Bart Kennedy: Hater of Slavery, Tramp and Professor of Walking

Abstract

Bart Kennedy thrived in the 1900s when his name became a byword for the literature of “trampdom.” He also produced a piece of radical working class writing, Slavery: Pictures from the Depths (1905), that should have earned him a place in the annals of proletarian literature. But he does not figure in any survey of the field. As one of the submerged, Kennedy knew what life was like in overcrowded unsanitary habitations, tramp wards, workhouses or sweatshops. This article profiles Kennedy, concentrating on the works that still hold an interest for present day readers: Slavery, read against the foil of a later Lancashire classic, Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole (1933); the two road books A Man Adrift (1899) and A Sailor Tramp (1902); and the late Golden Green (1926), a paean to the English countryside.

BART KENNEDY (1861–1930) belongs to the foot soldiers in the army of largely forgotten writers. He thrived in the 1900s when his name became a byword for the literature of “trampdom”¹ on account of a stream of books published almost annually on the subject. They are based on his travels in North America and parts of Western Europe. But Kennedy’s fame was soon eclipsed by the rise of a new star, W. H. Davies, whose The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) was promoted by G. B. Shaw, who was also responsible for the “Super” in the title. Whereas Davies’s work was reprinted many times over the last century (with three further editions in the 1920s alone), none of Kennedy’s books enjoyed such success, and when some were reissued recently they came not from trade publishers.²

Kennedy also produced a piece of radical working-class writing, Slavery (1905), that should have earned him a place in the annals of proletarian literature. But he does not figure in any survey of the field. Nor has he fared much better in studies of turn-of-the-century British literature, though there is at least a brief entry in The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction.³ However, “fiction” does not seem quite the right tag for a prose in which autobiography and travelogue, fact and fiction are often rolled into one, with a dose of polemic thrown in for good measure.

Such a generic mix should not have excluded Kennedy from critical discussion; for as Peter Keating has pointed out, the 1900s were rife with works in which “the methods and concerns of journalism, empirical sociology and fiction intermingled [so that] it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between them.”⁴ The social explorers of the day used narrative techniques in bringing their findings to the attention of the public, while major writers such as Joyce and Lawrence were not above starting their careers by fictionalizing autobiographical material. Keating mentions the example of Stephen Reynolds, who not only blended fiction and documentary in his A Poor Man’s House (1909), but went on to theorize the outcome by coining the cumbersome term “autobiografiction,”⁵ which unsurprisingly did not catch on. Yet even an authority such as Keating has no place for Kennedy in his several books about late Victorian and Edwardian representations of working-class life.

It is true that Kennedy’s case was anomalous. For one thing, he could not, like other working-class writers such as his contemporary Allen Clarke, with whom he shares his Irish roots and early work as a half-timer in a Lancashire cotton mill, solicit support from labour publications.⁶ By disposition he was too much of an individualist, even individual Anarchist, and always kept his distance from the working-class movement. While he had no faith in democracy and criticized the evils of the present system, he disagreed with the socialists because “they believe in the extension of the principle of authority. They would cure the evils of mankind by giving to the State a power that the State even in its most insane moments has never dreamed of.”⁷ But Kennedy had nothing in common either with the upper- or middle-class documentarists who, in disguise, descended into the darker reaches of the city in order to gather material on the conditions of the poor. As one of the submerged, he knew what life was like in overcrowded unsanitary habitations, tramp wards, workhouses or sweatshops. He was rather intent on climbing out of Manchester’s pit, and did so by signing on as a sailor and trying his luck in various jobs and places in North America, and in the process tramping across that continent. The last thing on his mind at this stage—he was twenty—would have been how to make literary capital out of his exploits. As he later confessed, “I was all but an illiterate man—being hardly able to read and write.” He remained eternally grateful to a companion of the road in the United States, English Billy, a gentleman come down in life, “a piece of human wreckage,” yet still with manners and an awesome knowledge,⁸ who instilled in him a hunger for self-education. What eventually brought Kennedy to the desk after his return to Britain some fifteen years later is unclear—he certainly did not meet his Shaw—but his future wife, the journalist Emma Priestly, may have helped.⁹

The following profile of the author will concentrate on the works that arguably still hold an interest for present-day readers: Slavery, read against the foil of a later Lancashire classic, Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole (1933); the two road books A Man Adrift (1899) and A Sailor Tramp (1902); and the late Golden Green (1926), a paean to the English countryside.

