SUBURBIA IN ENGLAND

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18635, 2 August 1930, Page 15

SUBURBIA IN ENGLAND

CHANGES OF THE YEARS. Many novels have traced the changes which succeeding generations have witnessed in England. Latterly the tendency has been to view these changes through the eyes of exceptional or neurotic people who group themselves into artistic cliques. A book is of greater value and appeal when it recounts ordinary people, as H. G. Wells, has done for London suburbia, Arnold Bennett for the Five Towns, and as Mr Gordon Stowell now does for the Provinces in “The History of Button Hill.” Button Hill is a Yorkshire suburb, self-conscious and select, and it sets out patriotically to have a future. It is in the dear old Victorian days of Bands of Hope, bombadine dresses which trailed the ground, Ladies Cycling Clubs, Mutual Improvement Societies, "mashers” who sang humanitarian tenor in the church choir, and Liberal Prime Ministers so wicked as to win the Derby. But where as almost every other writer who holds up this period to our derision does so with a "thank God we know better now,” Mr Stowell manages to make it seem beneath one’s smiles as a rather enjoyable time even if we all did some quaint hypocrital things. And because it was the time of so many emancipated peoples’ glorious youth, his is surely the better, truer retrospect. A hero who went round turning Holman Hunt’s pictures face to the wall because their painter had spoken in favour of opening the picture galleries on Sundays, is surely a figure of fun, not of revilement.

But the first half of “Button Hill” is about a suburb and its growth, only incidentally about people—Button Hill, which unseated a Government and took so’ prominent a share in resisting the Education Bill, Button Hill which seemed assured of a glorious future. But the electric tram, which annihilated distance, was its first enemy; it ran through it and treated it as an incidental rather than a destination. Then the younger generation grew distcontented with it; finally the war well-nigh decimated it, and the profiteer destroyed its individuality and appearance. This is a book which can be recommended with confidence to those who know England and like to go back over the changes wrought by the years. "The History of Button Hill,” by Gordon Stowell. (GolTanc).