the Ashington Group contributed some pictures to what the art historian Anthony Blunt called ‘the most important event of the year from the point of view of English Art’, organised by the Artists International Association.
‘Unprofessional Painting’ was the title of an exhibition held at Gateshead in October 1938 to which the Ashington Group sent work. ‘They Paint Their Own Lives’ was another, held in Mansfield, Nottingham, six months later, and indeed the corpus of work did depict ‘ordinary life’: a miner reading a newspaper, a Bedlington terrier — ‘Miners are keen on Bedlingtons,’ explained a critic in The Listener — miners with their pigeons, playing dominoes, having Sunday dinner with their families, poaching. But most were of men at work: down the pits hacking coal, in the pit-head baths, eating their ‘bait’ (packed lunch). In the early days the men sold their pictures for a pound or thirty shillings, ‘to get money for painting materials’, and found themselves regarded as representatives of the British ‘social realist’ school. But ‘mining pictures would not be welcome to hang on the walls at home; landscapes would be considered more suitable. The women had had enough of mining dominating their lives, and frequently, when there were several workers in the house, reducing them to slaves. Many women were never able to get to bed except at weekends and just dozed in a chair to fit in with the different shifts.’
Such voluntary efforts to help the unemployed (and integrate them into the life of the community, since most clubs and classes were open to all, in work or not) might be rightly admired for what they achieved, but there was a suspicion expressed by the trade union movement that occupational centres would produce semi-trained craftsmen who could be used to undercut existing wage rates, and in some areas pressure was put on unemployed union members not to join them. Others regarded the occupational clubs as little more than opium for the masses, handed down by a government that had no policies to end unemployment. Wal Hannington of the NUWM sneered at ‘how craftily the ruling class, by evoking the sentiment of charity, have sought to cover up their sins and omissions in the treatment of the unemployed’, and pointed out that the ‘honoured gentlemen’ of the NCCS had never joined in the demand for the abolition of the Means Test or the restoration of benefit cuts. Frank Forster, an intermittently unemployed casual labourer from Saltney in Cheshire, thought that ‘the idea behind … the BBC broadcasting of morning talks to Unemployed Clubs … seems to be an attempt to keep those who attend the clubs quiet. To dope them … They hand out … what will keep them out of mischief. They must place their existence on a charitable basis, provide them with voluntarily contributed clubs and games etc … All this to prevent them from falling into the hands of Communists.’ George Orwell was of much the same mind, arguing in The Road to Wigan Pier that the centres were ‘simply a device to keep the unemployed quiet and give them an illusion that something is being done for them’, though he conceded that what he considered the ‘rubbish’ the centres offered was probably better for the unemployed man ‘than for years upon end he should do absolutely nothing’.
The educational and occupational activities at the unemployment centres may have seemed like splendid opportunities to those offering them, but from those on the receiving end, enthusiasm was not always so evident. Since club leaders were poorly paid, suitable people could be hard to find, and a great deal depended on their vitality and organisational skills. Such activities as the centres offered tended to appeal more to the young than to the older long-term unemployed, and class numbers dropped in some districts. ‘What we unemployed could do with is a little less of education and a little more of entertainment,’ suggested one of their nameless number in a letter to the Spectator in March 1933, while the anguish of an out-of-work miner permeates a documentary film made in 1932, when unemployment stood at over two million: ‘We can do physical jerks, grow cabbages until we’re blue in the face, but it’s not paid work. It’s just killing time. It’s not the real work that we want.’
The British working man, employed or unemployed, is very conservative in his allegiance to law, order and tradition. He hates the idea of a Red Revolution, which he knows would make an awful mess … Communist visitors in the distressed areas get short shrift from men standing unemployed round disused pit-heads.
Sir Philip Gibbs, Ordeal in England (1937)
No saviour from on high delivers,
No trust have we in prince or peer.
Our own right hand the chains must sever …
From the third verse of ‘The Internationale’
On the first day of 1932 the son and heir of the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam attained his majority. To celebrate, beacons were lit on the hills surrounding the family’s magnificent house, Wentworth. Built in the 1720s, the largest privately owned house in Britain, it had a room for every day of the year, and five miles of corridors. In front of the façade, which was the longest in Europe, the Elsecar Colliery Brass Band struck up, and a crowd 40,000 strong joined in singing ‘Londonderry Air’ and ‘We Won’t Come Home Till Morning’. And when the birthday boy, Lord Milton, drove with his father in the first car of a fleet of yellow Rolls-Royces on a ceremonial tour of his estates, the eight-mile route was lined with estate workers and the men who worked in the Fitzwilliams’ mines (on short time, given the economic climate) and their families, all waving and cheering, delighted that they had each been given a day’s paid holiday and a freshly issued ten-shilling note. At various stops en route Lord Milton would open proceedings by cutting a ribbon with a gold pocket knife his father had given him for his birthday, and at the New Stubbin pit the Secretary of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association stepped forward to thank the Earl and applaud him as ‘the finest idealistic employer in the country today’, a mine-owner who had so arranged things that not a single man had been dismissed despite the slump, and shifts had been arranged so the men received ‘the fullest benefits of the Unemployment Act’.
The Wentworth miners might have doffed their flat caps and have had reason to feel grateful towards their employers, but in the 1930s most coalminers — the ‘sort of grimy caryatid[s] upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported’, according to George Orwell, had both particular grievances and a particular militancy. The 1926 General Strike left a bitter legacy for men working in the Welsh Valleys, the Scottish, Durham and East Midlands coalfields, most of whom stayed on strike for months after the nine-day TUC strike collapsed. As a result many were blacklisted by the colliery owners, and never worked again. Wages were cut, hours extended and working conditions deteriorated. Employment in the coal industry fell consistently, from 218,000 in 1926 to 136,000 in 1932, and across Wales as a whole unemployment averaged 39 per cent.
At a time when over 40 per cent of the miners were out of work in the Yorkshire coalfields, a local headmaster would reputedly admonish pupils who answered his question, ‘Now then, boy, what are you going to do when you leave school?’ ‘We’re going to pit, sir,’ with ‘’Cos tha’ strong in the arm and weak in the head.’ Coalmining remained probably the most dangerous occupation in Britain. A West Lothian pit was known locally as ‘the Dardanelles pit. It was named that because of the high accident rate — they compared it with the slaughter at the Dardanelles’ in the First World War. There was widespread bitterness about the lack of compliance — since compliance invariably cost money — that many mine-owners accorded to health and safety regulations, and in the early hours of 22 September 1934 one of the worst mining disasters in British history occurred at Gresford colliery near Wrexham in North Wales, when an explosion ripped through part of the mine known as the Dennis section during the night shift. Although six miners managed to crawl to safety, three men were killed in the rescue attempt, and on the following night, Sunday, 23 September, it was agreed that the mine should be sealed with the dead miners entombed inside. A further violent explosion a couple of days later killed a surface worker: the disaster had claimed a total of 266 lives.
At the subsequent inquiry, Sir Stafford Cripps agreed to represent the mineworkers’ union pro bono. Despite the Labour lawyer’s relentless, technically informed questioning (Cripps had read chemistry