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hae blankets wi’ us. We had a haversack for a pillae’ and the men slept with their backs to the railings in Princes Street so they couldn’t be attacked.’ The next morning women protesters had to be cleared from the tramways, the marchers washed themselves in the street fountains, shaved by looking at their reflections in shop windows and set up their field kitchens which had ‘a place underneath where you fuelled them by coal, and they had a chimney for the smoke to go out. So you can imagine what it was like when the fair citizens of Edinburgh saw these field kitchens all belching away preparing some food for the Marchers … after all Princes Street’s the showpiece of Edinburgh … you’ve got all these luxury hotels and big clubs, the Conservative Club and the Liberal Club … but the average Edinburgh working-class person was in sympathy with what the demonstrators were in Edinburgh for.’

      The newspaper headlines spoke of ‘Two Days that Shook Edinburgh’, in reference to the Russian Revolution, to the alarm of the authorities, who quickly found the protesters accommodation for the following night; after which ‘We were loaded into bloody buses and they just got rid of us.’

      Local marches continued throughout autumn 1933. When the Unemployment Bill was published in 1934, it followed the main recommendations of the Royal Commission on Unemployment’s report, including no restoration of benefit cuts, the continuation of the Means Test, the transfer of transitional payments away from local PACs which had firsthand knowledge of conditions in their area to a national body, the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB), and a requirement that could make benefit payments conditional on attending a government training centre.

      The government had started a number of training schemes for the unemployed in the mid-1920s, and by the late 1930s there were five funded by the Ministry of Labour. Some million and a half young people had been through junior instructional centres, which were in effect a continuation of schooling, and were compulsory in some areas, while each year about 2,000 young women took courses in ‘the various domestic arts, including cooking, needlework and laundry’, designed to equip them for domestic service or hotel work. There were grants available for individual vocational training, and in 1928 an Industrial Transference Board had been set up to enable the Ministry of Labour to transfer workers out of their own districts where work was no longer available — miners were natural candidates — and send them to training centres mainly situated in the depressed areas where they, and sometimes their wives, could learn skills which could lead to a new life in Canada, Australia or the more prosperous South of England. Between 1929 and 1938, over 70,000 men passed through such centres, and though in the early days it was hard to place them in work, 63,000 eventually found jobs. Though a number drifted back to their home areas, there were continual complaints that the scheme was draining the life blood from the depressed areas — particularly as the parallel scheme for young unemployed men was transferring them at a rate of over 10,000 a year.

      But it was felt that there were some unemployed who were not suitable for these programmes. In December 1929 the Ministry of Labour hatched a plan ‘to deal with the class of men to whom our existing training schemes do not apply … those, especially among the younger men, who, through prolonged unemployment, have become so “soft” and temporarily demoralised that it would not be practicable to introduce more than a very small number of them into one of our ordinary training centres without danger to morale’. Such men could not be considered for any transfer scheme until they were ‘hardened … for these people have lost the will to work’.

      These Instructional Centres, which catered for around 200,000 unemployed men between 1929 and 1939, did not aim to teach a skill or trade, but rather to toughen the ‘fibre of men who have got out of the way of work’ by providing a twelve-week course of ‘fairly hard work, good feeding and mild discipline’ at residential camps, often in remote rural areas, which it was hoped ‘would help the [men] to withstand the pull of former ties and associates’.

      Although the threats to cut their benefits if men refused to attend the Instructional Centres were never implemented, the NUWM, which was concerned that this was another attempt to generate cheap labour and undercut trade union rates of pay, added them to its list of complaints against the government’s attempts to deal with unemployment. It described the centres as ‘slave colonies’ or even ‘concentration camps’, though this was a rather excessive description, since men could come and go as they liked, and in any one year up to a quarter left before completing their courses.

      Under the toughening-up regime the men were issued on arrival with a ‘uniform’ of work shirts, corduroy trousers and hobnailed boots, which they could keep if they completed the course. They slept under canvas (in the summer), or in huts, were paid around four shillings a week and issued with a pack of Woodbines and a stamp for a letter home, and were subjected to a strict regime: parading each morning for work, roll calls, lights out, and hard manual labour such as chopping down trees, building roads, digging sewers and stone-breaking. Sometimes men would be ‘lent’ to work on outside projects, such as the building of Whipsnade Zoo, London University’s playing fields, and the Piccadilly Line tube extension, all to accustom them ‘once more to regular hours and steady work’.

      Len Edmondson’s brother was ‘sent to a camp in County Durham where the men were employed digging stone and helping to make roads for forestry work. They were accommodated in huts and following breakfast the Union Jack was hoisted [which was a particular irritant to the Welsh and Scottish attendees] whilst they were all lined up and marched to the place of work. In the evening they were lined up again and marched back to the camp when the Union Jack was then lowered.’ ‘They established one camp in Glen Branter in Argyllshire and a number o’ other places. And it is a fact that most of the work they did was afforestation work, mostly for the dukes and the big lords, makin’ roads through the forests. And I think it was at Glen Branter they actually had them diggin’ holes and filling them up again. The camps were horrible … I think they got the idea o’ these camps frae Hitler, because Fascism was establishing itself in Germany and they were sending all these young men to these camps,’ concluded Tom Ferns, an unemployed Glaswegian who had only ever managed to find short-term jobs and was active in both the NUWM and the Young Communist League. But others enjoyed their camp days, rejoicing in the outdoor life, long walks and sports — particularly football — and rejected any notion of a ‘slave camp’.

      The camps were clearly authoritarian, with many, it was claimed, overseen by ‘civilian sergeant-majors, retired police officers, ex NCOs of the army and officials transferred from the Poor Law Institutions’. But the most numerous complaints seem to have been about the food — stale bread, leathery meat, sandwiches ‘with bread an inch thick, with a piece of cheese in between that a mouse wouldn’t get up for … when the men used to be working among the fir trees they’d gnaw the resin off the trunk … and pick wild mushrooms and eat them raw, they were that hungry,’ reported William Heard, a West Ham man with a wife and five children who was sent to Shobdon camp in Herefordshire.

      ‘I still don’t know what we learned … it was a waste of time. The only thing was it took us away from something I suppose,’ thought Heard (who featured in an NUWM pamphlet, Slave Camps). But Alwyn Jones, who was sent to a camp in Suffolk from Oldham, felt ‘so much rot is talked about the camps’ that he wrote an article for his local paper extolling their virtues. ‘A man gets four shillings a week, and of course his wife and children draw if they are unemployed while he is away. He has the best food he ever ate [four meals a day], a bed, and clothes and medical attention if necessary … in beautiful surroundings.’

      Although camps continued to open throughout the 1930s, judged by results they were not particularly effective. Of a total intake of 83,000 ‘volunteers’ between 1935 and 1938, only 12,500 subsequently found employment: 19,500 either gave up or were sacked during the twelve-week course. The last one closed in 1939, and several were converted to house prisoners of war.

      The National Government had inherited the notion of transference schemes and training camps, but one initiative of its own was the introduction in 1934 of the Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act, in recognition of the fact that there was little hope of a sufficient upswing in world trade to bring jobs back to the areas of the old staple industries — coal, iron, steel, shipbuilding. Four special investigators were appointed to examine conditions

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