Читать книгу The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain - Juliet Gardiner, Juliet Gardiner - Страница 19

The British working man, employed or unemployed, is very conservative in his allegiance to law, order and tradition. He hates the idea of a Red Revolution, which he knows would make an awful mess … Communist visitors in the distressed areas get short shrift from men standing unemployed round disused pit-heads.

Sir Philip Gibbs, Ordeal in England (1937)

No saviour from on high delivers,

No trust have we in prince or peer.

Our own right hand the chains must sever …

From the third verse of ‘The Internationale’

On the first day of 1932 the son and heir of the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam attained his majority. To celebrate, beacons were lit on the hills surrounding the family’s magnificent house, Wentworth. Built in the 1720s, the largest privately owned house in Britain, it had a room for every day of the year, and five miles of corridors. In front of the façade, which was the longest in Europe, the Elsecar Colliery Brass Band struck up, and a crowd 40,000 strong joined in singing ‘Londonderry Air’ and ‘We Won’t Come Home Till Morning’. And when the birthday boy, Lord Milton, drove with his father in the first car of a fleet of yellow Rolls-Royces on a ceremonial tour of his estates, the eight-mile route was lined with estate workers and the men who worked in the Fitzwilliams’ mines (on short time, given the economic climate) and their families, all waving and cheering, delighted that they had each been given a day’s paid holiday and a freshly issued ten-shilling note. At various stops en route Lord Milton would open proceedings by cutting a ribbon with a gold pocket knife his father had given him for his birthday, and at the New Stubbin pit the Secretary of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association stepped forward to thank the Earl and applaud him as ‘the finest idealistic employer in the country today’, a mine-owner who had so arranged things that not a single man had been dismissed despite the slump, and shifts had been arranged so the men received ‘the fullest benefits of the Unemployment Act’.

The Wentworth miners might have doffed their flat caps and have had reason to feel grateful towards their employers, but in the 1930s most coalminers — the ‘sort of grimy caryatid[s] upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported’, according to George Orwell, had both particular grievances and a particular militancy. The 1926 General Strike left a bitter legacy for men working in the Welsh Valleys, the Scottish, Durham and East Midlands coalfields, most of whom stayed on strike for months after the nine-day TUC strike collapsed. As a result many were blacklisted by the colliery owners, and never worked again. Wages were cut, hours extended and working conditions deteriorated. Employment in the coal industry fell consistently, from 218,000 in 1926 to 136,000 in 1932, and across Wales as a whole unemployment averaged 39 per cent.

At a time when over 40 per cent of the miners were out of work in the Yorkshire coalfields, a local headmaster would reputedly admonish pupils who answered his question, ‘Now then, boy, what are you going to do when you leave school?’ ‘We’re going to pit, sir,’ with ‘’Cos tha’ strong in the arm and weak in the head.’ Coalmining remained probably the most dangerous occupation in Britain. A West Lothian pit was known locally as ‘the Dardanelles pit. It was named that because of the high accident rate — they compared it with the slaughter at the Dardanelles’ in the First World War. There was widespread bitterness about the lack of compliance — since compliance invariably cost money — that many mine-owners accorded to health and safety regulations, and in the early hours of 22 September 1934 one of the worst mining disasters in British history occurred at Gresford colliery near Wrexham in North Wales, when an explosion ripped through part of the mine known as the Dennis section during the night shift. Although six miners managed to crawl to safety, three men were killed in the rescue attempt, and on the following night, Sunday, 23 September, it was agreed that the mine should be sealed with the dead miners entombed inside. A further violent explosion a couple of days later killed a surface worker: the disaster had claimed a total of 266 lives.

At the subsequent inquiry, Sir Stafford Cripps agreed to represent the mineworkers’ union pro bono. Despite the Labour lawyer’s relentless, technically informed questioning (Cripps had read chemistry at University College London, since he considered the lab conditions there to be far superior to those at either Oxford or Cambridge, before turning to law) in pursuit of his contention that safety had been sacrificed in the pursuit of profit, it was hard to establish what precisely had caused a build-up of lethal methane gas which had ignited, particularly since the mine-owners refused to allow the sealed section to be opened for inspection. While the report that the Chief Inspector of Mines, Sir Henry Walker, laid before Parliament in January 1937 singled out no one — neither the colliery management, the firemen who worked down the mine, the shot-firers whose job it was to blow up the coal face so the miners could get at the coal to be hewn, nor the inspectors — as having been criminally negligent, he concluded that nor had any of them performed their duties satisfactorily. Yet when charges were brought in the courts by the bereaved against the company and its officials, most of the cases were either dismissed or withdrawn, and no one was convicted of any wrongdoing.

The Gresford pit disaster provoked nationwide sympathy, gifts (over half a million pounds were raised) and unease among many that until the mines were taken out of private hands the catalogue of accidents and disregard for safety would continue, as would the mining industry’s generally poor industrial relations and sluggish productivity.

The previous September, unemployed coalminers had marched from South Wales to Bristol to lobby the TUC meeting there, and in September 1932 a contingent from Wales was among the eighteen from all over Britain that marched on London in what the organisers, the NUWM, called the ‘Great National Hunger March of the Unemployed Against the Means Test’, which culminated in a rally in Hyde Park. The NUWM claimed there were 100,000 unemployed in the park on 27 October, while the Metropolitan Police estimated the number at somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000.

This ‘great march’ was the largest to date, but by no means the first of the frequent protests by the unemployed since the effects of the Depression had first begun to bite in 1920. As well as numerous local demonstrations, the NUWM organised six national marches between 1922 and 1936, gathering contingents from all over the country to march to London with their demand for ‘work or full maintenance at trade union rates’. ‘If history is to be truly recorded,’ wrote Wal Hannington, ‘our future historians must include this feature of the “Hungry Thirties”.’ To Hannington the marches were a rebuttal of the charge — or, in the case of such proto-sociologists as the Pilgrim Trust survey team or E. Wight Bakke, the sympathetic observation — that the unemployed were apathetic, that they ‘quietly suffered their degradation and poverty’ despite the evident fact that ‘they were hungry; their wives and children were hungry’.

In March 1930, with the number of registered unemployed standing at over 2.5 million, over a thousand men left Scotland, the Durham coalfields, Northumberland, Plymouth, Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Nottingham coalfields, the Potteries, South Wales, the Midlands and Kent to trudge, most of the way on foot, to the capital, where they were joined by the London workless. For the first time women from the depressed textile areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire made up a special — separate — contingent, in the hope that the female Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield, might afford their case a sympathetic hearing. This was not to be, and the only success that what Hannington called the ‘raiding parties’ had was to storm the Ministry of Health, lock themselves in and address the crowds in Whitehall below, until they were forcibly ejected.

In the days after the formation of the National Government in August 1931, protest had escalated, often ending in pitched battles between the unemployed and the police, with the protesters reported as having thrown stones and hammer heads, and attempting to pull the police from their horses, while the police allegedly laid about the protesters with batons. By the end of the year over thirty different towns and cities had seen clashes between the police and unemployed demonstrators. ‘This “cuts” business may bring the Empire down,’ predicted Samuel Rich, a London teacher who had spent time in September 1931 working out his family’s annual budget in anticipation that ‘JRM [Ramsay MacDonald] will reduce all teachers’ salaries by 15% by Order in Council’. Philip Snowden, who had translated his job as Chancellor into the National Government (until the election in October 1931), announced in his budget on 10 September that not only unemployment insurance benefit would be slashed by 10 per cent, but so would the pay of teachers, the police and the armed forces.

Articles had started to appear in the Manchester Guardian in the 1930–31 school year highlighting the plight of out-of-work teachers, and it was not long before suggestions were being made that the already very small number of married women teachers might be ‘let go’. Although 10,000 teachers marched through the streets of London in protest on 11 September 1931 (members of what Hannington referred to triumphantly as ‘the black-coated proletariat … embarking on a new experience, marching through the streets carrying banners’), Samuel Rich was appalled at what he regarded as the supine acquiescence of his profession. ‘The “L[ondon] T[eacher]” and other teachers’ papers all sickening today. The 10% cut is a victory! A victory! What lice! I hear that only 218 London schoolmasters voted to be absent yesterday after the meeting. 218! — Bah!’.

As well as demonstrations and clashes with the police over the following months there was one response that was unprecedented — and more disturbing to the government than that of the ‘black-coated proletariat’ — the incident that Samuel Rich thought ‘might bring the Empire down’, and which gave an added twist to fears about Britain’s stability at the moment of acute economic crisis. ‘The Atlantic Fleet has been recalled owing to dissatisfaction among the sailors,’ Rich reported. ‘They’ll get redress tho’ as they are at the right end of the guns.’ The largest ships of the North Atlantic Fleet had been gathering in the Cromarty Firth for their annual autumn exercises when the news of the cuts came through — not from official sources such as the Admiralty Board, but piecemeal via newspaper reports and rumours. The cuts were not only swingeing, they were not equitable, and bore most heavily on the lower ranks, as an across-the-board cut of a shilling a day would mean only 3 per cent off the pay of a Lieutenant Commander, while an Able Seamen between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five would suffer a reduction of 25 per cent. This, a senior officer immediately realised, was ‘perfectly absurd’. Six shillings week less money would mean real hardship to the men’s families: furniture would be repossessed, clothes and shoes would not be replaced, some families might be evicted, others go short of food. Alan Drage, a Lieutenant Commander on board HMS Valiant, was never able to forget ‘the queue of dismayed sailors outside my cabin door, each brandishing a sheet of paper covered with elaborate and meticulous calculations, which were explained to me in the utmost detail, each interview concluding, “You see, Sir, I can’t possibly manage on this; what am I going to do?”’

In the canteens, which were for the lower orders only, discontent was growing: Len Wincott, an Able Seaman aboard the cruiser HMS Norfolk, jumped on a table and called for a strike ‘like the miners’, but since setting out on a march to London didn’t make any sense, it would have to be passive resistance, a sit-down strike. Seamen had long been denied any effective channels of complaint such as a trade union, and were forbidden to communicate directly with their MP to express any grievances about the navy that they might have. But of course any mass resistance by His Majesty’s Forces was mutiny — though none of the sailors used that word — in this case ‘mutiny not accompanied by violence’, but mutiny nevertheless, for which the punishment was death. If the seamen were anxious not to label their actions mutiny, nor was the Admiralty: the Royal Navy was the symbol of Britain’s prestige around the world, and rarely had that prestige been more at risk, with an acute financial crisis, a run on gold, and foreign anxieties about the stability and resolve of the British government. The words used were ‘disturbance’ and ‘unrest’. The National Government approached newspaper editors requesting them not to mention Invergordon at this sensitive time for the country. But Ritchie Calder, then a young journalist on the Daily Herald, did not feel constrained by such discretion, and the Herald ran the story.

