When you
contemplate
such ugliness as this, there are two questions that strike you.
Orwell
In the hotter mines they wear only a
pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and
knee-pads. You can hardly tell by the look of them whether they are young or old. They
may be any age up to sixty or even sixty-five, but when they are black and naked they all
look alike. No one could do their work who had not a young man’s body, and a figure fit
for a guardsman at that, just a few pounds of extra flesh on the waist-line, and the
constant bending would be impossible. You can never forget that spectacle once you have
seen it — the line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their, huge
shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed. They are on the job for seven
and a half hours, theoretically without a break, for there is no time ‘off. Actually they,
snatch a quarter of an hour or so at some time during the shift to eat the food they have
brought with them, usually a hunk of bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea. The first
time I was watching the ‘fillers’ at work I put my hand upon some dreadful slimy thing
among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of tobacco. Nearly all the miners chew
tobacco, which is said to be good against thirst.
Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get much grasp of the
processes that are going on round you. This is chiefly because the mere effort of getting
from place to place; makes it difficult to notice anything else, In some ways it is even
disappointing, or at least is unlike what you have, expected. You get into the cage, which
is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two or three times as long. It holds ten
men, but they pack it like pilchards in a tin, and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The
steel door shuts upon you, and somebody working the winding gear above drops you into
the void. You have the usual momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation in
the cars, but not much sensation of movement till you get near the bottom, when the cage
slows down so abruptly that you could swear it is going upwards again. In the middle of
the run the cage probably touches sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it
touches even more. When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four hundred
yards underground. That is to say you have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of you;
hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing
things, green grass and cows grazing on it — all this suspended over your head and held
back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg. But because of the speed at
which the cage has brought you down, and the complete blackness through which you
have travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down than you would at the bottom of the
Piccadilly tube.
What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal distances that have to be
travelled underground. Before I had been down a mine I had vaguely imagined the miner
stepping out of the cage and getting to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away. I had
not realized that before he even gets to work he may have had to creep along passages as
long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the beginning, of course, a mine shaft is
sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as that seam is worked out and fresh seams are
followed up, the workings get further and further from the pit bottom. If it is a mile from
the pit bottom to the coal face, that is probably an average distance; three miles is a fairly
nonnal one; there are even said to be a few mines where it is as much as five miles. But
these distances bear no relation to distances above ground. For in all that mile or three
miles as it may be, there is hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many places
even there, where a man can stand upright.
You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred yards. You start off,
stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight or ten feet wide and about five high,
with the walls built up with slabs of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard
or two there are wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders
have buckled into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually it is bad going
underfoot — thick dust or jagged chu nk s of shale, and in some mines where there is water
it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also there is the track for the coal tubs, like a miniature
railway track with sleepers a foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk on. Everything
is grey with shale dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which seems to be the same in all
mines. You see mysterious machines of which you never learn the purpose, and bundles
of tools slung together on wires, and sometimes mice darting away from the beam of the
lamps. They are surprisingly common, especially in mines where there are or have been
horses. It would be interesting to know how they got there in the first place; possibly by
falling down the shaft — for they say a mouse can fall any distance uninjured, owing to its
surface area being so large relative to its weight. You press yourself against the wall to
make way for lines of tubs jolting slowly towards the shaft, drawn by an endless steel
cable operated from the surface. You creep through sacking curtains and thick wooden
doors which, when they are opened, let out fierce blasts of air. These doors are an
important part of the ventilation system. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by
means of fans, and the fresh air enters the other of its own accord. But if left to itself the
air will take the shortest way round, leaving the deeper workings unventilated; so all the
short cuts have to be partitioned off.
At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that soon wears off. I am
handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when the roof falls to four feet or less it is a
tough job for anybody except a dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you
have also got to keep your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and
dodge them when they come. You have, thehefore, a constant crick in the neck, but this is
nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs. After half a mile it becomes (I am not
exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You begin to wonder whether you will ever get to the
end — still more, how on earth you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and
slower. You come to a stretch of a couple of hundred yards where it is all exceptionally
low and you have to work yourself along in a squatting position. Then suddenly the roof
opens out to a mysterious height — scene of and old fall of rock, probably — and for
twenty whole yards you can stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this
there is another low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams which you
have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a relief after the squatting
business. But when you come to the end of the beams and try to get up again, you find
that your knees have temporarily struck work and refuse to lift you. You call a halt,
ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a minute or two. Your guide (a
miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles are not the same as his. ‘Only another
four hundred yards,’ he says encouragingly; you feel that he might as well say another
four hundred miles. But finally you do somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have
gone a mile and taken the best part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than
twenty minutes. Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your
strength back for several minutes before you can even watch the work in progress with
any kind of intelligence.
Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired out but because
the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You get through the low places at the
speed of a tortoise, and you have no shame now about calling a halt when your knees
give way. Even the lamp you are carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you
stumble you drop it; whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams
becomes more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. Y ou try walking
head down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even the miners bang
their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why in very hot mines, where it is
necessary to go about half naked, most of the miners have what they call ‘buttons down
the back’ — that is, a permanent scab on each vertebra. When the track is down hill the
miners sometimes fit their clogs, which are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and
slide down. In mines where the ‘travelling’ is very bad all the miners carry sticks about
two and a half feet long, hollowed out below the handle. In normal places you keep your
hand on top of the stick and in the low places you slide your hand down into the hollow.
These sticks are a great help, and the wooden crash-helmets — a comparatively recent
invention — are a godsend. They look like a French or Italian steel helmet, but they are
made of some kind of pith and very light, and so strong, that you can take a violent blow
on the head without feeling it. When finally you get back to the surface you have been
perhaps three hours underground and travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted
than you would be by a twenty-live-mile walk above ground. For a week afterwards your
thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a difficult feat; you have to work your
way down in a peculiar sidelong manner, without bending the knees. Your miner friends
notice the stiffness of your walk and chaff you about it. (‘Flow’d ta like to work down pit,
eh? ’ etc. ) Yet even a miner who has been long away front work — from illness, for
instance — when he comes back to the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.
It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been down an old-fashioned
pit (most of the pits in England are old-fashioned) and actually gone as far as the coal
face, is likely to say so. But what I want to emphasize is this. Here is this frightful
business of crawling to and fro, which to any nonnal person is a hard day’s work in itself;
and it is not part of the miner’s work at all, it is merely an extra, like the City man’s daily
ride in the Tube. The miner does that journey to and fro, and sandwiched in between
there are seven and a half hours of savage work. I have never travelled much more than a
mile to the coal face; but often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other
than coal-miners would never get there at all. This is the kind of point that one is always
liable to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you think of depth, heat, darkness,
blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you don’t think, necessarily, of those miles of
creeping to and fro. There is the question of time, also. A miner’s working shift of seven
and a half hours does not sound very long, but one has got to add on to it at least an hour
a day for ‘travelling’, more often two hours and sometimes three. Of course, the
‘travelling’ is not technically work and the miner is not paid for it; but it is as like work
as makes no difference. It is easy to say that miners don’t mind all this. Certainly, it is not
the same for them as it would be for you or me. They have done it since childhood, they
have the right muscles hardened, and they can move to and fro underground with a
startling and rather horrible agility. A miner puts his head down and runs, with a long
swinging stride, through places where I can only stagger. At the workings you see them
on all fours, skipping round the pit props almost like dogs. But it is quite a mistake to
think that they enjoy it. I have talked about this to scores of miners and they all admit that
the ‘travelling’ is hard work; in any case when you hear them discussing a pit among
themselves the ‘travelling’ is always one of the things they discuss. It is said that a shift
always returns from work faster than it goes; nevertheless the miners all say that it is the
coming away after a hard day’s work, that is especially irksome. It is part of their work
and they are equal to it, but certainly it is an effort. It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing
a smallish mountain before and after your day’s work.
