The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

At harvest time or in the shooting or hunting season it might be possible for those men within walking distance of farms or orchards or country estates to get a few days’ work. Often this did not bring in much money, ‘but you used to get a drink of beer and that while you were in the fields’, and hop-picking drew numbers of East Enders to Kent — as it always had. Some made a bit on the side in less obvious ways, breeding rats, mice or ferrets for scientific research or to sell to London Zoo to feed the snakes — though mice ‘had to be alive when they got there or they would not pay for them’. A box of five hundred mice would earn a postal order for around thirty shillings — a tidy sum when the dole for a family with two children was around twenty-eight shillings a week — though collecting five hundred mice and keeping them alive must have been a real team effort.

Women might take in dressmaking, mending or washing, bake bread or cakes, or cook ‘potato plates’ (scraps of meat sandwiched between two layers of potato) to sell, make toffee or jam, knit or crochet. All these activities assumed not only a few coppers to buy the materials, but also a local market that was better placed financially than the ‘petty capitalist’. Some families, already living in cramped accommodation, would double up even more and take in a lodger to help make ends meet — or even ‘hot sheet’: an Irishwoman in the mining village of Chopwell in County Durham ‘had pitmen who slept in the beds during the day and she had men who worked in the coke yard during the night. On different shifts … when one would get out of bed, the other would go in.’

Enterprise had its price. The Means Test empowered inspectors to take account of all earnings, no matter how paltry. In March 1934 The Times reported that ‘In Durham villages one sees that men are genuinely fearful of taking an odd job to earn a shilling or two, doubtful whether their weekly means of livelihood will be cut down if they are found to be keeping a few hens.’ Although the newspaper reported that ‘The policy … is to make no deductions for paid earnings of this sort; on the contrary, they will encourage them,’ it admitted that ‘Knowledge has not yet filtered through to the men, and because all depends on their Dole they take no risks.’ Indeed, the Society of Friends made a point of getting ‘a clear statement from the Ministry of Labour that the small amount of produce which a man could sell from his allotment would not affect the amount of his dole. This was a great gain (even although the feeling of suspicion on this point ceased only very slowly).’

A ‘worthy woman in Merthyr, who had kept a bakery’ told an American sociologist who came to Britain in June 1931 to study the effects of unemployment that ‘she had wanted the yard wall of her bakery whitewashed and seeing that there were 6,000 unemployed men walking about Merthyr, she had thought that it would be a good idea to ask one of them to do it in return for a few shillings. She asked one after another, but all refused; they said they “might be seen”. Eventually she promised a man that if he would do it, she would undertake to let no one into the yard while he was at work and to keep the gate barred. On that condition she got it done. She then thought she would get one of them to putty the lights on the bakehouse roof. But the roof allowed no hiding place while he did the work; so no one would do it … To be “seen” earning a shilling is a terrifying prospect. The regulations may provide for such things, but the unemployed man does not know what the regulations are, and the last thing he wants is to stir up mud.’ And there were always neighbours who were quick to make allegations of ‘benefit fraud’ if they suspected someone in receipt of dole was making a bit on the side. In Greenwich anonymous letters arrived at the benefit office at the rate of two a day, snitching on those the writers thought might be cheating.

In some ways the first weeks after a man lost his job were the easiest: there could be a sense of release, something of a holiday feeling after the tyranny of the pit or factory. The initial days would be filled with the search for work. The Labour Exchange wasn’t considered much help. Most jobs were obtained by someone ‘speaking for you’, a relative or friend already in work who might be able to put in a good word. There was no legal requirement for employers to notify the ‘Labour’ of any work they might have, and the general view of the unemployed was that employers only used it as a place of last resort, when they were offering worthless jobs no one wanted. And if a man refused such a job when offered it by the Labour Exchange, he lost his entitlement to the dole for six weeks. Across the country, only one vacancy in five was filled through the Labour Exchanges in the 1930s. This is perhaps not surprising at a time when there was such a pool of men seeking work that there was no point in wasting time with the paperwork required by the Labour Exchange.