On Tuesday, 15 September at 8 a.m. most of the stokers on the battleship HMS Valiant refused the order to sail from Invergordon on the edge of the Cromarty Firth to take part in exercises in the North Sea, and the crews aboard the battleships Rodney and Nelson and the battle cruiser Hood followed suit, all refusing to move. Over the following thirty-six hours most of the 12,000 men on the twelve ships at Invergordon refused orders.

The Admiralty appeared to be completely out of touch with the situation, taking hours to reply to any communications from the officers, reiterating that in effect every man must do his duty, and it was not until mid-afternoon on Wednesday, 16 September that the order came that ships were to return to their home ports and cases of hardship would be looked into. The strikers’ resolve began to crumble, and by that night the ships started to put to sea. The nearest Britain ever came to a Battleship Potemkin moment in modern times was over. There were those in the Admiralty, and indeed some naval officers, who portrayed the strike as a mutiny and put it down to ‘Bolshevik agitators’ — a charge that was perhaps easier to sustain when Able Seaman Wincott, discharged from the navy, joined a front organisation of the Communist Party which capitalised on the ‘mutiny’ and his claims to have ‘led’ it. Another leader, Fred Copeman, who was not a member of the Communist Party at the time, became a fellow traveller and active in the unemployed movement and later in Spain. But although twenty-four ratings were discharged — though not until after the 1931 general election — the Admiralty was unable to establish that the events were anything more than the spontaneous actions of a large number of deeply disaffected men, denied any legitimate channels of complaint or redress and faced with a seemingly uncomprehending, unsympathetic and unresponsive Admiralty Board. On 21 September 1931, the same day Britain came off the Gold Standard, the government announced that there would be no pay cuts of more than 10 per cent.

Like the previous national marches and many of the local demonstrations that preceded it, the fourth national march which got underway on 26 September 1932, when a contingent of 250 unemployed men left Glasgow, had been organised by the NUWM, which had been set up in 1921 to mobilise unemployed discontent. There was little competition. The Labour Party largely accepted the view, even after 1931, that the government was doing its best in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, while the TUC (whose membership had fallen from 5.5 million in 1925 to under 4.5 million by 1932) was essentially concerned with the interests of the employed, resisting pay cuts and short-time working. The unions’ contribution in the early 1930s was confined to mouthing statements ‘strongly’ condemning cuts in benefit payments and making ‘emphatic (verbal) protests’ at government inaction. ‘Their line was “No illegality, wait, vote for the Labour Party,”’ recalled an unemployed Kirkcaldy man, ‘and Pat Devine … who was a real agitator … says “What is the workers supposed to do? Starve until we get a Labour Government?”’

In 1932, after more than a decade of high unemployment, the TUC began to consider a scheme for ‘unemployed associations’. By 1934 such associations numbered 123, with a total membership of around 5,000, but they were essentially local initiatives, with no national TUC guidance or support until 1935, when the TUC offered to pay the expenses of union officials who were prepared to visit associations within their areas ‘to stimulate and advise them’.

The NUWM had been established initially as an umbrella group to bring together various district councils for the unemployed which had been active in protests against post-war unemployment, the cessation of the ex-servicemen’s ‘donation’ and what were considered other iniquities. Wal Hannington, the national organiser, was a skilled toolmaker who had been a prominent member of the shop stewards’ movement in the engineering trade during the First World War, and Harry McShane, the NUWM leader in Scotland, was also an engineer. Both were founder members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), as were many of the activists in the movement. While the NUWM’s slogan was ‘Work or Full Maintenance at Trade Union Rates of Pay’ (which meant in practice thirty-six shillings a week for an unemployed man and his wife; five shillings for each child up to the age of sixteen; a rent allowance of up to fifteen shillings a week plus one hundredweight of coal or its equivalent in gas; thirty shillings for a single person over eighteen, or fifteen shillings if they were aged sixteen to eighteen), all members were required to take an oath ‘never to cease from active strife until capitalism is abolished’.

Although a member of the CPGB himself, Wal Hannington was always anxious to distance the movement from the Communist Party and insist on its autonomy. On occasion resolutions would be passed at the NUWM’s national conference reaffirming this, and repudiating any notion that the NUWM was in any way an auxiliary of the CP — though there was some substance in the labour movement’s charge that any links with the Communists were concealed so as not to alienate Labour and TUC support. Moreover, however much the Communist Party might hope that the unemployed would provide, if not the vanguard for revolution, then its footsoldiers, the vast majority of those who went on the marches did so for tangible, short-term aims: to get a better deal for the unemployed from the existing state.

It is hard to get accurate figures for how many joined the NUWM, since most records come either from the movement itself or from the CPGB: some historians claim that it mobilised ‘hundreds of thousands of people’, while others dismiss it as remaining ‘a minority movement’. One of those who helped organise the Scottish contingent on the march in 1932, and went himself in 1934, Finlay Hart, an unemployed shipbuilder, recalled, ‘It was as natural as being at work and being a trade unionist, being unemployed and being in the NUWM … At the time of the ’32 march to London the membership of the Clydebank branch of the NUWM would be in hundreds. There were collectors that stood at the Labour Exchange … There were regular meetings outside the Labour Exchange. Members were recruited there.’

The unemployed signed on on Wednesday and were paid on Friday. So Harry McShane and his comrades ‘went always on a Wednesday or a Friday to the Labour Exchange. And we could get a good crowd at the Labour Exchange and hold a meeting on top o’ a chair. And from there we organised all our marches and activities.’ ‘Being a member of the NUWM wasn’t a necessary qualification for going on the March,’ but Finlay Hart ‘couldn’t imagine any being on the March that wouldnae had been a member of the NUWM’. Yet in fact nine or ten of the Clydebank contingent of forty-two were not members of the NUWM. Isa Porte, who went on several marches in Scotland, ‘wasn’t a member myself of the NUWM but I think a lot of the people I marched with would be in it. I wouldnae think there were very many of them in political parties. There would be some in the Communist party, and then there would be Labour Party people. But the majority weren’t politically committed in that way. It was just a question of being unemployed and they wanted to do something about it.’

With unemployment at an unprecedented two and a half million, or some 20 per cent of the insured workforce, the 1932 March was the largest so far. It was preceded by months of continuing unrest. Although the NUWM had enjoyed a certain amount of success in opposing the harshest application of the Means Test in some areas of high unemployment and had succeeded in raising the rates of relief benefits by some Public Assistance Committees, a demand for an end to the Means Test in Birkenhead on Merseyside had erupted in a week of protests, bans and counter-protests. An estimated 8,000 unemployed men marched in a line over a mile long to the PAC offices with their demands. During the ensuing battles between police and demonstrators, stones and bricks were hurled, iron railings torn up, windows smashed and shops looted, batons wielded and police horses charged. Dozens of arrests were made, police reinforcements had to be drafted in from across the Mersey in Liverpool, and thirty-seven demonstrators needed hospital treatment, while seven police were injured, three of them seriously.

In Belfast the next month there was a demonstration by some 2,000 unemployed men demanding better pay for relief work which soon developed into running battles between the police and demonstrators, culminating in the police opening fire on the crowds, killing two men, and having to call on the troops to restore order.

The logistics of the 1932 march were formidable: accommodation had to be found in 188 towns along the route, which was modified in the light of experience of previous marches to try to ensure that the marchers passed through places where they were most likely to be welcomed. Wherever possible reception committees would gather to meet the marchers and march into town with them, provide food, accommodation and entertainment paid for by money raised in advance, and wave them on their way the next morning. St Albans, a prosperous cathedral city twenty miles north of London provided hospitality for thirty-eight women marchers who were met on the road from Luton, escorted into town, accommodated and fed at the Trade Union Club. A concert was laid on to entertain them, and a rally held in the market square to stiffen their resolve. A cobbler took in any shoes that needed repairs, while someone else did the marchers’ washing. The women left the next morning with a packet of sandwiches for the road, shouting, ‘Unite with us to smash the National Government!’ to the citizens of St Albans. Mrs Paisley, a sixty-three-year-old woman from Burnley with sixteen children and twenty-three grandchildren who had suffered much under the Means Test, proclaimed that she ‘had had that much good food on the march that I don’t want to go home’.

Others were less fortunate: if nothing else could be found, marchers were obliged to seek a bed for the night at the local workhouse (now known as the Institution), where managers had been instructed to accommodate them in casual wards and treat them as tramps or vagrants, which meant searching the men, removing their possessions, insisting on them having a bath while their clothes were disinfected if necessary, locking them in for the night, feeding them a ‘spike’ diet of two slices of bread and margarine and tea, and refusing to allow them to leave until 9 a.m. on the second day after their admission, by which time they were supposed to have done whatever work was required to ‘earn’ their keep. Not all workhouse managers insisted on all these conditions: Coventry Council, which had shown ‘weakness’ in 1930 when it put the marchers up in a school and paid for food provided by the Co-op, was warned that it would be surcharged if that were to happen again.

There were skirmishes along the road, usually over what the marchers were expected to put up with at some workhouses (the Lancashire marchers were seriously batoned by the police at a workhouse in Stratford-upon-Avon, and arrived in Hyde Park heavily bandaged) or restrictions put on their right to hold meetings. Harry McShane, who was in charge of the Scottish contingent, made it a practice that ‘if we were banned from marching along a street, we always went up and down it twice’. Some of the Scottish marchers had come from as far away as Dundee, an eighty-mile walk to Glasgow, where they mustered before setting off on the long march south. The men would march on average for twenty-two miles a day, stopping every hour for a ten-minute rest; the cook’s lorry would go ahead and ‘dish out a good big lunch, usually stew’. Wal Hannington made an effort to march for a stretch with each contingent. ‘He loved to lead a big body of men singing. He used to march at the head of the Scots singing “McGregor’s Gathering” and get them all waving their caps on top of their sticks — with the Welsh it was “Land of my Fathers”.’ Most of the contingents had a band which marched all the way to London with flutes and drums, and sometimes cymbals and triangles too. ‘Flautists — you cannae stop them … they would have played all the way if you’d let them.’ The marchers liked to sing as they trudged along too, and the Scots had their own song:

From Scotland we’re marching,

From shipyard, mill and mine.

