The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  The Communist-backed National Unemployed Workers Movement, which organized most of the marches, had as many as 100,000 members at one time; yet this was but a very small proportion of the total of unemployed, and its leaders blamed the apathy of those who did not join it as much as they blamed the Labour Party for its lack of wider support. Drawn neither to the extreme Left nor to the extreme Right of the British Union of Fascists, which, founded by Sir Oswald Mosley in 1932, had less than 50,000 members, most of the unemployed waited in silent resignation for better days to come.

  Deeply sunk in poverty though so many of them were, the unemployed were, however, not alone in their plight. In some industries in the 1920s and 1930s wages were so low that a man might even be better off on ‘the dole’ than in work. Agricultural labourers who were earning about £48 a year on average in 1906, were getting no more than £82 in 1924 and £89 in 1935, despite the rise in the cost of living; and over a quarter of the entire employed population in 1938 were earning less than £2 10s a week. Domestic servants frequently had no more then £1, some had no more than 5s; shop assistants commonly had to make do with 10s a week. Surveys carried out between 1924 and 1937 in various towns on Merseyside, in London, Bristol and York suggested that an unacceptably high proportion of the population was living in circumstances ranging from ‘primary poverty’ to ‘utter destitution’. Seebohm Rowntree estimated that in 1935–6 almost 20 per cent of the people of York could be described as poor. Herbert Tout came to similar conclusions after a study of conditions in Bristol in 1937.

  Survival for the poor was both a struggle and a challenge; and experience and ingenuity were often needed. After his bankruptcy Helen Forrester’s father was driven to discover how essential it was to know the ropes of poverty in Liverpool:

  There were agencies in the town, he was told, which would provide the odd pair of shoes or an old blanket for a child. There were regimental funds willing to provide a little help to old soldiers. He gathered other scraps of information, which were revelations to a man who had never had to think twice about the basic necessities of life. An open fire, he was assured, could be kept going almost all day from the refuse of the streets, old shoes, scraps of paper, twigs, wooden boxes, potato peelings; if one was very ill or had a broken bone, the outpatients departments of most of the local hospitals would give some medical care. Pawnbrokers would take almost anything saleable, and one could buy second-hand clothing from them. Junk yards would sometimes yield a much needed pram wheel or a piece for an old bike.16

  Middle-class people from homes like that of this man’s childhood were as unaware of conditions in the poorest homes of large towns as Dickens’s ‘amazing Alderman’ was unaware of the real existence of the slum known as Jacob’s Island which was described in Oliver Twist. And when the Second World War led to the arrival in country districts of families evacuated from city slums, the owners of houses who were asked to take them in were appalled by their dirty, inadequate clothes, their skin diseases and head-lice, their extraordinary tastes in food, their incomprehensible accents and their ‘insanitary habits’, such as defecating on newspapers which were then wrapped up and thrown on the fire, a practice which, so it was believed, resulted from a reluctance in their own families to use a communal outdoor lavatory. In all about 1.5 million of those who were eligible under the official evacuation scheme chose to take advantage of it – another 2 million made private arrangements – but most of them liked the country no better than many of their hosts liked them. And by the end of 1939 almost a million of them, encouraged by the evident reluctance or inability of the Germans to carry out the air raids that had been predicted, were thankful to go home.

  While poverty remained an intractable problem in Britain between the wars, the majority of the people lived in relative comfort, real wages for those in reasonably well paid regular employment in the 1920s having gone up 20 per cent since the war and the average working week having been reduced from fifty-five to forty-eight hours. Several major industries were in decline, but other, newer ones were growing fast. The output of coal fell sharply in the late 1920s and early 1930s; so did its export, particularly to France, formerly one of the industry’s best customers, which was now receiving coal from Germany by way of reparations. Seams had been exhausted by the immense demand of the war years; and oil was becoming recognized as an alternative fuel. Although 40 per cent of Britain’s merchant fleet had been lost in the war, shipbuilding, after the needs of peace-time trade had been met, came to a complete halt. Cotton exports slumped dramatically; so did those of iron and steel; manufacturing production generally continued to fall while that of America, which had risen by over 20 per cent in the war, and that of Japan, which had gone up by over three-quarters, continued to increase rapidly. There was some recovery of earlier losses by 1935; but by 1937 Britain’s share of world trade, which had been a third in 1870 and a seventh in 1914, had fallen still further to a tenth. And, after the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, the total value of British exports fell from £729.3 million in that year to £390.6 million in 1931, and unemployment rose to new heights. Yet the motor vehicle, chemical, construction, textile, printing, consumer and electricity supply industries were all expanding fast and providing work for large numbers of well-paid men and women. The electricity industry alone was employing over 350,000 people by 1939 when two-thirds of the houses in the country were lit by electric light; even more workers, about 400,000, were employed in making the more than half million motor vehicles produced that year. Large and prosperous industrial combines such as Imperial Chemical Industries and Unilever employed tens of thousands more. So did the new chain stores such as Woolworths, which had opened the company’s first English shop in Liverpool in 1909, and Marks and Spencer, which owed their origins to a stall in Leeds market set up by a Polish immigrant in 1884 and which was to have over 250 stores in the country by 1939 when its turnover was ten times as great as it had been a decade earlier. The number employed in the distributive trades generally rose from 1,773,000 in 1920 to 2,039,000 in 1929 and continued to rise thereafter.

