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Virginia Woolf’s introduction to Life As We Have Known It (1931)

David Bradshaw’s selection of essays by Virginia Woolf for the Oxford World Classics is divided into four thematic areas.

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. Looking On

This blog post summarises one of the six essays in the third section, ‘Women and Fiction’, titled ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1931). For reference I list all 6 essays in the section. I reviewed the other five in a previous blog post. The essay is an introduction to a volume titled Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women‘, and it inspired me to go and read the whole book, which I have reviewed separately.

  1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
  2. Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
  3. Women and Fiction (1929)
  4. Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
  5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
  6. Why? (1934) [article for a student magazine]

5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931: 14 pages)

This is the longest and most complex essay in the section, at 14 pages. Well, maybe not complicated in structure, but complicated in 1) the eccentrically roundabout way in which Woolf addresses the subject matter and her own complicated responses to it, and 2) the multi-text nature of the book she’s introducing.

I’ll try to give a summary overview of the content, and then a description of my changing impressions as I read it through.

Summary

In 1931 Woolf was asked to write a preface to a collection of letters and photos written by members of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild and collected into a book titled Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women. The Guild was founded as far back as 1883 and Woolf was commissioned by one of its co-founders, Margaret Llewellyn Davies. The book was to be published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so it was very much an in-house project.

Woolf approaches the commission in a rather roundabout way and most of the introduction feels like a meandering digression. This is because she kicks off by describing two memories.

1) First of all, she casts her mind back to the annual Congress of the Guild she attended as long ago as 1913 and recalls, very vividly, being frustrated and bored. And also alienated by the fact that so many of the women speakers were solid working class and she found, to her dismay, that she had nothing in common with them, not even the language they spoke.

2) This is supplemented by a second memory, of going soon afterwards for a meeting with Davies at the head office of the Guild, in Hampstead, north London. Here Woolf raises the sense she had of being alienated from the predominantly working class membership of the Guild and frustration at not being able to break out of the prison of her class. She wishes the two classes of women could break through the class barriers, and simply share their experiences, talk and exchange experiences and ideas. But she fears that will never happen in her lifetime.

Although I’ve made it sound brisk and logical, that is not at all how it reads. I became quite irritated with Woolf’s alienated, detached self obsession, her inability to care about what any of the social and political issues the speakers at the Congress raised and discussed, her fatal tendency to drift off into her own world, focusing on what colour their dresses are, or inventing completely imaginary home lives for each of the speakers, rather than paying them the elementary respect of listening to what they were saying.

She tells us that it was at this point of the discussion in Hampstead that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the hundreds of letters she’d received from members of the Guild over the years, thanking her for giving them an opportunity to expand their horizons, to meet and talk and learn and gain the confidence to speak up and address political issues.

Woolf was immediately interested to read all these first-hand accounts and Davies promised to send them on but, for whatever reason, never did. Then the War came and a thousand other distractions and then the social confusion of the post-war period. So it was only years later that Davies got round to posting Woolf a big parcel packed with folders containing letters, notes and photographs from working class women, which she went through with fascination.

3) And this provides the third section of this little text, which is only three or four pages long but really vividly summarises the content of loads of those letters, one- or two-sentence summaries of the cramped, exploited, violent lives and abuse so many of these women suffered, for decades, for all their lives. It is shocking and sometimes harrowing evidence. Suddenly this short text bursts into colour, stops being about mimsy Virginia, becomes three-dimensional, acquires a completely different force from the idle, middle-class reveries which preceded it. It’s worth reading for this three-page summary alone.

These, of course, are some of the letters which were then included in the volume which Woolf was asked to write a preface to. Now the whole text comes full circle. Now you realise why she began with the apparently inconsequential and self-obsessed memories of attending the Congress. Crabwise, her introduction approaches the real core of the text – the working women’s experiences – so obliquely that when they arrive, the contrast with Woolf’s leisurely upper class existence – all opera and Shakespeare – is all the more shocking and dramatic.

So was it planned? Was this artful structuring? The self-description as a snobbish, alienated middle-class lady all a ploy to make the working class content, when it comes, more shocking? Or the much simpler result of Woolf’s artless self-absorption? Much the same question could be asked of her novels: to what extent they are artful constructions or, conversely, just the result of her letting her mind drift and then arranging the blizzard of details and sense impressions into a sort of order based grouped into a handful of characters and a vague plot…

Background

From the Yale Review archives is an introduction to this piece which must be out of date but is still useful.

These pages relating to the English Women’s Co-operative Guild are addressed to a former officer of this organization who had placed in Mrs Woolf’s hands a collection of letters written by its members. The Guild, which now has an enrolment of some 70,000 and is the largest association of its kind in England, was founded in 1883 to stimulate the ideas and activities of working women. It holds important annual Congresses, and it is of one of these which met at Manchester, in 1913.

We know the Yale text is out of date because it talks about the Guild in the present tense but we know that the Guild closed in 2016, according to the Co-operative Women’s Guild Wikipedia article.

No prefaces

This text is the Introductory Letter to a social history book called Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press. She was actually invited to write a preface to the book by its editor, the founder of the Guild, Margaret Llewellyn Davies, but refused on principle, the principle being that a book should stand or fall by its content without loads of prefaces and other bric-a-brac surrounding it.

But you also quickly come to suspect it’s because Woolf couldn’t write that kind of thing. She couldn’t gracefully summarise the themes of a book, its content and the achievement of its author, that’s not how her mind worked. Not without subterfuge and artifice.

Instead of directly grappling with the content of the book or the issues it raises about working class women collaborating to improve their lives, Woolf starts by going off at a tangent. With characteristic solipsism, she approaches the book by asking what memories it prompts in her and goes on to share two in particular.

Out of her inability to concentrate, out of her tendency to lose track of what anyone’s saying, out of her tendency to drift off and look out the nearest window, daydreaming and noticing all kinds of inconsequential details, Woolf made a style, a magnificent style, a new approach to narrative which characterises her classic novels Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Years and Between The Acts. In the context of essays which are meant to be about something, it can make for a frustrating read.

Scene 1. The 1913 Congress of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

So Woolf whisks us to a hot June morning in 1913 in Newcastle where she attended a meeting of, presumably (it’s not really made clear) the Women’s Guild. She describes the hall and the people as if in a novel and describes a succession of women who’ve come from all over the country to make their 5-minute speeches. She namechecks the issues of the day:

  • reform of the divorce laws to allow women to petition for divorce
  • taxation of land
  • campaign for a minimum wage
  • the Trades Board Act
  • education of children over 14
  • complete adult suffrage

She namechecks them but, of course, she doesn’t go into them. You have to turn to Bradshaw’s notes at the back of the OUP edition to find out more about any of them. Instead Woolf glories in her superficiality, dwelling on the mustiness of the room and the appearance of the ladies. She candidly admits that all these political issues leave her ‘in her blood and bones, untouched’. And explains why – it’s a matter of class. Woolf isn’t really engaged in any contemporary politics because she is a comfortably off, middle class lady.

If every reform they demand was granted this very instant it would not touch one hair of my comfortably capitalistic head. Hence my interest is merely altruistic. It is thin spread and moon-coloured. There is no life blood or urgency about it. However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet, there is a hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator. I am irretrievably cut off from the actors. I sit here hypocritically, clapping and stamping, an outcast from the flock. (p.148)

This is the characteristic attitude of all her fictional characters: they all experience the sense of being outsiders, outside the conversations other people are having and, at their most delirious, of being outside their own lives, looking on. You can’t help thinking of her mental illness and repeated mental breakdowns.

Also Woolf is afflicted by a strong sense of what’s the point? None of these women or any of their resolutions will have any impact because it is 1913 and none of them have the vote. This one thought leaves her feeling ‘irritated and depressed’, as well it might, but with the rather more Woolfian threat of ‘boredom and despair’ lurking behind. See how it’s all about her, her and her mental problems?

So Woolf does what she always does and drifts away from the present and daydreams, fantasises, imagines the home life of some of the speakers, of Mrs Giles and Mrs Edwards, imagines the view from their windows (windows, that talismanic Woolfian image). In a pretty patronising tone she imagines what it must be like to be a working class woman, so very different from her own la-di-da habits of ringing up the opera to book tickets or lying in the garden enjoying sensitive reveries of Greece and Italy. Without speaking to a single working class woman she imagines their lives, and her position of irredeemable hauteur and snobbery comes out clearer and clearer.

Here is Virginia Woolf imagining the lives of the working class women of her time.

There were no armchairs, electric light, or hot water laid on in their homes, no Greek hills or Mediterranean bays in their lives. They did not sign a cheque to pay the weekly bills, or order, over the telephone, a cheap but quite adequate seat at the Opera. If they travelled it was on excursion day, with paper bags and hot babies in their arms.

They did not stroll through the house and say, that cover must go to the wash, or those sheets need changing. They plunged their arms in hot water and scrubbed the clothes themselves. In consequence they had thickset muscular bodies. They had large hands; they had the slow emphatic gestures of people who are often stiff and fall tired in a heap on hard-backed chairs.

They touched nothing lightly. They gripped papers and pencils as if they were brooms. Their faces were firm, with heavy folds and deep lines. It seemed as if their muscles were always taut and on the stretch. Their eyes looked as if they were always set on something actual—on saucepans that were boiling over, on children who were getting into mischief.

Their faces never expressed the lighter and more detached emotions that come into play when the mind is perfectly at ease about the present. They were not in the least detached and cosmopolitan. They were indigenous and rooted to one spot. Their very names were like the stones of the fields, common, grey, obscure, docked of all the splendours of association and romance.

Vivid enough, very vivid and persuasive, but at the same time so patronising and privileged. Back to the Congress, where Woolf dismissively reports that there were innumerable more speeches, exchanges of home-made jams and biscuits, songs sung and meals consumed, a new President elected, then it was over and everyone caught their trains home.

Scene 2. At the Hampstead headquarters of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s really rammed home why this text is called ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’. In another writer’s hands this might involve memories of other people, of what they were like, what they said and what they achieved. In Woolf’s hands everything is always about her and her sensitive perceptions and concerns.

In the inconsequential way which you either find charming or irritating, according to taste, Woolf doesn’t remember the substance of any of the conversations she takes part in at the Hampstead headquarters – instead she remembers that the Guild’s secretary, Miss Kidd, was stout and fierce and dressed in a deep purple dress.

Nowadays, if you’re a man, you’re likely to be criticised for judging women purely on their appearance instead of their character, thoughts and achievements. Yet this is exactly what Woolf does. Lacking the mental ability or interest in what anyone says, it is appearance and quirks which appeal to her most consistently. Presumably she’d have said this is the novelist’s eye. Forget issues. Enjoy characters.

Miss Lillian Harris who, whether it was due to her dress which was coffee-coloured, or to her smile which was serene, or to the ash-tray in which many cigarettes had come amiably to an end, seemed the image of detachment and equanimity.

