The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell – Audiobook

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Embark on a literary exploration with “The Road to Wigan Pier” by George Orwell in this captivating audiobook. Orwell’s keen observations and thought-provoking reflections on working-class life in Northern England during the 1930s come to life through the skilled narration.

As Orwell delves into the harsh realities of poverty, social injustice, and class disparity, the audiobook offers listeners a profound and eye-opening experience. The narrator expertly captures the nuances of Orwell’s prose, making this audiobook a compelling choice for those interested in social commentary and historical perspectives.

Immerse yourself in the compelling narrative of “The Road to Wigan Pier,” where Orwell’s insightful exploration of societal issues continues to resonate with contemporary audiences. 📖🎧

The road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell read by Jeremy Northam part one chapter 1 the first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill girl’s clogs down the cobbled street earlier than that I suppose there were Factory whistles which I was never awake to

Hear there were generally four of us in the bedroom and a beastly place it was with that defiled impermanent look of rooms that are not serving their rightful purpose years earlier the house had been an ordinary dwelling house and when the brookers had taken it and fitted it out

As a tripe shop and lodging house they had inherited some of the more useless pieces of furniture and had never had the energy to remove them we were therefore sleeping in what was still recognizably a drawing room hanging from the ceiling there was a heavy glass Chandelier on which the

Dust was so thick that it was like fur and covering most of one wall there was a huge hideous piece of junk something between a sideboard and a hall stand with lots of carving and little drawers and strips of Looking Glass and there was a once gy carpet ringed by the

Slop pales of years and two guilt chairs with burst seats and one of those oldfashioned horsehair armchairs which you slide off when you try to sit on them the room had been turned into a bedroom by thrusting four squalled beds in among this other wreckage my bed was in the right hand

Corner on the side nearest the door there was another bed across the foot of it and jammed hard against it it had to be in that position to allow the door to open so that I had to sleep with my legs doubled up if I straightened them out I

Kicked the occupant of the other bed in the small of the back he was an elderly man named Mr Riley a mechanic of sorts and employed on top at one of the coal pits luckily he had to go to work at 5: in the morning so I could uncoil my legs

And have a couple of hours proper sleep after he was gone in the bed opposite there was a scotch Miner who had been injured in a pit accident a huge chunk of stone pinned him to the ground it was a couple of hours before they could lever it off and had received £500

Compensation he was a big handsome man of 40 with grizzled hair and a clipped mustache more like a sergeant major than a minor and he would lie in bed till late in the day smoking a short pipe the other bed was occupied by a succession of commercial Travelers newspaper canvases and higher purchase

Touts who generally stayed for a couple C of nights it was a double bed and much the best in the room I had slept in it myself my first night there but had been maneuvered out of it to make room for another lodger I believe all newcomers spent

Their first night in the double bed which was used so to speak as bait all the windows were kept tight shut with a red sandbag jammed in the bottom and in the morning the room stank like a ferret’s cage you did not notice it when you got

Up but if you went out of the room and came back the smell hit you in the face with a smack I never discovered how many bedrooms the house contained but strange to say there was a bathroom dating from before the brooker’s time downstairs there was the usual

Kitchen living room with its huge open range burning night and day it was lighted only by a skylight for on one side of it was the shop and on the other the ladder which opened into some dark Subterranean place where the tripe was stored partly blocking the door of the

Ladder there was a shapeless sofa upon which Mrs Brooker our land lady lay permanently ill festooned in grimy blankets she had a big pale yellow anxious face no one knew certain what was the matter with her I suspect that her only real trouble was overeating in front of the fire there

Was almost always a line of damp washing and in the middle of the room was the big kitchen table at which the family and all The Lodgers ate I never saw this table completely uncovered but I saw its various wrappings at different times at the bottom there was a layer of

Old newspapers stained by Worcester source above that a sheet of sticky white oil cloth above that a green surge cloth above that a coarse linen cloth never changed and seldom taken off generally the crumbs from breakfast were still on the table at supper I used to get to know individual crumbs by

Sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day the shop was a narrow cold sort of room on the outside of the window a few white letters relics of ancient chocolate advertisements were scattered like stars inside there was a slab upon which

Lay the great white folds of tripe and the gray flocculent stuff known as black tripe and the Ghostly translucent feet of pigs ready boiled it was the ordinary tripe and pea shop and not much else was stocked except bread cigarettes and Tin stuff teas were advertised in the window

But if a customer demanded a cup of tea he was usually put off with excuses Mr Brooker though out of work for 2 years was a minor by trade but he and his wife had been keeping shops of various kinds as a sideline all their

Lives at one time they had had a pub but they had lost their license for allowing gambling on the premises I doubt whether any of their businesses had ever paid they were the kind of people who run a business chiefly in order to have something to Grumble about Mr Brooker was a dark

Small boned sour Irish looking man and astonishingly dirty I don’t think I ever once saw his hands clean as Mrs Brooker was now an invalid he prepared most of the food and like all people with permanently dirty hands he had a peculiarly intimate lingering manner of handling things if he gave you

A slice of bread and butter there was always a black thumb print on it even in the early morning when he descended into the mysterious Den behind Mrs brooker’s sofa and fished out the tripe his hands were already black I heard Dreadful stories from the other Lodgers about the place where the

Tripe was kept black Beatles were set to swarm there I do not know how often fresh Consignments of tripe were ordered but it was at long intervals for Mrs Brooker used to date events by oh let me see now I’ve had in three lots of fro Frozen tripe since that happened

Etc etc we Lodgers were never given tripe to eat at the time I imagined that this was because tripe was too expensive I have since thought that it was merely because we knew too much about it the brookers never ate tripe themselves I noticed the only permanent Lodgers were

The scotch Miner Mr Riley two old age pensioners and an unemployed man on the PAC named Joe he was the kind of person who has no surname the scotch Miner was a boore when you got to know him like so many unemployed men he spent too much time

Reading newspapers and if you did not head him off he would discourse for hours about such things as the yellow Peril trunk murders astrology and the conflict between religion and science the old old age pensioners had as usual been driven from their homes by the means test they handed their weekly

10 Shillings over to the brookers and in return got the kind of accommodation you would expect for 10 Shillings that is a bed in the attic and meals chiefly of bread and butter one of them was of superior type and was dying of some malignant disease cancer I

Believe he only got out of bed on the days when he went to draw his pension the other called by everyone old Jack was an ex- minor aged 78 who had worked well over 50 years in the pits he was alert and intelligent but curiously enough he seemed only to

Remember his Boyhood experiences and to have forgotten all about the modern mining machinery and improvements he used to tell me Tales of fights with Savage horses in the narrow galleries Underground when he heard that I was arranging to go down several col mind he was contemptuous and declared that a man

Of my size 6′ 2 and A2 would never manage the traveling it was no use telling him that the traveling was better than it used to be but he was friendly to everyone and used to give us all a fine shout of good night boys as he crawled up the stairs

To his bed somewhere under the rafters what I most admired about old Jack was that he never cadged he was generally out of tobacco towards the end of the week but he always refused to smoke anyone else’s the brookers had ensured the lives of both old AG pensioners with one

Of the Tanner weak companies it was said that they were overheard anxiously asking the insurance tout how long people lived when they’ got cancer Joe like the Scotchman was a great reader of newspapers and spent almost his entire day in the public library he was the typical unmarried

Unemployed man man a derelict looking frankly ragged creature with a round almost childish face on which there was a naively naughty expression he looked more like a neglected little boy than a grown-up man I suppose it is the complete lack of responsibility that makes so many of these men look younger than their

Ages from Joe’s appearance I took him to be about 28 and was amazed to learn that he was 43 he had a love of of resounding phrases and was very proud of the astuteness with which he had avoided getting married he often said to me matrimonial change is a big item

Evidently feeling this to be a very subtle and portentous remark his total income was 15 Shillings a week and he paid out six or seven to the brookers for his bed I sometimes used to see him making himself a cup of tea over the kitchen fire but for the

Rest he got his meal Somewhere Out of Doors it was mostly slices of bread and Marge and packets of fish and chips I suppose besides these there was a floating CLE onele of commercial Travelers of the poorer sort traveling actors always common in the north because most of the larger pubs higher

Variety artists at the weekends and newspaper canvases the newspaper canvases were a type I had never met before their jobs seemed to me so hopeless so appalling that I wondered how anyone could put up with such a thing when prison was a possible alternative they were employed mostly by

Weekly or Sunday papers and they were sent from town to town provided with maps and given a list of streets which they had to work each day if they failed to secure a minimum of 20 orders a day they got the sack so long as they kept

Up their 20 orders a day they received a small salary £2 a week I think on any order over the 20 they drew a tiny commission the thing is not so impossible as it sounds because in workingclass districts every family takes in a tppy weekly paper and changes

It every few weeks but I doubt whether anyone keeps a job of that kind long the newspapers engage poor desperate wretches out of work Clarks and Commercial Travelers and the like who for a while make frantic efforts and keep their sales up up to the minimum

Then as the deadly work wears them down they are sacked and fresh men are taken on I got to know two who were employed by one of the more notorious weekies both of them were middle-aged men with families to support and one of them was a grandfather they were on

Their feet 10 hours a day working their appointed streets and then busy late into the night filling in blank forms for some Swindle their paper was running one of those schemes by which you are given a set of Crockery if you take out a six week subscription and send a two

Shilling postal order as well the fat one the grandfather used to fall asleep with his head on a pile of forms neither of them could afford the pound a week which the brookers charged for full board they used to pay a small sum for their beds and make shamefaced

Meals in a corner of the kitchen off bacon and bread and margarine which they stored in their suitcases the brookers had large numbers of sons and daughters most of whom had long since fled from home some were in Canada at Canada as Mrs Brooker used to put

It there was only one son living nearby a large pig-like young man employed in a garage who frequently came to the house for his meals his wife was there all day with the two children and most of the cooking and laundering was done by her and by

Emmy the fiance of another son who was in London Emmy was a fair-haired sharp-nosed unhappy looking girl who worked at one of the mills for some starvation wage but nevertheless spent all her evenings in bondage at the brooker’s house I gathered that their marriage was constantly being postponed and would

Probably never take place but Mrs Brooker had already appropriated Emmy as a daughter-in-law and and nagged her in that peculiar watchful loving way that invalids have the rest of the housework was done or not done by Mr Brooker Mrs Brooker seldom Rose from her sofa in the kitchen she spent the night

There as well as the day and was too ill to do anything except eat stupendous meals it was Mr Brooker who attended to the shop gave The Lodgers their food and did out the bedrooms he was always moving with Incredible slowness from one hated job to another

Often the beds were still unmade at 6:00 in the evening and at any hour of the day you were liable to meet Mr Brooker on the stairs carrying a full chamber pot which he gripped with his thumb well over the rim in the mornings he sat by the fire

With a tub of filthy water peeling potatoes at the speed of a slow motion picture I never saw anyone who could peel potatoes with quite such an air of brooding resentment you could see the hatred of this bloody Woman’s Work as he called it fermenting inside him a kind of bitter

Juice he was one of those people who can chew their grievances like a cud of course as I was indoors a great deal I heard all about the brooker’s woes and how everyone swindled them and was ungrateful to them and how the shop did not pay and the lodging house hardly paid

By local standards they were not so badly off for in some way I did not understand Mr Brooker was dodging the means test and drawing an allowance from the PAC but their Chief pleasure was talking about their grievances to anyone who would listen Mrs Brooker used to lament by the

Hour lying on her sofa a soft mound of fat and self-pity saying the same things over and over again we don’t seem to get no customers nowadays I don’t know how it is the tribes just laying there day after day such beautiful Tri it is too

It does seem hard don’t it now etc etc etc all Mrs brooker’s laments ended with it does seem our don’t it now but the refrain of a ballad certainly it was true that the shop did not pay the whole Place had the unmistakable Dusty flyblown air of a business that is going

Down but it would have been quite useless to explain to them why nobody came to the shop even if one had had the face to do it neither was capable of understanding that last year’s dead blue bottles supine in the shop window are not good for trade but the thing that really

Tormented them was the thought of those two old AG pensioners living in their their house usurping floor space devouring food and paying only 10 Shillings a week I doubt whether they were really losing money over the old age pensioners though certainly the profit on 10 Shillings a week must have been very

Small but in their eyes the two old men were a kind of dreadful parasite who had fastened on them and were living on their charity old Jack they could just tolerate because he kept out of doors most of the day but they really hated the bedridden one hooker by name Mr

Brooker had a queer way of pronouncing his name without the H and with a long u uker what Tales I heard about old hooker and his fractiousness the nuisance of making his bed the way he wouldn’t eat this and wouldn’t eat that his endless ingratitude and above all the selfish

Obstinacy with which he refused refuse to Die the brookers were quite openly pining for him to die when that happened they could at least draw the insurance money they seemed to feel him there eating their substance day after day as though he hadd been a living worm in their

Bowels sometimes Mr Brooker would look up from his potato peeling catch my eye and jerk his head with a look of inexpressible bitterness towards the ceiling towards old hooker’s room it’s a book a’t it he would say there was no need to say more I had heard all about old hooker’s ways

Already but the brookers had grievances of one kind and another against all their Lodgers myself included no doubt Joe being on the PAC was practically in the same category as the old age pensioners the Scotchman paid a pound a week but he was indoors most of the day

And they didn’t like him always hanging around the place as they put it the newspaper canvases were out all day but the brookers bore them a grudge for bringing in their own food and even Mr Riley their best lodger was in disgrace because Mrs Brooker said that

He woke her up when he came downstairs in the mornings they couldn’t they complained perpetually get the kind of Lodgers they wanted good class commercial gentlemen who paid full board and were out all day their ideal logic would have been somebody who paid 30 Shillings a week and never came indoors except to

Sleep I have noticed that people who let lodgings nearly always hate their Lodgers they want their money but they look on them as Intruders and have a curiously watchful jealous attitude which at bottom is a determination not to let the lodger make himself too much at

Home it is an inevitable result of the bad system by which the lodger has to live in somebody else’s house without being one of the family the meals at the brooker’s house were uniformly disgusting for breakfast you got two rashes of bacon and a pale fried

Egg and bread and butter which had often been cut overnight and always had thumb marks on it however tactfully I tried I could never induce Mr Brooker to let me cut my own bread and butter he would hand it to me slice by slice each slice gripped firmly under that broad black

Thumb for dinner there were generally those threy steak puddings which are sold ready made in tins these were part of the stock of the shop I think and boiled potatoes and rice pudding for tea there was more bread and butter and frayed looking Sweet Cakes which were probably bought as stales from the

Baker for supper There was the pale flabby Lancashire cheese and biscuits the brookers never called these biscuits biscuits they always refer to them reverently as cream crackers have another cream cracker Mr Riley you like a cream cracker with your cheese thus glossing over the fact that there was only cheese for

Supper several bottles of Worcester sauce and a half full jar of marmalade lived permanently on the table it was usual to Sauce everything even a piece of cheese with Worcester sauce but I never saw anyone Brave the marmalade jar which was an unspeakable mass of stickiness and dust Mrs Brooker had her meals

Separately but also took snacks from any meal that happened to be going and maneuvered with great skill for what she called the bottom of the pot meaning the strongest cup of tea she had a habit of constantly wiping her mouth on one of her blankets towards the end of my stay she

Took to tearing off strips of newspaper for this purpose and in the morning the floor was often littered with crumpled up ballls of slimy paper which lay there for hours the smell of the kitchen was Dreadful but as with that of the bedroom you ceased to notice it after a

While it struck me that this place must be fairly normal as lodging houses in the industrial areas go for on the whole The Lodgers did not complain the only one who ever did so to my knowledge was a little black haired sharp-nosed Cockney a traveler for a

Cigarette firm he’d never been in the north before and I think that till recently he’d been in better employ and was used to staying in commercial hotels this was his first glimpse of really low class lodgings the kind of place in which the poor tribe of touts

And canvases have to shelter upon their endless Journeys in the morning as we were dressing he had slept in the double bed of course I saw him look round the desolate room with a sort of wondering aversion he caught my eye and suddenly divined that I was a fellow

Souer the filthy bloody bastards he said feelingly after that he packed his suitcase went downstairs and with great strength of Mind told the brookers that this was not the kind of house he was accustomed to and that he was leaving immediately the brookers could never understand why they were astonished had

Hurt the ingratitude of it leaving them like that for no reason after a single night afterwards they discussed it over and over again in all its bearings it was added to their store of grievances on the day when there was a full chamber pot Under The Breakfast Table I decided to

Leave the place was beginning to depress me it was not only the dirt the SM smells and the vile food but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay of having got down into some Subterranean place where people go creeping round and round just like black Beatles in an endless

Muddle of sloved jobs and mean grievances the most Dreadful thing about people like the brookers is the way they say the same things over and over again it gives you the feeling that they are not real people at all but a kind of ghost forever rehearsing the same futile

Rigmar in the end Mrs brooker’s self-pitying talk always the same complaints over and over and always ending with the tremulous whine of it does seem our don’t it now revolted me even more than her habit of wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper but it is no use saying that

People like the brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind for they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands they are one of the characteristic byproducts of the modern world you cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them for this is part at least of what

Industrialism has done for us Columbus sailed the Atlantic the first steam engines tottered into motion the British squares stood firm under the French guns at watero the oneeyed Scoundrels of the 19th century praised God and filled their pockets and this is where it all led to labyrinthine slums and dark back

Kitchens with sickly aging people creeping round and around them like black Beatles it is a kind of Duty to see and smell such places now and again especially smell them lest you should forget that they exist though Perhaps it is better not to stay there too

Long the train Bore Me Away through the Monstrous scenery of slag heaps chimneys piled scrap iron foul canals Paths of cindry mud crisscrossed by the prince of clogs this was March but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow as we moved slowly through the

Outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little gray slum houses running at right angles to the embankment at the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones poking a stick up the leadon waste pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I

Suppose was blocked I had time to see everything about her her sacking apron her clumsy clogs Her Arms rened by the cold she looked up as the train passed and I was almost near enough to catch her eye she had a round pale face the usual

Exhausted face of the slum girl who is 25 and looks 40 thanks to miscarriages and drudgery and it wore for the second in which I saw it the most desolate hopeless expression I have ever seen it struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that it isn’t the

Same for them as it would be for us and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums for what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal she knew well enough what was happening to her understood as well as I did how

Dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold on the slimy stones of a slum backyard poking a stick up a foul drainpipe but quite soon the train Drew way into Open Country and that seem strange almost unnatural as though the Open Country had been a kind of

Park for in the industrial areas one always feels that the smoke and filth must go on forever and that no part of the Earth’s surface can escape them in a crowded dirty little country like ours one takes defilement almost for granted slag heaps and chimneys seem a more normal probable landscape than

Grass and trees and even in the depths of the country when you drive your fork into the ground you half expect to lever up a broken bottle or a rusty can but out here the snow was untrodden and lay so deep that only the tops of the stone boundary walls were showing

Winding over the hills like black paths I remembered the DH Lawrence writing of this same landscape or another nearby said that the snow covered Hills Ripple pulled away into the distance like muscle it was not the simile that would have occurred to me to my eye the snow

And the black walls were more like a white dress with black piping running across it although the snow was hardly broken the Sun was shining brightly and behind the shut Windows of the carriage it seemed warm according to the almanac this was spring and a few of the birds seemed to

Believe it for the first time in my life in a bare patch beside the line I saw Rooks copulating they did it on the ground and not as I should have expected in a tree the manner of courtship was curious the female stood with her beak open and the

Male walked around her and appeared to be feeding her i’ had hardly been in the train half an hour but it seemed a very long way from the brooker’s back kitchen to the empty slopes of snow the the bright sunshine and the big gleaming Birds the whole of the industrial

Districts are really one enormous town of about the same population as greater London but fortunately of much larger area so that even in the middle of them there is still room for patches of cleanness and decency that is an encouraging thought in spite of hard trying man has not yet

Succeeded in doing his dirt everywhere the Earth is so vast and still so empty that even in the filthy heart of civilization you find Fields where the grass is green instead of gray perhaps if you looked for them you might even find streams with live fish in them instead of salmon

Tins for quite a long time perhaps another 20 minutes the train was rolling through Open Country before the Villa civilization began to close in upon us again and then the outer slums and then the slag heaps belching chimneys blast furnaces canals and gasometers of another industrial Town chapter

2 our civilization pacy chesteron is founded on coal more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it the machines that Keep Us Alive and the machines that make the machines are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal in the metabolism of the Western World

The coal miner is second in importance only to the man who plows the soil he is a sort of grimy KD upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported for this reason the actual process by which coal is extracted is well worth watching if you get the

Chance and are willing to take the trouble when you go down a coal mine it is important to try and get to the coal face when the fillers are at work this is not easy because when the mine is working visitors are a nuisance and are

Not encouraged but if you go at any other time it is possible to Come Away with a totally wrong impression on a Sunday for instance a m seems almost peaceful the time to go there is when the machines are roaring and the air is black with cold dust and when you can

Actually see what the miners have to do at those times the place is like hell or at any rate like my own mental picture of Hell most of the things one imagines in hell are there heat noise confusion Darkness foul air and above all unbearably cramped space everything

Except the fire for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of cold dust when you have finally got there and getting there is a job in itself I will explain that in a moment you crawl

Through the last line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black wall 3 or 4 ft high this is the coal face overhead is the smooth ceiling made by The Rock from which the coal has been cut underneath is the rock again so that

The gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal it self probably not much more than a yard the first impression of all overmastering everything else for a while is the frightful deafening D from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away you cannot see very far because the

Fog of cold dust throws back the beam of your lamp but you can see on either side of you the line of half- naked kneeling men one to every four or five yards driving their shovels under the Fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders they are feeding it onto the

Conveyor belt a moving rubber belt a couple of feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them down this belt a glittering River of coal races constantly in a big mine it is carrying away several tons of coal every minute it Bears it off to some place in the

Main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a ton and then dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air it is impossible to watch the fillers at work without feeling a Pang of Envy for their toughness it is a dreadful job that they do an almost

Superhuman job by the standards of an ordinary person for they are not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal they are also doing it in a position that doubles or trebles the work they’ve got remain kneeling all the while they could hardly rise from their knees without hitting the ceiling and you can

Easily see by trying it what a tremendous effort this means shoveling is comparatively easy when you are standing up because you can use your knee and thigh to drive the shovel along kneeling down the whole of the strain is thrown upon your arm and belly muscles and the other conditions do not

Exactly make things easier there is the Heat it varies but in some Minds it is suffocating and the cold dust that stuffs up your throat and nostrils and collects along your eyelids and the unending rattle of the conveyor belt which in that confined space is rather like the rattle of a machine

Gun but the fillers look and work as though they were made of iron they really do look like iron hammered iron statues under the smooth coat of coold dust which clings to them from head to foot it is only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realize what

Splendid men they are most of them are small big men are at a disadvantage in that job but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies wide shoulders tapering to slender Supple waists and small pronounced buttocks and siney thighs with not an ounce of waste flesh

Anywhere in the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers clogs and knee pads in the hottest minds 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 60 or even

65 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 waistline and the constant bending would be

Impossible you can never forget that spectacle once you have seen it the line of bowed kneeling figures so black all over driving their huge shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed they are on the job for 7 and a half hours theoretically without a break for there is no time

Off actually they snat 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 cold 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 to down several coal mines before you can get much grasp of the processes that are

Going on around 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 10 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 ears 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 C page probably touches 60 M an hour in some of the deeper Minds it touches even more when you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps 400 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 traveled you hardly feel yourself deeper down than you would at the bottom of the Picadilly tube what is surprising on the other hand is the immense horizontal distances that have to be traveled 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 his work he may have to creep through 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 is probably an average distance 3 miles is a fairly normal one there are even said to be a few mines where it is as much as 5 miles but these distances bear no relation to distances above ground for

In all that mile or 3 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’ve gone a few hundred yards you start off stooping slightly

Down the dim lit Gallery 8 or 10 ft wide and about five high with the walls built up with slabs of shale like the stone walls in darbishire 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 chunks of shale and in some Minds where there is water it is as Mucky as a farmyard 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 gray 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 SL hung 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 but 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 shortcuts 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 4T or less it is a tough job

For anybody except a dwarf or a child you have not only got 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 therefore a constant

Cck in the neck but this is nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs after half a mile it becomes I’m 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 an old fall of rock probably

And for 20 whole yards you can stand upright the relief is overwhelming but after this there is another low stretch of 100 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 minor is

Sympathetic he knows that your muscles are not the same as his only another 400 yards he says encouragingly you feel that he might as well say another 400 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 20 minutes having got there you have to sprawl in the cold 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 probably 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 Davey lamp it goes out ducking the beams becomes more and more of an effort and sometimes you forget to duck you 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 vertebrae when the track is downhill the

Miners sometimes fit their clogs which are Hollow underneath onto the trolley rails and slide down in mines where the traveling is very bad all the miners carry sticks about 2 and 1/2 ft 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’ve been perhaps 3 hours underground and traveled 2 miles and you are more exhausted than you would be by

A 25m 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 minor friends notice the stiffness of your walk and chaff you

About it how you like to work down pit eh Etc yet even a miner who has been long away from 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 no one who has been down an oldfashioned

Pit most of the pits in England are oldfashioned and actually gone as far as the coldface 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 normal 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 7 and 1 half hours of savage work I never

Traveled much more than a mile to the coalface 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 a 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 7 and 1 half hours does not sound very long but one

Has got to add on to it at least an hour a day for traveling more often two hours and sometimes three of course the traveling is not technically work and the minor 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 around the pit props almost like dogs but it is quite a mistake to think that they enjoy it I’ve talked about this to scores of

Miners and they all admit that the traveling is hard work in any case when you hear them discussing a pit among themselves The Traveling 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 down 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 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 and 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 2 or

3 feet and almost impossible to breathe the machine travels along the coal face cutting into the base of the coal and undermining it to the depth of 5 ft or 5 ft 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 smaller version of the drills used in Street mending BS holes at intervals in the coal inserts blasting powder plugs it with Clay goes

Around the corner if there is one handy he is supposed to retire to 25 yard 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 onto the conveyor belt it comes out at first in monstrous Boulders which may weigh anything up to 20

Tons the conveyor belt shoots it onto tubs and the tubs are shoved into the main road and hitched onto 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 that cannot be used is sent to the surface and dumped hence the Monstrous dirt heaps like hideous gray 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 5 ft 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 5 ft forward and reassembled 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 lore not always kept that forbids its being done when there are other men working nearby and the filling in the morning shift which lasts from 6:00 in the morning

Until half 1 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 performing normally each man has to

Clear a space four or 5 yards wide the cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of 5 ft so that if the seam of coal is 3 or 4 ft High each man has to cut out break up and load onto the belt something between 7 and 12 cubic yards

Of coal this is to say taking a cubic yard is weighing 20 2700 weight that each man is Shifting coal at a speed approaching 2 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 th000 ft underground in suffocating heat and swallowing cold 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 the flying trapeze or to win the Grand National I’m not a manual laborer 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 pinch I could be a tolerable Road sweeper or an inefficient Gardener or even a 10th rate farmand 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 different people inhabit down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without

Ever hearing about probably a 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

Shoveling 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 CR crowds May assemble at Lords that the Nancy

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 co cart drives up to the 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 labor in the mindes it is just coal something that I’ve got to have black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular like Mana 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 a 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 minor 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 brought home to you at least while you were 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 up and the Nancy poets 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 cold dust driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of Steel chapter 3 when the miner comes up from the pit his face is so pale that it is noticeable even through the mask of cold dust this is due to the foul air that he

Has been breathing and will wear off presently to a southerner new to the mining districts the spectacle of a shift of several 100 miners streaming out of the pit is strange and slightly Sinister their exhausted faces with the grime clinging in all the hollows have a fierce wild

Look at other times when their faces are clean there is not much to distinguish them from the rest of the population they have a very upright Square shouldered walk a reaction from the constant bending underground but most of them are shortish men and their thick ill-fitting clo clothes hide the Splendor of their

Bodies the most definitely distinctive thing about them is the blue scars on their noses every Miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead and will carry them to his death the cold dust of which the air underground is full enters every cut and then the skin grows over it and forms a

Blue stain like tattooing which in fact it is some of the older men have their foreheads veined like Rock four chees from this cause as soon as the miner comes above ground he gargles a little water to get the worst of the cold dust out of his

Throat and nostrils and then goes home and either washes or does not wash according to his temperament from what I have seen I should say that a majority of miners prefer to eat their meal first and wash afterwards as I should do in their circumstances it is the normal thing to

See a m sitting down to his tea with a Cristy minstral face completely black except for very red lips which become clean by eating after his meal he takes a largish basin of water and washes very methodically first his hands then his chest neck and armpits then his forearms

Then his face and scalp it is on the scalp that the grime clings thickest and then his wife takes the fannel and washes his back he has only washed wash the top half of his body and probably his navl is still a nest of cold dust but even so

It takes some skill to get possibly clean in a single Basin of water for my own part I found I needed two complete bars after going down a coal mine getting the dirt out of one’s eyelids is a 10 minutes job in itself at some of the larger and better

Appointed curries there are piit head bars this is an enormous advantage for not only can the miner wash himself all over every day in comfort and even luxury but at the baths he has two lockers where he can keep his pit clothes separate from his day clothes so

That within 20 minutes of emerging as black as a negro he can be riding off to a football match dressed up to the nines but it is only comparatively few Minds that have baths partly because a seam of coal does not last forever so that it is not necessarily worth

Building a bath every time shaft is sunk I cannot get hold of exact figures but it seems likely that rather less than one minor in three has access to a piit head bath probably a large majority of miners are completely black from the waist down for at least 6 days a

Week it is almost impossible for them to wash all over in their own homes every drop of water has got to be heated up and in a tiny living room which contains apart from the kitchen range and a quantity of furniture a wife some children and probably a dog there is

Simply not room to have a proper bath even with a basin one is bound to Splash the furniture middleclass people are fond of saying that the miners would not wash themselves properly even if they could but this is nonsense as is shown by the fact that where piit head baths exist

Practically all the men use them only among the very old men does the belief still linger that washing one’s legs causes lumbago moreover the piit head baths where they exist are paid for wholly or partly by the miners themselves out of the Minor’s welfare fund sometimes the C company subscribes

Sometimes the fund Bears the whole cost but doubtless even at this late date the old ladies in Brighton boarding houses are saying that if you give those miners baths they only use them to keep coal in as a matter of fact it is surprising that miners wash as regularly as they do

Seeing how little time they have between work and sleep it is a great mistake to think of a Minor’s working day as being only 7 and 1 half hours 7 and 1/2 hours is the time spent actually on the job but as I have already explained one has got to add on

To this time taken up in traveling which is seldom less than an hour and may often be 3 hours in addition most miners have to spend a considerable time in getting to and from the pit throughout the industrial districts there is acute shortage of houses and it is only in the small

