Sundry Creditors

By Nigel Marlin Balchin

After the works party of Midlands engineering firm Lang's, the Chairman, Gustavus Lang, collapses and dies. His power-crazed half-brother Walter attempts to seize control of the company by purchasing Gustavus's shares but is swiftly rebuffed. Jack Partridge, a lathe operator, begins a romance with Rosamund, Walter's nubile young daughter, after

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penhaligon Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781914076336

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Praise for Nigel Balchin

A writer of genius – John Betjeman

The missing writer of the Forties – Clive James, The New Review, 1974

Balchin […] writes about timeless things, the places in the heart – Ruth Rendell, Sunday Telegraph, 1990

…among the great masters of English fiction… – Julian Fellowes, Foreword to Separate Lies, 2004

"Probably no other novelist of Mr. Balchin’s value is so eminently and enjoyably readable" – Elizabeth Bowen, Tatler, 1949

…his characters have only to open their mouths to reveal a personality – L. P. Hartley, Sketch, 1945

Mr. Balchin is a writer of real skill… He has established a firm monopoly on his peculiar but admirable territory – Philip Toynbee, New Statesman, 1943

To some good judges, Balchin, rather than C. P. Snow, was the novelist of men at work – Guardian, 1970

I’d place him up there with Graham Greene… – Philippa Gregory, BBC Radio 4, 2005

SUNDRY CREDITORS

NIGEL BALCHIN

First published by Collins, London, 1953

© Nigel Balchin 1953

Editorial content © Derek Collett 2023

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or

mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without

written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a

book review.

This edition published in 2023 by Penhaligon Press.

ISBN 978 1 914076 32 9 (paperback)

ISBN 978 1 914076 33 6 (ebook)

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Nigel Balchin’s son, Charles, for kindly granting me permission to republish this novel on behalf of the estate of his late father and to Nigel’s second wife, Yovanka, for her stalwart support of my work over many years.

I am also exceedingly grateful to Andrew Chapman of Penhaligon Press, not only for typesetting the book, preparing it for printing and designing the cover but also for his shrewd advice concerning the overall concept of the Nigel Balchin Collection.

For help with compiling the notes, I would like to thank D. J. Taylor, Taff Gillingham, Ben Bergonzi and my father, Barry.

Derek Collett

Inside Sundry Creditors: The Story Behind the Story

It is respectfully suggested that, so as not to spoil your enjoyment of Sundry Creditors, you should read it before reading this introduction.

Sources

Novelists, as a race, know very little about industry. They regard the subject as fundamentally dull. For my own part, I have been wanting to write a novel about industry for at least twenty years. I did in fact write one in about 1937. It was unbelievably bad and I threw it away.

On the cover flap of a book club edition of Sundry Creditors, Nigel Balchin outlined the genesis of his 1953 factory novel. Nothing is known about the book’s ‘unbelievably bad’ predecessor: Balchin would appear to have thrown it away so thoroughly that no trace of the work now remains. What we do have though, the select band of us fortunate enough to own a copy, is No Sky, Balchin’s debut novel. Published in 1934, it can be viewed as a sort of preliminary sketch undertaken as preparation for the later masterpiece.

Set in an engineering factory, No Sky emerged from Balchin’s own work experiences in the early 1930s (see ‘Nigel Balchin: A Condensed Biography’ at the back of this volume for details). The book contains some illuminating descriptions of factory procedures as viewed through the eyes of a time-and-motion man, and some clashes between employees of a similar nature to those later depicted in Sundry Creditors, but little in No Sky rises above the level of the humdrum and the novel impresses more as a piece of industrial reportage than as a compelling work of fiction.

As an industrial psychologist, Balchin paid visits to a large number of workplaces between 1930 and 1935. His travels were so extensive that, in 1939, he was able to say that ‘there are few well known firms [in England] whose factories I have not visited’. It is this in-depth knowledge of the ‘general methods and organisation’ of English factories that shines out from the pages of Sundry Creditors.

