by John Moore
In fact, by comparison with Elmbury people, those daring intellectuals seemed rather colourless and dull. Their outlook seemed curiously limited. I wouldn’t have hurt their feelings by telling them so, but they seemed to me to have a small-town mentality, somehow.
And so, as I walked home through the fantastic populous streets of Elmbury on that first night of my homecoming, I did not feel that I had exchanged a great world for a little one: I felt exactly the opposite.
Emotion seemed larger here, pleasures were keener, sorrows sharper, men’s laughter was more boisterous, jokes were funnier, the tragedy was more profound and the comedy more riotous, the huge fantasy of life was altogether more fantastic. London, for all its street lights, was a twilit world; Elmbury, on a murky February evening, seemed as bright as a stage.
The Unemployed
It was a bright world, yes: but the glow which lights Elmbury in my memory shows up also the dark shadows. That was 1931, during which western civilisation demonstrated for the first time that it could contrive a peace which was, for most of its citizens, nearly as uncomfortable as war. The storm which Mr. Jeffs had sniffed in the balmy air four years ago had broken with a vengeance now. Already Elmbury had more than three hundred unemployed.
It was the first thing I noticed when I walked down the High Street by day; the crowd of idle men standing at the Cross. Of course there had always been men at the street corners in Elmbury; but only a few and these the familiar ones, such as Pistol, Bardolph and Nym. Those had a purpose in standing about; they were on the look-out for whatever they could scrounge. Others of their kidney would often hang about deliberately on the chance of picking-up an “odd-job”; and if we wanted the garden tidied up, or extra help in the market, we would always send somebody to the Cross to find a man who wanted a job.
These hangers-about had been purposeful, they had had a very good reason for standing at the Cross, but now Elmbury saw something which it had never seen before, something very grim and terrible and shocking, it saw men loafing about purposelessly, men who had long ago given up the hope of finding a job but who stood at the street-corner out of habit, or perhaps because it was slightly more interesting, and not much colder, than sitting in their own house.
You could find a score any morning at the Cross; another little group outside the Anchor Inn; a third at the end of the town where the road bridge crosses the river. On Fridays the queue outside the Labour Exchange stretched for nearly a hundred yards down Church Street.
Most of the men were young, many were in their ’teens. The majority of the older men with regular jobs were still in employment. Elmbury was luckier in that respect than many another small town. Its own little industries—flour-milling, malting, boat-building—were not greatly affected by the depression and were able to carry on; and agriculture, though severely hit, could not cut down its labour beyond a certain indispensable minimum. Cows must be milked, stock reared, fields ploughed, and crops harvested, even though these operations resulted in a loss. The colliery and the factory could close down; but not the farm.
The bitter consequences of the depression, therefore, fell first upon the casual labourers and the semi-skilled odd-jobbers, of which Elmbury had a great number; and next upon the lads who had never had a job at all. Many of these boys, in normal times, would have gone away to learn a trade, the more adventurous would probably drift to the cities and would either remain there—adding good country stock to the urban populations—or return in due course to their home town bringing back new ideas and new ways to Elmbury. Both city and country town reaped benefits from this migration of labour. But now the cities had no jobs to offer. They themselves had an unemployment problem, not of hundreds, but of tens of thousands; and so our young men at the very time when they should have been learning a trade lost heart and hope at the street corner.
In Defence of Odd-job Men
The casual labourer and the handyman, the odd-jobbers who could turn their hands to anything from making a rabbit hutch to picking plums, sprouts, or peas, from gardening to hay-trussing, from thatching to salmon-netting, now spent their days with the youths lounging on the pavement. Plums last season had fetched less than the cost of sending them by rail to Manchester; sprouts at a shilling a pot were best left to rot on the stalks; there was no sale for hay, and no job for the hay-trusser.
This was a local disaster, for the popular notion that the casual labourer doesn’t matter (or at best is unimportant by comparison with the man in regular work) is a very mistaken notion. In Elmbury at any rate the class of odd-job-man included some of the best elements in the community. These were the men with independent spirits who would bind themselves to no master. “Better be a free man than have a full belly twice a day,” one of them said to me once. These were the adventurous and the imaginative men, whose restless minds and ingenious hands would scorn to perform the same set task day in, day out, through the long years. These were the Jacks-of-all-trades. They might perhaps be masters of none; but they were the last free men in Elmbury.
England has always been lucky in her possession of such a class, bound to no trade and no employer, handy at many things, quick to learn, experimental and adventurous. When the agents of Drake and Raleigh looked for men for a voyage to the Americas it was among this class, I’ll wager, that they first sought. It was not the men in regular jobs who’d leave hearth and home and the certainty of a weekly wage to follow a romantic captain to the ends of the earth. And it was this class too, the unstable and the adventurous, which gave the first volunteers to all our wars. The odd-job man makes a good soldier. He learns quickly to handle weapons as he has often learned to handle new tools. He is not set in his ways like the regular worker; he has a mind more easily moulded to the event. And best of all, he doesn’t look to the future; the future, for him, has always looked after itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof is his watchword; and it serves for a soldier’s watchword very well indeed.
