Mabel Ferrett, who has died aged 93, was respected as a local historian in West Yorkshire, where her research led to her writing books including The Brontës in the Spen Valley (1978). Further afield, she was best known as a poet. Her first collection, The Lynx-Eyed Strangers, was published in 1956, and later collections included The Tall Tower (1970) and The Years of the Right Hand (1975). Her historical novel The Angry Men (1965), exploring the conflict between weavers and industrialists in the Spen Valley, was serialised on BBC radio in the late 1960s.
Mabel was a founding member of the Pennine Poets group, one of the longest established writers' groups in England. Formed in Elland, West Yorkshire, in 1966, the group has held monthly creative workshops for more than 40 years, staged readings and festivals, and produced a journal, Pennine Platform. From 1973 until four years ago, Mabel hosted their workshops at her home in Heckmondwike. She edited Pennine Platform from 1973 to 1976 and was the editor of the literary journal Orbis from 1978 to 1980.
I first met Mabel in 1979 when she invited me to join the Pennine Poets. In 1996 she published one of my early collections. The following year, she asked me to become her partner in Fighting Cock Press, the publishing house she had founded in 1973. Her aim was to produce books of poetry and short prose mainly by northern writers, of good literary quality, elegantly produced and within the price range of most people.
Mabel was born in Ossett. Her father died when she was 15. After attending Ossett grammar school, she qualified as a teacher. She obtained a post at Armley national school, Leeds, which catered for boys up to the age of 14. She taught English during the second world war, accompanying her class to Lincoln, where they were evacuated.
Following her marriage, in 1947, to Harold Ferrett, a solicitor, Mabel moved to Heckmondwike. She wrote articles for local magazines, and, in 1976, received the Julia Cairns award for poetry from the Society of Women Writers and Journalists, one of many prizes in her career. In 1996 Salzburg University published her selected poems as Scathed Earth. Her last collection, Imaginary Gates, was published in 2001. Her autobiography, After Passchendaele, came out in 2003. To celebrate the Pennine Poets' 40th anniversary in 2006, she wrote a fascinating account of the group, Spirit and Emotion.
"We do not choose our verses; they choose us," she wrote in the poem Vision. For Mabel, poetry was needed to give meaning to a violent society.
Her finest poems are about people, whether tributes to friends or portraits of historical characters. Hartshead Ballad poignantly recalls the starvation of the croppers during the industrial revolution, while Atherton Moor, 1643 recreates a battle from the English civil war. There is anger as well as acceptance: at the suffering of ordinary people, against political and social repression. Her short poem AD 1066 IM outlines a period of history in one highly compressed stanza:
These fought for power; not their own./ Beneath a brown October sun what they, themselves, had not begun, and could not finish, came to pass./ A Conqueror ordained a Mass./ The indifferent soil took blood and bone.
Harold died in 1977. Mabel is survived by her son, John.