Frank Tilsley

Frank Tilsley (5 May 1904 – 1957) was a British novelist, broadcaster, and television dramatist. Tilsley became a full-time author after the publication of his first novel, Plebeian's Progress (1933), and subsequently published over twenty novels, including She Was There Too (1938), Pleasure Beach (1944), Champion Road (1948), Heaven and Herbert Common (1953), and Brother Nap (1954).[1] His novel Mutiny (1958) was adapted for film and released as H.M.S. Defiant, starring Alec Guinness and Dirk Bogarde, in 1962.[2] Tilsley was also a frequent radio broadcaster and writer of popular television shows including The Makepeace Story.[3][4]

Rendering Accounts - The Writings of Frank Tilsley (The London Magazine, May 1997) [5]

During the less than quarter century of literary activity before his premature death Frank Tilsley had come to enjoy much popularity as a novelist as well as being well known as a broadcaster on various BBC programmes including The Critics. In a writing career begun by that disturbing story of the rise and fall of an accountant’s clerk, The Plebeian’s Progress (1933), and ended by a novel exploring the background to the British naval rebellion of the 1790s, Mutiny (1957), Tilsley published twenty-seven novels, two of which, Little Man, This Now and The Land is Bright, coming out pseudonymously, the former appearing under his real name some years after he died. Tilsley also published perhaps one of the most honest autobiographical documents of the 1930s, We Live and Learn. But by 1957 he had become worried about his future, about his health, and, above all, become prey to that abiding fear of all serious authors - that his writing was drying up entirely. He was dissatisfied with his latest novel, Mutiny, which he was working on till the day he died, and would not let his publisher see it. In the spring of 1957, Frank Tilsley committed suicide. He was just fifty-two years old.

The Times obituary of Tilsley saw as his strength as a novelist ‘The lively fidelity with which the author caught the everyday life of ordinary men and women . . . his characterisation was always strong and his detail vivid and abundantly true’. Over the years his books had earned him plenty of critical praise. Nearly twenty years before The Times’s obituary The Times Literary Supplement had acclaimed Tilsley for ‘a punch unequalled by almost any other writer on this side of the Atlantic’. V. S. Pritchett, writing in the New Statesman, called him ‘obviously an outstanding writer’ and numbered among Tilsley’s other notable admirers had been H. G. Wells, Cyril Connolly and J. B. Priestley. But the tragedy of Tilsley’s untimely end has been compounded by the subsequent neglect of his work. All of his books are now out of print, and it is increasingly difficult to find on the shelves of public libraries such masterpieces as Little Tin God, that perceptive study of a small man turning to Nazism. Tilsley was able to draw on a wide variety of experience to enable him to catch ‘the everyday life of ordinary men and women’. At various times he worked as an accountant, a club secretary, ran a cake and pastry shop and a seaside boarding house, was a teacher and a ledger clerk, never finding he could settle into any of them. But it was all to be set to some profitable and successful purpose when he turned to the job of being a novelist.

Frank Tilsley was born in Levenshulme, Manchester, the last of five children of a tailor. He attended a Manchester council school and thereafter spent some years as an accountant’s clerk or ‘incorporated accountant’. His intellectual development in these early years would be illuminatingly described in his book We Live and Learn (1939), which relates his shifts of political allegiance in his early working years; in so doing he displays the honesty never to fall into the common trap of travestying views he has since renounced. From being a Conservative in his teens, he moved through The Liberal Party to arrive eventually at a very English form of socialism which would bear its most eloquent expression in his political testament First Things First (1938). He was a critic of authoritarianism, rejecting communism as ‘socialism minus the democratic sanction’. In the late 1930s, as a member of The Labour Party, he would be an advocate of the Popular Front policy against fascism, which was at variance with the official party line.

Tilsley’s experiences as an accountant’s clerk played a major part in turning him to socialism. In the job of auditing he gained insight into the way firms operated. Management corruption and petty fiddling seemed a routine part of business practice. Tilsley also came to resent the injustice that boys with only an elementary school education like himself were heavily handicapped in getting into full chartered accountancy. After he married Tilsley left clerking to set up his own business which shortly failed. For about four years he worked as the secretary of The Salon Club, an arts club in Oxford Street, Manchester, arranging exhibitions, but then the place was closed down and the bailiffs were called in. In his spare time he had been working on his first novel, The Plebeian’s Progress, which was accepted and published by Gollancz in 1933. It was hailed by some critics as the All Quiet on the Western Front of the Depression and compared to Hans Fallada’s Little Man What Now? which, appearing earlier in the same year, traced the decline into poverty of a some-time clerk and shop-assistant.

