The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

‘DON’T BE DEPRESSED IN A DEPRESSED AREA. GO TO THE PICTURES AND ENJOY LIFE AS OTHERS DO’ urged a cinema poster outside the Memorial Hall cinema (named in memory of the dead of the First World War, but known locally as ‘the Memo’) at the Celynen Collieries and Workingmen’s Institute at Newbridge in South Wales. The inter-war years were the great decades of cinema-building, with Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, Byzantium, rococo and baroque extravaganzas gradually giving way to ‘dream palaces’ that were streamlined and modern, sinuously curved, plate-glass-decorated, Art Deco buildings that seemed to pay homage to Manhattan, to ocean liners — or to TB sanatoria. Many were huge: Green’s in Glasgow, built in 1927, could seat more than 4,300, while the Bolton Odeon, which opened in 1937, had 2,534 seats and forty-one employees, including usherettes, doormen, chocolate girls and pageboys as well as the expected projectionists and box-office staff.

Cinema-going remained a popular activity for those without work — though the frequency of their visits might be reduced by shortage of money, despite most cinemas selling sixpenny tickets. The reasons were obvious: it was something to do, somewhere warm to go, and a transport out of the dreary reality to romance, humour, drama, thrills. ‘For two and a half hours [the viewer] could live in another world where, invariably, the spirit of adventure was given full play, justice triumphed over injustice, and the hero eventually won through.’ On Merseyside, where unemployment was high, a 1934 survey found that 40 per cent of the population went to the cinema once a week and of them about two-thirds went twice. In Brynmawr in South Wales there were two cinemas, and both did good business throughout the 1930s, while in Greenwich those unemployed who were encouraged to keep diaries estimated that on average they would spend 2.6 hours a week at the cinema, usually going to an afternoon matinee when the seats were cheaper. The Carnegie Report on unemployed youth in Glasgow concluded that ‘attendance at cinemas is the most important single activity’ of those they interviewed, with 80 per cent seeing at least one film a week, and a quarter of those going more frequently. This was not, the report considered, altogether for the good: ‘It was perhaps inevitable, but none the less unfortunate, that many acquired a habit of attending the cinemas regardless of the standard of the films … The harmful effects of indiscriminate cinema attendance are obvious. Young men may come to accept their experiences vicariously. If their only mental sally into adventure comes while they are sitting in a comfortable seat, the enthusiasm and spirit for personal action will soon disappear.’ It was hoped that ‘increasing endeavour’ would be made by the film industry ‘to develop a high standard of artistic appreciation’.

Not all cinemas were of such magnificence as the lavish new ‘dream palaces’: while the patrons of Tooting in South London might watch their films in a building that was a simulacrum of the Doge’s Palace in Venice (with a nod to the cathedral at Burgos), the unemployed in the Rhondda Valley were more likely to have their silver screen set up in a Miners’ Institute, or a ‘fleapit’ or ‘bug house’ unmodernised since its erection possibly before the First World War — the ‘Memo’ in Newbridge was an exception, seating seven hundred people and decorated with both Art Nouveau and Art Deco flourishes, and murals depicting ‘industrial scenes with miners toiling underground’.

Cinemas in Miners’ and other Institutes were run by committees that bargained with the film distributors to get the best prices for the films they wanted to show, kept seat prices down — fourpence was not unusual, and at Mardy Workingmen’s Institute in the Rhondda, where unemployment was very high, customers were asked to pay what they could afford — and also kept a close watch over what films the patrons watched. Most favoured films with a social message, such as Broken Blossoms (1919), a depiction of slum life, though they also responded to customer demand by showing comedies like the nihilistic (and hugely popular) Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races (1937) or Shirley Temple’s Bright Eyes, which was screened ‘twice nightly with matinee showings for adults on Thursday afternoons and Saturdays for children’ in October 1935. Moreover, in communities where most social activities — the pub, the billiard hall, the Miners’ Institute — were organised exclusively for men and either forbade entry to women or made them entirely unwelcome, the cinema was somewhere a woman could go and enjoy herself away from the confines of the home: though while a number of the films shown at Cwmllynfell Miners’ Welfare Hall cinema, for instance, such as the swashbuckling The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) or American musicals, were unisex in their appeal, an awful lot were clearly ‘boy’s own’ adventures aimed at a male audience.

In the nineteenth century miners’ pay had commonly been docked by a penny or two in the pound to pay for their children’s education, and when universal free education was introduced this money was redirected to miners’ institutes, which were also partly funded by the colliery owners, and in which many fine libraries were collected. Following the recommendations of the 1920 Sankey Commission into coalmining, a Miners’ Welfare Fund was established to provide indoor and outdoor entertainment, financed by a levy on colliery owners, and for the first time on the royalty owners (those who owned the land on which the mines were sunk), as well as mineworkers. The fund was administered by a Miners’ Welfare Committee on which representatives of all interests sat. This money was used to fund pit-head baths (despite the fact that, according to evidence given to the Coal Industry Commission, wives regarded it as their duty and privilege to wash their husbands’ backs and to see that they had their hot bath before the kitchen fire), build or improve institutes, and provide scholarships and libraries. Only about thirty institutes had a cinema (the jewel in the crown was Tredegar’s Workmen’s Institute, which had an eight-hundred-seat cinema, a film society and hosted a series of celebrity concerts, with the top-price seats costing three shillings). Some were little more than a collection of huts, but all played an important role in the life of the community, offering evening classes and lectures, concerts, theatres and dances, debating societies, gymnastics, photography laboratories and amateur dramatics, and hosting political and trade union meetings, travelling theatrical and opera companies and eisteddfodau (Welsh cultural festivals). This strong ethos of education and improvement as well as entertainment led them to be referred to in South Wales as ‘Prifysgol y Glowyr’ (the Miners’ University), and influenced the choice of films shown in the cinemas, the books on loan in the libraries, and the periodicals lying around in the reading rooms.

By 1934 there were more than a hundred miners’ libraries in the Welsh coalfields, with an average stock of around 3,000 books, though some were much smaller, with a local miner acting as a volunteer librarian one evening a week. Despite the strong religious nonconformism of the ‘tin bethels’ in the Valleys with their crusade for a better life morally, mentally and socially, and the fierce political and union activism of the ‘Little Moscows’ of South Wales, even during the ‘red decade’ of the 1930s few miners seemed interested in reading about politics or economics. The library committees (Aneurin Bevan headed the one at Tredegar) might acquire the complete works of Lenin or Marx, but those volumes remained on the shelves, while the ones that were most borrowed appear to have been Victorian novels (Mrs Henry Wood was much in demand), detective stories or westerns — though, as Jonathan Rose points out, so few borrowing records for the miners’ libraries are extant that it is hard to generalise. An Ynyshir library lent books to three hundred out-of-work miners who read on average eighty-six books a year, whereas a survey of 437 unemployed young men from Cardiff, Newport and Pontypridd revealed that while 57 per cent claimed that reading was one of their most significant leisure activities, only 20 per cent ever visited a library, and only 6 per cent borrowed books. To them, reading meant the daily paper, mostly for sport and horoscopes, or cheap paperback novels exchanged with others in the queue at the Employment Exchange.

The institutes had received their funding from miners’ wages, the Miners’ Welfare Fund and the local authority, so in the harsh economic conditions of the 1930s, when many young men left the Valleys looking for work, and many of those left behind were unemployed, these all but dried up, and the acquisition budgets of most such libraries became non-existent. Miners’ libraries were reduced to issuing public appeals for books, approaching sympathetic public library authorities such as those in Manchester, Bethnal Green or Finsbury in London, all of which sent boxloads of books, or reluctantly ceding their hard-fought-for autonomy and becoming essentially distribution centres for their local public library service. By 1937 many had bought no new books for over a decade, so readers were obliged to read whatever was on the shelves over and over again — and presumably most soon became disheartened by a repetition that echoed so many other dreary repetitions in the lives of the long-term unemployed.

The sports pages, the cinema, football, allotment-tending, pigeon-racing, the kazoo band — all these were traditional working-class leisure activities that in substantial areas of Britain were, by the 1930s, no longer something to do at the end of a working day, a working week, but rather had taken the place of work. What if, as seemed increasingly likely, this was not to be a phase, a transition, but a way of life? The ‘idle rich’ might be an accepted feature of society, but what about the idle poor — even if their idleness was unsought, regretted, enforced, unafforded? Were such men and women to be regarded as the inevitable human cost of industrial decline, to be left to decline themselves, of no further use, supported at a minimal level by the state and allowed to pass their days as if on an unpunctuated weekend, but without the resources to do so? Or were they the vanguard of a new society in which new technologies and a more efficient form of capitalism would mean that there would simply be less work to do and fewer people needed to do it? In 1934 Havelock Ellis, usually described as a sexologist, predicted, rather as Major Douglas and Ezra Pound had done, ‘the four-hour working day as the probable maximum for the future. The day of the proletariat is over. Few workers but skilled ones are now needed. Most of the unemployed of today will perhaps never be employed again. They already belong to an age that is past.’ However, as a Vice-President of the Eugenics Education Society, Ellis was hard-pressed to see that it would be a bad thing if the ‘single proletarian left in England [was] placed in the Zoological gardens and carefully tended’, since, after all, ‘the glorification of the proletarian has been the work of the middle-class’, and the fact was that the ‘lowest stratum of a population which possesses nothing beyond its ability to produce off spring’ would be phased out as a matter of economic evolution.

When the film-maker Humphrey Jennings came to make a documentary for the GPO Film Unit at the end of the 1930s, ‘a surrealist vision of industrial England … the dwellers in Blake’s dark satanic mills reborn in the world of greyhound racing and Marks & Spencers’, the film’s working title was ‘British Workers’. But by the time he had filmed, in Sheffield, Bolton, Manchester and Pontypridd, men walking lurchers, releasing pigeons, playing billiards, drinking in a pub, a kazoo band ‘razzing away at “If You Knew Susie”’ and later carrying a child dressed as Britannia as they play a jazz version of ‘Rule Britannia’, a fairground, women watching a puppet show, a ballroom slowly filling with dancers, lions and tigers padding round their cages in Bellevue Zoo, Manchester, the title had been changed to Spare Time. The voice-over (spoken by the poet Laurie Lee) intoned: ‘Spare time is the time when people can be most themselves,’ as the miners’ cage descended the coalshaft. A re-evaluation of the whole notion of ‘leisure’ was clearly overdue. If talking about the unemployed as having leisure was to ‘mistake the desert created by the absence of work for the oasis of recreation’, how would it be possible to avoid the apathy that various social commentators confidently identified as the final stage the unemployed would pass through, via resolution, resignation and distress. As a ‘rough progression from optimism to pessimism, from pessimism to fatalism’? And if the creation of new jobs was not on the cards, how could the unemployed be encouraged to make the ‘right’ use of the leisure that would be the pattern of their future?

S.P.B. Mais, in his introduction to Time to Spare (1935), was convinced that ‘Left to themselves the unemployed can do nothing whatever to occupy their spare time profitably … This is where you and I come in … we have quite simply to dedicate our leisure to the unemployed,’ and suggested that this meant giving the unemployed man ‘a chance to work [since] playing draughts isn’t going to fit him for anything except perhaps the asylum’. Mais was full of ideas for ‘work’: ‘I don’t care what it is you set up,’ he insisted, ‘from a forge for men to work on the anvil to a stamp collecting society. It’s all grist to the mill. There cannot be too many interests in an unemployed man’s life … sell him the best leather at the cheapest possible rates and let him learn how to mend his boots for himself and his family … make it possible for him to buy [Mais stressed: ‘you will have noticed my insistence on the word buy. The unemployed do not want charity. They prefer to pay to the limit of their capacity to pay’] … to buy wood, then encourage him to learn how to make chests of drawers, wardrobes, chairs and other necessities of household furniture … to buy material and learn to make his own suits.’ Give the wife and family of an unemployed man a holiday, or imitate ‘the young Cotswold farmer who … gave up his summer to entertaining relays of school children from Birmingham … This principle of adoption should be extended to towns, and prosperous towns in the South like Brighton should adopt derelict towns in the North like Jarrow.’ But Mais recognised that this help should involve neither ‘charity (in the wrong sense) nor patronage’ (though, however well-meaning he may have been, the latter seemed rather evident). What was needed was either for ‘you and I’ to ‘join a local occupational club’, or if there wasn’t one, ‘get one going … all that is required to start with is a disused barn, hut or shop and the goodwill of, say, a dozen unemployed men to pay a penny for the privilege of membership’.

Some initiatives were essentially social clubs, organised locally and spontaneously, usually financed by the members, and intended to be money-making activities. Some, like those in Wales (where drinking in pubs on the Sabbath was not permitted) had licensed bars, and most had a billiards table and a wireless which supplied continuous background music. Such clubs in cities tended to be in the poorer districts. In Liverpool there were reputed to be nearly 150, most housed in empty shops, cellars or basements. Apart from the ubiquitous billiards table, raffles were organised, ‘the glittering prize quite often being a box of groceries with a bottle of beer or whisky for the man’, card games and other ‘petty gambling games — sometimes not so petty — are played from morning to night’. Many clubs organised a football team, and some a ‘Wembley Club’ into which members would pay a sixpence a week so that every other year when the international football match between England and Scotland was played at Wembley ‘a charabanc is hired and club members attend the match and go sight-seeing in London’. At Christmas an outing to the local pantomime would be organised, and ‘since some of the clubs are not lacking in the spirit of service to others, an old folk’s treat or free film show for the kiddies of the locality is occasionally provided’.

There were, as Mais recognised, already a number of ‘occupational clubs’ in areas of high unemployment. The Society of Friends had started an educational settlement at Maes-yr-Haf in the Rhondda in 1927, and another in Brynmawr the following year. Mais spoke approvingly of a club in Lincoln where ‘unemployed engineers cook the dinners for their own nursery school, mak[e] furniture for the Orphanages, toys for imbecile children, and invalid chairs for the decrepit aged’, and still found the energy for ‘Greek dancing’ in the evening. This was probably the one started in 1927 by the WEA, which had been founded in 1903 to ‘link learning with labour’, with the motto ‘An enquiring mind is sufficient qualification’.

The spread of such centres had been given a boost in January 1932 when the Prince of Wales, the (briefly) future King Edward VIII, who was patron of the National Council of Social Service (NCSS), speaking at a meeting at the Albert Hall called upon the British people to face the challenge of unemployment ‘as a national opportunity for voluntary social service’, and ‘refusing to be paralyzed by the size of the problem, break it into little pieces’. The response was heartening. By that autumn over seven hundred schemes were in operation in various parts of the country, and by mid-1935 the number had grown to over a thousand centres for men and more than three hundred for women, with a total membership of over 150,000. Many provided occupational opportunities as well as the usual facilities for billiards, dancing and reading. In the depressed areas of Lancashire there were 114 centres for men and thirty-five for women. There were nine in Glasgow, the same number in Liverpool and twenty-one in Cardiff. In the Rhondda there were between thirty and forty clubs which offered activities ranging from choral and operatic societies to mining outcrop coal. In Manchester, where there were some thirty centres for the unemployed (seventeen providing facilities for men to repair their own and their families’ shoes), an orchestra was formed among unemployed musicians which in May 1933 gave a recital on the BBC North Regional Service, while Gladys Langford, a generally rather discontented North London schoolteacher, went to Queen Mary’s Hall, Bloomsbury to hear the British Symphony Orchestra, ‘a body of unemployed musicians conducted by Charles Hambourg. He is a stocky little man with a bulging bottom much accentuated by a very short lounge jacket. Enjoyed the music.’

Many clubs used church halls or schoolrooms, which might only be available for a few hours a week, but in some cases disused premises were offered, perhaps a local church, shop, pub or empty factory, or in the case of Salford a fire and police station, and the unemployed spent time painting and equipping them as places in which they would want to spend time.

Some of the clubs received help from their local authority, or Lord Mayor’s Fund, others from voluntary social service agencies under the umbrella of the NCSS, the Pilgrim Trust, the Society of Friends, the WEA, which also allowed the unemployed to attend its classes free of charge, or the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM). Others were ‘adopted’ by local industrial or other concerns, though they tended to manage them undemocratically, with little input from the members, a situation that ‘seems to have been based on the theory that unemployed men were unfitted to take any responsibility for their own Clubs and that the Management Committee, by definition, knew what was good for the men better than the men knew it themselves’.

There were five residential centres, including Hardwick Hall in County Durham, which opened in October 1934, and provided classes in upholstery and bookbinding as well as more usual crafts; The Beeches, Bournville, which was solely for women (courses there only lasted for two weeks rather than the usual six, since it was presumed that women could not afford to be away from home for any longer); and Coleg Harlech, an established adult education college which regarded itself as the Welsh equivalent of Ruskin College, Oxford. In October 1933 the Coleg started running residential courses for the unemployed offering a more academic curriculum rather than crafts and practical skills.

The various organisations received small — if any — grants from the government, usually via the NCSS or the Scottish Council for Community Service. By March 1935 the Ministry of Labour had tipped in £80,000, while voluntary donations totalled more than £125,000. However, while Thomas Jones spoke of ‘trying to fob off the unemployed with a miserable grant of a few thousand pounds to Ellis’ show [Captain Lionel Ellis was chairman of the NCSS]’, the voluntary schemes appeared to value their independence from government funding — and control.

Despite the stringency of its financial support, the government rarely failed to instance the success of such schemes in dealing with the ‘residual problem’ of the long-term unemployed. And there were many successes: on Clydebank, where one club had ‘a membership of seven hundred and twenty three and a waiting list of two hundred’, and where men were ‘split into fifty groups, occupied in motor mechanics, dress-making, photography, shorthand, music, swimming, boot repairing, metal work, woodwork and wireless’; a Boys’ Club in Barnsley where members took ‘a nightly run’; Blackburn, which had its own parliament, or Barnard Castle, where traditional quilt-making was being revived.

The Reverend Northcott described a club in Darwen in Lancashire, where only twenty-eight of the sixty cotton mills were still working. It was housed, ‘ironically enough, in a building which had been used as a Labour Exchange … The motto is “Occupation of Hand and Brain”.’ Facilities were provided for ‘cobbling of all descriptions, woodwork classes, discussion circles, lectures and concerts. Twenty men a day pursue the art of rug making. There is first-aid instruction, a physical instruction group, and singing lessons given in a room in the fire station. Men have gone to camp, played cricket regularly, and have learned to swim.’

Since, according to the vicar, the ‘Lancashire woman who has gone to the mill has not been a great housewife’, a women’s centre was ‘helping its members in the management of their families’ food and clothes’, and a number of the occupational centres had women’s sections. ‘Members bring old clothes and are shown how to remake them … The men have made wheelbarrows out of old boxes and wheels made out of circular discs. Jigsaw puzzles were made out of magazine pictures and three-ply wood.’ In a neighbouring centre an unemployed weaver of fine cloth ‘modelled two vases of fine shape’ out of old gramophone records he had melted down, ‘and felt immediately that he was in the line of genuine potters’. It cost a penny a week to belong to such a club, and this entitled a member to vote for a committee which drew up the programme of activities.

Spennymoor Settlement in County Durham was started in 1931 by Bill Farrell, who had studied at Toynbee Hall, the original example of a settlement house founded by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett in Whitechapel in the East End of London in 1884 with support from various Oxford colleges. There the privileged came to live and work among the poor, in the words of Samuel Barnett, ‘To learn as much as to teach: to receive as much as to give.’ Funded by the Pilgrim Trust, Spennymoor was open to all (though initially there was suspicion that Bill Farrell’s title, ‘warden’, meant ‘warder’) and offered classes in such things as carpentry, shoe repairing, elementary psychology and the British Constitution. It instigated a debating society, a male voice choir, a children’s centre, a needlework class for women taught by Farrell’s wife, Betty, and a public lending library, also on her initiative. The Farrells’ interest in art and drama stimulated a sketching club and a play-reading group, with scenery made in the carpentry classes. The centre put on its first play in 1934, largely organised by a group of miners’ wives, a theatre was built which opened in 1939, and soon Spennymoor was dubbed ‘The Pitman’s Academy’ for its prodigious success in helping its members win scholarships to Oxford and adult colleges. Sid Chaplin, a very successful novelist in the 1950s, honed his writing skills at Spennymoor, as did the miner Norman Cornish his artistic talents at the ‘wonderful’ Spennymoor sketching club. The Prince of Wales paid a visit in December 1934.