Z-Arts in Hulme has an interactive exhibition, called Fairytales. It’s a world of play and storytelling for little ones and their grownups. Dates throughout the week, but typically open from 10am. Book here . I knew other readers had tried to piece together the remainder of Hilton’s story before, and that my own search would be only the most recent attempt over several decades. Registries had been scoured, family trees traced — articles were even run in the Oldham Chronicle and Evening News (most recently in 2014), hoping to “hear from anyone with information about Hilton.” Despite the obvious recognition of marriage’s disabilities, the bally thing took place. With it came, not the entrancing mysteries of the bedroom, nor the passionate soul-stirring of two sugar-candied Darby and Joans, but the practised resolve that, come what may, be the furnishers’ dues met or no, the rent paid or spent, we – the wife and I – would commemorate our marriage by having, every Sunday morn, ham and eggs, So it was we got one over on the poet, with his madness of love, the little dove birds, etc. Over three hundred years of civilised evolution, and still the workhouse for the native, and the spike for the rover, the propertyless are still with us, they are multiplied over a hundred times…You get there about 5.30 and find others there like yourself, waiting aimlessly and fatigued, spread along the road, making a picture of untidiness to the eye of the aesthetic. Slowly a distant thin chained army is streaming in dribbles to the bottom of this road, the prelude, the wait, for the opening of the spike. This is the autobiography of an unemployed Lancashire working-man now aged thirty-five. In portraying his own life and his reflections upon it he has described a case which is more broadly typical than those who only know the unemployed as statistics will easily realise. Mr. Hilton, of course, is exceptional in that he has broken through the formidable barriers between experience and the recording of that experience on paper (and they are formidable indeed to those whose schooldays end at fourteen). But all over Great Britain, in the devastated industrial regions, there are men of the same brave and generous temper, who express it in the like rich and vigorous speech. Men who know that it is Man's mismanagement and not Nature's law that has thrust the role of Caliban upon them. They are disillusioned, but seldom cynical, industry cannot use them. But society needs them. And they know - better than most - what the real needs of Society are. They are worth listening to.

‘Humorous courage’ and ‘fearful realism’ – George Orwell on

As ever, we have a great list of things to do this week including a twilight art class, a visit to a ‘bee corner’ in Salford, and readings and music at Chetham’s Library about a radical reformer. OT Creative Space in Old Trafford has a ‘Twilight Art Class’. It’s a 6-week art course, and no experience is needed. You’ll learn how to create art with charcoal, pastels, and watercolours. Starts 6.15pm. Info here . It seemed there was little hope – Hilton was married twice but had no children and his closest relative moved to Australia and had long since died. Hilton did eventually come home to Rochdale, and was able to find steady but varied work — until the Great Depression hit. One of millions forced onto the dole, he used the time to read and some of his mates did the same. This small band of semi-illiterate twenty-somethings came together to read about the world, about the crisis, about the official reasons for their hunger, about the cobbled-together solutions of the day’s top politician. Hilton read Marx, he read Shakespeare. They all did. It’s hard to imagine a private school which could have imparted a better knowledge of the classics than that which this bunch of working men in Rochdale gave themselves, while on the dole, in these bleak years.

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Respected poet and academic Dr Ian Patterson, of Queens’ College, Cambridge, said: “Hilton was a terrific, provocative, phenomenally surprising writer – a true iconoclast. Hilton died modestly and unacclaimed, and for 80 years his novels have been virtually impossible to get hold of after they went out of print, the ownership of the publishing rights unknown. Doherty had always been out of place. His columns for The Star were not his first choice of written medium: he'd produced three excellent novels in the Fifties, despite the arduous demands of his then- day job — down the mines. He'd worked in pits since he was seventeen, and was always deeply proud of this first calling, especially as the pivot to journalism relegated him to an office of “fokkin' graduates.” While he respected and could get on with many of his colleagues at The Star , the middle-class trimmings of the average journalist grated on the rough and ready Len. Band on the Wall welcomes Hempress Sativa, a reggae star who is on a tour of the UK. Expect reggae, hip-hop and afrobeat vibes. Starts 7.30pm. Book here. From a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war, Caliban Shrieks’ narrator takes readers on a lyrical tour of life as a young man born into the first days of the 20th century.

