Why Eric Blair, recently married to a woman he found an intellectual as well as sexual soul mate, should go to kill fascists in the Spanish Civil War, just when also his books are being published in quick succession remains a mystery to me to me, especially as he was not a member of any political party and while being in favour of justice as a sense of fairness, believed himself to be a socialist and against things like Imperialism and Fascism but no more than many educated thinking and caring men and women.
Did the turning point come when at the suggestion of Victor Gollancz he spent a couple of months in Wigan Sheffield and Barnsley and Leeds investigating social conditions and the lives of the proletariat, going down a mine, listening to an Oswald Moseley speech and attending a meetings or meetings of a local Communist Party.? The outcome was his book the Road to Wigan Pier published in 1937 during his time in Spain. I first skipped through the book online on 12th February 2013, and then pausing to study several aspects and appreciated that while, the trip was recommended to him, Blair had defined himself as an intellectual socialist who needed to gain first hand knowledge and the perspective of those who made up the proletariat. His findings led to the question why are not the majority of people in UK socialists and demanding and taking action?
The book is in three parts. The first chapter is a kind of forward and an extension to Down Out in Paris and London in that he stays in a doss house in Wigan where in theory the wife runs the accommodation with the help and a daughter and daughter to be and the husband runs a Tripe shop on the ground floor. We learn about the conditions of the accommodation and shop, the people who run it and the other residents. In reality as with Down and Out he or his editors juggled the truth for literary and commercial convenience for just as he went tramping before going to Paris, he went to Wigan before going down the pits and staying at the homes of miners and which I believe had the greatest of impact on his thinking as it has all those who have live and worked among those who once made up the mining community, separate hierarchy from the rest of proletariat, including those working in the shipyards and steel works often regarded as the industrial elite, in the same way that the scaffolders and structure makers of the building trades or the marines and other special forces are elites of the armed services.
The next two chapters covers his experience of going down a pit, making the point that to take in the life underground you need to visit several times and he communicates the challenge of using the cage to get to the mine floor, then the difficulties getting to the latest seam face and then the difficult business of trying to get clean as well together with dangers of work, and the diseases of the eyes and chest in the days before nationalization and the dramatic reduction in deaths and accidents that then occurred..
He also spells out the actual earning against the misleading presentation of averages, the stoppages from what is actually handed, deductions enforced and deductions voluntary. There are then chapters on the housing conditions and the cost living as well as the reality of the level of unemployment and the difference between the official figures and the numbers who would work but are unable to do so. One has to judge this book in terms of the situation and public awareness at the time and in the context of other books that attempted to describe the lives, the working conditions and the income and expenditure of the poor.
When I studied economic and social history the benchmarks had been set by J L and Barbara Hammond in their books on the Village and Town Labourer 1760 to 1832. Then there was Henry Matthew on London’s Labour and London’s Poor on the 1840’s. G D H Cole wrote his masterpiece history of the British Working Class Movements in 1925 and then in 1948 he published his update to 1947 and which is matched by his work with Raymond Postgate, The first part of the Road to Wigan Pier is more journalism than social study but he provides hard facts about what people earn and what they have to spend and something of conditions in which they live and he rightly gives prominence to the miners and their conditions and which was further brilliantly exposed in Clancy Sigal‘s book Weekend on Dinlock, published as a novel two decades later.
Blair goes down the coal mine and describes the conditions in which the men work in considerable detail communicating the hardship and the dangers together with the impact on their lives. “ Most of the things you imagine are there, the heat, the noise the darkness and the foul air. The aspect that one tends to forget is that as one approaches the coal face it is impossible to walk upright and Blair at over six feet found this very difficult and a journey of one mile takes hour whereas the experienced miner whose limbs have adjusted to the conditions will take twenty minutes. Then getting out the coal with pick axe is a problem because unlike above ground you have to work at best on your knees and one reason why miners take so long to clean themselves is that dust gets everywhere and they wear just thin trunks and shin pads with clogs on their feet. It is not surprising that the bodies of the miners are covered with scars and that injuries are common. I have looked at the lists of the dead in the mines here in South Shields, in Jarrow, Hebburn, Bolden and Whitburn, and then horrifying number of women, the high percentage of young men and boys 14 to 20, of the totals alarming in themselves, that is before nationalization when safety became the priority it ought to have been and numbers plummeted to almost zero such as in pits like Westoe colliery where men went files miles under the North Sea here in South Shields.
He also describes he use of the power drills and of explosives which if the charge is too powerful with bring down the roof as well as bring out the coal. And he has to work continuously and at pace to achieve the two tons an hour required and you try shifting two tons of earth an hour above ground! He makes the point that even where the mines have pithead baths these have come out of their own welfare fund and that the numbers of baths available is inadequate. The consequence is that while moat miners are able to clean their face, getting the dust out of the eyes and nostrils and with the help of mothers and wives from their backs it is only at weekends that many are fully clean to the church or chapel or going to match on Saturdays and for a drink at the at the welfare club afterwards. Ten there are disability illnesses of the eye and the chest.
