Orwell & the English pew renters.

 

George Orwell

George Orwell was not of the English working-class. He described himself as having been born into the 'lower-upper-middle class’. He was a King's Scholar at Eton. Orwell said that as a young boy, he'd been a frightful English snob, who often berated impudent bus conductors. His aunt Nellie who lived in Paris, was a socialist and suffragette. When Orwell lived in Paris, Aunt Nellie helped him financially and introduced him to important people.

Ida Blair, his mother, was a Fabian Socialist and suffragette, but she stopped young Eric playing with the plumber's daughter. Ida reminds me of Lady Chatterley's sister Hilda, who is a socialist, but couldn't possibly mix with the working-classes. Her sister Connie, is not as squeamish.

The dignity of labour, is a lot of bourgeois Puritanical bullshit, but it's alive and well in the Labour Party of Sir Keir Starmer-oid. The English middle-classes always looked down their nose at anybody who wore a pair of overalls. That's why Orwell's mother stopped him playing with the plumber's daughter.

The trades unions in Britain were formed by the workers themselves. They were never revolutionary organisations but some British trade unionists, like Tom Mann, were influenced by French revolutionary syndicalism and they imported this into Britain. They knew that as workers, they wouldn't get anywhere if they didn't combine.

The early 'coffin club' or craft trade unions in Britain, were mainly comprised of skilled men and probably owe their origins, more to craft snobbery, then class consciousness. They saw themselves as 'labour aristocrats' or more precisely, beggars on horseback. Trade unions representing the unskilled came much later.

I have worked in engineering and I remember one day hearing a fitter dressed in greasy overalls say that labourer's shouldn't be able to buy their homes but should live in council houses. I thought he was rather stupid and politically backward. Orwell always said that there was a pew renter who sleeps in every English workman.