The George Garrett Archive Project

Module Three. Workshop Three

On The Parish. 1934 – 1937. 

The Writer as Historian and Dramatist.

Christopher Hilliard: To Exercise Our Talents, P.105

In introducing this, the eleventh workshop of the George Garrett Archive course, Tony Wailey, in situating and contextualising George Garrett and his work, opened by reflecting back on the previous workshop where we discussed the great slump, the great depression and the 1929 crash. Because of the level of need displayed through mass unemployment, and as a results of the protests against both that and the poor levels of maintenance generally provided by the poor-law parish guardians, there was more state assistance available to the unemployed. But, the sheer length of the recession and the recession meant that a whole generation had grown up with mass unemployment as a permanent feature of their life. For many, Garrett included, ten years could pass with little more than a week or two of casual work to be had. As an interesting contrast to this back ground, Tony quoted from Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century. 1914-1991’:

All this in spite of the fact that the 1930’s were a decade of considerable innovation in industry, for instance, in the development of plastics. Indeed, in one field – entertainment and what later came to be called ‘the media’ – the interwar years saw the major breakthrough, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, with the triumph of mass-radio, and the Hollywood movie industry, not to mention the rotogravure illustrated press. Perhaps it is not quite so surprising that the giant movie theatres rose like dream palaces I the grey cities of mass unemployment, for cinema tickets were remarkable cheap, the young as well as the oldest, disproportionately hit by unemployment then as later, had time to kill, and, as the sociologists observed, during the depression husbands and wives were more likely to share joint leisure activities than before. (P. 102)

However, just as this technological revolution was underway, and later as the move to rearmament brought some relief as it provided employment, this period also marked the fall of liberalism and saw the end of free trade. There were contradictions; the rise of social democracy was tempered by the rise of far-right and fascist movements in all major European countries. Keynesianism gained support, most notably in the New Deal policies of US president Roosevelt. This ‘age of extremes’ drew people in from all quarters into new movements and new activities. Nowhere is this better displayed than in the response to the putting down of the Spanish revolution, and the taking of sides in the Spanish Civil War.

The middle-classes here saw the middle-class in Spain voting republican. Then they saw the army stepping in and stamping upon the new aspirations and hopes for liberal democracy, or even revolution. For sections of the middle class, and for our purposes the literary intelligentsia, this marks a major turning point, and pushes their sympathies towards the working classes.

At this moment reading becomes part of the mass entertainment industry, and John Lehmann, a friend of Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden, and others including John Middleton Murray and Richard Rees, set up new magazines devoted to new writing: The Adelphi, left Review, New Writing, etc.; an English take on the American dime novel. When it falls under the imprint of Penguin, Lehmann’s ‘New Writing’ reaches sales of 75,000 per issue.

This is the moment at which George achieves his greatest success. His first story, fittingly titled ‘First Born’, is published in June 1934 in John Middleton Murry’s ‘The Adelphi’ magazine. George publishes ‘First-Born’ under the pseudonym ‘Matt Low’, a play on the French word for sailor, ‘Matelot’. Between 1934 and 1937 he goes on to have a further nine stories published in The Adelphi, New Writing and Left Review, four of which are attributed to Matt Low. His reasons for using the pseudonym may well have been to avoid losing benefits, although it seems that George enjoyed playing round with identity, using pseudonyms like an ‘overcoat’ to work within a new identity dependending on which genre he was working within. He has moved on from his plays. Too big an enterprise with very little chance of them being staged, could well have been his motivation. But these short stories are where he truly finds his voice. His letters to Lehmann, to Rees, Middleton-Murry and fellow writer Jack Common are numerous. These and his re-discovered notebooks show Garrett to be a committed, intelligent writer, alive within his craft, and a worker who reaches far beyond the confines of the ‘proletarian writer’.

 But this feverish activity comes at great cost. Without a room of his own, and barely able to even find time in a library due to fellow benefit sufferers appealing for help, George finally succumbs to the pressure of balancing enduring poverty with a growing family and a vital need to be creative. Christopher Hilliard, in To Exercise Our Talents, reports the following from a letter of George Garrett to New Writing Editor, John Lehman:

People wanted more from him – Jack Common, Tom Harrison – there was even talk of a publishing contract for a complete book, but it wasn’t to be. He got out 3000 words for Jack Common, but when he turned away ‘the baby tore it to shreds’. Heart-breaking, in every sense, but we are here to celebrate what was achieved rather than mourn what could have been. This, as we know from his involvement in The Unity Theatre dramas in the 1930’s and 40’s, wasn’t the end of George’s writing career, but it was the end of his ‘moment’ in the 1930’s, when he managed to publish an incredible series of stories that rubbed shoulders with the work of WH Auden, Isherwood and George Orwell, to name but a few.

