The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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