The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

L. Shinnie of Westminster School reviewed the collected Listener articles Memoirs of the Unemployed for Out of Bounds, concluding that ‘members of the public schools can only make certain that they will not suffer the conditions depicted in this book if they join with the working classes to achieve a better society’. Esmond Romilly managed to persuade his mother not only to contribute half a crown to the National Hunger March Committee, but also to pen a letter to the Daily Worker expressing her ‘entire sympathy with the cause of the unemployed who have had their benefits cut and I am glad they are availing themselves of a traditionally British method to voice their grievances’. Nellie Romilly had wished to add ‘God Save the Queen’ at the bottom, but had been dissuaded. However, young Romilly later realised the political capital that could be made out of a sister of the wife of Winston Churchill writing such a letter, and it never appeared.

One afternoon in February 1934 Henry Crowder, a black American jazz musician and the lover of a wealthy and rebellious socialite with a restless social conscience, Nancy Cunard, went to her flat and found her wearing ‘a bizarre collection of garments — a man’s overcoat, an aviator’s helmet and several scarves — which, she told him, were partly for warmth and partly for disguise. She informed him that she was off to join the hunger marchers and he was to tell no one. Off she went with a small movie camera in her hand.’

Much later, Nancy Cunard wrote to a friend: ‘It was at Stamford [that] I met them [the hunger marchers], up that great road … One thought the dog of the Inn had been put in the soup, just as we were all sitting down, in pretty great cold, eating stew on the roadside … Why the hunger march? In protest against the Means Test.’

‘We were on the road when this car drew up,’ remembered Tom Clarke, who was on the march from Dundee. ‘I think it was a Rolls Royce — I’m not very good on cars. This woman got out … [she] was taking newsreels or films. [Peter] Kerrigan said, “That’s Nancy Cunard.” I didn’t at the time know who Nancy Cunard was. To me here we were fighting capitalism and yet ye’d get these people coming along and dropping money, maybe a pound note or more, into a collection bag. I remember quizzing Kerrigan about this. I says, “How the hell does this happen?” He says, “Well, they’re so accustomed to giving tips, this doesn’t mean a thing.” They may have intended well, they may not, but they just gave tips.’

‘Eighth day,’ wrote Joseph Albaya, who was marching in a Sheffield contingent on 17 February. ‘Kettering — one of those towns that didn’t know what unemployment was — also where the inhabitants looked at us if were dogs.’ The marchers were put up in the workhouse. ‘Speech by Mayor to welcome us — (he said he believed in action by constitutional means).’ The next day it was ‘on to Bedford our longest trek to date — never been so tired as on this day — feet in a terrible condition … the trek was about 32 miles on hard roads — admittedly may have done rambles this length but never with the necessity of keeping in step — dark before we reached Bedford — five miles out the leaders had to keep encouraging the marchers — kept telling us we were there — these to my mind were silly tactics as the result was disappointment — had one final rest on the side of the road — utterly fagged out — was stretched out in a ditch — a Good Samaritan came out and dished cigarettes out.’

Aware that the Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, and the Attorney General had both warned mothers along the marchers’ route to keep their children indoors and shopkeepers to shutter their windows, hinting at the prospect of ‘grave disorder, public disturbances’, even ‘bloodshed’, the NUWM was determined to avoid confrontations. ‘We’re here to demonstrate against the operation of the Means Test and the economy cuts and not to have a diversion or fight with the police which would misrepresent the whole idea of the March,’ warned Harry McShane. ‘We’re here to protest peacefully and with discipline.’ Any transgressor would usually be packed off back home — though only after a meeting had been held with all the contingent to decide his fate. Misdeeds might include drunkenness (though according to most marchers this was rare: ‘There was no money for drink anyway in the first place.’ It took Frank McCusker six weeks to march from Scotland, and ‘I could say I had about six pints o’ beer frae Glasgow to London’), scrounging, brawling, stealing another man’s boots, pilfering the collection boxes or pulling off a scam such as arriving in a town in advance of the main body of marchers, collecting money from sympathetic onlookers and pocketing the proceeds before rejoining the march.

