The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

However, novels such as Love on the Dole were hailed as a wake-up call, with the left-wing novelist Ethel Mannin hoping that ‘It is going to shock smug, fashionable, comfortably-off, middle-class London into a realisation of what the industrial north is really like.’ One reader at an Ilkeston public library noticed how many grimy thumbprints such novels bore, evidence, he thought, of their having ‘clearly passed through the hands of a variety of curious proletarians’. Thus, in various ways and with varying intensity, by the end of the decade the contours of unemployed Britain in the 1930s had been, if not fully explained, at least comprehensively mapped — even if some declined to listen, or to believe that the topography was quite so bleakly craggy as others portrayed it.

FIVE Hungry Britain

Oh hush thee, my baby,

Thy cradle’s in pawn:

No blankets to cover thee

Cold and forlorn …

Thy mother is crying,

Thy dad’s on the dole:

Two shillings a week is the price of a soul.

‘A Carol’, C. Day Lewis (1935)

The death of Annie Weaving, the thirty-seven-year-old wife of an unemployed man in South-East London, mother of seven children, who collapsed and died while bathing her six-month-old twins, offered a stark definition of poverty in 1933. Mrs Weaving had been struggling to keep her family going on the forty-eight shillings a week benefits her husband received. She did so by going without food herself, and though the immediate cause of her death was recorded as pneumonia, the coroner concluded that this would not have proved fatal if Mrs Weaving had had enough to eat, rather than ‘sacrificing her life’ for the sake of her children. At the inquest, the coroner was blunt: ‘I should call it starvation to have to feed nine people on £2.8s a week and pay the rent.’

The press took up the story, and the Week-End Review launched a ‘Hungry England’ inquiry in the spring of 1933, conducted by ‘an economist [A.L. Bowley], a physiologist [Professor V.H. Mottram], a housewife, a doctor and a social worker’, in the hope that the debate could be settled ‘scientifically’. It could not. They found that unemployment relief payments were insufficient to provide the minimum diet for a family recommended by the recently established Advisory Committee on Nutrition set up by the Ministry of Health (on which Mottram also sat), and concluded that the ‘cheapest practical diet in current English conditions’ were about 5s. a week for a man ‘not doing muscular work. 4s.2d for a woman; and 2s.9d- 4s.10d for children according to age’.

In November that year the British Medical Association (BMA) established a benchmark for poverty, and this was generally accepted for most subsequent surveys. It specified that an average man required 3,400 calories a day, the cost of providing which was 5s.11d. This figure was later adapted according to whether a man was doing light or heavy work, and proportionately for women and children. Seebohm Rowntree used this standard when assessing the level of poverty in York, but Sir John Boyd Orr, Director of the respected Rowett Research Institute of Nutrition in Aberdeen (who had already been influential in getting free school milk for needy children in Scotland), used more generous figures borrowed from the US Bureau for Economics, which suggested that an active man required 4,500 calories a day and that the population as a whole needed to consume 2,810 calories per head each day.

Until the First World War ‘sufficient food’ was judged simply by the amount a person consumed: having ‘enough to eat’ meant just that. But since then there had been extensive research into medical conditions such as rickets, that revealed the importance of the sort of food consumed. There was a growing understanding of the significance of vitamins and minerals, and with it an awareness that large numbers of the low-paid and unemployed could not afford what were known as ‘protective foods’ — milk, fresh vegetables, meat, fish and fruit — and were subsisting on a largely cheap carbohydrate diet — bread and margarine and potatoes — washed down by copious amounts of tea sweetened with condensed milk. The link between poor nutrition and lack of money was a political question, since, in the view of the think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP), which had been established as a result of the Week-End Review’s campaign, hunger should not be regarded as ‘an act of God … but a problem which can be analysed and treated by the same methods of common sense that we are trying to apply to other problems’.

‘Common sense’ suggested it was largely a question of money. A table published in the Manchester Guardian in December 1934 showed that to have an acceptable diet a family of a man, his wife and four children (aged five, seven, nine and eleven) needed 35s.2d to live on (excluding rent): what they received in unemployment benefit (also excluding rent) was 29s.6d — a crucial shortfall of 5s.8d.

