Hindle Wakes

The first sound version of the oft-filmed and once controversial play, about the fling between a mill-owner’s son and a girl from the factory floor.

In the Lancashire mill town of Hindle, it’s ‘wakes week’ and employees decamp en-mass to Blackpool, where a lowly mill-girl strikes up a relationship with the mill-owners son. Upon returning to Hindle the news of the affair threatens to cause a scandal.

This Gainsborough Pictures production of Stanley Houghton’s controversial 1912 play was the second of several adaptations, reuniting several of the cast and crew from Maurice Elvey’s silent version of 1927. The original play emerged from a movement known as the ‘Manchester school of Drama’, a group of playwrights noted for their focus on realism and class issues, foregrounding the work of the ‘Angry young men’ of the 1950s.