CAMPAIGN The other George...

Working-class hero Garrett.. too poor to be a success

bblies. When Garrett wasn’t at sea he leading the fight for workers’ rights verpool and helped found the Unity atre. He was unusually progressive an 1896-born stoker, a feminist and -racist who, as the son of a staunch holic and a Belfast Orangeman, had ime for sectarianism.

He took part in the Walker Art ery Riot and was battered by the ce,” Sean says, showing the £50 fine m the city of Liverpool. “He led the onal Hunger March on London as of the Liverpool contingent in 1922.” arrett’s most famous speech at the ks, recorded for posterity by a secret policeman after race riots in 1919, could have come straight from today. “Fellow workers, it is all very well criticising the alien … and telling you he is the cause of your unemployment. It is not so. The present rotten system is the cause…”

Garrett was desperately disappointed when he read Orwell’s book. “A book like that can do a lot of damage” he wrote to his publisher John Lehman.

Ten Years on the Parish lacks Wigan Pier’s forensic detail but is vividly readable. It tells of stowing away on the voyage to Buenos Aires, Liverpool children running from the “night man” who checked whether families were “improperly” sharing beds and the busybody parish officials lifting pan lids to see whether mothers were squandering money. The misery of food vouchers, poor relief, unemployed men being forced to break stones contrast dramatically with the camaraderie of the Hunger March on London.

As the Liverpool writer Frank Cottrell Boyce says: “We read The Road to Wigan Pier to see how poverty looked to a sympathetic, intelligent, compassionate outsider. We read Garrett to find out how poverty felt. From the inside... Garrett’s desperation for money – and time – quivers through every sentence”.

Mike Morris, co-director of Writing On The Wall, says: “His tenement was desperately overcrowded. But when Garrett went to the library, people would collar him for help with writing and advocacy. He was like a one-man Citizen’s Advice Bureau.”

Historian Alan O’toole says it is remarkable “not that George wrote so little” but “that he wrote so much”. Garrett had a breakdown just as publishers came knocking for a sea novel. “He couldn’t have afforded to go to London to go and meet those publishers anyway,” Sean says. Instead, he left a legacy of short stories, plays and the more socially secure world built by his generation.

So, Sean is glad his grandad can’t see the country 80 years on.thgb “He’d be appalled and angry at the erosion of workers’ rights, racism in the wake of the Brexit vote, foodbanks, the depiction of the working class and the relentless pushing back of the welfare state,” he says. “After everything his generation achieved, the upper classes pushed right back. Now people are back on the street, back in new slums.” He says the people at the homeless shelter he works at are there “just because the rent has gone up or because of welfare changes”.

He has no doubt what George would be doing. “He wouldn’t be taking it standing still,” he says. “He would be using his skills to push back.”

Orwell died in 1950 of tuberculosis after finishing his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-four and fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Garrett was last seen in public giving a speech during the 1966 seamen’s strike, despite having throat cancer. The other George then gave his bus fare to the collection for the striking men, walked home and died.

See www.georgegarrettarchive.co.uk. Ten Years on the Parish is published by Liverpool University Press.