81. Scotch Barley Broth and Fruit Tart: Jonathan Priestley and the First School-Feeding in Bradford

This photograph shows  Jonathan Priestley, father of the writer J.B. Priestley, serving school dinners to children at the White Abbey Dining Room, Bradford, in 1907.  Jonathan was Headmaster of Green Lane School, which hosted a new central depot which made meals for children across the city.

The First School-Feeding. Jonathan Priestley, father of the writer J.B. Priestley, serving school dinners to children at the White Abbey Dining Room, Bradford, in 1907. Copyright holder unknown.

The introduction of “school-feeding” is an example of Bradford innovation in social welfare.  From its earliest days as a booming wool town through the 1890s and 1900s, the fast-growing city saw great poverty among its industrial workers and their families.  It became a centre of radical ideas and practice in alleviating these conditions, often strongly influenced by Nonconformism: social obligations and the value of education.   Witness the fight of Oastler and Forster against “Yorkshire slavery”- cruel conditions in factories – and later the Manningham Mills strike, which led to the founding of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

The photograph is taken from Socialism over Sixty Years: the life of Jowett of Bradford, by Fenner Brockway (Allen and Unwin for the National Labour Press, 1946).  Frederick William “Fred” Jowett (1864-1944) was instrumental in the founding of the ILP and was a pioneer of “municipal socialism” to improve the lives of working people.  Jowett served on Bradford Town and City Councils and later became an MP.

J.B. Priestley, by then perhaps the city’s most famous son, wrote the Preface to Brockway’s book.  JBP did not agree with Jowett and the ILP on all issues, but he paid tribute to Jowett’s integrity and what he and they had achieved for poor people.

“School-feeding” was one of these  achievements.  The city’s workers suffered in the 1890s and 1900s as the wool trade declined.   ILP activist Margaret McMillan, elected to the Bradford School Board with a mandate to fight “the battle of the slum child”, saw from medical inspections that children were under-nourished and that this was the most serious health concern in the city.  It led to listlessness, disease, and meant children could not benefit from their education.  However, schools were powerless to help.  Charities such as the Cinderella Club could not feed all who needed assistance and the Guardians of the Poor Law provided inadequate meals mocked by activists as “bun, banana and beverage”.

The Council finally agreed to supply school meals in 1904, after many years of campaigning by Jowett and others, and despite stiff opposition (McMillan had left Bradford by that time, following the abolition of School Boards).  Bradford was the first Council to offer this service.  The Provision of Meals Act was passed in 1906 in Parliament, Jowett, who had by then been elected member for Bradford West, speaking in favour.

Page from the “Priestley Family Register”, kept by J.B. Priestley’s grandfather John, and showing the birth of his father Jonathan.

As a result of the passing of the Act, a School Meals Depot was set up at Green Lane School in 1907, supplying food to several schools in the poorest parts of the city.  Our photograph shows the official opening in October 1907, which featured a meal of “scotch barley broth and fruit tart, with bread and a mug of water for each child”, Jonathan Priestley serving the broth.  JBP was then aged 13 and recalled in his Preface the great local and national press interest in the story.

It is fitting that Jonathan Priestley is linked with this major innovation in welfare.  A conscientious Baptist, Jonathan Priestley was part of Bradford’s Nonconformist socialist scene.  He came from a poor family; his father, John, was a mill worker (according to the 1881 census, a “cotton warp dresser”, the same trade as Jowett’s father).   The “Priestley Family Register”, a copy of Smollett’s History of England inscribed by John Priestley, shows the harshness of their world: three of Jonathan’s siblings died in infancy.  Education was Jonathan’s way out, and he believed passionately in its value.

Jonathan Priestley and his wife Emma Holt, JBP’s mother, in Blackpool. Emma, who was remembered as high-spirited and witty, died when JBP was very young.  Amy, Jonathan’s second wife, fortunately proved to be very kind and loving mother for the young Jack Priestley.

His son remembered Jonathan as a pugnacious, fiery man, rather puritanical, a strict Sabbatarian, kind, dutiful, sometimes funny, and above all a born teacher.  Relations between father and son were strained for a time when JB did not want to carry on with his own education, but JB clearly loved and admired his father.  Many years after Jonathan’s death in 1924, he wrote that Jonathan was  “unselfish, brave, honourable, public-spirited.  He was the man socialists have in mind when they write about socialism”.

