The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

Those living on the poverty line or hovering just above it, whether as a result of unemployment, underemployment or simply low wages, lived a dreary life indeed, since ‘The minimum standard makes no allowance whatever for sickness, savings, old age or burial expenses, holidays, recreations, furniture, household equipment, drink, newspapers or postage.’ There was simply no margin; it was the breadline — and not always that.

With an endless struggle to find enough money to feed a family, it was hardly surprising that there was virtually no money left for anything else. And the longer a man had been out of work, the worse things got. Any small savings were used up, cooking pots, brushes, bedding, towels and clothes wore out. Families got into debt, some had to move to cheaper accommodation if they could find any, or face eviction. Economies on a budget that was already pared to the bone were made on heating and lighting, food got stodgier.

In Sunderland, Mrs Pallas’s husband had been ‘robust and he had a good job … But he fell out of work about four months after I was married, so I’ve hardly known what a week’s wage was.’ After thirteen years of unemployment and five children, the oldest boy’s trousers had six patches.

I just tell him, he’ll be all the warmer, specially in winter. My husband helps me with the darning; I do the patching. I’ve just put the eighth patch on a shirt of his. I take the sleeves out and put them in another — anything to keep going.

Then when we’ve finished with the clothes, my husband puts them into making a mat [a peg or rag rug, made by pushing strips of fabric through a sugar sack begged from the grocer or a potato sack]. Everything goes invests, stockings, linings.

Many a time my husband has had to make cups for the children out of empty condensed milk tins. He solders the handles on.

Our kettle’s got about six patches on it. My husband made the patches from cocoa tins. My husband does all that sort of patching, all the cobbling and hair cutting and spring cleaning …

My husband never changes his dole money, but although he doesn’t keep a halfpenny pocket money, we still can’t manage. And we don’t waste nothing. And there’s no enjoyment comes out of our money — no pictures, no papers, no sports. Everything’s patched and mended in our house.

‘It’s the women who suffer,’ insisted Mrs Pallas. ‘The man brings the dole in and he’s finished — the woman’s got all the rest.’ When she married him, Mr Pallas was earning £8 to £10 a week: ‘He’s a left-handed ship’s riveter — a craft which should be earning him a lot. There aren’t many left-handed riveters … Many a week he’s given it [his unemployment benefit] to me and I’ve just said, “put it in the fire.” It’s just like an insult to a mother to bring in 33 shillings … I’m not blaming my husband. He’d work if he could get it.’

By the time Mrs Pallas had paid ten shillings for coal, gas and rent, and

money for the allotment rent, for burial insurance, to the clubs for the children’s clothes, for chapel collection, and cigarettes for my husband, I have about ten shillings left for groceries, two shillings for milk, and about three shillings and sixpence a week for food. It varies a few pence, according to whether we have to make money out of food to buy leather for cobbling or spring cleaning and so on … I do the washing every other week because I find I can do a large amount of clothes with the same amount of soap, but it’s tiring. I can’t manage more than one box of matches a week. Many a time we’ve sat in the dark — it is gas light, and we haven’t a penny for the slot maybe, or we haven’t a match.

‘A woman had a full time job in the home in those days,’ remembered John McNamara in Lancaster. ‘It was the blacklead brush to polish the grate. It was the scrubbing brush and a bucket and a floor cloth and a bar of soap [or a donkeystone if they were flagstones] to wash the floors and the tables and the paintwork. And all the paraphernalia to do the weekly washing [often with no running water, washboards to scrub with, blue dollys to make sure the sheets were white, mangling, starching, drying, ironing]. Baking day was Wednesdays. There was a day for everything.’

‘It’s upon the wives of the unemployed that the real burden falls,’ wrote a miner who had been unemployed for eight years by 1934. ‘It means they have to scrounge around for the cheapest food and for anything in the shape of clothes, and what our women don’t know about jumble sales is not worth knowing. And I cannot imagine a more distressing sight than the average jumble sale in these parts.’

As well as cooking, cleaning and washing, women had to juggle almost non-existent money. Getting things ‘on strap’ (credit) from the grocer, balancing one tradesman’s bill against another, putting a penny or two by in a club for clothing or boots, and putting a brave face on it as she paid her weekly visit to the pawn shop.

