"I shouldn't have survived my childhood because I came from the working class."

Harry Leslie Smith

February 25, 1923-November 28, 2018

The Green & Pleasant Land

Chapter Two:

I shouldn’t have survived my childhood during the 1920s because I was sick more often than well. Working-class children were easy prey for death in the early 20th century because healthcare was allotted to those who could afford it- which were the middle and upper classes. 

I was lucky I made it through my first two years of life because my belly was more times empty than full. Too often, persistent malnutrition came close to killing me were it not for my mother’s stubborn determination to see me live into adulthood.

It was she who kept the fire of life burning inside of me no matter how ill I became as a bairn. At around 18 months, I developed a prolapsed rectum from malnutrition that caused a portion of my intestines to slip out of my backside. Later in life, when I questioned her erratic mothering skills, Mum roared back at me, “ You wouldn’t have been alive today if I hadn’t shoved your bowels back up your arsehole when you were a sickly lad. I told death to bugger off and you now thank me like this?”

To her lasting regret, Mum was not able to say the same to Marion in adulthood because she didn't survive her childhood. Marion couldn’t be fixed like I was by shoving my guts back into me. TB wasn’t cured by brute force, and for Marion to survive her form of TB, she needed care in a sanatorium- and that was beyond my parent’s fiscal resources.

1926 was a horrible, hungry time to be dying if you were working class. The streets where the working class lived were angry because they had been cheated by their political leaders who promised a "Land fit for Heroes," after the Great War in 1918. But eight years on, wages for miners hadn't gone up but instead were clawed back. Other workers felt a similar pinch from their employers who wanted more hours worked for less pay.

Work was no more honest then as it is today. Low-wage servitude to the entitled is to live a life in bondage to one’s capitalistic masters.

By May 1926, the working class could take no more. In solidarity with the miners, who were fighting the coal barons for better pay and conditions, Britain's trade unions called for a General Strike to settle wage demands and working conditions for all workers.

The General Strike terrified Britain’s establishment because they feared the country was about to fall into a rabbit hole of revolution. It didn’t want to be Central Europe in 1918 following the end of the First World War-a place where the proletariat took charge. Winston Churchill made speeches in parliament about the strikers and portrayed them as communist revolutionaries out to topple democracy. Strikers were described in newspapers as if they were insurgents or a rabble mob that wanted to storm Buckingham Palace. The prose was feverish and by inference reminded readers how Russian revolutionaries had stormed Imperial Russia’s Winter Palace in 1917, overturning that monarchy.

Right-wing newspapers turned working-class aspirations for fair wages, affordable housing, and the right to time off into a communist plot by Lenin to make the United Kingdom another Soviet Union. Naturally, the middle class accepted this propaganda as gospel because the worker was not thought of as human on equal footing with a homeowner. To them, we were a different and inferior species whose purpose of- existence was to be their maids, dig their coal or drive their commuter buses to their comfortable white-collar places of employment. We were background players in their lives, extras in their real-life silent picture extravaganza.

The General Strike began with militant optimism, and in less than a fortnight; it was crushed by the government, its press, and middle-class animosity. Only the miners’ union refused to budge or break in the face of the intimidation thrown at them by the government and the press. While other workers returned to their employment, the miners’ union held firm with the slogan “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute off the day.”

It was heroic but in vain that the miners’ held their picket line after other trade unions had been beaten into surrender. For their fight for better pay, the miners, their families, and the communities they lived in were destroyed and starved into submission by the Coal Barons who refused to negotiate with the miner's union. The Coal Barons had a stockpile of coal and compliant miners who were not union members to supply Britain’s economy with the fuel it needed to keep running for as long as the strike continued. They had time on their side whilst the strikers did not because strike pay did not pay the rent or the food bill.

During the strike, miners went into deep rent arrears or were evicted from their rented housing. We were starved into submission and then into surrender like rebels on the losing side of a civil war. My mother was compelled as other women married to miners to take my sisters and me to soup kitchens for our daily meals because there was no money left to pay for groceries.

As the strike dragged on for months, Marion's TB grew worse because of our limited food supply. Death was coming for her. My father and mother knew she'd soon be dead. It's why I was told, “Play near Marion because she won’t be with us for long.”

