The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

There was, reported Richard Blewett in his 1935 survey, ‘a noticeable amount of squalor in the village and its surroundings’. Electric street lighting had only arrived at St Day in February that year, no sewerage scheme existed, and water was delivered in barrels by horse and cart. A survey of sixteen households revealed an average of seven children per family, and of six people sleeping in the same bedroom.

‘St Day is poverty stricken,’ Blewett concluded. Three hundred and twenty of its inhabitants were excused all or part of their rates, and 50 per cent of children on the school register were entitled to free milk, which was provided when the weekly household income did not exceed six shillings per head: in 1937, Merthyr Tydfil’s schools were handing out free milk to only 25 per cent of their pupils.

‘While 268 St Day men and women were employed in 1935, most finding some sort of work in the village, and others ventured to Truro, Falmouth, Redruth or Cambourne, 82 were unemployed’ — ‘NEARLY A QUARTER’ wrote Blewett in capital letters with heavy underlining. ‘The fathers of 53 families are unemployed and their children number 127 at school. I can find no relationship between the unemployment of the fathers and the intelligence of the children.’

The question of the relationship between unemployment and poverty, physical health and psychological well-being (as well as crime) preoccupied politicians, both national and local, committees, commissions and inquiries, social investigators, memoirists, novelists and newspaper pundits in the 1930s. The Pilgrim Trust surveyed a thousand unemployed men drawn from six areas throughout Britain and published its findings as Men Without Work; E. Wight Bakke shared the life, insofar as it was possible to do so, of The Unemployed Man in the London Borough of Greenwich; Hubert Llewellyn Smith led a team at the London School of Economics assessing what had changed since Booth’s turn-of-the-century survey Life and Labour of the People in London; Seebohm Rowntree set out to remeasure ‘poverty and progress in York’ as he had done in a survey published in 1901, and though he found poverty alleviated by 50 per cent, the cause, he noted, was different: in Booth’s day it had been low wages, now it was unemployment, which had also struck the London inquiry. Herbert Tout, son of a distinguished Manchester medieval historian, did the same — though much more briefly — for Bristol; Hilda Jennings reported on conditions in the mining community of Brynmawr in South Wales, where unemployment was among the highest in Britain; the Carnegie Trust reported on the young unemployed in the same region; and there were many more specific investigations into the health of the unemployed, the incidence of maternal and infant mortality, and other long-term effects of being without work.

Believing that ‘our civilisation was rather like the stock comic figure of the professor who knows all about electrons but does not know how to boil an egg or tie his bootlaces. Our knowledge begins anywhere but at home’, J.B. Priestley had set out on his unscientific but evocatively impressionistic journey across England, determined not to be one of those who, because they had ‘never poked [their noses] outside Westminster, the City and Fleet Street’, were unaware of what was happening in ‘outer England’. He was not alone. Throughout the decade Britain (most especially England) would be crisscrossed by those bent on pinning down the true state of the nation — largely by heading north. Honest inquiry, indictment, nostalgic gazetteer, guidebook (although often light on precise information — H.V. Morton’s comment on the ‘Five Sisters’ window in York Minster was, ‘No words can describe it; it must be seen,’ and he found the pillars of Gloucester Cathedral ‘beyond description’), zeitgeist entrapper, each book had a different agenda, each traveller was freighted with different baggage. But all had a common purpose: to show Priestley’s ‘outer England’ to those in ‘inner England’ who would buy their books (‘Fact is now the fashion’ in publishing), read their articles, take notice, maybe even take action. Towards the end of the decade this documentary impulse would crystallise in the formation of Mass-Observation, which aimed to give voice to the masses it observed, in the documentary films of John Grierson and others, and in the magazine Picture Post. But until then the pickings were there to be had for anyone who could get a commission to turn them over.

