Hannah Hauxwell (1926–2018)

Hannah Hauxwell is a retired English farmer from an isolated area of the North Riding of Yorkshire. She was living alone in 1972, at age 46, following the deaths of her parents, at the family's Low Birk Hatt Farm, with no electricity, central heating, or running water and struggling to survive in the harsh winters, when she was discovered by a friend of a researcher at Yorkshire Television while out walking. The researcher contacted a producer at the company, who made a TV documentary about Hannah entitled Too Long a Winter. After it aired, her life was transformed. A local factory raised money to get electricity to the farm, and she received thousands of letters and donations from around the world. A second documentary nearly 20 years later, A Winter Too Many, saw that although Hannah had a little more money, which she had invested in a few more cows, her back-breaking labor on the farm continued. With her health and strength slowly failing, she had to make the heart-rending decision to sell her family farm and the animals she loved and move into a cottage in a nearby village. In 1992, another a documentary series, An Innocent Abroad, followed Hannah on her first trips outside of the UK on a grand tour of Europe and the USA. A book called Hannah Hauxwell -- 80 Years in the Dales was published in 2008.