Believing that finding work was ‘down to me’, most men would trudge for miles each day from place to place in search of a job, following up leads that led nowhere. ‘It became quite customary,’ Wal Hannington observed, ‘to find men walking miles from their own district, such as from Halifax to Huddersfield, in search of work, whilst men from Huddersfield would walk to Halifax in [the] search for work — often passing each other on the road.’ After a few weeks or even months of this dispiriting failure it would become apparent that there just weren’t any jobs to be had locally, and this was when some men from the valleys and the smoke-filled towns would go ‘on the tramp’, moving from place to place in search of work.

‘On the main roads leading from the coalfields to the big towns — particularly the Bath road leading from South Wales to London’, Hannington saw ‘almost any day hundreds of men, footsore and weary … trudging towards London having left their families at the mercy of the Boards of Guardians’. But most of the men on the road looking for work in the 1930s were probably young and single. John Brown was one. He had lost his job in the docks and, aged nineteen, left his home in South Shields and took a journey round England that was as extensive as J.B. Priestley’s, if less salubrious. From South Shields he and a companion scrambled aboard a lorry bound for Newcastle, from there to York, then hearing about the possibility of a job, Brown managed to get a lift to Salford, then he tried his luck in Liverpool, Grantham, Reading, then Basingstoke, from where he walked to Guildford, where he managed to get a few hours’ work painting some railings round a bungalow. Then it was on the road again, with a lift to Winchester, then on to Southampton, where he went round the shopkeepers asking for a ‘pennyworth of work’. This netted him enough for a bed at the local workhouse and a shared meal of cocoa and bread and butter.

Over the next months Brown travelled from Dover to Dumfries by way of Bath, Worcester, Shrewsbury and London, where he found work for a bit. Sometimes alone, sometimes with companions — including a young woman, Hilda, who had been sacked from her job as a parlourmaid and had been sleeping out in London parks until Brown took her under his wing, he walked, hitched lifts on lorries, crawled under tarpaulins when the lorry driver was taking a break, and once was offered a lift in a private car. He slept mainly in ‘spikes’, the casual wards of workhouses, which varied hugely: the one at Winchester was particularly highly spoken of, but others were considered ‘not fit to live in’, with dirty sheets and blankets, and infestations of lice and nits. He passed nights lying on potato sacks in barns, or under hedges, and when he was temporarily in funds he would stay in cheap ‘model’ lodging house, or hostels run by such philanthropic organisations as the Salvation Army or the Church Army.

Food was meagre workhouse rations such as skilly (thin oatmeal gruel that must have brought Oliver Twist to mind, though this was officially abolished in 1931, and meat and vegetables added to the diet), usually given in exchange for work such as chopping wood or breaking stones (though stone-breaking was discontinued by the same order in 1931), sometimes bread and a cup of tea, maybe a cold sausage given by someone whose windows or car Brown had cleaned, or fence he’d repaired, or a cheap meal in a café which the grapevine that ran between ‘roadsters’ recommended, like Nash’s in Southampton where a three-course meal could be got for a tanner (sixpence). Brown took whatever work he could get, including bricklaying, washing up and handing out cinema flyers. He discovered that blankets tucked in crosswise, sometimes on a necessarily shared bed, provided the maximum warmth, and learned always to sleep with his trousers under his pillow and the legs of the bed in his boots to prevent them being stolen in the night. But finally, after many months on the road, he grew ‘weary of the “spikes” and “models” and barns. The “romance of the road” had turned out to be a sordid tragedy of bread, weak tea, blankets, washing and baked clothes.’ John Brown went back home to South Shields — but still no job.

Max Cohen, a frequently unemployed London cabinet-maker, offered a cigarette in a café in the Strand to an unkempt-looking man, his clothes ragged and shabby, his shoes tied up with string, the holes stuffed with newspaper, who told him, ‘I tramped the country, lookin’ for work … But yer can’t get any work — nowhere! I tried — honest. I’ve been out six years … never go on the road. You’ll be driven from one town to ‘nother. A vagrant, that’s what they calls you, a vagrant. Y’ave to go to the spike, else you’ll get locked up’ — ‘sleeping out’ was an offence under the 1824 Vagrancy Act until it was modified in 1935.

It is not possible to know precisely how many people ‘on the tramp’ in the 1930s were unemployed men seeking work, and how many were vagrants, but on the night of 21 May 1932, at the depth of the Depression, 16,911 men were sleeping in casual wards; the number had been 3,188 in May 1920 and 10,217 in December 1929.

