In which D.H. Lawrence visits Snailbeach

On Friday we saw D.H. Lawrence getting all Lawrentian about the Stiperstones: "It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers."

But when did he visit the area? The answer's in the video clip above: January 1924.

A paper by Lawrence Jones and Paul Simpson-Housley tells us something about Lawrence and Frederick Carter got up too:

They enjoyed a winter's walk together, which they began by climbing Cad's Hill. Later they crossed a narrow gauge railway and ascended the Stiperstones. The tiny Lord's Hill Chapel, located at the edge of the moors, and the works and smoke of Snailbeach came within their view. They then climbed Cranberry to the crest of the Stiperstones, at the southern end of which is located the Devil's Chair, an area of scattered rock.

Lead mining had ceased at Snailbeach by 1924, but the upper levels of the mine and the spoil heaps were being worked for barytes. Colonel Stephens had recently bought Snailbeach District Railways. Most of the line's traffic came from a quarry halfway along the line, but it was still open all the way to Snailbeach mine because that's where its locomotive shed was.

I've not read St Mawr, but Jones and Simpson-Housley say Lawrence combined the Stiperstones and the Wrekin to produce a symbolic landscape with a Devil's Chair and an Angel's Chair, the latter based on Heaven's Gate on the Wrekin.

So D.H. Lawrence visited Snailbeach. I'm sure Mary Webb did too, but did any other notable writers?

"The old savage England": D.H. Lawrence visits the Stiperstones

From St Mawr by D.H. Lawrence, published in 1925:

They came at last, trotting in file along a narrow track between heather, along the saddle of the hill, to where the knot of pale granite suddenly cropped out. It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England, whose last blood still flows in a few Englishmen, Welshmen, Cornishmen. The rocks, whitish with weather of all the ages, jutted against the blue August sky, heavy with age-moulded roundnesses.

Lewis stayed below with the horses, the party scrambled rather awkwardly, in their riding boots, up the foot-worn boulders. At length they stood in the place called the Chair, looking west, west towards Wales, that rolled in golden folds upwards. It was neither impressive nor a very picturesque landscape: the hollow valley with farms, and the rather bare upheaval of hills, slopes with corn and moor and pasture, rising like a barricade, seemingly high, slantingly. Yet it had a strange effect on the imagination.

John Carey and The Intellectuals and the Masses

The death of John Carey, the critic and former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been reported today. I discovered him through his 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939, which skewered the snobbish and anti-democratic attitudes that pervaded modernist literature and Fabian politics.

Here is Ian Hamilton reviewing Carey's book in the London Review of Books the year it came out:

The book is not meant to be straight literary criticism. It is about attitudes, not artworks. And on the matter of attitudes, Carey’s testiness can be joyously unreined. He has no patience with high-flown talk about predicaments and alienation. He is first of all an educator. His sympathies are with readers rather than with writers and he believes that, with the advent of mass literacy, a great educational opportunity was missed. 

Instead of sneering at Leonard Bast’s pretensions, Forster should have been teaching him at night school. But that could never have happened because, however the intellectuals chose to dress up their disdain, it was actually class-based – it had its roots in a fear and loathing of the mass, a revulsion which in some cases turned into super man delusions or fantasies of mass-extermination.

Carey's views are, I think, less controversial now than they were when The Intellectuals and the Masses was published, yet the idea that modernist writers must be, or at least ought to be, on the side of social progress was held for many decades.

Here's my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold expressing a generation's sense of betrayal when T.S. Eliot's Conservative politics and adherence to the Church of England became known:

HOW NICE for a man to be clever,
So famous, so true
So sound an investment how EVER
So nice to be YOU.

To peer into basements, up alleys,
A nose for the search.
To challenge with pertinent sallies,
And then JOIN the Church.

I had a very good teacher for A level English Literature, but I have shaken off his taste for the modernists over the years, now preferring Dickens and Auden to his gods Lawrence and Eliot. And I suspect we can all see now what Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W. H. Auden: Selected Poems in 1979:

Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. 

In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernists predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. 

All of this Auden rejected.

I commend The Intellectuals and the Masses to anyone with an interest in the literature and politics of the early 20th century.

GUEST POST Reform are still gaining councillors and Labour and the Tories are still losing them

The latest Defections Update from Augustus Carp provides a corrective to the view that Reform are falling apart in local government.

Now it is autumn, and the falling fruit,
And the long journey to oblivion….
D.H. Lawrence

The Seer of Eastwood probably didn’t have local government defections in mind when he wrote The Ship of Death, so it falls to us to consider these mysteries on his behalf. 

The toll continues, mercilessly. Since early September, a further 227 elected councillors have decided that they will be better able to serve their wards, or advance their careers, or sleep more easily in their beds, if they leave the party that supported them when they were elected. Their reasons for doing so may be many and various, but the consequences are similarly disturbing.