Our banners raised on high

We toilers are in line.

We are a determined band,

Each with his weapon in his hand.

We are the Hunger Marchers

Of the Proletariat.

Tom Ferns recalled the unemployed protesters marching through the grounds of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, ‘with the Maryhill Flute Band … leading the contingent and it was playing Connolly’s Rebel Song, so that was quite an astonishing event going through the Royal territory’. He thought that the songs the marchers sang ‘were very simple. Sometimes something simple can explain a situation better than something a bit more complicated,’ and instanced songs like:

Mary had a little lamb,

Its fleece was white as snow.

And everywhere that Mary went

The lamb was sure to go

Shouting out the battle cry for freedom.

Hurrah for Mary, hurrah for the lamb,

Hurrah for the Bolshie boys that don’t give a damn.

The Brighton contingent added a further verse:

Ramsay [MacDonald] had a little lamb

Whose feet were black as soot,

Shouting out the battle cry of TREASON.

Some of the women sang (to the tune of ‘Oh why are we waiting’) ‘Oh why are we marching?’ and answered in the last line, ‘The reason is the Means Test.’ Other marchers sang ‘The Red Flag’ repeatedly. While the Greenock contingent on the Edinburgh March in 1933 sang ‘a Russian tune, Budenny’s Cavalry March … the Red Flag [“The people’s flag is deepest red/It shrouded oft our martyred dead/And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold/Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold”] [it] was a very, very kind o’ hymn thing. It was a bit slow and it wasnae much use for marching.’

But ‘they [presumably the organisers] were strict about what we sang’. Emily Swankie and the women she was marching with ‘were stopped singing one night because it was the wrong type of song — Land of Hope and Glory! Someone started to sing it and just because it was a good tune, we all joined in, and the woman came over and said “Just stop that. We don’t want that”’ It was the same with ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. One of the Scottish organisers, Peter Kerrigan, ‘blew his top’ when that was sung: ‘Being the puritanical sort o’Scots Communist that he were, Kerrigan put an end to that song. It was a jingo song — pack up your troubles, nothing to worry about.’ Another Scottish marcher recalled that although ‘There wis many, many tunes we played … we never got to It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, we never got asked to play that! It wis too capitalistic — it was associated wi’ the First World War.’ Other marchers ‘didn’t feel it was a bit militaristic because actually most of our men were ex military men’, and sang it a lot.

The marchers carried banners, some with slogans such as ‘We Refuse to Starve in Silence’, ‘No to the Means Test’ or ‘Wales to London’, or simply with the name of their contingent. Those marching from Brighton to London in 1932 carried one that had been embroidered by women NUWM members with ‘Solidarity not Charity’. These banners were heavy, and were mostly carried furled until the marchers drew near a town. Hugh Sloan wondered, as the Scottish contingent battled a blizzard through the Lowther Hills in January 1934, ‘where the only occupants were sheep … why the hell we were carryin’ the banner … the wind was rackin’ the banner around … and we couldnae maintain our balance … it was the main banner. It just said “The Scottish Contingent”. But why we were carryin’ the banner in a place like that wi’ strong winds blowin’, I just don’t know.’

Most of the marchers were in their twenties or thirties, though some younger men went too, such as William McVicar, who had only managed to find work for a few days since leaving school at fourteen, and was sixteen and a half when he set off on the march to Edinburgh from his home in Greenock in the summer of 1933. Charles Teasdale of Blantyre, by contrast, was seventy when he set off for London on the 1930 march.

The marchers travelled light, though the Brighton contingent ‘borrowed’ a wheelbarrow, ‘trusting that we would be able to put matters right on our return’, to transport their food and a pile of blankets — and to give an occasional ride to their oldest marcher, a seventy-five-year-old woman. Archie McInnes, marching from Glasgow, had ‘an old army haversack — surplus equipment. Ye carried your own gear, your knife, fork and plate, and your blankets of course. One tin mug and a plate … A change of underwear [though other marchers insisted “We didn’ wear underwear in those days,” and John Brown, who marched from Glasgow to London in 1932, only took “jist one of everything. I don’t think I washed any o’ ma underwear or socks during the time I was away” — more than a month!] and shirt, a … hand towel, soap, shavin’ equipment.’ Some wore a waterproof cycling cape — useful in downpours — while John Lochore set off from Glasgow wearing his aunt’s old raincoat, ‘which buttoned on the wrong side’. Most wore some sort of head covering, a flat cap or what the Scots called ‘a bonnet’, and carried a stick to help them along. ‘The walking stick was a camouflaged sort of weapon … a sort of symbol it was in a way and it was very, very helpful,’ according to Harry McShane. The police insisted that these potentially offensive weapons must be surrendered on the approaches to London, though some marchers managed to conceal them from the authorities.

On Thursday, 27 October 1932 the marchers arrived at Hyde Park, their ranks of some 1,500 swollen by around 100,000 Londoners, and pressed towards seven carts that had been set up as a platform. They were met by 2,600 police, including 136 on horseback and 758 special constables who lacked the training or discipline of the regular force, and whose presence, in the words of the Police Review, was ‘calculated to cause trouble rather than avoid it … the special is an irritant rather than an antiseptic … the less they are seen and used [on hunger marches and demonstrations] the better for everyone’. The ‘specials’, goaded by the crowd (factory girls in Borough in South London hardly helped, screaming, ‘Kiss me, Sergeant!’), attacked the marchers with batons, the mounted police charged, and the marchers retaliated, tearing up railings and breaking branches off the trees. As dusk fell nineteen police and fifty-eight demonstrators were reported to have been injured, while fourteen people had been arrested. There were similar scenes in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, 30 October, when Wal Hannington appealed, ‘Let the working class in uniform and out of uniform stand together in defence of their conditions,’ and leaflets were stuck on railings urging: ‘Policemen! Defeat your own pay cuts by supporting Tuesday’s demonstration against the Economies.’

But when Tuesday came, Hannington had been arrested, charged with ‘attempting to cause disaffection among members of the Metropolitan Police’, and detained in custody. Declining the offer of a Labour MP to sponsor them, since the Labour Party had listed the NUWM as a proscribed organisation in 1930, a fifty-strong deputation of the marchers collected their petition calling for the abolition of the Means Test and of the Anomalies Act, the restoration of benefit cuts and withdrawal of the new economy measures, with, it was claimed, a million signatures (‘bigger than the Chartists’ petition’) from Charing Cross left-luggage office, intending to march from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall to present it at the bar of the House of Commons, as was the ancient right of citizens. However, the police clanged shut the gates, leaving the deputation and their petition inside and a milling crowd of supporters outside.

Those supporters marching towards Parliament — which was illegal, since processions were not allowed within a mile of the Palace of Westminster — were met by 3,174 policemen, including 2,000 on horses — some borrowed from the army for the occasion — detailed to defend Parliament. Fighting broke out which continued until midnight, as far away as the Edgware Road and across Westminster Bridge. Official figures listed twelve police and thirty-two demonstrators injured, and forty-two arrests — though only two of those were marchers. The petition was never presented: it was returned to the left-luggage office, and eventually the marchers set off back to their homes all over Britain in trains, their fares negotiated at greatly reduced rates paid for by the money they had collected en route.

Hannington was sentenced to three months in prison — his fifth term in ten years. Sid Elias, the leader of the deputation to hand the petition in to Parliament, was charged with having stirred the hunger marchers to acts of disorder in a letter written to Hannington (who never received it) while he was in Russia, which allowed the right-wing press to raise again the spectre of a ‘Moscow connection’, ‘Russian dupes’ and ‘red gold’ backing the hunger marches, and received the maximum sentence of two years. Five days after the trial Emrhys Llewellyn, the NUWM’s Secretary and Treasurer (who had stashed the petition in the left-luggage office) and the seventy-six-year-old veteran trade unionist, leader of the 1889 Dock Strike, Tom Mann, were also arrested. Both refused to be bound over to keep the peace. Mann addressed the court: ‘If I am to be tied, if my mouth is to be closed, if I am not to participate in voicing the grievances of those who are suffering, while the incompetency of those responsible cannot find work for them, and is knocking down their miserable standards still lower, then whatever the consequence may be … I will not give an undertaking not to be identified with the further organisation of mass demonstrations and the ventilation of the troubles of the unemployed and of the workers generally.’ He went to prison for two months, as did Llewellyn.

The politically engaged writers Storm Jameson, Amabel Williams-Ellis (who was the sister of John Strachey) and Vera Brittain wrote a letter to Time and Tide in protest:

The most important point about the recent demonstrations and hunger marches is this. Other minorities have channels for airing grievances. The unemployed who have the most serious complaint are the least articulate. Their way of saying what they want to say is taken from them if it is made impossible for them to demonstrate or to hold meetings or to state their case directly whether it be to Parliament or to the local Public Assistance Committee. Can it be that the Government are so anxious to silence them because it would rather not hear too much of what it feels like to try to feed a child on two shillings a week? It is with considerable disquiet that we see a National Government attempting to suppress the views of any body of its subjects and especially that section which has the fewest opportunities of making itself heard. The unemployed are muzzled as they have no other means of publicity for their grievances.

Just over a year later, in the bitter cold of January 1934, the unemployed were on the march again. The Labour Party, still hostile to any demands for united action with the Communists, despite the fact that Hitler had come to power in Germany in January 1933 and both the Communist and the Socialist Internationals had called for united working-class action against fascism, continued to class the NUWM as ‘a mere instrument of the British Communist Party’. ‘One of our troubles was that the Labour Party were opposed to our earlier marches,’ recalled Harry McShane. ‘The woman organiser of the Labour Party used to go ahead of us and advise people not to have anything to do with us. The Labour Party were opposed to anything, opposed to the Communist Party mainly. It’s quite true to say that Hannington and myself were members of the Communist Party. And most of the leading elements were members of the Communist Party, not all of them … they did a lot o’ that and it did a lot o’ harm to us. But later on we managed to get Attlee [Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party from 1935] to agree to support a March and speak with us in Hyde Park … and we got the assistance of Aneurin Bevan, who was a tremendously fine person … He was probably the best speaker I’ve ever heard. It was on the 1934 March that I first met him.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Len Edmondson’s brother was ‘sent to a camp in County Durham where the men were employed digging stone and helping to make roads for forestry work. They were accommodated in huts and following breakfast the Union Jack was hoisted [which was a particular irritant to the Welsh and Scottish attendees] whilst they were all lined up and marched to the place of work. In the evening they were lined up again and marched back to the camp when the Union Jack was then lowered.’ ‘They established one camp in Glen Branter in Argyllshire and a number o’ other places. And it is a fact that most of the work they did was afforestation work, mostly for the dukes and the big lords, makin’ roads through the forests. And I think it was at Glen Branter they actually had them diggin’ holes and filling them up again. The camps were horrible … I think they got the idea o’ these camps frae Hitler, because Fascism was establishing itself in Germany and they were sending all these young men to these camps,’ concluded Tom Ferns, an unemployed Glaswegian who had only ever managed to find short-term jobs and was active in both the NUWM and the Young Communist League. But others enjoyed their camp days, rejoicing in the outdoor life, long walks and sports — particularly football — and rejected any notion of a ‘slave camp’.

