The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

The newspaper headlines spoke of ‘Two Days that Shook Edinburgh’, in reference to the Russian Revolution, to the alarm of the authorities, who quickly found the protesters accommodation for the following night; after which ‘We were loaded into bloody buses and they just got rid of us.’

Local marches continued throughout autumn 1933. When the Unemployment Bill was published in 1934, it followed the main recommendations of the Royal Commission on Unemployment’s report, including no restoration of benefit cuts, the continuation of the Means Test, the transfer of transitional payments away from local PACs which had firsthand knowledge of conditions in their area to a national body, the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB), and a requirement that could make benefit payments conditional on attending a government training centre.

The government had started a number of training schemes for the unemployed in the mid-1920s, and by the late 1930s there were five funded by the Ministry of Labour. Some million and a half young people had been through junior instructional centres, which were in effect a continuation of schooling, and were compulsory in some areas, while each year about 2,000 young women took courses in ‘the various domestic arts, including cooking, needlework and laundry’, designed to equip them for domestic service or hotel work. There were grants available for individual vocational training, and in 1928 an Industrial Transference Board had been set up to enable the Ministry of Labour to transfer workers out of their own districts where work was no longer available — miners were natural candidates — and send them to training centres mainly situated in the depressed areas where they, and sometimes their wives, could learn skills which could lead to a new life in Canada, Australia or the more prosperous South of England. Between 1929 and 1938, over 70,000 men passed through such centres, and though in the early days it was hard to place them in work, 63,000 eventually found jobs. Though a number drifted back to their home areas, there were continual complaints that the scheme was draining the life blood from the depressed areas — particularly as the parallel scheme for young unemployed men was transferring them at a rate of over 10,000 a year.

But it was felt that there were some unemployed who were not suitable for these programmes. In December 1929 the Ministry of Labour hatched a plan ‘to deal with the class of men to whom our existing training schemes do not apply … those, especially among the younger men, who, through prolonged unemployment, have become so “soft” and temporarily demoralised that it would not be practicable to introduce more than a very small number of them into one of our ordinary training centres without danger to morale’. Such men could not be considered for any transfer scheme until they were ‘hardened … for these people have lost the will to work’.

These Instructional Centres, which catered for around 200,000 unemployed men between 1929 and 1939, did not aim to teach a skill or trade, but rather to toughen the ‘fibre of men who have got out of the way of work’ by providing a twelve-week course of ‘fairly hard work, good feeding and mild discipline’ at residential camps, often in remote rural areas, which it was hoped ‘would help the [men] to withstand the pull of former ties and associates’.

Although the threats to cut their benefits if men refused to attend the Instructional Centres were never implemented, the NUWM, which was concerned that this was another attempt to generate cheap labour and undercut trade union rates of pay, added them to its list of complaints against the government’s attempts to deal with unemployment. It described the centres as ‘slave colonies’ or even ‘concentration camps’, though this was a rather excessive description, since men could come and go as they liked, and in any one year up to a quarter left before completing their courses.

Under the toughening-up regime the men were issued on arrival with a ‘uniform’ of work shirts, corduroy trousers and hobnailed boots, which they could keep if they completed the course. They slept under canvas (in the summer), or in huts, were paid around four shillings a week and issued with a pack of Woodbines and a stamp for a letter home, and were subjected to a strict regime: parading each morning for work, roll calls, lights out, and hard manual labour such as chopping down trees, building roads, digging sewers and stone-breaking. Sometimes men would be ‘lent’ to work on outside projects, such as the building of Whipsnade Zoo, London University’s playing fields, and the Piccadilly Line tube extension, all to accustom them ‘once more to regular hours and steady work’.

