A month in the country film review

A month in the country book club questions
A month in the country film analysis
The old timers

•

The New Yorker, September 3, 1984 P. 23

Talk story about J.L. Carr, the English novelist, who was in New York presenting a manuscript of his "A Month in the Country" to the Morgan Library. In 1980, it won the Guardian Fiction Prize. It is the most recent of his five novels. Carr has also published sixty-one three-by-five inch booklets on favorite poets and writers, several improbable dictionaries, and forty idiosyncratic maps of the English counties, most illustrated by himself. His business occupies the back bedroom of his house in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Carr told the writer about his career. He started teaching at the age of eighteen, and in 1938 he got a job teaching in Huron, South Dakota, in Beadle County. His time in America made a great impression on him. He left at the end of the school year, and during the war he was an Intelligence officer in the British Air Force. In 1952, after marrying and having a son, he was made headmaster of a school in Kettering, where the influence of American schools was apparent in his methods. In 1956, he returned to Huron

•

Joseph Lloyd Carr (JLC) was born on 20th May 1912 at No. 5 Railway Houses at Carlton Miniott, a village outside Thirsk in the North Riding of Yorkshire. It was one of the row of houses facing the railway line here, because it is illustrated in Visions Afar, the Journal of Raymond Carr (1905-2005), his elder brother. Raymond's journal contains pictures of other houses in which they lived, so I have been able to identify them on Google maps and have provided links here, for the curious.

JLC's father was also named Joseph, so most of his family called him Lloyd. This middle name had been suggested by his mother's brother, Richard Welbourn, in honour of the Welsh Labour politician David Lloyd George (see Visions Afar). JLC also had two older sisters: Ethel Blanche (1900-1986) and Kathleen Winifred (1902-1999). Uncle Richard had also proposed that Ethel should be named 'Ladysmith', as she was born on the day that Ladysmith was relieved during the Boer War. Another brother, named Robert Wilfred, had died of meningitis aged four in August 1902. Joseph Carr senior worked on the railwa

•

J. L. Carr

English novelist

Joseph Lloyd Carr (20 May 1912 – 26 February 1994), who called himself "Jim" or "James", was an English novelist, publisher, teacher and eccentric.

Biography

Carr was born in Carlton Miniott in the North Riding of Yorkshire, next to Thirsk railway station, into a Wesleyan Methodist family. His father Joseph, the eldest of 12 children of a tenant farmer,^[1] went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a station master then traffic controller for the North Eastern Railway.^[2] Carr was given the same Christian name as his father and the middle name Lloyd, after David Lloyd George, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer and subsequent Prime Minister.^[3] He adopted the names Jim and James in adulthood. His brother Raymond, who was also a station master, and other members of his family called him Lloyd.^[1]

Carr attended the village school at Carlton Miniott, where there was an innovative headmaster named James Milner,^[4] but when the family moved to Sherburn-in-Elmet when he was abou