Women had to work miracles with the dole, or low wages. ‘My father didn’t realise how my mother was having to budget. He wasn’t aware of a lot of things we had to do, my mother and me, to keep the cart on the wheels. He just tipped his money in and thought it did the job. He just pushed his head in the sand,’ recalled Clifford Steele in Barnsley.

Pawn shops were as common as betting shops today. On Monday a woman would pawn her jewellery, often including her gold wedding ring (which she would replace with a sixpenny brass one from Woolworths to stay respectable), or maybe her husband’s watch if he had one, or his only suit if he didn’t need it that week, and would hope that she would be able to redeem them when the money came in on Friday. Then it would be back to the pawn shop on Monday again, until the family’s meagre possessions got too shabby to raise any money against, or even worse, she had to sell the pawn tickets to raise a few pounds, and that would mean the things would be gone for good.

Charles Graham recalled that ‘in almost every street [in South Shields] there was the old woman who offered her services as messenger for those people who were too proud to be seen going into the pawn shop. She would be well known to the pawnbroker and could be trusted. She would get a pound loan, the pawn shop would charge twopence a week until the pawn was redeemed. The messenger would get threepence or sixpence from the housewife … the parcel would never be opened [by the pawnbroker], it was just a way of getting round the law of money lending. The pawn shop was a bank.’ Women would come clattering along the street in clogs and shawls to a pawn shop in Burslem in the Potteries, where unemployment was over 30 per cent in 1931, and stayed high throughout the decade. Its owner ‘used to do very well. He used to reckon that it was the only shop in Burslem that had a queue on Monday morning.’

When there was not enough food to go round towards the end of the week, the woman would often go without herself so that her husband and children had a meal on the table — as Annie Weaving must have done countless times. ‘We are told we ought to eat fruit, but it is very seldom that I can afford fruit … My husband and I always have to suffer if there is anything to buy. We give it all to the bairns and we have bread and marge,’ said Mrs Pallas. ‘I was practically living on bread and potatoes,’ remembered an Aberdeen women with two small children and an unemployed, unskilled husband. ‘But I tried to get something every night for my husband and the girls. Sausages were cheap … the men in the fish [shop] would sometimes give us a bit of fish … In the winter months I walked over to the New Market. You got a great big rabbit for sixpence and we had that every Sunday, all the months that rabbits were in season … But mostly I had potatoes and bread and toast … I’d had the two girlies and then I’d had five boys — all dead-born, and I’m certain it was because of the malnutrition.’

John McNamara remembered how ‘It was a common thing for a housewife, for a mother, to do a hell of a lot of sacrificing. Unknownst to hubby. Unknownst to kiddies. It was nothing for them to say, “Oh, I’ve had mine.” And they hadn’t had a bite. But you didn’t find out till it was too late. A good mother went without many a meal. Kids come first. And husband. She was last though she worked harder than anyone.’

There are few tales of greater poignancy than that of an anonymous mother included in Nigel Gray’s superb compilation of voices of the unemployed: ‘When our baby was born we had to borrow a mattress from next door and spread newspapers on it. I used to feed the baby on a bottle of warm water. We put her to bed in a drawer. We made nappies out of newspaper. When I went before the public Assistance Committee they asked me if the baby was being breast fed and when I said yes, they reduced the allowance for a child.’

CODA The ‘Hatry Crash’

In 1935 the body of a Woking magistrate, Francis Wellesley, was found floating face-down in the river Wey. ‘Another Hatry Crash Victim’, decided the headline of a national newspaper, though in fact the death turned out to be an accident rather than suicide. Furthermore, Mr Wellesley had never been an investor in any of Clarence Hatry’s companies. But the dapper, Chaplinesque Hatry, the son of a silk-top-hat manufacturer who was always so well turned out himself that it was put about that the soles of his shoes were polished as well as the uppers, had become — at least to some — the personification of an attenuated British version of the Wall Street crash, when share prices plummeted and many fortunes were wiped out. And indeed it was on the day after ‘Black Thursday’, 25 October 1929, that Clarence Hatry had been remanded to Brixton Prison in South London to await trial on charges of fraud and forgery.

