Benjamin Myers’ 2017 novel The Gallows Pole told the true-life tale of the 18th-century gang of coin clippers led by “King” David Hartley, whose illegal work and attendant violence came to dominate Cragg Vale in West Yorkshire. It had formerly been the home of a thriving cottage textiles industry, but the advent of the industrial revolution and the rise of nearby Halifax as the centre for all that trade had left surrounding towns and villages concomitantly impoverished. In Myers’ hands, it is a powerful story of desperation, class warfare and the ability of money to corrupt – or further corrupt – anyone it touches. Though it must be said that it is so unrelentingly grim and humourless that at times you do feel you are moments away from hearing the voice of Jim Broadbent as the pretentious playwright in Victoria Wood’s Staying In crying “The north! My north!”.
Shane Meadows’s take on the tale keeps all the energy, density and fortitude of the book, but adds the missing humour (and women – Myers’ book is, quite legitimately but noticeably, all about the men) to give it light and shade. Though it retains the strange “stag men”, who roam the moors appearing to people on the edge of consciousness or death, it moves the main figures back to a more ordinary humanity, from Myers’ bordering-on-folkloric space.
