‘The Good Lion’ at Off the Shelf

It was an honour and a real pleasure to join a panel at the Off the Shelf festival to discuss the recently republished novel The Good Lion. Fifty-odd tickets were sold and a few people who couldn’t make it asked if there was a recording. Unfortunately not – but hopefully this little write-up will make you want to buy the book.

The session was chaired by Professor Dave Forrest, who is currently working on the Wakefield writer David Storey and pointed out some interesting parallels in terms of Storey and Doherty’s shared love of sport and experience of mental health crises.

Steven Kay, an important Sheffield novelist in his own right (The Evergreen in Red and White is excellent) and an advocate for steel city literature through republication projects like this (and his 1889 Books blog), kicked us off with a short introduction to Len Doherty and his third, final and – in Steve’s view – finest novel. He talked about how his dad, a near contemporary of Doherty’s, had recommended the book to him and how he had immediately been struck by its understated genius.

Steve read the evocative opening, which contextualises the action – and Sheffield itself – in the many-centuries-long development of metalworking in the area. He compared it to the opening of Adam Bede and lamented the fact that no contemporary publisher would consider a novel with such a slow opening.

Jack Chadwick, invited because he wrote a great piece about The Good Lion for The Tribune (paywall), read a section from a discussion between the novel’s central character, Walt, and a group of his roommate’s political and intellectual friends. It’s the first time Walt sets out his half-baked ‘Good Lion’ philosophy:

“Well, the scientist doesn’t see life as intellectuals and that kind do. He doesn’t care about morals and standards or ordinary good and bad. He thinks functional value and survival value are what count. So, to the biologist, the lion that kills a deer and eats it isn’t a bad lion; it’s a good lion.”

Jack then talked about the novel as a groundbreaking work of ‘autofiction’ published twenty years before the term itself was even coined. He drew useful comparisons with the work of Jack Hilton, whose Caliban Shrieks will be republished by Penguin next year (expect more on this – Jack has done incredible work to bring it back into print and I’ve posted here about it before).

My reading was from a conversation between Walt and his friend and on/off romantic interest, Elaine. I quote at length because part of the aim of the event was to give people a chance to appreciate some of Doherty’s writing, rather than just listening to us talk about it. They go to a jazz club together and Walt sneers at Elaine’s students friends:

‘Beards!’ he grunted disgustedly. ‘University types, I suppose…’

‘Don’t resent their being students, Walt. A lot come from poor families and it’s very hard for them.’

‘But I don’t resent them,’ he protested. ‘Why should I?’

University, he thought; years spent learning all kinds of things; an ingrained scholastic wisdom which would mean no doubts, no hesitation when more learned men talked, no sense of inadequacy when he read something which appealed to a knowledge simply not in his own mind… To have been at university must mean a huge confident power that made you equal to anyone in argument and conversation… Yet this had never occurred to him seriously before.

[…]

‘Just remember I’m a different kind. You’re not turning me into something out of a woman’s book.’ His accent was deliberately being increased. Incognizant anger was making him glower at her. ‘Your sort like to do that, don’t they?’

‘You’re trying to hurt, aren’t you? You nurse some kind of grudge against me, Walt – we shouldn’t go out together, really.’

[The argument escalates to the point that Elaine calls Walt a pig and he prepares to ‘ward off a slap’, recalling an earlier episode where his first girlfriend, Brenda, smacks him when he breaks off their courtship.]

He teetered back in the chair, determined to stare her out, but, as the staring lasted, asking himself why he gave way to these flashes of temper […] He was growing ashamed, and was slowly easing down the chair as her eyes suddenly filled. He was about to tell her not to cry when her small, rich mouth began curving and widening. She tilted back her head, her laughter tinkling out, then bent forward. ‘I can’t help it Walt; we’re just so ridiculous – glaring!’

‘We’re like kids, he muttered. Her eyes rose to his rueful look and she burst into fresh, helpless peals, with people glancing again at them. Her head bobbed, red and yellow light rioting over her tumbled hair, and Walt leaned over to tousle it with is right hand as he would have done with Bryan or another good friend. He trusted her suddenly. She looked up, her tanned face glowing, smile helplessly wide and eyes lambent with dark glee.

pp. 184-6

The passage is dense with themes from the novel and it would take more space than I have to unpack them all here. Walt feels guilt and shame often and acutely throughout the book, especially around his relationships with women. The reference to ‘a woman’s book’ here is self-referential: Walt blushes uncontrollably, especially early on, and the breathless treatment of romantic encounters and detailed descriptions of both men’s and women’s fashions could be straight out of a romantic novel of the era.