Len Edmondson’s brother was ‘sent to a camp in County Durham where the men were employed digging stone and helping to make roads for forestry work. They were accommodated in huts and following breakfast the Union Jack was hoisted [which was a particular irritant to the Welsh and Scottish attendees] whilst they were all lined up and marched to the place of work. In the evening they were lined up again and marched back to the camp when the Union Jack was then lowered.’ ‘They established one camp in Glen Branter in Argyllshire and a number o’ other places. And it is a fact that most of the work they did was afforestation work, mostly for the dukes and the big lords, makin’ roads through the forests. And I think it was at Glen Branter they actually had them diggin’ holes and filling them up again. The camps were horrible … I think they got the idea o’ these camps frae Hitler, because Fascism was establishing itself in Germany and they were sending all these young men to these camps,’ concluded Tom Ferns, an unemployed Glaswegian who had only ever managed to find short-term jobs and was active in both the NUWM and the Young Communist League. But others enjoyed their camp days, rejoicing in the outdoor life, long walks and sports — particularly football — and rejected any notion of a ‘slave camp’.

The camps were clearly authoritarian, with many, it was claimed, overseen by ‘civilian sergeant-majors, retired police officers, ex NCOs of the army and officials transferred from the Poor Law Institutions’. But the most numerous complaints seem to have been about the food — stale bread, leathery meat, sandwiches ‘with bread an inch thick, with a piece of cheese in between that a mouse wouldn’t get up for … when the men used to be working among the fir trees they’d gnaw the resin off the trunk … and pick wild mushrooms and eat them raw, they were that hungry,’ reported William Heard, a West Ham man with a wife and five children who was sent to Shobdon camp in Herefordshire.

‘I still don’t know what we learned … it was a waste of time. The only thing was it took us away from something I suppose,’ thought Heard (who featured in an NUWM pamphlet, Slave Camps). But Alwyn Jones, who was sent to a camp in Suffolk from Oldham, felt ‘so much rot is talked about the camps’ that he wrote an article for his local paper extolling their virtues. ‘A man gets four shillings a week, and of course his wife and children draw if they are unemployed while he is away. He has the best food he ever ate [four meals a day], a bed, and clothes and medical attention if necessary … in beautiful surroundings.’

Although camps continued to open throughout the 1930s, judged by results they were not particularly effective. Of a total intake of 83,000 ‘volunteers’ between 1935 and 1938, only 12,500 subsequently found employment: 19,500 either gave up or were sacked during the twelve-week course. The last one closed in 1939, and several were converted to house prisoners of war.

The National Government had inherited the notion of transference schemes and training camps, but one initiative of its own was the introduction in 1934 of the Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act, in recognition of the fact that there was little hope of a sufficient upswing in world trade to bring jobs back to the areas of the old staple industries — coal, iron, steel, shipbuilding. Four special investigators were appointed to examine conditions in the worst-hit areas: Scotland, West Cumberland, Durham and Tyneside and South Wales. Their reports confirmed what the government must have known already: that while trade was beginning to revive in the Midlands and the South-East, massive unemployment persisted in the depressed areas, with no real prospect of improvement. Parts of South Wales were described as ‘derelict’, with 39,000 men and 5,000 boys ‘surplus to requirements’, there was a permanent labour ‘surplus’ in the depressed areas of Scotland, and Durham bore out the claims of a series of influential articles in The Times in March 1934 which described the area as ‘Places Without a Future: Where Industry is Dead’.

Alongside advertisements for Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Talbot luxury cars, holidays in the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz, which offered ‘Casino-Golf’, a broadtail fur coat with a white fox-fur collar on sale at Jays of Regent Street for forty-nine guineas, and a long list of the wedding presents received by Mr Walter Elliot MP and Miss Katharine Tennant, the ‘Special Correspondent’ (who had reported on the ‘stricken areas’ of South Wales in 1928) explained that ‘There are districts of England, heavily populated, whose plight no amount of trade recovery can ever cure because their sole industry is not depressed but dead.’ The articles spoke of places where the ‘pits are not only closed but abandoned, the works not only shut but dismantled’, of families who had had ‘no proper spell of work for eight years … people living on the very margin … everything superfluous has been pawned or sold … and the necessities of life are largely worn out or broken … shops are shut and boarded up … You may even see the rare sight of a pawnshop closed … the men are not starving, but they are permanently hungry.’ Alongside stark photographs of mining villages such as Spennymoor and Escombe with their slag heaps, rubble and long, empty, derelict streets making them look truly like war zones, the article declared, ‘It would be a failure of humanity to forget them, a failure of statesmanship to ignore them.’ An editorial concluded the grim series with a call for the appointment of a director of operations charged with rehabilitating the workforce and reviving the economies of the depressed areas.