When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get some grasp of the
processes that are going on underground. (I ought to say, by the way, that I know nothing
whatever about the technical side of mining: I am merely describing what I have seen. )
Coal lies in thin seams between enormous layers of rock, so that essentially the process of
getting it out is like scooping the central layer from a Neapolitan ice. In the old days the
miners used to cut straight into the coal with pick and crowbar — a very slow job because
coal, when lying in its virgin state, is almost as hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary
work is done by an electrically-driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely
tough and powerful band-saw, running horizontally instead of vertically, with teeth a
couple of inches long and half an inch or an inch thick. It can move backwards or
forwards on its own power, and the men operating it can rotate it this way or that.
Incidentally it makes one of the most awful noises I have ever heard, and sends forth
clouds of coal dust which make it impossible to see more than two to three feet and
almost impossible to breathe. The machine travels along the coal face cutting into the
base of the coal and undennining it to the depth of five feet or five feet and a half; after
this it is comparatively easy to extract the coal to the depth to which it has been
undermined. Where it is ‘difficult getting’, however, it has also to be loosened with
explosives. A man with an electric drill, like a rather small version of the drills used in
street-mending, bores holes at intervals in the coal, inserts blasting powder, plugs it with
clay, goes round the corner if there is one handy (he is supposed to retire to twenty-five
yards distance) and touches off the charge with an electric current. This is not intended to
bring the coal out, only to loosen it. Occasionally, of course, the charge is too powerful,
and then it not only brings the coal out but brings the roof down as well.
After the blasting has been done the ‘fillers’ can tumble the coal out, break it up and
shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It comes out first in monstrous boulders which may
weigh anything up to twenty tons. The conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs, and the tubs are
shoved into the main road and hitched on to an endlessly revolving steel cable which
drags them to the cage. Then they are hoisted, and at the surface the coal is sorted by
being run over screens, and if necessary is washed as well. As far as possible the ‘dirt’ —
the shale, that is — is used for making the roads below. All what cannot be used is sent to
the surface and dumped; hence the monstrous ‘dirt-heaps’, like hideous grey mountains,
which are the characteristic scenery of the coal areas. When the coal has been extracted to
the depth to which the machine has cut, the coal face has advanced by five feet. Fresh
props are put in to hold up the newly exposed roof, and during the next shift the conveyor
belt is taken to pieces, moved five feet forward and re-assembled. As far as possible the
three operations of cutting, blasting and extraction are done in three separate shifts, the
cutting in the afternoon, the blasting at night (there is a law, not always kept, that forbids
its being done when other men are working near by), and the ‘filling’ in the morning
shift, which lasts from six in the morning until half past one.
Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only watch it for a
short time, and it is not until you begin making a few calculations that you realize what a
stupendous task the ‘fillers’ are perfonning. Normally each man has to clear a space four
or five yards wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so that if
the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut out, break up and load on
to the belt something between seven and twelve cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking
a cubic yard as weighing twenty-seven hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a
speed approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel
work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I
shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is
tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don’t have to work kneeling down, a thousand
feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take;
nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner’s job would be as
much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand
National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are
some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable
road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no
conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would
kill me in a few weeks.
Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people
inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily
go through life without ever hearing about. Probably majority of people would even
prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world
above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from
baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the
arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of
revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as
much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking and
shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at any rate without pausing for more
than a few weeks at the most. In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the
Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the
poets may scratch one another’s backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole
we are not aware of it; we all know that we ‘must have coal’, but we seldom or never
remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my
comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives
up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of
tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I
make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the
mines. It is just ‘coal’ — something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives
mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it.
You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once
remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the
coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit
world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.
It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There are still
living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with the
harness round their waists, and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all
fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were
pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women
dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of
coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it. It
is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its
existence. More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual
worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so
vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we
are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even
humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your
own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to
you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out
that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit.
Supp. , and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of
Marxism for Infants — all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor
drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving
their shovels forward with anns and belly muscles of steel.
NORTH AND SOUTH (1937) (FROM “THE ROAD TO WIGAN
PIER”)
As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice much
difference until you are beyond Binningham. In Coventry you might as well be in
Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham is not unlike Norwich Market, and
between all the towns of the Midlands there stretches a villa-civilization indistinguishable
from that of the South. It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns
and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism — an ugliness
so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.
A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless. It is
something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin. On the
outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed
completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and over-
head the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country. Often the
slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the red rivulets of fire winding this way
and that, and also the slow-moving blue flames of sulphur, which always seem on the
point of expiring and always spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does
ultimately, only an evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface.
One in the slums of Wigan, used as a playground, looks like a choppy sea suddenly
frozen; ‘the flock mattress’, it is called locally. Even centuries hence when the plough
drives over the places where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still
be distinguishable from an aeroplane.
I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar
landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the
mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of
smoke. The canal path was 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 was horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with
ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock
gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished;
nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. But even Wigan is
beautiful compared with Sheffield. Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called
the ugliest town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in
everything, very likely do make that claim for it. It has a population of half a million and
it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred.
And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have
begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that runs through the town is-usually bright
yellow with some chemical or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the factory
chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there would have been far more
if the air had not been obscured by smoke. One scene especially lingers in my mind. A
frightful patch of waste ground (somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a
squalor that would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered
with newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four-roomed
houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory
chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a
railway embankment made of the slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of waste
ground, a cubical building of red and yellow brick, with the sign ‘Thomas Grocock,
Haulage Contractor’.
At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the blackness of
everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister magnificence. Sometimes the
drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze
themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors
of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you
hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under the blow.
The pottery towns are almost equally ugly in a pettier way. Right in among the rows of
tiny blackened houses, part of the street as it were, are the ‘pot banks’ — conical brick
chimneys like gigantic burgundy bottles buried in the soil and belching their smoke
almost in your face. You come upon monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and
almost as deep, with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the
other workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the cliff with
their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather, and even the snow was black. The best
thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly.
Less than ten miles away you can stand in un-defiled country, on the almost naked hills,
and the pottery towns are only a smudge in the distance.
When you contemplate such ugliness as this, there are two questions that strike you. First,
is it inevitable? Secondly, does it matter?