Part of Walt’s guilt and shame comes from the fact that his behaviour often reminds him – painfully – of his own abusive father. Walt inhabits a kind of toxic masculinity trap which Len Doherty does much more to examine than many (any?) of the ‘Angry Young Men’ of the period whose work has attracted much larger audiences and more critical attention. This argument culminates in a platonic trust and respect that complicates Walt and Elaine’s relationship. She challenges his sexism and homophobia and interrogates his ambivalence about sex itself, calling him a ‘Puritanical old wolf’. Elaine is Walt’s intellectual superior and she makes him reflect on his own identity and behaviour – and his snobbery and insecurity.

Which brings us to the issue of social class. Much of the literature of the post-war period is centrally concerned with the changing nature of class relations. The upwardly mobile grammar school boy is the archetypal writer – and hero – of much fiction of the period. But along with Alan Sillitoe, Doherty wasn’t a product of the grammar schools but a driven autodidact with an unshakeable commitment to writing. The social mobility that characterised the period and its literature is deeply problematic for Walt – as it was for Doherty. Walt is embarrassed by his mother’s aspirational attitudes and craves the solid class identity and noble working-class history that being a miner offers.

Doherty’s strong sense of class identity was expressed through his writing and his work as a miner but it was destabilised by the opportunities and friendships his success as a novelist brought. He spent time with Doris Lessing and her circle of friends in London, taking time away from the pit and the typewriter to mix with bohemian intellectuals (and Clancy Sigal, whose great book Weekend in Dinlock is a fictionalised account of his visits to Thurcroft to stay with Doherty). Although details of Doherty’s private life during this period are scarce, it’s hard not to see these dynamics play out through the relationships he so compellingly crafts between his characters in The Good Lion.

An hour was never going to be long enough to say everything – or even very much – about such a rich novel and such an intriguing writer. One thing that struck me that I didn’t get across, though, is the importance of the kind of ‘recovery’ work that led to this republication. The whole tradition of working-class writing is built on the dedication and hard work of people who care deeply about it: we wouldn’t have the unexpurgated version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists if it weren’t for Fred Ball; nor would we have The Songs of Joseph Mather written down if it weren’t for the ‘hours stolen from [his] slumbers’ of the nineteenth-century cutler John Wilson. Steven Kay and Jack Chadwick have ensured thatThe Good Lion and Caliban Shrieks are restored to their rightful places in that great tradition – and that many more people will get to appreciate these excellent books.

Ghost Rider to the Stones – A Christmas Story by Jack Hilton of Wilcot

I’ve been championing and researching Jack Hilton’s writing for several years now and will be doing lots more work on this important and overlooked writer in 2019. Amongst some other papers of Hilton’s I acquired a couple of years ago from old friends of his in Pewsey there is this 1958 Christmas story from The Marlborough Times.

Our Pegasus

I wrote this poem for Peggy Gell’s birthday six years ago and read it at her funeral last month. She was a wonderful woman and I was lucky to know her – happy birthday Peg x

Its full title is ‘Lines written for Our Pegasus on the occasion of her seventieth’.

Seventy is not so old
When you’re into rock’n’roll:
Rockabilly makes you stronger,
Twist and shouting in Clehonger.
Charlie Bliss and a choc ice,
Wouldn’t a cup of tea be nice?
In rural Tory Hereford
Who’d have thought you’d ever’ve
Met a red-haired rock’n’roller,
Cockney Welfare State extoller,
Poet, jeweller, dreamer, Mum,
Who simply has to get things done?
Blink or slightly turn your head,
She’s painted the whole kitchen red!
Thank God she had that broken leg,
Or there’d be no stopping Peg,
Singing Elvis, popping pills,
Showing off her boogie skills.

