COOPER: The New House, National Provincial: 2 Status and Class

Part 2: Status and Class

Lettice Cooper:

The New House, London, Persephone, 2003 [1936]

National Provincial, London, Persephone, 2018 [1938]

The events of The New House and one of the plot strands of National Provincial are occasioned by the attempts of the Labour council of Leeds to replace the slums of the city with modern housing for the working class.  The housing committee was chaired by the socialist Reverend Charles Jenkinson, a protégé of Conrad Noel, the ‘Red Vicar’ of Thaxted (https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/category/leeds/ ).  In The New House there is a brief reference to ‘a young clergyman who had been for a holiday in Russia,’ (II.xxi.172) that might be inspired by Jenkinson.   In National Provincial Charles Jenkinson’s characteristics are subdivided between the socialist curate Mark Forrester and the left-wing agitator Tom Sutton.  

The New House sees the housing movement from the perspective of middle-class family the Powells, who are selling their family home; National Provincial from a working-class family, the Walters, who are being displaced and rehoused.    The reaction of the snobbish in-law Evelyn in The New House is characteristic of middle-class reaction: ‘I simply hate to think of the house pulled down, and nasty little red houses, full of common people and screaming children, all over that lovely garden,’ (I.v.41).  This attitude is tacitly contradicted by Rhoda’s conscience: ‘It was when you remembered that they put their servants to sleep in attics without windows that you saw the justice of a housing estate blotting out their garden,’ (I.i.12).  The phrase ‘put…to sleep’ suggests the killing of elderly or inconvenient pets.     Later in the novel the view is directly contradicted by Rhoda’s socialist sister Delia.  When Lucy complains of the new housing: ‘”I hate it!  It’s a shame!”’, ‘”They’re covering the whole country with shoddy, temporary new things!  I wish they could leave the old ones alone!”’, Delia responds ‘“Slums for instance?”’ (I.xi.95).

A few surviving old warehouses and houses in Mabgate give an idea of the Victorian inner-city targeted by the rehousers of the 1930s.

Nevertheless Delia’s view is still the view from above.  It is the point of view of one who is confident that large-scale social engineering can eradicate the class-differences of Britain.   More literally Delia belongs to a family that has been brought up over the heads of the working class.   Stone Hall, the family home is set with ‘its back to the town, its face to the open country,’ (I.vii.60).  

Like 'Stone House' Lodge house for Leventhorpe Hall still faces 'the open countryside'.

Behind the lodge, that gives the impression the 19th century never ended isLeventhorpe Hall, uneasily poised on the edge of the latest expansion of Leeds, south of Temple Newsam

 As National Provincial points out, historical and industrial Aire/Leeds grew up ‘at the end of a long valley,’ (I.115) and the prestigious houses that wanted an outlook colonised the hills above the valley.   It is after WWI that the old Victorian separation of the city into ‘big solid stone houses, with their beautiful gardens’ and ‘the slums’ (I.vii.59) has begun to be overwritten by a new pattern.   ‘It was only after the war that the town had begun to spread and grow to’ the ‘gates’ of Stone Hall (I.iii.25).  National Provincial confirms the breakdown of the simple pattern noted by Sutcliffe in his fictional town of Saxilton, based on the actual Pennine town of Bingley.    Aire, like Saxilton, once had its areas of old money and new money and a north side where ‘big stone houses stood alone in beautiful and carefully tended gardens,’ (I.116), equivalent to Sutcliffe’s ‘leprosy of modern mansions’ (The Eleventh Commandment,1.1.10) on the north side of Bingley.   This Aire is changing:

  New housing estates were springing up in districts that had never expected to see with their own  

  eyes how working people lived.  Half the big houses were empty, some were now Corporation

  property, institutions or blocks of flats.  A little further out in the country the sons and daughters of

   the men who owned them had built for themselves villas of a more manageable size, ‘ (I.116)

They also gentrified traditional villages to the east of Leeds, such as Scholes, often creating elements of garden-villages.     Barwick-in-Elmet may be the original of ‘Barton’, ‘seven miles out’ of town (I.47) where Joy’s parents live, though their house sounds isolated rather than part of the suburbanisation of  Scoles. 

Even  Scholes, lampposts express civic pride.

Significant new council estates built in the 1930s were constructed to the north east of the city centre at Gipton and Halton Moor and to the south at Middleton.  Cooper’s book Yorkshire West Riding (172) says that the ‘windy heights of Middleton’ are the model for the ‘new estate of Netherton’, ‘a city built upon a hill’ (III.326) where the Walters are moved.   

 These playing fields give an idea of the original ‘windy heights’  at Middleton

 Middleton was originally a village four miles out of Leeds that was getting gradually absorbed by the industrialisation of the Leeds.  One landmark was the installation of the Middleton Railway by the Brandling family to take the coal of Middleton Colliery to the industrial district of Hunslet in 1758; the wooden rails and horse-drawn carriages being replaced by iron rails and a steam locomotive in 1812.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleton,_Leeds  

The track of Middleton railway

By In 1920 Leeds council started building a large estate to the south   "a vast low-density corporation built cottage estate with circuses and avenues with houses that offered ‘a bathroom, a sitting room and a garden’, (II.233). 

Council houses Middleton

The replacement for the small cosy pub Mr Walters misses is a ‘great new Trust House on the estate, ‘(IV.560). 

Halton Moor Public house; this equivalent ‘Trust House’ on Halton Moor became an unromantic ruin and was demolished in 2018. 

The Trust House becomes an important part of National Provincial’s depiction of the view from below of rehousing.    The first problem is a generational one.  Mr Walters does not regard the Trust House ‘as a pub at all, and he only ventured into it occasionally with great discomfort,’ (IV.560) Though ‘Goaded by Olive’ into keeping their garden tidy he is ‘too old to find a garden a new and entrancing adventure,’ (IV.560).   All of the family appreciate the comfort and convenience of the new home but the older Walters miss the community of their old street and find the new estate acrophobic and alienating: ‘Between the asphalt pavements and the wide road stretched long strips of grass. The whole effect was clean, airy, spacious and, to Mr and Mrs Walters incredibly bleak and strange,’ (III.326).  

Middleton ‘circus’

They react similarly to the extra space of the new house; they live as they did in the old house, crammed in the kitchen, leaving the sitting-room for Olive.  Ironically, before they are moved, the older Walters echo but invert Lucy from The New House.    They resent the idea that their old house could be considered a slum and do not wish to be moved to the new estate: ‘There’s nothing wrong with this ‘ouse,’ (II.233).   Consequently Mr Walters frequently travels back to town on Saturday nights to his old local The Three Bears.  For Mr Walters the Three Bears is a home from home ‘where he had his own seat on the worn red-leather settee’ (II.237) and there is the same snug enclosure as in the kitchen of his home, not to be found in ‘some improved public-house full of restless young people drinking cocktails,’ (II.237).    It is an important link to his old way of life. 

Following these material aspirations causes her to replicate the snobbery of Evelyn from The New House and Mrs Batley from National Provincial.  Mrs Batley claims to know that one family in a new house: ‘started growing mushrooms in one of the bedrooms, ‘[italics in original] (III.337).    Evelyn shares her point of view:  ‘Another of Evelyn’s articles of faith was that it was a waste of time moving people out of a slum, because they turned any house they lived in into a slum,’ (The New House, 1.v.41)   This is said to be the case on Olive’s new estate with ‘half a dozen Irish families’ who ‘made their houses dirty, frowsy and untidy as soon as possible,’ (IV.559).  These incomers upset the ‘original householders in Netherton’ (IV.558) who do not know them and Olive who does know them.  Olive is ‘delighted’ to be talked to by ‘Mrs Ashworth’ part of the ‘aristocracy of Netherton’, (IV.558) and regards it as a ‘nightmare’ that she is known to ‘Mrs Murphy’, despite the fact that Mrs Murphy nursed Olive’s mother during an attack of pneumonia (IV.560).  

 ‘Rustic cottages’ Town Road, Middleton.

In Middelton there is a division, clearly seen on any plan, between the earlier settlement on and around Town Street, close to the grounds of Middleton Park and the new estate running from the ‘circus’ down to the A654.   Presumably the ‘aristocracy’ of ‘Netherton’ live in older cottages equivalent to these on Town Street.

National Provincial shows the tenants as being equal economically but keen to establish a system of rank based on social prestige rather than wealth.    To Tom Olive’s aspirations are simply ‘petty-bourgeois’, imitating the pretentions of her ‘married brother, Herbert’ and his wife: ‘always thinking about how things would look to the neighbours, and aping the standards of the real bourgeoisie,’ (I.84).  Cooper satirises Olive’s passion for consumerist modernity through Olive’s concern for her hair: ‘she was always washing it or having it waved or having it set at Haley’s, the big, new multiple store at the corner of Highgate,’ (I.85/6).   Haley’s might be based on Marshall and Snelgrove that stood on the corner of Park Row and Bond Street, mentioned appreciatively by Cooper in Yorkshire West Riding (p 161).  Tom later describes Haley’s as ‘her Paradise,’ (II.236).  Nevertheless Cooper sympathises with Fred and Olives’ enjoyment of privacy.  Fred looks forward to ‘Not sharing the big double bed with his father, hearing him snore,’ (II.238).  Ironically Mr Walters sees the slum clearance as an invasion of his privacy and wishes: ‘”to be let alone!”’ (II.239).

In fact all the tenants within Leeds council housing were not economically equal:

 ‘The scheme had caused immense division.  Financially, there were clear winners and losers and differential rents set better-off tenants against the worse-off.  One opponent complained of the ‘constant bickering and…general feeling of unneighbourliness’ which had resulted. (https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/category/leeds/)

Tom is more worried about the ideological implications.  He sees a well-housed working class as turning into ‘a race of petty-bourgeois who were far more interested in their private property than in any cause,’ (II.240).   Tom has detected a central problem in left wing economics; the satisfying of an appetite in the working-class for luxury rather than mere necessity.  The failure to provide a consumer life-style as comfortable as that provided by capitalism was a leading factor in the fall of the Marxist-Leninist economies and regimes of Europe.  This is acted out in microcosm as farce rather than tragedy.  Tom has no luck in luring Olive to the occupations beloved by the politically active of the 1930s, political meetings and long walks.  His suggestion: ‘Let’s take a bus ourselves Saturday and go out on the moors,’ is declined (I.88).  Olive counter-suggestion is: ‘”Let’s go up to the Park, Tom, and have our teas at the café and listen to the Pierrots,’ (I.88).

