First published in 1936, May Day is an inventive, fluent, experimental and above all very readable novel. Set over a three-day period in mid-1930s London, it follows the fortunes of a diverse range of characters as militant anger bubbles over in the East End and spills into the City and West End on May Day. Idealism, manipulation, police violence all play a part in the journey from cockney London to moneyed London, reflecting the turbulent culture of a period of heightened social awareness.
Features an introduction by John King.
Introduction by John King author of The Football Factory.
2010
Britain is in turmoil - the people are fed up with the excesses of big business; workers are told to increase production for less pay; the wealthy meet in grand buildings to plan how they can become even richer; the unions try to mobilise the power of the masses; links between government, arms-manufacturers and the media is hinted at but never proven; disillusionment spreads; a march takes place; the police clash with demonstrators; a man is killed on the streets of London. This could be Britain today, but it is also a summary of some of the events driving May Day - a novel by John Sommerfield, first published in 1936.
Set over three days, sometime during the 1930s, a snappy, italicised description of London sets the scene `... the sky oozes soot and aeroplanes, and burns by night with an electric glow. Railways writhe like worms under the clay, tangled with spiderwebs and mazes of electric cables, drains and gaspipes. Then there are the eight or nine million people.' May Day is about these people - their hopes, successes, mistakes, regrets, dreams, reality. Graffiti shows the way ahead - ALL OUT ON MAY DAY... WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE. The busmen are going to strike and everyone is talking about their unions plans for May 1st - the day of the the workers. Change is in the air.
John Sommerfield was a politically-active man who rejected the bullying aspects of capitalism and, for a period of his life, was an active member of the Communist Party. He marched and spoke at meetings and had his front teeth knocked out in a fight with either the police or fascists. He fought in one of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and, like many idealists during at this time, held firm views on how society needed to be improved. He was also open-minded, a lifelong optimist, someone who believed in the worth of every individual, and it is these qualities that elevate May Day above some of the more dour fiction of the period.
This belief in the individual shows itself in the unusual large number of characters who make up May Day. No single voice dominates, no central character is in control. The political is made personal as a series of smaller sketches connect to form a bigger picture. Scenes shift and faces change, but the links are neat and effective, some complementary, others adding contrast and conflict, but always pushing the novel forward. It is a complex, experimental approach, which could easily have failed, losing direction and focus, but Sommerfield pulls it off. The result is a fluent, exciting, highly-imaginative piece of writing.
The author's own experiences, as well as his beliefs, back up the the text. The first of the larger characters to appear is James Seton - Communist, seaman, Civil War veteran; like Sommerfield - who is on a ship anchored off Gravesend, waiting to return to London. The next scene shows his brother John and Martine, their child and dog, sleeping in a humble house near the Harrow Road. John is a carpenter at Langfier's Carbon Works, and while aware of the trouble brewing there, he has already been unemployed and Martine doesn't want him to strike, fearing he will lose his job. (Sommerfield had also been a carpenter spent periods out of work).
The first day dawns and the Thames is bustling with ships, the great dockyards of East London throbbing with activity, and soon we are inside the Carbon Works where `two hundred and forty girls in ugly grey overalls and caps live, breathe and think, their fragile flesh confused with the greasy embraces of steel tentacles.' They are on piecework rather than proper pay, and the bosses are demanding a `speed-up'. These young women are kept on until they are twenty-one and then let go, as their rate would have to be increased. The conditions are cramped and dangerous, and the girls are tired. Machines roar and hands are mangled. When a belt breaks and the machines stop, the workers don't get paid. This is the world of Daisy Miller, Molly Davis and Ivy Cutford.
From Langfier's Carbon Works the book spirals off into the wider city, dipping in and out of the lives of the Seton brothers and the bosses and a selection of related men and women, spreading out from East London into the West End and West London, crossing boundaries of sex and class, moving from terraced streets and factories to mansions and parks. The book starts to build towards May Day.
Generally in literature, and the arts in general, then as now, the common people are stereotyped or belittled, or if they are really lucky treated as curiosities before being dismissed to the margins, so when a novel is written from a more sympathetic position it is natural for the author to want to reverse the prejudice, but John Sommerfield resists this temptation. He remains even-handed and rejects a more dogmatic approach, and by doing so opens the story right up, showing that maybe the bosses aren't benefitting as much as their power and wealth would suggest.
