In 1919, Winifred went up to Oxford, where she met Vera Brittain who became her life-long friend and in 1921 she became one of the first women to be awarded a degree by that University.
Winifred was a feminist, pacifist, writer, poet and journalist – working for The Manchester Guardian, Daily Express, Evening Standard, Good Housekeeping and The News Chronicle. Winifred’s debut novel “Anderby Wold” was published in 1923.
She travelled widely, lecturing for the League of Nations, wrote a book about Virginia Woolf, which was published in 1932 and “Women in a Changing Civilisation” for the Women’s Movement, which was published in 1934.
In 1931, she was diagnosed with Brights Disease and she died in 1935.
Of all the 14 books Winifred wrote, the most famous – the novel, “South Riding”, which was published in 1936 after her death - was made into a film and twice into a television series. Hull History Centre holds many of Winifred’s papers and an academy school in Hull has been named after her.
‘Trains In France’
All through the night among the unseen hillsThe trains,
The fire-eyed trains,
Call to each other their wild seeking cry,
And I,
Who thought I had forgotten all the War,
Remember how a night in Camiers,
When, through the darkness, as I wakeful lay,
I heard the trains,
The savage, shrieking trains,
Call to each other their fierce hunting-cry,
Ruthless, inevitable, as the beasts
After their prey.
Made for this end by their creators, they,
Whose business was to capture and devour
Flesh of our flesh, bone of our very bone,
Hour after hour,
Angry and impotent I lay alone
Hearing them hunt you down, my dear, and you,Hearing them carry you away to die,
Trying to warn you of the beasts, the beasts !
Then, no, thought I ;
So foul a dream as this cannot be true,
And calmed myself, hearing their cry no more.
Till, from the silence, broke a trembling roar,
And I heard, far away,
The growling thunder of their joyless feasts –
The beasts had got you then, the beasts, the beasts –
And knew the nightmare true.
