Chapter Ten

The World Unvisited

What we now call “cultural studies” can be traced back to George Orwell’s classic essay “Boys’ Weeklies” (1939). Orwell was one of the first intellectuals to subject popular culture—in this case the Gem, the Magnet, and other story papers for boys—to serious critical analysis, focusing on their political implications. These magazines, read largely by working-class children, specialized in public school stories suffused with a frolicsome Toryism, and otherwise oblivious to the political storms of the past twenty-five years. Orwell concluded that the Gem and Magnet had successfully indoctrinated their readers in the ideology

of a rather exceptionally stupid member of the Navy League in the year 1910. . . . Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last for ever.¹

Since then, historians and literary scholars have become increasingly obsessed with the ideologies of race, class, empire, and gender embedded in all kinds of texts, canonical literature as well as popular magazines. According to this new conventional wisdom, a whole generation was converted to imperialism by the novels of G. A. Henty, children’s magazines, and classroom propaganda. “At school, in church groups, in recreational associations—at almost every turn boys were exposed to the imperial idea,” observes Patrick Dunae. “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century most British youths were acutely aware of their imperial heritage. They could scarcely have been otherwise.”²

In reality, they often were otherwise. The majority of those youths were working-class, and they seem to have been strikingly unaware of their empire. There is no denying that textbooks, popular literature, and later the cinema were supersaturated with imperialist propaganda.³ But did these messages get through to their intended audience? Too often, those who examine literature for evidence of imperialism, racism, or male supremacy assume that these values were unproblematically transmitted to its readers, as if literature were a kind of political drug, with predictable and consistent effects. In fact, the ideological impact of popular literature is far more complicated and often fairly surprising.

An illustration of that point is offered by Guy Aldred (b. 1886), a socialist anarchist who devoted his political life to denouncing other socialists and anarchists as sellouts. William Morris, Bernard Shaw, the SDF, the ILP, the Soviets—all had betrayed the true Marxist faith. So had Marx, for that matter. (“In practice he deviated badly very often. I would not consider him a sound revolutionist.”)⁴ Remarkably, one of the very few unblemished heroes in Aldred’s pantheon was Nick Carter, an American dime novel detective who tracked down criminals in a thousand stories published between 1886 and 1990.⁵ “My interest in the exploits of Nick Carter was intense and so thoroughly had I studied him that I could have written his biography,” he asserted. “Nick Carter kept me sane and certainly did me no harm. It did not make me believe in prison or crime . . . . I merely saw in Nick Carter a champion of Right. I idealised the tales and adventures. I am quite sure that this reading made nothing but a good impression on me . . . . It was good fun, kept my mind healthy and clear and saved me from much hypocrisy.”

How could one worship such a pillar of law and order and remain an incorruptible radical? Aldred had no difficulty explaining it: “We often get out of our reading what we put into it.”⁶ The same uncertainty principle was at work in that vast genre of pulp fiction that glorified the English public school and the British Empire. To a remarkable extent, these stories did transmit a public school ethos to Board school children, but they generally failed to make them imperialists. Even after a half-century of unrelenting indoctrination, most working people knew little of the Empire and cared less. This case study illustrates, once again, that reader response depends entirely on the frame of the audience, which in turn depends on their education and their other reading experiences.

Greyfriars’ Children

Public school stories were a staple of children’s papers, and they had an enormous readership. Boys of England, founded in 1866, within a few years had an estimated circulation of 250,000, and gave rise to a number of imitations, all of which reworked the themes and values of Tom Brown’s School Days.⁷ In 1879 the Boy’s Own Paper had a print run of 200,000 and an audience that cut across class lines. Correspondents reported that it was read by students at Wellington College, half the pupils at a Birmingham grammar school, and sixty-eight out of eighty-four boys working at a Scottish branch of the Technical Department of the Post Office.⁸ By 1940, one of every eight books read by boys whose education was due to terminate at age fourteen was a school story. Among girls, the proportion was one in four—well ahead of love stories, which accounted for less than 10 percent.⁹

Beginning in 1907, the celebrated Frank Richards stories in the Gem and Magnet were tremendously popular. But how successful were they in communicating conservative values down the social scale? That question can only be answered by consulting the memoirs of Richards’s fans. It may be objected that none of them would say outright “These stories indoctrinated me in bourgeois cultural hegemony, and I’m a better man for it”—but that, in effect, is what some of them did say. London hatter Frederick Willis asserted that they taught him to be “very loyal” to the headmaster and teachers at his old Board school:

We were great readers of school stories, from which we learnt that boys of the higher class boarding schools were courageous, honourable, and chivalrous, and steeped in the traditions of the school and loyalty to the country. We tried to mould our lives according to this formula. Needless to say, we fell very short of this desirable end, and I attributed our failure to the fact that we were only board school boys and could never hope to emulate those of finer clay. Nevertheless, the constant effort did us a lot of good. We thought British people were the salt of the earth. . . . The object of our education was to train us to become honest, God-fearing, useful workmen, and I have no complaints against this very sensible arrangement.¹⁰

Edward Ezard (b. c. 1900) admitted that he and his friends read the Gem and Magnet for “the public school glamour.” They thoroughly absorbed all the stock phrases and attitudes associated with Greyfriars, Frank Richards’s mythical school, conducting playground fights strictly according to Marquess of Queensberry rules. The headmaster was “firm but just and he had our wholesome respect.” One teacher “gave we lads from that poorish neighbourhood a pride in themselves, so that we carried ourselves well anywhere and wouldn’t for all the world let him or the school down.” If they did, then “caning round the school” was clearly “a salutary experience.”¹¹ (Of course boys’ papers also authorized high jinks, within limits: Richard Hoggart claimed they inspired him to throw a stink-bomb in grammar school.)¹² For Paul Fletcher (b. 1912), a colliery winder’s son in a Lancashire mining town, the Magnet’s appeal lay precisely in that “code of schoolboy honour.” “Although I never realised it at the time, it proved to influence me more about right and wrong than any other book,” he recalled. “And that includes The Bible.” After all, the Greyfriars code “was as well defined as the scriptures [were] nebulous.” Writing in 1972, Fletcher conceded that some,

rejoicing under the name of intellectuals, would find it difficult to stifle their mirth at yarns which had a beginning and an end, and were completely free of drugs, dolls, crude Americanisms, and lavatory wall adjectives. But they don’t matter. Harry Wharton and the Famous Five set an example of how to “play the game” (and here there will be a slight pause for merriment by some soccer players and their followers), and their code of honour, effete as it may seem now, was something which society as a whole could now do with.¹³

Where no other code existed, Frank Richards supplied one. A. J. Mills, a charlady’s son, recalled that his teachers made a pathetic attempt to teach an honor system, but “the nearest any of us got to knowing about the honor system was to read the Magnet to find out how the other half lived.”¹⁴ Robert Roberts described this phenomenon in wonderful detail:

The standards of conduct observed by Harry Wharton and his friends at Greyfriars set social norms to which schoolboys and some young teenagers strove spasmodically to conform. Fights—ideally, at least—took place according to Greyfriars rules: no striking an opponent when he was down, no kicking, in fact no weapon but the manly fist. Through the Old School we learned to admire guts, integrity, tradition; we derided the glutton, the American and the French. We looked with contempt upon the sneak and the thief. Greyfriars gave us one moral code, life another, and a fine muddle we made of it all. I knew boys so avid for current numbers of the Magnet and Gem that they would trek on a weekday to the city railway station to catch the bulk arrival from London and buy first copies from the bookstall. One lad among us adopted a permanent jerky gait, this in his attempt to imitate Bob Cherry’s “springy, athletic stride.” Self-consciously we incorporated weird slang into our own oath-sprinkled banter—“Yarooh!” “My sainted aunt!” “Leggo!” and a dozen others. The Famous Five stood for us as young knights, sans peur et sans reproche. Any idea that Harry Wharton could possibly have been guilty of “certain practices” would have filled us with shame. He, like the rest, remained completely asexual, unsullied by those earthy cares of adolescence that troubled us. And that was how we wanted it.

With nothing in our own school that called for love or allegiance, Greyfriars became for some of us our true Alma Mater, to whom we felt bound by a dreamlike loyalty. The “mouldering pile,” one came to believe, had real existence: of that boys assured one another. We placed it vaguely in the southern counties—somewhere between Winchester and Harrow. It came as a curious shock to one who revered the Old School when it dawned upon him that he himself was a typical sample of the “low cads” so despised by all at Greyfriars. Class consciousness had broken through at last. Over the years these simple tales conditioned the thought of a whole generation of boys. The public school ethos, distorted into myth and sold among us weekly in penny numbers, for good or ill, set ideals and standards. This our own tutors, religious and secular, had signally failed to do. In the final estimate it may well be found that Frank Richards during the first quarter of the twentieth century had more influence on the mind and outlook of young working-class England than any other single person, not excluding Baden-Powell.¹⁵

Much as the actual public schools created a common culture for affluent children, public school stories created a common frame of morality, ritual, and literary references that enabled working-class children to socialize with one another. “We knew the same families in a way,” as one Glasgow boy put it.¹⁶ “How my eight year old mind boggled at the heroic antics of Harry Wharton and Tom Merry,” recalled the son of a Camberwell builder’s laborer, “and how determined I was to emulate their true blue behaviour by my conduct in the more prosaic atmosphere of St. George’s [Church School], even if I sometimes wore no shoes and the arse was out of my trousers.”¹⁷ These readers were entirely aware that they could never hope to enter the world of Greyfriars School, as the son of a Walworth telephone linesman noted:

They were the sons of rich fee-paying parents; many of our parents were on the dole! They had a splendid sports ground with a “Pav”—we managed with an asphalt-covered yard and an open shed. They did prep and attended lectures in exotic things like French, biology and maths. We had lessons in “the three Rs” and a few other things and were sometimes given homework. In case of misdemeanour, they were given “lines”, “six of the best” in the Master’s study or, in extreme cases, expelled. We didn’t have the luxury of expulsion: there might have been a queue for it. . . . Our homework competed for a place on the kitchen table; they had “studies.” What was a “study”? This was an idea so foreign to us that we didn’t know how to pronounce the word.

And yet, he added, “There was no envy on our part.” Quite the contrary, “to paraphrase the Indian pal of Harry Wharton and Bob Cherry, the interestfulness was terrific!”¹⁸ And where class resentment did exist, the stories could act as a salve. Joseph Stamper, a Lancashire ironmoulder’s son, might publicly ridicule private school boys as “Jane-Anns.” But privately, in what he called an act of “frustration-compensatory-escapism,” he projected himself into the Fifth Form at Greyfriars.¹⁹ Bermondsey boys saw no inconsistency in taunting actual Eton and Harrow students they occasionally encountered in the street (“Does yer muv’ver know yer out?” “Where did yer git that ’at?”) while devouring the antics of Billy Bunter in the Magnet.²⁰ Lionel Fraser (b. 1895), the son of domestic servants, dreamt of Oxbridge but had to settle for a commercial course at Pitman’s School. He certainly got on, rising into the higher altitudes of merchant banking, but he always regretted the lack of university education. Whatever resentment he may have felt was mollified by the Gem and Magnet, which “brought brightness into my rather humdrum existence giving me an insight into the hitherto unknown life of upper-class children.” Making sense of the school slang and rituals was not easy, but Tom Merry and Harry Wharton “became my idols and I longed to be like them. They behaved themselves so admirably, they were so clean-limbed, they set a high tone, yet were strong and brave, never bumptious or priggish, and they commanded my respect and admiration.” They also produced a contented boy who loved the Boy Scouts and unquestioningly accepted the Church of England.²¹

Charwoman’s son Bryan Forbes “devoured every word, believed every word” of the Magnet and Gem, “surrendering to a world I never expected to join.” As an adult he appreciated that they rehashed the same plot week after week, all to buttress “our indestructible class system.” Nevertheless, he reviled Orwell’s “politically slanted hatchet job.” It was Richards who “won the contest hands down,” Richards who “was the first author to cement my love of the printed word.” As far as Forbes was concerned, Orwell’s essay was only the first in a long series of “literary papal bulls,” usually

issued by some self-appointed arbitress, signposting crimes that were never intended and which young readers would never suspect of their own accord. Every so often these crabbed (and I suspect childless) pundits fire a salvo in the direction of Enid Blyton; dark Freudian and racist undertones are unearthed for the unwary. The shot scatters, peppering the likes of A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame—the young, we are told, will be in danger of having their values corrupted for life by indiscriminate exposure to such works. All balls, of course.

