Speaker 1: Jack Hilton was a plaster trade unionist, survivor of World
Speaker 1: War One, and local activist in Lankash's Unemployed Workers' Movement
Speaker 1: who turned to writing while banned from political activity. But
Speaker 1: despite being celebrated by some of the most respected writers
Speaker 1: of his generation, Hilton and his work faded into obscurity,
Speaker 1: only to be rediscovered now, some ninety years after he
Speaker 1: was first published. This is Working Class Literature.
Speaker 2: Alamatina Happena Oh, very large Child, Very large Child, Very
Speaker 2: large child, Child Child, Alamatina.
Speaker 1: Before we start, a quick note to say that we're
Speaker 1: only able to continue making these podcasts, both Working Class
Speaker 1: History and Working Class Literature because of the support of
Speaker 1: our listeners on Patreon. If you like what we do
Speaker 1: and want to help us with our work, join us
Speaker 1: on patreon dot com slash working Class History, where you
Speaker 1: can get benefits like early access to episodes, exclusive bonus content,
Speaker 1: discounted books, merch and more. For instance, Patreon supporters can
Speaker 1: listen to both episodes about Jack Hilton now and also
Speaker 1: have exclusive access to a special Patreon only bonus episode
Speaker 1: where we discuss more passages from Jack Hilton's brilliant novel
Speaker 1: Caliban Shrieks. Patrioon supporters also get access to our two
Speaker 1: Patreon only podcast series, Radical Reads and fireside Chat link
Speaker 1: in the show notes. In this double episode, we're going
Speaker 1: to look at the life and work of British working
Speaker 1: class author Jack Hilton, with a particular focus on his
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five auto biographical novel Caliban Shrieks. To do that,
Speaker 1: we spoke to Jack Chadwick, who chanced upon Hilton's novel
Speaker 1: back in twenty twenty one, and through what can only
Speaker 1: be described as an incredible feat of literary detective work,
Speaker 1: managed to track down some of Hilton's old friends and
Speaker 1: get his book back into print almost ninety years after
Speaker 1: it was first published. We discussed this incredible story of
Speaker 1: how Jack got the book back into print in Part two.
Speaker 1: So turning to Jack Hilton himself, then it's fair to
Speaker 1: say that he had an extremely difficult start in life.
Speaker 3: One of the things that makes him easy to sort
Speaker 3: of date is he was born in nineteen hundred. For
Speaker 3: someone who's not particularly good at mental maths, that makes
Speaker 3: it a lot easier to sort of work out how
Speaker 3: old he was at any given point. So born in
Speaker 3: a slum terrace in Rochdale, the house where he was
Speaker 3: born and is still standing. The only difference is but
Speaker 3: it's no longer pact. But I think it would have
Speaker 3: been two families. Now it's I presume just one. I've
Speaker 3: not knocked on to check, but yes, so he was
Speaker 3: born into this one room, but his two parents lived
Speaker 3: in he was I've never been able to work out
Speaker 3: where he was exactly in the order of the children born.
Speaker 3: I think he was about maybe the third, the third child,
Speaker 3: and potentially the first son. Part of why it's impossible
Speaker 3: to know exactly where he came in the order of
Speaker 3: a family is because of his siblings, so many of
Speaker 3: them died within the first you know, before they even
Speaker 3: reached adulthood. I think only one of his siblings out
Speaker 3: of seven reached adulthood alongside him. I think a lot
Speaker 3: of his siblings were even missed out by the censuses
Speaker 3: because obviously they were born and died within a period,
Speaker 3: so unless they reached ten, they were sort of like
Speaker 3: missing from the records. His dad was from what Jack
Speaker 3: Hilton described as being it's a sort of a lump proproletariat,
Speaker 3: the lowest of the low.
Speaker 4: But despite that, he was at.
Speaker 3: The forefront of for sort of a meager early efforts
Speaker 3: of socialist organizing in Rochdale, and so his dad had,
Speaker 3: you know, quite like Jack Hilton went on to achieved.
Speaker 3: He'd sort of scraped a little bit of an education
Speaker 3: for himself, but it's not the kind of thing that
Speaker 3: his father's work allowed him to pass on to his children.
Speaker 4: So Jack Hillson would have.
Speaker 3: Got, you know, little scraps of his father's knowledge because
Speaker 3: obviously his father was working hard with all these children,
Speaker 3: with all this death around him. But it still is
Speaker 3: the case that Hilton was sort of given this sort
Speaker 3: of early orientation towards socialism and towards the working class
Speaker 3: and sort of knew he stood up and put on
Speaker 3: firm ground. It was a solid foundation for what he
Speaker 3: went on to do and what he went on to
Speaker 3: do in terms of his own efforts to educate himself
Speaker 3: and and as we'll talk about later, the direct inputs
Speaker 3: he had into building the movement that his father was
Speaker 3: sort of a father of in Rochdale.
Speaker 1: As was common at the start of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: Jack Hilton was denied in education and forced into employment
Speaker 1: as a child.
Speaker 3: So Hilton grew up and like all of the kids
Speaker 3: of his class and age in Rochdale at that time
Speaker 3: went under the halftime system, went to work at the
Speaker 3: age of nine, and there one small victory for a
Speaker 3: working class around that time was that when you went
Speaker 3: to work at the age of nine, you weren't since
Speaker 3: for mill. Yet you got a bit of a grace
Speaker 3: period of two years before you were sent to the
Speaker 3: local mills. I say the local mills was about I
Speaker 3: believe our three towering, dark buildings covered in black ash
Speaker 3: smoke that you know, we're blackening the skies of rushed Owe.
Speaker 3: All of these buildings within a stone's throw of where
Speaker 3: Jack Hilton grow up. They're no longer there, but Hilton
Speaker 3: was after about two years. I think he worked for
Speaker 3: a grocer's. He did some sort of errand boy kinds
Speaker 3: of jobs in his afternoons after school, and then he
Speaker 3: was sent for mill at the age of eleven, waking
Speaker 3: up at at you know, five point thirty in the
Speaker 3: dark and carrying himself you know, up for Hill Downhill
Speaker 3: to the local mill to do labor. That left him
Speaker 3: absolutely knackered, to say the least. By the time he
Speaker 3: was supposed to start what really has no right to
Speaker 3: call itself an education.
Speaker 4: Which would have been in the afternoons.
Speaker 3: So he speaks about what this education entailed in Caliban Shrieks,
Speaker 3: and if the image he gives of it is so
Speaker 3: distinct and so different to what any kind of ideal
Speaker 3: sense of what that word means now, or you know,
Speaker 3: even at the time, it was jingoistic, it was patronizing.
Speaker 3: It was very much about teaching the kid the web
Speaker 3: along and under the Victorian scheme of class, rather than
Speaker 3: giving him any sense of what they could be or
Speaker 3: what the world is. So I think perhaps Jack Hilton
Speaker 3: had the gift of knowing the limitations of what was
Speaker 3: being presented to him as an education because of his father.
Speaker 3: Even if his father wasn't able to give him any
Speaker 3: kind of other education, he was able to let him
Speaker 3: know the limitations of what was on offer in this
Speaker 3: you know, authoritarian brutal school with its religious sealousy and
Speaker 3: just quite frankly brutal floggings of the kids, which I
Speaker 3: think he speaks about a little bit. And that was
Speaker 3: a really bleak early instruction for Jack too, the worst
Speaker 3: of capitalism, the worst of life.