Mining Villages where the village is grouped round the pit that the men can be certain of living near their work in the larger mining towns where I have stayed nearly everyone went to work by bus half a crown a week seem to be the normal amount to spend on fairs one

Minor I stayed with was working on the morning shift which was from 6:00 in the morning till half 1 he had to be out of bed at4 to 4: and got back somewhere after 3:00 in the afternoon in another house where I stayed a boy of 15 was working on the

Night shift he left for work at 9 at night and got back at 8: in the morning had his breakfast and then promptly went to bed and slept till 6:00 in the evening so that his Leisure Time amounted to about 4 hours a day actually

A good deal less if you take off the time for washing eating and dressing the adjustments a Minor’s family have to make when he is changed from one shift to another must be tiresome in the extreme if he is on the night shift he gets home in time for breakfast on the

Morning shift he gets home in the middle of the afternoon on the afternoon shift he gets home in the middle of the night and in each case of course he wants his principal meal of the day as soon as he returns I noticed that the reverent W in

In his book England accuses the miners of gluttony from my own observation I should say that they eat astonishingly little most of the miners I stayed with ate slightly less than I did many of them declare that they cannot do their day’s work if they have had a heavy meal

Beforehand and the food they take with them is only a snack usually bread and dripping in cold tea they carry it in a flat tin called a snap can which they strap to their belts when a minor gets back late at night his wife Waits up for him but when

He is on the morning shift it seems to be the custom for him to get his breakfast for himself apparently the old Superstition that it is bad luck to see a woman before going to work on the morning shift is not quite extinct in the old days it is said a

Minor who had happen to meet a woman in the early morning would often turn back and do no work that day before I had been in the coal areas I shared the widespread illusion that miners are comparatively well paid one hears it Loosely stated that a minor is

Paid 10 or 11 Shillings a shift and one does a small multiplication sum and concludes that every Miner is earning round about £3 a week or £150 a year but the statement that a minor receives 10 or 11 Shillings a shift is very misleading to begin with it is only the

Actual coal getter who is paid at this rate a dater for instance who attends to the roofing is paid at a lower rate usually eight or nine Shillings a shift again when the coal getter is paid pie work so much patan extracted as is the case in many mines is dependent on the

Quality of the coal a breakdown in the Machinery or a fault that is a streak of rock running through the coal seam May Rob him of his earnings for a day or two at a time but in any case one ought not to think of the minor as working 6 days a

Week 52 weeks a year almost certainly there will be a number of days when he is laid off the average earning per shift worked for every mine worker of all ages and both sexes in Great Britain in 1934 was 9 Shillings penny3 faring footnote from the cier yearbook in cold trades directory for

1935 end of footnote if everyone were in work all the time this would mean that the mine worker was earning a little over £42 a year or nearly £25 Shillings a week his real income however is far lower than this for the 9 Shillings Penny and three farings is merely an

Average calculation on shifts actually worked and takes no account of blank days I have before me five paychecks belonging to a Yorkshire minor for five weeks not consecutive at the beginning of 1936 averaging them up the gross weekly wage they represent is £2 15 Shillings

And T this is an average of nearly 9 Shillings tens hapy a shift but these paychecks are for the winter when nearly all mines are running full time as spring advances the Cal trade slacks off and more and more men are temporarily stopped While others still technically in work are laid off

For a day or two in every week it is obvious therefore that £150 or even £ 142 is an immense overestimate for the mine worker’s yearly income as a matter of fact for the year 1934 the average gross earnings of all miners throughout Great Britain was only £151 Shing and

6 it varied considerably from District to District Rising as high as 133 lb 2 shill 8 in Scotland while in Durham it was a little under 105 or barely more than2 a week I take these figures from the Cole Scuttle by Mr Joseph Jones mayor of barnesley Yorkshire Mr Jones adds these figures

Cover the earnings of youths as well as adults and of the higher as well as the lower paid grades any particularly High earning would be included in these figures as would the earnings of certain officials and other higher paid men as well as the higher amounts paid for overtime

Work the figures being averages fail to reveal the position of thousands of adult workers who earnings were substantially below the average and who received only 30 shillings to 40 Shillings or less per week Mr Jones’s italics but please notice that even these wretched earnings are gross

Earnings on top of this there are all kinds of stoppages which are deducted from the minor wages every week here is a list of weekly stoppages which was given me as typical in one Lancashire District Insurance unemployment and health one shilling and 5 higher of lamp six P for sharpening

Tools six P check Wayman 9 P Infirmary tence Hospital a penny benevolent fund six P union fees six P total 4 Shillings and 5 some of these stoppages such as the benevolent fund and the union fees are so to speak the miner’s own responsibility others are imposed by the cury

Company they’re not the same in all districts for instance the iniquitous Swindle of making the minor pay for the hire of his lamp at 6p a week he buys the lamp several times over in a single year does not obtain everywhere but the stoppages always seem to total up to about the same

Amount on the Yorkshire miners five paychecks the average gross earning per week is £25 Shillings and T the average net earning after the stoppages have come off is only £2 11 shill and 4 a reduction of3 Shilling and 10 a week but the paycheck naturally only mentions stoppages which are imposed by

Or paid through the cury company one has got to add the union fees bringing the total reduction up to something over 4 Shillings probably it is safe to say that stoppages of one kind and another cut four Shillings or thereabouts from every adult Miner’s weekly wage so that the

£5 11 Shillings and6 which was the Mine Workers average earning throughout Great Britain in 1934 should really be something nearer £ 105 as against this most miners receive allowances in kind being able able to purchase coal for their own use at a reduced rate usually 8 or 9 Shillings a

Ton but according to Mr Jones quoted above the average value of all allowances in kind for the country as a whole is only 4 p a day and this four p a day is offset in many cases by the amount the miner has to spend on fairs in getting to and from

The pit so taking the industry as a whole the sum The Miner can actually bring home and call his own does not average more perhaps slightly less than2 a week meanwhile how much coal is the average minor producing the tonnage of coal raised yearly per person employed in mining Rises steadily though rather

Slowly in 1914 every mine worker produced on an average 253 tons of coal in 1934 he produced 280 tons footnote the coal scuttle the Cy yearbook and cold trades directory gives a slightly higher figure end of footnote this of course is an average figure for Mine Workers of all kinds

Those actually working at the coal face extract an enormously greater amount in many cases probably well over a thousand tons each but taking 280 tons as a representative figure it is worth noticing what a vast achievement this is one gets the best idea of it by comparing a Minor’s life work with somebody

Else’s if I live to be 60 I shall probably have produced 30 novels or enough to fill two medium-sized Library shelves in the same period the average minor produces 8,000 400 tons of coal enough coal to pave Trafalga Square nearly 2 ft deep or to supply seven

Large families with fuel for over a hundred years of the five paychecks I mentioned above no less than three are rubber stamped with the words death stoppage when a minor is killed at work it is usual for the other miners to make up a subscription generally of a

Shilling each for his widow and this is collected by the Cy company and automatically deducted from their wages the significant detail here is the rubber stamp the rate of accidents among miners is so high compared with that in other trades that casualties are taken for granted almost as they would be in a

Minor War every year one minor in about 900 100 is killed and one in about six is injured most of these injuries of course are Petty ones but a fair number amount to Total disablement this means that if a Minor’s working life is 40 years the chances are

Nearly 7 to1 against his escaping injury and not much more than 20 to1 against his being killed outright no other trade approaches this in dangerousness the next most dangerous is the shipping trade one sailor in a little under 1300 being killed every year the figures I have given apply of

Course to Mine Workers as a whole for those actually working underground the proportion of injuries would be very much higher every Miner of longstanding that I have talked to had either been in a fairly serious accident himself or had seen some of his mates killed and in

Every mining family they tell you Tales of father brothers or uncles killed at work and he fell 700 ft and they wouldn’t never have collected to Pieces only were wearing a new suit of all skins etc etc etc some of these Tales are appalling in the extreme one minor for instance

Described to me how a mate of his a dayala was buried by a fall of rock they rushed to him and managed to uncover his head and shoulders so that he could breathe and he was alive and spoke to them then they saw that the roof was

Coming down again and had to run to save themselves the dayala was buried a second time once again they rushed to him and got his head and shoulders free and again he was alive and spoke to them then the roof came down a third time and

This time they could not uncover him for several hours after which of course he was dead but the minor who told me the story he had been buried himself on one one occasion but he was lucky enough to have his head jammed between his legs so that

There was a small space in which he could breathe did not think it was a particularly appalling one its significance for him was that the dayaler had known perfectly well that the place where he was working was unsafe and had gone there in Daily expectation of an

Accident and it worked on his mind to that extent that he got to kissing his wife before he went to work and she told me afterwards that it were over 20 year since he’ kissed her the most obviously understandable cause of accidents is explosions of gas

Which is always more or less present in the atmosphere of the pit there is a special lamp which is used to test the air for gas and when it is present in at all large quantities it can be detected by the flame of an ordinary Davy lamp burning

Blue if the wick can be turned up to its full extent and the flame is still blue the proportion of gas is dangerously High it is nevertheless difficult to detect because it does not distribute itself evenly throughout the atmosphere but hangs about in cracks and crevices before starting work a minor

Often tests for gas by poking his lamp into all the corners the gas may be touched off by a spark during blasting operations or by a pick striking a spark from a stone or by a defective lamp or by Gob fires spontaneously generated fires which smolder in the cold dust and are very

Hard to put out the great mining disasters which happen from time to time in which several hundred men are killed are usually caused by explosions hence one tends to think of explosions as the chief danger of mining actually the great majority of accidents are due to the normal everyday

Dangers of the pit in particular to Falls of roof there are for instance potholes circular holes from which a lump of stone big enough to kill a man shoots out with a promptitude of a bullet with so far as I can remember only one exception all the miners I have

Talked to declared that the new machinery and speeding up generally have made the work more dangerous this may be partly due to conservatism but they can give plenty of reasons to begin with the speed at which the cold is now extracted means that for hours at a time a dangerously large

Stretch of roof remains unpropped then there is the vibration which tends to shake everything loose and the noise which makes it harder to detect signs of danger one must remember that a Miner’s safety underground depends largely on his own care and skill an experienced minor claims to

Know by a sort of instinct when the roof is unsafe the way he puts it is that he can feel the weight on him he can for instance hear the faint creaking of the props the reason why wooden props are still generally preferred to iron girders is that a wooden prop which is

About to collapse gives Warning by creaking whereas a gerder flies out unexpectedly the devastating noise of the machines makes it impossible to hear anything else and thus the danger is increased when a minor is hurt it is of course impossible to attend to him immediately he lies crushed under

Several 100 weight of stone in some Dreadful cranny underground and even after he has been extricated it is necessary to drag his body a mile or more perhaps through galleries where nobody can stand upright usually when you talk to a man who has been injured you find that it

Was a couple of hours or so before they got him to the surface sometimes of course there are accidents to the cage the cage is shooting several hundred yards up or down at the speed of an Express train and it is operated by somebody on the surface who cannot see what is

Happening he has very delicate indicators to tell him how far the cage has got but it is possible for him to make a mistake and there have been cases of the cage crashing into the pit bottom at its very maximum speed this seems to me a dreadful way to die

Ey for as that tiny steel box whizzers through the Blackness there must come a moment when the 10 men who were locked inside it know that something has gone wrong and the remaining seconds before they are smashed to Pieces hardly bear thinking about a minor told me he was once in a

Cage in which something went wrong it did not slow up when it should have done they thought the cable must have snapped as it happened they got to the bottom safely y but when he stepped out he found that he had broken a tooth he’d been clenching his teeth so hard in

Expectation of that frightful crash apart from accidents miners seem to be healthy as obviously they have got to be considering the muscular efforts demanded of them they are liable to rheumatism and a man with defective lungs does not last long in that dust impregnated air but the most characteristic industrial disease is nagus

This is a disease of the eyes which makes the eyeballs oscillate in a strange manner when they come near a light it is due presumably to working in half darkness and sometimes results in total blindness miners who are disabled in this way or any other way are compensated by the CER company sometimes

With a lump sum sometimes with a weekly pension this pension never amounts to more than 29 Shillings a week if it falls below 15 Shillings the disabled man can also get something from the Dole or the PAC if I were a disabled minor I should very much prefer the lump sum for then

At any rate I should know that I had got my money disability pensions are not guaranteed by any centralized fund so that if the Cy company goes bankrupt that is the end of the disabled Miner’s pension though he does figure among the other creditors in Wigan I stayed for a while with a

Minor who was suffering from nagas he could see across the room but not much further he’d been drawing compensation of 29 Shillings a week for the past 9 months but the cery company were now talking of putting him on partial compensation of 14 Shillings a week it all depended on whether the doctor

Passed him as fit for light work on top even if if the doctor did pass him there would needless to say be no light work available but he could draw the dole and the company would have saved itself 15 Shillings a week watching this man go to the Cy to

Draw his compensation I was struck by the profound differences that are still made by status here was a man who had been half blinded in one of the most useful of all jobs and was drawing a pension to which he had a perfect right if anybody has a right to

Anything yet he could not so to speak demand this pension he could not for instance draw it when and how he wanted it he had to go to the Cy once a week at a time named by the company and when he got there he was kept waiting about for

Hours in the cold wind for all I know he was also expected to touch his cap and show gratitude to whomever paid him at any rate he had to waste an afternoon and spend six p in bus fars it is very different for a member of the Bourgeois even such a down a

Heill member as I am even when I am on the verge of starvation I have certain rights attaching to my borar status I do not earn much more than a minor earns but I do at least get it paid into my bank in a gentlemanly

Manner and can draw it out when I choose and even when my account is exhausted the bank people are still possibly polite this business of petty inconvenience and indignity of being kept waiting about of having to do everything at other people’s convenience is inherent in working class life a thousand influencers constantly

Press a working man down into a passive role he does not act he is acted upon he feels himself self the slave of mysterious Authority and has a firm conviction that they will never allow him to do this that and the other once when I was hot picking I

Asked the sweated Pickers they earn something under six P an hour why they did not form a union I was told immediately that they would never allow it who were they I asked nobody seemed to know but evidently they were omnipotent a person of boura origin goes through

Life with some expectation of getting what he wants within reasonable limits hence the fact that in times of stress educated people tend to come to the front they are no more gifted than the others and their education is generally quite useless in itself but they are accustomed to a certain amount

Of difference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander that they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted always and everywhere in L’s history of the commune there is an interesting passage describing the shootings that took place after the commune had been suppressed the authorities were shooting

The ring leaders and as they did not know who the ring leaders were they were picking them out on the principle that those of better class would be the ring leaders an officer walked down a line of prisoners picking out likely looking types one man was shot because he was

Wearing a watch another because he had an intelligent face I should not like to be shot for having an intelligent face but I do agree that in almost any Revolt the leaders would tend to be people who could pronounce their hes chapter 4 as you walk through the industrial

Towns you lose yourself in in labyrinths of little brick houses blackened by smoke festering in planless chaos around myy alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dustbins and lines of grimy washing and half ruinous WC’s the Interiors of these houses are always very much the same though the

Number of rooms varies between two and five all have an almost exactly similar living room 10 or 15 ft Square with an open kitchen range in the larger ones there is a skullery as well in the smaller ones the sink and copper are in the living

Room at the back there is the yard or part of a yard shared by a number of houses just big enough for the Dustbin and the WC not a single one has hot water laid on you might walk I suppose through literally hundreds of miles of streets

Inhabited by miners every one of whom when he is in work gets black from head to foot every day without ever passing a house in which one could have a bath it would have been very simple to install a hot water system working from the kitchen range but the Builder saved

Perhaps £10 on each house by not doing so and at the time when these houses were built no one imagined that miners wanted baths for it is to be noted that the majority of these houses are old 50 or 60 years old at least and great numbers of them are by any

Ordinary standard not fit for human habitation they go on being tenanted simply because there are no others to be had and that is the central fact about housing in the industrial areas not that the houses are Pokey and ugly and insanitary and comfortless or that they are distributed in incredibly filthy

Slums around belching foundaries and stinking canals and slag heaps that Deluge them with sulfurous smoke though all this is perfectly true but simply that there are not enough houses to go round housing shortage is a phrase that has been banded about pretty freely since the war but it means very little

To anyone with an income of more than £10 a week or even5 a week for that matter where rents are high the difficulty is not to find houses but to find tenants walk down any Street in Mayfair and you will see to let boards in half the

Windows but in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty it means that people will put up with anything any hole and Corner slum any misery of bugs and rotting floors and cracking walls any extortion of skinflint landlords and blackmailing

Agents simply to get a roof over their heads I have been into appalling houses houses in which I would not live a week if you paid me and found that the tenants had been there 20 and 30 years and only hoped they might have the luck to die

There in general these conditions are taken as a matter of course though not always some people hardly seem to realize that such things as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking rofes as acts of God others rail bitterly against their landlords but all cling desperately to their houses lest worse should

Befall so long as the housing shortage continues the local authorities cannot do much to make existing houses more livable they can condemn a house but they cannot order it to be pulled down till the tenant has another house to go to and so the condemned houses remain

Standing and are all the worse for being condemned because naturally the landlord will not spend more than he can help on a house which is going to be demolished sooner or later in a town like Wigan for instance there are over 2,000 houses standing which have been condemned for

Years and whole sections of the town would be condemned on block if there were any hope of other houses being built to replace them towns like Leeds and Sheffield have scores of thousands of backtack houses which are all of a condemned type but will remain standing for decades I have inspected great numbers

Of houses in various mining towns and Villages and made notes on their essential points I think I can best give an idea of what conditions are like by transcribing a few extracts from my notebook taken more or less at random they are only brief notes and they will need certain explanations

Which I will give afterwards here are a few from Wigan one house in walgate quarter blind back type one up one down living room measures 12 ft x 10 10 ft room upstairs the same Al Cove underst stairs measuring 5 ft by 5 ft and serving as ladder skullery and coal hole windows

Will open distance to lavatory 50 yards rent 4 shill 9 rates 2 shill and 6 total 7 shill and3 two another nearby measurements as above but no Al Cove under stair merely a recess 2 ft deep containing the sink no room for ladder Etc rent three Shillings and T rates 2 Shillings total

5 Shillings and T three another as above but with no Al Cove at all merely sinkin living room just inside front door rent 3 Shilling and 9 rates 3 Shillings total 6 Shilling and 9 four house in skulls quarter condemned house one up one down rooms 15 ft by 15

Ft sink and copper in living room coal hole under stairs floor subsiding no windows will open house decently dry landlord good rent 3 Shilling and 8 rates 2 Shilling and 6 total 6 Shillings and T five another nearby two up two down and coal hole walls falling absolutely to

Pieces water comes into upstairs rooms in quantities floor lopsided downstairs windows will not open landlord bad rent 6 Shillings rates 3 Shilling and 6 total 9 Shillings and 6 six house in green ups Row one up to two down living room 133 ft by 8 ft walls coming apart and water

Comes in back windows will not open front one will 10 in family with eight children very near together in age Corporation are trying to evict them for overcrowding but cannot find another house to send them to landlord bad rent 4 Shillings rates 2 Shillings and thre total 6 Shillings and

Thre so much for Wigan I have Pages more of the same type here is one from Sheffield a typical specimen of Sheffield’s several score thousand back-to-back houses house in Thomas Street backto back two up one down I.E a three-story house with one room on each story Cellar

Below living room 14 ft by 10 ft and rooms above corresponding sink in living room top floor has no door but gives on open stairs walls in living room slightly damp walls in top rooms coming to pieces and oozing damp on all sides house is so

Dark that light has to be kept burning all day electricity estimated at six p a day probably an exaggeration six in family pay parents and four children husband on Pac is tuberculous one child in hospital the others appear healthy tenants have been seven years in this house would move but

No other house available rent 6 Shillings and six rates included here are one or two from barnesley one house in wartle Street two up one down living room 12 ft x 10 ft sink and copper in living room coal hole under stairs sink worn almost flat and constantly overflowing walls not too

Sound penny in slot Gaslight house very dark and Gaslight estimated at 4 p a day upstairs rooms are really one large room partitioned into two walls very bad wall of back room cracked right through window frames coming to pieces and have to be stuffed with wood rain comes

Through in several places sewer runs under house and stinks in summer but Corporation says they can’t do n six people in house two adults and four children the eldest aged 15 youngest but one attending Hospital tuberculosis suspected house Infested by bugs rent 5 Shillings and thre including

Rates house in Peele Street Street back to back two up two down and large Cellar living room 10 ft square with copper and sink the other downstairs room the same size probably intended as parlor but used as bedroom upstairs rooms the same size as those below living room very

Dark gas light estimated at four p heny a day distance to lavatory 70 yards four beds in house for eight people two old parents two adult girls the eldest aged 27 one young man and three children parents have one bed eldest son another and remaining five people share the other

Two bugs very bad you can’t keep them down when it’s hot Indescribable squala in downstairs room and smell upstairs almost unbearable rent 5 Shillings 7 hpy including rates three how house in mapplewell small mining Village near barnesley two up one down living room 14 ft by 12 ft

Sink in living room plaster cracking and coming off walls no shelves in oven gas leaking slightly the upstairs rooms each 10 ft by 8 ft four beds for six persons all adult but one bed does not presumably for lack of bed clothes room nearest stairs has no door and stairs

Have no banister so that when you step out of bed your foot hangs in vacancy and you may fall 10 ft onto Stones dry rots so bad that one can see through the floor into the room below bugs but I keep some down with sheep dip

Earth Road past these Cottages is like a muuk heap and said to be almost impossible in Winter Stone lav trees at ends of gardens in semi- ruinous condition tenants have have been 22 years in this house are £1 in areas with rent and have been paying an extra one

Shilling a week to pay this off landlord now refuses this and has served orders to quit rent 5 Shillings including rates and so on and so on and so on I could multiply examples by the score they could be multiplied by the 100,000 if anyone chose to make a

House-to house inspection throughout the industri districts meanwhile some of the Expressions I have used need explaining one up one down means one room on each story I.E a two- roomed house backto back houses are two houses built in one each side of the house being somebody’s front door so that if

You walk down a row of what is apparently 12 houses you are in reality seeing not 12 houses but 24 the front houses give on the on the street and the back ones on the yard and there is only one way out of each house the effect of this is obvious the lavat

Trees are in the yard at the back so that if you live on the side facing the street to get to the lavat Tre or the dust bin you have to go out of the front door and walk around the end of the block a distance that may be as much as 200

Yards if you live at the back on the other hand your outlook is onto a row of lavatories there are also houses of what is called the blind back type which are single houses but in which the Builder has omitted to put in a back door from Pure spite

Apparently the windows which refuse to open are a peculiarity of old mining towns some of these towns are so undermined by ancient workings that the ground is constantly subsiding and the houses above slip sideways in Wigan you pass whole rows of houses which have slid to startling angles

Their Windows being 10 or 20° out of the horizontal sometimes the front wall Bell is outward till it looks as though the house was 7 months gone in pregnancy it can be refaced but the new facing soon begins to bulge again when a house sinks at all suddenly its windows

Are jammed forever and the door has to be refitted this excites no surprise locally the story of The Miner who comes home from work and finds that he can only get indoors by Smashing down the front door with an axe is considered humorous in some cases I have noted

Landlord good or landlord bad because there is great variation in what the slum dwellers say about their landlords I found one might expect it perhaps that the small landlords are usually the worst it goes against the grain to say this but one can see why it should be

So ideally the worst type of Slum land Lord is a fat Wicked Man preferably a bishop who was drawing an immense income from extortion at rents actually it is a poor old woman who has invested her life savings in three slum houses inhabits one of them

And tries to live on the rent of the other two never in consequence having any money for repairs but mere notes like these are only valuable as reminders to myself to me as I read them they bring back what I have seen but they cannot in themselves give much idea

Of what conditions are like in those fearful Northern slums words are such feeble things what is the use of a brief phrase like roof leaks or four beds for eight people it is the kind of thing your eye slides over registering nothing and yet what a wealth of misery it can cover

Take the question of overcrowding for instance quite often you have eight or even 10 people living in a three- roomed house one of these rooms is a living room and as it probably measures about a dozen feet square and contains besides the kitchen range in the sink a table

Some chairs and a dresser there is no room in it for a bed so there are eight or 10 people sleeping in two small rooms probably in at most four beds if some of these people are adults and have to go to work so much the worse in

One house I remember three grown-up girls shared the same bed and all went to work at different hours each disturbing the others when she got up or came in in another house a young minor working on the night shift slept by day in a narrow bed in which another member

Of the family slept by night there is an added difficulty when there are grown-up children in that you cannot let adolescent youth and girls sleep in the same bed in one family I visited there were a father and mother and a son and daughter aged round about

17 and only two beds for the lot of them the father slept with the Son and the mother with the daughter it was the only Arrangement that ruled out the danger of incest then there is the misery of leaking roofs and oozing walls which in Winter make some rooms almost

Uninhabitable then there are the bugs once bugs get into a house they are in it till the crack of Doom there is no sure way of Exterminating them then there are the windows that will not open I need not point out what this must mean in summer in a tiny stuffy living

Room where the fire on which all the cooking is done has to be kept burning more or less constantly and there are the special miseries attendant upon backtack houses a 50 yards walk to the lavry or the dust bin is not exactly an induced to be

Clean in the front houses at any rate in a side street where the corporation don’t interfere the women get into the habit of throwing their refu out of the front door so that the gutter is always littered with tea leaves and bread crusts and it is worth considering what

It is like for a child to grow up in one of the back alleys where its gaze is bounded by a row of lavat trees and a wall in such places as these a woman is only a poor drudge muddling among an Infinity of jobs she may keep up her spirits but she

Cannot keep up her standards of cleanliness and tidiness there is always something to be done and no conveniences and almost literally not room to turn round no sooner have you washed one child’s face than another’s is dirty before you have washed the Crocs from

One meal the next is due to be cooked I found great variation in the houses I visited some were as decent as one could possibly expect in the circumstances some were so appalling that I have no hope of describing them adequately to begin with the smell the dominant and essential thing is

Indescribable but the squalor and the confusion a tub full of filthy water here A Basin full of unwashed Crocs there more Crocs piled in any odd Corner torn newspaper lited everywhere and in in the middle always the same Dreadful table covered with sticky oil cloth and crowded with cooking pots and irons and

Half Dar stockings and pieces of stale bread and bits of cheese wrapped round with greasy newspaper and the congestion in a tiny room where getting from one side to the other is a complicated Voyage between pieces of furniture with a line of damp washing getting you in the face every

Time you move and the children as thick underfoot as toad stools there are scenes that stand out vividly In My Memory the almost bare living room of a cottage in a little mining village where the whole family was out of work and everyone seemed to be underfed and the big family of grown-up

Sons and Daughters sprawling aimlessly about all strangely alike with red hair Splendid bones and pinched faces ruined by malnutrition and idleness and one tall son sitting by the fireplace too listless even to notice the entry of a stranger and slowly peeling a sticky sock from a bare

Foot a dreadful room in Wigan where all the furniture seemed to be made of packing cases and Barrel staves and was coming to pieces at that and an old woman with a blackened neck and her hair coming down denouncing her landlord in a Lancashire Irish accent and her mother aged well over 90

Sitting in the background on the barrel that served her as a commode and regarding us blankly with a yellow cronous face I could fill up pages with memories of similar Interiors of course the squalor of these people’s houses is sometimes their own fault even if you live in a backtack

House and have four children and a total income of 32 and6 a week from the PAC there is no need to have empty chamber pod standing about in your living room but it is equally certain that their circumstances do not encourage self-respect the determining factor is probably the number of

Children the best kept Interiors I saw were always childless houses or houses where there were only one or two children with say six children in a three- roomed house it is quite impossible to keep anything decent one thing that is very noticeable is that the worst squalors are never

Downstairs you might visit quite a number of houses even among the poorest of the unemployed and bring away a wrong impression these people you might reflect cannot be so badly off if they still have a fair amount of furniture and Crockery but it is in the rooms upstairs

That the gauntness of poverty really discloses itself whether this is because Pride makes people cling to their living room furniture to the last or because bedding is more porable I do not know but certainly many of the bedrooms I saw were fearful places among people who have been unemployed for several years

Continuously I should say it is the exception to have anything like a full set of bed clothes often there is nothing that can be properly called bed clothes at all just a heap of old overcoats and misscellaneous Rags on a rusty iron bedstead in this way overcrowded ing is

Aggravated one family of four persons that I knew a father and mother and two children possessed two beds but could only use one of them because they had not enough bedding for the other anyone who wants to see the effects of the housing shortage at their very worst should visit the Dreadful

Caravan dwellings that exist in numbers in many of the northern towns ever since the war in the complete impossibility of getting houses parts of the population have overflowed into supposedly temporary quarters in fixed Caravans Wigan for instance with a population of about 85,000 has round about 200 Caravan

Dwellings with a family in each perhaps somewhere near 1,000 people in all how many of these Caravan colonies exist throughout the industrial areas it would be difficult to discover with any accuracy the local authorities are reticent about about them and the census report of 1931 seems to have decided to

Ignore them but so far as I can discover by inquiry they are to be found in most of the larger towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire and perhaps further north as well the probability is that throughout the north of England there are some thousands perhaps tens of thousands of

Families not individuals who have no home except a fixed Caravan but the word Caravan is very misleading it calls up a picture of a cozy Gypsy encampment in fine weather of course with woodf fires crackling and children picking blackberries and many colored washing fluttering on the lines the Caravan colonies in Wigan and

Sheffield are not like that I had a look at Several of them I inspected those in Wigan with considerable care and I have never seen comparable squala except in the f Far East indeed when I saw them I was immediately reminded of the filthy kennels in which I have seen Indian

Coolies living in Burma but as a matter of fact nothing in the East could ever be quite as bad for in the East you haven’t are clammy penetrating cold to contend with and the Sun is a disinfectant along the banks of wigan’s mey canal are patches of waste ground on

Which the Caravans have been dumped like rubbish shot out of a bucket some of them are actually Gypsy Caravans but very old ones and in bad repair the majority are old single decker buses the rather smaller buses of 10 years ago which have been taken off their wheels and propped up with struts

Of wood some are simply wagons with semicircular slats on top over which canvas is stretched so that the people inside have nothing but canvas between them and the outer air inside these places are usually about 5 ft wide by six High I could not stand quite upright in any of them and

Anything from 6 to 15 ft long some I suppose are inhabited by only one person but I did not see any that held less than two persons and some of them contained large families one for instance measuring 14 ft long had seven people in it seven

People in about 450 cubic feet of space which is say that each person had for his entire dwelling a space a good deal smaller than one compartment of a public lavatory the dirt and congestion of these places is such that you cannot well imagine it unless you have tested