Had one not known that Miss Harris was to the Congress what the heart is to the remoter veins—that the great engine at Newcastle would not have thumped and throbbed without her—that she had collected and sorted and summoned and arranged that very intricate but orderly assembly of women—she would never have enlightened one.

She had nothing whatever to do—she came to the office because an office is a good place in which to read detective stories—she licked a few stamps and addressed a few envelopes—it was a fad of hers—that was what her manner conveyed. It was Miss Harris who moved the papers off the chairs and got the teacups out of the cupboard. It was she who answered questions about figures and put her hand on the right file of letters infallibly and sat listening, without saying very much, with calm comprehension, to whatever was said. (p.151)

‘She had nothing whatever to do’. Yes. Again Woolf repeats her troubled sense of class superiority to most of these working women.

To expect us, whose minds such as they are, fly free at the end of a short length of capital to tie ourselves down to that narrow plot of acquisitiveness and desire is impossible. We have baths and we have money. Therefore, however much we had sympathised our sympathy was largely fictitious. It was aesthetic sympathy, the sympathy of the eye and of the imagination, not of the heart and nerves.

This turns into a complaint about the way some of the working women who spoke at the Congress imitated and mocked the dainty speech of middle and upper class women. As you can imagine, Virginia didn’t like this, but she comes up with a principled reason. It’s because she found the working class speakers more authentic and real when they stuck to their own voices and concerns and despite the fact that ‘the range of expression is narrower in working women’.

So much does she like this authenticity that she wonders why they want to acquire money and become middle class and so lose the thing they have, their ‘contact with life’, ”facing facts’, ‘the teaching of experience’, call it what you will. Ah the bourgeois fondness for the dignity of labour, as long as it’s other people doing the labouring.

In among all this Woolf makes a claim which is so preposterously privileged it is laugh-out-loud funny, claiming that:

No working man or woman works harder with his hands or is in closer touch with reality than a painter with his brush or a writer with his pen. (p.152)

Yes, her sister, Vanessa, and all the Rogers, Quentins and Duncans in the Bloomsbury Group, they all knew far more about hard work than a coal miner! It’s precisely attitudes like this which gave the group its reputation for high-minded snobbery and condescension. And stupidity.

Woolf is painfully aware of being trapped in her upper-middle-class bubble, what she calls ‘shut up in the confines of the middle classes’. This first part of the essay records all the aspects of embarrassment and boredom and frustration which this plight triggers in her.

She finds many things to admire in ‘them’, these working class women, such as their robust sense of humour, their energy and, especially interesting for Woolf the writer, their way with words, the phrases which Shakespeare would have enjoyed (Woolf and all her characters endlessly invoke Shakespeare, in a thumpingly obvious way, as the absolute peak of poetic expression), their ‘shrewd sayings in the speeches at the Congress which even the weight of a public meeting could not flatten out entirely’ (p.153).

Finally she arrives at the frustrated wish that if only the classes could come together and remove the class barriers between them.

We are condemned to remain forever shut up in the confines of the middle classes wearing tail coats and silk stockings and called Sir or Madam as the case may be, when we are all, in truth, simply Johns and Susans.

And they remain equally deprived. For we have as much to give them as they us—wit and detachment, learning and poetry and all those good gifts which those who have never answered bells or touched their foreheads with their forefingers enjoy by right. But the barrier is impassable.

And nothing perhaps exasperated us more at the Congress (you [Davies] must have noticed at times a certain irritability) than the thought that this force of theirs, this smouldering heat which broke the crust now and then and licked the surface with a hot and fearless flame, is about to break through and melt us together so that life will be richer and books more complex and society will pool its possessions instead of segregating them… but only when we are dead. (p.153)

Which prompts the question, Have class barriers been removed in modern England, 90 years after Woolf wrote this, 112 years after the Guild Congress which prompted it?

My impression is that these class barriers have substantially loosened, are not as absolutely impassable as they were in Woolf’s day, but they still remain. The chavs on the council estate round the corner are a slightly threatening mystery to me as I, with my civil service job and interest in the arts, might be for them. I think. The real point is that I don’t know. To a large extent everybody else is a mystery to me.

And also the entire question of ‘class’ has been ruptured and recast by the huge immigration which has changed the nature of English society over the last twenty years. In 2021 63.2% of London residents identified with an ethnic minority group. People identifying with the White ethnic group are now in a minority in London.

I grew up in an England where the main divide was between the middle and working classes and so leaned towards socialist politics on behalf of the downtrodden. But the advent of progressive or woke politics – the rise and rise feminism, the revelation of a dazzling range of gender identities, alongside the immigration of hundreds of ethnic groups which all retain their ethnic identities and allegiances – has  massively confused the sociology of England and the old politics. No wonder it (the old two-party system) can’t keep up.

In my opinion these sociological changes have permanently fragmented what used to be called the Left, not only here but all across Europe, leading to the rise of right-wing populist parties. I don’t really judge any of these changes, I’m just observing what I consider to be the biggest social and cultural issue of my time, which presses fairly heavily on all of us, and so colours my readings of political or social writings from the past.

Back to Woolf, my point is that her worry about trying to break down barriers between the unknown white working class women and posh white ladies like herself who go to the opera and understand Shakespeare, these concerns now seem quaint and charming. Of historic interest. Like watching an Ealing Comedy. It is an issue from an England which has disappeared.

Her clarion cry to break down the barriers of class between women is fine and inspiring but I don’t know what they’d mean to the Kurdish hairdressers based in the Kurdish barbers I go to; to the till woman at Tesco from Ghana and Mauritius that I always chat to; to the wives of the Albanian builders who put up a new fence for me; to the Somali family or the Afghan family who live in the flats across from my place. Enjoying the blessings of Shakespeare? Most of them can barely speak English. I’m not saying that’s fatal. I’m just saying it restricts the relevance of Woolf’s discourse, these days, to an even tinier, bookish clique than it did in her day.

To summarise, Woolf feels that in this conversation at the Guild headquarters in Hampstead, she tried:

to describe the contradictory and complex feelings which beset the middle-class visitor forced to sit out a congress of working women in silence. (p.154)

Scene 3. The letters themselves

Apparently it was at this point in Woolf’s lament to Davies in the Hampstead headquarters, that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the many letters she had received from working women around the country. Woolf asked to see them but Davies, at that meeting, demurred. It was only years later, after the Great War, that she finally sent Woolf a packet of letters.

And here comes the radical transformation in the content and tone of the piece which I mentioned earlier. The simple unvarnished lives of these staggeringly poor women, the brutal conditions they grew up in, the childhood exploitation, the lives of unremitting labour garnished with the brutality of overseers, fathers and husbands, the horrors of childbirth, the lack of any healthcare, beggars belief.

Yet out of all these terrible stories, Woolf emphasises the positives, praising ‘that inborn energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench’. The women describe lives packed with debilitating toil,  long hours working in fields and factories and domestic service, six days a week, with sometimes only a few hours free time each week, along with the struggle to support husbands, often ill or thrown out of work, and all the time raise numerous children, often going hungry in the process, worn out by stress and continual work, old and ill before their time.

And so, as I mentioned in my summary, the reader at last gets to the nub of the subject, the testimony of these many women and, as I suggested, realises that maybe the self-obsessed vapourings of the first half of the essay are intended as a deliberate contrast with the shocking lives depicted in the letters. Maybe. Or was Woolf that artful? Discuss.

Because of the in-your-face reality of these last few pages, this essay stands head and shoulders above the others. Maybe it’s just my old left-wing leanings being triggered, but I felt the essay only came to life with them and suddenly, from whimsical Woolfian sepia, changed into colour. Woolf, too, is thrilled by what she calls:

the extraordinary vitality of the human spirit. The dauntless energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench

This is all very moving but, unfortunately, Woolf rather undermines herself, and in a characteristic way, which is that she in particular praises the women who made time in their wretched lives to read and to read the classics, which she then goes to the trouble of namechecking for us:

They read Dickens and Scott and Henry George and Bulwer-Lytton and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Alice Meynell and would like “to get hold of any good history of the French Revolution, not Carlyle’s please,” and B. Russell on China, and William Morris and Shelley and Florence Barclay and Samuel Butler’s Note Books…

All true no doubt, and education begins with reading, but you can’t help feeling there’s something everso narrow about Woolf’s view of life. In her view the good life is reading the books she loves, the books she grew up reading in her father’s library, the same relatively short, restricted list of Great Books, Masterworks of the Spirit etc. Very narrow. Very limited.

Anyway, in the last pages she moves on to praise the work of the Guild and at this point the text morphs more into what you’d expect an introduction to be like, praising the work of the organisation it’s introducing.

It was the Guild that drew to itself all that restless wishing and dreaming. It was the Guild that made a central meeting place where formed and solidified all that was else so scattered and incoherent. The Guild must have given the older women, with their husbands and children, what ‘clean ground’ had been given to the little girl in Bethnal Green, or the view of day breaking over the hills had been to the girls in the hat factory. It gave them in the first place that rarest of all possessions – a room where they could sit down and think, remote from boiling saucepans and crying children… (p.157)

And she goes on to describe the growth of the organisation, its importance as a place where women could meet and share and think and develop their ideas.

And the force that lay behind their speeches was compact of many things—of men with whips, and sick rooms where match boxes are made, of hunger and cold, and many and difficult childbirths, of much scrubbing and washing up, of reading Shelley and William Morris and Samuel Butler, of meetings of the Women’s Guild, and committees and congresses at Manchester and elsewhere.

His final section which actually summarises the letters and the achievements of the Guild is as genuinely inspiring as Three Guineas is excoriating and anger-making. But again Woolf partly undermines what she’s saying, because she feels the (wholly unnecessary) need to pass literary judgement on these stories, lamenting their lack of literary finish like the crustiest of male critics.

The writing lacks detachment and imaginative breadth, even as the women themselves lacked variety and play of feature. Here are no reflections; no view of life as a whole; no attempt to enter into the lives of other people. It is not from the ranks of working class women that the next great poet or novelist will be drawn. (p.158)

It’s not only socially that Woolf was a snob, but in her very narrow, elitist view of Great Art. But she does condescend to comment that some of the accounts have the rude ‘accuracy and clarity’ of Defoe. In the midst of pontificating, she says something very, very symptomatic, she writes:

Writing is a complex art.

But is it? She would like to think so, but much of the great writing is not that complex. Worked over and elaborated, maybe, but not necessarily that complex. And the history of twentieth century literature since her heyday tends to demonstrate a steady simplification and de-complicating of literary writing, until our own day when much ‘literary’ writing is not, sentence by sentence, complex or difficult.

