Читать книгу The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain - Juliet Gardiner, Juliet Gardiner - Страница 12

You were such an angel to take trouble with my old women and it was really worthwhile. I do not know whether this story of an old castle will affect the Labour vote. People are so odd. They might say, ‘He is a humbug: he talks Labour and lives in a castle.’ But they might also say, ‘How splendid of him when he lives in a castle to come and worry about our little affairs.’

Harold Nicolson writing to his wife Vita Sackville-West, who had entertained fifty ladies from the West Leicester Women’s Conservative Association (his constituency) at their home, Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, on 5 June 1937

‘Southampton to Newcastle, Newcastle to Norwich: memories rose like milk coming to the boil. I had seen England. I had seen a lot of Englands. How many?’, J.B. Priestley asked himself at the conclusion of his English Journey in 1933. But although Priestley had roamed (usually by ‘motor coach’, which he found ‘voluptuous, sybaritic … This is how the ancient Persian monarchs would have travelled, if they’d known the trick of it … they have annihilated the old distinction between rich and poor travellers’) from Bristol in the West to Norwich in the East, from Southampton in the South to Yorkshire, Lancashire and Tyneside in the North, by way of Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Arnold Bennett’s ‘five pottery towns’ in between, he had not, as most commentators had not, rambled down to England’s south-westernmost extremity, Cornwall. If he had, he would have found there unemployment, poverty and despair to equal any found in the reproach that Jarrow, Merthyr Tydfil, Clydeside and the other depressed areas constituted.

The village of St Day, named for a Celtic saint and a stopping place in the Middle Ages for pilgrims on their journey to St Michael’s Mount, lies nine miles north of Falmouth and seven miles east of Truro in Cornwall. A prosperous village in the early nineteenth century, its wealth was founded on copper-mining until 1870, when competition from Chile, Bolivia and Peru meant that 2,000 men were thrown out of work when the United Mines closed down. ‘The dismal procession of the Gwennap [the parish in which St Day is located] Mines to the scrap heap had passed, [and] the modern history of St Day had begun. When the Great War came it was trotting down the hill at a leisurely pace. When the war ended the speed of the pace was accelerated and that was the only difference the War made,’ explained Richard Blewett, the Medical Officer of Health for the district, in a ‘modern historical survey’ of St Day he prepared in 1935 for a Board of Education short course for elementary school teachers held at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

The land surrounding the village was ‘pocked by mineshafts … and scarred by “burrows” or mine tips, over many of which nature is gradually casting a blanket of heather’. In 1935 the rate of unemployment in St Day was nearly 30 per cent, since not only had copper-mining collapsed, but so, in the mid-1920s, had the tin-mining industry around nearby Redruth and Cambourne, from where many of St Day’s inhabitants came in search of cheaper housing — even in 1935 the average rent of a workman’s house was not much more than two shillings a week. China clay production, which it had been hoped might fill the vacuum left by the decline of mining had done no such thing: by the end of 1932 output had fallen 40 per cent since 1929, and the price had fallen by more than 30 per cent. The Cornish economy was in paralysis, with the population having fallen in the decade up to 1931 by 0.9 per cent (while that of the rest of England and Wales had risen by 5.5 per cent), and the annual average of unemployment between 1930 and 1933 was 21.6 per cent.

Moreover, de-industrialisation at the turn of the century meant that trade unionism amongst the Cornish miners was never the force it was in the Welsh Valleys. Even when a strike was organised by the Transport and General Workers’ Union in January 1939 at South Crofty mine, when police and strikers clashed, only 234 men out of a total workforce of 435 stopped work, while the seasonal and scattered nature of the tourist industry meant that unionism did not find a foothold among those toiling in hotels and other holiday amenities. Politically Cornwall, as part of Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’ and with its strong tradition of religious nonconformism remained a fairly staunch Liberal stronghold during the 1930s (the Conservatives managed to take two seats in the 1931 election and three in 1935), with Isaac Foot, MP for Bodmin until 1935 — the patriarch of a radical dynasty that included the future Labour leader Michael Foot and the campaigning Socialist Workers’ Party and Daily Mirror journalist Paul Foot — the ‘towering presence’. An eloquent preacher and stirring orator, with an ‘anti-drink, anti-betting, evangelical stance’, Foot was revered throughout the county and the fishermen’s luggers at Looe were reputed to be painted in the Liberal colours of blue and yellow in his honour. Indeed, ‘Our Isaac’ was an important factor in preventing what another Cornishman (though Foot was actually a native of Devon, and began his political career there), the historian A.L. Rowse, who stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate for Penryn and Falmouth in both elections in the thirties, believed was ‘the prime task for Labour in Cornwall … to bring home the futility of going on being Liberal [since] Cornish liberalism [was] a fossilised survival’ — as, unfortunately, was the inter-war Cornish economy.

