Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  One day in 1944 in the test-house of Foster Motors (Aircraft Division) at Darley Bank three men gazed anxiously and intently, now through the observation window of a sound-proofed testing bay, now back to the dials on the control panel before them. Both the engine in the bay and its test rig looked strange. This was not one of the familiar Peregrine engines with its two inclined banks of six cylinders which the factory had turned out by the thousand during the war years. Here were none of the familiar fittings: carburettor and supercharger, intercooler and manifolds, the complicated ignition system and its nest of armoured high-tension leads. This engine was totally different in form. It could be said that it resembled an octopus or the head of a harpoon, a formidable-looking blunt head of curving pipes on a barrel-shaped body tapering away to a single circular orifice. The soundproof walls which had effectually subdued the roar of the Peregrine as it delivered its two thousand horse-power to dynamometer or wind tunnel propeller could scarcely contend with the howling tornado of sound which tore from this engine. It was not connected to any propeller or dynamometer; its only visible betrayal of power and motion was the tongue of flame that issued from its tapering tail. Yet the roar from the jet was so overwhelming and the scream of the compressor so excruciatingly intense and high pitched that the impression conveyed was one of a power and velocity too prodigious for any metals to withstand. This was the prototype Foster ‘Wendle’ jet engine undergoing its first full-power test. Just as the turbine had superseded the old steam reciprocating engine forty years before, so now the Peregrine piston engine would soon be obsolete. The pace of industrial revolution was still accelerating.

  While the engineers of Foster Motors had been developing their jet engine at Darley Bank, work of even greater moment was going on along the by-pass within the walls of that mysterious newcomer to Winterstoke, the Electronics Development Corporation. This highly secretive activity could be called a mystery within a mystery. The word Electronics was mysterious enough for most people whose only knowledge of this highly specialized science was that it had something to do with the Radar Station whose masts now encircled the long barrow on the crown of Summersend Hill. But this arcane research had nothing to do with electronics. That was merely a cloak of convenient obscurity. The work was finally carried to a successful conclusion in America, and it was just as well that Winterstoke did not experience its first-fruits. Indeed it was not for some time afterwards that the town learnt that it had unwittingly played its part in the successful obliteration of two cities by the power of atomic fission which marked the end of the second world war. Like the creaking Newcomen pump and the stuttering engine of the Foster Brothers’ first horseless carriage, the explosions which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented only the first tentative and puny stirrings of a new power. The ‘atomic age’ had dawned, the third, and in all probability the last, phase of the industrial revolution.

  Chapter Fifteen

  WE ARE NEARING the end of a long journey. Why should we hesitate upon the threshold of this, our own Atomic Age? Despite the war and the drastic rationing of food the great majority of the poor of Winterstoke are better off materially than they have ever been before. Thanks to the development of medical science they enjoy better health and a longer expectation of life. They have had the benefit of education, they work much shorter hours, are better clothed and better fed. They have electric light, gas, sanitation and rapid transport. They have their amusements: the cinema, the wireless and now television, the popular press, the greyhound track, the Saturday football match and the Pools. Unemployment is almost non-existent. Why should we not step back with relief from the past into such a present? Is it only the threat of the atomic bomb and the ‘cold war’ that makes us shrink from the new Winterstoke and look back with nostalgia down the road we have followed to a past that can never come again? No, it is not. The question is more difficult to answer. Something has died in this post-war Winterstoke that was alive even during the terrible years of the early nineteenth century, something which was intangible and yet seemed indestructible, something which awoke during the Winterstoke Blitz but now seems to have disappeared. It is as though the town had lost its soul. At Darley Bank and Ketton and along the by-pass the factories still hum, the pit wheels spin, traffic roars through the town and the long expresses slide into the central station; people crowd pavements, chain stores and market more densely than they ever did before. Yet somehow all this familiar activity seems to have become suddenly aimless and meaningless, like the automatic muscular contractions in the body of a chicken after its head has been struck off. Life goes on in Winterstoke, but it seems a life without belief, without purpose either for good or evil, a life without faith in itself or hope for the future. It is not as though the industrial revolution has come to a standstill in the town by any means. There is a roar of jet engines on test from Darley Bank and the new machines from High Emberley Field scream overhead at the speed of sound. There is also a new Atomic Research Station in the fields below Summersend Hill to the east of the by-pass; a new village of impermanent-looking houses surrounding mysterious buildings of steel and concrete. The whole area is enclosed like a prison camp by a high ring-fence of barbed wire patrolled by security police. But who in Winterstoke was responsible for these new developments and with what object? Whose personal ambition or whose dream for the future of mankind do they represent? What successor to the Hanmers, the Leeds, the Blenkinsops and the Fosters, has now come forward to stand or fall by the success or failure of these new enterprises? The questions echo round an empty room. Nobody answers. Are they then a communal achievement, the creation of the people of Winterstoke, the expression of their corporate will? Once more there is no answer. It is as though the industrial revolution had acquired a momentum of its own, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ who was clever enough to set the genie to work now finds he knows no counter charm.

