Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Arguably the most emblematic bus route was ‘The Inner Circle’. This was Birmingham’s number 8 route, which from 1928 linked the city’s inner suburbs and was invariably known as the ‘Workmen’s Special’ because of the large number of factories and workshops it served. Beginning at Five Ways, the bus was soon (going anti-clockwise) passing through Sparkbrook and approaching Small Heath, where the B.S.A. (Birmingham Small Arms) factory in Armoury Road was by 1950 employing 3,500 workers making its world-renowned motorcycles. Soon afterwards, going up the hill towards Bordesley Green and not far from Birmingham City’s ground, there were the Meadway Spares scrapyard, several paint manufacturers and Mulliners, the vehicle bodybuilder that for many years made military buses for the British armed forces. The route then curved round to Saltley (with its West Midlands Gas Board yard always tantalisingly full of coke) and Nechells (with its towering gas-holders in Nechells Place). Then it was along Rocky Lane (with the H. P. Sauce factory, the Hercules Cycle and Motor Company and the nearby Windsor Street gasworks) before reaching Aston Cross, home to the impressive Ansells Brewery building. After Six Ways and Hockley, the swing south went through the justifiably famous Jewellery Quarter, a warren of small firms and passed-down skills, before a final turn took the workhorse bus, often at this time of a ‘Utility’ design with wooden-slatted seating, back to Five Ways.7.

  Most of the Inner Circle’s passengers were short-distance; many of the workers who used it lived in houses cheek by jowl with the factories and workshops that lined the route; and – whatever the pronouncements of the planners – few conceived that its self-contained ecology would ever change.

  6

  Part of the Machinery

  ‘Local men worked in local plants and factories,’ the historian of Blackhill, a particularly tough part of Glasgow, has written of the 1950s: ‘Braby’s, the Maronite steel works, the St Rollox engine sheds, Alec Binnie’s, the White Horse distillery, the Caledonian locomotive works, the Blochairn steel works, W. Lumloch and Cardowan pits, the Parkhead Forge, the Royston Road copper works, the Hogganfield creamery, the Robroyston brick works . . .’ We will never know about the lives of the men – mainly, but not entirely, manual unskilled and semi-skilled – who filled those jobs, but one Scottish industrial life that has been memorialised by a son is that of Harry Jack (1902–1981), a fitter:

  Naturally as a boy, I regarded him as a genius. Certainly, he was conscientious. He took the problems of work home with him. Drawings of faulty steam valves would be spread on the kitchen table and he would sometimes speak bitterly of his workmates, scowling into his food and exclaiming:

  ‘I told old Tom Ramsden where to stick his overtime!’

  ‘That damned Macdonald! Calls himself a fitter! Took half the morning to take three washers off!’

  He did not prosper. He started work as a fourteen-year-old apprentice in a linen mill on five shillings a week and progressed variously through other textile factories in Scotland and Lancashire, into the engine-room of a cargo steamer, down a coal pit, through a lead works and a hosepipe factory . . . He ended his working life only a few miles from where he had begun it, and in much the same way; in overalls and over a lathe and waiting for the dispensation of the evening hooter, when he would stick his leg over his bike and cycle home.1.

  Jack in 1951 was one of an ‘occupied’ population in Britain of some 20.3 million people. Within that workforce, the proportion doing what were generally recognised as manual, working-class jobs had declined from 78.1 per cent in 1931 to 72.2 per cent twenty years later – a decline especially marked on the part of unskilled workers, with big drops in the coal and textile industries (especially in Scotland, Wales and the north) only partially compensated for by an increase in skilled workers (up from 1.56 million to 2.26 million) in the metal and engineering industries (especially in the Midlands – quintessentially Coventry – and around London). Within industry as a whole, the ratio of administrative, clerical and technical employees to operatives increased from 13.5 per cent in 1935 to 18.6 per cent in 1948. It was a workforce in which, as higher education slowly expanded and retirement provision became more extensive, the trend in terms of age profile was increasingly towards a middle-aged bulge: 43 per cent of the male workforce in 1951 was aged between 35 and 54, compared with 32 per cent half a century earlier. Gender was a different story, with the 30.8 per cent female component of the total workforce in 1951 barely a percentage point above the 1911 proportion. Nevertheless, women by this time were engaged in significant numbers in a far greater range of occupations even than in 1931.2

  Any generalisation about work is easy to challenge. For one thing, so much depended – like almost everything else in mid-century Britain – on matters of class and accumulated expectations attached to class. In the late 1940s a leadpress cable-maker described to the ever-curious social anthropologist Ferdynand Zweig what he saw as the chief differences between a manual worker’s situation in the workplace and that of an ‘office man’:

  I start at 7.30 in the morning, an ‘office-wallah’ starts at 9. He works in a collar and tie and has clean hands, and I have to dirty my hands. What he does can be rubbed out with a rubber, while what I do stays. He keeps in with the boss class. He has a full sick-wage, while I have none. He has a salary, while I am an hourly rated man. His holidays are twice as long as mine. He has superannuation, while I have none. He eats in the staff dining-room and has a better-served meal, which he calls lunch, while we eat in the general dining-room and call it dinner.3.

  The world of work as experienced by working-class people – still by a considerable margin the numercially predominant group in British society – varied hugely, but the dismal ambience of a medium-sized bottle-making firm based in Hunslet, Leeds, may well have been typical of many family-owned, backward-looking manufacturing enterprises. ‘One thing that the war did not change was the working conditions at Lax & Shaw’s works,’ observes that firm’s notably unsentimental historian about conditions that remained largely the same until the late 1960s:

  The heat was terrific. The furnaces were much lower in those days, therefore they threw off considerably more heat. This was compounded by the hot, molten glass which dropped down behind the machines when they had to stop, and which had to be dragged out by hand and wheeled away in barrows by the ‘flow boys’, a back-breaking business. A machine operator would wear clogs on his bare feet, belted trousers, a waistcoat, and a towel around his neck. An operator’s shirts would be white with the salt sweated out of his body.

  There wasn’t even a tap from which to collect cold water to mop one’s brow. There was nowhere to wash other than in the water which tumbled down behind the machines. The room set aside at the Albert Works for the men to eat their lunch in was filthy and never used. At Donisthorpe Works the canteen was a horrible, stinking, empty place. But such primitive facilities were on a par with the rest of the industry. The non-machine men usually brought sandwiches and ate them in the works. In the machine shops it was not unknown for men to cook a casserole or hang kippers in the lehr [a type of furnace].

  An altogether larger-scale enterprise was Raleigh in Nottingham, kingpin of the British bicycle industry, where a very young Alan Sillitoe worked during the war. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) he would evoke something of this formative experience: ‘The factory smell of oil-suds, machinery, and shaved steel that surrounded you with an air in which pimples grew and prospered on your face and shoulders’; ‘lanes of capstan lathes and millers, drills and polishers and hand-presses, worked by a multiplicity of belts and pulleys turning and twisting and slapping on heavy well-oiled wheels overhead, dependent for power on a motor stooping at the far end of the hall like the black shining bulk of a stranded whale’; ‘the noise of motor-trolleys passing up and down the gangway and the excruciating din of flying and flapping belts’. Overall, it was not an enviable environment in which to spend most of one’s waking hours.

  Admittedly Sillitoe’s hero, Arthur Seaton, fou
nd that he could think and daydream once he had got his lathe working properly, yet at the same time there was always the sense of someone – the rate-checker or the foreman or one of the tool-setters – being potentially on his back. It was that pervasive sense, in essence a loss of independence, that has prompted one historian of work, Arthur J. McIvor, to write of a ‘degenerative transformation’ as having taken place during the first half of the century:

  Almost all work was considerably more mechanised and capital-intensive by 1950 compared to 1880. Mechanisation and new structures of managerial control incorporating ‘scientific’ methods, the stopwatch and the rate-fixer meant that the all-round skills of the artisan in trades such as engineering, building, mining and printing were far less in evidence . . . The last vestiges of pre-industrial patterns of work – which had proven particularly persistent – disappeared and labour became regularised, intensified, monitored and codified within the context of a shorter work day and year. Work assumed its ‘modern’ form.

