The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ not permanently to Cornwall until 1939, the painter Ben Nicholson was a regular summer visitor to St Ives throughout the thirties. There was already a thriving Society of Artists in the town, which had held an annual exhibition since 1927 and sent work to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It was in St Ives that Nicholson ‘discovered’ the local fisherman Alfred Wallis, who often painted on cardboard supplied by the local grocer. ‘No one likes Wallis’ paintings [though of course] no one liked Van Gogh for a time,’ reported the artist Christopher Wood, who had been on a walk with Nicholson when they glimpsed Wallis’s work for the first time through the open door of his cottage. But they would. Today twelve of his paintings hang in Tate St Ives, and his images of sailing boats circulate on greetings cards.

      But St Ives, Newlyn and Mennabilly/Manderley were as far from the concerns of St Day as were the ‘professional Cornishmen’ of the 1930s, most notable among them the historian A.L. Rowse and the essayist ‘Q’, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Similarly, the town had little time for a new revivalist organisation, Tyr Ha Tavas (Land and Language), which emerged in 1933, declaring that it stood for ‘the unity of persons of Cornish birth or descent who value their Cornish heritage, and who desire to maintain the outlook, individualism, culture, and idealism characteristic of their race’, and pronouncing a determination ‘to show Cornish people what Cornish men have done and what they still can do to help the World’. There had been a series of earlier Cornish revivalist movements, since ‘Every Cornishman knows well enough, proud as he may be of belonging to the British Empire, that he is no more an Englishman than a Caithness man is, that he has as much right to separate local patriotism to his motherland … as has a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, or even a Colonial, and that he is as much a Celt and as little of an Anglo-Saxon as any Gael, Cymro, Manxman or Breton.’ A College of Bards, a Cornish Gorsedd, affiliated to its Welsh and Breton sister organisations, was established in 1927, and held annual ceremonies conducted by blue-robed bards speaking the Cornish language. But by 1937 a newspaper correspondent reluctantly admitted: ‘If we are quite truthful we have to admit that the revival of the Gorsedd has scarcely touched the lives of the common people of Cornwall.’

      The members of Tyr Ha Tavas, mainly young people, lobbied local MPs to give greater importance to specifically Cornish problems, and produced a magazine, Kernow (the Cornish word for ‘Cornwall’). However, Kernow always sold more copies to those outside Cornwall than to those who lived there, and the marginal political thrust of Tyr Ha Tavas failed entirely to address the social and economic problems of the county, which St Day had in great number.

      Those few men still employed in the few mines operating would leave the village just after five in the morning to go down on the early-morning shift, ‘up again at 3.30 p.m. then walk home … there were no baths or showers … mining was hard, dirty and wet work and the miners did almost everything by hand. The only lighting was candles or carbide lights.’ Nevertheless, work was so scarce in the Welsh coalmines that ‘A number of families decided to pack up and head for Cornwall, with just a glimmer of hope that their luck might change,’ remembers F.R. Clymo, who was a boy at the time.

      I have no idea how many were involved in this trek, but I well remember five or six men coming to St Day … It took them almost a month to reach us, sleeping rough as they went. They were desperate men who had to make it because their families left behind in the valleys were dependent on them. About a month later when accommodation had been found their families came down in lorries, which were sponsored by the British Legion … I remember the new intake of Welsh girls and boys who came to our school … they were like refugees … [but] at no time did we have any industrial projects since the closing of the mining industry … very few people were tempted to become residents here.

      The only casual work likely to be had, Clymo recalled, was

      when Falmouth Docks would get a shipload of cement in, which would have to be unloaded … it was a job not done by the dock labourers, so … the labour exchange would direct a certain number of unemployed men to report to the docks … There was no such thing as refusal. Refusing meant instant stoppage of unemployment benefits … I’ve seen men return after three days of this work with their hands raw and bleeding through continually carrying hundredweights of hot cement from the ship to the warehouse. On another occasion, right here in the village the GPO put the main telephone cables underground from the Exchange … to the Old Post Office in Market Square. Several villagers who were unemployed were directed to do this work … they did the work with hammers and gads (steel chisels); first they moved the hard top, then they had to dig down three feet with pick and shovel … Many of them had not worked for years, so with soft hands and not much muscle they were soon in trouble with blistered and bleeding hands. Some of them got a few bruises as well especially those holding the chisels, because the hammer men, who were out of practice, invariably missed and consequently delivered a blow to the holder’s hands. Yet not much sympathy was ever shown because after all it was only a temporary job, as soon as it was finished they would all be laid off and back on the dole again with plenty of time to heal their wounds … It was quite a common sight to see half a dozen [older] women on a sunny dry afternoon … heading for Unity Woods and the old Tram Road, their mission to collect sticks or any broken limbs of trees to keep the fire alight … These women wore long hessian aprons (towsers to us), some wore caps and the odd one or two smoked a clay pipe. They would round up as much wood as they could carry in the big aprons. Some would do this two or three times a week to save buying coal. Coal was cheap but they could not afford to buy it … times were bad, they were old at forty, no one was ever in a position to help them … Life was tough, only the very strongest got through.

      There was, reported Richard Blewett in his 1935 survey, ‘a noticeable amount of squalor in the village and its surroundings’. Electric street lighting had only arrived at St Day in February that year, no sewerage scheme existed, and water was delivered in barrels by horse and cart. A survey of sixteen households revealed an average of seven children per family, and of six people sleeping in the same bedroom.

      ‘St Day is poverty stricken,’ Blewett concluded. Three hundred and twenty of its inhabitants were excused all or part of their rates, and 50 per cent of children on the school register were entitled to free milk, which was provided when the weekly household income did not exceed six shillings per head: in 1937, Merthyr Tydfil’s schools were handing out free milk to only 25 per cent of their pupils.

      ‘While 268 St Day men and women were employed in 1935, most finding some sort of work in the village, and others ventured to Truro, Falmouth, Redruth or Cambourne, 82 were unemployed’ — ‘NEARLY A QUARTER’ wrote Blewett in capital letters with heavy underlining. ‘The fathers of 53 families are unemployed and their children number 127 at school. I can find no relationship between the unemployment of the fathers and the intelligence of the children.’

      The question of the relationship between unemployment and poverty, physical health and psychological well-being (as well as crime) preoccupied politicians, both national and local, committees, commissions and inquiries, social investigators, memoirists, novelists and newspaper pundits in the 1930s. The Pilgrim Trust surveyed a thousand unemployed men drawn from six areas throughout Britain and published its findings as Men Without Work; E. Wight Bakke shared the life, insofar as it was possible to do so, of The Unemployed Man in the London Borough of Greenwich; Hubert Llewellyn Smith led a team at the London School of Economics assessing what had changed since Booth’s turn-of-the-century survey Life and Labour of the People in London; Seebohm Rowntree set out to remeasure ‘poverty and progress in York’ as he had done in a survey published in 1901, and though he found poverty alleviated by 50 per cent, the cause, he noted, was different: in Booth’s day it had been low wages, now it was unemployment, which had also struck the London inquiry. Herbert Tout, son of a distinguished Manchester medieval historian, did the same — though much more briefly — for Bristol; Hilda Jennings reported on conditions in the mining community of Brynmawr in South Wales, where unemployment was among the highest in Britain; the Carnegie Trust reported on the young unemployed in the same region; and there were many more specific investigations into СКАЧАТЬ