Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

A woman has plenty of subjects which can occupy her mind and her mind is always busy with small bits of everyday life. Not only does she rarely complain of the monotony of her job, but in most cases she loves a repetitive job of such a kind which enables her to indulge in daydreaming or simply reviving pictures of the past. If she was in the pictures last night, she has something to remember the whole day afterwards if the film was interesting. The other advantage of having a light repetitive job is the ability to have a chat: ‘I must keep my eyes on the machines but I can talk’. If the noise is not too deafening the girls can talk freely about their experiences and last night’s outings.

  Predictably, Music While You Work (on the Home Service at 10.30 each weekday morning) was ‘much more popular with women than with men’.

  Were working women broadly content? Zweig had started his inquiry, he admitted, ‘with a preconceived idea about the unhappy woman dragged from her home to work, the little slave doing a monotonous and uncongenial job, the victim of the industrial civilisation’. His eyes were opened:

  I can say definitely on the basis of my experience that industry has a great attraction for women workers, apart from a small minority of women whose health and energy are not sufficient to carry on two jobs and who are driven to industry by the whip of want. Women are not interested in industry as such but the industry stands in their mind for many things which they want and opens for them a new world. Here they come into contact with real ‘life’; they feel that they are in a place where there is something worth while going on.

  Friends and companionship, chatter and gossip, looking for a mate or just giving one an interest in life – there were many reasons, Zweig explained, why women enjoyed working, in addition to the obvious economic motivation. He went on:

  I do not like general theories, and least of all psychological theories, but the one thing which struck me in my inquiry was the sense of inferiority which many, if not most, women have. They accept man’s superiority as a matter of fact and a man’s job is as a rule superior to a woman’s job. You can feel the regret that they were not born men, who have the best of everything and the first choice in practically all things. So they do as much as they can to prove equal to men, to prove that they are not drones or pleasure animals kept by men for their amusement, or sleeping partners to men’s booty. Paid work, especially work in industry, relieves that sense of inferiority.

  ‘I don’t need to ask my husband for permission to spend a shilling as others do,’ he was told. ‘I spend my own money in my own way.’

  This was far from Zweig’s only inquiry in these years, but it seems to have been the one that meant the most to him. He described in his foreword how it had revealed to him ‘a whole world of distinct female values’, exemplified by ‘the amazing endurance and struggle against the adversities of life on the part of many married women with large families’. It was not unusual, he explained, ‘to find a mother of five small children going out to work full-time, getting up at 6 a.m. and going to bed at 12, doing her washing on Sundays, and accepting all this with a smile as a matter of course’. Such women, he asserted, ‘were an inspiration to me – as they can be to anyone who looks deeply into the turbulent waters of life’.

  But perhaps the most haunting of the individual case-studies he provided was of a childless married woman, aged 36, working in a factory:

  Her steady wage on a machine is £4 plus 15s bonus. She worked for three years during the war and has since been working two years. She likes her job; it’s interesting and of course she likes the money. Her husband is a skilled fitter and turner in the same firm, but she doesn’t know how much he earns. He gives her £4 a week. She saves for a nice house, because for the time being they live with in-laws.

  They have no children. Why? ‘It is up to him. I would like to have children and I am not getting any younger.’

  Her greatest hope: ‘To get a nice house.’ Her greatest fear: ‘To die.’

  The basis of happiness consists of a nice house and a good married life. (‘I can say that because I haven’t got it.’)

  She doesn’t go in for pools or other gambling, ‘that I leave to my husband’.

  She enjoys life as far as she can. She goes three times a week to the pictures, at the weekends to the pub; she reads Western stories. No churchgoing.

  ‘Life is what you make it.’

  ‘She has never heard about the devaluation or cheapening of the pound or the economic crisis,’ Zweig’s pen picture added. ‘What is meant by economic crisis to her is that there are no nylons in the shops.’13

  In 1952 Zweig also published The British Worker, pulling together the fruits of his hundreds of interviews in the late 1940s with male manual workers. In the book he drew similarly positive conclusions about the human effects of industrial work. A worker who complained about a monotonous job was usually unhappy in his home life; most male jobs were not monotonous; and even if up to a third of the male working-class population did ‘dull, repetitive, and uninteresting jobs’, that did not mean that they were all bored stiff with them, given the twin observed facts of the sociability of the workplace and that ‘machines are often very interesting and many people like handling them.’

  Yet as Zweig fully conceded, the question of job satisfaction depended on a range of variables, even within the same grade of the same industry in the same region:

  Cleanliness, the right temperature, good air, light, private lockers, good washing facilities, good canteens, the good repute of a firm, a genial atmosphere, friendly relations on the floor, fairness in dealing with the worker, a good foreman, and a good boss, may turn even a distasteful job into an attractive one. No one of these factors can be singled out as more important than the others. Men react to the general conditions of the work, not to any individual factor in it.