  We have seen many changes pass over the face of Winterstoke. Once it was very fair. Then it became black, terrible and pitiless as Lucifer in smoke and furnace flame; yet always it has worn a human face. What makes the face of atomic Winterstoke so fearful is that it appears no longer human. It is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor evil because the power to distinguish the one from the other has been lost. Like a death mask its steel and concrete face is expressionless. Yet power there must be somewhere or the wheels would run down. We have seen that power pass from family to family and then disperse in huge hydra-headed industrial monopolies. Where now is the seat of power to be found? By one of those strange ironies of history it has come to rest in the corner of Winterstoke Park on the very spot where once the cloisters of the great Cistercian abbey stood. A warren of single-storeyed and flat-roofed buildings, it resembles the factory of the Electronics Development Corporation on the by-pass or the R.A.F. buildings at High Emberley. But, oddly enough, its interior is not unlike a cloister with its long, echoing corridors. True, there is much traffic upon them: Government messengers tramping to and fro with inter-departmental minutes and memos; officials with bulging brief cases; pert typists with armfuls of tape-tied files or carrying interminable cups of tea. Yet no laymen trespassing in the old monastic cloister could look more harassed or apprehensive than those members of the public who stray into these corridors to seek audience, chivied from department to department or waiting submissively at closed doors. Apart from their heat and the smell of stale tobacco, these offices, with their ink-stained trestle tables, wire letter-baskets, metal filing cabinets and hard chairs are as austere as that narrow stone cell in which the good Ambrosius wrote his Chronicles six hundred years ago.

  These are the offices of the new Welfare State. Here preside the officials of the various Ministries whose task it is to regulate the life and work of the townspeople of Winterstoke in sickness or in health, for richer or poorer, in joy or in sorrow from the cradle to the grave. They have pitched their mansion here because the pre-war local government office block in Wharf Square was damaged in the b
litz and was in any case far too small to house them all. Moreover, this encampment in Winterstoke Park only houses the elite corps of the great army of officials which a new régime has brought to Winterstoke.

  By the consistent return of a Labour Member to Parliament ever since the election of 1922, the majority of the inhabitants of Winterstoke proclaimed their belief in the Socialist theory. Through the long years of poverty and grinding monotony in the squalor and unrelieved ugliness of the back streets, in the darkness of the mine, in the roar of the machine-shop or in the heat of the furnace; through strike and lock-out and unemployment, they held fast to their faith in the Socialist State. For many of them it became a religion, promising deliverance from all the evils, the hardships and injustices of an inhuman system. How much braver and brighter this new doctrine, this splendid crusade for which all could fight, than the old religion of superstition which had advised them to be content with their lot and read their Bibles on the seventh day!