A proper Champagne Socialist
Believing we should all insist
On a glass of fizz with lunch,
Or maybe lager, ale or punch:
Equality of booze for all!
A democratic rallying call.
A fan of lifelong education,
Peggy Gell has seen the nation
Go from stuffy RP voices
To PR twats selling choices:
Attlee, Bevan, Callaghan,
Barack Obama: Yes We Can!
Normally it’s those other pricks,
Stealing milk and closing pits,
Hacking phones and country supping,
Hunting foxes, pitch and putting.
Anyway, I am digressing,
Now is not the time for stressing
About the cunts who run the world.
We are here to celebrate
A woman I met at sixty-eight.
It’s a real thing of wonder:
She seems to me two years younger!
All energy and bright young eyes,
Hoeing weeds under summer skies,
Crafting a cascading rockery
And in general making mockery
Of the notion broken limbs
Are any bar to downing Pimm’s,
wielding heavy garden toolery,
general high jinks and tom-foolery,
Or indeed to ever being
What I’ve become used to seeing:
The youthful hostess with the mostess,
A real corker and no less,
Up for a drink and a good time
More than most at twenty-nine.
Peg certainly does cast a spell
And never moans about my smell.
And as this verse comes to a close
I should try and mention those
Dearest to our Peggy Gell
But undulating doggerel
Really does not convey well
Owt too serious, truth to tell
So please forgive my brevity,
And give your drinks some levity
It would take more than seventy
Lines, or years, to do justice to
Such a wonderful woman as YOU.

Len Doherty – “Biographische Daten”

Since reading Len Doherty’s fantastic novel The Good Lion (1958) following a recommendation on Steven Kay’s 1889 Books blog I’ve been fascinated by this important, enigmatic and unfairly overlooked Sheffield writer. Steven and I have been hatching plans to republish his final novel and I’ve been in touch with friends and family to find out more about his life.

Steve Eszrenyi got in touch because Doherty is one of the working-class writers he is writing a PhD thesis about. Steve has very kindly translated the biographical notes to the German edition of Doherty’s first novel, A Miner’s Sons (1955). They’re a good introduction to Doherty and the first of an intended series of Proletics posts about him.

Len Doherty was born in 1930 in one of the poorest areas of Glasgow, Scotland. The grim economic situation and the fear of unemployment were important influences in the development of Doherty’s  working-class consciousness.

Doherty moved at the beginning of the 1950s to Thurcroft, a small mining community in South Yorkshire. Doherty worked down the pit and also became a member of the Communist Party. As a miner, he was entitled to living accommodation and this helped the newly married Doherty considerably.

As a member of the local Communist Party group, he was opposed to the idea of union leaders working with, as he saw it, the capitalist apparatus of the state. He fought on a number of issues which directly concerned miners: the recently introduced and divisive wage system down the pit – piece rate for face-workers and fixed wages for miners below ground; the large compensation claims of the former mine owners which were paid by the Labour government, at the expense of updating and improving the conditions for the miners down the pit; the high handed attitudes of the mining officials who sought to impose fixed working hours; miners being locked out and the denial of strike action for miners. Doherty saw clearly that the class war still existed-despite claims to the contrary by others- and that the situation of the mine worker in the nationalised industry had not improved.

Down the pit, Doherty proved himself to be a class conscious trade unionist. It was not though the experiences of the conflicts that occurred day in and day out with management that led him to communism. It was rather the identification with the intellectual superiority of Dialectical Materialism over the ideology of the Labour Party, as well as the recognition that communism was somehow morally superior to the Labour Party which proved to be decisive. Doherty said about his joining the Communist Party: “We had a communist professor who came round and sold the Daily Worker and Peace News. It was through him and a few others that I became interested in communism. We had a lot of respect for these people, and the more they were put down, the more we sided with them. They were courageous people, who lived life according to their principles. It was more out of respect and admiration for these people than any other reason, that we joined the Communist Party.”

The time in the Communist Party ran parallel with the phase in his life where Doherty began to read a lot and write. He was hungry for any form of knowledge and he used this newly acquired knowledge in Union conflicts. Doherty was more interested in how the class war played itself out in the interpersonal conflicts, than in the historical aspects of it. Honesty, courage, respect for oneself were qualities which marked a communist out from all others.

In 1956, after the Hungarian Uprising, Doherty- along with many others- left the Communist Party. “I didn’t leave the Communist Party just because of the Hungarian Uprising, but the Khrushchev speech at the Twentieth Party Conference was one of the worst experiences of my life and was a decisive factor in me leaving the CPGB. Up until the moment of the Khrushchev speech, the Communist Party of Great Britain was fully behind Stalinism and I too was convinced by Stalin’s greatness. In the period of time after the speech, it became clear to me that things were not quite as they were made out to be and that the CPGB had the wrong take on things and that the members of the CPGB had been misinformed.

