The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

The NUWM had been established initially as an umbrella group to bring together various district councils for the unemployed which had been active in protests against post-war unemployment, the cessation of the ex-servicemen’s ‘donation’ and what were considered other iniquities. Wal Hannington, the national organiser, was a skilled toolmaker who had been a prominent member of the shop stewards’ movement in the engineering trade during the First World War, and Harry McShane, the NUWM leader in Scotland, was also an engineer. Both were founder members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), as were many of the activists in the movement. While the NUWM’s slogan was ‘Work or Full Maintenance at Trade Union Rates of Pay’ (which meant in practice thirty-six shillings a week for an unemployed man and his wife; five shillings for each child up to the age of sixteen; a rent allowance of up to fifteen shillings a week plus one hundredweight of coal or its equivalent in gas; thirty shillings for a single person over eighteen, or fifteen shillings if they were aged sixteen to eighteen), all members were required to take an oath ‘never to cease from active strife until capitalism is abolished’.

Although a member of the CPGB himself, Wal Hannington was always anxious to distance the movement from the Communist Party and insist on its autonomy. On occasion resolutions would be passed at the NUWM’s national conference reaffirming this, and repudiating any notion that the NUWM was in any way an auxiliary of the CP — though there was some substance in the labour movement’s charge that any links with the Communists were concealed so as not to alienate Labour and TUC support. Moreover, however much the Communist Party might hope that the unemployed would provide, if not the vanguard for revolution, then its footsoldiers, the vast majority of those who went on the marches did so for tangible, short-term aims: to get a better deal for the unemployed from the existing state.

It is hard to get accurate figures for how many joined the NUWM, since most records come either from the movement itself or from the CPGB: some historians claim that it mobilised ‘hundreds of thousands of people’, while others dismiss it as remaining ‘a minority movement’. One of those who helped organise the Scottish contingent on the march in 1932, and went himself in 1934, Finlay Hart, an unemployed shipbuilder, recalled, ‘It was as natural as being at work and being a trade unionist, being unemployed and being in the NUWM … At the time of the ’32 march to London the membership of the Clydebank branch of the NUWM would be in hundreds. There were collectors that stood at the Labour Exchange … There were regular meetings outside the Labour Exchange. Members were recruited there.’

The unemployed signed on on Wednesday and were paid on Friday. So Harry McShane and his comrades ‘went always on a Wednesday or a Friday to the Labour Exchange. And we could get a good crowd at the Labour Exchange and hold a meeting on top o’ a chair. And from there we organised all our marches and activities.’ ‘Being a member of the NUWM wasn’t a necessary qualification for going on the March,’ but Finlay Hart ‘couldn’t imagine any being on the March that wouldnae had been a member of the NUWM’. Yet in fact nine or ten of the Clydebank contingent of forty-two were not members of the NUWM. Isa Porte, who went on several marches in Scotland, ‘wasn’t a member myself of the NUWM but I think a lot of the people I marched with would be in it. I wouldnae think there were very many of them in political parties. There would be some in the Communist party, and then there would be Labour Party people. But the majority weren’t politically committed in that way. It was just a question of being unemployed and they wanted to do something about it.’

With unemployment at an unprecedented two and a half million, or some 20 per cent of the insured workforce, the 1932 March was the largest so far. It was preceded by months of continuing unrest. Although the NUWM had enjoyed a certain amount of success in opposing the harshest application of the Means Test in some areas of high unemployment and had succeeded in raising the rates of relief benefits by some Public Assistance Committees, a demand for an end to the Means Test in Birkenhead on Merseyside had erupted in a week of protests, bans and counter-protests. An estimated 8,000 unemployed men marched in a line over a mile long to the PAC offices with their demands. During the ensuing battles between police and demonstrators, stones and bricks were hurled, iron railings torn up, windows smashed and shops looted, batons wielded and police horses charged. Dozens of arrests were made, police reinforcements had to be drafted in from across the Mersey in Liverpool, and thirty-seven demonstrators needed hospital treatment, while seven police were injured, three of them seriously.

In Belfast the next month there was a demonstration by some 2,000 unemployed men demanding better pay for relief work which soon developed into running battles between the police and demonstrators, culminating in the police opening fire on the crowds, killing two men, and having to call on the troops to restore order.

