Double episode about Jack Hilton, a working-class author, World War I veteran, unemployed movement organiser, and trade union activist from Rochdale, north-west England.

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Episodes

  • Part 1: Jack Hilton’s early life in Rochdale’s slums, starting work as a child, World War I, unemployed activism during the Great Depression, his celebrated 1935 debut novel, Caliban Shrieks, and his long-term (and sometimes strained) relationship with George Orwell. Listen without ads here on Patreon.

WCL12: Jack Hilton, Rochdale Caliban, part 1 – Working Class History

  • Part 2: Discussion of Caliban Shrieks in more detail and how it compares to other working-class novels from the same period; his later writing and life, and how his writing career would come to an end (despite George Orwell’s efforts); and, finally, the amazing series of events that led to the rediscovery and republication of Caliban Shrieks. Listen without ads here on Patreon.

WCL13: Jack Hilton, Rochdale Caliban, part 2 – Working Class History

More information

Images

Jack Hilton on his wedding day, c. 1950s. Credit: Jack Chadwick.
Jack Chadwick in one of Hilton’s local pubs holding the poster he used to (successfully) track down some of Hilton’s old friends. Credit: Jack Chadwick.
Poster left in one of Hilton’s old pubs. Underneath the title question is written “Or Bill Hassall (Jack’s mate)”. Credit: Jack Chadwick.

Sources

Acknowledgements

  • Image: Jack Hilton. Credit: Jack Chadwick.
  • Thanks to all our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
  • Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.
  • This episode was edited by Jesse French.

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Transcript

Part 1

Matt: Jack Hilton was a plasterer, trade unionist, survivor of World War One, and local activist in Lancashire’s unemployed workers’ movement, who turned to writing while banned from political activity. But despite being celebrated by some of the most respected writers of his generation, Hilton and his work faded into obscurity only to be rediscovered now, some 90 years after he was first published. This is Working Class Literature.

[intro music]

Matt: Before we start, a quick note to say that we’re only able to continue making these podcasts – both Working Class History and Literature – because of the support of our listeners on Patreon. If you like what we do and want to help us with our work, join us on patreon.com/workingclasshistory where you can get benefits like early access to episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted books, merch and more. For instance, Patreon supporters can listen to both episodes about Jack Hilton now, and also have exclusive access to a special Patreon-only bonus episode, where we discuss more passages from Jack Hilton’s brilliant novel, Caliban Shrieks. Patreon supporters also get access to our two Patreon-only podcast series, Radical Reads and Fireside Chat. Link in the show notes.

In this double episode, we’re going to look at the life and work of the British working-class author, Jack Hilton, with a particular focus on his 1935 autobiographical novel, Caliban Shrieks. To do that, we spoke to Jack Chadwick, who chanced upon Hilton’s novel back in 2021 and, through what can only be described as an incredible feat of literary detective work, managed to track down some of Hilton’s old friends, and get his book back into print almost 90 years after it was first published. We discuss this incredible story of how Jack got the book back into print in Part 2.

So, turning to Jack Hilton himself, then, it’s fair to say he had an extremely difficult start in life.

Jack Chadwick: One of the things that makes him easy to date is that he was born in 1900. For someone who is not particularly good at mental maths, that makes it a lot easier to work out how old he was at any given point. Born in a slum terrace in Rochdale. The house that he was born in is still standing and the only difference is that it’s no longer packed… I think it would have been two families and now I presume it’s just one. I’ve not knocked on to check. So he was born in this one room that his two parents lived in. I’ve never been able to work out where he was exactly in the order of the children born. I think he was maybe the third child and potentially the first son. Part of why it’s impossible to know exactly where he came in the order of the family is because, of his siblings, so many of them died before they even reached adulthood. I think only one of his siblings out of seven reached adulthood alongside him. I think a lot of his siblings even missed out on the censuses because obviously they were born and died within the period. So unless they reached ten, they were missing from the records.

His dad was from what Jack Hilton described as being a lumpen proletariat or the lowest of the low but despite that, he was at the forefront of the meagre, early efforts of socialist organising in Rochdale. Quite like Jack Hilton went on to achieve, his dad scraped a little bit of an education for himself but it wasn’t the kind of thing that his father’s work allowed him to pass on to his children. Jack Hilton would have got little scraps of his father’s knowledge. Obviously, his father was working hard with all this death around him but it was still the case that Hilton was given this early orientation towards socialism and towards the working class.

Matt: As was common at the start of the twentieth century, Jack Hilton was denied an education and forced into employment as a child.

Jack Chadwick: Like all of the kids of his class and age in Rochdale at that time, Hilton grew up under a halftime system, he went to work at the age of nine. One small victory for the working class around that time was that when you went to work at the age of nine, you weren’t sent to the mill yet and you got a bit of a grace period of two years before you were sent to the local mills. When I say the local mills, there were about three towering, dark buildings covered in black ash with smoke blackening the skies of Rochdale. All of these buildings were within a stone’s throw of where Jack Hilton grew up. They are no longer there.

I think he worked for a grocer and did some sort of errand boy jobs in his afternoons after school. He was then sent to the mill at the age of eleven. He would wake up at 5.30am in the dark and carry himself up the hill and down the hill to the local mill to do labour that left him absolutely knackered, to say the least, by the time he was supposed to start what really has no right to call itself an education.

He speaks about what this education entailed Caliban Shrieks and the image he gives of it is so distinct and so different to any kind of ideal sense of what that word means now or even at the time. It was jingoistic. It was patronising.

I think perhaps Jack Hilton had the gift of knowing the limitations of what was being presented to him as an education because of his father. Even if his father wasn’t able to give him any kind of other education, he was able to let him know the limitations of what was on offer in this authoritarian, brutal school with its religious zeal and, quite frankly, brutal floggings of the kids which I think he speaks about a little bit.

Matt: While Hilton’s earliest experiences were already extremely difficult, they would be compounded by the onset of the First World War and the horrors he would live through there.

Jack Chadwick: At first, he was too young to be sent to the trenches so he began a series of jobs in the logistics support and auxiliary roles in England. One of the jobs that he did for the longest was looking after the horses of a marshall who was being kept back in England in preparation for being sent to Belgium. Hilton did this job for a while and it gave him this relationship and an introduction to the ruling class. He was working for the officer types and I think this was another really important influence on the man he would become. Unlike many of the other boys who were sent off to fight, he wasn’t around his own type from the very beginning of the war. The war brought him into the world of class and it gave him a window into the lives of how richer Britons lived. I think part of why he was selected to work for the officers and why he was able to do it for so long – about two years – was because they recognised that there was a brilliant brain in this lad even though he lacked any formal education.

When he was of age, he was sent to the trenches and he writes very little about this in the grand scheme of things but very powerfully. I think it’s one of those cases where a lot of the meaning is contained in the gaps as opposed to what is communicated in the actual words on the page. So if you read between the lines of his account of the war and what came after for him, you get this particularly brutal and personal explanation of the effects of the war on this young working-class boy. He talks about the experience of being sent to the trenches and describes it in a harrowing, quick-fire, rapid-fire sort of way. His account of what happened is very visceral but it does only run for maybe two or three pages.

What happens afterwards is that you have this pair of chapters covering ten years of Jack Hilton’s life from the end of the war until he was mentally able to settle in Rochdale again at the end of the ‘20s. This period of ten years is a direct response to what happened in the war. It’s clear this period of homelessness, rough-sleeping and vagrancy which he went through wasn’t unique to him. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of veterans from the First World War went through this long period of wandering that is timeless. In fact, the account that Jack Hilton gives of this period tells you so much about his experiences of the war and that’s what I mean by how you really have to read between the lines of his account of the war to get a sense of how much trauma he was carrying around with him afterwards. That was all he was carrying with him. He didn’t have anything to his name. He was wandering the countryside from town to town. He made it to London, out of London, back to London, back up North and back down South. From spike to spike and from poorhouse to poorhouse, he was carrying nothing but this immense trauma that completely prevented him from settling his own mind and settling down anywhere for at least ten years and potentially eleven or twelve.