I just couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the Communist Party had in effect lied to me. It was exactly that- the deviousness- which I so disliked in other political parties. I simply had to step back from the CPGB and reconsider everything. Then the Hungarian Uprising happened which was a tremendous shock for many of us. We had always taken the stance that socialism could not simply be grafted on to a country, but that it had to develop and take root in the working class of a particular country. Otherwise it is impossible for true socialism to happen. It was the basis of all our discussions that the Soviet Union was not an aggressive power. Then we heard the news from Hungary and although the reports were sometimes biased, the Hungarian Uprising made a deep impression on us all.”

In the early 1960s Doherty gave up his job down the pit and became a reporter for the Sheffield Star. From 1968 he played an important part in the creation of the 44 Group which sought to bring together all the local councils to work with common aims. Doherty received a prize in 1969 for being the best provincial journalist of the year. He wrote many reports including one in 1961 about the French and Algerian negotiations, in 1969 about Northern Ireland and North Vietnam and in 1970 about the Middle East. A Miner’s Sons was translated into twelve languages.

In 1970 fragments from a bomb, which was intended for the son of Moshe Dayan, hit Doherty as he was in a bus coming from Munich to the airport. Since then and as a result of the injuries he suffered as a result of the bomb attack, Doherty has been unable to work. In 1972 he voiced his support for the miners’ strike and also wrote numerous articles about it.

Translated from Rudolf Wichmann’s “Biographische Daten” in Drum sind wir rot geworden: Der Roman der englischen Bergarbeiter (Köln: Verlag Gaehme Henke, 1974)

Translation of the Nachwort (Afterword) to the German edition of Drum sind wir rot
geworden (A Miner’s Sons). pp. 218-220.

Doherty wrote his first three novels while still working down the pit at
Mainworth. He began writing in 1952 and wrote numerous poems and short
stories and if Arnold Kettle and Maurice Cornforth from the publishers
Lawrence and Wishart hadn’t suggested to Doherty that he write a novel,
Doherty’s writing might have taken a different path. He wrote A Miner’s Sons
in nine weeks. According to Doherty himself, there were no problems with
either the style or form of writing, even allowing for the fact that Doherty’s last
contact with any form of literature was at secondary school. Doherty’s literary
style reflects his life and his social background. As Doherty himself says “I knew
what it was like to work 18 hours down the pit so that I could then have a free
day to devote to my writing. I had something to say, and it needed saying. No-
one else was writing about the things I wrote about. That gave me the
determination to carry on for a number of years with working down the pit and
then writing.” [Taken from an interview with Len Doherty on 14.03.1974.]
In contrast to many professional writers who distanced themselves from their
immediate environment and from the people they wrote about, Doherty
involved himself with his local community. “In the village, word got around
that there was a miner who wrote novels. People used to come up to Doherty
and tell him stories and anecdotes in the hope that they too would appear in
print. Writing took on a form of community identity and if Len had been the
sort of person to channel this interest from the locals and had he opened his
‘writing shop’ in the pub and said to his mates we’re going to write a chapter
for a novel together- half the village would have turned up. Everyone took
novels seriously as indeed they took working-class writing seriously.” [From an
interview with E. Clavering 03.03.1974.]
In this sense, Doherty links in with the old cultural mining tradition of song,
ballad and poetry. These forms of expression are immediate, vivid and
descriptive but are nevertheless still relevant and alive. The novel, on the other
hand, has the ability to deal with more complex sociological themes and to
develop characters more fully.

…. Ten years ago, there was very little in the way of the working-class novel in
Great Britain. Since the beginning of the 1950s a whole clutch of novels
appeared – the so-called “Northern Drift.” These novels concerned themselves
with life in the industrial North of England. In contrast to Len Doherty, these
writers saw the working class as something to escape from- through the
dramatic behaviour and actions of individual characters. This was either by
marriage-planned or otherwise- into the middle class or by working oneself by
virtue of talent, ability and educational opportunity and not a little force out of
the working class and into the middle class. The class conscious worker and
loyal hard worker is very much in the background and is usually depicted in
these novels by the character of an older person – a grandfather figure or
retired worker figure.
Doherty’s characters, however, remain very much in and of the working-class
and try to find solutions to their problems from within working-class life. He
shows how class consciousness develops directly from experiences of living
within the working class and how his characters learn, grow and develop from
their experiences as a member of the working class.

Salmon Pastures

A while back I saw this video of a salmon trying to make it up Aldwarke Weir near Rotherham shortly before going for a run through Salmon Pastures and the little maze of streets in Attercliffe between Staniforth Road and the River Don. It got me thinking about cobbles, scales and the past and present of the area and I wrote a little poem about it.

