The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

moved the hard top, then they had to dig down three feet with pick and shovel … Many of them had not worked for years, so with soft hands and not much muscle they were soon in trouble with blistered and bleeding hands. Some of them got a few bruises as well especially those holding the chisels, because the hammer men, who were out of practice, invariably missed and consequently delivered a blow to the holder’s hands. Yet not much sympathy was ever shown because after all it was only a temporary job, as soon as it was finished they would all be laid off and back on the dole again with plenty of time to heal their wounds … It was quite a common sight to see half a dozen [older] women on a sunny dry afternoon … heading for Unity Woods and the old Tram Road, their mission to collect sticks or any broken limbs of trees to keep the fire alight … These women wore long hessian aprons (towsers to us), some wore caps and the odd one or two smoked a clay pipe. They would round up as much wood as they could carry in the big aprons. Some would do this two or three times a week to save buying coal. Coal was cheap but they could not afford to buy it … times were bad, they were old at forty, no one was ever in a position to help them … Life was tough, only the very strongest got through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Beverley Nichols took a ‘bird’s eye’ view of the country in 1938 to ‘differentiate it from the England of 1928’, and although he modestly recognised that the nation’s problems ‘cannot be settled in a single book … at least they can be indicated’ Priestley