Here as in most of her writings, Woolf is judging others by her own standards and these standards are themselves a kind of aspiration to an ideal made up of a bunch of Victorian writers mashed together, Keats and Shelley and Lamb, into a vague icon of high Poetry and Truth. Her judging of the working class women’s writings says more about Woolf and her narrow idea of Literature than it does about the working class women.

This is characteristic of all her criticism. She doesn’t really engage with the meat and texture of the works under review, she tends to use them as pretexts to sound off about her hobby horses, to repeat her commitment to Poetry and Truth and hold Shakespeare up as the Great Model, time after time.

A Virago classic

I already knew that the book was published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so there was a more than usually close connection between her and the book i.e. she was more than just an admirer of the Guild asked to write something, but the book’s publisher.

From looking on Amazon and Ebay I learned that Life As We Have Known It was one of the first books published by the feminist publishing house, Virago. So there are multiple layers of feminist history at work here: the women’s original personal experiences; the Guild which encouraged them to write about them; the collection of writings itself; the Woolf connection (publishing it and writing the introduction); and the Virago revival of it. It is quite a dense, multi-layered cultural artefact, then.

So I bought and read it and have reviewed the book as a whole, in a separate blog post.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most though not all of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction to the book can be read on Amazon.

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By the Seaside @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The Photographers’ Gallery in Soho has a Print Sales Room downstairs, next to the book shop. Here they stage rotating exhibitions of works by the 40 or so photographers whose work they’re licensed to print and sell. Since their roster of artists includes some big international names, and because they always select the best of the best, it’s always worth paying a visit. Smaller and less pressurised than the main exhibitions in the galleries above, these discreet and petite displays regularly come close to pure visual pleasure.

Currently, they’re hosting photos by seven photographers, all on the theme of the English seaside. After the gruelling horrors of the Ernest Cole exhibition about apartheid South Africa and the strange and mysterious Mexican culture photographed by Graciela Iturbide (also currently on display and reviewed in forthcoming blog posts), it’s a relief to stroll into the ‘Carry On…’ simplicity of possibly the quintessential English subject.

John Hinde (1916 to 1997)

Hinde is in a way the most interesting snapper in the show because he is a historical figure. Born in 1916, he developed an interest in photography at the start of the war, from which he was excluded as a Quaker conscientious objector. He had a big hiatus in his life between the mid-40s and the mid-50s when he worked in a circus (!). In 1956 he set up a company to take photos of Ireland where he’d settled. The company wasn’t about high art but a commercial operation designed to sell postcards wholesale to shops or resort owners who sold them onto tourists and visitors.

At the time most postcards sold to tourists were in black and white, since this was felt to convey the misty romance of the landscape and quaint village ways. Hinde set out to find a way of achieving the same effect in colour. His experiments led him to develop a stylised and distinctive approach. His shoots were carefully posed. Anything ugly was covered or moved. There’s a variety of colour in the shots but they feel, at the same time, somehow bleached or dated. Partly that’s due to the colour technology available at the time which played tricks with colour. I remember the holiday snaps my dad took which were converted into slides having the same effect, which I can’t quite put into words.  They looked colourful but faded at the same time. According to his Wikipedia article Hinde achieved a 1) idealistic and 2) nostalgic style, which can maybe be attributed to 1) the careful posing of the shot, and 2) the discreetly faded colouring.

His most famous set of images was from Butlins in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Billy Butlin hired Hinde to provide postcards for the hundreds of thousands of working class families who took advantage of his fun-for-all-the-family camps and low prices.

By this time, Hinde worked more as an art director than an actual photographer, so he hired two German photographers, Elmar Ludwig and Edmund Nägele, and one British photographer, David Noble. They toured Butlin’s camps and took great pains to compose and light each shot for best effect. The result is a peculiar combination of people in relaxed situations which somehow still feel formal. Apparently, Hinde enhanced the colours in post-production to give the shots a more vivid feel.

Despite the care he took, Hinde set no great store by the artistic value of his postcards and sold the company in 1972. But photography critics have taken them very seriously, and in 1993 Irish Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his photos and postcards in Dublin. I love it that the show was titled Hindesight.

‘Butlins Bognor Regis, Lounge Adjoining Heated Indoor Pool’ by John Hinde (photographed by Edmund Nagele) (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen (b. 1948)

Born in Finland, Konttinen moved to London to study film in the late 1960s at the Polytechnic in Regent Street. In 1968, she co-founded the Amber Film and Photography Collective, which moved to Newcastle in 1969. From 1969 Konttinen lived in Byker, an area of Newcastle, and for seven years photographed and interviewed the residents of this area of terraced houses until her own house was demolished. She became a real member of the community, capturing locals in all moods, before the entire area was destroyed to make way for the Byker housing estate, which was to become notorious.

This work resulted in the book, Byker, and, today, this body of work is considered by UNESCO to be of high national value as a profound account of the working class and marginalised communities in the North-East of England. In parallel she created a series depicting people on the chilly beaches of Whitley Bay and Tynemouth, titled Writing in the Sand (1978 to 1998) and it’s a couple of images from that album which are on display here.

‘Whitley Bay’ from ‘Writing in the Sand’ (1980) by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen – £3,000 + VAT (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

These, to be a bit harsh, are good enough, but don’t have the same power as her urban shots, which are quite stunningly brilliant.

Martin Parr (b. 1952)

Parr has become very famous for capturing the ungainly, graceless aspects of everyday British life in big colour-saturated photography. In fact it was seaside photos that really brought him widespread recognition, namely the images in his breakthrough series ‘The Last Resort’ (1985), which captured the exploits of working class people on holiday in the seaside resort of New Brighton, Merseyside. The show features three prints from that project.

Whereas the human brain picks out only the leading actions in any scene, Parr’s photos show an immense attention to every detail in the frame, which is one source of their power and almost overwhelming impact. The gallery says this makes him a great satirical photojournalist and that’s true. But years ago I read a critic who described his capturing of the fat and ugly, the graceless and ungainly, the clumsy and awkward in British life, as ‘cruel’, and I’ve never been able to forget that word. If Parr’s work feels like this, it’s partly because the size and brilliant clarity of his images have a kind of unrelenting quality which, in me at least, creates a negative impact. They’re visually merciless.

‘Ice cream kids, New Brighton, England, 1983-85’ by Martin Parr – £2,750 + VAT (©️ Martin Parr, courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery / Rocket Gallery)

Anna Fox (b. 1961)

Fox is, apparently, known for her ‘combative, highly charged by the use of flash and colour’. According to Wikipedia she’s part of the ‘second wave’ of British colour documentary photography. Seeing her use of saturated colour to capture scenes of ‘ordinary people’ (meaning working class people) in a not totally flattering way, it comes as no surprise to learn that one of the tutors on her degree course was Martin Parr. He has, apparently, spawned a tradition.

Similarly secondary was her decision to spend two years photographing Butlins Bognor Regis. Surprising really. Wouldn’t it be a tad more modern to cover somewhere like Center Parcs, let alone acknowledge that anyone who can these days, and for some time past, goes on holiday abroad? Brits made 55 million holidays abroad in 2023, mostly to Spain, with 17.8 million trips. Sun, sand and sangria long ago trumped the sad holiday camp. Not to be too critical, the choice feels a bit retro and, if it was chosen in order to capture proles at play, a bit patronising.

‘Hair and Make-up Shop, 2010’ by Anna Fox – £2,200 + VAT (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

Simon Roberts (b. 1974)

Roberts is known for his interest in identity as the titles of his books – Motherland (2007), We English (2009), Pierdom (2013) and Merrie Albion (2017) – suggest. Pierdom, as the name suggests, is a comprehensive survey of Britain’s pleasure piers, contrasting their historical significance with their modern contexts. For me, the widescreen, long-distance nature of his shots here made them feel flat and empty. I think I can see the effect he’s striving for, but the architectural features of Blackpool Pier just aren’t distinct or striking enough to justify the treatment.

Blackpool South Pier, Lancashire, 2008 by Simon Roberts (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

Rob Ball (b. 1977)

Ball has been photographing the coast for fifteen years, viewing the coastline as an intrinsic part of British identity. He examines the rhythms of seaside resorts and the changes that arise from seasonal and generational shifts. I found his images of just buildings, bereft of the people who give them meaning, sad and depressing. They have a kind of stark power, maybe, and usually I like photos of bleak architecture, but for some reason found these soulless.

‘Slots of fun, Blackpool, 2022’ by Rob Ball – £600 + VAT (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

Luke Stephenson (b. 1983)

Stephenson records the quirks of the British character. He combines demotic i.e. popular subject matter, with the studied formality of not just studio portraiture but a fine art approach. 99 x 99s does what it says on the tin, being a collection of formal portraits of the legendary 99 whipped ice cream, complete with Cadburys flake and a variety of colourful sauces, which he took on an extended road trip round the seaside resorts of England. Part of the culinary heritage which explains why 70% of British men and 60% of British women are overweight, and about a fifth of British children are obese. Taste yummy though, don’t they?

#97 Dawlish Warren, 2013 by Luke Stephenson – £850 + VAT (Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery)

In the studied isolation and formality which converts them from real life objects to icons, they reminded me of Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup tins or Coca Cola cans. You can easily imagine them being arranged as grids of images, maybe given the Warhol silk screen treatment, and sold to adorn board rooms and meeting rooms or, like one TV company I worked for, the canteen. Or, for a joke, placed next to an actual Mr Whippy machine with racks of cones and flakes in some cool advertising or tech company.

Other seasides

To give this fun little display more seriousness than it intends, it made me realise that there are plenty of other kinds of English seaside. A friend is a naturist so I immediately thought of nudist camps, not so much for the bare bodies but the joie de vivre she always glows with. Another friend works for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and he spends a lot of his time at the coast counting seabirds. Twitchers, they’re everywhere. There’s a lot of nature-watching goes on at the British coast, and not just birds but pond-dipping and rock-pooling for, crabs and such, and spotting the dolphins and seals and whales which are sometimes visible. At Croyde in Devon my son and I learned to surf and there are surfers and windsurfers all round the coast. We admired the rock climbers we saw ascending the perilous cliffs. And of course, sailing. Lots of sailing. The English coast is littered with docks and quays and marinas and all manner of pleasure boats from humble dinghies to swanky yachts.

So I enjoyed this little display, and I know it’s only meant to be a piece of light-hearted summer fun, but it triggered thoughts of how much more varied, active and interesting our engagement with the coast is than when John Hinde made his postcards of Butlins in the 1960s. Although there are seven photographers in this show they have, I think, been curated to depict a very narrow and rather dated vision of ‘the seaside’. Surely there’s a lot more to it than chilly beaches, shabby piers and amusement arcades.

For sale

All the prints are for sale, at prices starting from £600 + VAT but quickly rising to the thousands. If you could only have one, which one would you choose? For me it would be a toss-up between the Butlins lounge and the old lady on the beach with a dog.