  As families became smaller in size and as earnings grew, those in regular employment found that their standard of living continued to improve. Workers at Ford’s factory at Dagenham could earn £4 or £5 a week in 1935; and, while workers in potteries had less than £4 a week and miners rather less than £3, prices were low enough for most working-class families in receipt of regular wages to live without hardship, spending far more on fresh food – almost twice as much on fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, butter and eggs – than they had done in the past, but also filling their shopping baskets with tinned soups and cornflakes, cocoa and granulated coffee, custard powders and all manner of sweets and chocolates, yet still finding enough money left over to buy clothes, to smoke and to drink, and to pay a far higher proportion of their income on insurance, medical care, trade union subscriptions, and pleasure.

  Far more was spent on tobacco than had been before the war. Expenditure rose from about £40 million in 1914 to £204 million in 1939 and £564 million by 1945. By 1948, 80 per cent of men and over 40 per cent of women bought cigarettes, smoking on average about twelve or thirteen a day. The consumption of beer, on the contrary, declined from some 34 million barrels a year in 1910–13 to only about half that amount in the 1930s. The consumption of spirits, which were far more highly taxed than they had been in the past, also fell sharply. And, whereas before the war public houses remained open throughout most of the day – in London from five o’clock in the morning until half an hour after midnight, elsewhere from six in the morning until ten or eleven at night – after the passing of the Intoxicating Liquor (Temporary Restriction) Act in August 1914 licensing authorities were encouraged to impose more limited opening hours. In London ‘a transformation of the night scenes’ became immediately apparent.

  Great traffic centres, like the Elephant and Castle, at which immense crowds usually lounge about until 1 o’clock, have suddenly become pe
aceful and respectable [the Brewers’ Gazette reported]. The police, instead of having to ‘move on’ numbers of people who have been dislodged from the bars at 12.30 at night, found very little intoxication to deal with.17

  Other observers, however, were not so impressed by the efficacy of the Act, Lloyd George among them. ‘We are fighting Germany, Austria and Drink,’ he declared in a speech in March 1915, ‘and, as far as I can see, the greatest of these deadly foes is Drink.’ In an effort to defeat that particular foe, he prompted the king to give up alcohol for the duration of the war as an example to the people. His Majesty promptly concurred, having his cellars locked and his dinner guests handed a list of soft drinks including ginger ale which Lord Rosebery reluctantly chose as the nearest thing to alcohol he was likely to get and suffered from a fearful attack of hiccups in consequence. Queen Mary’s jug of fruit cup was, however, liberally if discreetly spiced with champagne, and the king, himself, when the meal was over, so his eldest son said, retired to his study ‘to attend to a small matter of business. The matter in question was tacitly assumed to be a small glass of port.’18

  Despite the king’s well-publicized example, reports of excessive drinking throughout the country continued to disturb the government, and further measures to curb it were deemed necessary. In June 1915, under the comprehensive and widely resented Defence of the Realm Act known as Dora, a Central Control Board was established to impose further restrictions upon the sale and consumption of liquor; and soon afterwards, in areas where heavy drinking was thought to be hindering the war effort, the sale of alcohol was forbidden before noon and throughout the afternoon after half past two. The traditional practice of buying drinks for other customers in public houses was also forbidden.

  Yes, no treating [recalled a worker in the East Anglian hay trade]. You couldn’t go into a public house, two on you and say, ‘Give us two pints o’ beer and I’ll pay for them.’ That was against the law. The pubs got restricted, and it got so they didn’t have the beer. Sometimes they weren’t open above two days a week because they never had the beer. It was more or less rationed to them… Some of them boys came home here [to Bungay] on leave and would go into a pub. There was a notice up: Regular Customers Only, and only one pint! Yes, there were terrible rows down there. Chaps smashed the windows because the landlord wouldn’t serve them… Before the war some of the pubs would be open all night nearly. Open again at six in the morning. I’ve been down there [at The Crown in Carlton] at 6.30 in the morning and seven or eight of ’em have been drunk as lords. There was more beer spilled on the floor then than is drunk now.19