Balchin’s familiarity with a certain chocolate factory in the north of England gave his 1953 novel added piquancy and humanity. The author of Sundry Creditors first visited Rowntree’s Cocoa Works in York in September 1930 as part of his inaugural industrial investigation for the National Institute of Industrial Psychology and was still making frequent visits there on Rowntree’s business some twenty-five years later. Some of the disparate characters that he brushed shoulders with in various Rowntree’s boardrooms are reflected in Sundry Creditors. Gustavus Lang for instance, the Chairman and benevolent father figure of the engineering firm, Lang’s, that is at the heart of Sundry Creditors, shares some character traits with Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, son of Joseph, founder of the York chocolate manufacturers.

Balchin was well acquainted with Seebohm Rowntree. ‘BSR’, as he was known, was Chairman of Rowntree’s between 1923 and 1941 and Balchin’s first report for the NIIP landed on his desk in 1931. Later, after he left the NIIP, Balchin spent more than four years prior to World War Two employed as BSR’s assistant. When Gustavus, at the Works Party, enumerates some of the benefits introduced by the enlightened management of Lang’s during his lifetime (‘Decent working conditions—a fair wage for a fair day’s work—shorter hours—proper pensions…’) he is listing many of the reforms that Joseph and his son were instrumental in introducing at Rowntree’s. And it should be made clear that Balchin, in spite of Lawrence Spellman’s retort to the Chairman’s speech (‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody who can put nineteenth-century paternalism more beautifully in a nutshell’), which I think is intended to be satirical, is emphatically on the side of Gustavus here, as is apparent from his many writings on the subject over a long period.

Gustavus’s half-brother Walter is more closely based on a single person than almost any other character in the Balchin canon. George J. Harris was Chairman of Rowntree’s from 1941 to 1952. He clashed with Balchin at least twice during the latter’s association with Rowntree’s: in August 1940, Harris took umbrage to certain views Balchin had promulgated whilst on secondment to the Ministry of Food and, in July 1941, he was infuriated that Balchin accepted an offer to join the army whilst under contract to Rowntree’s.

Although Balchin once said that ‘Nobody in his senses puts portraits of his friends in books; there is no point in doing so’ he did not extend that stricture to include his enemies. As expressed via the medium of his fiction, Balchin was a man who bore grudges. In 1942, he satirized the composer Christian Darnton (who had enjoyed a romantic dalliance with Balchin’s wife Elisabeth in the early months of World War Two) in his novel Darkness Falls from the Air. The artist Michael Ayrton also fell foul of Balchin, in his case by spiriting Elisabeth away from him in the late 1940s, and paid the price by being caricatured as a callous, unprincipled toff in Balchin’s novel A Way Through the Wood (1951).

A published account of Harris’s conduct and temperament whilst he was Chairman of Rowntree’s reveals clear parallels with the tyrannical managing director of Lang’s and suggests to me that Balchin was intent on sending up Harris in the form of Walter:

Harris was always producing product ideas, and his impatient wish to seize entrepreneurial opportunities was both feared and respected. He demanded the highest level of commitment from his staff—he was himself a ‘workaholic’—and, although always willing to praise staff when appropriate, he was capable of bawling at those who failed him.

Balchin’s displeasure with Harris, which had been simmering ever since World War Two, finally boiled over when Harris stripped BSR’s son Peter of his managerial responsibilities. Peter Rowntree served with Balchin on several Rowntree’s marketing committees in the post-war years and Balchin was probably upset by how his colleague had been treated by Harris. When BSR was made aware of what had happened to his son, he mobilized his fellow shareholders (many of whom were family members or close friends) and put pressure on them to ask for Harris’s resignation. This action is suggestive of Henry Spellman’s response in Sundry Creditors to his son Lawrence being subjected to a ‘Royal Commission’ by Walter on the basis of Hilda Pinner’s accusation. The Rowntree’s constitution contained a clause that required a director to resign if requested to do so by all the other members of the Board. That clause was triggered, and Harris’s fate was sealed. The scene in the final chapter of the novel in which Walter drives to the factory in an attempt to stop Lang’s from falling into ‘enemy hands’ is reminiscent of this description of the overthrow of Harris:

On the 15th of January [1952], Harris travelled to a Rowntree board meeting at the Cocoa Works, but, told of the growing concern about him, Harris felt unable to continue as chairman. The way to his office being barred, he wrote his resignation and completed some business in his car.

