SMOKY ENGLAND
For years before going to England I had been interested in the north
of England--the land, as I was accustomed to think, of the under dog.
England, if one could trust one’s impression from a distance, was a
land of great social contrasts--the ultimate high and the ultimate
low of poverty and wealth. In the north, as I understand it, were all
of the great manufacturing centers--Sheffield, Leeds, Nottingham,
Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester--a whole welter of smoky cities
whence issue tons upon tons of pottery, linen, cotton, cutlery. While
I was at Bridgely Level I spoke of my interest in this region to
Barfleur, who merely lifted his eyebrows. He knew little or nothing
about that northern world. The south of England encompassed his
interest. However, Barfleur’s cousin, the agreeable Gerard Barfleur,
told me soulfully that the north of England must be like America,
because it was so brisk, direct, practical, and that he loved it. (He
was a confirmed American “rooter” or “booster,” we would say over here,
and was constantly talking about coming to this country to enter the
theatrical business.)
I journeyed northward the last day of the old year to Manchester and
its environs, which I had chosen as affording the best picture of
manufacturing life. I had been directed to a certain hotel, recommended
as the best equipped in the country. I think I never saw so large a
hotel. It sprawled over a very large block in a heavy, impressive,
smoky-stone way. It had, as I quickly discovered, an excellent Turkish
and Russian bath in connection with it and five separate restaurants,
German, French, English, etc., and an American bar. The most important
travel life of Manchester centered here--that was obvious. I was told
that buyers and sellers from all parts of the world congregated in
this particular caravanserai. It was New Year’s day and the streets
were comparatively empty, but the large, showy, heavily furnished
breakfast-room was fairly well sprinkled with men whom I took to be
cotton operatives. There was a great mill strike on at this time and
here were gathered for conference representatives of all the principal
interests involved. I was glad to see this, for I had always wondered
what type of man it was that conducted the great manufacturing
interests in England--particularly this one of cotton. The struggle was
over the matter of the recognition of the unions and a slight raise in
the wage-scale. These men were very much like a similar collection of
wealthy manufacturers in the United States. Great industries seem to
breed a certain type of mind and body. You can draw a mental picture
of a certain keen, dressy, phlegmatic individual, not tall, not small,
round, solid, ruddy--and have them all. These men were so comfortably
solid, physically. They looked so content with themselves and the
world, so firm and sure. Nearly all of them were between forty-five
and sixty, cold, hard, quick-minded, alert. They differed radically
from the typical Englishman of the South. It struck me at once that if
England were to be kept commercially dominant it would be this type of
man, not that of the South, who would keep it so.
And now I could understand from looking at these men why it was that
the north of England was supposed to hate the south of England, and
vice versa. I had sat at a dinner-table in Portland Place one evening
and heard the question of the sectional feeling discussed. Why does it
exist? was the question before the guests. Well, the south of England
is intellectual, academic, historic, highly socialized. It is rich
in military, governmental, ambassadorial and titled life. The very
scenery is far more lovely. The culture of the people, because of the
more generally distributed wealth, is so much better. In the north of
England the poor are very poor and contentious. The men of wealth are
not historically wealthy or titled. In many cases they are “hard greedy
upstarts like the irrepressible Americans,” one speaker remarked. They
have no real culture or refinement. They manage to buy their way in
from time to time, it is true, but that does not really count. They are
essentially raw and brutal. Looking at these men breakfasting quietly,
I could understand it exactly. Their hard, direct efficiency would but
poorly adjust itself to the soft speculative intellectuality of the
south. Yet we know that types go hand in hand in any country with a
claim to greatness.
After my breakfast I struck out to see what I could see of the city.
I also took a car to Salford, and another train to Stockport in order
to gather as quick a picture of the Manchester neighborhood as I
could. What I saw was commonplace enough. All of the larger cities of
present-day Europe are virtually of modern construction. Most of them
have grown to their present great population in the last fifty years.
Hence they have been virtually built--not rebuilt--in that time.