It with your own eyes and more particularly your nose each contains a tiny Cottage Kitchener and such Furniture as can be crammed in sometimes two beds more usually one into which the whole family have to huddle as best they can it is almost impossible to sleep on the

Floor because the damp soaks up from below I was shown mattresses which were still ringing wet at 11: in the morning in Winter it is so cold that the kitcheners have to be kept burning day and night and the windows needless to say are never opened water is got from a hydrant

Common to the whole Colony some of the Caravan dwellers having to walk 150 or 200 yards for every bucket of water there are no sanitary Arrangements at all most of the people construct a little Hut to serve as a lavatory on the tiny patch of ground surrounding their

Caravan and once a week dig a deep hole in which to bury the refuges all the people I saw in these places especially the children were unspeakably dirty and I do not doubt that they were lousy as well they could not possibly be otherwise the thought that haunted me as

I went from Caravan to car aravan was what can happen in those cramped Interiors When anybody dies but that of course is the kind of question you hardly care to ask some of the people have been in their Caravans for many years theoretically the corporation are doing away with the Caravan colonies and

Getting the inhabitants out into houses but as the houses don’t get built the Caravans remain standing most of the people I talked to had given up the idea of ever getting a decent habitation again they were all out of work and a job and a house seemed to them about equally remote and

Impossible some hardly seemed to care others realized quite clearly in what misery they were living one woman’s face stays By Me A Worn skull-like face on which was a look of Intolerable misery and degradation I gathered that in that Dreadful pigy struggling to keep her large brood of children clean she felt

As I should feel if I were coated all over with Dung one must remember that these people are not gypsies they are decent English people who have all except the children born there had homes of their own in their day besides their Caravans are greatly inferior to those of gypsies and they have not the great advantage of being on the

Move no doubt there are still middleclass people who think that the lower orders don’t mind that kind of thing and who if they happen to pass a caravan colony in the train would immediately assume that the people live there from choice I never argue nowadays with that kind of

Person but it is worth noticing that the Caravan dwellers don’t even save money by living there for they are paying about the same rents as they would for houses I could not hear of any rent lower than five Shillings a week five Shillings for 200 cubic feet of space

And there are even cases where the rent is as high as 10 Shillings somebody must be making a good thing out of those Caravans but clearly their continued existence is due to the housing shortage and not directly to Poverty talking once with a minor I asked him when the housing shortage

First became acute in his district he answered when we were told about it meaning that till recently people’s standards were so low that they took almost any degree of overcrowding for granted he added that when he was a child his family had slept 11 in a room

And thought nothing of it and that later when he was grown up he and his wife had lived in one of the old style backtack houses in which you not only had to walk a couple of hundred yards to the lavry but often had to wait in a queue when

You got there the lavry being shared by 36 people and when his wife was sick with the illness that killed her she still had to make that 200 yards Journey to the lavatory this he said was the kind of thing people would put up with till they were told about

It I do not know whether this is true what is certain is that nobody now thinks it bearable to sleep 11 in a room and that even people with comfortable incomes are vaguely troubled by the thought of the slums hence the clatter about rehousing and slum clearance which we have had at

Intervals ever since the war Bishops politicians philanthropists and whatnot enjoy talking piously about slum clearance because they can thus divert attention from more serious evils and pretend that if you abolish the slums you abolish poverty but all this talk has led to surprisingly small results so far as one can discover the congestion

Is no better perhaps slightly worse than it was a dozen years ago there is certainly great variation in the speed at which the different towns are attacking their housing problem in some towns building seems to be almost at a standstill in others it is proceeding rapidly and the private

Landlord is being driven out of business Liverpool for instance has been very largely rebuilt mainly by the efforts of the corporation Sheffield too is being torn down and rebuilt pretty fast though perhaps considering the unparalleled beastliness of its slums not quite fast enough footnote the number of Corporation

Houses in process of construction in Sheffield at the beginning of 1936 was 1,398 to replace the slum areas entirely Sheffield is said to need 100,000 houses end of footnote why rehousing has on the whole moved so slowly and why some towns can borrow money for building purposes so

Much more easily than others I do not know those questions would have to be answered by someone who knows more about the Machinery of local government than I do a corporation house costs normally somewhere between £3 and £400 it costs rather less when it is built by direct labor than when built by

Contract the rent of these houses would average something over2 a year not counting rates so one would think that even allowing for overhead expenses and interest on loans it would pay any Corporation to build as many houses as could be tenanted in many cases of course the

Houses would have to be inhabited by people on the PAC so that the local bodies would merely be taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another I.E paying out money in the form of relief and taking it back in the form of rent but they have got to pay the

Relief in any case and at present a proportion of what they pay is being swallowed up by private landlords the reasons given for the slow rate of building a lack of money and the difficulty of getting hold of sites for Corporation houses are not erected peace meal but in Estates sometimes of

Hundreds of houses at a time one thing that always strikes me as mysterious is that so many of the northern towns see fit to build themselves immense and luxurious public buildings at the same time as they are in crying need of dwelling houses the town of barnesley for instance recently spent close on

£150,000 on a new town hall although admittedly needing at least 2,000 new workingclass houses not to mention public baths the public baths in barnesley contain 19 men’s slipper baths this in a town of 70,000 inhabitants largely miners not one of whom has a bath in his house for

£150,000 it could have built three 50 Corporation houses and still had £10,000 to spend on a Town Hall however as I say I do not pretend to understand the mysteries of local government I merely record the fact that houses are desperately needed and are being built on the whole with paralytic

Slowness still houses are being built and the corporation building Estates with their row upon row of little red houses all much lier than two peas where did that expression come from peas have great individuality are a regular feature of the outskirts of the industrial towns as to what they are like and how

They compare with the slum houses I can best give an idea by transcribing two more extracts from my diary the tenants opinions of their houses vary greatly so I will give one favorable extract and one unfavorable both of these are from Wigan and both are the cheap nonp paror

Type houses one house in Beach Hill estate downstairs large living room with Kitchener fireplace cupboards and fixed dresser composition floor small hallway largish kitchen up-to-date electric cooker hired from Corporation at much the same rate as a gas cooker upstairs two largish bedrooms one tiny one suitable only for a box room or

Temporary bedroom bathroom w see with hot and cold water smallish Garden these vary throughout the estate but mostly rather smaller than an allotment foreign family parents and two children husband in good employee houses appear wellb built and are quite agreeable to look at various restrictions eg it is forbidden to keep

Poultry or pigeons take in lodges sublet or start any kind of business without leave from the corporation this is easily granted Ed in the case of taking in Lodgers but not in any of the others tenant very well satisfied with house and proud of it houses in this estate

Are all well-kept Corporation are good about repairs but keep tenants up to The Mark with regard to keeping the place tidy Etc rent 11 Shillings and thre including rates bus Fair into town tence two house in well estate downstairs living room 14 ft x 10 ft kitchen a good deal smaller tiny ladder

Underst stairs small but fairly good bathroom gas cooker electric lighting outdoor WC upstairs one bedroom 12 ft by 10 ft with tiny fireplace another the same size without fireplace another 7 ft by 6 ft best bedroom has small wardrobe let into wall Garden about 20 yards by 10 six in

Family parents and four children eldest son 19 eldest daughter 22 none in work except eldest son tenants very discontented their complaints are house is cold drafty and damp fireplace in living room gives out no heat and makes room very dusty attributed to its being set too low fireplace in best bedroom

Too small to be of any use walls upstairs cracking owing to uselessness of tiny bedroom five are sleeping in one bedroom one the eldest son in the other Gardens in this estate all neglected rent 10 Shillings and thre inclusive distance to town a little over a mile there is no bus

Here I could multiply examples but these two are enough as the types of Corporation houses being built do not vary greatly from place to place two things are immediately obvious the first is that at their very worst the corporation houses are better than the slums they replace the mere possession

Of a bathroom and a bit of garden would outweigh almost any disadvantage the other is that they are much more expensive to live in it is common enough for a man to be turned out of a condemned house where he is paying six or seven Shillings a week and given a

Corporation house where he has to pay 10 This only affects those who are in work or have recently been in work because when a man is on the PAC his rent is assessed at a quarter of his Dole and if it is more than this he gets an extra

Allowance in any case there are certain classes of Corporation houses to which people on the Dole are not admitted but there are other ways in which life in a corporation estate is expensive whether you are in work or out of it to begin with owing to the higher

Rents the shops in the estate are much more expensive and there are not so many of them then again in a comparatively large detached house away from the frowsy Huddle of the slum it is much colder and more fuel has to be burnt and again there is the expense especially

For a man in work of getting to and from town this last is one of the more obvious problems of rehousing Slum clearance means diffusion of the population when you build on a large scale what you do in effect is to scoop out the center of the town and redistribute it on the

Outskirts this is all very well in a way you have got the people out of feted alleys into places where they have room to breathe but from the point of view of the people themselves what you have done is to pick them up and dump them down 5

Miles from their work the simplest solution is Flats if people are going to live in large Towns at all they must learn to live on top of one another but the northern working people do not take kindly to Flats even where Flats exist they are contemptuously named tenaments almost everyone will tell you

That he wants a house of his own and apparently a house in the middle of an unbroken block of houses 100 yards long seems to them more their own than a flat situated in midair to revert to the second of the two Corporation houses I have just mentioned the tenant complained that the

House was cold damp and so forth perhaps the house was jerryb built but equally probably he was exaggerating he had come there from a filthy H in the middle of Wigan which I happen to have inspected previously while there he had made every effort to get hold of a corporation

House and he was no sooner in the corporation house than he wanted to be back in the slum this looks like mere captious but it covers a perfectly genuine grievance in very many cases perhaps in half the cases I found that the people in corporation houses don’t

Really like them they are glad to get out of the stink of the slum they know that it is better for their children to have space to play about in but they don’t feel really at home the exceptions are usually people in good employe who can afford to spend a little extra on

Fuel and furniture and Journeys and who in any case are of superior type the others the typical slum dwellers miss the fry warmth of the slum they complain that out in the country I.E on the edge of the town they are starving freezing certainly most Corporation Estates are pretty bleak in Winter some

I have been through perched on treeless clayy hillsides and swept by Icy winds would be horrible places to live in it is not that slum dwellers want dirt and congestion for their own s sakes as the fat-bellied Bourgeois love to believe see for instance the conversation about slum clearance in

Galsworthy Swan Song where the Ron’s cherished belief that the slum dweller makes the slum and not vice versa is put into the mouth of a philanthropic Jew give people a decent house and they will soon learn to keep it decent moreover with a smart looking house to

Live up to they improve in self-respect and kiness and their children start life with better chances nevertheless in a corporation estate there is an uncomfortable almost prison-like atmosphere and the people who live there are perfectly well aware of it and it is here that one comes on the central difficulty of the housing

Problem when you walk through the smoked dim slums of Manchester you think that nothing is needed except to tear down these Abominations and build decent houses in their place but but the trouble is that in destroying the slum you destroy other things as well houses are desperately needed and

Are not being built fast enough but in so far as rehousing is being done it is being done Perhaps it is unavoidable in a monstrously inhuman manner I don’t mean merely that the houses are new and ugly all houses have got to be new at sometime and as a matter of fact the

Type of Corporation house now being built is not at all offensive to look at on the outskirts of Liverpool there are what amount to whole towns consisting entirely of Corporation houses and they are quite pleasing to the eye the blocks of workers Flats in the center of the

Town modeled I believe on the workers Flats in Vienna are definitely fine buildings but there is something ruthless and soulless about the whole business take for instance the restrictions with which you are burdened in a corporation house you’re not allowed to keep your house and guard Garden as you want them in summer

Estates there is even a regulation that every Garden must have the same kind of hedge you are not allowed to keep poultry or pigeons the Yorkshire miners are fond of keeping Homer pigeons they keep them in the backyard and take them out and race them on Sundays but pigeons

Are messy Birds and the corporation suppresses them as a matter of course the restrictions about shops are more serious the number of shops in a corporation estate is rigidly limited and it is said that preference is given to the co-op and the chain stores this may not be strictly true but certainly

Those are the shops that one usually sees there this is bad enough for the general public but from the point of view of the independent shopkeeper it is a disaster many a small shopkeeper is utterly ruined by some rehousing scheme which takes no notice of his

Existence a whole section of the town is condemned on block presently the houses are pulled down and the people are transferred to some housing estate miles away in this way all the small shopkeepers of the quarter have their whole centel taken away from them at a

Single swoop and receive not a penny of compensation they cannot transfer their business to the estate because even if they can afford the move and the much higher rents they would probably be refused a license as for pubs they are banished from the housing Estates almost completely and the few that remain a

Dismal sh Tudor places fitted out by the big Brewery companies and very expensive for a middleclass population this would be a nuisance it might mean walking a mile to get a glass of beer for a workingclass population which uses the pub as a kind of Club it is a serious

Blow at communal life it is a great achievement to get slum dwellers into decent houses but it is unfortunate that owing to The Peculiar temper of our time it is also considered necessary to Rob them of the the last vestages of their Liberty the people themselves feel this

And it is this feeling that they are rationalizing when they complain that their new houses so much better as houses than those they have come out of are cold and uncomfortable and unhomelike I sometimes think that the price of Liberty is not so much aernal vigilance as Eternal

Dirt there are some Corporation Estates in which new tenants are systematically deloused before being allowed into their houses all their possessions except what they stand up in are taken away from them fumigated and sent onto the new house this procedure has its points for it is a Pity that people should take

Bugs into brand new houses a bug will Folly you about in your luggage if he gets half a chance but it is the kind of thing that makes you wish that the word hygiene could be dropped out of the dictionary bugs are bad but a state of affairs in which men will allow

Themselves to be dipped like sheep is worse perhaps however when it is a case of Slum clearance one must take for granted a certain amount of restrictions and inhumanity when all is said and done the most important thing is that people should live in decent houses and not in

Pigy I have seen too much of slums to go into chestertonian raptures about them a place where the children can breathe clean air and the women have a few conveniences to save them from drudgery and a man has a bit of garden to dig in must be better than the stinking back

Streets of Leeds and Sheffield on balance the corporation Estates are better than the slums but only by a small margin when I was looking into the housing question I visited and inspected numbers of houses perhaps 100 or 200 houses altogether in various mining towns and Villages I cannot end this chapter

Without remarking on the extraordinary courtesy and good nature with which I was received everywhere I did not go alone I always had some local friend among the unemployed to show me round but even so it is an impertinence to go poking into strangers houses and asking to see the cracks in the bedroom

Wall yet everyone was astonishingly patient and seemed to understand almost without explanation why I was questioning them and what I wanted to see if any unauthorized person walked into my house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was much troubled by bugs and what I

Thought of my landlord I should probably tell him to go to hell this only happened to me once and in that case the woman was slightly deaf and took me for a means test knock but even she relented after a while and gave me the information I wanted

I am told that it is bad form for a writer to quote his own reviews but I want here to contradict a reviewer in the Manchester Guardian who says appr propo of one of my books set down in Wigan or White Chapel Mr Orwell would still exercise an unerring power of

Closing his vision to all that is good in order to proceed with his wholehearted vilification of humanity wrong Mr Orwell was set down in Wigan for quite a while and it did not Inspire him with any wish to vilify Humanity he liked Wigan very much the people not the scenery indeed he has

Only one fault to find with it and that is in respect of the celebrated Wigan Pier which he had set his heart on seeing alas Wigan Pier has been demolished and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain chapter 5 when you see the unemployment figures

Quoted at 2 Millions it is fatally easy to take this as meaning that 2 million people are out of work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable I admit that till recently I was in the habit of doing so myself I used to calculate that if you put the

Registered unemployed at round about 2 millions and threw in the destitute and those who for one reason and another were not registered you might take the number of underfed people in England for everyone on the Dole or thereabouts is underfed as being at the very most 5 Millions this is an enormous

Underestimate because in the first place the only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the Dole that is in general heads of families an unemployed man’s dependents do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a separate allowance a labor exchange officer told

Me that to get at the real number of people living on not drawing the Dole you have got to multiply the official figures by something over three this alone brings the number of unemployed to round about 6 Millions but in addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but

Who from a financial point of view might equally well be unemployed because they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living wage foot note for instance a recent census of the Lancashire cotton Mills revealed the fact that over 40,000 full-time employees receive less than 30 Shillings

A week each in Preston to take only one town the number receiving over 30 Shillings a week was 640 and the number receiving under 30 Shillings was 3,113 end of footnote allow for these and their dependants throw in as before the old age pensioners the destitute and other

Nondescripts and you get an underfed population of well over 10 Millions so John or puts it at 20 Millions take the figures for Wigan which is typical enough of the industrial and Mining District the number of insured workers is round about 36,000 26,000 men and 10,000 women of these the number unemployed at

The beginning of 1936 was about 10,000 but this was in winter when the mines are working fulltime in summer it would probably be 12,000 multiply by three as above and you get 30,000 or 36,000 the total population of Wigan is a little under 87,000 so that at any moment more than

One person in three out of the whole population not merely the registered workers is either drawing or living on the Dole those 10 or 12,000 unemployed contain a steady core of from 4 to 5,000 miners who have been continuously unemployed for the past 7 years and Wigan is not especially badly off as

Industrial towns go even in Sheffield which has been doing well for the last year or so because of wars and rumors of war the proportion of unemployment is about the same one in three of registered workers unemployed when a man is first unemployed until his insurance stamps

Are exhausted he draws full benefit of which the rates are as follows single man 17 Shillings per week wife 9 Shillings per week each child below 14 three Shillings per week thus in a typical family of parents and three children of whom one was over 14 the total income would be 32 Shillings

Per week plus anything that might be earned by the eldest child when a man’s stamps are exhausted before being turned over to the PAC Public Assistance committee he receives 26 weeks transitional benefit from the UAB unemployment assistance board the rates being as follows single man 15 Shillings per week man and wife 24

Shillings per week children for 14 to 18 6 Shillings per week children 11 to 14 4 Shilling 6 per week children 8 to 11 4 Shillings children 5 to8 3 Shilling and 6 children 3 to 5 3 Shillings thus on the UAB the income of the typical family of five persons would

Be 37 Shilling 6 a week if no child was in work when a man is on the UAB a quarter of his doll is regarded as rent with a minimum of 7 Shilling 6 a week if the rent he is paying is more than a quarter of his Dole he receives an extra

Allowance but if it is less than 7 Shilling 6 a corresponding amount is deducted payments on the PAC theoretically come out of the local rates but are backed by a central fund the rates of benefit are single man 12 Shing 6 per week man and wife 23 Shillings per week

Eldest child 4 Shillings per week any other child three Shillings per week being at the discretion of the local bodies these rates vary slightly and a single man may or may not get an extra 2 Shilling six weekly bringing his benefit up to 15 Shillings as on the UAB a quarter of a

Married man’s doll is regarded as rent thus in the typical family considered above the total income would be 33 three Shillings a week a quarter of this being regarded as rent in addition in most districts a coal allowance of 1 shilling 6 a week one shilling 6 is equivalent to about

100 weight of coal is granted for 6 weeks before and 6 weeks after Christmas it will be seen that the income of a family on the Dole normally averages around about 30 Shillings a week one can write at least a quarter of this offers rent which is to say that

The average person child or adult has got to be fed clothed warmed and otherwise cared for for six or seven Shillings a week enormous groups of people probably at least a third of the whole population of the industrial areas are living at this level the means test is very

Strictly enforced and you are liable to be refused relief at the slightest hint that you are getting money from another source dock laborers for instance who are generally hired by the har day have to sign on at a labor exchange twice daily if they fail to do so it is

Assumed that they have been working and their Dole is reduced correspondingly I have seen cases of evasion of the means test but I should say that in the industrial towns where there is still a certain amount of communal life and everyone has neighbors who know him it is much harder than it

Would be in London the usual method is for a young man who is actually living with his parents to get an accommodation address so that supposedly he has a separate establishment and draws a separate allowance but there is much spying and tail bearing one man I knew for instance was

Seen feeding his neighbor’s chickens while the neighbor was away it was reported to the authorities that he had a job feeding chickens and he had great difficulty in refuting this the favorite joke in Wigan was about a man who was refused relief on the ground that that he had a job

Carting firewood he’d been seen it was said carting firewood at night he had to explained that he was not carting firewood but doing a Moonlight flit the firewood was his furniture the most cruel and evil effect of the means test is the way in which it breaks up families old people sometimes bedridden

Are driven out of their homes by it an old pensioner for instance if a widower would normally live with one or other of his children his weekly 10 Shillings goes towards the household expenses and probably he is not badly cared for under the means test however he counts as a

Lodger and if he stays at home his children’s Dole will be docked so perhaps at 70 or 75 years of age he has to turn out into lodgings handing his pension over to the lodging housekeeper and existing on the verge of starvation I’ve seen several cases of

This myself it is happening all over England at this moment thanks to the means test nevertheless in spite of the frightful extent of unemployment it is a fact that poverty extreme poverty is less in evidence in the industrial north than it is in London everything is poorer and shaber

There are fewer Motorcars and fewer well-dressed people but also there are fewer people who are obviously destitute even in a town the size of Liverpool or Manchester you are struck by the Fess of the Beggars London is a sort of Whirlpool which draws derelict people towards it

And it is so vast that life there is solitary and Anonymous until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you and you can go to Pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had neighbors who knew you but in the industrial towns the old

Communal way of life has not yet broken up tradition is still strong and almost everyone has a family potentially therefore a home in a town of 50,000 or 100,000 inhabitants there is no casual and as it were unaccounted for population nobody sleeping in the streets for instance moreover there is just this to

Be said for the unemployment regulations that they do not discourage people from marrying a man and wife on 23 Shillings a week are not far from the starvation line but they can make a home of sorts they are vastly better off than a single man on 15 Shillings the life of a single

Unemployed man is Dreadful he lives sometimes in a common lodging house more often in a furnished room for which he usually pays 6 Shillings a week finding himself as best he can on the other nine say six shillings a week for food and three for clothes tobacco and

Amusements of course he cannot feed or look after himself properly and a man who pays 6 Shillings a week for his room is not encouraged to be indoors more than is necessary so he spends his days loafing in the public library or any other place where he can keep

Warm that keeping warm is almost the sole preoccupation of a single unemployed man in winter in Wigan a favorite Refuge was the pictures which are fantastically cheap there you can always get a seat for four Pence and at the MAA at some houses you can even get a seat for

Tence even people on the verge of starvation will readily pay tant to get out of the ghastly cold of a winter afternoon in Sheffield I was taken to a public hall to listen to a lecture by a clergyman and it was by a long way the silliest and worst delivered lecture I

Have ever heard or ever expect to hear I found it physically impossible to sit it out indeed my feet carried me out seemingly of their own accord before it was halfway through yet the hall was thronged with unemployed men they would have sat through far worse Dil for the

Sake of a warm place to shelter in at times I have seen unmarried men on the Dole living in the extreme of misery in one town I remember a whole colony of them who were squatting more or less illicitly in a derelict house which was practically falling

Down they had collected a few scraps of furniture presumably off Refuge tips and I remember that their sole table was an old marble topped wash handstand but this kind of thing is exceptional a workingclass bachelor is a rarity and so long as a man is married unemployment makes comparatively little

Alteration in his way of life his home is impoverished but it is still a home and it is noticeable everywhere that the anomalous position created by unemployment the man being out of work while the Woman’s Work continues as before has not altered the relative status of the sexes in a working class

Home it is the man who is the master and not as in a middle class home the woman or the baby practically never for instance in a workingclass home will you see the man doing a stroke of the housework unemployment has not changed this convention which on the face of it seems

A little unfair the man is Idle from morning to night but the woman is as busy as ever more so indeed because she has to manage with less money it’s so far as my experience goes the women do not protest I believe that they as well as

The men feel that a man would lose his manhood if merely because he was out of work he developed into a marry an but there is no doubt about the deadening debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody married or single and upon men more than upon women the best intellects will not stand

Up against it once or twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary ability there are others whom I haven’t met but whose work I occasionally see in the magazines now and again at long intervals these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite

Obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the blurb reviewers why then do they make so little use of their talents they have all the leisure in the world why don’t they sit down and write books because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude and

Solitude is never easy to attain in a workingclass home you also need peace of mind you can’t settle to anything you can’t command the Spirit of Hope in which anything has got to be created with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you still an unemployed man who feels at

Home with books can at any rate occupy himself by reading but what about the man who cannot read without discomfort take a minor for instance who has worked in the pit since childhood and has been trained to be a minor and nothing else how the devil is he to fill up the empty

Days it is absurd to say that he ought to be looking for work there is no work to look for and everybody knows it you can’t go on looking for work every day for S years there are allotments which occupy the time and help to feed a family but

In a Big Town there are only allotments for a small proportion of the people then there are the occupational centers which were started a few years ago to help the unemployed on the whole this movement has been a failure but some of the centers are still

Flourishing I have visited one or two of them there are shelters where the men can keep warm and there are periodical classes in carping boot making leather work hand Loom weaving basket work seagrass work etc etc the idea being that the men can make furniture and so

Forth not for sale but for their own homes getting tools free and materials cheaply most of the Socialists I have talked to denounce this movement as they denounce the project it is always being talked about but it never comes to anything to give the unemployed small Holdings they say that the occupational

Centers are simply a device to keep the unemployed quiet and give them the illusion that something is being done for them undoubtedly that is the underlying motive keep a man busy mending boots and he is less likely to read the daily worker also there is a nasty YMCA

Atmosphere about these places which you can feel as soon as you go in the unemployed men who frequent them are mostly of the cap touching type the type who tells you oily that he is temperance and votes conser ative yet even here you feel yourself torn both ways for

Probably it is better that a man should waste his time even with such rubbish as seagrass work than that for years upon end he should do absolutely nothing by far the best work for the unemployed is being done by the nwm national unemployed workers movement this is a revolutionary

Organization intended to hold the unemployed together stop them black legging during strikes and give them legal advice against the means test it is a movement that has been built out of nothing by the pennies and efforts of the unemployed themselves I have seen a good deal of

The nwm and I greatly admire the men ragged and underfed like the others who keep the organization going still more I admire the tact and patience with which they do it for it is not easy to C even a penny a week subscription out of the pockets of people on the

PAC as I said earlier the English working class do not show much capacity for leadership but they have a wonderful talent for organization the whole Trade union movement testifies to this so do the excellent working Men’s Clubs really a sort of glorified Cooperative Pub and splendidly organized which are so common

In Yorkshire in many towns the Nu WM have shelters and arrange speeches by communist speakers but even at these shelters The Men Who go there do nothing but sit round the stove and occasionally play a game of dominoes if this movement could be combined with something along the lines

Of the occupational centers it would be nearer what is needed it is a deadly thing to see a skilled man running to seed year after year in utter hopeless idleness it ought not to be impossible to give him the chance of using his hands and making

Furniture and so forth for his own home without turning him into a YMCA Coco drunkard we may as well face the fact that several million men in England will unless Another War breaks out never have a real job this side the grave one thing that probably could be

Done and certainly ought to be done as a matter of course is to give every unemployed man a patch of ground and free tools if he chose to apply for them it is disgraceful that men who were expected to keep alive on the PAC should not even have the chance to grow

Vegetables for their families to study unemployment and its effects you have got to go to the industrial areas in the South unemployment exists but it is scattered and querly unobtrusive there are plenty of rural districts where a man out of work is almost unheard of and you don’t anywhere

See the spectacle of whole blocks of cities living on the Dole and the PAC it is only when you Lodge in streets where nobody has a job where getting a job seems about as probable as owning an aerplane and much less probable than winning £50 in the football pool that

You begin to grasp the changes that are being worked in our civilization for a change is taking place there is no doubt about that the attitude of the submerged working class is profoundly different from what it was s or 8 years ago I first became aware of the unemployment problem in

1928 at that time I had just come back from Burma where unemployment was only a word and I had gone to Burma when I was still a boy and the postwar boom was not quite over when I first saw unemployed Men At Close Quarters the thing that horrified

And amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed I was very ignorant but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes 2 million men out of work those 2 million are any more to blame than the people who draw

Blanks in the Kolkata sweep but at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable because this meant admitting that it would probably continue the middle classes were still talking about lazy Idol loafers on the Dole and saying that these men could all find work if they wanted to and

Naturally these opinions percolated to the workingclass themselves I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me when I first mingled with Tramps and Beggars to find that a fair proportion perhaps a quarter of these beings whom i’ had been taught to regard as cynical parasites were decent young Miners and

Cotton workers gazing at their Destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap they simply could not understand what was happening to them they’d been brought up to work and behold it seemed as if they were never going to have the chance of working

Again in their circumstances it was inevitable at first that they should be haunted by a feeling of personal degradation that was the attitude towards unemployment in those days it was a disaster which happened to you as an individual and for which you were to blame when a quarter of a million miners

Are unemployed it is part of the order of things that Alf Smith a minor living in the back streets of Newcastle should be out of work Alf Smith is merely one of the quarter million a statistical unit but no human being finds it easy to regard himself as a statistical unit so

Long as Bert Jones across the street is still at work Al Smith is bound to feel himself Dishonored and a failure hence that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is almost the worst evil of unemployment far worse than any hardship worse than the demoralization of inforced idleness and only less bad

Than the physical degeneracy of of Smith’s children born on the PAC everyone who saw Greenwoods play Love on the Dole must remember that Dreadful moment when the poor good stupid working man beats on the table and cries out oh God send me some work this was not dramatic exaggeration

It was a touch from life that cry must have been uttered in almost those words in tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of English homes during the past 15 years but I think not again or at least not so often that is the real Point people are ceasing to kick against the

Pricks after all even the middle classes yes even the bridge clubs in the country towns are beginning to realize that there is such a thing as unemployment the my dear I don’t believe in all this nonsense about unemployment why only last week we wanted a man to

Weed the garden and we simply couldn’t get one they don’t want to work that’s all it is which you heard at every decent tea Table 5 years ago is growing perceptibly less frequent as for the working class themselves they have gained immensely in economic knowledge I believe that the daily

Worker has accomplished a great deal here its influences out of all proportion to its circulation but in any case they have had their lesson well rubbed into them not only because unemployment is so widespread but because it has lasted so long when people live on the Dole for

Years at a time they grow used to it and drawing the Dole though it remains unpleasant ceases to be shameful thus the old independent workhouse fearing tradition is undermined just as the ancient fear of debt is undermined by the higher purchase system in the back streets of Wigan and barnesley I saw

Every kind of privation but I probably saw much less conscious misery than I should have seen 10 years ago the people have at any rate grasped that unemployment is a thing they cannot help it is not only out Smith who is out of work now Bert Jones is out of work as

Well and both of them have been out for years it makes a great deal of difference when things are the same for everybody so you have whole populations settling down as it were to a Lifetime on the Pac and what I think is admirable perhaps even hopeful is that they have

Managed to do it without going spiritually to Pieces a working man does not disintegrate under the strain of poverty as a middleclass person does take for instance the fact that the working class think nothing of getting married on the Dole it annoys the old ladies in Brighton but it is a proof of

