The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State

Worse was to come. In 1929 the American stock market collapsed, bringing in its wake the deepest recession the modern world has known. Its length was not matched in Britain until the early 1990s when the very welfare state created in reaction to the 1930s helped mitigate the effects. In the early 1930s, Keynes had yet to ride to the rescue on the white charger of his new economics. He was still developing his theories: indeed, the jibe at the time (which with the name changed can still be used today) was that ‘where five economists are gathered together there will be six opinions and two of them will be held by Keynes’. Cutting the soaring expenditure on the unemployed to defend the gold standard became the sole touchstone of British economic policy. It smashed the Labour Government in 1931. Ramsay MacDonald was left as Prime Minister of a new National Government, but effectively a prisoner of the Tories, to carry out the blood-letting of ‘severe surgical operations’ on Britain’s economy.46 Insurance benefits were cut, and those who had exhausted their benefit or lacked sufficient contributions to qualify were transferred to the Public Assistance Committees of local authorities, who in 1929 had replaced the Poor Law guardians. The committees were empowered to enforce a stringent household means-test. As Derek Fraser put it:

The means test, like the workhouse before it, was destined to leave an indelible mark on popular culture. The means test of the early 1930s was a family one which involved a household assessment of need, taking into account the income of all its members, be it the few shillings pension of the aged parent, or the coppers earned on the son’s paper round. Its inquisitorial tone produced resentment and frustration among applicants and heightened family tension, already aggravated by the loss of patriarchal dignity and discipline consequent upon unemployment itself.

In effect it put the unemployed ‘right back on the Poor Law (though not in name) which, locally administered, exhibited wide regional variations in scale and conditions of benefit. Injustice only added to the demoralisation.’47 A father whose son or daughter found work could see his benefit ended. George Orwell recorded it as ‘an encouragement to tittle-tattle and the informer’. A word from a jealous neighbour spotting a new coat or pair of shoes could bring the means-test men round demanding to know where the money had come from. Its effects became seared into the national soul.

In 1934 responsibility for the means-test and its attendant benefits was removed from local authorities and placed in the hands of a national Unemployment Assistance Board which at least applied rather more consistent rules. Freed of their direct financial responsibility for the unemployed, local authorities found in the late 1930s that their Poor Law responsibilities for children, the sick, the elderly, widows and deserted wives began, in Fraser’s words, ‘to mellow’. A 1937 report from Political and Economic Planning, an early independent research organisation and think-tank, records them slowly evolving into something faintly recognisable as the social services departments to come: ‘Instead of the grim Poor Law of the nineteenth century with its rigorous insistence on the principle of “less eligibility” and the workhouse test we have a liberal and constructive service supplementing the other social services, filling in gaps and dealing with human need in the round in a way which no specialist service could ever be expected to do.’48 Such a picture, according to Sir George Godber, then a medical officer with the Ministry of Health, remained very much that of the best. ‘Some of the services, particularly the accommodation for “wayfarers”, could be grim indeed when I was inspecting them in 1939.’49

Unemployment, as Fraser says, had become ‘the central issue of the inter-war years. Its malignant canker had poisoned millions of homes; it had blighted whole industrial regions; it had disinherited a generation; and it had laid low an elected Government.’ The Pathé News images of the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 are the most potent symbol of the times. Two hundred men, selected from hundreds of volunteers among the 8000 made redundant after the Tyne shipyard and its linked industries closed, marched to London and on Parliament led by their MP ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson (whom we will meet again). Their cheerful discipline washed through with despair still comes through the flickering black and white film. In the short term they received and achieved nothing – indeed, on their return they learned their dole had been cut; as the Unemployment Assistance Board explained, while on the march they would not have been available for work had any turned up.50

Yet unemployment was far from touching everybody equally. While it reached 67 per cent in Jarrow, it was a mere 3 per cent in High Wycombe, and 7 per cent in London’s Deptford.51 Britain’s first great twentieth-century experience of mass unemployment was as regional as its return was to be in the recession of the early to mid-1980s. As in the eighties – though not the nineties – it was heavy engineering, coal, steel, and shipbuilding that were razed by foreign competition. The twenties and thirties added to that the dramatic decline of King Cotton in Lancashire and the slower decline of Yorkshire wool: the world was discovering that it wanted fewer of the ‘millions of yards of calico and thousands of steam engines’52 that Britain had previously provided. So it was chiefly the north of England, Scotland and Wales that suffered.