Using the much more generous calculation that a family of five needed 43s.6d a week to live on at the most basic level, excluding rent, Seebohm Rowntree estimated that 31.1 per cent of the working-class population of York were living in poverty, as were 18 per cent of the population overall. He concluded that 32.8 per cent of the poverty was due to low wages and 28.6 per cent to unemployment, and that 72.6 per cent of unemployed families lived below the poverty line. In Bristol, Herbert Tout found that over 10 per cent of working-class families were living below the poverty line, an additional 19.3 per cent of working-class families had insufficient income, and more than a quarter of the working class in Bristol as a whole were living in utter destitution; 21.3 per cent of the families suffered as a result of low wages, and 32.1 per cent because of unemployment. But Bristol and York were both relatively prosperous cities, with unemployment rates little more than the national average. Furthermore, these surveys took place in 1936 and 1937 respectively, when the worst of the Depression had passed. What about areas such as the Welsh mining valleys, Tyneside, Teesside and Clydeside, where poverty was much more widespread, and bit far deeper for far longer?

Surveys such as those in York and London, which made comparisons with times when the only recourse for the poor had been charity and the Poor Law, showed that absolute poverty was lower, perhaps half what it had been at the turn of the century. But if poverty was defined as living conditions a little above mere subsistence, then around a third of the working class in Britain — and the manual working class constituted more than 75 per cent of the population, according to the 1931 census — lived on incomes that were insufficient for ‘human needs’.

In London in 1929 unemployment and underemployment (short-time working) accounted for 38 per cent of families in poverty, and 55 per cent of the unemployed were living on the poverty line; a survey of Northampton, Warrington, Bolton and Stanley showed that the proportion of poverty due to unemployment had increased more than threefold since 1918; in Sheffield in the winter of 1931–32 it was found that 42.8 per cent of families lived in poverty. All of these calculations presumed the most rigorous housekeeping, that allowed families to exist, but certainly not to live in any meaningful sense.

The Pilgrim Trust calculated the difference between unemployment pay and the average working man’s wage. The authors admitted that their sample was small, but concluded that on average, unemployment benefit equalled around 65 per cent of wages; older men, aged between fifty-five and sixty-four, would however receive only 45 per cent of the wages they would have expected had they been in work.

Britain was a world leader in nutritional research, but there was in the thirties no internationally agreed definition of malnutrition, nor a standard measurement for it. Anthropomorphic tests that judged height, weight, hair texture and other outward signs were considered fallible, and blood and urine tests were still in the experimental stage. The seemingly promising evidence of social scientists was proving problematic. Despite the provision to families of measuring jugs, scales and lined exercise books in which to record their income, expenditure and exactly what and how much every member of the household ate (which was regarded as useful training in housewifery as well as yielding survey data) in the course of a month, their findings were ‘frustratingly compromised by the human factor’, since it was asking a lot to expect poor and often ill-educated families to keep such detailed records over such a period. And for some the natural inclination to resist the spying of outsiders, secrets between husband and wife about money, and even the ever-present spectre of the Means Test man, meant there might be a certain amount of creative accounting in their returns.

However, social investigators on the ground were continually finding correlations between poverty and malnutrition and poverty and infant and maternal mortality, and experiments showed clearly that improved nutrition did bring improved health and life chances. In the Rhondda, the simple expedient of supplementing expectant mothers’ diets with a food distribution programme had been tried. The results were startling: ‘a sharp fall in the puerperal death rate followed immediately on the introduction of this scheme, the rate dropping from 11.29 in 1934 to 4.77 in 1935’.

Poverty was poverty whatever caused it, and in areas of high unemployment wages tended to be depressed, so the incidence of those with not enough to live on was compounded. Yet the government remained resolute that regardless of what surveys showed, widespread unemployment did not mean an unhealthy nation — or part of a nation — and was quick to blame a lack of education or the fecklessness of the much-maligned working-class housewife, rather than poverty, for inadequate diets. ‘There is no available medical evidence of any general increase in physical impairment, sickness or mortality as a result of the economic depression or unemployment,’ insisted the Minister of Health, Sir E. Hilton Young, in the House of Commons in July 1933, while the Chief Medical Officer to the Board of Health, Sir George Newman, based his optimism on what he maintained were declining mortality rates and the near eradication of ‘malnutrition requiring treatment’.

