The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

The tenor of most discussion about unemployment dwelt on unemployed men (as indicated by titles of E. Wight Bakke’s The Unemployed Man and the Pilgrim Trust’s Men Without Work). Yet a Fabian tract published in 1915, as women flooded into munitions factories, had recognised that ‘unemployment in industry affects women as well as men, and often differently from men. How often do we find the state of the labour market treated as if it were solely a matter of the relationship between supply and demand for men?’ However, although women tended to outnumber men in such fields as cotton, woollen, worsted and jute manufacture, and in the newer industries producing merchandise for the home market such as light electrical goods, chemicals and drugs, artificial fibres (mainly rayon or ‘art’ — artificial silk), tinned food and packaging, only 30 per cent of those working in the traditional heavy export industries subject to cyclical unemployment and covered by the 1911 Unemployment Insurance Act were female. Thus, between 1930 and 1932, during the worst of the slump, only 16.8 per cent of the insured unemployed were women, compared to 22.6 per cent men. And since around 50 per cent of working women did jobs that were not covered by unemployment insurance, and thus did not show up in the Ministry of Labour statistics, it is hard to be certain how many women were unemployed at any time, though the figure was undoubtedly higher than 16-odd per cent.

There was considerable prejudice against women workers, and consequently a certain lack of sympathy for those who were unemployed — particularly married women, who were often accused of ‘taking men’s jobs’, and were usually the first to be let go when times were hard. The First World War fear of ‘dilution’ — that women would be prepared to do the jobs men had left when they went to fight for less money, and would thus depress wages and exclude men from their ‘rightful work’ when the war was over — persisted long into the peace. The notion that a woman’s place was in the home impacted on the attitude to unemployed men — and frequently on their own sense of self-worth — in that a man’s wage was intended to support his family, and thus an unemployed man was not the ‘provider’ society expected him to be, while the ‘odd shilling’ a woman might contribute to the family budget by odd jobs such as sewing, ‘making up’, laundry or other domestic work, was seen essentially as pin money, to be dispensed with as soon as the man of the house found work again. In Nelson in Lancashire, for example, the local Weavers’ Association agreed to significantly improved rates of pay for male weavers (defined as ‘heads of households’) who were employed to operate six or eight rather than the customary three or four cotton looms, in return for the dismissal of the married women who comprised 37 per cent of the workforce.

The indignities could be subtle: in her novel We Have Come to a Country (1935) Lettice Cooper sketches the scene at the Earnshaw family’s tea table. Joe Earnshaw, a skilled joiner, is unemployed, and his daughter Ada has just started work.

The procedure on these occasions was invariable. Mrs Earnshaw picked out the biggest kipper and laid it on Joe’s plate. She gave the next two best to the children, and took the smallest herself. In the days when Joe had been in good work and come home ravenous, there had been two kippers for him. Nowadays there was never more than one each — not always that — but, as the man and the worker, he was still helped first and given the biggest. This evening some idea of celebrating — some feeling that it was Ada’s day — made Mrs Earnshaw do a thing she had never done before. She picked out the largest kipper first and slapped it, smoking, onto Ada’s plate. ‘There you are Ada,’ she said, ‘eat it up. You’ll have to keep well and strong for your work.’ None of them realised that a small revolution had taken place in their family life, and that Mrs Earnshaw had paid her first homage to the new head of the house. Henceforth, little fourteen-year-old Ada would be the man of the family.

And in Walter Greenwood’s best-selling novel of the Depression, Love on the Dole, published in 1933, Sally Hardcastle’s fiancé, Larry Meath, breaks off their engagement when he loses his job in a foundry. ‘Why can’t we be married as we arranged?’ Sally demands. ‘There’s nowt t’stop us. You’d get your dole, and I’m working.’ But Larry refuses: ‘A humiliating picture of himself living under such conditions flashed through his mind: it smacked of Hanky Park [the working-class area of Salford where the novel is set and where Greenwood had been brought up] at its worst … “No …” he said, sharply, suddenly animated. “No, no, Sal. No, I can’t do it … It’s no use arguing, Sally. It’d be daft to do it. Yaa! Fifteen bob a week! D’y'think I’m going to sponge on you. What the devil d’y’ take me for?”’

