by Simon Schama
Although he is ‘In Search of England’ he makes sure to look for it (with one brief exception) only where there are no factories or polluted industrial canals, much less spikes and sevenpenny kips. The kind of places Morton favours are invariably cathedral towns (Canterbury, Lincoln, Norwich, York, Ely, Exeter) or market towns, best of all cathedral towns that are also market towns, like Wells (‘How can I describe to you the whisper of the water that runs in gutters, musically tinkling past the steps of old houses?’). There his soul is eased by cosy pubs, where pewter ‘glimmered like moonlight on still water’ and the taps run with ‘mahogany brew’. The best places of all are those that are mossy with memory; where ghosts drift through the ruins. At Beaulieu Abbey he meets a Miss Cheshire who actually lives above the ruined monks’ dormitory ‘alone with seven hundred years’. At Winchester he sees ‘down a long tunnel of time, the Kings of Wessex riding through a country that was not yet England’. In fact he is constantly seeing and hearing things as if all England had been turned into an open-air Madame Tussaud’s. Mile after mile, in between the moments of seraphic illumination in the fields, or rather on lay-bys near fields, Morton gives this nostalgia everything he has.
But of course there is a worm in the bud: the disagreeable 20th century. Two sets of barbarians are massing to despoil paradise: Yanks and yobbos. In Morton’s pages, alternately quivering with bucolic ecstasy or wrinkle-nosed with distaste, Americans are constantly ruining the scenery with their vulgar, garish presence. In Clovelly in Devon, Morton wants to put his fingers in his ears lest he hear another Alabama college girl exclaim how everything is ‘too cute for words’. Morton’s parody Yanks speak a bizarre language, a sort of fractured, badly heard movie-speak overstuffed with ‘gees’ and ‘sures’. He insists, unconvincingly, that ‘no-one respects the average American traveller more than I do’, and says it just as ardently as his contemporaries protested that some of their best friends were Jews. But wait! There is hope for these loud, comical primitives, and that hope is called History. The ghosts of King Edgar and Henry VIII and the original Pilgrims (not yet American), summoned by the spirits of the place, stun the Americans into awestruck appreciation for All that Past and force them to confess that, although they affect to despise it, they are really in love with Tradition.
Not much hope, however, for the domestic enemies of the idyll, the ‘charabanc parties from large manufacturing towns’ – the Jacks and the Beryls, the Dougs and the Maureens. The countryside, alas, is in no condition to resist this coachborne invasion of the unwashed and the ill-mannered. ‘An old order is being taxed out of existence’, an avalanche of sales, and ‘the impossibility of growing corn because of the expense of labour and foreign competition’. (The Council for the Preservation of Rural England, founded in 1926, would make that lament its battle cry.) For someone so devoted to the countryside, Morton makes no mention of the pitiful plight of agricultural workers, their average wage, when they could find work, cut from 42 shillings a week to 30; or to the countless farms abandoned, the barns allowed to fall down; to the untended hedgerows bolting, thickening and turning into copses; to the fields shaggy with weeds. At least mass unemployment might have the inadvertent benefit of keeping These People in their own noisome little alleys and hovels, to stand around waiting for the dole. Morton can’t quite escape the industrial enemy, though. His route takes him between Manchester and Liverpool – ‘to the right there was an ominous grey haze in the sky which meant Manchester’. For a moment in the Black Country he is ‘thrilled’ by the smokestacks – but on closer inspection is not. In Lancashire he sees the only Englishmen he knows who squat like Arabs – coal miners with whippets. And then he sees ‘a signpost marked “Wigan”. Who could resist a glimpse of Wigan?’
Just a glimpse, of course. As a sampler Morton goes over the tired music-hall joke that is ‘Wigan Pier’, ‘sufficient to make an audience howl with laughter’. Its Roman name, Coccium, has him doubled up. But it turns out that Wigan is not quite the hell-hole he had been led to believe (and confesses he was eager to record). He sees half-timbered mock-Tudor buildings, which lead him to believe that in 20 years or so Wigan might be a perfectly fine-looking place (for a manufacturing town). The case for a kindly view is clinched when he discovers that the area had been staunchly royalist in the Civil War. Not just a coalfield, then, by God. To his own astonishment, Morton admits he ‘would not mind spending a holiday in Wigan – a short one’.
