“Too Long a Winter”

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33514, 20 April 1974, Page 5

“Too Long a Winter”

A Yorkshire Television documentary on a small, isolated farming community i in Britain —“Too Long a Winiter,” is on next Sunday’s•. programme. Twenty miles up the vali ley of the Tees, and on the high Pennines, a few men I and-two remarkable women I still live a life as harsh and I unremitting as their fore- - bears, fearing—above all—'“Too Long a Winter.” People like the Bainbridges. For I'7 years they reared sheep and a family on bleak Birkdale, absorbing the hardships with a strange severity. But during the outrageous winter of 1963 their whole flock of 350 was simply wiped out. In 1967, they were filially driven out by the weight of setbacks. But now the Bainbridges are back. The hills and the moors and the loneliness have called them back, even though Mrs Bainbridge readily admits to the harsh times "when the whole household succumbed to a succession of illnesses, from whooping cough to measles.

Hannah Hauxweil lives alone in an isolated farmhouse overlooking one of the Baldersdale reservoirs. She farms 80 acres. Her dilapidated home has no running water, and no electricity. She gets her water by squelching 50 yards across the fields to an unattractive stream. She lives on an income that amounts to little more than £250 a year, scraped together from small subsidies, selling the odd head of cattle, and renting out her fields for grazing.

A remarkably gentle, film about people who are themselves gentle and yet hard . . . when facing “Too Long a Winter.”

Tennis.—A. Pattison (Rhodesia) won the men’s singles title at the W.C.T. Monaco international tennis ‘championships. He beat the Rumanian, I. Nastase, 5-7, 6-3, 6-4.