I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably ugly about
industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of its own nature to be ugly,
any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a cathedral. It all depends on the architectural
tradition of the period. The industrial towns of the North are ugly because they happen to
have been built at a time when modem methods of steel-construction and smoke-
abatement were unknown, and when everyone was too busy making money to think
about anything else. They go on being ugly largely because the Northerners have got
used to that kind of thing and do not notice it. Many of the people in Sheffield or
Manchester, if they smelled the air along the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that
it had no taste in it. But since the war, industry has tended to shift southward and in doing
so has grown almost comely. The typical post-war factory is not a gaunt barrack or an
awful chaos of blackness and belching chimneys; it is a glittering white structure of
concrete, glass, and steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips. Look at the
factories you pass as you travel out of London on the G. W. R. ; they may not be aesthetic
triumphs but certainly they are not ugly in the same way as the Sheffield gasworks. But
in any case, though the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about it and
the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it is centrally important. And
perhaps it is not even desirable, industrialism being what it is, that it should learn to
disguise itself as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark
Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious
and splendid gods. Moreover, even in the worst of the industrial towns one sees a great
deal that is not ugly in the narrow aesthetic sense. A belching chimney or a stinking slum
is repulsive chiefly because it implies warped lives and ailing children. Look at it from a
purely aesthetic standpoint and it may, have a certain macabre appeal. I find that anything
outrageously strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I abominate it. The
landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the
qualities of nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged to
write a novel about them to get rid of them. (In all novels about the East the scenery is the
real subject-matter. ) It would probably be quite easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold
Bennett did, from the blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine
Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap. But the beauty or ugliness of
industrialism hardly matters. Its real evil lies far deeper and is quite uneradicable. It is
important to remember this, because there is always a temptation to think that
industrialism is hannless so long as it is clean and orderly.
But when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the
unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of certain real
differences which do exist, but still more because of the North-South antithesis which has
been rubbed into us for such a long time past. There exists in England a curious cult of
Northemness, sort of Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South will always
take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will
explain that it is only in the North that life is ‘real’ life, that the industrial work done in
the North is the only ‘real’ work, that the North is inhabited by ‘real’ people, the South
merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’,
plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate, and
lazy — that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the
first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among
savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a
barbarian out for loot. And feelings of this kind, which are the result of tradition, are not
affected by visible facts. Just as an Englishman five feet four inches high and twenty-nine
inches round the chest feels that as an Englishman he is the physical superior of Camera
(Camera being a Dago), so also with the Northerner and the Southerner. I remember a
weedy little Yorkshireman, who would almost certainly have run away if a fox-terrier had
snapped at him, telling me that in the South of England he felt Tike a wild invader’. But
the cult is often adopted by people who are not by birth Northerners themselves. A year
or two ago a friend of mine, brought up in the South but now living in the North, was
driving me through Suffolk in a car. We passed through a rather beautiful village. He
glanced disapprovingly at the cottages and said:
‘Of course most of the villages in Yorkshire are hideous; but the Yorkshiremen are
splendid chaps. Down here it’s just the other way about — beautiful villages and rotten
people. All the people in those cottages there are worthless, absolutely worthless. ’
I could not help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody in that village. No, he
did not know them; but because this was East Anglia they were obviously worthless.
Another friend of mine, again a Southerner by birth, loses no opportunity of praising the
North to the detriment of the South. Here is an extract from one of his letters to me:
I am in Clitheroe, Lanes. . . . I think running water is much more attractive in moor and
mountain country than in the fat and sluggish South. ‘The smug and silver Trent,’
Shakespeare says; and the South-er the smugger, I say.
Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only are you and I and
everyone else in the South of England written off as ‘fat and sluggish’, but even water
when it gets north of a certain latitude, ceases to be H20 and becomes something
mystically superior. But the interest of this passage is that its writer is an extremely
intelligent man of ‘advanced’ opinions who would have nothing but con-tempt for
nationalism in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as ‘One Britisher is
worth three foreigners’, and he would repudiate it with horror. But when it is a question
of North versus South, he is quite ready to generalize. All nationalistic distinctions — all
claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or
speak a different dialect — are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people
believe in them. There is no doubt about the Englishman’s inbred conviction that those
who live to the south of him are his inferiors; even our foreign policy is governed by it to
some extent. I think, therefore, that it is worth pointing out when and why it came into
being.
When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing
that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory
that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given
when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining in the naivest way that a cold
climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of
the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the superior energy of the English (actually the
laziest people in Europe) has been current for at least a hundred years. ‘Better is it for us’,
writes a Quarterly Reviewer of 1827, ‘to be condemned to labour for our country’s good
than to luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices. ’ ‘Olives, vines, and vices’ sums up the
nonnal English attitude towards the Latin races. In the mythology of Garlyle, Creasey,
etc. , the Northerner (‘Teutonic’, later ‘Nordic’) is pictured as a hefty, vigorous chap with
blond moustaches and pure morals, while the Southerner is sly, cowardly, and licentious.
This theory was never pushed to its logical end, which would have meant assuming that
the finest people in the world were the Eskimos, but it did involve admitting that the
people who lived to the north of us were superior to ourselves. Hence, partly, the cult of
Scotland and of Scotch things which has so deeply marked English life during the past
fifty years. But it was the industrialization of the North that gave the North-South
antithesis its peculiar slant. Until comparatively recently the northern part of England was
the backward and feudal part, and such industry as existed was concentrated in London
and the South-East. In the Civil War for instance, roughly speaking a war of money
versus feudalism, the North and West were for the King and the South and East for the
Parliament. But with the increasing use of coal industry passed to the North, and there
grew up a new type of man, the self-made Northern business man — the Mr Rouncewell
and Mr Bounderby of Dickens. The Northern business man, with his hateful ‘get on or
get out’ philosophy, was the dominant figure of the nineteenth century, and as a sort of
tyrannical corpse he rules us still. This is the type edified by Arnold Bennett — the type
who starts off with half a crown and ends up with fifty thousand pounds, and whose chief
pride is to be an even greater boor after he has made his money than before. On analysis
his sole virtue turns out to be a talent for making money. We were bidden to admire him
because though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant, grasping, and uncouth, he
had ‘grit’, he ‘got on’; in other words, he knew how to make money.
This kind of cant is nowadays a pure anachronism, for the Northern business man is no
longer prosperous. But traditions are not killed by facts, and the tradition of Northern’
grit’ lingers. It is still dimly felt that a Northerner will ‘get on’, i. e. make money, where a
Southerner will fail. At the back of the mind of every Yorkshireman and every
Scotchman who comes to London is a sort of Dick Whittington picture of himself as the
boy who starts off by selling newspapers and ends up as Lord Mayor. And that, really, is
at the bottom of his bumptiousness. But where one can make a great mistake is in
imagining that this feeling extends to the genuine working class. When I first went to
Yorkshire, some years ago, I imagined that I was going to a country of boors. I was used
to the London Yorkshireman with his intenninable harangues and his pride in the
supposed raciness of his dialect (’ “A stitch in time saves nine”, as we say in the West
Riding’), and I expected to meet with a good deal of rudeness. But I met with nothing of
the kind, and least of all among the miners. Indeed the Lancashire and Yorkshire miners
treated me with a kindness and courtesy that were even embarrassing; for if there is one
type of man to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner. Certainly no one
showed any sign of despising me for coming from a different part of the country. This
has its importance when one remembers that the English regional snobberies are
nationalism in miniature; for it suggests that place-snobbery is not a working-class
characteristic.
There is nevertheless a real difference between North and South, and there is at least a
tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as one enonnous Brighton inhabited by
lounge-lizards. For climatic reasons the parasitic divi-dend-drawing class tend to settle in
the South. In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without
once hearing an ‘educated’ accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the South of
England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.
