THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER
ONE
The Road To Wigan Pier (Pt 1) by George Orwell
(Eric Blair 1937, Victor Gollancz 1947, Secker & Warburg 1949, Penguin 1962)
The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her ― her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round, pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that 'It isn't the same for them as it would be for us', and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her ― understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.
TWO
Wigan Pier by Derek Winstanley and Bill Aldridge
(Wigan Arch. Soc. 2015, The Wigan Archaeological Society 2023)
Wigan is in the middle of the Lancashire Coalfield ... landlocked with no easy means of transporting large quantities of coal to growing markets ... However, coal production in the early 1700s was only a few thousand tons per year and the population only a few thousand. Demand for coal was not great, technology only allowed for shallow mining, and transport was primitive ... 'Strings of pack horses, thirty and forty in a gang, were used for carrying coals and lime'...
If you were born in the Wigan area in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was no question about the dominance of coal mining ― pits, spoil heaps and steam locomotives were everywhere. A defiled landscape with flashes, caused by extraction of millions of tons of coal underground, and spoil heaps, caused by dumping vast quantities of mining waste on the surface, became visible signs of laissez-faire development. A huge iron works mushroomed across the landscape and cotton mills sprang up everywhere...
The first major transport development was authorization of The (River) Douglas Navigation in 1720 ... finished in 1742, allowing boats to carry some 20 tons of coal and other goods 10 miles to the Ribble Estuary ... 'bow hauled' by gangs of men ... History reveals that Wigan's first 'maritime' structure was a dock at the head of the Douglas Navigation ... When the Leeds and Liverpool Canal was finished to Wigan in 1794, the Navigation was effectively abandoned ... the Wigan to Dean section of the Canal took over ... and provided direct access to the emerging Liverpool market ... Horse-drawn barges now could transport 60 tonnes of goods ...
By the 1820s, there were railway pier heads at three locations in the Wigan Canal Basin. John Daglish built the earliest documented pier head with a tippler and weighing machine on the site of the current symbolic replica of a tippler c. 1822. This is where horse-drawn coal wagons on a narrow-gauge railway from Daglish's Colliery in the Worsley Mesnes/Goose Green area tippled coal into canal barges ... The pier heads for Germans' and Blundell's railways, near Seven Stars Bridge, were the second and third Wigan piers to be constructed in the Wigan Basin in ... c.1825-28 ... Both railways were narrow gauge, probably 4 feet, laid on iron edge rails and worked by gravity and horse power ...
1980s image of replica tippling mechanism opposite original stone warehouse
Wigan Pier No 1 has its own particular story and this has been stretched to make a strictly literal point. Between 1882 and 1887 the narrow-gauge line down to the canal was changed to standard gauge and extended to Winstanley Colliery, with new steam locomotives introduced to haul the coal for mine owner Meyrick Bankes Jr. As the railroad now transported coal from
the pithead at Winstanley to the canal, it could be said that the Road to Wigan Pier started at the Winstanley mine.
Although coalmining is central to industrialised Britain, this interpretation is far too narrow. A more useful approach is to consider that the book and its title, The Road to Wigan Pier, had a literary beginning in the mind of the author. Orwell's real concern is the English working class. This is an altogether denser topic.
THREE
The Road To Wigan Pier (Pt 2) by George Orwell
(Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook, faded page.com/#20180878)
In the earlier chapters of this book I have given a rather fragmentary account of various things I saw in the coal areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire. I went there partly because I wanted to see what mass-unemployment is like at its worst, partly in order to see the most typical section of the English working class at close quarters. This was necessary to me as part of my approach to Socialism. For before you can be sure whether you are genuinely in favour of Socialism, you have got to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable, and you have got to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult issue of class ... [Ch VIII]
I thought it over and decided what I would do. I would go suitably disguised to Limehouse and Whitechapel and such places and sleep in common lodging-houses and pal up with dock-labourers, street hawkers, derelict people, beggars, and, if possible, criminals. And I would find out about tramps and how you got in touch with them and what was the proper procedure for entering the casual ward; and then, when I felt I knew the ropes well enough, I would go on the road myself ... I have described all this in Down and Out in London and Paris ... But unfortunately you do not solve the class problem by making friends with tramps. At most you get rid of some of your own class-prejudice by doing so. Tramps, beggars, criminals and social outcasts generally are very exceptional beings and no more typical of the working class as a whole than, say, the literary intelligentsia are typical of the bourgeoisie ... [Ch IX]
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice ... For it must be remembered that a working man, so long as he remains a genuine working man, is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete, logically consistent sense. Very likely he votes Labour, or even Communist if he gets the chance, but his conception of Socialism is quite different from that of the book-trained Socialist higher up. To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about ... But, so far as my experience goes, no genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency. But what he does not grasp is that Socialism cannot be narrowed down to mere economic injustice and that a reform of that magnitude is bound to work immense change in our civilisation and his own way of life. His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centring around the same things as at present ― family life, the pub, football, and local politics ... I have yet to meet a working miner, steel worker, cotton-weaver, docker, navvy or whatnot who was 'ideologically' sound. One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the 'educated' are completely orthodox ... [Ch XI]
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