Note on sources
This account is based on that in the Brockway book and many other sources, including,

• City of Peace: Bradford’s story notably the chapter by Brenda Thomson.
• Writings by JB about his childhood, in particular Midnight on the Desert and Margin Released, source of above quotations.
• Oxford DNB entries on Jowett and McMillan (subscription required, often available via public libraries)
• This Green Lane School web page explains and illustrates with lots of photographs the workings of the Green Lane depot.

Our copy of Socialism over Sixty Years is itself an artefact.  Showing the wear of much reading, it has connections to Margaret McMillan, nursery school pioneer Miriam Lord and her father ILP member Hird Lord!

80. The Fumes of Latakia: J.B. Priestley’s Pipes

This week, some very special objects from the J.B. Priestley Archive: Priestley’s tobacco pipes!   We have over seventy pipes, plus the paraphenalia needed for using them: tobacco tins and pouches, matchbooks, and a bowl for pipes Priestley was currently using.

A couple of J.B. Priestley’s pipes, plus a hollowed-out book used to hold them, on show at the Picturing Priestley exhibition, Ilkley, 2006

The pipes and paraphenalia are important because pipe smoking is crucial to understanding Priestley: as an individual, throughout his writing, and as part of his public image.

Smoking was one of Priestley’s greatest pleasures in life: “I don’t know anything in this lower world of taste and smell that has given me so much pleasure as tobacco” (Rain upon Godshill, 1939).

J.B. Priestley with pipe on seashore, circa 1928 (PRI 22/1/1)

More than that, though, he argued that, “Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny … needs an ally.  (Woman I include here in Man).  Mine has been tobacco.  Even without it I have too often been impatient and intolerant.  Without it I should have been insufferable.  You may retort that I am insufferable anyhow, but, with a pipe nicely going, I do not believe you” (The Moments, 1966).

Naturally, pipes, tobacco and tobacconists crop up all the time in Priestley’s writings.  In Delight, for instance, he wrote about the delight of trying new blends of tobacco and of “lying in a hot bath, smoking a pipe … lost in steam, the fumes of Latakia and the vaguest dreams …”.  He often used pipesmoking in his fiction as an indicator of dreamy, good-humoured characters, think of Jess Oakroyd, Adam Stewart or Mr Smeeth …

However, managing a pipe is a complicated business, a hobby which requires care, thought and the aforesaid paraphenalia.  Priestley often advised on these matters in his writings.

His pipes became an iconic part of Priestley the celebrity. Chosen Pipe Smoker of the Year 1979, Priestley is often seen with his pipes in portraits and other images.  Here we see him with another famous pipesmoker and Yorkshireman, prime minister Harold Wilson.

Harold Wilson and J.B. Priestley, with their pipes, at the Opening of the J.B. Priestley Library, 1975 (UNI University of Bradford Archive).

Historian Mark Mason of the J.B. Priestley Society is working with us to clean and identify the pipes.  Eventually we hope to have a full catalogue (there are, apparently, many interesting kinds in Priestley’s large collection) and to match them up with those appearing in photographs and in Priestley’s writings.

Sources: I am indebted to Mark Mason for much of the above, which originally appeared as a post on the Special Collections blog.

79. I Have Been Here Before: J.W. Dunne, J.B. Priestley, Time and Dreams

This week’s Object is An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne (1927), which had an extraordinary influence on J.B. Priestley’s work.  Priestley reviewed Dunne’s book when it was published and later got to know him: “though we never became close friends we had some good talks”.

A mathematician and aeronautical engineer, Dunne developed his time theory “to account for the startling precognitive element in his dreams”.  Priestley did not follow Dunne into the wilder reaches of his Serialism theory.  But he felt that Dunne had much to say about the mysteries of “Life, Death and Time”, especially the crucial question of dreams.

Dreams were always  important to Priestley (we have seen his interest in Jung):  “I am one of the dreamers. My dreaming self is just as important as my waking self.  I have had dreams that haunted me for days and days …”

Priestley often wrote about his own dreams in his essays and autobiographies: witness the Strange Outfitter in Apes and Angels (featuring horrible masks with movable mouths) or the Berkshire Beasts in Open House.  Not to forget the powerful dream vision of the Birds and the White Flame in Rain upon Godshill.  He sought out examples of powerful and predictive dreams from talking to others and even from a television appeal, on the BBC’s Monitor programme.

