by Hilda Newman
That should have been the end of the matter but the story leaked out to the newspapers – probably because the Prince of Wales was involved – and the colonel was dismissed from the army. Facing financial and social ruin, he sued all the gentlemen present – including the Prince and the Earl of Coventry – for libel. The case ended up in the High Court in London, with both Edward and Lord Coventry forced to give evidence on oath. Today, perhaps, such a case would attract little attention and no real damage would be done. But back then it caused a storm of scandal and, following on from Lord Deerhurst’s very public bankruptcy, once again dragged the Coventry name through the mud.
Nor were relations inside the family any better. One of the great rooms at Croome Court – one that I would come to know well and where the future Countess of Coventry would teach me a new skill – was the Tapestry Room. Its walls were hung with the most gorgeous huge cloths of green damask, and the matching sofa and chairs were worth a small fortune. As the cost of maintaining Croome Court and the Estate grew and grew – annual expenditure on drainage for the parkland topped £1,000 (a whopping £200,000 today) - the Earl decided he had to part with some of its assets: the contents of the Tapestry Room were catalogued and sold off to a French collector for £50,000 – a handy £10 million today.
But the Earl’s son was furious. The dissolute Lord Deerhurst was outraged that what he regarded as part of his inheritance should be so snatched away from him. After lengthy and acrimonious negotiations – which would drag on until 1920 – Deerhurst was allocated £5,000 from the money, with the balance to be invested for the benefit of the Coventry family (in other words, for him). All of this was once again played out, ignominiously, in public.
I sometimes wonder if my parents ever saw the reports of these scandals. Dad was a traditional working man – not particularly political, but Labour if anything – and he read the traditional working-man’s newspaper, the Daily Mirror. It must have covered the various unfolding embarrassments but I don’t recall anyone ever talking about them in our little home. Then again, times were different back then: somehow, the rules were different for rich and poor. We may have had little money but we were – and were expected to be – respectable. No dissolute lifestyle (I doubt we would have recognised the word!) for us: we never gambled anything more than a penny – at most – on a whist drive at the British Legion. And we’d been brought up in that solid, respectable belief that drink was a mocker of fools and led to bad ways. But the aristocracy? Well, it was different for them: somehow the sort of idle, even debauched, life they led was tolerated – was even expected. After all, they were the gentry. All in all, if Dad ever read about the scandals, he either dismissed them or didn’t associate them with the family I was about to join and the life I was about to live.
Chapter Three
Apprenticeship
They called them The Hungry Thirties. A decade of financial crises, ever-rising unemployment, confusion, anger, a growing distrust of politicians and, as the years wore on, the looming shadow of another world war. ‘Locust years’, ‘a dark tunnel’, ‘the Devil’s Decade’ – those were some of the phrases used back then. And time has done nothing to change the image of the 1930s. And always, always, throughout the length and breadth of the land, there was hunger.
We need, I think, to stop for a moment and talk about money because money was, of course, very different then to what it is now: not just in what it could buy (if you had it) but the actual money – coins and notes – was a whole different system to the one which almost all of you will have grown up with. I suppose I’m one of the few people still alive who can remember all the various coins we used then. So before their names – still romantic sounding to me – slip from the grasp of memory, I should tell you what was what.
Of course, the pound was still the basic unit of currency. But in those pre-decimal days there weren’t 100 pennies in a pound: there were 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound, which meant that a pound was made up of 240 pennies. I suppose that must sound terribly complicated to a generation – possibly two or three – brought up on the simplicity of our current coinage but, to us, it was as natural as the air we breathed. And at school when we learned our times table – always chanting it together until we knew it off by heart – we went up to 12 times 12 as a matter of routine. These days, when I fish in my purse for a coin and pull out a penny, it seems terribly small and insignificant because, back when I was growing up, a penny was a big, heavy round coin – it felt solid and reassuring in your pocket – nearly an inch and a half (I suppose you would say 30 millimetres) and made of good English brass.
The halfpenny was, as its name suggests, worth half of one penny but we also had farthings. There were four farthings in a penny and, for a child, a farthing was a very valuable commodity: one could buy you two big gobstoppers, a sweet guaranteed to keep you occupied for up to half an hour (if you were careful how you sucked it), or perhaps a lovely, chewy piece of liquorice. And if you happened to have four farthings – a whole penny – why, then you had a whole afternoon’s confectionary delight to look forward to! As a child, a penny was a real treasure – and, like most families of our class, the pennies were counted and saved and looked after very, very carefully. Above a penny was a thruppeny bit: a solid-brass, 12-sided coin (though there were also some older silver thruppeny coins), worth three whole pennies, but which always seemed like the ugly duckling of our coinage. Sixpences were silver and everyone new them as a ‘tanner’. A shilling was a ‘bob’, a two-shilling coin a florin (or, to us, a ‘two-bob bit’). We even had another coin worth two shillings and sixpence called ‘half a crown’.
