Party Days

Copyright © 2015 by Geoffrey Partington.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015902957

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-0277-2

                Softcover      978-1-5035-0279-6

                eBook         978-1-5035-0278-9

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Rev. date: 02/25/2015

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Family

Chapter 2 Life As A Child

Chapter 3 Life As A Schoolboy

Chapter 4 Life With A Divided Mind

Chapter 5 Life As A Communist Student

Chapter 6 Life As A National Serviceman

Chapter 7 Life As A Young Teacher

Chapter 8 Life In Teacher Politics

Chapter 9 Life As A Teacher Educator

Chapter 10 Life As A Headmaster

Chapter 11 Life Between Old And New Lefts

Chapter 12 Life On The Move

Chapter 13 Life As An Education Officer

Chapter 14 Life In An Australian University

Chapter 15 Life On The ‘Right Wing’’

Chapter 16 Life On Study Leaves

Chapter 17 Life After Retirement

Chapter 18 Life With Aboriginal Issues

Chapter 19 Life At The History Summit

Chapter 20 Life In Old Age

CHAPTER 1

FAMILY

MY FATHER

My father, Fred Partington, was born in 1892 in Middleton, a small cotton-spinning town just north of Manchester. He had three older sisters, Nellie, Ada and Florrie, and one younger, Bertha. The family lived at the ‘Top of Middleton’, the streets around Middleton Parish Church, St. Leonard’s, the highest point of the town. His father, Charles Partington, was a cotton spinner, the main local occupation, but his family was more entrepreneurial than most. Two of his sisters owned a small shop which sold wool and dress materials, whilst Charles himself built up a small part-time business, selling lamp oil, paraffin and cleaning materials from a horse and cart. Unfortunately, he liked a drop. I was told that his horse would get tired of waiting for him outside the Who’d A’ Thowt It? or Red Lion, and wend its own way back home, several items often being lost or stolen en route. Charles was not a drunkard, but he drank too much at a time when drinking and gambling often made the difference for a working-class family between abject poverty and modest adequacy. His children were determined to be respectable and of good ‘character’.

Charles Partington was politically active on the left. He was a member of the first committee of the Independent Labour Party branch set up in Middleton in the 1890s. His political activities were as much deplored as his drinking by his daughters, who said of him, ‘He wanted to put the whole country right, but he couldn’t manage his own affairs’, or ‘He hadn’t sense to realise that charity should begin at home, with his own wife and children.’ They claimed that when he was told that his wife, Annie, was about to give birth to their youngest child, he replied, ‘Never mind that for now. I want to know who won the Dewsbury by-election’. Charles did not see the political rise of the Labour Party, since his wife and he died in their forties within a month of each other in 1905 when my father was thirteen. The cotton towns of Lancashire had among the worst mortality rates in England, and when the war started in 1914, a larger proportion of volunteers was found unacceptable on health grounds in the Manchester district than anywhere else in England. My father was among those rejected, in his case because of defects in his hearing and sight. Proportionally more men were also rejected as unfit for military service in south-east Lancashire than in the rest of the country when conscription was introduced in 1916 and the men recruited made up a good proportion of the ‘bantam regiments’ of the British Army.

My father’s second oldest sister, Ada, had married a fireman, Jack Richmond, and they looked after him for a while after his parents died. Later my father moved into a room above his aunts’ shop. He was able by then to pay his way, since he started work in the mill as a part-timer at twelve and in February 1905, when thirteen, he obtained the Labour Certificate conferring total exemption from school attendance. To get this he had to have made 350 attendances in each of five years, each half-day counting as an attendance. In Oldham, perhaps in some other cotton-towns, there was a broad difference in the attitude to child-labour of the native population from that of more recent immigrants from Ireland or the south of England, the original population being much more favourable to tighter regulation.