Marion died by inches at the beginning of 1926 and then by feet when autumn approached. The TB wrapped around her spine like an Anaconda and then spread to her other organs. She was an invalid, who even lost her ability to speak. To ease my parents’ burden of care, Dad’s trade union donated to them a wicker landau. It had thin rubber wheels on it, which allowed Marion to be taken outside to enjoy Barnsley’s infrequent days of sun that weren’t obscured from coal fire pollution. When Mum pushed Marion down the street with me by her side, I’d watch the wheels turn and hear their mournful squeak that sounded like cries of pity for its occupant.

Most often, Marion's time before death was spent marooned in our dingy “couldn’t swing a cat” parlour imprisoned on her landau. Sometimes, I sat on the floor near Marion and told her nonsense stories that she responded to with groans of pain or thrashing her hands against the side of the landau. For eating, bathing, dressing, and going to the bathroom, Marion was now totally dependent on my mother’s care. It exhausted my mother and made her impatient with others, including me because I was underfoot when Mum needed to give all her attention to my dying sister.

In early autumn, the miners' determination to continue the strike began to die. The coal barons had starved them out and broken them without mercy. Just before the strike ended- my dad took me to one of their pickets. I don't know the reason; it might have been as simple as there was no one to care for me because my mother was busy tending to Marion. Or it might have been something more profound like my father- wanting to imprint me with an image of working-class courage in the face of insurmountable oppression. Whatever the reason, I remember my visit to his picket line as a lesson taught to me. All human beings must have the right to a decent, fulfilling life.

At the picket, Dad let me ride on his shoulders while he stood with his comrades to fight for fair wages and better working conditions. On Dad’s shoulders, I felt happy and safe in the company of him and his mates who fought a fair fight for our kind.

Not long after my trip to the picket line and my triumphant ride on my father’s shoulders, the miners’ union settled with the Coal Barons. They surrendered to the owners of the pits as if they were a defeated army and were treated with no more mercy than Germany was during the drafting of the Versailles Treaty.

When miners returned to work in the pits, their work hours increased to Victorian times whilst their wages were cut in half. The General Strike proved to the working class that Britain had sacrificed its young in the Great War for nothing more than to maintain and perpetuate the wealth of the few families who controlled our nation’s economy.

October 1926 was a month of incredible brutality: Marion was dying, my family was starving, and the miners' general strike collapsed in humiliating surrender. It was feudalistic what happened to my family and our mining community that year. We were just meat for capitalism’s economic grinder.

At the beginning of October, Mum knew she couldn’t care for Marion any longer. Death was coming hard and quick for my sister. There was nothing left to be done for her at home, and since my parents didn’t have middle-class wealth, Marion couldn’t be taken into the care of a hospital that charged for health services. There was no alternative for Marion’s end-of-life care. She had to be committed to our local workhouse because it had a small infirmary where the working class and the indigent were provided with limited healthcare services. Generally, it was only laudanum to make one's end of life less torturous.

One morning in early October, Dad, with the help of a neighbour, lifted Marion, who rested on her wicker bed onto the back of a coal wagon drawn by a lone horse. After Marion was put on the wagon, my mother climbed up to accompany her to the workhouse. The horse and wagon forlornly pulled away from our front stoop and moved slowly down the street towards the workhouse.

Marion lasted less than a fortnight in the workhouse infirmary. My parents went every day to visit my sister and make her feel that she was loved until she died.

There was no funeral for Marion after she died. My parents could not afford the cost of burial because they were destitute from fighting the General Strike. Instead, she was dumped in a pauper's pit and shared her grave with the indigent of our community.

It was bitterly ironic that the month and year Marion died was the same month and year A. A. Milne’s first Winnie the Pooh book was published and sold in shops. Marion was dead, and the General Strike was crushed by the entitled. But for middle-class kids at the end of 1926, their bedtime stories were filled with tales about "Pooh Corner- an idealistic wood that was easy for them to imagine because they weren't hungry, cold, or their families too poor to afford a doctor should they fall ill.

This month marks the 5th anniversary of my dad's death. It also marks the second anniversary of my Harry's Last Stand newsletter going live. During these past 24 months, I have posted 245 essays, as well as excerpts from the unpublished works of Harry Leslie Smith - along with chapter samples from my book about him. My newsletter has grown from a handful of subscribers to 1200 in that period. Around 10% of you are paid members. I appreciate all of you but ask if you can switch to a paid subscription because your help is NEEDED to keep me housed and Harry Leslie Smith's legacy relevant. But if you can't all is good too because we are sharing the same boat.  Take care, John.