yards to a spot where they were mechanically hauled to the surface. He would then collect empty tubs and drive them back to be filled. This cycle would repeat itself over his seven-and-a-half-hour shift.
Thomas remembers his first night in the mine: ‘Timber supports were holding the roof which was trying to come down, cracks would show, and I was frightened to death. The noises! When I was on my own! It was very frightening for a boy of fourteen to go in the mine under those conditions.’
A short while later, Thomas’s fears about safety were confirmed when a boy was killed doing the very same job. The boy had been asked by a hewer to carry a drill in his empty tub. As his pony galloped along, the tub slid off the road and the drill shot up in the air, driving itself through the boy’s body. Thomas was horrified when he heard the news. ‘I’m going there no more,’ he told his brother that evening. ‘You’re going back again tomorrow!’ he was told. ‘You’ve got to get over this!’ Shortly afterwards, when yet another boy was killed, Thomas was the first person there. ‘What a scene!’ he says. ‘There wasn’t a body. He had been pulled to bits.’
In the year that Thomas started work, an average of four miners were killed every day in Britain. Coal mining was the nation’s most dangerous peacetime occupation. And even when a miner had worked his way up to hewer, the work was no safer. Hewers had to work in tiny seams, sometimes as narrow as twelve inches wide, lying on their sides, hacking at coal with an elbow tucked inside a knee. ‘You get the coals out the bloody best you can,’ a Durham miner told BBC interviewer Joan Littlewood in 1938. ‘If you hear the ceiling coming down, you have to get out of the way. But the only way to be really safe is to let the flaming coal stay there …’
Life was difficult as well as dangerous. Miners returned, caked in coal and sweat, to small homes without bathrooms. Most washed in little tubs in the kitchen. The author W. F. Lestrange spent some time in a house, like Thomas’s, lived in by a family that included three miners. The woman of the house, he wrote, ‘spent most of her time fighting vainly against coal-dust-smeared walls and furniture and floors in the intervals of boiling water for the three successive bath-times’.
Life was no easier across the Irish Sea. Politically, Northern Ireland was (and still is) a part of the United Kingdom; geographically, it is a part of Ireland. Harry Murray started work at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast in 1937. ‘People used to earn their pay or they didn’t get it,’ he says, ‘and if they didn’t earn it, they were sacked and that was it.’ Harry worked out in the open, in all weathers, drinking tea from a can, with a half-hour break to eat, play dice or pray. And his future was dependent on the goodwill of the foreman. ‘He used to get brought in butter, eggs, money, just so people could keep their job,’ Harry says. ‘If the foreman didn’t like your face, that was good enough to put you out … and if you were unemployed, it was ten times worse to survive.’
Yet as odd as it may sound, Harry Murray was a fortunate man. The Northern Ireland government was intended, in the words of its first Prime Minister, to be ‘a Protestant government for a Protestant people’. And as a Protestant, Harry was guaranteed access to basic housing and a lowly paid job in industry. An Ulster Catholic had no such security. Harland and Wolff had not employed Catholics since the early twentieth century, and they no longer bothered applying for shipyard jobs. These had become the natural preserve of Protestants, passed from father to son, from uncle to nephew.
So although Ulster Protestants received lower wages than their English counterparts, and often lived in houses without mains water and gas lighting, they could be considered – in relative terms – privileged. It was, after all, better to be second than third class.
Even in London, the beating heart of the British Empire, ordinary life was hard. In 1939, the average Londoner lived to the age of sixty-two, compared with eighty-two today. Two per cent of Londoners attended university in 1939; today, the figure is 43 per cent. In 1934 Sister Patricia O’Sullivan arrived in east London, where she lived among the families of sailors. One of her chief memories is of the importance of pawn shops to local people. When a man went to sea, he would not be needing his suit for a while, so he would take it to the pawn shop. On his return, he would redeem it, and pawn items brought back from distant parts of the world. Sister Patricia would often furnish poor homes with the things sailors had brought home and pawned.
One of those homes belonged to Doris Salt. Doris’s husband had been killed by a drunk driver in a stolen car. The circumstances meant that she received no insurance money. ‘It was just make-do with me for years,’ she says. ‘I had to learn to make a good meal out of more or less nothing. People pooh-pooh sheep’s head, oh no, they wouldn’t eat that, but we used to thoroughly enjoy it.’ Florence Muggridge, from Poplar, knew a woman whose husband was killed working in the docks. ‘Miserable bugger, we were going out tonight,’ said the woman on hearing that she was now a widow. But, says Florence: ‘You didn’t expect anything, you see? That’s the whole point. People had to fend for themselves in ways that are unheard of now.’
It is possible to view modern life – from a western perspective, at least – as a succession of choices. But for most young Britons living in the first decades of the twentieth century, fewer choices existed. They followed their father’s trade, lived near their birthplace, and married for convenience as often as for love. Yet in Britain in the 1930s – as in Germany and the United States – economic tremors would begin to shake social foundations. Young people’s attitudes and expectations started to change, and a generational gulf would emerge.
But for change to occur, a catalyst had to appear – and that catalyst was, as elsewhere, the depression. As author Ronald Blythe points out, Britain’s inter-war years took place against a huge, dingy, boring and inescapable backcloth – unemployment. All sorts of people suffered as a result.
Trevor, a seventeen-year-old from south Wales, had wanted to become an engineer, but when his father lost his job, he was forced to leave school to become an errand boy. This was intended to be a temporary arrangement, but Trevor’s father had failed to find another job, and now Trevor too was out of work. He spent his days playing table tennis in an unemployment centre.
In 1933, the number of unemployed in Britain reached three million, and it remained high until the outbreak of war. Alfred Smith, from south London, lost his job in 1935. Three years later, despite being in his mid-thirties, he was described in Picture Post magazine as having a lined face, sunken cheeks, and looking down as he walked – ‘the typical walk of the unemployed man’.
Alfred lived with his wife and three young children in a two-room flat, of which one of the rooms was partitioned. On a typical day, the family ate bread and margarine for breakfast, stew or boiled fish with potatoes and bread for dinner (the midday meal), and more bread and margarine in the evening. The Smiths rarely ate fresh fruit or vegetables – not because they were too expensive, but because they were less filling than bread and potatoes. Unemployed people in Britain were more likely to be malnourished than underfed.
In 1935, 45 per cent of British army recruits were considered unfit to serve. Five years later, when American journalist William Shirer was working as a special correspondent with the German armed forces, he was introduced to a group of British soldiers taken prisoner shortly before the Dunkirk evacuation. Describing them as a cheery lot (one said, ‘You know, you’re the first American I’ve ever seen in the flesh. Funny place to meet one, ain’t it?’), Shirer writes that what struck him most was ‘their poor physique’. The depression affected Germany and the United States with equal (if not greater) severity, but the young British male seems to have showed the effects most visibly. Military training had not, believed Shirer, made up for bad diet, and lack of fresh air and exercise.
George Orwell, that unsurpassed chronicler of British working-class life, noted that almost the worst evil of unemployment, beyond even financial hardship, was ‘the frightful feeling of impotence and despair’. Trevor, the seventeen-year-old from Wales who now spent his days playing table tennis, was a case in point. ‘I’m here every day at ten and play till dinner-time,’ he told W. F. Lestrange, ‘and there’s nothing to do in the afternoon, either, so I come up here and play whenever the table’s free. Ping-pong. Knocking little celluloid balls