The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

‘It was a banker’s ramp’, charged the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Christopher Addison, on the day of his resignation. The TUC also suspected as much, and the Daily Herald made the accusation public on 25 August. Bankers, it was claimed, had used the economic crisis to dictate government policy. But no one in government had doubted the bankers’ insistence that the budget had to be balanced: it was how it was to be balanced that was at issue. The American banks made a loan dependent on a balanced budget, but insisted that the way in which that was achieved was ‘quite outside our province’. But in the end, since the other two political parties were insisting on cuts in unemployment benefit payments as a condition of their support, while the TUC and an important and sizeable minority of MacDonald’s own Cabinet would not agree the 10 per cut, the Cabinet resigned.

‘Well — we have what is called a “National Government” — Conservatives, Liberals, and Mr Ramsay MacDonald and a few friends,’ wrote the Conservative MP for Barnard Castle, County Durham, Cuthbert Headlam, sceptically. ‘I cannot see how such a combination … is going to do any good … except on paper this is not a coalition. It is a collection of people collected together to save the situation … their task, if carried out properly will make them very unpopular — they cannot go on for long without quarrelling among themselves for their policies are widely divergent.’

MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas were expelled from the Labour Party, and Arthur Henderson assumed the leadership. In September Snowden’s budget (attacked by Keynes as being ‘replete with folly and injustice’) raised taxes, proposed a range of cuts in public workers’ salaries and cut 10 per cent (though not the 20 per cent recommended by the May Committee) off unemployment pay. On 21 September, with a renewed run on the pound (partly as a result of the Invergordon Mutiny, when naval ratings refused to muster when faced with disproportionate pay cuts), the Bank of England abandoned the Gold Standard, a situation that the National Government had been brought into being to avoid. Within a year this allowed interest rates to fall to as low as 2 per cent and brought about the ‘cheap money’ that would help build Britain’s industrial recovery.

The election that was called for October 1931 was essentially a fight between Labour and the rest: and the rest won. In 1929, 287 Labour MPs had been elected; in 1931 this was cut to fifty-two, and that included Scottish ILP Members (who eventually disaffiliated from the rest of the ILP under their leader James Maxton in July 1932, believing they could answer the need the ILP perceived among the working classes for a more radical socialist party). Labour was all but annihilated everywhere except in coalmining areas. Arthur Henderson lost his seat, as did Hugh Dalton and Herbert Morrison. Only one former Labour Cabinet Minister, George Lansbury, was returned, though two Junior Ministers, the men of tomorrow, Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps, just managed to hang on. The so-called National Government, which was composed mainly of Conservatives and members of a terminally divided Liberal Party, swept the board with 554 seats.

Thomas Jones felt like ‘the Scotch minister who had prayed earnestly for rain, and then had the whole contents of a drainpipe emptied over him’ when he heard of the rout. ‘The election results are astounding,’ wrote Samuel Rich, a teacher at the Jews’ Free School in London, who considered that ‘teachers are the worst hit in the land, except the poor unemployed’ when he received his first reduced monthly salary of £29.7s instead of the former £32.6s on 23 October 1931. ‘There will be no opposition … “Socialism in our Time” is off,’ he wrote in his diary, underlining ‘off’ heavily, twice.

Indeed, it seemed to many that Labour would never again come to power democratically. Hugh Dalton talked darkly about bringing the Durham Light Infantry to London to replace the Brigade of Guards. When Hugh Gaitskell was adopted as Labour candidate for Chatham for the 1935 general election he was rueful: ‘The Labour Party … tried to get better conditions out of capitalism … leaving the economic power in the hands of the same people as before … The only way in which Socialism could be got was shortly and fairly sharply … [T]hey should get the power, proceed with measures of Socialisation, and smash the economic power of the upper class.’ Cripps, for his part, would hint at ‘adopting some exceptional means such as the prolongation of the life of Parliament for a further term without an election’, and ‘overcoming opposition from Buckingham Palace’, though when taxed that this sounded a bit like treason, he affected surprise that ‘anybody should have thought I was referring to the Crown’.

