Stan Barstow

Theirs was a highly-distinctive brand of gritty fiction which became a hallmark of new English writing, and Barstow’s best-known, most successful contribution was his novel A Kind of Loving. It was adapted for the cinema in 1962, with Alan Bates and June Ritchie, and inspired a TV series in 1982.

He wrote 11 novels and three books of short stories, most of them set in the imaginary mining town of Cressley in West Yorkshire, and scripts for TV, radio and the theatre.

In 1974, his adaptation for television of Winifred Holty’s South Riding and his own novel A Raging Calm swept the board of awards.

A feature that made his fiction stand out was its discarding of the convention which required a story to have heroes and villains; Barstow, along with John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Keith Waterhouse wrote about normal people trying to negotiate their way through the sort of lives ordinary people were experiencing day to day.

They were the first generation of grammar school boys from the North of England with the self belief to think of themselves as writers. Barstow would describe his background as “lace curtain working class”.

Born in Horbury, Wakefield, he was the only son of Elsie and Wilfred, a miner and prize-winning cornet player with a number of colliery bands. It was a household with few books and little encouragement to read. If he had followed his father into the pits, he would have needed little formal education.

His expectations, however, lay elsewhere, and he won a place at Ossett Grammar School.

He left school at 16 to work in the drawing office of a near-by engineering firm where he stayed for seven years before getting a similar job in another firm. There he moved into the sales department.

In 1951 he married Constance Kershaw who encouraged him to write. He was now 23, and they would remain together for 40 years.

His first successes were thanks to the BBC to which he sold some of his short stories. He wrote a novel in 1956 for which he failed to find a publisher, but in 1957 his short story The Search for Tommy Flynn was published in the Putnam series Pick of Today’s Short Stories under the name of Stanley Barstow.

Then, in 1960 came A Kind of Loving, about an unhappy marriage, and the unsentimental, realistic tone it struck was very much in accord with the already-published Room at the Top (John Braine) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Alan Sillitoe).

A section of Barstow’s book was read out in Parliament during a debate about the housing shortage. “Kitchen sink” had arrived.

Unlike his successful Northern-born contemporaries who went to London, Barstow remained in Yorkshire until his later years when he moved to south Wales.

He was a serious writer, professional in every sense of the word, and extremely well read, having made up for his earlier lack of interest.

Music, both jazz and classical, was a great love and he acquired an extensive recorded collection.

Sociable, skilled at pub dominoes in his younger days, humorous and a gifted raconteur with a fund of anecdotes he was, paradoxically a private man, both perceptive and sensitive, who revealed only a certain amount of himself to all but those to whom he was closest. And true to his Yorkshire heritage, he could certainly be blunt.

He was an honorary Master of Arts of the Open University, and also a Fellow of the Academy of Welsh Writers, a considerable honour considering his origins, and conferred on him around his 80th birthday.

The Desperadoes, a collection of short stories, among them The Search for Tommy Flynn, was published in 1961, followed by his novels Ask Me Tomorrow (1962) and Joby (1964). Then came a trilogy of novels set in the 1940s, Just You Wait and See (1986), Give Us This Day (1989) and Next of Kin (1991). His autobiography, In My Own Good Time, was published in 2001. Last year A Kind of Loving was dramatised for Radio 4 by his partner, Diana Griffiths. A collection of short stories, entitled The Likes of Us, is due to be published next year.

Barstow is survived by his wife Connie, his partner Diana Griffiths, children Neil and Gill and grandson Elliot.