All profits from print sales support The Photographers’ Gallery public programme.

Related link

  • By the Seaside continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 8 September 2024

The photographers’ PG pages

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Posted by Simon on August 18, 2024

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Chris Killip @ the Photographers Gallery

This is one of the most powerful and moving exhibitions I’ve ever been to.

Chris Killip was one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers. He was born in 1946 and died in October 2020. He is best known for his gritty photos of working class life in the north of England in the 1970s and 80s and we really mean ‘gritty’ – portraits of people living in the depths of poverty, immiseration, neglect, illness, marginalisation, scraping a living in grim, depressed, forgotten communities.

Spread over the top two floors at the Photographers’ Gallery, including some 150 black and white photographs as well as a couple of display cases of ephemera (magazines, posters, publicity flyers) works, this exhibition amounts to the most comprehensive survey of Killip’s work ever staged. And dear God, it’s devastating.

Helen and her hula-hoop, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumbria, 1984 © Chris Killip, Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

I’m going to replicate the structure of the exhibition and summarise the wall labels because it’s important to get a good understanding of time and place to really appreciate the work.

Off to London 1964

In 1963, aged 17 and living on the Isle of Man, Killip opened a copy of Paris Match looking for news about the Tour de France and instead came across the famous photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson of the little boy carrying two bottles of wine along the Rue Mouffetard in Paris. On the spot he realised he wanted to be a photographer. He bought a cheap camera and worked that summer as a beach photographer saving up the money to move to London in 1964, just at the start of Swinging London.

Here he found work as an assistant to the commercial photographer Adrian Flowers. They were heady times and he was at the heart of London, arranging commercial photoshoots for magazines, fashion, commercials.

New York 1969

In autumn 1969 he went on a visit to New York which changed his life. He went to see the exhibition of Bill Brandt photos at the Museum of Modern Art but it was the museum’s permanent collection which made his head spin. Here he saw photos by Paul Strand, August Sander, Walker Evans and others like them, documentary photographers who tried to depict the life of the common people in communities often remote from flashy urban living.

He returned to England, quit his job in flash London and returned to his homeland, the Isle of Man, a man with a mission, to photograph his truth, to record the traditional peasant lifestyle of the island before it was eroded and swept away by the very commercialism he had formerly served.

Isle of Man 1970 to 1972

Between 1970 and 1972 Killip photographed the island and its inhabitants during the day and worked at his dad’s pub by night. In 1973 he completed his book, Isle of Man.

This was the first of the long-form or long-term projects which form the basis of his achievement. the next few decades would see him applying the same in-depth approach to capturing marginalised communities on film, living in them, getting to know them, sharing their privations, getting under the skin of their physically and spiritually impoverished lives.

As you would expect, many of the photos of the Isle of man are landscapes but they are not that great, they are not as powerful as, say, Don McCullin’s louring, threatening studies of his adopted region of Somerset. But it’s not the landscapes that matter, it’s the people.

Mr ‘Snooky’ Corkhill and his son © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

My God, what a wonderful, wonderful collection of portraits, warm, humane, detailed, candid but compassionate portraits of the kind of plain-living, rural workers who were dying out as a breed even as he photographed them. You know those lines from Yeats’s poem, Easter 1916:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in verse:

Invoking that mood of respect, it feels like an act almost of worship to write out the names of the people Killip photographed, the children, teenagers, farmers, wives and widows:

There is no God, no plan and no redemption. But images like this, full of understated dignity and wholeness on the part of the sitters, and respect and humanity on the part of the photographer, make you think maybe human love and compassion does redeem something, save something from the human wreck, raise us above our everyday lives into a higher realm blessed by more than human love.

(Note the way in the list above all the people are given titles, Mr, Mrs, Ms. It’s an old-fashioned mark of respect.)

Mrs Hyslop, Ballachrink Farm, the Braid © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Immersion

He became an immersive photographer, living for months or more among the communities he sought to depict. His mission and his sympathies were not with the well-educated and well-heeled who run the country and write about it, but with ‘those who have had history done to them‘, the proles and chavs and pikeys and white trash who are dismissed by all commentators, make no impact on official culture, live and die in caravans or shitty council houses on sink estates at the arse end of nowhere.

Huddersfield 1972

In 1972 the Arts Council commissioned Killip to do a photo essay comparing and contrasting Huddersfield in Yorkshire with Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk for the exhibition ‘Two Views: Two Cities’. As far as I could see there was just one photo from Bury in the show, a neat-looking shot of some nice castle ruins. By contrast, as you can imagine, the rundown streets of Huddersfield with its mills, tenement housing, crappy high streets, boarded up shops and sad bus shelters grabbed Killip’s sympathies.

Playground in Huddersfield, 1974 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Newcastle 1975 to 1979

In 1975 Killip was commissioned to undertake a British Gas/Northern Arts fellowship. In his spare time from this commission he roved the streets and suburbs and slums of the city and as far afield as Castleford and Workington. My God, the squalor, the neglect, the decline, the decay, the old Victorian slums being demolished and the new cut-price, cheap council estates falling to pieces before your eyes. A landscape of vandalism and graffiti.

Demolished housing, Wallsend, August 1977. © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Killip stayed in Newcastle for years, getting to know the area. For two years, 1977 to 1979, he served as director of a photo gallery, Amber’s Side Gallery. The May 1977 issue of Creative Camera was entirely devoted to Killip’s North East photos (a copy of it is one of the ephemera gathered in the display cases I mentioned earlier).

  • Children and terraced housing
  • Terraced house and coal mine
  • Two men on a bench
  • Looking East on Camp Road, Wallsend, 1975

There is a huge difference between the Manx series and this one. The Manx photos are dominated by large portraits of people who fill the screen, who are at home in their surroundings, their crofts or workshops. They’re big. They fill the photos as they fill their lives, at ease with who they are. They are fully human.

In the North East photos what dominates is the built environment. People are reduced to puppets, physically small against the backdrop of the enormous or decaying buildings. The buildings come in two types, terrible and appalling. The terrible ones are the old brick terraces thrown up in a hurry by the Victorian capitalists who owned the mines and steel works and shipbuilding yards and needed the bare minimum accommodation to keep their workers just about alive – badly built, no insulation, draughty windows, outside toilets and all.

Though Killip didn’t plan it, his time in Newcastle coincided with the wholesale destruction of the old brick terraces and their replacement with something even worse: the concrete high rises with broken lifts reeking of piss, the windswept plazas, dangerous underpasses, and oppressive network of toxic, child-killing urban highways, all the products of 1960s and 70s urban planners and brutalist architects.

May 5, 1981, North Shields, Tyneside © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

This is why I call the architects room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the room of shame. Go on a tour of British cities to see for yourself the destruction of historic centres and their replacement with brutal concrete urban highways full of thundering traffic, concrete underpasses tailor made for muggers and rapists, bleak open spaces where the wind blows dust and grit into your eyes, the concrete facias of a thousand tragic shopping precincts and, looming above them, the badly built tower blocks and decaying office blocks. Concrete cancer.

This isn’t an architecture for people, it’s an architecture for articulated lorries. Thus the human beings in Killip’s harrowing photos of these killing precincts are reduced to shambling wrecks, shadows of humanity, scarecrows in raincoats, harassed mums, bored teenagers hanging round on street corners sniffing glue. This is what Killip captures, the death of hope presided over by a thousand architects and town planners who could quote Le Corbusier and Bauhaus till the cows came home and used them to build the most dehumanised environment known to man.

Killingworth new town, 1975 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

As Philip Larkin wrote of young northern mums in their headscarves supervising their unruly children in some suburban playground:

Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

(from Afternoons by Philip Larkin, 1959)

It’s epitomised by the photo of the silhouette of an old lady sitting in a half vandalised bush shelter in Middlesbrough. She’s wearing a headscarf and slumped forwards because her life, in this gritty, alienated environment, is bereft.

Woman in a bus shelter, Middlesborough, Teeside © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Compare and contrast with the proud, erect, unashamed men and women of the Isle of Man. Pretty much all the humanity has been stolen from the mainlanders.

At some point I realised a lot of these grim Tyneside photos show a disproportionate number of children, children imprisoned in squalid houses, hanging round on derelict streets, trying to play in a crappy playground overshadowed by mines and factories, left outside the crappy, rundown bingo parlour, the cheapest nastiest, knockoff 60s architecture, complete with collapsing concrete canopy. A landscape of blighted lives and stunted childhoods.

Boy outside Prize Bingo Parlour, Newcastle 1976 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

  • Two girls in Grangetown
  • Terraced house and coal mine, Castleford, 1976
  • Terraced housing, County Durham, 1976
  • Children and terraced housing, Byker, Newcastle, 1975
  • Butchers shop, Byker, Tyneside, 1975

Skinningrove 1982 to 1984

Skinningrove is a fishing community on the North Yorkshire coast. Killip had noticed its striking landscape on a drive up the east coast back in 1974 but found it difficult to penetrate the community. In fact locals chased him off the couple of times he tried to photograph them. His way in was through friendship with a young local named Leso, who made Killip feel welcome and reassured locals of his good intentions. Between 1982 and 84 Killip documented the crappy, poor, hard scrabbling lives of Leso and his mates – Blackie, Bever, Toothy, Richard, Whippet – as they fixed nets, repaired boats and hung around bored.

Leso and mates waiting for the tide to turn, Skinningrove, 1986 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

This is an extraordinary, remarkable, amazing portrait of a dead-end community, poverty, low expectations and young people bored off their faces. No wonder they took to sniffing glue and as the 80s moved on and adopted the punk look pioneered down in London to express some kind of sense of identity and worth, rebellion against grey-clad council houses, the grey sky and the unremitting rhythms of the grey, cold, freezing sea.

This section is given tragic force when we learn that Leso, who got Killip his ‘in’ into the community and of whom there are many photos, fixing nets, waiting round for the tide to turn, hanging with his punk mates, walking across a dirty road carrying a rifle, he died tragically during Killips’s stay.

The fishing boat he and some mates were in was overturned at sea and Leso and David were drowned, tubby Bever made it back to shore. In tribute Killip made Leso’s grieving mother an album of three dozen photos of her lost son.

Leso, Blackie, Bever, ?, David, on a bench, Whippet standing, Skinningrove, 1986 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Seacoal Camp 1981 to1984

Killip discovered Lynemouth, Northumberland, in 1976. It had a strange and eerie vibe because there was a massive coalmine not far from the sea and waste coal was expelled into the sea, only to be brought back to shore on the incoming tides.

And a community of travellers or extremely poor people living in caravans and using horse-drawn wagons in and near the sea had sprung up which made a living scavenging this coal, using it to heat their homes, cook food, and to sell to other locals. An entire lifestyle based on coal scavenging.