The logistics of the 1932 march were formidable: accommodation had to be found in 188 towns along the route, which was modified in the light of experience of previous marches to try to ensure that the marchers passed through places where they were most likely to be welcomed. Wherever possible reception committees would gather to meet the marchers and march into town with them, provide food, accommodation and entertainment paid for by money raised in advance, and wave them on their way the next morning. St Albans, a prosperous cathedral city twenty miles north of London provided hospitality for thirty-eight women marchers who were met on the road from Luton, escorted into town, accommodated and fed at the Trade Union Club. A concert was laid on to entertain them, and a rally held in the market square to stiffen their resolve. A cobbler took in any shoes that needed repairs, while someone else did the marchers’ washing. The women left the next morning with a packet of sandwiches for the road, shouting, ‘Unite with us to smash the National Government!’ to the citizens of St Albans. Mrs Paisley, a sixty-three-year-old woman from Burnley with sixteen children and twenty-three grandchildren who had suffered much under the Means Test, proclaimed that she ‘had had that much good food on the march that I don’t want to go home’.

Others were less fortunate: if nothing else could be found, marchers were obliged to seek a bed for the night at the local workhouse (now known as the Institution), where managers had been instructed to accommodate them in casual wards and treat them as tramps or vagrants, which meant searching the men, removing their possessions, insisting on them having a bath while their clothes were disinfected if necessary, locking them in for the night, feeding them a ‘spike’ diet of two slices of bread and margarine and tea, and refusing to allow them to leave until 9 a.m. on the second day after their admission, by which time they were supposed to have done whatever work was required to ‘earn’ their keep. Not all workhouse managers insisted on all these conditions: Coventry Council, which had shown ‘weakness’ in 1930 when it put the marchers up in a school and paid for food provided by the Co-op, was warned that it would be surcharged if that were to happen again.

There were skirmishes along the road, usually over what the marchers were expected to put up with at some workhouses (the Lancashire marchers were seriously batoned by the police at a workhouse in Stratford-upon-Avon, and arrived in Hyde Park heavily bandaged) or restrictions put on their right to hold meetings. Harry McShane, who was in charge of the Scottish contingent, made it a practice that ‘if we were banned from marching along a street, we always went up and down it twice’. Some of the Scottish marchers had come from as far away as Dundee, an eighty-mile walk to Glasgow, where they mustered before setting off on the long march south. The men would march on average for twenty-two miles a day, stopping every hour for a ten-minute rest; the cook’s lorry would go ahead and ‘dish out a good big lunch, usually stew’. Wal Hannington made an effort to march for a stretch with each contingent. ‘He loved to lead a big body of men singing. He used to march at the head of the Scots singing “McGregor’s Gathering” and get them all waving their caps on top of their sticks — with the Welsh it was “Land of my Fathers”.’ Most of the contingents had a band which marched all the way to London with flutes and drums, and sometimes cymbals and triangles too. ‘Flautists — you cannae stop them … they would have played all the way if you’d let them.’ The marchers liked to sing as they trudged along too, and the Scots had their own song:

From Scotland we’re marching,

From shipyard, mill and mine.

Our banners raised on high

We toilers are in line.

We are a determined band,

Each with his weapon in his hand.

We are the Hunger Marchers

Of the Proletariat.

Tom Ferns recalled the unemployed protesters marching through the grounds of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, ‘with the Maryhill Flute Band … leading the contingent and it was playing Connolly’s Rebel Song, so that was quite an astonishing event going through the Royal territory’. He thought that the songs the marchers sang ‘were very simple. Sometimes something simple can explain a situation better than something a bit more complicated,’ and instanced songs like:

Mary had a little lamb,

Its fleece was white as snow.

And everywhere that Mary went

The lamb was sure to go

Shouting out the battle cry for freedom.

Hurrah for Mary, hurrah for the lamb,

Hurrah for the Bolshie boys that don’t give a damn.

The Brighton contingent added a further verse:

Ramsay [MacDonald] had a little lamb

Whose feet were black as soot,

Shouting out the battle cry of TREASON.

