BENTLEY: THE MORCAR NOVELS: 1 THE RISE OF HENRY MORCAR

Rise of Henry Morcar

Bentley, Phyllis, The Rise of Henry Morcar , London, Pan Books, 1968 [1945]

Rise fills in all the areas of the life of a factory owner that Carr leaves blank.  As a contemporary review of the novel put it the text is a ‘two-generation, 1890-1945, V.R, to V.1, family chronicle,’ (Observer, quoted fly-leaf Rise).   The weapon that dominate the book’s opening is the German ‘Veltgeltungswaffe 1’ ( ‘Revenge Weapon 1), a jet-powered unguided flying-bomb. http://www.flyingbombsandrockets.com/V1_into.html

A VI in Flight  

A pre-echo of this civilian vulnerability is built into the book.  Henry spends his honeymoon in London ‘in spite of Zeppelins’ (III.15.98) during the period in which the WWI German air-attacks on British towns and civilians were moving from being carried out by airships to aircraft.  

L45, one of the Zeppelins attacking London in 1917.

By 1917 the Zeppelin was effectively obsolete and struggling to cope with London's air-defences.   The aircraft were painted black on the underside, to try to conceal them from London's searchlights and white above, giving them a strangely broken-backed appearance. 

Henry's experience reflects Britain's:  the technology of air-attack has moved from huge lighter-than-air  craft to compact pulse-jets within 30 years.

Readers who pick up The Rise of Henry Morcar knowing that the book is a continuation of Inheritance would expect Rise to start where Inheritance finishes, following the young David Oldroyd’s journey across the moor past his ancestors’ factories.  Instead the later novel opens in 1944 amidst a group of characters who have no connection with Inheritance; it is only on page 2 ( Rise, Prologue) that David Oldroyd is mentioned .   The years separating the young boy from the adult are not filled in until page 175 (Rise, Chp 25) when the story of his jump from the train is finally taken up.  It is mentioned only in a reported conversation relayed to an initially uninterested Henry Morcar.   David and the other surviving Oldroyds occupy the margins of a book centred on Henry Morcar, whose rise is a familiar one, rehearsed by Bentley in Carr and Inheritance.   

Paradoxically The Rise of Henry Morcar opens with a fall.  Henry and members of his family have heard the motor of a V1 cut and are waiting to see if it will fall on them or not.  The book becomes a flashback as Henry remembers his life in the moments before his possible death.  The cliché of a drowning man’s life flashing before him has been given a sinister update to place it in a modern world in a total war dominated by indiscriminate modern weapons.

Henry grows up in ‘Hurst’.  In Ned Carter in Danger ‘Hurst’ is an independent village but by Victorian times it is ‘a suburb of the town of Annotsfield,’ ( I.1.11).    Henry lives in his grandfather’s house  ‘on the well-thought- of Hurstholt road, where a group of similar houses looked across at the new Hursthead Park,’ (I.1.11).    As ‘Annotsfield’ is ‘Huddersfield’ and Huddersfield contains ‘Greenhead Park’, flanked on the west by ‘Gledholt Road’, the situation, if not the number of ‘Old John Morcar’s  house’ (I.1.11), is easy to identify.    Gledholt Road has changed little in appearance or prestige since 1884 when the park was built.

the high-status of the project is shown by the heralidc shields on the lodge-gate by the town entrance (left) and the benches (right)

However, this ‘Hurst’ does not appear to be where it will be in Ned Carter in Danger .  In the later book  ‘Hurst’  has to be moved north and east to be close to The Shears Inn, Liversedge, and Rawfolds Mill.   Bentley needs Morcar’s house to be in this precise location so she can show young Henry literally moving down in the world after the premature death of his father.    His grandfather’s house is situated at the top of Gledholt Road;  following the road south means going downhill into the industrial area of Paddock, leaving behind ‘the sober satisfaction of substantial ratepayers,’  (I.1.11).   This is the route Henry and his mother are forced to follow when the family money is lost: ‘Down the hill to the right the road became suddenly precipitous and turned into Hurst Bank, and at the bottom of Hurst Bank lay a nest of mills and workmen’s houses, and one of those railway viaducts of which the hilly West Riding has such an abundance,’ (I.1.12).  The description winds its way to the bottom, along with the road, lightened by the humorous deployment of a Victorian phrase at the end: ‘has such an abundance,’ (I.1.12).