‘The one thing that is not inevitable now is gradualness,’ Cripps insisted. The Webbs agreed, and in September 1932 the Fabian-inspired SSIP was merged with the minority wing of the ILP that had stayed in the Labour Party to form what became the Socialist League, another intellectual pressure group, this time with a clear, if broad, Marxist agenda, with Harold Laski and H.N. Brailsford among its members, and soon Sir Stafford Cripps as its chairman. The Socialist League became the main organisation of the left until it too was dissolved by the leadership in 1937, while the NFRB merged with a revived Fabian Society a year later.

MacDonald — and his ‘ism’ — were, as his daughter had predicted, faced with antagonism from most (but not all) of the Labour Party, though this had as much to do with his disdainful treatment of his parliamentary colleagues and TU supporters as with his initial ‘betrayal’. Samuel Rich was amused to receive a ‘jeu d’esprit’ about MacDonald that a friend wrote and slipped in a Christmas card:

If Ramsay MacDonald, you still have brains that work

Not solely to commands from high finance …

How it must chill your socialistic bones

Seated upon your unsubstantial throne —

A transient triumph — then the long alone —

Sans friends, sans party, salary or loans …

History’s verdict has been kinder, more prepared to absolve MacDonald from conspiracy and self-aggrandisement, accepting to some extent his reading of the national interest, seeing little culpable substance in his faiblesse for eating cucumber sandwiches with and getting sentimental about aristocratic ladies, and finding the explanation for his actions in confusion, being out of touch, having an imperfect understanding (but who did not?) of economic forces, and few mechanisms at his disposal to influence those forces, and thus of clinging to outworn verities, of believing in socialism but having no plan for achieving it. In sum, being blinded by the blizzard that swept the world in which, to strain a metaphor, the windscreen wipers seemed to have frozen.

Could things have been different? Would a ‘Keynesian Revolution’, an idea which gained favour in the 1960s and ’70s, have saved the day? Such an ambitious ‘New Deal’ public works programme might at least have provided Britain with a creditable infrastructure of roads and bridges. But would it have solved the unemployment problem? Possibly back in 1929 when unemployment was around a million it could have been cut by 600,000, as Lloyd George pledged, the most astute historian of that proposed ‘revolution’ judges, but by 1931 the Labour government’s own two-year public works schemes had become operational, and unemployment remained obdurate in the face of the world slump. The theoretical basis of the ‘multiplier effect’ (whereby creating primary employment opportunities generates secondary or subsequent ones as a result of increased spending power) of such schemes on employment was imperfectly understood until the mid-1930s. At the time public works projects were advocated as being cheaper and more controllable than the dole, rather than because of ‘the beneficial repercussions that will result from the expenditure of the newly-employed men’s wages’ (though evidence to the Macmillan Committee had suggested something similar, as Bevin and McKenna’s enthusiasm showed). And, of course, those in the Labour Party who still imagined they were tramping along the long road to socialism noted that Keynes’ solutions were intended to make capitalism work more efficiently and humanely, not bring about its demise.

The month before Labour went down to an electoral ignominy from which it would not recover until 1945, the number of those out of work was the highest ever: 2,811,615.

SEVEN (Too Much) Time to Spare

If the hours which are designated as leisure time are an important part of the life of the community, they are an especially important part of the life of that portion of the community who happens to have no work to do. For a man who has a job, the day’s activities centre round that job. It takes the greatest share of his time. It eliminates the necessity of constant choices concerning what shall be done with his day. It provides him with the means of enjoying his spare time at the various forms of voluntary or commercial amusement fairly regularly and dressed in clothes of which he need not be ashamed.

With the man out of a job, it is different …

E. Wight Bakke, The Unemployed Man: A Social Study (1934)

He could make marvellous things with his hands. He once made a church from about five thousand matchsticks … I think it took him two years … He was always having to invent something … an alarm clock, that was a thing of the past, and he sat for weeks and weeks … fiddling with his tools and pieces of metal and we had a cuckoo clock … it occupied his mind for weeks.

Interview by Kate Nicholas with Mrs Bell, the daughter of a long-term unemployed Teesside man

‘What animals cause you the most worry?’ the unemployed Nottingham miner George Tomlinson once asked a gamekeeper: ‘I was thinking of stoats, weasels, foxes and their like. But he answered sourly, “miners”.’ Tomlinson ‘knew well enough what he meant, for the collier when he sets his hand to it is the most skilful of poachers. I loved to watch them go out in the evening, slipping merrily along a forest path [Tomlinson lived near Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest], single file like Indian braves but not a bit like Indians in their appearance. Old slouch hats, short coats with big bulging pockets, a cosh pulled down the back of the coat and sticking out above their heads.’

