Ken Loach (1969)

Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel for a Knave, first published in 1968, is well named.  It picks up two meanings of ‘knave’ – a rascal or a man of low social standing.  The title derives from the fifteenth-century Book of St Albans, a kind of contemporary gentleman’s handbook, which includes a detailed hierarchy of falconry, pairing social ranks and particular birds of prey.  The hierarchy comprises no less than fifteen levels, from emperor down (a king is only second class).  The lowest rank is knave or servant, the only bird such a person might legally own a kestrel.

Hines’ protagonist, fifteen-year-old Billy Casper, answers to both definitions of knave.  From a working-class family in South Yorkshire, Billy already has juvenile delinquent form; he says his petty criminal days are behind him though he still swipes sweets from the newsagent’s where he has a paper round, and milk from a milk float when the milkman’s back is turned.  Billy’s mother is a single parent; his father is long gone; his elder brother, Jud, with whom Billy shares a bed, is really his half-brother.  Billy will soon leave school, at the earliest possible opportunity, with no qualifications.  He hasn’t a clue what he wants to do but is sure he’s not going to follow Jud down the pit, where so many local men work.  Billy is interested in the natural world, though, and often goes for solitary walks in woodland or farmland.  One day, he steals a young bird from a kestrel nest and decides to train it.  He calls the bird Kes.

Barry Hines shared the screenplay credit on Kes with the film’s producer, Tony Garnett, and director, Kenneth (as he was known on credits then) Loach.  I don’t think I’d seen Kes since I was a teenager:  it’s being shown at BFI currently (in the ‘Big Screen Classics’ slot), presumably to coincide with the UK release of Philippa Lowthorpe’s H is for Hawk (2025).  Kes is a fine film, perhaps Ken Loach’s best.   It’s certainly political, in its indictment of the bleak prospects faced by unqualified and unskilled working-class boys.  It isn’t narrowly polemical, though, in the manner of late-Loach films like Jimmy’s Hall (2014) and I, Daniel Blake (2016).

Loach is unsentimentally partial to the social routines of the local community in Kes, which was shot in and around Barnsley.  This comes through most strongly in a sequence in the working men’s club, which cuts between Jud (Freddie Fletcher) and his pals chatting up girls, Billy’s mother (Lynne Perrie) and her latest bloke at a nearby table, and the musical entertainment on stage (a group covering Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Honey’, a comic singing ‘Oh! What a Beauty!’).  The WMC audience is clearly made up of real locals enjoying what for them is normal Saturday night entertainment (except for the cameras).  Meanwhile, Billy (David Bradley) is at home, reading the book on falconry he nicked from a bookshop because he’s not a member of the public library.

There are moments in Kes when you wonder if Loach has become so absorbed in the rituals of the lives described that there’s not enough of the title character, but the rationing of sequences showing Billy training the bird proves very effective.  If there were more of them earlier, the classroom scene where English teacher Mr Farthing (Colin Welland), the one sympathetic member of school staff in the story, gets Billy up at the front to talk about training the kestrel, might not have such impact.  Billy starts reluctantly and haltingly but soon can hardly contain his enthusiasm.  For the film’s audience, the enthusiasm is infectious – and Billy’s classmates’ more varied reactions are very credibly observed.  A few kids look interested, a few bored, while others seem relieved that, for as long as someone else is the focus of attention, they’ll be safely ignored.  Farthing is full of praise for what he hears.  Talking with Billy afterwards, he says he’ll come along to watch him training Kes during the school lunch hour and is as good as his word.  Because Loach hasn’t shown much of the training up to this point, we, like Farthing, can enjoy it as revelatory.

