William Woodruff had the sort of childhood satirized in the famous Monty Python Yorkshireman sketch. The son of a weaver, he was born on a pallet of straw at the back of the mill and two days later his mother was back at work. Life was extremely tough for the family in 1920's Blackburn—a treat was sheep's head or cow heel soup—and got worse when his father lost his job when the cotton industry started its terminal decline. At 16, William leaves the poverty of Blackburn for London, where he finds no streets paved with gold, but filthy tenements and such squalor only a great city can conceal. He gets a job in an iron foundry and finds lodgings with a beer-swilling landlady and her family—a predatory daughter, and a tattooed madman of a son with whom he has to share his bed. Then, at night school, William discovers his love of learning, which eventually takes him to Plater college, Oxford. As Mosley's blackshirts provoke fighting on the streets, William witnesses the courage of ordinary people in the face of war: a war in which he himself will soon be fighting
William Woodruff (1916-2008)
A world historian who, in his eighties, wrote two volumes of autobiography: The Road to Nab End: A Lancashire Childhood and Beyond Nab End, which became No 1 bestsellers in Britain.
Robert McCrum, writing about The Road to Nab End in the Observer, deemed the work 'A terrific story ... nostalgic, vivid and charming.'
William was born on the floor of a cotton mill in Blackburn, England during the First World War. His mother returned to work two days after his birth. His father was away fighting in France and there were four children to feed. By the time William's father came home to take up his life as a weaver, the Lancashire cotton textile industry was about to collapse. There followed years of hardship, unemployment and social unrest. From the age of six, through the years of the great depression of the early 1930s, William supplemented his family's income by delivering newspapers. He did go to school, but sometimes just to catch up on his sleep. At thirteen his education was considered complete and he became a delivery boy in a grocer's shop. His memoir, The Road to Nab End, is full of the joys of running free in a town full of unforgettable characters, it also conveys the mood of quiet desperation that eventually drove his family to a room in a derelict boarding house at Nab End.
'Once started, it is impossible to put this book down ... the author ... has the historian's gift for bringing to life a particular society at a particular time,' wrote Allan Bullock in the Times Literary Supplement.
At the age of sixteen, when he was a temporary laborer in a brickworks, he ran away to London. For two years he worked as a 'sand rat' in an iron foundry (wet sand was used in the casting process). Discovering a love of learning, he enrolled in night school. In 1936 he went to Oxford University with the aid of a London County Council Scholarship. Beyond Nab End is the totally refreshing and amusing story of the foundry worker's struggles to come to grips with the challenges and opportunities of an Oxford education.
'Hard times had bred resourcefulness and self-reliance. I knew by experience how to take setbacks. I also knew that nobody owed me a living. I was lucky to have been born and reared in Lancashire; doubly lucky to have been born poor,' he wrote.
The Second World War put William's education on hold for six years, he called them the years the locusts ate. He fought in North Africa and the Mediterranean region. His wartime experiences became the basis of his autobiographical novel Vessel of Sadness, a stark, yet poetic account of the battle for Anzio.
'Deceptively simple in language and imagery, frightening and upsetting, frank and unflinching in view, Vessel of Sadness helps us understand the nature of man in a world where there is as yet no alternative to the desolation of war' wrote Martin Blumenson in the preface to the book.
In 1946 William renewed his academic career. His research focused on world history. 'The Balkanization of the social sciences,' he wrote, 'has brought us to a state of ever-growing general ignorance and dehumanized science. Hence, I have stressed the central role, not of methods or theories or systems, but of humanity ... In seeking to understand the totality, complexity and diversity of the past, I shifted my focus from the parts to the whole; from the nation to the world.'
Impact of Western Man: A Study of Europe's Role in the World Economy, 1750-1960 was a seminal work which explored the interrelatedness of continents. In his Concise History of the Modern World: 1500 to the Present he brings together a lifetime's insights into how the present has come to be shaped by the past.