Some of the women sang (to the tune of ‘Oh why are we waiting’) ‘Oh why are we marching?’ and answered in the last line, ‘The reason is the Means Test.’ Other marchers sang ‘The Red Flag’ repeatedly. While the Greenock contingent on the Edinburgh March in 1933 sang ‘a Russian tune, Budenny’s Cavalry March … the Red Flag [“The people’s flag is deepest red/It shrouded oft our martyred dead/And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold/Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold”] [it] was a very, very kind o’ hymn thing. It was a bit slow and it wasnae much use for marching.’

But ‘they [presumably the organisers] were strict about what we sang’. Emily Swankie and the women she was marching with ‘were stopped singing one night because it was the wrong type of song — Land of Hope and Glory! Someone started to sing it and just because it was a good tune, we all joined in, and the woman came over and said “Just stop that. We don’t want that”’ It was the same with ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. One of the Scottish organisers, Peter Kerrigan, ‘blew his top’ when that was sung: ‘Being the puritanical sort o’Scots Communist that he were, Kerrigan put an end to that song. It was a jingo song — pack up your troubles, nothing to worry about.’ Another Scottish marcher recalled that although ‘There wis many, many tunes we played … we never got to It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, we never got asked to play that! It wis too capitalistic — it was associated wi’ the First World War.’ Other marchers ‘didn’t feel it was a bit militaristic because actually most of our men were ex military men’, and sang it a lot.

The marchers carried banners, some with slogans such as ‘We Refuse to Starve in Silence’, ‘No to the Means Test’ or ‘Wales to London’, or simply with the name of their contingent. Those marching from Brighton to London in 1932 carried one that had been embroidered by women NUWM members with ‘Solidarity not Charity’. These banners were heavy, and were mostly carried furled until the marchers drew near a town. Hugh Sloan wondered, as the Scottish contingent battled a blizzard through the Lowther Hills in January 1934, ‘where the only occupants were sheep … why the hell we were carryin’ the banner … the wind was rackin’ the banner around … and we couldnae maintain our balance … it was the main banner. It just said “The Scottish Contingent”. But why we were carryin’ the banner in a place like that wi’ strong winds blowin’, I just don’t know.’

Most of the marchers were in their twenties or thirties, though some younger men went too, such as William McVicar, who had only managed to find work for a few days since leaving school at fourteen, and was sixteen and a half when he set off on the march to Edinburgh from his home in Greenock in the summer of 1933. Charles Teasdale of Blantyre, by contrast, was seventy when he set off for London on the 1930 march.

The marchers travelled light, though the Brighton contingent ‘borrowed’ a wheelbarrow, ‘trusting that we would be able to put matters right on our return’, to transport their food and a pile of blankets — and to give an occasional ride to their oldest marcher, a seventy-five-year-old woman. Archie McInnes, marching from Glasgow, had ‘an old army haversack — surplus equipment. Ye carried your own gear, your knife, fork and plate, and your blankets of course. One tin mug and a plate … A change of underwear [though other marchers insisted “We didn’ wear underwear in those days,” and John Brown, who marched from Glasgow to London in 1932, only took “jist one of everything. I don’t think I washed any o’ ma underwear or socks during the time I was away” — more than a month!] and shirt, a … hand towel, soap, shavin’ equipment.’ Some wore a waterproof cycling cape — useful in downpours — while John Lochore set off from Glasgow wearing his aunt’s old raincoat, ‘which buttoned on the wrong side’. Most wore some sort of head covering, a flat cap or what the Scots called ‘a bonnet’, and carried a stick to help them along. ‘The walking stick was a camouflaged sort of weapon … a sort of symbol it was in a way and it was very, very helpful,’ according to Harry McShane. The police insisted that these potentially offensive weapons must be surrendered on the approaches to London, though some marchers managed to conceal them from the authorities.

