26 July 2016 - Littleover Farm, Sutton Bonington, near Loughborough

It was not until mid-morning that we headed off for our last touring day of the Nottingham area, today Eastwood, a little to the north west of the city and about sixteen miles away from our camp. Famous and infamous author D H Lawrence was born and raised in his early years in this small town, then one of those rather dreary and ugly “dormitories” for the coal mines all about. 

We found a park quite centrally, charging a mere £1 for a full day. We soon found the D H Lawrence Birthplace Museum, administered by the Broxtowe Borough Council. Admission is timed and charged for, which in the first instance may seem rather strange for a local body institution although we were soon to understand the reasons. There was, until recently, another “museum” celebrating the same child of the city, the Durban House Heritage Centre, however we were later to find this has now closed, perhaps for lack of patronage, or insufficient patronage to warrant the staffing. I am fully supportive that councils should concentrate of infrastructure, not dabble in cultural pursuits for minorities, and quite frankly I can believe this may fall into that category. Having said that, just as Nottingham and other settlements in the Sherwood Forest area cash in on the Robin Hood legends, Eastwood might have done better to cash in further on their own literary hero.

David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 to an ordinary working class home, son of a coal miner and an ambitious woman who had for a while worked as a teacher, then in harder times, as a lace maker. The fourth of five children, he and his siblings all escaped the normally inevitable track into the mines, the demise of 99% of Eastwood born children.

Lawrence, as he was known to his peers in adulthood, or Bert to his parents and siblings, was a sickly soul, and better suited to the life as a writer than the teaching career he first pursued. Most famous for writing the scandalous "Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, Lawrence wrote eleven novels, eight plays, over seventy short stories, many essays, hundreds of poems and thousands of letters, as well as painting a number of quite pleasing works, all in the space of his life cut short at the age of 44 years. I soon realised today that the collection I have of his works in just a drop in the ocean. I came away keen to read his first almost autographical work, “The White Peacock”, and biographies by others, just as I had come away from the Coventry Museum keen to learn and read more of George Elliot. I guess that is the measure of a good museum, or tourist experience, to whet the appetite for further learning.

The reason admission is timed soon became quite evident, as we, with one other couple, were led into a couple of small rooms above the museum shop to pour through static exhibits, then left to watch a DVD that concentrated on Lawrence’s early life in Eastwood. We were then collected and led from room to room through the restored house where he spent the first couple of years of his life, and the life of the family was recounted using photos and furnishings representative of the day. The hour and a bit passed quickly and we were glad of the interaction with our personal guide.

The Brinsley Head Stocks

We retreated to the car to eat our lunch, soon discovering I had omitted the fresh fruit, so we popped down the road to buy some apples and a dozen other items which leapt off the shelves into our basket. After finishing our lunch, and observing the weather was likely to change, we decided not to follow the Blueline Trail about the town, a painted line along the footpath leading from one place of Lawrence significance to another. Instead we decided to pick the eyes out of the list, the first the Durban House Heritage Centre which we soon found to be closed, the second the Brinsley Colliery, where Lawrence’s father worked. 

The colliery has long since ceased to operate and is now reclaimed and laid out as a picnic site and conservation area, surrounding the restored pit headstocks. We would have enjoyed our lunch better had we come here immediately after the Museum, however we would not have been able to rescue the poorly organised picnic had we been a mile out of Eastwood.

This particular area stopped producing coal in 1930, but was in use until 1970 for access to other mines in the area. The close links to Brinsley are not just because of his miner father, but Lawrence’s grandfather, who had been a tailor in Birmingham, settled here with his wife in 1838 and owned a shop where he made work clothes of the miners. Lawrence’s father, Arthur, and three of his uncles also worked at the mine.

We wandered up to the stocks and briefly considered undertaking a longer walk described on the interpretative boards, but decided instead to do a walk nearer home. As so we headed back to Sutton Bonington and spent an hour walking through the spinney discovered a few days ago, then along the canal toward Zouch, before retracing our steps and heading home to enjoy a leisurely afternoon, the last here before we move on to the Peak District.