Fishing was also in the doldrums in Cornwall by the mid-1930s. ‘Outside the Duchy the legend still holds that the fisher is the typical Cornishman,’ wrote the former suffragist Cicely Hamilton on her journey round England in 1938, ‘but, in sober fact, that race of Cornish fishers is a race that is dwindling fast.’ With the Cornish fisheries unable to compete with those of the Artic and the North Sea, there were only two first-class steam trawlers registered in the whole of Devon and Cornwall by 1938, one of which had not put to sea since 1925, and whereas there had been 150 first-class motor vessels in 1919, there were only ninety-one by 1938. The decline in the number of sailing boats was even more dramatic. It was much the same with agriculture: under-investment and out-of-date production methods on family farms that were too small to be economic without a high degree of specialisation meant that there were mutterings by the 1930s of the need to ‘collectivise’ Cornish farms if they were ever to be economically viable. There were, as Cicely Hamilton found, still some earning a living from the Cornish soil: flower-growers. The trade had started on the Isles of Scilly, taking advantage of the islands’ mild winters. At first it had been small, ‘a few boxes packed with narcissus and daffodils and shipped on the little mail boat that three times a week makes the voyage to St Mary’s, and three times a week makes it back to Penzance’. But by the mid-thirties flower-growing had spread to the mainland, and ‘in the spring of the year, the Great Western Railway, night by night, carries the spoil of the daffodil fields to the markets of London and the midlands’.

Apart from its abundance of spring flowers, Cornwall’s mild climate appeared to offer its only prospect of economic salvation. Every summer the Cornish Riviera Express conveyed many thousands of tourists, not only ‘the privileged minority who might otherwise holiday in the real Mediterranean, but … anyone who could afford the price of a third class ticket from Paddington’. The journalist and travel writer S.P.B. Mais helped the romance along with a series of promotional booklets written at the behest of the Great Western Railway hinting at ‘a western land of Celtic mysticism’. Even the trains carried such resonant names as Trelawney, Tintagel Castle, Tre, Pol and Pen. When a rival railway company decided to make North Cornwall its own preserve, putting such places as Tintagel and Boscastle on the tourist map, it gave its locomotives such appropriately Arthurian names as Merlin, Lyonesse, Iseult, Sir Cador of Cornwall, Sir Constantine — and even the traitorous Sir Mordred was briefly considered suitable. Despite their mystic names, the trains were among the fastest in the world. In 1938 the playwright Beverley Nichols was struck by the anachronism of George VI ‘flying through a country that even his father would hardly recognise, so quickly are the landscapes passing’, to collect ‘a grey cloak, a brace of greyhounds, a pair of gilt spurs, a pound of cumin, a salmon spear, a pair of white gloves, a hundred shillings and a pound of pepper’, dues owed by the Duchy of Cornwall to its Duke/King.

The South-West’s tourism boom had begun before the First World War, and it expanded dramatically between 1920 and 1938, with a rise of 80 per cent in the number of people employed in hotels, boarding houses, laundries and cafés in Devon and Cornwall. Tourists came not only by train but increasingly by coach or car, as roads were improved and car-ownership increased. The tourist traffic was of course seasonal: employment in Cornwall would dip to its lowest point in January, and peak in June.

Cornwall, with its Arthurian romance, its Celtic culture, its periodic ‘Cornish revival’ movements, now intertwined with the romance of ivy-covered, suggestively gothic, disused mineshafts and engine houses, spectacular coastline and stretches of silver sand, and the charm of ‘remote accessibility’, also held appeal for those who had no need to fuss with a third-class railway ticket, but could motor down with a wicker picnic hamper (though the journey on A-class roads from London might well require an overnight stop). During the 1930s Cornwall became the summer destination of choice of a number of artistic, literary and generally ‘bohemian’ types — though with its ‘reputable light’ Cornwall had been attracting artists challenged to paint its ever-changing seascapes since before the First World War. Vanessa Bell went (as did her sister Virginia Woolf), Augustus John (whose son Edwin had settled at Mousehole), the artist Laura Knight (who also had a cottage in Mousehole), her friend and fellow painter Dod Procter and her artist husband Ernest, as well as the writer who gave Cornwall to popular literature, and whose work is still celebrated in an annual festival that brings literary tourism to Cornwall, Daphne du Maurier.

