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Despite being the author of stories praised for their ‘distinctiveness’ and Conradian intensity’, the name George Garrett seldom appears in accounts of British writers from the 1930s. His reputation at the time, particularly among influential figures on the Left, was altogether more significant. Sylvia Townsend Warner believed him to be a writer with a ‘serious outlook upon mankind’, while John Lehmann, in a characteristically wide-ranging study of new European writing in 1940, praised his ‘robust’ approach to detailing ‘events in the day to day struggle in which he himself took an active part’. Of course the ‘struggle’ for Garrett meant balancing the necessity of supporting a family with the no less pressing need to write. The demands of the former, as with so many writers from a working-class environment, allied to the difficulty Garrett had finding work after the Second World War because of his being blacklisted as a ‘Communist’, meant that writing had more and more to take a back seat. Which isn't to say that Garrett hadn't always to find other outlets for continuing the struggle. As Jerry Dawson, who first met Garrett in 1937, writes:
In the late thirties G.G. played a big part in the establishment of Merseyside Unity Theatre (or Left Theatre as it was called then). He had some experience in America with the Princetown Group, and in England he had already taken the leading part in a Merseyside production of [Eugene] O'Neill's The Hairy Ape. His first parts in Unity were what might have been expected. He played Agate Keller in Waiting for Lefty and Driscoll in Bury the Dead – and it is unlikely that they were ever played better anywhere, for all George's experience, not only in this country, but even more in the Wobbly movement in the USA went into them. In these years, too, it was not only G.G.'s ability as an actor that was invaluable to such a theatre group but even more what he was as a man. Many of us learned much more about the meaning of socialism from our contact with him than we did from the Left Book Club choices, Left Review or New Writing.
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