The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      With unemployment at an unprecedented two and a half million, or some 20 per cent of the insured workforce, the 1932 March was the largest so far. It was preceded by months of continuing unrest. Although the NUWM had enjoyed a certain amount of success in opposing the harshest application of the Means Test in some areas of high unemployment and had succeeded in raising the rates of relief benefits by some Public Assistance Committees, a demand for an end to the Means Test in Birkenhead on Merseyside had erupted in a week of protests, bans and counter-protests. An estimated 8,000 unemployed men marched in a line over a mile long to the PAC offices with their demands. During the ensuing battles between police and demonstrators, stones and bricks were hurled, iron railings torn up, windows smashed and shops looted, batons wielded and police horses charged. Dozens of arrests were made, police reinforcements had to be drafted in from across the Mersey in Liverpool, and thirty-seven demonstrators needed hospital treatment, while seven police were injured, three of them seriously.

      In Belfast the next month there was a demonstration by some 2,000 unemployed men demanding better pay for relief work which soon developed into running battles between the police and demonstrators, culminating in the police opening fire on the crowds, killing two men, and having to call on the troops to restore order.

      The logistics of the 1932 march were formidable: accommodation had to be found in 188 towns along the route, which was modified in the light of experience of previous marches to try to ensure that the marchers passed through places where they were most likely to be welcomed. Wherever possible reception committees would gather to meet the marchers and march into town with them, provide food, accommodation and entertainment paid for by money raised in advance, and wave them on their way the next morning. St Albans, a prosperous cathedral city twenty miles north of London provided hospitality for thirty-eight women marchers who were met on the road from Luton, escorted into town, accommodated and fed at the Trade Union Club. A concert was laid on to entertain them, and a rally held in the market square to stiffen their resolve. A cobbler took in any shoes that needed repairs, while someone else did the marchers’ washing. The women left the next morning with a packet of sandwiches for the road, shouting, ‘Unite with us to smash the National Government!’ to the citizens of St Albans. Mrs Paisley, a sixty-three-year-old woman from Burnley with sixteen children and twenty-three grandchildren who had suffered much under the Means Test, proclaimed that she ‘had had that much good food on the march that I don’t want to go home’.

      Others were less fortunate: if nothing else could be found, marchers were obliged to seek a bed for the night at the local workhouse (now known as the Institution), where managers had been instructed to accommodate them in casual wards and treat them as tramps or vagrants, which meant searching the men, removing their possessions, insisting on them having a bath while their clothes were disinfected if necessary, locking them in for the night, feeding them a ‘spike’ diet of two slices of bread and margarine and tea, and refusing to allow them to leave until 9 a.m. on the second day after their admission, by which time they were supposed to have done whatever work was required to ‘earn’ their keep. Not all workhouse managers insisted on all these conditions: Coventry Council, which had shown ‘weakness’ in 1930 when it put the marchers up in a school and paid for food provided by the Co-op, was warned that it would be surcharged if that were to happen again.

      There were skirmishes along the road, usually over what the marchers were expected to put up with at some workhouses (the Lancashire marchers were seriously batoned by the police at a workhouse in Stratford-upon-Avon, and arrived in Hyde Park heavily bandaged) or restrictions put on their right to hold meetings. Harry McShane, who was in charge of the Scottish contingent, made it a practice that ‘if we were banned from marching along a street, we always went up and down it twice’. Some of the Scottish marchers had come from as far away as Dundee, an eighty-mile walk to Glasgow, where they mustered before setting off on the long march south. The men would march on average for twenty-two miles a day, stopping every hour for a ten-minute rest; the cook’s lorry would go ahead and ‘dish out a good big lunch, usually stew’. Wal Hannington made an effort to march for a stretch with each contingent. ‘He loved to lead a big body of men singing. He used to march at the head of the Scots singing “McGregor’s Gathering” and get them all waving their caps on top of their sticks — with the Welsh it was “Land of my Fathers”.’ Most of the contingents had a band which marched all the way to London with flutes and drums, and sometimes cymbals and triangles too. ‘Flautists — you cannae stop them … they would have played all the way if you’d let them.’ The marchers liked to sing as they trudged along too, and the Scots had their own song:

      From Scotland we’re marching,

      From shipyard, mill and mine. Our banners raised on high We toilers are in line. We are a determined band, Each with his weapon in his hand. We are the Hunger Marchers Of the Proletariat.

      Tom Ferns recalled the unemployed protesters marching through the grounds of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, ‘with the Maryhill Flute Band … leading the contingent and it was playing Connolly’s Rebel Song, so that was quite an astonishing event going through the Royal territory’. He thought that the songs the marchers sang ‘were very simple. Sometimes something simple can explain a situation better than something a bit more complicated,’ and instanced songs like:

      Mary had a little lamb,

      Its fleece was white as snow.

      And everywhere that Mary went

      The lamb was sure to go

      Shouting out the battle cry for freedom.

      Hurrah for Mary, hurrah for the lamb,

      Hurrah for the Bolshie boys that don’t give a damn.

      The Brighton contingent added a further verse:

      Ramsay [MacDonald] had a little lamb

      Whose feet were black as soot, Shouting out the battle cry of TREASON.

      Some of the women sang (to the tune of ‘Oh why are we waiting’) ‘Oh why are we marching?’ and answered in the last line, ‘The reason is the Means Test.’ Other marchers sang ‘The Red Flag’ repeatedly. While the Greenock contingent on the Edinburgh March in 1933 sang ‘a Russian tune, Budenny’s Cavalry March … the Red Flag [“The people’s flag is deepest red/It shrouded oft our martyred dead/And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold/Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold”] [it] was a very, very kind o’ hymn thing. It was a bit slow and it wasnae much use for marching.’

      But ‘they [presumably the organisers] were strict about what we sang’. Emily Swankie and the women she was marching with ‘were stopped singing one night because it was the wrong type of song — Land of Hope and Glory! Someone started to sing it and just because it was a good tune, we all joined in, and the woman came over and said “Just stop that. We don’t want that”’ It was the same with ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. One of the Scottish organisers, Peter Kerrigan, ‘blew his top’ when that was sung: ‘Being the puritanical sort o’Scots Communist that he were, Kerrigan put an end to that song. It was a jingo song — pack up your troubles, nothing to worry about.’ Another Scottish marcher recalled that although ‘There wis many, many tunes we played … we never got to It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, we never got asked to play that! It wis too capitalistic — it was associated wi’ the First World War.’ Other marchers ‘didn’t feel it was a bit militaristic because actually most of our men were ex military men’, and sang it a lot.

      The marchers carried banners, some with slogans such as ‘We Refuse to Starve in Silence’, ‘No to the Means Test’ or ‘Wales to London’, or simply with the name of their contingent. Those marching from Brighton to London in 1932 carried one that had been embroidered by women NUWM members СКАЧАТЬ