Ronald Blythe, Akenfield, and The Age of Illusion

I follow the art historian Richard Morris on Twitter and his tweets are a daily delight – each one providing a insight into a painter, a period, a life, or work of art. This week he referenced the Guardian obituary of the wonderful writer Ronald Blythe who has just died at the age of 100.

Here’s the tweet:

Patrick Barkham’s obituary is excellent and well worth reading in full. He writes:

The eldest of six children, Blythe was born in Acton, near Lavenham, into a family of farm labourers rooted in rural Suffolk. His surname comes from the Blyth, a small Suffolk river, but his mother and her family were Londoners. His mother, Matilda (nee Elkins), a nurse, passed to him her love of books. Although Blythe left school at 14, by then he had already established a voracious reading habit – “never indoors, where one might be given something to do,” he remembered – which became his education.

His father, Albert, had served in the Suffolk Regiment and fought at Gallipoli and Blythe was conscripted during the second world war. Early on in his training, his superiors decided he was unfit for service – friends said he was incapable of hurting a fly – and he returned to East Anglia to work, quietly, as a reference librarian in Colchester library.

I love that detail of reading outside “never indoors, where one might be given something to do,”

Companions and Bedfellows: Blythe, John Nash, and Patricia Highsmith

Morris’s tweet and the obituary both link Blythe with the artist John Nash. More surprising to me was the anecdote about Bythe’s connection with Patricia Highsmith

In the mid-1960s, he was befriended by the American novelist Patricia Highsmith. “I admired her enormously. She was a very strange, mysterious woman. She was lesbian but at the same time she found men’s bodies beautiful,” he remembered. One evening, after a Paris literary do, they slept together; he told a friend they were both curious “to see how the other half did it”.

Akenfield

Two of Blythe’s books are among my all-time literary favorites. He is best known for Akenfield  (1969) –  a portrait of a long-lost world woven from the words and memories of the inhabitants of a Suffolk village in the 1960s.

Years later he explained how he had been commissioned to write the book jointly by Penguin Books in the United Kingdom and Pantheon Books in the United States, as part of a series on how village life was changing around the world:

When they came to me and said I should do Britain, I told them I was not a sociologist remotely, nor had I heard of the term oral history at the time.” He had no idea how to get started on the task.

At some point they said, “Have you started this book yet?” So I went for a walk around Akenfield. It was an awful February day. The ditches were full of churning water coming through the field drains. These were partly the medieval ditches of the village, and when I looked down I could see what people had seen for centuries. I went to speak to the village nurse, a very old lady. Although I knew her very well, I soon realized I didn’t know her at all. When she started speaking about her own life, another person emerged. When I got home, I was astonished, shaken really, by knowing what I now knew about her. When I wrote it down, that other person emerged: she worked in what was really an army hut, she’d got a club foot (which I never put in the book because I thought it would upset her), she delivered all the children and laid out all the dead and patched people up with basically vaseline and strips of sheets. From there, I just shaped the book. … Often I hardly asked any questions at all, I just listened. From The introduction to Akenfieldby Ronald Blythe. NYRB Classics.

Blythe’s first ambition had been to be a painter and it’s no coincidence that Akenfield is subtitled Portrait of an English Village. The book is divided into 20 sections and includes detailed portraits of fifty or so inhabitants of the village identified by age and vocation. We meet women and men, the old and the young, employed and retired, all of them identified simply by age and vocation: Among them are farm owners and farmworkers, a ploughman, a shepherd, orchardmen, teachers, a deacon, a magistrate, bell ringers, a blacksmith, a wheelwright, a thatcher, a saddler, a military man, a union organizer, a district nurse, a vet, a poet, and a gravedigger. 

Akenfield is an oral history of a village mostly by people not generally inclined to talk. It’s an ethnography of a time and place it seems hard now to imagine ever existed. 

The first section “Survivors” has stories of WW1. This is from Leonard Thompson, farm worker, aged 71, who grew taller and gained weight after joining up 

…because it was the first time in my life there had been no strenuous work. I want to say this simply as a fact, that village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech. I was worked mercilessly. I am not complaining about it. It is what happened to me… We were all delighted when war broke out….We were all damned glad to have got off the farms.” Ronald Blythe – Akenfield

Thompson was a machine gunner with the Third Essex Regiment in the Dardanelles

Later that day we marched through open country and came to within a mile and a half of the front line. It was incredible.  We were there – at the war! … That evening we wandered about on the dead ground and asked about friends of ours who had arrived a month or so ago. “How is Ernie Taylor?’ – ‘Ernie? – He’s gone.’  ‘Have you seen Albert Paternoster?’ ‘Albert? – He’s gone.’ We learned that if 300 had gone, but 700 were left, then this wasn’t too bad. We then knew how unimportant our names were.