Viaduct View ; bottom of Gledholt Road

Before the descent the first page describes ‘Hurstholt’ Road and the family home:  ‘Old John Morcar’s house was built of good local stone,’ ( I.1. 11).  This is the first involvement of ‘local stone’ in Henry’s life and the first manifestation in the Morcar books of Bentley’s aphorism ‘All Halifax history depends on Halifax geography’ (http://www.2ubh.com/features/SlasherSA.html), albeit applied to Huddersfield.  Here ‘local stone’ (Millstone Grit) is used to create artificial distinctions of status which are carefully observed by Bentley;

                 A semi-detached house on Gledholt Road.                                             A detached house on Gledholt Road.

The detached house carries greatest prestige: 'superior to the semi-detached houses on the left,' (!.1.11)

The kind of 'workman's cottage' further down 'Hurstholt Road' that Henry and his mother end up living in.

'they were moving into a tiny house, really a workman's cottage, in a row along Hurst road'(1.8.41-2)

At the bottom of the lane, as Ruskin would have expected, stands the mill that earns the grandfather's fortune: 

Syke Mill has clock-tower.    Mills with clock towers are rarer than might be thought.   Bentley may have been inspired by Newsome Mill that dominates the north-east portion of the Holme Valley

The mill immediately at the bottom of  Gledholt road in Paddock is the Continental Mill.

The conspicuous tower lacks a clock...

Politics

Bentley spoke out against appeasement in 1938:

   On 30 September 1938, Chamberlain returned from Munich and delivered his lines: "I believe it is      

    peace for our time. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep." By November, local novelist Phyllis

   Bentley was writing to the Yorkshire Post to denounce this appeasement – afterwards, she later

    recalled, "some Halifax shopkeepers... murmured in my ear their thanks." 

http://www.2ubh.com/features/SlasherSA.html

Nevertheless the end of the book does not celebrate the overthrow of Nazism.  The sub-title is ‘To work’ and the celebrations of the war’s end are ‘melancholy, even in triumph’ (Epilogue, 347).  The book has been dominated by the random deaths of war, symbolised by the unpredictability of the VI strikes.  Though A Man of his Time shows Bentley’s awareness of the existence of atomic weapons, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not mentioned.  Significantly it is not clear if this is VE day (the end of the war in Europe) or VJ Day (the end of the war with Japan and hence the end of WWII).  Local celebrations of victory are recorded affectionately with a touch of humour but the event is dominated by relief and sadness.  ‘Bunting and paper were in short supply’ (Epilogue, 346).  Local pomp centres on the town hall: ‘The mace-bearers came out on the balcony; the Mayor in robes and chain, the Town Clerk in wig and gown, the Mayor’s chaplain in his best black,’ but the mayor’s speech is ‘simple’ and not pompous, read in ‘A Yorkshire voice uneven with emotion’.  The cheers which celebrate the winning of the war are hushed by ‘the strange high notes of the Cease Fire, so  melancholy even in triumph,’  During the silence Morcar reflects not on the defeat of the Axis but his irreplaceable personal loss. (Epilogue, 347) 

Huddersfield Town Hall and Balcony

In keeping with the novel’s awareness that war is merely an interruption of trade, the book ends with Henry sitting at his desk thinking ‘To work!  To work! To work for the good of all…. It was an ideal to which he was proud to have risen.  To work for the good of all,’ (Epilogue, 348).   Implicitly the text offers comfort to a generation who have survived the most destructive war of human history.    They are reassured that the wartime spirit of unity will help restore peace and prosperity to Britain and Britain will be able to move beyond class war.  Significantly this hope is expressed as a series of questions that occur to Henry not a series of declarations:

   How to provide good houses, good education, good wages, good hopes of advancement for all     

  workers in the industry, without raising the price of the product beyond what other workers could  

  pay? (Epilogue, 349)  

It anticipates the dictum of another Huddersfield man; Harold Wilson: ‘One man’s pay rise is another man’s price rise.’  The quote exists in various forms usually prefaced by ‘Wilson is said to have said’ See Business Communication: Made Simple, E. C. Eyre (London,  Heineman, 1987,166) 

A Man of his Time will see how adequate the answers to Henry’s urgent questions are in the post-war Yorkshire during one of Wilson’s times as Prime Minister.

