George Meek: Bath chair-man, by Himself must be one of the earliest working-class autobiographies to be issued by a major publisher. It came out from Constable in 1910, with an introduction by H.G Wells which assured it a wide readership in Britain and north America.
Being a bath chair man was, by Meek's account, one of the most miserable jobs around:
If you would know the horror of black despair, go out with a bath chair day after day, with the chair-owner or landlord worrying you for rent, food needed at home, and get nothing. Stare till your eyes ache; pray with aching heart to a God whom you ultimately curse for his deafness. And this not for a few weeks, but year after year.
He made much the same point in his poem, Song of the Chair-Men, which begins
We do not live, we only starve and linger;
We do not hope, we only drift along;
We have no faith, the years have made us faith-less
and ends
Oh! Land of England! is there none to help us?
Is life just this and presently the grave?
In seaside resorts like Eastbourne, where Meek lived, and spa towns such as Bath, desperate men like him would hire a bath chair and take it out around town, touting for business. Their clients were mostly invalids, convalescents or elderly people - or simply ladies of good breeding - who were either too weak or too rich to take themselves shopping, visiting or sightseeing. The chair man would push or pull the wheeled chair wherever its passenger wanted to go.
It was nothing like steady work, of course: a cold or rainy day, or a day on which the chair owners had hired out too many vehicles, could see a chair man going home with no earnings at all. But the rent on the chair still had to be paid. Meek was jailed for debt at one point, which was quite a welcome interlude since it meant being fed every day.
George was born poor on June 1st 1868, and died poor fifty-three years later. His life was one of those "Dickensian" stories which prove that Dickens was no exaggerator. Along with poverty, and parents who emigrated without him when he was a toddler, Meek suffered physical infirmities including very poor eyesight - despite a "fearfully painful" eye operation when he was eleven, conducted without anaesthetic.
Like most children of his class and era he received only a brief schooling, working full-time from the age of twelve, but he seems to have been a keen reader and writer from early on. An unhappy home life and difficulty holding down a job meant that it wasn't long before he went on the tramp for the first time. These wanderings, partly prompted by a restless belief that something better was out there somewhere if only he could find it, both reflected and shaped his character.
In adult life he became heavily involved in the socialist movement - not just in his home-town but throughout the south-east. In fact, during those pioneering times of the 1890s and 1900s, he appears to have been one of the most active and significant organisers in the whole region.
Finding himself temporarily unemployed in the early summer of 1907, Meek set off on an extended tour of south-east England, much of it on foot, in pursuit of his ambition to unite all the various socialist groups of the region into a federation. Staying with comrades along the way, he travelled from Eastbourne to Hastings, then on to Ashford, Folkestone, Sandgate, Dover, Sheerness, Gillingham, Gravesend, Dartford, Erith, London, Penge, Bromley, Sidcup, Sevenoaks, Tunbridge Wells, Brighton - and back home.
Sandgate was the home of the socialist science fiction author, H.G. Wells, who, if he was surprised when George Meek knocked on his door to say hello, hid it well and invited his visitor to lunch. They had corresponded previously, both being involved in the area's labour movement, but this was the first time they met.
Meek's literary ambitions at that time included a treatise on ethics, but - to posterity's great relief - Wells persuaded him that he had an opportunity to write something unique. He was a working man with a talent for writing and a socialist understanding of how the world worked. An account of his own life, in his own words, would provide an unprecedented inside view of how the poor lived.
Contemporary reviews of the resulting book make interesting reading. A newspaper in Windsor thought that "as a cultured casual labourer, Mr. Meek certainly stands alone. Living in a modern atmosphere permeated by Socialism, he has made no fetish of self-help, but has preferred to live what he calls the 'Come day, go day, God send Sunday' life."
The Ladies Field - which covered the pastimes and fashions of its leisured readers - found Meek's work valuable because it revealed "that small purpose and energy and self-respect which investigation has so often found to be the real, the determining cause of the existence of the submerged tenth. Mr. Meek's fellow workers looked from help for without, but never from within."
That's a useful reminder of something we must never lose sight of for a moment: that, then as now, the well-to-do believed poverty to be voluntary.
The autobiography is remarkably frank. Too frank, perhaps; George comes across as having plenty of ego, a good deal of self-pity, and not a few prejudices. Some passages might make 21st century readers uncomfortable. But it's a book (easily found second-hand, and its text available online) which really shouldn't be as obscure as it is today. Not only was it a remarkable achievement on its own, and a rare direct source of social history, but it's also the monument to a rebel born with all the bad luck in the world who still managed to give an unshaking two-fingered salute to a rotten system.
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Sources:
George Meek Bath Chair-man by George Meek (Constable, 1910)
George Meek by Bill Coxall & Clive Griggs (New Millennium, 1996)
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/lhr.58.1.37?download=true
Ladies Field May 14 1910
Bexhill-on-Sea Observer March 12 1921
Windsor and Eton Express May 14 1910
https://nynne.org/exhibits/george-meeks-grandfather.pdf
https://peopleseastbourne.com/2024/08/23/radical-history-tour/