Matt: In the UK, we talk quite a lot about the First World War, but often gloss over the sheer scale of the horror and destruction that it involved: so, in total, around 20 million people were killed, and around another 20 million were wounded. During the Battle of the Somme, over 57,000 British soldiers died on one single day, but it wasn’t uncommon for hundreds to die even on supposedly ‘quiet’ days. So, it’s not surprising that anyone who found themselves in the middle of all that, would come home with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; and, indeed, hundreds of thousands did. Harry Patch, the last surviving British combat veteran from World War I, went on to describe war as “organised murder and nothing else” and said that the politicians who had dragged them into it should have “been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves.”

Jack Hilton lived through all of this, as did many others. But as if that wasn’t enough, Hilton and his generation would have yet another era-defining catastrophe to come: the Great Depression.

Jack Chadwick: He had just got to that point in his life where he was able to overcome the trauma of the war and what he saw and begin to settle in Rochdale which is where he was born. Just after he’d settled into doing odd jobs, predominantly in the construction industry, the Great Depression hit. His entire generation has the worst luck when it comes to the ages at which they hit these events. He is young enough to go to the trenches. He’s young enough to be still dealing with the effects of the First World War as the Great Depression hits. He finds himself trying to settle in Rochdale but is unable to find work and groups together with some of his friends in the local library. They go to this library predominantly for warmth. I think he was in a fixed abode at that point but there was no heating, no food and sharing with five other lads I believe. They go to the library to keep warm in between the odd jobs that they’re able to pick up from wherever there is work. These lads are all clinging to each other out of desperation in the library and as the months pass by, they sort of turn towards what they can do to improve their situation out of sheer desperation. They think, ‘We’re just doing nothing. What can we do to make us feel like we’re doing something?’

Matt: It’s worth mentioning just how bad the Great Depression in Britain was: in 1931, for instance, almost a quarter of men and one in five women were recorded as unemployed. Rather than do anything to help the unemployed, the government introduced the Means Test, whereby inspectors would visit unemployed people’s homes to see if they were living fecklessly or had any items they could sell, before giving them their unemployment benefit. On top of that, the Means Test applied to the household, meaning that if one of the children got a job, their earnings would be deducted from the parent’s dole money. Unsurprisingly, this meant that families would often be broken up with children leaving home in the event they found work.

It’s also really important to highlight as well that, despite these harsh conditions, the unemployed were never given the sympathy you’d expect from the influential voices of their time. Just like the demonisation of the unemployed today, newspapers during the Great Depression depicted them as irresponsible, lazy, and having brought their poverty upon themselves: in 1931, The Times ran an article in favour of the Means Test, claiming that the dole had become “an alternative source of almost permanent maintenance.” Similarly, The Scotsman published a piece claiming that “income-tax payers are, unlike the unemployed, paying out and getting no return directly for their money [while] Many of the workless marry and breed families while in receipt of the dole”.

While many – perhaps even most – of the unemployed responded to this situation with a deep sense of hopelessness, others (such as Jack Hilton) began to get politically active.

Jack Chadwick: The first thing that happens is they hear about the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) which had been founded by the Communist Party of Great Britain to represent the unemployed masses after the end of the First World War. This organisation existed for ten years but didn’t really achieve anything like the breakthroughs that it managed in the first years of the Great Depression. I think the biggest march that they held was 110,000 people in 1932 to present a petition to Whitehall. Whitehall responded with 70,000 police mobilised from across the country to brutally intercept this crowd of desperate people, steal the petition they’d gathered and then beat them out of London over a few days effectively.

Matt: The march that Jack is talking about here was the 1932 Hunger March when 2,500-3,000 unemployed workers set off from Glasgow to London, one of many similar cross-country marches that took place in that period. In London, they were joined by over 100,000 other demonstrators and attempted to present a petition with over a million signatures to the government but were stopped by police, resulting in huge clashes in Central London.

Jack Chadwick: This is the kind of event that would have got Hilton and his mates’ attention in Rochdale and that’s what led them to attempt to found a chapter of the NUWM in the town. The first meeting they held was dire. These weren’t educated men. Like I said, they had no concept of how to make a speech, how to explain what was going on in their lives. They just knew that they needed to be able to explain it. They needed to understand it themselves. After their first meeting, they go back to the library and they swallow book after book after book and Hilton is not alone in this. It’s him and about five other mates who do this and read Marx and the classics of the English canon. They read Shakespeare.

It does bear fruit and their meetings start to pick up steam and every single new meeting, they talk with more eloquence. They’re able to explain things in more detail with more credibility and the crowds grow and grow. Within a matter of months, these men are giving speeches that are drawing people from all over the town, men and women, young and old. The meetings become rallies and then the rallies become riots. The riots obviously, for the powers that be in Rochdale, were completely unacceptable and scary. The local business leaders and local bourgeoisie lean on the local judges, the local police and anyone who will listen to put a stop to this. Jack Hilton is seized from the midst of a demonstration, thrown in the cells and then taken to Strangeways Prison. He is let out after a matter of weeks but he is only let out on the proviso that, for the period of three years, he never makes another political speech in that time on pain of being sent straight back to Strangeways.

Matt: However, it was precisely a result of the conditions of Hilton’s release that he would go on to write his first novel.

Jack Chadwick: In this period that he’s bound over, having taught himself how to make speeches that can move hundreds and hundreds of people to action but now being completely unable to do this anymore, he turns to pen and paper. The speeches that he would have been giving to these crowds are kept for himself and his scrappy little notebooks. He starts to write in these notebooks what he would otherwise have been saying to the crowds.

One evening, he went to a night class organised by the Working Men’s Educational Association which I think he started going to around the time that he and his mates were beginning to educate themselves to make speeches. Whenever he went to these classes, he was either knackered after a day of work or starving because he hadn’t had any work. After one of these classes, for whatever reason, he left his notebook behind and the association’s tutor picked up the notebook and, being a nosey bugger, took it home and leafed through it. What he had in his hands was the clamouring nucleus of what would then become Caliban Shrieks. I think it equates to being about the first and second chapters or thereabouts.

What this nosey bugger does is he sends Jack Hilton’s notebook, without his permission, to the editor of a modernist literary magazine called The Adelphi which was a real sort of… I don’t know how to put this really. It was a sort of haven for the misfits and the most unpopular figures of the literary world at that time in England like D. H. Lawrence.

Matt: DH Lawrence was an author and son of a Nottinghamshire coal miner closely connected to the literary avant-garde of the early twentieth century. His works frequently dealt in themes of sexual desire that scandalised the literary mainstream, not to mention British authorities: a number of his novels were the subjects of obscenity trials, like 1915’s The Rainbow, whose copies were seized and burnt. Obviously not learning his lesson, in 1928, Lawrence published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, about a steamy love affair between the wife of a wealthy landowner and her working-class gamekeeper. That book was similarly banned and not published in full until yet another obscenity trial resulted in the ban being lifted in 1960, by which time Lawrence had been dead for 30 years.

While Lawrence was still alive, however, The Adelphi was a firm supporter of his work.

Jack Chadwick: So when Jack Hilton’s notebook was sent in and they saw that what they’d been given was such a radical, unusual but brilliant piece of writing, the editors jumped on it, especially because one of the unspoken missions of this magazine, after D. H. Lawrence’s death, had sort of been – to put it quite crudely – to find the heirs of Lawrence. It’s no exaggeration to say that with Jack Hilton, at least John Middleton Murry, the editor, was so excited and enamoured with what he’d been sent that he thought this could really be the Second Coming of the figure that was the reason this journal existed. So he wrote to Jack Hilton via the tutor asking him to write more and to expand and tidy up this fragment for a publication in the journal. That’s what he did and that was the first piece of published writing by Jack Hilton.

The main takeaway here is that Hilton, at no point, ever believed he would ever be a published writer and never sought out publication himself despite clearly having the talent to achieve publication and to warrant other people reading his writing.

