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The Pole and Whistle
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Published January 1, 1966
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September 22, 2024
It is impossible for me to disengage my love of this novel from the fact that it was published in 1966 and is unlike any other early/pre Stonewall 'gay' fiction (completely inaccurate term to use but what else, now, can one use?). There is no attempt to explain, justify, or apologize for anything to do with homosexuality or being queer (the only words people would have used back then which are not now utterly insulting). This is a novel about falling in love, one night John Anselm leaving his dull job late at night in a dull provincial English town stops in a pub, The Pole and Whistle'. Once inside he gradually has a revelation:
“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve...”
and from that moment he decides he is not going to try and supress what he knows about himself, that he needs the love, affection and sex (be clear while explicit in its descriptions this novel is completely open about men having and needing to have sex with each other). In its way John Anselm's revelation in that seedy pub on wet winters night is as beautiful as that of Charles Ryder in 'Brideshead Revisited':
'...I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden...'
The man John Anselm falls in love with is as impossible as that of Charles Ryder but for different reasons. The result is the same:
'A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought...open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.' (Brideshead Revisited).
For John Anselm it was the door to The Pole and Whistle that is closed forever both practically and metaphorically. You can't go back, the past is a different country even if it is a case of months not years.
If you have the feeling I am being deliberately obscure and opaque in my discussion of the novel it is because I am. I don't like 'spoilers' but as almost everyone reading this review will not have read the novel I don't want to give anything away. It is too short and perfect a little novel, 114 pages, to do that. At the end of this review there is a full description along with information about the author taken from the Neglected Book page (https://neglectedbooks.com/ a site well worth knowing if you love good books).
It is fascinating to read this novel because it is a 'gay' version of the post war 1950s/60s 'kitchen sink' English working class authors from provincial, non metropolitan, non public school backgrounds such as John Braine ('A Room at the Top') or Alan Sillatoe ('The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner'). In terms of English 'gay' writing there wouldn't be a novel like until authors like Tom Wakefield ('Mates') were published Gay Men's Press in the 1980s. 'The Pole and Whistle' in its matter of fact handling of John Anselm's story could have been published in the 1980s and would have been as relevant. Its frank openness contrasts strongly with novels published in the UK and USA even forty years later. That this novel was only published in paperback by a small publisher so attracted no reviews or coverage was a shame. It will stand as a rebuke to mainstream UK publishing for their insdular narrow mindedness.
'The Pole and Whistle' is also a reminder of an England that remained untouched by what was going on in London. The year this novel was published, 1966, was the year Time magazine ran its famous 'Swinging London' cover story. Not only is there nothing 'swinging' in the fictional town it is set in and those types of places probably didn't start swinging until New Romantics came along in the early 1980s. The worlds of this novel both the suffocating provincial town and of 'gay' life were on the verge changing irrevocably. Traditions like first 'first-footing' on new year's eve were gone in a few years, like the Pole and Whistle's mixture of working class queers and gangsters as the only mileu were queers could meet and find each other.
This is a wonderful novel and I could go on, and on, but discover it for yourself. I strongly urge you to read the Neglected Book page information quoted below:
'“A frank novel of today’s most controversial subject.” The tag line on the cover of the New English Library edition of George Moor’s novel The Pole and Whistle is accompanied by a photo of two men having a chat in the pub over a pint and a fag. It may have been the publisher’s way of achieving some plausible deniability, given that the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults, had yet to be passed. The subject could just as well be alcoholism, perhaps.
'The contrast between the tentative tone of the book’s cover and the candour of George Moor’s writing, however, is striking. In fact, Moor’s ability to create a situation which is simultaneously utterly mundane and life-destroyingly risky is part of what makes The Pole and Whistle a fascinating work for its time.
'John Anselm, in his mid-twenties, is working for his uncle in a chick hatchery in a large city in Lancashire (Moor was raised in Liverpool). His work is hard, tedious, and full of long days. One evening, dreading the long walk back to his apartment, he stops at the Pole and Whistle, a run-down pub just off the main square. There, as he quietly sips a pint, and then another and another, standing in the narrow “parlour,” he notices the young men in tight blue jeans going in and out through the door marked, “Singing Room.” The carefree spirit of the teenagers, the blare of the jukebox, and another pint or two releases John’s inhibitions. “Like a chameleon I changed my emotional colour with each succeeding song. I yearned for ‘Johnny’ and I flamed for ‘Norman.'”
