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John Goss wrote in unpublished memoirs: |

'| came of radical stock;
hartism in the blood...

WHEN THE death of John
Goss at his homé in Birmingham,
England, was reported last
month, one of the many young
singers who studied under him.
during his 10 years’ residence in
Vancouver wrote this brief ap-
preciation:

“John Goss did so much for us
musically and. otherwise, and as
far as I was concerned he had,
more influence on my life than
anyone else. I feel my life has
been richer through my assocla-
tion with him.”

The letter enclosed a clipping
from an English: paper, giving in
one tense paragraph the bio-
graphical outline of a life so re-
plete with accomplishment that
it might have filled a book.

~ “Born in 1894 in London and
educated at various council
schools and at Woodbridge, Selly
Oak — where he obtained a
scholarship at Ruskin College,
Oxford — he was errand boy,
golf caddy, page boy, cotton mill
laborer, fitter’s mate and clerk

ns ”

’ before becoming a singer. .

the clipping stated.

As a matter of fact, John Goss
did write-a book relating the
story of the years embraced by:
this paragraph. He left a copy.
of the still unpublished manu-
script with friends in Vancouver

when he returned to England in ~

1950. Tentatively entitled, From
Such Beginnings, it is the joint
work of Goss and his wife, the
former Mabel Gill, who is her-
self well known on the London
Together, in alternate.
chapters, they trace the separate
stories of their lives from their
first childhood: memories to the’
day they met. There the book
ends. t :

There are really two stories,
that of the working class boy
reared in the poverty and strug-

gles of his class, and that of the

girl brought up in comfortable

~ surroundings, with servants and

a governess, who sought the
theatre as a career and then was.
faced with the necessity of earn-
ing her living from it as the
family fortunes disintegrated.

_ But Canadians will be concern- °
ed principally with John Goss’

story, for in the pages of his
manuscript are revealed the in-
fluences and experiences that
shaped the man thousands of
Canadians acclaimed as an artist

: and respected for his political
integrity and courage.

* * *

IN ITS first years, John Goss’
story differs only in detail from

that of any other boy, then or —

now, brought up in one of Lon-

 don’s working class suburbs.

His first recollection, he
writes, is of moving, and the Goss
family was constantly moving,
usually in search of work, on oc-

casion to avoid paying back rent, —

but always of necessity. Goss’
father was a piano-forte maker,
as his father had been before
him, and when work was unob-
tainable in London he moved to
the Lancashire cotton town of
Ola@ham. -

“I seem to have lived, in the

tirely in the streets . . . it is
quite a natural rule of working
class families that the more chil-
dren are out of the house, the
better for housekeeping,” Goss
writes.

wits.

ism.”

# Movable was stamped

‘ Life on the streets, as he him-
self points out, sharpened — his
But the frequent moves
did nothing to improve his in-
different scholastic record and it
was only in his last year or two
at school that he began to apply
himself diligently, finishing at
the top of his class. :

' The boy who was to become
one of the foremost singers of
our times notes, “The only sub-
jects I could not abide were
English and music,” and recalls

‘the frustration of his. music

teacher.

Ee «when, after the class had

ploughed disastrously through.
some wretched part-song, the dis-
tracted man would drop his
hands in despair and wearily
complain, ‘Yes, yes, that was
pretty awful, wasn’t it? We’ll try
it just once more, and Goss, this
time you keep your mouth shut!
That might improve matters’.”

OK

THE YOUNG John Goss — he
was then around 14 years old —
got his first job as a) page boy
at the Junior Constitutional Club,
“a fastness of London. Conservat-
He detested but learned.
to make the most of it.

" «|. I came of radical stock;
Chartism was in the blood, and
one of my father’s choicest recol-
lections . . . was of the great un-’
employed march led by John
Burns, on which occasion, in .re-
sponse to the derisive taunts. of
the idle rich, the idle poor up
and smashed their windows,” he
writes of this period.