If the marchers were organised, so were the authorities. Instructions were reiterated that any soft-hearted local PAC thinking of offering food or loans of blankets to the marchers would be surcharged for this largesse. Chief Constables along the route were required to file reports about the number, progress and behaviour of each contingent, and whether any marchers had previous convictions for breaches of the peace.

In fact both sides were concerned to avoid any aggressive confrontation as the marchers streamed into Hyde Park on Sunday, 25 February 1934. Unknown to police or marchers, a vigilante committee had assembled in a small flat behind Selfridges, watching the action and hovering by the telephone to report any police brutality among the crowd of over 50,000 marchers. It was a distinguished posse, ‘rather like the members of a cultural, intellectual and progressive Who’s Who’: E.M. Forster, Professor Julian Huxley, Vera Brittain, her husband, Professor George Caitlin, and her friend the novelist Winifred Holtby, ‘tall, calm and big-boned’, and Dr Edith Summerskill were there, as were a couple of barristers, two young solicitors and Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman. Claud Cockburn brought H.G. Wells, who had been unwell, and was ‘wrapped in mufflers’. The assembled group were either members of, or distinguished left-wingers who had been invited as observers by, the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL), since previously reports of acts of harassment by the police had been easy to discredit since they came mainly from the victims themselves.

The NCCL (now Liberty) had been set up by a one-time actor and freelance journalist, Ronald Kidd, who also owned a radical, free-thinking bookshop, the Punch and Judy, in Villiers Street, where unexpurgated copies of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness could be purchased, as well as books about the Soviet Union which were not ‘full of hysterical anti-communism’, and the barrister, writer and soon-to-be Independent MP, A.P. Herbert, as a result of Kidd’s disquiet at the behaviour of police agents provocateurs during the 1932 Hunger March, and Herbert’s unease at the police acting as ‘bandits’, ordering drinks in nightclubs after hours in order to secure convictions. The civil libertarians peered down at ‘the sea of hats in the Park — caps, trilbies, hard felts and the occasional bowler’ marching through the grey, slanting drizzle, and some ventured down to the edge of the crowds to get a closer look. The music of the pipe and flute bands of the Scottish marchers (Glasgow’s contingent alone boasted eight flute bands) hung in the air, interspersed with much shouting of slogans and singing of ‘The Internationale’ as the lines of unemployed marched in step, watched by lines of police, one unit atop Marble Arch with a telephone, ready to direct operations and summon reinforcements in case of trouble.

Joseph Albaya, who had been on the road for sixteen days, recorded:

Got up late for the GREAT DAY … put on clean shirt … long boring wait at Friends’ Meeting House where leaders entertained us in usual fashion by usual speeches — fell in outside, raining on my new outfit … put on selling Hunger March Bulletins — papers not counted so had plenty of chances of making a dishonest penny — rather alarmed by the reports of the older marchers of not keeping to the ranks consequently rather felt like a hero [sic] lined outside for ration of oranges and cigarettes and the singing of the daily ritual (the ‘Internationale’) — set off in fine style — rather impressed by the military bearing and dignity of the comrades — the consciousness that it was their Great Day had made the marchers buck themselves up — the contingent headed by Scottish pipers, fifes and drums … raining lightly all the time — my papers getting wet and not selling — soon picked up a companion who was trying to convey the usual idea that we were in for a blood bath — crowds increasing — also police contingent headed by three mounted policemen … under the command of a military-looking old bastard … Noticed that comrades’ London banners are much bigger and better than provincial ones and that London comrades are much more militant and less apathetic than provincial comrades [possibly partly because they were less exhausted] … the police led us into a better class district off the main traffic roads — blocks of imposing flats — I went berserk … yelling obscenities at the occupants of the flats — I was sobbing with rage — I never knew what class consciousness was until that moment — I was ready to do anything, charge the police, smash up everything in sight — it was the way the occupants of the flats looked at us … every flat seemed to have a balcony from which they laughed at us and then contemptuously threw down money — their contempt was so open that even the dullest of the marchers could see it. Christ! … if they had been on a level on us and not above us on their balconies well … I should have taken part willingly in my first riot.