Speaker 4: It gave him the bleakest outlook. I think you could have.
Speaker 1: Well Hilton's earliest experiences were already extremely difficult. They would
Speaker 1: be compounded by the onset of the First World War
Speaker 1: and the horrors that he would live through there.
Speaker 3: He was at first too young to be sent to
Speaker 3: the trenches, so he began a series of jobs in
Speaker 3: the sort of logistics and a sort of support auxiliary
Speaker 3: auxiliary roles in England. One of the jobs did for
Speaker 3: the longest was looking after the horses of a marshal
Speaker 3: who was sort of being kept back in England in
Speaker 3: preparation for being sent to Belgium. Hilton did this job
Speaker 3: for a while and it gave him this relationship with
Speaker 3: this instruction to the ruling class. He was working for
Speaker 3: the officer types. And I think this is another really
Speaker 3: important influence on the man he would become, because you know,
Speaker 3: unlike many of the other boys who were said off
Speaker 3: to fight, he wasn't around his own type from the
Speaker 3: very beginning of the war. The war brought him into
Speaker 3: the world of class and it gave him a bit
Speaker 3: a window onto the lives of how other richer Britain's lived,
Speaker 3: and I think part of why he was selected for
Speaker 3: his work working for the offices and why he was
Speaker 3: able to do it for so long, I think about
Speaker 3: two years, was because they recognized that there was a
Speaker 3: brilliant brain in this lad Even though he lacked any
Speaker 3: formal education.
Speaker 4: He could just about write and read.
Speaker 3: But this is again the gift of his father, who
Speaker 3: had instilled in this sort of advantage of I guess
Speaker 3: you would call it a cultural capital really that enabled
Speaker 3: him to be distinctish from the other working class lights
Speaker 3: is potentially having some kind of ability to do the
Speaker 3: sort of more administrative taxs that were predominantly given to
Speaker 3: middle class boys. So he was then when he was
Speaker 3: of age, he was sent to the trenches.
Speaker 4: And he writes.
Speaker 3: Very little about this in the grand scheme of things,
Speaker 3: but very powerfully. And I think it's one of those
Speaker 3: cases where you know, a lot of the meaning is
Speaker 3: contained in the gaps as opposed to in what's actually
Speaker 3: communicated in the actual words on the page. So if
Speaker 3: you read between the lines of his account of the
Speaker 3: war and what came after for him, you get this,
Speaker 3: I think, particularly brutal and personal explanation of the effects
Speaker 3: of the war on this young working class boy. And
Speaker 3: I say that because the following chapters, so he talks
Speaker 3: about the experience of being sent to the trenches and
Speaker 3: describes the the sort of a harrying how can I
Speaker 3: put the very sort of a quick fire, rapid fire
Speaker 3: sort of weight.
Speaker 4: It's very visceral.
Speaker 3: His account of what happened, but it does only run
Speaker 3: maybe two three pages. But then what happens afterwards is
Speaker 3: you have this pair of chapters covering ten years of
Speaker 3: Jack Hilton's life from the end of the war until
Speaker 3: he was mentally able to settle in Rochdale again at
Speaker 3: the end of the twenties. And this period of ten
Speaker 3: years is a direct response to what happened in the war.
Speaker 3: And it's clear this period of homelessness and rough sleeping
Speaker 3: and vagrancy which he went through, but it wasn't unique
Speaker 3: to him. It was actually sort of hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 3: of thousands of veterans from the First World War went
Speaker 3: through this long period of wandering. That it's timeless and
Speaker 3: the account that he gives of this period tells you
Speaker 3: so much about his experiences in the war, And that's
Speaker 3: what I mean by you really have to sort of
Speaker 3: read between the lines of his account of the war
Speaker 3: to get a sense of how much trauma he was
Speaker 3: carrying around with him afterwards, and that was all he
Speaker 3: was carrying with him. He didn't have anything to his name.
Speaker 3: He was wandering the countryside from town to town, made
Speaker 3: it to London, made it out of London, and made
Speaker 3: it back to London, back up north, back down south,
Speaker 3: from Spike to Spike, poorhouse to poorhouse. He was carrying
Speaker 3: nothing but this immense trauma that completely prevented him from
Speaker 3: settling his own mind and settling down anywhere for at
Speaker 3: least ten years, potentially eleven or twelve.
Speaker 1: In the UK, we talked quite a lot about the
Speaker 1: First World War, but often gloss over the sheer scale
Speaker 1: of the horror and destruction they involved. So in total,
Speaker 1: around twenty million people were killed and around another twenty
Speaker 1: million were wounded. During the Battle of the Somme, over
Speaker 1: fifty seven thousand soldiers died on one single day, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't on common for hundreds to die, even on
Speaker 1: supposedly quiet days, so it's not surprising that anyone who
Speaker 1: found themselves in the middle of all that would come
Speaker 1: home with severe post traumatic stress disorder, as indeed hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands did. Harry Patch, the last surviving British combat
Speaker 1: veteran from World War One went on to describe war
Speaker 1: as quote organized murder and nothing else end quote, and
Speaker 1: said that the politicians who had dragged them into it
Speaker 1: should have quote been given the guns and told to
Speaker 1: settle their differences themselves end quote. Jack Hilton lived through
Speaker 1: all of this, as did many others, but as if
Speaker 1: that wasn't enough, Hilton and his generation would have yet
Speaker 1: another era defining catastrophe to come, the Great Depression.
Speaker 3: He had just got to that point in his life
Speaker 3: where he was able to overcome the trauma of the
Speaker 3: war and of what he saw and begin to settle
Speaker 3: in Rochdale, which is where he was born. But he'd
Speaker 3: settled into doing you know, odd jobs predominantly in the
Speaker 3: construction industry. For Great Depression hits, and his entire generation
Speaker 3: just has the worst luck when it comes to the
Speaker 3: sort of the ages at which they hit these events.
Speaker 3: You know, he's young enough to go to the trenches,
Speaker 3: he's young enough to be still dealing with the effects
Speaker 3: of the First World War as the Great Depression hits,
Speaker 3: and he finds himself trying to settle in Rochdale but
Speaker 3: unable to find work, and groups together with some of
Speaker 3: his friends in the local library. There's only one library
Speaker 3: and the whole of the town or its area. It
Speaker 3: had been built about thirty years before, and they go
Speaker 3: to this library predominantly for warmth because they have no
Speaker 3: they're living in I think he was in a fixed
Speaker 3: abode at that point, but no heating and no food
Speaker 3: and sharing with like five of the lads, I believe.
Speaker 3: So they're going to the library to sort of keep
Speaker 3: warm in between the odd jobs that they're able to
Speaker 3: pick up from arrival of this work. So these lads
Speaker 3: were all clinging to each other out of desperation in
Speaker 3: the library, and as the mobs passed by, they sort
Speaker 3: of turned towards what they can do to improve their
Speaker 3: situation out of sheer desperation. If they think, you know,
Speaker 3: we're just doing nothing, what can we do to even
Speaker 3: to make us feel like we're doing something.