Their essential good sense they realize that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a human being so that in one way things in the distressed areas are not so bad as they might be life is still fairly normal more normal than one really has the right to expect families

Are impoverished but the family system has not broken up the people are in effect living A reduced version of their former lives instead of raging against their Destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards but they don’t necessarily lower their standards by cutting out luxuries and concentrating on

Necessities more often it is the other way about the more natural way if you come to think of it hence the fact that in a decade of unparalleled depression the consumption of all cheap luxuries has increased the two things that have probably made the greatest difference of

All are the movies and the mass production of cheap smart clothes since the war the youth who leaves school at 14 and gets a blind alley job is out of work at 20 probably for life but for £210 on the higher purchase system he can buy himself a suit which for a

Little while and at a little distance looks as though it had been tailored in saval row the girl can look like a fashion plate at an even lower price you may have three h in your pocket and not a prospect in the world and only the

Corner of a leaky bedroom to go home to but in your new clothes you can stand on the street corner indulging in a private Daydream of yourself as Clark Gable or Greta Garbo which compensates you for a great deal de and even at home there is

Generally a cup of tea going a nice cup of tea and father who has been out of work since 1929 is temporarily happy because he has a Shore tip for the Cesaro trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid underfed people with the

Result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity one pair of of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra smart pairs for the price of one square meal you can get 2 lounds of cheap sweets you can’t get much meat for threp but you

Can get a lot of fish and chips milk costs threp a pint and even mild beer costs 4 but aspirins are 7 a penny and you can ring 40 cups of tea out of A4 pound packet and above all there is gambling the cheapest of all luxuries even people on the verge of

Starvation can buy a few days hope something to live for as they call it by having a penny on a sweep steak organized gambling has now risen almost to the status of a major industry consider for instance a phenomenon like the football pools with a turnover of

About6 million a year almost all of it from the pockets of workingclass people I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler reoccupied the r land Hitler Lano Fascism and the threat of War aroused hardly a flicker of Interest locally but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their

Fixtures in advance this was an attempt to quell the football pools flung all Yorkshire into a storm of Fury and then there is the queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering Miracles upon people with empty bellies you may shiver all night for lack of bed clothes but in the

Morning you can go to the public library and read the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore 20 million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio what we have lost in food we have gained in electricity whole sections of the

Working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated in part by Cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of Life do you consider all this desirable no I don’t but it may be that the psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is the

Best they could make in the circumstances they have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a ficient chip standard the alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of Despair or it might

Be attempted insurrections which in a strongly governed country like England could only lead to futile massacres and a regime of savage repression of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers it is quite likely that fish and chips art Silk Stockings tined salmon

Cut priced chocolate 5 2 O bars for six the movies the radio strong tea and the football pools have between them averted Revolution therefore we are sometimes told that the whole thing is an astute maneuver by the governing class a sort of breaden circuses business to hold the unemployed

Down what I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence the thing has happened but by an unconscious process the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half starved people for cheap palliatives chapter

6 when I was a small boy at school a lecturer used to come once a term and deliver excellent lectures on famous battles of the past such as Blen him aitz Etc he was fond of quoting Napoleon’s Maxim an army marches on its stomach and at the end of his lecture he would

Suddenly turn to us and demand what’s the most important thing in the world we were expected to shout food and if we did not do so he was disappointed obviously he was right in a way a human being is primarily a bag for putting food into the other functions and

Faculties may be more Godlike but in point of time they come afterwards a man dies and is buried and all his words and actions are forgotten but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children I think it could be plausibly

Argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of Dynasty or even of religion the Great War for instance could never have happened if tin food had not been invented and the history of the past 400 years in England would have been immensely different if

It had not been for the introduction of of root crops and various other vegetables at the end of the Middle Ages and a little later the introduction of non-alcoholic drinks tea coffee cocoa and also of distilled Liquors to which the beer drinking English were not accustomed yet it is curious how seldom

The all importance of food is recognized you see statues everywhere to politicians poets Bishops but none to Cooks or bacon curers or Market gardeners the the emperor Charles I is said to have erected a statue to the inventor of bloaters but that is the only case I can think of at the

Moment so perhaps the really important thing about the unemployed the really basic thing if you look to the future is the diet they are living on as I said earlier the average unemployed family lives on an income of round about 30 Shillings a week of which at least a

Quarter goes in rent it is worth considering in some detail how the remaining money is spent I have here a budget which was made out for me by an unemployed minor and his wife I asked them to make a list which represented as exactly as possible their expenditure in

A typical week this man’s allowance was 32 Shillings a week and besides his wife he had two children one aged 2 years and 5 months and the other 10 months here is the list rent 9 Shillings and hence clothing Club 3 Shillings coal 2 Shillings gas one shilling and

Thre milk 10 apony union fees thre insurance on the children T meat 2 shill and 6 flour two Stone 3 Shilling and 4 yeast 4 potatoes one shilling dripping 10 10 margarine 10 bacon 1 shilling and T sugar 1 shilling and 9 tea 1 shilling Jam 7 P hpy peas and

Cabbage 6 P carrots and onions 4 P Quaker Oats 4 P hpy soap powders blue Etc 10 P total1 12 Shillings in addition to this three packets of dried milk were supplied weekly for the baby by the infant’s welfare Clinic one or two comments are needed

Here to begin with the list leaves out a great deal blacking pepper salt vinegar matches kindling wood razor blades Replacements of utensils and wear and tear of furniture and bedding to name the first few that come to mind any money spent on these would mean reduction on some other

Item a more serious charge is tobacco this man happened to be a small smoker but even so his tobacco would hardly cost less than a shilling a week meaning a further reduction on food the clothing clubs into which unemployed people pay so much a week are run by big Drapers in

All the industrial towns without them it would be impossible for unemployed people to buy new clothes at all I don’t know whether or not they buy bedding through these clubs this particular family as I happen to know possessed next to no bedding in the above list if you allow a

Shilling for tobacco and deduct this and the other non-f food items you are left with 16 and 5 heny call it 16 Shillings and leave the baby out of account for the baby was getting its weekly packets of milk from the welfare clinic this 16 Shillings has got to provide the entire

Nourishment including fuel of three persons two of them adult the first question is whether it is even theoretically possible for three persons to be properly nourished on 16 Shillings a week when the dispute over the means test was in progress there was a disgusting public Wrangle about the

Minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive so far as I remember one school of dietitians worked it out at 5 and9 while another school more generous put it at 5 and9 heny after this there were letters to the papers from a number of people who claim to be feeding

Themselves on four Shillings a week here is a weekly budget it was printed in the new Statesman and also in the news of the world which I picked out from among a number of others three whole meal loaves one shilling 1 half pound margarine T apony 1 half pound dripping

Thent one pound cheese 7 1B onions Penny Hy one PB carrots Penny hat me 1 broken biscuits 4 2 dates 6 One Tin of apparated milk 5 10 oranges 5 total 3 Shillings 11 hpy please notice that this budget contains nothing for fuel in fact the writer explicitly stated that he could

Not afford to buy Fuel and ate all his food raw whether the letter was genuine or a hoax does not matter at the moment what I think will be admitted is that this list represents about as wise an expenditure as could be contrived if you

Had to live on 3 and 11 P Hony a week you could hardly extract more food value from it than that so perhaps it is possible to feed yourself adequately on the PAC allowance if you concentrate on essential food stuffs but not otherwise now compare this list with the

Unemployed miners budget that I gave earlier the miners family spend only 10 p a week on green vegetables and 10 p heny on milk remember that one of them is a child Less Than 3 years old and nothing on fruit but they spend one and

N on sugar about 8 lb of sugar that is and a shilling on tea the half crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef the basis of their diet therefore

Is white bread and margarine corned beef sugared tea and potatoes an appalling diet would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and whole meal bread or if they even like the writer of the letter to the new Statesman saved on fuel and ate their carrots

Raw yes it would but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing the ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots and the peculiar evil is this that the less money you have the less

Inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food a millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ry Vita biscuits an unemployed man doesn’t here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play when you are unemployed which is to say when you are underfed

Harassed bored and miserable you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food you want something a little bit tasty there is always some cheaply Pleasant thing to tempt you let’s have three penneth of chips run out and buy us a toughy ice cream put the kettle on and we’ll all

Have a nice cup of tea that is how your mind works when you are at the PAC level white bread and Marge and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent but they are nicer at least most people think so than brown bread and dripping and cold water unemployment is an endless misery

That has got to be constantly pated and especially with tea the englishman’s Opium a cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread the results of all this are visible in a physical degeneracy which you can study directly by using your

Eyes or inferentially by having a look at the vital statistics the physical average in the industrial towns is terribly low lower even than in London in Sheffield you have the feeling of walking among a population of trogloditas are Splendid men but they are usually small and the mere fact that

Their muscles are toughened by constant work does not mean that their children start life with a better Physique in any case the miners are physically The Pick of the population the most obvious sign of undernourishment is the Badness of everybody’s teeth in Lancashire you would have to look for a long time

Before you saw a workingclass person with good natural teeth indeed you see very few people with natural teeth at all apart from the children and even the children’s teeth have a frail bluish appearance which means I suppose Cal deficiency several dentists have told me that in industrial districts a person

Over 30 with any of his or her own teeth is coming to be an abnormality in Wigan various people gave me their opinion that it is best to get shut of your teeth as early in life as possible teeth is just a misery one woman said to me in one house where I

Stayed there were apart from myself five people the oldest being 43 and the youngest a boy of 15 of these the boy was the only one who possessed a single tooth of his own and his teeth were obviously not going to last long as for the vital statistics the

Fact that in any large industrial town the death rate and infant mortality rate of the poorest quarters are always about double those of the welltoo residential quarters a good deal more than double in some cases hardly needs commenting on of course one ought not to imagine that the prevailing bad physique is due

Solely to unemployment for it is probable that the physical average has been declining all over England for a long time past and not merely among the unemployed in the industrial areas this cannot be proved statistically but it is a conclusion that is forced upon you if

You use your eyes even in rural places and even in a prosperous town like London on on the day when King George V’s body passed through London on its way to Westminster I happened to be caught for an hour or two in the crowd in Trafalga Square it was impossible looking about

One then not to be struck by the physical degeneracy of modern England the people surrounding me were not workingclass people for the most part they were the shopkeeper commercial traveler type with a sprinkling of the welltoo but what a set they looked puny limbs sickly faces Under The Weeping London

Sky hardly a well-built man or a decent looking woman and not a fresh complexion anywhere as the king’s coffin went by the men took off their hats and a friend who was in the crowd at the other side of the Strand said to me afterwards the only Touch of color anywhere was the

Bald heads even the guards it seemed to me there was a squad of guards Guardsman marching beside the coffin were not what they used to be where are the Monstrous men with chests like barrels and mustaches like the wings of eagles who stroe across my childhood’s gaze 20 or

30 years ago buried I suppose in the Flanders mud in their place there are these pale-faced boys who have been picked for their height and consequently look like HPP Poes in overcoats the truth being that in modern England a man over 6 feet high is usually skin and bone and not much

Else if the English physique has declined this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them largely before they had had time to breed but the process must have begun earlier than that and it

Must be due ultimately to unhealthy ways of living I.E to industrialism I don’t mean that the habit of living in towns probably the town is healthier than the country in many ways but the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything we may find

In the long run that tined food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun it is unfortunate that the English working class the English Nation generally for that matter are exceptionally ignorant about and wasteful of food I have pointed out a elsewhere how civilized is a French

Navi’s idea of a meal compared with an englishman’s and I cannot believe that you would ever see such wastage in a French house as you habitually see in English ones of course in the very poorest homes where everybody is unemployed You Don’t See Much actual waste but those who can

Afford to waste food often do so I could give startling instances of this even the northern habit of baking one’s own bread is slightly wasteful in itself because an overworked woman cannot bake more than once or at most twice a week and it is impossible to tell beforehand

How much bread will be wanted so that a certain amount generally has to be thrown away the usual thing is to bake six large Loaves and 12 small ones at a time all this is part of the old generous English attitude to life and it is an

Amiable quality but a disastrous one at the present moment English working people everywhere so far as I know refuse brown bread it is usually impossible to buy home meal bread in a workingclass district they sometimes give the reason that brown bread is dirty I suspect the real reason

Is that in the past brown bread has been confused with black bread which is traditionally associated with popery and wooden shoes they have plenty of popery and wooden shoes in Lancashire a pity they haven’t the blackb bread as well well but the English pallet especially the workingclass pet now rejects good food almost

Automatically the number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have tinned milk even that Dreadful tinned milk which is made of sugar and corn flour

And has unfit for babies on the tin in huge letters in some districts efforts are now being made to teach the unemployed more about food values and more about the intelligent spending of money when you hear of a thing like this you feel yourself torn both

Ways I have heard a communist speaker on the platform grow very angry about it in London he said parties of society Dames now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping lessons to the wives of the unemployed Floyd he gave this as an instance of the

Mentality of the English governing class first you condemn a family to live on 30 Shillings a week and then you have the Damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money he was quite right I agree heartily yet all the same it is a Pity

That merely for the lack of a proper tradition people should pour muck like tinned milk down their throats and not even know that it is inferior to the product of the cow I doubt however whether the unemployed would ultimately benefit if they learn to spend their money more

Economically for it is only the fact that they are not economical that keeps their allowances so high an Englishman on the PAC gets 15 Shillings a week because 15 Shillings is the smallest sum on which he can conceivably keep alive if he were say an Indian or Japanese

who can live on rice and onions he wouldn’t get 15 Shillings a week he would be lucky if he got 15 Shillings a month our unemployment allowances miserable though they are are framed to suit a population with very high standards and not much notion of economy if the unemployed learned to be

Better managers they would be visibly better off and I fancy it would not be long before the Dole was docked correspondingly there is one great Mitigation Of employment in the north and that is the cheapness of fuel anywhere in the coal areas the retail price of coal is about 1 and six 100

Weight in the south of England it is about half a crown moreover miners in work can usually buy coal direct from the pit at 8 or N9 Shillings a ton and those who have a seller in their homes sometimes store a ton at a time and sell it

Illicitly I suppose to those who are out of work but a apart from this there is immense and systematic thieving of coal by the unemployed I call it thieving because technically it is that though it does no harm to anybody in the dirt that is sent up from

The pits there is a certain amount of broken coal and unemployed people spend a lot of time in picking it out of the slag heaps all day long over those strange gray mountains you see people wandering to and fro with sacks and baskets among the the sulfurous smoke

Many slag heaps are on fire under the surface prizing out the tiny nuggets of coal which are buried here and there you meet men coming away Wheeling strange and wonderful homemade bicycles bicycles made of Rusty Parts picked off Refuge tips without Saddles without chains and almost always without tires across which

A slung bags containing perhaps half aund weight of coal fruit of half a day searching in times of strikes when everybody is short of fuel the miners turn out with pick and shovel and burrow into the slag heaps when the humiy appearance which most slag heaps have during long strikes

In places where there are outcrops of coal they have sunk surface mines and carried them scores of yards into the Earth in Wigan the competition among unemployed people for the waste Co has become so Fierce that it has led to an extraordinary custom called scrambling for the coal which is well worth seeing

Indeed I rather wonder that it has never been filmed an unemployed Miner took me to see it one afternoon we got to the place a mountain range of ancient slag heaps with a railway running through the valley below a couple of hundred ragged men each with a sack and coal Hammer

Strapped under his coattails were waiting on the Brew when the dirt comes up from the pit it is loaded onto trucks and an engine runs these to the top of another slag he a quarter of a mile away and there leaves them the process of scrambling for the

Coal consists in getting onto the train while it is moving any truck which you have succeeded in boarding while it is in motion counts as your truck presently the train Hove in sight with a wild yell a hundred men dashed down the slope to catch her as she rounded the bend even

At the bend the train was making 20 M an hour the men hurled themselves upon it caught hold of the Rings at the rear of the trucks and hoisted themselves up by way of the bumpers five or 10 of them on each truck the driver took no notice he

Drove up to the top of the slag Heap uncoupled the trucks and ran the engine back to the pit presently returning with a fresh string of trucks there was the same wild Rush of ragged figures as before in the end only about 50 men had failed to get onto either

Train we walked up to the top of the slag Heap the men were shoveling the dirt out of the trucks while down below their wives and children were kneeling swiftly scrabbling with their hands in the damp dirt and picking out lumps of coal the size of an egg or smaller you

Would see a woman pounce on a tiny fragment of stuff wipe it on her apron scrutinize to make sure it was coal and pop it jealously into her sack of course when you are boarding a truck you don’t know beforehand what is in it it may be actual dirt from the

Roads or it may merely be Shale from the roofing if it is a Shale truck there will be no coal in it but there occurs among the Shale another inflammable rock called canel which looks very like ordinary Shale but is slightly darker and is known by splitting in parallel lines like

Slate it makes tolerable fuel not good enough to be commercially valuable but good enough to be eagerly sought after by the unemployed the miners on the Shale trucks were picking out the cnel and splitting it up with their hammers down at the bottom of the Brew

The people who had failed to get onto either train were gleaning the tiny chips of coal that came rolling down from above fragments no bigger than a hazelnut these but the people were glad enough to get them we stayed there till the train was empty in a couple of hours the people

Had picked the dirt over to the last grain they slung their sacks over shoulder or bicycle and started on the 2-mile trudge back to Wigan most of the families had gathered about half aund weight of coal or camel so that between them they must have stolen five or 10 tons of

Fuel this business of robbing the dirt trains takes place every day in Wigan at any rate in Winter and at more curries than one it is of course extremely dangerous no one was hurt the afternoon I was there but a man had had both his legs cut off a few weeks earlier and

Another man lost several fingers a week later technically it is stealing but as everybody knows if the coal were not stolen it would simply be wasted now and again for form’s sake the Cy companies prosecute somebody for coal picking and in that morning’s issue of the local paper there was a paragraph

Saying that two men had been find 10 Shillings but no notice is taken of the prosecutions in fact one of the men named in the paper was there that afternoon and the calp pickers subscribe among themselves to pay the fines the thing is taken for granted everyone knows that the unemployed have

Got to get fuel somehow so every afternoon several hundred men risk their necks and several hundred women scrabbled in the mud for hours and all for half aund weight of inferior fuel value 9 that scene stays in my mind as one of my pictures of Lancashire the dumpy shawed women with

Their sacking aprons and their heavy black clogs kneeling in the cindery mud and the bitter wind searching eagerly for tiny chips of coal they are glad enough to do it in winter they are desperate for fuel it is more important almost than food meanwhile all around as far as the

Eye can see are the slag heaps and hoisting gear of colies and not one of those ceries can sell all the coal it is capable of producing this ought to appeal to Major Douglas chapter 7 as you you travel northward your eye accustomed to the south or east does not

Notice much difference until you are Beyond Birmingham 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 of 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 were 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 Dustbin on the outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful Landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by Jagged gray mountains and underfoot is mud and Ashes and overhead

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 sulfur 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 plow drives over the places where coal was once mined the sights of ancient slag heaps will still be distinguished isable from an airplane 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 crisscrossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs and

All round the as far as the slag heaps in the distance stretched the flashes pools of stagnant water that has seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits it was horribly cold the flashes were covered with ice the color of raw umber the barg men 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 preeminent 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 500 and the stench if at rare moments

You stop smelling sulfur 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 33 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 squala that would be impossible even in London trampled bare of grass and littered with newspapers and old

Saucein 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 fad 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 cubicle building of red and yellow brick with the sign Thomas groko H 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 sulfur and serrated Flames like circular sores 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 Red lit boys and you hear the whiz and thump of steam

Hammers and the scream of the iron under the blow the pottery town s 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 sfer gatherers and cutting into the face of

The cliff with their pics 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 10 mil away you can stand in undefiled 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 Gas

Works 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 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 modern 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 gwr they may not be aesthetic triumphs but certainly they are not ugly in the

Same way as the Sheffield Gas Works 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 aldus 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 macabra 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 bodair 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 ineradicable it is important to remember this because there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is is harmless 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 northernness a sort of Northern snobbishness a Yorkshire 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 ronas and their parasites the northerner has Grit he is grim dur 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 yorkman 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 5′ 4

In high and 29 in round the chest feels that as an Englishman he is the physical Superior of carera Cara being a so also with the northerner and the Southerner I remember a weedy little yorkman who would almost certainly have run away if a fox terrier had snapped at

Him telling me that in the the south of England he felt like 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 suffk 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 Yorkshire men are Splendid chap 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 extra ract from one of his letters to me I in clithero lanks I think running water is much more attractive in more and Mountain Country Than in the fat and sluggish South the smug and silver Trent Shakespeare says

And the Souther 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 H2O 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 contempt 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 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 navest 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 100 years better

Is it for us writes a courtly reviewer of 1827 to be condemned to labor for our country’s good than to luxuriate amid olives Vines and vicces olives Vines and vices sums up the normal English attitude towards the Latin races in the mythology of carile Cy Etc the northerner tonic later Nordic is

Pictured as a hefty vigorous chap with blonde mustaches 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 50 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 concent ated in London and the southeast 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 businessman the Mr Rell and Mr bounderby of Dickens the northern businessman with his hateful get on or get out philosophy was the dominant figure of the 19th

Century and as a sort of tyrannical corpse he rules us still this is the type deified by Arnold Bennett the type who starts off with half a crown and ends up with £50,000 and whose Chief pride is to be an even greater boore 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 sorted ignorant grasping and uncouth he had grit he got on in other words he knew how to make money this kind of C is nowadays a pure

Anachronism for the northern businessman is no longer prosperous but Traditions are not killed by facts and the tradition of Northern grit lingers it is still 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

Yorkman and every Scotchman who comes to London is a sort of dick wittington 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 Club when I first went to Yorkshire some years ago I imagined that I was going to a country of bors I was used to the London yorkman with his interminable herang 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 rudess 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 work 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 enormous Brighton inhabited by Lounge Lizards for climatic reasons the parasitic dividend 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 Bourgeois ification 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 BBC hence your educated ACC stamps you

Rather as a foreigner than as a chunk 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 workingclass people on on approximately equal terms it is fairly easy to live in a Minor’s house and be accepted as one of

The family with say a farm laborer in the southern counties it probably would be impossible I’ve seen just enough of the working class to avoid idealizing them but I do know that you can learn a great deal in a workingclass home if only you can get there the essential point is

That your middleclass ideals and prejudices are test by contact with others which are not necessarily better but are certainly different take for instance the different attitude towards the family a workingclass family hangs together as a middleclass one does but the relationship is far less tyrannical a working man has not that

Deadly weight of family Prestige hanging around his neck like a millstone I have pointed out earlier that a middle class class person goes utterly to Pieces under the influence of poverty and this is generally due to the behavior 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 middleclass workers because in times of strikes almost every

Middleclass wife would be egging her husband on to Black leg 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 middleclass

Person would accept it to avoid giving offense and again take the workingclass attitude to 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 14 dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs it seemed to me Dre F that the Doom of a job should descend upon anyone at 14 of course I know now that there is

Not one workingclass 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 18 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 workingclass boy of 18 allowing himself

To be caned he is a man when the other is still a baby nnest ponteix 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 debor there is much in middleclass life

That looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a workingclass angle in a working class home I’m 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 and 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 workingclass 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 penth of mint humbugs and the dog lulls 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 workingclass family

Sitting around 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 200 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 labor 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 I will come up Street and there won’t be a

Coal fire in the great 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 would have been suppressed 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 moldy 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 modern engineering nor the

Radio nor the cinematograph nor the 5,000 novels which are published yearly nor the crowds at aset and the eaten and Harrow match but the memory of workingclass 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 part two chapter 8 the road from mandelay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking it are not immediately clear in the earlier chapters of this book I’ve given a rather fragmentary

Account of various things I saw sore in the coal areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire I went there partly because I wanted to see what mass unemployment is like at its worst partly in order to see the most typical section of the English working class at Close Quarters this was necessary to me as

Part of my approach to socialism for before you can be sure whether you are genuinely in favor of socialism you’ve got to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable and you’ve to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult issue of class here I shall have to digress and

Explain how my own attitude towards the class question was developed obviously this involves writing a certain amount of autobiography and I would not do it if I did not think that I am sufficiently typical of my class or rather subcast to have a certain symptomatic importance I was born into what you

Might describe as the lower upper middle class the upper middle class which had its Heyday in the 80s and ’90s with Kipling as its poet laurate was a sort of mound of wreckage Left Behind When the tide of Victorian Prosperity receded or perhaps it would be better to change

The metaphor and describe it not as a mound but as a layer the layer of society lying between 2,000 and £300 a year my own family was not far from the bottom you notice that I Define it in terms of money because that is always the quickest way of making yourself

Understood nevertheless the essential point about the English class system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money roughly speaking it is a money stratification but it is also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy cast system rather like a jerryb built modern Bungalow haunted by medieval

Ghosts hence the fact that the upper middle class extends or extended to incomes as low as £300 a year to incomes that is much lower than those of merely middleclass people with no social pretensions probably there are countries where you can predict a man’s opinions from his income but it is never quite

Safe to do so in England you have always got to take his Traditions into consideration as well a naval officer and his grosser very likely have the same income but they are not equivalent persons and they would only be on the same side in very large issues such as a

War or a general strike possibly not even then of course it is obvious now that the upper middle class is done for in every country town in Southern England not to mention the dreary wastes of Kensington and Earl’s Court those who knew it in the days of its Glory are

Dying vaguely embittered by a world which has not behaved as it ought I never open one of Kipling’s books or go into one of the huge dull shops which were once the favorite haunt of the upper middle class without thinking change and decay in all around I

See but before the war the upper middle class though already none too prosperous still felt sure of itself before the war you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such whatever your income might be between those with £400 a year and

Those with £2,000 or even £1,000 a year there was a great Gulf fixed but it was a gulf which those with £400 a year did their best to ignore probably the distinguishing Mark of the upper middle class was that its Traditions were not to any extent commercial but mainly military official and

Professional people in this class owned no land but they felt that they were land owners in the sight of God and kept up a semi- aristocratic Outlook by going into the professions and the fighting Services rather than into trade small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates and foretell

Their Destiny by chanting Army Navy Church medicine law and even of these medicine was faintly inferior to the others and only put in for the sake of symmetry to belong to this class when you were at the £400 a year level was a queer business for it meant that your

Gentility was almost purely theoretical you lived so to speak at two levels simultaneously theoretically you knew all about servants and how to tip them although in practice you had one or at most two resident servants theoretically you knew knew how to wear your clothes and how to order a dinner although in

Practice you could never afford to go to a decent tailor or a decent restaurant theoretically you knew how to shoot and ride although in practice you had no horses to ride and not an inch of ground to shoot over it was this that explained the attraction of India more recently Kenya

Nigeria etc for the lower upper middle class the people who went there as soldiers and officials did not go there to make money for a soldier or an official does not make money they went there because in India with cheap horses free shooting and hordes of black

Servants it was so easy to play at being a gentleman in the kind of shabby gential family that I’m talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any workingclass family above the level of the Dole rent and clothes and School bills are an unending Nightmare and every

Luxury even a glass of beer is an unwarrantable extravagance practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances it is obvious that people of this kind are in an anomalous position and one might be tempted to write them off as mere exceptions and therefore unimportant actually however they are or

Were fairly numerous most clergymen and school Masters for instance nearly all Anglo Indian officials a sprinkling of Soldiers and Sailors and a fair number of professional men and artists fall into this category but the real importance of this class is that they are the shock absorbers of the

Bourgeois the real Bourgeois those in the £2,000 a year class and over have their money as a thick layer of padding between themselves and the class they plunder in so far as they are aware of the the lower orders at all they are aware of them as employees servants and

Tradesmen but it is quite different for the poor Devils lower down who are struggling to live gential lives on what are virtually workingclass incomes these last are forced into close and in a sense intimate contact with the working class and I suspect it is from them that the traditional upper class attitude

Towards common people is derived and what is this attitude an attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred look at any number of punch during the past 30 years you will find it everywhere taken for granted that a workingclass person as such is a figure

Of fun except at odd moments when he shows signs of being too prosperous whereupon he ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a demon it is no use wasting breath in denouncing ing this attitude it is better to consider how it has arisen and

To do that one has got to realize what the working classes look like to those who live among them but have different habits and traditions a Shabby Gentile family is in much the same position as a family of poor whites living in a street where everyone else is a

Negro in such circumstances you’ve got to cling to your gentility because it is the only thing you have and meanwhile you are hated for your stuck upness and for the accent and manners which stamp you as one of the boss class I was very young not much more

Than six when I first became aware of class distinctions before that age my chief Heroes had generally been workingclass people because they always seem to do such interesting things such as being fishermen and blacksmiths and Brick Layers I remember the farm hands on a farm in cornw

Who used to let me ride on the drill when they were sewing turnips and would sometimes catch the ‘s and milk them to give me a drink and the Workman building the new house next door who let me play with the wet mortar and from whom I

First learned the word bug and the plumber up the road with whose children I used to go out bird nesting but it was not long before I was forbidden to play with the plumbers children they were common and I was told to keep away from them this was snobbish if you like but

It was also necessary for middleclass people cannot afford to let their children grow up with vulgar accents so very early the working class ceased to be a race of friendly and wonderful beings and became a race of enemies we realized that they hated us but we could never understand why and

Naturally we set it down to Pure vicious malignity to me in my early Boyhood to nearly all children of families like mine common people seemed almost subhuman they had coarse faces hideous accents and gross manners they hated everyone who was not like themselves and if they got half a chance they would

Insult you in brutal ways that was our view of them and though it was false it was understandable but one must remember that before the war there was much more overt T hatred in England than there is now in those days you were quite likely to be insulted simply for looking like a

Member of the upper classes nowadays on the other hand you are more likely to be fawned upon anyone over 30 can remember the time when it was impossible for A well-dressed person to walk through a slum street without being hooted at whole quarters of Big Towns were considered unsafe because of hooligans

Now almost an extinct type and the London gutter boy everywhere with his loud voice and lack of intellectual Scruples could make life a misery for people who considered it beneath their dignity to answer back a recurrent Terror of my holidays when I was a small boy was The Gangs of

Cads who were liable to set upon you five or 10 to one in term time on the other hand it was we who were in The majority and the cads who were oppressed I remember a couple of savage Mass battles in the cold winter of 19161 17 and this tradition of open hostility

Between upper and lower class had apparently been the same for at least a century past the typical joke in punch in the 60s is a picture of a small nervous looking gentleman riding through a slum Street and a crowd of street boys closing in on him with shouts of here

Comes a swell let’s frighten his hor just fancy the street boys trying to frighten his horse now they would be much likelier to hang around him in vague hopes of a tip during the past Dozen Years the English workingclass have grown servile with a rather horrifying