On Thursday, 27 October 1932 the marchers arrived at Hyde Park, their ranks of some 1,500 swollen by around 100,000 Londoners, and pressed towards seven carts that had been set up as a platform. They were met by 2,600 police, including 136 on horseback and 758 special constables who lacked the training or discipline of the regular force, and whose presence, in the words of the Police Review, was ‘calculated to cause trouble rather than avoid it … the special is an irritant rather than an antiseptic … the less they are seen and used [on hunger marches and demonstrations] the better for everyone’. The ‘specials’, goaded by the crowd (factory girls in Borough in South London hardly helped, screaming, ‘Kiss me, Sergeant!’), attacked the marchers with batons, the mounted police charged, and the marchers retaliated, tearing up railings and breaking branches off the trees. As dusk fell nineteen police and fifty-eight demonstrators were reported to have been injured, while fourteen people had been arrested. There were similar scenes in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, 30 October, when Wal Hannington appealed, ‘Let the working class in uniform and out of uniform stand together in defence of their conditions,’ and leaflets were stuck on railings urging: ‘Policemen! Defeat your own pay cuts by supporting Tuesday’s demonstration against the Economies.’

But when Tuesday came, Hannington had been arrested, charged with ‘attempting to cause disaffection among members of the Metropolitan Police’, and detained in custody. Declining the offer of a Labour MP to sponsor them, since the Labour Party had listed the NUWM as a proscribed organisation in 1930, a fifty-strong deputation of the marchers collected their petition calling for the abolition of the Means Test and of the Anomalies Act, the restoration of benefit cuts and withdrawal of the new economy measures, with, it was claimed, a million signatures (‘bigger than the Chartists’ petition’) from Charing Cross left-luggage office, intending to march from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall to present it at the bar of the House of Commons, as was the ancient right of citizens. However, the police clanged shut the gates, leaving the deputation and their petition inside and a milling crowd of supporters outside.

Those supporters marching towards Parliament — which was illegal, since processions were not allowed within a mile of the Palace of Westminster — were met by 3,174 policemen, including 2,000 on horses — some borrowed from the army for the occasion — detailed to defend Parliament. Fighting broke out which continued until midnight, as far away as the Edgware Road and across Westminster Bridge. Official figures listed twelve police and thirty-two demonstrators injured, and forty-two arrests — though only two of those were marchers. The petition was never presented: it was returned to the left-luggage office, and eventually the marchers set off back to their homes all over Britain in trains, their fares negotiated at greatly reduced rates paid for by the money they had collected en route.

Hannington was sentenced to three months in prison — his fifth term in ten years. Sid Elias, the leader of the deputation to hand the petition in to Parliament, was charged with having stirred the hunger marchers to acts of disorder in a letter written to Hannington (who never received it) while he was in Russia, which allowed the right-wing press to raise again the spectre of a ‘Moscow connection’, ‘Russian dupes’ and ‘red gold’ backing the hunger marches, and received the maximum sentence of two years. Five days after the trial Emrhys Llewellyn, the NUWM’s Secretary and Treasurer (who had stashed the petition in the left-luggage office) and the seventy-six-year-old veteran trade unionist, leader of the 1889 Dock Strike, Tom Mann, were also arrested. Both refused to be bound over to keep the peace. Mann addressed the court: ‘If I am to be tied, if my mouth is to be closed, if I am not to participate in voicing the grievances of those who are suffering, while the incompetency of those responsible cannot find work for them, and is knocking down their miserable standards still lower, then whatever the consequence may be … I will not give an undertaking not to be identified with the further organisation of mass demonstrations and the ventilation of the troubles of the unemployed and of the workers generally.’ He went to prison for two months, as did Llewellyn.

The politically engaged writers Storm Jameson, Amabel Williams-Ellis (who was the sister of John Strachey) and Vera Brittain wrote a letter to Time and Tide in protest:

The most important point about the recent demonstrations and hunger marches is this. Other minorities have channels for airing grievances. The unemployed who have the most serious complaint are the least articulate. Their way of saying what they want to say is taken from them if it is made impossible for them to demonstrate or to hold meetings or to state their case directly whether it be to Parliament or to the local Public Assistance Committee. Can it be that the Government are so anxious to silence them because it would rather not hear too much of what it feels like to try to feed a child on two shillings a week? It is with considerable disquiet that we see a National Government attempting to suppress the views of any body of its subjects and especially that section which has the fewest opportunities of making itself heard. The unemployed are muzzled as they have no other means of publicity for their grievances.