So why did Dunne’s ideas interest Priestley?  Dunne proposed multiple selves and streams of time.  As I understand it, Observer 1, our everyday self, lives in Time 1: linear chronological time.  Observer 2 is another self operating in four dimensions (Time 2)  who can see Observer 1′s future and past.  Hence deja vu.  Above all, Observer 2 comes to the fore when Observer 1 is asleep, hence precognitive dreams which seem to bring the future into the present.  Observer 1 will die in Time 1, but Observer 2 is immortal and will continue to exist.  Observer 2 might therefore revisit and improve the life led by Observer 1 …

Priestley also explored the works of other writers reflecting on time, such as Ouspensky’s New Model of the Universe, which features multiple dimensions of which the final one is circular – people live their lives over and over again.  However, at certain points, they can choose a different path, turning the circle into a spiral, escaping the endless repetition and moving into a better or higher state.

Priestley exploited the dramatic or literary potential of these ideas to the full in the famous time plays and many other works.   They make for wonderful plot devices, but go beyond that in evoking deep mystery or emotion.

J.B. Priestley with cast of Russian production of An Inspector Calls, 1945 (PRI 21/8/30) (see Object 19)

Witness the end of An Inspector Calls: all seems to be back to normal after the shocking revelations elicited by the Inspector’s visit, but then the mysterious Inspector is at the door – again …

I Have Been Here Before brings together individuals in a Yorkshire pub – they have certainly been there before, but this time one of the characters makes an Ouspenskian choice, freeing them from the cycle of repeated lives.

In Time and the Conways, a happy family reunion in 1919 in the First Act is followed by the same characters, disillusioned, in Priestley’s present.  In the Third Act we are back to 1919, but it is made poignant by our foreknowledge of what lies ahead.

Johnson over Jordan uses the idea of the “bardo” state from Tibetan beliefs.  An Everyman character has to confront and review his life in a strange limbo immediately after his death.  The scene at the Inn at the End of the World uses the Time 2 idea to moving and comforting effect: Johnson “touchingly re-encounters those forgotten or unrecognised aspects of his existence that had warmed and illuminated it”: his childhood books, photographs, pictures, the characters he knew and admired, the people he has loved …

At the end, Johnson steps into the unknown that so intrigued Priestley:

“JOHNSON, wearing his bowler hat and carrying his bag, slowly turns and walks towards that blue space and the shining constellations, and the curtain comes down and the play is done”.

Note on sources: Inn scene quotation from Paul Taylor in the Oberon edition of Johnson over Jordan.  Priestley quotations from Over the Long High Wall and Rain upon Godshill.  The other essential Priestley work on time and dreams is Man and Time, which discusses the Monitor postbag.  Series 17 of the J.B. Priestley Archive contains many of the letters sent to Priestley as a result of this appeal.

PS I put this Object out in this particular week because there are two exciting happenings around Priestley’s speculative fiction.  Find out more on the main Special Collections blog site.

While we’re away …

We’re taking a little break, to edit broken links in our older stories, do some technical tweaks and research the final twenty.  Back in March!

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in J.B. Priestley, the J.B. Priestley Society has plenty to offer you!

The Society’s spring event explores the relatively unknown links between Priestley and another great British author.  Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess liked J.B. Priestley’s Image Men so much he read it ten times!   Dr Andrew Biswall, Director of the Burgess Foundation, explains, at this free event in Manchester on 16 March.  Full details on the Society website or see our Facebook event.

75. “Let us also have fountains – more and more fountains …”: J.B. Priestley’s One Hundred and Fourteen Delights

J.B. Priestley’s Delight (1949) is one of his best-loved and best known books.  A quirky selection box of 114 mini essays, each offering a glimpse of an everyday moment which delighted him.  Altogether they also give a sense of Priestley’s personality, family life, his boyhood in Bradford, and life in the late 1940s.

Front cover of Delight by J.B. Priestley, 1973 Heinemann re-issue

The joy of this book is that there are Delights to appeal to everyone.  My own favourites are A walking tour, about the joy of a spring morning in the Dales just after Priestley left the army, Gin and tonic, 1940, which gives a lovely sense of a moment of peace in the pub during the madness of the Blitz, Lawn tennis, and The sound of a football.

Some are famous, such as Fountains, in which Priestley calls for towns and cities to be filled with “fountains – more and more fountains – higher and higher fountains – like wine, like blue and green fire” instead of the “many idiotic things we are given and do not want”.

Some are funny, such as Quietly malicious chairmanship.  Priestley must have sat through many excruciatingly dull meetings to give this insight into how a chairman can ruin an event by pre-empting the speaker’s main point in his introduction, whispering, passing notes, doodling, and taking a cigarette lighter to pieces.

