Jack Common

Common's writing was warm, ironic and quirky. He soon won admirers throughout the 1930s as a writer with a genuine proletarian viewpoint, as distinct from the purveyors of middle-class Marxist fiction. He was invited in 1930 by John Middleton Murry, founder and editor The Adelphi, who had noticed an essay he had written, to become circulation promoter and later assistant editor of the magazine. For a period in 1936 he was acting editor, and a collection of his articles The Freedom of the Streets appeared in 1938. V.S. Pritchett considered the book to have been the most influential in his life, and George Orwell heard in the essays 'the authentic voice of the ordinary working man, the man who might infuse a new decency into the control of affairs if only he could get there, but who in practice never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail.'[2] E. M. Forster also praised Common as a "warm-hearted, matey writer."[3]

Common's writings about the day-to-day realities of workers lives include descriptions of how work was performed and production organized, and how knowledge was transmitted from worker to worker. Common's writing also reflects on the separation between the ideas of middle-class intellectuals and the ideas of workers. In his usual warm tone, he wrote "Very likely we will have to await the arrival of the intellectuals-in-touch, the unemployed man at present reading in public libraries, the young stoker spending the mornings of his back-shift week ploughing through Shaw and Lawrence, fumbling his way through acceptances and rejections towards a cultural consciousness which squares with this communal experience."[4]

He inspired, prefaced and edited the compilation Seven Shifts (1938), in which seven working men told of their experience. Common and Orwell became friends,[5] corresponding and occasionally meeting when Common was running the village shop in Datchworth, Hertfordshire, about ten miles from Orwell's Wallington cottage. The impractical Orwell asked Common's advice on setting up his own shop. After the war he was engaged in writing film scripts including Good Neighbours (1946), about a community scheme in a Scottish town; he also travelled to Newfoundland and Labrador on another film assignment.

In 1951 Turnstile Press published Common's best-known book, the autobiographical Kiddar's Luck, in which he vividly describes his childhood on the streets of Edwardian Tyneside, as seen through the lens of his adult socialism. There are four chapters on his life before five years old – a feat of detailed memory – while his mother's alcoholism and the overbearing father whom Jack at length dramatically defies, form the dark background to the vigorous, at times bravura, narrative. The book found praise as a slice of Geordie naturalism, a convincing depiction of 'the other England' which so beguiled the imagination of contemporary intellectuals. On the other hand, its irony and subtly bitter universality went largely unrecognised.

In The Ampersand (1954) Common took the story further, but his publishers went into liquidation two years later.[6] Neither book had been a commercial success and Common had not completed the trilogy with his long-promised Riches and Rare, a novel set in Newcastle at the time of the General Strike. Too early (or too old) to be an angry young man of the 1950s, Common was unable to sustain a career in writing. His political attitudes were by now out of fashion, and when he sent the manuscript of In Whitest Britain (1961) to his friend Eric Warman in London, Warman replied in a letter of 7 June 1961 that he was sorry 'such a bloody good writer' could not achieve success. There was too much 'class distinction' in the book, and the downtrodden, golden-hearted workman was a dated 'leading cliché'. Thus Jack Common, perhaps the finest chronicler of the English working class to follow Robert Tressell, spent his last years in Newport Pagnell writing film treatments at poor rates.

Sculptor Laurence Bradshaw used Common's brow as a model for his bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, saying that he found there a similar patience and understanding.

The folk singer/songwriter Jez Lowe has an album entitled Jack Common's Anthem, containing a song of the same name.

In 2009, North-East poet and scholar Keith Armstrong published Common Words and the Wandering Star, about Jack Common and his work. He has drawn extensively on the archive.

North East folk band, Kiddars Luck, formed by John Dixon, Colin McLelland and Alan Beadle have a track on their album, Where the Red Kites Fly, called "Jack The Lad" dedicated to Jack Common.

For a selection of articles by Jack Common, further biography and a photograph: Jack Common - selected articles