The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ decay of Britain’s staple traditional industries, on which the country’s nineteenth-century prosperity had been based, was not confined to shipbuilding. Coal, iron, steel, heavy engineering and cotton accounted for more than 40 per cent of total unemployment, and in areas where they were concentrated — Teesside, South Wales and Monmouthshire, Tyneside, Cumberland, Lowland Scotland and Lancashire — the unemployment figure was much higher than the average: in some cases staggeringly high. In July 1931 Jarrow’s employment exchange reported that 72.6 per cent of its workforce was unemployed, and in Ferndale in the Rhondda Valleys, 96.5 of those in jobs covered by insurance contributions from workers, employers and the government were out of work. In the worst of times — 1932 — nearly a third of all coalminers were unemployed, and even in 1936, when the economy was in upswing, a quarter of all coalminers were still without work, as were almost a third of iron and steelworkers.

      ‘Everybody knows that there are at present in England prosperous districts and “depressed areas”,’ explained Men Without Work, a report from the Pilgrim Trust, which had been established in 1930 under the chairmanship of Stanley Baldwin with a £2 million gift from Edward Harkness, an American philanthropist who had inherited a vast oil fortune and who, proud that his ancestors came from Dumfries, took a most munificent interest in Britain, its society and culture, at a time when his own country was also in the throes of a deep depression.

      The ‘prosperous districts’ were to be found mainly in the Midlands and the South of England: ‘a line from the Severn to the Wash’ was generally recognised as roughly delineating the areas of prosperity from those of ‘distress’. Although the Yorkshire novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley famously came across three rather than two ‘Englands’ in his ‘rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933’, he reported finding prosperity in only two of these. It was apparent in much of the first, ‘Old England, the country of cathedrals and minsters, of manor houses and inns, of Parson and Squire; guide-book and quaint highways and by ways England’, the Cotswolds, parts of rural ‘middle England’, most of Southern England, and also in the third, ‘the new post-war England … of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings … all glass and white tiles and chromium plate … of giant dance-halls and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages’. It was largely in ‘new post-war England’ around London and in the Midlands — Leicester ‘claims to be the most prosperous city in England’ — that the new industries were located. Indeed, they and the lifestyles they engendered defined Priestley’s somewhat scornful characterisation, since he did not much care for the ‘third England’ he had happened across, with its ‘depressing monotony’, its ‘trumpery imitation of something not very good in the original’ (that is, ‘American influence’) and its general ‘Woolworths culture’ of cheapness — and, he admitted, accessibility — defined by money.

      Such recently established and expanding industries as light engineering, artificial-textile and motor-vehicle manufacture, electrical goods (the national grid, which was completed in 1933, provided a stimulus for the manufacture of electrically-powered domestic appliances such as radios, cookers, vacuum cleaners, gramophones and electric irons) were invariably smaller-scale than the old industrial giants, and often a number of diverse enterprises were located in one place, each employing fewer people, but less vulnerable to the vagaries of world trade, particularly as many were producing goods primarily for the home market, and were concentrated where that market was dense.

      However, in the depressed regions the most deeply disquieting fact was not just the number of unwilling conscripts into the army of the unemployed — an estimated nearly three and a half million in total in 1932, at the deepest trough of the Depression — and their concentration in certain areas: it was the length of time some of them had been without a job. Long-term unemployment was defined as having been out of work for more than a year. In September 1929 about 45,000 were in that category; by August 1932 the number had risen to 400,000, or over 16 per cent of the unemployed workforce. In Crook, in County Durham, 71 per cent of the unemployed had been without a job for five years or more, while the figure for the Rhondda Valley in South Wales was 41 per cent, and for Liverpool 23 per cent. Even in a generally prosperous city such as York, where the overall rate of unemployment was relatively low, Seebohm Rowntree’s 1935 survey found that 21.9 per cent of unemployed heads of families had been out of work for between two and four years, 23.6 per cent for four to six years, and 17.9 per cent for over six.

      Moreover, the numbers proved obdurate. The Pilgrim Trust reported that while there had been optimism that with industrial recovery growing rapidly after 1935, labour would start to resemble ‘a fairly rapidly moving stream with only small stagnant pools here and there’. But the murky water that the long-term unemployed represented proved deep and still. While the total number of those without work fell, the proportion of those idle for longer than a year stayed roughly the same. ‘Recovery had failed to solve the problem. On the contrary, as the unemployment figures fell, the seriousness [of the matter of the long-term unemployed] became more and more obvious.’ Indeed, in the month before Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 there were still nearly a quarter of a million long-term unemployed, men with little chance of ever working again — at least in peacetime.

      The problem of the long-term unemployed particularly exercised politicians, economists and social scientists — either for the insight the phenomenon might provide into the nature of industrial decline, the prospects for recovery and the seemingly unstoppable rise in the cost of unemployment insurance and relief, or to help them discover if the problem was ‘industrial’ (that is, the long-term unemployed would get work if there was work to be got) or ‘residual’ (that is, was there a ‘type’ who were in some way ‘inadequate’, physically, psychologically or morally for the world of work?). Sir William Beveridge, later to garner for himself the accolade ‘father of the Welfare State’, had written and lectured on the subject extensively, and had suggested to the Pilgrim Trust that this was ‘the crux of the matter’, and worthy of extensive investigation.

      What were the effects of such unemployment, particularly in single-industry towns where the decay of the staple industry polluted not only the lives of those thrown out of work with little hope of a job, but impoverished the whole community? As the Pilgrim Trust put it: ‘Beyond the man in the queue we should always be aware of those two or three at home whom he has to support.’ It calculated that the 250,000 long-term unemployed were responsible for 170,000 wives and 270,000 young children, ‘whose burden is perhaps the heaviest of all’.

      ‘Attention has been repeatedly drawn by the Minister of Labour … and many others, to the extent to which unemployment is “an old man’s problem”,’ reported the Pilgrim Trust. Men in their middle years were less likely to remain without work for long: across the country 13 per cent of men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four were unemployed, but for those between fifty-five and sixty-four the percentage was 22.6 — though of course this number was much higher in areas with the highest levels of unemployment. Men over fifty were noticeably less likely to find another job in times of high unemployment, since employers tended to regard such old-stagers as less flexible, less able to ‘adjust’ to modern working methods and technologies. This was seen as a particular problem in the Welsh coalfields, where life in the pits began early: ‘When he is 35 a man has already been at work for more than twenty years underground, and above that age adjustment [to new methods of coal cutting and other forms of mechanised production] begins to get harder.’

      In addition, years cutting coal underground, often with scant concern for health or safety, made relatively young men old. A feature of life in the coalmines was the high incidence of disabling industrial diseases such as nystagmus and silicosis among the older miners with a (shortened) lifetime of breathing in coal dust. ‘The Coal Mines Act was flagrantly broken day in, day out, year in year out,’ remembers Kenneth Maher, who started work in the Bedwas colliery near Newport in Monmouthshire aged fourteen in January 1930, earning 12s.4d a week for six eight-hour shifts. Apart from the danger of explosion from the methane gas that СКАЧАТЬ