Those wayward Medical Officers of Health or investigators who declared otherwise were considered guilty of perpetrating socialist ‘stunts’. Dr M’Gonigle, the Medical Officer of Health for Stockton-on-Tees, was threatened with removal from the medical register for misconduct if he participated in a broadcast on the problem of malnutrition, while Sir John Boyd Orr was summoned by the Minister of Health, Kingsley Wood, who ‘wanted to know why I was making such a fuss about poverty … when there was no poverty in this country. This extraordinary illusion was genuinely believed by Mr Wood who held the out-of-date opinion that if people were not actually dying of starvation there could be no food deficiency. He knew nothing about the results of the research on vitamin and protein requirements, and had never visited the slums to see things for himself.’ Despite the government’s suppression of Boyd Orr’s finding in the run-up to the 1935 general election, the Conservative MP and publisher Harold Macmillan, who had seen poverty and hunger up close in his own constituency of Stockton, agreed to publish Food, Health and Income in January 1936, thus ‘informing the public of what the true position was regarding undernourishment among their fellow citizens’ — half of their fellow citizens, Boyd Orr calculated in 1937.

Despite such government complacency — or wilful avoidance — there was a mounting body of evidence from independent investigators that by the 1930s the fall in rates of infant mortality (the number of deaths of children under one year of age), which had been declining impressively since the First World War, with the introduction of maternity and child welfare centres and health visitors, had slowed down considerably, so that England and Wales now ranked ninth in the League of Nations’ Table of Infant Mortality, while Scotland was seventeenth. Moreover, there were considerable discrepancies between different parts of the country, and even within small areas. In a comfortable part of Manchester, for example, the rate was forty-four per thousand live births, while in a poorer area it was 143 per thousand. Seventy-six out of every thousand infants died in Glamorgan and Durham, seventy-seven in Scotland, ninety-two in Sunderland and an appalling 114 in Jarrow, whereas in the Home Counties the rate was forty-two per thousand. It was the same with maternal mortality (the number of women’s deaths attributed to childbirth): in the North it was 4.36 per thousand, in Wales it was 5.17, whereas in the South-East it was 2.57. Mothers were simply dying in childbirth at a far greater rate in the depressed areas: poor nutrition during pregnancy meant that in the 1930s it was four times as dangerous to bear a child as it was to work down a coalmine. In addition, every five years perhaps a quarter of a million women were likely to suffer disabling and long-lasting ‘dull diseases’ caused or aggravated by repeated pregnancies and childbirths in adverse conditions. And the wives of unemployed men were not covered by their husbands’ health insurance.

Nutrition mattered desperately to the health of the nation — a point that would be taken very seriously at the end of the decade, when after the coming of the Second World War the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, drew heavily on Boyd Orr’s estimates of the standard diet needed to maintain a healthy population — yet, as the leader of the NUWM, Wal Hannington, pointed out, ‘The kinds of food … necessary to provide the vitamins and calories which have been specified as the minimum requirements [recommended by the BMA] are not being eaten in the homes of the workless since they cannot afford to buy them.’ A pint of milk a day would cost 2s.½d a week, while the BMA scale prescribed 2s.8d as the total weekly food allowance for a child of one to two years, and 3s.1d for one aged two to three. Again using the BMA scale, a man eating three meals a day would have exactly 3¼d to spend on each meal, and a woman 2¾d. Furthermore, Hannington quoted the Chief Medical Officer to the Board of Health, Sir George Newman himself, who had estimated in his 1933 report that the milk a pregnant woman needed would cost 4s.1d a week, while the amount allowed for her total food consumption under unemployment benefit regulations was 4s.11d. ‘It would, indeed, be interesting,’ wrote Hannington, ‘to know how the Minister of Health would spend the odd ten pence on buying three meals a day for seven days a week.’