The central figure of The Plebeian’s Progress, Allen Barclay, is a clerk for a firm of accountants. Secure in his job, Barclay marries and moves to a nice bungalow in a commuter village. But the Depression bites, he loses his job and moves down the social scale to a cheaper house. He tries jobs such as door-to-door salesman and shoe-cleaning, and a spell on the dole before getting a job as an accountant at a small restaurant. Tempted by the opportunities the job affords, and feeling he has the right to emulate his employers corrupt practices in his own minor way, Barclay is driven to a petty theft which he fully intends to repay but is caught out before he is able to and loses his job. The novel charts Barclay’s rapid decline as, unable to find employment, he murders his wife, attempts suicide and is finally hanged. In his death cell, facing what he sees as his day of atonement, Allen reflects: “It wasn’t fair, either. They decided you were not fit to live and then, for the first time, your life became important, they watched you, guarded you, made a fuss about you. Allen with a life to live was an unimportant nonentity; nobody’s business. But Allen with a life to lose was a very different proposition.” There is the final inspired sardonic touch with the report of Barclay’s execution featuring in the newspaper on the same page as a leading British statesman claims the country is recovering from the slump: “The unprecedented sacrifices we had all so nobly borne (people had even paid their income tax more or less promptly) had placed us on the high road to prosperity. We had set an example to every country in the world, and could look forward to the future with the uttermost confidence . . .” Tragedy is not normally associated with such figures as Barclay in 1930s literature, but the widespread impact of the Depression period had numerous casualties among the white collar workers also, and it was to Tilsley’s credit that he was prepared to reach out beyond the stereotypes of tragedy to overlooked characters like Barclay, with an effect which is achieved with great restraint. The Plebeian’s Progress was an impressive literary debut.

Tilsley had to wait till 1936 for his next book to be published. His second attempted novel, a rather long-winded work exposing the machinations of the monetary system, was rejected by Gollancz. Now in financial straits, Tilsley and his wife Clarice opened a shop which sold home-made pies and cakes. He found himself, as he put it, ‘rolling pastry when he should have been at his typewriter". This project lasted six months before he moved on to trying the boarding house trade in Blackpool. Then he went to London as a teacher at a private school which, as his luck would have it, soon closed down. There followed a period as a ledger clerk with a firm of motor engineers. Adding to his by now rich store of work experience, he became an accountant at a big London public company running a multiple shop chain. This job once again collapsed and he was out of work for five weeks, which proved itself a blessing because during this time the compulsion to write returned and the result was a new novel entitled I’d Do It Again, which Secker & Warburg brought out in 1936. It was immediately hailed by H. G. Wells as ‘fresh, sympathetic, real, vivid and beautifully told. I should put it equal with the best American story-telling and that is high praise’. Cyril Connolly called I’d Do It Again a ‘tour-de-force’, ‘a phenomenon . . . an attempt to apply the talkie-novel to the English scene . . . an attempt to write about England as if it were America’. It is a book written with pace and simplicity, in the first person, and in a rough staccato style which reminded critics of Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Like The Plebeian’s Progress, I’d Do It Again features an accounts clerk who sees through his firm’s swindling rackets, the misleading adverts, the mistreatment of both clients and employees, and is thereby lured into criminality himself. But, by contrast with Allen Barclay of The The Plebeian’s Progress, for the unnamed narrator of Tilsley’s second published novel his luck holds good when he fiddles his employers. He is being paid £3 a week for a £5 a week job at a mail order office and, prompted by his love of his beautiful wife who wants that bit more from life, he decides to systematically extract the £2 a week he feels is his due. As he achieves what he wants, his relationship with his wife improves ‘greatly and he cuts a stronger and more confident figure from the experience. The suspense of this book is heightened as it seems the protagonist’s high-risk activities are bound to be uncovered and he’ll go the way of the luckless Barclay. But he survives auditors and succeeds in using the tricks of accountancy to his own ends and even gets promotion within the company. ‘Honesty isn’t a virtue. It’s a luxury", he comments. He has no regrets. The title of the book echoes the narrator’s sentiments: ‘I don’t call what I’d done foolish. I’d do it again’.

