Many of the posts on Clay Lane are by well known writers such as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Others are by less well known authors who have something no less important to say.
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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 1920s to the 1960s. 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. Clay’s 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 He also left behind a mass of unpublished material: stories, poems, guides to English domestic history and the experience of ordinary women, and studies of Jane Austen’s heroines. Clay championed ‘straightforward English’ as an antidote to the slogans and manipulative propaganda which plague every society, and hoped that his textbooks would help a new generation to learn more of the world they lived in, free their imagination, and do their democratic duty by holding their governors to account.