Our notes, too, were different. Today we hand over five-pound notes without thinking much: they’re almost a basic place to start and people are beginning to talk about phasing out the pound coin. That would have been unthinkable to us back then – not that we had pound coins. Paper money started with the ten-shilling note – with lovely brown-coloured engraving on it. Pound notes were green and, at least until the middle of the decade, five-pound notes were big white sheets of what felt like parchment. Not that we ever saw many five-pound (or even one-pound) notes: those were something from storybooks and comics, used by rich people, not ordinary folk living in little terraced cottages.
As this chapter goes on, we’ll be talking about money quite a bit, so I need to explain the way money was written down. One penny was 1d; one shilling was 1s – so when you see figures like £1 17s 6d you will (I hope) know what I’m talking about.
It’s easy for me to sit back and tell you that money was worth a lot more in those days: certainly a shilling – never mind a whole pound – would be enough to buy a bar of soap or a small loaf of bread, or a even cinema ticket. But clever people have worked out a way of translating the real value of a pound or a shilling in the 1930s compared to what it would buy today. There are, in fact, a whole set of different answers, depending on what is used as the yardstick but, for the purposes of this book, I’ve gone with the one that compares average weekly wages now and back then – although, as we’ll see, that wasn’t the whole story, not by a long chalk. Today the average wage before tax for a working man or woman is £442 per week; at the start of the 1930s it was between £3 and £4 – so you can see that we have to multiply the figures by at least 110 to get some idea of what they meant to ordinary families. In those days wages were paid – at least to the vast number of ordinary folk – in cash, in a little brown envelope at the end of every week. Most people didn’t have bank accounts (although they might have had a savings book at the post office): bank accounts were for what we would today call white-collar workers – although back then they were known as black-coat employees, on account of the smart black jackets they would have to wear.
When the weekly wage came into the home, it was routinely handed over by the man of the house to his wife (although, for the less respectable families – and respectability was the big class divide in working families – so
me of it might have gone missing in the pub by the time the man rolled home on a Friday night). For good, honest, decent families (as we thought of ourselves), the woman would open the envelope and often divide up the wages into separate tins – one each for rent, food, gas, coal and so on: all the bills that would have to be paid – again in cash – mostly on a weekly basis. One of a wife’s jobs was to run the weekly housekeeping budget, often scrimping and saving on one or other of the tins to ensure that the most pressing bills would be paid on time.
There were no credit cards, of course, but many families existed on ‘tick’ – credit at the local shop, or purchases of clothing from catalogue firms on the basis of a few pennies, or a shilling, a week. ‘Neither a lender nor a borrower be’ was, in respectable homes, something of a watch word.
For many households – and mine was one of them – there was a strict separation of duties between man and wife. It was the man’s role to go out to work and bring home enough to support the whole family. A woman’s work was largely in the home – and what work it was. The fire grate or the oven might be black-leaded every week, to keep it immaculate and respectably shiny. The front step had to be scrubbed with a brush and a bar of soap – if your front step wasn’t spotless, neighbours would know that the family living inside was on the slide. The weekly washing was a laborious and time-consuming chore, with a peggy stick to stir the clothes in a big bucket of soapy water and a wooden washboard to scrub them. There was no electricity, so ironing had to be done with a heavy piece of cast iron heated up on the coal fire. Baking day was generally a Wednesday – again using a big old coal-or gas-fired stove. I don’t know anyone today who regularly bakes their own bread – everyone seems to go to the supermarket and buy it pre-sliced as well as ready-made – but back then most wives and mothers would never dream of buying a loaf: not only was it an expensive luxury – and believe me we didn’t have the money for those – but it was just another of the things expected of the woman of the house.
Children were expected to help too. All of us in the Mulley household went to the local school in Stamford but we were expected to help with the bed-making and the cleaning and generally make Mum’s life a little easier.
Around 6pm was the woman’s one bit of rest in those days. Often as not – and even in respectable families like ours – the man might go to the pub for a half pint of mild (bitter was more expensive and a whole pint meant a celebration) and his wife might get to put her feet up after a day’s hard labour in the house.
That was how working-class life had always been: generation after generation knew its place and knew its duties and where in the fabric of family life the men and the women fitted in. But by the start of the 1930s something had come along to change this traditional balance – in fact, to knock it out of kilter forever more. Unemployment.
People today talk about unemployment and the state of the economy – and rightly so. But the 1930s were much more terrible than what Britain has been going through in the past few years. I was 13 and still at school when the decade began and I saw for myself how bad things were for ordinary people. When you see films or television programmes today set in the 1920s, they tend – like Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey – to show life from the point of view of the rich and privileged. So we get the impression of that decade as one of glitz and excitement – the jazz age with its flappers and fancy frocks. But the financial troubles, which would make the 1930s a time of fear – terror even – in which people literally didn’t have enough money to feed themselves, let alone keep a roof over their heads, began in that so-called decade of glamour.
The 1929 American stock-market crash set off global economic shockwaves. British exports, already falling in the 1920s, fell by half again and, as a result, people were put out of work on a mass scale. Unemployment rose to 3 million and, for them, the prospect was truly bleak. You see, we didn’t have then the welfare state to catch and support people who lost their jobs.