Although he did move not permanently to Cornwall until 1939, the painter Ben Nicholson was a regular summer visitor to St Ives throughout the thirties. There was already a thriving Society of Artists in the town, which had held an annual exhibition since 1927 and sent work to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It was in St Ives that Nicholson ‘discovered’ the local fisherman Alfred Wallis, who often painted on cardboard supplied by the local grocer. ‘No one likes Wallis’ paintings [though of course] no one liked Van Gogh for a time,’ reported the artist Christopher Wood, who had been on a walk with Nicholson when they glimpsed Wallis’s work for the first time through the open door of his cottage. But they would. Today twelve of his paintings hang in Tate St Ives, and his images of sailing boats circulate on greetings cards.

But St Ives, Newlyn and Mennabilly/Manderley were as far from the concerns of St Day as were the ‘professional Cornishmen’ of the 1930s, most notable among them the historian A.L. Rowse and the essayist ‘Q’, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Similarly, the town had little time for a new revivalist organisation, Tyr Ha Tavas (Land and Language), which emerged in 1933, declaring that it stood for ‘the unity of persons of Cornish birth or descent who value their Cornish heritage, and who desire to maintain the outlook, individualism, culture, and idealism characteristic of their race’, and pronouncing a determination ‘to show Cornish people what Cornish men have done and what they still can do to help the World’. There had been a series of earlier Cornish revivalist movements, since ‘Every Cornishman knows well enough, proud as he may be of belonging to the British Empire, that he is no more an Englishman than a Caithness man is, that he has as much right to separate local patriotism to his motherland … as has a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, or even a Colonial, and that he is as much a Celt and as little of an Anglo-Saxon as any Gael, Cymro, Manxman or Breton.’ A College of Bards, a Cornish Gorsedd, affiliated to its Welsh and Breton sister organisations, was established in 1927, and held annual ceremonies conducted by blue-robed bards speaking the Cornish language. But by 1937 a newspaper correspondent reluctantly admitted: ‘If we are quite truthful we have to admit that the revival of the Gorsedd has scarcely touched the lives of the common people of Cornwall.’

The members of Tyr Ha Tavas, mainly young people, lobbied local MPs to give greater importance to specifically Cornish problems, and produced a magazine, Kernow (the Cornish word for ‘Cornwall’). However, Kernow always sold more copies to those outside Cornwall than to those who lived there, and the marginal political thrust of Tyr Ha Tavas failed entirely to address the social and economic problems of the county, which St Day had in great number.

Those few men still employed in the few mines operating would leave the village just after five in the morning to go down on the early-morning shift, ‘up again at 3.30 p.m. then walk home … there were no baths or showers … mining was hard, dirty and wet work and the miners did almost everything by hand. The only lighting was candles or carbide lights.’ Nevertheless, work was so scarce in the Welsh coalmines that ‘A number of families decided to pack up and head for Cornwall, with just a glimmer of hope that their luck might change,’ remembers F.R. Clymo, who was a boy at the time.

I have no idea how many were involved in this trek, but I well remember five or six men coming to St Day … It took them almost a month to reach us, sleeping rough as they went. They were desperate men who had to make it because their families left behind in the valleys were dependent on them. About a month later when accommodation had been found their families came down in lorries, which were sponsored by the British Legion … I remember the new intake of Welsh girls and boys who came to our school … they were like refugees … [but] at no time did we have any industrial projects since the closing of the mining industry … very few people were tempted to become residents here.