None the less, other parts of the country and the middle classes were not entirely immune. In 1934 it was estimated that 300,000 clerks, office managers, engineers, chemists and the like were out of work, white-collar workers whose earnings were too high to qualify for the state insurance schemes and who thus did not appear in the general statistics.53 In 1936, when the worst was over, Fowey in Cornwall, Ross on Wye, and Keswick in the Lake District featured alongside Wigan, Hartlepool and Glasgow as priority places for official contracts because their adult unemployment had run at above 25 per cent in the previous year. But it remains true that even at the absolute nadir of the slump, more than three-quarters of the workforce was still working. And overall – again a pre-echo of the eighties – those in work enjoyed real, rising standards of living over the two decades before World War II. In fact the thirties was to be the last decade for half a century when it could fairly be said that the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.

The 1930s not only saw George Orwell chronicle the plight of lower England in The Road to Wigan Pier, it also saw J. B. Priestley’s English Journey. The novelist and critic travelled from Southampton to Newcastle by way of most points in between and back to London. He found three Englands. There was ‘Old England’ of the cathedrals, the colleges and the Cotswolds, ‘a luxury country’ that ‘has long since ceased to earn its own living’. Then there was the nineteenth-century England: ‘the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways’ with ‘thousands of rows of little houses all alike’, ‘detached villas with monkey trees’, ‘mill chimneys, slums, fried-fish shops’ and ‘good-class draper’s and confectioner’s’ – all existing in ‘a cynically devastated countryside’ itself dotted with ‘sooty dismal little towns and still sootier grim fortress-like cities’. It was an area he described as ‘the larger part of the Midlands and the North’ but ‘existing everywhere’. This England, Priestley judged, ‘is not being added to and has no new life poured into it. To the more fortunate people it was not a bad England at all, very solid and comfortable.’54 But this England also contained the England of the dole, one that looked as if it had ‘devoted a hundred years of its life to keeping gigantic sooty pigs. And the people who were choked by the reek of sties did not get the bacon.’

It was this England that also contained Hebburn and Jarrow, its ironworks derelict and its shipyards nearly so when Priestley visited in 1933, three years before the march. He pronounced the town quite simply ‘dead’.

Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual, penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a distant civilization … would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was now being punished. He would never believe us if we told him that in theory this town was as good as any other and that its inhabitants were not criminals but citizens with votes.55

Writing nine years before Beveridge, in an unconscious premonition of things to come and using the same capital letters, Priestley railed: ‘If Germans had been threatening these towns instead of Want, Diseases, Hopelessness, Misery, something would have been done, and done quickly.’56

Priestley also found a third England – and not one which appealed much to his fastidious taste. That was ‘the new post [First World] war England … the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motorcoaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarettes and coupons.’57

It was also, he might have added, the England of the middle-class estates of twenties semis that were just starting to explode into the thirties suburban private house building boom, the England of Beckenham and Bromley and of Metroland, the rise of the clerk and the demise of the servant, the heyday of ribbon development, of the Great West Road, the Art Deco of the Firestone and Hoover factories, the days of ‘glass and white tiles and chromium plate’.58 This England was a country of which a large section had prospered despite the celestial emperor’s view of Jarrow.

But all three of these Englands, along with the rest of the United Kingdom, went again to war in 1939. And it was war which merged them closer into one.

As if to underline that not all social progress halted in the 1930s, the school leaving age had been due to rise to from fourteen to fifteen on 1 September 1939. But in the early hours of that morning German tanks rolled into Poland and the mass evacuation of schoolchildren and mothers from Britain’s cities, planned since the time of Munich, began.

In three days – war was finally declared on Sunday the third – an incredible one and a half million people were decanted into the countryside, including 827,000 schoolchildren, 524,000 mothers and their children under school age, and 103,000 teachers and helpers.59 It was the start of the massive movements of population that were to stretch and bend the old class system as never before, one of the effects of a war which impinged on the civilian population in a way that 1914–18, for all its carnage on foreign fields, never did. While it slew the flower of a generation, from whole families of yeomen recorded on village war memorials to the gilded contemporaries of Robert Graves, the First World War did not throw people together as the Second did. It did not force one half of England to see how the other half lived. The Second World War, Paul Addison says, in The Road to 1945:

hurled together people of different social backgrounds in a series of massive upheavals caused by bombing, conscription, and the migration of workers to new centres of war industry. Over the war as a whole there were 60 million changes of address in a civilian population of about 38 million, while more than five million men and women were drawn into the three armed services. There were one and a half millions in the Home Guard, and about the same number in the various Civil Defence services, by the end of 1940. More than one and a quarter million evacuees, over half of them children, were billeted on families in the reception areas in February 1941. The number of women working in industry increased by 1,800,000 between 1939 and 1943. In air-raid shelters, air raid warden’s posts, Home Guard units, and overcrowded trains where soldiers barged into first class compartments, class barriers could no longer be sustained. ‘It is quite common now,’ Lord Marley was reported as saying in 1941, ‘to see Englishmen speaking to each other in public, although they have never been formally introduced.’60

Many of the first evacuees soon returned home. But the impact of incomers who were mostly (though not entirely) from poorer inner city areas on the more comfortable countryside was remarkable. Ben Wicks in No Time to Wave Goodbye, his remarkable compilation of evacuees’ experiences (he was one himself), records children brought up in the days before mass television who, having watched cows being milked, were convinced they were being offered urine to drink; some who had never slept in a bed and preferred the floor; while Richard Titmuss told of the child who said to his visiting mother: ‘They call this spring, Mum, and they have one down here every year.’61

Mabel Louvain Manning took in two boys.

