Sylvia and Ted in Elmet

Alan Dearling invites us on a personal journey of discovery about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and their lives in and around Calderdale in Yorkshire

Every book, every music album, even a painting, certainly poems and biographies, are each like snowflakes, unique structures, or, perhaps like one-off, bespoke  jigsaw puzzles. And this is how I have viewed my personal journey of discovery whilst seeking out the local geographical connections through lots of differently assembled ‘jigsaws’:  books and on-line sources about the lives of poet laureate, Ted Hughes, his family, and Ted’s relationship with and marriage to American poet, Sylvia Plath. Along the way I have taken a lot of my own photos of locations and buildings of significance in the Hughes’ family lives and the times when Sylvia visited Ted’s parents around the Colden Valley, near to Slack, Heptonstall and their excursions across the moors to Haworth, home of the Brontës.  This ‘collection of words and images’ has, I hope, created a new jigsaw, one assembled from many other jigsaws. Something a little special by the nature of its connections to the patina of the poets’ lives and legacies.

Almost no other twentieth century poets have created such waves of controversy and discord. Their creations, their poems, their books and letters have been minutely dissected, debated and disputed. This veneration, disharmony and at times, vitriol, continues even today in 2025 as I will try to share. There’s certainly plenty of material to mull over!

 

The Hughes family arrive in the Calderdale Valleys

John Hughes was born in 1856. Somewhere around 1870, he moved from Manchester to Cragg Vale, fairly close by to Hebden Bridge. He was working with a group of largely Irish labourers building a local reservoir. I believe he lived at least for a while in a house on King Street near to Stubbings Wharf, drank in that local hostelry, and was renowned as a singer of Irish ballads. King Street was badly affected by flooding and at some point the family moved over to Cragg Vale near Mytholmroyd. Hence he was known as Cragg Jack. He was Ted Hughes’s grandfather. Polly Major was Cragg Jack’s wife.

 

Olwyn Hughes (Ted’s sister) has written that he was, “Our Irish grandfather who died young, was a great singer and popular.” Also, in a letter to Ann Skea, she wrote: “All we know of him is that he was a merry soul, a great drinker and singer and he died when his children were little of tuberculosis. When on his death bed the local Church of England minister came by and spoke of religion, and the Catholic priest made a visit and left a bottle of whisky, that Jack drank and died”.

Ted’s father, William (Billy) Hughes married Edith Farrar, from Hebden Bridge in 1920, and Ted was born in 1930 in the family home at 1 Aspinall Street in Mytholmroyd. There is a blue plaque on the building now. Ted’s first seven years were spent exploring in the wild countryside, often in the company of his brother, Gerald, who was ten years older. They both had a passion for nature, birds, foxes, the local wildlife and much enjoyed fishing, shooting and swimming. Ted’s  family moved to Mexborough in 1938 where they ran a newsagents’ shop. However, Ted retained his fascination with the Calderdale area and it was his inspiration for many of his poems and the basis for the ‘Remains of Elmet’, the last Celtic kingdom. Ted recreated Elmet in the collaborative books of photographs by Fay Godwin, which are interleaved with Ted’s poems. Ted had written of the plan, “If only some of that could be caught in the photographs – the way the primeval reality of the region is taking over again…the black peculiarities of the three points of the triangle, Colne, Todmorden and Halifax.”  Ted discussed ‘Elmet’ at length with his friend, Keith Sagar (www.keithsagar.co.uk  ‘Ted Hughes and the Calder Valley’ 2012), saying, “(it provides) …the magical change from description to metaphor to myth (which) is enacted before our eyes.”

Ted describes the area as, “A happy hell”. Keith added that it has, “A mourning quality in the spirit of the place.” And Ted wrote in ‘The Rock’, “Everything in West Yorkshire is slightly unpleasant. Nothing ever quite escapes into happiness.”

