The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner
… I used to have a sack barrow for deliveries and I had to walk about five miles [there] and five miles back … When I was seventeen I managed to get work from a lady who owned two hardware shops and a wholesale grocery business … My take home pay was 13/6d [minus five shillings a week deducted to repay his employer for driving lessons] (I would have had 14/- on the dole).’
Graham started work sweeping out the shop at 6 a.m., and ‘very often did not finish work until eight or nine p.m. (but there was no overtime pay) … I got a job as a driver for a biscuit factory. I was only 17 then and I had a huge van … You had to go at 60 miles an hour to get round … I managed to get a job with Wall’s ice cream once. With a tricycle. I was getting about 32/- a week. A fortune for me.’ But that came to an end too, and Graham got a job on a building site. ‘My stepfather knew the builder. That’s why I got the job … A lot of apprentices were used as cheap labour on the building site. They’d be signed on as apprentices and work for about four hours on the site and all they’d be doing was wheeling a barrow and stacking bricks like I was doing. And then when the building was completed the apprentices would be out before they’d even started laying bricks. Anyway, that lasted about eighteen months. Then I was unemployed again looking for work … During the slump you couldn’t join the Army because there were so many. There was such a great demand to get into the forces, to get away from it, although the wages were only 14/- a week, with stoppages out of that. But they were so selective, just like the police. The police could say six foot, and that was your lot, and so much chest because they had anyone to choose from.’ Eventually, when war broke out in 1939, Charles Graham was able to join the army. ‘I don’t suppose 90 per cent of the men in the army with me would have been able to get in two years before because of malnutrition. But when war broke out, they were all fit.’
Many others, taken on as cheap labour when they left school at fourteen, might find that once they reached eighteen, when by law their employer had to contribute towards their unemployment insurance, they were sacked. Being both less experienced than older men (and often untrained), and more expensive than the next wave of school leavers, a long period of unemployment followed in those regions where jobs were scarce anyway.
Donald Kear lost his job a fortnight before his twentieth birthday in 1933: ‘I was a machine attendant at a small factory [in the Forest of Dean, where coalmining was the predominant industry] and it was the custom of my employer to discharge employees when they became older and more expensive to him and employ younger lads in their place. There was plenty of labour available. Young lads were hanging around the factory gates every day looking for work.’
Jack Shaw ‘went butchering’ when he left school in Ashton-under-Lyne, just outside Manchester. ‘The idea in my dad’s mind was that I was going to learn a trade. But there was a lot of butchers and he picked the wrong one. He was probably only making enough to keep his self. He gave me five shillings a week. Then I got seven and sixpence. When I got [to] about eighteen I come to ten shillings a week and he couldn’t pay me any more. He said “I’ll give you a reference, and that’s about all I can do. I just hope you can get a job.” So that’s when I had my first experience of the dole.’
‘I am glad that I haven’t a son,’ said an unemployed Welsh miner vehemently. ‘It must be a heartbreaking business to watch your boy grow into manhood and then see him deteriorate because there is no work for him. And yet there are scores of young men in the Valley who have never worked since the age of sixteen … at sixteen they become insurable, and the employers sack them rather than face the extra expense. So we have young men who have never had a day’s work since. They have nothing to hope for but aimless drift. I’m glad no son of mine is in that position.’
Even those signing up for apprenticeships in industries such as engineering or shipbuilding might be no better off, since when they had completed their training the depressed state of the industry could mean there were no jobs. Around 4 per cent of juveniles (those aged fourteen to eighteen) were unemployed, but again this varied from area to area. In 1933, 10 per cent of boys and 9 per cent of girls available for work in Sheffield, a depressed city, were unemployed. The true figure of young people without work was undoubtedly much higher, as these statistics relate only to sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds: those under sixteen did not qualify for unemployment benefit, and therefore were not registered at the Labour Exchange. The implications for the future of large numbers of young people without skills, proper training or any real prospect of regular employment was bleak, not only for the individuals but for the national economy. ‘They tell me I haven’t the experience and they’ll not give me the chance of getting it,’ one young man reported in a Carnegie Trust survey complained, while others felt fed up with being ‘messed around’. The Pilgrim Trust was disquieted to discover that in Liverpool there were ‘large numbers of young men to be found who “don’t want work”’.
During the 1930s employers in depressed areas knew that they could take their pick from a large pool of the workless, and tended to shun those in shabby clothes or exhibiting tendencies to demoralisation and apathy, the inevitable consequences of long months stretching into years searching for work. The Unemployment Assistance Board stressed problems that arose from ‘loss of industrial efficiency’ in the long-term unemployed. E. Wight Bakke, a young American who came to Britain in 1931 on a Yale fellowship to study the problem of unemployment, was not alone in concluding that ‘even a short period of unemployment handicapped a man in his efforts to market his labour … The handicap increased with the length of time out of work … [long-term unemployment leads] to the slow death of all that makes a man ambitious, industrious and glad to be alive.’
So the dreary spiral was perpetuated: no work increasingly seen as a disqualification for work. The Pilgrim Trust also found that anyone with a minor physical defect such as a speech impediment, a slight limp, or even being short of stature, might be discriminated against, regardless of whether this was in any way relevant to the sort of work he was likely to be required to do, when there was an embarrassment of ‘perfect specimens’ for hire.
Disconsolate groups of the long-term unemployed, shabbily dressed, hanging round street corners slicked black by rain against a background of boarded-up shops, lounging against lamp-posts, playing desultory games in the gutter, kicking a tin around in lieu of a football, watched by ragged, grimy-faced urchins, have become a familiar image of the 1930s, captured in grainy Picture Post-like photographs in the years before Picture Post existed. The young Canadian writer George Woodcock described a typical scene when he took a free holiday from his ‘wretchedly paid’ job in London with a Welsh aunt in a small town in Glamorgan:
One day I decided to take a bus and visit the Rhondda area, the heart of the South Wales mining district … It was the worst of times in the Rhondda, though it probably looked little better than the best of times, since most of the mines were not working, and the smoke that would normally have given a dark, satanic aspect to the landscape was less evident than in more prosperous times. Still it was dismal enough … it had the feeling of occupied territory. Many of the shops had gone out of business, the mines had slowed down years ago, and the General Strike of 1926 — disastrous for workers — had delivered the coup de grace to the local economy. The people were shabby and resentful. Groups of ragged men squatted on their haunches, as miners do, and played pitch-and-toss with buttons, they had no halfpennies to venture. A man came strolling down the street, dejectedly whistling ‘The Red Flag’ in slow time as if it were a dirge.
Caught in a downpour of rain, Woodcock was
a sad, sodden object … as I came down into the valley beside a slag heap where fifty or so men and women were industriously picking over the ground. I caught up with a man walking along the overgrown road from the mine to the village, whose damp slate roofs I could see glistening about half a mile away. He was pushing a rusty old bicycle that had no saddle and no tires, but it served to transport the dirty gunnysack he had tied onto the handlebars. He had been picking up coal from the slag heap. ‘No bigger nor walnuts, man,’ he explained. The big coal had been taken years ago, so long ago was it that work had been seen in the village. I asked him how long he had been unemployed. ‘Ach y fi, man, it’s nine years I’ve been wasting and wasted.’ … He apologetically remarked that these days nobody had a fire in the village except to cook the mid-day dinner, if there was