The final link between Sundry Creditors and real-life events was revealed to me in 2006 when I first visited the Borthwick Institute in York, home of the Rowntree’s archive. In the pages of the company’s in-house magazine, I was staggered to discover that the comic turn performed by the entertainer (‘a dissipated-looking man with a long, pointed red nose and spectacles’) at the Works Party in Sundry Creditors had a factual basis. A comedian known as Stainless Stephen performed at a Rowntree’s social event in 1931 and amused the audience by poking fun at the hobbies of the managers and the political and civic activities of the directors. (The entertainer’s reference to Gustavus’s love of pigs is probably a joke at the expense of Oscar Rowntree, Seebohm’s brother, who served briefly on the Rowntree’s Board before resigning to concentrate on pig farming.) The fictional and factual accounts of the two entertainments are so alike that Balchin must either have been present at that social evening—which is highly plausible, as he was working for the NIIP in York at the time—or subsequently received a detailed account of it from someone who did attend.

Analysis

One evening about fifteen years ago I was dining with an old friend in London. During our meal I had occasion to rummage inside my bag in search of something and, as I did so, a book fell out onto the floor of the restaurant, cover uppermost. The book was a first edition of Sundry Creditors. My friend said, ‘Oh, what’s that? Let me have a look.’ I passed the book across the table. She stared at the cover for a few moments. ‘Sundry Creditors?’ she said. ‘That’s the most boring title for a book I’ve ever heard of!’

Whatever the merits of its title, which was changed at a very late stage from the similarly unprepossessing Heir and Heiress, Sundry Creditors is definitely not a boring novel, as I pointed out to my friend. Its story line may not be one of the strongest Balchin devised but the book has many appealing features. In the separate panel, I draw attention to Balchin’s use of ‘little details’ to lift his narrative; here, I want to concentrate on the quality and variety of the novel’s dramatis personae.

Sundry Creditors opens in bravura fashion. In Chapter I, Balchin gives us a whistle-stop tour of the factory that is his novel’s principal setting, launches a number of different plot threads and, in the process, introduces us to many of his leading players. In one regard, Sundry Creditors surpasses all of Balchin’s other fiction: it contains the finest collection of characters ever assembled by the author, with everyone from the humblest shop-floor worker to the Chairman himself having an important role to play.

Walter Lang is the most prominent character in Sundry Creditors and is discussed elsewhere in this essay. His daughter, eighteen-year-old Rosamund, a motherless only child, is by far the novel’s most important female character.

When Julian Maclaren-Ross wrote a feature-length review of Sundry Creditors for The Times Literary Supplement, he made the valid observation that ‘Mr. Balchin, with all his expert knowledge of the world of men, has rarely drawn a credible woman’. Maclaren-Ross felt that Lucy Byrne in A Sort of Traitors (1949) was the first exception to that rule. I would argue that Rosamund is the second. Balchin displayed great novelistic skill when he created Walter’s enchanting daughter, a bored, lonely and very probably depressed teenager reduced to the solitary re-enactment of scenes from Antony and Cleopatra every time her father abandons her in the evenings in order to further his business ambitions. It is no wonder that Rosamund hooks up with the ‘unsuitable’ Jack Partridge when the alternatives are either bedroom-bound amateur dramatics or ministering, like a surrogate wife, to her excessively demanding parent.

