That’s why the most successful writing about the working class is funny. Brassed Off, though tragic, was also funny. Coronation Street used to be funny. Ena Sharples said, ‘A woman needs a good strong voice’, but she was grimly funny. Ken Loach writes poverty porn. He is not funny.
Thanks Claire – just watched it and remembered why I found it so moving as a kid. Almost in tears at the end.
Strange to hear the kids talked of as factory fodder – now that the factories have almost all gone. And still the education system is failing so many.
My pleasure David.
Maybe trying to make things better for kids is all we can do. I had a particularly good English teacher, with a working class accent, I wish I could remember her name. She once had a thoroughly mixed class of usually stroppy teenage girls raptly listening to her explain one of John Donne’s metaphysical love poems. I’m not sure inspiring teaching like that is possible now.
Last edited 2 years ago by Claire D
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
It could be argued that one of the reasons for the success of ‘Honey’ was the sudden appearance of Northern accents in the theatre, a theatre which had previously been dominated by the South.
Therefore we are perhaps not talking about a Male/Female issue here but a North/South.
Claire D
2 years ago
My Working Class Heroine.
Kitty Wilkinson – the ‘Saint of the Slums’, 1786 – 1860. During the cholera epidemic in Liverpool 1826 – 1837 Kitty shared her boiler with her neighbours at a charge of 1d per week, boiling clothes and bedding killed the cholera bacteria. Convinced of the importance of cleanliness in the fight against disease she pushed for the first combined public bath and wash house in Liverpool which opened in 1846, and she was superintendent. She was presented with a silver teapot from Queen Victoria by the mayor and there is a statue of her in St George’s Hall.
Last edited 2 years ago by Claire D
Jean Nutley
2 years ago
I am having difficulty tying the headline of the article into the synopsis of “Honey”.
Working class women have plenty of heroines, namely their mothers, aunts and grandmothers before them. My great aunt Mary was in service from a tender age,becoming a companion to an industrialists wife in her middle years. Mary also owned five houses and was a suffragette. I wouldn’t mind being a bob or two behind her right now!
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
But these “new wave” plays lost their momentum quickly by the Seventies as the boom years of the Sixties had raised up the working-class along with their expectations. The working-class did not want to do grim in the arts: when it came to the arts. They did not want to be defined by grimness. They wanted to be as happy and optimistic as everyone else.
The plain old folk had probably enjoyed great films like Hobson’s Choice, that, although made in the 50s was set in the 1890s, because Salford was given an upstanding sheen by the storyline: a morality and good endeavour that apparently persisted among most of the working-class population. The reality was not so sweet. Hence the necessary pinprick of a play like ‘Honey’, by Shelagh Delaney.
I recall reading about the decline of the “new wave” plays (such as “Look Back In Anger”) by stumbling ten years ago across a musty old Silver Jubilee souvenir pull-out section of the Yorkshire Evening Post, dated July 1977. There were a few articles on how much Britain had changed in terms of the arts: in plays, cinema, music.
And there was a short article on why the “new wave” plays had declined so dramatically in terms of popularity. I don’t remember all of it. But there did not seem to be any thoughts that “a voice” had been lost.
The left-leaning arts world has championed “the arts” as a way to get much-needed funds from the government during the corona pandemic. People from all walks of life know how good for the soul and the health the arts are.
It’s up to the working-class, whoever they are, to make good use of artistic endeavours and the freedoms on offer to push their case, their cause. They are allowed a voice. Perhaps good ones are drowned out in our multichannel, tech-ridden age?
The working-class did not want to do grim in the arts
This reminds me of the way middle class socialists used to talk about working class people – as if they only had one opinion to share between them!
Working class people are as individual as everyone else. Indeed, rather more individual than a lot of middle class people – social pressure to conform really has made the latter rather like a lot of clones of each other.