H.V. Morton had been ‘in search of’ England (then Scotland, Ireland and Wales) since the end of the 1920s, but he was a self-confessed ‘magpie picking up any bright thing that pleased me’, and ‘deliberately shirked realities. I made wide and inconvenient circles to avoid modern towns and cities … I devoted myself to ancient towns and cathedral cities, to green fields and pretty things.’ Though Morton found himself drawn more into the inequities of urban industrial poverty as the decade progressed, he never lost his visceral fondness for a pre-industrial, prelapsarian rural world, and scuttled back to its soft embrace as often as he could, defending the countryside against neglect and exploitation.

The journalist J.L. Hodson roamed from the countryside of Norfolk and Suffolk up the north-east coast, taking in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and then back south to the ‘English seaside’ and ‘London town’ via the Potteries. He called the resultant book Our Two Englands (1936), after Disraeli’s concept of two nations, one rich, the other poor. ‘We know no more about the unemployed, those of us who live apart from them, than those who stayed at home knew of the Great War,’ Hodson concluded of the ‘six millions of men, women and children in England [who] have neither enough to eat, nor enough clothes to wear, nothing like enough either on backs or beds’.

An American professor of English, Mary Ellen Chase, found two Englands too, but while her divide was geographic like that of the other roamers, her condemnation was of a different order. Venturing north after a pleasant amble round Southern England, Chase reported in her book In England Now (1937) that ‘there are few more ugly, more depressing places on this earth than the industrial towns of northern England. Their very names lack the euphony of the south: Manchester, Staylebury, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Crewe and Preston.’ Although she noted that the North was known for its radical politics and economics, Chase conjectured that this was partly the result of the ‘wilder, freer winds that sweep across wider, higher, more barren moors’, she could not wait to leave behind the ‘rows upon rows of identical grey houses where strident women with untidy babies stand in doorways … the smell of cheap petrol, fish and chips, smoke and wet woollens; treeless streets; advertisements for Lyons’ tea, Capstan and Woodbine cigarettes; miserable shops displaying through their unwashed windows, pink rock candy, drill overalls, tinned sardines, sticky kippers, sucking dummies for babies, garish underwear, impossible hats …’

However, Cicely Hamilton, who experienced ‘a stirring of the heart’ every time she landed at Dover, recognised that the real England was ‘essentially urban, living by the office, the factory and the shop’. She made no apologies for devoting two chapters of her survey Modern England. As Seen by an Englishwoman to what she called ‘hard core unemployment’, to ‘those Englishmen cast out of industry in the fullness of their skill and experience’.

Beverley Nichols took a ‘bird’s eye’ view of the country in 1938 to ‘differentiate it from the England of 1928’, and although he modestly recognised that the nation’s problems ‘cannot be settled in a single book … at least they can be indicated’ Priestley had admitted, ‘I have certain quite strong political opinions and I tend more and more to bring them into my writing,’ and was clear about what he was looking for before he set out: ‘I know there is deep distress in the country. I have seen some of it, just a glimpse of it, already. And I know there is far, far more ahead of me.’

In his indictment Hungry England (1932), Fenner Brockway recognised that ‘figures and statistics signify little’ unless they are translated to a human scale. He described a family of four ‘existing on 14s.6d a week; 5s for rent at the lowest 1s.6d for coal and lighting. Allow nothing at all for clothing and household extras. That leaves 8s to provide food for two adults and two children. How can it be done without leaving actual hunger — hunger gnawing at the stomach, hunger making one dizzy and weak, hunger destroying one’s body and destroying one’s mind.’

The Daily Worker journalist and typographer Alan Hutt followed much the same route that Brockway had taken through Lancashire, the Black Country, Tyneside and Teesside, South Wales, Clydeside and Suffolk to investigate the effects of seasonal unemployment on rural poverty, and discovered — or rather confirmed — that ‘The stark reality is that in 1933, for the mass of the population, Britain is a hungry Britain, badly fed, clothed and housed.’

The ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, another with ‘quite strong political opinions’ that he tended to bring into his writing) left his part-time job in a Hampstead bookshop and took The Road to Wigan Pier for two months, finding no pier (it was a music-hall joke attributed to George Formby’s father), but a ‘strange country [of] ugliness so frightful and arresting that we are obliged to come to terms with it’. He took the road north partly because he ‘wanted to see what mass unemployment is like at its worst, partly in order to see the most typical section of the English working-class at close quarters’. What he found was fury-inducing hard-core unemployment, poverty, deprivation, exploitation, squalor and hopelessness. Some thought his account exaggerated: the right-wing historian Arthur Bryant accused him of being a ‘super sensitive’ tourist, searching for local colour in the land of the unemployed, producing ‘propaganda’ in the name of literature.

Others began to publish their autobiographies of the ‘hungry thirties’ during the decade. John Brown went ‘on the tramp’ for work before ending up as a student at Ruskin College, Oxford; the young cabinet-maker Max Cohen wrote an account of his life as ‘one of the unemployed’, mainly in the East End of London; another autobiography was that of George Tomlinson, an uncomplaining coalminer from Nottingham who found that ‘After four years of unemployment I get a thrill out of ignoring the pit buzzer,’ and set off for a walk in Sherwood Forest, reminding himself that ‘If I have lost my job, I have also lost a hard master.’ Tomlinson was one of the few unemployed at the time who believed there was ‘very little hostility between the “means test” visitor and the family … The visitor does his rather unpleasant job in a way that no fair-minded person could object or take exception to. He was probably unemployed himself before he took the job.’

The BBC broadcast a series of talks on unemployment in 1931. The speakers had included John Maynard Keynes, Seebohm Rowntree and Herbert Morrison, with the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin winding up. These were followed by six lectures by Sir William Beveridge in which he aimed to diagnose the ‘disease of unemployment’ by tracing its origins back to before the First World War, considering whether the causes were labour or credit, and examining such symptoms as ‘social malingering’ before trying to calculate the cost of the ‘cure’. Beveridge had begun to change his mind on unemployment, moving away from the idea that its main cause was a residual section of the population that would always be unemployable for reasons of physical or moral deficiency, to an understanding of its structural nature, recognising that ‘There is not a special class or kind of people who constitute the unemployed. They come from almost every calling and have as great a variety of interests and capacities as any other member of the community. They are ordinary decent people like ourselves to whom an extraordinary misfortune has happened.’ Since this was the case, Beveridge later regretted that he had not made his talks more ‘human’. Instead of assailing his listeners with abstract notions and yards of statistics, he reflected, he should have talked more about the social consequences, how actual people were affected.

The human face of unemployment was given more prominence in a series of articles that appeared in The Listener, ‘the organ of the BBC’, and were subsequently published as a book, but never broadcast. Memoirs of the Unemployed described the psychological effects of unemployment on people’s lives, their politics and their hopes for the future. The idea had come from a similar study carried out in Marienthal, a small industrial village near Vienna, where the closure of the textile mill in 1929 had thrown almost the entire population out of work, and from a competition organised by the Institute of Social Economy in Warsaw which had resulted in the publication of fifty-seven vivid accounts sent in by the Polish unemployed.

In 1932 the ubiquitous journalist S.P.B. Mais had travelled through some of England’s lesser-known beauty spots at the behest of the BBC. His seventeen talks, subsequently published as a book, were entitled This Unknown Island. The following year the BBC commissioned Mais to give a ‘human face’ to unemployment on the radio by exploring a different sort of unknown island. This time, rather than idyllic places he visited Labour Exchanges, out-of-work clubs and settlements and other places where species unemployed might be located, talking to organisers and the unemployed themselves, ‘black-coated’ (now ‘white-collar’) and former rural workers, women who were either out of work themselves or were bearing the brunt of coping with no regular wage coming in. The intention of the exercise, entitled Time to Spare, was largely to give people who had no personal experience of unemployment ‘an account from the unemployed themselves of what life is like when one is out of work, what steps they take to cope with the problems of existence … since if you have never been out of work you can no more realize the horror of unemployment than you can realize the horror of leprosy … If you have never moved outside of Sussex, you can no longer visualize the destitution on the banks of the Tyne than you can visualize a tornado in Japan.’