My bench mark novel for describing the nature of coal mining is not Richard Llewellyn How Green was my Valley, which I also possesses and which was made into an excellent film which is still occasionally shown on a film channel, but the almost now unknown Weekend in Dinlock by the American Clancy Sigal which was published in 1960 and I have the first Penguin Books print 3/6 1962. At the time reference was made to following in the footsteps of Orwell because he locates his mine in the Barnsley area now regarded as south Yorkshire although when I was there a few years later it was part of the West Riding County Council with its HQ in Wakefield for whom I worked. Sigal is now better known as a film script writer and with his best known contribution as a co writer of the important film of the life of Frida Kahlo, a film based on a biographical work by Hayden Herrea both of which I possess and value, and for his autobiographical novel Going Away which was published just after Weekend in Dinlock.
Clancy Sigal’s book builds up to his fictionalised visit down a mine and his description is no less vivid and although by then the pitheads had baths and the main thoroughfares were well lit but with developing technology the depth of workings had become greater as had the distance required to travel to the pitface and whereas in Orwell’s book, his guide adjust his pace to that of the visitor, Sigal finds it impossible to keep up and lags behind losing contact, such was his difficulty and because of heat and foul air constantly hitting his well covered head he become dizzy and he has to pinch himself from passing out
Both books, a quarter of a century apart go into some detail about wages with Orwell makes the point that only those at the coal face, rather like train drivers on the railways earn the best wages, but the work is paid according to tonnage with some of the best rates in Scotland and those in Durham at the lower end. In the days before social security miners in Yorkshire paid 1/3 for unemployment Infirmary 2p Hospital 1p Benevolent fund 6p and Union fees 6p and they were also required to pay for their individual lamps at 6p a week, for sharpening their tools 6p and the check weigh man 9p.The men also contributed a shilling a week towards the welfare of window and the children of colleagues who had been killed.
For often around £2 a week £100 -130 as year at best the coal face man is producing a vast tonnage which worked out at 280m tons a year per mineworker, that is those working above and below ground, the maintenance men, those move the coal face from the face to the surface, weighing and grading in addition to the coal face men and with production having risen 10% over the previous two decades.
Sigal also looks at wages where by 1960 the conditions at the pit head as well as coal face had improved but the wages has become close to the top end of the manual worker, as they should and he devotes the greater part of the novel to describing the way of life, the nature of the mining community and this reveals the extent to which the miner and those who worked in the shipyards when they existed and steel works had the cash in hand to drink regularly at the club especially at weekends when they went with their wives or girlfriend and this included shorts where they got drunk, many fighting drunk.
I had one Sunday lunch experience of a miners club which was well packed out on two floors by several hundred men slowly supping pints and reading in comparative silence behind the popular Sunday papers. This was after the Sunday night knees up with their wives and entertainment. I met the committee in their room and then joined everyone for drinks and the Bingo. In the days when Orwell investigated women were only allowed into the clubs on the Saturday evening, but by the mid 1970’s there were sessions of Bingo for the ladies each week. Sunday lunch time was the men’s Bingo with cuts of meat for some of the prizes but the main prize was a month’s wages after which the men went home to their families and Sunday lunch between 2 and 3 depending on which part for the estate they lived or indeed if they came from further affield.
Clancy married one the sixties British feminists so he paid particular attention in the novel to the traditional industrial culture of the menfolk who could live with their wives being found in another‘s bed more than cope with being found washing up the dishes. This was not as chauvinistic as it sounds because after your shift upon shift underground you did not have much energy for anything else, as Clancy records the moan of the wives, uttered behind the backs of the men was about the lack of personal attention, and their at times hatred for the life they found themselves although in front of their man they would keep silent, until the drink took its toll on the Saturday and returned to comfort of their homes, albeit sometimes with a best mate or two and their women. Relationships were often direct and raw and the rough stuff was not restricted to union and political matters with the children awoken treated roughly mostly playfully but as indeed as I was to find out worse, much worse.
Clancy describes attending union meetings, club committees and conversations with some of bigwigs in this hierarchy of proletariat hierarchies and what he said shows an appreciation of the realities. t Eric Blair also attended political meetings, including those of the Communist Party and an Oswald Moseley gathering but rather than detailing these, the second part of his book is a general statement of his views on the true nature of poverty in the UK, on class and a accurate but depressing conclusion that fundamental change would not take place from the main political parties and that was needed was new approach. The Second World War with all his horrors, the genocide and the destruction together with the deprivations suffered by the majority of the people and which I experienced throughout my childhood, nevertheless did produce significance changes with the creation of the National Health Service of which I experienced, the Social Security based Welfare State , the development of public sector Welfare Service, the raising of the school leaving age, an expansion in the provision of public housing, important improvements in health and safety at work and some progress in the emancipation of women.
Before coming to his political conclusions Blair covers the reality of housing conditions and the true levels of unemployment and of poverty and what interests me especially are the parallels between then and now where because of the mobility between countries and the increased level of home ownership, individual living longer and on their own the need for low cost social housing to rent and own has become even greater although the level of accommodation generally available bears no comparison. I was based in in a portable metal bath during my early years with adults with a miscellany of aunts and first cousins milling around which I hated, and my mother in law only had an internal bathroom and toilet added to her council estate house in the late 1960’s we were so overcrowded that I slept at one end of a double bed with my care mother and my birth mother and another sister at the other until after my eleventh year, in fact I had moved from independent primary to secondary level education schools before a two bedroom requisitioned property was allocated.
