The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner
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Название: The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain
Автор: Juliet Gardiner
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007358236
isbn:
One author had some notepaper printed with the heading ‘B.L. Coombes, Miner-Author’ after the success of his first book, These Poor Hands (1937), another Left Book Club choice, and he continued to work as both. A[rchibald]. J. Cronin, who had been appointed Medical Inspector of Mines in 1924, drew on his experience of the wretched conditions in the coal industry for The Stars Look Down (1935), while his sensationally successful next novel, The Citadel (1937), was an attack on the system of private medicine, again drawing on his experiences in Tredegar, where he had witnessed the correlation between the inhalation of coal dust and lung disease, and its ‘model’ treatment with the help of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society.
By the second half of the thirties the prejudice against those who had no intimate experience of working-class life, of poverty and unemployment, seems to have somewhat dissipated: there was an important story to be told, whoever the teller. The one-time editor of the Strand Magazine and John O’London’s, George Blake, wrote a novel set in the shipyards, and in Ruined City Nevil Shute (who was an engineer rather than a manual worker) wrote of a rescue package dreamed up by an altruistic businessman for a thinly disguised Jarrow.
Although unemployment seared deepest into the working classes, not all the middle classes escaped: by 1934 an estimated 4,000 black-coated workers were without work, and their plight began to be described in such novels as Simon Blumefeld’s They Won’t Let You Live (1939), in which the graduate protagonist unsuccessfully applies for 187 jobs, eventually deciding to kill himself. Even the thriller writer Eric Ambler used the frustration of a skilled production engineer who could not find work as the basis for the plot of Cause for Alarm, published in 1938.
Despite the widespread evocations of unemployment, both real and fictional, which stood as indictments of a system that had failed, political calls to action — let alone revolution — were muted. The BBC dutifully bore vivid witness to the plight of the unemployed, but in its efforts to avoid more controversy than programmes such as Time to Spare already whipped up, it largely avoided probing the causes of unemployment and means of relieving it, other than by strenuous voluntary efforts to ‘help’. When ‘Edward Windsor’, as Wal Hannington consistently referred to the Prince of Wales, an active supporter of voluntary movements for the unemployed, came to the microphone in December 1933 to introduce the first series of Time to Spare, he set the tone by asserting that ‘the causes of unemployment are beyond our control, and we might differ in our estimate of them, but it is largely within our power to control the effects of unemployment. The unemployed are just our fellow men, the same as ourselves, only less [considerably less in his case] fortunate.’
However, novels such as Love on the Dole were hailed as a wake-up call, with the left-wing novelist Ethel Mannin hoping that ‘It is going to shock smug, fashionable, comfortably-off, middle-class London into a realisation of what the industrial north is really like.’ One reader at an Ilkeston public library noticed how many grimy thumbprints such novels bore, evidence, he thought, of their having ‘clearly passed through the hands of a variety of curious proletarians’. Thus, in various ways and with varying intensity, by the end of the decade the contours of unemployed Britain in the 1930s had been, if not fully explained, at least comprehensively mapped — even if some declined to listen, or to believe that the topography was quite so bleakly craggy as others portrayed it.
Oh hush thee, my baby,
Thy cradle’s in pawn: No blankets to cover thee Cold and forlorn …
Thy mother is crying,
Thy dad’s on the dole: Two shillings a week is the price of a soul.
‘A Carol’, C. Day Lewis (1935)
The death of Annie Weaving, the thirty-seven-year-old wife of an unemployed man in South-East London, mother of seven children, who collapsed and died while bathing her six-month-old twins, offered a stark definition of poverty in 1933. Mrs Weaving had been struggling to keep her family going on the forty-eight shillings a week benefits her husband received. She did so by going without food herself, and though the immediate cause of her death was recorded as pneumonia, the coroner concluded that this would not have proved fatal if Mrs Weaving had had enough to eat, rather than ‘sacrificing her life’ for the sake of her children. At the inquest, the coroner was blunt: ‘I should call it starvation to have to feed nine people on £2.8s a week and pay the rent.’
The press took up the story, and the Week-End Review launched a ‘Hungry England’ inquiry in the spring of 1933, conducted by ‘an economist [A.L. Bowley], a physiologist [Professor V.H. Mottram], a housewife, a doctor and a social worker’, in the hope that the debate could be settled ‘scientifically’. It could not. They found that unemployment relief payments were insufficient to provide the minimum diet for a family recommended by the recently established Advisory Committee on Nutrition set up by the Ministry of Health (on which Mottram also sat), and concluded that the ‘cheapest practical diet in current English conditions’ were about 5s. a week for a man ‘not doing muscular work. 4s.2d for a woman; and 2s.9d- 4s.10d for children according to age’.
In November that year the British Medical Association (BMA) established a benchmark for poverty, and this was generally accepted for most subsequent surveys. It specified that an average man required 3,400 calories a day, the cost of providing which was 5s.11d. This figure was later adapted according to whether a man was doing light or heavy work, and proportionately for women and children. Seebohm Rowntree used this standard when assessing the level of poverty in York, but Sir John Boyd Orr, Director of the respected Rowett Research Institute of Nutrition in Aberdeen (who had already been influential in getting free school milk for needy children in Scotland), used more generous figures borrowed from the US Bureau for Economics, which suggested that an active man required 4,500 calories a day and that the population as a whole needed to consume 2,810 calories per head each day.
Until the First World War ‘sufficient food’ was judged simply by the amount a person consumed: having ‘enough to eat’ meant just that. But since then there had been extensive research into medical conditions such as rickets, that revealed the importance of the sort of food consumed. There was a growing understanding of the significance of vitamins and minerals, and with it an awareness that large numbers of the low-paid and unemployed could not afford what were known as ‘protective foods’ — milk, fresh vegetables, meat, fish and fruit — and were subsisting on a largely cheap carbohydrate diet — bread and margarine and potatoes — washed down by copious amounts of tea sweetened with condensed milk. The link between poor nutrition and lack of money was a political question, since, in the view of the think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP), which had been established as a result of the Week-End Review’s campaign, hunger should not be regarded as ‘an act of God … but a problem which can be analysed and treated by the same methods of common sense that we are trying to apply to other problems’.
‘Common sense’ suggested it was largely a question of money. A table published in the Manchester Guardian in December 1934 showed that to have an acceptable diet a family of a man, his wife and four children (aged five, seven, nine and eleven) needed СКАЧАТЬ