  By limiting the sale of beer, decreasing gravity – though the price increased from 3d a pint to as much as 10d – restricting the sale of spirits, and controlling opening hours, the government did eventually manage to reduce the incidence of drunkenness throughout the country. In 1914 average weekly convictions for drunkenness had been 3388 in England and Wales; by the end of 1918 they had dropped to 449; and after the war they remained far lower than they had been before it. It was still possible in some districts to find public houses open all day long and far into the night, but after the Licensing Act of 1921 this was no longer the case. By then drunkenness, previously ‘half admired as a sign of virility’, was regarded ‘as, on the whole, rather squalid and ridiculous’.20

  Just as the First World War had a profound effect upon people’s drinking habits, so it changed certain attitudes towards sexual morality. One of the most popular songs of the war years was ‘There’s a Girl for Every Soldier’; and in most towns soldiers on leave found this to be only too satisfactorily true, although many of those who had gone so far as to marry in haste lived to regret their imprudence. There were almost three times as many divorces in 1920 as there had been in the years immediately before the war.

  There were also far more men and women who had had some kind of sexual experience before marriage. One survey suggested that, while less than 20 per cent of married women born before 1904 had had such experience before their marriages, 36 per cent of those born between 1904 and 1914 and almost 40 per cent of those born between 1914 and 1924 had been sexually intimate either with their future husbands or with other men. There was at the same time an increased awareness and tolerance of contraception. Whereas in mid-Victorian times, so it has been estimated, only about a fifth of women practised contraception, well over three-quarters of those who married between 1918 and 1939 did so. And, while in 1900 a quarter of all married women had a baby every year, in 1930 this was true of only one in eight. Apart from total abstention or abstention except at those times when conception was least likely, coitus interruptus remained the most common method of birth control; but other methods were becoming more widely known. For the poor there were home-made pessaries manufactured from lard and flour, cocoa-butter and quinine; there were sponges and douches. For those who could afford them there were vaginal syringes; there were diaphragms and by the early 1930s these had been made more reliable by the introduction of improved contraceptive jellies. There were also rubber condoms, so much more effective than the ‘armour’ with which Boswell had had to make do. By the 1930s 2 million rubber sheaths were being produced by the largest manufacturer in the country and large numbers were also being imported.21 ‘When I left England in 1911,’ wrote Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ‘contraceptives were hard to buy outside London or other large cities. By 1913 every village chemist was selling them.22

  When the Second World War broke out, birth control had become respectable. The Roman Catholic Church maintained its opposition to all forms of contraception other than what had become known as the use of the ‘safe period’; but the Anglican Church had long since abandoned the teaching that sexual intercourse was permissible only when the procreation of children was intended. The Ministry of Health had authorized advice on contraception being given in Maternity Welfare Centres; and the Family Planning Association ran numerous birth-control clinics all over the country. For the change in the climate of opinion much credit was due to Dr Marie Stopes, a palaeobotanist by profession, who had been the first woman to join the science faculty at Manchester University. Her first marriage had been annulled on her suit of non-consummation; and it was after her second marriage to a man also interested in birth control that her own passionate devotion to the problem and to sex education in general was intensified. Her first book Married Love was published in 1918 and caused a sensation; almost half a million copies were sold within five years. Her next book, Wise Parenthood, was even more successful and widely influential.

  While contraception became more widespread, abortions were still common, particularly among the poorer classes. Before 1938 it was illegal in England for a doctor to end the pregnancy of a woman unless her life was in danger. In that year, after a gynaecological surgeon, Aleck Bourne, operated on a girl of fourteen (who had been raped and made pregnant by some guardsmen) and then reported his operation to the police, it was established that therapeutic abortion could be justified if there were reasonable grounds for supposing that a continued pregnancy would permanently impair the mother’s mental or physical health. But it was not until after the Second World War that the law governing abortion became more relaxed; and in the meantime criminal and back-street abortions were of daily occurrence: as late as the 1960s it was estimated that 300 were performed every day in England.23 Those carried out at home were induced by the usual methods of drinking gin, lying in hot baths, jumping off tables, falling downstairs and ingesting a variety of real or supposed abortifacients, including soap, gunpowder, pennyroyal, aloes, vinegar, quinine, slippery elm, expectorants, tobacco and a potion made by boiling together water, olive oil and lead oxide.

  Smaller families led to an improvement in living standards not only for the poor who had fewer children to feed and clothe but also for the middle classes who had less to pay in school bills and in wages for increasingly expensive nursemaids, governesses or for the few day nurseries which then existed. They also made it easier
for women to go out to work. Over 6 million women had jobs outside the house in 1931, an appreciable increase on those who went out to work before the war; and, although most of these were unmarried women, the proportion of married working women was increasing all the time: by 1951, while less than a quarter of married women went out to work, this was twice as many as had done so a generation earlier and a far higher proportion than in nearly all other countries in Europe.