The true grit of Britain's first reality TV star
Last week, Hannah died at the age of 91, still pining for her spartan home after exchanging the farm for more modern creature comforts in the late 1980s
It was an unlikely entrance for Britain’s first reality television star: As a blizzard raged in a remote corner of the Yorkshire Dales, a solitary ragged figure battled against the bitter wind to lead her cow to shelter.
Then aged just 46, but with the strikingly white hair of a much older woman, hill farmer Hannah Hauxwell had spent more than a decade alone at Low Birk Hatt farm, eking out a meagre living from its 80 acres of land. She had no wish for fame and had never even watched television.
Yet her harsh, uncomplaining life 1,000ft up in Baldersdale, where the fields were blanketed with snow for many months of the year, became a nationwide focus of attention when, in 1973, a TV documentary revealed the details of her stoical existence.
That someone could survive alone in such brutal and simple conditions, without electricity, running water or a flushing toilet, was thought quite remarkable even at the time of broadcast 45 years ago.
How much more so, then, does her remarkable story represent a rebuke to our soft lives today; a society mired in consumerism and in which a very different sort of snowflake holds sway?
Such an impact did the programme make that it spawned three further documentaries, six books and even an invitation to Buckingham Palace.
Last week, Hannah died at the age of 91, still pining for her spartan home after exchanging the farm for more modern creature comforts in the late 1980s.
She died knowing that her legacy, and the inspiration of that simple life, have never been more relevant than today
But she died knowing that her legacy, and the inspiration of that simple life, have never been more relevant than today.
‘Most people in 1970s Britain didn’t have a clue that someone like Hannah even existed,’ explains John Fairley, executive producer of Too Long A Winter, the documentary that catapulted her to sudden fame.
‘Not only did she exist but she also had this extraordinary character and openness of speech.
‘If the programme aired now I think it would have the same appeal. There are definitely people seeking Hannah’s way of life.
‘They want to get out of the internet, iPhone and iPad era. Hannah was interested in modern life but she always wanted to return to Baldersdale. That was the thing that gave her the most pleasure.
‘It stunned the nation in a way that television can’t do now. Here, in the North of England rather than Siberia, was a local woman who never saw anybody for days or weeks on end, yet made enough to keep herself alive on this farm.’
her harsh, uncomplaining life 1,000ft up in Baldersdale, where the fields were blanketed with snow for many months of the year, became a nationwide focus of attention when, in 1973, a TV documentary revealed the details of her stoical existence
Hannah Bayles Tallentire Hauxwell had spent almost the whole of her life living and working at Low Birk Hatt farm, now part of County Durham.
Her family had moved there in 1929 when she was three, but seven years later, tragedy struck when her father William died. Hannah learned to work the land with her mother Lydia and uncle Tommy, and while the house filled with elderly relatives, all had passed away by the time she was 34 in 1961, leaving her to tend the farm alone.
This was how she was living, with one milking cow and two calves, when Yorkshire Television researcher Barbara Twigg tracked her down. Hannah, she discovered, was living on £280 a year ‘if things went well’.
Barbara recalls walking ‘over two or three fields and over walls’ to get to her house.
‘There she was with her rosy cheeks in a tatty old raincoat held together with garden twine.
Hannah Bayles Tallentire Hauxwell had spent almost the whole of her life living and working at Low Birk Hatt farm, now part of County Durham
‘She invited me in for tea. She had to get the water from a bucket outside her front door before boiling it on the coal fire. The water was nearly as brown as the tea itself but I drank it.’
The coal fire was Hannah’s only concession to comfort – the one expense she refused to economise on. Otherwise, she read by the light of an oil lamp and used an earth closet as a toilet.
The nearest road was a mile-and-a-half away down a boggy track where, once a month, the grocer would leave her provisions.
A budget of £5, which came from the annual sale of a bullock and by renting out some of the land to neighbouring farms, bought two loaves of bread – white for her and a brown one for her cat – milk and eggs, and one tin of spam.
Such an impact did the programme make that it spawned three further documentaries, six books and even an invitation to Buckingham Palace
Two chickens were delivered once a year from the man who did the hay making.
Clothes were washed in the local reservoir while plastic bags containing her food supplies hung from the rafters away from the rats.
Her only entertainment was an old organ, which she played beautifully, and a battery-operated radio.
‘I said we’d like to make a television programme,’ Barbara says. ‘She didn’t seem taken aback or excited.’
Nothing came of that first visit. But a couple of years later the producer Barry Cockcroft – now deceased – was looking for local people for a series tentatively titled The Hard Life when he came across Barbara’s notes – as a result of which he and John Fairley paid her a visit.
‘She was full of charm and very well read,’ John recalls.
‘Although she never married, she was very ladylike. She never wore make-up. Her main thing was to be warm.’
By 1988, Hannah, who was by then taking tablets for angina, concluded she could no longer live safely at Low Birk Hatt and moved six miles to the village of Cotherstone
The crew started filming in the bitter winter of 1972. After one session filming in a helicopter, the cameraman’s limbs were so stiff he had been locked into a sitting position and had to be carried to warmth and safety.
