17 June 2009

Orwell's Leeds diary

The Leeds section of George Orwell's 1936 Road To Wigan Pier diary initially concentrates on his experiences in Sheffield, but then moves on to his stay in Headingley. He was a bugger for very long paragraphs, which are difficult to read on-screen, so I've added some paragraph breaks.

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5 March

At 21 Estcourt Avenue, Headingley, Leeds. I left Sheffield at 10.30 this morning, and in spite of its being such a frightful place and of the relief of getting back into a comfortable house, I was quite sorry to leave the Searles. I have seldom met people with more natural decency. They were as kind to me as anyone could possibly be, and I hope and trust they liked me. Of course I got their whole life-history from them by degrees.

Searle is 33 and was an only child. When a youth he joined the Army and was in the Ordnance Corps (or whatever it is called) with the army of occupation in Palestine and Egypt. He has vivid memories of Egypt and wishes he was back there. Since then he has only had short-lived jobs, e.g. as store-keeper and check-weighman at various works, also as railway (outside) porter.

Mrs S comes from a somewhat more prosperous family, as her father till only a few weeks ago36 (36 He died very suddenly and his wife has now no resources except the old age pension [Author's footnote) was in a good job at £5 a week and also made something on the side by making fishing rods. But it was a very large family (11) and she went into service. She married S when he was on the dole, against the opposition of her family. At first they could not get a house, and lived in a single room, in which two children were born and one died. They told me they had only one bed for the family and had to 'lay out' the dead baby in the perambulator.

Finally, after frightful difficulty (one reason for this is that private landlords are not too keen on letting to people on the dole and there is a certain amount of bribery of agents) they got this house, of which the rent is about 8s. 6d. Mrs S earns about 9s. a week from her charing. Exactly what deduction is made for this from S's dole I don't know, but their total income is 32s. 6d. In spite of which I had great difficulty in getting them to accept enough for my keep while there - they wanted to charge only 6s. for full board and lodging from Monday night to Thursday morning.

They keep the house very clean and decent, have a bit of garden, though they can't do much with it, as it has factory chimneys on one side and the gas works on the other, besides being poor soil, and they are very fond of one another. I was surprised by Mrs S's grasp of the economic situation and also of abstract ideas - quite unlike most working-class women in this, though she is I think not far from illiterate. She does not seem resentful against the people who employ her - indeed she says they are kind to her - but sees quite clearly the essential facts about domestic service. She told me how the other day as she waited at the lunch table she calculated the price of the food on the table (for 5 persons for one meal) and it came to 6s. 3d. - as much as the P.A.C. allows her child for a fortnight.

B was very good and took my request to 'show me over Sheffield' even too seriously, so that from morning to night I was being rushed from place to place, largely on foot, to see public buildings, slums, housing estates etc. But he is a tiresome person to be with, being definitely disgruntled and too conscious of his Communist convictions. In Rotherham we had to have lunch at a slightly expensive restaurant because there didn't seem to be any others except pubs (B is T.T.), and when in there he was sweating and groaning about the 'bourgeois atmosphere' and saying he could not eat this kind of food.

As he declares that it is necessary to literally hate the bourgeoisie, I wondered what he thought of me, because he told me at the very start I was a bourgeois and remarked on my 'public school twang'. However, I think he was disposed to treat me as a sort of honorary proletarian, partly because I had no objection to washing in the sink etc. but more because I seemed interested in Sheffield. He was very generous and though I had told him at the start that I was going to pay for his meals etc. while we were together, he would always go out of his way to spare me expense.

It seems that he lives on 10s. a week - I had this from Searle: exactly where B's 10s. comes from I don't know - and the rent of his room is 6s. Of course it would not be possible to subsist on the remainder, allowing for fuel. You could only keep alive on 4s. a week if you spent nothing on fuel and nothing on tobacco or clothes.

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Orwell kept a newspaper cutting among his notes:

News of The World, 1 March 1936

LIVING on 4s. A WEEK: MAN'S DESCRIPTION OF HOW HE DOES IT.

Following the disclosures in the News of the World of parent who have to bring up big families on tiny incomes, a correspondent draws our attention to the case of a man who spends less than 4s. a week on food.