‘Rabbits were the thing! And a good dog was half the battle.’ George Bestford, an unemployed Durham miner whose father had come north when the Cornish mining industry collapsed, had ‘a good whippet! I think we’d have starved if it hadn’t been for the dog. Away he’d go and back with a rabbit. They always had the game keepers out and they were there watching to make sure you didn’t get any of their game … I was lucky because I was well in with a farmer and he used to let me have half what we caught on his land. So on a moonlit night — away with the dogs and catch a few rabbits! Some of the farmers were very good. They would give you some potatoes or a turnip. But some would give you nothing … We used to pinch off them.’

A rabbit for the pot would supplement the endless dole diet of bread and margarine, and suet: ‘Every miner’s house used suet. That was like the basic. Every day you’d have something with suet in for the main meal of the day. To fill you up. You’d buy a big piece of suet from the butcher’s for tuppence and every day you grated a bit of suet into the flour. Monday’s dinner was always a plain suet pudding with what was left from Sunday’s dinner. Another day was “pot pie” we called it. Then “Spotted Dick” with currants in it or you’d roll it out and put blackberries in the middle, tie a cloth around it and put it in the pan.’

It was not just rabbits that nature provided — or rather that the men took. Anything was fair game for scavenging for hungry families. ‘We used to live off the land for quite a number of years,’ explained a Derbyshire miner. ‘You had to … it were a matter of getting by. If we were hungry we used to go into the field with a bit of a broken knife and find pignuts and scrape them out and put a bit of salt on … we used to go round scrounging what we could get. If we saw a barrow full of peas, we’d come back with a jersey full of peas and that were it … we used to eat owt … We used to go out and get rabbits and anything, owt what we could catch … pigeons, pheasant and ducks off the canal … Sometimes we used to pull mangols [sic] and bring them ’ome and stew ’em … we had a gaddo [catapult], we got quite expert … wood pigeons, we used to wait for dusk for them to settle in the trees to roost and then we’d knock them out of the trees.’

In the mid-nineteenth century the political philosopher John Stuart Mill had claimed that allotments were ‘a contrivance to compensate the labourer for the insufficiency of his wages by giving him something else as a supplement to them’: a way, in fact, of ‘making people grow their own poor rate’. Little had changed nearly a hundred years later. The notion that ‘the hungry could grow their own foods and obtain a living from their own methods’ was a throwback to Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of the Civil War, but it gained a new relevance during the Depression: an allotment could provide potatoes, carrots, cabbages and other vegetables to eke out family meals. The campaign to make Britain more self-sufficient in food production during the First World War, when George V had directed that the geraniums planted around the Queen Victoria memorial opposite Buckingham Palace should be grubbed up and replaced with potatoes and cabbages, had resulted in an astonishing increase in the number of allotments. By 1918 something like 1.5 million allotments dug by a ‘new short-sleeved army numbering over 1,300,000 men and women’ were producing over two million tons of vegetables. The return to its former owners of land requisitioned by the government during the war and the spread of the suburbs, where most houses had gardens, meant that the number of allotments fell during the 1920s, but by the 1930s the Ministry of Agriculture was recording a revival of interest as both the Ministry and local authorities made land available for allotments, particularly in depressed areas, while the Land Settlement Association, whose main aim was to turn the urban unemployed into smallholders, encouraged not only the cultivation of produce on small plots, but also the keeping of pigs and chickens to provide food and manure.

In a prefiguration of the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign during the Second World War, allotments were dug on wasteland and on roadside and railway banks, wherever the soil might yield food for the table. They clung to the steep, scoured hillsides of the Rhondda Valley, perched on riverbanks prone to flooding and huddled under the ugly shadow of gasworks — anywhere the land could not be used more profitably for some other activity. Working his allotment could be a satisfying occupation for a man who felt that was what he no longer had: out of the house, in the fresh air and using his strength to dig. Many took great pride in what they grew on their allotment or in their back garden — and many colliery houses had quite large back gardens. Charles Graves, a rather patrician journalist (and the brother of the poet Robert Graves), paid a visit to Ollerton in the Midlands, ‘in the heart of the Dukeries’ (a large tract of Nottinghamshire in private hands which once contained the estates of no fewer than five dukes), for the society magazine the Sphere. He reported: ‘All have gardens … work in the mines is limited to three days a week … All of them like to … grow their own vegetables … And the Garden Holders Association among the miners is a very powerful organisation with annual cups and prizes to be won. Potatoes, cabbages, carrots all grow well at Ollerton. So do onions and woe betide the man who is caught pilfering his neighbour’s celery.’

