Chapter 6 When I was a small boy at school a lecturer used to come once a term and
deliver excellent lectures on famous battles of the past, such as Blenheim,
Austerlitz, etc. He was fond of quoting Napoleon's maxim 'An army marches
on its stomach', and at the end of his lecture he would suddenly turn to us
and demand, 'What's the most important thing in the world?' We were
expected to shout 'Food!' and if we did not do so he was disappointed.
Obviously he was right in a way. A human being is primarily a bag for
putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike,
but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and
all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives
after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be
plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of
dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have
happened if tinned food had not been invented. And the history of the past
four hundred years in England would have been immensely different if it had
not been for the introduction of root-crops and various other vegetables at
the end of the Middle Ages, and a little later the introduction of non-
alcoholic drinks (tea, coffee, cocoa) and also of distilled liquors to
which the beer-drinking English were not accustomed. Yet it is curious how
seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere
to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or
market-gardeners. The Emperor Charles V is said to have erected a statue to
the inventor of bloaters, but that is the only case I can think of at the
moment.
So perhaps the really important thing about the unemployed, the really
basic thing if you look to the future, is the diet they are living on. As I
said earlier, the average unemployed family lives on an income of round
about thirty shillings a week, of which at least a quarter goes in rent. It
is worth considering in some detail how the remaining money is spent. I
have here a budget which was made out for me by an unemployed miner and his
wife. I asked them to make a list which represented as exactly as possible
their expenditure in a typical week. This man's allowance was thirty-two
shillings a week, and besides his wife he had two children, one aged two
years and five months and the other ten months. Here is the list:
s. d.
Rent 9 0 1/2
Clothing Club 3 0
Coal 2 0
Gas 1 3
Milk 0 10 1/2
Union Fees 0 3
Insurance (on the children) 0 2
Meat 2 6
Flour (2 stone) 3 4
Yeast 0 4
Potatoes 1 0
Dripping 0 10
Margarine 0 10
Bacon 1 2
Sugar 1 9
Tea 1 0
Jam 0 7 1/2
Peas and cabbage 0 6
Carrots and onions 0 4
Quaker oats 0 4 1/2
Soap, powders, blue, etc. 0 10
--------
Total L1 12 0
-------
In addition to this, three packets of dried milk were sup-plied weekly
for the baby by the Infants' Welfare Clinic. One or two comments are needed
here. To begin with the list leaves out a great deal--blacking, pepper,
salt, vinegar, matches, kindling-wood, raeor blades, replacements of
utensils, and wear and tear of furniture and bedding, to name the first few
that come to mind. Any money spent on these would mean reduction on some
other item. A more serious charge is tobacco. This man happened to be a
small smoker, but even so his tobacco would hardly cost less than a
shilling a week, meaning a further reduction on food. The 'clothing clubs'
into which unemployed people pay so much a week are run by big drapers in
all the industrial towns. Without them it would be impossible for
unemployed people to buy new clothes at all. I don't know whether or not
they buy bedding through these clubs. This particular family, as I happen
to know, possessed next to no bedding.
In the above list, if you allow a shilling for tobacco and deduct this
and the other non-food items, you are left with sixteen and fivepence
halfpenny. Call it sixteen shillings and leave the baby out of account--
for the baby was getting its weekly packets of milk from the Welfare
Clinic. This sixteen shillings has got to provide the entire nourishment,
including fuel, of three persons, two of them adult. The first question is
whether it is even theoretically possible for three persons to be properly
nourished on sixteen shillings a week. When the dispute over the Means Test
was in progress there was a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum
weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive. So far as I remember,
one school of dietitians worked it out at five and ninepence, while another
school, more generous, put it at five and ninepence halfpenny. After this
there were letters to the papers from a number of people who claimed to be
feeding themselves on four shillings a week. Here is a weekly budget (it
was printed in the New Statesman and also in the News of the World) which I
picked out from among a number of others:
s. d.
3 wholemeal loaves 1 0
1/2 lb. margarine 0 2 1/2
1/2 lb. dripping 0 3
1 lb. cheese 0 7
1 lb. onions 0 1 1/2
1 lb. carrots 0 1 1/2
1 lb. broken biscuits 0 4
2 lb. dates 0 6
1 tin evaporated milk 0 5
10 oranges 0 5
----
Total 3 11 1/2
----
Please notice that this budget contains nothing for fuel. In fact, the
writer explicitly stated that he could not afford to buy fuel and ate all
his food raw. Whether the letter was genuine or a hoax does not matter at
the moment. What I think will be admitted is that this list represents
about as wise an expenditure as could be contrived; if you had to live on
three and elevenpence halfpenny a week, you could hardly extract more food-
value from it than that. So perhaps it is possible to feed yourself
adequately on the P.A.C. allowance if you concentrate on essential
foodstuffs; but not otherwise.
Now compare this list with the unemployed miner's budget that I gave
earlier. The miner's family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables
and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less
than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on
sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The
half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials
for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins
of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and
margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes--an appalling diet.
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like
oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter
to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it
would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do
such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on
brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less
money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A
millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an
unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of
the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say
when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to
eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is
always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth
of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and
we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are
at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you
to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than
brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery
that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the
English-man's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a
temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
The results of all this are visible in a physical degeneracy which you
can study directly, by using your eyes, or inferentially, by having a look
at the vital statistics. The physical average in the industrial towns is
terribly low, lower even than in London. In Sheffield you have the feeling
of walking among a population of troglodytes. The miners are splendid men,
but they are usually small, and the mere fact that their muscles are
toughened by constant work does not mean that their children start life
with a better physique. In any case the miners are physically the pick of
the population. The most obvious sign of under-nourishment is the badness
of everybody's teeth. In Lancashire you would have to look for a long time
before you saw a working-class person with good natural teeth. Indeed, you
see very few people with natural teeth at all, 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 Wigan various people gave me their
opinion that it is best to get shut of your teeth as early in life as
possible. 'Teeth is just a misery,' one woman said to me. 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. As for the vital statistics, the fact
that in any large industrial town the death rate and infant mortality of
the poorest quarters are always about double those of the well-to-do
residential quarters--a good deal more than double in some cases--
hardly needs commenting on.
Of course one ought not to imagine that the prevailing bad physique is
due solely to unemployment, for it is probable that the physical average
has been declining all over England for a long time past, and not merely
among the unemployed in the industrial areas. This cannot be proved
statistically, but it is a conclusion that is forced upon you if you use
your eyes, even in rural places and even in a prosperous town like London.
On the day when King George V's body passed through London on its way to
Westminster, I happened to be caught for an hour or two in the crowd in
Trafalgar Square. It was impossible, looking about one then, not to be
struck by the physical degeneracy of modern England. The people surrounding
me were not working-class people for the most part; they were the
shopkeeper--commercial-traveller type, with a sprinkling of the well-to-
do. But what a set they looked! Puny limbs, sickly faces, under the weeping
London sky! Hardly a well-built man or a decent-looking woman, and not a
fresh complexion anywhere. As the King's coffin went by, the men took off
their hats, and a friend who was in the crowd at the other side of the
Strand said to me afterwards, 'The only touch of colour anywhere was the
bald heads.' Even the Guards, it seemed to me--there was a squad of
guardsmen marching beside the coffin--were not what they used to be.
Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like
the wings of eagles who strode across my child-hood's gaze twenty or thirty
years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud. In their place there are
these pale-faced boys who have been picked for their height and
consequently look like hop-poles in overcoats--the truth being that in
modern England a man over six feet high is usually skin and bone and not
much else. If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly
due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men
in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed.
But the process must have begun earlier than that, and it must be due
ultimately to un-healthy ways of living, i.e. to industrialism. I don't
mean 'the habit of living in towns--probably the town is healthier than
the country, in many ways--but the modern industrial technique which
provides you with cheap substitutes for everything. We may find in the long
run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.