Salford, a part of Manchester, was nothing--great cotton and machine
works and warehouses. Stockport was not anything either, save long
lines of brick cottages one and two stories high and mills, mills,
mills, mills. It always astounds me how life repeats itself--any idea
in life such as a design for a house--over and over and over. These
houses in Salford, Stockport and Manchester proper were such as you
might see anywhere in Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore--in
the cheap streets. I had the sense of being pursued by a deadly
commonplace. It all looked as people do when they think very little,
know very little, see very little, do very little. I expected to learn
that the churches flourished here very greatly and that there was an
enormous Sunday school somewhere about. There was--at Stockport--the
largest in the world I was told, five thousand students attending. The
thing that impressed me most was the presence of the wooden clog or
shoe.
In Stockport there was a drab silence hanging over everything--the
pathetic dullness of the laborer when he has nothing to do save the
one thing he cannot do--think. As it was a Sunday the streets were
largely empty and silent--a dreary, narrow-minded, probably religious,
conventional world which accepts this blank drabness as natural,
ordered, probably even necessary. To the west and the south and the
east and the north are great worlds of strangeness and wonder--new
lands, new people--but these folks can neither see nor hear. Here they
are harnessed to cotton-mills, believing no doubt that God intended
it to be so, working from youth to age without ever an inkling of the
fascinating ramifications of life. It appalled me.
In some respects I think I never saw so dreary a world as manufacturing
England. In saying this I do not wish to indicate that the working
conditions are any worse than those which prevail in various American
cities, such as Pittsburgh, and especially the minor cities like
Lawrence and Fall River. But here was a dark workaday world, quite
unfavored by climate, a country in which damp and fogs prevail for
fully three-fourths of the year, and where a pall of smoke is always
present. I remember reading a sign on one of the railway platforms
which stated that owing to the prevalence of fogs the company could
not be held responsible for the running of trains on time. I noticed
too, that the smoke and damp were so thick everywhere that occasionally
the trees on the roadside or the houses over the way would disappear
in a lovely, Corot-like mist. Lamps were burning in all stores and
office-buildings. Street cars carried head-lamps and dawned upon you
out of a hazy gloom. Traffic disappeared in a thick blanket a half
block away.
Most of these outlying towns had populations ranging from ninety to
a hundred thousand, but in so far as interesting or entertaining
developments of civic life were concerned--proportioned to their
size--there were none. They might as well have been villages of five
hundred or one thousand. Houses, houses, houses, all of the same size,
all the same color, all the same interior arrangement, virtually.
Everywhere--in Middleton, Oldham, and Rochdale, which I visited the
first day, and in Boulton, Blackburn, and Wigan, which I visited the
next--I found this curious multiplication of the same thing which you
would dismiss with a glance--whole streets, areas, neighborhoods of
which you could say, “all alike.”
In Middleton I was impressed with the constant repetition of “front
rooms” or “parlors.” You could look in through scores of partly open
doors (this climate is damp but not cold) and see in each a chest of
drawers exactly like every other chest in the town and in the same
position relative to the door. Nearly all the round tables which
these front rooms contained were covered with pink, patterned, cotton
tablecloths. The small single windows, one to each house, contained
blue or yellow jardinières set on small tables and containing
geraniums. The fireplace, always to the right of the room as you
looked in the window, glowed with a small coal fire. There were no
other ornaments that I saw. The ceilings of the rooms were exceedingly
low and the total effect was one of clean, frugal living.