As has been noted before, defections by sitting councillors probably tell us more about local politics, and the health of local parties, than council by elections. Of course, personalities play a large part in this, and some people seem to be impossible to accommodate within any of the existing party disciplines. Nevertheless, when these people resign, defect, or flounce out, it is indicative of problems in the local party that may run deeper than appears on the surface.

For example, a number of Labour defections – particularly in London – are occurring now, in the run-up to candidate selection for the all-up Borough elections next year. Serving councillors are not being reselected, for whatever reason, and so are serving out their time as Independent councillors. 

Whether they decide to seek re-election has yet to be determined, but in any event they have deprived the party of canvassing time, campaigning ability and local knowledge. Their friends and family might also stop delivering leaflets and sitting outside polling stations – time will tell. 

If they do stand for re-election as Independents, they might take a significant number of personal votes with them, and can probably be guaranteed to slag off their old party, much to the mirth and merriment of the local press and the other candidates.

The little coverage this topic receives in the mainstream media tends to be used to reinforce today’s bigger political narrative, i.e. that lots of Conservative councillors are leaving, and as a consequence Reform UK is on the rise. As ever with political analysis, it seems to be a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, the Conservatives have not lost as many councillors as Labour recently.

Since September, a net total of 57 councillors have left the Conservative party, compared with 75 from the Labour Party. The Lib Dems are unchanged, the Greens have gained 13, and the Nationalists have lost 3. Reform UK have gained 34 councillors, and the balance have become Independent, non-aligned etc.

As usual, there are very few straight swaps between Party A and Party B. The process seems to be to leave Party A, become non-aligned or independent, and then see the light and join Party B. The duration of these moves can be extensive.

Clearly, in the current political climate, most direct party-to-party defections involve Reform UK - of the direct changes between parties, 32 Conservatives have moved to Reform UK, with one going in the opposite direction. One Lib Dem and one Labour councillor have both made the same move. 

Nine Labour Councillors have become Greens, and one has gone to Reform UK. Other Labour defections (included in the Independent category for now) have expressed their intention to join Your Party in due course – the Labour defectors seem to be going in many more different directions than Tory defectors.

Activists are (or at least should be) getting ready for the May 2027 elections now – the selection, reselection and deselection processes in all parties might persuade many more councillors to defect before then.

Augustus Carp is the pen name of someone who has been a member of the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats since 1976.

Labour loses control of Broxtowe as 20 councillors leave the party

Twenty Labour members of Broxtowe District Council in Nottinghamshire have resigned from the party.

The Guardian report says:

In a statement, the councillors – who will now sit as part of a new Broxtowe Independents party – said: "It is with a heavy heart that we can no longer be in a party that has abandoned traditional Labour values under Keir Starmer's leadership."

They were particularly critical of the cut to the winter fuel allowance, the bus fare increase and Labour’s plans to scrap two-tier county and district councils, which are to be merged to create large unitary authorities.

Radulovic said: "I believe the concentration of power in the hands of fewer people, and the abolition of local democracy through the current proposals of super councils, is nothing short of a dictatorship, where local elected members, local people, local residents will have no say over the type and level of service provided in their area.

"I have therefore been left with no alternative. I cannot support and will not support another centrist government intent on destroying local democracy and dictating national policy from a high pedestal."

It may be significant that the person the Guardian found to speak in favour of the Labour Party was Anna Soubry, the former Conservative MP for Broxtowe. Readers may also recall her as a leading member of the failed centre party Change UK, even if they couldn't remember which of its several names that party ended up using.

I am pleased to see that Labour's proposals for local government are meeting with opposition, at least within the party itself. 

Social class: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

More about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Publishing site. I've slightly lost the thread of which issue which column has appeared in, but this one has certainly been published. In fact, I don't remember writing parts of it.

Sighcology

The progress of the working-class grammar school boy and the estrangement from his background it brought about were once such a theme of English letters that it was honoured with a Monty Python sketch inverting it. 

A coal miner returns home to his playwright father and receives a cold welcome:

“Hampstead wasn't good enough for you, was it? You had to go poncing off to Barnsley, you and your coal-mining friends.”

The grandfather of this school of writing was D.H. Lawrence, and I was studying his novel The Rainbow for A level when David Storey’s Saville won the Booker Prize. Our teacher talked of Storey’s debt to Lawrence and suggested we considered reading his novel.

Saville introduced me to David Storey, whose early life encompassed elements no novelist would dare combine. At one time, Storey’s posthumous memoir A Stinging Life reminds us, he was studying fine art at the Slade in the week and supporting himself by taking the train north at the weekend to play rugby league for Leeds.

Fashions change, and a few years ago I saw Andy Miller from the Backlisted podcast exclaiming online that Saville had won the Booker Prize yet he could find no one who had read it.

