The Green & Pleasant Land-Harry Leslie Smith's last book-a plea for the Welfare State.

I am navigating all the excerpts from The Green And Pleasant Land to a subfolder on my Harry's Last Stand Substack. It will be easier for readers to find the progression of the last book Harry Leslie Smith worked on before his death in November 2018. I have been editing and shaping it to how my Dad wanted it presented to his readers.

Reading a chapter here or there doesn't give the full breadth of despair and desperation endured by the working class during the Great Depression.

The book is an intimate look at poverty. My father learned first-hand how destitution dissolves a family's love for each other with the harshness of acid touching human skin. It's a political testament of outrage about the lost potential of the working class, who then- like now were chained to lives of hungry drudgery.  

The Green & Pleasant Land is an important to read at this juncture in our history. Society is broken. Democracy does not function as it was intended. The system is not a for and by-the-people institution anymore. It works for the select entitled few. It can't be repaired, unless we rebuild a Welfare State fit for the 21st century. Democracy won't survive neoliberalism, and should we continue on this path- most of us will envy the dead.

It might even be too late to stop our march to authoritarianism. But it is still worth the effort to resist.

As this Substack now has two distinct sections, there will be, at least for the next few days- perhaps- 2 posts per day. I apologise for that, and my only excuse is I need the money from your paid subscriptions to stay housed. I am living through a harsh publish or perish moment. So you have my apologies and thanks for your kindness.  

Although, I believe anything I send you believe has merit and is worth the read. I can't stress enough if you can't afford a paid subscription, don't worry because by reading all of this you are helping me too. But if you can move to a paid subscription and feel it is worth it-please do because I don't think I can do any of this from a pitched tent. So enough of the preamble. Let's start again for some and anew for others at my father's beginning in the Green and Pleasant Land. At the end of the these two chapters, you will find an audio recording of Harry Leslie Smith’s audio recording talking about the times past and the times present to him in 2017. I have also included a tip jar for those inclined.

Chapter One:

I was born in a Barnsley slum on February 25^th during the economically bleak winter of 1923. My working-class family were on a first name basis with poverty and hunger, so my beginnings weren’t auspicious but damning. The start to my impecunious rough and ready life was the way it was for the working class during the first quarter of the 20^th century, and had been for the centuries previous. From my first breath of life outside of the womb and all subsequent breaths during childhood; my belly would never be full because I was the bairn of a Yorkshire miner during a glut in the price of coal.  

Working at the coal face was what my folk had done since the Industrial Revolution. Before then, my ancestors mined tin. That was what capitalism dictated, we were good for- brute labour for the profits of the mucks who lived in stately homes. I am sure, in ancient times, those from my blood line dug for the metals that were smelted into bronze.

Had The Great Depression and the Second World War not revolutionised my working-class world, I too would have earned my crust by hacking coal from Yorkshire’s sunless underworld.

1923 was a fearful, unstable, and melancholic time to come into existence. Grief over the dead from the First Great War was still as sharp as broken glass because memories of the war were as fresh as the scent from a grave dug in the morning to someone who strolls a cemetery in the tea time light of evening. A hundred million soldiers, mostly workers from the nations of Europe, were slaughtered in that war, that the entitled said would end all wars. Bollocks.

They died for nothing except the vanity of the monarchs who ruled Europe during that era and the greed of their munition makers. The coal barons, steel merchants, uniform makers, ship builders, stock brokers, and bankers all made a pretty penny helping to crank the handle of the meat grinder called the Western Front

When the guns went dumb and the killing stopped, peace took up a sword of pestilence rather than a ploughshare. Over 60 million across the world were slayed by a plague known as the Spanish Flu. . The virus was a modern-day Black Death, and it collected the living and put them in their graves with medieval haste. It brought death everywhere in the world, including Yorkshire. Then in 1922; it petered out like a forest fire that burnt down all the trees.

So much, death, disease, poverty and despair awaited me once I emerged from the birth canal.

It is little wonder why my mother was in labour with me for hours. I just didn’t want to budge from my safe harbour inside her womb. I did not want to meet a world full of threats, harm, and caution. I would not be coaxed out with either gentle words or harsh curses. But eventually I appeared into this world during the early morning hours while a freezing rainstorm pelted the window of my parent’s dingy front parlour.

 I let all around me know I wasn’t pleased to have arrived. I hollered at the top of my lungs after a midwife who loved gin and shag cigarettes slapped my arse. I mewled like a runt of the litter for milk from my Mum’s breast because I was underweight.

Being born malnourished was normal for my class in 1923. No matter how hard my dad laboured  below in the pits, he never earned enough money to pay the rent and feed his kind. He was capitalism’s beast of burden and treated accordingly.

In the year of my birth, my parents were new settlers to Barnsley. They had come to this spot of Yorkshire because the pits here promised a better wage than up in Wakefield and Barley Hole. Besides, Barnsley was far enough away from my dad’s siblings, who despised my mother and ostracised him for marry her.

When I was older, and Mum was soured by the hunger created by the Great Depression, she revealed to me my father’s family were a little bit more than colliers. They were “better folk” according to her. My dad, she said in moments of acrimony during the 1930s, had let his family’s pub slip through his hands. “It could have kept us in clover until we all breathed our last.”

On the day of my birth, my father was not glad-handed down at his local by neighbours in our village of Hoyland Common. No one slapped his back or shook his hand in congratulations because; when I was born, Dad was in his late fifties, and Mum was 27 years his junior.

