Long ago an Italian named Brachi had found his way into one of the Welsh mining villages and had established a modest café. Others had followed him, but his name had clung, and Italian cafés in the Rhondda were generically called Brachi shops. The Brachi shop in Rhondda Fach was a melancholy place, its front in need of a paint, a sheet of old cardboard filling the broken part of the window in which stood a few dummy packets of tea and biscuits. A dejected girl came from the back. Her black hair and olive complexion were Mediterranean, but her voice had the lilt of Wales. She looked at me hostilely when I talked about a fire, and I think I was humiliating her into admitting that they, too, lit the fire only at mealtimes. Nobody came for meals anymore. So I spent my tuppence on a cup of tea, which she languidly made on a primus stove. She thawed a little as the kettle warmed up, and talked of her longing to go to London. I hope she got there.
The Orcadian poet Edwin Muir witnessed the state of the unemployed in Scotland when he took a journey there in 1934 at the request of the publishers of J.B. Priestley’s English Journey:
It was a warm, overcast summer day: groups of idle, sullen-looking young men stood at the street corners; smaller groups were wandering among the blue black ranges of pit-dumps which in that region are a substitute for nature; the houses looked empty and unemployed like their tenants; and the road along which the car stumbled was pitted and rent, as if it had recently been under shell-fire. Everything had the look of a Sunday that had lasted for many years, during which the bells had forgotten to ring and the Salvation Army, with its accordions and concertinas had gone into seclusion, so that one did not even bother to put on one’s best clothes: a disused, slovenly, everlasting Sunday. The open shops had an unconvincing yet illicit look, and the few black-dusted miners whom I saw trudging home seemed hardly to believe in their own existence … A century ago there was a great clearance from the Highlands, which still rouses the anger of the people living there. At present, on a far bigger scale, a silent clearance is going on in industrial Scotland, a clearance not of human beings, but of what they depend on for life.
This word dole has two meanings. It means a charitable distribution, especially a rather niggardly one. It also means, or did mean, in its archaic use, a man’s lot or destiny. We have contrived most artfully to combine these two meanings. As I looked back on it, the England of the dole did not seem to me to be a pleasant place. We could not be proud of its creation. We could not really afford to be complacent about it, although we often are. It’s a poor shuffling job, and one of our worst compromises.
J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934)
‘At the present time I am out of work,’ recorded Frank Forster in his diary on Saturday, 14 December 1935. ‘I have been out for 3 or 4 weeks. I am safe for 6 months on the Labour and for this period will receive each week 17/-. But what is to happen after that if I do not get a job, I just don’t know.’ Forster, who was in his mid-twenties and of strongly left-leaning persuasions, lived at home in Saltney in Cheshire with his father, who worked in the sanitation department of the local rural district council, his mother and one of his two sisters (the other was married). ‘During the past few years my life has consisted of a series of periods of unemployment spaced out with periods of employment’ — as a fitter’s mate, in horticulture and as a casual labourer.
Life at home was not easy:
Our family at the present time is in rather straitened financial circumstances. From father’s side came only 9/- Union benefit. [Forster’s father was in hospital with ‘the old stomach trouble’.] Mother gets 10/- from cleaning at a public house in the village. Hilda [his sister] gives in about 8/- or 9/- from her wages. She is working on a stall in Chester market. I give 8/- out of the 17/- which I get from the Labour Exchange. We have had to cut down considerably on various things and are able to buy only necessities. We are helped a great deal by our various relatives who now and again give us food or money … There is at times talk of me getting a job somewhere no matter what it is or what the money being paid is. I do not relish making small money. [I] would sooner die fighting and starving than live cringing and in slavery. The thrill which I get out of the situation is the thought of what might happen when my point of view clashes with the law or with authority when our family is bought to the point of starvation, to Poor Law level. Then, at that time, I would be able to come into my own and express my opinion against this damnable society.
The Forsters’ pared-down family income would not have been unusual in an area where there was little regular work to be had — nor would Frank’s feelings of frustration as a youngish man with apparently no prospects. The money he received was unemployment insurance benefit, since at some point he had worked in the building trade, which was covered by the government insurance scheme that had been in existence since before the First World War.
An unemployed married man with two children still at school who was covered by the insurance scheme would receive thirty shillings per week, or half the national average wage of £3. This benefit was paid at a flat rate regardless of previous earnings, and the scheme was intended to insure the worker against unemployment, not against poverty. As the author of an informative if briskly upbeat coda, ‘The State Services for the Unemployed’, to Time to Spare, a book of a BBC series of talks published in 1935 which gave the unemployed ‘a chance to speak out freely, according to one of them’, explained: ‘Although the rates of insurance benefit may … have provided the subsistence of millions of persons, on and off, during recent years, they still have nothing to do with maintenance. No British Government, as yet, has ever accepted such a liability.’ This was not entirely true, since an Out of Work Donation had been briefly granted to those who had served their country in the First World War and who had been unable to find work, and there continued to be some minimal ‘liability’ not only for those unemployed workers who had exhausted their benefits, but also for those able-bodied unemployed in jobs not covered by the unemployment insurance scheme, who therefore had no benefit entitlement.
The first Unemployment Insurance Act had been passed by Asquith’s Liberal government in 1911 in response to demands for ‘something better than the current system of deterrent poor relief, eked out here and there by spasmodic local relief works and private charities. In those days the majority of the artisan class could and did somehow tide themselves over temporary out-of-work spells, either by saving or by trade union insurances. And as for the unthrifty and the lowest-paid workers, the opinion was that to dispense on easy terms to such people would be the road to ruin.’ Much had changed: little had changed.
The Act had ‘opened a new chapter in unemployment relief. The government took a leaf out of the trade union book and launched a cautious scheme of contributory insurance … the object was to cover short spells of unemployment and help men to eke out their family savings. There were no allowances for the wife and children in those days, and if State benefits, plus savings or trade union benefit, were insufficient or were exhausted, the only other public resource was the Poor Law. And in many areas the rule of the Poor Law Guardians was to offer the workhouse or the labour colony.’
Twenty years after that first Act, there was indeed a safety net in place for the unemployed and their families that had not been there before the First World War. It had been painstakingly knotted together in the growing realisation that unemployment was no longer merely an occasional eventuality that thrifty members of the ‘artisan class’ would be able to ride out. But the net sagged perilously in places.
Between 1920 and 1934 no fewer than twenty-one Acts concerned with unemployment insurance had been passed as various governments tried to rein in the mounting costs of unemployment benefits, grappling with the problem of those without work in a changed world, informed by the old Poor Law principle of ‘less eligibility’, meaning that it must not be more financially advantageous not to work than to work.
Until the slump of 1920–21, unemployment had generally been assumed to be cyclical and short-term: economic fluctuations might