Book Review by George Simmers: Philip Gibbs was the most topical of twenties novelists. The General Strike put the country at a standstill in June 1926, and in September of the same year, Gibbs’s novel about it appeared.
Gibbs had been a journalist as well as a novelist since before 1914, and had achieved distinction as a war correspondent (His post-war collection of war reports, Realities of War, was a great success.) After the war he produced in very quick succession, novels dealing with all manner of social problems (A complete checklist of his books can be found here.} His most notable novel was The Middle of the Road (1922), wich is as much reporting as fiction. It takes its journalist hero on a journey to see what Gibbs himself had witnessed in damaged Europe – notably to Ireland disrupted by the Troubles, to Germany, suffering from post-war chaos, and to Russia,experiencing the horrors of the post-revolutionary period. It was his shock at seeing the suffering in Russia that made him, in novels like Young Anarchy, distrustful of doctrinaire socialism.
The title The Middle of the Road summarises Gibbs’s political attitude. He is a Liberal, with a horror both of the entitled attitudes of the privileged and of the doctrinaire eyhos of revolutionaries. In his books, there is always a sense that if only men of goodwill on both sides could talk to each other, the worst could be averted. This attitude informs Young Anarchy.
It begins as a book about modern youth (like his earlier Heirs Apparent). Gibbs’s narrator finds himself involved, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, with the family of the reactionary Bishop of Burpham. The Bishop’s son, Jocelyn, goes to Oxford and meets an ex-miner from Ruskin College, who converts him to socialism. The daughter, Nancy, writes a best-selling novel (compared with The Constant Nymph) that controversially sums up the spirit of the age. The Bishop disowns them both, and can do nothing but fulminate helplessly against what he sees as the decline of civilization.
The Bishop’s sister, Elizabeth, is more positive about Youth. During the war she had successfully run a canteen, and in the twenties organises a night refuge for don-and-outs (many of them ex-soldiers, of course). She sees the potential in Youth, and so tries to organize a League of Youth that would work together for the good of the country. There is a set-piece description of the inaugural meeting that is one of the best bits in the book (Gibbs was good at describing public meetings. In his Intellectual Mansions, S.W. (1910) there is a terrific account of the Prime Minister being heckled by suffragettes). For a start, most of the people who have come to the join the League of Youth are grey-haired. Then, when the Bishop starts to speak, the Communists begin heckling, the Hooray Henries attack them, and everything fragments into chaos.
The main concern of the first half of the novel is with this upper-middle class family, but Gibbs inserts reminders of wider sociaal problems, especially those resulting from the war.
…it was the war itself which was the cause of all this. It brought down more than the crowns and the kingdoms. It killed more than the millions of dead. It smashed something in the minds of men – age-old traditions of thought, the foundations of faith, many hopes and illusions in the soul of humanity, the ancient discipline of social life. Its heritage of misery and ruin left a cynicism which has been bequeathed to the very children of the years that followed.
But though the war was disruptive and unsettling, it provides a standard by which the post-war world can be judged. The novel’s narrative traces the story of privileged young people exploring the possibilities of a new and freer world, but on the edges of the picture there are shabby men wearing service medals, ex-sergeants proud of their war service, and men blinded on the Somme, now begging in the streets.
We follow Jocelyn’s campaign as a Labour candidate, a disillusioning experience for all, and the novel seems set for utter pessimism about the prospects for England. But then the National Strike occurs.
When the Strike begins, the narrator expects the worst: “It was impossible to believe that there would not be rioting, mob violence, looting, lawlessness.” But what is expected to be the most disruptive and negative event of the book turns out to be unifying and almost entirely positive. For a start, the hedonistic Glad Young Things buckle to and do their bit. They drive buses, wearing their plus fours and tasselled socks, show good humor when they do hard work unloading food at the docks. “The post-war youth of England,” the narrator decides, were “as like as peas in a pod to another crowd of youth I had known, twelve years ago, when the country was in danger.”
The wartime spirit is demonstrated not only by the undergraduates and public-school boys who step in to keep the country going. The office workers and shop-girls who ride on the unofficial buses develop a community spirit that was not there before. The working men, too, show that they have not been corrupted by militants. They show solidarity with the miners by striking, but they are not violent. The only clashes are marginal and minor. What Gibbs sees as the dogged, essentially peaceful spirit of England wins out against extremists of all sort – whether the fanatical Communists who are represented as taking their orders from Moscow, or those on the Conservative side who would like to bring things to a crisis. Churchill is seen as a divisive figure (“that fat brat” one character calls him.)
Some later General Strike novels, like Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929) would position thmeselves as sympathetic to the miners’ cause. In this one, Gibbs’s ‘plain man’ hero hears a large variety of points of view, and it is not without sympathy for those fighting for a living wage, but Gibbs’s feelings are very strongly against those who want to use the Genaral Strike as a political weapon, to disrupt the country’s stability, and to use industrial force against the legitimate rulers chosen by the electorate. I suspect that in this book he spoke for much of England. I remember my (lower-middle-class) parents in the 1950s looking back on the Strike as a victory for right-thinking, because after it had been broken and the revolutionaries had been put in their place, nothing like that would ever happen again. My mother especially had happy memories of the strike. In 1926 she was seventeen, and just starting an office job in London. She remembered how exciting it was when the buses were taken over by Oxford undergraduates who treated it as a lark and an adventure (and, I suspect, flirted outrageously with teenage female passengers.)