from Dover to Dumfries by way of Bath, Worcester, Shrewsbury and London, where he found work for a bit. Sometimes alone, sometimes with companions — including a young woman, Hilda, who had been sacked from her job as a parlourmaid and had been sleeping out in London parks until Brown took her under his wing, he walked, hitched lifts on lorries, crawled under tarpaulins when the lorry driver was taking a break, and once was offered a lift in a private car. He slept mainly in ‘spikes’, the casual wards of workhouses, which varied hugely: the one at Winchester was particularly highly spoken of, but others were considered ‘not fit to live in’, with dirty sheets and blankets, and infestations of lice and nits. He passed nights lying on potato sacks in barns, or under hedges, and when he was temporarily in funds he would stay in cheap ‘model’ lodging house, or hostels run by such philanthropic organisations as the Salvation Army or the Church Army.
Food was meagre workhouse rations such as skilly (thin oatmeal gruel that must have brought Oliver Twist to mind, though this was officially abolished in 1931, and meat and vegetables added to the diet), usually given in exchange for work such as chopping wood or breaking stones (though stone-breaking was discontinued by the same order in 1931), sometimes bread and a cup of tea, maybe a cold sausage given by someone whose windows or car Brown had cleaned, or fence he’d repaired, or a cheap meal in a café which the grapevine that ran between ‘roadsters’ recommended, like Nash’s in Southampton where a three-course meal could be got for a tanner (sixpence). Brown took whatever work he could get, including bricklaying, washing up and handing out cinema flyers. He discovered that blankets tucked in crosswise, sometimes on a necessarily shared bed, provided the maximum warmth, and learned always to sleep with his trousers under his pillow and the legs of the bed in his boots to prevent them being stolen in the night. But finally, after many months on the road, he grew ‘weary of the “spikes” and “models” and barns. The “romance of the road” had turned out to be a sordid tragedy of bread, weak tea, blankets, washing and baked clothes.’ John Brown went back home to South Shields — but still no job.
Max Cohen, a frequently unemployed London cabinet-maker, offered a cigarette in a café in the Strand to an unkempt-looking man, his clothes ragged and shabby, his shoes tied up with string, the holes stuffed with newspaper, who told him, ‘I tramped the country, lookin’ for work … But yer can’t get any work — nowhere! I tried — honest. I’ve been out six years … never go on the road. You’ll be driven from one town to ‘nother. A vagrant, that’s what they calls you, a vagrant. Y’ave to go to the spike, else you’ll get locked up’ — ‘sleeping out’ was an offence under the 1824 Vagrancy Act until it was modified in 1935.
It is not possible to know precisely how many people ‘on the tramp’ in the 1930s were unemployed men seeking work, and how many were vagrants, but on the night of 21 May 1932, at the depth of the Depression, 16,911 men were sleeping in casual wards; the number had been 3,188 in May 1920 and 10,217 in December 1929.
‘It is when a man settles down to being unemployed,’ wrote the Reverend Cecil Northcott of his experience in Lancashire, ‘that he finds it difficult to know how to fill his time. Beyond the weekly events of signing on and drawing the dole there is not much regulation to his life.’ The clergyman spoke of ‘helping his missus … becoming a permanent occupation. The brass round the kitchen range and anything that shines comes within the duties of the man’; of the fathers who took their children in the pram to the park, ‘the same collection of men day after day’; of the ‘handicrafts [that] have become so important in many unemployed homes’ — an Elizabethan galleon made out of a block of wood, for example.
Joseph Farrington’s father, an unemployed iron-moulder, had the skills of a sailor, which was how he started his working life. He would sew two canvas bags together to make a floor covering, or ‘cut up different coloured coats and make a pattern. It was as though he’d bought it in a shop when he’d finished it. He could knit … he could do anything. He even used to cook the meals because my mother couldn’t cook. And he made toys like so many unemployed men, wooden trains, hobby horses, dolls for the girls out of paper and packing and put faces on with indelible pencil. He was clever at making things with newspaper. He’d make a tablecloth with a pattern — just by tearing.’ Arnold Deane, an unemployed Oldham man, made a magnificent fifteen-inch model of a hotel, complete with elegant grounds and railings, using cardboard and beads. It had 176 windows, a ballroom, and was lit by electric light. The construction took him two months and was photographed for the local paper.
John Brierley’s father Walter, an unemployed Derbyshire miner, was not able to fill his time so productively. He ‘felt ill at ease … when he was on the dole [from 1931 to 1935]. Hanging about the house and garden when other men were working and the women busy made him feel particularly inadequate. To make matters worse he was clumsy with his hands and could no more build a wall, or put up a fowl house than “fly in the air” my mother said. The tasks he was set required no skill, collecting wood or shovelling coal or muck. If he was set to weed, he would uproot the wrong plants, would knock cups against the taps when washing up, his head probably full of his latest piece of poetry or writing’ — one of which, fortunately, found a publisher as a novel, Means Test Man, in 1935.
To the observer it might look as it did to the poet T.S. Eliot, in whose poem ‘The Rock’ the voices of the unemployed intone: ‘No man has hired us/With pocketed hands/And lowered faces/We stand about in open places.’ But in fact standing about in open places could be a necessary social activity, since there was no longer the camaraderie of work, or the money to go to the pub to meet your mates. Convictions for drunken behaviour fell by more than half between 1927 and 1932, for though the solace of a warm pub and the oblivion of drink might seem an appealing way of blotting out reality, the high price of a pint of beer (a pint of mild cost fivepence and one of strong ale elevenpence) discouraged it, though Jack Shaw reported that men in Ashton-under-Lyne ‘used to go round the pubs and off licences and pinch some bottles. There were a penny [deposit] on a bottle. They’d pinch half a dozen and go round and get sixpence and get a gill [half a pint]. You could sit in all night with a gill.’
If they couldn’t drink, men might still smoke. ‘You could buy five Woodbines for twopence. But that’s no bargain if you haven’t got twopence. You’d go for maybe a week without a single drag and then when you were given a cigarette, you inhaled so deeply you’d have expected to see the smoke coming out through the laceholes of your boots.’ Men would take one drag on a cigarette, pinch it and put it in their pockets for later, or go round the streets picking up butts, which they would mix up together and make their own cigarettes, ‘So they were smoking for nothing.’ Loose tobacco cost around fourpence an ounce, and this might well be supplemented by dried tea leaves either in a rollup or a pipe.
It seemed that given an extremely limited amount of disposable income (if any at all), an unemployed man would rather spend it on gambling than smoking or drinking: after all, putting a bet on might prove to be the down-payment on a better life. Street gambling was illegal, but that didn’t stop it: men would be posted as lookouts while their friends laid bets on pretty much anything. Horseracing was a subject of great interest — though the interest was not in the horses themselves, but in betting on them, which formed a link between the unemployed and the ‘sport of kings’. ‘It’s always been a miner’s privilege, a little bit on the horses, the dogs.’ ‘Blokes used to earn half a crown in the pound as a bookies’ runner. There were no licensed bookies. The runners used to stand in the doorways of pubs or else the ginnel [alleyway] of some place. Some of the blokes would go round the mills and pubs and houses. Anything to get a bet.’
Men would not just play billiards, they would gamble on it, a penny or tuppence for the winner. They’d play cards for money, one of their number earning tuppence or threepence a time for ‘Keeping Konk’ (lookout). Pitch and toss (throwing a coin so it landed as close as possible to a wall) and crown and anchor (a dice game) were almost universal pastimes. ‘In most back alleys and lanes young and old men would play their few pennies away on Sunday mornings.’ Sometimes bigger events were organised, such as those on a secluded beach at South Shields to which men would come from as far afield as Newcastle or Sunderland, and the bookies came too. While some played for pence, others graduated to ‘the bigger school’, where the stakes for pitch and toss could be raised to five shillings