Some accounts of the film describe Billy as virtually illiterate but that’s just not the case – and not only because, early on, he reads aloud cartoon captions in The Dandy.  There’s no suggestion that he struggles to read the stolen book or relies on its illustrations to teach himself falconry.  After using the words ‘jesses’ and ‘swivel’ and ‘leash’ in what he tells the class, Billy is asked by Farthing to write the words on the blackboard, and he does, spelling them correctly.  It’s true that, later on, in a careers interview, Billy claims that he can hardly read or write, but that’s partly because he wants out of the interview as quickly as possible and says things to try and convince the ‘youth employment officer’ (Bernard Atha) that their conversation is a waste of time.  Loach’s point that Billy’s life is circumscribed by preconceived attitudes, including his own, is more strongly made by illustrating his potential and aptitudes, literacy among them.

Unlike some later Loach works, Kes doesn’t insist that characters can be only one thing; nor does it whitewash cruelty.  Jud isn’t a hero because he’s a coal miner and isn’t, because he bullies Billy, incapable of appealing humour, joking in the club that his mother’s companion is so tight-fisted that when he married, he got the confetti on elastic.  It’s the same Jud who delivers the story’s nasty coup de grâce by killing Kes – because Billy failed to carry out instructions to put Jud’s bet on and both horses won.  The famous episode on the school football field and in the changing rooms afterwards is a very striking juxtaposition of comedy and viciousness.  Even allowing that Billy’s small for fifteen, it’s hard to believe that he and the other boys in his class are the same age.  (The girls in the class, as well as an apparent minority, play a very minor role.)  But the collection of different shapes and sizes in the football match is very comical.  On the field, sports master Mr Sugden (Brian Glover), wearing Man Utd strip, is an entertaining autocrat and showoff – would-be star striker as well as referee.  In the changing rooms, Sugden is a more offensive martinet, continuing to pick on Billy and making him stand under a freezing cold shower.  (This working-class tyrant in a northern secondary modern school subjects his victim to the same punishment endured by privately educated Mick Travis at the hands of a vile prefect in Lindsay Anderson’s If…, released the year before Kes.)

The short sequences at the newsagent’s and the bookie’s, in the public library and a fish and chip shop, all enrich the film’s social texture.  The BFI handout’s claim that Colin Welland ‘was the only professional actor in the cast’ isn’t quite accurate.  Bill Dean, as the man at the chippie, had had several small roles on TV and in cinema – ditto Harry Markham, who plays the newsagent.  But the main cast other than Welland were all first-time actors.  Among the adults, vividly believable Lynne Perrie is outstanding, and it’s no surprise that her future screen career would be the most sustained.  Perrie first appeared in Coronation Street in 1971 and played Ivy Tilsley well into the 1990s; she also had a lead role in Leeds United!, a 1974 Play for Today, written by Colin Welland.

The least successful casting in Kes is Bob Bowes.  He’s the school headmaster, Mr Gryce, as inept as he is abusive.  Bowes looks the part, as well he might:  he really was a secondary modern head in the area.  With scripted lines to deliver, he’s not convincing, though.  He’s monotonously shouty, so it doesn’t help that Gryce has perhaps the film’s longest monologue – even though the reactions of Billy and other boys, as Gryce inveighs against them and metes out corporal punishment, come close to saving the scene.  Alone in Kes, Gryce is a one-dimensional figure because he’s conceived and played as the representative of a bad system (and is thus a forerunner of other Loach characters in more recent years).

David Bradley gives what must be one of the finest teenage performances in British cinema history.  As skinny, canny Billy, Bradley is thoroughly authentic yet he’s also an instinctive actor, with a precocious understanding of the camera and ability to shape and vary his line readings.  Loach directs him very skilfully.  A few years later, he would (as Dai Bradley) play Alan Strang in Equus on stage, on both sides of the Atlantic; it’s a pity that Bradley’s acting career didn’t develop much beyond that.

The cinematography by Chris Menges achieves strong spatial contrasts throughout yet never stresses too much the transforming freedom experienced by Billy as he trains the bird in the great outdoors.  Although John Cameron’s pleasant music is a bit too sensitive, Ken Loach uses it sparingly, and effectively.  The film’s closing scene, in which Billy buries Kes, is admirably understated, which makes it even more tragic.

7 February 2026