Submitted by
Malcolm Pratt
Shropshire's Webb Site
"In Britain" magazine
Aug. 2000
As a new millennium attraction opens in the Shropshire hills to show the
history, geology and literary inspirations of the area, Lee Karen Stow pays
tribute to local author Mary Webb.
Some 50 years ago, Hollywood - its film crews, make-up artists, wind machines
and electric cables - descended upon the Shropshire hills.
[Well it wasn't really Hollywood, it was a British crew led by P&P]
Amidst all the paraphernalia, Oscar winner and classic brunette beauty Jennifer
Jones clambered upon the grey, jagged outcrops known as the Stiperstones
to drape her shawl on the Devil's Chair. "If I be to go to Hunter's Spinney,"
she asked the night air on mid-summer's eve, "if I be to go, let me hear
the fairy music." On cue, plucked notes of a harp drifted over the Welsh
borderlands and the fate of the doomed Hazel Woodus was sealed.
Jennifer, as Hazel, was enacting a gypsy charm - taken from a book of spells
handed down to Hazel by her late mother - in the 1950 movie "Gone to Earth"
(released in the USA as "Wild Heart"). Based on the novel of the same name
by Shropshire-born Mary Webb, the story is reportedly being refilmed this
summer by Daniel Day Lewis and his wife Rebecca Miller. The production will
feature Samantha Morton in the role of Hazel and Jeremy Irons as the Squire
of the Undern, Jack Reddin.
Webb is just one writer captivated by the landscape and remembered in this
summer's opening of the Secret Hills Discovery Centre in Craven Arms. A
millennium-funded landmark building engulfed by meadows and topped off with
a green grass roof, the centre will show the history, geology, geography
and mystery of the hills, and pay tribute to the pastures loved and walked
by its resident writers.
Published in 1917 "Gone to Earth" is, some say, as powerful as a Bronte
script. For Webb has engraved her landscape, its people, flora, fauna and
scars from the days of leadmining into her prose as deeply as those Stiperstones
are rooted in the moortop. She knew each and every laurel and lilac tree,
the blackthorns, blackberry and honeysuckle intimately.
Set in the late 1800s, GTE portrays 19-year-old Hazel Woodus as a wild girl
with unkempt auburn hair dressed with a crown of foxgloves, picking dawn
mushrooms, or running barefoot through the meadows with her pet fox cub,
Foxy. "She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy
with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not
slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap." Her dialect has a richness still
audible in the hills: "Where you bin? You'm stray and lose yourself, certain
sure!" she chides Foxy.
Hazel marries the minister, Edward Marston (played by Cyril Cusack), a platonic
marriage, before being brutally seduced by the fox-hunting Squire of Undern,
Jack Reddin (David Farrar). She wants neither, only the outdoors, for she
is "enchained by earth, prisoner to it only a little less than the beech
and the hyacinth..." Ultimately, it's both men's desire that destroys her.
Running from the death-pack of hunting blood-hounds
[fox hounds]
led by Reddin, her fox cub clasped in her arms, Hazel plunges to her death
down a disused mine shaft.
For visitors to south Shropshire, it's two for the price of one. Literary
fans can trace the writer's footsteps on marked byways over the hills, while
those who remember the movie can seek out the backdrops used, or bump into
some of the 300 locals enlisted as extras to join Jennifer Jones on screen.
One extra, Mary Palmer, danced round a maypole: "I was about five, and as
little ones we were so excited," Mary told me. "I remember being fitted
for a long, brightly coloured Victorian-style dress with a hemline just
above the calves. I wore pigtails, but they took them out and brushed my
hair loose.
"We were employed for three days and paid £3, which was a lot. My father
was also an extra, you can see him in the horse racing scene - a lovely
side view of his grey whiskers," adds Mary. When the movie was screened
in the cinema at Much Wenlock in 1950, Mary and her family paid sixpence
to sit on wooden benches and watch the credits roll. "When the racing scene
came on I stood up and shouted 'that's my daddy!'"
Glyn Williams, also an extra, guided me round the landmarks of Much Wenlock
used in the filming. He was aged 16 and played a bookie in the race scene.
What you cannot detect in the clip is Glyn using a screwdriver to jot down
the odds because no one could find him a pen. Hollywood paid him £1.50
a day for seven days' work, a colossal wage. "I bought my first wrist watch,"
he said proudly.
Filming brought the town to a standstill. "There were big lights, reflectors
and electric cables all over the place," Glyn recalled. "This didn't suit
tradesmen and people who weren't interested in the film. One chap refused
to be silent and told them where to stick it." In those early days of Technicolor,
cameramen needed the sun to appear before they could shoot, which meant
hours of waiting around for the cast. Glyn whiled away the hours playing
football, with David Farrar in goal.
Much Wenlock hasn't completely altered. There remains the black-and-white
buttermarket, where Hazel's cousin Albert (played by George Cole), astonished
by the beauty of Hazel in her new dress, cried, "you're jam 'azel", opposite
the clock tower. I'm told the George and Dragon pub still treasures the
mug used by Jennifer Jones when, as Hazel, she shrank back in the corner
away from the relentless Squire Reddin.
