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Post by Rebelliousjukebox on Jan 27, 2008 8:59:31 GMT
In the path of Priestley
The Potteries are, as JB Priestley said, curiously exhilarating. Dirty, shabby and 'extremely ugly', but intensely quirky. His descriptions in English Journey made the reader long to follow in his footsteps - and so Margaret Drabble did
Saturday January 26, 2008
The Guardian
Stoke-on-Trent, according to those who live there, is not a fashionable address. It's better to stretch a postcode and say you come from the Staffordshire Moorlands. But this strange urban sprawl of uneasily conglomerated towns has produced great art. Everybody knows the pots of the Potteries, but the Five Towns have inspired fine literature as well as world-famous ceramics. Arnold Bennett's name is not forgotten, even in his grudging home town of Burslem, and the region provoked his literary heir, JB Priestley, into some of his best writing. The chapter entitled To The Potteries in English Journey is classic Priestley: humane, indignant, personal, impassioned and charged with the energy of his restless curiosity. He does not mince his words, describing the neighbourhood as grim, smoky, dingy, dirty, shabby, preposterous and, in sum, "extremely ugly", but he describes other quirky aspects of its intensely individual character in a manner that makes the reader long to follow in his footsteps. And this is just what I did
English Journey is a record of the author's rambling travels through the country in 1933. It was published in 1934 and was highly influential, directly inspiring George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier and feeding into a growing stream of sociological commentary that included the investigations of Mass Observation and the documentary films of John Grierson and WH Auden. It has even been credited with winning the 1945 election for the Labour party. Priestley was writing during the slump, and he cries out for a fairer deal than the dole, for better housing for workers, for new industrial cities that would be smokeless and spacious, not cramped and filthy. This appeal springs from the political fervour and utopian hopes of the 30s. But when Priestley reaches the Potteries, halfway through his book, and halfway between Yorkshire and Lancashire, something odd happens. They defeat his economic analysis, they baffle and intrigue him, they capture his imagination, they repel and fascinate him. Their "remote provinciality" becomes exotic in his eyes, as it did for their self-banished son, Bennett. The faults and virtues of the region strike him as inseparable. And they are all still there, interwoven and jumbled together in the most bizarre manner. It is, as Priestley wrote, unlike any other industrial area. And he found it curiously exhilarating.
The ugliness is still there. A visitor cannot escape it. I have been visiting the Potteries infrequently over nearly 40 years, and some areas have got worse. Maybe they get worse before they get better: there is talk of urban regeneration, of new housing, but then there always has been. There are miles upon miles of pitted and pocked brownfield sites, of derelict buildings, of wasteland. Allotments and scruffy open spaces called "fields" scatter themselves through town centres and residential areas alike. Bennett called the landscape "slatternly", but he was a native and allowed to insult it. A few picturesque pot banks and kilns survive: Priestley wrote of "a fantastic collection of narrow-necked jars or bottles peeping above the housetops on every side, looking as if giant biblical characters, after a search for wine or oil, had popped them there, among the dwarf streets." Some of these are now protected as listed buildings. But other historic structures (including the Wedgwood warehouses and kilns at Etruria) have been demolished. There are new ring roads and dual carriageways and flyovers. I was told that Stoke, always behind the times, had modernised its roads and transport system too late, and without learning from the mistakes of others. Thus it had got the worst of all worlds. This is the kind of thing Stoke people say in deprecation of their own neighbourhood. "Apathy" and "low self-esteem" are words you often hear.