The English-Welsh novelist and writer Charles Morgan wrote a very short essay on The Uncommon Man. In it he believes “… that the coming age will be that of the Uncommon rather than of the Common Man, …” His “two reasons for believing this” are that “first, that the concept of the Common Man” is “false, inhuman and fictitious”; and “second, that my experience of men and women has taught me that they love their differences, …, and will not tolerate the sea-green regimenters who, in the name of social equality, seek to impose upon them a grey sameness of the soul.”
Morgan then describes how an individual who “has had genuine experience of life outside a social-betterment committee … and has worked with the so-called masses instead of grinding a political axe on their backs; …” has “learned his fellow-creatures outside the sheep-pens of the social dogmatists.”
Morgan himself had served in the Royal Navy in WW1 and been imprisoned (along with several others) at a remote castle or keep on the Belgian-Dutch coastal border (if I recall correctly when I read a brief bio on him).
He goes on to say of the individual who has “learned” his “fellow-creatures” that he “knows that each one of them is an uncommon man and is incapable of thinking of himself or of the man next to him in any other terms.”
He writes: “Woe betide the priest who looks for the Common Parishioner and not for the child of God, or the captain who is not a distinguisher of sailors, or the midshipman whose cutter’s crew is for him an Average multiplied by twelve! The boat is called away at night. The shore is distant by a long spell under oars. The dip of the blades, the click-clock of the crutches, the steady body-swing, the dim monotony of twelve faces half hidden, half revealed: might not the midshipman on his dickey almost be lulled into supposing himself confronted by a dozen specimens of the Common Man? Not when shore is reached and the boat waits, tied up to a wall, and pipes are lighted. Then each man is distinct; alone in his case of flesh as all spirits are, as Nelson was; with a sense of association, never of sameness, and, ultimately, incommunicable. Look in the twelve faces: the Common Man is not there, nor any awareness of him.”
In the essay, Morgan wondered if his dissenters reading of his stance would presume that he has “always inhabited an ivory tower of privilege” and is therefore “disabled from opinion on this matter by his ignorance of ‘the masses’”. But he remarks that “the supreme insolence of the regimenters, and their most profound delusion, is their belief that ‘the masses’ exist. There is no ivory tower so windowless as theirs.”
I’ve quoted the above passages from The Uncommon Man by Charles Morgan, which in turn appears in Reflections In A Mirror by the publishers Messrs Macmillan and Co., Ltd, as stated in the Acknowledgements in The Harrap Book Of Modern Essays edited by Lionel Gough (first published in GB in 1952).
What an interesting post, thank you.
Reminds me of Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times and his ‘facts’.
Martin Bollis
2 years ago
”There was an attempt to suppress Honey before it was even staged. At a time when all plays were subject to censorship, Theatre Workshop was required to submit Delaney’s manuscript to the Lord Chamberlain for inspection.”
I’m as anti woke cancel culture as most commenters on here, but it’s worth remembering there were cancel cultures before woke and they often had more institutional power.
“Shelagh suggested that women were unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood”
No doubt true for some, but since feminism compulsory for all.
David Morley
2 years ago
they ripped through any romanticism about working-class life
I saw this as a film when I was a working class kid, and loved it. For me the contrast wasn’t with posh theatre, but with a lot of pap on tv.
We were rough, even by working class standards, and my parents didn’t have a qualification between them, but we watched Play for Today and similar fare on a regular basis.
There has always been a thirst for things that “really say something”.
Ah yes, Play for Today, a wonderful serious of serious plays (mostly). I loved the majority of these things when I was in my teens, I particularly liked Rita Tushingham in A Taste of Honey. Like you, Mr Morley, I came from a working-class family and was raised in a working-class area with parents who left school at thirteen (in my mother’s case before that, I think, as she could barely read and write), and although we all enjoyed “escapist” entertainment we also liked seeing ourselves and our struggles reflected on screen. A continual diet of the “kitchen-sink” dramas would have been too much though, but it was refreshing to see them, and Sheila Hancock and Miriam Karlin were two of my favourites in the delightfulThe Rage Trade, ok this was a comedy not a drama, working-class heroines both (at least on-screen).