Hatry’s spectacular business career — and its demise — mirrored the boom-and-bust economy of the 1920s. Given the frenzy of concern about speculation, unstable money and the financial integrity of the City of London in the shaky world economy, it was no surprise that when he and his three fellow defendants faced the formidably ‘icy’ Mr Justice Avory in the dock of the Old Bailey in January 1930, the prosecution was led by the Attorney-General himself, Sir William Jowitt.

The case was a complicated one, but again Hatry’s story embodied another concern — or in this case a suggested panacea — of the times: rationalisation. Almost Edwardian in his spending habits, at various times he had owned racehorses, one of which, Furious, won the Lincolnshire Handicap at wondrously long odds; a yacht which cost £15,000 (almost £700,000 in today’s money) a year to keep afloat; and a magnificent house off Park Lane which his wife described as ‘a palace in miniature’, but which the Observer would later sneer at as ‘a palazzo in Mayfair with its classical swimming bath above and its sham Tudor cocktail bar below’. Hatry had built and lost his various fortunes largely by consolidating businesses, which was exactly what many economists and industrial pundits were recommending as the way forward for outdated, undercapitalised British industries. While Jute Industries, which he formed in 1920, was a success, there was little ‘strategic logic or managerial vigour’ in such creations as British Glass Industries or Amalgamated Industrials, ‘a hodgepodge of cotton spinning, shipbuilding, and pig farming’, according to his biographer.

However, Hatry sold the London department stores (including Swan & Edgar) he had bought and combined into the Drapery and General Investment Trust to Debenhams at a handsome profit, and merged the majority of London’s private bus companies, before selling them to London General Omnibus Co., which would eventually become the nucleus of London Transport. He also financed rather less successful ventures, such as the Photomaton Parent Corporation (which operated photographic booths) and the Associated Automatic Machine Corporation (operating vending machines, mainly on railway platforms), both of which perhaps spoke more to his weakness for gizmos than his financial acumen, and leaked funds.

Nevertheless, by 1928 Hatry appeared to be successfully juggling his activities as a proto-asset-stripper under his umbrella company Austin Friars Trust, ‘a £300,000 finance house which was to be the linchpin of his later enterprises and the central company in a complicated network of interrelated investment and industrial enterprises’, buying companies, amalgamating them, liquidating then reconstructing them under a new name. At his trial, however, the liquidator, Sir Gilbert Garnsey, alleged that the whole group had been insolvent from the very start in May 1927.

Within that cavernous enterprise one particularly successful amalgamation was Allied Ironfounders, a combine of light castings manufacturers, and this gave Hatry the idea of pulling off a similar feat in the ailing steel industry. In April 1929 he acquired control of the United Steel Companies, but the next month the general election returned a Labour government. ‘This is ruination,’ Hatry lamented to Hubert Meredith of the Daily Mail. ‘How can I possibly carry through my steel scheme now?’ And indeed, in the bear market that followed what might have been anticipated as the beginning of a full-frontal attack on capitalism, Hatry saw the value of his securities take a severe hammering.

To achieve his ‘steel scheme’ he needed a large amount of money — probably nearly £8 million — but he had a shortfall, and one that he was finding increasingly difficult to bridge, not least because Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, was implacably opposed to both Hatry’s scheme and its promoter. ‘I say he shd stand aside as long as Hatry controls,’ Norman advised a director of the merchant bank Morgan Grenfell, which had been approached for a loan.

To raise the £900,000 (more than £40 million in today’s currency) necessary to float Steel Industries of Great Britain Inc., Hatry, at the suggestion of one of his directors, an Italian called John Gialdini, tipped from dextrous dealings and sailing close to the wind into illegality. A few years earlier he had audaciously managed to break into the lucrative corporations loans business, and by the end of 1928 he had cornered 90 per cent of the market. Now, in a manoeuvre ‘intended to rob Peter to pay for Paul and to reimburse Peter from the profits of selling Paul’ he agreed to forge corporation scrip certificates (receipts and contracts) for three of the municipalities with which he had dealings, Gloucester, Swindon and Wakefield, thereby providing security for further loans from the banks until the steel combine was floated, whereupon the forged certificates could be redeemed.

