Always on the look out for interesting snippets of local socialist history, I was directed to look up one Francis Haydn Williams, the Unitarian Church's Minister in Whitby in the 1900's. It seemed that Williams, in an early incarnation of the Occupy movement, once led a crowd of locals to occupy a piece of the Abbey Plain enclosed by Whitby's Lord of the Manor 'in the name of the common people'. Now I didn't find out much more about the Rev Williams at that first attempt although I now have good leads that I am now following, but it did lead me to another Whitby person whose reputation in the Labour movement dearly needs rescuing from the dust of posterity - Margaret Storm Jameson.
It was said that Williams was the person who first motivated Storm Jameson to look to 'a political life' and this led me to try and find out more.
I knew her vaguely as a pre-war 'middlebrow' British novelist, and I can remember her volumes seemed to be a unread staple of many second hand bookshops in my youth, but it seems there was much more to her than that prosaic fact.
So I sought out some facts on her and a copy of her autobiography "Journey from the North', written late in her life in 1969. From this, it was clear how much Whitby and the North meant to her - both politically and in her writing. The title itself says it all - her Whitby life was not just an incidental part of her upbringing - it was, in fact, her life force. That life was one always on the left, and a life which reflected its times - from being an Edwardian middle class young lady, through the carnage of the Great War, the hungry 20's and 30's. the moral dilemmas of the left in World War 2 and then the equally hard dilemmas of the Cold War and the rise of a new left.
Sure, she made mistakes, but these were mistakes she acknowledged (although some were somewhat sublimated). She worked with and amongst some of the most towering intellectuals of the 20th century, but was not fazed out by them.
First the bare facts. Margaret Storm Jameson was born in Ladysmith Avenue on Whitby's West Side in 1891. Her house is now part of the Saxonville hotel complex. Her father and grandfather were successful shipbuilders, although at the time her father's firm had been liquidated and he had turned to work as a ships captain. Her mother Hannah, from the town's well to do, Tory and ship owning, Galilee family, was always conscious of these divisions and tensions, and this, it seems, led to a troubled childhood for their daughter, caught as she was between warring factions and left mainly to the care of a mother who thought nothing of thrashing Margaret and her siblings for any mild transgressions or misdemeanours.
However, she was allowed a high degree of intellectual freedom, based around church activities (her aunt was a Deacon in the local Congregational Church), a freedom which allowed to her to meet and be informally taught by Haydn Williams, a man whose activities were chronicled in her 1938 novel "The Moon is Making" with Williams appearing as the thinly-disguised arch-nonconformist cleric 'Handel Wikker' ministering to a community that, in the words of the author H.E Bates, reviewing it in the arch Conservative Morning Post, was "wretchedly narrow and fiercely parochial in their capacity for small feuds", a description still resonant for anyone who has been involved in small town politics.
This intellectual early journey stood her is good stead when later in life she was sent to a local Grammar School where she developed serious political views under the influence of two brothers called Harland, the eldest of whom, Sydney, (1) went on to become one of the UK's leading geneticist and a campaigner against British colonialism. Both brothers, Sydney and Oswald, were active supporters of the left in the shape of the ILP, and although not old enough to be engaged in 'grown-up' activism, were regular supporters of ILP street corner speakers in their home town of Scarborough and helped deliver copies of party newspapers and the 'Clarion'.
It seems that Storm (and here, I should say she always used her middle name, taken from her father's family, rather than Margaret) moved on from these influences to active support as a young teenager for both the ILP and women's suffrage,(at the time when the first stirrings from the WPSU was being born).
From school, she took what was then an unusual route for a lower middle class girl and elected to go on to University. Oxbridge was out of reach and so she went on to study English Literature at the University of Leeds and became the Secretary of the University's Women's Representative Council.
A Young Storm in the making.
But it was her extra mural activities that took up her day to day life. Firstly she became active in the Leeds Arts Club. As its name suggests it was primarily a club devoted to the arts, mainly writing, painting and dramatics. But it was also a centre for 'advanced debate' as it was styled, and this aspect was encouraged by its founder, Arthur Orage, an avowed socialist and a champion of Storm. (2)
Orage was born in the village of Dacre, near Harrogate. After being bought up in a non-conformist household, he went on to become am elementary teacher in a Leeds Board School where he taught the children of working class families from the city centre district. He was a founder member of the Leeds ILP and became a regular writer for the party paper, the 'Labour Leader' where he concentrated on questions of philosophy, and championed the work of socialist thinker, Edward Carpenter.