As the social investigator and occasional politician Sidney Webb observed, the assumption was that ‘a woman always had some kind of family belonging to her, and can in times of hardship slip into a corner somewhere and share a crust of bread already being shared by too many of the family mouths, whereas the truth is that many women workers are without relatives, and a great many more have delicate or worn-out parents, or young brothers or sisters, or children to support’.

For unmarried women, this domestic vision translated into working in other people’s homes rather than their own. With female unemployment running at around 600,000 in 1919, various committees and schemes had been set up to investigate the problem. As these committees were composed — predictably — mainly of middle-class women who rather minded the difficulties they were having in finding maids and other staff, their recommendations were invariably that domestic training was the answer. Between 1922 and 1940 the Central Commission on Women Training and Employment trained an average of 4,000 to 5,000 women every year on Home Craft and Home Maker courses. To begin with such training was provided on non-residential courses, but the first residential centre opened at Leamington Spa in January 1930. According to the Ministry of Labour, ‘This experiment [was] designed to accustom trainees to live and sleep away from home and to observe the routine which resident domestic service entails.’ The experiment was judged a success, and by 1931 seven such centres had been opened, each providing eight-week training courses.

But on the whole women had no desire to do domestic work. A 1931 survey found that while more women in London were still employed in domestic service than in any other industry, their numbers had fallen by over a third since the turn of the century, and they now had a choice of other occupations ‘which appear more attractive to most London girls’. Indeed, ‘the London girl has always been particularly averse to entering residential domestic service’, and most young women, wherever they lived, would prefer to do almost anything rather than opt for life ‘below stairs’ or, in the case of the prevailing ‘cook general’ of the inter-war years, accommodated in a poky back bedroom in a middle-class villa. In an unnamed textile town in the North-West a Ministry of Labour survey revealed that of the 380 unemployed women on the employment exchange register who were single and under forty — natural recruits into domestic service, it might be thought — only four were prepared to consider such an option, while in Preston, out of 1,248 women interviewed, a bare eleven were prepared to train for domestic service. It was partly because wages were low — a live-in housemaid in London earned around £2.3s a week and a cook general perhaps a few shillings more (though with board and food included this was not as bad as it might appear); it was partly because domestic service was not covered by the unemployment insurance scheme until 1938, so a domestic servant would not be able to claim benefit if she lost her job; but it was also partly the life: the long hours, the loss of personal liberty — ‘No gentleman callers’ — entailed in being a servant rather than an employee.

However, an unemployed woman who refused domestic work, or declined to be trained for it, could have her benefit refused or reduced, since she could be said not to be ‘genuinely seeking work’. This had been one of the criteria for benefit since 1921, and until it was repealed by the Labour government in 1930 it had put the onus on the claimant to prove that he or she had been assiduously searching for a job, regardless of whether there was any work to be had. It was not until the end of 1932 that the Ministry of Labour finally acceded to pressure and agreed that refusal to accept a training place for domestic service should not automatically lead to loss of benefit: it would only be withdrawn if a young women had accepted training, then taken a post in service, but subsequently left it and refused all further offers of such work.

The abolition of the ‘genuinely seeking work’ clause caused an outcry that it was a sponger’s charter that would encourage opportunists, scroungers, malingerers and loafers. The particular fear was that married women who had no real intention of seeking work, but had accrued insurance entitlements prior to their marriage, would now come forward to claim benefits — and indeed employers wrote in maintaining that they knew of women who had worked for them who were now claiming benefit even though they had left work for reasons of pregnancy or domestic duties.

Sections of the press enjoyed a field day peddling stories of abuse. A Nottingham newspaper attested to the case of a girl of sixteen who had allegedly received £150 unemployment pay in the course of a year, having paid only twenty-four shillings’ worth of insurance stamps. Rebutting the charge in the House of Commons, the Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield, Britain’s first woman Cabinet Minister, claimed that to achieve this remarkable feat the girl ‘must have maintained, with dependents’ allowances, not only herself but a husband or parent, and at least twenty-three children’.

