Читать книгу The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain - Juliet Gardiner, Juliet Gardiner - Страница 10

… An utterly lost and daft

System that gives a few at fancy prices

Their fancy lives

While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet

Must wash the grease of ages off the knives …

Louis MacNeice, ‘Autumn Journal’ (1939)

The post of Poet Laureate, official versifier, has had a chequered history. Originating with John Dryden in 1670, it has had its peaks — Wordsworth, Tennyson — and its troughs — possibly Colley Cibber, possibly Robert Southey (who only got the laurel wreath because Sir Walter Scott declined), certainly Alfred Austin (who was wheeled on because William Morris refused). When the scholarly, pantheistic Robert Bridges (who was only in post because Rudyard Kipling had said no) died on 21 April 1930, the honorary position as a member of the royal household (ranking between the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod and the Marine Painter in the arcane hierarchy), carrying a nugatory stipend, was offered to John Masefield. He had his doubts: ‘I can write verse only in moments of deep feeling … this may perhaps be a disqualification,’ he wrote on 30 April to Ramsay MacDonald, who had offered to submit his name for royal approval — a mere formality, particularly since it was rumoured that Masefield was George V’s favourite poet. The Prime Minister must have had many more pressing matters on his mind, but he took time out to reply to the havering fifty-one-year-old poet, reassuring him that should the spirit move him, he could ‘write odes and such things’ on occasions of national import, but if it did not, he could keep quiet. Masefield accepted, but made it clear that as a writer committed to the cause of ‘the man with too weighty a burden, too heavy a load’, he would not define his task as being to acclaim ‘The princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers/Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years’. He would hold the post for thirty-seven years until his death in 1967, a longer tenure than any of his predecessors except Tennyson.

John Masefield had long hymned the sea and the men who went down to the sea in ships (although he himself was an indifferent sailor who failed in his first choice of career in the Merchant Navy, and on one occasion had to be shipped home from Chile as a DBS — Distressed British Seaman). In 1934 the perfect opportunity to fuse his maritime yearnings with the gravitas of a national event presented itself. Masefield rose to the challenge with a seven-stanza poem entitled, rather unpromisingly, ‘Number 534’. ‘… Man in all the marvel of his thought/Smithied you into form of leap and curve,’ he wrote, ‘And took you so, and bent you to his vast/Intense great world of passionate design/Curve after changing curving, bracing and mast/To stand all tumult that can tumble brine.’ Far from being one of Masefield’s best-known ‘dirty British coaster[s] with a salt-caked smoke stack … With a cargo of Tyne coal/Road-rail, pig-lead/Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays’, ‘Number 534’ was the largest ocean-going liner ever built, the Queen Mary, and the occasion of his tribute was the ship’s launch, when in pouring rain on 26 September 1934 in front of a crowd of 200,000 mostly umbrella-holding spectators, the consort whose name the vessel carried, the wife of George V, dressed in powder blue, smashed a bottle of Australian wine over her bows, pressed a button, and the massive 81,000-ton Cunard liner, ‘long as a street and lofty as a tower’ and looking like a ‘great white cliff’, slipped into the Clyde.

The Queen Mary represented many things. It was a gamble that despite a world depression this luxury liner, this super ship, would enable Britain to recapture its prestige on the seas, would win the coveted Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, and would rekindle a glamorous and moneyed lifestyle that seemed lost. And yet, though its elaborate and luxurious interiors, its fabulous menus, its non-stop programme of entertainment seemed to hold out such a promise, the construction of the Queen Mary could be seen as an unfolding metaphor for the ambitious intentions, the rigid yet muddled thinking, the collective misery and dashed hopes of British industrial production in the early 1930s.