Speaker 1: It's worth mentioning just how bad the Great Depression in
Speaker 1: Britain was. In nineteen thirty one, for instance, almost a
Speaker 1: quarter of men and one in five women were recorded
Speaker 1: as unemployed. Rather than do anything to help the unemployed,
Speaker 1: the government introduced the means Test, whereby inspectors would visit
Speaker 1: unemployed people's homes to see if they were living fecklessly
Speaker 1: or had any items that they could sell before giving
Speaker 1: them their unemployment benefit. On top of that, the means
Speaker 1: test applied to the household, meaning that if one of
Speaker 1: the children got a job, they're earning would be deducted
Speaker 1: from the parents dole money. Unsurprisingly, this meant that families
Speaker 1: would often be broken up, with children leaving home in
Speaker 1: the event that they found work. It's also really important
Speaker 1: to highlight as well that despite these harsh conditions, the
Speaker 1: unemployed were never given the sympathy that you'd expect from
Speaker 1: the influential voices of their time. So, just like the
Speaker 1: demonization of the unemployed today, newspapers during the Great Depression
Speaker 1: depicted them as irresponsible, lazy, and having brought their poverty
Speaker 1: upon themselves. In nineteen thirty one, The Times ran an
Speaker 1: article in favor of the means test, claiming that the
Speaker 1: doll had become quote an alternative source of almost permanent
Speaker 1: maintenance end quote. Similarly, the Scotsmen published a piece claiming
Speaker 1: that quote income taxpayers are unlike the unemployed, paying out
Speaker 1: and getting no return directly for their money. While many
Speaker 1: of the workless marry and breed families while in receipt
Speaker 1: of the doll end quote. While many, perhaps even most,
Speaker 1: of the unemployed responded to this situation with a deep
Speaker 1: sense of hopelessness, others like Jack Hilton, began to get
Speaker 1: politically active.
Speaker 3: The first thing what happens is they hear about the
Speaker 3: National Unemployed Workers Movement, which had been founded by the
Speaker 3: Communist Party of Great Britain to represent the unemployed masses
Speaker 3: after the end of the First World War. Now, this
Speaker 3: organization existed for ten years but didn't really achieve anything
Speaker 3: like the breakthroughs, but it managed in the first years
Speaker 3: of the Great Depression. I think the biggest march that
Speaker 3: they held was one hundred and ten thousand people in
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty two to present a petition to Whitehall. Whitehall
Speaker 3: responded with seventy thousand police mobilized from across the country
Speaker 3: to brutally intercept this crowd of desperate people and steal
Speaker 3: the petition they'd gathered, and then beat them out of
Speaker 3: London over a few days of actively.
Speaker 1: The march that Jack is talking about here is the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty two Hunger March, when two and a half
Speaker 1: to three thousand unemployed workers set off from Glasgow to London,
Speaker 1: one of many similar cross country marches that took place
Speaker 1: in that period. In London, they were joined by over
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand other demonstrators and attempted to present a
Speaker 1: petition with over a million signatures to the government, but
Speaker 1: were stopped by police, resulting in huge clashes in central London.
Speaker 3: So I think this is the camera vendor would have
Speaker 3: got Hilton and his mate's attention in Rochdale, and that's
Speaker 3: what led them to attempt to found a chapter of
Speaker 3: the NUWM in the town. The first meeting they held
Speaker 3: was dire. These weren't educated men, like I say. They
Speaker 3: had no concept of how to make a speech or
Speaker 3: how to explain what was going on in their lives.
Speaker 4: They just knew that they.
Speaker 3: Needed to be able to explain it. They need to
Speaker 3: understand themselves. So after their first meeting they go back
Speaker 3: to the library and they just swallow book after book
Speaker 3: after book. And Hilton is not alone in this. It's
Speaker 3: about him and about five of them mates who do this.
Speaker 3: Who read marks, He read the classics of the English Canon,
Speaker 3: he read Shakespeare, and it does spare through. Their meetings
Speaker 3: start to pick up steam and every single new meeting.
Speaker 3: They talk with more eloquence, They're able to explain things
Speaker 3: in more detail, with more credibility, and the crowds grow
Speaker 3: and grow riven a matter of months, these men are
Speaker 3: giving speeches that are drawing people from all over the town,
Speaker 3: men and women, young and old, and the meetings become rallies,
Speaker 3: and then the rallies become riots. And the riots, obviously,
Speaker 3: for the powers that be in Rochdale, were completely unacceptable
Speaker 3: and scary, and the local business leaders, the locals lean
Speaker 3: on the local judges and the local police and anyone
Speaker 3: who will listen to sort of put a stop to this.
Speaker 3: And Jack Hilton is seized in the midst of a
Speaker 3: demonstration and thrown in the cells and then taken to
Speaker 3: Strange Rays prison, and he's let out after a matter
Speaker 3: of weeks, but he's only let out on the privize
Speaker 3: over he never, for I think a period of three years,
Speaker 3: never make another political speech in that time, on pains
Speaker 3: of being sent straight back to Strange Rays.
Speaker 1: However, it was precisely a result of the conditions of
Speaker 1: Hilton's release that he would go on to write his
Speaker 1: first novel.
Speaker 3: In this period that he's bound over, having taught himself
Speaker 3: how to make the speeches that can move hundreds and
Speaker 3: hundreds of people to action, But now being completely unable
Speaker 3: to do this anymore, he instead turns to pen and paper,
Speaker 3: and the speeches that he would have been giving to
Speaker 3: these crowds are kept for himself and his scrappy little notebooks.
Speaker 3: He starts to write in these notebooks what he would
Speaker 3: otherwise have been saying to the crowds. And then one
Speaker 3: evening a night class organized by the Workingmen's Educational Association,
Speaker 3: which I think he started going to around the time
Speaker 3: but him and his mates were begin to educate themselves
Speaker 3: to make speeches.
Speaker 4: You've been going to these night classes.
Speaker 3: Well, whenever he went to these classes, he was either
Speaker 3: you know, knackered after a day of work or starving
Speaker 3: because he hadn't had any work. So after one of
Speaker 3: these classes, for whatever reason, he left his notebook behind,
Speaker 3: and the education or association suitor picked up the notebook and,
Speaker 3: being a nosy booker, took it home and leafed through it,
Speaker 3: and you know what he had in his hands was
Speaker 3: the clamoring nucleus of what would then become caliban shrieks.
Speaker 3: I think it equates to being about the first and
Speaker 3: second chapters or thereabouts. What this nosey booker does is
Speaker 3: he sends Jack Hilton's notebook without his permission to the
Speaker 3: editor of a modernist literary magazine called Viadelphi, which was
Speaker 3: I don't know how to promis really it was a
Speaker 3: sort of a haven for the misfits and the most
Speaker 3: sort of unpopular figures of the literary world at that
Speaker 3: time in England, like DH Lawrence, D. H.
Speaker 1: Lawrence was an author and son of a Nottinghamshire coal miner,
Speaker 1: closely connected to the literary avant garde of the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century. His works frequently dealt in themes of sexual
Speaker 1: desire that scandalized the literary mainstream, not to mention British authorities.
