Recently, a Sunday newspaper took advantage of the 75th anniversary of the publication of JB Priestley’s English Journey by commissioning an article on Englishness from the perspective of Bradford, where Priestley was born and raised.

The article concluded that Englishness was an expression of behaviour rather than ideas or ideals. Priestley’s English Journey, splendidly republished by Great Northern Books, is rich with observations about the peculiarities of human behaviour.

As historian Lee Hanson says in his introductory essay, some people read English Journey as a sequel to Priestley’s 1929 best-selling novel The Good Companions. It is not simply a social report on economic conditions during the Depression; that accolade belongs to George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier, published in 1937.

Being a playwright, novelist and essayist helped Priestley enormously. Writer Beryl Bainbridge, who retraced Priestley’s journey for television in 1984, says writers are more to be trusted than historians and journalists: “…writers tend not to be particularly bothered with either causes or hard facts; their preoccupations are not with how or why a certain event took place, but simply how to make the rest of us feel what it was like to live through it. Priestley did this with brilliance and with a raging conviction.”

There have been other rambling chroniclers. Daniel Defoe, from 1724 to 1727, journeyed through the whole island of Great Britain; William Cobbett looked at early industrial England from the back of a horse; and Bill Bryson, whose Notes From A Small Island was less than flattering about the state of Priestley’s hometown.

In the new edition of English Journey, illustrated with lots of photographs – old and new – Roy Hattersley says: “Love of country is not the easiest of emotions to express in print. Affection too easily becomes – or sounds like – sentimentality or, worse still, cultural chauvanism.

“But Priestley wrote about his devotion to England without bringing a blush to the most fastidious cheek. That was because he gladly admitted to a plain man’s passion.

“‘I would rather spend a holiday in Tuscany than in the Black Country,’ he confesses. ‘But if I were compelled to choose between living in West Bromich and Florence, I should make straight for West Bromich’. “Neither Rupert Brooke nor Robert Browning ever made such extravagant claims about the thrall in which England held them. English Journey is a love story that races along with humour and then makes the reader pause to ponder its insights…”

The pages on Bradford consist of six episodes. In the first, Preistley sketches the rise and decline of Bradford as the wool capital of the world, famously noting the paradoxical nature of the place: a determinedly Yorkshire provincial backwater but cosmopolitan, with suburbs reaching as far as Frankfurt and Leipzig.

The First World War, in which he was physically wounded and psychologically scarred, put paid to Bradford’s trading supremacy. Priestley feared that the war had also made Bradford “more provincial than it was 20 years ago”.

“But so, I suspect, is the whole world,” he adds. “It must be when there is less and less tolerance in it, less free speech, less liberalism. Behind all the new movements of this age, nationalistic, fascistic, communistic, has been more than a suspicion of the mental attitude of a gang of small town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger.”

The next four chapters deal with a reunion of Army comrades, a Sunday trip out into the surrounding countryside, a wet Sunday evening in the city centre, and a return to his former home at 33 Saltburn Place, from where he visited Thornton, Halifax and Haworth.

Preistley contemplates some of the changes to Bradford, most notably its theatrical reputation.

“While the professional theatre regards it as a very poor place indeed, hardly on the map any longer, actually it is theatrically-minded to a most fantastic and droll degree. It is a city crowded with amateur actors. I have never known anything like it. Operas, musical comedies, farces, dramas, the place hums with them.”

Arguably, modern Bradford, for all its good intentions, has come to be associated more with farce. Humour and courage, he says, are two notable West Riding qualities; but Bradford has a third: “…we never pay compliments in Bradford. We are, as we readily admit, not good at expressing our feelings, which only means, of course, that we are bad at expressing our pleasant feelings, for I have noticed that we give tongue to the other kind with great frequency and force… “So – well, I’m off. Behave thi’sen, lad!”

  • English Journey, by J B Priestley is published by Great Northern Books, priced £25.