After reading George Orwell's
The Road To Wigan Pier, I have for a while been meaning to lampoon the lampooner himself, with regard to his portrayal of "vegetarian Quaker sandal wearing (etc. etc.) socialist cranks" and his implied notions of 'common sense' historical materialism vs 'airy fairy' libertarian socialism. But I needn't have bothered! I came across this
brilliant 2006 blog by Paul Laity for Cabinet Magazine called A Brief History Of Cranks, which I have taken the unusual measure of reproducing in full below.
It is worth saying that Paul Laity also sees the respectability of the William Morris romantic nature tradition of wanton tree hugging:
"In many ways, the tables have turned on
Orwell. The likes of Edward Carpenter and Leslie Paul can now be
regarded as forerunners of a very modern ecological anti-capitalism. Environmentalism is increasingly the cause rather than an eccentric distraction from it.
"
No shit. Oh how I would hate to live in Orwell's world, where we are outdoing each other with Maoist style Burberry uniforms, grunting in one syllable to "pass us a chunk of coal 'cross table.. ahm 'ungreh". Presumably in Orwell's world he would be Minister of Propaganda, and we would sit at his feet adoringly and listen to his North Korean prognostications. Now I just can't remember that author who wrote a dystopian novel on proscriptive lifestyle fascism and the totalitarian state... something to do with a Big Brother...
A Brief History of Cranks
Paul Laity
”Socialism,” George Orwell famously wrote in
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1936), draws towards it ”with magnetic force every fruit-juice
drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack,
pacifist and feminist in England.” His tirade against such “cranks” is
memorably extended in other passages of the book to include “vegetarians
with wilting beards,” the “outer-suburban creeping Jesus” eager to
begin his yoga exercises, and ”that dreary tribe of high-minded women
and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking
towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”
Andrew Muir in "rational dress." Courtesy First Garden City Heritage
Museum of the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation.
The stereotyping and caricaturing of middle-class “cranks” goes
deep in English national culture. Throughout the nineteenth century,
Punch
magazine lampooned health obsessives who sought a purer life in boiled
cabbage and teetotalism. An Aldous Huxley story, “The Claxtons,” which
anticipates much of Orwell’s philippic, portrays a puritanical, radical,
self-deceiving bourgeois family: “In their little house on the common,
how beautifully the Claxtons lived, how spiritually! Even the cat was a
vegetarian.” And earlier this year the right-wing tabloid
Daily Mail derided the
Guardian
(not for the first time, no doubt) as being run by (and for)
“sandal-wearing folk.” It’s a gibe that’s still meant to suggest the
things it did in Orwell’s day: woolly-headed naivety, moral superiority,
and worthy bohemianism—certainly a world beyond the values of a
mythical “real” England of ordinariness and decency.
Orwell’s savage send-ups of “cranks” betray some anxiety about
sexual freedom but usually make straight for the obvious target—their
earnestness.
Cranks want the world to become a less cruel, less crassly commercial,
more beautiful place. Their pleasures are wholesome, “natural,” and
energetic. (When I was growing up, my parents would refer to certain
people as very “brown rice and bicycles.”) According to the cartoon
version of countercultural progressives, they are desperate for
everything to be health-giving and improving. So one of Orwell’s figures
of fun is a “hangover from the William Morris period” who proposes to
“level the working class ‘up’ (up to his own standard) by means of
hygiene, fruit-juice, birth-control, poetry, etc.” In his novel
Coming Up For Air
(1939), we encounter “Professor Woad, the psychic research worker”: “I
knew the type. Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry, nature-worship, roll
in the dew before breakfast … They’re all either health-food cranks or
else they have something to do with the boy scouts—in either case
they’re great ones for Nature and the open air.”
Orwell’s satire in
The Road to Wigan Pier was employed in
a particular and urgent cause: the fashioning of a popular
(non-crankish), common-sense radical politics to face the growing threat
of Fascism. (Soon after handing the manuscript of the book to his
publisher, Victor Gollancz, he began his journey to Barcelona to fight
for the Republicans in the Civil War.) In his view, cranks—along with
“shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables”—were giving socialism a
bad name. He also implied that they were only superficially committed to
the socialist cause, and ultimately concerned more about their own
moral purity than about the exploitation of the working class. But who
exactly did Orwell have in mind when he let loose his invective? Who
were the cranks?