However, these admirable men were the first to go to the wall when that strange, disastrous dislocation of trade and finance happened in 1931: they, and the young men, equally adventurous, who had not yet started to learn a trade. These two classes, containing some of the best of our manhood, were thrown upon the rubbish-heap. In many places, of course, the skilled and regular workers were affected as well; but in Elmbury it was chiefly a problem of the youths and the casual labourers: about 150 youths, about 200 “odd-jobbers,” for whom there was no work and no likelihood of work until this catastrophe of peace was solved by the catastrophe of war.
The Town Council did what it could. It published a most expensive brochure with the idea of persuading people to spend their holidays in “unspoilt Elmbury”; and another expensive brochure for the purpose of persuading manufacturers to come and spoil it. But this ingenuous attempt to make the best of both worlds was doomed to failure. Money seemed to have dried up at its mysterious source. There were few visitors, and they had little to spend. Nobody contemplated building factories at such a time and if they had done so would have been unlikely to choose a site so far from coal, ports, or railway-junctions.
“I will give you work,” was the easily-made, easily-broken promise of every candidate at the Council elections. Any ill-paid drudgery, in 1931, seemed utterly desirable. A man deemed himself fortunate indeed if he were taken on by a farmer to dig ditches at thirty shillings a week. And this, I think, was one of the worst aspects of the tragedy as far as Elmbury was concerned. Our people, who by lucky chance had escaped the defiling touch of Victorian industrialism, were now driven to accept the horrible heresies of Victorian industrialism, that the giving of work was a favour, that the doing of work was a virtue per se. While there was plenty of casual work to be had, the men of Elmbury had always been free to choose what work they should do and whom they should work for: for they could always go and pick sprouts or plums, fell timber or make hay. And because they had been able to do the work of their own choice, they had generally taken pl
easure and pride in it. Now all that was changed. The industrial heresy, beloved of great capitalists, bemused even the rugged independent spirits of Elmbury. Hard and uninteresting work was something rare, desirable, and of itself virtuous. The man who had the privilege of working long hours at a dull job was a better man than his neighbour who worked as little as he need. The man who had work to offer was necessarily a good citizen; the man who refused a job because it was uninteresting was wicked—or mad. You didn’t look for interest or pleasure in your work; the virtue lay in the doing of the work for the appointed number of hours, whether it was ill done or well done; in serving humbly and blindly the great capitalist god.
Thus the blight settled on men’s minds during the depression. The gay, happy-go-lucky fellows who would do six different jobs on six different days, do them well, and enjoy doing them—and then, feeling prosperous, take three days off to go fishing—these men weren’t wanted any more. They must toe the line, join the queue, think themselves lucky if they were found worthy to serve the god.
So the skill of the handyman went to waste at the street corner; so the adventurous spirit was lost and the happy-go-lucky mood turned sour. The odd-job men and the pale-faced youths stood together at Elmbury Cross, hands in pockets, shoulders slumped, coat collars turned up against the cold wind. Our best manhood rotted alongside our best youth.
We should need them both in 1940.
Economics of Odd-Jobbing
As an example of what I mean by the odd-jobber, I quote the typical case of Jim Fletcher, an alert and able-bodied man of about thirty, a jolly good worker when he wanted to work but also a devoted angler who was almost always to be found at the waterside when the weather was right and the fish were biting. I asked him how he contrived this, while supporting a wife and three children and how nevertheless he managed to have plenty of money to spend in the pub. I give his answer, which referred to the year 1925, in the form of a statement of his income such as he might have sent to the Inspector of Taxes if he had had to pay Income Tax.
JIM FLETCHER’S EARNINGS DURING 1925
You will see that although he earned £143 16s. 10d. in the year—an average of nearly £3 a week 1—Jim Fletcher did little more than 200 full days’ work, an average of less than 4 days a week. His work was almost always fun—except the sprout-picking, which he didn’t enjoy. (But it happened at a time when odd jobs were hard to come by.) He had no appearances to keep up, and spent practically nothing on clothes. His household was never short of food. He grew his own vegetables, brought home plenty of eels and other fish (including, I daresay, an occasional poached salmon), and could always lay his hands on a rabbit or even—though he wouldn’t admit it—a hare. He killed a pig once a year, and was never short of bacon. He always had plenty of firing, for in flood-time he went out in his punt and collected logs from the river. The three days a week when he wasn’t working he spent in fishing, “mucking about in his boat,” or running after the hounds.
In fact, Jim Fletcher lived like a lord.
Farmer-cum-Dealer: A Moral Tale
Apart from the growing queue outside the labour exchange (“This running sore in our body-politic,” as the Mayor, given to pomposity, frequently described it) I found Elmbury little changed. The farming community for the most part was still living on its fat; it hadn’t yet felt the full blast of the depression and most of the farmers had respectable bank-balances left over from the prosperous years. The cautious majority, anticipating that it would be a long time before conditions became normal, cut down their expenses and husbanded their resources, reckoning their capital would “tidy them over” till trade improved. The feckless ones persisted in a belief that next season the topsy-turvy world would mysteriously right itself, and took comfort from some mystic saying of their grandfathers, “Things always goes in threes; three bad years, and then three good ones.” These optimists overstocked their land on the principle, “Now is the time to buy, when prices are at rock-bottom.” Unfortunately the economic waters were uncharted; no lead-line could find where rock-bottom lay. Six months later stock prices were lower still, and the farmers found that they had given free hospitality to a large number of beasts which they sold for less than they had paid for them.