  There were two even more important variables – the size of the wage packet and the extent of job security – with Zweig in both cases emphasising the social as much as the economic aspect. All in all, he concluded, ‘there is an element of hate in the most valued jobs, and an element of love in the most hated’:

  The factor of habit clearly comes into men’s feelings towards a job, and makes them like even a job they originally disliked. But the hateful thought that they are bound to a job for life is an unpleasant feature of even the most interesting jobs . . .

  The vast majority of men if asked whether they like their job will answer thoughtfully ‘I suppose I do’; but their further comments are often revealing.

  Some men will tell you: ‘I should think so. Think about the people who have no job at all’, or ‘It gives me my bread and butter’, or ‘I am used to it now’, or ‘I mustn’t grumble’.

  Strong feelings for or against the job are less common than the combination of liking and disliking at the same time.

  ‘I like the job but you get fed up with it at times.’

  In short, ‘the ambivalence of love and hate is nowhere more strongly expressed than it is in the attitude to work’.14Zweig’s portrayal, here and in his other studies, of a fatalistic, suspicious, deeply conservative working class, finding a degree of satisfaction in its labours while overall stoically and unenthusiastically accepting its lot, is broadly convincing – not least because no other sociologist or commentator of the era came so intimately and extensively into contact with that class as he did.

  Certainly there were some workers intensely proud of what they did. Take the Sheffield steel industry, where for so many years the crucible had nurtured what the industry’s historian justifiably calls ‘virtuoso skill in hand and eye’. That skill may have been under threat by the 1950s, but it still remained important. ‘It was all rule of thumb,’ recalled one operative. ‘We did play around with devices such as thermocouples, but they were so unreliable, we tended not to use them.’ Sheffield, remembers Stewart Dalton about growing up there, ‘was a proud City, and its workers proud of their skills’. Not only the workers: ‘Children on the housing estates could be h
eard arguing, “My dad works at ESC [English Steel Corporation]. It’s better than Firth Browns.” Pity the child whose father’s occupation was so humble as to be ignored in the daily round of squabbles. The melter, the roller, the forgeman . . . these were the “worthy” occupations, not comparable in any way with the “wimpish” occupations found outside the factories.’

  In general, such pride was unsurprising. Whatever the long-term trend towards deskilling that was undeniably taking place in British industry, the fact was that by mid-century less than 5 per cent of the overall workforce was engaged in mass-production processes, increasingly typified by the assembly line of the car plant. Nor does Zweig’s emphasis on the positive social function of the workplace seem misplaced. As often as not there was humour and camaraderie, as well as a strict hierarchy within many of the workforces – a hierarchy which, by informally imposing its code of proper conduct, in turn contributed to the strength of civil society. ‘If you didn’t behave at the works,’ the Labour politician Frank Field has recalled, ‘you were taken behind the shed and dealt with, because you couldn’t have people risking other people’s limbs and lives.’ That necessity, as well as the sense of solidarity in factory culture, comes through in Colin Ferguson’s diary entry for the last Monday in August 1950:

  Worked only half a day in the Pattern Shop today. Just before dinner time a Shop Meeting was hurriedly called & within 2 minutes a vote was taken whether we would stop at the whistle & go home till tomorrow morning. This was agreed to on a show of hands without a count. The reason for this was a request, that our shop fall in line with the Dressing Shop & the Iron & Steel Foundries, which (as a mark of respect to a dresser who’d just been killed by a 3½ ton casting falling on him) had decided to stop work for the day. The man killed came from Paisley. His name was Patterson.

  It was a discipline good at creating a sense of duty, even loyalty – primarily towards fellow-workers, but sometimes to employers. Field’s father spent 48 years building carbon blocks for Morgan Crucible in Battersea. ‘He got up every day, coughing his lungs out, hating his job, but he never went sick, never let them down.’ His reward on retirement was £1 for every year of employment.15

  In the end – whether or not the job was satisfying (and here Zweig may have been somewhat rose-tinted, ignoring for example the sheer numbing, alienating tedium of the vast majority of clerical work), whether or not there was solidarity within the workforce (at Lax &Shaw the sorters were the sworn enemies of the operators, the latter paid by the accepted bottle and often provoked to violence when ‘idle sorters on a slow-moving lehr raked away perfectly good bottles simply to get away for their break more quickly’), and whether or not there was a good atmosphere in the workplace – every worker knew full well, like generations of workers before him, that he was not there for the fun of it.

  ‘When a man receives his wages every seven days, and these on the whole not a great deal more than enough for comfortable survival, he is bound to his work,’ noted the authors of a study of a Yorkshire mining community in the early to mid-1950s. ‘By Sunday night the collier who starts work at 6 a.m. on Monday is not enjoying himself with the same abandon as he did the night before. By Wednesday, three hard days may have made him tired and dispirited and he consoles himself only with the remark that at least the back of the week has been broken.’ While on the vexed question of the voluntary Saturday morning shift, that subject of much well-meaning exhortation and propaganda from above, the authors quoted a typical snatch of miners’ dialogue:

  Coming in on Saturday?