‘It is when a man settles down to being unemployed,’ wrote the Reverend Cecil Northcott of his experience in Lancashire, ‘that he finds it difficult to know how to fill his time. Beyond the weekly events of signing on and drawing the dole there is not much regulation to his life.’ The clergyman spoke of ‘helping his missus … becoming a permanent occupation. The brass round the kitchen range and anything that shines comes within the duties of the man’; of the fathers who took their children in the pram to the park, ‘the same collection of men day after day’; of the ‘handicrafts [that] have become so important in many unemployed homes’ — an Elizabethan galleon made out of a block of wood, for example.

Joseph Farrington’s father, an unemployed iron-moulder, had the skills of a sailor, which was how he started his working life. He would sew two canvas bags together to make a floor covering, or ‘cut up different coloured coats and make a pattern. It was as though he’d bought it in a shop when he’d finished it. He could knit … he could do anything. He even used to cook the meals because my mother couldn’t cook. And he made toys like so many unemployed men, wooden trains, hobby horses, dolls for the girls out of paper and packing and put faces on with indelible pencil. He was clever at making things with newspaper. He’d make a tablecloth with a pattern — just by tearing.’ Arnold Deane, an unemployed Oldham man, made a magnificent fifteen-inch model of a hotel, complete with elegant grounds and railings, using cardboard and beads. It had 176 windows, a ballroom, and was lit by electric light. The construction took him two months and was photographed for the local paper.

John Brierley’s father Walter, an unemployed Derbyshire miner, was not able to fill his time so productively. He ‘felt ill at ease … when he was on the dole [from 1931 to 1935]. Hanging about the house and garden when other men were working and the women busy made him feel particularly inadequate. To make matters worse he was clumsy with his hands and could no more build a wall, or put up a fowl house than “fly in the air” my mother said. The tasks he was set required no skill, collecting wood or shovelling coal or muck. If he was set to weed, he would uproot the wrong plants, would knock cups against the taps when washing up, his head probably full of his latest piece of poetry or writing’ — one of which, fortunately, found a publisher as a novel, Means Test Man, in 1935.

To the observer it might look as it did to the poet T.S. Eliot, in whose poem ‘The Rock’ the voices of the unemployed intone: ‘No man has hired us/With pocketed hands/And lowered faces/We stand about in open places.’ But in fact standing about in open places could be a necessary social activity, since there was no longer the camaraderie of work, or the money to go to the pub to meet your mates. Convictions for drunken behaviour fell by more than half between 1927 and 1932, for though the solace of a warm pub and the oblivion of drink might seem an appealing way of blotting out reality, the high price of a pint of beer (a pint of mild cost fivepence and one of strong ale elevenpence) discouraged it, though Jack Shaw reported that men in Ashton-under-Lyne ‘used to go round the pubs and off licences and pinch some bottles. There were a penny [deposit] on a bottle. They’d pinch half a dozen and go round and get sixpence and get a gill [half a pint]. You could sit in all night with a gill.’

If they couldn’t drink, men might still smoke. ‘You could buy five Woodbines for twopence. But that’s no bargain if you haven’t got twopence. You’d go for maybe a week without a single drag and then when you were given a cigarette, you inhaled so deeply you’d have expected to see the smoke coming out through the laceholes of your boots.’ Men would take one drag on a cigarette, pinch it and put it in their pockets for later, or go round the streets picking up butts, which they would mix up together and make their own cigarettes, ‘So they were smoking for nothing.’ Loose tobacco cost around fourpence an ounce, and this might well be supplemented by dried tea leaves either in a rollup or a pipe.

It seemed that given an extremely limited amount of disposable income (if any at all), an unemployed man would rather spend it on gambling than smoking or drinking: after all, putting a bet on might prove to be the down-payment on a better life. Street gambling was illegal, but that didn’t stop it: men would be posted as lookouts while their friends laid bets on pretty much anything. Horseracing was a subject of great interest — though the interest was not in the horses themselves, but in betting on them, which formed a link between the unemployed and the ‘sport of kings’. ‘It’s always been a miner’s privilege, a little bit on the horses, the dogs.’ ‘Blokes used to earn half a crown in the pound as a bookies’ runner. There were no licensed bookies. The runners used to stand in the doorways of pubs or else the ginnel [alleyway] of some place. Some of the blokes would go round the mills and pubs and houses. Anything to get a bet.’