Freud and Morcar

Bentley stages the clash between the Morcar generations in terms of their understanding of Freud.     David belongs to a generation who have grown up knowing and understanding Freud: ‘Oh that’s just the usual Oedipus complex stuff,’ said David calmly.’   Morcar does not.  He is left baffled:  ‘wondering who (or what) Oedipus was,’ (V.34.237).   Nevertheless Henry ‘s marriage is ensnared by a distinctive and unusual Freudian tension.  Henry Morcar is surprisingly passive sexually, especially compared to the early Oldroyds of Inheritance.  He does not court Winnie Shaw, she courts him: ‘Are we engaged or not?’ (III.14.95 ).  This happens at a crucial time.  Charlie, Winnie’s brother, who had been the link between them, has been killed on the Western Front.   Henry’s feelings sound like a delayed coming-of-age: ‘He felt tremendously flattered and exhilarated, suddenly proud for Winnie’s sake of his medal, his war service and his manhood,’ ( III.14.96 ).   It looks as if all the class and sexual inferiority that has dominated Henry’s growing-up has been dissolved by love but his ‘manhood’ is brutally undermined within 15 pages.    At the end of part III Winnie tells him ‘He’s not your child!’ (III.17.111).   Consequently this part of the text  that covers Britain’s victory in World War I is called ‘Defeat’.     Three quarters of the way through the book there is a sudden reversal when Winnie says Henry is the boy’s father: ‘’Of course he’s yours… He’s the living image of you –’ (V.40. 265).  Then a Freudian twist comes in.   Though Winnie has incorporated her husband’s name in that of her son ‘Cecil Henry Morcar’ she points out to Henry that  the initials ‘C.H’ are ‘ the beginning of Charlie’ (V.40.265).  The name reflects the guilt and anger felt by both Henry and Winifred over the death of Charlie but it appears Winnie both needs and resents Henry as a substitute for Charlie.  Her feelings for Charlie were more emotionally trusting and intimate than her feelings for her husband and the name ‘Cecil Henry’ gives the dead brother a living role in the parentage of her boy.   ‘CH’ precedes and supersedes the father’s name ‘Henry’.  No wonder in pre DNA days, Henry seeks reassurance by seeing in Cecil ‘almost exactly his own face,’ (V.40. 269).   Nevertheless the anxiety is still haunting him in the sequel A Man of his Time: ‘He [Cecil] did not in the least, thank heaven, resemble any of the Shaws, his mother’s people,’ (I.3.24).    Winnie’s forbidden desire has become a modern weapon that has tormented Henry’s adult existence as deeply as his experience of the First World War and his fears of a second world war.

Existential Space

As in Inheritance , The Rise of Henry Morcar provides the hero with a blank area in which he can think about the meaning of the world and his place in it.  In Inheritance this is the low-lying, marshy Knavesmire; in this is a high moor ‘Marthwaite Moore’:

  A landscape of singular beauty lay before him: a vast amphitheatre where three great slopes  

  interlocked, sweeping majestically down to the stream far out of sight below.  (IV.18.112)

 The name ‘Marthwaite’ is an imaginative fusion of Marsden and Slaithwaite.    Slaithwaite Moor is bleak enough and the edge offers views over the ‘Ire Valley’   

Slaithwaite Moor

However Bentley points out that this apparent wilderness contains ‘smoke-vents’: ‘

  These marked smoke-vent, airholes to the long railway tunnel crawling deep through the Pennines     

   beneath Morcar’s feet,’ (V.41.272)  

A railway tunnel must run deep under ‘Marthwaite Moor’.   In the Colne Valley the railway to Manchester runs under Standedge and its course is marked out by steam vents.  This area is called ‘Marsden Moor’ by the plaques of the ‘Marsden Heritage Trail’, though it is not marked as such on the Ordnance Survey Landranger series.   