My father attended a Primitive Methodist Elementary School until he was eleven and then a Central School run by the Local Education Authority (known until 1904 as the School Board). Like other lads starting in the cotton mills, he was first a little piecer and shared that duty with another part-timer. Whether each always did the late or early factory shift, or took them in turns, I do not know. I think he became a big-piecer soon after he became a full-time worker. The self-acting mules of the early twentieth century required a minder, two piecers (male), and two doffers and creelers (female). The others worked directly for the minder, not the factory owners. The mules derived their name from Samuel Crompton’s spinning machine of 1779, a combination of James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny and Richard Arkwright’s water frame. Becoming a minder was proverbially a matter of ‘stepping into dead men’s shoes’. The First World War increased the number of the dead, but the metaphor was somewhat inaccurate, since spinners worked bare-footed. The soles of my father’s feet were as hard as leather and ingrained with dust and oil; about six months after he retired both soles peeled and left pink feet like those of a baby. He found it hard to walk until his feet toughened up again. Like most working-class men he did basic soling and heeling himself, and found it hard to believe that my shoes needed mending so often, although he knew that I spent a lot of time kicking a ball about. I never had football boots in primary school.

My schooling had many merits but it provided little knowledge about local history and industries. The first book I read which mentioned the cotton industry was the sad tale of ‘The Little Slaves of Industry’ in Rhoda and Eileen Power’s Stories from World History for Children. Among early familiar sounds was the clatter of clogs as the workers went to the mills. In an earlier generation, before alarm clocks were common, knocker-ups had an important job: with long sticks, called nowsters (‘now stir’), which they rattled against bedroom windows. In a later generation, when mule spinning was no more and mills were revered as wonders of industrial archaeology, not as smoky blots on the landscape, such old customs attracted sentimental affection. One result was that one of the public houses at the end of our street, the Lamb Inn, was renamed the Nowster when enlarged and rebuilt during the 1960s.

Cotton was taken to the mills in huge bales on large trucks, which shook the houses as they went past. Mrs Tetlow, one of our next-door neighbours and matriarch of our terrace, spoke darkly of claims for compensation, but her family was one of the few with little direct connection with the mills. Her husband Isaac Tetlow was a cobbler, with the bent back of his trade, her son Ernest, a sailor during the first world war, was manager of the local Co-op grocery, and her daughter Alice married a manager at Middleton’s own brewery, John Willie Lees. Most other families, although they disliked heavy lorries, reasoned that raw cotton had to get to the mills some way or the other. Our other next-door neighbours were the most important mill family in the vicinity, Joe Taylor being a manager, or ‘on the staff’ as Middleton people called it, at the Cromer Mill. He died much lamented in his late forties.

I often heard my father and his pals discussing work, mostly on the way to or from cricket matches or during frequent periods when rained stopped play. I learned that Lancashire was the biggest industrial centre of the world’s first big industrial nation, but that this might not last. There would still be humidity, which Middleton and surrounding towns had in plenty for most of the year, so that breaks in cotton yarn were kept to a minimum. There would still be soft and rapidly flowing water, although the Irk at Middleton might become even muckier with the passing of the years. There would still be coal close by and a port at Liverpool. Lancashire folk would continue to be clever and hard-working, although unappreciated and underpaid, and would, if permitted, still keep the rest of the country wealthy - one of my father’s cherished beliefs was that the North of England subsidised the South, especially London: ‘We make it, they spend it’.

However, my father and his workmates had seen bad as well as good times in the cotton trade and feared bad ones would return. The years immediately following the first world war had been a boom time, when local employers invested in more new mills than elsewhere in Lancashire, because there was then particularly high demand for the coarser yarns of Oldham. My father became a minder in the new Rex Mill built during that boom. The new mills often had grandiose names: Don, Soudan, Albany, Rome, Cairo and so on, but the Rex proved to be among the last cotton mills built in England for mule spinning. Close to our house, one of the first ring spinning mills in Middleton, called the Cromer after Britain’s most famous pro-consul in Egypt, was built in the early 1920s. Ring spinning proved faster and cheaper, especially when vertical integration, long practised in the United States, was introduced into the Lancashire mills during the 1930s, and the Cromer survived after mule spinning had disappeared from Middleton.

Although deafness kept him out of active politics, my father was from his early twenties a member of the ILP and then the Labour Party. He rarely missed union meetings, which were held monthly on Monday after work at the Old Cock Inn. Our newspapers at home were the Daily Herald, controlled by the Labour Party, and on Sundays The People and Reynolds News, both left-wing but editorially more independent. I rarely heard or read a good word of any Conservatives, always called Tories in our house, who were usually represented in cartoons I saw as fat-bellied men with top hats whose aim was to deceive and exploit the workers.