Slavery: Pictures from the Depths, to give its full title, starts with a denunciation of the class divide between rich and poor across the ages and ends with a prophecy of approaching revolution, welcomed for its purifying powers. Within this frame a plotless narrative unfolds based on the author’s memories of childhood and adolescence and suffused with diatribes against the injustices of society. Many characters in the book go unnamed, which underlines the wider importance of the “pictures” drawn from the bottom of British society. Even the central figure, Kennedy’s alter ego, remains simply “the boy” for several chapters.

Yet lack of interest in, or inability at, plot-making is not synonymous with a lack of dramatization, as a workhouse incident demonstrates, in which the famished youngster is reprimanded for trying to snatch a piece of bread lying on the table of the office. The warden’s behaviour so much enrages the mother that she strikes him and lands in prison. Two other emblematic chapters, centrally placed in the book, also illustrate the author’s ability to generate a lively scene. The first depicts a long queue of the hungry unemployed waiting for hours on a dark wintry morning in the freezing cold in the hope of being taken on for clearing the snow, and accompanies some of them through a day’s toil on an empty stomach, in the course of which one man collapses and dies from sheer exhaustion. The second scene, running parallel to the previous one, takes us inside a pawnshop. In it, Jim, whose first name we know by now, does not even appear, though we catch a glimpse of his mother who hopes to pawn her shawl so as to be able to provide her son with a bite for his hard shovelling job.

Slavery is in some respects a precursor of Greenwood’s famous Love on the Dole, a work no less fed by the author’s life and using similar material. Both books depict a slum area of greater Manchester; in fact, the two authors grew up within a few miles of one another. In both cases, the atmosphere is from the first evoked through the sounds coming from the streets into a house on an early morning: the clogs in Slavery, which is set mainly in the 1870s; a ship’s siren and the knocker-up in Love on the Dole,¹⁰ which spans from the First World War to the onset of the Depression. In another parallel, the central figure in each works for a stretch as a half-timer—Jim in a cotton factory, Harry Hardcastle in a pawnshop—before moving on to an engineering plant.

The treatment of the pawnshop offers an interesting point of comparison. Kennedy starts his chapter with a factual explanation of the pawning system, the endless circulation of articles against cash and vice versa in a process that impoverishes the poor ever more while fattening the broker. The narrative then introduces “the young man” who presides over the business like a “magistrate” (in Love on the Dole he actually is a magistrate) and has fun at the expense of his clientele. It is through his eyes and short dialogues that we follow the bargaining in several cases, all of them at once individualized and typical. Every little transaction reveals a tragedy: the middle-aged woman who pays interest just for being allowed to look at a trinket pawned years ago that contains a lock of her long deceased husband’s hair; the young recently married woman who hesitates a long time outside the shop before parting in tears with her wedding ring; Jim’s mother vainly pleading for her shabby shawl to be accepted for pawn. There is also the workingman (there are no male customers in Greenwood’s novel) ready to pawn his tools but resenting the young man’s cheek and departing without a deal.

For Kennedy, the pawnshop is, along with the workhouse, the half-time system, recurrent unemployment and fierce competition for casual jobs, a social evil that breeds and perpetuates deprivation and degradation, and in so doing blights the chances in life of the poor. This is how he ends his chapter:

This pawnshop here in a slum of a great town. It was gloomy and sinister and dark. Just as the town. It came down with a merciless, iron hand upon the miserables of the slum. Just as did the town. It battened upon misery and misfortune and necessity. It was a dark place of the damned. As was the town.… For it grew fat upon hunger and starvation. It stole and thieved from the poorest of the poor. And its theft was sanctioned by the majesty of the law of the nation—the law made by the sleek rich thieves in Westminster.¹¹

Where Kennedy’s straightforward presentation of the pawnshop can be read as a sketch in its own right, Greenwood’s handling of the material seems subordinated to the exigencies of the plot and overlaid by some heavy-handed symbolic meaning. In Love on the Dole the shop is located at a point in a triangle that also includes the church and the pub. As a Justice of the Peace and devout churchgoer, its owner, the appropriately named Mr. Price, represents an unholy trinity of power, religion and commerce, at the receiving end of which are the slum-dwellers. From Harry’s point of view, the pawnshop is first and foremost a prison from which he is desperate to break out. This is how Greenwood’s authorial voice depicts the amorphous “rowdy, pushing, shoving, squeezing crowd of women” entering the place on a Monday morning:

In the staring gas light, the women, throwing back their shawls from their dishevelled hair revealed faces which, though dissimilar in features, had a similarity of expression common, typical, of all the married women around and about; their badge of marriage, as it were. The vivacity of their virgin days was with their virgin days, gone; a married woman could be distinguished from a single by a glance at her facial expression.… Simple natures all, prey to romantic notions whose potent toxin was become part of the fabric of their brains.¹²

Although Greenwood later will also single out some of the customers, the condescension of the authorial voice toward the “unwashed” women does not diminish. And it merges with Harry’s contempt for his pen-pushing job, the filling in of the pawn ticket, which he will soon exchange for an apprenticeship in the engineering works he associates with manhood and good wages. The pawnshop scene, like large portions of the novel, is focalized through him, not through Mr. Price. But, in fact, all three—narrator, Harry, and his boss—embody “the dominant masculine ideology that positions women in the role of submissively servicing men’s needs.” Whether the novel succeeds in challenging this ideology, as one critic has argued,¹³ by showing some of the female customers’ involvement in devious if economically defensible schemes and by devaluing the working-class male following the loss of his breadwinner’s status is a matter of debate. However, beyond this question there can be no doubt about Greenwood’s condemnation of the pawning system, in which he is at one with Kennedy:

Next Friday or Saturday … they would hand over their wages to Mr Price in return for whatever they had pawned today. And next Monday they would pawn again whatever they had pawned today, paying Mr Price interest on interest until they were so deep in the mire of debts that not only did Mr Price own their and their family’s clothes, but, also, the family income as well. They could not have both at the same time.¹⁴

This vicious circle, actually a downward spiral, foreshadows the progress of the novel, which ends as it began, with a policeman on his beat and the knocker-up on his round. Harry’s feeling of imprisonment in the pawnshop is mirrored by a conclusion that portrays the slum in naturalist fashion as a trap from which there is no escape; or if there is, as in the novel’s magic solution, it is portrayed only as an individual rescue operation effected by Harry’s sister, a device that cannot dispel the pervading hopelessness, as Greenwood was only too aware. In contrasting Harry’s good luck with the fate of another unemployed the authorial voice comments: “No influential person to pull strings on his behalf; no wages for him tonight; no planning for the morrow.”¹⁵

Slavery, by contrast, does not end in resignation and apathy, but with a glowing welcome to the revolution as “the prelude to change” that Kennedy, ever prescient, sees on the horizon: “So let us be bold and resolute. Let us fear not. Nay, let us exult and face with bold brows this frightful coming Change.” This upbeat finale picks up where the “Proem” had left us: “Pity the poor. Nay, I ask you who are poor to pity yourselves. Become strong and resolute. None may free slaves but slaves. Become courageous. Remember that the giant who will free you lies sleeping in yourselves. Awake him.”¹⁶

Clearly, such opposed endings have as much to do with the historical moments in which they were conceived as with the different literary methods and political perspectives of the authors. Slavery was written against the background of labour unrest in Belgium, Catalonia and Finland leading up to the rumblings of a volcano in Russia 1905–1906, which showed the country rife with revolution. Love on the Dole was composed under the impact of the slump.

One further instance where the two authors differ is in their attitude to religion. The church’s part in the three-cornered competition for customers and the triple identity of Mr. Price are evidence of Greenwood’s reservations about the subject. Kennedy, when discussing the matter, does not deny that the church has its black sheep but defends religion and uses the opportunity for a blast on

the damnable priests of commerce. These men who in the stock-marts of the world cause thousands upon thousands to suffer hunger and death so that they may amass millions! These cornerers of the food—and the materials for earning the food—of the people! These men who possess the millions that are drenched with the blood of the people!… These men who do murder from afar behind closed doors.¹⁷

As today’s speculation with food on the part of investment banks and hedge funds shows, this broadside has lost nothing of its relevance.

