The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ battled a blizzard through the Lowther Hills in January 1934, ‘where the only occupants were sheep … why the hell we were carryin’ the banner … the wind was rackin’ the banner around … and we couldnae maintain our balance … it was the main banner. It just said “The Scottish Contingent”. But why we were carryin’ the banner in a place like that wi’ strong winds blowin’, I just don’t know.’

      Most of the marchers were in their twenties or thirties, though some younger men went too, such as William McVicar, who had only managed to find work for a few days since leaving school at fourteen, and was sixteen and a half when he set off on the march to Edinburgh from his home in Greenock in the summer of 1933. Charles Teasdale of Blantyre, by contrast, was seventy when he set off for London on the 1930 march.

      The marchers travelled light, though the Brighton contingent ‘borrowed’ a wheelbarrow, ‘trusting that we would be able to put matters right on our return’, to transport their food and a pile of blankets — and to give an occasional ride to their oldest marcher, a seventy-five-year-old woman. Archie McInnes, marching from Glasgow, had ‘an old army haversack — surplus equipment. Ye carried your own gear, your knife, fork and plate, and your blankets of course. One tin mug and a plate … A change of underwear [though other marchers insisted “We didn’ wear underwear in those days,” and John Brown, who marched from Glasgow to London in 1932, only took “jist one of everything. I don’t think I washed any o’ ma underwear or socks during the time I was away” — more than a month!] and shirt, a … hand towel, soap, shavin’ equipment.’ Some wore a waterproof cycling cape — useful in downpours — while John Lochore set off from Glasgow wearing his aunt’s old raincoat, ‘which buttoned on the wrong side’. Most wore some sort of head covering, a flat cap or what the Scots called ‘a bonnet’, and carried a stick to help them along. ‘The walking stick was a camouflaged sort of weapon … a sort of symbol it was in a way and it was very, very helpful,’ according to Harry McShane. The police insisted that these potentially offensive weapons must be surrendered on the approaches to London, though some marchers managed to conceal them from the authorities.

      On Thursday, 27 October 1932 the marchers arrived at Hyde Park, their ranks of some 1,500 swollen by around 100,000 Londoners, and pressed towards seven carts that had been set up as a platform. They were met by 2,600 police, including 136 on horseback and 758 special constables who lacked the training or discipline of the regular force, and whose presence, in the words of the Police Review, was ‘calculated to cause trouble rather than avoid it … the special is an irritant rather than an antiseptic … the less they are seen and used [on hunger marches and demonstrations] the better for everyone’. The ‘specials’, goaded by the crowd (factory girls in Borough in South London hardly helped, screaming, ‘Kiss me, Sergeant!’), attacked the marchers with batons, the mounted police charged, and the marchers retaliated, tearing up railings and breaking branches off the trees. As dusk fell nineteen police and fifty-eight demonstrators were reported to have been injured, while fourteen people had been arrested. There were similar scenes in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, 30 October, when Wal Hannington appealed, ‘Let the working class in uniform and out of uniform stand together in defence of their conditions,’ and leaflets were stuck on railings urging: ‘Policemen! Defeat your own pay cuts by supporting Tuesday’s demonstration against the Economies.’

      But when Tuesday came, Hannington had been arrested, charged with ‘attempting to cause disaffection among members of the Metropolitan Police’, and detained in custody. Declining the offer of a Labour MP to sponsor them, since the Labour Party had listed the NUWM as a proscribed organisation in 1930, a fifty-strong deputation of the marchers collected their petition calling for the abolition of the Means Test and of the Anomalies Act, the restoration of benefit cuts and withdrawal of the new economy measures, with, it was claimed, a million signatures (‘bigger than the Chartists’ petition’) from Charing Cross left-luggage office, intending to march from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall to present it at the bar of the House of Commons, as was the ancient right of citizens. However, the police clanged shut the gates, leaving the deputation and their petition inside and a milling crowd of supporters outside.

      Those supporters marching towards Parliament — which was illegal, since processions were not allowed within a mile of the Palace of Westminster — were met by 3,174 policemen, including 2,000 on horses — some borrowed from the army for the occasion — detailed to defend Parliament. Fighting broke out which continued until midnight, as far away as the Edgware Road and across Westminster Bridge. Official figures listed twelve police and thirty-two demonstrators injured, and forty-two arrests — though only two of those were marchers. The petition was never presented: it was returned to the left-luggage office, and eventually the marchers set off back to their homes all over Britain in trains, their fares negotiated at greatly reduced rates paid for by the money they had collected en route.

      Hannington was sentenced to three months in prison — his fifth term in ten years. Sid Elias, the leader of the deputation to hand the petition in to Parliament, was charged with having stirred the hunger marchers to acts of disorder in a letter written to Hannington (who never received it) while he was in Russia, which allowed the right-wing press to raise again the spectre of a ‘Moscow connection’, ‘Russian dupes’ and ‘red gold’ backing the hunger marches, and received the maximum sentence of two years. Five days after the trial Emrhys Llewellyn, the NUWM’s Secretary and Treasurer (who had stashed the petition in the left-luggage office) and the seventy-six-year-old veteran trade unionist, leader of the 1889 Dock Strike, Tom Mann, were also arrested. Both refused to be bound over to keep the peace. Mann addressed the court: ‘If I am to be tied, if my mouth is to be closed, if I am not to participate in voicing the grievances of those who are suffering, while the incompetency of those responsible cannot find work for them, and is knocking down their miserable standards still lower, then whatever the consequence may be … I will not give an undertaking not to be identified with the further organisation of mass demonstrations and the ventilation of the troubles of the unemployed and of the workers generally.’ He went to prison for two months, as did Llewellyn.

      The politically engaged writers Storm Jameson, Amabel Williams-Ellis (who was the sister of John Strachey) and Vera Brittain wrote a letter to Time and Tide in protest:

      The most important point about the recent demonstrations and hunger marches is this. Other minorities have channels for airing grievances. The unemployed who have the most serious complaint are the least articulate. Their way of saying what they want to say is taken from them if it is made impossible for them to demonstrate or to hold meetings or to state their case directly whether it be to Parliament or to the local Public Assistance Committee. Can it be that the Government are so anxious to silence them because it would rather not hear too much of what it feels like to try to feed a child on two shillings a week? It is with considerable disquiet that we see a National Government attempting to suppress the views of any body of its subjects and especially that section which has the fewest opportunities of making itself heard. The unemployed are muzzled as they have no other means of publicity for their grievances.

      Just over a year later, in the bitter cold of January 1934, the unemployed were on the march again. The Labour Party, still hostile to any demands for united action with the Communists, despite the fact that Hitler had come to power in Germany in January 1933 and both the Communist and the Socialist Internationals had called for united working-class action against fascism, continued to class the NUWM as ‘a mere instrument of the British Communist Party’. ‘One of our troubles was that the Labour Party were opposed to our earlier marches,’ recalled Harry McShane. ‘The woman organiser of the Labour Party used to go ahead of us and advise people not to have anything to do with us. The Labour Party were opposed to anything, opposed to the Communist Party mainly. It’s quite true to say that Hannington and myself were members of the Communist Party. And most of the leading elements were members of the Communist Party, not all of them … they did a lot o’ that and it did a lot o’ harm to us. But later on we managed to get Attlee [Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party from 1935] to agree to support a March and speak with us in Hyde Park … and we got the assistance of Aneurin СКАЧАТЬ