Matt: One of the interesting things about Hilton’s book (and probably a result of the fact that he started writing because the state had banned him from making speeches) is the way that it differs from a traditional novel. So, rather than a linear narrative that follows characters from the beginning to the middle and end, Hilton narrates episodes or whole periods of his life in a style that the writer, Andrew McMillan, has described as “poetic monologues”.

Jack Chadwick: It’s completely resistant to any kind of neat category or any kind of recognisable form of writing or prose. This is something that Andrew McMillan really gets across very well in his introduction to the new edition. There are different impressions at different points in the text that you could sort of pass as being different poetic monologues. The way I think about it is that I had to reflect on my own first time reading Caliban Shrieks in the library where I found it. I remember that when I first took a break to have a cigarette, I reflected on what I’d been reading and I just thought to myself that it didn’t feel like I’d been reading something similar to anything I’d ever read before. It felt very much like I’d been, at points, listening to someone I already knew from across a pub table recounting their impressions to me. It sounds to you like it’s coming from above a soap box.

I think an interesting comparison or the best one that I’ve ever been able to find to draw any kind of similarities between Caliban Shrieks and other pieces of culture is the punk poetry of the ‘60s. The punk poets of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s come closest to doing the same things as what Hilton’s doing in terms of creating this warm, accessible… I think of it like he’s placing himself in your head and you are, at the same time, being welcomed into his head with a red carpet and a pint waiting for you there. It’s the most intimate connection I’ve felt when reading an author before in the sense that you’re taken through these junctions in his life… not in the sense of a description of events as he lived them which actually, as McMillan touches on, there’s not much of that in the novel. It’s not about saying, ‘This happened and then I did this.’ There’s not much cause and effect. It’s not a historical document in that way. It’s a history of his internal life and the responses of his mind and personality to the things he lived through, the ideas he came into contact with and the rules that he had to crash up against. That’s what is brilliant about Hilton. He achieves this with poetic monologues.

Just after talking about these monologues a little bit, McMillan asks the question: ‘Who is being addressed within them?’ If you go off how he addresses his audience in the text, it’s almost as if he’s writing for people that he’s quite disdainful of or writing for a middle-class crowd. I’m undecided on this. I think his introduction to the network of The Adelphi magazine, which was a very middle-class, upper-class outfit… I think the most working-class people in The Adelphi subscribers list would be teachers and academics. People who lived in worlds far, far removed from Hilton’s own. He knew that these people were the ones who were reading and applauding his writing. That’s expressed in Caliban Shrieks in that he is sort of directly addressing them.

McMillan says, “There’s an odd sense throughout that the people who were so central to Hilton like the people in the pub, the ordinary soldiers and the wider community aren’t imagined as the readers of the book. His imagined reader is Prospero, not Caliban.” I think is a very fair reading of the book but I also don’t necessarily agree with that. I think, actually, this is quite a clever way of Hilton addressing his ideal reader, the working-class reader, and he definitely would have been aware they weren’t reading the book in the same magnitudes as the middle-class audience that gave birth to his writing career. It’s quite cheeky really to address a book to one audience in a sort of scathing and dismissive way and then, all along, hope this is a device for getting the attention of readers from another class. I think that’s potentially what he was doing.

It’s like ushering the working-class readers into the jury box in a way while he takes the stand and then the rest of them are in the dock or in the court gallery.

Matt: In a moment, Jack is going to read the preface to Caliban Shrieks, where this narrative style, in which Hilton is ostensibly addressing (and denouncing) the middle-class reader but almost for the entertainment of an imagined working-class onlooker, may become clear.

However, first we should probably explain that the ‘Caliban’ in the title of Hilton’s novel is a reference to William Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. Set on a remote island, The Tempest follows Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, who uses his magical powers to seek vengeance on his brother. Caliban, meanwhile, is a native inhabitant of the island that Prospero has been exiled to, and who Prospero has both taught language, and enslaved.

Anyway, here is Jack Chadwick, reading the preface to Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks.

Jack Chadwick:

Caliban is a man you should know well. ‘A freckled whelp hag-born – not honour’d with a human shape.’ He holds opinion about his rights; such foolishness he should overcome. ‘Hag-seed, hence! Fetch us in fuel; and be quick, thou’rt best to answer other business,’ than say, ‘I must eat my dinner. This island’s mine – which thou takest from me. When thou camest first, thou stroked’st me and madest much of me, wouldst give me water with berries in’t, and teach me how to name the bigger light, and how the less, that burn by day and night; and then I loved thee and show’d thee all the qualities o’ the isle, the fresh springs, brine-pits, barren places and fertile; cursed be that I did so – for I am all the subjects that you have, which first was my own king.’

I know the musings and tirades of my modern Caliban flout all the accepted rules of writing, but, ‘You taught me a language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language.’

I break from the personal to a diatribe against all and sundry but here is ‘Neither bush nor shrub, to bear off any weather at all and another storm abrewing.’

You may not want to be disturbed by Caliban’s inflated inflicted importance, still he is here. I give you his story, from infancy to infirmity, as clear as my feeble ability can arrange it for you. The jargon is one of the ‘Clamorous Demagogue’ for which there is no apology.

Yours, Jack Hilton

Matt: When Hilton writes in this preface that “you should know” Caliban well, but “may not want to be disturbed” by him, we can begin to see what Andrew McMillan means when he says Hilton’s imagined reader is Prospero, not Caliban. But the mockery and sarcasm of Hilton’s tone also lends itself to what Jack says about this also being done for the benefit of a working-class audience; or, to use Jack’s analogy, Hilton puts the middle and upper classes in the dock while the working-class reader is ushered into the jury box and court gallery to watch as Hilton puts them on trial (and, by extension, the society they represent).

Hilton also uses a number of quotes in this preface, not just from The Tempest but from a number of Shakespeare’s other plays as well, often doing away with quotation marks completely, so that Shakespeare’s words are integrated into the language and rhythms Hilton’s own words. In his book chapter on working-class writing and literary experimentation, Ben Clarke argues that this is Hilton’s way of reclaiming Shakespeare,  so that his work should not be “the property of the dominant classes, to which others may be granted conditional access, but a common resource.”

This struggle with (but also for) the established canon of English literature, can also be read as a struggle both for and against literary language. As Hilton writes, his modern Caliban “flout[s] all the accepted rules of writing” followed by a line from The Tempest: “You taught me a language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse”. Hilton is acknowledging that it’s not just the texts of the English literary canon that have been kept as the property of the dominant classes, but the very language of literature itself. Regional, working-class accents and dialects were for a long time excluded from conventional ideas of what is ‘literary’. Against such a literary tradition, then, Hilton could do nothing but flout its accepted rules.

Jack Chadwick: The nucleus of Caliban Shrieks was this really roughly-written, scribbled-down account of Jack Hilton’s early life which he did probably out of boredom or desperation to express himself in some way in the notebook that he took along to a tutorial at the Working Men’s Educational Association in Rochdale. His writing, at that point, was purely a way for him to vent the frustration of being bound over by the courts and prevented from making political speeches. He started to write more and develop this fragment with the encouragement of John Middleton Murry from The Adelphi who asked him to turn it into an entry in the journal which he did. He tidied it up a little bit. Middleton Murry edited it and it became one of the most impactful, popular, unique entries in the magazine at that period. A publisher that had links to the journal, Cobden-Sanderson, approached Hilton at the behest of John Middleton Murry to develop this entry into a longer book or debut novel.

If you’re reading it out aloud, you can really tell that the energy of the text transforms according to the metre that Hilton writes in. The point where this is most obvious is often at the end of chapters, particularly at the end of the last chapter where he breaks off from his normal style of writing in the book. Although, there really is no one normal style of writing in this book. He breaks off from one approach to this new approach based on a hidden metre which just climbs and climbs in energy as it goes. The monologue, at this point, is a toast – ‘Here’s to you, Mr Landlord. Here’s to you, Mr Bootstrapper. Here’s to you, the working men of England.’ There are five or so big paragraphs of text, the effect of which you can only really get by reading it out aloud and reading it directly as a follow-on from the start of the chapter. Obviously, he would have learnt about metres and I think he read a lot about speech-making and the theory of oration. You have to remember that this was a main challenge that him and his mates had set themselves when they went to the library to learn how to make political speeches. I guess they read the Victorian guidebooks or maybe even earlier on how to make good speeches which would have introduced them to concepts and the various different options to use. I think that’s the biggest influence on the form of the text.