He also explodes the myth about the numbers registered for employment i.e. the unemployed put two million, reflected the numbers actually out of work because in most households females of working age and sons of working age would not be registered as only one person per household was eligible for full benefit during the period when his unemployed insurance was valid. He was given 17/- a week as the head and 9/- if married for his wife plus 3/- for each child under 14r that is 32/ for a family with two children unless there were older children earning when the income was allowed. There was then a transitional period of payment of 26 weeks before you were required to seek help from the Public Assistance Committee and whose records of Committee in South Shields I studied, inherited in my office in 1974 and where for example a woman if she had a second illegitimate child was not given relief but committed to a lunatic asylum, as hospital mental health facilities were then described.
So the average family, whether short term or long term unemployed with two to three children averaged 30/- a week of which it was assumed a quarter would go on rent and by any standards then they were poor, with those who were single, including the elderly worse hit plus all those whose income from work, often part time work such as Dockers and those in the building trades amounted to the same or less, and he concluded, with a figure challenged at the time of one third or more of the population was living in physical poverty and without proper educational opportunity and good health care. Given that a substantial number of other people were concerned about this situation he posed the question why are more people not Socialists willing to take political, industrial and other action? And the main reason he gives is class in the UK, class that can be defined and class that is felt. This he discusses at length in Chapter 8 which he begins by admitting that the road from Mandalay ( where he trained as a policeman ) and Wigan had been along one ( lasting over ten years) and the reasons for taking onto this road were not immediately clear, to which I add and to kill and be killed in civil war between people with whom you have had no previous involvement, is not clear to me, except that I assume that he stopped at Gibraltar on his way out and back from Burma.
He explains that he felt he needed to see at first hand what mass unemployment was like at its worst at close quarters because he accepted that views and position of the intellectual socialist was very different from the working man. Even as late as 1975 I came across the view that if a married man applied for the same job as a woman, he would get preference irrespective of whether the female was better qualified and experienced, and some older men continue to hold this view. This is first written declaration that I have seen that Eric Blair saw himself as an intellectual socialist and separated from the proletariat by his background and class from which eh struggles to free himself, claiming greater success than most of the intellectual socialists of his day
Blair says he was born into the upper middle class an assessment with which I also concur although the position was reinforced by his public school education and going to Eton in particular, which remains an important cross over point with the upper class. However he then defines his social status in money terms for between £2000 and £3000 a year with father at the lower end, but admits the English class is not defined by money as the middle class can include those with incomes are as low as £300 a year. A naval officer and a grocer may earn the same amount a year and on issues such a war or a general strike they might be on the same side but in other respects they would live in different worlds. He suggests that until the first World War the primary consideration was whether you were a gentleman or not and the positions open to the gentleman with no land or inherited wealth included the Army, the Navy, the Church, Law and to less extent medicine. Such an individual knew about servants and how to tip although at most you would have was two in your residence and you might know how to shoot and to ride and how to order a suit and which restaurants to go to but in practice you could not afford a tailor or the best of restaurants. He argued that these were not the real bourgeoisie who were in the £2000 a year position and with they financial padding between themselves and those the plunder. Because of this analysis he therefore included in the poor not just those who produced by their manual labour or who would work in such occupations if they could but also a vast swathe of people who would consider themselves middle class through their gentility. There is much with this analysis that I agree not just in the 1930s but which is carried through to the sixties and where there are vestiges to this day, The concept of gentility has almost disappeared. Those who wear suit are regarded differently from the majority who do not and those who were tailored suit are still considered superior. The acquisition of wealth alone is not long considered to be the virtue it was from the maritime adventurer and industrial entrepreneur. Public school and a region less accent are still considered superior and people covered the order of the British Empire, the bestowing a knighthood and the status of the aristocracy especially in the Counties.
While I believe that class continues to have a negative influence on the politics but the way society works in the UK ones birth, education, accent and financial state is not necessarily an inhibitor to making advancement although there has been less social mobility over the past two decades than over the past 50’s to 70’s according to views, During an online review I came across an article on the politics of George Orwell on the site of Socialist of Great Britain which then pursued the crude Marxist premise that there can be only two classes the capital class who do not produce and the proletariat who do. This is of course nonsense especially with the attached moral implication that to be a capitalist is morally wrong and that to be a member of the proletariat is always good. I mention this because despite the article’s strictures Orwell in chapter 8 shows the same tendency of his class to see manual work as good rather than necessary and that because a man does a difficult and dangerous job it is OK that he swears, is violent, lacks manners, talks irrationally, is racially prejudice, religiously intolerant and so on. There is also the false assumption that worker a manager. a private an officer without appropriate training he will do as good or a better job than someone who becomes an officer via a middle or upper class background and education. Neither will do an effective job unless they are properly trained for the task there required and have the strength of character and the personality to become a confident leader of others.
