Polemical Journalism
The Primark Trousered Philanthropists
By Alan Morrison
commissioned by Tribune, 2006
In 1906, Robert Tressell (real name Noonan), started writing his great working-class novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, while working a fifty-six hour week as a painter and decorator in Hastings. The novel was to tell the story of Noonan’s alter-ego, Owen, who attempts to convert his exploited workmates to Socialism, ultimately to no avail. It was completed by 1910 and returned unread by the publishers because it was in long-hand. It was finally published four years after the author’s premature death, in 1914.
It is dispiriting to glimpse in a novel written at the turn of the previous century, passages of social and industrial parallel; to some extent, the book’s themes appear perennial as the Socialist and Marxist ideas that inspired its ethical fibre. That this novel has over the past century gained a cult status among the British Left as a veritable social Bible further emphasises its timeless relevance; it even achieved the accolade of helping the Labour Party win the 1945 general election, from which ensued the most radically leftwing welfare reforms in British history.
The story invites us into the dead-end existences of a group of painters and decorators employed by an exploitative private firm, Rushton & Co, which pits its downtrodden employees against one another in an inexorable grappling for scant work placements. The firm encourages its workers to ‘scamp’ (i.e. rush) their jobs in order to maximise profits at the expense of doing the work properly. Socialist Owen nicknames his workmates ‘the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ for their submission to the lifelong servitude of the capitalist system in return for pitiful wages, and bouts of unemployment and poverty. The derelict lots of these ‘journeymen’ are depicted tangibly in twelve hour working days painting and plastering the freezing interior of a large house referred to throughout as ‘the Cave’, constantly stalked by their taskmaster foreman. Seems remote? One only needs to draw up the contemporary parallel of call centre staff having their work time monitored by their own computers (even logging in and out to go to the toilet) to see how this Orwellian practise has translated into the post-electronic age.
The only daily respites of the ‘philanthropists’ are pitifully short breaks, sipping stewed tea from tins, sat on upturned pails which on some occasions Owen uses as makeshift soap-boxes for tub-thumping on the sanity of Socialism, which almost always falls on deaf ears:
it was not as if it were some really important matter, such as a smutty story … something concerning football or cricket, horse-racing or the doings of some Royal personage or aristocrat. (p748)
Sound familiar? If our present ‘celebrity’-obsessed, Royalist society is anything to go by, very little has changed in terms of the British idea of ‘culture’. These ‘philanthropists’’ rely for their opinions on the local tabloid rag, The Obscurer, which voices the jingoism of the Directors of the limited company that funds it:
The papers they read were filled with vague and alarming accounts of the quantities of … the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving, and their destitute conditions, … the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to British trade. (p34)
Here one can immediately see a parallel to the reaction of British tabloids such as The Daily Express to the proposals of EU Enlargement in April 2004:
Only three days to go before thousands of eastern European migrants head to Britain. … Gypsies say they can't wait to arrive in land of dole and benefits…
Their lives, materially and intellectually – despite Owen’s touting the dictums of his hard-earned Socialist pamphlets – undernourished, wreak profoundly of cheap tobacco, turpentine and tubercular diets:
the workers subsist on block ornaments, margarine, adulterated tea, mysterious beer (p772)
the Happy Shopper and Poundstretcher fare of yesteryear.