Once again Killip had trouble penetrating this closed and fiercely protective community. From 1976 when he first came across it he made repeated attempts to photograph the people but was chased away. Only in 1982 was he finally accepted when, on a final visit to the local pub he was recognised by a man who’d given him shelter from a rainstorm at Appleby Horse fair and vouched for his good intentions.

So Killip set about taking photos, delicately tactfully at first. But in winter 1983 he bought a caravan of his own and got permission to park it alongside the community’s ones. Once really embedded he was able to record all the different types of moments experienced by individuals or between people engaged on this tough work, at the mercy of the elements, permanently dirty with coal muck.

Rocker and Rosie Going Home, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

In the unpublished preface to the volume of poems he was working on when he was killed in the last days of the Great War, Wilfred Owen wrote:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Same, with modifications, goes for Killip. The poetry, the deep, deep poetry of these photographs, derives from the immense love and compassion they evince, love of suffering humanity, the candour and accuracy of the shots, finding moments of piercing acuity amid the grinding poverty and mental horizons which are hemmed in on every side by slag heaps, metal works and the four walls of a cramped caravan.

Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, 1983 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Photography and music

Photography is like music. Regarding music you can describe the notes and cadences, the technical manoeuvres and key changes, the invocation of traditions and forms and write at length about the ostensible subject (the Pastoral symphony, the Moonlight sonata etc). But in the end you have to let go of all of that and experience it as music, let the music do its work, what only it can do, triggering emotions, memories, fragments of feelings or thoughts, stirring forgotten moments, making all kinds of neural connections, filling your soul.

Same with these photographs. I’ve described what he was trying to do, bring respect and compassion to people right on the margins of society, the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten. He’s quoted as saying he had no idea he would end up recording the process of de-industralisation, it just happened to be going on as he developed his method and approach as a social photographer. Long essays could be written about class in England, about deindustrialisation and then, of course, about the Thatcher government which supervised the destruction of large swathes of industry and British working class life alongside it.

But at some point you pack all that way and let the photos do their work, which is to lacerate your heart and move you to tears. This is the best our society could offer to God’s children. What shame. What guilt.

Father and son watching a parade, West End of Newcastle, Tyneside, 1980 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

The Miners Strike 1984 to 1985

A friend of mine at school in the Home Counties, his older sister was married to a copper. He told us the Miners Strike was great. They were bussed to Yorkshire, put up in army barracks, paid triple time wages and almost every day there was a fight, which he and his mates always won because they had the plastic shields, big truncheons and if things got really out of control, the cavalry. Killip apparently treated the long strike as another project with a view to producing another long-form series.

Durham Miners Gala, 1984 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

But images from the Miners Strike project aren’t treated separately as the other projects are. Instead they’re rolled into the In Flagrante section.

In flagrante 1988

In 1985 the publisher Secker and Warburg told Killip they’d be interested in publishing his next book. This would mean access to a larger audience than previously and Killip was inspired. He worked with editor Mark Holborn and designer Peter Dyer to produce the 1988 book In Flagrante. Unlike all his previous projects which were heavily themed around specific communities and locations, In Flagrante deliberately cut his images adrift from their source projects to create a randomised cross-section of his career (although anyone who’d studied the previous projects has a good idea where each of them come from).

For the bitter bleakness and the unerring accuracy of the images, In Flagrante has been described as ‘the most important book of English photography from the 1980s.’ I was particularly taken by the set of photos of miserable English people from the 70s and 80s on various English beaches, at Whitley Bay, and so on. Narrow lives, no expectations, the quiet misery of the English working classes. They’ve come to the seaside for a break, for a ‘holiday’ and none of them know what to do there. Images of a nation at a loss what to do with the land it finds itself in.

Revolt

Respect goes to the tribes of young people who forged ways of rebelling against the poverty and low to zero expectations of their environment. In Flagrante contains a surprising number of photos of young punks who took the form to baroque extremes long after it was abandoned in London. There are lots of shots of the Angelic Upstarts of all bands, playing sweaty punk gigs in Gateshead. In fact the gallery shop has a music paper-size fanzine-style publication entirely full of shots he did of sweaty punk gigs in the mid-80s. ‘We’re the future, your future.’

The Station, Gateshead, 1985 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

America 1991

What happened to Killip after that? America. I was disappointed to read that in 1991 he was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies in Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994 to 1998. He only retired from Harvard in 2017. Well, no doubt taking the Yankee dollar was the right move for him, but it meant the abrupt end of the sequence of breath-taking portfolio projects which had begun in 1970.

Summary

Killip’s oeuvre represents not only an invaluable document of social history 1970 to 1985 and, as such, a blistering indictment of an incompetent, uncaring, bewilderingly lost society – but it is also a testament to love and the redeeming possibilities of art.

The compassion and humanity of his work is embodied in its closeness and intimacy with its subjects, not the fake intimacy of eroticism, but being right there with poor suffering humanity; right up close as the dirty kids play in their abandoned playgrounds, the dispirited losers chain-smoke in a wretched bingo hall, an old lady loses the will to live in a vandalised bus shelter, bored young men sniff glue in a remote fishing town, and lost children spend all day every day clambering over filthy mounds of coal to help their mums and dads scrape a flimsy living The poetry is in the pity.

Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1975 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Levelling up

In the 50 years since Killip took these photos generations of politicians have come and gone, promising to narrow the North-South Divide and level up the whole country. All bollocks. Life expectancy for babies born in the North-East, like per household income, remain stubbornly below the national average. Pathetic, isn’t it. What a sorry excuse for a country.

Go and see this marvellous, searing, heart-rending exhibition.

The promotional video

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by Simon on February 8, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 8, 2023

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A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 3. The reign of Charles I

The reign of Charles I

The 1620s

King James I died on 25 March 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles I. A month and a half later Charles married the French Princess Henrietta Maria (sister of King Louis XIII) by proxy in a ceremony in Paris. She was then sent to Kent where they met and spent their marriage night.

Charles was crowned in Westminster in February 1626 but Henrietta’s Catholicism prevented her from being crowned with him and this lack of a formal coronation, along with her overt Catholicism and the stipulation that she be allowed to practice her Catholicism in the royal court, were all to build up popular animosity against her.

In fact, the French stipulation that she be allowed to bring up her children in the Catholic religion lay the seeds of the overthrow of her son James II in 1685. It’s odd that Charles’s advisers didn’t grasp this obvious fact.

With James dead, Charles gave hid father’s former favourite, and his own best friend, the Duke of Buckingham, his head to launch a war against Spain. Yet just like his father, Charles soon found himself stymied.

  1. Brave talk of capturing the annual Spanish treasure fleet coming from South America turned out to be pointless as the fleet had already safely arrived in Spain.
  2. Buckingham led a naval attack on the port of Cadiz which failed to achieve anything.
  3. Ships which the British lent the French to combat the Spanish off the coast of Holland, ended up being used, instead, to attack France’s own Protestant rebels holed up in the Atlantic port of La Rochelle.

Like his father, Charles called a Parliament expecting patriotic enthusiasm and uncritical support, and was taken aback when it promptly launched a series of attacks on him and his favourite adviser.

Instead of voting him the subsidies he wanted, Parliament impeached Buckingham. Charles responded by imprisoning the leaders of the impeachers, which led to predictable outcries about free speech, which Charles ended by shutting Parliament altogether. So much for the Parliament of 1625.

The forced loan

Charles initiated a ‘forced loan’ i.e. the compulsory taxation of his rich subjects, but this led to a storm of protest and Charles found himself having to imprison a whole series of eminent protesters and other officials to carry it through. By this stage relations with France had collapsed – both sides were confiscating each others’ ships – and Charles and Buckingham spent the £200,000 raised by the loan to launch a well-equipped campaign to relieve La Rochelle, the Atlantic port which had become the focus for Protestant resistance to the Catholic king and his chief adviser, Cardinal Richelieu.

The British fleet and army attacked the island of Saint-Martin-de-Ré in order to relieve the Siege of La Rochelle but, for a number of reasons, the siege was a failure, many English lives were lost, and the expedition was eventually forced to withdraw in humiliation.

The 1628 Parliament

Charles was forced to call another Parliament, in May 1628, which immediately began debating the various measures he had taken the preceding year, plus abuses arising from the passing of martial law to organise the troops sent to France. Many aspects of this – for example, billeting soldiers on civilians – had become deeply unpopular.

The Petition of Right

The upshot was that before Parliament voted him more money, it insisted on Charles agreeing to a ‘Petition of Right’. This was drawn up to confirm four traditional liberties:

  • freedom from arbitrary arrest
  • freedom from taxation not approved by parliament aka arbitrary taxation
  • freedom from the billeting of troops
  • freedom from being governed by martial law

Assassination of Buckingham

Charles was careful to specify that these liberties did not affect his own prerogative, and then agreed. Parliament voted him the subsidies he wanted. Buckingham hurried off to Portsmouth to ready the fleet for another attempt to relieve the French Protestants. Then Buckingham was assassinated.

The Duke was stabbed to death on 23 August 1628 at the Greyhound Pub in Portsmouth, where he had gone to organise yet another campaign. According to an eye-witness account, he lived just long enough to jump up, shouting ‘Villain!’ and making to chase after his assailant, but then fell down dead. The assassin was John Felton, an army officer who had been wounded in the earlier military adventure and believed he had been passed over for promotion by Buckingham.

Felton

Buckingham was by now so hated that his assassin, John Felton, was feted as a hero, had poems and pamphlets written about him. He was tried and executed, of course, but when his body was taken back to Portsmouth to be publicly hung up, it became an object of popular veneration. A few months later, in October 1628 La Rochelle finally fell to French Catholic forces.

So his favourite was dead and the policy which had driven his first four years as king had completely failed. Charles needed to regroup. He sought to make peace with both France and Spain, and he knew he needed to call one more Parliament. The first of his reign had refused to grant the traditional tonnage and poundage tax to him for the whole reign. He needed that money. But in the meantime…

Peace

Charles signed peace treaties with France in 1629 and Spain in 1630. Sick to death of confrontations with Parliament he decided – now he no longer needed special funds for war – not to call another one, and so ruled through his council and by exercising the Personal Prerogative. In fact, he wasn’t to call another Parliament until 1640, a period of 11 years which is referred to as the period of his Personal Rule or (by his harshest critics) as the Eleven Years Tyranny.

After the tribulations of the 1620s, Charles tried to make the 1630s a decade of peace and reconciliation. But such was the distrust generated by the opening years of his reign, that everything he did tended to be misinterpreted for the worst, and in four or five main areas of government, he took aggressively centralising decisions which alienated large numbers of his subjects.

Issues of the 1630s

Ship Money

Charles was still chronically short of money and his Chancellors came up with a series of ever-more ingenious ways of mulcting money from his subjects. The most controversial was ship money. This was a traditional and well-accepted tax imposed on coastal communities to pay for ships to be built and crewed to defend coastal towns. Ship money had traditionally been authorised only during wars, and only on coastal regions.

