Hannah Hauxwell: Life of famous Yorkshire Dales farmer featured in many documentaries
Hannah Hauxwell was a Yorkshire Dales farmer who first soared to fame when she starred in the ITV documentary Too Long a Winter.
Hannah Hauxwell inherited her parents’ farm when she was 34 years old and her life with no electricity or running water.
Her daily life was chronicled by The Yorkshire Post in April 1970 when she worked in her family home, Low Birk Hatt Farm, a farm in Baldersdale.
Hannah’s life was difficult against poverty and hardship, particularly during extreme Pennine winters, when she had to work outside looking after her cattle in ragged clothes in sub-zero temperatures.
Life of Hannah Hauxwell
Hannah was born on August 1, 1926, in Sleetburn, Baldersdale, and next year will mark her 100th birthday.
In 1972, Hannah was discovered by a friend of a researcher at Yorkshire Television while she was walking in the Yorkshire Dales.
A producer at the company suggested making a TV documentary called The Hard Life; it started with her leading a cow into a shed during a blizzard in Baldersdale.
Following the release of the documentary, the number of viewers calling Yorkshire TV to find out more and help her caused the phone line to become jammed for three days.
ITV received hundreds of phone calls and mail with gifts and money for ‘the old lady in the Yorkshire Dales’. A local factory raised money to fund getting electricity to Low Birk Hatt Farm.
Nearly 20 years later after the documentary Too Long a Winter, in 1989, the same TV crew returned to her farm.
This subsequently led to the second documentary, A Winter Too Many, which saw that Hannah was living better financially. She had invested her money in a few more cows.
The crew followed her to London where she was guest of honour at the Women of the Year gala. She continued to work on her farm out of the limelight and every winter became more challenging for her.
In the documentary she is heard saying: “In summer I live, and in winter I exist.” In the 1980s with her health and strength slowly failing, she had to sell her family farm and the animals she loved and moved into a warm cottage in a village nearby.
In 1992, director Barry Cockcroft visited Hannah again and made another documentary called Hannah Hauxwell: Innocent Abroad, which followed Hannah on her first journeys outside of the UK.
She visited France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, where she met the Pope. The series was so popular that it was followed by another trip, but this time to the US in 1993 where she filmed Hannah: USA.
Her family’s farm is now called Hannah’s Meadows and is a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest and is managed by Durham Wildlife Trust.
To honour her 85th birthday, Hannah was interviewed by The Yorkshire Post and said that she was still living a frugal life.
In 2016, she moved into a care home in Barnard Castle and then to a nursing home in West Auckland a year later and died there on January 30, 2018.
Hannah was laid to rest at Romaldkirk cemetery, near Low Birk Hatt.