Scottish Authors > George Blake Novelist 1893-1961

George Blake was born in Greenock on 28th October 1893. He was educated at Greenock Academy, then at Glasgow University where World War I interrupted his legal studies. He was wounded at Gallipoli and wrote The Path to glory about his experiences. After the War he took up journalism, working for the Glasgow Evening News under Neil Munro's editorship, later editing selections of Munro's journalism, The Brave days and The Looker-on. Blake's first novel The Vagabond papers was published in 1922. In 1923, he married Ellie Malcolm Lawson with whom he had two sons and a daughter. In 1924 he became acting editor of John O'London's Weekly and in 1928 moved to Strand Magazine but was unable to restore its fortunes. In 1930 he became a director of the Porpoise Press, an imprint of Faber and Faber. The Porpoise Press was established to stimulate and publish Scottish writing, interest in which was high at the time. Of the writers linked with the Scottish Literary Renaissance Neil Gunn probably had the closest links with Porpoise. Apart from a period in World War II when Blake worked for the Ministry of Information he lived in Scotland from 1932 onwards.

Blake was a familiar figure on the Scottish literary scene. His analysis of the literature of the 1920s and 30s is contained in Barrie and the Kailyard School (1951) and Annals of Scotland 1895-1955: an essay on the twentieth tentury Scottish novel (1956) written to supplement a series of BBC radio broadcasts. Blake reflects on the popular fiction of the Kailyard, acknowledging some merit in it, but seeing in its easy sentimentalism "a betrayal of the realities of Scottish life". Although Blake praises Lewis Grassic Gibbon's description of rural life in Sunset song as "farming with the gloves off", he was convinced that the Kailyard had deflected attention from the life of the urban working class. In order to redress this imbalance he wrote The Shipbuilders (1935) which described the contrasting lives of a shipyard owner and a riveter. Of this programmatic novel Blake later wrote that he pled "guilty to an insufficient knowledge of working class life and to the adoption of a middle-class attitude to the theme of industrial conflict and despair". Blake's vision was not always commensurate with his literary ability but this attempt at a proletarian novel stands as an early example of what has become a fine tradition of Scottish writing in the fiction of Edward Gaitens, Robin Jenkins, William McIlvanney and James Kelman. Blake's fiction is more successful in the "Garvel" novels which are set in Greenock and follow the lives of sailors, ship designers, ship builders and their families. The Westering sun (1946) and The Constant star (1946) demonstrate this love of the Clyde and its ships.

Not all Blake's output was concerned with literary matters. He wrote industrial histories of the British India Shipping Company and Lloyd's Register of Shipping as well as contributing a volume, The Trials of Patrick Carraher, to Notable British trials. He continued to write for the Scottish Daily Express and the Glasgow Herald until the end of his life. He died on 30th August 1961.

Beth Dickson

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