Jack Gaster, a young lawyer, was the ILP representative on the London reception committee:

I was based in Marylebone and we were always organising the Hyde Park meetings … we used to go down to some stables behind Great Ormond Street owned by the Co-op and arrange for eight or ten horse drawn vehicles to come to Hyde Park to form a platform. In those days … there were no loudspeakers or anything like that … I had to marshal [the marchers] out of Hyde Park which was a very important job because we were determined to march down Oxford Street. The police were determined that we shouldn’t. They wanted to keep the marchers off the main streets. There were hundreds of thousands in the Park. We arranged for part of the march to leave Hyde Park by the Bayswater Road entrance … and another part to go out via Park Lane … and both to converge … There were police lined up, very senior officers because it was a very important thing, ‘mounties’ too. They said ‘Sorry, Mr Gaster, you can’t go down Oxford Street.’ I said ‘We’re going down.’ I was trembling in my shoes … but I very carefully put the Scottish marchers behind me. They were the real tough ones. I said, ‘These lads haven’t walked from all over England to be pushed into the back streets.’ ‘Sorry, we can’t allow it.’ I said, ‘Very well. We’re going down Oxford Street and the responsibility is yours … There’s going to be a fight. Do you want a fight? Does the government want a fight?’ They withdrew and we marched down Oxford Street.

In the event the entire occasion went off peacefully: ‘not a scuffle, not a baton raised. No report from anywhere of even so much as a pane of glass broken. No bloodshed!’ the NCCL observers, who had had no need to pick up their phone, recorded. The same was the case at a rally in Trafalgar Square.

After queuing in the snow some two hundred unemployed marchers were allowed into Parliament, where some struck up ‘The Internationale’ in the Central Lobby, while those allowed into the Strangers’ Gallery interrupted debate by shouting ‘Hear the Hunger Marchers!’ and ‘Down with the Starvation Government!’ All were ejected, and they eventually returned home without having been able to present their petition to Parliament, the reduced train fares that had been negotiated with the railway companies covered by money raised on the march.

However, some female textile marchers, led by Maud Brown, the women’s organiser of the NUWM, had managed to penetrate 10 Downing Street and confront Ramsay MacDonald’s daughter Ishbel, who was ‘very friendly [and] offered … tea … but on a point of honour we refused it’, recalled Mary Johnston, one of Miss MacDonald’s unexpected visitors. ‘We felt it would be weakening our position if we accepted tea.’ Before they left the Prime Minister’s daughter suggested that maybe the unemployed women might try domestic service, according to one of them.

Ramsay MacDonald refused to grant the marchers an audience. ‘Has anyone who cares to come to London, either on foot or in first-class carriages, the constitutional right to demand to see me, to take up my time, whether I like it or not?’ he asked rhetorically in the Commons a few days later. ‘I say he has not.’

Sir Herbert Samuel, the Liberal leader and former Home Secretary, was despairing:

No one can say that the grievances of these men, who have walked to this city from many parts of this island, are trivial or imaginary … What should they have done other than what they have done, if they want to draw the attention of the nation to their plight, to stir the nation out of what is really a shameful complacency, and to protest against the utterly inadequate measures that have so far been taken? Are we to say to them, ‘If you are disorderly, we cannot listen to you; it would be to discourage disorder. If you are orderly, we need not listen to you?’ …

It is said that they are Communists, and therefore that they ought to be ignored. Let us not attach so much importance to labels, but see the realities behind the name. There is not here, and everyone knows it, any deliberate plan or attempt to overturn society. This march is nothing more than a protest, a bitter cry. They say to us: ‘Hear us; see us; help us.’ It is that and nothing more …

It is said that these men are not representative of the whole body of the unemployed. Perhaps not, but there is no one else to represent them; there is no other organisation that speaks urgently in their name.

