beauty, and something of the touching inexpressiveness of youth as well.' The critic Edward Garnett, writing in his foreword to The Two Sisters, praised Bates's writing style for its light-heartedness, commenting that 'the realistic chronicle novel threatens to suffocate us'.

Bates followed this with a number of novellas and collections of short stories, including Day's End and Other Stories (1928), A Threshing Day (1931), Sally Go Round the Moon (1932) and The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934). He became known for his well-crafted bucolic stories which recorded a fast-vanishing way of life, and his reputation was consolidated with the publication in 1935 of his novel The Poacher, the first of his works to become a bestseller in both the UK and America. The New York Times described Bates as 'standing in the front rank of English writers under thirty', and commented on his ability to write about 'the brightness and activity and even humorousness of life'. Bates's next major success came with My Uncle Silas (1939), illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. These earthy, humorous stories about an old countryman were based on a relative of Bates.

On the outbreak of the Second World War Bates joined the Royal Air Force. Holding the rank of squadron leader, he was tasked by the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Information to write what was, in effect, propaganda. In this capacity he produced booklets such as The Story of the Royal Ordnance Factory (1940), There's Freedom in the Air: The Official Story of the Allied Air Forces from the Occupied Countries (1944) and The WAAF in Action (1944). However, he also wrote a series of short stories under the pseudonym of 'Flying Officer X', published in two volumes: The Greatest People in the World (1942) and How Sleep the Brave (1943). Transcending propaganda, these atmospheric and moving stories are set on an un-named bomber station 'somewhere in England', and tell of the ordinary bomber crews taking off night after night, and the fates that befall them. These two books were published to instant critical and public acclaim, and the pseudonym fooled no one.

Fair Stood the Wind for France, today one of Bates's best-known novels, was published in 1944. This tells the story of a bomber pilot, John Franklin, and his crew, who force-land in occupied France, and follows their efforts to escape back to England, aided by the French underground. Two further books were to come directly from Bates's war experiences, both set in Burma: The Purple Plain (1946) -- later filmed, starring Gregory Peck -- and The Jacaranda Tree (1948).

A prolific writer, after the war Bates returned to writing the pastoral novels and stories for which he had first become known. The most significant of these are Love for Lydia (1952) and Feast of July (1954), which was described as 'one of the great novels of Midlands life'. However, it was with the 'Pop Larkin' books that Bates found further commercial success. The first of these was The Darling Buds of May (1958), followed by A Breath of French Air (1959), When the Green Woods Laugh (1960), Oh! To be in England (1966) and A Little of What You Fancy (1970). The novels, written in Bates's gentle, affectionate style, reflected the social and cultural mores of working-class, 1950s England -- the actress Pam Ferris, who played the part of Ma Larkin in the 1990s television adaptations of the stories, commented that her character 'was a male chauvinist's dream', bringing up eight children, managing a household on a small income and living with a philandering husband, and yet never losing her temper or complaining. However, these stories of a slightly dysfunctional family became bestsellers, although later critics have commented on the somewhat stereotypical characterisations.

Bates wrote three autobiographical works: The Vanishing World (1969), The Blossoming World (1971) and The World in Ripeness (1972). He was awarded the CBE in 1973, a few months before his death from cancer, aged 68, in 1974. Twenty years later an unpublished pamphlet by Bates about the German flying bomb campaign was discovered in the Public Record Office. It transpired that this had been commissioned by the Air Ministry but rejected by them, probably 'because Bates insisted on telling the truth about the extent of civilian casualties'. This was published in 1994 as Flying Bombs Over England.

There has been very little critical work published on Bates. There is a biography by Dean R. Baldwin, H.E. Bates: A Literary Life (1987), while a comprehensive bibliography, H.E. Bates: A Bibliographical Study by Peter Eads, was published in 1990.