Black Diamonds (42 page)

four best-kept homes, the four best examples of embroidery, needlework, or other handicraft, and for the four women whose families can show the best records in any of the following directions: (a) the greatest number of children with the greatest aggregate ages who have the greatest aggregate period to their credit of good honest work to the satisfaction of their employers (2 prizes); (b) the greatest scholastic or musical or artistic achievements (2 prizes); (c) outstanding nursing or secretarial service (2 prizes); (d) the four women who can prove to the satisfaction of the judges and jury that they have never quarrelled with their husbands and have consistently shown the best good temper towards and camaraderie with their husbands; the judges to consist of two ladies and a gentleman and the jury of three ladies and three gentlemen, a Counsel to be employed on both sides to cross examine the applicant. This might be productive of considerable amusement.

After considering the Milton Committee’s recommendations, Billy concluded that Peter’s birthday should be celebrated over the course of a week. Beginning with a ball at Wentworth House for the Yorkshire gentry, a further two balls were to be held, one for the farm tenants, the other for the Fitzwilliams’ 4,200 employees. The biggest party of the week was to be on the day of the birthday itself; scheduled to take place in the Park at Wentworth, over 15,000 invitations were to be sent out. There was to be a fairground in Menagerie Paddock and scores of buffet tents to feed the guests. Three thousand bottles of Audit Ale – beer that had been specially brewed and laid down in the vast cellars at Wentworth at Peter’s birth – were to be distributed, and an ox roasted. Throughout the week, in the afternoons, cinema shows and concert troupes were to be staged for the children at the Fitzwilliams’ two collieries and at the chemical works. All employees were to be given a day’s holiday and a day’s pay. Lastly, to commemorate the coming of age, New Stubbin colliery would receive a sports ground and a cricket pavilion; Elsecar colliery, a new market hall; and the chemical works, a new canteen.

The cost of the celebrations was estimated by the Committee to run to tens of thousands of pounds. Privately, a number of its members believed the entertainments to be in poor taste. The slump that had followed the 1929 Wall Street Crash had decimated the British coal industry. In the summer of 1931 almost half the miners in the neighbourhood of Wentworth were unemployed.

28

The train bore me
away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us’, and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.

George Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier

At the height of the Great Depression, George Orwell left his part-time job as a bookshop assistant in London to tour the industrial slums of the North. After spending some weeks in the mill towns of Lancashire, he caught a train to Barnsley. Orwell had been commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz to write an account of working-class life in the areas of high unemployment. Barnsley, barely four miles from Wentworth, was one of them. ‘
It is a kind of duty
to see and smell such places now and again,’ he noted, ‘especially smell them, lest you forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there for too long.’

Over the course of a month spent travelling around the South Yorkshire coalfield, Orwell recorded the living conditions in the mining communities.
The Road to Wigan Pier
provides a graphic account of the hardship in the neighbourhood of Wentworth. ‘I have inspected great numbers of houses in various mining towns and villages and made notes on their essential points,’ he wrote. ‘Here are one or two from Barnsley’:

House in Wortley Street. Two up, one down. Living room 12 ft by 10 ft. Sink and copper in living room, coal hole under stairs. Sink worn almost flat and constantly overflowing. Walls not too sound. Penny in slot, gas-light. House very dark and gas-light estimated at 4d. a day. Upstairs rooms are really one large room partitioned into two. Walls very bad – wall of back room cracked right through. Window-frames coming to pieces and have to be stuffed with wood. Rain comes through in several places. Sewer runs under house and stinks in summer but Corporation ‘says they can’t do nowt’. Six people in house, two adults and four children, the eldest aged fifteen. Youngest but one attending hospital – tuberculosis suspected. House infested by bugs. Rent 5sh. 3d., including rates.

House in Peel Street. Back to back, two up, two down and large cellar. Living-room 10 ft square with copper and sink. The other downstairs room the same size, probably intended as parlour but used as bedroom. Upstairs rooms the same size as those below. Living room very dark. Gas-light estimated at 4½d. a day. Distance to lavatory 70 yards. Four beds in house for eight people – two old parents, two adult girls (the eldest aged twenty-seven), one young man and three children. Parents have one bed, eldest son another, and remaining five people share the other two. Bugs very bad – ‘You can’t keep ’em down when it’s ’ot’. Indescribable squalor in downstairs room and smell upstairs almost unbearable. Rent 5sh 7½d., including rates.

Studying house after house from top to bottom, Orwell saw the true extent of hardship – a level of poverty he suspected that many families were at pains to conceal from their own communities.