Men would not just play billiards, they would gamble on it, a penny or tuppence for the winner. They’d play cards for money, one of their number earning tuppence or threepence a time for ‘Keeping Konk’ (lookout). Pitch and toss (throwing a coin so it landed as close as possible to a wall) and crown and anchor (a dice game) were almost universal pastimes. ‘In most back alleys and lanes young and old men would play their few pennies away on Sunday mornings.’ Sometimes bigger events were organised, such as those on a secluded beach at South Shields to which men would come from as far afield as Newcastle or Sunderland, and the bookies came too. While some played for pence, others graduated to ‘the bigger school’, where the stakes for pitch and toss could be raised to five shillings a time and two lookouts were placed to warn if the police approached. For Joseph Farrington it was ‘marbles — flirting. We used to make a ring of tin milk-bottle tops. If you hit one with a marble you took it out. We used to play with money, when we had money.’ Jack Shaw and his friends would bet on a ‘peggy’, a piece of wood that one player would hit and the others had to guess how far away it had landed. Once they had to jump the local canal to get away from the police, and that in itself soon became an activity to bet on.

‘They’d gamble on anything. It was the only way they had of getting a few bob. A lot of it was “Why have dry bread when I might have a bit of bread and jam?”’ If life seemed an irrational lottery when it came to getting a job, why not take part in a more enjoyable lottery in the hope of turning your luck round, or at least having some control over the choices you made? ‘They [the unemployed] have given up all hope of earning anything by work,’ Fenner Brockway was told, ‘and hundreds of them put all their hopes on horses and dogs and football matches. They put 1s. on. They may lose, they go short on food; but they’re so used to going short that they don’t trouble much … Betting … means excitement in the midst of monotony … You may deplore the betting mania, but you can’t be surprised. What other excitement, what other chance, does existence offer these men?’

Men would keep homing pigeons, as long as they could afford to feed them (and would often bet on races between them), or greyhounds, which ‘often received as much attention as any child’. More likely, they would earn a few shillings exercising the greyhounds of an employed friend. Many sports offered reduced rates for the unemployed: bowls or billiards for a penny. Young men would play football on a piece of waste ground — games that would sometimes last all day, with a leather ball they’d pooled their coppers to buy if they were lucky, a blown-up pig’s bladder or caps sewn together if they weren’t — and men of all ages would go to football matches. In Liverpool in the early 1930s the average gate was 30,000 when Liverpool or Everton were playing, and most professional football clubs would admit the unemployed for half price at half time and free ten minutes before the final whistle. And there was always the opportunity to try to make a few pennies by entertaining the crowds as they queued to get in, singing, juggling, playing a tin whistle, doing handstands.

Boxing was another popular sport. William Saunders would ‘go round the boxing booths in the fairgrounds, we used to get £1 for standing up so many rounds’. Some of George Bestford’s unemployed friends in Newcastle would volunteer for three-round contests: ‘Some of them could box and others couldn’t. Those who couldn’t just received a good punching-up and the fee which was paid to the boxers was five shillings, out of which they paid two shillings to the seconds. One night there was a man who was so weak and tired it was obvious he should not have been in the ring. The crowd was just beginning to voice their disapproval of his poor show when the referee waved them to be quiet and explained that the man was on the road, had not had anything to eat all day, but had come along to the Hall and volunteered to fight.’ But as for the unemployed taking up tennis, badminton, cricket or golf to fill their empty hours, these were, a report on Glasgow’s unemployed youth concluded, ‘the pursuits of another class’.

The day of one young unemployed man from Lancashire was not untypical. He was ‘one of a gang [who] used to stay in bed late in the mornings so as not to need breakfast. I used to have a cup of tea, and then we would all go down to the library and read the papers. Then we went home for a bit of lunch, and then we met again at the billiard hall where you could watch and play for nothing. Then back to tea and to watch billiards again. In the evening we used to go to the pictures. That’s how we spent the dole money. In the end, I thought I’d go mad if I went on like this … in the end I joined a PT Class. But I found it made me so hungry I couldn’t go on with it.’

