The George Garrett Archive Project

 Module Three. Workshop Four 

On The Parish. 1937 – 1939. 

From Popular Front to Another War.

For this, the final workshop of our third module, and the last meeting of the group before Xmas, we looked at the period of George’s life from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War through to the beginning of the Second World War. A tumultuous time, which saw George respond, in classic George Garrett style, through his writing and his personal, social and political activities, to the events he was living through.

Although poverty and unemployment was still endemic throughout the late 1930’s, there were the signs of some improvement on a number of fronts. The ‘Stand Still’ act of 1935, won on the back of the consistent unemployed demonstrations, marches and crusades of the 1920’s and early 1930’s,  a ensured no further cuts in benefits. The parochial councils, ‘The Parish’, had shown themselves incapable with dealing with mass unemployment and the paying of benefits, which were disparate across the country anyway, and as this was taken under state control, so too the state began to offer support to local councils (corporations), particularly in the area of housing. Alongside the rise in available and affordable private housing, a building programme was under way which saw the development of tenements and Gardens, such as Gerrard Gardens in Liverpool, leading to a rise of families in rented accommodation from 1% in 1914 to 14% in 1939. Slum clearances were underway, something commented upon by George Orwell, who George Garrett took round a number of the new developments in Liverpool when Orwell was researching ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’.

In his diaries, Orwell, ‘was impressed by the fact that Liverpool is doing much more In the way of slum-clearance than most towns. The slums are still very bad but there are great quantities of Corporation houses and flats at low rents.’ He comments upon the developing new towns outside of Liverpool ‘consisting almost entirely of Corporation houses, which are really quite livable and decent to look at’, and finishes by noting how there is no tradition of wearing clogs and a shawl over head in Liverpool – ‘how abruptly this custom stops a little west of Wigan’.

George, following his brief illness, as mentioned in the previous blog, is still out of work, and will remain so up until the outbreak of war. He has had some success with his short stories, and judging by ‘The Pianist’, a story taken from real-life experience which remained unpublished until 1980, he would have had plenty of material to play around with, including documentary evidence and his own reportage, which he demonstrated some skill at being able to work up into short stories. This is shown in the ‘The Parish’, published in October 1937 in Left Review, which was culled from his longer autobiographical work, ‘On The Parish’. But nothing was forthcoming. Like the three plays before, he had the ability to leave them behind and move forward, no doubt restless, but maybe bored at the same time.

Alan O’Toole, whose monograph on George we hope to publish, speculates on the reasons given for George leaving behind his short stories. As George, in this period, wrote a major study on Hamlet, ‘Worms: Hamlet of Denmark’ (no doubt embarked upon after the success of having his critical piece ‘That Four Flusher Prospero’ published alongside two essays by leading critics in Shakespeare Survey, 1937) and also spent many hours on his as yet unpublished autobiography, ‘Ten Years on the Parish’, Alan pours scorn upon the idea that George had no time to write, that family commitments got in the way, and states that ‘The idea that his well of creativity simply having dried up overnight is not even worth consideration.’
What Alan does draw out is that George’s success in being published also brought disappointment and some disillusion at the milieu and the literary cliques around these magazine, The Adelphi in particular. George revealed this in his own sardonic manner, inviting delegates at one Adelphi convention to line outside the toilets for the ‘privilege of passing Murry (The editor of The Adelphi) his toilet paper. He goes on to say that George, along with other working class writers of the period, may have been irked by the realisation that he had ‘an almost exclusively middle-class audience’.

To consider this is also to consider whether this could have literally been the end of the story as far as Garrett’s writing goes. But something new, and ultimately both inspirational and dreadful was to once again demand George’s attention and involvement.

Fascism, and fascist groups, had been attempting to gain ground across Europe, in the UK, and also within Liverpool. Liberalism had failed amidst the age of extremes. Both extreme left and extreme right were vying for popular attention. The fascists, even though Liverpool’s Tory Lord Mayor, Margaret Beaven, visited Mussolini in 1928 and was photographed giving the fascist salute, were given short shrift within the city. Amidst the dithering of the national labour organisations, Liverpool generally supported a ‘no platform’ policy, and moved swiftly to break up meetings and demonstrations the fascists attempted to hold. British Union of Fascist leader Oswald Mosely made some forays into Liverpool to try and gain ground, but each time was repelled, even with what appeared to be tacit support from the local police who hospitalised and arrested many a demonstrator. But regardless, the protests continued, and in 1937, after Oswald was felled and knocked unconscious by a brick thrown by an ant-fascist after Oswald’s latest attempt to appear in the city, Oswald ‘lost a great deal of his image as being a man of action who could control the streets’, and never appeared in Liverpool again.

