A new festival is aiming to restore an overlooked landmark in the life of Ted Hughes to its proper place on the map later this year. The Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) plans to develop a Ted Hughes literary trail in and around Mexborough, South Yorkshire, and to develop poetry, writing and creative arts in and around the town in Hughes’ name, as well as holding an annual festival. This year’s will be held from 3-5 July.

Poet Steve Ely, whose book about Hughes’ time in Mexborough will be published later this year, said that Hughes spent his most formative years in the South Yorkshire town, between 1938-51. “In Mexborough Hughes was exposed to the experiences and influences that formed his poetic tastes and temperament; received a first-class education and came under the influence of inspirational teachers of English that drove and supported him to the extent that an unlikely candidate was able to win an Open Exhibition to Pembroke College; wrote his first poems and became a man of letters; developed his characteristic mythopoeic imagination; fished, shot and trapped; and developed his adult ‘poetic-person’ (charismatic, dark, brooding).”

In his opening to a paper which he gave to the Cambridge conference of the Ted Hughes Society in 2012 Steve Ely said: “Ted Hughes is a poet strongly associated with place.  With regard to biography, the ‘place-progression’ - Mytholmroyd, Mexborough, Cambridge, London, Boston, Devon - and so on, is well established.  With regard to works, Moortown, Season Songs, Remains of Elmet, River and many individual poems in other collections are closely linked to specific locations. 

“However, within that context, the importance of Hughes’s 14-year (1938-1951) South Yorkshire period has been consistently overlooked – in the words of Mexborough poet, Ian Parks, ‘airbrushed out of his biography’. For many, Hughes is still the feral Heathcliffian poet who, after an initial eight-year forging on the desolate Mytholmroyd moors, somehow emerged at Cambridge as a fully-formed poet.” Ely argues that “the attitudes to animals, nature, town and country that shaped Hughes’s work were formed during his South Yorkshire period”.  

He says that in November 1938, the Hughes family moved from the mill town of Mytholmroyd in the upper Calder valley to Mexborough, a busy coal and steel town located midway between the larger South Yorkshire industrial centres of Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham. “Ted’s parents William and Edith Hughes, had acquired an end-terrace newsagent’s shop at 75 Main Street, close to Mexborough’s commercial centre.”

This summer’s festival in Mexborough in July will include a talk by Ely, readings by Ian Parks, Ian Duhig, Helen Mort, David Morley, Kim Moore, Zaffar Kunial, and Gaia Holmes, a Pitman Poets open mic, and a two-hour walk, Ted Hughes Paper Round.  There has been a Ted Hughes festival in West Yorkshire  for several years, run by the Elmet Trust, based in Mytholmroyd, where Hughes spent the first eight years of his life. The trust is not holding its festival in West Yorkshire this year. Steve Ely said: “We have links with the Elmet Trust in Mytholmroyd and will be working to develop synergies from the autumn on.”