Consequently, with no petty gentry to set the pace, the bourgeoisification of the working
class, though it is taking place in the North, is taking place more slowly. All the Northern
accents, for instance, persist strongly, while the Southern ones are collapsing before the
movies and the B. B. C. Hence your ‘educated’ accent stamps you rather as a foreigner
than as a chu nk of the petty gentry; and this is an immense advantage, for it makes it
much easier to get into contact with the working class.
But is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class? I shall have to discuss
that later; I will only say here that I do not think it is possible. But undoubtedly it is easier
in the North than it would be in the South to meet working-class people on approximately
equal tenns. It is fairly easy to live in a miner’s house and be accepted as one of the
family; with, say, a fann labourer in the Southern counties it probably would be
impossible. I have seen just enough of the working class to avoid idealizing them, but I
do know that you can learn a great deal in a working-class home, if only you can get
there. The essential point is that your middle-class ideals and prejudices are tested by
contact with others which are not necessarily better but are certainly different.
Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A working-class family hangs
together as a middle-class one does, but the relationship is far less tyrannical. A working
man has not that deadly weight of family prestige hanging round his neck like a
millstone. I have pointed out earlier that a middle-class person goes utterly to pieces
under the influence of poverty; and this is generally due to the behaviour of his family —
to the fact that he has scores of relations nagging and badgering him night and day for
failing to ‘get on’. The fact that the working class know how to combine and the middle
class don’t is probably due to their different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot
have an effective trade union of middle-class workers, be-cause in times of strikes almost
every middle-class wife would be egging her husband on to blackleg and get the other
fellow’s job. Another working-class characteristic, disconcerting at first, is their plain-
spokenness towards anyone they regard as an equal. If you offer a working man
something he doesn’t want, he tells you that he doesn’t want it; a middle-class person
would accept it to avoid giving offence. And again, take the working-class attitude
towards ‘education’. How different it is from ours, and how immensely sounder!
Working people often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where
‘education’ touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct.
The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen
dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me
dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I
kn ow now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the
day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on
ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying
at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea
of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his
parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his
lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a
man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh,
after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and
university education and found it a ‘sickly, debilitating debauch’. There is much in
middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class
angle.
In a working-class home — I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of
comparatively prosperous homes — you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human
atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker,
if he is in steady work and drawing good wages — an ‘if which gets bigger and bigger —
has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall
more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar
easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class interior at its best.
Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances
mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one
side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing,
and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting
himself on the rag mat — it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it
but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.
This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though not in so many as
before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one question — whether Father is in
work. But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family sitting round
the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and
could not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years into the
Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of the things I have
imagined will still be there. In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is
‘educated’, it is hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands
who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says ‘Ah wur coomin’ oop street’. And there won’t be
a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of
rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly
be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no
poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have
been sup-pressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won’t be so many children, either, if
the birth-controllers have their way. But move backwards into the Middle Ages and you
are in a world almost equally foreign. A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes in
your face because there is no chimney, mouldy bread, ‘Poor John’, lice, scurvy, a yearly
child-birth and a yearly child-death, and the priest terrifying you with tales of Hell.
Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modem 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 —
especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was
still prosperous — that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live
in.
SPILLING THE SPANISH BEANS (1937)
The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the
Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who
have been raped and crucified before the eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is
the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the
NEWS CHRONICLE and the DAILY WORKER, with their far subtler methods of
distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the
struggle.
The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government
(including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution
than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some kind of
compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao
fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever
about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time
past a reign of terror — forcible suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the
press, ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial — has been in progress.
When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had
long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any
other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the
people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not
because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the
Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries
at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes — the Communists.
Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the front-
line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle
is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying
to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are
so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England
have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force;
that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois refonnism and using the
whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of
revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as
wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them. Mr
Wyndham Lewis, for instance, ought to love the Communists, at least temporarily. In
Spain the Communist-Liberal alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that
the Spanish workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few
collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year; and
presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later, when there is no longer any need to
placate them. To see how the present situation arose, one has got to look back to the
origins of the civil war.
Franco’s bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in that it was a
military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion, and therefore had not much mass
backing, though Franco has since been trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters, apart
from certain sections of Big Business, were the land-owning aristocracy and the huge,
parasitic Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will array against it various forces which
are not in agreement on any other point. The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and
clericalism; but so does the ‘liberal’ bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more
modem version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn’t called Fascism. The ‘liberal’
bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for
the degree of progress implied in the phrase ‘la carriere ouverte aux talents’. For clearly
he has no chance to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too
poor to buy goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for bishops’
vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course to the friend of the
catamite of the duke’s illegitimate son. Hence, in the face of such a blatant reactionary as
Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality
deadly enemies, are lighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular
Front (or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously democratic appeal, People’s
Front). It is a combination with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist,
as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.
In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front is bound to make
itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism,
they are not lighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois
democracy, i. e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for
Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers understood the
issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was defeated they did not content themselves
with driving the rebellious troops out of the towns; they also took the opportunity of
seizing land and factories and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers’ government
by means of local committees, workers’ militias, police forces, and so forth. They made
the mistake, however (possibly because most of the active revolutionaries were
Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments), of leaving the Republican Government in
nominal control. And, in spite of various changes in personnel, every subsequent
Government had been of approximately the same bourgeois-refonnist character. At the
beginning this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in Catalonia,
was almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or even (this was still happening
when I reached Spain in December) to disguise themselves as workers. Later, as power
slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-
wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came out of
hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor reappeared, not much modified.
Henceforward every move, except a few dictated by military emergency, was directed
towards undoing the work of the first few months of revolution. Out of the many
illustrations I could choose, I will cite only one, the breaking-up of the old workers’
militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with officers and men
receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete equality, and the substitution
of the Popular Army (once again, in Communist jargon, ‘People’s Army’), modelled as
far as possible on an ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense
differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a military necessity, and
almost certainly it does make for military efficiency, at least for a short period. But the
undoubted purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In every
department the same policy has been followed, with the result that only a year after the
outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary bourgeois State,
with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the status quo.
This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have taken place
without foreign interference. But the military weakness of the Government made this
impossible. In the face of France’s foreign mercenaries they were obliged to turn to
Russia for help, and though the quantity of arms sup — plied by Russia has been greatly
exaggerated (in my first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary
machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into power. To
begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good military qualities of the
international Brigades (not necessarily Communist but under Communist control),
immensely raised the Communist prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico
were the only countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not only to get
money for their weapons, but to extort tenns as well. Put in their crudest form, the terms
were: ‘Crush the revolution or you get no more arms. ’ The reason usually given for the
Russian attitude is that if Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet
pact (and the hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it may be, also,
that the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would rouse unwanted echoes in
Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any direct pressure has been exerted by the
Russian Government. But this, even if true, is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties
of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain that the
Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom they control, plus the
Communist press of the whole world, have used all their immense and ever-increasing
influence upon the side of counter-revolution.
In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in Spain, on the
Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the
Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even
more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was
accompanied.
Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully dishonest. He would
tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish Government crushing the revolution,
because the revolution never happened; and that our job at present is to defeat Fascism
and defend democracy. And in this connexion it is most important to see just how the
Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works.
pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and
knee-pads. You can hardly tell by the look of them whether they are young or old. They
may be any age up to sixty or even sixty-five, but when they are black and naked they all
look alike. No one could do their work who had not a young man’s body, and a figure fit
for a guardsman at that, just a few pounds of extra flesh on the waist-line, and the
constant bending would be impossible. You can never forget that spectacle once you have
seen it — the line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their, huge
shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed. They are on the job for seven
and a half hours, theoretically without a break, for there is no time ‘off. Actually they,
snatch a quarter of an hour or so at some time during the shift to eat the food they have
brought with them, usually a hunk of bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea. The first
time I was watching the ‘fillers’ at work I put my hand upon some dreadful slimy thing
among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of tobacco. Nearly all the miners chew
tobacco, which is said to be good against thirst.
Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get much grasp of the
processes that are going on round you. This is chiefly because the mere effort of getting
from place to place; makes it difficult to notice anything else, In some ways it is even
disappointing, or at least is unlike what you have, expected. You get into the cage, which
is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two or three times as long. It holds ten
men, but they pack it like pilchards in a tin, and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The
steel door shuts upon you, and somebody working the winding gear above drops you into
the void. You have the usual momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation in
the cars, but not much sensation of movement till you get near the bottom, when the cage
slows down so abruptly that you could swear it is going upwards again. In the middle of
the run the cage probably touches sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it
touches even more. When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four hundred
yards underground. That is to say you have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of you;
hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing
things, green grass and cows grazing on it — all this suspended over your head and held
back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg. But because of the speed at
which the cage has brought you down, and the complete blackness through which you
have travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down than you would at the bottom of the
Piccadilly tube.
What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal distances that have to be
travelled underground. Before I had been down a mine I had vaguely imagined the miner
stepping out of the cage and getting to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away. I had
not realized that before he even gets to work he may have had to creep along passages as
long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the beginning, of course, a mine shaft is
sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as that seam is worked out and fresh seams are
followed up, the workings get further and further from the pit bottom. If it is a mile from
the pit bottom to the coal face, that is probably an average distance; three miles is a fairly
nonnal one; there are even said to be a few mines where it is as much as five miles. But
these distances bear no relation to distances above ground. For in all that mile or three
miles as it may be, there is hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many places
even there, where a man can stand upright.
You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred yards. You start off,
stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight or ten feet wide and about five high,
with the walls built up with slabs of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard
or two there are wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders
have buckled into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually it is bad going
underfoot — thick dust or jagged chu nk s of shale, and in some mines where there is water
it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also there is the track for the coal tubs, like a miniature
railway track with sleepers a foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk on. Everything
is grey with shale dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which seems to be the same in all
mines. You see mysterious machines of which you never learn the purpose, and bundles
of tools slung together on wires, and sometimes mice darting away from the beam of the
lamps. They are surprisingly common, especially in mines where there are or have been
horses. It would be interesting to know how they got there in the first place; possibly by
falling down the shaft — for they say a mouse can fall any distance uninjured, owing to its
surface area being so large relative to its weight. You press yourself against the wall to
make way for lines of tubs jolting slowly towards the shaft, drawn by an endless steel
cable operated from the surface. You creep through sacking curtains and thick wooden
doors which, when they are opened, let out fierce blasts of air. These doors are an
important part of the ventilation system. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by
means of fans, and the fresh air enters the other of its own accord. But if left to itself the
air will take the shortest way round, leaving the deeper workings unventilated; so all the
short cuts have to be partitioned off.
At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that soon wears off. I am
handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when the roof falls to four feet or less it is a
tough job for anybody except a dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you
have also got to keep your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders and
dodge them when they come. You have, thehefore, a constant crick in the neck, but this is
nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs. After half a mile it becomes (I am not
exaggerating) an unbearable agony. You begin to wonder whether you will ever get to the
end — still more, how on earth you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and
slower. You come to a stretch of a couple of hundred yards where it is all exceptionally
low and you have to work yourself along in a squatting position. Then suddenly the roof
opens out to a mysterious height — scene of and old fall of rock, probably — and for
twenty whole yards you can stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this
there is another low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams which you
have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a relief after the squatting
business. But when you come to the end of the beams and try to get up again, you find
that your knees have temporarily struck work and refuse to lift you. You call a halt,
ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a minute or two. Your guide (a
miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles are not the same as his. ‘Only another
four hundred yards,’ he says encouragingly; you feel that he might as well say another
four hundred miles. But finally you do somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have
gone a mile and taken the best part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than
twenty minutes. Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your
strength back for several minutes before you can even watch the work in progress with
any kind of intelligence.
Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired out but because
the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You get through the low places at the
speed of a tortoise, and you have no shame now about calling a halt when your knees
give way. Even the lamp you are carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you
stumble you drop it; whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams
becomes more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck. Y ou try walking
head down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Even the miners bang
their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why in very hot mines, where it is
necessary to go about half naked, most of the miners have what they call ‘buttons down
the back’ — that is, a permanent scab on each vertebra. When the track is down hill the
miners sometimes fit their clogs, which are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and
slide down. In mines where the ‘travelling’ is very bad all the miners carry sticks about
two and a half feet long, hollowed out below the handle. In normal places you keep your
hand on top of the stick and in the low places you slide your hand down into the hollow.
These sticks are a great help, and the wooden crash-helmets — a comparatively recent
invention — are a godsend. They look like a French or Italian steel helmet, but they are
made of some kind of pith and very light, and so strong, that you can take a violent blow
on the head without feeling it. When finally you get back to the surface you have been
perhaps three hours underground and travelled two miles, and you, are more exhausted
than you would be by a twenty-live-mile walk above ground. For a week afterwards your
thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a difficult feat; you have to work your
way down in a peculiar sidelong manner, without bending the knees. Your miner friends
notice the stiffness of your walk and chaff you about it. (‘Flow’d ta like to work down pit,
eh? ’ etc. ) Yet even a miner who has been long away front work — from illness, for
instance — when he comes back to the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.
It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been down an old-fashioned
pit (most of the pits in England are old-fashioned) and actually gone as far as the coal
face, is likely to say so. But what I want to emphasize is this. Here is this frightful
business of crawling to and fro, which to any nonnal person is a hard day’s work in itself;
and it is not part of the miner’s work at all, it is merely an extra, like the City man’s daily
ride in the Tube. The miner does that journey to and fro, and sandwiched in between
there are seven and a half hours of savage work. I have never travelled much more than a
mile to the coal face; but often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other
than coal-miners would never get there at all. This is the kind of point that one is always
liable to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you think of depth, heat, darkness,
blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you don’t think, necessarily, of those miles of
creeping to and fro. There is the question of time, also. A miner’s working shift of seven
and a half hours does not sound very long, but one has got to add on to it at least an hour
a day for ‘travelling’, more often two hours and sometimes three. Of course, the
‘travelling’ is not technically work and the miner is not paid for it; but it is as like work
as makes no difference. It is easy to say that miners don’t mind all this. Certainly, it is not
the same for them as it would be for you or me. They have done it since childhood, they
have the right muscles hardened, and they can move to and fro underground with a
startling and rather horrible agility. A miner puts his head down and runs, with a long
swinging stride, through places where I can only stagger. At the workings you see them
on all fours, skipping round the pit props almost like dogs. But it is quite a mistake to
think that they enjoy it. I have talked about this to scores of miners and they all admit that
the ‘travelling’ is hard work; in any case when you hear them discussing a pit among
themselves the ‘travelling’ is always one of the things they discuss. It is said that a shift
always returns from work faster than it goes; nevertheless the miners all say that it is the
coming away after a hard day’s work, that is especially irksome. It is part of their work
and they are equal to it, but certainly it is an effort. It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing
a smallish mountain before and after your day’s work.