Speaker 1: A number of his novels were subjects to obscenity trials,
Speaker 1: like nineteen fifteen's The Rainbow, whose copies were seized and burnt.
Speaker 1: Obviously not learning his lesson, in nineteen twenty eight, Lawrence
Speaker 1: published Lady Chatterley's Lover, about a steamy love affair between
Speaker 1: the wife of a wealthy landowner and her working class gamekeeper.
Speaker 1: That book was similarly banned and not published in full
Speaker 1: until Yeah, another obscenity trial resulted in the band being
Speaker 1: lifted in nineteen sixty, by which time Lawrence had been
Speaker 1: dead for thirty years. Well, Lawrence was still alive, however,
Speaker 1: the Adelphi was a firm supporter of his work.
Speaker 3: So when Jack Hilton's notebook was sent in and they
Speaker 3: saw that what they'd been given was such a radical,
Speaker 3: unusual but brilliant piece writing, the editors jumped on it,
Speaker 3: especially because it was sort of one of the unspoken
Speaker 3: missions of this magazine after d. H. Lawrence's death had
Speaker 3: sort of been to put it quite crudely, to sort
Speaker 3: of find the airs of Lawrence. It's no exaggeration to
Speaker 3: say that with Jack Hilton, at least John Middleton Murray,
Speaker 3: the editor, was so exciting and enamored of what he'd
Speaker 3: been sent that he thought this could really be, you know,
Speaker 3: the second coming of a figure that was the reason
Speaker 3: this journal existed. So he wrote to Jack Hilton Vivi
Speaker 3: Tutor asking him to write more and to expand on
Speaker 3: just tied you up this fragment for a publication in
Speaker 3: a journal, and that's what he did. About was the
Speaker 3: first piece of published writing by Jack Hilton. So The
Speaker 3: main takeaway here is that Hilton at no point ever
Speaker 3: believed he would ever be a published writer, and never
Speaker 3: sought out publication himself, despite clearly having the talent to
Speaker 3: achieve publication and to warrant other people reading his writing.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things about Hilton's book, and probably
Speaker 1: a result of the fact that he started writing because
Speaker 1: the state had banned him from making speeches, is the
Speaker 1: way that it differs from a traditional novel. So rather
Speaker 1: than a linear narrative that follows the characters from the
Speaker 1: beginning to the middle and end, Hilton narrates episodes or
Speaker 1: whole periods of his life in a style that the
Speaker 1: writer Andrew McMillan has described as poetic monologues.
Speaker 3: It's completely resistant to to any kind of neat category,
Speaker 3: any kind of recognizable form of writing of prose. Is
Speaker 3: This is something that Andrew mc millan really gets across
Speaker 3: very well in his instruction to the new edition, where
Speaker 3: he sort of says, is this impression. There's different impressions
Speaker 3: at different points in the text that you could sort
Speaker 3: of pass as being different poetic monologues.
Speaker 4: There's one thing that.
Speaker 3: Andrew says that I love, and it's in this instruction
Speaker 3: where he says, it's as if Hilton is running down
Speaker 3: the street shouting at points. And the way I think
Speaker 3: about it is that I have to reflect on my
Speaker 3: own first time reading Caliban Tricks in the library where
Speaker 3: I found it, and I remember when I first took
Speaker 3: a break to have a cigarette, and I've reflected on
Speaker 3: what I've been reading. I just thought to myself, it
Speaker 3: didn't feel like I've been reading something similar to anything
Speaker 3: I've ever read before. It felt very much like i'd been,
Speaker 3: at points, listening to someone I already knew from across
Speaker 3: a pub table, recounting stuff to me, recounting their impressions
Speaker 3: to me. It sounds to you like it's coming from
Speaker 3: above a soapbox. What Andrew McMillan says is the novel
Speaker 3: you're about to read runs shouting down the street, trying
Speaker 3: to break everybody up at points. The novel is a
Speaker 3: conundrum that can only be answered by reading it, And
Speaker 3: there is a narrative, but not in any conventional sense.
Speaker 3: It's almost filmmaking in its sensibilities. It sort of anticipates
Speaker 3: the nature of episodic boxet TV shows. Each scene here
Speaker 3: could be a different, self contained novel shifting location and
Speaker 3: constantly oscillating between eccentricity and stark social realism. Now, what
Speaker 3: Andrew means by eccentricity here is I think it's a
Speaker 3: real sense that Hilton is trying to sort of make
Speaker 3: you smile at points, make you laugh sor it's the
Speaker 3: kind of thing that your mates would do if you're
Speaker 3: trying to tell you a story in an interesting ways.
Speaker 3: But I think I'm interesting. Comparison, the best one that
Speaker 3: I've been able ever able to find to sort of
Speaker 3: draw any kind of similarities between Calabatricks and other pieces
Speaker 3: of culture is in the sort of punk poetry of
Speaker 3: the sixties, because those punk poets of the sixties, seventies
Speaker 3: and eighties, I think come closest to sort of doing
Speaker 3: the same things as what Hilton's in terms of creating
Speaker 3: this warm, accessible Also, I think of it as sort
Speaker 3: of like he's placing himself in your head and you
Speaker 3: are at the same time being welcomed into his head
Speaker 3: with a red carpet of a pint waiting for you there.
Speaker 3: And it's the most sort of intimate connection I've felt
Speaker 3: with another with reading an author before. I think in
Speaker 3: a sense that you're taken through these junctions in his life,
Speaker 3: not in a sense of a description of events as
Speaker 3: he lived them, which actually, as McMillan touches on, there's
Speaker 3: not much of that in the novel. It's not about
Speaker 3: you know, it's not about valved This happened, and I
Speaker 3: did this, and then you know, there's no sort of
Speaker 3: or at least not much cause and effect. It's not
Speaker 3: a historical document in that way.
Speaker 4: It is a.
Speaker 3: History of his internal life and the responses of his
Speaker 3: sort of mind and personality to the things he lived
Speaker 3: through and the ideas he came into contact with. And
Speaker 3: there's sort of the rules of the world that he
Speaker 3: had to crash up against. That's what's brilliant about Hilton.
Speaker 3: And he achieves this with poetic monologues, which I think
Speaker 3: McMillan just after talking about these monologues a little bit,
Speaker 3: he sort of asks the question, you know, who is
Speaker 3: being addressed with invent And there's a sense that Hilton
Speaker 3: is writing if you go off how he addresses his
Speaker 3: audience in the text, it's almost as if he's writing
Speaker 3: for people that he's quite disdainful of, for writing for
Speaker 3: a middle class crowd, and this might be because I'm
Speaker 3: undecided on this. I think his sort of instruction to
Speaker 3: the network of the Adelphi magazine, which was a very
Speaker 3: middle class, upper class outfit, but with I think the
Speaker 3: most working class people in the Adelphie subscribers list would
Speaker 3: be like teachers and academics, people who lived in worlds
Speaker 3: far far removed from Hilton's own. So he knew that
Speaker 3: these people were the ones who are reading and applauding
Speaker 3: he's writing, and so that's expressed in Caliban trias in
Speaker 3: but he is sort of directly addressing McMillan says, you know,
Speaker 3: there's a nonsense for art for the people who were
Speaker 3: so central to Hilton. The people in the pub, ordinary soldiers,
Speaker 3: the wider community aren't imagined as the readers of the book.
