Preface
A Foreword written by author Benjamin Myers exclusive to the USA/Third Man Books Edition of The Gallows Pole. Foreword A decade or so ago my now-wife and I, like generations of jaded romantics before us, left London and headed back to our native northlands, to a dank valley in West Yorkshire. London is for the young and the wealthy and after twelve years of scratching an existence in the writing and music racket, and a financial crash causing fault-lines across the world, I was alarmed to discover that we were neither. We moved to a village called Mytholmroyd (pronounced My-thom-royd), located in the upper Calder Valley in the Pennines, that rocky, spine-like range of hills that runs up through England towards the Scottish borders. The Pennines are the backbone of the rural north, a place traditionally based around sheep-farming, cotton-weaving and, more recently, tourism. Its landscapes can be unforgiving, wild and gothic places. I had previously visited Mytholmroyd for half an hour; it didn’t matter. I was tired and wanted a change of scene. Our rented cottage was built in 1641 and was fed with beautiful clean water, filtered through subterranean strata over thousands of years, that ran from a spring up the hill. I knew the village only as the birth-place of visionary poet Ted Hughes and that his American wife, the equally brilliant Sylvia Plath, was buried a mile or two along the road in a cemetery on a hill overlooking the bohemian hill town of Hebden Bridge. In time I heard the story of the Cragg Vale Coiners, a local organised crime gang of forgers lead by charismatic ‘King’ David Hartley who quickly accumulated great wealth in the area during the 1760s (Hartley is now buried close to Plath). The story of the Coiners was largely unknown beyond the valley yet seemed as significant in the narrative of English history as that of Robin Hood, a figure of whom very little is known but nevertheless has been much mythologised. Here also was a tale that seemed akin to those of the wild American frontier, yet took place in an earlier England, at the dawn of the coming Industrial Age. I spent two years researching and writing the Coiners’ story, as well as walking in their footsteps around the valley. Along the way I learned that the man responsible for their downfall, James Broadbent, had worked a loom in the very same squat stone cottage in which we had been living. I was inadvertently part of their continuity, the latest link in a chain from a tough and troubled past to a modern digital world. Sometimes life gifts you such signs and prompts. A writer’s duty is to act upon them. The Gallows Pole was published in 2017 by Bluemoose Books, a small independent publisher based in a terraced house hallway between my desk and the buried bones of Hartley himself. Reviews in the national press were positive and the initial print run sold well. Then I began to notice strange things happening: I passed groups of weekend walkers on my otherwise solitary routes. They were looking for the haunts of the Coiners and visiting the grave of Hartley to place coins on his horizontal headstone. With a local cartographer I produced a map so that visitors might better explore real locations from the book. And the novel kept selling. The film and TV rights were optioned and The Gallows Pole took me to many unexpected places: onto radio, television and the occasional magazine cover, and to a vast country mansion where a Scottish duke awarded it the Walter Scott Prize, the world’s largest literary prize for historical fiction. A band of musicians recorded a soundtrack to the novel, and released it to acclaim. After seven print runs it also lead to a deal with Bloomsbury publishing, otherwise known as the house of Harry Potter. And the journey has also lead to Third Man Books. A more appropriate spiritual home for a bunch of enterprising and artisan outlaws, I could not conceive of. ‘King’ David Hartley has crossed the water. I hope you enjoy his story. Benjamin Myers.