The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

At the other end of the age range, young, untrained men often found similar difficulties in getting steady work. The school leaving age was fourteen, and only those whose family could afford to send them to grammar school, or who had won a scholarship, had any hope of secondary education. Most working-class children left elementary school at fourteen and, like Jim Wolveridge from Stepney in the East End of London, found themselves at a disadvantage. ‘I went into a dead end job … Not many kids in the neighbourhood did get good jobs … I spent a few weeks calling at the juvenile exchange at Toynbee Hall, but the few vacancies that were available were for boys who’d had secondary or grammar school education. That left me, and a good many more like me, out in the cold.’

Charles Graham was born in South Shields on the north-east coast of England, ‘a beautiful place. There’s beautiful scenery there’ — but little work. When he left school at fourteen in 1930 he ‘went round the quay trying to get to sea because this was the dream in that area. But after a year I got a job as a lather boy at a barber’s. Five shillings a week. I was there for about eight months. I knew I wasn’t going to learn how to cut hair because he didn’t want to teach me because he was afraid for his job. This was general. People were afraid of letting you know their little secrets. It was only short back and sides after all … Then I got a job as an errand boy in a grocer’s shop. Trade was really competitive. One grocer’s shop next to another … I used to have to fill these seven or fourteen pound bags of flour and deliver the orders … I used to have a sack barrow for deliveries and I had to walk about five miles [there] and five miles back … When I was seventeen I managed to get work from a lady who owned two hardware shops and a wholesale grocery business … My take home pay was 13/6d [minus five shillings a week deducted to repay his employer for driving lessons] (I would have had 14/- on the dole).’

Graham started work sweeping out the shop at 6 a.m., and ‘very often did not finish work until eight or nine p.m. (but there was no overtime pay) … I got a job as a driver for a biscuit factory. I was only 17 then and I had a huge van … You had to go at 60 miles an hour to get round … I managed to get a job with Wall’s ice cream once. With a tricycle. I was getting about 32/- a week. A fortune for me.’ But that came to an end too, and Graham got a job on a building site. ‘My stepfather knew the builder. That’s why I got the job … A lot of apprentices were used as cheap labour on the building site. They’d be signed on as apprentices and work for about four hours on the site and all they’d be doing was wheeling a barrow and stacking bricks like I was doing. And then when the building was completed the apprentices would be out before they’d even started laying bricks. Anyway, that lasted about eighteen months. Then I was unemployed again looking for work … During the slump you couldn’t join the Army because there were so many. There was such a great demand to get into the forces, to get away from it, although the wages were only 14/- a week, with stoppages out of that. But they were so selective, just like the police. The police could say six foot, and that was your lot, and so much chest because they had anyone to choose from.’ Eventually, when war broke out in 1939, Charles Graham was able to join the army. ‘I don’t suppose 90 per cent of the men in the army with me would have been able to get in two years before because of malnutrition. But when war broke out, they were all fit.’

Many others, taken on as cheap labour when they left school at fourteen, might find that once they reached eighteen, when by law their employer had to contribute towards their unemployment insurance, they were sacked. Being both less experienced than older men (and often untrained), and more expensive than the next wave of school leavers, a long period of unemployment followed in those regions where jobs were scarce anyway.

Donald Kear lost his job a fortnight before his twentieth birthday in 1933: ‘I was a machine attendant at a small factory [in the Forest of Dean, where coalmining was the predominant industry] and it was the custom of my employer to discharge employees when they became older and more expensive to him and employ younger lads in their place. There was plenty of labour available. Young lads were hanging around the factory gates every day looking for work.’

Jack Shaw ‘went butchering’ when he left school in Ashton-under-Lyne, just outside Manchester. ‘The idea in my dad’s mind was that I was going to learn a trade. But there was a lot of butchers and he picked the wrong one. He was probably only making enough to keep his self. He gave me five shillings a week. Then I got seven and sixpence. When I got [to] about eighteen I come to ten shillings a week and he couldn’t pay me any more. He said “I’ll give you a reference, and that’s about all I can do. I just hope you can get a job.” So that’s when I had my first experience of the dole.’