National Trust Display board, Marsden Moor 

In his wartime role as a Local Defence Volunteer Henry can be imagined stationed up near one of the steam vents of Standedge:

Steam Vents on the Marsden side of Standedge.

This is the view he would get of the valley:

The 'Ire Valley' from 'Marthwaite Moor'.  

Henry has two epiphanies here.  The first is bleak, of himself as cuckold: ’Who was her lover, he wondered?’ (IV.18.112).   As Freud might expect his thwarted sexual energy is sublimated into work and Henry’s resolve is studded with sexually charged words ‘bend’, ‘stiffen’, ‘soft’, ‘hard’:

   ‘there are two ways of taking this sort of thing, ‘ he said to himself. ‘Bend or stiffen.  The soft or the hard.  I shall take the hard.’

      (IV.18.114).

It is stiff, hard Henry who now confronts the world.    

The second is redemptive; the fear and discomfort of war generate a vision of interconnectedness and protection:

    A deep love suddenly rushed into his heart for the West Riding, which he watched here to guard;these are my people, he thought,

    I must protect them if I can help it,’ (V.42.275 ).

It is not surprising that his mother is first on his list but Winnie unexpectedly second:

   His mother, Winnie, Nathan, the Jessopps, the workpeople at Sykes Mills and Old Mill and all the other mills whose chimneys were 

   even now just beginning to exhale smoke; even the dog Heather; for that night they had all been in his care,’  (V.42.275 ).

The wide-ranging view from the hill has encouraged Henry to be far-sighted in a moral and metaphorical sense. 

However the novel is realistic.    It shows that Henry cannot protect those in his care from a global war that kills those he loves in London as well as overseas.   Henry’s vision can have no practical effect on his place in the larger world.

War and Trade

The cover of the 1968 paperback is based on a still from the Granada 1967 TV adaptation.  It shows an apparently heroic scene of a First World War soldier carrying a comrade on his back and seeks to sell the book as a novel about the Great War to a reading public hungry for such material.   However the book is not an anticipation of Pat Barker’s retellings of WWI, instead the book’s social realism shows trade as more important than war.   The first four sections of the book are 170 pages long.  WWI occupies only 32 of these pages.    Even the incident the cover depicts turns out to be ironic, not heroic.  The man Henry carries back from No Man’s Land is his friend Charlie who is not wounded but dead.    From the perspective of Social Realism the misery caused by war is less important than the misery caused by declining trade.   The end of Part IV and the start of Part V mostly concern the bankruptcy of mills, including that of the Oldroyds.   Morcar himself would have been dragged down if he had not held back a shipment from Mr Butterworth when he realises Brutterworth’s mill is failing.  The sentence that comments on this seems to combine the morality of the author with the morality of Henry: ‘It was the most completely selfish act, the lowest point, the nadir of his career,’ ((IV.24.169).  Tautology confirms the moral lesson by repeating ‘lowest point’ as ‘nadir’ but the text makes it clear that the economics of the day left Henry no choice.  Had he not been ‘selfish’ his mill and the jobs depending on it would have failed as well.

World War II repeats the lesson.    Henry volunteers for the LDF, the forerunner of the home Guard, and has one of his moments of existential epiphany whilst guarding the Ire Valley, but his most important contribution to winning the war is his participation in the Export Drive.  This takes place in the part of the book labelled ‘RISE’.  In V.36 this is part of the Cash and Carry trade with America, where neutral America ensures that it receives dollars for all goods sold.   David explains the system with conscious objectivity:  ’Our dollar reserve is getting very low, so we must earn more dollars.  The only way to earn dollars is by selling our products in the States,’ (V.36. 258).  However the economic calculations behind this look cold-blooded and self-interested compared to Henry’s Post-Dunkirk vision of how total war has encompassed everyone he knows, from ‘David and Cecil ‘ ‘training’  to ‘Canon Harington and his vicarage’ destroyed by the crash of an enemy plane (V.42.275).   A further twist is added when American protectionism curtails the activities of the Export Group.   Henry realises that this is likely to allow America post-war dominance:  ‘So our export drive has gone into reverse.  We’re just throwing away our export trade in order to win this war,’ (V. 46.308).   The book has only another 42 pages to run and economics and Henry’s role in trade drop from the narrative.  Henry and Britain are no longer in a position, unlike the first generation of Oldroyds, to create industries and markets and economic ascendency.

