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Chapter 15
The Devil’s Decades: Politics and Poverty (1918–1945)
In This Chapter
Uncovering the causes of mass unemployment
Looking at the living conditions of the unemployed
Understanding the changing political order
The so-called ‘Great War’ heralded a new begi
Toward the Depression: The Economy and Employment
During the war, Britain suffered tremendous losses – not just in men, but also in industries like merchant shipping – and the first priority of the government was to put right the deficit. This brought expectations of a post-war economic boom, which initially was more than realised. For example, shipbuilding in Britain saw the number of berths increase by more than 40 per cent above the 1914 level. Everyone was happy, profits were high, wages were good and the war had been won! Hip-hip-hooray!
But it wasn’t to last. The world stumbled into depression, and unemployment grew to massive proportions everywhere in western Europe and the United States. Scotland was particularly hard hit – it became one of the unemployment black spots in the UK. The number of people on welfare grew to unprecedented proportions. The politicians were all at sea – no one had an answer that could put people back to work. Everyone was waiting for the expected upturn in trade, which never came. The onset of war in the late 1930s provided the solution to the depressed Scottish economy.
Things aren’t working
Things began to go pear-shaped around the end of 1920, and the first signs of depression were seen in the growing numbers of unemployed. Demobilisation had brought thousands of extra workers into the labour market. Women who had been employed in what was described as ‘men’s work’ (engineering, shipbuilding and munitions) were blackmailed into withdrawing into the home, because who would’ve wanted to stand in the way of brave men finding work? The male was still seen as the breadwi
But the demobilised soldiers were re-entering an economy that found itself unable to meet the challenges of the post-war world. Scotland’s economy was based mainly on heavy industry. We made ships, railway engines and machines of all kinds, and produced coal and steel, which were not in demand after 1920. World trade collapsed as countries tried to halt the import of foreign-made goods. To make matters worse, British/Scottish manufactures were expensive because the pound was overvalued after a return to the gold standard in 1925. As a result, Scottish exports dropped like a stone.
The reaction of employers was to cut costs, which in practice meant lowering wages and increasing hours – measures that were opposed by the trade unions. This led to massive numbers of days lost in strikes, particularly in the coal industry. Coal was the focal point of industrial conflict, and disputes there culminated in the General Strike of May 1926, when other trade unionists came out in sympathy with the miners. For nine days, Britain was paralysed, and to some it appeared that the country was on the verge of a class war. However, compromise was reached between the trade union movement and the government and employers. The Trades Union Congress called off the strike, and workers reluctantly returned to work.
Whether Britain was on the brink of revolution is much disputed by historians. Some have argued that the workers were sold out by their leaders, so 1926 was a missed revolutionary opportunity to fundamentally change British society. But on balance it would appear that the trade union leaders, who had no intention of overthrowing a democratically elected government, realised the weakness of their position – both organisationally and constitutionally – and called off the strike.
The miners carried on for another nine months, but because of hunger, they were eventually forced to return to work under worse conditions. From that point, strikes were less frequent and the number of trade unionists fell dramatically.
It’s not getting any better
Many people, faced with the prospect of unemployment or, if they had work, falling wages, decided to pack their bags and head elsewhere. Half a million Scots, or 8 per cent of the population, left the country in the 1920s – a figure that more than dwarfs the Highland Clearances of the early 19th century. This was compared to 0.9 per cent for England and 4.5 per cent for Ireland. Things were obviously bad, but could they get any worse? The short answer was: yes!
The Wall Street crash of 1929 saw the world economy nosedive into depression and huge increases in unemployment. By 1932, average male unemployment was nearly 30 per cent for Scotland as a whole, and over 50 per cent in mining and shipbuilding. The young male school leavers and older workers were hardest hit. Workers in the west of Scotland, where the heavy industries were concentrated, suffered more than those in the east, with the exception of Dundee, where 37,000 people in the city were out of work in 1932. Registered unemployment in Motherwell in 1933 was 49 per cent; in nearby Wishaw, 53 per cent of the workforce was on the dole (known today as social security).
What made matters worse was the fact that many of those families that had left in the 1920s were returning in the 1930s, especially from the United States, where the depression was even worse. So, emigration, which was the safety valve for Scottish society, fell by three-quarters in the 1930s. Strangely enough, despite the poor economic conditions, the birth rate rose in Scotland – it was 30 per cent higher in Scotland than in England. Add returning immigrants to a higher birth rate and it meant there were a lot of people looking for work that wasn’t there.
Hard Times
As you can imagine, social conditions were about as bad as the state of the economy. John Boyd Orr’s book
Food, Health and Income
(1935) showed that the diet of the Scottish poor was insufficient to maintain health. At the high point of the depression in Dundee in the early 1930s, the staple diet was said to be ‘bried [bread] and marge [margarine]’.
Diphtheria was rife among children. One-third of Glasgow children were infested with fleas and lice, and scabies was common. Shoeless children were found in large numbers in many of Scotland’s towns and villages.
Many of the diseases contracted by children were due to the appalling housing conditions. Sixty per cent of Dundee’s and Glasgow’s populations lived in houses of one or two rooms with no toilet or bath. Housing conditions were so bad in Glasgow that one of the town councillors described the city as ‘earth’s nearest suburb to hell’. But even in more middle-class cities like Aberdeen, things could be equally desperate. One woman recalled that in the city’s Littlejohn Street in the 1920s, 14 families had to share two toilets and had no gas or electricity and only an open fire to cook on.
The demoralisation of the adult workforce was palpable, particularly among skilled workers. Although they were no strangers to unemployment, they faced long periods of idleness. The iconic image of men in mufflers and caps standing on street corners with nothing to do was captured in prose by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir, driving in 1933 through the bleak industrial landscapes of Lanarkshire past groups of ‘idle, sullen-looking young men’. He observed that ‘Airdrie and Motherwell are the most improbable places imaginable in which to be left with nothing to do; for only rough work could reconcile anyone to living in them’. Most of the unemployed were resigned to their fate, schooled in the art of patience and waiting like politicians for the expected upturn in trade.
The government’s treatment of the unemployed was on the harsh side. So many petty indignities were forced on the workless by a heartless bureaucracy, including the following:
In the 1920s, the ‘not genuinely seeking work test’ forced the unemployed to prove to the authorities that they had sought non-existent work on a daily basis before they could receive benefit.
The Anomalies Act of 1931 withdrew unemployment benefit from working married women and casual workers.
But these acts were nothing in terms of humiliation compared to the introduction of the household means test later that year. When statutory benefit was exhausted after 26 weeks, claimants went on the dole. They had a visit from an inspector to ascertain circumstances and to sell anything of value. Because it was household income, any children earning money, even if only delivering milk or newspapers, would be seen as contributing to that income, and the benefit would be reduced in proportion to their earnings. This forced parents to expel children over school age from the home. For this reason, the means test broke up families, and the system and those who operated it were detested by the unemployed.
The impact of the household means test and the general state of the unemployed is clear when you consider that
one-quarter
of the total population of Scotland was dependent on the dole in 1935.
For those on state aid, there was a marked change in the gender character of the claimant. In 1914, the typical claimant of poor relief was a woman, who was widowed, sick or disabled; in 1938, it was a man. Before 1914, there were few areas where more than 5 per cent of the population was claiming poor relief; in Bridgeton, Cowcaddens and the Gorbals in Glasgow, this number had increased to over two-thirds.
An expatriate Scot returning from the United States in the early 1930s remarked, ‘Most of my pals are still in the Gallowgate. Some of them haven’t had a job in their lives and have been living off the parish.’
Responses to unemployment
Unemployment on this kind of mass level drew a variety of responses from those affected. Some went on hunger marches; some looked for scapegoats; and others just looked for forms of escapism.
Organised opposition: The hunger marchers
Not all the unemployed took things lying down (nor did the employed; see ‘Things aren’t working’, earlier in the chapter). Some people organised hunger marches – the first national one took place in 1922. These marches were organised by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, a Communist front organisation viewed with distrust by the Labour Party (see ‘Jerusalem Postponed: The Politics of the Interwar Years’, a bit later) and the trade unions. But although they tramped the streets protesting at unemployment and government welfare policies, they had little effect. The government continued to pursue its austerity programme of cutting public expenditure.
Increasing sectarianism