That ‘bitter cry’ was heard again in January 1935, when the 1934 Unemployment Act was implemented, and under what the National Government referred to as a ‘Great Social Reform’, responsibility for administering Means-Tested relief for those who had exhausted their unemployment insurance entitlement, and the able-bodied uninsured unemployed, were transferred from the 183 local PACs to a new national Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB). A national sliding scale of relief was to replace the various local scales of the PACs, some of which in depressed areas had been lenient in their interpretation of the test. Indeed, as late as 1935 a number of councillors in South Wales boasted that the Means Test had never operated in their area.

When the new rates were announced they turned out to be lower than those previously allowed, and large-scale agitations broke out in South Wales (including the storming of Merthyr Tydfil UAB office, where 90 per cent of claimants had been receiving full rates of benefit), spreading to the North-East (where 10,000 marched on Sheffield Town Hall to demand the repeal of the Act and the immediate restoration of old allowances) and Scotland, with the unemployed besieging local authority offices and PACs with complaints about reduced benefits. Forty-eight per cent of all those in receipt of benefit across the country had seen them cut, while only 34 per cent had seen an increase. An emergency two-day debate in Parliament revealed the divide in the country, as MPs representing seats in the Midlands and the South of England ‘listened in often puzzled silence’ to the ‘virulent attacks’ from their colleagues of all parties from the depressed areas. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, admitted that ‘It had been realised for the first time that very large numbers of working men in Great Britain, and particularly in Scotland, were paying rents much lower than had been thought [which meant that their benefit had been cut, since the sliding scale reckoned that rent equalled around a quarter of living costs], and were living under very bad conditions.’ A Standstill Act was introduced for two years which allowed the unemployed to choose whichever rate was the higher, that of the UAB or their local PAC.

These protests had been essentially local and spontaneous (though with some NUWM support), and it was not until two years after the previous one that another NUWM-organised march set off. But that 1936 Hunger March was eclipsed, both then and down the years to come, by a much smaller march of only two hundred men, organised with Labour Party and TUC support and led by a Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson, to protest at the singular situation of one devastated town, Jarrow.

If Jarrow has come to epitomise the ‘Hungry Thirties’, what, if anything, was the importance of those other seven Hunger Marches from all over Britain? Their success can’t be judged in terms of concessions wrung from the government, but though the numbers involved were relatively small, the name — the indictment — ‘Hunger March’ stuck, giving the decade its epithet. Winston Churchill called them ‘Anger Marches’, and they were that too. Most of those who took part were realistic about what they achieved. The hated Means Test was still in force when war broke out in 1939, though the government did raise benefit payments after the 1934 march. Rather, marchers spoke in terms of ‘showin the authorities that ye are nae prepared to take things lyin’ down’: ‘I felt we had the guts but we had nae policy. I never knew anyone on the March that got a job through it … [but] the March meant that you were trying to tae do somethin’ about it. They wernae just accepting it’; ‘I don’t think we achieved any success. We had this approach by Government: you were down and they were trying to keep you down … But the Hunger Marches kept alive the spirit to keep fighting’; ‘It highlighted the situation that people were in … it brought to the notice o’ the general public the conditions o’ the unemployed at that time’; ‘I don’t think we achieved that much out o’ it. But we let the people in the whole o’ the country know the conditions that were going on as far as we were concerned in Scotland, or South Wales, or the North East’; ‘Being a Marxist you know you’re no’ gaun tae get any immediate results. It’s a process of development and it takes the form of struggles and the class struggle in a’ its aspects. I didn’t expect any dramatic victory.’

There was no dramatic victory, but the Hunger Marchers helped to rewrite the concept of ‘welfare’, reclaiming it as part of the commons, as a social right rather than something given selectively as a matter of discretion to mendicants. This reading would underpin the Beveridge Report of 1942, and subsequent social welfare legislation after the Second Word War.