The “pictures from the depths” were indeed an outcry de profundis, but they illustrated more than personal sorrows. The reticence to name the characters helped to generalize the perspective, which was propelled by a burning indignation, a sense of outrage. Slavery was not Kennedy’s last word on the rapacity of the rich and the miseries of the downtrodden. The Hunger Line (1908), a longish pamphlet, is a more systematic attempt to document the social wrongs of Edwardian “England” (he never writes “Britain”). Once again, the author focuses on the bottom of society, starting, predictably, with the unemployed, but by heading the chapter “The Making of Unemployables” he immediately pinpoints the agency responsible for redundancies. He finds the employers “guilty of murder” for having caused starvation.¹⁸ Subsequently, he takes up lesser noted cases such as the “slaves of the kerb” (street vendors as well as “sandwichmen,” that is carriers of placards advertising wares or shops), the “slaves of the shop” (the shopgirls) and other “women-slaves” such as the needlewomen (working ninety-five hours a week for a pittance),¹⁹ or the widows and single mothers. He also speaks on behalf of former soldiers and even puts in a good word for ex-convicts, perhaps because he had met quite a few on the road and had himself served time in a United States jail.²⁰ While he holds “The Ways of the State” (another chapter title) responsible for some of the abuses, his greatest wrath is directed at the captains of industry and the owners of the big department stores: “England must check these rapacious wolves and blood-suckers.” “This is the class that we have to fear,” adding more soberly “Anarchists are nothing”²¹—a revealing aside at a moment when novelists such as Joseph Conrad and Frank Harris were seizing on the anarchist panic.

Kennedy’s denunciatory usage of “slaves” and “slavery,” while appearing loose and indiscriminate from a historian’s perspective, expresses his belief that a life in bondage was a curse that could afflict any human society. Not necessarily defined by a legal contract between master and slave, slavery was rather a state of subjugation marked by oppression, dispossession, exploitation and destitution into which the victims were born or driven by circumstances beyond their control. Nor was it a matter of racism. As he saw it, for the nineteenth-century poor, being nominally free but toiling without proper reward was equivalent to slavery. For the unemployed or underemployed starvation meant unfreedom. For the paupers without shelter, the alternative between sleeping rough and entering the workhouse (in popular parlance “the Bastile”) was a choice between degradation and captivity. Insubordination and escape, individual or collective, from such a condition meant an assertion of human dignity, a victory over self-contempt.

The language of “slaves” and “slavery” has, of course, a long history in British radical and working-class rhetoric and around the turn of the century may already have sounded slightly dated, but Kennedy was not alone in still employing it. Robert Sherard, another Kennedy, albeit one born into an upper-class family (whose name he later dropped), used it for his reportages The White Slaves of England (1897) and The Child-Slaves of Britain (1905), based on undercover social investigations pursued courageously across the British Isles well before Jack London’s ten-week descent into the abyss of the metropolis. We find the vocabulary also in Kennedy’s fellow Lancashire writers Allen Clarke and Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. The latter’s novel This Slavery appeared as late as 1925, although it bears the stamp of the prewar period. Edward Carpenter still speaks of labour as “modified slavery” in a late section (“Empire”) of his Towards Democracy (1902). The continued use of the word was a bitter reminder that a nation that took some pride in its role in the abolition of black slavery with the Emancipation Act (1833) had hidden from public view its own variant of human bondage, as Sherard’s books demonstrated.

Other images from Slavery such as the “thieves” who “steal from the poorest of the poor” become “The Forty Thieves” of Mugsborough in Robert Tressell’s working-class landmark The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), begun in 1906, just after the publication of Kennedy’s work. On the original manuscript Tressell had scribbled “Being the story of twelve months in hell, told by one of the damned,” a turn of phrase that echoes Kennedy’s “dark place of the damned” cited above. His own subtitle, Pictures from the Depths, connects with Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths which had opened in London in 1903. “Depths” in turn is synonymous with the more dramatic “abyss” employed by, among others, H. G. Wells, C. F. G. Masterman, Jack London and Mary Higgs as a designation for London’s East End and its populace.

Thus, if Kennedy’s vocabulary is of its time and place, his direct and demonstrative style (“This pawnshop here”) is unmistakably his own. He addresses the readers (“I ask you”) and sometimes exhorts them (“Become courageous”). He is not averse to stern archaisms (“Let us fear not”). He rarely qualifies, and has little time for humour, though he can be sarcastic. The voice is often loud, ardent, opinionated. One can imagine him thumping on the table. The sentences come in jerks and spasms: short paratactic units abound, often without a predicate. The style was singular enough to catch the attention of Edwin Pugh, who in the New Age spoke of “the writers of the school of Mr. Bart Kennedy who may claim to have invented the language of punctuation.”²² At his death the New York Times even credited him with having pioneered “the staccato method of short story writing.”²³

