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Mabel Ferrett
MABEL Ferrett, one of Yorkshire’s most enduring, versatile and influential writers has died after a long illness, aged 93.
From Heckmondwike, she was best-known as a poet, editor, Brontë scholar and local historian, but she also published a successful novel and a wide range of journalism. Born in Leeds in 1917, she was early encouraged by her father Michael Frankland, a headmaster who wrote short stories. He taught her to read from advanced school history texts and by the age of four she had recited her own first poem, The King of Kent. After herself training as a teacher she worked inspirationally in difficult wartime conditions with often-deprived boys at Armley National School, an experience vividly recounted in her After Passchendaele: A Writer’s War.
After the war, now happily married to solicitor Harold Ferrett, she moved to the Spen Valley. With Harold’s encouragement and later, after his death, with the constant, loving support of her son John, also a solicitor, her second career of writing took over. This included sketches for the Yorkshire Post’s own Northerner III humorous column, where she took pride in having created Mr and Mrs Wuzzle, Mrs Schnapps and Mrs Pepper and the Wuzzle Cattery, and numerous articles for the Yorkshire Ridings magazine.
Mabel Ferrett had been involved in the Pennine Poets from its second meeting at Elland Library in 1966, and for over 30 years from the 1970s the group met in the front room of her house in Heckmondwike.
Here, she encouraged a wide range of writers who went on to their own substantial achievements, from the late Brian Merrikin Hill and Clare Chapman to those very much active today such as Ian Emberson and Pauline Kirk.
Her promotional work for others also included editing the poetry magazines Pennine Platform and Orbis as well as a number of anthologies. In an ‘Indian summer’, and by this time entering her eighties, she worked tirelessly with Pauline Kirk to create the impressive range of Fighting Cock Press publications.
Working at the Red House Museum in Gomersal helped to develop further her keen interest in the Brontë sisters and eventually resulted in books on The Brontës in the Spen Valley and The Taylors of the Red House. Her historical interests were also creatively employed in her novel about the Chartists, The Angry Men, which was successfully dramatized on Radio Four. She was a founder member of the Spen Valley Historical Society, editor of its magazine and its lifetime President.
It is, however, for her poetry, marked by dramatic vividness and a wide curiosity, that she will probably best be remembered.
At once accessible to the general reader and vast in its human range, it memorably identifies with one of the desperate Luddites in The Hartshead Ballad.
She now lies, as she had wished, near Hartshead church and its bell “that draws us from/ our separate ways/ and tolls the times/ for praise and prayer”.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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