BOOK OF THE WEEK

Taranaki Daily News, 2 June 1934, Page 13 (Supplement)

BOOK OF THE WEEK

INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND

(By

U.S.)

“English Journey,” by J. B. Priestley.

* William Heinemann Ltd., in association with Victor Gollancz Ltd., London. A. J. Fyfe Ltd., New Plymouth.

Those who know Mr. Priestley’s sympathetic descriptions of industrial England in his .novels “Good Companions” and “Wonder Hero,” will be assured that the sub-title to “English Journey” will be thoroughly justified. Mr. Priestley calls his book “a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933.” It is no pretty picture he has drawn. Except for the first and last few days of it Mr. Priestley s itinerary was through those parts of industrial England that have felt the economic depression most of all. Birmingham and the Black Country; Liverpool, Manchester and the cotton districts of Lancashire; Leicester and Nottingham, his own home town, Bradford, and the rest of the West Riding of Yorkshire, the stricken shipyards of Durham and the Tees, the gradually recovering industries on the Tyne, all these Mr. Priestley visits and makes comment grave and gay. Very often it is not only the poverty but the ugliness of industrial England he finds so depressing. In Lancashire, he says, they had a saying that “where there's muck there’s money.” To-day Lancashire has only the “muck” and the same is true of many other districts. Even hard times and- sordid surroundings do not kill the humour of the English workingman or woman though the wit may be a bit ironical. Mr. Priestley tells of a weaver at Blackburn who had just lost her husband. “Where are you going to bury ’im ?” a neighbour asked her. “Ah’m not going to bury ’im,” she replied. “Well, what are yer (going to do wi’ ’im ?” she was asked. “Ah’m going to ’ave ’im cremated,” she replied. The neighbour was impressed. “But whatever will yer do wi’ th’ ashes ?” she inquired. “Ah’U tell yer what Ah’m going to do wi’ th’ ashes,” said the widow. “Ah’m going to ’ave ’em put into an egg-timer. Th’ owd devil wouldn’t ever work when ’e wer ialive, so ’e can start doing a bit now ’e’s deead.” That story Mr. Priestley considers a “fair” sample of Lancashire’s “grimly ironic humour.” They need all their gaiety, their stoicism, if this is a true sketch of Lancashire to-day. “The whole district had been tied to prosperity, to its very existence, with threads of cotton; and you could hear them snapping all the time...... That very day a mill, a fine big building that had cost £lOO,OOO or so not 20 years ago, was put up for auction, with no reserve: there was not a single bid. There hardly ever is. You can have a mill rent-free up there, if you are prepared to work it. Nobody has any money to buy,' rent or run mills any m0re......1 heard of one former cotton king who was seen picking up cigarette ends in the street. Another is a bus conductor, another has a stall in the open market, another is a barman. Decent men were forced by circumstances into the most terrible positions. ‘Damn it,’ cried one of them, exploding, ‘an employer in this business can’t be honest to-day’ and these men'who were talking were-the comparatively: fortunate ones.” . , .!■

Just as depressing. are the' stories of the wasted shipyards, coal mines and engineering establishments of the Tyne and Durham areas. Most pathetic of all, if it is not something more ominous, is the account of an entertainment organised by workless youths and men=for the sake of having something ,to ? do. Mr. Priestley’s guide told him “he had had great difficulty in persuading them to join his concert party, which was for their benefit and-not his own, and that even when they had consented to join it was not easy to get these young men who had grown up in a workless world to turn up punctually to rehearsals,' to learn their songs and patter, and to make them submit even to the easiest discipline There was no loss of self-respect, no anxiety, with them. They had no sense whatever of waste and tragedy in themselves. They were not at odds with their peculiar environment, which by this time had moulded their characters and shaped their way of living They lived below the level of worry. They were not citizens, though some of them soon would be husbands and fathers...... They knew nothing, about responsibility They live, in short, in a workshop that has no work for them......1f they live mean, foolish little lives, whose fault ■is that ? Citizens must have a city.” Truly industrial England under the dole is hot the happiest of visions. Mr. Priestley could see other pictures as the following quotation shows: “To see Beverley Minster suddenly hanging in the sky is as astonishing as hearing a great voice intoning some noble line of verse. I am ho Catholic, no mediaevalist, no Merrie Englander but I cannot help asking myself and you why our own age, which boasts of the conquest of material things, never seems to offer us here any -of these superb aesthetic surprises. You go up and down this country and what makes you jump with astonishment and delight is something that has been there for at least 500 •years. And it is not its age but its mere presence that does the trick. If you want to know the difference between working for the glory of God and working for the benefit of debenture-holders, simply take a journey and keep your eyes open.” It is this faculty for keeping his eyes and his mind open that enables Mr. Priestley to close his book full of warmest patriotism. England, he says, “has given the world something more than millions of yards of calico and thousands of steam engines. If we are a nation of shopkeepers, then what a shop! There is Shakespeare in the window, to begin with; and the whole establishment is blazing with geniuses We stagger beneath our inheritance. But let us ■burn every book, tear down every memorial rather than grow old and petrify, rather than forget that inner glowing tradition of the English spirit We have led the world, many a time before to-day, on good expeditions and bad ones We can lead it again. We headed the procession when it took what we see now'to be the wrong turning, down into the dark bog of greedy industrialism, where money and machines are of more importance than men and women. It is for us to find the way i out again, into the sunlight.” I

Books of interest for hostesses, Foulsham’s Fun Book, a great guide to home amusement; .includes many new party games, 1/3. Party Games, by Elizabeth Burton, price 1/-. A Book of Games for Young and Old. Games and competitions for parties, etc., price 1/3. Popular Indoor Games, by F. R. Ings, price 1/3. The 12 Best Indoor Games for Two, price 1/3. Fifty Best Party Games, by Albert Ross, price 1/3. Procurable at Fyfe’s, “The Book People,” Phone 1397, New Plymouth.*