Over the years the tone becomes shriller, not just in The Hunger Line, but also in the racially charged patriotism of The German Danger (1907) and Soldiers of Labour (1917), with the latter’s diatribe against the Hun whose victory in the Great War would result in “slavery and blackness and annihilation,” whereas “We the strong Island Race” fight for “light and freedom and the sacredness of the individual.”²⁴ In such moments Kennedy’s harangues, delivered with an Old Testament furore, are the verbal equivalent of the many fistfights in which he had become embroiled. His manner of writing may, like the episodic structure of his works, mirror the unpredictable, if not aimless day-for-day, moment-for-moment life the author had led during his wandering years and suit a temperament formed by these experiences.

In terms of autobiography, A Man Adrift: Being Leaves from a Nomad’s Portfolio is a sequel to Slavery.²⁵ Although published earlier, it starts where Slavery left off, with the author, having come of age, boarding the ship for North America, which was his private solution to slum life. But, as Kennedy noted in a chapter of Slavery entitled “The Magic of Change,” “the reason that people of the working class desire to go off to distant and foreign places is not altogether because of their not doing well at home.”²⁶ Other authors of tramp narratives also evoke a deep-seated wish to break out, a desire to be released from social constraints, a spirit of adventure, a deliberate setting out into the unknown that has driven them from home. Davies, for example, felt possessed of “a fever of restlessness”²⁷ that prompted him, who had not grown up in a slum, to quit the picture-framing trade to which he had been apprenticed. In his Drifting Men, R. M. Fox cites the case of a “rootless vagabond” who on the first of May “always left whatever job he might have and struck out for the open country” claiming that these rambles were “the one part of his life that was really worth living.”²⁸ Such “vagabond unrest” not only causes vagrants to leave their familiar surroundings in the first place, but also accounts for their constant shifting and drifting about: “It mattered little where they were going as long as they were going.”²⁹

A Man Adrift uses the “I” voice. The book recounts the author’s adventures as an untrained sailor across the Atlantic and along the American coast, follows him on his various occupations on wharfs, in mines, on the railroad, in goldfields and even as a chorus singer in an opera house, but also offers an inside view of the world of tramps. The first thing we learn is that “Who you are or what you were matters not.… You may be one who has belonged to the topmost class, you may be a labourer, or a man from out of the filth of the slums, or a dispirited low-down thief.”³⁰ What name a tramp goes by derives from some former occupation (Sailor), origin (English Billy, Galway Paddy) or physical features (Kennedy was Reddy because of his hair colour). More important are the manly attributes required on the beat. Without physical strength, toughness of mind and body, survival is near impossible. Hunger, danger, violence, brutality and the prospect of prison are never far away. Masculinity asserts itself in taking risks and proving oneself in dangerous situations, and in dodging laws and authorities.

While in no way representative of all the outcasts, the central figures in both A Man Adrift and A Sailor Tramp display a fierce sense of independence, autonomy and human dignity. This strongly individualist and not infrequently righteous disposition can easily lead to fistic arguments (eight such incidents in A Man Adrift), but it does not rule out male bonding or homosocial camaraderie. While on the road, which in America includes the railroad, that is jumping trains, the tramp may strike a companionship with others; thus often they travel in pairs or threes, but these are invariably temporary arrangements; for everything is in the here and now. In the Sailor and his mate the Cockney’s eyes “two weeks meant the far away, almost the eternal.”³¹ Hence money earned or won today is often gambled or drunk away tomorrow. As to earning, “The tramp’s real means of livelihood is begging.”³² Ingenuity in this field is regarded highly among the tribe.

In this male preserve, women are conspicuously absent. A Man Adrift is entirely devoid of romance. By contrast, the Sailor twice falls under the spell of female charm, but the impulse behind is pure and chaste. The women are idealized, the encounters highly romanticized, and each episode occupies no more than one chapter out of three dozen.