The camps were clearly authoritarian, with many, it was claimed, overseen by ‘civilian sergeant-majors, retired police officers, ex NCOs of the army and officials transferred from the Poor Law Institutions’. But the most numerous complaints seem to have been about the food — stale bread, leathery meat, sandwiches ‘with bread an inch thick, with a piece of cheese in between that a mouse wouldn’t get up for … when the men used to be working among the fir trees they’d gnaw the resin off the trunk … and pick wild mushrooms and eat them raw, they were that hungry,’ reported William Heard, a West Ham man with a wife and five children who was sent to Shobdon camp in Herefordshire.

‘I still don’t know what we learned … it was a waste of time. The only thing was it took us away from something I suppose,’ thought Heard (who featured in an NUWM pamphlet, Slave Camps). But Alwyn Jones, who was sent to a camp in Suffolk from Oldham, felt ‘so much rot is talked about the camps’ that he wrote an article for his local paper extolling their virtues. ‘A man gets four shillings a week, and of course his wife and children draw if they are unemployed while he is away. He has the best food he ever ate [four meals a day], a bed, and clothes and medical attention if necessary … in beautiful surroundings.’

Although camps continued to open throughout the 1930s, judged by results they were not particularly effective. Of a total intake of 83,000 ‘volunteers’ between 1935 and 1938, only 12,500 subsequently found employment: 19,500 either gave up or were sacked during the twelve-week course. The last one closed in 1939, and several were converted to house prisoners of war.

The National Government had inherited the notion of transference schemes and training camps, but one initiative of its own was the introduction in 1934 of the Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act, in recognition of the fact that there was little hope of a sufficient upswing in world trade to bring jobs back to the areas of the old staple industries — coal, iron, steel, shipbuilding. Four special investigators were appointed to examine conditions in the worst-hit areas: Scotland, West Cumberland, Durham and Tyneside and South Wales. Their reports confirmed what the government must have known already: that while trade was beginning to revive in the Midlands and the South-East, massive unemployment persisted in the depressed areas, with no real prospect of improvement. Parts of South Wales were described as ‘derelict’, with 39,000 men and 5,000 boys ‘surplus to requirements’, there was a permanent labour ‘surplus’ in the depressed areas of Scotland, and Durham bore out the claims of a series of influential articles in The Times in March 1934 which described the area as ‘Places Without a Future: Where Industry is Dead’.

Alongside advertisements for Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Talbot luxury cars, holidays in the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz, which offered ‘Casino-Golf’, a broadtail fur coat with a white fox-fur collar on sale at Jays of Regent Street for forty-nine guineas, and a long list of the wedding presents received by Mr Walter Elliot MP and Miss Katharine Tennant, the ‘Special Correspondent’ (who had reported on the ‘stricken areas’ of South Wales in 1928) explained that ‘There are districts of England, heavily populated, whose plight no amount of trade recovery can ever cure because their sole industry is not depressed but dead.’ The articles spoke of places where the ‘pits are not only closed but abandoned, the works not only shut but dismantled’, of families who had had ‘no proper spell of work for eight years … people living on the very margin … everything superfluous has been pawned or sold … and the necessities of life are largely worn out or broken … shops are shut and boarded up … You may even see the rare sight of a pawnshop closed … the men are not starving, but they are permanently hungry.’ Alongside stark photographs of mining villages such as Spennymoor and Escombe with their slag heaps, rubble and long, empty, derelict streets making them look truly like war zones, the article declared, ‘It would be a failure of humanity to forget them, a failure of statesmanship to ignore them.’ An editorial concluded the grim series with a call for the appointment of a director of operations charged with rehabilitating the workforce and reviving the economies of the depressed areas.

Ramsay MacDonald responded by impressing on the Minister of Labour, Henry Betterton, ‘the importance of doing something to meet The Times leaders, and the growing chorus in the Commons’. Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, agreed, but thought it was essentially ‘not a question of spending a great deal of money, but of showing that the matter had not been pigeon-holed’.

Eight months later the Depressed Areas Bill (its name was later changed by the House of Lords to the Special Areas Bill at the behest of the people of Tyneside, who found the title disparaging) was reluctantly introduced into Parliament. It proposed two full-time, unpaid Commissioners for the areas, one for England and Wales, the other for Scotland. Their budget was £2 million, and their remit was strictly limited — there must be no suggestion that ‘a sort of financial hosepipe designed to pour assistance into the districts’ was being uncoiled, or that this was the thin edge of a public-works wedge. Grants could be given to local authorities and to voluntary agencies such as the NCSS in the Special Areas to initiate or subsidise amenities such as water supplies, sewerage schemes, drainage and sanitation, hospitals, children’s playgrounds, football pitches or open-air swimming pools, and some money was made available for ‘back to the land’ initiatives such as smallholdings, co-operative farming projects and afforestation schemes — though an imaginative plan for a Welsh national park based on the American model was turned down.

One problem was that the Act was at total variance with the labour transference policies which various governments had been pursuing since the 1920s. As a Ministry of Labour official put it, government initiatives should ‘neither waste sympathy nor public funds on any activity which may anchor or attach young or middle-aged people more firmly to the depressed areas’. The ‘Get on your bike’ attitude which has resonated for the right down the decades as a legacy of the ‘hungry thirties’ was expressed in the words of the National Government’s Chief Industrial Advisor, Horace Wilson: ‘The people who wish to work must go where the work is.’

The Act’s narrow scope and the limited funds available made it seem little more than a gesture, and it drew criticism from the press and across the political spectrum. The Mayor of Newcastle regarded it as ‘a flea bite, a sop’; to Aneurin Bevan it was ‘an idle, empty farce’, a mere palliative offering ‘a bit of colour-washing colliers’ cottages’ in the hope of attracting new industry (as had already happened at Brynmawr). Lloyd George damned the Act as ‘patching’ and ‘peddling hope’, while Harold Macmillan, with patrician languor, ridiculed it as ‘Parturiunt montes: nascetur ridiculus mus. The mountains have been in labour and there has been born a mouse … a nice mouse, a profitable and helpful little mouse, but a ridiculous, microscopic, Lilliputian mouse.’

Other depressed areas such as Manchester and Lancashire lobbied to be ‘special’ too, since they too had moribund industries and high unemployment. By 1936, when the Commissioner for England and Wales, Sir Malcolm Stewart, who had been particularly disappointed at the failure to build a bridge across the Severn, which had first been mooted in the 1840s (but which did not happen until 1965), resigned, ostensibly on health grounds, he admitted that ‘No appreciable reduction in the number of unemployed has been effected.’ A survey of 5,800 firms that he had undertaken in 1935 showed that only eight would even consider investing in the Special Areas. They gave their reasons as inaccessibility, high local taxes, low consumer purchasing power and high rates of trade union membership. The powers of the Commissioners were increased by an Amendment to the Act in 1937 which meant that rates, rent and taxes could be remitted for industries starting or relocating to the Special Areas, and trading estates were set up with all facilities laid on in which firms could lease premises. It was also agreed that ‘steps should be taken to prevent further industrial concentration round London and the South’ by diverting industry to areas of heavy unemployment. The Commissioners’ budget was increased annually, so that by 1938 they were allowed to spend £17 million. Nevertheless, fewer than 50,000 new jobs were created under the Special Areas legislation.

The 1934 Unemployment Act spurred the NUWM to organise another national march. Given that it was to take place ‘in the dead of winter [starting in January], it is essential that proper provision be made for every marcher having stout clothes, good boots and coat, as well as a real Army pack’. Cobblers must accompany every contingent (they would repair boots overnight), and for those coming from Scotland, the North-East, Lancashire and Yorkshire, who would be on the road for more than ten days, hot food would have to be provided. This meant a one- or two-ton truck to transport the field kitchen, which was ‘like an old washin’ house boiler on the back of a lorry’, according to one Scottish marcher. An ‘ambulance unit’ would also be on hand to cope with the inevitable spate of blisters and other medical emergencies. Every marcher was to be provided with a copy of the Unemployment Bill and the twelve-page Manifesto of the National Hunger March and Congress so that he or she would know exactly why they were marching and what for. Generally, money was more forthcoming than it had been on earlier marches. The Tyneside marchers left with generous donations from various Durham mining lodges, and even the impoverished lodges of South Wales managed to scrape together some funds for their representatives. The Scottish contingent collected £45 in the streets of Coventry and £20 in Birmingham, while in Warrington £55 was dropped into the rattled tins of the Lancashire marchers, and they left Oxford £120 better off.

Women were in a very small minority among the membership of the NUWM. ‘But there were several capable women who were very active,’ recalled Finlay Hart. And when it came to the Hunger Marches, ‘We didn’t like women with the men in case there was any scandal,’ according to Harry McShane, the Scottish NUWM organiser. ‘There was a woman’s contingent … and they marched a separate route.’ ‘We never saw any of the men on the March,’ remembered Mary Johnston, who had been unemployed for over a year when she joined the Scottish women en route for London in 1934. ‘We never had any contact with them. I don’t suppose we ever thought of questioning them. I don’t recollect any discussion on the point at all. And of course it would be quite a good thing, really, if the men were using a separate route.’