‘I am glad that I haven’t a son,’ said an unemployed Welsh miner vehemently. ‘It must be a heartbreaking business to watch your boy grow into manhood and then see him deteriorate because there is no work for him. And yet there are scores of young men in the Valley who have never worked since the age of sixteen … at sixteen they become insurable, and the employers sack them rather than face the extra expense. So we have young men who have never had a day’s work since. They have nothing to hope for but aimless drift. I’m glad no son of mine is in that position.’

Even those signing up for apprenticeships in industries such as engineering or shipbuilding might be no better off, since when they had completed their training the depressed state of the industry could mean there were no jobs. Around 4 per cent of juveniles (those aged fourteen to eighteen) were unemployed, but again this varied from area to area. In 1933, 10 per cent of boys and 9 per cent of girls available for work in Sheffield, a depressed city, were unemployed. The true figure of young people without work was undoubtedly much higher, as these statistics relate only to sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds: those under sixteen did not qualify for unemployment benefit, and therefore were not registered at the Labour Exchange. The implications for the future of large numbers of young people without skills, proper training or any real prospect of regular employment was bleak, not only for the individuals but for the national economy. ‘They tell me I haven’t the experience and they’ll not give me the chance of getting it,’ one young man reported in a Carnegie Trust survey complained, while others felt fed up with being ‘messed around’. The Pilgrim Trust was disquieted to discover that in Liverpool there were ‘large numbers of young men to be found who “don’t want work”’.

During the 1930s employers in depressed areas knew that they could take their pick from a large pool of the workless, and tended to shun those in shabby clothes or exhibiting tendencies to demoralisation and apathy, the inevitable consequences of long months stretching into years searching for work. The Unemployment Assistance Board stressed problems that arose from ‘loss of industrial efficiency’ in the long-term unemployed. E. Wight Bakke, a young American who came to Britain in 1931 on a Yale fellowship to study the problem of unemployment, was not alone in concluding that ‘even a short period of unemployment handicapped a man in his efforts to market his labour … The handicap increased with the length of time out of work … [long-term unemployment leads] to the slow death of all that makes a man ambitious, industrious and glad to be alive.’

So the dreary spiral was perpetuated: no work increasingly seen as a disqualification for work. The Pilgrim Trust also found that anyone with a minor physical defect such as a speech impediment, a slight limp, or even being short of stature, might be discriminated against, regardless of whether this was in any way relevant to the sort of work he was likely to be required to do, when there was an embarrassment of ‘perfect specimens’ for hire.

Disconsolate groups of the long-term unemployed, shabbily dressed, hanging round street corners slicked black by rain against a background of boarded-up shops, lounging against lamp-posts, playing desultory games in the gutter, kicking a tin around in lieu of a football, watched by ragged, grimy-faced urchins, have become a familiar image of the 1930s, captured in grainy Picture Post-like photographs in the years before Picture Post existed. The young Canadian writer George Woodcock described a typical scene when he took a free holiday from his ‘wretchedly paid’ job in London with a Welsh aunt in a small town in Glamorgan:

One day I decided to take a bus and visit the Rhondda area, the heart of the South Wales mining district … It was the worst of times in the Rhondda, though it probably looked little better than the best of times, since most of the mines were not working, and the smoke that would normally have given a dark, satanic aspect to the landscape was less evident than in more prosperous times. Still it was dismal enough … it had the feeling of occupied territory. Many of the shops had gone out of business, the mines had slowed down years ago, and the General Strike of 1926 — disastrous for workers — had delivered the coup de grace to the local economy. The people were shabby and resentful. Groups of ragged men squatted on their haunches, as miners do, and played pitch-and-toss with buttons, they had no halfpennies to venture. A man came strolling down the street, dejectedly whistling ‘The Red Flag’ in slow time as if it were a dirge.