Toward the end of A Man Adrift Kennedy arrives at a damning judgment of his host country. Apart from the spectacle of civic corruption, or the torture and killing of prison inmates he had witnessed, what appalled him was the treatment of Native Americans:

One would think that to conquer and subjugate a race was bad enough, without afterwards sending out men to insult this race by telling them that their religion was a false one.… [I}t is impolitic to allow the religion of a race that is called “savage” to be interfered with. Men will forgive you for beating them in war, but they will not forgive you for interfering with their inherited ideas of what is sacred and holy.³³

This statement may come as a surprise from someone whom we have seen hurling vitriol at the Hun in an overheated patriotic climate, but Kennedy’s sympathies always went out to the underdog (and the Germans did not count as such). He was impressed by the Native Americans’ social commitment to allow none of their tribe to starve so that “they are much more Christian in this respect than we are.”³⁴ His fellow-feeling for the oppressed led to another observation: “When labouring men were struggling for the right to live they were shot and crushed by the military with more mercilessness and for less provocation than they would be under the most despotic and ruthless Government in Europe.” Thus in the final reckoning “England” appeared to him “a freer and more democratic country” than the supposed “Land of the Free” with “its air of blatant, sham democracy.”³⁵

As a logical conclusion Kennedy decides to return to Britain, though ending up as a lonely unsheltered vagrant in a London park dampens his spirits. His last thoughts are a refutation of the often voiced opinion that the low-down people are not aware of the degradation of their lives: “This is a lie. They realize that they are dogs and slaves, but their way of saying is not what is called an elegant way. It is not the drawing-room way. It is the way that smacks of the slums, and the foul alley, and the gaol, and the gutter.”³⁶

A Sailor Tramp is from start to finish a road book. No passage to the New World here, no roaming over long distances, no detailed work description; no induction either, but an in medias res opening. Six outcasts of different nationalities emerge from the desert and are heading towards Galveston. Already in the second chapter the Sailor, driven by hunger and taking his chances, commits a robbery. In abandoning what he may have felt to be the constraints of the autobiographical form of A Man Adrift, Kennedy has found greater freedom in his treatment of tramp life. He can choose from his store of personal experiences and the yarns heard over a campfire. He can embellish and invent scenes such as the romantic encounters, and he can recount a deed that in an “I” narrative would have incriminated him. The Sailor justifies the mugging in words that have the ring of an authentic Kennedy outburst: “Robbery! Everything was based upon it. Nations plundered nations with no other licence than the licence of might; ruling cliques plundered people of their liberties; employers plundered labourers of their bread. And so on. It was a case of plunder all round.”³⁷ The author half-heartedly distances himself from this kind of reasoning, but there is no doubt that the Sailor is, like Jim in Slavery, his alter ego. When he goes to the opera the music, Kennedy’s great passion, so entrances him that he passes in review over his life:

a little child was standing in a town in England watching a regiment of soldiers pass through a street—a boy was standing in a great workshop—a youth was on the deck of a ship, pulling on halyards while a terrible storm was raging in the Atlantic—a young man was going solitarily along a road—a man was walking with other men over a desert—a man was tracking another like a panther.³⁸

A Sailor Tramp shows the ups and downs in the life of tramps, an existence as much marked by freedom of movement as by random encounters and sheer luck or misfortune. Like its predecessor, it has its share of violence, hardships and ill-treatment, including a death march back into the desert following the expulsion from Galveston, but there are also moments of real comradeship and sublime serenity. Kennedy lets a hobo wax lyrical in his lingo:

A hobo’s life is the only life goin’. No one to bother you. No one to say where you’ll go or where you won’t go. You’re out in the good air all the time—an’ you’re chucks on the nail if you know the game. There’s no one depennin’ on you. No one. All youse have to do is to look out for number one. Youse have no graft to do, and youse is your own boss. An’ there’s another thing I likes about bein’ a hobo. It’s the chuck. You’re never sure of what you’re goin’ to get in a castle. An’ I guess I likes variety. It’s healthy. No, I guess a hobo’s life is great. An’ when you gets so far as I’fe got, it’s the life of a king. Gimme the life of a hobo!³⁹

An unexpected feature of the book is what one might call the flickering of an environmental sensibility. During their wanderings the Sailor and his mate witness the felling of giant pine trees and are struck with awe and sadness: “They saw a great pine in the act of toppling over. It gave a slight shiver and swayed a little and then crashed down with a terrible sound. A sound that had something of a cry.”⁴⁰ The pathetic fallacy of attributing human emotions to the natural world is part and parcel of the pastoral tradition, but its sudden appearance in an often hard-nosed tramp narrative is arresting. On another occasion, during his homeward voyage, the Sailor contemplates the dwarflike and transitory existence of humans faced with the vastness of the sea: “How small seemed man and his works when compared with this wonderful, heaving, immenseness. Man was a little thing that was here to-day and gone to-morrow. But the ocean was always here.”⁴¹ As if to emphasise humans’ vulnerability, the ship is a little later caught in a violent storm. Both scenes are mere cameos, but the melancholy mood behind them foreshadows the lover of the countryside that we encounter in the late work Golden Green.