When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get some grasp of the
processes that are going on underground. (I ought to say, by the way, that I know nothing
whatever about the technical side of mining: I am merely describing what I have seen. )
Coal lies in thin seams between enormous layers of rock, so that essentially the process of
getting it out is like scooping the central layer from a Neapolitan ice. In the old days the
miners used to cut straight into the coal with pick and crowbar — a very slow job because
coal, when lying in its virgin state, is almost as hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary
work is done by an electrically-driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely
tough and powerful band-saw, running horizontally instead of vertically, with teeth a
couple of inches long and half an inch or an inch thick. It can move backwards or
forwards on its own power, and the men operating it can rotate it this way or that.
Incidentally it makes one of the most awful noises I have ever heard, and sends forth
clouds of coal dust which make it impossible to see more than two to three feet and
almost impossible to breathe. The machine travels along the coal face cutting into the
base of the coal and undennining it to the depth of five feet or five feet and a half; after
this it is comparatively easy to extract the coal to the depth to which it has been
undermined. Where it is ‘difficult getting’, however, it has also to be loosened with
explosives. A man with an electric drill, like a rather small version of the drills used in
street-mending, bores holes at intervals in the coal, inserts blasting powder, plugs it with
clay, goes round the corner if there is one handy (he is supposed to retire to twenty-five
yards distance) and touches off the charge with an electric current. This is not intended to
bring the coal out, only to loosen it. Occasionally, of course, the charge is too powerful,
and then it not only brings the coal out but brings the roof down as well.
After the blasting has been done the ‘fillers’ can tumble the coal out, break it up and
shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It comes out first in monstrous boulders which may
weigh anything up to twenty tons. The conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs, and the tubs are
shoved into the main road and hitched on to an endlessly revolving steel cable which
drags them to the cage. Then they are hoisted, and at the surface the coal is sorted by
being run over screens, and if necessary is washed as well. As far as possible the ‘dirt’ —
the shale, that is — is used for making the roads below. All what cannot be used is sent to
the surface and dumped; hence the monstrous ‘dirt-heaps’, like hideous grey mountains,
which are the characteristic scenery of the coal areas. When the coal has been extracted to
the depth to which the machine has cut, the coal face has advanced by five feet. Fresh
props are put in to hold up the newly exposed roof, and during the next shift the conveyor
belt is taken to pieces, moved five feet forward and re-assembled. As far as possible the
three operations of cutting, blasting and extraction are done in three separate shifts, the
cutting in the afternoon, the blasting at night (there is a law, not always kept, that forbids
its being done when other men are working near by), and the ‘filling’ in the morning
shift, which lasts from six in the morning until half past one.
Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only watch it for a
short time, and it is not until you begin making a few calculations that you realize what a
stupendous task the ‘fillers’ are perfonning. Normally each man has to clear a space four
or five yards wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so that if
the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut out, break up and load on
to the belt something between seven and twelve cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking
a cubic yard as weighing twenty-seven hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a
speed approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel
work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I
shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is
tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don’t have to work kneeling down, a thousand
feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take;
nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner’s job would be as
much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand
National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are
some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable
road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no
conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would
kill me in a few weeks.
Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes people
inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily
go through life without ever hearing about. Probably majority of people would even
prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world
above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from
baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the
arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of
revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as
much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking and
shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at any rate without pausing for more
than a few weeks at the most. In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the
Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the
poets may scratch one another’s backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole
we are not aware of it; we all know that we ‘must have coal’, but we seldom or never
remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my
comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives
up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of
tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I
make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the
mines. It is just ‘coal’ — something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives
mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it.
You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once
remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the
coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit
world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.
It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There are still
living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with the
harness round their waists, and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all
fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were
pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women
dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of
coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it. It
is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its
existence. More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual
worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so
vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we
are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even
humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your
own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to
you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out
that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit.
Supp. , and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of
Marxism for Infants — all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor
drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving
their shovels forward with anns and belly muscles of steel.
NORTH AND SOUTH (1937) (FROM “THE ROAD TO WIGAN
PIER”)
As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice much
difference until you are beyond Binningham. In Coventry you might as well be in
Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham is not unlike Norwich Market, and
between all the towns of the Midlands there stretches a villa-civilization indistinguishable
from that of the South. It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns
and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism — an ugliness
so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.
A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless. It is
something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin. On the
outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed
completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and over-
head the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country. Often the
slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the red rivulets of fire winding this way
and that, and also the slow-moving blue flames of sulphur, which always seem on the
point of expiring and always spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does
ultimately, only an evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface.
One in the slums of Wigan, used as a playground, looks like a choppy sea suddenly
frozen; ‘the flock mattress’, it is called locally. Even centuries hence when the plough
drives over the places where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still
be distinguishable from an aeroplane.
I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar
landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the
mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of
smoke. The canal path was 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 was horribly cold. The ‘flashes’ were covered with
ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock
gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished;
nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. But even Wigan is
beautiful compared with Sheffield. Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called
the ugliest town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in
everything, very likely do make that claim for it. It has a population of half a million and
it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred.
And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have
begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that runs through the town is-usually bright
yellow with some chemical or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the factory
chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there would have been far more
if the air had not been obscured by smoke. One scene especially lingers in my mind. A
frightful patch of waste ground (somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a
squalor that would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered
with newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four-roomed
houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory
chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a
railway embankment made of the slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of waste
ground, a cubical building of red and yellow brick, with the sign ‘Thomas Grocock,
Haulage Contractor’.
At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the blackness of
everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister magnificence. Sometimes the
drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze
themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors
of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you
hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under the blow.
The pottery towns are almost equally ugly in a pettier way. Right in among the rows of
tiny blackened houses, part of the street as it were, are the ‘pot banks’ — conical brick
chimneys like gigantic burgundy bottles buried in the soil and belching their smoke
almost in your face. You come upon monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and
almost as deep, with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the
other workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the cliff with
their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather, and even the snow was black. The best
thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly.
Less than ten miles away you can stand in un-defiled country, on the almost naked hills,
and the pottery towns are only a smudge in the distance.
When you contemplate such ugliness as this, there are two questions that strike you. First,
is it inevitable? Secondly, does it matter?
