The Diary of a Nobody

is a terrific snob, even though he has little to be snobbish about. As far as we know he has attended no great school, has little cultural awareness (he never visits an art gallery, reads anything other than the Daily Telegraph, or takes any interest in learning) and is only a lowly clerk when we first meet him. Yet he continually shows contempt for those supposedly lower down the social scale and, determined to keep his distance from such people, is mortified when Farmerson, the ironmonger, turns up at the Mansion House Ball (7 May, year 1). ‘I simply looked at him, and said coolly: “I never expected to see you here.” ’ Farmerson then has the gall to know one of the sheriffs. ‘To think that a man who mends our scraper should know any member of our aristocracy!’ In one stroke Pooter displays admirable ignorance: sheriffs are appointed and no more aristocratic than clerks. And in any case, how could a ‘member of the aristocracy’ have gone to school with Farmerson?

Most of all Pooter’s position is defined by his address. If he were Perkupp he might live in sumptuous surroundings such as Kensington or Chelsea. Instead, as one of Perkupp’s underlings, he is obliged to inhabit that most hellish of English locations, suburbia. Pooter’s suburban hell is Holloway with which the Grossmiths were well acquainted, having been raised in Hampstead, two miles west, and having attended the North London Collegiate School in neighbouring Camden Town. Holloway was just one of scores of erstwhile London villages which grew rapidly following industrialization from being an insignificant Middlesex hamlet, separated from London proper by a few miles of farms and fields, to being part of the new London sprawl covered with rows of houses, roads, schools, shops and warehouses. The capital’s population rose accordingly. As David Thorns showed in Suburbia,²⁰ ‘During the second half of the 19th century the population of London’s outer ring grew by approximately fifty per cent in each of the ten-year periods between the census of 1861 and that of 1891.’

A crucial factor in Holloway’s growth was the arrival of the railways, by which Pooter lives, as set out very early in the book. David Thorns in Suburbia claimed that ‘the growth of the suburbs… was almost entirely the product of the improved system of public transport’,²¹ not that improved transport was necessarily beneficial to the area, for as the London Encyclopaedia puts it, ‘the expansion of the railways, the spread of industry and grim housing with no space for parks made Holloway a synonym for a drab existence’.²²

Holloway, mostly residential with only a smattering of light industry such as timber yards and goods depots, was aimed specifically at the white-collar brigade of clerks whose number mushroomed as the financial sector needed to keep the heart of the empire beating grew. By the beginning of the 1890s there were 100,000 clerks in the City.²³ Holloway, though salaried and middle class, had little conspicuous wealth and few facilities. The houses were tightly packed with just enough room for a garden, but care was taken on the design of some of the properties, especially those to the north, near the hills of Highgate, and especially where clerks like Pooter could feel reassured by one or two architectural flourishes. So while Pooter’s home, ‘The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace’, as drawn by Weedon Grossmith, may be a basic square box, the dash of baroque features add the kind of integrity that would gladden Pooter’s heart. There are heavy stone facings on the windows, a cornice with parapet and a half-basement. There is a stuccoed base and a flight of steps up to the porticoed front door (which is never used anyway). The main living area is slightly raised above the street level in the Italian piano nobile style so that Pooter can feel elevated from the common herd.

But where did the Grossmiths set the Laurels? There are countless examples of such houses throughout north London but there is no evidence that the Grossmiths based Pooter’s house on a real address, and there now remains only one such house in Holloway that backs on to the railway – 1 Pemberton Gardens – close to Upper Holloway Station. When Richard West, researching for the Independent an article commemorating the centenary of the book version of The Diary of a Nobody, found this house in 1992, like so many houses of its size and style in north London it had been divided into flats.