******

Writing for the online publication Too Little / Too Hard, Rachael Allen recalls being the first in her family to receive any kind of schooling after the age of 14:

At Goldsmiths, I did not meet the children of cleaners or shop workers. I met the children of landlords, the children of airline pilots, and actual princesses, the children of executives at mega pharmaceutical companies, people so wealthy they owned their own charities. I met the children of TV personalities and doctors, barons and writers.

And she goes on to record a revelation that many of us have experienced:

One of my most eye-opening experiences as a working-class person moving into educated and middle-class spaces was the correction to my misconception that wealthy people are clever. I held onto this misconception for longer than I should have, because, at university, and then into my professional life, I was surrounded by the rich.

The English are indeed likely to confuse an upper-class accent with intelligence – a failing that more than one contemporary comedian has exploited to land a more serious column. But Allen says her working-class father reads more than anyone she knows, giving himself a summer to read War and Peace and then everything around Tolstoy and Russian literature he can find. She grew up with him pointing out flowers, leaves, and trees in the Latin that he had taught himself over the years as an amateur naturalist.

My own class background is complicated – my mother once claimed to have “gone from rags to rags in one generation” – but when I was a poor teenager, I was still able to pass as middle class. The disadvantage of this was that, in an instance of the same fallacy, it did not occur to any teacher that I might be having problems. 

******

Class, which once held a central place in our political discourse, now competes with other sources of injustice. The Conservative MP David Johnston once wrote about his time running social mobility. recalling a firm which, while it thought itself fully signed up to the concept, nevertheless raised queries like: 

“Our clients need us to have worldliness and you get that by travelling the world. So how will the young people you work with be able to demonstrate it?"

and

“They’ll be alongside the children of high net-worth individuals who we’re teaching how to invest the assets their parents gave them, so you’ll have to send us someone suitable.”

Johnston would watch banks professional service firms fall over each other to hire black graduates if they were privately educated and from professional families:

These young people were deemed to have the requisite social capital they claimed their “clients expect from us”. If, however, you were the sort of black young person my organisations typically helped – poor and from a council estate – enthusiasm waned.

All these companies, said Johnston, would talk on their websites about valuing diversity, but diversity of social background was not tend to be high on their agenda. You could be black or white, but you had to be middle class.

Without the right social connections you will never break into the circles where the best jobs are on offer. Andy Burnham was mocked when he spoke of the problems in this he had still faced with a Cambridge degree – hadn’t been in the cabinet before he was 40? – but then he had found an alternative network in the shape of the Labour Party.

******

I saw a tweet from another female academic, Professor Amanda Vickery, the other day:

Found Saltburn unpleasant. Brought back memories of being working class at uni. Am decades from that & obvs privileged now, but still recall that any time I said "no my father was a bricklayer & no we never went skiing", boys would launch into the Monty Python sketch.

There’s little doubt which sketch that was, though the Four Yorkshiremen were originally seen in an earlier television programme, At Last the 1948 Show, and the sketch was written and performed by Marty Feldman, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, as well as John Cleese. You know, I think we’ve found a hill I will die on.

A radical reading of the Four Yorkshiremen is possible – we are laughing at the self-aggrandisement of the rich as they tell increasingly incredible stories of their own childhoods – but Vickery’s fellow students found the very idea of poverty amusing and old fashioned. It’s become just one more of those odd notions that private school pupils tease one another out of holding so they can be sure of fitting in.

Which may be why, if British novelists wrote of nothing but the experiences of the bright poor boy in the Fifties and early Sixties, they now seldom mention the working class at all.

Glenda Jackson interviewed by Mavis Nicholson in 1973

Here's another treat from the archive of Mavis Nicholson interviews on YouTube: Glenda Jackson in her prime.

Two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors

I saw a tweet by Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, in support of the End Sexism in Schools campaign. It said that, "shockingly", only two per cent of GCSE students study literature by female authors.

It is a shocking statistic, and it made me think back to my own schooldays. Sure enough, I didn't study a single woman writer for O level or A level English literature.

Since you ask, here are the books I studied:

O level

• The Merchant of Venice
• An anthology of 20th-century British poets
• Lord of the Flies

You had to study Lord of the Flies for O level in those days - I think there was a law. And there wasn't a single woman poet in that anthology: the poets I liked most in it were Edward Thomas and Edwin Muir. There was no Auden, who is now my favourite British poet of this era, and I don't think there was anyone later than the early Betjeman.

A level

• Hamlet
  
• The Tempest
• Dr Faustus
• Wordsworth's Prelude (Book 1)
• John Donne
• T.S. Eliot (Selected Poems)
• The Rainbow
• The Grapes of Wrath

I think we studied more texts than we needed to because use we had a good teacher and we were a bright class, but there was still no room for a woman writer.