It really is such a unique creation and it’s unique because he didn’t have access to the kinds of writing that he may have, in a different world, used to give his own writing more of a recognisable form. Also, he didn’t have the motivation to follow any form because he wasn’t writing to be recognised as a writer. The biggest influences or the origins of his creative output are in speech-making and the understanding of metre that he picked up for that purpose.

Matt: Hilton’s writing was widely appreciated in 1930s literary circles, not just by John Middleton Murry of The Adelphi but also a number of other highly respected literary figures: the famous poet, WH Auden, for example, described Hilton as “the finest writer of them all” and praised what he called the book’s “magnificent Moby Dick rhetoric”. But the most famous of Hilton’s literary supporters was probably George Orwell. Interestingly, the two of them had actually met previously as part of their political activism.

Jack Chadwick: When he and his mates set up this chapter of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement in Rochdale, it brought them into contact with the Independent Labour Party (ILP) which was undergoing a big crisis in the Northwest where many of its members were in the early ‘30s. This is quite important because it potentially is what brought Jack Hilton into contact with another key figure from The Adelphi, potentially even before Hilton had been contacted by John Middleton Murry about the fragment from the notebook. George Orwell (Eric Blair) was up North for the founding conference of the Independent Socialist Party which was a sort of Northwest breakaway from the ILP. Hilton was at this conference in Manchester and would have met some of the figures from The Adelphi through this and certainly, another writer called Jack Common, I believe, who came into contact with Hilton at this point.

Matt: There are a couple of groups and names that might need some explaining here. So, the Independent Labour Party was a British political party that predated the main Labour Party, then later affiliated and eventually merged into it. The ILP was generally to the left of the mainstream Labour Party. The Independent Socialist Party was a short-lived splinter from the ILP, which had Hilton’s native Lancashire as its base.

Jack Common, meanwhile, was a working-class author from Newcastle in the North-East of England. Common worked at The Adelphi and went on to write a number of books, most famously his autobiographical debut novel, Kiddar’s Luck.

Anyway, Orwell was also a big fan, writing that Hilton had “a considerable literary gift”. For Orwell, Hilton embodied the “humorous courage, the fearful realism and the utter imperviousness to middle-class ideals, which characterise the best type of industrial worker”. Furthermore, Hilton also had a hand in the evolution of Orwell’s famous piece of Depression-era non-fiction, The Road to Wigan Pier.

Jack Chadwick: In the early conferences that he attended in Manchester around the time of the founding of the Independent Socialist Party in the Northwest. They would have come across each other and maybe Hilton remembered Orwell but Orwell didn’t really remember Hilton. What happened after that was that Orwell was commissioned by his publisher to write a documentary work about conditions for the working class in the North of England. He turned to his network of friends that he had through The Adelphi and the ILP/ISP and one of the names that was given to him to use as a first port of call for getting a vantage point on where it would be useful to go was Jack Hilton.

A few of Orwell’s contacts told him to write to Jack Hilton asking him if it would be possible to come and live with him in Rochdale for a period of a month or so to structure the book that he’d been commissioned to write around the experiences of the Rochdale millworkers. The story of Jack’s response to this is fascinating because it says a lot about the cultural differences between a working-class man like Jack Hilton and someone with a background like Orwell. Orwell was asking to come and stay with Hilton in his tiny, little set of rooms. I think there were two rooms where Hilton and his wife were living.

It was a bizarre request for someone like Hilton to be fielded because it just wasn’t the done thing to ask to stay in someone’s house when that house was so small and when Hilton himself was out working for most of the day. Orwell would have been left alone in the house with Hilton’s wife. It would just never happen in the community that Hilton lived in to have a male visitor staying at home where it’s just him and your wife. Hilton said this to him in his letter back and said, ‘I can’t host you, mate.’ He maybe didn’t emphasise how much of a weird request it was for him to have. He did, however, recommend to Orwell to go to Wigan… ‘for they are good folk, the Wigan colliers’ is I think how he puts it. He even gave him some people to write to in Wigan. I believe one of those contacts either was able to host Orwell or to put him in touch with the place he ended up staying, which was above a tripe shop in Wigan. Orwell went to Wigan and did his investigation. What resulted from that was The Road to Wigan Pier, a copy of which made its way to Hilton.

Matt: Hilton, however, did not think much of what went on to be one of Orwell’s most celebrated works.

Jack Chadwick: He was aghast, to be honest. His response is a really difficult thing to explain because at first, on behalf of the people documented in this book, he was insulted by the emphasis that Orwell placed on the smell, the lack of hygiene and how these people would go to the toilet and not wash their hands, how their breath stank and the smell of the tripe shop below. It was critical little nitpicking of their personal hygiene in a situation where they actually had no running water and no money for soap. It made Hilton think that, basically, what Orwell had done was take no more care to be polite and respectful than a wildlife documentarian would take in writing about the habits and lives of apes. It was as if he was making a sort of taxonomist’s study of this community without taking into account that these were people who he was writing about in some ways with such derision and rudeness. There’s no other way to put it.

That said, what Orwell was attempting to do enamoured him to Hilton and what grew out of this dismissal of The Road to Wigan Pier on the part of Hilton was a sort of respect for the fact that this old Etonian, ex-officer type… as he puts it ‘this lanky, well-spoken, teetotal…’ who was completely detached in all of his characteristics from the kind of people who went to study. He’d made an effort to go and study this community because he did care and genuinely wanted to communicate their conditions of life to his middle-class readership. I think Hilton recognised that this was an impossible challenge for a man like Eric Blair to undertake in a respectful way but, nonetheless, he was impressed that he’d gone off and tried to do it. I can’t think of the exact phrase but he did say a few years afterwards that this showed there was something special about Orwell.

Matt: Hilton’s main issue with Orwell’s text was its failure to understand poverty from the inside: one example that Hilton gives is Orwell’s description of Mr Brooker, the keeper of a tripe shop and lodging house, as he carries a chamber pot full of excrement which he gripped with his thumb well over the rim – the same thumb, Orwell points out, that touches the sandwiches Mr Brooker gives to his lodgers.

In response, Hilton writes that when he’s carried chamber pots down stairs, he also has always gripped the pot with his thumb well over the rim. As Hilton explains: “one inexperienced in pots should get hold of one, feel its weight and carry it.” While Hilton acknowledges Orwell’s text as one of very few genuine attempts by upper-class writers to describe working-class life, in his opinion it fails due to Orwell’s distance from the experiences he’s trying to depict.

This is one of the key differences between Orwell’s text, and Caliban Shrieks, as Jack explains.

Jack Chadwick: In terms of the similarities between The Road to Wigan Pier and Caliban Shrieks, there are none whatsoever. They are totally different. They could not be more different in a way in their guiding values, form, what they were attempting to get across and their relationship to the people who formed the subjects of these two works. They are so different. Say if Hilton had been commissioned to write something similar,  he wouldn’t have been able to do it either. At this point in his life, he wouldn’t have been able to write a documentary study of working-class people in the North of England because the enlightenment idea of writing an objective study of such working-class communities wouldn’t have been something that Hilton could have done. He was of these communities and That’s an important thing to note.

Matt: Here, Jack is about to read another passage from Caliban Shrieks. This passage focuses on Hilton’s time as a public speaker with the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and, in particular, the fate of Bill, a fellow unemployed activist in Rochdale. Listening to the passage, you should get an idea of just how different it is from the top-down-in-more-ways-than-one style of The Road to Wigan Pier.

