Читать книгу The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain - Juliet Gardiner, Juliet Gardiner - Страница 18

If the hours which are designated as leisure time are an important part of the life of the community, they are an especially important part of the life of that portion of the community who happens to have no work to do. For a man who has a job, the day’s activities centre round that job. It takes the greatest share of his time. It eliminates the necessity of constant choices concerning what shall be done with his day. It provides him with the means of enjoying his spare time at the various forms of voluntary or commercial amusement fairly regularly and dressed in clothes of which he need not be ashamed.

With the man out of a job, it is different …

E. Wight Bakke, The Unemployed Man: A Social Study (1934)

He could make marvellous things with his hands. He once made a church from about five thousand matchsticks … I think it took him two years … He was always having to invent something … an alarm clock, that was a thing of the past, and he sat for weeks and weeks … fiddling with his tools and pieces of metal and we had a cuckoo clock … it occupied his mind for weeks.

Interview by Kate Nicholas with Mrs Bell, the daughter of a long-term unemployed Teesside man

‘What animals cause you the most worry?’ the unemployed Nottingham miner George Tomlinson once asked a gamekeeper: ‘I was thinking of stoats, weasels, foxes and their like. But he answered sourly, “miners”.’ Tomlinson ‘knew well enough what he meant, for the collier when he sets his hand to it is the most skilful of poachers. I loved to watch them go out in the evening, slipping merrily along a forest path [Tomlinson lived near Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest], single file like Indian braves but not a bit like Indians in their appearance. Old slouch hats, short coats with big bulging pockets, a cosh pulled down the back of the coat and sticking out above their heads.’

‘Rabbits were the thing! And a good dog was half the battle.’ George Bestford, an unemployed Durham miner whose father had come north when the Cornish mining industry collapsed, had ‘a good whippet! I think we’d have starved if it hadn’t been for the dog. Away he’d go and back with a rabbit. They always had the game keepers out and they were there watching to make sure you didn’t get any of their game … I was lucky because I was well in with a farmer and he used to let me have half what we caught on his land. So on a moonlit night — away with the dogs and catch a few rabbits! Some of the farmers were very good. They would give you some potatoes or a turnip. But some would give you nothing … We used to pinch off them.’

A rabbit for the pot would supplement the endless dole diet of bread and margarine, and suet: ‘Every miner’s house used suet. That was like the basic. Every day you’d have something with suet in for the main meal of the day. To fill you up. You’d buy a big piece of suet from the butcher’s for tuppence and every day you grated a bit of suet into the flour. Monday’s dinner was always a plain suet pudding with what was left from Sunday’s dinner. Another day was “pot pie” we called it. Then “Spotted Dick” with currants in it or you’d roll it out and put blackberries in the middle, tie a cloth around it and put it in the pan.’

It was not just rabbits that nature provided — or rather that the men took. Anything was fair game for scavenging for hungry families. ‘We used to live off the land for quite a number of years,’ explained a Derbyshire miner. ‘You had to … it were a matter of getting by. If we were hungry we used to go into the field with a bit of a broken knife and find pignuts and scrape them out and put a bit of salt on … we used to go round scrounging what we could get. If we saw a barrow full of peas, we’d come back with a jersey full of peas and that were it … we used to eat owt … We used to go out and get rabbits and anything, owt what we could catch … pigeons, pheasant and ducks off the canal … Sometimes we used to pull mangols [sic] and bring them ’ome and stew ’em … we had a gaddo [catapult], we got quite expert … wood pigeons, we used to wait for dusk for them to settle in the trees to roost and then we’d knock them out of the trees.’

In the mid-nineteenth century the political philosopher John Stuart Mill had claimed that allotments were ‘a contrivance to compensate the labourer for the insufficiency of his wages by giving him something else as a supplement to them’: a way, in fact, of ‘making people grow their own poor rate’. Little had changed nearly a hundred years later. The notion that ‘the hungry could grow their own foods and obtain a living from their own methods’ was a throwback to Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of the Civil War, but it gained a new relevance during the Depression: an allotment could provide potatoes, carrots, cabbages and other vegetables to eke out family meals. The campaign to make Britain more self-sufficient in food production during the First World War, when George V had directed that the geraniums planted around the Queen Victoria memorial opposite Buckingham Palace should be grubbed up and replaced with potatoes and cabbages, had resulted in an astonishing increase in the number of allotments. By 1918 something like 1.5 million allotments dug by a ‘new short-sleeved army numbering over 1,300,000 men and women’ were producing over two million tons of vegetables. The return to its former owners of land requisitioned by the government during the war and the spread of the suburbs, where most houses had gardens, meant that the number of allotments fell during the 1920s, but by the 1930s the Ministry of Agriculture was recording a revival of interest as both the Ministry and local authorities made land available for allotments, particularly in depressed areas, while the Land Settlement Association, whose main aim was to turn the urban unemployed into smallholders, encouraged not only the cultivation of produce on small plots, but also the keeping of pigs and chickens to provide food and manure.

In a prefiguration of the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign during the Second World War, allotments were dug on wasteland and on roadside and railway banks, wherever the soil might yield food for the table. They clung to the steep, scoured hillsides of the Rhondda Valley, perched on riverbanks prone to flooding and huddled under the ugly shadow of gasworks — anywhere the land could not be used more profitably for some other activity. Working his allotment could be a satisfying occupation for a man who felt that was what he no longer had: out of the house, in the fresh air and using his strength to dig. Many took great pride in what they grew on their allotment or in their back garden — and many colliery houses had quite large back gardens. Charles Graves, a rather patrician journalist (and the brother of the poet Robert Graves), paid a visit to Ollerton in the Midlands, ‘in the heart of the Dukeries’ (a large tract of Nottinghamshire in private hands which once contained the estates of no fewer than five dukes), for the society magazine the Sphere. He reported: ‘All have gardens … work in the mines is limited to three days a week … All of them like to … grow their own vegetables … And the Garden Holders Association among the miners is a very powerful organisation with annual cups and prizes to be won. Potatoes, cabbages, carrots all grow well at Ollerton. So do onions and woe betide the man who is caught pilfering his neighbour’s celery.’

But pilfer they did: ‘There were a hell of lot of allotments. And there used to be a lot of knocking off’ in Ashton-under-Lyne. ‘They used to be up around three or four in the morning going on the Moss pinching lettuce and celery, anything to make a meal. The Moss was more or less peat. That’s why they’ve never built on it.’ Jack Shaw’s father, an unemployed miner, ‘had an allotment on the Moss. He paid a pound a year. It was just a matter of growing vegetables for our house. Others had big ones and it would be like a full time job.’

But even in those places such as the mining valleys where there was a long tradition of allotment-holding, the Depression, while making such activity all the more necessary, meant it was harder to do. An unemployed man — or one on short-time hours — might well not be able to afford the necessary seeds, tools or fertiliser. The Quaker Society of Friends reported that an unemployed miner in South Wales ‘who had been accustomed to grow his own potatoes … had become too poor to buy the seed, that for a time he received seed from his companions, and when that was no longer available he went to the rubbish heaps for peelings and took out such “eyes” as he could find in order to plant his allotment’.

The Society of Friends started a scheme ‘to supply (at first free of charge) small seeds, seed potatoes, tools, fertilizer and lime’. It was so successful that the government took it up, and in the winter of 1930, 64,000 families were helped in this way. But it was one of the casualties of the 1931 economic crisis, so the Friends stepped in again, persuading the government to give pound-for-pound matching grants to some 62,000 allotment-holders; this rose to over 100,000 grants in subsequent years. In Sheffield over 117,500 unemployed men were provided with ‘the requisites for a 300 square yard plot’ in 1934, but as the Sheffield Allotments for Unemployed Scheme pointed out, ‘This is a scheme to help men who help themselves — how substantial is that self help is shown by the amount the men themselves have contributed towards the cost of supplies — no less than £24,700 collected week by week’. Moreover, such activity was giving a welcome boost to the local steel industry, since in 1933 ‘over 56,000 spades, forks, etc were supplied nationally, and these were all made in Sheffield’.