Rapidity it was bound to happen for the frightful weapon of unemployment has cowed them before the war their economic position was comparatively strong for though there was no Dole to fall back upon there was not much employment and the power of the boss class was not so

Obvious as it is now a man did not see ruin staring him in the face every time he cheeked a tough and naturally he did cheek a tough whenever it seemed safe to do so GJ renier in his book on Oscar wild points out that the strange obscene

Bursts of popular Fury which followed the wild trial were essentially social in character the London mob had caught a member of the upper classes on the Hop and they took care to keep him hopping all this was natural and even proper if you treat people as the English working class have been treated

During the past two centuries you must expect them to resent it on the other hand the children of shabby Gentile families could not be blamed if they grew up with a hatred of the working class typified for them by prowling gangs of cads but there was another and more serious

Difficulty here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the west the real reason why a European of bourge upbringing even when he calls himself a communist cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal it is summed up in four frightful Words

Which people nowadays are cherry of uttering but which were banded about quite freely in my childhood the words were the lower classes smell that was what we were taught the lower classes smell and here obviously you are at an impossible barrier for no feeling of like or

Dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling race hatred religious hatred differences of Education of temperament of intellect even differences of moral code can be got over but physical repulsion cannot you can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite but you cannot have an

Affection for a man whose breath stinks habitually stinks I mean however well you may wish him however much you may admire his mind and character if his breath stinks he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him it may not greatly matter if the

Average middleclass person is brought up to believe that the working classes are ignorant lazy drunken borish and dishonest it is when he is brought up to believe that they are dirty that the harm is done and in my childhood we were brought up to believe that they were

Dirty very early in life you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a workingclass body you would not get nearer to it than you could help you watched a great sweaty Navi walking down the road with his pick over his shoulder you looked at his

Discolored shirt and his cordr trousers stiff with the dirt of a decade you thought of those nests and layers of greasy Rags below and under all the unwashed body Brown all over that was how I used to imagine it with its strong bacon-like reek you watched a taking off his

Boots in a ditch G it did not seriously occur to you that the might not enjoy having black feet and even lower class people whom you knew to be quite CLE F servants for instance were faintly unappetizing the smell of their sweat the very texture of their skins were mysteriously different from

Yours everyone who was grown up pronouncing his hes and in the house with a bathroom and one servant is likely to have grown up with these feelings hence the chasmic impossible quality of class distinctions in the west it is queer how seldom this is ad admitted at the moment I can think of

Only one book where it is set forth without humbug and that is Mr Summerset MMS on a Chinese screen Mr mm describes a high Chinese official arriving at a Wayside in and blustering and calling everybody names in order to impress upon them that he is a supreme dignitary and they are only

Worms 5 minutes later having asserted his dignity in the way he thinks proper he is eating his dinner in perfect Amity with the baggage coolies as an official he feels that he has got to make his presence felt but he has no feeling that the coolies are of different clay from

Himself I have observed countless similar scenes in Burma among Mongolians among all asiatics for all I know there is a sort of natural equality an easy intimacy between man and man which is simply Unthinkable in the West Mr mm adds in the west we are divided from our

Fellows by our sense of smell the Working Man is our Master inclined to rule us with an iron hand but it cannot be denied that he stinks none can Wonder at it for a bath in the dawn when you have to hurry to your work before the

Factory Bell Rings is no Pleasant thing nor does heavy labor tends to sweetness and you do not change your linen more than you can help when the weeks washing must be done by a sharp tonged wife I do not blame the Working Man because he stinks but stink he does

It makes social intercourse difficult to persons of sensitive nostril the matutinal tub divides the classes more effectually than birth wealth or education meanwhile do the lower classes smell of course as a whole they are dirtier than the upper classes they are bound to be considering the circumstances in which they live for

Even at this late date less than half the houses in England have bathrooms besides the habit of washing yourself all over every day is a very recent one in Europe and the working classes are generally more conservative than the Bourgeois but the English are growing visibly cleaner and we may hope that in

A 100 years they will be almost as clean as the Japanese it is a Pity that those who idealize the working class so often think it necessary to praise every working class characteristic and therefore to pretend that dirtiness is somehow meritorious in itself here curiously enough the Socialist and the sentimental Democratic

Catholic of the type of Cheston sometimes join hands both will tell you that dirtiness is healthy and natural and cleanliness is a mere fad or at best a luxury footnote according to chesteron dirtiness is merely a kind of discomfort and therefore ranks as self-mortification unfortunately the discomfort of

Dirtiness is chiefly suffered by other people it is not really very uncomfortable to be dirty not nearly so uncomfortable as having a cold bath on a winter morning end of footnote they seem not to see that they are merely giving color to the notion that Working Class People are dirty from

Choice and not from necessity actually people who have access to a bath will generally use it but the essential thing is that middleclass people believe that the working class are dirty you see from the passage quoted above that Mr M himself believes it and what is worse that they are somehow inherently

Dirty as a child one of the most Dreadful things I could imagine was to drink out of a bottle after a navi once when I was 13 I was in a train coming from a market town and the third class Carriage was packed full of Shepherds and pig men who had been

Selling their beasts somebody produced a quart bottle of beer and passed it round it traveled from mouth to mouth to mouth everyone taking a swig I cannot describe the horror I felt as that bottle worked it it way towards me if I drank from it after all those

Lower class male mouths I felt certain I should vomit on the other hand if they offered it to me I dared not refuse for fear of offending them you see here how the middle class squeamishness works both ways nowadays thank God I have no feelings of that kind a working man’s

Body as such is no more repulsive to me than a millionaires I still don’t like drinking out of a cup or bottle after another person another man I mean with women I don’t mind but at least the question of class does not enter it was rubbing shoulders with the

Tramps that cured me of it tramps are not really very dirty as English people go but they have the name for being dirty and when you have shared a bed with a and drunk tea out of the same snuffin you feel that you have seen the worst and the worst has no

Terrors for you I have dwelt on these subjects because they are vitally important to get rid of class distinctions you’ve got to start by understanding how one class appears when seen Through The Eyes of another it is useless to say that the middle classes are snobbish and leave it

At that you get no further if you do not realize that snobbishness is bound up with a species of idealism it derives from the early training in which a middle class child is taught almost simultaneously to wash his neck to be ready to die for his country and to despise the lower

Classes here I shall be accused of being behind the times for I was a child before and during the war and it may be claimed that children nowadays are brought up with more enlightened Notions it is probably true that class feeding is for the moment a very little less bitter than it

Was the working class are submissive where they used to be openly hostile and the post-war manufacturer of cheap clothes and the general softening of manners have toned down the surface differences between class and class but undoubtedly the essential feeling is still there every middleclass person has a dormant class Prejudice which needs

Only a small thing to arouse it and if he is over 40 he probably has a firm conviction that his own class has been sacrificed to the class below suggest to the average unthinking person of gentle birth who is struggling to keep up appearances on four or 500 a

Year that he is a member of an exploiting parasite class and he will think you are mad in perfect sincerity he will point out to you a dozen ways in which he is worse off than a working man in his eyes the workers are not a submerged race of slaves they are a

Sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence hence that queer watchful anxiety lest the working class shall grow too prosperous in a number of punch soon after the war when Cole was still

Fetching high prices there is a picture of four or five miners with grim Sinister faces riding in a cheap Motorcar a friend they are passing calls out and asks them where they have borrowed it they answer we brought the thing this you see is good enough for

Punch for miners to buy a motorc car even one car between four or five of them is a monstrosity a sort of crime against nature that was the attitude of a dozen years ago and I see no evidence of any fundamental change the notion that the working class have been absurdly pampered hopelessly

Demoralized by dolls old age pensions free education Etc is still widely held it has merely been a little shaken perhaps by the recent recognition that unemployment does exist for quantities of middleclass people probably for a large majority of those over 50 the typical working man still rides to the

Labor exchange on a motorbike and keeps coal in his bathtub and if you’ll believe it my dear they actually get married on the do the reason why class hatred seems to be diminishing is that nowadays it tends not to get into print partly owing to the mey mouthed habits of our time

Partly because newspapers and even books now have to appeal to a workingclass public as a rule you can best study it in private conversations but if you want some printed examples it is worth having a look at the obiter dictor of the late professor saintsbury saintsbury was a very learned

Man and along certain lines a judicious literary critic but when he talked of political or economic matters he only differed from the rest of his class by the fact that he was too thick skinned and had been born too early to see any reason for pretending to common decency according to saintsbury

Unemployment insurance was simply contributing to the support of lazy neru wills and the whole Trade union movement was no more than a kind of organized mendicancy poper is almost actionable now is it not when used as a word though to be popers in the sense of being wholly or partly supported at the

Expense of other people is the Ardent and to a considerable extent achieved aspiration of a large proportion of our population and of an entire political party a second scrapbook it is to be noticed however that saintsbury recognizes that unemployment is bound to exist and in fact thinks that it ought to exist exist

So long as the unemployed are made to suffer as much as possible is not casual labor the very secret and safety valve of a safe and sound labor system generally in a complicated Industrial and Commercial State constant employment at regular wages is impossible while do supported unemployment at anything like

The wages of employment is demoralizing to begin with and ruinous at its more or less quickly arriving end a last scrapbook what exactly is to happen to the Casual laborers when no casual labor happens to be available is not made clear presumably saintsbury speaks approvingly of good poor laws they are

To go into the workhouse or sleep in the streets as to the notion that every human being ought as a matter of course to have the chance of earning at least a tolerable livelihood saintsbury dismisses it with contempt even the right to live extends no further than the right of protection against

Murder charity certainly will morality possibly May and public utility perhaps ought to add to this protection super rogatory provision for continuance of life but it is questionable whether strict Justice demands it as for the insane doctrine that being born in a country give some right to the

Possession of the soil of that country it hardly quires notice a last scrapbook it is worth reflecting for a moment upon the beautiful implications of this last passage the interest of passages like these and they are scattered all through Sainsbury’s work lies in their having been printed at

All most people are a little shy of putting that kind of thing on paper but what saintsbury is saying here is what any little worm with a a fairly safe 500 a year thinks and therefore in a way one must admire him for saying it it takes a

Lot of guts to be openly such a skunk as that this is the Outlook of a confessed reactionary but how about the middle class person whose views are not reactionary but Advanced beneath his revolutionary mask is he really so different from the other a middleclass person in Embraces

Socialism and perhaps even joins the Communist Party how much real difference does it make obviously living within the framework of capitalist Society he’s got to go on earning his living and one cannot blame him if he clings to his bourgea economic status but is there any change in his

Tastes his habits his manners his imaginative background his ideology in communist jargon is there any change in him except that he now votes labor or when possible communist at the elections it is noticeable that he still habitually Associates with his own class he is vastly more at home with a member

Of his own class who thinks him a dangerous bulchi than with a member of the working class who supposedly agrees with him his tastes in food wine clothes books pictures music ballet are still recognizably bourgeois tastes most significant of all he invariably marries into his own class look at any boura

Socialist look at comrade X member of the cpgb and author of Marxism for infants comrade X it so happens is an old eonian he would be ready to die on the barricades in theory anyway but you notice that he still leaves his bottom wasket button undone he idealized es the

Proletariat but it is remarkable how little his habits resemble theirs perhaps once out of sheer bravado he has smoked a cigar with a band on but it would be almost physically impossible for him to put pieces of cheese into his mouth on the point of his knife or to

Sit indoors with his cap on or even to drink his tea out of the sorcer perhaps table manners are not a bad test of sincerity I have known numbers of bour our socialists I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class and yet never

Not even once have I met one who had picked up proletarian table manners yet after all why not why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still takes such pains to drink his soup silently it can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are

Disgusting so you see he is still responding to the training of his childhood when he was taught to hate fear and despise the working class chapter nine when I was 14 or 15 I was an odious little snob but no worse than other boys of my own age and

Class I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school here at least one cannot say that English education fails to do its job you forget your Latin and

Greek within a few months of leaving school I studied Greek for8 or 10 years and now at 33 I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet but your snobbishness unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is sticks by you till your grave at school I was in a difficult

Position for I was among boys who for the most part were much richer than myself and I only went to an expensive public school because I happened to win a scholarship this is the common experience of boys of the lower upper middle class the sons of clergymen Anglo

Indian officials Etc and the effects it had on me were probably the usual ones on the one hand it made me cling tighter than ever to my gentility on the other hand it fed me with resentment against the boys whose parents were richer than mine and who

Took care to let me know it I despised anyone who was not describable as a gentleman but also I hated the hoggish rich especially those who had grown Rich too recently the correct and elegant thing I felt was to be of gentle birth but to

Have no money this is part of The Credo of the lower upper middle class it has a romantic jackaby in Exile Fe feeling about it which is very comforting but those years during and just after the war were a queer time to be at school for England was near a

Revolution than she has been since or had been for a century earlier throughout almost the whole nation there was running a wave of revolutionary feeling which has since been reversed and forgotten but which has left various deposits of sediment behind essentially the of course one could not then see it in perspective it

Was a Revolt of Youth against age resulting directly from the war in the war the young had been sacrificed and the old had behaved in a way which even at this distance of time is horrible to contemplate they had been sternly patriotic in safe places while their

Sons went down like SS of hay before the German machine guns moreover the war had been conducted mainly by old men and had been conducted with Supreme incompetence by 1918 everyone under 40 was in a bad temper with his elders and the mood of anti-militarism which followed naturally upon the fighting was

Extended into a general revolt against Orthodoxy and Authority at that time there was among the young a curious Cult of hatred of old men the dominance of old men was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity and every accepted institution from Scots novels to the

House of Lords was derided merely because old men were in favor of it for several years it was all the fashion to be a bulli as people then called it England was full of half-baked antinomian opinions pacifism internationalism humanitarianism of all kinds feminism free love divorce reform atheism birth control things like these

Were getting a better hearing than they would get in normal times and of course the Revolutionary mood extended to those who had been too young to fight even to public school boys at that time we all thought of ourselves as enlightened creatures of a new age casting off the Orthodoxy that

Had been forced Upon Us by those detested Old Men We retained basically the snobbish Outlook of our class we took it for granted that we should continue to draw our divid ends or tumble into soft jobs but also it seemed natural to us to be again the government we derided the OTC the

Christian religion and perhaps even compulsory games and the royal family and we did not realize that we were merely taking part in a worldwide gesture of distaste for War Two incidents stick in my mind as examples of the queer revolutionary feeling of that time one day the master who taught us

English s us a kind of general knowledge paper of which one of the questions was whom do you consider the 10 greatest men now living of 16 boys in the class our average age was about 17 15 included Lenin in their list this was at a snobbish expensive public school and the

Date was 1920 when the horrors of the Russian Revolution were still fresh in everyone’s mind also there were the so-called peace celebrations in 1919 our elders had decided for us that we should celebrate peace in the traditional manner by whooping over the Fallen foe we were to March into the schoolyard carrying

Tortes and sing Jingo songs of the type of Rule Britannia the boys to their honor I think guide the whole proceeding and sang Blasphemous and seditious words to the tunes provided I doubt whether things would happen in quite that manner now certainly the public school boys I meet nowadays even the intelligent ones

Are much more right-wing in their opinions than I and my contemporaries were 15 years ago hence at the age of 17 or 18 I was both a snob and a revolutionary I was against all authority I had read and reread the entire published works of Shaw Wells and gold worthy at that time

Still regarded as dangerously Advanced writers and I Loosely described myself as a socialist but I had not much grasp of what socialism meant and no notion that the working class were human beings at a distance and through the medium of books Jack London’s the people of the Abyss for instance I could

Agonize over their sufferings but I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them I was still revolted Ed by their accents and infuriated by their habitual rudess one must remember that just then immediately after the war the English working class were in a fighting

Mood that was the period of the great coal strikes when a minor was thought of as a fiend incarnate and old ladies looked under their beds every night lest Robert’s Smiley should be concealed there all through the war and for a little time afterwards there had been high wages and abundant

Employment things were now returning to something worse than normal and naturally the working class resisted The Men Who had fought had been lured into the army by gy promises and now they were coming home to a world where there were no jobs and not even any

Houses moreover they had been at War and were coming home with the solders attitude to life which is fundamentally in spite of discipline a lawless attitude there was a turbulent feeling in the air to that time belongs the song with the memorable refrain there’s nothing sure but the rich get richer and

The poor get children in the meantime in between time ain’t we got fun people had not yet settled down to a lifetime of unemployment mitigated by endless Cups of Tea they still vaguely expected the Utopia for which they had fought and even more than before they were openly hostile to the H pronouncing

Class so to the shock absorbers of the Bourgeois such as myself common people still appeared brutal and repulsive looking back upon that period I seem to have spent half the time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in Raging over the insolence of bus

Conductors when I was not yet 20 I went to Burma in the Indian Imperial police in an outpost of Empire like Burma the class question appeared at first sight to have been shelved there was no obvious class friction here because the all important thing was not

Whether you had been to one of the right schools but whether your skin was technically white as a matter of fact most of the white men in Burma were not of the type who in England would be called gentlemen but except for the common soldiers and a few n cripts they

Lived lives appropriate to gentlemen had servants that is and called their evening meal dinner and officially they were regarded as being all of the same class they were white men in contradistinction to the other and inferior class the natives but one did not feel towards the natives as one felt towards the lower

Classes at home the essential point was that the natives at any rate the Burmese were were not felt to be physically repulsive one looked down on them as natives but one was quite ready to be physically intimate with them and this I noticed was the case even with white men

Who had the most vicious color Prejudice when you have a lot of servants you soon get into lazy habits and I habitually allowed myself for instance to be dressed and undressed by my Burmese boy this was because he was a Burman and UND disgusting I could not have endured to let an Englishman

Servant handle me in that intimate manner I felt towards a Burman almost as I felt towards a woman like most other races the burmes have a distinctive smell I cannot describe it it is a smell that makes one’s teeth tingle but this smell never disgusted me incidentally

Orientals say that we smell the Chinese I believe say that a white man smells like a corpse the burmes say the same though no Burman was ever rude enough to say so to me and in a way my attitude was defensible for if one faces facts one must admit that most Mongolians have

Much nicer bodies than most white men compare the firm knit silken skin of the Burman which does not wrinkle at all till he’s past 40 and then merely Withers up like a piece of dry leather with the coarse grained flabby sagging skin of the white man the white man has

Lank L hair growing down his legs and the backs of his arms and in an ugly patch on his chest the Burman has only a tuft or two of stiff black hair at the appropriate places for the rest he is quite hairless and is usually beardless

As well the white man almost always goes bald the Burman seldom or never the burman’s teeth are perfect though generally discolored by Beetle Juice the white man’s teeth invar Decay the white man is generally ill-shaped and when he grows fat he bulges in improbable places the Mongol

Has beautiful bones and in old age he is almost as shapely as in youth admittedly the white races throw up a few individuals who for a few years are supremely beautiful but on the whole say what you will they are far less comely than orientals but it was not of this that I

Was thinking when I found the English lower classes so much more repellent than Burmese natives I was still thinking in terms of my early acquired class Prejudice when I was not much past 20 I was attached for a short time to a British Regiment of course I admired and

Liked the private soldiers as any youth of 20 would admire and like Hefty cheery youths 5 years older than himself with the medals of the Great War on their chests and yet after all they faintly repelled me they were common people and I did not care to be too close to them

In the hot mornings when the company marched down the road myself in the rear with one of the junior subon the steam of those hundred sweating bodies in front made my stomach turn and this You observe was pure Prejudice for a soldier is probably as inoffensive physically as it is possible

For a male white person to be he is generally Young he is nearly always healthy from fresh air and exercise and a rigorous discipline compels him to be clean but I could not see it like that all I knew was that it was lower class sweat that I

Was smelling and the thought of it made me sick when later on I got rid of my class Prejudice or part of it it was in a roundabout way and by a process that took several years the thing that changed my attitude to the class class issue was something

Only indirectly connected with it something almost irrelevant I was in the Indian police 5 years and by the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear in the free air of England that kind of thing is not fully

Intelligible in order to hate imperialism you’ve got to be part of it seen from the outside the British rule in India appears indeed it is benevolent and even necessary and so no doubt are the French rule in Morocco and the Dutch rule in Borneo for people usually govern foreigners better than

They govern themselves but it is not possible to be part of such a system without recognizing it as an unjustifiable tyranny even the thickest skinned Anglo Indian is aware of this every native face he sees in the street brings home to him his monstrous intrusion and the majority of Anglo

Indians intermittently at least are not nearly so complacent about their position as people in England believe from the most unexpected people from ginp pickled old Scoundrels high up in the government service I have heard some such remark as of course we have no right in this blasted country at all

Only now we’re here for God’s sake let’s stay here the truth is that no modern man in his heart of hearts believes that it is right to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force foreign oppression is a much more obvious understandable evil than economic

Oppression thus in England we tamely admit to being robbed in order to keep half a million worthless idlers in luxury but we would fight to the last man sooner than be ruled by Chinamen similarly people who live on unearned dividends without a single qual of conscience see clearly enough that it is

Wrong to go and Lord it in a foreign country where you are not wanted the result is that every Anglo Indian is haunted by a sense of guilt which he usually conceals as best he can because there is no freedom of speech and merely to be overheard making a

Seditious remark may damage his career all over India there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part and just occasionally when they are quite certain of being in the right company their hidden bitterness overflows I remember a night I spent on the train with a man in the Educational

Service a stranger to myself whose name I never discovered it was too hot to sleep and we spent the night in talking half an hour’s cautious questioning decided each of us that the other was safe and then for hours while the train jolted slowly through the pitch black night sitting up in our

Bunks with bottles of beer handy we damned the British Empire damned it from the inside intelligently and intimately it did us both good but we’ been speaking forbidden things and in the Haggard Morning Light when the train crawled into Mandalay we parted as guiltily as any adulterous

Couple so far as my observation goes nearly all Anglo Indian officials have moment when their conscience troubles them the exceptions are men who are doing something which is demonstrably useful and would still have to be done whether the British were in India or not Forest officers for instance and doctors and

Engineers but I was in the police which is to say that I was part of the actual Machinery of despotism moreover in the police you see the Dirty Work of Empire at Close Quarters and there is an appreciable difference between doing doing dirty work and merely profiting by

It most people approve of capital punishment but most people wouldn’t do The Hangman’s job even the other Europeans in Burma slightly looked down on the police because of the brutal work they had to do I remember once when I was inspecting a police station an American missionary

Whom I knew fairly well came in for some purpose or other like most non-conformist missionaries he was a complete ass but quite a good fellow hello one of my native sub inspectors was bullying a suspect I described this scene in burmes days the American watched it and then turning to me said

Thoughtfully I wouldn’t care to have your job it made me horribly ashamed so that was the kind of job I had even an ass of an American missionary a ttotal virgin from the middle west had the right to look down on me and Pity Me

But I should have felt the same shame even if there had been no one to bring it home to me I had begun to have an Indescribable loathing of the whole Machinery of so-called Justice say what you will our criminal law far more Humane by the way in India than in

England is a horrible thing it needs very insensitive people to administer it The Wretched prisoners squatting in the wreaking cages of the lockups the gray cowed faces of the long-term convicts the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos the women and children howling when their menfolk were

LED away under arrest things like these are Beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them I watched a man hanged once it seemed to me worse than a thousand murders I never went into a jail without feeling most visitors to jails feel the

Same that my place was on the other side of the the bars I thought then I think now for that matter that the worst criminal who ever walked is morally Superior to a hanging judge but of course I had to keep these Notions to myself because of the almost

Utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the east in the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them

Alone this of course was sentimental nonsense I see now as I did not see then that it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence in any state of society where crime can be profitable you’ve got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly the alternative is Al

Capone but the feeling that punishment is evil arises inescapably in and those who have to administer it I should expect to find that even in England many policemen judges prison warders and the like are haunted by a secret horror of what they do but in Burma it was a double

Oppression that we were committing not only were we hanging people and putting them in jail and so forth we were doing it in the capacity of unwanted foreign Invaders the burmes themselves never really recognized our jurisdiction the thief whom we put in prison did not think of himself as a criminal justly

Punished he thought of himself as the victim of a foreign conqueror the thing that was done to him was merely a wanten meaningless cruelty his face behind the Stout teak bars of the lockup and the iron bars of the jail said so clearly and unfortunately I had not trained myself

To be indifferent to the expression of the human face when I came home on leave in 1927 I was already half determined to throw up my job and one sniff of English air decided me I was not going back to be a part of that evil despotism but I wanted much more than

Merely to escape from my job for 5 years I had been part of an oppressive system and it had left me with a bad conscience innumerable remember faces the faces of prisoners in the dock of men waiting in The Condemned cells of subordinates I had bullied and aged

Peasants I had snubbed of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of Rage nearly everyone does these things in the east at any rate occasionally orientals can be very provoking haunted me in tolerably I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to

Expiate I suppose that sounds exaggerated but if you do for 5 years a job that you thoroughly disapprove of you will probably feel the same I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong a mistaken Theory but the

Natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s minion over man I wanted to submerge myself to get right down among the oppressed to be one of them and on their side against their

Tyrants and chiefly because I had had to think everything out in solitude I had carried my hatred of Oppression to extraordinary lengths at that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue every suspicion of self- advancement even to succeed in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a

Year seem to me spiritually ugly a species of bullying it was in this way that my thoughts turned towards the English working class it was the first time that I had ever been really aware of the working class and to begin with it was only because they supplied an

Analogy they were the symbolic victims of Injustice playing the same part in England as the Burmese played in Burma in Burma the issue had been quite simple the whites were up and the blacks were down and therefore as a matter of course one’s sympathy was with the

Blacks I now realized that there was no need to go as far as Burma to find tyranny and exploitation here in England down under one’s feet were the submerged working class suffering miseries which in their different way were as bad as any an oriental Ever Knows the word unemployment was on

Everyone’s lips that was more or less new to me after Burma but the Dil which the middle classes were still talking these unemployed are all unemployables etc etc failed to deceive me I often wonder whether that kind of stuff deceives even the fools who utter it on

The other hand I had at that time no interest in Socialism or any other economic theory it’s seemed to me then it sometimes seems to me now for that matter that economic Injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop and no sooner and if we genuinely want it to

Stop the method adopted hardly matters but I knew nothing about workingclass conditions I had read the unemployment figures but I had no notion of what they implied above all I did not know the essential fact that respectable poverty is always the worst the frightful Doom of a decent working

Man suddenly thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work his agonized struggles against economic laws which he does not understand the disintegration of families the corroding sense of Shame all this was outside the range of my experience when I thought of poverty I thought of it in terms of brute

Starvation therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases the social outcasts tramps Beggars criminals prostitutes these were the lowest of the low and these were the people with whom I wanted to get in contact what I profoundly wanted at that time was to find some way of getting out

Of the respectable world allog together I meditated upon it a great deal I even planned parts of it in detail how one could sell everything give everything away change change one’s name and start out with no money and nothing but the clothes one stood up in but in real life

Nobody ever does that kind of thing apart from the relatives and friends who have to be considered it is doubtful whether an educated man could do it if there were any other course open to him but at least I could go among these people see what their lives will like

And feel myself temporarily part of their world once I had been among them and accepted by them I should have touched bottom and this is what I felt I was aware even then that it was irrational part of my guilt would drop from me I thought it over and decided what I

Would do I would go suitably disguised to Lim house and White Chapel and such places and sleep in common lodging houses and pal up with dock laborers Street Hawkers derelict people Beggars and if possible Criminal crial and I would find out about Tramps and how you

Got in touch with them and what was the proper procedure for entering the Casual Ward and then when I felt that I knew the ropes well enough I would go on the road myself at the start it was not easy it meant masquerading and I have no talent

For acting I cannot for instance disguise my accent at any rate not for more than a very few minutes I imagined noticed the frightful class consciousness of the Englishman that I should be spotted as a gentleman the moment I opened my mouth so I had a hard

Luck story ready in case I should be questioned I got hold of the right kind of clothes and dirted them in appropriate places I am a difficult person to disguise being abnormally tall but I did at least know what a looks like how few people do know this by the way

Look at any picture of a in punch they are always 20 years out of date one evening having made ready at a friend’s house I set out and wandered Eastward till I landed up at a common lodging house in Limehouse Causeway it was a dark dirty looking

Place I knew it was a common lodging house by the sign good beds for single men in the window Heavens how I had to screw up my courage before I went in it seems ridiculous now but you see I was still half afraid of the working

Class I wanted to get in touch with them I even wanted to become one of them but I still thought of them as alien and dangerous going into the dark doorway of that common lodging house seemed to me like going down into some Dreadful Subterranean place a sewer full of rats

For instance I went in fully expecting a fight the people would spot that I I was not one of themselves and immediately infer that I’d come to spy on them and then they would set upon me and throw me out that was what I

Expected I felt that I had got to do it but I did not enjoy the prospect inside the door a man in shirt sleeves appeared from somewhere or other this was the deputy and I told him that I wanted a bed for the night my accent did not make him stare I noticed

He merely demanded 9 p and then showed me the way to a fry fet kitchen underground there were stors and navies and a few Sailors sitting about and playing drafts and drinking tea they barely glanced at me as I entered but this was Saturday night and

A hefty young stor was drunk and was reeling about the room he turned saw me and lurched towards me with broad red face Thrust out and a dangerous looking fishy gleam in his eyes I stiffened myself so the fight was coming already the next moment the stor

Collapsed on my chest and flung his arms around my neck I C te Cham he cried tearfully have a cup of tea I had a cup of tea it was a kind of baptism after that my fears vanished nobody questioned me nobody showed offensive curiosity everybody was polite and

Gentle and took me utterly for granted I stayed two or three days in that common lodging house and a few weeks later having picked up a certain amount of information about the habits of destitute people I went on the road for the first time I have described all this in Down

And Out in Paris and London nearly all the incidents described there actually happened though they have been rearranged and I do not want to repeat it later I went on the road for much longer periods sometimes from Choice sometimes from necessity I have lived in common lodging

Houses for months together but it is that first expedition that sticks most vividly in my mind because of the strangeness of it the strangeness of being at last down there among the lowest of the low and on terms of utter equality with workingclass people a it is true is not a

Typical workingclass person still when you are among tramps you are at any rate merged in one section one subcast of the working class a thing which so far as I know can happen to you in no other way for several days I wandered through the northern outskirts of London with an

Irish I was his mate temporarily we shared the same cell at night and he told me the history of his life and I told him a fictitious history of mine and we took it in turns to beg at likely looking houses and divided up the proceeds I was very happy here I was

Among the lowest of the low at the Bedrock of the Western World the class bar was down or seemed to be down and down there in the squalet and as a matter of fact horribly boring subor of the I had a feeling of release of Adventure which seems absurd when I back

But which was sufficiently Vivid at the time chapter 10 but unfortunately you do not solve the class Problem by making friends with tramps at most you get rid of some of your own class Prejudice by doing so tramps Beggars criminals and social outcasts generally are very exceptional

