An Introduction To George Garrett

By Mike Morris and Tony Wailey

George Garrett, Merchant Seaman, writer, playwright and founder member of Liverpool’s Unity Theatre, was a radical activist who travelled the world and wrote a series of short stories, stage plays and documentary reports about poverty and struggle in the 1920’s and 30’s.
This introduction to his work has been published to celebrate the launch of the George Garrett Archive, a Heritage Lottery funded project by Writing on the Wall, designed to preserve, protect and celebrate his legacy, and bring his work to a new generation of readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Writing on the Wall
• Release date: May 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780992832377

Book preview

Introduction to Garrett

To some who have knowledge of his work, George Garrett is regarded as one of the most significant working class writers of his generation. Yet, since his work was published in the late 1930’s, and following his death in 1966, he has almost disappeared from view. The George Garrett Archive Project, launched with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund by Liverpool’s Writing on the Wall Festival, aims to celebrate and preserve his legacy, bring his life and work to a new generation of readers, and inspire a new generation of writers.

www.georgegarrettarchive.co.uk

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Contents Page

Introduction to George Garrett  1

Mike Morris and Tony Wailey 

First Born  21

George Garrett

The First Hunger March  35

George Garrett

Glossary  62

Introduction to George Garrett

A Stoker with Punch

George Garrett, Merchant Seaman, writer, playwright and founder member of Liverpool’s Unity Theatre, was a radical activist who travelled the world and wrote a series of short stories, stage plays and documentary reports about poverty and struggle in the 1920’s and 30’s. He occupies a unique and significant position as the central point of a compass that links Liverpool’s literary, cultural, and maritime history.

Seagoing was central to George Garrett’s life. Here he learned everything about comradeship, whether as galley boy or as a member of the ‘down below’ crew amid the fearsome toil of the stokers. The sea gave him a taste of the cosmopolitan, encouraged him to jump ship in the great ports of Latin American or New York, just as it enabled him to return home, and never left him through all his bouts of unemployment in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

George Garrett lived a life that few of us these days could imagine. Born to a protestant and a staunchly catholic mother, his early life was characterised by uncertainty and poverty; born out of these circumstances was a burning hatred of injustice, and a desire to escape.

Upheaval came early. Shortly after his birth in 1896, in Seacombe on the opposite bank of the Mersey, the family were forced to move across to Liverpool after his father lost his confectioners business to drink. They built a new life in the slum areas around Park Road on the Dingle, living within sight of the docks and the river, which were to shape both the man and writer until the end of his days.

He developed an early distaste for religion in all forms, but not before his mother had won the argument for George to be educated at St Vincent’s Catholic Primary School on St James’s Street. The tyrant priests and Christian Brothers who ran the school left their mark on many of their young charges, but maybe none more so than George. His son John relates how his father once intervened in defence of a classmate being beaten, by smashing a slate over the head of the offending priest.

In his short story, Apostate, George bears bitter witness to the memory of this by telling the tale of a young boy wearing hand me downs, or ‘Dees clothes’, donated for the children of the poor, who rebels in class, kicks the priest with his clogs, and, to the delight of his classmates, escapes over the school wall and away across the canal.

George’s ‘christening’ into radical politics and protest came in 1911 on his fifteenth birthday, when he attended a mass demonstration on Lime Street outside Liverpool’s St George’s Hall. A series of strikes by seamen, dockers and transport workers had erupted into a city-wide general strike. The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, likened it to revolution, sent in police reinforcements and ordered gun boats into the River Mersey. On what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, the police used a minor incident to charge the mass ranks of up to 100,000 demonstrators, and the young George Garrett, a bystander, suffered a broken nose and the loss of a few teeth when he was smashed in the face by a police baton.

In incidents such as this from his own life, we find many of the themes George returned to throughout his time