Another necessity of life was fuel. It cost at least two shillings a week to heat a modest house, and anyone who could went collecting wood or ‘scratting’ (scavenging) for coal. Herbert Allen, whose father was a frequently unemployed farm labourer (and as an agricultural worker was not covered by the unemployment insurance scheme) in Leicestershire, always went ‘wooding’ on a Saturday. ‘We never bought any coal … My step-brother and myself used to have to go wooding round the spinneys and the hedges and all that. We’d have a pram and a home made truck and we’d … walk four or five miles to the woods and pile the old pram right up, put bits of wood round the side so you got a real good height. If ever we was hanging round the house it was always: “If you’ve got nothing to do you can go and do some wooding.”’

Will Paynter, a trade union activist and checkweighman at Cymmer colliery in the Rhondda who was often on short time or out of work during the thirties, spent one day every week with his father and brother on the colliery slag heaps searching for coal. They would only manage to fill one bag each: ‘To get three bags could involve turning over twenty to thirty tons of slag which was hard work in any language.’ They then had to carry the heavy bags on their shoulders for a mile or more over the uneven and often slippery sheep-tracks on the mountainside.

‘Scratting’ around for small pieces of coal was particularly humiliating for men who had spent their working lives hewing great lumps underground. ‘If there’s one thing that makes us bitter here in the Rhondda, it’s the question of coal,’ said John Evans.

I have to pay half a crown a week for coal — though there’s plenty lying around. When we’re in work in the mines we get supplies at a small fixed rate. Why can’t we when we are unemployed? We who have worked all our lives in the mines feel we have a kind of a right to it. In these parts there are places where the coal seam comes to the surface on all sides of the hills — they are called outcrops. We could get coal there. But the companies won’t allow it — they even use explosives to make it more difficult for us to get at the coal, though it isn’t profitable enough for them to use it. Every colliery has its slag tip — where they throw out all the stuff they can’t get rid of, and among it are bits of coal. We are sometimes allowed to pick this over at certain times after the contractors have been over it. At these times the place crawls with men trying to find bits of coal — like ants on an ant heap. It’s a hell of a job, especially on a cold day, and of course one can never find enough. That’s why so many go out at night and try to steal it. But they have policemen, and if one’s caught it means fifteen shillings [fine, or worse].

In Ashton-under-Lyne there was a neat scam: coal was brought to the mills in barges, and when it was taken in lorries from the bin, it was shovelled down a chute into the barge below. ‘The chaps that was working on the barges would only be on two or three days a week, and they’d be related to the blokes that wasn’t working — brothers and cousins … well accidentally on purpose [the men shovelling the coal would] throw about six shovelfuls into the canal every time they got the chance. When the barge moved on, there’d probably be three or four hundredweight of coal,’ so the men waiting and watching on the bridge ‘used to get a bucket full of holes on a clothes line, throw it across the canal and scoop it up. Fill half hundredweight bags. Then they had a pram or pram wheels with boxes on and they used to go round the streets selling it. People used to grumble, “This bloody coal, it’s all wet through.” But it was only two bob for half a bag,’ recalled Jack Shaw.

‘Some of them [the unemployed miners] have become coal pirates,’ one of their number in South Wales told Fenner Brockway, an ILP MP until he lost his seat in the 1931 election, and a fierce critic of the National Government and the Labour Party’s unemployment policies. ‘They get caught sometimes and do a turn in prison. But what does it matter? Prison is no hardship these days; food guaranteed and no worry. There are men who raid the coal-trucks … Every night a train climbs [the mountain] side. The men jump on it when it’s going slow, scramble on top of a truck, throw coal off, and then leap down the other side and gather the coal in sacks to sell. A man was killed doing that the other night: slipped and got cut up by the train … it shows to what lengths they’re being driven.’

Poverty drove many very close to the wrong side of the law — and then tipped them over. As some scavenged for coal to sell, others poached with the same intention. Charles Graves noted that ‘there used to be hundreds of pheasants on Lord Savile’s property, Wellow Wood. Two years ago [in 1930] they bagged 900. Last year only 35 and a similar number of rabbits.’ An East Midlands miner on short time recalled that ‘The best time we ’ad was when we went out pegging one Friday night … there were six of us … we ran the nets out there three times and we got twenty rabbits apiece … Some going that were, three nets for 120 rabbits.’

Dick Beavis, a Durham miner, ‘spent a lot of time poaching in the 1930s. I was the “knitter”. I used to knit all the nets for the lads. Put them over holes … and put the ferret in. I found that more interesting than pit heaps. And that’s how I learned my political thoughts. Well whose was the land? You go on all these neglected heaps. I used to think what harm are we doing? We were caught by the police and when we received our summons it was said we were catching “conies”. We didn’t know what that was. (It wasn’t until later in my life that I discovered that “conies” is the old English word for rabbits. Rabbits are classified as vermin — and so you could say you were catching vermin — but “conies” is not.) So the magistrate looked at me and he said, “Where did you get them?” And I said “I found them, Sir.” Well, he said he’d never heard such a bloody tale and fined us all.’

A poacher might make as much as eight shillings in a good night, though often he would not make more than three shillings, and sometimes nothing at all. Others might stay on the right side of the law by buying rabbits from a farmer for sixpence, skinning them and selling the skins for ninepence and the meat for fourpence. Selling coal or garden produce could also raise a few pence. Some men set up as cobblers, cutting up old rubber tyres to resole boots, mended clocks, soldered saucepans and kettles, made rag, or peg, rugs, ‘did carpentry in their back yards or kitchen, making sideboards out of orange boxes stained brown with permanganate of potash, while their wives cook and tend the children in restricted places round the fireplace, uncomplaining because they realise the necessity of providing some occupation for their husbands in order to keep them even moderately content’. An unemployed man might offer to tend the garden, paint the house or wallpaper a room for a better-off neighbour in exchange for money or goods — a side of bacon, maybe, or a joint of meat. The trouble was that there weren’t many — if any — better-off neighbours in most of the depressed areas: perhaps a colliery manager, a works foreman, or a moderately prosperous farmer nearby. But most of the men and women in the towns and villages would be in the same situation: no work, not enough money to live on, certainly not to pay for services.

At harvest time or in the shooting or hunting season it might be possible for those men within walking distance of farms or orchards or country estates to get a few days’ work. Often this did not bring in much money, ‘but you used to get a drink of beer and that while you were in the fields’, and hop-picking drew numbers of East Enders to Kent — as it always had. Some made a bit on the side in less obvious ways, breeding rats, mice or ferrets for scientific research or to sell to London Zoo to feed the snakes — though mice ‘had to be alive when they got there or they would not pay for them’. A box of five hundred mice would earn a postal order for around thirty shillings — a tidy sum when the dole for a family with two children was around twenty-eight shillings a week — though collecting five hundred mice and keeping them alive must have been a real team effort.

Women might take in dressmaking, mending or washing, bake bread or cakes, or cook ‘potato plates’ (scraps of meat sandwiched between two layers of potato) to sell, make toffee or jam, knit or crochet. All these activities assumed not only a few coppers to buy the materials, but also a local market that was better placed financially than the ‘petty capitalist’. Some families, already living in cramped accommodation, would double up even more and take in a lodger to help make ends meet — or even ‘hot sheet’: an Irishwoman in the mining village of Chopwell in County Durham ‘had pitmen who slept in the beds during the day and she had men who worked in the coke yard during the night. On different shifts … when one would get out of bed, the other would go in.’

