Work by Oliver Kilbourne, one of the Pitmen Painters
Culture Belongs to Everyone
One day at school, when I was about fourteen years old, our
English teacher, Mister McNamara, played us a videotape of a production of
Arnold Wesker’s play, Chips With Everything. The play is a fairly devastating
attack on the British class system, using the vehicle of national service in
the Royal Air Force. Wesker himself was a national serviceman, doing two years
in the RAF. There is a particularly powerful episode, a Christmas party at which
both officers and ordinary aircraftmen are present. The officers expect the
entertainment from the erks and NCO’s to be bawdy and crude. Two guys produce a
guitar and fiddle and perform the folk song The Cutty Wren. To this day, I am
quite proud of the fact that I and my pals recognised the performers as those
giants of English folk music, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick. Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd2V4XaiH6M
The officers are clearly perturbed at the fact that the entertainment
is not mind-numbingly lowbrow, and even more so when a Scottish serviceman recites
the Lyke Wake Dirge. This too has been covered by numerous giants of English
folk music, including Al Stewart, Pentangle and Steeleye Span. However, although
it was presumably composed to be sung, it has considerably more power recited
in normal speech. The first and last verse goes:
This aye night, this aye night,
Every night and all.
Fire and fleet and candle light,
And Christ receive thy soul.
I am not a religious person, but to this day, that sends
shivers down my spine. I cannot remember the result of the stand-off between
officers and men at the party, but I do remember how powerful I found the play.
The machinery on which the video was played would be
considered archaeological now. A sort of framework with a great big
reel-to-reel machine mounted on the lower shelf, the magnetic tape more than an
inch wide, looking like something supposed to be very up-to-the-minute in a
1960’s Man from Uncle episode. There was a chunky black and white telly on
the upper shelf.
The twenty-first century recipient of the mantle of the
concept that culture does not belong to the toffs is Lee Hall, the Geordie
playwright responsible for Billy Elliott and The Pitmen Painters.
The latter is a retelling of the story of the Ashington Group, painters who
where mostly coalminers with no artistic training, working underground in the Ellington
and Woodhorn collieries in Northumberland
in the early 20th century. The story is a powerful and inspiring
one, and counters the attitude, to this day more common than you might think,
that only toffs appreciate art and that ordinary workers are troglodyte
philistines.
You might think that Wesker had idealised the ordinary servicemen,
but bear in mind that he was one of them. We weren’t. And here is another
example.
Also in my teenage years, I recall one Saturday afternoon my
dad returning from the pub, accompanied by a man I didn’t recognise, but
clearly a kindred spirit to the old man in that he too was completely plastered.
The pair of them swapped quotes from Shakespeare and various poets. The guest
could quote screeds of verse from Wordsworth, Burns and Coleridge. My dad knew
a lot of Shakespeare. The pair of them might have had difficulty standing up,
but I couldn’t fault their memories or recitation skills.
Later, I realised that our visitor had been Lawrence Daly,
General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers. When his father had died,
he was carried down the street with his coffin draped in a red flag. Lawrence himself
had worked at Glencraig Pit near Ballingry in Fife, and was largely self-educated.
When I was doing my MSc in London in 1978-79, at the end of
my evening’s swotting, I would have a pint in the Ennismore Arms (now sadly
converted to luxury flats), and read my library book. The guvnor of the pub
noticed me reading Moby Dick one evening and started talking to me about 19th
century fiction. He had a strong Cockney accent and was in all respects a
traditional London pub landlord. By heaven, he knew his Dickens and Thackeray.
So many of the colleagues who read this blog are university-educated
(like Mister La-Di-Da Gunner Graham in the TV sitcom, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum)
professionals like myself. Just remember: you are made of the same clay as the people
who clean your offices and stack the shelves in the shops where you buy your lunchtime
sandwiches. And you’re not necessarily smarter or more cultured than them.
Just to come full circle to my schooldays and the giants of
English folk music, this weekend, my old pals from school Kevin and Frank are
visiting. They too were viewers of the Chips With Everything Video. I
can’t wait to see them again. Not sure what time I should order the ambulance
for. On Saturday night, we will be going to see Richard Thompson, the most
respected folk-rock guitarist of his generation, at the Cambridge Corn Exchange.
Here he is on his Hand of Kindness tour in the early 1980’s, when I first saw
him. Enjoy.
Comments
Post a Comment