The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ and East Midlands coalfields, most of whom stayed on strike for months after the nine-day TUC strike collapsed. As a result many were blacklisted by the colliery owners, and never worked again. Wages were cut, hours extended and working conditions deteriorated. Employment in the coal industry fell consistently, from 218,000 in 1926 to 136,000 in 1932, and across Wales as a whole unemployment averaged 39 per cent.

      At a time when over 40 per cent of the miners were out of work in the Yorkshire coalfields, a local headmaster would reputedly admonish pupils who answered his question, ‘Now then, boy, what are you going to do when you leave school?’ ‘We’re going to pit, sir,’ with ‘’Cos tha’ strong in the arm and weak in the head.’ Coalmining remained probably the most dangerous occupation in Britain. A West Lothian pit was known locally as ‘the Dardanelles pit. It was named that because of the high accident rate — they compared it with the slaughter at the Dardanelles’ in the First World War. There was widespread bitterness about the lack of compliance — since compliance invariably cost money — that many mine-owners accorded to health and safety regulations, and in the early hours of 22 September 1934 one of the worst mining disasters in British history occurred at Gresford colliery near Wrexham in North Wales, when an explosion ripped through part of the mine known as the Dennis section during the night shift. Although six miners managed to crawl to safety, three men were killed in the rescue attempt, and on the following night, Sunday, 23 September, it was agreed that the mine should be sealed with the dead miners entombed inside. A further violent explosion a couple of days later killed a surface worker: the disaster had claimed a total of 266 lives.

      At the subsequent inquiry, Sir Stafford Cripps agreed to represent the mineworkers’ union pro bono. Despite the Labour lawyer’s relentless, technically informed questioning (Cripps had read chemistry at University College London, since he considered the lab conditions there to be far superior to those at either Oxford or Cambridge, before turning to law) in pursuit of his contention that safety had been sacrificed in the pursuit of profit, it was hard to establish what precisely had caused a build-up of lethal methane gas which had ignited, particularly since the mine-owners refused to allow the sealed section to be opened for inspection. While the report that the Chief Inspector of Mines, Sir Henry Walker, laid before Parliament in January 1937 singled out no one — neither the colliery management, the firemen who worked down the mine, the shot-firers whose job it was to blow up the coal face so the miners could get at the coal to be hewn, nor the inspectors — as having been criminally negligent, he concluded that nor had any of them performed their duties satisfactorily. Yet when charges were brought in the courts by the bereaved against the company and its officials, most of the cases were either dismissed or withdrawn, and no one was convicted of any wrongdoing.

      The Gresford pit disaster provoked nationwide sympathy, gifts (over half a million pounds were raised) and unease among many that until the mines were taken out of private hands the catalogue of accidents and disregard for safety would continue, as would the mining industry’s generally poor industrial relations and sluggish productivity.

      The previous September, unemployed coalminers had marched from South Wales to Bristol to lobby the TUC meeting there, and in September 1932 a contingent from Wales was among the eighteen from all over Britain that marched on London in what the organisers, the NUWM, called the ‘Great National Hunger March of the Unemployed Against the Means Test’, which culminated in a rally in Hyde Park. The NUWM claimed there were 100,000 unemployed in the park on 27 October, while the Metropolitan Police estimated the number at somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000.

      This ‘great march’ was the largest to date, but by no means the first of the frequent protests by the unemployed since the effects of the Depression had first begun to bite in 1920. As well as numerous local demonstrations, the NUWM organised six national marches between 1922 and 1936, gathering contingents from all over the country to march to London with their demand for ‘work or full maintenance at trade union rates’. ‘If history is to be truly recorded,’ wrote Wal Hannington, ‘our future historians must include this feature of the “Hungry Thirties”.’ To Hannington the marches were a rebuttal of the charge — or, in the case of such proto-sociologists as the Pilgrim Trust survey team or E. Wight Bakke, the sympathetic observation — that the unemployed were apathetic, that they ‘quietly suffered their degradation and poverty’ despite the evident fact that ‘they were hungry; their wives and children were hungry’.

      In March 1930, with the number of registered unemployed standing at over 2.5 million, over a thousand men left Scotland, the Durham coalfields, Northumberland, Plymouth, Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Nottingham coalfields, the Potteries, South Wales, the Midlands and Kent to trudge, most of the way on foot, to the capital, where they were joined by the London workless. For the first time women from the depressed textile areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire made up a special — separate — contingent, in the hope that the female Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield, might afford their case a sympathetic hearing. This was not to be, and the only success that what Hannington called the ‘raiding parties’ had was to storm the Ministry of Health, lock themselves in and address the crowds in Whitehall below, until they were forcibly ejected.

      In the days after the formation of the National Government in August 1931, protest had escalated, often ending in pitched battles between the unemployed and the police, with the protesters reported as having thrown stones and hammer heads, and attempting to pull the police from their horses, while the police allegedly laid about the protesters with batons. By the end of the year over thirty different towns and cities had seen clashes between the police and unemployed demonstrators. ‘This “cuts” business may bring the Empire down,’ predicted Samuel Rich, a London teacher who had spent time in September 1931 working out his family’s annual budget in anticipation that ‘JRM [Ramsay MacDonald] will reduce all teachers’ salaries by 15% by Order in Council’. Philip Snowden, who had translated his job as Chancellor into the National Government (until the election in October 1931), announced in his budget on 10 September that not only unemployment insurance benefit would be slashed by 10 per cent, but so would the pay of teachers, the police and the armed forces.

      Articles had started to appear in the Manchester Guardian in the 1930–31 school year highlighting the plight of out-of-work teachers, and it was not long before suggestions were being made that the already very small number of married women teachers might be ‘let go’. Although 10,000 teachers marched through the streets of London in protest on 11 September 1931 (members of what Hannington referred to triumphantly as ‘the black-coated proletariat … embarking on a new experience, marching through the streets carrying banners’), Samuel Rich was appalled at what he regarded as the supine acquiescence of his profession. ‘The “L[ondon] T[eacher]” and other teachers’ papers all sickening today. The 10% cut is a victory! A victory! What lice! I hear that only 218 London schoolmasters voted to be absent yesterday after the meeting. 218! — Bah!’.

      As well as demonstrations and clashes with the police over the following months there was one response that was unprecedented — and more disturbing to the government than that of the ‘black-coated proletariat’ — the incident that Samuel Rich thought ‘might bring the Empire down’, and which gave an added twist to fears about Britain’s stability at the moment of acute economic crisis. ‘The Atlantic Fleet has been recalled owing to dissatisfaction among the sailors,’ Rich reported. ‘They’ll get redress tho’ as they are at the right end of the guns.’ The largest ships of the North Atlantic Fleet had been gathering in the Cromarty Firth for their annual autumn exercises when the news of the cuts came through — not from official sources such as the Admiralty Board, but piecemeal via newspaper reports and rumours. The cuts were not only swingeing, they were not equitable, and bore most heavily on the lower ranks, as an across-the-board cut of a shilling a day would mean only 3 per cent off the pay of a Lieutenant Commander, while an Able Seamen between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five would suffer a reduction of 25 per cent. This, a senior officer immediately realised, was ‘perfectly absurd’. Six shillings week less money would mean real hardship to the men’s families: furniture would be repossessed, clothes and shoes would not be replaced, СКАЧАТЬ