I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably ugly about
industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of its own nature to be ugly,
any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a cathedral. It all depends on the architectural
tradition of the period. The industrial towns of the North are ugly because they happen to
have been built at a time when modem methods of steel-construction and smoke-
abatement were unknown, and when everyone was too busy making money to think
about anything else. They go on being ugly largely because the Northerners have got
used to that kind of thing and do not notice it. Many of the people in Sheffield or
Manchester, if they smelled the air along the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that
it had no taste in it. But since the war, industry has tended to shift southward and in doing
so has grown almost comely. The typical post-war factory is not a gaunt barrack or an
awful chaos of blackness and belching chimneys; it is a glittering white structure of
concrete, glass, and steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips. Look at the
factories you pass as you travel out of London on the G. W. R. ; they may not be aesthetic
triumphs but certainly they are not ugly in the same way as the Sheffield gasworks. But
in any case, though the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about it and
the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it is centrally important. And
perhaps it is not even desirable, industrialism being what it is, that it should learn to
disguise itself as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark
Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious
and splendid gods. Moreover, even in the worst of the industrial towns one sees a great
deal that is not ugly in the narrow aesthetic sense. A belching chimney or a stinking slum
is repulsive chiefly because it implies warped lives and ailing children. Look at it from a
purely aesthetic standpoint and it may, have a certain macabre appeal. I find that anything
outrageously strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I abominate it. The
landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the
qualities of nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged to
write a novel about them to get rid of them. (In all novels about the East the scenery is the
real subject-matter. ) It would probably be quite easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold
Bennett did, from the blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine
Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap. But the beauty or ugliness of
industrialism hardly matters. Its real evil lies far deeper and is quite uneradicable. It is
important to remember this, because there is always a temptation to think that
industrialism is hannless so long as it is clean and orderly.
But when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the
unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of certain real
differences which do exist, but still more because of the North-South antithesis which has
been rubbed into us for such a long time past. There exists in England a curious cult of
Northemness, sort of Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South will always
take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will
explain that it is only in the North that life is ‘real’ life, that the industrial work done in
the North is the only ‘real’ work, that the North is inhabited by ‘real’ people, the South
merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’,
plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate, and
lazy — that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the
first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among
savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a
barbarian out for loot. And feelings of this kind, which are the result of tradition, are not
affected by visible facts. Just as an Englishman five feet four inches high and twenty-nine
inches round the chest feels that as an Englishman he is the physical superior of Camera
(Camera being a Dago), so also with the Northerner and the Southerner. I remember a
weedy little Yorkshireman, who would almost certainly have run away if a fox-terrier had
snapped at him, telling me that in the South of England he felt Tike a wild invader’. But
the cult is often adopted by people who are not by birth Northerners themselves. A year
or two ago a friend of mine, brought up in the South but now living in the North, was
driving me through Suffolk in a car. We passed through a rather beautiful village. He
glanced disapprovingly at the cottages and said:
‘Of course most of the villages in Yorkshire are hideous; but the Yorkshiremen are
splendid chaps. Down here it’s just the other way about — beautiful villages and rotten
people. All the people in those cottages there are worthless, absolutely worthless. ’
I could not help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody in that village. No, he
did not know them; but because this was East Anglia they were obviously worthless.
Another friend of mine, again a Southerner by birth, loses no opportunity of praising the
North to the detriment of the South. Here is an extract from one of his letters to me:
I am in Clitheroe, Lanes. . . . I think running water is much more attractive in moor and
mountain country than in the fat and sluggish South. ‘The smug and silver Trent,’
Shakespeare says; and the South-er the smugger, I say.
Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only are you and I and
everyone else in the South of England written off as ‘fat and sluggish’, but even water
when it gets north of a certain latitude, ceases to be H20 and becomes something
mystically superior. But the interest of this passage is that its writer is an extremely
intelligent man of ‘advanced’ opinions who would have nothing but con-tempt for
nationalism in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as ‘One Britisher is
worth three foreigners’, and he would repudiate it with horror. But when it is a question
of North versus South, he is quite ready to generalize. All nationalistic distinctions — all
claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or
speak a different dialect — are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people
believe in them. There is no doubt about the Englishman’s inbred conviction that those
who live to the south of him are his inferiors; even our foreign policy is governed by it to
some extent. I think, therefore, that it is worth pointing out when and why it came into
being.
When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing
that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory
that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given
when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining in the naivest way that a cold
climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of
the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the superior energy of the English (actually the
laziest people in Europe) has been current for at least a hundred years. ‘Better is it for us’,
writes a Quarterly Reviewer of 1827, ‘to be condemned to labour for our country’s good
than to luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices. ’ ‘Olives, vines, and vices’ sums up the
nonnal English attitude towards the Latin races. In the mythology of Garlyle, Creasey,
etc. , the Northerner (‘Teutonic’, later ‘Nordic’) is pictured as a hefty, vigorous chap with
blond moustaches and pure morals, while the Southerner is sly, cowardly, and licentious.
This theory was never pushed to its logical end, which would have meant assuming that
the finest people in the world were the Eskimos, but it did involve admitting that the
people who lived to the north of us were superior to ourselves. Hence, partly, the cult of
Scotland and of Scotch things which has so deeply marked English life during the past
fifty years. But it was the industrialization of the North that gave the North-South
antithesis its peculiar slant. Until comparatively recently the northern part of England was
the backward and feudal part, and such industry as existed was concentrated in London
and the South-East. In the Civil War for instance, roughly speaking a war of money
versus feudalism, the North and West were for the King and the South and East for the
Parliament. But with the increasing use of coal industry passed to the North, and there
grew up a new type of man, the self-made Northern business man — the Mr Rouncewell
and Mr Bounderby of Dickens. The Northern business man, with his hateful ‘get on or
get out’ philosophy, was the dominant figure of the nineteenth century, and as a sort of
tyrannical corpse he rules us still. This is the type edified by Arnold Bennett — the type
who starts off with half a crown and ends up with fifty thousand pounds, and whose chief
pride is to be an even greater boor after he has made his money than before. On analysis
his sole virtue turns out to be a talent for making money. We were bidden to admire him
because though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant, grasping, and uncouth, he
had ‘grit’, he ‘got on’; in other words, he knew how to make money.
This kind of cant is nowadays a pure anachronism, for the Northern business man is no
longer prosperous. But traditions are not killed by facts, and the tradition of Northern’
grit’ lingers. It is still dimly felt that a Northerner will ‘get on’, i. e. make money, where a
Southerner will fail. At the back of the mind of every Yorkshireman and every
Scotchman who comes to London is a sort of Dick Whittington picture of himself as the
boy who starts off by selling newspapers and ends up as Lord Mayor. And that, really, is
at the bottom of his bumptiousness. But where one can make a great mistake is in
imagining that this feeling extends to the genuine working class. When I first went to
Yorkshire, some years ago, I imagined that I was going to a country of boors. I was used
to the London Yorkshireman with his intenninable harangues and his pride in the
supposed raciness of his dialect (’ “A stitch in time saves nine”, as we say in the West
Riding’), and I expected to meet with a good deal of rudeness. But I met with nothing of
the kind, and least of all among the miners. Indeed the Lancashire and Yorkshire miners
treated me with a kindness and courtesy that were even embarrassing; for if there is one
type of man to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner. Certainly no one
showed any sign of despising me for coming from a different part of the country. This
has its importance when one remembers that the English regional snobberies are
nationalism in miniature; for it suggests that place-snobbery is not a working-class
characteristic.
There is nevertheless a real difference between North and South, and there is at least a
tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as one enonnous Brighton inhabited by
lounge-lizards. For climatic reasons the parasitic divi-dend-drawing class tend to settle in
the South. In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without
once hearing an ‘educated’ accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the South of
England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.