Ted Hughes went to Cambridge University in 1951 and at that time we learn from the notes in Steve Ely’s 2015 publication, ‘Ted Hughes’ South Yorkshire’:

“In 1951, Billy and Edith Hughes returned to the Calder Valley, having acquired a newsagent’s business on Crown Street in Hebden Bridge. However, on this occasion they did not ‘live over the shop’. Initially living in Todmorden for a short period, the Hugheses moved to ‘The Beacon’, a detached house that lay between the villages of Heptonstall and Slack, in late 1952. One of the attractions of the latter house was its proximity to Edith’s family – both her brother Thomas’s widow Minnie and her nephew David lived close by. It seems that the Hugheses had always intended to return to their natal valley. Once their children had left home, having completed their education, there was no reason for Billy and Edith to remain in Mexborough.”

I learned from my local friend, Neil Sowerby: “Ted Hughes lived in Todmorden in the house next door to us on Woodlands Avenue, when his parents moved back from Mexborough, just before he went to Cambridge in 1951.”

Ted and Sylvia around Calderdale

Ted met Sylvia Plath at Cambridge University. At that time, Ted’s parents had become firmly ensconced at their home in Heptonstall at ‘The Beacon’. Here’s what it says about Sylvia from the Heptonstall Community Parish website. https://heptonstall.org/sylvia-plath/

“Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932 to a middle class family. Otto Plath was a loving father, a noted expert on bees who cultivated a love of all things academic in his two children, Sylvia and her younger brother Warren. Aurelia Plath was a stay at home mother until the death of Otto in 1940 pushed her into a succession of low paid jobs. Otto died of complications from diabetes. His death could have been prevented had he sought treatment, but Otto was convinced he had a terminal illness and refused medical help.

The sudden and unnecessary death of her father hit young Sylvia hard and she began both her writing career and her decline into depression in this year. Sylvia excelled through high school academically but wrote in her journals that she felt constantly alienated and fundamentally different from her peers.”

 

Sylvia arrived at Cambridge University on a Fullbright scholarship. It was there that she met Ted Hughes. According to legend, the poets clashed at a party for Ted’s literary magazine, the ‘St Botolph’s Review’. After dancing with Sylvia, Ted stole her earring and Sylvia responded with a bite to the cheek that drew blood. They were married in June 1956. It was in 1956 that Sylvia and Ted first visited Ted’s parents at The Beacon at Slack, just outside Heptonstall. My photos of The Beacon and the stunning view are very recent.

Calderdale Libraries created and published a very beautiful video that can be viewed on-line. ‘Visit to Heptonstall 1956 by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’. It relates to the visit to Yorkshire soon after their secret marriage and honeymoon in Spain. This film combines words from Sylvia (and Ted), produced for Calderdale Libraries by Gill Carpenter: “On the 31st of August, 1956, the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes boarded a train in London bound for Yorkshire. They were travelling north for an extended visit, staying with Ted’s parents, Edith and William, in Heptonstall… and the Hughes’ home, The Beacon.”

It’s an intense, emotive, and informative roller-coaster with lots of words about the Colden Valley below Heptonstall and the lives and aspirations of Sylvia and Ted.  It’s chock full of darkness and light from both poets about where to live and how to live creatively.  Well worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXC9GTr_3Tw

 Relatively recently, the auction house, Sothebys, sold a selection of photos of the Hughes’s family with Ted and Sylvia at The Beacon taken during this visit.

Ted and Sylvia returned to Cambridge after their visit to Heptonstall and then, according to Wikipedia moved to America in 1957:

“The couple moved to the United States in 1957 so that Plath could take a teaching position at her alma mater, Smith College. During this time, Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 1958, they met artist Leonard Baskin, who would later illustrate many of Hughes’s books, including ‘Crow’.

The couple returned to England in 1959, staying for a short while back in Heptonstall and then finding a small flat in Primrose Hill, London. They were both writing: Hughes was working on programmes for the BBC as well as producing essays, articles, reviews, and talks. During this time, he wrote the poems that would later be published in ‘Recklings’ (1966) and ‘Wodwo’ (1967).