Jack is another memorable figure. At first sight, he may strike the reader as being simply a ‘type’, one of many Angry Young Men who populate English novels of the 1950s. With his sullen demeanour, class-inferiority complex and determination to bed a woman who is his social superior, Jack echoes the contumacious working-class protagonists of novels such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957) and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). Brusque and confrontational in the early chapters of Sundry Creditors (his first meaningful action is to pick a fight with Walter over the matter of wage rates during a Works Council meeting), Jack gradually displays a gentler side to his character as the novel unfolds. His arrogance and tetchiness melt away as his romance with Rosamund blossoms and she notices that ‘his eyes were full of tears’ when their love affair finally implodes on a deserted stretch of seafront somewhere on the south coast.

The Spellman family provide much light relief in what is, by and large, a rather serious and sombre novel. The paterfamilias, Henry, may be introduced to us as ‘a huge, bald old man, rather like a good-humoured, slightly sleepy sea-lion’ but he later demonstrates that he is far shrewder than some of his colleagues at Lang’s, and that he has a saner attitude towards business than Walter. Henry’s son is one of the most entertaining characters to be found in Balchin’s fiction. Like Jason Pellew in 1955’s The Fall of the Sparrow, the novel that followed Sundry Creditors, Lawrence is a decorated former war hero who resembles a fish out of water in peacetime: ‘Lawrence was a damned good fighting soldier in the war. Let’s leave it at that.’ At Lang’s, Lawrence’s role is that of a cynical, wisecracking, world-weary roué who casts covetous glances at the pretty, young female workers (‘I have a reputation as a skirt-chaser that it has taken me years to cultivate’). Bored with his work, and frustrated by his icy wife Laura, he is reduced to making advances towards the modest, pious Hilda. Lawrence’s final act in Sundry Creditors is to pen a characteristically flippant and amusing resignation letter: ‘An opportunity has arisen for me to take a partnership in a firm of cheesemongers’ sundriesmen…’

Balchin also carefully delineates his minor characters. Chief amongst these is Sir Francis Proudfoot, head of a rival company intent on swallowing up Lang’s. The bird-like Sir Francis, described as ‘a dapper little grey man about five foot three in height, with a large head and sharp pointed nose’, proves himself to be avuncular on the outside but utterly ruthless on the inside. His henchman, Winter, who Rosamund mistakes for his bodyguard, is a more intimidating physical specimen—‘He had very thick black eyebrows and a flat nose like a prize-fighter’s’—and we know that he is up to no good at Lang’s from the moment when he flouts social convention by sitting in the armchair in Walter’s office. Other minor characters who make an impression on the reader include the frightening and sinister Mr Pinner, with his black eyepatch, who is affronted not so much because Lawrence may have interfered with his daughter but because he found her in distress when he returned home after a day’s work: ‘The thought that it was after a day’s work […] made him angrier than ever.’ And I haven’t even mentioned Jim Talbot-Rees (‘Well, I always say the business ought to be able to afford one gentleman’), or his snobbish, gossipy wife Amy, or Miss Bell, the Welfare Worker, or the Company Secretary, North, a man with chronic catarrh and a love of fine detail who has ‘an invaluable habit of taking out a few figures’.

Sundry Creditors in Close-Up

Sundry Creditors consists of a sparkling array of lively sequences, expertly stitched together. But it also contains a great many well-observed minor details, some of which provide insight into the social fabric of 1950s England. Here are a few of my favourite examples.

Henry playing with his glasses in meetings: ‘He took off his spectacles, put them on the desk, and goaded them like a cat goading a moribund mouse.’

Rosamund throwing two meat sandwiches out of her bedroom window because she has no dog to feed them to and doesn’t wish to offend her housekeeper.

The Honourable Amy Talbot-Rees at the Works Party, earnestly hoping that her husband has succeeded in organizing ‘a special loo for the Directors’ wives’.

The Birdwood Palace night spot: ‘as it was five miles out along the by-pass, you got a nice class there’.