His socialism was esoteric - not for him 'gas and water' reform via a town hall or social advance through industrial struggle - although he certainly supported struggle in its widest sense. He believed that "Economic power precedes political power and political reform is useless without prior economic reform".
Under the influence of Edward Carpenter, an anarchistic evolutionary socialist, and who, living just outside nearby Sheffield, met Orage often (and perhaps, also, Storm) and also Carpenter's own mentor, American poet, Walt Whitman, Orage burgeoned. Orage's individualistic socialism had an anarchistic taste. While he encouraged open debate between all shades of radical political opinion in the pages of his later magazine "The New Age", his editorials were explicit in what he called "a passionate desire to break all bounds whether human or divine‟ (3)
His favoured approach was that of the 'Guild Socialists' who looked to the working classes and the Trade Unions forming 'Guilds' that would take over, then own and run - on a co-operative basis and with a strong craft ethos - industry and the workshops. They were often ridiculed as 'socialist mediaevalists' who wanted a 'better 1400's' instead of the surrounding greyness of Edwardian industrial Britain, but their emphasis on working class self-management and control struck a chord with the emerging Syndicalist movement active in Trade Unions organising miners and railwaymen. Their inspiration, it was said, came from William Morris and the arts and crafts movement, but the tragedy, as again it was said, was that the Labour movement once in power looked to the 'other' William Morris (the motor manufacturer) for their guidance in the structure and techniques of industrial management rather than the socialist Pre-Raphaelite from Hammersmith. (4)
A.E. (Arthur) Orage
Orage became someone who was a lifelong influence on Storm, and she later became a regular writer for 'The New Age'. She was ready to back local Leeds tailoring workers who were caught up in the strike wave of 1911 and collected food for their families amongst her fellow middle class students. She wrote later of that experience, saying in a passage that showed the influence of Orage that: "I believe that there exists in the intellect of the working class a vigour and freshness that may well bring forth a new Renaissance. For generations crushed under the industrial slavery, I believe that it will move when it does move, with a mighty bound."
The influence of Orage and Carpenter stayed with Storm in the 1920's but by the end of that decade, and the realities of economic depression pushed Storm towards a more pragmatic socialist position. In her 1945 novel "The Journey of Mary Hervey Russell", the central male character, Hugh Hervey is mocked for "his "radicalism‟ consists in wishing to turn back the industrial clock so that England may be again a nation of craftsmen‟ with his Whitby born and bred wife Mary observing acidly "You‟re a Tory, yourself, really. The other's only a dream you had. Oh, a charming dream, but a dream none the less....."''
The other influence was the women's suffrage movement, and she partnered the intellectual life of the Arts Club with the activism of the WPSU. In July 1913 - exactly 100 years ago - she took part in the Women's Pilgrimage to show the House of Commons how many women wanted the vote. Members of the National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies set off in the middle of June, and during the next six weeks held a series of meetings all over Britain. An estimated 50,000 women reached Hyde Park in London on 26th July. According to her autobiography, shades of Saurez, she bit a policeman's ear during the demonstration.
On the 13th January 1913, Jameson married Charles Clarke, a fellow student at Leeds. They moved to London where the relationship rapidly soured. She tried to commit suicide with an overdose of phenacetin, and he was deeply unsympathetic. She fell ill at the end of the year and went home to her parents in Whitby, while he moved in with his Quaker parents in North London. The marriage however staggered on into the Great War and resulted in the birth of her only son. The war touched her deeply too, in other ways. Her beloved brother, Harold, was killed in France, and her father, skippering a merchant vessel, was torpedoed by a U Boat and taken into captivity for the duration of the conflict. These events, and the knowledge of the horrors of the trenches instilled in her a third component of her socialism - an abiding hatred of war and force.