It didn’t work. The City’s confidence in Hatry, already ebbing, went into free fall, partly as a result of the excessive number of scrip certificates that seemed to be in circulation, and the Stock Exchange suspended dealings in Austin Friars Trust. Gialdini had already done a runner back to Italy when on 19 September 1929 Hatry, who was by now being investigated by Sir Gilbert Garnsey of Price Waterhouse on behalf of worried creditors, and his three other directors confessed to the Chairman of his companies, the 16th Marquess of Winchester, in the Charing Cross Hotel, that there were ‘irregularities’. The four then piled into a taxi to tell Garnsey, ‘We want to make a complete statement before the investigation is begun.’ They subsequently made a formal confession to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, in which the forty-year-old Hatry took full responsibility himself for the misdemeanours. Garnsey revealed that the total liability of Hatry’s companies was in the region of £21 million, with Austin Friars Trust responsible for £15 million. The City took the news badly. ‘This Hatry affair has besmirched us all, especially in the eyes of foreigners, which we can ill afford,’ wrote the Governor of the Bank of England. In his diary he laconically gave his verdict: ‘I do not favour bail for Hatry.’

Hatry did not get bail, nor did his young associates. When the case came to trial on 20 January 1930 it took the prosecution a full four days to present the charges, so complicated were the details, so breathtaking the sums of money involved. Hatry was defended by Norman Birkett, KC, but since he and his fellow defendants changed their pleas to guilty of all charges, all Birkett could plead was mitigation. All the lawyer’s legendary powers of persuasion (which brought tears to the eyes of the accused) were to no avail. The judge failed to see the difference between Hatry’s intention to redeem his fraudulent issue out of the large profits he anticipated making when his ambitious steel combine was floated and ‘the threadbare plea of every clerk or servant who robs his master and says that he hoped to repay the money before his crime was discovered by backing a winner. Except that your crime was on a large scale.’ Mr Justice Avory sentenced Hatry to a draconian fourteen years of penal servitude, since ‘You stand convicted on your own confession of the most appalling frauds that have ever disfigured the commercial reputation of this country.’ The ‘bird-like’ Hatry ‘visibly reeled’. His son bitterly concluded that the case had been prejudged in the name of a nation that was itself reeling from the effects of the world slump, but on appeal two months later Hatry’s sentence was effectively increased by the two months that had elapsed between trial and appeal.

The verdict of some in the City was similar to that of the judge. Hatry’s Chairman, the Marquess of Winchester, who had lost money and reputation in the ‘Hatry crash’, had once thought that Hatry was ‘an example of the alert business brain having an unusually quick perception of any proposition, a marvellous gift for shifting the intricacies, a power of putting his case with a clarity of expression rarely found apart from legal training, coupled with an apparent frankness which amounted to a charm of manner’. He now revised his opinion, and decided that in fact what Hatry possessed was ‘dangerous optimism coupled with inordinate conceit … his brain was honeycombed with crevasses into which unpleasant facts were allowed to slip and there he permitted them to remain in the hope that the glacier would never reveal its secrets’. The Times spoke of ‘a rogue … a signalman who deliberately tampers with the signal’.

But others were less anxious to clamber onto the moral high ground. The left-wing New Statesman, which might have been expected to be very harsh about the unacceptable face of capitalism, was kinder. ‘Hatry was not a swindler … he was rather an unbalanced optimist with a defective moral sense. He set out not to defraud the investors in his companies, but to make money, if he could, for them as well as himself … “If only I had been reasonably lucky,” a man in a similar position might say, “I would have retrieved everyone’s fortunes, and no one would have been a penny the worse for my illegality. How right I should have been!”’ For the New Statesman it was the City itself that was particularly to blame: ‘How in the name of fortune did the banks come to give the Hatry group so much money?’ At a time, it probably wanted to add, when it was so unwilling to lend to industry in the depressed areas. Indeed, ‘The Hatry case will have done some good if it rivets public attention on the joint-stock banks and reveals what part they are really playing in City speculation and in financing productive industry.’