The only casual work likely to be had, Clymo recalled, was

when Falmouth Docks would get a shipload of cement in, which would have to be unloaded … it was a job not done by the dock labourers, so … the labour exchange would direct a certain number of unemployed men to report to the docks … There was no such thing as refusal. Refusing meant instant stoppage of unemployment benefits … I’ve seen men return after three days of this work with their hands raw and bleeding through continually carrying hundredweights of hot cement from the ship to the warehouse. On another occasion, right here in the village the GPO put the main telephone cables underground from the Exchange … to the Old Post Office in Market Square. Several villagers who were unemployed were directed to do this work … they did the work with hammers and gads (steel chisels); first they moved the hard top, then they had to dig down three feet with pick and shovel … Many of them had not worked for years, so with soft hands and not much muscle they were soon in trouble with blistered and bleeding hands. Some of them got a few bruises as well especially those holding the chisels, because the hammer men, who were out of practice, invariably missed and consequently delivered a blow to the holder’s hands. Yet not much sympathy was ever shown because after all it was only a temporary job, as soon as it was finished they would all be laid off and back on the dole again with plenty of time to heal their wounds … It was quite a common sight to see half a dozen [older] women on a sunny dry afternoon … heading for Unity Woods and the old Tram Road, their mission to collect sticks or any broken limbs of trees to keep the fire alight … These women wore long hessian aprons (towsers to us), some wore caps and the odd one or two smoked a clay pipe. They would round up as much wood as they could carry in the big aprons. Some would do this two or three times a week to save buying coal. Coal was cheap but they could not afford to buy it … times were bad, they were old at forty, no one was ever in a position to help them … Life was tough, only the very strongest got through.

There was, reported Richard Blewett in his 1935 survey, ‘a noticeable amount of squalor in the village and its surroundings’. Electric street lighting had only arrived at St Day in February that year, no sewerage scheme existed, and water was delivered in barrels by horse and cart. A survey of sixteen households revealed an average of seven children per family, and of six people sleeping in the same bedroom.

‘St Day is poverty stricken,’ Blewett concluded. Three hundred and twenty of its inhabitants were excused all or part of their rates, and 50 per cent of children on the school register were entitled to free milk, which was provided when the weekly household income did not exceed six shillings per head: in 1937, Merthyr Tydfil’s schools were handing out free milk to only 25 per cent of their pupils.

‘While 268 St Day men and women were employed in 1935, most finding some sort of work in the village, and others ventured to Truro, Falmouth, Redruth or Cambourne, 82 were unemployed’ — ‘NEARLY A QUARTER’ wrote Blewett in capital letters with heavy underlining. ‘The fathers of 53 families are unemployed and their children number 127 at school. I can find no relationship between the unemployment of the fathers and the intelligence of the children.’

The question of the relationship between unemployment and poverty, physical health and psychological well-being (as well as crime) preoccupied politicians, both national and local, committees, commissions and inquiries, social investigators, memoirists, novelists and newspaper pundits in the 1930s. The Pilgrim Trust surveyed a thousand unemployed men drawn from six areas throughout Britain and published its findings as Men Without Work; E. Wight Bakke shared the life, insofar as it was possible to do so, of The Unemployed Man in the London Borough of Greenwich; Hubert Llewellyn Smith led a team at the London School of Economics assessing what had changed since Booth’s turn-of-the-century survey Life and Labour of the People in London; Seebohm Rowntree set out to remeasure ‘poverty and progress in York’ as he had done in a survey published in 1901, and though he found poverty alleviated by 50 per cent, the cause, he noted, was different: in Booth’s day it had been low wages, now it was unemployment, which had also struck the London inquiry. Herbert Tout, son of a distinguished Manchester medieval historian, did the same — though much more briefly — for Bristol; Hilda Jennings reported on conditions in the mining community of Brynmawr in South Wales, where unemployment was among the highest in Britain; the Carnegie Trust reported on the young unemployed in the same region; and there were many more specific investigations into the health of the unemployed, the incidence of maternal and infant mortality, and other long-term effects of being without work.

Believing that ‘our civilisation was rather like the stock comic figure of the professor who knows all about electrons but does not know how to boil an egg or tie his bootlaces. Our knowledge begins anywhere but at home’, J.B. Priestley had set out on his unscientific but evocatively impressionistic journey across England, determined not to be one of those who, because they had ‘never poked [their noses] outside Westminster, the City and Fleet Street’, were unaware of what was happening in ‘outer England’. He was not alone. Throughout the decade Britain (most especially England) would be crisscrossed by those bent on pinning down the true state of the nation — largely by heading north. Honest inquiry, indictment, nostalgic gazetteer, guidebook (although often light on precise information — H.V. Morton’s comment on the ‘Five Sisters’ window in York Minster was, ‘No words can describe it; it must be seen,’ and he found the pillars of Gloucester Cathedral ‘beyond description’), zeitgeist entrapper, each book had a different agenda, each traveller was freighted with different baggage. But all had a common purpose: to show Priestley’s ‘outer England’ to those in ‘inner England’ who would buy their books (‘Fact is now the fashion’ in publishing), read their articles, take notice, maybe even take action. Towards the end of the decade this documentary impulse would crystallise in the formation of Mass-Observation, which aimed to give voice to the masses it observed, in the documentary films of John Grierson and others, and in the magazine Picture Post. But until then the pickings were there to be had for anyone who could get a commission to turn them over.

