George Blake (1893–1961) was a Scottish journalist, literary editor and novelist. His The Shipbuilders (1935) is considered a significant and influential effort to write about the Scottish industrial working class. "At a time when the idea of myth was current in the Scottish literary world and other writers were forging theirs out of the facts and spirit of rural life, Blake took the iron and grease and the pride of the skilled worker to create one for industrial Scotland." As a literary critic, he wrote a noted work against the Kailyard school of Scottish fiction; and is taken to have formulated a broad-based thesis as cultural critic of the "kailyard" representing the "same ongoing movement in Scottish culture" that leads to "a cheapening, evasive, stereotyped view of Scottish life." He was well known as a BBC radio broadcaster by the 1930s. Early life He was born in Greenock, the son of Matthew Blake, machinery manufacturer, and his wife Ursula Scott McCulloch. He was educated at Greenock Academy and Glasgow University. He then trained as a solicitor. During World War I he served in the British Army and was wounded during the Gallipoli Campaign. After the war Blake worked at the Glasgow Evening News, where Neil Munro was editor from 1918. At this period he had contact with Red Clydeside through his dramatic works, sitting on the council of the Scottish National Players. As a playwright, he came under the influence of Andrew P. Wilson. London journalist Blake moved to London where he stayed from 1924 to 1932. There he was an editor of John O'London's Weekly, replacing Sidney Dark as subeditor and writing a number of columns, to 1928; and then edited the Strand Magazine. The Porpoise Press and Faber & Faber The Porpoise Press, in existence from 1922 to 1939, was founded in Edinburgh by Roderick Watson Kerr and George Malcolm Thomson. Blake had contact with Thomson from 1923, when the Press published his one-act play The Mother. Thomson's 1927 book Caledonia broached the "condition of Scotland" question that preoccupied Blake and other Scottish intellectuals into the 1930s. Late in 1929, Blake was introduced to Geoffrey Faber, by Frank Vigor Morley. He became in 1930 a director of Faber & Faber, playing a role in the Porpoise Press: Faber & Faber effectively took it over, through interest in Scottish national literature. Morning Tide (1931), a novel by Neil Gunn,