She had foolishly fallen in love with him in 1913. He had the gift of the gab and an optimism that was infectious. My mother attached her wagon to my Dad's destiny nine years before my birth. In 1914, she believed, despite his advanced age; he could guarantee her a secure future. Mum lived until the day of her death feeling cursed by the creed: marry in haste and repent in leisure.

Mum felt my dad had the best prospects for her future. Dad was the son of miner/ innkeeper for a public house that stood on the fringe of a colliery in the decrepit village of Barley Hole. It was in the nether regions between Sheffield and Barnsley. So, when my granddad died in 1914, my parents assumed my father would become master of the New Inn and his days as a coal miner would be over. My parents married on that expectation.

But my parents’ dreams for financial stability were as hopeful as believing a sandcastle would stand after the eventide comes ashore. Life always has other plans for us rather than happiness and a pocket full of cash.

My father didn’t inherit the publican license after Granddad died. Instead, it transferred over to his uncle Larrat ensuring Dad would die a miner rather than a business owner. The machinations Larrat employed to accomplish this were as pernicious and preposterous as any subplot from a Dicken’s novel or at least that is how it seemed to me when my mother during my youth ranted about our “lost legacy.” 

After my grandad died my parents moved on from Barley Hole. All my dad took from the pub was a painted portrait of his father, and an upright piano.

According to Mum, bad luck followed our family with the persistence of a stray dog looking for an owner because of Dad’s tender heart. He wasn’t “tough enough, for this life.” Poor Dad was the toughest of us all . He took the misfortunes that came his way after my birth with stoicism and good humour. Sadly, including me, none of his family recognised his heroism because we were too busy trying to escape our own destruction.

Nine years had passed since the time of my parent’s marriage to my wails of life. The intervening time was a series of disappointments and defeats for my parents. Their relationship in 1923 was shorn of its lustre. Mum was only twenty-eight, but she felt like a broad mare when I was born having already given birth to my two elder sisters, Marion in 1915 and Alberta in 1920. Whereas Dad was in his fifty’s and his physical strength was in decline. His ability to earn a living to keep us out of the poor house was less certain as he grew older.

The worry, the daily struggle to stretch Dad’s impecunious wages to both make the rent and put food on the table had by the time of my birth worn my mother down to a nub of anger, outrage and cunning. She spent her waking hours outwitting the calamities that knocked on our front door which were generally debt collectors demanding the rent be paid.

Trying to keep one step ahead of our debts tired Mum out. But what exhausted my mother was the row she had with death who since 1920 had tried to steal my eldest sister Marion away from our family.

Poor Marion, she drew a very short straw when she developed spinal tuberculosis at the age of five. It was a death sentence for the poor those from the middle classes generally survived their encounter with this form of tuberculosis. The poor never died and we were poor. Pulmonary TB had already killed my uncle Eddie in 1918 who died from it in an army Sanitorium in Scarborough. So my mother knew what awaited Marion. Yet, she did everything to forestall my sister’s early reservation with death. But a mother's love for her child isn't a currency that can be exchanged for proper healthcare in a capitalistic society. Your life and the lives of those you love only has only worth if you can pay to save it from disease and injury.  

Chapter Two:

I became aware of the world around me when I turned three, and I wasn’t pleased with what I saw. I was exposed to so much discord by the time I began to walk, it scarred my emotional development for decades. The first memories formed in my brain were profound sensations of hunger, loneliness, grief and sadness.

Were it not for my mother’s stubborn determination to see me live into adulthood, persistent malnutrition and common childhood maladies would have killed me off long before I had a chance to savour my existence.

It was she who kept the fire of life burning inside of me no matter how ill I became as a bairn. When I was 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 about Marion because my sister 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. For Marion to survive her form of TB, she needed care in a sanatorium- and that was beyond my parent’s fiscal resources.

While I was becoming aware as a toddler of the world around me, Marion, when she turned nine, became aware that she was dying.

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 left her bedridden and unable to speak.

To ease my parents’ burden of care, Dad’s trade union donated a wicker landau to help transport Marion. 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.

The atmosphere within our house was tragic because Marion was dying. But outside, it was just as sad because the working class was being squeezed to the bone by the greedy owners of factories, mines, foundries and mills.  

The streets where people like my family lived were angry because they had been cheated by their political leaders who promised after the Great War in 1918. "A Land Fit for Heroes."

But eight years on- wages for miners had not risen but were instead clawed back. Other workers felt a similar pinch from their employers who wanted more hours worked for less pay. The quality of life for most was a dismal struggle from sunup to sundown because rent and food were unaffordable for workers on the wages they were paid.

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.

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.

The miners’ union refused to budge or break in the face of the government's and news media's intimidation directed at the strikers.

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 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. I was told, “Play near Marion because she won’t be, for long with us."

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 not having a carer 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 capitulated to 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. What happened that year to my family and the mining community we lived in was feudalistic. 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 was committed to our local workhouse.

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 the 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. Until she died, my parents were at her bedside.

When she was gone, there was no funeral for Marion. 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- 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 middle-class kid in 1926- slept well because 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.

For me, rent day approaches like the headlights from a truck with an unsteady load on its trailer. It leaves me stuck in the middle of the road, transfixed by it, or perhaps I am too tired to react this time and jump out of its way.

A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent because all I need is 8 to make June’s payment. But with 3 days to go, it is getting tight.
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. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John