It was considered that a march from Glasgow to London would be too taxing for the thirty or so Scottish women, so the men ‘set off a week or two before us … but … we would have a send off from Clydebank and we’d get a bus from Glasgow to Derby and join up with the other women, mainly the women from Northern England, Lancashire,’ making a contingent of around a hundred. But Emily Swankie, who had decided with her husband John that as the Labour Exchange would have stopped his money if he’d joined the 1934 march (as he would not be available for work if he was on the road — a requirement of drawing benefit) she would march instead, since she was also unemployed. The first day out from Derby

we walked sixteen miles … we found that sixteen miles is quite a distance for people not used to marching. And if like me you were in a new pair of shoes, it wasn’t funny … We never did sixteen miles again. The next day it was twelve miles. And then we cut it down to eight … We had black stockings which we were asked to wear all the time … they frowned on bare legs. No bare legs on the Hunger March … There was a wee bit of puritanism there too, but it was that they wanted to avoid at all costs any bad publicity — women marching with bare legs … There were long hours of walking and nothing really happened, passing through villages, people coming out to look at us, curious, interested some of them, not very curious, some of them not very receptive … But where we did have receptions, it was great. We had the Co-operative Guild women, some Church Guild women, Labour Party women and Communist Party women. They had made up reception committees for us … sometimes they had brought in home baking, and they got us bedded down in halls etc. for the night. In one place they anticipated we wouldn’t be very well fed the next day because they knew the area through which we were going. And they made us big bowls of hard-boiled eggs. We had to stuff our pockets with them because it was on the cards that we wouldn’t eat next night. And they sent in basins with Lysol — that was the old disinfectant for your feet … we were very kindly received.

Like the men, the women always marched in step when they got to a town. ‘You march better when you’re tuned in with other people,’ thought Marion Henery. And it looked more organised and purposeful. As with the men, it was sore feet that were the main problem for the women: ‘The Lancashire women wore clogs. You heard the clatter of the clogs but they never had any trouble with their feet … but a lot of other women had problems with heel blisters.’ The women ‘had to sleep in workhouses quite a number of times … we had always to give our names. The women on the March didnae take kindly to this. So a lot of fictitious names were given — Mary Pickford [the American film star of the silent screen] and names like that.’

Although the Labour Party and the TUC leadership continued to label the NUWM as the Communist party in disguise and to reject attempts to build a ‘United Front’ against unemployment (though the ILP, which had recently disaffiliated from the Labour Party and would wither henceforth, heeded the call), there was more support among the rank and file this time. The South Wales contingent, for example, had the support of almost all the Labour MPs in the area and many of the local union branches and trades councils for the 1934 march. Reception committees were more likely to turn out as the marchers neared towns, and were more prepared to offer food and accommodation. Many committees included a clergyman who might offer his church hall, or even his church, for the night. However, the reception en route was mixed: as the marchers tramped through Windsor, servants working at the castle threw them money, but at Reading, where there was no reception committee, they had to bed down on used straw in a cattle market.

As the marchers neared Oxford they found ‘students were standing on the side o’ the road with bundles o’ walking sticks and handin’ them to us as we passed again after the police [who had confiscated the marchers’ sticks] was away. They were sympathetic students, no’ Communists or anything like that. But they’d seen what we were goin’ through and they decided we needed sticks for walkin’,’ recalled Frank McCusker. Duff Cooper, who was Financial Secretary at the War Office, was appalled, and said in the House of Commons that he hoped that the university authorities would know how to deal with these undergraduates who fell into step with the Hunger Marchers. When he came to speak at the Oxford Union few weeks later Cooper was challenged about his remarks by Anthony Greenwood, known in Oxford as the ‘young Adonis of the Labour Party’, the son of Arthur Greenwood, who had been Minister of Health in the 1929 Labour government, but had declined to join the National Government. ‘It is a vile thing,’ Cooper replied, ‘to encourage these poor people, under-fed, ill-clothed, to set out in bad weather, marching the roads to London, knowing perfectly well that they would get nothing when they got there. In a university with traditions, it was a suitable case for the authorities to interfere with the young fools who lost their heads and their sense of proportion.’

The Labour politician George Lansbury was the other speaker, and he disagreed, welcoming the fact that ‘Christian charity’ still existed among the undergraduates. It was capitalism that had failed to do anything for its victims, ‘and that is the greatest condemnation of the system that can be offered’. The President of the Union, the socialist Frank Hardie, questioned the right of Oxford undergraduates to have £2,000 spent on their education while others were pitchforked into the labour market at fourteen. The motion that ‘This House believes that in Socialism lies the only solution to the problems of this country’ was passed by 316 votes to 247.

The ‘young fools’ of Oxford were not the only less obvious supporters of the Hunger Marchers. Fifteen-year-old Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, who was a pupil at Wellington College and who kept a porcelain bust of Lenin on his study shelves under a portrait of his uncle and next to six copies of The Communist Manifesto, was a fervent, if unfocused, enthusiast too. With his brother Giles he had started a magazine, Out of Bounds, ‘against reaction in the public schools’, which contained attacks on the Officer Training Corps, fascism (though Michael Wallace of Oundle was allowed space for a defence), traditional public schools which were ‘concerned with the production of a class’, as well as informative articles on subjects such as masturbation (‘some form of auto-eroticism is absolutely inevitable’) and progressive schools (including Dartington, which permitted copies of the Moscow Daily News as well as the Times Literary Supplement in its library) plus some rather memorable poems by the schoolboy Gavin Ewart. The Romillys were delighted to announce in the first issue, published in March 1934, that Out of Bounds was ‘Banned in Uppingham — Banned in Cheltenham’, and they could gleefully add ‘Banned in Aldenham, Imperial Service College and Wellington’ (from whence it sprang) by the second. Furthermore, the Daily Mail had picked up the story under the headlines ‘Red Menace in Public Schools’, ‘Moscow Attempts to Corrupt Boys’, ‘Officer’s Son [the Romillys’ father was a colonel in the Scots Guards and had commanded the Egyptian Camel Corps in the First World War] Sponsors Extremist Journal’.

L. Shinnie of Westminster School reviewed the collected Listener articles Memoirs of the Unemployed for Out of Bounds, concluding that ‘members of the public schools can only make certain that they will not suffer the conditions depicted in this book if they join with the working classes to achieve a better society’. Esmond Romilly managed to persuade his mother not only to contribute half a crown to the National Hunger March Committee, but also to pen a letter to the Daily Worker expressing her ‘entire sympathy with the cause of the unemployed who have had their benefits cut and I am glad they are availing themselves of a traditionally British method to voice their grievances’. Nellie Romilly had wished to add ‘God Save the Queen’ at the bottom, but had been dissuaded. However, young Romilly later realised the political capital that could be made out of a sister of the wife of Winston Churchill writing such a letter, and it never appeared.

One afternoon in February 1934 Henry Crowder, a black American jazz musician and the lover of a wealthy and rebellious socialite with a restless social conscience, Nancy Cunard, went to her flat and found her wearing ‘a bizarre collection of garments — a man’s overcoat, an aviator’s helmet and several scarves — which, she told him, were partly for warmth and partly for disguise. She informed him that she was off to join the hunger marchers and he was to tell no one. Off she went with a small movie camera in her hand.’

Much later, Nancy Cunard wrote to a friend: ‘It was at Stamford [that] I met them [the hunger marchers], up that great road … One thought the dog of the Inn had been put in the soup, just as we were all sitting down, in pretty great cold, eating stew on the roadside … Why the hunger march? In protest against the Means Test.’

‘We were on the road when this car drew up,’ remembered Tom Clarke, who was on the march from Dundee. ‘I think it was a Rolls Royce — I’m not very good on cars. This woman got out … [she] was taking newsreels or films. [Peter] Kerrigan said, “That’s Nancy Cunard.” I didn’t at the time know who Nancy Cunard was. To me here we were fighting capitalism and yet ye’d get these people coming along and dropping money, maybe a pound note or more, into a collection bag. I remember quizzing Kerrigan about this. I says, “How the hell does this happen?” He says, “Well, they’re so accustomed to giving tips, this doesn’t mean a thing.” They may have intended well, they may not, but they just gave tips.’

‘Eighth day,’ wrote Joseph Albaya, who was marching in a Sheffield contingent on 17 February. ‘Kettering — one of those towns that didn’t know what unemployment was — also where the inhabitants looked at us if were dogs.’ The marchers were put up in the workhouse. ‘Speech by Mayor to welcome us — (he said he believed in action by constitutional means).’ The next day it was ‘on to Bedford our longest trek to date — never been so tired as on this day — feet in a terrible condition … the trek was about 32 miles on hard roads — admittedly may have done rambles this length but never with the necessity of keeping in step — dark before we reached Bedford — five miles out the leaders had to keep encouraging the marchers — kept telling us we were there — these to my mind were silly tactics as the result was disappointment — had one final rest on the side of the road — utterly fagged out — was stretched out in a ditch — a Good Samaritan came out and dished cigarettes out.’

Aware that the Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, and the Attorney General had both warned mothers along the marchers’ route to keep their children indoors and shopkeepers to shutter their windows, hinting at the prospect of ‘grave disorder, public disturbances’, even ‘bloodshed’, the NUWM was determined to avoid confrontations. ‘We’re here to demonstrate against the operation of the Means Test and the economy cuts and not to have a diversion or fight with the police which would misrepresent the whole idea of the March,’ warned Harry McShane. ‘We’re here to protest peacefully and with discipline.’ Any transgressor would usually be packed off back home — though only after a meeting had been held with all the contingent to decide his fate. Misdeeds might include drunkenness (though according to most marchers this was rare: ‘There was no money for drink anyway in the first place.’ It took Frank McCusker six weeks to march from Scotland, and ‘I could say I had about six pints o’ beer frae Glasgow to London’), scrounging, brawling, stealing another man’s boots, pilfering the collection boxes or pulling off a scam such as arriving in a town in advance of the main body of marchers, collecting money from sympathetic onlookers and pocketing the proceeds before rejoining the march.

If the marchers were organised, so were the authorities. Instructions were reiterated that any soft-hearted local PAC thinking of offering food or loans of blankets to the marchers would be surcharged for this largesse. Chief Constables along the route were required to file reports about the number, progress and behaviour of each contingent, and whether any marchers had previous convictions for breaches of the peace.