Speaker 3: His imagined reader is Prospero, not Caliban. Now, I think
Speaker 3: this is a very fair reading of the book, but
Speaker 3: I also don't necessarily agree with I think, actually this
Speaker 3: is quite a clever way of Hilton actually addressing his
Speaker 3: ideal reader for working class reader who definitely he would
Speaker 3: have been aware weren't reading the book in the same magnitude.
Speaker 3: Is the middle class audience that gave birth to his
Speaker 3: writing career. But I think there's a sort of a
Speaker 3: sort of I don't know. It's quite cheeky, really to
Speaker 3: address a book to one audience in a sort of
Speaker 3: scathing way, in a sort of dismissive way, and then
Speaker 3: all along. I actually hope this is a device forgetting
Speaker 3: the attention of readers from another class. I think that's
Speaker 3: potentially what he was doing that. I think he's like
Speaker 3: ushering the working class readers into the jewry box in
Speaker 3: a way while he takes the stand, and then the
Speaker 3: rest of them are in I guess, in the doc
Speaker 3: or in the sort of court gallery.
Speaker 1: Just interrupting this episode to give you a quick podcast recommendation.
Speaker 1: If you're looking for an excellent philosophy podcast, then here's
Speaker 1: the show for you. The Partially Examined Life is a
Speaker 1: philosophical podcast by four guys who are at one point
Speaker 1: set on doing philosophy for a living. For each episode,
Speaker 1: they pick a text and chat about it with some
Speaker 1: balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know
Speaker 1: any philosophy or even to have read the text they're
Speaker 1: discussing to be able to follow and enjoy. With a
Speaker 1: thirteen year plus catalog of episodes, The Partially Examined Life
Speaker 1: has probably covered any philosophical topic you're interested in, from
Speaker 1: practical ethics to theoretical foundations of science. They go deep
Speaker 1: into the history of philosophy while making it personal and funny.
Speaker 1: Join the over forty five million downloads already pondering with
Speaker 1: the Partially Examined Life. Find new episodes wherever you stream
Speaker 1: your podcasts or at partially Examined life dot com. In
Speaker 1: a moment, Jack is going to read the preface to
Speaker 1: Caliban Shrieks, where this narrative style, in which Hilton is
Speaker 1: ostensibly addressing and denouncing a middle class reader but almost
Speaker 1: for the entertainment of an imagined working class onlooker, may
Speaker 1: become clear. However, first we should probably explain that the
Speaker 1: Caliban in the title of Hilton's novel is a reference
Speaker 1: to William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Set on a remote island,
Speaker 1: The Tempest follows Prosper, the exiled Duke of Milan, who
Speaker 1: uses his magical powers to seek vengeance on his brother. Caliban, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: is a native inhabitant of the island that Prosper has
Speaker 1: been exiled to, and who Prospero has both taught language
Speaker 1: and enslaved anyway. Here is Jack Chadwick reading the preface
Speaker 1: to Jack Hilton's Caliban, shrieks.
Speaker 3: Caliban is a man ye should know well, a freckled
Speaker 3: whelp hagborne, not honored with a human shape. He holds
Speaker 3: opinions about his rights. Such foolishness. He should overcome hag seed.
Speaker 3: Hence fetch us in fuel and be quick vout best
Speaker 3: to answer for businessman, say, I must eat my dinner.
Speaker 3: This island's mind, which vou takest from me? When val
Speaker 3: Camest first stroked me and made as much of me,
Speaker 3: which give me water with berry sints, and teach me
Speaker 3: how to name the bigger light and halve less for
Speaker 3: burned by day and night. And then I love thee
Speaker 3: and showed the over qualities of the aisle, the fresh springs,
Speaker 3: brian pitts, barren places, and fertile curse beavers.
Speaker 4: I did so vi.
Speaker 3: I am all the subjects that you have, which first
Speaker 3: was my own king. I know the musings in the
Speaker 3: rays of my modern Caliban flout all the accepted rules
Speaker 3: of writing. But you taught me a language, and my
Speaker 3: prophet huntint is I know how to curse the red plague.
Speaker 3: Rid you for learning me your language. I break from
Speaker 3: a personal to a dire tribe against alden sundry. But
Speaker 3: here is neither bush nor shrub to bear off any
Speaker 3: weather at all, and another stormy brewing. You may not
Speaker 3: want to be disturbed by Caliban's inflated, inflicted importance.
Speaker 4: Still he is here.
Speaker 3: I give you his story from infancy to infirmity, as
Speaker 3: clear as my feeble ability can arrange it for you.
Speaker 3: The jargon is one of a clamorous demagogue for which
Speaker 3: there is no apology yours, Jack Hilton.
Speaker 1: When Hilton writes in this preface that you should know
Speaker 1: Caliban well but may not want to be disturbed by him,
Speaker 1: we can begin to see what Andrew McMillan means when
Speaker 1: he says Hilton's imagined reader is Prospero, not Caliban. But
Speaker 1: the mockery and sarcasm of Hilton's tone also lends itself
Speaker 1: to what Jack says about this also being done for
Speaker 1: the benefit of a working class audience, or, to go
Speaker 1: back to Jack's analogy, Hilton puts the middle and upper
Speaker 1: classes in the dock, while the working class reader is
Speaker 1: ushered into the jury box and court gallery to watch
Speaker 1: as Hilton puts them on trial and, by extension, the
Speaker 1: society that they represent. Hilton also uses a number of
Speaker 1: quotes in this preface, not just from The Tempest, but
Speaker 1: from a number of Shakespeare's other plays as well, often
Speaker 1: doing a way with quotation marks completely so that Shakespeare's
Speaker 1: words are integrated into the language and rhythms of Hilton's
Speaker 1: own words. In his book chapter on Working Class Writing
Speaker 1: and Literary Experimentation, BENK Clark argues that this is Hilton's
Speaker 1: way of reclaiming Shakespeare so that his work should not
Speaker 1: be quote the property of the dominant classes, to which
Speaker 1: others may be granted conditional access, but a common resource
Speaker 1: end quote. This struggle with, but also for the established
Speaker 1: canon of English literature can also be read as a
Speaker 1: struggle both for and against literary language. As Hilton writes
Speaker 1: his modern Caliban flouts all the accepted rules of writing,
Speaker 1: followed by a line from The Tempest quote you taught
Speaker 1: me a language, and my profit on it is I
Speaker 1: know how to curse end quote. Hilton is acknowledging that
Speaker 1: it's not just the text of the English literary canon
Speaker 1: that have been kept as the property of the dominant classes,
Speaker 1: but the very language of literature itself, regional working class
Speaker 1: accents and dialects were for a long time excluded from
Speaker 1: conventional ideas of what is literary. Against such a literary tradition,
Speaker 1: then Hilton could do nothing but flout its accepted rules.
