H.G. WELLS ON HIS COUNTER DAYS

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20244, 23 May 1931, Page 5

H.G. WELLS ON HIS COUNTER DAYS

R£iaa&ED: The far-offdays when lie was eassistant ware recalled . ' tie most famous.' member of ~the"<Sh6pi i Assistants' Union/Mr "H. G., Wells,-ait a dinner held inwjinexion with the fortieth annual. - conference oi£ , unipn, now amalgamated: Warehousemen.attd Ole'rke'. ' ''Whenever.. "with a table jjji< | -front' of £ra| i paralysis comes upon me,' ancf *1 find W hands goingi liker this," he.i >ud, leaning' over the}table with' his/hands upon it. "I- wonder,; then-if due to-a certain' experience.in'iny'sa*ly; life'when I stood in terror counter. My contact .with/the, connt,erbegan before tie .days of your union,, when the gentility which has been thecurse of the ahpp assistant—^nd sft still, I gather from the: numberof jyotrf* members-yhad prevented the development,of any trade unionism, at all. ,We. were genteel.' ~ : "There were* two attempts jmadQ .'tO; ■ make me gentael, and the iSrst broke down through, my , utter .lack . ofgentility. There was troublp.with one of the errand ■ Xs those days there was a profound-difference between the: apprentices and the errand boys. " £' littlfe niatter>gnvo -mt.a black eye. The,, second attempt lasted two years, W years which J. still, remember as,, the most terrible'in my life;,.temble largely - because a number "of things which your', union has achieved still had to be done.' 'I escaped from it in the course time, to find myself earning.a precarious livelihood as <t writer, and then I- tried to write something ,of my experience as a shop assistant. ' . . „ - Shop as a Subjept "I tried three times, to aboiifra, shop. The ir.st stoxy a shop assistant leaving for his and ended when he came back.- I could-not stand it. The next time I wrote about a person called Kipps, and after a-'fewT .brief chapters I had to endow a fortune "to .get him out of "'lt.- ;i?id the third, Mr Polly, "followed" in, my' footsteps and ran away."' ' * Mr Wells said shop assistants had a way-of drifting into other occupations;There were a great-number of writers who had at one time been shop:assist tants. The carious thing was that none of them, with one brilliant .exception, had written about' shops and about what'it. meant to be a shop assistant. He writer too little esteemed,"; who done it with "brutal thoroughness in 'Nothing to Pay*.* An extraordinarily good book" said-Mr Wells". ''Ete, has put into it the slang and technique of a pretty bad shop. "In my days the' week would have. t bee"n a_ v went down to dust "at thirty, and got outofithe ,shqp ; a&«ight-' thirty or nine, and^'you'* 1 were" let ibff one day in the week at five o'clock. 4 If, as I heard, livhsg*i» is dying,-then the 75 per cent, of s&op assistants who , do not belong to ;pßr-sni©nase <ii»>

1 idL this Winch than 38.000 bands at. the mills, ana mill OTffiera'arj>"jaWßßßipirSjffi Swedish' prloas the level of.