The employees of Rushton & Co. are liable to dismissal at an hour’s notice. This might no longer be the case today in permanent jobs, but it is still par for the course in temping placements. I used to temp as a secretary for a private employment agency and on at least two occasions had placements terminated at less than a day’s notice. I learnt I had very little rights and that I had to submit frequently to humiliation inflicted by various employers who were seemingly taking advantage of my financial insecurity:
…all the time he (the worker) holds his employment at the caprice and by the favour of his masters… . If he is not abjectly civil and humble, if he will not submit tamely to insult, indignity, and every form of contemptuous treatment … he can be dismissed, and replaced in a moment by one of the crowd of unemployed… (p623-4)
This paragraph speaks to me, from experience, more clearly than anything I have read. The recent industrial debacle of Gate Gourmet’s instant sacking over loud-hailer of 160 Union-backed workers for striking over poor working conditions, shows little has changed. The ‘philanthropists’ are ruled by the tyranny of ‘references’, a psychological blackmail still inflicted on modern day employees, whether permanent or temporary:
The men knew … that if they got the sack from one firm it was no easy matter to get another job, and that was why they were terrified. (1120)
New laws restricting an employer’s power to provide unsatisfactory references, like the measly rate introduced to serve as a ‘minimum wage’ still does not go far enough to protect the employee: a present day employer can still imply an unsatisfactory reference by omitting to provide a satisfactory one. Even present day temping agencies blacklist clients to their competitors simply on the say so of often dubiously minded contractors.
If I had been writing this article in the late 1940s I would probably be approaching it more optimistically, talking of how British society had finally started to achieve some of the ideas that, for one, Tressell’s novel proposed. Unfortunately I am writing in 2006, a time endemically tarnished by the ethics of Thatcherism, the same sort of philistine carrot-throwing – offering council house tenants the opportunity to buy their houses, the new consumer class, shares etc. – that Tressell relates as far back as 1906:
These wretches had abandoned every thought and thing that tends to the elevation of humanity. They had given up everything that makes life good and beautiful, in order to carry on a mad struggle to acquire money which they would never be sufficiently cultured to properly enjoy. (1304-5)
1906/2006 parallels proliferate the novel: Rushton & Co.’s ‘bounding’ of a boy apprentice for no wages the first year, and only two shillings for the second prophetic of the YTS’s transparently ‘improved’ New Deal for 18-24 year olds, involving a ₤10 top up on the pittance of ₤44.50 weekly JSA for working in the ‘community’. Our contemporary Housing Benefit system, due to its inexorable application processing delays does little to placate the interminable cycle of arrears faced by claimants, rendering the following extract still pertinent to today:
…the rent is an expense that goes on all the time, whether they are employed or not. If they get into arrears when out of work, they have to pay double when they get employment again (p389)
Modern claimants often end up unknowingly swapping rent arrears for benefit debts on learning some way down the line that the House Benefit department has accidentally overpaid them previously. The interrogative questions of modern day benefit forms have also changed little from the wording of 1906’s Distress Committee:
`Where do you live?'
`How long have you been living there?'
`What was your previous address?'
`Are you Married or single or a Widower or what?'
`What kind of a house do you live in? How many rooms are there?'
`Who was your last employer? Why did you leave?'
`Give the full names and addresses of all the different employers you have worked for during the last five years, and the reasons why you left them?'
`Does your wife earn anything? How much?'
While I was growing up in the late Eighties/
early Nineties, my mother did shift work as an auxiliary nurse for a private nursing home and my father, as a security officer for a private security firm. Both worked on average ten hour shifts for paltry wages. My father was not allowed any sick pay at all and so often had to go to work when he was ill in order not to lose any of his wage. Anyone who argues that slave labour is a thing of the past falls as much on my deaf ears as Owen’s attempts at Socialist conversion do on those of his workmates. The recent introduction of a minimum wage does little to alleviate our working rights in British society: it can be seen as another ‘carrot’ thrown to us to quell any potential agitation. If the minimum wage is a meagre concession to the working people for the astronomical rise in private companies’ profits, it does not go far enough.
One of the most depressing parallels between 2006 and 1906 is the cancer of privatisation: despite the much-needed surgery of nationalisation in the mid 20th century, this growth has re-attached itself post-Thatcher.
The only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. … "It's Their Land," "It's Their Water," "It's Their Coal," "It's Their Iron," so you would say "It's Their Air," (p397)
The results of these combines have been - an increase in the quantities of the things produced: a decrease in the number of wage earners employed - and enormously increased profits for the shareholders. (p1351)
Today we see the plague of Private-Public Partnership infesting the NHS to the detriment of patient welfare and provision. Then taking into account the rapid rise in prescription charges since 1951, we are again pretty much back to 1906:
It happened that it turned out to be more expensive than going to a private doctor… The medicine they prescribed and which he had to buy did him no good, for the truth was … he … needed … proper conditions of life and proper food…. (p1673)
Owen’s health problems are down to poor diet and work/unemployment-related stress – with the present Government’s proposal to replace Incapacity Benefit with a new Working Support Allowance and place employment advisers in GP surgeries, the once sanctuary of ‘the sick’ is to contract into a new set of pressures.
