Richard Hoggart

Virtue and Reward

Fred Inglis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745651712
• eBook ISBN: 9780745672373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Richard Hoggart has been, perhaps, the best-known, and certainly the most affectionately acknowledged, British intellectual of the past sixty years. His great classic, The Uses of Literacy, provided for thousands of unsung working-class readers a wholly recognisable and tender account of their own coming-to-maturity and of the preciousness and the hardships of the life of the poor in pre-World War II Britain.

But he was far more than narrator of a neglected class. Hoggart was also a public figure of extraordinary energy and eminence. He dominated the single most important Royal Commission on broadcasting, and single-handedly he is remembered as clinching for the defence the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, after which he became a leading officer and defender of the international agency protecting the culture of the very world, UNESCO.

This is the first biography of this amazing man. It seeks to tie together in a single narrative life and work, to settle Hoggart in the great happiness of a fulfilled family life and in the astonishing achievements of his public and professional career, considering each of his books in detail, and following him through the long and hard labours of his different public and academic offices.

Fred Inglis tells this gripping tale of a figure of great significance to anyone who cherishes the stuff of culture, and tells it vividly and directly. It is a tale of a good man with which to edify the present, and to teach us of all that now threatens our best national (and international) forms of expression: our art, our culture, ourselves.

— 1 —

THE STONES OF LEEDS

I

In 1855, when Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell published her novel North and South, it was already commonplace to talk of England as divided into two nations at the boundary of Yorkshire. In 1918 this was no less true, and the Great North Road, prouder in name than in width or surface, unrolled itself out of London and trailed smoothly away towards the mighty metropolis of the foreign lands heralded, indeed, by a great road sign, big as a man, announcing ‘The North’. Leeds was one of the mightiest cities in the province, cooked black by the soot of ages falling from the mills, the railways, their trains always visible not only as the rushing expresses on their way to Scotland, but from the little chuffing freight trains busy on every one of the dozens of branch lines circling the city and coiling thickly through the packed, dilapidated terraces separating heavy industry from green suburb.

Leeds is pretty flat,
but the ‘close-ribbed streets’, in one dead end of which the Hoggart family were crowded into a tiny, two-bedroomed terrace house, nonetheless they

… rise and fall like a great sigh out of the last century.

‘Back to backs’ they were called, and were, each with a short yard criss-crossed with washing lines, a high wall at the back irresistible to boys to sit on and outrage passers-by in the blank, walled, cobbled street below.

I say ‘cobbled’ but in truth the surfaces were laid with slightly curved, black stone blocks about 15 inches square, smooth to walk on, just ridged enough for heavy-laden horses and donkeys to find a grip and heave up the slope. There were no cars in 1918, none parked in North Leeds until after the second war. Street traffic was slow and intermittent. In the early morning, the horse and cart of the milkman clopped slowly around the narrow roads; the milkman sometimes doubled as greengrocer. A chatty little queue of local housewives would form, their hair folded inside a neat scarf headdress, most of them in pinafore aprons, each holding a big jug into which the milkman would pour out a quart from a metal dipper with a long handle. During the morning the rag and bone man would make his slow traverse of every street, his long mournful cry of ‘J-i-i-ingle’ tolling his unbroken passage, and one or two people would labour out with antique articles – an old tin scouring board on which to scrub the washing, a much-refilled pillow, its ticking worn gossamer-thin, a broken saw, every object much repaired, reluctantly scrapped.

After the traders in poverty, the handcarts, variously laden with domestic bits and pieces, some of them surprisingly bulky – a vast old armchair, a wardrobe, I once saw a whole three-door cast iron oven – being moved across a dozen streets, a main road, up and down two steep hills, for the benefit of family or friends elsewhere in the neighbourhood.