Part of the problem lies with the municipal structure of the five (which are, in fact, six) towns, which were at last, after epic struggles, federated in 1910. There is no geographical or political centre. The age-old rivalry of the towns of Hanley and Burslem was bypassed by labelling the whole area Stoke-on-Trent, after what both considered the inferior town of Stoke. The amalgamation has not been wholly successful. Town halls and civic buildings stand empty, or under used. Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in his The Buildings Of England, written in the 70s, was scathing about what had happened to the region, calling it an "urban tragedy". Today, each region stubbornly preserves its own accent and dialect: Tunstall folk are still famed for the grammatical construction "We're going to get us dinners" and southerners of the district can always spot (and not always understand) a northerner. Or so I was told. Hanley is the shopping centre, with its chain stores and its vast and well-stocked independent bookshop, Webberley's, the only place where I have seen my own novels displayed for sale in years. Hanley also houses the Cultural Quarter, thus designated in 1997, which is home to a very fine museum and art gallery with a spectacular collection of Staffordshire ceramics. Has Burslem lost out for ever to Hanley? There is a sadness in Burslem, and the draper's shop that Bennett made famous in The Old Wives' Tale looks neglected. There are plans to revitalise Burslem, but they have a long way to go.
The terrain of the Five Towns is hilly and therefore offers views. This has advantages and disadvantages. From a dark, terraced street you can see a green and distant hillside irradiated by sunlight. You can see long perspectives that suggest the industrial sublime. You can also see wastelands undisguised.
There is, nevertheless, something perversely cosy and comforting about the long 19th-century terraces with their little workmen's cottages. Walking from leafy Etruria Road down Victoria Street, across Shelton New Road and Stoke Old Road, you pass stretches of mean, jerry-built uniformity. The houses front the street, with no barrier of step or yard, and you can peer into the rooms through net curtains. Stretches of 19th-century terrace will suddenly erupt into strange and occasionally fantastic interludes of more recent date. Some of these homes are depressingly dingy, but some are well kept and inviting. The modest smallness of scale is in its way endearing. Life is what you make it, these houses say.
The Potteries make their own culture. Bennett, their chronicler, wrote about them with the same mixture of attraction and revulsion that Priestley experienced on his brief tour. Priestley, in 1933, two years after Bennett's death, noted that there was no memorial to Bennett, and that nobody ever mentioned him. Public life and public monuments celebrated local industrialists and "empty big-wigs", but not their greatest writer. The Five Towns did not wholly admire their successful son. He did not flatter them enough. This situation has not changed much. There are maroon plaques identifying some of the buildings in which Bennett set his novels and stories, but as yet no statue. Councillors today argue that a statue would be nostalgic, retrospective, backward-looking. They are not persuaded that the history of the Five Towns is an asset, and that it can be exploited to build a future.
Bennett, in The Death Of Simon Fuge, one of the greatest short stories in the English language, tells the tale of a ceramics expert from the British Museum who visits the Potteries just after the London press has announced the early death of a famous artist from the region. The people in Fuge's home town have not heard of this event and, when informed of it, do not let on they are much interested. They are too busy with their own lives. The story is a study in the contrast between metropolitan and provincial culture and values, in which the townsfolk reveal themselves to be at least as cultured as their guest, whom they overwhelm with hospitality. As I myself was almost overwhelmed.
There are few things I like more than pottering around an unfamiliar place, but I knew that on this trip I had to emulate Priestley and, although he relished lonely pottering, he always liked to make a companionable contact or two and see local life from the inside. So I braced myself to find a guide.
The Arnold Bennett Society provided me with the ideal escort. John Shapcott revealed himself as a man who loved the theatre, who had been roused to indignation by Priestley's dismissal of the sparse and tired theatrical offerings of Stoke in 1933. He wanted to show me otherwise. He was on familiar terms with theatre directors, stage managers and doormen. At our approach, doors swung open and lights blazed to reveal a lavishly restored deco auditorium that could seat thousands or the best purpose-built theatre-in-the round in Britain. He meant to dazzle me, and I was dazzled. This, he impressed on me, was no cultural backwater. Professional and amateur productions flourished, Glyndebourne loved to visit, Ken Dodd was on his way, and he himself was engaged in writing a musical that would be performed next year in the newly built Repertory Theatre.