Accustomed as he was to public speaking … J.B. Priestley addressing an audience, late 1940s, occasion & photographer unknown. Ref: PRI 21/9/24

Some show Priestley’s delight in things one might expect him to like, such as tobacco (Trying new blends, Smoking in hot bath).  Others give new insights into unexpected experiences,  such as the refreshment of Mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels, after traipsing round cathedrals etc and drinking too much wine.

The essays often explore the compensations of adulthood: being allowed to wear Long trousers, and No school report, and of age, such as Not going to social events if you don’t want to – he came to realise he wasn’t missing much, and not to care if he did.

Spine of copy of US edition of Delight (Harper & Brothers, 1949). Book was specially bound for JB and later inscribed by him to Jacquetta Hawkes in 1978 describing it as the most attractive book in his collection

The book has added resonance because it goes against Priestley’s own apparent nature and public image.   As he said in his Preface, or “Grumbler’s Apology”, “I have always been a grumbler”, stemming in part from his Yorkshire background where “to a good West Riding type there is something shameful about praise, that soft Southern trick.  But faultfinding and blame are constant and hearty”.

Naturally, as  a journalist, Priestley often felt compelled to highlight negative things in his essays and broadcasts, speaking for those who could not.  Which might lead readers to complain, as he suggested, “Does this chap never enjoy anything?”.  But of course he did – and Delight beautifully illustrates his talent for evoking positive emotions, especially little bits of happiness, wonder and cosiness in everyday life.

Want to experience Delight for yourself?  It’s in print (60th anniversary edition), plentiful and cheap on the second-hand market, and widely available in public libraries.  If you read it, do let us know your favourite Delight, and if there are modern works (blogs perhaps) which do something similar.

73. My Life on the Variety Stage: J.B. Priestley’s Lost Empires

The novel Lost Empires (1965) is J.B. Priestley’s late masterpiece.  Like so many of his finest works, it is set in the long-lost Bradford of his teens, a vivid world of larger-than-life characters, proud provincial cultures – and music-hall.

Priestley loved music-hall.  It was part of what he called his “broad-brow” appreciation of any cultural experience that was life-affirming, from classical music to football.  However, as with his other explorations of pre-war Bradford, he could see the dark side of what might otherwise be cosy nostalgia.

Priestley’s naive young hero, aspiring artist Richard Herncastle, joins his uncle Nick Ollanton’s astonishing Indian Magician illusionist act.  Richard finds romance and glamour, but also betrayal and unhappiness, though, in keeping with the picaresque comic English tradition which strongly influenced Priestley’s novels, he eventually gains wisdom and love with the right woman.

Lost Empires front cover, Popular Library 1965.  The “major motion picture” did not happen though readers may remember the 1986 Granada TV series, starring Colin Firth as Richard.

Lost Empires shares with The Good Companions Priestley’s relish for describing the day to day experiences of travelling artists.  It is a less sunny reading experience however, partly because 1960s freedoms enabled Priestley to write more candidly about relationships, but above all because of the reader’s sense of the shadow of the Great War.

Priestley had recently, almost fifty years on, written directly for the first time about his painful Great War experiences, in Margin Released.   He now addressed and re-used this in fiction.  When the War breaks out, Nick decides to take the magic act to the United States; Richard tells Uncle Nick that he won’t come along:  like Priestley himself, he has joined the Army.  Uncle Nick’s bitter response feels like the older, wiser Priestley directly addressing his younger self, who could not possibly know what he was blithely walking into.  Nick has visited Germany, has seen their military might, and he understands that,

“The war isn’t going to last months, it’s going to last years and years – and every year it’ll get worse.  You’re asking to be put into a bloody mincing machine … We’re in for the biggest bloody massacre of all time.  And you can’t even wait for them to fetch you”.

But just so we aren’t too tempted to see Richard and young Jack Priestley as one, Priestley used a literary device to distance himself from this character who shared so much of his own story: framing the book with a prologue and epilogue in which he as JBP the well-known writer prepares Herncastle’s recorded stories for publication as this book …

70. “City offices, crowded buses, tubes, cheap tea-shops, little pubs in decaying old City streets”: J.B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement.

Angel Pavement (1930) was J.B. Priestley’s follow-up to the huge success of The Good Companions.   His improved finances freed him to write another large, broad novel.  However, while the latter is picaresque, light-hearted, escapist, Angel Pavement shows Priestley using his characteristic humour, sympathy, vivid characters and strong set-pieces to create a novel much darker in tone and which fixes (traps!) his characters in one place: London.