In a way The Plebeian’s Progress and I'd Do It Again, coming three years apart, complement one another - both protagonists are clerks who turn crooked when inspired by the evident crookedness pervading the business that employs them. One clerk goes down to oblivion on the end of a rope, the other climbs up the ladder of success in his small world. In both the work of accountancy gives insights into the corruption Tilsley sees as being at the heart of society, which might turn out either way for the individual who chooses to follow its selfish logic, though neither The Plebeian’s Progress nor I'd Do It Again present this dilemma in a narrowly political manner. The central character of the latter novel seems to have more than a little in common with the sort of ‘anti-hero’ of 1950s working-class writing, the cynical, anarchistical rebel, out for number one.

The success of I'd Do It Again was followed by the publication of a version of the novel of Tilsley’s which had been rejected by Gollancz, this time completely re-written, under the title of Devil Take The Hindmost, about two boys armed with a sort of autocratic Socialist conviction who determine to conquer the world together but who in life enjoy contrasting fortunes and end as sworn enemies. The dealings of Bartoft, whose ruthless love of power leads him to the domination of the life of a small town in Lancashire, are often subtly drawn. Again fraudulent accounting and the workings of finance capital are exposed at some length, though more laboriously and with less effectiveness here, and the book certainly lacks the suspense-filled qualities of I'd Do It Again.

By this time Tilsley found he could earn a living as a writer, and other novels followed in quick succession, I'd Hate To Be Dead and She Was There Too (1938). Whereas the central figure of I'd Do It Again begins by trying to be fair and decent before succumbing to the temptations of embezzlement, the narrator of I'd Hate To Be Dead is hard-bitten from the start, an unpleasant, indomitable self-made man, who makes and loses fortunes in a colourful, brutal life. The book is slightly marred by the unlikeliness of an ending in which a daughter of his unfaithful wife (whose death he had deliberately hastened) finally salvages his fortunes and saves him from jail in spite of having had her life made a misery by him.

This period, the late 1930s, saw the rise of fascism throughout Europe; a challenge Tilsley did not shirk in his writing. His treatment of the subject must be considered one of his great achievements, illustrated by his novel Little Tin God (1939). Carl Cramm, who, despite his German surname, is seven-eighths English, is, when the novel begins, a bank clerk of socialist persuasion. Overlooked for promotion in favour of a Jew, his creeping anti-semitism and resentment against the financial system he feels he's slave to combines with a mounting frustration with life, encouraged by Higson, an active Nazi at his workplace. Cramm’s university-educated wife Jean’s feelings are particularly powerfully rendered as the strain on their relationship develops. Carl, resentful, among other things, at Jean’s superior education, becomes increasingly bullying and brutal in his attitude to her. The domestic sexual politics of fascism are illuminatingly explored in Little Tin God, with the tyranny of Carl towards his wife and young son which parallels the rise of Hitler and the growth of Carl’s sympathy with the dictator. Higson’s insidious influence increases and Cramm accompanies him to political meetings, and by the time he visits a relative in Germany he is ready to be a dedicated apostle of Nazism.

There is much that rings true in Tilsley’s representation of the appeal of fascist ideals to the small, insignificant man who is full of feelings of inadequacy about his lot in life. Brian Howard in the New Statesman wrote of Little Tin God, ‘The book . . . contains the best sketch of an English totalitarian propagandist I have read’. Effectively communicated too is Tilsley’s critical view of the pacifist position, in the shape of Cramm’s wife, whose reaction to Cramm’s domestic violence is submissiveness. She ceases to be a strong independent woman: “We pacifists have to plumb human experience to the depths”, she reflects, “Degradation is perhaps the price we have to pay for trying to do things in a new way, for trying to do things by persuasion and example, instead of by force and law”. As war looms Cramm loses his job for assaulting a Jew at work, is recruited as a Nazi spy and his wife realises he cannot be transformed by good will, that he needs to be stood up to. But the conflict within herself about how to react to Carl’s thuggishness ends the novel on a note of uncertainty; the times too are uncertain, with the war i about to break out, forcing the issue. Little Tin God is a remarkable achievement both in its treatment of the development of the Nazi mentality in a small man, and in how that mentality translates itself into domestic brutalism.