« ... And one of my last re-
collections is of another unem-
ployed march. It came untidily
down Piccadilly behind a bugle
band that blared away with un-
defeatable cockney impertinence.
The club members gathered in
the windows and smiled their
scorn. On _ this occasion they
were careful not to make their

comments audible.

_“T stood apart, grinding my
teeth, a revolutionary minnow in
a sea of complacent tritons. Sud-
denly I saw my father and my
heart missed several beats. f
caught his eye, made him a sign
and rushed downstairs to meet
him at the back entrance; asked
him to wait and then, descending
to the servants’ hall, mortgaged,
my spare time for weeks to the,
rascally steward in charge, and
returned with a large parcel of
game pies, chicken legs and
goose livers which I thrust into
his arms. . . . I had made my
secret gesture a revolt... .”

When the family moved to
Oldham, John followed them and
got a job as a fitter’s improver,
actually a bench hand, at an
electrical plant, working a 53-
hour week. Here he gained his
first experience of labor organi-
zation, leading a strike of ap-
prentices, for which he was fir-
ed, and subsequently getting. a.
job, which he quit in disgust,
with a U.S.-controlled electrical —
company in Manchester where
detectives’ patrolled the plant»
“to watch the men at work and
report cases of slackness or mal-
ingering”; and where everything
“Stolen
from the firm of Brown and.
Smith.” .

Here too, he came under the
influence of the socialist think-
ing of the day.

“The British Socialist move-
ment in those days had passed
through its Age of Innocence; it
was now busy erecting its Tower
of Babel,” he writes. Goss listen-
ed to them all — the Social De-
mocratic Federation, which later
became the British Socialist
Party, the Fabian Society, the In-

dependent Labor Party, the So- ©

cialist Labor Party (which he

later joined), the Socialist Party °

of Great Britain, and the move-
ment around Robert Blatchford’s
Clarion.

* * *

7 «“

ONCE AGAIN the Goss family
moved, this time to Birmingham,
where John went to work “with
a small firm of motor car manu-
facturers that occupied several
large sheds in the middle of a
field near the sleepy village of
Northfield. . ... It was called the
Austin Motor Company... . “Em-
ploying, as far as I can recall,
something under a hundred men,
women and boys, it turned out
about a dozen cars a month,
mostly, / so I was told, for the
Russian market.”

Here; attending a series of lec-

tures on economics mainly with ~

the intent of pitting his own
newly acquired socialist theories.
against the apologies for capital-
ism elaborated by a St. George
Heath, he was astonished’ when
Heath offered him a resident
scholarship in the Quaker Settle-
men at Woodbrooke.

At the end of his year at the
Settlement, Goss found it “had
taken from me the taste for fac-'
tory life I knew best and had
left me inadequately equipped
for any other... .” gid

Actually, although he . could
not know it at the time, he was
at the beginning of his career as
a singer. Studying under a.
Birmingham ,music teacher, St.

Clare Barfield, he began to train
_ his voice. °° ee

Then he. sat for, and won, a
scholarship to Ruskin College,
Oxford, open to the sons of allt
Cooperators in the country. Goss
recalls his father’s reaction to
this achievement:

“He was as hidebound in class
consciousness as a descendant of
one of William the Conqueror’s
barons; but not in any Marxian
sense; he never looked upon him-
self as a member of an oppres-
sed section of society whose day
was yet to come; he was, here
and now, one of the elite, and
he carried the unshakeable con-.
viction that all men who were
not skilled craftsmen, be they
bank clerks, lordlings or million-

aires, were ridiculous parasites

of inferior blood... . c

“When I had gone to Wood-
brooke he was coldly contemptu-
ous. I was resigning a glorious
proletarian heritage for a mess
of middle class culture. ... The
Oxford scholarship only confirm-
ed his worst suspicions, or so he’
pretended; and to keep face’ he
refused to. share the family re-
joicings. But I heard later that
he carried the press reports
about with: him in his pocket
until they became tattered . be-
yond recognition. . . .”