Bookshop window display for Angel Pavement, D. Wilson, Kirkgate, Bradford (archive ref PRI 21/4/37)

J.B. Priestley is often thought of as a novelist of Bradford.  As we’ve seen, he wrote incredibly well about his home city.  But London was also Priestley’s home for many years and he wrote just as well about its scenes and people.  He moved there during the early 1920s to make his career as a writer; his most famous home was no. 3 The Grove, Highgate, where Coleridge lived; even after he no longer lived in London, he kept his Albany flat there.  Priestley wrote about the City of London  in Angel Pavement, because it had haunted him for years, although naturally the novel follows its characters across the whole of London.

Angel Pavement also illustrates Priestley’s understanding of and skill in depicting the world of work and people in groups.   He was drawing on experience: he had worked in a wool office as a teenager, spent five years in the Army during the war, and, even when he took up the solitary work of a writer, was active in theatrical productions and all kinds of committees and campaigns.   Many of his novels in particular focus on a workplace or collaborative project: Bright Day (film-making), Lost Empires (music hall), Festival at Farbridge (the Festival of Britain), The Image Men (universities and advertising), Let the People Sing (saving a Market Hall) …  Angel Pavement also reflects his growing concern about society, as he shows how difficult life was becoming for poorer people and small firms in the Slump.  Unlike those in The Good Companions, for his Angel Pavement people, there was “no easy fairy-tale escape.  They are the victims of circumstance – and the cruel financial chaos of our time is part of that circumstance”.

Angel Pavement popular edition cover

Priestley brought all these ingredients together to tell the story of a struggling small firm who make “inlays and veneers for the furniture trade”: Twigg and Dersingham, on the first floor of no. 8 Angel Pavement.   A mysterious rather piratical stranger, Mr Golspie, virtually takes over the firm, bringing it to ruin and leading its staff into personal disasters.   Despite this grim plot, there are many delights along the way.  The novel is both a wonderful picture of everyday life in London in the 1930s and a very strong story with resonance today.  For many readers it ranks with Bright Day as Priestley’s greatest novel.   The Priestley Special Collection of books  includes fifteen different editions, evidence of the title’s continuing popularity, and it has just been re-printed by Great Northern.

Sources: quotations from Angel Pavement or Priestley’s introduction to the 1937 Everyman edition.  I am also indebted to the works of Michael Nelson and Holger Klein.

63. “Now, Herbert Soppitt!”: J.B. Priestley’s “When we are Married”

When We Are Married / J.B. Priestley (Heinemann, 1938)

When we are Married (1938) is probably Priestley’s best loved play, his comic masterpiece.   It is set in the world of Priestley’s youth, the West Riding before the First World War, the setting that evoked his best writing, such as Bright Day (Object 53). Like the novel, WWAM brings to life a world of solid comfort and eccentric, larger than life characters, respectable but set in their ways, self-satisfied, possibly selfish and narrowminded.  An Inspector Calls (Object 19) uses tragedy and mystery to shatter the illusions of such characters and make Priestley’s point about the need for society to care for all.  WWAM also creates and then breaks apart that world, but for comic effect.

Three very respectable married couples, the Helliwells, Soppitts and Parkers, married on the same day by the same parson, are celebrating their joint Silver Wedding anniversaries.  Confronting Gerald Forbes, the young “la-di-dah” “Southerner” chapel organist about his “goings-on”, the men learn from him  that the parson was not authorised … their marriages were not in fact legal … There follows tightly constructed farce full of embarrassments and plain speaking: Herbert Soppitt confronts his bossy wife Clara; Annie Parker reveals to her pompous husband Albert that he is dull, dreary and stingy and that she’s had enough!

Slip announcing J.B. Priestley’s stand-in role in When We Are Married (archive ref PRI 9/1/13)

The J.B. Priestley Archive tells the story of this play and its many productions.  This slip is fascinating:  Priestley himself acted in the first London production of the play (St. Martin’s Theatre, produced by Basil Dean). To save the show, which had just opened, he stood in as the comic drunken photographer Ormonroyd when the actor Frank Pettingell was injured in a motor accident.  Priestley wrote in the memoir Margin Released that he knew his lines and “duly got my laughs” but didn’t find the experience rewarding.