There was a basic system of what was called unemployment insurance – when you had a job, you paid in a few shillings a week so that, if – or when – you got turfed out, you got something to keep you and your family going. But even that was pitifully small – no more than £1 17s – and, as the crisis worsened and the government got less and less money coming into the scheme, these already pitiful benefits were cut by ten per cent. Does that sound a lot? It should do because people were already struggling to pay their rent – which could often be as much as 40% of their regular income, never mind what they got when they lost their jobs – let alone buy food or put money aside for the gas bill. An official report of the time said that a man with a wife and two children needed to spend 19s and 9d each and every week just to buy enough food to stop them starving. That would leave just 17s and 3d to pay the rent – at least 15s a week – and all the other bare necessities of life.
What made it all even worse was that, as more and more people were laid off, a strict and cruel means test was introduced. In order to qualify for welfare handouts, an unemployed worker had to apply to the local Public Assistance Committee. These were just one step up from the old Victorian Poor Law relief – the system that resulted in desperate men, women and children being put into workhouses. And it was really only a very small step: the Committees – made up of the great and good – put the worker’s finances through a rigorous investigation before they could qualify for benefit. Officials went into every detail of a family’s income and savings. Sometimes they even took into account what furniture was in a home and insisted this be sold off. The mean-spirited intrusiveness of the means test and the insensitive manner of officials who carried it out was a terrible blight on people’s lives. Many people began slowly to starve.
My Dad had experienced the first taste of what was to come when, after the First World War, he couldn’t get his old job at the engineering works back. He did, as we’ve seen, what many other men with pride and integrity and nowhere else to turn did, setting himself up as a boot and shoe repairer. Now this wasn’t a proper business at all. He didn’t have a shop or premises where customers could come: his workshop was our back yard or, occasionally, the front room. But in this way he somehow managed to keep us afloat – often with my aunt at the hotel slipping us items of leftover food. I don’t to this day know how he did it but he took pride in being resourceful, and he insisted on a smart turnout – no backsliding for Dad – with his shoes polished to a gleaming shine every morning. He even managed to find enough money for a few cigarettes – but in those days these were cheap: Woodbines – always the working-man’s smoke – were 2d for five.
Not everyone was able to manage like we did and, as the numbers of men unemployed rose and rose, many went ‘on the tramp’: trudging many miles each day from town to town in the hope of finding any sort of paid work. But even this was often hopeless and it wasn’t long before other marches began to happen. Hunger marches, they called them: hundreds of unemployed men from all over the country determinedly setting out in an organised group to march on London in the hope of persuading the government to take notice of their plight. More than one of them – for there were many – came through Stamford. They processed – a long, disciplined snake of men with hollow faces and some carrying banners – through the main street. At lunchtime they stopped outside the Crown Hotel and somehow food was found for them, given free in acknowledgement, I suppose, that there but for the grace of God could be our own menfolk.
Still, we were the lucky ones in all this. While unemployment rose to 2.5 million and, in some areas, the proportion out of work reached 70 per cent, and quarter of the population existed on a subsistence diet, often with signs of child malnutrition such as scurvy, rickets and tuberculosis, I was growing up in the heart of a warm, loving family. And, between them, Mum and Dad managed to insulate their three young children from the worst of the hard times.
Money was, of course, very scarce so, when we weren’t at school or helping around the house, we tended to make use o
f such free entertainment as we could. I had always loved swimming and in those days it was perfectly normal for children to be allowed to go out and play in the river. The River Welland begins more than a hundred miles away in Northamptonshire and flows sluggishly north-eastwards to The Wash on the edge of East Anglia. The Romans had used it to transport food between their settlements and it has been part Stamford’s character ever since. Growing up, Mum and Dad would send us off – sometimes with a sandwich packed in greaseproof paper – to swim in one of the shallower parts of its course. I loved it: feeling the cool, fresh water on my skin was so much better than a trip to the Municipal Baths and in those days Stamford felt as safe as safe can be for a youngster. What was more, it was completely free!
But one day all this changed. It wasn’t a day that I went swimming but we heard about it soon enough. Edith, a school friend of mine, just about the same age as me, had somehow got out of her depth or caught her foot in the reeds and drowned. There – in our safe, lovely old river. Well, that was enough for Dad: he put his foot down straight away and told all of us that we’d made our last trip to the Welland. Looking back, I can, of course, see his point – although it was rare for Dad to be so stern with us. Mum was the one who wore the trousers in our house and everything had to be done exactly as she wanted. Even to this day, when I have carers coming in to help me, I still remake the bed after they’ve gone because it wouldn’t live up to Mum’s exacting standards. Dad, though, was a softie – a gentle, kind man who rarely, if ever, raised his voice: perhaps that’s what made his instruction that the river was now out of bounds all the more forceful. But at the time I think I must have felt a confusing mixture of sorrow at my friend’s death, fear for what we had all escaped and sadness that we’d no longer be able to enjoy one of our few, cost-free pleasures. My sister Joan and I carried on swimming every day but we had to go to the freezing-cold outdoor Municipal Pool from that moment on.