British shipbuilding had suffered a similar fate to other heavy industries in the 1920s: a sharp decline from the First World War, when orders had flooded in for battleships, the big yards on the Clyde had expanded their capacity and their workforce to cope with military orders. When the war ended it seemed natural that the requirement for warships would be replaced by the need for a steady supply of merchant vessels, many of them to replace those lost at sea during hostilities. Indeed, foreseeing a boom in merchant orders John Brown & Co. had injected a huge capital sum of £316,000 into the facilities at their Clydebank yard, and shipbuilding companies merged and acquired control of the majority of Scotland’s steel industry. For the first two years after the war it looked as if this would pay off: between December 1918 and December 1920 Clydebank received orders for twelve merchant ships, including seven for the Royal Mail, two large passenger liners, the Franconia and the Alaunia for the Cunard line, and another two, the Montcalm and the Montclare, for Canadian Pacific.

But in fact the industry was facing a series of problems, the most pressing of which was a decline in world trade. Added to this were technical innovations that had improved speeds and shipping capacity, meaning that what trade there was could be carried in fewer ships, fierce overseas competition, and at home overmanning, fractious industrial relations, underinvestment in new technologies — particularly the switch from steam to diesel — unprofitable credit arrangements, cut-to-the-bone profit margins and a high rate of emigration of skilled workers, mainly to Canada. As a result, by 1930, when almost no new orders were coming in, the shipyards had already been in deep trouble for some years. The only hope on the horizon was the announcement in May 1930 of an order from Cunard for an ocean-going liner. Without it, John Brown’s yard would probably have had to close, with the loss of thousands of jobs. The insurance liability for the liner while she was being built and when she put to sea was reckoned at £4 million, but the commercial marine insurance market was only prepared to cover £2.7 million. The whole project was at risk, but eventually the government, only too aware of the political as well as the economic and social implications of thousands of shipworkers being thrown out of work, agreed to cover the shortfall of £1.3 million itself, though The Times had sounded a cautionary note: ‘Is it wise that Parliament should be asked to lend a hand on a project planned on so colossal a scale that private enterprise could not find the means to carry it through?’

On 1 December 1930 the contract was finally signed, and on the day after Boxing Day, ‘a particularly raw, foggy winter’s day [when] the electric lights under the cranes of the building berth had to be put on soon after three in the afternoon’, the hull plate was laid and named Job No. 534. It would mean three to four years’ work, and ‘so strong was the grim enthusiasm of managers, foremen and workers in their determination to have something to show at the end of that first day after all the months of waiting that work continued in the wet and the darkness well into the night’.

By the end of January 1931 the whole of the keel had been laid, and the lower ribs and frame were in position. With three shifts working round the clock the skeleton of the hull had been completed by late spring. By November 80 per cent of the hull plating had been riveted into place and the great liner loomed above Clydebank, its graceful bows dwarfing men and machines. There was a general feeling of optimism that ship No. 534 would be launched in May or June 1932, ready to vie with France’s pride, the Normandie, currently under construction in Saint-Nazaire, for the Atlantic crown.

But that crown was already tarnished. Fewer passengers were making the crossing, about half as many as had done so in 1926, and those who did were less lavish in their spending: British earnings from passenger ships had been over £9 million in 1928; by 1931 they had fallen to less than £4 million, and foreign competition for fewer passengers was fierce.

On Thursday, 10 December 1931, the directors of Cunard in Liverpool decided that the Clydebank project was no longer viable: the plug was pulled on ship No. 534. At seven o’clock the next morning a notice was nailed up in John Brown’s shipyard. ‘The services of all employees … will terminate at noon today.’ Three thousand men directly employed on building the ship were sacked, and 10,000 men and women at work on subsidiary contracts for electrical equipment and all the other parts needed to build and equip such a liner were also affected, either losing their jobs or put onto short-time working.

The directors blamed ‘world conditions’. The Daily Telegraph reported that while the announcement ‘proved somewhat of a shock in the City … the wisdom of the decision was not questioned’, though the newspaper recognised that the cessation of the project was ‘an industrial catastrophe’, and suggested that ‘Even as an emergency measure for the prevention of unemployment a government loan or guarantee of cheap money would be a far sounder business proposition than most of the “unemployment schemes” in which public money has been sunk … here is an obvious case for government help.’

