The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

In Dowlais in South Wales Beatrice Wood’s father was an unemployed miner, but her brother had a job. The Means Test

meant that everybody working had to keep their parents … there was a lot of friction between fathers and sons because the boys resented keeping their parents. We tried to live an honest life, we really tried, but … the Government was making honest people dishonest because of their rules. The Means Test man would come often, asking the same question. So we devised a plan with the help of my mother’s friend. We would say my brother was living with them. It didn’t matter to them because her husband was working. My mother didn’t like doing it, but we had to in order to live — if you could call it living. There was a lot of people doing it. The trouble was, my brother couldn’t be seen in our house because he wasn’t supposed to be living there. The Means Test man came when you least expected him. Sometimes he would call just as my brother had come in from work. He would be eating his food and if there would be a knock on the door there would be one mad rush to get the food off the table (because we only had one room) before we opened the door, and my brother would have to hide in the pantry … and stay there until [the Means Test man] had gone. The Means Test man came one day when my brother was bathing in front of the fire in a tub. Well. My brother jumped out of the tub wet and naked and went into the pantry to hide. We didn’t have time to take the tub out, so my mother, resilient as ever, caught hold of our dog and plunged him into the tub, pretending she was bathing the dog. My brother was freezing in the pantry. When we opened the door to let the Means Test man in, the dog jumped out of the tub and shook himself all over the Means Test man. It took all my powers not to laugh, because it was like a comic strip if it wasn’t so serious … Those Means Test men were horrible men, and very arrogant. They would sometimes lift up the latch and just walk in. So my mother went one better — she kept the door locked. They weren’t above looking through your window. I was always told that your home was your castle. But not us — we might as well be living in a field: we had no privacy — this was the dreaded nineteen thirties. How people suffered.

If a father was considered to have sufficient means to support an unemployed son or daughter, his or her benefit would be stopped. Donald Kear, an unemployed machine attendant from the Forest of Dean, remembered: ‘Any family unlucky enough to have one of their number unemployed were forced to accept a lower standard of living because they had a passenger to carry. In our house I became the passenger. My benefit was immediately cut to 5/- a week. My father [a miner] was paid on production at the coal face. When his earnings rose a little the benefit was correspondingly reduced. The Means Test man went regularly to the office at the mine to find out how much my father was earning so these adjustments could be made.’ Occasionally this inquisition meant that a son or daughter without work would find themselves without a home either, as they would be thrown out so as not to be a ‘parasite’ on the family; this probably happened more when a step-parent was involved.

Any entitlement to benefit passed after six months: after that it was a question of cash handouts at the minimum possible level to keep the unemployed from destitution. The dispensation felt like an act of charity, as the Fabian socialist writer G.D.H. Cole saw it. ‘It is therefore — for charity begins at home — to be strictly limited to the smallest sum that will keep the unemployed from dying or becoming unduly troublesome; and their relations as far as possible to be made to bear the cost of maintaining them in order to save the pockets of the tax payers. Behind this system is the notion that unemployment is somehow the fault of the unemployed, from which they are to be deterred if possible; and an attempt is made to persuade their relations to help in deterring them, because they will be made to contribute to their support.’

The ex-Labour MP Fenner Brockway, now an ILP member, attempted to conjure up the effects of the Means Test for those Southerners who could not envisage it, urging them to imagine the Royal Albert Hall ‘filled three times over. That would represent the workers on the Means Test in Newcastle. Imagine it filled twelve times over. That would represent their families. It is beyond imagination to realise the anxiety and despair and suffering they would represent.’

In a number of Labour-controlled authorities, PACs were in fundamental opposition to the Means Test, and subverted its operation by always allowing the maximum possible centrally specified benefit, regardless of an applicant’s circumstances. County Durham (where an estimated 40,000 people had to face the Means Test), Glamorgan County (where the number was around 27,000), Monmouth, Rotherham and Barnsley were among those warned by the Ministry of Labour against ‘illegal payments’. If they persistently refused to conform, as Rotherham and County Durham did, the PACs were suspended and replaced by commissioners from London to ‘do the dirty work’. Other authorities felt it was better to submit to the regulations, but to mitigate them wherever possible, as a statement from the London East End borough of West Ham explained: ‘We were threatened with supercession, and in face of that threat we prefer to keep our poor under our own care and do what we can for them rather than hand them over to an arbitrary Commissioner from whom they could expect little humanity.’