Just over a year later, in the bitter cold of January 1934, the unemployed were on the march again. The Labour Party, still hostile to any demands for united action with the Communists, despite the fact that Hitler had come to power in Germany in January 1933 and both the Communist and the Socialist Internationals had called for united working-class action against fascism, continued to class the NUWM as ‘a mere instrument of the British Communist Party’. ‘One of our troubles was that the Labour Party were opposed to our earlier marches,’ recalled Harry McShane. ‘The woman organiser of the Labour Party used to go ahead of us and advise people not to have anything to do with us. The Labour Party were opposed to anything, opposed to the Communist Party mainly. It’s quite true to say that Hannington and myself were members of the Communist Party. And most of the leading elements were members of the Communist Party, not all of them … they did a lot o’ that and it did a lot o’ harm to us. But later on we managed to get Attlee [Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party from 1935] to agree to support a March and speak with us in Hyde Park … and we got the assistance of Aneurin Bevan, who was a tremendously fine person … He was probably the best speaker I’ve ever heard. It was on the 1934 March that I first met him.’

Equally, the TUC had refused to involve the NUWM in a rally it had organised in London in February 1933, the sole large demonstration sanctioned by the official labour movement on the issue of unemployment throughout the 1930s. ‘The ILP [Independent Labour Party] seemed to do strange things at the time,’ mused McShane. ‘Sometimes they would support us. They tried to form separate Unemployed Committees, separate entirely from us. They and the … TUC were doing the same thing, forming rival bodies.’ However, despite the fact that the official Labour Party was ‘awfy absent, awfy absent’, in the words of Guy Bolton, an unemployed Lanarkshire miner, local Labour Party workers, less concerned with internecine wrangles and more sympathetic to the plight of the individual unemployed, would often turn out to offer support in the form of food, accommodation or entertainment. Hugh Duffy travelled from Scotland ‘on the chuck wagon in advance o’ the marchers. I chalked the streets and shouted through the loudspeaker, “The Hunger Marchers are comin’! They’ll be here at six o’clock! Turn out and support their cause!” And then the lads came marchin’ in.’

‘Local people were generally sympathetic to the Marchers. They’d come out everywhere in big droves, particularly in England. We had tremendous turn outs to see the Marchers. And we got money from them. The money kept us going.’ The local Co-op store might provide food for the marchers as they passed through a town, and even Woolworths sometimes offered meals: ‘We made the most of that … it saved an awful lot of trouble in cooking.’ ‘We always got donations,’ recalled Archie McInnes. ‘A huge box of chocolate wafer biscuits from, I think, the Co-op at Lancaster … if you got cigarettes and that … ye handed it in to supplies of course. I remember at Macclesfield an elderly lady … a bystander … pushed cigarettes into my hand … They were Capstan. I was a pipe smoker. So I handed them in.’ ‘We elected people who had the responsibility of taking collections en route and they were very, very good at their job. They made sure they didn’t pass anybody. Anybody standing en route invariably found a can under their nose. And the response was very, very good. The people seeing the unemployed marchin’, they felt it in their heart. People turned out to see us.’ Indeed, so generous were the onlookers that when Finlay Hart acted as treasurer on the Scottish march he was in a position to know that ‘we collected on the road down [from Carlisle] to London £991. That was a lot of money. That was just from shaking collection cans and there were public meetings we were passing through … The money was used for providing food, leather, sending men home who were ill, expenses like that.’

Since more men had been out of work for longer, more families were having to suffer the indignities of the Means Test. After the government had refused to reverse the benefit cuts that had been introduced as an emergency measure in 1931, a thousand Scots from as far away as Aberdeen and Dundee converged on Edinburgh on 11 June 1933, and finding nowhere to sleep on the second night all bedded down on the hard pavements of Princes Street below the Castle. ‘We didnae hae blankets wi’ us. We had a haversack for a pillae’ and the men slept with their backs to the railings in Princes Street so they couldn’t be attacked.’ The next morning women protesters had to be cleared from the tramways, the marchers washed themselves in the street fountains, shaved by looking at their reflections in shop windows and set up their field kitchens which had ‘a place underneath where you fuelled them by coal, and they had a chimney for the smoke to go out. So you can imagine what it was like when the fair citizens of Edinburgh saw these field kitchens all belching away preparing some food for the Marchers … after all Princes Street’s the showpiece of Edinburgh … you’ve got all these luxury hotels and big clubs, the Conservative Club and the Liberal Club … but the average Edinburgh working-class person was in sympathy with what the demonstrators were in Edinburgh for.’