Speaker 3: They are the nucleus of calibantrieks. Obviously really roughly written,
Speaker 3: just scribbled down account of Jack Hilton's early life, but
Speaker 3: he just got out, probably out of just boredom or
Speaker 3: desperation to express himself in some way in the notebook
Speaker 3: that he took along to a tutorial of a workingmen's
Speaker 3: educational association in Rochdale. In his writing at that point
Speaker 3: was purely way for him to vent the frustration of
Speaker 3: being bound over by the courts and prevented from making
Speaker 3: political speeches. So he started to write more and developed
Speaker 3: this fragment of the encouragement of Johnason Murray from the Fiadelphia,
Speaker 3: who asked him to turn it into an entry in
Speaker 3: the journal, which he did. He tied it up a
Speaker 3: little bit Middleton Murray edited it and it became one
Speaker 3: of the most impactful, popular unique entries in the magazine
Speaker 3: of that period, and then a publisher that had links
Speaker 3: to the journal, Cobden Sanderson, approached Hilton at the behest
Speaker 3: of of Generald to murray to turn this entry into
Speaker 3: develop it into a longer book, a debut novel. If
Speaker 3: you're reading it out loud, you really tell that the
Speaker 3: energy of the text transforms according to the meter that
Speaker 3: Hilton writes it in. And the point right this is
Speaker 3: most obvious is it's often at the end of chapters,
Speaker 3: particularly the end of the last chapter, where he breaks
Speaker 3: off from his I would say, is that in his
Speaker 3: normal style of writing in the book, But there really
Speaker 3: is no normal for one normal style of writing in
Speaker 3: this book. He breaks off from from one approach to
Speaker 3: this new approach based on a sort of hidden meter,
Speaker 3: but just climbs and climb in energy as it goes.
Speaker 3: In the monologue at this point is is a toast
Speaker 3: to you know, here's to you, mister landlord, here's to you,
Speaker 3: mister bootstrapper, here's to you the working man of England.
Speaker 3: It's it's like five or so big paragraphs of text,
Speaker 3: the effect of which you can only really get it
Speaker 3: by reading it out loud and reading it directly as
Speaker 3: a follow on from a previous start of a chapter,
Speaker 3: and obviously he would have learned about meters from I
Speaker 3: think he read a lot about speech making, about the
Speaker 3: sort of theory of varration, because you have to remember
Speaker 3: this was the main challenge. But him and his mates
Speaker 3: had set themselves when they went to the library to
Speaker 3: learn how to make political speeches. They'd sort of read
Speaker 3: I guess the guidebooks, probably like Victorian guidebooks, maybe even earlier,
Speaker 3: on how to make good speeches, which would have introduced
Speaker 3: them to concepts and to the various different options to use.
Speaker 3: And so I think that's kind of the biggest influence
Speaker 3: on the form of the text. It really is such
Speaker 3: a unique creation, and it's unique because of he didn't
Speaker 3: have access to the kinds of writing that you may
Speaker 3: have in a different world used to give his own
Speaker 3: writing more of a recognizable form.
Speaker 4: And also he didn't.
Speaker 3: Have the sort of a motivation to follow any form
Speaker 3: because he wasn't writing to be recognized as a writer.
Speaker 4: And so we have the biggest influence his.
Speaker 3: Sort of start, the sort of the origins of his
Speaker 3: creative output being in speechmaking, and the understanding of me
Speaker 3: to v picked up for that purpose.
Speaker 1: Hilton's writing was widely appreciated in nineteen thirties literary circles,
Speaker 1: not just by John Middleton Murray of the Adelphi, but
Speaker 1: also a number of other highly respected literary figures. The
Speaker 1: famous poet W. H. Jordan, for example, described Hilton as
Speaker 1: quote the finest writer of them all end quote and
Speaker 1: praised what he called the books magnificent moby dick rhetoric.
Speaker 1: But the most famous of Hilton's literary supporters was probably
Speaker 1: George Orwell. Interestingly, the two of them had actually met
Speaker 1: previously as part of their political activism.
Speaker 3: When he and his mate set up this chapter of
Speaker 3: the National Unemployed Workers Movement in Rochdale, it brought them
Speaker 3: into contact with the Independent Labourer, which was undergoing a
Speaker 3: big sort of I guess crisis really in the Northwest
Speaker 3: where many of its members were in the early thirties.
Speaker 3: And this is quite important because it potentially is what
Speaker 3: brought Jack Hilton into contact with another key figure from Viodelphi,
Speaker 3: potentially even before Hilton had been contacted by John Milton.
Speaker 3: A fragment from the Notebook, and that's George Orwell. Over time,
Speaker 3: Eric Blair, who was up north for the founding conference
Speaker 3: of the Independent Socialist Party, which was a sort of
Speaker 3: northwest breakaway from the ILP, and Hilton was at this
Speaker 3: conference in Manchester and would have met some of the
Speaker 3: figures from Fiadelphi through this and certainly another writer called
Speaker 3: Jack Common, I believe was he first came into contact
Speaker 3: with Hilton at this point.
Speaker 1: There are a couple of groups and names here that
Speaker 1: might need some explaining. So the Independent Labor Party was
Speaker 1: a British political party that predated the main Labour Party,
Speaker 1: then later affiliated and eventually merged into it. The ILP
Speaker 1: was generally to the left of the mainstream Labour Party.
Speaker 1: The Independent Socialist Party was a short lived splinter from
Speaker 1: the ILP, which had Hilton's native Lancashire as its base.
Speaker 1: Jack Common, meanwhile, was a working class from Newcastle in
Speaker 1: the northeast of England. Common worked at the Adelphi and
Speaker 1: went on to write a number of books, most famously
Speaker 1: his autobiographical debut novel Kidder's Luck Anyway. Orwell was also
Speaker 1: a big fan, writing that Hilton had quote a considerable
Speaker 1: literary gift. End quote for Orwell, Hilton embodied the quote
Speaker 1: humorous courage, the fearful realism and the utter imperviousness to
Speaker 1: middle class ideals which characterizes the best type of industrial
Speaker 1: worker end quote. Furthermore, Hilton also had a hand in
Speaker 1: the evolution of Allwell's famous piece of Depression era and
Speaker 1: non fiction, The Road to Wigan Pier.
Speaker 3: In the early conferences they attended in Manchester around the
Speaker 3: time of the founding of the Independent Socialist Party in
Speaker 3: the Northwest. But they would have come across each other,
Speaker 3: and maybe Hilton remembered Orwell, but Orwell didn't really remember
Speaker 3: Hilton or what happened after that was Orwell was commissioned
Speaker 3: by his publisher to write a sort of documentary work
Speaker 3: about conditions for the working class in the North of England,
Speaker 3: and he turned to his network of friends that he
Speaker 3: had through Fiodelphi and the ILP slash isp and but
Speaker 3: one of the names that was given to him to
Speaker 3: sort of use as a first port of call for
Speaker 3: getting a sort of advantage point on where we would
Speaker 3: be useful to go was Jack Hilton. So a few
Speaker 3: of Allwill's contacts told him to go and to write
Speaker 3: to Jack Hilton asking him if it would be possible
Speaker 3: to come and live with him in Rochdale for I
Speaker 3: think a period of like a month or so to
Speaker 3: structure of a book that he'd been commissioned to write
Speaker 3: around the experiences of the Rochdale mill workers. Now, the
Speaker 3: story of Jack's response to it is fascinating. It says
Speaker 3: a lot about the sort of cultural differences between a
Speaker 3: working lass man like Jack Hilton and someone of the
Speaker 3: background of all Well. Orwell was asking to come and
Speaker 3: stay with Hilton in his tiny little set of rooms
Speaker 3: like two rooms, where Hilton and his wife were living,
Speaker 3: and it was it was a bizarre request for someone
Speaker 3: like Hilton to be fielded, because it just wasn't a
Speaker 3: done thing to ask to stay in someone's house when
Speaker 3: that house was so small, and when Hilton himself was
Speaker 3: out working for most of the day, and so Orwell
Speaker 3: would have been left alone in the house with Hilton's wife,
Speaker 3: which was it would have been something it just never
Speaker 3: happened in the community. But Hilton lived in to have
Speaker 3: like a male visitor staying at home where it's just just.