Beings and no more typical of the working class as a whole than say the literary intelligencia are typical of the Bourgeois it is quite easy to be on terms of intimacy with a foreign intellectual but it is not at all easy to be on terms of intimacy with an

Ordinary respectable Foreigner of the middle class how many Englishmen have seen the inside of an ordinary French Bourgeois family for instance probably it would be quite impossible to do so short of marrying into it and it is rather similar with the English working class nothing is easier than to be BOS and

Pals with a pickpocket if you know where to look for him but it is very difficult to be bosm Pals with a brick layer but why is it so easy to be on equal terms with social outcasts people have often said to me surely when you are with the tramps They

Don’t Really accept you as one of themselves surely they notice that you are different notice the difference of accent etc etc as a matter of fact a fair proportion of tramps well over a quarter I should say notice nothing of the kind to begin with many people have no ear

For accent and judge you entirely by your clothes I was often struck by this fact when I was begging at back doors some people were obviously surprised by my educated accent others completely failed to notice it I was dirty and ragged and that was all they

Saw again tramps come from all parts of the British Isles and the variation in English accents is enormous a is is used to hearing all kinds of accents among his mates some of them so strange to him that he can hardly understand them and a man from say Cardiff or Durham or Dublin

Does not necessarily know which of the South English accents is an educated one in any case men with educated accents though rare among tramps are not unknown but even when tramps are aware that you are of different origin from themselves it does not necessarily alter their attitude from their point of view

All that matters is that you like themselves are on the bum and in that world it is not done to ask too many questions you can tell people the history of your life if you choose and most tramps do so on the smallest provocation but you are under no

Compulsion to tell it and whatever story you tell will be accepted without question even a bishop could be at home among tramps if he wore the right clothes and even if they knew he was a bishop it might not make any difference provided that they also knew or believed that he was genuinely

Destitute once you are in that world and seemingly of it it hardly matters what you have been in the past it is a sort of world within a world where everyone is equal a small squalid democracy perhaps the nearest thing to a democracy that exists in

England but when you come to the normal working class the the position is totally different to begin with there is no shortcut into their midst you can become a simply by putting on the right clothes and going to the nearest casual Ward but you can’t become a navi

Or a coal miner you couldn’t get a job as a navi or a coal miner even if you were equal to the work via socialist politics you get in touch with a workingclass intelligencia but they are hardly more typical than tramps or bir burglers for the rest you can only

Mingle with the working class by staying in their houses as a lodger which always has a dangerous resemblance to sluming for some months I lived entirely in coal miners houses I ate my meals with the family I washed at the kitchen sink I shared bedrooms with miners drank beer with

Them played darts with them talk to them by the hour together but though I was among them and I hope and trust they did not find me a nuisance I was not one of them and they knew it even better than I did however much you like them however

Interesting you find their conversation there is always that accursed itch of class difference like the PE under the princess’s mattress it is not a question of dislike or distaste only of difference but it is enough to make real intimacy impossible even with miners who described themselves as Communists I

Found that it needed tactful maneuverings to prevent them from calling me sir and all of them except in moments of great animation softened their Northern accents for my benefit I liked them and hoped they liked me but I went among them as a foreigner and both of us were aware of

It whichever way you turn this curse of class difference confronts you like a wall of stone or rather it is not so much like a stone wall as the plate glass pane of an aquarium it is so easy to pretend that it isn’t there and so impossible to get through

It unfortunately it is nowadays the fashion to pretend that the glass is penetrable of course everyone knows that class Prejudice exists but at the same time everyone claims that he and some mysterious way is exempt from it snobbishness is one of those vices which we can ER in everyone else but never in

Ourselves not only the qu a pratic socialist but every intellectual takes it as a matter of course that he at least is outside the class racket he unlike his neighbors can see through the absurdity of wealth ranks titles etc etc I’m not a snob is nowadays a kind of universal

Credo who is there who is not Jered at the House of Lords the military cast the royal family the public Public Schools the hunting and shooting people the old ladies in chelton and boarding houses the horrors of County society and the social hierarchy generally to do so has

Become an automatic gesture you notice this particularly in novels every novelist of serious pretensions adopts an ironic attitude towards his upper class characters indeed when a novelist has to put a definitely upper class person a duke or a baronet or whatnot into one of his stories he gu him more or less

Instinctively there is an important subsidiary cause of this in the poverty of the modern upper class dialect the speech of educated people is now so lifeless and characterless that a novelist can do nothing with it by far the easiest way of making it amusing is to burlesque it which means pretending

That every upper class person is an ineffectual ass the trick is imitated from novelist to novelist and in the end becomes almost a reflex action and yet all the while at the bottom of his heart everyone knows that this is hug we all rail against class distinctions but very few people

Seriously want to abolish them here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed if you want a good illustration of this it is worth studying the novel and plays of John galsworthy keeping one eye on their

Chronology galsworthy is a very fine specimen of the thin skinned tear in the eye pre-war humanitarian he starts out with a morbid pity complex which extends even to thinking that every married woman is an angel chained to a SAT he is in a Perpetual quiver of indignation over the

Sufferings of overworked Clarks of underpaid Farm hands of Fallen women of criminals of prostitutes of animals the world as he sees it in his earlier books the man of property Justice Etc is divided into oppressors and oppressed with the oppressors sitting on top like some monstrous Stone Idol which all the

Dynamite in the world cannot overthrow but is it so certain that he really wants it overthrown on the contrary in his fight against an immovable tyranny he is upheld by the consciousness that it is immovable when things happen unexpectedly and the world order which he has known begins to crumble he feels

Somewhat differently about it so having set out to be the champion of the underdog against tyranny and Injustice he ends by advocating V Day the Silver Spoon that the English working class to cure their economic ills shall be deported to the colonies like batches of cattle if he had lived 10 years longer

He would would quite probably have arrived at some gential version of fascism this is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist all his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality the same streak of soggy Half Baked insincerity runs through all advanced opinion take the question of imperialism

For instance every left-wing intellectual is as a matter of course an Anti-Imperialist he claims to be outside the Empire racket as automatically and self-righteously as he claims to be outside the class racket even the right-wing intellectual who is not definitely in revolt against British imperialism pretends to regard it with a

Sort of amused attachment it is so easy to be witty about the British Empire The White Man’s Burden and Rule Britannia and Kipling’s novels and Anglo Indian BS who could even mention such things without a snig and is there any cultured person who has not at least once in his life made a

Joke about that old Indian havar who said that if the British left India there would not be a rupe or a virgin left between peshawa and Delhi or wherever it was that is the attitude of the typical left Winger towards imperialism and a thoroughly flabby boneless attitude it is for in The Last

Resort the only important question is do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate and at the bottom of his heart no Englishman least of all the kind of person who is witty about Anglo Indian kernels does want it to disintegrate for apart from any other

Consideration the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the empire particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and Africa under the capitalist system in order that England may live in comparative Comfort a 100 million Indians must live on the verge of

Starvation an evil State of Affairs but you acques in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream the alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have

To work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes that is the very last thing that any left Winger wants yet the left Winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism he is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to

Save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the empire together it is at this point that one begins to grasp the unreality of most people’s attitude towards the class question so long as it is merely a question of ameliorating the worker’s lot every decent person is agreed

Take a coal miner for example everyone barring fools and Scoundrels would like to see The Miner better off if for instance the miner could ride to the coal face in a comfortable trolley instead of crawling on his hands and knees if he could work a three-hour

Shift instead of 7 and 1 half hours if he could live in a decent house with five bedrooms and a bathroom and have 10s a week wages Splendid moreover anyone who uses his brain knows know perfectly well that this is within the range of possibility the world potentially at

Least is immensely Rich develop it as it might be developed and we could all live like princes supposing that we wanted to and to a very superficial glance the social side of the question looks equally simple in a sense it is true that almost everyone would like to see class distinctions

Abolished obviously this Perpetual uneasiness between man and man from which we suffer in modern England is a curse and a nuisance hence the temptation to believe that it can be shouted out of existence with a few Scout Mish Bellows of Goodwill stop calling me sir you chaps

Surely we’re all men let’s pal up and get our shoulders to the wheel and remember that we’re all equal and what the devil does it matter if I know what kind of ties to wear and you don’t and I drink my soup comparatively quietly and you drink yours with the noise of water

Going down a waste pipe and so on and so on and so on all of it the most pernicious rubbish but quite alluring when it is suitably expressed but unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class distinctions away more exactly it is necessary to wish them away but your wish has no

Efficacy unless you grasp what it involves the fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself here am I a typical member of the middle class it is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class

Distinctions but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class distinctions all my Notions Notions of Good and Evil of pleasant and unpleasant of funny and serious of ugly and beautiful are essentially middle class Notions my taste in books and food and clothes my sense of honor my table

Manners my turns of speech my accent even the characteristic movements of my body are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special Niche about halfway up the social hierarchy when I grasp this I grasp that it is no use clapping a proletarian on

The back and telling him that he is as good a man as I am if I want real contact with him I’ve got to make an effort for which very likely I’m unprepared for to get outside the class racket I’ve got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness but most of my

Other tastes and prejudices as well I’ve got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as the same person what is involved is not merely the amelioration of workingclass conditions nor an avoidance of the more stupid forms of snobbery but a complete

Abandonment of the upper class and middle class attitud to life and whether I say yes or no probably depends upon the extent to which I grasp what is demanded of me many people however imagine that they can abolish class distinctions without making any uncomfortable change in their

Own habits and ideology hence the eager class breaking activities which one can see in progress on all sides everywhere there are people of Good Will who quite honestly believe that they are working for the overthrow of class distinctions the middleclass Socialist infuses over the proletariat and runs Summer Schools where the proletarian and

The repentant Bourgeois are supposed to fall upon one another’s necks and be brothers forever and the Bourgeois visitors Come Away saying how wonderful and inspiring it has all been the proletarian ones come away saying something different and then there is the outer Suburban creeping Jesus a hangover from the William morrris

Period but still surprisingly common who goes about saying why must we level down why not level up and proposes to level the working class up up to his own standard by means of hygiene fruit juice birth control poetry Etc even the Duke of York now King George V 6 runs a

Yearly camp where public school boys and boys from the slums are supposed to mix on on exactly equal terms and do mix for the time being rather like the animals in one of those happy family cages where a dog a cat two ferrets a rabbit and three canaries preserve an armed truce

While the Showman’s eye is on them all such deliberate conscious efforts at class breaking are I am convinced a very serious mistake sometimes they’re merely futile but where they do show a definite result it is usually to intensify class Prejudice this if you come to think of

It is only what might be expected you have forced the pace and set up an uneasy unnatural equality between class and class the resultant friction brings to the surface all kinds of feelings that might otherwise have remained buried perhaps forever as I said appropo of galsworthy the opinions of the sentimentalist

Change into their opposites at the first Touch of reality scratch the average pacifist and you find a Jingo the middle class ILP and the bearded fruit juice Drinker are all for a classless society so long as they see the proletariat through the wrong end of the telescope force them into any real

Contact with a proletarian let them get into a fight with a drunken fish Porter on Saturday night for instance and they are capable of swinging back to the most ordinary middle class snobbishness most middleclass socialists however are very unlikely to get into fights with Drunken Fish Porters when they do make a

Genuine contact with the working class it is usually with the workingclass intelligencia but the workingclass intelligencia is sharply divisible into two different types there is the type who remains working class who goes on working as a mechanic or a dock laborer or whatever it may be and does not

Bother to change his workingclass accent and habits but who improves his mind in his spare time and works for the ILP or the Communist party and there is the type who does alter his way of life at least externally and who by means of State scholarships succeeds in climbing into the middle

Class the first is one of the finest types of man we have I can think of some I have met whom not even the most hidebound Tory could help liking and admiring the other type with exception DH Lawrence for example is less admirable to begin with it is a Pity

Though it is a natural result of the scholarship system that the proletariat should tend to interpenetrate the Middle Class via the literary intelligencia for it is not easy to crash your way into the literary intelligencia if you happen to be a decent human being the Modern English

Literary world at any rate the highbrow section of it is is a sort of poisonous jungle where only weeds can flourish it is just possible to be a literary gent and to keep your decency if you are a definitely popular writer a writer of detective stories for instance but to be

A highbrow with a footing in the snootier magazines means delivering yourself over to horrible campaigns of wire pulling and backstairs crawling in the highbrow world you get on if you get on at all not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of

Cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions this then is the world that most readily opens its doors to the proletarian who is climbing out of his own class the clever boy of a workingclass family the sort of boy who wins scholarships and is obviously not

Fitted for a life of manual labor may find other ways of rising into the class above a slightly different type for instance Rises via labor Party politics but the literary way is by far the most usual literary London now teams with young men who are of proletarian origin

And have been educated by means of scholarships many of them are very disagreeable people quite unrepresentative of their class and it is most unfortunate that when a person of Bourgeois origin does succeed in meeting a proletarian face to face on equal terms this is the type he most

Commonly meets for the result is to drive the bourgea who was idealized the proletariat so long as he knew nothing about them back into frenzies of snobbishness the process is sometimes very comic to watch if you happen to be watching it from the outside the poor well-meaning bourgea eager to embrace

His proletarian brother leaps forward with open arms and only a little while later he is in Retreat minus a borrowed £5 and exclaiming doly but Dash it the fellow is not a gentleman the thing that disconcerts the borar in a contact of this kind is to find certain of his own professions

Being taken seriously I have pointed out that the leftwing opinions of the average intellectual are mainly spurious from Pure imitativeness he jeers at things which in fact he believes in as one example out of many take the public school code of Honor with its team spirit and don’t hit a man when he’s

Down and all the rest of that familiar bunkum who has not laughed at it who calling himself an intellectual would dare not to laugh at it but it is a bit different when you meet somebody who laughs at it from the outside just as we spend our lives in

Abusing England but grow very angry when we hear a foreigner saying exactly the same things no one has been more amusing about the public school than Beach coma of the express he laughs quite rightly at the ridiculous code which makes cheating at cards the worst of all sins

But would Beach coma like it if one of his own friends was caught cheating at cards I doubt it it is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are if you are a boura intellectual you too readily

Imagine that you have somehow become unoura because you find it easy to laugh at patriotism and the C of and the old school thae and Colonel blimp and all the rest of it but from the point of view of the proletarian intellectual who at least by origin is genuinely outside

The Bourgeois Culture Your resemblances to Colonel blimp may be more important than your differences very likely he looks upon you and Colonel blimp as practically equivalent persons and in a way he is right though neither you nor colonel blimp would admit it so that the meeting of proletarian

And boura when they do succeed in meeting is not always the Embrace of long-lost brothers too often it is The Clash of alien cultures which can only meet in war I’ve been looking at this from the point of view of the Bourgeois who finds his secret beliefs challenged and is

Driven back to a frightened conservatism but one has also got to consider the antagonism that is aroused in the proletarian intellectual by his own efforts and sometimes with frightful agonies he has struggled out of his own class into another where he expects to find a wider freedom and a greater intellectual

Refinement and all he finds very often is a sort of hollow a deadness a lack of any warm human feeling of any real life whatever sometimes the the Bourgeois seem to him just dummies with money and water in their veins instead of blood this at any rate is what he says

And almost any young highbrow of proletarian origin will spin you this line of talk hence the proletarian C from which we now suffer everyone knows or ought to know by this time how it runs the Bourgeois are dead a favorite word of abuse nowadays and very effective because meaningless

Bouro culture is bankrupt Bourgeois values are despicable and so on and so forth if you want example see any number of the left review or any of the younger communist writers such as Alec Brown Philip Henderson Etc the sincerity of much of this is suspect but DH Lawrence who was sincere

Whatever else he may not have been expresses the same thought over and over again it is is curious how he hops upon that idea that the English Bourgeois are all dead or at least gelded mellers the gamekeeper in lady chatterly’s lover really Lawrence himself has had the

Opportunity to get out of his own class and does not particularly want to return to it because English working people have various disagreeable habits on the other hand the Bourgeois with whom he has also mixed to some extent seemed to him half dead a race of Unix lady chatterly’s husband symbolically is

Impotent in the actual physical sense and then there is the poem about the young man once again Lawrence himself who got up to the top of the tree but came down saying oh you’ve got to be like a monkey if you climb up the tree you’ve no more

Use for the solid earth and the lad you used to be you sit in the boughs and Jibber with superiority they all Jibber and Jibber and chatter and never a word they say comes really out of their guts lad they make it up halfway I tell you something’s been done

To them to the pullets up above there’s not a bird among them etc etc you could hardly have it in pler terms than that possibly by the people at the top of the tree Lawrence only means means the real Bourgeois those in the £2,000 a year

Class and over but I doubt it more probably he means everyone who is more or less within the Bourgeois culture everyone who was brought up with a mincing accent and in a house where there were one or two servants and at this point you realize the danger of the proletarian C realize

I mean the terrible antagonism that it is capable of arousing for when you come to such an accusation as this you are up against a blank wall Lawrence tells me that because I have been to a public school I am a unic well what about it I can produce medical

Evidence to the contrary but what good will that do Lawrence’s condemnation remains if you tell me I am a scoundrel I may Mend my ways but if you tell me I am a unic you are tempting me to hit back in any way that seems feasible

If you want to make an enemy of a man tell him that his ills are incurable this then is the net result of most meetings between proletarian and Bourgeois they lay be a real antagonism which is intensified by the proletarian C itself the product of forced contacts between class and class the only

Sensible procedure is to go slow and not force the pace if you Secret secet L think of yourself as a gentleman and as such the superior of the green gross’s errand boy it is far better to say so than to tell lies about It ultimately you’ve got to

Drop your snobbishness but it is fatal to pretend to drop it before you are really ready to do so meanwhile one can observe on every side that Drey phenomenon the middleclass person who is an Ardent socialist at 25 and a sniff conservative at 35 in a way his recoil is natural enough

At any rate one can see how his thoughts run perhaps a classless society doesn’t mean a beatific State of Affairs in which we shall all go on behaving exactly as before except that there will be no class hatred and no snobbishness perhaps it means a bleak

World in which all our ideals our codes our tastes our ideology in fact will have no meaning perhaps this class breaking business isn’t so simple as it looked on the contrary it is a wild ride into the darkness and it may be that at

The end of it the smile will be on the face of the tiger with loving those slightly patronizing Smiles we set out to greet our petarian brothers and behold our petarian brothers in so far as we understand them are not asking for our greetings they are asking us to commit

Suicide when the Bourgeois sees it in that form he takes to flight and if his flight is rapid enough it may carry him to Fascism chapter 11 meanwhile what about socialism it hardly needs pointing out that at this moment we are in a very serious mess yes so serious that even

The dullest witted people find it difficult to remain unaware of it we are living in a world in which nobody is free in which hardly anybody is secure in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive for enormous blocks of the working

Class the conditions of Life are such as I have described in the opening chapters of this book and there is no chance of those conditions showing any fundamental Improvement the very best the English working class can hope for is an occasional temporary decrease in unemployment when this or that industry is artificially stimulated

By for instance rearmament even the middle classes for the first time in their history are feeling the pinch they have not known actual hunger yet but more and more of them find themselves floundering in a sort of deadly net of frustration in which it is harder and harder to

Persuade yourself that you are either happy active or useful even the lucky ones at the top the real Bourgeois are haunted periodically by a consciousness of the miseries below and still more by fears of the menacing future and this is merely a preliminary stage in a country still rich with the

Loot of a 100 years presently there may be coming God knows what Horrors horrors of which in this sheltered Island we have not even a traditional knowledge and all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that socialism as a world system and wholeheartedly applied is a way

Out it would at least ensure our getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else indeed from one point of view socialism is such Elementary Common Sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already the world is a raft sailing through space with potentially plenty of

Provisions for everybody the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt

Motive for clinging to the present system yet the fact that we have got to face is that socialism is not a abl lishing itself instead of going forward the cause of socialism is visibly going back at this moment socialists almost everywhere are in Retreat before the onslaught of fascism and events are

Moving at terrible speed as I write this the Spanish fascist forces are bombarding Madrid and it is quite likely that before the book is printed we shall have another fascist country to add to the list not to mention a fascist control of the Mediterranean which which may have the effect of delivering

British foreign policy into the hands of bolini I do not however want here to discuss the wider political issues what I am concerned with is the fact that socialism is losing ground exactly where it ought to be gaining it with so much in its favor for every

Empty belly is an argument for socialism the idea of socialism is less widely accepted than it was 10 years ago the average thinking person nowadays is not merely not a socialist he is actively hostile to socialism this must be due chiefly to mistaken methods of propaganda it means that socialism in

The form in which it is now presented to us has about it something inherently distasteful something that drives away the very people who ought to be flocking to its support a few years ago this might have seemed unimportant it seems only yesterday that socialists especially Orthodox marxists were telling me with Superior Smiles

That socialism was going to arrive of its own accord by some mysterious process called historic necessity possibly that belief still lingers but it has been shaken to say the least of it hence the sudden attempts of Communists in various countries to Ally themselves with Democratic forces which they have been sabotaging for years

Past at a Moment Like This it is desperately necessary to discover just why socialism has failed in its appeal and it is no use writing off the current distaste for socialism as the product of stupidity or corrupt motives if you want to remove that distaste you have got to

Understand it which means getting inside the mind of the ordinary objector to Socialism or at least regarding his Viewpoint sympathetically no case is really answered until it has had a fair hearing therefore rather paradoxically in order to defend socialism it is necessary to start by attacking

It in the last three chapters I tried to analyze the difficulties that are raised by our anachronistic class system I shall have to touch on that subject again because I believe that the present intensely stupid handling of the class issue May Stampede quantities of potential socialists into fascism

In the chapter following this one I want to discuss certain underlying assumptions that alienate sensitive Minds from socialism but in the present chapter I am merely dealing with the obvious preliminary objections the kind of thing that the person who is not a socialist I don’t mean the where’s the money to come

From type always starts by saying when you tax him on the subject some of these objections may appear frivolous or self-contradictory but that is beside the point I am merely discussing symptoms anything is relevant which helps to make clear why socialism is not accepted and please notice that I’m am

Arguing for socialism not against it but for the moment I am advocatus diabo I am making out a case for the sort of person who is in sympathy with the fundamental aims of socialism who has the brains to see that socialism would work but who in practice all

Always takes to flight when socialism is mentioned question a person of this type and you will often get the semi- frivolous answer I don’t object to socialism but I do object to socialists logically it is a poor argument but it carries weight with many people as with the Christian religion

The worst advertisement for socialism is its adherence the first thing that must strike any out outside Observer is that socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class the typical socialist is not as tremulous old ladies imagine a ferocious looking working man with greasy overalls

And a rockus voice he is either a youthful snob Bolshevik who in 5 years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism or still more typically a prim little man with a white colge job usually a secret T Toler and often with vegetarian leanings with a

History of non-conformity behind him and above all with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting this last type is surprisingly common in socialist parties of every shade it has perhaps been taken over on block from the old Liberal Party In addition to this there is the horrible the really disquieting

Prevalence of cranks wherever socialists gathered together one sometimes gets the impression that the mere words socialism and communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit juice Drinker nudist sandal wearer sex maniac Quaker nature cure quack pacifist and feminist in England one day this summer I was riding

Through leworth when the bus stopped and two Dreadful looking old men got onto it they were both about 60 both very short pink and chubby and both hatless one of them was obscenely bald the other had long gray hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style they were dressed in pistachio

Colored shirts and Cary shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple their appearance created a mild Stir of horror on top of the bus the man next to me a commercial traveler I should say glanced at me at them and

Back again at me and murmured socialists as who should say red Indians he was probably right the ILP were holding their summer school at leworth but the point is that to him as an ordinary man a crank meant a socialist and a socialist meant a crank any socialist he

Probably felt could be counted on to have something eccentric about him and some such notion seems to exist even among social s themselves for instance I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say whether my diet is ordinary or

Vegetarian they take it for granted you see that it is necessary to ask this question this kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people and their instinct is perfectly sound for the food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from Human societ Society in

Hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcass that is a person out of touch with common Humanity to this youve got to add the ugly fact that most middleclass socialists while theoretically pining for a classless society cling Like Glue to their miserable fragments of social

Prestige I remember my sensations of horror on first attending an ILP br brch meeting in London might have been rather different in the north where the Bourgeois less thickly scattered are these M little beasts I thought the champions of the working class for every person there male and female bore the

Worst Stigmata of sniff middleclass superiority if a real working man a minor dirty from the pit for instance had suddenly walked into their midst they would have been embarrassed angry and disgusted some I should think would have fled holding their noses you can see the same tendency in

Socialist literature which even when it is not openly written do on is always completely removed from the working class in idiom and manner of thought the coals webs stres Etc and not exactly proletarian writers it is doubtful whether anything describable as proletarian literature now exists even the daily worker is

Written in standard South English but a good musical comedian comes nearer to producing it than any socialist writer I can think of as for the technical jargon of the Communists it is as far removed from the common speech as the language of a mathematical textbook I remember hearing a

Professional communist speaker address a working-class audience his speech was the usual bookish stuff full of long sentences and parentheses and notwithstanding and be that as it may besides the usual jargon of ideology and class Consciousness and proletarian solidarity and all the rest of it after him a lisher working man got up

And spoke to the crowd in their own broad lingo there was not much doubt which of the two was nearer to his audience but I do not suppose for a moment that the Lancashire working man was an orthodox communist for it must be remembered that

A working man so long as he remains a genuine working man is seldom or never a socialist in the complete logically consistent sense very likely he votes labor or even communist if he gets the chance but his conception of socialism is quite different from that of the book trained

Socialist higher up to the ordinary Working Man the sort you would meet in any Pub on Saturday night socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about to the more Revolution tionary type the type who is a hunger marcher

And is blacklisted by employers the word is a sort of rallying cry against the forces of Oppression a vague threat of future violence but so far as my experience goes no genuine Working Man grasps the deeper implications of socialism often in my opinion he is a truer socialist than the Orthodox

Marxist because he does remember what the other so often forgets that social ISM means Justice and common decency but what he does not grasp is that socialism cannot be narrowed down to Mere economic Justice and that a reform of that magnitude is bound to work immense changes in our civilization

And his own way of life his vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present Society with the worst abuses left out and with interest centering around the same things as at present Family Life The Pub football and and local Politics As for the philosophic side of

Marxism the p and thimble trick with those three mysterious entities thesis antithesis and synthesis I have never met a working man who had the faintest interest in it it is of course true that plenty of people of workingclass origin are socialists of the theoretical bookish type but they are never people

Who have remained working men they don’t work with their hands that is they belong either to to the type I mentioned in the last chapter the type who squirms into the middle class via the literary intelligencia or the type who becomes a labor MP or a high-up trade Union

Official this last type is one of the most desolating spectacles the world contains he has been picked out to fight for his mates and all it means to him is a soft job and the chance of bettering himself not merely while but by fighting the bouris he becomes a bouris

Himself and meanwhile it is quite possible that he has remained an orthodox Marxist but I have yet to meet a working minor steel worker cotton Weaver Docker Navi or whatnot who was ideologically sound one of the analogies between communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the educated are completely

Orthodox the most immediate striking thing about the English Roman Catholics now I don’t mean the real Catholics I mean the converts Ronald Knox Arnold Lun at Hoke genus is their intense self-consciousness apparently they never think certainly they never write about anything but the fact that they are Roman

Catholics this single fact and the self-praise resulting from it formed the entire stock in trade of the Catholic literary man but the really interesting thing about these people is the way in which they have worked out the supposed implications of Orthodoxy until the tiniest details of Life are

Involved even the liquids you drink apparently can be Orthodox or heretical hence the campaigns of chesteron beach comr Etc against tea and in favor of beer according to chesteron tea drinking is Pagan while beer drinking is Christian and coffee is the Puritans opium it is unfortunate for this theory

That Catholics abound in the temperance movement and the greatest te- boozers in the world are the Catholic Irish but what I am interested in here is the attitude of mind that can make even food and drink an occasion for religious intolerance a workingclass Catholic would never be so absurdly consistent as

That he does not spend his time in brooding on the fact that he is a Roman Catholic and he is not particularly conscious of being different from his non-catholic neighbors tell an Irish dock laborer in the slums of livible that his cup of tea is Pagan and he will

Call you a fool and even in more serious matters he does not always grasp the implications of his faith in the Roman Catholic homes of Lancashire you see the crucifix on the wall and the daily worker on the table it is only the educated man especially the literary man

Who knows how to be a bigot and mutatis mutandis it is the same with Communism the Creed is never found in its pure form in a genuine proletarian it may be said however that even if the theoretical bookt trained socialist is not a working man himself

At least he is actuated by a love of the working class he is endeavoring to shed his Bourgeois status and fight on the side of the proletariat that obviously must be his motive but is it sometimes I look at a socialist the intellectual track writing type of socialist with his pullover his fuzzy

Hair and his marxian quotation and wonder what the devil his motive really is it is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody especially of the working class from whom he is of all people the furthest removed the underlying motive of many socialists I believe is simply a

Hypertrophied sense of order the present State of Affairs offends them not because it causes misery still less because it makes Freedom impossible but because it is untidy what they desire basically is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard take the plays of a lifelong socialist like

Shaw how much understanding or even awareness of working class life do they display Shaw himself declares that you can only bring a working man on the stage as an object of compassion in practice he doesn’t bring him on even as that but merely as a sort

Of WW Jacobs figure of fun the readymade comic East Ender like those in major Barbara and Captain brass bound’s conversion at best his attitude to the working class is the sniggering punch attitude in more serious moments consider for instance the young man who symbolizes the dispossessed classes in misalliance he finds them merely

Contemptible and disgusting poverty and what is more the habits of mind created by poverty are something to be abolished from above by violence if necessary perhaps even preferably by violence hence his worship of Great Men and appetite for dictatorships fascist or communist for to him apparently VI his remarks appropo of the Italo

Abyssinian War and the Stalin Wells conversations Stalin and musolini are almost equivalent persons you get the same thing in a more mey mouthed form in Mrs Sydney web’s autobiography which gives unconsciously a most revealing picture of the high-minded Socialist slum visitor the truth is that to many people calling themselves socialists Revolution

Does not mean a movement of the CL es with which they hope to associate themselves it means a set of reforms which we the clever ones are going to impose upon them the lower orders on the other hand it would be a mistake to regard the bookt trained socialist as a bloodless creature

Entirely incapable of emotion though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred a sort of queer theoretical invacuo hatred against the exploiters hence the grand old socialist sport of denouncing the Bourgeois it is strange how easily almost any socialist writer can lash

Himself into frenzies of Rage Against the class to which by birth or by adoption he himself invariably belongs sometimes the hatred of Bourgeois habits and ideology is so far-reaching that it extends even to bouro characters in books according to HRI bar the characters in the novels of PR GED