Because of its position as a port, and the possibilities for casual work through the docks and the ships, Liverpool was never classed as an area of distress. But in Liverpool there were pockets of poverty like nowhere else. As one report noted, the human decay was as serious as the material decay, and many people were written off as being beyond rehabilitation into the workforce. This grinding poverty was a challenge and impediment to life for many, but it must have been an added weight upon someone trying to express themselves artistically.

In the late 1930’s George, after a brief interlude to recover, is enjoying something of a resurgence, indicated by his role in showing George Orwell (another George who works under a pseudonym – Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair) around Liverpool when orwell was researching his classic study of the depression, ‘the Road to Wigan Pier’.

Orwell was introduced to Garrett by the Deiners, another radical working class family who ran an ‘Adelphi’ circle in the area. It’s an indication again of George Garrett’s standing that he was thought of as someone who had the knowledge and authority to introduce Orwell to the working conditions and effects of poverty in Liverpool. They must have felt a certain affinity, and sat up all night discussing books and politics. The following day Garrett took Orwell to the docks to witness how men were hired, or sent away for the day of they didn’t get the ‘tap on the shoulder’.

Orwell spoke very highly of George in his ‘Wigan Pier Diaries’, commenting that:

'I was very greatly impressed by Garrett. Had I known before that it is he who writes under the pseudonym of Matt Low in the Adelphi (a magazine published in the 1920's and 30's) and one or two other places, I would have taken steps to meet him earlier.' - George Orwell. (Hilliard. P 119)

Unfortunately, after ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ was published, Garrett, along with other working-class writers such as Jack Common, didn’t feel as favourable towards Orwell. George regarded ‘Wigan Pier’ as ‘one long sneer’, commenting to John Lehmann that he felt it could do a lot of ‘damage’, adding “That it should appear as a ‘Left Book’ gives it an added damage”. Lehmann himself recognised the difference between Orwell’s middle class sensibilities compared to Garrett’s handling of working class life, saying, in ‘Man In the Street’ from ‘New Writing in Europe’, that Garrett’s ‘needle of sensitivity does not quiver so violently as Orwell’s who hates and despises all the things that Garrett does but knows them in a far less familiar way.’ (p.83-84)

Orwell had previously commented in 1936 that there was no such thing as working-class writing. This provoked a furious response, which in itself would have taken much time and energy for writers like George. This response, and Orwell’s encounter with Garrett, led him to change his mind. Speaking later, in 1940 on BBC radio, Orwell, in a discussion on proletarian and working class writing brought together a number of writers he admired; ‘Oh yes’ he says, talking about good writing that has risen from the ranks of working class writers, ‘lots. Jack London’s book The Road, Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks, Jim Phelan’s prison books, George Garrett’s sea stories, Private Richards’s Old Soldier Sahib, James Hanley’s Grey Children — to name just a few.’

We had a long discussion on a number of issues, some of which will come up next week, in relation to Garrett and Spain, and George’s role in the formation of the Left Theatre and Unity Theatre, and also speculated on just how well known, or how well read, was Garrett’s work in Liverpool at that point. As mentioned earlier, the Deiner’s knew it was Garrett they would ask to accompany Orwell on his visit to Liverpool, and, as the Deiner’s ran a circle connected to the Adelphi Magazine, we know they were aware of Garrett’s writing under his own name and as ‘Matt Low’. This indicates Garrett was fairly well known for his work, even if that was among a relatively limited circle.

Next week , for the 4th and final workshop of module three, we will be looking at the years 1937-39, and Garrett’s life and work moving from the Popular Front to Another War’.


Blog created and written by Mike Morris & Tony Wailey, based upon a series of introductions by Tony Wailey to the George Garrett Archive course.

The George Garrett Archive project workshops are free and open to all. We meet every Monday, 6-8pm in Liverpool John Moores University’s Aldham Robarts Library, Maryland Street, L1 9DE (off Hope Street).