Synopsis:

In the 1930s, commissioned by a left-wing book club, Orwell went to the industrial areas of northern England to investigate and record the real situation of the working class. Orwell did more than just investigate; he went down to the deepest part of the mine, lived in dilapidated and filthy workers’ houses, and used the tip of his pen to vividly reveal every aspect of the coal miners’ lives. Reading today, 80 years later, Still shockingly true. The despair and poverty conveyed by this picture have a terrifying power that transcends time and national boundaries. At the same time, the Road to Wigan Pier is also Orwell’s road to socialism as he examines his own inner self. Born in the British middle class, he recalled how he gradually began to doubt and then hate the strict class barriers that divided British society at that time. Because in his mind, socialism ultimately means only one concept: “justice and freedom.” (Goodreads)

The Road to Wigan Pier, written in 1936 and published in 1937, is a book of two halves. Orwell’s graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain. I loved Part One, Part Two less so. I was much more interested in the social and economic conditions than in Orwell’s political views on socialism and fascism.

I knew very little about the 1930s, so I was fascinated and appalled by Orwell’s descriptions in Part One of the working conditions in the coal mines in three towns in the industrial north of England in 1936. His experience of working in a coal mine convinced him that could never have been a coal miner:

I am not a manual labourer and please God I shall never be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that i could do if I had to. At a pinch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; the work would kill me in a few weeks.

Yet as bad as the conditions in the mines were in 1936, Orwell stated that it was not long since conditions had been even worse, and he went on to describe how women used to have to work underground, crawling on all fours with a harness round their waists and a chain that passed between their legs dragging tubs of coal even when they were pregnant.

The slag heaps were just ‘dumped on the earth like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin’ on the outskirts of the mining towns and often they were on fire. At night they could be seen as ‘rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue flames of sulphur’.

Orwell states that

… the majority of these houses are old, fifty or sixty years old at least, and great numbers of them are by any ordinary standard not fit for human habitation. They go on being tenanted simply because there are no others to be had. And that is the central fact about housing in the industrial areas: not that the houses are poky and ugly, and insanitary and comfortless, or that they are distributed in incredibly filthy slums round belching foundries and stinking canals and slag heaps that deluge them with sulphurous smoke – though all this is perfectly true – but simply that there are not enough houses to go round.

Given that the living and working conditions were so appalling it was no surprise to read Orwell’s descriptions of the miners’ health – the most distinctive thing about them were the blue scars on their noses. The coal dust entered every cut and then their skin grew over it and formed the blue stain like tattooing. Only the largest pits had pithead baths, so the miners could only wash when they got home, where it was impossible to wash all over but they could only wash in a bowl of water – and that was only the top half of their bodies. This was because none of the miners’ houses had hot water and at the time they were built no one had imagined that the miners wanted baths!

Before he’d looked into the real situation of the working class, Orwell had thought that the miners were comparatively well paid having heard that a miner was paid ten or eleven shillings a shift, concluding that every one was earning round about £2 a week or £150 a year. However the actual average earnings were only £115 11s 6d. He included a list of weekly stoppages that were given to him as typical in one Lancashire district and also a comprehensive account of their expenses, all of which reduced their earnings considerably.

He then went on to describe the rate of accidents and of those miners killed and injured – if a miner’s working life was forty years the chances were nearly seven to one against his escaping injury and not much more that twenty to one of his being killed outright, giving horrifying accounts of being buried by rock falls when a roof came down. The most understandable cause of accidents was gas explosions, but there were also ‘pot-holes’, circular holes that shot out lumps of stone big enough to kill a man and large stretches of roof were left unpropped because of the increased speed at which the coal was extracted. No other trade was this dangerous.

I struggled to keep my attention focused whilst reading Part Two. He wrote about class divisions, class prejudice and the struggle towards a liberation from the constrictions of class. He pondered whether he had been born into the lower-upper middle class or the upper middle class, or whether it was better to define the class division in terms of money – that is, a layer of society lying between £2000 ad £300 a year. In any case he thought it was not entirely explicable in terms of money as there was also a sort of shadowy caste-system involved. But a lot of Part Two just went over my head.

I was curious about the title, because there is no ‘road to Wigan Pier’ in Orwell’s book and also because I’d grown up knowing that ‘Wigan Pier’ was not a pleasure pier at the seaside – Wigan is not near the sea. It’s inland and part of Greater Manchester!

In a broadcast radio interview of 1943 Orwell elaborated on the name Wigan Pier:

Wigan is in the middle of the mining areas. The landscape is mostly slag-heaps – Wigan has always been picked on as a symbol of the ugliness of the industrial areas. At one time, on one of the muddy little canals that run round the town, there used to be a tumble-down wooden jetty; and by way of a joke some nicknamed this Wigan Pier. The joke caught on locally, and then the music-hall comedians got hold of it, and they are the ones who have succeeded in keeping Wigan Pier alive as a byword.” (Wikipedia)

For more information about the current ‘Wigan Pier’ area see this article about a proposal to redevelop the disused 18th century industrial buildings that is being led by Step Places, The Old Courts, Wigan Council and the Canal and River Trust with the aim of creating a new cultural destination.

I read this book as part of The 1936 Club hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon from Stuck in a Book blogs, but was too late to enter my post with the other bloggers’ links during the club event.