"I was determined to forge a path out of Poverty"

The working class battle to build a welfare state to prevent another Hitler.

Chapter 25:

Harry Leslie Smith’s The Green & Pleasant Land tells a true story about the lives of working class people who lived during a time of political and economic extremities. From their sufferings these unemployed miners, mill workers, along with the rest of ordinary Britain made a better world for themselves and others by constructing a Welfare State, where all could share in a nation’s prosperity.

The Harry’s Last Stand project which I worked on with my Dad for the last 10 years of his life was an attempt to use his life story as a template to effect change. His unpublished history- The Green & Pleasant Land is a part of that project. I have been working on it, refining it and editing it to meet my dad’s wishes. It should be ready for a publisher in May.

Your support in keeping my dad’s legacy going and me alive is greatly appreciated. I depend on your subscriptions to keep the lights on and me housed. So if you can please subscribe and if you can’t it is all good because we are fellow travellers in penury. But always remember to share these posts far and wide. Below is another chapter selection from the Green & Pleasant Land.

After Alberta moved out, I knew my time living with my mother, my brothers, and Bill was soon ending. My mum wasn't going to push me out of the nest because she liked my rent money. I wanted to leave home as quickly as I could and not look back. Nothing that happened from my birth in 1923 to 1937 made me think I was better off with my family than on my own.

The brutality of the Great Depression strangled any possibility that my family developed into an empathetic tribe for each other.

During my teenage years, I harshly blamed my mother for our family's destruction. I harboured resentment towards her because I saw my mother as the one who not only exiled my dad to living rough but had made my sister and me- accessories to this betrayal of him.

Shamed by my past, I developed anger and disgust for my Northern poverty. I despised myself because I believe to others I sounded uneducated and unsophisticated. because of my broad accent.

Actors and actresses on the screen all spoke with the diction of the South or with the voices of Americans. I was determined to forge a path for myself out of poverty. If my country refused to provide me the educational skills to do it, I'd find another way to get ahead.

I couldn't afford to go to school to improve my education but I could afford the tuition to take elocution lessons at The Athenaeum Working Man’s Academy in Halifax. I was young enough and foolish enough to believe a posh accent would give me the velocity to escape the gravitational pull of my hard scrabble existence.

I thought having a "better" accent; one that didn't sound like it came from Barnsley and the rough streets of Bradford was my best chance to escape the destiny of a working-class lad who lacked family connections to enter a trade.

The Athenaeum was a cooperative learning centre for languages, pronunciation, diction, and self-improvement. The school was established by a collective of utopian cloth cutters in the 1890s to advance education for the downtrodden.

The classes occurred in the evenings because those who enrolled at the Athenium were full-time workers. There were about nine of us in the class, and all the other students were at least four years older than me.

The other students were children of mill supervisors, greengrocers, or low level clerks in banking and insurance. .

The course consisted of breathing exercises, singing, warbling and denouncing the uncouthness of the accent you were born to. The instructor manhandled my jaw as I repeated nursery rhymes. I was made to repeat the sounds of vowels and consonants while a metronome beat back and forth on the teacher's desk. I spent weeks at it. When I was alone, I recited poetry, read from news papers or imitated dialogue from movies, I'd seen at the cinema.

I tried to erase how my ancestors and, folk were taught to speak and communicate for centuries. It was this mad and desperate hope that by altering the pattern of my speech I could erase the shame of eating from rubbish bins to keep alive as a boy.

Gradually, my speech pattern developed to a more neutral accent, which resembled the ‘neither from here nor there’ county. My workmates at Grosvenor's thought I was taking the piss out of them with my newly developed speech pattern. The owner with his profound reverence for God and self-improvement, applauded my efforts.

As my speaking voice became less my own, I became bolder. I was able to conceal- if only for brief moments, my poor education and my impoverished upbringing.

Near Christmas of that year, I met Alberta for lunch. She was amused at my futile attempts to erase my identity. To her, I was like so many from my class who had attempted this deception before. She called me Icarus at that lunch because she remembered that ancient myths of Greece our dad taught us when we lived with him in the attic of that Bradford Doss on St Andrew’s Villas.. 

"The bloody toffs, are going to burn your wings to cinders." 

Alberta knew- having been disappointed by life more than me because she was older, that you can change your diction but never your history. You drag around the baggage from your past wherever you end up.

Thanks for reading in this case viewing my Substack. It’s an SOS because the end of the month approaches and I am short on rent with only 1 day to go. Your support keeps me housed and also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent and I am looking for 6 of them. Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John. Have a listen below to my dad talk about the past.