Jack Chadwick:

Bill was ever trying to improve, he started to swallow the dictionary page by page, somehow or other he could not stop, it was words, words, words. He would sit in the library hours upon hours, writing and pronouncing words, then at night he would deliver himself. What a strain he put on himself, underfed, rushing from inarticulateness to eloquence, mastering the fluency of speech, the meaning of words, words, words. More and more Bill swallowed and delivered. The task was too mighty. He nearly conquered; then, snap: he became potty. He flew off at a tangent, he became a reincarnation of a French Revolutionary, made the hottest speech of his speeches. Years of starvation, consuming of words, the fire in his soul, his mind became unbalanced, he left us in a fit of derangement. He was done for, moody and melancholy, never again normal, sometimes walking excessively brisk with eyes staring vacantly about him. Later he was run in for purloining a motor car. Poor Bill, the whitest man I’ve known.

More harmless than Christ, a life celibate possessing no vice, Bill of all people in prison. There he started to chew the printed regulations. There they found he was gone; after treatment he returned to R—— a strange man, his mind far away from everything, walking about with eyes that never seemed to see, a head always looking upwards and a nervous habit of continually pulling his neck above his collar. Later he again, in an act of unaccountableness, purloined another car, drove it for about a mile, got out and lay on the grass. The police searching for the car, found him. He was arrested muttering: ‘There’s something doing.’ He came up in front of the bench; they did not know him, nor his strangeness; the evidence was convincing, previous conviction mentioned, and lo! a prison medical view of him. It showed him to be an artful dodger, who put the apparent loopiness on so as to get off easily. The bench acting on the evidence before them, administered justice according to their consciences. He went down. It may sound of no account, but knowing Bill as I know him, nothing will convince me of the criminality of his acts; the poor blighter had gone potty. Poverty and overstudy are the causes. He is a case for treatment instead of punishment. Humanity may seem as though its powers of endurance are limitless, but many reach that point when too great an effort sends them over the line. Often, in the case of exceptional, beautiful innocents, they became irresponsible. Bill came out and in a very brief period committed the same act, purloined another car. This time he gets the assizes, eighteen months. Poor Bill. Reader, I cannot dwell on it, there may be some mistake; superficial judgement can commit mistakes. I know Bill was strange, he was once potty (cause: poverty and overstudy) – is he now sane? Eighteen months hard. Bill, the cleanest liver I knew.

Matt: In this heartbreaking passage, Hilton returns to that theme of the working-class struggle for a literary language. Like Hilton himself, Bill is another Caliban, teaching himself the “words, words, words” of Prospero’s language, a language from which (by virtue of his class) he has always been excluded. Unlike Hilton, however, the struggle for that language – combined with the hardships of the Great Depression – proved too much for Bill.

But this passage also brings us back to that fundamental difference between Hilton’s book and a documentary work like Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. Hilton isn’t observing Bill from a distance as someone going through an experience that’s completely alien. When Hilton writes, “Reader, I cannot dwell on it”, he’s struggling to retell the suffering of a friend; struggling not just because the memory itself is painful, but because Bill’s suffering could just as easily have been his own.

Matt: That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. Join us in Part 2 where we’ll discuss Jack Hilton’s writing in relation to some of the other working-class novels of the time. We’ll also talk more about his later life and continuing relationship to George Orwell, his struggles with middle-class editors and publishers, and how his writing was almost lost forever had it not been for quite an amazing series of events.

We also have a bonus episode where our interviewee, Jack Chadwick, reads and discusses more passages from Caliban Shrieks. That bonus episode is available now, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon. That bonus episode will be available soon, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

Thanks also to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Nick Williams and Old Norm.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 2

Matt: Welcome to Part 2 of our double-episode about the life and literature of working-class writer, Jack Hilton. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, we suggest you go back and listen to that first.

Matt: Before we start, a quick note to say that we’re only able to continue making these podcasts – both Working Class History and Literature – because of the support of our listeners on Patreon. If you like what we do and want to help us with our work, join us on patreon.com/workingclasshistory where you can get benefits like early access to episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted books, merch and more. For instance, patreon supporters got early access to both episodes about Jack Hilton, and get exclusive access to a Patreon-only bonus episode. They also get access to two series of Patreon-only bonus content, Radical Reads and Fireside Chat. Link in the show notes.

As we mentioned in Part 1, Jack Hilton’s experience of long-term unemployment was all too common during the Great Depression in Britain. But out of that mass experience of unemployment (and, in part, because of the extra time that unemployment allowed), came a huge upsurge in writing not just about working-class people, but actually by them, recounting their experiences of both work and worklessness as well as their hopes for change. The result was that the 1930s was an extremely rich decade for working-class literature, arguably even the high point in the history of British working-class writing.

Caliban Shrieks was very much a part of this literary moment. Here, Jack Chadwick (who we spoke to in Part 1 and whose tireless efforts brought Caliban Shrieks back into print) reads a passage from Hilton’s text on the effects of hard work on working-class minds and bodies.

Jack:

Most of my mates have uneventfully fallen into the way of working for their living. Most of them greet me and seem proud of their lot. They think they can perform the functions of this favourite recreation of the working class, better than their fellows. ‘I can eat the b—— job’, is a common expression. Beastly blondes of toil, willing, eager, eaters up of production. To me they are overdoing it. I think they work too hard and think too little. But they know they are good ones at it, and work never killed anyone, not hard work. Even working men do at times die. The stimulus to existence is work, it is life’s sole purpose. Work for a decent wage if possible, but work certainly. For regularity and plenty of it hard, many are prepared to do it under the odds. Of course they thought the work game would go on forever. Rationalisation has now made their services less important, thank goodness. Poor cattle, full of pomposity when adorned in a new suit off Montague Burton’s. Tailor made! What tailor could meet their slender purses and yet hide the fact that they are toilers? Where is their poise, straightness, carriage, where is their elasticity of heel; what collar could rest unwrinkled when their bony collarbones stick out so generously? How can one’s head sit graciously, when the nape of the vertebrae aches with jaded exhaustion? Such is the price of eating the b—— job. What mental recreation is acceptable to the fatigued body? None, only the artificial manufactured kind. Horseology, cardology, beerology, and sexology.

Man is the creature of conditions – environment; if the brute is overworked he generally cannot think. That must be done for him by Edgar Wallace, Winalot, and the Bow St Reporter. Of course this is for the good. What is nicer than hewing wood and drawing water to the thoughts of ‘What’s going to win the Two-Thirty?’ or ‘Yes, he has to hang by the neck until dead.’ Possible fortune on one hand and glorious better-than-he on the other.

Matt: In this passage, Hilton aims his trademark sarcasm at the cult of hard work under capitalism. But what’s interesting here is that he’s directing that sarcasm at other working-class people; specifically, those workers who pride themselves on their hard work, on their ability to “eat the bloody job”. Work is “life’s sole purpose,” jokes Hilton, so “Work for a decent wage if possible, but work certainly.”

Hilton is being sarcastic here because his fellow workers’ belief in hard work for its own sake is damaging to themselves. Not just because of their “bony collarbones” or how their vertebrae ache, but because of how overwork exhausts the mind.

Again, Hilton’s working-class background is so important here because a passage like this by an upper-class writer would risk being condescending. Hilton, meanwhile, strikes a fine balance between concern for his fellow workers but also frustration with them precisely because he shares their experiences.

The period that Hilton was writing in saw a huge interest in working-class writing as publishers and literary journals increasingly wanted to document the experiences of the Great Depression. This was one of the most productive periods in British working-class literary history so there are far too many authors and novels from this period to mention here, but two of the most famous working-class novels from the 1930s were Love on the Dole and Means-Test Man.

Love on the Dole depicts the effects of unemployment on a young working-class couple in Depression-hit North-West England. It was probably the most successful working-class novel from the period, being reissued ten times between 1934 and 1937. On the other hand, Means-Test Man, was written by out-of-work Derbyshire coal miner, Walter Brierley, and follows an unemployed miner and his wife in the week leading up to their invasive means-test inspection. We go into a bit more detail about the means test and how it worked in Part 1.

Both Love on the Dole and Means-Test Man are what’s known as ‘realist’ novels in that they attempt to depict reality ‘as it is’, making sure to accurately describe the details of the external world, what characters look and sound like, etc.

But perhaps because of its origin as Hilton’s substitute for speech-writing (which we discussed in Part 1), Caliban Shrieks is very different from both of these novels.

Jack Chadwick: If you look at well-known working-class texts from this period like Love on the Dole and Means-Test Man, Hilton was so, so removed from the styles of these texts and the way they’re structuredthe fact that he never set out to be a writer meant that… he wasn’t oblivious to how these texts were being written but he just didn’t care because he wasn’t writing to fit into any mould. If you’re trying to write something with the idea of it getting published and read, even if you’re not conscious of the fact that you’re doing this, you are still going to be writing it with these norms in mind. Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole would have been written with the idea of having a kind of structure that it ended up having, even if Greenwood wasn’t exactly thinking, ‘I’m going to write this and it’s going to tick all these boxes.’ Hilton just did not have any kind of sense of needing to tick off certain rules of what constituted a good piece of prose when he was writing his own masterpiece.

I think because the rough draft of Caliban Shrieks or what would become Caliban Shrieks made it to literary people and publishers before Hilton even knew that he could publish it, it meant that they then encouraged him to keep going with his eccentricities and the things that defined his debut novel as completely uncategorisable. The main point is there is just nothing to compare Hilton to or if there is… I think there probably is you know but it’s completely buried and completely forgotten and lost. I wonder how many other private journals remained private journals from this period, afterwards and before. There are probably scores of them that just never had the good luck to have this sort of fluke exposure that Hilton had. Maybe the only texts that would have any kind of similarity to Hilton’s are people’s private diaries and journals.

He wasn’t writing to be read. He just didn’t care. By the time his writing had been discovered, the fact that it was so formless or had its own form made it so special to people who got their hands on it. The encouragement from these people was then emphasised in the uniqueness of Hilton’s prose. Hilton never had to really fit inside any of the accepted rules of writing. Before he even knew it, he was being celebrated for flouting these rules. Certainly, I think his editors would have had a hard time because although he taught himself how to write, it’s undoubtedly the case that his prose at that point would have been probably quite hard to read. If you read some of his correspondence, even from the late thirties, his punctuation and spelling is… you can understand it but it’s vernacular Lancastrian. I think his editors tried to keep as much of it as possible but still had to put a bit of a straightjacket on his writing.

Matt: However, Hilton was not always happy to receive this kind of “straightjacket” from his editors. A few years after Caliban Shrieks was published, one of Hilton’s stories was due to appear in the literary journal, New Writing, but he pulled it when he found out that he’d gotten a book deal elsewhere. In a letter to friend and fellow working-class author, Jack Common, Hilton explained that he didn’t want what he referred to as the New Writing editor’s “amendments & cuttings”: “He takes the bloody life out of a job … these pups of University boys with a flairy flare for LIT, in the worst form, are too dictatorially important.” In another letter to Common, Hilton explains how he was determined to “break through to independence of this lot of the little, ‘big’ men … these silver-spoon, progressive editors”.

Jack Chadwick: I don’t want anyone to get the impression from what I’ve said that Hilton didn’t know what he should be doing with Caliban Shrieks because, like I say, he’d read hundreds and hundreds of novels from the English canon, including modernist texts like Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. He’d read it all and so he would have had an idea of what a novel should have been in the eyes of the people who, at the time, held the purse strings of publishers. Even critics nowadays responding to Caliban Shrieks have this tendency to view what Hilton does as being either completely accidental or just not giving him the credit that is due for the effects that his book has. It’s almost like it’s just a happy accident that it has this stirring effect and that he takes you on this emotional journey.

Matt: Indeed, Hilton was well acquainted with the works of the literary canon, not to mention its various techniques and motifs, as shown in this next passage that Jack is about to read out.

Jack Chadwick:  

The lily-painted descriptions of nature by an artist in the throes of hypnotic rapture is but the expression of the dualism of being well fed and ideally imaginative. The Grecians with their culture belonged to the well-fed minority, while their slave brethren were more or less inexpressive. So it is that we paint pictures according to our stage of evolution. Well-fedness is the objective stimulus for the nice abstract words or canvas painting. A hungry man has a hungry outlook, and little or no interest in the noctambulist woolgatherings of the nature devotee, who raves away – you know how: A Sky of silken blue, stuccoed with the golden riplets of sunny tints, above hills of green brown majesty. Oh, the muck of metaphor! how you kid the soft high falutin’, hungering, shop assistants with such stuff and send them on their Sunday hikes with those back-to-nature rucksacks.

To the hobo the sky is hardly ever noticed, unless it be to see whether it offers mildness or storm; pleasant scenery is totally ignored; only nature in dithyrambic humour is worthy of concern, and only because of its possibility of discomfort. The miles are long and weary; they lead uninterestingly from one town to another.

Man must have some purpose: walking from one town to another is the tramp’s.

Matt: There’s a biting cynicism here that seems aimed at the writers of romantic nature poetry, or Victorian landscape painters, which he calls “noctambulist woolgatherings”; the pointless daydreams of a sleepwalker, basically. Hilton mocks their descriptions of silken blue skies and stuccoed sunny tints, saying that they’re of no interest to the hobo (which Hilton was for about a decade, as we discussed in Part 1). The hobo’s relationship to nature and the sky is entirely practical: will it rain? Will I be able to walk for miles or sleep outside comfortably? In stark contrast to the scenes of nature poets or painters, then, Hilton writes that the hobo’s paths “are long and weary” and lead “uninterestingly from one town to another.”

But this contrast is not necessarily a total rejection of the literary canon. As mentioned previously, Hilton frequently quotes Shakespeare in his novel. And, in this passage itself, he even drops little mentions of the Ancient Greeks, like his comments about Grecian culture belonging to the “well-fed minority”, and nature’s “dithyrambic humour” (with the dithyramb being an Ancient Greek form of choral song or poem).

So, while it might seem at first that Hilton’s point is that literary tradition is of no interest to the poor, on closer inspection, it’s more that the conditions of the poor detach them from literary tradition. Hilton’s mockery of that tradition while drawing on parts of it can be read as another example of his attempt to seize it for the working class. As much as it’s a comment about bourgeois literature, it’s also a comment about what society does to both the poor and to culture (and how that might be different, if only everyone was “well fed”).

The success of Caliban Shrieks opened up new opportunities for Jack Hilton.

Jack Hilton [02:26:52]: After Caliban Shrieks was met with critical acclaim and favourable reviews from the likes of Orwell, Auden and the rest of the modernist circle around The Adelphi, it gave Hilton this confidence to pursue writing even though never in his entire life did he think he could one day do this. He had never thought of himself as ever having the ability to make money from his expression. He had only ever thought of his expression as being potentially useful in getting a better quality of life for his class. He took the opportunity presented by the success of Caliban Shrieks to go and study atRuskin College. I’ve not been able to find out exactly what he studied but it would have been I think quite an all-encompassing course maybe involving politics, economics and literature.

Matt: Ruskin College was set up in 1899 with the aim of providing education to the working classes. The college received funding from trade unions and sympathetic wealthy benefactors, and provided working people the opportunity to do long-distance and evening courses. However, its main function was as a residential college where working-class people could live and study for a minimal price with many attending on scholarships.

Over the next few years, Hilton would publish two more novels: Champion (in 1938), and Laugh at Polonius (in 1942).

Jack Chadwick: [cont. From above] It could have crossed into many different areas. I think it was a two-year-long course that took him to Oxford. It’s here that he wrote his first traditional novel which was Laugh at Polonius and then he wrote another one, Champion. Both of these are fantastically written and demonstrate his ability to write a very neat novel that gets across working-class life in a really powerful way but they weren’t really, I don’t think, the kind of things that he wanted to write. By this point in the late ‘30s, there was this general turn away from working-class writers on the part of publishing houses and it became more and more of an uphill struggle. It had always been steep but it became almost a vertical struggle to get publishers to pay any attention or any mind to people like Hilton even though he did have the assistance of people with big profiles and more respected writers like Orwell.

