National Provincial – Lettice Cooper (1938)

One of the books on my original #20booksofsummer pile was National Provincial. It’s novel I had set aside for LT’s All Virago All August (Persephone books also count) it is one of the most recent reissues from Persephone books. At just over 600 pages I was also waiting for my summer holidays to read it.

Ever since I first read South Riding by Winifred Holtby I have been searching for another novel with similar themes. National Provincial ticked all the boxes I wanted it to. A novel of Northern politics, social class and subtle feminism, I loved it. It definitely embraces many of the themes explored two years before by Winifred Holtby and also by Elizabeth Gaskell almost a century earlier. There is a large cast of characters and several story strands – I could probably write far, far too much about them all.

In the mid-1930s the (fictional) city of Aire in the West Riding of Yorkshire, people are divided very much along political and social class lines. The middle classes are staunchly Conservative and have been for years, some families more liberal than others. The working classes have always been Labour. Not everything has stayed the same, some men like factory boss Ward brought up in poverty have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and now own the works that employ many of the local workers. That peculiar brand of British snobbery denotes who is socially acceptable and who isn’t – to some families at least, new money just doesn’t cut it.

“She looked out of the window at the sliding panorama of streets, warehouses, chimneys, slag-heaps, railway sidings and colliery shafts. She was too familiar with such scenes to be struck by their ugliness, but she saw with a fresh eye their beauties, the subdued harmonies of grey and brown, all taut perfection of springing line in crane and chimney, all softened to-day in a sunlight thickened by smoke to a haze of gold. The industrial North, one of the battlefields of that sporadic war of which so many people were still unaware, seeing each battle separately and with surprise in terms of their own emotional or social colouring. But you could not look at anything separately nowadays, and there was not  much surprise left to anyone who had been on a newspaper.”

Into this sprawling mass of Yorkshire urban life comes Mary, returning from her successful journalistic career in London, where she had lived happily alongside other independent young women. With her sister Doris about to marry a well-known local cricket star, Mary must take on the mantle of caring for their mother Emily who is ill with Rheumatoid Arthritis. She is due to take up a position on the Yorkshire Guardian, though we sense it’s a far inferior position to the one she had in London. Her job means she has to attend lots of local society events, bringing her into contact with local families like the Wards and Hardings. She falls in love with a married man from another class.

Mary’s Aunt Grace and Uncle John Allworthy are life-long supporters of the Labour movement, in his late sixties, John is still the Union man at Ward’s. Grace herself is an old campaigner, she has stood by her husband – also a labour councillor, throughout their marriage, their beliefs and aspirations the same. As young boys, Allworthy and Ward had started out in the machine shops together, now Ward is a wealthy man, with a large house, where he’s brought up his two children in comfort, a world away from the slums he grew up in. Ward is a man who has dedicated his whole life to the making of money. His children pull against him, making friends with people Ward doesn’t like. Marjorie the eldest thinks along traditional Conservative lines, like her father – though she is keen to befriend Mary, against her father’s wishes. Ward’s son Lesley; just started at the university, awkward and unhappy, meets a group of left-wing academics, his eyes wide open he is led inexorably toward extremism.

Two old genteel families are the Marsdens and the Hardings. William Marsden lost his sons in WW1 and is an older, sadder man because of it. Lionel Harding is his brother-in-law, politically something of a liberal, he still represents the traditional Conservative class. His adult sons Stephen and Robert are sensibly married, his daughter Claire, no longer the girl her father thinks, is struggling with her mental health. Stephen is married to Joy, a cool proud beauty; the daughter of an old, traditional family, she is ashamed that Stephen must now work for Ward. They have two little boys. Robert is married to Beryl who longs for a baby. In the political upheavals that are coming to the West Riding both Stephen and Robert will have reason to question their allegiances.

All over Aire people are thinking differently, questioning living conditions and wanting better for their families. Olive works at Wards in one of the machine rooms, she loves her job, the banter with the other girls, the money in her pocket. When her family is rehoused on the new housing estate, Olive’s simple, working class snobbery goes into overdrive. She wants a new suite for the sitting room, expects her family to live more graciously, looks down on her brother’s girlfriend because she is in service to the Robert Hardings. Olive is engaged to Tom Sutton, an idealistic rabble rouser in the Ward factory, once he called John Allworthy Uncle John, sitting by his fire talking long into the night. Now Tom sets himself against John, calling an unofficial strike. 

“Tom bent to his cloth again, a snake of suspicion stirring in his heart. He suspected both of them, but whereas his suspicion of Mr Harding, the gentleman, the class enemy, the master, was automatic and almost perfunctory, his suspicion of John Allworthy, the workman, the Trade Union man, the stalwart of the Divisional Labour Party, was a vivid and uncomfortable emotion.”

The novel is set against a backdrop of World politics, Mussolini marching into Abyssinia, Hitler taking over the Rhineland, people feeling like the League of Nations have let them down. Mosley’s Blackshirts are on the rise – though everyone says England just doesn’t do Fascism. Some Labour supporters are listing toward Communism while others are frankly bored by all the divisions and politics. It’s a thoroughly absorbing and fascinating portrayal.