Hannah was used to the conditions but admitted she hated the terrible winters which ‘came too soon and stayed too long’.
John continues: ‘I remember one extraordinary scene in which Hannah was trying to get a bullock in to shelter from the snow.
‘She had to pull this bullock along. He didn’t want to go. I don’t know how she did it. She was as strong as an ox herself.’
The farm was routinely covered in snow for many months as temperatures plummeted to minus 15C.
The response to the show was phenomenal, with countries around the world bidding for transmission rights. The phone lines at Yorkshire Television were jammed for days; the lanes around Hannah’s home filled with tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of the unlikely star.
Bulging sacks of letters poured in, some addressed to ‘the old lady in the TV programme somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales’. Many contained money, from £100 cheques to postal orders for 50p, while local factory workers even paid for her to have electricity installed.
Viewers wrote that they had been inspired by Hannah’s uncomplaining acceptance of hardship. Many said she had changed their perspective on their own complaints, which seemed paltry by comparison.
The farm was routinely covered in snow for many months as temperatures plummeted to minus 15C
But Hannah’s new-found fame had little impact on her lifestyle and she steadfastly refused to leave the farm. Money was spent on more cattle rather than home comforts.
It did, however, give Hannah the opportunity to take a glimpse of a rather different life – one of many invitations she received was to a prestigious Women of the Year lunch in 1977.
It was Hannah’s first trip to London and Barry Cockcroft suggested another documentary, this time entitled Hannah Goes To Town.
In it, Hannah marvels at the 100mph train ride to King’s Cross station and chats amiably to the Duchess of Gloucester.
Most overwhelming was her stay at The Savoy.
She admitted shedding a tear at having to leave such opulence and return to the farm.
During one four-day power cut in 1978 everything in the house froze, including the glass of water holding Hannah’s false teeth and even the coat on her back, which had got wet while she hauled fodder up to the cattle in the top fields.
She was forced to bunk down with her favourite cow, Rosa, to keep warm, and drank her milk almost straight from the udder.
‘I would go straight to bed after finishing my work with all my clothes on, including Uncle’s old tweed coat and socks,’ Hannah recalled in her 1989 book Seasons Of My Life. ‘It was not an experience I would wish to endure often.’
But she concluded the hardships produced a ‘wonderful spirit in the community. Everybody helped everybody else’.
Still, she admitted staying on the farm was a ‘battle’.
‘The cattle and the place form chains,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I wish they weren’t there but that’s how it is. I’m attached to the place because my family have lived here since my great grandfather’s time.’
Hannah returned to London in 1980 to attend a Royal Garden Party in honour of the Queen Mother’s 80th birthday, buying a new frock and noting that Prince Charles seemed rather smaller in person.
She claimed she never wanted children but instead thought of her animals as offspring, even giving her cows names such as Her Ladyship, Rosa and Puddles
But ultimately she found London lonely. Nobody said ‘hello’ as they would in Yorkshire, she said.
‘It’s nice for a while but not on a permanent basis,’ she told an assembled throng of reporters at the lunch.
‘I would need to be quiet and get back to the hills.’
Although there were a few potential suitors over the years, including a soldier who played double bass in a band, Hannah never married or even had a boyfriend.
She confessed that she had hoped a rugged type might come stalking over the fell, but resigned herself to the fact it probably wouldn’t happen.
‘If it isn’t a success then there can be nothing worse than being obliged to share a roof with someone who you’re utterly at variance with,’ she said in Too Long A Winter. ‘It’s in other hands. One can’t go into a shop and say, I want a husband.’
She claimed she never wanted children but instead thought of her animals as offspring, even giving her cows names such as Her Ladyship, Rosa and Puddles.
By 1988, Hannah, who was by then taking tablets for angina, concluded she could no longer live safely at Low Birk Hatt and moved six miles to the village of Cotherstone. Her new cottage home had central heating, hot running water and even a phone.
Barry responded with a third film in 1989, A Winter Too Many, about Hannah’s tearful departure from the farm, her face white and wet with distress.
Modernity lost no time in catching up with Low Birk Hatt. The couple who bought the property turned it into a five-bedroom, three-bathroom farmhouse with central heating and broadband. It sold last year for £546,000.
Hannah’s film career continued with a trip around Europe for the 1992 series Hannah Hauxwell: An Innocent Abroad. Barry then accompanied her on the QE2 to New York before a tour around the US for Hannah In America, one of six books she published.
She never returned to Low Birk Hatt, spending the last years of her life quietly in a nursing home in West Auckland, County Durham. Although she enjoyed being able to watch life pass by outside her window, she always felt nostalgic.
‘Wherever I go, and whatever I am, this is me,’ she declared, the day she left the farm. ‘There’s nowhere like it.’
In some small measure, that is still the case: her main pasture on the farm, untainted by modern agricultural chemicals, has turned out to be a haven for wild flowers.
A fitting legacy to a life that found beauty in even the harshest of conditions.