His week's supply and its cost is as follows:-
3 Wholemeal loaves 1/0
½ lb. Margarine 2½d
½ lb. Dripping 3d
1lb. Cheese 7d
1lb. Onions 1½d
1lb. Carrots 1½d
1lb Broken biscuits 4d
2lb. Dates 5d
1 Tin evaporated milk 5d
10 Oranges 5d

Total cost 3/11 ½

The man, Mr W Leach of Lilford Road, London SE, adds that he would prefer to boil the carrots to eating them raw 'but, of course, to boil the water would cost too much'.

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I gather B gets meals from time to time from the Ss and other friends, also from his brother who is in comparatively good employ. His room is decent and even cultured-looking, as it has bits of 'antique' furniture which he has made himself, and some crude but not disagreeable pictures, mostly of circuses, which he has painted.

Much of his bitterness obviously comes from sexual starvation. His deformity handicaps him with women, his fear of transmitting it has stopped him from marrying (he says he would only marry a woman past the childbearing age), and his inability to earn money makes it more impossible still. However, at one of the Adelphi summer schools he picked up with some school-mistress (aged 43) who I gather is his mistress when opportunities permit and who is willing to marry him, only her parents oppose it. The Searles say he has improved greatly since taking up with this woman - before that he used to have fits occasionally.

We had an argument one evening in the Searles' house because I helped Mrs S with the washing-up. Both of the men disapproved of this, of course. Mrs S seemed doubtful. She said that in the North working-class men never offered any courtesies to women (women are allowed to do all the house-work unaided, even when the man is unemployed, and it is always the man who sits in the comfortable chair), and she took this state of things for granted, but did not see why it should not be changed. She said that she thought the women now-a-days, especially the younger women, would like it if men opened doors for them etc.

The position now-a-days is anomalous. The man is practically always out of work, whereas the woman occasionally is working. Yet the woman continues to do all the house-work and the man not a hand's-turn, except carpentering and gardening. Yet I think it is instinctively felt by both sexes that the man would lose his manhood if, merely because he was out of work, he became a 'Mary Ann'.

One particular picture of Sheffield stays by me. A frightful piece of waste ground (somehow, up here a piece of waste ground attains a squalor that would be impossible even in London), trampled quite bare of grass and littered with newspaper, old saucepans etc. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four room houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney behind chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a railway embankment made from the slag of furnaces. In front, across the piece of waste ground, a cubical building of dingy red and yellow brick, with the sign, 'John Grocock, Haulage Contractor'.

Other memories of Sheffield: stone walls blackened by smoke, a shallow river yellow with chemicals, serrated flames, like circular saws, coming out from the cowls of the foundry chimneys, thump and scream of steam hammers (the iron seems to scream under the blow), smell of sulphur, yellow clay, backsides of women wagging laboriously from side to side as they shove their perambulators up the hills....

7 March

Staying till next Wed. with M[arjorie] and H[umphrey] at 21 Estcourt Avenue, Headingley. Conscious all the while of difference in atmosphere between middle-class home even of this kind and working-class home. The essential difference is here there is elbow room, in spite of there being 5 adults and 3 children, besides animals, at present in the house. The children make peace and quiet difficult, but if you definitely want to be alone you can be so - in a working-class house never, either by night or day.

One of the kinds of discomfort inseparable from a working man's life is waiting about. If you receive a salary it is paid into your bank and you draw it out when you want it. If you receive wages, you have to go and get them in somebody else's time and are probably kept hanging abo0ut and probably expected to behave as though being paid your wages at all was a favour. When Mr H at Wigan went to the mine to draw his compensation, he had to go, for some reason I did not understand, on two separate days each week, and was kept waiting in the cold for about an hour before he was paid. In addition the four tram journeys to and from the mine cost him 1s., reducing his compensation from 29s. weekly to 28s. He took this for granted, of course.