In fact both sides were concerned to avoid any aggressive confrontation as the marchers streamed into Hyde Park on Sunday, 25 February 1934. Unknown to police or marchers, a vigilante committee had assembled in a small flat behind Selfridges, watching the action and hovering by the telephone to report any police brutality among the crowd of over 50,000 marchers. It was a distinguished posse, ‘rather like the members of a cultural, intellectual and progressive Who’s Who’: E.M. Forster, Professor Julian Huxley, Vera Brittain, her husband, Professor George Caitlin, and her friend the novelist Winifred Holtby, ‘tall, calm and big-boned’, and Dr Edith Summerskill were there, as were a couple of barristers, two young solicitors and Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman. Claud Cockburn brought H.G. Wells, who had been unwell, and was ‘wrapped in mufflers’. The assembled group were either members of, or distinguished left-wingers who had been invited as observers by, the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL), since previously reports of acts of harassment by the police had been easy to discredit since they came mainly from the victims themselves.

The NCCL (now Liberty) had been set up by a one-time actor and freelance journalist, Ronald Kidd, who also owned a radical, free-thinking bookshop, the Punch and Judy, in Villiers Street, where unexpurgated copies of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness could be purchased, as well as books about the Soviet Union which were not ‘full of hysterical anti-communism’, and the barrister, writer and soon-to-be Independent MP, A.P. Herbert, as a result of Kidd’s disquiet at the behaviour of police agents provocateurs during the 1932 Hunger March, and Herbert’s unease at the police acting as ‘bandits’, ordering drinks in nightclubs after hours in order to secure convictions. The civil libertarians peered down at ‘the sea of hats in the Park — caps, trilbies, hard felts and the occasional bowler’ marching through the grey, slanting drizzle, and some ventured down to the edge of the crowds to get a closer look. The music of the pipe and flute bands of the Scottish marchers (Glasgow’s contingent alone boasted eight flute bands) hung in the air, interspersed with much shouting of slogans and singing of ‘The Internationale’ as the lines of unemployed marched in step, watched by lines of police, one unit atop Marble Arch with a telephone, ready to direct operations and summon reinforcements in case of trouble.

Joseph Albaya, who had been on the road for sixteen days, recorded:

Got up late for the GREAT DAY … put on clean shirt … long boring wait at Friends’ Meeting House where leaders entertained us in usual fashion by usual speeches — fell in outside, raining on my new outfit … put on selling Hunger March Bulletins — papers not counted so had plenty of chances of making a dishonest penny — rather alarmed by the reports of the older marchers of not keeping to the ranks consequently rather felt like a hero [sic] lined outside for ration of oranges and cigarettes and the singing of the daily ritual (the ‘Internationale’) — set off in fine style — rather impressed by the military bearing and dignity of the comrades — the consciousness that it was their Great Day had made the marchers buck themselves up — the contingent headed by Scottish pipers, fifes and drums … raining lightly all the time — my papers getting wet and not selling — soon picked up a companion who was trying to convey the usual idea that we were in for a blood bath — crowds increasing — also police contingent headed by three mounted policemen … under the command of a military-looking old bastard … Noticed that comrades’ London banners are much bigger and better than provincial ones and that London comrades are much more militant and less apathetic than provincial comrades [possibly partly because they were less exhausted] … the police led us into a better class district off the main traffic roads — blocks of imposing flats — I went berserk … yelling obscenities at the occupants of the flats — I was sobbing with rage — I never knew what class consciousness was until that moment — I was ready to do anything, charge the police, smash up everything in sight — it was the way the occupants of the flats looked at us … every flat seemed to have a balcony from which they laughed at us and then contemptuously threw down money — their contempt was so open that even the dullest of the marchers could see it. Christ! … if they had been on a level on us and not above us on their balconies well … I should have taken part willingly in my first riot.

Jack Gaster, a young lawyer, was the ILP representative on the London reception committee:

I was based in Marylebone and we were always organising the Hyde Park meetings … we used to go down to some stables behind Great Ormond Street owned by the Co-op and arrange for eight or ten horse drawn vehicles to come to Hyde Park to form a platform. In those days … there were no loudspeakers or anything like that … I had to marshal [the marchers] out of Hyde Park which was a very important job because we were determined to march down Oxford Street. The police were determined that we shouldn’t. They wanted to keep the marchers off the main streets. There were hundreds of thousands in the Park. We arranged for part of the march to leave Hyde Park by the Bayswater Road entrance … and another part to go out via Park Lane … and both to converge … There were police lined up, very senior officers because it was a very important thing, ‘mounties’ too. They said ‘Sorry, Mr Gaster, you can’t go down Oxford Street.’ I said ‘We’re going down.’ I was trembling in my shoes … but I very carefully put the Scottish marchers behind me. They were the real tough ones. I said, ‘These lads haven’t walked from all over England to be pushed into the back streets.’ ‘Sorry, we can’t allow it.’ I said, ‘Very well. We’re going down Oxford Street and the responsibility is yours … There’s going to be a fight. Do you want a fight? Does the government want a fight?’ They withdrew and we marched down Oxford Street.

In the event the entire occasion went off peacefully: ‘not a scuffle, not a baton raised. No report from anywhere of even so much as a pane of glass broken. No bloodshed!’ the NCCL observers, who had had no need to pick up their phone, recorded. The same was the case at a rally in Trafalgar Square.

After queuing in the snow some two hundred unemployed marchers were allowed into Parliament, where some struck up ‘The Internationale’ in the Central Lobby, while those allowed into the Strangers’ Gallery interrupted debate by shouting ‘Hear the Hunger Marchers!’ and ‘Down with the Starvation Government!’ All were ejected, and they eventually returned home without having been able to present their petition to Parliament, the reduced train fares that had been negotiated with the railway companies covered by money raised on the march.

However, some female textile marchers, led by Maud Brown, the women’s organiser of the NUWM, had managed to penetrate 10 Downing Street and confront Ramsay MacDonald’s daughter Ishbel, who was ‘very friendly [and] offered … tea … but on a point of honour we refused it’, recalled Mary Johnston, one of Miss MacDonald’s unexpected visitors. ‘We felt it would be weakening our position if we accepted tea.’ Before they left the Prime Minister’s daughter suggested that maybe the unemployed women might try domestic service, according to one of them.

Ramsay MacDonald refused to grant the marchers an audience. ‘Has anyone who cares to come to London, either on foot or in first-class carriages, the constitutional right to demand to see me, to take up my time, whether I like it or not?’ he asked rhetorically in the Commons a few days later. ‘I say he has not.’

Sir Herbert Samuel, the Liberal leader and former Home Secretary, was despairing:

No one can say that the grievances of these men, who have walked to this city from many parts of this island, are trivial or imaginary … What should they have done other than what they have done, if they want to draw the attention of the nation to their plight, to stir the nation out of what is really a shameful complacency, and to protest against the utterly inadequate measures that have so far been taken? Are we to say to them, ‘If you are disorderly, we cannot listen to you; it would be to discourage disorder. If you are orderly, we need not listen to you?’ …

It is said that they are Communists, and therefore that they ought to be ignored. Let us not attach so much importance to labels, but see the realities behind the name. There is not here, and everyone knows it, any deliberate plan or attempt to overturn society. This march is nothing more than a protest, a bitter cry. They say to us: ‘Hear us; see us; help us.’ It is that and nothing more …

It is said that these men are not representative of the whole body of the unemployed. Perhaps not, but there is no one else to represent them; there is no other organisation that speaks urgently in their name.

That ‘bitter cry’ was heard again in January 1935, when the 1934 Unemployment Act was implemented, and under what the National Government referred to as a ‘Great Social Reform’, responsibility for administering Means-Tested relief for those who had exhausted their unemployment insurance entitlement, and the able-bodied uninsured unemployed, were transferred from the 183 local PACs to a new national Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB). A national sliding scale of relief was to replace the various local scales of the PACs, some of which in depressed areas had been lenient in their interpretation of the test. Indeed, as late as 1935 a number of councillors in South Wales boasted that the Means Test had never operated in their area.

When the new rates were announced they turned out to be lower than those previously allowed, and large-scale agitations broke out in South Wales (including the storming of Merthyr Tydfil UAB office, where 90 per cent of claimants had been receiving full rates of benefit), spreading to the North-East (where 10,000 marched on Sheffield Town Hall to demand the repeal of the Act and the immediate restoration of old allowances) and Scotland, with the unemployed besieging local authority offices and PACs with complaints about reduced benefits. Forty-eight per cent of all those in receipt of benefit across the country had seen them cut, while only 34 per cent had seen an increase. An emergency two-day debate in Parliament revealed the divide in the country, as MPs representing seats in the Midlands and the South of England ‘listened in often puzzled silence’ to the ‘virulent attacks’ from their colleagues of all parties from the depressed areas. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, admitted that ‘It had been realised for the first time that very large numbers of working men in Great Britain, and particularly in Scotland, were paying rents much lower than had been thought [which meant that their benefit had been cut, since the sliding scale reckoned that rent equalled around a quarter of living costs], and were living under very bad conditions.’ A Standstill Act was introduced for two years which allowed the unemployed to choose whichever rate was the higher, that of the UAB or their local PAC.

These protests had been essentially local and spontaneous (though with some NUWM support), and it was not until two years after the previous one that another NUWM-organised march set off. But that 1936 Hunger March was eclipsed, both then and down the years to come, by a much smaller march of only two hundred men, organised with Labour Party and TUC support and led by a Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson, to protest at the singular situation of one devastated town, Jarrow.

If Jarrow has come to epitomise the ‘Hungry Thirties’, what, if anything, was the importance of those other seven Hunger Marches from all over Britain? Their success can’t be judged in terms of concessions wrung from the government, but though the numbers involved were relatively small, the name — the indictment — ‘Hunger March’ stuck, giving the decade its epithet. Winston Churchill called them ‘Anger Marches’, and they were that too. Most of those who took part were realistic about what they achieved. The hated Means Test was still in force when war broke out in 1939, though the government did raise benefit payments after the 1934 march. Rather, marchers spoke in terms of ‘showin the authorities that ye are nae prepared to take things lyin’ down’: ‘I felt we had the guts but we had nae policy. I never knew anyone on the March that got a job through it … [but] the March meant that you were trying to tae do somethin’ about it. They wernae just accepting it’; ‘I don’t think we achieved any success. We had this approach by Government: you were down and they were trying to keep you down … But the Hunger Marches kept alive the spirit to keep fighting’; ‘It highlighted the situation that people were in … it brought to the notice o’ the general public the conditions o’ the unemployed at that time’; ‘I don’t think we achieved that much out o’ it. But we let the people in the whole o’ the country know the conditions that were going on as far as we were concerned in Scotland, or South Wales, or the North East’; ‘Being a Marxist you know you’re no’ gaun tae get any immediate results. It’s a process of development and it takes the form of struggles and the class struggle in a’ its aspects. I didn’t expect any dramatic victory.’