He chose never to mention in print that he had himself mixed with
many countercultural types, including his aunt, Nellie Limouzin—a
bohemian whose husband was a socialist and stalwart of the Esperanto
movement—and the Westropes, who owned the bookshop in Hampstead where he
worked in the mid-1930s. Francis Westrope had been a conscientious
objector in the war and was a member of the Independent Labour Party;
his wife, Myfanwy, campaigned for women’s rights—both were keen
Esperantists. His backer Mabel Fierz, too, lived in a big house in
Hampstead Garden Suburb and leaned towards a mystical and spiritual
socialism.
Friends and family members no doubt influenced Orwell’s portrait
to some extent, but he had a whole politico-cultural tradition in his
sights. This stretched back at least as far as the millennial socialist
sects of the 1830s and 1840s, inspired by the reformer Robert Owen and
his newspaper the
New Moral World. “Cranks“ were much in
evidence in these model communities—Catherine and Goodwyn Barmby, for
instance, who became impatient with the imperfectly purist tone of the
Owenite movement, and formed the Communist Church (its sister
organisations included the White Quakers in Dublin and the Ham Common
Concordium in Richmond). They preached various New Age prophecies, along
with vegetarianism, hydrotherapy, long hair, and sandal wearing. Over
the years, Goodwyn Barmby became a Christ-like figure, with blonde hair
down to his shoulders; together the young couple walked the London
streets with a cart from which they dispensed tracts and harangued
passers-by.
The late nineteenth-century socialist revival was heavily invested
in “crankish” beliefs. As Michael Holroyd has written, it was largely
“from agnostics, anarchists and atheists; dress and diet reformers; from
economists, feminists, philanthropists, rationalists and spiritualists,
all striving to destroy or replace Christianity” that the revival was
drawn. The firebrand Henry Hyndman, a disciple of Engels and founder of
the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1881, despaired, like Orwell,
of this kind of moral faddism. “I do not want the movement,” he
asserted, “to be a depository of old cranks, humanitarians, vegetarians,
anti-vivisectionists, and anti-vaccinationists, arty-crafties and all
the rest of them.” Not surprisingly, William Morris and his friends in
the SDF decided to secede and in 1884 formed their own group, the more
anarchical (and sexually radical) Socialist League.
The Fabian Society,
begun at the same time, was an outgrowth of the ethical-spiritual (and
meat renouncing) Fellowship of the New Life. This was also the age of
the Vegetarian Cycling Society and the socialist Clarion Field Clubs,
which aimed “to bring the town dweller more frequently into contact with
the beauty of nature: to help forward the ideal of the simpler life,
plain living and high thinking.” George Bernard Shaw, who, as a
vegetarian and wearer of unbleached and knitted natural wool, had a
close relationship with crankery, summed up the two different impulses
in the socialism of the time: one was to “organise the docks,” the other
to “sit among the dandelions.”
The patron saint of the dandelion-sitters was Edward Carpenter,
and Orwell clearly had him in his thoughts. A former curate, a guest of
Thoreau, and the author of a long Whitmanesque poem,
Towards Democracy,
Carpenter exhorted a spiritual socialism and a return to nature. As a
result of a vision, he bought a smallholding at Millthorpe, near
Sheffield, where he grew his own food. He was a vegetarian and an
advocate of birth control and Eastern mysticism; he also wrote
The Intermediate Sex,
the first book generally available in Britain to shine a positive light
on gay sex. He used to bathe naked at dawn with his manservant and
lover, and his life was denounced as scandalous and immoral.
Edward Carpenter wearing his famous Indian-style sandals.
Courtesy Sheffield Archives, Carpenter Collection, Box 8/31 a.
More than anyone else, Carpenter was also responsible for
introducing sandals to British life. When his friend Harold Cox went to
India, he was given instructions to send back to Millthorpe a pair of
sandals from Kashmir. The pair in question featured a thong that curled
up from the sole over the toes to an ankle fastening. “I soon found the
joy of wearing them,” Carpenter wrote. “And after a little time I set
about making them.” Shoes, he decided, were “leather coffins.” He took
lessons from a Sheffield bootmaker and “soon succeeded in making a good
many pairs for myself and various friends.” (Shaw was given some, but
they cut his feet and he vowed never to wear them again.) Various
disciples made the pilgrimage to Millthorpe, including, Carpenter
remembered, one woman dress-reformer—“her name was Swanhilda
something“—who walked miles in the pouring rain, wearing a roughly cut
blue serge dress and sandals which kept getting stuck in the mud. One of
Carpenter’s employees at Millthorpe, George Adams, also took up
sandal-making. When he fell out with his master, he moved to the newly
established Letchworth Garden City, in Hertfordshire, and established a
small sandal business there.