The public library was somewhere warm to sit, and scouring the ‘situations vacant’ pages of local newspapers was a daily — if usually frustrating — thing to do, as was checking the racing pages, if the librarian hadn’t removed them to discourage such undesirable activities, as quite a number did. The journalist and writer Paul Johnson recalled that the librarian at his local library in Tunstall in the Potteries, the tyrannical Miss Cartlich, was unsympathetic to the unemployed, who ‘had no money — literally not a penny — for any form of entertainment and therefore could only walk the streets aimlessly. The reading room of the public library was thus a winter garden of rest.’ But woe betide any man who fell asleep, for then Miss Cartlich would ‘wake them up and escort them off the premises, if necessary taking a hand to their collar. “Out, out, out!” she would say. “I’ll have no men here snoring in my reading room.” If they could stay awake, however, and pretend to be reading, the men were safe.’

Many unemployed men found they developed — or now had the time to indulge — a taste for reading books. ‘Thousands used the Public Library for the first time,’ averred John Brown who read Shaw’s plays, Marx, Engels, ‘the philosophers of Greece and Rome’ and a great deal of fiction in his local South Shields library. ‘It was nothing uncommon to come across men in very shabby clothes kneeling in front of the philosophy or economics shelves.’ Jack Jones, a Welsh miner, wrote three articles about unemployment for Time and Tide in 1931 in which he maintained that ‘people were reading for dear life now that they had no work to go to. I tried to show how the depressed mining communities were trying to read themselves through the Depression, and how this was sending borrowing figures in the libraries such as Pontypridd, where there were six and a half thousand unemployed, up and up by scores of thousands.’ However, in Deptford in South London the Pilgrim Trust noticed that when unemployment was high, borrowing from the public libraries declined, since all men’s energies were focused on getting work, and to them reading was associated with well-earned leisure.

In Greenwich, E. Wight Bakke found that among those unemployed who obligingly filled in diaries of how they spent their days for him, ‘an average of 10.7 hours a week was spent in reading’. While more than half that time was devoted to newspapers and magazines, the rest was taken up by books borrowed from the free public libraries. Most of these were fiction: Bakke found little evidence that the men — and presumably the women either — were particularly interested in reading books on ‘Socialism or Trade Unionism or other works on economic and political theory’. But some were: an ex-army officer who had been unable to find other work ‘joined the public library and read numerous books. I read no fiction at all, but turned my attention to many other subjects, astronomy, physics, economics, history, photography, psychology, and read books on psychic phenomena, the Yogi culture, and other things. I went to lectures by eminent people of all kinds, statesmen and politicians, with the general idea of getting the world and its affairs in perspective and finding out what was wrong with everything.’

One ‘brilliantly successful experiment’ was the translation of an act of a Shakespeare play into Tyneside dialect in a Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) class, while a young unemployed letterpress operator filled his long days by sitting in the parks, swimming or talking with ‘other fellows who are out. I am a member of a library and spend most evenings reading until midnight. I find it the only thing that can take my mind off loneliness, poverty and hunger. My choice varies: Fiction — Priestley, Dell, Orczy, Tolstoy etc. (Russian writers are my favourite.) Educational and interest subjects — philosophy, psychology, travel, Socialism, economics etc.’ George Tomlinson read The Canterbury Tales, Lamb’s Essays, Darwin’s Origin of Species, Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘or anything that I could get hold of’ as he sat on his toolbox at the pit head having volunteered for a weekend repair shift. An unemployed miner in the Rhondda was an avid reader of Balzac, and it was ‘during my dole days’ that Donald Kear in the Forest of Dean ‘became a compulsive reader. I read anything and everything that came my way, from Jack London and Anatole France to medical dictionaries and odd volumes of electrical engineering encyclopaedias.’ Kear also listened to ‘weekly talks on the radio addressed to the unemployed by a man called John Hilton’. Hilton, a working-class autodidact with a trade union background, was appointed the first Montagu Burton Professor of Industrial Relations at Cambridge in 1931. He was a prolific journalist and broadcaster with an informed and compassionate interest in the plight of the poor. ‘I came to have a great respect and liking for him,’ recalled Kear. ‘His was the only sympathetic voice the unemployed ever heard. He recommended reading as a pastime for us. “Long way ahead in the future,” he said, “someone will want to know where you got your know-how, your handiness with words, and you’ll tell ’em you were unemployed in the ’30s and you did a lot of reading.”’