[Shame that scene wasn't actually filmed in there (there wasn't room for
the huge Technicolor cameras). They rebuilt it in the "studio" in an
aircraft hanger.]
The town is, of course, known for the Grange, a Victorian privately-owned
house where Mary Webb lived with her parents from 1882 to 1896.
Mary was actually born in Leighton, five days before spring in 1881. From
an early age she suffered Graves Disease, a thyroid disorder that forced
her to spend time in seclusion, wandering the hills, embroidering nature,
gossip and folklore into her work. She married Henry Webb and moved with
his teaching posts, switching from countryside to town, but always pined
for Shropshire where most of her novels are set.
She died at a nursing home on the Sussex coast in 1927, aged 46, and is
buried beneath a lime tree on a rise in Shrewsbury Cemetery, within view
of the Stiperstones. The literary acclaim she so desperately sought came
when her novel "Precious Bane" was praised by the then Prime Minister Stanley
Baldwin at a Royal Literary Fund Dinner. It came too late, a year after
her death. However, today her power of pen is drawing more people to her
novels and to the magic of her hills.
By daylight I climbed the grass meadow to Bromlow Callow (Hunters Spinney)
where in the movie, Jennifer Jones searches the spindly trunks for Foxy.
The tall Scots pines ruffled their tops in the wind as though sweeping the
sky and I could see for miles. Later, I travelled the old coaching road
from Bishop's Castle to Shrewsbury which runs between the Stiperstones and
the ridge of the Long Mynd. Both rise to more than 1,500 ft, cloaked in
heather and whinberrys (billberries).
Mary Webb would walk or ride her pony round here. She would have seen the
weather-aged ash trees, the rooftops of the villages of Pontesbury and Habberley.
She might have modelled Undern - home to Squire Reddin - on Hogstow Hall,
haunted by huntsman Jack Scarlet who raped a nun and was hung, drawn and
quartered for his crime.
At the Nills, where Mary wrote GTE with such speed her pages lay scattered
on the floor, I strolled the public bridlepath that cuts in from of the
privately-owned stone cottage where she lived, surrounded by her locations.
Shrouded by conifers is Lordshill Chapel, built in 1833 on Lordshill (God's
Little Mountain in GTE), sloping "softly up and away apparently to its possessor".
It was here Edward lived and married Hazel.
A bowl of hyacinth bulbs (true to the book) stands on the window sill inside.
I wandered the moss-encrusted headstones, careful not to tread on clusters
of snowdrops and yellow primroses, to the overgrown baptismal pond fed by
a babbling stream from the Stiperstones. It was here Jennifer Jones performed
the baptism to the tune of the local choir. The chapel itself, refurbished
with a wash of pale blue and white and furnished with wooden pews, holds
services twice on summer Sundays.
Walkers are encouraged to keep to the footpaths, especially around the six-mile
quartzite ridge of the Stiperstones. Deposited 480 million years ago and
revealed during the break up of ice in the last Ice Age, it is designated
as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and National Nature Reserve, due
to its outstanding geological and wildlife interest. Locals, however say
the Stiperstones appeared when the devil attempted to fill the valley with
rocks and accidentally dropped them. They add that if bad weather obscures
the Devil's Chair, it means he is sitting in it.
By dusk I had crossed the heathland to reach the Stiperstones from where,
on a clear day, you can see Snowdon, the Welsh mountain. A mist had obliterated
the Devil's Chair. Evidently, he was at home. As I turned to leave, the
mist ran off the tors like a river of white silk, revealing turrets as craggy
as a castle. Hollywood's wind machines, the shawl and the fairy music, have
long gone, what's left is a perfect still.
Photograph Captions:
- The craggy magnificence of the Stiperstones (main picture);
- (inset, from top) author Mary Webb, aged 15, used the Shropshire
hills as the setting for many of her future novels;
- a poster promoting the film "Gone to Earth", adapted from one of
Mary's books;
- doomed heroine Hazel Woodus, played by Jennifer Jones, in the film
adaptation
- The filming of GTE in 1950 (above) brought the Shropshire town of
Much Wenlock with its historic buttermarket (opposite, top right) to a standstill;
- Oscar-winner Jennifer Jones holding the foxcub Foxy on set (opposite,
bottom);
- Lordshill Chapel (right), where Hazel married and lived with Minister
Edward Marston
Further Information:
Shropshire Tourism
[additional text omitted]
The Mary Webb Society,
Secretary: Mrs. Sue Higginbotham,
8 The Knowe,
Willaston,
Neston,
Chesire
CH64 1TA
[phone number]
www.wlv.ac.uk/~me1927/mwebb.html/.
What to Visit
[descriptive text omitted]
Secret Hills
Snailbeach Mine
Mary Webb Weekends
The Stiperstones Inn
Where to Stay
[descriptive text omitted]
Shuttocks Wood
The Wenlock Edge Inn
Further Reference
BTA's "Best of New Britain"
[text omitted]
BTA's "Green Britain for the new millennium"
[text omitted]
"GTE" (1917) and "Precious Bane" (1927) by Mary Webb
[text omitted]
"Hollywood Comes to Shropshire" is a 75-min video with movie footage
and interviews with the locals. On sale at some tourist centres in the
area, £14.99
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