The Day War Broke Out Read online

  Unemployment benefits were minimal. They were cut off after six months out of work and the rules, even for minimal payments, were harsh and unforgiving: any woman refusing an offer to work in domestic service, for instance, would usually be denied benefits.

  A Household Means Test for the dole was introduced in 1931. In many cases, the test meant officials would visit families to ascertain how much was being earned – or even what possessions there were in the home that could be sold, i.e. a piano, before a family became eligible for a dole payment. This, of course, was the cause of much anguish for struggling, out-of-work families. Any household where someone had some sort of work, such as an older child, or even a situation where a grandparent lived in the home rent-free, would be unlikely to receive any dole.

  The system seemed cruel and uncaring to many. It was best described in 1931 by the writer, poet and journalist G. K. Chesterton: ‘For the first time in living memory, the Government and the nation has set out on a definite deliberate campaign to make the poor poorer.’ In any event, the dole payment itself – 21 shillings in 1931 for a family of five – was not enough to cover basic costs like food and clothing.

  To this day, we still talk about Britain’s North–South divide. Back then, this best describes the country – in much starker terms. Life in a family where the breadwinner had previously been an unskilled worker in declining heavy industry was very tough indeed. Poverty had become endemic.

  Through the 1930s, there were several hunger marches to London from protesting unemployed groups of men from different parts of the country to little effect. Awareness of this huge division of society peaked with the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 when unemployed workers marched to London to petition the government. (Jarrow had been ravaged by unemployment and became an unemployment blackspot when shipyard closures left 10,000 men out of work in 1934.) Despite hugely sympathetic press coverage, however, the marchers’ petition fell on deaf ears, although in the long term it would bring awareness and a change in government attitude to welfare.

  Conversely, by the mid- to late 1930s, families who were working and living in the southern part of the country – the Midlands, the Home Counties and other parts of the South – were experiencing a steady improvement in their living standards. Effectively, there were two Britains in the 1930s.

  In the more fortunate part of the country, new light industries had emerged, powered by electricity rather than coal, so they did not need to be built near coalfields and new factories or plants were being built closer to areas of high population, like the Midlands and the South-East.

  New industries, like the car industry, brought jobs and as a result of this development of light industry, an evergrowing volume of new, mass-produced household goods, made in modern factories, advertised heavily through the newspapers and magazines of the time, were bringing small but significant beginnings of more affluence for the working population, with increasing numbers of hire-purchase schemes (an early form of credit, repaid with interest over a fixed period) also becoming readily available. Prices too had fallen during the Depression years – family sizes had also started to drop. The very first family-planning clinic for married women, offering free advice on contraception, was opened by Marie Stopes in London in 1921. Stopes (1880–1958) was an author and campaigner for women’s rights whose controversial sex manual, Married Life, had scandalised society when it was first published in 1918, bringing the topic of birth control into public awareness for the first time. That first-ever family planning clinic in London, run by midwives and visiting doctors, moved to Central London a few years later and, in time, developed into a chain of nongovernmental organisation birth control clinics across the world.

  Cars, previously the sole province of the wealthy or upper middle classes, were beginning to be slightly more affordable. The Highway Code first appeared in 1931; driving tests became compulsory in 1934.

  Two million cars were sold in 1938 and the most popular, the Austin 7 Tourer, could be purchased for £125. Given that the average wage in that year was £139 – less than £3 a week – buying a car was now within the reach of the comfortably-off lower middle classes too. Yet if cars were still mostly unaffordable, the new, tempting items that were being made in the modern factories were starting to make a gradual impact.

  Locally manufactured radiograms [a combined radio and record player, usually housed in a wooden cabinet], radios, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, electric cookers and other ‘modern’ home appliances began to appear in middle-class homes in towns and cities that now had mains electricity. For the first time in history, a big change in women’s lives was on the horizon through these new labour-saving devices.

  Paid holidays for workers were introduced too – also for the first time ever. The Holidays with Pay Act of 1938 introduced one week’s paid holiday a year for all working-class employees. (Until then, only around four million manual workers were entitled to a holiday with pay.)

  Younger, unmarried, working-class women, for whom the only route to employment had been domestic service and little else, were discovering less back-breaking, albeit low-paid work in shops and offices in the fast-growing larger towns or cities.

  Public transport also developed rapidly in the 1930s, with increasing numbers of trolley buses (electric buses that took their power from overhead cables via two trolley poles on the vehicle’s roof), electric trams and trains moving people from workplace to home, especially in London, where the Underground was expanding as never before to link homes in the fast-growing outer suburbs directly to Central London, all broadening working people’s horizons.

  Glamour also made a huge impact. This was a time when the powerful influence of Hollywood ensured that the movies became the most popular form of entertainment. By 1938, there were nearly 5,000 cinemas in the UK, some of them hugely exotic architectural works of art, seating thousands.