For workers who had regarded unemployment benefit as a right, earned while they were in work and to be drawn when, through no fault of their own, they were out of it, the Means Test was not only harsh in its effects, it was degrading and humiliating in its association with destitution and the Poor Law, violating the privacy of homes they had worked hard to scrape together, prying into family matters, letting the neighbours witness their shame as their furniture was carted off to be sold.

‘If somebody had a decent home, the man from the Means Test came and made a list of what you had. Then you were told to sell a wardrobe this week, some chairs next week, some pictures the week after, until you perhaps you only had your bed, two chairs and a table left. Only then would you be able to claim something off the Public Assistance,’ recalled Kenneth Maher. Not all officers were brutal: some clearly felt disquiet at the job they were obliged to perform, and were as respectful and thoughtful as the brutal and inquisitorial system would permit, but nevertheless:

You were only left with the bare essentials. I bet today, in some upper-class homes there are thousands of pounds’ worth of valuable goods stolen by the Means Test men from the poor in the thirties … Mother was given thirty bob to feed herself and five kids. We were left with four chairs, a table, a couple of benches and a couple of beds. I remember thinking, ‘Good job we’ve got no rugs on the floor ‘cos they’d have took them as well.’

… The Means Test bloke arrived with a van to take the best of our furniture. How I hated him with his smart clothes and the smirk on his face, twirling his stick of chalk in his fingers. I watched as he walked over to two large brass lions standing either side of the hearth, telling my mother they had to go. It didn’t matter to him that they had belonged to her grandmother long since dead. The poor weren’t allowed sentiment. We hadn’t got much before he got cracking with his chalk. We’d got a damn sight less when he’d finished.

Such confiscations struck at the heart of an unemployed worker’s sense of the modest achievements of a hard-working life, as a London sheet-metal worker explained: ‘Suppose I would have to sell off that chair over there. There would be more than that chair go out of this room. How many times do you suppose the old woman and I have gone by the store window and looked at chairs like that waiting till we could get one? Then finally, we got it … if I had to sell that, I’d be selling more than the wood and the cloth and the stuffing. I’d be selling part of myself.’

The Means Test was not only harsh and often inequitable, it also defied logic. As the Rhondda Fach Gazette reported: ‘It is in many cases a penalty upon thrift. If a man had been careful and thrifty all of his life and has got a small income he loses exactly that amount from the dole, while a reckless unthrifty person gets it in full.’

By January 1932 almost a million unemployed were having to register for transitional payments, and were thus coming within the scope of the Means Test. Thousands were cut off from benefit, while others had their relief drastically reduced. It was claimed that in the depressed textile areas of Lancashire only 16 per cent of claimants were awarded the full transitional benefit, while a third were disallowed altogether. Throughout Britain as a whole, half of those applying for transitional payments received less than half the maximum amount, and 180,000 people were judged no longer eligible to receive unemployment benefit under the unemployment insurance scheme as a result of the application of the Means Test. The government saved £24 million in that first year. The cost to society was incalculable.

As James Maxton bitterly lectured Harold Macmillan, ‘The Means Test has been useful in disclosing once more how limited were the resources of the working population. But was there any need to set up expensive investigating machinery to discover that the majority of the working class were very poor?’

FOUR Mapping Britain

You were such an angel to take trouble with my old women and it was really worthwhile. I do not know whether this story of an old castle will affect the Labour vote. People are so odd. They might say, ‘He is a humbug: he talks Labour and lives in a castle.’ But they might also say, ‘How splendid of him when he lives in a castle to come and worry about our little affairs.’

Harold Nicolson writing to his wife Vita Sackville-West, who had entertained fifty ladies from the West Leicester Women’s Conservative Association (his constituency) at their home, Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, on 5 June 1937

‘Southampton to Newcastle, Newcastle to Norwich: memories rose like milk coming to the boil. I had seen England. I had seen a lot of Englands. How many?’, J.B. Priestley asked himself at the conclusion of his English Journey in 1933. But although Priestley had roamed (usually by ‘motor coach’, which he found ‘voluptuous, sybaritic … This is how the ancient Persian monarchs would have travelled, if they’d known the trick of it … they have annihilated the old distinction between rich and poor travellers’) from Bristol in the West to Norwich in the East, from Southampton in the South to Yorkshire, Lancashire and Tyneside in the North, by way of Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Arnold Bennett’s ‘five pottery towns’ in between, he had not, as most commentators had not, rambled down to England’s south-westernmost extremity, Cornwall. If he had, he would have found there unemployment, poverty and despair to equal any found in the reproach that Jarrow, Merthyr Tydfil, Clydeside and the other depressed areas constituted.

