The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ in the North, by way of Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Arnold Bennett’s ‘five pottery towns’ in between, he had not, as most commentators had not, rambled down to England’s south-westernmost extremity, Cornwall. If he had, he would have found there unemployment, poverty and despair to equal any found in the reproach that Jarrow, Merthyr Tydfil, Clydeside and the other depressed areas constituted.

      The village of St Day, named for a Celtic saint and a stopping place in the Middle Ages for pilgrims on their journey to St Michael’s Mount, lies nine miles north of Falmouth and seven miles east of Truro in Cornwall. A prosperous village in the early nineteenth century, its wealth was founded on copper-mining until 1870, when competition from Chile, Bolivia and Peru meant that 2,000 men were thrown out of work when the United Mines closed down. ‘The dismal procession of the Gwennap [the parish in which St Day is located] Mines to the scrap heap had passed, [and] the modern history of St Day had begun. When the Great War came it was trotting down the hill at a leisurely pace. When the war ended the speed of the pace was accelerated and that was the only difference the War made,’ explained Richard Blewett, the Medical Officer of Health for the district, in a ‘modern historical survey’ of St Day he prepared in 1935 for a Board of Education short course for elementary school teachers held at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

      The land surrounding the village was ‘pocked by mineshafts … and scarred by “burrows” or mine tips, over many of which nature is gradually casting a blanket of heather’. In 1935 the rate of unemployment in St Day was nearly 30 per cent, since not only had copper-mining collapsed, but so, in the mid-1920s, had the tin-mining industry around nearby Redruth and Cambourne, from where many of St Day’s inhabitants came in search of cheaper housing — even in 1935 the average rent of a workman’s house was not much more than two shillings a week. China clay production, which it had been hoped might fill the vacuum left by the decline of mining had done no such thing: by the end of 1932 output had fallen 40 per cent since 1929, and the price had fallen by more than 30 per cent. The Cornish economy was in paralysis, with the population having fallen in the decade up to 1931 by 0.9 per cent (while that of the rest of England and Wales had risen by 5.5 per cent), and the annual average of unemployment between 1930 and 1933 was 21.6 per cent.

      Moreover, de-industrialisation at the turn of the century meant that trade unionism amongst the Cornish miners was never the force it was in the Welsh Valleys. Even when a strike was organised by the Transport and General Workers’ Union in January 1939 at South Crofty mine, when police and strikers clashed, only 234 men out of a total workforce of 435 stopped work, while the seasonal and scattered nature of the tourist industry meant that unionism did not find a foothold among those toiling in hotels and other holiday amenities. Politically Cornwall, as part of Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’ and with its strong tradition of religious nonconformism remained a fairly staunch Liberal stronghold during the 1930s (the Conservatives managed to take two seats in the 1931 election and three in 1935), with Isaac Foot, MP for Bodmin until 1935 — the patriarch of a radical dynasty that included the future Labour leader Michael Foot and the campaigning Socialist Workers’ Party and Daily Mirror journalist Paul Foot — the ‘towering presence’. An eloquent preacher and stirring orator, with an ‘anti-drink, anti-betting, evangelical stance’, Foot was revered throughout the county and the fishermen’s luggers at Looe were reputed to be painted in the Liberal colours of blue and yellow in his honour. Indeed, ‘Our Isaac’ was an important factor in preventing what another Cornishman (though Foot was actually a native of Devon, and began his political career there), the historian A.L. Rowse, who stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate for Penryn and Falmouth in both elections in the thirties, believed was ‘the prime task for Labour in Cornwall … to bring home the futility of going on being Liberal [since] Cornish liberalism [was] a fossilised survival’ — as, unfortunately, was the inter-war Cornish economy.