Ramsay MacDonald responded by impressing on the Minister of Labour, Henry Betterton, ‘the importance of doing something to meet The Times leaders, and the growing chorus in the Commons’. Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, agreed, but thought it was essentially ‘not a question of spending a great deal of money, but of showing that the matter had not been pigeon-holed’.

Eight months later the Depressed Areas Bill (its name was later changed by the House of Lords to the Special Areas Bill at the behest of the people of Tyneside, who found the title disparaging) was reluctantly introduced into Parliament. It proposed two full-time, unpaid Commissioners for the areas, one for England and Wales, the other for Scotland. Their budget was £2 million, and their remit was strictly limited — there must be no suggestion that ‘a sort of financial hosepipe designed to pour assistance into the districts’ was being uncoiled, or that this was the thin edge of a public-works wedge. Grants could be given to local authorities and to voluntary agencies such as the NCSS in the Special Areas to initiate or subsidise amenities such as water supplies, sewerage schemes, drainage and sanitation, hospitals, children’s playgrounds, football pitches or open-air swimming pools, and some money was made available for ‘back to the land’ initiatives such as smallholdings, co-operative farming projects and afforestation schemes — though an imaginative plan for a Welsh national park based on the American model was turned down.

One problem was that the Act was at total variance with the labour transference policies which various governments had been pursuing since the 1920s. As a Ministry of Labour official put it, government initiatives should ‘neither waste sympathy nor public funds on any activity which may anchor or attach young or middle-aged people more firmly to the depressed areas’. The ‘Get on your bike’ attitude which has resonated for the right down the decades as a legacy of the ‘hungry thirties’ was expressed in the words of the National Government’s Chief Industrial Advisor, Horace Wilson: ‘The people who wish to work must go where the work is.’

The Act’s narrow scope and the limited funds available made it seem little more than a gesture, and it drew criticism from the press and across the political spectrum. The Mayor of Newcastle regarded it as ‘a flea bite, a sop’; to Aneurin Bevan it was ‘an idle, empty farce’, a mere palliative offering ‘a bit of colour-washing colliers’ cottages’ in the hope of attracting new industry (as had already happened at Brynmawr). Lloyd George damned the Act as ‘patching’ and ‘peddling hope’, while Harold Macmillan, with patrician languor, ridiculed it as ‘Parturiunt montes: nascetur ridiculus mus. The mountains have been in labour and there has been born a mouse … a nice mouse, a profitable and helpful little mouse, but a ridiculous, microscopic, Lilliputian mouse.’

Other depressed areas such as Manchester and Lancashire lobbied to be ‘special’ too, since they too had moribund industries and high unemployment. By 1936, when the Commissioner for England and Wales, Sir Malcolm Stewart, who had been particularly disappointed at the failure to build a bridge across the Severn, which had first been mooted in the 1840s (but which did not happen until 1965), resigned, ostensibly on health grounds, he admitted that ‘No appreciable reduction in the number of unemployed has been effected.’ A survey of 5,800 firms that he had undertaken in 1935 showed that only eight would even consider investing in the Special Areas. They gave their reasons as inaccessibility, high local taxes, low consumer purchasing power and high rates of trade union membership. The powers of the Commissioners were increased by an Amendment to the Act in 1937 which meant that rates, rent and taxes could be remitted for industries starting or relocating to the Special Areas, and trading estates were set up with all facilities laid on in which firms could lease premises. It was also agreed that ‘steps should be taken to prevent further industrial concentration round London and the South’ by diverting industry to areas of heavy unemployment. The Commissioners’ budget was increased annually, so that by 1938 they were allowed to spend £17 million. Nevertheless, fewer than 50,000 new jobs were created under the Special Areas legislation.

