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The Clay Lane website is inspired by the textbooks, methods, and personal values of my great-uncle, NL Clay. This page provides some biographical details, and a select bibliography of his works.

Norman Llewellyn Clay (1905-1991) was a Yorkshire schoolmaster who wrote a series of textbooks for schools, colleges and the home in a career that stretched from the late 1920s to the 1960s. His books ranged from classroom courses in oral and written composition through to anthologies of prose and poetry, brief plays adapted from literature, and guides to better writing for adult learners.

He was born in Tingley, Yorkshire, on April 22nd, 1905, the son of Charles William Clay and Sarah (Sadie) Catherine Griffiths, and younger brother of Laurence Griffith Clay. Charles was manager of the village Co-operative store; among other things Sadie was a teacher and a correspondent for two local newspapers. Norman turned down work as a clerk in the local mill to remain at the Grammar School — most Tingley men worked in the mill or down the pit — and went on to become a teacher of English language and literature, thanks largely to his mother, a Welshwoman who gave him a love of words and books and encouraged his aspirations. He taught English at Wath-on-Dearne Secondary School, and later at Ecclesfield Grammar School near Barnsley; his wife Hilda, whom he married in 1930, was a classicist and a fellow-schoolteacher.

Norman’s upbringing had taught him sympathy with the daily lives of ordinary people, and he took a scholar’s interest in the lives of ordinary people in earlier generations too, especially women. This led him and his wife Hilda to spend their leisure time exploring antique-shops, looking especially for those items which shed light on the everyday experiences, habits and customs of the past. Amid the mass of unpublished manuscripts he left behind were easy-to-read guides to English domestic history, and studies of Jane Austen’s heroines and their time (written long before such topics became fashionable). He delighted in countryside scenery and moorland, a fondness which he attributed to his Welsh heritage, kept a Yorkshire terrier called Kim, and wrote poetry on countless scraps of card.

Norman died on May 19th, 1991, aged eighty-six.

Select Bibliography

  1. Think and Speak (J. M. Dent: 1929)
  2. The Young Writer (J. M. Dent: 1930)
  3. School Certificate Practice (J. M. Dent: 1933)
  4. English Exercises: Twelve to Thirteen (William Heinemann: 1933)
  5. The English Critic: from Chaucer to Auden (William Heinemann: 1939)
  6. Advanced English Exercises (William Heinemann: 1939)
  7. The Narrative Art in Verse (John Murray: 1942)
  8. American Sampler (John Murray: 1943)
  9. Dialogues for Discussion (John Murray: 1945)
  10. This Half Century: 50 Poems from 1900 to 1949 (William Heinemann: 1945)
  11. Record and Report (William Heinemann: 1947)
  12. Straightforward English (MacDonald: 1949)
  13. The London Bridge Book of Verse (William Heinemann: 1962)
  14. I Remember: an Anthology of Childhood Reminiscences (Heinemann Educational Books: 1964)