Speaker 4: Him and your wife.
Speaker 3: And Hilton said this to him in his letter back
Speaker 3: and said, you know, I can't host you. Maybe, but
Speaker 3: maybe didn't sort of emphasize how much of a weird request.
Speaker 3: It was, I guess for him to have. He did, however,
Speaker 3: recommend to or Weell to go to Wigan for Veril
Speaker 3: good Folk, for Wigan colligues is. I think Harry puts
Speaker 3: him and he even gave him some contacts to people
Speaker 3: to write to in Wigan. And I believe it was
Speaker 3: one of those contacts who either was able to host
Speaker 3: or Well or to put him in touch with the
Speaker 3: place he ended up staying, which was above a tripe
Speaker 3: shop in Wigan. Now Orwell went to Wigan and did
Speaker 3: his investigation, and then what resulted was for Rosewig and Peter,
Speaker 3: a copy of which made its way to Hilton.
Speaker 1: Hilton, however, did not think much of what went on
Speaker 1: to become one of Allwell's most celebrated works.
Speaker 3: He was aghast, to be honest, he was very It's
Speaker 3: a really difficult thing to explain his response because I
Speaker 3: think at first on behalf of the people documented in
Speaker 3: this book. He was insulted by the emphasis but all
Speaker 3: Well placed on the smell and the lack of hygiene,
Speaker 3: and how these people would go to the toya and
Speaker 3: not wash their hands, and how breath stank, and how
Speaker 3: the smell of the tripe shop below and just critical
Speaker 3: little nitpicking of their personal hygiene in a situation where
Speaker 3: they actually had no running what and no money for
Speaker 3: soap and stuff like that. It made Hilton think that
Speaker 3: basically what we had done is not much better. Or
Speaker 3: Well had taken no more sort of care, to be
Speaker 3: quite respectful, than a wildlife documentarian would take in writing
Speaker 3: about the habits and lives of apes. It was as
Speaker 3: if he was making a sort of taxonomous study of
Speaker 3: this community without taking into account of that these were
Speaker 3: people that he was writing about in some ways with
Speaker 3: such derision and just I guess rudeness. Really, it was
Speaker 3: no other way to put it. But that said, what
Speaker 3: or Well was attempting to do enamored him to Hilton,
Speaker 3: and what grew out of this dismissal of the road
Speaker 3: compare on the part of Hilton was a sort of
Speaker 3: respect for the fact that this Exitonian old Etonian ex
Speaker 3: officer type, as he puts it, this lanky, well spoken,
Speaker 3: teetotal because guy who was completely detached in all of
Speaker 3: his characteristics from the kind of people who went to study.
Speaker 3: But he'd made an effort to go and study this
Speaker 3: community because he did care. He did genuinely want to
Speaker 3: communicate their conditions of life to his middle class leadership.
Speaker 3: I think Hilton recognized that this was an impossible challenge
Speaker 3: for a man like Eric Blair to undertake in a
Speaker 3: respectful way. But nonetheless he was impressed that he'd gone
Speaker 3: off and tried to do it. So he yeah, I
Speaker 3: can't think of the exact phrase, but he did say
Speaker 3: a few years afterwards, you know that it shows that
Speaker 3: this or Well it was there was something special.
Speaker 1: Indeed, while Hilton and all Well stayed in touch and
Speaker 1: in many ways were quite close to each other, Hilton
Speaker 1: was no fan of the Road to Wigan Pier. Writing
Speaker 1: some years later, Hilton said that while Orwell quote went
Speaker 1: to Wigan, he might as well have stayed away end quote,
Speaker 1: as what he ultimately produced was quote color that wasn't
Speaker 1: worth the paint mixes end quote. Hilton's main issue with
Speaker 1: all Wor's texts was its failure to understand poverty from
Speaker 1: the inside. One example that Hilton gives is Alway's description
Speaker 1: of mister Brooker, the keeper of a tripe shop and
Speaker 1: lodging house, as he carries a chamber pot full of
Speaker 1: excrement which he gripped with his thumb well over the rim.
Speaker 1: The same thumb, or Will points out that touches the
Speaker 1: swages mister Brooker gives to his lodgers. In response, Hilton
Speaker 1: writes that when he's carried chamber pots downstairs, he also
Speaker 1: has always gripped the pot with his thumb well over
Speaker 1: the rim. As Hilton explains, quote one inexperienced in pots
Speaker 1: should get hold of one, feel its weight, and carry
Speaker 1: it end quote.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 1: Hilton does acknowledge Orwell's text as one of very few
Speaker 1: genuine attempts by upper class writers to describe working class life.
Speaker 1: In his opinion, it fails due to all Well's distance
Speaker 1: from the experiences he's trying to depict. This is one
Speaker 1: of the key differences between all Worll's text and Caliban Shrieks.
Speaker 3: As Jack explains, now, in terms of the similarities of
Speaker 3: the Road Twig and Pare and Caliban Shreeksbey are none whatsoever.
Speaker 3: They are totally different. It could not be more different
Speaker 3: in a way in their sort of guiding values and form,
Speaker 3: and you know what they're attempting to get across, in
Speaker 3: their relationship to the people form the subjects of these
Speaker 3: two works. They are so different, and they say if
Speaker 3: Hilton had been commissioned to write something similar, he would
Speaker 3: have knowlt it. Either at this point in his life,
Speaker 3: he wouldn't be able to write a documentary sort of
Speaker 3: study of working class people in the North of England
Speaker 3: because the sort of enlightenment idea of writing a sort
Speaker 3: of objective study of such working class communities wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been something that Hilton could could have done, because you know,
Speaker 3: he was of these communities. Yeah, that's an important thing
Speaker 3: to know.
Speaker 1: Here, Jack is about to read another passage from Calabana Shrieks.
Speaker 1: This passage focuses on Hilton's time as a public speaker
Speaker 1: with the National Unemployed Workers Movement and in particular the
Speaker 1: fate of Bill, a fellow unemployed activist in Rochdale. To
Speaker 1: this passage, he should get an idea of just how
Speaker 1: different it is from the top down in more ways
Speaker 1: than one. Style of the road to wig and Pier.
Speaker 3: Bill was ever trying to improve. He started to swallow
Speaker 3: a dictionary page by page. Somehowever, he could not stop.
Speaker 3: It was words, words, words. He was sitting in the
Speaker 3: library hours upon hours writing and pronouncing the words. Then
Speaker 3: at night he would deliver himself. What a strain he
Speaker 3: put on himself, underfed, rushing from inarticulateness to eloquence, mastering
Speaker 3: the fluency of speech, the meaning of words, words, words,
Speaker 3: More and more bills swallowed and delivered. The task was
Speaker 3: too mighty. He nearly conquered. Then snap, he became potty.