      Fishing was also in the doldrums in Cornwall by the mid-1930s. ‘Outside the Duchy the legend still holds that the fisher is the typical Cornishman,’ wrote the former suffragist Cicely Hamilton on her journey round England in 1938, ‘but, in sober fact, that race of Cornish fishers is a race that is dwindling fast.’ With the Cornish fisheries unable to compete with those of the Artic and the North Sea, there were only two first-class steam trawlers registered in the whole of Devon and Cornwall by 1938, one of which had not put to sea since 1925, and whereas there had been 150 first-class motor vessels in 1919, there were only ninety-one by 1938. The decline in the number of sailing boats was even more dramatic. It was much the same with agriculture: under-investment and out-of-date production methods on family farms that were too small to be economic without a high degree of specialisation meant that there were mutterings by the 1930s of the need to ‘collectivise’ Cornish farms if they were ever to be economically viable. There were, as Cicely Hamilton found, still some earning a living from the Cornish soil: flower-growers. The trade had started on the Isles of Scilly, taking advantage of the islands’ mild winters. At first it had been small, ‘a few boxes packed with narcissus and daffodils and shipped on the little mail boat that three times a week makes the voyage to St Mary’s, and three times a week makes it back to Penzance’. But by the mid-thirties flower-growing had spread to the mainland, and ‘in the spring of the year, the Great Western Railway, night by night, carries the spoil of the daffodil fields to the markets of London and the midlands’.

      Apart from its abundance of spring flowers, Cornwall’s mild climate appeared to offer its only prospect of economic salvation. Every summer the Cornish Riviera Express conveyed many thousands of tourists, not only ‘the privileged minority who might otherwise holiday in the real Mediterranean, but … anyone who could afford the price of a third class ticket from Paddington’. The journalist and travel writer S.P.B. Mais helped the romance along with a series of promotional booklets written at the behest of the Great Western Railway hinting at ‘a western land of Celtic mysticism’. Even the trains carried such resonant names as Trelawney, Tintagel Castle, Tre, Pol and Pen. When a rival railway company decided to make North Cornwall its own preserve, putting such places as Tintagel and Boscastle on the tourist map, it gave its locomotives such appropriately Arthurian names as Merlin, Lyonesse, Iseult, Sir Cador of Cornwall, Sir Constantine — and even the traitorous Sir Mordred was briefly considered suitable. Despite their mystic names, the trains were among the fastest in the world. In 1938 the playwright Beverley Nichols was struck by the anachronism of George VI ‘flying through a country that even his father would hardly recognise, so quickly are the landscapes passing’, to collect ‘a grey cloak, a brace of greyhounds, a pair of gilt spurs, a pound of cumin, a salmon spear, a pair of white gloves, a hundred shillings and a pound of pepper’, dues owed by the Duchy of Cornwall to its Duke/King.

      The South-West’s tourism boom had begun before the First World War, and it expanded dramatically between 1920 and 1938, with a rise of 80 per cent in the number of people employed in hotels, boarding houses, laundries and cafés in Devon and Cornwall. Tourists came not only by train but increasingly by coach or car, as roads were improved and car-ownership increased. The tourist traffic was of course seasonal: employment in Cornwall would dip to its lowest point in January, and peak in June.

      Cornwall, with its Arthurian romance, its Celtic culture, its periodic ‘Cornish revival’ movements, now intertwined with the romance of ivy-covered, suggestively gothic, disused mineshafts and engine houses, spectacular coastline and stretches of silver sand, and the charm of ‘remote accessibility’, also held appeal for those who had no need to fuss with a third-class railway ticket, but could motor down with a wicker picnic hamper (though the journey on A-class roads from London might well require an overnight stop). During the 1930s Cornwall became the summer destination of choice of a number of artistic, literary and generally ‘bohemian’ types — though with its ‘reputable light’ Cornwall had been attracting artists challenged to paint its ever-changing seascapes since before the First World War. Vanessa Bell went (as did her sister Virginia Woolf), Augustus John (whose son Edwin had settled at Mousehole), the artist Laura Knight (who also had a cottage in Mousehole), her friend and fellow painter Dod Procter and her artist husband Ernest, as well as the writer who gave Cornwall to popular literature, and whose work is still celebrated in an annual festival that brings literary СКАЧАТЬ