George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
At the height of the Great Depression, George Orwell left his part-time job as a bookshop assistant in London to tour the industrial slums of the North. After spending some weeks in the mill towns of Lancashire, he caught a train to Barnsley. Orwell had been commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz to write an account of working-class life in the areas of high unemployment. Barnsley, barely four miles from Wentworth, was one of them. ‘It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again,’ he noted, ‘especially smell them, lest you forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there for too long.’
Over the course of a month spent travelling around the South Yorkshire coalfield, Orwell recorded the living conditions in the mining communities. The Road to Wigan Pier provides a graphic account of the hardship in the neighbourhood of Wentworth. ‘I have inspected great numbers of houses in various mining towns and villages and made notes on their essential points,’ he wrote. ‘Here are one or two from Barnsley’:
House in Wortley Street. Two up, one down. Living room 12 ft by 10 ft. Sink and copper in living room, coal hole under stairs. Sink worn almost flat and constantly overflowing. Walls not too sound. Penny in slot, gas-light. House very dark and gas-light estimated at 4d. a day. Upstairs rooms are really one large room partitioned into two. Walls very bad – wall of back room cracked right through. Window-frames coming to pieces and have to be stuffed with wood. Rain comes through in several places. Sewer runs under house and stinks in summer but Corporation ‘says they can’t do nowt’. Six people in house, two adults and four children, the eldest aged fifteen. Youngest but one attending hospital – tuberculosis suspected. House infested by bugs. Rent 5sh. 3d., including rates.
House in Peel Street. Back to back, two up, two down and large cellar. Living-room 10 ft square with copper and sink. The other downstairs room the same size, probably intended as parlour but used as bedroom. Upstairs rooms the same size as those below. Living room very dark. Gas-light estimated at 4½d. a day. Distance to lavatory 70 yards. Four beds in house for eight people – two old parents, two adult girls (the eldest aged twenty-seven), one young man and three children. Parents have one bed, eldest son another, and remaining five people share the other two. Bugs very bad – ‘You can’t keep ’em down when it’s ’ot’. Indescribable squalor in downstairs room and smell upstairs almost unbearable. Rent 5sh 7½d., including rates.
Studying house after house from top to bottom, Orwell saw the true extent of hardship – a level of poverty he suspected that many families were at pains to conceal from their own communities.
It is in the rooms upstairs that the gauntness of poverty really discloses itself. Whether this is because pride makes people cling to their living-room furniture to the last, or because bedding is more pawnable, I do not know, but certainly many of the bedrooms I saw were fearful places. Among people who have been unemployed for several years continuously I should say it is the exception to have anything like a full set of bedclothes. Often there is nothing that can be properly called bedclothes at all – just a heap of old overcoats and miscellaneous rags on a rusty iron bedstead. In this way overcrowding is aggravated. One family of four persons that I knew, a father and mother and two children, possessed two beds but could only use one of them because they had not enough bedding for the other.
Bedding was unaffordable on the average dole allowance of 32 shillings* a week. One miner, who had a wife and two children – one aged two and the other ten months – gave Orwell a precise breakdown of the family’s weekly expenditure.
s. d.
Rent
9 0½
Clothing Club
3 0
Coal
2 0
Gas
1 3
Milk
0 10½
Union Fees
0 3
Insurance (on the children)
0 2
Meat
2 6
Flour (2 stone)
3 4
Yeast
0 4
Potatoes
1 0
Dripping
0 10
Margarine
0 10
Bacon
1 2
Sugar
1 9
Tea
1 9
Jam
0 7½
Peas and cabbage
0 6
Carrots and onions
0 4
Quaker Oats
0 4½
Soap, powders, blue etc
0 10
Total
£1 12 0
Malnutrition, caused by a diet consisting primarily of fats, carbohydrates and sugar, was rife in the pit villages around Barnsley. ‘You see very few people with natural teeth at all,’ Orwell observed,
apart from the children; and even the children’s teeth have a frail bluish appearance which means, I suppose, calcium deficiency. Several dentists have told me that in industrial districts a person over thirty with any of his or her own teeth is coming to be an abnormality … In one house where I stayed there were, apart from myself, five people, the oldest being forty-three and the youngest a boy of fifteen. Of these the boy was the only one who possessed a single tooth of his own, and his teeth were obviously not going to last long.
In the years between 1930 and 1936 unemployment levels in the South Yorkshire coalfield did not fall below 45 per cent. By the summer of 1931, the Fitzwilliams’ miners joined the shocking percentage claiming the dole.
