“We come here for fame!” was how the Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once explained the allure of the House of Commons to the liberal politician John Bright. “Bright earnestly insisted that he came there for no purpose of the kind,” according to one observer. “Disraeli ceased to argue the point, and listened with a quiet half-sarcastic smile, evidently quite satisfied in his own mind that a man who could make great speeches must make them with the desire of obtaining fame.”
Fame is the Spur is, at one level, the account of a Labour Disraeli, preternaturally attracted to climbing the greasy pole of politics only to confront the hollow reality of the Book of Matthew: “For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” As such, it is often read as a stinging rebuke to the career of Ramsay MacDonald who, like our hero John Hamer Shawcross, chose to betray the Labour movement in 1931 by leading the National coalition into the General Election in the hope of retaining high office.
But, this being a socialist rather than Conservative story, a familiar tale of principles sold out for power is then overlaid with all the complexity of social class, lineage, education and even pronunciation, which so often suffuse the personality politics of the Labour movement. However, Howard Spring’s engrossing work of fiction is so much more than a critique of radical firebrands turned establishment reactionaries. It is a richly absorbing account of the psychology of politics; a fiercely paced novel by a gifted journalist turned popular writer, with rich echoes of The Forsyte Saga; and an account of poverty, social injustice and the indignities of inequality that stands comparison with Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Disraeli’s Coningsby, or The New Generation and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
The lineage of John Hamer Shawcross, whose journey takes him from the hunger, fragility and filth of backstreets Manchester to the red benches of the House of Lords, is both pure and sullied. He is, at one and the same time, the bastard child of an aristocrat (providing his sense of entitlement and ultimate corruption) and heir to Peterloo. His inheritance of a sabre from the bloodbath of St Peter’s Field – where, in 1817, the Manchester and Salford cavalry cut down a peaceful gathering of democracy campaigners and proto-Chartists – links him umbilically to the ur-point of nineteenth-century socialism. Peterloo was the Martyrs’ Memorial for the Victorian radical tradition and Shawcross begins his political odyssey endowed with its finest relic.
That is just the start. In an echo of his unknown, aristocratic breeding, the young Shawcross is trained, like a Derby winner, for the very heights of the Labour movement. Harold Wilson once reflected that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than Marxism, but Shawcross has both. From his stepfather he learns his Pilgrim’s Progress, Life of Wesley, Methodist Hymn Book and the cadences and rhythms of the chapel sermon – “the easy brilliance, the challenging eye, the persuasive gestures and the rise and fall of the voice that could plead, condemn, exhort.” Naturally, he also discovers the work of the great republican puritan John Milton:
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days.
Then, from his stepfather’s friend, the old Jewish bookseller Charles Suddaby, there came a schooling in socialism from the works of Cobbett, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Robert Owen. Only Michael Foot could have read more widely. Best of all, there is a Manchester cameo from Friedrich Engels: “His face was heavily bearded; his clothes were of stout, excellent broadcloth. And he earnestly hoped that perhaps this dead and damned and rotten old year is the last year men will know in poverty and squalor... It’s like a rotten old shed. How it will blaze!”
Added to Shawcross’s intellectual pedigree was the lived reality of poverty. Later crafted into a politician’s narrative of empathy and struggle (“I can speak of a poor home smitten by sudden calamity, of the loaf dwindling in the cupboard, the oil failing in the lamp, the fire sinking low upon the hearth, and hope burning low in the soul”), Spring nonetheless describes how Shawcross’s childhood, amidst want and misery, drives his political mission. In his account of Manchester soup kitchens, worries of respectable working-class life, and brutality of capitalism, this is a work to stand comparison with Dickens’s Hard Times, Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
Spring successfully explains the fury and agony of inequality, and a life lived at the whim of the propertied class: “They own you, body and soul. One word, and they put out the light for you. No clothes for your wife. No food for your children.” There is the occasional lapse into socialist impatience at the stubborn incapacity of the proletariat to realize their historic function (“It makes you wonder whether they’re worth saving”), but, in fact, Spring has a much deeper sympathy for the lives of the working class than Dickens or Tressell ever did. In his descriptions of the Shawcross parlour, the chapel, the workshop, and the Saturday afternoon outfits, there is an admiration for a provincial urban culture of richness and pride.