Charles, however, argued that there was no legal bar to collecting the tax for defence during peacetime and throughout the whole of the kingdom. Ship money, paid directly to the Treasury of the Navy, provided between £150,000 to £200,000 annually between 1634 and 1638, after which yields declined. Opposition to ship money steadily grew, but the 12 common law judges of England declared that the tax was within the king’s prerogative, though some of them had reservations. The prosecution of John Hampden for non-payment in 1637–38 provided a platform for popular protest, and the judges only found against Hampden by the narrow margin of 7–5.

Monopolies

Charles also raised money by the granting of monopolies for specific trades. This was despite a statute forbidding such action, which, though inefficient, raised an estimated £100,000 a year in the late 1630s.

Act of Revocation

Charles also raised funds from the Scottish nobility, at the price of considerable acrimony, by the Act of Revocation (1625), whereby all gifts of royal or church land made to the nobility since 1540 were revoked. If the owners wanted to continue in possession of their property, they had to pay an annual rent.

Forest money

In addition, the boundaries of the royal forests in England were extended to their ancient limits as part of a scheme to maximise income by exploiting the land and fining land users within the expanded boundaries for ‘encroachment’.

Sales of Royal lands, especially the large expanses of under-developed Royal forests was another way of raising money. The programme arranged for the sale of forest lands for development as pasture and arable, or in the case of the Forest of Dean, development for the iron industry. This included providing compensation to people using common land, but not for people who had settled illegally. Pushed off land they had been working for some time, many of these rioted. In fact such was the sale of the discontent in the west of England it became known as the Western Rising, with other scattered riots in Feckenham Forest and Malvern Chase.

Despite all these measures, Charles still faced bankruptcy in the summer of 1640. The City of London refused to make any further loans to the king. Pushed to extreme measures, Charles then seized the money held in trust at the mint of the Exchequer in the tower of London. This represented the capital of the merchants and goldsmiths of the city. In August Charles seized all the stocks of pepper held by the East India Company, and sold it off cheap.

You can see how virtually every expedient Charles developed to raise money alienated and embittered large groups of subjects, and especially merchants in the City of London, who came to think of the king as a public menace.

Strafford and Ireland

Another long-term problem for any British king was the situation in Ireland. Throughout the Tudor period, from Henry VIII through Elizabeth, parts of Ireland had been settled by ‘planters’, not without resistance from the native Irish and their traditional lords, who rose in repeated uprisings.

But the so-called ‘Flight of the Earls’ in 1607 had left a lot of the land in north-east Ireland leaderless, and so James I set about organising the Plantation of Ulster, a plan to encourage emigrants from Scotland to settle in what is now known as Ulster, with funding from the City of London.

With the result that Ireland, by Charles’s time, contained about four identifiable groups:

  • the Irish population, mostly rural peasants
  • the Irish leadership – the traditional lords of various lands and estates who, however, a century of negotiating and compromising with their English invaders had split into various parties, some for compromise, some for submission, some burning for rebellion and independence
  • the ‘Old English’ settlers i.e. the originally English families who had been in Ireland for generations and begun to think of themselves as in a sense Irish, appreciated local customs and laws and who were often put out or deprived by the new plantation
  • the ‘New English’ who had arrived in the past generation and who had a vested interest in expanding and consolidating the new plantation

Managing this situation took a firm hand, and Charles was clever in selecting Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford, to be his Viceroy in Ireland. Strafford brought all sides to heel, though at the cost of uniting them all in hatred of his strong-arm, inflexible approach.

Archbishop Laud and religion

Something similar happened in religion, where Charles appointed Laud as archbishop of Canterbury. Charles wanted order and clarity and beauty in his church. However, religion continued to be a source of discontent among virtually all his subjects.

Arminianism

Charles’s reign saw the spread of Arminianism among Anglican intellectuals. The Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius  reacted against the iron predestinationism of Calvin and the Calvinists. According to Calvin, God had already chosen who was saved (the Elect) and who was damned. All we could do was examine our own lives with scrupulous attention and live as purely as possible in the hope we were one of the Elect.

This was in sharp contrast to traditional Catholic teaching which is the more commonsense view that we attain salvation through our works. We may sin and err but we can be forgiven through Church rituals such as confession and the Mass.

Starting in the 1610s, Arminius proposed a sort of middle way, adopting the outlines of Calvinism, and certainly espousing a Christianity much purified of Catholic superstitions (veneration of saints, the Virgin Mary, miracles and so on). But still he modified the harshness of Calvinist theology, asserting that the Atonement of Christ offers each individual some leeway, some freedom, in determining their own salvation or damnation.

To Puritans this was blasphemy, but it was attractive to Charles and his archbishop, Laud. The rise of Arminianism within moderate sections of the Anglican church therefore became a battleground with more radical Puritans.

Buildup to the outbreak of civil war

Thus there were many long-term issues which Charles was struggling with. But the first spark which led to outright violence was his attempt to impose a new prayer book on the Scottish church or Kirk as they called it.

On a visit to Scotland, Charles and Laud had been upset at the variation in church services there, and the scrappy state of many of the churches. Being a devout Christian Charles thought it was his duty as King to renovate and improve the Scottish church. He gave money to repair buildings. But in the same vein he wanted to bring Scottish church practice in line with English. And so he commissioned English clerics to write a new unified prayer book.

When this was first used in a service at Edinburgh in July 1637, it caused a riot. It was seen as an imposition of English values on Scottish religion, and as blasphemously Arminian, or pseudo-Catholic. Religious chauvinism combined with Scottish nationalism. With characteristic arrogance, Charles had held no consultations, either in the Scottish Parliament or in an Assembly of the Kirk.

The protests quickly spread across Scotland, and – as with many religious disturbances – became a handy opportunity for the powerful in the land to push for more independence (and power) from England.

The Scottish National Covenant

Quickly they organised the Scottish National Covenant. In February 1638, at a ceremony in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, large numbers of Scottish noblemen, gentry, clergy and burgesses signed the Covenant, committing themselves under God to preserving the purity of the Kirk. Copies were distributed throughout Scotland for signing on a wave of popular support. Those who hesitated were often intimidated into signing and clergymen who opposed it were deposed. This was followed in August 1639 by a series of acts passed by the Parliament of Scotland that amounted to a constitutional revolution.

First Bishops’ War

Charles decided to invade Scotland and impose his will. A complicated plan to co-ordinate a land invasion and an amphibious landing failed (remember the long list of military failures which characterised the 1620s). A Scottish army was raised and marched to within a few miles of the English border. Talks were held and a peace treaty signed, but both sides regarded it only as a truce.

Charles called a Parliament, as usual hoping for patriotic support and money but, as usual, the Parliament immediately drew up a list of grievances, notably ship money and the arbitrary behaviour of the feared Star Chamber, and called for the impeachment of many of his advisers, so Charles promptly dissolved it.

Second Bishops’ War

Alexander Leslie, 1st Earl of Leven, had fought in the Thirty Years War. He led a vastly better trained and provisioned Scottish army into England in August 1640, which swept aside the ill-trained English militias and seized Newcastle, main source of coal for London. The Scots were in the driving seat. The Scots insisted on being paid £850 per day maintenance.

The Long Parliament

Charles was forced to call a Parliament to raise the money to pay the Scots. What was to become known as the Long Parliament organised to take revenge on Charles, impeaching his advisers, and demanded the return of Strafford from Ireland. Strafford was tried and executed Strafford in May 1641 and in August the Scots finally evacuated Northern England after the Treaty of London.

The Irish Rising

However, the withdrawal of Strafford, the only man strong enough to balance the conflicting sides in Ireland, turned out to be a disaster. In October 1641 the Irish Rebellion broke out, beginning as an attempted coup d’état by Irish Catholic gentry, who tried to seize control of the English administration in Ireland to force concessions for Catholics, but developing into an ethnic conflict between Irish Catholics on one side, and English and Scottish Protestants on the other. Thousands of English and Scots were forced to flee their homes, amid scare stories of burning and looting and murder and rape.

When news of this arrived in London it transformed the atmosphere from crisis into hysteria. Once again the Protestants felt the deadly paranoia of a Catholic conspiracy. Both Charles and Parliament realised an army needed to be raised quickly to combat the Irish rebels, but neither side trusted the other with such a large force.

And that crux, control of the army raised to put down the Irish rebellion, was the issue which triggered the civil war.

More seventeenth century reviews

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Posted by Simon on August 27, 2020

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How students, academics, artists and galleries help to create a globalised, woke discourse which alienates ordinary people and hands political power to the Right

‘As polls have attested [traditional Labour voters] rejected Labour because it had become a party that derided everything they loved.’
(John Gray in The New Statesman)

As of January 2020, Labour has 580,000 registered members, giving it the largest membership of any party in Europe, and yet it has just suffered its worst election defeat since 1987. How do we reconcile these contradictory facts?

Trying to make sense of Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the 2019 General Election has prompted a flood of articles and analyses, most of which rightly focus on the distorting effects of Brexit. But I was fascinated to read several articles, by writers from the Left and the Right, which also attribute the defeat to more profound changes which have taken place in the Labour Party itself, that:

  • The decline of the traditional, manual-labouring working class, the decline in Trades Union membership and the increasing diversity of types of work and workplace, with the rise of part-time and zero hours contracts, now mean that the only section of society which Labour can entirely rely on is the vote of students, academics and middle-class, urban, university-educated progressives – writers, artists, film-makers, actors and the like – in other words, the cultural élite.
  • Students and academics and artists and film-makers are vastly more woke and concerned about the cultural issues which make up political correctness – feminism, #metoo, Black Lives Matter, LGBT+ issues and trans rights – these issues matter hugely more to them than to the rest of the population. Why? Because they’re well fed, they have the time, and the education.

1. ‘Why Labour Lost’ by John Curtice in The Spectator

John Curtice is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde and Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research. His article in the Spectator (in fact extracts from a speech) is measured and cautious, but includes the following revealing statements:

Where does the [Labour] party go from here? Well, you certainly need to understand where you are at. This is no longer a party that particularly gains the support of working-class voters. Although it does still do relatively well in places that you might call working-class communities. This, at the moment, is a party that has young people, it has graduates, and their distinctive characteristic is that they are socially liberal. These are the people who are remain-y. These are people who are not concerned about immigration…

… now the party should run with the grain of what its got, which is young, socially liberal, university-educated voters…

This is where source of the new members who flocked into the Labour Party as it became clear that Jeremy Corbyn was running for leadership in 2015: young, socially liberal, aware and radical students or former students, who elected and then re-elected the old school, radical Socialist leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Image result for labour party membership graph

UK political party membership

So if it has such an enormous membership, why did Labour lose so badly? Obviously Brexit played a large part, but so – every single post mortem and account of anyone who canvassed on the doorsteps indicates – did the public’s profound dislike and distrust of Jeremy Corbyn himself.