That’s why the most successful writing about the working class is funny. Brassed Off, though tragic, was also funny. Coronation Street used to be funny. Ena Sharples said, ‘A woman needs a good strong voice’, but she was grimly funny. Ken Loach writes poverty porn. He is not funny.
I recently found ‘Our Day Out’ by Willy Russell (1977) on Youtube, absolutely brilliant, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Saw this as a working class kid when it came out -loved it – thanks very much, will check it out.
Thanks Claire – just watched it and remembered why I found it so moving as a kid. Almost in tears at the end.
Strange to hear the kids talked of as factory fodder – now that the factories have almost all gone. And still the education system is failing so many.
My pleasure David.
Maybe trying to make things better for kids is all we can do. I had a particularly good English teacher, with a working class accent, I wish I could remember her name. She once had a thoroughly mixed class of usually stroppy teenage girls raptly listening to her explain one of John Donne’s metaphysical love poems. I’m not sure inspiring teaching like that is possible now.
It could be argued that one of the reasons for the success of ‘Honey’ was the sudden appearance of Northern accents in the theatre, a theatre which had previously been dominated by the South.
Therefore we are perhaps not talking about a Male/Female issue here but a North/South.
My Working Class Heroine.
Kitty Wilkinson – the ‘Saint of the Slums’, 1786 – 1860. During the cholera epidemic in Liverpool 1826 – 1837 Kitty shared her boiler with her neighbours at a charge of 1d per week, boiling clothes and bedding killed the cholera bacteria. Convinced of the importance of cleanliness in the fight against disease she pushed for the first combined public bath and wash house in Liverpool which opened in 1846, and she was superintendent. She was presented with a silver teapot from Queen Victoria by the mayor and there is a statue of her in St George’s Hall.
I am having difficulty tying the headline of the article into the synopsis of “Honey”.
Working class women have plenty of heroines, namely their mothers, aunts and grandmothers before them. My great aunt Mary was in service from a tender age,becoming a companion to an industrialists wife in her middle years. Mary also owned five houses and was a suffragette. I wouldn’t mind being a bob or two behind her right now!
But these “new wave” plays lost their momentum quickly by the Seventies as the boom years of the Sixties had raised up the working-class along with their expectations. The working-class did not want to do grim in the arts: when it came to the arts. They did not want to be defined by grimness. They wanted to be as happy and optimistic as everyone else.
The plain old folk had probably enjoyed great films like Hobson’s Choice, that, although made in the 50s was set in the 1890s, because Salford was given an upstanding sheen by the storyline: a morality and good endeavour that apparently persisted among most of the working-class population. The reality was not so sweet. Hence the necessary pinprick of a play like ‘Honey’, by Shelagh Delaney.
I recall reading about the decline of the “new wave” plays (such as “Look Back In Anger”) by stumbling ten years ago across a musty old Silver Jubilee souvenir pull-out section of the Yorkshire Evening Post, dated July 1977. There were a few articles on how much Britain had changed in terms of the arts: in plays, cinema, music.
And there was a short article on why the “new wave” plays had declined so dramatically in terms of popularity. I don’t remember all of it. But there did not seem to be any thoughts that “a voice” had been lost.
The left-leaning arts world has championed “the arts” as a way to get much-needed funds from the government during the corona pandemic. People from all walks of life know how good for the soul and the health the arts are.
It’s up to the working-class, whoever they are, to make good use of artistic endeavours and the freedoms on offer to push their case, their cause. They are allowed a voice. Perhaps good ones are drowned out in our multichannel, tech-ridden age?
This reminds me of the way middle class socialists used to talk about working class people – as if they only had one opinion to share between them!
Working class people are as individual as everyone else. Indeed, rather more individual than a lot of middle class people – social pressure to conform really has made the latter rather like a lot of clones of each other.
