How Orwell inspired Hines

Richard Lance Keeble, Chair of the Orwell Society, expands on David Forrest’s excellent article commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel For A Knave, later filmed as Kes.

*

The influence of Orwell on writing and culture in general is vast. To take just one small example: the 50^th anniversary of the first publication of the novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines (and filmed by Ken Loach the following year) is currently being celebrated. And Orwell was crucial in the making of Hines as a writer. Hines came from Hoyland Common, a pit village between Rotherham and Barnsley, and studied at Loughborough College of Education, graduating in 1963. But as David Forrest, senior lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sheffield, writes in the Morning Star (of 14 February 2018; put online a week earlier): “When a roommate lent him a copy of Orwell’s Animal Farm, Hines, then aged 21, found himself for the first time reading for pleasure. He was hooked.”

Hines went on to write a large number of plays for television, cinema scripts and novels. And as Tony Garnett comments in the Foreword to a new text on Hines, Barry Hines: Kes, Threads and beyond, by David Forrest and Sue Vice (Manchester University Press, 2018): “He was a socialist writer. Not a reformist, not a soft liberal, not a Stalinist hack. He was from the working class, identified with it and fought the class war. He never wavered nor trimmed. His political commitments were in his bones. They were his lodestar and succoured everything he wrote, even piece that appeared to have no political theme.”

The phrase ‘A kestrel for a knave’ comes from the rules of medieval hunting, known as venery, found in the Book of Saint Albans, published in 1486.

*

Richard Lance Keeble

Uploaded 14th February 2018