Nine years later, in January 1936, George Orwell travelled to Wigan, stayed for two months and found it altogether less of a giggle. He recorded canal paths ‘a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the “flashes” – pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. … It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water.’
Orwell had had a modest success with Down and Out in Paris and London (perhaps 3000 copies sold in the UK), but he realized, paradoxically, that in writing about the outcasts of England he had documented a tiny population – tens of thousands – rather than the millions of the industrial working class in the Midlands and the north whom the depression had turned into the real misérables of Ramsay MacDonald’s and Stanley Baldwin’s Britain. Baldwin, who liked to present himself as a plain-as-a-pikestaff solid sort with (like Cobbett and Lord Emsworth) a passion for pigs, wrote his own sub-Housman lyric verse ‘On England’, featuring the usual obligatory plough and team coming over the hill. But this was precisely the period when, if farmers (together with their labourers, now no more than 5 per cent of the working population) were going to survive, they would be riding tractors and combine harvesters. And the hill was going to be planted out, not with spears of golden English wheat, but with sugar-beet, one of the few surefire moneymakers of the 1930s.
Morton had expressed his horror that cornfields had become coalfields. Travelling through Northumberland, he liked to pretend it had never happened, that the industrial towns were ‘mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England’.
On the other hand, socialist writers like J.B. Priestley, whose English Journey of 1933 was another antidote to Morton’s rustic sentimentalism, and who himself came from the wool-manufacturing town of Bradford, were prepared to stare the disaster of industrial England in the face and certainly call it ‘real’. In fact, for much of England industrial work had been the only reality and, for all the apparent grimness of the factory floors and terraced streets, not such a bad thing either. It was the white and shiny, tile and glass ‘new’ factories of London’s Great West Road, from which Priestley set out on his journey by the miracle of coach comfort, that he couldn’t quite see as places that could manufacture anything. It was ‘bending iron and riveting steel to steel’ that were ‘the real thing’, man’s work.
In the north of England it was the terrible quiet that got to Priestley: ‘Grim and ugly as it might be, nevertheless if this riverside [the Tyne] had been black, and shattering with the smoke and din of tens of thousands of men hard at it, for the commonwealth and for their own decent comfort and self-respect, I think I would have found it wildly inspiring …’
He wanted the guide-book description of Jarrow as ‘A busy town (35,590 inhabitants)’ with ironworks and shipyards changed to ‘an idle and ruined town (35,590 inhabitants, wondering what is to become of them)’. Priestley remembered it had been Bede’s abbey town; the cradle, then, of a self-conscious English history. Now it seemed to be its grave. ‘The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath’, he recorded, with thousands of men just standing around doing nothing. At nearby Hebburn he clambered through a derelict shipyard, the result of reckless speculation, now a ‘fantastic wilderness of decaying sheds, strange mounds and pits, rusted iron, old con
crete and new grass’. When Priestley got to the river bank he could see rows and rows of idle ships rotting into rusty hulks. As with the cotton mill in Blackburn he had seen put up for auction – with, of course, no takers – he felt he was present at the death-bed of the industrial empire. And when he heard the clatter of stones thrown at warehouses by boys in West Bromwich – ‘I could not blame them if they threw stones and stones and smashed every pane of glass for miles’ – it was the death rattle.
Orwell didn’t think much of Priestley, whom he wrote off, not altogether fairly, as a sentimental accumulator of banal anecdotes and cosy homilies. He shared the socialist urge to stick the grim plight of industrial Britain in the face of the solid south and to shout: ‘DO SOMETHING!’ Unemployment overall had come down from a high of 2.5 million in 1932 to 1.5 million four years later. But its distribution was shockingly uneven; 4 per cent in Middlesex; 30–50 per cent in Barrow or Jarrow. As Priestley noted, there were actually three Englands (he could as easily have said Britains): the clapped-out wreckage of the old industrial heartland; then Morton-Albion, all limestone hamlets nestling (they always nestled) amidst velvety dales as larks soared into the sweet empyrean; but also a new England of lipstick and car assembly lines, Benny Goodman, sheer stockings and Friday-night cinema.
