The Birmingham Group: Reading the Second City in the 1930s By ROBIN CHRISTOPHER HARRIOTT A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The School of English, Drama, and Creative Studies. College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham January 2021 UNIVERSITYDF BIRMINGHAM University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract The Birmingham Group: Reading the Second City in the 1930s Author Robin Harriott Description: Described politically as propagandistic: the imposition of political dogma on creativity; the literature of a party disguised as the literature of a class and often dismissed formally as: conservative; lacking in invention, or simply the naive emulation of bourgeois realism, attempts to define ‘Proletarian’, or ‘Working-Class’ fiction and vouchsafe the ‘authenticity' of its writers have continually proven resistant to any single or facile definition. This thesis will argue that the narratives of the Birmingham group, rather than constrained by such narrow and negative assessments, present instead as a direct challenge and refutation of them. Departing from traditional views of working-class writing informed by male-oriented, notions of class-solidarity or contemporary critiques which, during a period of representational experimentation, perfunctorily viewed working-class writing as indebted to the individualistic concerns of bourgeois realism, this thesis will suggest that Birmingham narratives are more accurately characterised by their diversity of innovative and formal approach. Far from politically quiescent they operate in the liminal space between overt propaganda and addressedness to reveal how intersections of class, gender and sexual identity neglected and overlooked owing to the critical legacy of patriarchal and workerist assumptions, were, from the outset not only present in their narratives but prescient of political and formal issues raised in more recent discussions of working-class writing. Dedication The enemy of study is distraction and it is generally agreed that finding space, both temporal and physical, is something of a necessity. I take this opportunity to thank my dear wife Elaine for keeping the hounds at bay and clearing a space for this undertaking. I have been particularly fortunate in this respect, time is indeed a valuable commodity and without her help and attention this project would not have begun, let alone come to fruition. Acknowledgements In the first instance I wish to register my appreciation and heartfelt gratitude to Doctor Daniel Moore for supervising this thesis and pointing me towards aspects of the wider critical and theoretical discussion I would not have considered. His encouragement, not to mention patient and diplomatic guidance were invaluable in reining in some of my less-focussed departures and in bringing this project to a conclusion. Thanks are also due to Tony Davies, now retired, who first piqued my interest in the Birmingham group writers, and also to the many others past and present who made my intermittent periods of study at Birmingham University so rewarding. Returning to study following a somewhat extended interval is, to say the least, a challenge, but the enthusiasm of the lecturers and researchers at Birmingham has not only proven contagious but also supportive in providing the much needed momentum to complete this project. Abbreviations Throughout this thesis, I have provided the abbreviations shown here in bold italics to locate the Birmingham group novels and short-stories that constitute the primary texts. These refer to the editions shown in the ‘List of Works Cited’: Allen, Walter. Innocence is Drowned ID ———, Blind Man’s Ditch BM Brierley, Walter. Means Test Man MM ———, Sandwichman SM ———, ‘Transition’ T ———, ‘Body’ B Chamberlain, Peter. ‘Mr. Marris’ Reputation’ MR ———, ‘What The Hell?’ WH ———, ‘Suburban Exercise’ SE ———, ‘Belgravian Exercise’ BE Halward, Leslie. ‘Belcher’s Hod’ BH ———, ‘Initiation’ I ———, ‘A Broken Engagement’ BE Hampson, John. ‘Man About the House’ MA ———, Saturday Night at the Greyhound SN ———, O Providence OP Archives: Allen, Walter. Archive and Papers. Cadbury Research Centre. University of Birmingham. A selection of Allen’s novels, poems, criticism and correspondence. Brierley, Walter. Papers. Derby Local Studies Library. Deposit DL282. A large selection of correspondence between Walter Brierley, Walter Allen and John Hampson. Copies of Brierley’s Novels. Halward, Leslie. Papers. Halward Collection, Birmingham Central Library. MS/1293/106/. Collection of typescript talks, press cuttings and correspondence, including various playscripts. Hampson, John. Papers. Special Collections Services. University of Reading. GB6 RUL 5091. Copies of Hampson’s published novels. Contents Abstract Dedication Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Introduction: ‘They at Least Were Not Hybrids’ 1 - 48 2. This Working Life: Work and the Workplace. 49 - 90 3. Feeling the Pinch: Unemployment. 91 - 133 4. Writing Their Selves: Subjectivity and Representation in Birmingham Group 134 - 188 Narratives. 5. Conclusion. 189 - 199 6. List of Works Cited. 200 - 207 Introduction They at least were not hybrids My interest in the affiliation of working-class writers known variously as The Birmingham Proletarian Writers, The Birmingham School, or, more commonly The Birmingham Group, was prompted by a brief reference to them during an undergraduate lecture at the University of Birmingham some thirty years ago. The seed of my intention to investigate the work of this unlikely, if not rather incongruous literary coterie who met to discuss their writing in the urban- industrial, manufacturing centre that was 1930s Birmingham, finally germinated in 2016 when the University of Birmingham accepted my research proposal. Armed with assumptions based upon recollections of the nineteenth-century ‘Condition of England’ novel and such later classics of the working-class canon as Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, or Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole and only vague notions as to what a working-class or proletarian literature ought to resemble, my initial encounter with the narratives of the Birmingham group was somewhat perplexing. Over time critiques of working-class literature produced during the inter-war period have come to regard it as irretrievably ‘caught between the jaws of form and content’ and, while praising its laudable imperative to promote social change, it was generally considered such principled aims were purchased at the expense of literary expression.1 Seemingly (I use the adverb provisionally) antithetical to modernist experimentation and social realism’s commitment to political engagement, one’s initial encounter with Birmingham Group narratives is unlikely to move far beyond this view, and in this respect it is not difficult to see how, as a consequence, their narratives have been consigned to critical oblivion. This thesis will provide a close reading and analysis of their novels and short-stories to demonstrate that, although diverging markedly from the work of their contemporaries, the Birmingham group’s engagement with the familiar thirties themes of work and unemployment actively challenges contemporary notions of what a working-class text should be. Neither aesthetically- or philosophically-naïve, as commentators on proletarian literature have charged, the narratives of the Birmingham group exercise restraint by voicing a soft-spoken radicalism and expressive ingenuity which paradoxically reveals them as more powerful means by which to document working-class experience. This thesis will show how their collective achievement was realised in a combination of formal innovation and ideological addressedness not only unique in its time but prescient of recent critical engagements centring on a politics of form. Though dismissed as offering apolitical, at times quietist, representations of the working- 1 class lives they document, or by failing to urge traditional sectarian concerns, the narratives of the Birmingham group were fully alive to aspects of working-class experience occluded by their more clamant and politically-oriented literary counterparts. Their narratives not only respond to the plight of the working-class by consistently giving voice to those considered peripheral or marginal by contemporary society, but also provide a more holistic picture of working-class culture as it emerges in ‘the routine activities of everyday life’ chronicled in their narratives.2 Beyond their dedicated promotion by Andy Croft some thirty years ago, this is the first extended critical study devoted solely to the narratives of the Birmingham group’s constituent members Walter Allen, Leslie Halward, Peter Chamberlain, John Hampson and Walter Brierley.3 ‘Fenced-in’ as they were, between two major world conflicts and critical assumptions that viewed their work as merely illustrative of a localised outpouring of social-realism geared to issues of working-class