… The Means Test bloke arrived with a van to take the best of our furniture. How I hated him with his smart clothes and the smirk on his face, twirling his stick of chalk in his fingers. I watched as he walked over to two large brass lions standing either side of the hearth, telling my mother they had to go. It didn’t matter to him that they had belonged to her grandmother long since dead. The poor weren’t allowed sentiment. We hadn’t got much before he got cracking with his chalk. We’d got a damn sight less when he’d finished.
Such confiscations struck at the heart of an unemployed worker’s sense of the modest achievements of a hard-working life, as a London sheet-metal worker explained: ‘Suppose I would have to sell off that chair over there. There would be more than that chair go out of this room. How many times do you suppose the old woman and I have gone by the store window and looked at chairs like that waiting till we could get one? Then finally, we got it … if I had to sell that, I’d be selling more than the wood and the cloth and the stuffing. I’d be selling part of myself.’
The Means Test was not only harsh and often inequitable, it also defied logic. As the Rhondda Fach Gazette reported: ‘It is in many cases a penalty upon thrift. If a man had been careful and thrifty all of his life and has got a small income he loses exactly that amount from the dole, while a reckless unthrifty person gets it in full.’
By January 1932 almost a million unemployed were having to register for transitional payments, and were thus coming within the scope of the Means Test. Thousands were cut off from benefit, while others had their relief drastically reduced. It was claimed that in the depressed textile areas of Lancashire only 16 per cent of claimants were awarded the full transitional benefit, while a third were disallowed altogether. Throughout Britain as a whole, half of those applying for transitional payments received less than half the maximum amount, and 180,000 people were judged no longer eligible to receive unemployment benefit under the unemployment insurance scheme as a result of the application of the Means Test. The government saved £24 million in that first year. The cost to society was incalculable.
As James Maxton bitterly lectured Harold Macmillan, ‘The Means Test has been useful in disclosing once more how limited were the resources of the working population. But was there any need to set up expensive investigating machinery to discover that the majority of the working class were very poor?’
You were such an angel to take trouble with my old women and it was really worthwhile. I do not know whether this story of an old castle will affect the Labour vote. People are so odd. They might say, ‘He is a humbug: he talks Labour and lives in a castle.’ But they might also say, ‘How splendid of him when he lives in a castle to come and worry about our little affairs.’
Harold Nicolson writing to his wife Vita Sackville-West, who had entertained fifty ladies from the West Leicester Women’s Conservative Association (his constituency) at their home, Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, on 5 June 1937
‘Southampton to Newcastle, Newcastle to Norwich: memories rose like milk coming to the boil. I had seen England. I had seen a lot of Englands. How many?’, J.B. Priestley asked himself at the conclusion of his English Journey in 1933. But although Priestley had roamed (usually by ‘motor coach’, which he found ‘voluptuous, sybaritic … This is how the ancient Persian monarchs would have travelled, if they’d known the trick of it … they have annihilated the old distinction between rich and poor travellers’) from Bristol in the West to Norwich in the East, from Southampton in the South to Yorkshire, Lancashire and Tyneside in the North, by way of Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Arnold Bennett’s ‘five pottery towns’ in between, he had not, as most commentators had not, rambled down to England’s south-westernmost extremity, Cornwall. If he had, he would have found there unemployment, poverty and despair to equal any found in the reproach that Jarrow, Merthyr Tydfil, Clydeside and the other depressed areas constituted.
The village of St Day, named for a Celtic saint and a stopping place in the Middle Ages for pilgrims on their journey to St Michael’s Mount, lies nine miles north of Falmouth and seven miles east of Truro in Cornwall. A prosperous village in the early nineteenth century, its wealth was founded on copper-mining until 1870, when competition from Chile, Bolivia and Peru meant that 2,000 men were thrown out of work when the United Mines closed down. ‘The dismal procession of the Gwennap [the parish in which St Day is located] Mines to the scrap heap had passed, [and] the modern history of St Day had begun. When the Great War came it was trotting down the hill at a leisurely pace. When the war ended the speed of the pace was accelerated and that was the only difference the War made,’ explained Richard Blewett, the Medical Officer of Health for the district, in a ‘modern historical survey’ of St Day he prepared in 1935 for a Board of Education short course for elementary school teachers held at Selwyn College, Cambridge.
The land surrounding the village was ‘pocked by mineshafts … and scarred by “burrows” or mine tips, over many of which nature is gradually casting a blanket of heather’. In 1935 the rate of unemployment in St Day was nearly 30 per cent, since not only had copper-mining collapsed, but so, in the mid-1920s, had the tin-mining industry around nearby Redruth and Cambourne, from where many of St Day’s inhabitants came in search of cheaper housing — even in 1935 the average rent of a workman’s house was not much more than two shillings a week. China clay production, which it had been hoped might fill the vacuum left by the decline of mining had done no such thing: by the end of 1932 output had fallen 40 per cent since 1929, and the price had fallen by more than 30 per cent. The Cornish economy was in paralysis, with the population having fallen in the decade up to 1931 by 0.9 per cent (while that of the rest of England and Wales had risen by 5.5 per cent), and the annual average of unemployment between 1930 and 1933 was 21.6 per cent.
Moreover, de-industrialisation at the turn of the century meant that trade unionism amongst the Cornish miners was never the force it was in the Welsh Valleys. Even when a strike was organised by the Transport and General Workers’ Union in January 1939 at South Crofty mine, when police and strikers clashed, only 234 men out of a total workforce of 435 stopped work, while the seasonal and scattered nature of the tourist industry meant that unionism did not find a foothold among those toiling in hotels and other holiday amenities. Politically Cornwall, as part of Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’ and with its strong tradition of religious nonconformism remained a fairly staunch Liberal stronghold during the 1930s (the Conservatives managed to take two seats in the 1931 election and three in 1935), with Isaac Foot, MP for Bodmin until 1935 — the patriarch of a radical dynasty that included the future Labour leader Michael Foot and the campaigning Socialist Workers’ Party and Daily Mirror journalist Paul Foot — the ‘towering presence’. An eloquent preacher and stirring orator, with an ‘anti-drink, anti-betting, evangelical stance’, Foot was revered throughout the county and the fishermen’s luggers at Looe were reputed to be painted in the Liberal colours of blue and yellow in his honour. Indeed, ‘Our Isaac’ was an important factor in preventing what another Cornishman (though Foot was actually a native of Devon, and began his political career there), the historian A.L. Rowse, who stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate for Penryn and Falmouth in both elections in the thirties, believed was ‘the prime task for Labour in Cornwall … to bring home the futility of going on being Liberal [since] Cornish liberalism [was] a fossilised survival’ — as, unfortunately, was the inter-war Cornish economy.
Fishing was also in the doldrums in Cornwall by the mid-1930s. ‘Outside the Duchy the legend still holds that the fisher is the typical Cornishman,’ wrote the former suffragist Cicely Hamilton on her journey round England in 1938, ‘but, in sober fact, that race of Cornish fishers is a race that is dwindling fast.’ With the Cornish fisheries unable to compete with those of the Artic and the