At Oxford, Goss widened ‘the
horizons of his knowledge, pur-
suing his quest for learning after
a fashion that satisfied himself
‘but not the authorities of Ruskin
College, who informed him, be-
fore the completion of his sec-
ond year “that after careful con-

The late George Bernard Shaw chatting with neighbors.

‘Prizefighter or singer?’

G.B.S. asked John Goss

IN THE preface to From Such
Beginnings, ‘John Goss writes:

“1 was once introduced to
‘George Bernard Shaw. He gaz-
ed down at me quizzically and
seemed to probe an elusive mem-
ory. ‘Ah, he said, ‘you are either
the prizefighter or the singer.’ |
was flattered that the great man,
as it were, so much as half-iden-
tified me, but was puzzled that
complete recognition had been
balked by an obscure middle-
weight champion who had been
in his grave for more than half
a century. | confessed to being
the singer. e

“1 am not sure that you made

the wiser choice,’ he commented.
‘Recently | was walking in the
Piazza del San Marco in Venice
with: Richard Strauss, the com-
poser. The third member of our
party was a gentleman named
Gene Tunney. 7
’ “14£\ cosmopolitan crowd whiri-
ed about Mr, Tunney, anxious fo
see him, to touch the hem of his
garment, to obtain his autograph.
._They were entirely unmoved by
the presence in their midst of the
world’s greatest musician and
the world’s greatest playwright.
“'Young man, | think you:

_ would have been better advised

to have become a prizefighter.’ ”

sideration they had come to the
conclusion I was a square peg in
a round hole and that, therefore,

. it would be to neither their ad-
vantage nor mine if I returned

the following year.”

Sassenbach, general secretary
of the German Trades Unions, of-
fered him a post in the Leipzig

Trades Union Bureau, and he ac-

cepted, captivated by the idea of
travelling abroad.

But, for the intervening
months, he had to’ find a job. This
he did by making his first pro-

fessional appearance as a singer

—with a concert party, The Rus-

kins, touring the Welsh resorts.

Goss closes his story indeterm-
inately at the outbreak of the
First World War, which at once
terminated the concert .tour and
ended all thought of the post
with the German Trades Unions.

* * *

THERE SHOULD have been a
second: volume, the story of his
achievements as a professional
singer, the record of his life’s

work in the progressive labor.

movement, the conclusions of his
more mature, Marxist thinking,
the declaration of his Communist:
principles with which he crown-
ed his great talent. But he died

- with the book still unwritten.

Yet, in this manuscript, Goss
states clearly the understanding!
that impelled him to jeopardize
his professional career rather
than compromise the political
principles he set above every-
thing else. i oe Viet

$3 lt-would? appear that in

politics, if a man would live at
peace with his soul, there is no
turning back. One may step
aside and take up hobbies, or
shamefacedly cultivate a garden
and let the battle pass unheeded;
but if one insists on remaining a
political animal and tries to turn
in one’s tracks, the path from —
Left to Right must (it seems) lead
inevitably, under the solicitous.
guidance of Mr. Worldly Wise-
man, back through the Slough of -
Despond to the City of Destruc-
tion. And what at first appears
to be only a cautious withdrawal
becomes in time a stampede.

“Tf. one would know the vilest ~
traitor to the Light who will stop
at no political infamy, whose
treachery is unredeemed, he is
to be found, not among the be-

_ wildered and embittered liberals

or the dyed-in-the-wool reaction-
aries, but among those who, at
first tentatively, but later eager-
ly, and with the willing assist-
ance of hosts of formerly un-
suspected friends, have turned.
their backs on their revolution-
any vOut vag.

- Throughout his life, John Goss

stood consistently with the: Left,

with the working people and all
who strive with them for pro-
gress. His last tour, of People’s
Rumania, sustained and strength-
ened his conviction, for there he
saw the seeds of his own en-
deavors flowering into the so-
cialist culture of the people. In
Canada, as in Britain, his name
will be honored when even in-
famy cannot perpetuate the
names of the petty Vancouver
politicians who denied him a
place to sing—HAL GRIFFIN.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — MARCH 6, 1953 — PAGE 8 _

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