ABSTRACT
I was born on 23rd of March 1934 in Hunslet, an industrial district of the Yorkshire city of Leeds. My mother’s side of the family were solidly Yorkshire, her father, Henry Hanson, coming from the adjoining district of Holbeck, from a family that I was told was seen as slightly superior on the grounds that they kept a pig. Her mother’s family hailed from Richmond in North Yorkshire, where it was rumoured that some of them had been in service down in London, again a minor source of distinction in mid-19th-century working-class culture. My grandfather had a series of jobs, ranging from steel worker to driving a “steam derrick” engaged in building the high school that I subsequently attended.
