Son of legendary Dalesman editor Bill Mitchell publishes debut novel inspired by roving Yorkshire adventures

WR Mitchell, editor of The Dalesman, rubbed shoulders with Yorkshire’s finest. His son, David, has used his father’s story for a debut novel. John Blow reports.

They knew him as the prolific author and veteran of The Dalesman magazine, where he worked for forty years – 20 as editor from 1968 to 1988 – and recognised him as an authority on rural life.

In 2009, he was even named the Yorkshire Dales National Park's greatest living cultural icon.

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Consequently, growing up in the Mitchell household could be quite an experience, as his son David remembers.

"It was interesting at such a time as when J.B. Priestley knocked at the door,” says David, who was born in Skipton, though the family lived briefly in Austwick, then in Settle and Giggleswick.

“Dad was coming home from work and my mum was doing the baking. She had a pinny on and everything, and the doorbell rang, and this guy and this small lady pitched up and asked if dad was there. She didn't have a clue who he was and put him in the front room because she knew (dad) wasn't going to be long, and my dad said when there's somebody in the front room, he must be important, and he opened the door and there was J.B. Priestley. He was a journalist as well as a (novel) writer, and he had come to tap my dad up for some contacts for a story he was writing.

"He put him in the Wenhaven Café for a meal and he went to some show with him.

"I was more interested in the Beano at that point in time, rather than J.B. Priestley, but it's a story I'll always remember.”

It is this bygone Yorkshire which has influenced David’s debut novel, Going to Press, based on his late father’s adventures as a reporter.

Bill, who also contributed articles to this newspaper, began his career on the Craven Herald before joining the Dalesman in 1948, nine years on from its founding, later becoming editor, and took on the same job for its sister magazine, Cumbria.

In David’s book – which he has dropped off at shops such as the Stripey Badger in Grassington and the Grove in Ilkley – the protagonist Jimmy Wilson joins the fictional Skeldersby Chronicle as a cub reporter in 1943, but gets the opportunity to work for the prestigious Moors and Dales magazine. After reporting on a macabre discovery, Jimmy is offered the opportunity to join a Fleet Street publication in London, so has a life-changing decision to make.

The initial inspiration for the book came as David and his wife Susan, who live in Cheshire, were watching the modern television adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small. “(My father’s) reputation is just immense across Yorkshire and I've got all his books, and I've got all these wonderful stories. It was my wife who said, we were watching a copy of the Herriots on telly, ‘Just pause it, I've got an idea’. And this was it. Because they both roamed the Dales in their different work, their different lives. There's loads of stories and characters he met, so I thought, well, yeah, why not? Let's give it a go. I started it back in September, developed a plot, unearthed a story of real interest that I didn't know about, to do with a skeleton that was found on the moors just above Clapham and was never identified, so I brought that into the story. There's a love element, there's humour, and I'm really pleased with it, actually.”

David, 72, a former headteacher who later worked in the press department at Fleetwood Town FC, had plenty of research material. Alongside the numerous articles which reside in his back catalogue of Dalesman copies kept from his father’s tenure, David could also look to the many books he wrote and the archive of recorded conversations he had with countryside characters from another era – one of them being Alf Wight, the man behind Herriot, himself.

The Yorkshire Post recently marked what would have been the 100th birthday of Hannah Hauxwell, the titanic Dales farmer made famous in the documentary Too Long a Winter, and she was someone Bill knew.

“He did a lot with Hannah, so I built a character in there who he visited, which was very much based on Hannah Hauxwell.

"The very first one he did was Mick, the Bull Walloper, who had a prodigious appetite for drink. I don't think he had an Adam's apple, so the beer just went down in one gulp. That was a fascinating character, so I put him in as well. It's really enjoyable unearthing all the stories.”

While the book is based on Bill’s life, some parts are more fictitious than others including a love interest in the early part before he met his real wife, David’s mother, Freda, who was, naturally, a farmer’s daughter.

That was “a story in itself because he met her on the Pennine bus,” says David. "My dad was coming home from Clapham to Skipton quite late and there was only one place left on the bus, and my mum got on. Of course, she had to sit next to him. By the time they got to Skipton, he had arranged to see her the following weekend.”

Bill Mitchell died in October 2015 aged 87, so the novel’s publication is somewhat bitter-sweet for David, though his sister, Janet, loved the book.

"I just wish he was still around to read it,” says David.

“He always wanted to write fiction. He wrote over 200 books. He dabbled in one fictional story, but just gave up on it. And ironically, I'll never catch his 200 books, but at least I've overtaken him in fiction books.”

Later in Bill’s life, father and son collaborated as David served as proofreader and has also published his own non-fiction works – the novel is his 16th book – including the compilation Bill Mitchell’s Yorkshire.

“I’m very proud of him,” says David. “When he died, I was there, and I held his writing hand with my writing hand. I thought: something's passed over here.”

Going to Press: Tales of a Dales Reporter is out now.