photo #9080075

A film crew went looking for Dales farmers in the winter of 1972. They found a woman living in conditions Britain thought had vanished with the Victorians. She was 46 years old. Her hair was white. She was wearing what appeared to be several layers of carefully laundered rags. Her name was Hannah Hauxwell. And until that moment, she had been completely alone for eleven years. Hannah had been born on August 1, 1926, at Sleetburn in the remote Pennine valley of Baldersdale, in what was then the North Riding of Yorkshire. When she was three, her family moved to Low Birk Hatt Farm — 80 acres of wind-battered hill land a mile and a half from the nearest road. Her father died when she was six. Her uncle Tommy took over the running of the farm and stayed until Hannah's mother died, and then he died three years after that. By 1961, Hannah was thirty-four years old, unmarried, and alone on a farm with no electricity, no running water, no telephone, and no real prospect of anything changing. So she stayed. And she worked. Year after year, in the only life she knew. Her water came from a stream two hundred yards away, carried in buckets across frozen ground in winter. Her light came from oil lamps. Her heat came from a coal range she was careful never to let go out. She slept in an old army greatcoat on the coldest nights. Her income came from selling a single cow each year at Barnard Castle market — somewhere between £240 and £280 annually, at a time when the average British salary was £1,339. She was surviving on less than a fifth of what most people earned, and she never complained. Her diet was porridge, bread, and tea. Her bread was delivered to a gate three fields away and she walked to collect it in whatever the Pennines sent down at her — snow, rain, or frozen fog. She had left the valley only once, for a brief stay in hospital. In the summer of 1972, a researcher at Yorkshire Television was walking in the Dales and heard about Hannah from a local contact. The researcher passed the name to a producer named Barry Cockcroft, who tracked down a Yorkshire Post profile published two years earlier under the headline "How to be happy on £170 per year." Cockcroft drove to Baldersdale, left his car at the road, and scrambled over drystone walls until he found what he first thought was an abandoned farmhouse. Then he saw the woman in the ragged layers, only forty-six years old but aged far beyond her years by decades of outdoor work in Pennine winters. He went back with a film crew. The documentary he made was called Too Long a Winter. When it was broadcast in 1972, Yorkshire Television's switchboard stopped working. It was jammed for three days. Hundreds of phone calls poured in. Thousands of letters. Gifts of money and warm clothing arrived from strangers across the country who could not believe such poverty still existed in modern Britain. A local factory raised money to connect Low Birk Hatt to the electrical grid. At the age of forty-six, Hannah Hauxwell saw electric light in her own home for the first time. She was invited to London as a guest of honour at the Women of the Year gala at the Savoy Hotel, where she met the Duchess of Gloucester. This woman who had left her valley once in her adult life was suddenly standing in one of the most gilded ballrooms in England. But the farm was still there. The winters were still brutal. And Hannah was getting older. In December 1988, Cockcroft returned with his cameras to film A Winter Too Many. The footage he captured was quiet and final. Hannah saying goodbye to each of her animals. The removal lorry inching down the track in falling snow. Her face at the window. She was sixty-two years old and her health was failing. The farm had become impossible. She told the camera: in summer I live, and in winter I exist. She said a big part of her, wherever she went, would remain in that place.