To put in bluntly: the half million or so members of the Labour Party repeatedly voted for a leader who was shown time after time to be incompetent and unelectable. And in so doing cemented the shift from Labour being a party of the working class, to it becoming a party which mostly represents the bien-pensant, socially liberal, urban, professional middle classes.

2. ‘Why the Left Keep Losing’ by John Gray in the New Statesman

I very much enjoy Gray’s detached scepticism. Like me, he starts from the belief that humans are only another type of animal, mammals who happen to be able to stand up, speak and make things and as a result have developed an over-inflated sense of their own importance, but whose main achievement, in the long run, may turn out to be making planet earth uninhabitable.

Gray rightly gives pride of place to Brexit in this long analysis of what went wrong for Labour. But it is set in the context of a broader attack on the self-defeating progressive strain within the party.

He starts by enjoying the way the progressive liberal-minded politically correct have been shocked to discover that they don’t own the electorate and that things don’t appear to be smoothly trundling along fixed railway lines towards their version of a progressive Nirvana.

For the two wings of British progressivism – liberal centrism and Corbynite leftism – the election has been a profound shock. It is almost as if there was something in the contemporary scene they have failed to comprehend. They regard themselves as the embodiment of advancing modernity. Yet the pattern they imagined in history shows no signs of emerging. Any tendency to gradual improvement has given way to kaleidoscopic flux. Rather than tending towards some rational harmony, values are plural and contending. Political monotheism – the faith that only one political system can be right for all of humankind – has given way to inescapable pluralism. Progress has ceased to be the providential arc of history and instead become a prize snatched for a moment from the caprice of the gods.

He is describing that state of blank incomprehension and incredulity which we have seen all across the progressive cultural élite (writers, commentators, film-makers, actors, playwrights, poets, novelists and academics) ever since Leave won the Brexit referendum (23 June 2016).

The root cause is because progressives don’t understand that the majority of people are not like them – didn’t go to university, don’t agonise every day about the slave trade and trans rights, don’t have cushy office jobs writing books and articles.

Because many people in Britain struggle to earn enough to keep a roof over their heads and feed their children. Many people never read books or magazine articles and only read newspapers for the football and racing results. In fact many people in this country – up to 8 million adults, a fifth of the population – are functionally illiterate. (Adult Illiteracy In The UK)

Ignoring these most basic facts about the country they live in and the people they live among, progressives think everyone is like them, deep down, whether they know it or not – because progressives are convinced that their values are the only correct values and so must inevitably triumph.

Given this mindset, the only reason they can conceive for their repeated failures is that it’s all due to some right-wing conspiracy, or Russians manipulating the internet, or the first past the post system, or the patriarchy, or the influence of the right-wing media, or institutional racism, or any number of what are, in effect, paranoid conspiracy theories.

A much simpler explanation doesn’t occur to them: that the majority of the British people do actually pretty much understand their ideas and values and simply – reject them.

Gray makes a detour to demolish the progressive case for changing the electoral system, the case the Liberals and Social Democratic Party and then the Lib Dems have been making all my adult life.

Because they don’t understand the nature of the population of the country they live in, Gray says, it rarely crosses the progressive mind to consider that, if we introduced some other form of electoral system such as proportional representation, it would in all probability not usher in a multicultural Paradise, but might reveal the electorate as being even more right-wing than we had imagined. Progressives easily forget that in the 2014 election UKIP won nearly 4 million votes. If we had an elementary system of proportional representation, that would have given them 80 MPs!

Progressives talk of building the kind of majority they want, as if it somehow already latently exists. More likely, parties of the far right would set the political agenda, as they do throughout much of the continent. If you want a European-style voting system, you get a European style of politics.

Sceptics love ironies and Gray is a turbo-charged sceptic, he revels in paradoxes and ironic reversals. Thus he enjoys the idea that Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for modernising New Labour, for the glamorous appeal of a global economy and for the unlimited immigration which went with it, ended up shafting his own party.

New Labour’s unthinking embrace of globalisation and open borders produced the working-class revolt against economic liberalism and mobilised support for Brexit.

A key element of this has been the unforeseen consequence of Blair and Brown’s idea to send 50% of the British population to university.

The result over the past fifteen years or so has been a huge increase in the number of young people with degrees, people who – if they did a humanities degree, certainly – will have been exposed to an exhilarating mix of Western Marxism, feminism, anti-racism, post-structuralism and the whole gamut of progressive ideas which come under the rubric of ‘Theory’ or ‘Critical Theory’. (What is critical theory)

I feel confident of this terrain since this is precisely the exhilarating mix of ideas which I absorbed as an English student back in the 1980s, when we thought reading Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan and Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida would somehow sort out the Miners’ Strike and overthrow Mrs Thatcher, much like the rioting students of 1968 thought that reading Michel Foucault would usher in the Millennium.

But it didn’t, did it?

It turns out that clever students reading clever books – devoting months of your life to studying ‘the death of the author’, Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony or Derrida’s notion of deconstruction – doesn’t really change anything. And then they all go out into the real world and become lawyers and accountants. Or TV producers and writers. Or they remain in academia and teach this self-reinforcing and weirdly irrelevant ideology to a new generation of young acolytes.

Gray devotes a central section of his essay to the baleful impact which contemporary woke academia and the progressive ideology it promotes have had on actual politics.

If only people aged between 18 and 24 had voted in the general election, Corbyn would have won an enormous majority. No doubt this is partly because of Corbyn’s promise to abolish student tuition fees and the difficulties young people face in the housing and jobs markets. But their support for Corbyn is also a by-product of beliefs and values they have absorbed at school and university. According to the progressive ideology that has been instilled in them, the West is uniquely malignant, the ultimate source of injustice and oppression throughout the world, and Western power and values essentially illegitimate.

Humanities and social sciences teaching has been largely shaped by progressive thinking for generations, though other perspectives were previously tolerated. The metamorphosis of universities into centres of censorship and indoctrination is a more recent development, and with the expansion of higher education it has become politically significant. By over-enlarging the university system, Blair created the constituency that enabled the Corbynites to displace New Labour. No longer mainly a cult of intellectuals, as in Orwell’s time, progressivism has become the unthinking faith of millions of graduates.

When Labour voters switched to Johnson, they were surely moved by moral revulsion as well as their material interests. As polls have attested, they rejected Labour because it had become a party that derided everything they loved. Many referenced Corbyn’s support for regimes and movements that are violently hostile to the West. Some cited anti-Semitism as one of the evils their parents or grandparents had gone to war to defeat. For working class voters, Labour had set itself against patriotism and moral decency.

Compare and contrast Gray’s summary with this excerpt from an article by Toby Young, who did some canvassing for a friend standing as a Tory candidate in Newcastle. All the working class people he spoke to said they were going to vote Conservative, often for the first time in their lives. This was partly because many wanted to get Brexit done, but also:

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have talked a good deal about winning back these working class voters, but his policy positions haven’t been designed to appeal to them. I’m not just talking about his ambivalence on Brexit – there’s a widespread feeling among voters who value flag, faith and family that Corbyn isn’t one of them. Before he became Labour leader in 2015, he was an energetic protestor against nearly every armed conflict Britain has been involved in since Suez, including the Falklands War. He’s also called for the abandonment of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, the withdrawal of the UK from NATO and the dismantling of our security services – not to mention declining to sing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain service in 2015. From the point of view of many working class voters, for whom love of country is still a deeply felt emotion, Corbyn seems to side with the country’s enemies more often than he does with Britain. (Britain’s Labour Party Got Woke – And Now It’s Broke)

Immediately after the election I read an interview with a Labour activist in a northern constituency which was home of several army barracks of the British Army. She said many people considered Corbyn a traitor who was a more enthusiastic supporter of groups like Hamas and the IRA than of our own armed forces.

The discrepancy between how woke, over-educated commentators interpreted the Brexit vote and the reality on the ground was epitomised by disputes about whether it involved some kind of nostalgia for the British Empire. I read numerous articles by academics and progressive commentators saying Brexit was the result of entrenched racism and/or nostalgia for the days when Britain was Great.

But on Radio 4 I heard Ruth Smeeth, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, saying she’d been reading London-based, college-educated commentators claiming that the people who voted Brexit were nostalgic for the British Empire, and went on quite crossly to say people voting Brexit had nothing to do with the bloody British Empire which hardly any of them remember…

It’s because where they live there’s widespread unemployment, lack of housing, the schools are poor, the infrastructure is falling to pieces and they just think they’ve been ignored and taken for granted by London politicians for too long. And being told they’re ignorant white racist imperialist chavs by posh London liberals doesn’t exactly help.

This is the problem Rebecca Long-Bailey tried to address a few weeks ago when she called for a patriotic progressivism. She had obviously seen how Corbyn’s support for Britain’s enemies lost him huge swathes of working class support, the support of not only soldiers and sailors and air force personnel, but all the families of those people, the average squaddie and seaman who have often come from rough working class backgrounds and for whom a career in the services, with the training which goes along with it, is a welcome way out of a life of low expectations.

But on ‘patriotism’ Long-Bailey is caught between two forces, the common sense views of the majority of the British public and the hyper-liberal progressive values of the modern Labour Party’s middle-class and student base. Just as she is on transgender rights and anti-Semitism and dwelling endlessly on the evils of the slave trade – because the majority of the population doesn’t hold these views, but the majority of the Labour Party’s young, indoctrinated, politically correct students and graduates (the ones John Gray describes) very powerfully do hold all these views.

They have been taught by their lecturers and professors that the British Empire was the worst thing in world history, worse than the Nazis and Stalin and Pol Pot, and that Britain only has any industry or prosperity because of the slave trade, and that all British institutions (starting with the police, the army and the judiciary) are institutionally racist and sexist – just as they think trans rights are one of the key issues of our time, and are vehemently anti-Israel and pro-Palestine – the attitude which lies behind the lamentable rise of anti-Semitism in the modern Labour Party.

Here’s an excerpt from an article in GQ lamenting the big hole Labour has dug for itself by identifying with progressive anti-patriotism, and essentially agreeing with the John Gray and Toby Young analyses:

Much has been made of Labour leadership hopeful Long-Bailey’s reference to “progressive patriotism”, a phrase which wants to have its cake and eat it, but ends up satisfying nobody. The fact that she felt compelled to mention at all it suggests a cultural jolt is underway. In this context, “progressive” is being used to soothe her suspicious supporters, to help them hold their noses when discussing something as demeaning as patriotism. For the millions of voters Labour has lost, patriotism is not and has never been a problem, so dressing it up in the frills of progressive politics not only neuters the idea, but insults their intelligence. (Boris Johnson has won the culture war… for now by George Chesterton in GQ magazine)

Who can forget Emily Thornberry’s tweeted photo of a white van parked outside a house displaying the English flag while she was out canvassing in Rochester, a photo which neatly embodied both the anti-patriotic instincts of the Labour high command, as well as their Islington middle-class contempt for the actual working classes they so ludicrously claim to represent.

