The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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      So the dreary spiral was perpetuated: no work increasingly seen as a disqualification for work. The Pilgrim Trust also found that anyone with a minor physical defect such as a speech impediment, a slight limp, or even being short of stature, might be discriminated against, regardless of whether this was in any way relevant to the sort of work he was likely to be required to do, when there was an embarrassment of ‘perfect specimens’ for hire.

      Disconsolate groups of the long-term unemployed, shabbily dressed, hanging round street corners slicked black by rain against a background of boarded-up shops, lounging against lamp-posts, playing desultory games in the gutter, kicking a tin around in lieu of a football, watched by ragged, grimy-faced urchins, have become a familiar image of the 1930s, captured in grainy Picture Post-like photographs in the years before Picture Post existed. The young Canadian writer George Woodcock described a typical scene when he took a free holiday from his ‘wretchedly paid’ job in London with a Welsh aunt in a small town in Glamorgan:

      One day I decided to take a bus and visit the Rhondda area, the heart of the South Wales mining district … It was the worst of times in the Rhondda, though it probably looked little better than the best of times, since most of the mines were not working, and the smoke that would normally have given a dark, satanic aspect to the landscape was less evident than in more prosperous times. Still it was dismal enough … it had the feeling of occupied territory. Many of the shops had gone out of business, the mines had slowed down years ago, and the General Strike of 1926 — disastrous for workers — had delivered the coup de grace to the local economy. The people were shabby and resentful. Groups of ragged men squatted on their haunches, as miners do, and played pitch-and-toss with buttons, they had no halfpennies to venture. A man came strolling down the street, dejectedly whistling ‘The Red Flag’ in slow time as if it were a dirge.

      Caught in a downpour of rain, Woodcock was

      a sad, sodden object … as I came down into the valley beside a slag heap where fifty or so men and women were industriously picking over the ground. I caught up with a man walking along the overgrown road from the mine to the village, whose damp slate roofs I could see glistening about half a mile away. He was pushing a rusty old bicycle that had no saddle and no tires, but it served to transport the dirty gunnysack he had tied onto the handlebars. He had been picking up coal from the slag heap. ‘No bigger nor walnuts, man,’ he explained. The big coal had been taken years ago, so long ago was it that work had been seen in the village. I asked him how long he had been unemployed. ‘Ach y fi, man, it’s nine years I’ve been wasting and wasted.’ … He apologetically remarked that these days nobody had a fire in the village except to cook the mid-day dinner, if there was anything to cook, so I’d find it difficult to dry my clothes. Then he suddenly brightened. ‘Try the Brachi shop, man. They’ll have a fire, sure to goodness. And it’s glad they’ll be for a couple of pence to dry your clothes.’

      Long ago an Italian named Brachi had found his way into one of the Welsh mining villages and had established a modest café. Others had followed him, but his name had clung, and Italian cafés in the Rhondda were generically called Brachi shops. The Brachi shop in Rhondda Fach was a melancholy place, its front in need of a paint, a sheet of old cardboard filling the broken part of the window in which stood a few dummy packets of tea and biscuits. A dejected girl came from the back. Her black hair and olive complexion were Mediterranean, but her voice had the lilt of Wales. She looked at me hostilely when I talked about a fire, and I think I was humiliating her into admitting that they, too, lit the fire only at mealtimes. Nobody came for meals anymore. So I spent my tuppence on a cup of tea, which she languidly made on a primus stove. She thawed a little as the kettle warmed up, and talked of her longing to go to London. I hope she got there.

      The Orcadian poet Edwin Muir witnessed the state of the unemployed in Scotland when he took a journey there in 1934 at the request of the publishers of J.B. Priestley’s English Journey:

      It was a warm, overcast summer day: groups of idle, sullen-looking young men stood at the street corners; smaller groups were wandering among the blue black ranges of pit-dumps which in that region are a substitute for nature; the houses looked empty and unemployed like their tenants; and the road along which the car stumbled was pitted and rent, as if it had recently been under shell-fire. Everything had the look of a Sunday that had lasted for many years, during which the bells had forgotten to ring and the Salvation Army, with its accordions and concertinas had gone into seclusion, so that one did not even bother to put on one’s best clothes: a disused, slovenly, everlasting Sunday. The open shops had an unconvincing yet illicit look, and the few black-dusted miners whom I saw trudging home seemed hardly to believe in their own existence … A century ago there was a great clearance from the Highlands, which still rouses the anger of the people living there. At present, on a far bigger scale, a silent clearance is going on in industrial Scotland, a clearance not of human beings, but of what they depend on for life.