The habits of thrift, of making-do-and-mend, of household tools and utensils which nowadays would have been chucked out a decade earlier, betokened a necessity, a dogged definition of utility and indeed of passive endurance which characterized the English working class between, let us say, 1920, by which time the big northern cities had each passed a population total of 250,000, and the moments at which the unprecedented tides of prosperity began to flow across three-quarters of the country after 1960 or so.

When Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth set themselves towards the end of the nineteenth century to investigate and measure poverty in, respectively, York and London, Booth found 30 per cent of the capital living close to destitution, and Rowntree, scion of the Quaker philanthropist family whose chocolate factory was, with the church, source of the city’s wealth, found 43 per cent in the same circumstances.¹ In 1899 Rowntree estimated that an individual family needed £100 a year to edge above the poverty line.

Thirty-seven years later, in a show of remarkable stamina, Rowntree found, with more precise statistical instruments, 31 per cent of York’s population still in the same battered boat. But as Laslett points out on Rowntree’s behalf,² the cause of destitution in 1899 was pitifully low wages; the cause in 1936, however, was unemployment. Over the years of Richard Hoggart’s boyhood, the British welfare state was brought parsimoniously to birth. From Lloyd George’s introduction of national insurance and old age pension in 1908 and 1911 to the Beveridge Report and the great work of Richard Titmuss in preparation for the National Health Service and family allowances between 1943 and 1946, the huge trawler of ‘cradle to grave’ support and protection against accident, sudden incapacity or loss of a job, together with provision for the everyday rearing of children, was massively constructed.

Those years more or less see the three Hoggart siblings from birth to settlement in adult life, in and out of military uniform, then, for the two boys at least, if not sister Molly, securely in a lifetime’s well-regarded employment. Their mother, shadowy heroine of their early years, Adeline Emma (‘Addie’) was child of a respectable shopkeeper in Liverpool, a slim, pretty woman with soft wavy dark hair and the dash and spirit to leave home in 1915, get a job serving in the canteen at the Light Infantry Brigade headquarters at Strensall Camp a few miles out of York, where she met Tom Hoggart who had served in the Boer War, been in and out of the army since, enlisted in 1914, married Addie in 1915 and fathered son Tom two years later, Richard, for many years known by his first name as ‘Bert’ (like the D. H. Lawrence Richard came later so much to admire) in 1918, Molly in 1920.

Then, abruptly and in his early forties, Tom Hoggart Senior died of brucellosis, caught from drinking contaminated milk, a fierce bacterial fever at that date, untouchable by the antibiotics which by 1945 would have rendered the illness negligible. But in 1920 the life expectation of very poor British males at birth was 43, although soldiers were well enough fed, and indeed weight and height increases among conscripts after 1915 were famously remarkable. But earlyish paternal death among the poorer classes was common enough, as was more than one death among the children of families averaging nine or ten until the steep falls in mortal demography beginning among the middle classes in the 1920s.

To begin with, there were the three Hoggart children, and Addie. She had little to do with her relations in Liverpool but although her husband Tom had left her well ringed with relations in Leeds, as we shall see, until death struck again in 1926 the four of them lived in a tight little island of their own, succoured only by the narrow exigence of the Guardians, their State protectors, the last trace of the father of the family a medal reading ‘the Great War for Civilization 1914–1919’ and a Book of Common Prayer inscribed to Tom by Addie, ‘May God watch over you and keep you safe.’

The Board of Guardians was then the source of all public assistance, and its officials made a tight enough estimate of what was due to a mother of three children far too small to permit her going to find work in a Leeds garment maker’s on tiny wages. So the Guardians provided about a pound a week, mostly in food coupons realizable only at certain grocers, for the Hoggarts the Maypole chain, and they paid the weekly rent of four shillings.

Four bob paid for the little cottage in Potternewton. It was a minute remnant of a hamlet engulfed by the flood of housing which cascaded outwards from the rambling city spread roughly along the river Aire, and then beside its squalid and jostling partner and thoroughfare, the Aire and Calder Navigation canal. The mountains of wool spun in the north of the county poured into Leeds and the country’s clothing was stitched together by tens of thousands of women hired by a few hundred men, large numbers of them Jewish émigrés from Central European pogroms and prejudices, assembling a respectable family pile before moving to the grand suburbs in the north of the city and building the dignified synagogues of Lidgett Park and Moor Allerton.