This, then, is the setting for Shawcross’s ascent to the top. Whilst the very same circumstances produces his friend, and conscience, Arnold Ryerson, who flees Manchester for Bradford to work as a printer and become involved in the nascent trade union movement, it is Shawcross who retains the aura of mystery around his persona. Whilst Ryerson does the branch meetings and factory gate demos, it is Shawcross (supported by his doting mother and stepfather) who travels the world, then sweeps into West Yorkshire to take the parliamentary seat and steal the heart of the guiltily well-off socialist Ann Artingstall. There is a Carlylian transcendence around Shawcross’s “energy and force” which Spring urges us not to trust. And, with it, a willingness to use and discard friends and family on his way to the top – even uprooting his own mother from her settled domestic circumstances in order to curtail some political flak.
The ascent of Shawcross provides the narrative arc for a broader history of the rise of the Labour Party and the strange death of Liberal Britain. In Spring’s schema, it was to be a party as dedicated and selflessly committed to the interests of working people as the Tories promoted the rights of capital. And from Bradford to Manchester to the Rhondda Valley, Spring ably marks the movement’s growth across working-class communities. Yet the cynical joy of Fame is the Spur is that a nascent politician like Shawcross instantly understands the particular merits of a new party. “A man might join the Conservative Party or the Liberal Party, old and slow-moving both of them, and in twenty years be where he was at the beginning. The party of the rising tide was another matter.” On a spring tide of socialist solidarity and collective endeavour, Shawcross rises to personal fame with a knowingness around the political process which would have impressed the most world-weary Whig grandee. Like so many Labour leaders, he knows how to quote his Shelley (“You are many; they are few”), how to “make these people feel that they were crusaders, not mere voters,” and “while appearing to have nothing but his country’s interest at heart” he knows the real politician “must be an expert at appealing to panic, passion and prejudice. When these do not exist, he must know how to create them at the right moment.” Only occasionally would the guard drop, such as when he finally reached Westminster. “‘So this is it,’ said Hamer at last [on entering the Commons]; ‘this is what all the dusty work and drudgery means – to get through those doors.’” Forget all that rot about service and sacrifice.
Such is Hamer Shawcross’s personal ambition and growing self-regard that he even opposes female suffrage on the grounds it might costs Labour votes and block his ascent to office. “‘I am a politician,’ he said bluntly. ‘I want to see my party in power.’” This provides the unbridgeable fissure in the marriage between Shawcross and Ann, who joins with her progressive aunt Lizzie Lightowler and Arnold Ryerson’s wife, Pen Muff, to become an active campaigner for women’s votes – even if that meant disrupting Shawcross’s own hustings. The battle for the suffrage provides a symbol of true political principles and personal sacrifice in the cause of a just ideal. It also means a cast of female characters of much greater depth and sophistication than is the case in most “socialist classics”. Spring is at his most powerful as a writer when describing, in gruesome detail, the force-feeding of Ann by a team of nurses and doctors prizing open her mouth. “She felt steel forcing her lips apart, grating on her teeth. It searched along the line of clenched teeth, slipped, cut into her gums... She tried to draw her tongue back, retching.”
Shawcross, meanwhile, is enjoying all the trappings of public life as one of the Labour Party’s new MPs. “His quarterdeck was the terrace along the Thames, opposite the House of Commons. He loved to come here and walk and think. On one hand the blackened time-smoothed granite parapet with the lamps springing out of it. Beneath his feet the long stone pavement, running forward in a lovely vista.” At Westminster, any remaining radicalism which still attached to “Shawcross of Peterloo” is stripped away. From his growing flirtation with the Countess of Lostwithiel to the smart, prep school education for his son, to his regular appearances in the newspaper society pages, London feeds his vanity and corruption. His growing disconnect from the working-class voters of West Yorkshire earns him a rebuke from the ascetic Keir Hardie: “‘There’s a certain virtue’ – he smiled – ‘in lighting your own fires, and cleaning your own boots, and cooking your own food, as I do in my wee place behind Fetter Lane.’”
But, for Shawcross, the allure of high office was too enticing and he proves willing to undertake any number of humiliating errands to get into power. As striking miners in South Wales threaten to undermine the energy supply for the Royal Navy during World War I, Shawcross is despatched as Minister of Ways and Means in the wartime government to get them back to work. Whilst his own son, Charles, is wounded on the battlefields of northern France, and Pen Muff suffers in a munitions factory explosion, Shawcross’s national service is to ask labour to bend to capital. “Never before had he felt so furtive and ashamed... He believed that the miners were in the wrong, but that was not the point... His visit had been contrived by people who would have been against the miners wrong or right.”
