Kitabı oku: «The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain», sayfa 7
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.’
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.