Highlighting the timeless relevance of the most loved novel of the British Left then is a sad task. We have in effect arrived back at 1906: we presently have a Labour Government which has disowned its former Socialism and championed the capitalist edicts of privatisation and the free market. Our ‘public’ services are calved up between unaccountable private companies, who siphon off profits instead of investing in improving the ‘services’ they inflict. Our ‘public’ services serve bosses and shareholders first and second, customers third. The working people are no longer represented in Parliament by any significant party. Our ‘democracy’ itself now seems – as Tressell’s Mugsborough (Hastings) – dictated to by media tycoons and businessmen; and the three main parties – analogous to the soft and hard capitalisms of the novel’s Liberals and Tories – are squabbling over an ideologically arid centre ground. At least in 1906 Tressell’s generation had a shred of hope invested in Keir Hardie’s Labour Party, which took its first seats in Parliament that very year. In 2006, with the bitter hindsight afforded post-Thatcherite society, the Socialist optimism of the likes of Tressell is put into a tragic context. We are now the Primark Trousered Philanthropists.
[All quotes taken from the Project Gutenberg website, the pagination corresponding with Robert Tressell’s original longhand manuscript]
A Scowling Class Apart
A sketch of James Keir Hardie
By Alan Morrison
published in the Chartist, 2006
“Keir Hardie has been the greatest human being of our time. When the dust raised by opposition to the pioneer has settled down, this will be known by all” (The Women’s Dreadnought (1915).
The premier leader of Labour is an ex-barrister, son of a barrister, educated at Edinburgh College and St. John’s College Oxford. Keir Hardie, leader of the original parliamentary party which adopted the name Labour 100 years ago this month (12th February 1906), was an ex-miner, illegitimate son of a single mother, and self-educated at a Lanarkshire coal face.
Considering the two greatest achievements of the Labour Party were masterminded by ex-coal miners – its Parliamentary formation by Keir Hardie, and the NHS by Aneurin Bevan – one begins to think the party has been truer to its cause when in the hands of those from the class it traditionally purports to represent. Further, taking into account the ‘modernisation’ of policies under the Oxford-educated, Clause IV-sceptics Hugh Gaitskill and Tony Blair, a detectable pattern emerges: social background influences the degree of radicalism or moderatism in Labour policies.
Blair has stretched Gaitskillian ‘moderatism’ to new extremes. With the power allowed him by the massive majority with which he swept into office, he has inexplicably squandered a golden opportunity to reverse Thatcherism. Instead he has embraced it, championing the virus of privatisation and further paralysing the public sector. New welfare benefit concessions are paltry alms in the widening shadow of the British class divide. Again, there is no significant party in Parliament representing the interests of the working classes. A similar state of affairs to those which the Labour Party first came into Parliament to change over 100 years ago, under the leadership of the spirited Keir Hardie.
James Keir was born on August 15, 1856, illegitimate son of Mary Keir, a servant from a pit village in Lanarkshire. She married ship’s carpenter David Hardie, gifting her son a legitimate surname. David Hardie was an outspoken atheist whose humanism ironically took inspiration from selected social teachings of Christ – later inspiring his stepson’s Christian Socialism.
