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.

Nelson Mandela 1918-2013

Nelson Rolihlahala* Mandela was a hero and icon of our time. Millions of words have been written, and many more will be, about his amazing political career – the struggle, the long imprisonment and his emergence, unbroken and unembittered, to steer South Africa away from the danger of civil war to democracy and a degree of unity.
There was, of course, an element of myth-making about all this. The focus on his imprisonment – Anti-apartheid’s Free Mandela campaign – cleverly individualised what was a mass struggle which he was ever ready to acknowledge. His period of membership of the Communist Party of South Africa wasn’t revealed until recently. Detractors have pointed to failures and mistakes, among them his slowness to act to stem the spread of AIDS. But I believe the phenomenal outpouring of emotion and tributes worldwide following his death show that few politicians have touched our imagination or inspired our love as he did. For me, his essential greatness lay not only in his courage, dedication, endurance and toughness, but in his understanding and forgiveness of opponents coupled with warmth, humour, simplicity and absence of arrogance. He conquered white South Africans, including Afrikaner Nationalists, by his unfaked concern for their fears. He was relaxed and easy with people whatever their status. Even his youthful ladies’ man image, two broken marriages and reputed weakness for celebrities, especially pretty ones, are widely accepted as part of his humanity.
Though not a member of the ANC, I worked in Port Elizabeth and Durban with many of his lieutenants and knew he had organised non-violent civil disobedience in the 1950s. His decision to call for armed struggle after the massacre by police of 69 peaceful black protesters against the infamous pass laws in 1960, influenced my own abandonment of pacifism.  Mandela was a successful lawyer with links to the Transkei Thembu aristocracy, but he was nonetheless willing to go underground and lay his life on the line in the cause of a democratic, inclusive and non-racial South Africa.  He movingly said at his trial:

‘I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for…But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’ 

His conduct during his time as president proved he meant what he said and gave South Africans of all ethnicities hope of a better society (a hope sadly dented by his successors).
  In prison for a mere 5 years to Mandela’s 27, I was inspired to begin a cycle of poems depicting him as an African Prometheus, a Titan who stole fire from the gods to empower ordinary humanity and was cruelly punished for it by Zeus (for whom read the South African apartheid state).
I'm moved that there are proposals in Liverpool to celebrate and honour Mandela’s valuable life. Grateful, too, that when Shirley Mashiane Talbot, a lifelong ANC member, and I were campaigning together years ago for the Anti-apartheid Movement we got heart-warming support from residents of the city. And in 2008 several organisations, including the City Council, co-operated to organise events to mark the great man’s 90th birthday.

*an isiXhosa word meaning troublemaker!

African Prometheus

High 

Upon the krantz

Smeared with blood and gore and shit 

Prometheus 

Is chained. 

Handcuffs rasp with aching writsts

The ridge knife-cuts his bleeding back

King Zeus 

Holds a blowtorch to his blistered face.

Nightfall 

Brings the eagles 

Like hunger lust and fear

To rip 

With beak and talons

At his gut 

His groin 

And then it all begins again. 

He prays 

For death – and cannot die

Cursed with endless life.

Girls 

Come in their mini skirts 

Their smooth thighs moist for love; 

He feels sap swell his horn 

Hears the whispers in his ear…

Recant. 

Zeus

Stubs his fat cigar 

His voice too is soft:

You stole the sacred flame for men 

Joined the mob behind my back 

Led revolt against the gods

Tried to turn my world to ash

And build a new. But 

I forgive.

Forget that rabble.

Recant. 

Hermes 

Comes 

The messenger

Soft-footed in his brown-suede shoes

Exit permit in his hand: 

We drank together at the club 

You’ve only got to say the word 

Sign here on the dotted line.

Recant. 

Prometheus

Writhes against the rock

Teeth-torn lips spit out a groan

I can’t. 

Zeus

In his car below

Tells the chauffeur to drive on 

Eagle-wings 

Blot out the sun 

Eagle-beaks tear out the gut again. 

Heracles. 

Is far away

Beyond the reach of a telegram 

While silent on the folded plains 

The unseen people 

Seem to sleep. 

David Evans

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).

Pulp Idol Book Launch

We are holding a celebration event on 12th December at The Siren Café, 54 St James Street, to launch the 2014 Pulp Idol book. We will also be inviting people from our What’s Your Story? course to commend all our writing courses throughout the year.

There will be live music to accompany the night, so bring all your friends and family to celebrate our WoW writers getting published! Doors will open at 7pm and run till late.

The books will be available on the night for £2.99.