The best example of this is Sir Edwin Langfier, owner of the Carbon Works, who comes across as a decent man, but someone whose real power has been lost in a deal with Amalgamated Industrial Enterprises, a big organisation with a cynical approach to business. We see him in his chauffeur-driven Daimler, passing through Hyde Park, reaching Commercial Road, travelling along East India Dock Road, heading towards the shipyards, a rich man in a one of the greatest cities on the planet, but despite his position in society he is disillusioned and empty inside. His wife is the same, while his son Peter lacks any meaning to his life, walking in the park, attending a society dance, searching for love. Everyone is looking for love, across the social spectrum, but it is John and Martine who are truly happy together - making do, Martine shopping in Portobello Road market while John works at the factory, both of them appreciating what they have because it has been earned.
Towards the end of the book, a near-broken Sir Edwin tells Peter that he has let his son down, that because he has never had to work for anything he lacks direction. Against the odds, the reader feels sadness for the Langfier family, and by achieving this reaction Sommerfield strengthens the novel and shows that, on a deeper and more meaningful level, an exploitative system is no good for anyone - rich or poor. The Setons are, in the end, more content than the Langfiers, although this doesn't mean that their inequalities of wealth should be accepted, just that the system needs to change, and that a fairer society would help everyone develop their inner humanity.
Family connections are clearly important, a concentration of the larger family perhaps - John and James Seton; the powerful (and well-named) Sloane brothers; Sir Edwin and his son Peter. James is a loner in many ways, dedicated to his politics, while John has Martine and his son, and James is searching for his brother, but doesn't find him until late in the novel, outside the Carbon Works, though not in the sort of circumstances either would have chosen. By chance James meets an old friend, Pat Morgan, much earlier, and this other sort of brother is another interesting character.
A sub-editor on a leading newspaper, Morgan is a Communist and former comrade of James Seton, from either seafaring days or the Spanish Civil War. Pat's workmate is Vernon - the name of John Sommerfield's father... a journalist - and through his work Morgan sees what the newspaper's owner is planning to write about the busmen and their May Day protest. He visit one of the printers, Jackson, an older Communist and Father Of The Chapel, and we are left with the firm impression that these men are going to put a spanner in the works. Morgan is a free spirit, but one lurking deep inside the machine.
When someone becomes caught up in one of the machines and is badly injured, the anger of the Carbon Works girls bubbles over. Ivy Cutford steps forward and finds her voice and mobilises the others, a doubly courageous move given the position of working women at the time. Some of the most downtrodden members of the workforce stand up and fight back. It is a culmination of their own plight, but also the smaller discussions throughout the book regarding trade-unionism and communism/socialism. Subjects looked at include fears of reprisals by the bosses if an individual goes on the strike, the motives behind union decisions, and parts played by both ideology and self-interest. The decision is made and the girls unite and walk out.
The May Day march is underway by this point, and it detours to the women can join it, but the police are out in force and trying to control the route. The marchers break through the police lines and approach the factory, only to find that the gates are locked. It is one of the most symbolic and dramatic passages of the book - the shut gates, a mainly female workforce breaking out, the reaction of mountain police, the baton raised in the air. The great propaganda posters of the period are unfurled in the reader's mind. The images are dramatic and romantic, and they linger.
Writing nearly fifty years after the book was first published, in May 1984, in a foreword to a new edition, Sommerfield said: `When I wrote it I'd have probably said that May Day was socialist realism. Now I'd call it early '30s communist romanticism. I'm not in any way apologising for the book's enthusiastic, simple-minded political idealism. Because it was a genuine idealism.'
He is being modest, as there is plenty of social realism in May Day. There is naivety too, but that has to be better than cynicism or apathy. His optimism is clear throughout the novel, but also in the foreword, which is reproduced at the back on this latest edition. He romanticises communism, but this wasn't unusual in the 1930s, when people seem to have been unaware of what it meant to live under the Soviet regime. Being a British communist in 1936 was very different to being one in 1984, the year of the Thatcher-Scargill Miner's Strike, when the term `communist' was used as a smear against anyone who believed in worker's rights and the importance of a trade union.