My father was also suspicious of much of the propaganda that emanated from his own beloved Labour Party. When enthusiasts told him, say, that it would be much efficient if there were one milk deliverer rather than many for the same part of a town, or the whole town or entire country, his stock response was an unconvinced ‘Ah, happen!’ He believed in nationalisation of the coal mines, because Arthur Hancock had pressed him on that over many years, but he and his pals at the mill generally had a contempt for men who worked for the council or the post office. A favoured description of council-workers and postmen, was ‘They’re come-a-day, ago-a-day, God send Sunday’, a very poor section of the human race compared with cotton spinners and weavers. Many social policies embraced by left-wing intellectuals appalled my father, including easier divorces and abortions, and abolition of capital punishment. When in my father’s hearing, my mother expressed a like detestation, but she was impressionable and could not find it in her heart to despise ideas advocated by people she liked.

It only took my father about ten minutes to walk to the Rex Mill each working day, but he always arose very early and, except in the height of summer, got a fire going. Fire lighting and fire-regulation through the damper were arts in which he considered himself something of an expert. After his colostomy, there were few foods he could eat without adverse results. He was always fearful of being far away from home in unfamiliar places. My mother was also apprehensive, since, despite his surgical belt, it was very difficult for my father to exercise full control of the working of his bowels and the washing entailed was not the sort you would send to a laundry or wash in someone else’s sink or boiler. My father’s main problem, however, was the daily one of clearing his remaining bowels as completely as possible before setting off to work. Given that for a good part of the year it was nearly freezing in the outside lavatory at the end of the yard, it is not surprising that these manoeuvres were conducted in front of the fire, once he had got it going. I was rarely up and about at that early hour, but over the years I saw often enough how he was placed. I felt various mixtures of sympathy, anger at the unfairness of the world, apprehension that any of my friends might know of my father’s condition, and shame at my own revulsion.

My father was very diligent and conscientious in all things. Removal of his lower bowel made it hard for him to lift heavy objects, but no passing observer would ever have thought so, since he was determined not to let his physical ailments get the better of him. He very rarely took a day off work and went into the mill when most others would have gone to bed for the week. Although very courageous, he shared the hypochondria of many Lancastrians of his time. The greeting, How are you was not regarded as merely conventional in Middleton, as I later found it to be elsewhere, but often evoked lengthy descriptions of medical conditions and current treatments. My father had little confidence in lawyers or ministers of religion but he trusted the judgements of the three doctors, all Scotsmen, whose patients we were.

MY MOTHER

My mother was born Elsie Banks in 1894 in the small mining town of Atherton, between Bolton and Leigh. She was the eldest of nine children, seven of whom survived to become adults. The Banks family had been in Atherton for at least two generations, but my maternal grandmother, born Martha (Matty) Turner somewhere in Staffordshire, had during the 1880s accompanied her parents, and a handcart containing all their worldly goods, to Atherton, where new coal mines were then being opened. After working in a cotton mill, Martha met and married Allen Banks, a strongly built miner. His father had become a local hero during a big colliery fire by returning to the coalface to rescue several of his mates. When the smoke and pit dirt were washed from their faces, one of the rescued men proved to be his own brother. This took place just after General Charles George Gordon had suppressed the Taipings on behalf of the Chinese Emperor and became a British hero with the nickname of ‘Chinese’ Gordon. Allen’s father became known, at any rate in the press of Atherton and Leigh, as ‘Chinese’ Banks. His deed affected me, since my mother gave me the first name of Gordon in order to perpetuate her family’s sole title to fame.

Allen Banks, although hardy and durable, did not show any of his father’s outstanding heroism, but my grandmother, like many other women of her generation, needed many qualities of the heroine. Their small two-up and two-down terraced cottage, 14 North Street, was in one of Atherton’s less salubrious districts, ‘The Valley’, close to a stream which carried away factory and pit rubbish. Some rubble among weeds and wild flowers is all that is left now of North Street, although a few hundred yards away the public house still stands which played an important part in my grandfather’s life.