Walter struggling to drink a cup of tea in the dining car of a fast-moving train and being impressed that ‘The man opposite put his spoon into his cup and left it there, and after that his tea did not slop over.’

Laura trying to convince Amy that she shops ‘constantly’ at a certain boutique: ‘She had bought a head scarf there, one rainy day in 1941.’

Jack experiencing difficulty when trying to obtain a cup of coffee late in the evening, both after the cinema (‘Not much more than half-past ten and it’s like the grave.’) and on the south coast: ‘It was only half-past nine, and the milk-bar on the front did not seem to be quite sure whether it was open or not. It had given Jack coffee, but was still washing the floor rather resentfully round his feet.’

*

As pointed out by several reviewers (see ‘Press reaction’), Balchin’s story tails off as its end approaches, specifically once three of the principal characters decamp from the industrial Midlands to the south coast of England. Personally, I do not consider that this weakens the book overall. Balchin generally resisted the temptation to tie up all the loose ends in his stories—Darkness Falls from the Air stands out as a notable exception to that policy—and it served him well time and time again. A novelist is placed in an invidious ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation where a book’s ending is concerned. If you carefully plait together all of the dangling plot threads then some readers will bemoan the fact that the ending is contrived and unrealistic. If you adhere to Balchin’s usual policy and conclude your novel with some of the plot business still unresolved and open to interpretation, other readers will complain that the ending is unsatisfying. You can’t win either way. For what it is worth, I prefer Balchin’s approach, which to me seems to result in fiction that is more natural and lifelike.

By eschewing direct narration in favour of almost complete reliance on dialogue to advance the story, Balchin, in the words of his fellow factory novelist Walter Allen in the New Statesman and Nation, ‘robs his novel of the profundity it might well have had’. What Allen meant was that Balchin was unwilling to subject Walter to the type of psychological analysis that he felt Balchin’s most prominent character merited. Here I think Allen had a point. Much of the action in Sundry Creditors revolves around Walter—the novel has no single main character but almost all of the plots involve him in one way or another—and he steals many of the scenes he is in, but his fate doesn’t really move us and perhaps we don’t really care whether he is alive or dead at the end of the book. The episodic story-telling technique deployed by Balchin in Sundry Creditors makes for slick, compelling, fast-moving fiction but an exploration of the motivations of Walter would undeniably have strengthened the book. Is he the way he is purely because his wife died young, or is there more to it than that?

And is Walter alive or dead on the last page of Sundry Creditors? In his review of the novel, Maclaren-Ross was undecided: ‘we leave him, concussed and bewildered […] in a darkness which leaves us to guess whether or not he is still alive’. Having studied the book extensively for this reissue, I feel that Balchin may have supplied the answer to that question with his inclusion of the Montaigne epigraph that precedes the novel.

Finally, if you enjoyed reading Sundry Creditors then you may also enjoy Roy Fuller’s 1956 novel Image of a Society, which I recommend at every opportunity. It is also set in a closed-world environment (a building society) and the plot is forged from the cross-pollination of the working and private lives of a handful of well-drawn characters. An atmosphere of impending dread suffuses both novels and Fuller succeeds in sounding more like Balchin than Balchin sometimes did himself.

Press reaction

Sandwiched as it was between two Balchin novels—A Way Through the Wood and The Fall of the Sparrow—that mostly received very positive reviews, despite not being markedly superior to Sundry Creditors, it is surprising that Sundry Creditors did not receive better notices. Press reaction to the novel, however, was largely underwhelming.

The most enthusiastic supporter of the book was George Malcolm Thomson in the Evening Standard. He awarded Sundry Creditors the accolade of being his newspaper’s Book of the Month and stated that Balchin possessed ‘the rare magnetic power that draws the human eye from one sentence to the next’. In the Daily Sketch, Norman Walker was almost equally complimentary, describing Sundry Creditors as ‘Definitely a book to keep and read again’ and Michael Sadleir in the Sunday Times praised Balchin for his ‘easy nonchalant style’ and ‘mastery of pace without hurry’.