My escort drove me hither and thither, as I bleated from time to time, "Is this still Tunstall? Is this Hanley? What's this bit called? What's the WaterWorld? Where are we now?" At one point we arrived in the centre of Burslem and entered a historic 17th-century coaching inn called the Leopard. At first sight, this looks like an ordinary old English pub with an Edwardian reception room, but it is nothing of the sort. It is vast. Behind the facade is a 19th-century hotel with 80 rooms that have been uninhabited since 1951, and beneath it lie ancient tunnels and vaults that stretch for miles. In the 19th century, the Leopard was the hub of Burslem, and it was in this building that Josiah Wedgwood and the engineer James Brindley met in 1765 to plot the building of the Trent and Mersey canal - the canal that was to transform life in the Potteries and help to launch the industrial revolution. HG Wells and Dirk Bogarde both stayed there. Two brave men plan to awaken this sleeping beast. They speak of it affectionately as "her". Oh yes, they agree, she's a big undertaking. But if they have their way, the Leopard will stir again, and the centre of Burslem will revive.
No visit to the Potteries is complete without a tour of a factory. Priestley had been shown the Wedgwood works, where he had fallen under the spell of clay and attempted, confidently, comically and disastrously, to throw a pot. The Wedgwood works are no more, and I was shown round the Burleigh works of Burgess Dorling & Leigh, which border the Trent and Mersey canal somewhere between Longport and Burslem and Stoke. Their promotional leaflet quotes Priestley on the subject of plates and teacups and British craftsmanship, and many of the aspects of the industry that he noted are still evident - the small scale of manufacture, the sense of continuous history, even a lingering paternalism in what was once a network of family businesses.
We were taken through warehouses and up outdoor staircases and along corridors and past an enormous, still functioning steam engine that had once powered HMS Liverpool. We saw earthenware in various stages of firing - "green" and "biscuit" are words that linger - but the room that impressed me most was monochrome and stacked with white pots. It looked like a film set, awaiting action. At one point I noted the mysterious and suggestive words "Dark Felicity" handwritten on a piece of paper on top of a pile of plates, and was told that this was the name of one of Burleigh's traditional, blue-flowered patterns. You could buy your crockery in Dark Felicity or Pale Felicity. I met a woman who was engaged in covering a large jug with a Dark Felicity transfer. It looked an immensely tricky business, and I knew I'd never learn the knack. My jug would have been covered in wrinkles, just as Priestley's clay kept shooting up into a lopsided tower.
Something atavistic in the Potteries calls out to me from my past. My mother's family had once been potters, and I seem to have inherited a loyalty and a curiosity. These places are part of me, although I never lived there. I rarely now remember to look at the back stamp on the bottom of a cup or jug, but my aunt often used to look to see if she was drinking from Doulton or Wedgwood or Minton. On my last morning, I set off home with mixed feelings. Stoke-on-Trent is still a mess, and Priestley's prayers, that "a real city, spacious and gay, fit for good craftsmen to live in" might rise high and white above the blackened fields, have not been answered. Stoke was, I gloomily concluded, an illustration of urban deprivation, a visible casualty of the decline of coal mining and the manufacturing industries. And yet it is full of wonderful surprises, of light felicity.
As I tried to make for the M6, my car found its way to the Spode factory shop. As I was selecting some tea plates, I overheard a conversation between two young people at the till which filled me with an extraordinary hope and gaiety. They were talking about philosophy, discussing Plato and utilitarianism and chlorophyll. I forget now how chlorophyll came into it, but it did. The young man was explaining why it was impossible to know if she and he meant the same thing by the words "red" and "blue", and putting forward the proposition that some cultures might not even recognise the names of colours. It was a wonderful interchange. I could not resist asking who they were. They were Dan and Sara, sixth-formers, on their Saturday morning shift, and Dan wanted to study philosophy and drama. I should have pestered Sara to tell me her plans, but a queue of bargain hunters was beginning to stretch behind me. They were a radiant pair and my heart sang as I drove back to the poor, tired, old metropolis. The culture of the Five Towns is indeed beyond compare.
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