  No. Five days is enough for anybody.

  Oh, so you’re not bothered about getting some extra coal out for the country?

  I suppose that’s why you come in on Saturdays.

  Is it . . .! We come in for some extra brass and that’s that.

  It is a trend impossible to date precisely, but it seems plausible that it was during these relatively early post-war years that the shift began – at least on the part of a significant proportion of the working class – from ‘living to work’ (as the phrase went) to ‘working to live’. Work, in other words, was starting to lose some of its traditional centrality in terms of defining a working man’s life and purpose. ‘If extra hours have to be worked at pressure periods, it is almost impossible to persuade workers to do them on Saturday mornings’ was the 1949 finding of the Chief Inspector of Factories about the coming of the five-day week, not only in relation to coal miners. An important shift, it can only be understood against the background of full employment and rising real wages.

  Even so, for the workforce as a whole, it did not alter the dominant priorities identified by Zweig. Early in 1953, Research Services Ltd, the organisation run by Mark Abrams, interviewed 1,079 people who worked for a living across the country. They were shown a list of ten possible job satisfactions – nearness to your home; friendly people to work with; good wages or earnings; security of employment; opportunity to use your own ideas; good holidays; opportunities to get on; adequate pension; good training facilities; reasonably short hours – and asked to name which three they considered most important. Good earnings (placed in 58 per cent of people’s top three) and security of employment (55 per cent) were easily the most popular, followed by friendly people to work with (39 per cent), while reasonably short hours and good training finished equal bottom at 8 per cent each. Predictably, middle-class workers attached greater importance to opportunities to get on and use one’s own ideas; equally predictably, older people (who had lived through the inter-war slump) put job security above good earnings, while younger workers were the other way round. There was indeed a distinct generational gap emerging in attitudes to work. ‘A middle-aged craftsman will say sometimes: “My work is my hobby”, but a young man will very rarely say this’ was Zweig’s observation. ‘He finds his hobbies somewhere else, and lacks the same firmly-established working habits.’16

  Fortunately, it is possible to get a bit closer up. In 1946 a University of London psychologist, Norah M. Davis, conducted individual interviews across the country with 400 building workers, a mixture of skilled tradesmen (bricklayers, joiners, plasterers, etc) and labourers (mainly unskilled but including some semi-skilled like scaffolders). She found that 82.1 per cent of tradesmen expressed ‘definite liking’ for their jobs, compared with 69.6 per cent of labourers. ‘Open-air life; healthy; sense of freedom’ was the most popular explanation given (34.5 per cent) for liking the job, with – despite the acute national housing shortage – ‘Job is of social importance’ put forward by only 2.9 per cent. Whether liking or disliking the job, there were plenty of patently sincere views expressed:

  Mine is a job on its own. Not everyone can get an eighth of an inch off 57 feet long of glass.

  I feel that men’s lives depend on my work [scaffolding]. The more ticklish a job the better I like it.

  I dislike being a labourer and looked down on as an imbecile. It gives me an inferiority complex. Girls draw away from you in buses and say, ‘He’s only a labourer’.

  I like being a labourer as we have less responsibility than trades-men.

  The wages aren’t enough to live on. I have slaved for fifty years and now have only one suit. Is that enough out of life?

  It frightens me to think I’ll do nothing but lay bricks all my life.

  I like making a place look decent. I want a house of my own so I am interested.

  I like the open air. I like laying bricks and the harmony among your mates.

  Asked about their ambitions, more than 40 per cent of the tradesmen and over 52 per cent of the labourers replied – in what tone of voice is not recorded – that they had ‘No ambition’, with many men adding, ‘It’s no good having ambition.’

  The interviews also revealed that a high degree of group solidarity, with overwhelmingly favourable attitudes being expressed about fellow-workers (‘They’re a good, sociable crowd of lads’ was a typical assertion), co-existed with widespread grumbling about management
:

  There are too many walking about in hats. Why?

  You can get no satisfaction out of the Head Office. They pass the buck and you get nowhere.

  I wish they had a suggestion scheme. Of course I expect only one in a hundred suggestions would be any good and be accepted, but that wouldn’t matter because it would be an encouragement to everyone.

  I’m sure our squad is laying an average of about 800 bricks whatever the Corporation says. They never give us the facts or tell us how they get their figures.

  It would be more interesting if they’d only tell us how the job is progressing.

  ‘On most of the sites,’ summarised Davis, ‘the relationship of the operatives to the management was characterised by lack of contact and ignorance.’ Significantly, private contractors were less the target of criticism than public contractors, in effect the local authorities – a discouraging finding in the light of Aneurin Bevan’s systematic privileging of public above private house-building.