If the marches achieved few concrete results, did they politicise the unemployed? Did the unemployed come to see themselves as a dispossessed class in revolt against capitalism? Many — politicians of all parties and most of the press — portrayed the unemployed as vulnerable to exploitation by the Communist Party for its own nefarious ends. Some charged that the NUWM was controlled by the Communist Party, others saw it as a recruiting ground providing footsoldiers for the Party. The third World Congress in 1921 had directed all Communist Parties to ‘participate directly in the struggle of the working masses, establish Communist leadership of the struggle, and, in the course of the struggle create large, mass Communist Parties’.

The CPGB would certainly have liked to gain control of the unemployed movement, build it up as a mass political organisation and direct its activities towards the overthrow of capitalism, but most marchers insist that the overlap of the NUWM and the CPGB was small among the ordinary members, indeed that most members had no particular political affiliation. Very few of the tens of thousands drawn into the agitation went on to join the CPGB — and in fact few actually joined the NUWM. ‘The people’s flag is deepest pink/It’s not as red as people think/And ere their limbs grow stiff and cold/The Dundee workers will be sold’- sang one sceptical marcher. The total number who paid tuppence for an NUWM membership card and a penny a week for a stamp was probably around 15,000 by the end of 1931. When there was government action that was regarded as hostile to the interests of the unemployed, membership would surge: 2,000 a week were recruited in response to the cuts in benefit and the introduction of the Means Test in 1931. Numbers rose throughout 1933 when the NUWM was engaged in active protests and was meeting harsh opposition, but fell again until early 1935, when the announcement of another round of benefit cuts for the unemployed gave a further impetus, and membership rose to above 20,000. But by the time of the final Hunger March in 1936 it had declined to nearer 14,000, and it only rose slightly in late 1938, coinciding with a campaign for winter relief. Some of the unemployed joined in support of a particular campaign, and then left, most let their membership lapse if they found a job, while a few found even the required penny a week subscription unaffordable. This was not the behaviour of ‘a militant army committed to revolutionary change’, and throughout the 1930s those who went on hunger marches remained a minority among the unemployed, the unemployed remained a (sometimes, in some places, large) minority within the working class, and moreover a minority without economic power.

The successes that the NUWM achieved among the unemployed were less in politicising them (though a number of Hunger Marchers subsequently did go to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War) than in drawing attention to the failure of the government to do enough about unemployment, gaining sufficient sympathy for their cause that the government took care not to be seen to be acting provocatively, and particularly in helping unemployed individuals fight for their rights.

The NUWM did have victories in getting local PACs to raise benefit rates, or to impose the Means Test less harshly, and it also evolved a system of local committees trained in legal aspects of unemployment regulations and benefits to advise members, and, supported by advice from the legal department, to represent a member who took his or her appeal to the National Umpire at Kew. So successful was this growing expertise on national insurance questions that the NUWM was sometimes asked for help by a trade union branch, and William Beveridge invited Wal Hannington and Sid Elias to advise official committees on several occasions.

The Maryhill local branch of the NUWM in Glasgow was

a hive of activity … People coming in were getting cut off from benefit as a result of the Means Test and all the other anomalies that were introduced then. And their case was taken up and there was always somebody at the Labour Exchanges representing them … the NUWM was organising, fighting appeals against the decision when people’s benefits were cut, even turning out when people had been evicted for arrears of rent, advertising the many demonstrations which were taking place in Glasgow — at least one a week, where anything from 5,000 to 20,000 people were turning up … we used chalk or whitewash in the streets … we had a problem eventually. There were so many demonstrations taking place — unemployed and other — there wisnae enough space left at the street corner to advertise them all.

Michael Clark was ‘never a member o’ the Communist Party. I was in sympathy quite a lot, but I never did join … these fellows read politics and history goin’ away back hundreds of years about the Clearances in Scotland … the big shot landlords and all that. I’d time for adventure books, but no time for politics!’ Nevertheless, Clark took over as rent convenor on behalf of the NUWM in Greenock, taking direct action in disputes. ‘We’d go to a house where eviction was threatened [for falling behind with the rent] and sit in the house … as many of us as possible, to occupy the house so’s they widnae get takin’ the furniture. And then we’d negotiate with the Parish Council and councillors … to get like a settled fee … for them to pay the rent, make up the arrears.’