Golden Green is a miscellany, ranging from pub talk to a kind of manual for “The Fine Art of Walking,” from sympathetic portraits of footloose people (tramps, navvies, old soldiers, “wander-children,” that is, Romanies) to observations of the sky and the sun complete with a vision of the use of solar energy: “Coal is here but for a short, swift-passing span in the life of man.… He must learn to chain and control the heat of the sun. And the time will come when sun-fire will be the power that will drive vast ships over seas and oceans.”⁴²

Some of the pieces such as those alluding to World War I must have been written and were probably published earlier. One bears an uncanny resemblance to Rudyard Kipling’s famous “Mary Postgate” (1915). The scene is the village of the title, situated in Kent. The narrator is sitting on a bench, looking down the one street. A little girl with her battered doll is walking toward him, a dog is barking, and eventually an old woman is leaving the only shop. Suddenly the peace is disturbed by “a formidable, sinister, droning sound,” which brings more villagers to the street, all gazing up at a low-flying aircraft. Contrary to Kipling’s story, nothing dramatic happens. At the end of the sketch the little girl comes back unharmed, under her arm the doll “that had been in the rough-and-ready tumble of the wars.” And even though it is not at all clear whether the aircraft was a military one, let alone an enemy or British plane, the narrator “felt the spirit of the raging Armageddon.”⁴³ The tranquil life of the village has been shattered, its isolation from the world at large revealed as illusory. There is a tragic personal side to Kennedy’s vignette in that his son, a member of a squadron of the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down over France aged just nineteen.⁴⁴ Kennedy and Kipling, both at one time living in Sussex, were united in their grief for a son killed in the war and in their hatred of Imperial Germany.

However, Golden Green has none of the fulminating charge of the earlier Kennedy. It is the work of a man at peace with the world and the cosmos, despite the loss of his only child. He appears to have found solace in the rural south of England, which he takes in with all his senses. Ever the outdoor man, and at sixty-five claiming still to be walking five miles per day, he is attentive not only to birdsong but also “to the music there is in the rain.” He celebrates the wind and the thunderstorm as “a great all-voice of many, many tones,”⁴⁵ and imagines the plants secretly speaking. He is inhaling the fragrance of their blossoms in spring, and later in the year admiring the infinite variety in the shapes and colours of their leaves. He rejoices in the physical contact with the earth, no wonder for a man who in his time had tramped thousands of miles and often made the ground his pillow. In an epiphany-like moment he senses the “rhythmical movement that was in the earth, the trees, and the hills off in the beyond.”⁴⁶ The sentiment is not new. Already in a passage of A Sailor Tramp the protagonist is drawing contentment out of a temporary gardening job: “He felt himself less at enmity with all mankind. He did not feel a wish to curse and rail at his fate. The mother of mothers, the earth, calmed him and brought him back to normalness. The earth. Man must go back to the earth if his race is not to become extinct in the world. He must leave the horrible, crowded, noisome cities and go back to the earth.”⁴⁷ Hence his determination, once he was back from America, to keep clear of the northern slumland of his youth and settle instead in the lush green south of England.

Yet in Golden Green the author goes a step further by downgrading humans’ position in the universe: “For man to think that he is of more import [than the birds] comes from an egotism that is based mainly upon his power to destroy.” The green Kennedy writing here adopts an egalitarian attitude toward other species. It is true that he still endows the birds with human characteristics such as a sense of habitation, of humour and speech: “there seems to be as much variation in the pitch and the length of the sounds and the intervals of time, as there is in human speech.”⁴⁸ But at the same time he grants animal expression a sui generis status and in default of proper terms refers to the birds’ linguistic behaviour as “bird-intelligence” and “bird-psychology.”