Houses designed like the Laurels, ridiculed at the time, are now considered desirable by most home-owners. The locale less so. The suburbs have always been ridiculed as a place of inferior status to the city or countryside. Ben Jonson in Every Man in His Humour (1598) cracked the line: ‘If I can but hold him up to his height… it will do well for a suburbe-humour.’ By Victorian times the rapid growth of new suburbs like Holloway led to fresh attacks. An anonymous contributor to The Architect in 1876 wrote: ‘A modern suburb is a place which is neither one thing nor the other; it has neither the advantage of the town nor the open freedom of the country, but manages to combine in nice equality of proportion the disadvantages of both.’²⁴ Holloway earned a rare literary mention in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, 1865. Reginald Wilfer, a clerk in the drug-house of Chicksey, Veneering and Stobbles (a post that would have suited Pooter) lives in Holloway, ‘a tract of suburban Sahara where tiles and bricks were burnt, bones were boiled, carpets were beat, rubbish was shot, dogs were fought, and dust was heaped by the contractors’.²⁵ Later, Walter Besant in London in the 19th Century, commented on ‘the life of the suburb without any society; no social gatherings or institutions; as dull a life as mankind ever tolerated’.²⁶

In the twentieth century writers have continued the barbs. To E. M. Forster suburbia was ‘a land where nothing had to be striven for and success was indistinguishable from failure’. George Orwell railed against suburbia’s ‘semi- detached torture chambers’ and more recently one character in Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes moans: ‘I come from suburbia… and I don’t ever want to go back. It’s the one place in the world that’s further away than anywhere else.’

Few writers other than John Betjeman have had a good word to say about this huge slice of England. Betjeman continually gave support to suburbia, and in two poems, ‘Thoughts on The Diary of a Nobody’ and ‘Middlesex’ referred to Diary of a Nobody characters. ‘Thoughts on The Diary of a Nobody’ is a paean to the vanishing semi-rural county, nostalgically recalling that when ‘the Pooters walked to Watney Lodge’ the public footpaths ‘used to dodge round elms and oaks to Muswell Hill’, although even here the inclusion of the ‘chuffs of the Great Northern train’ reminds readers of the identity of the culprit responsible for the local changes. In ‘Middlesex’ Betjeman reminiscences about ‘taverns for the bona fide, Cockney Anglers, cockney shooters, Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters’.

But Lupin probably wouldn’t be impressed. To him Holloway, and Brickfield Terrace in particular, is a ‘bit off’. Once he has some money he moves to posh Bayswater just beyond the West End, whereas Pooter celebrates being able to live in Holloway for the rest of his life after Perkupp buys the Laurels’ freehold and presents it to him. Yet it is most likely Lupin who makes the wiser decision; Pooter should have been forewarned by the arrival of the loutish Griffin boys next door. A decade after the Diary was written the outwardly respectable Dr Crippen poisoned his wife in a house on Hilldrop Crescent only a half a mile south. Weedon Grossmith, for one, was well aware of the changes in Holloway in his lifetime. He wrote in his autobiography, From Studio to Stage,²⁷ in 1913 about fishing in the New River less than a mile east of Pooterland at ‘a place with bean fields all around, but all built over 25 years ago’ [i.e, around the time the Diary first appeared in Punch].

In the twentieth century Holloway continued to be developed, so that now almost no parkland or greenery, let alone a bean field, remains, and even the New River has been culverted as it passes near Holloway. The area is also no longer classed as suburban, but inner-city. Of course suburbia is continually on the move, as cities develop. In Twelfth Night Shakespeare wrote: ‘In the south suburbs, at the Elephant it is best to lodge.’ The Elephant (Elephant & Castle) would not have been classed as suburban even by the time The Diary of a Nobody was written. Early in the twentieth century Pooterland moved to what are now termed the ‘leafy suburbs’ – Hillingdon, Hatch End or Havering-atte-Bower – places which make Pooter’s Holloway look like havens of intellectual debate in comparison.²⁸ Pooter’s suburban idyll has given way to a land of congested trunk roads, run- down housing and urban blight, brought about largely by the presence of the Holloway Road (better known as the A1), a traditional exit route from London but which became one of the busiest roads in London.

By the time of Joe Orton’s mid-1960s journal, significantly entitled Diary of a Somebody, Holloway, in one of its few literary mentions, is merely the setting for the dark public toilets where Orton indulges in homosexual encounters. Shortly before Orton wrote his diary, in 1959, Punch published some joke predictions. The most ridiculous was thought to be the one