A Kestrel for a Knave

Barry Hines was born in a small coal-mining village in the north of England just as World War II was beginning. His father was a coal miner. Hines was a decent student and qualified for grammar school, the most academic of the three educational tracks under England’s Tripartite System of Education. A successful athlete during his youth, Hines played for a youth football (soccer) league and was given a chance to try out for Manchester United. Hines initially declined to continue his education beyond high school, and he entered the workforce as an apprentice mine surveyor. Ultimately, however, he returned to school and studied to become a physical education teacher at Loughborough College. Hines began writing while working as a teacher. His short play, Billy’s Last Stand, was produced on the radio by the BBC in 1965, and the success of this program helped him to find a publisher for his first novel, The Blinder, which came out in 1966. A Kestrel for a Knave, Hines’s second novel, was published in 1968 and turned into a film, Kes, shortly thereafter. During a career that spanned four decades, Hines wrote nine novels, one short story collection, and seven works for radio, television, and stage. Much of his work focuses on social issues, including the way the educational and welfare systems impact the lives of the working class, particularly in the industrial north of England. He was married twice and had two children. Hines received many nominations and awards for his work throughout his career, including a BAFTA for his television drama Threads and fellowship in the Royal Society of Literature. An Alzheimer’s Disease diagnosis in 2006 ended Hines’s writing career, and he passed away seven years later at the age of 76.

Billy’s life and experiences are organized by two major efforts at social reform undertaken by the British government in the years following WWII. The first was a massive expansion of publicly subsidized housing for the working-class and the poor through so-called “council estates.” Although the purpose of this movement was to provide safe and dignified housing for more people, in practice estates tended to concentrate and ghettoize the poor and working classes. Similarly, Billy is a beneficiary—or a victim—of educational reforms starting with the Butler Act which, in 1944 declared secondary education a right and established a framework for state-funded secondary schools. At the time, less than 20% of working-class children stayed in school beyond the age of 13. Although educational reformers described an educational system designed to meet the various needs of different kinds of students, what developed was a two-tiered system in which only the brightest and most privileged students were able to pass the aptitude exams administered at age 11. These children went to academically-rigorous, well-rounded, and well-funded grammar schools—an essential steppingstone toward college and financial security—while the rest were consigned to so-called modern secondary schools. Billy attends one such underfunded modern school, and although it’s supposed to be teaching him marketable and practical life skills, it’s clear in the book that the poor quality of his overall education has doomed him to a life of manual labor and poverty from the start. British politicians aligned with the working class began to abandon the so-called Tripartite system of education in the late 1950s, and it largely fell out of favor (at least officially) in the 1970s. 

A Kestrel for a Knave is a self-consciously regional novel, set in the urbanized, industrialized north of England. Many regional novels set in this area, like Kestrel, consider the lives and hardships of the working-class laborers who mined the area’s rich coal deposits and worked in its smoke-belching factories. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian novel North and South, which was published in 1854-1855, exemplifies this type of novel. North and South follows protagonist Margaret Hale as she moves from the rural, agrarian south to the urban, industrialized north and bears witness to the plight of the workers and their families in Manchester. Similarly, albeit in a different generation and literary period, D. H. Lawrence’s work often considers the constraints placed on individuals by industrialization and the stifling British class system in novels set in the north, particularly The Rainbow (1915) and Sons and Lovers (1913). Hines has cited the latter specifically as an influence on his own writing for the way it explores the juxtaposition of industry and the natural world. Although it’s a work of fiction, Kestrel is heavily influenced by T. H. White’s memoir Goshawk (1951), which describes his attempts to teach himself traditional falconry and raise a goshawk. Finally, as a fictionalized account of a young boy who finds solace and redemption through his relationship with a bird, Kestrel bears a resemblance to My Side of the Mountain, a young-adult novel written by American author Jean George and published in 1959, which follows a year in the life of 12-year-old boy who runs away from home and survives on his own in the mountains of upstate New York with a peregrine falcon named Fearsome as his companion.