Speaker 3: He flew off at a tangent. He became a reincarnation
Speaker 3: of a French revolutionary, made the hottest speech of his speeches.
Speaker 3: Years of starvation, consuming of words for fire in his soul,
Speaker 3: his mind became unbalanced. He left us in a fit
Speaker 3: of derangement. He was done for, moody and melancholy, never
Speaker 3: again normal, sometimes walking excessively brisk, with eyes staring vacantly
Speaker 3: about him. Later he was running for purloining a motor car.
Speaker 3: Poor Bill, the whitest man I've known, more harmless than Christ.
Speaker 3: A life celibate, possessing no vice, Bill of all people.
Speaker 3: In prison there he started to chew the printed regulations.
Speaker 3: There they found he was gone. After treatment, he returned
Speaker 3: to Rochdale a strange man, his mind far away from everything,
Speaker 3: walking about with eyes that never seemed to see a head,
Speaker 3: always looking upwards in a nervous habit of continually pulling
Speaker 3: his neck above his collar. Later, he again, in an
Speaker 3: act of unaccountableness, purloined another car, drove it for about
Speaker 3: a mile, got out and lay on the grass. The
Speaker 3: police searching for the car found him. He was arrested,
Speaker 3: muttering there's something doing. He came up in front of
Speaker 3: the bench. They did not know him, nor his strangeness.
Speaker 3: The evidence was convincing, previous conviction mentioned and low a
Speaker 3: prison medical view of him. It showed him to be
Speaker 3: an artful dodger. He put the loopiness on sowers to
Speaker 3: get off easily. For bench, acting on the evidence before them,
Speaker 3: administered justice according to their consciences.
Speaker 4: He went down.
Speaker 3: It may sound of no account but knowing Bill as
Speaker 3: I know him, nothing will convince me of the criminality
Speaker 3: of his acts. The poor blighter had gone potty, poverty,
Speaker 3: and overstudy of the causes. He is a case for
Speaker 3: treatment instead of punishment. Humanity may seem as though wis
Speaker 3: in powers of endurance are limitless, but many reach that
Speaker 3: point when too great an effort sends them over the line.
Speaker 3: Often in the case of exceptional beautiful innocence, they become irresponsible.
Speaker 3: Bill came out in a very brief period, committed the
Speaker 3: same act purloined another car. This time he gets the
Speaker 3: assizes eighteen months, poor Bill, Reader, I cannot dwell on it.
Speaker 3: There may be some mistake. Superficial judgment can commit mistakes.
Speaker 3: I know Bill was strange. He was once potty cause
Speaker 3: poverty and overstudy. Is he now saying?
Speaker 4: Eighteen months? Hard Bill?
Speaker 3: The cleanest liver I knew?
Speaker 1: In this heartbreaking passage, Hilton returns to that theme of
Speaker 1: the working class struggle for literary language. Like Hilton himself,
Speaker 1: Bill is another caliban, teaching himself the words words words
Speaker 1: of prosperos language, a language from which, by virtue of
Speaker 1: his class, he has always been excluded. Unlike Hilton, however,
Speaker 1: the struggle for that language, combined with the hardships of
Speaker 1: the Great Depression, proved too much for Bill. But this
Speaker 1: passage also brings us back to that fundamental difference between
Speaker 1: Hilton's book and a documentary work like Allwell's Road to
Speaker 1: Wig and Pier. Hilton isn't observing Bill from a distance
Speaker 1: as someone going through an experience that's completely alien. When
Speaker 1: Hilton writes, reader, I cannot dwell on it, he's struggling
Speaker 1: to retell the suffering of a friend, struggling not just
Speaker 1: because the memory itself is painful, but because Bill's suffering
Speaker 1: could just as easily have been his own.
Speaker 3: At our propaganda meetings, we at first only got little
Speaker 3: lad and a dog. If our audience increased, it was
Speaker 3: generally hostile collections We dare not ask for. We could
Speaker 3: not speak for nuts. We were badly clobbered. We had
Speaker 3: not that respectable appearance.
Speaker 4: We were raw and very green.
Speaker 3: Still we had within our breasts what people call inspiration.
Speaker 3: This was viurge viewerage, out of which all lost and
Speaker 3: hopeless causes get the sustenance to continue. Laughed at and ridiculed,
Speaker 3: we were dubbed workshires or idiots and what convey dos.
Speaker 3: Slowly and surely we improved, improved to be able to
Speaker 3: get a platform perform the crude rudiments of stating our case.
Speaker 3: It became our existence. Bill would be what we termed
Speaker 3: coming out. That would mean he had spoken some words
Speaker 3: continuously for fifteen minutes. Joe would get confidence to be
Speaker 3: the chairman. Frank would be able to conclude with a
Speaker 3: peroration about the good things that could be if only
Speaker 3: we got together. Gradually, we got better, got wise to
Speaker 3: for many little tricks of a talkie game, how not
Speaker 3: to get hoarse, how not to say it all at once,
Speaker 3: how to dress it up, humor it. Get our listeners
Speaker 3: a little grieved about misfortunes, indignant at how they were treated.
Speaker 3: Get them optimistic, feeling that something could be done, would
Speaker 3: be done, and must be done. We grew. We whitewashed
Speaker 3: the flags with our slogans as a form of publicity
Speaker 3: to awaken our fellow sufferers. We painted our posters, became
Speaker 3: our own sandwich meny lucky, luck out.
Speaker 1: That's all we've got time for in this episode. Join
Speaker 1: us in part two, where we will discuss Jack Hilton's
Speaker 1: writing in relation to some of the other working class
Speaker 1: novels of the time. We'll also talk more about his
Speaker 1: later life and continuing relationship to George Orwell, his struggles
Speaker 1: with middle class editors and publishers, and how his writing
Speaker 1: was almost lost forever had it not been for quite
Speaker 1: an amazing series of events. We also have a bonus
Speaker 1: episode where our interviewee Jack Chadwick reads and discusses more
Speaker 1: pass from Caliban Shrieks. That bonus episode will be available
Speaker 1: soon exclusively for our supporters on Patreon. It is only
Speaker 1: support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make
Speaker 1: these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do
Speaker 1: think about joining us at patreon dot com slash working
Speaker 1: Class History link in the show notes. In return for
Speaker 1: your support, you get early access to content as well
Speaker 1: as ad free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch and more.
Speaker 1: And if you can't spare the cash, absolutely no problem.
Speaker 1: Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give
Speaker 1: us a five star review on your favorite podcast app.
Speaker 1: Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast
Speaker 1: possible special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Nick
Speaker 1: Williams and Old Norm. Our theme tune is Bella Chau.
Speaker 1: Thanks for permission to use it from Disky del sale.
Speaker 1: You can buy it or stream it on the links
Speaker 1: in the show notes. This episode was edited by Jesse French. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode and
Speaker 1: thanks for listening.
Speaker 2: Mister Fielded BiONO Moto Linia
Speaker 3: Mister Fiordedo Moto be liniverda Montoli