Caught in a downpour of rain, Woodcock was

a sad, sodden object … as I came down into the valley beside a slag heap where fifty or so men and women were industriously picking over the ground. I caught up with a man walking along the overgrown road from the mine to the village, whose damp slate roofs I could see glistening about half a mile away. He was pushing a rusty old bicycle that had no saddle and no tires, but it served to transport the dirty gunnysack he had tied onto the handlebars. He had been picking up coal from the slag heap. ‘No bigger nor walnuts, man,’ he explained. The big coal had been taken years ago, so long ago was it that work had been seen in the village. I asked him how long he had been unemployed. ‘Ach y fi, man, it’s nine years I’ve been wasting and wasted.’ … He apologetically remarked that these days nobody had a fire in the village except to cook the mid-day dinner, if there was anything to cook, so I’d find it difficult to dry my clothes. Then he suddenly brightened. ‘Try the Brachi shop, man. They’ll have a fire, sure to goodness. And it’s glad they’ll be for a couple of pence to dry your clothes.’

Long ago an Italian named Brachi had found his way into one of the Welsh mining villages and had established a modest café. Others had followed him, but his name had clung, and Italian cafés in the Rhondda were generically called Brachi shops. The Brachi shop in Rhondda Fach was a melancholy place, its front in need of a paint, a sheet of old cardboard filling the broken part of the window in which stood a few dummy packets of tea and biscuits. A dejected girl came from the back. Her black hair and olive complexion were Mediterranean, but her voice had the lilt of Wales. She looked at me hostilely when I talked about a fire, and I think I was humiliating her into admitting that they, too, lit the fire only at mealtimes. Nobody came for meals anymore. So I spent my tuppence on a cup of tea, which she languidly made on a primus stove. She thawed a little as the kettle warmed up, and talked of her longing to go to London. I hope she got there.

The Orcadian poet Edwin Muir witnessed the state of the unemployed in Scotland when he took a journey there in 1934 at the request of the publishers of J.B. Priestley’s English Journey:

It was a warm, overcast summer day: groups of idle, sullen-looking young men stood at the street corners; smaller groups were wandering among the blue black ranges of pit-dumps which in that region are a substitute for nature; the houses looked empty and unemployed like their tenants; and the road along which the car stumbled was pitted and rent, as if it had recently been under shell-fire. Everything had the look of a Sunday that had lasted for many years, during which the bells had forgotten to ring and the Salvation Army, with its accordions and concertinas had gone into seclusion, so that one did not even bother to put on one’s best clothes: a disused, slovenly, everlasting Sunday. The open shops had an unconvincing yet illicit look, and the few black-dusted miners whom I saw trudging home seemed hardly to believe in their own existence … A century ago there was a great clearance from the Highlands, which still rouses the anger of the people living there. At present, on a far bigger scale, a silent clearance is going on in industrial Scotland, a clearance not of human beings, but of what they depend on for life.

THREE Dole Country

This word dole has two meanings. It means a charitable distribution, especially a rather niggardly one. It also means, or did mean, in its archaic use, a man’s lot or destiny. We have contrived most artfully to combine these two meanings. As I looked back on it, the England of the dole did not seem to me to be a pleasant place. We could not be proud of its creation. We could not really afford to be complacent about it, although we often are. It’s a poor shuffling job, and one of our worst compromises.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934)

‘At the present time I am out of work,’ recorded Frank Forster in his diary on Saturday, 14 December 1935. ‘I have been out for 3 or 4 weeks. I am safe for 6 months on the Labour and for this period will receive each week 17/-. But what is to happen after that if I do not get a job, I just don’t know.’ Forster, who was in his mid-twenties and of strongly left-leaning persuasions, lived at home in Saltney in Cheshire with his father, who worked in the sanitation department of the local rural district council, his mother and one of his two sisters (the other was married). ‘During the past few years my life has consisted of a series of periods of unemployment spaced out with periods of employment’ — as a fitter’s mate, in horticulture and as a casual labourer.