George Orwell quoted — in amazement — a newspaper article that suggested that by eating a diet composed mainly of vegetables and whole-meal bread, with cheese for protein, it was possible for an adult to have a balanced diet for 3s.11d a week. But the ‘minimum weekly expenditure on foodstuffs which must be incurred by families of varying size if health and working capacity are to be maintained’ recommended by the BMA worked out for a man, his wife and two children aged eleven and nine at 19s.9d a week, out of an unemployment allowance of £1.7s. Since the average weekly rent for three rooms in the East End of London was 12s.6d, and in Stockton-on-Tees the rent for one of the 2,756 new council houses was over nine shillings (which was beyond the reach of most of the unemployed, who continued to live in slum cottages where they paid nearer 4s.8d a week), it was hardly surprising that the Pilgrim Trust found that 44 per cent of the families of the unemployed would not be able to afford the minimum diet once they had paid their rent and allowed for other necessary expenditure. And Rowntree found that in 1933, 72 per cent of the unemployed in York were able to spend less on food than the BMA recommended, ‘due to lack of means’. This finding was borne out by Dr M’Gonigle in Stockton-on-Tees, who was convinced that the malnutrition he came across was caused by poverty, and not mismanagement, as was sometimes alleged.

‘I learned the meaning of hunger,’ wrote Max Cohen of his days as a single, unemployed cabinet-maker. ‘I knew what it was to count my pennies carefully and to spend them with hesitation and misgiving. I knew the dull finality of having no money at all.’ Cohen

came within the Labour Exchange category of a ‘Young Man’ (18–21 yrs). Therefore I was receiving fourteen shillings per week … apparently it was assumed by the authorities that a ‘Young Man’ … can in some mysterious way support himself on a smaller sum than a ‘Man’ (21–65 yrs) …

Life … became divided into more or less rigid periods … There was Friday … the day, when after feverish waiting at the Labour Exchange, I received the life-giving fourteen shillings. After paying six shillings and sixpence a week rent, I was able, with much care and discrimination, to exist in a more or less normal fashion during the first half of the week. Of course, I could spend nothing on replacing my clothes, or on minor luxuries of any kind, no matter how trifling.

From Tuesday on came bankruptcy … I had no money at all, and so, in a sense, nothing more to worry about … I lived on whatever may have been left of those things I had bought at the beginning of the week — on dry bread and bits of tasteless cheese. All that was necessary was to pull my belt tighter, ignore the empty ache in my stomach and hang on till Friday and deliverance came round again.

A London housepainter aged forty-seven, married with six children, three of them under six, found himself ‘unemployed and unable to fulfil my duties towards my family’. He had a weekly income (including a naval pension and the earnings of three of his children) of £4s.11d, which meant that

after allowing for rent, rates, light, coal and gas with a balance of £2.11s to keep, house, clothe two adults, one adolescent and three children, and provide all other necessaries of life for eight persons, which position a PAC inquisition described as ‘not in need of assistance’ … The chief article of our diet is bread. Margarine comes next, and it is my experience that children prefer this to dripping [from meat] … unless the dripping is made use of for frying bread when it often forms a breakfast meal when other food is not available. We invariably take sweetened condensed milk with our tea, a saving thereby being effected in the consumption of sugar; and we often use it for making rice puddings. We usually purchase fresh meat on Friday or Saturday evenings, cash being available on those days, and this being the time when butchers make an effort to sell their odds and ends. Fresh vegetables have been fairly cheap, and these together with cheap sausages, often form our principal meal on two or three days.

A skilled wire-drawer, thirty-two years old, with a wife and one child aged five, who had been unemployed for over three years, had ‘little variety in our food since the staple ingredients are bread and butter and tea and cocoa and cheese. Until this year [1933] I had an allotment from which we obtained all our vegetables. A local factory bought the land and I have not yet been able to rent another. We have no garden attached to our house; we share a small back yard with five other houses … our rent is 5s6d a week.’

