CA worked in the USA where he was active in the Industrial Workers of the World. He returned to Britain in the early 20s where he began to write for the Daily Worker. His book is an autobiography. George Orwell, who would champion Hilton and become his penpal — but who Hilton seemed unsure about. Photo: Getty Images. As ever, we have a great list of things to do this week including a twilight art class, a visit to a ‘bee corner’ in Salford, and readings and music at Chetham’s Library about a radical reformer. JC was born in Newcastle in 1903 the son of a railway man. He had various jobs throughout his life including clerk, caretaker, labourer and various stints unemployed. During the 30s he worked on the magazine Adelphi and had many short articles published. It was during this time that he became friendly with George Orwell.

Hilton was born in Oldham but lived most of his life in and around Rochdale. Although his mother had many children, only four lived to adulthood. Hilton began working at an early age: at nine he worked before and after school as a "barber's lather boy and later as a grocer's errand boy." [1] At twelve, he worked half time at a cotton mill as a "doffer" – a term used for young boys who replenished the spindles used by the older weavers. [2] He left school at fourteen and worked various jobs until joining the army at sixteen. During the war he was injured in France, at which point he returned to Rochdale and became a plasterer. He remained a plasterer for the rest of his life and was an active member of the plasterers' union, which he joined in 1924. In June 1922, he married Mary Jane Parrott, a cotton mill worker. Mary would continue to work in local cotton mills for the duration of their marriage. [1] Authorship [ edit ] JH was born in Handsworth in 1901. His parents were once rich. Hampson worked at a variety of jobs including munitions factory worker, chef, waiter and book thief.

Much of the writing featured in this list (though not all of it) could be said to be in a realist style, following narrative patterns. Today, with a wider variety of forms on offer, many of which are more immediate, it could be that such a list appears quaint and unfashionable. This may be the case, but that is not to belittle the achievements of these mostly self-taught writers who chose to base the contents of their novels upon their immediate experiences: for some a depiction of brutalities that led to prosecution (Hanley), of dropping out and going on the tramp (Phelan), of political commitment (Heslop, Jones, Sommerfield). Working class life had been a subject before, but the 30s marked a time when much of that writing was written by working class people themselves. Over three hundred years of civilised evolution, and still the workhouse for the native, and the spike for the rover, the propertyless are still with us, they are multiplied over a hundred times…You get there about 5.30 and find others there like yourself, waiting aimlessly and fatigued, spread along the road, making a picture of untidiness to the eye of the aesthetic. Slowly a distant thin chained army is streaming in dribbles to the bottom of this road, the prelude, the wait, for the opening of the spike. Dr Windle said: “Following the success of Caliban Shrieks he won a Cassell Scholarship to Oxford and pursued a career as a writer, publishing a few novels including Laugh at Polonious and Champion as well as a fantastic travelogue called English Ways in 1940." Hilton did eventually come home to Rochdale, and was able to find steady but varied work — until the Great Depression hit. One of millions forced onto the dole, he used the time to read and some of his mates did the same. This small band of semi-illiterate twenty-somethings came together to read about the world, about the crisis, about the official reasons for their hunger, about the cobbled-together solutions of the day’s top politician. Hilton read Marx, he read Shakespeare. They all did. It’s hard to imagine a private school which could have imparted a better knowledge of the classics than that which this bunch of working men in Rochdale gave themselves, while on the dole, in these bleak years. Throughout Caliban Shrieks he subjects the unearned privileges of the wealthy to prosecutorial diatribes, knowingly delivered in the metre of a Shakespearean Sonnet. These polemics gradually build in strength and sophistication through the novel, with the final chapter as just one long toast-like oration against the class system — modelled on the kinds of speeches he would give as an organiser of the unemployed, the speeches that would eventually put him in chains.

One of the main arguments for the value of Hilton’s writing today is the way it probes the development of his own ideas, his own relationship to the myths that hold up the class system. His writing models this process of critical self-examination to the reader, as if in invitation for us to join in. Benjamin Clarke is a professor of literature at the University of North Carolina. He tells me how this depth in Hilton went unseen — “[Hilton’s] writing is so distinctive, it’s so unusual, I would like to think people would see it today and understand that there are so many dimensions to working-class writing; it goes far beyond just simplistic realist accounts of what happens in factories or mines.” FOC was born in Cork in 1903 and was later active in the Irish Republican movement. He was imprisoned in Gormanstan. By the 30s and 40s he was part of the Irish literary revival and became director of the Abbey Theatre. He left Ireland in the 50s as a result of government censorship of his work. He settled in the USA and died in 1966. Real name: Leslie Mitchell. Born in 1901 in Aberdeenshire. Worked as a journalist before joining army and later turned to archeological research. Took up writing fiction in late 1920s and called himself a”revolutionary writer”. The last 3 novels form the much acclaimed trilogy: A Scots Quair. LM died in 1934 at Welwyn Garden City. I knew other readers had tried to piece together the remainder of Hilton’s story before, and that my own search would be only the most recent attempt over several decades. Registries had been scoured, family trees traced — articles were even run in the Oldham Chronicle and Evening News (most recently in 2014), hoping to “hear from anyone with information about Hilton.”Dr Windle first discovered Hilton while researching life in the 1930s and said Caliban Shrieks had a powerful effect on him. As to the sociological information that Mr Hilton provides, I have only one fault to find. He has evidently not been in the Casual Ward since the years just after the war, and he seems to have been taken in by the lie, widely published during the last few years, to the effect that casual paupers are now given a “warm meal” at midday. I could a tale unfold about those “warm meals”. Otherwise, all his facts are entirely accurate so far as I am able to judge, and his remarks on prison life, delivered with an extraordinary absence of malice, are some of the most interesting that I have read. JJ was a founder member of the CPGB who ended up supporting the Liberals after passing through Oswald Mosley’s New Party. Even so the Unity Theatre staged a dramatisation of Rhonnda Roundabout.