The Lowry exhibition currently at Tate Britain in London includes all the popular ‘matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs’ paintings paid tribute to in the 1978 song by Brian and Michael. Lowry portrayed working class life in Pendlebury, Salford and Manchester from the economic depression of the 1930s to welfare state Britain of the 1950s or as John Berger wrote in New Society in 1966: ‘this is what has happened to the ‘workshop of the world’, the production crisis, the obsolete industrial plants’.
The ‘matchstalk’ paintings such as Coming Home from the Mill, People Going to Work, Returning from Work, Coming from the Mill and Outside the Mill are repetitive and convey the world of factory whistles, wage slavery and payday for the Manchester working class only a few generations after Engels wrote his investigative book.
Lowry’s more interesting work includes the 1926 A Northern Hospital which is fundamentally a workhouse (‘a Bastille of the proletariat’) which contrasts with the NHS in Ancoats Hospital Outpatients Hall from 1952. For all his ‘solid Lancashire conservatism’ Lowry quietly welcomed the post-1945 new world of the NHS and welfare state.
Lowry’s industrial landscapes and The Pond commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain are impressive panoramic views of industrial Manchester. The Pond with its smoking chimneys, terraced houses and the Stockport Viaduct was used as a Christmas card by prime minister Harold Wilson in 1964.
Lowry’s 1937 The Lake is all fetid spillage in an industrial scene and demonstrates clearly his opposition to sentiment in art and his statement that he ‘was affected and inspired by the beauty of the industrial scene’.
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| Going to the Match, 1953. |
Going to the Match from 1953, one of his football paintings which the Professional Footballers Association bought for £1.9 million in 1999 depicts Burnden Park, home of Bolton Wanderers Football Club, which was the scene of a disaster in 1946 when 33 football fans were crushed to death. Football was central to masculine working class culture at this time and Burnden Park was later used prominently in the 1955 Arthur Askey film The Love Match.
The Funeral from 1928 and the cemetery in Necropolis of 1947 are a reminder of the centrality of death in life but also the financial cost. Today there is a rise in ‘public health funerals’ which is another name for ‘paupers funerals’ and the working class have to resort to pay-day lenders and credit cards to pay for funerals.
Although conservative in many respects, Lowry was an enemy of privilege and turned down all ‘gongs’ and a knighthood.
Steve Clayton
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