Mais was eager to learn all he could, but he was a naïve observer. After commenting on the neatness of the women’s clothes at a female keep-fit class in Tyneside he was told tartly, ‘It’s perhaps just as well that you can’t see what they’ve got on underneath.’ Time to Spare was broadcast in early January 1933, the series introduced by the Prince of Wales. Mais called it ‘an S.O.S. message, probably the most urgent you will ever hear and it vitally concerns you. You are called upon to create an entirely new social order. The bottom has apparently fallen out of the old world in which everything was subordinated to a day’s work.’ He appealed to listeners (who were clearly not envisaged as the unemployed themselves) to rally round and ‘make yourself known to the manager of your local Labour Exchange, or if you live in a village, to the Schoolmaster or Parson’, to initiate schemes to occupy those without work.

The second series of Time to Spare, which started in April 1934, was rather less of an outsider’s view of the unemployed: this time the producer Felix Greene toured the country as Mais had, but when he found an unemployed person with a compelling story to tell, he invited him or her to Broadcasting House in London, where he got them talking and their conversation was relayed over a loudspeaker to the next room, where secretaries transcribed their words. In his introduction, Mais suggested that things had improved since the first series, but that there was no room for complacency. Indeed, the programmes caused a furore in the press, particularly since they started transmission at the same time as the final reading of the Unemployment Bill was going through the Commons. Labour MPs quoted from them (they were reprinted in The Listener) to harangue the government about the Means Test and proposals to further limit the entitlement of the unemployed to benefits.

On 5 June 1934 the Daily Herald reported: ‘Time to Spare is shattering too many illusions. Millions are being turned against the Government.’ Sir John Reith, Director General of the BBC, was summoned to 10 Downing Street to be told by Ramsay MacDonald that the series could not continue. Reith recognised that the government had the power to pull the programmes, but told MacDonald that if this were done, there would be a twenty-minute silence at the time they would have been broadcast, and it would be announced that this was because the government had ‘refused to allow the unemployed to express their view’. The series continued.

Although the Director of Talks at the BBC, Charles Siepmann, was concerned that the programmes on unemployment merely attempted to ameliorate its effects, rather than probing its possible political causes, Wal Hannington, leader of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), had his request to be allowed to broadcast turned down by the BBC on the grounds that it wished to avoid controversy. Denied a voice on the airwaves, Hannington wrote a number of books castigating government policy and describing the plight of the unemployed, with such unequivocal titles as Never on Our Knees, Ten Lean Years, Unemployed Struggles. Several of these were published by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which brought the hardships of those suffering unemployment, as well as suggestions for the problem’s solution, to a wider and very engaged audience — Gollancz had also published Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier and, in collaboration with his usual publisher, Priestley’s English Journey.

Others drew on what they had experienced of unemployment or saw all around them, and wrote novels about how it affected men, their families, their communities. Walter Greenwood, who had three spells of unemployment from his work as a clerk and council canvasser, was the author of Love on the Dole, which was the probably the best-known novel of the Depression. Nevertheless, in 1936 the British Board of Film Censors twice refused to allow a film version to be shown in cinemas on both moral (too much bad language) and political (a scene of unemployed men fighting the police) grounds. It was, they declared, a ‘very sordid story in very sordid surroundings’, despite the fact that both the book and a play based on it had enjoyed great success. It finally reached the screen in 1941.

Although Love on the Dole was the only ‘Depression novel’ that was a best-seller, publishers were anxious to find ‘authentic’ proletarian writers — partly because there were so few of them. As the novelist, reviewer and editor Cyril Connolly pointed out, ‘90 per cent of all English authors come from the Mandarin class … A rigorous class system blankets down all attempts to enlarge these barriers. The English mandarin simply cannot get at pugilists, gangsters, speakeasies, negroes’- or the unemployed, he might have added. In June 1927 the Communist newspaper the Sunday Worker had written of having the ‘misfortune to be compelled to make do with stories about the working-class who are “sympathetic” but have no first hand knowledge of workers’ lives’.