Life at home was not easy:

Our family at the present time is in rather straitened financial circumstances. From father’s side came only 9/- Union benefit. [Forster’s father was in hospital with ‘the old stomach trouble’.] Mother gets 10/- from cleaning at a public house in the village. Hilda [his sister] gives in about 8/- or 9/- from her wages. She is working on a stall in Chester market. I give 8/- out of the 17/- which I get from the Labour Exchange. We have had to cut down considerably on various things and are able to buy only necessities. We are helped a great deal by our various relatives who now and again give us food or money … There is at times talk of me getting a job somewhere no matter what it is or what the money being paid is. I do not relish making small money. [I] would sooner die fighting and starving than live cringing and in slavery. The thrill which I get out of the situation is the thought of what might happen when my point of view clashes with the law or with authority when our family is bought to the point of starvation, to Poor Law level. Then, at that time, I would be able to come into my own and express my opinion against this damnable society.

The Forsters’ pared-down family income would not have been unusual in an area where there was little regular work to be had — nor would Frank’s feelings of frustration as a youngish man with apparently no prospects. The money he received was unemployment insurance benefit, since at some point he had worked in the building trade, which was covered by the government insurance scheme that had been in existence since before the First World War.

An unemployed married man with two children still at school who was covered by the insurance scheme would receive thirty shillings per week, or half the national average wage of £3. This benefit was paid at a flat rate regardless of previous earnings, and the scheme was intended to insure the worker against unemployment, not against poverty. As the author of an informative if briskly upbeat coda, ‘The State Services for the Unemployed’, to Time to Spare, a book of a BBC series of talks published in 1935 which gave the unemployed ‘a chance to speak out freely, according to one of them’, explained: ‘Although the rates of insurance benefit may … have provided the subsistence of millions of persons, on and off, during recent years, they still have nothing to do with maintenance. No British Government, as yet, has ever accepted such a liability.’ This was not entirely true, since an Out of Work Donation had been briefly granted to those who had served their country in the First World War and who had been unable to find work, and there continued to be some minimal ‘liability’ not only for those unemployed workers who had exhausted their benefits, but also for those able-bodied unemployed in jobs not covered by the unemployment insurance scheme, who therefore had no benefit entitlement.

The first Unemployment Insurance Act had been passed by Asquith’s Liberal government in 1911 in response to demands for ‘something better than the current system of deterrent poor relief, eked out here and there by spasmodic local relief works and private charities. In those days the majority of the artisan class could and did somehow tide themselves over temporary out-of-work spells, either by saving or by trade union insurances. And as for the unthrifty and the lowest-paid workers, the opinion was that to dispense on easy terms to such people would be the road to ruin.’ Much had changed: little had changed.

The Act had ‘opened a new chapter in unemployment relief. The government took a leaf out of the trade union book and launched a cautious scheme of contributory insurance … the object was to cover short spells of unemployment and help men to eke out their family savings. There were no allowances for the wife and children in those days, and if State benefits, plus savings or trade union benefit, were insufficient or were exhausted, the only other public resource was the Poor Law. And in many areas the rule of the Poor Law Guardians was to offer the workhouse or the labour colony.’

Twenty years after that first Act, there was indeed a safety net in place for the unemployed and their families that had not been there before the First World War. It had been painstakingly knotted together in the growing realisation that unemployment was no longer merely an occasional eventuality that thrifty members of the ‘artisan class’ would be able to ride out. But the net sagged perilously in places.

Between 1920 and 1934 no fewer than twenty-one Acts concerned with unemployment insurance had been passed as various governments tried to rein in the mounting costs of unemployment benefits, grappling with the problem of those without work in a changed world, informed by the old Poor Law principle of ‘less eligibility’, meaning that it must not be more financially advantageous not to work than to work.