Little Man, This Now (1940), with its deliberately ironic echo of Hans Fallada’s earlier novel in its title, was originally published by Tilsley under the pseudonym ‘X.Y.Z.’ It deals with a rent collector in Germany called Walter who, like Cramm, has an Anglo-German connection. Walter’s father, a socialist, had spent eight formative years in England, the legacy of which has had some impact on Walter’s attitudes. Again in Little Man, This Now one is struck by the refusal of the author to caricature what he disapproves of in depicting the articulacy of Walter’s thought after he loses his job, struggling between defiance of and advancement within the Nazi Party. Joining the Nazis and given a position of authority, Walter ceases to feel depressed and aimless, and experiences a real feeling of pride in his uniform, but continues to wrestle with his better nature, embodied in his secret guardianship of Anna, a girl survivor of a concentration camp. Walter’s son too becomes transformed into a Nazi and his spying on his own family causes problems, exacerbating Walter’s inner conflicts as well as threatening his position within the Nazi Party. But Walter becomes reinforced in his belief in Nazism by the success of Hitler’s aggressive moves abroad, beginning in the Rhineland. Tellingly, Tilsley depicts the gullibility of groups of British tourists in Nazi Germany with their gushing, infectious enthusiasm for the regime’s formalised obedience and responsibility when shown what the authorities want them to see. A part of Walter which is still receptive to his father’s opinions is bitterly disappointed by these visitors. Walter’s ‘core of uneasiness’ about National Socialism is stilled by such experiences and by the success of Hitler’s aggression. But war comes and the old doubts resurface.

Little Man, This Now, like Little Tin God, gives some genuine insight into just what Nazi ideology drew its strength from at grass roots level. Tilsley is convincing dealing with the little man caught up in great events and on the options he takes up which challenge or diminish his responsibility still further. In both books the use of central characters who hold some special connection with their country’s enemies helps focus their inner struggles and allows for dramatic comparisons to be made between the respective nations.

During the Second World War, Tilsley became a Squadron Leader working on the coastal patrol defending convoys, an experience which resulted in his only book of short stories, The Boys of Coastal. The documentary sense of this book is strengthened by British official photographs of coastal patrols with quotes from the stories accompanying them. In these stories the otherwise small, perhaps inconsequential figure who in civvy street might find his life wasted in a job he is unfitted for, and whose ability goes unused, is often transformed by war into someone of consequence. The author is aware of human potential, is aware also that there are no simple heroes, that contradictions are always at work, but typically the pressures of war provide unlikely revelations of character.

The war was remarkably productive for Tilsley. He published eight books, if of an uneven quality, which is understandable given the circumstances. These included one written right at the end of the war The Land Is Bright, appearing under a pseudonym, Francis Heaton-Chapel, alluding to a place in Manchester with some family associations. The Land Is Bright is about an RAF bomber team in which the pilot, Rogers, falls sick every time he encounters enemy searchlights, so the flight engineer has to stand in for him. The team stick by the pilot in spite of his incompetence for the task. The loyalties of the disparate characters in the team are such that they take the secret of the pilot’s weakness with them to their eventual doom on a bombing trip over Germany in which the regular flight engineer is replaced by an engineer who can't fly a plane. The Land Is Bright is a tensely told and often moving account of RAF life culminating in a heroic disaster which makes few concessions to propaganda or sentimentality.

One theme in Tilsley’s work in the 1940s is of the little man and woman rising above socially prescribed limitations by conscious effort if not monetary necessity. Lady in a Fur Coat (1941) has two people from quite different backgrounds thrown together by having been snowed-in at a railway station, both of whom are apparently failing in life. Tom has just broken from working on a farm with his crooked brother, and Greta, real name Elsie, is an actress in a struggling show called ‘Welcome Nineteen Forty’, aware she is being used and facing the sack as a dancer. The contrast between the two characters is great, but they show the capacity to endure and find much common cause in being temporarily brought together in extreme circumstances. Rather as the war was just then itself bringing widely differing people together in the desperate extremities of national survival.