Enterprise had its price. The Means Test empowered inspectors to take account of all earnings, no matter how paltry. In March 1934 The Times reported that ‘In Durham villages one sees that men are genuinely fearful of taking an odd job to earn a shilling or two, doubtful whether their weekly means of livelihood will be cut down if they are found to be keeping a few hens.’ Although the newspaper reported that ‘The policy … is to make no deductions for paid earnings of this sort; on the contrary, they will encourage them,’ it admitted that ‘Knowledge has not yet filtered through to the men, and because all depends on their Dole they take no risks.’ Indeed, the Society of Friends made a point of getting ‘a clear statement from the Ministry of Labour that the small amount of produce which a man could sell from his allotment would not affect the amount of his dole. This was a great gain (even although the feeling of suspicion on this point ceased only very slowly).’

A ‘worthy woman in Merthyr, who had kept a bakery’ told an American sociologist who came to Britain in June 1931 to study the effects of unemployment that ‘she had wanted the yard wall of her bakery whitewashed and seeing that there were 6,000 unemployed men walking about Merthyr, she had thought that it would be a good idea to ask one of them to do it in return for a few shillings. She asked one after another, but all refused; they said they “might be seen”. Eventually she promised a man that if he would do it, she would undertake to let no one into the yard while he was at work and to keep the gate barred. On that condition she got it done. She then thought she would get one of them to putty the lights on the bakehouse roof. But the roof allowed no hiding place while he did the work; so no one would do it … To be “seen” earning a shilling is a terrifying prospect. The regulations may provide for such things, but the unemployed man does not know what the regulations are, and the last thing he wants is to stir up mud.’ And there were always neighbours who were quick to make allegations of ‘benefit fraud’ if they suspected someone in receipt of dole was making a bit on the side. In Greenwich anonymous letters arrived at the benefit office at the rate of two a day, snitching on those the writers thought might be cheating.

In some ways the first weeks after a man lost his job were the easiest: there could be a sense of release, something of a holiday feeling after the tyranny of the pit or factory. The initial days would be filled with the search for work. The Labour Exchange wasn’t considered much help. Most jobs were obtained by someone ‘speaking for you’, a relative or friend already in work who might be able to put in a good word. There was no legal requirement for employers to notify the ‘Labour’ of any work they might have, and the general view of the unemployed was that employers only used it as a place of last resort, when they were offering worthless jobs no one wanted. And if a man refused such a job when offered it by the Labour Exchange, he lost his entitlement to the dole for six weeks. Across the country, only one vacancy in five was filled through the Labour Exchanges in the 1930s. This is perhaps not surprising at a time when there was such a pool of men seeking work that there was no point in wasting time with the paperwork required by the Labour Exchange.

Believing that finding work was ‘down to me’, most men would trudge for miles each day from place to place in search of a job, following up leads that led nowhere. ‘It became quite customary,’ Wal Hannington observed, ‘to find men walking miles from their own district, such as from Halifax to Huddersfield, in search of work, whilst men from Huddersfield would walk to Halifax in [the] search for work — often passing each other on the road.’ After a few weeks or even months of this dispiriting failure it would become apparent that there just weren’t any jobs to be had locally, and this was when some men from the valleys and the smoke-filled towns would go ‘on the tramp’, moving from place to place in search of work.

‘On the main roads leading from the coalfields to the big towns — particularly the Bath road leading from South Wales to London’, Hannington saw ‘almost any day hundreds of men, footsore and weary … trudging towards London having left their families at the mercy of the Boards of Guardians’. But most of the men on the road looking for work in the 1930s were probably young and single. John Brown was one. He had lost his job in the docks and, aged nineteen, left his home in South Shields and took a journey round England that was as extensive as J.B. Priestley’s, if less salubrious. From South Shields he and a companion scrambled aboard a lorry bound for Newcastle, from there to York, then hearing about the possibility of a job, Brown managed to get a lift to Salford, then he tried his luck in Liverpool, Grantham, Reading, then Basingstoke, from where he walked to Guildford, where he managed to get a few hours’ work painting some railings round a bungalow. Then it was on the road again, with a lift to Winchester, then on to Southampton, where he went round the shopkeepers asking for a ‘pennyworth of work’. This netted him enough for a bed at the local workhouse and a shared meal of cocoa and bread and butter.

Over the next months Brown travelled from Dover to Dumfries by way of Bath, Worcester, Shrewsbury and London, where he found work for a bit. Sometimes alone, sometimes with companions — including a young woman, Hilda, who had been sacked from her job as a parlourmaid and had been sleeping out in London parks until Brown took her under his wing, he walked, hitched lifts on lorries, crawled under tarpaulins when the lorry driver was taking a break, and once was offered a lift in a private car. He slept mainly in ‘spikes’, the casual wards of workhouses, which varied hugely: the one at Winchester was particularly highly spoken of, but others were considered ‘not fit to live in’, with dirty sheets and blankets, and infestations of lice and nits. He passed nights lying on potato sacks in barns, or under hedges, and when he was temporarily in funds he would stay in cheap ‘model’ lodging house, or hostels run by such philanthropic organisations as the Salvation Army or the Church Army.

Food was meagre workhouse rations such as skilly (thin oatmeal gruel that must have brought Oliver Twist to mind, though this was officially abolished in 1931, and meat and vegetables added to the diet), usually given in exchange for work such as chopping wood or breaking stones (though stone-breaking was discontinued by the same order in 1931), sometimes bread and a cup of tea, maybe a cold sausage given by someone whose windows or car Brown had cleaned, or fence he’d repaired, or a cheap meal in a café which the grapevine that ran between ‘roadsters’ recommended, like Nash’s in Southampton where a three-course meal could be got for a tanner (sixpence). Brown took whatever work he could get, including bricklaying, washing up and handing out cinema flyers. He discovered that blankets tucked in crosswise, sometimes on a necessarily shared bed, provided the maximum warmth, and learned always to sleep with his trousers under his pillow and the legs of the bed in his boots to prevent them being stolen in the night. But finally, after many months on the road, he grew ‘weary of the “spikes” and “models” and barns. The “romance of the road” had turned out to be a sordid tragedy of bread, weak tea, blankets, washing and baked clothes.’ John Brown went back home to South Shields — but still no job.

Max Cohen, a frequently unemployed London cabinet-maker, offered a cigarette in a café in the Strand to an unkempt-looking man, his clothes ragged and shabby, his shoes tied up with string, the holes stuffed with newspaper, who told him, ‘I tramped the country, lookin’ for work … But yer can’t get any work — nowhere! I tried — honest. I’ve been out six years … never go on the road. You’ll be driven from one town to ‘nother. A vagrant, that’s what they calls you, a vagrant. Y’ave to go to the spike, else you’ll get locked up’ — ‘sleeping out’ was an offence under the 1824 Vagrancy Act until it was modified in 1935.

It is not possible to know precisely how many people ‘on the tramp’ in the 1930s were unemployed men seeking work, and how many were vagrants, but on the night of 21 May 1932, at the depth of the Depression, 16,911 men were sleeping in casual wards; the number had been 3,188 in May 1920 and 10,217 in December 1929.

‘It is when a man settles down to being unemployed,’ wrote the Reverend Cecil Northcott of his experience in Lancashire, ‘that he finds it difficult to know how to fill his time. Beyond the weekly events of signing on and drawing the dole there is not much regulation to his life.’ The clergyman spoke of ‘helping his missus … becoming a permanent occupation. The brass round the kitchen range and anything that shines comes within the duties of the man’; of the fathers who took their children in the pram to the park, ‘the same collection of men day after day’; of the ‘handicrafts [that] have become so important in many unemployed homes’ — an Elizabethan galleon made out of a block of wood, for example.