Sommerfield also writes about the changes that had occurred in Britain since May Day was written, the better living conditions enjoyed by working people, and that only `the truly rich and powerful' carried on regardless, as if nothing had changed except for `electronic improvements in the means of selling goods and bending minds'. Twenty-six years since he wrote those words, and sixty-four years after May Day first appeared, the rich and powerful are still doing what they want, while the internet and digital technology means the selling and bending have gone into overdrive.
Following his death in 1991, another wave of change has swamped us. The exploiters are the same, but come in different forms to 1984, never mind 1936. Cool Britannia, the For Sale sticker stuck to every element of our infrastructure and culture, privatisation and globalisation and the expansion of the EU superstate, free-enterprise crusades and a nation in debt to mobile-phone companies, ultra-surveillance and a tightening of state control, the ever-increasing slaughter of the meat and dairy industries, a loss of national law-making and boundaries, the digital breakdown of life into dots on a computer screen, Google and the threat to copyright laws, maybe even novels themselves.
Idealistic literature, whether naive or not, is more important than ever. Rather than a cut-price file to decorate yet another appliance, it can offer an honest and independent take on life that is beyond money. It stimulates free-thought, promotes imagination, invites people to create their own imagery and stretch their minds rather than have them bent by big business. Books such as May Day matter. Condition have obviously improved massively since it was written, but they did so because there were idealist willing to fight for change. Those who want to control and exploit other human beings are still with us and will never go away, it is just the methods that have changed. Books from the past tell us about our lives today. Everything changes... nothing changes.
The 1930s produced a rich seam of London authors who captured the grittier side of society in their fiction - James Curtis, Gerald Kersh and Robert Westerby are some of the best - and John Sommerfield belongs in this company. He was a regular in The Fitzroy Tavern, north of Soho, and he knew at least Curtis and Kersh, who were also regulars, and maybe George Orwell, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Dylan Thomas, who also drank in the pub.
The so-called `lowlife' novels of Curtis, Kersh and Westerby - The Gilt Kid, Night And The City and Wide Boys Never Work being examples - centred around the criminal alleyways of London life, and in particular the broader Soho area. It was an exotic location that drifted into theartreland and the older areas of exoticism and sleaze around Piccadilly and the Strand. The West End was a world away from the factories and dockyards of East London, a place where classes and nationalities mixed, the daily grind of industrial labour remote and ignored, and yet the lives of the prostitutes and villains who fill these books were rooted in these communities.
Curtis, a dedicated socialist, a more `difficult' man than Sommerfield, but someone who lived and suffered for his principles, was interested in language, and his work captures the speech and slang of a range of working-class characters in a unique and vital way. Yet Curtis was also concerned with prejudice, and in particular the unfairness of the judicial system. He deals with miscarriages of justice, with the threat and reality of capital punishment. Interestingly, the hangman Pierrepoint was another regular in the Fitzroy Tavern. So too was Robert Fabian, aka Fabian Of The Yard.
In Night And The City, Kersh positions Harry Fabian - a cockney ponce and chancer, who tries to sell his girlfriend into slavery - against his honest, costermonger brother Bert. Fabian tries to pass himself off as American, impressed by movies and status, but he is a desperate if charismatic man, and is doomed to failure. Wide Boys Never Work, meanwhile, sees Jim Bankley leave his job in a car factory and travel to London after seeing a Soho razor-gang in action at his local racecourse. He is impressed by their flash motors and sharp suits, and ends up joining the Franks mob, his hard-working father performing the same role as Bert. In all these books the main characters try to escape the hard labour of their backgrounds through mainly low-level crime. They are dreamers.
In May Day, John Sommerfield has attempted something very different. His working-class heroes are interested in self-improvement, the struggle against exploitation, and in some cases the removal of capitalism itself. This is the common people in their more everyday form. May Day deals in labourers and craftsmen and factory girls who would never dream of turning to prostitution - though Sommerfield does create the character Jenny Hardy to show the choices some women make, in this case one driven by want rather than need. AIE man Dartry has set Jenny up as his mistress. She is a former Carbon Works girl, living in a flat in a nice part of London, with money and trinkets and a secret boyfriend. She has rejected the factory floor, and in Jenny we see a recognition of the truths written about by Curtis, Kersh and Westerby.
The majority of Sommerfield's working-class characters are keen to take on their enemies rather than mimic their values, though it is all part of the same dilemma. On the surface the subject matter might not seem as suited ...
