The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ of dust. When the compressed air exhaust caught it, when the colliers shovelled it on to the conveyors, when it tipped into the tubs, it was like black fog travelling into the ventilation. A miner in South Wales who is free from dust is called a wet lung. There is a difference between silicosis and pneumoconiosis. The stone dust [found in the stones at the bottom of pits] sets like cement [in the lungs] but coal doesn’t. Particles of silica cut into the lungs and kill the tissue. I remember taking my wife to my brother’s home. We saw a man leaning over a low wall. My wife said, “Whatever is the matter with that man?” “That,” I said, “is what dust does to a man.” He was gasping and coughing his lungs up. He was dying on his feet. He was 45 years old.’

      Furthermore, older men were less likely to be offered the opportunity of learning a new trade, or of relocating to find work, and thus were forced into what was in effect early retirement whether they wanted — or could afford — it or not. And usually they couldn’t afford it, since with no older children still living at home who could have contributed to the family budget, the older unemployed worker was likely to be living on an income which was only half what it would have been if he was in work.

      At the other end of the age range, young, untrained men often found similar difficulties in getting steady work. The school leaving age was fourteen, and only those whose family could afford to send them to grammar school, or who had won a scholarship, had any hope of secondary education. Most working-class children left elementary school at fourteen and, like Jim Wolveridge from Stepney in the East End of London, found themselves at a disadvantage. ‘I went into a dead end job … Not many kids in the neighbourhood did get good jobs … I spent a few weeks calling at the juvenile exchange at Toynbee Hall, but the few vacancies that were available were for boys who’d had secondary or grammar school education. That left me, and a good many more like me, out in the cold.’

      Charles Graham was born in South Shields on the north-east coast of England, ‘a beautiful place. There’s beautiful scenery there’ — but little work. When he left school at fourteen in 1930 he ‘went round the quay trying to get to sea because this was the dream in that area. But after a year I got a job as a lather boy at a barber’s. Five shillings a week. I was there for about eight months. I knew I wasn’t going to learn how to cut hair because he didn’t want to teach me because he was afraid for his job. This was general. People were afraid of letting you know their little secrets. It was only short back and sides after all … Then I got a job as an errand boy in a grocer’s shop. Trade was really competitive. One grocer’s shop next to another … I used to have to fill these seven or fourteen pound bags of flour and deliver the orders … I used to have a sack barrow for deliveries and I had to walk about five miles [there] and five miles back … When I was seventeen I managed to get work from a lady who owned two hardware shops and a wholesale grocery business … My take home pay was 13/6d [minus five shillings a week deducted to repay his employer for driving lessons] (I would have had 14/- on the dole).’

      Graham started work sweeping out the shop at 6 a.m., and ‘very often did not finish work until eight or nine p.m. (but there was no overtime pay) … I got a job as a driver for a biscuit factory. I was only 17 then and I had a huge van … You had to go at 60 miles an hour to get round … I managed to get a job with Wall’s ice cream once. With a tricycle. I was getting about 32/- a week. A fortune for me.’ But that came to an end too, and Graham got a job on a building site. ‘My stepfather knew the builder. That’s why I got the job … A lot of apprentices were used as cheap labour on the building site. They’d be signed on as apprentices and work for about four hours on the site and all they’d be doing was wheeling a barrow and stacking bricks like I was doing. And then when the building was completed the apprentices would be out before they’d even started laying bricks. Anyway, that lasted about eighteen months. Then I was unemployed again looking for work … During the slump you couldn’t join the Army because there were so many. There was such a great demand to get into the forces, to get away from it, although the wages were only 14/- a week, with stoppages out of that. But they were so selective, just like the police. The police could say six foot, and that was your lot, and so much chest because they had anyone to choose from.’ Eventually, when war broke out in 1939, Charles Graham was able to join the army. ‘I don’t suppose 90 per cent of the men in the army with me would have been able to get in two years before because of malnutrition. But when war broke out, they were all fit.’

      Many others, taken on as cheap labour when they left school at fourteen, might find that once they reached eighteen, when by law their employer had to contribute towards their unemployment insurance, they were sacked. Being both less experienced than older men (and often untrained), and more expensive than the next wave of school leavers, a long period of unemployment followed in those regions where jobs were scarce anyway.

      Donald Kear lost his job a fortnight before his twentieth birthday in 1933: ‘I was a machine attendant at a small factory [in the Forest of Dean, where coalmining was the predominant industry] and it was the custom of my employer to discharge employees when they became older and more expensive to him and employ younger lads in their place. There was plenty of labour available. Young lads were hanging around the factory gates every day looking for work.’

      Jack Shaw ‘went butchering’ when he left school in Ashton-under-Lyne, just outside Manchester. ‘The idea in my dad’s mind was that I was going to learn a trade. But there was a lot of butchers and he picked the wrong one. He was probably only making enough to keep his self. He gave me five shillings a week. Then I got seven and sixpence. When I got [to] about eighteen I come to ten shillings a week and he couldn’t pay me any more. He said “I’ll give you a reference, and that’s about all I can do. I just hope you can get a job.” So that’s when I had my first experience of the dole.’

      ‘I am glad that I haven’t a son,’ said an unemployed Welsh miner vehemently. ‘It must be a heartbreaking business to watch your boy grow into manhood and then see him deteriorate because there is no work for him. And yet there are scores of young men in the Valley who have never worked since the age of sixteen … at sixteen they become insurable, and the employers sack them rather than face the extra expense. So we have young men who have never had a day’s work since. They have nothing to hope for but aimless drift. I’m glad no son of mine is in that position.’

      Even those signing up for apprenticeships in industries such as engineering or shipbuilding might be no better off, since when they had completed their training the depressed state of the industry could mean there were no jobs. Around 4 per cent of juveniles (those aged fourteen to eighteen) were unemployed, but again this varied from area to area. In 1933, 10 per cent of boys and 9 per cent of girls available for work in Sheffield, a depressed city, were unemployed. The true figure of young people without work was undoubtedly much higher, as these statistics relate only to sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds: those under sixteen did not qualify for unemployment benefit, and therefore were not registered at the Labour Exchange. The implications for the future of large numbers of young people without skills, proper training or any real prospect of regular employment was bleak, not only for the individuals but for the national economy. ‘They tell me I haven’t the experience and they’ll not give me the chance of getting it,’ one young man reported in a Carnegie Trust survey complained, while others felt fed up with being ‘messed around’. The Pilgrim Trust was disquieted to discover that in Liverpool there were ‘large numbers of young men to be found who “don’t want work”’.

      During the 1930s employers in depressed areas knew that they could take their pick from a large pool of the workless, and tended to shun those in shabby clothes or exhibiting tendencies to demoralisation and apathy, the inevitable consequences of long months stretching into years searching for work. The Unemployment Assistance Board stressed problems that arose from ‘loss of industrial efficiency’ in the long-term unemployed. E. Wight Bakke, a young American who came to Britain in 1931 on a Yale fellowship to study the problem of unemployment, was not alone in concluding that ‘even a short period of unemployment handicapped a man in his efforts to market his labour … The handicap increased with the length of time out of work … [long-term СКАЧАТЬ