There were also concerns that by ceasing to require that claimants must be actively seeking work (however ritualistic, and often harsh and excluding, that requirement had been), labour mobility would be impaired. It was argued that there would be no financial incentive for a man or woman to ‘get on his or her bike’ (or rather go on the tramp) in search of a job in areas away from the depressed regions, though this was hardly a realistic prospect for thousands of men who would either have to maintain a family back home, or move home and family for a job that turned out not to be permanent. Disquiet was not confined to the press: ‘Are we to legislate on the lines that these people should think that they need do nothing themselves; that they should wait at home, sit down, smoke their pipes and wait until an offer comes to them?’ ridiculed Labour’s Attorney General Sir William Jowitt. Even the Prime Minister became prey to alarmist thoughts. Ramsay MacDonald’s ‘colourful imagination … began to picture married women driving up in fur coats to draw benefit: and the retelling of such tales became a staple part of his conversation’.

In November 1930 the Minister of Labour reported that the Act had admitted an extra 200,000 persons to benefit, and nervously cited examples of employers arranging the working hours of part-time workers so that they too would be able to claim. However, the abolition had coincided with a severe recession in the pottery and textile industries, both employers of large numbers of women — indeed, 38 per cent of married women claiming benefit in June 1930 had previously worked in the Lancashire cotton industry, where unemployment had risen from 13.3 per cent in November 1929 to 45.4 per cent in July 1930. That month, with male and female unemployment in the cotton industry at more than twice the national average, 71.3 per cent of claims for transitional benefit came from married women. A year later the figure was still 68.5 per cent.

Pressure continued to grow to stem what were regarded as ‘abuses’ of unemployment relief — and to take urgent action to reduce the ever-rising borrowing by the Unemployment Fund, which had climbed from £50 million in March 1930 to £70 million in December, plus an additional £60 million from the Treasury to support the unemployed, with the cost of transitional payments alone reaching £30 million. Faced with the conundrum of obviously rising costs and equally obvious rising needs, the traditional prevaricating sticking plaster was applied: a Royal Commission was set up charged with recommending how the National Insurance Scheme could be made ‘solvent and self-supporting’ and what should be done about those outside the scheme who were ‘available and capable of work’.

Reluctant to grasp the political hot potato of actually cutting benefits, as the interim report of the Commission recommended, yet anxious to find a way of reducing costs and staunching ‘abuses’ (or, as they could more judiciously be called, ‘anomalies’), the Labour government rushed through an Anomalies Act which came into effect on 3 October 1931, intended to deal with workers whose attachment to the labour force was considered to be marginal. Such categories included seasonal workers and married women who could claim benefit by virtue of the insurance contributions they had paid when they were single. The immediate effect of the Act was to exclude large numbers of married women from unemployment insurance benefit. Unless a woman had worked for a time since marriage and had paid a minimum of fifteen contributions, and could establish that she was normally in ‘insurable employment’ and was ‘actively seeking work’ — and likely to find it in her local area — her claim would be disallowed.

By the end of March 1932 over 82 per cent of married women’s claims had been disallowed. It had always been difficult to calculate how many women were unemployed. Now it became all but impossible, since there was so little incentive for women to register for unemployment benefit.

While the number of disallowed claims once the ‘genuinely seeking work’ requirement had been dispensed with confirmed some in their conviction that there had been ‘abuse’ of the system, it could also be read as revealing a distressingly prevalent aspect of the slump: low wages and widespread underemployment.

Lancashire textile-weaving families needed more than one income to survive even when the main breadwinner was in work. ‘We were very poorly paid. The wives couldn’t stay at home on a husband’s wage. Women have always had to work in Macclesfield,’ said one woman interviewed for a study of the Northern silk-industry town. In 1937 a cotton-weaver working full time would make just over £2 a week, while the national average industrial wage for an adult male manual worker the following year was £3.9s. An insured worker with three children who was in receipt of unemployment benefit would receive twelve shillings a week more than an employed cotton-weaver. And in the worst years of the slump Lancashire men’s wages were often further depressed by ‘playing the warps’, or working less than a full complement of looms — and accordingly being paid less.

