Wigan Pier Revisited

by Beatrix Campbell

See picture of text on back cover.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Anna Ryan-Punch · Rating 5 out of 5]

An under-reviewed book that’s as personally and politically devastating as the book it takes as a jumping-off place. It’s sharp, highly readable, emotionally engaged, and knows its own prejudices. “Poverty makes economy impossible, not because the poor are improvident but because economy is always a matter of scale - bull buying demands bulk incomes.” Campbell’s account of what women experienced in 1980s poverty along the Wigan trail is as shocking as it should be, and adds a vital generation and a more than vital gender to Orwell’s original exclusions. “Unlike the hostels for the homeless, places of last resort where inmates fees treated as if they had no rights, the refuge is a place of first resort, where women learn they have rights and how to exercise them. Feminism has generated this network of refuges. (If they’d existed in George Orwell’s day, when they were needed at least as much as now, we’d have been spared all his sentimental fallacies about the perfect symmetry of family life.)”

Far from detracting from the original impact of Orwell’s book, Campbell’s focus on women’s poverty not only critically acknowledges Orwell’s work but expands his focus to create a more universal impact. (I seriously don’t get the critical standpoint that one book eclipses another. The original book is still there, Alexander.)

Orwell’s classic book The Road To Wigan Pier was over 50 years old when Campbell’s book was published. Campbell’s book is 35 years old now. If I really need to say it (do I??), there’s no time limit for when a book is too old to stand judgement and when criticism becomes Just Not Fair. Let’s settle up right now: the longevity of books written in the 1930s has everything to do with them being written by men, published by men, and in this case created in a time where it was unheard of for women to travel alone. Campbell’s criticisms of Orwell are pretty clear cut for any modern-day reader: “The Road to Wigan Pier’s wanton polemics against effete intellectuals and strident feminists are suffused by homophobia. Did he know how much he went on and on about ‘Nancy poets’ and namby pambies? Didn’t any of his best friends tell him?”

This is a book that shouldn’t disappear into its publication decade as an inadvertent omission just because it’s attached to George Orwell’s name. “...women more than most know that life, like history, is made up of inadvertencies.” Beatrix Campbell has her own name.

[Jake Turbill · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book in itself is fantastically well written and researched. I was under the impression it would be a direct tete a tete with Orwell’s original. It is not. The misunderstanding is my fault, not the books. Well worth a read if poverty and politics interest you.

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book's cover features a picture of young women dressed up outside a goth/new romantic club in Wigan (not the Casino) and so I thought the book was going to be about life in a northern town, then when I started reading it and found a lot of statistics about how much dole money an unemployed person received in 1983 and how that was spent (food/rent/utilities/children), making the salient point that the poor pay more for food - if you have no credit and are living week to week you can’t bulk buy, you can’t take advantage of savings to be had. There was also a treatise on the bad, damp housing that the was the legacy of the Macmillan’s govt housing policy (throw ‘em up cheap and fast) and information on women’s refuges and so my second impression was that the book seemed to be Marxism For Dummies.

However, Campbell goes on to analyse women’s work and how the trades union movement has hindered rather than helped women’s progress. She talks about how women’s work becomes a vicious circle: because men view themselves as the bread winners, the responsibility falls on the women for childcare, so they work around the children (e.g. evening work), but because they are part time, women are not seen as breadwinners. She also talks about how unions have always focussed on pay rather than on hours/flexibility (because they see themselves as existing for their male workers and, because men are often hostile to women in their sphere, women were not encouraged to take part in the union, so their concerns were not taken seriously).

Some things have changes beyond recognition: there is not a widespread belief nowadays that women shouldn’t work and that their role is to look after the men at home (at least not in the white working class - wives of prominent (i.e. rich) men are expected to support them and not pursue a career of their own, and of course in some ultra-religious communities, the women stay at home). Men now do housework, possibly because of feminism, possibly because they don’t leave home to get married but are more likely to live on their own or with housemates who aren’t going to clear up after them. Campbell doesn’t touch on sexual harassment in the workplace, but some things remain the same; she talks about how when women talk amongst themselves, they mention their menfolk, big them up, mention their names, but in the similar conversations amongst men they do not mention women at all. They wait for women to stop speaking rather than engage them in conversation.

I was reminded of a friend who went on holiday with two male friends, who knew each other through her, not independently. She complained that they had spent most of their time talking to each other and ignoring her. When I mentioned this casually to one of the men, he said she should have joined in more. He didn’t see that his behaviour had to change – hers had to. And yet if I’d accused this man of being sexist, he would have been appalled.

But the book is educational: I didn’t realise how little miners were paid back when there was a mining industry. I thought with the strong trade union and strikes for better pay and the high esteem miners were held in that they would be earning £25 to £30K in today’s prices. The book states average earnings £96 per week, which is around £17,500 per annum now, similar to minimum wage. Of course, the book was researched and written in 1983, published in 1984 just before the strike, and strikes and trades union officials and combines versus committee now seems like a forgotten world.

I also didn’t know that women had worked in the mines – not in them, but at the coal face sorting coal from slate. This was outlawed when the mines were nationalised after the war.

The final chapter is a critical analysis of The Road To Wigan Pier and its faults. I’m a fan of Orwell, but I have nothing against iconoclasm, no-one should be sacred and above criticism. Let’s not forget some of Orwell’s prejudices:

“It is not much use to try and form a union as about half the pickers are women and gypsies and are too stupid to see the advantage of it.”

“A sheep like crowd – gaping girls and shapeless middle aged women dozing over their knitting”

“I was surprised by Mrs S's grasp of the economic situation and also abstract ideas.”

“Mrs M as usual does not understand much about politics, but has adopted her husband's views as a wife ought to”.

[Paul Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. The premise of the book promises more than it delivers (and arguably is lazy in using Orwell's book as a skeleton and a marketing ploy). Multi-faceted it tries to do too much and as a result achieves too little. In reality it is two books: a comparison between the 1930s and the 1980s; which is potentially fascinating unfortunately the second book on the (often unsung) substantial role of working class women in society and in the work place gets in the way and reduces the important impact that two books rather than one could have achieved. It doesn't help that Campbell lacks the elegant, precise prose of Orwell. I also think it is unfair to find fault with Orwell's work fifty years after its publication; it was a book of its time and though it mayn't be wholly relevant to the modern socio economic environment it has endured and is still relevant and eminently readable 90 years on; not something that I expect will be truse of Campbell's book.

[Molly Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this *such* an interesting socialist-feminist social history of the 1980s. I thought the discussion of communalising women's 'privatised' work in mining communities (ie mining companies paying women to work in canteens & laundries at the pitheads) was fascinating + made me wonder if there was a specific reason that Campbell doesn't explicitly link this to the 'wages for housework' campaigns for the 1970s. Sad that the author's politics have turned into obsessively hating Owen Jones over his stance on trans rights or whatever