Thomas Thompson (1880-1951) was a Lancashire writer and broadcaster, whose work generally appeared under the name of T. Thompson. He lived all his life in Bury, an industrial town some ten miles north of Manchester.

Early Years

Thomas Thompson was born in Bury on January 14 1880 to Thomas Thompson, a clog maker, and Ellen Greenhalgh, a cotton mill worker. By his eleventh birthday, the young Thompson was a ‘half-timer’, working half the day in the mill as a warehouse boy, and the other half at school. He once called his education “a poor do”. He left both school and mill as soon as he could. He worked as an errand runner and then as a printer’s apprentice, gaining a silver medal for book-binding in 1898 from the Skinners’ Company. He continued to work as a book-binder until 1946. He married Ethel Heapy in 1911, and they had one child, Herbert. Thomas Thompson’s early years are described in his autobiography, Lancashire for Me.

Writing

Thompson drifted into writing at an early age, with articles on the countryside for his local newspaper, and a piece in the Sunday Chronicle. These were noticed by The Guardian, who invited him to write something longer. It turned into a regular column, the Plum Street Memoirs, based largely on the people in and around Wood Street in Bury, where he had spent most of his childhood. ^[1]

Thompson’s column ran through the 1920s, culminating in Blind Alley, a novel about Plum Street’s residents. Thereafter, Thompson continued with a column of Lancashire portraits that appeared regularly in The Guardian from the 1930s to his death in 1951. He also published sixteen books, with George Allen and Unwin, about Lancashire people and their communities; these were mostly collections of short stories, the first in 1933. He wrote several plays, and helped to write two film scripts: Mario Zampi’s comedy thriller, Spy for a Day, and Carol Reed’s Penny Paradise, starring Betty Driver.

Thompson’s books and Guardian column were highly regarded and well-reviewed. The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, was an admirer.^[2] A.J.P. Taylor mentions Thompson in his monumental volume, English History 1914-1945.^[3] A few years later, Taylor recalled that “For many years the stories of T. Thompson were the things I first read in The Manchester Guardian. He has had no successor.”^[4] When Thompson’s Lancashire Lure came out in 1947, The Guardian’s reviewer felt “it is temperate to say that what Kipling was to India and what O. Henry was to New York that Thompson is to Lancashire.”^[5] Thompson’s writing set a high standard of authenticity; he was, said Walter Greenwood, the “most Lancashire of Lancashire writers.”^[6] In 1950, the University of Manchester awarded him an honorary Masters degree for his scholarly contribution to dialect literature.^[7]

Broadcasting

Thompson was a prolific broadcaster, making a name for himself on the BBC with programmes on Lancashire dialect, as well as over thirty sketches, stories and plays broadcast between 1937 and 1951, almost all of them about life in Lancashire towns and villages. He wrote a wartime series for the forces called Tom, Dick and Harry, and was a regular contributor of short stories to the Radio Times.

He was also responsible for seven of the nine episodes of Burbleton, an imaginary northern community created by BBC staff in 1937.^[8] His series, Under the Barber’s Pole, broadcast on the Home Service between 1947 and 1952, comprised dialect stories set in the fictional Lancashire village of Owlerbarrow, with Wilfred Pickles in the lead role. It was so successful that Allen and Unwin published a collection of the stories in 1949.

Thompson was as versatile a broadcaster as he was prolific. He took part in programmes about regional culture, music, painting, nursery schools, food, eccentrics, book clubs, BBC announcers and in 1946, to mark his retirement as a book-binder, a Home Service broadcast on how he had moved from the routines of the bindery to those of the typewriter.

Thomas Thompson died in Bury on February 15 1951. His last column for The Guardian was published posthumously.^[9] Wilfred Pickles later said of him that he was a writer “who captured life with all the accuracy and none of the flatness of a photograph, the brilliant and modest man of letters who was as unaffected as he was sincere.”^[10] His obituary in The Guardian reminded readers that he was a born writer, with an inspiration that was “nearer to genius than to talent.”^[11]

Works

Lancashire Mettle (1933) with a frontispiece by L. S. Lowry.

Blind Alley (1934) novel

Song o’ Sixpence (1935) novel

Lancashire Brew (1935)

Lancashire Lustre (1937)

Cuckoo Narrow (1937) novel

Stick-in-the Mud (1937) a one act comedy

Lancashire Fun (1938)

Lancashire Lather (1940)

Lancashire for Me – Little Autobiography (1940)

Lancashire Rampant (1943)

Lancashire Pride (1945)

Crompton Way (1947) novel

Lancashire Lure (1947)

Under the Barber’s Pole (1949)

Lancashire Laughter (1950)

The Lancashire Omnibus (1951)

(all published by Allen and Unwin)

Thompson’s stories and articles have also appeared in a number of anthologies, including:

Fifty Great Years: the Evening Chronicle Golden Jubilee Book (1947), ed. H.J Denys, Kemsley Newspapers

The Bedside Lilliput (1950), ed. R. Bennett, Hulton Press

North Country Stories (1953), ed. A. G. Brooks, Faber

My North Countrie: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose of the Northern Counties (1955), ed.W. Pickles, Allen and Unwin

Lancashire of One Hundred Years Ago (1993), ed. John Hudson, Sutton

External Links

Thompson’s broadcasting career as detailed in the Radio Times: [1]

Photographs of Thompson: [2]

Some of Thompson’s press clippings: [3]

Burbleton: [4] and also [5]

References