It is in Chapter nine that I came across more contradictions and much explanation of why Orwell at 33 was on the verge of going to Spain to fight. He admits that at 14 and 15 at Eton he was a snob but no more than the others of his class and generation but this also coincided with the First World War ending and the Russian Revolution and claims it was a queer time to be at school as throughout the nations there was running a revolution feeling. How he knew this at that time is a great puzzle even if it was true which it was not, no more than what happened after World War II when the mood was for change and given the failure of governments in the 1920 it is to the credit Atlee that he despite the economic constraints and the huge war debt he had he majority to achieve major reforms through the democratic process, he also claims that people were far more radical in the 1920s than in the later thirties were again is nonsense. The working class has always been reactionary and small c conservative and remains so There has always been the black economy the selling of knocks off and the get away with it in terms of avoiding effort at work, more so when sanctioned by a union umbrella and exploiting the benefits system. I also found that despite the arrogance, class hatreds and racism which runs through the middle and upper class there is just as great a strand of empathy, tolerance and commitment to ameliorate unjustified inequalities and injustice. Blair argues that from an early age he raged against the capitalism system. I do not believe him. He joined one of the four strong arms of the imperialist capitalism, the police. He then argues that his approach to the native population was different from all his colleagues yet he remained for five years a feat which I suspect was nigh on impossible in that you either accepted the culture even if you did not wholeheartedly agree with every aspect. He watched the hangings, shot the elephant, beat he prisoners like everyone else, had a man servant dress him and it is difficult to believe that given his life long approach to sex did not avail himself of indigenous women for his bed. I am also inclined to challenge his assertion that he came to hate imperialism before his return to England. He returned to England on holiday recuperation from fever and only then decided to resign and become a writer. In other words I am suggesting that even when he came to write the second part of the Road to Wigan Pier hew as still working through his prejudices and trying bridge the gulf he felt between his views and feelings and those all around him. It was only by going to Spain, and seeing what happened when the when the Stalin directed communists turned on POUM and the anarchists and was shot in the throat that he began to grasp the reality of the words he had been writing and the experience destroyed the myopic vision he had until then.
As I write this I appreciate that I am doing a great disservice and misrepresentation of this normal man, just as complex as most but prepared to cross the line, step off the edge to find out not just what doing so was like but how doing so reinforced or modified his views at that time. I suspect that he grasped that it is possible to hold contradictory views at the same time and to know that something is right or wrong without necessarily being able to articulate or explain. My conclusion is that he was stronger about recording his own processes than he was about those of other people something which he admitted in relation to proletariat but found more difficult to accept in relation to the bourgeoisie.
Blair admits in Chapter 10 that making friends with Tramps, beggars and other social outcasts does not solve the problems of poverty and social inequality and that they are no more typical of the working class than the literary intelligentsia are typical of the bourgeoisie.. What he says is that he was able to get on with and close to those members of the underclass he encountered than the working class with which he mingled in the lodging houses or when staying with miners in their homes.. He then makes several revealing admissions first saying that it is no good clapping a working man or the back as saying he is as good a man himself. Don’t be ridiculous Eric whose says you are a good man and who says the particular working man is a good man?. Your talking simplistic literary hogwash! He then attacks the ILP members he encountered for not being proletarians yet believing that they knew what was right or better for the working class than themselves, Again this is a simplistic divide. The individual ILP member may or may not have known what was right just as the individual member of the proletariat may get it horribly wrong. You miss the whole point of equality under the law... The working man or woman an the occupationally unemployed man or woman has just the same right as Orwell to stand for election to a political office, right to a job etc conditional only on being approved by a political party or gaining sufficient nominations to stand as an independent, or to be considered for a job with appropriate qualifications, training and experience. They should then be judged by their performance, not what they said before or after or matters unrelated to the political position or occupational post. Collectively a group of educated land owning and or wealthy business may make a better or worse job of running a county council as a group of trade unionist and manual worker housewives than running a London Borough and vie versa irrespective of political party labels and policies, just as no reorganisation works as designed or hoped for unless you recruit people who have helped devise the reorganisation and or understand and believe in it.
In Chapter 11 he poses the question What about Socialism? I was struck by his 1930 comment that even the middle class for the first time in their history are feeling the pinch. What would you make of now Eric or of the 13 years of Labour Government? He then makes the statement that socialism if applied world wide would give everyone enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else! Blair expresses amazement that socialism was not progressing, going backwards with the Fascists going forward. He then goes on to criticise those who argue that socialism is no more or else than economic justice and defines his utopian society as somewhere with at its cornerstone family life, the pub, football and local politics and he was not joking.
Where I do agree is that many of those who push ideologies do not communicate that there is a love of anybody, just as I inappropriate told a couple of pontificating pacifists that in reality they were violent men searching for peace for themselves. In this and the next chapter he makes some attempt to understand the good and the bad aspects of Fascism well as Communism as a means of understanding why an increasing number of people appeared to support Fascism and were turning away from socialism. So far he had not defined what socialism is to him in any meaningful way and he concludes the chapter by stating that it is primarily justice and freedom. In his final chapter he asserts that anyone who has a genuine hatred of tyranny and war must be on the socialist side and goes on to say that the role of thinking man is not to reject socialism but to humanize it. A real socialist will want to overthrow tyranny. The issue of class as distinct from mere economic status has got to be faced more than it had been. He goes on to argue that there no chance of righting the conditions which he has described or preventing Fascism from taking over in England without bringing an effective socialist party into existence. On returning from Spain he was to join the Independent Labour Party.