At the end of the war, with an extra mouth to feed and to pay for an errant husband she turned to serious novel writing. Her first novel, The Pot Boils,was published in 1919. This was a novel inspired by her Leeds student life, with a description of a campus 'swept by socialistic thought' and where, inspired by their reading of Marx, female students opposed to the curriculum imposed by a reactionary Professor of Economics. Alas, it was a novel that passed critics, and readers, by, and what was said by reviewers was damning. Take a Punch review which said that "although the book is hardly likely to gain universal popularity, … certain persons, notably very young Socialists and experts in Labour journalism, may find it of absorbing interest."
Her marriage to Charles came to its inevitable end and in January 1924 she met her future husband for life, Guy Chapman, a junior academic. They soon began a relationship. The couple married on 1st February 1926.
Now living in a less stressful manner, Storm Jameson continued to write novels, including a trilogy about a family of Whitby shipbuilders, The Lovely Ship, The Voyage Home and A Richer Dust. These were not just potboliers based around the family, but were a history of her fathers time and place, as well as having the shipyard workers featured as key characters as both masters and men struggled in a time of economic decline and technological change. She was not romanticising Edwardian, insular, conservative Whitby. She recognised the deep class divisions that existed in a small town - which unlike neighbouring East Cleveland or Middlesbrough - did not have an established and vocal Labour movement to allow for working class self-expression. In the 'Haydn Williams' novel based on shipbuilding and fishing, "The Moon is Making" (mentioned above) she drew attention to the manner in which social divisions in her native town were etched into the very landscape with the River Esk dividing the lower-class district of the East Cliff ('Under Wik') from the more upper-class district of the West Cliff ('Over Wik').
She also found, in 1927, employment as what was probably the first 'womans correspondent' on a Fleet Street paper when she joined the Daily Mirror. At a time when women had just gained the vote and were encroaching heavily into the Labour Force, the Editor, Alexander Campbell and its owner, Harold Harmsworth, saw the need to appeal to new women readers. Storm, however was corralled into 'safe' subjects like clothes, cooking and entertaining although she managed to pen some tentative articles about sexual freedom.
In September 1932 Storm Jameson became close friends with Vera Brittain. The two women had both lost brothers during the Great War and as a result became committed pacifists Jameson reviewed Brittain's 'Testament of Youth' in the Times stating that as a representation of war from a woman's perspective it "makes it unforgettable". She then, in the late 1920's became involved with the British section of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers - a Comintern Front Group.. At a meeting in January 1934, spurred on by the effects of recession, the economic failure of the National Government and the growth of Facism, it was decided to publish a new Marxist intellectual journal. As a result the 'Left Review' first appeared in October 1934. Fellow contributors, many of whom were to become household names in the future included Storm Jameson, Tom Wintringham, John Strachey Hugh McDiarmid, A L Morton, W H Auden, Stephen Spender, Edward Hutchinson, Storm's fellow Yorkshirewomen Winifred Holtby and Edward Upward..
Despite her association with this leftist, London, glitterati, Storm continued her association with Whitby, returning to live in a house on Mayfield Road, a 1930's semi, which fronted onto the Guisborough Moors Road and, at the rear, emptied out into the open countryside, She continued to write from there, was active in the local Whitby Constituency Labour Party, serving for a number of years as the CLP Secretary (and how my heart goes out to her for performing that dreadful job), and as the CLP's Delegate to Labour's Annual Conference where she upset many in the party establishment by speaking and arguing for workers control of industry.
On 7 July, 1934, the British Union of Facists held a large rally at London's Olympia.. About 500 anti-fascists including Storm Jameson, Vera Brittain, the Reverend Dick Sheppard and Aldous Huxley (another writer with a Teesside connection) managed to get inside the hall. When they began heckling Oswald Mosley they were attacked by hundreds of black-shirted stewards. Several of the protesters were badly beaten by the fascists. Jameson argued in the Daily Telegraph "A young woman carried past me by five Blackshirts, her clothes half torn off and her mouth and nose closed by the large hand of one; her head was forced back by the pressure and she must have been in considerable pain. I mention her especially since I have seen a reference to the delicacy with which women interrupters were left to women Blackshirts. This is merely untrue... Why train decent young men to indulge in such peculiarly nasty brutality? "
Hitlerism comes to Hammersmith - the Olympia BUF Rally
Her friendship with Sheppard also led to one of Storm's political errors. Sheppard was, like a radical cleric of our own time, Giles Fraser, a Canon of London's St Paul's Cathedral. He had been an army chaplain during the Great War A committed pacifist he was concerned by the failure of the major nations to agree to international disarmament and in October 1934, he had a letter published in the Manchester Guardian inviting readers to send him a postcard giving their undertaking to "renounce war and never again to support another." Within two days 2,500 responded and over the next few weeks around 30,000 pledged their support for Sheppard's campaign. The result was the founding of the Peace Pledge Union, supported vocally by Storm and many fellow writers and intellectuals including Bertrand Russell,, Labour Party Leader George Lansbury and Great War poet Siegfried Sassoon.