In March 1960, his book ‘Lupercal’ was published, and it won the Hawthornden Prize. He found he was being labelled as the poet of the wild, writing only about animals. Hughes began to seriously explore myth and esoteric practices including shamanism, alchemy and Buddhism, with The Tibetan Book of the Dead being a particular focus in the early 1960s. He believed that imagination could heal dualistic splits in the human psyche, and poetry was the language of that work.”

There were signs of the ructions and domestic disputes between Sylvia and Ted during their 1959 stay in Heptonstall. Ted wrote the poem, ‘Stubbing Wharfe’ from this time, when they were arguing over where to live.

“Shut-in sodden dreariness of the whole valley…the gloomy memorial of a valley, the fallen grave of ruined mills and abandoned chapels…the windows glittered black.”

Aurelia, Sylvia’s mother visited The Beacon too, commenting that it is, “…a strange, wild part of England”, adding that Heptonstall is “mean and ugly”. But, alongside that negativity, Sylvia fell in love with the imagery of the Brontës, and likened herself and Ted to Cathy and Heathcliff, and in her letters to her mother in America alluded to acting out parts of their Yorkshire life as like being in ‘Wuthering Heights’ set among the moorlands around Haworth. But Sylvia commented that in Heptonstall, despite what she calls The Beacon’s ‘gothic charm’, she sensed that ‘the curtains would twitch open’ at her passing, given her American ‘otherness’. On an earlier visit, Sylvia had written in her journal, “And two sit apart in wrongness…two silent strangers”. Indeed, there is much dark foreboding in much of Sylvia’s writings, perhaps a resonance from and reaction to the landscape of the Colden Valley and surrounding area. From the ‘November Graveyard’ poem:

It offers, “…the damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor…the bland untenanted air.” Sylvia Plath missed America and often felt that she had left civilised society. In ‘Hardcastle Crags’ (1957):

A young woman walks out alone to confront a violent, alienating landscape.

“Though a mist-wraith wound up from the fissured valley and hung shoulder-high. Ahead, it fattened.”

Frieda, was Ted and Sylvia’s first child, born in 1960, and Nicholas was born in January 1962. The couple were separated by end of 1962 after living in a house in North Tawton in Devon. Ted was involved in an affair with Assia Wevill in London and Sylvia was also living in London, when she heard that Assia was expecting a child, presumably Ted’s. Sylvia committed suicide on 11^th February 1963 in her freezing cold London flat. Here’s the account from the Heptonstall site:

“On 11th February 1963 the district nurse arrived at Fitzroy Road to find the body of Sylvia Plath-Hughes in the kitchen and her two children inside a locked bedroom with a plate of bread and butter and glasses of milk. The door had been sealed with tape to prevent the gas which Sylvia had used to end her own life from harming her children. On her desk, Sylvia left the manuscript for her last book of poetry ‘Ariel’ containing her most widely recognised and critically acclaimed work.”

In March 1969, Assia accompanied Ted to Manchester for a TV presentation. She was desperate for commitment from Ted and a permanent home for herself and the three children: Frieda, Nicholas and four-year-old Shura. About this time, Ted bought Lumb Bank, a run-down Mill owner’s house located deep down in the Colden Valley below The Beacon. Assia was never Ted’s wife and she was haunted by Sylvia’s spirit and death. From Wikipedia, we learn:

 “On 23 March 1969, at their London flat, Wevill killed her daughter Shura and then herself in a murder-suicide, sometimes described a ‘copycat suicide’ of Plath’s, using sleeping pills and turning on the gas stove.”

