Hardacre by C.L. Skelton, a Yorkshire family saga

In late 19th century Yorkshire, Sam Hardacre guts herrings for a living, earning pennies to support his wife, Mary, and two young sons. It is a hard life, following the herring fleet, and although he is not afraid of hard work, he worries what will happen to his family if he is incapacitated. 

 The Hardacres’ savings are in a Tin Box, which remains precious to them as their fortunes improve:

This Tin Box was their treasure chest. It was old and battered and black with a gold line around its middle, but it occupied a place of honour, the center of the mantelpiece. It contained their marriage lines, the children’s birth certificates, and the guano money. That money was their emergency fund, to be used only as a last resort when all else had failed. Every now and then they had to dip into it, but this was done after long and serious consultation On November the eighteenth, 1885, the Tin Box contained four golden sovereigns, eighteen shillings in silver, two pennies and one farthing.

A chance meeting at the race track with a man who has a tea stall gives Sam an idea. He has an entrepreneurial vision and, with help from Mary and his boys, Joe and Harry, he starts offering cooked herrings to those attending the races. The first day yields as much money as Sam would normally make in a month. The friendly vicar introduces them to a lawyer who helps them put their earnings into a bank account. They expand from fish to sausages, from the race tracks to beaches. Sam opens tea shops with “Hardacre” in large red letters over the window, realizing these are not dependent on the weather.

As the family’s fortunes improve, Sam buys a hotel, invests in cotton factories, and eventually buys a country estate. A daughter, Jane, is born. Sam even invests in a school when he realizes that his growing wealth is insufficient to get his boys into an elite establishment otherwise. Joe is not interested in studying and clashes with his father – he has Sam’s drive to make money but without his father’s kindness. Eventually, they quarrel and Joe heads to America to make his fortune. Harry excels at school and goes up to Balliol before joining East York’s Imperial Yeomanry as a Second Lieutenant in the Boer War. As the family expands to new generations, this is just the first of three wars in which the Hardacres play a role as they become pillars of the community. 

There is something very appealing about Sam, who is never ashamed of his lowly beginnings but refuses to let anyone sneer at his beloved Mary.  In turn, Mary is so conscious of her lowly background that it is difficult for her to adjust to riches and the life of a lady on a country estate. Some parts of the story were predictable but all of it was engrossing.  The book starts in 1885 and ends in 1950 when Harry gives the Hardacres estate to the National Trust. This is a suitable place for the saga to end and Skelton tied things up very nicely but there is a sequel, which I am eager to find.

Years ago, I picked up two books in another series by Skelton at a bookstore on Charing Cross Road. When I read that Hardacre had been made into a television series, I was intrigued and requested this book via Interlibrary Loan (it came from the venerable Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore). I hope PBS picks up this series; it’s the kind of thing Rebecca Eaton, the former Executive Producer of Masterpiece Theatre, would have appreciated.

This is my final book of the year, number 30, for Marg's Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Title: Hardacre
Author: C.L. Skelton
Publication: Dial Press, hardcover, 1976
Genre: Historical Fiction
Source: Library