Miners in the Lancashire coalfield, like many others in Britain, were not paid by the hour but on the amount of coal they hewed. The equivalent to the minder in the cotton mills was the leader of a team of three or four hewers, the butty, who negotiated a rate with the colliery management. The rate struck could differ sharply from one part of the coal face to another, because of the thickness or quality of the seam, the level of difficulty in getting at the coal, or the distance of the stall or stint being worked from the pit cage which brought the colliers down from the surface. External factors such as market prices of different types of coal also influenced bargaining. The trickiness of the negotiations, together with the hardship and danger of the job, ensured that tempers were lost and local strikes erupted more often than in most other workplaces. As well as negotiating with the management, the butty also negotiated their rate per ton with the other hewers. The distribution of pay by the butty to the other hewers was usually carried out in a public house. Given that mining was a thirsty job, that on pay day the colliers all had money in the pocket, and that beer was immediately at hand, it is not surprising that a larger proportion of miners’ pay than that of other male workers was often spent before any reached home. Unfortunately for my grandmother, Allen Banks liked to be a big man at the bar.

There was an elaborate structure of status, rank and prestige among English workers, over and above the cruder designations of class. Some distinctions related to the skill required in a job: carpenters and joiners, for example, were generally esteemed highly, but postmen and council workers (on road works and the like) very poorly, although over in some years the group with low esteem might earn more on average. During depression years the postmen and council workers were often relatively well off, being far less likely to be unemployed. Sheer physical strength and toughness was also generally respected, so that miners, with others such as stokers and foundry workers, also formed part of an aristocracy of labour. Within each group a key factor in family prosperity was whether a man was a big drinker or not. The broad division between what Victorians and Edwardians termed the deserving and the undeserving poor was more closely linked to alcoholic intake than any other factor. Other matters entered into concepts of desert as well, such as gambling and womanising, but these in their turn usually correlated closely with drinking. It was hardly surprising that temperance was the first great cause of women in politics

Even with seven children, Matty Banks ought to have been a bit better off than most of her neighbours, since Allen was a butty and both strong and fit, but even during good years economically there were weeks when she had very little left over after the rent had been paid. When pregnancy and post-natal pressures made it possible, she often managed to get casual work scrubbing steps, cleaning and dusting, or ironing clothes. An important survival strategy, as her brood increased in size and the bedroom problem became ever more acute, was to place the two girls with Allen’s more affluent relations. Her daughters were born first (Elsie) and third (Maggie), with Arthur between them, and Dick, Jack, a younger Allen and Fred following on. When my mother was nine she was boarded out with a bachelor uncle and two unmarried aunts at Howe Bridge, about two miles from Atherton. Other relatives were found to look after Maggie.

Life with my mother’s parents had been free and easy, but unstable and arbitrary, given her father’s volatile conduct when in his cups. Her Howe Bridge uncle and aunts were strong Church (of England) people, although one of her Howe Bridge cousins, Walter Bridge, after emigrating to the United States, became a prominent Baptist preacher in Spokane, Washington. One of Walter’s brothers, Joe, stayed in England and became a prosperous butcher in Astley with a low golf handicap. My mother’s Howe Bridge aunts and uncle brought her up to love and respect her parents, whom she usually visited each Saturday or on Sunday after morning service, but they had little respect for her father, the prodigal of their family. My mother was enrolled in the Band of Hope at the earliest eligible age, taking the vow, among others, ‘Lips that have touched strong liquor shall never touch mine’. She interpreted this pledge with an exclusion clause, since she could hardly refuse to kiss her parents. She loved her mother, but North Street and the Valley compared badly with her new home in Howe Bridge, which had its own lavatory attached to the back of the house, whereas the outside lavatory in North Street was reached across a communal courtyard and was shared with the family next door. My grandmother and her neighbours worked hard and successfully to keep everything clean and decent but, with big families and a damp and cold climate, it was always a struggle.

My mother attended the Church of England elementary school in Howe Bridge. She was a diligent and industrious girl, but vacillated between ambition to shine and fear of ridicule and failure. She often pressed her teachers to choose her to read a lesson during the morning assembly, or to take a part in a playlet or other entertainment, but she almost invariably came close to drying up when the chance was presented to her. Her main recollection of success was that she and her best friend, Nelly Fletcher, were once in a little sketch in which they were asked, ‘What are your names?’ Their reply was ‘Maximum and minimum’, Nelly being dressed as a little boy. This sally must have impressed my mother, since she mentioned it several times to me.

