It’s hard to think of a writer who better encapsulates Nottingham’s defiant individualism than Alan Sillitoe. The creation of anti-hero Arthur Seaton is reason in itself for Nottingham to be accredited as a UNESCO City of Literature.
In 1958 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning became the first Pan paperback to sell a million copies thanks to the antics of hard drinking, womanising anti-hero Arthur Seaton. In the opening chapter to Alan Sillitoe’s raw portrait of working-class Nottingham life, Seaton quenches payday thirst by having a skinful down his local, The White Horse.
By the end of the evening he’s had a drinking game with a sailor, thrown up over some fellow drinkers before exiting head first down the pub stairs.
Yet Seaton is more than just your average drunk. He’s belligerent and hedonistic, with a healthy scepticism of all forms of authority. Karel Reisz’s 1960 film would immortalise him forever as the icon of anti-establishment defiance.
‘Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, and income tax offices rob you to death,’ the wonderfully quotable Seaton declares. ‘And if you’re still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death.”
Sillitoe’s novel has provided the defining image of my home town, Nottingham, be it in our labelling as the binge capital of Britain, or in recognition of the defiant streak that has manifested itself in numerous ways over the centuries.
You don’t get more unconventional than the 1766 Cheese Riots, when we expressed our dissatisfaction with rising food prices by flattening the mayor with a barrel-shaped cheese, or the 1831 Reform Riots when we burned down our very own castle. And let’s not forget that we’re home to England’s favourite potty mouth, D H Lawrence. The acquittal of Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960 would pave the way for greater freedom of expression for us all. A Nottingham man made it possible for everyone to swear more freely.
But Nottingham has an incredibly rich literary history that extends beyond booze and foul language. It was home to Quaker poet Mary Howitt who translated the works of Hans Christian Anderson, it’s the birthplace of Alma Reville, aka Mrs Hitchcock, and it was here that J M Barrie found the inspiration for Peter Pan and Graham Greene converted to Catholicism. More recently it has become the adopted home of Booker-shortlisted author Alison Moore and Impac winner Jon McGregor. Yet despite this, Nottingham, and the Midlands in general, are largely ignored when it comes to mapping out English literary culture.
As the Chair of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio, I find this absolutely maddening and dedicate every waking hour to rectifying this vulgar prejudice. Currently I’m doing this through a graphic novel called Dawn of the Unread in which twelve literary figures from Nottingham’s past return back from the grave in search of the one thing that can keep their memories alive: Boooks. The aim is to get people reading about local history and in turn supporting libraries. The fact that so far we’ve only lost one library, at Wilford in 2010, suggests the fighting spirit of Arthur Seaton lives on.
We may be good at standing up to authority but we’re absolutely rammel – that’s local dialect for ‘rubbish’ – at promoting ourselves. All of which might go some way to explaining why England is talked about as a country of two halves: Our Friends in the North and the Beautiful South. These binary identities have acted as a kind of cultural vice that have effectively crushed everything in between. Talk about a squeezed middle – that’s the Midlands for you. Neither use nor ornament to use another local phrase.
It’s probably because of this that when you tell someone you’re from Nottingham they don’t go, ‘which of Geoffrey Trease’s 113 books would you recommend?’ Instead preconceptions about Nottingham can be reduced to three recurring themes: Are there really four women to every man? Will I get shot? And Brian Clough – manager of Nottingham Forest in their heyday – was mint. Sex, violence and vanity. It makes us sound like we’re in a Jilly Cooper novel.
The female myth is a throwback to the Age of Empire when a quarter-mile square chunk of the city was the centre of the world’s lace industry. The knitting frame was invented here in 1589 by William Lee, which would help mechanise the textile industry. By the 1750s there were about 1,800 frames in Britain, with the majority located in the East Midlands.
But, as is typical of Nottingham, no sooner had we invented something, we were smashing it up: the Luddite movement began here. Ned Ludd was reputed to be a resident of Sherwood Forest – like that other famous local anti-establishment rebel, Robin Hood. So 1811 saw the smashing of frames in protest at diminishing wages and when the government threatened to make this a capital crime, Lord Byron, who had inherited the ancestral home of nearby Newstead Abbey, stepped forward and delivered his maiden speech in the House of Lords.
“Can you carry this bill into effect? Can you commit a whole county to their own prisons? Will you erect a gibbet in every field and hang up men like scarecrows?” Byron isn’t around to stand up for the poor anymore – come to think of it, nobody is, certainly not in these parts. A recent survey found that there are fewer noble lords and baronesses in the House of Lords representing the East Midlands than any other part of the UK.
The lace industry has long gone and the warehouses that once housed a thriving workforce have been converted into fancy apartments and swanky offices. But still hordes of lusty stags invade the Nottingham city centre every weekend hoping to find the streets paved with garters. Rather than tell them they’re a couple of centuries late, I quietly whisper: they’re at home writing books. There’s Betty Trask winner Nicola Monaghan and Sarah Jackson, who took the 2012 Seamus Heaney Prize. And let’s not forget Jenny Swann, publisher of Candlestick Press or Alison Em, editor of irreverent local magazine LeftLion. We are the Queen of the Midlands in more ways than one.
The perception of Nottingham as a hedonistic and violent city may in large part be down to the success of Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. But not everybody shared Arthur Seaton’s idea of a good time: many publishers rejected the original manuscript because they wanted a more edifying narrative, feeling that the working class had it hard enough already. They feared the book might incite hatred for decent working men among its potential readers; some even suggested that the author had no experience of the life he described – at the time, Sillitoe was sunning it up abroad in self-imposed exile.