Symbolic recognition that everyone in Britain belonged, somehow, in the same boat seemed to Orwell not enough. The biggest symbolic gesture of all was made by the royal family, sending the Prince of Wales to the mining villages to express concern at the distress, a public relations move that worked like a charm. At the end of 1935 the silver jubilee of George V’s reign was orchestrated in much the same spirit of democratic monarchism, with the genuinely popular king and queen touring London’s East End in an open motor landau. Stunned at the public enthusiasm, George wondered why, since he was ‘just an ordinary fellow’ – which, as a courtier was quick to assure him, was precisely the point. The fatherly image of the king–emperor entered a new dimension altogether with the first royal radio broadcast, carried off with baritone aplomb. In another brilliantly conceived gesture, George V made a point of talking to the children of Britain – ‘Now children, it is your KING who is talking to you’, something that is likely to have made them sit up and take notice. And with just a few more months to live the normally gruff and taciturn monarch happily talked and talked: most notably at Westminster Hall in a speech written for him by G. M. Trevelyan, which represented the empire as one great ‘family’, the ultimate progeny of the great and glorious unwritten, immemorial British constitution.
As far as Orwell was concerned, however, the ancient constitution had not done a whole lot for Lancashire lately. So when his publisher, Victor Gollancz, suggested that he go north and write about what he saw in Wigan, he leaped at the opportunity to expose an England that was a long way from Jubilation and to write it as a journey, stripped of all traces of folksiness. He may have succeeded all too well with The Road to Wigan Pier, which was hated by much of both the right and the left. Conservatives naturally dismissed it as Bolshevik propaganda; trade unionists and the Hampstead socialists among whom Orwell had been living, working and running a bookshop thought it too bleak, pessimistic and uncharitable a picture of working-class heroes.
But, for Orwell, Wigan Pier was the first demonstration of the literature he was meant to write: intensely and frankly political, but neither as arid as a Fabian essay or a Labour party position paper, nor as mystically over-excited and fanciful as D. H. Lawrence. Most of all, the writing was meant to deliver the reader, who might be sitting in an armchair in Esher (or Southwold), into an alien world of sights, like that of the ‘scramblers’ rooting around for pebble-sized lumps of coal on the slag-heaps; the smells (especially, with Orwell, smells) hanging in the yellow fumes over the canal; and the sounds, like the clatter of clogs that awakened him before dawn in Wigan, every day as he lay in bed over the tripe shop where he lodged. What Dickens (a literary hero) did with fog at the beginning of Bleak House, Orwell did with the soot and grime of the mining town that covered everyone and everything: the fingers of his landlord who insisted on cutting the white breakfast bread, leaving black fingerprints on the soft white surface; the black beetles that he saw crawling over the whitish-yellow tripe (too commercially valuable to be served for tea); the second skin of thick soot that Orwell got when he went down the pit, and which would not wash off in the tepid water. (There was, of course, no hot water.)
As soon as he got down the pit, Orwell realized that if being unemployed in Wigan was hell, being employed was purgatory. Wake-up time for the day shift was 3.45 a.m. Along with the miners he stooped, or crawled, half-naked through 4-foot-high passages to the coalface, sometimes for miles – as far, he calculated one day, as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus – and this before the day’s work had actually begun. The first day, the 6-foot-3-inch Orwell banged his head on a pit prop on his way to the face, and was so exhausted when he finally got there that, tough though he usually was, he fainted.
When the miners ended their shift, at 2.30 in the afternoon, they came back to terraced houses that Orwell thought should have been condemned many years before. There were always dirty dishes in the sink. A tea of heated-up tinned fish or stew, boiled potatoes, a bit of bread, jam and, Orwell’s particular bugbear, margarine (nothing like the polyunsaturated diet-friendly spread of today), was served up on tables covered with a grimy oilcloth that itself rested on geologically encrusted strata of old Worcestershire-sauce-stained newspapers, crunchy with the crumbs of countless greasy teas. Yet Orwell’s horror for what the miners had to endure only increased his admiration for the way that working-class families managed to make real homes – assuming, that is, that ‘Father’ was in work. And he was touched by the genuine generosity and openness he found in Wigan, extended even to strange and snooping strangers like him: ‘Curiously enough, it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, nor the radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match, but the memory of working-class interiors … that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.’