My mother was confirmed in the parish church of Howe Bridge in May, 1908, when fifteen and working in a cotton mill. Changes in family circumstances then led to her being moved to another relative in Bowlee, a village just outside Middleton. She got a job in a mill in Rhodes, another village at the foot of the hill leading to Bowlee. This mill, Schwabbe’s, had the tallest chimney in Lancashire, and was owned by one of the many German emigrants who made an important contribution to Manchester’s industries and culture, such as Sir Charles Halle, the leading figure in Manchester’s musical life in the late nineteenth century and Hans Richter, conductor of the Halle Orchestra after the turn of the century. Neither of my parents attended a symphony concert in their lives.

My mother knew nobody in the Middleton district, except her Aunt Alice, with whom she boarded, but she soon made many friends, both at Rhodes Parish Church and at Schabbe’s Mill. She was used to being an outsider and a poor relation, but her Aunt Alice, although strict, was, like the Howe Bridge relatives, always kind to her. The impression my mother subsequently gave me of life as a mill girl just before the first world was of a golden age, in which she and the other girls were always having fun at work, playing tricks, but none malicious or resented, on the men, a time when crime and vice were virtually unknown. Young women could then, she told me, walk home from a dance in Middleton along the Manchester Old Road to Rhodes and then up the hill to Bowlee safely and without fear.

The dances at which my parents met were highly formal and high standards of dress and conduct were demanded. Respectable young workingmen wore white gloves and winged collars. Given my father’s general shyness, it was amazing that he managed to ask my mother or anyone else to dance with him, but they started going out regularly together. He was 21 and she 19 when they met. In other circumstances they might have delayed becoming engaged and married, but both were living in the homes of others. My mother’s Aunt Alice and my father’s aunts at the shop suggested that they might as well take the matrimonial path. My father’s sisters did not share their aunts’ enthusiasm for the wedding, since they did not think my mother good enough for their brother. None of his family appears on the wedding photographs. My mother’s sister Maggie was bridesmaid, her Aunt Alice matron-of honour, and her cousin Joe Bridge the butcher acted as best man for my father. There was an increased marriage rate during the early years of the war, since many young men thought they had better marry while they had the chance and many young women thought it would be better to be widows rather than spinsters. One young man unavailable for marriage was the oldest among my mother’s brothers, Arthur Banks. He was a miner and thus in a reserved occupation, but volunteered for the Lancashire Fusiliers together with eleven other miners from the same colliery, many of whom had been in the same class with him at school. He was killed in the first week of the landings at Gallipoli in April, 1915.

MARRIED LIFE

After a few years in rented houses, my father and mother took out a mortgage on their own three-up and three-down terrace house in Hilton Fold Lane, a respectable street convenient for my father’s mill. The men in most of the neighbouring houses were skilled workmen, some being foremen or managers, and hardly any of the women worked outside the home after marriage. During the first fifteen years of marriage my mother either miscarried or delivered a stillborn child. In 1930 she had another very difficult pregnancy and feared she would miscarry again. During this pregnancy my father went to hospital for a colostomy which removed his lower bowel. He had only been out of one of the surgical wards in Boundary Park Hospital, Oldham, for a month when my mother was admitted to the maternity ward. To my parents their final success in producing me was little less miraculous than that of Sarah in giving birth to Isaac, the child of promise. The only letter from my father my mother kept until her death, after several years of widowhood, was the one he wrote on the day I was born

Sunday.

Dear Elsie,

I don’t know realy how to write to you. I am so very pleased you have got over it allright. I was at Uncle Will’s when I heard you had got a bonny boy. Ethel Tomlin of Oldham came to tell me she had been there about two hours waiting to see how you went on. I think it was very good of her and she sent you a parcel which I hope you got allright and the parcel I sent you on Saturday. I might have sent you a letter with the parcel but I dint know wether I was doing right or not. However - Ethel gave me the address this afternoon. I have been round to all relations and friends and I can you they have been so good and are very pleased you have come out allright. I am sending your Mother and Maggie word of the avent, and you rest content you will have a great wellcome home when your time is up so cheer-up their is a good time coming,

From your Loving Husband

Fred

My mother wanted me to be called Gordon, but my father’s aunts at the shop disliked what they considered a Scottish name and persuaded her to give me the second name of Geoffrey. By that name I have been called throughout life, except during two hospital spells in which the nurses used Gordon, the name on my medical notes. Like most people in hospital I was not feeling well at the time and lacked the energy or determination to put the nurses right.

