The means test, like the workhouse before it, was destined to leave an indelible mark on popular culture. The means test of the early 1930s was a family one which involved a household assessment of need, taking into account the income of all its members, be it the few shillings pension of the aged parent, or the coppers earned on the son’s paper round. Its inquisitorial tone produced resentment and frustration among applicants and heightened family tension, already aggravated by the loss of patriarchal dignity and discipline consequent upon unemployment itself.
In effect it put the unemployed ‘right back on the Poor Law (though not in name) which, locally administered, exhibited wide regional variations in scale and conditions of benefit. Injustice only added to the demoralisation.’47 A father whose son or daughter found work could see his benefit ended. George Orwell recorded it as ‘an encouragement to tittle-tattle and the informer’. A word from a jealous neighbour spotting a new coat or pair of shoes could bring the means-test men round demanding to know where the money had come from. Its effects became seared into the national soul.
In 1934 responsibility for the means-test and its attendant benefits was removed from local authorities and placed in the hands of a national Unemployment Assistance Board which at least applied rather more consistent rules. Freed of their direct financial responsibility for the unemployed, local authorities found in the late 1930s that their Poor Law responsibilities for children, the sick, the elderly, widows and deserted wives began, in Fraser’s words, ‘to mellow’. A 1937 report from Political and Economic Planning, an early independent research organisation and think-tank, records them slowly evolving into something faintly recognisable as the social services departments to come: ‘Instead of the grim Poor Law of the nineteenth century with its rigorous insistence on the principle of “less eligibility” and the workhouse test we have a liberal and constructive service supplementing the other social services, filling in gaps and dealing with human need in the round in a way which no specialist service could ever be expected to do.’48 Such a picture, according to Sir George Godber, then a medical officer with the Ministry of Health, remained very much that of the best. ‘Some of the services, particularly the accommodation for “wayfarers”, could be grim indeed when I was inspecting them in 1939.’49
Unemployment, as Fraser says, had become ‘the central issue of the inter-war years. Its malignant canker had poisoned millions of homes; it had blighted whole industrial regions; it had disinherited a generation; and it had laid low an elected Government.’ The Pathé News images of the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 are the most potent symbol of the times. Two hundred men, selected from hundreds of volunteers among the 8000 made redundant after the Tyne shipyard and its linked industries closed, marched to London and on Parliament led by their MP ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson (whom we will meet again). Their cheerful discipline washed through with despair still comes through the flickering black and white film. In the short term they received and achieved nothing – indeed, on their return they learned their dole had been cut; as the Unemployment Assistance Board explained, while on the march they would not have been available for work had any turned up.50
Yet unemployment was far from touching everybody equally. While it reached 67 per cent in Jarrow, it was a mere 3 per cent in High Wycombe, and 7 per cent in London’s Deptford.51 Britain’s first great twentieth-century experience of mass unemployment was as regional as its return was to be in the recession of the early to mid-1980s. As in the eighties – though not the nineties – it was heavy engineering, coal, steel, and shipbuilding that were razed by foreign competition. The twenties and thirties added to that the dramatic decline of King Cotton in Lancashire and the slower decline of Yorkshire wool: the world was discovering that it wanted fewer of the ‘millions of yards of calico and thousands of steam engines’52 that Britain had previously provided. So it was chiefly the north of England, Scotland and Wales that suffered.
None the less, other parts of the country and the middle classes were not entirely immune. In 1934 it was estimated that 300,000 clerks, office managers, engineers, chemists and the like were out of work, white-collar workers whose earnings were too high to qualify for the state insurance schemes and who thus did not appear in the general statistics.53 In 1936, when the worst was over, Fowey in Cornwall, Ross on Wye, and Keswick in the Lake District featured alongside Wigan, Hartlepool and Glasgow as priority places for official contracts because their adult unemployment had run at above 25 per cent in the previous year. But it remains true that even at the absolute nadir of the slump, more than three-quarters of the workforce was still working. And overall – again a pre-echo of the eighties – those in work enjoyed real, rising standards of living over the two decades before World War II. In fact the thirties was to be the last decade for half a century when it could fairly be said that the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.
The 1930s not only saw George Orwell chronicle the plight of lower England in The Road to Wigan Pier, it also saw J. B. Priestley’s English Journey. The novelist and critic travelled from Southampton to Newcastle by way of most points in between and back to London. He found three Englands. There was ‘Old England’ of the cathedrals, the colleges and the Cotswolds, ‘a luxury country’ that ‘has long since ceased to earn its own living’. Then there was the nineteenth-century England: ‘the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways’ with ‘thousands of rows of little houses all alike’, ‘detached villas with monkey trees’, ‘mill chimneys, slums, fried-fish shops’ and ‘good-class draper’s and confectioner’s’ – all existing in ‘a cynically devastated countryside’ itself dotted with ‘sooty dismal little towns and still sootier grim fortress-like cities’. It was an area he described as ‘the larger part of the Midlands and the North’ but ‘existing everywhere’. This England, Priestley judged, ‘is not being added to and has no new life poured into it. To the more fortunate people it was not a bad England at all, very solid and comfortable.’54 But this England also contained the England of the dole, one that looked as if it had ‘devoted a hundred years of its life to keeping gigantic sooty pigs. And the people who were choked by the reek of sties did not get the bacon.’
It was this England that also contained Hebburn and Jarrow, its ironworks derelict and its shipyards nearly so when Priestley visited in 1933, three years before the march. He pronounced the town quite simply ‘dead’.
Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual, penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a distant civilization … would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was now being punished. He would never believe us if we told him that in theory this town was as good as any other and that its inhabitants were not criminals but citizens with votes.55
Writing nine years before Beveridge, in an unconscious premonition of things to come and using the same capital letters, Priestley railed: ‘If Germans had been threatening these towns instead of Want, Diseases, Hopelessness, Misery, something would have been done, and done quickly.’56
Priestley also found a third England – and not one which appealed much to his fastidious taste. That was ‘the new post [First World] war England … the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motorcoaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarettes and coupons.’57
It was also, he might have added, the England of the middle-class estates of twenties semis that were just starting to explode into the thirties suburban private house building boom, the England of Beckenham and Bromley and of Metroland, the rise of the clerk and the demise of the servant, the heyday of ribbon development, of the Great West Road, the Art Deco of the Firestone and Hoover factories, the days of ‘glass and white tiles and chromium plate’.58 This England was a country of which a large section had prospered despite the celestial emperor’s view of Jarrow.
But all three of these Englands, along