SALMON PASTURES

Glinting in bright winter sunlight, cobbles
reappear, wet, through cracked tarmac. A
Halal butcher, a strip joint and the
Office of the Diocese huddle against

Workshops whose sounds and smells have filled the air
Since obnailed boots scratched sparks along these lanes
And pithead gears auled ancient istory up
From underfoot to fuel forge fires at Firth’s.

Flexing furiously against the force
Of weir water and centuries of works’
dirt, silver scales shimmer. Soon they will be
at Salmon Pastures, proving that the past

Presses into the present as sure as
The rich cannot enter heaven.

I was well chuffed that Now Then printed it alongside the winning Off the Shelf short story entry, Sarah Peacock’s excellent ‘After the Fire’.

It’s the first time I’ve had a poem published and I’ve been overwhelmed by the response. One of the great – and unexpected – results has been people sharing their knowledge and memories of the area. Here are a few examples:

• indentures stated that ‘little mesters who had their workshops in Salmon Pastures weren’t allowed to feed their apprentices salmon more than three times a week‘
• ‘Oh Sheffield and Rotherham used to be aglow, I’d park my little Renault 4 for a few minutes to watch white hot ingots of iron cooling outside a foundry on my way home on a winter’s evening‘
• ‘I liked watching the rolling mills, long red hot snakes yards and yards long‘
• there was ‘a wee train loaded with hot pig iron crossing the road at Brightside‘
• sturgeon were caught in the Don up to the late 1800s and fish passes are now being installed on the weirs to help fish return upriver

Thanks to everyone whose comments I’ve shamelessly pilfered from Facebook! Please do comment below or drop me a line if my poem sparks any memories for you.

The kind of cobble thing I’m talking about ©David Ash – thanks Dad!

A salmon trying to make it up Aldwarke weir

Ray Hearne: Joe Mather and Me

Ray kindly took the time to write a few words for Proletics about how he came across Owd Mather, what he found so inspirational about the radical balladeer and how his songs spring from – and add to – the ‘people’s tradition’.

I came back from Essex University in 1981 with a head full of Shakespeare, WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison and Pablo Neruda. I thought I knew a bit about literature and poetry.

I’d got myself a job as ‘Tutor Organiser’ for Rotherham, my home-town, for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) with the ambition of ‘liberating’ literature and poetry from the vaults of the rich and distributing it promiscuously around the borough. Ray Fisher was the WEA’s District Secretary and he had a passion for what he called ‘local literature.’ Ray had a copy of The Songs of Joseph Mather and he used to let me borrow it.

It seared across my mindscape like a lightning flash, or maybe it just meandered like a murmuration of starlings and installed itself into chemical permanence in my bonce. I was supposed to know something about English literature and here were people who spoke and thought a bit like me, yet nobody mentioned them. That’s where my next literary education began.

Mather inspired me. I came from an Irish house and a childhood filled with hymns and ballads. Here was a bloke, uneducated except that he seemed to know the bible back’ards, making up his own songs and ballads about his own experiences and his own community: dark, dogged, highly charged with political insights, telling the stories of his own people in crafted versions of their own language and idioms, and performing them in the hope of earning a few bob at fairs, markets, race meetings and public gatherings generally.

Nobody knows anything about the music he employed. He might have sung everything unaccompanied; he might have worked ad hoc with musicians, a fiddler perhaps; he might have composed his own melodies. Far more likely it has always seemed to me, he was one of the few bobbydazzler South Yorkshire embodiers of the ‘people’s tradition’.

By that I mean he heard, adapted, borrowed, chopped, changed and tailored the tunes and melodies that he heard from other singers, either local or passers through. That for me is how the people’s tradition has always worked. It’s mucky, grubby from pawing by innumerable gentle and powerful dirty hands; a vibrant, dynamic and exquisite vehicle capable of transmitting as great an artistic experience as any other art form Radio Three might mention. Its most marvellous exponents include Shakespeare, Robert Burns and the yet-to-be equalled Ann On.

Mather’s flat-vowelled, late-eighteenth-century Sheffield demotic, with its overtones of biblical rhetoric and phrasing, filtered through an ancient stand-in-the-street-and-sing-it ballad tradition, confirming some of my deepest intuitions about human songs and their roots.

