The unemployed loathed the way in which the means test was carried out. Officials from the local Public Assistance Committee (PAC) would drop into their homes unannounced to see if their children were working or if they had recently purchased clothes or furniture. If either was found to be the case, the benefit payments to the family were cut or stopped. Alternatively, the PAC men would insist that certain household items and clothes be pawned before benefit could be claimed. One woman tried to prove her poverty to a committee official by showing him the drawer in which her baby daughter slept. Unimpressed, the representative ‘asked if the baby was being breast fed, and [when] I said yes he reduced the allowance for a child’ on the grounds that it would not require other nourishment. The means test was psychologically as well as economically damaging. Workers who had been independent for their entire lives were forced to open their doors to the successors of the hated Poor Law Guardians before being humiliated by probing questions. There was an irony in the way an increasingly bureaucratic social service state functioned: it had the power to intrude into every aspect of people’s private lives, yet it would offer them neither support nor security.
Between 1932 and 1933 over 180,000 benefit claimants had their relief cancelled, while it was reduced for half of those who continued to receive it, ‘saving’ the government £24 million. Chamberlain was forced to admit that the system required ‘rationalisation’, yet his attempt to improve its ‘efficiency’, via the Unemployment Act of 1934, did little to ease the plight of those without work. Nor did the provision of grants to certain ‘special’ areas of the country make much difference.
Unemployment became the focus of extensive sociological research. ‘From the London School of Economics and other places,’ commented the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘went annually many earnest persons, male and female, to plant their tents in depressed areas.’ Here was a manifestation of the political conscience of the age and also of its ‘scientific’ spirit. In 1936, the Mass Observation organization was founded to collect data concerning the British people; its monthly magazine offered statistics on economic and social trends to a public that was eager for facts.
As a result of these investigations, we know a great deal about life in the ‘hungry thirties’. According to Seebohm Rowntree’s ‘human needs’ standard, 30 per cent of proletarian families lived below the poverty line in northern cities such as Liverpool and York, at a time when the working classes comprised over 70 per cent of the population in such urban areas. To give readers an idea of what existence on the poverty line was like, Rowntree described everyday life for a family in which the wage earner was ‘never absent from his work for a single day’. Such a family ‘must never spend a penny on railway fares … never purchase a newspaper … never save … never join trade unions … must smoke no tobacco … drink no beer … have no money for marbles or sweets … nothing must be bought but that which is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of physical health.’ This meant a weekday dinner of boiled potatoes and white bread with ‘a lick of marge’, accompanied by ‘a pinch of tay’ with ‘a screw of sugar’ in it.
Those who lived below the poverty line lacked the income for the basic requirements of rent and the minimum diet. Parents in such households ‘literally starved themselves in order to feed and clothe their children’. A Liverpool family whose male head was unemployed ‘had nothing but bread, margarine and tea, with condensed milk, for breakfast and dinner’ and went ‘to bed early so as not to feel hungry’. They lived four or five people to a filthy room, in the squalid Victorian slums that remained standing after the National Government discontinued Labour’s clearance programme. There were an estimated 70,000 such dwellings in Manchester and 60,000 in Sheffield. No other European country had such extensive or insalubrious slums. Dampness, leaking roofs, peeling plaster and infestation of bugs were commonplace in these back-to-back terraces. None of the houses had hot water and many lacked clean cold water; several people would sleep in each single bed.
Living in these conditions took its inevitable toll on slum dwellers’ health. They were malnourished, with nearly 70 per cent of all workingclass children in the period having rickets; many were also afflicted with tuberculosis and anaemia. Often it was the mothers who suffered most. ‘Mam’ sacrificed her portion of the meagre household diet for her children, yet she became weak in consequence. A third of all women living below the poverty line were classified as suffering from ill health, while maternal mortality was identified as one of the most serious consequences of unemployment. Yet such findings were dismissed by the National Government, which attributed ill health to irresponsible household management. When doctors who worked in impoverished areas publicly challenged this view, their livelihoods were threatened by the government.
Along with sociologists, numerous novelists and journalists flocked to the underworld. ‘Dole literature’ of both the documentary and fictional variety became a popular subgenre in the Thirties. Affluent southerners enjoyed reading detailed accounts of the plight of those who lived ‘up north’. ‘Misery,’ as one novelist commented, is a ‘marketable commodity’, as was naturalism. The ‘Condition of England question’, which had been asked in the 1840s by authors such as Dickens, was now asked again with even more fervour. Autobiographies by manual labourers who had lost their livelihoods became popular, as did the volumes of essayists such as Orwell, who followed in Priestley’s footsteps and recorded his impressions in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Popular dole novels of the period included Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man and Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, in which an archetypal image of the genre appears. ‘Motionless as a statue’, an unemployed man hangs around a street corner, ‘gaze fixed on pavement, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, the bitter wind blowing.’
Many of these books vividly evoke the psychological impact of unemployment. Orwell was horrified to find that many men in the north of England were ashamed of being unemployed. ‘The middle classes were talking about “lazy idle loafers on the dole”, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves.’ Their feeling of personal degradation was accompanied by a sense of impotence, and by depression, cynicism, mental instability, defeatism and fatalism. It was through work that the older working classes had defined themselves and their place in the world; without it, they felt hopeless. Youths, on the other hand, were less affected: Priestley described them as ‘undisciplined and carefree, the dingy butterflies of the back streets’.
The unemployed of all ages had a tendency to turn violent. Sometimes their violence was directed against officials at the labour exchange, and on other occasions it was directed against themselves. Home Office statistics show that two unemployed men committed suicide every day in England in the early Thirties. Yet the violence was generally sporadic, being smothered by an overwhelming sense of apathy and boredom. It was this, along with sheer exhaustion, that stifled the anger of the unemployed towards a system that had failed them. While some Tory MPs feared that a revolutionary situation had developed, the jobless displayed little appetite for revolution. ‘It cannot be reiterated too often,’ one sociologist commented, ‘that unemployment is not an active state … The overwhelming majority have no political convictions.’ Orwell was shocked by the lack of politically conscious misery he encountered in Wigan. He attributed it to the longevity of people’s suffering – after years without work, many had simply settled down to the dole as a way of life. He also reckoned that cheap luxuries, such as ‘fish and chips … chocolate … the radio, the movies’ had ‘between them averted a revolution’.