The writer Sheila Stewart, who has died aged 86, specialised in recounting the lives of working people in their own words. It was in two early books, Country Kate (1971) and Country Courtship (1975), that she developed her trademark style: recounting the reminiscences of ordinary people in the first person and in the vernacular. In 1974 her radio play based on Country Kate won the Writers Guild award for best radio feature script.
Her most popular book, Lifting the Latch: A Life on the Land (1987), tells the story of a carter and shepherd, Mont Abbott, who worked in and around the Oxfordshire village of Enstone through all the upheavals of the 20th century. Among the books many admirers was the lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire, Hugo Brunner, who in 2007 arranged for a blue plaque to be placed on Mont Abbotts former cottage surely the only blue plaque to commemorate the life of a man who spent his whole life working on the land.
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