Letchworth has a special place in the history of crankery. “One day this summer,” Orwell writes in
The Road to Wigan Pier,
“I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two
dreadful-looking old men got onto it. They were both about sixty, both
very short, pink and chubby, and both hatless. … They were dressed in
pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki-shorts into which their huge bottoms
were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their
appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next
to me … murmured ‘Socialists.’” “He was probably right,” the passage
continues. “The Independent Labour Party were holding their summer
school in the town.” (Orwell neglects to say that he was attending it.)
Letchworth Garden City, established in 1904 as an experiment in
town planning—a utopia of pure air and rational living—instantly became a
mecca for simple-lifers and acquired a nationwide reputation for
“crankishness:” sandals and scandals. One of its two original
architects, Raymond Unwin, was a former associate of Carpenter’s within
Sheffield socialism (and a vegetarian). An early resident offered a
description of the “typical Garden citizen,” who wore sandals, ate no
meat, read William Morris and Tolstoy, and kept two tortoises “which he
polished periodically with the best Lucas oil.” The vegetarians in the
town opened the Simple Life Hotel, which had a health-food shop and a
food reform restaurant. A member of the Quaker Cadbury family started up
an alcohol-free pub, the Skittles Inn, which did a brisk trade in hot
chocolate and Cydrax, a non-intoxicating apple wine. (This inspired G.
K. Chesterton’s comment about a life which is all skittles and no beer,
and later John Betjeman’s raillery in
Huxley Hall: “Not my
vegetarian dinner, not my lime juice minus gin, / Quite can drown a
faint conviction that we may be born in Sin.”) Londoners, on their
Sundays off, made special excursions by train to study Letchworth’s
strange collection of smock-wearing Esperanto speakers and theosophists:
a cartoon from a local newspaper showed day-trippers at a human zoo.
“Daddy, I want to see them feed!” pleads a child. Signs for visitors
include: “To the Long Nebbed Sandal Footed Raisin Shifters,” “This Way
to the Non-Tox Pub,” and “To the Hairy-Headed Banana Munchers.” Annie
Besant, a theosophist and campaigner for birth control, opened the St.
Christopher School—where the Independent Labour Party gathering was
held—and which today still offers only vegetarian food (its pupils admit
to nipping out to McDonald’s).
Cartoon by Louis Weirter, published in the local paper The Citizen, 1909.
Courtesy First Garden City Heritage Museum of the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation
The 1920s and 1930s offered plenty of countercultural trends to
cause Orwell more immediate alarm. Pacifism of an absolutist kind was
more generally espoused in the early to mid-1930s than at any other time
in British history. There was also a craze for the open air (associated
with an increase in leisure) and for a hygienic, wholemeal lifestyle.
The membership of the Clarion Cycling Club reached a peak in the
mid-1930s, and unprecedented numbers of city dwellers in knickerbockers
and open-necked shirts took to youth hostelling and rambling with
high-minded verve. “Freedom to roam” over dales and moors became a
left-wing issue, and mass hiking a political act, sometimes combined
with a touch of nature mysticism. In 1932, the writer S. P. B. Mais led
sixteen thousand people out onto the South Downs one morning to see the
sun rise over Chanctonbury Ring (unfortunately, it was cloudy). The
back-to-nature movement assumed other forms, too. The Nature Cure Clinic
was opened in Marylebone in 1928, taking its homeopathic ideas from the
East via Germany. Raw fruit and vegetable juices were championed as
essential for removing toxins from the body. And it was in the 1930s
that Dr. Edward Bach argued for the healing effects of the flower
essences he had found while collecting dewdrops from plants at dawn.
Organized nudism first appeared in Britain in the late 1920s. One
of the first resorts to open was Sun Lodge in Upper Norwood, southeast
of London. From 1928, members of the Sun Bathing Society would meet at
weekends to soak up the invigorating, health-giving rays and enjoy other
activities such as “rhythmic dancing.” Locals would gather around the
boundary fence trying to catch a glimpse of the bathers
in puris naturalibus.
In 1929, the police were called in at the Welsh Harp Reservoir near
Wembley to protect naturists from rioters. In spite of the controversy
it attracted, the nudity movement gathered strength. A letter to the
Times in
1932 called for recognition of the benefits of sun-worshipping “in less
than a bathing costume.” Its signatories included Shaw and C. E. M.