'Then, after a visit to the gents’, he encounters a sharp-dressed man in his late twenties who offers him a pint. “You were on ‘D’ landing in Stafford, weren’t you?” he asks. Frank Jeffers, just out of prison, is full of cock and confidence and not the least bit reserved about his interest in John. The two wander out and into a park, where Frank pushes John up against a tree and kisses him. “I’ll do you tomorrow night,” he tells John. “I’ll wait for you in the Pole and Whistle.”
'“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve,” John tells us. He has accustomed himself to loneliness as a way of avoiding the reality of his sexual orientation. “I could never be liberated from an inner watchfulness. To myself I disclosed only a slumbering awareness of what I was.” To be honest about his desire would ruin everything in his life: his job, the love of his parents, the acceptance of his community, the right to live freely outside prison.
'But Frank wipes that all away with the openness of his physical and emotional attraction to John. Soon their nights all start in the Pole and Whistle and end in John’s bed, although this still requires some subterfuge to avoid the patrolling bobby and suspicions of John’s landlady. Frank is even so comfortable with their relationship that he takes John home to meet his mum, almost to show off that he can make friends with someone of a better class.
'For as genuine as Frank and John’s love for each other is, the fact that they are nightly committing an illegal act is not their only problem. Frank is a criminal, a petty burglar. He can never hold onto an honest job for more than a week or two and he is constantly trying to devise another easy theft. One night, Frank goes missing and stays missing for weeks. When he finally shows up at John’s flat, he confesses that he’d tried to pull a job in a nearby town, been caught, and spent some time in jail. Before long, he attempts another robbery, which also fails, and lands him in prison with a five year sentence.
'If John is hoping for a discreet and (relatively) safe long-term relationship, Frank is the last man he should be involved with. Well, next to last, perhaps, after Beggy, one of Frank’s thuggish friends, who takes advantage of the absence of John’s protector to organise a session where John is gang-raped and tortured.
'Feeling his world near collapse, John retains enough of a self-preservation instinct to grab a thin, implausible thread and save himself by taking a job in Japan. In a rare moment alone with his mother, he comes out to her. “I knew,” she tells him. “Only, you had so much control I thought it would be for ever.” “It is better to be dead than live without love,” he responds, adding, “The love of a man” to be clear. Their conversation ends in the most British way imaginable: “‘I accept you as you are,’ said my mother. ‘I’ll make some tea'” John replies.
'Although The Pole and Whistle was a potentially controversial book when it was published (the New English Library lacked the visibility or marketing clout to attract any serious attention), it’s actually a quite ordinary and calmly-told story about inappropriate loves and learning to accept them. John loves Frank and knows they can never be together. John’s sister is involved with a married man and she and her parents accept this as a long-term relationship. John’s mother may regret the consequences of her son’s sexuality but accepts it as a fact. No one gets everything he wants and still life goes on.
'The Pole and Whistle was only ever published as a paperback original and copies are extremely scarce today. But it is recognised as one of the few and one of the best English novels to deal openly with homosexual love published before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. Dewey Wayne Gunn included it in his Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881-1981.
'It’s likely that the book had some autobiographical elements. After attending Cambridge, where he won several awards for his poetry, George Moor returned north, teaching in Lancashire and Wales before he moved to Japan in the early 1960s. There, he worked as an English teacher and translator. He later taught in Papua New Guinea and Iran, returning to England after the fall of the Shah. He won an award for his novella Fox Gold not long after that. This was collected with his stories “Nightingale Island” and “Bowl of Roses” and published by John Calder in 1978. He also had two novellas published in New Writing and Writers in the 1970s. Moor was a frequent entrant in New Statesman parody and satire competitions in the 1980s. He died in Burnley in 1992.'
P.S. some of the spelling in the above has been transferred by my spell check into UK spelling. I believe the Neglected Book page is USA based.
“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve...”
and from that moment he decides he is not going to try and supress what he knows about himself, that he needs the love, affection and sex (be clear while explicit in its descriptions this novel is completely open about men having and needing to have sex with each other). In its way John Anselm's revelation in that seedy pub on wet winters night is as beautiful as that of Charles Ryder in 'Brideshead Revisited':
'...I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden...'
The man John Anselm falls in love with is as impossible as that of Charles Ryder but for different reasons. The result is the same:
'A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought...open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.' (Brideshead Revisited).
For John Anselm it was the door to The Pole and Whistle that is closed forever both practically and metaphorically. You can't go back, the past is a different country even if it is a case of months not years.