Thornberry was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet as a result of this tweet and this image, but she was, of course, taken back into the cabinet a year later, and until very recently was one of the candidates to become next Labour leader. Who needs any additional proof of the Labour Party top cadres’ contempt for the ‘patriotic’, ‘white’, ‘working classes’, three terms which, in the last decade or so, have become terms of abuse within progressive ideology.

Image result for emily thornberry tweet

Towards the end of his essay Gray skewers politically correct progressives with a vengeance:

Liberal or Corbynite, the core of the progressivist cult is the belief that the values that have guided human civilisation to date, especially in the West, need to be junked. A new kind of society is required, which progressives will devise. They are equipped for this task with scraps of faux-Marxism and hyper-liberalism, from which they have assembled a world-view. They believed a majority of people would submit to their vision and follow them. Instead they have been ignored, while their world-view has melted down into a heap of trash. They retain their position in British institutions, but their self-image as the leaders of society has been badly shaken. It is only to be expected that many should be fixated on conspiracy theories, or otherwise unhinged. The feature of the contemporary scene progressives fail to understand, in the end, is themselves.

Given the grip of these progressive zealots over the party base, it is going to be difficult to create a coherent Labour Party ideology which can reunite its alienated working class voters, especially in the North, with the liberal, middle-class progressives of the bourgeois south.

And then Gray ends his essay with a calculated insult designed to infuriate the kind of woke progressives he is describing, suggesting that to a large extent their vehement espousal of women’s rights, black rights, Muslim rights, LGBT+ rights, trans rights and so on were in fact, in the end, the convenient posturing of cynical careerists who could see that it would help their careers as actors and film-makers and TV presenters and artists and gallery curators and so on to adopt the latest progressive views but who might, given the right-wing drift of the times, be prepared to abandon them… for the right price.

Faced with the possibility of a decade or more of Conservative rule, Britain’s cultural establishment may change its complexion. As well as an identity, progressive views have been a means of advancement in the academy, the arts and broadcast media. With the funding position of cultural institutions under review, the usefulness of progressivism as a career strategy may be about to decline.

As satirical insults go, this is quite funny, as funny as anything in Swift or Pope, but I think it’s wrong.

In my opinion progressives will continue painting themselves further and further into a virtuously woke corner, and in doing so permanently undermine the ability of a Left-of-centre government to ever return to power.

Conclusion

The point of this blog post is not to present conclusive evidence for my thesis. There is a world of evidence for countless other positions and I’ve mostly omitted the importance of Brexit which might turn out to have caused a one-off temporary alignment of British politics which then gently returns to its basic two-party model, all the commentators I’ve quoted say that is a possibility.

And I’m always ready to accept the possibility that I am simply wrong.

The main point of this brief commentary on John Gray’s article is more to explain to readers the thinking underlying my response to books and exhibitions which embody progressivee ideology i.e. which go out of their way to criticise Britain, Britain’s armed forces, the British Empire, white people, men, and straight people.

My points are:

1. The progressive academics and writers and artists and film-makers and gallery curators who use 1960s sociological terminology to attack British history, British heritage, the British Empire and British values, and who quote feminist and post-colonial rhetoric to attack men, the patriarchy, the male gaze, heteronormativity, Britain’s racist society and so on – they quite clearly think that History is On Their Side and that each one of their critical and minatory articles, works of art, films and exhibitions, are chipping away at the white, patriarchal, racist Establishment which, because of their efforts, will one day crumble away and reveal a multicultural Paradise in which the male gaze and inequality and manspreading have all been abolished.

2. But not only is this not very likely to happen, but the General Election of 2019 (and the Brexit vote and, if you want to drag the Yanks into it, the election of Donald Trump) suggest the precise opposite: that there is no such thing as history being on anyone’s side, that events take their own course regardless of anyone’s intentions, that their victory is far from inevitable. I entirely agree with Gray’s fundamental interpretation of human history which is things change, they change all the time and often at bewildering speed – but they don’t necessarily change for the better. To believe they do is a fundamentally Christian idea, based on the notion that History has a purpose and is heading towards a glorious endpoint, the Revolution, the Return of the King, the creation of a fair and just society.

But it’s not. It never has been and it never will. To believe otherwise, contrary to all the evidence of human history, is to have precisely the same kind of ‘faith’ as Christians and other religious believers do in their consoling ideologies. It is not, in other words, to live in the real world which we all actually inhabit.

3. And lastly, as the various writers quoted above suggest, there is plenty of evidence that, if anything, the metropolitan, liberal, progressive élite of artists and actors and film-makers and writers and gallery curators and their relentless insistence on woke issues actively alienates the majority of the population.

The majority of the population does not support its victim-grievance politics, its disproportionate concern for refugees and immigrants and every other minority cause, its excessive concern for the Palestinians and the black victims of the American police. Who gives a damn about all that (the overwhelmingly white, London, liberal middle classes, that’s who).

On the contrary most of the polling evidence shows that the majority of the British population just wants someone to sort out the NHS, and the police, and crack down on crime, and control immigration, and improve their local schools. Much the same issues, in other words, as have dominated all the general elections I can remember going back to the 1970s, and which a huge swathe of working class and Northern voters didn’t believe the Labour Party was capable of delivering.

The sound of losers

So it is this real-world political analysis which explains why, when I read yet another book by a left-wing academic attacking the British Empire or the slave trade i.e. fighting battles which were over generations or hundreds of years ago – or when I visit another exhibition about the wickedness of straight white men, or read another article explaining why I should be up in arms about the rapacious behaviour of Hollywood film producers, my first reaction is: this is the rhetoric of losers.

Not ‘losers’ in the playground, insult sense. I mean it is, quite literally, the rhetoric of the over-educated minority of the population who keep losing elections, who lost the last election, and the three before that, and the Brexit referendum. It is the sound of people who keep losing. Any way you look at it, the progressive Left’s record is appalling.

  • 2010 General Election = Conservative-led coalition
  • 2015 General Election = Conservative government
  • 2016 Leave wins the Brexit referendum
  • 2017 General Election = Conservative government
  • 2019 General Election = Conservative government

In order to win elections in a modern Western country you need to build coalitions and reach out to people, all kinds of people, imperfect people, people you don’t like or whose values you may not share or actively oppose, in order to assemble what is called ‘a majority’.

The woke insistence on an utterly pure, unstained and uncontaminated virtue – a kind of political virginity test – militates against this ever happening.

So all this explains why, when I visited the Barbican gallery’s exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography and read its wall labels:

  • attacking traditional notions of masculinity
  • attacking men for running the Patriarchy and for their male gaze and for their manspreading and mansplaining and their toxic masculinity (in case you think I’m exaggerating, there is a section of the exhibition devoted to manspreading, and several displays devoted explicitly to toxic masculinity)
  • attacking white people for their institutional racism
  • attacking straight people for their homophobia
  • and attacking heteronormative people for their transphobia

I very simply concluded that this is not how you reach out and build alliances. This is not how you create coalitions. This is not how you win political power.

This is how you create a politically correct ivory tower, convinced of your own virtue and rectitude – this is how you propagate an ideology which objectifies, judges and demonises the majority of the population for what you claim to be its sins of sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and so on.

What I felt was that exhibitions like this are part of the much broader anti-British, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-family, anti-tradition cultural message being pumped out across all channels and all media by a London-based, university-educated, progressive élite, which worships American gay and black and feminist art, but which – when it came to the crunch – repelled huge numbers of traditional Labour Party voters and helped deliver the Conservative Party its biggest electoral victory since 1987.

Quite frankly this scares me. It scares me because I wonder whether the decline of the old manual-labouring working class, the disappearance of all the old heavy industries I grew up with – coalmining, steelmaking, shipbuilding, car manufactring – the casualisation and zero contract nature of so much modern work, the loss to Labour of the so-called Red Wall constituencies, the loss of Scotland dammit, combined with the sustained attack on all forms of traditional belief by the metropolitan cultural élite and the reduction of Labour support to the progressive middle classes of the big English cities – London, Bristol, Brighton…

All these social, economic and cultural changes hardly make me think we’re on the verge of some glorious multicultural, post-patriarchal age of Aquarius which progressive ideology promises if only we can smash the patriarchy and reclaim the night and free the nipple and stand up for trans rights and welcome tens of thousands more refugees into the country…

It all makes me wonder whether the Labour Party will ever hold power in Britain again.

And, more specifically, whether the kind of progressive art élite I’m describing is destined to become a permanent minority, stuck like a cracked record in its reverence of ‘transgressive’ and ‘rebel’ art by black and feminist and gay and trans artists from New York and Berlin and Seoul, luxuriating in its rhetoric of ‘subversion’ and ‘challenge’ and ‘interrogation’, while in reality being completely ignored by the great majority of the population or, if it makes any impression at all, simply contributing to the widespread sense that a snobbish progressive London élite is looking down its superior nose at the lifestyles, opinions and patriotic beliefs of the great majority of the working class, while hypocritically keeping all the money and power, the best schools, the private hospitals and the plum jobs for themselves.

The scale of the challenge

Related links

Here is an article by Owen Jones in the Guardian which soundly rejects the position I’ve sketched out. I agree with him that just because Labour lost is no reason to blame it on the various minorities which have achieved huge advances in freedom and reality over the past 30 or 40 years. I’m not blaming the minorities: I’m blaming the middle-class cultural élite which has prioritised trendy minority issues at the expense of the bread-and-butter issues which affect real communities the length and breadth of the land.

Also, analysing Jones’s piece, it is notable for being relatively light on psephological data i.e, quantitative or qualitative analysis of the 2019 election, and relies on going back to the 1970s and 1980s to dig up ancient examples of dated bigotry. In other words, it sounds good but unintentionally exposes the weakness of its own position. The 1970s were a long time ago. I was there. They were awful. But it’s 2020 now. Crapping on about 1970s bigotry is similar to crapping on about the British Empire or the slave trade – it’s enjoyable, makes us all feel virtuous, but avoids the really difficult task of explaining how you are going to tackle entrenched poverty and inequality NOW.

Related blog posts

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by Simon on February 26, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 26, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/26/woke-academia-and-art-world-undermine-the-left/

Walk: Hadrian’s Wall

23 February 2012

For half term with my son to Durham (for Eucharist at the cathedral), Newcastle (for a few days history and sightseeing), then out to Hadrian’s Wall for a week of long walks along it and through Northumberland’s big, boggy, windswept openness.

Hadrian's Wall near Housesteads

Hadrian’s Wall near Housesteads

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by Simon on April 28, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 28, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/walk-hadrians-wall/