That arbitress might have replied that Frank Richards had done his job more thoroughly than even Orwell imagined: as a television director, Forbes worked for the Conservative Party to refurbish the public images of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher. Forbes also endorsed corporal punishment: if he was caned at school, it must have been for a good reason. “My own nefarious exploits included tumbling through the skylight of the girls’ changing room and riding an upright piano down an incline until it crashed straight through the door of the headmaster’s study, there to disintegrate.”²²

Those incidents sound suspiciously like episodes in a Frank Richards story. If Forbes was consciously or unconsciously fictionalizing here, that shows how far Richards influenced his readers and moulded their treatment of reality. On the other hand, if he really did toboggan on a piano and so forth, that might help to explain Richards’s popularity: in certain important ways, his stories captured the essence of school life (pranks and all) even as it was experienced by working-class boys. Certainly those boys were able to project themselves into the world of Greyfriars. As one of them wrote, “the exploits of Tom Merry and Harry Wharton were better than the ‘comics’ of today [1979], in that we could at least imagine ourselves as the heroes in the stories.”²³ It was much easier to identify with Billy Bunter than the Incredible Hulk, if only because the fans of the former probably attended schools that had much in common with Greyfriars. Edward Balne’s school memoirs are filled with rosy recollections of “spacious playing fields, country lanes, extensive farm lands, which included a wide variety of fruit trees, a well-kept cricket ground and a football pitch; the School Band practice room . . ., a spacious swimming bath, . . . the school church—a surprisingly fine building,” as well as a dedicated headmaster who offered the brightest boys special tutelage in his office. Reading this, one has to remind oneself that Balne, an orphan who never knew any of his relatives, is describing a London Poor Law school at the turn of the century. He knew well that the poor “were at a great disadvantage from an educational point of view,” and he did not deny that school discipline was strict even by the standards of the day. But he thoroughly absorbed the conservatism that the school inculcated, and came to harbor unlimited contempt for the progressive education of the 1970s.²⁴

When Thomas Burke was sent to a West Country orphanage, he anticipated a school like those in the boys’ papers, and he was not disappointed:

In retrospect I see it as others see Winchester or Rugby or Westminster, and can never pass a certain station beyond the Gloucester boundary without a gush of sentiment. Except for its uniform and its drills, there was little to distinguish it from the public school. It had its own tone and tradition, and its own slang, and it had much to give that was good. . . . For four years it fed me and clothed me and trained me, and while the discipline was a constant fret, I recognise that they had a mixed crowd to deal with, and that it was necessary. . . . They had called it a happy family, and it was. . . . They gave me a school to look back upon with affection, a contact with tradition: old walls and lighted windows that enclose the faint perfume of our mornings. Their buildings are something more than buildings; their masters something more than men with degrees; and if their system hurt me in places, it armoured me in others, and set me on the right way. For me it was at first hard, but it helped by hardening me. It taught me to cultivate a hide and preserve my soul intact from the crowd. In short, they built me; and in going back to the old school—a sentimental indulgence which every man grants himself once—I went back to distant spires and antique towers, and wondered how I could ever have been unhappy there.²⁵

When he entered the House of Lords, veteran miner and Board school graduate Bernard Taylor (b. 1895) could join his colleagues in the same kind of nostalgia, recalling with pride the inspiring headmaster, the lifetime friendships among the old boys, the “strong school patriotism,” the football and cricket rivalries—everything, in fact, except the green playing fields, which in Taylor’s case were asphalt.²⁶ “Who doesn’t remember the absorbing tales from Greyfriars School,” a railwayman’s son (b. 1907) reminisced. “These boys went on for years, and never went past the Remove, and never grew up, for which we were truly grateful.” That message was daily reinforced by the headmaster of his Walthamstow school, whose motto was “Play up, play up, and play the game.”²⁷ A council school in the slums of Sheffield taught the same maxim: “Even today,” one alumnus recalled in 1979, “it still holds a proud place for me.”²⁸ One grimy Salford school sat next to a railway siding, and the pupils were constantly distracted by shunting trains and flurries of coal dust; but even there boys were required to wear Eton collars, and the respected headmaster (“a good sort, but very strict”) would give one to anyone who could not afford it.²⁹ According to Yorkshire journalist George Scott, a young fan of the Gem and Magnet, “that self-esteem which is supposedly acquired on the playing fields of Eton” could just as easily take root in “the back alleys and the stony recreation grounds, the gravel football pitches and our own peculiar and exclusive wall games played against the sides of houses with wickets or goals marked out in chalk.” Rugby men might pity him for his gritty childhood—or envy his early immersion in what they chose to call “real life”—but

when I recall the absorption of self into the games I played and even into the stories in those boys’ comics I cannot believe that my imagination was stunted in its growth. . . . Every child has in common the construction of a private world of fantasy, compounded of a variety of extravagant wishes which he can fulfil in his games. What we loosely call reality—meaning the bread and butter facts of life which are the burden and responsibility of parents—impinge upon a child’s life only lightly except in the most grievous circumstances. Unless poverty bears down so hardly upon a family that the child is forced to give up his dream-life for the real life of the pit or the factory, as in the early days of the industrial revolution, then there is little enough difference between the life of the prep.-school boy and the elementary school child.³⁰

Even a delinquent (b. 1910) happily recalled that “My favourite reading was of middle-class boys who attended ancient academies, threw Liddell and Scott’s lexicons at each other, and carried the public-school spirit into the most fantastic situations.” So when he was sent to an industrial school, he found it astonishingly familiar:

A two-storied red building, gabled and tiled, stood in a billow of green foliage, restful as a grazing cow. About it stretched an extensive demense of orchards, farm-land, chicken-runs and meadows. In a large playing field some boys were kicking about a football, and as the train passed another group came into view who were practising the jump across a sunken stream. In this brief glimpse there was nothing to suggest the grim and repressive institution I had feared; it was obviously a school, but a school, it seemed, of the idyllic sort one had read about in boys’ papers.

Later, at a Borstal, he got on famously because he was so clearly a Greyfriars type: “A spirited fellow, not too amenable to discipline, good in sports, ruthless in fights, hard-working and sociable. It will be seen that this tallies pretty well with the ‘Public School’ persona; and . . . this is what the Borstal authorities set out to impose.”³¹

One has to conclude that, in early twentieth-century Britain, there was a common schoolboy culture that largely (though of course not entirely) transcended class. The secret of Frank Richards’s success was that he uncannily understood that culture and was able to guide his readers through it. Louis Battye (b. 1923), the spastic child of former millworkers, was at first utterly bewildered by the Gem and Magnet, because he was being educated at home and had no school experience of any kind. The boys of Greyfriars and St. Jim’s

wore long trousers like men and most peculiar collars and jackets. The teachers, too, seemed very odd: they were all men and wore square hats and long black cloaks. And what strange things went on there! What queer lessons were taught! What on earth was Latin, for instance? And the customs, the caning and flogging and fighting, the inexplicable moral taboos (why was it bad to smoke and drink and play cards?—quite nice people came to the pub every day to do all three)! No wonder I was baffled.

But I persevered and eventually familiarised myself with the conventions of the form. I accepted Harry Wharton, Tom Merry and the other “decent chaps” as heroes, I learned to accept their standards as my own even when I couldn’t see the reason for them, I learned to hate the “cads” and “rotters” and laugh at Billy Bunter and Arthur Augustus D’Arcy, to fear Mr. Quelch and respect Dr. Holmes. I even began to wonder if the stories were actually true, and if they were I rather wished I could go to one or other of these schools, in spite of the thrashings, kickings and other personal violences I would have to suffer if I did. . . .

I have dwelt at some length on this peculiar mythology because it really did have a profound effect on my mental development. I continued to read the Gem and Magnet religiously until I was fourteen or fifteen, and from them I received what might be called the Schoolboy’s Code.

That code was, contrary to what one might expect, immensely useful to a poor and severely disabled child. It enabled him to get along with other children when he was sent to Heswall Hospital: “I had absorbed a certain amount of theoretical know-how on the business of living with boys from my Greyfriars and St. Jim’s training which helped me to avoid major gaffes, although on the surface the Boys’ Surgical Ward at Heswall hadn’t a great deal in common with those mythical academies.” Later, at the school for the handicapped at Chailey, this same code

was of great value in enabling me to settle down in what would otherwise have been a completely strange and bewildering society. True, Chailey was far from being Greyfriars, but at certain points there was sufficient resemblance for what I had learned of public school life to apply. To a certain degree I knew what to expect and what was expected of me. And what would otherwise have been a terrifying ordeal was made quite bearable.³²

Well before the Teddy Boys, school stories created a youth culture powerful enough to challenge parental authority. Though uniforms were not compulsory at her Exmouth council school, Patricia Beer wore hers with pride and immersed herself in girls’ school stories, particularly Ursula’s Last Term. “It was an addiction,” she confessed, and even temporary deprivation brought on “what must have been withdrawal symptoms.” Her mother dismissed them with the ultimate expression of parental contempt: “I could write that kind of thing myself.” They were both stunned when Patricia shot back, “Then why don’t you?” It was appallingly defiant behavior for a young girl in the 1930s, but “it never once occurred to me that my mother’s point of view about Ursula could embody any integrity or taste.” These stories, which strike us today as laughably wholesome, may have threatened working-class parents “because all the girls in them went away to boarding schools and were out of their mothers’ clutches. Certainly, I fervently wanted to go to boarding school myself and might well, after a period of conditioning to middle-class ways and speech, have been very happy there. Perhaps Mother sensed this wish and disposition.”³³ Angela Brazil inspired Kathleen Betterton (whose father operated a lift in the London Underground) to ascend the scholarship ladder to Christ’s Hospital in Hertford and thence to Oxford University. The Brazil stories, she wrote,

conjured up muddled visions of midnight picnics, sweet girl prefects, hockey, house-matches, and exploits that saved the honour of the school. It never occurred to me that Mother and Father might be hurt by my anxiety to leave home, or feel that in letting me go they were losing a part of me. With the heartless self-absorption of childhood I was longing for a different world, less circumscribed than the one I knew.³⁴

The fact that many parents banned such stories only enhanced their appeal for children. John Macadam (b. 1903) had to read them in secret and, forty years later, could still quote freely from them.³⁵ V. S. Pritchett furtively devoured the Gem and Magnet with a compositor’s son: both adopted Greyfriars nicknames and slang. Pritchett’s father eventually discovered them, burnt them in the fireplace, and ordered the boy to read Ruskin, though there was no Ruskin in the house. As far as the father was concerned, boys’ weeklies were pornography—and Pritchett later realized he was entirely right:

The crude illustrations, the dirty condition of the papers, indicated that they were pulp and sin. One page and I was entranced. I gobbled these stories as if I were eating pie or stuffing. To hell with poor self-pitying fellows like Oliver Twist; here were the cheerful rich. I craved for Greyfriars, that absurd Public School, as I craved for pudding. There the boys wore top-hats and tail-coats—Arthur Augustus D’Arcy, the toff, wore a monocle—they had feasts in their “studies”; they sent a pie containing a boot to the bounder of the Remove; they rioted; they never did a stroke of work. They “strolled” round “the Quad” and rich uncles tipped them a “fivah” which they spent on more food.³⁶

Though Orwell faulted Frank Richards for banishing sex from his stories, perhaps they were capable of a more suggestive reading. Amy Gomm, an electrician’s daughter, discovered the erotics of the text in some old Gems and Magnets she found in a cupboard. “What a joy to share my bed with Tom Merry and his chums, and that other band of derring-doers, Harry Wharton & Co. My excitement knew no bounds. My indiscretion was equally boundless.” When she told her parents about the papers, they naturally burned them.³⁷

Yet fathers often read comics with their children and absorbed the Greyfriars mythology.³⁸ After Dennis Marsden won an exhibition to St. Catherine’s College Cambridge his parents, solid Labour supporters,

found supreme happiness sitting on the Backs looking over the river and towards King’s College. For my father, Lord Mauleverer (of Billy Bunter and the Magnet) might have walked that lawn; Tom Brown must have been there, and the Fifth Form from St. Dominic’s. He had read The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green at Oxford, and saw that I had a “gyp” (as Verdant Green had a “scout”). He imagined how my gyp would shake his head and say (as Verdant Green’s scout always said), “College gents will do anything.” All I could say—and I said many bitter things—couldn’t convince my parents that that powerful Cambridge image of my father’s schoolboy reading wasn’t my Cambridge. “We’ll have to start learning to talk proper now,” my father would quip, not wholly joking. How I writhed when he asked me, not completely facetiously, how soon Lord Mauleverer was coming home with me! How I ranted when my parents and family listened to Union debates on the wireless, watched “our boat” in the Boat Race, or waited eagerly for “our team” to score in the Varsity Match! To no effect. Actually, the only Public-School friends of mine they met seemed to them comically distasteful. But they never lost their dream. I came slowly to accept that when I questioned it, just as when I expressed my doubts about a scientific future, they became frightened, hurt or puzzled, and said that I had a funny attitude to things.³⁹

Adolescent Propaganda

Though school stories appeared to be blatantly conservative, they were not always an effective vaccination against leftist politics. One could enjoy Frank Richards and still become a socialist or even a Communist. Walter Citrine won, as a Sunday school prize, a volume of school stories from the Captain, including one by P. G. Wodehouse. “The lady who gave this prize awakened in me a thirst for good literature,” eventually leading to the works of Karl Marx and his followers.⁴⁰ George Scott left school and the boys’ weeklies behind at fifteen: in barely a year he had absorbed enough Shaw, Wells, Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and (secondhand) Marx to lecture his parents on the evils of capitalism and to flirt with the Communist Party.⁴¹ C. H. Rolph, a member of the Left Book Club and later director of the New Statesman, felt Orwell had been terribly unfair: “I do not believe that any writer has ever given me greater pleasure than this incredibly many-sided man Frank Richards.”⁴² One of the Famous Five’s greatest fans, Harry Young (b. 1901), would become a leading organizer of the Communist Party. Their appeal, he concluded, was a matter of

sheer gut affluence and opulence. Christmas at Greyfriars; all those Puddings and Pies. Toast in front of the blazing fire in “their own study” where incidentally they never studied anything! The “fivers” from “Pater”!! All the games, fights and japes. But above all !NO WORK! which we all had to do. . . . None of the Greyfriars boys . . . were ever going to be anything, or do anything. There was never the slightest suggestion that they MIGHT work at something. They were fifteen but the thought of a career or profession just didn’t occur. They were true parasites—non workers.⁴³

