“FULL UP AND FED UP”

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 18532, 14 July 1922, Page 3

“FULL UP AND FED UP”

AN AMERICAN ON CROWDED BRITAIN. Mr. Whiting Williams, a keenly observant and enterprising American journalist, who in 1919 spent several months in the “labour gangs” of his own country, and recorded his impressions in “What’s on the Workers Mind,” went to Great. Britain in 1920, and by tho same methods gained experience in the labour gangs there. Upon his return to America he wrote n Full Up and Fed Up” (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.; Melbourne; Robertson and Mullens). “Full Up” is intended by the author to convey that the British labour market is overstocked. He interprets the remainder of the title himself ip this fashion:—“The British citizen in general—also the British worker in particular—is tired. Tired and therefore touchy—dangerously touchy—‘Fed Up.’ ”

Mr. Williams, donning the regulation outfit of the British working-man spent most of his time in the South Wales mines and smelting works, at Glasgow docks, and in the Midlands iron and steel works and ship-yards. He had had actual experience of such places in America, and therefore was able to carry with him into the ordeal a certain amount of confidence. His pictures of the underworld life in these great industrial centres are vividly realistic, and illumined here and there with glimpses of humour. The author, by posing as “a hard drinker”—a useful hint given to him by a “college man” in London—found the knack of getting close up to the subjects that he wished to study. AVhat he learned in these intensely human colloquies will move the reader to both tears and laughter. Only a stranger who, like the author, dropped in upon these people from another country, where the industrial atmosphere is different, could describe their lives in the same broad outlines. The “ buddies” in the closely packed, fume-laden townships of South Wales, the revolutionaries (he was among them in the critical months of 1920), of Glasgow and their “poverty disease” afflicted childien ,and the lens discontented though mildly socialistic workers in the lietter-crdered Midlands —all these he discovers for the average reader, who knew, of course, that these were areas of disaffection in Great Britain, but had never been introduced to the folk working and living in them. Perhaps in his quest of “copy” Mr. Williams has been tempted occasionally to enlarge upon an extraordinary incident that he was a witness of, or an extraordinary person that he met, to the exclusion of the many more nearly normal events and pe:sons. Still, there is every reason to trust him as a recorder, and in the gross the impressions he formed are strikingly interesting. Had he resisted the temptation to try to too closely imitate the various dialects that he encountered, some of the points that he makes would have shown out more sharply. But it is the author’s summing up of his experiences that expectantly awaits, and without de-

trading from his keenness of observation and and his capacity to .express himself, it must be said that Mr. Williams adds little or nothing to the knowledge of thoso who are seeking to solve the problem of British industrial unrest. “It does seem certain,” he ventures to say in one place, “ that the general or common labourer over here, though English-speaking, is of a lower grade and level than even our lowest workers among the foreign-born. I wonder if the reason is that our lowest workers have, perhaps, a livelier hope —a larger faith that a better job may come, and with it a better life. The question is. whether regularity of employment, if and when this is increased by the present national efforts, will be able greatly to help these near wrecks of the dock districts, their wives and families, as long as bad housing and “booze” continue to flourish as they do —with also the ‘bookie’ to be named as the third of the destructive trio.” This is from a diary entry made in Glasgow which the author "brands as “certainly the most revolutionary and also the most rum-ridden and degraded city I ever yet have seen.” The prevalence of the drink habit among men and women, young and old, is harped on by Mr. Williams from the beginning to the end of his book. He seems to have had distressing evidence of it everywhere he went. To the uncertainty of obtaining a job Mr. Williams attributes a great deal of the physical and moral demoralisation of the men that he saw—“years and years of never knowing from one day’s end to another whether tomorrow’s sun will find them at work.” He snatches eagerly at the remark of an English Labour leader (who, as a class, he considers better trained and better educated than the American equivalent), who said: “Irregular work always makes an irregular worker. And an irregular worker is always found to be. an irregular citizen.” If Mr. Williams has any advice to offer, it is that employers and employees should “get closer together,” that tfee “fixed job” idea (once a labourer always a labourer) should be broken down by encouraging men to advance themselves by scientific training rather than by experience, and that more men should be engaged in producing the nation’s food from the soil in order to reduce the endless queues waiting for jobs in the factories and mines. A number of illustrations help Mr. Williams in depicting the scenes that he writes about.