Moreover, in 1931 when the Lancashire cotton trade was at its lowest, it was hit by another blow when India imposed tariff barriers against imported cotton goods. ‘Strong appeals went forth to … Gandhi to use his influence towards their abolition,’ reported Alice Foley who had started work in a Bolton mill at the age of thirteen and was by 1931, aged forty, a JP and secretary of the Bolton and District Weavers and Winders Association.

The great Indian leader paid a personal visit to Lancashire. He chose Darwen as his seat of investigation and later came to Bolton … He arrived at the Weaver’s office, accompanied by his little spinning wheel, but minus the goat which, presumably, he had left in safe keeping with his hostess, Miss Barlow, a member of a wealthy spinning family … He was a thin, angular figure, draped in a soft white dhooty [sic] garment, and with kindly eyes peering through round glasses. Gandhi listened gravely to the various appeals from leaders and officials, erstwhile [sic] plying his spinning wheel … I think he was gravely moved by what he had heard and seen of the effects of low earning, unemployment and persistent under-employment but could do nothing immediately; his people, he reminded us had always been on the verge of starvation.

In the evening a dinner had been arranged at our local Swan Hotel in his honour, but Gandhi declined to eat anything but bread and water at the repast, somewhat to the embarrassment of his hosts.

After the distinguished, diminutive visitor had left the benighted towns where unemployment for women had reached nearly 60 per cent, some ‘hard-headed folks’ opined that Gandhi was ‘a bit of a fraud’, but to Miss Foley he seemed like ‘a passing saint in a world of gross materialism’ in those hard, grim years.

The 1930s economy is often characterised as one divided between those in work and the unemployed, whereas in fact there were a number of economies operating: full-time work adequate to a family’s needs, full-time work inadequate to a family’s needs, unemployment and underemployment. When sixteen-year-old Doris Bailey’s father, a French polisher in Bethnal Green in East London, was put on short-time work, she was obliged to abandon her matriculation, since the family needed money. She eventually found work in an underwear factory in Holborn, and contributed her wages to the family budget. To qualify for unemployment benefit a worker had to experience three continuous days of unemployment in any one six-day week, which meant that those who worked non-consecutive days, or for part of four separate days, were excluded from benefit. For Kenneth Maher, a miner who was often only in work part-time, it was an iniquitous system. ‘Nearly all the pits in Wales were on short time. Even then the coal owners and the government of the day kept bashing the miners. The favourite trick was to work on Monday and Tuesday, off Wednesday, work Thursday, off Friday, work Saturday, or off Monday, work Tuesday, off Wednesday, work Thursday, off Friday, work Saturday. In this way the men could not claim any dole. They were taking home maybe three days’ pay — about £1 or 25/-. That was bad enough, but those on the dole were in an awful plight — 18/- for a man 6/- for a wife.’

‘The miners were always subject to a day or two days out. If they got four shifts a week they were lucky,’ recalled Clifford Steele, whose father was a miner at Grimethorpe colliery in South Yorkshire. ‘And then there were the odd occasions, perhaps in wintertime when coal was demanded, that they worked pretty regularly. It was the case of only a few hours’ notice. If a man was on day shift starting at six in the morning he had to be hanging about at night to see whether the pit buzzer went. If the pit buzzer went at half past eight it meant that there was no work the following day. So it was a case of don’t put me snap [packed lunch] up Mother.’

However, in industries where demand fluctuated but was generally depressed, part-time work could act in the interests of both employer and employee. A study of the workings of British industry between the wars has shown that in the harsh market conditions of the 1930s in the iron and steel industry it became imperative for over-capitalised firms to secure orders ‘at any price simply to provide sufficient cash flow for their creditors’. Short-time working meant that skilled men were kept on the firm’s books in case an order came in, and if this was on a regular basis ‘the sequence of idle days almost invariably enables the workers to qualify for Unemployment Benefit’. This suited the employers, since it allowed them flexibility and a team of experienced workers. And the employees knew that if it didn’t suit them, there were plenty of unemployed men eager to take their place.