  In the new order on the factory floor, power lay in the hands not of the old-fashioned foremen but of the specialised and highly functional supervisors and line managers.

  It was a transformation perhaps most visible in that twentieth-century phenomenon, the motor-car plant. For Phyllis Willmott, visiting Ford’s at Dagenham in October 1948, it was a Kurtz-like experience:

  Surely the wheel has completed its full circuit! Seeing those masses of men fixed to the assembly line, the furnace, the inhuman vastness of the power-transformer it is impossible to believe that the condition of man was worse when factory conditions were first in real swing. Hours are shorter, breaks are longer, materially environment is improved – but all, surely, sops to the enslavement, the dehumanisation, the degrading &humiliation of man as a whole person. The shuffle alongside of the moving belt, now this way, now that to fix one screw or add one further bit of superstructure. The moving chair in all directions & at all levels. The noise – The massiveness – The horror!

  This procession of car bodies moving ceaselessly and relentlessly past the assembly-line workers was what struck every observer of the industry. One of those workers was Joe Dennis, working on the night shift by the 1950s. ‘My wife always insisted that I had my breakfast before I went to bed,’ he recalled. ‘And I would get into such a state that I would sit down to a bacon and egg and the table would appear to be going away from me.’ He himself stuck it out, he added, ‘but the elderly chaps couldn’t stand the pace’.4.

  Nevertheless, there were (as Willmott conceded) some positives in the workplace. In 1947, for example, soon after Hugh Dalton had appealed to the women of the textile areas to ‘come back to the mills and speed the export drive’, the Illustrated London News featured photographs of ‘Scenes in a Modernised Cotton-Mill’ in Bolton, showing how ‘by the provision of fluorescent lighting and the painting of the premises, together with welfare services for the employees, the mills can be made attractive’. As for wages, the striking fact was that by 1949 a manual worker’s average earnings stood at 241 per cent of their 1937 level, whereas the equivalent figure for a member of the higher professions was 188 per cent. Even so, that professional man was still earning as much as a skilled manual worker, a semi-skilled manual worker and an unskilled manual worker put together. The hours of work, meanwhile, were undeniably shortening by the immediate post-war period. ‘The five-day week is now almost universal,’ declared the Chief Inspector of Factories in 1949, by which point an average manufacturing operative was working some 46 to 47 hours a week (including paid overtime), compared with 54 on the eve of the Great War. Moreover, the great majority of workers were by now entitled to at least one week’s paid holiday (in addition to six public holidays), and in practice many manual workers received a fortnight’s paid holiday.

  Finally, on the improving side of things, it was irrefutable that the British workplace had become by mid-century a significantly safer environment: the annual average of persons killed in industrial accidents declined from more than 4,000 in the 1900s and more than 3,000 in the 1920s to 2,425 in the 1940s and 1,564 in the 1950s. One of the most compelling arguments for the nationalisation of the coal-mining industry had been the dreadful safety record under private ownership, but it still took until the second half of the 1950s for the annual level of fatalities regularly to get down to below 400. Moreover, in post-war British industry as a whole, workplace accidents remained an all too regular feature. Colin Ferguson, in the pattern shop at Babcock & Wilcox’s Renfrew Works, was only a few feet away from one in October 1950:

  Last Thursday Willie Agnew was seriously injured while working at the Wadkin patternmaking machine just behind me. All the ribs on his left side were broken & he was caught by the cutter of the machine behind his left shoulder & badly lacerated. His shoulder blade is broken & the lung pierced. His clothing had to be cut to release him. He was unconscious but regained consciousness for a few moments. It was I who put off the power to stop the machine. Jas Edmond & C. Connell both ran for the Dr. He was carried in a stretcher to the ambulance room & injected with morphine . . .

  Happily, the poor man regained full consciousness on the Saturday.5.

  Occupational safety, of course, was not quite the same as occupational health. If one of the traditional killers, lead poisoning, had been more or less eliminated by this time, there still remained the remorseless ‘dust’ diseases of silicosis (including coal miners’ pneumoconiosis) and asbestosis. In 1950 there were more than 800 deaths directly from silicosis, rising to more than 2,000 by 1955. In the former year some 5,000 more men left the coal mines of South Wales – where the disease was mainly centred – than went into them, principally for fear of getting silicosis. The National Coal Board, to start with anyway, did not cope shiningly well with the problem: detailed scientific research did not begin until 1952 and made only slow progress, while a squabble with the NHS over the work and the cost meant that it was not until 1959 that there began, with a view to prevention and control, the systematic medical examination of all mine workers. Laurence Thompson’s sentiments after visiting the South Wales pits at the start of the decade were understandably heartfelt. ‘If I had to live or work with someone slowly choking of silicosis, I would leave too,’ he declared, ‘and I would never let a word pass my lips about lazy miners who won’t get the coal.’ Yet, as he added, ‘someone must get the coal’.

  The number of deaths caused by exposure to asbestos (specifically, the inhalation of asbestos fibres) was for a long time appreciably less, yet arguably it was the more shocking story, given that it was not until the 1960s that most of the workers engaged in asbestos-related industries became aware of the danger, which was at least 30 years after they could and should have been made aware. Asbestosis, lung cancer, mesothelioma – all were caused by the insidious dust, which (as victims from Clydeside shipyards and building sites would recall) came ‘down like snow’ on them, whether in the form of dust, asbestos cuttings or dried-out ‘monkey dung’, as asbestos paste was called. Britain’s leading asbestos manufacturer was Turner & Newall, headquartered in Rochdale’s Spodden Valley near Manchester. Its records have been comprehensively studied by Geoffrey Tweedale, who for the mid-decades of the century relates an appalling tale of management indifference to the dangers to which its workforce was exposed, allied to an almost systemic policy of trying to wriggle out of financial liability to the families of those who had died (usually in their mid-50s) as a direct result of those dangers. ‘We have many cases of death obviously caused by the usual diseases to which man is heir,’ privately grumbled the chairman, Sir Samuel Turner, in 1947, ‘but if by any chance a few particles of asbestos happen to be found in the lung, then coroners invariably bring in a verdict which involves a claim.’ Tweedale, however, shows in devastating detail that the odds were heavily weighted against a victim’s family receiving an adequate (let alone an equitable) level of compensation; that Turner & Newall could very well have afforded in the post-war period to adopt a more
generous policy; and that human sympathy was conspicuous by its absence. A hardheaded, unpreachy business historian, he is compelled to a class-based conclusion: ‘The majority of sufferers were working-class people – usually manual workers – and their “masters” rarely developed asbestos disease. While hundreds of its workforce perished, Turner & Newall’s higher echelons remained immune.’6.

  How typical was this cold-hearted exploitation? ‘The neglect of the human side in industry was a frequent theme of my conversations with workers of all grades,’ Zweig noted after some three years of intensive and extensive interviews, mainly in the late 1940s:

  ‘My employer never looks at me,’ a cotton spinner said to me, ‘he just sees the £ s. d. I represent. For him I am manpower, not a man.’

  ‘Men are treated here as part of the machinery and everybody knows that they are valuable pieces of machinery,’ a factory engineer told me, ‘but the funny part of it is that they are not studied as the machines are, and kept in good running order. No one is interested in finding out the needs and requirements of men. They are simply taken for granted.’