The first morning I was awoken about 6 am by such a noise, it was the boys fighting in bed! One had a bloody nose which had splattered all over the wall. I cleaned them up and got them ready for breakfast. They had no idea how to use a knife and fork and picked up a fried egg by their fingers. They didn’t like stew or pies, only beans in tomato, which they wanted to eat out of a tin, and chips.

When they came to me, one was wearing wellingtons, the other plimsolls, and no coats or extra shirts or underclothes. I cadged what I could from friends, and then decided to write to the parents for more. The mother wrote back saying she would have to get their suits and shoes out of pawn, which she did, and sent them down.62

There were horrified tales of nits, lice and scabies, taken up by a press amazed by stories of children sewn into their only clothes. In Dorset a couple took in a mother and three children.

It was very hot weather when war broke out, but those older children went all round my house urinating against the walls.

Although we had two toilets, one being outside with very easy access for them, they never used them. Although my husband and I told the children and the mother off about this filthy habit they took absolutely no notice and our house stank to high heaven.63

A more revealing tale of life in the under-toileted Glasgow slums came from the Scottish mother who told her six-year-old: ‘You dirty thing, messing up the lady’s carpet. Go and do it in the corner.’ The evacuation produced happier humour, too. Jean Chartrand recorded two boys billeted on a cousin’s farm asking to help with the milking. ‘One boy had put the pail under the cow’s udders and was holding it there while the other boy was the using the cow’s tail like a pump-handle. They were both very disgusted when there was no milk forthcoming.’64

Some made lifelong friends from the experience, other children found themselves abused and exploited, emotionally, physically and even sexually, and never recovered. The lesser shocks were not all one way. Eileen Stoddart recalled coming from a ‘very respectable home. Some of the girls ended up in tiny cottages, three to a single bed, with bedbugs which they had never seen before in their lives. I wasn’t allowed to wash my hair for four months since we had to bring the water up the hill from the village pump.’65 The overall impact of the whole experience, however, is summed up by one child’s memory of her family taking in three sisters. ‘We had never seen the like before and seriously learned how the other half lived.’66 Or as Rab Butler, the creator of the 1944 Education Act, was to put it: ‘It was realized with deepening awareness that the “two nations” still existed in England a century after Disraeli had used the phrase.’67

By the time Beveridge was appointed, the war had progressed through Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain to the Battle of the Atlantic as the convoys from America worked to save Britain from potential starvation and defeat. Food was rationed, with the Board of Trade, not the Labour Government of 1945, coining the phrase ‘fair shares for all’ as clothes rationing came in. And there had been the Blitz. By June 1941, the month Beveridge took on his task, more than two million homes had been damaged or destroyed by bombing, 60 per cent of them in London.68 Bombs respected neither class nor income. The Luftwaffe may have effected a slum clearance programme around Britain’s docks that it would take years of post-war housing programmes to equal, but they also took out homes in Mayfair and Belgravia and the comfortable suburbs of towns when targets were missed or bombs jettisoned on the way home. Not just cities and big towns up and down the land were hit, but eastern and southern coastal areas in ‘tip and run’ raids. Some 100,000 people had been killed or seriously injured and the Emergency Medical Service was already running an embryo national health service by providing free treatment to ‘casualties’ – a definition which included evacuees.

Civil defence brought social classes together as much as the armed forces. My mother, a slip of an eighteen-year-old who worked as an ambulance attendant when the bombs began to fall on Bristol, recalls giggling with her middle-class friends at the shy approaches of dustmen too old and too young for call-up when they first sat at opposite ends of the canteen waiting for the siren’s call. ‘We just didn’t know people like them, or they people like us,’ she recalls. ‘We had never heard such language. But when you saw the risks they’d take to pull people out of bombed buildings, there couldn’t any longer be any sense of them and us.’