  It was not until after the second world war when they secured an overwhelming majority in Parliament that the forces of labour at last had their opportunity to translate theory into practice. Two circumstances made their task easier. First, the demands of the new ‘total war’ had already vastly extended the powers of the State over industry and transport, over local government and over the lives of all its citizens. Only by such imitative methods had it been possible to counter the attack of totalitarian Germany. Secondly, just as Marx had forecast, a competitive industry had proceeded so far along the road to monopoly that it was ripe for plucking. For example, it would have been a difficult problem to nationalize the iron industry in the days of the Leeds family. In the case of an industry represented only by a few huge concerns such as the Universal Steel Corporation it became a relatively simple matter. ‘Private enterprise’ had come like a sheep to the slaughter; the transition was easy, so easy, in fact, that for a while it was a case of ‘business as usual’ in Winterstoke. There was little to indicate to the workers that the long-awaited Utopia was now at last in the making and that, to paraphrase the words of one of their spokesmen, ‘they were the masters now’. They became the owners of the pits of Camp, High Hanger, Ketton Deep and Emberley Heath, of the London & North Midland Railway, of the Gas, Light & Coke Company, the Midshire Power Supply Company, and the Winterstoke General Hospital, yet it was strangely difficult to feel exactly proprietorial about them.

  Soon, however, the new régime began to make itself evident in Winterstoke. ‘Highways’, Robert Foster’s bomb-damaged house on Emberley Hill, was thoroughly reconditioned, enlarged and its dilapidated gardens restored to order. It was then reopened as the area headquarters of the National Coal Board. A block of bombed shops on Wharf Square was similarly rebuilt as regional offices for the Gas and Electricity Undertakings. The big ‘Countess’ class Pacifies which hauled the crack expresses of the London & North Midland Railway appeared, for a time, in a new livery of bright blue with a strange insignia on cab-sheets and tender sides. The L. & N.M.R. had now officially become the North Midland Region, and gradually the individuality of the old Company began to disappear. The people of Winterstoke had already heard over the wireless and read in the press what immense benefits the nationalization of transport would bring so soon as the system began to operate for the public good instead of for private profit. All forms of transport could now be fully utilized, while to ensure that the public had their say in this new and truly democratic organization, Users Consultative Committees would be set up. It therefore came as a surprise to many when the first important action of the new organization in Winterstoke was to close down the Summersend branch line. There were vigorous protests in the Winterstoke Sentinel. An aggrieved resident of Summersend wrote to the paper and explained precisely what a journey from Summersend to London with heavy luggage now involved. He pointed out that the Midshire bus, now the only link between Summersend and Winterstoke, had refused to handle his luggage. As a result he had been forced to hire a car and had missed his main line train. But such protests were vain. As well might Canute bid the tide recede. The private monopolies had been dictatorial enough, but it became increasingly apparent that these new State monopolies were virtually unassailable. As a last resort, an injured customer of one of the old public companies could always write to his M.P. and have the matter ventilated in the Commons. But now there was no such redress. The responsible Minister would smoothly reply that he was not empowered to deal with questions affecting the day to day administration of the nationalized undertakings. As for the Consultative Committees, no one in Winterstoke seemed able to discover much about these bodies or how or where they functioned. Certainly no aggrieved local customer was ever invited to join one. He had to remain content with the practised evasions of some public relations officer.

  If the new nationalized industries were a law unto themselves, how much more so were the officials in Winterstoke Park, those ‘obedient servants’ as they continued to sign themselves. For under their delegated powers they could not only make their own laws in the form of Ministerial Orders but, through committee and tribunal, act as judges in their own causes, a state of affairs which set at nought the ancient Common Laws of England. Yet not one of them could be held personally responsible for the consequences of his actions. The machinery of power was much too democratic, too complex and highly organized for that. None of these officials ever stated anything himself; he was always ‘directed to state’; there was always a ‘higher level’ to which responsibility could be passed. No wonder the face of Winterstoke became blank and expressionless. No wonder freedom and initiative in the town was slowly but surely destroyed as its inhabitants became form-filling suppliants whose right to live depended on a rubber stamp.