But not all of those who joined up returned. 

In remote, self-contained towns like “Akenfield” it is Armistice Day that draws every one to church. By contrast, says, Ronald Blythe, “Good Friday is barely observed at all, everybody playing football then.” (Paul Fussell The Great War and Modern Memory)

Blythe conducted his interviews in 1967 and the older villagers are witnesses to the extraordinary social upheaval and technological changes in the years since the Victorian era of their childhood. There is nothing sentimental or romantic about the hardship of their lives. Work was tough and poorly paid and there was little opportunity for social and economic mobility. Life was difficult and everything was different. Fred Mitchell, an 81-year-old horseman, comments:

But I have forgotten one thing–the singing. There was such a lot of singing in the village then, and this was my pleasure, too. Boys sang in the fields, and at night we all met at the Forge and sang. The chapels were full of singing. When the first war came, it was singing, singing all the time. So I lie; I have had pleasure. I have had singing.

There’s a section “The School” complete with extracts from the school log book that I will have to save for post all of its own. 

The Age of Illusion

The second Blythe amongst my all-time favorites is The Age of Illusion (1963). I read it as a teenager and it led me to an enduring interest in the social history of the interwar period.

It takes the reader from the funeral of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey at the end of one war, to the fall of Neville Chamberlain at the start of another. It has memorable portraits of some of the colorful characters of the era including Jix – William Joynston-Hicks – an out-of-control Home Secretary.

Here’s how Blythe describes Jix:

All he saw was a country stripped of its whalebone and showing its sores. he gave the police carte blanche to stem the flood of filth. 

He was irrepressible, self-satisfied and shallow. At his mother’s knee he had learnt a great truth—that black was black and white was white. Guided by this truth he was able, like God, to pronounce with finality on the failings of mankind. He knew what was good for them —white. Which meant that he had only to deny them black for the world to be the best of all possible worlds. That the world had come to such a beastly pass was entirely because it had invented a lot of silly shades of behaviour between black and white. All these were quite imaginary—the inventions of artists whose pictures were ridiculous and of writers with dirty minds and of mad rich women like Dr. Stopes. He and his very good friends the policemen would soon put things right. Ladies would return to their pedestals, gentlemen to their frock coats and those who dared ever to mention black again, be they Mrs. Kate Meyrick or D. H. Lawrence, would discover that Jix would rout them out to the limits of his prejudice.

Unleashed by Jix, the police went to work raiding art galleries for the drawings of D.H. Lawrence, banning a collection of his poems the preventing the sale of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness  It was only when they seized the drawing of William Blake did the public finally began to start treating this moral crusade and cultural cleansing campaign with full derision. 

Mrs. Kate Meyrick, of course, is the nightclub owner on whom Kate Atkinson based her character Nellie Coker in Shrines of Gaiety. 

Blythe writes:

There was a perverse element in his obsession with sexual morality and something immature in his neurotic ideas about drink.

He set out to destroy London’s night-clubs immediately he took office.

This, on the whole, was all right. Only like all little tyrants, Jix had to justify his ruthlessness by a colourfully exaggerated denunciation of the evil he intended to crush. A reasonable man would have seen that night-clubs were rather shame-faced versions of ordinary café and revue-bar life such as could be found in any major Continental city, and in most instances the haunts of people who merely didn’t happen to want to go to bed early. Jix’s pre- occupation with them gave them a reputation for orgiastic activities and the raids made headlines in the Sunday newspapers. The smuttiness of the latter at this time always amazed foreign visitors. Nearly all the raids concerned drinking out of hours, that strange sin whose enormity is only exceeded by paederasty in Anglo-Saxon countries. The police would arrive, everyone’s name would be taken, the club would be closed down—and the following evening it would open up in the house next door under a new name.

One club resisted these attentions. It was called the Cecil Club but was known as the ‘43’ to its members and to a great many others as well, because of the number on its door. It was run by the notorious Mrs. Kate Meyrick. This fact and the fact that no policeman had got his boot inside the door for four whole years during Jix’s reign of terror mystified everybody, not least Jix himself. While Ma Meyrick lived, Babylon would never perish. While vigilantes of all kinds prowled around outside, Ma flourished. How? It was a mystery. The months passed and then the years, and still the police reports on the ‘43? made it sound like a coaching inn where the weary traveller in Gerrard Street might call for home-baked bread and porter. As the travellers included such people as the King of Roumania, Tallulah Bankhead and Steve Donoghue, the mystery deepened. Jix and the Commissioner for Police were at their wits’ end how to nab Ma.