But that changed over the next decade: with time on their hands, men turned to writing about what they knew only too well. Leslie Halward, an unemployed plasterer, had a story accepted by John o’London’s magazine — and was paid £100 just as the Means Test man was scheduled to call. Another out-of-work plasterer, Jack Hilton, was sent to Strangeways for six months in 1932 for leading an unemployed workers’ protest in Rochdale, and wrote his autobiography and a novel — about unemployed workers’ protests — while he was in prison. William Holt, a weaver, went to jail for nine months for the same offence, this time committed at Todmorden; when he was released he couldn’t find a job and was about to be evicted so he resumed the writing he had always done, but now his subject was invariably the experience of unemployment, selling his books from door to door in the Calder Valley. Walter Brierley recounted the harrowing tale of the depredations wrought by a Means-Test Man (1935); the novel sold 6,000 copies in the first year of publication. James Hanley’s Grey Children was a story of ‘humbug and misery’ in the lives of unemployed shipyard workers; Roger Dataller’s Steel Saraband was a tale of unemployment in the steelworks; Lewis Jones’s Cmwardy and also his later We Live told of the hard lives of miners in the Welsh Valleys. Lewis Grassic Gibbon (the stirring pseudonym of Leslie Mitchell) wrote a powerful dialect trilogy of Scotland’s ills, A Scots Quair, the story of a family moving from rural to urban poverty, of which the third volume, Grey Granite (1934), charts their response to unemployment in a fictitious industrial city. Jack Lindsay (writing under the pseudonym Richard Preston) wrote a novel dealing with the collapse of the Cornish economy.

One author had some notepaper printed with the heading ‘B.L. Coombes, Miner-Author’ after the success of his first book, These Poor Hands (1937), another Left Book Club choice, and he continued to work as both. A[rchibald]. J. Cronin, who had been appointed Medical Inspector of Mines in 1924, drew on his experience of the wretched conditions in the coal industry for The Stars Look Down (1935), while his sensationally successful next novel, The Citadel (1937), was an attack on the system of private medicine, again drawing on his experiences in Tredegar, where he had witnessed the correlation between the inhalation of coal dust and lung disease, and its ‘model’ treatment with the help of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society.

By the second half of the thirties the prejudice against those who had no intimate experience of working-class life, of poverty and unemployment, seems to have somewhat dissipated: there was an important story to be told, whoever the teller. The one-time editor of the Strand Magazine and John O’London’s, George Blake, wrote a novel set in the shipyards, and in Ruined City Nevil Shute (who was an engineer rather than a manual worker) wrote of a rescue package dreamed up by an altruistic businessman for a thinly disguised Jarrow.

Although unemployment seared deepest into the working classes, not all the middle classes escaped: by 1934 an estimated 4,000 black-coated workers were without work, and their plight began to be described in such novels as Simon Blumefeld’s They Won’t Let You Live (1939), in which the graduate protagonist unsuccessfully applies for 187 jobs, eventually deciding to kill himself. Even the thriller writer Eric Ambler used the frustration of a skilled production engineer who could not find work as the basis for the plot of Cause for Alarm, published in 1938.

Despite the widespread evocations of unemployment, both real and fictional, which stood as indictments of a system that had failed, political calls to action — let alone revolution — were muted. The BBC dutifully bore vivid witness to the plight of the unemployed, but in its efforts to avoid more controversy than programmes such as Time to Spare already whipped up, it largely avoided probing the causes of unemployment and means of relieving it, other than by strenuous voluntary efforts to ‘help’. When ‘Edward Windsor’, as Wal Hannington consistently referred to the Prince of Wales, an active supporter of voluntary movements for the unemployed, came to the microphone in December 1933 to introduce the first series of Time to Spare, he set the tone by asserting that ‘the causes of unemployment are beyond our control, and we might differ in our estimate of them, but it is largely within our power to control the effects of unemployment. The unemployed are just our fellow men, the same as ourselves, only less [considerably less in his case] fortunate.’