posted on 25 Sep 2023

Weekend in Dinlock by Clancy Sigal

Chicago-born Clancy Sigal (1926 – 2017) was an interesting and now, I think, largely forgotten novelist, journalist and radical political activist. Raised in a left-wing Jewish family, he joined the Communist Party at the age of just 15. He got a job working for a Hollywood agent just as the McCarthy witch-hunts were gathering momentum and soon got caught up in the purges and demands to testify in public. Although his own hearing was suddenly postponed, Sigal decided to head-off and move to London, where he stayed for the next 30 years. During his time in the UK, he found himself in a four-year relationship with Doris Lessing and makes an appearance as Saul Green in Lessing’s magnum opus, The Golden Notebook.

Shortly after his arrival in the UK in the late 1950s, Sigal became friendly with a northern miner, Len Doherty, who himself goes on to be a novelist of some note. Doherty offers to take Sigal to meet the community he comes from in his home town of Thurcroft and Sigal records some of his experiences in a semi-fictionalised account of that visit. Thurcroft becomes Dinlock and Doherty is renamed ‘Davie’ but apart from the changes of names and some minor reordering of events, not very much of this is in fact fictionalised.

The portrait of Dinlock and the mining community is not, for the most part, romanticised – indeed, you could argue that it’s quite the opposite. This is a closed community, bound by unwritten rules, that conforms to gender and class stereotypes and is unforgiving of those who seek to break free of these boundaries.

“(if) ‘you live in Dinlock you must make Dinlock your life, and you cannot live in Dinlock and be accepted by the core if you have a real means of escape.’  

And Davie wants to escape – he wants to be a painter – but it’s an aspiration that makes him suspicious in the eyes of the other men. Harbouring thoughts of ‘betterment’ is enough to see you ‘relegated to that sub world of Dinlock which, in the eyes of the coal face men, includes dead-beats, surface workers, and clerks’.

Davie takes his guest to meet the men, their wives and even some of the coal bosses and all the time Sigal is ‘needled’, psychologically and physically jostled into showing his worth. But it’s at the coal-face that we really see just what the life of a miner is really like. A review of the book on the ‘Places and Cultural Traces’ website captures the centrality of this experience on the coalface well:

“Dinlock is a monumental evocation of the values, sights, sounds and smells of a disappeared world. His 40 page account of the coal face, where he witnessed ‘a unique self respect, an unfleshy dignity…both elemental and deep driven’, where the ‘fraternity of the naked worker need not be fierce’, stays long in the memory.”

There are, of course, strong echoes of what George Orwell had already achieved in The Road To Wigan Pier and his separate essays about miners that cast them as heroic physical specimens in a way that hinted at the homo-erotic. But in much the same way as Orwell attracted criticism from the Left for his, sometimes, less than flattering portrait of miners and their community, so Sigal too found himself the subject of fury from those who felt his portrait of the Dinlock community too negative.

Reading Weekend in Dinlock over half a century on, the politics seem to matter less now than they may have done back then. There is a real respect in Sigal’s portrait and a willingness to acknowledge that the strengths of any community are always counter-balanced in some ways by the weaknesses. The picture we get of Dinlock is an important historical document as well as a fascinating invitation to find yourself inside a community that no longer exists.

 

The book is, I suspect, out of print but older copies of both the Penguin edition and the hardback Readers Union edition (the one shown in the photograph that accompanies this review) can be found online and can be purchased for under £10.  

 

Terry Potter

September 2023