At eight years old Hardie started work as a baker’s delivery boy, but his wage of 3s. 6d. a week made scant difference to the penury induced by his stepfather’s unemployment and mother’s second pregnancy. In 1886 Hardie was sacked from his second job as a rivet-heater due to coming in to work late after being up all night nursing his dying younger brother (a scenario almost straight out of Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists). His next occupation was as grittily poetic a motif for his subsequent political rise as for his ideological inheritor, Aneurin Bevan: “No one should ever look at Keir Hardie without remembering the pit from which he was digged. He was sent down the coal mine when a bit laddie of eight”*. It was while working down the pits that Hardie taught himself to read and write; an extraordinary stride of will for someone unable to sign his own name only six years earlier. He completed his self-mentoring in literacy by “…reading from the picture books in the booksellers’ shop windows”*.
But it wasn’t only literacy Hardie taught himself: “When he had a little spare time in the pit, he took his pit lamp, blackened with its smoke the white stone, and scratched upon its surface the shorthand characters with a pin”* – a sketch stranger than fiction (even Robert Tressell’s or Arthur Morrison’s); bringing a new meaning to ‘Pitman’. This laudable self-education would later pay off with the tribute: “He was the only really cultivated man in the ranks of any of the Labour parties.”**
Hardie’s autodidactic gifts fitted the Messianic map of his future, one fired by apparently rootless faculties, drawing Biblical comparisons: “If the … prophets of the Old Testament and the fisherfolk who became apostles in the New Testament were to … enter the House of Commons; they would … find themselves more at home in the company of Keir Hardie than in that of any other member…”*. The archetypal photo of a Moses-bearded Hardie, legs planted on soap box, arm out-stretched evangelistically, is indeed prophet-like. And like all prophets Hardie was “emphatically a man of the future” as he demonstrated in Ishmaelitism Justified (1903), an open letter to one Mr. Morley, who had deprecated the Independent Labour movement as “a sullen and scowling class apart”: “Even a ‘sullen and scowling class sitting apart’ would be preferable to a besotted and unthinking class dragged hither and thither by unscrupulous guides””.
Hardie’s first step towards politics was in becoming Secretary of the Miner’s Union. Four years later he pitted his shorthand in journalism, working as editor of The Miner. He converted to Socialism with the encouragement of Robert Smillie, leader of the Lanarkshire miners, and then, at 32, stood as MP for Mid-Lanark – unsuccessfully. Undaunted by defeat, he stood again as Independent Labour Party candidate for South-West Ham and was elected to Parliament in 1892 with a sizeable majority. His inauguration as a Member of Parliament was described like a political caricaturist’s sketch: “…Keir Hardie sent a shudder of horror through the Mother of all Parliaments by presenting himself at the bar of the House …clad in the costume of his class. … It was as if the avant courier of the social revolution had knocked at the portals of Parliament”*.
Around 1897 Hardie was converted to Christianity, to him synonymous with Socialism: “We are called upon at the beginning of the 20th century to decide the question propounded in the Sermon on the Mount, as to whether we will worship God or Mammon. The present day is a Mammon worshipping age. Socialism proposes to dethrone the brute god Mammon and to lift humanity into its place.” He made no bones about his political inspiration: “…the impetus which drove me … into the Labour movement, … has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than from all other sources combined” (Keir Hardie, 1910). The influence of Hardie’s former lay preaching in the Evangelical Union Church and public speaking in The Temperance Society shone through in his sermonizing parliamentary speeches: “The peoples who have carved their names most deeply on the tables of the human story all set out on their conquering career as communists… When the old civilizations were putrefying, the still small voice of Jesus the Communist stole over the earth like a soft refreshing breeze carrying healing wherever it went”***.
In 1899, seven years after Hardie’s election to Parliament, the various Socialist and union factions conglomerated to form the Labour Representation Committee. Hardie was now MP for Merthyr Tydfil. In the 1906 General Election, while the Liberal Party formed the new government, the newly-named Labour Party won 29 seats and Hardie was elected its leader in the House of Commons. But with overwhelming divisions within the party, Hardie resigned the leadership in 1908 – he led from the front and was not by nature a rank-and-file caretaker.
It was Hardie’s brazen radicalism which marked him out as a figure with ideas far ahead of his time. He made speeches for self-rule in India and racial equality in South Africa; supported women’s suffrage; and later attempted to organise a national strike against Britain’s involvement in the First World War.