  The workers in the new national monopolies were told that they were now public servants working for the good of the community instead of being exploited by greedy capitalists. Yet somehow this fact remained singularly abstract and uninspiring. It was difficult to distinguish this new freedom from the old exploitation. The work in mine or machine shop became no less arduous or monotonous. Not only was there no ‘gaffer’, there was now no management either; only a growing army of officials harassed by mysterious and unknown ‘higher levels’: Area Boards, Purchasing, Finance, and Co-ordinating Committees to which decisions must be referred or requests made on the appropriate form in sextuplicate. It began to occur to some that the bureaucrat could become as heavy an incubus as the hated capitalist. For the greatest disillusionment of all was that the Socialist State did not appear to be a promised land overflowing with milk and honey after all. Their leaders had broken open the capitalist’s till and seized that miser’s hoard but where was the working man’s long promised share? What had become of it? Why did not that obstinate gap between wages and prices now close? Prices should fall and wages increase now that a privileged class could no longer claim their pound of flesh. Yet instead the gap yawned as wide as ever and, instead of falling, the price of coal, of gas, electricity and transport rose rapidly. So did the cost of food. The workers of Winterstoke found themselves waging the same old battle for higher wages against their own leaders.

  The sorry truth may have dawned on some that the sinister figure of the Capitalist was a mere turnip ghost and that the reason for the gap between wages and prices must lie much deeper, so deep that it called the whole industrial system in question. In truth, the effect of the revolution which caused Winterstoke to grow from a small, self-sufficient, regional community into a great town, was to create an ever wider gulf between the producer and the consumer. In that gulf there stood, not a mere clique of capitalist exploiters, but an enormous and ever-growing army of unproductive labour: chains of buyers and sellers and carriers, swollen offices filled with administrators, salesmen, planners, buyers, progress men, production experts, personnel managers and welfare workers, clerks and typists, each one adding his or her quota to the price of an article whose real value remains as it always was and ever will be
the ‘just price’: the cost of the labour and the materials that have gone to its making. This was the bitter lesson which Winterstoke began to learn as it not only paid more instead of less for its goods and services but staggered under a weight of taxation so heavy that it destroyed all incentive. This was the price of the Welfare State, the pound of flesh demanded, not by the old enemy but by those obedient servants in Winterstoke Park.

  There is no neat conclusion to this story of Winterstoke, no tidy tying of its many stranded threads. The story goes on as these words are written into a future that we can neither follow nor forecast. We may visit its long past in imagination, hearing again the shrill scream of the peacocks on Richard Hanmer’s lawn or the music of the virginals, the churning of the mill wheel, the thud of Alfred Darley’s first tilt hammer. We can watch the swaying beam of the High Hanger Newcomen, see the glare of Bedlam Furnace, ride with Brindley through the woods of Deepforest or on the footplate of Typhoon as she hauls the first train down the valley. We can walk through those splendid rooms of the Earls of Winterstoke or through the thunderous forge at Darley Bank. Thus far imagination will carry us, but not into the future; that is hidden.

  But it would be a mistake to suppose that the prospect before the town is necessarily dark. We should not be misled into despair by the blank expressionless face which it now wears; by the bewilderment and the lack of purpose; by the loss of freedom and initiative and the weight of frustration and apathy which that loss has bred. Appearances are always deceptive. To despair would be to lose faith in life itself with its eternal capacity for regeneration and renewal. For however forbidding and inscrutable the face of Winterstoke may appear, beneath that exterior there are thousands of individual human souls, each with a capacity for good as well as for evil. If another war were to come they would display the same heroism and self-sacrifice as they did in the last. Such a life current may be woefully misdirected and abused, but no tyranny of industrialist, bureaucrat or machine can ever altogether prevail against it. Though seemingly weak it can overthrow tyranny as a green shoot will lift and crack a paving slab. There is doubt and uncertainty now because both versions of the materialistic philosophy have been tried and found wanting, the second threatening a form of tyranny worse than the first. But nature abhors a vacuum, and angels are as likely to fill this void as devils. What is needed is a religious faith by which alone the one species can be distinguished from the other. Modern materialistic philosophers have tried to paint life in Winterstoke a uniform dirty grey and have succeeded in creating a very fair semblance of their vision. In medieval Winterstoke they had a much more realistic conception of that life as a continual struggle between black and white, between the world of men and the natural world of God.