The opposite was true.
He had grown up in chronic poverty and witnessed his illiterate, violent father Christopher imprisoned for being unable to pay for food acquired on tick, while his mother, Sabina, had at one point turned to prostitution to provide for her family. Sillitoe was simply following the advice of his friend Robert Graves and writing what he knew with such devastating accuracy, it scared the living daylights out of the literati.
In the late ’50s Sillitoe would find himself grouped alongside the likes of John Braine, Kingsley Amis and John Osborne as an Angry Young Man. But, according to critic Peter Green, the Nottingham writer’s guttural version of working class life made the Northerner Braine’s offering in Room at the Top look “like a vicarage tea party” by comparison.
Sillitoe deplored labels and had no interest in being a member of anyone’s gang, a characteristic he shared with Arthur Seaton. Everyone was out for whatever they could get and only extreme cunning would give you protection, as Seaton put it, from “the snot-gobbling get that teks my income tax, the swivel-eyed swine that collects our rent, the big-headed bastard that gets my goat when he asks me to union meetings.” The message both Sillitoe and Seaton send to the world at large is clear: leave me alone.
This defiant individualism and mistrust of all forms of propaganda is a trait that has come to define the Nottingham character. With the 30th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike upon us we’ll inevitably be reminded of another, not-unrelated label: Scab City. I grew up in a mining village south east of the Trent called Cotgrave. That’s right: Cot. Grave. Says it all. For years I thought the local accent was Geordie because men from the north east relocated here in the early seventies since Nottinghamshire miners drew one of the highest salaries in the country. We were second in output only to Yorkshire.
Most Nottinghamshire miners didn’t join their Yorkshire brethren in coming out on strike when Arthur Scargill made the call; the mining town of Mansfield, 12 miles up the road, became the headquarters of the breakaway – and non-striking – Union of Democratic Miners. The non-strikers were seen by many to have betrayed their own in refusing to down tools but I guess how you interpret this depends on whose account of history you’re reading and whether you’re going to lump us all together.
We were either greedy and out for ourselves or we simply didn’t like outsiders coming down and expecting us to do as we were told. And let’s be honest. It wasn’t like it was the first time in history we’d defied orders to strike or refused to go along with other people’s propaganda.
This spirit of resistance is best exemplified by an incident in 1936 when Miners’ leaders flocked to the cause of the Spanish Republic in fighting Franco’s fascism. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain introduced a members levy to raise funds for the International Brigade but guess who refused to contribute. Nottinghamshire.
As writer Harry Patterson reports: ‘The Area insisted that if the leadership wanted to send cash to the Spanish fighters, then it should come from the Union’s political fund and not the members’ political pocket.’
I’m not going to blather on about the Strike because it’s a complicated mess and you’re best listening to those that were down the pit rather than a writer with clean finger nails like me. But there are many similarities between the stance of Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and the issues raised by the Miners’ Strike.
Some critics accused Sillitoe of being a traitor to his own. That instead of necking pints Arthur Seaton should have done something more “constructive” to change his material existence. He should have united with his work colleagues, rather than turn them against each other. Yeah, imagine that: For it was Saturday Night, the binggiest gladtime of the week. But Arthur went to bed early because he had work the next morning and he didn’t want to let his fellow comrades down.
If anything, Seaton’s political sentiments are an early echo of Thatcherism in that he, too, believes there is no such thing as society: “If I won the lottery, I’d only look after me own. I’d make bonfires out of the beggin letters.”
Sillitoe addressed these accusations of disloyalty when he wrote: “Those individuals who work in factories are only members of a ‘class’ when they band together to come out on strike for better wages and conditions. In normal circumstances they see each other as unique people, otherwise they would not see each other as human beings at all.” Perhaps this is what happened in the Miners’ Strike. Workers saw themselves as individuals, belonging to individual tribes with their own ballots, rather than as an entire class of people.
When Raleigh workers were interviewed about their response to the character of Arthur Seaton they protested that they were nothing like him, and that nobody they knew in the factory was like him either. I imagine this would have made Sillitoe laugh as it echoed the very sentiments of his charismatic protagonist: “I’m me and nobody else,” declared Seaton, ‘and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me.”
I don’t think people know a bloody thing about Nottingham either, and I think most of us here prefer it this way. We’re much happier left to our own devices, something the villagers of Goatham can testify to. Back in the days of King John, folklore has it that to avoid a Royal Highway being built through the village – which the locals would be expected to build for free – they feigned madness by fencing off a small tree in order to keep a cuckoo captive. At the time madness was seen as contagious and so when King John’s knights witnessed Cuckoogate they re-routed their highway to avoid the village. It’s a cracking story that pretty much sums up our attitude to authority and unnecessary work. Goatham has now become Gothem and is forever immortalised as the fictional home of Batman in the DC Comics.
I see this sense of defiance everywhere I look in Nottingham, not least in the River Trent which cuts a crooked smile through the heart of England and has acted at more than one point in history as the dividing line between north and south. Its refusal to take the natural route offered by the geological configuration of the land by suddenly darting north east captures the rebellious and unpredictable essence of our personality, though I guess you could also say it suggests indecision. Let’s not get carried away.
So next time you’re heading our way swing past the Nottingham Writers’ Studio and let’s have a natter about the literature and fighting that has been hewn and continues to be sculpted from the city’s rough sandstone heart. And if you insist on calling us scabs or Shottingham, don’t be surprised if we lob a cheese cob at your head. Tara, duck.
This was originally published by Radio 3 for The Essay as part of their In Praise of the Midlands series, produced by Robert Shore and Made in Manchester.