On a day in June 1894, when the Commons moved an address of congratulations on the birth of a son to the then Duchess of York – later to become King Edward VIII –Hardie further moved an amendment that the mining disaster of the same day, in which over 250 men and boys had died, should take precedence over the birth of “any baby”. J. R. Clynes related the result of Hardie’s defiant interruption in his Memoirs (1937): “The House rose at him like a pack of wild dogs. His voice was drowned in a din of insults and the drumming of feet on the floor. But he stood there, white-faced, blazing-eyed, his lips moving, though the words were swept away.”
The 1910 General Election saw 40 Labour MPs elected to the House of Commons and Hardie agreed to become leader again but in the very same year he resigned for a second and final time, handing over to George Barnes. On 25th September 1915, in the aftermath of his controversial open opposition to Britain’s involvement in the First World War, Hardie died after a long illness. Sylvia Pankhurst wrote: “…he had a stroke in the House of Commons after some conflict with the jingoes. … he arranged for the disposal of his books and furniture and gave up his rooms, foreseeing his end, and fronting it without flinching or regret”****; a harassed, white-haired Aslan of politics, fatally mauled by the mocking Commons’ goblins, crawling into retirement amid the dull thuds of book-packing, was a muted end to a ferocious career.
But what of Hardie’s legacy?
Unfortunately its resonance, which culminated in the 1945 Labour Government’s creation of the Welfare State, was eroded by Thatcher’s trampling of Socialism, and her cancerous infusion of monetarism into the public consciousness. The ultimate sting in the tail has been the Thatcherite corruption of the Labour Party itself, now ideologically invisible bar token lapses such as the minimum wage, first proposed by Hardie on entering Parliament in 1892: ““A minimum wage might … be established, making it a penal offence for an employer to engage a worker under a sum sufficient to ensure the necessaries of life””*).
The House of Lords Act 1999 half-heartedly modernised the moribund second chamber, but fell short of full reform by allowing 92 hereditary peers to retain their seats. Hardie’s proposal to abolish the Lords was fired by his opposition to the rich buying titles and votes by bankrolling their political party. With the present ‘modernised’ Lords attracting accusations of housing ‘Tony’s cronies’ – recipients of life peerages being, coincidentally, former New Labour financial donors – one can see Blair’s Act as merely a replacement of the old second chamber with a differently undemocratic one. The idea of thorough reform (let alone abolition) of the Lords, is being continually filibustered in Parliament and is – like the belated blood sports debate – still a controversial bugbear among the well-camouflaged landed classes and Daily Mail reactionaries. Thankfully some Labour backbenchers still argue for total abolition of the second chamber in the vein of political scientist Harold Laski, who echoed these Keirite sentiments way back in 1938 by alluding to the Lords as “an indefensible anachronism”*****.
Meanwhile, other propositions of Hardie’s have still yet to come about: ““A restriction of the hours of labour to eight per day … the erection of workshops … wherein work now performed at home could be undertaken, these having crèches attached for the benefit of women with children called upon to earn a living for themselves ... Recreation-rooms and reading-rooms should be abundantly provided, especially in poor quarters, together with small open spaces laid down in grass for children to play upon, and thus preserve their contact with nature and mother earth, the loss of which is accountable for much of the atheism which is a natural product of city life””*. This bucolic vision of labour echoes William Morris’s dictum: “A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he … wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body”.
We can only hope now, having gone full circle back to a Parliament in which the working people and underprivileged are not properly represented, someone else fired by a first-hand sense of social injustice might emerge to lead a truly Socialist party back into the Commons. For as much as when that Lanarkshire miner first lifted himself from the coal pits into the light of literacy and politics, Keir Hardie’s country needs him now.
* Mr. Kier Hardie M.P., W. T. Stead (ed.), Coming Men on Coming Questions No: VI, (May, 18, 1905)
**James Mayor, My Windows on the Street of the World (1923)
***James Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism (1907).
****Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (1931)
*****Parliamentary Government in England, Harold Laski (1938)