The English-Welsh novelist and writer Charles Morgan wrote a very short essay on The Uncommon Man. In it he believes “… that the coming age will be that of the Uncommon rather than of the Common Man, …” His “two reasons for believing this” are that “first, that the concept of the Common Man” is “false, inhuman and fictitious”; and “second, that my experience of men and women has taught me that they love their differences, …, and will not tolerate the sea-green regimenters who, in the name of social equality, seek to impose upon them a grey sameness of the soul.”
Morgan then describes how an individual who “has had genuine experience of life outside a social-betterment committee … and has worked with the so-called masses instead of grinding a political axe on their backs; …” has “learned his fellow-creatures outside the sheep-pens of the social dogmatists.”
Morgan himself had served in the Royal Navy in WW1 and been imprisoned (along with several others) at a remote castle or keep on the Belgian-Dutch coastal border (if I recall correctly when I read a brief bio on him).
He goes on to say of the individual who has “learned” his “fellow-creatures” that he “knows that each one of them is an uncommon man and is incapable of thinking of himself or of the man next to him in any other terms.”
He writes: “Woe betide the priest who looks for the Common Parishioner and not for the child of God, or the captain who is not a distinguisher of sailors, or the midshipman whose cutter’s crew is for him an Average multiplied by twelve! The boat is called away at night. The shore is distant by a long spell under oars. The dip of the blades, the click-clock of the crutches, the steady body-swing, the dim monotony of twelve faces half hidden, half revealed: might not the midshipman on his dickey almost be lulled into supposing himself confronted by a dozen specimens of the Common Man? Not when shore is reached and the boat waits, tied up to a wall, and pipes are lighted. Then each man is distinct; alone in his case of flesh as all spirits are, as Nelson was; with a sense of association, never of sameness, and, ultimately, incommunicable. Look in the twelve faces: the Common Man is not there, nor any awareness of him.”
In the essay, Morgan wondered if his dissenters reading of his stance would presume that he has “always inhabited an ivory tower of privilege” and is therefore “disabled from opinion on this matter by his ignorance of ‘the masses’”. But he remarks that “the supreme insolence of the regimenters, and their most profound delusion, is their belief that ‘the masses’ exist. There is no ivory tower so windowless as theirs.”
I’ve quoted the above passages from The Uncommon Man by Charles Morgan, which in turn appears in Reflections In A Mirror by the publishers Messrs Macmillan and Co., Ltd, as stated in the Acknowledgements in The Harrap Book Of Modern Essays edited by Lionel Gough (first published in GB in 1952).
What an interesting post, thank you.
Reminds me of Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times and his ‘facts’.
”There was an attempt to suppress Honey before it was even staged. At a time when all plays were subject to censorship, Theatre Workshop was required to submit Delaney’s manuscript to the Lord Chamberlain for inspection.”
I’m as anti woke cancel culture as most commenters on here, but it’s worth remembering there were cancel cultures before woke and they often had more institutional power.
“Shelagh suggested that women were unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood”
No doubt true for some, but since feminism compulsory for all.
I saw this as a film when I was a working class kid, and loved it. For me the contrast wasn’t with posh theatre, but with a lot of pap on tv.
We were rough, even by working class standards, and my parents didn’t have a qualification between them, but we watched Play for Today and similar fare on a regular basis.
There has always been a thirst for things that “really say something”.
Ah yes, Play for Today, a wonderful serious of serious plays (mostly). I loved the majority of these things when I was in my teens, I particularly liked Rita Tushingham in A Taste of Honey. Like you, Mr Morley, I came from a working-class family and was raised in a working-class area with parents who left school at thirteen (in my mother’s case before that, I think, as she could barely read and write), and although we all enjoyed “escapist” entertainment we also liked seeing ourselves and our struggles reflected on screen. A continual diet of the “kitchen-sink” dramas would have been too much though, but it was refreshing to see them, and Sheila Hancock and Miriam Karlin were two of my favourites in the delightfulThe Rage Trade, ok this was a comedy not a drama, working-class heroines both (at least on-screen).