But pilfer they did: ‘There were a hell of lot of allotments. And there used to be a lot of knocking off’ in Ashton-under-Lyne. ‘They used to be up around three or four in the morning going on the Moss pinching lettuce and celery, anything to make a meal. The Moss was more or less peat. That’s why they’ve never built on it.’ Jack Shaw’s father, an unemployed miner, ‘had an allotment on the Moss. He paid a pound a year. It was just a matter of growing vegetables for our house. Others had big ones and it would be like a full time job.’

But even in those places such as the mining valleys where there was a long tradition of allotment-holding, the Depression, while making such activity all the more necessary, meant it was harder to do. An unemployed man — or one on short-time hours — might well not be able to afford the necessary seeds, tools or fertiliser. The Quaker Society of Friends reported that an unemployed miner in South Wales ‘who had been accustomed to grow his own potatoes … had become too poor to buy the seed, that for a time he received seed from his companions, and when that was no longer available he went to the rubbish heaps for peelings and took out such “eyes” as he could find in order to plant his allotment’.

The Society of Friends started a scheme ‘to supply (at first free of charge) small seeds, seed potatoes, tools, fertilizer and lime’. It was so successful that the government took it up, and in the winter of 1930, 64,000 families were helped in this way. But it was one of the casualties of the 1931 economic crisis, so the Friends stepped in again, persuading the government to give pound-for-pound matching grants to some 62,000 allotment-holders; this rose to over 100,000 grants in subsequent years. In Sheffield over 117,500 unemployed men were provided with ‘the requisites for a 300 square yard plot’ in 1934, but as the Sheffield Allotments for Unemployed Scheme pointed out, ‘This is a scheme to help men who help themselves — how substantial is that self help is shown by the amount the men themselves have contributed towards the cost of supplies — no less than £24,700 collected week by week’. Moreover, such activity was giving a welcome boost to the local steel industry, since in 1933 ‘over 56,000 spades, forks, etc were supplied nationally, and these were all made in Sheffield’.

Another necessity of life was fuel. It cost at least two shillings a week to heat a modest house, and anyone who could went collecting wood or ‘scratting’ (scavenging) for coal. Herbert Allen, whose father was a frequently unemployed farm labourer (and as an agricultural worker was not covered by the unemployment insurance scheme) in Leicestershire, always went ‘wooding’ on a Saturday. ‘We never bought any coal … My step-brother and myself used to have to go wooding round the spinneys and the hedges and all that. We’d have a pram and a home made truck and we’d … walk four or five miles to the woods and pile the old pram right up, put bits of wood round the side so you got a real good height. If ever we was hanging round the house it was always: “If you’ve got nothing to do you can go and do some wooding.”’

Will Paynter, a trade union activist and checkweighman at Cymmer colliery in the Rhondda who was often on short time or out of work during the thirties, spent one day every week with his father and brother on the colliery slag heaps searching for coal. They would only manage to fill one bag each: ‘To get three bags could involve turning over twenty to thirty tons of slag which was hard work in any language.’ They then had to carry the heavy bags on their shoulders for a mile or more over the uneven and often slippery sheep-tracks on the mountainside.

‘Scratting’ around for small pieces of coal was particularly humiliating for men who had spent their working lives hewing great lumps underground. ‘If there’s one thing that makes us bitter here in the Rhondda, it’s the question of coal,’ said John Evans.

I have to pay half a crown a week for coal — though there’s plenty lying around. When we’re in work in the mines we get supplies at a small fixed rate. Why can’t we when we are unemployed? We who have worked all our lives in the mines feel we have a kind of a right to it. In these parts there are places where the coal seam comes to the surface on all sides of the hills — they are called outcrops. We could get coal there. But the companies won’t allow it — they even use explosives to make it more difficult for us to get at the coal, though it isn’t profitable enough for them to use it. Every colliery has its slag tip — where they throw out all the stuff they can’t get rid of, and among it are bits of coal. We are sometimes allowed to pick this over at certain times after the contractors have been over it. At these times the place crawls with men trying to find bits of coal — like ants on an ant heap. It’s a hell of a job, especially on a cold day, and of course one can never find enough. That’s why so many go out at night and try to steal it. But they have policemen, and if one’s caught it means fifteen shillings [fine, or worse].