H.V. Morton had been ‘in search of’ England (then Scotland, Ireland and Wales) since the end of the 1920s, but he was a self-confessed ‘magpie picking up any bright thing that pleased me’, and ‘deliberately shirked realities. I made wide and inconvenient circles to avoid modern towns and cities … I devoted myself to ancient towns and cathedral cities, to green fields and pretty things.’ Though Morton found himself drawn more into the inequities of urban industrial poverty as the decade progressed, he never lost his visceral fondness for a pre-industrial, prelapsarian rural world, and scuttled back to its soft embrace as often as he could, defending the countryside against neglect and exploitation.

The journalist J.L. Hodson roamed from the countryside of Norfolk and Suffolk up the north-east coast, taking in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and then back south to the ‘English seaside’ and ‘London town’ via the Potteries. He called the resultant book Our Two Englands (1936), after Disraeli’s concept of two nations, one rich, the other poor. ‘We know no more about the unemployed, those of us who live apart from them, than those who stayed at home knew of the Great War,’ Hodson concluded of the ‘six millions of men, women and children in England [who] have neither enough to eat, nor enough clothes to wear, nothing like enough either on backs or beds’.

An American professor of English, Mary Ellen Chase, found two Englands too, but while her divide was geographic like that of the other roamers, her condemnation was of a different order. Venturing north after a pleasant amble round Southern England, Chase reported in her book In England Now (1937) that ‘there are few more ugly, more depressing places on this earth than the industrial towns of northern England. Their very names lack the euphony of the south: Manchester, Staylebury, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Crewe and Preston.’ Although she noted that the North was known for its radical politics and economics, Chase conjectured that this was partly the result of the ‘wilder, freer winds that sweep across wider, higher, more barren moors’, she could not wait to leave behind the ‘rows upon rows of identical grey houses where strident women with untidy babies stand in doorways … the smell of cheap petrol, fish and chips, smoke and wet woollens; treeless streets; advertisements for Lyons’ tea, Capstan and Woodbine cigarettes; miserable shops displaying through their unwashed windows, pink rock candy, drill overalls, tinned sardines, sticky kippers, sucking dummies for babies, garish underwear, impossible hats …’

However, Cicely Hamilton, who experienced ‘a stirring of the heart’ every time she landed at Dover, recognised that the real England was ‘essentially urban, living by the office, the factory and the shop’. She made no apologies for devoting two chapters of her survey Modern England. As Seen by an Englishwoman to what she called ‘hard core unemployment’, to ‘those Englishmen cast out of industry in the fullness of their skill and experience’.

Beverley Nichols took a ‘bird’s eye’ view of the country in 1938 to ‘differentiate it from the England of 1928’, and although he modestly recognised that the nation’s problems ‘cannot be settled in a single book … at least they can be indicated’ Priestley had admitted, ‘I have certain quite strong political opinions and I tend more and more to bring them into my writing,’ and was clear about what he was looking for before he set out: ‘I know there is deep distress in the country. I have seen some of it, just a glimpse of it, already. And I know there is far, far more ahead of me.’

In his indictment Hungry England (1932), Fenner Brockway recognised that ‘figures and statistics signify little’ unless they are translated to a human scale. He described a family of four ‘existing on 14s.6d a week; 5s for rent at the lowest 1s.6d for coal and lighting. Allow nothing at all for clothing and household extras. That leaves 8s to provide food for two adults and two children. How can it be done without leaving actual hunger — hunger gnawing at the stomach, hunger making one dizzy and weak, hunger destroying one’s body and destroying one’s mind.’

The Daily Worker journalist and typographer Alan Hutt followed much the same route that Brockway had taken through Lancashire, the Black Country, Tyneside and Teesside, South Wales, Clydeside and Suffolk to investigate the effects of seasonal unemployment on rural poverty, and discovered — or rather confirmed — that ‘The stark reality is that in 1933, for the mass of the population, Britain is a hungry Britain, badly fed, clothed and housed.’

The ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, another with ‘quite strong political opinions’ that he tended to bring into his writing) left his part-time job in a Hampstead bookshop and took The Road to Wigan Pier for two months, finding no pier (it was a music-hall joke attributed to George Formby’s father), but a ‘strange country [of] ugliness so frightful and arresting that we are obliged to come to terms with it’. He took the road north partly because he ‘wanted to see what mass unemployment is like at its worst, partly in order to see the most typical section of the English working-class at close quarters’. What he found was fury-inducing hard-core unemployment, poverty, deprivation, exploitation, squalor and hopelessness. Some thought his account exaggerated: the right-wing historian Arthur Bryant accused him of being a ‘super sensitive’ tourist, searching for local colour in the land of the unemployed, producing ‘propaganda’ in the name of literature.

Others began to publish their autobiographies of the ‘hungry thirties’ during the decade. John Brown went ‘on the tramp’ for work before ending up as a student at Ruskin College, Oxford; the young cabinet-maker Max Cohen wrote an account of his life as ‘one of the unemployed’, mainly in the East End of London; another autobiography was that of George Tomlinson, an uncomplaining coalminer from Nottingham who found that ‘After four years of unemployment I get a thrill out of ignoring the pit buzzer,’ and set off for a walk in Sherwood Forest, reminding himself that ‘If I have lost my job, I have also lost a hard master.’ Tomlinson was one of the few unemployed at the time who believed there was ‘very little hostility between the “means test” visitor and the family … The visitor does his rather unpleasant job in a way that no fair-minded person could object or take exception to. He was probably unemployed himself before he took the job.’

The BBC broadcast a series of talks on unemployment in 1931. The speakers had included John Maynard Keynes, Seebohm Rowntree and Herbert Morrison, with the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin winding up. These were followed by six lectures by Sir William Beveridge in which he aimed to diagnose the ‘disease of unemployment’ by tracing its origins back to before the First World War, considering whether the causes were labour or credit, and examining such symptoms as ‘social malingering’ before trying to calculate the cost of the ‘cure’. Beveridge had begun to change his mind on unemployment, moving away from the idea that its main cause was a residual section of the population that would always be unemployable for reasons of physical or moral deficiency, to an understanding of its structural nature, recognising that ‘There is not a special class or kind of people who constitute the unemployed. They come from almost every calling and have as great a variety of interests and capacities as any other member of the community. They are ordinary decent people like ourselves to whom an extraordinary misfortune has happened.’ Since this was the case, Beveridge later regretted that he had not made his talks more ‘human’. Instead of assailing his listeners with abstract notions and yards of statistics, he reflected, he should have talked more about the social consequences, how actual people were affected.

The human face of unemployment was given more prominence in a series of articles that appeared in The Listener, ‘the organ of the BBC’, and were subsequently published as a book, but never broadcast. Memoirs of the Unemployed described the psychological effects of unemployment on people’s lives, their politics and their hopes for the future. The idea had come from a similar study carried out in Marienthal, a small industrial village near Vienna, where the closure of the textile mill in 1929 had thrown almost the entire population out of work, and from a competition organised by the Institute of Social Economy in Warsaw which had resulted in the publication of fifty-seven vivid accounts sent in by the Polish unemployed.

In 1932 the ubiquitous journalist S.P.B. Mais had travelled through some of England’s lesser-known beauty spots at the behest of the BBC. His seventeen talks, subsequently published as a book, were entitled This Unknown Island. The following year the BBC commissioned Mais to give a ‘human face’ to unemployment on the radio by exploring a different sort of unknown island. This time, rather than idyllic places he visited Labour Exchanges, out-of-work clubs and settlements and other places where species unemployed might be located, talking to organisers and the unemployed themselves, ‘black-coated’ (now ‘white-collar’) and former rural workers, women who were either out of work themselves or were bearing the brunt of coping with no regular wage coming in. The intention of the exercise, entitled Time to Spare, was largely to give people who had no personal experience of unemployment ‘an account from the unemployed themselves of what life is like when one is out of work, what steps they take to cope with the problems of existence … since if you have never been out of work you can no more realize the horror of unemployment than you can realize the horror of leprosy … If you have never moved outside of Sussex, you can no longer visualize the destitution on the banks of the Tyne than you can visualize a tornado in Japan.’

