ENGLISH SOCIAL CONDITIONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 509, 25 March 1949, Page 10

ENGLISH SOCIAL CONDITIONS

MARGARET McMILLAN: A Memoir. By D’Arcy Cresswell. Hutchinson and Co., London.

Reviewed by

Ormond

Wilson

ECAUSE this is the first work of D’Arcy Cresswell’s to be published since Present Without Leave in 1939, I had looked forward to it with some excitement. I was in no way, however, prepared for what I found. A memoir of Margaret McMillan, socialist and welfare worker, commissioned by the Margaret McMillan Memorial Fund, hardly seemed to offer much scope. And indeed, Margaret McMillan, as a person, emerges only indistinctly in this memoir, except in the passages quoted from her own vivid writings. The book is primarily about the world she lived in; and that is where its interest lies. The approach is significantly different from that of Mr..Cresswell’s earlier dis‘sections of New Zealand life and _attitudes. Then his vision was the vision of a poet, and if he wrote "prose" it was in the manner and with the polish of a poet. In this work there are (for admirers of those earlier writings) exquisite passages of poetic insight, which brilliantly illuminate his argument, but its primary quality is its angry and biting attack on English social conditions.

Perhaps the clue to it is to be found in the note at the beginning of Present Without Leave: Here in England one finds again the same two million unemployed, the same rent strikes. in Stepney, the same puppet Government and facade of good works, the same buffer Departments between rich and poor, the same charming sympathetic people who want nothing changed, the same polish and cleverness and fun on the face of things, the same fake poets, kind critics and funkhole publicists. . . . In the ten years since that was written those first, and perhaps superficial, observations have taken precise shape, and we have here an analysis as keen and,’ if you like, as one-sided, as anything written by the nineteenth century reformers, Take this: But the great landlords had the most urgent reasons for opposing reform, and by far the most power and influence in effecting their purpose. For in addition to the industrialists and shareholders by whom the poor were defrauded of their just wages, there was, and’ still is, a more weird and awful kind of extortionists who (in its fearfullest examples, though there were many less dreadful) owned vast areas of the very land whereon the working poor were crowded, which these owners never came near, but by néeans of agents they collected, bit by bit, and from doorstep to doorstep, along miles of reeking: alleys and through oceans of unspeakable destitution, the immense fortunes which by this means they enjoyeda wealth which lost all taint of vulgarity, and acquired the most inscrutable of alibis, on being delivered at the mansions and ballrooms and racing_stables where it was spent. It was something new in human history, that usury on such a scale, and with such consequences in human misery, should be practised by gentlemen, who may even, in most instances, be allowed to save good men, On account of ‘their invincible illucianc

For they were possessed (and are still possessed) by the illusion that their great wealth and grandeur, so indispensable to themselves, was also indispensable to the Nation. These gentlemen took their pretensions from an earlier century and their Payrolls from this, and nothing more drastic need be asked of them, to restore them to sanity, than to reverse this extravagant misconception, and equate their pay-rolls to an earlier century and their pretensions to this. In another passage he remarks that "the ignorance of Englishmen about living conditions and statistics in their own country amazes the inquisitive and adventurous visitor from the Dominions." It is from the standpoint of an inquisitive visitor that the book is written. Here is a work of someone who still belongs, if not typically to New Zealand, at least distinctively outside England; and, because it is from a New Zealand background that he writes, we can claim this as a New Zealand book. Some listeners may still remember the fascinating series of broadcasts, given about 1938, in which D’Arcy Cresswell juxtaposed readings from the classics with appropriate and contrasting music. In a manner reminiscent of this technique, the memoir is illustrated by a series of most happily selected photographs which, in the same way as the book itself, give us vividly the setting against which Margaret McMillan lived and worked.