Snapshots of the Common Man
Portrait of England : News from Somewhere. By Laurence -Thomp- son. (Gollancz. 10s. 6d.) Tills is the age of Mass Observation ; of the common man. Writers need no longer go to Greenland or Africa to report ; they need not confine themselves to eminent people. They can wander round Britain's villas and public houses, reporting half-conversations, simple family histories. These motorist's-eye-view reports have certain advantages. They give the writer scope for descriptive writing. They give scope for humour, as in Mr. Thompson's visit to a Plymouth housing-estate with an enthusiastic housing chairman, only to be met on every side with stolid dissatisfied residents. They give scope for lively discussions on social problems without too many hard statistics. So Mr. Thompson goes into the problem of South Wales and the economic situation of Cornwall. A reporting run of this kind can also give an enormous sense of variety—if of sameness too.
Mr. Thompson, who is a journalist, took some " random " journeys to find out what " was happening in England after six years of Labour rule." He went from the South West to the Midlands and then to South Wales and North England. He did a night run with a lorry-driver and talked with social workers, pro- fessors, Communists and officials. He is not afraid of offending his hosts' susceptibilities. " Birmingham is as ugly as sin " ; the Sheffield students are " loutish " ; Northallerton " is an ordinary little town much given to chicken-coops." He detests the ugliness of industrialism without accounting for industrial towns' local patriotism, but he shows an admirable reporter-like detachment in discussing the pros and cons of nationalisation among the coal- mines of Cannock Chase or at a transport-depot at Bermondsey. When one has finished one knows a certain amount more about a large number of things.
They are, however, unrelated things—except that they all have to do with the common man. People feel kindly to one another on the whole ; they think in a limited way about their own problems ; and there they are up and down the country, mainly in these squalid towns, going to the pictures or at the highest to school lectures on child psychology. Mr. Thompson himself has no general theme ; he gives a series of bright snapshots which like snapshots illuminate and at the same time disguise. Sheffield has eight small pages ; Sharpness four • Wigan eight and a half ; they are not connected in any way, and the book ends without a conclusion. " Everything exists ; nothing has value "—E. M. Forster's phrase haunts the
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