But the government did not see it like that. Speaking in the House of Commons that same afternoon, the President of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman, rejected the idea: ‘I am afraid that any idea of direct government financial assistance is out of the question.’ Offers poured into the Cunard Company from individuals willing to lend money to see the ship completed, and Will Thorne MP, General Secretary to the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, tirelessly lobbied the government to ‘supply the necessary money needed to complete the work at a reasonable rate of interest’. The Labour MP for Clydebank and Dumbarton, David Kirkwood, a trade unionist who had himself worked at John Brown’s shipyard, ‘had “534” engraved on his heart’, and for two years he ‘outdid the importunate widow … I had written, spoken, pleaded, cajoled, threatened men and masters, shipbuilders and ship owners, Cabinet Ministers and financiers.’ But no help was forthcoming. By the beginning of 1932 the Clyde was building fewer ships than at any time since 1860. Almost the only people still employed in the shipyards were ‘black-coated’ workers such as foremen and draughtsmen. Other shipyards were as badly hit as John Brown’s and had either chained their gates shut or kept only a skeleton staff. Since the only other source of employment was the Singer sewing-machine factory, from which half the workforce had been laid off, Clydebank became a town of the unemployed, and the vast, gaunt hulk of the unfinished liner a daily reminder of that fact. And the symbol resonated beyond the banks of the Clyde. ‘I believe that as long as No. 534 lies like a skeleton in my constituency so long will the depression last in this country,’ David Kirkwood told the Commons. ‘To me it seems to shout “Failure! Failure!” to the whole of Britain.’

By 1933 almost 75 per cent of shipbuilding workers in Scotland were unemployed. Edwin Muir, a poet and novelist born on Orkney whose family had moved to Glasgow, where he had worked as a clerk in a shipyard office, found when he revisited his former workmates that half had been laid off, and those who were still at their desks were on half time (and half pay). All were sunburned, an unwelcome mark then of the un- and underemployed who spent too many hours outside, hanging around, digging allotments, scavenging for coal and wood. ‘The dead on leave’ was how Muir described Britain’s unemployed, borrowing the phrase (‘die Toten auf Urlaub’) from the German socialist Rosa Luxembourg.

It was not until 3 April 1934 that work resumed on No. 534. With a slow upturn in the economy, and concerned for British maritime prestige, particularly with the spectre of the Normandie, the government finally agreed to advance £3 million to complete the work, plus a further £5 million if it was decided to build a sister ship, as had been the original plan. A skirl of bagpipes accompanied the three hundred workers who marched through the gates of John Brown’s shipyard to scour off the tons of accumulated rust on the hulk, displace the colonies of birds nesting there, and resume building. Soon some one thousand men from all over the country were supplying what was needed to complete the liner later that summer.

One of the conditions of the government loan had been that Cunard should merge with White Star Lines, creating a strong British firm to compete for the North Atlantic trade. So-called ‘rationalisation’ was seen as the key to increasing efficiency and productivity, and allaying schemes of nationalisation which would cut a swathe through Britain’s staple industries. It was an au courant term even if no one was quite sure what it meant, and it invariably meant the merger of larger companies, with smaller ones left on the sidelines. The Labour MP for Jarrow, Ellen Wilkinson, wrote of this tendency in the Tyneside shipyards: ‘If the lambs would not lie down with the lions, the lions were ready to co-operate together to make certain of their victims later.’ Such mergers meant that by 1937 twenty-eight British shipyards, with a total capacity of over a million tons, had been put out of business. The men thus displaced were unlikely to be absorbed into other industries. Until 1938 the highest rates of unemployment in any British industry were in shipbuilding: not just along the Clyde, but in Belfast, the North-East of England and on Merseyside too. When Palmer’s shipyard closed in 1932, ‘Jarrow was utterly stagnant. There was no work. No one had a job except a few railway officials, and workers in the co-operative stores, and the few clerks and craftsmen who went out of town to their jobs each day.’ Across the country 60 per cent of those who had worked building or repairing ships were unemployed, compared to an average unemployment rate of around 22 per cent.