The fiction critic of the Daily Express, Nancy Spain, strongly disliked Balchin’s novel, which she disparaged as ‘quite innocuous—a very weak cup of tea indeed’. Maclaren-Ross included the words ‘a real disappointment’ as part of his review and The Times echoed that criticism: ‘It is a disappointing book.’

Although John Betjeman in the Daily Telegraph and Marghanita Laski in the Observer expressed admiration for a number of facets of Sundry Creditors, the two reviewers perceived the same flaw. Betjeman pointed out that ‘The end of this readable and clever book flags’ and Laski went further in the same direction, observing that ‘it is only when the book is finished that one feels that it all rather faded away, each little tale dying out, and that what was dramatically needed to complete this kind of good story-telling was a resounding climax uniting the separate human parts’.

UK publication history

First published in hardback 4 May 1953 by Collins.

First paperback edition published by Fontana in 1957.

Penhaligon Press paperback and ebook editions published in 2023.

Interesting fact

In 1990, as part of a new feature in the paper, the Sunday Telegraph gave thriller writer Ruth Rendell ‘£25 to spend on three old books’ in second-hand bookshops. Her acquisitions included Sundry Creditors, about which she had this to say:

Balchin has dated but not where he writes about timeless things, the places in the heart. Is any publisher reissuing his books? A revival seems due.

If You Liked Sundry Creditors… A Selection of Other Factory Novels

When he reviewed my biography of Balchin (His Own Executioner: The Life of Nigel Balchin) for the Christmas 2015 edition of The Times Literary Supplement, the writer and critic D. J. Taylor took the opportunity to embed his review within a wider meditation on the literature of work. Apropos of British novels set in factories, Taylor began by observing that ‘There is, admittedly, a small and piecemeal factory-novel tradition…’ and then proceeded to list a handful of key texts. In compiling this selection of factory novels I have used Taylor’s list as my starting point, but have augmented his choices with some of my own. NB. I have restricted my selection to novels by British authors published during the twentieth century.

Highly Recommended

Living by Henry Green (1929)

Living is set in a Birmingham iron foundry. After leaving Oxford University, Green (real name Henry Yorke) worked in a factory owned by his father that made equipment for the plumbing and beer-bottling trades and he wrote Living, arguably his masterpiece, when he was only twenty-four. This is an unusual book, largely because of the way in which it is written. Certain words are omitted, presumably to give the novel a more proletarian feel; one paragraph reads thus: ‘Noise of lathes working began again in this factory. Hundreds went along road outside, men and girls. Some turned in to Dupret factory.’ There are enjoyable descriptions of disagreements between the shop-floor workers and the works manager (always referred to, disparagingly, as ’Tis ’im) and some wonderful little details, such as the posting of a man outside the factory’s toilets to ensure that no one takes too long attending to bodily functions when they should be working! The story shares some common ground with Sundry Creditors, including the fact that the managing director of the factory dies and is succeeded by his son. I have only read Living once, more than fifteen years ago, but can still recite some of the novel’s more striking phrases from memory; ‘Worry, I’ve ’ad enough of that washing about in my head to drown a dolphin’ is one that instantly springs to mind. Living is heartfelt, touching, brilliantly observed, very funny in places. It is a work of art, and probably the finest factory novel ever written.

Availability: Living is available as a New York Review of Books Classics paperback, although better value is the Vintage Classics edition, which also includes two other Green novels.

The Fancy by Monica Dickens (1943)

This novel opens with the appointment of Edward Ledward as a chargehand at Canning Kyles, a factory in the London suburbs responsible for servicing aeroplane engines during World War Two. Ledward’s duties include overseeing the work of a team of women of very different ages and characters, and from a variety of backgrounds. Although Ledward always remains the central figure, as the narrative unfolds Dickens focuses attention on the domestic lives of several of the women as they struggle to deal with the challenges posed by the war. Less than a quarter of the book is set at Canning Kyles but the details of the work carried out there are engrossing, and originate in the author’s experience of working in a Spitfire factory during World War Two. Cleverly structured and nicely observed, The Fancy also includes interesting information about the breeding and showing of rabbits, as hinted at by the book’s title.

Availability: Bloomsbury.

The Plate Shop by John Harvey (1979)

The Plate Shop details two tumultuous days in the life of a heavy-engineering works during a heatwave in the 1960s. The author worked in the time-study department of a similar factory in Bishop’s Stortford in his gap year between school and university and his expert knowledge is used to great effect. Harvey is good at describing the interactions between working men—their banter, petty grudges and occasional flare-ups—and the brooding tension that envelops the factory as its future hangs in the balance gives the narrative real momentum. Like Living, The Plate Shop is written in a poetic, impressionistic manner that won’t be to everyone’s taste but the novel contains some excellent characters (Clyde, the foreman, is especially well drawn) and builds steadily towards a satisfying conclusion.

Availability: A new edition was published by Holland House in 2021.

Well Worth Reading

Daylight on Saturday by J. B. Priestley (1943)

Set in the ‘Elmdown Aircraft Factory’ in the south Midlands, Daylight on Saturday was written during the middle of World War Two (the author’s note included in the book is dated March 1943). Priestley had visited a number of aircraft factories before writing this novel but he is not much concerned with factory work per se, pointing out that ‘the absence of any technical details is not an accident’. Instead, he concentrates on ‘the human element in the industry’. His cast of characters is a large one—perhaps too large—with everyone from the general manager to the odd-job man occupying centre stage at one time or another. Several of the factory employees make a lasting impression, such as Bob Elrick, the hard-working, hard-drinking works superintendent constantly at loggerheads with those around him, the ‘very grand and county’ Freda Pinnel, who thinks she was born for better things than to be just the assistant manager’s secretary, and the mentally unstable Stonier, convinced that the machine he operates is talking to him. Like The Plate Shop, practically the entire narrative takes place beneath the roof of the factory itself. In spite of some flaws, this is a warm and absorbing novel and Priestley succeeds in conveying the importance and urgency of the work performed in aircraft factories during wartime.

Availability: Out of print.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe (1958)

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the story of Arthur Seaton, a man in his early twenties employed as a lathe operator in a Nottingham bicycle factory in the 1950s. Both Sillitoe and his father worked at the Raleigh bicycle factory in Nottingham, so this is another novel born out of personal experience. There is an interesting counterpoint here with The Fancy and Daylight on Saturday: without a war to win, Seaton views his occupation solely as a way of earning £14 (about £350 today) per week, which he then proceeds to spend on buying natty clothes, drinking as much alcohol as his stomach will tolerate and chasing after women, married or otherwise. The drinking, womanizing and fighting sequences seem a little dated now and it’s a pity that more of the story doesn’t take place inside the factory—in contrast to most of these novels, there are no shop-floor confrontations between the workers—because the detail of how Seaton manipulates the piece-rate system to his own advantage constitutes one of the more compelling aspects of Sillitoe’s narrative.

Availability: HarperCollins.

Other Factory Novels

No Sky by Nigel Balchin (1934)

I have written about Balchin’s debut novel elsewhere in this volume and don’t want to add any more here suffice to say that it is a genuine factory novel which, like The Plate Shop, gives an insight into what it must have been like to have worked as a time-and-motion man in a factory, in this case in the 1930s.

Availability: Out of print.

Over to Bombers by Mark Benney (1943)

I have to confess that I have not read Over to Bombers and know very little about it other than that it is set in a factory in England during World War Two. A library catalogue comes to my rescue and supplies a little more detail: ‘Story of the conversion of an imaginary English factory from the production of luxury automobiles to four-engined bombers.’ Mark Benney was the pseudonym of the London-born Henry Ernest Degras and rose to prominence in the 1930s on the back of an autobiographical novel, written in prison, that detailed his life as a criminal.