Even Hymie Fagan, an East End Jewish Communist, picked up public school ethics from the Gem, the Magnet, and the stories of Talbot Baines Reed. He once declined to run in an athletic event because “It seemed to me, under the influence of the boys’ books I had read, that it was dishonourable to run for money.”⁴⁴

There are no real paradoxes here. These responses simply demonstrate that whether a text is “conservative” or “subversive” depends on the context in which it is read and the larger literary diet of the reader. The same reader can enjoy Karl Marx and Frank Richards in separate compartments, bringing a different frame to each. As a boy Percy Wall (b. 1893) adored the Magnet, the Boy’s Own Paper, and G. A. Henty novels; he collected cigarette cards of Baden-Powell, Kitchener, and Redvers Buller; and, in a South Wales miners’ library, he loved to “penetrate darkest Africa with Rider Haggard as my guide.” Nevertheless, he regarded Cleopatra’s Needle as a “symbol of Britain’s predatory attitude to the African continent” and later spent thirty months in prison as a conscientious objector. While he read Henty for enjoyment, he studied the Clarion, the Freethinker, The Struggle of the Bulgarians for Independence, and The Philippine Martyrs for their politics, and did not allow one body of literature to affect the other.⁴⁵

It is equally possible for the same reader to adopt different frames for the same story, relishing it on one level while seeing through the claptrap on another. In his youth Aneurin Bevan enjoyed the Magnet and Gem surreptitiously (his father forbade them) and devoured H. Rider Haggard at the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute Library. But during the “Phoney War” he blasted the government’s stupidly optimistic predictions in precisely the same terms: “Immediately on the outbreak of war, England was given over to the mental level of the Boys’ Own Paper and the Magnet. . . . If one can speak of a general mind in Britain at all just now, it is sodden and limp with the ceaseless drip of adolescent propaganda.” In 1944 Bevan freely admitted that “William Le Queux, John Buchan and Phillips Oppenheim have always been favourite authors of ours in our off-moments. Part of their charm lies in their juvenile attitude.” But in his public speeches Winston Churchill seemed incapable of switching off this boys’ paper frame: “It is this refusal to grow up which is part of the Prime Minister’s attraction for the general public.”⁴⁶

As human beings are flooded with far more empirical data than they can possibly process, they must invent strategies for preprocessing, admitting some kinds of information while screening out others. This is one of the functions of the frame: like an intelligence analyst, it must first sift “signals” from a much larger body of irrelevant “noise” before it can interpret the former. As one London East Ender explained in 1911, he developed an internal censor to edit “the flood of goody-goody literature which was poured in upon us. Kindly institutions sought to lead us into the right path by giving us endless tracts, or books in which the comparative pill of religious teaching was clumsily coated by a mild story. It was necessary in self-defense to pick out the interesting parts, which to me at the time were certainly not those that led to the hero’s conversion, or the heroine’s first prayer.”⁴⁷

Marx encountered that filtering mechanism at work in Greek dramas. They condoned slavery, and in that sense were political; yet modern audiences could still be riveted by these plays, without in any way diminishing their horror of slavery as an institution. “There is then a problem when we discover that work pronounced ideologically incorrect or unsound is found to be enjoyable, technically excellent, or in some other way ‘aesthetically’ good,” Janet Wolff writes. She is disturbed by her own enjoyment of, “first, the classical ballet, many of whose works of repertory are based on reactionary and sexist (not to say silly) stories, and secondly, the paintings of Emil Nolde, a German expressionist painter who was a Nazi sympathiser.” If she appreciates these works in spite of their politics, “what is it that I am appreciating?”⁴⁸ The answer is that all audiences at all times employ frames that focus selectively on some types of data while de-emphasizing or disregarding others. A cultural critic may choose to address the ideology of the dance, but a balletomane would probably lay down an opposite set of interpretive rules: ignore the story, and concentrate on the beauty of the body in motion. In that case, it hardly matters whether Swan Lake or the Magnet is broadcasting reactionary propaganda, because the audience has tuned out that message.⁴⁹

Harry Wharton and Bob Cherry could inspire passionate loyalty in the Jewish East End, where some immigrants’ sons wore Eton caps.⁵⁰ Even in the roughest streets of that district there was a steady market for back issues of the Magnet, which could be a spur to literary creativity: Willy Goldman (b. c. 1911) recalled that the cheap weeklies inspired his circle of young toughs to create their own handwritten magazine.⁵¹ With Orwell’s essay in mind, Chaim Bermant (b. 1929) described the enormous acculturating power of children’s magazines. His father was an ordained rabbi, but when he emigrated to Glasgow he had to work as a poor schochet (slaughterer). “Provincial Jewish life in the 1930s was still in the hands of immigrants who, if only to establish their own bona fides as Englishmen, demanded one quality above all others from their Rabbis, that they speak ‘mit a gutten Englis’, which was the one quality father lacked.” It was a skill that the next generation would acquire rapidly. The Bermant family arrived in Scotland when Chaim was eight: before his ninth birthday he had mastered enough English to read Beatrix Potter in the Mitchell Library. Her stories were not so alien to him as one might imagine: somehow the animal characters reminded him of the Latvian village from which he had come.

Chaim soon became a fan of the Beano’s Lord Snooty, an aristocrat who inexplicably consorted with a gang of working-class kids: “The strip fulfilled every schoolboy’s fantasy of finding himself among wealthy people in a noble setting.” Thanks to school stories, his everyday conversation was filled with student slang he barely understood— “prep”, “fag”, “prefect”, “close”, “quad”, “remove”, “poor show”, “well-played”. So far he was no different from his gentile schoolmates, but for Chaim there was a special added appeal: “The comics as a whole provided my sole entry into the non-Jewish universe.” Even a working-class comic hero like Deed a Day Danny was a cultural model to emulate, for he always “came home at the end of the day to an orderly house with a set tea, whereas with the exception of the Sabbath and festivals, we rarely sat down at a table together as a family.”

Later in life, Bermant wondered why the public schools enthralled him. “Was it that I was so embarrassed by our domestic circumstances that I wanted to leave home? Or was it, perhaps, that I was already finding the closeness and intensity of Jewish life overpowering, that I longed to be away from parental eyes and parental concern?” If we ask whether he realized that these schools did not take immigrant boys, the answer is that, just three years after his family stepped off the boat onto Scottish soil, “I found myself in a public school of sorts.” It was a Jewish school near Castle Douglas in Dumfriesshire, another of those institutions that acquired enough public-school trappings to reinforce the messages sent by the Magnet and Gem.

The building itself helped, for although it could not have been more than fifty years old, it had battlements and turrets and dark cellars which were out of bounds to the boys, which, given the schoolboy’s imagination, could easily have functioned as dungeons. There were also extensive grounds, including a good cricket pitch, and a couple of water-towers mocked up to look like ancient keeps. We had pillow fights with adjoining dorms, cricket matches with a number of third-rate boarding schools in the vicinity, and I imbibed something of the public school ethos.

Like most Glasgow Jews, Bermant assimilated to England, not Scotland. Children’s magazines were nearly all Anglocentric, even when they were published in Scotland, and BBC announcers spoke south-of-the-Severn English. Later he had some passing sympathy for the Scottish National Party, but what was the point of leaving one’s own ghetto for someone else’s? His father owned no books other than religious texts, he never read a novel or saw a play, and his only exposure to classical music was an accidental encounter with Beethoven’s Egmont Overture on the radio. For his son, the BBC and school stories offered an escape from a suffocatingly narrow culture. And there would be no turning back: though Bermant later emigrated to Israel, he soon returned home, incapable of living without tea shops, gothic churches, hedgerows, Bishop’s Stortford, and ‘soft mellowness on summer afternoons.’”

Bermant once told the joke of the Jewish immigrant who yearns to become a British subject, and finally applies for naturalization, only to return home shattered and in tears. His wife assumes that his application has been turned down, but no: her distraught husband has just learned that “They’ve given India away.” All that was deadly serious to young Bermant as he followed the progress of the Second World War in the Glasgow Herald and Manchester Guardian. The war, the school, the boys’ weeklies were all “building up new obsessions to replace the old and drawing reassurance and pride from the Empire.” He dreamt of a postwar world where that Empire would be mightier still, until “gradually the whole of Africa glowed pink before my eyes.” No wonder he loved singing “There’ll Always be an England” and “Rule, Britannia”: he sensed that his own survival depended on the survival of the British Empire.⁵²

Marlborough and All That

That attitude was common among assimilating Jews, but not typical of British working people in general. Few of them were imperialists; many of them were only vaguely aware that the Empire existed; most of them would have been hard put to name a couple of British colonies. Once again reader response was highly selective: the public school stories, which were so successful in converting slum children to Rugbeian values, dramatically failed to make them love the Empire, even when reinforced by relentless imperialist evangelizing in the schools.

Grass-roots working-class activists in the Liberal, Labour, and Communist parties were almost uniformly anti-imperialist, while those who were less interested in politics generally brought a healthy apathy to imperial issues. It is revealing that most plebeian memoirs do not mention the Empire, and those that do usually view it through a skeptical frame. A Lancashire silk millworker who took up the study of Roman history in the 1840s noted that Caractacus, “when taken a prisoner to Rome, could only ask in astonishment why his captors living in palaces should envy him a hut in Britain: and we wondered how many Asiatic, African, and other chieftains had asked the same question, as they, and all belonging to them, successively fell into the hands of their English captors.”⁵³ Working in a Leeds boot and shoe factory, George Ratcliffe (b. 1863) studied the courses of great empires (Babylonia, Persia, Carthage, Rome) and concluded that of all these, “the action of British Government regarding America [in 1776] was the most foolish I had ever read of.”⁵⁴

Some time ago Richard Price scotched the myth of working-class support for the Boer War. Only a handful of trades councils and workingmen’s clubs expressed any opinion at all on the conflict, and those that did often formed branches of the National Democratic League, an anti-imperialist pressure group within the Liberal Party. The clubs tolerantly heard both prowar and antiwar lecturers, but the war was widely regarded as a distraction from social reform and a violation of national self-determination, fomented by a conspiracy of South African capitalists. Jingoist celebrations like Mafeking Night were carried on by middle-class clerks, apolitical young men out for a lark, and some workingmen expressing both their patriotism and genuine relief for the safety of British boys.

As a general rule, the attitudes of working people toward the Boer War were shaped by a profound instinct of loyalty—not to the Empire, but to their families and neighbors. Workingmen’s clubs naturally felt a community obligation to local men who had gone off to fight in South Africa, and often raised money to support their families. For the same reason, resolutions denouncing British atrocities were often opposed by antiwar workers, since they implied a slur on their friends and sons. There would of course be boisterous celebrations when the troops came home, but these reflected a familial concern for the safe return of their boys rather than military triumphalism.⁵⁵ David Livingstone, who once worked in a Lanarkshire cotton mill, had inspired the same fraternal sentiment. He enjoyed “universal popularity among the masses,” a Glasgow power-loom tenter recalled. “When he was lost in Africa and H. M. Stanley went out in search of him, our first question every morning was: ‘Any news of Dr. Livingstone?’ When at last we heard he had been found there was a day of rejoicing like a coronation.”⁵⁶

Workers’ memoirs sometimes discuss family members who fought in South Africa, but with no apparent awareness of what they were fighting for.⁵⁷ “It was so far away it didn’t seem real somehow,” remembered one charwoman. “It was a story-book sort of war: George and the Dragon stuff. We heard bits about individual bravery, but we really had no idea why it was being fought and we thought the Boers were a lot of stupid savages not wanting to be in the Empire.”⁵⁸ “But for George Brown,” recalled a resident of the Lincolnshire hamlet of Digby, “the Boer War might have passed unnoticed in the village.” Brown was a local laborer and ne’er-do-well, but his enlistment “had the effect of transforming him overnight from a black sheep into a village hero,” Digby’s only soldier at the front.

We on our part were very conscious of the honour and responsibility which had been thrust upon us. We were now personally represented, and it became Digby’s war.