The very first time I read ‘The File-Hewer’s Lamentation’ [listen to Ray’s version below] it seemed to arrange itself to the tune of ‘The boys of Mullaghbawn’ on an old cassette-tape I’d somewhere acquired of songs by Paddy Tunney. No one knows the source of the original tune, though the words we have seem to pertain to the United Irishmen’s 1798 rising. I like to think either that Joe picked up a variant of that very tune listening to some itinerant Irish labourer looking for work in the alleys of early industrial Sheffield, or even more pleasing is the idea that the same Irish singer heard Joe’s song and took the tune back to Ireland where it became ‘The boys of Mullaghbawn.’

I was also struck by the staggering courage involved in composing and singing publicly, ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine.’ To sing such a piece, just after the French Revolution and during what some historians have called ‘the English reign of terror,’ calling for the overthrow of kings and aristocracy and championing democracy, is an act of such breath-taking bravery as to be barely believable. That he was singing this song and others with similar sentiments to fellow Sheffielders in the streets gives us insights into the local culture. Sheffield was considered ‘disloyal’: ‘barracks and bastilles’ were built and militias were recruited. The ideological battle for the next fifty years was made articulate between the plain English, common-sense, Republican ideas of Paine – ‘The People and Reform’ – against the flowery, murderously oppressive polysyllables of the turncoat Burke and his ‘Church and King,’ to whom the common people were a mere ‘Swinish Multitude.’

All that and more, emblematised in the words and defiant singing of a bloke from Cack Alley, just off West Bar, known to locals as ‘Shitten Entry.’

So when I was offered an opportunity to set some of Joe’s pieces for the Festival of the Mind I was delighted. It nudged me towards doing what I should have done years before. I was able to bend tunes to fit six more pieces in addition to the two above, most of them emerging from my small but well-mellowed crock-full of Irish airs and melodies. Though my attitude to the provenance of each of the tunes remains open and flexible, sceptical and even mischievous, if you like. Who is to say that the above wandering Irish man was not a woman? Ann On herself even? Gathering sheaves of tunes during her dalliance with Joe before making her way back over the water to share them with all and sundry. I could swear that when I hear such as ‘Biddy Mulligan’, ’Patrick was a Gentleman,’ ‘Rosin the Bow,’ ‘The Dean’s Chapter,’ and ‘Kevin Barry,’ I can detect clearly beneath them, as sure as I’m plinking on this banjo, Mather’s own tunes donkeying their beneficent ways through the beaming and appreciative crowd.

 

Listen to Ray’s version of ‘The File-Hewer’s Lamentation’ here:

https://clyp.it/e01gksiq/widget

If you like what you hear you can get the CD for six quid – find out more here.

Dennis Skinner: Nature of the Beast

A couple of years back I wrote a post about Shut Out the Light’s fantastic Still Ragged, a documentary about The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. In it Dennis Skinner provides a typically passionate and straightforward critique of zero-hours contracts, arguing that they are the modern-day equivalent of the insecure employment that blights the lives of Tressell’s characters.

The filmmakers obviously got on well with Skinner: they’ve spent the last two years making a documentary about his life. And what a life. Skinner was born between the wars into a big mining family in Clay Cross, Derbyshire. His dad had been blacklisted following the General Strike in 1926 and Dennis followed in his footsteps, going into the mines – and the Union – when he left school. Skinner was a gifted scholar with a sharp wit and was quick to master the skills of a pitman and a union rep, going on to get elected as a councillor in 1960 and MP for Bolsover in 1970.

Since then he’s been the scourge of Tories in the House of Commons, stymying bills from Enoch Powell and Anne Widdecombe (on stem cell research and abortion, respectively) and delivering brilliant parliamentary put-downs, earning himself the title The Beast of Bolsover. Examples in recent years include him telling Jeremy Hunt to ‘wipe the smirk off his face’ and suggesting that rather than the economy, the only things growing in the 1970s and 80s were the lines of cocaine in front of George Osborne.

Behind the headline-grabbing one-liners, though, there’s a serious and thoughtful politician and a kind and decent man. Skinner’s socialism was formed through the mining culture he grew up in and 22 years down the pit. He actively supported the 1972 Rent Rebellion in his home town (he had two brothers on the Council) and the 84-85 Strike. As an elected representative he’s fought tirelessly for his constituents, embodying the ideals of hard work and selfless public service that underpin his politics.

