Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

BUGGERY AND MONTAGE:
BIRMINGHAM AND BLOOMSBURY IN THE 1930S
by Lara Feigel
In 1931 the Hogarth Press published Saturday Night at the Greyhound by John Hampson
Simpson, a working-class writer from Birmingham. Virginia Woolf’s initial reaction to
Hampson was somewhat sceptical: ‘We have discovered a good novelist, homosexual,
a waiter, I think, in Cardiff ; but he wont help—his rags will further diminish our hoard’
(L4 221). Despite his dubious provenance, Hampson turned out to be very profi table and
Saturday Night quickly sold ten thousand copies. Hampson was fêted by the younger generation
of Bloomsbury intelligentsia, hungry for contact with the working classes, and soon
Birmingham would be the unlikely twin-town of Bloomsbury, as young upper and workingclass
writers passed freely between the ivory towers and grubby brickworks factories. In this
paper I shall explore the connections between London and the Midlands, fi rst by looking at
the friendships developing between the two groups of writers and then by looking at a particular
technique, cinematic montage, that I see as bonding these writers artistically. I shall
suggest that, far from diminishing Woolf’s hoard, Hampson was responsible for enriching
not only the Press’s purse but also Woolf’s own artistic vocabulary as she moved towards
cinematically inspired montage in her politically engaged 1930s writing.
John Hampson himself formed the hub of the wheel linking working-class Birmingham
with chattering-class Bloomsbury. He was a key fi gure in the Birmingham Writers’
Group that developed in the mid-thirties and formed the nexus for literary Birmingham.
Hampson’s working-class credentials are in fact slightly dubious. He was born into the affl
uent home of middle-class, double-barrelled parents. Leslie Halward, a more convincingly
working-class member of the Birmingham Group chastised Hampson for his apparently
working-class short story, “Man About the House,” in 1935 saying: “only middle and upperclass
parents explain to their children why they are thrashing them” (cited by Simpson 22).
Nonetheless, Hampson’s parents fell rapidly into penury and Hampson went on to live in
poverty and prison as a kitchen-hand, billiard marker, and book thief, before beginning his
literary career and becoming a key player in the Birmingham Writers’ Group.
Th e Birmingham Group itself was brought into being, rather surprisingly, by the American
critic Edward O’Brien, who was editing the best short stories of 1935 and noticed that
many of the strongest stories of working-class life had been written in Birmingham. In an introduction
to Halward’s To Tea on Sunday O’Brien announced the existence of “a new group
of writers emerging in the Midlands, chiefl y in and near Birmingham” and listed them as
Hampson, Halward, Walter Allen, Walter Brierley, and Peter Chamberlain (cited by Croft
162). Th e only three writers actually in touch at this point were Hampson, Brierley, and
Allen. Walter Brierley had started writing during a period of unemployment as a miner, and
Hampson had contacted him after reading his article in the Listener detailing the trials of being
a working-class writer. It was Hampson who suggested the idea for the novel that would
become Means-Test Man, Brierley’s most successful work, with Walter Allen providing the
title. Hampson and Allen met and became great friends whilst Allen, the best educated of