The thing about working to help people emerge from squalor is that the very act of doing so expresses a certain disdain. Deciding to change someone’s circumstances implies that there is something about the way they live, and therefore about them, that must be changed. Paternalistic conservatism, like religion, is built on the notion that you are defective and that Father shall improve you – but for socialists this has always been even more of a problem.
Hence the title of Bill Broady’s historical novel about the creation of the Independent Labour Party (please keep reading, it’s more fun than that sounds). In cities such as Manchester and Bradford, English socialism flourished on the issue of privy middens, communal cesspits from which the solids were removed by the night-soil men (“gong farmers”, as they were known in Tudor times) while the town slept. The poorest streets shared a single privy between four to eight houses.
In Broady’s retelling, Fred Jowett – a founding member of the ILP, who grew up on such a street in Bradford and began working in a textile mill at eight years old – can never escape the smell of excrement. It pervades every childhood memory and wakes him every night, years after the middens have been excavated. He has a lifelong horror of the night-soil men, whose job it was to remove it, with shovel and cart – and shame at having deprived them, as his city’s first socialist councillor and a campaigner for decent municipal housing, of their work.
Victor Grayson, the rock star of English Victorian socialism, had no such horror of the unsanitary, or indeed of anything: as Broady paints him, Grayson was a man with an insatiable and indiscriminate appetite for sex, alcohol and argument. It sounds as if this is close to the truth; Grayson’s life was very colourful indeed.
A child of Liverpool’s 19th-century slums, he stowed away on a ship to Australia at 14, only to be returned after four days at sea – to South Wales, from where he walked the 150 miles back to Liverpool. Having trained as a preacher, which involved overcoming a speech impediment, he turned his gift for public speaking to the growing socialist movement, joining the ILP in 1904. His speeches were mass entertainment, and he developed a devoted following, winning the 1907 Colne Valley by-election aged 26. His voters named their children after him; one of those infant Victors would become general secretary of the TUC. An American newspaper called him “England’s greatest mob orator”. Lenin wrote of Grayson that although “very fiery”, he was “not strong in principles and given to phrase-mongering”.
Parliament was a different matter – Grayson’s most notable achievement was to be repeatedly thrown out of the chamber – and his brief stint in Westminster was marked by depression and alcoholism. He lost his seat in 1910 and did not regain it. In 1916 he enlisted in the New Zealand Army to fight in the First World War, where he was wounded at Passchendaele. In 1920, having resurrected his career as a populist demagogue, Grayson was having a drink with friends when he was called to the telephone; he left, apparently to meet someone at a hotel, and was never seen again.
As with Hilary Mantel’s historical novels – this book shares the ambition of A Place of Greater Safety to paint history in vibrant, bloody red – years of painstaking research are evident but unspoken. The novelist is invisible, the characters do all the talking. The Night-Soil Men is an electric piece of writing, deft and funny and occasionally obscene. As an evocation of the left’s long struggle between radicalism and electability, it is perfectly timed to the current moment – which is impressive, given that Broady spent a decade writing it. No novel this year will give a better background to the dichotomy of power and principle that is at the heart of our new Labour government.
As for Grayson, where did he go? He remains a totemic figure. Decades after he lost Colne Valley, which he only represented for three years, voters there still remembered him as “our Victor”. Jeremy Corbyn thinks he was an early victim of the Deep State: “Somewhere in some files from Scotland Yard or the Home Office, the truth is known,” he wrote in a foreword to a 2021 biography of Grayson. Perhaps there is a filing cabinet in Whitehall marked “Secret Government Murders” in which the mystery is at last explained, but Broady is above constructing a theory: the mystery is the point. It is probably what Victor would have wanted.
The Night-Soil Men
Bill Broady
Salt Publishing, 480pp, £12.99
[See also: A reckoning with Ghislaine Maxwell]
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk