The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

‘Ashington, pop. 40,000. Mining town mostly built in the early part of this century. Dreary rows a mile long. Ashpits and mines down the middle of the streets,’ was how the 1937 Shell Guide to Northumberland & Durham described this Durham town. Not the sort of place to which to take a scenic detour, but some of those — employed and unemployed — who lived in those ‘dreary rows’ had a yearning for the finer things. There was no public library, but there was a Harmonic Hall, built by the miners so that string bands and brass bands had somewhere to play, as could a children’s orchestra with ‘violins for about eighty kiddies’, and there was a football pitch that doubled as a greyhound track. There was also a thriving branch of the WEA. Harry Wilson, who could have opted to learn music or drama there, instead plumped for ‘Experimental Evolution’, which took the students out into the surrounding area to poke ‘around in ponds and look for flints’. When the course was over, he and some friends felt they were ‘at a dead end again so we started on Art’. Robert Lyon ARCA, Master of Painting and Lecturer in Fine Art at Armstrong College, Newcastle, then part of Durham University, was invited by ‘a number of men … all associated with the pits’, to discuss the possibility of forming an art appreciation group in Ashington. After a lecture by Lyon at which he showed them black-and-white slides of Renaissance paintings and classical Greek sculptures, the twenty-four men and two girls (who didn’t last long, since ‘there’s a strict understanding in mining districts where women fit in and where men fit in’), made it clear that that was not what they wanted: they ‘wanted a way, if possible, of seeing for themselves’. So Lyon agreed (entirely against the spirit of the WEA, which was ‘all theory: nothing which could possibly be interpreted as being of any use for making a living could be taught’) to teach the men how to draw and paint, setting them homework each week to produce a picture on a subject like ‘The Dawn’, ‘Deluge’ or ‘The Hermit’, on cardboard or whatever material they could find.

Lyon took his class to look at watercolours in Newcastle Gallery, and in February 1936, thanks to the generosity of the daughter of the chairman of the P&O shipping line, Helen Sutherland, who lived nearby in Alnwick and was a discerning collector of modernist art, to London to see the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy, and visit the Tate and other city sights, ending up with a cream tea and madrigals in the Hampstead home of the owner of Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge, ‘a celebrated exercise in applied tastefulness’.

In 1936 the Ashington Group held its first exhibition of ninety-seven paintings and several engravings in Newcastle. The ‘experiment’ received favourable notices; soon the art world (the Surrealist painter Julian Trevelyan and the post-impressionist Clive Bell in particular) began to take notice, and the group was mentioned in a Penguin survey of art in England. Inspired by Ashington’s success, other art appreciation groups started to spring up, the British Institute of Adult Education mounted three exploratory ‘Art for the People’ exhibitions, and in April 1937 the Ashington Group contributed some pictures to what the art historian Anthony Blunt called ‘the most important event of the year from the point of view of English Art’, organised by the Artists International Association.

‘Unprofessional Painting’ was the title of an exhibition held at Gateshead in October 1938 to which the Ashington Group sent work. ‘They Paint Their Own Lives’ was another, held in Mansfield, Nottingham, six months later, and indeed the corpus of work did depict ‘ordinary life’: a miner reading a newspaper, a Bedlington terrier — ‘Miners are keen on Bedlingtons,’ explained a critic in The Listener — miners with their pigeons, playing dominoes, having Sunday dinner with their families, poaching. But most were of men at work: down the pits hacking coal, in the pit-head baths, eating their ‘bait’ (packed lunch). In the early days the men sold their pictures for a pound or thirty shillings, ‘to get money for painting materials’, and found themselves regarded as representatives of the British ‘social realist’ school. But ‘mining pictures would not be welcome to hang on the walls at home; landscapes would be considered more suitable. The women had had enough of mining dominating their lives, and frequently, when there were several workers in the house, reducing them to slaves. Many women were never able to get to bed except at weekends and just dozed in a chair to fit in with the different shifts.’

Such voluntary efforts to help the unemployed (and integrate them into the life of the community, since most clubs and classes were open to all, in work or not) might be rightly admired for what they achieved, but there was a suspicion expressed by the trade union movement that occupational centres would produce semi-trained craftsmen who could be used to undercut existing wage rates, and in some areas pressure was put on unemployed union members not to join them. Others regarded the occupational clubs as little more than opium for the masses, handed down by a government that had no policies to end unemployment. Wal Hannington of the NUWM sneered at ‘how craftily the ruling class, by evoking the sentiment of charity, have sought to cover up their sins and omissions in the treatment of the unemployed’, and pointed out that the ‘honoured gentlemen’ of the NCCS had never joined in the demand for the abolition of the Means Test or the restoration of benefit cuts. Frank Forster, an intermittently unemployed casual labourer from Saltney in Cheshire, thought that ‘the idea behind … the BBC broadcasting of morning talks to Unemployed Clubs … seems to be an attempt to keep those who attend the clubs quiet. To dope them … They hand out … what will keep them out of mischief. They must place their existence on a charitable basis, provide them with voluntarily contributed clubs and games etc … All this to prevent them from falling into the hands of Communists.’ George Orwell was of much the same mind, arguing in The Road to Wigan Pier that the centres were ‘simply a device to keep the unemployed quiet and give them an illusion that something is being done for them’, though he conceded that what he considered the ‘rubbish’ the centres offered was probably better for the unemployed man ‘than for years upon end he should do absolutely nothing’.

The educational and occupational activities at the unemployment centres may have seemed like splendid opportunities to those offering them, but from those on the receiving end, enthusiasm was not always so evident. Since club leaders were poorly paid, suitable people could be hard to find, and a great deal depended on their vitality and organisational skills. Such activities as the centres offered tended to appeal more to the young than to the older long-term unemployed, and class numbers dropped in some districts. ‘What we unemployed could do with is a little less of education and a little more of entertainment,’ suggested one of their nameless number in a letter to the Spectator in March 1933, while the anguish of an out-of-work miner permeates a documentary film made in 1932, when unemployment stood at over two million: ‘We can do physical jerks, grow cabbages until we’re blue in the face, but it’s not paid work. It’s just killing time. It’s not the real work that we want.’

EIGHT The Hard Road Travelled

The British working man, employed or unemployed, is very conservative in his allegiance to law, order and tradition. He hates the idea of a Red Revolution, which he knows would make an awful mess … Communist visitors in the distressed areas get short shrift from men standing unemployed round disused pit-heads.

Sir Philip Gibbs, Ordeal in England (1937)

No saviour from on high delivers,

No trust have we in prince or peer.

Our own right hand the chains must sever …

From the third verse of ‘The Internationale’

On the first day of 1932 the son and heir of the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam attained his majority. To celebrate, beacons were lit on the hills surrounding the family’s magnificent house, Wentworth. Built in the 1720s, the largest privately owned house in Britain, it had a room for every day of the year, and five miles of corridors. In front of the façade, which was the longest in Europe, the Elsecar Colliery Brass Band struck up, and a crowd 40,000 strong joined in singing ‘Londonderry Air’ and ‘We Won’t Come Home Till Morning’. And when the birthday boy, Lord Milton, drove with his father in the first car of a fleet of yellow Rolls-Royces on a ceremonial tour of his estates, the eight-mile route was lined with estate workers and the men who worked in the Fitzwilliams’ mines (on short time, given the economic climate) and their families, all waving and cheering, delighted that they had each been given a day’s paid holiday and a freshly issued ten-shilling note. At various stops en route Lord Milton would open proceedings by cutting a ribbon with a gold pocket knife his father had given him for his birthday, and at the New Stubbin pit the Secretary of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association stepped forward to thank the Earl and applaud him as ‘the finest idealistic employer in the country today’, a mine-owner who had so arranged things that not a single man had been dismissed despite the slump, and shifts had been arranged so the men received ‘the fullest benefits of the Unemployment Act’.

The Wentworth miners might have doffed their flat caps and have had reason to feel grateful towards their employers, but in the 1930s most coalminers — the ‘sort of grimy caryatid[s] upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported’, according to George Orwell, had both particular grievances and a particular militancy. The 1926 General Strike left a bitter legacy for men working in the Welsh Valleys, the Scottish, Durham and East Midlands coalfields, most of whom stayed on strike for months after the nine-day TUC strike collapsed. As a result many were blacklisted by the colliery owners, and never worked again. Wages were cut, hours extended and working conditions deteriorated. Employment in the coal industry fell consistently, from 218,000 in 1926 to 136,000 in 1932, and across Wales as a whole unemployment averaged 39 per cent.

At a time when over 40 per cent of the miners were out of work in the Yorkshire coalfields, a local headmaster would reputedly admonish pupils who answered his question, ‘Now then, boy, what are you going to do when you leave school?’ ‘We’re going to pit, sir,’ with ‘’Cos tha’ strong in the arm and weak in the head.’ Coalmining remained probably the most dangerous occupation in Britain. A West Lothian pit was known locally as ‘the Dardanelles pit. It was named that because of the high accident rate — they compared it with the slaughter at the Dardanelles’ in the First World War. There was widespread bitterness about the lack of compliance — since compliance invariably cost money — that many mine-owners accorded to health and safety regulations, and in the early hours of 22 September 1934 one of the worst mining disasters in British history occurred at Gresford colliery near Wrexham in North Wales, when an explosion ripped through part of the mine known as the Dennis section during the night shift. Although six miners managed to crawl to safety, three men were killed in the rescue attempt, and on the following night, Sunday, 23 September, it was agreed that the mine should be sealed with the dead miners entombed inside. A further violent explosion a couple of days later killed a surface worker: the disaster had claimed a total of 266 lives.

At the subsequent inquiry, Sir Stafford Cripps agreed to represent the mineworkers’ union pro bono. Despite the Labour lawyer’s relentless, technically informed questioning (Cripps had read chemistry at University College London, since he considered the lab conditions there to be far superior to those at either Oxford or Cambridge, before turning to law) in pursuit of his contention that safety had been sacrificed in the pursuit of profit, it was hard to establish what precisely had caused a build-up of lethal methane gas which had ignited, particularly since the mine-owners refused to allow the sealed section to be opened for inspection. While the report that the Chief Inspector of Mines, Sir Henry Walker, laid before Parliament in January 1937 singled out no one — neither the colliery management, the firemen who worked down the mine, the shot-firers whose job it was to blow up the coal face so the miners could get at the coal to be hewn, nor the inspectors — as having been criminally negligent, he concluded that nor had any of them performed their duties satisfactorily. Yet when charges were brought in the courts by the bereaved against the company and its officials, most of the cases were either dismissed or withdrawn, and no one was convicted of any wrongdoing.

The Gresford pit disaster provoked nationwide sympathy, gifts (over half a million pounds were raised) and unease among many that until the mines were taken out of private hands the catalogue of accidents and disregard for safety would continue, as would the mining industry’s generally poor industrial relations and sluggish productivity.

The previous September, unemployed coalminers had marched from South Wales to Bristol to lobby the TUC meeting there, and in September 1932 a contingent from Wales was among the eighteen from all over Britain that marched on London in what the organisers, the NUWM, called the ‘Great National Hunger March of the Unemployed Against the Means Test’, which culminated in a rally in Hyde Park. The NUWM claimed there were 100,000 unemployed in the park on 27 October, while the Metropolitan Police estimated the number at somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000.

This ‘great march’ was the largest to date, but by no means the first of the frequent protests by the unemployed since the effects of the Depression had first begun to bite in 1920. As well as numerous local demonstrations, the NUWM organised six national marches between 1922 and 1936, gathering contingents from all over the country to march to London with their demand for ‘work or full maintenance at trade union rates’. ‘If history is to be truly recorded,’ wrote Wal Hannington, ‘our future historians must include this feature of the “Hungry Thirties”.’ To Hannington the marches were a rebuttal of the charge — or, in the case of such proto-sociologists as the Pilgrim Trust survey team or E. Wight Bakke, the sympathetic observation — that the unemployed were apathetic, that they ‘quietly suffered their degradation and poverty’ despite the evident fact that ‘they were hungry; their wives and children were hungry’.

In March 1930, with the number of registered unemployed standing at over 2.5 million, over a thousand men left Scotland, the Durham coalfields, Northumberland, Plymouth, Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Nottingham coalfields, the Potteries, South Wales, the Midlands and Kent to trudge, most of the way on foot, to the capital, where they were joined by the London workless. For the first time women from the depressed textile areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire made up a special — separate — contingent, in the hope that the female Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield, might afford their case a sympathetic hearing. This was not to be, and the only success that what Hannington called the ‘raiding parties’ had was to storm the Ministry of Health, lock themselves in and address the crowds in Whitehall below, until they were forcibly ejected.

In the days after the formation of the National Government in August 1931, protest had escalated, often ending in pitched battles between the unemployed and the police, with the protesters reported as having thrown stones and hammer heads, and attempting to pull the police from their horses, while the police allegedly laid about the protesters with batons. By the end of the year over thirty different towns and cities had seen clashes between the police and unemployed demonstrators. ‘This “cuts” business may bring the Empire down,’ predicted Samuel Rich, a London teacher who had spent time in September 1931 working out his family’s annual budget in anticipation that ‘JRM [Ramsay MacDonald] will reduce all teachers’ salaries by 15% by Order in Council’. Philip Snowden, who had translated his job as Chancellor into the National Government (until the election in October 1931), announced in his budget on 10 September that not only unemployment insurance benefit would be slashed by 10 per cent, but so would the pay of teachers, the police and the armed forces.

Articles had started to appear in the Manchester Guardian in the 1930–31 school year highlighting the plight of out-of-work teachers, and it was not long before suggestions were being made that the already very small number of married women teachers might be ‘let go’. Although 10,000 teachers marched through the streets of London in protest on 11 September 1931 (members of what Hannington referred to triumphantly as ‘the black-coated proletariat … embarking on a new experience, marching through the streets carrying banners’), Samuel Rich was appalled at what he regarded as the supine acquiescence of his profession. ‘The “L[ondon] T[eacher]” and other teachers’ papers all sickening today. The 10% cut is a victory! A victory! What lice! I hear that only 218 London schoolmasters voted to be absent yesterday after the meeting. 218! — Bah!’.

As well as demonstrations and clashes with the police over the following months there was one response that was unprecedented — and more disturbing to the government than that of the ‘black-coated proletariat’ — the incident that Samuel Rich thought ‘might bring the Empire down’, and which gave an added twist to fears about Britain’s stability at the moment of acute economic crisis. ‘The Atlantic Fleet has been recalled owing to dissatisfaction among the sailors,’ Rich reported. ‘They’ll get redress tho’ as they are at the right end of the guns.’ The largest ships of the North Atlantic Fleet had been gathering in the Cromarty Firth for their annual autumn exercises when the news of the cuts came through — not from official sources such as the Admiralty Board, but piecemeal via newspaper reports and rumours. The cuts were not only swingeing, they were not equitable, and bore most heavily on the lower ranks, as an across-the-board cut of a shilling a day would mean only 3 per cent off the pay of a Lieutenant Commander, while an Able Seamen between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five would suffer a reduction of 25 per cent. This, a senior officer immediately realised, was ‘perfectly absurd’. Six shillings week less money would mean real hardship to the men’s families: furniture would be repossessed, clothes and shoes would not be replaced, some families might be evicted, others go short of food. Alan Drage, a Lieutenant Commander on board HMS Valiant, was never able to forget ‘the queue of dismayed sailors outside my cabin door, each brandishing a sheet of paper covered with elaborate and meticulous calculations, which were explained to me in the utmost detail, each interview concluding, “You see, Sir, I can’t possibly manage on this; what am I going to do?”’

In the canteens, which were for the lower orders only, discontent was growing: Len Wincott, an Able Seaman aboard the cruiser HMS Norfolk, jumped on a table and called for a strike ‘like the miners’, but since setting out on a march to London didn’t make any sense, it would have to be passive resistance, a sit-down strike. Seamen had long been denied any effective channels of complaint such as a trade union, and were forbidden to communicate directly with their MP to express any grievances about the navy that they might have. But of course any mass resistance by His Majesty’s Forces was mutiny — though none of the sailors used that word — in this case ‘mutiny not accompanied by violence’, but mutiny nevertheless, for which the punishment was death. If the seamen were anxious not to label their actions mutiny, nor was the Admiralty: the Royal Navy was the symbol of Britain’s prestige around the world, and rarely had that prestige been more at risk, with an acute financial crisis, a run on gold, and foreign anxieties about the stability and resolve of the British government. The words used were ‘disturbance’ and ‘unrest’. The National Government approached newspaper editors requesting them not to mention Invergordon at this sensitive time for the country. But Ritchie Calder, then a young journalist on the Daily Herald, did not feel constrained by such discretion, and the Herald ran the story.

On Tuesday, 15 September at 8 a.m. most of the stokers on the battleship HMS Valiant refused the order to sail from Invergordon on the edge of the Cromarty Firth to take part in exercises in the North Sea, and the crews aboard the battleships Rodney and Nelson and the battle cruiser Hood followed suit, all refusing to move. Over the following thirty-six hours most of the 12,000 men on the twelve ships at Invergordon refused orders.

The Admiralty appeared to be completely out of touch with the situation, taking hours to reply to any communications from the officers, reiterating that in effect every man must do his duty, and it was not until mid-afternoon on Wednesday, 16 September that the order came that ships were to return to their home ports and cases of hardship would be looked into. The strikers’ resolve began to crumble, and by that night the ships started to put to sea. The nearest Britain ever came to a Battleship Potemkin moment in modern times was over. There were those in the Admiralty, and indeed some naval officers, who portrayed the strike as a mutiny and put it down to ‘Bolshevik agitators’ — a charge that was perhaps easier to sustain when Able Seaman Wincott, discharged from the navy, joined a front organisation of the Communist Party which capitalised on the ‘mutiny’ and his claims to have ‘led’ it. Another leader, Fred Copeman, who was not a member of the Communist Party at the time, became a fellow traveller and active in the unemployed movement and later in Spain. But although twenty-four ratings were discharged — though not until after the 1931 general election — the Admiralty was unable to establish that the events were anything more than the spontaneous actions of a large number of deeply disaffected men, denied any legitimate channels of complaint or redress and faced with a seemingly uncomprehending, unsympathetic and unresponsive Admiralty Board. On 21 September 1931, the same day Britain came off the Gold Standard, the government announced that there would be no pay cuts of more than 10 per cent.

Like the previous national marches and many of the local demonstrations that preceded it, the fourth national march which got underway on 26 September 1932, when a contingent of 250 unemployed men left Glasgow, had been organised by the NUWM, which had been set up in 1921 to mobilise unemployed discontent. There was little competition. The Labour Party largely accepted the view, even after 1931, that the government was doing its best in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, while the TUC (whose membership had fallen from 5.5 million in 1925 to under 4.5 million by 1932) was essentially concerned with the interests of the employed, resisting pay cuts and short-time working. The unions’ contribution in the early 1930s was confined to mouthing statements ‘strongly’ condemning cuts in benefit payments and making ‘emphatic (verbal) protests’ at government inaction. ‘Their line was “No illegality, wait, vote for the Labour Party,”’ recalled an unemployed Kirkcaldy man, ‘and Pat Devine … who was a real agitator … says “What is the workers supposed to do? Starve until we get a Labour Government?”’

In 1932, after more than a decade of high unemployment, the TUC began to consider a scheme for ‘unemployed associations’. By 1934 such associations numbered 123, with a total membership of around 5,000, but they were essentially local initiatives, with no national TUC guidance or support until 1935, when the TUC offered to pay the expenses of union officials who were prepared to visit associations within their areas ‘to stimulate and advise them’.