Potternewton had been a rural hamlet long before all this massive building and displacement. Then the black industry swept in, the clothiers accompanied by the loom-makers, the sewing machine manufacturers, the warehouse construction industry, the barge-builders, and everywhere the railway engine builders, the parallel metal lines, the black trains, the heavy black smoke, the specks of soot, blobs of the stuff sometimes an inch wide, covering over the once green wolds, turning the mighty new city into one of the greatest in the country, known across the Empire, one fifth of the globe.

Leeds Grammar School long predated the high peak of Victorian production and naturally became the forcing house of the city’s newish ruling class.³ One John Heaton, doctor, social reformer and city spokesman, returned from the Grand Tour alight with admiration for Florence and Siena, as well as for the great woollen Guild Halls of Bruges and Ghent. He enjoined his fellow-citizens to build, in his own words, ‘a noble municipal palace … to be erected in the middle of their hitherto squalid and unbeautiful town’,⁴ the Leeds Mercury chimed in to the effect that Leeds needed a beautiful tower to ‘adorn this great seat of industry with buildings worthy of the people of Leeds and of their country’, and largely thanks to Heaton the grandest and most expensive town hall outside the capital, its tower 90 feet high, was opened by the Queen herself in 1858. Outside and in, the splendid building still speaks eloquently of how Yorkshire’s wealth, its sense of civic pride as well as its self-made and boastful vainglory, displayed itself to the nation and its narrative.

Potternewton, only a couple of miles up the slope from the Town Hall, was in a different country. Not just in terms of wealth or civic awareness, but in the merest dispositions of space and district. The Hoggart cottage, built of stone, was huddled round by later, tight little blackened brick terraces, tucked in at the end of a short courtyard where no vehicle could reach, and the recollection of the peasant dwelling it once was, was still made visible in the 1920s by willowherb and dandelions growing between the cobbles. Modernity stopped up at the end of the street in Potternewton Lane, where the tramlines ran and the heavy trams rumbled into the depot, to be swung round on a turntable and pointed back to the city centre.

In the corner of the courtyard stood a wooden, crudely built privy shared by the three houses, discharging into a cesspool periodically emptied into a horse-drawn collection trolley, when the always detectable odour became very strong. The plank door opened straight into the only living room. The deep cast-iron fireplace was surrounded by and heated by an iron range with two ovens on each side, the whole thing kept clean and dull-surfaced with blackleading. In front of the range lay a clip (or proggle, or clootie) rug made from little multicoloured rectangles of rag and worsted pushed thickly through the hessian underlay, probably an old sack. Such a rug set off every working-class fireplace in the land, substituting for a carpet, a metaphor for more broadcast and deep pile underfoot. Behind the living room was a small scullery or washroom, with running water taking a bit of heat from the fire, a flagged floor, a hip bath, a scouring board for the laundry, a hand-turned mangle, a low window. From the living-room a short stair led to one very small and one slightly larger bedroom, the two beds shared by the foursome family.

Hoggart’s own recollections of his eight or so years of life before his mother’s death are inevitably thin, but it is clear that the family stood always at the very edge of destitution, of unfed, unclothed extremity, and were kept back from that edge only by the unyielding watchfulness of a mother not at all brought up on such short commons, and minutely attentive to the arithmetic of necessity as well as to the no less tiny details of status, accomplishment, demeanour and apparel, which would set her own children on the long path out of poverty.

One aspect of the new condition of England is a habitual deprecation of the struggle for status, although of course in innumerable ways the struggle goes on. What is insufficiently honoured is Addie Hoggart’s kind of fighting stand – though the fight was with the invisible weapons of anxious protectiveness, stressful providence, loving kindness and principled gentility – on behalf of children for whom she was utterly determined that they should find an easier, happier, more fulfilled future.

