At the beach, children would build sandcastles or go on donkey rides, while adults would sunbathe, read or play football. Anyone who wished could swim in the sea, and sailing boats could usually be hired. Along the promenade there were pubs, cafes and restaurants. Funfairs, zoos, concert and music halls vied for custom, as did large venues for ballroom dancing. In this carnival atmosphere, people tended to drink more and wear less. One visitor to Margate described the fun: ‘Singing, flirting, drinking, banjos and laughter; a distinct touch of sunburn; our lungs full of sea air, ourselves full of lobster and salmon.’
The passion for the seaside among the working classes prompted Billy Butlin to set up the first ever commercial holiday camp at Skegness in 1936. It proved so successful that he was encouraged to open other camps. By the end of the decade, there were more than one hundred commercial camps in England, which attracted over half a million holidaymakers each year. The camps offered three meals a day and entertainment for only 35 shillings per week in the low season. Entertainment typically included around-the-clock live music, dancing, sports, day trips, talent shows and beauty contests, including the selection of the ‘glamorous grandmother’. After a day of frenetic fun, the presenter on the camp’s Radio Butlin would say ‘Good night, campers’ at 11.45 p.m. Many holidaymakers ignored the announcement, however, and danced on long past midnight. At Butlin’s, and at the seaside generally, the working classes were determined to prove their fun was as good as that of their so-called ‘betters’.
24
The country of the dole
J. B. Priestley was one of millions of people who visited Blackpool in the Thirties, passing through the seaside resort in 1933 while compiling his survey of the nation, English Journey. Priestley liked the democratic atmosphere of the Lancashire resort: ‘you are all as good as one another so long as you have the necessary sixpence’, the town seemed to say to workingclass holidaymakers. People had formerly lived in ‘a network of relations up and down the social scale, despising or pitying their inferiors, admiring or hating their superiors’; but in the ‘American’ atmosphere of Blackpool, snobbery seemed to be losing its grip on the English psyche.
Yet some aspects of Blackpool manifested less welcome features of ‘Americanization’. According to Priestley, the entertainment on offer at the resort was ‘standardised’, ‘mechanised’, ‘calculating’ and ‘cheap’. In all these respects, the town was emblematic of the emerging England of mass production and mass consumption: the whole country, Priestley commented, was ‘rapidly Blackpooling itself’. ‘Everything and everybody’, Priestley concluded, ‘is being rushed down … one dusty arterial road of cheap mass production and standardised living.’
Priestley was depressed by the ‘monotony’ of this new mechanized country, but nevertheless thought it infinitely preferable to another England he encountered: the old ‘industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways … square-faced chapels, back-to-back houses … slag heaps … doss houses … sooty dismal little towns [and] grim fortress-like cities’. England’s urban centres had remained stationary in the nineteenth century, as if they were part of an industrial museum. Looking at the predominantly unemployed inhabitants of such places, Priestley thought there must still be a war on; this seemed doubly wretched to him since many of the unemployed he encountered had fought in France two decades previously.
This ‘country of the dole’ enjoyed none of the benefits of the decade’s economic boom. Those who lived in the north of England, and much of the Midlands, did not regard the period as an age of plenty, but as ‘the hungry thirties’ or ‘the devil’s decade’. After the brief post-war boom, Britain’s staple export industries were in terminal decline and reliant on shrinking international demand. By the late Twenties a quarter of British coal miners and steel and iron workers were unemployed, along with half of those who worked in cotton and a third of shipbuilders. The mining towns of Durham, the cotton towns of Lancashire and the metal and shipbuilding centres of Cumberland and the Tyne and Tees were officially designated ‘depressed areas’.
And then came the crash. After 1929, international demand collapsed, cotton exports and steel production were reduced by half, coal production fell by a fifth and shipbuilding by 85 per cent. The consequences for workers were predictable and devastating. By 1932 over 40 per cent of miners, 50 per cent of iron and steel workers, and 60 per cent of shipbuilders were out of work. In many towns the unemployment rate was over 50 per cent and in some it rose to 80 per cent after the younger inhabitants left in search of work. Not only were more people out of work in these ghost towns, but they were unemployed for much longer – for years or even decades. Industrial action was no longer an option after the failure of the General Strike, while parliament offered little scope for protest, since Labour MPs now comprised a mere 8 per cent of the Commons. Yet many English people felt it was the government’s duty to help the unemployed. Did the National Government have the vision to protect citizens who had lost jobs through no fault of their own?
The chancellor, Neville Chamberlain, insisted that mass unemployment was an inevitable consequence of market forces. All the government could do was wait until economic conditions improved, even if that was unlikely to happen for ‘at least a decade’. The contrast with his attitude to the 1931 financial crisis was marked. The cabinet now believed that the currency and the banks could be saved by ‘balancing the budget’, which in practice meant making deep cuts to unemployment benefit. While the miners, metalworkers and shipbuilders could be left to face a maelstrom of market forces unaided, the banks could not. The government practised free market capitalism for manufacturing and manual workers, and socialism for the financial and monetary sector. Critics on the left reminded the coalition that England was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and the centre of the largest empire in history.
By doing nothing for the unemployed, the National Government exacerbated the impoverishment of a large part of the population. They tried to reduce the existing unemployment benefit in the name of ‘economy’; when the long-term unemployed exhausted the ‘insurance pay’ that was drawn from their own contributions or passed the six-month period of entitlement, the benefit they received was, in the words of one sociologist, ‘limited to the smallest sum that will keep [them] from dying or becoming unduly troublesome’. This meagre relief was granted to the unemployed only after a ‘means test’ had been carried out to ascertain whether the applicant was truly ‘destitute’ and ‘deserving’. If the unemployed man had alternative sources of income – either through savings, or because another member of their household was in work – then the benefit he received would be reduced or withdrawn.
The means test was popular among middle-class suburbanites. Money from the public coffers ought not to be ‘wasted’ on those who did not need it; besides, ‘lavish’ benefits would deter the unemployed from making an ‘effort’ to find work. It was believed to be perfectly reasonable that an unemployed man who refused to take up a job offer 250 miles from where he and his family had always lived should have his allowance cut off. The unemployed naturally took a different view – why should a man who was not responsible for the loss of his job be penalized for having saved? Why should his family face a choice between starvation and leaving their community to resettle hundreds of miles away?