A WAY WITH WORDS
DAVID HADFIELD 14 June 1951 - 18 March 2022
By MIKE RYLANCE
BACK in the early nineties, Dave Hadfield was one of the contributors to the British Coal-sponsored Rugby League Yearbook, edited by Tony Pocock, who, while a director of Faber and Faber, had previously published the annual Rugby League Review.
As a director of the distinguished publishing house, which listed the likes of TS Eliot, Philip Larkin and William Golding among its authors, Pocock could be expected to recognise a good writer when he saw one. Public school and Oxford-educated, he was, he confided, a little bemused by Hadfield, this large, bearded, outwardly gruff character with a broad Lancashire accent. “But,” he said, “he writes like an angel.”