61. J.B. at the JBPL: The Opening of the J.B. Priestley Library, 18 October 1975

On 18 October 1975, J.B. Priestley opened the Library that bears his name at the University of Bradford.  We know a great deal about the opening ceremony thanks to files in the University Archive and this week’s Object, an album of photographs taken on the day and presented to Priestley as a memento.   This later returned to the University as part of Priestley’s Archive.

Proceedings began the night before with a small dinner party in “one of the private dining rooms” in the main building.  The menu survives: Florida Cocktail or Spring Vegetable Soup, then sole, lamb, and Cherry Cheese Cake.  Harold Wilson, the University’s first Chancellor and Prime Minister at the time, wrote to Vice-Chancellor Ted Edwards that “the warmth of the occasion surpassed even the high quality of the cuisine”.

Priestley and Harold Wilson looking at book by shelves in new J.B. Priestley Library

On the day, the Chancellor and Priestley spoke, Priestley unveiled a plaque, then the party toured the new building and had a buffet lunch before the University car whizzed the Priestleys back to their home in Stratford.  The event was planned to the last detail, including the whereabouts of umbrellas and keeping the lift free for Priestley to use (he was then over eighty).

Harold Wilson and J.B. Priestley, with pipes

The new Library building (which was supplemented by an extension in the 1990s) was five levels high, one floor occupied by the Computer Centre.   The publicity campaign emphasised what was described as a “whole phalanx of mechanical and electronic aids to ease the paths of users” of both services.  The rapid expansion of the University from the Bradford Institute of Technology had put considerable pressure on library services.  The new building transformed what was possible for staff and students.   From the 1959 situation of two rooms crammed with 9,000 out of date books (which could not be browsed) staffed by two assistants, 1975 offered students over 200,000 volumes, 53 professional and support staff and a pioneering system of subject librarians offering specialist help.

Brochure for J.B. Priestley Library and Computer Centre 1975

This year the GLEE building project is transforming the upper floors of the Library.  J.B.’s album (along with our other archives) records these areas as they were imagined at the time, as impressive modern facilities which aimed to provide the best possible environment and services for students: we hope to do the same today with the new facilities.

58. A New and Vital Democracy: J.B. Priestley’s Out of the People

In Out of the People (Collins, 1941), J.B. Priestley set out his views on British society and post-war reconstruction.   It is one of his most eloquent and powerful books.

Priestley called for a “new and vital democracy”, an end to the waste and unfairness of social inequalities, which he had pointed out in English Journey.  He argued that society was already changing for the better: the upheaval of war was shattering old systems and bringing people together to work for a common goal.  The war offered an opportunity to build on these changes rather than going back to old, failed systems as had happened after the First World War.

Priestley had already spoken about these issues in his Postscript broadcasts, but Out of the People gave him the opportunity to explain his ideas, unconstrained by time or the restrictions of wartime broadcasting.

Out of the People was intended to be the first in a series, Vigilant Books, in which eminent writers would explore the issues of post-war reconstruction.  However, paper shortages meant the series was not continued.  Copies of the book offer a physical sense of the privations and atmosphere of the period: the classic 1940s style of the dustjacket and the thin wartime paper with its characteristic grainy quality and poor take-up of ink.

The book also illustrates how Priestley was becoming active in political groups.  Early in 1941 he became chairman of the 1941 Committee, a group of writers who called for a declaration of national objectives after the war.   The Committee suggested the Vigilant Books series to Collins, who keenly took up the idea and commissioned Priestley to write the first.

J.B. Priestley reading, circa 1941, photographer unknown (archive ref PRI 21/8/2)

Later the Committee merged with Forward March, led by Richard Acland, to form Common Wealth.  Common Wealth stood for “common ownership, vital democracy, equal opportunity, colonial freedom and world unity” and was willing to field candidates in by-elections, breaking the Labour-Conservative wartime truce: three were eventually elected.  Priestley briefly chaired Common Wealth, but withdrew because of political disagreements with Acland.

Common Wealth performed poorly in the 1945 election: most members defected to Labour although the group remained active until 1993.  Priestley himself stood in that momentous election, as an Independent candidate in Cambridge, where he came third to a Conservative candidate.

While Priestley’s political activities with Common Wealth and as a parliamentary candidate were unsuccessful, Out of the People and his other writings and broadcasts helped create an atmosphere favourable to the 1945 Labour victory and the creation of the welfare state (although this was much more state-led and top-down than Priestley’s vision).

P.S. Common Wealth’s Archive is held by University of Sussex Special Collections.  I am indebted to their site and to Vincent Brome’s biography of Priestley for much of the above.