Books

The good old days?

John Grigg

The Slump: Society and Politics during the Depression John Stevenson and Chris Cook (Jonathan Cape 0.45) In his Oxford history of England 1914 to 1945 A. J. P. Taylor challenged the fashionable myth that the decade before the second World war was a time of undiluted misery in Britain for all but the privileged few. Despite mass unemployment, he said, 'most English people were enjoying a richer life than any previously known in the history of the world: longer holidays, shorter hours, higher real wages.' And he asked which was the more significant aspect of the decade, 'over a million unemployed or over a million private cars?'

This challenge to the polemical orthodoxy of the Left was all the more impressive coming from a left-wing historian who experienced the period as an adult; and it is now taken further by two young dons whose parents (to whom the book is dedicated) 'lived through the worst years of the Slump.' They do not belittle the ghastly problem of unemployment, showing that the peak figure of just under three million during the winter of 1932-3 was almost certainly less than the true total, because it 'excluded categories such as the selfemployed, agricultural workers, and married women who did not sign on for the dole.' Similarly, no doubt, the figure to which unemployment was reduced by 1939 — almost identical with that which it has reached at the beginning of 1978— has to be taken with a pinch of salt, though it is incontestable that the number of unemployed was almost halved over a period of seven years.

The authors do not suggest that the world depression affected Britain less severely than other countries. According to their calculations, 'Britain, Germany and the United States had roughly comparable rates of unemployment when judged as a percentage of the total labour force,' and each country 'had three years when more than a fifth of the working population was out of a job.' But they do explain that Britain's case was different, in that the areas most affected had been in trouble for some time, and that unemployment there was not a new problem but 'rather an intensification of an existing one.'

Against the picture of depression in specific areas and industries we are shown a more general picture of affluence and growth. Between 1932 and 1937 domestic output rose by a quarter, industrial output by almost half and domestic investment in the same proportion. (In 1937 unemployment was actually lower than in 1939: on the quoted figures lower than it is now.) Thanks to the establishment of the grid system wider the auspices of the Central Electricity Board with monopoly powers, consumption of electricity increased fourfold between 1925 and 1939. Whereas at the end of the first World war only one house in seventeen was wired for electricity, by 1939 the figure was two houses in three.

The Thirties saw a dramatic advance in the manufacture and marketing of consumer goods, itself a sure sign of prosperity. The turnover of Marks and Spencer, for instance, rose from £2.5 million to £23.5 million between 1929 and 1939, and similar expansion was achieved by other chainstore businesses. People were able to buy because they were earning more, in real terms. During the Thirties average real wages rose by 15 per cent, for those in regular employment. Higher living standards were reflected not only in the mass purchase of consumer goods, but also in a housing boom, vastly increased personal savings, and foreign travel by people who had never been abroad before, except in uniform. Travel was further assisted by the spread of holidays with pay. Eleven million people were entitled to paid holidays by 1939, compared with only 1.5 million in 1931.

One key point which the authors emphasise is that the improvement in real wages was brought about by falling prices rather than by nominal increases in pay. The average industrial weekly wage stood at just under 3 throughout the Thirties, but between 1920 and 1939 the cost of living index fell by a third, with a particularly steep drop in the early Thirties.

It is easy to understand, therefore, why the Slump failed to provide a climate in Britain for political extremism. In so many ways there was not a slump at all, but quite the reverse. Moreover, even in the depressed areas there was very little revolutionary feeling. The mood of the unemployed was more fatalistic than indignant. Precisely because unemployment was so localised, so concentrated in communities, it was less invidious than it might otherwise have been. Such agitation as there was was directed against the working of unemployment relief (especially the means test) rather than against unemployment itself.

The authors give a fascinating account of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, and of the attitude towards it of the Labour Party and the trade unions. They show how disastrously handicapped it was by being under Communist control. Even though it organised all the hunger marches but one, and even though it did much good work for individuals, it never succeeded in mobilising more than a frac tion of the unemployed, and it was on the whole shunned by the traditional leaders of the British working class. Its maximum

membership was probably no more than 50,000, and even this was short-lived. By

the end of the period support for the NUWM had dwindled almost to insignificance.

By contrast, the one hunger march which it did not organise was an outstanding publ icity success and has passed into folklore as the most effective act of protest during the Slump. This was the march from Jarrow in 1936, of which the moving spirit was the newly-elected Labour MP for the town, Ellen Wilkinson, but which also had the backing of the local Conservative Associ ation. Above all, it was orderly and in no way tainted with Communism. When the marchers reached London, they refused to join in a Communist rally in Hyde Park, and showed their patriotism and respect for the Constitution by cheering Edward VIII 'lustily' in the Mall.

The relative passivity of the unemployed does not mean that they were well treated by officialdom, or that the National Gov ernment showed as much sympathy and imagination as it might have done. The authors make no such claims. On the con trary, they show that the police, acting on instructions or guidance from the Home Office, often handled demonstrations with excessive roughness, and they reveal that in 1932 a Bill was nearly introduced which would have given the Home Secretary power to prohibit all marches. (It was scotched by the Attorney-General, Inskip, who said that the Home Secretary should not be given such extensive power and that it would be better to make use of an Act of Edward III.) On the other hand the authors largely agree with Robert Skidelsky that it is mythi cal to suggest, as many left-wingers still do, that the police discriminated against the left and in favour of the Fascists. The police, in their view, were above all 'concerned to preserve public order whatever group was causing disruption', and it should be obvi ous that the Public Order Act of 1937, with its ban on the political use of uniforms, was aimed at the Fascists rather than at the Communists. The authors do, however, admit that the police were even more hostile to the Communists than to the Fascists, if only because the Fascists were more disciplined and less anti-police.

The worst blemish on the domestic record of the National Government is that it lacked generosity and sympathetic insight in its treatment of the unemployed. It was outrageous that those who took part in hunger marches— even the Jarrow marchers — were disqualified, while they were away, from receiving the dole. Such small

mindedness deserves the censure of history, though not to the extent of obscuring positive achievements or distorting the total picture.

Mr Stevenson and Mr Cook are not sub stituting a new mythology for the old. They have written a book which is as distinguished for its fairness as for its careful scholarship. They do not pretend that the bad old days were good old days for the millions who actually suffered from the Slump. They clearly indicate that the average statistics conceal what were, in effect, two nations — regionally even more than socially. Yet they insist that it is 'a harsh Judgment which condemns the National Government for failing to alter the regional imbalance of unemployment at a time of World-wide recession, when the problem Still remains after thirty-five years of affluence'. That, surely, is the tone in which history should be written, and serious political argument conducted.