An official, governing mentality had by now subsumed all remnants of that socialist idealism that first spurred him into political combat – that initial aspiration to pull down the Lostwithiel seat of Castle Hereward and all the social injustice it stood for. “Beat a drum. Fire a rocket... There it has been since Domesday, running us, ruining us, milking us, arranging the wars we should fight in and the dens we should live and die in.” Now Shawcross’s political “reality” sees him condemn the Jarrow March of 1929; support austerity in the public finances (“‘We are spending more than we earn, and I tremble to think what the consequence of that will be on our credit abroad’”); feel a terrible sense of national loss when Castle Hereward is put on the market in the aftermath of the crash; and, finally, heretically, sanction the destruction of the Labour Party by signing up to support the 1931 National Government. His reward is a Viscountcy.
As such, Fame is the Spur can be read as a denunciation of the “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s and the fateful merging of Liberal, Labour and Tory ideology. Howard Spring had himself once complained of how “the formal distinctions had melted; the three old gangs were fused into one amalgam, one sort of man: just a politician.” But for all the finely tuned contempt for Shawcross’s self-regard, in the final chapters of the book Spring seems to offer the reader a slightly more generous consideration of his characters and motives. Unlike so many on the Left, including his son Charles, Shawcross never falls for the bleak Marxism of Soviet communism and, instead, makes a strong case for the progressive merits of social democracy. “‘I’ve come to believe that there is more in life than bread-and-butter for what you call the workers, I believe they can have it – plenty of it – without destroying free art and science and letters.’”
Increasingly disillusioned with the ugly, righteous stridency of politics, Shawcross inherits from Ann a growing fondness for the meditations of Marcus Aurelius and his philosophy of contemplative Stoicism. Shawcross ends his days a lonely widower, distanced from his son, his Peterloo sabre now encased in glass, lamenting the vanity and hubris of man. Fame is no longer the spur. In fact, his one prayer is that “‘for fifty years, politicians of all breeds would leave the people alone. We might then have a better world. We couldn’t have a worse one.’”
The socialist who has done well for himself and enjoys the comforts of success has long been a familiar subject of ridicule in British popular culture. “There is nothing too good for the working class – or their representatives,” as Labour MPs like to joke. And in the rise of Shawcross there is, yes, the example of Ramsay MacDonald (who rose as an illegitimate son of Lossiemouth to Lord President of the Council); but also shades of Roy Jenkins’s Duchess and claret dinner parties; the suave career of Labour Attorney-General Sir Hartley Shawcross (widely ridiculed as “Sir Shortly Floorcross,” for his abandonment of Labour); and perhaps even Anthony Powell’s grotesquely ambitious anti-hero Kenneth Widmerpool, in A Dance to the Music of Time.
Fame is the Spur sits outside Howard Spring’s canon of more family-based sagas, but brings to the study of politics a popular novelist’s gift. He captures not only late-Victorian Manchester, and the suffragette struggle, but also the socialist, literary culture and Nonconformist sense of purpose which underpinned so much of the early Labour movement. In the chronicle of Shawcross, the Labour Party rises and falls with all the weakness of his own character faults – and, in the process, leads Spring himself to urge a broader retreat from politics. In fact, just five years after publication, the Labour Party was to surge to power in its own right and, under the leadership of Clement Attlee (who also believed in private education and the House of Lords), deliver a programme of radical change which still stands as a lodestar for contemporary, left-wing politics.
And what of today? This is a cynical tale, which can only cement the fervent convictions of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s followers, that the Parliamentary road to socialism is inherently flawed. Real change has to take place on the streets away from the Vanity Fair of SW1. Hamer Shawcross’s fame-hungry journey from Peterloo to Parliament is a salutary tale of the Establishment embrace, from which true socialism needs always to immunise itself. But, at the conclusion of the book, for all the language of betrayal and “sell-out,” Howard Spring, the idealistic Labour voter, seems to have some sympathy for Shawcross’s stoical humanism. “‘Go on demanding the Millennium, my boy,’ said Hamer [to Charles]. ‘God help us when we cease to do that. But don’t expect to get it, and, above all things, don’t try to shove it down other people’s throats. If the Millennium pays a penny in the pound, you’ll be lucky.’” Indeed.
TRISTRAM HUNT