Jack Hilton was an English working-class writer of rare force and originality, shaped not by universities or salons, but instead by war, unemployment, and the slums of industrial England.
Born in 1900, in Rochdale, Lancashire, his childhood was one of extreme poverty and illness and— before it was even over— he was consigned to the cotton mill aged just eleven. The First World War came and he joined the Lancashire Fusiliers, only narrowly surviving a bomb blast in the Rosières trenches.
Scarred by the horrors, Hilton struggled to settle afterwards. He wandered England and Scotland, living hand to mouth. After three years he was at last able to find a job back in Rochdale, as a plasterer; he worked in this trade with pride for ten years, until the Depression saw him and thousands of others laid off.
Out of moral necessity, he began to organise the town’s unemployed to collectively demand better living conditions. His speeches drew crowds — crowds that terrified the town's economic elite. They conspired to have Hilton sent to prison. There, behind bars, he was given a stark choice: Either stay locked up or agree to stop his organising. With his beloved wife Mary back at home, he took the second option but still suffered as local bosses blocked him from securing more work.
And so, back on the outside — stuck on the dole and barred from politics — he picked up a pen.
Hilton wrote his first book, Caliban Shrieks (1935), as an explosive mixture of autobiography, essay, and polemic — bracing, angry, yet strangely beautiful. George Orwell praised the novel for capturing the inner life of poverty like no other work he knew. W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender offered their own praises for such qualities as the book's "raw, Moby-Dick prose."
The book found its way to publication by pure fluke. A tutor at the Workingmen’s Educational Association had quietly sent some of Hilton's notebooks to The Adelphi, a London literary magazine. That chance intervention launched Hilton into a brief but formidable literary career. He went on to publish four more works, all marked by formal daring, political clarity, and a resolute pride in the English working-class.
After establishing himself as one of the most original literary voices to emerge from the North of England, Hilton disappeared from print. After the death of his first wife Mary in 1955, from an industrial disease of the cotton mills, Hilton left behind both literature and the North, moving to Wiltshire and settling with Beatrice Bezzant, a pioneering trade unionist for domestic workers.
Here at The Jack Hilton Trust, we are working to preserve the remarkable history and legacy of one of England's greatest forgotten authors. His story is proof that good writing can begin anywhere.