If you have the feeling I am being deliberately obscure and opaque in my discussion of the novel it is because I am. I don't like 'spoilers' but as almost everyone reading this review will not have read the novel I don't want to give anything away. It is too short and perfect a little novel, 114 pages, to do that. At the end of this review there is a full description along with information about the author taken from the Neglected Book page (https://neglectedbooks.com/ a site well worth knowing if you love good books).
It is fascinating to read this novel because it is a 'gay' version of the post war 1950s/60s 'kitchen sink' English working class authors from provincial, non metropolitan, non public school backgrounds such as John Braine ('A Room at the Top') or Alan Sillatoe ('The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner'). In terms of English 'gay' writing there wouldn't be a novel like until authors like Tom Wakefield ('Mates') were published Gay Men's Press in the 1980s. 'The Pole and Whistle' in its matter of fact handling of John Anselm's story could have been published in the 1980s and would have been as relevant. Its frank openness contrasts strongly with novels published in the UK and USA even forty years later. That this novel was only published in paperback by a small publisher so attracted no reviews or coverage was a shame. It will stand as a rebuke to mainstream UK publishing for their insdular narrow mindedness.
'The Pole and Whistle' is also a reminder of an England that remained untouched by what was going on in London. The year this novel was published, 1966, was the year Time magazine ran its famous 'Swinging London' cover story. Not only is there nothing 'swinging' in the fictional town it is set in and those types of places probably didn't start swinging until New Romantics came along in the early 1980s. The worlds of this novel both the suffocating provincial town and of 'gay' life were on the verge changing irrevocably. Traditions like first 'first-footing' on new year's eve were gone in a few years, like the Pole and Whistle's mixture of working class queers and gangsters as the only mileu were queers could meet and find each other.
This is a wonderful novel and I could go on, and on, but discover it for yourself. I strongly urge you to read the Neglected Book page information quoted below:
'“A frank novel of today’s most controversial subject.” The tag line on the cover of the New English Library edition of George Moor’s novel The Pole and Whistle is accompanied by a photo of two men having a chat in the pub over a pint and a fag. It may have been the publisher’s way of achieving some plausible deniability, given that the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults, had yet to be passed. The subject could just as well be alcoholism, perhaps.
'The contrast between the tentative tone of the book’s cover and the candour of George Moor’s writing, however, is striking. In fact, Moor’s ability to create a situation which is simultaneously utterly mundane and life-destroyingly risky is part of what makes The Pole and Whistle a fascinating work for its time.
'John Anselm, in his mid-twenties, is working for his uncle in a chick hatchery in a large city in Lancashire (Moor was raised in Liverpool). His work is hard, tedious, and full of long days. One evening, dreading the long walk back to his apartment, he stops at the Pole and Whistle, a run-down pub just off the main square. There, as he quietly sips a pint, and then another and another, standing in the narrow “parlour,” he notices the young men in tight blue jeans going in and out through the door marked, “Singing Room.” The carefree spirit of the teenagers, the blare of the jukebox, and another pint or two releases John’s inhibitions. “Like a chameleon I changed my emotional colour with each succeeding song. I yearned for ‘Johnny’ and I flamed for ‘Norman.'”
'Then, after a visit to the gents’, he encounters a sharp-dressed man in his late twenties who offers him a pint. “You were on ‘D’ landing in Stafford, weren’t you?” he asks. Frank Jeffers, just out of prison, is full of cock and confidence and not the least bit reserved about his interest in John. The two wander out and into a park, where Frank pushes John up against a tree and kisses him. “I’ll do you tomorrow night,” he tells John. “I’ll wait for you in the Pole and Whistle.”
'“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve,” John tells us. He has accustomed himself to loneliness as a way of avoiding the reality of his sexual orientation. “I could never be liberated from an inner watchfulness. To myself I disclosed only a slumbering awareness of what I was.” To be honest about his desire would ruin everything in his life: his job, the love of his parents, the acceptance of his community, the right to live freely outside prison.
'But Frank wipes that all away with the openness of his physical and emotional attraction to John. Soon their nights all start in the Pole and Whistle and end in John’s bed, although this still requires some subterfuge to avoid the patrolling bobby and suspicions of John’s landlady. Frank is even so comfortable with their relationship that he takes John home to meet his mum, almost to show off that he can make friends with someone of a better class.
'For as genuine as Frank and John’s love for each other is, the fact that they are nightly committing an illegal act is not their only problem. Frank is a criminal, a petty burglar. He can never hold onto an honest job for more than a week or two and he is constantly trying to devise another easy theft. One night, Frank goes missing and stays missing for weeks. When he finally shows up at John’s flat, he confesses that he’d tried to pull a job in a nearby town, been caught, and spent some time in jail. Before long, he attempts another robbery, which also fails, and lands him in prison with a five year sentence.