Joseph Farrington’s father, an unemployed iron-moulder, had the skills of a sailor, which was how he started his working life. He would sew two canvas bags together to make a floor covering, or ‘cut up different coloured coats and make a pattern. It was as though he’d bought it in a shop when he’d finished it. He could knit … he could do anything. He even used to cook the meals because my mother couldn’t cook. And he made toys like so many unemployed men, wooden trains, hobby horses, dolls for the girls out of paper and packing and put faces on with indelible pencil. He was clever at making things with newspaper. He’d make a tablecloth with a pattern — just by tearing.’ Arnold Deane, an unemployed Oldham man, made a magnificent fifteen-inch model of a hotel, complete with elegant grounds and railings, using cardboard and beads. It had 176 windows, a ballroom, and was lit by electric light. The construction took him two months and was photographed for the local paper.

John Brierley’s father Walter, an unemployed Derbyshire miner, was not able to fill his time so productively. He ‘felt ill at ease … when he was on the dole [from 1931 to 1935]. Hanging about the house and garden when other men were working and the women busy made him feel particularly inadequate. To make matters worse he was clumsy with his hands and could no more build a wall, or put up a fowl house than “fly in the air” my mother said. The tasks he was set required no skill, collecting wood or shovelling coal or muck. If he was set to weed, he would uproot the wrong plants, would knock cups against the taps when washing up, his head probably full of his latest piece of poetry or writing’ — one of which, fortunately, found a publisher as a novel, Means Test Man, in 1935.

To the observer it might look as it did to the poet T.S. Eliot, in whose poem ‘The Rock’ the voices of the unemployed intone: ‘No man has hired us/With pocketed hands/And lowered faces/We stand about in open places.’ But in fact standing about in open places could be a necessary social activity, since there was no longer the camaraderie of work, or the money to go to the pub to meet your mates. Convictions for drunken behaviour fell by more than half between 1927 and 1932, for though the solace of a warm pub and the oblivion of drink might seem an appealing way of blotting out reality, the high price of a pint of beer (a pint of mild cost fivepence and one of strong ale elevenpence) discouraged it, though Jack Shaw reported that men in Ashton-under-Lyne ‘used to go round the pubs and off licences and pinch some bottles. There were a penny [deposit] on a bottle. They’d pinch half a dozen and go round and get sixpence and get a gill [half a pint]. You could sit in all night with a gill.’

If they couldn’t drink, men might still smoke. ‘You could buy five Woodbines for twopence. But that’s no bargain if you haven’t got twopence. You’d go for maybe a week without a single drag and then when you were given a cigarette, you inhaled so deeply you’d have expected to see the smoke coming out through the laceholes of your boots.’ Men would take one drag on a cigarette, pinch it and put it in their pockets for later, or go round the streets picking up butts, which they would mix up together and make their own cigarettes, ‘So they were smoking for nothing.’ Loose tobacco cost around fourpence an ounce, and this might well be supplemented by dried tea leaves either in a rollup or a pipe.

It seemed that given an extremely limited amount of disposable income (if any at all), an unemployed man would rather spend it on gambling than smoking or drinking: after all, putting a bet on might prove to be the down-payment on a better life. Street gambling was illegal, but that didn’t stop it: men would be posted as lookouts while their friends laid bets on pretty much anything. Horseracing was a subject of great interest — though the interest was not in the horses themselves, but in betting on them, which formed a link between the unemployed and the ‘sport of kings’. ‘It’s always been a miner’s privilege, a little bit on the horses, the dogs.’ ‘Blokes used to earn half a crown in the pound as a bookies’ runner. There were no licensed bookies. The runners used to stand in the doorways of pubs or else the ginnel [alleyway] of some place. Some of the blokes would go round the mills and pubs and houses. Anything to get a bet.’

Men would not just play billiards, they would gamble on it, a penny or tuppence for the winner. They’d play cards for money, one of their number earning tuppence or threepence a time for ‘Keeping Konk’ (lookout). Pitch and toss (throwing a coin so it landed as close as possible to a wall) and crown and anchor (a dice game) were almost universal pastimes. ‘In most back alleys and lanes young and old men would play their few pennies away on Sunday mornings.’ Sometimes bigger events were organised, such as those on a secluded beach at South Shields to which men would come from as far afield as Newcastle or Sunderland, and the bookies came too. While some played for pence, others graduated to ‘the bigger school’, where the stakes for pitch and toss could be raised to five shillings a time and two lookouts were placed to warn if the police approached. For Joseph Farrington it was ‘marbles — flirting. We used to make a ring of tin milk-bottle tops. If you hit one with a marble you took it out. We used to play with money, when we had money.’ Jack Shaw and his friends would bet on a ‘peggy’, a piece of wood that one player would hit and the others had to guess how far away it had landed. Once they had to jump the local canal to get away from the police, and that in itself soon became an activity to bet on.

‘They’d gamble on anything. It was the only way they had of getting a few bob. A lot of it was “Why have dry bread when I might have a bit of bread and jam?”’ If life seemed an irrational lottery when it came to getting a job, why not take part in a more enjoyable lottery in the hope of turning your luck round, or at least having some control over the choices you made? ‘They [the unemployed] have given up all hope of earning anything by work,’ Fenner Brockway was told, ‘and hundreds of them put all their hopes on horses and dogs and football matches. They put 1s. on. They may lose, they go short on food; but they’re so used to going short that they don’t trouble much … Betting … means excitement in the midst of monotony … You may deplore the betting mania, but you can’t be surprised. What other excitement, what other chance, does existence offer these men?’

Men would keep homing pigeons, as long as they could afford to feed them (and would often bet on races between them), or greyhounds, which ‘often received as much attention as any child’. More likely, they would earn a few shillings exercising the greyhounds of an employed friend. Many sports offered reduced rates for the unemployed: bowls or billiards for a penny. Young men would play football on a piece of waste ground — games that would sometimes last all day, with a leather ball they’d pooled their coppers to buy if they were lucky, a blown-up pig’s bladder or caps sewn together if they weren’t — and men of all ages would go to football matches. In Liverpool in the early 1930s the average gate was 30,000 when Liverpool or Everton were playing, and most professional football clubs would admit the unemployed for half price at half time and free ten minutes before the final whistle. And there was always the opportunity to try to make a few pennies by entertaining the crowds as they queued to get in, singing, juggling, playing a tin whistle, doing handstands.

Boxing was another popular sport. William Saunders would ‘go round the boxing booths in the fairgrounds, we used to get £1 for standing up so many rounds’. Some of George Bestford’s unemployed friends in Newcastle would volunteer for three-round contests: ‘Some of them could box and others couldn’t. Those who couldn’t just received a good punching-up and the fee which was paid to the boxers was five shillings, out of which they paid two shillings to the seconds. One night there was a man who was so weak and tired it was obvious he should not have been in the ring. The crowd was just beginning to voice their disapproval of his poor show when the referee waved them to be quiet and explained that the man was on the road, had not had anything to eat all day, but had come along to the Hall and volunteered to fight.’ But as for the unemployed taking up tennis, badminton, cricket or golf to fill their empty hours, these were, a report on Glasgow’s unemployed youth concluded, ‘the pursuits of another class’.

The day of one young unemployed man from Lancashire was not untypical. He was ‘one of a gang [who] used to stay in bed late in the mornings so as not to need breakfast. I used to have a cup of tea, and then we would all go down to the library and read the papers. Then we went home for a bit of lunch, and then we met again at the billiard hall where you could watch and play for nothing. Then back to tea and to watch billiards again. In the evening we used to go to the pictures. That’s how we spent the dole money. In the end, I thought I’d go mad if I went on like this … in the end I joined a PT Class. But I found it made me so hungry I couldn’t go on with it.’

