How Southampton featured in JB Priestley's English Journey

John Boynton Priestley, or J.B. Priestley, was a Yorkshireman, born in Bradford, but merits his inclusion as a Hampshire Great because of one chapter of one book, but one lauded as the finest book ever written about this country and its people.

A novelist, playwright and critic, Priestley was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and first came to prominence with his novel, The Good Companions (1929), as Hampshire Life tells.

If you’re of a younger disposition you may have studied his play, An Inspector Calls (1945), as part of your English Lit. It’s English Journey (1934) that I’m interested in though, especially as Chapter One is entitled, To Southampton. Priestley’s romp around England was perhaps made easier because he was between marriages.

He’d first wed Pat Tempest, that coupling lasting only a few years (1921-25), and wouldn’t tie the knot again until 1953 when he joined forces with Jacquetta Hawkes, a noted writer and archaeologist, a marriage that lasted to his end of days.

Whilst he was journeying England he may have had the odd dalliance; although once described as having a ‘potato face’ he was also quite a ladies’ man.

The author arrived in Southampton by motor coach, confessing it was the first he’d been on. He’d travelled light with the ‘minimum of clothes’ which allowed room for life’s necessities; a portable typewriter, notebooks, erasers, paper fasteners, pencils (well, he was a writer).

On the coach he strikes up conversation with another Southampton-bound traveller, or rather it was the other person striking up most of the chat; it’s the sort of thing we did before smartphones.

At some point they depart Surrey (he mentions Camberley) and enter Hampshire, our county greeted with discourse about its ‘pleasant empty countryside’ with its ‘timeless quality’ (would he say the same today?) Priestley’s new friend decided to break his journey in Winchester.

The scribe sounded relieved, and I think I would have been too. Priestley manages a window view of Winchester, ‘busy and bright and more new than old’, before the coach continues and is soon back in the country, ‘so empty and lovely’, the road straightening ‘inexorably for Southampton’.

Southampton's Grade I listed Bargate which Priestley described the traffic swirling about which wouldn't be possible today following pedestrianisation. (Image: Stephen Roberts)

Priestly admits he has visited Southampton many times but always either ‘to or from a ship’. He trots out his former dismissal of the place, somewhere he didn’t regard as ‘a real town’, but just the flotsam and jetsam of the docks, an entrepôt, a place for entry and exit.

It must seem like that for today’s cruise passengers; the first place on one’s itinerary but probably not one you’d think of exploring. He mentions the new graving dock, ‘the largest … in the world, big enough for the monsters that have as yet only been planned and not built’.

Priestley’s coach picks its way down London Road, past Southampton Common, between West Park and East Park, and when it’s reached the Palace Theatre the transition from countryside to town is complete.

He mentions ‘a memorial to the lost engineers of the Titanic’, the disaster having occurred just over 20 years before.

Having attained Above Bar Street, Priestley launches into expressive mode as he describes how ‘the traffic swirls about the Bargate itself’, which he laments is ‘very old but has so many newly painted armorial decorations that it looks as gaudy as the proscenium of a toy theatre’.

After proceeding ‘through or round Bargate’ we are ‘in High Street’ but Priestley cautions us as ‘another quarter of a mile or so’ and according to his prose we could either be on a boat or in the drink.

This ‘main artery’, this ‘long street’, this ‘mile of shops’, Priestley likens to something connecting the New Forest with the ‘great liners.’ He drinks in a wine bar (there’s lots of choice), then lunches in another establishment.

He eavesdrops conversations and hears mention of Hitler who’d recently come to power in Germany. It’s an unwelcome bit of historical context.

The West Gate through which troops headed for Crecy and Agincourt. (Image: Stephen Roberts)

Priestley embraces the nautical air, noting shops catering for the ocean wave where you can ‘buy a flag or two, charts, ropes and all the yachtsman’s paraphernalia’ but also interrupts his ribaldry for the old town wall and the memorial to the Pilgrim Fathers who he relates sailed off from here in a ship the size of a cocktail bar on a modern liner.

The West Gate comes next with Priestley puffing out his chest to recall troops marching through here for embarkation and victory at Crécy and Agincourt. He’d found historical Southampton but had it almost to himself.

At the Town Quay he gazed on the liners, a mass of funnels, yet beauteous things, ‘genuine creations of man the artist’. Priestley connects the ships with the place, concluding ‘nor would the High Street look so prosperous’ if the latter didn’t have the former for company.

But Priestley is nothing except observant and he sees that the prosperity lobbed ashore by mankind’s floating palaces was not evenly spread as he noted the city had ‘some very poor quarters’ and even ‘squalid little side-streets’ although he acknowledged they didn’t compare to the slums of the larger industrial towns and cities, particularly those of the Midlands and North which he’d visit later.

He feels instead, ‘it is impossible to live a completely colourless existence on the edge of such blue water’ and perhaps he’s right. Revisiting the High Street, Priestley back-treads on his prosperous soundings from earlier as he bemoans the number of cheap shops and tack from abroad; was he writing ninety years ago?

Priestley was travelling and writing when the Great Depression was still making itself felt so perhaps it was unsurprising ‘business was not as good as it was supposed to be’ and that people ‘cannot spend as they once could’. It sounds like today’s cost of living crisis and assuredly was.

Southampton's old town walls which Priestley noted in almost the same breath as the Pilgrim Fathers' memorial. (Image: Getty)

Priestley concludes though by saying Southampton is ‘not a bad town’, a ‘town that had not let the universal depression master it’ and that it was in fact ‘a lovely bay window upon the wide world’ although the town worthy of those majestic liners was yet to come.

In Chapter Two, Priestley spreads his wings and heads for Bristol and Swindon and places north.

He’d achieve far more including writing the first televised play, When We Are Married, shown on TV in 1938, and becoming a founder member of CND. J.B. Priestley died on August 14, 1984, aged 89.

CHRONOLOGY

1894 – John Boynton Priestley born in Manningham, Bradford (September 13).

1921 – Priestley’s first marriage to Pat Tempest (until 1925).

1929 – Publication of Priestley's novel, The Good Companions, establishes him as a writer.

1934 – Publication of J.B. Priestley’s seminal English Journey.

1938 – The first televised play, When We Are Married, is shown; it was written by Priestley.

1945 – An Inspector Calls, Priestley’s play for the ages, is published.

1953 – Priestley marries for a second time to archaeologist/writer Jacquetta Hawkes.

1984 – Death of J.B. Priestley in Alveston, nr. Stratford-upon-Avon (August 14), aged 89.