When it came to my MA in Victorian Studies, male writers were in the majority, but we did at least study Felix Holt by George Eliot and Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell.

And it's interesting that, when I was preparing to start the MA course, I read the two Victorian novels I was most ashamed of not having read: Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights.

So all power to End Sexism in Schools. Not because the male writers I studied were bad, though Lord of the Flies was surely overrated in those days, but because one point of studying good literature is to widen your imagination and your sympathies. And you are less likely to do that if you study only writers of one sex.

You can download the full report from the campaign's website.

David Storey, the Booker-winning novelist who played rugby league for Leeds

Embed from Getty Images

I first came across David Storey when his novel Saville won the Booker Prize. It was one of those books about the progress of a working-class grammar school and his alienation from his background that used to be everywhere.

The grandfather of this school of literature was D.H. Lawrence, and I was studying his novel The Rainbow for A level at the time. Our teacher talked about Storey's debt to Lawrence and suggested we might want to read Saville.

Storey's own life story was like one of his novels on speed. At one time he was studying fine art at the Slade in the week and catching the train back north to play rugby league for Leeds at the weekend.

He wrote of rugby league in his posthumous memoir A Stinging Delight:

An odd game, rugby league was confined principally to the two northern counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire and was almost exclusively working class. It seemed to me that it had about it something of the graft of underground labour (several of the more notable players were miners), something of the confederacy induced by enclosed spaces; something of the magnanimity of the elements: dourness, strength, tenacity, graft.

Grafting was what the forward game was all about: five-tank like players formed the scrum, with me shifting between the second row (the two players welded between the three in front) and the loose-forward at the back .The first ten minutes of the game were taken up with seeking what might be described as a psychological advantage: a stag-like confrontation whether forwards trying to suppress and finally demoralise their opposite numbers. There ferocity with which a player ran with the ball was matched by the ferocity with which he was tackled, the subsequent course of the game determined by the conclusions reached in these introductory encounters.

A winter sport, austere and remorselessly physical, we played in rain, mist, fog or occasional snow; on darkening afternoons, in encroaching dusk; on grounds enclosed by industrial workings, or by the debilitating and depressing environs of a smoke-ridden town. Journeys took us around the industrialised valleys of the Pennines. Occasionally the sky would be illuminated by the descending sun, the valleys suffused with a purplish glow. Occasionally the Pennine hills would rear in the distance but, invariably, the terraces were silhouetted against chimneyed roofs, mills, factories, the cooling towers of a power station: slopes of ashy, industrial dereliction.

I'm remined of how Eddie Waring used to refer to the "Satanic Mills End" at Leigh's Hilton Park ground.

Fashions change in literature. Not so long ago I saw Andy Miller from the Backlisted podcast exclaiming online that Saville had won the Booker Prize yet he could find no one who had read it.

Bolsover and D. H. Lawrence

Just as it was more or less obligatory for someone of my generation to study Lord of the Flies at O level, so D. H. Lawrence was hard to avoid if you took English Literature at A level.

Perhaps for that reason, I always think of Lawrence as a writer who appeals most to adolescents. No doubt this is unfair, but I have seldom been tempted to spend much time on Lawrence since leaving school.

One thing I disliked about him even as a teenager was his exaggerated rhetoric about industrialisation. Again and again, industrialism and the way of life it leads to are compared unfavourably with rural, "organic" alternative. It seemed reactionary, and at worst to point the way towards something like Nazism.

I could not have put it half so neatly, but Edward Mendelson expresses this distrust of Lawrence and the other early twentieth century Modernists perfectly.

One of the unexpected side-effects of my visit to Bolsover Castle yesterday is that I now understand Lawrence better.

Let me explain. Even to those of us who live elsewhere in the East Midlands, the area to the north of Nottingham and the east of Chesterfield is a non-descript one that we imagine to have always been industrialised. We think of it as all Dennis Skinner and slagheaps.

Yet a little study shows that this is a travesty. Mining came much later to the area than you might imagine. So much so that the first coal mine did not open at Bolsover until 1891.

For centuries this was an area of great landed estates - so much so that there is an area of Nottinghamshire still known "the Dukeries" because of the number of leading aristocrats who had houses there. We should imagine instead a rural landscape dotted with great houses, the whole devoted to sport or, in the case of Bolsover, more amorous pleasures.

In Eastwood, where Lawrence grew up, the mines opened a decade or two earlier. But it remains true that, in his own boyhood, Lawrence saw the rural, aristocratic landscape summoned up by Bolsover Castle transformed into one of exceptional industrial desolation

This should not lead you to a Tory love of aristocrats - it was, after all, they who sold the land or the mineral rights to allow this spoilation to take place - but it does explain Lawrence's extreme reaction to industrialisation. It was something he had lived through in his own lifetime.