Did the turning point come when at the suggestion of Victor Gollancz he spent a couple of months in Wigan Sheffield and Barnsley and Leeds investigating social conditions and the lives of the proletariat, going down a mine, listening to an Oswald Moseley speech and attending a meetings or meetings of a local Communist Party.? The outcome was his book the Road to Wigan Pier published in 1937 during his time in Spain. I first skipped through the book online on 12th February 2013, and then pausing to study several aspects and appreciated that while, the trip was recommended to him, Blair had defined himself as an intellectual socialist who needed to gain first hand knowledge and the perspective of those who made up the proletariat. His findings led to the question why are not the majority of people in UK socialists and demanding and taking action?
The book is in three parts. The first chapter is a kind of forward and an extension to Down Out in Paris and London in that he stays in a doss house in Wigan where in theory the wife runs the accommodation with the help and a daughter and daughter to be and the husband runs a Tripe shop on the ground floor. We learn about the conditions of the accommodation and shop, the people who run it and the other residents. In reality as with Down and Out he or his editors juggled the truth for literary and commercial convenience for just as he went tramping before going to Paris, he went to Wigan before going down the pits and staying at the homes of miners and which I believe had the greatest of impact on his thinking as it has all those who have live and worked among those who once made up the mining community, separate hierarchy from the rest of proletariat, including those working in the shipyards and steel works often regarded as the industrial elite, in the same way that the scaffolders and structure makers of the building trades or the marines and other special forces are elites of the armed services.
The next two chapters covers his experience of going down a pit, making the point that to take in the life underground you need to visit several times and he communicates the challenge of using the cage to get to the mine floor, then the difficulties getting to the latest seam face and then the difficult business of trying to get clean as well together with dangers of work, and the diseases of the eyes and chest in the days before nationalization and the dramatic reduction in deaths and accidents that then occurred..
He also spells out the actual earning against the misleading presentation of averages, the stoppages from what is actually handed, deductions enforced and deductions voluntary. There are then chapters on the housing conditions and the cost living as well as the reality of the level of unemployment and the difference between the official figures and the numbers who would work but are unable to do so. One has to judge this book in terms of the situation and public awareness at the time and in the context of other books that attempted to describe the lives, the working conditions and the income and expenditure of the poor.
When I studied economic and social history the benchmarks had been set by J L and Barbara Hammond in their books on the Village and Town Labourer 1760 to 1832. Then there was Henry Matthew on London’s Labour and London’s Poor on the 1840’s. G D H Cole wrote his masterpiece history of the British Working Class Movements in 1925 and then in 1948 he published his update to 1947 and which is matched by his work with Raymond Postgate, The first part of the Road to Wigan Pier is more journalism than social study but he provides hard facts about what people earn and what they have to spend and something of conditions in which they live and he rightly gives prominence to the miners and their conditions and which was further brilliantly exposed in Clancy Sigal‘s book Weekend on Dinlock, published as a novel two decades later.
Blair goes down the coal mine and describes the conditions in which the men work in considerable detail communicating the hardship and the dangers together with the impact on their lives. “ Most of the things you imagine are there, the heat, the noise the darkness and the foul air. The aspect that one tends to forget is that as one approaches the coal face it is impossible to walk upright and Blair at over six feet found this very difficult and a journey of one mile takes hour whereas the experienced miner whose limbs have adjusted to the conditions will take twenty minutes. Then getting out the coal with pick axe is a problem because unlike above ground you have to work at best on your knees and one reason why miners take so long to clean themselves is that dust gets everywhere and they wear just thin trunks and shin pads with clogs on their feet. It is not surprising that the bodies of the miners are covered with scars and that injuries are common. I have looked at the lists of the dead in the mines here in South Shields, in Jarrow, Hebburn, Bolden and Whitburn, and then horrifying number of women, the high percentage of young men and boys 14 to 20, of the totals alarming in themselves, that is before nationalization when safety became the priority it ought to have been and numbers plummeted to almost zero such as in pits like Westoe colliery where men went files miles under the North Sea here in South Shields.
He also describes he use of the power drills and of explosives which if the charge is too powerful with bring down the roof as well as bring out the coal. And he has to work continuously and at pace to achieve the two tons an hour required and you try shifting two tons of earth an hour above ground! He makes the point that even where the mines have pithead baths these have come out of their own welfare fund and that the numbers of baths available is inadequate. The consequence is that while moat miners are able to clean their face, getting the dust out of the eyes and nostrils and with the help of mothers and wives from their backs it is only at weekends that many are fully clean to the church or chapel or going to match on Saturdays and for a drink at the at the welfare club afterwards. Ten there are disability illnesses of the eye and the chest.
