Snaith Library Readers Group have been reading The Fateful Year by Mark Bostridge. Here’s what member Margaret Tones thought.
I enjoyed this book a great deal. In the preface it says that Mr Bostridge hoped that this book was “an attempt to capture the character, shape and spirit” of England in 1914 and, with some reservations, I feel that he has achieved this.
He writes in a very readable style. I read quite a few factual books for pleasure (I am at the moment reading Antonia Frazer’s The Weaker Vessel) and this book is written in a lively style that retains the interest throughout. As good as many novels, and better than a good many. I read it straight through, though it would be a good book to dip into from time to time. The topics chosen are very varied, and there is bound to be at least one theme of interest to every reader. However, they are not very well distributed geographically and, apart from the chapter on the bombing of Scarborough and Hull, there is not really a great deal set in the north of England. Was Mr Bostridge saying that the northern counties lacked “character, shape and spirit”? I think not, but perhaps a wider range would have been welcome. The Biographical Essay provided an excellent list of sources and also further reading, if a particular chapter caught the imagination.
I was rather miffed to find a few errors in the text. For instance, there is mention of the cotton mills of Leeds. There were cotton mills in Leeds, in the very early nineteenth century, but these failed as the climate was not found suitable – the wetter areas of Lancashire were better, and the cotton trade thrived there. A strike among football players at football clubs was mentioned, giving Hull Kingston Rovers as an example. Hull KR is a rugby league club not a football club. (Incidentally my husband is a former professional rugby league player!) In the statistics section, the population of West Yorkshire was given.
As any historian should know, West Yorkshire only came into existence in 1974. So is this the population of the West Riding, or the area now covered by West Yorkshire, but in 1914. The West Riding and West Yorkshire are two very different things. I don’t think Mr Bostridge knows Yorkshire very well.
