As well as cooking, cleaning and washing, women had to juggle almost non-existent money. Getting things ‘on strap’ (credit) from the grocer, balancing one tradesman’s bill against another, putting a penny or two by in a club for clothing or boots, and putting a brave face on it as she paid her weekly visit to the pawn shop.
Women had to work miracles with the dole, or low wages. ‘My father didn’t realise how my mother was having to budget. He wasn’t aware of a lot of things we had to do, my mother and me, to keep the cart on the wheels. He just tipped his money in and thought it did the job. He just pushed his head in the sand,’ recalled Clifford Steele in Barnsley.
Pawn shops were as common as betting shops today. On Monday a woman would pawn her jewellery, often including her gold wedding ring (which she would replace with a sixpenny brass one from Woolworths to stay respectable), or maybe her husband’s watch if he had one, or his only suit if he didn’t need it that week, and would hope that she would be able to redeem them when the money came in on Friday. Then it would be back to the pawn shop on Monday again, until the family’s meagre possessions got too shabby to raise any money against, or even worse, she had to sell the pawn tickets to raise a few pounds, and that would mean the things would be gone for good.
Charles Graham recalled that ‘in almost every street [in South Shields] there was the old woman who offered her services as messenger for those people who were too proud to be seen going into the pawn shop. She would be well known to the pawnbroker and could be trusted. She would get a pound loan, the pawn shop would charge twopence a week until the pawn was redeemed. The messenger would get threepence or sixpence from the housewife … the parcel would never be opened [by the pawnbroker], it was just a way of getting round the law of money lending. The pawn shop was a bank.’ Women would come clattering along the street in clogs and shawls to a pawn shop in Burslem in the Potteries, where unemployment was over 30 per cent in 1931, and stayed high throughout the decade. Its owner ‘used to do very well. He used to reckon that it was the only shop in Burslem that had a queue on Monday morning.’
When there was not enough food to go round towards the end of the week, the woman would often go without herself so that her husband and children had a meal on the table — as Annie Weaving must have done countless times. ‘We are told we ought to eat fruit, but it is very seldom that I can afford fruit … My husband and I always have to suffer if there is anything to buy. We give it all to the bairns and we have bread and marge,’ said Mrs Pallas. ‘I was practically living on bread and potatoes,’ remembered an Aberdeen women with two small children and an unemployed, unskilled husband. ‘But I tried to get something every night for my husband and the girls. Sausages were cheap … the men in the fish [shop] would sometimes give us a bit of fish … In the winter months I walked over to the New Market. You got a great big rabbit for sixpence and we had that every Sunday, all the months that rabbits were in season … But mostly I had potatoes and bread and toast … I’d had the two girlies and then I’d had five boys — all dead-born, and I’m certain it was because of the malnutrition.’
John McNamara remembered how ‘It was a common thing for a housewife, for a mother, to do a hell of a lot of sacrificing. Unknownst to hubby. Unknownst to kiddies. It was nothing for them to say, “Oh, I’ve had mine.” And they hadn’t had a bite. But you didn’t find out till it was too late. A good mother went without many a meal. Kids come first. And husband. She was last though she worked harder than anyone.’
There are few tales of greater poignancy than that of an anonymous mother included in Nigel Gray’s superb compilation of voices of the unemployed: ‘When our baby was born we had to borrow a mattress from next door and spread newspapers on it. I used to feed the baby on a bottle of warm water. We put her to bed in a drawer. We made nappies out of newspaper. When I went before the public Assistance Committee they asked me if the baby was being breast fed and when I said yes, they reduced the allowance for a child.’
In 1935 the body of a Woking magistrate, Francis Wellesley, was found floating face-down in the river Wey. ‘Another Hatry Crash Victim’, decided the headline of a national newspaper, though in fact the death turned out to be an accident rather than suicide. Furthermore, Mr Wellesley had never been an investor in any of Clarence Hatry’s companies. But the dapper, Chaplinesque Hatry, the son of a silk-top-hat manufacturer who was always so well turned out himself that it was put about that the soles of his shoes were polished as well as the uppers, had become — at least to some — the personification of an attenuated British version of the Wall Street crash, when share prices plummeted and many fortunes were wiped out. And indeed it was on the day after ‘Black Thursday’, 25 October 1929, that Clarence Hatry had been remanded to Brixton Prison in South London to await trial on charges of fraud and forgery.
Hatry’s spectacular business career — and its demise — mirrored the boom-and-bust economy of the 1920s. Given the frenzy of concern about speculation, unstable money and the financial integrity of the City of London in the shaky world economy, it was no surprise that when he and his three fellow defendants faced the formidably ‘icy’ Mr Justice Avory in the dock of the Old Bailey in January 1930, the prosecution was led by the Attorney-General himself, Sir William Jowitt.
The case was a complicated one, but again Hatry’s story embodied another concern — or in this case a suggested panacea — of the times: rationalisation. Almost Edwardian in his spending habits, at various times he had owned racehorses, one of which, Furious, won the Lincolnshire Handicap at wondrously long odds; a yacht which cost £15,000 (almost £700,000 in today’s money) a year to keep afloat; and a magnificent house off Park Lane which his wife described as ‘a palace in miniature’, but which the Observer would later sneer at as ‘a palazzo in Mayfair with its classical swimming bath above and its sham Tudor cocktail bar below’. Hatry had built and lost his various fortunes largely by consolidating businesses, which was exactly what many economists and industrial pundits were recommending as the way forward for outdated, undercapitalised British industries. While Jute Industries, which he formed in 1920, was a success, there was little ‘strategic logic or managerial vigour’ in such creations as British Glass Industries or Amalgamated Industrials, ‘a hodgepodge of cotton spinning, shipbuilding, and pig farming’, according to his biographer.
However, Hatry sold the London department stores (including Swan & Edgar) he had bought and combined into the Drapery and General Investment Trust to Debenhams at a handsome profit, and merged the majority of London’s private bus companies, before selling them to London General Omnibus Co., which would eventually become the nucleus of London Transport. He also financed rather less successful ventures, such as the Photomaton Parent Corporation (which operated photographic booths) and the Associated Automatic Machine Corporation (operating vending machines, mainly on railway platforms), both of which perhaps spoke more to his weakness for gizmos than his financial acumen, and leaked funds.
Nevertheless, by 1928 Hatry appeared to be successfully juggling his activities as a proto-asset-stripper under his umbrella company Austin Friars Trust, ‘a £300,000 finance house which was to be the linchpin of his later enterprises and the central company in a complicated network of interrelated investment and industrial enterprises’, buying companies, amalgamating them, liquidating then reconstructing them under a new name. At his trial, however, the liquidator, Sir Gilbert Garnsey, alleged that the whole group had been insolvent from the very start in May 1927.
Within that cavernous enterprise one particularly successful amalgamation was Allied Ironfounders, a combine of light castings manufacturers, and this gave Hatry the idea of pulling off a similar feat in the ailing steel industry. In April 1929 he acquired control of the United Steel Companies, but the next month the general election returned a Labour government. ‘This is ruination,’ Hatry lamented to Hubert Meredith of the Daily Mail. ‘How can I possibly carry through my steel scheme now?’ And indeed, in the bear market that followed what might have been anticipated