Chapter Six: Motherhood, Domesticity & Recreation.

Between the wars, high maternal mortality and infant mortality rates continued to disfigure most industrial districts in Britain. While deaths in childbirth affected all classes of women, Hans Singer showed in his 1937 reports for the Pilgrim Trust that there was a clear relationship between poverty and maternal mortality rates (I have written about this in the previous series of articles). The high rate of maternal was a national disgrace. It was the result of numerous causes, including a moral attitude to women and conception that contributed to their suffering. In England and Wales, four women in every thousand lost their lives in childbirth every year. As we have seen in an earlier chapter in this series, the rate was seven per thousand in the distressed areas of South Wales, a fact masked by the continuing high birth-rate in the area throughout the inter-war period. In January 1936, the Prime Minister announced that a bill to establish a national midwives’ service would be put before Parliament. Under the Act, all maternity cases would, from July 1937, be conducted by a properly qualified midwife, whether working under a local authority or a voluntary service. With the agreement of the Chancellor, the service, costing half a million pounds, was to be funded by central government. Conservatives responded to the call of their leader and his wife, while Labour MPs welcomed the establishment of a national medical service in tune with their party’s pledge to provide a universal national health service. One of them, Arthur Greenwood, author of the play Love on the Dole, referred to the eugenic advantages of improving the maternity care of mothers:

… what this nation may in future lack in numbers, it ought to be the aim of statesmanship to make up in quality. That has a very distinct bearing upon the problem of maternal well-being.

As Susan Williams has pointed out, it was the first time that the principles of a state medical service had been put into effect, scotching the myth that the NHS sprang to life fully formed in 1948 as the brainchild of Aneurin Bevan (see the caption above). Nevertheless, the relationship between poverty and infant mortality was even clearer. In Coventry, although the rate of infant deaths at the beginning of the interwar period, 92 per thousand, was lower than in many other major West Midland towns and cities, it was still far too high. The vital statistics taken from an average of the seven years ending 1931 showed an overall death-rate of 12.1 for England and Wales as a whole, compared with 11.6 for Birmingham and 6.5 for Bournville, Cadbury’s ‘model village’ area of the second city. Infant mortality rates for England and Wales over the same period were 69, for Birmingham 72 and for Bournville 56. In the earliest of these years, the heights and weights of Bournville children were compared with one of the children of one of the more deprived areas of Birmingham, and the Bournville children were found to be between two to four inches taller and between four and nine pounds heavier.

More than a decade later, a survey carried out on behalf of the Birmingham Social Survey Committee in 1939 was concerned with the relationship between poverty and the size of families on a new housing estate in one of the city’s poorest suburbs, Kingstanding. It found that, at a time when the volume of both employment and earnings were higher than ever before in Birmingham’s history, fourteen percent of the 5,300 families with dependent children on the estate had insufficient income to buy the minimum diet prescribed by the British Medical Association (B.M.A.). This meant that one-third of the children on the estate were living in poverty. The investigators separated these families into groups according to the number of dependent children they had. They found that whilst only five percent of the families with one or two children under fourteen were in poverty, forty percent of the families with three or more dependent children were below the minimum line.

Across the country as a whole, although contraception was not readily available, it was becoming widespread, thanks to the work of the Marie Stopes clinics. Many married couples across Britain were using some method to prevent pregnancy. As a result, families were declining in size, leading to widespread fears of a shrinking population. Eugenicists warned of a decline in the country’s ‘human stock’, as the families with many children tended to be from the poorer working class. One of the motivations behind Marie Stopes’ publicising of the effects of the benefits of contraception was the eugenicist belief in the necessity of limiting the ‘poor quality’ offspring of this class. Despite Stopes’s efforts, there were still large families in solidly working-class towns and poorer districts of London and cities such as Birmingham and Coventry. Margery Spring-Rice, the pioneering social reformer, studied the lives of 1,250 mothers in these districts for her book, Working-Class Wives. Alongside the poverty and hardship, she drew attention to the number of pregnancies the women endured. Nearly five was the average, but a third of those she studied had six or more confinements, which led to large families, despite the high rates of infant mortality. In 1936, for every thousand births, fifty-six babies were dead before the age of one, compared with fewer than five per thousand today. Only half of the poorer families Margery Spring-Rice researched used any form of birth control.

Oral evidence for Coventry reveals how a group of self-organised working-class women determined to combat this ‘social ill’ through their practical involvement with mothers and children in its poorer, but growing suburbs. Six members of the Women’s Cooperative Guild were elected to the City Council between the wars, lobbying powerfully for the expansion of Maternity and Child Welfare clinics. Cooperative guilds-women also became voluntary workers in these clinics as they were established by independent committees in the expanding city. A daughter of one of these women, interviewed in the mid-1980s, had fond memories of her mother’s work in a voluntary clinic. She recalled that, as a twelve-year-old, she had helped her mother tear old sheets into strips to make the ‘belly bindings’ which had formed parts of the contents of maternity bags issued to mothers in need. In 1935, Alderman Mrs Hughes spoke to Lower Stoke Branch of the wonderful way our guilds-women have taken to the Maternity and Child Welfare work, a new clinic having been opened at Radford, staffed with guilds-women. 

Right up until the reorganisation of health services into the NHS in 1948, voluntary workers played a large part in Maternity and Child Welfare work in the city. During this period there was only one clinic administered by the City Council, although after the 1929 Local Government Act it did provide medical and nursing staff for the voluntary clinics. Statistics showing the number of children attending clinics (above) provide evidence of the extent of the voluntary commitment. Proximity was probably the biggest factor in the popularity of the voluntary clinics for they were held in church halls and similar buildings in residential areas, whereas the municipal clinic was held in the city centre. The attitude of the volunteers at the clinics may also have been important. As well as being deterred by personal difficulties such as the inability to afford to pay the fare to a centre or to attend at awkward hours, ‘poor people’ may also have been put off by a harsh or wooden administration or unacceptable personnel. These problems could be overcome by the use of voluntary workers who had both a genuine concern for the mothers and a thorough understanding of their problems.

Ivy Cowdrill was involved both in the establishment and the day-to-day administration of a clinic which was opened in Tile Hill in 1937. Her account of her work shows that when voluntary workers were part of the community in which a clinic was established they had a shared experience which helped them to understand the mother’s problems. She begins with an explanation of the circumstances in which her local clinic was opened:

… they were starting to build up here … and the people used to come along the lane here … it was all fields then … They (the mothers) used to go down with the prams all the way to Gulson Road (the municipal clinic in the city centre) to get the cheap food … I used to feel sorry for them. Well, we all did. And Pearl Hyde talked to us about it and asked if we’d help her. We certainly would! … There were several of us in … the Coop Guild … We talked about it at the Guild but it was when Pearl started to come round that we got to talk about it more.

Pearl Hyde was the Labour Party candidate for the ward. Although she did not win the seat in the 1937 municipal elections in which the Party won control of the Council, she was successful shortly afterwards in a by-election in another ward. Due to her local government commitments and her work with the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, Pearl Hyde’s practical involvement with the clinic soon ceased but the enthusiasm of her followers remained and many of those originally involved were inspired to carry on until 1941 when ‘the (Ministry of) Health’ took over. Ivy Cowdrill’s testimony conveyed the enthusiasm and energy of the women involved:

We got talking about it and they all said they’d help … we used to go out every day. My daughter used to go with me, knocking on doors, enquiring … to see how many babies and who would come.

With the approval of the Ministry of Health and with professional personnel provided by the city council the clinic was opened in October 1937. Ivy Cowdrill went on to give a detailed description of activities at the clinic and the duties of voluntary workers:

We bought aluminium bowls and we used to put a clean piece of tissue paper in the bowl … to put the babies’ clothes in, by the side of every chair. We used to go early and do that before the clinic opened. And put everything ready and the scales … One would be weighing the toddlers this side and one the other side weighing the tiny babies. And we had a couple of nurses (health visitors) and a doctor. We had a doctor’s room. We used to take it in turns or it wouldn’t be fair or someone would have the dirty jobs all the while, washing the aluminium bowls out, washing the cups and saucers.

From the evidence in the local Medical Officer of Health reports it appears that the majority of voluntary clinics were organised in this way. The volunteers administered the clinics and were ancillary workers whilst the councils provided the health visitors and doctors. A criticism of voluntary clinics in this era was that voluntary workers were inclined to usurp the duties of the health visitors but there is no evidence that Coventry volunteers took over any of the health visitors’ educational or advisory duties. Indeed, they did not receive training in such matters. What many of them did have, however, was the experience of being mothers and that would qualify them as experts on baby matters in the eyes of many of the young mothers who attended the clinics. In this capacity, they passed on common sense advice and words of encouragement as they handled the babies. Not only were many of them experienced mothers, but most of them had experienced a similar lifestyle to the women who attended, and they spoke the same colloquial language.

The usual image of a voluntary worker is of a middle class ‘lady bountiful’, but in the thirties working class helpers were fairly common in baby clinics, in Coventry and elsewhere. They often had part-time jobs in the factories or in local hospitals as, for example, laundry workers. Although they might be more financially secure than many of the young mothers, many of them had endured periods of hardship themselves in younger days. Apart from the weighing of babies, the main tasks of a voluntary worker at a child welfare clinic centred around the sale of baby foods and food supplements. Here too their knowledge of working-class life was useful, as they were immediately aware when some of the mothers needed flexible arrangements regarding payment:

We used to sell Bemax, Marmite, Ovaltine and every food there was until the National Food came out; orange juice, vitamin pills, the lot … It was very big welfare. You can tell by the money we took ’cause the food was … very cheap … And the Ovaltine was only about a shilling … If anyone said, “I’ve no money”, I’d say, “We’ll get it”. I’d lend them the money and they’d bring it back here … And I’ve come home like a packed mule ’cause the soldiers’ wives used to have their money on a Monday and the clinic wasn’t till Thursday, so … they’d no money come Thursday … I used to bring the food home and they used to come here for it here … My husband used to shout “Shop!”

The volunteers were also aware of other needs among their clients. The concept of ‘welfare’ was extended and clinic attendance was made into a social occasion by the provision of tea and biscuits. Special social events, including day trips, were organised, and Cadbury’s donated bars of chocolate for the children for Christmas parties. The Coventry clinic seems to have been the sort of centre which could have developed into the type of women’s club advocated by Margery Spring-Rice of the Women’s Health Enquiry Committee in 1939. Such a centre would enable women to meet their fellows … form social ties … talk and laugh and eat food which they had not cooked themselves. The efforts made in this direction by the Tile Hill volunteers were appreciated by the women of the district throughout the thirties and early forties. Not only were the volunteers deeply committed to the work, but they also gained a great deal of satisfaction from what was, in effect, an extension of the traditional female role of nurturer within the private domain of the family. Ivy Cowdrill’s recollection typified this:

It was great. I loved it. Thursday was my day out … and I just lived for Thursday every week. You know it was so great to be involved in it … It wasn’t only working at the welfare, we was interested in the life of the children altogether. You seem to live for them really. You got so interested in it, it seemed to occupy your mind all the while.

Volunteers like Ivy Cowdrill made their mark by transferring the caring values of the private domain into the public one of the clinic and putting a human face on what was otherwise an impersonal service. The people who flooded into Coventry during the thirties, attracted by jobs in the new factories, were mainly young people. The proportion of the population aged over forty-five in the City was lower than almost anywhere else in Britain. The people had more consistent and better-remunerated work than in most other industrial areas and yet infant mortality remained high and old vested interests resisted the modernisation of medical services. The women of the Coop Guild, with little help from the State, set about tackling this problem and confronted it with zeal and zest until the onset of war and then the foundation of the National Health Service prepared the way for the bureaucratization of health care. Many of the ‘clinic activists’ gave up their positions with reluctance having hoped for a role for their voluntary work within the healthcare schemes devised by the state.

Oral testimony is also a crucial source of information about attitudes towards family life in the past. In many respects, Coventry interviewees might be speaking for members of working-class families of any industrial town in Britain. Peter Lynam’s article on Domestic Life in Coventry 1920-39 draws material from a wider study of Coventry car workers based on sixty interviews with couples from three generations. Most of the evidence was drawn from talking with the women who, apart from relatively short periods at work either just before marriage or during the second world war, spent most of their time on the domestic front. Many of those interviewed, although resident in Coventry for many decades, had spent their formative years in other towns and regions. Even those proud to have been born in the City were children of at least one parent who had come from outside. Marjorie Clark remarked of her own parents, for example:

Mother was a cook in service in Cheshire, and dad was an engineer, a toolroom man, in Altrincham … Dad came first, got a job in Coventry and got lodgings. Then mother followed and, of course, being in Coventry, as cook-housekeeper. And they got married in Coventry and stayed afterwards … They must have come to Coventry about 1906-1907, married about 1909 …

June Bream came as a very young child to Coventry in the early twenties. Her background displayed the peculiar characteristic shared by the families of tradesmen working in the motor industry at an early stage of its development:

I was born in Liverpool, in Wavertree, West Derby … My grandma had a boarding house in Southport and before I was born my father worked in Scotland … My father was an old coach-builder and in those days they had to travel to where the work was. So they had a big tool box and the man was known by his tool box whether he was a tradesman or not. And then after I was born my father moved down to Coventry, looking … for work. … after he’d been here a couple of years … the family moved down with him.

 

Housing was always a problem for working people but the flood of migrants into Coventry produced a housing shortage which lasted almost thirty years. Moreover, most of the housing was small and lacking in modern conveniences, prompting frequent attempts to find something better. It was unusual for those born in one house still to be living there a decade later. The family would move from rented accommodation according to the price charged for it and the space provided, taking into account added children or those leaving home on marriage, thus making payment for unused space an extravagance. Irregular employment or unforeseen adversity could prompt a move to more restricted but cheaper living space. Marjorie Clark described her family’s mid-thirties move to a ‘nicer house’:

We lived in a house in Kingston Road without a bathroom, just a two up, two down. Mother and dad wanted a house with a bathroom and we had a chance to move into a slightly larger house. That was the reason we moved into Queensland Avenue.

‘Two up, two down’ was the most common form of accommodation, even though many families had more than two children. Some older people lived in the old weavers’ or watchmakers’ houses with large windows and an extra floor that was one large room, originally a workshop. The Midland Daily Telegraph had been calling for three-bedroom houses to be built since 1919, as young families would grow and need more space. As it was, families with a number of children slept several to a bed in the back bedroom, with curtains dividing boys from girls, while parents slept in the front bedroom with the baby in the cot when required. Very large families would have older boys and girls sleeping in the downstairs back living room. In many homes, the front room would still be kept for special occasions. The usual furniture consisted of a large crockery cupboard, a dining table and set of chairs. By the mid-thirties, most families would also have a radio, and there might be a piano in the front room.

The home was ‘mother’s domain’. She did the cooking, washing and mending. Sometimes other family members – especially daughters – helped with the cooking and cleaning. Younger children were often assigned domestic tasks like swilling out the yard, polishing the fireplace, dusting mantelpieces, or polishing the ‘lino’ in the hall. A woman’s work was particularly laborious. Without washing machines, an exception in the thirties, washing clothes would take the best part of a day. Preparing meals also took time, and traditional mid-day dinner times for men and young workers in the family often involved them returning home from workplaces to eat cooked ‘dinners’, along with children of school age who were not entitled to free school meals. They would not be long out of the house before their evening meal was having to be planned and prepared. June Bream had to miss most of her last school year when she was thirteen because her mother was confined to bed after losing a baby. She had to look after her mother ill in bed, her father and two brothers and a sister. She went to school in the mornings one week, and the afternoons the next week, fitting her domestic duties in as best she could. When her father came home on a Friday night, wages night, she put her clean ‘piny’ on so that he could throw his wages in it. He told her, you’re the mother of the house … till your mother’s well now.

Although June missed some schooling due to her domestic responsibilities, an experience which was far from unique for girls of her age, the notion of the woman’s place being in the home was strongly reinforced by the education given to girls. June would normally have had lessons in sewing, cooking, and laundry, and in the senior, there was a specialist ‘housewifery’ teacher:

She used to teach you to be a housewife, a mother. They used to have this part (of the school) where it used to be like a house and you used to have old grates in it … and gas stoves where they were all black-leaded, and of course you had to do all that. … you had special times, and it was either cookery or washing and ironing … or housework. … you had to go in every room; you had a kitchen and a living room and a bedroom. And if you were doing cookery … you had to cook the meal in the morning and then the teacher and the rest of the class … used to stop for dinner and you used to have to wait on table. They showed you how to set the table.

Since most women stopped paid employment on marriage, the home became the focus for most women by their mid-twenties. Imelda Wintle remembered her mother’s working hours with appreciation:

She used to describe herself as a “poor old slave” … I mean she was on the go all the time. She used to do her own decorating and things like that, and cutting down clothes … and making do.

When money was tight, housewives would also take in washing, which they would also press and iron. Many Coventry housewives would also have a locally made Singer sewing machine, often received as a wedding gift, with which she would mend clothes as well as making clothes for the children. Most clothes were either made at home or by a local dressmaker or tailor. Many of the dressmakers would be ordinary housewives with a skill in dressmaking.

Sunday (afternoon) dinner was the best meal of the week, with the mother going personally to the butcher’s shop, knowing exactly what she was looking for. The week’s meals then followed a set pattern, with variations according to income. Kath Smith recalled:

Sundays we had roast, always … and of course we had the cold meat on Monday. And we always had … meat and potato pie on Tuesday. I suppose it could have been sausage, or something, on Wednesday or Thursday.  It was always fish on Friday and … a makeshift dinner on Saturday. It may be sometimes on a Saturday we would have fish ‘n’ chips instead of faggots and peas. … fish ‘n’ chips was thre’pence , tu’penny fish and a penny worth of chips … and on Sunday for tea we’d always have salmon and fruit and cream … a tin of salmon was eleven pence ha’penny and a tin of pineapple was five pence ha’penny …

The pattern was determined by other domestic tasks, like Tuesday being washday which meant the stew could be left to cook slowly and then finished off with pastry. Pay-day was usually on a Thursday or Friday, so the mid-week days often required ingenuity to keep the family going on shrinking resources. Feeding the breadwinner was the top priority, next came the children. The housewife often ate very little at these meals. Eva Shilton commented:

I’ve seen her eat bread and mustard, and she’d eat a sandwich of cabbage and things like that. Since, later on in life, I’ve mentioned it to her and she said, “Well, I couldn’t see you lot go without”. And she’d make do, she was a typical mother …heart and soul for her children … She didn’t like cooking but she would always cook for my dad because he liked the things we didn’t … I think with him having so much ill-health, when he was well she would look after him to keep him well.

The death of a parent was a dreadful experience for young children especially. A father’s death also meant the loss of the breadwinner. The family was in deep trouble unless older children were in employment, still single and part of the parental household. It often necessitated a move to cheaper accommodation and the mother’s quest for employment, at least cleaning work or taking in washing, or at best factory work, which was not well-paid where women were concerned because most female workers were young, single and cheap. The loss of a mother had its emotional impact and needed older members of the family to ‘rally round’. Vera Langford’s fiance was confronted with this situation when his mother died, having to return to Coventry from London to look after the younger children in a large family. It took him, his father and his elder brother to bring them up between them.

Industrial injury or recurrent illness suffered by a male breadwinner also led to a wife’s search for paid employment. Although fathers were ultimately responsible for disciplining children who misbehaved, mothers were usually responsible for nurturing ‘respectability’ and protecting the family’s reputation:

Well, we always classed ourselves as being respectable. “And don’t bring trouble home” and that kind of thing. I think if we had’ve done we would never have been able to enter the house again … my mother was like that … she meant it. She just wanted us all to be happy and respectable and live a decent life … and that was what we did; no one ever brought trouble to her …

In an immigrant family, relatives were not likely to be near at hand. In such circumstances, a family wedding was a major event. For native Coventrians, however, the city’s growth provided little reason to move and find work elsewhere, so local extended families gathered easily for wedding celebrations. Marriage was approached in a practical fashion. Vera Langford recalled her wedding at the Registry Office:

We hadn’t got any money for a big ‘do’. What we had got we kept, … we sort of spent on necessities … Just family.

Many couples started married life in inauspicious circumstances. The city’s motor industry provided many with a living, as many as it provided with spells of unemployment. Together with a number of other women, Marjorie Clark was made redundant from Standard Motors just six weeks before her wedding. Nonetheless, preparations for it had been going on for some time, so she was determined to go ahead with the celebrations:

We got engaged on New Year’s Day in 1937 and got married on New Year’s Day, 1938 … We saved enough for the deposit on the house, that was fifty pounds, … a lot of money then! … mother helped me in a lot of ways, even if it was only with a bottom drawer, that sort of thing. And for the year that I was engaged she had no money from me for my keep. I kept all my money … and saved every penny of it for the wedding and everything like that … It was a white wedding at an Anglican church and… it was bitterly cold … It was a very happy wedding … There was no reception, no photographer, no honeymoon because I was out of work and my husband was on short time … So my mother saved the turkey from Christmas, cooked it and we had that for the reception … at home. 

By 1939, Coventry car ownership was surpassed only by that of London. This increased mobility opened up new possibilities for travel. Cycles, motorcycles and sidecars were used particularly by young workers for some distance from the city with boyfriends or girlfriends. On the other hand, most women confined themselves to the home after marriage and some mothers rarely went out when the children were young. Mothers spent recreation time in the evening either sewing, knitting, making clothes, listening to the radio or reading. All this went on in the living room, keeping an eye on the children not yet in bed. Public houses in Coventry had long been the ‘marketplace of the working class’ and when work was erratic the companionship found in them might lead to information about which firms were hiring at their factory gates.  The dominance of engineering topics in pub discourse was the reason given by the head porter of J. B. Priestley’s hotel, during his stay in Coventry in 1933, for avoiding the city’s pubs:

You go into one of these pubs … All right. What do you hear? All about gears and magnetos and such-like. Honest. That’s right. They can’t talk about anything else here. Got motor cars on the brain, they have. I hardly ever go into a pub. I go home and have a read.

Matt Nelson, from a North-east mining community, remembered that it was taboo for a woman to enter a pub ‘up there’, as was also the case with pubs ‘down there’ in south Wales. In Coventry, however, wives might respectably join husbands in pubs or clubs, meeting others from the locality. However, for many from chapel-going working-class families who regarded themselves as ‘respectable’, they shared the views of the workers from the depressed areas, regarding pubs as ‘low dives’, not the sort of places that either they or their daughters should be found in. Priestley made a brief visit to the bar of his hotel, where a barmaid with an enormous bust and a wig was busy exchanging badinage with four friends, two male (drinking ‘Bass’) and two female (drinking Guinness):

“He did, didn’t he, Joe?”

“‘S ri’, ”

“Cor, he didn’t ever,”

“Well, you ask Florrie,”

“I don’t mean what you mean,”

” ‘s ri’ ”

“‘Ere, Joe you tell ‘er.”

Men and women would also go to the cinemas and theatres together and mothers sometimes went to ‘matinée’ film shows with female friends. Social circles were sometimes organised through local churches providing companions for women otherwise tied to the home, but mothers seemed to have little time to themselves: their ‘recreation’, such as it was, was often home-based and spent with the family, making clothes, baking cakes, and so on.

Although a number of the city’s firms had established recreation clubs by the late thirties which attracted large numbers of employees, very few women seemed to take up these opportunities. The Secretary of the Alfred Herbert Recreation Club, E. Thomas, observed in 1939 that a relatively small number of women were involved in club activities. The nature of women’s recreation at this period is not clear. Certainly, they constituted at least half of dancers, a large part, even a majority of cinema-goers and, at least in inner-city areas, a sizeable proportion of pub-goers. However, in addition to the domestic roles of married women, the practice of leaving work on marriage, either through a ‘marriage bar’ operated by the company they worked for, or through a choice made under familial and cultural pressure, excluded them from works’ clubs unless they were in the company of a husband who worked for the company. Married women were occasionally referred to in works magazines in recreational contexts, but it is not clear whether they were widows or were challenging the convention of ceasing to work after marriage. The involvement of unmarried women in works’ activities also presented something of an issue for employers like Courtaulds and London Laundry for whom recruitment and moral discipline among female employees was central to business efficiency.

When women workers did participate in works’ recreational activities, they were rarely given any control over their use of leisure facilities. The Alfred Herbert Recreation Club had no female members on its management committee until 1940 and the Magnet Club committee welcomed women only as representatives of all women’s sections such as women’s hockey. In part, this reflected the lack of women as foremen and skilled workers in these firms because it was from the ranks of these that the committee personnel were usually drawn. It is particularly noticeable that women were never chosen to represent activities that were evenly mixed, such as cycling and swimming. Firms’ magazines were always patronising towards women, and cartoons, jokes and pen-portraits cast them in subservient roles. Women’s pages were purely domestic in focus and rarely successful. For the most part, they did not celebrate the achievements of individual women workers, nor their collective activities. Therefore, they lacked the appeal that team news had for male workers.

Firms and clubs showed intermittent bursts of enthusiasm for encouraging women’s participation. In particular, many firms tried to capitalise on the keep-fit craze from the mid-thirties on , often under the auspices of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, mentioned in chapter one, since it had the attraction of providing women employees  with discipline and exercise at the same time, at little cost and in large numbers. Instructresses pointed out how it helped girls to enjoy life and work much better than before and that it was consistent with the belief that the success of the mass depends entirely on the individual. There is, however, no evidence that the League’s eugenic beliefs in the achievement of racial health and beauty by natural means were ever treated with any degree of seriousness in Coventry. Indeed, such initiatives met with varying success. The London Laundry branch of the Everywoman’s Health Movement folded after just over a year in 1939 through lack of support. It had never achieved a membership of more than twenty-five. The GEC Ladies’ Physical Culture Club, affiliated to the League of Health and Beauty, had over two hundred members in 1937 in two classes, but despite displays in Coventry, Birmingham and London, it experienced declining enthusiasm and finished after the outbreak of war.

Not all women’s recreational activities were doomed to failure, however, and there are several examples of autonomous women’s sections and activities providing sociability for employees over long periods. Women’s sports, even women’s soccer, common during the First World War, continued until the ending of munitions work and the dispersal of the hostel labour force in 1918-19. By 1930, the Magnet Club ran two women’s cricket teams and several departmental teams, although these came in for a certain amount of ridicule in The Loudspeaker. In 1932, there was the first of series of women’s cycling camps. The fashion for departmental outings had meant that trips such as that of the coil-winders and the assembly section at GEC were virtually all-women affairs, and women began holding their own annual dinners as early as 1928. It is not apparent, however, how such occasions related to women’s prospects of advancement at work or their status within the company, unlike the complex rituals of competitive displays at full staff dances.

The relationship between works social clubs and the recreation of the city as a whole was at its closest, and most beneficial to both parties, in the regular dances which were held on factory premises. Dances were already being put on by some of the city’s chief companies in 1921. There were only two commercial ballrooms, the Gaumont and the Rialto, in Coventry, so the factories provided the main alternative to church hall dances, and their dancehalls and ballrooms were far grander. They also had the specially sprung floors which were favoured by dancing enthusiasts. The dance craze was most popular among skilled manual workers and clerical staff, people who had served time and could afford to pay 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. for admission. For them, the refined, formalised ritual of the dance halls provided an appropriate setting for courtship and social aspiration.The halls banned drink, although men would go to the pubs first, and the doors were closed at 9.30 in order to exclude those who had drunk too much. Young women, who therefore arrived first, at about 8 p.m., would not tolerate men whose breath revealed that they had spent too much of the intervening time in the pub. Men were also expected to carry a second handkerchief for their right hand so that they didn’t soil their partner’s dresses, or inadvertently touch any exposed skin.

Dancing was enjoyed most by the young women, who spent time at home and work trying out the latest steps with sisters and friends, often to the radio or gramophone. The complexity of the dances of the thirties – foxtrots, waltzes, quicksteps and tangos, required tuition, and men needed to be confident of their dancing before they could be among the first to venture out onto the floor. Ability to dance was, therefore, an asset in successful courtship, and while many learnt from their sisters or other female acquaintances, others went to one of the city’s many dancing schools. There were beginners’ nights at the major ballrooms. The dance halls also offered camaraderie. Groups from different areas of town would rendezvous at set pitches in each dance hall, but courtship no doubt provided the basic motivation. Male toolroom employees met few women at work because they were segregated by skill and they rarely met the office and shop girls they aspired to marry. Courting couples were left to other areas of the dance floor where they would try to be lost to the group.

No doubt, there were some for whom the attraction of a particular hall lay in its resident dance band. The biggest firms’ hall, which most effectively escaped the canteen atmosphere and rivalled purpose-built commercial halls, was the GEC ballroom (shown below), often referred to as ‘The Connor’. Attendances were large, averaging over six hundred by 1936. Special occasions, in particular, the New Year’s Eve dances, drew massive audiences, as many as 1,350 in 1930. Attendances thereafter were limited to eight hundred, and in 1937 a second dance was organised for New Year’s Day, to accommodate the 750 dancers who had been unable to get tickets for the previous night.

 

This ‘new leisure’ was the subject of many contemporary social investigations and surveys conducted by organisations such as the Pilgrim Trust and the NCSS. Following his visit to Coventry in January 1939, Sir William Deedes wrote to its local Employment Exchange Officer, Philip Handley, to express his alarm at what he referred to as a lack of social and recreational provision in the form of community centres, boys’ clubs, churches and hostels. His distaste for working class preferences in leisure activities is clear from the following extract from his subsequent report, which he attached to his letter:

Cinemas are thronged and on a Saturday afternoon queues ‘a quarter-mile-long’ and mainly of young people are to be seen. I was informed that on Saturday and Sunday nights also Road Houses within a twenty-mile radius of Coventry are full of young people dancing and entertaining themselves. The night I was there a small road house four miles out of Coventry had fifty cars and four charabancs outside and some three hundred persons inside dancing. A football match the same afternoon was attended by thirty thousand to forty thousand people and ‘the Dogs’, I am told, never fail to draw large numbers… Is it proper to ask oneself whether, if there were better facilities for playing games, both out and indoor, use would be made of them? An answer to the question cannot be given in Coventry because the facilities are not there!

Handley might have replied that Deedes seemed to have ignored the facilities provided by local firms in making this assertion, but we do not have such a letter. Deedes may have had in mind the ‘model’ which Bournville in Birmingham provided in terms of recreational provision. J. B. Priestley, who visited Cadbury’s Birmingham ‘village’ in 1933, pointed out that they had long been in the top class of the school of benevolent and paternal employers. Their workers had been provided with magnificent recreation grounds and sports pavilions, with a large concert hall in the factory itself, where midday concerts are given, with dining-rooms, recreation-rooms, and drama facilities. The factory was almost as busy in the evenings as it was in the daytime, with games, music, lectures, classes, plays, hobbies, conferences all keeping the place in full swing. The membership of the various clubs and societies ran to several thousand for whom no form of self-improvement, except those that have their base in some extreme form of economic revolution, was denied. The only form of pastime which was precluded was the ancient one of getting drunk. The factory had all the facilities for leading a full and happy life and, he asserted, what progressive people all over the world are demanding for humanity was what the Cadbury workers already had. Those in charge insisted that the firm used no compulsion whatever and never moved to provide anything until it knew that there was a real demand for it. He added his conviction that…

 … whether all this is right or wrong, the employers themselves have acted in good faith … Is it right or wrong? … It is easy for some academic person, who has never spent an hour in a factory and does not really know how people live, to condemn it on philosophical grounds … Now there is no getting away from the fact that here, owing to this system of paternal employment, are factory workers who have better conditions, more security, and infinitely better chances leading a decent and happy life, than nearly all such factory workers elsewhere … who worked in bad conditions, who had no security, and whose employers did not care a rap if their people drink themselves silly in their leisure … No factory workers in Europe have ever been better off than these people. 

Despite this accolade, however, Priestley has his doubts as to whether, taking a longer view, it was good for people to see the factory where they worked as the centre of their whole lives, even if it offered them so much. A worker whose whole life was centred on the factory might, he suggested, enjoy many unusual luxuries, but one obvious ‘luxury’ they could not enjoy was a spirit of independence. Pensions and bonuses, works councils, factory publications, entertainments and dinners,  garden-parties and outings, all organised by the firm, were all very well, but they could easily create an atmosphere injurious to the personal growth and ‘self-help’ of the men and women working for the firm. Although he conceded that workers in such places as Bournville had so many solid benefits conferred upon them that they were better placed than the ordinary factory worker, who is probably not so content at either work or play, …

On the other hand, I for one would infinitely prefer to see workers combining to provide these benefits, or a reasonable proportion of them, for themselves, to see them forming associations far removed from the factory, to see them using their leisure, and demanding its increase, not as favoured employees but as citizens, free men and women.   

In reality, the ‘new leisure’ cut across class and regional demarcations, especially in Coventry, where it mixed, mingled and blended with older forms of leisure, some of which had migrated with their adherents from the older industrial areas. There were, evidently, many in key positions within the social service movement in both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ industrial areas, who regarded the development of mass, commercial forms of entertainment  as undermining their patronage, and when these critics wrote of the lack of leisure provision or of the absence of a communal ethos, they were writing from an ‘establishment’ perspective. Meanwhile, the Coventrian workers themselves, whether newcomers or ‘established’ citizens, both at work and at play, were re-modelling and re-making their city in their own image and shaking off the bonds of both patronage and paternalism.

The reactions of the migrants themselves to the social life of the new industry areas, documented in previous chapters, are more relevant in comprehending the wider cultural factors at work within the processes of migration and settlement. In Coventry, the streets themselves, the neighbourhoods and districts reflected the migration of labour. Some areas were completely cosmopolitan in this respect, with neighbours from all parts of the Midlands and North of England, Scotland and Ireland. In other neighbourhoods, there were concentrations of certain nationalities, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. Certainly, from the mid-1930s on, Coventry was a stronghold of the affluent worker. The roast every Sunday, the buying of your own house, early TV and car ownership all bear witness to rising living standards. Not everyone experienced the improvement in quite the same way or to the same degree, but enough did for it to constitute a trend. From the late thirties onwards, and especially with the onset of war and after, married women found that they had jobs to go to. Women began, increasingly, to have dual roles, providing the family with two wage packets, allowing many to enjoy a short period of affluence before the privations of war and the Blitz hit home.

Women at War in Coventry:

While the main onslaught of the ‘Blitz’ of the autumn of 1940 was directed at the capital, other ports and cities were subjected to severe attacks over short, concentrated periods, or to single raids. The ten-hour incendiary and explosive blitz upon Coventry caused tremendous damage, overnight, in November 1940 (I have written more extensively about this elsewhere on this site). Most of the ‘inner’ city’s factories sustained some damage, with the Daimler factory, the GEC and British Thomson Houston being badly hit. In 1981, Muriel Jones, then a young worker in the city, recalled her experience of that night:

 The night of the November Blitz, I was on day shift with my sister and two friends. Just as we left work the siren sounded so we ran as fast as we could, hoping to get to our digs or a shelter. One of my friends stopped along the road to say goodbye to her sailor boyfriend; it was their last goodbye, they were never seen again. We made it to one of the four shelters, and ours was the only one that escaped the bombs, all the other occupants were killed. About sixty people. After the raid we had to dig ourselves out as best we could, to face all the damage. Around us our digs were gone along with a lot more houses. Our landlady and husband with them, although they were in a garden shelter.

 Coventry,  14 November 1940

“Those of us who lost everything in the war will never forget. We don’t need anniversaries and war films and books, we just remember … everything seemed so vast, so much happened, we thought that nothing more could happen. We often believed that things would never come right again.”

– Two elderly ladies who had survived the blitz, interviewed by The Coventry Standard on the twentieth anniversary of the raid.

“Please don’t let it die Coventry. We managed to survive then when all the odds were against us. We can do it now if we try.”

 – A ‘young lady’ interviewed by The Coventry Evening Telegraph in 1980, about the previous evening’s television documentary.

 

Sources:

Denys Blakeway (2010), The Last Dance: 1936: The Year Our Lives Changed. London: John Murray.

Mark Abrams (1945), The Condition of the British People, 1911-1945: A Study prepared for The Fabian Society. London: Victor Gollancz.

J. B. Priestley (1938), English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933. Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (eds.) (1986), Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry: Cryfield Press.

John Gorman (1980), To Build Jerusalem: A Photographic Remembrance of British Working Class Life, 1875-1950. London: Scorpion Publications.

Asa Briggs, et.al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

René Cutforth (1976),  Later Than We Thought: A Portrait of the Thirties. Newton Abbott: David & Charles.

Andrew J. Chandler (1988), ‘The Re-Making of a Working Class: Migration from the South Wales Coalfield to the New Industry Areas of the Midlands, c. 1920-40. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cardiff.

 

Chapter Four: Poverty, Resistance and Reconstruction.

In May 1936, the South Wales and Monmouthshire Council of Social Service held a special ‘Conference on Transference’ at the YMCA in Barry. Up to this time, the Council had played a major role in the government’s strategy, with a number of its members being involved in both the social administration of the transference scheme for juveniles and young men and the government-sponsored voluntary work in the valleys for older men and women. Most of the prominent figures in the social administration of South Wales attended the Conference. On its second day, clear divisions emerged over the continuance of the scheme, with Rev. T. Alban Davies going so far as to call for civil disobedience to counter its operation. His argument was that the national conscience was being roused against the break-up of communities which represented the history and traditions of Wales. Aneurin Bevan, MP, also called for an end to the policy, attacking the complacent attitude of those who had set themselves up as the leadership of the Welsh Nation:

… if this problem was still viewed as complacently as it had been, this would involve the breakdown of a social, institutional and communal life peculiar to Wales. The Welsh Nation had adopted a defeatist attitude towards the policy of transference as the main measure for relief of the Distressed Areas in South Wales, but objection should be taken as there was no economic case for continuing to establish industries in the London area rather than the Rhondda.

The reason for this complacency was made apparent by one speaker who replied to Bevan by suggesting that East Monmouth had no Welsh institutions or traditions likely to be damaged by large-scale transference, as most of the people were originally immigrants who had not been absorbed into local life… Elfan Rees, Secretary to the SWMCSS, agreed that much of the population of South Wales had come from English counties, but pointed out that it was not the ‘rootless undesirables’ who were leaving:

It is not only the young, it is not only the best, it is also the Welsh who are going … if transference were repatriation it might be a different story, but it is expatriation. It is the people with the roots who are going – the unwillingness to remain idle at home – the essential qualification of the transferee again, are the qualities that mark or own indigenous population. And if this process of social despoilation goes on, South Wales of tomorrow will be peopled with a race of poverty-stricken aliens saddled with public services they haven’t the money to maintain and social institutions they haven’t the wit to run. Our soul is being destroyed and the key to our history, literature, culture thrown to the four winds.

Rees’ ‘analysis’ of the problem helps to explain why, in 1928, the ‘liberal-Cymricists’ had chosen not to oppose the Baldwin Government’s Transference policy. They had hoped that it would remove, as they saw them, the aliens who had robbed them of the loyalty of the people of the valleys. By 1936, it had become clear that become clear that the transference scheme in particular and voluntary migration, in general, had failed to discriminate in the way they had hoped it would.

Migration also had a tendency to delay marriage and to restrict parenthood. Those couples who did manage to move before starting a family often delayed doing so due to the continuing sense of insecurity they felt in their new homes. This meant that migration not only altered significantly the age structure of South Wales and the North, but also did little or nothing to counter the declining birth rates in the recipient areas, and therefore nationally, at least until the late 1940s. The decline of the nonconformist chapels also had its impact on the ability of couples to get married in their hometowns and villages. In many ways, the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Wales in 1919 represented a high water mark for Welsh Nonconformity. A decade later its pre-eminence had been destroyed. In early 1930 a correspondent in The Times stated that in Cwmavon all nine nonconformist chapels were without ministers and that all marriages except one from the town had taken place in the registry office at Neath, ten miles away. This was not an isolated case. A survey into the position of the Free Churches in the Special Area was completed in 1938, showing their total debt to be in excess of forty thousand pounds. This debt swallowed al their income. While there were 1,100 chapels still active throughout the Special Area, less than half of them were able to support ordained ministers.

There was a detectable change in the Special Areas’ Commissioner’s third report of November 1936, which included an acknowledgement of the negative effects of transference upon the Special Areas and promised inducements to attract new industries. However, the Commissioner stressed the need for continuation of the Transference Policy. Malcolm Stewart warned that the establishment of industries in the Areas on an effective scale would take time. In the meantime, failure to help the youths and the younger generation of the unemployed to transfer to districts offering better opportunities would be to neglect their best interests. They must not wait about until absorbed locally. By the following November, in confirmation that the Government had accepted the priority of new industrial development and felt able at last to align itself with the new consensus, the fourth report which the new Special Areas Commissioner, George Gillett, presented to parliament, referred to the Transference Scheme in the past tense. It included a statement by Captain Geoffrey Crawshay, who had been appointed District Commissioner for the South Wales Special Area, which was a significant apology for the operation of the scheme over the previous decade:

In common with many others, one cannot but deplore a policy which has the effect of robbing Wales of her most enterprising sons and daughters as well as creating other vital problems of the future. There is consolation in the thought that those who have left are not necessarily permanently lost to Wales as I am convinced that, given an opportunity of work at home, thousands of exiles would return. This is an argument which I have used with effect in negotiating new industries.

However, the effective end of the official transference policy did not put a stop to the continued exodus of workers from South Wales, especially since the rearmament boom was swallowing up more and more labour, especially in the English Midlands. However, the construction of a new economic base was well underway in South Wales by the end of 1938, and Crawshay’s prophecy about the return of the natives was beginning, in part, to be fulfilled. Nevertheless, much of the damage to the reputation of government had already been done. Although few protestors went as far as the Welsh Nationalists in comparing its actions to those of Hitler in the Sudetenland, as just another Fascist way of murdering a small defenceless nation without going to war about it, the Transference Scheme had been an act of unprecedented government intervention which, though relieving those it removed, caused further economic depression in the communities from which they were taken. By the end of the decade of the Scheme’s operation, the government had become involved in subsidising wages, turning the Ministry of Labour into a Social Service agency which directly interfered in the personal lives of citizens, using every measure short of force to remove young people from South Wales.

The Treforest Trading Estate Co. was formed in September 1938 seventy-two firms were assisted to settle in different parts of the Special Area, including fifty-one at Treforest. Shortly before the outbreak of war, this estate was providing employment for 2,500 workers at twenty factories. At first, doubts were expressed about the suitability of Welsh labour in the new industries, with some industrialists arguing that the workers were accustomed only to heavy work and would find it too difficult to adapt themselves to the intricacies of the more delicate work demanded in the call for high precision. This problem was countered in two ways: Firstly, one skilled immigrant worker, refugees from Austria or Czechoslovakia, was employed for every twenty-five local workers, and, secondly, the majority of the local workers employed were women. By June 1939, there were only 914 men out of a workforce of 2,196 at Treforest. As in the Bridgend valleys, the new industries were beginning fundamentally to alter the gender balance of the Welsh workforce.

The people of the coalfield were not simply subjected to varying forms of economic and political intervention during the late twenties and thirties, but they were also besieged by a host of social workers who formed part of a cultural intervention which operated in tandem with the transference policy. If these communities were to be denuded of the younger element of their population, then it was also realised that something would also have to be done for the increasingly elderly elements which were left behind. Even when new industries were brought into the coalfield there were still a large number of men over forty-five who were no longer employable. Moreover, it was felt that these communities needed help to develop the ‘right sort’ of social leadership which could rescue them from ‘the slough of despond’. These were the motivations behind the social service schemes which extended their tentacles along the valleys.

The return of the National Government in 1936  led to the social service movement becoming a clearly recognised substitute for direct state intervention.The Cabinet took the decision that neither local authorities nor the central government should assume direct responsibility for welfare work for the unemployed, but that such work could be more appropriately and effectively be undertaken by private agencies with limited financial help in appropriate cases from National Funds.The Government recognised the NCSS as the appropriate body for coordinating and stimulating schemes and McDonald broadcast an appeal laying stress upon what he considered the successes already achieved at Brynmawr, as a model of what could be achieved elsewhere. This brought a strong reaction from the Urban District Council, whose clerk wrote to the PM to correct the impression he had conveyed to the nation of the nature and scale of what was taking place in their town. Sensitive to the accusation that the social service schemes were simply providing ‘dope’ for the unemployed and that they were leading them further into ‘demoralization’ by depriving them of courage and self-reliance, Peter Scott acknowledged that his group at Brynmawr had failed to achieve their ideal of reconstruction from within:

To many of us, the thought that this work was being used merely as a palliative, bread and circuses on a large-scale, would indeed be a bitter one.

But although Percy Watkins, the Secretary of the Welsh Section of the NCSS and one of the key liberal-Cymricists of the period, remained fearful of the consequences for the future of coalfield society of the absence of a new generation of leaders, he was also hopeful about the resilience of mining families:

… The effect of these two factors, migration of young people and permanent unemployment for so large a section of the community, means that the quality of social leadership in the area, and the maintenance of its social institutions in future years are gravely jeopardised, unless special efforts are made to preserve them… The fact that many thousands of men and women bend their minds to these enterprises (the occupational clubs), as well as to various forms of craft and physical training, in spite of their ever-present anxieties, is an eloquent testament to the quality of the South Wales miner…  

Many of the miners themselves, however, continued to believe that the Government was using the unemployed clubs to break their spirit, and with it their own autonomous organisations such as the miners’ institutes. It was this belief that conditioned many of the responses of the coalfield communities, its families and individuals, to unemployment and impoverishment. It is therefore important that one of the major responses ‘from below’, that of voluntary migration, should not be confused with the ‘top-down’ organisation of the official Transference Scheme. The decision of the workless families themselves to organise their own ‘exodus’ rather than be broken up by officialdom, was not a response of acquiescence and defeat, but rather one of resistance to, and escape from, the web of state intervention in the coalfield. Equally, it has been too often assumed that organised resistance to intervention from within the coalfield can best be measured by the extent of demonstrations and political action. It is important to treat with extreme caution ;< the kind of stereotypical imagery and crude causal analysis of ‘propagandists’ such as Donovan Brown, writing about the 1935 demonstration against the new UAB scales:

There has always been in South Wales a tradition of militant struggle and extreme radicalism. English bourgeois standards have never penetrated deeply into the villages of the Welsh mining valleys… The village forms a perfect unit for militant organisation around the pit; there class-consciousness has arisen quite naturally… we are reminded of the Chartist days when the Welsh mining villages constituted enemy territory… poverty,  and the traditional militancy of the Welsh workers, naturally produced a vigorous opposition… Ceaseless activity has also continued among the unemployed… Marches and demonstrations all over the area had previously been taking place… South Wales is ablaze with indignation.                                       

In fact, the demonstrations against unemployment often arose out of specific local grievances, such as the operation of Government policy over the local poor-law officials on the Board of Guardians. In May 1927 there was a ‘demonstration of unemployed’ from Brynmawr against the Urban District Council’s decision to limit the age of applicants for the post of Rate collector to forty, excluding the older unemployed men from applying. They interrupted the Council meeting and forced the Councillors to reconsider the terms of the appointment. There were two further demonstrations later that summer in relation to local issues affecting the unemployed. These preceded the first of the massed marches of the unemployed to London, organised by the miners’ ‘Fed’ (SWMF). The main motivation for it arose out of the stranglehold exercised by the Ministries of Health and Labour upon the Boards of Guardians. It began from Pontypridd, where an Unemployed Organisation had been formed in September 1927, and it was well supported by the Pontypridd Trades Council.

As the depression progressed, the political energies of an increasing number of the unemployed were drained away by decreasing resources. Successful political agitation depended on the addressing of the immediate issues facing the unemployed, such as the actions of the Courts of Referees, and it was these issues which took up nearly all the time of the Trades Councils in the late 1920s as well as bringing about the growth of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, led by the Communist, Wal Hannington. However, there was no widespread shift towards the ideological position held by Hannington. At the General Election in October, the well-known Communist J R Campbell came fourth in the Ogmore and Garw Constituency with only eight percent of the poll, losing his deposit. Yet the October election came only a fortnight after the following report appeared in the Glamorgan Gazette:

Unemployed people, becoming more and more restive, continue to worry public bodies with their importunities. On Monday afternoon, a deputation organised by the Maesteg and Ogmore and Garw Council of Action, waited upon the Bridgend Guardians Committee… in reference to the reductions in unemployment benefit, and submitted that the difference between the old and the new rates of… benefit should be made up by the Guardians; that all unemployed workers and their families should be provided with boots, clothing and bed-clothes; that an allowance of coal be made to all unemployed workers; and that equal consideration be given to single men.

Clearly, the small but influential group of communists in the Bridgend valleys were unable to turn their role in the leadership of the unemployed into votes and immediate success in national or local elections. Yet even among supporters of the NUWM, the attitude towards transference schemes was confused. Government reports claimed that little opposition was encountered by officials, even in “Little Moscow”, Maerdy in the Rhondda, where they found that the Communists were quite happy to transfer!

In the Hunger Marches of 1932 and 1934, women had marched to London in contingents beside the men. Pictures and text from the first two marches can be seen above and below; the pictures of the 1934 march were taken of the women’s column which marched from Derby. The pictures are taken from the collection of Maud Brown, Women’s organiser of the NUWM, who herself took part in the marches and was an indefatigable champion of the jobless and the poor. On one occasion, during a tenants’ protest at a council meeting in Aberdeen, she hurled a live rat, taken from a slum dwelling, at the assembled councillors.

The photographs capture the sense of humour and comradeship which existed among the women, and in their interactions with the men. The shots of hay-box heated food being served beside the road and the first aid treatment to blistered feet demonstrate the determination of the women not to starve in silence. All the marchers were unemployed themselves, or had unemployed husbands, and depended on the good-will of local labour organisations to provide nightly accommodation during the journey. Hospitality from a Co-operative Society in providing a meal with unaccustomed waiter service is evident in a scene which pokes fun at the inversion of the roles of men and women.

Mindful of the disturbances of 1932 in the capital, the Home Secretary, Lord Gilmour, made the first attack on the hunger marchers, stating that the government will have to ask Parliament to grant such powers as experience might show to be necessary to deal with such demonstrations. Two days later, the Attorney-General, Sir Thomas Inskip, speaking at a meeting, warned of bloodshed and said the government would be bound to take steps to stop it. Petty police harassment followed the contingents all the way. At Birmingham, where the contingents spent the night in the workhouse, the police stayed with them in the sleeping quarters claiming they were there in case of fire! After they had been persuaded to withdraw at midnight, a large number of them were found hiding in a room upstairs and the superintendent pretended not to know they were there!

As the marchers drew close to London, the clamour for their suppression and restriction increased. The Duchess of Athol asked the Home Secretary if he would take suitable steps to prevent the marchers from holding meetings in Trafalgar Square. The Tyneside contingent was visited by police and five marchers were arrested for ‘wife desertion’. This action was instigated by the public assistance authorities because their wives were claiming poor relief. The men were later able to prove that their wives supported them in marching and that the authorities were merely creating difficulties. It was the attempt of the government to brand and condemn the hunger marchers before they reached London that led to a number of prominent men and women forming a committee to maintain a vigilant observation on proceedings. These included the future Labour PM, Clement Attlee, H. G. Wells, the novelist, Kingsley Martin and Ellen Wilkinson. By 23 February, the contingents were drawn up around London in readiness for their entry and reception at a great rally in Hyde Park on Sunday 25th.  The Home Secretary called up ten thousand special constables and provincial police forces were drafted in to support the metropolitan force.

A delegation representing the Welsh and Scots marchers met a hundred MPs at a special meeting in the House of Commons. The March Council also requested a meeting with the premier, Ramsay MacDonald, in a letter which was also signed by the MPs Aneurin Bevan, James Maxton and Ellen Wilkinson. In the drizzle and intermittent heavy rain, the hunger marchers finally made a footsore entry to Hyde Park where an estimated hundred thousand people gathered around eight platforms to hear the speakers and pay tribute to the courage of the emissaries from the valleys, old industrial towns and docklands of Britain. The marchers didn’t succeed in putting their case to the House, despite the support of a large number of MPs and the support of Sir Herbert Samuel, leader of the Liberal opposition. Clement Attlee addressed the Commons on their behalf, however, saying:

The marchers are fair representatives of the unemployed. The injustice from which these men and women suffer is very widely known in all parts of the House and the feeling in the country is now tremendous… there is no reason why these men should be refused a hearing by the cabinet.

The marchers sent a deputation to Downing Street, led by Maxton, but MacDonald was not at home. Later on, in the Commons, the Prime Minister stated, in an angry outburst,

… has anybody who cares to come to London, either on foot or in first class carriages, the constitutional right to demand to see me, to take up my time whether I like it or not? I say he has nothing of the kind!

A great rally was held on Sunday, 3rd March in Trafalgar Square. Crowds gathered along the route from Hyde Park to the Square as the hunger marchers had a last meal from the soup kitchens and marched into the square singing “The Red Flag” (see the picture below, showing the crowd’s heads turning to greet the marchers). Dora Cox and Ceridwen Brown were among other women left Tonypandy on the 1934 March.

 

In 1935-36, public opinion against the principle of means testing families was at its peak. The iniquitous and petty economies of the government that brought acrimony and family division to the tables of the poor were hated by all but the Tories. Women especially bore the brunt of the bureaucratic inquisition. A family with a newborn child, claiming the appropriate allowance, would be asked is the child being breastfed? If the answer was yes, the benefit was refused. A fourteen-year-old boy might get a job as cheap labour while his father remained unemployed, the boy’s earnings were counted and the family benefit cut, for the boy was expected to maintain his father. In Merthyr Tydfil, where unemployment reached nearly sixty percent of the insured population, nine thousand people, more than seventy percent of the unemployed, were on the means test, for mass unemployment had lasted for years. Mothers went without food to feed their children while the children went without boots. In the winter months, coal was brought four pennyworth at a time as families struggled to exist on means-tested allowances. Another teenager from a means-tested family told James Hanley;

We’re on the Means Test now.  Yesterday I was sitting in the kitchen when the when the man came in. It made me feel mad the way he questioned my mother. She got all fluttery and worried. , I thought she was going to run into the street. She’s not used to it… Mother is very good in spite of the conditions. It’s wives and mothers who are the real heroines. Don’t you think so?                                         

The massive demonstrations against the 1934 Unemployment Act, which took place between January and February of 1935, were an expression of the recovery of organised Labour, especially the Miners’ Federation, and of a new and unprecedented unity within the coalfield as a whole. They were at their strongest and, at times, most violent, at the heads of the valleys, in Merthyr and the Ebbw Fach Valley, which by this time had learnt to live with long-term unemployment and had come to regard benefit and assistance payments as due by right, rather than by charity. It was in these communities that unwaged families stood to lose most through the new regulations. Nowhere was the latent resentment of state intervention more visibly expressed than in Merthyr.  The women around Merthyr organised a march on the offices of the  Unemployed Assistance Board (UAB) in response to a new UAB Act: they smashed the offices, despite the imprecations of the Quaker, John Dennithorne. The next day the government backed down on the introduction of the Act, signalling a major victory for the female protestors.

The nervousness which these shock waves created in government circles prompted Captain Ellis of the NCSS to warn against the Royal Visit to South Wales, planned for November 1936, the same month that as the revised code of regulations for men on transitional benefits was due to take effect. On 12 October 1936, Ellis penned the following letter to Godfrey Thomas at Buckingham Palace:

I feel bound to say first that I think the date is ill-chosen. The new UAB regulations come into force on 16th October. On the whole they tend to affect South Wales more than most places, and it is extremely likely that between 16th and 19th, which is the first day, there will be a great of demonstration against them. It seems to me that if that time is chosen for a visit of the King, the agitators will say that his visit is intended to distract attention from the regulations, and to mark by royal approval what is being done by the Ministry of Labour and other bodies. His visit will then be given something of a political significance. .. When Tom Jones saw the announcement of the date he asked me to tell you that he felt the very strongly that the King should not bed not be taken  to South Wales during that week.

There was some basis in evidence for these apprehensions looking forward, as well as back to the previous year’s violent demonstrations. In August the Merthyr Unemployed Lodge had demanded that there should be a one-day strike, a march on London and a ‘monster petition’ of the whole of South Wales in the campaign against the new regulations. Later that month, the Dowlais Unemployed Lodge had decided to support the boycott of the Coronation. However, refusing to heed even the warnings of Tom Jones, Edward VIII chose to go ahead with the visit and, ironically, it was in Dowlais, during a tour of the derelict steelworks, that he made his misquoted remark, terrible, terrible, something will be done about this. This may well have been an attempt to head off the kind of criticism which Captain Ellis had predicted, rather than an attempt to embarrass the Cabinet. But this was exactly the effect it had on a government which was already questioning his position. Nevertheless, the publicity given to the King’s casual remarks did have an important impact in quickening the process of industrial redevelopment.                                    

Meanwhile, The Jarrow Crusade which had set out from the town as its official delegation to Parliament on 5 October 1936, had more of the ethos of a religious pilgrimage about it. It was the march of the ‘breadwinners’ who had been deprived of their families’ daily bread. It was to eschew the violence of the earlier Hunger Marches, led by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. If it was seen as a march,  it had to be the march to end all marches according to René Cutforth. He wrote that of all the black, noxious, stinking industrial hell-holes left behind by the nineteenth-century enterprise, the town of Jarrow was just about the nethermost pit. Jarrow’s population had risen to thirty-five thousand in the 1920s, but in the early thirties, a firm called ‘National Shipbuilding Security Ltd, whose speciality was buying up enterprises hit by the slump moved into Jarrow and dismantled Palmers’ Shipyard, which had been there since 1852. Deprived of its main industry, the shipyard, Jarrow demonstrated vividly the conditions prevailing in many parts of Northumberland and Durham. Jarrow depended entirely on shipbuilding for its living, therefore. With its shipyard shut, the sky cleared and the river ran through clear again. But a blight had descended on the town as to make its previous squalor seem a memory of paradise. Jarrow was dead. When the President of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman, told its delegations that Jarrow must work out its own salvation, the townspeople knew they were indeed on their own.

So they decided on a great crusade of two hundred hand-picked men, the story of which is well-known. The Mayor and Mayoress led them for the first twelve miles. The image of the Jarrow Marchers reaching London with their petition is iconic of the period. Although the march was exclusively male in composition, it was accompanied by its well-known female MP, Ellen Wilkinson, who had written the book The Town that was Murdered two years earlier. The journalist René Cutforth described her as a small, slight, red-haired ball of fire. In 1935 she had led a march to Ramsay MacDonald in his constituency of Seaham, fifteen miles away. The cornered statesman told her, with some irony and perhaps more than a touch of sarcasm, to go out and preach Socialism, which is the only remedy for all this.

The National Government, now led by Baldwin, had nothing to say to them, so they went home by train only to be told by their wives on arrival that their dole had been cut because they had not been ‘available for work’. Ellen Wilkinson was rebuked at a Labour Party Conference for her ‘irresponsibility’ and the whole episode was closed, despite the way that so many had rallied to support them on their route to London.

The Crusade represented an attempt at self-help publicity of a group of unemployed men representing their whole community. In that sense, it was meant to be fundamentally different from the Communist-organised Hunger Marches which preceded it. Though it became the classic and legendary march, it achieved nothing, and even while it was going on, four hundred Scotsmen and women from Glasgow were marching south to join up with other contingents, from ten other cities, on the last of the national hunger marches.  The largest of the great protests, this time it was a united demonstration embracing all sections of the Labour movement and focused on the changes to the Means Test and transitional benefits proposed in the National Government’s Unemployment (UAB) Bill. The organisation of the march was strengthened by the participation of the Trades Councils and the Constituency Labour Parties. This was despite the claim for direct representation of the NUWM being rejected by the Merthyr Conference against the Means Test in July 1936. In the autumn, the Trades Council also rejected a demand for Communist Party affiliation.

 

Nevertheless, the NUWM claimed it had no difficulty in raising a Welsh contingent of eight hundred men and women for the biggest and most united of the hunger marches against the means test in November. The public response to the marchers was magnificent. When the eight hundred marchers from South Wales reached Slough, they were greeted by a crowd of eleven thousand, for Slough had become a ‘little Wales’, peopled by those who had left the valleys over the previous decade, to find work. The Lancashire contingent was given a twelve-mile bus ride paid for by Oxford students. Hailed and fed by Trades Councils and Co-ops along the way, the hunger marchers were in good spirits for their triumphal march into the capital where a quarter of a million turned out. Thousands lined the streets with clenched fist salutes and packed around the six platforms set up in the park to hear the speeches of miners’ leaders and MPs, including Aneurin Bevan and Clement Attlee. Bevan claimed, with some justification, that,

The hunger marchers have achieved one thing. They have for the first time in the history of the Labour movement achieved a united platform. Communists, ILP’ers, Socialists, members of the Labour Party and Co-operators for the first time have joined hands together and we are not going to unclasp them.

With the autumn leaves drifting across the banners, Attlee moved the resolution:

… the scales (of unemployment benefit) are insufficient to meet the bare physical needs of the unemployed…

In his visit to South Wales in June 1929, an official at the Ministry of Labour found that parents were increasingly in favour of their boys migrating rather than working underground, despite the fact that the employment situation had improved to the point where there was a fresh demand for juvenile labour in the collieries.  Another report that year revealed that boys had refused the offer of underground employment in the hope of securing employment in England. In January 1934, the Juvenile Employment Officer for Merthyr reported that of the boys due to leave school at Easter, less than seventeen percent, or one in six expressed a preference for colliery work. A quarter of the boys stated that they had no particular preference but invariably added that they did not want to work underground. By comparison, twenty-six percent wanted to enter the distributive trades and ten percent stated a preference for engineering.

A 1934 Investigation into the Problems of Juvenile Unemployment in Specific Areas by the Ministry of Labour found that there were 148 boys unemployed in areas where there were unfilled local vacancies for boys in coal mining. Although only twenty-nine of these boys had stated that they were unwilling to accept mining employment, the Report concluded that this antipathy was widespread. The shortage of boys wishing to enter coal mining was most marked in the Ferndale employment exchange area of the Rhondda, although managers of all the South Wales exchanges covered by the enquiry reported this changed attitude towards pit work. This change of attitude was shared by the boys’ parents, especially their mothers. In Abertillery, it was reported that most of the boys leaving school in 1932 were anxious to obtain employment other than mining and that their mothers were ’emphatic’ that they should not face the same hardships and unemployment as their fathers. Clearly, it was the nature of the work involved as well as its insecurity which promoted this preference which amounted to determined resistance among women. This evidence from government sources is well supported by the purely anecdotal evidence of the social ‘surveyors’. In his survey of Nantyglo and Blaina, Philip Massey reported that migration was itself playing in the broadening of the minds of the population. He detected the erosion of what he called the “coal complex”.

The American writer Eli Ginzberg found that many of those who left Wales looked forward in a spirit of adventure in settling in communities where coal mining was not the sole occupation. He traced the break-up of ‘the coal complex’ to the summer of 1926, and the freedom from the mines which the long stoppage provided. This had prompted many, he argued, to question the advantages of coal mining, a questioning which was intensified by the worsening conditions and reduced pay which followed the return to work. Women became even more prejudiced against coal mining, he noted, as a result of their suffering as household managers, and when employment became uncertain and wages fell, they sought other occupations for their sons, even if it meant them leaving not just their homes but also the valleys altogether. Many of these young men, encouraged by their mothers, were among the first significant streams of migration to the new industry towns of England, especially Cowley near Oxford, where the Pressed Steel Works was opening up at the same time. The author’s own recordings of such migrant men and women confirm this.

Migration was not simply a response to unemployment in that industry; it was, in many senses, a deliberate rejection of the industry itself. Thus, although several thousand South Wales miners succeeded in obtaining employment in the Kent coalfield and several hundred transferred to the East Midlands coalfields, in total they accounted for only two percent of the total migrants from the region. Some individuals who moved did so because they had ‘had enough’ of the mines, whether or not they were unemployed at the time. Some families, despite having members working, decided to move in order to keep younger members from working underground. Young women and even girls were allowed to leave home because their mothers didn’t want them to marry miners and many miners, despite strong pressures to return to the collieries, would not do so even when jobs were available for them there. Many of these jobs, of course, were of a temporary and insecure nature, three days and three shifts a week. Clearly, it is evident that this break-up of the ‘coal complex’ was a major push factor in the migration equation.

This was a changing attitude which found support in the school system, which had long been charged with at one time fostering a sense of local patriotism at the same time encouraging a spirit of individual enterprise, the ideal secondary pupil being one who aimed at leaving the valleys on leaving school. At the Garw Secondary School’s Annual Speech Day in 1927, Dr Olive Wheeler told her audience that she hoped the boys and girls were not going to be content to remain in the Garw Valley all their lives. ‘The Royal Commission on Merthyr Tydfil’ reported in 1935 that ‘good secondary education’ was assisting young people to find work outside the area, so helping to solve the general problem which confronted the Corporation.

Any society which, by the mid-1920s had produced the wealth of institutional life which existed in communities like Merthyr, could hardly be described as rootless, but it was a society whose institutions were already well-adapted to continual ebbs and flows in inter-regional and international migration. In addition to these patterns of immigration, there were also strong traditions of young people, especially girls, going into service in both Welsh and English cities and seaside towns. The post-war shortage in ‘domestics’ led to the advertisement pages of the Welsh press being filled with ‘propaganda’ about the prospects awaiting young girls in England. Many of the realities failed to match up to these claims, but there is little evidence to suggest that reports of poor conditions or even deaths from tuberculosis while in service restricted the flow of girls from the coalfield. Indeed, in the late twenties and early thirties, female migration was exceeding male migration.

A sample enquiry made for the New Survey of London Life and Labour reveals that about eight percent of domestic servants resident in the County of London in 1929 were born in Wales and Monmouthshire. Therefore, of the 185,000 female domestic servants in the County in 1931, there were probably more than ten thousand from South Wales. Of the 491 girls from the Rhondda who were placed in employment in other districts between 1927 and 1933, 98% went into domestic service. By comparison, only ninety-one girls were placed locally. In 1934, sixty-seven percent of girls about to leave Merthyr’s schools expressed a preference for domestic service.

Many girls would treat their employment away from home as a short-term experience, after which they would return home to play a new role in the family or to get married. This tendency was strengthened by the re-employment of the male members of the family or by the erosion of the mother’s health. The Ministry of Labour’s General Review of the Industrial Transference Scheme conducted in 1938-39 found that a significant proportion of migrants had moved simply because they wanted a change and not with any intention of settling. Young men were made aware by their sisters and girlfriends of the openings in personal service, club and hotel work which they could fill in London and elsewhere. Some were encouraged to take up industrial employment in Oxford because of fiancées, sweethearts and sisters were already working there in the colleges and hotels. Like their ‘women folk’, many of these male migrants saw their migration as a temporary, short-term experience, and left the valleys out of a sense of boredom or frustration, often with vague plans.

The desire to wriggle away from stifling official paternalism was more likely to express itself in second-stage voluntary migration than to prompt young men and women to fall back on the Transference Scheme, a factor that James Hanley commented on:

… it is even worse for the young, for they are continually at the beck and call, the whims and caprices, of every Tom, Dick and Harry who likes to call himself a social worker or a Government official. There is no independence for them at all… the ideas of the Government on the question of Labour Camps and the like should, once and for all, prove to them that to go one step further in obeisance is to yield all they value as individuals to a power which regretfully appears to waver rather favourably towards the social type now being created in the dictator countries.

Indeed, despite all the financial inducements for young people to transfer under bureaucratic supervision, the numbers doing so were very small compared with those who moved under their own devices and, most importantly, on their own terms, in keeping with traditions of migration common within their communities. To have accepted dependence on the state would, for many, have been an acceptance of their own ‘demoralization’. The purpose of migration was, after all, to escape from what Hanley described as this mass of degradation, and the stink of charity in one’s nostrils everywhere.

In any case, in the case of juvenile transference, many of the placements were in ‘blind alley’ jobs, from which employers would discharge workers as soon as they reached sixteen years of age, which was when insurability commenced. This threw juveniles back into the labour market at the time when formative employment was most desirable from a psychological point of view so that the employer could avoid paying their insurance costs. In 1937, Merthyr’s Juvenile Employment Committee reported that it had had difficulty in recruiting errand boys, and that although some of the vacancies were ‘progressive’ and not of the “blind alley” type, boys were reluctant to apply, knowing that many of their friends had been discharged on their sixteenth or eighteenth birthdays. Under the UAB regulations, these boys were under the same weekly sum they had worked for. Of course, these conditions applied to all placements, whether local or far away. Thus, “blind alley” employment also acted as a catalyst to migration in anticipation of being made redundant, as the following personal story shows. Haydn Roberts’ decision, which he kept secret from his mother, to bid ‘farewell’ to the Rhondda in 1932, just before his sixteenth birthday,  was one which was repeated many times over:

My money would have been the only money coming into the house, apart from my father’s dole. I carried on working at the butchers until I was sixteen, a couple of years… a chap I knew, Emrys Davies, had gone to London the year before and he was coming back with plenty of money, or he said he had, and he said he could get me a job. It was the custom down home then to employ children until they were sixteen and when they had to start paying stamps for them they would get somebody else you see, so that was looming for me when I was sixteen. Seeing all the other people out of work, and there was nothing in the Rhondda for us, there was no chance of a trade, I decided to go. I didn’t tell my mother, I just saved up the fare. The red and white was starting a daily night service to London. The fare was fourteen shillings single to Uxbridge then. I saved that money and before Morgan Jones had the chance to sack me I told my mother that I was off that night to London.

At the same time, there were many obstacles to migration which stemmed from the nature of family life in the coalfield. Married men with dependents and those who owned their own houses, were far less likely to transfer. In addition, men and women lacking either youth or the necessary self-confidence to settle among strangers and Welsh-speakers who would find themselves in an even more ‘alien’ environment in England would be reluctant to leave their valley neighbourhoods.

However, despite the deliberate intervention of the Baldwin Government in 1927 to ensure that the Guardians did not provide relief which would provide a disincentive to migration, it does not appear that either unemployment benefit or public assistance operated in this way. In the first place, many families and individuals experienced a significant drop in income as a result of either short-term working or more permanent stoppages in the coal industry. This decline was even more marked when compared with the standard of living in the ‘prosperity’ of the immediate post-war period. Even in 1937, by which time the administration of Unemployment Benefit and the UAB had changed substantially, a Ministry of Labour enquiry focusing on four employment exchanges in the Rhondda found that only one of the managers considered that rates of benefit or assistance had any impact on the willingness of juveniles and their parents to consider transfer. The other three managers reported that they did not consider this factor of importance in stemming the tide of transference.

Where state provision for the unemployed did act as a disincentive to migration, this was often related to the specific operation of policy rather than to the general level of the provision. For instance, while the means test often broke up families in the depressed areas, it also prevented their reunion in the more prosperous areas. Parents were reluctant to follow their sons and daughters because they feared, not without justification, that if they joined their earning children, their public assistance would be reduced and they would become at least partially dependent upon their children. By the 1930s, the Unemployment Assistance Board was under considerable pressure to amend its policy in this respect and found itself having to make discretionary adjustments to allowances in order to remove this obstacle.

It was the innate conservatism in many mining families, particularly among older men, that led to contradictory attitudes to transference and migration among the parents of prospective young migrants and transferees. On the whole, they were far more willing for their daughters to be placed in other districts than their sons, provided employment took the form of domestic or institutional service. The idea of girls being placed in factory work was described as anathema to the average Rhondda mother by the chief official to the Minister of Labour, J A Jones, in the mid-1930s. The idea was barely more acceptable to the girls themselves, whose reluctance to take up this form of employment was attributed to their entire inability to visualise the conditions of work and what they would do in the evenings. Out of 256 Merthyr girls who were placed in other districts between 1935 and 1937, only nineteen went into some form of factory employment. On the other hand, as the transference policy continued, and more information was provided for parents concerning the nature of factory work, they were more willing for both their daughters and sons to be transferred to this type of work. Mothers in particular, as has been noted, would rather their sons went into factory work elsewhere, than to go into the collieries.

Much of this parental opposition to transference was determined not only by a prejudice against factory work for their daughters but also by the strength of the extended family and by a consequent reluctance to relinquish parental control. Whilst it had been accepted practice for girls within the family to go into service, though often no further than to the coastal towns and cities, it was considered usual for the male members to remain in the home until marriage, which often meant well into adulthood. This tradition was so strong that many young men only told their parents of their decision to leave at the moment of departure, or after all their plans had been carefully laid, and some left without parental consent or knowledge. Others preferred to remain at home, even if this meant prolonged unemployment and the postponement or abandonment of marriage; some men remained in this state for sixteen years after leaving school.

The Ministry of Labour official who visited the coalfield in June 1929 reported that unemployed boys in Neath were being kept away from the instruction centres by their parents who feared they would be forced into transferring. Parents in Blaina were said to give their consent to transference ‘unreadily’ due to the strength of ‘family feeling’ and the loss of potential financial help. Of the sixty-eight Blaina boys placed in the South Eastern Division, seventeen had returned home, a ‘returnees’ rate’ of twenty-five percent. This ‘family feeling’ was a far more significant obstacle in the communities of the South Wales coalfield than it was in those of the Durham coalfield, according to the Pilgrim Trust’s Survey, which contrasted the attitudes of sixteen families in Crook with those in the Rhondda:

None of them complained, and several said how proud they were that the children should have found good employment and be earning good wages… “It’s been a great success with the boy and girl, but I’ll not go myself (colliery horse-keeper, aged fifty-seven). … All these were families of a decidedly good type, and it is plain that the better social types are also, on the whole, more ready to move… It was a striking contrast to the atmosphere in Wales, where many complained that they had brought up their children with much trouble and expense and now, when they might reasonably expect some ‘benefit’ from them, they were going away and benefiting their landlady rather than their parents. 

This resentment was also apparent in the responses of Massey’s interviewees in Blaina, many of whom complained of the break-up of family life and of other areas benefiting from the upbringing they had given their children and from the local public expenditure on them in terms of education. Massey also encountered the attitude that transference gave ‘the kids a chance’ and was ‘the only hope for the young’. Many respondents admitted that those transferred seemed ‘fairly happy’, since they were able to pay their own way, and it seemed that a number of the families were grateful to receive the money which was sent home. The truth is that the ‘Crook’ attitudes and those from the Rhondda were not universally polar opposites. There existed a spectrum of family attitudes to transference in both communities. Many parents were caught on the horns of a dilemma of whether to accept transference with its demoralising effects in terms of their values of family unity and solidarity, or whether to resist this form of intervention which in turn might mean their children falling prey to means test bureaucrats and social workers instead. The following response from one of Hanley’s witnesses provides a direct illustration of this dilemma:

I’ve a lad seventeen who did eighteen months in the pit. He stopped the same day as I did. He wants to go to one of these camps, and I say nothing in the matter. If he goes everybody’ll say “oh, look at him! His son’s gone to a labour camp”. If he doesn’t, somebody else will say, “No, he won’t let his son go. Rather see him rot”… You really don’t belong to yourself any more.”

It appears that the more fundamental the challenge to family life posed by the Transference Scheme the greater was the resistance from families closing ranks in a determination to stay put at whatever the cost, or through a parallel evolution of kinship networks which conducted the entire process of migration on a wholly autonomous basis. Family migration was conducted, in the main, without the help of the state, though financial assistance was available for this. In those cases where the parents were considering following juvenile or adult sons or daughters to a new area, they often felt constrained by the need to maintain two homes while looking for work and suitable housing in the new areas. The prospect of paying rent in two places, combined with a lack of tenure in his new employment for the older man, militated against successful migration.

Moreover, as Goronwy Daniel, then a young Welsh research student in Oxford pointed out, men who had lived in South Wales married and had children there, were more in the grip of Welsh ways of thinking and acting than single men since they had experienced more extensively and more intimately those ways of living characteristic of Wales. They had absorbed Welsh ways of bringing up children and maintaining a home and would, therefore, find the movement to an alien district more disturbing. Daniel concluded that economic, social and psychological factors made men with large families far less ready to move than those with few or no dependents. Given this, it is interesting to note that although young, single men were dominant in the migration streams, family migration was far more significant in the case of South Wales than it was for other depressed areas. The nature of Welsh family life would appear to have both stemmed and channelled the flow of migrants.

Within this ‘family factor’, attachment to the Welsh language in coalfield families was an important prohibitive factor to migration. Certainly, among Daniel’s interviewees, there was a detectable correlation between their allegiance to the language and their potential adaptability to a new environment. One Welsh-speaking family, whose ‘head’ had been employed in a mine near Neath until migration to Oxford in 1934, and which comprised four sons aged between thirteen and twenty-one and a daughter aged twenty-two, expressed with unanimity the sense of loss they felt at being unable to use the language and their strong desire to return to Wales. Professor Marquand of Cardiff University, the chief author and editor of the two Industrial Surveys of the 1930s was correct to identify the strength of ‘family feeling’, the strength of institutional life and the sense of ‘belonging’, the extensiveness of home ownership and the problem of declining health as major obstacles to migration, whether voluntary or state-induced and controlled. Attachment to the Welsh language was less inhibiting in the decade following his original statement in 1931, particularly among young people, male and female, who were already embracing a broader, transatlantic popular culture.

Naturally, the issues of wages and conditions were also of primary practical importance to many coalfield families. Gwyn Meara’s 1936 survey of juvenile unemployment showed that the ‘the juveniles’ will to move and the parents’ consent, would be very much easier to obtain if wages were offered sufficient for the full support of the boys or girls concerned. All too often the transferred juvenile became an additional drain upon the financial resources of a family already hard pressed at home. Resistance was reinforced by the appearance that Transference was the only policy adopted by successive, mainly conservative governments, to deal with large-scale, long-term unemployment. Many in the coalfield, led by the recovering SWMF, felt that there was a deliberate conspiracy to lower wages, undermine the strength of trade unions and weaken its true political leadership. As early as 1929, officials within the Ministry of Labour were noting that these opinions were more freely expressed throughout South Wales than in other depressed areas:

My impression is that the north country miner is much slower to express his own ideas than the more argumentative Welsh miner who is disposed to criticise the inadequacy, from his point of view, of the Government Schemes.

Although the basis for widespread public opposition existed in 1929, it was not until the late 1930s that the disparate strands of opposition were galvanised by an awareness of the social effects of a decade of migration and by the possibilities for the introduction of new industries. The chapels began to frighten mothers about the evils of city life, tradesmen suggested that although one might find a job in England there would be little gained, because the cost of living was so much higher: Trades Councils, always uneasy about the dilution of wages, began to oppose the transference of juveniles; the Lord Mayor of Merthyr, D J Evans, stated categorically that the flow of young people from this borough to other parts of the country, the steady movement of depopulation must be checked, and soon. 

The authors of the ‘General Review’ of the Transference Scheme were in little doubt that this publicity, which appeared in the Western Mail and elsewhere, had some adverse effect on the willingness of a number of applicants to consider transference to more prosperous areas.  This was not simply a government view, looking for scapegoats, but was supported by A J Lush:

The constant reiteration in press and pulpit of the dangers to the social life of South Wales by migration made it possible for many of these young persons to quote eminent authority against the whole policy. This made it extremely difficult to stress the value of ‘training’ itself. 

One of the most significant obstacles to both transference and voluntary migration was the widespread ill-health bred by poverty and malnutrition. The statistical evidence on the effects on women’s health was fully investigated by and published by Richard Titmuss in 1938, and have been dealt with above. The poverty of diet endured by many potential young transferees, many of them already forced to live away from their parental home due to the operation of the means test, is revealed by James Hanley’s more anecdotal evidence:

It has already been seen that young people who have left Wales and gone elsewhere and have got work and gone into lodgings, have vomited up whatever first wholesome meal they have had served up to them by their landladies. I verified five instances of this.       

Other important obstacles were the strength of trade union traditions, a deep-seated resentment of official and quasi-official intervention and a broadening communal opposition to the Transference policy. More negatively, there was, at least until the introduction of new industries in the second half of the thirties, a widespread antipathy to factory work, especially among women, though a preference for such work over colliery work by young men, both attitudes receiving parental support, especially from mothers. Specific aspects of the levels and administration of unemployment benefit and allowances, together with the emergence of a subsistence sub-economy within the coalfield also played a significant though secondary role, in preventing migration.

Between 1911 and 1939, the working population of Britain increased by twenty percent. In peacetime women formed thirty percent of this working population; most of them were young, single women, but towards the end of the period, married women tended to continue at work, at least until the birth of their first child. For some working women, like those in the photograph above, very little changed in their working lives. The photograph could have been taken at the end of the nineteenth century, in any of the coalfields, since there were pit-brow lasses in all of them at that time. Perhaps surprisingly, there were still well over three thousand women employed in coal mines in Britain in 1930, 239 under the age of sixteen, and more than half of the total employed in the Lancashire and Cheshire districts where the tradition of women colliery workers was strongest. They worked on the sidings, tramways and, as in the photo, in washing and sorting the coal. There were sixteen mines in operation in Wigan when the photo above was taken and it is believed that the scene is from the largest of these, owned by the Wigan Coal Corporation Limited.

Above: Unemployed man and daughter (?) in Wigan, 11 November 1939

(Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)

Of course, Wigan was made ‘infamous’ by George Orwell’s visit there in 1937, which led to his somewhat fictionalised account of the lives of the local unemployed in The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell provides the historian with an invaluable, if somewhat emotive picture of conditions in the depressed area. However, as he himself admitted later, he emphasised the worst rather than the improving features of British Society and his picture, therefore, gives the most pessimistic view of northern English communities like Wigan. In particular, he graphically describes the operation of the means test and the real character of poverty, based on his own experiences and fieldwork. Yet there is also a sense of working-class resistance and resilience alongside the ironic comments in his account and, as with those visitors to the South Wales coalfield, he emphasises the role of women and the family in this:

The most cruel and evil effect of the Means Test is the way in which it breaks up families… Nevertheless, in spite of the frightful extent of unemployment, it is a fact that poverty – extreme poverty – is less in evidence in the industrial North than it is  in London. Everything is poorer and shabbier, there are fewer motor-cars and fewer well-dressed people: but there are also fewer people who are obviously destitute… But in the industrial towns the old communal way of life has not yet broken up, tradition is still strong and almost everyone has a family – potentially… Moreover, there is just this to be said for the unemployment regulations, that they do not discourage people from marrying. A man and wife on twenty-three shillings a week are not far from the starvation line, but they can make a home of sorts; they are vastly better off than a single man on fifteen shillings… 

Above: Part of the cover design for Theo Baker’s book,

The Long March of Everyman, by Ken Carroll.

Bibliography:

Andy Chandler (1982), The Black Death on Wheels: Unemployment and Migration – The Experience of Interwar South Wales in Papers in Modern Welsh History 1 (the Journal of the Modern Wales Unit), Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

A. J. Chandler (1988), The Re-making of a Working Class: Migration from the South Wales Coalfield to the New Industry Areas of the Midlands. Unpublished PhD. Thesis.

Theo Baker (ed.)(1975), The Long March of Everyman. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Bill Jones (1993), Teyrnas y Glo/ Coal’s Domain. Cardiff: National Museum of Wales.

John Gorman (1980), To Build Jerusalem: A Photographic Remembrance of British Working Class Life, 1875-1950. London: Scorpion Publications.

 

Gwyn Thomas (1979), The Subsidence Factor; The Annual Gwyn Jones Lecture. Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press.

Picture Post (?) (1938), These Tremendous Years, 1919-38: A History in photographs of life and events, big and little, in Britain and the world since the war. London. Unknown publisher.

D. Hywel Davies (1983), The Welsh Nationalist Party, 1925-1945: A Call to Nationhood. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

René Cutforth (1976), A Portrait of the Thirties: Later Than We Thought. Newton Abbott: David & Charles (Publishers) Limited.

Margaret R. Pitt (neé Wates) (1981), Our Unemployed: Can the Past Teach the Present? Work done with the unemployed in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Harrow: Margaret R. Pitt. (obtainable from Friends Book Centre, Friends House, Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ).

 

Chapter Two: Class, the ‘Celtic Complex’ & the ‘Black Dog of Capitalism’.

 

It is possible to detect from Hilda Jennings’ 1934 book and other publications on the Brynmawr ‘voluntary’ venture, that its dominating ‘outside’ participants were strongly motivated by a specific definition of ‘Community’ which was different, but just as alien to the coalfield ‘communities’, as that which was prevalent in official government and ‘social service’ circles. None of these was a definition or set of ideas which was readily shared by ordinary residents of the town, who might be forgiven for thinking that an attempt was being made to elevate ‘community’ over ‘class’.

She asserted that the cosmopolitan nature of the people of Brynmawr and its long history of industrial and political revolt were factors that acted against the building up of a sense of community. She wrote that it was despite this militant history, rather than because of it, that Brynmawr had maintained its cohesion as a community, exerting power over individuals through their attachments to various institutions. Furthermore, her writing-up of the Survey’s findings was clouded throughout by an overbearing concept of ‘community’, which placed its accent firmly on the importance of continuity with a pre-industrial past:

… the life of Brynmawr is still shaped by the dynamic forces of nature, race, common traditions and common history… Probably no force which has influenced its past can safely be ignored in the consideration of its future… We cannot ‘pluck out the heart of the mystery’ of Brynmawr, but it is well that we should study its history if we wish to plan a future for it instead of drifting down the stream of declining prosperity and disillusionment.

She went on to stress that these traditions were underlaid by the retention of a ‘rural-urban complex’, a pride of craftsmanship and an affinity for the common culture of the Welsh countryside which had transferred itself into the urban context. Much of the Survey, in common with other writing on the town by those who were attracted to it in these years, is coloured by eulogy for the rural heritage of the Welsh people. J Kitchener Davies, reporting on the 1932 Plaid Cymru Summer School held in Brynmawr (thus enabling the people of the town, so he claimed, to live in Wales again for a week), held it up as a model community, in stark contrast to its more urban neighbours:

Bryn Mawr … suffers from the advertisement of its poverty which had made us expect distress writ larger over it than over any other mining community. This is not so… (it) has a background of lovely open country, easily accessible, and this, I imagined, reflected in the faces of the people, made a contrast with those of more hemmed-in communities . The objectiveness of an open plateau turns men’s minds from their subjective brooding. 

For nationalist visitors like Kitchener Davies, Brynmawr represented a model ex-coalfield community worthy of being reclaimed for their ‘new Wales’, confirming the suspicions of many of the ‘militant generation’ that they were seeking to elevate both ‘community’ and ‘nation’ over ‘class’. That such suspicions were well-founded is evident from the Walter Dowding’s pamphlet, Wales-Know Thyself!, published during the war by Foyle’s Welsh Press and dedicated to Saunders Lewis, the leader of the Welsh Nationalist Party, as well as to Peter Scott and ‘the Group’ in Brynmawr. The author, who had taken part in the Brynmawr experiment as a volunteer, proposed that a ‘free’, post-war Wales would need to be based on small communities and that since the word ‘community’ or ‘commune’ was not synonymous with the word ‘town’, Cardiff, Swansea and Newport would, therefore, need to be broken down into ‘natural, sizeable units’. Dowding also advocated the redefinition of coalfield communities and their transformation into new, re-cymricised, re-sanctified, classless communities. He may have disagreed with the party leadership’s anti-communist, pro-fascist international policies, but in ‘domestic’ matters, his pamphlet echoes Saunders Lewis’ Ten Points of Policy, a personal declaration for consideration as the principles of the Nationalist Party’s social and industrial policy, providing, as far as Lewis was concerned, its ‘social catechism’. In them, Lewis called for wholesale de-industrialisation of South Wales:

… industrial capitalism and economic competition free from the control of government (i.e. free trade) are a great evil and are completely contrary to the philosophy of cooperative nationalism… Agriculture should be the chief industry of Wales and the basis of its civilisation. For the sake of the moral health of Wales and for the moral and physical welfare of its population, South Wales must be de-industrialised.  

These were quite clearly extreme nationalist views, compared with the liberal-nationalism outlook of the left-over leadership of the old liberal and nonconformist Wales, who had now found a new role for themselves as mediators between the Conservative government in Whitehall and the trades unionists and municipal socialists in south Wales, as the depression deepened. They were comprised of Welsh professionals, clerics, administrators and academics who, although small in number were, by the nature and value of the positions they held, influential in the political life of both Wales and Britain as a whole. Their image of the coalfield, past and present, was one of a society in which industry had distorted nationality and brought an incursion of alien people bringing with them an alien culture.

These people had never, it was claimed, shared in the inheritance of Welsh culture. Such alien accretions to the population had gradually stultified the natural development of native culture, as though the industrial invader, having no culture of his own, would brook no other either. This was a view expressed by delegates to the Welsh School of Social Service which met at Llandrindod Wells in 1934 and was one which was repeated at several public forums both before and after. Contemporary novelists also saw industrialisation, together with immigration, as being the root of all evil as far as the continuity of older Welsh traditions. The popularity of Richard Llewellyn’s novel, How Green Was My Valley, made into a Hollywood film in 1941, was perhaps an indication of the widespread acceptance of this explanation of the region’s fall from grace. The nation had moulded itself to the will, and abandoned to the needs of industry. The Coal industry had dominated South Wales, bent it to its will and made it hideous. Worst of all, for these ‘liberal-cymricists’, it had strangled our language and scorned our culture. 

The view of those at the Ministry of Health was that whereas the Welsh-speaking miners of the western anthracite district of the coalfield had clung to the manners and customs characteristic of the ‘Cymric’ race. They had remained largely uninfluenced by immigration, except that of people from the Welsh-speaking areas. The Eastern sector, however, had been invaded by a more or less alien population which partly accounted for the acceptance by South Wales miners of economic and social theories and policies which would appear to cut across Welsh tradition.  The events of 1926 were a case in point: The liberal-Cymricists expressed their belief, within official services, that the old Welsh Collier was a home-loving and God-fearing man who was only inflamed when an outside man came in, like Mr A J Cook, who was not Welsh. Cook was seen as representative of an undesirable element… which we have never got rid of. In a similar vein, the people of Rhymney were contrasted with those of Blaina by the General Inspector to the Welsh Board of Health:

In this and other districts where the native Welsh culture most strongly persists and the influences of the Methodist revival… are still felt, there is a noticeable difference in the character and outlook of the people as compared with the districts where the industrial revolution submerged the populace and introduced an economic doctrine and a philosophy of life both of which are strange and unsatisfying, though socially disturbing, to the Celtic Complex.

These commentators may have differed in the degree of their dislike of industrialisation, but all were agreed in their projection of an image of a coal polluted by immigration. For them, the militancy of the coalfield was not the product of closely-knit communities, valuing their mutual solidarity, but of the openness of the coalfield to people and influences from far and wide. The ‘Celtic Complex’ – the love of home, of chapels, of language, of eisteddfodau, of music and singing; the cultural emblems of nonconformist Wales had been crumbling in the face of an anglicising, alien onslaught. An expatriate Welsh minister of religion, writing a tour guide to Wales in 1930, described the coalfield communities as outposts… of hell itself, with their inhabitants, almost to a man, supporters of the left wing of the Labour Party. Nevertheless, he was pleased to find an Eisteddfod taking place in the Rhondda and the rendering of Welsh hymn-tunes – and all this despite the considerable admixture of aliens. However, as far as he was concerned, the South Wales miners could not compete with their Flintshire brethren:

The colliers here are more purely Welsh than they are in the southern mining districts. Most of them speak Welsh, their politics are a milder shade of red, and they hold much more tightly to the ancient cultural and religious standards of the nation. 

Merthyr, in particular, was singled out for condemnation by ministers of religion and literary travellers from rural Wales for whom it encapsulated their sense of  ‘hemmed-in’ South Wales. Rev. W Watkin Davies had described it, after a brief visit in the 1920s as a hideous place, dirty and noisy, and typical of all that is worst in the South Wales Coalfield. P. B. Mais, a non-Welsh traveller along the Highways and Byways of the Welsh Marches a decade later, went into culture-shock as he came down from the Brecon Beacons to discover the town, with these unbelievably narrow, wedged rows and rows of miners’ houses huddled in a land where there was so much room that you get lost on the moors if you leave the town in any direction but downward. He went on to describe…

… ill-nourished children playing in the over-heated, crowded streets, or in the filfthy, offal-laden, tin-strewn streams at the backs of the houses with little strips  of backyards that make Limehouse backyards look like the Garden of Eden.

Mais could not believe that Merthyr people could be ‘content’ to live in such conditions, given their heritage:

Are they not sprung from hillsmen, farmers, men and women who regard air and space to breathe as essentials of life? Why, then, do these people go on living here? All of these South Wales mining villages want wiping out of existence, so that the men and women can start again in surroundings that are civilised, and not so ugly as to make one shiver even in memory.

It is significant that Welsh ministers of religion were continuing to express this image of a coalfield defiled by immigration a decade later, a decade which had seen ‘their’ communities suffering from large-scale unemployment, emigration and de-industrialisation. Rev. J Selwyn Roberts of Pontypridd wrote that,

…it is clear that for the last two generations there have been alien factors at work which have almost completely overcome the traditional conscience and spirit of the Welsh people.

According to Rev. Watkin Davies, a decade on from his original pronouncements, the coalfield was a grimy, foreign country made up of things and people which in no true sense belong to Wales. John Rowland, of the Welsh Board of Health, continued to present his ‘liberal-cymricist’ image of the impoverishment and demoralisation within the Borough of Merthyr as minatory to the ‘Celtic Complex’ of the ‘old Welsh stock’:

The prevailing impression after all my dealings with Merthyr Tydfil is of the real poverty that exists. This poverty is visible everywhere, derelict shops, execrable roads and deplorable housing conditions. Merthyr is inhabited by many worthy persons of old Welsh stock, hard-working and religious… It is very hard to see such people gradually losing their faith in the old established order and turning to look for desperate remedies.

Yet, for the government bureaucrats who viewed the community from the outside, Merthyr was a Borough which in the early months of 1939 still had forty percent of its working population idle and was costing central government a pound per family per week, and so could no longer be said to be viable, let alone on the road to recovery. Some went so far as to suggest that the whole town should be abandoned, and its population transported wholesale to the coast. The reaction of the Merthyr Express, stating that such a proposal was ‘fantastic’ reflected the gulf which had opened up between the liberal-cymricists and the representatives of the coalfield communities themselves. It was highlighted by their ‘arch-druid’ Tom Jones’ ironic suggestion, that the entire population of South Wales should be transferred out of the region so that the valleys could be flooded, used as an industrial museum or could serve as an ideal location for bombing practice.

The third group of investigators, Marxist propagandists, themselves regarded as aliens by the liberal-cymricists, projected an image of south Wales which was shaped by a belief in a class struggle in which they saw the colliers as the vanguard.  For writers like Allen Hutt, whose books were published as propaganda for the times, the South Wales miners were the cream of the working class… the most advanced, most militant, most conscious workers. His neat definition of the Welsh working class led him to an even neater explanation of why they did not rise up against their suffering:

One of the obstacles confronting the revolt of the workers in South Wales is precisely that degradation of which Marx spoke of as an accompaniment of the growth of impoverishment under monopoly. 

In this way, the preconceptions of the these ‘propagandists’ often led to an idealisation of coalfield people in which individuality was frequently subsumed into an image of ‘the masses’ which could be made to fit their ideology. The tendency is also apparent in the historiography of the period, particularly that written in the following four decades, which tended to eulogise the miners and their leaders. Some, however, like Fenner Brockway, chose to focus on Merthyr for a chapter of Hungry England (1932), which naturally painted the bleakest possible portrait of the poverty and ill-health among the Borough’s people.

Historians tended to draw on the sources provided by the contemporary ‘propagandists’ and therefore projected an image of the 1930s coalfield communities as hotbeds of militancy, restrained by the demoralisation resultant from mass unemployment. More recently, over the past four decades, historians have demonstrated how such imagery tended to dominate much of the contemporary fiction, newsreel footage and photography of ‘The Thirties’. These preconceptions of coalfield societies served to create and perpetuate what may be termed, the myth of ‘The Unemployed Man’. This image of ‘the unemployed’ as a uniform group within British society, by definition excluding women either as factory workers or colliery housewives, was one which served the purposes of those who saw the causes of unemployment as correspondingly straightforward in economic terms. Thus, John Gollan began a chapter of on unemployment in his 1937 book, Youth in British Industry: A Survey of Labour Conditions Today with the following classical Marxist statement:

What is unemployment? We would be fools if we thought that unemployment depended merely on the state of trade. Undoubtedly this factor affects the amount of unemployment but it does not explain why, for instance, unemployment is absolutely essential for capitalist industry, while under socialism in the USSR it has been abolished completely. Modern capitalist production has established an industrial reserve army is essential in order that capital may have a surplus of producers which it can draw upon when needed. Unemployment is the black dog of capitalism…

In his book, Unemployment and the Unemployed (1940), H W Singer was scathing in his criticism of such generalisations both about unemployment and the unemployed. He argued that there was no such thing as the ‘unemployed man’, but only ‘unemployed men’, that there was no uniformity but an intense variety. He listed sixteen independent causes of unemployment and pointed out that since work enforced a common routine on the people who took part in it, it was reasonable to expect that when people became unemployed their suppressed individuality would again assert itself. Poverty, the dole queue and the Means Test might all restrict diversity, but that didn’t mean that the unemployed could be described as…

… a uniform mass of caps, grey faces, hands-in-pockets, street-cornermen with empty stomachs and on the verge of suicide, and only sustained by the hope of winning the pools…  

Singer divided his ‘reserve army’ into two camps, the ‘stage army’ and the ‘standing army’, or the ‘short-term’ (under three months) and ‘long-term’ unemployed. The short-term unemployed could include those, like B L Coombes, who were ‘temporarily-stopped’ for two or three days per week from their colliery, so that they were paid for three shifts and could claim dole for the rest of the week. But if they were called to work a fourth shift, they would then lose their dole money for the rest of the week:

All that spring and summer I was working, but was not a penny better off than if I had been on the dole; while the men with big families and who had a shilling a day plus bus fare to pay were losing money every week by working…

Many miners would avoid losing dole in this way by ensuring that they were not at home when the colliery officials sent for them. For the twenty thousand or so unemployed miners over fifty in South Wales who were unlikely to work in the pits again, there was a three-fold ongoing problem. First, they had lost their sense of purpose as skilled, active workers and bread-winners for their families; relationships with younger, working members of the family became more difficult, particularly if these members were working away from home and thirdly, they found it impossible to make any kind of provision which would enable them to keep up the home’s standard of living when they reached the old age pension age.

Apart from these variations in income from week to week and even day to day, which made household budgeting (usually done by the women) impossible, the drop from full-time working to full-time unemployment had a dramatic impact on both family standards of living and general wellbeing. A skilled collier may well, in the prosperous early twenties, have brought home a wage of up to eight pounds per week, and when three or more sons were working on full shifts, the economic standard of the family would have been greater than that of an ordinary middle-class family such as that of a shopkeeper, policeman or small businessman. The maintenance system, however, led to an immediate drop in income per head of at least a pound per week, even starting from the more precarious wage levels which existed in working collieries by 1928-29. H W Singer commented:

It is just the extent of this drop… which will largely determine an unemployed man’s attitude to unemployment and work, whether he compromises with this present state and tries to settle down somehow, or whether he will frantically refuse to accept and submit… It is, therefore, the skilled men… that are feeling the edge of their condition of unemployment most keenly, because it is these people that are in fact being penalised by the existing system of ‘welfare’.

The effect on mental health was also felt by the miners’ wives. James Hanley was one of few writers who let the unemployed speak for themselves in his 1937 book, Grey Children: A Study in Humbug, reported his interview with one of them, John Williams:

My missus is in a mental home. We had a nice little lad, and were doing not so bad until I lost my job, and that and one thing and another, well, I suppose it got in her way.

Significantly, Hanley entitled one of his chapter’s ‘Many Voices’. Despite the common experiences involved in unemployment, many stemming from bureaucratic procedures, including the hated ‘Mean’s Test’, there were varied voices among the unemployed and their families. The myth of ‘the unemployed man’ not only excludes the experience of women in what might more accurately be defined as ‘the unwaged family’, but it is also an unreal image of uniform processes of impoverishment and demoralisation throughout coalfield society in the 1930s. Nevertheless, it is important to identify the factors which tended towards uniformity. Firstly, there was what Singer called the common pattern of poverty, the reality that since most forms of association cost money, the freedom of association of unemployed people was severely restricted in this way. Unwaged families could easily become cut off from institutions which required expenditure incompatible with unemployment. Attendance at chapel might stop, for example, because of the lack of a good suit. Secondly, the physical routine of standing in the dole-queue provided the forum for the formulation of opinion between the unemployed, much as the shared experience of the coalface did for the employed:

… One will usually find that this occasion is a sort of social meting, that people hang about the Exchange or the street near… for some time after, or they even go to the Exchange outside their own hours to meet the other people waiting there. It is there that information about prospective jobs is exchanged, or that politics, pools or the last fire or ‘whatnot’ are discussed.         

The ‘institution’ of the dole queue was particularly important to the long-term unemployed as they began to lose contact with the institutions which were based around work, such as the Miners’ Federation Lodge. For many of the long-term unemployed, the dole queue was a reminder that their condition was not ‘a special personal handicap’. It is in this sense that the examination of both individual and collective experiences of unemployment within coalfield communities is essential for social historians.

It was this combination of idealism and practical community cohesion which helped transform Jennings’ survey into a model for similar joint local-national ventures elsewhere, but it perhaps also significant that many of the key figures in other distressed places were also determined women sharing her values. In June 1926 Emma Noble had first gone to the Rhondda Valley, during the Coal Lock-Out, and contacted the local distress committee to investigate the need for outside assistance. She reported the deep need for material help and loving sympathy in the Rhondda to Friends in Oxford and London who had expressed concern for the miners. Funds were raised for leather for boot repairing, and clothing was collected, so Emma returned to the Rhondda, living in a miner’s cottage where Joyce Bater later joined her, and they did relief work based at Tonypandy until just before Christmas. The relief work closed down, as the government and social service agencies sought to encourage migration from the coalfield as the solution to its problems, and “relief” was seen as immediately necessary, but also “harmful” to the longer-term ‘Malthusian’ objective of transferring the “surplus population”.

Nevertheless, the Maes-yr-Haf settlement was opened in 1927 as an experiment backed by the Coalfields Distress Committee comprising Joan Fry, Peter Scott and others. They helped to inspire the nationwide publicity for the Lord Mayor of London’s Mansion Hose Fund in 1928, which had drawn a generous response from the British public, following an appeal by Edward, Prince of Wales. By March 1928, Friend’s “Meeting for Sufferings” was asked to make a wider appeal for financial support and to recruit volunteers for personal service, since Emma Noble had reported from the Rhondda that further relief was now essential. It was decided to send representatives to the government, as the Minister of Health, Neville Chamberlain, was known to be having a change of heart.

Emma and William Noble were appointed to become Wardens of the Maes-yr-Haf settlement by Dr A D Lindsay, renowned Master of Balliol College, who became Chairman of the Coalfields Distress Committee at that time. A great number of activities developed at the centre, and eight other settlements were established throughout south Wales over the next decade or so, led by people who had worked with the Nobles or had been influenced by them. Emma and William had similar backgrounds, both under the strong Methodist influence of their schools, which they both left at twelve. Later, they both became members of the Workers’ Education Association, where they met. In 1908 they married in the Methodist chapel in Weymouth and had a son and daughter before attending Ruskin College from 1921. There they came into contact with Oxford Quakers and became members of the Labour Party. Emma became an Alderman and William a JP and Trade Union official. They became Quakers in Swindon but left for South Wales with the support of their Meeting and their MP.

Under their guidance, Maes-yr-Haf became a centre for friendship, counselling and practical help. With their knowledge of local government and the poor-law, they were soon able to assist the unemployed in practical ways, but the Nobles were also determined to make education a priority. By the mid-thirties they had established fifty-two unemployed clubs in the Rhondda with a membership of nine thousand men, women and juveniles. The courses taught ranged from philosophy to country dancing, and they were supported by the University of Wales, the National Council of Music for Wales, the WEA, the National Council of Social Service (NCSS) and the Carnegie Trust. A few of the unemployed were able to advance to full.time residential courses at Coleg Harlech, Fircroft College in Birmingham, and Ruskin College. One of the unemployed men who attended the clubs went on to Fircroft and later became Lord Mayor of Birmingham. Lord Lindsay said of them:

These unemployed clubs came out of Maes-yr-Haf and spread all over England and even migrated to America.

Above: The well-known photograph of Mrs George, Pontypool, washing with a doll-tub, about 1900. Photographs of domestic work are rare, but oral evidence reveals that little changed in washing methods, even when unemployment meant fewer shirts in the tub.

They began in the Rhondda Valleys and then the Welsh Council of Social Service helped them to spread to all the other valleys and area officers helped to make sure the unemployed had a meeting place for the courses. Women, in particular, had had little hope of employment or of improving themselves before, since all their time and effort was taken up with the traditional, daunting task of looking after men and their clothes, as described below. Now, with at least some of their men no longer coming home covered in coal-grime, women’s clubs and sewing groups were formed up and down the valleys to unpick, alter and make children’s garments, which were then distributed through the schools. Women were not used to independence but soon enjoyed providing their own entertainment, organising concerts, drama, dances and discussions, often exchanging ideas on the best uses for their very limited resources. Thus, the guiding principle of the settlements and clubs was ‘self-help’ and women were beginning to find a new role for themselves outside the home, organising with other women.

As the settlement did not wish to be associated with relief, ‘jumble sales’ were organised, which enabled the new material to be bought wholesale so that clothes could be made and sold for the cost of the material. A concession was made for baby clothes which were kept in a box in the hall and given away when needed. Altogether, thirty-five women’s clubs were formed, some with a membership of over a hundred. Maes-yr-Haf again supplied new materials at wholesale prices as well as providing the instructors in many and various handicrafts including needlework, leather glove making, and quilting, covering old pieces of blanket with new material, and renovating the members’ old garments. Belts were made from scraps of cellophane, which the women were taught to fold and weave into a belt, they looked like mother of pearl, and were very popular. By the late 1930s, not much clothing was sent to the Settlement, but jumble sales still made it available cheaply to members at small prices.

In 1929 girls clubs were started. In 1932, they asked, why can’t girls have a holiday? So a holiday camp was arranged for them at which the girls enjoyed team games, physical culture handwork and inter-club competitions. A hand-loom was given to the Settlement so Emma and two others went to the movement’s centre at Haslemere for ten days’ training in weaving: they were then able to instruct others, so a small weaving industry was started. Wool embroidery also became popular, rugs being made for sale, favouring Welsh and Celtic traditional designs. Leatherwork was done, rush stools were made along with pottery, which was readily saleable: exhibitions took place on both sides of the Atlantic and some samples went on permanent exhibition in the National Museum of Wales. All these activities needed more space, so a two-storey annexe was built by voluntary labour.

In 1930, with the effects of the general economic recession spreading to the whole of the British Isles, the opportunities for large-scale family migration from the coalfields came to a rather abrupt, if temporary halt. At the very least, it became apparent that men over forty-five would struggle to find work in new industries and places once the economic recovery set in, which wasn’t to be for another four years in many of the more prosperous areas of the country. In these circumstances, the Settlement’s work among older men and women became more important, as their more independent children continued to leave the valleys in large numbers, leaving their parents ‘stranded’ in long-term unemployment and relative poverty. Maes-yr-Haf helped many thousands of people to escape from spiritual isolation, at least. Through the clubs and range of activities it offered, new interests and enthusiasms developed.

In 1931 Emma Noble started a Nursing Association, so two Queen’s Nurses were appointed to the district. The following year, the Settlement acquired a disused malt-house, twenty-two miles away, by the sea. Unemployment led not only to material impoverishment but also to spiritual deprivation and a “shut-in” syndrome. One woman from Llwynypia in the Rhondda recalled how her mother only ever left the town on one occasion each year:

We had a good clean home, you know, a good mother, and I mean a careful mother… And the only outing we used to go on was with the Sunday School. We’d go to Porthcawl. We’d walk to Pen-y-graig station, I’d have a couple of coppers, and that’s all we had to be satisfied. Take our own food, init? And that’s all my mother ever went, love ‘er. 

Above: Woman carrying a baby “Welsh fashion”, Rhondda 1930.

As a remedy, the Malthouse provided thousands of men, women and children with breaks by the sea, with regular meals, good food, cheerful company and, above all, healthy rest. An interesting observation on gender relations was that men, notorious for riots, rebellions and disputes throughout the period, never failed to uphold democratic discipline, collective action, common sense and co-operative goodwill in the clubs and camps. In five summers, there was not a single expulsion. They did their camp duties with good humour, and when asked, reported that the three hours per day of these were the most enjoyable part of the day for them. This was a revealing comment coming from men who, traditionally, had been used to a division of domestic duties in which they relied heavily on their wives. There were also separate camps held for juveniles, helping the next generation of men and women to adapt to these important social changes in the nature and divisions of labour between the sexes.

Emma and William Noble understood trade unionism and working conditions as well, so they were able to work closely with organised labour, emphasising the importance of democratic organisation in all work undertaken with the unemployed, whenever they were called upon to give evidence to the numerous commissions and social service surveys which took place among them. Nonetheless, as in Brynmawr, there was much local criticism of the voluntary schemes and unemployed clubs, particularly from the unemployed men themselves, though this was often glossed or scripted by those with their own sympathies to external agencies. Although the film Today We Live (1937) was commissioned by the NCSS and produced by the Strand Film Company, it was made by a documentary unit led by Paul Rotha. Its directors were Ralph Bond, John Grierson and Donald Alexander, all of whom were determined to give the local critics of unemployed clubs a voice.

Significantly, there were few women involved in the outside scenes which were shot in Pentre, and certainly no main character. When the character Glyn Lewis, played by a real unemployed miner, hears that they have to contribute fifteen pounds of their own to the scheme to build a new unemployed club hut, he grabs his cap and leaves the room in disgust (see the picture and caption below). The scene was supposed to take place in ‘Big John’s’ living room, but it had to be filmed in the Marylebone film studio in London and Les Adlam, playing Big John, was introduced to a ‘girl’ from Lancashire, who was supposed to be his wife. Obviously, she wasn’t expected to say much, if anything, on film, let alone voice a feminine opinion, but Adlam found the actress very nice, a homely sort of person.

The support given to the Riverside Club by the Quaker centre at Maes-yr-Haf was not mentioned in the film, undoubtedly because it would distract attention from the role of its sponsor, the NCSS. However, Glyn Lewis commented, realistically if critically, on the practical significance of its role:

When we were unemployed and formed our club in the stable, the garage, Maes-yr-Haf used to give us cheap cocoa, a bag. We used to have cocoa and sell it. Maes-yr-Haf then developed coming in there, coming back and forth. They had lectures: Jack Jones, the Rhondda Roundabout, started lecturing in the Riverside… They bought us carpenter tools and things like that. You know, the social side of it. Mr Noble was the head of Maes-yr-Haf and he had his lieutenants of course to see how everything went. They were very good indeed., but that wasn’t our problem. It was no money and nothing much around.

Les Adlam agreed with the policy that was adopted concerning the film, that…

… they were trying to expose the Government paying money to build these huts and not create jobs. I think the club did a good thing. It took us off the streets and filled idle hands with the arts and crafts centre and the social activities that it was performing. Otherwise we’d spend our time going on the mountains or standing on street corners… You couldn’t go in the pubs, you had no money. You couldn’t even go to pictures. we had nothing.

Glyn Lewis was even more emphatic about what was really needed:

The film was saying to tell you that the Government, the National Council of Social Service, was doing something for you. Well, there was a club in this district, there was one in Treorchy, there was one in Cwmparc, there was one in Treherbert. They’d spread them all around, so as to keep you quiet, not to cause rampage. But the point was the living of the people, people with families and no work and not much money. That was the problem of the unemployed. They didn’t want a club – it was all right for them, but it wasn’t the real thing – work was what we wanted! 

In his ‘Swarthmore Lecture’ on Unemployment and Plenty, delivered on the evening preceding the assembly of the Friends’ Yearly Meeting at Friends House in London on 24th May, 1933,  Shipley N Brayshaw spoke on the role of what he called ‘Palliatives’, referring specifically to the Quaker work in the Occupational Centres of the Rhondda, mindful of the criticism which had been directed at this work from both within and outside the coalfield. He dealt directly with these, fully accepting the limitations of the Quaker relief work:

Our Society is taking at least its full share in seeking to alleviate the hardship caused by unemployment, but no one recognizes more clearly than Friends themselves the insignificance of such work in relation to the main problem of dealing with the fundamental causes of the evil. Palliatives, have their place so long as they are not linked with an attitude which accepts the existence of unemployment. In addition to many small contributions, such as lending their premises fitted up with wireless and other amenities, Friends have been prime movers in the work of Occupational Centres which, started in the Rhondda, have spread throughout the country and which are helping to arrest the moral disintegration of enforced idleness and poverty. Allotment cultivation has been developed through the past four or five years to such an extent that it has received government recognition and help and has become national in character. This work while bringing to impoverished homes a regular supply of fresh vegetables, not otherwise obtainable, has been of incalculable benefit in finding healthy interest and useful creative labour for more than a hundred thousand unemployed men.

We are thankful for all such work; but when a Prime Minister eulogizes it, and allocates to it an important place in relation to the major question, we ask to be saved from our friends. These efforts make no real contribution to striking at the roots of the evil; yet we do not know but what the knowledge and experience gained may prove to be of unexpected worth… those who are most anxious to conduct present-day business aright may also be the ones most keenly aware of their inability, by such efforts, to solve the troubles of the community…

If all the employers in the country had the maximum both of business ability and of benevolence they could not, under capitalism as it exists today, set everyone to work and distribute the available goods… 

Whatever the acknowledged limitations of the Quaker work in the Rhondda, the gender division among the workers at Maes-yr-Haf reflected the Nobles’ own partnership of equals. In addition to their son, Mac Noble, who later became the committee chairman, and Rowntree Gillett, its treasurer throughout, there were five male and five female full-time craft-workers/ instructors. This balance between the sexes among the ‘settlers’ was also found in Merthyr Tydfil where John Dennithorne was ‘appointed’ by Friends’ House in London to work alongside Margaret Gardener. Dennithorne was a  local Quaker and gifted orator, and in Dowlais, who had started the Dowlais unemployed club in 1928. It became a full settlement in 1935, when Margaret Carslake was the mainstay of the settlement, often visiting the Brynmawr group. The Merthyr settlement was founded in 1930, placed under the wardenship of Oxford graduate, Gwilym Jones. The Risca Educational Settlement (established in 1931) was associated with Maes-yr-Haf and organised by Mary Dawson. At Pontypool and Bargoed married couples were in charge. The Thomases at Bargoed were Friends from Yorkshire who had worked at Maes-yr-Haf and followed the lead of Emma and William Noble in establishing an educational settlement, with women’s clubs formed up and down the Rhymney Valley, specialising in sewing groups and belt-making. In May 1929, the Glamorgan Gazette reported that, in the Garw Valley, the local company known as the “Society of Friends” were doing splendid work towards the alleviation of distress among the unemployed. Clearly, by the 1930s, the social service movement had obtained a substantial footing throughout a wide area of the coalfield and was well-co-ordinated by the Joint Committee and from Maes-yr-Haf. 

Above: Unemployed miners getting coal, Tredegar patches, late 1920s.

Like the Nobles, many of the wardens had a background in the Labour and trade union movement, and so fitted well into the local community. Jim Thomas helped to organise the Rhymney Outcrop Scheme in 1933-34, enabling the unemployed to get supplies of free coal without falling foul of the local police by picking coal from tips and levels. By 1936-37 the first level had yielded fifteen thousand tons of coal, which had been supplied to about 450 unemployed families for 2d or 3d per week, plus voluntary labour. The group of men in charge worked long hours and had many disappointments, but enjoyed the struggle, as Jim Thomas himself reported:

Miners like mining much better than gardening because it is their trade, and they rejoice in the freedom to do the work as real craftsmen should. In no mine, however well-managed, has better workmanship in road making and timbering been accomplished … the committee explained difficulties to the rest of the men. The committee had no misconceptions about human nature … men at work can be difficult to control … in voluntary schemes they can be more difficult than ever. With some men a great deal of firmness has been necessary, but with the majority there has been willingness to do even more than their share.

The other voluntary workers at Bargoed included two single men and single women. In terms of employment and class composition, the colliery towns and villages were more truly one-industry communities than Merthyr or Brynmawr.

Some historians have suggested that social service movement was not well enough funded to imply that the government saw it as a major barrier to revolution. This opinion is, however, based on the level of direct government funding which occurred after 1932 and do not take into account the level of funding that which civil servants were able to facilitate and direct from private and charitable funds. The funds from the Carnegie Trust were small but significant, and large amounts were committed by the Society of Friends in the early period. However, it was the establishment of the Pilgrim Trust and the Nuffield Trust which helped to transform the situation. The duty of the Pilgrim trustees was to apply their resources at key points of the present distress, … to prevent many places where moral and intellectual leadership is absent, from sinking into despair. The impact of these fresh funds on the settlement work was immediate. In Dowlais John Dennithorne was able to receive a proper wage, two full-time female assistants could be engaged, more social and classroom accommodation was secured and materials and equipment bought in order to extend the work being done. The Trust’s grants to South Wales were essential in enabling both Dennithorne and Scott to develop their plans for Merthyr and Brynmawr.

(to be continued…)