There are the accountants and property speculators featuring still in Tilsley’s work, like those the eponymous Peggy works for in Peggy Windsor and the American Soldier. Above all there is the character who sometimes transforms a defeated life into a victorious one, or in defeat shows up the nature of an acquisitive, grasping society (though this is never realised in a crudely propagandistic way), like the central figure in What's In It For Walter? (1942). Walter Leonards plays the piano in a Butlin’s style holiday camp band and finds himself without any proper preparation for the massive test of endurance he is suddenly faced with pursuing a hundred-hour marathon of continuous playing. He is being manipulated and flattered by corrupt interests in the camp, and all manner of intrigues ensue as Walter presses on to the impossible, to that point on his horizon where, as he puts it, “There'll be nobody to laugh at me, to think me a washout”. He just fails to reach his objective, but what he does achieve is to again demonstrate the capability of the seemingly ordinary individual, whose achievements and worth go beyond money and are not to be measured by it either.

The pressures placed on people to achieve within the culture and the effects of this on those who, not because of lack of ability but because of their background and circumstances, are unable to achieve, a theme in What's In It For Walter?, is further developed after the war in Icedrome (1949). A young girl skater, Jean Mason, whose life centres on a local skating rink, a place of fantasy which fosters the illusion of being a world all of its own, finds that the realities of being handicapped by her humble circumstances continually break through. Living with her mother Dora, a struggling single parent who is forced to make all sorts of sacrifices to further her daughter’s development, Jean is prevented from making the most of what ability she has when in competition with those who can afford expensive tuition and facilities.

Both the world of the ice-rink in Icedrome and that of the holiday camp in What's In It For Walter?, are places where jealousies and injustices are rife, with only the illusion of classlessness promoted to conceal this. The sites of popular culture as well as those of the work-place Tilsley sees as full of snares for individuals who are disadvantaged and pressed into performing often in someone else’s interests, victims of the belief that all have a ‘fair chance’.

In Tilsley’s post-war work he was given to some repetition of material. For instance in Champion Road (1948) and Heaven and Herbert Common (1953), which, though well-observed and. done with much narrative skill, strike one now as rather over-long sagas after the rags-to-riches self-made working-class man formula originally typified in his own work back in 1938 in I'd Hate To Be Dead. But Champion Road in particular proved a great popular success at the time and was dramatised for BBC television.

Of more interest are the two volumes Voice of the Crowd (1954) and its sequel, Brother Nap, which appeared in the same year. These books follow the history of two brothers, Nap and Ted Ellis, as seen through the narrative perspective of the latter. Tilsley traces their early lives, their various conflicts and relationships, their rise to prominence in the Labour Party and their work as Labour MP’S deeply involved in the major issues of their time. We see Nap and Ted move up through the Labour Party machine and rub shoulders with both fictional and real-life politicians of the pre-war and post-war world. In Voice of the Crowd, for instance, there is a vivid picture of the Labour Party Conference which sees the downfall of Lansbury on the politics of appeasement and the Popular Front, and Ted’s battles with Nap have some parallels here, with Ted feeling much as Lansbury felt in being defeated on the Popular Front issue. Nap is a large belligerent Bevin-like figure, with greater ambition and ruthlessness than his more generous brother. Contributing to his political failure Ted has a wife quite unsuitable for a Labour MP, and he betrays her with an affair. Again well and faithfully dramatised is the working-class women’s perspective. In this case Annie Ellis, Ted’s, wife, who is shy, nervous and out of sympathy with the Labour Party.

In Brother Nap Ted finds his ideals collide with the realities of his position in the post-war world. His frustrations mount as, after returning from war duty, he fails to get his home back from the unprepossessing people he rented it to, and also suffers embarrassments with the tax authorities. Ted senses he is losing his vocation as he finds the ideals of the Welfare State foundering, as he sees it, on the greed, laziness and limitations of the people involved. He loses his seat and faces bankruptcy. But as his determinedly ruthless, opinionated brother goes on from strength to strength in pursuit of his commitment to what he sees as the Labour cause he is convinced he himself embodies, Ted chooses the quiet path, returning to the pit where he began his working life, believing he can make a modest contribution to bettering the lot of his fellow workers. The message of disillusion is not hard to discern in these books, and the author is courageously critical of some received party political wisdom of those post-war years.

