English Journey: ‘The finest book ever written about England and the English’

Sometimes a particular book keeps coming to your attention from different directions and you know that you will have to read it. This was the case with J. B. Priestley's English Journey - in fact I'd bought a copy before I even realised that it was the inspiration for the latest title from my favourite current English travel(ish) writer, Stuart Maconie.Priestley made a journey around parts of England in 1933 - not the pretty bits (apart from the Cotswolds) but more what back then were thought of as that derogatory feeling location 'the provinces'. Priestley was an odd mix for the period - a London literary type, but one from Bradford who still considered being northern a positive. What he is without doubt superb on is uncovering the social conditions of the time. Unlike Orwell's attempt, which feels a bit like someone looking at an alien species through a microscope, this is a picture of the common people by someone who identified personally with their plight (although he can still come across as a touch snobbish).One piece of information he gives really struck home. While visiting Bournville, the Cadbury family's model living space in the West Midlands, he notes (while pondering whether or not such a pleasant but controlling environment is a good thing) that infant mortality is lower than the average 69 per thousand live births in England and Wales. Compare that with the current value of 3.7 and you really realise that, despite all our moans, things are a lot better now than they were in the 1930s.On a less important, but quite interesting, level I found it remarkable that Priestley was using the word ‘robot’ repeatedly only 10 years or so after it appeared in English. It seems to have become very rapidly (for a time with slower communications) embedded as a term that doesn't need explaining. It did also strike me that it was a shame that he chose to make the journey in late autumn/early winter when, to be honest, the weather ensures that few places in England are at their best - he even admits to seeing places differently when it's a rare sunny day.The greatness of this as a travel book is that it is a portrait not of places, but of the English people, specifically the English working class. Is it sexist? Certainly - it is of its time, though Priestley does at least celebrate the character of women, particularly Lancastrian women. But his genuine sympathy with the plight of so many people whose home town’s reason for existing was an industry that hardly existed anymore is remarkable. It’s also the case that his plea for the left behind of the industrial North is horrendously still an issue 90 years later. Just as Priestley bemoans the way the south east's wealth has been made on the backs of those now discarded workers so we can see the appeal of levelling up… and exactly the same inability to make it happen as was the case then.To make a slight personal moan as an inhabitant of Swindon, which is one of the places he visits, it's about the only place dominated by an industry (in Swindon's case, the railway works) where he simply complains that it's not a very nice place to be in, but doesn't bother to visit the workplace as he does practically everywhere else, nor does he really engage with the people. Swindon's main role in the book seems to be to provide a contrast with Bristol and the Cotswolds, which was a little mean of him.I can see why so many people enthuse about this book. It has its faults. Apart from those already mentioned, it is, frankly, significantly too long and spends too much time making any particular point and then re-making at some length. Priestley's style can be a little heavy going to the modern reader. But the fact remains that this a landmark book, which shows just how long levelling up the country has been an issue that successive governments have failed to address.

Son of Bradford with an entertaining turn of phrase and a period piece

The writing is brilliant. Unfortunately the paperback version fell apart by chapter 3, losing pages in the process.

Priestley subtitled his ‘English Journey’ with these words; “being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933.” He was almost forty years old.I came to this work fresh as a recommended antidote to the sickliness of HV Morton’s ‘In Search of England’ of 1927 (also reviewed by me). Morton stuck to the heritage trail: rural idylls, quaint rustic customs, quaint rustic people, old cathedral cities, country towns, Shakespeare, with overawed and amusing American visitors. He had an eye for the ladies and not for their poor livelihoods. He steered clear of anything that smelt of oil and grease or turned coal into power.Priestley, though, was curious about all of the different kinds of England and divided his trip neatly into twelve chapters, zigzagging north from Southampton up to Northumbria and returning to London via East Anglia. Personally, it is a shame he never ventured to Devon and Cornwall, but at least he got to Bristol.The opening paragraph is so good, that I immediately warmed to Priestley and knew I had met a man who spoke my language. About the luxuriousness of the then-modern motor coach, he writes – tongue firmly but not totally in cheek – “They are voluptuous, sybaritic, of doubtful morality. If the proletariat has money in its pocket now, it can lead a life of a satrap. And it does. It is the decaying landed county folk … who are the Spartans of our time. But who and where are our Athenians? Perhaps this journey will tell me.”Reading his experiences one cannot but make comparisons with today. For instance, in Southampton, “I noticed too quite a number of blatant cut-price shops, their windows crammed with goods, mostly inferior and dubious, and loud with placards so exclamatory that they made one’s eyes jump.” And Southampton still has its liners, but Swindon has lost its locomotives and Bristol its cigarettes and chocolate. The Cotswolds are still “charming” and it was good to read Priestley being tolerant of monied eccentricity even if it has no economic rationality.Whilst so much still connects us to the thirties, so much also distances us. For instance, Priestley attends a meeting of the fascist black shirts where “most of the audience consisted of communists … I do not imagine, however, that either of these parties will make many converts in Bristol.” But it is tragic – and ironic – that he can see old Coventry as a set for a performance of ‘Die Meistersinger’.But the further north he travels, the more the effects of the depression were evident. This was a time “when there never were more men doing nothing and there never was before so much to be done.” He has wise words and acute observations about football matches and fairgrounds. His ability to take a minor incident or, say, a piece of architecture and run with it in an absorbing manner appears quite natural.Then there is his famed humanity. In Gateshead he fiercely argues with an earnest youth but accompanies his assertions with a friendly smile. Imagine his shock and shame when he suddenly becomes aware that the boy is blind. And amidst the economic devastation and the blighted working lives of East Durham, Priestley declares, “if any reader thinks that … the writer of these chapters is rapidly turning himself into a prig as the book grows, I can only ask that reader, before finally passing judgement, to make the same journey that I have made. A few days in North-Eastern England will do the trick.”Back in London at the end of his journey, Priestley contemplates three different Englands. The first is that of Morton, “Old England, the country of the cathedrals and monasteries and manor houses and inns, of Parson and Squire”; the second comprises the England of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution later explored by Orwell in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’; the third can be epitomised in one word: Woolworths! This is the modern England, clean-lined and consumer-orientated. They all still survive to a greater or lesser extent in the twenty-first century.This is a review of the Great Northern Books edition, a handsome, unabridged, hardback book released on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Priestley’s original in 1934. There are a number of annoying typological errors, but the one thing that is missing is a map of his journey. But, in addition to some modern photographs taken by Rod Slater, photographs of no great quality in terms of texture or framing – indeed, some are not worthy of so fine an edition – there are a number of small introductory essays.These include short pieces by Lee Hanson, who compares Priestley to Cobbett, Johnson, and Engels (who is his present-day equivalent?); John Baxendale, who reviews the different critical approaches to the book; Beryl Bainbridge, who asserts that Priestley would not see many differences if he returned today; Alan Plater, who recommends that today’s elites within the M25 take a few more English journeys of their own; and William Woodruff, who reflects on his own experiences of 1930s Blackburn. There is a longer piece by Margaret Drabble who looks afresh at the Potteries with Priestley’s book in hand, whilst Margaret Cullingford tells us of the finding of a remarkable scrapbook.Nina Bawden provides a foreword to this edition, Priestley’s son Tom supplies an introduction, and Roy Hattersley a preface. Hattersley notes that “no prejudices spoil our appreciation of the journey. Much of what he saw Priestley liked, admired, enjoyed. The rest he simply wanted to improve.”