The village of St Day, named for a Celtic saint and a stopping place in the Middle Ages for pilgrims on their journey to St Michael’s Mount, lies nine miles north of Falmouth and seven miles east of Truro in Cornwall. A prosperous village in the early nineteenth century, its wealth was founded on copper-mining until 1870, when competition from Chile, Bolivia and Peru meant that 2,000 men were thrown out of work when the United Mines closed down. ‘The dismal procession of the Gwennap [the parish in which St Day is located] Mines to the scrap heap had passed, [and] the modern history of St Day had begun. When the Great War came it was trotting down the hill at a leisurely pace. When the war ended the speed of the pace was accelerated and that was the only difference the War made,’ explained Richard Blewett, the Medical Officer of Health for the district, in a ‘modern historical survey’ of St Day he prepared in 1935 for a Board of Education short course for elementary school teachers held at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

The land surrounding the village was ‘pocked by mineshafts … and scarred by “burrows” or mine tips, over many of which nature is gradually casting a blanket of heather’. In 1935 the rate of unemployment in St Day was nearly 30 per cent, since not only had copper-mining collapsed, but so, in the mid-1920s, had the tin-mining industry around nearby Redruth and Cambourne, from where many of St Day’s inhabitants came in search of cheaper housing — even in 1935 the average rent of a workman’s house was not much more than two shillings a week. China clay production, which it had been hoped might fill the vacuum left by the decline of mining had done no such thing: by the end of 1932 output had fallen 40 per cent since 1929, and the price had fallen by more than 30 per cent. The Cornish economy was in paralysis, with the population having fallen in the decade up to 1931 by 0.9 per cent (while that of the rest of England and Wales had risen by 5.5 per cent), and the annual average of unemployment between 1930 and 1933 was 21.6 per cent.

Moreover, de-industrialisation at the turn of the century meant that trade unionism amongst the Cornish miners was never the force it was in the Welsh Valleys. Even when a strike was organised by the Transport and General Workers’ Union in January 1939 at South Crofty mine, when police and strikers clashed, only 234 men out of a total workforce of 435 stopped work, while the seasonal and scattered nature of the tourist industry meant that unionism did not find a foothold among those toiling in hotels and other holiday amenities. Politically Cornwall, as part of Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’ and with its strong tradition of religious nonconformism remained a fairly staunch Liberal stronghold during the 1930s (the Conservatives managed to take two seats in the 1931 election and three in 1935), with Isaac Foot, MP for Bodmin until 1935 — the patriarch of a radical dynasty that included the future Labour leader Michael Foot and the campaigning Socialist Workers’ Party and Daily Mirror journalist Paul Foot — the ‘towering presence’. An eloquent preacher and stirring orator, with an ‘anti-drink, anti-betting, evangelical stance’, Foot was revered throughout the county and the fishermen’s luggers at Looe were reputed to be painted in the Liberal colours of blue and yellow in his honour. Indeed, ‘Our Isaac’ was an important factor in preventing what another Cornishman (though Foot was actually a native of Devon, and began his political career there), the historian A.L. Rowse, who stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate for Penryn and Falmouth in both elections in the thirties, believed was ‘the prime task for Labour in Cornwall … to bring home the futility of going on being Liberal [since] Cornish liberalism [was] a fossilised survival’ — as, unfortunately, was the inter-war Cornish economy.

