Book 5: ‘The Gallows Pole’ by Benjamin Myers

With book five, I was given the choice between:

‘The Gallows Pole’ by Benjamin Myers

‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing

‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie

Of the three books, I went for the one that was probably the least well known – ‘The Gallows Pole’. Having picked it up during a Kindle Sale of some sort, it had been opened a couple of times but never properly read. Until now.

Amazon summary: From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is ‘clipping’ – the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death. When an excise officer vows to bring them down and with the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, Hartley’s empire begins to crumble. Forensically assembled, The Gallows Pole is a true story of resistance and a rarely told alternative history of the North.

‘The Gallows Pole’ was dripping with mud and the smell of sweat oozed out of every page that I read. Throughout the story, Myers does a brilliant job of bringing 18^th Century Yorkshire to life, a world that is as wild and dangerous as the men who live upon it. Every setting and fluctuation in the season is presented in glorious detail, further emphasising the harsh and unflattering lives lived by the Cragg Vale Coiners and those who lived in the moors. They respected the land, harsh and unforgiving as it was, believing that it would see them right when needed.

It is this clash between the old world values of working the land, getting your hands dirty and looking after your kith and kin, against that of encroaching industrialisation, that drives the narrative forward almost as much as David Hartley’s attempts to line everyone’s pockets with counterfeit gold. Though Hartley is never played for sympathy, especially in his written ramblings from a jail cell after the law catches up with him, the awareness of how lives such as those represented in ‘The Gallows Pole’ were due to change so significantly does at least give you pause for thought. Drunken and rugged though they were, the Coiners just wanted a better life and were not long for the modern world that was about to hit them hard in the coming years.

The descriptions of the less than positive facets of life as a treasonous coin clipper are told in unflinching detail, including several acts of violence that even had myself wincing with pain. Considering this is all meticulously researched makes the aggression shown from the men to their fellow peers even more disheartening. Acts of violence are a means to maintain status, and Hartley is never too many words away from a threat that you know if more than possible a viable outcome of the confrontation.

Hartley as the main protagonist is interestingly realised as a man who oftentimes seems more excited by the prospect of the ‘celebrity’ surrounding being ‘King’ than any true desire to protect his men and their relative families. Though he does once reward his men with a feast after a day’s hard work, it is the songs and rhymes that proclaimed his value that he ends up reminiscing about during his time behind bars.

‘The Gallows Pole’ and the world it explores is unashamedly masculine, but the occasional dabbling in this situation viewed through the eyes of a woman are all the more rewarding for it. Indeed, from an early section where Grace Hartley compliantly allows David to complete his husbandly duty whilst her mind wandered to the spiders and dust around the room, to her stoic responses to her husband’s incarceration and eventual death, and the actions she takes in the epilogue, her involvement is engaging, if brief.

Grace’s aforementioned actions in the epilogue do almost come as one last middle finger to the authorities that attempted to keep the Cragg Vale Coiners from their illegal behaviours. That it would come against a backdrop of a sea change to life in the area leave the gesture ultimately futile, but could fan the flames of any particularly anti-establishment reader as the little guy gets one over on those that try to contain him.

Occasionally heavy work, but an otherwise interesting historical slice of fiction from a time in the not too distant past, this books deserves all the recognition it received.