Mais was eager to learn all he could, but he was a naïve observer. After commenting on the neatness of the women’s clothes at a female keep-fit class in Tyneside he was told tartly, ‘It’s perhaps just as well that you can’t see what they’ve got on underneath.’ Time to Spare was broadcast in early January 1933, the series introduced by the Prince of Wales. Mais called it ‘an S.O.S. message, probably the most urgent you will ever hear and it vitally concerns you. You are called upon to create an entirely new social order. The bottom has apparently fallen out of the old world in which everything was subordinated to a day’s work.’ He appealed to listeners (who were clearly not envisaged as the unemployed themselves) to rally round and ‘make yourself known to the manager of your local Labour Exchange, or if you live in a village, to the Schoolmaster or Parson’, to initiate schemes to occupy those without work.

The second series of Time to Spare, which started in April 1934, was rather less of an outsider’s view of the unemployed: this time the producer Felix Greene toured the country as Mais had, but when he found an unemployed person with a compelling story to tell, he invited him or her to Broadcasting House in London, where he got them talking and their conversation was relayed over a loudspeaker to the next room, where secretaries transcribed their words. In his introduction, Mais suggested that things had improved since the first series, but that there was no room for complacency. Indeed, the programmes caused a furore in the press, particularly since they started transmission at the same time as the final reading of the Unemployment Bill was going through the Commons. Labour MPs quoted from them (they were reprinted in The Listener) to harangue the government about the Means Test and proposals to further limit the entitlement of the unemployed to benefits.

On 5 June 1934 the Daily Herald reported: ‘Time to Spare is shattering too many illusions. Millions are being turned against the Government.’ Sir John Reith, Director General of the BBC, was summoned to 10 Downing Street to be told by Ramsay MacDonald that the series could not continue. Reith recognised that the government had the power to pull the programmes, but told MacDonald that if this were done, there would be a twenty-minute silence at the time they would have been broadcast, and it would be announced that this was because the government had ‘refused to allow the unemployed to express their view’. The series continued.

Although the Director of Talks at the BBC, Charles Siepmann, was concerned that the programmes on unemployment merely attempted to ameliorate its effects, rather than probing its possible political causes, Wal Hannington, leader of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), had his request to be allowed to broadcast turned down by the BBC on the grounds that it wished to avoid controversy. Denied a voice on the airwaves, Hannington wrote a number of books castigating government policy and describing the plight of the unemployed, with such unequivocal titles as Never on Our Knees, Ten Lean Years, Unemployed Struggles. Several of these were published by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which brought the hardships of those suffering unemployment, as well as suggestions for the problem’s solution, to a wider and very engaged audience — Gollancz had also published Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier and, in collaboration with his usual publisher, Priestley’s English Journey.

Others drew on what they had experienced of unemployment or saw all around them, and wrote novels about how it affected men, their families, their communities. Walter Greenwood, who had three spells of unemployment from his work as a clerk and council canvasser, was the author of Love on the Dole, which was the probably the best-known novel of the Depression. Nevertheless, in 1936 the British Board of Film Censors twice refused to allow a film version to be shown in cinemas on both moral (too much bad language) and political (a scene of unemployed men fighting the police) grounds. It was, they declared, a ‘very sordid story in very sordid surroundings’, despite the fact that both the book and a play based on it had enjoyed great success. It finally reached the screen in 1941.

Although Love on the Dole was the only ‘Depression novel’ that was a best-seller, publishers were anxious to find ‘authentic’ proletarian writers — partly because there were so few of them. As the novelist, reviewer and editor Cyril Connolly pointed out, ‘90 per cent of all English authors come from the Mandarin class … A rigorous class system blankets down all attempts to enlarge these barriers. The English mandarin simply cannot get at pugilists, gangsters, speakeasies, negroes’- or the unemployed, he might have added. In June 1927 the Communist newspaper the Sunday Worker had written of having the ‘misfortune to be compelled to make do with stories about the working-class who are “sympathetic” but have no first hand knowledge of workers’ lives’.

