The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ the TUC had refused to involve the NUWM in a rally it had organised in London in February 1933, the sole large demonstration sanctioned by the official labour movement on the issue of unemployment throughout the 1930s. ‘The ILP [Independent Labour Party] seemed to do strange things at the time,’ mused McShane. ‘Sometimes they would support us. They tried to form separate Unemployed Committees, separate entirely from us. They and the … TUC were doing the same thing, forming rival bodies.’ However, despite the fact that the official Labour Party was ‘awfy absent, awfy absent’, in the words of Guy Bolton, an unemployed Lanarkshire miner, local Labour Party workers, less concerned with internecine wrangles and more sympathetic to the plight of the individual unemployed, would often turn out to offer support in the form of food, accommodation or entertainment. Hugh Duffy travelled from Scotland ‘on the chuck wagon in advance o’ the marchers. I chalked the streets and shouted through the loudspeaker, “The Hunger Marchers are comin’! They’ll be here at six o’clock! Turn out and support their cause!” And then the lads came marchin’ in.’

      ‘Local people were generally sympathetic to the Marchers. They’d come out everywhere in big droves, particularly in England. We had tremendous turn outs to see the Marchers. And we got money from them. The money kept us going.’ The local Co-op store might provide food for the marchers as they passed through a town, and even Woolworths sometimes offered meals: ‘We made the most of that … it saved an awful lot of trouble in cooking.’ ‘We always got donations,’ recalled Archie McInnes. ‘A huge box of chocolate wafer biscuits from, I think, the Co-op at Lancaster … if you got cigarettes and that … ye handed it in to supplies of course. I remember at Macclesfield an elderly lady … a bystander … pushed cigarettes into my hand … They were Capstan. I was a pipe smoker. So I handed them in.’ ‘We elected people who had the responsibility of taking collections en route and they were very, very good at their job. They made sure they didn’t pass anybody. Anybody standing en route invariably found a can under their nose. And the response was very, very good. The people seeing the unemployed marchin’, they felt it in their heart. People turned out to see us.’ Indeed, so generous were the onlookers that when Finlay Hart acted as treasurer on the Scottish march he was in a position to know that ‘we collected on the road down [from Carlisle] to London £991. That was a lot of money. That was just from shaking collection cans and there were public meetings we were passing through … The money was used for providing food, leather, sending men home who were ill, expenses like that.’

      Since more men had been out of work for longer, more families were having to suffer the indignities of the Means Test. After the government had refused to reverse the benefit cuts that had been introduced as an emergency measure in 1931, a thousand Scots from as far away as Aberdeen and Dundee converged on Edinburgh on 11 June 1933, and finding nowhere to sleep on the second night all bedded down on the hard pavements of Princes Street below the Castle. ‘We didnae hae blankets wi’ us. We had a haversack for a pillae’ and the men slept with their backs to the railings in Princes Street so they couldn’t be attacked.’ The next morning women protesters had to be cleared from the tramways, the marchers washed themselves in the street fountains, shaved by looking at their reflections in shop windows and set up their field kitchens which had ‘a place underneath where you fuelled them by coal, and they had a chimney for the smoke to go out. So you can imagine what it was like when the fair citizens of Edinburgh saw these field kitchens all belching away preparing some food for the Marchers … after all Princes Street’s the showpiece of Edinburgh … you’ve got all these luxury hotels and big clubs, the Conservative Club and the Liberal Club … but the average Edinburgh working-class person was in sympathy with what the demonstrators were in Edinburgh for.’

      The newspaper headlines spoke of ‘Two Days that Shook Edinburgh’, in reference to the Russian Revolution, to the alarm of the authorities, who quickly found the protesters accommodation for the following night; after which ‘We were loaded into bloody buses and they just got rid of us.’

      Local marches continued throughout autumn 1933. When the Unemployment Bill was published in 1934, it followed the main recommendations of the Royal Commission on Unemployment’s report, including no restoration of benefit cuts, the continuation of the Means Test, the transfer of transitional payments away from local PACs which had firsthand knowledge of conditions in their area to a national body, the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB), and a requirement that could make benefit payments conditional on attending a government training centre.

      The government had started a number of training schemes for the unemployed in the mid-1920s, and by the late 1930s there were five funded by the Ministry of Labour. Some million and a half young people had been through junior instructional centres, which were in effect a continuation of schooling, and were compulsory in some areas, while each year about 2,000 young women took courses in ‘the various domestic arts, including cooking, needlework and laundry’, designed to equip them for domestic service or hotel work. There were grants available for individual vocational training, and in 1928 an Industrial Transference Board had been set up to enable the Ministry of Labour to transfer workers out of their own districts where work was no longer available — miners were natural candidates — and send them to training centres mainly situated in the depressed areas where they, and sometimes their wives, could learn skills which could lead to a new life in Canada, Australia or the more prosperous South of England. Between 1929 and 1938, over 70,000 men passed through such centres, and though in the early days it was hard to place them in work, 63,000 eventually found jobs. Though a number drifted back to their home areas, there were continual complaints that the scheme was draining the life blood from the depressed areas — particularly as the parallel scheme for young unemployed men was transferring them at a rate of over 10,000 a year.

      But it was felt that there were some unemployed who were not suitable for these programmes. In December 1929 the Ministry of Labour hatched a plan ‘to deal with the class of men to whom our existing training schemes do not apply … those, especially among the younger men, who, through prolonged unemployment, have become so “soft” and temporarily demoralised that it would not be practicable to introduce more than a very small number of them into one of our ordinary training centres without danger to morale’. Such men could not be considered for any transfer scheme until they were ‘hardened … for these people have lost the will to work’.

      These Instructional Centres, which catered for around 200,000 unemployed men between 1929 and 1939, did not aim to teach a skill or trade, but rather to toughen the ‘fibre of men who have got out of the way of work’ by providing a twelve-week course of ‘fairly hard work, good feeding and mild discipline’ at residential camps, often in remote rural areas, which it was hoped ‘would help the [men] to withstand the pull of former ties and associates’.

      Although the threats to cut their benefits if men refused to attend the Instructional Centres were never implemented, the NUWM, which was concerned that this was another attempt to generate cheap labour and undercut trade union rates of pay, added them to its list of complaints against the government’s attempts to deal with unemployment. It described the centres as ‘slave colonies’ or even ‘concentration camps’, though this was a rather excessive description, since men could come and go as they liked, and in any one year up to a quarter left before completing their courses.

      Under the toughening-up regime the men were issued on arrival with a ‘uniform’ of work shirts, corduroy trousers and hobnailed boots, which they could keep if they completed the course. They slept under canvas (in the summer), or in huts, were paid around four shillings a week and issued with a pack of Woodbines and a stamp for a letter home, and were subjected to a strict regime: parading each morning for work, roll calls, lights out, and hard manual labour such as chopping down trees, building roads, digging sewers and stone-breaking. Sometimes men would be ‘lent’ to work on outside projects, such as the building of Whipsnade Zoo, London University’s playing fields, and the Piccadilly Line tube extension, all to accustom them ‘once more to regular hours and steady work’.

      Len Edmondson’s brother was ‘sent СКАЧАТЬ