Joad, popular philosopher, socialist, pacifist, countryside enthusiast
(and perhaps the model for Orwell’s “Professor Woad”). Joad was
convinced of the healthiness of lying “naked to the sun,” if only in
deserted coves. Ridicule was never far away. In the film
I See Ice
(1938), George Formby sang of having “A picture of a nudist camp / In
my little snapshot album. / All very jolly but a trifle damp / In my
little snapshot album.”
Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, an anti-militarist
alternative to the scouts, which was open to both boys and girls,
described himself as “a socialist of the Edward Carpenter stamp, in love
with a mystical vision of England.” In 1933, five hundred young members
of the Folk camped around a large Bronze Age standing stone in
Herefordshire to hear a lecture on ley lines while two boys crouched in
wicker cages on top of the monument. (Today, the owner of the land on
which the Queen Stone sits prefers its exact location not to be
publicized so as to discourage the holding of séances.) Paul, a writer
and journalist, spent much of his time in a cottage in rural Devonshire.
A local friend, Joe, his “taut and curly” chest hair like a “wire
mattress,” would sunbathe naked for hours a day while declaring his
Tolstoyism and denouncing leather shoes. “Vegetarianism was in the
progressive air,” Paul later wrote. “New food shops catered for
fantastic new-life tastes. … I drank a mixture of malted milk, hot water
and olive oil which was held to have the most beneficial effects on
one’s colon and nerves.” He was an admirer of the Soviet Union, a
socialist, and a pacifist. “Pacifism had an extraordinary affinity for
vegetarianism,” he reflected, “and so we lived on enormous wooden bowls
of garlic-flavoured salad, and messes of lentils and roasted
pine-kernels garnished with leeks. We thrived.”
Orwell attended two socialist summer schools in 1936: the one in
Letchworth and another, held at a large house in Langham, near
Colchester, which was organized by the
Adelphi, a magazine he
reviewed for. The journal’s founding editor was the critic John
Middleton Murry, a pacifist and socialist of a spiritual, poetic kind,
who acquired the countryside house in the hope that it would become the
nucleus of a new form of egalitarian community. (“In that simple and
beautiful place, our socialism became a reality,” he wrote. “It felt to
me as though we had attained a new kind of immunity from illusion.”) All
the guests were asked to help in the center’s running: Orwell was in
demand as a dishwasher, using skills he had developed while down and out
in Paris. During one of the discussions he apparently told the mostly
middle-class audience that they wouldn’t “recognise a miner or a docker
if they came into the room.” Murry eventually came to believe that the
Adelphi Centre was too much of a talking shop: the socialists staying
there lacked the discipline imposed by tough physical work. His next
project was a pacifist farm.
There are hundreds of other examples of simple-life socialists who
would have provoked Orwell’s scorn. And, despite his best efforts, the
long and rich history of “crankery” continues beyond the 1930s to
elements of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the hippies, and the
greens. (And beyond Britain too, of course.) In the 1960s, a vegetarian
restaurant took the sting out of over a century of mockery by proudly
adopting the name “Cranks.” In many ways, the tables have turned on
Orwell. The likes of Edward Carpenter and Leslie Paul can now be
regarded as forerunners of a very modern ecological anti-capitalism.
Environmentalism is increasingly
the cause rather than an eccentric distraction from it.
Much of what Orwell understood to be crankishness has become
fashionable. There are now three-and-a-half million vegetarians in
Britain, yoga seems to be an increasingly accepted part of middle-class
life, and homeopathic pills are taken in the millions. (Though such
trends perhaps suggest even more than in Orwell’s day a certain kind of
self-preserving, self-cherishing lifestyle as opposed to a genuine
commitment to change the world.)
Inevitably, as some aspects of crankishness have been absorbed
into the mainstream, other strange practices and beliefs take their
place, ripe for ridicule by the majority. In the spirit of
The Road to Wigan Pier,
today’s anti-capitalism could be said to draw towards it with magnetic
force every tree-hugger, organic fruitarian, solar-powered scooter
rider, water-birth enthusiast, Tantric-sex practitioner, world-music
listener, teepee-dweller, hemp-trouser wearer, and Ayurvedic massage
addict in England. As for sandals, the journalists at the
Daily Mail
may keep alive the time-honored association of cranks with near-naked
feet, but the long queues outside Birkenstock shops should make them
think again. The simple life may be as far away as ever, but we are all
sandal-wearers now.
Paul Laity is an editor at the
London Review of Books. He edited the
Left Book
Club Anthology (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001).
By South Utsire (confirmed dandelion sitter)