'If John is hoping for a discreet and (relatively) safe long-term relationship, Frank is the last man he should be involved with. Well, next to last, perhaps, after Beggy, one of Frank’s thuggish friends, who takes advantage of the absence of John’s protector to organise a session where John is gang-raped and tortured.
'Feeling his world near collapse, John retains enough of a self-preservation instinct to grab a thin, implausible thread and save himself by taking a job in Japan. In a rare moment alone with his mother, he comes out to her. “I knew,” she tells him. “Only, you had so much control I thought it would be for ever.” “It is better to be dead than live without love,” he responds, adding, “The love of a man” to be clear. Their conversation ends in the most British way imaginable: “‘I accept you as you are,’ said my mother. ‘I’ll make some tea'” John replies.
'Although The Pole and Whistle was a potentially controversial book when it was published (the New English Library lacked the visibility or marketing clout to attract any serious attention), it’s actually a quite ordinary and calmly-told story about inappropriate loves and learning to accept them. John loves Frank and knows they can never be together. John’s sister is involved with a married man and she and her parents accept this as a long-term relationship. John’s mother may regret the consequences of her son’s sexuality but accepts it as a fact. No one gets everything he wants and still life goes on.
'The Pole and Whistle was only ever published as a paperback original and copies are extremely scarce today. But it is recognised as one of the few and one of the best English novels to deal openly with homosexual love published before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. Dewey Wayne Gunn included it in his Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881-1981.
'It’s likely that the book had some autobiographical elements. After attending Cambridge, where he won several awards for his poetry, George Moor returned north, teaching in Lancashire and Wales before he moved to Japan in the early 1960s. There, he worked as an English teacher and translator. He later taught in Papua New Guinea and Iran, returning to England after the fall of the Shah. He won an award for his novella Fox Gold not long after that. This was collected with his stories “Nightingale Island” and “Bowl of Roses” and published by John Calder in 1978. He also had two novellas published in New Writing and Writers in the 1970s. Moor was a frequent entrant in New Statesman parody and satire competitions in the 1980s. He died in Burnley in 1992.'
P.S. some of the spelling in the above has been transferred by my spell check into UK spelling. I believe the Neglected Book page is USA based.
March 29, 2025
Is giving melodramatic Wattpad despite being published in 1966.
2.75 stars because the premise is refreshingly straightforward. So straightforward that it actually reminds me of a pulp/erotic novel from the 1960s that was rewritten to try to be literary. I just wish it was actually written well.
2.75 stars because the premise is refreshingly straightforward. So straightforward that it actually reminds me of a pulp/erotic novel from the 1960s that was rewritten to try to be literary. I just wish it was actually written well.
March 9, 2024
I really enjoyed this book, which is a remarkably straightforward account of a gay relationship, originally published in 1966. It's also a description of the careful and respectable lead's increased exposure to criminality. I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to read it: this is the first time it's been in print for nearly sixty years.
January 7, 2024
I kept seeing advertisements on social media for this short novel which has been reprinted.
It’s only a short book, however it transports you to a time (not too far in the past) when attitudes were far less progressive and it makes you realise how far we have come.
Definitely recommend this, if only for an insight into how life was for some gay men back then.
It’s only a short book, however it transports you to a time (not too far in the past) when attitudes were far less progressive and it makes you realise how far we have come.
Definitely recommend this, if only for an insight into how life was for some gay men back then.
September 9, 2024
“If I were to encounter the full force of society’s contempt and persecution I would need an uncommon spiritual stoicism and an unshaken faith that our love was worth the world.”
This is a book that desperately deserves to have been saved from obscurity.
CW: sexual assault
Written in a time when homosexuality was still a crime, it depicts the bleak existence and the unrelenting disconnect that occurs when you’re not able to exist without fear of being arrested.
Our main character, John, meets someone who he adores from top to bottom, but soon realises that person seems to be addicted to self-destructive petty crime. Neither of them can discuss their relationship with anyone else, or report anything to the police when things start to escalate because it would be self-incriminating. Is this just what being gay is like?
An incredibly written book that captures such an important period of time that, incidentally, is well within living memory.
This is a book that desperately deserves to have been saved from obscurity.
CW: sexual assault
Written in a time when homosexuality was still a crime, it depicts the bleak existence and the unrelenting disconnect that occurs when you’re not able to exist without fear of being arrested.
