Juliet Gardiner - The Thirties - An Intimate History of Britain

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

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

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

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

In addition, years cutting coal underground, often with scant concern for health or safety, made relatively young men old. A feature of life in the coalmines was the high incidence of disabling industrial diseases such as nystagmus and silicosis among the older miners with a (shortened) lifetime of breathing in coal dust. ‘The Coal Mines Act was flagrantly broken day in, day out, year in year out,’ remembers Kenneth Maher, who started work in the Bedwas colliery near Newport in Monmouthshire aged fourteen in January 1930, earning 12s.4d a week for six eight-hour shifts. Apart from the danger of explosion from the methane gas that collected in the underground passages, or the couplings breaking on the heavy metal tubs that conveyed the coal, ‘the coal-cutting machines cut out the seams, raising clouds of dust. When the compressed air exhaust caught it, when the colliers shovelled it on to the conveyors, when it tipped into the tubs, it was like black fog travelling into the ventilation. A miner in South Wales who is free from dust is called a wet lung. There is a difference between silicosis and pneumoconiosis. The stone dust [found in the stones at the bottom of pits] sets like cement [in the lungs] but coal doesn’t. Particles of silica cut into the lungs and kill the tissue. I remember taking my wife to my brother’s home. We saw a man leaning over a low wall. My wife said, “Whatever is the matter with that man?” “That,” I said, “is what dust does to a man.” He was gasping and coughing his lungs up. He was dying on his feet. He was 45 years old.’

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

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

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

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