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John Goss wrote in unpublished memoirs: |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 of the still unpublished manu- script with friends in Vancouver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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