I remember the change taking place. From the moment of George Brown’s arrival in South Africa everybody took a lively interest in the fighting. . . . Everything in the village was now on a war footing. The women had sewing meetings to make Army comforts. The children learned patriotic songs. . . . Children were christened with the names of war heroes. . . . We followed with keen interest the news of the famous sieges, and when word came through that Mafeking had been relieved there was great excitement.⁵⁹

A Birmingham glass-blower’s son described the return of a local veteran—and the anticlimax that followed:

The whole street prepared to give him the welcome befitting to a public hero. Flags and streamers linked up every window, and excitement ran high when the news flashed round that the hero had arrived. Presently he came like the Sultan of Turkey, mounted on a chair, with the South African sun beaming from under a broad-brimmed hat and crowds of people jostling and joking and cheering him along in a mad frenzy of delight. I was among the drummer-boys who tapped tin-cans and marched to patriotic singing but was finally put to bed in tears because I could not join further in the festivities. Soon after the celebrations the hero became an ordinary man again who received only ordinary notice from the people who had cheered him, which made me wonder whether he was a hero at all.⁶⁰

War fervor did produce a swing to the Unionists among the lower working class in the election of 1900, but that support quickly evaporated, and skilled workers remained solidly Liberal or Labour. After the military victories of mid-1900, working-class jingoism and army enlistments faded away.⁶¹ Tom Tremewan was eleven when the conflict broke out, working on his grandfather’s farm in Cornwall. He was boyishly patriotic, until one of their horses was killed in combat: “I have hated war ever since.”⁶² Initially London hatter Frederick Willis supported the war: “As a citizen of the great British Empire, earning six shillings a week, I felt I could never face the world’s scorn if we ceased to exist as a first-class power.” The hysteria of Mafeking Night, however, later gave way to “admiration for the rebels who refused to surrender.”⁶³ Young Manny Shinwell was one of the few men in his Glasgow neighborhood who backed the war, and even he had no awareness of the Empire. He felt properly patriotic “when I saw men marching to the docks on their way to South Africa, though I could hardly be expected to understand the reason for their departure.” In that he was entirely typical: “My patriotism was of the subconscious variety—I just believed Britain was the best country.”⁶⁴

When Welsh miner Jack Jones enlisted, his father was disgusted: “Boy, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Only them that runs from the p’lice, an’ them that are too lazy to work, goes to the army.” Shortly after arriving in South Africa, he deserted.⁶⁵ One Manchester slum boy remembered that soldiers in those days were objects of contempt: his aunt would never have gone out with one.⁶⁶ Robert Roberts noted that jingoistic ditties, though hugely popular, did not

alter the common soldier’s social status one iota. With us, as with the rest of the working class, “regulars”, ex-regulars and their families stayed unquestionably “low”. One eldest son, I remember, who after a row at home walked out and joined the Fusiliers was considered by his father (a joiner) to have “brought shame and disgrace on all the family.” Yet the same parent, solid Conservative like the ex-soldiers he despised, drank himself into insensibility to celebrate the accession of George V.

“Except in periods of national crisis or celebration,” Roberts explains, “industrial labourers, though Tory, royalist and patriotic, remained uninterested in any event beyond the local, horse racing excepted.” This is a critically important distinction which is often blurred or overlooked. The same workers who cheered when the king visited Bolton were indifferent when he visited Delhi. Any direct threat to their homeland, as during the two world wars, would arouse in them a fervent, visceral patriotism, but their love of England stopped at Dover, and did not imply any special affection for Somaliland. In that respect, G. K. Chesterton had a better sense of the popular pulse than Rudyard Kipling. Coronations were celebrated as national, not imperial, holidays: “One felt the coming together of a whole country for a day of contentment and freedom,” Roberts recalls. For most children, Empire Day meant nothing more than a recitation of “a lot of inconsequential facts on India [and] parts of Africa, . . . all ruled over by Edward the Peace-maker (pacemaker, my father called him).”⁶⁷

Empire Day was, in fact, instituted to combat that kind of apathy among Board school pupils. First officially observed on 24 May 1904, the holiday was still going strong into the 1950s, and then quickly disappeared with decolonization. Though working-class memoirs frequently mention Empire Day, they also reveal that these celebrations did little to enhance awareness of the colonies. Only occasionally did the propaganda work as it was supposed to, as in the case of the son of a Bristol engineer:

They used to encourage us to be proud of the flag, salute the flag when we was at school. Yes, I was proud of being British. We was always taught to be proud of the Queen and King. We was the people of the world, wasn’t us? . . . I knew we ’ad to have somebody in charge, I knew, same as having a teacher or headmaster in charge of the school. You ’ad to have somebody up there, didn’t you? I was proud of the school, I used to play football for the school. . . . “St. Silas for honour, for loyalty, for courage, for courtesy. Play up, play fair, play the game.”

More typical was a Fulham baker’s daughter, who remembered Empire Day mainly as a school sporting event: “We had to have small Union Jacks, and the address before the sports started was very patriotic, but it was completely lost on us, all we wanted was to get on with the excitement of winning for our colour.”⁶⁸ “I regret to say that the glories passed over our collective heads,” Hymie Fagan recalled. “What we celebrated on Empire Day was that we had a half-day’s holiday.”⁶⁹ Stephen Humphries concluded, from oral interviews, that the strongest memories were of “the chocolate buns and mugs that were distributed freely on such occasions.”

Some children came away with more subversive thoughts, like the laborer’s daughter who had to recite a poem about the great merchant ships bringing England her bread and butter. “And somehow or other it stirred a bit of rebellion in me. I thought, where’s my bread, where’s my butter? And I think it sowed the first seeds of socialism in me, it really did.” When the standard imperialist history was taught, recalled engineer’s son Jim Flowers (b. 1905), “It was all dates and names and battles, the Spanish Armada, Nelson, Marlborough and all that. . . . It didn’t make much impression on me though. It went into my brain and I stored the facts because you had to, but patriotism never struck me as being very clever.” His trade unionist father had given him Tom Paine to read, so he took an internationalist republican view of history. During the First World War, when the headmaster read aloud rosy dispatches from the Daily Chronicle, “It struck me that if ever the British had to go backwards they wouldn’t say it was a retreat, it was a strategic withdrawal so that they could swallow up the enemy later on.”⁷⁰ Grace Foakes (b. 1901), daughter of an East London dockworker, could not remember exactly how many children her mother had (probably fourteen) but was certain that only five survived infancy. On Empire Day “We sang of our lands and possessions overseas. We sang of ‘Deeds of Glory.’ We sang, and believed we were the mightiest nation on earth. But . . . I sang with my mouth only, not from the heart. For I saw only those same high walls and thought to myself, ‘We sing of our possessions, while not one of us here owns as much as a flowerpotful of earth.”’⁷¹ A. J. Mills, son of a disabled First World War veteran and a charlady, was frankly contemptuous of school lessons in military glory and hated reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” On Empire Day “The Mayor always seemed to tell us how fortunate we were to be born British, or words to that effect. It must have taken a bit of doing on his part considering how many of us nippers had fathers who were unemployed. Anyhow, as it was followed by a halfday’s holiday for us kids, it must have been a good country to live in.”⁷²

Most memoirs of Empire Day do not mention specific colonies, and those that do often seriously confuse them. A Cornish farmworker’s daughter (b. late 1920s) remembered a classroom map with the British Empire in pink, but she could never tell the East from the West Indies.⁷³ Alfred S. Hall (b. 1910), son of a Camberwell bus conductor, was enlisted in a school pageant where the children were draped in the flags of the various colonies. “I was representing Montenegro,” he wrote, “not only did I not know who or where they were, I couldn’t even say the word.” (Nor did he remember it correctly: Montenegro was never a part of the British Empire.) One teacher completely baffled the pupils when she spoke about the Far East: “Most of us didn’t even know which way was East, those that were Scouts of course did, there were few of those, couldn’t afford the uniform. The Far East to our mob was Whitechapel, East of London, many had never even been there.”⁷⁴

For some, Empire Day meant only the embarrassment of impersonating a Jamaican banana in the school pageant.⁷⁵ Fairly representative was Dorothy Burnham (b. 1915), whose father was an irregularly employed French polisher. In geography classes she picked up very quickly that Britain imported butter from New Zealand and pineapples from Australia: “the subject of food was of the greatest possible interest to me,” given that she had to go home to “two slices of bread and marge and a handleless cup of weak tea. . . . It really didn’t seem much of a meal for a proud citizen of the most Important Capital of the Greatest Country of the Mightiest Empire in the Whole World!” While her catechized classmates would all shout in unison that London was the world’s greatest city, few hands went up when they were asked to explain why, though they all lived there. They were keenly patriotic, but

Patriotism in those days was an ideal of love and service to one’s country. It did not conjure up pictures of an intolerably supercilious British raj arrogantly wielding the big whip on cowering, depressed natives. Rather, it inspired courage, promoted unselfishness and a concern for others which overrode purely private considerations. For my father army drill was not a chore to be endured; it was an article of faith to be constantly renewed by devoted practice. . . . Not till the grey decades of the ‘thirties did patriotism become identified with an aggressive nationalism, when the emergent dictators stripped the word of its idealism and flung it in the dirt to be trampled by succeeding post-war generations.⁷⁶

What Dorothy Burnham and her classmates embraced was a specifically English patriotism, not an attachment to impossibly remote colonies. One seaman’s daughter went home for her half-holiday “with no understanding of anything we had done, but aware that we were exceptional because we were English.”⁷⁷ Granted, even if this English exceptionalism did not make slum children imperialists per se, it could sometimes endow them with an imperial sense of assurance. Empire Day conveyed to Louis Heren (b. 1919), a poor boy in Shadwell, “that London was the seat of the Empire and beyond question the greatest city in the world. We took a vicarious pride in goings-on such as the Opening of Parliament, royal garden parties, Henley and Wimbledon.” Since he scarcely knew where Henley and Wimbledon were, he was not likely to absorb much from geography lessons about the North-West Frontier and the Federated Malay States.

It made no lasting impression on me except—and this is a very large qualification—to establish that I was a freeborn Englishman and the world was my oyster. I developed an expansive and proprietory view of the world which has never quite left me. I am certain that it helps to explain why years afterwards I could fly into India, Palestine, Korea, Singapore, Indo-China and many other exotic and occasionally dangerous places and feel equipped to report and comment on the goings on of the natives.

As a correspondent for The Times, he could coolly cross from Jordan to Israel via the Mandelbaum Gate in 1948, when most Israelis were still hostile to the British. One Israeli “said how he admired the confidence of the British public school man . . . I did not tell him that my confidence, or whatever it was, was nurtured in a slum school.”⁷⁸

What those schools failed to create was any real feeling of imperial comradeship toward Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans. A young attendant in a Liverpool military hospital during the First World War recalled endless slanging matches and punch-ups between English and Commonwealth soldiers, even among the wounded, mainly because the colonials were much better paid and competing for local girls:

They taught us at school about the unity and solidarity of the far-flung British Empire; but when I was a kid I never saw any evidences of it in the conduct and talk of these men. . . . Although I don’t think it will be found in any official version of the Great War as fought at home, I know from actual experience that much real trouble occurred between the wounded of the Colonies and the Homeland. . . . We looked upon the British Empire Unity as a myth: we could do no other. Teachers might rave and yammer of “brothers” from beyond the seas standing shoulder to shoulder with the brothers from the Homeland. We knew such was not the case. Instead of shoulder to shoulder, it was hand to throat and feet to belly, and kick him when he’s down.⁷⁹

A Map of the World

Why, then, did the working classes care so much for Greyfriars, and so little for the Empire? Two memoirs in particular suggest an answer. In one, Walter Southgate set down his recollections of Mafeking Night in the East End. His father, a quill-pen maker, treated the celebrations with unbridled contempt (“How much of the Empire do these cockneys think they own I should like to know?”). The children enjoyed it purely for the fireworks and bonfires. They played “English versus Boers” and wore celluloid buttons of Baden Powell and Lord Roberts, but “Mafeking for all I and other children knew might have been in Timbuctoo.” The world beyond their local streets was unknown: Southgate never saw the English countryside until age nine. That is why working-class memoirists were able to reconstruct their communities in such amazing detail: they dealt every day with the same circle of neighbors, friends, and shopkeepers until the memories became indelible. As Southgate wrote, “So self-contained was that North Street community (and this applied to other East End streets too) that even after 60 years, I was able to recall most of the names of the neighbours and the men’s occupations,” a total of fifty-three individuals.⁸⁰ This intense localism also explains why another East Ender, Phyllis Willmott (b. 1922), could scarcely grasp the concept of a British Empire:

Firmly bounded as it was by the geography of the locality, and underpinned by the local sub-culture based on the rules and unquestioned authority of the adult world, this was my complete and self-contained universe. At school, of course, we learnt about the far-flung countries of the British Empire, and at Sunday school about the missionaries who “saved” savages in “darkest Africa” and other frighteningly strange places. But in contrast to the solid reality of our own circumscribed world these were to me as awesome and unreal as a story from Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Far less of a mental leap was involved in winning a scholarship to a Greenwich grammar school: a more affluent world than the one she lived in, but otherwise not much different. After she graduated and found work with the Times Book Club, she discovered the West End. It was a thrill to visit the galleries and theaters, but she felt as disoriented as a tourist in a foreign capital. She never thought to buy a street map: she had no idea that such things existed, and in any case would have considered it “an unacceptable extravagance.”⁸¹

The frame of the reader includes a mental map of the world, and a story that cannot find a place on that map will be difficult to grasp. With remarkable consistency, British working people described their mental maps in terms that call to mind a Saul Steinberg cartoon. The center ground was dominated by the streets where they grew up, drawn to enormous scale and etched in fine detail. Nearby towns hovered vaguely in the middle distance. Foreign countries, if they existed at all, were smudges on the horizon. When Alison Uttley’s Peak District Board school tried to instill pride in the four nations of the Kingdom by singing “Men of Harlech,” “Blue Bells of Scotland,” “The Minstrel Boy,” and “Rule Britannia,” the children all dutifully applauded, but “nobody knew anything of those far regions Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, except the Scottish head gardener.”⁸² British working-class memoirs are predominantly works of local history, announcing their parochial focus in their titles: A Sheffield Childhood; Newlyn Boyhood; Memories of Old Poplar; Salford Boy; Ancoats Lad; A Love for Bermondsey and Its People; Jipping Street; 36 Stewart Street, Bolton; Lark Rise.

