Homage to A. B. Roger

Woodruff, you have not come to Oxford to take examinations, you have come to learn. The whole purpose of Oxford is learning.

Buoyed up by the instant success of the first volume of his autobiography, William Woodruff and his English publishers have understandably decided to cash in on the Nab End brand in this, the second. As many readers will remember, The Road to Nab End – about an unusually run-down, and miserably poor neighbourhood in Blackburn – was immediately recognised as a classic account of working-class family life between the wars in what was then a Lancashire cotton town. The author had been born in 1916. The first volume took his story down to 1933. It left him in the cab of a friendly lorry-driver, being driven south from Lancashire into Cheshire and heading for London.

The second starts in the cab with the same friendly lorry-driver, on the same journey south and with ‘Tha’s started to shave I hope,’ addressed by the driver to the author. I will come back to that journey shortly. But first I must do a ‘fast forward’ not to the end of this volume but to what happened to the author after it. Enough to say that he has become a distinguished academic historian, and has held a number of professorships, mainly in America. Now 86, he is retired and lives near Florida University. It appointed him to his final chair in 1966. Not counting the two Nab End volumes, the blurb says that he has written ‘over ten highly acclaimed books’, mostly of academic history.

Back to the friendly truck-driver’s cab. The author was decanted from it somewhere in Hendon one Friday morning in 1933:

‘Good luck young’un,’ Mr Bundle said