‘They were rough times,’ Ralph Boreham, a miner’s son from Elsecar pit, remembered. ‘We were lucky. We weren’t a big family, there were just me and me brother. “Now then, boy, what are you going to do when you leave school?‘’ the Headmaster used to ask us. “We’re going to pit, Sir.” “’Cos tha’ strong in the arm and weak in the head,” he’d say. You were lucky to get a job in them days. When I were at school there were some kids, their mothers had put their names down at the pit for a job before they were ten years old. There was one at Platts Common, up the road from us. They shut it down. Thirteen hundred men thrown out of work. The council turned them out of their homes. They couldn’t pay their rent. They had to emigrate. They went to Doncaster. It were a bad job. Elsecar pit were working one week on, one week off. The off week you were on the dole. It were sad. All the men wanted to work. Earl Fitzwilliam used to give the miners anything he didn’t want, to get shot of it. The family next door to us got a harpsichord. Neighbours said, “It’ll be growing grass out of it.” Pitmen didn’t go shouting and picketing. They just went gardening instead, to keep themselves. Keep their family. Everybody had a garden then. You lived off it. Mind, there was some as still thought they were a cut above the rest. One miner, they called him “Tommy Two Eggs” ’cos his wife ’ud always brag, “He has two eggs every morning before he goes down t’ pit.” Course he never did, two eggs were unheard of. There were a market on Hoyland Common. Me mother used to go there on a Friday night. She’d buy three pounds of beef cheek for a shilling. Deputies at the pit, the overmen, they thought they were better than you. Some of their wives ’ud say to her, “Would you bring us back some meat for the dog?” Dog n’er saw meat. They aten it.’
The psychological impact of unemployment was often hardest to bear. Walter Brierley from Denby Hall pit, forty miles north-west of Wentworth, was unemployed between the years 1931 and 1935. ‘Though both my wife and myself are physically healthy, walking as we do about the Derbyshire countryside on Sundays and somedays in the week,’ he wrote,
the prolonged strain of living on the edge of domestic upheaval, and the fact that our social urge has to be repressed, has ruined our nerves and given us an inferiority complex. For myself, the dependence on the state for money without having honestly earned it, has made me creep within myself … there are fools, unintelligent fools, who believe that the fault of a man’s being unemployed lies at his own door. This
is especially so in isolated, gossip-ridden villages like the one in which I live, where, if one does not stand at street corners or go rapping on the wet benches in the public houses, one is afraid to come out, ashamed, idle.
The work ethic was engrained in the miners’ culture. Until the years of mass unemployment, idleness had been something to deride. ‘Capacity to work was the criterion: a good workman being honoured everywhere by implicit assent,’ Arthur Eaglestone remembered. ‘The most heinous of accusations lay in the terrible phrase: “He doesn’t like work!” I remember as a boy I looked upon men so branded with an apprehensive eye. In Rotherham the tradition of publicly shaming a lazy good-for-nothing who had shirked a day’s labour, by trundling him through the streets in a wheelbarrow, still lingered.’
Ridiculing the idle was not exclusive to the Fitzwilliams’ villages; it happened in every pit village in the West Riding. Jim Bullock, from Bowers Row colliery, remembered one miner known as ‘Lazy Bill’. He wrote:
I could give you his last name, but for the sake of his relatives, I will not. Lazy Bill used to spend more time talking than working, always talking about the wonderful dreams he had. His workmates got completely fed up with him, and the manager got so tired of hearing complaints that he finally sent for Bill to come to his office and sacked him. Now he had a large family, because he had never been idle in that way, but in those days there were no relief benefits, no Social Security. The stark reality of his being sacked had to be faced by his wife.
To make ends meet, as Jim recalled, she resorted to taking in washing and ironing and doing housework for the neighbours. ‘I have never seen anyone get as low as she did. She went about looking miserable,’ he remembered, ‘without interest in herself or anything else.’
The ultimate fate of Lazy Bill was a story told and retold in Jim’s village; a salutary tale for would-be shirkers.
One day, just at the top of our street, Lazy Bill was knocked down by a bicycle and killed. They put him on an old door, one which was laid against the fences. When they took him in his wife was getting the tea ready for the kids, and she did not show the slightest bit of emotion. Years ago some wit wrote – and it was quoted quite often then:
They brought him home dead on a shutter,
But she just kept on cutting bread and spreading the butter.
This was not the end of Lazy Bill’s story. His wife was so fed up with him that she expressed the wish to have him cremated, because she did not want the bother of tending his grave and she could not afford a headstone. She was not going to walk down to the churchyard to take him flowers, because he just was not worth it. The subscription towards the cremation was the first we had in the village, but the thing the villagers could not understand was the widow’s one request. This came when she was asked what she wanted the authorities to do with the ashes: ‘I want them, I’m taking them home,’ she said.
