The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ since they cannot afford to buy them.’ A pint of milk a day would cost 2s.½d a week, while the BMA scale prescribed 2s.8d as the total weekly food allowance for a child of one to two years, and 3s.1d for one aged two to three. Again using the BMA scale, a man eating three meals a day would have exactly 3¼d to spend on each meal, and a woman 2¾d. Furthermore, Hannington quoted the Chief Medical Officer to the Board of Health, Sir George Newman himself, who had estimated in his 1933 report that the milk a pregnant woman needed would cost 4s.1d a week, while the amount allowed for her total food consumption under unemployment benefit regulations was 4s.11d. ‘It would, indeed, be interesting,’ wrote Hannington, ‘to know how the Minister of Health would spend the odd ten pence on buying three meals a day for seven days a week.’

      George Orwell quoted — in amazement — a newspaper article that suggested that by eating a diet composed mainly of vegetables and whole-meal bread, with cheese for protein, it was possible for an adult to have a balanced diet for 3s.11d a week. But the ‘minimum weekly expenditure on foodstuffs which must be incurred by families of varying size if health and working capacity are to be maintained’ recommended by the BMA worked out for a man, his wife and two children aged eleven and nine at 19s.9d a week, out of an unemployment allowance of £1.7s. Since the average weekly rent for three rooms in the East End of London was 12s.6d, and in Stockton-on-Tees the rent for one of the 2,756 new council houses was over nine shillings (which was beyond the reach of most of the unemployed, who continued to live in slum cottages where they paid nearer 4s.8d a week), it was hardly surprising that the Pilgrim Trust found that 44 per cent of the families of the unemployed would not be able to afford the minimum diet once they had paid their rent and allowed for other necessary expenditure. And Rowntree found that in 1933, 72 per cent of the unemployed in York were able to spend less on food than the BMA recommended, ‘due to lack of means’. This finding was borne out by Dr M’Gonigle in Stockton-on-Tees, who was convinced that the malnutrition he came across was caused by poverty, and not mismanagement, as was sometimes alleged.

      ‘I learned the meaning of hunger,’ wrote Max Cohen of his days as a single, unemployed cabinet-maker. ‘I knew what it was to count my pennies carefully and to spend them with hesitation and misgiving. I knew the dull finality of having no money at all.’ Cohen

      came within the Labour Exchange category of a ‘Young Man’ (18–21 yrs). Therefore I was receiving fourteen shillings per week … apparently it was assumed by the authorities that a ‘Young Man’ … can in some mysterious way support himself on a smaller sum than a ‘Man’ (21–65 yrs) …

      Life … became divided into more or less rigid periods … There was Friday … the day, when after feverish waiting at the Labour Exchange, I received the life-giving fourteen shillings. After paying six shillings and sixpence a week rent, I was able, with much care and discrimination, to exist in a more or less normal fashion during the first half of the week. Of course, I could spend nothing on replacing my clothes, or on minor luxuries of any kind, no matter how trifling.

      From Tuesday on came bankruptcy … I had no money at all, and so, in a sense, nothing more to worry about … I lived on whatever may have been left of those things I had bought at the beginning of the week — on dry bread and bits of tasteless cheese. All that was necessary was to pull my belt tighter, ignore the empty ache in my stomach and hang on till Friday and deliverance came round again.

      A London housepainter aged forty-seven, married with six children, three of them under six, found himself ‘unemployed and unable to fulfil my duties towards my family’. He had a weekly income (including a naval pension and the earnings of three of his children) of £4s.11d, which meant that

      after allowing for rent, rates, light, coal and gas with a balance of £2.11s to keep, house, clothe two adults, one adolescent and three children, and provide all other necessaries of life for eight persons, which position a PAC inquisition described as ‘not in need of assistance’ … The chief article of our diet is bread. Margarine comes next, and it is my experience that children prefer this to dripping [from meat] … unless the dripping is made use of for frying bread when it often forms a breakfast meal when other food is not available. We invariably take sweetened condensed milk with our tea, a saving thereby being effected in the consumption of sugar; and we often use it for making rice puddings. We usually purchase fresh meat on Friday or Saturday evenings, cash being available on those days, and this being the time when butchers make an effort to sell their odds and ends. Fresh vegetables have been fairly cheap, and these together with cheap sausages, often form our principal meal on two or three days.

      A skilled wire-drawer, thirty-two years old, with a wife and one child aged five, who had been unemployed for over three years, had ‘little variety in our food since the staple ingredients are bread and butter and tea and cocoa and cheese. Until this year [1933] I had an allotment from which we obtained all our vegetables. A local factory bought the land and I have not yet been able to rent another. We have no garden attached to our house; we share a small back yard with five other houses … our rent is 5s6d a week.’

      A twenty-five-year-old skilled letterpress printer who had been unable to find work since having a nervous breakdown after the death of his mother five years earlier, was in receipt of 15s.3d benefit. ‘How do I exist on my “magnificent bounty”? I pay 8s. for a furnished room which includes laundry. Gas costs 6d weekly; letters for situations 8d; razor blades, soap, shoe blacking, haircuts etc. average 3d; and 6d a week I save to help buy boots, second hand flannels etc. This leaves me 5s6d for food. Can a man keep up health and strength on such a sum? Emphatically no! … My breakfast consists of three slices of bread and jam and a cup of tea. Dinner, two slices of bread and about 2ozs cheese. Tea two boiled eggs, or ½lb tomatoes, or a tin of baked beans. If I have 2d left at the week-end (which isn’t often) I “mug” [treat] myself and buy some chip potatoes. I have not tasted meat, potatoes (barring the above occasions) or vegetables for over twelve months — and then I am told I get enough money to keep fit and strong.’ George Tomlinson, a Nottingham miner, unemployed for four years, explained that ‘The real secret of living on the dole [is] potatoes and bread.’

      A Scottish hotel-worker, out of work since 1931, had the single man’s dole of seventeen shillings a week in 1933, and when he had paid his rent, coal and laundry he was left with 5s.3d, out of which he spent ‘about 1 shilling every week on stamps, stationery and typed copies of my references’; ‘In the cold wet months of a Glasgow winter … my meals, which were few and far between, consisted mostly of tea, bread and margarine,’ though he occasionally managed sixpence for some boiling mutton or 4½d for bacon.

      Charles Graham, whose father, a merchant seaman, had died when he fell from a ship in dry dock in Australia, and whose stepfather, a miner, was out of work, recalled that his sister ‘had just one attic room and two children and with only one gas ring, she couldn’t cook an economical dinner. Parents would make soup with a bone, some cabbage, a few turnips and so on. But we usually had a slice of bread in the morning. For dinner a penn’orth of each, that’s a penn’orth of fish and a penn’orth of chips; and probably a couple of slices of bread at night … now and then with a penn’orth of pease pudding and a saveloy from the local German butcher.’ When, during the Second World War, Graham was taken prisoner of war by the Germans for two and a half years, he found his diet much the same as it had been in the ‘hungry thirties’.

      Graham remembered his mother baking every Sunday (in most North Country families it seems to have been Wednesdays, with washdays on Monday and the Sabbath without work).

      Most of us children would be out collecting orange boxes to stoke the fire. It was a great day, Sunday, because there was plenty of bread, and oven bottom cakes and scones, and so on. We used to buy rusty cans of cheap jam in the market. A housewife would go any distance to save a halfpenny. A halfpenny was a candle and that was four or five hours of light. We were lucky, we had a distant relative of my stepfather who was a butcher and he used to let us СКАЧАТЬ