But the 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 collected in the underground passages, or the couplings breaking on the heavy metal tubs that conveyed the coal, ‘the coal-cutting machines cut out the seams, raising clouds of dust. When the compressed air exhaust caught it, when the colliers shovelled it on to the conveyors, when it tipped into the tubs, it was like black fog travelling into the ventilation. A miner in South Wales who is free from dust is called a wet lung. There is a difference between silicosis and pneumoconiosis. The stone dust [found in the stones at the bottom of pits] sets like cement [in the lungs] but coal doesn’t. Particles of silica cut into the lungs and kill the tissue. I remember taking my wife to my brother’s home. We saw a man leaning over a low wall. My wife said, “Whatever is the matter with that man?” “That,” I said, “is what dust does to a man.” He was gasping and coughing his lungs up. He was dying on his feet. He was 45 years old.’

Furthermore, older men were less likely to be offered the opportunity of learning a new trade, or of relocating to find work, and thus were forced into what was in effect early retirement whether they wanted — or could afford — it or not. And usually they couldn’t afford it, since with no older children still living at home who could have contributed to the family budget, the older unemployed worker was likely to be living on an income which was only half what it would have been if he was in work.

At the other end of the age range, young, untrained men often found similar difficulties in getting steady work. The school leaving age was fourteen, and only those whose family could afford to send them to grammar school, or who had won a scholarship, had any hope of secondary education. Most working-class children left elementary school at fourteen and, like Jim Wolveridge from Stepney in the East End of London, found themselves at a disadvantage. ‘I went into a dead end job … Not many kids in the neighbourhood did get good jobs … I spent a few weeks calling at the juvenile exchange at Toynbee Hall, but the few vacancies that were available were for boys who’d had secondary or grammar school education. That left me, and a good many more like me, out in the cold.’

Charles Graham was born in South Shields on the north-east coast of England, ‘a beautiful place. There’s beautiful scenery there’ — but little work. When he left school at fourteen in 1930 he ‘went round the quay trying to get to sea because this was the dream in that area. But after a year I got a job as a lather boy at a barber’s. Five shillings a week. I was there for about eight months. I knew I wasn’t going to learn how to cut hair because he didn’t want to teach me because he was afraid for his job. This was general. People were afraid of letting you know their little secrets. It was only short back and sides after all … Then I got a job as an errand boy in a grocer’s shop. Trade was really competitive. One grocer’s shop next to another … I used to have to fill these seven or fourteen pound bags of flour and deliver the orders … I used to have a sack barrow for deliveries and I had to walk about five miles [there] and five miles back … When I was seventeen I managed to get work from a lady who owned two hardware shops and a wholesale grocery business … My take home pay was 13/6d [minus five shillings a week deducted to repay his employer for driving lessons] (I would have had 14/- on the dole).’

Graham started work sweeping out the shop at 6 a.m., and ‘very often did not finish work until eight or nine p.m. (but there was no overtime pay) … I got a job as a driver for a biscuit factory. I was only 17 then and I had a huge van … You had to go at 60 miles an hour to get round … I managed to get a job with Wall’s ice cream once. With a tricycle. I was getting about 32/- a week. A fortune for me.’ But that came to an end too, and Graham got a job on a building site. ‘My stepfather knew the builder. That’s why I got the job … A lot of apprentices were used as cheap labour on the building site. They’d be signed on as apprentices and work for about four hours on the site and all they’d be doing was wheeling a barrow and stacking bricks like I was doing. And then when the building was completed the apprentices would be out before they’d even started laying bricks. Anyway, that lasted about eighteen months. Then I was unemployed again looking for work … During the slump you couldn’t join the Army because there were so many. There was such a great demand to get into the forces, to get away from it, although the wages were only 14/- a week, with stoppages out of that. But they were so selective, just like the police. The police could say six foot, and that was your lot, and so much chest because they had anyone to choose from.’ Eventually, when war broke out in 1939, Charles Graham was able to join the army. ‘I don’t suppose 90 per cent of the men in the army with me would have been able to get in two years before because of malnutrition. But when war broke out, they were all fit.’

