[Stan Barstow, working-class Yorkshire novelist and playwright, author of ‘A Kind of Loving’.] Typed Letter Signed to Paul Furness, discussing the literary group in The Fenton pub in Leeds, connected with the BBC radio programme 'The Northern Drift'.

See his entry in the Oxford DNB. 1p, foolscap 8vo. Thirty lines of text. Signed ‘Stan Barstow’. One of a number of letters to Furness by writers, responding to his enquiry about socialist authors and British pubs. Barstow begins by discussing ‘The Fenton in Woodhouse Lane, Leeds’, which had ‘proximity to the BBC, where Alfred Bradley ran the radio drama studio. Drama production was moved to Manchester, but during the mid-sixties, and especially in connection with a programme called “The Northern Drift”, The Fenton was a watering hole for a number of writers, including Alan Plater, Jim Andrew, Trevor Griffiths, Henry Livings, Alex Glasgow, Jack Sharratt, Brian Thompson, the late Norman Smithson and myself. Not all of us wrote for that particular programme (in fact Griffiths was actually working for the BBC, in Further Education at the time, and Alan Ayckbourn was for a short period a radio drama producer) but we used the occasions of its recording to get together’. He continues with reference to the Little Bull, Teall Street, Ossett, where a BBC Omnibus programme about him was filmed, as well as one about Henry Livings whose reason for ‘encroaching’ on Barstow’s ‘patch’ was ‘that he was fed up of TV people fouling up his own, on the other side of the Pennines’. He ends by suggesting that Furness contact Livings, whose details he provides. A letter to Furness from Livings, discussing 'The Fenton' and other pubs, is among those offered separately. Furness's book does not appear to have been completed.