But Oswald’s raids were child’s play compared to the events that began on July 17th 1936, when General Franco assumed command of the Moors, and virtually every one of the 50 Garrisons throughout Spain declared support for his fascist manifesto. In response the workers of Barcelona, virtually unarmed, stormed and won the city’s barracks, and the Spanish Civil War, which would rage for two years until Madrid fell in 1939 was underway.

Many workers from Liverpool volunteered and lost their lives in the International Brigades. Less than 10% of the volunteers were married men. George, now with five children, and maybe not as fit as he once was, stayed at home. But George’s activism was as significant as any at that time, as George, along with jerry Dawson and others, as a direct response to the events in Spain, formed Merseyside left Theatre, which then joined with the national movement and became The Unity Theatre.

Formed with an avowedly radical manifesto that declared, ‘We are a political theatre involved in the struggle for socialism’, it sought out a working class audience to bring to them the ‘most urgent political issue of the day – the need to rouse support for the Spanish people in their fight against international fascism and to warn: Madrid today – Merseyside Tomorrow’. The first plays were called ‘Guernica’ and ‘Spain’, and they toured the region appearing in theatres, church halls, on the streets, and anywhere they could get an audience. There was a ready response and many of their productions played to full houses.

George Garrett and The Unity Theatre were a marriage made in heaven. Here George could bring his experience, contribute his writing, and express himself through acting, something which also brought appreciative reviews and critical support. Writing in ‘Left Theatre, Merseyside Unity Theatre – a Documentary record’ Jerry Dawson comments upon Garrett’s role and influence, saying, ‘Merseyside left theatre were lucky. They had a man who had worked with the Wobblies in America. He could set the cast firmly in Brooklyn and in the Bronx. He had led the Liverpool contingent in the Hunger march of 1922. He could carry the American Struggle across the Atlantic and make it British.’ George’s impact, and his zest for performance can also be seen on this page in the glowing tribute paid to him by Jerry Dawson.

Where George went, trouble did seem to follow, and in December 1938 he again found himself under arrest, along with eleven other cast and crew members, after the curtain was brought down upon the left theatre’s performance of Clifford Odett’s ‘Waiting for Lefty’, which they were presenting in Chester as part of a pre-Christmas Drama festival. Bishop Norman Tubbs, The Dean of Chester, along with a number of other ‘prominent patrons’ walked out at a perceived blasphemy in the play. It appears that this was an excuse to put a halt to a radical play being performed to a theatre that, as a result of the trades-union and Labour party branches being circulated, had an audience with a distinctly working class tinge to it. Due to not complying with the demands of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, the defendants were bound over for twelve months with costs. But the case made national publicity and was even discussed in the House of Commons.

George’s involvement with The Unity Theatre, up to the war and into the late 1940’s, contradicts the idea that his writing career was at an end after his last short story was published in 1937. The Unity Theatre was ‘an enterprise which took both literature and “the message” straight to the people on the streets’, and George no doubt felt this to be a ‘more worthwhile project on which to devote his time’. And, alongside acting, he devoted many hours to writing and contributing scenes and dialogue to new plays, and is credited as the co-writer of Man with a Plan and One Hundred years Hard, two plays that were highly successful across the North-west region at the time.

And then came the war, and George was now allowed ‘to risk his life once more at sea’. A Stoker again, who understood more than most the need to engage in the fight against fascism, now rampant across Europe following the defeat of the Spanish workers, George signed on and spent time at sea, and then endured some of Hitler’s worst bombing raids while working as a night-watchman on the docks at Bootle.

This has been an immense decade in George’s life. His writing, at least what we know about, has ranged across the genres – theatre, short story, reportage, poetry and criticism. He’s seen success in literary spheres, but seems happier engaging in the drama of struggle, sharing the stage with others on his wavelength rather than holed up in singular writing. He has lived in America, and again sailed the oceans, but he is changed by it all, and after the war changes will come which will suit him even less.

Alan O’Toole writes that ‘George’s own way had become a more isolated path than ever.’ As many of his former comrades, the ‘old guard of libertarian socialism’ had disappeared. ‘I think George was glad to get out of things’, he writes, and that may be true, but there are far more stories of George to be told, and we’ll be returning to them after Xmas, when we move on to Module Four of the course.

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). The next meeting will be on Monday 6th January 2014. All welcome.