Thicker Than Water (1955), though set in the English Midlands, seems likely was in part inspired by the Clapham Common murder of 1953, the emblematic motiveless Teddy Boy crime of the early 1950s, which was also to inspire Julian Symons’s Progress of a Crime (1960) and Tony Parker’s later documentary book The Plough Boy (1965). Tilsley’s talent for creating suspense, an outstanding feature in I'd Do It Again, is evident here also. It is a study of pressures on a whole family resulting from the condemning to death of the youngest son, Sid Greensmith, for running over a man in the commission of a car theft by a gang. The family is caught up in the tragedy with the doubts crowding in, as is the public, while the hopes for Sid’s life are continually raised only to be dashed. Here, as with Tilsley’s first novel, and as it would be with his last, the book ends with an execution. In the lead up to it, it is a woman’s strength which comes shining through the horror of the situation, in the shape of Sid’s sister, Joan Greensmith, who has the crucial role of holding the family together. She is one of a long line of strong women in Tilsley’s fiction, such as the put-upon daughter Joan in I'd Hate To Be Dead, Dora, the self-sacrificing single parent in Icedrome, Sally Butterworth, who ekes out a living in a sea-side show in Pleasure Beach, or Grace Gregson, who runs the shabby south London cafe in The Jungle of Your Heart. His sympathetic insights here may be the result of his early experiences of sturdy, self-reliant Lancashire working-class women.

With The Makepeace Story, written in collaboration with his son Vincent, Frank Tilsley helped pioneer in the 1950s the television family saga of generations (his son, incidentally, went on to be a successful TV writer and editor for the next twenty years, contributing over 100 scripts for such series as The Forsyte Saga, Dr. Finlay’s Casebook, Z-Cars, The Guardians and The Prisoner). This work, shown on BBC TV in 1955, was novelised as Seth Makepeace a year later. It was to be Frank Tilsley’s penultimate novel, and shared something in common with his final book, Mutiny. Seth Makepeace and Mutiny are both historical novels informed by the purpose of excavating the origins of class conflict, if from different sides, exploring the mentalities involved and the implications which may be drawn from this. In Seth Makepeace Frank Tilsley and son go back to the 1770s to examine the birth of the factory system and its distinctively aggressive capitalist view of the world.

The book focuses on an enterprising young cottage weaver, Seth, who founds the pioneering industrial mill and prospers after having stolen the secret of the revolutionary spinning mule from Samuel Crompton. Seth makes the potent argument for the beginnings of the factory system, and in the cause of his notion of progress gains further social acceptance with an advantageous marriage to the moneyed local squire’s daughter. Convincingly portrayed are Seth’s entrepreneurial frustrations, his self-justification for his behaviour towards others, his hypocrisy and contradictions of character. Tilsley’s ability to empathise with those he cannot morally agree with is apparent once more. As in Voice of the Crowd and Brother Nap, fact and fiction are mixed so it is not easy to know where one ends and the other begins, as real historical figures like Crompton interact with fictitious ones like Seth. A strong woman is important here also, in this case the wife of Seth, who functions as the voice of conscience, for instance, on the matter of child labour.

In Mutiny, the book he was working on on the day he died, Tilsley explores what he thinks of as the first modern strike by workers, the beginnings of modern unionism. It has as its background the Nore and Spithead mutinies of the 1790s. As Vincent Tilsley put it in his foreword to the book, what fascinated Frank Tilsley was that in planning and conduct the events constituted ‘the first really successful “strike”, in its modern sense, in history. It is the first example of labour ‘organising itself on a considerable scale to light for, and obtain, improved conditions’, a ‘controlled explosion which set the pattern of industrial warfare until the present day’. In the novel we get the conflicts of power between the authoritarian dictator’s personality of Scott-Padget and the more liberal humanitarian authority of Captain Crawford, and an investigation of the dilemmas of compromise, almost of appeasement, between the two views of exercising authority which in some respects recall the exploration of power relationships in Little Tin God. The suspense building up to the mutinies delineates in a telling way the motivation of the mutineers and their fate, in particular Vizard, the strong but ill-starred radical.

As well as that ‘lively fidelity with which the author caught the everyday life of ordinary men and women’ The Times obituary referred to, Tilsley was not afraid to tackle the large issues of the period he lived through, and latterly explored historical themes bearing upon important contemporary concerns of social morality and power. When mapping twentieth century working-class writing Frank Tilsley must be reckoned a significant figure, whose work suggests some interesting continuity in bridging the 1930s and the 1950s; his career of course almost straddling these decades. This continuity is indicated stylistically and in terms of his approach to dealing with people’s experiences in their everyday working lives. That public libraries have sold off, or are busy selling off, Tilsley’s books from stock in a sorry short-sighted policy based on current ‘popularity’, and that his twenty-seven novels are all now out of print, must be a source of more than idle regret.