Skinner is Labour through and through. He’s proudly on the Left of the Party but he believes in supporting his colleagues from across the Labour spectrum. As a principled left-winger who has consistently spoken out against the dodgy patronage of Parliament, his honesty and integrity are beyond reproach and he has lessons for us all about socialism, solidarity – and singing (as demonstrated in this moving clip about Skinner singing with the elderly in his constituency).

Skinner’s story is an important and timely one. As the Labour Party rediscovers its socialism, Dennis Skinner’s long memory can help its members to understand the rich political tradition they inherit. If you have a few quid to spare, please chip in to help Shut Out the Light finish their film and bring the compelling story of this real-life working-class hero to the big screen.

The Songs of Joseph Mather – Ray Hearne CD

Firstly, thank you very much indeed to everyone who came along on Monday and helped make our celebration of Joseph Mather’s life and songs such a great occasion.

Ray and Robin Garside also produced this fantastic CD of the Songs, which you can get for a fiver (plus a quid for postage). These sold like hot cakes on the night so get yours quick to avoid disappointment!

To order, please drop me an email with your postal address to j.windle@sheffield.ac.uk and then transfer £6 to me with your postcode as the reference (s/c 07-04-36, account number 13264065). Email me if you need to pay by cash or cheque.

I’ll be writing a proper post about the project soon.

All the proceeds from sales of the CD will go towards a project I am working on with Steven Kay to republish the classic Sheffield novel The Good Lion by Len Doherty.

Finally, massive thanks to Ray for arranging these songs and bringing them to life so brilliantly – I for one hope to see him perform them again soon!

‘Osgathorpe, behold!’-Strange Trains and Poetry on the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway

I learnt two fascinating things about the Sheffield to Rotherham railway last Friday. The first was the the 16.24 from Sheffield is invisible, as are all its passengers. Along with a fellow inhabitant of this reality I stood and watched as no train departed from anywhere except the LED screen on Platform 1A. At the information desk we were shocked to discover that  it had definitely left because the computer system – triggered by censors in the tracks, no less – said so.

Glad to have narrowly avoided a trip to the Rotherham of a parallel universe, when I did eventually get there I met up with Ray Hearne to talk about a project we’re working on (more on this soon). It just so happened that Ray had a copy of Ebenezer Elliot’s ‘Verses on the opening of the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway’ which he very kindly gave me (you can find it on page 65 of this excellent collection of Elliot’s poems edited by Agnes Lehoczky and Adam Piette for the PlastiCities project back in 2012).

This is a remarkable poem for a number of reasons. Familiar places are vividly brought to life through enraptured, Romantic eyes and returned to the final days of their pre-industrial innocence. The poet stands ‘on war-marked Winco’s side’ less than half a mile from the brand new railway and calls on the surrounding settlements to see ‘with gladdened eyes’ the ‘triumph for mankind’ represented by the ‘towering vapours’ that trace the new trains’ progress:

The note is my favourite thing about the whole poem. It tells us that Osgathorpe is ‘A beautiful eminence between Sheffield and Winco-bank, and, like the latter, overlooking a landscape of equal beauty’. My mum lives on Osgathorpe Road and I was brought up round the corner and I love it, but ‘beautiful eminence’ isn’t a description many people would recognise. It transports us back to a time when Sheffield’s industry was concentrated in a small centre whose outlying areas remained largely unspoilt.

This 1832 map shows Burn Greave, Grimesthorpe and Wincobank were sparsely populated, semi-rural areas overlooking the Don Valley and the villages of Attercliffe and Darnall.

 

The view over the Don Valley is still a beautiful one in its own, post-industrial way: the vast steelworks away to the north-east, the incinerator, the railway arches and Supertram lines, Park Hill flats and the neatly laid out streets of the Manor. Elliot reminds us that not so many generations ago, if we strip back the layers of history, this was a stunning, idyllic valley (the otters and salmon who are returning to it remind of this, too).

Another remarkable feature is Elliot’s scattergun approach to the exclamation mark, a piece of punctuation now associated with the excitable emotion of acronym-heavy text-speak. The above stanza – with a fairly modest six occurrences – shows perfectly that inveterate texters and shouty copywriters in our own time are working with a long-established textual means of conveying intensity of feeling with a sense of wide-eyed innocence and youthful excitement. OMG! Literary pedigree!? WTF! LMAO!