Blythe provides us with a little background:

Mrs. Kate Meyrick began her life as respectably as even Jix could wish. She was the daughter of an Irish doctor and the wife of a medical student. The Meyricks resided at Sylvan Hall, Brighton, where they produced a number of good-looking children. The boys were sent to Harrow and the girls to Roedean. Having achieved all this, Mrs. Meyrick and Mr. Meyrick parted. Finding herself with only £50 in the world and with all these boys and girls at Harrow and Roedean, Mrs. Meyrick came to London to seek her fortune….

What she discovered was nightclubs. Blythe comments:

By 1923 sex taboos were falling like fig-leaves and the majority of those who crowded the noisy, stifling backrooms and cellars called night-clubs, often did so because these places represented a kind of healthily ribald answer to the soul-sickening platitudes of the ‘as you were’ faction.

And 

One of the things that astonished Jix about night-clubs was that he expected them to be filled with whores and found them crammed with ‘society’.

Blythe wryly comments:

All these clubs were, of course, purely for the convenience of those who required early breakfast. “What time did breakfast begin?’ asked Mr. Justice Avory at her trial. “Ten p.m.,’ said Ma.

Ma Meyrick went to prison twice more, but when she looked as though she might be going there for a fourth time a kindly judge persuaded her to give him an honourable undertaking that she would have nothing more to do with night-clubs. Ma kept her word, though she knew what she had promised would be the death of her. In 1933 she passed away, leaving {£58 and any number of well- frisked friends, to the quite genuine sorrow of many distinguished people, not quite a Magdalen but always a lady. She had run through half a million, placed two daughters in the peerage and had challenged Jixery. And all in a decade.

The end for Meyrick – and a heavy nail in the coffin of the reputation of the police – came thanks to an anonymous hand-written letter to Scotland Yard

…telling them that he thought they ought to know that Station-Sergeant Goddard, whose pay was £6 a week, owned a freehold house at Streatham, a motor-car and two safe accounts. The police were shattered at this news. Their popularity was at the lowest ebb ever known. Jix’s purity campaign had reduced them in the public’s regard from a decent lot of men with a difficult job to do to a lot of Paul Prys.

It’s a classic story of political pressure leading the police astray and also of police corruption:

Goddard was the bluest-eyed boy in the vice squad. He had been in the police force for twenty-eight years and had specialized in raiding night-clubs since 1918. The fervour he brought to his task and the success by which he had been rewarded had taken the station-sergeant out of the ordinary chap- with-a-job-to-do class and put him among the vocationists. His nose was so keen that he could pick up the chypre-and-bubbly scent of a new club almost before the first member had sidled past its chucker-out. He had been involved in the raiding of 234 premises. The Force had commended him over and over again, and had paid him £6 a week. Life was good for the station-sergeant, though not good enough as it proved. An anonymous letter set dog on to dog. The safe deposits were unlocked and in one of them was found £12,000—all the nice crisp notes which had been pressed into his simple hand by Ma and a Mr. Ribufh, who ran a club called Uncle’s in Albemarle Street, for letting them know when there would be a raid. The station-sergeant defended himself topically. He told the judge that his fortune was the profits from selling rock at the Wembley Exhibition in his spare time. The judge was quite unable to believe this and sent the sergeant down for eighteen months’ hard labour and fined him £2,000. Ma and Mr. Ribuffi each got fifteen months’ hard labour, and Soho went into half-mourning. It was then revealed that a Sergeant Josling had been forced to resign from the police seven years earlier for bringing a false charge of corruption against Goddard. It was now proved that Josling had been right and he was given £1,500 compensation.

So much for the real-life queen of the Soho nightclubs.  But there’s more! How about the scandal of Rev. Harold Davidson who was unfrocked as the Rector of Stiffkey for taking more interest in young women in London than in his Norfolk parishioners? Not to mention the abdication of Kind Edward VIIIth and the affair with Mrs. Wallis Simpson. 

While not every character and incident is colorful and/or scandalous, Blythe creates a compelling portrait of an era that I relished at age 17 and, reading it again now renews that fascination. 

Blythe wrote and edited so much more than these two volumes. I see more pleasures ahead.