Until the slump of 1920–21, unemployment had generally been assumed to be cyclical and short-term: economic fluctuations might throw men out of work, but they would soon find another job. This informed the framing of the early Insurance Acts. Indeed, the original Act only covered seven trades, including shipbuilding, iron and steel and the building industry, where it was recognised that seasonal unemployment was frequent. But by 1930 the rate of unemployment averaged not the 4 per cent on which calculations had been made, but around 16 per cent, and in the ‘black spots’ such as the Welsh Valleys, Teesside, Tyneside and Clydeside it was more than double that. And in such areas more than half of the unemployment was not cyclical and short-term — it was structural and long-term. By 1934, thirteen million workers came under the umbrella of the contributory unemployment scheme, though agricultural workers, public servants (including the armed forces, the police, teachers and civil servants), non-manual workers earning more than £250 a year, domestic servants and the self-employed — which included such categories as shopkeepers — continued to be excluded until 1938, as were workers under sixteen or over sixty-five. But since a rising number of workers — about one in every fifteen of those who registered as unemployed; and again, the figure was higher in the unemployment ‘black spots’ — had been unemployed for longer than twelve months, they had exhausted their right to statutory benefits, and had to be supported by a series of ad hoc measures sequentially known as ‘extended’, ‘uncovenanted’ or ‘transitional’ benefit (the last designation having been adopted in 1927, when a brief upswing in the economy suggested that such relief could be phased out within eighteen months or so).

James Maxton, Independent Labour Party (ILP) MP for a Clydeside seat, attempted to get the centrist Conservative MP Harold Macmillan to agree to the following ‘facts’ in a BBC debate in December 1932: ‘That our present industrial system could not provide regular unbroken employment to the working population: that the earning power of the employed worker was not sufficient to allow of his making provision for extended periods of unemployment: that when the ordinary industrial system was unable to employ him, it was impossible for a man to employ himself remuneratively: that the State had some measure of responsibility for these conditions: that there were not merely breaks in continuity of employment — for some there was no hope of employment at all.’

It was never going to be possible for a series of additional tiding-over benefits to mean that unemployment could be funded by insurance contributions, and it had to be recognised that there were in effect two sorts of unemployed: those generally in regular work who occasionally lost their jobs and would be able to ‘cash in’ the insurance benefits they had been building up for the relatively short time it took before they found another one; and those who for reasons of their skills (or rather more often lack of skills), the trades in which they worked, the regions where they lived, or perhaps their age, were unlikely ever to find the regular work that would enable them to make unemployment insurance contributions. While the Exchequer contributed roughly a third (along with the employer and the employee) to the unemployed insurance scheme, the heavy financial burden of those out of benefit, for whatever reason, would last as long as there were high rates of long-term unemployment.

When a worker’s insurance benefit was exhausted, he or she could apply for transitional benefit, but might be ‘disallowed’ that benefit for a number of reasons, including refusing the offer of suitable employment. But what was ‘suitable employment’? Did it depend on how long they had been out of work? What if a skilled man had been unemployed for two years, but refused to take casual unskilled work, since it was likely to reduce the chances of his ever getting back into his old trade? How long could he be allowed to wait for a job if the industry in which he had previously worked was in decline, and those few jobs that remained were much more likely to go to someone who had recently been working than to one of the long-term unemployed, whose skills may have rusted with disuse? And of course in areas of high unemployment, urging a man to ‘take anything’ was hardly realistic since there was probably ‘very little of “anything” to do’.

If the Labour Exchange decided that a claimant was unreasonably refusing to accept offers of casual work, and that his chances of getting a job in his own trade were negligible, he would be referred to the Court of Referees, which was proclaimed to be independent. If the Court disallowed his claim, he would effectively forfeit his right to be part of the unemployment insurance scheme, and if he could not support himself and his family he would be obliged to apply to what had until recently been called the Poor Law Board of Guardians for relief, assuming he had no other resources. This was also the resort of those unemployed whose work was not covered by the insurance scheme — their numbers were estimated at between 120,000 and 140,000, not counting dependents — as well as those whose benefits or wages were insufficient to keep their family. Not that this was what it was officially called any more: the Poor Law, with its dreaded spectre of the workhouse, had been abolished in 1929, the Boards replaced (in name but often not wholly in personnel) by Public Assistance Committees (PACs), which were locally funded and notorious for the discrepancies of their awards in different areas of the country.