Old times

Thursday, February 18th., Cadogan Square, London.

I have to make a visit to the Potteries next week. Only for the day! As usual an impending visit to my native area sets me reflecting on its distinctive character. 

Evolution in the Potteries has been quite remarkably dramatic during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. And of course it has marched with the improvement in the means of communication. Long after the death of Josiah Wedgwood, its supreme hero, the Potteries retained the primitive characteristics of a district cut off by Nature from the rest of the world. Josiah Wedgwood was a great man and did much, but his impress was left far more deeply on the manufacture of pottery than on the habits of the potters.

A great-uncle of mine used often to tell me stories of bear and dog fights at which he assisted as a boy. At that time Burslem had its municipal bear and Sunday was the day of battles. "But what about the law?" I asked him. "Bless ye!" he would reply, "There was no law in the Potteries in those days." The statement was exaggerated for effect of course, but it had some truth. Hundreds of men still alive in the Potteries can remember a period when during the annual 'Wakes', the public houses kept open day and night for a week, and the sole ambition of the population (male half) seemed to be to get drunk and to remain drunk.

In my youth the population of the Potteries was at least 130,000, and the towns were even then merged into one another, and yet there existed less than two miles of tram line in the entire district, and only two trams (drawn by horses and travelling between Burslem and Hanley) twice an hour. Now, electric cars in scores run about everywhere, from Longton in the south to Tunstall in the north, and from Newcastle in the east to Smallthorne in the west. And it was precisely these rapid cars which at last broke down the stubborn individualism of the separate towns and brought about their federation. And Hanley was in the middle and quickly outgrew its neighbours. Another case of geography influencing history.

I hope to find time for a walk up through Burslem Park as far as the cemetery where one day I hope to lie with my ancestors.

Feted

Saturday, February 14th., Cadogan Square, London.

I had a great time in the Potteries. Sundry hours with Wilcox Edge in the train! He is a very interesting old man, and the Potteries is too much obsessed by his failings. He tells me he was Mayor of Burslem thirty years ago. Imagine that! Though born in Burslem he lived mainly in Wolstanton and had a scheme for the 'annexation' of Wolstanton by Burslem. It came to nothing in the end and Wolstanton remained instead in the clutches of Newcastle. Seemed philosophical about it. A lifelong Liberal.

I went to Hanley and did nothing whatever except ornament the proceedings with my presence, and I was told about forty times how much I had 'honoured' the said proceedings with my 'presence'. Not at all as I expected. The Mayor wore his two-ton chain. I sat on his right. I saw all sorts of people who knew me and whom I didn't know, and whom I admirably pretended to know.  Disconcerting to be feted in a place one has persistently described as being indifferent, if not inimical, to worldly renown. I arrived at 2.30 and left at 6.39, breathing a sigh of relief, and dozed on the train.

But I got home without a headache and the next three days did vast quantities of my novel. yesterday I reposed, and had Robert Loraines to lunch, and a musical supper party. At this party Arnold Bax and Eugene Goossens sat down at the piano and improvised, without a preliminary word to each other, a Spanish tango which lasted a quarter of an hour, and to which Tania danced. It was full of new tunes, and there was never the slightest hitch, discord, or fumbling. How they do it I know not but in that line it was the most marvellous thing I ever heard. Bed at 1.45. Tania was, of course, much admired.

Today I am writing the preface to "Don Juan".

Milk of paradise

Saturday, December 26th., Waterloo Road, Burslem.

Yesterday I read "Falk" in Conrad's "Typhoon", and then several stories by Wells. I went to bed at 1.30 and was kept awake until 4.30 by a barking dog. Then at 7.15 my mother knocked on the wall. She was in the middle of a bilious crisis caused by overnight hare and bilberries, but I think she thought she was having a heart attack. She stays in bed. Hence the whole atmosphere of the house becomes special, and 'sick-roomy', and I can't proceed with my novel today as I had meant.

Last Wednesday I went with Frank to the Grand Theatre in Hanley. I entered with curiosity and not a little trepidation for, though it is the business of my life to keep an eye on the enthralling social phenomena of the Potteries, I had never been there before. Now I saw an immense carved and gilded interior, not as large as the Paris Opera, but assuredly capable of seating as many persons. I was impressed. My first thought was: "Why, it's just like a real Music Hall!"

I was so accustomed to regard Hanley as a place where the great visible people went into work at 7a.m. and emerged from public houses at 11p.m., or stood movelessly in mournful packed tramcars, or bitterly partisan on chill football grounds, that I could scarcely credit their presence here, lolling on velvet amid gold Cupids, and smoking at ease, with plentiful ash-trays to encourage them. I was offered chocolates and what-not at reasonable prices by a boy whose dress indicated that his education was proceeding at Eton. 

I was glad to see the vast gallery filled with persons who had paid their twopences and intended to have their monies worth. In nearly all public places of pleasure, the pleasure is spoiled for me by the obsession that I owe it, at last, to the underpaid labour of people who aren't there. It is a regrettable residual awareness of social injustice which I admit does me no credit in this age of capitalism. But I did not feel it here. Even the newspaper-lad and the match-girl might visit this Music Hall and, sitting together, drink the milk of paradise. Wonderful discoverers these new Music Hall directors all up and down the Kingdom. They have discovered the folk!

The vice of the Potteries

Thursday, December 24th., Waterloo Road, Burslem.

I had a smooth passage over on Monday and came here yesterday with Tertia, William and a headache. The first printed thing that caught my eye when I landed at Newhaven was a newspaper placard: "Vice in the Potteries: Shocking Details." It turns out that a bumptious local vicar, the Honourable Leonard Tyrwhitt by name, has been preaching sermons on "The Devil (and all his works) in the Potteries". It beggars belief. Talk about self-righteous, he is the sort of priest who goves religion a bad name.

It is one of the easiest and one of the most dangerous things in the world to kick up the dust of what is called 'morals'. The mere word 'vice' will draw people together from afar as a dead dog will draw carrion crows. When I tried to buy the London newspaper which had placarded our 'vice', do you suppose I could get it? Not a bit. It was sold out. It was sold out all over London. And the fact is that for days past the whole of England has been feasting upon the panorama of our alleged enormities.

It would be interesting to know whether any thinking man really believes at the bottom of his heart that human nature is worse in the Potteries than it is elsewhere. For my part I regard the theory that the Potteries is ultra-vicious as unworthy of discussion. I have no doubt that the same 'vice' is to be found in any large manufacturing district. Indeed in English villages a virgin at age twenty is something of a curiosity. No doubt the Honourable Tyrwhitt has emerged from that stratum of society which is sufficiently affluent to be high-minded and high-moraled. His elevated position does not however give him the right to look down on those less favoured by birth and expect them to conform to his idea of what is right and wrong.



I went out this morning and saw numbers of people as I walked down to Burslem. This afternoon, walking to Hanley, I was struck by the orange-apple cold Christmas smell of the greengrocers' shops. And now all is silent. There is a palpable air of expectation.