There was no dramatic victory, but the Hunger Marchers helped to rewrite the concept of ‘welfare’, reclaiming it as part of the commons, as a social right rather than something given selectively as a matter of discretion to mendicants. This reading would underpin the Beveridge Report of 1942, and subsequent social welfare legislation after the Second Word War.

If the marches achieved few concrete results, did they politicise the unemployed? Did the unemployed come to see themselves as a dispossessed class in revolt against capitalism? Many — politicians of all parties and most of the press — portrayed the unemployed as vulnerable to exploitation by the Communist Party for its own nefarious ends. Some charged that the NUWM was controlled by the Communist Party, others saw it as a recruiting ground providing footsoldiers for the Party. The third World Congress in 1921 had directed all Communist Parties to ‘participate directly in the struggle of the working masses, establish Communist leadership of the struggle, and, in the course of the struggle create large, mass Communist Parties’.

The CPGB would certainly have liked to gain control of the unemployed movement, build it up as a mass political organisation and direct its activities towards the overthrow of capitalism, but most marchers insist that the overlap of the NUWM and the CPGB was small among the ordinary members, indeed that most members had no particular political affiliation. Very few of the tens of thousands drawn into the agitation went on to join the CPGB — and in fact few actually joined the NUWM. ‘The people’s flag is deepest pink/It’s not as red as people think/And ere their limbs grow stiff and cold/The Dundee workers will be sold’- sang one sceptical marcher. The total number who paid tuppence for an NUWM membership card and a penny a week for a stamp was probably around 15,000 by the end of 1931. When there was government action that was regarded as hostile to the interests of the unemployed, membership would surge: 2,000 a week were recruited in response to the cuts in benefit and the introduction of the Means Test in 1931. Numbers rose throughout 1933 when the NUWM was engaged in active protests and was meeting harsh opposition, but fell again until early 1935, when the announcement of another round of benefit cuts for the unemployed gave a further impetus, and membership rose to above 20,000. But by the time of the final Hunger March in 1936 it had declined to nearer 14,000, and it only rose slightly in late 1938, coinciding with a campaign for winter relief. Some of the unemployed joined in support of a particular campaign, and then left, most let their membership lapse if they found a job, while a few found even the required penny a week subscription unaffordable. This was not the behaviour of ‘a militant army committed to revolutionary change’, and throughout the 1930s those who went on hunger marches remained a minority among the unemployed, the unemployed remained a (sometimes, in some places, large) minority within the working class, and moreover a minority without economic power.

The successes that the NUWM achieved among the unemployed were less in politicising them (though a number of Hunger Marchers subsequently did go to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War) than in drawing attention to the failure of the government to do enough about unemployment, gaining sufficient sympathy for their cause that the government took care not to be seen to be acting provocatively, and particularly in helping unemployed individuals fight for their rights.

The NUWM did have victories in getting local PACs to raise benefit rates, or to impose the Means Test less harshly, and it also evolved a system of local committees trained in legal aspects of unemployment regulations and benefits to advise members, and, supported by advice from the legal department, to represent a member who took his or her appeal to the National Umpire at Kew. So successful was this growing expertise on national insurance questions that the NUWM was sometimes asked for help by a trade union branch, and William Beveridge invited Wal Hannington and Sid Elias to advise official committees on several occasions.

The Maryhill local branch of the NUWM in Glasgow was

a hive of activity … People coming in were getting cut off from benefit as a result of the Means Test and all the other anomalies that were introduced then. And their case was taken up and there was always somebody at the Labour Exchanges representing them … the NUWM was organising, fighting appeals against the decision when people’s benefits were cut, even turning out when people had been evicted for arrears of rent, advertising the many demonstrations which were taking place in Glasgow — at least one a week, where anything from 5,000 to 20,000 people were turning up … we used chalk or whitewash in the streets … we had a problem eventually. There were so many demonstrations taking place — unemployed and other — there wisnae enough space left at the street corner to advertise them all.

Michael Clark was ‘never a member o’ the Communist Party. I was in sympathy quite a lot, but I never did join … these fellows read politics and history goin’ away back hundreds of years about the Clearances in Scotland … the big shot landlords and all that. I’d time for adventure books, but no time for politics!’ Nevertheless, Clark took over as rent convenor on behalf of the NUWM in Greenock, taking direct action in disputes. ‘We’d go to a house where eviction was threatened [for falling behind with the rent] and sit in the house … as many of us as possible, to occupy the house so’s they widnae get takin’ the furniture. And then we’d negotiate with the Parish Council and councillors … to get like a settled fee … for them to pay the rent, make up the arrears.’

The NUWM also organised social events for the unemployed: country rambles, football matches, whist drives, socials, study circles, concerts and dances. ‘The jiggin’, the dancin’ was right popular — many of the best dancers in town went. Well, you could say that the unemployed got plenty o’ time to practise! They got quite a good band together … they could go up to town and at the Palais de Danse they could have held their own wi’ the best o’ them.’ Then there were days out for the children of the unemployed — including an outing to Battery Park near Greenock for 4,700 children who were provided with milk and buns and a bag of toffees to take home.

The charge stuck, however, of a movement controlled from Moscow, financed by ‘red gold’ and aiming at revolution. Yet if the NUWM attracted only relatively small numbers, the Communist Party certainly did no better. By August 1930 membership, which had peaked at 12,000 immediately after the General Strike in 1926, had fallen to fewer than 2,500, while the Labour Party had around 200,000 individual members. Since 1929 the CPGB had been pursuing the Communist International (Comintern)-dictated ‘class against class’ policy, identifying the Labour Party as the ‘third capitalist party’ and ‘social fascists’, and had severed links with other left-wing organisations including the ILP.

Villages such as Mardy at the head of the Rhondda Valley and Lumphinnans in the West Fife coalfield were demonised as ‘Little Moscows’ for their industrial militancy, opposition to the coal owners — and to the capitalist system in general — and their supposed unwavering support for communism (though the ‘class against class’ policy had eroded cooperation in local politics with Labour built up over a decade — as it closed so many doors — and reduced the CP to an opposition party). Miners formed the hard core of the membership, but the party was strongest in London and Scotland. While most CPGB members were relatively young, working-class men, by late 1932, 60 per cent of them were out of work, and that figure was higher in Scotland. There were few female members, since women had been ‘completely neglected’ in the drive to grow a mass party, and the Young Communist League could only claim two or three hundred members.

Moreover, the avenues of persuasion could be narrow. In Bolton, members of the Communist Party petitioned the central library to subscribe to the Daily Worker and periodicals such as The USSR in Construction and Labour Monthly, as well as to purchase what the local press dubbed ‘red’ books (such as Lenin’s Complete Works and Plekanoff’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism). The chief librarian circulated sample copies for a month, but the Library Committee gave hardly an inch, agreeing only that Labour Monthly could be placed in the reading room — and that for a trial period of six months only.

Nevertheless, the decision had been taken not only to try to grow a mass working-class revolutionary movement, but also to engage in electoral politics. However, Communist candidates performed poorly, and seemed unable to capitalise on growing disappointment first with the Labour, and then with the National Government. Even in Seaham, Ramsay MacDonald’s own constituency, disgust with the ‘great betrayer’ did not translate into support for the Communist candidate, who only picked up 677 votes. The Party’s most solid support was in London and the depressed mining areas, particularly those in Scotland and South Wales, and at the depth of the Depression in January 1932 membership had risen to 9,000. Yet in the Merthyr Tydfil by-election in 1934, Wal Hannington only managed to pick up 9.4 per cent of the votes, and the Communists were hardly more successful in local elections. In Gateshead even a local ‘Douglas Credit’ candidate polled more votes than the Communist contender, and no council in England was ever controlled by Communists. Although Communist participation in elections was of considerable ‘nuisance value’, splitting the left vote and sometimes, as in Whitechapel in London’s East End, West Fife and a Sheffield seat, letting in a Conservative or National candidate, it was not until the 1935 election that the Party managed to send an MP to Westminster, when Willie Gallacher won West Fife and Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary, came within a whisker of being returned for East Rhondda.

Attempts to build an industrial base met with little success either: the Minority Movement, the Communist industrial organisation, urged the setting up of alternative unions to rival existing trade unions, but only two ever came into being: the United Mineworkers of Scotland, based in the coal mines of Fife, and the short-lived United Clothing Workers of East London. The Minority Movement never attracted more than seven hundred members, and when it was finally wound up in 1933 it could claim only 550 party members organised in eighty-two factory cells.

The Party’s greatest problem in the early 1930s was its retention rate: if the NUWM leached members, so did the CPGB, partly due to ‘rotten’ organisation, and partly to the rigour and commitment demanded of recruits to the cause. An anonymous member of the Bromley Communist Party in Kent recalled that it had been ‘a serious decision’ when, after much discussion, eight people ‘decided that the time had come to make a commitment to the Communist Party … for one thing the police, including the special branch, took a great interest in the activities, however trivial, of even rank and file members of the party. Secondly, a great many employers refused to employ anyone known to be associated with the party, and lastly, it meant virtual segregation and exclusion from the work of the Labour Party and even some Trade Unions.’ Cut off from the rest of the ‘reformist’ left, the CPGB built itself something of a world within a world. ‘Like practising Catholics or Orthodox Jews, we lived in a little private world of our own … a tight … self-referential group,’ frequenting cafés such as Meg’s in Parton Street in London and the Clarion in Market Street, Manchester (‘Communists met in cafés rather than pubs: there was quite a strong inhibition against drink’), the pro-Soviet Scala cinema in Charlotte Street in London, Henderson’s ‘bomb shop’ (which became Collet’s bookshop) and others in King Street and the Farringdon Road, as well as meeting at dances and whist drives organised by the Friends of the Soviet Union, the League of Socialist Freethinkers, the Rebel Players and the Federation of Student Societies, and the activities of the Workers’ Theatre Movement and the British Workers’ Sports Federation. They rambled collectively at weekends, took holidays at Socialist youth camps or Communist guest houses, or stayed in youth hostels as part of hiking trips (some YHA wardens were rumoured to be ‘sympathisers’). If the expenditure of £5 was feasible, they might take a week’s holiday with the Workers’ Travel Association in the Lake District, or maybe the Trossachs.