The neighbours soon found out the reason for this strange request. She put his ashes in an egg-timer, stood back and looked in real satisfaction as she said to the neighbours, ‘There now, I’ve got him just where I want him. He’s never worked for me. He’s never worked for the kids while he was alive, but I’ll make sure he’ll work for us now he’s dead, because every time I boil an egg, he’ll have to work in that egg-timer, and he won’t do any grumbling either.’
In the slump years of the early 1930s, Billy Fitzwilliam, at considerable cost to himself, saved his miners from the humiliation of long-term unemployment. At the start of 1931, to artificially maintain the prices, quotas had been set to limit the amount of coal each colliery could produce. Billy could easily have met his weekly quota by shutting down one of his pits; instead, to save the men’s jobs, he kept both pits open by operating them on alternate weeks.
In the weeks they were not working the men at New Stubbin and Elsecar were entitled to claim the dole. In order to qualify for unemployment benefit, a miner had to lose three days’ work in every six. Working the collieries one week on, one week off, was an enlightened strategy on Billy’s part, one that was in marked contrast to a number of other coal owners. In some mining regions, the bitterness and bad feeling generated by the 1926 Strike had continued: out of spite, to deprive the miners of the dole, the coal owners were operating their collieries on a four-day week, with the result that, in some areas, the miners were worse off for working. B. L. Coombes, who worked at a pit in the Brecknock Beacons in Wales, described this practice:
I remember we were working only four turns every week for over six months, and yet not once getting eligible for the dole during that period, because we had to lose three in six to get paid. Often it was very difficult for the company to work the fourth shift, but they did so, and the men worked that shift at a loss, because had they not worked it, they would have qualified for three days’ dole. My feelings were not very pleasant when I had to go to work for eight shillings and I would have had fourteen and sixpence – three days’ dole – if we had not worked that night, while we knew that the colliery was bound to be idle again before many days. All that spring and summer I was working, but was not a penny better off than if I had been on the dole.
The human cost of the misery inflicted by the Great Depression was hard to measure; but by the summer of 1931, its impact on the Exchequer was all too calculable. On 11 July, Clive Wigram, George V’s Private Secretary, who, twenty years earlier, had accompanied him on his visit to Wentworth, wrote a stark letter to the King: ‘We are sitting on the top of a volcano, and the curious thing is the Press and the City have not really understood the critical situation. The Governor of the Bank of England is very pessimistic and depressed.’
The eruption came exactly one month later. On 11 August there was a dramatic run on the pound as foreign investors scrambled to remove their money from the City of London. Ramsay Mac-Donald’s Government was already grappling with a deficit in the forthcoming autumn budget; the flight from sterling threw it into crisis. Interrupting his holiday, the Prime Minister returned to Downing Street where he was met by a committee of bankers. Britain, they told him, ‘stood on the edge of the precipice’.
‘Deficit’ had been the political catchphrase of the preceding months. Earlier in the summer, two committees, the first headed by MacDonald’s former Lord Advocate Harold Macmillan, the second under the chairmanship of the eminent financier Sir George May, had concluded their reports. Macmillan’s focused attention on Britain’s balance of payments with the rest of the world. Hitherto, it had been assumed that the country lived by trade, exporting manufactured goods and raw materials which paid for the foodstuffs and other imports that came in. In fact, Britain’s trading account had not shown a credit balance since 1822. It was the ‘Invisibles’ – shipping and banking – that had always put the balance right. These were the very things that had been hit by the global Depression: receipts from shipping were £50 million less in 1931 than in 1929, and the return from foreign investment £70 million less. In the same period, the volume of Britain’s exports had almost halved. Macmillan’s report emphasized this decline; when May’s report was published, alarm intensified. Owing to the Depression, the yield from taxes had gone down, whereas expenditure – specifically on unemployment benefit – had rocketed. May’s report identified an immediate budget deficit of £120 million. It recommended that £24 million of this deficit should be met by increasing taxation: the remaining £94 million should be met by slashing unemployment benefit.
Faced with the flight from sterling, on 12 August MacDonald summoned his Cabinet to Downing Street. One way of propping up the pound was to secure loans in Paris and New York. But foreign bankers were unwilling to lend the Government money unless the budget deficit was resolved. Forced into a corner, the Prime Minister proposed cutting unemployment benefit by 10 per cent – a cut that nine members of the Cabinet were not prepared to make. As the country’s gold and currency reserves continued to drain away, the Government collapsed. On the evening of 23 August, MacDonald went to Buckingham Pala
ce to hand in his resignation to the King.
Once again, labour – the impoverished working class in Britain’s old industries, a large percentage of them miners – was being asked to bear the cost of capital’s mistakes.
Historians would condemn the crisis of the summer of 1931 as the ‘bankers’ ramp’. The flight from sterling on 11 August was not precipitated by the budget deficit – the millions being paid out in unemployment benefit – but by the speculative activities of London’s bankers.
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 32