A similar situation affected women workers. As a Macclesfield Silk Trade Association member explained to a Board of Trade inquiry: ‘Trade … was slack … It went up and down — and the married women thought it wasn’t fair that they should be put on the dole when work was found for the girls. The boss … tried to explain. “My girls will go where there’s work,” he told them, “and they won’t come back when things improve and I’ll lose them. They’ll find work in another mill. Besides there’s only one wage going in with a girl.” But he took no notice that many of the men were on short time or the labour [i.e. receiving benefit] too, as well as their wives.’

In the crisis year of 1931, the Ministry of Labour became concerned that payment of benefit for short-time working was ‘one of the abuses of the present system’. However, an inquiry into the iron and steel trades revealed that most — though not all — employers believed that 80 per cent of short-time workers needed benefit payments in order to survive. As one employer put it: ‘We know all our men and their domestic circumstances, and but for the “dole,” they would be physically unable to do their work when there is any for them.’ Overall it seemed that only about 15 to 20 per cent of the men normally employed in the industry ‘would not be reduced to “needy” circumstances if unemployment pay is not granted’ — presumably these men were members of the small aristocracy of affluent skilled labour, for differentials in the industry were very wide.

Far from suggesting that short-time workers were abusing the system by drawing benefit, the employers argued that if benefit was not allowed, there would be no sense in a man being prepared to work three days a week: he would be better off not working at all and drawing a full week’s benefit. The government took the point, and the system continued. One effect, however, was to further disadvantage the ‘hard kernel’ of long-term unemployed, since there was always a reserve pool of short-time labour when an industry began to recover, and it was these men who stood to benefit, since there was little incentive to offer work to those who had been out of the labour market for some time, and whose skills and efficiency might be thought to have diminished. And so the curse was handed down. The sons of men already employed in an industry were much more likely to be offered apprenticeships or training schemes in that industry than other boys. If a boy started work in the same insured industry as his father, both would be eligible for unemployment benefit as of right, regardless of family circumstances. That was not the case for an unemployed youth, nor indeed, more perniciously, for the unemployed father of an employed youth following the introduction of the much-loathed Means Test.

As part of the swingeing austerity package of 1931, which also raised contributions while cutting benefits, unemployment benefit could in future only be drawn as of right for six months: after that, those still out of work and requiring support had to apply for ‘transitional payments’ paid through the Labour Exchange. Before this was granted, they had to undergo a household means test carried out by the local PAC. The Committee would inform the Labour Exchange of the applicant’s circumstances, and the rate of relief he should receive was assessed. In arriving at this figure all forms of household income were taken into consideration. These included any pensions or savings, any money coming into the house from a working son or daughter, even household possessions. The maximum amount which an adult male could receive before losing his entitlement to benefit was 15s.3d a week.

The fact that the total income of a family was assessed led to much bitterness, and sometimes family break-up. ‘The Act drove many more young men and women away from home than anything else, because if you had a son working, and the father was out of work, the son was made to keep him,’ explained a Welsh miner. ‘It was one of the reasons why so many left [the Valleys] for London or the Midlands.’

Various ruses were thought up to get round this deprivation: a working child might leave home and go to live with a relative or in lodgings so that the parent would qualify for benefit. Or he or she might remain at home, but cram into an outhouse or a shed on the allotment when the Public Assistance officer was expected. Stanley Iveson, a mill worker in Nelson in Lancashire, a textile town with high unemployment, recalls the effect of the Means Test there: ‘In 1931 when people were being knocked off the dole, there was a big building across [the street] … it was a model lodging house. And … lads used to go and sleep there, during the week … It was a shilling a night. So they were able to draw the dole. But they went home for their meals. And it broke up homes in those days.’