My bench mark novel for describing the nature of coal mining is not Richard Llewellyn How Green was my Valley, which I also possesses and which was made into an excellent film which is still occasionally shown on a film channel, but the almost now unknown Weekend in Dinlock by the American Clancy Sigal which was published in 1960 and I have the first Penguin Books print 3/6 1962. At the time reference was made to following in the footsteps of Orwell because he locates his mine in the Barnsley area now regarded as south Yorkshire although when I was there a few years later it was part of the West Riding County Council with its HQ in Wakefield for whom I worked. Sigal is now better known as a film script writer and with his best known contribution as a co writer of the important film of the life of Frida Kahlo, a film based on a biographical work by Hayden Herrea both of which I possess and value, and for his autobiographical novel Going Away which was published just after Weekend in Dinlock.
Clancy Sigal’s book builds up to his fictionalised visit down a mine and his description is no less vivid and although by then the pitheads had baths and the main thoroughfares were well lit but with developing technology the depth of workings had become greater as had the distance required to travel to the pitface and whereas in Orwell’s book, his guide adjust his pace to that of the visitor, Sigal finds it impossible to keep up and lags behind losing contact, such was his difficulty and because of heat and foul air constantly hitting his well covered head he become dizzy and he has to pinch himself from passing out
Both books, a quarter of a century apart go into some detail about wages with Orwell makes the point that only those at the coal face, rather like train drivers on the railways earn the best wages, but the work is paid according to tonnage with some of the best rates in Scotland and those in Durham at the lower end. In the days before social security miners in Yorkshire paid 1/3 for unemployment Infirmary 2p Hospital 1p Benevolent fund 6p and Union fees 6p and they were also required to pay for their individual lamps at 6p a week, for sharpening their tools 6p and the check weigh man 9p.The men also contributed a shilling a week towards the welfare of window and the children of colleagues who had been killed.
For often around £2 a week £100 -130 as year at best the coal face man is producing a vast tonnage which worked out at 280m tons a year per mineworker, that is those working above and below ground, the maintenance men, those move the coal face from the face to the surface, weighing and grading in addition to the coal face men and with production having risen 10% over the previous two decades.
Sigal also looks at wages where by 1960 the conditions at the pit head as well as coal face had improved but the wages has become close to the top end of the manual worker, as they should and he devotes the greater part of the novel to describing the way of life, the nature of the mining community and this reveals the extent to which the miner and those who worked in the shipyards when they existed and steel works had the cash in hand to drink regularly at the club especially at weekends when they went with their wives or girlfriend and this included shorts where they got drunk, many fighting drunk.
I had one Sunday lunch experience of a miners club which was well packed out on two floors by several hundred men slowly supping pints and reading in comparative silence behind the popular Sunday papers. This was after the Sunday night knees up with their wives and entertainment. I met the committee in their room and then joined everyone for drinks and the Bingo. In the days when Orwell investigated women were only allowed into the clubs on the Saturday evening, but by the mid 1970’s there were sessions of Bingo for the ladies each week. Sunday lunch time was the men’s Bingo with cuts of meat for some of the prizes but the main prize was a month’s wages after which the men went home to their families and Sunday lunch between 2 and 3 depending on which part for the estate they lived or indeed if they came from further affield.
Clancy married one the sixties British feminists so he paid particular attention in the novel to the traditional industrial culture of the menfolk who could live with their wives being found in another‘s bed more than cope with being found washing up the dishes. This was not as chauvinistic as it sounds because after your shift upon shift underground you did not have much energy for anything else, as Clancy records the moan of the wives, uttered behind the backs of the men was about the lack of personal attention, and their at times hatred for the life they found themselves although in front of their man they would keep silent, until the drink took its toll on the Saturday and returned to comfort of their homes, albeit sometimes with a best mate or two and their women. Relationships were often direct and raw and the rough stuff was not restricted to union and political matters with the children awoken treated roughly mostly playfully but as indeed as I was to find out worse, much worse.
Clancy describes attending union meetings, club committees and conversations with some of bigwigs in this hierarchy of proletariat hierarchies and what he said shows an appreciation of the realities. t Eric Blair also attended political meetings, including those of the Communist Party and an Oswald Moseley gathering but rather than detailing these, the second part of his book is a general statement of his views on the true nature of poverty in the UK, on class and a accurate but depressing conclusion that fundamental change would not take place from the main political parties and that was needed was new approach. The Second World War with all his horrors, the genocide and the destruction together with the deprivations suffered by the majority of the people and which I experienced throughout my childhood, nevertheless did produce significance changes with the creation of the National Health Service of which I experienced, the Social Security based Welfare State , the development of public sector Welfare Service, the raising of the school leaving age, an expansion in the provision of public housing, important improvements in health and safety at work and some progress in the emancipation of women.
Before coming to his political conclusions Blair covers the reality of housing conditions and the true levels of unemployment and of poverty and what interests me especially are the parallels between then and now where because of the mobility between countries and the increased level of home ownership, individual living longer and on their own the need for low cost social housing to rent and own has become even greater although the level of accommodation generally available bears no comparison. I was based in in a portable metal bath during my early years with adults with a miscellany of aunts and first cousins milling around which I hated, and my mother in law only had an internal bathroom and toilet added to her council estate house in the late 1960’s we were so overcrowded that I slept at one end of a double bed with my care mother and my birth mother and another sister at the other until after my eleventh year, in fact I had moved from independent primary to secondary level education schools before a two bedroom requisitioned property was allocated.