A twenty-five-year-old skilled letterpress printer who had been unable to find work since having a nervous breakdown after the death of his mother five years earlier, was in receipt of 15s.3d benefit. ‘How do I exist on my “magnificent bounty”? I pay 8s. for a furnished room which includes laundry. Gas costs 6d weekly; letters for situations 8d; razor blades, soap, shoe blacking, haircuts etc. average 3d; and 6d a week I save to help buy boots, second hand flannels etc. This leaves me 5s6d for food. Can a man keep up health and strength on such a sum? Emphatically no! … My breakfast consists of three slices of bread and jam and a cup of tea. Dinner, two slices of bread and about 2ozs cheese. Tea two boiled eggs, or ½lb tomatoes, or a tin of baked beans. If I have 2d left at the week-end (which isn’t often) I “mug” [treat] myself and buy some chip potatoes. I have not tasted meat, potatoes (barring the above occasions) or vegetables for over twelve months — and then I am told I get enough money to keep fit and strong.’ George Tomlinson, a Nottingham miner, unemployed for four years, explained that ‘The real secret of living on the dole [is] potatoes and bread.’

A Scottish hotel-worker, out of work since 1931, had the single man’s dole of seventeen shillings a week in 1933, and when he had paid his rent, coal and laundry he was left with 5s.3d, out of which he spent ‘about 1 shilling every week on stamps, stationery and typed copies of my references’; ‘In the cold wet months of a Glasgow winter … my meals, which were few and far between, consisted mostly of tea, bread and margarine,’ though he occasionally managed sixpence for some boiling mutton or 4½d for bacon.

Charles Graham, whose father, a merchant seaman, had died when he fell from a ship in dry dock in Australia, and whose stepfather, a miner, was out of work, recalled that his sister ‘had just one attic room and two children and with only one gas ring, she couldn’t cook an economical dinner. Parents would make soup with a bone, some cabbage, a few turnips and so on. But we usually had a slice of bread in the morning. For dinner a penn’orth of each, that’s a penn’orth of fish and a penn’orth of chips; and probably a couple of slices of bread at night … now and then with a penn’orth of pease pudding and a saveloy from the local German butcher.’ When, during the Second World War, Graham was taken prisoner of war by the Germans for two and a half years, he found his diet much the same as it had been in the ‘hungry thirties’.

Graham remembered his mother baking every Sunday (in most North Country families it seems to have been Wednesdays, with washdays on Monday and the Sabbath without work).

Most of us children would be out collecting orange boxes to stoke the fire. It was a great day, Sunday, because there was plenty of bread, and oven bottom cakes and scones, and so on. We used to buy rusty cans of cheap jam in the market. A housewife would go any distance to save a halfpenny. A halfpenny was a candle and that was four or five hours of light. We were lucky, we had a distant relative of my stepfather who was a butcher and he used to let us have some offcuts of meat at the weekends [a sheep’s head was another cheap meat bought for stewing]. Usually sausages was the nearest the average working class got to meat. One of the favourite meals was pan-haggerty. You slice potatoes, put a layer in the frying pan. Put scraps of bacon in the middle then a layer of sliced of potatoes again and fill it with water and just boil away. Or corned beef in the middle. Meat was scarce. I don’t ever remember having cheese except for weddings and funerals. And fresh milk was out of the question. It was mainly condensed milk [even though the tin was clearly marked ‘unfit for babies’].

John McNamara, an unemployed factory-worker, remembered: ‘Lancaster market used to be open till nine Saturday night, and whatever beef and pork sausages they had to sell, they had to get rid of. They couldn’t put it away over the weekend because there was no refrigeration, so it would go bad on them … especially in the summer months … so the stuff went right down to rock bottom prices.’ McNamara’s mother, ‘along with a lot of other married ladies knew this. That was the time they used to go and try and get a bit of meat for Sunday. They’d wait to the last minute. The butcher would practically throw it at them for next to nothing. The fruiterers never threw fruit away. If they’d gone bad, the bad part was cut out. What they called damaged fruit. There was nothing wrong with it but middle class people and the upper crust, they wouldn’t think of buying them. But to us it was a godsend. For twopence you could get a handful of damaged apples or oranges … The only time you would get to see a chicken was Christmas. But it had taken twelve months to get that chicken. Mam would find a penny from somewhere to put in the butcher’s shop and by the time the year end come she might have five bob.’