In all seriousness, though, its sheer excitement at the potential of new technology is what is so remarkable about the poem. For Elliot, the Sheffield to Rotherham Railway is a harbinger of a new, fairer world and proof that the human ‘Mind shall conquer time and space’ to ‘Bid East and West shake hands!’. ‘Tyrants of all lands’ will ‘wither’ before the revolutionary power unleashed by advances in transport and communications, heralding a new world free from oppression.

This utopian vision chimes with the most hopeful and optimistic assessments of the power of technology in our own time, such as in the predictions of a post-work world of full automation by the likes of Paul Mason, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. The poem’s most striking relevance to contemporary debates, though a bit more modest and mundane, lies in its advocacy of the democratising power and freedom-giving potential of public transport. Remembering the world-changing optimism of the early days of the railways can help us to re-energise our arguments for renationalisation now. Our ancestors forked out the £100,000 that paid for the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway in the first place and we deserve a cheap, efficient, public and accessible train service that doesn’t depart Platform 1A into a parallel universe.

 

There’s a petition to stop the sell-off of our stations here.

Elliot had excellent hair too

 

A Raisin in the Sun

A Raisin in the Sun is one of the great plays of the twentieth century. I was lucky enough to see it at the Royal Exchange in 2010 and there is a superb Eclipse Theatre Company production at the Crucible until February 13, then on tour.

I first encountered Lorraine Hansberry’s masterpiece as an undergraduate ten years ago and found it a compelling piece of drama that – and this is rare for a play – was engrossing, exciting and entertaining even on the page. I wrote a fairly cringeworthy first-year essay about the play and raved about it to anyone who would listen. A couple of weeks back my mum offered to queue for tickets to the public dress rehearsal so I got the train home and went with my folks. When it finished every actor had tears running down their cheeks and I reckon quite a few of the audience did too…

Raisin is about three generations of the Younger family, living in a cramped flat and sharing a bathroom with neighbours, whose fortunes are set to change with the arrival of a cheque for the late Big Walter’s life insurance. The action all takes place in the living room – which doubles up as the young Travis’s bedroom – and is driven by the tensions between generations, genders, siblings, beliefs and colours of skin. The vicious racism of post-war Chicago, which Hansberry had experienced first-hand as a child when her house was attacked by a racist mob, is central to the plot.

Lorraine Hansberry, New York City on April 7, 1959. (AP Photo)

Hansberry was brought up by committed members of the NAACP and her uncle was a prominent professor and pioneer of African American studies. The family mixed in the same circles as many leading figures of the Civil Rights Movement such as Langston Hughes*, W E B DuBois and Paul Robeson, whose journal Freedom Hansberry wrote for when she moved to New York at the age of twenty. One of Hansberry’s many achievements in A Raisin in the Sun is to distil so much of contemporary Civil Rights and anti-colonial discourse into such accessible, amusing and utterly plausible dialogue. Beneatha – the strong-minded, outspoken atheist who will be a doctor and won’t be pressured into marriage despite the stifling, sexist social conventions of the time – is courted by both an ‘assimilationist’ and a Nigerian student. Her feminism and Afrocentrism are fully developed and wittily articulated, despite predating the second wave of the former and the coinage of the latter by at least two years.

Old values and ways of life are openly challenged (Beneatha: ‘What has He got to do with anything? Does he pay tuition?’), causing painful generational friction. Preoccupations with housing, money, masculinity and education are central, as are the aspiration and social mobility of the post-war period (Beneatha again: ‘the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich coloured people’). There are striking parallels with developments on the British stage at the same time: Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey premiered in 1958 and deals with many of the same issues, including racism, in the British context.

Ossie Davis, who played Walter in an early production, said that ‘one of the biggest selling points about Raisin was how much the Younger family was just like any other American family’. It is testament to Hansberry’s genius as a dramatist that she was able to condense so much of mid-century African American experience into such a seemingly simple domestic drama about an ordinary working-class family.

Until her tragic death at just 34 years old, Hansberry worked tirelessly for the Civil Rights Movement, honouring her conviction that a ‘total’ approach was the only way to gain true equality:

Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent… They must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns and pray on steps.

To find out just how excellent a production of this wonderful, visionary play the Eclipse Theatre one is, get along to the Crucible by Saturday or go in Ipswich, Southampton, Liverpool, Watford, Deptford or Coventry.

 

Nina Simone talks movingly about Hansberry and performs ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’, the song she wrote for her with Weldon Irvine.

There’s a short doc about Lorraine Hansberry here.

*This is the Langston Hughes poem, ‘Harlem’, from which the play takes its title: