The press took up the story, and the Week-End Review launched a ‘Hungry England’ inquiry in the spring of 1933, conducted by ‘an economist [A.L. Bowley], a physiologist [Professor V.H. Mottram], a housewife, a doctor and a social worker’, in the hope that the debate could be settled ‘scientifically’. It could not. They found that unemployment relief payments were insufficient to provide the minimum diet for a family recommended by the recently established Advisory Committee on Nutrition set up by the Ministry of Health (on which Mottram also sat), and concluded that the ‘cheapest practical diet in current English conditions’ were about 5s. a week for a man ‘not doing muscular work. 4s.2d for a woman; and 2s.9d- 4s.10d for children according to age’.
In November that year the British Medical Association (BMA) established a benchmark for poverty, and this was generally accepted for most subsequent surveys. It specified that an average man required 3,400 calories a day, the cost of providing which was 5s.11d. This figure was later adapted according to whether a man was doing light or heavy work, and proportionately for women and children. Seebohm Rowntree used this standard when assessing the level of poverty in York, but Sir John Boyd Orr, Director of the respected Rowett Research Institute of Nutrition in Aberdeen (who had already been influential in getting free school milk for needy children in Scotland), used more generous figures borrowed from the US Bureau for Economics, which suggested that an active man required 4,500 calories a day and that the population as a whole needed to consume 2,810 calories per head each day.
Until the First World War ‘sufficient food’ was judged simply by the amount a person consumed: having ‘enough to eat’ meant just that. But since then there had been extensive research into medical conditions such as rickets, that revealed the importance of the sort of food consumed. There was a growing understanding of the significance of vitamins and minerals, and with it an awareness that large numbers of the low-paid and unemployed could not afford what were known as ‘protective foods’ — milk, fresh vegetables, meat, fish and fruit — and were subsisting on a largely cheap carbohydrate diet — bread and margarine and potatoes — washed down by copious amounts of tea sweetened with condensed milk. The link between poor nutrition and lack of money was a political question, since, in the view of the think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP), which had been established as a result of the Week-End Review’s campaign, hunger should not be regarded as ‘an act of God … but a problem which can be analysed and treated by the same methods of common sense that we are trying to apply to other problems’.
‘Common sense’ suggested it was largely a question of money. A table published in the Manchester Guardian in December 1934 showed that to have an acceptable diet a family of a man, his wife and four children (aged five, seven, nine and eleven) needed 35s.2d to live on (excluding rent): what they received in unemployment benefit (also excluding rent) was 29s.6d — a crucial shortfall of 5s.8d.
Using the much more generous calculation that a family of five needed 43s.6d a week to live on at the most basic level, excluding rent, Seebohm Rowntree estimated that 31.1 per cent of the working-class population of York were living in poverty, as were 18 per cent of the population overall. He concluded that 32.8 per cent of the poverty was due to low wages and 28.6 per cent to unemployment, and that 72.6 per cent of unemployed families lived below the poverty line. In Bristol, Herbert Tout found that over 10 per cent of working-class families were living below the poverty line, an additional 19.3 per cent of working-class families had insufficient income, and more than a quarter of the working class in Bristol as a whole were living in utter destitution; 21.3 per cent of the families suffered as a result of low wages, and 32.1 per cent because of unemployment. But Bristol and York were both relatively prosperous cities, with unemployment rates little more than the national average. Furthermore, these surveys took place in 1936 and 1937 respectively, when the worst of the Depression had passed. What about areas such as the Welsh mining valleys, Tyneside, Teesside and Clydeside, where poverty was much more widespread, and bit far deeper for far longer?
Surveys such as those in York and London, which made comparisons with times when the only recourse for the poor had been charity and the Poor Law, showed that absolute poverty was lower, perhaps half what it had been at the turn of the century. But if poverty was defined as living conditions a little above mere subsistence, then around a third of the working class in Britain — and the manual working class constituted more than 75 per cent of the population, according to the 1931 census — lived on incomes that were insufficient for ‘human needs’.
In London in 1929 unemployment and underemployment (short-time working) accounted for 38 per cent of families in poverty, and 55 per cent of the unemployed were living on the poverty line; a survey of Northampton, Warrington, Bolton and Stanley showed that the proportion of poverty due to unemployment had increased more than threefold since 1918; in Sheffield in the winter of 1931–32 it was found that 42.8 per cent of families lived in poverty. All of these calculations presumed the most rigorous housekeeping, that allowed families to exist, but certainly not to live in any meaningful sense.
The Pilgrim Trust calculated the difference between unemployment pay and the average working man’s wage. The authors admitted that their sample was small, but concluded that on average, unemployment benefit equalled around 65 per cent of wages; older men, aged between fifty-five and sixty-four, would however receive only 45 per cent of the wages they would have expected had they been in work.
Britain was a world leader in nutritional research, but there was in the thirties no internationally agreed definition of malnutrition, nor a standard measurement for it. Anthropomorphic tests that judged height, weight, hair texture and other outward signs were considered fallible, and blood and urine tests were still in the experimental stage. The seemingly promising evidence of social scientists was proving problematic. Despite the provision to families of measuring jugs, scales and lined exercise books in which to record their income, expenditure and exactly what and how much every member of the household ate (which was regarded as useful training in housewifery as well as yielding survey data) in the course of a month, their findings were ‘frustratingly compromised by the human factor’, since it was asking a lot to expect poor and often ill-educated families to keep such detailed records over such a period. And for some the natural inclination to resist the spying of outsiders, secrets between husband and wife about money, and even the ever-present spectre of the Means Test man, meant there might be a certain amount of creative accounting in their returns.
However, social investigators on the ground were continually finding correlations between poverty and malnutrition and poverty and infant and maternal mortality, and experiments showed clearly that improved nutrition did bring improved health and life chances. In the Rhondda, the simple expedient of supplementing expectant mothers’ diets with a food distribution programme had been tried. The results were startling: ‘a sharp fall in the puerperal death rate followed immediately on the introduction of this scheme, the rate dropping from 11.29 in 1934 to 4.77 in 1935’.
Poverty was poverty whatever caused it, and in areas of high unemployment wages tended to be depressed, so the incidence of those with not enough to live on was compounded. Yet the government remained resolute that regardless of what surveys showed, widespread unemployment did not mean an unhealthy nation — or part of a nation — and was quick to blame a lack of education or the fecklessness of the much-maligned working-class housewife, rather than poverty, for inadequate diets. ‘There is no available medical evidence of any general increase in physical impairment, sickness or mortality as a result of the economic depression or unemployment,’ insisted the Minister of Health, Sir E. Hilton Young, in the House of Commons in July 1933, while the Chief Medical Officer to the Board of Health, Sir George Newman, based his optimism on what he maintained were declining mortality rates and the near eradication of ‘malnutrition requiring treatment’.
Those wayward Medical Officers of Health or investigators who declared otherwise were considered guilty of perpetrating socialist ‘stunts’. Dr M’Gonigle, the Medical Officer of Health for Stockton-on-Tees, was threatened with removal from the medical register for misconduct if he participated