Hannah Hauxwell, who has died aged 91, was a Daleswoman who in 1973 captured the hearts of the nation when her solitary life on the remote Low Birk Hatt Farm, near the North Pennine village of Baldersdale, then in the North Riding of Yorkshire (now in County Durham), became the subject of an award-winning Yorkshire Television documentary, Too Long A Winter.
Three years earlier she had been the subject of an article in the Yorkshire Post entitled “How to be happy on £170 a year”.
By the time Barry co*ckroft turned up to make his film chronicling a community of North Country people and their struggle to survive in the harsh Pennine winters, her income had risen to around £250 a year. The average salary at the time was £2,000.
Hannah Hauxwell had inherited her parents’ dilapidated 80-acre farm when she was 34. There was no electricity, running water or central heating, and she tended her small herd of cattle in layers of raggedy clothing when temperatures were below freezing. It was mainly from the sale of a few of these “beasts” that her modest income was derived.
Though she had lived an isolated life, often going for a fortnight without seeing another human being, Hannah Hauxwell turned out to be a television “natural”.
As Sean Day-Lewis observed in a review of the documentary in The Daily Telegraph, she “upstaged people and beasts and even the grand surrounding landscape” with her “extraordinary dignity, simplicity and acceptance [which] shone without a hint of acting or editorial manipulation”.
Hannah, then 46 and unmarried, was shown hauling water from the stream, lugging logs, setting out in blizzards to tend her animals and breaking the ice on a pond to keep them watered.
Pink-cheeked, white-haired, twinkly, and with a simple, old-fashioned turn of phrase, she was seen unaffectedly discussing the cow pail she used as a bath, the bread deliveries which were left at a gate three fields away, and the night the chimney above her kitchen coal fire collapsed and she ended up sleeping in the byre with her favourite cow.
Other sequences showed her obviously enjoying a rare night out at a harvest festival supper and dance, and hanging food in plastic bags from hooks in the ceiling (formerly used, she explained, “for funerals and pig killings”) to prevent it being eaten by rats.
Although Hannah Hauxwell had been hermetically sealed from the modern comforts most people take for granted, her other-worldliness struck a chord with viewers.
Her almost beatific contentment with her lot, her immaculate manners and quiet strength, shaped by adversity, seemed to provide evidence that modern society, with all its getting and spending, had forgotten something essential and human.
The film made Hannah Hauxwell into something of a celebrity. She found herself travelling halfway around the world for further documentaries, with accompanying books including Seasons of My Life (1989) and Daughter of the Dales (1990).
She was guest of honour at a Women Of The Year gala at the Savoy Hotel in London (wearing the first dress she had bought since her mother’s funeral), attended a Buckingham Palace garden party and appeared on This Is Your Life, when she seemed genuinely to have no idea who Michael Aspel was.
Yet she continued to live a frugal life and remained unspoilt by fame: “I’m always amazed that people should be interested,” she said in 2008. “I’ve led such a very simple life.”
An only child, Hannah Hauxwell was born at Baldersdale on August 1 1926 and was three when her family moved to Low Birk Hatt Farm. It was too small to be a commercial hill farm, and her father had paid too much for it at auction for it ever to be a going concern.
He died when Hannah was still a girl, and her uncle moved in to help her mother Lydia try to make a go of it.
Her mother died in her sixties, followed three years later by her uncle. “And then the loneliness came down,” she told The Daily Telegraph in 1996. “You can’t be in a household with people who care about you and then be the only one left without it hurting.”
When Too Long A Winter was aired, her life was changed. Yorkshire Television’s switchboard was inundated for several days with viewers wanting to offer help. A local factory raised money to connect her farm to the National Grid and she received letters and donations from well-wishers around the world.
She was given a cooker, and an electric kettle (“such a blessing,” she recalled): one winter she had gone without a hot drink, apart from warm milk from Rosa the cow, for four days.
In 1988, however, after decades of running the farm on her own, ill health and a series of bitter winters persuaded Hannah Hauxwell to sell up, prompting the Yorkshire Television team to return to film a second documentary, A Winter Too Many (1989).
The film showed that she had a little more money, which she had invested in a few more cows, and she was seen bidding her farm a tearful goodbye.
Hannah Hauxwell moved to a cottage at Cotherstone, a nearby village, telling an interviewer that hot water and a flushing lavatory had come as something of a culture shock.
“I have a fridge that doesn’t work,” she went on. “And a telephone – but it’s not always convenient, so I don’t always answer it. There’s also a washing machine. I don’t know if it works, because I’ve never tried it. I do it by hand. It’s not one of my favourite jobs, but that’s how I’ve always done it.”
In 1991 Barry co*ckcroft made Innocent Abroad, a six-part series following Hannah Hauxwell, by now 65, on her first trip abroad – to continental Europe.
“It is totally unsexy and there is not a young person in sight anywhere,” observed the Canadian Globe and Mail. “The main character speaks with a thick regional accent, may not be in possession of her own teeth and has lived her entire life in a British backwater communing more with cows than humans.
“Yet Innocent Abroad has more charm, exquisite scenery and wit than most of what passes for entertainment on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.”
The series was followed by another trip, to America, in 1993.
Asked whether she would have liked to join the modern world sooner, she admitted that she had not enjoyed “the really hard bits” of her life, but added: “I liked the farming and I loved my beasties and I had the countryside, and nature all around me, and books and music and good friends. You really don’t need much more than that.”
Hannah Hauxwell spent her final years in a nursing home, where she listened constantly to the radio.
She never married, explaining that she had never met anyone she felt “special” about.
Hannah Hauxwell, born August 1 1926, died January 30 2018