The public library was somewhere warm to sit, and scouring the ‘situations vacant’ pages of local newspapers was a daily — if usually frustrating — thing to do, as was checking the racing pages, if the librarian hadn’t removed them to discourage such undesirable activities, as quite a number did. The journalist and writer Paul Johnson recalled that the librarian at his local library in Tunstall in the Potteries, the tyrannical Miss Cartlich, was unsympathetic to the unemployed, who ‘had no money — literally not a penny — for any form of entertainment and therefore could only walk the streets aimlessly. The reading room of the public library was thus a winter garden of rest.’ But woe betide any man who fell asleep, for then Miss Cartlich would ‘wake them up and escort them off the premises, if necessary taking a hand to their collar. “Out, out, out!” she would say. “I’ll have no men here snoring in my reading room.” If they could stay awake, however, and pretend to be reading, the men were safe.’

Many unemployed men found they developed — or now had the time to indulge — a taste for reading books. ‘Thousands used the Public Library for the first time,’ averred John Brown who read Shaw’s plays, Marx, Engels, ‘the philosophers of Greece and Rome’ and a great deal of fiction in his local South Shields library. ‘It was nothing uncommon to come across men in very shabby clothes kneeling in front of the philosophy or economics shelves.’ Jack Jones, a Welsh miner, wrote three articles about unemployment for Time and Tide in 1931 in which he maintained that ‘people were reading for dear life now that they had no work to go to. I tried to show how the depressed mining communities were trying to read themselves through the Depression, and how this was sending borrowing figures in the libraries such as Pontypridd, where there were six and a half thousand unemployed, up and up by scores of thousands.’ However, in Deptford in South London the Pilgrim Trust noticed that when unemployment was high, borrowing from the public libraries declined, since all men’s energies were focused on getting work, and to them reading was associated with well-earned leisure.

In Greenwich, E. Wight Bakke found that among those unemployed who obligingly filled in diaries of how they spent their days for him, ‘an average of 10.7 hours a week was spent in reading’. While more than half that time was devoted to newspapers and magazines, the rest was taken up by books borrowed from the free public libraries. Most of these were fiction: Bakke found little evidence that the men — and presumably the women either — were particularly interested in reading books on ‘Socialism or Trade Unionism or other works on economic and political theory’. But some were: an ex-army officer who had been unable to find other work ‘joined the public library and read numerous books. I read no fiction at all, but turned my attention to many other subjects, astronomy, physics, economics, history, photography, psychology, and read books on psychic phenomena, the Yogi culture, and other things. I went to lectures by eminent people of all kinds, statesmen and politicians, with the general idea of getting the world and its affairs in perspective and finding out what was wrong with everything.’

One ‘brilliantly successful experiment’ was the translation of an act of a Shakespeare play into Tyneside dialect in a Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) class, while a young unemployed letterpress operator filled his long days by sitting in the parks, swimming or talking with ‘other fellows who are out. I am a member of a library and spend most evenings reading until midnight. I find it the only thing that can take my mind off loneliness, poverty and hunger. My choice varies: Fiction — Priestley, Dell, Orczy, Tolstoy etc. (Russian writers are my favourite.) Educational and interest subjects — philosophy, psychology, travel, Socialism, economics etc.’ George Tomlinson read The Canterbury Tales, Lamb’s Essays, Darwin’s Origin of Species, Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘or anything that I could get hold of’ as he sat on his toolbox at the pit head having volunteered for a weekend repair shift. An unemployed miner in the Rhondda was an avid reader of Balzac, and it was ‘during my dole days’ that Donald Kear in the Forest of Dean ‘became a compulsive reader. I read anything and everything that came my way, from Jack London and Anatole France to medical dictionaries and odd volumes of electrical engineering encyclopaedias.’ Kear also listened to ‘weekly talks on the radio addressed to the unemployed by a man called John Hilton’. Hilton, a working-class autodidact with a trade union background, was appointed the first Montagu Burton Professor of Industrial Relations at Cambridge in 1931. He was a prolific journalist and broadcaster with an informed and compassionate interest in the plight of the poor. ‘I came to have a great respect and liking for him,’ recalled Kear. ‘His was the only sympathetic voice the unemployed ever heard. He recommended reading as a pastime for us. “Long way ahead in the future,” he said, “someone will want to know where you got your know-how, your handiness with words, and you’ll tell ’em you were unemployed in the ’30s and you did a lot of reading.”’

‘DON’T BE DEPRESSED IN A DEPRESSED AREA. GO TO THE PICTURES AND ENJOY LIFE AS OTHERS DO’ urged a cinema poster outside the Memorial Hall cinema (named in memory of the dead of the First World War, but known locally as ‘the Memo’) at the Celynen Collieries and Workingmen’s Institute at Newbridge in South Wales. The inter-war years were the great decades of cinema-building, with Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, Byzantium, rococo and baroque extravaganzas gradually giving way to ‘dream palaces’ that were streamlined and modern, sinuously curved, plate-glass-decorated, Art Deco buildings that seemed to pay homage to Manhattan, to ocean liners — or to TB sanatoria. Many were huge: Green’s in Glasgow, built in 1927, could seat more than 4,300, while the Bolton Odeon, which opened in 1937, had 2,534 seats and forty-one employees, including usherettes, doormen, chocolate girls and pageboys as well as the expected projectionists and box-office staff.

Cinema-going remained a popular activity for those without work — though the frequency of their visits might be reduced by shortage of money, despite most cinemas selling sixpenny tickets. The reasons were obvious: it was something to do, somewhere warm to go, and a transport out of the dreary reality to romance, humour, drama, thrills. ‘For two and a half hours [the viewer] could live in another world where, invariably, the spirit of adventure was given full play, justice triumphed over injustice, and the hero eventually won through.’ On Merseyside, where unemployment was high, a 1934 survey found that 40 per cent of the population went to the cinema once a week and of them about two-thirds went twice. In Brynmawr in South Wales there were two cinemas, and both did good business throughout the 1930s, while in Greenwich those unemployed who were encouraged to keep diaries estimated that on average they would spend 2.6 hours a week at the cinema, usually going to an afternoon matinee when the seats were cheaper. The Carnegie Report on unemployed youth in Glasgow concluded that ‘attendance at cinemas is the most important single activity’ of those they interviewed, with 80 per cent seeing at least one film a week, and a quarter of those going more frequently. This was not, the report considered, altogether for the good: ‘It was perhaps inevitable, but none the less unfortunate, that many acquired a habit of attending the cinemas regardless of the standard of the films … The harmful effects of indiscriminate cinema attendance are obvious. Young men may come to accept their experiences vicariously. If their only mental sally into adventure comes while they are sitting in a comfortable seat, the enthusiasm and spirit for personal action will soon disappear.’ It was hoped that ‘increasing endeavour’ would be made by the film industry ‘to develop a high standard of artistic appreciation’.

Not all cinemas were of such magnificence as the lavish new ‘dream palaces’: while the patrons of Tooting in South London might watch their films in a building that was a simulacrum of the Doge’s Palace in Venice (with a nod to the cathedral at Burgos), the unemployed in the Rhondda Valley were more likely to have their silver screen set up in a Miners’ Institute, or a ‘fleapit’ or ‘bug house’ unmodernised since its erection possibly before the First World War — the ‘Memo’ in Newbridge was an exception, seating seven hundred people and decorated with both Art Nouveau and Art Deco flourishes, and murals depicting ‘industrial scenes with miners toiling underground’.