It is unfortunate that the English working class--the English nation
generally, for that matter--are exception-ally ignorant about and
wasteful of food. I have pointed out elsewhere how civilized is a French
navvy's idea of a meal compared with an Englishman's, and I cannot believe
that you would ever see such wastage in a French house as you habitually
see in English ones. Of course, in the very poorest homes, where everybody
is unemployed, you don't see much actual waste, but those who can afford to
waste food often do so. I could give startling instances of this. Even the
Northern habit of baking one's own bread is slightly wasteful in itself,
because an overworked woman cannot bake more than once or, at most, twice a
week and it is impossible to tell beforehand how much bread will be wasted,
so that a certain amount generally has to be thrown away. The usual thing
is to bake six large loaves and twelve small ones at a time. All this is
part of the old, generous English attitude to life, and it is an amiable
quality, but a disastrous one at the present moment.
English working people everywhere, so far as I know, refuse brown
bread; it is usually impossible to buy whole-meal bread in a working-class
district. They sometimes give the reason that brown bread is 'dirty'. I
suspect the real reason is that in the past brown bread has been confused
with black bread, which is traditionally associated with Popery and wooden
shoes. (They have plenty of Popery and wooden shoes in Lancashire. A pity
they haven't the black bread as well!) But the English palate, especially
the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The
number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and
real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could
afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have tinned milk--even
that dreadful tinned milk which is made of sugar and corn-flour and has
UNFIT FOR BABIES on the tin in huge letters. In some districts efforts are
now being made to teach the unemployed more about food-values and more
about the intelligent spending of money. When you hear of a thing like this
you feel yourself torn both ways. I have heard a Communist speaker on the
platform grow very angry about it. In London, he said, parties of Society
dames now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping-
lessons to the wives of the unemployed. He gave this as an instance of the
mentality of the English governing class. First you condemn a family to
live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence
to tell them how they are to spend their money. He was quite right--I
agree heartily. Yet all the same it is a pity that, merely for the lack of
a proper tradition, people should pour muck like tinned milk down their
throats and not even know that it is inferior to the product of the cow.
I doubt, however, whether the unemployed would ultimately benefit if
they learned to spend their money more economically. For it is only the
fact that they are not economical that keeps their allowances so high. An
English-man on the P.A.C. gets fifteen shillings a week because fifteen
shillings is the smallest sum on which he can conceivably keep alive. If he
were, say, an Indian or Japanese coolie, who can live on rice and onions,
he wouldn't get fifteen shillings a week--he would be lucky if he got
fifteen shillings a month. Our unemployment allowances, miser-able though
they are, are framed to suit a population with very high standards and not
much notion of economy. If the unemployed learned to be better managers
they would be visibly better off, and I fancy it would not be long before
the dole was docked correspondingly.
There is one great mitigation of unemployment in the North, and that
is the cheapness of fuel. Anywhere in the coal areas the retail price of
coal is about one and sixpence a hundredweight; in the South of England it
is about half a crown. Moreover, miners in work can usually buy coal direct
from the pit at eight or nine shillings a ton, and those who have a cellar
in their homes sometimes store a ton and sell it (illicitly, I suppose) to
those who are out of work. But apart from this there is immense and
systematic thieving of coal by the unemployed. I call it thieving because
technically it is that, though it does no harm to anybody. In the 'dirt'
that is sent up from the pits there is a certain amount of broken coal, and
unemployed people spend a lot of time in picking it out of the slag-heaps.
All day long over those strange grey mountains you see people wandering to
and fro with sacks and baskets across the sulphurous smoke (many slag-heaps
are on fire under the surface), prising out the tiny nuggets of coal which
are buried here and there. You meet men coming away, wheeling strange and
wonderful home-made bicycles--bicycles made of rusty parts picked off
refuse-tips, without saddles, without chains and almost always without
tyres--across which are slung bags containing perhaps half a
hundredweight of coal, fruit of half a day's searching. In times of
strikes, when everybody is short of fuel, the miners turn out with pick and
shovel and burrow into the slag-heaps, whence the hummocky appearance which
most slag-heaps have. During long strikes, in places where there are
outcrops of coal, they have sunk surface mines and carried them scores of
yards into the earth.
In Wigan the competition among unemployed people for the waste coal
has become so fierce that it has led to an extraordinary custom called'
scrambling for the coal', which is well worth seeing. Indeed I rather
wonder that it has never been filmed. An unemployed miner took me to see it
one afternoon. We got to the place, a mountain range of ancient slag-heaps
with a railway running through the valley below. A couple of hundred ragged
men, each with a sack and coal-hammer strapped under his coat-tails, were
waiting on the 'broo'. When the dirt comes up-from the pit it is loaded on
to trucks and an engine runs these to the top of another slag-heap a
quarter of a mile away and there leaves them. The process of 'scrambling
for the coal' consists in getting on to the train while it is moving; any
truck which you have succeeded in boarding while it is in motion counts as
'your' truck. Presently the train hove in sight. With a wild yell a hundred
men dashed down the slope to catch her as she rounded the bend. Even at the
bend the train was making twenty miles an hour. The men hurled themselves
upon it, caught hold of the rings at the rear of the trucks and hoisted
themselves up by way of the bumpers, five or ten of them on each truck. The
driver took no notice, He drove up to the top of the slag-heap, uncoupled
the trucks, and ran the engine back to the pit, presently returning with a
fresh string of trucks. There was the same wild rush of ragged figures as
before. In the end only about fifty men had failed to get on to either
train.
We walked up to the top of the slag-heap. The men were shovelling the
dirt out of the trucks, while down below their wives and children were
kneeling, swiftly scrabbling with their hands in the damp dirt and picking
out lumps of coal the size of an egg or smaller. You would see a woman
pounce on a tiny fragment of stuff, wipe it on her apron, scrutinize it to
make sure it was coal, and pop it jealously into her sack. Of course, when
you are boarding a truck you don't know beforehand what is in it; it may be
actual 'dirt' from the roads or it may merely be shale from the roofing. If
it is a shale truck there will be no coal in it, but there occurs among the
shale another inflammable rock called cannel, which looks very like
ordinary shale but is slightly darker and is known by splitting in parallel
lines, like slate. It makes tolerable fuel, not good enough to be
commercially valuable, but good enough to be eagerly sought after by the
unemployed. The miners on the shale trucks were picking out the cannel and
splitting it up with their hammers. Down at the bottom of the 'broo' the
people who had failed to get on to either train were gleaning the tiny
chips of coal that came rolling down from above--fragments no bigger than
a hazel-nut, these, but the people were glad enough to get them.
We stayed there till the train was empty. In a couple of hours the
people had picked the dirt over to the last grain. They slung their sacks
over shoulder or bicycle, and started on the two-mile trudge back to Wigan.
Most of the families had gathered about half a hundredweight of coal or
carmel, so that between them they must have stolen five or ten tons of
fuel. This business of robbing the dirt trains takes place every day in
Wigan, at any rate in winter, and at more collieries than one. It is of
course extremely dangerous. No one was hurt the afternoon I was there, but
a man had had both his legs cut off a few weeks earlier, and another man
lost several fingers a week later. Technically it is stealing but, as
everybody knows, if the coal were not stolen it would simply be wasted. Now
and again, for form's sake, the colliery companies prosecute somebody for
coal-picking, and in that morning's issue of the local paper there was a
paragraph saying that two men had been fined ten shillings. But no notice
is taken of the prosecutions--in fact, one of the men named in the paper
was there that afternoon--and the coal-pickers subscribe among themselves
to pay the fines. The thing is taken for granted. Everyone knows that the
unemployed have got to get fuel somehow. So every afternoon several hundred
men risk their necks and several hundred women scrabble in the mud for
hours--and all for half a hundredweight of inferior fuel, value ninepence.
That scene stays in my mind as one of my pictures of Lancashire: the
dumpy, shawled women, with their sacking aprons and their heavy black
clogs, kneeling in the cindery mud and the bitter wind, searching eagerly
for tiny chips of coal. They are glad enough to do it. In winter they are
desperate for fuel; it is more important almost than food. Meanwhile all
round, as far as the eye can see, are the slag-heaps and hoisting gear of
collieries, and not one of those collieries can sell all the coal it is
capable of producing. This ought to appeal to Major Douglas.
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