Etc are characters whom one would dearly love to have at the other side of a barricade a barricade You observe judging from lefur I should have thought Barb’s experience of barricades had left him with a distaste for them but the imaginary bayonetting of bourgea who presumably don’t hit back is a bit

Different from the real article the best examp example of Bourgeois baiting literature that I have yet come across is miry’s intelligencia of Great Britain this is a very interesting and aely written book and it should be read by everyone who wants to understand the rise of fascism mki formerly Prince mki was a

White russian igra who came to England and was for some years a lecturer in Russian literature at London University later he was converted to Communism returned to Russia and produced this book as a sort of show up of the British intelligencia from a Marxist standpoint it is a viciously malignant

Book with an unmistakable note of now I’m out of your reach I can say what I like about you running all through it and apart from a general Distortion it contains some quite definite and probably intentional misrepresentation as for instance when Conrad is declared to be no less

Imperialist than Kipling and DH Lawrence is described as writing bare boded pornography and as having succeeded in erasing all Clues to his proletarian origin as though Lawrence had been a pork butcher climbing into the House of Lords this kind of thing is very disquieting when one remembers that it

Is addressed to a Russian audience who have no means of checking its accuracy but what I am thinking of at the moment is the effect of such a book on the English public here you have a literary man of aristocratic extraction a man who had probably never in his life spoken to a

Working man on anything approaching equal terms uttering venomous screams of Lial against his Bourgeois colleagues why so far as appearances go from Pure malignity he is battling against the British intelligencia but what is he battling for within the book itself there is no no indication hence the net effect of

Books like this is to give Outsiders the impression that there is nothing in communism except hatred and here once again you come upon that queer resemblance between communism and convert Roman Catholicism if you want to find a book as evil spirited as the intelligencia of Great Britain the likeliest place to

Look is among the popular Roman Catholic apologists you will find there the same Venom and the same dishonesty though to do the Catholic Justice you will not usually find the same Bad Manners queer that comrade miry’s spiritual brother should be father so and so the Communist and the Catholic are

Not saying the same thing in a sense they are even saying opposite things and each would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike the fact is that socialism in the form in which it is now presented

Appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types and the one hand you have the warmhearted unthinking Socialist the typical working class socialist who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies on the other hand you have the intellectual bookt trained socialist who understands that it is necessary to

Throw our present civilization down the sink and is quite willing to do so and this type is drawn to begin with entirely from the middle class and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that still more unfortunately it includes so much so that to an outsider it even appears to

Be composed of the kind of people I have been discussing the foaming denouncers of the Bourgeois and the more water in your beer reformers of whom Shore is the Prototype and the astute young social literary climate who are communists now as they will be fascists 5 years hence

Because it is all the go and all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of progress like blue bottles to a dead cat The Ordinary Decent person who is in sympathy with the essential aims of

Socialism is given the impression that there is no room for his kind in any Socialist Party that means business worse he has driven to the cynical conclusion that socialism is a kind of Doom which is probably coming but must be staved off as long as possible of

Course as I have suggested already it is not strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherence but the point is that people invariably do so and that the popular conception of socialism is colored by the conception of a socialist as a dull or disagreeable person socialism is pictured as a state of

Affairs in which our more vocal socialists would feel thoroughly at home this does great harm to the cause the ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat if you offer it tactfully offer him a dictatorship of the prigs and he gets ready to fight there is a widespread feeling that

Any civilization in which socialism was a reality would bear the same relation to our own as a brand new bottle of colonial burgundy Bears to a few spoonfuls of first class boile we live admittedly amid the wreck of a civilization but it has been a great civilization in its day and in

Patches it still flourishes almost undisturbed it still has its bouquet so to speak whereas the imagined socialist future like the colonial burgundy tastes only of iron and water hence the fact which is really a disastrous one that artists of any consequence can never be persuaded into the Socialist fold this is particularly

The case with the writer whose political opinions are more directly and obviously connected with his work than those of say a painter if one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as socialist literature is dull tasteless and bad consider the situation in England at the present moment a whole

Generation has grown up more or less in familiarity with the idea of socialism and yet the high Watermark so to speak of socialist literature is wh Oren a sort of gutless Kipling and even The feebler Poets who are associated with him every writer of consequence and

Every book worth reading is on the other side I am willing to believe that it is otherwise in Russia about which I know nothing however for presumably in post-revolutionary Russia the mere V violence of events would tend to throw up a vigorous literature of sorts but it is certain that in Western

Europe socialism has produced no literature worth having a little while ago when the issues were less clear there were writers of some Vitality who called themselves socialists but they were using the word as a vague label thus if Ipson and Zola described themselves as socialists it did not mean much more

Than that they were prog aggressives while in the case of anatol France it meant merely that he was an anti-clerical the real socialist writers the propagandist writers have always been dull empty windbags Shaw barose Upton Sinclair William Morris Waldo Frank etc etc I’m not of course suggesting that

Socialism is to be condemned because literary gents don’t like it I’m not even suggesting that it ought necessarily to produce literature on its own account though I do think it a bad sign that it has produced no songs worth singing I’m merely pointing to the fact that writers of genuine Talent are

Usually indifferent to socialism and sometimes actively and mischievously hostile and this is a disaster not only for the writers themselves but for the cause of socialism which has great need of them this then is The Superficial aspect of the ordinary man’s recoil from socialism I know the whole dreary

Argument very thoroughly because I know it from both sides everything that I say here I have both said to Art and socialists who were trying to convert me and had said to me by bored non-socialist whom I was trying to convert the whole thing amounts to a

Kind of malaise produced by dislike of individual socialists especially of the cockshaw Marx quoting type is it childish to be influenced by that kind of thing is it silly is it even contempt it is all that but the point is that it happens and therefore it is important to keep it in

Mind chapter 12 however there is a much more serious difficulty than the local and temporary objections which I discussed in the last chapter faced by the fact that intelligent people are so often on the other side the Socialist is apt to set it down to corrupt motives conscious or

Unconscious or to an ignorant belief that socialism would not work or to a mere dread of the horrors and discomforts of the revolutionary period before socialism is established undoubtedly all these are important but there are plenty of people who are influenced by none of them and are nevertheless hostile to

Socialism their reason for recoiling from socialism is spiritual or ideological they object to it not on the ground that it would not work but precisely because it would work too well what they are afraid of is not the things that are going to happen in their own lifetime but the things that are

Going to happen in the remote future when socialism is a reality I have very seldom met a convinced socialist who could grasp that thinking people may be repelled by the objective towards which socialism appears to be moving the Marxist especially dismisses this kind of thing as Bourgeois sentimentality marxists as a rule are

Not very good at reading the minds of their adversaries if they were the situation in Europe might be less desperate than it is at present possessing a technique which seems to explain everything they do not often bother to discover what is going on inside other people’s heads here for instance is an

Illustration of the kind of thing I mean discussing the widely held Theory which in one sense is certainly true that fascism is a product of Communism Mr na holdway one of the ablest Marxist writers we possess writes as follows the Hy Legend of Communism leading to

Fascism the element of Truth in it is this that the appearance of communist activity warns the ruling class that Democratic labor parties are no longer capable of holding the working class in check and that capitalist dictatorship must assume another form if it is to survive you see here the defects of the

Method because he has detected the underlying economic cause of fascism he tacitly assumes that the spiritual side of it is of no importance fascism is written off as a maneuver of the ruling class which at bottom it is but this in itself would only explain why fascism appeals to

Capitalists what about the millions who are not capitalists who in a material sense have nothing to gain from Fascism and are often aware of it and who nevertheless are fascists obviously their approach has been purely along the ideological line they could only stampeded into fascism because communism attacked or seemed to

Attack certain things patriotism religion Etc which lay deeper than the economic motive and in that sense it is perfectly true that communism leads to Fascism it is a Pity that marxists nearly always concentrate on letting economic cats out of ideological bags it does in one sense reveal the truth but

With this penalty that most of their propaganda misses is its mark it is the spiritual recoil from socialism especially as it manifests itself in sensitive people that I want to discuss in this chapter I shall have to analyze it at some length because it is very widespread very powerful and

Among socialists almost completely ignored the first thing to notice is that the idea of socialism is bound up more or less inextricably with the idea of machine production C socialism is essentially an urban Creed it grew up more or less concurrently with industrialism it has always had its roots in the town

Proletariat and the town intellectual and it is doubtful whether it could ever have Arisen in any but an industrial society granted industrialism the idea of socialism presents itself naturally because private ownership is only tolerable when every individual or family or other unit is at least moderately self-supporting but the effect of

Industrialism is to make it impossible for anyone to be self-supporting even for a moment industrialism once it rises above a fairly low level must lead to some form of collectivism not necessarily to socialism of course conceivably it might lead to the slave state of which fascism is a kind of

Prophecy and the converse is also so true machine production suggests socialism but socialism as a world system implies machine production because it demands certain things not compatible with a primitive way of life it demands for instance constant intercommunication and exchange of goods between all parts of the earth it

Demands some degree of centralized control it demands an approximately equal standard of life for all human beings and probably a certain uniformity of Education we may take it therefore that any world in which socialism was a reality would be at least as highly mechanized as the United States at this moment probably

Much more so in any case no socialist would think of denying this the Socialist world is always pictured as a completely mechanized immensely organized World depending on the machine as the civilizations of antiquity depended on the slave so far so good or so bad many perhaps a majority of thinking people

Are not in love with machine civilization but everyone who is not a fool knows that it is nonsense to talk at this moment about scrapping the machine but the unfortunate thing is that socialism as usually presented is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress not merely as a necessary

Development but as an end in itself almost as a kind of religion this idea is implicit in for instance most of the propagandist stuff that is written about the rapid mechanical advance in Soviet Russia the Dena Dam tractors etc etc Carol chapek hits it off well enough in the horrible ending

Of R youur when the robots having slaughtered the last human being announc their intention to build many houses just for the sake of building houses you see the the kind of person who most readily accepts socialism is also the kind of person who views mechanical progress as such with

Enthusiasm and this is so much the case that socialists are often unable to grasp that the opposite opinion exists as a rule the most persuasive argument they can think of is to tell you that the present mechanization of the world is as nothing to what we shall see when socialism is established where

There is one aerplane now now in those days there will be 50 all the work that is now done by hand will then be done by Machinery everything that is now made of leather wood or stone will be made of rubber glass or steel there will be no

Disorder no Loose Ends no wildernesses no wild animals no weeds no disease no poverty no pain and so on and so forth the Socialist world is to be above all things an ordered World an efficient world but it is precisely from that vision of the future as a sort of

Glittering Wells world that sensitive Minds recoil please notice that this essentially fat-bellied version of progress is not an integral part of socialist Doctrine but it has come to be thought of as one with the result that the temperamental conservatism which is latent in all kinds of people is easily mobilized against socialism

Every sensitive person has moments when he is suspicious of machinery and to some extent of physical science but it is important to sort out the various motives which have differed greatly at different times for hostility to science and machinery and to disregard the jealousy of the modern literary gent who hates science because

Science has stolen literature’s Thunder the earliest fulllength attack on science and Machinery that I am acquainted with is in the third part of gul’s travels but Swift’s attack though brilliant as a tour of force is irrelevant and even silly because it is written from the standpoint perhaps this

Seems a queer thing to say of the author of guler’s travels of a man who lacked imagination to Swift science was merely a kind of futile mck raging and the machines were nonsensical Contraptions that would never work his standard was that of practical usefulness and he lacked the vision to see that an

Experiment which is not demonstrably useful at the moment may yield results in the future elsewhere in the book he names it as the best of all achievements to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before not seeing apparently that this is just what the machine can

Do a little later the despised machines began working physical science increased its scope and there came the celebrated conflict between religion and science which agitated our grandfathers that conflict is over and both sides have retreated and claimed a victory but an anti-scientific bias still lingers in the minds of most

Religious Believers all through the 19th century protesting voices were raised against science and Machinery C dickens’s hard times for instance but usually for the rather shallow reason that industrialism in its first stages was cruel and ugly Samuel Butler’s attack on the machine in the well-known chapter of erowan is a different

Matter but Butler himself lived in a less desperate age than our own an age in which it was still possible for a First Rate man to be a diletante part of the time and therefore the whole thing appeared to him as a kind of intellectual exercise he saw clearly enough our

Abject dependence on the machine but instead of bothering to work out its consequences he preferred to exaggerate it for the sake of what was not much more than a joke it is only in our own age when mechanization has finally triumphed that we can actually feel the tendency of the

Machine to make a fully human life impossible there is probably no one capable of thinking and feeling who has not occasionally looked at a gaspipe chair and reflected that the machine is the enemy of Life as a rule however this feeling is instinctive rather than reason people know that in some way or

Another progress is a Swindle but they reach this conclusion by a kind of mental shorthand my job here is to supply The Logical steps that are usually left out but first one must ask what is the function of the machine obviously its primary function is to save work and the type of person

To whom machine civilization is entirely acceptable seldom sees any reason for looking further here for instance is a person who claims or rather screams that he is thoroughly at home in the modern mechanized world I am quoting from world without faith by Mr John beavers this is what he

Says it is plain lunacy to say that the average 2 10 Shillings to4 a week man of today is a lower type than an 18th century Farm laborer or than the laborer or peasant of any exclusively agricultural Community now or in the past it just isn’t true it is so damn

Silly to cry out about the civilizing effects of work in the fields and farmyards as against that done in a big locomotive works or an automobile factory work is a nuisance we work because we have to and all work is done to provide us with Leisure and the means

Of spending that Leisure as enjoyably as possible and again man is going to have time enough and power enough to hunt for his own heaven on Earth without worrying about the supernatural one the Earth will be so pleasant a place that the priest and The Parson won’t be left with

Much of a tale to tell half the stuffing is knocked out of them by one neat blow etc etc etc there is a whole chapter to this effect chapter four of Mr beaver’s book and and it is of some interest as an exhibition of machine Worship in its most completely vulgar ignorant and

Half-baked form it is the authentic voice of a large section of the modern world every aspirin eater in the outer suburbs would Echo it fervently notice the shrill whale of anger it just isn’t true Etc with which Mr beavers meets the suggestion that his grandfather may have been a better man than

Himself and the still more horrible suggestion that if we return to a simpler way of life he might have to toughen his muscles with a job of work work you see is done to provide us with Leisure Leisure for what Leisure to become more like Mr beavers

Presumably though as a matter of fact from that line of talk about heaven on Earth you can make a fairly good guess at what he would like Civilization to be a sort of lion’s Corner housee lasting in secular seculum and getting bigger and noisier all the time and in any book

By anyone who feels at home in the Machine World in any book by HG Wells for instance you will find passages of the same kind how often have we not heard it that glutenous uplifting stuff about the machines our new race of slaves which will set Humanity free etc etc etc to

These people apparently the only Danger of the machine is its possible use for destructive purposes as for instance airlanes are used in war barring Wars and unforeseen disasters the future is envisaged as an Ever more rapid March of mechanical progress machines to save work machines to save thought machines to save pain

Hygiene efficiency organization more hygiene more efficiency more organization more machine until finally you land up in the by now familiar wellsian Utopia aptly caricatured by Huxley and Brave New World The Paradise of little fat men of course in their Daydreams of the future the little fat men are neither

Fat nor little they are men like Gods but why should they be all mechanical progress is towards greater and greater efficiency ultimately therefore towards a world in which nothing goes wrong but in a world in which nothing went wrong many of the qualities which Mr Wells regards as Godlike would be no

More valuable than the animal faculty of moving the ears the beings in menlike Gods and the dream are represented for example as Brave generous and physically strong but in a world from which physical danger had been banished and obviously mechanical progress tends to eliminate danger would physical courage be likely to

Survive could it survive and why should physical strength survive in a world where there was never the need for physical labor as for such qualities as loyalty generosity Etc in a world where nothing went wrong they would be not only irrelevant but probably unimaginable the truth is that many of

The qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of Desire disaster pain or difficulty but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster pain and difficulty in books like the dream and men like Gods it is assumed that such qualities as strength courage generosity

Etc will be kept alive because they are comely qualities and necessary attributes of a full human being presumably for instance the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial Danger in order to exercise their courage and do dumbbell exercises to harden muscles which they would never be obliged to use and here You observe

The huge contradiction which is usually present in the idea of progress the tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft and yet you are striving to keep yourself Brave and hard you are at the same moment furiously pressing forward and desperately holding back it

Is as though a London stock broker should go to his office in a suit of chain mail and insist on talking medieval Latin so in the last analysis the champion of progress is also the champion of anachronisms meanwhile I am assuming that the tendency of mechanical progress is to make life safe and

Soft this may be disputed because at any given moment the effect of some recent mechanical invention may appear to be the opposite take for instance the transition from horses to Motor Vehicles at a first glance one might say considering the enormous toll of Road deaths that the motor car does not

Exactly tend to make life safer moreover it probably needs as much toughness to be a first rate Dirt Track Rider as to be a Bronco Buster or to ride in the Grand National nevertheless the tendency of all machinery is to become safer and easier to handle the danger of accidents would

Disappear if we chose to tackle our road planning problem seriously as we shall do sooner or later and meanwhile the Motorcar has evolved to a point at which anyone who is not blind or paralytic can drive it after a few lessons even now it needs far less nerve and skill to drive

A car ordinarily well than to ride a horse ordinarily well in 20 years time it may need no nerve or skill at all therefore one must say that taking society as a whole the result of the transition from horses to cars has been an increase in human softness presently somebody comes along

With another invention the airlane for instance which does not at first sight appear to make life safer the first men who went up in aeroplanes were superlatively Brave and even today it must need an exceptionally good nerve to be a pilot but the same tendency as before is at work the

Airlane like the Motorcar will be made foolproof a million Engineers are working almost unconsciously in that direction finally this is the objective though it may never be quite reached you will get an airplane whose pilot needs no more skill or courage than a baby needs in its perambulator and all mechanical progress

Is and must be in this direction a machine evolves by becoming more efficient that is more foolproof hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof World which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools Mr Wells would probably retort that the world can never become foolproof because however higher

Standard of efficiency you have reached there is always some greater difficulty ahead for example this is Mr wells’s favorite idea he has used it in goodness knows how many perorations when you have got this planet of ours perfectly into trim you start upon the enormous task of reaching and colonizing

Another but this is merely to push the objective further into the future the objective itself Remains the Same colonize another planet and the game of mechanical progress begins a new for the full proof world you have substituted the foolproof solar system the foolproof Universe in tying yourself to the ideal

Of mechanical efficiency you tie yourself to the ideal of softness but softness is repulsive and thus all progress is seen to be a frantic struggle towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached now and again but not often you meet somebody who grasps that what is

Usually called progress also entails what is usually called the genery and who is nevertheless in favor of progress hence the fact that in Mr Shaw’s Utopia a statue was erected to Falstaff as the first man who ever made a speech in favor of cowardice but the trouble goes immensely deeper than

This hither to I have only pointed out the absurdity of aiming at mechanical progress and also at the preservation of qualities which mechanical progress makes us unnecessary the question one has got to consider is whether there is any human activity which would not be maimed by the dominance of the

Machine the function of the machine is to save work in a fully mechanized world all the dull drudgery will be done by Machinery leaving us free for more interesting Pursuits so expressed this sounds Splendid makes one sick to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig

A trench for a waterpipe when some easily devised machine would scoop the Earth out in a couple of minutes why not let the machine do the work and the men go and do something else but presently the question arises what else are they to do supposedly they

Are set free from work in order that they may do something which is not work but what is work and what is not work is it work to dig to Carpenter to plant trees to fell trees to ride to fish to hunt to feed chickens to play

The piano to take photographs to build a house to cook to sew to trim hats to mend motor bicycles all of these things are work to somebody and all of them are play to somebody there are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you

Choose to regard them the laborer set free from digging may want to spend his leisure or part of it in playing the piano while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the Potato Patch hence the antithesis between work as something intolerably tedious and not

Work as something desirable is false the truth is that when a human being is not eating drinking sleeping making love talking playing games or merely lounging about and these things will not fill up a lifetime he needs work and usually looks for it though he may not call it

Work above the level of a third or fourth grade life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort for man is not as the vulgar hedonists seem to suppose a kind of walking stomach he has also got a hand an eye and a brain

Cease to use your hands and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your Consciousness and now consider again those half dozen men who were digging the trench for the waterpipe a machine has set them free from digging and they are going to amuse themselves with something else carpentering for

Instance but whatever they want to do they will find that another machine has set them free from that for in a fully mechanized World there would be no more need to carpent to cook to mend motor bicycles Etc than there would be to dig there is scarcely anything from catching

A whale to carving a Cherry Stone that could not conceivably be done by Machinery the machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as art it is doing so already via the camera and the radio mechanize the world as fully as it might be mechanized

And whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working that is of living at a first glance this might not seem to matter why should you not get on with your creative work and disregard the machines that would do it for you

But it is not so simple as it sounds here am I working 8 hours a day in an insurance office in my spare time I want to do something creative so I choose to do a bit of carpet ring to make myself a table for instance notice that from the very start

There is a touch of artificiality about the whole business for the factories can turn me out a far better table than I can make for myself but even when I get to work on my table it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet maker of a

Hundred years ago felt towards his table still less as Robinson cruso felt towards his for before I start most of the work has already been done for me by Machinery the tools I use demand the minimum of skill I can get for instance planes which will cut out any molding

The cabinet maker of 100 years ago would have had to do the work with chisel and gouge which demanded real skill of eye and hand the boards I buy are ready planed and the legs are already turned by the lathe I can even go to the wood shop and

Buy all the parts of the table ready made and only needing to be fitted together my work being reduced to driving in a few pegs and using a piece of sandpaper and if this is so at present in the mechanized future it will be enormously more so with the tools and

Materials available then there will be no possibility of mistake hence no room for skill making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a potato in such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of creative work in any case the Arts of the hand which have got to be transmitted by apprenticeship

Would long since have disappeared some of them have disappeared already under the competition of the machine look around any country churchyard and see whether you can find a decently cut Tombstone later than 1820 the art or rather the craft of stonework has died out so completely that it would take centuries to revive

It but it may be said why not retain the machine and retain creative work why not cultivate anachronisms as a Sparetime hobby many people have played with this idea it seems to solve with such beautiful ease the problems set by the machine the citizen of Utopia we are

Told coming home from his daily two hours of turning a handle in the Tomato canning Factory will deliberately revert to a more primitive way of life and Solace his creative instincts with a bit of fret work Pottery glazing or handloom weaving and why is this picture an

Absurdity as it is of course because of a principle that is not always recognized though always acted upon that so long as the machine is there one is under an obligation to use it no one draws water from the well when he can turn on the the tap one sees a good

Illustration of this in the matter of travel everyone who has traveled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains cars Etc is the difference between life and death The Nomad who walks or rides with his

Baggage stowed on a camel or an ox cart may suffer every kind of discomfort but at least he is living while he is traveling where for the passenger in an Express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum a kind of temporary death and yet so long as the railways

Exist one has got to travel by train or by car or airplane here am I 40 m from London when I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage onto a mule and set out on foot making a two days March of it

Because with the the green line buses whizzing past me every 10 minutes such a journey would be intolerably irksome in order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel it is necessary that no other method should be available no human being ever wants to do anything in

A more cumbrous way than is necessary hence the absurdity of that picture of utopians saving their souls with fretwork in a world where everything could be done by Machinery everything would be done by machinery deliberately to revert to primitive methods to use archaic tools to put silly little difficulties in your own

Way would be a piece of dilettantism a pretty pretty Arty and craftiness it would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements revert to hand workk in a machine age and you were back in Ye Old D shoy or the Tuda Villa with the Sham beams tacked to the

Wall the tendency of mechanical progress then is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation it makes unnecessary and even impossible the activities of the eye and the Hand the Apostle of progress will sometimes declare that this does not matter but you can usually drive him

Into a corner by pointing out the horrible lengths to which the process can be carried why for instance use your hands at all why use them even for blowing your nose or sharpening a pencil surely you could fix some kind of Steel and rubber Contraption to your shoulders

And let your arms wither into stumps of skin and bone and so with every organ and every faculty there is really no reason why a human being should do more than eat drink sleep breathe and procreate everything else could be done for him by Machinery therefore The Logical end of

Mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle that is the goal towards which we are already moving though of course we have no intention of getting there just as a man who drinks a bottle of whiskey a day does not

Actually intend to get therosis of the liver the implied objective of progress is not exactly perhaps the brain in the bottle but at any rate some frightful subhuman depth of softness and helplessness and the unfortunate thing is that at present the word progress and the word socialism are linked

Inseparably and almost everyone’s mind the kind of person who hates Machinery also takes it for granted to hate socialism the Socialist is always in favor of mechanization rationalization modernization or at least thinks that he ought to be in favor of them quite recently for instance a prominent I Pier confessed to

Me with a sort of wistful shame as though it was something faintly improper that he was fond of horses horses you see belong to to the vanished agricultural past and all sentiment for the past carries with it a vague smell of heresy I do not believe that this need

Necessarily be so but undoubtedly it is so and in itself it is quite enough to explain the alienation of decent Minds from socialism a generation ago every intelligent person was in some sense a revolutionary nowadays it would be nearer the mark to say that every intelligent person is a

Reactionary in this connection it is worth comparing HG Wells as the sleeper awakes with Aldis huxley’s Brave New World written 30 years later each is a pessimistic Utopia a vision of a sort of PRS Paradise in which all the dreams of the progressive person come true considered merely as a piece of

Imaginative construction the sleeper awakes is I think much superior but It suffers from from vast contradictions because of the fact that Wells as the arch priest of progress cannot write with any conviction against progress he draws a picture of a glittering strangely Sinister World in which the privileged classes live a life of

Shallow gutless Hedonism and the workers reduced to a state of utter slavery and subhuman ignorance toil like trites in Caverns underground as soon as one examines this idea it is further developed in a splendid short story in stories of space and time one sees its inconsistency for in the immensely

Mechanized world that Wells is imagining why should the workers have to work harder than at present obviously the tendency of the machine is to eliminate work not to increase it in the Machine World the workers might be enslaved ill treated and even underfed but they certainly would not be condemned to

Ceaseless manual toil because in that case what would be the function of the machine you can have machines doing all the work or human beings doing all the work but you can’t have both those armies of underground workers with their blue uniforms and their debased half

Human language are only put in to make your flesh creep Wells wants to suggest that progress might take a wrong turning but the only evil he cares to imagine is inequality one class grabbing all the wealth and power and oppressing the others apparently out of pure spite give it

Quite a small twist he seems to suggest overthrow the privileged class change over from World capitalism to socialism in fact and all will be well the machine civilization is to continue but its products are to be shared out equally the thought he dare not face is

That the machine itself May may be the enemy so in his more characteristic Utopias the dream men like Gods Etc he returns to optimism and to a vision of humanity liberated by the machine as a race of enlightened sunbathers whose sole topic of conversation is their own superiority to their

Ancestors Brave New World belongs to a later time and to a generation which has seen through the Swindle of progress it contains its own contradictions the most important of them is pointed out in Mr John str’s the coming struggle for power but it is at least a memorable assault on the more

Fat bellied type of perfectionism allowing for the exaggerations of caricature it probably expresses what a majority of thinking people feel about machine civilization the sensitive person’s hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to

Stay but as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it the machine has got to be accepted but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug that is grudgingly and suspiciously like a drug the machine is useful dangerous and habit forming the

Oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes you have only to look about you at this moment to realize with what sinister the speed the machine is getting us into its power to begin with there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been affected by A Century of

Mechanization this is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out but as a single instance take taste in its narrowest sense The Taste for decent food in the highly mechanized countries thanks to tinned food Cold Storage synthetic flavoring mats Etc the pallet is almost a dead

Organ as you can see by looking at any green grosser shop what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of Highly colored cotton wool from America or Australia they will devour these things apparently with pleasure and let the English apples rot under the trees it is

The shiny standardized machine-made look of the American Apple that appeals to them the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice or look at the factory made foil wrapped cheeses and Blended butter in any grosses look at the Hideous rows of

Tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food shop even a dairy look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a tppy ice cream look at the filthy chemical byproduct that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer wherever you look you will see some

Slick machine machine made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust and what applies to food applies also to Furniture houses clothes books amusements and everything else that makes up our environment there are now millions of people and they are increasing every

Year to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the Lo of cap or the song of birds the mechanization of the world could never proceed very far while taste even the taste buds of the tongue

Remained uncorrupted because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted in a healthy World there would be no demand for tin food aspirins gramophones gaspipe chairs machine guns daily newspapers telephones Motor Cars etc etc and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the

Things the machine cannot produce but meanwhile the machine is here and its corrupting effects are almost Irresistible One invad against it but one goes on using it even a be ass Savage given the chance will learn the vices of civilization within a few months mechanization leads to the decay

Of taste the decay of taste leads to the demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanization and so a vicious circle is established but in addition to this there is a tendency for the mechanization of the world to proceed as it were automatically whether we want it or

Not this is due to the fact that in modern Western man The Faculty of mechanical invention has been fed and stimulated till it has reached almost the status of an instinct people invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously rather as a somnambulist will go on working in his

Sleep in the past when it was taken for granted that life on this planet is Harsh or at any rate laborious it seemed the natural fate to go on using the clumsy Implements of your forefathers and only a few eccentric persons centuries apart proposed Innovations hence throughout enormous ages such

Things as the ox cart the plow the sickle Etc remained radically unchanged it is on record that screws have been in use since remote Antiquity and yet that it was not until the middle of the 19th century that anyone thought of making screws with points on them for several thousand years they remained

Flat-ended and holes had to be drilled for them before they could be inserted in our own Epoch such a thing would be Unthinkable for almost every modern Western man has his invented faculty to some extent developed the Western man invents machines as naturally as the Polynesian Islander

Swims give a western man a job of work and he immediately begins devising a machine that would do it for him give him a machine and he thinks of ways of improving it I understand this tendency well enough for in an ineffectual sort of way

I have that type of Mind myself I have not either the patience or the mechanical skill to devise any machine that would work but I am perpetually seeing as it were the ghosts of possible machines that might save me the trouble of using my brain or muscles a person with a more definite

Mechanical turn would probably construct some of them and put them into operation but under our present economic system whether he constructed them or rather whether anyone else had the benefit of them would depend upon whether they were commercially valuable the Socialists are right therefore when they claim that the rate

Of mechanical progress will be much more rapid once socialism is established given a mechanical civilization the process of invention and Improvement will always continue but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected some indeed which

Threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by ronus footnote for example some years ago someone invented a gramophone needle that would last for decades one of the big gramophone companies bought up the patent rights and that was the last that

Was ever heard of it end of footnote establish socialism remove the profit principle and the inventor will have a free hand the mechanization of the world already rapid enough would be or at any rate could be enormously accelerated and this Prospect is a slightly Sinister one because it is