  People flocked in droves to the cinemas that had sprung up in cities and towns from the late 1920s onwards. The high-octane allure of movie stars like the glamorous Jean Harlow, the enigmatic Greta Garbo or the urbane Cary Grant projected a compellingly enticing vision of a world of luxury, romance and sophistication – a fantastic escape from reality for the price of a ten-penny ticket to the flicks.

  THE HOUSING REVOLUTION

  Underlying the huge contrasts of the era and the North– South divide is another, slightly less-heralded, story of growing living standards – led primarily by the late-thirties changes to the housing landscape.

  By 1938, when much of the worldwide economic recession had ended, there was a house-building boom in Britain. Suburbia, as we know it today, expanded greatly at around this time, helped by improved train services, while a new and much-needed approach to house-building had started with the introduction of local authority-subsidised council housing.

  After 1933, the worst of the nineteenth-century slums of Britain’s inner cities, dark, vermin-infested, insanitary rented homes not fit for habitation, were beginning to be demolished by local authorities. Unfortunately, the task was only half-complete by the time war was declared (though in one way, it could be said that Hitler’s Luftwaffe carried out some of the other necessary demolition work).

  In fact, by the time the Second World War began, more than four million new homes had been built in Britain in the ‘between-wars’ period. By 1938, three and a quarter million people owned their own home or were buying one with a mortgage of repayments usually spread over twenty-five to thirty years.

  A lower middle-class couple, with the white-collar worker husband earning a respectable £200 a year (just under £4 a week), could buy a semi-detached house in a suburb of London for under £600 with a mortgage from a building society, repayments sometimes costing just £1 a week. Row after row after row of these new, bright homes sprang up on green fields outside the cities and along the coast. Brand-new crescents, drives and avenues began to take over the areas outside urban centres.

  Ninety per cent of these homes were bui
lt for sale on suburban estates by private builders; one million brand-new council houses and flats for rent were built by government-funded local authorities, replacing some of the worst slums.

  By 1939, nearly a third of the population were living in post First World War houses. And home ownership, which had made up just under 10 per cent of all housing in Britain before 1914, rose to 27 per cent of all British homes by 1939. The elite disliked the new suburban houses, however. Given that class distinctions were still so dominant in the pre-war era, there was a lot of snobbery about the new homes. But millions moved in – and loved them.

  Those who aspired to buying a new home, mostly lower middle-class working families, were often couples or families who had previously rented in crowded innercity areas. The opportunity to have their own brand-new home, front gate and door, plus garden, front and back, was virtually a dream come true.

  Mortgages for housing via a building society loan had only been available to the very wealthy in previous times so this was the first time ever the funds to buy a home on a mortgage became more widely available. Being an owner-occupier was a major step upwards.

  Renting a home, while still the only option for the majority of families, was a fairly straightforward process in the 1930s, as was moving house, as Eva Merrill recalled.

  Father always managed to find work, not easy in the 1920s and 1930s, but he was very adept at turning his hand to most things and had a good work record. Moving house was also very easy. Houses and rooms to let were advertised in every area and it was a matter of days to pick up one’s bits and pieces and move house to another location. One week’s rent in advance was all that was required and one week’s notice to the current landlord.

  I can remember going with Mother in the 1930s, looking at numerous empty houses and rooms. She’d say, ‘Let’s go and look at some houses’ and off we’d go, collect the keys from the estate agents and look around. She had no intention of moving, she just liked viewing different houses and seeing what was on offer, much as one goes window shopping.

  Of course, if the rent wasn’t paid on the dot, you were likely to find yourself and your possessions dumped on the streets; no going to court for a possession order, or the like, quick, rough justice all round. No rent, no home.

  This harsh practice also applied to families who were moved by local authorities from slum or sub-standard dwellings, due for demolition, into newly built homes.

  Another aspect of the quiet housing revolution was that the one million brand-new council homes for rent were built by local authorities to high standards hitherto unknown to working-class families. It was recommended that the standard of building should allow such houses to last for at least sixty years, with a minimum of three bedrooms – living room, parlour, kitchen and scullery on the ground floor and three rooms on the floor above. There were indoor lavatories, bathrooms, a larder, hot-water supply and gardens rather than yards. For many families this was a near-miraculous transformation.

  ‘Because we had no indoor lavatory, the use of chamber pots was part of our everyday life,’ wrote author, poet and philosopher Bryan Magee of his childhood in 1930s Hoxton, at the time one of London’s worst inner-city slum areas. ‘There were always two pots under each bed upstairs. And they were called “the po”. I was supposed to try hard not to use the po and use it only when I had to.’

  RAF veteran Ken Hone recalled vividly the time he and his family were moved into a brand-new council house for rent on a small housing estate in Morriston, near Swansea, in 1927.

  Just five years old, Ken was awestruck by their new surroundings, the three separate bedrooms, a gleaming bathroom and toilet upstairs. To such an extent that the first time he used the brand-new toilet in their home, he pulled the chain to flush and upon hearing the noise, ran, terrified, down the stairs to the living room.

  ‘It made a noise I’d never heard before,’ said Ken. ‘To us, coming from very cramped conditions indeed, the new house was a palace – there was no other word for it.’

