Through Hilton, the reader experiences a first-person interrogation of a childhood characterised by infant-mortality and child-labour. Mr Clarke recently presented his research on Hilton’s relationship with Orwell at a conference in London. Dr Windle said: “Following the success of Caliban Shrieks he won a Cassell Scholarship to Oxford and pursued a career as a writer, publishing a few novels including Laugh at Polonious and Champion as well as a fantastic travelogue called English Ways in 1940."

Hilton did eventually come home to Rochdale, and was able to find steady but varied work — until the Great Depression hit. One of millions forced onto the dole, he used the time to read and some of his mates did the same. This small band of semi-illiterate twenty-somethings came together to read about the world, about the crisis, about the official reasons for their hunger, about the cobbled-together solutions of the day’s top politician. Hilton read Marx, he read Shakespeare. They all did. It’s hard to imagine a private school which could have imparted a better knowledge of the classics than that which this bunch of working men in Rochdale gave themselves, while on the dole, in these bleak years. Despite the obvious recognition of marriage’s disabilities, the bally thing took place. With it came, not the entrancing mysteries of the bedroom, nor the passionate soul-stirring of two sugar-candied Darby and Joans, but the practised resolve that, come what may, be the furnishers’ dues met or no, the rent paid or spent, we – the wife and I – would commemorate our marriage by having, every Sunday morn, ham and eggs, So it was we got one over on the poet, with his madness of love, the little dove birds, etc.This witty and unusual book may be described as an autobiography without narrative. Mr Hilton lets us know, briefly and in passing, that he is a cotton operative who has been in and out of work for years past, that he served in France during the latter part of the war, and that he has also been on the road, been in prison, etc etc; but he wastes little time in explanations and none in description. In effect his book is a series of comments on life as it appears when one’s income is two pounds a week or less. Here, for instance, is Mr Hilton’s account of his own marriage:

One of the main arguments for the value of Hilton’s writing today is the way it probes the development of his own ideas, his own relationship to the myths that hold up the class system. His writing models this process of critical self-examination to the reader, as if in invitation for us to join in. Benjamin Clarke is a professor of literature at the University of North Carolina. He tells me how this depth in Hilton went unseen — “[Hilton’s] writing is so distinctive, it’s so unusual, I would like to think people would see it today and understand that there are so many dimensions to working-class writing; it goes far beyond just simplistic realist accounts of what happens in factories or mines.”Hilton was proud to be a plasterer. Part of the magic of Caliban Shrieks is the novel’s interrogation of the status games compelling so many into decades of drudgery, in the mills, trenches, factories. He never wanted to rise above his class, “the lower working-class type,” into mortgaged respectability: "Whenever I’m with the intellectuals I always feel they do not belong to my world,” he wrote, continuing, “...with all their theories and mentalised life they have had very little experience of living…they’ve been too sheltered, and too looked up to." If the price for becoming a professional writer was his position within the working-class — the aspect of his life he believed enabled him to write with such critical directness about what he saw — then he would choose plastering, and proudly so. An archive of Hilton's work and papers is held at Nottingham University Libraries. A description of the archive holding can be found at Archives Hub. Previous investigators had mistakenly believed Hilton died in Wiltshire because of an incorrect report in a newspaper at the time.

WB was born in 1900 in the village of Waingroves, Derbyshire the son of an engine-winder. He began working as a miner in Derbyshire and between 1927-31 he partook in a Miner’s Welfare Scholarship on day release from the pit. On returning to full time work he was soon put on short time and then made redundant. He was unemployed between 1931-35 when he began to write. He scraped a living from writing (including radio plays) during the 1930s before eventually becoming a child-welfare officer in 1937, a job in which he remained until his death in 1967. HH was a miner in South Shields and a militant in the Durham Miners Association from whom he won a scholarship to the Central Labour College from 1924-26.A former member of the Independent Labour Party he attended the 2nd Revolutionary Writers Congress in Charkov (USSR). His first 2 books were criticised by the CPGB and the authorities in the USSR and Last Cage Down was written as a direct expression of the CPGBs”Class against Class” policy. Ironically for Heslop, this too met with a jaded reaction, as CPGB policy had changed by the time of its publication to Popular Front tactics. Heslop’s earlier books were rehabilitated. At the weekend, we published an insightful essay by Mollie about the sacrifices that football demands of young women in Manchester. Mollie spoke to young women who had been considered exciting footballing stars as teenagers, only to drop out of the game prematurely, including Liv, who played for Manchester City Juniors:

Sexual offences in Bolton have reached their highest levels on record . The ONS found 1,104 sexual offences were recorded in the year up to March, up from 810 the year before. Bolton South MP Yasmin Qureshi, who we profiled early this year , said the findings were the "most concerning" part of the ONS's report. The rise could be down to two things: a genuine rise in offences, or more people being prepared to report cases to GMP than in previous years. Now celebrated as one of the best writers of the twentieth-century, Lawrence died in 1930, reviled. Murry was hated too — described in one 1934 biography as “the best-hated man of letters in the country.” He saw himself as a “moral prophet” engaged in a war of position against bourgeois stodge of the type that had driven Lawrence into exile abroad, since 1920. I knew other readers had tried to piece together the remainder of Hilton’s story before, and that my own search would be only the most recent attempt over several decades. Registries had been scoured, family trees traced — articles were even run in the Oldham Chronicle and Evening News (most recently in 2014), hoping to “hear from anyone with information about Hilton.” Sources have told the Times that Manchester could completely run out of Monkeypox vaccinations next week. Andy Burnham has written to the health secretary to complain that vaccinations have become concentrated in the capital despite a growing rate of infection in Manchester. He said: "As things stand, we are not expecting to receive enough doses to enable us to vaccinate the 3,500 high-risk individuals we have already identified. Currently, Monkeypox seems to be unevenly affecting gay and bisexual men — almost all the cases in the UK are in young males, with 73% of infections concentrated in London. Burnham has said Manchester will need an "urgent uplift in vaccine supply" before Manchester Pride on August 26. OT Creative Space in Old Trafford has a ‘Twilight Art Class’. It’s a 6-week art course, and no experience is needed. You’ll learn how to create art with charcoal, pastels, and watercolours. Starts 6.15pm. Info here .