My native heath, thanks to the enterprise of London newspapers and the
indestructibility of picturesque lies, has the reputation of being quite
unlike the rest of England, but when I set foot in it after absence, it
seems to me the most English piece of England that I ever came across.
With extraordinary clearness I see it as absurdly, ridiculously,
splendidly English. All the English characteristics are, quite
remarkably, exaggerated in the Potteries. (That is perhaps why it is a
butt for the organs of London civilisation.) This intensifying of a type
is due no doubt to a certain isolation, caused partly by geography and
partly by the inspired genius of the gentleman who, in planning what is
now the London and North-Western Railway, carefully diverted it from a
populous district and sent it through a hamlet six miles away. On the 28
miles between Stafford and Crewe of the four-track way of the greatest
line in England, not a town! And a solid population of a quarter of
a million within gunshot! English methods! That is to say, the
preposterous side of English methods.
We practise in the Potteries the fine old English plan of not calling
things by their names. We are one town, one unseparated mass of streets.
We are, in fact, the twelfth largest town in the United Kingdom (though
you would never guess it). And the chief of our retail commerce and of
our amusements are congregated in the centre of our town, as the custom
is. But do not imagine that we will consent to call ourselves one town.
* No! We pretend that we are six towns, and to carry out the pretence
we have six town halls, six Mayors or chief bailiffs, six sanitary
inspectors, six everything, including six jealousies. We find it so
much more economical, convenient, and dignified, in dealing with public
health, education, and railway, canal, and tramway companies to act by
means of six mutually jealous authorities.
* Since this was written a very modified form of federation has been
introduced into the Potteries.
*****
We make your cups and saucers--and other earthen utensils. We have been
making them for over a thousand years. And, since we are English, we
want to make them now as we made them a thousand years ago. We flatter
ourselves that we! are a particularly hard-headed race, and we are.
Steel drills would not get a new idea into our hard heads. We have a
characteristic shrewd look, a sort of looking askance and suspicious.
We are looking askance and suspicious at the insidious approaches of
science and scientific organisation. At the present moment the twelfth
largest town is proposing to find a sum of £250 (less than it spends
on amusement in a single day) towards the cost of a central school
of pottery. Mind, only proposing! Up to three years ago (as has been
publicly stated by a master-potter) we carped at scientific methods.
“Carp” is an amiable word. We hated and loathed innovation. We do still.
Only a scientific, adventurous, un-English manufacturer who has dared to
innovate knows the depth and height, the terrific inertia, of that hate
and that loathing.
Oh, yes, we are fully aware of Germany! Yesterday a successful
manufacturer said to me--and these are his exact words, which I wrote
down and read over to him: “Owing to superior technical knowledge, the
general body of German manufacturers are able to produce certain
effects in china and in earthenware, which the general body of English
manufacturers are incapable of producing.” However, we have already
established two outlying minor technical schools, and we are proposing
to find £250 privately towards a grand and imposing central technical
college. Do not smile, you who read this. You are not archangels,
either. Besides, when we like, we can produce the finest earthenware
in the world. We are only just a tiny bit more English than you--that’s
all. And the Potteries is English industry in little--a glass for
English manufacture to see itself in.
*****
For the rest, we are the typical industrial community, presenting the
typical phenomena of new England. We have made municipal parks out of
wildernesses, and hired brass bands of music to play in them. We have
quite six parks in our town. The character of our annual carnivals has
improved out of recognition within living memory. Electricity no longer
astounds us. We have public baths everywhere (though I have never heard
that they rival our gasworks in contributing to the rates). Our public
libraries are better and more numerous, though their chief function
is still to fleet the idle hours of our daughters. Our roads are less
awful. Our slums are decreasing. Our building regulations are
stricter. Our sanitation is vastly improved; and in spite of asthma,
lead-poisoning, and infant mortality our death-rate is midway between
those of Manchester and Liverpool.
We grow steadily less drunken. Yet drunkenness remains our worst
vice, and in the social hierarchy none stands higher than the brewer,
precisely as in the rest of England. We grow steadily less drunken, but
even the intellectuals still think it odd and cranky to meet without
drinking fluids admittedly harmful; and as for the workingman’s beer...
Knock the glass out of his hand and see! We grow steadily less
drunken, but we possess some 750 licensed houses and not a single proper
bookshop. No man could make a hundred pounds a year by selling books in
the Potteries. We really do know a lot, and we have as many bathrooms
per thousand as any industrial hive in this island, and as many
advertisements of incomparable soaps. We are in the way of perfection,
and when we have conquered drunkenness, ignorance, and dirt we
shall have arrived there, with the rest of England. Dirt--a public
slatternliness, a public and shameless flouting of the virtues of
cleanliness and tidiness--is the most spectacular of our sins.
We are the supreme land of picturesque contrasts. On one day last week
I saw a Town Clerk who had never heard of H. G. Wells; I walked five
hundred yards and assisted at a performance of chamber-music by Bach
and a discussion of the French slang of Huysmans; walked only another
hundred yards and was, literally, stuck in an unprotected bog and
extricated therefrom by the kindness of two girls who were rooting in a
shawd-ruck for bits of coal.
Lastly, with other industrial communities, we share the finest of all
qualities--the power and the will to work. We do work. All of us
work. We have no use for idlers. Climb a hill and survey our combined
endeavour, and you will admit it to be magnificent.