Fishing was also in the doldrums in Cornwall by the mid-1930s. ‘Outside the Duchy the legend still holds that the fisher is the typical Cornishman,’ wrote the former suffragist Cicely Hamilton on her journey round England in 1938, ‘but, in sober fact, that race of Cornish fishers is a race that is dwindling fast.’ With the Cornish fisheries unable to compete with those of the Artic and the North Sea, there were only two first-class steam trawlers registered in the whole of Devon and Cornwall by 1938, one of which had not put to sea since 1925, and whereas there had been 150 first-class motor vessels in 1919, there were only ninety-one by 1938. The decline in the number of sailing boats was even more dramatic. It was much the same with agriculture: under-investment and out-of-date production methods on family farms that were too small to be economic without a high degree of specialisation meant that there were mutterings by the 1930s of the need to ‘collectivise’ Cornish farms if they were ever to be economically viable. There were, as Cicely Hamilton found, still some earning a living from the Cornish soil: flower-growers. The trade had started on the Isles of Scilly, taking advantage of the islands’ mild winters. At first it had been small, ‘a few boxes packed with narcissus and daffodils and shipped on the little mail boat that three times a week makes the voyage to St Mary’s, and three times a week makes it back to Penzance’. But by the mid-thirties flower-growing had spread to the mainland, and ‘in the spring of the year, the Great Western Railway, night by night, carries the spoil of the daffodil fields to the markets of London and the midlands’.

Apart from its abundance of spring flowers, Cornwall’s mild climate appeared to offer its only prospect of economic salvation. Every summer the Cornish Riviera Express conveyed many thousands of tourists, not only ‘the privileged minority who might otherwise holiday in the real Mediterranean, but … anyone who could afford the price of a third class ticket from Paddington’. The journalist and travel writer S.P.B. Mais helped the romance along with a series of promotional booklets written at the behest of the Great Western Railway hinting at ‘a western land of Celtic mysticism’. Even the trains carried such resonant names as Trelawney, Tintagel Castle, Tre, Pol and Pen. When a rival railway company decided to make North Cornwall its own preserve, putting such places as Tintagel and Boscastle on the tourist map, it gave its locomotives such appropriately Arthurian names as Merlin, Lyonesse, Iseult, Sir Cador of Cornwall, Sir Constantine — and even the traitorous Sir Mordred was briefly considered suitable. Despite their mystic names, the trains were among the fastest in the world. In 1938 the playwright Beverley Nichols was struck by the anachronism of George VI ‘flying through a country that even his father would hardly recognise, so quickly are the landscapes passing’, to collect ‘a grey cloak, a brace of greyhounds, a pair of gilt spurs, a pound of cumin, a salmon spear, a pair of white gloves, a hundred shillings and a pound of pepper’, dues owed by the Duchy of Cornwall to its Duke/King.

The South-West’s tourism boom had begun before the First World War, and it expanded dramatically between 1920 and 1938, with a rise of 80 per cent in the number of people employed in hotels, boarding houses, laundries and cafés in Devon and Cornwall. Tourists came not only by train but increasingly by coach or car, as roads were improved and car-ownership increased. The tourist traffic was of course seasonal: employment in Cornwall would dip to its lowest point in January, and peak in June.

Cornwall, with its Arthurian romance, its Celtic culture, its periodic ‘Cornish revival’ movements, now intertwined with the romance of ivy-covered, suggestively gothic, disused mineshafts and engine houses, spectacular coastline and stretches of silver sand, and the charm of ‘remote accessibility’, also held appeal for those who had no need to fuss with a third-class railway ticket, but could motor down with a wicker picnic hamper (though the journey on A-class roads from London might well require an overnight stop). During the 1930s Cornwall became the summer destination of choice of a number of artistic, literary and generally ‘bohemian’ types — though with its ‘reputable light’ Cornwall had been attracting artists challenged to paint its ever-changing seascapes since before the First World War. Vanessa Bell went (as did her sister Virginia Woolf), Augustus John (whose son Edwin had settled at Mousehole), the artist Laura Knight (who also had a cottage in Mousehole), her friend and fellow painter Dod Procter and her artist husband Ernest, as well as the writer who gave Cornwall to popular literature, and whose work is still celebrated in an annual festival that brings literary tourism to Cornwall, Daphne du Maurier.

Although he did move not permanently to Cornwall until 1939, the painter Ben Nicholson was a regular summer visitor to St Ives throughout the thirties. There was already a thriving Society of Artists in the town, which had held an annual exhibition since 1927 and sent work to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It was in St Ives that Nicholson ‘discovered’ the local fisherman Alfred Wallis, who often painted on cardboard supplied by the local grocer. ‘No one likes Wallis’ paintings [though of course] no one liked Van Gogh for a time,’ reported the artist Christopher Wood, who had been on a walk with Nicholson when they glimpsed Wallis’s work for the first time through the open door of his cottage. But they would. Today twelve of his paintings hang in Tate St Ives, and his images of sailing boats circulate on greetings cards.

