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TOM STEELE, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 1893-1923

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TOM STEELE, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 1893-1923 248 History Workshop Journal 2 John Stevenson and Chris Cook. The Slump. Society and Politics During the Depression. 1979 edn, p. 157-8. 3 Quoted in Croucher. p. 47. 4 e.g. Bagguley, pp. 94-5. 5 e.g. Croucher. p. 173. 6 This remark is also quoted, and rather surprisingly endorsed, by Croucher, pp. 55-6. 7 This is explored by David Englandcr, 'The National Union of Ex-Servicemen and the Labour Movement. 1918-1920'. History 76. p. 246. 1991. 8 Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People's Movements. Why They Succeed. How They Fail, New York. 1977. Flanagan sounds very like Pivcn and Cloward in places (e.g. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/35/1/248/661811 by guest on 29 September 2021 p. 4). but nowhere does he acknowledge their influence. 9 Croucher. pp. 114-117. 10 Ross McKibbin. 'The "Social Psychology" of Unemployment in Inter-war Britain', in P. J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain. Brighton. 1987. reprinted in The Ideologies of Class. Social Relations in Britain. 1880-1950. Oxford. 1991. 11 Stuart Macintyre. Little Moscows. Communism and Working-class Militancy in Inter-war Britain. London, 1980. 12 Bagguley, pp. lOOff. 13 Noelle Whiteside and J. Gillespie. 'Deconstructing unemployment: developments in Britain in the inter-war years'. Economic History Review 44: 4. 1991. TOM STEELE, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 1893-1923. Aldcrshot, Scolar Press 1990. ISBN 0-85967-825-3. £35.00. Oragc was one of the most stimulating and sometimes profound of early-twentieth century cultural writers in Britain. Beginning in Leeds in 1893 as a Board-School teacher and soon becoming popular in the Independent Labour Party both as speaker and as writer, he remained 'radical' throughout. But his radicalism jumped during the subsequent thirty years or so from a kind of socialism, via many stages including Social Credit, to fulltime discipleship at the feet of a mystical guru in Paris called Gurdjicff. Stccle is not Orage's first biographer, but his is the first full-length study of the Leeds Art Club which Oragc founded during 1903 along with the stabler, sometime socialist called Holbrook Jackson. Three years later, Oragc left Leeds for London. Jackson soon followed. There, the two soon became famous. Oragc as editor of a periodical called the NewAge. The heart of the book narrates the Club's meetings. These reports arc fascinating. By ill luck. Steclc's sources break off with the Club still in full swing, after the newspaper which had printed the reports was taken over. Despite a stiff entry-fee, the Club had hundreds of members, and its visiting speakers were acknowledged at the time as a rollcall of contemporary radical spokespeoplc and opinions within politics and most of the arts. On meeting Oragc during 1900. Jackson had alerted him to Nietzsche. When three years later - along with 'a few theosophists. socialists and businessmen' - they had founded the Arts Club, their main aim had been to 'reduce Leeds to Nietzschcanism'. Orage quickly made himself this philosopher's most readable exponent. Steele rightly notes that Orage was not the first Nietzschcan in Britain or even in northern England: he mentions that tiny periodical the Eagle and Serpent and. on no less modest a scale, he could also have mentioned other Northern exponents. But these had long been searching for some doctrinal synthesis between Reviews 249 collectivism and individualism. This search had made some of them as kaleidoscopic in their loudly-proclaimed ideological allegiances as Orage was to be. Unlike Orage and Steele, though, they made much of their origins direct or indirect within the secularist and anarchist movements, as well as within the socialist. One example is Bradford's Truth Seeker, spearheaded by J. W. Gott, a lifelong propagandist of socialism and atheism into the early 1920s. Another is the Manchester-based labour agitator Leonard Hall, active from the 1880s to 1916. In other words, Nietzsche was welcomed mainly as a radicalizer of individualism, but within an older discourse which had involved other totems and jargons. Indeed searchings, amalgams and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/35/1/248/661811 by guest on 29 September 2021 switchings between individualism and socialism were virtually as old as the word 'socialism'. Thus, there is no surprise that the Club's development offers a fascinating glimpse of the prehistory and early history of Guild Socialism, the major early-century attempt in Britain to work out how to structure a post-capitalist society. But there need be no greater surprise that at least one of the ideologists of Guilds, Arthur J. Penty, was later to move in a Fascist direction as lastingly as some of his former followers were to move sharply leftwards. I would therefore argue that, insofar as the Club was ever associated with any predominant political direction whatever, it