Hoggart himself was – need one say? – blessed with a naturally happy nature. He recalled being greeted, at about the age of five, by the amiable old lady with a large mole on her chin, who kept the small bakery at the corner of their entry, as ‘Sunny Jim, always cheerful.’ The original Sunny Jim first appeared on the back of a breakfast cereal called Force in 1902:

High o’er the fence leaps Sunny Jim,
Force is the food which raises him.

Sunny Jim himself was a regency buck in scarlet tails and natty pumps, but the appellation was common for eighty-odd years. Hoggart took it as a compliment but also as an accurate enough description of what he was like, made it into a small discovery of selfhood, of there being an ‘I’ about whom he could think of while separating himself from himself, the ego become an object of thought. Probably this is the earliest motion of the mind intrinsic to all those becoming capable of moral introspection and self-aware self-criticism. No inevitable salvation in that of course; but it’s a help.

His mother’s courageous gentility and the Guardians’ close-fisted assistance could not, however, keep up her health against the relentless battering of poverty, shortage in her diet, Yorkshire cold and Leeds smoke, and the ceaseless care and chattering demands of small children. One day she brought back from the Maypole grocery shop, with its marble walls and tiled floor, its glassed-in, appetizing display counters, a couple of slices of boiled ham, not shiny and wafer-thin as it would be today, but cut thick and firm from the bone. Threepennyworth perhaps, the money eked out onto a narrow margin, away from daily necessity. The ham was for her, a solitary treat. The children besieged her for it, like quarrelsome and insistent baby starlings. She had to give way, give it away. Her whole life-habit, her tight and tense lovingness insisted, yet again, on self-denial. The children snaffled her share. She resented it, even bitterly. It had been her treat, in a life without a single person who might be counted on for the very occasional such afterthought. The odd neighbour might call with a little something spare from her own hard calculations, but rarely. The ham was the product of strict forbearance. Its loss was sharp, ragged also; it drew a grated edge across a sensibility for which no adult, not one, could have a tender touch.

Hers was a life lived always on the edge of a steep downward slope into irretrievable loss: loss of balance, of respectability, of provision, always straining upwards against the terrific pull of social gravity, never a moment off guard or off duty. Once upon a time, her son recalled a sixpenny bit lost between shops, one fortieth of the week’s income, and saw his mother’s face as she struggled to compose herself, to recalculate her sums without panic, saw the tears well up and fill her eyes without quite brimming over, the jaw clenched, her grip maintained.

Holding onto ‘respectability’ – that all-powerful and pervasive principle – wasn’t something as nowadays to be scoffed at by the bien-pensants, as part of a social class system now happily superseded by a genial egalitarianism. It was less a single principle than a whole frame of being, one which bolted together duty and self-esteem, responsibility and satisfied relief, loving care and moral judgement, all into a daily way of life. Necessarily comparative – ‘I’m not going to live like that’ – it was not the vehicle of snobbery but the guide to demeanour, the code of propriety, the measure of a good life. The loss of the value of respectability – and the loss in present-day Britain is almost complete – betokens a society some of whose seriousness has drained away, a people no longer as steady as they used to be.

One May day in 1926 Hoggart, then aged eight, walked past the tram d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface by Paul Hoggart
• Prologue: The Condition of England
• 1 The Stones of Leeds
• 2 Best Boy: A Grammar School Education
• 3 A Civic Education: The University of Leeds
• 4 A Military Education in ‘an Ingenious and Civilian Army’
• 5 The Education of the People
• 6 Best of Friends: The Book, the Centre and the Moral Community
• 7 Hoggart-Watching: Arguments with Marxism, Aspects of World Government
• 8 Goldsmiths and Gold Standards
• 9 Tiring the Sun
• Bibliography of Hoggart’s Works
• Index