In the case of Orwell, he received a lot of help, particularly into the ‘40s. I think it’s quite fair to say that Orwell gave more support and more concrete help to Jack Hilton than he gave to any other writer in his life. In 1945, this took the shape of the two, after a break in their correspondence because of the war, Orwell’s illnesses and in general because they’d both been busy with other things… Hilton had been doing something for the war effort working in a fire station to put out fires. They got back in touch with each other and Hilton asked Orwell for help with moving forward with the kind of things he wanted to write. Orwell not only put in a good word for Hilton with his publisher at Jonathan Cape but he invited Hilton to come and take tea with him in his flat in Islington which was incredibly rare. Orwell did this with less than a handful of other people. He invited him around for tea and then went to a pub with him. He was a very guarded, private man and so was Jack Hilton.

I’m really intrigued by what the dynamic between Orwell and Hilton would have been like because Orwell was a listener as well. I think it was really unusual because, with Hilton, Orwell was in a position of actually having to talk which is another quirky thing about their relationship. From the accounts of their meetings, I think both of them had to talk more than either of them were used to with each other [laughter] because, otherwise, there would have been silence and black pudding.

The lengths that Orwell went to support Hilton are really remarkable. After negotiating on his behalf with Jonathan Cape, he even came with Hilton to meet the bearer of bad news from the publisher in which Hilton found out that he wouldn’t be commissioned to write the kinds of books that he really wanted to write.

Matt: Indeed, Orwell arranged a dinner for Hilton with Veronica Wedgewood, a reader for the publisher, Jonathan Cape (who had already published some of Hilton’s work). Orwell and Hilton’s hope was that Wedgewood might be able to secure a three-book contract for Hilton, which would give him the kind of longer-term financial stability to be able to leave his plastering job and pursue a career in writing. However, as Jack mentioned, the tide was turning against working-class literature with Wedgewood herself writing an internal memo at Jonathan Cape saying that “[the] proletarian novel in my opinion is finished completely.”

Before this, however, Hilton also experimented with another literary genre: the travelogue.

Jack Chadwick: [cont from above] One of the other forms of writing that he thought he could play a lot with and develop in the same way as he did with his prose in Caliban Shrieks was the form of a travelogue. I think my second favourite of his books is English Ways which was published in 1939. Dare I say, it’s satire and it takes the popular format of the travelogue which are probably the most sold books at the time about traipsing up and down the English countryside and quite quaint narrations of these journeys by upper middle-class writers. Hilton took this format and turned it on its head by using it as a way to talk about different working-class communities across the country, exploring the people of these communities and the types of people in these places. He was the only person who wrote a travelogue to start in the North of England. All the others started either in London or in places just on the outskirts.

Matt: As Jack mentioned, English Ways is fundamentally satirical in tone. But, as some have pointed out, Hilton’s travelogue seems to be a satire specifically directed at Orwell. The writer Andy Croft argues that English Ways can be read as an answer to The Road to Wigan Pier, while literary scholar, Ben Clarke, points out that while Hilton doesn’t mention Orwell by name, he does mention “a best seller from a middle-class socialist [who] was at particular pains to stress the acuteness of his sense of smell [and insisted that] working-men stank”.

Jack Chadwick: He wrote English Ways in 1939 and ten years later, he wrote English Ribbon.They’re quite cocky and quite cheeky. I think there’s more humour. There’s certainly less bleakness and tragedy in these texts but they are, nonetheless, really special for the way that Hilton found his voice. It is the voice of the same Caliban of 1934 but Caliban, after Prospero’s Island, or once he’s got full mastery of himself. It’s really terrible that the publishers didn’t jump on these books and really back them in a way that would have got Hilton a proper lifelong literary career, especially because after the refusal to publish him or give him a contract that would guarantee him a good quality of life in writing, he sort of gave up. Within five years, after writing English Ribbon, he just gave up on the idea of being a full-time writer because he realised that to get those kinds of contracts where he wouldn’t have to go begging back after writing each book and he’d have a guarantee of stable work, he’d have to censor himself in a way. With the garbling effects of mortgage respectability, he would have to really change his tone and write differently and he never wanted to do that. His voice and its rootedness in his status as a manual proletarian, a worker from Rochdale in the North so far outside of London. It was more important to him to keep that than to be paid for writing more… I guess the word is ‘tasteful’ in the sense of his work being more in keeping with the tastes of the people who held the money and pursestrings. He chose to stop trying to get his writing published. He kept on writing throughout his life but, unfortunately, a lot of what he wrote has been lost.

Matt: This really highlights a common theme in the production of working-class writing; that is, that beyond the struggle to find time between long working hours to actually write, and even after the struggle to actually get published, is the struggle for that work to actually be remembered and valued. As Jack mentioned in Part 1, Hilton was celebrated by some of the biggest writers of his time, thought of as possibly the next DH Lawrence. That a working-class author as appreciated as Hilton could be forced to drop out of writing, and then fall immediately into almost total obscurity, really demonstrates just how easy it is to lose such authors.

And Hilton would’ve been lost, possibly forever, had it not been for Jack’s determination and what, it has to be said, was quite an amazing series of lucky events.

Jack Chadwick: I’d given up on finding anything more I could about Jack Hilton. After reading Caliban Shrieks in the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, I was just desperate to find out whatever I could about him and finish his story. I wanted to find out what had happened to this man. After you’ve taken yourself through this psychic tour of his first 35 years, you’re just left with this desperate feeling of wanting to know more. So I set about doing the typical things like Googling and I even used Ask Jeeves. I was desperate. I was trying to think of whatever I could to try and find out whatever I could. I spoke to a librarian and she only added fuel to this fire. She was able to tell me that he’d mysteriously left writing for reasons that no one that she knew could really speak to. I even went on Ancestry.co.uk to try and find out more about his family to see if any of them would still be alive or know anything about what happened to Jack. That got me nowhere at all.

The last thing that I could think to do was, after finding out that he’d died in Chadderton in Oldham in 1984, find his death certificate. I can’t remember if it was his death certificate or if I found some kind of proof that he’d died in Oldham in 1984. As a last-ditch effort, I went to what would have been his old locals. I think I set off with the intention of going to four pubs that were still standing from when he would have lived there in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. I went around these pubs with a poster that I’d printed out of the only picture I could find of him with big letters saying, ‘Do you remember Jack Hilton?’ or something to that effect. At the bottom, there were tear-off tassels with my number asking people to get in touch if they had any vague recollections of this man. I went around two pubs, put up these posters and had a pint.

I continued going down this bus route towards Chadderton. In the two pubs before, no one had been that interested in what I was doing and so I’d been in and out after my pint. In the third pub, the lass behind the bar was really interested and so I started talking to her about it. I think she just thought I was a little bit mad. The bar had columns along it and from behind this column, out of sight to me but not the barmaid, was a woman who must have been in her late 70s maybe. Basically, she had been eavesdropping on my conversation with the barmaid. After about five minutes, she just popped up, stuck her head forward so that I could see her and said, ‘You know what, love? I think I might know who you’re on about.’ She’d been drinking in the pub for decades and decades and from the time of Hilton but she had only the vaguest memories of Jack but she could tell me a lot about Jack’s best friend. He was a guy called Brian who was much younger than Jack and had gone on drinking in the same pub for about 30 years more. In fact, he only died the year before I went to visit this pub, his old local. She was able to give me Brian’s name and tell me that he used to hang around with this kind, old man, Jack Hilton. He was dead quiet and he used to come and sit in the pub. She said there were three of them. There was Brian, another bloke whose name she forgot and then Jack. They used to just keep themselves to themselves.