It is in the rooms upstairs that the gauntness of poverty really discloses itself. Whether this is because pride makes people cling to their living-room furniture to the last, or because bedding is more pawnable, I do not know, but certainly many of the bedrooms I saw were fearful places. Among people who have been unemployed for several years continuously I should say it is the exception to have anything like a full set of bedclothes. Often there is nothing that can be properly called bedclothes at all – just a heap of old overcoats and miscellaneous rags on a rusty iron bedstead. In this way overcrowding is aggravated. One family of four persons that I knew, a father and mother and two children, possessed two beds but could only use one of them because they had not enough bedding for the other.

Bedding was unaffordable on the average dole allowance of 32 shillings
^*
a week. One miner, who had a wife and two children – one aged two and the other ten months – gave Orwell a precise breakdown of the family’s weekly expenditure.

Malnutrition, caused by a diet consisting primarily of fats, carbohydrates and sugar, was rife in the pit villages around Barnsley. ‘
You see very few
people with natural teeth at all,’ Orwell observed,

apart from the children; and even the children’s teeth have a frail bluish appearance which means, I suppose, calcium deficiency. Several dentists have told me that in industrial districts a person over thirty with any of his or her own teeth is coming to be an abnormality … In one house where I stayed there were, apart from myself, five people, the oldest being forty-three and the youngest a boy of fifteen. Of these the boy was the only one who possessed a single tooth of his own, and his teeth were obviously not going to last long.

In the years between 1930 and 1936 unemployment levels in the South Yorkshire coalfield did not fall below 45 per cent. By the summer of 1931, the Fitzwilliams’ miners joined the shocking percentage claiming the dole.

‘They were rough times,’ Ralph Boreham, a miner’s son from Elsecar pit, remembered. ‘We were lucky. We weren’t a big family, there were just me and me brother. “Now then, boy, what are you going to do when you leave school?‘’ the Headmaster used to ask us. “We’re going to pit, Sir.” “’Cos tha’ strong in the arm and weak in the head,” he’d say. You were lucky to get a job in them days. When I were at school there were some kids, their mothers had put their names down at the pit for a job before they were ten years old. There was one at Platts Common, up the road from us. They shut it down. Thirteen hundred men thrown out of work. The council turned them out of their homes. They couldn’t pay their rent. They had to emigrate. They went to Doncaster. It were a bad job. Elsecar pit were working one week on, one week off. The off week you were on the dole. It were sad. All the men wanted to work. Earl Fitzwilliam used to give the miners anything he didn’t want, to get shot of it. The family next door to us got a harpsichord. Neighbours said, “It’ll be growing grass out of it.” Pitmen didn’t go shouting and picketing. They just went gardening instead, to keep themselves. Keep their family. Everybody had a garden then. You lived off it. Mind, there was some as still thought they were a cut above the rest. One miner, they called him “Tommy Two Eggs” ’cos his wife ’ud always brag, “He has two eggs every morning before he goes down t’ pit.” Course he never did, two eggs were unheard of. There were a market on Hoyland Common. Me mother used to go there on a Friday night. She’d buy three pounds of beef cheek for a shilling. Deputies at the pit, the overmen, they thought they were better than you. Some of their wives ’ud say to her, “Would you bring us back some meat for the dog?” Dog n’er saw meat. They aten it.’

The psychological impact of unemployment was often hardest to bear. Walter Brierley from Denby Hall pit, forty miles north-west of Wentworth, was unemployed between the years 1931 and 1935. ‘
Though both my wife
and myself are physically healthy, walking as we do about the Derbyshire countryside on Sundays and somedays in the week,’ he wrote,

the prolonged strain of living on the edge of domestic upheaval, and the fact that our social urge has to be repressed, has ruined our nerves and given us an inferiority complex. For myself, the dependence on the state for money without having honestly earned it, has made me creep within myself … there are fools, unintelligent fools, who believe that the fault of a man’s being unemployed lies at his own door. This is especially so in isolated, gossip-ridden villages like the one in which I live, where, if one does not stand at street corners or go rapping on the wet benches in the public houses, one is afraid to come out, ashamed, idle.

The work ethic was engrained in the miners’ culture. Until the years of mass unemployment, idleness had been something to deride. ‘
Capacity to work
was
the
criterion: a good workman being honoured everywhere by implicit assent,’ Arthur Eaglestone remembered. ‘The most heinous of accusations lay in the terrible phrase: “He doesn’t like work!” I remember as a boy I looked upon men so branded with an apprehensive eye. In Rotherham the tradition of publicly shaming a lazy good-for-nothing who had shirked a day’s labour, by trundling him through the streets in a wheelbarrow, still lingered.’