Consequently, with no petty gentry to set the pace, the bourgeoisification of the working
class, though it is taking place in the North, is taking place more slowly. All the Northern
accents, for instance, persist strongly, while the Southern ones are collapsing before the
movies and the B. B. C. Hence your ‘educated’ accent stamps you rather as a foreigner
than as a chu nk of the petty gentry; and this is an immense advantage, for it makes it
much easier to get into contact with the working class.
But is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class? I shall have to discuss
that later; I will only say here that I do not think it is possible. But undoubtedly it is easier
in the North than it would be in the South to meet working-class people on approximately
equal tenns. It is fairly easy to live in a miner’s house and be accepted as one of the
family; with, say, a fann labourer in the Southern counties it probably would be
impossible. I have seen just enough of the working class to avoid idealizing them, but I
do know that you can learn a great deal in a working-class home, if only you can get
there. The essential point is that your middle-class ideals and prejudices are tested by
contact with others which are not necessarily better but are certainly different.
Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A working-class family hangs
together as a middle-class one does, but the relationship is far less tyrannical. A working
man has not that deadly weight of family prestige hanging round his neck like a
millstone. I have pointed out earlier that a middle-class person goes utterly to pieces
under the influence of poverty; and this is generally due to the behaviour of his family —
to the fact that he has scores of relations nagging and badgering him night and day for
failing to ‘get on’. The fact that the working class know how to combine and the middle
class don’t is probably due to their different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot
have an effective trade union of middle-class workers, be-cause in times of strikes almost
every middle-class wife would be egging her husband on to blackleg and get the other
fellow’s job. Another working-class characteristic, disconcerting at first, is their plain-
spokenness towards anyone they regard as an equal. If you offer a working man
something he doesn’t want, he tells you that he doesn’t want it; a middle-class person
would accept it to avoid giving offence. And again, take the working-class attitude
towards ‘education’. How different it is from ours, and how immensely sounder!
Working people often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where
‘education’ touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct.
The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen
dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me
dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I
kn ow now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the
day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on
ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying
at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea
of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his
parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his
lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a
man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh,
after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and
university education and found it a ‘sickly, debilitating debauch’. There is much in
middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class
angle.
In a working-class home — I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of
comparatively prosperous homes — you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human
atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker,
if he is in steady work and drawing good wages — an ‘if which gets bigger and bigger —
has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall
more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar
easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class interior at its best.
Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances
mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one
side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing,
and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting
himself on the rag mat — it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it
but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.
This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though not in so many as
before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one question — whether Father is in
work. But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family sitting round
the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and
could not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years into the
Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of the things I have
imagined will still be there. In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is
‘educated’, it is hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands
who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says ‘Ah wur coomin’ oop street’. And there won’t be
a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of
rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly
be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no
poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have
been sup-pressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won’t be so many children, either, if
the birth-controllers have their way. But move backwards into the Middle Ages and you
are in a world almost equally foreign. A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes in
your face because there is no chimney, mouldy bread, ‘Poor John’, lice, scurvy, a yearly
child-birth and a yearly child-death, and the priest terrifying you with tales of Hell.
Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modem 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 —
especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was
still prosperous — that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live
in.
SPILLING THE SPANISH BEANS (1937)
The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the
Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who
have been raped and crucified before the eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is
the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the
NEWS CHRONICLE and the DAILY WORKER, with their far subtler methods of
distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the
struggle.
The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government
(including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution
than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some kind of
compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao
fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever
about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time
past a reign of terror — forcible suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the
press, ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial — has been in progress.
When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had
long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any
other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the
people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not
because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the
Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries
at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes — the Communists.
Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the front-
line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle
is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying
to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are
so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England
have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force;
that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois refonnism and using the
whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of
revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as
wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them. Mr
Wyndham Lewis, for instance, ought to love the Communists, at least temporarily. In
Spain the Communist-Liberal alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that
the Spanish workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few
collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year; and
presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later, when there is no longer any need to
placate them. To see how the present situation arose, one has got to look back to the
origins of the civil war.
Franco’s bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in that it was a
military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion, and therefore had not much mass
backing, though Franco has since been trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters, apart
from certain sections of Big Business, were the land-owning aristocracy and the huge,
parasitic Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will array against it various forces which
are not in agreement on any other point. The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and
clericalism; but so does the ‘liberal’ bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more
modem version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn’t called Fascism. The ‘liberal’
bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for
the degree of progress implied in the phrase ‘la carriere ouverte aux talents’. For clearly
he has no chance to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too
poor to buy goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for bishops’
vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course to the friend of the
catamite of the duke’s illegitimate son. Hence, in the face of such a blatant reactionary as
Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality
deadly enemies, are lighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular
Front (or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously democratic appeal, People’s
Front). It is a combination with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist,
as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.
In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front is bound to make
itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism,
they are not lighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois
democracy, i. e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for
Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers understood the
issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was defeated they did not content themselves
with driving the rebellious troops out of the towns; they also took the opportunity of
seizing land and factories and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers’ government
by means of local committees, workers’ militias, police forces, and so forth. They made
the mistake, however (possibly because most of the active revolutionaries were
Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments), of leaving the Republican Government in
nominal control. And, in spite of various changes in personnel, every subsequent
Government had been of approximately the same bourgeois-refonnist character. At the
beginning this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in Catalonia,
was almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or even (this was still happening
when I reached Spain in December) to disguise themselves as workers. Later, as power
slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-
wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came out of
hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor reappeared, not much modified.
Henceforward every move, except a few dictated by military emergency, was directed
towards undoing the work of the first few months of revolution. Out of the many
illustrations I could choose, I will cite only one, the breaking-up of the old workers’
militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with officers and men
receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete equality, and the substitution
of the Popular Army (once again, in Communist jargon, ‘People’s Army’), modelled as
far as possible on an ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense
differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a military necessity, and
almost certainly it does make for military efficiency, at least for a short period. But the
undoubted purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In every
department the same policy has been followed, with the result that only a year after the
outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary bourgeois State,
with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the status quo.
This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have taken place
without foreign interference. But the military weakness of the Government made this
impossible. In the face of France’s foreign mercenaries they were obliged to turn to
Russia for help, and though the quantity of arms sup — plied by Russia has been greatly
exaggerated (in my first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary
machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into power. To
begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good military qualities of the
international Brigades (not necessarily Communist but under Communist control),
immensely raised the Communist prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico
were the only countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not only to get
money for their weapons, but to extort tenns as well. Put in their crudest form, the terms
were: ‘Crush the revolution or you get no more arms. ’ The reason usually given for the
Russian attitude is that if Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet
pact (and the hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it may be, also,
that the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would rouse unwanted echoes in
Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any direct pressure has been exerted by the
Russian Government. But this, even if true, is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties
of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain that the
Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom they control, plus the
Communist press of the whole world, have used all their immense and ever-increasing
influence upon the side of counter-revolution.
In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in Spain, on the
Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the
Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even
more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was
accompanied.
Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully dishonest. He would
tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish Government crushing the revolution,
because the revolution never happened; and that our job at present is to defeat Fascism
and defend democracy. And in this connexion it is most important to see just how the
Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works.