The error here was simply that there was a simple blind contradiction between the naive pacifism of the PPU and the fact there was no way in which this could overcome the brute force shown by the Facist and Nazi states on the European mainland, determined to extirpate any and all progressive movements of the left by force if needed and warranted by their ideology. None the less, Storm remained a member of the PPU until the invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940. She latter wrote in her autobiography: "I had joined Dick Sheppard when he started it, in October 1934. Then, I was absolutely certain that war is viler than anything else imaginable... I don't think that now."
In press articles in 1936 Storm, speaking for her fellow left writers, called for the Labour Party to work with the ILP and the Communist Party to create a British 'Popular Front. movement. In one article she said "The reanimation of the Labour Party - by (1) a change in its constitution. The statement that the Labour Party is ruled by the Trade Unions is delusive. As constituted, it is ruled by a narrow oligarchy of Trade Union leaders, as much out of touch with their rank and file as is the executive of the Labour Party with the Party rank and file. (2) An alliance, on the basis of an exactly defined programme, with the progressive Liberals, I.L.P. and Communist Party, as distinct from a shabby vote-catching agreement between leaders - is a preliminary step towards the only form of Popular Front worth voting for. Apart from a People's Front, what indeed is there to hope for in the political future? And without it, what hope of averting the eventual triumph of reaction by the default of the Labour Party?"
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The struggle continues - Storm snapped in the 1930's
It was at this time that Storm, as well as producing novels on an assembly line basis, became the UK leader of the International Writers Group PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists) a body that acted as a global voice for writers and for the integrity of writers and writing. At a time when writers in continental Europe were under attack from Nazism and Facism this had to be a role which would have to be much more than issuing pious statements. PEN became active in rescuing writers facing persecution and imprisonment and arranging for them to enter the UK as asylum seekers. Storm, in her PEN role, had to be the named sponsor for many of these people and for a time her home (she was now back living in London) resembled an airport arrival lounge for writers fleeing from countries like Austria Spain, Germany and Czechoslovakia where the tanks and planes of the axis were grinding out the life force of democracy.
The experiences of these men and women led Storm to a further ideological facet of her socialism, the conviction that socialism, if it were to survive, had to built in a structure of a united "Europe of the Nations". This conviction was strengthened by her growing disillusionment with the Soviet Union at a time when the Hitler / Stalin Pact and the national Communist movement campaign against the war looked to be merely ceding victory to Facism, and the equal suspicion that the US, despite Roosevelt's New deal, was still at heart a nation actively hostile to social progress and socialism.
During he war, Storm carried on with her writing, with much of her output being novels set in Whitby (Danesborough as she now christened it), augmenting this by acting as a jobbing journalist and pamphleteer for the Ministry of Information, highlighting the role of women workers (in the same fashion as Staithes artist Laura Knight who provided vivid paintings of the factories and the work of the home front emergency services).
She also continued to act as the UK spokesperson for PEN, and in this role (which, given the contending, often monstrous, egos of fellow authors could be seen as trying to herd cats) she had to confront for the first time the growing opposition to democratic socialism of the Communist Party, which, now that the Soviet Union was in the war, had become super patriots, often out-Churchilling Churchill in their opposition to any move from the left which could be seen to be detrimental to the interests of the Soviet Union .
