George Orwell in Headingley – the Walk and the Talk

  Richard Wilcocks writes:

A lot more people, in Leeds anyway, now know about Orwell’s brief residence in Headingley, and have hopefully read The Road to Wigan Pier to add to their knowledge of his other works. People were invited to walk from where he stayed in 1936 to Headingley’s main community centre on Saturday, 5 March 2022.

 

The walkers all arrived on time outside 21 Estcourt Avenue. They stood on the pavement, but also between parked cars, several dozen or so people, a dog and a baby in a buggy. At one thirty actor Jem Dobbs took up his position outside the front door, which had recently closed behind one of the student residents who had been showing him around the house where he had lived for his first nineteen years.

 

He spoke for ten minutes about his mother, who still lives nearby and who is one hundred and one, his father and his childhood, which was rather more free range than those of today. “I spent most of my life outside the house,” he told us. “Maybe if it was like that in 2021 my parents would be accused of neglect and I would be taken into care,” he joked. 

 

“I was always in the road at the back with a football, with friends, in the woods at Beckett Park or climbing over the wall to get into the rugby ground. Once or twice the police brought me home. I was a pupil at Bennett Road Primary School, which is now the HEART Centre, where I got the cane plenty of times. I was a juvenile delinquent!”

 

Les Hurst spoke next, very briefly, about how George Orwell had stayed in the house, at the time occupied by his sister Marjorie and her husband Humphrey Dakin. He had worked on his notes for The Road to Wigan Pier, possibly on the top floor, and had been taken on trips to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth and to nearby Kirkstall Abbey.

 

There were a few contributions from the crowd, the most memorable one being from Ray Brown, who had rented a room in Harrogate in the sixties. The landlord, Humphrey Dakin, was severely war-wounded and had a glass eye. This sometimes fell out when he produced tears. He was remembered crawling about on a front room carpet searching for it. The walk took ten minutes, and at two o’clock everybody was sitting in the Shire Oak Hall of the HEART Centre, joining those already there. It was full.

 

Les Hurst from the Orwell Society is an excellent lecturer. Without using more than a basic crib sheet which was distributed to the audience, he took us through the chapters of Part One of The Road to Wigan Pier. Here is some of what was on it:

 

1.   Lodging houses and the lives of men without families

2.   Miners at work (the other chapters are all outside work)

3.   The miner at home

4.   Housing conditions (Slums, Caravans, Council estates)

5.   Unemployment

6.   Nutrition

7.   Industrial panorama

 

We heard about how Orwell’s progress on his investigative journey, which began after a lift to Coventry as a starting point, had been partly planned and partly left to chance, because he often worked on last-minute information supplied by friends of friends, and about how publisher Victor Gollancz had originally wanted the book he had commissioned to consist solely of the first, descriptive half, without the substantial second half. This consists largely of Orwell’s personal musings on the nature of socialism and on why people living miserable lives who could benefit from a socialist system did not actually vote for one. He explores class prejudices, including his own (he was an old Etonian), remarks on the dullness of the utopias envisaged by the likes of H. G. Wells, expresses his mistrust of mechanisation and asserts that ‘crankiness’ amongst left-wing activists puts off many would-be supporters. The Communist Party, very influential in 1937, especially its General Secretary Harry Pollitt, objected strongly to this second half, but Orwell insisted that it stay. Gollancz tried to mollify objectors by writing a special introduction.

 

Les Hurst was inexhaustible, and paused for questions after nearly an hour, but his audience was still very much with him. All questions and observations were dealt with in great detail. Orwell’s comments on crankiness were understood as coming from a man who was ‘a product of his time’. They included, for example:

 

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” 

 

Judging from questions and from comments later, the great majority of the book was appreciated as a valuable insight into class divisions, the contrast in wealth and living conditions between the north and the south and the grinding poverty experienced by so many people in the years of the Depression, and not only then but today in the foodbanks era. Parallels were drawn.

 

On the topic of working class nutrition, for example, Orwell writes:

 

“…the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't… When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.”

 

There seemed to be general agreement for this truth, judging from comments and nods from the audience. Other topics of interest included the continuing dominance of the public schools and Orwell’s fears about the advance of Fascism, which he went to Spain to fight in 1936. Time did not allow for more than a mention of the modern resonances here.

 

The session was long but very well-sustained. It made quite an impression. A number of people have been in contact with me over the past days, like the woman whose grandfather was a miner from Barnsley: “After listening to Les Hurst and reading about miners in that book, I really understood what it was like for him.”