Cinemas in Miners’ and other Institutes were run by committees that bargained with the film distributors to get the best prices for the films they wanted to show, kept seat prices down — fourpence was not unusual, and at Mardy Workingmen’s Institute in the Rhondda, where unemployment was very high, customers were asked to pay what they could afford — and also kept a close watch over what films the patrons watched. Most favoured films with a social message, such as Broken Blossoms (1919), a depiction of slum life, though they also responded to customer demand by showing comedies like the nihilistic (and hugely popular) Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races (1937) or Shirley Temple’s Bright Eyes, which was screened ‘twice nightly with matinee showings for adults on Thursday afternoons and Saturdays for children’ in October 1935. Moreover, in communities where most social activities — the pub, the billiard hall, the Miners’ Institute — were organised exclusively for men and either forbade entry to women or made them entirely unwelcome, the cinema was somewhere a woman could go and enjoy herself away from the confines of the home: though while a number of the films shown at Cwmllynfell Miners’ Welfare Hall cinema, for instance, such as the swashbuckling The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) or American musicals, were unisex in their appeal, an awful lot were clearly ‘boy’s own’ adventures aimed at a male audience.

In the nineteenth century miners’ pay had commonly been docked by a penny or two in the pound to pay for their children’s education, and when universal free education was introduced this money was redirected to miners’ institutes, which were also partly funded by the colliery owners, and in which many fine libraries were collected. Following the recommendations of the 1920 Sankey Commission into coalmining, a Miners’ Welfare Fund was established to provide indoor and outdoor entertainment, financed by a levy on colliery owners, and for the first time on the royalty owners (those who owned the land on which the mines were sunk), as well as mineworkers. The fund was administered by a Miners’ Welfare Committee on which representatives of all interests sat. This money was used to fund pit-head baths (despite the fact that, according to evidence given to the Coal Industry Commission, wives regarded it as their duty and privilege to wash their husbands’ backs and to see that they had their hot bath before the kitchen fire), build or improve institutes, and provide scholarships and libraries. Only about thirty institutes had a cinema (the jewel in the crown was Tredegar’s Workmen’s Institute, which had an eight-hundred-seat cinema, a film society and hosted a series of celebrity concerts, with the top-price seats costing three shillings). Some were little more than a collection of huts, but all played an important role in the life of the community, offering evening classes and lectures, concerts, theatres and dances, debating societies, gymnastics, photography laboratories and amateur dramatics, and hosting political and trade union meetings, travelling theatrical and opera companies and eisteddfodau (Welsh cultural festivals). This strong ethos of education and improvement as well as entertainment led them to be referred to in South Wales as ‘Prifysgol y Glowyr’ (the Miners’ University), and influenced the choice of films shown in the cinemas, the books on loan in the libraries, and the periodicals lying around in the reading rooms.

By 1934 there were more than a hundred miners’ libraries in the Welsh coalfields, with an average stock of around 3,000 books, though some were much smaller, with a local miner acting as a volunteer librarian one evening a week. Despite the strong religious nonconformism of the ‘tin bethels’ in the Valleys with their crusade for a better life morally, mentally and socially, and the fierce political and union activism of the ‘Little Moscows’ of South Wales, even during the ‘red decade’ of the 1930s few miners seemed interested in reading about politics or economics. The library committees (Aneurin Bevan headed the one at Tredegar) might acquire the complete works of Lenin or Marx, but those volumes remained on the shelves, while the ones that were most borrowed appear to have been Victorian novels (Mrs Henry Wood was much in demand), detective stories or westerns — though, as Jonathan Rose points out, so few borrowing records for the miners’ libraries are extant that it is hard to generalise. An Ynyshir library lent books to three hundred out-of-work miners who read on average eighty-six books a year, whereas a survey of 437 unemployed young men from Cardiff, Newport and Pontypridd revealed that while 57 per cent claimed that reading was one of their most significant leisure activities, only 20 per cent ever visited a library, and only 6 per cent borrowed books. To them, reading meant the daily paper, mostly for sport and horoscopes, or cheap paperback novels exchanged with others in the queue at the Employment Exchange.

The institutes had received their funding from miners’ wages, the Miners’ Welfare Fund and the local authority, so in the harsh economic conditions of the 1930s, when many young men left the Valleys looking for work, and many of those left behind were unemployed, these all but dried up, and the acquisition budgets of most such libraries became non-existent. Miners’ libraries were reduced to issuing public appeals for books, approaching sympathetic public library authorities such as those in Manchester, Bethnal Green or Finsbury in London, all of which sent boxloads of books, or reluctantly ceding their hard-fought-for autonomy and becoming essentially distribution centres for their local public library service. By 1937 many had bought no new books for over a decade, so readers were obliged to read whatever was on the shelves over and over again — and presumably most soon became disheartened by a repetition that echoed so many other dreary repetitions in the lives of the long-term unemployed.

The sports pages, the cinema, football, allotment-tending, pigeon-racing, the kazoo band — all these were traditional working-class leisure activities that in substantial areas of Britain were, by the 1930s, no longer something to do at the end of a working day, a working week, but rather had taken the place of work. What if, as seemed increasingly likely, this was not to be a phase, a transition, but a way of life? The ‘idle rich’ might be an accepted feature of society, but what about the idle poor — even if their idleness was unsought, regretted, enforced, unafforded? Were such men and women to be regarded as the inevitable human cost of industrial decline, to be left to decline themselves, of no further use, supported at a minimal level by the state and allowed to pass their days as if on an unpunctuated weekend, but without the resources to do so? Or were they the vanguard of a new society in which new technologies and a more efficient form of capitalism would mean that there would simply be less work to do and fewer people needed to do it? In 1934 Havelock Ellis, usually described as a sexologist, predicted, rather as Major Douglas and Ezra Pound had done, ‘the four-hour working day as the probable maximum for the future. The day of the proletariat is over. Few workers but skilled ones are now needed. Most of the unemployed of today will perhaps never be employed again. They already belong to an age that is past.’ However, as a Vice-President of the Eugenics Education Society, Ellis was hard-pressed to see that it would be a bad thing if the ‘single proletarian left in England [was] placed in the Zoological gardens and carefully tended’, since, after all, ‘the glorification of the proletarian has been the work of the middle-class’, and the fact was that the ‘lowest stratum of a population which possesses nothing beyond its ability to produce off spring’ would be phased out as a matter of economic evolution.

When the film-maker Humphrey Jennings came to make a documentary for the GPO Film Unit at the end of the 1930s, ‘a surrealist vision of industrial England … the dwellers in Blake’s dark satanic mills reborn in the world of greyhound racing and Marks & Spencers’, the film’s working title was ‘British Workers’. But by the time he had filmed, in Sheffield, Bolton, Manchester and Pontypridd, men walking lurchers, releasing pigeons, playing billiards, drinking in a pub, a kazoo band ‘razzing away at “If You Knew Susie”’ and later carrying a child dressed as Britannia as they play a jazz version of ‘Rule Britannia’, a fairground, women watching a puppet show, a ballroom slowly filling with dancers, lions and tigers padding round their cages in Bellevue Zoo, Manchester, the title had been changed to Spare Time. The voice-over (spoken by the poet Laurie Lee) intoned: ‘Spare time is the time when people can be most themselves,’ as the miners’ cage descended the coalshaft. A re-evaluation of the whole notion of ‘leisure’ was clearly overdue. If talking about the unemployed as having leisure was to ‘mistake the desert created by the absence of work for the oasis of recreation’, how would it be possible to avoid the apathy that various social commentators confidently identified as the final stage the unemployed would pass through, via resolution, resignation and distress. As a ‘rough progression from optimism to pessimism, from pessimism to fatalism’? And if the creation of new jobs was not on the cards, how could the unemployed be encouraged to make the ‘right’ use of the leisure that would be the pattern of their future?