The great mills bore pleasing names, such as Rob Roy, Tabitha,
Marietta, and their towering stacks looked down upon the humbler
habitations at their base much as the famous castles of the feudal
barons must have looked down upon the huts of their serfs. I was
constrained to think of the workaday existence that all this suggested,
the long lines of cotton-mill employees going in at seven o’clock in
the morning, in the dark, and coming out at six o’clock at night, in
the dark. Many of these mills employ a day and a night shift. Their
windows, when agleam in the smoke or rain, are like patins of fine
gold. I saw them gleaming at the end of dull streets or across the
smooth, olive-colored surfaces of mill ponds or through the mist and
rain. The few that were running (the majority of them were shut down
because of the strike) had a roar like that of Niagara tumbling over
its rocks--a rich, ominous thunder. In recent years the mill-owners
have abandoned the old low, two-story type of building with its narrow
windows and dingy aspect of gray stone, and erected in its stead these
enormous structures--the only approach to the American sky-scraper
I saw in England. They are magnificent mills, far superior to those
you will see to-day in this country, clean, bright and--every one I
saw--new. If I should rely upon my merely casual impression, I should
say that there were a thousand such within twenty-five miles of
Manchester. When seen across a foreground of low cottages, such as I
have described, they have all the dignity of cathedrals--vast temples
of labor. I was told by the American Consul-General at London that
they are equipped with the very latest cotton-spinning machinery and
are now in a position to hold their own on equal terms with American
competition, if not utterly to defy it. The intricacy and efficiency
of the machinery is greater than that employed in our mills. I could
not help thinking what a far cry it was from these humble cottages,
some few of which in odd corners looked like the simple, thatched huts
sacred to Burns and “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” to these lordly
mills and the lordly owners behind them--the strong, able, ruthless men
whom I saw eating in the breakfast-room at the Midland the day before.
Think of the poor little girls and boys, principally girls, clattering
to and from work in their wooden shoes and, if you will believe it (I
saw it at Boulton on a cold, rainy, January day), in thin black shawls
and white straw hats, much darkened by continuous wear. One crowd that
I observed was pouring out at high noon. I heard a whistle yelling its
information, and then a mouse-hole of a door in one corner of the great
structure opened, and released the black stream of mill-workers. By
comparison, it looked like a small procession of ants or a trickle of
black water. Small as it was, however, it soon filled the street. The
air was wet, smoky, gray, the windows even at this midday hour gleaming
here and there with lights. The factory hands were a dreary mass in the
rain, some of them carrying umbrellas, many without them, all the women
wearing straw hats and black shawls!
I looked at their faces--pale, waxy, dull, inefficient. I looked
at their shapeless skirts hanging like bags about their feet. I
looked at their flat chests, their graceless hands, and then I
thought of the strong men who know how to use--I hesitate to say
exploit--inefficiency. What would these women do if they could not work
in the mills? One thing I am sure of: the mills, whatever charges
may be brought against their owners in regard to hours, insufficiency
of payment, indifference of treatment, are nevertheless better places
in which to spend one’s working hours than the cottages with their
commonplace round of duties. What can one learn washing dishes and
scrubbing floors in a cottage? I can see some one jumping up to
exclaim: “What can one learn tying commonplace threads in a cotton
mill, taking care of eight or nine machines--one lone woman? What
has she time to learn?” This--if you ask me; the single thought of
organization, if nothing more. The thought that there is such a thing
as a great machine which can do the work of fifty or a hundred men.
It will not do to say the average individual can learn this method
working in a home. It is not true. What the race needs is ideas. It
needs thoughts of life and injustice and justice and opportunity or
the lack of it kicked into its senseless clay. It needs to be made to
think by some rough process or other (gentleness won’t do it), and
this is one way. I like labor-leaders. I like big, raw, crude, hungry
men who are eager for gain--for self-glorification. I like to see them
plotting to force such men as I saw breakfasting at the Midland to
give them something--and the people beneath them. I am glad to think
that the clay whose womankind wears black shawls and straw hats in
January has sense enough at last to appoint these raw, angry fellows,
who scheme and struggle and fight and show their teeth and call great
bitter strikes, such as I saw here, and such as had shut tight so many
of these huge solemn mills. It speaks much for the race. It speaks much
for _thinking_, which is becoming more and more common. If this goes
on, there won’t be so many women with drabbly skirts and flat chests.
There will still be strong men and weak, but the conditions may not be
so severe. Anyhow let us hope so, for it is an optimistic thought and
it cheers one in the face of all the drab streets and the drab people.
I have no hope of making millionaires of everybody, nor of establishing
that futile abstraction, justice; but I do cherish the idea of seeing
the world growing better and more interesting for everybody. And the
ills which make for thinking are the only things which will bring this
about.