you took it out. We used to play with money, when we had money.’ Jack Shaw and his friends would bet on a ‘peggy’, a piece of wood that one player would hit and the others had to guess how far away it had landed. Once they had to jump the local canal to get away from the police, and that in itself soon became an activity to bet on.
‘They’d gamble on anything. It was the only way they had of getting a few bob. A lot of it was “Why have dry bread when I might have a bit of bread and jam?”’ If life seemed an irrational lottery when it came to getting a job, why not take part in a more enjoyable lottery in the hope of turning your luck round, or at least having some control over the choices you made? ‘They [the unemployed] have given up all hope of earning anything by work,’ Fenner Brockway was told, ‘and hundreds of them put all their hopes on horses and dogs and football matches. They put 1s. on. They may lose, they go short on food; but they’re so used to going short that they don’t trouble much … Betting … means excitement in the midst of monotony … You may deplore the betting mania, but you can’t be surprised. What other excitement, what other chance, does existence offer these men?’
Men would keep homing pigeons, as long as they could afford to feed them (and would often bet on races between them), or greyhounds, which ‘often received as much attention as any child’. More likely, they would earn a few shillings exercising the greyhounds of an employed friend. Many sports offered reduced rates for the unemployed: bowls or billiards for a penny. Young men would play football on a piece of waste ground — games that would sometimes last all day, with a leather ball they’d pooled their coppers to buy if they were lucky, a blown-up pig’s bladder or caps sewn together if they weren’t — and men of all ages would go to football matches. In Liverpool in the early 1930s the average gate was 30,000 when Liverpool or Everton were playing, and most professional football clubs would admit the unemployed for half price at half time and free ten minutes before the final whistle. And there was always the opportunity to try to make a few pennies by entertaining the crowds as they queued to get in, singing, juggling, playing a tin whistle, doing handstands.
Boxing was another popular sport. William Saunders would ‘go round the boxing booths in the fairgrounds, we used to get £1 for standing up so many rounds’. Some of George Bestford’s unemployed friends in Newcastle would volunteer for three-round contests: ‘Some of them could box and others couldn’t. Those who couldn’t just received a good punching-up and the fee which was paid to the boxers was five shillings, out of which they paid two shillings to the seconds. One night there was a man who was so weak and tired it was obvious he should not have been in the ring. The crowd was just beginning to voice their disapproval of his poor show when the referee waved them to be quiet and explained that the man was on the road, had not had anything to eat all day, but had come along to the Hall and volunteered to fight.’ But as for the unemployed taking up tennis, badminton, cricket or golf to fill their empty hours, these were, a report on Glasgow’s unemployed youth concluded, ‘the pursuits of another class’.
The day of one young unemployed man from Lancashire was not untypical. He was ‘one of a gang [who] used to stay in bed late in the mornings so as not to need breakfast. I used to have a cup of tea, and then we would all go down to the library and read the papers. Then we went home for a bit of lunch, and then we met again at the billiard hall where you could watch and play for nothing. Then back to tea and to watch billiards again. In the evening we used to go to the pictures. That’s how we spent the dole money. In the end, I thought I’d go mad if I went on like this … in the end I joined a PT Class. But I found it made me so hungry I couldn’t go on with it.’
The public library was somewhere warm to sit, and scouring the ‘situations vacant’ pages of local newspapers was a daily — if usually frustrating — thing to do, as was checking the racing pages, if the librarian hadn’t removed them to discourage such undesirable activities, as quite a number did. The journalist and writer Paul Johnson recalled that the librarian at his local library in Tunstall in the Potteries, the tyrannical Miss Cartlich, was unsympathetic to the unemployed, who ‘had no money — literally not a penny — for any form of entertainment and therefore could only walk the streets aimlessly. The reading room of the public library was thus a winter garden of rest.’ But woe betide any man who fell asleep, for then Miss Cartlich would ‘wake them up and escort them off the premises, if necessary taking a hand to their collar. “Out, out, out!” she would say. “I’ll have no men here snoring in my reading room.” If they could stay awake, however, and pretend to be reading, the men were safe.’
Many unemployed men found they developed — or now had the time to indulge — a taste for reading books. ‘Thousands used the Public Library for the first time,’ averred John Brown who read Shaw’s plays, Marx, Engels, ‘the philosophers of Greece and Rome’ and a great deal of fiction in his local South Shields library. ‘It was nothing uncommon to come across men in very shabby clothes kneeling in front of the philosophy or economics shelves.’ Jack Jones, a Welsh miner, wrote three articles about unemployment for Time and Tide in 1931 in which he maintained that ‘people were reading for dear life now that they had no work to go to. I tried to show how the depressed mining communities were trying to read themselves through the Depression, and how this was sending borrowing figures in the libraries such as Pontypridd, where there were six and a half thousand unemployed, up and up by scores of thousands.’ However, in Deptford in South London the Pilgrim Trust noticed that when unemployment was high, borrowing from the public libraries declined, since all men’s energies were focused on getting work, and to them reading was associated with well-earned leisure.
In Greenwich, E. Wight Bakke found that among those unemployed who obligingly filled in diaries of how they spent their days for him, ‘an average of 10.7 hours a week was spent in reading’. While more than half that time was devoted to newspapers and magazines, the rest was taken up by books borrowed from the free public libraries. Most of these were fiction: Bakke found little evidence that the men — and presumably the women either — were particularly interested in reading books on ‘Socialism or Trade Unionism or other works on economic and political theory’. But some were: an ex-army officer who had been unable to find other work ‘joined the public library and read numerous books. I read no fiction at all, but turned my attention to many other subjects, astronomy, physics, economics, history, photography, psychology, and read books on psychic phenomena, the Yogi culture, and other things. I went to lectures by eminent people of all kinds, statesmen and politicians, with the general idea of getting the world and its affairs in perspective and finding out what was wrong with everything.’
One ‘brilliantly successful experiment’ was the translation of an act of a Shakespeare play into Tyneside dialect in a Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) class, while a young unemployed letterpress operator filled his long days by sitting in the parks, swimming or talking with ‘other fellows who are out. I am a member of a library and spend most evenings reading until midnight. I find it the only thing that can take my mind off loneliness, poverty and hunger. My choice varies: Fiction — Priestley, Dell, Orczy, Tolstoy etc. (Russian writers are my favourite.) Educational and interest subjects — philosophy, psychology, travel, Socialism, economics etc.’ George Tomlinson read The Canterbury Tales, Lamb’s Essays, Darwin’s Origin of Species, Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘or anything that I could get hold of’ as he sat on his toolbox at the pit head having volunteered for a weekend repair shift. An unemployed miner in the Rhondda was an avid reader of Balzac, and it was ‘during my dole days’ that Donald Kear in the Forest of Dean ‘became a compulsive reader. I read anything and everything that came my way, from Jack London and Anatole France to medical dictionaries and odd volumes of electrical engineering encyclopaedias.’ Kear also listened to ‘weekly talks on the radio addressed to the unemployed by a man called John Hilton’. Hilton, a working-class autodidact with a trade union background, was appointed the first Montagu Burton Professor of Industrial Relations at Cambridge in 1931. He was a prolific journalist and broadcaster with an informed and compassionate interest in the plight of the poor. ‘I came to have a great respect and liking for him,’ recalled Kear. ‘His was the only sympathetic voice the unemployed ever heard. He recommended reading as a pastime for us. “Long way ahead in the future,” he said, “someone will want to know where you got your know-how, your handiness with words,