The 1934 Unemployment Act spurred the NUWM to organise another national march. Given that it was to take place ‘in the dead of winter [starting in January], it is essential that proper provision be made for every marcher having stout clothes, good boots and coat, as well as a real Army pack’. Cobblers must accompany every contingent (they would repair boots overnight), and for those coming from Scotland, the North-East, Lancashire and Yorkshire, who would be on the road for more than ten days, hot food would have to be provided. This meant a one- or two-ton truck to transport the field kitchen, which was ‘like an old washin’ house boiler on the back of a lorry’, according to one Scottish marcher. An ‘ambulance unit’ would also be on hand to cope with the inevitable spate of blisters and other medical emergencies. Every marcher was to be provided with a copy of the Unemployment Bill and the twelve-page Manifesto of the National Hunger March and Congress so that he or she would know exactly why they were marching and what for. Generally, money was more forthcoming than it had been on earlier marches. The Tyneside marchers left with generous donations from various Durham mining lodges, and even the impoverished lodges of South Wales managed to scrape together some funds for their representatives. The Scottish contingent collected £45 in the streets of Coventry and £20 in Birmingham, while in Warrington £55 was dropped into the rattled tins of the Lancashire marchers, and they left Oxford £120 better off.

Women were in a very small minority among the membership of the NUWM. ‘But there were several capable women who were very active,’ recalled Finlay Hart. And when it came to the Hunger Marches, ‘We didn’t like women with the men in case there was any scandal,’ according to Harry McShane, the Scottish NUWM organiser. ‘There was a woman’s contingent … and they marched a separate route.’ ‘We never saw any of the men on the March,’ remembered Mary Johnston, who had been unemployed for over a year when she joined the Scottish women en route for London in 1934. ‘We never had any contact with them. I don’t suppose we ever thought of questioning them. I don’t recollect any discussion on the point at all. And of course it would be quite a good thing, really, if the men were using a separate route.’

It was considered that a march from Glasgow to London would be too taxing for the thirty or so Scottish women, so the men ‘set off a week or two before us … but … we would have a send off from Clydebank and we’d get a bus from Glasgow to Derby and join up with the other women, mainly the women from Northern England, Lancashire,’ making a contingent of around a hundred. But Emily Swankie, who had decided with her husband John that as the Labour Exchange would have stopped his money if he’d joined the 1934 march (as he would not be available for work if he was on the road — a requirement of drawing benefit) she would march instead, since she was also unemployed. The first day out from Derby

we walked sixteen miles … we found that sixteen miles is quite a distance for people not used to marching. And if like me you were in a new pair of shoes, it wasn’t funny … We never did sixteen miles again. The next day it was twelve miles. And then we cut it down to eight … We had black stockings which we were asked to wear all the time … they frowned on bare legs. No bare legs on the Hunger March … There was a wee bit of puritanism there too, but it was that they wanted to avoid at all costs any bad publicity — women marching with bare legs … There were long hours of walking and nothing really happened, passing through villages, people coming out to look at us, curious, interested some of them, not very curious, some of them not very receptive … But where we did have receptions, it was great. We had the Co-operative Guild women, some Church Guild women, Labour Party women and Communist Party women. They had made up reception committees for us … sometimes they had brought in home baking, and they got us bedded down in halls etc. for the night. In one place they anticipated we wouldn’t be very well fed the next day because they knew the area through which we were going. And they made us big bowls of hard-boiled eggs. We had to stuff our pockets with them because it was on the cards that we wouldn’t eat next night. And they sent in basins with Lysol — that was the old disinfectant for your feet … we were very kindly received.

Like the men, the women always marched in step when they got to a town. ‘You march better when you’re tuned in with other people,’ thought Marion Henery. And it looked more organised and purposeful. As with the men, it was sore feet that were the main problem for the women: ‘The Lancashire women wore clogs. You heard the clatter of the clogs but they never had any trouble with their feet … but a lot of other women had problems with heel blisters.’ The women ‘had to sleep in workhouses quite a number of times … we had always to give our names. The women on the March didnae take kindly to this. So a lot of fictitious names were given — Mary Pickford [the American film star of the silent screen] and names like that.’