In his self-appointed position as “professor of walking” Kennedy offers all manner of advice to the long-distance traveller: the best foot-wear (old, much-worn-out shoes), the right gait (a “shambling slouch”), the ideal pace (never to hurry, but strolling at ease), the perfect posture (the head bent slightly forward), the safest track on a country lane. Respecting these rules, and advancing at a rate of about two-and-a-half miles per hour (“the good old gait of the tramp”), an experienced walker can be abroad a whole day. To hurry was for Kennedy “of all the foolishnesses that exist in this civilization … the most foolish.”⁴⁹ He pours scorn over the “physical culturists” of his day with their dumbbells and horizontal bars as well as the drilled “strutting along” of soldiers. What he would have made of today’s Nordic walkers with their ski sticks, or the joggers with their sophisticated pulse-, time- and distance-measuring appliances, can be surmised from his comment on those among his contemporaries who were “endeavouring to commit suicide in a misguided attempt to win a six days’ walking match. Why walking-match lunatics are not locked up beats me.”⁵⁰

The miseries of wage slavery, the scandal of food speculation, the unbalanced relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment, the disaffection with the conventions and routines of “civilized” life and the longing to drop out of it, resistance to the pressure toward ever more accelerated living: these are not one man’s timeworn obsessions, but the concerns of many twenty-first-century readers. However, a selective appreciation of Kennedy’s work as this article has offered should not blind us to some of its darker, not to say ugly, sides already hinted at in passing. Take this tirade from The Hunger Line:

The scum of the races of Europe is pouring upon us. We are being invaded by hordes of wastrel aliens who are devouring the substance that belongs to our own people.… Our city … is being made the refuge for foreign bullies and thieves and burglars and makers of counterfeit money, and shirkers from military duty, and loathsome paupers. They are teeming in upon us from all the nations of Europe. London is the port for foreign human derelicts. The slime of the world is oozing in upon us.⁵¹

Substitute “the Arab world” for “Europe” and you have the populist xenophobic rhetoric sweeping across many parts of the Old World today in the face of the fugitive crisis caused by wars in which not a few European powers, and especially Britain, have been heavily engaged. Connected with this jingoism, and to some extent based on it, is Kennedy’s adulation of “the strong man” (and by extension the “strong race”), which comes from a crude amalgam of Darwinian and Nietzschean ideas, hardened in the daily struggle for survival during his wandering years. It is by no means a feature of Kennedy alone. Other Edwardian tramp writers, equally steeled by years on the beat, such as Jack London, Davies and Patrick MacGill display similar tendencies.⁵²

“The world will be saved by the strong man. For all strong men are at heart rebels against the sinister principle of authority.”⁵³ This is the unresolved contradiction in Kennedy’s philosophy. He is at once in revolt against the authority of the state as well as the large corporations and in love with a leader. Now he will speak on behalf of the poorest and most vulnerable in society, now dedicate a book to Lord Northcliffe, the press baron.⁵⁴ His sympathies flow out to the ill-treated Native Americans or the gypsies, but his temperature rises when he speaks of the “lesser” races of Europe. With some forbearing one could regard these conflicting attitudes as dynamic, arising out of a specific occasion and historical context in which they were expressed, but Fascism is in the wings. To project the strong man as a protector of the weak, ready to right their wrongs, is at best naïve.

In other respects, Kennedy was a better forecaster. He foresaw not only the coming world war, but also prognosticated the horrors under Communist regimes: [State] “Socialism would be but a magnifying a million fold of the diabolical trust-system.”⁵⁵ He predicted that Catalonia’s yearning for independence could never be suppressed: “In the end Catalonia must become a separate state.”⁵⁶ He anticipated the domestic use of solar energy: “Prisoned sun-fire will be used in man’s habitations.”⁵⁷

Posterity has not been as kind to Kennedy as it has been to Davies. Beyond Shaw’s initial promotional impact, is it because of the rather pleasing rags-to-cultural-riches story of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, as opposed to the inconclusive endings of A Man Adrift and A Sailor Tramp? Or that the latter part of Davies’s book is set in Britain where we find the author penning his poems in doss-houses, hawking them from door to door and sending them to potential patrons? Did it matter that Davies subsequently fashioned himself as a poet, a career crowned posthumously by inclusion in Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973)? Whatever the answer, Davies’s best-seller should not be used as a yardstick by which to measure Kennedy’s writings. If interest in this work is to be resuscitated, it ought also to consider the raging critic of urban slums and the affectionate observer of village and natural life, even if in the final reckoning it is likely to be the passionate champion of the open road that may appeal. In his applications to the Royal Literary Fund from 1912 onward Kennedy gave as his profession “tramp.”⁵⁸ To the last he identified with the vagrants whose habits, frame of mind and code he, walking wizard that he was, felt called upon to record.