He also explodes the myth about the numbers registered for employment i.e. the unemployed put two million, reflected the numbers actually out of work because in most households females of working age and sons of working age would not be registered as only one person per household was eligible for full benefit during the period when his unemployed insurance was valid. He was given 17/- a week as the head and 9/- if married for his wife plus 3/- for each child under 14r that is 32/ for a family with two children unless there were older children earning when the income was allowed. There was then a transitional period of payment of 26 weeks before you were required to seek help from the Public Assistance Committee and whose records of Committee in South Shields I studied, inherited in my office in 1974 and where for example a woman if she had a second illegitimate child was not given relief but committed to a lunatic asylum, as hospital mental health facilities were then described.
So the average family, whether short term or long term unemployed with two to three children averaged 30/- a week of which it was assumed a quarter would go on rent and by any standards then they were poor, with those who were single, including the elderly worse hit plus all those whose income from work, often part time work such as Dockers and those in the building trades amounted to the same or less, and he concluded, with a figure challenged at the time of one third or more of the population was living in physical poverty and without proper educational opportunity and good health care. Given that a substantial number of other people were concerned about this situation he posed the question why are more people not Socialists willing to take political, industrial and other action? And the main reason he gives is class in the UK, class that can be defined and class that is felt. This he discusses at length in Chapter 8 which he begins by admitting that the road from Mandalay ( where he trained as a policeman ) and Wigan had been along one ( lasting over ten years) and the reasons for taking onto this road were not immediately clear, to which I add and to kill and be killed in civil war between people with whom you have had no previous involvement, is not clear to me, except that I assume that he stopped at Gibraltar on his way out and back from Burma.
He explains that he felt he needed to see at first hand what mass unemployment was like at its worst at close quarters because he accepted that views and position of the intellectual socialist was very different from the working man. Even as late as 1975 I came across the view that if a married man applied for the same job as a woman, he would get preference irrespective of whether the female was better qualified and experienced, and some older men continue to hold this view. This is first written declaration that I have seen that Eric Blair saw himself as an intellectual socialist and separated from the proletariat by his background and class from which eh struggles to free himself, claiming greater success than most of the intellectual socialists of his day
Blair says he was born into the upper middle class an assessment with which I also concur although the position was reinforced by his public school education and going to Eton in particular, which remains an important cross over point with the upper class. However he then defines his social status in money terms for between £2000 and £3000 a year with father at the lower end, but admits the English class is not defined by money as the middle class can include those with incomes are as low as £300 a year. A naval officer and a grocer may earn the same amount a year and on issues such a war or a general strike they might be on the same side but in other respects they would live in different worlds. He suggests that until the first World War the primary consideration was whether you were a gentleman or not and the positions open to the gentleman with no land or inherited wealth included the Army, the Navy, the Church, Law and to less extent medicine. Such an individual knew about servants and how to tip although at most you would have was two in your residence and you might know how to shoot and to ride and how to order a suit and which restaurants to go to but in practice you could not afford a tailor or the best of restaurants. He argued that these were not the real bourgeoisie who were in the £2000 a year position and with they financial padding between themselves and those the plunder. Because of this analysis he therefore included in the poor not just those who produced by their manual labour or who would work in such occupations if they could but also a vast swathe of people who would consider themselves middle class through their gentility. There is much with this analysis that I agree not just in the 1930s but which is carried through to the sixties and where there are vestiges to this day, The concept of gentility has almost disappeared. Those who wear suit are regarded differently from the majority who do not and those who were tailored suit are still considered superior. The acquisition of wealth alone is not long considered to be the virtue it was from the maritime adventurer and industrial entrepreneur. Public school and a region less accent are still considered superior and people covered the order of the British Empire, the bestowing a knighthood and the status of the aristocracy especially in the Counties.
While I believe that class continues to have a negative influence on the politics but the way society works in the UK ones birth, education, accent and financial state is not necessarily an inhibitor to making advancement although there has been less social mobility over the past two decades than over the past 50’s to 70’s according to views, During an online review I came across an article on the politics of George Orwell on the site of Socialist of Great Britain which then pursued the crude Marxist premise that there can be only two classes the capital class who do not produce and the proletariat who do. This is of course nonsense especially with the attached moral implication that to be a capitalist is morally wrong and that to be a member of the proletariat is always good. I mention this because despite the article’s strictures Orwell in chapter 8 shows the same tendency of his class to see manual work as good rather than necessary and that because a man does a difficult and dangerous job it is OK that he swears, is violent, lacks manners, talks irrationally, is racially prejudice, religiously intolerant and so on. There is also the false assumption that worker a manager. a private an officer without appropriate training he will do as good or a better job than someone who becomes an officer via a middle or upper class background and education. Neither will do an effective job unless they are properly trained for the task there required and have the strength of character and the personality to become a confident leader of others.