 Pierrots

This is an amatuer group of pierrots, raising funds during WWI.

My mother's mother, a staunch member of the tea-total Mothers' Union happily took part, testifying to the essential respectability of the entertainment.  

  Middleton Park bandstand.  

This has a bandstand that could have been employed by local pierrots, though this structure looks post 1936.  

Pic  Ilkley Road 3 One of the closest moors to Leeds via bus or train is Ilkley Moor, part of Rombald’s Moor.  It is the setting of the song ‘Ilkla Moor Ba’t’Tat’ that the workers of National Provincial sing on a couple of occasions (e.g. III.404).    This winter picture shows why it could arouse Olive’s existential fears: ‘nothing but miles and miles of heather around her and miles and miles of sky above her,’ (I.88).

Significantly the moor makes her feel ‘little and lost and as though she had no clothes on,’ (I.88).  She doesn’t see this as comic as ‘Ilkla Moor Ba’t’Tat’ does, a song sung by workers on two occasions in the text.  Instead her feelings become part of Cooper’s dialogue with D H Lawrence.   His 1929 poem ‘Being Alive’ contains the line  ‘The world is waiting for a new wave of generosity, or a new great wave of death,’ (https://kalliope.org/en/text/lawrence2001061125) that is quoted once in The New House (II.xixi.180)and twice in National Provincial .  The first time the quotation is used in National Provincial it is unattributed, used as part of Mark Forrester’s Christmas Day sermon (II.302).  The second time it is quoted and given authorial authority as the epigram for Part IV (485).   It is placed in a context where it is an argument against extremism according with the epigram for Part III, a quote from Yeats Meditations in time of Civil War ‘The Stare’s Nest By My Window’:  

We have fed the heart on fantasies, 

The heart's grown brutal from the fare; 

More substance in our enmities 

Than in our love; (317)

However the opening lines of Lawrence’s poem set a challenge that is faced by all the characters of The New House and National Provincial , a challenge that is not responded to in the ways of characters in Lawrence’s novels.

The only reason for living is being fully alive;

and you can’t be fully alive if you are crushed by secret fear,

and bullied with the threat: Get money, or eat dirt! —

and forced to do a thousand mean things meaner than your nature,

and forced to clutch on to possessions in the hope they’ll make you feel safe,

Olive is one of the simplest examples.     In Chapter XV of the Rainbow Ursula is possessed by the force of nature and her own sexuality:

  Then there in the great flare of light, she clinched hold of him, hard, as if suddenly she had the     

  strength of destruction, she fastened her arms round him and tightened him in her grip, whilst her

   mouth sought his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing kiss, till his body was powerless in her grip, his

    heart melted in fear from the fierce, beaked, harpy's kiss,’ (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28948/28948-h/28948-h.htm)

an encounter that drains and intimidates her lover Skrebensky.   ‘Consummation was terrible,’ in the sense of terrifying and he fears: ‘if ever he must see her again, his bones must be broken, his body crushed, obliterated for ever,’ whilst Ursula is left ‘cold, dead, inert,’ 

(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28948/28948-h/28948-h.htm)

 However, after the encounter with the horses in the final chapter she is granted a vision: ‘She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven’ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28948/28948-h/28948-h.htm

Tom is as close to a Lawrencian character as Cooper gets.  He is not a calm, calculating communist like Harold Pearson or Claud Unwin; instead he shares Lawrence’s emotional desire to sweep away ‘the old brittle corruption’ and feels a similar sexual urgency outdoors;

  Once on a Saturday outing he had persuaded her to lie down with him in the grass.  Low down   

  between the springing stems and small flowers, with bee humming close to them, he drew her to  

  him and coaxed her to relax into his arms, his cheek against his shoulder.  The sweetness and

  warmth of those moments had been such as he had never known, a vivid and tender surprise,

  I.86

An undertone of wry humour underlies the description as the cliché of the birds and the bees is represented by the bees in the flowers beside them.    His response is not reciprocated; Olive breaks the mood: ‘I look ever such a mess!   We mustn’t do that again, Tom.  It’s common,’ (I.86).  Olive would sooner he took her ‘to the Regal or the Tivoli or somewhere to have a bit of fun?’ (I.87).

The problem of female sexuality and sexual need returns in both novels and it becomes evident that this aspect of Lawrence’s ideas being as much tested as quoted. 

   The Regal Cinema, Leeds.  

Leeds once had an aggressively modernist Regal Cinema at Cross Gates.   Olive sees the cinemas, like Ward’s factory, as embodying everything she loves about modern life; style and cleanliness.