Vintage set to republish Caliban Shrieks after bartender’s

Hilton was proud to be a plasterer. Part of the magic of Caliban Shrieks is the novel’s interrogation of the status games compelling so many into decades of drudgery, in the mills, trenches, factories. He never wanted to rise above his class, “the lower working-class type,” into mortgaged respectability: "Whenever I’m with the intellectuals I always feel they do not belong to my world,” he wrote, continuing, “...with all their theories and mentalised life they have had very little experience of living…they’ve been too sheltered, and too looked up to." If the price for becoming a professional writer was his position within the working-class — the aspect of his life he believed enabled him to write with such critical directness about what he saw — then he would choose plastering, and proudly so. Doherty’s literary past had slammed shut not long after the publication of his masterpiece third and final novel, The Good Lion . Finished in 1958, the novel opens in the late Forties. Its three-year narrative maps the same period in Len's own life, beginning with his arrival by train in Sheffield, all alone, a lad of seventeen.

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This witty and unusual book may be described as an autobiography without narrative. Mr Hilton lets us know, briefly and in passing, that he is a cotton operative who has been in and out of work for years past, that he served in France during the latter part of the war, and that he has also been on the road, been in prison, etc etc; but he wastes little time in explanations and none in description. In effect his book is a series of comments on life as it appears when one’s income is two pounds a week or less. Here, for instance, is Mr Hilton’s account of his own marriage: Throughout Caliban Shrieks he subjects the unearned privileges of the wealthy to prosecutorial diatribes, knowingly delivered in the metre of a Shakespearean Sonnet. These polemics gradually build in strength and sophistication through the novel, with the final chapter as just one long toast-like oration against the class system — modelled on the kinds of speeches he would give as an organiser of the unemployed, the speeches that would eventually put him in chains. How Green was the Psychedelic Revolution? Acid King Richard Kemp breaks his 45-year silence January 6, 2023

(DOC) ‘The ugly duckling that is a ‘literary’ curiosity

At the weekend, we published an insightful essay by Mollie about the sacrifices that football demands of young women in Manchester. Mollie spoke to young women who had been considered exciting footballing stars as teenagers, only to drop out of the game prematurely, including Liv, who played for Manchester City Juniors: Chippy Tuesday at Levenshulme veggie and vegan bistro The Gherkin gives you a free chip butty with every drink. Don’t miss out. Info here . And the fallout from the local elections continues with news in The Star that local Labour councillors fear being purged after Labour HQ took control of selections for 10 key positions. Jobs members are being required to reply for include council leader, deputy leader, chief whip, group chair, secretary and treasurer, as well as committee chairmanships held by Labour members. Some councillors plan to protest by not applying or resigning, they say.This weekend marks the start of Music in the Round’s annual Sheffield Chamber Music Festival . Featuring performances from some of the world's best musicians, including Sheffield's brilliant Ensemble 360, the festival takes place in the incomparable setting of the Crucible Playhouse where the audience surrounds the performers on all sides. The programme begins with a launch event on Friday, 12 May and ends on Saturday, 20 May.

Caliban shrieks by Hilton, Jack | Open Library Caliban shrieks by Hilton, Jack | Open Library

Before his death, Hilton used to come round to Mary and Brian’s for tea several times a week, eating with them and their two boys. None of the family had known that he’d ever been a writer, nor did they ever hear much about his tumultuous early life. Sources have told the Times that Manchester could completely run out of Monkeypox vaccinations next week. Andy Burnham has written to the health secretary to complain that vaccinations have become concentrated in the capital despite a growing rate of infection in Manchester. He said: "As things stand, we are not expecting to receive enough doses to enable us to vaccinate the 3,500 high-risk individuals we have already identified. Currently, Monkeypox seems to be unevenly affecting gay and bisexual men — almost all the cases in the UK are in young males, with 73% of infections concentrated in London. Burnham has said Manchester will need an "urgent uplift in vaccine supply" before Manchester Pride on August 26.Half-time system, how many bow legs have you made? little puny legs shuffling along up hill at early morn, then bearing a doffing box plus a tired body. No wonder the comedians of the day made the Lancashire lad a skit; still it was a tragic one. What a price to pay for prestige; cotton the world and ruin the child! Cities of the Dreadful Future: The Legacy of Psychogeography, Urbanism and the Dérive in London and Paris January 9, 2023