The result of long training in this kind of thing is that whereas the bourgeois goes through life expecting to get what he wants, within limits, the working man always feels himself the slave of a more or less mysterious authority. I was impressed by the fact that when I went to Sheffield Town Hall to ask for certain statistics, both B and Searle - both of them people of much more forcible character than myself - were nervous, would not come into the office with me, and assumed that the Town Clerk would refuse information. They said, 'He might give it to you but he wouldn't give it to us'.

Actually the Town Clerk was snooty and I did not get all the information I asked for. But the point was that I assumed my questions would be answered, and the other two assumed the contrary.

It is for this reason that in countries where the class hierarchy exists, people of the higher class always tend to come to the front in times of stress, though not really more gifted than the others. That they will do so seems to be taken for granted always and everywhere.

N.B. to look up the passage in Lissagary's History of the Commune describing the shootings after the Commune had been suppressed. They were shooting the ringleaders without trial, and as they did not know who the ringleaders were, they were picking them out on the principle that those of better class than the others would be the ringleaders. One man was shot because he was wearing a watch, another because he 'had an intelligent face'. N.B. to look up this passage.

Yesterday with H and M to Haworth Parsonage, home of the Brontes and now a museum. Was chiefly impressed by a pair of Charlotte Bronte's cloth-topped boots, very small, with square toes and lacing up the sides.

9 March

Yesterday with H and M to their cottage at Middlesmoor, high up on the edge of the moors. Perhaps it is only the time of year, but even up there, miles from any industrial towns, the smoky look peculiar to this part of the country seems to hang about anything. Grass dull-coloured, streams muddy, houses all blackened as though by smoke. There was snow everywhere, but thawing and slushy. Sheep very dirty - no lambs, apparently. The palm was out and primroses putting out new shoots; otherwise nothing moving.

11 March

On the last two evenings to 'discussion groups' - societies of people who meet once a week, listen to some talk on the radio and then discuss it. Those at the one on Monday were chiefly unemployed men and I believe these 'discussion groups' were started or at any rate suggested by the Social Welfare people who run unemployed occupational centres.

That on Monday was decorous and rather dull. Thirteen people including ourselves (one woman besides M) and we met in a room adjoining a public library. The talk was on Galsworthy's play The Skin Game and the discussion kept to the subject until most of us adjourned to a pub for bread and cheese and beer afterwards.

Two people dominated the assembly, one a huge bull-headed man named Rowe who contradicted whatever the last speaker has said and involved himself in the most appalling contradictions, the other a youngish, very intelligent and extremely well-informed man named Creed. From his refined accent, quiet voice and apparent omniscience, I took him for a librarian. I find he keeps a tobacconist's shop and was previously a commercial traveller. During the war he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector.

The other meeting was at a pub and the people were of higher standing. The arrangement is that M and H go there taking the portable radio, and the publican, who is a member of this group, lets them have a room for the evening. On this occasion the talk was called 'If Plato Lived Today', but no one listened-in except M and myself - H has gone to Bedford.

When the talk was over the publican, a Canadian with a very bald head, a market gardener who was already the worse for drink, and another man rolled in and there began an orgy of drinking from which we escaped with difficulty about an hour later.

Much of the talk on both nights about the European situation and most people saying (some of them with ill-dissembled hope) that war is certain. With two exceptions all pro-German.

Today to Barnsley to fix up about a place to stay. Wilde, secretary of the South Yorkshire Branch of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union, has fixed it all up for me. The address is Agnes Avenue. The usual 2 up 2 down house, with sink in living room, as at Sheffield. The husband is a miner and was away at work when we got there. House very disorganized as it was washing day, but seemed clean.

Wilde, though kind and helpful, was a very vague person. He was a working miner till 1924 but as usual has been bourgeois-ified. Smartly dressed with gloves and umbrella and very little accent - I would have taken him for a solicitor from his appearance.

Barnsley is slightly smaller than Wigan - about 70,000 inhabitants - but distinctly less poverty stricken, at any rate in appearance. Much better shops and more appearance of business being done. Many miners coming home from the morning shift. Mostly wearing clogs but of a square-toed pattern different from the Lancashire ones.

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On 25 March, Orwell closes his diary with, 'Returning to Leeds tomorrow, then on to London on Monday'. This gave him a further four days in Leeds, though there is no record from that visit.

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