Any excursion beyond those boundaries could be bewildering. In search of work, John Clare once walked just twenty-one miles to Grantham, “and I thought to be sure I was out of the world.” Proceeding to Newark-on-Trent “I felt quite lost . . . . I had never been from home before scarcely farther than out of sight of the steeple I became so ignorant in this far land that I could not tell what quarter the wind blew from and I was even foolish enough to think the sun’s course was altered and that it rose in the west and set in the east.”⁸³ A century later remarkably little had changed, even in cosmopolitan cities. Harry Watkin (b. 1909) was one of those memoirists who could recollect the names of all his schoolmates, but he also related a more painful memory: when a painting he had done in art class was accepted for a student exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery, he never told his parents. Though it was only a tramride away “it seemed a preposterous idea. Mother had never been to town in my lifetime. Would she have gone on the tram? She couldn’t walk there and I couldn’t imagine her trying to get on a tram. Could she have found her way there? And wearing what? A shawl? And Dad. A ridiculous thought . . . . So they never knew about their son’s work being shown in the Art Gallery.”⁸⁴ Until the Maharajah of Jeypore visited London in 1902, Guy Aldred, a Clerkenwell office boy, never fully appreciated that some human beings were not Londoners:

The world to me was London; and, as I realised to my surprise, not all London. The other countries of the world did not exist for me. The dominions of the British Empire meant nothing to me. Scotland was a kind of no-man’s land, a hidden and impossible Tibet beyond some mighty wall, leagues upon leagues distant from the place in which I lived. I realised that there was a country called England because I lived in the chief city of that country. I knew, of course, that there were other cities in England. I knew their names but they were not nearly so important as the names of the shops in the small part of London in which I had been born and reared. England was but a suburb of London just as London itself was but a suburb of Clerkenwell. . . . I did pay a faint tribute to the reality of Highgate but as a place I sometimes visited on a horse tram. This seemed the back of beyond to me and merely gave character and reality to the part of the city in which I lived. I was thoroughly ignorant and rejoiced in my ignorance. I was indeed the perfect London villager . . . . I accepted that there must be a world peopled even as Clerkenwell was peopled. It was all gloriously vague. History, geography, everything beyond the immediate locality of my experience was an indefinable alienism. My mind refused to form any impression of a true wide-view of the past, just as it declined to form any impression of the distant in point of space. For all practical purposes, the world outwith London and the world before now was a ghost-land. I understood that there was a world that was not Christian. But it was not the world in which I lived. It was not the world of my experience. I could not conceive of it having any connection, any practical transport association with that real world of my understanding, the world called Christian. It was a wonderful world of magic and myth; and it seemed to me that in order to enter into relations with it, I would have to possess Aladdin’s lamp.⁸⁵

In 1934 more than 95 percent of London East End residents had been born there or in neighboring boroughs.⁸⁶ A labor exchange clerk found it pointless to inquire if an applicant would emigrate overseas: “‘Overseas? Where’s that?’ would ask the girl who had never been further than the London Hospital.”⁸⁷ This was the audience for Empire Day and Rudyard Kipling.

Through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, little news from the outside world penetrated working-class communities. In 1863 few popular newspapers or cheap books circulated in Oldham, where there were only six postal deliveries per capita per year: one of the lowest rates in England, but fairly typical of northern manufacturing towns.⁸⁸ Consequently, recalled J. R. Clynes,

Millions of men and women died in their towns and villages without ever having travelled five miles from the spot where they were born. To them the rest of the world was a shadowy place merging into the boundaries of unreality. . . . Old cotton-spinners in Oldham, when I was a lad, used to debate with immense gravity on the destination of the tons of cotton the mills turned out, and lived in permanent fear lest the world should be overloaded with cotton goods and all the mills suddenly have to close down.⁸⁹

The isolation was worse in rural areas, where the Marian martyrs might seem more newsworthy and immediate than Khartoum. In the 1880s, according to Richard Pyke, farm workers of Devonshire had access to few books or periodicals, beyond a weekly paper that was handed from house to house and read aloud by one of the educated children: “Rumours might reach us of a war with the Zulus, or the tragedy of General Gordon: but it was all too distant to disturb our sleep, or excite our fear.”⁹⁰

By the turn of the century urban workers were reading evening, Sunday, and sporting papers as well as local weeklies, but these usually did not carry much national or world news. Even when they did report global events, recalled a Lancashire textile worker’s son, “these were remote from our little sphere, and only affected us like stories in books; they were not in our daily lives.”⁹¹ As a result, notes Robert Roberts, “A national morning newspaper had little appeal. Some workers hardly ever went into their own city, and London was a place where royalty lived, that and little more. Having no official connection with national government beyond an occasional election, they did not feel the State as a reality at all.”⁹² No national commentator sympathized with working-class culture so well as Wilfred Pickles, BBC newsreader and stonemason’s son. But even he admitted that the hours he spent in the public library, reading Shelley, Keats, Shaw, and Galsworthy, represented a desperate breakout from the stultifying provincialism of his native Halifax:

I found a depressing narrowness of outlook and resented my family’s unquestioning judgment that everything they did was right and anything to the contrary was to be condemned. People who had coffee for breakfast were peculiar and not to be trusted, while folk living on the other side of North Bridge had none of our earthy qualities, it was believed. Bradford, eight miles away, was another world which could not be a nice place . . . . I was grappling with my first big personal problem—how to escape from this world of mean streets.⁹³

Before the advent of bus travel in the 1930s, Northumberland mining communities were so isolated that each one developed a distinctive accent. That self-containment, one local boy recalled, left “miners vulnerable to a belief that those who lived in the wider world beyond their circumscribed own were in contempt of them.”⁹⁴ Though Welsh colliers maintained miners’ libraries and impressive personal collections of books, “the lack of public transport . . . meant that one’s world often consisted of a library of one’s own,” in the words of one ex-coalworker.⁹⁵

Even communities with a lively literary and musical culture could be suffocatingly insular. The father of Labour politician T. Dan Smith, a Wallsend miner, was fascinated by travel books, Twain’s Innocents Abroad, Chaliapin, Caruso, and European affairs. But hardly anyone in their neighborhood ever ventured outside it. “A hundred yards for shopping, a couple of hundred yards to the church, made up much of my world,” wrote the younger Smith, who, like his father, was a fervent anti-imperialist.⁹⁶ John Macadam, the son of a Greenock lathe operator, recalled that his relatives and neighbors regularly came over to discuss everything under the sun. “Such talk there was! The wild generalizations we would make! The tremendous arguments there would be as to whether Burns was a greater poet than Shakespeare, or Scott the master of Dickens, or John Kerr of Greenock Glenpark a greater bat than Hobbs. There was a lot of pawky wit in it and a lot of laughter and, thinking back on it now, a surprising range of subjects.” Yet this intellectual depth did not translate into geographical breadth. Macadam was an apprentice shipyard plater, and never

did it ever occur to me in those days [c. 1920] that there was much prospect of any other life for me than the one I was leading. Thirty-odd years ago life was much more localized than it is now. We were much more inclined to stay put. Until I was sixteen a day out in Glasgow, twenty-six miles away, was a great annual event. London was a mirage and beyond London a vast void that one filled at will with imaginings spiced by reading. Mr. Cook was as unreal—or, maybe as real—as Captain Marryat or Fenimore Cooper. Years later, when I got into newspaper work, I met a considerable character called William Power who wrote a book titled The World Unvisited, a very fascinating survey of the world from his own fireside. It was only when I read Power that I realized that this is what I had been doing subconsciously all my short life.⁹⁷

The same intellectual vitality could be found in the Jewish East End of the 1930s, a short ride on the Underground from central London. But it was still, as Bernard Kops described it, “a self-imposed ghetto. . . . It was my world, and Aldgate East was the outside frontier of that world, a world that consisted mainly of Jewish people. I had no chip on my shoulder about being Jewish, because I knew of nothing else that existed.”⁹⁸

Even the most ambitious autodidacts rarely ventured far beyond the bounds of English and American literature. With the exception of Hugo and Dumas, and sometimes Cervantes, Balzac, and Tolstoy, there was little interest in continental authors. James Hanley’s workmates laughed when he taught himself French by reading the Mercure de France. When he lectured to an audience of railwaymen on realism in modern French literature, the response was still more discouraging. Working the night shift at a railway station, Hanley withdrew into the work of Molière, Hauptmann, Calderon, Sudermann, Ibsen, Lie, and Strindberg, until he grew quite cozy in his literary shell. His parents were appalled that he had no friends. “But I’ve hundreds of friends,” he protested. “Bazarov and Rudin and Liza and Sancho Panza and Eugènie Grandet.” His father countered with Squeers, Nickleby, Snodgrass, and Little Nell: “And they’re a healthy lot I might say, whereas all your friends have either got consumption or are always in the dumps.”⁹⁹

That isolation could produce enormous contrasts in culture between neighboring working-class communities. As far back as the Regency, a strolling actor noted the phenomenon as his company moved from town to town:

Nothing is more surprising than the difference of taste and of manners in the inhabitants of adjoining villages. Sometimes I have observed this marked difference in the short space of two miles; and without any outward thing whereby to indicate the cause, you might find the people at one place seeking their pleasure in the ale-house, and making bets upon the next prize-fight, . . . playing at cards for a quart, . . . earnestly debating the age and qualities of a bull-dog, or quarrelling over the bets upon a cock-fight. . . . In such places the inhabitants generally show an utter contempt for everything associated with literature: they can find amusement in coarse oaths, in insulting and harassing, by every means in their power, anybody who professes to love literary refinement or science. In a neighbouring village, or hamlet, on the other hand, you may find the bulk of the inhabitants fond of reading, and conversant with the poets,—panting to gain a better acquaintance with our Shakespeare, and quoting his writings,—singing out the songs of the Ploughman Bard, “A man’s a man for a’ that,” having their occasional music-meetings, and taking pleasure in the theatre, because they can appreciate the author’s work, and can find religion beaming in the soulfulness of his expressions.¹⁰⁰

Geography was always a conspicuously weak subject in English popular schooling. James Bonwick (b. 1817), a carpenter’s son, received what was, by contemporary standards, a fine education at the Borough Road School in Southwark, but it did not go far beyond the King James Bible. Biblical history and geography were taught thoroughly: Lord Brougham, inspecting the school, was impressed by a boy who sketched from memory a detailed map of ancient Palestine. “We learned what happened to a small and but partially civilized nation two to three thousand years ago,” wrote Bonwick, but “of Egypt, Assyria, India, Greece, Rome, or even England, we knew nothing. Of the war with France we retained the memory of three events,—the battles of the Nile, Trafalgar, and Waterloo.” This was hardly the education of an imperialist: “We were genuine Little-Englanders.” Bonwick later became an amateur Egyptologist, fond of pointing out “how much our Western Civilization is indebted to Orientals”; and a pioneer anthropologist who condemned the destruction of the Tasmanians by “the Christian civilized Whitefellow!”¹⁰¹ Scottish primary education had its strengths, but one shepherd’s son (b. 1825) from North Esk wrote that geography was “unheard of in our school. . . . I well remember my idea was, that our little glen constituted the whole universe,—that the tops of the hills which surrounded it were the ends of the earth,—and that the opening between them which allows the river to escape to the sea, was nothing else than the road out of the world away into the unknown.”¹⁰²

Even as the government began to invest more in education, the quality of instruction in geography did not improve dramatically. Between 1856 and 1859, roughly 3,800 state-aided primary schools ordered 902,926 reading lesson books and 163,512 arithmetic and math texts. In contrast, they bought only 82,836 geography texts, plus 14,814 school atlases and 14,369 wall maps. Only 67,272 history texts were ordered, and they would not convey much sense of the larger world, since nearly all of them focused on Britain. What was worse, recently published geography texts contained maps that were up to fifty years out of date. Population figures were hopelessly obsolete, the United States did not extend west of the Rockies, the European settlement of New Zealand was just beginning, many other new colonies were omitted altogether, railways were a new invention, and mail coaches were still described as the main means of transport. All that, it should be underscored, could be found in newly printed texts, quite apart from the thousands of older geography books still in use.¹⁰³

Even in the 1880s, Flora Thompson’s village school had no geography books and no formal instruction in geography or history, other than readers offering stock tales about King Alfred and the cakes and King Canute ordering the tide to retreat. There were good maps on the walls, and her Royal Reader offered thrilling depictions of the Himalayas, the Andes, Greenland, the Amazon, Hudson’s Bay, and the South Pacific, as well as scenes from Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. She also remembered borrowing a decrepit copy of Belzoni’s Travels and enjoying intensely the excursion through Egyptian archaeology. But she was an unusually self-motivated reader: her less-educated neighbors were only hazily aware of the existence of Oxford, just nineteen miles away.¹⁰⁴