It is in Chapter nine that I came across more contradictions and much explanation of why Orwell at 33 was on the verge of going to Spain to fight. He admits that at 14 and 15 at Eton he was a snob but no more than the others of his class and generation but this also coincided with the First World War ending and the Russian Revolution and claims it was a queer time to be at school as throughout the nations there was running a revolution feeling. How he knew this at that time is a great puzzle even if it was true which it was not, no more than what happened after World War II when the mood was for change and given the failure of governments in the 1920 it is to the credit Atlee that he despite the economic constraints and the huge war debt he had he majority to achieve major reforms through the democratic process, he also claims that people were far more radical in the 1920s than in the later thirties were again is nonsense. The working class has always been reactionary and small c conservative and remains so There has always been the black economy the selling of knocks off and the get away with it in terms of avoiding effort at work, more so when sanctioned by a union umbrella and exploiting the benefits system. I also found that despite the arrogance, class hatreds and racism which runs through the middle and upper class there is just as great a strand of empathy, tolerance and commitment to ameliorate unjustified inequalities and injustice. Blair argues that from an early age he raged against the capitalism system. I do not believe him. He joined one of the four strong arms of the imperialist capitalism, the police. He then argues that his approach to the native population was different from all his colleagues yet he remained for five years a feat which I suspect was nigh on impossible in that you either accepted the culture even if you did not wholeheartedly agree with every aspect. He watched the hangings, shot the elephant, beat he prisoners like everyone else, had a man servant dress him and it is difficult to believe that given his life long approach to sex did not avail himself of indigenous women for his bed. I am also inclined to challenge his assertion that he came to hate imperialism before his return to England. He returned to England on holiday recuperation from fever and only then decided to resign and become a writer. In other words I am suggesting that even when he came to write the second part of the Road to Wigan Pier hew as still working through his prejudices and trying bridge the gulf he felt between his views and feelings and those all around him. It was only by going to Spain, and seeing what happened when the when the Stalin directed communists turned on POUM and the anarchists and was shot in the throat that he began to grasp the reality of the words he had been writing and the experience destroyed the myopic vision he had until then.
As I write this I appreciate that I am doing a great disservice and misrepresentation of this normal man, just as complex as most but prepared to cross the line, step off the edge to find out not just what doing so was like but how doing so reinforced or modified his views at that time. I suspect that he grasped that it is possible to hold contradictory views at the same time and to know that something is right or wrong without necessarily being able to articulate or explain. My conclusion is that he was stronger about recording his own processes than he was about those of other people something which he admitted in relation to proletariat but found more difficult to accept in relation to the bourgeoisie.
Blair admits in Chapter 10 that making friends with Tramps, beggars and other social outcasts does not solve the problems of poverty and social inequality and that they are no more typical of the working class than the literary intelligentsia are typical of the bourgeoisie.. What he says is that he was able to get on with and close to those members of the underclass he encountered than the working class with which he mingled in the lodging houses or when staying with miners in their homes.. He then makes several revealing admissions first saying that it is no good clapping a working man or the back as saying he is as good a man himself. Don’t be ridiculous Eric whose says you are a good man and who says the particular working man is a good man?. Your talking simplistic literary hogwash! He then attacks the ILP members he encountered for not being proletarians yet believing that they knew what was right or better for the working class than themselves, Again this is a simplistic divide. The individual ILP member may or may not have known what was right just as the individual member of the proletariat may get it horribly wrong. You miss the whole point of equality under the law... The working man or woman an the occupationally unemployed man or woman has just the same right as Orwell to stand for election to a political office, right to a job etc conditional only on being approved by a political party or gaining sufficient nominations to stand as an independent, or to be considered for a job with appropriate qualifications, training and experience. They should then be judged by their performance, not what they said before or after or matters unrelated to the political position or occupational post. Collectively a group of educated land owning and or wealthy business may make a better or worse job of running a county council as a group of trade unionist and manual worker housewives than running a London Borough and vie versa irrespective of political party labels and policies, just as no reorganisation works as designed or hoped for unless you recruit people who have helped devise the reorganisation and or understand and believe in it.
In Chapter 11 he poses the question What about Socialism? I was struck by his 1930 comment that even the middle class for the first time in their history are feeling the pinch. What would you make of now Eric or of the 13 years of Labour Government? He then makes the statement that socialism if applied world wide would give everyone enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else! Blair expresses amazement that socialism was not progressing, going backwards with the Fascists going forward. He then goes on to criticise those who argue that socialism is no more or else than economic justice and defines his utopian society as somewhere with at its cornerstone family life, the pub, football and local politics and he was not joking.
Where I do agree is that many of those who push ideologies do not communicate that there is a love of anybody, just as I inappropriate told a couple of pontificating pacifists that in reality they were violent men searching for peace for themselves. In this and the next chapter he makes some attempt to understand the good and the bad aspects of Fascism well as Communism as a means of understanding why an increasing number of people appeared to support Fascism and were turning away from socialism. So far he had not defined what socialism is to him in any meaningful way and he concludes the chapter by stating that it is primarily justice and freedom. In his final chapter he asserts that anyone who has a genuine hatred of tyranny and war must be on the socialist side and goes on to say that the role of thinking man is not to reject socialism but to humanize it. A real socialist will want to overthrow tyranny. The issue of class as distinct from mere economic status has got to be faced more than it had been. He goes on to argue that there no chance of righting the conditions which he has described or preventing Fascism from taking over in England without bringing an effective socialist party into existence. On returning from Spain he was to join the Independent Labour Party.
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