This aspect became more to the fore after the end of the war. In July 1945 Storm visited countries like France, occupied Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Holland and saw at first hand the Concentration Camps, But she also began to witness the growing persecution (and indeed imprisonment) of writers in Eastern Europe if they were seen as being hostile to Stalinist orthodoxy. In an act of supreme irony, PEN had to act to directly help some refugee writers a second time around as they had to flee Stalinism in the same way that they fled from Nazism.
This become a double faceted issue for Storm, as she also faced a growing threat from the other side of the divide. As the cold war developed, many American writers faced growing persecution from McCarthyism, and some, like veteran star Charlie Chaplin and screen director Sam Wanamaker, had to flee the US to survive and continue to work. Parallel to this were the not so subtle attempts to nobble groups like PEN through the covert use of cash funnelled from the CIA to their Front Groups like the "Congress for Cultural Freedom". In this side of the struggle, Storm had to face the bitter anti-communist criticism of some who, like Stephen Spender, had been her allies in the 1930's.
In the post war years she both carried on with her work for PEN and also continued to write novels, again either set in Whitby, or using characters based on local Whitby place-names like ' Nicholas Roxby', 'Captain Esk' or "Mr Thorgill" (a character modelled on a fictional WEA teacher from North Yorkshire who is both used and patronised by younger, upper-class and thoroughly Stalinised University Academics.).
By this time Storm was aging, and often seemed to be a person hailing from a past age. But her political convictions stayed fixed to democratic socialism, in opposition, as it is often put, to 'both Washington and Moscow".
Storm in later years
Her determination and central guiding point was and remained European unity and this was an ideal modelled on her upbringing in Whitby,which she saw as an ideal balanced, human, community and rural France where a veneration of peasant life meshed with the sturdy independence they shared with the fishermen of her native town.
Again, I turn to her autobiography, which in its deliberate titling and in its content, shows how Whitby and the surrounding moors made up her life's outlook and her own life force. "Journey from the North" also showed how growing up in Edwardian England at a moment of radical change and coming to maturity across the historical fissure of the Great War, she also experienced conflicts in her own: as a woman working in what was then a male-dominated sphere of culture; as a socialist with roots in a proudly individualist protestant tradition; as an atheist with roots in religious nonconformity; and as a 'modern' but in whose mind, as she graphically put it "the Victorian habit persisted, like an old coat hung behind the door‟.
Still, none the less, the central truth was that she saw her writing as a way of bringing about a better, socialist, society. As she once said "The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment that words are laid to it."
She enjoyed a brief renaissance in the 1970's as some of her novels as well as her autobiography were re-published as an act of homage to a woman writer by the feminist publishing house, Virago. A blue plaque was erected at the family home in Ladysmith Avenue and a new student accommodation block was named after her. Despite this, I still wonder whether holidaymakers staying at the Saxonville Hotel or indeed today's students at Leeds really know anything of her ?
Storm Jameson Hall at Leeds Uni
She died a very old lady in 1986 in a Cambridge Nursing Home, but despite a lonely death amidst the featureless black earth Fens of St Neots (a landscape as far removed from her birthplace cannot be imagined), she died a Whitby women. To borrow a common cliche 'You could take the woman out of Whitby, but you could not take Whitby out of the woman."
Walshy
Authors notes
(1) Sydney Harland has also been described as one of the intellectual founding fathers of the Green movement. Regrettably, his own genetic bequest to his son, Psychologist Richard Lynn, has not survived, with Lynn becoming a leader of a school which sees IQ's as linked to racial and national differences and who is quoted as a strong influence in the controversial book, "The Bell Curve".
(2) Orage (like his contemporary, Sylvia Pankhurst) later succumbed to occultism, a not unusual route for many raised in the ethos of the Victorian left, a movement that often had a strong interest in such things as spiritualism and theosophy. In consequence most published material on Orage concentrates on this, rather that his political life.
(3) The standard work on Carpenter is Sheila Rowbotham's "Edward Carpenter, a Life of Liberty and Love" published as a Verso paperback.
(4) The most modern writing on Guild Socialism is "Guild Socialism Revisited" by Anthony Wright in the Journal of Contemporary History 1974 and is available via Sage Publications Ltd. Like the ILP, Guild Socialism still survives in the ethereal electronic cloud of the web. (see http://www.guildsocialism.org/
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