18 July 1970: Barry Hines no longer opens the Guardian at the sports page. He starts with the arts, and follows with the leader. Otherwise, the author of Kes thinks he has changed very little since he was a boy
Barry Hines, author of book behind Kes, dies
Barry Hines is a survivor of an educational system that has no time for academic runts. He was an average, working-class grammar school boy of the fifties, when clever workers’ lads could win through, and average middle-class sons could be pushed through. But to be average, socially and academically, was to be offered a glimpse of a brighter world before being ground into the unrelieved monotony of the colliery weigh office, the town hall, or any of a hundred repositories for boys too sharp to be plumbers but sharp enough to appreciate their fate.
Football and athletics were the saving of Barry Hines. He was an England Grammar Schools footballer and an even-time sprinter, which gave him his only reasons to continue attending an establishment which, otherwise, he found an incomprehensible bore. Even so, he left at the age of 16, and became an apprentice mining surveyor, and with any luck, he might have been a colliery undermanager today. But surveying seemed to involve maths, at which Barry was very average, and since he only wanted to kick the ball and dash about, he returned to school after six months, where, to put it mildly, he played a blinder.
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