Our main character, John, meets someone who he adores from top to bottom, but soon realises that person seems to be addicted to self-destructive petty crime. Neither of them can discuss their relationship with anyone else, or report anything to the police when things start to escalate because it would be self-incriminating. Is this just what being gay is like?
An incredibly written book that captures such an important period of time that, incidentally, is well within living memory.
May 4, 2024
I hope I’m not showing my ignorance if I describe this as a gay Kitchen Sink drama, but it felt like the equal of anything else in the genre I’ve read.
A fascinating portrait of a world in transition, highly relatable to anyone who has made questionable choices when under the influence of a brute with cheekbones. The following quote sums it up for me perfectly-
“As I looked at Heenan, whose face was growing nore discoloured and bloated as he dabbed at the blood with a dirty rag, I thought "what babies, what cruel little boys these grown Englishmen are!" But Frank pinched my bottom and I stopped philosophising”
Essential reading.
A fascinating portrait of a world in transition, highly relatable to anyone who has made questionable choices when under the influence of a brute with cheekbones. The following quote sums it up for me perfectly-
“As I looked at Heenan, whose face was growing nore discoloured and bloated as he dabbed at the blood with a dirty rag, I thought "what babies, what cruel little boys these grown Englishmen are!" But Frank pinched my bottom and I stopped philosophising”
Essential reading.
July 1, 2024
Really surprising that a book from 1966 set against the brink of the Sexual Offences Act moral panic presents such a sympathetic (nonetheless frank and, at times, awful) "gay" story, and especially one of northern working class characters. Glad to have been able to read this now that it has been reprinted for the first time since 1967. Will probably be reflecting on this one for a while. Really struck by how candid and mundane everything is in Moor's writing, which again for the subject matter and the time seems quite something.
April 11, 2024
A tragedy that this has been out of print for so long, it should and hopefully will be held in the same reverence as other books of its era.
September 10, 2024
The Pole and Whistle of the title is a public house, ‘up north’ that appears to be a bit of a dive. Frequented by working class men, it is a local’s local!
…. John is in the closet and goes into the pub on the way home where he meets Frank, a ‘butch’ petty criminal. John gets sucked into Frank’s sphere and they become lovers.
The story is about a mundane life lived in the closet in the 1960’s where people are afraid to ‘come out’ because they might get arrested and bring shame on their family who live locally ….. little changed between then and the 1970’s/80’s I seem to recall!
Frank inevitably gets back into trouble which brings its own challenges for John on New Years Eve where he is seen as ‘easy pickings’ for a good time. It is surprising who comes to his rescue …. and I thought the phrase from the services ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ applied to this story too ….
Enjoyable, mainly, and highly evocative of the time, and fear, just before Gay sex between consenting males was legalised in 1967.
A small book that packs a punch - glad it was recommended to our LGBT+ book group!
…. John is in the closet and goes into the pub on the way home where he meets Frank, a ‘butch’ petty criminal. John gets sucked into Frank’s sphere and they become lovers.
The story is about a mundane life lived in the closet in the 1960’s where people are afraid to ‘come out’ because they might get arrested and bring shame on their family who live locally ….. little changed between then and the 1970’s/80’s I seem to recall!
Frank inevitably gets back into trouble which brings its own challenges for John on New Years Eve where he is seen as ‘easy pickings’ for a good time. It is surprising who comes to his rescue …. and I thought the phrase from the services ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ applied to this story too ….
Enjoyable, mainly, and highly evocative of the time, and fear, just before Gay sex between consenting males was legalised in 1967.
A small book that packs a punch - glad it was recommended to our LGBT+ book group!
June 5, 2024
A fantastic lost classic
October 9, 2024
4 stars. I love a "forgotten" queer book and this short novel is definitely one of the more enjoyable I have encountered. Set in England at the time when homosexuality was illegal, but not so hidden for people to be unaware of its existence, The Pole and Whistle tells the story of a young man whose journey of self-acceptance is helped along by falling in love with a local hooligan (truly the most appropriate descriptor for Frank). Despite a melancholy undercurrent, the book is not at its core depressing or hopeless, some moments of beauty and compassion shine through. A lot is packed into 114 pages that must have been intimidating and risky to write in the mid 1960s!
May 4, 2024
This was a fascinating insight into gay relationships in 1960s Britain. I think the book lacked for being very short as the characters could have had more development. Fascinating also to see how little it took for books to be banned in this period.
September 24, 2024
So so good , devoured it ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews