— and his ‘ism’ — were, as his daughter had predicted, faced with antagonism from most (but not all) of the Labour Party, though this had as much to do with his disdainful treatment of his parliamentary colleagues and TU supporters as with his initial ‘betrayal’. Samuel Rich was amused to receive a ‘jeu d’esprit’ about MacDonald that a friend wrote and slipped in a Christmas card:
If Ramsay MacDonald, you still have brains that work
Not solely to commands from high finance … How it must chill your socialistic bones Seated upon your unsubstantial throne — A transient triumph — then the long alone — Sans friends, sans party, salary or loans …
History’s verdict has been kinder, more prepared to absolve MacDonald from conspiracy and self-aggrandisement, accepting to some extent his reading of the national interest, seeing little culpable substance in his faiblesse for eating cucumber sandwiches with and getting sentimental about aristocratic ladies, and finding the explanation for his actions in confusion, being out of touch, having an imperfect understanding (but who did not?) of economic forces, and few mechanisms at his disposal to influence those forces, and thus of clinging to outworn verities, of believing in socialism but having no plan for achieving it. In sum, being blinded by the blizzard that swept the world in which, to strain a metaphor, the windscreen wipers seemed to have frozen.
Could things have been different? Would a ‘Keynesian Revolution’, an idea which gained favour in the 1960s and ’70s, have saved the day? Such an ambitious ‘New Deal’ public works programme might at least have provided Britain with a creditable infrastructure of roads and bridges. But would it have solved the unemployment problem? Possibly back in 1929 when unemployment was around a million it could have been cut by 600,000, as Lloyd George pledged, the most astute historian of that proposed ‘revolution’ judges, but by 1931 the Labour government’s own two-year public works schemes had become operational, and unemployment remained obdurate in the face of the world slump. The theoretical basis of the ‘multiplier effect’ (whereby creating primary employment opportunities generates secondary or subsequent ones as a result of increased spending power) of such schemes on employment was imperfectly understood until the mid-1930s. At the time public works projects were advocated as being cheaper and more controllable than the dole, rather than because of ‘the beneficial repercussions that will result from the expenditure of the newly-employed men’s wages’ (though evidence to the Macmillan Committee had suggested something similar, as Bevin and McKenna’s enthusiasm showed). And, of course, those in the Labour Party who still imagined they were tramping along the long road to socialism noted that Keynes’ solutions were intended to make capitalism work more efficiently and humanely, not bring about its demise.
The month before Labour went down to an electoral ignominy from which it would not recover until 1945, the number of those out of work was the highest ever: 2,811,615.
SEVEN (Too Much) Time to Spare
If the hours which are designated as leisure time are an important part of the life of the community, they are an especially important part of the life of that portion of the community who happens to have no work to do. For a man who has a job, the day’s activities centre round that job. It takes the greatest share of his time. It eliminates the necessity of constant choices concerning what shall be done with his day. It provides him with the means of enjoying his spare time at the various forms of voluntary or commercial amusement fairly regularly and dressed in clothes of which he need not be ashamed.
With the man out of a job, it is different …
E. Wight Bakke, The Unemployed Man: A Social Study (1934)
He could make marvellous things with his hands. He once made a church from about five thousand matchsticks … I think it took him two years … He was always having to invent something … an alarm clock, that was a thing of the past, and he sat for weeks and weeks … fiddling with his tools and pieces of metal and we had a cuckoo clock … it occupied his mind for weeks.
Interview by Kate Nicholas with Mrs Bell, the daughter of a long-term unemployed Teesside man
‘What animals cause you the most worry?’ the unemployed Nottingham miner George Tomlinson once asked a gamekeeper: ‘I was thinking of stoats, weasels, foxes and their like. But he answered sourly, “miners”.’ Tomlinson ‘knew well enough what he meant, for the collier when he sets his hand to it is the most skilful of poachers. I loved to watch them go out in the evening, slipping merrily along a forest path [Tomlinson lived near Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest], single file like Indian braves but not a bit like Indians in their appearance. Old slouch hats, short coats with big bulging pockets, a cosh pulled down the back of the coat and sticking out above their heads.’
‘Rabbits were the thing! And a good dog was half the battle.’ George Bestford, an unemployed Durham miner whose father had come north when the Cornish mining industry collapsed, had ‘a good whippet! I think we’d have starved if it hadn’t been for the dog. Away he’d go and back with a rabbit. They always had the game keepers out and they were there watching to make sure you didn’t get any of their game … I was lucky because I was well in with a farmer and he used to let me have half what we caught on his land. So on a moonlit night — away with the dogs and catch a few rabbits! Some of the farmers were very good. They would give you some potatoes or a turnip. But some would give you nothing … We used to pinch off them.’
A rabbit for the pot would supplement the endless dole diet of bread and margarine, and suet: ‘Every miner’s house used suet. That was like the basic. Every day you’d have something with suet in for the main meal of the day. To fill you up. You’d buy a big piece of suet from the butcher’s for tuppence and every day you grated a bit of suet into the flour. Monday’s dinner was always a plain suet pudding with what was left from Sunday’s dinner. Another day was “pot pie” we called it. Then “Spotted Dick” with currants in it or you’d roll it out and put blackberries in the middle, tie a cloth around it and put it in the pan.’
It was not just rabbits that nature provided — or rather that the men took. Anything was fair game for scavenging for hungry families. ‘We used to live off the land for quite a number of years,’ explained a Derbyshire miner. ‘You had to … it were a matter of getting by. If we were hungry we used to go into the field with a bit of a broken knife and find pignuts and scrape them out and put a bit of salt on … we used to go round scrounging what we could get. If we saw a barrow full of peas, we’d come back with a jersey full of peas and that were it … we used to eat owt … We used to go out and get rabbits and anything, owt what we could catch … pigeons, pheasant and ducks off the canal … Sometimes we used to pull mangols [sic] and bring them ’ome and stew ’em … we had a gaddo [catapult], we got quite expert … wood pigeons, we used to wait for dusk for them to settle in the trees to roost and then we’d knock them out of the trees.’
In the mid-nineteenth century the political philosopher John Stuart Mill had claimed that allotments were ‘a contrivance to compensate the labourer for the insufficiency of his wages by giving him something else as a supplement to them’: a way, in fact, of ‘making people grow their own poor rate’. Little had changed nearly a hundred years later. The notion that ‘the hungry could grow their own foods and obtain a living from their own methods’ was a throwback to Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of the Civil War, but it gained a new relevance during the Depression: an allotment could provide potatoes, carrots, cabbages and other vegetables to eke out family meals. The campaign to make Britain more self-sufficient in food production during the First World War, when George V had directed that the geraniums planted around the Queen Victoria memorial opposite Buckingham Palace should be grubbed up and replaced with potatoes and cabbages, had resulted in an astonishing increase in the number of allotments. By 1918 something like 1.5 million allotments dug by a ‘new short-sleeved army numbering over 1,300,000 men and women’ were producing over two million tons of vegetables. The return to its former owners of land requisitioned by the government during the war and the spread of the suburbs, where most