Sylvia Plath was buried in the new cemetery in Heptonstall after a funeral at St Thomas the Apostle Church on February 18^th 1963. The gravestone text is from ‘The Monkey’, a Buddhist text that Ted had apparently often read to her. The fact Sylvia was buried in the village home of the Hughes’ family and that the gravestone includes her married name, ‘Hughes’ as well as Plath has been explained as the reason that the name ‘Hughes’ is often defaced.  A little distance away is the rather neglected grave of Ted’s parents.

Ted later wrote to Aurelia, Sylvia’s mother, saying that we were:

“Two people so openly under the control of deep psychic abnormalities.”

Frieda Hughes has become a much published poet in her own right and in some of her writings she has shared fragments of her up-bringing. In ‘Preparing the ground’ she writes about the period immediately after her mother’s death as she moved around among different family members:

“This is the memory that caused a loss of memory – I was two and a half, after this day there was blank of almost two years…I had no recollection of my name, my family, my home.”

Frieda continues by explaining that it was only when she was 30 that memory of her mother and grandmother returned to her.  Even more painfully, Frieda writes in ‘My mother’ about the grief and anger she experienced when the film, ‘Sylvia’ starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig was made and released:

“…they think I should give away my mother’s words

To fill the mouth of their monster.

Their Sylvia Suicide Doll

Who will walk and talk

And die at will

And forever be dying.”

 

Ted Hughes died on 28 October, 1998, aged 68 at his home in North Tawton. His second wife, Carol is still alive. On March 16, 2009, Nicholas Hughes died by suicide in his home in Fairbanks, Alaska. According to his sister Frieda he had long battled depression. 

Some local Calderdale legacies

Along the platforms at Mytholmroyd railway station there are sited sections from Ted Hughes’ children’s story, ‘The Iron Man’.

There are also plans for a sculpture to be erected in Ted’s honour.  The BBC reported on 24th May 2025:

“A fresh planning application for a sculpture to honour the work of former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes in his birthplace has been submitted. Community-based voluntary organisation Royd Regeneration wants to erect a 6ft 5in (2m) high iron sculpture in Mytholmroyd.

The group had previously submitted a similar application, which was approved by planners two years ago despite objections from Mr Hughes’ widow, Carol.

Calderdale Council will now consider the new application and publish a decision in due course.”

“Royd Regeneration, which works to raise Mytholmroyd’s profile, is hoping to install the cast iron sculpture of a large milk churn and two life-sized foxes in the centre of the village, opposite the Dusty Miller in Burnley Road.”

Probably of much more lasting significance is the renovation and redevelopment of Lumb Bank House, which coincides with Lumb Bank’s fiftieth year as a Writers’House. Here’s what has been announced on the Arvon Foundation’s website:

“The original Arvon concept of enabling young people to live and work with experienced writers was developed by John Fairfax and John Moat. They started running courses in 1968 in the Beaford Centre in Devon. Ted Hughes was living fifteen miles down the road and one day John Fairfax decided to seek him out and tell him about the idea.

Ted was at first sceptical, but asked that if anything should come of the idea he’d like to be told.

Ted was invited to attend the last night of the first Beaford course and from then was fully supportive of the venture, often holding meetings in his Devonshire home and joining courses as the guest reader, where “his presence would have a magical effect, a contagion of imaginative excitement”.

“In 1975, following Ted’s suggestion for a northern centre, Arvon leased Lumb Bank from Ted and Carol Hughes. In 1986, Carol Hughes took up the Chair of Arvon. In 1989, Arvon bought Lumb Bank from The Hughes Trust with help from the Arts Council.”

“There were so many individual contributions vital to Arvon’s survival, but I think no-one would dispute that Ted’s contribution was of an order all of its own.” —John Moat

“The house which legendary poet Ted Hughes once owned and became a centre for creative writing with Arvon North is being renovated in an ambitious £2.2m project.

Today, Arvon is announcing a £188,990 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to protect and share the rich literary and social heritage of Lumb Bank – once home to poet Ted Hughes – and dramatically increase public engagement.”