Many others, taken on as cheap labour when they left school at fourteen, might find that once they reached eighteen, when by law their employer had to contribute towards their unemployment insurance, they were sacked. Being both less experienced than older men (and often untrained), and more expensive than the next wave of school leavers, a long period of unemployment followed in those regions where jobs were scarce anyway.

Donald Kear lost his job a fortnight before his twentieth birthday in 1933: ‘I was a machine attendant at a small factory [in the Forest of Dean, where coalmining was the predominant industry] and it was the custom of my employer to discharge employees when they became older and more expensive to him and employ younger lads in their place. There was plenty of labour available. Young lads were hanging around the factory gates every day looking for work.’

Jack Shaw ‘went butchering’ when he left school in Ashton-under-Lyne, just outside Manchester. ‘The idea in my dad’s mind was that I was going to learn a trade. But there was a lot of butchers and he picked the wrong one. He was probably only making enough to keep his self. He gave me five shillings a week. Then I got seven and sixpence. When I got [to] about eighteen I come to ten shillings a week and he couldn’t pay me any more. He said “I’ll give you a reference, and that’s about all I can do. I just hope you can get a job.” So that’s when I had my first experience of the dole.’

‘I am glad that I haven’t a son,’ said an unemployed Welsh miner vehemently. ‘It must be a heartbreaking business to watch your boy grow into manhood and then see him deteriorate because there is no work for him. And yet there are scores of young men in the Valley who have never worked since the age of sixteen … at sixteen they become insurable, and the employers sack them rather than face the extra expense. So we have young men who have never had a day’s work since. They have nothing to hope for but aimless drift. I’m glad no son of mine is in that position.’

Even those signing up for apprenticeships in industries such as engineering or shipbuilding might be no better off, since when they had completed their training the depressed state of the industry could mean there were no jobs. Around 4 per cent of juveniles (those aged fourteen to eighteen) were unemployed, but again this varied from area to area. In 1933, 10 per cent of boys and 9 per cent of girls available for work in Sheffield, a depressed city, were unemployed. The true figure of young people without work was undoubtedly much higher, as these statistics relate only to sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds: those under sixteen did not qualify for unemployment benefit, and therefore were not registered at the Labour Exchange. The implications for the future of large numbers of young people without skills, proper training or any real prospect of regular employment was bleak, not only for the individuals but for the national economy. ‘They tell me I haven’t the experience and they’ll not give me the chance of getting it,’ one young man reported in a Carnegie Trust survey complained, while others felt fed up with being ‘messed around’. The Pilgrim Trust was disquieted to discover that in Liverpool there were ‘large numbers of young men to be found who “don’t want work”’.

During the 1930s employers in depressed areas knew that they could take their pick from a large pool of the workless, and tended to shun those in shabby clothes or exhibiting tendencies to demoralisation and apathy, the inevitable consequences of long months stretching into years searching for work. The Unemployment Assistance Board stressed problems that arose from ‘loss of industrial efficiency’ in the long-term unemployed. E. Wight Bakke, a young American who came to Britain in 1931 on a Yale fellowship to study the problem of unemployment, was not alone in concluding that ‘even a short period of unemployment handicapped a man in his efforts to market his labour … The handicap increased with the length of time out of work … [long-term unemployment leads] to the slow death of all that makes a man ambitious, industrious and glad to be alive.’

So the dreary spiral was perpetuated: no work increasingly seen as a disqualification for work. The Pilgrim Trust also found that anyone with a minor physical defect such as a speech impediment, a slight limp, or even being short of stature, might be discriminated against, regardless of whether this was in any way relevant to the sort of work he was likely to be required to do, when there was an embarrassment of ‘perfect specimens’ for hire.

