2 - Hannah Hauxwell - A Winter Too Many

"A Winter Too Many" Almost two decades after Too Long a Winter, in 1989, the same TV crew returned to her farm to catch up with Hauxwell. The second documentary, A Winter Too Many, saw that Hauxwell had a little more money, which she had invested in a few more cows. The crew followed her to London where she was guest of honour at the Women of the Year gala. Out of the spotlight, however, her work on the farm continued, and each winter became harder for her to endure. She commented "In summer I live and in winter I exist" in the film, which also showed her departure just before Christmas 1988. With her health and strength slowly failing, she had to sell her family farm and the animals she adored and move into a warm cottage in a nearby village. ________________________________________________ From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Hannah Hauxwell (1 August 1926 – 30 January 2018) was an English farmer who was the subject of several television documentaries. She first came to public attention after being covered in an ITV documentary, Too Long a Winter, made by Yorkshire Television and produced by Barry Cockcroft, which chronicled the almost unendurable conditions of farmers in the High Pennines in winter. A Yorkshire Post article published in April 1970 chronicled the daily life of Hauxwell, then 44, as she worked alone in her family home, Low Birk Hatt Farm, a dilapidated 80-acre (32 ha) farm in Baldersdale, west of Cotherstone, in the North Riding of Yorkshire (since 1974 in County Durham). She had run the farm by herself since the age of 35 following the deaths of her parents and uncle. With no electricity or running water and struggling to survive on £240–280 a year (at a time when the average annual salary in the UK was £1,339), life was a constant battle against poverty and hardship, especially in the harsh Pennine winters, when she had to work outside tending her few cattle in ragged clothes in temperatures well below freezing.