She was able to tell me Brian’s full name, I looked him up immediately. I tried to find anything I could and an old Yellow Pages had his address as listed as being just around the corner from the pub so I went and knocked on. I had no response to the knock. There were no cars in the drive so I thought, ‘It’s pissing down with rain. I got excited but this probably isn’t going to lead to anything.’ However, I had these posters with me and, just pure luck, I had a biro on me so I put a note through the door. One thing I’ve said since is that I was never the kind of person to carry pen and paper around with me until that day but ever since, I’ve realised that the rediscovery of Hilton rested on the fact that I had a biro on me that day. I’ve always carried one with me since.

I’d left my email and my phone number and about a week later, I got an email back from a woman called Mary [s.l. Hasor – 02:44:46] who was Brian’s widow informing me that Brian had passed away but that she remembered Jack. “Dear old Jack,” she called him. He used to come over for his tea at her and Brian’s house several times a week, especially after Jack’s wife had died and he was on his own. He was sort of like a surrogate grandfather to her two kids.

She invited me over for a cup of tea and some custard tarts. I went over and we talked for hours about Jack and as we were talking, more and more memories came back. I go around again and we keep talking. I’m recording and I’m writing everything I can about her memories of Jack. One time, she told me this story that when the kids were bored, he would blow smoke rings. He was a chain-smoker and he could blow smoke rings with his pipe which would do the trick most of the time to entertain the kids. If they were being particularly rowdy, Hilton had another party trick up his sleeve which was that he could blow smoke through his ears. At first, when Mary told me this, I said, ‘Are you sure?’ I’d never heard of this before in my life. I looked into it and actually got in touch with a friend of mine who is a GP. It was the strangest request for medical advice I think this mate of mine had ever received in his life. I said, ‘Would it ever be possible for someone to blow smoke through their ears?’ He told me, ‘Yeah, but only if you’ve had severe damage to your ears.’ It was the kind of damage, in the case of Hilton, could have come from the mill machinery when he was 11 working in a cotton mill in Rochdale. It could have come from the trenches. It could have even come from breaking rocks in the poorhouses in the 1920s. This was one of the tricks he would do to keep the kids amused.

Matt: The fact that Hilton could take what were likely perforated eardrums that he’d gotten from one or another of the traumatic experiences he’d lived through and use them for the entertainment of others is, in a way, a miniature version of what he did with Caliban Shrieks.

Mary also told Jack about Hilton’s pet budgie, which in its own way led indirectly to the republishing of Caliban Shrieks.

Jack Chadwick: When he passed away, his best mate, Brian, was at his deathbed and Brian and Mary agreed to take on the efforts of organising the funeral and cleaning out his flat. They also decided to adopt Hilton’s budgie. They brought it into their house and within a day or so, the budgie was at death’s door and then it just died. According to a vet, the reason Mary told me that it passed away after Jack’s death was because it was suffering from nicotine withdrawal because Jack was such a heavy smoker. The budgie had been used to being absolutely hotboxed with nicotine all of its waking life and a day or two without it was such a stress on its little anatomy that it packed itself in.

That made me think about what else Brian and Mary had been left by Jack Hilton. Using information from Mary, I was able to track down his probate. The probate was small. He had very little when he died. He’d left most of it to Mary. As you get with probates, at the end of it, you have a clause where it says, ‘Anything not named in this last will and testament goes to…’ In this case, the ‘everything else goes to…’ clause was to Brian. Without ever knowing that Jack had been a writer, Brian Hassell, his mate, had inherited all of the literary rights to his collected works. Again, without ever knowing that Brian had the rights to Jack’s work or that Jack had ever been a writer, Mary then inherited the author’s rights to his writings when Brian passed away.

After realising this, I told Mary about it and said, ‘This is fantastic because this means that we can get Hilton back in print, potentially, if we can make the case to publishers and get someone interested.’ At that point, I thought the best case scenario would be getting a small, independent publisher to maybe do a small run of a few hundred or potentially if that wasn’t possible, we could maybe raise some money to get some copies self-published. I had no idea that it would ever end up with the world’s largest literary publisher, Penguin.

Mary was thrilled but she said, ‘Do you know what, Jack? It sounds like a lot of work and the kind of work that should be for you to do. I don’t know how to do this exactly but I’ll sign over whatever these rights are to you on the proviso that you do your utmost to get Hilton back in print.’

That’s what happened. We ended up looking up how to do this and found a Google template. We had to look up what exactly a literary right was and look up how to do transfers. I ended up with the rights so then I started to turn the story of my discovery of Hilton, my feelings about what I found, the story of finding Mary and reminiscing about Jack into an article for a small, independent, Manchester-based magazine called The Mill.

When it was eventually published a few months after I first met Mary, I had the most amazing response and became one of the outlet’s best read ever pieces. It caught the ear or eyes of people working at various media outlets so within a couple of months of that, I was on Times Radio, BBC 6 Music and even in national print in The Independent and The Guardian. It all culminated in being invited for a segment on BBC Front Row.

Of all the people listening to that segment, there was one bloke, Nick, who was the publishing director of Vintage Classics, an imprint of Penguin Books. He was listening to this 15-minute-long segment and waiting for the good news at the end to be… ‘so Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks will be republished with X publisher.’ By that point, I had no idea how to approach publishers and I had no idea what it would take to take to get the book back in print so there was no deal done. Nick was listening to this segment on Front Row and waiting for the good news story. To his utter disbelief, there was no ‘… and then the book will be brought back out with… ‘ in so-and-so time period. He found me on Twitter and he sent me a direct message. We had a conversation on the phone. He was on paternity leave so he ducked out of paternity leave to basically say, ‘Let’s go ahead. Let’s try to get this brought out with Vintage.’ That’s what happened. Within a few months, it was all agreed and then about a year and a half later, here we are with the book out… last month on 7th March with a response to its publication that I could never have imagined. It became the number one seller for Vintage and entered the Top 100 on Amazon. It has sold incredibly well. It cleared 10,000 copies. In the timeframe that it cleared 10,000 copies, I don’t think Hilton could have ever imagined. I don’t exactly know how many were printed in the ‘30s but my suspicion is that it was only in the hundreds. To say that his legacy has exploded 90 years after the book was first published is an understatement.

Matt: Finally, then, Jack Hilton is getting the recognition he so richly deserves. But as Jack points out, while Hilton absolutely should be remembered for the excellent writing he left behind, his legacy also needs to be thought of in relation to his trade union activity outside of writing.

Jack Chadwick: He never saw himself as a writer. He loved the work of plastering so much and by this point after the war, it was a decent pay that you got from plastering. It was enough to have quite a decent life by his standards at least. He kept to it and he loved the union work. He loved the fact that this craft gave him an opportunity to better the lives of working-class people through the strengthening and establishment of the union in the North West.

We talk about the legacy of Jack Hilton but I think if you were to talk to Jack Hilton about his legacy, for him, this resurgence and new look at his books, which were never popular back in the ‘30s and ‘40s and never that well-read… the credit that he is being given now and the celebration of him now is an important part of his legacy but no less important to me, to him or the people that his life touched is his work in the trade union movement. He was a plasterer who was proud of his work and who founded the Rochdale branch of the Plasterers’ Union and was its first president. I believe potentially also that this branch was integral to forming the wider Lancastrian chapter of the Plasterers’ Union. Hilton was involved in this and senior in the regional union structure until the mid-1950s, about 1955. He was proud not only of the work that he did as a plasterer, the buildings that he beautified and the frescos and stuccos that he was able to do in these big houses across Greater Manchester but he was also proud of the fact that he passed on not only these skills to younger workers but he also founded these branches that won better lives for their members. If you want to look for a material legacy for Jack Hilton, it is in the better lives that his union branches left for his workers and that’s just as important a legacy as his writing.

Matt: That’s it for this double-episode on the life and work of the working-class author, Jack Hilton. We also have a bonus episode where our interviewee, Jack Chadwick, reads and discusses more passages from Caliban Shrieks. That bonus episode is available now, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon. That bonus episode will be available soon, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon.

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This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

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