Although the Labour Party and the TUC leadership continued to label the NUWM as the Communist party in disguise and to reject attempts to build a ‘United Front’ against unemployment (though the ILP, which had recently disaffiliated from the Labour Party and would wither henceforth, heeded the call), there was more support among the rank and file this time. The South Wales contingent, for example, had the support of almost all the Labour MPs in the area and many of the local union branches and trades councils for the 1934 march. Reception committees were more likely to turn out as the marchers neared towns, and were more prepared to offer food and accommodation. Many committees included a clergyman who might offer his church hall, or even his church, for the night. However, the reception en route was mixed: as the marchers tramped through Windsor, servants working at the castle threw them money, but at Reading, where there was no reception committee, they had to bed down on used straw in a cattle market.

As the marchers neared Oxford they found ‘students were standing on the side o’ the road with bundles o’ walking sticks and handin’ them to us as we passed again after the police [who had confiscated the marchers’ sticks] was away. They were sympathetic students, no’ Communists or anything like that. But they’d seen what we were goin’ through and they decided we needed sticks for walkin’,’ recalled Frank McCusker. Duff Cooper, who was Financial Secretary at the War Office, was appalled, and said in the House of Commons that he hoped that the university authorities would know how to deal with these undergraduates who fell into step with the Hunger Marchers. When he came to speak at the Oxford Union few weeks later Cooper was challenged about his remarks by Anthony Greenwood, known in Oxford as the ‘young Adonis of the Labour Party’, the son of Arthur Greenwood, who had been Minister of Health in the 1929 Labour government, but had declined to join the National Government. ‘It is a vile thing,’ Cooper replied, ‘to encourage these poor people, under-fed, ill-clothed, to set out in bad weather, marching the roads to London, knowing perfectly well that they would get nothing when they got there. In a university with traditions, it was a suitable case for the authorities to interfere with the young fools who lost their heads and their sense of proportion.’

The Labour politician George Lansbury was the other speaker, and he disagreed, welcoming the fact that ‘Christian charity’ still existed among the undergraduates. It was capitalism that had failed to do anything for its victims, ‘and that is the greatest condemnation of the system that can be offered’. The President of the Union, the socialist Frank Hardie, questioned the right of Oxford undergraduates to have £2,000 spent on their education while others were pitchforked into the labour market at fourteen. The motion that ‘This House believes that in Socialism lies the only solution to the problems of this country’ was passed by 316 votes to 247.

The ‘young fools’ of Oxford were not the only less obvious supporters of the Hunger Marchers. Fifteen-year-old Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, who was a pupil at Wellington College and who kept a porcelain bust of Lenin on his study shelves under a portrait of his uncle and next to six copies of The Communist Manifesto, was a fervent, if unfocused, enthusiast too. With his brother Giles he had started a magazine, Out of Bounds, ‘against reaction in the public schools’, which contained attacks on the Officer Training Corps, fascism (though Michael Wallace of Oundle was allowed space for a defence), traditional public schools which were ‘concerned with the production of a class’, as well as informative articles on subjects such as masturbation (‘some form of auto-eroticism is absolutely inevitable’) and progressive schools (including Dartington, which permitted copies of the Moscow Daily News as well as the Times Literary Supplement in its library) plus some rather memorable poems by the schoolboy Gavin Ewart. The Romillys were delighted to announce in the first issue, published in March 1934, that Out of Bounds was ‘Banned in Uppingham — Banned in Cheltenham’, and they could gleefully add ‘Banned in Aldenham, Imperial Service College and Wellington’ (from whence it sprang) by the second. Furthermore, the Daily Mail had picked up the story under the headlines ‘Red Menace in Public Schools’, ‘Moscow Attempts to Corrupt Boys’, ‘Officer’s Son [the Romillys’ father was a colonel in the Scots Guards and had commanded the Egyptian Camel Corps in the First World War] Sponsors Extremist Journal’.