Obvious even now that the process of mechanization is out of control it is happening merely because Humanity has got the Habit a chemist perfects a new method of synthesizing rubber or a mechanic devises a new pattern of gudon pin why not for any clearly understood purpose but simply from the impulse to

Invent and improve which has now become instinctive put a pacifist to work in a bomb Factory and in two months he will be devising a new type of bomb hence the appearance of such diabolical things as poison gases which are not expected even by their inventors to be beneficial to

Humanity our attitude towards such things as poison gases ought to be the attitude of the king of brobdingnag towards gunpowder but because we live in a mechanical and scientific age we are infected with the notion that whatever else happens progress must continue and knowledge must never be suppressed verbally no doubt we would

Agree that Machinery is made for man and not man for Machinery in practice any attempt to check the development of the machine appears to us as an attack on knowledge and therefore a kind of blasphemy and even if the whole of Humanity suddenly revolted Against the Machine and decided to escape to a

Simpler way of life the Escape would still be immensely difficult it would not do as in Butler’s erowan to smash every machine invented after a certain date we should also have to smash the habit of mind that would almost involuntarily devise fresh machines as soon as the old ones were

Smashed and in all of us there is at least a tinge of that habit of mind in every country in the world the large army of scientists and technicians with the rest of us panting at their heels is marching along the road of progress with the blind Persistence of a column of

Ants comparatively few people want it to happen plenty of people actively want it not to happen and yet it is happening the process of mechanization has itself become a machine a huge glittering vehicle whirling us we are not certain where but probably towards the padded Wells world and the brain in the

Bottle this then is the case Against the Machine whether it is a sound or unsound case hardly matters the point is that these or very similar arguments would be echoed by every person who is hostile to machine civilization and unfortunately because of that Nexus of thought socialism progress Machinery Russia tractor

Hygiene Machinery progress which exists in almost everyone’s mind it is usually the same person who is hostile to socialism the kind of person who hates Central Heating and gaspipe chairs is also the kind of person who when you mention socialism murmur something about beehive state and moves away with a pained

Expression so far as my observation goes very few socialists grasp why this is so or even that it is so get the more vocal type of socialist into a corner repeat to him the substance of what I have said in this chapter and see what kind of

Answer you get as a matter of fact you will get several answers I am so familiar with them that I know them almost by heart in the first place he will tell you that it is impossible to go back or to put back the hand of progress as

Though the hand of progress hadn’t been pretty violently put back several times in human history and will then accuse you of being a medievalist and begin to discant upon the horrors of the Middle Ages leprosy the Inquisition Etc as a matter of fact most attacks upon the Middle Ages and the past

Generally by apologists of modernity are beside the point because their essential trick is to project a modern man with his squeamishness and his high standards of comfort into an age when such things were unheard of but notice that in any case this is not an answer for a dislike

Of the mechanized future does not imply the smallest reverence for any period of the past DH Lawrence wiser than the medievalist chose to idealize the atrans about whom we know conveniently little there is no need to idealize even the atrans or the pelasgians or the Aztecs or the Sumerians or any other vanished

And romantic people when one picks pictures a desirable civilization one pictures it merely as an objective there is no need to pretend that it has ever existed in space and time press this point home explain that you wish merely to aim at making life simpler and harder

Instead of softer and more complex and the Socialist will usually assume that you want to revert to a state of nature meaning some stinking Paleolithic cave as though there were nothing between a flint scraper and the steel mills of Sheffield or between a skin coracle and the Queen

Mary finally however you will get an answer which is rather more to the point and which runs roughly as follows yes what you are saying is all very well in its way no doubt it would be very Noble to harden ourselves and do without aspirins and Central Heating and so

Forth but the point is you see that nobody seriously wants it it would mean going back to an agricultural way of life which means beastly hard work and isn’t at all the same thing as playing at gardening I don’t want hard work you don’t want hard work nobody wants it who

Knows what it means you only talk as you do because you’ve never done a day’s work in your life etc etc now this in a sense is true it amounts to saying we’re soft for God’s sake let’s stay soft which at least is realistic as I have pointed out already

The machine has got us in its grip and to escape will be immensely difficult nevertheless this answer is really an evasion because it fails to make clear what we mean when we say that we want this or that I am a degenerate modern semi-

Inell who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my new Statesman every Friday clearly I do not in a sense want to return to a simpler harder probably agricultural way of life life in the same sense I don’t want to

Cut down my drinking to pay my debts to take enough exercise to be faithful to my wife etc etc but in another and more permanent sense I do want these things and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which progress is not definable as making the world safe for

Little fat men these that I have outlined are practically the only arguments that I’ve been able to get from socialists thinking bookt trained socialists when I have tried to explain to them just how they are driving away possible adherence of course there is also the old argument that socialism is going to

Arrive anyway whether people like it or not because of that troubl saving thing historic necessity but historic necessity or rather the belief in it has failed to survive Hitler meanwhile the thinking person by intellect usually left WI but by temperament often right-wing hovers at the Gate of the Socialist fold he is no

Doubt aware that he ought to be a socialist but he observes first the dullness of individual socialists then the apparent flabbiness of socialist ideals and veers away till quite recently it was natural to Veer towards indifferentism 10 years ago even 5 years ago the typical literary gent wrote

Books on B architecture and had a soul above politics but that attitude is becoming difficult and even unfashionable the times are growing harsher the issues are clearer the belief that nothing will ever change I.E that your dividends will always be safe is less prevalent the fence on which the

Literary gent sits once as comfortable as the plush cushion of a cathedral stall is now pinching his bottom intolerably more and more he shows a disposition to drop off on one side or the other it is interesting to notice how many of our leading writers who a dozen

Years ago were art for arts saking for all they were worth and would have considered it too vulgar for Words even to vote at a general election are now taking a definite political standpoint While most of the younger writers at least those of them who are Not Mere

Footless have been political from the start I believe that when the pinch comes there is a terrible danger that the main movement of the intelligencia will be towards fascism just how soon the pinch will come it is difficult to say it depends probably upon events in

Europe but it may be that within 2 years or even a year we shall have reached the decisive moment that will also be the moment when every person with any brains or any decency will know in his bones that he ought to be on the Socialist side but he will not necessarily come

There of his own accord there are too many ancient prejudices standing in the way he will have to be persuaded and by methods that imply an understanding of his Viewpoint socialists cannot afford to waste any more time in preaching to the converted their job now is to make socialists as rapidly as possible

Instead of which all too often they are making fascists when I speak of fascism in England I I’m not necessarily thinking of Mosley and his pimpled followers English fascism when it arrives is likely to be of a sedate and subtle kind presumably at any rate at

First it won’t be called Fascism and it is doubtful whether a Gilbert and Sullivan heavy draon of Mosley’s stamp would ever be much more than a joke to the majority of English people though even Mosley will bear watching for experience shows viday the careers of Hitler Napoleon III that to a political

Climber it is sometimes an advantage not to be taken too seriously at the beginning of his career but what I am thinking of at this moment is the fascist attitude of mind which Beyond any doubt is gaining ground among people who ought to know better fascism as it appears in the

Intellectual is a sort of mirror image not actually of socialism but of a plausible travesty of socialism it boils down to a determination to do the opposite it of whatever the mythical socialist does if you present socialism in a bad and misleading light if you let people imagine that it does not mean

Much more than pouring European civilization down the sink at the command of marxist prigs you risk driving the intellectual into fascism you frighten him into a sort of angry defensive attitude in which he simply refuses to listen to the Socialist case some such attitude is already quite clearly discernible in writers like

Pound Windam Lewis Roy Campbell Etc in most of the Roman Catholic writers and many of the Douglas credit group in certain popular novelists and even if one looks below the surface insue Superior conservative highbrows like Elliot and his countless followers if you want some unmistakable illustrations of the growth of fascist feeling in

England have a look at some of the innumerable letters that were written to the Press during the Abyssinian War approving the Italian action and also the howl of Glee that went up from both Catholic and Anglican pulpits see the Daily Mail of August 17th 1936 over the fascist rising in

Spain in order to combat fascism it is necessary to understand it which involves admitting that it contains some good as well as much evil in practice of course it is merely an Infamous tyranny and its methods of attaining and holding power are such that even its most Ardent apologists

Prefer to talk about something else but the underlying feeling of fascism the feeling that first draws people into the fascist Camp may be less contemptible it is not always as the Saturday review would lead one to suppose a squealing Terror of the Bolshevik bogey man everyone who has

Given the movement so much as a glance knows that the rank and file fascist is often quite a well-meaning person quite genuinely anxious for instance to better the lot of the unemployed but more important than this is the fact that fascism draws its strength from the good as well as the

Bad varieties of conservatism to anyone with a feeling for tradition and for discipline it comes with its appeal ready made probably it is very easy when you have had a belly full of the more tackless kind of socialist propaganda to see fascism as the lastline defense of all that is good in European

Civilization even the fascist bully at his symbolic worst with rubber truncheon in one hand and cter oil bottle in the other does not necessarily feel himself a bully more probably he feels like Roland in the pass of Rono defending Christendom against the Barbarian we have got to admit that if

Fascism is everywhere advancing this is largely the fault of socialists themselves partly it is due to the mistaken communist tactic of sabotaging democracy I.E soaring off the branch you are sitting on but still more to the fact that socialists have so to speak presented their case wrongs side

Foremost they have never made it sufficiently clear that the essential aims of socialism are Justice and Liberty with their eyes glued to economic facts they have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia as

A result fascism has been able to play upon every Instinct that revolts against Hedonism and a cheap conception of progress it has been able to pose as the upholder of the European tradition and to appeal to Christian belief to patriotism and to the military virtues it is far worse than useless to

Write fascism offers Mass sadism or some easy phrase of that kind if you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord you are dreaming a Dream from which you will awake when somebody CES you with a rubber truncheon the only possible course is to

Examine the fascist case grasp that there is something to be said for it and then make it clear to the world that whatever good fascism contains is also implicit in socialism at present the situation is desperate even if nothing worse befalls us there are the conditions which I

Described in the earlier part of this book which are not going to improve under our present economic system still more urgent is the danger of fascist domination in Europe and unless socialist Doctrine in an effective form can be diffused widely and very quickly there is no certainty that fascism will ever be

Overthrown for socialism is the only real enemy that fascism has to face the capitalist imperialist governments even though they themselves are about to be plundered will not fight with any conviction against fascism as such our rulers those of them who understand the issue would probably prefer to hand over

Every square inch of the British Empire to Italy Germany and Japan than to see socialism triumphant it was easy to laugh at fascism when we imagined that it was based on hysterical nationalism because it seemed obvious that the fascist States each regarding itself as the chosen people and patriotic contam

Mundum would Clash with one another but nothing of the kind is happening fascism is now an international movement which means not only that the fascist Nations can combine for purposes of loot but that they are groping perhaps only half consciously as yet towards a world system for the vision of the

Totalitarian state there is being substituted the vision of the totalitarian world as I pointed out earlier the advance of machine technique must lead ultimately to some form of collectivism but that form need not necessarily be equalitarian that is it need not be socialism Pac see the economists it is

Quite easy to imagine a world society economically collectivist that is with the profit principle eliminated but with all political military and educational power in the hands of a small cast of rulers and their Bravos that or something like it is the objective of fascism and that of course

Is the slave state or rather the slave world it would probably be a stable form of society and the chances are considering the enormous wealth of the world if scientifically exploited that the slaves would be wellfed and contented it is usual to speak of the fascist objective as the beehive state

Which does a grave Injustice to bees a world of rabbits ruled by stoes would be nearer the mark it is against this beastly possibility that we have got to combine the only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of socialism Justice and Liberty but it is hardly strong enough

To call this ideal underlying it is almost completely forgotten it has been buried beneath layer after layer of doctrinaire priggishness party squabbles and Half Baked progressivism until it is like a diamond hidden under a mountain of dung the job of the Socialist is to get it out again Justice and Liberty those

Are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world for a long time past certainly for the last 10 years the devil has had all the best Tunes we have reached a stage when the very word socialism calls up on the one hand a picture of airlanes

Tractors and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete on the other a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards of Bolshevik commissars half gangster half gramophone of earnest ladies in sandals shockheaded marxists chewing poly syllables escaped Quakers birth control Fanatics and labor party backstairs crawlers socialism at least in this

Island does not smell any longer of Revolution and the overthrow of tyrants it smells of cranking machine worship and the stupid Cult of Russia unless you can remove that smell and very rapidly fascism may win chapter 13 and finally is there anything one can do about

It in the first part of this book I illustrated by a few brief sidelights the kind of mess we are in in this second part I’ve been trying trying to explain why in my opinion so many normal decent people are repelled by the only remedy namely by socialism obviously the most urgent need

Of the next few years is to capture those normal decent ones before fascism plays its trump card I do not want to raise here the question of parties and political expedience more important than any party label though doubtless the mere Menace of fascism will presently bring some

Kind of popular front into existence is the diffusion of socialist Doctrine in an effective form people have got to be made ready to act as socialists there are I believe countless people who without being aware of it are in sympathy with the essential aims of socialism and who could be one over

Almost without a struggle if only one could find the word that would move them everyone who knows the meaning of poverty everyone who who has a genuine hatred of tyranny and war is on the Socialist side potentially my job here therefore is to suggest necessarily in very general

Terms how a Reconciliation might be affected between socialism and its more intelligent enemies first as to the enemies themselves I mean all those people who grasp that capitalism is evil but who are conscious of a sort of queasy shuddering sensation when socialism is mentioned as I have pointed out this is

Traceable to two main causes one is the personal inferiority of many individual socialists the other is the fact that socialism is too often coupled with a fat bellied Godless conception of progress which revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of an aesthetic sense let me take the second Point

First the distaste for progress and machine civilization which is so common among sensitive people is only defensible as an attitude of mind it is not valid as a reason for rejecting socialism because it presupposes an alternative which does not exist when you say I object to mechanization and standardization therefore I object to

Socialism you are saying in effect I am free to do without the machine if I choose which is nonsense we are all dependent upon the machine and if the machine stopped working most of us would die you may hate the machine civilization probably you are right to

Hate it but for the present there can be no question of accepting or rejecting it the machine civilization is here and it can only be criticized from the inside because all of us are inside it it is only romantic fools who flatter themselves that they have escaped like

The literary gent in his Tudor Cottage with bathroom H and c and the He-man who goes off to live a primitive life in the jungle with a man liquor rifle and four wagon loads of tinned food and almost certainly the machine civilization will continue to Triumph there is no reason

To think that it will destroy itself or stop functioning of its own accord for some time past it has been fashionable to say that war is presently going to wreck civilization altogether but though the next full-sized war will certainly be horrible enough to make all previous ones seem a joke it is immensely

Unlikely that it will put a stop to Mechanical progress it is true that a very vulnerable country like England and perhaps the whole of Western Europe could be reduced to chaos by a few thousand well-placed bombs but no war is at present thinkable which could wipe out industrialism in all countries simultaneously

We may take it that the return to a simpler Freer less mechanized way of life however desirable it may be is not going to happen this is not fatalism it is merely acceptance of facts it is meaningless to oppose socialism on the ground that you object to The Beehive State for the

Beehive state is here the choice is not as yet between a human and an inhuman world it is is simply between socialism and fascism which at its very best is socialism with the virtues left out the job of the thinking person therefore is not to reject socialism but

To make up his mind to humanize it once socialism is in a way to being established those who can see through the Swindle of progress will probably find themselves resisting in fact it is their special function to do so in the Machine World they have got to be a sort of permanent

Opposition which is not the same thing as being an obstructionist or a traitor but in this I’m speaking of the future for the moment the only possible cause for any decent person however much of a Tory or an anarchist by temperament is to work for the establishment of

Socialism nothing else can save us from the misery of the present or the nightmare of the future to oppose socialism now when 20 million Englishmen are underfed and fascism has conquered half Europe is suicidal it is like starting a Civil War when the Goths are crossing the

Frontier therefore it is all the more important to get rid of that mere nervous prejudice against socialism which is not founded on any serious objection as I have pointed out already many people who are not repelled by socialism are repelled by socialists socialism as now presented is unattractive largely because it appears

At any rate from the outside to be the play thing of cranks doctrinaires parlor Bolsheviks and so forth but it is worth remembering that this is only so because the cranks doctrinaire Etc have been allowed to get there first if the movement were invaded by better brains and more common decency the

Objectionable types would cease to dominate it for the present one must just set one’s teeth and ignore them they will Loom much smaller when the movement has been humanized besides they are irrelevant we have got to fight for justice and Liberty and socialism does mean Justice and Liberty when the

Nonsense is stripped off it it is only the essentials that are worth remembering to recoil from socialism because so many individual socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket collector’s face and secondly as to the Socialist himself more especially the vocal track writing

Type of socialist we are at a moment when it is desperately necessary for left Wingers of all complexions to drop their differences and hang together indeed the is already happening to a small extent obviously then the more intransigent kind of socialist has now got to Ally himself with people who are

Not in perfect agreement with him as a rule he is rightly unwilling to do so because he sees the very real danger of watering the whole socialist movement down to some kind of pale pink humbug even more ineffectual than the Parliamentary labor party at the moment for instance there

Is great danger that the popular front which fascism will presumably bring into existence will not be genuinely socialist in character but will simply be a maneuver against German and Italian not English fascism thus the need to unite against fascism might draw the Socialist into alliance with his very worst

Enemies but the principle to go upon is this that you are never in danger of allying yourself with the wrong people provided that you keep the essentials of your movement in the foreground and what are the essentials of socialism what is the mark of a real socialist I suggest that the real

Socialist is one who wishes not merely conceives it as desirable but actively wishes to see tyranny overthrown but I fancy that the majority of Orthodox marxists would not accept that definition or would only accept it very grudging ly sometimes when I listen to these people talking and still more when I

Read their books I get the impression that to them the whole socialist movement is no more than a kind of exciting heresy hunt a leaping to and fro of frenzied Witch Doctors to the beat of tomtom’s and the tune of Fifi faam I smell the blood of a right-wing

Deviationist it is because of this kind of thing that it is so much easier to feel yourself a socialist when you are among workingclass people the workingclass Socialist like the working-class Catholic is weak on Doctrine and can hardly open his mouth without uttering a heresy but he has the

Heart of the matter in him he does grasp the central fact that socialism means the overthrow of tyranny and the mares if it were translated for his benefit would appeal to him more deeply than any learned treaties on dialectical materialism at this moment it is a waste

Of time to insist that acceptance of socialism means acceptance of the philosophic side of Marxism plus agulation of Russia the Socialist movement has not time to be a league of dialectical materialists it has got to be a league of the oppressed against the oppressors you’ve got to attract the man

Who means business and you’ve got to drive away the mey mouthed liberal who wants foreign fascism destroyed in order that he may go on drawing his dividends peacefully the type of humbug who passes resolutions against fascism and communism I.E against rats and rat poison socialism means the overthrow of

Tyranny at home as well as abroad so long as you keep that fact well to the front you will never be in much doubt as to who are your real supporters as for minor different es and the profoundest philosophical difference is unimportant compared with saving the 20 million Englishmen whose bones are

Rotting from Mal nutrition the time to argue about them is afterwards I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of Essentials but certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals it would help enormously for instance if the smell of to the Socialist movement could be

Dispelled if only the sandals and the pistachio colored shirts could be put in a pile and burnt and every vegetarian te Toler and creeping Jesus sent home to Welling Garden City to do his yogur exercises quietly but that I am afraid is not going to happen what is possible however is for

The more intelligent kind of socialist to stop alienating possible supporters in silly and quite irrelevant ways there are so many minor priggishness which could so easily be dropped take for instance the dreary attitude of the typical Marxist towards literature out of the many that come into my mind I will give just one

Example it sounds trivial but it isn’t in the old workers weekly one of the forerunners of the daily worker there used to be a column of literary chat of the books on the editor table type for several weeks running there had been a certain amount of talk about Shakespeare whereupon an incensed reader

Wrote to say dear comrade we don’t want to hear about these Bourgeois writers like Shakespeare can’t you give us something a bit more proletarian etc etc the editor’s reply was simple if you will turn to the index of Marx’s Capital he wrote you will find that Shakespeare is mentioned several

Times and please notice that this was enough to silence the objector once Shakespeare had received the benediction of Marx he became respectable that is the mentality that drives ordinary sensible people away from the Socialist movement you do not need to care about Shakespeare to be repelled by that kind of

Thing again there is the horrible jargon that nearly all socialists think it necess necessary to employ when the ordinary person hears phrases like bourge ideology and proletarian solidarity and expropriation of the expropriators he is not inspired by them he is merely disgusted even the single word comrade

Has done its dirty little bit towards discrediting the Socialist movement how many a waverer has halted on the brink gone perhaps to some public meeting and watched self-conscious socialists dutifully addressing one another as comrade and then slid away disillusioned into the nearest foral bar and his

Instinct is sound for where is the sense of sticking onto yourself a ridiculous label which even after long practice can hardly be mentioned without a gulp of shame it is fatal to let the ordinary Inquirer get away with the idea that being a socialist means wearing sandals and burbling about dialectical m

Materialism you’ve got to make it clear that there is room in the Socialist movement for human beings or the game is up and this raises a great difficulty it means that the issue of class as distinct from Mere economic status has got to be faced more realistically than it is being faced at

Present I devoted three chapters to discussing the class difficulty the principal fact that will have emerged I think is that though the English class system has outlived its usefulness it has outlived it and shows no signs of dying it greatly confuses the issue to assume as the Orthodox

Marxist so often does see for instance Mr Alec Brown’s in some ways interesting book the fate of the middle classes that social status is determined solely by income economically no doubt the there are only two classes the rich and the poor but socially there is a whole

Hierarchy of classes and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but this is the essential Point generally persist from birth to death hence the anomalous individuals that you find in every class of society you find writers like Wells and Bennett who have grown immensely rich

And have yet preserved intact their lower middleclass non-conformist prejudices you find millionaires who cannot pronounce their hes you find Petty shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the brick layer and who nevertheless consider themselves and are considered the brick layer social superiors you find boor school boys

Ruling Indian provinces and public school men touting vacuum cleaners if social stratification corresponded precisely to economic ification the public schoolman would assume a cockney accent the day his income dropped below £200 a year but does he on the contrary he immediately becomes 20 times more Public School than

Before he clings to the old school tie as to a lifeline and even the Hess millionaire though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and learns a BBC accent seldom succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to it is in fact very difficult to escape

Culturally from the class into which you have been born as Prosperity declines social anomalies grow commoner you don’t get more Hess millionaires but you do get more and more public schoolmen touting vacuum cleaners and more and more small shopkeepers driven into the workhouse large sections of the middle class are being gradually proletarian

Ized but the important point is that they do not at any rate in the first generation adopt a proletarian outlook here am I for instance with a bourgea upbringing and a workingclass income which class do I belong to economically I belong to the working class but it is almost impossible for me

To think of myself as anything but a member of the Bourgeois and supposing I had to take sides whom should I side with the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence or the working class whose manners are not my manners it is probable that I personally

In any important issue would side with the working class but what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who were in approximately the same position and what about that far larger class running into millions this time the office worker and black coated employees of all kinds whose Traditions are less

Definitely middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them proletarians all of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class all are being robbed and bullied by the same system yet how many of them realize it when the

Pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies it is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment this being of course a ready-made fascist

Party obviously the Socialist movement has got to capture the exploited middle class before it is too late above all it must capture the office workers who are so numerous and if they knew how to combine so powerful equ obviously it has so far failed to do

So the very last person in whom you can hope to find revolutionary opinions is a clerk or a commercial traveler why very largely I think because of the proletarian C with which socialist propaganda is mixed up in order to symbolize the class war there has been

Set up the more or less mythical figure of a proletarian a muscular but downtrodden man in Greece overalls in contradistinction to a capitalist a fat Wicked Man in a top hat and fur coat it is tacitly assumed that there is no one in between the truth being of

Course that in a country like England about a quarter of the population is in between if you are going to harp on the dictatorship of the proletariat it is an elementary precaution to start by explaining who the proletariat are but because of the Socialist tend y to idealize the manual worker as such

This has never been made sufficiently clear how many of The Wretched shivering Army of Clarks and Shop Walkers who in some ways are actually worse off than a miner or a dockhand think of themselves as proletarians a proletarian so theyve been taught to think means a man without

A collar so that when you try to move them by talking about class war you only succeed in scaring them they forget their incomes and remember their accents and fly to the defense of the class that is exploiting them socialists have a big job ahead of them here they have got to demonstrate

Beyond possibility of Doubt just where the line of cleavage between exploiter and exploited comes once again it is a question of sticking to Essentials and the essential Point here is that all people with small insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same

Side probably we could do with a little less talk about capitalist and proletarian and a little more about the robbers and the robbed but at any rate we must drop that misleading habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual laborers it has got to be brought home to the clerk the engineer

The commercial traveler the middleclass man who is come down in the world the village grosser the lower grade civil servant and all other doubtful cases that they are the proletariat and that socialism means a fair deal for them as well as for the navi and the factory

Hand they must not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce their Ates and those who don’t for if they think that they will join in on the side of the hes I am implying that different classes must be persuaded to act together

Without for the moment being asked to drop their class differences and that sounds dangerous it sounds rather too like the Duke of York summer camp and that dismal line of talk about class cooperation and putting our shoulders to the wheel which is eyewash or fascism or both there can be no cooperation between

Classes whose real interests are opposed the capitalist cannot cooperate with the proletarian the cat cannot cooperate with the mouse and if the cat does suggest cooperation and the mouse is full enough to agree in a very little while the mouse will be disappearing down the cat’s throat but it is always possible to

Cooperate so long as it is upon a basis of common interests the people who have got to act together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the rent this means that the small holder has got to Ally himself with the factory

Hand the typist with the coal miner the school Master with the garage mechanic there is some hope of getting them to do so if they can be made to understand where their interest lies but this will not happen if their social prejudices which in some of them are at

Least as strong as any economic consideration are are needlessly irritated there is after all a real difference of manners and traditions between a bank Clerk and a dock laborer and the bank Clark’s feeling of superiority is very deeply rooted later on he will have to get rid of it but

This is not a good moment for asking him to do so therefore it would be a very great Advantage if that rather meaningless and mechanical bouris baiting which is a part of nearly all socialist propaganda could be dropped for the time being throughout left-wing thought and writing

And the whole way through it from the leading articles in the daily worker to the comic columns in the news Chronicle there runs an anti-gal tradition a persistent and often very stupid jibing at Gentile mannerisms and Gentile loyalties or in communist jargon bourgea values it is largely humbug coming as it

Does from bourgea biters who are Bourgeois themselves but it does great harm because it allows a minor issue to block a major one it directs attention away from the central fact that poverty is poverty whether the tool you work with is a pickaxe or a fountain

Pen once again here am I with my middle class Origins and my income of about £3 a week from all sources for what I am worth it with be better to get me in on the Socialist side than to turn me into a fascist but if you are constantly

Bullying me about my Bourgeois ideology if you give me to understand that in some subtle way I am an inferior person because I have never worked with my hands you will only succeed in antagonizing me for you are telling me either that I am inherently useless or

That I ought to alter myself in some way that is beyond my power I cannot proletarianized my accent or certain of my tastes and beliefs and I would not if I could why should I I don’t ask anybody else to speak my dialect why should anybody else ask me

To speak his it would be far better to take these miserable class stigar for granted and emphasize them as little as possible they are comparable to a race difference and experience shows that one can cooperate with foreigners even with foreigners whom one dislikes when it is really

Necessary economically I am in the same boat with the miner the navi and the farmand remind me of that and I will fight at their side but culturally I am different from the miner the navi and the farmand lay the emphasis on that and you

May arm me against them if I were a solitary anomaly I should not matter but what is true of myself is true of countless others every Bank Clark dreaming of the sack every shopkeeper teetering on the brink of bankruptcy is in essentially the same position these are the sinking middle

Class and most of them are clinging to their gentility under the impression that it keeps them afloat it is not good policy to start by telling them to throw away the life belt there is a quite obvious danger that in the next few years large sections of the middle class will make a

Sudden and violent swing to the right in doing so they may become formidable the weakness of the middle class hitherto has Lain in the fact that they have never learned to combine but if you frighten them into combining against you you may find that you have

Raised up a devil we had a brief glimpse of this possibility in the General’s strike to sum up there is no chance of writing the conditions I described in the earlier chapters of this book or of saving England from fascism unless we can bring an effective Socialist Party into

Existence it will have to be a party with genuinely revolutionary intentions and it will have to be numerically strong enough to act we can only get it if we offer an objective which fairly ordinary people will recognize as Desir beyond all else therefore we need intelligent propaganda less about class

Consciousness expropriation of the expropriators bourgea ideology and proletarian solidarity not to mention the sacred sisters thesis antithesis and synthesis and more about Justice Liberty and the plight of the unemployed and less about mechanical progress tractors the denipa dam and the latest salmon canning Factory in Moscow that kind of thing is not an

Integral part of socialist Doctrine and it drives away many people whom the Socialist cause needs including most of those who can hold a pen all that is needed is to hammer two facts home into the public Consciousness one that the interests of all exploited people are the same the other that

Socialism is compatible with common decency as for the terribly difficult issue of class distinctions the only possible policy for the moment is to go easy and not frighten more people than can be helped and above all no more of those muscular curate efforts at class breaking if you belong to the

Bourgeois don’t be too eager to bound forward and embrace your proletarian Brothers they may not like it and if they show that they don’t like it you will probably find that your class prejudices are not so dead as you imagined and if you belong to the

Proletariat by birth or in the sight of God don’t sneer too automatically at the old school tie it covers loyalties which can be useful to you if you know how to handle them yet I believe there is some hope that when socialism is a living issue a thing that large numbers of Englishmen

Genuinely care about the class difficulty may solve itself more rapidly than now seems thinkable in the next few years we shall either get that effective Socialist Party that we need or we shall not get it if we do not get it then fascism is coming probably a slimy anglicized form

Of fascism with cultured policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and The Lion and the the unicorn instead of the swastika but if we do get it there will be a struggle conceivably a physical one for our plutocracy will not sit quiet under a genuinely revolutionary government and when the widely separate

Classes who necessarily would form any real Socialist Party have fought side by side they may feel differently about one another and then perhaps this misery of class Prejudice will fade away and we of the sinking middle class the private school Master the half starved freelance journalist the Colonel’s spinster

Daughter with £75 a year the jobless Cambridge graduate the ship’s officer without a ship the clerks the civil servants the commercial Travelers and the Thrice bankrupt Drapers in the country towns May sink without further struggles into the working class Where We Belong long and probably when we get

There it will not be so Dreadful as we feared for after all we have nothing to lose but our hes you’ve been listening to a CSA word audio production we hope you’ve enjoyed it for further information about our classic audio books please visit CSA word. co.uk thanks for listening