Orwell’s mission in The Road to Wigan Pier was to force the different Englands to face each other squarely. Perhaps he didn’t have much hope – especially since he was being published by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club – of getting the Fair-Isle sweater-clad, Morton-reading motoring set to come with him into the soot-coated, bacon-greased kitchens of Wigan. But from the ‘old England’, which had the power (the City, parliament, the law courts), not to mention the ‘new England’, which had the money (the newspapers and the suburban commuters; the garage owners and the department-store salesmen), he wanted some recognition that they belonged to a common nation. Otherwise, what did all the cant about the blessings of the British constitution, of the imperishable empire of freedom, boil down to? The freedom to choose between accepting a reduced dole or booting out granny when the means-test inspectors told you the old girl was a ‘lodger’ and that, sorry as they were, they would have to cut your weekly allowance?
It was the smug cushioning of well-off Britain against the sting of grievance that most got to Orwell. Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government, elected in 1929, with Snowden once more as chancellor of the exchequer and the trade-union leader J. H. Thomas as Lord Privy Seal, had been indecently eager to honour all the canons of Victorian economy – the gold standard, deflation, balanced budgets and public parsimony. When the inevitable run on the pound had happened and the government declared a deficit, MacDonald and Snowden had been so committed to the budget cuts that J. P. Morgan and others had demanded as the condition of a loan that in August 1931 they were prepared to end the Labour government and join Baldwin’s Tories and the Liberals in a three-party ‘national administration’. Only one Labour minister, Oswald Mosley, the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, had actually had the gumption to insist on a Keynesian solution, using substantial deficit fi
nancing to lower unemployment and invest in infrastructure. Failing to have his way, in May 1930 he resigned from the government, attacked it in the Commons, was expelled and formed his ‘New Party’.
In March 1936, in the Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley, Orwell went to hear Mosley speak. By this time the ‘New Party’ had become the blackshirted British Union of Fascists. Mosley, surrounded by 100 black-shirts who beat the living daylights out of a heckler, was still committed to Keynesian public spending but full of praise for Mussolini and Hitler, who had done the same thing, and full of venom against the ‘mysterious international gangs of Jews’ who, not satisfied with having caused the slump in the first place, were now financing the Labour party, thus doubly betraying the workers. To Orwell’s dismay the audience, which had begun by loudly booing Mosley, ended up applauding him.
Later that year Orwell, whose sense of history had been almost as insular as Churchill’s, decided, after all, that there was an unavoidable battle coming between socialism and freedom on the one hand and fascism on the other, and that it needed to be faced sooner rather than later. This seemed all the more urgent since, just as Baldwin’s government had its head in the sand about the miseries of the British poor, it was in even deeper denial about the coming crisis. When Orwell went off to the Spanish Civil War in December 1936, under the aegis of the Independent Labour party and as an officer in the POUM anarchist militia, he wanted it understood that it was as a fighter and not as a writer, since he was aggressively estranged from the coffee-house socialists in London who seemed, to him, all sanctimonious talk and precious little action. Finally, though, his own parade-ground history – the cadet corps at Eton and the Burma police college – stood him in good stead when he drilled raw Republican recruits. Eccentrically dressed in a modified balaclava and the longest woolly scarf anyone had seen, and unmissably conspicuous because of his great height, Orwell ended up taking a bullet through the neck outside Huesca. It miraculously missed both his carotid artery and his spine, but fatality rates for that kind of wound (given the rudimentary medical attention available) were nearly 80 per cent. Orwell, however, survived, although the damage to his vocal cords made it difficult if not impossible for him to shout. His faith in socialist solidarity, especially when masquerading as the ‘Popular Front’, did not survive. In Barcelona he had witnessed first-hand the Republican cause being sabotaged by the bitter feuds of the left. The communists, driven by instructions from Moscow, seemed to be much more interested in hunting down heretics like the anarchists than in taking on General Franco’s fascists.
