The original crime lords of Happy Valley

...or how a poverty-stricken Yorkshire community became Britain’s most ingenious counterfeiters

An exhausted man dragging a very heavy sack is struggling across the moors. He’s bleeding and in a bad way, and when he collapses on the grass it looks as though he might be about to breathe his last. Five terrifying figures in ragged robes and wearing stag’s skulls emerge from the mist and surround him. ‘Which way am I heading, boys? Up or down?’ he asks them. Heaven or hell? Neither, it would seem. At least not yet. The ‘stag men’ lead him off the moor to Cragg Vale, his home village, where his father is about to be buried.

The returning wanderer is David Hartley (Michael Socha), and he’s come back to

West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, the setting for contemporary crime drama Happy Valley. The Gallows Pole, though, is set in the 1760s, when the growing mechanisation of the textiles industry means that cottage weavers are losing their livelihoods.

Whole communities are struggling and hard times have certainly come to

Cragg Vale but David, who has been in Birmingham for the previous seven years learning a different trade, has an idea as to how they might restore the village to prosperity. He proposes a ‘coin-clipping’ enterprise. They will use the tools in his sack to shave portions of metal from legitimate coins, melt down those shavings and use them to make new coins. In this way, 11 coins can profitably be created from ten. Coin-clipping is a capital offence, but desperate times call for desperate measures…

There really was a band of 18th Century counterfeiters known as the Cragg Vale Coiners led by a ‘King’, David Hartley. They have been the subject of several stories and songs. This version, which plays out over three episodes, is a prequel to the Benjamin Myers novel of the same name.

It’s directed by Shane Meadows (This Is England), who says: ‘I really wanted to delve into the history of this story and why an entire West Yorkshire community risked their lives to put food in their children’s bellies.’ The series features, above from left, Thomas Turgoose, Charlotte Ockelton, Sophie McShera and Socha, but several of the cast are making their acting debuts after an extensive open audition.. It won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s part naturalistic period drama, part broad comedy and there are elements of horror in Hartley’s visions of the strange stag men. The improvised dialogue is sweary and anachronistic. But no one can say that Meadows doesn’t deliver something different.