In Ashton-under-Lyne there was a neat scam: coal was brought to the mills in barges, and when it was taken in lorries from the bin, it was shovelled down a chute into the barge below. ‘The chaps that was working on the barges would only be on two or three days a week, and they’d be related to the blokes that wasn’t working — brothers and cousins … well accidentally on purpose [the men shovelling the coal would] throw about six shovelfuls into the canal every time they got the chance. When the barge moved on, there’d probably be three or four hundredweight of coal,’ so the men waiting and watching on the bridge ‘used to get a bucket full of holes on a clothes line, throw it across the canal and scoop it up. Fill half hundredweight bags. Then they had a pram or pram wheels with boxes on and they used to go round the streets selling it. People used to grumble, “This bloody coal, it’s all wet through.” But it was only two bob for half a bag,’ recalled Jack Shaw.

‘Some of them [the unemployed miners] have become coal pirates,’ one of their number in South Wales told Fenner Brockway, an ILP MP until he lost his seat in the 1931 election, and a fierce critic of the National Government and the Labour Party’s unemployment policies. ‘They get caught sometimes and do a turn in prison. But what does it matter? Prison is no hardship these days; food guaranteed and no worry. There are men who raid the coal-trucks … Every night a train climbs [the mountain] side. The men jump on it when it’s going slow, scramble on top of a truck, throw coal off, and then leap down the other side and gather the coal in sacks to sell. A man was killed doing that the other night: slipped and got cut up by the train … it shows to what lengths they’re being driven.’

Poverty drove many very close to the wrong side of the law — and then tipped them over. As some scavenged for coal to sell, others poached with the same intention. Charles Graves noted that ‘there used to be hundreds of pheasants on Lord Savile’s property, Wellow Wood. Two years ago [in 1930] they bagged 900. Last year only 35 and a similar number of rabbits.’ An East Midlands miner on short time recalled that ‘The best time we ’ad was when we went out pegging one Friday night … there were six of us … we ran the nets out there three times and we got twenty rabbits apiece … Some going that were, three nets for 120 rabbits.’

Dick Beavis, a Durham miner, ‘spent a lot of time poaching in the 1930s. I was the “knitter”. I used to knit all the nets for the lads. Put them over holes … and put the ferret in. I found that more interesting than pit heaps. And that’s how I learned my political thoughts. Well whose was the land? You go on all these neglected heaps. I used to think what harm are we doing? We were caught by the police and when we received our summons it was said we were catching “conies”. We didn’t know what that was. (It wasn’t until later in my life that I discovered that “conies” is the old English word for rabbits. Rabbits are classified as vermin — and so you could say you were catching vermin — but “conies” is not.) So the magistrate looked at me and he said, “Where did you get them?” And I said “I found them, Sir.” Well, he said he’d never heard such a bloody tale and fined us all.’

A poacher might make as much as eight shillings in a good night, though often he would not make more than three shillings, and sometimes nothing at all. Others might stay on the right side of the law by buying rabbits from a farmer for sixpence, skinning them and selling the skins for ninepence and the meat for fourpence. Selling coal or garden produce could also raise a few pence. Some men set up as cobblers, cutting up old rubber tyres to resole boots, mended clocks, soldered saucepans and kettles, made rag, or peg, rugs, ‘did carpentry in their back yards or kitchen, making sideboards out of orange boxes stained brown with permanganate of potash, while their wives cook and tend the children in restricted places round the fireplace, uncomplaining because they realise the necessity of providing some occupation for their husbands in order to keep them even moderately content’. An unemployed man might offer to tend the garden, paint the house or wallpaper a room for a better-off neighbour in exchange for money or goods — a side of bacon, maybe, or a joint of meat. The trouble was that there weren’t many — if any — better-off neighbours in most of the depressed areas: perhaps a colliery manager, a works foreman, or a moderately prosperous farmer nearby. But most of the men and women in the towns and villages would be in the same situation: no work, not enough money to live on, certainly not to pay for services.