Epilogue

In the light of the novel’s economic pessimism and the tragedies that have struck the Morcar and Oldroyd families, the epilogue is downbeat, describing survival rather than victory.    Nevertheless it offers comfort for its first generation of readers who survived the random and impersonal dangers of WWII that the ‘real’ England has survived.   This real England is ‘sober, kindly, spontaneous, democratic’ (Epilogue, 348).   It is a list comparable to similar lists drawn from both ends of the political spectrum in the 20th century, George Orwell’s and John Major’s

George Orwell:

     When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation     of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?   ‘England, your England’ http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye

John Major:

Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and - as George Orwell said - “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way - Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials.

http://www.johnmajor.co.uk/page1086.html

 However, where the Orwell and Major lists are preoccupied with the appearance as much as the morality of England, Bentley’s list concerns England’s moral qualities.   Henry Morcar is created to embody these traits in a stolid, literal, blunt, unselfconscious Yorkshire manner.    He appears to be a figure the audience can affectionately laugh at as much as identify with.  V.38 is short and pointed, laid out like a poem, hovering between satire and celebration:

38.  Call to Sacrifice

      It was May 1940.

          Morcar entered the lounge of the Annotsfield Club.

          ‘…and so Churchill is Prime minister at last.’

           ‘Thank God!’ said Morcar.

          ‘You needn’t be so chirpy about it – he only promises us blood, toil, tears and sweat.’

          ‘Who cares?’ said Morcar.   (260)

It is immediately followed by

39. Volunteer

Once more Morcar’s enthusiasm is applauded and gently deflated: ‘But of course by the time he reached the Police Station there was a long queue of middle-aged men like himself, waiting to join the local defence Volunteers to guard England against invasion.’ (V.39.260)

Here the same sentence makes Morcar’s eagerness reflects that of his peers, who are tactfully reminded that they are ‘middle-aged men’.    A similar sentence of p 261 allows him epitomise the resilience of survivors of Dunkirk returning to Annotsfield:

  They looked worn, dirty, tired, unshaven, but they did not – thanks God, thought Morcar – look   

  defeated,’ (V.39. 261). 

Realistically the affirmation is followed by a pessimistic voice from the beaches of France:

 ‘Jerry’ll soon knock all these down, ‘ said another man looking around him at the undamaged    

  buildings,’ (V.39.261-2).

The tactic of identifying Morcar with Churchill as the backbone of England is returned to at the end of A Man of his Time, when the death of Churchill forces readers to think such qualities may belong to the past not the future.   Certainly the economic future is being determined outside Yorkshire.  Despite Morcar’s upbringing and the siting of his mills he is forced to spend more and more time in London, where he acquires cultivation, through a mistress, and a war-role, through the government.

Nevertheless Henry’s resolve is proposed as representing the future not the past:

 ‘To work!  To work! To work for the good of all…. It was an ideal to which he was proud to have

  risen.  To work for the good of all,’ (Epilogue, p348).  

This is so important to Bentley that a short prefatory note alerts readers to Henry’s significance:

   Some may think that Morcar in his last phase does not yet exist amongst West Riding

   manufacturers.  For my part, however, I believe that numbers of him can be found.

  London-Halifax                                                                                                   PHYLLIS BENTLEY

  January-October, 1945

However the tone is as much defensive as assertive: ‘some may think’, ‘however’, ‘believe’ and the  final novels of the ‘Morcar’ trilogy objectively confirm the rise of the south over the north and the international over the national.      Nevertheless the novel's last image is of Morcar driving through the gates of Syke Mills archway in order to work for this common good:

The gates of Upper Mills, Slaithwaite