Certainly a great deal was asked of a Communist: attending frequent meetings, organising, speaking, selling Party literature, trade union activities, membership of other outside bodies and ‘front’ organisations. Ernest Trory suggests the level of commitment required: ‘I had become engaged to a girl who was not at all interested in the Party. The engagement was later broken off but in the meantime I began to spend more time dancing and taking her to the pictures than was consistent with Party work … To make matters worse, I frequented the Empire Club. A real sink of iniquity … spending my time gambling and playing cards, when I was needed by the Party at a critical time …’

As well as regular attendance at ‘advanced political training lectures’, the Bromley Communists were expected to sell the weekend edition of the Daily Worker (produced in its early days in an unheated office without electricity, the editor typing articles by candlelight) outside Woolworths and Marks & Spencer’s in the town centre, although they found they could shift more copies late on Saturday evenings, ‘when the bus crews returned to Bromley garage at the end of a day’s work’. However, ‘sales were not very great, twenty to thirty copies being considered adequate compensation for the long hours worked’. Perhaps that was hardly surprising, since at the time the Daily Worker, the first issue of which had appeared on 1 January 1930, echoed the Communist Party’s dilemma. It was to contain none of the ‘frills … dazzle … corruption and entertainment’ of the popular press, so as not to distract readers from the struggle. But Harry Pollitt, the Party’s General Secretary since 1929, was prepared to venture that he thought the paper was ‘dull and dismal’, and suggested that those who produced it should study the ‘techniques of the capitalist press’. ‘We constantly talk about being close to the masses,’ Pollitt argued in June 1930 when the paper was selling a maximum of 10,000 copies and haemorrhaging some £500 each week from Party funds, ‘but no one can say we carry this out in regard to the paper.’ What the ‘masses’ wanted was more general news, sport, humour and topical features, but what they got in the pages of the Daily Worker was ‘nothing save struggle and death on every page’. Two journalists, one from the Daily Mail, the other from the Daily Express, were invited to moonlight on the Daily Worker to teach the staff how to use capitalism’s skills against the capitalists. However, faced with the edict of the CPGB’s severe theoretician, R. Palme Dutt, that ‘The task is to destroy (not to take over) … so-called “general news” and “sport” … and replace it by working-class technique,’ the pair scuttled back to their day jobs. Despite a gradual dilution of the paper’s strict on-message stance with more news — including some investigative ‘scoops’ — the odd photograph of Gracie Fields, film reviews, excellent cartoons and a women’s page with recipes and knitting patterns, it was some time before racing tips, which had disappeared after the first few issues, were allowed back; they remained a distinct selling point for much of the century.

In January 1933, Hitler’s assumption of the German chancellorship led to a change in the class-against-class policy, and in the summer of 1935 the Seventh (and last) Congress of the International affirmed the Soviet intention ‘to establish a united front on a national as well as an international scale’ against fascism — a front that it was argued should include democratic political parties across a wide spectrum. This was not to be a call to which the British Labour Party responded, though the change of policy did bring the CPGB new recruits, among them engineers, railwaymen, textile workers, builders and some in the distributive trades. Jack Gaster, who had previously regarded the Party as ‘ultra sectarian … their concept of a United Front was “We’ll unite with anyone who unites with us,”’ and had helped expel ‘a secret group of Communist Party members within the ILP’, had himself lost patience with the ILP by 1935 and joined the CPGB, undertaking frequent legal work for the Party.

Although the CPGB remained an overwhelmingly working-class party, it had always attracted a small number of intellectuals, particularly scientists, and in the 1930s it gradually drew in a coterie of undergraduates and recent graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, sometimes referred to sneeringly by Rose Macaulay as ‘the not-so-very intelligentsia’, or, as Beatrice Webb labelled them, ‘the mild-mannered desperadoes’.

In 1931 David Guest, son of the Labour peer Lord Haden-Guest, returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, after a year studying in Germany, where he had become convinced that the threat of fascism was dangerously real, and that communism was the only hope, and set about organising the Cambridge branch of the CPGB. This attracted his fellow philosophy student Maurice Cornforth, the poet Charles Madge, John Cornford, James Klugmann and Guy Burgess, all of whom were mentored by Maurice Dobb, an economist and Fellow of Trinity College who had been a member of the Party since 1923, and who had suffered professionally for his affiliation.

The best-known, most-heard (if most tenuously linked) of those Oxbridge students and ex-students who were drawn to communism in the mid 1930s were the ‘MacSpaundays’ — the poets and would-be poets W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. ‘Tell us about the Thirties,’ a group of Cambridge undergraduates urged Day Lewis after the Second World War; ‘… it seems to be the last time that anyone believed in anything.’ ‘We were singularly fortunate compared with the young of today,’ acknowledged the poet, ‘in believing that something could be done about the social and political evils confronting us … no one who did not go through this political experience during the Thirties can quite realise how much hope there was in the air then, how radiant for some of us was the illusion that man could, under Communism put the world to rights.’

What communism offered such young intellectuals was ‘substitutes for a faith, heterogeneous ideas which served to plug “the hollow in the breast where God should be”’. Most of Day Lewis’s friends who became active in left-wing movements, or sympathetic to them, had similar backgrounds. All had been to public schools, ‘with their tradition of both authoritarianism and service to the community’. Three were the sons clergymen — Day Lewis himself, Louis MacNeice and Rex Warner — while W.H. Auden had ‘a devout Anglo-Catholic mother … we had all lapsed from the Christian faith, and tended to despair of Liberalism as an effective instrument for dealing with the problems of our day, if not despise it as an outworn creed’.

For Day Lewis the attraction to communism had both a religious and a romantic dimension: ‘My susceptibility to the heroic, played upon by Russian films in which the worker, mounted upon his magnificent tractor, chugged steadily towards the dawn and the new world, joined up with my natural partisanship of the underdog to create a picture, romantic and apocalyptic, of the British worker at last coming into his own.’ Nevertheless, he was, he admitted, ‘an extremely odd recruit to the Party’ in Cheltenham, where he was teaching at the time (though with a ‘gentlemanly refusal to indoctrinate my pupils with Left-Wing ideas’). The CPGB cell there resembled ‘more of a combined study-group of a nonconformist chapel than of a revolutionary body’, consisting as it did of ‘one or two school teachers, a waiter, and several men who worked at the Gloucester aircraft factory … as an “intellectual” I was given the job of political education. Never can there have been a more signal instance of the blind leading the shortsighted. I mugged up Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto, the writings of Lenin, and endeavoured to teach dialectical materialism and economic theories I only half understood to people who lived their lives right up against the fact of economic necessity.’

Although Auden issued a clarion call to his generation to stop ‘lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down’, he did not join the CPGB. Nor did MacNeice, another ‘Marxist of the Heart’ for whom ‘comrade became a more tender term than lover’. Despite this, MacNeice could see communism’s attraction after the ‘jogtrot’ left of the Labour Party, which was ‘notoriously lacking in glamour’, and he could appreciate why ‘these young poets had turned to the tomb of Lenin … The strongest appeal of the Communist Party was that it demanded sacrifice; you had to sink your ego.’ Though he was ‘repelled by the idolisation of the state’, MacNeice was able to console himself with Marx and Engels’ dictum that it would soon ‘wither away’. Spender did actually sign up, but his membership was short-lived.

Other Cambridge Communist sympathisers who would later gain notoriety for their espionage activities on behalf of the USSR included Donald MacLean, H.A.R. (Kim) Philby and Anthony Blunt, who was always ‘thought of as a fellow-traveller, never as a Party member [and who made] extremely cynical remarks about Communism that went beyond the call of duty in suppressing the fact that he was one’.

But there were those who were prepared to make the commitment. In December 1931 the October Club (named after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917) was started in Oxford by an American Rhodes scholar, Frank Meyer, who subsequently translated to the London School of Economics, where he remained active in student politics until he was deported by the government. By January 1933 it could boast three hundred members, though not all of these were card-carrying Communists. However, by 1934 Communists had effectively succeeded in taking over the Oxford Labour Club, hanging a huge portrait of Lenin on the wall of the club’s meeting house to signal their entryism. Not everyone advertised their affiliation, but Philip Toynbee, the son of the Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee and grandson of the classicist Gilbert Murray, who had joined the CPGB at the end of his first term at Oxford and ‘retired deeper and deeper into this secretive hive … was not a clandestine member, but sat on a little iceberg peak above the submarine majority, revealing, as we used to say, “the Face of the Party”’. Toynbee exemplified the song ‘we would ruefully sing at our evening socials [the Bromley branch members would, no doubt, have joined in] :

Dan, Dan, Dan!

The Communist Party man

Working underground all day.

In and out of meetings,

Bringing fraternal greetings,

Never sees the light of day.

His undergraduate life consisted largely of sitting through interminable committee meetings, sometimes lasting ‘from lunchtime until eight or nine in the evening’, leafleting, demonstrating in support of strikes in Oxford factories, taking part in ‘slogan-shouting marches through London’, attending international Communist Party conferences, going to work alongside the miners in the Rhondda Valley, soaking up ‘the whole lively atmosphere of purpose and intrigue’. In 1938 he was elected the first Communist President of the Oxford Union (to be succeeded by Edward Heath two terms later).

While there were probably around two hundred card-carrying Oxford undergraduates, in Cambridge several dons were members of the CPGB, including Dobb, the biochemist ‘Doggy’ Woolf and the literary scholar Roy Pascal. By 1935 the Cambridge Socialist Society of around five hundred members was dominated by Communists, of whom again some two hundred were Party members. The Cambridge cell, centred on Trinity and King’s colleges, was active in the town organising anti-war demonstrations, supporting CP candidates at elections and welcoming the Hunger Marchers in February 1934 (Margot Heinemann owed her conversion to an encounter while at Newnham with the wan and down-at-heel marchers, and remained a Party member all her life), as well as within the colleges agitating for better pay and conditions for college servants, distributing leaflets and selling copies of the Daily Worker.

But despite this varied and gifted glitterati, ‘traitors to their class’ until the Party line changed, the ‘entry of the intellectuals’ remained something of a trickle, and for every student, scientist or poet who declared for communism there were hundreds of workers. Though the membership of the CPGB rose to a pre-war peak of 18,000 in December 1938, the vast majority of members were working-class. Moreover, distrust of the eggheads did not fade easily: in 1938 one veteran at the fifteenth Party Congress railed against ‘these unscrupulous semi-intellectuals who pose as left revolutionaries, who put their “r”s in barricades, instead of putting their arse on the barricades’.