A model prisoner with influential and eloquent supporters such as Harold Nicolson, eighteen MPs and his lawyer Birkett prepared to petition for him, Hatry was released from prison after serving nine rather than fourteen years. He subsequently borrowed sufficient money to purchase the ‘carriage trade’ bookshop Hatchard’s in Piccadilly. Again he expanded and acquired and amalgamated and diversified, and again his rickety empire crashed. In the late 1950s Hatry was to be found cashing in on the coffee-bar craze, buying up premises in the West End to serve ‘froffy coffee’ to a newly affluent post-war generation of teenagers. He died of heart failure on 10 June 1965.

PART TWO The Search for Solutions

PROLOGUE R101 Disaster

It would be a coup de maître. British prestige confirmed with a stylish gesture. The country’s position as an imperial power elegantly underlined. Brigadier-General the Right Honourable Lord Thomson of Cardington, Secretary of State for Air in the Labour government, would stroll coolly into the meeting of the Imperial Conference in London on 20 October 1930 as the delegates were getting down to a discussion of air power. Thomson would have just arrived back from a round trip to India which had taken little more than a fortnight, while the representatives from Australia and New Zealand had taken six or seven weeks to get to the mother country. It would demonstrate that Britain had taken the lead from Germany in the development of ‘lighter than air’ machines. Furthermore, Thomson was being canvassed as the next Viceroy of India, and the subcontinent had been showing disturbing signs of nationalist unrest for over a decade now. The previous year Jawaharlal Nehru, the President of the Indian National Congress, had pre-empted the Simon Commission’s recommendations on India’s constitutional future by declaring for purna swaraj (complete independence). Perhaps the choice of this destination for the R101, the airship in which Thomson would make his flight, would be read as evidence of how close and how benign the ties of Empire were — at least as far as Britain was concerned.

During the First World War, rigid German airships named after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a German cavalry officer who had been interested in constructing a ‘dirigible balloon’ ever since he had seen the French using them during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, had become an ominous sight over England. By the outbreak of the war there were a total of twenty-one Zeppelins in service for commercial passenger transport. Recognising their military potential (which Zeppelin had always intended), the German army and navy purchased fourteen airships, most of which were used for reconnaissance. However, on 19 January 1915, in the first ever bombing raid on civilians, two Zeppelins dropped twenty-four fifty-kilogram high-explosive bombs and a number of incendiaries on towns along the Norfolk coast, killing four people, injuring sixteen and causing considerable damage to property. In the course of the war there were fifty-one such raids; 557 British civilians were killed in all, and 1,358 injured. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, all airships were transferred to the Allies as part of the war reparations package.

The British had started to experiment with rigid airships in 1908, but a series of disasters, beginning with the unfortunately appropriately-named Mayfly in September 1911, put an end to their development until towards the end of the war. After it resumed, success seemed as elusive as ever: a review in 1923 revealed that out of the 154 rigid airships that had been completed and flown by Germany, Britain the United States and France, 104 (68 per cent) had been lost, along with a total of 584 lives. One life had been lost for every sixty-five airship flying hours. However, one German commercial aircraft company had flown 138,975 miles without a single fatality, and airships had the edge over ‘heavier than air’ aeroplanes when it came to spaciousness, comfort, load-carrying and quietness.

On leap year’s day 1924, Lord Thomson, newly appointed Secretary of State for Air in the first Labour government, announced a three-year Government Research, Experiment and Development airships programme. The gauntlet was picked up by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives when they came to power in November that year, and in 1926 the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Samuel Hoare, announced that not one but two airships, each capable of long-distance overseas voyages, were to be constructed, in the hope, as Hoare told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, that ‘in a few years it will be possible to have a regular airship service between London and Bombay as it now is to have an aeroplane service between London and Paris’. At that time the sea voyage took seventeen days. While an airship could not fly fast as an aeroplane (then averaging around 120 mph) it would be able to sustain a regular 60 mph, and unlike a plane it could remain in the air throughout the day and night. One of the airships (the R101) would be built by the Air Ministry at the Royal Airship Works at Cardington, near Bedford, the other (the R100) by a private company, the Airship Guarantee Company Ltd, owned by the engineering firm of Vickers, at Howden in Yorkshire, where Barnes Wallis, later to develop the famous ‘bouncing bomb’ used by the ‘Dambusters’ in the Ruhr in May 1943, was chief designer.