S.P.B. Mais, in his introduction to Time to Spare (1935), was convinced that ‘Left to themselves the unemployed can do nothing whatever to occupy their spare time profitably … This is where you and I come in … we have quite simply to dedicate our leisure to the unemployed,’ and suggested that this meant giving the unemployed man ‘a chance to work [since] playing draughts isn’t going to fit him for anything except perhaps the asylum’. Mais was full of ideas for ‘work’: ‘I don’t care what it is you set up,’ he insisted, ‘from a forge for men to work on the anvil to a stamp collecting society. It’s all grist to the mill. There cannot be too many interests in an unemployed man’s life … sell him the best leather at the cheapest possible rates and let him learn how to mend his boots for himself and his family … make it possible for him to buy [Mais stressed: ‘you will have noticed my insistence on the word buy. The unemployed do not want charity. They prefer to pay to the limit of their capacity to pay’] … to buy wood, then encourage him to learn how to make chests of drawers, wardrobes, chairs and other necessities of household furniture … to buy material and learn to make his own suits.’ Give the wife and family of an unemployed man a holiday, or imitate ‘the young Cotswold farmer who … gave up his summer to entertaining relays of school children from Birmingham … This principle of adoption should be extended to towns, and prosperous towns in the South like Brighton should adopt derelict towns in the North like Jarrow.’ But Mais recognised that this help should involve neither ‘charity (in the wrong sense) nor patronage’ (though, however well-meaning he may have been, the latter seemed rather evident). What was needed was either for ‘you and I’ to ‘join a local occupational club’, or if there wasn’t one, ‘get one going … all that is required to start with is a disused barn, hut or shop and the goodwill of, say, a dozen unemployed men to pay a penny for the privilege of membership’.

Some initiatives were essentially social clubs, organised locally and spontaneously, usually financed by the members, and intended to be money-making activities. Some, like those in Wales (where drinking in pubs on the Sabbath was not permitted) had licensed bars, and most had a billiards table and a wireless which supplied continuous background music. Such clubs in cities tended to be in the poorer districts. In Liverpool there were reputed to be nearly 150, most housed in empty shops, cellars or basements. Apart from the ubiquitous billiards table, raffles were organised, ‘the glittering prize quite often being a box of groceries with a bottle of beer or whisky for the man’, card games and other ‘petty gambling games — sometimes not so petty — are played from morning to night’. Many clubs organised a football team, and some a ‘Wembley Club’ into which members would pay a sixpence a week so that every other year when the international football match between England and Scotland was played at Wembley ‘a charabanc is hired and club members attend the match and go sight-seeing in London’. At Christmas an outing to the local pantomime would be organised, and ‘since some of the clubs are not lacking in the spirit of service to others, an old folk’s treat or free film show for the kiddies of the locality is occasionally provided’.

There were, as Mais recognised, already a number of ‘occupational clubs’ in areas of high unemployment. The Society of Friends had started an educational settlement at Maes-yr-Haf in the Rhondda in 1927, and another in Brynmawr the following year. Mais spoke approvingly of a club in Lincoln where ‘unemployed engineers cook the dinners for their own nursery school, mak[e] furniture for the Orphanages, toys for imbecile children, and invalid chairs for the decrepit aged’, and still found the energy for ‘Greek dancing’ in the evening. This was probably the one started in 1927 by the WEA, which had been founded in 1903 to ‘link learning with labour’, with the motto ‘An enquiring mind is sufficient qualification’.

The spread of such centres had been given a boost in January 1932 when the Prince of Wales, the (briefly) future King Edward VIII, who was patron of the National Council of Social Service (NCSS), speaking at a meeting at the Albert Hall called upon the British people to face the challenge of unemployment ‘as a national opportunity for voluntary social service’, and ‘refusing to be paralyzed by the size of the problem, break it into little pieces’. The response was heartening. By that autumn over seven hundred schemes were in operation in various parts of the country, and by mid-1935 the number had grown to over a thousand centres for men and more than three hundred for women, with a total membership of over 150,000. Many provided occupational opportunities as well as the usual facilities for billiards, dancing and reading. In the depressed areas of Lancashire there were 114 centres for men and thirty-five for women. There were nine in Glasgow, the same number in Liverpool and twenty-one in Cardiff. In the Rhondda there were between thirty and forty clubs which offered activities ranging from choral and operatic societies to mining outcrop coal. In Manchester, where there were some thirty centres for the unemployed (seventeen providing facilities for men to repair their own and their families’ shoes), an orchestra was formed among unemployed musicians which in May 1933 gave a recital on the BBC North Regional Service, while Gladys Langford, a generally rather discontented North London schoolteacher, went to Queen Mary’s Hall, Bloomsbury to hear the British Symphony Orchestra, ‘a body of unemployed musicians conducted by Charles Hambourg. He is a stocky little man with a bulging bottom much accentuated by a very short lounge jacket. Enjoyed the music.’

Many clubs used church halls or schoolrooms, which might only be available for a few hours a week, but in some cases disused premises were offered, perhaps a local church, shop, pub or empty factory, or in the case of Salford a fire and police station, and the unemployed spent time painting and equipping them as places in which they would want to spend time.

Some of the clubs received help from their local authority, or Lord Mayor’s Fund, others from voluntary social service agencies under the umbrella of the NCSS, the Pilgrim Trust, the Society of Friends, the WEA, which also allowed the unemployed to attend its classes free of charge, or the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM). Others were ‘adopted’ by local industrial or other concerns, though they tended to manage them undemocratically, with little input from the members, a situation that ‘seems to have been based on the theory that unemployed men were unfitted to take any responsibility for their own Clubs and that the Management Committee, by definition, knew what was good for the men better than the men knew it themselves’.

There were five residential centres, including Hardwick Hall in County Durham, which opened in October 1934, and provided classes in upholstery and bookbinding as well as more usual crafts; The Beeches, Bournville, which was solely for women (courses there only lasted for two weeks rather than the usual six, since it was presumed that women could not afford to be away from home for any longer); and Coleg Harlech, an established adult education college which regarded itself as the Welsh equivalent of Ruskin College, Oxford. In October 1933 the Coleg started running residential courses for the unemployed offering a more academic curriculum rather than crafts and practical skills.

The various organisations received small — if any — grants from the government, usually via the NCSS or the Scottish Council for Community Service. By March 1935 the Ministry of Labour had tipped in £80,000, while voluntary donations totalled more than £125,000. However, while Thomas Jones spoke of ‘trying to fob off the unemployed with a miserable grant of a few thousand pounds to Ellis’ show [Captain Lionel Ellis was chairman of the NCSS]’, the voluntary schemes appeared to value their independence from government funding — and control.

Despite the stringency of its financial support, the government rarely failed to instance the success of such schemes in dealing with the ‘residual problem’ of the long-term unemployed. And there were many successes: on Clydebank, where one club had ‘a membership of seven hundred and twenty three and a waiting list of two hundred’, and where men were ‘split into fifty groups, occupied in motor mechanics, dress-making, photography, shorthand, music, swimming, boot repairing, metal work, woodwork and wireless’; a Boys’ Club in Barnsley where members took ‘a nightly run’; Blackburn, which had its own parliament, or Barnard Castle, where traditional quilt-making was being revived.

The Reverend Northcott described a club in Darwen in Lancashire, where only twenty-eight of the sixty cotton mills were still working. It was housed, ‘ironically enough, in a building which had been used as a Labour Exchange … The motto is “Occupation of Hand and Brain”.’ Facilities were provided for ‘cobbling of all descriptions, woodwork classes, discussion circles, lectures and concerts. Twenty men a day pursue the art of rug making. There is first-aid instruction, a physical instruction group, and singing lessons given in a room in the fire station. Men have gone to camp, played cricket regularly, and have learned to swim.’

Since, according to the vicar, the ‘Lancashire woman who has gone to the mill has not been a great housewife’, a women’s centre was ‘helping its members in the management of their families’ food and clothes’, and a number of the occupational centres had women’s sections. ‘Members bring old clothes and are shown how to remake them … The men have made wheelbarrows out of old boxes and wheels made out of circular discs. Jigsaw puzzles were made out of magazine pictures and three-ply wood.’ In a neighbouring centre an unemployed weaver of fine cloth ‘modelled two vases of fine shape’ out of old gramophone records he had melted down, ‘and felt immediately that he was in the line of genuine potters’. It cost a penny a week to belong to such a club, and this entitled a member to vote for a committee which drew up the programme of activities.