Claims of social cohesion can be overdone. The prison population almost doubled to more than 21,000, much of the increase owing to sentences for looting. Anélitestill lived better than the rest and black markets flourished. Nicholas Davenport, the highly successful and socialist City journalist wrote in the spring of 1941: ‘Not a week passes without the Ministry of Food prosecuting hundreds of food offenders and the Board of Trade dozens of offenders against clothes rationing and quota laws.’69 But that same rationing was to change dramatically the nutritional status of the British people during the course of the war. Richard Titmuss, who told the official tale of the war’s social effects, recorded that ‘the families in that third of the population of Britain who in 1938 were chronically undernourished had their first adequate diet in 1940 and 1941 … [after which] the incidence of deficiency diseases, and notably infant mortality, dropped dramatically.’70 It became known early on that the Royal Family too had ration books and ate Spam, while the King posed for a publicity photograph as he joined a ‘Pig Club’ – just about anything that was left over could be used for pig swill and converted into pork and bacon.71 Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, found windows blown out in Buckingham Palace and a black line painted round the inside of the bath, above which it was not to be filled. The Queen’s remark after Buckingham Palace was hit: ‘It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face’,72 may sound sentimental, even patronising. It contained, however, a truth.

The switch to a war economy had also virtually eliminated unemployment. By the summer of 1941 it was down to 200,000 and falling. In 1943, soon after Beveridge reported, it had fallen to a mere 62,000, most of whom were in transit from one job to another.73 Not only that, wages were rising. And Keynes, the uncertain prophet in the wilderness of the early 1930s, had now become the fount of Keynesianism. He had published his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 and had been in the United States where he had seen in Roosevelt’s New Deal the effects of ideas similar to those he advanced. Since June 1940 he had been inside the British Treasury, his influence plain on the 1941 Budget. While there were battles still to be fought before Keynesian economics ruled, the results of the government’s ever-growing economic intervention appeared to be demonstrating that his theories worked on this side of the Atlantic, too.

Things plainly were changing. The Times had gone pink, or so it seemed to right-wing Tories. In October 1941, Geoffrey Dawson, who had done so much to scar the paper’s reputation by his support for appeasement, was replaced by Robin Barrington-Ward, a Balliol contemporary of Beveridge. The paper’s official chronicler records Barrington-Ward as a radical Tory who was ‘inclined by temperament to welcome social change in advance, prepare for it, and so control it.’74 He took the paper to the left. Earlier that year E. H. Carr, the leftish historian, had been appointed assistant editor, from which position he argued consistently for the need to espouse social justice as the aim after the war. In a sense, the then small group of Tory reformers, whose views had first been clearly articulated in 1938 when a rather obscure back-bench rebel called Harold Macmillan had defined the politics he was to follow in a book called The Middle Way, had found a voice in the leader columns of The Times. Even before Dawson left, however, a new tone had begun to emerge. An editorial on 1 July 1940 declared:

Over the greater part of Western Europe the common values for which we stand are known and prized. We must indeed beware of defining these values in purely 19th Century terms. If we speak of democracy we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organisation and economic planning. If we speak of equality we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction we think less of maximum (though this job too will be required) than of equitable distribution.

Labour’s right-wing egalitarians, Tony Crosland in the 1950s or Roy Hattersley in the 1990s, could have said amen to that. One Tory MP was later to growl (though not in the context of the welfare state) that The Times had become merely ‘the threepenny edition of the Daily Worker’, the Communist Party paper which was suppressed for a time during the war.75 If the voices on The Times were a-changing, they were not alone. The Economist, long the guardian of financial orthodoxy, could pronounce that the ‘old controversy’ over ‘the question of whether the state should make itself responsible for the economic environment’ was ‘as dead as a doorknocker – that is, useful for making a noise but nothing else’.

Newspapers may shape the world around them, but they also reflect it. The churches had found a new vigour in siding with the underdogs, running meetings demanding social justice after the war. In this William Temple, appointed on Churchill’s recommendation as Archbishop of Canterbury in early 1942, played a key role. He was to bless Beveridge’s marriage later that year and still later was to be contemptuously described as Beveridge’s ‘warm-up man’ by Correlli Barnett, the Cambridge historian whose influential reinterpretation of the Second World War puts Beveridge high on the list of Great Satans responsible for Britain’s post-war decline.76 In 1941, while still Archbishop of York, Temple had written Citizen and Churchman in which he defined the ‘Welfare-State’ in contrast to the Power-State of the continental tyrannies.77 A meeting of the Industrial Christian Fellowship in the Albert Hall in October 1942, at which Temple spoke, drew ten thousand participants. ‘The general demands included … a central planning for employment, housing and social security,’ Picture Post reported.78 It was thus fertile ground into which Beveridge was to plant his dragon’s teeth, seeking to raise up giants to respond to the ‘five giant evils’ he had identified.

Moreover, during 1942 the Conservatives found themselves losing by-elections to some of the oddest characters ever to sit in Parliament. Labour, the Liberals and the Tories did not stand against each other because of the coalition – indeed, Labour actively backed some of the Conservative coalition nominees. The awkward independents, standing on the vaguest and most confused of platforms, still won. Screaming Lord Sutch should have been born earlier. Soon Labour was to find its own candidates losing by-elections in similar circumstances.