Everyman's England (6 page)

From the Laird yard, in 1829, came the first iron ship ever launched in England, to mark the beginning of the mythical Mother Shipton's prophecy that ‘iron should float and carriages without horses run.'

I wanted lunch while I was in Birkenhead, and I asked a policeman to direct me to a good cafe.

‘You won't do better than that,' he said, nodding across the roadway to where a notice was fixed to the railings of a tall house.

I thanked him, and crossing the road, went down the area steps which led to the cafe. I found myself in a large room, lit by two windows that looked out into the well of the area and brightened by the polish on the brass utensils which hung upon the walls. At the far end of the room a huge kitchen range smiled the blackest and shiniest smile I have ever seen. I knew that I was in a place where I should be well satisfied for a few people, obviously regular patrons, looked at me with the scarce-hidden annoyance which comes over one's face at the intrusion of a stranger into one's favourite cafe. In Birkenhead, the city of the tunnel, perhaps all good things are found underground.

At the next table were two young men and it was obvious from their talk, which I could not help but hear, that they were actors met for a while in Birkenhead before passing on with their respective companies. Their talk was mostly of common acquaintances, and went like this:

‘What's happened to Charlie these days?

‘Never hear anything about him.'

‘Him? Oh – is that French mustard? Pass it would you? Him, he's left the stage now. Keeps a fish and chip shop in Plymouth – married the daughter, I think. Bit of funny business about that if you ask me. I shall get the inside story when we play Exeter. Remember Johnny Crew and his craze for playing Shakespeare with Benson?'

‘You bet. He was in rep. with me for a while at Blackpool. What's he doing?'

‘Chorus in an Edinburgh panto. He's a card.'

‘I'll say he is. I shall never forget the night when he and…'

What they were doing, whether they were both playing that night in the same or separate theatres at Birkenhead, or Liverpool, I never found out. There was something pathetic in the eagerness with which they exchanged news. It might be months, years before they met, or perhaps they never would meet again. The stage, especially for those conscientious, aspiring, but never-tobe-famous men and women who serve the provinces, is a hard master.

When I left they were still talking hard, but they had exhausted their news and were swapping jokes…

From Birkenhead I went on to Port Sunlight. Port Sunlight, not far from Birkenhead, must be seen to be believed. An oasis in a morass of industry, it is a classical example of benevolent capitalism, and a demonstration of the power of soap. The hundreds of houses, quartered by fresh greens and walks, represent all styles of English cottage architecture. Its abiding merit is that the architects have not attempted to reproduce all the styles in one house as is done in some suburban estates.

I saw happier, healthier-looking people in Port Sunlight than anywhere else in the Wirral, and now every time I wash my hands I feel that the act is one of blessing, for it perpetuates in the Wirral a beauty which deserves a more appreciative audience.

When you go to the Wirral you may not be as disappointed as I was. If you have read these words you will not be expecting so much as I was. Maybe you will find there much that I missed, or see in places which appalled me an interest which holds you. I hope so, for I would like to think that my view was jaundiced and that the district deserves better than I have given it.

If your faith in the sanity of mankind is shaken; if you cannot reconcile the stupidity of the Dee with the dirty dignity of the Mersey then wander along the Mersey shore, passing the explosive and margarine factories, tripping over railway lines and trespassing upon factory roads until you come to Eastham Ferry where the canal begins, and in the public house there you will find good beer and conversation with men who love the dirty Mersey in a way which is past explanation, and if you are in no mood for talk, you can lean upon the fence overlooking the entrance to the canal and watch the great ships come out of the mist to pass inland, a dim, silent procession.

CHAPTER 6

Dr Johnson, in an idle moment, during his tour of the Hebrides with Boswell, once composed a meditation upon a pudding. The meditation, while it makes good reading, is a bad recipe. I fancy Dr Johnson's pudding would be as ponderous as he was and would weigh heavier upon one than his devastating retorts. The meditation is enough to show that a pudding has in it those elements which must excite all men's wonder and is such a compound of creative mysteries that it almost becomes a sacrilege to eat it.

It is a pity that Dr Johnson, although he was born at Lichfield, so close to the Potteries, did not visit them with his Boswell and give us a meditation upon a basin, for there is in the making of a basin enough speculative material to satisfy anyone, and perhaps the basin deserves a more noble meditation than the pudding, for without the basin where would the pudding be?

If without the basin the pudding is lost, or at the best wrapt in the sorry folds of a cloth to lose its flavour, then without the Potteries they are both lost. That so much which is essential to mankind's happiness should depend upon so curious a district is a fit subject for reflection.

Judged from any standard the Potteries district is ugly. Yet it is not an ugliness which repels. It challenges deliberate attention with its frankness and seems to cry aloud from every pot-bank and street: ‘We may be ugly and dirty, but that is because we work, because we have a task that makes us what we are.'

The honesty of this cry may be judged from the fact that the Potteries does not, as so many other industrial areas do, overrun into the surrounding countryside in sprawling, shapeless islands and peninsulas of ugliness, but gathers itself into one compact district. It restrains its red-bricked horror within rigid bounds, as though it sensed the contamination which it bears and were reluctant to touch more than it need. There is no intermediate sordidness of patchy settlements, half residential and half industrial, between the Potteries and the countryside. Where the Potteries cease the real country begins.

On a day when most farmers were thinking of the lambing that was to come, I stood upon a hillside, surrounded by sheep and shivering in a wind that swept across from the barren Peak district. In a few months, I thought, there would be thyme and bugle in the bare grass, and stonecrop and toadflax rioting over the stone walls. Now there was only the yellow grass and the dark stems of dead nettles. High above me a hawk hovered and across a neighbouring field a horse and cart moved slowly as a farm-hand pitched out swedes for cattle fodder. I might have been on some moorland farm, miles from the nearest town. I was not. When I turned round, across the valley behind me, I could see the Potteries.

Instead of sheep, long rows of houses covered the hillside and mixed with them were the lines of kilns, chimneys and the occasional spire of a church. No hawk moved in the wind; there were instead the plumes of smoke from the chimneys and the slow journey of a conveyor carrying refuse to a mountainous slag heap along an overhead wire.

No matter where you go in the County Borough of Stoke-onTrent, which embraces all the Potteries and includes more than just the five towns of Arnold Bennett, this is the typical outlook. It is a landscape, painted in red and grey, of ‘pot-banks,' as the potteries are called, coal pit and steelwork. Everywhere are chimneys and the narrow-necked kilns, like huge, dirty milk jars, and thrusting up here and there are heaps of slag and refuse.

The streets are not narrow. They are dismal and uninspired, and their lighting, to anyone accustomed to the glare of London, seems worse than niggardly. In Hanley and Burslem there are fine modern shops, filled with a wealth of bright clothes and polished furniture. The red brick admits no rival, and the concrete purity of the modern shops and buildings is quickly discounted by the weight of red-bricked houses and the steep roads paved with dingy brown sets. It was with surprise that I noticed the modern buildings after I had been in the district for some time, for my eyes were occupied with the kilns, those emblems of the Potteries' real life, where earthenware is glossed and baked, and the flints which are used in the manufacture of pottery are calcined.

The district is hilly and no space is left uncovered. Coalmine, steel-work, pot-bank and tile factory crouch in the valleys and along the hillsides, streets and shops take what they can.

Nowhere did I see a children's playground and, even if there are any, as I have no doubt there must be, the children seem to prefer playing at street corners under the light of the lamps, but that is a perversity of child nature which is found even in the greenest towns.

I was shown over one of the pot-banks. I stood for a while in the porter's room at the main entrance, talking with the porter and warming myself at his fire. As we stood there a policeman came in, nodded to the porter and said:

‘May I use the telephone?'

‘Ay, you may,' answered the porter. The policeman picked up the instrument and called his superintendent at the police station.

‘Sergeant — speaking. There's a swan up here on the canal,' he said, ‘with a broken wing and it looks as though it's dying. Been like it for a couple of days. What shall I do?'

He was silent listening to his superior's instructions about the dying swan and while he stood there, his head cocked to the ear-piece, I was called away to begin my tour of the pottery. I asked the porter as I left if he knew what the policeman had decided to do, but he shook his head. No one admires the police more than I do for their efficiency and I should like to have known exactly what their procedure would be with a dying swan with a broken wing. Here was a missed opportunity, too, for me to put to the test the fable of the death song of the dying swan…

The foreman who showed me over the works left no doubt in my mind of the pride which these people take in their industry. It is not just their bread and butter, a job which they do for so many hours a day and then forget when they reach home. It is their life, and they are not ashamed to admit it.

He showed me the whole process from beginning to end, and his manner reminded me of my schooldays.

‘This is the canal wharf where the boats come from the Mersey bringing clay from Dorset and Devon. It is put into trucks and runs along that overhead rail and is then shot into these different stalls, according to the type of clay. Mind your head as you go down here. See, the brown clay in that stall comes from Dorset – we use that for one kind of crockery. The white clay, or kaolin in the other stall comes from Dartmoor and is used for other work…'

There was no need for him to tell me that the white china clay came from Dartmoor. As a boy I had lived in Plymouth and if any boy who lives in Plymouth has walked out to Plym Bridge, blackberrying, or to fish for tadpoles, and not stolen a ride home on the top of a china clay wagon coming down from the moor – then he is no boy at all. The ride back behind a horse patiently pulling a string of wagons filled with white clay was always an adventure, for the carters were not over-fond of small boys… His voice woke me from my reverie.

‘This series of magnets set across the running sludge removes all the particles of steel which come into it during the various processes. It is essential to get this out, otherwise in the baking the steel would discolour the crockery and probably crack it.'

With the care – and patience – of a mother explaining a moral lesson to a child, he took me through the works; from the canal where the clay came in, to the kilns where the calcined flints lay in whitey-grey heaps, and where, in earthenware tubs, the clay cups and plates were packed to be glossed by the action of the heat on the minerals sprinkled over them.

I do not think he would have minded had I not been listening as he explained the various processes. It was when we came to the ‘slip' that I realised that I was in the presence of a master. The ‘slip' is the prepared clay, ready for shaping into cup, plate, or any other china object. All the excess water squeezed from it by gigantic presses, it travels from the final mixing machine in a long strip, like paste being forced from an enormous tube.

‘Look at that,' he said, his voice rising and his face suddenly bright with a new expression. He leaned over and sliced a piece of slip from the length with a wire, much as a grocer cuts cheese. ‘Isn't that grand stuff?' he asked, and shook his head as his fingers played and dug into the soft clay. ‘It's good enough to eat.' And all the while he spoke his fingers were playing with the clay, fingering, caressing and shaping it. He was a mild-mannered, undistinguished man, but in that moment I realised that it was not just clay he was handling, but vivid, living stuff without which his life would be nothing, and as he fingered it there was a light in his eyes which probably few other things in this world could evoke. I was suddenly awed before him, as we must all be awed before a craftsman. In that moment, as I stood there watching the long line of clay ooze from the mixing machine, I regretted that I had not been born in the Potteries and become a potter. Here was a man who worked with his hands, knew a craft shared by a comparative few and one that was as old as mankind. He had every right to be arrogant, to scorn me and the rest of the world, I felt. As he stood there he represented, as faithfully as anyone I have ever met and with a beauty that was impossible to forget, the dignity of labour and the pride which comes from having a craft.

And all around there were others who felt the same, who shared a like spirit. To the people of the Potteries clay is not something from which they make a living, it is their life. The girls working in the pot-banks, whether they do no more than carry long tray-fulls of cups from the drying-rooms to the kilns, or paint those coloured bands round the plates, or stick transfers on the cheaper china, all seem to have this feeling for the trade they own, a trade as old as any in the world; and the men and boys all have a joy in their work which comes from a heritage of craftsmanship. When I had first seen them at night, dressed-up, laughing and jostling in picture queues, out to enjoy themselves, I had not guessed at their pride, but when I saw them in that pot-bank I should have had to have been imperceptive to have missed it.

The history of the Potteries is a history of individuals. The Dutch brothers, Elers, are the first in the line of individuals who raised the craft from an unimportant occupation of a few at Burslem, the mother of the Potteries, to the position of a major industry. About 1690 these brothers discovered a vein of clay near Bradwell Wood from which they produced a fine red stoneware and, most important, they introduced into the industry the secret of making the famous salt-glazed stoneware. So jealous were they of this secret that it is said, with what truth you must judge for yourself, that the two brothers employed none but half-wits in their pot-banks so that they might not discover the secret or communicate it to other people, and every day – as though they were not sure even of their half wits – all the workmen were searched before they left the factory.

And after the Elers brothers came Josiah Wedgwood who, as the inscription on his monument reads: ‘…converted a rude and inconsiderable manufactory into an elegant art and an important part of national commerce.'

Josiah Wedgwood's chief genius lay in his love of experiments. Born in the Potteries of a family which had for years been engaged in the trade, after he had served his apprenticeship with his brother, Thomas, he was refused a partnership because of his unorthodox experiments. Josiah, like so many other famous inventors, was too progressive for the men of his own age. Yet it is of him that most people think when pottery is mentioned, and when you are in the Potteries you will hardly fail to miss Etruria, the village and factory which he founded for the manufacture of cream-coloured earthenwares, black basaltes and jasper ware, all of which he introduced or improved by his experiments. He had that high courage which comes from faith, and from his faith he helped to build one of the greatest and most interesting industries in the world.

Anyone in the Potteries, I found, can tell you about the Wedgwood family and the two Ralph Woods, who made the sometimes crude, but always humorous, Staffordshire figures. Yet there was one name which produced no response from quite a lot of people. Ask a Potteries man or woman anything you like about their jobs and you will have a ready answer. Ask them if they have ever heard of Arnold Bennett, and do not be surprised if they look at you with polite blankness.