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Ahead of the release of her new book, Françoise Harvey talks Northernness, pride and cultural power with author, stand-up poet and journalist Kate Fox
In Kate Fox’s new book Where There’s Muck There’s Bras: The Lost Stories of the Amazing Women of the North, she describes nearly forgotten swimming star Hilda James taking to the water before a local swimming gala at the age of 76, and astonishing the watching crowd with her speed and strength.
It’s one of the many stories of forgotten Northern women that Fox has gathered together, covering a timeline from Iron Age queen Cartimandua to today’s politicians, and when I read it, it made me cry. Fox beams when I tell her this.
“Hilda James is the guiding spirit of this for me, because her story was so nearly lost to me,” she says. “I read about a swimmer who wasn’t allowed to go to the Olympics. But I nearly couldn’t find her. The only source really is her grandson.”
If the book’s title, Where There’s Muck There’s Bras, is familiar, it’s because it expands on the stage show of the same name (as well as a writer, Fox is also a stand-up poet and a radio journalist). But where in the show Fox was really only able to “skim over a couple of details of people’s lives” the book involved a lot more research. In fact, she was initially reluctant to write it: “I would say ‘Oh, it’ll have to be a list, and to have lots of facts in’. Then I realised that the publisher didn’t want that to be the case, and the book needed my voice in it.”
It is Fox’s voice keeps the stories flowing and exciting, drawing threads between lives. (In fact, she can’t stop doing that. As we talk she hits on the idea of a stage show where Margaret Cavendish, writer of possibly the first sci-fi book (1666) meets Ngozi Onwurah, the first British Black woman to make a full-length feature film (sci-fi, 1994).)
we’re visible and useful… more than any other time, we have the potential for a shift in the balance of cultural power
Though the storytelling is light and witty, Fox agrees “there is this weight of emotion under it”. Pride and joy, but also “anger, and recognition of the unjustified shame that a lot of Northern working class women had put on them. The erasure.” And that erasure isn’t limited to the women being forgotten. In some cases they’re well-known, but their connection to the North has been masked.
Northernness is Fox’s area of expertise – she has a PhD in Northernness, gender and class. In the book, she points out that often Northerners still feel they have to move South to make themselves heard, unless they’re lucky enough to “hit one of the periods when Northernness, or regionality generally, is cool. That’s different to being taken seriously.” So where does she think we are right now? After some thought, she says, “we’re visible and useful… more than any other time, we have the potential for a shift in the balance of cultural power.”
I believe that books like this will go some way towards that shift. But, Fox points out, there’s more to be done. Her writing barely skims the surface of many of these women’s lives: “What would be an amazing thing, actually, is if people read the book and were like, ‘Oh, I’m so excited by her. I’m going to write her story’.”
Listen to Fran’s interview with Kate Fox on our My Writing Life podcast here