  While the late-thirties housing boom would not yet eradicate sub-standard or slum housing, it did mark the beginning of an improvement. By 1939, 245,000 slum houses had been demolished or boarded up – though close to half a million slum dwellings remained in cities and towns.

  BRIGHTON’S SLUM CLEARANCE

  Inner-city Brighton had some very bad slum housing dating back to the early 1800s. In 1921, the popular seaside town was the second most-populated county borough in the country, an area with an urgent need to house its working-class population in better accommodation.

  Through the inter-war period, Brighton demolished 900 slum homes and built 4,285 brand-new council homes in areas just a few miles to the east of the city centre, much of which had previously been open farmland.

  The new council housing extended up the Bevendean Valley to form the Bevendean Estate: land was purchased by the council in 1935 to create the East Moulsecoomb Estate and, the following year, work started on building homes on the Manor Farm Estate.

  As a social experiment, Brighton’s 1930s slum clearance was only partially successful: the rents on many of the newly built estates were often too expensive for those being rehoused.

  A new two-bedroom house on the East Moulsecoomb Estate, for instance, could be rented for 12 shillings 7½d; slum-clearance families were even given a 25 per cent rebate. But when you consider that in an unemployed household, a weekly dole payment could be just £1, quite often the choice between feeding a family of three or four children and paying the rent meant that food usually came first.

  Brighton’s slum poverty, however, bad as it was, was not quite as extreme as it was in some of the industrial innercity slums simply because as a seaside town, there was always some food around, for instance free fish scraps from the beach or from the many smokeries in the area. But too many Victorian-era small houses crammed close together, with inadequate sanitation, overcrowding and poor water supply, meant nonetheless that inner-city life in Brighton’s back streets was, to twenty-first-century eyes, a shocking state of affairs.

  FROM A SLUM TO A PALACE

  Preece’s Buildings, built in the 1820s, was a tiny cramped cul-de-sac between Gardner Street and Regent Street in central Brighton. The Buildings were demolished by the local authority in the late 1930s. Today, the area forms part of the much-visited fashionable North Laine district.

  Victor Cox grew up in Preece’s Buildings in the twenties and thirties.

  My parents got the house on the condition they decorated it, for a rent of 5 shillings a week. I was the first child in the family to be born in a house. My father was a horse trader but he became a labourer and scaffolder and took what work he could get. My mother went out cleaning in a house in Powis Square and in two pubs.

  Our house had three floors, was cobbled outside and had only one small room on each floor, about eight feet by nine feet square. The top room was even smaller as it had a sloping roof. As you came in, the stairs were straight in front of you. The downstairs room was the only room to live and cook in. My mother cooked on the fire and the black grate by the side of the fire.

  We had no back door and no yard as our house joined the cork factory which supplied a cork shop in Gardner Street. We would lie awake at night and hear the machinery going. There was only one way in and out of the house, through the front door. My mother lived until she was ninety-seven. She often said we could have been burnt alive.

  We didn’t have much furniture in the downstairs room, only a table and kitchen chairs. There was just room to pull the chairs out and sit down at the table, so you can see how small it was. When the coalman came to put the coal under the stairs, he had to open the door to this room and we had to move the table over to make space. On the first floor was my parents’ bedroom, but you couldn’t light a fire there because it would have set the bed alight, it was so close.

  To reach the top floor, you had to mount a curved staircase where we children slept in two beds, ‘top and tailed’
[two people sleeping with their heads at opposite ends of the bed]. The room was very cold. We never had a light even when gas mantles were put in the other rooms and we continued to go to bed by candle light until we left the house in 1936. Until 1927, the only lights in the house were oil lamps and candles.

  As there was no backyard, we had no running water. You had to go out of the house just to get a glass of water. Each house had its own WC, but we had to share the wash house, used in a rota system by the women. When the clothes were clean, they were rinsed and put on one of the lines across the street. When we came home from school, we had to dodge in and out of the washing to get to our front doors. If it was wet, the washing would be draped over lines inside the house, which was not pleasant.

  Everyone helped each other in those days. It was a hand-to-mouth existence but everyone was the same. Sometimes the rent money was late and I would have the job of taking it round to the landlord. If kids were ill, the neighbours would rally round to help.

  In 1936, the family learned they were to be rehoused: the Buildings had been scheduled for demolition.

  Manor Farm was the area we were to be moved to and I went with my father to look at the estate. The houses were like Buckingham Palace compared with Preece’s Buildings, having running water, a bathroom, plenty of living and sleeping space and electric light with just a switch.

  They also came with an electric cooker with the Corporation crest on it and an electric kettle. My mother was always afraid of electricity, she didn’t want to use them.

  THE BLACK SPOT OF BRIGHTON

  Oxford Court was a side turning on the south side of Oxford Street, near London Road, Brighton. Built in the mid-1820s and demolished in the late 1930s, such was the Court’s reputation that it was known locally as ‘The Black Spot of Brighton’, a poverty-stricken street surrounded by pubs.