But St Ives, Newlyn and Mennabilly/Manderley were as far from the concerns of St Day as were the ‘professional Cornishmen’ of the 1930s, most notable among them the historian A.L. Rowse and the essayist ‘Q’, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Similarly, the town had little time for a new revivalist organisation, Tyr Ha Tavas (Land and Language), which emerged in 1933, declaring that it stood for ‘the unity of persons of Cornish birth or descent who value their Cornish heritage, and who desire to maintain the outlook, individualism, culture, and idealism characteristic of their race’, and pronouncing a determination ‘to show Cornish people what Cornish men have done and what they still can do to help the World’. There had been a series of earlier Cornish revivalist movements, since ‘Every Cornishman knows well enough, proud as he may be of belonging to the British Empire, that he is no more an Englishman than a Caithness man is, that he has as much right to separate local patriotism to his motherland … as has a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, or even a Colonial, and that he is as much a Celt and as little of an Anglo-Saxon as any Gael, Cymro, Manxman or Breton.’ A College of Bards, a Cornish Gorsedd, affiliated to its Welsh and Breton sister organisations, was established in 1927, and held annual ceremonies conducted by blue-robed bards speaking the Cornish language. But by 1937 a newspaper correspondent reluctantly admitted: ‘If we are quite truthful we have to admit that the revival of the Gorsedd has scarcely touched the lives of the common people of Cornwall.’

The members of Tyr Ha Tavas, mainly young people, lobbied local MPs to give greater importance to specifically Cornish problems, and produced a magazine, Kernow (the Cornish word for ‘Cornwall’). However, Kernow always sold more copies to those outside Cornwall than to those who lived there, and the marginal political thrust of Tyr Ha Tavas failed entirely to address the social and economic problems of the county, which St Day had in great number.

Those few men still employed in the few mines operating would leave the village just after five in the morning to go down on the early-morning shift, ‘up again at 3.30 p.m. then walk home … there were no baths or showers … mining was hard, dirty and wet work and the miners did almost everything by hand. The only lighting was candles or carbide lights.’ Nevertheless, work was so scarce in the Welsh coalmines that ‘A number of families decided to pack up and head for Cornwall, with just a glimmer of hope that their luck might change,’ remembers F.R. Clymo, who was a boy at the time.

I have no idea how many were involved in this trek, but I well remember five or six men coming to St Day … It took them almost a month to reach us, sleeping rough as they went. They were desperate men who had to make it because their families left behind in the valleys were dependent on them. About a month later when accommodation had been found their families came down in lorries, which were sponsored by the British Legion … I remember the new intake of Welsh girls and boys who came to our school … they were like refugees … [but] at no time did we have any industrial projects since the closing of the mining industry … very few people were tempted to become residents here.

The only casual work likely to be had, Clymo recalled, was

when Falmouth Docks would get a shipload of cement in, which would have to be unloaded … it was a job not done by the dock labourers, so … the labour exchange would direct a certain number of unemployed men to report to the docks … There was no such thing as refusal. Refusing meant instant stoppage of unemployment benefits … I’ve seen men return after three days of this work with their hands raw and bleeding through continually carrying hundredweights of hot cement from the ship to the warehouse. On another occasion, right here in the village the GPO put the main telephone cables underground from the Exchange … to the Old Post Office in Market Square. Several villagers who were unemployed were directed to do this work … they did the work with hammers and gads (steel chisels); first they moved the hard top, then they had to dig down three feet with pick and shovel … Many of them had not worked for years, so with soft hands and not much muscle they were soon in trouble with blistered and bleeding hands. Some of them got a few bruises as well especially those holding the chisels, because the hammer men, who were out of practice, invariably missed and consequently delivered a blow to the holder’s hands. Yet not much sympathy was ever shown because after all it was only a temporary job, as soon as it was finished they would all be laid off and back on the dole again with plenty of time to heal their wounds … It was quite a common sight to see half a dozen [older] women on a sunny dry afternoon … heading for Unity Woods and the old Tram Road, their mission to collect sticks or any broken limbs of trees to keep the fire alight … These women wore long hessian aprons (towsers to us), some wore caps and the odd one or two smoked a clay pipe. They would round up as much wood as they could carry in the big aprons. Some would do this two or three times a week to save buying coal. Coal was cheap but they could not afford to buy it … times were bad, they were old at forty, no one was ever in a position to help them … Life was tough, only the very strongest got through.