My birth may have helped to bring about some reconciliation between my father and his sisters, although I must have been about sixteen before I met his eldest sister, Miss Ellen Partington. Aunt Nellie was a District Nurse, whose experience as a midwife may have made her particularly disdainful of a sister-in-law who had such difficulty in producing a live and healthy child to carry on the Partington name. Jack and Ada Richmond left Middleton when Jack was promoted to be deputy chief of Rowntree’s Fire Brigade in York, and then of Boots’ fire brigade in Nottingham. My parents must have resumed reasonably friendly terms with the Richmonds, since they visited them in York and Nottingham, both of which then seemed a long distance from Middleton. Nottingham was the farthest south I ever penetrated before the Second World War ended in 1945.

My mother was a strange mixture of toughness and impressionability. As a girl, she attended her local Anglican church at Howe Bridge, but she became a stalwart member of the local Baptist church in Middleton, largely because of the influence of one of our neighbours, Clara Taylor. Mrs Taylor’s influence did not arise from proselytising zeal, although she was as staunch a Christian believer as I have ever known, but because my mother admired her as a person and housewife. My mother was right to respect Mrs Taylor’s superior judgement on matters of domestic economy and could have followed far worse examples in religious belief. My mother had few political interests before marriage, but she followed my father and became a steadfast Labour woman.

Between the wars in cotton towns like Middleton many single women, more numerous than before 1914 because of the loss of so many men during the war, worked in the mills until their forties or fifties, unless of course they were temporarily unemployed. Before the war there had already been a reduction in the proportion of men in the population of Britain because of higher male emigration, but the war intensified the difference

Most married women gave up paid employment outside the home, the main exceptions being women with invalid husbands. It was generally expected that a fit and healthy man should support his wife and children, without her being a wage earner. Nonetheless women formed over half of the labour force in Lancashire textiles. Women rarely socialised with the men at work, and single-sex groups were formed for tea and ‘snap’ during the short breaks in mid-morning and mid-afternoon, but the mixture of the sexes contributed to a lower incidence of swearing than in all-male work places like coal-mines and even than in all-female factory employment.

It was only when I was deemed old enough to go with them to Boundary Park to watch Oldham Athletic that I heard my father’s friends swear and even then their curses were fairly mild. My mother and many of her friends were ex-mill girls, but I rarely heard a coarse word from them. However, their expressions of disapproval were often effective, being delivered with considered emphasis and stern countenances: ‘He’s a mess (pause), a mess without paper’ or ‘She’s a real b-i-t-c-h’, being at the stronger end of the continuum. In my teens I heard tales of women mill workers subjecting boys starting work to sexual ordeals, such as painting their genitals or pushing them into a small bottle and then inducing an erection, but I found it hard to envisage my mother and her friends doing such things.

The Middleton branch of the ILP had then a clubroom in Milton Street, a suitably inspiring address, in which talks on political and cultural topics were regularly organised, as well as walks and visits to historical and literary sites. A leading figure in these activities was Mrs Ann Hilton, who became a Justice of the Peace and who embodied for my mother all that was gracious and noble. Her daughter, Tess Hilton, introduced my mother to swimming and to the knack of drying one’s back by holding the towel in both hands and moving it rapidly from side to side. My mother was impressed by this technique and instructed me that it was the prescribed manner in the best circles. Tess’s brother Rodney became Professor of Medieval History in Birmingham University and also one of the Communist Party’s academic eminences. His path in life disposed my mother to be less antagonistic to my own politics a few years later. Ann Hilton encouraged my mother to read more widely and to join committees, but her hopes of my mother were not fulfilled. My mother was at heart a reluctant reader of anything more demanding than Edgar Wallace or Agatha Christie. She liked Nat Gould’s romances of the turf, even though she never attended a race meeting in her life and had no special liking for horses. Ann Hilton did not cast her bread upon the waters entirely in vain, since it was through her that my mother possessed Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England, Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. All of these remained unread in the display cabinet for some years but they influenced me later.

The ILP Club did not last long, partly because few of its proletarian members were genuinely attracted to the constructive uses of leisure advocated by Mrs Hilton and her friends. Most of the men preferred darts, cards, dominoes and bowls, the women whist, knitting and gossip. Although the ILP Club folded up, the Co-operative Women’s Guild, of which my mother was a stalwart member, lasted much longer, and as a small boy I