But that changed over the next decade: with time on their hands, men turned to writing about what they knew only too well. Leslie Halward, an unemployed plasterer, had a story accepted by John o’London’s magazine — and was paid £100 just as the Means Test man was scheduled to call. Another out-of-work plasterer, Jack Hilton, was sent to Strangeways for six months in 1932 for leading an unemployed workers’ protest in Rochdale, and wrote his autobiography and a novel — about unemployed workers’ protests — while he was in prison. William Holt, a weaver, went to jail for nine months for the same offence, this time committed at Todmorden; when he was released he couldn’t find a job and was about to be evicted so he resumed the writing he had always done, but now his subject was invariably the experience of unemployment, selling his books from door to door in the Calder Valley. Walter Brierley recounted the harrowing tale of the depredations wrought by a Means-Test Man (1935); the novel sold 6,000 copies in the first year of publication. James Hanley’s Grey Children was a story of ‘humbug and misery’ in the lives of unemployed shipyard workers; Roger Dataller’s Steel Saraband was a tale of unemployment in the steelworks; Lewis Jones’s Cmwardy and also his later We Live told of the hard lives of miners in the Welsh Valleys. Lewis Grassic Gibbon (the stirring pseudonym of Leslie Mitchell) wrote a powerful dialect trilogy of Scotland’s ills, A Scots Quair, the story of a family moving from rural to urban poverty, of which the third volume, Grey Granite (1934), charts their response to unemployment in a fictitious industrial city. Jack Lindsay (writing under the pseudonym Richard Preston) wrote a novel dealing with the collapse of the Cornish economy.

One author had some notepaper printed with the heading ‘B.L. Coombes, Miner-Author’ after the success of his first book, These Poor Hands (1937), another Left Book Club choice, and he continued to work as both. A[rchibald]. J. Cronin, who had been appointed Medical Inspector of Mines in 1924, drew on his experience of the wretched conditions in the coal industry for The Stars Look Down (1935), while his sensationally successful next novel, The Citadel (1937), was an attack on the system of private medicine, again drawing on his experiences in Tredegar, where he had witnessed the correlation between the inhalation of coal dust and lung disease, and its ‘model’ treatment with the help of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society.

By the second half of the thirties the prejudice against those who had no intimate experience of working-class life, of poverty and unemployment, seems to have somewhat dissipated: there was an important story to be told, whoever the teller. The one-time editor of the Strand Magazine and John O’London’s, George Blake, wrote a novel set in the shipyards, and in Ruined City Nevil Shute (who was an engineer rather than a manual worker) wrote of a rescue package dreamed up by an altruistic businessman for a thinly disguised Jarrow.

Although unemployment seared deepest into the working classes, not all the middle classes escaped: by 1934 an estimated 4,000 black-coated workers were without work, and their plight began to be described in such novels as Simon Blumefeld’s They Won’t Let You Live (1939), in which the graduate protagonist unsuccessfully applies for 187 jobs, eventually deciding to kill himself. Even the thriller writer Eric Ambler used the frustration of a skilled production engineer who could not find work as the basis for the plot of Cause for Alarm, published in 1938.

Despite the widespread evocations of unemployment, both real and fictional, which stood as indictments of a system that had failed, political calls to action — let alone revolution — were muted. The BBC dutifully bore vivid witness to the plight of the unemployed, but in its efforts to avoid more controversy than programmes such as Time to Spare already whipped up, it largely avoided probing the causes of unemployment and means of relieving it, other than by strenuous voluntary efforts to ‘help’. When ‘Edward Windsor’, as Wal Hannington consistently referred to the Prince of Wales, an active supporter of voluntary movements for the unemployed, came to the microphone in December 1933 to introduce the first series of Time to Spare, he set the tone by asserting that ‘the causes of unemployment are beyond our control, and we might differ in our estimate of them, but it is largely within our power to control the effects of unemployment. The unemployed are just our fellow men, the same as ourselves, only less [considerably less in his case] fortunate.’

However, novels such as Love on the Dole were hailed as a wake-up call, with the left-wing novelist Ethel Mannin hoping that ‘It is going to shock smug, fashionable, comfortably-off, middle-class London into a realisation of what the industrial north is really like.’ One reader at an Ilkeston public library noticed how many grimy thumbprints such novels bore, evidence, he thought, of their having ‘clearly passed through the hands of a variety of curious proletarians’. Thus, in various ways and with varying intensity, by the end of the decade the contours of unemployed Britain in the 1930s had been, if not fully explained, at least comprehensively mapped — even if some declined to listen, or to believe that the topography was quite so bleakly craggy as others portrayed it.