Disconsolate groups of the long-term unemployed, shabbily dressed, hanging round street corners slicked black by rain against a background of boarded-up shops, lounging against lamp-posts, playing desultory games in the gutter, kicking a tin around in lieu of a football, watched by ragged, grimy-faced urchins, have become a familiar image of the 1930s, captured in grainy Picture Post-like photographs in the years before Picture Post existed. The young Canadian writer George Woodcock described a typical scene when he took a free holiday from his ‘wretchedly paid’ job in London with a Welsh aunt in a small town in Glamorgan:

One day I decided to take a bus and visit the Rhondda area, the heart of the South Wales mining district … It was the worst of times in the Rhondda, though it probably looked little better than the best of times, since most of the mines were not working, and the smoke that would normally have given a dark, satanic aspect to the landscape was less evident than in more prosperous times. Still it was dismal enough … it had the feeling of occupied territory. Many of the shops had gone out of business, the mines had slowed down years ago, and the General Strike of 1926 — disastrous for workers — had delivered the coup de grace to the local economy. The people were shabby and resentful. Groups of ragged men squatted on their haunches, as miners do, and played pitch-and-toss with buttons, they had no halfpennies to venture. A man came strolling down the street, dejectedly whistling ‘The Red Flag’ in slow time as if it were a dirge.

Caught in a downpour of rain, Woodcock was

a sad, sodden object … as I came down into the valley beside a slag heap where fifty or so men and women were industriously picking over the ground. I caught up with a man walking along the overgrown road from the mine to the village, whose damp slate roofs I could see glistening about half a mile away. He was pushing a rusty old bicycle that had no saddle and no tires, but it served to transport the dirty gunnysack he had tied onto the handlebars. He had been picking up coal from the slag heap. ‘No bigger nor walnuts, man,’ he explained. The big coal had been taken years ago, so long ago was it that work had been seen in the village. I asked him how long he had been unemployed. ‘Ach y fi, man, it’s nine years I’ve been wasting and wasted.’ … He apologetically remarked that these days nobody had a fire in the village except to cook the mid-day dinner, if there was anything to cook, so I’d find it difficult to dry my clothes. Then he suddenly brightened. ‘Try the Brachi shop, man. They’ll have a fire, sure to goodness. And it’s glad they’ll be for a couple of pence to dry your clothes.’

Long ago an Italian named Brachi had found his way into one of the Welsh mining villages and had established a modest café. Others had followed him, but his name had clung, and Italian cafés in the Rhondda were generically called Brachi shops. The Brachi shop in Rhondda Fach was a melancholy place, its front in need of a paint, a sheet of old cardboard filling the broken part of the window in which stood a few dummy packets of tea and biscuits. A dejected girl came from the back. Her black hair and olive complexion were Mediterranean, but her voice had the lilt of Wales. She looked at me hostilely when I talked about a fire, and I think I was humiliating her into admitting that they, too, lit the fire only at mealtimes. Nobody came for meals anymore. So I spent my tuppence on a cup of tea, which she languidly made on a primus stove. She thawed a little as the kettle warmed up, and talked of her longing to go to London. I hope she got there.

The Orcadian poet Edwin Muir witnessed the state of the unemployed in Scotland when he took a journey there in 1934 at the request of the publishers of J.B. Priestley’s English Journey:

It was a warm, overcast summer day: groups of idle, sullen-looking young men stood at the street corners; smaller groups were wandering among the blue black ranges of pit-dumps which in that region are a substitute for nature; the houses looked empty and unemployed like their tenants; and the road along which the car stumbled was pitted and rent, as if it had recently been under shell-fire. Everything had the look of a Sunday that had lasted for many years, during which the bells had forgotten to ring and the Salvation Army, with its accordions and concertinas had gone into seclusion, so that one did not even bother to put on one’s best clothes: a disused, slovenly, everlasting Sunday. The open shops had an unconvincing yet illicit look, and the few black-dusted miners whom I saw trudging home seemed hardly to believe in their own existence … A century ago there was a great clearance from the Highlands, which still rouses the anger of the people living there. At present, on a far bigger scale, a silent clearance is going on in industrial Scotland, a clearance not of human beings, but of what they depend on for life.