Alfred Williams (b. 1877), the Swindon railway worker and poet, recalled that shortly after he left school, a chargeman offered him and five friends pennies for answering simple geographical questions. “During these tests the chargeman was astonished to learn that Salisbury is a county, Ceylon is the capital of China, and that Paris stands on the banks of the river Liffey. . . . Only one out of six could give the names of . . . six [English] counties. . . . Not one of the half-dozen, though all were born in the town, could give the name of a single Wiltshire river.”¹⁰⁵ In the early twentieth century Cornish schools tried to instill some sense of the county’s Celtic heritage, but according to one Newlyn boy, “For most of us who rarely travelled further than St. Ives or Hayle the names of places on the map of Cornwall were, to all intents and purposes, as remote-sounding as Babylon or Vladivostok.”¹⁰⁶ Boys’ weeklies were the powerful agents of acculturation for R. L. Lee (b. 1921), an impoverished half-Chinese boy in Merthyr Tydfil. He once caught a five-inch trout and tried to cook it on a spit, “like they did in the Canadian Rockies—and as I’d read about in the Wizard.” In contrast, his school geography lessons left no imprint. “Who cared where France was? We’d never be going there anyway—the furthest we were ever likely to go would be to Barry; didn’t really know where that was, but the bus driver did. And what about Sir Walter Scott going to all that trouble to find the South Pole, when it wasn’t even lost in the first place.”¹⁰⁷

So housepainter’s son Harry Burton might sing patriotic songs on Empire Days, “but it did us no harm because it never went very far,” and no one knew where the Empire was. His headmaster “once came into a geography lesson and explained how the Pyrenees got their name; it is almost the only fact that I still retain from that or any other geography lesson in that school. . . . On the other hand we wallowed in Eric and St. Winifred’s and other school stories, especially Talbot Baines Reed’s.” They described a world very like his own, except that Reed’s boys had more money. Burton’s London Board school promoted the same games ethic and esprit de corps, and by age eleven he had written his own school story. He, like other working-class children, preferred Frank Richards to Empire Day simply because the former was a more reliable guide to the reality he knew. When Burton won a secondary school scholarship, he inevitably found himself facing, on his very first day, a “tall hatchet-faced master” exactly like the one in the Magnet.¹⁰⁸

The geographic and historical literacy that the schools did not provide could be acquired from the staggeringly popular stories of G. A. Henty. In the slums, Edwardian boys’ club libraries reported that Henty was among the most frequently borrowed authors.¹⁰⁹ He may have sold as many as a quarter million books a year in the 1890s; his publishers estimated that they had disposed of a total of 25 million copies by the 1950s.¹¹⁰ Today, Henty’s works appear to be bumptious imperialist tracts, but a century ago they were often read quite differently: for readers with educational deficits, they supplied a clear introduction to the grammar of history and geopolitics. For that reason, Henty was widely admired among men of the left—in the Labour Party, the ILP, even the Communist Party.¹¹¹ As Roger Dataller explained, while Board school history lessons were largely lists of dates, Henty provided

for youthful readers the only historical information they were ever likely to encounter. Through Henty, I discovered for the first time that there was a Frederick the Great, a Gustavus Adolphus, and a William the Silent; that nations did not live in a vacuum, but were tied up—often very closely—one with another; that statesmen and diplomatists were important in the background; and that the seeds of one conflict often developed into the fruit of a second. I sensed pervasively his lack of characterization; but stereotyped as his situations and language was (“With a shout they ran forward,” “He fell with a sharp cry,” “Young sir, you have saved your country”), Henty did for me what my teachers had been unable to do. He made me ask for more.¹¹²

Since they filled those gaps, classic travel books could produce the same kind of epiphanies as other classic literature. Anson’s A Voyage Round the World performed that magic for Alexander Somerville (b. 1811) and for the Scottish turnip-hoers he read it to.¹¹³ A Scottish flax-dresser (b. 1803) gained his “first or incipient idea of localities and distances” when he was assigned to read aloud at work from Anson, Cook, Bruce, and Mungo Park: “I am not aware of having at any time since, enjoyed a similar treat with higher zest.” These authors sparked an intellectual awakening that ranged far beyond geography. He was inspired to read widely in fiction, drama, poetry, and history. He joined a mutual improvement society and a choral club, attended scientific lectures, spoke at public meetings, agitated for parliamentary reform and temperance.¹¹⁴ A 1946 survey of Tottenham residents, 95 percent of them working-class, found that their favorite category of nonfiction reading was travel and adventure. “Maybe that’s because I’ve never been outside England but I would like to go to some of them countries you read about,” explained one manual worker with an elementary education.¹¹⁵

If working people knew little of the world beyond their local communities, perhaps the only effective means of promoting the Empire was to bring bits of it home. The 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley attracted more than 27 million visitors, equivalent to 60 percent of the population of the United Kingdom, and it was only one of several such imperial festivals.¹¹⁶ Reading the memoirs of those who attended, one cannot help but conclude that these were by far the most persuasive vehicles of imperialist propaganda. School lessons only instilled the haziest consciousness of colonialism, but once the discussion turns to Wembley, it jumps into sharp and memorable focus.¹¹⁷ The physical reality of those exhibition pavilions hit home as no literature could. “Until this visit, apart from those annual school parades, my only other knowledge of the Empire was what I had seen on maps of the world showing all those pink portions,” wrote Moorside plate-moulder Fred Scholes, but this “one-in-a-lifetime” day left indelible impressions of a Maori village, South African ostriches, Burmese carvings, Maltese lace, a Hong Kong restaurant, models of the Taj Mahal and the residence of the Rajah of Sarawak. “Never before, or since, has there been an exhibition to come up to the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. Alas, there will never be another.”¹¹⁸ “Sheep shearing in the Australian pavilion, the Canada Pacific railways, miniature rolling stock, the very tall African Nationals, people up to eight feet tall, and little Africans as well,” exclaimed the son of an Oxfordshire farm laborer. “I am doubtful as to whether there has ever before or since been such a marvellous show.”¹¹⁹ The daughter of a Herefordshire gardener could not forget “The beautiful antique temples of India, the cleverly architectured buildings of Burma, the elaborate buildings of Ceylon, the primitive buildings of the Gold Coast, . . . the wonderfully realistic Canadian Pacific Railway, running amidst wild, rugged mountains, and the fertile prairie lands, and orchard lands, all looked very lifelike. . . . We felt, I remember, very proud to belong to the Mother Country.”¹²⁰ The African village at the 1929 North East Coast Exhibition in Newcastle could infect even miners’ daughters with a touch of imperial condescension:

The authenticity of this section was never questioned, and we were convinced that a whole village of Africans had been moved lock stock, and barrel to the town moor. Despite all the poverty around us, perhaps this was our first injection of a superiority complex. With furniture in our homes and desks in our classroom, surely we were very fortunate! Home cooking did not vary very much, but leek puddings and tettie hash were certainly more appetising than anything the Africans were eating.¹²¹

Building Jerusalem

The geography of one country, at least, was taught well and thoroughly to Victorian schoolchildren. Though it was not yet a British colony, these lessons would have consequences for future imperial policy. Disraeli’s Tancred and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which both envisioned a Jewish return to Palestine, prepared elite opinion for the Balfour Declaration. Among the masses, the same role was performed by the Sunday schools and church-related day schools, which, while they neglected modern geography, meticulously taught the landscape of the Holy Land. That biblical education could produce a kind of Anglo-Zionism, where children conflated contemporary England and ancient Israel to the point where they merged into a common homeland. One anonymous schoolboy of the early nineteenth century described the tremendous impact of those lessons:

The wish to travel became painfully strong; and the impossibility of gratifying that wish only added fuel to the spark which had been kindled. The East, the famous, celebrated, mysterious East, especially claimed my thoughts. To see Palestine, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, was my daily wish. To describe the absorbing interest with which I regarded the City of David at that time is literally impossible. . . .

. . . Men cannot forget the East. The lapse of ages, the rise and fall of dynasties, and the birth, growth, and decay of mighty empires are unable to erase from the memory—shall I call it?—of humanity that the East is its native place. . . . It is not the Jew only, but also the Gentile, who experiences this strong feeling. Undoubtedly, the Bible has much to do with this clustering of the affections around the scenes of sacred story . . .; but sometimes, in our wild daydreams, we imagine that our acquaintance with Biblical geography and story is but the renewal of knowledge which has accidentally slipped from memory.

The fact that Scripture provided the foundation of English literature and the modern English language perpetually reinforced the idea that Palestine was the promised land of the English people. That sentiment extended down to the bottom of the social pyramid. One day, returning from school, this same schoolboy heard an elderly beggar woman singing:

O, mother dear, Jerusalem!

 When shall I come to thee?

When shall my sorrows have an end?

 Thy joys when shall I see?

He found her living in “poverty in its absolute sense”—a hovel with no furnishings but some straw and a ragged blanket, nothing to eat but a few potatoes. “And yet this old woman was happy. What made her so? What was the secret of her contentment? The song I had heard on the moor suggested the secret, and it was confirmed by her own aged lips” when she asked him to read from her New Testament.¹²²

In a Norfolk rural school at the end of the nineteenth century, geography was still a matter of memorizing the cities, mountains, and rivers of Europe. “As far as our knowledge of its various inhabitants was concerned—their occupations and even their appearance—they might never have existed,” wrote a farmer’s son. But the Bible was taught so thoroughly at Sunday school that, “Though I was wholly unaware of it, the language of the Authorized Version became somehow a part of me. What I read was never unnatural,” and for that reason, he accepted Bible tales without question. “To me these stories were as real as if I had been a participant. Saul and the witch of Endor: David and Jonathan and the tragedy of Gilboa: Elijah and Elisha and Naboth’s vineyard and Mount Carmel were more real to me than the history stories in our Readers at school.”¹²³ In the warm community of his Cumberland Methodist chapel, tailor’s son Norman Nicholson enjoyed the same comforting sense that

we all belonged to the same country. And that country was the Holy Land. The landscape of the Bible was far more familiar to us than the geography of England. We had news of it twice every service in the lessons; the preachers preached about it; the hymns depicted and extolled it. Jerusalem, Jericho, Bethlehem, Canaan, the Sea of Galilee, Mount Carmel, Mount Ararat, Gilead, Moab, the Brook Cherith and cool Siloam’s shady rill—all these seemed no further away from home than, say, the Duddon Valley. They were like a private estate to which all chapel people had a key, a secret but accessible region, where they could call in and visit and rest for a while at any time of the day. It was not only that the Bible lands seemed near to home: in some ways they were home. And they looked like home. To me the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks were men like the Watsons of Millom Farm, or the Tysons of Beck Farm, or the Falconers of Water Blean. . . . And once, I remember, a Sunday School teacher gave us a lesson on the Good Samaritan. . . . “Now there was a man,” he said, “sent out on a walk from Jerusalem to Jericho, just as he might have been going from Foxfield to Broughton”—mentioning two villages eight or nine miles from Millom, just over the Lancashire side of the old County boundary. And even today, I cannot walk or drive along those two miles of highway, without seeing the man left half-dead, lying in the dyke bottom at the roadside.¹²⁴

As M. K. Ashby noted, late Victorian farm laborers projected themselves into Scripture, where they found not imperialism, but a radical liberalism:

They were on the side of the Prophets, rather than of the Kings, the institutions. The grounds of self-respect their fathers had lost in England they found afresh in Palestine. There were no two nations of the ancient Jews and there should be no great cleavage among Englishmen. They had read the injunction to the King of the Jews that “his heart be not lifted up above his brethren”. The great men of Israel were but farmers like their own cousins and ancestors. David had been a shepherd, Amos a herdsman, Christ himself a carpenter. For the more imaginative, the gorse bushes on Old Lodge could be on fire with the flames that do not consume. They could imagine the Saviour walking on the blue brick causeway the Feoffees were laying along the street, and were certain that saintly followers of his had walked and would yet walk the Tysoe lanes.¹²⁵

Michael Gareth Llewelyn remembered his mother, a £60-a-year schoolmistress in South Wales, teaching Bible tales with such a literary flair that

All these scriptural personages and scenes . . . were identified in my mind with people and places I knew. The widow whose cruse became inexaustible was old Marged Emmwnt, who lived in a small cottage near the brook “Kedron” in the wooded valley below the village. The walls of Jericho were the high walls around the churchyard. David, the Shepherd King, was my cousin, a young sheep farmer of Cilymynydd. Moses was one of the bearded deacons who came to the Lebanon Chapel, where the Calvinistic Methodists gathered to worship.¹²⁶

One Catholic millworker from Bolton remembered a brother who served in Palestine with General Allenby: “Exploring the Holy Places of history wholly absorbed and enthralled him, and eventually turned his spirit back to his childhood faith.”¹²⁷ As late as the 1920s, according to one chauffeur’s daughter, the schools ensured that “the map of the Holy Land . . . became almost as familiar to us as the map of England.”¹²⁸

To the West

British working people were equally enthralled by the geography, literature, and culture of another promised land. One of the sharpest ideological divisions between the classes involved their attitudes towards America. That country has always fascinated the proletariat as much as it has repelled the European educated classes, because it promised the former a measure of freedom and affluence that the latter was not prepared to grant. In the 1790s, London Corresponding Society radicals, inspired by Paine’s Rights of Man, idealized the young republic as a pastoral paradise without kings, lords, or bishops, where all enjoyed economic independence and none was too wealthy.¹²⁹ Meanwhile, an Aberdeenshire clergyman warned that young emigrants were writing effective and dangerous propaganda for the new nation:

By comparing (in their letters) their present with their former condition in this country, they have done much to excite others to follow their example. Such examples, and some late publications, may do much hurt, unless seasonably prevented. America is represented to be a wholesome and pleasant country, where the people, enjoying the rights of freemen, have a vote in the election of their legislators, pastors, and magistrates: a country provided by divine providence, to afford a comfortable habitation to those who are ill used at home; where the land is good in its quality, cheap, and gratuitously bestowed; and the passage to it unexpensive, and made in a few weeks. As migration is begun in this lowland country, something should be done to put a stop to its progress.¹³⁰

The 1830s, hard times in England, were the Age of Jackson across the Atlantic, making emigration all the more attractive. As a Slapton carpenter recalled:

One of the farmers who had emigrated some years ago to America wrote a glowing account of the country and its prospects, urging all who could to come over to Iowa. The letter was read in almost every cottage. It was read at the village inn and at the Methodist chapel every Sunday until it was nearly worn out. The Lord had now opened a door of escape. Special prayer-meetings were held to know the Lord’s will, which was that they should go. For several weeks nothing was thought about or talked about but going to America. The whole village was at work in packing and mending clothes. A farewell service was held in the Methodist chapel, which was crowded, and the services lasted through night until daybreak. The following evening, in the glorious springtime of May, some thirty-three men, women, and children knelt down in the street, and, after a short prayer-meeting, marched through the village singing hymns. The whole village turned out, and many accompanied them for miles. “Goodbye; God bless you!” rang from every cottage door. Every eye was wet. Mr. Tapper leaned over the Rectory gate and was visibly affected with this melancholy procession of his best parishioners. Prayers in the Methodist chapel were regularly offered up for the exiles until news came of their safe arrival and settlement. This induced others, in batches of threes and fours, to follow for several years.¹³¹

By mid-century, one of the most popular songs among British workingmen, including the father of Andrew Carnegie, was

To the West! to the West! to the land of the free,

Where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea;

Where a man is a man if he’s willing to toil,

And the humblest may gather the fruits of the soil.¹³²

Those who remained behind could immerse themselves in American literature. The United States failed to sign an international copyright agreement until 1891, leaving Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy defenseless against piracy, but British publishers were equally free to steal the works of American authors and sell them at rock-bottom prices. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal frequently published American stories, partly because they were accessible to readers and partly because they cost nothing in royalties.¹³³ Within two weeks in October 1852, at least ten English editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared: it has been estimated that, in one year, a total of 1.5 million copies were sold throughout the Empire.¹³⁴ By the 1860s Routledge was selling Uncle Tom and The Last of the Mohicans for 6d.¹³⁵ Thanks to this availability, the literary conservatism so common among the working classes was reversed in the case of American authors, who were enjoyed by common readers long before they acquired respectability in critical circles. Washington Irving was published in English school anthologies as early as the 1820s, Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant in 1833, Poe in 1836, Whittier in 1851.¹³⁶

All varieties of British radicals—abolitionists, humanitarians, temperance reformers, peace agitators, feminists, champions of public and adult education—drew inspiration and support from their American counterparts.¹³⁷ Chartist newspapers aggressively hailed the United States as a model of the blessings of democracy, a free press, cheap government, and separation of church and state, though they did not overlook the evils of slavery. When Chartists applied political tests to literature, they generally passed American poets with high marks for their democratic values. W. J. Linton was an early promoter of Longfellow in England, and the People’s Paper published fiction by Poe, Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.¹³⁸ As American authors seemed to address themselves to a plebeian audience, they were often hailed as brother workers, even when their credentials were questionable. Sid Chaplin, a Durham blacksmith, was inspired to write poetry by “Walt Whitman, who was my poet. I recognized a person like myself in Walt Whitman, a kindred spirit. He was a working man. I knew that from the start, it came out of everything in his poetry. A working man with a great feeling for his fellow working men, and fellow citizens as well when it came to the Civil War.”¹³⁹

As the tramp-poet W. H. Davies wrote, America was a wonderful territory for beggars.¹⁴⁰ The celebrated singer Sir Harry Lauder, when he was still a mineworker, acquired a fair knowledge of American history: “George Washington and Abraham Lincoln ranked second only in my estimation to Robert Burns and Walter Scott.” One of his (and Keir Hardie’s) favorite books was a popular biography of James Garfield, From Log Cabin to White House (1881).¹⁴¹ By 1893 it had gone through forty British editions, and it was quite capable of inspiring a Cornish tin miner to emigrate.¹⁴² Coming of age in Shadwell, Louis Heren intently followed news of the New Deal on the radio—liberal journalist Raymond Gram Swing reporting from Washington, Alistair Cooke broadcasting folk songs recorded by the Works Projects Administration (WPA), the labor struggles of Walter Reuther and John L. Lewis—and ever since he “felt at home in the United States.”¹⁴³ Mary Lakeman, a Cornish fisherman’s daughter, confirmed what George Orwell had written in “Riding Down from Bangor”: Little Women, Good Wives, What Katy Did, Avonlea, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and The Last of the Mohicans all created a romantic childhood vision of unlimited freedom and open space. “For me Jo, Beth and Laurie are right at the heart of a permanent unalterable American scene,” she wrote, “and I can turn on Louisa M. Alcott and others so powerfully that Nixon and Watergate are completely blacked out.”¹⁴⁴

In a country where few were educated intensively, the American alternative of broadly educating the many appealed to autodidacts. V. S. Pritchett’s “popular educator” was the literary section of the Christian Science Monitor.

It was imbued with that unembarrassed seriousness about learning things which gives American life its tedium but also a moral charm. In Europe the standards have been high for the few, the path of education has been made severe. If we learn, if we express ourselves in the arts, we are expected to be trained by obstruction and to emerge on our own and to be as exclusive, in our turn, as our mentors; willingness and general goodwill are—or have been until very lately—despised.¹⁴⁵

Though Pritchett did not attend a university until he was fifty, he was permitted to teach at Princeton, Berkeley, Smith, Vanderbilt, Brandeis, and Columbia. “From my earliest days I have liked the natural readiness and openness of the American temperament and I had been brought up in childhood a good deal on the classic American writers and their direct response to the world they lived in,” he recalled. “Good luck to escape, by going abroad, the perpetual British ‘no’ to the new boy; good luck to meet the American ‘yes’ to my first bits of writing.”¹⁴⁶

On a 1910 tour, trade unionist Margaret Bondfield was deeply impressed by students who cheerfully worked their way through the University of Wisconsin as waiters: “I wondered what sort of attitude one would find for a similar case, say in Eton or Harrow.” There was much in the United States that repelled her: yellow journalism, labor violence, the unbridled constitutional right to bear arms. But American literature had always been a beacon to British labor: back home, while organizing shop assistants, she kept up her courage by reciting Whitman, and in New England she visited the homes of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott. Speaking from a lorry in the Massachusetts mill town of Lawrence, she was surprised to discover that half her audience was from Yorkshire or Lancashire. When she asked one woman why she remained in America, “with a very dramatic gesture she swept the horizon with her arm and said, ‘Just look at this, and then think of that hell upon earth, Bradford.’” Miss Bondfield had to admit that “The Lawrence Mill was as clean as when it was first built. The windows were clean. The mill was surrounded with grass verges, and here and there tree-lined streets. The girls wore clean overalls, tidy feet and shoes, with their hair beautifully clean and nicely dressed. A mill crowd in Lawrence certainly would compare most favorably with Bradford.”¹⁴⁷

The memoirs of Margaret McCarthy convey the magic of New England for a Lancashire millgirl. When her family relocated from Oswaldtwistle to New Bedford for two years in the 1920s, “our whole existence, our way of life and thought, our outlook and ambitions were irrevocably revolutionised.” Though the mill where she worked was a non-union shop, the employees enjoyed something approaching affluence:

We noticed the smart, expensive-looking clothing, the careless, unconcerned spending of money, the easy hire-purchase way of the workers’ lives, with surprise. Inside the factories, too, the workers’ existence seemed transformed. The broken stone floors of Lancashire, steeped in water and oil, were replaced by smooth hardwood; automatic appliances relieved the weaver of so much labour that one worker could operate up to thirty looms, as against the four which was normal per weaver in Lancashire; technical appliances reduced breakages of the threads, but when such troubles occurred help was available to repair the damage. The unhealthy Lancashire habit of “kissing the shuttle” had been abolished, and in the factory were supplies of purified water, even iced water in summer, on tap in the weaving-sheds, for the workers’ convenience. Other facilities astonished us, as, for example, the music and dancing provided in the warehouses during the luncheon breaks.

As a girl she had identified closely with Tom Sawyer, and New Bedford, an old whaling town, conjured up Herman Melville. She took art classes which allowed far more scope for creativity than such courses at home, and she enjoyed friends of a variety of ethnic groups. Forced to return to Oswaldtwistle—“a grey trap, a straggling, gloomy, lifeless, forgotten place, which continued to exist from the dead past to the present by some oversight of Nature”—she was so embittered that she became a passionate Communist. She spent several hard years studying and working in the Soviet Union, enduring the privations and the repression, but in one respect she was always a deviationist: she insisted that she would return to America given the opportunity, even if the Party forbade her. There, to the West, was the Workers’ State.¹⁴⁸

According to Robert Roberts, the Russian Revolution went almost unnoticed in Salford, except among socialists and a butcher’s wife who named two pups Lenin and Trotsky. In contrast, the arrival of American troops was electrifying:

One sunny evening, to our wild astonishment, the cattle sidings were suddenly alive with soldiers, thousands of tall, clean, upstanding men—from the “Middle West,” they said—in boy scout hats and spick and span uniforms—all dumped in the heart of a northern English slum. They marched with a band, friendly and smiling, along our main way—and sang, too: “Over there, over there. We won’t get back till it’s over over there!” Everyone who could move poured from the slits of streets on to the high road to see them pass, screaming with joy: for so long now we had had so little to cheer. . . . We followed them far into the dusk until they turned into one of those great barracks built a hundred years before to intimidate the half-starved workers of the North. In the shop for days after people repeated the same things—“Did you see them? Wonderful fellers! They’ll show the Germans! It won’t be long now.”¹⁴⁹

A Liverpool dockworker’s son, who lost a brother and two uncles in the war, warmly remembered the arrival of American troops: “To the working class kids they were great guys, they would throw coins to us from their open trucks as they went by.”¹⁵⁰ According to a London tobacco worker’s son, whose brother died in the conflict, “Those were the days when people within our social class were looking to the new world of the American continent for relief from their existing poverty. A new world of prosperity and promise to which many emigrated.”¹⁵¹ For proletarian novelist Jack Common, that world was an alluring melange of Thoreau’s philosophy, Jack London’s socialism, and Bernarr MacFadden’s bodybuilding. He found the most authentic expression of British working-class culture in the Hollywood movie:

The popular imagination was now emigrant to America and the moving-picture was its Mayflower. A feat of modern technology had revived the ancient Gothic fascination of the cave with the lit drama at its end. This new thing that incorporated some very old things put a glow into many lives especially in need of such a mind-charmer at that distressed time.

The picture they looked at night after night was often American. So much the better, perhaps, for America was then a bright land, far, far away, the Golden West, the reborn Atlantis. There was the larger, truer, simpler democracy that England for all its revolutions and natural insurgence had never quite managed to make. America had fun, we all believed. Even its rich men were happy and unafraid; its poor could strike it lucky or be sure of an handout. A good rough working-class kind of world run openly to a gambler’s set of rules and tempered by a domestic morality of late-Victorian sweetness—that was our America of the dark final winter in World War One.¹⁵²

That combination of domesticity and limitless opportunity fascinated boys like R. L. Wild, an illegitimate child, whose family served doughboys in a small Eastleigh cafe: “Americans, to me, had something. They were different; more masculine, more romantic, all at the same time. I know now what they had, what they have to-day. A great deal more money than our own boys, no doubt. But this they also had—a sincere appreciation of the four walls of a home. . . . For years I was convinced that only the Americans could put a lighted match into their mouths, close the lips and bring the thing out, still flaming. Wonderful.”¹⁵³

Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and George Orwell in Coming Up for Air typified the horror felt by middle-class intellectuals when they confronted the prospect of flashy, chrome-plated, materialistic “Americanization.”¹⁵⁴ But denunciations of “Fordification” were not likely to resonate with workers like Margaret McCarthy: what most impressed her in New Bedford was the parking lot by the mill, where she discovered that the weavers and spinners owned cars. Thomas Burke, a poor boy from Poplar, was convinced that old England needed more rampant American consumerism. Movie palaces, snack bars, chain stores, and the resulting mixing of social classes had “done so much good that we now regard the zest and pungency of London life, which the States gave us, as our own growth.”¹⁵⁵ The informal, enthusiastic doughboys who arrived during the Great War had been a shot of adrenaline.¹⁵⁶ They could also send over more American girls, who, far from the stereotype of the hard-boiled businesswoman, were wittier than the English and more chic than the French.¹⁵⁷

American films had captured almost 60 percent of the British market by 1914, rising to 85 to 90 percent after the war, much to the distress of elitist critics.¹⁵⁸ The invasion, of course, was spearheaded by a son of England’s proletariat: Charlie Chaplin once told Thomas Burke that the British class system would never have allowed him to do what he had done in California.¹⁵⁹ An Irish laborer’s son in Clapton explained the enormous impact of Hollywood:

After The Big House, I ran straight home and informed my surprised and amused mother that I wanted to join the convicts when I grew up. To me they seemed to live a better life in their Big House than the heroes who joined the army or the Flying Corps. In the army you stood a good chance of ending up as a pair of bloody hands clinging to a barbed wire fence, while every single person in the Flying Corps crashed in flames. That was a fact—we saw it in the film, so I would be a convict or nothing, until I saw The Vagabond King. I spent days after that in despair, convinced that I had been born in the wrong century.¹⁶⁰

Of course it was escapist fantasy: but when your parents and teachers indoctrinated you in a class fatalism, squelching any hope that you might have some direction over your own life, Hollywood conveyed an intoxicating sense of possibility. Wally Horwood grew up in Walworth between the wars, the son of a barely literate telephone lineman and a mother who never neglected to remind him that

The world was ruled by a mysterious THEY whose sole purpose was to prevent ignorant people like US from making any headway in life. From boyhood onwards, any original endeavour that I might tentatively consider would be met with, “THEY won’t like it!” or “THEY won’t let you do that!” or a completely deflationary “THEY won’t take no notice of YOU!” Making every allowance for the double negative it will be seen that she was in no way a soul of encouragement.

