History as a means of telling a story can be a difficult task. William Shakespeare would often twist history in a way that would suit the drama best, in more recent years The Crown came under intense scrutiny for its inability to stick close to the truth of the events it was portraying. This is perhaps partly understandable. History can often be dramatic, exciting and engaging, ripe for transformation into drama, yet it can also be taxing, laborious and often devoid of any dramatic impetus.
So to read a novel that manages to be both historically accurate and entertaining is always a joy and this can certainly be said of Bill Broady’s novel The Night Soil Men. Chronicling the journey from the formation of the Independent Labour Party at that first Bradford Conference in January 1893 to the commemoration of Snowden’s memorial cairn in 1937, the novel charts the lives of the founders of the Labour Party from their relative youth into old age and the death of their particular brand of socialism. Broady’s artful talent lies in his ability to be both factual and dramatic, to tell the story in such a way that it is both compelling and educational. Clearly an immense amount of research went into this book – from the cold streets of Bradford, festooned with the masses who took part in the Manningham Mill Strikes to the halls of the early ILP meetings there is a palpable sense of real history in every single page.
Figures leap out at the reader from every turn, vividly realized by Broady. Bernard Shaw is a “tall red bearded Irishman in an obscenely tight russet brown suit of scratchy looking wool”, Keir Hardie a man who “it seemed had arisen from his death bed to utter some terribly final prophecy” wearing a “rough tweed jacket and dogstooth check knickerbockers”. These descriptions help to turn figures from history into characters we can engage with, they come alive before our eyes, not dull figures fixed to a textbook but players in an unfolding drama.
Broady’s flitting perspectives also help to create a fully immersive story. Whilst several different characters at one time or another take up the mantle of our point of view in the story, the novel is cemented by the perspectives and lives of three – Fred Jowett, Philip Snowden and Victor Grayson. Broady’s selection of these individuals is artful because they perfectly complement one another. Jowett is to all intents and purposes the main character of the novel – we begin with his striding into the Bradford Conference with Jim Sharp, a socialist colleague who soon deserts the cause for America, and the novel ends with Jowett at Ickornshaw at the ceremony to unveil Snowden’s memorial.
Snowden and Grayson, who also heavily take up our perspectives in the book, are in many ways the exaggerated opposites of Jowett’s personality, giving Jowett a more grounded perspective. Snowden is much more serious than Jowett, a man who when we first meet him has already had the accident that would prove to mark his life. Broady sensitively deals with Snowden’s disability and the sorrow his mother Martha felt at the twin tragedies of her husband’s sudden death and her son’s return home, unable to use his legs.
Snowden’s seriousness and his unrelenting determination are much starker than Jowett’s in the same way that Victor Grayson’s freewheeling, debonair and ultimately reckless approach to life is more cavalier than Jowett’s. Broady’s intersecting of the perspectives and lives of Jowett, Snowden and Grayson allows for a truer picture of the Labour Party to emerge than had he simply focussed on one individual. It is easy to think of the early Labour Party as solely one of trade unionists coming together to form a political body, whereas the truth is much more complicated. Figures like the aristocratic H M Hyndman, Edward Aveling portrayed as Marx’s overly nervous son in law and many others, demonstrate the mix of ideas, beliefs and ultimately bright and interesting people that were integral to the formation of Labour, all of which Broady injects with the appropriate amount of colour and historical accuracy.
It is perhaps best to think of the plot as less like Fame is the Spur – there is no Hammer Shawcross here who denies his beliefs for power – but something more similar to Our Friends in the North. We jump through time as the chapters of the novel progress, sometimes following events in a much more direct manner and in other parts jumping, for example, from the 1931 split to after Snowden’s death in 1937. This gives the book a deeper emotional resonance than if we have simply followed events year on year all of the time; we see the political storms Jowett and the others undergo and how the intervening years have affected him, how Grayson for example turns from imaginative idealist into something of an outcast, broken by his seeming political and personal failures. Broady’s skill as an author means that, like with Our Friends in the North, the jumps in time feel totally understandable – we are simply seeing important windows into the lives of our characters and can imagine how those years have taken a toll on them.
The Night Soil Men is a fascinating novel that readily engages both with the historical context in which it is set and also the need to tell an entertaining narrative. Broady walks the tightrope between introducing historical facts and allowing the emotions of the characters to come to the forefront and guide the reader’s journey through this important moment in British history. It is a novel that is easy to fall fully into and immerse yourself in the world of Jowett, Snowden and Grayson and will certainly leave any reader with a greater appreciation of both the struggles and achievements of those early Labour pioneers.