Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan

Born in Bath in 1903, the English writer Gertrude Trevelyan has a fascinating, albeit rather tragic, history. While studying at Oxford, she became the first woman to win the University’s Newdigate Prize for Poetry, an achievement that generated considerable interest from the worldwide press. A little later, a modest private income from her father allowed Trevelyan to take a room of her own (à la Virginia Woolf) in London’s Kensington, and a run of eight highly imaginative novels swiftly followed. All were published in the 1930s, mostly to great critical acclaim. Sadly, tragedy struck in 1940 when her flat was bombed in the London Blitz. While Trevelyan survived, her injuries were so severe that she died in early 1941 at the age of thirty-seven, robbing the literary world of one of its finest talents.

By the 1950s, Trevelyan and her novels had all but disappeared from public view; it is only now that her work is being rediscovered, largely due to the sterling efforts of Brad Bigelow, publisher at Recovered Books (Boiler House Press) and the Neglected Books website. Two Thousand Million Man-Power is the first of Trevelyan’s works to be reissued by this imprint, and what a marvellous rediscovery it is – striking, imaginative and utterly compelling, setting the trials and tribulations of a young couple’s relationship against the sweep of great social and technological change. Like Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues, Trevelyan’s novel is a near-certainty for my 2023 highlights – it really is that good.

The central story revolves around two young, idealistic individuals – Robert Thomas, a research chemist at a cosmetics firm, and Katherine Bott, a teacher in a mixed London County Council school – who first meet at a League of Nations debate in the early 1920s. Katherine is the more spirited and idealistic of the two, firmly believing in research, technological progress and socialist ideals. With her vague contempt for marriage and the trappings of bourgeois life, Katherine is impressed by Robert and his interest in science, viewing him as more interesting than many of his contemporaries. Robert, however, is less sure of himself, a fact that becomes increasingly clear as the novel unfolds.

Trevelyan follows her protagonists, charting the ups and downs of their relationship and lives together over the 1920s and early ‘30s, culminating in the funeral of King George V in 1936. When they first meet, Katherine and Robert are living in separate digs, carefully watched over by their respective landladies. Lovers of boarding-house novels will find much to enjoy here, with Trevelyan perfectly capturing the bleakness of interwar life – most of the couple’s courting must be conducted elsewhere, as visitors of the opposite sex are only permitted once a month to maintain a degree of respectability.

Night came on and shook them apart. Dusk came rattling up against the bus windows and the dark, shuttered High Road slid by past the long panels of the tram. Katherine got down at Verbena Road and let herself in and found Sunday supper — brawn and beetroot — on the front room table and the gas turned low. (p. 67)

After several years – and some persistence on Robert’s part – the pair finally decide to marry, with Katherine putting aside her earlier disdain in favour of a more comfortable existence. There is some wonderfully wry humour here as Trevelyan gently skewers Katherine’s desires for the trappings of bourgeois life, despite her passionate ideals. After all, as Katherine declares to Robert as they are about to move house, ‘there’s no need to be suburban and bourgeois because we live in a suburb. Besides, Primrose Green is hardly a suburb.’ (p. 144)

As the months and years slip by, we follow this couple through good times and bad, a trend mirrored in the broader economic environment. While Katherine is busy acquiring various ‘labour-saving devices’ for the home, Robert’s career is on the rise at work, allowing the couple to enjoy a brief period of consumerist comfort. Nevertheless, in the boom-and-bust economy of the late 1920s, a peak in prosperity is inevitably followed by a trough; and as the financial markets begin to bite, Robert unexpectedly loses his job, ushering in a period of unemployment that lasts for over a year. Gradually the Thomases lose pretty much everything except their furniture, which Katherine is determined to keep. Out goes the house in suburban Primrose Green in favour of a smaller, cheaper place to live, a grim two-roomed flat in a converted house in Holloway, where they scrape by on a diet of cheap kippers and eggs.

Trevelyan is particularly strong on how individuals can be worn down by a change in financial fortunes, gradually sapping their spirit and will to exist. The search for work is utterly soul-destroying for Robert, his days spent walking from one grim factory office to another, only to find he has the wrong sort of experience, insufficient training or no money to invest. Meanwhile, Katherine is becoming increasingly irritable and short-tempered, blaming Robert for his lack of drive and confidence in his abilities. She too joins the search for work (having previously given up her role), and after several humiliating interviews, secures a job in a dreadful private school which she dislikes intensely.

One of the many things that Trevelyan does so effectively in this novel is to shift her focus from the microcosm of the couple’s lives to the macro view of world events at the flick of a switch. By interspersing the core story with excerpts from real-life news headlines and radio bulletins, Trevelyan effectively situates the narrative in the broader context of historical developments.

The League Financial Committee sits at Geneva: financial plight of Europe: six million unemployed are registered in Germany, three hundred thousand in France and two million in Great Britain. In the West End plays are coming off after unprecedentedly short runs; managers play for safety in revivals of Shaw and Shakespeare. Shipyards are standing silent around the coasts of Great Britain. (p. 181)

In the hands of a lesser writer, this might feel jarring or contrived, but Trevelyan executes this with genuine skill, effortlessly moving from one level to another – sometimes in the same sentence or paragraph – with admirable ease. The novel is written in an experimental, modernist style, very much in keeping with the story’s progressive themes.

In time, Robert finally gets another job – ironically with essentially the same company as before but in a different guise – enabling Katherine to give up work again. While Robert seems irredeemably damaged by his period in the wilderness, Katherine is desperate to keep up with her contemporaries, eager to acquire new furniture, furnishings and fashions – the latest must-have accessories for a comfortable, middle-class life in their Bayswater flat.  

Everything was owing to her, because she had lived for a horrible year at Holloway, and because she’d had a horrible time ever since she married Robert, and because before that… We ought to have some decent modern furniture. We ought to have a black carpet and chromium furniture and long curtains of oiled silk. It would look awful in those little rooms. We ought to have a better flat. (p. 237)

Perhaps the novel’s lasting message concerns the capitalist system itself, a vast, all-consuming machine driven forward by the unrelenting pace of technological change. With new scientific and engineering developments emerging by the day, Trevelyan is remarkably prescient in capturing consumers’ desires for having it all.

Like Kath. Wanting everything. Chained to the things they haven’t got yet, the things other wives have got. Chained to the things they’ve got, the urgency of going one better. Chained to fear: the fear of losing what they’ve got, of not getting more, for not having the right thing, of not doing the right things, of not going to the right places. (pp. 240–241)

Moreover, she nails the impact of the consumerist society on individual people like Robert, a mere cog in an insatiable machine, in danger of being crushed and destroyed by the unstoppable march of progress and our insatiable desires for bigger and better things.  

Each, whether he sits in an office or stands in a shop or runs with papers in the street or unloads food at the dock or carts it or sells it or buys it or eats it, or goes to the pictures or the dogs, or presses a lift button or punches a bell or screws a nut on each of an infinite series of identical objects, a centre of countless concentric circles spreading out and out, a cog on the circumference of countless intersecting, interlocking wheels. All the wheels turning and grinding and gathering speed: one vast, intricate machine, speeding up, quicker, and quicker, running on man-power, running with loudening roar and grind through space to nothing. (p. 277)

All in all, this is a tremendous novel, full of depth and ideas, many of which remain highly relevant today. Kudos to Brad at Recovered Books for bringing it back into print; I can’t wait to see what he chooses to reissue next. (My thanks to the publishers for kindly providing a review copy.)