The movies brought home an entirely different message. Horwood was particularly struck by one film about “some kind of American Officer Training Corps and the humiliations of a boy from a poor home attempting to become a member. Eventually, he triumphed, became the chief cadet, or whatever, and, in a magnificent uniform led the passing-out parade on horseback. I used to daydream myself as being in that position.” Horwood fully recognized that Hollywood was mass-producing “the opium of the people,” an endless output of “fantasy and unreality. In days when many lived almost on the bread-line, we saw people living in the most opulent affluence. Yet I personally felt no resentment; neither did I ever hear of anyone that did.” The reason, clearly, was the relentless optimism of the New Deal cinema. It Happened One Night, The Thin Man, Easy Living, and The Philadelphia Story portrayed a society where class barriers existed but could be hurdled by anyone with determination.¹⁶¹ Some movies conveyed a more radical message. Jim Wolveridge, a costermonger’s son from Stepney, and formerly a guest of the Brentwood Workhouse, was electrified by Wild Boys of the Road.

It was set in the American depression, and was about groups of American boys riding the rails and going from town to town in search of work, and it showed the kids’ struggles with strong arm railway guards and officials who tried to keep them off the trains and away from the towns which might have to support them temporarily. It also showed the kids fighting back. Our crowd were too young to be marxists or bolshies, but knew enough about the struggles of the unemployed, and to see the kids hitting back at the law got our noisy support.

Fury, The Black Legion, Dead End Kids, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, All Quiet on the Western Front—“There were quite a few American films of the time dealing with social problems,” Wolveridge recalled, “but damn few English ones.” In British movies “poverty and unemployment didn’t exist and they gave the impression that we all spoke with posh Oxford accents, wore nothing but evening dress and spent all our time dining at the Savoy. If the working class were shown at all they were depicted as dimwitted clowns who spoke with a phoney accent that was even worse than the real thing.” Wolveridge was so offended by the ersatz cockneys of Bank Holiday that he walked out in the middle of the film. So predictable was this treatment that when he saw the English thriller They Drive by Night, he was stunned by the rare authenticity of the East End dialogue: “Blimey somebody’s been doing his homework.”¹⁶²

One could swallow Hollywood myths whole without blunting one’s political radicalism, perhaps because both were based on similar kinds of adolescent idealism. Ted Willis was swept away by Tom Mix and Pearl White:

The simple morality of those silent Westerns and other dramas made a deep impression on me. As I left the cinema I would resolve to make myself as bold and selfless as the stars I had seen, to protect the weak and defend the innocent at no matter what cost in personal sacrifice, and to emphasize my resolution I even tried to imitate the distinctive walk and mannerisms of the hero.

He brought the same righteous melodrama to socialist politics, lecturing his scandalized father “that I would rather that my three sisters become prostitutes than that they should be exploited as wage-slaves in a sweatshop for twelve or fourteen hours a day.” (Ted was also a great fan of Mrs. Warren’s Profession.) He identified completely with a film about a young surgeon who falls in love with a crippled girl and performs a dangerous operation to help her walk again: “For a long time after this I dreamed of finding a crippled girl of my own, to whom I could devote my life.” He did not plan to become a doctor—hardly a realistic ambition for the son of a London Transport worker and a washerwoman. “No, I simply wanted to sacrifice myself, to love and protect and serve someone weaker than myself, to perform an act of utter and complete unselfishness.” He found that vocation as a full-time organizer for the Labour Party League of Youth. “We’ll abolish poverty and misery and ignorance. And war, we’ll abolish war,” he assured his mother, in words that might have been composed by a Los Angeles screenwriter of the 1930s. “We’ll build beautiful new cities, and people will be happy, and there’ll be singing in the streets, and the children will grow up with a real chance.” (“That’s nice,” she replied.)¹⁶³

Sociological surveys of film audiences carried out around 1945 illustrated in detail the impact of American movies. One Swinton girl wished she were old enough to date Americans, and not only because GIs gave her sweets and tinned fruits: “Anyone from America, in my books, must be glamorous because all the film stars were, and I judged all Americans by them.”¹⁶⁴ Mass Observation found that 64 percent had a positive opinion of American films (including 26 percent who rated them “better than ours”), compared with only 20 percent negative. Though most filmgoers realized that Hollywood presented an unrealistic portrait of America, they also broadly perceived the United States as more democratic than Britain.¹⁶⁵ What the working classes found alluring in these movies was a society where, it seemed, everyone could be bourgeois, where middle-class affluence and values were apparently the norm. Hollywood taught an unemployed Irish shop assistant to adopt American table manners.¹⁶⁶ An engineer and an army postal worker wanted to model their own families after the Andy Hardy movies,¹⁶⁷ which left a sixteen-year-old clerk profoundly discontented: she wanted to hang out in corner drug stores like an American college girl, and she wished that English boys would treat her with the gallantry of Mickey Rooney.¹⁶⁸ A butcher’s son longed to become a band singer in America, “which in my opinion is the greatest place on the map of the world. Where everybody is classed as one, which (if you don’t mind my saying so), is not a policy generally carried out by all of the English people at the present day.”¹⁶⁹ A nineteen-year-old munitions worker, who had kept a record of every film she had seen since age four (a total of 1,350), was entranced by portrayals of affluent American homes with their labor-saving devices.¹⁷⁰ Respondents of both sexes confirmed that Hollywood glamor left them dissatisfied and somewhat envious of the American way of life, even if they realized that the tinsel was fake. “I know that all the stories are not true, and the characters merely exist on celluloid—I have told myself that hundreds of times,” said a miner’s daughter, “but somehow my brain refuses to accept it and I am more dissatisfied than ever. Films are like a drug—the more one has the more one wants, and yet, after seeing a film there is no satisfaction. Everything seems flat and dull when the last scene flickers out, and knowing that—I still go.”¹⁷¹

The complexities of the working-class perspective on America were most perceptively untangled by Herbert Hodge, author and taxi-driver. During the Second World War he had the rare privilege of a speaking tour across the United States, and he could see that it was not a model of egalitarianism. University of Wisconsin students asked him about the British class system, but seemed oblivious to gross economic inequality at home. Labor–management hostility in Detroit was worse than anything he had seen in Britain. He was outraged when the Chicago police ransacked the home of an elderly black lady, disgusted by the American “dollar complex” and success-at-any-cost ethic. Yet, he concluded, in one important sense this was a genuinely classless society. American business executives eagerly asked him for advice on public speaking, something their English counterparts would have been embarrassed to do. In Britain

You will find earnest ex-public school boy members of even the Communist Party writing little tracts for each other on how to get on with the “workers”—as if the “workers” were a different biological species.

In the States there is no such caste division. The American boy grows up in a community “dedicated to the proposition that all men are born free and equal.” In cold fact they may be no more free and equal in the U.S. than we are in Britain. But because they are all of them dedicated to the proposition they do tend to behave in their social intercourse as if it were so. And that is at least the beginning of true democracy. We’ll never get as near as that to democracy in Britain until we’ve abolished our caste system of education.

Hodge recalled The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, where W. H. Davies “presented himself as a confident, tough guy when a hobo in the States, and as a timid, diffident chap in England.” He found exactly the same transformation in himself. The public school boy might be repelled by American “vulgarity,” but

The council school boy . . . will warm and glow in this new social atmosphere. He will feel himself blossoming like a plant brought out of the cellar into the sunshine. For the first time in his life, he will feel free to chuck out his chest to its fullest capacity. . . . He will simply notice that he feels a lot better than he ever did at home, both mentally and physically, and that he has suddenly acquired an enormous confidence in himself.

It is only when he comes back to England and goes through the old, old process of being quietly snubbed and put in his place that he realizes that the difference between the vital, ebullient self he knew in America and the soggy self he knows in England is due almost entirely to this difference in social atmospheres.¹⁷²

Recessional

Perhaps the most damning conclusion one can reach about British imperial propaganda is that it utterly failed to alert the working classes to the greatest threat the Empire would ever face. As Orwell noted in 1939, the boys’ weeklies were stuck in 1910, scarcely conscious of the rise of the European dictators and the approach of war.¹⁷³ “Nazi Germany and the war in Abyssinia as seen in jerky clips on British Movietone News had little or no meaning for us,” recalled one fan of the Magnet and Sexton Blake. “The Spanish Civil War and the tribal warriors of Ethiopia aiming spears at the Italian Air Force seemed like an episode from Sanders of the River. People didn’t really die on films, they only fell down. Chamberlain dressed and looked like any of the other comics, and the goose step was better than Charlie Chaplin.”¹⁷⁴

For all our complaints about the superficiality of the Television Generation and the Internet Generation, the Movie Generation was far less aware of current events. They could scarcely have been otherwise, given that the typical newsreel consisted of five one-minute stories. Growing up in a family that read newspapers only for sport and scandal, Vernon Scannell knew all the great prize fighters by age thirteen, “but I could not have named the Prime Minister of the day or his political party. When, in 1935 I saw at the cinema newsreels showing the destruction of the Abyssinian warriors by the tanks and dive-bombers of Mussolini it was with little interest and less comprehension, and a few months later when Hitler’s troops invaded the Rhineland no minatory sound of war drums reached my ears.” The history and geography he was taught at school were never related to contemporary events. Remarkably, Scannell had read widely about the last war: the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. The Penguin edition of A Farewell to Arms so overwhelmed him that he tried to write his own Great War novel in a Hemingway style. But none of this translated into any awareness that another war might be on the way. He could not have found the Sudetenland on a map.¹⁷⁵ That part of the world was never discussed on Empire Day. “Instead of teaching us about how one-fifth of the world was red and British, we should have been taught something about Hitler, Mussolini and their kind,” complained the daughter of a Southampton longshoreman.¹⁷⁶

The only history Alf Strange learned at school consisted of “vague kings and dates”: he much preferred helping his father (a Shropshire village blacksmith) at the forge. Consequently, “Hitler and Europe and Chamberlain and the whole threat of war seemed another world away. We were all terribly ignorant of the storm that was building up across the horizon.”¹⁷⁷ For seventeen-year-old Margaret Perry, a Nottingham store clerk, the declaration of war meant only “the prospect of beautiful young men in uniform.”

I didn’t read newspapers in those days, had no idea what had been happening across the channel during the last six years. Germany was far, far away and Poland even further. Where was Poland anyway? I knew Austria was next to Germany and Czechoslovakia around there somewhere but our lessons in Geography at school hadn’t included a map of Europe. The British Empire, yes, I remember that. Tea came from India and Africa was full of little black pygmies, but Europe, that was full of foreigners who couldn’t speak English. Another world of which I was completely ignorant.¹⁷⁸

Two polls conducted in 1948 provide hard statistical evidence of that ignorance. A government survey found that only 33 percent of those earning £4 a week or less could correctly name a single colony, though another 36 percent mentioned a dominion. After forty years of Empire Day propaganda, 63 percent of all respondents could not think of a single raw material imported from the colonies. Among unskilled workers, 59 percent had little or no interest in colonial matters and only 15 percent a high level of interest, compared with 54 percent of the middle classes.¹⁷⁹ When Mass Observation asked 2,078 people which countries belonged to the Empire, 17 percent could not name any. The dominions scored reasonably well: Australia was mentioned by 78 percent, Canada 67 percent, New Zealand 52 percent, South Africa 40 percent. But India and Pakistan together were named by only 18 percent, Malaya 9 percent, and the rest of Africa combined by only 9 percent. A mere 8 percent cited any of the strategic Mediterranean bases of Malta, Gibraltar, and Cyprus, so critical during the Second World War. No other colony was mentioned by more than 1 percent. Fully 65 percent could not name any recent event in any part of the Empire: 20 percent mentioned India and Pakistan (which had just become independent amidst terrible turmoil) and 15 percent cited South Africa. Imperial literacy was lower still among the working class. Those with higher education could name on average 4.25 countries in the Empire, compared with only 2.75 for those with an elementary education. More strikingly, 71 percent of those with higher education, but only 24 percent of those with an elementary education, could explain the difference between a dominion and a colony.¹⁸⁰

This is not to say that Empire Day, Frank Richards, and Sanders of the River were complete failures as propaganda. They undoubtedly found a receptive audience among middle-class schoolboys, who could realistically look forward to a career commanding Africans or Indians. But they simply did not have the same relevance for working-class children, who rarely ventured far from home. After all, how much of the Empire did they own?