The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ to have sufficient means to support an unemployed son or daughter, his or her benefit would be stopped. Donald Kear, an unemployed machine attendant from the Forest of Dean, remembered: ‘Any family unlucky enough to have one of their number unemployed were forced to accept a lower standard of living because they had a passenger to carry. In our house I became the passenger. My benefit was immediately cut to 5/- a week. My father [a miner] was paid on production at the coal face. When his earnings rose a little the benefit was correspondingly reduced. The Means Test man went regularly to the office at the mine to find out how much my father was earning so these adjustments could be made.’ Occasionally this inquisition meant that a son or daughter without work would find themselves without a home either, as they would be thrown out so as not to be a ‘parasite’ on the family; this probably happened more when a step-parent was involved.

      Any entitlement to benefit passed after six months: after that it was a question of cash handouts at the minimum possible level to keep the unemployed from destitution. The dispensation felt like an act of charity, as the Fabian socialist writer G.D.H. Cole saw it. ‘It is therefore — for charity begins at home — to be strictly limited to the smallest sum that will keep the unemployed from dying or becoming unduly troublesome; and their relations as far as possible to be made to bear the cost of maintaining them in order to save the pockets of the tax payers. Behind this system is the notion that unemployment is somehow the fault of the unemployed, from which they are to be deterred if possible; and an attempt is made to persuade their relations to help in deterring them, because they will be made to contribute to their support.’

      The ex-Labour MP Fenner Brockway, now an ILP member, attempted to conjure up the effects of the Means Test for those Southerners who could not envisage it, urging them to imagine the Royal Albert Hall ‘filled three times over. That would represent the workers on the Means Test in Newcastle. Imagine it filled twelve times over. That would represent their families. It is beyond imagination to realise the anxiety and despair and suffering they would represent.’

      In a number of Labour-controlled authorities, PACs were in fundamental opposition to the Means Test, and subverted its operation by always allowing the maximum possible centrally specified benefit, regardless of an applicant’s circumstances. County Durham (where an estimated 40,000 people had to face the Means Test), Glamorgan County (where the number was around 27,000), Monmouth, Rotherham and Barnsley were among those warned by the Ministry of Labour against ‘illegal payments’. If they persistently refused to conform, as Rotherham and County Durham did, the PACs were suspended and replaced by commissioners from London to ‘do the dirty work’. Other authorities felt it was better to submit to the regulations, but to mitigate them wherever possible, as a statement from the London East End borough of West Ham explained: ‘We were threatened with supercession, and in face of that threat we prefer to keep our poor under our own care and do what we can for them rather than hand them over to an arbitrary Commissioner from whom they could expect little humanity.’

      For workers who had regarded unemployment benefit as a right, earned while they were in work and to be drawn when, through no fault of their own, they were out of it, the Means Test was not only harsh in its effects, it was degrading and humiliating in its association with destitution and the Poor Law, violating the privacy of homes they had worked hard to scrape together, prying into family matters, letting the neighbours witness their shame as their furniture was carted off to be sold.

      ‘If somebody had a decent home, the man from the Means Test came and made a list of what you had. Then you were told to sell a wardrobe this week, some chairs next week, some pictures the week after, until you perhaps you only had your bed, two chairs and a table left. Only then would you be able to claim something off the Public Assistance,’ recalled Kenneth Maher. Not all officers were brutal: some clearly felt disquiet at the job they were obliged to perform, and were as respectful and thoughtful as the brutal and inquisitorial system would permit, but nevertheless:

      You were only left with the bare essentials. I bet today, in some upper-class homes there are thousands of pounds’ worth of valuable goods stolen by the Means Test men from the poor in the thirties … Mother was given thirty bob to feed herself and five kids. We were left with four chairs, a table, a couple of benches and a couple of beds. I remember thinking, ‘Good job we’ve got no rugs on the floor ‘cos they’d have took them as well.’

      … The Means Test bloke arrived with a van to take the best of our furniture. How I hated him with his smart clothes and the smirk on his face, twirling his stick of chalk in his fingers. I watched as he walked over to two large brass lions standing either side of the hearth, telling my mother they had to go. It didn’t matter to him that they had belonged to her grandmother long since dead. The poor weren’t allowed sentiment. We hadn’t got much before he got cracking with his chalk. We’d got a damn sight less when he’d finished.

      Such confiscations struck at the heart of an unemployed worker’s sense of the modest achievements of a hard-working life, as a London sheet-metal worker explained: ‘Suppose I would have to sell off that chair over there. There would be more than that chair go out of this room. How many times do you suppose the old woman and I have gone by the store window and looked at chairs like that waiting till we could get one? Then finally, we got it … if I had to sell that, I’d be selling more than the wood and the cloth and the stuffing. I’d be selling part of myself.’

      The Means Test was not only harsh and often inequitable, it also defied logic. As the Rhondda Fach Gazette reported: ‘It is in many cases a penalty upon thrift. If a man had been careful and thrifty all of his life and has got a small income he loses exactly that amount from the dole, while a reckless unthrifty person gets it in full.’

      By January 1932 almost a million unemployed were having to register for transitional payments, and were thus coming within the scope of the Means Test. Thousands were cut off from benefit, while others had their relief drastically reduced. It was claimed that in the depressed textile areas of Lancashire only 16 per cent of claimants were awarded the full transitional benefit, while a third were disallowed altogether. Throughout Britain as a whole, half of those applying for transitional payments received less than half the maximum amount, and 180,000 people were judged no longer eligible to receive unemployment benefit under the unemployment insurance scheme as a result of the application of the Means Test. The government saved £24 million in that first year. The cost to society was incalculable.

      As James Maxton bitterly lectured Harold Macmillan, ‘The Means Test has been useful in disclosing once more how limited were the resources of the working population. But was there any need to set up expensive investigating machinery to discover that the majority of the working class were very poor?’

       FOUR Mapping Britain

      You were such an angel to take trouble with my old women and it was really worthwhile. I do not know whether this story of an old castle will affect the Labour vote. People are so odd. They might say, ‘He is a humbug: he talks Labour and lives in a castle.’ But they might also say, ‘How splendid of him when he lives in a castle to come and worry about our little affairs.’

      Harold Nicolson writing to his wife Vita Sackville-West, who had entertained fifty ladies from the West Leicester Women’s Conservative Association (his constituency) at their home, Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, on 5 June 1937

      ‘Southampton to Newcastle, Newcastle to Norwich: memories rose like milk coming to the boil. I had seen England. I had seen a lot of Englands. How many?’, J.B. Priestley asked himself at the conclusion of his English Journey in 1933. But although Priestley had roamed (usually by ‘motor coach’, which he found ‘voluptuous, sybaritic … This is how the ancient Persian monarchs would have travelled, if they’d known the trick of it … they have annihilated the old distinction between rich СКАЧАТЬ