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Harold Heslop (1898–1983) was an English writer. ==Biography== Harold Heslop, coalminer and author, was born on 1 October 1898 in the village of Hunwick, near Bishop Auckland, County Durham, to William Heslop, coalminer, and his wife, Isabel, née Whitfield. The Heslops had been miners for several generations. Heslop attended King James I Grammar School in Bishop Auckland on a scholarship until he was thirteen, then the family moved to Boulby on the north Yorkshire coast. Because this was too far from the nearest grammar school, Heslop began working underground at Boulby ironstone mine, where his father was now the manager.〔Andy Croft, "Heslop, Harold (1898–1983)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (accessed 30 Oct 2012 )〕 Shortly after this his mother died, and then his father remarried and the family moved to Northumberland. Soon after this Heslop moved to South Shields and started work at Harton colliery, where he remained for eleven years.〔 After World War I he was active in left-wing politics as secretary of a local Independent Labour Party branch and represented the miners of Harton colliery on the council of the Durham Miners' Association.〔 Then in 1923 he won a scholarship to study at the Central Labour College, a British higher education institution supported by trade unions, in London which he attended 1924-26. On 27 March 1926 Harold Heslop married Phyllis Hannah Varndell who clerk at Selfridges and whose family were active in left wing politics.〔 The same year Heslop's first novel ''Goaf'' was published, but it was in a Russian translation as ''Pod vlastu uglya'' and did not appear in England until 1934. This novel, about mining in northern England, apparently "sold half a million copies in Russia and made Heslop's name there", though he was only able to transfer a small part of his royalties to England.〔H. Gustav Klaus, ''The Literature of Labour''. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985, p.105.〕 Heslop returned to at Harton in 1926, where he unsuccessfully contested a seat on the South Shields Town Council for the Labour Party, sponsored by the Miners Lodge,〔97〕 but because of the contraction of the coal industry he became unemployed and the Heslops moved to London, where he worked at various things. Heslop's political activity included working for the British Communist Party's general secretary, Harry Pollitt against Ramsay MacDonald for the Seaham division of Durham in the 1929 election.〔 In 1929 he also published his first novel in England, ''The Gate of a Strange Field'', which was about the General Strike of 1926. The following year another novel ''Journey Beyond'', about unemployment in London, was published. Also in 1930 he was invited to attended the Second Plenum of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature in Russia.〔H. Gustav Klaus, ''The Literature of Labour''. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985, pp. 96-101.〕 Subsequently four of his novels were published in the Soviet Union, "including ''Red Earth'' (1931), a utopian novel about a successful revolution in Britain which was never published in the UK".〔Andy Croft, "Heslop, Harold (1898–1983)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (accessed 30 Oct 2012 ); E. Elistratova, ‘The Work of Harold Heslop’, ''International Literature'', 1 (1932), p.99.〕 He also worked in London for the Soviet trading mission and later Intourist.〔 In 1934 his novel ''Goaf'' appeared in an English version, as well this year Heslop also published a detective novel, ''The Crime of Peter Ropner''. In 1935 ''Last Cage Down'' was published, and in 1937, under the pseudonym Lincoln J. White, ''Abdication'', a study written with Bob Ellis about the abdication crisis, which sold over 40,000 copies.〔 During the war the Heslops evacuated to Taunton in Somerset, where he worked on his most successful novel in Britain, ''The Earth Beneath'' which was published in 1946 and sold 9000 copies, but although he continued to write this was his last novel.〔 While in Somerset Heslop joined the Labour Party and in 1948 he won a seat on the Taunton Town Council; however, he failed in a later attempt to become a Labour Member of Parliament for North Devon.〔 Some years after his death in 1983 ''Out of the Old Earth'' appeared in 1994, which was based on the manuscript of Heslop's ''Autobiography''.〔Durham University Library Special Collections Catalogue: Harold Heslop Papers. Reference code: GB-0033-HES. ()〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Harold Heslop」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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