nets for 120 rabbits.’
Dick Beavis, a Durham miner, ‘spent a lot of time poaching in the 1930s. I was the “knitter”. I used to knit all the nets for the lads. Put them over holes … and put the ferret in. I found that more interesting than pit heaps. And that’s how I learned my political thoughts. Well whose was the land? You go on all these neglected heaps. I used to think what harm are we doing? We were caught by the police and when we received our summons it was said we were catching “conies”. We didn’t know what that was. (It wasn’t until later in my life that I discovered that “conies” is the old English word for rabbits. Rabbits are classified as vermin — and so you could say you were catching vermin — but “conies” is not.) So the magistrate looked at me and he said, “Where did you get them?” And I said “I found them, Sir.” Well, he said he’d never heard such a bloody tale and fined us all.’
A poacher might make as much as eight shillings in a good night, though often he would not make more than three shillings, and sometimes nothing at all. Others might stay on the right side of the law by buying rabbits from a farmer for sixpence, skinning them and selling the skins for ninepence and the meat for fourpence. Selling coal or garden produce could also raise a few pence. Some men set up as cobblers, cutting up old rubber tyres to resole boots, mended clocks, soldered saucepans and kettles, made rag, or peg, rugs, ‘did carpentry in their back yards or kitchen, making sideboards out of orange boxes stained brown with permanganate of potash, while their wives cook and tend the children in restricted places round the fireplace, uncomplaining because they realise the necessity of providing some occupation for their husbands in order to keep them even moderately content’. An unemployed man might offer to tend the garden, paint the house or wallpaper a room for a better-off neighbour in exchange for money or goods — a side of bacon, maybe, or a joint of meat. The trouble was that there weren’t many — if any — better-off neighbours in most of the depressed areas: perhaps a colliery manager, a works foreman, or a moderately prosperous farmer nearby. But most of the men and women in the towns and villages would be in the same situation: no work, not enough money to live on, certainly not to pay for services.
At harvest time or in the shooting or hunting season it might be possible for those men within walking distance of farms or orchards or country estates to get a few days’ work. Often this did not bring in much money, ‘but you used to get a drink of beer and that while you were in the fields’, and hop-picking drew numbers of East Enders to Kent — as it always had. Some made a bit on the side in less obvious ways, breeding rats, mice or ferrets for scientific research or to sell to London Zoo to feed the snakes — though mice ‘had to be alive when they got there or they would not pay for them’. A box of five hundred mice would earn a postal order for around thirty shillings — a tidy sum when the dole for a family with two children was around twenty-eight shillings a week — though collecting five hundred mice and keeping them alive must have been a real team effort.
Women might take in dressmaking, mending or washing, bake bread or cakes, or cook ‘potato plates’ (scraps of meat sandwiched between two layers of potato) to sell, make toffee or jam, knit or crochet. All these activities assumed not only a few coppers to buy the materials, but also a local market that was better placed financially than the ‘petty capitalist’. Some families, already living in cramped accommodation, would double up even more and take in a lodger to help make ends meet — or even ‘hot sheet’: an Irishwoman in the mining village of Chopwell in County Durham ‘had pitmen who slept in the beds during the day and she had men who worked in the coke yard during the night. On different shifts … when one would get out of bed, the other would go in.’
Enterprise had its price. The Means Test empowered inspectors to take account of all earnings, no matter how paltry. In March 1934 The Times reported that ‘In Durham villages one sees that men are genuinely fearful of taking an odd job to earn a shilling or two, doubtful whether their weekly means of livelihood will be cut down if they are found to be keeping a few hens.’ Although the newspaper reported that ‘The policy … is to make no deductions for paid earnings of this sort; on the contrary, they will encourage them,’ it admitted that ‘Knowledge has not yet filtered through to the men, and because all depends on their Dole they take no risks.’ Indeed, the Society of Friends made a point of getting ‘a clear statement from the Ministry of Labour that the small amount of produce which a man could sell from his allotment would not affect the amount of his dole. This was a great gain (even although the feeling of suspicion on this point ceased only very slowly).’
A ‘worthy woman in Merthyr, who had kept a bakery’ told an American sociologist who came to Britain in June 1931 to study the effects of unemployment that ‘she had wanted the yard wall of her bakery whitewashed and seeing that there were 6,000 unemployed men walking about Merthyr, she had thought that it would be a good idea to ask one of them to do it in return for a few shillings. She asked one after another, but all refused; they said they “might be seen”. Eventually she promised a man that if he would do it, she would undertake to let no one into the yard while he was at work and to keep the gate barred. On that condition she got it done. She then thought she would get one of them to putty the lights on the bakehouse roof. But the roof allowed no hiding place while he did the work; so no one would do it … To be “seen” earning a shilling is a terrifying prospect. The regulations may provide for such things, but the unemployed man does not know what the regulations are, and the last thing he wants is to stir up mud.’ And there were always neighbours who were quick to make allegations of ‘benefit fraud’ if they suspected someone in receipt of dole was making a bit on the side. In Greenwich anonymous letters arrived at the benefit office at the rate of two a day, snitching on those the writers thought might be cheating.
In some ways the first weeks after a man lost his job were the easiest: there could be a sense of release, something of a holiday feeling after the tyranny of the pit or factory. The initial days would be filled with the search for work. The Labour Exchange wasn’t considered much help. Most jobs were obtained by someone ‘speaking for you’, a relative or friend already in work who might be able to put in a good word. There was no legal requirement for employers to notify the ‘Labour’ of any work they might have, and the general view of the unemployed was that employers only used it as a place of last resort, when they were offering worthless jobs no one wanted. And if a man refused such a job when offered it by the Labour Exchange, he lost his entitlement to the dole for six weeks. Across the country, only one vacancy in five was filled through the Labour Exchanges in the 1930s. This is perhaps not surprising at a time when there was such a pool of men seeking work that there was no point in wasting time with the paperwork required by the Labour Exchange.
Believing that finding work was ‘down to me’, most men would trudge for miles each day from place to place in search of a job, following up leads that led nowhere. ‘It became quite customary,’ Wal Hannington observed, ‘to find men walking miles from their own district, such as from Halifax to Huddersfield, in search of work, whilst men from Huddersfield would walk to Halifax in [the] search for work — often passing each other on the road.’ After a few weeks or even months of this dispiriting failure it would become apparent that there just weren’t any jobs to be had locally, and this was when some men from the valleys and the smoke-filled towns would go ‘on the tramp’, moving from place to place in search of work.
‘On the main roads leading from the coalfields to the big towns — particularly the Bath road leading from South Wales to London’, Hannington saw ‘almost any day hundreds of men, footsore and weary … trudging towards London having left their families at the mercy of the Boards of Guardians’. But most of the men on the road looking for work in the 1930s were probably young and single. John Brown was one. He had lost his job in the docks and, aged nineteen, left his home in South Shields and took a journey round England that was as extensive as J.B. Priestley’s, if less salubrious. From South Shields he and a companion scrambled aboard a lorry bound for Newcastle, from there to York, then hearing about the possibility of a job, Brown managed to get a lift to Salford, then he tried his luck in Liverpool, Grantham, Reading, then Basingstoke, from where he walked to Guildford, where he managed to get a few hours’ work painting some railings round a bungalow. Then it was on the road again, with a lift to Winchester, then on to Southampton, where he went round the shopkeepers asking for a ‘pennyworth