Spennymoor Settlement in County Durham was started in 1931 by Bill Farrell, who had studied at Toynbee Hall, the original example of a settlement house founded by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett in Whitechapel in the East End of London in 1884 with support from various Oxford colleges. There the privileged came to live and work among the poor, in the words of Samuel Barnett, ‘To learn as much as to teach: to receive as much as to give.’ Funded by the Pilgrim Trust, Spennymoor was open to all (though initially there was suspicion that Bill Farrell’s title, ‘warden’, meant ‘warder’) and offered classes in such things as carpentry, shoe repairing, elementary psychology and the British Constitution. It instigated a debating society, a male voice choir, a children’s centre, a needlework class for women taught by Farrell’s wife, Betty, and a public lending library, also on her initiative. The Farrells’ interest in art and drama stimulated a sketching club and a play-reading group, with scenery made in the carpentry classes. The centre put on its first play in 1934, largely organised by a group of miners’ wives, a theatre was built which opened in 1939, and soon Spennymoor was dubbed ‘The Pitman’s Academy’ for its prodigious success in helping its members win scholarships to Oxford and adult colleges. Sid Chaplin, a very successful novelist in the 1950s, honed his writing skills at Spennymoor, as did the miner Norman Cornish his artistic talents at the ‘wonderful’ Spennymoor sketching club. The Prince of Wales paid a visit in December 1934.

‘Ashington, pop. 40,000. Mining town mostly built in the early part of this century. Dreary rows a mile long. Ashpits and mines down the middle of the streets,’ was how the 1937 Shell Guide to Northumberland & Durham described this Durham town. Not the sort of place to which to take a scenic detour, but some of those — employed and unemployed — who lived in those ‘dreary rows’ had a yearning for the finer things. There was no public library, but there was a Harmonic Hall, built by the miners so that string bands and brass bands had somewhere to play, as could a children’s orchestra with ‘violins for about eighty kiddies’, and there was a football pitch that doubled as a greyhound track. There was also a thriving branch of the WEA. Harry Wilson, who could have opted to learn music or drama there, instead plumped for ‘Experimental Evolution’, which took the students out into the surrounding area to poke ‘around in ponds and look for flints’. When the course was over, he and some friends felt they were ‘at a dead end again so we started on Art’. Robert Lyon ARCA, Master of Painting and Lecturer in Fine Art at Armstrong College, Newcastle, then part of Durham University, was invited by ‘a number of men … all associated with the pits’, to discuss the possibility of forming an art appreciation group in Ashington. After a lecture by Lyon at which he showed them black-and-white slides of Renaissance paintings and classical Greek sculptures, the twenty-four men and two girls (who didn’t last long, since ‘there’s a strict understanding in mining districts where women fit in and where men fit in’), made it clear that that was not what they wanted: they ‘wanted a way, if possible, of seeing for themselves’. So Lyon agreed (entirely against the spirit of the WEA, which was ‘all theory: nothing which could possibly be interpreted as being of any use for making a living could be taught’) to teach the men how to draw and paint, setting them homework each week to produce a picture on a subject like ‘The Dawn’, ‘Deluge’ or ‘The Hermit’, on cardboard or whatever material they could find.

Lyon took his class to look at watercolours in Newcastle Gallery, and in February 1936, thanks to the generosity of the daughter of the chairman of the P&O shipping line, Helen Sutherland, who lived nearby in Alnwick and was a discerning collector of modernist art, to London to see the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy, and visit the Tate and other city sights, ending up with a cream tea and madrigals in the Hampstead home of the owner of Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge, ‘a celebrated exercise in applied tastefulness’.

In 1936 the Ashington Group held its first exhibition of ninety-seven paintings and several engravings in Newcastle. The ‘experiment’ received favourable notices; soon the art world (the Surrealist painter Julian Trevelyan and the post-impressionist Clive Bell in particular) began to take notice, and the group was mentioned in a Penguin survey of art in England. Inspired by Ashington’s success, other art appreciation groups started to spring up, the British Institute of Adult Education mounted three exploratory ‘Art for the People’ exhibitions, and in April 1937 the Ashington Group contributed some pictures to what the art historian Anthony Blunt called ‘the most important event of the year from the point of view of English Art’, organised by the Artists International Association.

‘Unprofessional Painting’ was the title of an exhibition held at Gateshead in October 1938 to which the Ashington Group sent work. ‘They Paint Their Own Lives’ was another, held in Mansfield, Nottingham, six months later, and indeed the corpus of work did depict ‘ordinary life’: a miner reading a newspaper, a Bedlington terrier — ‘Miners are keen on Bedlingtons,’ explained a critic in The Listener — miners with their pigeons, playing dominoes, having Sunday dinner with their families, poaching. But most were of men at work: down the pits hacking coal, in the pit-head baths, eating their ‘bait’ (packed lunch). In the early days the men sold their pictures for a pound or thirty shillings, ‘to get money for painting materials’, and found themselves regarded as representatives of the British ‘social realist’ school. But ‘mining pictures would not be welcome to hang on the walls at home; landscapes would be considered more suitable. The women had had enough of mining dominating their lives, and frequently, when there were several workers in the house, reducing them to slaves. Many women were never able to get to bed except at weekends and just dozed in a chair to fit in with the different shifts.’

Such voluntary efforts to help the unemployed (and integrate them into the life of the community, since most clubs and classes were open to all, in work or not) might be rightly admired for what they achieved, but there was a suspicion expressed by the trade union movement that occupational centres would produce semi-trained craftsmen who could be used to undercut existing wage rates, and in some areas pressure was put on unemployed union members not to join them. Others regarded the occupational clubs as little more than opium for the masses, handed down by a government that had no policies to end unemployment. Wal Hannington of the NUWM sneered at ‘how craftily the ruling class, by evoking the sentiment of charity, have sought to cover up their sins and omissions in the treatment of the unemployed’, and pointed out that the ‘honoured gentlemen’ of the NCCS had never joined in the demand for the abolition of the Means Test or the restoration of benefit cuts. Frank Forster, an intermittently unemployed casual labourer from Saltney in Cheshire, thought that ‘the idea behind … the BBC broadcasting of morning talks to Unemployed Clubs … seems to be an attempt to keep those who attend the clubs quiet. To dope them … They hand out … what will keep them out of mischief. They must place their existence on a charitable basis, provide them with voluntarily contributed clubs and games etc … All this to prevent them from falling into the hands of Communists.’ George Orwell was of much the same mind, arguing in The Road to Wigan Pier that the centres were ‘simply a device to keep the unemployed quiet and give them an illusion that something is being done for them’, though he conceded that what he considered the ‘rubbish’ the centres offered was probably better for the unemployed man ‘than for years upon end he should do absolutely nothing’.

The educational and occupational activities at the unemployment centres may have seemed like splendid opportunities to those offering them, but from those on the receiving end, enthusiasm was not always so evident. Since club leaders were poorly paid, suitable people could be hard to find, and a great deal depended on their vitality and organisational skills. Such activities as the centres offered tended to appeal more to the young than to the older long-term unemployed, and class numbers dropped in some districts. ‘What we unemployed could do with is a little less of education and a little more of entertainment,’ suggested one of their nameless number in a letter to the Spectator in March 1933, while the anguish of an out-of-work miner permeates a documentary film made in 1932, when unemployment stood at over two million: ‘We can do physical jerks, grow cabbages until we’re blue in the face, but it’s not paid work. It’s just killing time. It’s not the real work that we want.’