The Green And Pleasant Land Sampler-A Memoir of Why The Welfare State was Founded And Why We Must Rebuild It Again.

Hi All:

You may find this post has been truncated in your email. It's a long post because it is the first eight chapters of Harry Leslie Smith's Green and Pleasant Land. Should you not be able- to see the complete sampler of his work, DM me your email; l will send you a watermarked PDF. 

I also apologise because I put much of it behind a paywall. The times we live in, I am afraid. 

I not only want but need to remain housed to finish the work my father and I started many years ago, and your paid subscriptions help make that possible.

I have been like so many of you, skating on the thinnest of ice since Covid came. It also wasn't the ideal time to become disabled through illness. As they say, "thems the breaks."  

I hope to find another 20 or so paid subscribers from this posting of his work today. 

The Green and Pleasant Land was unfinished at the time of Harry Leslie Smith's death. I've been piecing it together from all the written notes, typescript & index cards. The entire work is over 600 pages long.  

Thank you again so much for not forgetting him and always supporting me. So many of you come from families with similar experiences as mine before the NHS during the Great Depression era. We must never forget and always remind those who have forgotten that all of us but the 1% are done for in a corporate authoritarian world that will have no social safety nets.

I’d say enjoy. But it makes for a tough and bitter read. My dad’s life, like millions of others, was only redeemed when, in 1945, working-class men and women built The Welfare State, after the defeat of fascism. From that, they were given a measure of leisure, education, prosperity and freedom to enjoy the works and the days of their life.

Take care, John

P.S. But if you are really skint and want to read it. Just DM me and I will forward you the PDF of the sampler.

The Green And Pleasant Land Sampler:

Harry Leslie Smith

Gentle Reader:

I am eighty-seven years old. My death approaches with actuary punctuality. I have lived a long life. Too long perhaps because my body is wearied from decades of existence. The party will be soon over for me. My journey across time was a wonderous adventure. I had an abundance of experiences. I knew intimately hunger, poverty, sickness, and grief because I came from the working class before the Welfare State was created. But I was also on first name terms with love, comradeship, and the delights of having a family. I will go from this world as I came with nothing. But with this book and any other book I may write in the future if I am permitted a handful more of years, I leave behind my footprint in the sands of history.

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                                      Chapter One:

I was born on February 25, 1923. I am told the winter of my birth was harsh and that the night my Mum went into labour with me, a fierce rain slashed against my parent’s rented domicile, located in a slum on the outskirts of Barnsley. We were poor folk because we were working class. Had I been given a choice; I would not have picked either the era or the economic circumstances into which I was born. But none of us chooses to whom and where we are born.

It 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 the end of that conflict was just five years old. A hundred million were slaughtered in that war. They died for nothing except the vanity of the monarchs who ruled Europe in that era and the greed of their munition’s makers. World War One’s start and ending dissolved empires into revolutions that first brought hope and then tyranny. No revolution came to Britain after the war. That wasn’t because it didn’t need one. It was because we were still a mighty empire, and the entitled who ruled over us kept the ordinary worker in a firm yoke of patriotism and poverty.

The working class was on the back foot in 1923 because if the war hadn’t made them aware of the brevity of their existence, the plague known as the Spanish Flu that came after the 1918 armistice certainly did. 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, and then in 1922; it petered out like a forest fire that burnt down all the trees.

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 and meet a world full of threats, harm, and caution. I would not be coaxed out with either gentle words or harsh curses. But I eventually did come into the world in the early morning hours. I let all around me know I wasn’t pleased by hollering 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. Me being born malnourished was normal for my class in 1923. My dad earned his grub as a miner, and like all workers then, no matter how hard they laboured never had enough money to pay the rent and feed their families. We were capitalism’s beasts of burden and treated accordingly.

Working at the coal face is what my folk did since our time began. It’s all they knew, which is why even before the Industrial revolution, my folk were miners, except then it wasn’t coal we dug but tin. I am sure, in ancient times, my ancestors dug for the metals that were smelted into bronze. For generations, my family’s labours and the millions like us made the entitled wealthy and us their humble servants. Had my working-class world not been changed by the Great Depression, I too would have kept hearth and home by hacking coal in its rich seams of Yorkshire like all my kind through our recorded history.

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 or Barley Hole; and Barnsley was far enough away from my dad’s siblings, who despised my mother.

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 her moments of acrimony during the 1930s, had let a family 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 ten years before my birth because 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.

But no one else she knew had Dad’s prospects.  His father was the innkeeper of a public house that stood on the fringe of a colliery in the decrepit village of Barley Hole, located 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 will 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 the 1930s ranted about our “lost legacy.”  

After my grandad died my parents moved on from Barley Hole with few possessions except a portrait of granddad and an upright piano that was once played by Dad to entertain off-shift miners with seaside songs from Blackpool.

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 “rough and ready,” even after decades at the coal face. Poor Dad, he was the toughest of us all because he took the misfortunes to come in the years after my birth with stoicism and good humour. But none of his family recognised it 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 and the intervening time was a series of disappointments and defeats for my parents. Their relationship in 1923 was shorn of of its lustre. Mum then 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 fifty-six and his physical strength was in decline. Therefore, his ability to earn a living that kept us away from the poor house in jeopardy.

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 that she hoped would outwit whatever calamity was intent on knocking on our front door demanding entry. Mum’s acerbic vigilance was understandable because besides having to battle the rent collector for arrears, she also battled the grim reaper that waited impatiently for my eldest sister Marion to die, who had contracted spinal tuberculosis as a young child. By the time of my birth, Marion was gravely ill from it. TB terrified my mother because her older brother Eddie died from it in- 1918 after doing a stint in the Veterinary Corps in France. She knew what awaited Marion, but my mother would do everything to forestall my sister’s early reservation with death. The problem was a mother's love for her child isn't a currency that can be exchanged for proper healthcare in a society designed to make a profit for the few.

                            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. It was considered normal by the middle class and, more importantly, the entitled class that the poor died earlier than them. We, the poor, did die earlier than the rich. We were weakened through malnutrition, unsafe housing conditions and general threats to life and limb that more affluent kids were protected from because wealth makes for safer living conditions.

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 her that 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," at the conclusion of 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 World War One a place where 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.