took those ancient searchings and tugged at their mainly plebian roots till many snapped. As Steele mentions, it began with joint membership with local theosophists and Fabians, and its founders had been 'a conjunction of Tory businessmen and socialist professional workers' whose main common ground remained a loathing of laissez-faire Liberalism. This became particularly clear from 1911 - coincidentally or not, a climacteric for strikes. Take Michael Sadler, who from 1912 was vice-chancellor of Leeds University and who soon dominated the Club as much as Orage had earlier. In 1913, the future Sir Michael persuaded a damaging number of his undergraduates to scab on a local transport-strike. Any post-1926 generation would surely love to know how far this was destined to turn out as a dress-rehearsal for larger-scale scabbing. One difference, though, is that Sadler acted in the name of 'socialism', of that Fabian kind purporting to stand above class and to know expertly the true interest of every class. Leonard Hall in Manchester had been drowning such socialism in scorn through decades - not least while flirting with Nietzscheanism during a period of despair over labour agitation around 1900. Orage's editings and wanderings between Leeds and London accomplished much cross-fertilization-of the young Herbert Read among others, nurtured from 1912 by what Steele nicely summarizes as 'the stew of ideas and culturing' ladled out in the Club. If any English city rivalled London as centre for an avant-garde, it was Leeds, whatever was going on in Newcastle's socialist People's Theatre or elsewhere. Only Glasgow and Dublin could compare in those years. Interestingly, Glasgow can go unmentioned here, whereas the contacts with Dublin climaxed in a visit by Yeats and the complete Abbey Theatre troupe. Some leading Club members admired Irish cultural nationalism. Among continential influences, those most often welcomed were those which answered to the Club's partly mystical origins: artistically as well as politically, there were repeated attempts to smooth modernism with pseudo- materialism. Wyndham Lewis was welcome, but Kandinsky was virtually wor- shipped. There are a number of tantalizers. Given the involvement of some feminists in the club (Isabella Ford and Mary Gawthorpe, for example), one wishes the sources could have been more prolific on other members' views in this area. Secondly, 250 History Workshop Journal Steele's conceptual discussion of avant-gardes is rarely resumed after the early pages. Thirdly, I have noted his shyness about situating his Leeds sub-world more empirically into its general North-English context (apart from his mention of Jackson's Liverpool). But Steele's work has almost as many dimensions as the Club itself. This is one of the most many-sided books for a long time: a vital source for historians of British aesthetics, theatre, politics and fine arts. It also reads engagingly, though a bit breathlessly: like a dictaphone-script spasmodically peppered with commas and showered with King Charles's heads. Let's hope his readiness to make jokes mystifies Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/35/1/248/661811 by guest on 29 September 2021 American reviewers less than mine did: maybe his jokes are better. LOGIE BARROW JOSE ALVAREZ JUNCO, El Emperador del Paralelo. Lerroux y la demagogia populista, 509pp, Madrid: Alianza Editorial. ISBN: 84-206-9605-6 The obtuse and obsolete historiographical orthodoxies of the Franco regime on modern Spain were finally swept away in Spain itself by a new generation of historians in the 1970s and 1980s. In reaffirming and legitimizing Spain's democratic and reformist traditions, many of these historians concentrated on political studies, especially of the working class. Although useful and necessary, the overwhelming bulk of these studies was extremely limited in scope: narrow, empirical exegeses which were rarely placed cither in their socio-economic context or in relation to wider political realities. If the work of Spanish economic historians has proven far more impressive, it has nevertheless remained strikingly distant from the social and political domains, while social history in Spain remains in its infancy. Today, political history in Spain still exhibits many of its earlier methodological shortcomings. One of the outstanding exceptions to this tendency has been the work of Jose Alvarez Junco. Beginning with a study of anarchist ideology 1868-1910 which has become the standard account (though unfortunately not available in English), he has focused mainly on the popular movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only has he remained committed to primary research as the basis of his work (rare in the Spanish academic world), but he has also evinced an unwavering commitment to the introduction of new techniques and approaches to the study of modern Spain. This determination to challenge the post-Francoist orthodoxies of the Spanish history world has also distinguished his seminar groups at the Complutense University of Madrid as well as his regular contributions at historical congresses.
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