Since common sense appeared to fail them in the face of inexplicable disaster, other farmers discovered a belief in luck and took to dealing, in the frantic hope that they’d be lucky enough to catch the chancy unstable market at the right moment. Mr. Tempest, the wise, tight-lipped little bank manager, would warn them in vain: “When I hear of a farmer going in for dealing, I always expect that the next time I hear of him will be through the Official Receiver.” A farmer’s job, said Mr. Tempest, was to grow things; and mixing his metaphors a bit, he added, “Let him stick to his last.”
It was good advice; and Mr. Transome, for example, would have been wise to heed it. Jeremy Transome was a fairly successful farmer with an eye for a bargain. He knew a bit about cattle and had often been pretty lucky in the past. He farmed the Highwoods Farm at Lower Hampton: 280 acres of mixed pasture and arable, where for fifteen years he’d made a good living. When the depression came he began to get into difficulties, and he thought he’d get out of them by doing a bit of dealing. He persuaded the reluctant Mr. Tempest to increase the mortgage on the farm by five hundred pounds and he bought fifty yearlings for an average price of ten pounds each. On the whole he bought them well; he was a very good judge of beasts. He turned them out in his pastures and proceeded to “watch the market.” This meant attending the stock sales in four different towns once a week. When he went to market he spent money. He spent about thirty shillings each time; it was mostly spent on drinks for potential customers, and he put it down quite fairly to “expenses”; six pounds a week for expenses.
At last he decided to send 25 of his yearlings to market. They were looking well, for they’d had a month’s good grazing; but the market happened to be a bad one, Mr. Transome was dissatisfied with the prices and he bought them in at eleven pounds a head. Indeed the prices for yearlings at that sale were so low that Mr. Transome thought it would be a golden opportunity missed if he didn’t buy some more. He bought thirty at nine pounds each.
Next day it began to freeze and the grass stopped growing.
He was short of grazing, for he had grossly overstocked his land; and soon he had to start feeding the cattle with hay. He was short of hay too, and he had to buy a ten-ton rick at three pounds a ton. He would gladly have sold his cattle now, for eleven pounds; but during the hard weather they had gone back in condition, and even to his prejudiced eye they didn’t look worth more than nine pounds ten.
Now he was on the slippery slope indeed. His dealing excursions, and his days at the markets, had caused him to neglect his farm. He was short of labour, for he’d sacked a couple of men when he decided to go in for dealing; and the few labourers he had were inclined to take things easy when the boss was out. The farm, which had been tidy and well-kept, began to look neglected; there were broken gates and fences, and one day some yearlings got out and it cost him a day’s work—and a couple of quid—to get them back again.
Ditching and draining had been put off too long; and when the thaw came, with heavy rain for three days, some fields flooded and Mr. Transome was harder put to it than ever for grazing. He was compelled to keep one bunch of yearlings in a sloppy field where, as the neighbours said, “they’d soon grow webbed-feet like ducks.”
And now the rumour began to spread about the countryside that Mr. Transome was in a bad way. Perhaps he owed his hay dealer or his cake-merchant a larger sum than usual, and had left it longer unpaid. Perhaps Mr. Tempest had even been compelled to return one of his cheques: “Refer to Drawer.” At any rate the dangerous rumour went about, and the professional cattle-dealers, who had long ears for such tales, came to hear of it.
And so before long unasked visitors began to call at his farm. They came in cars; they came, very often, from a long way off, They were genial and f
riendly men, and business had brought them, they said, into the district. They’d heard by chance that Mr. Transome might have a few yearlings for sale. Yes, thankee very much, they’d come in and have a drink and talk it over. …
Their visits generally cost Mr. Transome a bottle of whisky. That was only 12/6 then, but it was another charge added to the cost of the yearlings.
The dealers offered nine pounds apiece for them. Mr. Transome held out for nine pounds ten. The dealers politely refused; they’d had a look round the farm and noted its condition. They smiled to themselves and drove away.
But a fortnight later, by a curious coincidence, they would find themselves in the district again.
Meanwhile Mr. Transome had to buy some more hay. The floods went down, but left the grass sour and muddy. Some of the cattle went sick, and Mr. Transome had to call in the vet. Two of them died. He sold them in the end, desperately, foolishly, ruinously, at eight pounds fifteen apiece. He had to; his creditors were threatening to put him in court. The yearlings had cost him, in hay and grazing, drovering, travelling, vet’s bills and whisky, about fifty shillings a head more than the purchase price. But they had cost him more than that; they had cost him Highwoods Farm. For the dealers’ cheque went to pay the haydealer and the cake-merchant; and Mr. Transome hadn’t enough capital to restock his farm. The fields which had been overstocked now lay empty; and there was no profit in that. The next season was a bad one, and it finished him.