In early 1936 George Orwell, with much encouragement, and a small advance, from his publisher Victor Gollancz, set off from London to investigate the "distressed areas" of northern England with a view to producing a book. That book would become 'The Road to Wigan Pier', which, on publication, many critics hailed as both beautiful and disturbing.
As with much of Orwell's writing, 'Wigan Pier’, while of its time, is still relevant in England today. As in 1936, there is a government that has spent many years radically reducing public spending, overseen by a cabinet full of ex-public school boys making cuts that have prompted robust criticism from many quarters for their pace and scale. And despite many Government claims of 'levelling up', the north and south of England remain poles apart on economic prosperity. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
In the research for the book, Orwell lived with various families in Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield, and he was in Sheffield around this time in 1936. His diary entries (he was a prolific diarist) of that time offer an interesting insight into Orwell's view of the city and the social mores of the time. He begins a diary entry for early March 1936 with a description of James Brown, who is his guide on some of Orwell’s forays into Sheffield,
"Age 45 but looks less. Has malformed right hand, also one foot. This was inherited and he fears it is transmissible, so will not marry. Owing to this has never had much in the way of regular work. Was with a circus for some years as groom, clown and 'Wild West' rider - he could apparently handle the bridle with his damaged hand. Now lives alone and, for some reason, gets no dole [government support], only something from the parish [charity] and help from his brother. Has a single room with only an open fireplace, no oven, to cook on. Is terribly embittered and declares that feeling of actual hatred for the bourgeoisie, even personal hatred of individuals, is necessary to any genuine Socialist. Is nevertheless a good fellow and very anxious to help. Mixed up with his political feelings is the usual local patriotism of the Yorkshireman and much of his conversation consists of comparison between London and Sheffield to the detriment of the former.
Orwell then goes on to write of the then-English north-south 'divide',
"Sheffield is held to lead London in everything, e.g. on the one hand the new housing schemes in Sheffield are immensely superior, and on the other hand the Sheffield slums are more squalid than anything London can show. I notice that apart from the usual hatred between the Northerner and the Southerner, there is also hatred between the Yorkshireman and the Lancashireman, and also internecine hatred between the various Yorkshire towns. No one up here seems to have heard of any place in the south of England except London. If you come from the south you are assumed to be a cockney however often you deny it. At the same time as the Northerner despises the Southerner he has an uneasy feeling that the latter knows more of the arts of life and is very anxious to impress him."
Orwell continues, and although we aren't in England's Midlands, he could be describing a scene from 'Peaky Blinders',
"I have now traversed almost the whole city. It seems to me by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen. In whichever direction you look, you see the same landscape of monstrous chimneys pouring forth smoke, which is sometimes black and sometimes of a rosy tint said to be đue to sulphur. You can smell the sulphur in the air all the while… Halting at one place I counted the factory chimneys I could see and there were 33. But it was very misty as well as smokey - there would have been many more visible on a clear day… The town is very hilly (said to be built on seven hills, like Rome) and everywhere streets of mean little houses blackened by smoke run up at sharp angles, paved with cobbles which are purposely set unevenly to give horses etc. a grip. At night the hilliness creates fine effects because you look across from one hillside to the other and see the lamps twinkling like stars. Huge jets of flame shoot periodically out of the rooves of the foundries… and show a splendid rosy colour through the smoke and steam. When you get a glimpse inside you see enormous fiery serpents of red-hot and white-hot (really lemon-coloured) iron being rolled out into rails. In the central slummy part of the town are the small workshops of the "little bosses," i.e., smaller employers who are making chiefly cutlery. I don't think I ever in my life saw so many broken windows. Some of these workshops have hardly a pane of glass in their windows and you would not believe they were inhabitable if you did not see the employees, mostly girls, at work inside.
Orwell then notes the new development around Sheffield and is clearly not impressed.
"The town is being torn down and rebuilt at an immense speed. Everywhere among the slums are gaps with squalid mounds of bricks where condemned houses have been demolished and on all the outskirts of the town new estates of Corporation [Local Authority] houses are going up. These are much inferior, at any rate in appearance, to those at Liverpool. They are in terribly bleak situations, too. One estate just behind where I am living now, at the very summit of a hill, on horrible sticky clay soil and swept by icy winds. Notice that the people going into these new houses from the slums will always be paying higher rents and will also have to spend much more on fuel to keep themselves warm. Also, in many cases, will be further from their work and therefore spend more on conveyances."
Orwell writes of the financial challenges Brown faces...
"Brown 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 TT [Tee Total].), 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 bourgeois and remarked on my 'public school twang'. However, I think he was disposed to treat me as a sort 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 he lives on 10/- a week [about £45 today]… exactly where B's 10/- comes from I don't know - and the rent of his room is 6/-. Of course it would not be possible to subsist on the remainder, allowing for fuel. You could only keep alive on 4/-a week (see attached) if you spent nothing on fuel and nothing on tobacco or clothes. I gather B. gets meals from time to time from the S's [Orwell stayed with the Searle family while in Sheffield] 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 schoolmistress (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.
What Orwell attached was a cutting from the 'News of the World' of 1 March 1936 showing how a W. Leach, who had written to the newspaper, spent only 3s 11½d a week on food (equivalent to around £9 today) and while a direct comparison is difficult, I calculate the food he bought below, which does not offer the best of diets, would today cost £22,
Three loaves of bread
½ Ib. margarine
½ lb. dripping
1 lb. cheese
1 lb. onions
1 lb. carrots
1 lb. broken biscuits
2lb. dates
One tin of evaporated milk
Ten oranges
Leach also said he could not afford fuel, so he ate his food cold and raw. Orwell then turned to the social mores of the 1930s,
"We had an argument one evening ... 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 housework 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 housework and the man not a hands turn except carpeting 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."
And finally …
"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."
For Orwell, it really was grim up north!
My photograph is the frontispiece of my copy of 'Wigan Pier' showing unemployed Durham miners searching for coal on a slag heap, photographed by Bill Brandt in Jarrow in 1936.
Fascinating read, Harry, thank you. Orwell’s observations really cut to the chase. The part about the ill-thought-through downsides of social housing was particularly interesting.
As in "The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressell, the deprivation Orwell describes is unimaginable. For some people even today, hardship is a reality. As a species we seem to make so little progress It fills one with despair. Thanks for highlighting this important issue.